Panopticon

As Charles Babbage reminds us; “An object is frequently not seen, from not knowing how to see it, rather than from any defect in the organ of vision.”

All of this is from the essay, Obedient Numbers, Soft Delight in the book of essays, Each Wild Idea by Geoffrey Batchen (2002):

…. what if it can be shown that these two technologies [computing and photography] actually share a common history and embody comparable logics? What if the cultural and social conditions that made photography conceivable were the same as those from which emerged computing? What, indeed, if the representational desires, and therefore the political challenges, of the computer are also those of the photograph?

It is not difficult to establish the chronological and personal links between the inventions of computing and photography.

He goes on to describe the many ties between Henry Fox Talbot and Charles Babbage (which I am not going to include here). Then he goes on:

… Talbot … sent Babbage some photogenic drawings of pieces of lace. This was a common subject for Talbot, allowing him to demonstrate the exact, indexical copying of intricate details that photographic contact printing made possible. It also allowed him to demonstrate the strange implosion of representation and reality (again, culture and nature) that photography allowed. … As Root Cartwright has pointed out, contact printing was able to show the lace as a “true illusion” of white lines on burgundy-colored paper. It also meant that Talbot rendered the world in binary terms, as a patterned order of the absence and presence of light. When Talbot included one of these negatives in his 1844 The Pencil of Nature, his accompanying text carefully explained the difference between a contact print (“directly taken from the lace itself”) and the positive copies that could be taken from this first print (in which case “the lace would be represented black upon a white ground”). However, he suggested, a negative image of lace was perfectly acceptable, “black lace being familiar to the eye as white lace, and the object being only to exhibit the pattern with accuracy.” So this is a photograph not so much of lace as of its patterning, of its regular repetitions of smaller units in order to make up a whole.

Babbage too might have been impressed by the photograph’s ability to represent accurately the geometric patterns of lacework, for here was mathematics made visible.

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At the time he began working on his computing machines, Babbage was also calculating a set of “life tables” for the Protector Life Assurance Company of London. Interestingly, the only working example of a Difference Engine, produced by Swedish printers Georg and Edvard Sheutz between 1843 and 1853, was also employed to calculate tables for William Farr’s definitive 1864 publication, English Life Tables. From the beginning, then, we find the history of computing associated with the transformation of human beings into data — in this case, digitized for the purpose of making predictive judgments that fix them in space and time (that photograph them). In Babbage’s conception of the computer, the user becomes simultaneously the subject and the object of the apparatus. Indeed the apparatus itself collapses the boundaries of subject and object altogether; it is this power above all else — this ability to undermine the comfortable Cartesian dualities of the previous century — that so astonished its maker.

I have written elsewhere about the way photography embodies a similar collapse, in the process linking its conception with the paradoxical play of disciplinary power that Michel Foucault has associated with panopticism. Conceived by Jeremy Bentham in 1791, the panopticon is, for Foucault, the exemplary technological metaphor for the operations of modern systems of power. Continually projecting himself into a space between tower and cell, the panoptic subject becomes both the prisoner and the one who imprisons, both the subject and the object of his own gaze. As Foucault says, “He inscribes in himself the power relations in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principal of his own subjection … [Prisoners] are not only [panopticism's] inert or consenting target; they are always also the elements of its articulation.” As an effect of and vehicle for the exercise of power/knowledge, the modern person is, in other words, a being produced within the interstices of a continual negotiation of virtual and real. Thus, for Foucault, panopticism is not just an efficient piece of prison design but also “the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form.”

The same might be said for computing. And this, of course, is the point. The history I have been recounting, and the economy of power that it represents, is not only something that lies outside the computer. It is not just something that is conveyed, created, or reconstructed by the computer’s compliant circuitry. For the computer is itself the material expression of a certain history, the mechanical and electronic manifestation of a conceptual armature that insistently reproduces itself every time we depress a key and direct a flow of digital data. …

I find panopticism reminiscent of how the process of “doing” photography is often described (for example those self-descriptions posted in discussions found in the Philosophy of Photography forum at Photo.net).

See previous posts from Geoffrey Batchen essays here and here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Infans ex Machina

 

Though not a poet, nor a painter, nor a composer, he is yet an artist, and as an artist undertakes not only risks but responsiblity. And it is with responsibility that both the photographer and his machine are brought to their ultimate tests. His machine must prove that it can be endowed with the passion and the humanity of the photographer; the photographer must prove that he has the passion and the humanity with which to endow the machine.

– Dorothea Lange and Daniel Dixon, from “Photographing the Familiar,” Aperture vol. 1, no. 2, 1952

Warning: If experiencing a photograph can not be done with some of the abandon of a boy riding his bicycle, or children wading in the gutters after a rain, there is no reason to experience photographs.

– Minor White and Walter Chappell, from “Some Methods for Experiencing Photographs,” Aperture vol. 5, no. 4, 1957

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Tapping In

In a post on his blog, Jim Putnam has built on my Wendell Berry post of a few days ago, pursuing or circling around the subject of man’s unity with the natural world in general, and trees in particular. I’m going to segue from that to, of all things, reviews of a movie about life in urban working-class Britain.

Last night I watched the Mike Leigh film, All or Nothing. Here are some descriptions of it, taken from the movie’s reviews at Amazon (that I like better than the official descriptions of the film):

The story ostensibly watches the lives of Penny and Phil, moldering in a low-income housing project with individual lives that contain nothing to look forward to and nothing at all to share. … Penny is a middle-aged mother who is trying to hold up three very heavy lives, and she is crushed by the burden. Bitter and recriminative, she cannot fathom why she has so little. Phil has allowed himself to become an observer to all life, even his own, and in the process finds he too has nothing left. Their two children are fat, lonely, uneducated, and going nowhere.

– reviewer J.C. Clark

Everything about this movie is depressing of the lowest order. The background is set in a housing project of three main families. Timothy Spall’s character is a taxi driver whilst his partner is a counter lady for Safeway. Both of them have a dejected daughter who works as a cleaner in a retirement home whose work colleague is a lonely & sad old man who suggests to go out with her, a lazy & obese son who only cares to eat, watch TV & fighting with other children whole day long. Timothy is an disillusioned taxi driver who himself is less than motivated to work long hours. One of their neighbours happen to be Timothy’s character’s colleague whose wife is an alcoholic & a horny daughter. Another neighbour happens to be a cheery mother whose angry daughter has to come to terms with pregnancy. A tragedy would befallen one of them and aid would come from the least expected source. All of caricatures here are too busy minding their day to day life that they lack the perspective of cherishing what truly matters in their lives. An honest, gritty and well-made movie with superb casting.

– reviewer Ping Lim (Christchurch)

I will add that, to my eyes, though the film is unquestionably depressing, the characters are handled sympathetically. I liked all of them. And I liked the movie very much.

Now to get to how this ties in to Jim Putnam’s post. At the ending of the film, the mournfully pathetic, yet gentle and not uncaring character (played by Timothy Spall) confronts his wife, declaring with great emotion that he knows she does not love him and that he can’t go on as they are. In the midst of his anguish and sorrow he declares:

I feel like an old tree that ain’t got no water.

[spoken with British working class accent that leaves out Ts and Ls] In the context of this film, Shakespeare could not have said it better.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Distance

There is no real and no imaginary except at a certain distance. What happens when this distance, even the one separating the real from the imaginary, begins to disappear and to be absorbed by the model alone?

This is from Two Essays by Jean Baudrillard; translated by Arthur B. Evans.

Baudrillard is, well, Baudrillard. Perhaps nonsense, perhaps not; in any event, I think these bits are interesting if only as a thought exercise:

There are three orders of simulacra:

(1) natural, naturalistic simulacra: based on image, imitation, and counterfeiting. They are harmonious, optimistic, and aim at the reconstitution, or the ideal institution, of a nature in God’s image.

(2) productive, productionist simulacra: based on energy and force, materialized by the machine and the entire system of production. Their aim is Promethean: world-wide application, continuous expansion, liberation of indeterminate energy (desire is part of the utopias belonging to this order of simulacra).

(3) simulation simulacra: based on information, the model, cybernetic play. Their aim is maximum operationality, hyperreality, total control.

[ ... ]

There is no real and no imaginary except at a certain distance. What happens when this distance, even the one separating the real from the imaginary, begins to disappear and to be absorbed by the model alone? Currently, from one order of simulacra to the next, we are witnessing the reduction and absorption of this distance, of this separation which permits a space for ideal or critical projection.

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It is totally reduced in the implosive era of models. Models no longer constitute an imaginary domain with reference to the real; they are, themselves, an apprehension of the real, and thus leave no room for any fictional extrapolation — they are immanent, and therefore leave no room for any kind of transcendentalism. The stage is now set for simulation, in the cybernetic sense of the word — that is to say, for all kinds of manipulation of these models (hypothetical scenarios, the creation of simulated situations, etc.), but now nothing distinguishes this management-manipulation from the real itself: there is no more fiction.

Reality was able to surpass fiction, the surest sign that the imaginary has possibly been outpaced. But the real could never surpass the model, for the real is only a pretext of the model.

The imaginary was a pretext of the real in a world dominated by the reality principle. Today, it is the real which has become the pretext of the model in a world governed by the principle of simulation. And, paradoxically, it is the real which has become our true utopia — but a utopia that is no longer a possibility, a utopia we can do no more than dream about, like a lost object.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Influential

This is from The Difference a Painter Makes: Edward Hopper and Photography with notes by Jeffrey Fraenkel and Robert Adams in Aperture 195 (Summer 2009). First, the end of Adams’s remarks:

… As a college student I tried to determine how much a person needed to adopt an ironic manner, and Hopper’s paintings on Cape Cod and elsewhere in New England demonstrated that it was possible without sentimentality, to express affection for places that were naturally beautiful. One did not need to be ashamed of having a heart.

Hopper’s pictures still instruct and delight in ways that are new to me. As my memory of my youth fades some, for example, I think I do a little better when conversing with the young if I recall the painting of the usher there at the side of the movie theater, an individual partway between dream and experience. And when I look to my own future I am grateful for Hopper’s transcription of “sun in an empty room.”

Now some of Fraenkel’s notes:

The photographers whose work has been affected by Edward Hopper are so numerous as to make one wonder if any have completely escaped his gravitational pull.

… His recognition of new types of subject matter, his interest in the psychological, his depth as a landscape artist, his sensitivity to the power of color to communicate feeling, are only some of the elements that may have led the writer Geoff Dyer to theorize that Hopper “could claim to be the most influential American photographer of the twentieth century — even though he didn’t take any photographs.” More than almost any American artist, Hopper has had a pervasive impact on the way we see the world — so pervasive as to be almost invisible.

Fraenkel put together the Hopper exhibit that I posted about last summer, here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Wendell

I find Wendell Berry, from whose essay I quoted yesterday, hard to read. Not because I disagree with him but because he’s so terribly, horribly earnest. Also, he seems to be entirely devoid of humor. No chicken boogers for this guy.

Nevertheless, if I steel myself, I can survive long enough to find bits and pieces that hold my attention for a long time after I’ve read them. Here are a few that I like:

… His work seems to keep ahead of me, like a man’s shadow when he walks eastward in the afternoon, and I have the comfort of believing that I will not exhaust the delight I take in it.
– from “A Homage to Dr. Williams” [poet, William Carlos Williams]

… To be at home in the world, once one has come to the fateful modern consciousness of alternatives, requires a tremendous labor, an endurance of great fear.
– from “Notes from an Absence and a Return”

… [diary note about driving back to Kentucky after spending a year teaching in California] The oppression of driving mile after mile under a veil of poison. Now it is only in the wild places that a man can sense the rarity of being a man. In the crowded places he is more and more closed in by the feeling that he is ordinary — and that he is, on the average, expendable.
– from “Notes from an Absence and a Return”

… I haven’t been conscious before of how invariably when I have sensed or imagined the life of another creature, a tree or bird or an animal, I have had to begin by imagining my own absence — as though there was a necessary competition between my life and theirs. I looked upon my ability to imagine myself absent as a virtue. It seems to me now that it was an evasion. I began this morning to feel something truer — the beginning of the knowledge that the other creatures and I are here together.

For years the burden of my work has been the sense of being implicated, by inheritance and by various failures of consciousness of my own, in a phase of history that is malignant. Now what I am suddenly aware of is the possibility — or the hope? — of passing beyond guilt, which is clearly the source of my obsession with the absence metaphor.
– from “Notes from an Absence and a Return”

… What is the First Amendment to him whose mouth is stuck to the tit of the “affluent society”?
– from “Discipline and Hope”

… The end is preserved in the means; a desirable end may perish forever in the wrong means. Hope lives in the means, not end. Art does not survive in its revelations, or agriculture in its products, or craftsmanship in its artifacts, or civilization in its monuments, or faith in its relics.
– from “Discipline and Hope”

I don’t think I can agree that “[a]rt does not survive in its revelations”. I’m fairly certain that that is all that survives.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Inside/Outside IX

See previous here. Find the first Inside/Outside here.

 

John Wood, Mi Lai Massacre, ca. 1969

 

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

In the Way

I have been walking in the woods, and have lain down on the ground to rest. It is the middle of October, and around me, all through the woods, the leaves are quietly sifting down. The newly fallen leaves make a dry, comfortable bed, and I lie easy, coming to rest within myself as I seem to do nowadays only when I am in the woods.

And now a leaf, spiraling down in wild flight, lands on my shirt front at about the third button below the collar. At first I am bemused and mystified by the coincidence — that the leaf should have been so hung, weighted and shaped, so ready to fall, so nudged loose and slanted by the breeze, as to fall where I, by the same delicacy of circumstance, happened to be lying. The event, among all its ramifying causes and considerations, and finally its mysteries, begins to take on the magnitude of history. Portent begins to dwell in it.

And suddenly I apprehend in it the dark proposal of the ground. Under the fallen leaf my breastbone burns with imminent decay. Other leaves fall. My body begins its long shudder into humus. I feel my substance escape me, carried into the mold by beetles and worms. Days, winds, seasons pass over me as I sink under the leaves. For a time only sight is left to me, a passive awareness of the sky overhead, birds crossing, the mazed interreaching of the treetops, the leaves falling — and then that, too, sinks away. It is acceptable to me, and I am at peace.

When I move to go, it is as though I rise up out of the world.

– from the ending of Wendell Berry’s essay, A Native Hill (1969)

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Someone and the Ark Hive

What belongs in an archive? Everything that someone does not wish to forget and everything that someone believes will hold the key to the future. … In even the most diligently designed and strictly maintained archive, beside the birth certificates, land deeds, and public records, there must be room for contingency, for those things that may acquire a significance retroactively, alongside the flotsam of life and the hidden collections that may never fit within anyone’s research agenda, official history, or private version of the world.

This is all from an essay, Deep in the Archive by Ulrich Baer in Aperture 193 (Winter 2008):

… In the stacks there hovers the sense that these records of lives lived with hope, longing, and desire have all succumbed to the tooth of time. The archive seems to tinge its subjects with death: what is found in the archive bears testimony, first and foremost, to everything that could not be collected but was lost. In the silence of the archive, researchers try to grasp the texture of lives from the remains left here, on this sheet, in this box, on this clean table, and now for their eyes only.

… Photography as a medium, like the archive as a concept and place, has been characterized as “entombing” its subjects in advance of their actual deaths. Photographs have been understood by a distinguished lineage of thinkers, from Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, as inherently dialectical but ultimately melancholic. In this century-long view, photographs extricate their subjects from the flux of time to underscore that these photographed beings no longer exist in their original context. Underplayed in these melancholic interpretations of both photography and archives is the potential role of the contingent elements. Such interpretations often miss the fact that the archive and the photograph both offer the strategic or accidental possibility of opening up new worlds, or of offering new historical identities.

[ ... ]

We enter the archive as researchers or historians in search of a document, a deed, a letter, or a file that will lay our search to rest, just as life contains a “death drive” that moves us toward equilibrium and stasis. The death drive, it bears remembering, is ultimately a productive drive that attaches itself to any activity that seeks to establish an absolute authority or origin. We dig for an original that will fulfill our quest by its sheer existence; the archive is meant to store that which will finally be self-evident. Derrida analyzes this drive for an original, self-evident document or object as the search for the moment when the archive becomes irrelevant, and its purpose and existence is destroyed. This is the moment, in films and novels, when the researcher runs triumphantly past dusty files and the stunned archivists, waving in her hand the record that refutes what everybody (usually a packed courtroom audience, a jury, and an exasperated judge) had assumed to be the truth. She never looks back to the archive that has now served its function, and is now rendered obsolete by that which it contains.

The fact that “ things … may acquire a significance retroactively” is problematic in art. Did the artist do it by accident, or was there subconscious awareness? See my post of a few days ago on Stieglitz’s photography.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Cross Between an Egg and a Bloodhound

By special request.

*sigh*

Philip Larkin is so … gloomy. I’m probably biased because I know too much about him, having read Andrew Motion’s biography of the poet. But we must strive to keep Dr. C happy and/or enraged. The first poem is untitled (or it uses its first line as title):

Coming at last to night’s most thankful springs,
I meet a runner’s image, sharply kept
Ambered in memory from mythology;
A man who never turned aside and slept,
Nor put on masks of love; to whom all things
Were shadowlike against the news he bore,
Pale as the sky: one who for certainty
Had not my hesitations, lest he see
The loud and precious scroll of sounding shields
Not worth the carrying, when held before
The full moon travelling through her shepherdless fields.

[March 1945]

Compare that to Ashbery’s At North Farm. (Not you, Dr. C!)

Here is the second (and last) verse of Larkin’s poem, A Writer:

He lived for years and never was surprised:
A member of his foolish, lying race
Explained away their vices: realised
It was a gift that he possessed alone:
To look the world directly in the face;
The face he did not see to be his own.

He was not always without humor. Here are bits from a May 2008 article in The Guardian about his interactions with photographer Fay Godwin when she did his portrait:

Many of us hate looking at photographs of ourselves, but Philip Larkin seems to have particularly disliked the process. He variously described portraits of himself as looking like “the late Stan Laurel”, “CS Lewis on a drugs charge”, or displaying “as much expression as a lump of sugar”.

On other occasions he complained he looked like “a cross between an egg and a bloodhound” and “an egg sculpted in lard, with goggles on”.

… Larkin and Godwin obviously got on but there was a road bump in 1983 when Larkin said he was horrified to learn that a photograph he hated was to be published. He called it the “Boston Strangler” picture. Godwin too was horrified, blaming Faber, and insisting she had always acted honourably. They made up and another shoot was scheduled. “I now have three conditions … I am not bald, I have only one chin, my waist is concave,” Larkin wrote.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/