Silence and Invisibility

 

this morning, preparing a lecture on Walter Benjamin's theses On the Concept of History I found myself considering the difficulty of reconciling phenomenological and social ways of conceiving time (memory / history:: mortality / the redeemed world). Yesterday I made slides comparing Marx's M-C-M' to Shannon and Weaver's communication model. It struck me a way to think this would be to supplement the critic's question (can I know what you're saying?) with the artist's question (can I tell you anything?) - and if Shannon and Weaver are right and senders and receivers are commensurable because they already share a medium/channel, then the artist's question is also 'can I tell you anything you don't already know? At this pint the questions of silence and invisibility come centre-stage. For ecocriticism, there has to be some mode of communion (though not communication, not, certainly, in the mathematical model) bonding humans together, and humans with the world. Though the biochemistry of life means we are already mediated by and mediating the world, in the past I've argued that technology - the mediating role of all technologies between world and humans – can become our route royal to reversing the alienation of humans from the world. The three horsemen of the contemporary apocalypse, pandemic, climate and economy, and their brother the kleptocratic class, may not support that hypothesis. They are not 'significant' in any ordinary sense: they don't make sense, they don't use signs that we can understand, and they are fatal. This mixes up the ancient distinction between the mortal individual and the social as the source of hope. Now we face  mortality as a social event. The temptation to acedia, Benjamin's word for fatalist descent into melancholy contemplation, has rarely seemed to tempting, not since 'midnight in the century' that preceded this one.

I have set myself to read Dussell when teaching finishes.

For now however, as a working title, Silence and Invisibility

how to write a history of realism

In the 21st century frame, realism is a question of data – the composition of the stuff of the world in the form of facts - and modes of data capture, the ordering of captured data in a taxonomy for storage and retrieval; and the processing that today occupies the position once held by interpretation. The mathematical model tempts its acolytes to understand all previous discourses and practices as instances of the informatic model. The pursuit of realism as an aesthetic however requires us to consider the unique characteristics of the present moment – what criteria it has for recognising something as real – and therefore to understand that other ages and cultures had and have other criteria and therefore other realisms that cannot be reduced to the dominant model.

Henri-Jean Martin (1994: 1) notes in opening his book on the history of writing that 'anyone imprudent enough to risk studying the chronology of writing alternates ceaselessly between vertigo and myopia'. That oscillation between extreme detail and bewildering scale applies to the historian of realism. You could hazard that 2019 realism is to data as 1719 realism (the date of Robinson Crusoe's publication) was to romance and the fantastic, and there would be an order of truth involved; but how then would you position the 1937 debates on realism between Brecht, Lukacs and others in the pages of Das Wort? The prospect of realism is so vast and its conduct so detailed. Something like 3000 years separates is from the Iliad, yet even now parts of it – the tactical training, the management of ships and horses – are strikingly realistic; and pictorial realism should encounter far older techniques, and more mysterious relations with the world. Media archaeologists properly argue for myopia, but the vertiginous is alluring, if only as a way of understanding – one hopes, 'exactly' – how the mathematical theory has become so dominant that we no longer notice how deeply the harness has worn in.

What was realism in 1968, when Situationists adopted the slogan 'Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible' ('be realists, demand the impossible'), four years after Lacan's famous seminar on the four fundamental concepts where he proposed 'le réel, c'est l'impossible', the Real is the impossible? The impossible is Real, in Lacan's terms, because possibility can only be defined in the Symbolic, the arena of language, numbers and logic. The Real is impossible because it cannot be counted, recounted or accounted for. The situationists embraced the obverse of order, or what lies beyond it, and refused the already ascendant use of probability in political and financial risk management. Financialisation rests on this probabilistic Symbolic order, a system of derivatives unanchored from any solid ground. To be realiist after Lacan is to demand an unaccountable world. Lacan's relations with the surrealists Bataille and Breton from 1929 or 1930, and the reverberations of surrealism through eastern Europe in the Soviet era, suggest that the threshold between possible and impossible is the core concern of documentary and fictional realism and surrealism at least into the 1970s. For the mathematical model, the threshold lies in the probabilistic definition of noise, the opposite of communication. In Lacanian surrealism, and to a degree among the situationists, we instead encounter the possibility that there is an excess of meanings: that the world (and we humans to the extent that we are at once inside and external to the world) mediates way more than communication can handle.

'Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen', 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent', the seventh and concluding proposition of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, says that we cannot speak of or otherwise enumerate or state the Real, but that the moment of silence indicates the limits of what is sayable. Nonetheless there are statements about the Real – I defer to Hawking's Brief History – but they describe what cannot be experienced, black holes for example, and to the extent that they do describe, indicate, mathematically and algebraically, the limits of symbols and the symbolic order. The threshold does not define the nature of being, the Real: they define the limits of any symbolic order, the terrain, precisely, of the univeralist ambition of Shannon's theory. Noise is not defined by its difference from communication: rather vice versa, communication is definable as what excludes itself from the Real.

The precarity of a symbolic order self-exiled from reality is nowhere more apparent than in Appadurai's account of financialisation as a tower of self-referential promises which bind speakers to one another by contract while freeing themselves from the goods that they once would have traded but now increasingly distance themselves from. The realism of the global financial crisis of 2007-8 concerns those spurned houses underlying the mortgaged mortgages. The crash's realism was the revenge of the repressed real. #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter assert the real costs of symbolic orders. Those costs, however excluded from discourse, ideology and symbolic formations, participate in them as their defining boundaries. Within the closed system of finance, however, the hitherto final operation of humans, to provide meaning as the conclusion of interpretation, is no longer needed, and meaning too becomes Real, precisely because it is excluded from the symbolic. Subsumed under capital first as attention value (Dallas Smythe), human responses are no longer the final stage of communication but sources of second-order data. The formal subsumption of attention into the commodification of audiences in the Golden Age of Television becomes real subsumption with the capture of likes, swipes and clicks in interactive network media. Meaning becomes first physical behaviour but then, instantaneously and automatically, it is abstracted for symbolic storage and processing. Interpretation of the amassed data is no longer a human task.

Processing thus achieves a higher level of abstraction, construing and constructing its own world but, as in the GFC, its autonomous world is not truly self-sufficient, coherent or complete. Realism activates the threshold of incompletion. This is not a matter of lack but of loss: a historical, time-bound incompleteness. Lack, negation, noise as only the obverse of communication, would be ontological; loss is historical, a diminution, a missing part that runs a system down or stops it, frozen, in its tracks. Loss is historical because it belongs to the friction between 'autonomous' symbolic systems and the ontology they strive to expropriate and escape. This is the terrain of the failed freedom of art. And the object of loss, the lost object, the missing part, where is it? It cannot be said to have no existence. It is only lost. If the symbolic defines the now and the here, what's lost continues to exist, but elsewhere.

presence and abstraction

In Minima Moralia para 145, Adorno writes that, in both art and kitsch, 'freedom from nature is celebrated, but remains mythically entrapped' and adds 'the Eroica, like great philosophy, represents the idea as a total process, yet as if it were directly, sensuously present. In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at its shameless revelling in the joy of imitation, now placed under taboo, while the power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation'. If, as I propose, the kind of abstraction we meet in abstract art is truth to the subject, the self that is imagined is, in Kandinsky for example, or Mondrian, the site of ideas in process, imagined as free of nature, but actually trapped in it, which is how they engage their viewers so intensely, but their freedom from imitation is – in Adorno's account here – never carried out because they, like the nature they disdain, are present. It remains then to see whether the nature they try to rise above is indeed present or is rather a negation produced by the very effort to overcome it. If nature fails to exist, certainly as a whole, and arguably even as part (for example the contrast observable between city and ocean looking out over the bay during lockdown in St Kilda, where the bay is metonymic of Ocean, its freedom from restraint, its curative properties, its self-curing in the absence of trade, its alterity). It is the presence of the artwork (and equally of the kitsch object) both to itself and as object that appears, that distinguishes it from whatever it imitates. This was the discovery of the Impressionists and their impact on early cinema, documented in The Cinema Effect, which however leaves the film open to the criticism's that Bonitzer launches: that it implies not only the visible but the physical off-frame and the fictional/imaginary off-screen. The moment of abstraction occurs in moving image media between frames, at the frame edge, behind and in front of the screen, and in intermittence. Only to a limited degree is it feasible in relation to what is on the screen, photographed or animated. Something else occurs in the relation to sound. Likewise something occurs in lensing, where multi-part compound lenses make up for flaws, as they appear, especially at the edges of the image. Spherical aberration, with its iridescent fringing, is evidence of the emergence of an Other subjectivity in the abstract subject, as it fails to present itself – and is the medium of its failure, as it is also the means of its success.

Allonomy: autonomy and after

The era of autonomous art is over. Because, as Terry Flaxton put it in a recent email, media arts, electronic arts specifically, disappear when the electricity is turned off. Thus demonstrating the dependence of art on its power supply, as also on the power industry, on the financial system for paying the bills, as well as the drives, networks and screens it requires, and software – which even if original to the work is built on the traditions and units of code and their implementation.

This implies promptly that a poem ca not 'contain in itself the reasons why it is so and not otherwise' (Coleridge) since it must be written on top of the infrastructure of a language and orthography that the poet rarely originates (and if they do, in concrete poetry, risks losing comprehension, meaning or evocation other than of the poetic tradition or autonomy for autonomy's sake – a theme to be pursued later.

Similarly with all traditional art media: they require stages, galleries and concert venues; norms of inscription (notations, repertoires of gesture and motion) and a legacy of materials (instruments and tools, pigments, foundries). No wonder that art, now proven by new media to have no autonomy, instead embraces (critically or in celebration) its status as ideological or discursive vehicle of the social and historical apparatus that produces it.

True: art may still be useless. Giving up on beauty, communication or social function only deprives it of use. It does not remove it from exchange value. Having no use-value aligns it all the more closely with the society that shapes it when its only remaining use is to be exchanged. Alternatively it does have uses – as pleasure, as meaningful, as intellectual exercise – which then destroys the uselessness argument again, and once more emphasises art's dependent status.

This is not in itself a Bad Thing. Aesthetic practices that embrace their sociality can do things that may not otherwise be possible. For example, they have a habit of outliving not only their creators but the social order that birthed them, to the point that their pleasures no longer express for an audience today the matter they conveyed at their first appearance. The Eroica for one may still express the Absolute, as Adorno believed, but today scarcely evokes the fire and fury of Bonapartism or its tragedy.

A second potential then hoves into view: that the artwork is of value to the extent that it strives for autonomy and fails. If it did not fail, it would be fully incomprehensible; if it did not strive for freedom, it would be no different than any entertainment (which explains why so much content in the culture pages of our great organs is so entertaining). But because it strives and cracks in the attempt, it can show both the lineaments of the apparatus it is trying to escape and the possibility of there existing an alternate apparatus, even if the artwork can't realise it. This hypothesis is a slight revision of Adorno's ultimately pessimistic aesthetic theory (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/#4).

Outliving the context of their production, artworks do not become autonomous but, as migrants, they become alien and to that extent alienated – alien to themselves and alienated in themselves. Only separated from the conditions of their generation can they become trophies of an aesthetic regime that requires them to be emblems of a freedom that does not exist. Separation form the conjuncture of their birth is often traumatic, the loot of Empire, or the prison songs that become beautiful only when they are removed from the chain gang. The 'immortality' of the Bard or of Bach is only an assurance that mortality is everlasting, that the dignity, even the presence, of the past can always be looted by the present, and thatb whatever we might leave of ourselves in the world after we leave it and lock the door behind us, will be the property of a culture that praises above all individuals, and individuals above justice, but if founded on theft, now in the form of unpayable debt – the very soul, the anima that animates rapacious cyborg capital. Formal autonomy as ascribed to art is the aesthetic form of debt. We can understand this through the continuing appeal of sacred music to atheist ears: God was, as doubt is, the Lord who giveth and taketh away, whose ways are unfathomable, and who is, as Kant says of the sublime, that then which there is no greater.

After autonomy, ecocritique. Why would art be autonomous where there is no human autonomy? The un-freedom of art is a blessing because it creates the possibility of cultural practices whose allegiance is not to human freedom but the liberation of the three phyla: human, natural and technical. Their interdependence means that there can no longer be freedom for any without freedom for all – for everything. Ecocritical as it cannot help but be, media art has a purpose that autonomous art lacks: to speak truly of the three phyla. Trueness, to coin a phrase (Wahrheit rather than Truth)becomes possible for an art that declares its dependence. Allonomy. Where self and selfishness are transcended, another law is possible, beyond the self-rule that lies etymologically under the word 'autonomy'.

The life of a work that survives the conditions of its making, the archival life as Giovanna Fossati calls it, the perpetual work of remaking of the work undertaken by humans, natural processes and technical reproductions and maintenance, is the site of truths, beauties and good things. This is why it is possible to experience something different, estranged from the lockdown boundaries, reading a Hardy poem up here over St Kilda, on a website set in Times over a weird purple background, on the screen of a MacBook Pro, squinting into the autumn sun. This ultra-specific encounter cannot be exchanged because it is not reproducible. Whatever use it has is single-use only. Its value lies less in what Hardy meant or I understand than in the intersecting networks of economies, technologies and ecologies that draw him and me to this meeting and then pass on, subtly but permanently altered.

Presence, the edge, the abstract

In Minima Moralia para 145, Adorno writes that, in both art and kitsch, 'freedom from nature is celebrated, but remains mythically entrapped' and adds 'the Eroica, like great philosophy, represents the idea as a total process, yet as if it were directly, sensuously present. In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at its shameless revelling in the joy of imitation, now placed under taboo, while the power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation'.

If, as I propose, the kind of abstraction we meet in abstract art is truth to the subject, the self that is imagined is, in Kandinsky for example, or Mondrian, the site of ideas in process, imagined as free of nature, but actually trapped in it, which is how they engage their viewers so intensely, but their freedom from imitation is – in Adorno's account here – never carried out because they, like the nature they disdain, are present.

It remains then to see whether the nature they try to rise above is indeed present or is rather a negation produced by the very effort to overcome it. If nature fails to exist, certainly as a whole, and arguably even as part (for example the contrast observable between city and ocean looking out over the bay during lockdown in St Kilda, where the bay is metonymic of Ocean, its freedom from restraint, its curative properties, its self-curing in the absence of trade, its alterity).

It is the presence of the artwork (and equally of the kitsch object) both to itself and as object that appears, that distinguishes it from whatever it imitates. This was the discovery of the Impressionists and their impact on early cinema, documented in The Cinema Effect, which however leaves the film open to the criticism's that Bonitzer launches: that it implies not only the visible but the physical off-frame and the fictional/imaginary off-screen.

The moment of abstraction occurs in moving image media between frames, at the frame edge, behind and in front of the screen, and in intermittence. Only to a limited degree is it feasible in relation to what is on the screen, photographed or animated.

Something else occurs in the relation to sound. Likewise something occurs in lensing, where multi-part compound lenses make up for flaws, as they appear, especially at the edges of the image. Spherical aberration, with its iridescent fringing, is evidence of the emergence of an Other subjectivity in the abstract subject, as it fails to present itself – and is the medium of its failure, as it is also the means of its success.

ens quo maius cogitari nequit

" . . so that an angel can proportionate this power to a greater or smaller part of corporeal substance; for if there was no body at all, this power of God or of an angel would not correspond to any extension whatsoever" *

I place this here as a memento: the founder of modern science was still capable of arguing how many angels might dance on the head of a pin.

Second letter of Descartes to Henry More, 1649 as cited by Koyré

Marcel Mauss vs Arthur C Clarke

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic": Arthur C Clarke c. 1973

And here is a passage from Marcel Mauss's The General Theory of Magic, originally published in 1902:

"... the greater part of the human race has always had difficulty in distinguishing techniques from rites. Moreover, there is probably not a single activity which artists and craftsmen perform which is not also believed to be within the capacity of the magician. It is because their ends are similar that they are found in natural association and constantly join forces" (p.25)

I've been surprised at how some millennial students dislike having their noses rubbed in the protocols and standards, governance and engineering, of their digital media. Perhaps I shouldn't be. Removing the magic from the media is a kind of desecration. It isn't lazy or ideology that stops them wanting to know how it works. It is more like Richard Dyer's refusal to give up the glamour of Hollywood entertainment: a glamour (whose etymology includes magic spells) that we do not want to sacrifice on the altar of reason.

and besides, there is a certain cult-like mystery to the guilds of geeks and hackers themselves. We can as easily fetishise code as we can Ives' designs.

so the Mauss quote seems to be if anything more illuminating than Clarke's third law. The aims of technology and magic are the same, or similar enough, that they can be mistaken for one another. "Because I cast a rune" explains no less than "because of the second law of thermodynamics". And if magic depends on mystery, it is only that the mysteries are at the surface in magic, where modern technology shrouds its mysteries in guild/trade secrets and proprietary intellectual property law, or reveals only that their operation depends on processes which, ultimately, are incomprehensible or undiscoverable.

The Universal Turing machine is universal not simply because it can be turned to any task, but that like Mauss's concept of mana, as Lévi-Strauss described it, is an empty signifier, a void in the syntax of social relations, which because it is without sense can be filled with any meaning whatsoever. Digital devices are meaningful to the degree that they are meaningless.

realism and memory

a childhood in the 20th century will fade away like mist. This is what makes the Blade Runner films so poignant, 'like tears in the rain'

Will jpegs matter? Will the mass image make it possible to keep a snapshot of 2019? This too has a precursor in Blade Runner: the recovery of microscopic detail, the ability to catch what was around a corner at some moment in the past.

As Bazin said, realism can be an apotropaic against death, but that - as in RW Paul's 1896 Blackfriars film - will be transformed by those who cannot remember a horse-drawn London. The true miracle is the coincidence of picture and memory - this is what Barthes doesn't want to admit. We recall the dead as much from a handful of pictures as we do from life.

Poignant then, but are pictures worth recall for anyone but those who lived through the actuality? And for those who strive to forget . . .

The proximity of (social) realism and unrelentingness (as Eliza Cubitt reminded me) is witness to what we do not want to recall. Realism as apotropaic involves the opposite: it recalls beauty; but Realism as a school constantly evokes not memory but the future, a political goal based on sharing what has been, till now, hidden: ordinary life, as Watt argued, but also life (and death) as ordinary, and painful.

Faithful verisimilitude, scientific objectivity, social realism, are all at odds with phenomenological-affective sensuality and its inescapable nostalgia.

The question then is how certain techniques - pictorial and sonic realism - catch up all four programs of realism – and probably more.

Anecdotal: the Page 99 test

Over at The Capmaign for the American Reader, Marshal Zeringue has devised a great way to get writers to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their books. He invited me to read over page 99 of my new book Anecdotal Evidence. The results can be found linked from Marshall's blog

Hardy's walk: Subjectless perception

The last line of Thomas Hardy's short poem 'The Walk' evokes 'the look of a room on returning thence'. One of the Poems of 1912-13, written after the death of his wife Emma, 'The Walk' is an eminently realist poemIt gives a clear-sighted account of an emotional state. If, as I want to argue, realism, aesthetic realism rather than scientific or philosophical, concerns truth to perception, then Hardy gives a detailed description, unburdened by sentiment, of a change in his perception.

What makes it so valuable, above and beyond its finely tuned autobiographical account of personal loss, is its play on absence and presence, on solitude which is not the same as emptiness. There is of course its Victorian atheist dalliance with death including, undoubtedly, his own (his auto-haunting) – the honest (if not entirely admirable, and all the more honest for that) self-pity where, all the same, the indifference of the universe is not exclusively about how existentially gruesome it is to be human. Instead indifference appears as the persistence of the room without her, or him. This is not the indifferent iceberg forming while the Titanic is being built that he would write about in 'The Convergence of the Twain': it has none of that poems inevitability. If anything, the absence of 'The Walk' is entirely evitable: he just has to go for his familiar solitary walk – except that the empty room now accompanies him.

So who is doing the perceiving? Emma indeed, specifically absent-Emma; and also Hardy-when-he's-not-there. And thirdly the room itself, as it waits, synchronously wit the walk, self-perceiving, precisely at the moment when he is pre-occupied with another scene ('the familiar ground'). The real (in the loose sense) is both this familiar room and its unfamiliarity now she has gone, a space that now ejects him, his consciousness, most specifically his perception of it. It is the room that is empty and which he is not present in that changes where he is and what he sees when he is elsewhere, his habitation of the landscape of his walk.

The rather forced rhyme of sense/thence only deepens the alienation that binds him to the affect of absence; and it is this alienation from his own perception that makes this so profoundly realist. It is a poem about the illegibility of a perception.

In theatre there is always an audience. The great fiction of cinema is that there is not. This is Ozu's mystery: what does a room look like when there is no-one there to see it? But this is the very point: seeing without there being a person to see, the purity of perception that has no perceiver (no desire, no revulsion, the scientific principle revealed as not so much objective as non-subjective. The room sees itself because the camera, given the fiction of the absent audience, is in the room and part of the room, furniture. The work of death, of the dead, in Hardy's hard-won atheism, is to impersonate the absence of a perceiver, in order to realise (as all realism is a practice of making real) a subjectless perception in all its purity.

The poem has the medium-specific opportunity to see without a point of view. Ozu works with a tripod: the camera must occupy a point. Hardy was surely not inventing Steadicam. But he is, straddling two epochs in British and European culture, inventing a mode of perception that, having already rejected divine omniscience, is no longer exclusively human.

Interview for Digital Labour

Just published: an interview in Portuguese with Prof. Dr. Rafael Nacimento Grohmann. Here is the English.

1. How to reconnect media and communication studies to media materialities and "finite media"?

Media and Communications has for a long time recognised the materiality of certain aspects of media, notably media labour, industries and corporate systems. A good example is Curtin and Vanderhoeff's essay on the effects industry's supply chains in Television and New Media (attached) which contains a good survey of writing up to 2015 when it was published. The step from how media are made and how they operate to what they are made of is a relatively small one. It rests on some simple observations: (1) the vast majority of modern media, since about 1920, rely on electricity, which requires generators, which require energy in the form of fossil fuels, nuclear or water (and even in the case of 'renewables' require rare minerals which have to be mined). (2) the installed infrastructure of production, distribution and consumption machinery is made of millions of tonnes of plastics, metals and glasses. All of them require manufacturing, often using multiple chemical and electro-mechanical processes, and transport of sub-components in complex supply chains across the world (3) the cycle of innovation requests and sometimes requires consumers to replace outdated equipment - the old equipment is meant to be recycled, but is frequently only dumped. The whole product life-cycle of infrastructure and devices is an intensive user of power and materials - including the energy requirements of transmission, processing and storage – are significant components of global pollution and carbon emissions. In many instances, these factors are visible in the aesthetics of media content, an area explored in my most recent book, Anecdotal Evidence

Ecocritique is a practice of radical questioning, as essential to the critical armoury as feminism and postcolonialism have become. Like them, it extends beyond judgements about texts with clear ecological themes, demonstrating the significance of ecocriticism for any advanced understanding of cultural forms. Anecdotal method is ecocritical because it focuses on encounters, concentrated ... global.oup.com

2. What is the role of infrastructure costs for digital media?

"Costs" suggests an economic account of infrastructure, which is very important; but there are also environmental costs to launching satelllites, laying cables across oceans and over land, and the provision of cloud and other forms of remote storage. Redundant infrastructure, especially in near-Earth orbits and the deep oceans, is typically simply abandoned. We know little about the effects of space debris on the upper atosphere, or of decaying cable at the immense pressures of the deep sea. Both zones are controlled by extra-govenrmental legal systems with, consequently, little effect on their national and corporate owners. We simply do not know what the environmental costs are, largely because the economic costs are treated as externalities, that is, services provided largely by the environment that do not show up in the financial accounts of the owners. (Even the phrase 'environmental services' is a way of reducing the ecology to an item of accountancy, a fundamentally dishonest or 'ideological' position)

3. You highlight the role of "material" in a world where there are many theorists who speak only of "immaterial". What role does work (and labor exploitation) play in your research?

The same theorists who discuss immateriality of labour are often open to the arguments (associated with Latour among others) that labour is by no means an exclusively human activity. The term 'immaterial' tends to describe work which involves the manipulation of symbols. This work is increasingly undertaken by digital media, as in the case of algorithmic trading in stock exchanges, but also in the use of artificial intelligence for data capture and processing in social media and subscription services. The distinction is legitimate when it distinguishes physical from mental labour, for example in call centres, and is used to indicate changes in workplace organisatuon, discipline and surveillance in digital environments. The link that ecocritique makes apparent here is that the ecology also supplies 'labour' in the form of very material substrates of energy and materials; and that the exploitation of labour does not cease when the labourer dies. Using Marx's thesis of 'dead labour', we can see that the ideas and techniques of earlier generations are congealed into technologies which then form the increasingly important environment of work by human agents. This ancestral environment constitutes an ongoing materialisation and exploitation of labour, even post-mortem. Descriptions of our current situation as an information, cognitive or immaterial economy only over-emphasises the human element of work, to the exclusion of ecological and technological contributors to labour processes. Ecocritical materialism insists that humans cannot be liberated without also liberating technologies and ecologies from the same system that exploits living workers

4. You claim that "contemporary accumulation continues colonialism in the Global South (exocolonialism)". How to relate media finite and colonialism in the Global South?

The most obvious connection between the economic externalisation of the natural world and the Global South is that the human population of the South is equally externalised: the bodies of the poor can be exploited without pay (or with very little) and waste materials (including techno-waste shipped to Ghana and other undefended regions) can be dimped in the form of microplastics, toxic metals and other dangerous debris, into the bodies of the poor and the environments they depend on for food. The vast majority of extractive industries producing for the global electronics market are in developing nations, or worse - in regions torn apart by proxy wars over control of metals, as in the Congo in the notorious case of Coltan (tantalum, an essential component in mobile phones). Much of the so-called 'green technology' being mooted today requires lithium batteries (as in electric cars but also in every laptop, smart watch, phone, camera . . . ). Lithium comes from salt lakes in the Andes: the byproduct of extraction is salt water, which companies dump in the surrounding environment, killing everything. Much comes form land, such as this, kept as reservations when the first indigenous clearances happened under colonisation; indigenous peoples worldwide are being driven from even this marginal land every time a new deposit of valuable metals is discovered. Colonialism was not an event: it is an ongoing catastrophe

5. What does it mean to understand ecological communication as politics?

Ecocritique demands rethinking both politics and communication. We have traditionally thought of communication as an event occurring between people: this is Shannon's mathematical model, now the dominant discourse of the communication industries. May thinkers from McLuhan to Kittler, Flusser to Gitelman and Vismann emphasise the participation of machines in communication. We must now add the participation of materials and energies form the natural world. Communication is not exclusively human: it involves communication with as well as through technologies and environments. Equally politics can no longer be understood as an exclusively human activity. Oceans, atmospheric phenomena, glaciers, jungles, mountains all speak with us, in their ways, to make clear their demands, their requirements for what I take, from Aristotle, to be the concern of politics: how we should live the good life. That "we" must now embrace the non-human world, or their will be no world, and certainly no good life

In this politics as in human politics, we have for too long accepted the principle that a minority has the right (or even the obligation) to speak on behalf of others. I cannot speak on behalf of indigenous peoples. Nor can I speak on behalf of nature. We must rebuild politics so that natural entities can speak for themselves. This in turn requires a remaking of communication so that we can understand what nature is telling us. Not just translating it into data visualisations to persuade other humans - though this is a great and important task - but to create the conditions for dialogue. This in turn requires that we release technologies form their subservience, so that they can mediate between the living, whether human or not.

We cannot simply add ecology to the list of things-to-be-concerned-about: like feminism and decolonialism, ecocritique demands we rethink every aspect of our work

Temporalities, temporealities and temporamentalities

To the extent that the non-existent gap between images is absent from the succession of discrete frames, even if it determines its apparent flow, the gap between images occupies a different temporal register to succession. Collective action ascribes one form of truth to the durational aggregation of images, and a different, linear temporality. The gaps belong to another truth, and another time. As picnolepsia, the time of absence is absence from time, and might therefore be described as ontological. Where the aggregate of apparent motion emerges as a result of collective action, it is political. This political emergence might then be called a temporamentality - a government of time. The neologism needs to be distinguished from temporality, a term rooted in the distinction between the eternal, spiritual activities of the Mediaeval Church and its material, time-bound collection of tithes and guardianship of land. Descending from the mode of existing in time proper to mortals, the term now can refer to the specific differences of different modes of existing in time, like duration, instantaneity or ephemerality. Wolfgang Ernst (2016) offers another neologism, tempor(e)alities, to refer to ontological times produced by technical means, such as the millisecond transport times so critical to financial networks and computer-to-computer 'algo' trading. Temporamentalities, with their memory of Foucault's (2000) 'governmentalities', are rather constructions of temporalities and temporealities (to simplify Ernst's styling) that have achieved the status of real abstractions, capable of changing how time is organised, such as Progress. A familiar question returns as to whether temporal technologies like chronometers, determine temporamentalities, the tendency of Borst's (1993) and Mumford's (1934: 12) analyses: or, in common with all technologies, are symptomatic of a broader collective mentalité or designed entirely as servants of a dominant mode of production; or again if chrono-technologies and temporamentalities are relatively autonomous, interacting at a distance and according to their discrete internal logics. Or, as a final item in a potentially longer list, are temporamentalities and chrono-technologies in a relation of contradiction and negation? The relation between times and their measures is significant firstly because it forces the question: when is truth?; and secondly because it clarifies the stakes in animation which, as the fundamental technology for the reproduction of movement, is the chrono-technology par excellence of our era.

It is clear that movement existed before cinema. Cinematic representation of movement – animation – obeys the law that any representation stands in for a represented that is absent, which implies that movement is absent from animations. However, the optical illusion depends on a human to be deceived: dogs, for example, with their swifter eyesight, see only stills where we slip into illusion at a rate of 25 frames per second. Of course there must be movement for the illusion to occur, but like a magic trick, the decisive action has to be invisible. The shutter closes to hide the moment when the film strip ticks forward to the next frame (otherwise we would see a blur between frames), and in scanned images the fading of light from the pixels is obscured by their rescanning with a new frame, and the gaps between pixels and scanlines is just small enough to fool us. As a form of mediation, then, cinematic representation of movement is time-based, time-consuming, takes time, but unlike the time of the true movement it represents, this temporeality is subject to the temporamentality of a chronometer, the clockwork of a projector or the Herzian timing governing network protocols, computer processing and the codecs governing scanning

A little less than a thousand years ago, St Anselm, considering the mystery of God's eternity, noted

Whether, therefore, we are talking about what we may say (that truth does come to a beginning or an end), or about what we may intelligibly think (that truth does not come to a beginning or an end), truth is not circumscribed by beginning and ending (Monologion ¶19. Anselm 1998: 32).

We might come to a similar conclusion in considering the mystery of the universal constant that underpins contemporary physics. Movement as such belongs to eternity, not clocks. In animation therefore we confront the clash of two modes of time in which temporamentality overcomes and absents eternity. From the standpoint of the temporamental apparatus, eternity is the timeless nothing between frames; but Anselm teaches us that the nothing is in fact something, in this instance the principle that allows the illusion to flourish. At the same time, the illusion also depends on Virilio's picnolepsia, and the neuropsychology of human optics, our recurrent loss of consciousness in the interstices between images. It is not only the real movement that is absent but the perceiving consciousness. The question 'when is truth' thus also raises the question of who or what is present or absent in the mediation of truth, where truth is a quality of what is absented in the process of representation.

Transmitting video images today involves another temporamentality in the form of vector prediction. The near-universal standard is the MPEG codec, short for the compression-decompression algorithms defined by the Motion Picture Expert Group, a sub-group of the International Electrotechnical Commission and the International Standards Organisation's Joint Technical Committee, published by the International Telecommunications Union, a UN body with, like its partners, powerful corporate members. One technique for ensuring efficient transfer of the in-between frames is to send, not a pixel-by-pixel account of every frame, but a mathematical description of the likely trajectory of significant elements of the image from one keyframe to the next, a description known as a vector. These vectors are probabilistic: they do not recount the actual record of movement but a simulation based on the probable travel of, say, a cluster of red pixels representing a cricket ball across a field. Video animation is then not only picnoleptic but proleptic, representing real-time acts (in the case of live sports broadcasting) through representations of the likely future of those acts, or, from another perspective, showing the future as if it were already completed. In one sense this is, as prolepsis was at origin, a purely rhetorical effect; on the other, to the extent that discourse, including visual discourse, remediates what it represents, it is a performative action, perhaps most of all when coupled with the future-oriented simulations of Earth-observation networks, war-gaming and financial software.

Asking who is present during the picnoleptic blanks of real-time animated transmissions draws the answer: the codec is present, operating in real time, calculating with extreme rapidity the content of the next cluster of frames. This codec is however far from autonomous technology. It is an apparatus in Flusser's sense that embraces technical installations (the TCP/IP packet-switching protocol and with it the entire panoply of internet governance; construction standards in the electronics industry; the supply chains for metals, plastics, glass and the fabrication of chips; the ongoing colonialism and endocolonialism of resource extraction; the energy supply engineered in consort with the electronics industry; the environmental impacts of energy use, resource extraction and device fabrication; the ancient sunlight trapped in fossil fuels and the ancient energies stored in minerals; the distant echoes of the Big Bang . . . .). As Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, we can no longer disentangle human history from natural history. Cosmic forces are at play in our screens. But they are occluded by the demands of corporate standardisation, and a temporamentality that mirrors a temporeality that has risen to dominance with financialisation in the period since the 1973 Oil Crisis: the colonisation of the future.

Inhuman and Insignificant Pt 2: Truth 24fps

Godard wasn't wrong when he described cinema as Truth 24 times a second; except he was looking in the wrong place

The Real remains impossible because it is beyond Symbolic (or Imaginary). But it occurs exactly as Lacan predicted: in the micro-seconds between frames where Virilio spies picnolepsia, ie when the subject is absent, that is precisely when the Real can enter.

Film/video are privileged not because of their indexicality but because of the constitutive lacunae that enable apparent movement

Motion (as telos) is limitless, and is Real as a consequence. The Real can only enter a world of objects (the Symbolic as it exists historically in the 20th/21st centuries) in the absence of objecthood.

Inhuman and Insignificant Cinema: absence and the Real

'to deliver human speech from the lie that it is already human'(Minima Moralia p.102)

The joy of photography/cinematography is their inhumanity

As natural artifice and artificial nature, photography excludes the human from anything but selection.

It is not in any sense a 'language'. The remnant that appears linguistic is only the secondary choice of using the photo, as in an advert. Its function in news is precisely to persuade that no choice was involved, and that it has been an inhuman witness.

The question of 'significance' (Minima 142) needs to be attended to in terms not available to Adorno in the 1940s: the sign, and the contest over whether existents are already signs – of what makes them appear, and by appearing makes them appear significant, ie that they appear as existent, that they exist 'for' – perhaps for us, perhaps for each other (as in camouflage) or as evidence – of history or evolution, or God. Each relies on signifying, becoming a sign-for, and on the distinction between the whatever that appears and its appearance, between the substrate of pre-significant matter and the signifier. As the chora somehow pre-dates the signified, sign-ready Symbolic ego, so there is a pre-significant material process, but even that is only to the extent that its appearance as phenomenon makes it possible to signify, and under the rule that it is only by appearing and thus becoming capable of signifying that the possibility of a pre-significant / extra-significant existence becomes possible.

What film tries so hard to record is not the appearance of things as an achieved presentation (things as they are) but the process of their appearing. What slips under the procession of images is their inhuman vulnerability to nuance and process, forming and diffusing like the clouds over Monument Valley – which in turn de-monumentalise the geology, whose appearance appears under this light as a moment in a longer history of evolution and erosion, loosening in a third stage the definitenesss of the colonial wars played out in Ford's narratives. The cinematic sign exceeds ,as it precedes, the administration of Hollywood that seeks to contain it as a circumscribed entertainment and, perhaps, an unambiguous ideology. Thus the failure of realism/naturalism is precisely where it holds the greatest promise.

Post-anti-neo-Darwinism

Neo-Darwinism saw Man as pinnacle of a tree-like structure of evolution. Post-Darwinist evolution gets rid of the idea of the pinnacle, and instead sees the ecology as the triumph of complexity. Anthropocene anti-Darwinism returns to the pinnacle model to tell us that the whole of evolution has culminated, as pinnacle, in the engine of its own destruction: the human species. Post-anti-Darwinism proposes therefore that, if climate change and pollution are human effects, humans can change them but only once the distinction of humans from the ecology ends, and therewith the distinction between the ascent model and the ecological complexity model. Undoing the distinctions human-natural and human technological, as well as the natural-technological distinction these two imply, is thus a fundamentally aesthetic as well as politically fundamental task.

Doubt

The meteorologists predicted today's weather yesterday, with reasonable accuracy, and with a respectable degree of probability.

But predictions of longer and more devastating fire seasons may be a) incorrect (the further ahead the future, the more determinants there are in play, and the less assurance that predictions will be accurate; prediction becomes statistical -- rather than the accuracy of predicting a cool change around 4.00pm). Similarly the larger the scale, the more abstract the forces: not the causality of a weather system approaching from the SE at 5..00pm but combinations of dipole, el Ninõ, ocean surface temperatures . . . Counting in anthropogenic forces including carbon and greenhouse gases, water extraction etc no longer clearly causal, opening the field for doubt.

In a previous note I worked with truth's antonyms as lies, fictions and fantasies, using the distinction that lies and fictions are not believed but truths and fantasies are. Now we need to address doubt. and to distinguish it from systematic (Cartesian) doubt

Systematic doubt, historically the basis for the Western critical tradition, has been a tool for critical theory versus scientism and common sense. But today it is embraced in the new tactics of populist neo-nationalism (with which neo-liberalism clothes itself in the era of its triumph, which is also the era of the crisis of US hegemony. Every nation positions itself urgently to make the most of the rise of China (and beyond that of India, and somewhere down the line of Turkey) as well as in relation to its reluctant and often rebellious citizenry (and of course against its traditional foes, indigenous and migrant). Preliminary distinctions:

DOUBT 1 is a fortified, strategic position that refuses truth by characterising it as merely one belief among many in the 'marketplace of ideas' - ie a pro-position that all truths are equal.

DOUBT 2 is a critical move in the process of argument, a transitional stage, a recognition of the fundamentally antagonistic relation between truths. Any truth asserts itself as the only one.This is also the case with highly specific truths (it will rain at 4.00pm tomorrow; it is raining now), where the particular stands over against the universal. Doubt 2, critical doubt, asserts the irreducible difference between truths.

Dominant Ideology

“Environmentalism, the dominant ideology” is itself an ideological statement.

The top ten companies in the Fortune Global 500 for 2019 include six oil companies, two automotive, the Chinese national energy grid and Walmart. All are carbon dependent. They range between 0.5 and 0.27 trillion dollars of earnings in 2019.

The leaders of the USA and China, the largest (almost 25% of the global economy) and second largest (15.5%) economies, are not environmentalists. Nor is the leader of India, the fastest growing economy and about to achieve the largest population, with GDP of 10.5 trillion and growth rate around 7.5%.

An ideology is 'dominant' only when it is embraced by those who dominate. Neither politically nor economically can environmentalism be shown to belong to those who dominate the world today.

The source is Rupert Darwall, described as an 'opinion contributor'to The Hill , picked up via Apple's News app. They might consider what they think constitutes "news"

Return to blogging

When I was leaving the UK, Gareth Stanton observed that this once live site had become moribund. The fact is that I was writing stuff - notably Anecdotal Evicence - and didn't need a place to put thoughts while I had a clear project.

Now as I move to a new job I find I have little time to write substantial pieces, so it's back to these short thoughts, components towards the next big project on aesthetic politics