Getting specific about medium specificity

Mostly when we say "medium" we mean something of a pretty high order of complexity: TV, say. Or, saints preserve us, 'digital' (I once wrote a book called Digital Aesthetics: hubris, to believe that there was only one aesthetics for the whole digital realm). These media are constructs, not just feats of engineering but imaginary engines, imaginary in that we ascribe to them a coherence they do not actually possess. Convergence is the tip of the iceberg: so many elements which comprise the digital (and TV) are shared with other media. Take lens technologies for example. There are no analog or digital lenses.

Each medium is already a dozen technologies arranged in a system. To label one assemblage “photography” is almost silly: we have to look a) at the elements from which it is composed and b) the commonalities it has with other media. The term ‘medium’ would be better reserved for, say, a type of screen. And then we might be able to find some new results: coherent light operating in scientific instrumentation, fibre optics and a Jean-Michel Jarre lightshow has certain common characteristics but we rarely understand laser as a free-standing medium like print – and yet the commonalities are significant, as are continuities with pre-laser techniques for disciplining light waves.

(thanks to Kris Cannon for sparking this thought)

The Body at Work

As promised this afternoon, slides from a lecture on the labouring body for Elizabeth Presa's course on the Poetics of the Body ae available on my slideshare. The music was from Ustad Vilayat Khan, an evening raga; The Prisonnaires' version of Po' Lazarus from the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou, Captain Beefheart with Ry Cooder doing Hard Working Man from the soundtrack to Paul Schrader's film Blue Collar, and The Chemical Brothers, music : response

Imitation of Life, Truth and the Turing Test

Douglas Sirk's 1959 film opens when two young widows, one white one black, meet with their daughters. Lora prefers her career as an actress to her daughter Suzie or her lover. Her profession is an imitation. Her new best friend Annie is an Aunt Jemima who sacrifices her own welfare become Lora's housekeeper and to raise Lora's daughter. Her own daughter Sarah-Jane longs to be white, passes as white. Love interest Steve is a photographer whose images are just images (in the opening scene he appears to be trying to forge Weegee's famous 1937 shot of crowds on the beach at Coney Island). He is the object of a teenage crush from Lora's daughter. The whole thing is recounted in startling Technicolor, then as now a byword for gaudy and fraudulent colour.

John Gavin, who plays Steve the love interest, was half Mexican but passes here as authentically American, all-American. He would in later life be appointed ambassador to Mexico by another actor, Ronald Reagan, of whose presidency Gil Scott Heron would sing "This ain't really a life, ain't nothing but a movie". The real-life daughter of Lana Turner, who plays Lora, killed Turner's lover, though the inquest found she acted in self-defense, to the incredulity of Hollywood insiders and conspiracy nuts ever since. Turner herself had been, only a few years earlier, the target of a vitriolic attack by DH Lawrence on the faux sexuality of the 'sweater-girl'. All characters in the film are played by people who are not the people we see on the screen. Sirk's Brechtian heritage (as Detlef Sierck he was involved in the political theatre of Weimar) is all over their stilted performances, and the distances between them, filled with the things which fill up the spaces in which the characters' lives are not lived.

The problems only begin here. The soi-disant "truth" is that Sarah-Jane "is" black; and that Lora should have married Steve, so preventing the ghastly crush her daughter has on him. That is, the only available truth which they imitate is that of race and the Oedipal family. (That Annie and Lora are both widows suggests the Oedipal role of the dead father; and the suspicion that the same man might have fathered both daughters . . . ). But the finale at Annie funeral reveals that the only Truth is Death, and that truth is fatal. Except that we survive, weeping in the audience: we for whom the entire charade has been played out experience an imitation of emotion. And of course there is no Death, only a staged funeral with no body in the coffin. And we know it (je sais mais quand même): the only available truth is a disavowal, merely a Romantic willing suspension of disbelief, a conspiracy to act as if there were a truth, veiled underneath the appearances, underneath the ideologies. Truth is a projection, one we project as much as the cinematic apparatus does.

Nine years before Sirk's film's release, Alan Turing set out the terms of the Turing test. An interrogator in a room separated from a machine and a person asks questions, the answers to which are to prove which of the two unseen competitors is human and which a machine. In the cinema there is nothing behind the screen, only a loudspeaker. Not even a voice. Not even a recording of a voice, which is on the optical soundtrack up in the projection booth over our heads and behind our backs. The richness of this hall of mirrors and the cynical reading of the melodrama of manners that it reflects persuades us that an (authorial) intelligence inhabits it. Sadly it is also a remake - of a 1934 film by John Stahl.

In Imitation of Life, all the humans alive and dead, onscreen and in the auditorium, fail the Turing test, and only the filmic machine passes.

Internet filtering

It is the job of governments to distrust their citizens, and the job of citizens to distrust their governments. This state of armed détente is acted out in the history of public service broadcasting: if unpopular, elitist; if popular, undeserving of subsidy. The market loathes public service and will not tolerate public good arguments: the last thing neo-liberalism wants is an informed citizenship, just as consumer capital could not survive the ideally informed consumer it presents as its foundation. Network communications is worse for governments than public broadcasting: the more democratic the medium, the more brutal the censorship. Internet filtering is only partly a dispay of redundant power. It also ensures that the rump of the free internet pre-dot.com crash is safely castigated. Protecting the innocent from evil is an ideological mask for the true achievement of filtering: quelling the discussion about what constitutes the good life. Teaching the many to fear is integral to contemporary representative politics. The fear engendered by filters is enough to make them effective.

(The filtered have learnt to exploit the same emotional turmoil as the advertising and marketing industries: to control desire and deflect it towards useless and unpleasant products. If we refuse the one, logically we should also refuse the other. Logic however has little to do with politics, or censorship.)

Communion as the end of ethics

Where communication appears in discussions of ethics, it is either as a problem or an instrument. In Susan Sontag's moving work on images of torture, for example, communication is a means for extending the suffering of victims, while for Jürgen Habermas, communication is a means towards the esteblishment of values and norms. Of the two, the position which sees communication as an exercise of power is the most persuasive: there is no question that in a universe of flow, somehow communication has ended up in the hands of the few: ammassed, delayed, detoured, and used as a weapon in information warfare, propaganda, and as both Sontag and Elaine Scarry argue, as an instrument of torture. The sad truth of Habermas' more utopian vision is that communicative agreement between free and equal subjects can result in values and norms which are anything but utopian. Although Arendt uses the case of the Eichman trial to demonstrate the weaknes of kant's categorical imperative, her thesis of 'the banality of evil' is in the end an emprical argument against the idea that discussion among peers will always result in rational results: here, the discussion among ome of the most highly educated populations in Europe resulted in general agreement to the terms of the Final Solution. Something is wrong.

A eudaimonist perspective, deriving from one of the oldest European staements on ethics, Aristotle's Nichomachaean Ehics. In Aristotle (Book 10, Chapter 8), the highest good is the life of the mind: the moment at which we are most godlike, and which as 'Contemplative Soeculation', points both backwards and forwards in time. It is clear today that Aristotle needs to be adjusted in one crucial aspect. The life of the mind can no longer be understood as the life of one brain trapped inside a bone box on the top of the hum,an frame. In what we share with the aimals, and in what we share – throug language and all the other media which form the vehicles of thought – with other human beings, the life of the mind is an entriely collective entreprise: what recent writers refer to as the intellectual commons. Yet here Hardt and Negri are as misled as habermas. The commons is no more an instrument for the realisation of something else than is rational communication. From a eudaimonst persp[ective, communication itself is the Good. It remains to be seen why, if this is the case, communication regularly turns out to be evil, in the cases investigated by Arendt and by Scarry and Sontag. At stake is the nature and definition of 'communication'

Thus far in human history, political economy has served to parcel out scarce resources on the basis of wealth and power, in order to produce and reproduce differential access to the commons of communication. That concentration is no longer necessary. There is enough to go round. There has been enough food, water, shelter, fuel and knowledge to go round for over a hundred years. But the falling rate of profit has ensured that throughout that period, more and more demands for more and more consumption has been necessary to preserve the privilege of the ruling class. Commodification of all sorts of human wants are no longer useful: this is the case with knowledge and communication, for which it is also true that the atomisation of knowledge into data and information is no longer productive. Only the falling rate of profit leads to intellectual property right sin knowledge, the rent-charging regime which poisons the very well-springs of the innovation process it pretends to defend. We do not contemplate or speculate about the Good, because we are already presented with the goods - with commodity consumption as the only path to enjoyment. These are the pleasures which Aristotle analyses before making his final eudaimonist step from pleasures to happiness.

For Aristotle, 'contemplative specualation' fails a final test of wholeness because (1) it dep[ends on a sufficiency of the means of life (including the means of liberality: enough to give away) and (2) it is incapable of persuading, through its own media -– rhetoric for him, mass or personalised media for us – the mass of people to accept it as doctrine. In answer to (2), the masses are devoted to the pursuit of pleasures because they do not possess them, so that, in answer to (1), they do not have those underpinning sufficiencies wituout which happiness is inaccessible. Therefore the purpose of political life – and here we might properly say the purpose of communication – is to provide those pleasures which enable happiness – comntemplation and speculation. What else is intended by Marx's 'Realm of Freedom' (Capital III 820; [Ch 48]) - a realm which begins to be possible with the shortening of the working day.

Neither action nor creation, in Aristotle Contemplative Speculation is not restricted to rationality but includes sensory and emotional life. This consideration should indicate the weakness of his assertion that such happiness escapes non-human creatures: rationality is not the sole copnstituent of happiness, which is therefore not reserved only for the rational animal. Lie his comparison with the gods, the distinction form the animals no longer persuades us. Similarly in Marx, while we take from him the idea of 'socialised man', we part company over the false choice between ruling or being ruled over by nature. Our happiness depends on collectivity, connectivity, and therefore on extending our relations from the means of production (techne) to the physical world in which our pleasures place us as fully physical beings. Communication is not a means to ecotopia: it is ecotopia.

Yet as we have seen communication is in itself an overdetermined, purposive, not to say instrumental concept. We need to revise what weunderstand by it. It ight be possible to speak of true and false communication (as we might of true and false hope - of 'hope' for a win on the Lottery as opposed to hope for a just, open, happy world). Ontologically, mediation is the flow of matter and energuy, which both physical law and human instinct forms into order through negentropic processes. It is these processes which, as Shannon and Weaver showed in the eartliest days of information theory, construct order. yet they too easily construct communication as orders given and obeyed. This is the 'false' communication, yet it is the historical process through which we pass, and which we cannot gainsay or rescind. Perhaps the term we need is something else, somehting of the commons, such as communion (I owe the term to Rafael Lozano-Hemmer), to distinguish from the command-and-control ethic of communications. From universal mediation, and its entropic characteristic, through the negentropic but equally catastrophic command regime of communication, we move towards a eudaimonist utopia of communion, a term which has the added benefit of centuries of usage in which communion with nature, and indeed with the divine, has been part of its meaning. Communion is the goal itself, not a means to anything else. We seek justice,, health, food, drink, shelter. clothing and a modicum of order so that we can be happy communing beyond the artifices of wealth, power, species and phyla.

3 Theses on black and white

Thesis One:
that the opoposite of black is white: a surface which reflects all wavelengths equaly, as a black surface absorbs them all. When an imaginary pure black surface absorbs all wavelengths, it annihilates differences between them. And so does an imaginarly pure white, subordinating all wavelengths to its own purity. Thus there is not so much difference between white and black as we might suppose: both draw difference into unity.

Thesis Two:
the opposite of black is not white but light. Against the darkness in which our eyes can perceive nothing, there is the light in which they do. But light, the purest, brightest light, like darkness, blinds, as the desert sun does. The closer it comes to absolute, the more light burns out the rods and cones, maculates the seeing eye with afterimages, in extremis takes sight away permanently, as it has for so many observers of solar phenomena. Blinding, and the maculation of vision, is common to absoulte darkness and absolute light, just as reduction to unity is common to absolute black and absolute white. Here too there is no true opposition.

Thesis Three:
the opposite of black is not white but a mirror reflection, which reflects each wavelength in its own discrete form. Against black, we would set the differentiating forms of natural as well as manufactured mirrors – rivers and streams, wet rocks, oil shimmering on puddles – as indeed we might include those natural and manufactured forms of prism which split the light into rainbows, as in the spray of waterfalls and surf. Against black's unity, and against its blinding of vision, we might cast as its dialactical pair the shattering and splintering of light, its endless multiplication.

Vector Politics and the Aesthetics of Disappearance

From a chapter drafted for John Armitage (ed) Virilio Now

To build a new future is the greatest of challenges. When Virilio forces us to look into the abyss of final catastrophe, he makes us consider not only what is at stake, but how we might address it. In his pioneering work on ecological politics he demonstrates how much depends on how we see ourselves in relatiuon to the world. Today, as the terrains of 'immaterial labour' and the physical infrastructure of the network coincide, Virilio, in common with feminist phenomenologists of digital media like N. Katherine Hayles (1999), Margaret Morse (1998) and Michelle White (2002), argues against the mind-body split that informs the cyber-visionary desire to leave behind the crumpled, painful 'meat' of the body. Instead, Virilio argues, we have to understand that the general accident is not just a technological flaw, as in his insight that the inventions of the train, the airplane, nuclear power, internet and bio-engineering are always simultaneously the invention of the train crash, the plane wreck, meltdown, information crash and genetic time-bomb. The condition is however more general and formative than that: Virilio notes that 'the production of any 'substance' is simultaneously the production of a typical accident (Virilio 1993: 212). As Jussi Parikka observes of this passage, 'An accident . . . is not in this context intended to mean the opposite of absolute and neccessary, as Aristotelian metaphysics has maintained. Instead, accidents are an inherent part of an entity' (Parikka 2007: 4). This might recall Adorno's praise of disappointment, and perhaps also signal the danger attendant on construing the future not as risk management but as unknowable other. In other words, Virilio points us towards an aesthetics of failure: of the inherent risk that any object – and phenomenologically therefore any subject – runs of failing to continue to be. It comes down then to a duty of care, for the planet, and consequently therefore also for the people who inhabit it. It seems then that Virilio is correct: a putative vectoral network, one that is not self-identical, that evolves without notice, that plunges into accident and disappointment, and in which machines have as much say as humans is a terrifying risk. But it may also be the only way to escape the stifling grid of destruction which is the military, economic, political and cultural standoff of a present which denies hope to the mass of humanity and the planet itself.