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.