Overall, I found this text to be very useful in thinking through some of the theories of the visual that we have been discussing this semester. It seems that Burnett has outlined some of the most important issues within how we think about images, even if I somewhat disagree with his use of terminology in places and some of his conclusions. A few thoughts:
Burnett says, "[t]he process of copying was a precursor to new methods of disseminating information and ideas. This is most fully expressed through the zine movement and P2P communications systems that I examine in greater detail in chapter 7" (62). Although I found his later discussion of P2P systems useful for thinking about how we imagine new communities though emergent, digital forms of media, I would have liked him to continue the discussion of zines, which I believe are a valuable but often overlooked resource for thinking, as he suggests, about technologies of reproduction, the emergence of new forms of media, and collaborative design. What zines offer, I would argue, are a case study in the ways in which a given technology is often re-purposed within a given situation in order for a group to resist perceived cultural restraints. What I'm thinking of most specifically, here, is the founders of Punk in NYC in 1975 who claim that they had to create a magazine that would cover the music that was being ignored or disparaged in the mainstream publications. The editors of the publication also claim to have named punk rock more generally.
Burnett summarizes/takes issue with Baudrillard: "However, the artificial nature of these environments has made it seem as if simulation and virtual reality were illusions. This has resulted in rather superficial complaints about the world turning into Disneyland and artifice becoming the foundation for the real" (94). Several things here. I would say that Mitchell's summary of Baudrillard's description of Disneyland might be more on point with regard to the ways in which simulation might function. I think the bigger issue here, though, is a problem with the terminology itself. "Virtual" in this sense is just as problematic as "simulation." Or, to respond to Baudrillard's concerns, if we are in the desert of the real itself, then it is the desert that has been created by theories of the disappearance of the real, theories that the real is no longer real at all. Virtual suggests not real. In this sense, then, no images would be real. Unless we agree with Plato, then this seems misguided. Rather, I would argue, we have to begin to focus on the materiality of images and the ways in which things that we refer to as "simulations" or "virtual" are, in fact, actual creations. One example, here, and to tie into Burnett's discussion of immersion in video games, would be the story, printed in an Aug. 2007 editions of the WSJ of Ric Hoogestraat, who spends hours upon hours daily sitting in front of his computer playing Second Life. He is married, in name but not legally, to two women, one of whom he only spends time with when he logs into the game.
Burnett helpfully points toward the creation of a digital divide between those who are literate in computer languages and the rest of the population -- "[t]he opaqueness of 'coding' and the skills needed to create software are out of reach for the vast majority of people" (99).
Finally, I wasn't sure what to make of Burnett's claim that "[t]his is perhaps the first time in human history that a technology has been invented that could redefine what is meant by being human" (122). He argues that humans could not survive without machines (126). On one hand, yes, I agree that we should redefine how we have traditionally thought about what it means to be human. I also agree that humans could not now, nor have ever, survived without machines. This is perhaps, also, where I disagree with Burnett. He seems to suggest that there has been some sort of break that has caused us to redefine humans because humans have changed. Rather, if there has been a break, I would argue that it is that the degree of complexity of our reliance on machines has increased to the point that it has become visible. We have always relied on tools, even if they were not sophisticated machines with moving parts. But, to the first humans, those spears and rocks would have been every bit as valuable as the cars and ipods of today. Some have argued that the fact that humans walked upright came as a result of their use of tools. I believe not in technological determination but rather that man's relationship to technology has always been one of co-evolution.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
More thoughts on W.J.T. Mitchell's Picture Theory
In his chapter "Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and Language" Mitchell says there is "a sense that postmodernism is an explosive breaking down of that barrier between vision and language that had been rigorously maintained by modernism" (217).
Throughout this chapter, Mitchell seems to suggest that this barrier was never actually impermeable, (and perhaps the barrier here may function like the semiotic barrier in that it is not what on either side of this wall that should concern us so much as the qualities of the barrier itself) communication remains in even the most abstract paintings of modernism -- "These paintings, no matter how abstract, are never merely formal or decorative" (223).
Again, to return to the theories of the Gutenberg Parentheses or the resurgence of myth after the Enlightenment, all things suppressed or pushed out will perhaps return with a vengeance. So, the "reopening of art ... to kitsch, mass culture, the mixture of media, political propaganda ... the resurgence of artistic impurity, hybridity, and heterogeneity" (239) may all suggest that we, as Latour argues, have never actually been modern. I'm not sure how helpful this is to the navigating the predicament that Mitchell finds himself in when he seems to want to say that we have moved beyond postmodernism but is unsure of what to call this moving beyond -- "the 'end of postmodernism,' if that word has any meaning as the designation of a period" (263). He says, "I have called the end of postmodernism, the era of the 'pictorial turn' " (417). In this sense, then, the pictorial turn looks a like a pictorial revolution, not only in the sense of the re-turning that revolution implies, but, it seems, even more strikingly in the sense of Jameson's conception of revolution as the moment at which modes of production become visibly (emphasis mine) antagonistic. This sense would also point us toward where Mitchell suggests at the end of the text we may need to venture to be able to engage the image -- "suppose we thought about representation, not in terms of a particular kind of object ... but as a kind of activity, process, or set of relationships ... a process in which the thing is a participant" (420). To look at modes of production would be one way, it seems, to achieve this thinking about process and not simply objects.
Mitchell suggests that we look at the processes (and instruments) of production as a revolution -- "[t]here seems little doubt that we are now undergoing a revolution in the technologies of representation that makes possible the fabrication of realities on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, we know that this type of revolution has occurred before, that it appeared previously in the inventions of writing and printing and engraving and mechanical reproduction" (423). I would argue that until it is much more widely understood that these processes have happened before, then we cannot critically approach our current time without a neophilic beliefs in the potential of the image and the digital technology that sends it circulating in an ever widening gyre.
Mitchell says, "Perhaps we have moved in to an area when the point about pictures in not just to interpret them, but to change them" (369). This interesting, especially in light of his "hope for new and critical pictures of the public sphere" (369). Although, it seems several pages earlier that Mitchell may be suggesting the foreclosure of the possibility of a public sphere in the Habermasian sense -- "the telescreen effectively eliminates the boundary between the public and private spheres" (365). Or, again, its diffused -- it's all, in a sense, public (or privatized, branded), with the disappearance through ever more sophisticated, and perhaps now totalized, techniques of surveillance in the Western world, there is no longer privacy in the sense it was once thought.
From this point, I'd like to spend the remainder of this post focused on Mitchell's suggestion in "Pictures and Public Sphere" -- that what we might be experiencing "the new world order of the theme park" -- and the possibilities this suggestion holds for rethinking simulation and our current political situation.
On one hand, Mitchell's description of Disney World, in 1994, echoes Baudrillard's description of the function of theme parks to make our daily lives seem more real. In a different sense, how do we consider Banksy's choice for Disney World as the place to display an effigy of a tortured Guantanamo Bay detainee? That Banksy's photographer for the "installation," who later became Mr. Brainwash and whose art may ask us to reconsider what Mitchell has to say about Warhol, abstraction and the processes of commodification, was quickly captured and detained in a back room of the park, suggests, as Banksy's art does, that there is a relationship between the camp and the theme park. This is not connection that I can fully articulate here but one which I would be interested in pursuing further in the future.
Throughout this chapter, Mitchell seems to suggest that this barrier was never actually impermeable, (and perhaps the barrier here may function like the semiotic barrier in that it is not what on either side of this wall that should concern us so much as the qualities of the barrier itself) communication remains in even the most abstract paintings of modernism -- "These paintings, no matter how abstract, are never merely formal or decorative" (223).
Again, to return to the theories of the Gutenberg Parentheses or the resurgence of myth after the Enlightenment, all things suppressed or pushed out will perhaps return with a vengeance. So, the "reopening of art ... to kitsch, mass culture, the mixture of media, political propaganda ... the resurgence of artistic impurity, hybridity, and heterogeneity" (239) may all suggest that we, as Latour argues, have never actually been modern. I'm not sure how helpful this is to the navigating the predicament that Mitchell finds himself in when he seems to want to say that we have moved beyond postmodernism but is unsure of what to call this moving beyond -- "the 'end of postmodernism,' if that word has any meaning as the designation of a period" (263). He says, "I have called the end of postmodernism, the era of the 'pictorial turn' " (417). In this sense, then, the pictorial turn looks a like a pictorial revolution, not only in the sense of the re-turning that revolution implies, but, it seems, even more strikingly in the sense of Jameson's conception of revolution as the moment at which modes of production become visibly (emphasis mine) antagonistic. This sense would also point us toward where Mitchell suggests at the end of the text we may need to venture to be able to engage the image -- "suppose we thought about representation, not in terms of a particular kind of object ... but as a kind of activity, process, or set of relationships ... a process in which the thing is a participant" (420). To look at modes of production would be one way, it seems, to achieve this thinking about process and not simply objects.
Mitchell suggests that we look at the processes (and instruments) of production as a revolution -- "[t]here seems little doubt that we are now undergoing a revolution in the technologies of representation that makes possible the fabrication of realities on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, we know that this type of revolution has occurred before, that it appeared previously in the inventions of writing and printing and engraving and mechanical reproduction" (423). I would argue that until it is much more widely understood that these processes have happened before, then we cannot critically approach our current time without a neophilic beliefs in the potential of the image and the digital technology that sends it circulating in an ever widening gyre.
Mitchell says, "Perhaps we have moved in to an area when the point about pictures in not just to interpret them, but to change them" (369). This interesting, especially in light of his "hope for new and critical pictures of the public sphere" (369). Although, it seems several pages earlier that Mitchell may be suggesting the foreclosure of the possibility of a public sphere in the Habermasian sense -- "the telescreen effectively eliminates the boundary between the public and private spheres" (365). Or, again, its diffused -- it's all, in a sense, public (or privatized, branded), with the disappearance through ever more sophisticated, and perhaps now totalized, techniques of surveillance in the Western world, there is no longer privacy in the sense it was once thought.
From this point, I'd like to spend the remainder of this post focused on Mitchell's suggestion in "Pictures and Public Sphere" -- that what we might be experiencing "the new world order of the theme park" -- and the possibilities this suggestion holds for rethinking simulation and our current political situation.
On one hand, Mitchell's description of Disney World, in 1994, echoes Baudrillard's description of the function of theme parks to make our daily lives seem more real. In a different sense, how do we consider Banksy's choice for Disney World as the place to display an effigy of a tortured Guantanamo Bay detainee? That Banksy's photographer for the "installation," who later became Mr. Brainwash and whose art may ask us to reconsider what Mitchell has to say about Warhol, abstraction and the processes of commodification, was quickly captured and detained in a back room of the park, suggests, as Banksy's art does, that there is a relationship between the camp and the theme park. This is not connection that I can fully articulate here but one which I would be interested in pursuing further in the future.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Response to W.J.T. Mitchell's Picture Theory
In the materials we have covered thus far, it seems that "The Pictorial Turn" section of Mitchell's work may be one of the most commonly cited. So, it seems fair to start here (and because this is the first section after the intro.)
Mitchell says that "what is specific to our moment is exactly this paradox" that we encounter within the pictorial turn. He says that "it seems overwhelmingly obvious" that something has changed... here I hear an echo of Debord (who Mitchell cites 2 pages earlier) and yet, on the other hand, "the fear of the image" (15) is nothing new.
He goes on to say that the pictorial turn "is not a return to naive mimesis, copy or correspondence theories of representation ... it is rather a postlinguistic, postsemiotic resdiscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies and figurality" (16).
He says that the pictorial turn "is the realization that spectatorship ... may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading ... and that visual experience might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality" (16).
Here, I would add, as I believe Mitchell goes on in various places in the text to suggest. That is problem is not only as deep but also as old a problem as various forms of reading.
So, in that sense, the answers we may give in response to Baudrillard or Debord might be similar to how we approach Plato's consideration of the function of the image. This seems connected to what Mitchell goes on to say in "Beyond Comparison" (before another one of his phrases that we've seen quoted elsewhere this semester, "all media are mixed media" (95)) -- that "[t]he best preventitive to comparitive methods is an insistence on literalness and materiality" (90).
Later in "The Pictorial Turn," Mitchell says, "There is an ancient tradition, of course, which argues that language is the essential human attribute: "man" is the "speaking animal." the image is the medium of the subhuman, the savage, the "dumb" animal, the child, the woman, the masses" (24). This seems connected to what Mictchell goes on to describe in "Narrative, Memory, and Slavery" as "the blankness prior to the formation of memory" (188).
In the ancient theory (Aristotelian?) that Mitchell references, images would precede language, as we have traditionally understood it. Yet, it seems that before memory there is blankness. Could we then go on to say that blankness would be replaced by pictorial memories, which are then complicated and changed into narrative once the speaking subject is constituted? Or, it seems that from another point of view, and what Mitchell may also seem to suggest in his discussion of Morrison's Beloved, there is always the chance that we will fall, through images, back into a sort of blankness. Is it possible that this blankness is more of a sensorial overload, the presenting itself of presence in such a way that after we have acquired language, can be nearly blinding?
From a different perspective, if man is the animal whose nature is necessarily one of forgetfullness, then what is the monstrous quality of remembering? Is it one of images or words or is it something about the relationship between the two?
Mitchell says that "what is specific to our moment is exactly this paradox" that we encounter within the pictorial turn. He says that "it seems overwhelmingly obvious" that something has changed... here I hear an echo of Debord (who Mitchell cites 2 pages earlier) and yet, on the other hand, "the fear of the image" (15) is nothing new.
He goes on to say that the pictorial turn "is not a return to naive mimesis, copy or correspondence theories of representation ... it is rather a postlinguistic, postsemiotic resdiscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies and figurality" (16).
He says that the pictorial turn "is the realization that spectatorship ... may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading ... and that visual experience might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality" (16).
Here, I would add, as I believe Mitchell goes on in various places in the text to suggest. That is problem is not only as deep but also as old a problem as various forms of reading.
So, in that sense, the answers we may give in response to Baudrillard or Debord might be similar to how we approach Plato's consideration of the function of the image. This seems connected to what Mitchell goes on to say in "Beyond Comparison" (before another one of his phrases that we've seen quoted elsewhere this semester, "all media are mixed media" (95)) -- that "[t]he best preventitive to comparitive methods is an insistence on literalness and materiality" (90).
Later in "The Pictorial Turn," Mitchell says, "There is an ancient tradition, of course, which argues that language is the essential human attribute: "man" is the "speaking animal." the image is the medium of the subhuman, the savage, the "dumb" animal, the child, the woman, the masses" (24). This seems connected to what Mictchell goes on to describe in "Narrative, Memory, and Slavery" as "the blankness prior to the formation of memory" (188).
In the ancient theory (Aristotelian?) that Mitchell references, images would precede language, as we have traditionally understood it. Yet, it seems that before memory there is blankness. Could we then go on to say that blankness would be replaced by pictorial memories, which are then complicated and changed into narrative once the speaking subject is constituted? Or, it seems that from another point of view, and what Mitchell may also seem to suggest in his discussion of Morrison's Beloved, there is always the chance that we will fall, through images, back into a sort of blankness. Is it possible that this blankness is more of a sensorial overload, the presenting itself of presence in such a way that after we have acquired language, can be nearly blinding?
From a different perspective, if man is the animal whose nature is necessarily one of forgetfullness, then what is the monstrous quality of remembering? Is it one of images or words or is it something about the relationship between the two?
Sunday, February 6, 2011
More thoughts on Roland Barthes' Image-Music-Text
Some of these thoughts will be a continuation of last week's post. Others, I think, will go in different directions. To begin responding to the second half of Barthes' Image-Music-Text, I will work chronologically through text.
Death of the Author
To us, today, discussions of the death of the author should not seem new. In one sense, we seem to have moved on from these discussions forward to the death of the canon (during the Culture Wars) and on to predictions of the death of print. But Barthes' descriptions are still, if not even more so now, relevant.
He says, "Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author" (148).
Again, the latter half of this sentence is familiar. It's the first half that gives me pause. On one hand, what the speed of today's media change may have revealed is the degree to which this has not only been the case but is becoming an even more fluid process today. Some have suggested that what we are witnessing is a form of return. As just one example, we have the theory of the "Gutenberg Parentheses" (which, perhaps ironically(?), in its use of a grammatical convention to serve as a metaphor may suggest that the possibility of a true return has always already been foreclosed). In other words, some would suggest that we are returning to a culture that more closely resembles oral cultures of the past. Maybe, though, it's simply that as Barthes suggests, the authority of the author has always been, in some senses, false and that, similar to a repression of other modes of production that have not been replaced but simply suppressed into our collective unconscious, we are witnessing the rise of collectivity of production. As an example, we have Cory Doctorow's work or the penguin wiki novel project (unfortunately, it seems, in a Frey-esque fashion, titled A Million Penguins, which may allow us to question a parallel between the fad of the memoir that gave rise to a fictional tale of overcoming addiction and the neophilic interest in collective novels. meh?). Either way, we have at least 3 things to rethink from Barthes statement: technological change, copyright laws, and the emergence of new forms of media as the result of, in part, resistance to perceived impossibilities.
Musica Practica
Briefly, and to continue our discussion from our last meeting, Barthes' says, "Beethoven's music has in it something inaudible (something for which hearing is not the exact locality" (152).
Here we could return that which of language cannot speak, what is ineffable. Three things...1) it seems, as some have suggested, what cannot be communicated is something about medium itself, the tableau, film, etc., which to me suggests a return to materiality. 2) Since we've discussed outer space as a way of thinking about how we represent visually what isn't visual data, the discussion of what cannot be sense brings to mind discussions of dark matter. I'm not equipped to continue that discussion further except to note that they say it's even in our kitchens. 3) As we read, the break down of the symbolic chain of language may present itself for some as unusually vivid or bright images.
Lesson in Writing
In his discussion of Bunraku, Barthes suggests that the presence of the actors manipulating the puppet on stage may challenge how, in the West, we have traditionally viewed continuity. Here, I'm interested in other forms that do this. Barthes suggests the "modern text" is one example. From my own research, what comes to mind are punk rock zines and the ways in which the hand produced materials that resist the glossy, polished quality of mainstream magazines make the act of production continuously visible to the reader.
The Grain of the Voice
Barthes says, "The 'grain' is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue; perhaps the letter, almost certainly significance" (182).
Here, again, we have returned to the body. I am also tempted to think of the difference between analog and digital forms of media. In digital theaters that play FTP downloaded films instead of prints, we no longer see film grain, hear the 35mm projectors whirring, etc.
He says, "The 'gain' is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs" (188).
What autotune does, then, to pop music is perhaps mirrored in other forms of digital conversion. The sound of the pop and crack of the record as it turns has been cleansed, sanded down; the grain becomes imperceptible.
Death of the Author
To us, today, discussions of the death of the author should not seem new. In one sense, we seem to have moved on from these discussions forward to the death of the canon (during the Culture Wars) and on to predictions of the death of print. But Barthes' descriptions are still, if not even more so now, relevant.
He says, "Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author" (148).
Again, the latter half of this sentence is familiar. It's the first half that gives me pause. On one hand, what the speed of today's media change may have revealed is the degree to which this has not only been the case but is becoming an even more fluid process today. Some have suggested that what we are witnessing is a form of return. As just one example, we have the theory of the "Gutenberg Parentheses" (which, perhaps ironically(?), in its use of a grammatical convention to serve as a metaphor may suggest that the possibility of a true return has always already been foreclosed). In other words, some would suggest that we are returning to a culture that more closely resembles oral cultures of the past. Maybe, though, it's simply that as Barthes suggests, the authority of the author has always been, in some senses, false and that, similar to a repression of other modes of production that have not been replaced but simply suppressed into our collective unconscious, we are witnessing the rise of collectivity of production. As an example, we have Cory Doctorow's work or the penguin wiki novel project (unfortunately, it seems, in a Frey-esque fashion, titled A Million Penguins, which may allow us to question a parallel between the fad of the memoir that gave rise to a fictional tale of overcoming addiction and the neophilic interest in collective novels. meh?). Either way, we have at least 3 things to rethink from Barthes statement: technological change, copyright laws, and the emergence of new forms of media as the result of, in part, resistance to perceived impossibilities.
Musica Practica
Briefly, and to continue our discussion from our last meeting, Barthes' says, "Beethoven's music has in it something inaudible (something for which hearing is not the exact locality" (152).
Here we could return that which of language cannot speak, what is ineffable. Three things...1) it seems, as some have suggested, what cannot be communicated is something about medium itself, the tableau, film, etc., which to me suggests a return to materiality. 2) Since we've discussed outer space as a way of thinking about how we represent visually what isn't visual data, the discussion of what cannot be sense brings to mind discussions of dark matter. I'm not equipped to continue that discussion further except to note that they say it's even in our kitchens. 3) As we read, the break down of the symbolic chain of language may present itself for some as unusually vivid or bright images.
Lesson in Writing
In his discussion of Bunraku, Barthes suggests that the presence of the actors manipulating the puppet on stage may challenge how, in the West, we have traditionally viewed continuity. Here, I'm interested in other forms that do this. Barthes suggests the "modern text" is one example. From my own research, what comes to mind are punk rock zines and the ways in which the hand produced materials that resist the glossy, polished quality of mainstream magazines make the act of production continuously visible to the reader.
The Grain of the Voice
Barthes says, "The 'grain' is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue; perhaps the letter, almost certainly significance" (182).
Here, again, we have returned to the body. I am also tempted to think of the difference between analog and digital forms of media. In digital theaters that play FTP downloaded films instead of prints, we no longer see film grain, hear the 35mm projectors whirring, etc.
He says, "The 'gain' is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs" (188).
What autotune does, then, to pop music is perhaps mirrored in other forms of digital conversion. The sound of the pop and crack of the record as it turns has been cleansed, sanded down; the grain becomes imperceptible.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)