Technology – Page 4 – this Public Address 6.0

Oh, Snap!

December 8, 2010July 18, 2023 Jeff

“According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “snapshot” was first used in 1808 by an English sportsman by the name of Sir Henry Hawker. He noted in his diary that almost every bird he shot that day was taken by snapshot, meaning a hurried shot, taken without deliberate aim. Snapshot, then, was originally a hunting term.”¹

One Hour Photo

I had always meant to check this quote. It is basically accurate, except for some minor details. It was Peter Hawker, an English army officer (not sure about the “sir” either). The diary entry was dated 1808, but it wasn’t published until 1893, though their are similar usages noted from 1846 as well. Herschel applied “snap-shot” to photography as early as 1860. The comparatively recent deployment of the term makes it dubious to suggest any sort of originary hypotheses or hunting heritage based on Hawker alone. It’s easier if you trace down “snap” (sans shot). I love the OED.

Why does this matter? Because terminology always comes with a sort of baggage, a network of associations that persist even though the term is deployed in new contexts. I was reminded of that vividly by a chapter by Carolyn Miller on topos invoking the venatic (hunting) tradition in rhetoric. Photography, it seems to me, has even more direct ties to hunting and its rich tableau of associations. It is facile to simply associate hunting with predatory behavior as Sontag in On Photography, with critics in subsequent decades nodding along without challenge. The venatic tradition is, as Detienne and Vernant suggest, an alternate paradigm that simply does not fit in with the emergent classical world view². Consequently, hunting doesn’t sit comfortably in modern consciousness either. There’s a lot more to say about that than I can possibly manage here.

What drove me to explore this again was an interview with Joan Fontcuberta on Eyecurious:

MF: With the proliferation of digital technology, more still photographs are being made than ever before, despite advances in other media like video. Do you think that people would still be as attached to photography if it were no longer perceived as a document of reality?

JF: Yes, certainly. Photography is dissolving into the magma of images. It is losing its historical specificity, but is beginning to fulfil other functions. I just published a book titled Through the Looking Glass about cell phone photos and their circulation through the Internet and online social networks. Teenagers are not interested in photographs as documents but as trophies. When Martians finally invade the Earth, green lizard-shaped aliens will emerge from their spacecrafts. They will fire at us with laser guns but we won’t hide nor protect ourselves. We’ll take our cell phones and we’ll photograph them to prove that we saw them, to prove that we were there when they arrived.

I have difficulty understanding why Fontcuberta thinks that “trophies” are a separate and novel category from documents; photographers have been taking “trophies” since the beginning of the medium. Roger Fenton’s Crimean War photographs, for example. They are documents, yes, but they are also trophies of a strange and far away place. The trophies returned to England from Egypt were not simply archeological plunder, but stereo views of places that prove the intrepidness of their publishers. Dissolving into the magma of images? Oh, snap! The onslaught of images began sometime in the middle ages, if not before. I began to wonder about the vocabulary involved: the venatic vocabulary.

Just what is the linguistic relationship between documents, monuments, and hunting?

Snap seems to enter the English lexicon as a verb around 1530 with reference to biting both by animals or humans; a bit later (1586) it is associated with the sound, the snapping of fingers. But by the early 1600s it moves to on a more criminal tack: a snap, also known as a cloyer, is a pickpocket or thief. But there’s foreshadowing in the phrasal use of snap up in 1550: “Whan we lyue in ydlenes in all luste and pleasure, the deuyll snappyth vs vp.” The nominal use is evidenced prior to this slightly; In 1495 snap designates a bite or bite mark. The predator/prey dynamic is clearly at the core of the term.

In the same time period c.1550, trophy designated both a type of monument erected at a battlefield, and also the spoils of war. Used figuratively, “Anything serving as a token or evidence of victory, valour, power, skill, etc.; a monument, memorial.” Interestingly, one of the earliest synonyms for “spoils” was prey, in usage c. 1385.³ The prey/monument connection is positively ancient. Famously, Foucault remarked that modernity was engaged in the practice of transforming documents into monuments. It seems that the first monuments were prey or the symbolic representation thereof. It seems impossible to neatly sever the relationship between hunting and memory/memorial. The predatory isn’t value added/observed; it’s the historical core of the practice. Far from “losing its historical specificity” photography ultimately returns to traditonal social practices.

Of course, this is contingent on granting a sort of “shape-shifter” definition of imaging: images are transformed by technology (i.e., wood-block to metal plate engraving, halftone dots to pixels on a screen) but have a relatively consistent core amid outwardly changing manifestations/deployments. Nonetheless, I am interested Fontcuberta’s latest work. I was not able to locate any evidence of the “book” he refers to, but I suspect it’s the catalog to this exhibition. The closest bit to the topic he suggests in my prior quotation here:

REFLECTOGRAMS

Mirrors and cameras is a work which describes the panoptic and scopic character of our society : everything is given to an absolute vision and all of us are guided by the pleasure of viewing.
With the proliferation of digital cameras and their incorporation into mobile phones a new extremely popular genre of images has turned up, as evidenced in blogs and forums on the net : numerous self-portraits taken by youngsters and teenagers in front of the mirror (in which to close the perceptive circle the camera itself appears as a recording device ). Mirrors in intimate spaces like baths, student rooms , hotels, club toilets and other leisure premises , fitting rooms of clothes shops, car rear-view mirrors , elevators…

In these photos the ludic and selfexploratory character prevails over memory. Self photography and the dissemination of these images through social networks is part of a seduction game and of the rituals of communication of new urban subcultures.

I suspect that Fontcuberta is aware of the fact that his name for the series is appropriated from the well established imaging practice of reflectography, an infrared technique used to locate drawings and other hidden images behind paintings (such images are also called reflectograms). The self portrait, again, is hardly new. But Fontcuberta’s emphasis of the “ludic and selfexploratory character” is admirable. Does this negate “memory” though? I suspect not. As people age, they are slow to update their self-image. It has long been a commonplace among participants in social media to use old snapshots (either of themselves, or sometimes of strangers) as icons— particularly baby pictures. Memory is simply redirected, playfully, and not negated. The high seriousness of fixed representation is replaced with a sort of polymorphic shape shifting. This, in the end, is what I find fascinating.

In their quest to uncover the logic/paradigm behind the venatic tradition, Detienne and Vernant focus on metis (cunning intelligence), tracking it through Greek literature like hunters themselves, “in areas which the philosopher usually passes over in silence or mentions only with irony or with hostility so that, by contrast, he can display to its fullest advantage the way of reasoning and understanding required in his own profession” (4). The divisions, promoted by philosophers in couplets: being and becoming, or the intelligible and the sensible, leave little or no room for the functioning of agency or the logic of the hunt.

Metis is characterized precisely by the way it operates by continuously oscillating between two opposite poles. It turns into contraries objects that are not yet defined as stable, circumscribed, mutually exclusive concepts but appear as Powers in a situation of confrontation and which, depending on the outcome of the combat in which they are engaged, find themselves now in one position, as victors, and now in the opposite one, as vanquished [emphasis mine]. These deities, who have the power of binding, have to be constantly on their guard in order not to be bound in their turn.

Thus, when the individual who is endowed with metis, be he god or man, is confronted with a multiple, changing reality whose limitless polymorphic powers render it almost impossible to sieze, he can only dominate it— that is to say enclose it within the limits of a single, unchangeable form within his control— if he proves himself to be more multiple, more polyvalent than his adversary. (5)

The struggle to bind a continually shifting world, to seize it, underwrites the struggle to document and monumentalize the world as evidence of our domination changes its shape but not its intent. In some ways we’re still out on the savannah chasing prey.

And like a cat, we often play with our food before consuming it.

¹ I would have used the actual clip from the movie, but Fox blocked display of my upload of the 50 seconds I needed to illustrate my lead quote. Frickin’ copyright police.

²I cited Miller when I was working on my last RSA paper on Willis J. Abbot and his role in the invention/discovery of Panama in the popular consciousness. Shortly afterward, I dug through to find one of her primary sources on the venatic tradition and its influence on ancient thought,
Cunning Intellegence in Greek Culture and Society by Marcel Detienne & Jean-Pierre Vernant. Excellent stuff.

³Amazingly booty is late to the party only entering the lexicon c.1474; booty in its modern, sexualized sense is a very recent development c.1926 “bootylicious” enters the lexicon c.1992.

Capital Improvements

November 21, 2010July 18, 2023 Jeff

Curiously, icon of the Industrial Revolution James Watt seldom claims to have “invented” anything, rather, he claims the title “improver.” Huxley’s assertion that he was an “inventor” of time appears to be primarily a twentieth-century invention. As the Wikipedia article suggests, it seems curious to think of patents as a mode of communicating discoveries rather than essays and articles— but this was Watt’s way. Reading the 1853 “history” of Watt’s “inventions” it seems clear that the legend of the industrial revolution is cast as a myth of originality and invention rather than evolution and improvement is only in a nascent phase. The facts show that his work/research was quite social in nature, and the labeling of him as a “great man” to the exclusion of his cohort occurred relatively slowly in cultural history. Even Huxley mentions him in conjunction with an heir to his improvements, H.F. Stephens.

Watt really seems more like a skilled repairman and tinkerer than an inventor. The events narrated after his repair/improvement of the Newcomen steam engine follow a similar pattern. I was tickled by the tale of Watt and his organ (as told by Professor Robinson):

A mason-lodge in Glasgow wanted an organ. The office-bearers were acquaintances of Mr. Watt. We imagined that Mr. Watt could do anything; and, though we all knew that he did not know one musical note from another, he was asked if he could build this organ. He had repaired one, and it had amused him. He said “Yes;” but he began by building a very small one for his intimate friend Dr. Black, which is now in my possession. In doing this, a thousand things occurred to him which no organ-builder ever dreamed of, — nice indicators of the strength of the blast, regulators of it, &c. &c. He began to the great one. He then began to study the philosophical theory of music. Fortunately for me, no book was at hand but the most refined of all, and the only one that can be said to contain any theory at all,—Smith’s Harmonics. Before Mr. Watt had half finished this organ, he and I were complete masters of that most refined and beautiful theory of the beats of imperfect consonances. He found that by these beats it would be possible for him, totally ignorant of music, to tune his organ according to any system of temperament; and he did so, to the delight and astonishment of our best performers. (cix)

So, rather than just the improver of “fire engines,” Watt was a dabbler in many areas, including “perspective machines,” in Watt’s description:

The perspective machine was invented about 1765, on the following occasion. My friend Dr. James Lind, brought from India a machine invented by some English gentlemen there, —I believe a Mr. Hurst,—which consisted of a board fixed on three legs perpendicularly, upon which close to the the bottom and near the ends, were fixed two small friction wheels, upon which a horizontal ruler rested, and could be moved endwise horizontally, . . .[elaborate description of original machine] . . . This instrument very readily described perpendicular or horizontal lines, as these accorded best with its natural motions. But in diagonal or curved lines it was difficult to make the index follow them exactly, and the whole motions were heavy and embarrassing to the hand. Moreover, the instrument was heavy and too bulky.

I wished to make a machine more portable and easier in its use; and, at the suggestion of my friend Mr. John Robinson, I turned my thoughts to the double parallel ruler, an instrument then very little known and and at all used that I know of. After some meditation, I contrived the means of applying it to this purpose and making the machine extremely light and portable.

. . .The whole of the double parallelogram and its attached slips, (which were later contrived to be easily separated from the board,) were made capable of being readily folded up, so as to occupy only a small space in the box formed by the board when folded up. The sight piece also folded up, and readily found its place in the box, which also contained the screws for fixing the legs of the instrument; and the box, when shut, could be put into a great coat-pocket. The three legs were made of tinned iron, tapering, and one a little smaller than another, and formed a walking stick about four and a half feet long. (cxi-cxvii)

That the father of the industrial revolution (in elementary school textbooks, anyway) experimented with portable pantographs isn’t all that surprising, but the extent of his involvement in reproductive technologies is. To put Watt’s innovations in perspective, I need to return to Lewis Mumford, who lead me to consider all this in the first place:

This brief view of the course of the reproductive processes in art, from the wood engraving to the colored lithograph, from the photographic painting to the photograph proper, capable of being manifolded cheaply, does not take into account various subsidiary efforts in the same direction in many of the other arts, such as the reproduction of sounds, by means of the phonograph and the talking film; to say nothing of the fortunately abortive attempts of James Watt to find a mechanical means of reproducing, in the semblance of sculpture, the human form, an effort on which the inventor of the steam engine curiously wasted some of the best years of his life.

(Art and Technics, 95)

Just what Watt “invention” was Mumford on about here? I had to find out. Turns out it was the Polyglyptic Parallel-Eidograph. “The best years of his life” turn out to be his later years, because this machine is the last thing he worked on. He turned to it after giving up on inventing the first computer. Watt’s “arithmetical machine” of 1785 was never built, though he speaks of making an attempt at making it. His forward thinking attempt at stone holograms, however, had some success. I don’t know why Mumford dismisses it so cruelly.

But one engrossing occupation, nearly akin to those of his earlier, but what we can hardly call his better days, Mr Watt also found in gradually perfecting a sculpture machine: a highly ingenious invention, the idea of which was suggested to him by an implement he had seen and admired in Paris in 1802, where it was used for “tracing and multiplying the dies of medals.” He foresaw the possiblity, if only some mechancial difficulties could be overcome, of so enlarging its powers as to admit of it making in wood or the softer kinds of stone,—nay, even in marble,—copies of works of sculpture, which should be perfectly true to their originals, although of a smaller size; and the imagination of such an exploit seems to have been particularly delightful to him combining as it did some elements of more than one of his other favorite inventions.

. . .By April, 1809, he had made “considerable progress with the carving machine and it seemed necessary to christen it with a Greek name,” which to Professor Young, then the accomplished Professor of Greek at Glasgow College, he suggested might be Iconopoia, Iconurga, Iconoglypta, Aglamotopiea, Glyptes, Polyglyptes, Glyptic Machine, &c.., names to which he afterwords added those of Bust-lathe, Statue-lathe, Pantograph, Double Pantograph and Double Parallel Lathe. (ccxlii-ccxliii)

The machine was not an “abortive attempt to reproduce the human form” but rather a prototype for what would now be named a CNC lathe, and it was according to the source I found, completed:

The invention having been thus fully completed and having been publicly used by Mr. Watt in making the frequent copies of various specimens of sculpture which he, from time to time, distributed to his friends, operated, in more than one instance, to prevent patents from subsequently being taken out by others for similarly ingenious machines.

. . .The sculpture machine, —the youngest of his mechanical offspring, —the child of his old age and of his right hand,¹—had always been a great favorite with its venerable progenitory; and it is not difficult to imagine the sort of charm he must have felt in thus “searching for the beautiful forms in the hearts of marbles and of bringing them out into full daylight.”

¹See Gen, chap. xxxv,v.18 “His father called him Benjamin;””i.e.(adds the marginal interpretation) “the son of the right-hand” (cclii)

Watt did attempt to further push this into a machine that could carve forms from life, but never managed it. His biographer suggests that it was not necessarily a huge loss.

Only one problem, now seems to remain for such means to achieve; that, viz. of at once copying from a living model, in materials of lapidary hardness. For hitherto, in the object to be copied an inflexible surface has always been requisite, to enable the guiding point of the machine to traverse it with firmness. But even this appears to be a difficulty which may in time be overcome; possibly by the power being applied solely by the cutting tools, but their direction being regulated by a guiding point delicately moved over a soft surface, or even in air.

It is, perhaps, neither to be expected nor desired that such a process, which, however exact, must still be entirely mechanical, should ever supersede the freedom of inspiration which breathes in the works of a Praxiteles or a Phidias; any more than the angelic grace of a Raphael or a Correggio, or the glorious coloring of a Titian or a Guido, should be eclipsed by the photographic result of mere chemical action of light an a combination fo optical media.

. . .The classical “garrett” and all its mysterious contents,—the Polyglyptic Parallel-Eidograph with all its tools and models included,—have ever since been carefully preserved in the same order as when the hand and “eye of the master” were last withdrawn from them, and he crossed the threshold never to return to his work on earth. (cclv)

Time and the Machine

November 21, 2010July 18, 2023 Jeff

Time and the Machine by Aldous Huxley (1936)

Time, as we know it, is a very recent invention. The modern time-sense is hardly older than the United States. It is a by-product of industrialism – a sort of psychological analogue of synthetic perfumes and aniline dyes.

Time is our tyrant. We are chronically aware of the moving minute hand, even of the moving second hand. We have to be. There are trains to be caught, clocks to be punched, tasks to be done in specified periods, records to be broken by fractions of a second, machines that set the pace and have to be kept up with. Our consciousness of the smallest units of time is now acute. To us, for example, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something—something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance – did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.¹ [emphasis mine]

Another time-emphasizing entity is the factory and its dependent, the office. Factories exist for the purpose of getting certain quantities of goods made in a certain time. The old artisan worked as it suited him with the result that consumers generally had to wait for the goods they had ordered from him. The factory is a device for making workmen hurry. The machine revolves so often each minute; so many movements have to be made, so many pieces produced each hour. Result: the factory worker (and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the office worker) is compelled to know time in its smallest fractions. In the hand-work age there was no such compulsion to be aware of minutes and seconds.

Our awareness of time has reached such a pitch of intensity that we suffer acutely whenever our travels take us into some corner of the world where people are not interested in minutes and seconds. The unpunctuality of the Orient, for example, is appalling to those who come freshly from a land of fixed meal-times and regular train services. For a modern American or Englishman, waiting is a psychological torture. An Indian accepts the blank hours with resignation, even with satisfaction. He has not lost the fine art of doing nothing. Our notion of time as a collection of minutes, each of which must be filled with some business or amusement, is wholly alien to the Oriental, just as it was wholly alien to the Greek. For the man who lives in a pre-industrial world, time moves at a slow and easy pace; he does not care about each minute, for the good reason that he has not been made conscious of the existence of minutes.³

This brings us to a seeming paradox.² Acutely aware of the smallest constituent particles of time – of time, as measured by clock-work and train arrivals and the revolutions of machines – industrialized man has to a great extent lost the old awareness of time in its larger divisions. The time of which we have knowledge is artificial, machine-made time. Of natural, cosmic time, as it is measured out by sun and moon, we are for the most part almost wholly unconscious. Pre-industrial people know time in its daily, monthly and seasonal rhythms. They are aware of sunrise, noon and sunset, of the full moon and the new; of equinox and solstice; of spring and summer, autumn and winter. All the old religions, including Catholic Christianity, have insisted on this daily and seasonal rhythm. Pre-industrial man was never allowed to forget the majestic movement of cosmic time.

Industrialism and urbanism have changed all this. One can live and work in a town without being aware of the daily march of the sun across the sky; without ever seeing the moon and stars. Broadway and Piccadilly are our Milky Way; out constellations are outlined in neon tubes. Even changes of season affect the townsman very little. He is the inhabitant of an artificial universe that is, to a great extent, walled off from the world of nature. Outside the walls, time is cosmic and moves with the motion of sun and stars. Within, it is an affair of revolving wheels and is measured in seconds and minutes – at its longest, in eight-hour days and six-day weeks. We have a new consciousness; but it has been purchased at the expense of the old consciousness.

¹I located this essay through the article on James Watt on Wikipedia, which referenced a magazine article from 1973 which cited the emphasized quote. It turns out that this six paragraph essay was printed in a wide variety of writing text books, including An American Rhetoric by William Whyte Watt. I love this Amazon review of An American Rhetoric:

This book is, unfortunately for the literary world, out of print although it is probably only of interest to ‘true and thoughtful’ followers of English composition and literature. I am interested in the teaching of Mr Watt and also other leaders and instructors who developed the notions of creative and responsible writing that influenced writers of the period from the 1950s through the 1980s, after which, sadly to say, literature seemes to have ‘gone to hell in a handbasket’. I believe it is unfortunate that these fine Professors of detail and research have fallen into disfavor. I purchased the book at a premium price in order to once again enjoy the detailed works and guidance of one of the few who clung to attention and to fact and extactness. [sic]

² The usage of this essay for evaluation of comprehension has persisted, a evidenced by this notation of the 2002 New York State Regents English Literary Arts Exams:

3. Day Two, Part One: The “Compare and Contrast” Essay: The exam uses the last two paragraphs of a six-paragraph essay by Aldous Huxley, Time and the Machine. The altered passage now begins with the sentence: “This brings us to a seeming paradox.” Students cannot know what “this” refers to, without the preceding paragraphs. Compounding the problem, students are asked to answer a question about what the “paradox” refers to.

³ This paragraph, elaborating on the paradox of the culturally specific creation of time, was perhaps the offending part to the NYS examiners. Huxley’s deployment of cultural difference was not politically correct, but it was hardly racist. These days though, it seems accurate because I suspect no corner of the globe can be characterized as “pre-industrial.” This oversimplified version of culturally relative “time” doesn’t wear well into the twenty-first century. It’s more far more complex than six paragraphs can describe.

Contriving the exclusion

November 15, 2010July 18, 2023 Jeff

Lewis Mumford

The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do. (17)

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

When I read Vicki Goldberg’s excerpt of Lewis Mumford’s thoughts on the economy of images emphasizing the curmudgeonly proclamation that the proliferation of images had placed us all in hades, my gut feeling was that his view must be more complex than that. Three quarters of the way through his lecture series published in Art and Techics there is indeed polemic. But he sneaks up on it, making his way through photography on the way as a democratic process:

Now, by perfecting a mechanical method, the “taking of pictures” by a mere registration of the sensations was democratized. Anyone could use a camera. Anyone could develop a picture. Indeed, as early as the 1890s the Eastman Company went a step further in the direction of automatism and mass production, by saying to the amateur photographer—this was their earliest advertising slogan—you press the button we do the rest. What had been in the seventeenth century a slow handicraft process, requiring well trained eyes and extremely skilled hands, with all the rewards that accompany such highly organized bodily activities, now became an all-but-automatic gesture. Not an entirely automatic gesture, I hasten to add, lest any photographers in this audience squirm in agonized silence or break forth into a loud shout of protest. For after all it turns out that even in the making of the most mechanically contrived image, something more than machines and chemicals is involved. The eye, which means taste. The interest in the subject and an insight into the moment when it—it or he or she—is ready. An understanding of just what esthetic values can be further brought out in the manipulation of the instrument and materials. (92)

Mumford equivocates photography with “registration of the sensations,” masking his overwhelming bias toward photography as monosensual: visual to the exclusion of all other sense records. I suspect this is because it allows him to paint photography as gestural, contingent on a button press. Lately I have been thinking that the athletic edge to photography (street photography, as a prime example) invites examination of the invocation of multiple sense modalities. Taste, in its broadest sense, can be stretched to the appreciation of the spatial qualities of representation (beyond trompe l’oeil)— and thus be forced to confront the problems of bodies in space and their relations. The impact of scale, for example, as explored by many contemporary photographers can create special types of comfort, discomfort, and sensual response that are not, strictly speaking, visual. Esthetic values involve more than just the eyes.

The effort to understand the visual often tries to leapfrog over the body to get to the eye stalk. Nonetheless, it is admirable that Mumford does recognize the human qualities of photographs, and has a sense of photography’s history/pleasures

All these human contributions are essential. As in science, no matter how faithfully one excludes the subjective, it is still the subject that contrives the exclusion [emphasis mine]. All this must be freely granted. But this is only to say that in photography another machine art like printing was born; and that the standards of esthetic success in this art are not dissimilar than those in printing. If we consider those standards for a moment we shall have a clue to one of the most essential problems connected with automatism and reproduction.

As with printing, photography did not altogether do away with the possibilities of human choice; but to justify their productions as art there was some tendency on the part of early photographers, once they had overcome the technical difficulties of the process, to attempt to ape, by means of the camera, the special forms and symbols that had been handed down traditionally by painting. Accordingly, in the nineties, American photographs became soft and misty and impressionistic, just when impressionism was attempting to dissolve form into atmosphere and light. But the real triumphs of photography depended on the photographer’s respect for his medium, his interest in the object before him, and his ability to single out of the thousands of images that pass before the eye, affected by the time of day, the quality of light, movement, the sensitivity of his plates or film, the contours of his lens, precisely that moment when these factors were in conjunction with his own purpose. At that final moment of choice—which sometimes occurred when a picture was taken, sometimes only after taking and developing a hundred indifferent prints— the human person again became operative; and at that moment, but only at that moment, the machine product becomes a veritable work of art, because it reflects the human spirit. (92-93)

What this passage makes clear is that Mumford is concerned with the improper use of symbols and the clear role of human choice in art as opposed to technics, his word for technology deployed without the human element. That’s the primary reason for his coinage of techics— it is neither techné nor technology, though it is derived from them— it is the deployment of mindless or inhuman means of reproduction. It’s a shame that Goldberg neatly skips this part (quite photographer friendly) in her anthology.

It is this human element that interests me most in all this; to center photography on one sense (vision) tends to render it mechanistic. The sensual/bodily side of it is difficult to address without resort to subjectivity or spirituality. I think there are objectively verifiable, physical elements involved in perception that are ignored in discussions of reproductive technologies due to a tendency to compartmentalize the sense modalities. That’s why I can’t seem to stop jumping between audio/music reproduction, photographic and sculptural reproduction, textual production and reproduction, etc. It seems like it should all fit together as furniture for living.

Archie and Jughead

November 10, 2010July 18, 2023 Jeff

I’ve been obsessing a bit about Lewis Mumford lately, partly because I always encounter his writing in oft-anthologized inflammatory “theory bites.” I couldn’t help but think that there was more to it than a simple case of iconophobia. A used copy of Art and Technics, the source for Vickie Goldberg’s anthologized snippet I blogged about a few days ago, showed up yesterday. I don’t often just rip through things like I ripped through this book (a series of lectures)— but I read a hundred pages in about two hours. When it’s had time to digest a bit (and I finish the remaining 50 pages), I’d like to say more. But for now I have to comment about this bit:

Each art has its technical side, and technics involves calculation, repetition, laborious effort, in short, what would often be, were it not for the ultimate end of the process, sheer monotony and drudgery. But in the period when handicraft dominated, the artist and the technician arrived, as it were, as a happy compromise, because, for one thing, their roles were assumed by the same person. By this modus vivendi, the artist submitted to the technical conditions of fabrication and operation, schooling himself to do a succession of unrewarding acts in return for two conditions: first, the comradeship of other workers on the job, with the chance for chaffer and song. companionship and mutual aid in performing the work; and second, the privilege of lingering with loving care over the final stages of the technical process and transforming the efficient utilitarian form into a meaningful symbolic form. That extra effort, that extra display of love and esthetic skill, tends to act as a preservative of any structure; for, until the symbols themselves become meaningless, men tend to value, and if possible save from decay and destruction, works of art that bear the human imprint. (49)

The distinctions that Mumford strives to make in his binary art/techic framework make for an interesting grid: arts are subjective, technics are objective; arts are human, technics are inhuman; arts are orphic, technics are promethean; arts are symbolic, techics are utilitarian; etc. He doesn’t argue for the abolition of either, but rather suggests that they are codependent and in danger of losing balance in the contemporary (1952) world. The case that he makes in this section is that symbolic value has greater durability than utilitarian value. Which reminded me of a photographic series I was working on in the mid 1990s.

Songs from the Valley Towns was my name for a group of mostly square format images taken with my Rollei as I drove back and forth between Bakersfield and Fresno visiting my friend Slim, who had recently completed a collection of songs with the same title. What became clear to me was that there was a symbolic San Joaquin Valley, and there was an actual one. The two things were often at odds with each other. I remember passing through Riverdale, which was primarily a two or three block stretch of nondescript stucco strip malls and open farm fields, and laughing inside.

Riverdale was famous! This was the ancestral home of Archie and Jughead in the comics. I didn’t see any sign of Riverdale high, where Betty and Veronica would have hung out though. Just a TV dealership, and I think a gas station on the corner. The symbolic content of the place (false documents, after all, because comic books don’t exist) overwhelmed its actuality for me. Riverdale wasn’t the only revelation, there was also Pixley, which I blogged as far back as 2002. Pixley was the home of Petticoat Junction on TV.

There was no sign of a railroad track for miles, just a note on the door of the unattended used car lot that payments could be made at the Pixley Cafe next door. There was a playful dissonance to all this. I remember reading somewhere that Paul Henning, creator of Petticoat Junction, Green Acres (coincidentally a suburb of Bakersfield) and The Beverly Hillbillies, had simply looked at a road map and pulled his place names from that. Many of the places in the popular imagination could be found, in their less than symbolic form, scatted across the San Joaquin. The symbol, as Saussure has so assuredly demonstrated, is strictly arbitrary.

This amused me greatly then. It still does now; one of these days I need to do some decent scans/ fresh prints of these images. But, back to Mumford:

Now, the dynamic equilibrium on which all life depends is a difficult one to maintain, and nowhere has this been more true than in the balance between art and technics. Esthetic symbolism for a long time seemed to man either a short-cut to knowledge and power or an adequate substitute. So he applied it, not merely to things that could properly be created or formed by these methods—works of poetry and art, systems of conceptual knowledge like mathematics, or patterns of law and custom—but also to the physical environment and to natural forces: he foolishly invoked art and ritual to bring on rain or to increase human fertility. Without the counterbalancing interests and methods of technics, man might have easily gone mad, in that his symbols might have progressively displaced realities and in the end have produced a blind confusion that might have robbed him of his capacity for physical survival. At some point in his existence man must leave his inner world and return to the outer, must wake up, so to say, and go back to work. [emphasis mine] The tool tended to produce objectivity or matter-of-factness, as my old teacher, Thorstein Veblen, used to call it, and objectivity is a condition for sanity. (50-51)

Thinking about Slim’s semi-fictional songs, and the semi-fictional nature of the San Joaquin Valley tended to suggest that the world was filled with facades, and behind these facades there are a lot of ghosts. Mumford’s insights are not wholly negative and technophobic, they are strikingly insightful and progressive for their age. I am drawn to Mumford’s thinking, which tends to steer across the poles of print culture, photography, and sound reproduction technologies as lightning rods for productive discussion. There are no hard and fast lines between art and techics, between subjectivity and objectivity, and it seems a shame that he is colored as a curmudgeon.

Human history, unfortunately, discloses many symbolic aberrations and hallucinations. Perhaps the fatal course all civilizations have followed so far has been due, not to natural miscarriages, the disastrous effects of famines and floods and diseases, but to accumulating perversions of the symbolic functions. Obsession with money and neglect of productivity. Obsession with the symbols of centralized political power and sovereignty, and neglect of the processes of mutual aid in the small face-to-face community. Obsession with the symbols of religion the neglect of the ideal ends or the daily practices of love and friendship through which these symbols would be given an effective life. (51)

I think this anticipates Habermas’s concern with systematically distorted communication and the disjunction between system and lifeworld. The real treat for me is that Mumford faults not the systems, but the deployment of symbols inside them.

In a lot of ways, California was a sustained hallucination that lasted 37 years for me. My means of coping with it was primarily photography.

Close your eyes

November 4, 2010July 18, 2023 Jeff

A screen capture of this Shure ad has been sitting on my desktop for a year or so now. It bothers me a great deal— historically, I think music has been a way of connecting with the world not blocking it out. But music is also linked to escapism and flight to a sort of internal spiritual realm. The dichotomy doesn’t resolve itself neatly. There are a lot of things that I could suggest about this image. For one, music began as a social activity that has been gradually marginalized into privatized spaces, culminating in its domain being simply the distance between your ears. It seems like a rip-off and impoverishment of experience when looked at from that angle.

But in the space between your ears, and more importantly with your eyes closed, there is a sort of purity to it. Metaphorically speaking, it’s as if god whispers to you. To block out the world requires closing your eyes. But closing your eyes—returning to the dark side— suggests a form of death. Not an actual death, but deep separation from our social natures. I am reminded of a song by Steve Wynn about the ending of a relationship:

When they bring down the curtain
In an hour and 45 minutes
we can talk about the play
and pretend that we were never in it

flashes lit up the skies
thunder and then surprise
you can close your eyes

when the earth shakes,
opens up and swallow itself
I won’t be thinking about anybody else

fury and fire flies
it’s too late for compromise
you can close your eyes

words turn to anger,
anger comes to blows
nobody feels the hit but everybody knows

when nothing can tantalize
it’s gonna take a new set of lies
you can close your eyes

Close Your Eyes, from Dazzling Display

The complexity is rewarding. Part of what I read into this is a sort of necessary blindness in the name of moving forward, in the name of getting to the next sort of fiction you have to believe to be safe within a social relationship: “a new set of lies.” The implication is not that closing your eyes grants purity, but rather simply that it shuts out the previous deception. The headphone listener closes their eyes— a different sort of deception, a different relationship with music.

The title track, and indeed the entire LP Dazzling Display nestles in the shadow of its cultural preconditions: the first Gulf War. Many of the songs reflect the shallowness of a television war, with all it’s deceptions and facades. But it seems fallacious to suggest that if we close our eyes to outside stimuli and “block out the world” that the messages we receive will have greater purity, particularly if what concerns us is this world rather than the next. It is a conundrum. Music is a communicative phenomenon that unfolds in space and time, not outside it— just like relationships and wars. Both require massive leaps of faith— suspensions of disbelief, or at the very least, cynicism. Nonetheless, we are easily deceived. Try this video for example:

Even when you know the trick involved, you still can’t help but be deceived. Unless you close your eyes. But live musical events are seldom experienced with eyes closed. Deception is a core feature of the aesthetic experience. If we knew precisely what the experience was, it would lose its attractiveness.

Fidelity

October 31, 2010July 18, 2023 Jeff

The term “high fidelity” attained broad usage in the 1930s, and the post-war years are often labeled as a golden age of hi-fi. In a synoptic history of reproductive technologies, it should be noted that the documentary genre emerged in the 1930s, and in those same golden years picture-magazines (and socially concerned photography) graced the coffee tables of most middle-class homes. The common thread between both enterprises is a quest for particular notions of fidelity.

An examination of the etymology and history of fidelity as a description is useful. According to the O.E.D., the word was borrowed from the French fidelis in the early 16th century to describe faithfulness and fealty to a person, party, or bond. The connection to oath or bond falls away quickly, but it retains a connection with testimony. Nonetheless, its usage as a faithfulness to truth and reality disappears in the late nineteenth century. Concurrently, it becomes attached to reproductive technologies, at first the telephone and then radio. Fidelity to voice is recognized in Marconi’s 1878 patent on radio.

The evolution is an interesting one; instead of a fidelity to a static truth or reality, fidelity is used most frequently to identify a sort of exactitude of message, a faithfulness to an original. Truth abruptly drops out of the equation. In a historical context, it seems to me that documentary was introduced as a remedy for truth. By that I mean that “true stories” (including true romances and true crime) was the growth segment of the publishing market in the 1920s and 30s and documentary film and photography countered with faith (as in faithfulness and exactitude) rather than truth claims, a counterrevolution of a sort.

I think that this suggests an interesting thing about documentary and musical recording techniques. They are not necessarily married to concepts of fact and truth, as is so often assumed. The facile reference to the presence of fiction in documentary, or artificiality in sound reproduction, doesn’t really stick as damning evidence against them. Documentary (and high fidelity) claims are more directly connected to asking a viewer/listener to make a leap of faith in accepting that the worlds they portray as significant. The criterion of faithfulness refers to a faith in a message worth hearing/seeing, not to “truth.”¹

Hence, there is a deep connection to what Wordsworth and Coleridge termed “the momentary suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith” in both recorded music and documentary film/photography. Perfection and authenticity are a matter of subjective rather than objective perception. In fact, it seems to me that “objective perception” is oxymoronic when applied to human receivers.

It makes sense to keep the gulf between fidelity and truth wide and deep. Claims of quasi-scientific truth work for accuracy of waveforms, or correspondance of brightness zones, but these things do not tell us much about human perception (and the attendent attachment of meaning). They contribute, of course, but ultimately fidelity is a matter of faith not truth. Perfection is in the eye/ear of the beholder.

An interesting sidebar emerges with the survival of an arcane sense of fidelity: fidelity insurance is insurance against dishonesty (such as employee theft). Rather than making the claim that all documentary photographs are false or untrue, one might suggest that some messages are dishonest and exploitive. That makes much more sense to me.

¹The rhetorical campaigns of Lewis Hine against child labor springs to mind here— the effectiveness of Hine’s photo-textual broadsides rests not on the truthfulness of his depiction of conditions, but rather in the faith that those conditions were abhorrent and in need of change.

Lost Somewhere

October 29, 2010July 18, 2023 Jeff

I enjoy reading magazines about audio gear, largely because the multiple army of metaphors and absurdities used to describe sound in verbal terms is entertaining. Online, a wide variety of interested parties toe the line of science or subjectivity in an unquenchable thirst for what is generally identified as “the live experience,” a battle of words where various forums endlessly debate whether brand x or brand y reaches closer to the “musical truth.” It’s a battle waged mostly by absolutists, all firmly convinced of the validity of their experience.

What is less common, however, is the use of visual aids in the description of musical experience. I recently found this 1952 McIntosh brochure at a site called Hifi Lit. It deploys a lot of common tropes (such as the idea of mapping our way to understanding) while promoting its own trademarks, e.g. the little guy in the kilt. Music is portrayed as a visceral experience:

I suppose that in the quest for sound, McIntosh is a descendent of Braveheart? Or, at the very least you can purchase a pure brave heart for your system to assist in your quest to recover experience, perhaps so you can get your kicks on route 66?

It’s amazing to me the pervasiveness of these communicative metaphors. Remember that this is 1952, just after the Shannon-Weaver model of communication as messages down a conduit. Note that McIntosh wants to suggest that all sound (not just speech) contains messages. Such messages must be transmitted with purity. It makes me think of the launch code in Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove: POE, purity of essence, that wonderful twisting of peace on earth. We wouldn’t want to have listener fatigue from our stereo systems, now would we? Not very peaceful, is it? Especially when the little kilted gnome gets just as addled as you do.

As the brochure continues, it anticipates William Ivins 1953 argument for visual syntax in Prints and Visual Communication. The urge to impose verbal constraints on non-verbal phenomena was in the air. In this case, sound gets mapped on the alphabet:

Pleasure, alarm, discomfort and then back to school with a bribe for the teacher: I love it.

Secondhand World

October 28, 2010July 18, 2023 Jeff

My father receives his thirty-year watch for the benefit of the cameras

Deliberately, on every historic occasion, we piously fake events for the benefit of photographers, while the actual event often occurs in a different fashion; we have the effrontery to call these artful dress rehearsals “authentic historic documents.”

So an endless succession of images passes before the eye, offered by people who wish to exercise power, either by making us buy something for their benefit or making us agree to something that would promote their economic or political interests: images of gadgets manufacturers want us to acquire; images of seductive young ladies who are supposed, by association, to make us seek other equally desirable goods, images of people and events in the news, big people and little people, important and unimportant events; images so constant, so unremitting, so insistent that for all purposes of our own we might as well be paralyzed, so unwelcome are our inner promptings or our own self-directed actions. As a result of this wholly mechanical process, we cease to live in the multidimensional world of reality, the world that brings into play every aspect of the human personality, from its bony structure to its tenderest emotions: we have substituted for this, largely through the mass production of graphic symbols—abetted indeed by a similar multiplication and distribution of sounds—a secondhand world, a ghost-world, in which everyone lives a secondhand and derivative life. The Greeks had a name for this pallid simulacrum of real existence: they called it Hades, and this kingdom of shadows seems to be the ultimate destination of our mechanistic and mammonistic culture.

Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics excerpted in Vicki Goldberg’s edited collection Photography in Print (381-382).

I continue to be fascinated by Mumford’s iconophobia, as he channels Plato’s mistrust of mimesis. To Mumford’s credit, as the passage continues he makes it clear that what he fears is not the iconography of art and artists but rather the symbols created for and by the masses. What I wonder is this: is the smiling obligatory snapshot the symbol, or is it the watch?

The damn thing never kept time. It never had any utility as a watch; regardless of the claims of the commercials. It was a symbol, and not a happy one for my father. My father always smiled in pictures, even when he was irritated. The whole concept of a secondhand world, filled with technologies (either of accuracy or reproducibility) would have been incredibly foreign. You took the watch that the world offered for your service, and you moved on. He was bitter, because in the end everyone he knew was dying and the company that awarded the watch would not grant him what he really wanted: a transfer back to his home state of Oklahoma. He wore cheap Timex watches until he died, but he never threw the Accutron away. It was symbolic.

The conferring of the watch was also symbolic, but not in any particularly damaging way. I think Mumford really exaggerates that part. Dad had to get dressed up and go to a studio photographer in town to get his likeness taken for the company newsletter. Mom happily hung onto that picture as well. The significance, I think, is not in the symbols but in the way we act. Symbolic inducement, to use the old speech-com term for visual rhetoric, is real. But what we do matters much more than what our social rituals symbolize.

We have never lived in a non-multidimensional space. Such theories of simulation (as manifest in Baudrillard more recently) are to me, worse than useless. They distract us from the reality of our rituals and the physicality of our products—especially our recorded products. The symbolic has never been the center of action, but its periphery.

A symbol-worker never grew a tomato. My father did. He didn’t live in a secondhand world. Symbols remained in their place, reserved for special occasions or filed in a seldom revisited drawer.

June 26, 2000

A product that would fail you

October 16, 2010July 18, 2023 Jeff

From I Need that Record (bonus material)

One of the most common critiques/observations about photography is that it interferes with experience. It is commonplace to assert that all photography is elegiac in nature; it is only slightly less commonplace to compare photography with collecting. It seems productive to examine the relationship of shithoarding (Mike Watt’s colorful description of collecting), time travel, and experience.

Watt’s observes that young people don’t think about the future (and the certain loss of the past) much, favoring instead to dwell on experience and social interaction is well placed. But when it comes to music, we all are not blessed with having tons of live venues just outside our doors. Most of us, historically, have had to rely on records (or CDs, or MP3s depending on your vintage). In that way, the modern experience of music is also elegiac. As a kid, I was just becoming aware of the majesty of Jimi Hendrix’s music when he died. He was long dead by the time I had collected all of his records. It’s not always that extreme, but I think more people discover bands after they don’t exist anymore than discover them in their prime. Does that make these musical experiences elegiac or otherwise inferior to the sense of discovery of new art? Is music appreciation always tied to nostalgia, to shithoarding, to shadow worlds imitating more primal experiences?

From this perspective, recordings (visual, verbal or textual, and musical) are always products that fail. They aren’t originary experiences; they are commodifications of experiences: products meant to be consumed and thrown away or perhaps hoarded. MP3s certainly seem disposable. They are infinitely replicable, and therefore not precious. The same is true of CDs (as a storage medium rather than objects). Vinyl still has that mystique as collectable objects, but it’s connected to the imperfect (read physical) nature of their production and distribution. Paper fades, but it also holds a sort of physicality of touch that more pure repositories of data don’t have. The physical, like life, is riddled with imperfection.

What is missing in this theoretical cul-de-sac is the idea of recordings as social artifacts. As social artifacts, recordings attain a degree of perfection beyond the data they contain. A record doesn’t just simply have value as a commodity, it has exhibition value. It’s interesting to me that Chuck Close from the beginning sought museum sales far more than collector sales for his laborious works. In fact, the lovely self portrait of his that I admired in Minneapolis originally sold for a paltry $1500 or so, just so more people would see it. No one seems concerned about limiting their art experiences to “live painting” rather than dead ones.

Regardless of replications, I would argue that sincere confrontations with recordings are atemporal rather than elegiac. It’s a matter of how the recording is performed in a social context. Paintings are grouped and regrouped incessantly; so are record albums. Photographs are the most disposable of all though— without an elegiac function, most photographs have difficulty maintaining sustained interest. That is, unless you are a working photographer trying to hone your craft, or an educator or historian attempting to illustrate or simply understand another place and time. The time machine factor always lurks; but we always experience recordings now rather than then. Yes, they have a documentary (or record) value that can be commodified, but the experience of records is social and atemporal.

An interesting take on these matters was recently published (in a buyer’s guide, imagine that!) by Robert Harley of the Absolute Sound:

My friend Mike was at a hi-fi show with the manufacturer of an expensive turntable when a showgoer asked the manufacturer how much the turntable cost. When he was told that it was $75,000, the showgoer replied in shock, “That’s a lot of money for a turntable.” Mike instantly shot back, “Yes, but it’s cheap for a time machine.”

My friend’s view, in addition to being a brilliant witticism, is dead-on perfect; audio components are not things to be possessed, but facilitators for connecting you with music. A turntable doesn’t spin records, it transports you across time and space to those magical moments when extraordinary music-making occurred. It lets us in on the exuberance, tenderness, joy, and despair that can be felt by human beings.

I disagree that the time machine metaphor is “dead-on,” simply because most modern recordings are synthetic; rather than being any sort of event that can be recaptured, they are imaginative products that cannot be located precisely in time. This nostalgic and wistful review of a Mazzy Star album is a case in point. But Harley also explores music as shithoarding vs. social activity:

I see high-end audio from my friend Mike’s perspective. Quality audio equipment isn’t about consumption and materialism, but about experiencing and enjoying one of life’s fundamental pleasures. Sitting at home listening to music (and sharing it with others) is as much a return to simplicity, basic ideals, and valuing experience over possessions as I can imagine. A high quality audio system isn’t a shrine to technology or wealth, but a vehicle for exploring the world of music.

With that different view of high-end audio, the contemporary trend toward experience over possessions, of nourishing our core needs rather than encouraging mindless consumption, should embrace what high-end audio brings to the table— hearing your favorite music wonderfully reproduced night after night. Whether a turntable (of any price) is a thing on your equipment rack or a time machine isn’t determined by the turntable (the object) or it’s owner (the subject), but rather by the relationship between the two. The message from our community needs to be more about time machines and less about gear.

The peroration is decidedly odd, given this is from the 2011 High End Audio Buyers Guide which is filled with stratospherically priced hardware. There are several articles claiming a “democratization” of experience (by low-cost home theater, no less) but little evidence to support the claim that good sound can be had on the cheap. A “bargain” in here has many zeros behind it, save a few token items which are consistently trotted out (including my favorite speakers, the Magnepans). Where is the content that isn’t about “consumption and materialism”? The only article that qualifies is the recommended recordings list.

I fail to see any contemporary trend for “experience over possessions” at work right now. People simply have less money to hoard possessions, or to spend on experiences for that matter. Music rates highly on my list of simple pleasures, and I enjoy good gear— not as a time machine but rather as a sort of “study aid” to the human experience.

Music’s products have seldom failed me; neither have photographs. Both reward sustained attention.