Constant Epiphany

Representation?: Proximity and Distance

2011-11-19T10:56:00.000-08:00

I always take buses to campus. My bus route has changed several times over the last few years. I would estimate that I go to campus maybe three or four times a week by bus. This means that maybe every year I take the bus maybe 210 times to go campus. This means that I see the same scenery, from two different orientations, just as many times. I change my seat on the bus, and occasionally don't have a seat at all. The weather changes, the time of day changes, other passengers come and go, and, most of all, my mood changes. I am thinking of a certain broken clock tower, Holmby Hall, in Westwood Village; its copper dome greened from oxidization. Every bus route I have ever taken goes past this tower. Although I rarely notice the tower now, when I have, its meaning has been ambiguous.

Reading representation in geography is a difficult task. How should it be done? Is there one sort of cultural meaning that is attached to the tower that I can read? Sometimes I look at the tower and think of commercial place-making, other times I am thinking directly through theories from academia - the towers' historical citations, a performative landscape, elite ideology, post-modern capitalist transformation, Heidegger, feeling and affect, etc. Still other times the tower in its grandiose absurdity -its lapsed beauty and clock that only gets the right time twice a day- only remind me of not wanting to be in LA. Those thoughts have gradually subsided with time. A little over three years here, and I am finally content. So what does or did the tower mean?

The tower means only what one invests into it. One can argue either for a post-structuralist multiplicity of meaning, or a collapse of meaning itself. Perhaps the tower doesn't signify anything. I am the one always calling the tower to task - asking myself what it means. Of course, the historical chiasmus that brought Holmby Hall, or Westwood Village, into being is interesting for what it says about its creators and the larger milieu they operate within. Psychologically, it is noteworthy how changing lights and times inflect the phenomenon of the tower. For an anthropologist, my personal sojourn vis-à-vis this tower could be revealing of displaced peoples (though others' stories would be more interesting). All of these things are real and important, but they all depend on a post-representational subject, imbuing the world with contingent meanings that shift in and out of one's purview. Is nothing solid? Or at least temporally more persistent?

Maybe things with "meaning," with a semiotic anchoring outside of the self, whatever that is, must be distant. If I see something everyday, it will be subject to my whims and sea changes. One day I will be inspired, the next trodden down. Warm weather and a cheery mood make the tower a symbol of humans creating beauty. Stress and personal dissatisfaction cause me to turn my bitterness outwards, besmirching the "they" that erected this edifice at the expense of expropriated Indians and commercial pursuit, sowing an inauthentic, dissimulating landscape. Other times I don't even look up, only wait below it for the bus, it is place where me and two dozen others ignore each other and check our phones over and over.

Yet distance places are perhaps more secure. We can't subject them to our whims quite as easily. The opposite of a Utopia or Heaven is a caricature, a Dystopia or Hell. Even if one is cynical about these conceptions, they still persist. No one wants to subject their vacation spot to the vagaries of the mood of his or herself of that of a companion. That would be to "ruin" the vacation. Bad moods can certainly ruin everyday life as well, but we know that they are unavoidable. Distant places often avoid these "mooded readings" because they might only come up in one mood or another. When one wants to escape, anywhere else already in good personal standing can seem a utopian alternative.

But when one does become proximate to that other, rosier place, it will become subject to moods or disenchantment. Yurchak explains how the "Imaginary West" of late Socialist Russian youth lost its aura when the government finally allowed people to visit. It was a let down. A Norwegian explained to me how, in his youth, the land behind the Iron Curtain was always imagined as stark and overcast. When he finally visited Poland, he was surprised how beautiful and sunny it actually was. If he had stayed their longer, it would probably become cloudy and grey at least for a bit! Paradise only exists as a concept to aspire to as long as it is, in our mortal lives, inaccessible. For because of its distance, it may remain perfect.

So if representation breaks down in proximity, maybe it persists at a distance.

Invert Regret

2011-03-26T14:48:00.000-07:00

On March 23rd, a New York Times piece reported on a survey of American adults. The survey asked respondents what their biggest regrets were. The answers largely centered on three regrets: relationships, education, and career. And what is regret? Longing, anger, self-criticism. Why didn’t I choose this path? Why wasn’t I more decisive when I had the chance to be? We hate regret, and we love stories of those with no regrets. In fact, it seems that perhaps the key to happiness is banishing the concept from our lives. If we have no regrets, then we are content, and therefore in a place where past regrets are resolved, present anxieties are clear from the doubt of the future regret of making the wrong decision, and therefore the future can be embraced without worrying about how to move forward. No regret is satisfaction. The regrets that the survey picks up on are directly related to perceived happiness: love, living standard, respect of one’s family and peers, etc.

So why do we worry about regrets, and why do we constantly regret the decisions that we “should have made?” Any answer to this is complex and invites sociological, psychological, anthropological, and philosophical explanation. Indeed, much research and many writings have endeavored to shed light on regret.

But what if we made a simple moral inversion? What if we embraced all of the moments of indecision and of mistake that form the crossroads of the regretted event, and affirmed all that has slipped through our fingers? Instead of wallowing in could-of-been formulations of our lives, we can happily accept the contingencies of it all. Indeed, we can find pleasure in not being decisive. I often return to moments of my life when I did say the correct thing, when I shied away from being the decisive being I ought to be. And I regret this. I regret the missed opportunities for friends, love, and experiences. At the moment I failed to make the proper decision, I was, if not consciously aware, sure that this was the safest thing to do. The hesitation and turn down the safest road assured my preservation. Other sorts of regrets are formed by glowingly accepted a route, safe or not, and later realizing that this road led oneself to miss a similar number of opportunities. In this case, decisiveness has damned the decider. So regret in the moment, and regret in hindsight both bring us to image of the crossroads, where one is about to take the unremarkable path, or takes the remarkable path, but realizes it was false. All paths lead to nowhere.

So the solution is to dissolve this entire life mapping, this concern about proper paths, challenging paths, and the image of the fateful departure, where one embarks on a path towards later regret in reflection. Embrace life’s basic indecision. Or more precisely, embrace the infinite and unavoidable potentialities of what we do, and reconcile with the inevitable fact that doing necessitates decisions and regrets. All decisions necessarily exclude others, and in the infinite combination of possible paths, no way can’t lead to some sense of loss. This entire metaphor of the “life course,” with its pathways and routes, is corrupted: it implicitly posits a correct route, and guarantees regret. If we inverted this emphasis on doing – and doing things correctly – then we can arrive at acceptance of not doing. Thus, at every moment when a decision is made, and others aren’t, we can accept the falling away of what didn’t happen. This demands a moral inversion of the connotations of slipping through one’s fingers, so that the slipping through is no longer experienced as loss, but instead is the process that we will affirm and relish. Because of the infinitesimal count of not-done things, it is more fulfilling to simply accept what can’t be done, and glory in imaginings of what could have been done as one would enjoy a fine drink or nice smelling flowers or paintings in a gallery. Instead of regretting not owning the paintings, we can simply enjoy the moment we spend watching them in the museum of imagination. What greater hope is their for happiness than accepting that we can’t consume or consummate all, and that affirming this, instead of regretting it, may bring us a more realistic and possible happiness.

The Digital Age?

2011-01-27T09:40:00.000-08:00

During the State of the Union address on Tuesday January 25th, President Obama spoke of the need to usher in the Digital Age.
Obama presents the Digital Age as a social and economic epoch. Social because of the urgent necessity to bring Internet technologies to those without them, and economic because digital tools enable advancement to the next stage of industrial growth. Beyond the coffin of Fordism lies the hope of capturing and domesticating the IT contributions of international engineers, transnational financial institutions, and online sales. The Digital Age is imminent, and we must face it with our heads held high and our eyes alert, so that we may master it before others learn to master us through it.

A few months ago I read an article in the BBC that similarly spoke of a lack of access to the Internet not only as an infrastructural shortcoming, but as an educational shortcoming. Those lacking continuous private access to the worldwide web are presented as being at worst impoverished and at best unwittingly ignorant. The Internet now represents the crux of education in the 21st century, and once the population is wired, a basic necessity of the Digital Age will be satisfied. A society well connected to the Internet is a society predisposed to success in the 21st century.

When Obama speaks of the coming Digital Age I feel a tinge of excitement and a surge of apprehension. The politics of ambition may lead to a nation with a purpose, and purposes can unite a scattered society under one narrative. The narrative of the Digital Age is both heroic and modernistic, presenting a teleology of world affairs that overcomes postmodern cynicism through a Darwinian economic struggle. Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt both spoke regrettably of the slow dawn of the Modern Age and the arrival of the Technological Age or modern world, respectively. For both of these thinkers, the Modern Age was marked by a steady disenchantment of the religious world and the arrival of rational explanation. What set them apart from other thinkers was a perceived notion of the instrumentalization of not only the natural, and what present itself to humans in an undisclosed form, but also of the human. If the world is what humans make of it and how we relate to it, than an excessively rational and instrumental view of the world isn't simply progress, but actually dehumanizes our worlds and ourselves. People become cogs in a machine world, used and discarded as any production material. The natural world itself is no longer beautiful in its mystical beauty but is seen statistically as something to be exploited to an end.

For Arendt, the nuclear bomb and Sputnik both represented the extreme alienation of man from nature. The nuclear bomb is the uncontrollable transubstantiation of nature into a pulverizing unearthly force, and Sputnik was man's flight away from the hearth of the earth. Both Heidegger and Arendt have been accused of conservatism in the ways they nostalgically speak of the home, the private, and the earth, yet their somewhat mystical characterizations of these elements betrays the very human anxiety of imminent undeterminable change.

What changes does the Digital Age promise? Does it bring further instrumentalization and dehumanization of the human condition? Do technologies such as Facebook and Wikipedia further disclose our privacy and level knowledge into trivia? In a world dominated by the private made public and the public made unavoidable, do we lose an essential and important element of what humans need? Or is such apprehension simply situated (as it must be), conservative (it certainly is), and therefore reactionary?

The nuclear bomb and Sputnik were earth-threatening events. They hinted at a possible destruction of the globe as we knew it.
This was, however, a differentiated globe. When Kierkegaard wrote of the modern press in early 19th century Denmark he described it in terms similar to those I used to discuss Internet technologies. The current condition is more Kierkegaard's fear than Heidegger's or Arendt's. Instead of fearing the destruction of the earth, the fear is that of destruction of culture and the self, to be replaced only by a society sucking at the teat of the latest Internet meme.

When Obama speaks of our "Sputnik moment," he clearly suggests a heroic transcendence of cynicism and factionalism and ushers in a new age of meaning and purpose. "America does big things," he claims. This is certainly true. But what will be threatened by the Digital Age, this imminent, purposeful, and destructive paradigm. What will it change and what will we later regret about its arrival. A dawn that we certainly do desire, are creating and are already reeling from.

Holy Fools: Normativity, Existentialism, Place

2010-11-29T11:49:00.000-08:00

"For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight. As it is written: 'He catches the wise in their craftiness.' " (1 Corinthians 3:19)

"In this film it is my message that it is impossible to pass on experience to others or learn from others. We must live our own experience, we cannot inherit it." (Tarkovsky interviewed in "A Poet in Cinema")

"Beauty is in the balance of the parts. And the paradox is that the more perfect the work, the more clearly does one feel the absence of any associations generated by it." (Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, pg. 47)

Recently, watching some classic Soviet films, I was struck by the character of the holy fool. In the Russian Orthodox tradition, a holy fool is ignorant of worldly ways, and has been struck by dumb by God's grace. This sort of ignorance is a good ignorance, as these fools are blind to the corrupting ways of fallen man.

Unsurprisingly, scholarly work on the holy fool seems to be most prevalent in theology. I found research describing early Christian ascetics and how they trained to be ignorant (of corporal temptations) before God. Updating these discussions, there was an attempt to bring the holy fool before Foucault's theorization. Here the holy fool-ascetic learns a technique of self-discipline and self-control in their task of self-mastery before God.

These discussions are all very interesting, and I wish I had the time and the faculty to closely read them. In my own time, I got to thinking about the holy fool in a certain brand of Kiergaardian and Heideggerian existentialism and the relation of the holy fool to normative place. I discuss several theories on normativity and the individual in the face of society. Then I look at several holy fools from Russian cinema and their tactics (indeed, their lack thereof) in normative and emotive situations . Finally, I conclude on the relation of the holy fool to place.

Important to the power-knowledge theorization of Foucault is the bottom-up enforcement of normativity in society. An individual learns their place, or disposition, through the configurations of any given society. From their social disposition, they will appeal to a certain assortment of mentors - in family, church, education, literature, etc., who aid them in a particular moral cultivation. Eventually, this cultivation is turned inward, and thus we have the voice of God speaking directly into the mind of the Catholic of Protestant individual. This is governmentality writ large, or better yet, writ diffusedly and pervasively. The religious subject is both subjected and before the Subject of God - Althusser's dual subjectivity.

Now stepping back to Kierkegaard, we can see the individual as subject not only to a religious subjectivation, but also subject to a secular levelling. The modern age, with its press and Public, enacts a sort of secular-normative levelling on an individual, distracting and depriving them of a relationship to God. The reduction of the singular individual to the mass, of the religious subject to the civil subject, is a very sinister abstraction, as it leads one to in fact bow before the variegations of secular living. The best one can do is live an ethical life - a normative life - and re-utter the most complacent doxa about good living. The religious life, the life that a holy fool must live, before God and in awe of God at the expense of a human morality is cast aside.

For Heidegger, and perhaps in extension, Sartre, we find the normative individual living an inauthentic life, a life of bad faith. Making no significant decisions, a normative subject is resigned to a life, and a world, designed and controlled by others - by the averageness of the abstract mass. An authentic individual makes all the decisions that matter in the face of, and perhaps despite of, normativity.

What exactly is the role of a holy fool? A trained ascetic would be a subject to a discipline of asceticism and therefore a particular religious orthodoxy. The ascetic makes a conscious decision to assume their religious role, beginning the necessary regimen of preparation, and living out the conditions of hermetism. This would seem an authentic position, a singular turn to the eternal life before God, yet the decision is still adopting a normative orthodoxy. Indeed, following in the footsteps of other in any religious practice, could be taken as a move of the mass: reacting to religious opinions through particular religious conditions as any abstracted subject would: "... we shrink back from the 'great mass' as they shrink back." (Being and Time pg 164)

The sort of holy fool to whom I was initially drawn is the fool that cannot speak, as madness is forever relegated to silence - to being unheard. The holy fool has no voice and therefore no direction to share with others, as their life is indeed a silent singularity before God as others never moulded them, and they themselves have no intention or possibility of pedagogy. In distinction to the ascetic, the true holy fool has made no conscious decision to be authentic before eternity, but have been thrust by God onto the world as truly ignorant beings. They don't need to make a decision to be anything, as they are deprived of the decision altogether.

Prince Myshkin in Dostoevky's "The Idiot," and Vladimir in Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible" are holy fools, but not to the logical extreme of the "true holy fool" I just described. These holy fools, in their regular practice, reflect the desire, designs, and moods of others. Myshkin can't distance himself from the partial loves he is implicated in, and can't deny himself the relations of cynical men. As a "positively good man," Myshkin is a product of the situations he finds himself in, never extending an ethical self outside of the ethical worlds others contain him in at a given moment. Vladimir covets what him mother, Efrosinia covets, but only during the radiant expression of coveting. Like the black body of physicists, Vladimir absorbs and emits the emotions and projects of others. Yet in moments of disjuncture, before others, usually his mother, react to a situation, Vladimir is clearly at a loss of how to react - he can't make his own decision.

Durochka from Tarkovksy's Andrei Rublev is a true holy fool. She exists in a state of eternal delight - playful in any setting, eats with the voraciousness of an animal, and can't discern or decide who ought to be friend or foe. Her innocence inspires the icon painter Rublev, she survives with him the sack of Vladimir, and is eventually led away by the very Tartars that have razed and slaughtered her community. Throughout the entire situation, she remains in a state of delight, and when the Tartars effuse more joy than the distressed Rublev, she follows them to her likely doom. Durochka's fate always lies in the situation, but she does not absorb and emit like Myshkin or Vladimir. Her childlike ignorance is a permanent disposition, the self-state of a being completely existing despite the levelling process and ethical situation of the world. She knows only the religious and the eternal, and is incapable of aesthetic or ethical pursuits (her pursuit of joy is that of joy before God and in spite of the world, and not joy in personal pursuit - note her animal-like unrefinements). Life is not a concern, and therefore when death does arrive, she will be completely unawares.

The position of the holy fool in a place as social milieu is that of complete detachment. The fool reflects the sentiments of others, or the mood of the world, but does not project their own designs upon it. Before God and outside of the world, the holy fool moves through the world without abiding by or contributing to its normativity. The true holy fool lives so despite the world that they are completely incapable of decisions within it, they simply go with the world. This going-with the world is entirely different from a normative inauthentic going-with the world because decisions, ends, and means are entirely irrelevant. No ethical dilemmas play out. One can imagine a society composed entirely of such fools and how quickly, and how without malice or even consideration of others, it would die out. Its death would be unimportant, however, because it was always and anti-society, a temporal arrangement of singular eternities.

Usefullness of Epochal Divisions

2010-04-12T21:23:00.001-07:00

If in the beginning there was only one time, then that era would likely be referred to as A. We can also safely assume that no one who has ever thought of themselves as living in the one and only epoch of history would bother to cleave it from another epoch. If there was to be a division, it would likely only be made in juxtaposition to the past, and would require some sort of a clean break with it. The Christians broke with the Judaic calendar, itself fixed upon a starting point, before which there was simply nothing. A would have pre-A from which to define itself in opposition.

I want to interrogate a concept a bit more complicated then the BCE/CE split. Since perhaps the Enlightenment, writers have been writing of a break with the past, the era before people could fathom enlightenment and were groveling under the oppression of ignorance. We might consider this the Medieval/Enlightenment split, or A/B. As time goes on however, thinkers and writers begin to conceive of a modern era, an era built around the exacting forces of capitalism, international standards, the foreseeable death of primitivism, and a new dawn for human freedom and potential. Now we have a Medieval/Enlightenment/Modern split, or A/B/C. Such a division has been pursued in many literatures as the dark times before reason was known, the beginnings of rational thought and positivistic science, and when rational science matured and hit its stride ushering in “true” forms of modern science beyond mere rationalistic thought. Now, experts among us have identified yet another split, that of metastasized modernity: post-modernity is the condition of post-Fordist neoliberal capitalism, hyperspace, multiple identities, the death of scientific truth, plurality, and irony over earnestness. So we have A/B/C/D.

Is it all settled now? How can we move forward from this point? Historians and cultural critics have identified problems with these categories. World historians argue that medieval is not a suitable category for the pre-Enlightenment and pre-Westphalian system, neither in Europe nor outside of it. However, much of the world has exhibited a feudal system of some sort. Perhaps it would be best to insert a “pre-modernity” category before modernity to compensate for this discrepancy. This is an era marked by hunter-gatherers, advanced organic economies (AOEs), and capitalists anticipating industry. Now we have A/subB/B/C/D. By this point, A just means pre-rational, or pre-European rationality, which may or may not occur at the beginning of the Enlightenment or the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, or perhaps with Thomas Aquitaine (that would be a stretch). In any case, it starts to get messy when you try to figure out the exact extent of any of these global or local epochs.

So now we are in the era of post-modernity that is endorsed by many in the social sciences. Solid identity, permanent dwelling, the traditional family, and the worker/capitalist system were so very modern, and have come to pass. The shift can be traced back to the Bretton Woods accord if you are a political economist, or simply to the new domination of America if you just want to look at politics. Though you would have to disregard the decades of the 40s and 50s and 60s (except for the bit at the end), as they still belong to the modern era. During the modern era, most people believed in the power of modern art, the TV, and the infallibility of science. But then came the terror of the Atomic Age, the art of the Dadaists, HG Wells “War of the Worlds,” the Bloomsbury group, and Hip-Hop with its self-conscious appropriation of random bits of the past. But these things didn’t all happen at once, so maybe a new category should be added to meld these two latest epochs together. A/subB/B/C/CD/D.

Already, I feel that this description isn’t enough. Think of all the alternate cultures to ours in the world. In fact, in post-modernity, “ours” is unstable. I don’t know you any better than I know myself. And surely, I can’t agree with you, because to agree with you would be to approve of you, and to do that, I would likely have to judge you, which requires cognition of your acts. An inseparable gulf lies between us and within me. Schizophrenia. Multiplicities. Let’s scatter the categories. Everything is now contingent on particular cultures and societies which themselves are contingent on the whims and fancies of those reading them. However, to keep things partially clear, it would be good to try to redefine at least the last two of these categories (and their modifications) for the colonized world. So we might as well restate the equation as preC/Cm/CDm/Dm. No one is beyond Dm because it hasn’t been theorized yet, and likely, only turning into a vaporous ether could possibly describe this state.

Finally, a suitable set of categories for analysis within the social sciences has been established. Now we can discover meaning on the borders between or within these multiplicities. Like a merchant from subB Venice, we can again encounter the Other in a fashion that will not inspire us to wonder not about origins, but only [micro-]evolution, because we are no longer burdened with the staged [macro-]evolution of time and the oppressive weight of place. Home is nothing. The Highway is everything. We can dispatch with the abusive categories that reasonable thinkers have erroneously established in the past so that we can again analyze them using similar vocabulary, but devoid of anything but political economy and distrust. And we are back in the Medieval Era, looking only to our redemption by the cynical forces of post-modernity.

"Ruin Porn" in Detroit

2010-03-06T18:41:00.000-08:00

I've done my fair share of "abandoned place" exploration. There is a special draw the decayed, which can be traced all the way back to the enjoyment of Roman ruins in the 15th century, and then to the medieval castles, and then to Eastern ruins, and so on and so forth. Besides reflecting nostalgia for the (mis?)remembered, they also live on in the landscapes of post-apocalyptical science fiction (eg. 12 Monkeys and Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles").

A whole host of websites have sprung up to follow Detroit's decline, and blog entries as well. It is easy to access many of Detroit's ruins, because there are too many of them for the police to evict you. Hell, it might even draw tourism these days. I was just thinking about what a cool photo trip it would be. Once you're in, the more the decayed, the better the photo. Abandoned photography has been around for years. But Abandoned Detroit has drawn quite a bit of media attention.

This writer thinks that "ruin porn" is just a cop out for "lazy" journalists. I've seen the same accusations leveled at journalists that explore chatroulette. Journalists devouring journalists? But there is a real draw to these places. I think it reflects an anxiety about the decline of America. The last 50 years has seen the first thinning outs of heavily settled places. As Rust Belters fled to the Sun Belt, the Midwest changed from the America's future to the ghost in the attic. Remember Horace Smith's Oxymandius:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

[courtesy of Wikipedia]

Michigan is the Babylon of Midwestern manufacturing; Detroit and Flint are its neighborhoods. Perhaps the push to save Detroit's Michigan Central Station is more than civic pride, but the desire to rejuvenate America. An attempt to cover up a symbolic blight that speaks less about neighborhoods and cities and more about our civilization. To deny the relics that could one day speak of the beginnings of America's decline. But does destroying the past to prevent its future recovery really insure anything besides complete erasure?

Photography in the Age of Digital Reproduction

2009-08-10T07:19:00.000-07:00

I recently read Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and, unsurprisingly got to thinking about a medium of “art” close to my heart – photography. Over the past few years I have seen my own interest in photography shift along with its technologies.

When digital photography first started to break into the mass market (in a major way) about five or so years ago, my thoughts were those of a Luddite – the technology would never be good enough, the images would always be inferior, film would stay prominent. I was mistaken. Surely, I had a lot invested in the success of film, I had an expensive film camera and, most of all, was very proud of the fact that I had learned to use a film SLR through trial and error. Digital brought the threat of watering down a whole art so that anyone could do it, it was the equivalent of revealing all of the great secrets of the Master’s – no, it was more like grafting a Master’s hand onto your arm.

With digital photography anyone can cheaply (well, relatively) learn how to capture great images through trial and error. Versatile and easily usable consumer SLRs and new generation point-and-shoot/professional control hybrid cameras combined with intelligent imaging software have made the ability to produce great images available to anyone with an interest. Some would argue that little skill is now necessary to produce a good image, yet these days, little equipment is actually needed to create a great image and to cultivate good picture taking skills.

So, what is the status of photographic art in the age of digital reproduction? How has the art shifted? Some thoughts:

(1) No copy necessary.
Reproduction of the image is now done on the computer screen. Not only no longer is there an original image with a mythical aura, there is neither an infinitely reproducible physical copy. There is only the visual trace of the image on the screen. The existence of the copy is reduced to the retransfigurable crystals of an LCD screen; it truly flits in and out of the present.

(2) Image sharing websites.
Sites such as Flickr, Picassa, Facebook, and the various crowd-source stock photo collections provide for hundreds of thousands or millions of images to be available for viewing at any given moment. Thousands of photos are uploaded every hour and devoured by people across the world in seconds. Spatial differentiation in artistic style is consequently reduced. As another photographer, my influences pour in from all over the world and I am unable to tell who or where these influences originate. Photographers hide behind monikers like “Moann” or “ind67,” names that say nothing of identity. Images can be flipped through as fast as they load. A favorite image could be purchased and printed, but the likelihood of this happening is slight, as the image could just as easily be bookmarked or set as computer wallpaper or shared with a friend through a link. Again, as Benjamin reflects on the removing of recorded choral work from the auditorium to the home for private listening, personalization of the consumption of the work has occurred. The photographic image no longer has an original context beyond the moment and place it was snapped. Its whole life has been embedded in digital code.

(3) Mass production/consumption and its influence on the aesthetic

The eye sees a scene, the lens captures the scene, the internet hosts the image for all to look at. Image sharing sites host comment and ratings sections to mediate the consumers’ roles as critics. Is the image original? Interesting? What does it say about skill or art form? The mass provides answers. As more and more similar images are uploaded onto the internet, and people are normalized into what is a “good” photo, new forms of photography also arise. The High Dynamic Range photo and the heavily manipulated surreal image which restradles the line between reality and painterly fantasy are examples of a new photography allowed for digital photo processing. As the software and hardware to produce these images becomes more and more common, they are no longer the works of exceptionally skilled professionals, but the works of especially advanced technology. Hence, the “skill,” the aura of the ability to transmit the secreted flits of reality, of the photographer is diminished.

Where does this leave the art of photography? Is it now dying as an art form, or simply mutating? As technologies have improved, the traditional photograph has, for the most part, become an antique that conveys an era and aesthetic of limited technology - imperfect in comparison to the infinite perfectibility of the digitally manageable image. So it would seem that the art of photography would be pushed to a new level by necessity of survival, a level that would blur the line between photography and something new. So if this is the case, then the traditional professional photographer, artist or commercial, and even the skilled amateur have lost ground and been diluted by the proliferation of cheap cameras, computer sharing, mass judgment, and the outsourcing of their skill by technology. A new type of photographer has also been bred, however, one that is less a photographer and more of a computer wizard with another sort of creative skill, dealing with a 2D digital canvas and a whole palette of digital tools.

I am still unsure how I will fit into the new photography. My current temptation is to go retrograde and abandon the demands of the digital photographer. Yet there is another factor I haven’t yet discussed, and won’t go to deep into - the dilution of the identity of the photographer, of both the knack and the eye. Whose eye is it that pinpoints the image to be snapped? My eye or the eye of the masses that deem the image worthwhile? An old wizened man in an exotic country will draw the snapshots of a dozen tourists in a few moments. A majestic mountain landscape or a beautifully eroding factory could similarly draw a large amount of camera interest. Perhaps this is nothing new, but as the means and discourse around the art form falls into the hands of the masses, then does it become subject to too much cultural refereeing? Losing its ability to affect?

Marcuse "A Note on Dialectic"

2009-05-14T17:50:00.000-07:00

I updated a past post that was very bad. This explanation comes from a stronger base of understanding. 1/28/11

Marcuse turns to Hegelian dialectics in this essay in order to explain their philosophical strength against scientific rationalism and the tyranny of quantitatives. Marx drew from Hegel for this term and method, which Hegel in turn recovered not from thinkers such as Kant or Hume, but from the ancient Greeks. If you've ever read a dialectic from Plato or Socrates, you may know how it works. One speaker presents an argument, and another speaker (such as a Cynic or a Skeptic) refutes the argument. The dialogue between these two is a dialectic. By the end of the dialectic, the two opposing viewpoints should reconcile into some sort of hybrid argument. For Hegel this is thesis+antithesis=synthesis. Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind and Marx's historical dialectic approach the idea of dialectics in a different, but related way. For Hegel, one form of a thought reaches a threshold at which it negates itself, and then the original form and negation resolve into a synthesis, and the mind moves along through history while impacting the consciousness and material world. For Marx, the forms of material production,¹ which are modulated through economics, have a dialectical impact on social formation and cultural production. As history progresses, materialism affects society and thought, which, in turn, affects materialism.

Marcuse notes that the scientific world has become immune to dialectical thinking, preferring the steady flows of postivism verses the give and take of negation and dialectics. Marcuse's argument is that Hegelian dialectics recognize that objective reality is only a realization and contingent on the subject. Progress in dialectical thinking is therefore very much different then the progress of science, which seldom questions its fundamental objective substance and operative foundations. Dialectics always calls these into question; it must as this is how negative thinking works. "Its function is to break down the self-assurance and self-contentment of common sense, to undermine the sinister confidence in the power and language of facts..." (The Essential Frankfurt Reader: 447). This process of thinking, Hegel's ideal of Reason (not to be confused with scientific reason) allows us to unchain our minds from the facts of reality and therefore free us to other objective possibilities. The world suddenly becomes undefined and capable of being constituted by anything else.

The crux of the argument is that Hegel's Reason was unchanging and absolute. Marx saw Hegel's Reason as reaching its own stage of historical negation, where forces oppressed by the established epistemologies of reason needed to move Reason forward by bringing it down to earth. By grounding thought in materialism, Reason can move into a new historical stage in which it may be used to subvert the repressive powers of reified power structures, just as it had, in the past, been used to subvert thought and discourse.

¹ As Erich Fromm has explained in this introduction to Bottomore's "Selected Writings," for Marx materialism is not realism or naturalism, but is the field and conditions of actual production.

Spots

2009-04-15T09:31:00.000-07:00

Just a thought on one of the polyvalences of place - the spot. Perhaps this has already been talked about by someone, but it came to me, as I walked home from the gym today, as new.

Between Weyburn Terrace and the edge of campus, there are three hilly blocks of residential housing that I walk to whenever I go to or from the gym. On one of these blocks, there is a section - a spot - in which some ground vines have grown over the sidewalk, limiting the possible passage of two people to just one. Over half the sidewalk path is choked out by these vines, and today, I had to wait for someone else to pass through these six or seven feet of vinewalk before I could continue home. Then I got to thinking, should they cut these vines back? No, I thought, this is a nice spot on my (quasi-)daily trek. Some of the spots I pass through are too close to loud frathouses, some smell strongly of noxious garbage, and others are blocked by cars parking on driveway entrances. There are good spots and bad spots on my daily trek.

In a restaurant, there may be certain tables or seats that are "bad spots" due to their location under a strong-blowing air-conditioning duct, near a door that opens to a cold street, or seating that leaves one susceptible to bumps from passersby.

The power of these spots lies within their ability to shift one's routine. If I frequently take a walk through an area, I might do it in order to enjoy a spot, such as a tree of blooming lilacs. On the other hand, I may avoid a path that contains troubling or troubled spots, such as a sidewalk temporarily disrupted by a repavement. After discovering late last week that the elevator in my apartment complex was unwilling to stop at my floor, I consistently attempted to use it, hoping it would give in and let me out. Eventually I remade my path to my apartment through the staircase, and today I discovered, almost by accident that the elevator had been repaired. A troubled spot made me remake my route.

Is "spot" really a different way of looking at a place. I thought perhaps it was due its seeming irrelevance, yet pervasive presence in the world. They are, for me, temporary points of the day, that may or may not be consistently reproducible in the future. Their tones can make a place pleasant or unpleasant, and their variance can subtlety shift a daily routine. They are too transitory to visit (a passing lilac tree, but not a garden) and too seemingly minor to really shift one's attitude towards a place (in a restaurant, one can move to a table that is more comfortable for whatever issue one may have); they are not the big game changers. Spots go largely unnoticed, but they color our lives.

The East and the Orient

2009-03-13T21:17:00.000-07:00

In a stressful mood I ventured down to the tobacco store (No!) to buy some classy cigarettes (to make my smoking an exclusive event). The guy at the cash register was a fat bullshitter type who ended asking me what I do. I told him I studied geography and he did the usual not-familiar-with-academic-geography thing - he started asking me capital trivia. What is the capital of South Africa? (FYI, this is trick question - multiple capitals) Australia? Canada? And then another geographical question: What are the furthest north, south, west, and east states? His answer for north, west and east was Alaska. "Alaska is where the East begins!"

On Ken Rockwell's (the photographer-reviewer-self-promoter) website he has an entry on "Oriental" cameras. He considers cameras made in East Asia "Oriental," as he argues that the term only applies to the eastern part of the continent - Russia is not part of it.

I thought about writing him some hatemail to persuade him to drop the terminology, but decided that he would probably disregard it in his narcissism. Maybe I still should, though...

So what is my beef with the tobacco store guy and Ken Rockwell? Conceptions of the "East" and "Oriental" are both grossly misapplied terms. The "The Myth of Continents," a book by Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen, goes in depth about the contradictory nature of metageographical terms. The two terms I have picked out for this blog entry have come to be almost empty terms in regards to actual places. They are, however, loaded with essentialist ideas. The following is an excerpt from a precis I wrote earlier this quarter about "The Myth of Continents." I highly recommend this book:

"Said’s 'Orientalism' is to be commended for its exposure of the West’s construction of an illusional Orient. From this deconstructionist viewpoint, we can see the varying borders of the historical Orient. The Orient began mostly as the Near East studied by philologists. It was later used for the Middle East and North Africa, sort of an indicator for Islamic lands. As more contact was made with South and East Asia, those lands came to typify the Orient. Hegel discussed four Oriental zones, and two of them Persia and Egypt were 'historical buffers,' points were purely Oriental ideas were diffused into more civilized forms (due to their proximity to Europe). Japan itself adopted the label of the East (an idea tied to the Orient) and saw itself as a special exception to its sluggish progress and as a leader to the region. Western culture has shifted its conceptual borders with the East constantly since the Middle Ages. At times, the West seems to be little more than Anglo-America. Events like the Great Schism divided Europe religiously, and this event has been used to compare the Cold War division of Western and Eastern Europe. Russia has always been on the cusp of continents, and Communism is often seen as an anti-Western doctrine. In the last fifty years, battles in the defense of Western freedom and democracy have been waged on these grounds (Huntington Thesis). Further, due to Central Europe’s role in the Second World War, how could places like Germany be truly Western? Something Asiatic is perceived in the uncivilized events of Nazi Germany and the war’s eastern front. In the globalized world, there is still a curious notion as Globalization as nothing more than Westernization. If this is true, labeling Japan as Eastern would be as hard as putting it in the West.
Since the Enlightenment, the East evolved as a place ever more stagnant and barbaric. The technological and colonial advance of Europe marked the Orient as a land of irrational and aesthetically minded peoples without humor or freedom. Rationality was seen as a uniquely Western ideal. Weber saw notions of salvation in Eastern religions as the cul-de-sac of contemplation – Asian people had simply given up on rational and progressive thinking. The West itself has never been fully rational. Technological advancement and capitalism are not unique to Europe. Many Enlightenment thinkers operated on Deist and teleological schemes, embracing a mystical framework to be rational within. Many theories that label the East as irrational are irrational themselves, such as Asiatic despotism and hydraulic despotism."

For all these reasons, I think the terms should be thrown out of our daily discourse!!

Clifford Geertz and "Deep Play"

2009-03-07T10:05:00.000-08:00

This is essay is oft-cited in the works of both sociologists and anthropologists. Geertz uses Jeremy Benthams concept of "deep play," or high stakes games, to examine why someone might engage in betting game where they are in over their heads. By the end of the essay, the Balinese cockfight comes across as a sociological reflection of status, kinship, inter-personal conflict, and affirmations, denials, and explorations of masculinity, animality, and the seedy underbelly of human existance. The "deeper" the play, the more engaged the Balinese are with the conflict, and the higher the stakes, the more meaning is attached to the fight. A "shallow" game arouses little interest and is explemplified by two out of towners pitting their cocks against eachother. The audience cares little about the outcome. When family is involved, the Balinese are much more engaged. Betting together on a cock seems to reaffirm ties, to resolve petty conflicts that have emerged outside, and to wage a symbolic war on another clan. The greatest fights are high-bet, well matched fights, and the winners get to revel in their symbolic triumph. Geertz stresses that there are not "real world" consequences to these fights. A poor cockfighter from far away can't come to the city and rise himself to wealth and riches by cockfight victories. The fight is a story the Balinese "tell themselves about themselves" and reflects more the emotions and desires of people and day-to-day realities of class.

I like this style of "thick description" that Geertz engages in. When I am reading anthropological texts, these are the kinds of works I favor. Bruce Kapferer's "Celebration of Demons" read along similar lines, but without the theoretical insight. The context of the fight and accompanying explanation of symbols and society make the text seem solid. Today, I can imagine that such texts are frowned upon within anthropology for the assumptions they make when connecting people and their actions so clearly to stated cultural "realities." Is the cock truly an extension of the man? This would seem a slam dunk, as the accompanying language (cock jokes) and fights (bloodthirsty spasms of violence) seem tenable evidence of the masculine. Is this too easy of an assumption, playing into categories defined by Western culture? Perhaps the whole recognizableness and understandability of the cockfight is simple misinterpretation of a culture specific event. I'm not so convinced.

In American society, is the sportscar no more than the Balinese cock? Or the boxing match no more than a cockfight? At a boxing match we see two men duking it out until one of them figuratively dies - a total knockout. People may win money this way, and some could gain fortunes, though many more are labelled "compulsive gamblers" (like the social outcasts in Geertz's analysis). These sports, in their advertising, their cast make-up, and their allusions, are all very masculine. One only has to look at American pro-sports to see how male-dominated these sorts of sports are.

Looking back at the social symbolism and kin level cohesiveness that stem from the Balinese cockfight, I couldn't help but think of a Milwaukee Brewers baseball game. A Brewers game can be read in many different ways - through a child enjoying a sport with his family, through inattentive executives economically bonding over the distant game below, or, as it seems in Milwaukee, through drunken devotion to the home team. The latter resembles kinship bonding, it builds a sense of community. The enemy is the opposing team, and nearby rivals pose the most exciting foes. For Milwaukee, Chicago and Minnesota games are the most exciting, a sort of regional rivalry plays itself out. In standings, the divisions are regional, and being above the Cubs is a palpable goal. Outsider teams get less attention, and one can imagine that an Astros-Cubs game at Miller Park will draw little local enthusiasm. Well-matched games against rivals (the other local clan?) are the most exciting, and the ones that seem to foster the most local identity. What really defines blue-collar Brewers fans from Cubs fans? Probably not a whole lot, but these games serve as occasions to drum up some sort of hatred - conveyed through insults and possible fan altercations. Blood really starts to flow. The players on the teams are interchangeable. Though heroes may come and go, the teams persist through the decades, and though they get better or worse depending on the players and management, these facts are washed over with the power of the time-honored institution of Major League Baseball.

So how is this baseball game a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. First, it is that we are different from our Other, our rival. Insults based on stereotypical Chicagoans will surface, and laudable traits of Milwaukeeans will be created and reinforced during the game. Colors and symbols easily mark who is with you and who is not. Does the game say anything about social structure? In Geertz's ethnography, children, women, the disabled, and the outcast all engage in minor games at the periphery of the cockfight, engaging indirectly with the main festival of proud violence and social justification. At a baseball game we see elements of societal structure within the setup of the ballpark itself. The bleachers and nose-bleeders are the cheapest sections, followed by the upper deck, the lower deck, and finally, the skyboxes. For a geographer, this is interesting to ruminate on. The closer to the field the better, unless you have the chance of getting hit with a ball or you can't see anything. The further away you are the worse the seats, unless you are in a skybox. But those in skyboxes are hardly engaged in the play by play experience of the game anyway. For all, the game is probably a bonding experience of some sort. But those that would enjoy the game the most for its community-reinforcement and "deep play" are in the cheaper seats. Money is seldom at stake, but pride is, and like in Geertz's cockfights, when the game is said and done, nothing will actually change in social-economic structure of two major cities. Milwaukee won't be as important and respected as Chicago if they sweep the Cubs, but to some of the crowd, a symbolic victory will have been won, and pride will run deeper.

Schopenhauer and Love

2009-03-02T20:54:00.000-08:00

Looking at The Metaphysics of Love today, it is easy to cast it aside as out-of-date ruminations from a bygone era. Schopenhauer claims the will to live and the will of the species are linked to biological instincts that instill in us a compulsion to mate. Love is reduced to the biological tendency to find a mate. A man (who is Schopenhauer's subject) and a woman will come together to reform the Platonic Ideal of the human species. Passionate love is more or less humans flouting their individual selves and taking on the heroic role of species-first reproduction. A man will run climb the tallest mountain, dodge bullets and endure cultural ostracism to fulfill his passionate desire to meld with the object of his desire (and compulsion). In popular literature of the times, such a man was honorable in his sacrifices for obtaining this love. Honor is a value that exists for the greater good of the species; the child that results from the strenuous courtship is the ultimate goal.

"The will of a man of this kind has become engulfed in that of the species, or the will of the species has obtained so great an ascendency over the will of the individual that if such a man cannot be effective in the manifestation of the first, he disdains to be so in the last. The individual in this case is too weak a vessel to bear the infinite longing of the will of the species concentrated upon a definite object. When this is the case suicide is the result, and
sometimes suicide of the two lovers; unless nature, to prevent this, causes insanity, which then enshrouds with its veil the consciousness of so hopeless a condition..."

Romeo and Juliet are but weak vessels for the continuity of the species, losing sight of the species in their extreme passion.

All of the talk of will of species and our inherent desire for biological satisfaction really seems to cheapen love, but maintaining its mystery is not Schopenhauer's goal. He does not discuss homosexual love and only mentions pedastry in passing and as a simple deprivation. One must wonder if love can exist outside of reproduction, Schopenhauer doesn't seem to allow it. Even marriage - the ultimate symbol of enduring love seems a bit of a sham.The most successful marriages come out of arrangement or friendship - passionate lovers are doomed to misery and hatred for each other.

Schopenhauer's laws of attraction seem quite absurd. That those who deviate from the Ideal (most of us) mate with our bodily and dispositional opposite in order to reform the Ideal. Two fat people are doomed to have fat children, while a fat person and a boney person are likely to have normal child. A bit too simple, isn't it?

How does Schopenhauer's argument hold up in our increasingly post-modern society?

I couldn't help but agree with some his ideas about the stereotypically most attractive mates. If anything, this shows how little our culture has changed from that of the early 19th century in some regards. Men are to be kind of heart and muscular. Their intelligence is not the most important aspect for women, who are drawn mainly to strength and courage. Indeed, in contemporary American media, the courageous and heavily armed warrior still wins out over the scrawny book learner, no matter how astute he is (much to the dismay of budding scholars such as I). For women, the mainstream ideal seems to be witty and sexy woman. Driving through Los Angeles I can't help but be bombarded with billboards of buxom women every time I go out. Advertisements for breast augmentations and plastic surgery abound. Schopenhauer's take on attraction and the physical characteristics of the female still holds in today's culture, the "upward or downward turn of the nose" can still make or break a female in Hollywood.

For Schopenhauer, men look for in women "a certain plumpness, in other words, a superabundance of the vegetative function, plasticity," adding "excessive thinness strikingly repels us." At first this seems to be a break with the times: in an age of mega-obesity - thin is in. But on further thought, a peculiar breed of fashion models are striking for their attenuated limbs, sunken cheeks, and jarringly inhuman features. In recent years there has been a public outcry to ban bone-thin models for their own health and out of fear that they may spur others to anorexia and bulimia in emulation of their supposedly glamorous identities.

So it would seem to me that the door isn't shut on all of Schopenhauer's musings. Though many today eschew any sort of intrinsic biological desire for species perpetuation in explanations for human behavior, it does not seem completely absurd to me. This work (like most of its era) is limited by restricting most of love's agency to the heterosexual man and by scientifically obsolete ideas about heredity, biology and sex.

2009-03-02T19:56:00.001-08:00

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