The eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century were dominated by physiognomic theories of madness, which posited a one-to-one correspondence between mental states and body states: the body was seen as an undistorted image of the mind. Paradoxically, at a time when an ‘objective’ recording device (the camera) had not been invented yet, skepticism had not yet proven itself as serious a problem as it would become after the invention of photography. Indeed, I would argue that precisely the absence of an external recording/mirroring device (the camera) made it possible to assume the presence of an internal mirror i.e., to conceive of the body as an ‘image’ of the mind. In the second half of the nineteenth century the new media of photography and film contributed to a shift in the understanding of attention, thereby influencing the development of the new sciences of mind (psychology and psychiatry). Challenging the assumption of the mind and the body as ‘co-expressible’ — functioning as ‘mirrors’ of each other — photography and film foreshadowed the ‘discovery’ of the unconscious and were instrumental in the reconceptualization of pathology and in the transition from physiognomic to psychological theories of madness. As materialist theories constructing madness as purely organic and visually inscribed gradually gave way to a new understanding of consciousness and sanity in terms of attention, it became increasingly clear that inattention, distraction, automatism or absence from oneself, are, in fact, primary rather than secondary states. Paradoxically, precisely when a sophisticated technology for providing visual records of pathology was introduced, theories of pathology as visually inscribed became obsolete and pathology came to be seen as inherent in normal psychological processes.
Photography and film undermined physiognomic theories of insanity, thus blurring the distinction between sanity and insanity and contributing to the ‘discovery’ of the unconscious in three significant ways. First, photography and film gave rise to a new concept of the self as inherently theatrical and, by extension, of insanity as performative. Second, through its inherent, technical automatism photography revealed at the heart of any photographed movement — not only the movements of those diagnosed with some form of insanity — a similar, previously unsuspected, human automatism. Instantaneous photography demonstrated that what appear to be rational, purposeful movements/actions are often carried out automatically or unconsciously. Distraction and inattention — absence from oneself — which had previously been considered particular types of pathology now appeared to be inherent in normal psychological processes. Third, while photography was expected to provide objective records of insanity, most scientific applications of photography were driven by aesthetic concerns. To grasp the specific ways in which photography and film challenged materialist theories of insanity, it is helpful first to trace the historical transition from physiognomic to psychological theories of madness.
I. FROM PHYSIOGNOMIC TO PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES OF INSANITY
Early physiognomic theories of mind assumed the equivalence of mental and brain states, positing the mind and the body as ‘mirrors’ of each other. In Physiognomy, or the Corresponding Analogy between the Conformation of the Features and the Ruling Passions of the Soul (1775-1778) J.C.Lavater argued for “a certain native analogy between the external varieties of the countenance and form, and the internal varieties of the mind.”[1] He praised physiognomy for its ability to distinguish “what is permanent in the character from what is habitual, and what is habitual from what is accidental.”[2] The repetitious, regulated contraction of facial muscles, he argued, produces normal facial expressions that become deformed when an element of disproportionate change and randomness is introduced into the habitual work of the muscles. Lavater thus identified the normal with the habitual/recognizable and the pathological with the accidental/unpredictable; by extension, immobility (the immobile body/face) was a sign of normality whereas mobility (the body/face in motion) signified abnormality. In A Treatise on Insanity (1801) Pinel claimed to oppose the popular view of insanity as a result of an organic lesion of the brain, considering it instead a ‘functional disturbance’ produced by psychological causes. Nevertheless, he listed numerous exceptions demonstrating a connection between “certain malconformations of the cranium [and] a state of insanity.”[3] Building on the work of Lavater and Pinel, in The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases (1843) Sir Alexander Morison linked sanity to the habitual contractions of facial muscles, which produce a visually recognizable expression: “The appearance of the face is…dependent upon the state of the mind; the repetition of the same ideas and emotions, and the consequent repetition of the same movements of the muscles of the eyes and of the face, give a peculiar expression, which, in the insane state, is a combination of weirdness, abstraction or vacancy.”[4]
The connection Benjamin Rush and J.E.D. Esquirol drew between inattention and madness — a connection reinforced by popular studies like Robert Macnish’s The Philosophy of Sleep (1830)[5] which compared madness to dreaming — were the first cracks in dominant physiognomic theories. In “Of Reverie, or Absence of Mind,” chapter XVI of his Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind (1812), Rush described insanity in terms of inattentiveness, a predisposition to reverie or distractedness that could be induced either by “the stimulus of ideas of absent subjects being so powerful as to destroy the perception of present objects [or] by a torpor of mind so great as not to feel the impressions of surrounding objects upon the senses.”[6] In Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity (1845) Esquirol also identified the loss of attention and thus of the ability to reason, an ability not natural to us, as the essential feature of insanity: “[W]e are not naturally reasoning beings…our ideas are not conformed to objects, our comparisons exact, our reasonings just, but by a succession of effort of the attention, which supposes in its turn, an active state of the organ of thought.”[7]
In The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression (1862) G. B. Duchenne de Boulogne recorded the results of his experiments with ‘localized electrization’, the purpose of which was to ‘decompose’ general facial expressions — the elongated face of the melancholic or the changeful features of the maniac — into the series of particular facial muscles that produced them in the first place. On the basis of his accidental discovery that a single contraction of a facial muscle does not cause all other muscles to contract, he classified the isolated or combined contractions of the face as ‘expressive on their own’, ‘expressive only in a complementary way’, or ‘partly expressive’. Duchenne was essentially thinking of facial expression, on analogy with language, as a universal, immutable code: “To be universal, the language must always be composed of the same signs or, in other words, depend on muscular contractions that are always the same. [...] [E]ach emotion is always represented on the face by the same muscular contractions, which neither fashions nor whims can change.”[8] Reviving Lavater’s ideas, he proposed that a ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ facial expression is formed by the habitual contractions of the same muscles working in harmony to produce a general visually recognizable expression that can be compared to similar ones in the past. Conversely, Duchenne considered the face in motion as an example of deformity or abnormality: a deformed expression is not immediately recognizable because it is no longer the product of the habitual contraction of the same series of muscles; instead, individual muscles contract in new, unpredictable (non-habituated) ways. Duchenne thus defined pathology as a failure of recognition as a result of excessive localization (the autonomous and random manner in which isolated muscles contract). The physical deformity of the face (and the internal deformity it pointed to) was analogous to the disruption of the codified, conventionalized relation between signifier and signified, resulting in a dispersal and randomization of meaning. In such abnormal cases, even if a person’s internal state of mind remained the same (e.g. melancholy) the system of facial muscles (signifiers) that used to produce that particular expression in the past was disrupted, with the result that the individual contractions of isolated facial muscles failed to produce one recognizable expression i.e. a single, recognizable signified (melancholy).
Duchenne’s major contribution to the new sciences of mind lies in his novel conception of mental deformity as a kind of illegibility: the deformed mind cannot be ‘read’ through/’on’ the body. His experiments challenged the conventional belief in the correspondence between the visible (body) and the invisible (mind). Even as he held on to the familiar notion of physical deformity (the contraction of the facial muscles in non-habituated ways) as a sign of mental deformity, Duchenne’s emphasis on the illegibility (the ‘non-habituated’ as ‘illegible’) of the visible (physical deformity) pointed to a parallel illegibility of the invisible (mental deformity). Abandoning Esquirol’s holistic theory of correspondence, Duchenne proposed instead an analytic conception of the subject and of facial expression, underscoring the fragmentary/illegible nature of the body and, by implication, the fragmentary/illegible nature of the mind. By distancing himself from earlier physiognomic theories and using photography to capture the ephemeral and the instantaneous, Duchenne was already beginning to understand the human face cinematically: “instead of seeking a permanent physical imprint of fate or character [Duchenne] sought to understand the face in motion, describing facial expressions as a mobile muscular phenomenon.”[9] With Duchenne, “the human face became less a realm described in generalities [as had been the case with physiognomy which focused on classifying faces into types] than a zone of intense scrutiny on an individual basis.”[10]
The heyday of physiognomic theories was 1810-1840; by the 1870s and the 1890s the scientific basis of such theories was beginning to be seriously challenged.[11] In Degeneration (1892) Max Nordau argued that the main causes and symptoms of insanity were mental rather than physical: degeneracy is the result of a breakdown of the normal association of ideas, which depends on habitual responses to external stimuli based on the memory-images of similar past stimuli. The mind of the insane stops functioning as a screen for external stimuli: instead of taking the path of least resistance it allows presentations that have nothing to do with the present stimulus and fails to match past perceptions with present ones based on the four laws of association.[12]
[A]ttention is the faculty of the brain to suppress one part of the memory-images which, at each excitation of a cell or group of cells, have arisen in consciousness, by way either of association or of stimulus-wave; and to maintain another part, namely, only those memory-images which relate to the exciting cause i.e. to the object just perceived. [...] Inability to be attentive accompanies all forms of exhaustion. Untended and unrestrained by attention, the brain activity of the degenerate and hysterical is capricious, and without aim or purpose.[13]
Nordau conceived of degeneracy in terms of a gap between the input of external stimuli and the subject’s motor response to those stimuli (the transformation of idea into action):
With the incapacity for action there is connected the predilection for inane reverie. The degenerate is not in a condition to fix his attention long, or indeed at all, on any subject, and is equally incapable of correctly grasping, ordering or elaborating into ideas and judgments the impressions of the external world conveyed to his distracted consciousness by his defectively operating senses. It is easier and more convenient for him to allow his brain-centers to produce semi-lucid, nebulously blurred ideas and inchoate embryonic thoughts, and to surrender himself to the perpetual obfuscation of a boundless, aimless, and shoreless stream of fugitive ideas.[14]
Reviving a line of thought going back to Rush and Esquirol, Nordau described degeneracy as a form of inattentiveness, a break in the psychic-motor apparatus of stimulation and response[15] i.e., he assumed that that the structuring of the random series of associations into conscious/voluntary thought and action is a natural process which, when stopped or prevented, leads to degeneracy.[16] Nordau’s account of degeneration in terms of a lack of discrimination or inattentiveness could just as well be read as a reference to the non-discriminatory nature of the photograph. Early photographers struggled with the medium’s automatism, its tendency to record disinterestedly all kinds of disorderly, irrelevant incidents, suggesting that the instrument was only partially under the photographer’s control. It is likely that the unprecedented overabundance of irrelevant details recorded automatically by the camera shaped contemporary views (including Nordau’s) of ‘the insane, degenerate mind’ as similarly inattentive, automatic and prone to digressions. Simply put, the degenerate mind functioned like a camera: failing to screen out the irrelevant or the incidental it recorded everything.
Nordau identified dual personality as the epitome of degeneracy, referring to the explanation given by Pierre Janet, in Les actes inconscient et le dédoublement de la personnalité (1886) and his brother Paul Janet, in L’Hystérie et l’hypnotisme d’après la théories de la double personnalité (1888): “Every person consists of two personalities, one conscious and one unconscious. Among healthy persons both are alike complete, and both in equilibrium. In the hysteric they are unequal, and out of equilibrium. One of the two personalities, usually the conscious, is incomplete, the other remaining perfect.”[17] The conscious part is incomplete inasmuch as it has no recollections of the actions of the unconscious part, whereas the unconscious part is fully aware of the primary (conscious) state and is, therefore, complete. Degeneracy, Nordau concluded, manifests as a certain lack of self-presence (in this case, one-directional amnesia). A few years later, however, Breuer and Freud put forward the hypothesis that lack of self-presence, inattention, diffusion and reverie represent our natural state of mind rather than a form of pathology, that mental pathology is rooted in normal psychological processes, for example day-dreaming.[18] Based on their analysis of the case of Anna O., in Studies in Hysteria (1895), Breuer and Freud concluded that pathology results from the compartmentalization of consciousness, part of which continues to exist automatically in the real world (usually performing some kind of mechanical action) while another part becomes dissociated. They attributed this process of dissociation to particular private or social circumstances, in this case Anna O.’s monotonous private and public life, which left a large amount of her mental energy unemployed. Breuer and Freud proposed to think of consciousness and the unconscious in terms of attention and energy: being unconscious begins in the normal state of being inattentive or distracted, which presupposes the availability of surplus energy that has not been tapped into. The dissociation of personality starts out as a dissociation from reality, which fails to make a strong enough claim on the individual thereby leaving her free to disengage that surplus energy somewhere else (in unconscious acts, reveries, and hallucinations). Anna developed a
second state of consciousness which first emerged as a temporary absence and later became organized into a ‘double conscience’. [...] But whereas the paralysis experimentally provoked by Charcot in his patients became stabilized immediately…[Anna's] contracture, as well as the other disturbances that accompanied it, set in only during the short absences in her ‘condition seconde’ and left her during her normal state in full control of her body and possession of her senses.[19]
Freud and Breuer believed that the second state, which disposed of everything ‘mentally toxic’, was necessary for the proper functioning of the normal self. Studies in Hysteria was symptomatic of an important shift in the conceptualization of pathology: since consciousness, understood in terms of attention, functioned mostly as a mechanism inhibiting the normally diffused, involuntary, and multiple self, inattention, involuntariness and automatism could no longer be construed as pathological. By the time Ribot published The Psychology of Attention (1890) the old hierarchy of conscious and unconscious, attention and inattention, recognition and amnesia, had been reversed. Whereas in his earlier study, The Diseases of the Will (1884), Ribot described the hysterical constitution in terms of inattentiveness and inconstancy, in The Psychology of Attention he posited attention as an abnormal state, the natural state supported by consciousness being diffusion: “The normal condition is plurality of states of consciousness, or…polyideism. Attention is the momentary inhibition, to the exclusive benefit of a single state, of this perpetual progression: it is a monoideism.”[20]
Numerous studies corroborated Ribot’s claim that diffusion, rather than attention, is the natural state of consciousness, thereby encouraging the conceptualization of consciousness as an inhibitory mechanism and reversing the negative associations of ‘the unconscious’, ‘the diffused’ and ‘the multiple’ with ‘insanity’. Various cases reported at the end of the century demonstrated the difference between spontaneous and artificial somnambulism. In 1875 L’Académie de Médicine de Belgique asked M. Warlamont to do a report on the subject of ‘double conscience’, of which there had been many reported cases. His report insisted on “la realité scientifique du phenomena dit ‘dédoublement de la vie’, ‘double conscience’, ‘condition seconde’, états qui peuvent être spontanés ou provoqués.”[21] Warlamont recounted a 1875 case of a girl who fell into ‘somnambulism avec catalepsie’ whenever she worked “à des bontonnieres” — a line of work requiring great focus — and concluded that “c’était une hystérique qui s’hypnotisait elle-même.”[22] The more famous case of “Felida X” was discussed in Dr. Eugene Azam’s study Amnésie périodique ou dédoublement de la personnalité (1877). Significantly, Azam’s use of the term “dédoublement de la vie” departed from the dominant terminology in American studies at the time, ‘fragmentation of the ego’. In most other cases of amnesia, the patient felt as if they were double but had no memory of their double existence; however, Felida had no such feeling and in her ‘second’ state she had perfect memory of her first state. Indeed, Felida did not think of herself as being a different person — she always felt ‘semblable à elle-même.”
These studies reinforced the already established tendency to conceptualize consciousness and memory in terms of attention. The cataleptic girl became somnambulist whenever she engaged in some form of activity requiring absolute attention: her somnambulism was the result not of a memory dysfunction but of an imbalance of attention. The part of her existence to which she was not paying attention while she was focusing on her button-work became irrelevant — it did not produce a strong enough impression upon her or made no immediate demands upon her — and, therefore, forgettable/unreal/non-existent. Her case raised the question whether, given our ability to consciously or purposefully regulate our attention — our ability to focus on something to the exclusion of everything else — we are also capable of ‘hypnotizing ourselves’: indeed, Warlamont claimed the girl was capable of inducing a somnambulistic state herself. Along similar lines, Azam interpreted Felida’s amnesia as a loss of attention rather than the result of a memory dysfunction. As he put it, it is not that one forgets because one cannot remember (amnesia is not the result of memory disturbance); rather, one forgets that of which one was not completely conscious (or completely attentive to) in the first place, and which therefore left an “insufficient impression” upon him. Amnesia has nothing to do with memory in the conventional sense of memory as ‘the ability to recollect’ the past. Instead, amnesia presupposes at least a minimum awareness that we have lost something: whatever fails to register or become conscious, thus producing amnesia, must have still ‘registered’, however slightly, or else we wouldn’t be able to ‘have no memory’ of it.
For Bergson, as for Azam, amnesia no longer had to do exclusively with the past: to be amnesiac was not to be fully conscious of/attentive to what is going on ‘now’. In Matter and Memory (1896)[23] Bergson defined consciousness in terms of memory — matter is deprived of memory — thereby linking amnesia to the unconscious: the ‘forgotten’ is simply that which we have not perceived consciously i.e., the unconscious. Elaborating further on Ribot’s premise that the normal state of consciousness is diffusion, Bergson identified both madness (particularly the doubling/multiplication of personality)[24] and dreams as the substratum of mental life, insisting that the real question is not why some people are mad but rather why we are not all mad or dreaming all the time. Bergson’s refusal to distinguish categorically the waking state from the dream state, or perception from memory,[25] was an implicit attack on essentialist theories of sanity and madness for it suggested that the processes assumed to be symptomatic of insanity are always already going on under normal circumstances[26] but are “prevented from emerging, when about to appear, by one of those continually active inhibitory mechanisms which secure attention to life.”[27] It was becoming increasingly clear that attention — and therefore sanity — was by no means a state one would describe as ‘natural’ to us; on the contrary, sanity and consciousness now appeared as ‘selections’ within a vast, nebulous realm alternatively called Pure Memory (Bergson) or the unconscious (Freud). Inasmuch as the photograph framed a portion of the world, it served as an appropriate metaphor for the new understanding of the brain/mind relationship in terms of ‘selection’. Bergson made use of that metaphor when he compared the brain to a frame and the mind to a picture:
The frame determines something of the picture, by eliminating beforehand all which has not the same shape and size. [...] So also with the brain and consciousness. Provided the comparatively simple actions — gestures, attitudes, movements — in which a complex mental state would be materialized, are such as the brain is ready for, the mental state will insert itself exactly into the cerebral state. But there are a multitude of different pictures which would fit the frame equally well; consequently the brain does not determine thought and, at least to a large extent, thought is independent of the brain.[28]
II. THE NEW MEDIA AND PATHOLOGY
It is now time to consider the three ways in which photography and film contributed to the transition from physiognomic to psychological theories of insanity that I traced above.
1. Theatricality
At the fin de siècle photography and film played an important part in the rethinking of selfhood as a specular process. Writing in the 1880s and 1890s, French sociologist Gabriel Tarde argued that selfhood originates in imitation, a process he compared to “inter-psychical photography” i.e., “the action which consists of a quasi-photographic reproduction of a cerebral image upon the sensitive plane of another brain.”[29] The self is constructed by adopting the gestures and behaviors of those around us in a process similar to taking photographs. If self-consciousness is a product of imitation, early cinema made this self-objectification manifest.[30] According to Jonathan Auerbach “the early movie camera functioned as a distinct apparatus of self-objectification, at once triggering self-consciousness and registering it as a visual process.”[31] However, this self-objectification had already happened in still photography. In 1856 Dr. Hugh W. Diamond pioneered the use of photographic portraits in the study and treatment of the insane.[32] Rather than trying to isolate specific signs of malfunction, Diamond was interested in capturing the overall appearance of his patients. He would show them a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ photograph (e.g. the patient during a manic attack versus the patient convalescing) so that they could see the improvement they had made in the course of their treatment. The photographs made patients aware of their illness, sometimes provoking a degree of self-consciousness that allowed them to objectify their condition as a sort of performance from which they could distance themselves instead of being trapped by it. One patient imagined herself a Queen but when she was presented with a photograph of herself ‘posing’ as a Queen she found the photograph ludicrous. Although patients had no choice but to pose, since the technology available at the time depended on long exposure times, Diamond remained convinced that the use of professional models did not undermine the evidential value of photography. By 1859 Diamond’s photographs were being criticized, in The Photographic News, not for failing to be objective or scientific but, on the contrary, for lacking the justification of an art work.[33]
Diamond’s photographs inspired a series of essays by John Conolly on The Physiognomy of Insanity, published in 1858 in the Medical Times and Gazette. Conolly’s essays were illustrated with lithographs based on Diamond’s photographs, but there were some significant differences between the two, differences that undermined photography’s claim to provide an objective record of insanity. In her unpublished study Frames of Mind: An Investigation into the History of the Photography of Psychiatric Patients (1993)[34] Kamilla Porter draws attention to one particular photograph of a woman suffering from melancholy:
The two pictures are similar and clearly of the same patient, but in Conolly’s illustration the subject looks downwards, whereas originally she was gazing directly into the camera (2.7) [...] Had this particular patient been photographed in a different pose, for example without resting her cheek on her hand, and if she had not been wearing a crucifix, the diagnosis of religious melancholy would no doubt have been far less obvious to the observer of the photograph (2.8). [T]he diagnosis of melancholy depended on the reproduction of a classic image of melancholy, which in turn demanded that Diamond’s original photograph be slightly modified in order to fit that image. Ultimately, the medical diagnosis depended on the patient’s pose rather than on the photographic medium’s supposedly inherent objectivity.[35]
On the basis of her examination of the casebooks of photographs by Hering at Bethlem (c. 1850), by Diamond at the Surrey County Asylum (c. 1856) and by Dr. Clarke at Wakefield (c. 1869) Porter concludes that by the late 1860s photography was used not to study the physiognomy of the insane but rather for identification and record keeping, especially once new technological improvements allowed photographs to be taken more efficiently. Porter wonders whether the very development of photography might have contributed to the decline of physiognomic interpretations of insanity.
The writings of Albert Londe, medical researcher and chronophotographer appointed as head of the photographic service at La Salpêtrière, suggest that the decline of physiognomic theories might have to do with a growing awareness of ability of the camera to reproduce the object it is supposed to record. Londe emphasized the reproduction capacity of photography, which made possible a taxonomy of madness since different types of madness could be recognized only through comparisons across patients and across time. He derived the persistence or recurrence of the visual signs in which madness manifested itself — which he read as essential or inherent precisely because of its recurrence — from the reproducibility of reproductions (photographs).[36] The very nature of the apparatus — its ‘double identity’ insofar as it offered a means of mechanical reproduction but it also made possible the application of exactly the same process of reproduction to the result obtained through reproduction i.e., to the photographs themselves — reproduced the object of which it claimed to provide a record:
Il est même certaines affections qui donnent au malade une physionomie toute spéciale, qui ne frappe pas l’observateur dans un cas isolé, mais qui devient typique si on la retrouve chez d’autres personnes atteintes de la meme maladie. La comparison de photographies prises quelquefois à des années de distance permettra, comme l’a fait M. le Professeur Charcot a la Salpêtrière, de décrire la facies proper à telle ou telle affections dy système nerveux. Ce résultat est important; car le type, une fois défini, reste gravé dans la mémoire et il peut, dans certain cas, être précieux pour le diagnosic.[37]
Londe was aware of the danger of theatricality due to the sheer presence of the camera: “Il est évident, en effet, que si nous voulons saisir des attitudes, des mouvements qui soient pris sur le vif, il ne faudra pas éveiller l’attention de nos modeles involontaires qui ne manqueraient pas de se croire obligés de poser.”[38] Indeed, he understood that the behavior of the insane more often than not conformed to the apparatus used to represent it, an apparatus that functioned according to the same principle of decomposition and analysis that governed the attacks of the hysteric or the epileptic and was thus unusually suitable for recording them:
Dans sa clinique des maladies du système nerveux M. le professeur Charcot a toute une série de maladies atteints de paralysie, d’hystérie, d’épilpsie, de chorée etc., qui semblent mettre au défi la Photographie; il s’agit, en effet, d’étudier des tremblements, des attaques, de les analyzer et de les decomposer. D’ou la nécessité d’un appareil spécial qui permet de prendre un certain nombre d’épreuves à des intervalles quelconques, aussi rapproches ou aussi eloigner qu’on le voudra les uns des autres. Prenon comme type l’attaque hystéro-épileptique, attaque qui se subdivise en périodes parfaitement distinctes, composées chacune de mouvements rythmes et caractéristiques. Le medicin a interet a décomposer: 1. l’attaque en periodes caractérisées par le mouvement; 2. le mouvement lui-même.[39]
For E. Frippet, one of Londe’s students at La Salpêtrière, the good photographer was recognized by how artistic — well-posed — his photographs were. Frippet devoted himself to the study of different lighting conditions and the exact ‘temps de pose’ corresponding to each, for he believed that instantaneous photography had to be as exact as possible in its simulation of a natural attitude: “Il faudra donc, pour avoir d’excellents resultants, recourir a la pose, et avoir soin de placer son modele dans les meilleures conditions possible au point de vue de la lumière, tout en lui donnant une attitude naturelle.”[40] The inherent sincerity and precision of photography soon came to be seen as obstacles to its establishment as a true art:
Cette precision excessive, aveugle même, precieuze dans certain cas, sera ici plutôt un obstacle. Il faudra donc que l’opérateur compose son sujet de manière a attirer l’attention sur l’objet principal, qu’il l’éclaire de manière à mettre en lumière tel ou tel point, qu’il lui donne une attitude naturelle, qu’il fasse ressortir la physionomie qui lui est habituelle, en un mot qu’il exécute ce travail préparatoire tout comme le ferait un artiste; mais comme, d’autre part, il se sert d’un instrument particulier qui, àcertains points de vue, peut modifier les effects, qui’il prevoie tout, qu’il calcule tout.[41]
In the course of explaining why he could not use the fusil photographique of his excellent colleague Marey, Londe inadvertently acknowledged the extent to which the recording of madness and mental illness depended on the precise match between the mechanical progress of the apparatus and the ‘natural’ progress of the hysterical or epileptic attack: “la durée de l’attaque n’a absolument rien de régulier, et [il] fault pouvoir régler la marche de l’appareil sur celle de l’attaque. De plus l’appareil doit obéir au médicin, de facon que celui-ci puisse agir au moment précis qu’il croira utile de choisir.”[42] There was something pathological in the very capacity of photography to freeze time, a kind of technological catalepsy matching the ‘natural’ catalepsy of which it provided a record: “Catalepsy retains by way of the body what photography retains by way of the camera: it freeze-frames and retains the body in isolated position that can be viewed and theorized outside a sequence of motion.[43]
The possibility of taking multiple records of the insane over a period of time in order to study the effect of various treatments and to perform other kinds of comparative analysis rendered the idea of an essentially unified and static self obsolete. Indeed, that idea had already been put into question by the ‘boom’ in hysteria cases at the end of the nineteenth century. Hysteric patients could reproduce poses that were suggested to them under hypnosis as if there was a second self ‘in’ them. By the end of the century this second personality, associated with automatism, was recognized as the unconscious, a concept that would undergo numerous redefinitions and destabilize traditional definitions of ‘sanity’ and ‘insanity’. The privileged place of hysteria in fin de siècle culture can be attributed to its role in the development of the idea of the unconscious in terms of ‘performance’. Charcot’s name features prominently in histories of dynamic psychiatry, especially in relation to hysteria and the theatricalization of the cogito by the emerging new media.[44] Charcot contributed to the development of dynamic psychiatry by drawing a distinction between ‘dynamic’ and ‘organic’ paralyses: the latter resulting from a lesion of the nervous system, the former provoked through auto-suggestion or hypnosis and thus reversible. Similarly, he demonstrated that unlike organic amnesia, which involved the irreversible loss of memories, patients suffering from dynamic amnesia were capable of recovering their lost memories. Dynamic amnesia and dynamic paralysis were thus, in a manner of speaking, ‘simulations’. Charcot went on to argue that, like dynamic amnesia and dynamic paralysis, hysteria was the result of suggestion and could therefore be cured in the same way, by suggestion. His studies depended on the analogous dynamics of popular melodrama: at the Bal des Folles, very popular with the public, Charcot induced, through hypnosis, localized hysterical symptoms, which the patients then ‘acted out’ in front of an audience.[45] Conversely, after the introduction of film hysterical patients would often imitate cabaret performers and early film comedy actors, thus drawing attention to what Rae Beth Gordon calls ‘the performative nature of corporeal pathologies’:[46]
Is there a relationship between ways that movement was staged in early cinema and corporeal pathologies — contractures, tics, catalepsy, and convulsive movement — related to hysteria and epilepsy? [...] It seems plausible that café-concert performers provided models for potential hysterics who couldn’t resist imitating the tics, grimaces, and convulsive movements that later came to characterize the medical journal Nouvelle Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière.[47]
According to Kamilla Porter, Charcot’s use of photography differed from that of his predecessors:
Charcot’s approach to hysteria emphasized the external and visual rather than the unseen and purely psychological. [...] Thus Charcot’s use of photography differed from that of Diamond and Conolly in that he was interested in recording the bodily postures of the patients and not just their facial expressions. Also, Charcot’s photographs were more elaborately framed and staged than Diamond’s pictures and some of the patients were photographed many times to the extent that some made sort of a career out of modeling for the iconographies.[48]
The presence of the photographic camera destabilized the ontology of the mental state of which it sought to provide ocular proof. If ocular demonstration and record were essential to the continued study of madness and mental illness, then the camera was called upon to keep producing and reproducing the object of study (madness): to demonstrate the cure meant to provide the illness first. Even as the camera claimed to be the most objective and technologically advanced method of studying insanity, its sheer presence challenged the reality of the object it was supposed to represent objectively.
As soon as photography and film were ‘invented’ they were used for medical documentation. In 1885, ten years before the first film screening of the Lumière brothers, the first clinical case of a multiple, Louis Vivet, was photographed in his ten personality states. Two years later Albert Dad, the first person whose dissociative fugues were studied in detail, was photographed in his three states (normal, hypnotized and during a fugue).[49] Between 1899 and 1902, Romanian neurologist Gheorghe Marinescu wrote (for French medical journals) a series of articles on hysteria, basing his research on cinematographic documents. In 1883 Albert Londe studied the ‘large hysterical arc’ with serial cameras. And yet, as early as 1910 Dr. Hans Hennes of the Provinzial-Heil-und Pflegeanstalt Bonn observed (in his treatise Cinematography in the Service of Neurology and Psychiatry) that, paradoxically, film ‘produced’ madness precisely by providing reliable records of it. Although film was instrumental in what Hacking calls the re-conceptualization of the ‘soul’ — under the new disguise of ‘memory’ — as an object of scientific inquiry, it also contributed to the theatricalization of the cogito, provoking a shift in our understanding of rational thought from Descartes’ notion of the cogito as “a perpetual recession of the body” to the cinematic proof of the cogito through the “perpetual visibility of the self, a theatricality in my presence to others, hence to myself.”[50] Overexposed by the film camera, constantly on display, the cogito would from now on derive the proof of its own existence only from the realm of appearances: the camera compromised the previously stable distinction between reason and unreason, opening it up to manipulation. By offering incontrovertible visible evidence of the reality of a mental illness like multiple personality, for instance, film also demonstrated the increasing obsolescence of the idea of a transcendental subject, thereby contributing to a new discourse of the self as inherently multiple and reproducible, existing in a constant state of metaphysical embarrassment, a ‘perpetual theater’ involving other minds. The camera introduced an element of theatricality or insincerity that would eventually permeate the larger intellectual climate of modernity and play a central role in the birth of existentialism with its emphasis on the inherent inauthenticity or theatricality of the self (Sartre). By registering automatically both our conscious and unconscious movements/gestures, the camera condemned us to a perennially exposed mode of existence, of which it provided an inevitable surplus of proof.
Film did not only contribute to the anxiety of drift that Leo Charney identifies, in Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity and Drift,[51] as the defining experience of modernity; it also participated in the total restructuring of attention at the fin de siècle. Insofar as film perception mimicked the drifting, distracted perception of the flâneur, film was just one manifestation, among many, of modernity’s tendency to drift; on the other hand, film served as a bulwark against the threatening tendency to drift by structuring the viewer’s attention — structuring contingency — into ‘peaks and valleys’. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive [52] Mary Ann Doane identifies the tension between contingency and rationalization (the rationalization of time and space)[53] as central to modernity, and to film. Early cinema, argues Doane, was about instants and their accountability with respect to meaning: cinema resolved the pressing conflict between meaning and contingency by offering an automatic inscription of contingency (as distinguished, for example, from Impressionist painting’s purposeful attempts to capture contingency) thereby making rationalization tolerable. Contingency was thus constructed both as a lure (film’s promise of indexicality, of the re-materialization and archiving of time) and a threat (the threat of nonsense, illegibility and arbitrariness: any — empty — moment can be filmed). Film’s role in the structuring of attention exposed the natural predisposition of consciousness to drift, to ‘valleys’ rather than ‘peaks’, to involuntary rather than voluntary perception and memory: film promised to keep at bay the vertigo of drift by arresting time into moments that give us the illusion of presence.
The ambivalence toward film that informs both Benjamin’s writing (film embodies the modern experience of being overwhelmed by the constant shocks to the eye but, at the same time, it holds the key to the ‘optical unconscious’)[54] and Charney’s and Doane’s takes on modernity (the discourse of ‘drift’ as both a danger and a lure) informs, as well, Stanley Cavell’s writing on film, in which he seeks to demonstrate film’s potential to function as a defense against the skepticism brought about precisely by photography’s and film’s challenge to physiognomic theories that positioned body and mind as mirror images of each other.[55] According to Cavell, Freud’s unique contribution was his suggestion to look at the body’s relationship to the mind not simply in terms of expression but in terms of exposure, betrayal and embarrassment (e.g. Freud’s description of Dora’s ‘symptomatic acts’ as a ‘pantomimic announcement’).”[56] Even the ultimate failure of psychoanalysis, which, while promoting itself as a new ‘science of the mind’ deteriorated from a critique of metaphysics to a kind of quasi-metaphysics, did not lead to absolute skepticism, simply because, argues Cavell, the modern cogito exists in the mode of having always already betrayed itself. Under the present circumstances — the alienation of the cogito from itself — the human survives only in the body’s unconscious gestures.
Cavell analyzes the court scene in Frank Capra’s film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), in which the protagonist’s sanity is put into question,[57] in order to demonstrate that the importance of cinema lies in “returning the mind to the living body,”[58] in recording thinking, which is not limited to ‘intellectual processes’ but is enacted in ‘universal fidgetiness’, the little involuntary gestures and movements of the human body. Cavell calls such recordings ‘somatograms’, claiming that they belong to “what Walter Benjamin calls cinema’s optics of the unconscious.”[59] Here lies the value of cinema as a bulwark against skepticism: by automatically (unconsciously) recording the body’s automatic gestures, cinema reassures us that there is still something left of the human, something that is not fully conscious and thus not fully rationalized/constructed. In the scene Cavell analyzes Mr. Deeds delivers a speech, in which he argues that involuntary gestures and actions are a form of thinking too, though they do not conform to the common idea of thinking as a purely intellectual act:
And I take it that Deeds’ insight is that a reverse field of proof is available by way of the motion picture camera, so that while thinking is no longer secured by the mind’s declaration of its presence to itself, it is now to be secured by the presence of the live human body to the camera, in particular by the presence of the body’s apparently least intelligent property, its fidgetiness, its metaphysical restlessness. In Descartes the proof of thinking was that it cannot doubt itself; after Emerson the proof of thinking is that it cannot be concealed. [...] Am I saying that the camera is necessary to this knowledge? [...] Must I commit myself to saying that my existence is proved (only) each time the camera rolls my way? I ask a little license here. My idea is that the invention of the motion picture camera reveals something that has already happened to us. [...] We can think of what the camera reveals as a new strain either in our obliviousness to our existence or in a new mode of certainty of it. [60]
If there is a threat to speak of here, it is not the threat of skepticism but the opposite threat of overexposing the cogito: “If the price of Descartes’ proof of his existence was a perpetual recession of the body…the price of an Emersonian proof of my existence is a perpetual visibility of the self, a theatricality in my presence to others, hence to myself. The camera is an emblem of perpetual visibility. Descartes’ self-consciousness thus takes the form of embarrassment.”[61]
2. Automatism
The ‘ghosting’ of 19th century photographs — the appearance of incomplete, blurred images — along with photography’s basic technical property, the latent image, account for the fact that the discourse of scientific objectivity to which the new medium seemed to belong was from the very beginning enmeshed with another, contradictory discourse of the uncanny, the magical, and the latent. The notion of photography as nature’s “spontaneous reproduction,” which translated the medium’s inherent automatism into objectivity, was from the start undermined by the opposite reading of the very same characteristic of the medium — its automatism — as an instance of natural magic. Indeed, in slightly more than a decade after the invention of photography, it became associated with the idea of the double and the uncanny.
Early photography was more often than not discussed as a ‘discovery’ — “a discovery of nature’s capacity to register its own image” — rather than as an ‘invention’. Photographs were said to be “‘obtained’ or ‘taken’, like natural specimens found in the wild.”[62] Photography’s claims to scientific status were based on its promise to capture the instant.[63] However, no one expected that instantaneous photography, which managed to capture fleeting expressions and transient effects of light, would reveal something immobile, dead, and strangely distorted at the very heart of life. Albert Londe wrote:
Depuis le milieu du siècle, la photographie promettait l’instantané. Tout semblait y conduire. Mais personne ne s’attendait a ce qu’un gain de rapidité, au lien de traduire plus fidèlement le mouvement, engender un estrange suspens visual. Chutes et sants, corps maladroits, contortions incongrues, positions cocasses: devant ces clichés d’autant plus immobiles qu’ils auraient dus etre plus animés, la révélation de l’involuntaire, la pure apparition de l’accidental causent an choc imprévu.[64]
Through its ability to freeze time photography exposed the inhuman, the mechanical, and the inanimate inherent in the human, exacerbating the fear of death or absolute immobility. Photography not only afforded views that had been forbidden to the naked eye but transformed the body into a mannequin or a puppet seemingly devoid of an inner spirit. The photographed body appeared soulless; the free movements once attributed to the body were now exposed as an illusion concealing a series of maladroit, contorted postures: “L’émotion provoquée par l’instantané ne tient pas seulement à l’isolement d’un phenomena que l’ail n’avait jamais perçu. Il dépend fondamentalement de la représentation d’un corps, sous un mode aberrant qui le transforme en objet: une sorte d’inverse absolu de l’idéal du portrait.”[65] Instantaneous photography exposed the essentially aleatory, nonessential nature of every individual act and gesture by de-contextualizing them and suspending them outside time, robbing them of the potential to register as part of a chain of signification: Lessing’s ‘pregnant moment’ was replaced by the ‘aborted’ or ‘empty’ moment, what Deleuze calls the ‘any-moment-whatever’.[66]
Earlier I suggested that the introduction of an ‘external’ mirror (the camera) had the effect of undermining the belief in an ‘internal’ mirror (the body as an image of the mind). I have to slightly modify my claim. By arresting movement, instantaneous photography revealed something dead, mechanical, automatic or unconscious at the very core of life (life=movement) thereby undermining the notion of a singular, absolutely self-present self that expresses or manifests itself fully and purposefully through its movements. Paradoxically, the discovery that the mind and the body are not absolutely co-expressible depended on reaffirming exactly the assumption that was being challenged in the first place: it was precisely because on some level the body continued to be thought of as an ‘image’ (or mirror) of the mind that it was now possible to conclude — based on the photographic evidence of the body’s automatism (the mechanical, the dead, or the automatic exposed through the arresting of supposedly purposeful, fully conscious movements) — that the mind is not absolutely self-present either but rather inherently dual or even multiple. On the other hand, instantaneous photography’s ability to arrest movement further undermined the previously assumed mirror relationship between mind and body: by arresting movement, instantaneous photography exposed every movement as made up of multiple meaningless, random, empty moments devoid of any significance outside of a sequence of uninterrupted movement. These autonomous instants failed to signify and were sometimes even ‘guilty’ of mis-signification. Whereas an uninterrupted movement could convey a body’s exhaustion, for instance, the arresting of the body’s uninterrupted movement produced a series of de-contextualized instants whose ‘meaning’ (the state of exhaustion they were supposed to express) could be easily misread as conveying, in fact, the opposite impression of energy: an individual instant could create the impression of an energetic body whose exhaustion became evident only when the whole movement unfolded uninterrupted.
Motion studies by Eadweard J. Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Albert Londe demonstrated that a movement can be broken down into multiple, increasingly smaller constitutive elements; when viewed in its entirety, the movement appeared to be the repetition of this series of elements/fragments. That a movement could thus be broken down and analyzed suggested not only that it is internally constituted by repetition but, more importantly, that the movement itself is inherently repeatable/analyzable (e.g. comparable to other similar or dissimilar movements, and thus demanding a taxonomy of movements). By underscoring the habitual nature of simple daily movements (such as walking, running, bending) the camera also pointed to their inherently obsessive or neurotic nature (insofar as obsession/neurosis is defined in terms of repetition). At the same time, instantaneous photography provided shocking views of movement suspended in distorted, unnatural postures, demonstrating that what one had previously considered ‘normal’ movements might conceal deep-seated pathologies. Insofar as instantaneous photography suggested the possibility of all movements being inherently neurotic — analyzable into a series of repetitions — the line separating normal from abnormal movements became increasingly blurred. If all movements were constituted by repetition, it was no longer possible to maintain that the unconscious, repetitive, automated movements of the mentally ill/the insane were symptoms of some underlying mental disturbance.
3. The aesthetics of science
Instead of providing evidence in support of physiognomic theories, photography exposed the aesthetic nature of supposedly ‘pure’ scientific questions thus drawing attention to madness and sanity as performative tropes.[67] For instance, Duchenne de Boulogne defended his scientific method[68] on the ground of its applicability not only to anatomy and physiology but also to art, in particular painting and sculpture.[69] He famously criticized Laocoön, whose forehead he deemed anatomically incorrect, provoking critics to accuse him of reducing art to anatomical realism. Duchenne justified his use of photography in scientific experiments on account of its technological superiority to art: “Skillful artists have tried in vain to represent the faces of my subjects; for the contractions provoked by the electrical current are of too short a duration for an exact reproduction of the expressive lines that develop on the face to be drawn or painted. Only photography, as truthful as a mirror, could attain such desirable perfection.”[70] However, he acknowledged that the success of his scientific experiments depended, to a large extent, on achieving a certain artistic effect: “Art does not rely only on technical skills. For my research, it was necessary to know how to put each expressive line into relief by a skillful play of light.”[71] Indeed, he argued in favor of the technical imperfections of the apparatus he was working with — which caused parts of some of his photographs to be better focused than others — by pointing out that such imperfections produced an appropriate (desirable) aesthetic effect so that “the distribution of light is quite in harmony with the emotions that the expressive lines represent”[72]: for example, the somber passions (aggression, pain, suffering) were represented, appropriately, in chiaroscuro.
The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression contains a list of illustrations followed by two sections, a scientific and an aesthetic one. In the scientific section Duchenne speaks of his dedication to the truthful representation of his subjects’ expressive lines; however, in the aesthetic section he underscores the importance of an overall aesthetically pleasing picture of his subjects. In the notes on individual plates he describes each plate as a ‘scene’ and narrates it as though it were a mini narrative; as he tries to explain the particular emotion represented there he often makes use of terms like “depict” and “portray,” which one would expect to find in an art review rather than in the account of a scientific experiment. It was precisely Duchenne’s strong interest in the aesthetic appeal of his scientific experiments that prompted him to take into consideration his readers’ complaints that his original subjects were too ugly, eventually repeating his experiments with more aesthetically pleasing subjects.
This merging of aesthetic with scientific concerns informed, as well, another pioneering work of the period, Charles Darwin’s 1872 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals[73] devoted to the study of ‘abnormal’ faces (those of infants, the insane, and the ‘racially other’). Darwin included both photographs and engravings in his book but the majority of the engravings were used to illustrate the sections dealing with expression in animals and “insane people.” Although cost must have certainly been a factor in his choice (engravings were cheaper than photographs), the engravings were used to add dramatic emphasis, which set them apart from the photographs of normal expressions.[74] Darwin reproduced some of Duchenne’s photographs, but he also solicited the London commercial photographer Oscar Rejlander. Given Darwin’s desire to produce an objective study of expression, his decision to collaborate with Rejlander was odd at best since Rejlander was mostly known for advocating photography as an art form rather than a research instrument. Indeed, Rejlander posed for some of the illustrations himself, artificially inducing, like Duchenne had done before him, particular facial expressions.[75] His photographs were ultimately closer to simulation than to evidence. Although Duchenne and Darwin contributed to the establishment of photography’s use in scientific research, their work demonstrated that photography did not simply reaffirm the positivist, essentialist view of insanity as permanent, visually inscribed and recordable but, instead, revealed the performative nature of insanity. Ironically, precisely at the moment when the camera made its first appearance, apparently offering an objective record of pathology, scientists and philosophers began to question the idea of pathology as visually inscribed, wondering instead whether pathology might not be visually inaccessible i.e., psychological and whether it was not, in fact, inherent in normal physical and psychological processes.
CONCLUSION
The limitations of photography’s uses in psychiatry were rooted in photography’s claims to universality. H. Oppenheim, a leading 19th century neurologist, justified the analysis of static representations of expression by referring to Lessing’s Laocoön. Oppenheim argued that static images of expression (sculpture, photography) can serve as means of examining the total range of expressions. It was precisely this notion of the universal/static nature of expression that film would challenge, emphasizing instead the individual/transitory/relative nature of madness. Charles Darwin was among the first to question the assumed objectivity of psychiatric photography: “Though photographs are incomparably better for exhibiting expression than any drawing, yet I believe it is quite necessary to study the previous appearance of the countenance, its changes, however small, and the living eyes, in order to form any safe judgment.”[76] Once serial photography made it possible to represent the fleeting, transitory nature of insanity, instead of capturing a single, static moment and abstracting it into a general pattern, once the physical characteristics of insanity became as fluid as the mental aberrations they were supposed to reflect, the boundaries separating the sane from the insane grew increasingly blurred. Film played an important role in the transition from static, universalizing psychiatric paradigms, which constructed madness in terms of fixed, stylized states, to increasingly dynamic styles of psychiatry.
Cinema modernized psychiatry. Arguments to that effect inform the very first work of film theory, Münsterberg’s The Photoplay (1916), as well as recent research on the intersection of psychiatry and new media technologies (e.g. F. Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 1999). From the point of view of Münsterberg’s ‘psychotechnology’, each psychic apparatus is also a technological one, and vice versa: film techniques are not simply objectifications of particular mental functions (e.g. the flashback as an objectification of memory); rather, mental functions constitute the interface of media technologies. Recently, proponents of ecological cognitivist film theory have posited a correspondence between basic cognitive processes and particular film styles (e.g. editing styles), suggesting that radical revisions of the narrative schemas we have been using for reasons of convenience or accessibility (e.g. Hollywood classical cinema) eventually leave a mark on the cognitive skills matching these schemas i.e., changes in film styles have the potential of affecting — indeed transforming — our mental functions.[77] This line of research suggests that as technologies for representing madness continue to evolve, making it possible to visualize with increasing authenticity the experience of mentally ill people, our mental functions are likely to ‘adjust’ accordingly, thereby becoming increasingly ‘malfunctioned’ in new, ‘creative’ ways. Some have already argued that new digital technologies, in combination with standard film editing styles, disturb and deregulate our mental functions, provoking the postmodern ‘speed death of the eye’ (thus reviving the discourse of modernity’s pre-cinematic, shock-to-the-eye mode of visuality).[78] Recent technological innovations have made mental malfunctions available to anyone: e.g. a new type of 3-D virtual reality simulator, Mindstorm, allows viewers to experience an average day in the life of a schizophrenic. Mindstorm’s simulations, set in everyday locations and situations, move from simulation to hallucination so quickly that critics have already prophesied its use as a ‘fun ride’ in amusement parks.[79] Researchers at Harvard and McGill University are now working on an amnesia drug that blocks or deletes bad memories by disrupting the biochemical pathways that allow a memory to be recalled (this was the premise of the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, an interesting fact that once again brings into focus the looping effect that joins together cinema and scientific research).[80] Inasmuch as it seeks to ‘improve upon’ various kinds of mental disorders resulting precisely from the repression of memories, science now offers us a rational way of becoming mad.
Notes
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[1] J.C.Lavater, Physiognomy, or the Corresponding Analogy between the Conformation of the Features and the Ruling Passions of the Soul (London: T. Tegg, 1775), 3. Welcome Library Rare Books Collection.
[2] Ibid, 11.
[3] Philippe Pinel, A Treatise on Insanity. trans. D. D. Davis, M.D. (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1962) (1801), 121. Welcome Library Collection.
[4] Sir Alexander Morison. M.D., The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases (London: Longman, 1840), 1. Welcome Library Rare Books Collection.
[5] Robert Macnish, The Philosophy of Sleep, 3rd ed. (Glasgow: W. R. M’Phun, 1830). Welcome Library Rare Books Collection.
[6] Benjamin Rush, M.D., Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1962) (1812), 310. Welcome Library Collection.
[7] Jean Etienne Dominique Esquirol, Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity (New York and London: Hafner Publishing Company, 1965) (1845), 28. Welcome Library Collection.
[8] G. B. Duchenne de Boulogne, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression. ed. and trans. R. Andrew Cuthbertson (New York: Cambridge UP, 1990) (1862), 29-30. Welcome Library Collection.
[9] Tom Gunning, “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film.” The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880-1940, ed. Mark S. Micale (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004, 141-172), 149.
[10] Ibid, 148. Conversely, R. Andrew Cuthbertson, Duchenne’s editor and translator, claims that Duchenne’s work remained pre-cinematic since “it did not encompass the sequential nature of facial expression. [...] While Duchenne broke the facial mask into its individual constituent facial muscle actions, Muybridge fragmented movements of the whole body into a temporal serial sequence.” R. Andrew Cuthbertson, “The Highly Original Dr. Duchenne,” The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression (225-242), 231.
[11] Physiognomic theories remained somewhat influential as late as 1900. See, for instance, Frank Ellis, Physiognomy: The Science of Physiognomy Explained in the Form of Question and Answer (Blackpool: The Ellis Family, 1901).
[12] By the end of the century, insanity stopped being equated with a loss of the ability to reason (a breakdown in the association of ideas): “Reason is the just comprehension of cause and effect, or common sense. Now only a part of the accepted varieties of insanity imply disturbance of this, the crowning power of the mind. Mania is only an unusual hurrying of the psycho-physical action of the higher mammals involving as essential no disturbance other than one of a temporal sort. Melancholia is, on the other hand, a too long continuance of painful thoughts. It is in paranoia that we see a loss in reason in the technical sense of the word” (510). George V. Dearborn, “The Criteria of Mental Abnormality,” Psychological Review 5 (1898): 505-510.
[15] It is instructive to juxtapose Nordau’s account of degenerates’ ‘defective attention’ with early French film theory. For Nordau, when a perception arouses a representation, which in turn provokes a series of other associated representations, the healthy mind suppresses those representations contradictory or not rationally connected with the first perception; by contrast, early film theorists (e.g. Jean Epstein) praised cinema’s potential to bypass the automated, rational association of ideas, encouraging instead the free, playful association of contradictory or irrational ideas.
[16] Interestingly, photographers — assumed to produce objective visual records of degeneracy — were not immune to degeneracy. In a paper read to the Photographic Society in 1893, P. H. Emerson observed that photography, “when not scientific or topographical, is a pastime dangerous in many respects, as apt to foster morbid vanity in the degenerate.” P.H. Emerson, “Naturalistic Photography and Art,” a paper read to the Photographic Society, March 1893, included as ch.4 in Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, 3rd ed., 1899, New York: Arno Press, 1973).
[17] Janet cited in Nordau, 111.
[18] Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, “The Case of Fraulein Anna O.,” 1900: A Fin de siècle Reader (London: Penguin, 2000, 141-144), 142.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Theodore Ribot, The Psychology of Attention (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1890), 10.
[21] E. Azam, Amnesie périodique ou dédoublement de la personnalité (Bourdeux: Librarie Feret & Fils, 1877), 16.
[22] Ibid, 14.
[23] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1990).
[24] The notion of doubling is essential to Bergson’s philosophy, in which the present is always split into actual (perception) and virtual (memory). Déjà vu is the ultimate proof of the inherently double nature of the subject.
[25] Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) (1919).
[26] Nevertheless, he distinguished morbid or abnormal mental states into those characterized by a general impoverishment of mental life (amnesia, aphasia, paralysis) from those that actually enrich mental life (hallucination, delirium, obsession).
[27] Bergson, Mind-Energy, 125.
[28] Ibid, 42-43.
[29] Cited in Jonathan Auerbach, “Caught in the Act: Self-consciousness and Self-rehearsal in Early Cinema.” Le Cinématographe, nouvelle technologie du XXe siècle/The Cinema, A New Technology for the 20th century, ed. Andre Gaudreault, Catherine Russell, and Pierre Veronneau (Cinéma: Editions Payot Lausanne, 2004), 94.
[30] Fin de siècle formalized self-reflexiveness: crucial to the shift in this period within Freud’s work from Studies of Hysteria to Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) and The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) was the relationship between ego-formation and narcissism. See Jan B. Gordon, “‘Decadent Spaces’: Notes for a Phenomenology of the Fin de Siècle.” Decadence and the 1890s, ed. Ian Fletcher (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), 31-58.
[31] Auerbach 91. Tom Gunning also draws attention to an internal split within the early (proto-schizophrenic) spectator, whether it is between illusion and reality (Gunning) or between consciousness and self-consciousness (Auerbach). See “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus,” Le Cinématographe, nouvelle technologie du XXe siècle, 43.
[32] Diamond’s photographs are reproduced in Joel-Peter Witkin, Harm’s Way: Lust and Madness, Murder and Mayhem: A Book of Photographs (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 1994).
[33] Adrianne Burrows and Iwan Schumacher, Portraits of the Insane: The Case of Dr. Diamond (London and New York: Quartet Books, 1990) (1979), 35-49. New York Public Library Special Collections (Photography Room). On the debates surrounding photography’s relation to art and science, see Mary Warner Marien, Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural History, 1839-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), chapter 5.
[34] Welcome Library, London.
[35] Porter cited in Burrows and Schumacher, 43.
[36] On the implications of the production of multiple reproductions of reproductions, see Marien, chapter 1.
[37] Albert Londe, Officier d’Académie, Directeur du service photographique à l’hôpital de la Salpêtrière, La Photographie dans les arts, les sciences et l’industrie (Paris: Gauthier de la Bibliotheque Photographique, 1888), 23-24. Microfische. Bibliothèque National de France.
[38] Albert Londe, La Photographie Instantanée: Théorie et Pratique (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, Impremiur-Librairie, 1886), 142. Microfische. Bibliothèque National de France.
[39] Albert Londe, La Photographie Moderne (Paris: Cripto, 1986), 1.
[40] E. Frippet, La Pratique de la Photographie Instantanée par les appareils a main (avec méthode sur les agrandissements et les projections et notes sur le cinématographe, ed. J. Fritsch. Preface de Albert Londe (Paris: Librairie Scientifique et Industrielle, 1899), 72. Microfilm. Bibliothèque National de France.
[41] Albert Londe, Officier d’Académie, Directeur du service photographique à l’hôpital de la Salpêtrière. La Photographie dans les arts, les sciences et l’industrie (Paris: Gauthier de la Bibliothèque Photographique, 1888), 12. Microfische. Bibliothèque National de France. One way the photographer can manipulate his subject in order to produce a more realistic photograph, Londe advises his students, is to always situate the subject in his corresponding environment i.e., embodying his social role: “Un bûcheron dans le bois, un pêcheur sur le bord de la rivière ne seront pas déplacés. Évitez le monsieur en chapeau haute-forme et en redingote qui vient souvent faire tache dans une épreuve d’ailleurs fort réussie.” Ibid, 14.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Ulrich Bauer cited in Tom Gunning, “Bodies in Motion: The Pas de Deux of the Ideal and the Material at the Fin de Siècle.” Arrêt sur image, fragmentation du temps. Aux sources de la culture visuelle moderne. Stop Motion, Fragmentation of Time. Exploring the Roots of Modern Visual Culture, ed. Francois Albera, Marta Braun, and Andre Gaudreault (Cinéma: Editions Payot Lausanne, 2002), 26. Recent work on madness and cinema continues to draw attention to the inherent predisposition to madness of the cinematic apparatus (cinema’s displacement of space and time is fundamental to a range of mental illnesses): “Le déire et les stratégies du montage larguent aisément les amarres de l’espace et les coordonnées chronologiques du récit. La folie de [Kubrick's] Shining est complice des puisances du cinéma. Les effets, procedes, truquages, raccourcis, jongleries du décor et passé-passe du temps ne sont pas étrangers aux processualités muettes de la psychose, ni aux programmes technologiques d’une schizophrénie ‘mondialisée’. See Jean-Claude Polack, “Une delire nostalgique.” La raison en feu, ou la fascination du cinéma pour la folie. Ouvrage coordonné par Carole Desbarats (Saint-Sulpice-sur-Loire: L’ACOR, 1999), 23-27.
[44] One of the ways in which the new sciences of mind attempted to establish their authority was by emphasizing the link between their epistemology and the popular history of mental illness. For instance, Charcot sought to affirm his somatic view of illness by foregrounding the visual continuity between photographs of the insane included in the Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière and the first French illustrated atlases of mental illness, for instance Esquirol’s: “For Charcot, older images from high and popular art had validity as proof if their visual structures could be echoed in modern, high-tech media such as photography” (Gilman, Picturing Health and Illness, 22-23).
[45] Gunning reminds us that Charcot was not a neutral observer merely recording the hysterical attacks of his patients: “Charcot occasionally provoked an attack of hysterical epilepsy in his female patients by means of a sudden flash of brilliant electrical light within a darkened room, the very flash which made the photograph of their reactions possible” (“Bodies in Motion” 26).
[46] Gunning follows the influence of this freezing of the body-in-motion in absurd and ungainly postures in the work of Dega, Rodin and Duchamp, linking their representations of the body out of control, the sick and decadent body, to Charcot’s hysterical bodies. The obsession of Charcot and his contemporaries with using various technical means to record deviations from normality shows that “[p]hotographic technology served as a means of rational defense against the lack of physical and mental control of hysteria” (“Bodies in Motion” 26).
[47] Rae Beth Gordon, “From Charcot to Charlot: Unconscious Imitation and Spectatorship in French Cabaret and Early Cinema” in The Mind of Modernism, 93-124. 94.
[48] Porter, 2.12.
[49] Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Science of Memory. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 31.
[50] Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979), 128.
[51] Leo Charney, Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity and Drift (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998).
[52] Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002).
[53] See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003).
[54] Benjamin argues that the modern subject is increasingly incapable of registering and integrating new experiences. Bombarded with visual and audio stimuli, his consciousness shrinks back from new shocks, leading to an ‘impoverishment of experience’; the loss of immediate experience forces the subject to replace it with memories in a vain attempt to compensate for the loss. However, considered from a different point of view, this so-called ‘impoverishment of experience’ appears almost as a blessing in disguise: Benjamin goes on to celebrate cinema’s potential to unlock ‘the optical unconscious’ — which includes all direct experiences that have remained un-integrated, accessible only to involuntary memory — thereby tapping into a formidable source of surprising, fresh experiences that are simply ‘waiting’ for the camera to reveal them. In A Small History of Photography (1931) Benjamin makes explicit the causal relationship between the invention of photography and the ‘discovery’ of the unconscious by arguing that photography’s automatism reveals reality’s inherent ‘automatism’ i.e. its ‘optical unconscious’.
[55] In On Photography (New York: Delta Books, 1977) Susan Sontag also links the birth of photography to skepticism. She describes the 19th century as “the new age of unbelief [which] strengthened the allegiance to images” (153). On film and skepticism, see D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007).
[56] Stanley Cavell, “Psychoanalysis and Cinema: the Melodrama of the Unknown Woman,” The Cavell Reader, ed. Stephen Mulhall (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), 244.
[57] Stanley Cavell, “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004), 190-208.
[58] Ibid, 200.
[59] Ibid, 199.
[60] Ibid, 204-205.
[61] Ibid, 205.
[62] Ian Jeffrey, Photography: A Concise History (New York and Toronto: Oxford UP, 1981), 10. On the idea of photography as nature’s spontaneous reproduction, see Mary Warner Marien, 1-21. The notion of photography as a component of nature and as an idea predating the technical development of photography foreshadows Bazin’s ontology of the film image (film affects us as a thing of nature) and his notion of ‘total cinema.’
[63] Charles Musser examines the debate around photography and truth (and by implication the distinction between ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’) by formulating the question thus: do the precision and supposed neutrality of photography prove that photography captures the truth, or is it that precisely because of its precise and factual nature photography misses the truth? See Charles Musser, “Changing Conceptions of Truth in Photography, Chronophotography and Cinematography, 1887-1900.” Arrêt sur image, 69-90.
[64] Albert Londe, Photographie Moderne (Paris: G. Masson, 1888), 166. Londe discusses the radical shift in the conceptualization of hysteria as a representative mental illness, from Charcot’s notion of hysteria, which stressed its physical manifestations, to Freud’s redefinition of hysteria emphasizing its linguistic expression.
[65] Ibid, 169.
[66] Critics like W. de W. Abney argued that instantaneous photographs were untrue and artistically incorrect and urged photographers “to represent only those phases of action which approach that of rest.” Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography: from 1839 to the Present Day (New York: MOMA, 1964), 86.
[67] On the role of aesthetic considerations in medical training and diagnosis, and on the artistic intertextuality of images of health and illness, see chapter 2 in Gilman, Picturing Health and Illness.
[68] Duchenne explains his method as follows: “Au moyen d’électrodes, il contracte séparément un ou plusieurs muscles de la face, composant a volonté les expressions les plus diverses. Mail la contraction est passagère: l’irritabilité [du muscle], après quelques seconds d’action continue, semble s’affaiblir sous l’influence d’un courant a intermittences tres rapprochies. De la vient la nécessité de photographier rapidement les expressions produites par l’expérimentation électro-physiologique” (83).
[69] Indeed, he insisted on the validity of his scientific experiments by drawing a parallel between his experiment and a work of art (a painting). For example, he claimed that his experiments with facial muscles served to unmask a similar illusion in art, the illusion that when certain colors or shades are placed next to each other they appear differently than when we see them isolated.
[70] Duchenne, 36.
[71] Ibid, 39, my italics.
[72] Ibid, 40.
[73] Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. 3rd ed. (London and New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1998) (1872). Welcome Library Collection.
[74] Phillip Prodger, “Photography and the Expression of the Emotions” in Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions, 399-410. 400.
[75] On Rejlander’s high art photography, see Marien, 86-91.
[76] Darwin cited in Gilman, Seeing the Insane, 182-183. Freud, of course, would insist on the exclusion of photography and any visual representations of insanity from psychoanalysis, emphasizing the importance of ‘the third ear’ over ‘the eye’. See P. Morel et C. Quetel, “Reflexions sur les représentations iconographiques de l’áliené au XIXe siècle” in Art et folie, ed. Y. David-Peyre (Université de Nantes: 1984), 155-173. “Si de la physiognomie à la phrenology, on a pu aboutir en 1861 avec Broca a une théorie neurologique des localizations cérébrales le passage de la physiognomie au portrait ‘didactique’ d’áliené et aux supports idéologiques qu’il suppose, échappe a son propos car il ne correspond pas finalement a l’objet de la psychiatrie. Non pas seulement parce que l’élimination de tout aspect dynamique rend l’image inadequate mais surtout, parce que, des le fin du XIXe siècle, les apports de la psychologie des profondeurs et en particulier de la psychoanalyse, allaient montrer que la discipline psychiatrique est affaire d’écoute plutôt que de regard. Et depuis un quart de siècle, l’illustration a disparu des ouvrages de psychiatrie…en attendant le relais des nouvelles techniques audiovisuelles” (169).
[77] Joseph Anderson, The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1996).
[78] Tim Blackmore, “The Speed Death of the Eye: The Ideology of Hollywood Film Special Effects,” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Vol. 27, No. 5 (2007): 367-372.
[79] Rebecca Lee, “Virtual Reality Experience Mimics Schizophrenia to Teach Health Professionals about Their Patients.” http://www.abcnews.go.com/WN/story?id=3348856
[80] Bill Christensen, “New Drug Deletes Bad Memories.” http://www.livescience.com/health/070702_bad_memories.html
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Temenuga Trifonova is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at York University in Toronto. She is the author of The Image in French Philosophy (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007) and European Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 2008). Her articles have appeared (or are forthcoming) in journals such as Cineaste, CineAction, Film and Philosophy, SubStance, European Journal of American Culture, Quarterly Journal of Film and Video, Kinema, Scope, Postmodern Culture, International Studies in Philosophy, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies and in several edited collections.
Barusan liat film Not One Less. Sungguh mengharukan ! Ini recommended buat teman2 di kantor terutama yg ada di Lab Pendidikan IPS SD. Not One Less adalah filmnya yang dibuat tahun 1998 berdasarkan skenario yang ditulis oleh novelis Cina Shi Xiangsheng. Seperti film-filmnya yang lain, Not One Less pun sangat kental dengan kehidupan masyarakat Cina lapisan bawah. Kali ini, dalam Not One Less diceritakan tentang seorang gadis, Wei Minzhi (Wei Minzhi) berusia 13 tahun yang menjadi guru pengganti pada sebuah sekolah dasar di satu desa terpencil di Provinsi Heibei. Wei Minzhi menggantikan guru Gao yang harus merawat ibunya yang sakit di kota selama satu bulan.
Dengan kondisi sekolah yang serba minim (gedung reyot, bangku-bangku yang rusak, kapur tulis yang sangat terbatas jumlahnya), kegiatan belajar mengajar harus tetap berjalan. Wei Minzhi yang berasal dari keluarga miskin berharap akan mendapat upah sebesar 50 yuan plus 10 yuan sebagai upah tambahan jika ia mengajar dengan baik selama guru Gao pergi dan “tidak kurang satu anakpun” sampai Gao kembali.
Jumlah murid seluruhnya ada 28 dari yang semula 40 orang pada awal tahun pelajaran. Satu persatu para murid tersebut pergi meninggalkan bangku sekolah mereka untuk bekerja di kota. Pada saat Wei mengajar, kembali hal itu terjadi. Salah seorang murid ternakal, Zhang Huike (Zhang Huike), pada suatu hari tidak masuk sekolah. Huike pergi mencari kerja di kota agar bisa mendapat uang demi membayar utang ibunya yang sedang sakit. Wei bertekad mencari dan membawa kembali Huike ke sekolah mereka.
Maka dimulailah perjalanan guru muda itu menemukan muridnya di kota. Dengan berjalan kaki karena tidak punya cukup uang untuk membeli tiket bus, ia pun sampai di kota. Berbekal sebuah alamat di amplop surat dari ibu Huike, Wei tanpa putus asa terus berusaha menemukan muridnya yang ‘hilang’ itu.
Namun tidaklah mudah menemukan seorang anak lelaki berusia 11 tahun di tengah-tengah kota tanpa informasi yang memadai tentangnya. Berbagai cara dilakukan oleh Wei tanpa kenal lelah hingga sampailah ia pada sebuah stasiun televisi dan memberanikan diri bertemu dengan sang manajer. Dengan kebaikan hati si manajer tv, maka lalu upaya pencarian Huike disiarkan oleh stasiun tv tersebut. Melalui siaran tivi itulah akhirnya Huike berhasil ditemukan. Bukan itu saja, kisah Wei dan murid-muridnya yang miskin telah mengundang simpati para penonton. Dari situ terkumpullah dana dari para donatur untuk perbaikan gedung sekolah tempat Wei mengajar.
Seluruh karakter di film ini diperankan oleh para “amatir”. Mereka bukanlah para aktor dan aktris film sungguhan. Setiap pemain memerankan “dirinya sendiri”. Misalnya, sang kepala sekolah Tian (Tian Zhenda) dalam kehidupan sebenarnya memang berprofesi sebagai kepala sekolah. Tentu ini adalah hasil sebuah kerja profesional dari seorang Yimou sehingga film ini menjelma dengan amat bersahaja dan apa adanya.
Sebuah kisah yang mengharukan. Melihat kondisi sekolah itu, saya jadi teringat pada sekolah-sekolah dasar di negeri kita yang bernasib sama. Gedung yang nyaris roboh, atap sekolah yang runtuh, guru-guru di daerah terpencil yang bergaji sangat minim, adalah wajah pendidikan di Indonesia. Sungguh memilukan. Kepedulian pemerintah dan swasta akan hal ini amat kecil. Padahal, katanya pendidikan untuk semua.
If a mountain could talk it would tell us a story….Helloween “If A Mountain Could Talk”
Beberapa saat setelah Merapi meletus, aku sempat meng-upload beberapa foto lama ketika ke rumah Mbah Maridjan. Seorang teman kemudian bertanya, kok gak ditulis pengalaman dan kesannya ketika bertemu Mbah Maridjan.
Aku ingat perjalanan ke rumah Mbah Maridjan adalah bagian dari jalan-jalanku bersama seorang senior, disela-sela kegiatan diklat untuk guru vokasi regional barat, yang kebetulan diselenggarakan di PPPPTK Matematika, Yogyakarta, yang diselenggarakan selama 20 hari.
Perjalanan diawali dengan mengunjungi ketep. tempat wisata ini diresmikan oleh Megawati. Tema dari obyek wisata ini adalah gunung Merapi berserta letusannya. Ada teater yang memutar film letusan Merapi pada tahun 2006. Tapi aku tidak masuk ke teater tersebut. Hanya jalan-jalan dan foto-fotoan sedikit, lalu dengan gembira menuju warung untuk minum kopi bersama seorang teman. Terkejut dengan porsi kopinya. 1 sachet kopi instan dalam gelas (meminjam istlah seorang teman di kantor – yg murid si tuan panglos itu – bagi yg ingin tahu siapa itu tuan panglos: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=panglos) “kumbokarno”. Aku sempat komentar, abis minum kopi disini pasti kembung nih.
Kemudian perjalanan dilanjutkan ke pos pemantau Merapi di desa Babadan. Di masa kuliah dulu sebenarnya aku sudah beberapa kali ke pos pengamatan Merapi. Mulai dari yang di Klaten juga Sleman. Pos pengamat babadan termasuk pos pengamat terdekat dengan puncak Merapi (4 Km dari puncak…sekarang pasti sudah porak-poranda pos itu).
Setelah foto-fotoan dan masuk bunker, lalu perjalanan di lanjutkan ke kediaman Mbah Maridjan di daerah Cangkringan. Ada yang bilang Mbah Maridjan super sibuk. jd kami sempat was-was juga kalau tidak bertemu. Ternyata bisa bertemu dengan Mbah Maridjan. Jalan menuju kediaman Mbah Maridjan telah di paving bagus. Ada yang bilang itu didanai oleh pabrik minuman energi yang menjadikan Mbah Maridjan sebagai bintangnya. Lalu didekat rumah Mbah Maridjan ada masjid yang kalau menurut ukuran desa, lumayan megah.
Mbah Maridjan lembut sekali nadanya ketika berbicara. Lucu komentar-komentarnya. Ketika tahu jika kami datang dari Malang, Mbah Maridjan lalu mengajak berbicara tentang Lapindo. tentang bagaimana serakahnya nafsu manusia sehingga terjadi kerusakan alam yang sedemikian parah dan dampaknya sangat menyusahkan rakyat. Mbah Maridjan menolak jika diajak foto. Kata Mbah Maridjan kalau mau foto-fotoan dengan dirinya sebaiknya dengan potret dirinya saja. Rupanya Mbah Maridjan sudah menyediakan lukisan dirinya lengkap dengan tulisan “bale labuhan”. Labuhan adalah prosesi ritual terkait dengan Merapi. Dan tugas Mbah Maridjan sebagai juru kunci memang menyelenggarakan prosesi itu . Kutipan dari wiki terkait dengan prosesi itu :
Labuhan sacrificial ceremony dedicated to the spirits of Mount Merapi. A procession from the royal palace on Yogjakarta led by the guardian sacrifices to the volcano spirits a set of ritual offerings including textiles, perfume, incense, money and, every eight years, a horse saddle. He described his job, for which he was paid $1 a month, as being "to stop lava from flowing down. Let the volcano breathe, but not cough”
Rupanya saat ini Merapi tidak hanya batuk, tapi juga pilek. Yang akhirnya juga merenggut hidup Mbah Maridjan. Ada sementara orang yang menganggap tindakan Mbah Maridjan dengan menolak diungsikan adalah bodoh. Tapi permasalahannya adalah bukan disana. Tapi jabatan sebagai juru kunci memang mengharuskan itu. Bukan mengharuskan untuk bodoh, tapi mengharuskan pada tanggung jawab. Karena hanya juru kunci yang bisa “berbicara” pada Merapi. Mungkin karena kita tidak bisa “mendengar” apa kata Merapi, sehingga kita berkata tindakan Mbah Maridjan adalah bodoh. Berbicara dan mendengar adalah interaksi aktif. Hanya bisa dilakukan oleh orang yang memang telah lama tinggal disitu, sehingga apa yang terjadi dalam soal atau hidup adalah terkait dengan takdir. Seperti kata Mbah Maridjan “ penduduk Kinahrejo telah ditakdirkan untuk menjadi benteng untuk menjaga harta kraton dan masyarakat Mataram”. Selamat jalan Mbah…
"Thinking Logically to Feel Confident About Reading English"
– (from a Chinese Time-Newsweek subscription campaign)
1. At Full Love With Vivian
The Western visitor of East Asia marvels at English expressions that he encounters in advertisements, in magazines, on T-Shirts, and elsewhere that seem to come "out of another world." Single words and short adjective-loaded English sentences, rarely longer than five words, suggest something like the invention of a new language. In Japan and in Korea this phenomenon has been thriving for decades; in China it is more recent but developing along the same lines.
The use of English in East Asia is linked to a certain part of East-Asian social history. "Japano-English" for example, is neither "real" English nor Japanese but symbolizes, within the domain of linguistics, the co-existence of two cultural spheres. In Japan, after the mid-1880s, an earlier uncritical and unsystematic acceptance of things Western gradually gave way to the view that Japanese and Western culture can exist side-by-side. From then on the question was: how can East Asia incorporate the West without being culturally overwhelmed by it?
In the domain of language, Japano-English brings forward schemes of cultural coexistence of utmost sophistication. Wasei eigo (made in Japan English) is a well-known phenomenon. Most of the time, it concerns the invention — or rather re-invention — of words like arubaito (part-time work from the German Arbeit) or mansion (a modern apartment block), attributing new meanings to foreign words. More fascinating — though much more difficult to analyze — are the peculiar English sentences in which words and grammar follow almost normal usage rules but which nevertheless express an unmatched strangeness. Because such English is common in Japan (Engrish), Korea (Konglish), China (Chinglish), and other East-Asian countries like Indonesia and Thailand, I suggest labeling this "language" as East-Asian English (EA English). I am well aware that there are differences between these national branches of English, but I think that a certain overall similarity enables us to speak here of a new "Pan-Asian language" based on a common East-Asian cultural experience.
2. For Your Tasteful Life
The vagueness of these languages — as well as the lack of prepositions, inflections, connecting words, articles and personal pronouns in Japanese and Korean, and the indistinctness of concepts, verbs, adjectives, etc. in Chinese — make a literal translation from an Asian language to English imprecise and confused. In these cases the result is a kind of East-Asian Pidgin: "Do not play water," "400% expectation coffee," "Classics of world translates into film…"
However, EA English covers a range of phenomena much broader than the scope of Pidgin English. Therefore — though many cases might overlap — I distinguish simplified English from EA English, defining it as an autonomous way of speaking determined by layers of an inter-culturally determined cognition that reside at deeper levels than those produced exclusively by the grammar and vocabulary of the host language. The cognitive structure underlying the apprehension of EA English is not based principally on the process of derivation from an already existing language, but almost represents the creation of a new language. In the present article I will argue that the English fragments that appear in East-Asian contexts are experienced on a relatively immediate level of cognition that in many cases does not refer to linguistic models of the host language (Japanese, Korean, Chinese). I am aware that writing about a fluent phenomenon like EA English is difficult because the attribution of an expression to either decorative English, simply false English or a genuinely new way of speaking is often debatable. Many cases overlap. Still I will try to crystallize what appear to be the most general features of EA English.
3. Make Your Creativity Into Flowers
Decorative English appears most often in fashion and beauty magazines. In specialized business magazines it appears surprisingly rarely though one might expect a better knowledge of English among experts of economics than among housewives. However, what is at stake is not the understanding of this language. Most of the time, the words are printed in large roman letters that stand out from the vernacular script. The use of foreign language words (French words for fashion or German words for cars) occurs, of course, in advertisements all over the world and is not a particularly Asian phenomenon. But in Asia this phenomenon is more frequent. Foreign language words are often used as effective tools without creating language by relying on their visual function. These words are to be understood as silent (to be seen rather than heard), expressing a style rather than a clear semantic message. At the same time, their semantic meaning is not totally unimportant. They correspond to a concept that Walter Benjamin has singled out as a typical phenomenon of modernity: they are "images [that take] the place of concepts: riddles and picture-puzzles of dreams that hide, that slip through the net of semiotics but which are still worth the effort of gaining knowledge" [1]
Wasei eigo deals mainly with words that are written in the Japanese phonetic script katakana (though of course the Japanese write many English words in katakana without these words being recognized as belonging to the repertory of waseieigo). The Koreans do the same with hangul and the Chinese, in lack of a phonetic script, use their ideographs to transcribe more difficult foreign words (hambaobao for hamburger, and â er bei sî for Alpenliebe, for example). This transcribed language appears more like a secret language understandable — if at all — only to speakers of that language. The mystifying effect of such a secret national language is enormous. In Japanese, some "English" words become pronounceable only through their transcription in katakana. A shampoo with the difficult name "Asience" (apparently a fusion of Asia and science) can be pronounced "ajiensu" only when employing the katakana transcription. "Buru rich tea life," written in katakana, will most often only be understood by a Japanese person who knows that "buru" signifies "bourgeois."
Wasei eigo is a hybrid language which is based, like Pidgin-English or Spanglish, on a model of fusion. True, EA English shares with these languages the fact that it has no native speakers. At the same time EA English is more than a curious secret language because it has the more developed features of an autonomous language. Also, it is not restricted to the domain of advertisements and, thus, cannot be fully explained as an advertising ploy selling bourgeois sentiment. On a formal level, its particular character cannot be explained through binary (bilingual) schemes of fusion like code-switching, code-mixing, calques, insertion or alternation (all of them restricted to vocabulary and grammar). The scheme at work in EA English raises the phenomenon of "cultural coexistence" to a much higher level of sophistication. Only EA English is able to provide the stunning and dreamlike effect of sentences like this:
"Recovery-Rediscovery: Re-experience vibrant, youthful looking skin as REVITAL realigns your skin’s inner strengths to overcome gravity, the appearance of wrinkles and dullness" (a Chinese Shiseido advertisement).
The fluent — perhaps too fluent — English is grammatically flawless and does not employ a single newly invented word. Still it conveys a strangeness reminiscent of dreams. There is the playful use of language (like children playing with words beginning with re-) inviting the reader to "re-experience vibrant youthful looking skin." It is clear that it is impossible to experience one’s skin, either in English or in Chinese even if, through a playful device, the idea of "experience" is heightened by turning it into "re-experience."
The next example comes from a Shanghai real estate agency:
"New center world. Its totally different. Maybe we can call this a kind of Shanghai memory."
The assuring assertion that something is "totally" different is followed by a juxtaposition of "maybe," "can," and "kind of" (where all three are out of place). This is neither precise nor vague. One might say that this is the opposite of "thinking in words" because here the words have been chosen only because they appear momentarily appropriate on a — very unstable — emotional level. At the same time there is a lot of self-reflexive thought in this language, which makes it a far cry from a direct expression of emotions. There is some "thinking" at work, but it is not real analytical thinking; "thinking" is here guided — in an emotional manner — by words which are appreciated not only for their clear semantic content but as emotional-semantic fields whose borders remain unclear.
This process is far from spontaneous. Often these words are selected from a dictionary and selectively italicized. For example, the following is taken from the slogan of a Shanghai Hotel:
"Luxury flatlet and hotel establishment embody noblest verve."
Here are some Japanese examples:
"We think that we want to contribute to society through diamond drilling and wire sawing."
Or:
"Let’s carry out preservation at room temperature"
Or:
Beauty is anywhere around the world. AVE will change from uncertain to necessary the heart which feels beauty and is sharpened. AVE and you stir up the impression of people. It’s a AVE surrealism.
EA English is a reflective emotional language composed of "intellectualized word-emotions."
4. Because it Passes Soon, Pleasant Time is Lonely
EA English is representative of a more general process of a particularly paradoxical style of "Westernized" East-Asian culture. One paradox is the particularly strange combination of Orientalism and Occidentalism. Orientalism signifies the Western appropriation of the Orient and can be encountered by "Occidentalism," through which the "Orientals" attempt to reconstruct the West as their Other. However, as is well known, Occidentalism is not necessarily an inverted form of Orientalism. To the extent that Orientals strive towards an integration and coexistence of two cultures, they do not usually aim at the straightforward degradation and submission of the West.
In the domain of language, the complex character of these cultural techniques is particularly evident. By using EA English one intends:
(1) To be respectful towards the English language (and thus to degrade oneself because "we cannot say these things in Chinese or Japanese"). At the same time, by distorting it, one ends up being disrespectful towards English.
(2) To colonize the English language by using it, though at the same time being aware that one is colonized by it through its use.
Edward Said’s assumption that the cultural appropriation of the Other is either an act of imperialistic colonization or one of self-colonization is not true with regard to EA English. Both Orientalist and Occidentalist schemes remain trapped within a dialectics of "Oxford English" vs. "Pidgin English" and disregard the possibility of combining both approaches in a paradoxical way.
5. The Bag Means Your Mind
It is, of course, no surprise that English has been chosen as the new Pan-Asian language. While after the war the Korean language was not taught at any Japanese university, the use of English spread very quickly. What spread most significantly was a variation of English determined by a form of cultural paradox that is typical for a region marked by Pan-Asian "revolutionary" history. Pan-Asianism represented a movement of Asian cooperation launched around 1903 by Kakuzo Okakura and meant to halt the Western advance. All Asians should recognize their own cultural values and "weather the storm under which so much of the Oriental world went down." Being aware of the worldwide rise of colonial peoples and the decline of imperialism, Pan-Asianists tried to organize a cultural stronghold which could serve as an orientation mark to "second rate" nations that would otherwise be lost in a sea of individual civilizations and fall victim to European imperialism.
However, due to the curious geopolitical position of Japan, much of the identity of the "Orient" as well as the identity of Japan remained in the domain of the imaginary. As Kang Sanggjung said: "Japan constructed such an identity in terms of the relation between its idea of the ‘Orient’ (which was discovered or created by both its identity with and difference from the West) and its imaginary geography and history of Korea, Manchuria, and China. Herein lies the aporia that was repeated throughout Japan’s process of modernization." [2] For Kang the "very category of the ‘Orient’ is nothing but an ‘imaginary time and space,’ one that emerged from the suffering common to non-Western societies in their attempt to reconcile civilization and culture, difference and identity (p. 93)."
One of the results was the construction of Pan-Asianism as a kind of "anti-imperialist imperialism" under Japanese leadership, an attitude which turned out to be a constant producer of cultural paradoxes. However, because a large part of Pan-Asianist aspirations took place in the domain of the imaginary, these paradoxes were accepted. Indeed, Pan-Asianism is characterized by the coexistence of a series of paradoxical elements: colonialism / anti-colonialism, conservatism/ revolutionary attitudes, individualism / totalitarianism, and nationalism / internationalism.
Notably, "Western culture" was never celebrated as a geographical and historical reality but existed from the beginning in the form of an imagined and fictionalized "Western culture" (films, fashion, life style, etc). This is one of the reasons why pacific warfare failed to eradicate a hidden admiration for the United States of America.
Today, the paradoxes cultivated by colonized colonizers can thrive even better than in the 1920s. The reason is that since the times of Sun Yat-sen the linguistic and cultural reality of what is called "Western culture" or "English language" has shifted towards a sphere that is predominantly playful and dreamlike. East Asian "westernized" culture appears less than ever to be a "real world" in which objectified elements from eastern and western cultures have merely been combined. The emergence of EA English as an autonomous language represents one further step in a series of attempts to construct a "Western" Other capable of embracing all cultural paradoxes of Westernized East Asia.
6. These Pleasing Days
Children approach the linguistic reality of adults by incorporating new sentences into "old," childlike grammatical structures. By and by the old structures get expanded until they overlap with those of adult language. Even bilingual children do this, taking care not to put the two languages into a subset relation. [3] Children abandon incorrect grammatical patterns in order to acquire correct language. This language represents a concrete reality for children, as they hear correct grammatical structures very often (linguists estimate frequency measures of 100.000 inputs until a child abandons the wrong form) [4] More importantly, children need to acquire this correct language in order to survive in the linguistic reality made by adults.
How do these things work with regard to EA English? It is clear that the linguistic "reality" of EA English is inscribed into a completely different cultural schedule because with EA English an objectified model reality within which one can have concrete experiences does not exist. What exists is a linguistic imaginary of "English and the West" shaped with regard to one’s own imaginary Asian identity.
7. The Premonition that Happens to be Pleasant
In truth, "the West" is to most East Asians still as unfamiliar as it was sixty years ago. Any "familiarity" is not natural, rather, it is constructed by transforming Western reality into an allegory of itself. While the symbol symbolizes something, an allegory conveys a supplementary meaning in addition to the original meaning. Most East-Asians seem to take EA English for granted as a cultural symbol; indeed, EA English’s disquieting, "strange" character is noticed mostly by foreigners. A serious amount of allegorical discontinuity is reflected in EA English expressions as they "represent" Anglo-American culture. In this sense, EA English is exemplary of Fredric Jameson’s characterization of the postmodern episteme as dominated by an "allegorical spirit [which] is profoundly discontinuous, [which is] a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, [and] of the multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the homogenous representation of the symbol." [5]
EA English "represents" Western culture allegorically. Thus, EA English is comparable to Walter Benjamin’s conception of the allegory as an eternally strange quality that remains inaccessible to scientific analysis. Allegories contain a certain amount of feeling, but because they remain hazy and fleeting, they cannot be grasped with the help of empathy. For Benjamin, modernity is "the world governed by its phantasmagorias" [6] and the phantasmagoric world of modernity is a dream. The world of modernity transforms itself into a kind of dreamlike writing in which some words "flash" like allegories.
Contemporary East Asian culture has produced this type of writing in a more literal way than Benjamin could have thought. EA English allegories "dart [...] past only as an image flashing at the very moment [they] can be recognized but then disappear [...] immediately and for good." [7]
8. Discover the Taste of Food
In fashion and life-style magazines, EA English is used as a structuring element providing titles to columns, features, and sections. Here EA English adopts an allegorical technique of fragmentation. It is wrong to describe its role as being reduced to "decorative English." The English headings in magazines read — as perhaps any heading should — like fragments from a larger piece. However, the way articles are synthesized in these headings looks either incomplete and inconsistent or tautological. In this way, they are allegories par excellence because in them we encounter a "fixed image and a fixed sign in one." [8] Some examples:
"I Deserve the Best of All" (on a designer).
"For the Beauty of Stone"
"One Person in Brazil"
"Engine for Architecture"
"Seeing Believing"
"Bold Beautiful Pieces"
"So Attractive for Date"
"Origins of Love"
9. Lovely Water — You Are Free
On the one hand, the use of EA English is similar to children’s language; on the other hand, there is no expansion towards adult language as the "adult" model or ideal is absent. Therefore, EA English remains a largely "intuitive" way of speaking: Instead of appealing to a mental representation determined by a functional role (through practical or theoretical reasoning), it appeals to a "non-subjective" cultural consciousness and not to linguistic schemes of cognition. The concrete phenomenon of language passes through this non-subjective consciousness in the form of pre-linguistic experience; only afterwards the utterances of the speaker become concrete language. This means that the English language elements, in the way they are used in these contexts, have not been objectified by a subject beforehand, they are not experienced as objective elements, but immediately contribute to the formation of a new linguistic consciousness.
These EA English expressions certainly have an emotional appeal, but the way in which "emotion" is present in this language is intriguing. It is not present in a linguistically objectified form but rather as "pure emotion" that speaks indirectly though the choice of words and their combination. Although linguistic reflection often takes place on a conscious level, the choice of words is often determined by emotional, pre-linguistic patterns of reflection.
The cultural experience of EA English comes close to the notion of "pure experience" as elaborated by the philosopher William James. For James, pure experience "is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and more general than any of the particular ‘sense’ by which current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed." [9] These experiences are "pre-conceptual" in the sense that they are not mastered by a conceptualizing intellect but excel in the combination of non-objectified (imaginary) elements of Eastern and Western culture within linguistic experience.
The linguists Clore and Ortony have analyzed "emotion terms" in language: "If someone refers, for example, to ‘being alone’ in some situation, we would not necessarily assume that they are experiencing an emotion; but if they refer to ‘feeling alone’, we would. Hence, the failure to control the implicit linguistic context in which words are considered may be responsible for terms such as ‘alone’ sometimes being rated by subjects as emotions." [10] Clore and Ortony claim that "’being neglected’ does not satisfy the requirements of an emotion on any count [because] it does not necessarily involve a mental state" (p. 374). ‘Feeling neglected’ on the other hand, does communicate an emotional reaction.
The authors also designate so-called "nonemotion terms" like "abandoned" and "alone." These terms refer to conditions that, being absolute, are too abstract to produce emotions. Clore and Ortony point out that it is impossible to say that a person is "somewhat abandoned" or "somewhat alone" (p. 377).
Even though "feeling neglected" does transmit an emotion, the emotion is present in the form of a linguistically objectified state of emotion. However, this is not the only way that emotions can be transmitted in language.
Look at the sentence "Lovely Water — You Are Free," an advertisement by a Chinese water supplier. "You are free" is obviously an emotional idiom — understandable to many Chinese persons — that expresses something positive in the most general sense. The same can be said about the name of Chinese restaurants, which are "Promising Restaurant" or "Wishingfood," about a Japanese hair salon which advertises "Fresh Hair" or tissues that are sold with the slogan: "Living Tissues: Scent of a Woman". This does not mean in a concrete sense that this water makes you free, that this restaurant promises something, etc. The idea is rather that this water or this restaurant gives you a general positive feeling that EA English attempts to capture with the expression "you are free" or "promising." However, the connection between a word and such a remarkable abstract generality can be attained only because these expressions are immediately drafted in EA English. Notably, these expressions are nonsensical in both English and Chinese/Japanese.
10. Fairies Dreaming in the Night
All this explains why EA English remains resistant to conventional linguistic analysis. If you want to compare, for example, the semantic difference between the English word ‘anger’ and the German word ‘Wut’ you will set out to evaluate the cultural context within which these words are imbedded. You will then notice that within the German context there are also other words, like ‘Angst’ and ‘Zorn,’ all of which will help you to evaluate the meaning of ‘Wut.’ Taking it a step further, the ethno-linguists will try to adopt a "German perspective" on these culturally specific words.
How can this work with a language whose Western context is imagined and whose Eastern existence is inscribed in an equally imagined cultural universe? How can this work with a language which expresses a dream (or which is a dream) of Western culture that is floating and fluid and only loosely held together by an anglo-saxon linguistic Über-ich?
11. What Gets You Noticed Now?
Often it might seem ironic but — beware — it is not. It’s all dead serious. The Japanese Romantics tried to introduce irony to the Japanese in the 1920s, at the time when the Pan-Asian movement was thriving. They did not have much success and it is clear why. People who use irony are convinced that there are contradictions that have to be overcome through irony. The aim of German romantic dialectics had been to sublate contradictions within aesthetics. EA English, as the colonial-anti-colonial paradox that it is, does not need to be resolved through any form of dialectics because it is already a purely aesthetic phenomenon. [11] What is at work is not the dialectical combination of several real realities but a superimposition of several aesthetic realities. This is a technique that is current in the aesthetics of dreams. [12]
12. The Technique of Getting Stoned is the Trick of Marihuana
EA English is not real if real means "present," "strict" and "necessary." EA English words are not "strong" ("strong" enough, for example, to teach a child the correct use of English) because EA English itself is not a matter of Being but of imagination: from the outset EA English was not supposed to be "real English" but what people imagine English to be. The words in magazines, pictorial as they are, ask to be entered like one enters a dream. The words and sentences are silent and mysterious and the opposite of concrete: they have the fleeting character of words overheard on television or of words written by a talented computer which has language but no thought processes. They also resemble the language of e-mails because they have neither the presence of spoken speech nor the documentary commitment of traditional letters.
Another reason why EA English appears like a dream language is that it is often slightly out of context. As English fragments lacking a cultural frame, these elements stand out in any East-Asian environment. The words are there in front of our eyes, but we do not immediately recognize where they come from. It is as though they are spat out by a madman who does not really expect to be understood, who just says what he says, letting us more or less guess what he really means.
It is this disconnectedness that makes EA English fascinating for EA-readers. Often the words are there as if they had sprung out of the deepest layers of somebody’s linguistic consciousness, layers in which words are not primarily items used in real life but rather intimate companions of our ruminating childlike fantasy. These words and sentences might have no sense in the real world but somewhere they certainly mean a lot to someone.
13. Heartful Quality
These stylish, self-contained and fluent expressions are like a virtual world. EA English has never had the intention of bringing Asians into a meaningful relationship with concrete objects. From the beginning the EA English world has not been about concrete objects with names and properties but about style. The modern world is not really an environment made of things but a stylish universe. EA English captures this self-contained modern universe in which style can be so pure because it is unrelated to any concrete Western (or Eastern) reality. EA English is exclusively based on the experience of a non-objectified quantity of "something Western" or, in other words,
It’s the realization of my aspiration I hope to play along with the heartiest gadgetry manifesting my sensibility. So I cannot help being particular about the every surrounding.
An Excursion to the Chinese Suburbs: Charming Prunk
There was a time when style was more or less concrete. Even during the structuralist era style could appear as a kind of grammar or structure imbedded in a reliable social context. Style was so "hard" that it could even be cut into two halves that were called the "higher" and "lower" social spheres. Developed in Europe by class-conscious designers, it might come as a surprise that the notion of style would one day conquer the world. But actually it did: Today, former Chinese peasants who have become recently rich not only buy Maseratis but also read Vogue.
The Eiffel Tower is a symbol of Western structural concreteness. Surprisingly, today you find an Eiffel Tower on almost every roof of one-family houses of the suburbs of Eastern Chinese cities. These towers are not antennas; they have no other function than that of conveying social prestige to its owners. Rich people have very high Eiffel Towers (while poor people do not even have homes).
14. Colorful as my Will
Deleuze’s and Guattari’s division of human language into vernacular language (here), referential language (there), vehicular language (everywhere), and mythical language (beyond) leads our analysis of EA English to original conclusions. [13] EA English is not a referential language that has been vernacularized (that is, transferred from there to here) but a vehicular language that has been mythicized (that is, transferred from everywhere to beyond).
Not being based on vernacular (childlike) linguistic structures, but at the same time consistently refusing the (adult) world of referential English, EA English remains grounded in an adventurous cultural nothingness on which it can do only one thing: turn into a ritual combination of the vehicular and the mythical (that is, becoming a kind of "everywhere-beyond"). The ritual is opposed to both the vernacular and the referential and EA English ritually combines the "everywhere" and the "beyond" in order to become the "myth of the vehicular."
Thus, EA English does not resemble baby talk but rather the subtlest kind of teenage talk: in EA English half-intellectualized emotions, self-contained in immature fantasies, lead an ever liquid existence. Here everything is ritualized and everything is purely aesthetic. Being without formal vernacular roots and referring to nothing, EA English is a little like what teenagers do when they belt-out English-sounding words while singing in the shower. Thus, EA English is ritual and purely aesthetic.
Paradoxically, it is not in spite of its fluidity, but because of it, that EA English can so easily be integrated into our lives. The aesthetic world of EA English is not the "hard" kind of artistic style that those artists who were engaged in idealistic projects like the Arts and Crafts Movement or Pop Art tried to introduce almost violently into life and society. On the contrary, the vaguely palpable quality of EA English contains no real life: it is a liquid style that cannot be seen and hardly felt but only overlooked.
Acknowledgments ——————————
I would like to thank the anonymous CTheory reviewer for the helpful comments and suggestions as well as the CTheory copy editor, Craig Tretiak.
Notes —————
[1] Walter Benjamin: Passagenwerk in Werke ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983. All quotations from Benjamin are taken from this edition.
[2] Kang Sangjung: "The Imaginary Geography of a Nation and Denationalized Narrative" in Richard Calichman (ed.). Contemporary Japanese Thought, New York: Columbia UP, 2005, p. 90.
[3] The cognitive linguist Thomas Roeper explains that children, when acquiring "grammar," move from smaller to larger sets: "Each step of a child’s acquisition of grammar must involve movement from a smaller set to a larger set and cannot involve the reverse. The steps are motivated by pieces of input data (adult sentences) which fail to fit into the smaller set, thereby forcing an expansion of the set." Thomas Roeper: "Formal and Substantive Features of Language Acquisition: Reflections on the Subset Principle and Parametric Variation" in Stephen Schiffer & Susan Steele (eds.). Cognition and Representation, Westview, Boulder, 1988, p. 161.
[9] William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1985, p. 56.
[10] Gerald L. Clore and Andrew Ortony: "The Semantics of the Affective Lexicon" in Vernon Hamilton, Gordon H Brower, Nico H Frijda (eds.). Cognitive Perspectives on Emotion and Motivation, Dordrecht: Nato Asi Serie, Kluwer, 1988, p. 370, italics mine.
[11] Did you ever hear a Japanese say "soooo desu ka?" This is neither affirmative nor negative nor the ironical synthesis of both. It is simply aesthetic.
[12] There is at least one striking difference between Japanese and Chinese EA English. While in Japanese magazines a considerable proportion of the words are represented by the expressions "happy," "pleasure," "fun," and "fantastic," in Chinese magazines, among the words most employed are "luxury" and "enjoy." In men’s magazines, the titles are strikingly authoritarian which might be a due to Chinese authoritarianism or simply a hangover from communist times though it also projects masculinity, a type of masculinity that is rarely found in Japan. Her, in Chinese magazines, the authors clearly state what one is supposed to do in the emerging capitalist world. Still, the dreamlike effect of EA English prevails: "Well Dressed Men Have Nice Shoes"; "Eight Key Words to Text Your Understanding of Luxury"; "Skirts or Trousers for Everyday Beauty"; "We Invented Casual."
[13] Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure, Paris: Minuit 1975, p. 43ff. The scheme vernacular-referential-vehicular-mythical was actually first explored by Henri Gobard.
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Thorsten Botz-Bornstein was born in Germany and studied Russian in Münster, and philosophy in Paris and Oxford. As a postdoctoral researcher based in Finland he undertook four years of research on Russian formalism and semiotics in Russia and the Baltic countries. He has also been in Japan, researching the Kyoto School and the philosophy of Nishida Kitarô. Since 1997 he has been an Associate Researcher at the EHESS in Paris where he received his habilitation. He is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Zhejiang in China where he is working on a project entitled "Language and Cognition." He is the author of Place and Dream: Japan and the Virtual (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2004).
Amidst the current convulsions, global capitalism has one consolation left for its increasingly desperate subjects: you may have lost your job (or will never be able to retire from it), you can’t afford to go out, but you can always stay home (if you still have one) and play a video game. As Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns and Merrill Lynch fell and General Motors, Ford and Chrysler reeled round the edge of their grave, North American sales of game hardware and software hit all-time highs in 2008. Forecasters claimed virtual play was recession-proof; a maturing audience of stay-at-home gamers would cocoon around the Wii, Xbox360 or PS3, or migrate to World of Warcraft or Second Life, to enjoy a diversion from economic disaster. Such estimates of game-business resilience may prove optimistic: by 2009 job losses were hitting industry behemoths such as Sony and Electronic Arts (EA). But this latest iteration of bread-and-circuses culture-theory nevertheless provides a timely entry for a discussion of digital games as exemplary media of contemporary Empire.
We use "Empire" in the sense proposed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to designate a post-Cold War planetary capitalism with "no outside," [1] but we modulate their account to take greater consideration of the internal frictions wracking this order since the millennium. By Empire, we mean the global capitalist ascendancy of the early twenty-first century, a system administered and policed by a consortium of competitively collaborative states, among whom the US still clings, by virtue of its military might, to an increasingly fragile preeminence. This is a regime of biopower based on corporate exploitation of myriad types of labour, paid and unpaid, for the continuous enrichment of a planetary plutocracy. Empire is an order of extraordinary scope and depth. Yet it also is precarious, flush with power and wealth, yet close to chaos as it confronts a set of interlocking economic, ecological, energy, and epidemiological crises. Its governance is threatened by tensions between a declining US and a rising China which could either result in some super-capitalist accommodation, consolidating Empire, or split it into warring Eastern and Western blocs. Its massive inequalities catalyze resistances from below, some, reactionary and regressive, others, like the global justice and ecological movement, protagonists of a better alternative.
What makes virtual games’ technocultural form exemplary of Empire is their identity with its key means of production, communication and destruction–the digital network. More than any previous media other than the book, virtual play is a direct offshoot of its society’s crucial technology of power. Sprung from the military-industrial matrix that generated the computer and Internet, games are today a test ground for digital innovations and machinic subjectivities: online play worlds incubate artificial intelligences; consoles plug to grid computing systems; games are media of choice for experiments in neurobiological stimulation and brain driven telekinesis. And, once suspect as delinquent time waster, virtual play is increasingly understood by state and corporate managers as training populations for networked work, war and governability.
We examine the relation between games and Empire in terms of the virtual and the actual, conjugating this couplet with intentionally fuzzy logic in two distinct yet overlapping ways. The virtual is the digital, the on-screen world, as opposed to existence "IRL". But "virtual" also denotes potentiality; the manifold directions in which a given, actual, situation might develop. [2] The technological and ontological virtual are distinct and should never be conflated. [3] But they are related, through the practice of simulation. Computers create potential universes. They model, dynamically, what might be. Such simulation is vital to a power system engaged in the high-risk military, financial and corporate calculus required for globalized control. It is from such simulation that virtual games emerged, broke loose into ludic freedom–only to now be reintegrated into the assemblages of world capital, as a means of inducing the "flexible personality" [4] demanded by digital work, war and markets. Yet this ludic apprenticeship can generate capacities in excess of Empire’s requirements. Just as the eighteenth-century novel was a textual apparatus generating the bourgeois character required by mercantile colonialism (but also capable of criticizing it), and twentieth-century cinema and television were integral to industrial consumerism (yet screened some of its darkest depictions), so, we suggest, virtual games are the exemplary media producing subjects for twenty-first century global hyper-capitalism but also, perhaps, of exodus from it.
Global Game Factory
Let’s first reframe some conventionally celebratory factoids about virtual play. The global game factory is now a major cultural-industrial complex, dominated by the console corporations–Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo–and a cluster of super-publishers, such as EA, Activision, Konami, Ubisoft and THQ. Control of game finance, licensing and marketing enables these giants to harvest the creativity of thousands of game developers, from big third party studios to microenterprises, all around the world. The global revenues of this industry are about $57 billion, five times the annual additional expenditures necessary to provide basic primary education to every child on the planet. [5] It is often claimed videogames are "bigger then Hollywood," but while North American sales rival the cinema box office, games lack the film’s ancillary streams from advertising, DVD, and cable TV release, though advergaming and DLC sales may change this. Game factory revenues are, however, overtaking those of the music business, and growing faster than those of both film and music. More significantly, games are integrated with film, music, and other media: Spiderman, Saw and The Simpsons become games, Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy, films; EA’s Madden games are part of the sports-media nexus; Guitar Hero and Rock Band are the new music platform.
Most of the sales of this "global" media are concentrated in rich planetary consumption zones: North America, Europe, and Japan, with the US still the largest single market; some 53% of Americans, 97% of college students, play; gaming is no longer a youth pastime; and while its testosterone bias has not vanished, it is declining, as online casual gaming and the Wii attract more girls and women. [6] The diffusion of online cybercafé pay-per-play from South Korea–the most game-intensive culture in the world–to China is opening vast new player populations in Asia. For the majority of the world’s inhabitants, and especially the 2 billion who subsist on less than 2 dollars a day, a mint copy of Gears of War, let alone the $400 Xbox 360 on which it plays, remains an unthinkable luxury. But the market in old consoles and computers and mass pirating of game software give games a wider circulation into Latin America, the Middle East, and Southern Asia. Nonetheless, access to the game metaverse remains stratified by wealth, and by energy and Internet infrastructures. A quarter of the world’s population lacks electricity. Meanwhile in Second Life–whose parallel universe, though free at the most basic level, is populated by the avatars of Europeans, North American, and Japanese with annual real life incomes of $45,000 or more–the average resident uses about 1,752 kilowatts of electricity a year, as much as an average Brazilian, and generates CO2 emissions equivalent to a 2,300 mile journey in an SUV. [7] Virtual play is thus firmly embedded in Empire’s unequal, destructive consumption of global resources.
In production, too, situating games in Empire shatters myths. For millions of young men (and many aging ones, and some women) from Shanghai to Montreal, a job making virtual games seems employment nirvana–a promise of being paid to play. And it is true that for designers, programmers, and producers the industry offers creative, well paid work involving the most positive possibilities of "immaterial labour" [8]: scientific know-how, hi-tech proficiency, cultural creativity, and workplace cooperation. But just as game development studios typify the gloss of new media labour they also expose its dark side. The slogan of work-as-fun legitimates the perpetual "crunch-time" culture whose revelation in 2004 by the disenchanted partner of a programmer, EA Spouse, unleashed an industry wide scandal. Game studios, small and large, stratify permanent employees and a low-paid, precarious testers and contract workers. Behind these well-known studio labour flashpoints, however, lies the architecture of the digital play business organized, as part of Empire, in a "global hierarchy of production." [9]
What enables publishers to extract extreme hours is not only internalization of responsibility, but the threat of outsourcing. The global game factory, no longer constrained to a ‘core,’ comprises an increasingly distributed meshwork of satellite offices, subsidiary studios and contracted out work. A design team conceives a new game sipping espresso on the mountain vista patios of EA’s Vancouver studio, then sends elements of the game’s design to a World-Bank-funded company, Glass Egg, in Ho Chi Min City, where programmers earn about $4000 annually, rather than $60,000 in Canada; Lyon-based Infogrames (current owner of Atari), negotiating the game rights to Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible, dispatches the graphics work on NPC’s to Dhruva, a Bangalore studio, paying a fraction of North American rates, shrewdly cushioning itself (but not its Indian workers) when the deal turns sour.
Labour in such peripheral studios is far closer to the all-too material processes indispensable to the game factory, though far less glamorous, and less visible, than studio work. The abyssal depths of this ladder were glimpsed in the coltan scandal of 2000. Prices for columbite tantalite, a rare mineral vital for cell phones, computers and game consoles were driven to extreme heights by the launch of the PS2, setting off a frenzy of resource grabs on the open pit, child-labour mines of the Eastern Congo by the armies fighting Central Africa’s ongoing multi-million death war. But the low-cost, no-care human infrastructure of the play industry has many other rungs: maquiladora plants where hand-helds are made up by nimble-fingered female labor; the regimented electronics assembly lines of South China from which Xbox 360s and PS3′s pour; and the toxic e-waste sites of Nigeria and Delhi, where the products of Sony and Nintendo are amongst the most noxious disassembled by subsistence-wage scavengers.
Perhaps the best single demonstration of the game factory’s stratified planetary space is, however, the online fantasy game World of Warcraft (WoW). Of the 11.5 million participants of its virtual continent of Azeroth, about 25% play in North America, 20% in Europe and some 55% in Asia, mostly from Chinese cybercafés. [10]WoW was brought to Beijing and Shanghai by the partnership of its US developer, Blizzard, with Chinese game company The9, at once a neo-colonial penetration and a boost to China’s own MMO (Massive Online Game) industry. Where Empire’s inequities transform WoW, however, is via virtual trading. A "ludocapitalism" [11] by which virtual goods or skills exchange for real currencies generates an interdependence between North American players and as many as half a million planetary poor country "gold farmers," the majority probably in China, for whom looting monsters round the clock is an alternative to labour on the strike-swept assembly lines of the Pearl River cranking out the very computers on which WoW is played world-wide. Such migrant avatar-service work [12] at once sustains the gaming habit of time-stressed North Americans, incurs their racist antipathy for "ruining the game", and is repressed by Blizzard to control the property rights to its game world. It thus typifies the bipolarity of "Chimerica," [13] the current US-China axis of Empire, virtually replicating a relation where one side is all play, the other all work. Such are the biopolitical forces mobilized in the global game factory.
Empire Plays
To situate games in Empire we must, however, discuss not only their political economy but also the psycho-cultural valences. If virtual games are implicated in armored globalization, how do they support, or subvert, the subjectivities such a regime requires? And how can we answer this question without resorting to notions of hypodermic "media effects" or at assuming the success of every ideological interpellation? In a spirit of radical empiricism, we look at the articulation of virtual and actual practices. That is, we identify concrete linkages between in-game and real-life activity, examining how virtual play is connected to and articulated with other institutions, sites and practices, plugged in to barracks and battle spaces, work cubicles and call centers, investment banks and stock exchanges to form new virtual-actual assemblages. Here, we’ll quickly examine three nodes in this imperial gamespace–war, work and finance.
Banal War
The obvious, original bond of virtual games with imperial actualities is military. All the many claimants of the title "inventors of the videogame" — William Higginbotham, who made a simple tennis game on an analogue computer in 1958; Steve Russell, who created Spacewar in 1961; Ralph Baer, who in 1966 devised the TV-connected game console; or Nolan Bushnell, who founded Atari, the first commercial game company, in 1972–were directly or indirectly employees of the US military-industrial complex. Game-like simulations were integral to the "closed world" of Cold War computing, a means of thinking the unthinkable–thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union–and fighting not so unthinkable hot wars such as Vietnam. [14]
When Russell and the scientist-students of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club created Spacewar just for fun, they seemed to liberate computer simulation from this deadly instrumentality into a joyful world of pure play. But the get-away was far from clean. As the commercial game industry commodified hacker invention, it retained close links to the US military, borrowing technologies such as sideways scrolling display initially invented for anti-terrorist urban sims, and feeding back devices such as the tank-crew trainer based on Atari’s Battlezone. By the end of the Cold War, commercial games had advanced to become superior to the Pentagon’s in-house simulations; a briefly frugal military began to adapt them for training purposes (e.g. Marine Doom) and contract out work to private-sector studios. The so-called "Nintendo War"–the smart-weapon, video-bomb-sight slaughter in Kuwait in 1992–made visible how closely together an informatic Revolution in Military Affairs had brought the screens of play and war. [15]
9/11 put this symbiosis on steroids. While commercial game developers rushed to capitalize on market opportunities created by the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, funds poured into co-designed military-civilian simulations for the War on Terror. Developers able to cite collaboration with the military gave their products the cachet of authenticity that console-warriors craved, while military trainers capitalized on new generation of recruits familiarity with the Xbox and PS2. Gaming became the keystone of what James Der Derian terms "MIMENET"–the "Military Industrial Media Entertainment Network." [16] Today, a manifest continuum connects entertaining anti-terrorist games such as the Xbox Live hit, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, current affairs game, like Kuma War, whose subscribers re-live recent war events as "playable missions"; the US Defense Department’s multiplayer online shooter–recruiter, America’s Army, now entering its third incarnation; civilian-military co-productions such as urban warfare sim Full Spectrum Warrior; released as both commercial game and infantry trainer; and a new generation of therapeutic simulators, such as Virtual Iraq, used in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder for those returning from the actual battlefield.
For a more futuristic example of how virtual games spawn in and out of imperial battlespace, we can, however, take DARPA’s recently announced "Deep Green" project. Deep Green is not an ecological conversion, but a khaki super-computer, intended to generate automatic combat plans for military field commanders. It has several interlocking components: "Sketch to Plan" reads a commander’s doodles, listens to his words, and then "accurately induces" a plan, "fill[ing] in missing details." "Sketch to Decide" allows him or her to "see the future" by producing a "comic strip" of possible options; "Blitzkrieg" quickly model alternatives, while "Crystal Ball" figures out which scenarios are most likely, and which plans optimal. [17] Skeptics say Deep Green will never work; but even as a multi-million dollar boondoggle, it will generate innumerable spin-offs for the game industry. If it succeeds, future wars in Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela or Kazakhstan will be truly plug-and-play, separated only by a few orders of computing power from a commercial war game such as the recent Tom Clancy-scripted Endwar in which Xbox players give voice-commands to armored, air and infantry units deployed in global combat theatres.
Our argument, need we say, is not that "games make you kill," in the sense asserted in moral panics about the play of Doom or Grand Theft Auto. It is that digital games are systemically incorporated in the war-fighting apparatus of Empire, in ways that render developers and players material partners in military technoculture, and Defense Departments’ systemic cullers of gamer subjectivities: this is what makes virtual play integral to "banal war," the normalized state of perpetual conflict Empire’s global control demands. [18]
Measureless Work
Computerized war is, however, only one aspect of a broader process of virtualization vital to Empire–the shift from Fordist industrial work to the post-Fordist computer-mediated organization of labour crucial for capital’s globalization. Gaming’s rise from the 1970s to the present was part of this process, unlimited play that paradoxically apprenticed generations to a regime of measureless work. At first, virtual games were on the side of leisure, hedonism, and irresponsibility against clock-punching, discipline, and productivity, appearing in dubious masculine refuges from toil, bars and arcades, and then, as the console entered the home, as machines for children and adolescents, devices on the border between innocence and delinquency. Game playing on the job was subversion, a refusal of work. Then a strange reversal occurred. As the US military followed the tracks of its runaway virtual slave and re-captured it, other state sectors, from city planners to air traffic control, explored the possibilities of simulation. In the 1990s, corporate capital latched onto games as a technology for training an increasingly digitized labour force. By the turn of the century this activity had become an industry in itself, and a major focus of an emergent Serious Games movement; the market for corporate "e-learning" was estimated at $10.6 billion. [19]
In this virtual apparatus for the subject-formation of post-Fordist labour, game-like simulations are integrated with electronic hiring tools, psychometric personality tests and cognitive skills measures. To competitively select management candidates from around the world, fashion giant L’Oréal uses an online simulation linked to a TV game show in which players invest in R&D, plan marketing and look for ways to cut production costs. [20] Canon has repairmen dragging and dropping parts into virtual copiers–a light flashes and a buzzer sounds if they get it wrong. Cisco prepares its teams for on-call crisis management by gaming repair of a network in a virtual Martian sandstorm. A California ice cream chain has trainees game scooping cones and perfecting portion control against the clock; "It’s so much fun," says one manager, "I e-mailed it to everyone at work." Games engage the affective dimensions of labor too. Minerva Software (formerly Cyberlore) is making service workers empathetic, in a virtual store complete with point-of-purchase display, where they cultivate sale skills; the basis of this simulation is Cyberlore’s earlier game Playboy Mansion, in which players had to "persuade" models in a lavish Hugh Hefner-esque pad to pose topless. [21]
Yet more complete subsumption of games by work is offered by schemes such as Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk, which create an on-line, on-demand precarious workforce for tasks such as transcribing podcasts and labeling photos, processed on a piece-rate basis "in lieu of watching TV or fooling around on MySpace" [22] — or, playing games. In the so-called ESP Game a player, gaming with either a human or AI, strives to agree on words that match images within a set period of time to optimize search engines indexing on-line pictorial content. [23] Meanwhile, Stanford University spin-off, Seriosity promises to "steal sensibilities from games and virtual worlds and embed them into business." Observing people in MMOs like Star Wars Galaxies "spend countless hours carefully doing what looks like a job" not only battling Empire troops but also "building pharmaceutical manufacturing operations and serving as medics" the company is testing the possibility of "having players view real medical scans inside the game to find signs of cancer" which, it says, "gamers could do as well as an actual pathologist." [22]
The current corporate enthusiasm for virtual play extends, however, beyond training simulations and serious games. It is all games — silly games, time-wasting games, fantastic orc-slaying and alien-blasting games–that are seen as beneficial for the bottom line. As Steven Poole recently observed, whether playing an elf or a gangsta, many videogames follow the "employment paradigm" of career progression, asset management and monetary accumulation. [24] Now hipster management theorists, [25] drawing on serious cognitive studies of gameplay, argue that the content of games, be it car-jacking or dragon-slaying, is merely the occasion for intensive skill acquisition in multi-tasking, flexible role play, risk evaluation, persistence in the face of set backs, inventive problem solving, and on the fly decision making–all, of course, precisely what corporate employers claim to want. Now a high-score at Space Giraffe is de rigueur for the up-and coming careerist. Games have turned their coat, transforming from workplace saboteur to the perfect managerial snitch for an imperial production machine, flexibilized and redistributed to a global cyber-precariat across networks running 24/7 around the planet.
Financialized Life
Virtual play rose not only out of the era of information war and immaterial work, but also the casino economy. In his Empire of Indifference Randy Martin links the informatic risk management strategies of war and finance capital. [26] Video games are part of this conjugation. Their Golden Age was the time not only of Reagan’s first strike nuclear options, but of deregulated banking, junk bonds, debt escalation and stock market populism. Making a financial play is a perennial theme of early video and computer games: Wall Street Kid, Inside Trader, Wall Street Raider, Speculator: The Futures Market Game, and Black Monday all gamed actual investment practices that were themselves becoming virtualized as global money circulated in networks second in sophistication only to the Pentagon’s. On one side, these games blend seamlessly with software tools abetting the "financialization of daily life" [27]: as Atari created its hits it also made "Bond Analysis" and "Stock Charting." [28] On the other flank, these trading games form a continuum with the commercial empire-building "Tycoon" play genre; with the world of The Sims, where consumption proceeds divorced from work in the perfect virtual parable for the invested classes of long-boom America; and with the fully monetized economies of MMOs built around the fictive capital of digital platinum, gold and Linden Dollars. It is, we suggest, no coincide that in the early twenty-first century "virtual trading" means both on-line stock market speculation and the buying and selling of digital game goods.
Meanwhile finance capital, ramping through the dot-com spree, the Internet bubble, and on to the great housing splurge, was, like the military, hot on games. In 1997 a junior trader training in the game-like simulator of a German finance house posted 130,000 bond futures on-line, believing the sale was just an exercise. But the play was for real. He had "pressed the wrong button," creating a financial Ender’s Game scenario; his firm took a loss of some $16 million. The stockbroker Ameritrade created Darwin: Survival of the Fittest, a game distributed free to teach customers online trading just in time for the 2001 crash. Undeterred, by 2004 trading houses working rapid market fluctuations "easily missed on a bank of computer screens filled with fast moving explicitly" said "’it is unlikely that we would hire someone who didn’t show good proficiency at a Game Boy or online poker or similar video-type game.’" [29] On the brink of their great fall, the "quants" on Wall Street were using video game graphics processing units to speed options analytics and other math-intensive applications necessary for derivatives and mortgage-backed securities. [30]
They also prepared the future subjects of financialization. In 2008, at the moment of the crash, the annual cycle of The Stock Market Game was beginning in North American schools. The game, sponsored by Wall Street’s largest trade group, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, provides a "curriculum" for a "scholastic contest" in which players get "a hypothetical $100,000 to invest in stocks, bonds or mutual funds," and access to a computer system that executes the simulated trades, ranking teams for "bull and bear trophies." As the Dow Jones hit the worst week in its history, some 700,000 players from grades four through twelve tried to pick winners, time the market, and sell short. Two of the game’s national sponsors, Merrill Lynch and Wachovia, were annihilated in the financial firestorm. They had bet virtual play would "prime the next generation of customers". Some students learned a different lesson; a thirteen year old confessed: "Before all this, I asked my mom to get me stocks for Christmas," but after experiencing the carnage of The Stock Market Game "told her not to do it" and "asked for a parakeet instead." [31] Millions who didn’t go for the bird lost to a ludocapitalism that apparently can’t find "Resume Game."
Games of Multitude?
Do Mario and Princess Toadstool still have a chance for liberation from banal war, endless work and monetized life? We approach this possibility through Hardt and Negri’s concept of "multitude," a term we think conveys, better than any alternative their many critics can offer, the positive component of complex contemporary movements against capital. [32] Appearing in the turn of the century anti-globalization protests, this "movement of movements" only a few years ago seemed decisively defeated by the shock and awe of neoliberal war on terror. But today economic crisis, deepening ecological catastrophe and military quagmires vindicates its activism and analysis, which were revived in however refracted, reformist mode in the global support for the Obama election campaign. Even as this present crisis incubates nationalism, racism, retro-fascism and ultra-militarism, it also makes new radical openings to exit Empire. There is no blueprint for this process; many would say it defies schematic planning. But there are multiplying, thoughtful sketches of what a post-capitalist society might look like; less free market, more decentralized, democratic public planning; less commodification, more commons; less wage labour, more self-management, less precarity, more universal provision of basic life-needs. Virtual play’s production of subjectivities for Empire is easy to see: are there also Games of Multitude?
Such potential exists because Empire is a contradictory system, cultivating the very creative, cooperative capacities it must repress and contain, not least of which is the innovation power of immaterial labour. Gamers are amongst the most eager of this sorcerer’s apprentices. As we saw, games originated in the excess playfulness of military science workers. As this hacker innovation was captured by the game factory, it has continued to generate surplus know-how that escapes complete capture in the commodity form. Ever more sophisticated game editing tools, the rise of modding and machinima, flash authorship, and MMO participation have all generated within virtual play culture a powerful drive towards user-generated content created in an intensely collaborative and networked milieus. Some commentators see such "autoludic" activity as automatically empowering and democratizing. [33] We, however, insist on what Paolo Virno terms "the ambivalence of the multitude." [34] Radical analysis post-2001 can no longer just applaud so-called "indymedia." Rather it must recognize conditions of "immaterial civil war" [35] in which Web 2.0 applications, social software, the blogosphere and virtual games are both the terrain and the prize of a pitched battle, fought across a medley of devices and platforms, between two sides of the multitude’s collective subjectivity: creative dissidence and profitable compliance.
The turn to user-generated content stands in an equivocal relation to corporate control. It arises in part from digital capital’s drive to cut costs, exploit a knowledgeable fan-base, and make modders, MMO players, PSP home-brewers and Xbox DNA developers into farm teams of unpaid "playbour." [36] But it also, simultaneously, effects a devolutionary socialization of the means of production, generating conflicts between gamers and game capital and lines of flight from imperial themes and practices. Games and gamers do get out of the control of their corporate-military sponsors, and although many of these departures are recouped by game capital, and others are black holes of pointless or destructive energy, all persuade us that it isn’t quite "game over" yet. So now we look at three assemblages of games and multitude, around piracy, protest and planning.
Pirate Games
Piracy is as widespread in games as in music and films. Nothing better illustrates the virtual dilemmas of Empire than the attempt by EA (reminiscent of the "terminator seed" exploits of Monsanto) to shackle Spore, Will Wright’s game of do-it-yourself species-being development, with draconian DRM measures–attempts sabotaged by a gamer multitude that downloaded the games via file sharing networks more than 171,000 times within days of its release. In much of Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America game piracy rates run, by an admittedly dubious corporate calculus, as high as 80-90%. It affects PC games most, but consoles are far from immune. The game factory wages war on piracy by technological, judicial and police measures, ostensibly targeting big criminal software bootleggers. Industrial-scale game piracy is a reality, part of the transnational crime networks that are the shadow of neoliberal globalism. Nonetheless, the game industry crusade occludes many of the complexities, and all the politics, of piracy.
We call attention to just four points. First, not all piracy is for profit: much involves gamer cultures of swapping, sharing and "warez" accomplishment that are specifically anti-commercial. Second, piracy is the only way many people in, say, Brazil or the Philippines, or Egypt can afford games. [37] Third, virtual piracy is (alongside the smuggling of drugs, guns, exotic animals and maritime piracy) just one of the many avenues by which immiserated planetary populations make a de facto redistribution of wealth away from the bloated centers of consumer capital. Fourth, mass levels of piracy around the planet indicate a widespread perception that commodified digital culture imposes artificial scarcity on a technology capable of near costless cultural reproduction and circulation.
These points suggest digital piracy is a classic example of the criminalized social struggles that have always accompanied enclosures of common resources, responding in this case not to capital’s "primitive accumulation" of land enclosures, but to its "futuristic accumulation" fencing-in digital resources. Though we sympathize with small game developers whose livelihood PC piracy threatens, we also agree with James Boyle’s suggestion that corporate efforts to control digital copying are analogous to feudal lords and clerics contemplating tithe-rates for industrial threshing machines. [38] While the overt politics of game piracy range from anti-imperialism to the nihilism, the practice is a clandestine front of struggles whose liberal wing is "creative commons," and whose longer-range versions envisage new forms of open-sourced culture and public support for digital creation. Ongoing conflict over Intellectual Property Rights and Digital Rights Management in games is symptomatic of a bona fide contradiction between relations and forces of production, an antagonism of progressive technological capacities to the reactionary property rights into which they are forced.
Protest Games
A new culture, however, does not just copy, but creates. The diffusion of game-making know-how and easy-to-use authoring tools has allowed activists, artists and dissident game designers to produce games that challenge virtual play’s alignment with Empire. Feminist gamers such as Anne-Marie Schleiner were pioneers, hacking new skins and pacifist interventions to challenge the sexism and militarism of the game factory. Since 2001, however, radical game-creations have proliferated. These include ludic anti-war protests, like Gonzalo Frasca’s September 12, showing the inevitability of "collateral damage," and the famous flash game Gulf War 2 which, six months before the invasion of Iraq, predicted the consequent chaos; projects linked to migrant struggles, such as Escape from Woomera, a prototype mod exposing Australian detention camps, and The French Democracy, using machinima to replay Paris riots from the banlieusard side; O.U.T., "a live action wireless gaming urban intervention" in street demonstrations against the 2004 Republican New York convention; and even game cartographies of Empire itself in the work of Eastwood Real Time Strategy Group, whose Civilization IV: Age of Empire includes on its map "the military-entertainment complex," "immaterial labor," the "net economy," "surveillance mechanisms," and "governmentality."
For a sustained instance of game-multitude assemblage we should, however, look at Molleindustria, a Milanese collective of media activists and self-described "videogame detractors" who in 2004 emerged from a milieu crosscut by prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s monopolization of Italy’s communication system, and the activist digital media of the counter-globalization movement. With a slogan, "Radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment," operating out of a social centre self-managed by and for activists, Molleindustria has a catalogue of small but hilariously effective web-based games sardonically addressing Empire’s crimes and misdemeanors: Tubo-Flex, gaming the predicament of the post-Fordist precariat, part of the media promotion of EuroMayDay Parades; The McDonalds Game, satirizing the labour, nutritional and environmental consequences of fast-food empires; The Free Culture Game ("a playable theory") liberating digital resources from corporate capture; and, most recently, Oligarchy, making the player CEO of a petro-corporation: "explore and drill around the world, corrupt politicians, stop alternative energies and increase the oil addiction. Be sure to have fun before the resources begin to deplete." [39] Perhaps a Molleindustria financial crisis game — Bailout? — is in the works.
Such tactical games, with characteristic stripped-down graphics and rudimentary production values, teeter between brilliant ludic alienation-effects and blunt didacticism. But, as Alexander Galloway observes, such "counter gaming" is about more than overlaying alternative imagery in established genre conventions; building "radical action" in game culture requires the creation of "alternative algorithms." [40] Or, as Molleindustria says: "We often claim that it is important for us not to produce games to entertain radical people, but (to make) radical games." [41]
Planning Games
Is it possible to go beyond agitprop games of virtual protest to games of exodus that actively help constitute a society beyond Empire? All game development is about designing alternative worlds, all game play about learning what can be done in these worlds. "Another world is possible" is thus a gamer slogan. Twenty years ago Bill Nichols in his study of "the work of culture in an age of cybernetic reproduction," suggested video games could be emancipatory because they made the player engage with "systemic principles" of world design, inciting a glimpse of "the relativism of social order." [42] Since then, moreover, this world-building has become collectivized in MMOs and virtual social spaces coevolved between initial programming parameters and the activities of player populations numbered in millions. Given the imbrication of virtual play in actual Empire, it is no surprise the dynamics of these worlds frequently merely replicates and amplifies political economic premises of the world market: the basic formulae for MMOs, however fantastic their setting, is accumulation backed by force. Nonetheless the creation of such communal virtual laboratories allows social experiment simulating worlds with different rules.
For example, agoraXchange is an alternative MMO project devised by political theorist Jacqueline Stevens and game artist Natalie Bookchin. This is a virtual world clearly influenced by the new wave of writing about "life after capitalism." Inheritance of personal wealth, as a mechanism sustaining class privileges over time, has been abolished; it will be redirected to international institution whose mandate is global redistribution to ensure basic human needs for resources like clean water are met. Borders have been opened to the flow of people, not just commodities. Private property has gone, too. Land will be in the trust of the state, leased to individuals and businesses. This is artist-activist collaboration in advance of the recent claim by an eminent computer scientist in the journal Science that online games enable large-scale studies of alternative governmental regimes, including explorations of "how individuals can be induced to cooperate in producing public goods." [43]
It may, moreover, be feasible to link such simulations to new political institutions. Many radical activists agree that a global-commons alternative to the world market requires processes of participatory planning and democratized economic decision making. Game-like virtual worlds can be part of such processes. In 2008, The Institute of the Future launched Superstruct, the "first massively multiplayer forecast game." Set in the year 2019, it postulates that a Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has forecast human self-destruction by the year 2042 as the result of five simultaneous "super-threats": Quarantine, a result of "declining health and pandemic disease"; Ravenous, the global collapse of the world food system; Power Struggle, "as nations fight for energy supremacy and the world searches for alternative energy solutions"; Outlaw Planet, covering increased surveillance and loss of liberties; and Generation Exile, which a " massive increase in refugees." [44] The aim is for players to collaborate, communicating not only in-game, but across email, blogs and social networks, to devise solutions to these problems. We don’t necessarily hold any brief for the answers Superstruct comes up with–as we’ve already indicated, the global demographics of game play promises plenty of scope for class bias. But the basic point remains: if the Pentagon and Wall Street can use virtual worlds to plan the Empire, why should not communards use them to think through their escape routes?
Conclusion: Magic Circles, Strange Contraptions
Academic writing on virtual games often alludes to the "magic circle" of play proposed by the conservative medieval historian, Johan Huizinga, who in his famous Homo Ludens wrote of games as an "autotelic" activity, engaged in for their own sake, segregated in space and time from the hurly-burly of everyday life. [45] Such accounts set play well apart from the turmoils of global markets, preemptive militarism and street protest. Yet Huizinga himself, writing in the shadows of a recently concluded World War I and of the approaching European fascism that eventually took his life, was well aware of what Ian Bogost describes as "a gap in the magic circle," an inescapable relation between "magic circle" and "material power."[46]This recognition, subtly present in Homo Ludens, is paramount in Huizinga’s less well-known study of decaying feudal order, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, where he shows how jousts and tournaments cultivated the skills of chivalric elite, whose supremacy his account, despite its romanticism, unmistakably reveals as based in military barbarism and armed expropriation. The medieval "magic circle" of play, with all its visual pageantry and elaborate rules, is firmly set in the context of declining empires convulsively gripped by plague, war, emptying treasuries and peasant revolt, with the game-theoretician’s eye "trained on the depth of an evening sky, a sky steeped blood red, desolate with threatening leaden clouds, full of the false glow of copper." [47] It is such a light that we examine virtual games in today’s age of Empire.
"Gamers against Empire" is, we acknowledge, an optimistic concluding slogan to this somber examination, and an apparently unlikely one–but not, perhaps, as implausible as it may first seem. We ask of digital play what Félix Guattari asked of collective humanity: "how can it find a compass by which to reorient itself?" His response, by "remaking social practices," was grounded in a reading of transformations already underway. To speak of games of multitude is to assert that the possibilities of virtual play exceed its imperial manifestations, and the desires of many gamers surpass marketers’ caricatures of them. Games of multitude are, in Guattari’s conceptual terms, a "molecular revolution" involving "the effort to not miss anything that could help rebuild a new kind of struggle, a new kind of society." Not missing anything includes virtual games. "Strange contraptions, you will tell me, these machines of virtuality, these blocks of mutant percepts and affects, half-object, half-subject," Guattari mused, perhaps, who knows?, contemplating a video game console–yet potentially, he insisted, such "strange contraptions" were "crucial instrument[s]" to "generate other ways of perceiving the world, a new face on things, and even a different turn of events." [48]
Notes
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This essay draws on our Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming in 2009.
[1] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Empire, Cambridge: Harvard, 2000, p. 413.
[2] See Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II, London: Continuum, 2002.
[3] For contending views on the relation of the technological and ontological virtual, see Pierre Lévy, Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age, New York: Plenum, 1998, and Brian Massumi, Parables For the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University, 2002.
[36] Julian Kücklich. "Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry," http://journal.fibreculture.org/, 2005. Accessed May 13, 2009.
[37] See Pedro Franco, "A Nation of Pirates," and Ryan Sumo, "Piracy and the Underground Economy," both in The Escapist, February, 2009, and October 2008.
[38] James Boyle. Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society. Cambridge: Harvard, 1996.
[45] Johan Huizinga. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1950 [1944], p. 10.
[46] Ian Bogost. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006, p. 135.
[47] Johan Huizinga. The Autumn of the Middle Ages, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996 [1921], p. xix.
[48] Félix Guattari, The Guattari Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, p. 262; Soft Subversions, New York: Semiotext(e).1996, p. 90; 1995, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, Bloomington: Indiana University, pp. 92, 97.
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Nick Dyer-Witheford is Associate Professor and Associate Dean at the Faculty of Information & Media Studies, University of Western Ontario.
Greig de Peuter is a doctoral candidate in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University.
One hundred years after the publication of Max Weber’s classic text, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the fateful relationship between Protestantism and capitalism has been renewed in American political discourse. Except this time it is no longer the original convergence theorized by Weber between the spirit of Calvinism and acquisitive capitalism whereby Christianity was destined to be ultimately secondary to the unfolding historical project of capitalism, but the opposite. In a contemporary political climate marked by the resurgence seemingly everywhere of faith-based politics, capitalism and its historical correlate — modernism — have actually folded back on themselves, quickly reversing modernist codes of economic secularism and political pluralism, in the interests of being reanimated with the evangelical spirit of religious fundamentalism. What Weber foresaw as a primal compact between Calvinism and acquisitive capitalism — this migration, first in Europe and then in Puritan America, of Puritan attitudes towards personal salvation based on giving witness by habits of frugality, hard work, and discipline into the essentially acquisitive spirit of capitalism — has been renewed in new key. On the centennial of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the political universe is suddenly dominated by the spirit of what might be called the New Protestant Ethic as the ideological reflex of the age of networked capitalism and empire politics.
Animated by apocalyptic visions of the days of wrath announcing the Second Coming of Christ, motivated by feverish aspirations to be counted among the spiritually elect in the coming age of division between the Predestined and the Left Behind, witness to the vengeful spirit of the Old Testament, literal in its biblical interpretations, monistic in its drive to hegemony among the world religions, in active revolt against secularism, in bitter rebellion against pluralism, the New Protestant Ethic is the foundational creed of contemporary American politics.
We, the inhabitants of post-Enlightenment society might have thought that the current cultural horizon was exhausted by fateful struggles between modernism, postmodernism and posthumanism, but it turns out that the past will not be denied. Out of the ashes of the Book of Revelation emerges a form of faith-based politics which is, in every political sense, the ascendant historical tendency in American public life. Here, putting on the policy garments of the "culture of life" movement, there waging bitter political combat against the heresy of "same-sex marriage," now opposed to scientific claims concerning stem cell research, allying itself actively with the crusading spirit of American imperialist adventures, dominating the media with faith-based cultural perspectives, the New Protestant Ethic easily sweeps aside secular discourses in the interests of a vision of culture, society and politics which is as cosmological in its theological sweep as it is eschatological in its historical ambitions.
Understood metaphysically, it may well be that the insurgency represented by faith-based politics is the representative political form of what Heidegger’s Nietzsche described as the age of "completed nihilism." In this interpretation, power in its mature (nihilistic) phase — sick of itself, possessing no definitive goal, exhausted with the historical burden of remaining an active will, always sliding inexorably towards the nothingness of the will-less will — desperately seeks out a sustaining purpose, an inspiring goal, a historical mission. Into the ethical vacuum at the disappearing center of nihilistic power flows a strong historical monism — the New Protestant Ethic — that will not be suppressed. To power’s empty formalism, to liberal humanism’s (emotionally) ineffective proceduralist ethics, to the empire’s cybernetic equations written in violence and in blood across the landscape of imperial wars, the New Protestant Ethic provides a singular historical purpose — the crusading spirit of evangelical Christianity which is reconstructionist, resurgent, and reanimated — backed up by the semiotic purity of the foundational texts of the Old Testament. To those who would discount faith-based politics as only the most recent instance of the politics of cultural backlash, it should be noted that this fateful, and entirely original, entwinement of (fundamentalist) religion and (imperial) war technologies in the American mind may well be in the order of a great overturning. With faith-based politics, we are witness to something entirely unexpected, and for that reason, deeply ominous — an ethical reconciliation between religion and technology in which the apocalyptic visions of the Old Testament will be future-coded in the power languages of empire politics and networked capitalism. What is now only in its preparatory rhetorical stages as the "culture of life" movement may soon emerge full-blown as the essential life-principle of American, and by imperialist extension world, culture.
Consequently, it may no longer be The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in its original Calvinist evocation of ascetic propriety and regularity, nor capitalism any longer in its first pioneering acquisitive expression. However, it appears to most definitely be the New Protestant Ethic as the moral vision of American politics in the 21st century — intolerant, charismatic, crusading. Breaking beyond the boundaries of private religious belief, this fusion of religious fundamentalism and the instrumentalities of increasingly cyberneticized imperial forms of global warfare is, for example, the moral essence of the Bush administration’s political vision of "redemptive empire." Here, "Reconstructionist" Christianity — aggressive, projective, fundamentalist — is streamed instantly across the spacetime fabric of American empire by a military intent both on "full-spectrum domination of space" and, as recently announced, on "metabolic domination" of the bodies of its global subjects . A dangerous fusion then of fundamentalist Protestantism and cyber-war. In his first press conference after his second-term presidential election, George W. Bush said: "I have earned political capital and I intend to spend it."
There are intimations here: some known — the sacrificial violence directed against the cities of Iraq, recent reports of new versions of experimental weapons — poison gas and napalm — used against the citizens of Falluja, ominous warnings of adventurism to come in Iran; and some stories unknown, unreported, already forgotten at the dark edges of the real politics of empire — the sudden death in a southern motel room of Ray C. Lemme, a private investigator, who it is reported was following the trail of The Five Star Trust — a secret fund out of Texas, Saudi Arabia, the Phillipines — which may have financed the widespread computer manipulation of the last American election.[1] Thinking of these events, I again allow those chilling words of George W. Bush to brush against my thought: "I have earned political capital and I intend to spend it."
Inauguration Day Blues & the Messianic Rapture of End Times
History calls us.
– Condoleeza Rice, American Secretary of State
On Inauguration day, with the streets of Washington locked down tight with security, paranoia in the fearful air, ABC television commentators, probably trying to pass the time, remix visuals of John Kerry with the laconic words: "At least in this country, we don’t line up losers against the wall and shoot them." The messianic text of the inaugural speech proclaims America to be the moral tutelary of global politics, self-appointed in a journey to bring "freedom and democracy" to the world that may take many "generations to come." President Bush’s fateful political rhetoric — "America’s vital interests and deepest beliefs are now one" — carry with them a sense of deep foreboding: intimations of future aggressions by a rogue (imperial) state in the "name of liberty" and in the "image of the maker of heaven and earth." God Bless America.God Bless the American People.
Accordingly, the question: What would it mean to think American politics from the perspective of Born Again Ideology? What new forms of political interpretation would result from critical reflection upon that strange, but very real, very intense relationship between the resurfacing of religious fundamentalism in contemporary American politics and cyber-warfare by which America projects its imperial ambitions across the planet — this epochal meeting in the American political mind of its Puritan religious past and its increasingly militarized version of the posthuman future? In a way that Weber could only intimate we may well be already living in the ashes of The Protestant Ethic: a supposedly dead resurrection-effect — the Protestant ethic — hyper-moral, hyper-monistic, hyper-charismatic, hyper-fundamentalist — has suddenly come alive in the imperial language of redemptive empire. Little wonder then that Frank Rich, in a recent op-ed for The New York Times, can write of the cultural morbidity associated with "A Culture of Death, Not Life." (NYT, April 10, 2005)
Mortality — the more graphic, the merrier — is the biggest thing going in America. Between Terri Schiavo and the pope, we’ve feasted on decomposing bodies for almost a solid month now. The carefully edited, three-year-old video loops of Ms. Schiavo may have been worthless as medical evidence, but as necro-porn their ubiquity rivaled that of TV’s top entertainment franchise, the all-forensics-all-the-time "CSI." To help us visualize the dying John Paul, another Fox star, Geraldo Rivera, brought on Dr. Michael Baden, the go-to-cadaver expert from the JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson mediathons, to contrast His Holiness’s cortex with Ms. Schiavo’s.
As Rich concludes: "Once the culture of death at its most virulent intersects with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on the living."
Accordingly, is the "culture of death" a symptomatic sign of the psychogeography of the American mind, or does the scent of death attract such intense media fascination because it evokes a more fundamental turn in political culture, namely that (terminal) point when life itself gave up on the future, becoming born again in the ecstatic (media) signs of its own death? Understood as the cultural capstone of the New Protestant Ethic, this searing image of the "culture of death" is perhaps less an exclusively media phenomenon than a return to something autochthonous in American culture — the recurrence of 21st century America to the ruling passions of its 17th century Puritan origins. Obsessive, judgmental, moralistic, hard willed, messianic, intent on penalizing the signs of (earthly) life in the name of eternal life: Calvinism, like Christianity in general, always had about it a doubled fascination — certainly with the prospect of death as resurrection of the soul from the flesh of the sinful body; but also the strict disciplining of Christian life as a signifier of religious election. Propelled at the speed of (mass media) light into popular culture, the spirit of Calvinism is resurrected now as the scent of death which is the real attraction and psychological driver of the "culture of life."
Specifically, virulent as only a resurrection-effect can be, the Calvinist origins of the Protestant ethic have now successfully mutated into the redemptive fundamentalist language of Born Again Christianity. In contemporary political cartography, this is perfectly symbolized as the division of America into the chromatics of blue and red states. With this addition: perhaps the red states symbolize a certain psycho-geography in the American mind — a massive psychological reaction-formation — imminent, subjective, populist, faith-based — which once linked with the instrumentalities of power — cyber-warfare, militarized globalization, elite-driven, neo-conservative — constitutes what we mean now by cultural fascism. In the 20th century, the power libido of capitalist excess was politically constrained by the bi-polar opposition of the Communist Bloc. In the 21st century, the epoch initiated symbolically by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the politics of empire — capitalism triumphant — has no effective political check.
American empire, this spearhead of increasingly militarized capitalism, is free at last to be the universal sign — unipolar, unchallenged, self-directing. It is finally at liberty to stamp the political formula inscribed on American coins — e pluribus unum (from many one) — onto global culture. Without its Communist binary, without the necessity to maintain at least the rhetorical illusion of political commitment to the ideals of democratic rights and economic egalitarianism, empire capitalism swiftly backslides into the specter of cultural fascism as its chosen future. Again, the political formula is this: an imminent, populist reaction-formation — Born Again fundamentalism — sweeping from the southern states to the heart of the heartland of the industrial Midwest and west — combines with a right-wing elitist agenda of imperial politics — the logic of cyber-warfare, "The "American Project for the 21st Century," "full spectrum domination" — to produce a politics of empire which is incipiently authoritarian. Domestically, politically threatened by the human rights struggles of gays and lesbians, this psychological reaction-formation — this virulent political backlash against the politics of difference — fuses emotionally around issues of same-sex marriage, pro-choice, immigration, the restriction of welfare rights and the weakening of gun control. Globally, it projects itself outward in the language of ressentiment and sacrificial violence — a Born Again Ideology as the moral energy of American empire — what the American rhetorician and New England politician, Daniel Webster, long ago called "Our Moral Republic." Herewith, the language of religious fundamentalism merges with the logistics of cyber-empire. Weber’s dark prophecy concerning a bleak future of "specialists without spirit midst this nullity which calls itself a civilization" is not apparently our past, but the future.
Redemptive Violence and Panic Insecurity
The year 2005 was a double anniversary. Not only the publication of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism but also the centennial of Albert Einstein’s first publication of his special theory of relativity. These events are not unrelated. It’s my thesis that Weber’s grim vision of the "iron cage" has been projected into history at Einstein’s "speed of light." Today, the spirit of capitalism in networked culture moves literally at the speed of life. The Protestant Ethic has been renewed in the redemptive, passionate language of Born Again Christianity. What has happened this year, this time, this day, is that we are witness now to a fateful crossing-over of Born Again Christianity with the power of American empire moving at the speed of Born Again light. That’s Born Again Ideology: networked imperial power animated by the disciplinary energies of a now resurrected, redemptive Christianity moving at the speed of darkness.
Long before Einstein’s scientific vision of relativity theory, America always was a quantum country. A culture of communication, it has always privileged the speed of light as the emblematic sign of its technological omnipotence. A culture of relativity, American political economy could gain a global empire because it learned how to transform the purely theoretical principle of instrumental activism into the pragmatic business methods associated with the "enhancement of adaptive capacity." A culture of violence, American militarism split open the atom of colonizing power with the reactor of crusading, missionary consciousness. A culture of foundational political narratives, America’s ruling rhetoric was never based upon the modernist logic of binaries, the logic of either/or. Politically, America is a quantum culture because it has always only been an energy field simultaneously combining opposite changes of state. In its rhetoric as much as in its politics, culture and economy, America has always been both wave-form and particle. That is America’s secret, its seduction, its curse.
The signs of (quantum) America as simultaneously wave-form and particle — opposite changes of (cultural) state simultaneously — are everywhere. Symbolically, it’s the split visual energy field of the American flag with its star and stripes. Historically, it’s the received interpretation of the Civil War as a redemptive moral struggle fusing opposing violent energy states — Confederates and Unionists — in the continuing story of the American Republic. Legislatively, it’s the Federalist Papers proclaiming an impossible (quantum) political theory with its vision of unequivocal states-rights and strong central government. Culturally, it’s the governing contradiction of faith-based political populism and rule by political elites. In the American official song-line, it’s the unspoken contradiction of a national anthem with inspiring republican political rhetoric and impossibility of popular participation. Einsteinian before Einstein, American exceptionalism has everything to do with the fact that it is the political precursor of quantum reality — a contested style of government, a warring field of religion and technology, a violent energy field of individual subjectivity — which anticipates by several centuries the great scientific discoveries of modern times.
A nation of possibilities ("the American dream"), a country of probabilities which absorbs the difference, America is and has always been a historical singularity, a quantum culture, a spacetime fabric. Breaking with European (binary) discourse, America has always represented a fusion of pre-Enlightenment subjectivity and posthuman technology, just waiting to happen. Consequently, if Einstein’s special theory of relativity could speculate that light is both wave-form and particle simultaneously, that light is both/and, opposite states simultaneously; that is only to repeat the political formula that has animated American political culture from its Puritan beginnings, namely that this would be a culture simultaneously of redemptive violence and panic insecurity. And if Einstein could theorize against and beyond Newton’s modernist vision of an entitative universe (where discrete objects interact at a distance) that we live in a spacetime fabric moving at the speed of light, this was only to repeat what had long been established in the founding covenant of the United States. Namely, that this "good land" (in the words of the Mayflower Compact) was visualized from its historical inception as an imminently religious, imminently unified fabric of spacetime moving literally at the transcendental speed of (theological) light. And if quantum theorists after Einstein could theorize that implosive change occurs in quantum culture by virtue of a "tunneling effect" whereby warp holes suddenly and unpredictably open up in the spacetime fabric, linking singularities from the past and the future, that is exactly what is occurring in the politics of American empire today. Here, a (religious) singularity from the past (the Puritan origins of faith-based politics) has now literally tunneled its way into the future. Fueled by the Born Again emotions of religious premodernity, the American (cybernetic) posthuman opens onto a future in which atavistic religious impulses stream across the spacetime fabric of a technoculture moving at the speed of (digital) light. If this appears contradictory, paradoxical, indeterminate, that is probably because America is the first, and definitely most singular, expression of the "quantum idea" politically realized.
Precipitated by the (symbolically) cataclysmic events of 9/11, by waves of panic fear and calls for redemptive violence unleashed by this sudden dissolution, this breaching, of the boundaries of the sovereign body politic, a warp hole has opened up in the spacetime fabric of American empire linking two singularities — religious fundamentalism and cybernetized global militarism — into what quantum physicists call a "common world-line." Literally, the psychic shock of 9/11 — aided and abetted by a neoconservative regime with a preemptive plan of strategic military action already in place — ripped wide open the unitary spacetime fabric of the American mind, providing for a momentous fusion of two seemingly opposite ideas — technological futurism and religious prophecy — which, until that moment, had maintained their solitude according to the rituals of modernity. Instantly, the vengeance-seeking energies of the (religious) past poured through the psychic fissure of 9/11 to take flesh in the materiality of cybernetic warfare and crusading empire-consciousness.
We all know the enlightenment fable of the supposed death of god. But that story, the Nietzschean myth of the death of the sacred in our (enlightenment) minds and with it the supposed triumph of the rights of reason over religious sectarianism, is, it must be admitted, increasingly specific to the particularities of European late modernist experience. Like Hegel’s vision of the owl of Minerva which takes flight at dusk, the God of the New Testament may have died in European consciousness in the age of progress precisely because a new incarnation of God, the God of the Old Testament, fusing a crusading politics of redemptive violence and a domestic tutelary of panic insecurity, was being born by way of the American political covenant.
The second coming of god then as the real politics of American empire: a fateful meeting of the ancient prophecies of the Old Testament with full-spectrum futurism of cyber-warfare. That’s Born Again Ideology, and this time, the rulers of the American covenant intend to get it right, far right, with a style of political action — an unyielding politics based on preemptive action, a politics of hand to mouth existence, constant military interventions, ceaselessly stirring up turbulence, mediaprovocations intended to provoke panic fear among the domestic population for which redemptive violence is the only recourse — a style of political action which, with its scapegoating and appeals to intolerant, charismatic leadership is hauntingly reminiscent of what Leo Lowenthal, the Frankfurt School theorist writing in exile during the 1940s, described as the imminent strategy of authoritarian ideologies.
Rapture and the American Mind
To interpret the evangelical religious vision in American politics as only a useful addendum to America’s political/military ambitions is, I believe, to miss the point. The animating energy of the American imperial project is essentially religious, not political. The ruling American mythopoetic is eschatological. It is about ‘end times.’ It is animated by a strictly religious vision of ‘end times,’ spellbound by the imminence of the moment of ‘rapture,’ that moment when political crisis unleashes the violence, desolation and destruction of Armageddon prophesied by the Book of Revelation, enthusiastically reconstructionist, with the language of the Old Testament as its psychological horizon, the emotional horizon, of American imperialism. This is why it is of more than anecdotal interest that a recent Marine assault operation south of Baghdad was code-named "Operation Plymouth Rock," why American soldiers go into battle with camouflage bibles, and why the poignancy of that recent television image of Marines creating an impromptu baptismal fount out of spent artillery shells in order to be anointed in their terms "in the spirit of the Lord" during the fighting for Falluja.
When the first Pilgrims — the Massachusetts Bay Colony — crossed the waters of the Atlantic Ocean in the 17th century, their historical self-consciousness was truly ancient, not modern; informed less by the constraints of economic necessity than by biblical scripture: Matthew 5:14 to be exact, which provided the scriptural basis for John Winthrop’s famous shipboard declaration of the Mayflower Compact during that ‘great migration’ wherein he spoke of the colony’s collective destiny as the creation of a ‘City upon a Hill.’ These were a people of a biblical migration whose psycho-geography was a fourth-order simulacrum: a virtual symbolic reality which had no reality referent other than its own closed scriptural tautology — literally a universal sign populated most deeply with the voices of Daniel and Matthew, the seven-headed beasts of the Book of Revelation and the four beasts rising from the ocean of Daniel.
Listen anew to the Mayflower Compact, this early rhetoric of empire which is literally burned into American governing political rhetoric, from Daniel Webster’s reinvocation of the spirit of Puritanism as the essence of the American "Moral Republic" on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the "first encounter" at Plymouth Rock,[2] to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech to the political rhetoric of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, father and son and probably the next son too.
For we must Consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our god in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world, we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of god all profess for God’s sake; we shall shame the faces of many of god’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into Curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whether we are going.[3]
Not just the yearning to be a City Upon a Hill, but something else too, something little remarked in the inspiring glow surrounding the phrase a "City Upon a Hill." Consider again that ominous sentence: "If we deal falsely with our god…we shall be made a story and a byword through the world" — a fear of failure, an imminent self-doubt, a sub-text of potential shame and evil and potential curses.
There are two Americas present in the rhetoric of the Mayflower Compact: the much-remarked utopia of the rise of the American Republic, but also the hard-scrabble, bible-belt, unforgiving psychological territory of the fall — a feared world of shame and curses, an apocalyptic vision of desolation accompanying the withdrawal of God from this "good land." With this, the familiar story of the American Eden — America as a religious covenant signified by the image of itself as a "City Upon as Hill" — flips in the first instance into the cruel, imaginary country of the American Gothic. Tainted from the very first moment of its articulation with just the barest hint of panic insecurity, the political rhetoric surrounding America as a "City Upon a Hill" has an undetectable crack just beneath its psychic surface, namely, an imminent fear of the catastrophe awaiting a "chosen people" unfaithful to the terms of the religious covenant.
Consequently, even before the Puritans came out of the sea at Plymouth Rock, the American political code was firmly set in place. This would be a political culture dialectically bound by the rhythms and tensions of the master codes of the rise and fall, redemptive violence and panic insecurity, spasms of the "war spirit" and inertia tinged by a melancholic sense of fatalism.[4] But if this is the case, isn’t the story of the American covenant a continuation of the much older story of the rise and fall of cosmological experience? Doesn’t the Puritan invocation of the Mayflower Compact signify that the real historical project of America would rise and fall with the adequacy of its response to the problem of salvation? In this case, the resurgence of faith-based politics in the 21st century would represent less a moment of rupture with America’s self-conception as a secular technoculture driven by the speed of business than a faithful return to the generative political problematic underlying the American dream — the more ancient dream of the desire for salvation leavened by fear of banishment. And if the United States has never managed to escape its genealogical roots in the salvation myths of cosmology, this would indicate that its political future may well unfold in accordance with the more enduring metaphysics of cosmological experience, mediated through the specificities of contemporary American culture: its ontology (salvational), its epistemology (faith-based), its political organization (theocratic), its aesthetic (the "culture of life"). In current American political vernacular, issues of globalization and its consequences for a multinational world are eclipsed by the specter of cosmology.
Curiously, the United States, this self-proclaimed, immensely confident spearhead of technological modernity supposedly born, as the Canadian philosopher George Grant said, in the age of progress, has its mythic roots in a form of consciousness that is biblical, intensely spiritual, disciplined, given over in the first instance to frugality, moral uprightness, disciplined labor, and later to all the excesses of redemptive violence and panic insecurity, consumer ecstasy and bouts of economic over-indebtedness. Perhaps like Foucault’s theorization of the death of representation in Ceci n’est pas unepipe, the Puritan Pilgrims never really crossed the Atlantic. Perhaps in their minds, they were always one with the children of Israel fleeing the evil Pharaoh: not the Egyptian Pharaoh, but the royalist restoration in England and with it the collapse of the Anglican Church into the apostasy of ceremony and the reinstallation of religious hierarchy. These were refugees from Babylon intent on reenacting in the New World what the historian, Barbara Tuchman, has described as the essence of English Cromwellian religious enthusiasm — the power of the "bible and sword".[5] What came ashore at Plymouth Rock was, I believe, the premonitory shadow of the "last man" of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra — a fully armed spirit of Nietzschean ressentiment: an exiled religious community fleeing persecution in England and indifference in Holland, separatist, infused with the crusading spirit of the religiously elect, and most of all sexually perverse in its relationship to the body. The founding of America never really was (exclusively) about capitalist political economy, but about libidinal religious economy: an obsessive, disciplinarian attitude to the body which read Old Testament phantasmagoria into the body’s desire, aggressively policing the bodies of women, parishioners, indigenous people. Separatist, resentful, hardened in the bitter anvil of European religious struggles, filled with the spirit of the spiritually elect, obsessed to the point of sexual perversity with suppressing the body’s libido, the Puritans came ashore as an eschatology — a hard, cold vision of end times — just waiting its chance for full historical expression.
Now much has been made of the capitalist origins of the American experiment, but less so of the origins of American exceptionalism in the psycho-geography of the Old Testament. The very terms which trace the horizon of the so-called American dream — the ‘American covenant,’ ‘City Upon the Hill’ — indicate that governing American rhetoric is steeped in the ancient binaries of the Old Testament. Everything else is, I believe, at present derivative: blasted away in the contemporary fundamentalist turn to that primitive vision of the spirit of Puritan nihilism which came out of the sea in Plymouth Bay. George W. Bush’s appeal for the "expansion of freedom in all the world" is the emblematic rhetoric of missionary consciousness, just as much as the "culture of life" movement awakens in the American mind a Puritan habit of mind which is intolerant and disciplinarian in equal measure.
It is as if for one brief historical moment which has now been effectively eclipsed, the light of political reason, hard won from religious persecution and the exhaustion of Europe’s unending religious wars, dims again as the apocalyptic language of religious eschatology asserts itself anew. Thought from a critical, liberal perspective, the Puritan tradition represents that continuous, but episodic moment, in the American mind wherein the forces of reaction break out from the silence of many hearts fueled by ressentiment into the public passions of zealotry and scapegoating — witness the deep continuity of America’s historical experience of "culture of backlash" politics — the ideological specter of McCarthyism, the politics of race-baiting, union-baiting, sex-baiting, or the recent anti-terrorist campaigns codified into law by the US Patriot Act. Understood from the liberal side of the dialectic of reason, this may well be the case, but in terms of diagnosing the genealogy of the politics of American empire, I do not believe this to be an adequate theorization of the times in which we live.
We should listen anew, listen intently, to what the Puritans had to say, for theirs is, I believe, the foundational creed of contemporary American politics. Not in its specifics — their calls for frugality and self-discipline and bodily sequestration have disappeared under the surface of consumer capitalism and the society of the spectacle. Today, Nietzsche’s "last man" runs on digital empty: electronically interfaced by iPods, IM, and consumer prosthetics; hooked on porn, soaps, cosmetic surgery, and Fox TV; bunkered down in front of big-screen TV, surround sound pumped up full; silently fascinated by media reports of terrorists hunted down, captured, and imprisoned, perhaps tortured; and morally gratified with scenes of military violence visited upon an always accidental enemy.
But for all of this, the founding codes run deep: the spirit of Puritanism has not disappeared. Provoked by the classic psychic symptoms of Nietzschean ressentiment — "someone has to pay for my feeling ill" — the spirit of Puritanism may even have intensified. The rhetoric of exceptionalism — America as a City upon a Hill, bonded in the beginning as in the present with a predestined religious covenant with God — is the essence of American political self-consciousness. Call it what you will — the American Dream, the Founding Covenant, the "Redemptive Empire" — this is an animating rhetoric of moral exceptionalism which if it does provide (faithful in advance to the later political theories of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben)[6] a justification for the moral rightness of the cold power of the executive imperial state in determining who is and is not subject to the language of the exception, this should not distract our vision from the essentially religious nature of the American calling, nor from its uniqueness in linking together in the experiment of a "Moral Republic" an essentially Old Testament version of Christianity with a New Republican version of neo-conservative politics. Appeals now for faith-based politics, faith-based public policy, faith-based governance, commerce, science, and education do not represent something strikingly new in American political discourse, but constitute a return to an original unity of essentially missionary discourses — science and religious belief, governance and faith — which is the very essence of the new Covenant that is America. In American discourse, there are no real opposites, only clashing patterns in creative tension.
With the re-election of George W. Bush, the Puritan vision of America as a City Upon a Hill finds its articulation in a renewed interest in the language of a morally recharged, historically projective, militarily crusading Christianity. For example, in the American (electronic) homeland, theological visions of "Reconstructionist Christianity"[7] suddenly proliferate with endless salvational spin-offs, from specific religious theorizations of "theonomy"[8] and "denominationalism"[9] to the apocalyptic vision of the Left Behind armaggedon. Politicians, most of all, get into the (theological) act. Literally. With Pat Robertson of the 700 Club, President Bush is said to be a self-proclaimed ‘premillenial dispensionalist.‘[10] As opposed to other warring camps in what is described as "Reconstructionist Christiantity," (reconstructionist because it believes in the power of Christian belief and action to dramatically transform both personal identity and the course of history itself by imposing the biblical strictures of the Old Testament upon American society) President Bush is held to believe that the moment of Rapture — the 2nd advent of Christ will be brought about by a certain constellation of political events prophesied in the Old Testament, most famously the reunification of Israel and the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon on the Temple Mount. In combination with his closest White House advisors, he is held to affirm his unique executive historical position to realize in present-time the long-prophesied history of the 2nd advent. President Bush is, in fact, viewed by some Born Again Christians as God’s chosen sign of the elect, the long-anticipated sign of the coming of moment of Rapture, with its prophesied division of the transcendent Christian elect from the vast multitude that will be "left behind." The psychosis of these new pagans occupies the highest offices of the politics of empire.
Which is why, I believe, in the present circumstance there can be so little public protest at the suppression of traditional constitutional guarantees of civil rights in favor of faith-based politics and disciplinary power. With Born Again Ideology, the secular rhetoric of American exceptionalism has been disappeared as something superfluous to the essentially religious essence of the American mind. Here, the Kantian project of universal freedom is displaced in American political discourse by a vision of salvation which, refusing to express itself in strictly religious terms, merges perfectly with the political vocabulary necessary to the extension of empire.
If it be objected that this is a temporary phenomenon, I would note that the spirit of Rapture has always been the enduring song of the American homeland. Call it what you will — the steely belief of the original Puritans that they were less founders of a new political colony than a moment of redemptive renewal, a reinvocation in the wilderness, of an ancient religious compact (America literally as the new Jerusalem); evangelical revivalism in the backwoods religious tents of 18th and 19th century America; or those appeals to empire from the litany of Manifest Destiny to contemporary visions of Redemptive Empire — America has always been an essentially religious cosmology, wrapped in the shell of technology. Consequently, could it be that in the contemporary political juncture, American exceptionalism is less understandable in terms of traditional political imperialism than a violent effort to breed the objective worldwide crisis necessary to biblical revelation, to the moment ofrapture?
Vampire Puritans
Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant; and the stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation; its very dust is shared as a relic.
– Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America
In his brilliant study of American classical philosophy as a moral quest, The Wilderness and the City,[11] the political theorist, Michael A. Weinstein, proposed this discerning thesis about the foundational logic of American society. For Weinstein, the American mind has always oscillated between two extremes — between the "war spirit" and spirit of "acedia." Here, American exceptionalism is rooted in classically split consciousness veering between a raging "war spirit" (which, as de Toqueville noted set out to conquer the continental wilderness with a bible in one hand and an axe in the other); and panic fear (tempered by melancholic self-doubt) concerning the imminent dissolution of the boundaries of the self. Exploring the fundamental tension between American naturalists — John Dewey and George Santayana — and American vitalists — Josiah Royce and C.S. Peirce — with William James’ will to pragmatism as their philosophical mediation, Weinstein asks whether the essence of American experience is not an ontology of "hatred of existence" — covered up by aggressive displays of a veneer of frenzied activism over the reality of panic fear. As Weinstein states:
The challenge for the modern spirit today is to pass through Nietzsche’s trial of world-sickness. American culture, which is the last outpost of Western individualism, has evaded Nietzsche’s insight into the hatred for their own existence when the veils of piety have been lifted from their awareness. Among the American classical philosophers only William James came close to the Nietzschean phenomenology of the spirit, but he drew back in horror from reflection of his panic fear and chose to stimulate in other people a will to believe.[12]
The gravest of ills today is the massive aggregation of the weak into organized complexes that trample on the disorganized weak…There is a near universal sense of injury in America today, a will on the part of many to "get even." This sense of declining life, as Nietzsche’s analysis predicts, a bitterness that is often overt but that even more frequently hides a brittle piety.[13]
Reflecting upon Weinstein’s understanding of the moral basis of American exceptionalism as "brittle piety" and "hatred of existence," could it be that the Puritans of the Mayflower Compact with their intense self-consciousness as Old Testament prophets, engaged in their own terms in a "Great Migration" across the waters of the new Red Sea — the Atlantic — fleeing an evil Pharaoh (the royalist restoration in England) brought to the shores of Plymouth Rock something very different, more chilling in its implications for its vision of "end times?" Before the "bitterness" and "brittle piety" that have come to typify Nietzsche’s last man in the contemporary age of "declining life," I wonder if the Mayflower Compact was not the language of vampire-speak, spirit possession, a strange extra-terrestrial, extra-historical, extra-juridical language of the Old Testament, steeped in strong emotions of exile, resentment, vengeance, and optimism. Did the Puritans cross the Atlantic Ocean or the Red Sea? What was the Great Migration? Did they ever really settle America the land, or was America for them always something intermediary, spectral, a material instrument, a Great Migration, on the way to a final homecoming with the righteous god. With the Puritans, are not we suddenly time-warped to the psycho-geography of strange aliens?
We do know this. Social theorists such as Max Weber might later speak of the convenient convergence of Puritan habits of work — self-discipline, frugality, hard work — with the moral qualities necessary to support capitalism as a historical project, once liberated from the ethical anchor of religious worship. This is most certainly the religio-capitalist territory of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. However, with the advantage of 21st century cultural hindsight, perhaps we can now add a small, but important, vampire modification to Weber’s famous thesis. Could it be that American capitalism is a direct extension of an earlier religious impulse, namely the double necessity of first making of everything a great migration (what Nietzsche would later call a "crossing-over," a "gamble," a passage over the "abyss"); and a will to nihilation energized by the ‘hatred of existence’ which was the essence of Puritan psycho-geography — hatred of the body, hatred of nature, hatred of Europe, hatred of the reinstallation of Catholic ceremonial rituals in Anglicanism, hatred of life itself. Long before the post-structural reflections of Barthes, Derrida, Irigaray and Lyotard, the Puritans of the Mayflower Compact were the first semioticians of American experience, prophetic embodiment of what is meant by a society of the "universal sign." The collective identity of Puritanism was so fused, closed, self-reinforcing, tautological, so circular in its symbolic exchange, so sexually perverted in its disciplinary obsessions, so fetishistic and cosmological that it could have only one possible result — expand to fill the fabric of spacetime, or perish from this earth. In the imaginary of Puritan eschatology, there is to be discovered the fundamental grammar of the American way — either succeed in the will to empire, whether the sacred empire defined by the religious compact or the "Redemptive Empire" of decidedly more recent imperialist ambitions; or suffer the catastrophe of vanishing from the face of the earth. No mediation is possible between redemptive violence and panic fear. In Puritan futurism, America would either subordinate the recalcitrant matter of earthly space and bodily flesh to the eschatological language of end times or it would disappear.
Indeed, it was with good evangelical conscience that Puritan morality justified the extermination of indigenous peoples and the appropriation of their ancestral lands. As self-proclaimed founders of the New Jerusalem, Puritans established what would quickly become the American colonial pattern of demonizing indigenous peoples as radical negation itself — nothingness — before relieving them, first of their territories, then of their lives. While the Wampanoag Nation[14] in Massachusetts was the first victim of the Puritan crusade, what might be called the Puritan model would soon be applied with clinical savagery by the American military against all indigenous inhabitants of Turtle Island. Ironically, redemptive violence and panic fear may have bred that most European of all nihilisms — Blake’s "monstrous consciousness" — in the Puritan mind and heart. With the Puritans, what Nietzsche would later diagnose as the distinctly European disease — "Man" — crossed the Atlantic to take its revenge on the New Canaan of the Americas. On that day in 1620 when the Puritan spirit rose from the sea at Plymouth Rock, something very ancient in the story of human rage, something very bitter, recalcitrant and viral, just aching for revenge, forced itself upon the unsuspecting peoples, animals and land of Turtle Island. Beyond their specific religious cosmology, Puritans were also, I would claim, the unwitting carriers of an important particle of European metaphysics — the spirit of vengeance-seeking nihilism — which, in the crusading, salvational language of evangelical missionary consciousness, they injected directly into "this good land" of America.
Consequently, John Winthrop’s vision of America as a "City upon a Hill" may well be viewed as comprising the very essence of the American dialectic — a metaphysics of the war spirit and panic insecurity — conquer or perish. Here at last was a migrant people in flight willing to stake their existence on a metaphysical gesture — the spirit of the Puritan vampire — who were not European, decidedly not wholly human, never feudal nor modernist, strangely posthuman perhaps. Similar to Augustine’s Confessions in the garden at Cassiacium where the will to believe finally fused the Christian trinity of will, emotion and intellect in the flesh of his own subjectivity, the Puritan confession has burned its way into the American personality: life itself as a great migration — a "going across" the natural body to the biogenetic body, but also crossing the bodies of economy, nature, society, politics, these libidinal territories of an expanding empire, in pursuit of the saving grace of redemptive violence. What came out of the ocean at Plymouth Rock was a psychic precursor of faith-based American political culture: a biblical spirit infused with feelings of discipline and revenge, as implacable in its hatred of existence as it was motivated by yearning for salvation from a sinful world.
It is, I believe, the primal spirit of the Puritan Vampire — redemptive, violent, extra-terrestrial in its spiritual ambitions, steeped in the blood sacrifices of the Old Testament — it this spirit of the Puritan Vampire which issues again through the political rhetoric of faith-based politics. Here, "brittle piety" is swept away by feverish faith. Individual "bitterness" is collectively masked as the "culture of life" movement. "Hatred of existence" is transformed into the missionary consciousness of the "redemptive empire." Signs of the Puritan vampire are legion: from fundamentalist faith in the vision of "premillenial dispensationalism" to the new Covenant of the Mayflower Compact; from the current language of crusading imperialism to Puritan beliefs in the necessary application of redemptive violence against the body, particularly the unruly bodies of outlaw women, witches, and sorcerers. Signs of the ecstatic spirit of disciplinary Puritanism are everywhere: from the military’s obsession with sexual perversion — Abu Ghreib rethought now in the words of a Texas defense lawyer as normal "cheerleader sports" to an almost fetishistic obsession among the "organized weak" with purifying "traditional marriage" of the perceived "social contamination" of gay and lesbian love. From delirious White House ecstasy with visions of Armageddon to the Puritan rapture of the New Protestant Ethic, public life embodies a sense of time curving backwards, with the spirit of the Puritan Vampire as the future of faith-based politics.
Here is the moral essence of American triumphalism. Here is why American empire, which may be objectively — strategically — already in rapid decline from economic over-indebtedness, military over-expansion, media hubris, could also only be in its infancy. Nietzsche once remarked of that strange creature we call a human being that for all its resentment, cruelty, paranoia and fetishes, for all of its panic fear of the inner abyss and desperate struggles against the cage of its own moral conscience, it was a will, it was a going forth, and "nothing besides." Stopping for a moment from their game of wagers, the pantheon of gods took notice that with this birth of the "human, all-too-human," something fundamentally new was happening. But then Nietzsche was always the first philosopher of the American mind. If he could prophecize that he would only be understood posthumously, perhaps it was because his reflections on the "last man" as the final outcome of the will to power would only really take hold in the shadows of American empire in the 21st century. Equally, Nietzsche’s philosophical twin, Rene Girard, could write so eloquently and truthfully about "sacrificial violence"[15] because he too sensed the advent of the desolation of redemptive violence with its cruel episodes of "scapegoating" and "sacrificial violence" as the "end times" of Armageddon. Strangers in their own times, migrants of the darkness of intellectual imagination, Nietzche’s "last man" and Girard’s "sacrificial violence" remain strong psychic pulsars, pointing the way to the social apocalypse of Puritan eschatology once resurrected in the form of faith-based politics.
[4] For a brilliant account of the migration of American political thought between the war spirit and acedia, see Michael A. Weinstein, The Wilderness and the City: American Classical Philosophy as a Moral Quest, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.
[5] Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour, New York: Ballantine Books, 1984.
[6] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, translation, introduction and notes by George Schwab, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press,1976. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. By Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998.
[7] For an excellent account of the vision of Reconstructionist Christianity, see: Robert Parsons, "Christian Reconstruction: A Call for Reformation and Renewal." Available online at: http://atheism.about.com/od/reconstructionist/
[11] Ibid; Weinstein, The Wilderness and the City. For a compelling account of American classical philosophy as a continuing response to the "death of God in the West," see Chapter 7, "American Philosophy and Modern Individualism," (pp.129-156) where Weinstein argues that American thought, substituting the collective ideal of ‘society’ for God, is expressed in "successive appeals for deliverance to the community and … parallel critiques of the war-spirit," (p. 136).
[14] For a contemporary account of the Wampanoag struggle which continues to this day and which most recently involved a majority US court decision that the Wampanoag were "not a tribe" for land repatriation purposes see: http://www.inphone.com/seahome.html
[15] For his theorization of sacrificial violence under the sign of the "scapegoat," see: Rene Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. By Yvonne Freccaro, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
This paper seeks to explore the virtual states that may be represented through educational practice. On one side of the equation, these states are part of a system philosophy that introduces technology into the learning process, and therefore creates mediated spaces through which we may develop our mental capacities (virtualities). On the other lies our individual proclivity to virtualise or imagine states that may relate to each other in complex, abstract manners (virtual reality). I have turned to the work of Gilles Deleuze in order to pick our way through these educational possibilities. His ideas offer a complex understanding of virtual states, and one which may be applied to the ambiguous presentations of virtual reality as a uniform and trouble free educational resource.
II. Multiplicities and virtual learning
The vital link between virtual reality and learning lies in the deployment of multiplicities because multiplicities may be treated as abstract entities tied to reality through the agent transforming knowledge. The Deleuzian notion of multiplicities responds to hybrid reasoning that could neither be said to be canonical nor entirely new. For example, he uses Nietzschean plurality to focus the way in which multiplicities act through the duration of the unconscious. The notion of Nietzschean force is never singular; it is always a differential between other forces.[1] This qualifies Nietzsche’s interest in the ways in which schemes or perspectives "interact, attract, convince, corrupt, and incorporate one another."[2] It could also be said that there is no one perspective that is incommensurate to all others (e.g. God, meta-truth or ‘science’), but all perspectives actively participate in a coagulation of truth. Nietzsche critiqued the unitary notion of the will as a repudiation of any will (against Schopenhauer); and because of this we are left with a field of willing, where the differential between forces defines systems of domination (will over will) and ultimately the hierarchy and value that arise out of complex field dynamics. Deleuze used this plurality to designate the active and creative multiplicities of time that surge and pulse to inhuman, rhythmic forces. He also used the mathematical distinction between actual and virtual multiplicities.[3]
Actual multiplicities are numerical and discontinuous, virtual multiplicities are continuous and qualitative (this corresponds to his notion of simplicity). Deleuze terms the problematic at this point as being: "What is the multiplicity that is peculiar to time?"[4] Deleuze’s solution to this problematic is the notion of virtual multiplicities that express the coexistence of simultaneous fluxes. The coexistence of simultaneous fluxes divides into elements that differ in kind; these elements also only exist insofar as the division itself is effectively carried out. This is because, if our consciousness terminates the division at a given point, there also terminates divisibility.[5] To illustrate this point, we may encounter the scene of sitting on the bank of a river; in this situation we have the flowing of the river, the gliding of a boat and the flight of a bird, "the uninterrupted murmur of our deep life, are for us three different things or a single one, at will."[6] Each element of this characteristically pointillist scene, is a continuous multiplicity or a flux; these fluxes are simultaneous and therefore coexist in a kind of ‘inner time’, which may be merged into one or differentiated as the dream-like backdrop through which the elements taking their movement-places are subsumed in the duration of the scene.
Updating this tranquil picture further and into the clashing emergence of virtual reality; we may experience the continuity of lived time through electronic fluxes shaped as grand prix cars, we may find fantastic monsters hidden in their labyrinths, we may engage in combat with armed and dangerous opponents. These multiplicities are an expression of force, yet this force is not unitary, it is action contained within a field of forces. The action of the virtual demonstrates the ability to extract the particulars of the flux from other virtual elements, and therefore to manipulate the flux with respect to the shifting electronic environments within which multiple flux relations are present. We bring to the virtually constructed environment this ability to differentiate between elements; and through this skill we experience duration, which the process of differentiation can fall back into as the basic creative process or intuition that defines learning in virtual reality; and extends the virtual from the digitally repressive or recursive. Virtual reality is an enhanced form of the simultaneity of fluxes; as the effect of mediation through electronic perception, is to increase and emphasise the link with consciousness in duration, as action in virtual reality is time based rather than spatial and discontinuous. Furthermore, the perceived time in virtual reality is more clearly conceived time,[7] in the sense that we are not experiencing natural perception in virtual reality; as the environment is entirely constructed, and that movement within this environment depends upon the analysis of coexistent electronic data.
In line with postmodern theories of education, the critique of natural perception that we derive from Deleuze, undermines models of perception that would reduce the activity and becoming of perception to a centred subject. This is parallel to and ready for the decentred subject that we find inhabiting the electronic worlds that are fuelling the imaginations of many young learners. Bergson writes that "to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intense life, and in the summing up of a very long history. To perceive means to immobilise."[8] It is a creative activity, that involves considerable expenditure (more than a singular perspective), and the focus of many minds. It is also an activity that brings to the fore Deleuze’s conception of memory. Deleuze’s thinking of time as duration is one in which the emphasis is on the virtual character of time, and in particular on time’s past which always grows without ceasing and which possesses an infinite capacity for novel re-invention. The memory is involved with this re-invention, as the reality of the past is a deep and productive unconscious that evolves automatically. The Deleuzian memory is not a process of representation, as the past is not directly shifted into the present, but it is implicated in the future through the past’s becoming. It is not a psychological faculty of recollection, as it cannot be switched on and off intermittently.[9] To summarise this conception, the memory could be said to be a system property; the memory is not necessarily attached to agency, but it belongs to duration and to the variable essence of things, which provided Deleuze with his complex ontological reading of time.
This complex ontological reading allowed Deleuze to posit the inner time of duration into the time of the universe. Rather than seeing this as an inherent contradiction in the schema of Deleuze, the extension of the notion of duration into the variability of things, provides a methodology where the multiplicities of time that are produced by the automatic accumulation of experience in the unconscious, may be seen to work pragmatically in the outside world. In the world of education, these time based multiplicities are providing planes of becoming that define the future of learning. Virtual reality is one such plane of change, and the duration of the time based learning that happens in virtual reality, is providing the multiplicities that are released through the educational processes of virtual reality in learning environments.
III. Virtual reality and postmodern knowledge
Expectations that we might achieve stable knowledge about learners in virtual reality are hereby realigned to follow the release of unconscious multiplicities (the molecular to utilise Deleuze’s term). This process takes the Deleuzian project of difference seriously; it is a philosophical enterprise which looks to open up areas of thought through hybrid transposition. In the field of learning through virtual reality, positive difference of the qualitative type that this project requires is an internal difference that is experienced via the duration of the electronic flux. Expression of this learning extends the difference into exteriority, where the electronic flux becomes inculcated with the environment (for example, as we find in the simulacra of Baudrillard). The effects of learning through virtual reality are felt throughout the educational system to the extent that the substance of learning (the curriculum) responds to the forces of virtual reality, and to the unconscious multiplicities that are released through the creative action of the élan vital. Simultaneous curriculum innovation, leads to the notion that all subjects of the curriculum may take part in parallel distributed computational models of becoming (connectionist), where virtual reality gives extra breadth to the interdisciplinary learning regimes that are possible (for example, the use of parallel computation in the determination of the origins of order in chaos by Stuart Kaufmann).[10] Yet the virtual is not a field of potentia, which is easily absorbed by the idealism of technological progress; but it is a complex crossing-point, which has the characteristics of actuality mixed up with the intense technological enhancement of a digital universe.
Virtual reality is in this sense perspectival, in that the virtual gives rise to the idea that linkage between subjects is increasingly relevant and easily achieved. It is an extension of what the mind can do, and, to this extent, it is a zone in which the advanced experimentation of the imagination can figure and refigure the most complicated problem that is placed in front of it. It removes the hindrance of the unified subject or agent; and provides a plane on which the radical rearrangement and application of process may proceed without adherence to the needs of transcendence or moral order, although these are still possible and not excluded. This happens because the perspectivism of virtual reality is a non-extended space, where the motion of thought may be placed without ties to linear text or mechanical replication that would diminish the power of immanent diversification to come up with novel productions. It could be seen to be a type of intense design studio, where technical knowledge may interplay with creative writing, or advanced imagistics may enhance the representations of history. As such, virtual reality is at the cutting edge of the technology industry; it is where the future is reinventing the past, and the past is reinvested as a stock of productive material. The question of value in time is set onto a different perspectival plane in virtual reality. The ways in which our understanding of the past and the future alters due to VR; it is a looking glass process for learning, it is a digital reinvestment of what may be productively used to expand the notion of learning on the zero digital curriculum plane.
IV. Abstract Machines: The nexus of the virtual
The creative and philosophical system for the virtual which we derive from Deleuze is accelerated and updated by the assertion that the virtual is a systemic or machine philosophy. This machine philosophy is working throughout society and creating planes of interaction where the action of the virtual is apparent. The learning process is one such plane, and it is one where the virtual produces lines of flight that are defining the directions of the virtual in complex yet mappable orders. This mapping process is structured by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a Thousand Plateaus, as responding to the function of abstract machines. These abstract machines are diagrammatic representations of the complexities of change in society, coexisting with the changes. They do not exist as Platonic forms of society, or teleological programmes for the shepherding of progress along set technologically mediated paths, but the abstract machines are simultaneous productions, existing as "singular and creative, here and now, real yet non-concrete, actual yet non-effectuated -that is why abstract machine are named and dated (the Einstein abstract machine, the Weber abstract machine, but also the Galileo, the Bach or the Beethoven). Not that they refer to people or to effectuating moments; on the contrary, it is the names and dates that refer to the singularities of the machines, and to what they effectuate."[11] The concrete assemblage (orders of convergence and divergence) that go to make up learning in virtual reality, are the parts that are abstracted into its singular machine, and the heterogeneous body that is the object of this section.
Pierre Lévy has set about the mapping of the concrete assemblage of the virtual in terms of the way in which the actual is being virtualised in contemporary society.[12] The technological processes that he approaches are apparent across the board in the collective intelligence that he designates as signifying our society, which pinpoints the movement towards the virtual as being a derivative of technological progressivism. This is the type of theory that allows and encourages a utopian functionalism regarding the introduction of virtual technology into the learning process; and therefore could be designated as being an uncritical appraisal of the virtues of the new technology. However, simultaneously, and perhaps because of such a uni-directional movement of this thought, there is an inevitable backlash of nihilism associated with the designation of the virtual as being the next stage in educational sophistication. This stage concedes that the virtual is to be placed into the processes of society as a kind of destiny of the real; the lineage of technology stretching back to the use of the first machines,[13] and the virtual being the latest and most monstrous of our shared creations. Simultaneous with this placement is the thought that we have been virtualising all along, and that the new technology is allowing us to ‘see’ our mental process:
Virtuality has absolutely nothing to do with its image as supplied by television. It does not refer to some false or imaginary world. On the contrary, virtualisation is the very dynamic of a shared world; it is that through which we share reality. Rather than circumscribing a realm of lies, the virtual is the mode of existence from which both truth and lies arise. There is no sense of truth or falsehood among ants, fish, or wolves; theirs is a world of tracks and bait. Animals do not think in terms of propositions. Truth and falsehood are inseparable from articulated utterance, and each utterance underlies a question. The act of questioning is accompanied by a strange mental tension, unknown to animals. This active hollow, this seminal void is the very essence of the virtual. I believe that each leap into a new mode of virtualisation, each enlargement of the field of problems, opens new spaces to truth and, consequently, falsehood. I am referring to logical truth, which depends on language and writing (two of the major instruments of virtualisation), but there are other, perhaps more essential, forms of truth as well: those expressed by poetry, art, religion, philosophy, science, technology, and, of course, the humble and vital truths each of us experiences in our daily life. Among the contemporary avenues of artistic exploration, one of the most interesting is the discovery and exploration of the new forms of truth that accompany, although obscurely, the dynamic of virtualisation.[14]
Lévy takes the view that virtualisation is to be addressed through art, and that the truths that are revealed through the exploration of virtualisation, will help us to come to terms with the peculiar and latest technological developments that he lists as being associated with contemporary virtualisation; including the virtual hyper-body.[15] Yet the processes of virtualisation in the assemblage that makes up the abstract machine of the virtual are not merely tied up with the act of questioning through art. They are not uniquely human. In fact, they are inhuman and historical. The humanist perspective that Lévy portrays, hides the way in which virtualisation happens to us as well as being an operational procedure of system management. Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus took the axiom of virtualisation and incorporated it into the fold of capitalist organisation. Pre-capitalist society over-coded the flows of the technical machines and cast them in such a way so that they could never achieve any independence (for example, the blacksmith or the astronomer).[16] Capitalist organisation decoded these flows, which resulted in a deterritorialisation of the flows which has allowed them to enter into automatic machines; this process is now controlled by computers. Traditional codes that limit and control social relations and production, such as kinship systems, class structure, religious beliefs, folk traditions, customs; are inevitably subverted by capitalist organisation, so that they may enter into its processing organism. The automatic machines which effect this processing have increasingly internalised the flows of code, until they have entered into a field of forces which depend on a science and technology, and an intellectual labour, distinct from the manual labour of the worker. The digital axiom of the virtual can be seen to be fed into the social axiom of capitalist organisation, which itself corresponds to the digital on and off of capitalist modes of production. The social axiom of capitalism organisationally determines the path of decoded flows, including the scientific and the technical.[17]
V. Virtual power and learning (schools as killing machines)
Michael W. Apple has indicated that educational mores are also being incorporated into the fold of capitalist organisation.[18] He is concerned by capitalist reproduction, and by the way in which the curriculum is subverted by the concerns of accumulation, legitimisation (of the state), and the modes of capitalist production in general. Schools are, according to this perspective, used by outside forces in order to reproduce the codes of the dominant classes in society at the expense of other less dominant classes. They are tools at the behest of "middle-managers, semi-autonomous employees, technicians, engineers, accountants, government employees,"[19] who are reproducing their majoritarian credentials through the legitimisation of the state in schools. Apple indicates that the emphasis on competency based education, systems management, career education, futurism (a code-word for manpower planning), national testing programmes and technical colleges in general, is the outcome of the decoding of traditional codes, and the processing of education in favour of capitalist production (and reproduction). Creative, singular, perspectival education can be seen to suffer as a result of this processing; the processing of the virtual through capitalism is, in this sense, a homogenising force that destroys individuality and is at odds with the self-determination of schools. The abstract machine of the virtual, does involve this tendency; but, in contrast to the theoretical approach of Apple, it does not respond to the notion of schools as sites of resistance. The process of reproduction of code happens across the board to the extent that the virtual forms a plane of consistency and this plane is able to be designated as existing (in schools, in the workplace). It is a historical, irreversible process, and homogeneous to the extent that desire (for its results and process) is generated in society. Learning in virtual reality (most clearly and quickly by children through games), may remain heterogeneous to the extent that we remain at the bottom-up end of its process (where children are learning), and do not veer and subsequently enforce the perspective of the plane of consistency, where learning in virtual reality decodes values and substitutes traditional codes for its own. From that side of the equation, the abstract machine of the virtual is a powerful political tool, irrevocably tied up with political/social/military concerns; as it gives the intensified subject individual models of mediation as ‘kits’ for learning on its own terms (where information and skills may be placed into the subject in an accelerated and intensified form).
As Apple indicates, virtual power works through schools via reproduction of its codes. The three segments of the capitalist reproduction process were joined by Deleuze and Guattari in a paraphrase of Marx. These segments define the three aspects of the immanence of reproduction. 1) The extraction of human surplus value, based on the differential relation between decoded flows of labour and production. 2) The extraction of machinic surplus value, based on flows of scientific and technical code. 3) The absorption and realisation of the two forms of surplus value by maximising the emission of both and injecting anti-production into the production apparatus – this is especially cogent in the time-tabling, curriculum and control mechanisms of schools. The capitalist process takes the analogue flows of functional human mechanisms, for example, education, and continually introduces discrete elements into their functioning, digitising the continuum of reproduction to constrain it beneath the immanent force of on and off – this is the top-down mechanism of social and governmental inspection. The introduction of discrete elements into the learning process, forms binary chains of coupled desiring-machines. These are series, which take the multiplicity of relations in society and subjects them to a recording plane, whereby the coupling may be understood, for example, a mouth as eating-machine or breathing-machine or speaking-machine, a school as a thinking-machine or a training-machine or a conditioning-machine. The coupling also makes the elements more likely to be analysed, processed, accelerated and set to work in the machinic functioning of capitalist society. It takes learning in virtual reality and subjects it to educational efficiency, making the abstract machine of the virtual more likely and able to be used as a killing machine; this is because educational efficiency derives power from the homogeneity of the process that can only expand through the will to dominate or extermination of the other. This, again, is the top down side of the learning process, which has at its ultimate goal a fully automated system that works in terms of the education of a technical elite expressing a unified will. Virtual reality is a vital component of this machine, and, as such, it is dealt with here in terms of education, where the process of learning has not sedimented into its inter-linked, functional parts. This polemic field is the battle for the process through which the toolkits for individuals to learn about their own potentia in VR are disseminated and understood.
The virtualisation of war that we are witnessing through the development of smart machines such as cruise missiles with long range guidance systems; is a direct result of the decoding of the practices of war, and their processing by computers. The studies of Daniel Pick or Manuel de Landa have shown how the theoreticians of war such as Clausewitz have been updated and uploaded into computer technology. Computer games do have an unhealthy predilection for war games, and learning in virtual reality already has this tendency written into its codes. Yet the transition from learning through the virtual into military hardware is not a necessary relationship. The heterogeneous end of the abstract machine of the virtual, at the base level of the individual learners in virtual reality; dissipates the desire for war into simulated and often fantastic scenarios that enact war situations. In contrast, the construction of highly technological killing machines necessitates the homogenisation of material resources and intellectual skill through the auspices of government and industry. The two processes are therefore disparate, and whilst sharing content, are separated by an immense material gulf. This gulf may be bridged by the construction of an abstract machine of the virtual that channels a smooth plane of material reinvestment from the seriousness of death to the fun of leisure. The immanence of capitalist reproduction works in this sense through the involvement with virtual value. The extraction of machinic surplus value through the parallel series that are formed as capitalism codes and over-codes hosts cultures and practises, devolves a plane where virtual value may be elicited. This is most prevalent in the technical language of the new machines, that, for example, are used in the writing of computer programmes to guide missiles. The reproduction of capitalism in schools produces the necessity for virtual value as it codes the practises and values of teachers and their interaction with their pupils. Capitalism in this sense interrupts the analogue relationship between communities of learners in the digital curriculum, and simultaneously produces singular instances of virtual value that are disparate from host communities. Contained in these singular instances that are analogue, yet teachable as digital in the digital curriculum, are the diagrammatic representations of abstract machines; which demonstrate the ways in which VR is immanent without being prone to reproduction. These are the most creative uses of VR (for example, cyberpunk, virtual art and the singular rave).
The field of immanence peculiar to capitalism also realises a technical language that corresponds to the generalised decoding of flows instead of referring, directly or indirectly, to despotic over-coding [20] (as would have been the case in pre-capitalist society). The electric flow is one such flow which enters into a relationship when conjoined with other flows, one defining content, and the other expression. Here the capitalist sign means nothing, it acts to deregulate the process, functioning within economic parameters as a medium for trans-coding and co-ordinating various components of the circuit of production, exchange, distribution and consumption. This is not capital qua capitalism, but the sign of capital qua capitalism, which floats in the flow of signs and symbols, is mixed up and designified just like all the others. The electric flow can be conjoined with flows of words, images, music or digital commands in the controlling technical machines (computers). The conjoining of flows is also meaningless, it merely channels the flows in different directions; unless the capitalist automata is scraped (this is capital qua capitalism), which is, as Deleuze and Guattari term it, the "schizophrenic point of desire."[21] This is a place of relativity where values become mixed up and trans-coded, so that we are unable to directly predict the outcomes of educational programmes; the learners begin to learn for themselves in virtual reality, to the extent that they become part of a fluidic system of coded flows. The capitalist sign (but not capital) does not sit upon this process as a despotic signifier, but enters into the learning process as a meaningless differentiator between technologically enabled subjects.
Deterritorialised flows of content and expression in capitalist production are in a state of conjunction or reciprocal precondition that constitutes binary figures as the ultimate units of both content and expression. This deterritorialisation is increasingly entering into a relationship with education through the use of computers and the media in the classroom. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, the computer is a machine for "instantaneous and generalised decoding."[22] Content and expression, like voice or writing are not necessary to data processing; the electric flow is not determinate as either content or expression. In terms of the digital and the virtual, the flow of signs of the new technical language machines, as Michel Serres wrote, correlate to production defined by information. This production is the immanence of capitalism in Anti-Oedipus; coexistent with virtual organisation, binary flows of capital, the assimilation of money into time or space or information. The production of information combines with the power to turn the machines on or off, or to relocate or to make the process more streamlined. However we understand it, computers are a central combinational element of capitalist organisation, and the process of data accumulation is a dispersed axiomatic to continued proliferation at all levels. The virtual is in this sense the accumulation of experiential information, and the irreversible distribution of memory into the global realisation of capitalist production through virtual labour. Educational institutes are irrevocably connected to this plane of immanence, and, unless they discover their own peculiar funding power; they shall become incorporated in this aspect of the abstract machine of the virtual.
At the beginning of One Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari point out that many problems in information theory and computer science still cling to the oldest modes of thought, in that they grant all power to a memory or central organ.[23] This is a problem which has been widely discussed, for example, Daniel C. Dennett said that, "conscious human minds are more-or-less serial virtual machines implemented – inefficiently – on the parallel hardware that evolution has provided for us."[24] As computer technology has evolved, the explicative power that we have at hand to understand the workings of the mind has also progressed. The mind itself is now explained through the use of virtual technology; the virtual machine doing the work of thought. Deleuze and Guattari used the theory of Pierre Rosentiehl and Jean Petitot to note that accepting hierarchical structures with a central organ, gives arborescent structures privileged status. In these systems, the channels of transmission are pre-established, and pre-exist the individual who is integrated into it at a certain place. 1000 Plateaus could be seen to be an attempt to destratify the hierarchical structures in favour of geologically arranged strata, without recourse to central implementation; whether in linguistics or social studies or philosophy or education. Information theory as they saw it, misunderstands the working of biunivocalisation and binarization, (which is not just an increase in calculating skills); due to the deployment of a wall or a screen, the installation of a central computing hole, without which no message is discernible and no choice is decidable.[25] Virtualisation also works in 1000 Plateaus via the development of strata into epistrata and parastrata, and through the understanding that the abstract machine of the virtual is working as a distributed system on a plane of consistency. Rather than the distinction between the virtual and the material brain; we encounter planes of becoming that cross-over in every direction, so that the complex understanding that we have of the brain’s functioning, are not localised or isolated inside the head, but form conglomerate and molecular movements (swarms), that enable hybrid and cross-curricular expression; this defines the productive and unpredictable edge of the digital curriculum, which is in practise productive of digitally aesthetic packs.
VI. Education and the plane of media change
Deleuze invented many of his concepts which he used in 1000 Plateaus with a glance over his shoulder at the history of philosophy. Ronald Bogue noted, for example, that the Spinozist concepts of implication and explication, envelopment and development are used to inform and explain the abstract machine.[26] This is so that the abstract machine develops itself in respect to being absolutely deterritorialised matter, and wherever it is implicated in a process, it is the most fluid aspect of that process, and it is at the point of being the most responsive to the multiple. The problem of the abstract machine, in these terms, is not its location or invention, but its expression throughout a system so that it is not stratified or identified in propositional terms without a complex connectivity being unveiled though its usage. The abstract machine of Deleuze and Guattari therefore develops itself on a plane of consistency, whose continua, emissions and conjunctions it constructs; it also remains enveloped in a stratum whose unity of composition and force of attraction or prehension it defines.[27] Deleuze and Guattari also refigured the change in underlying substance of Aristotle, so that their abstract machine operates via "matter and not substance; via function and not form."[28] The abstract machine is defined by its matter and by the configuration of its plane of consistency. Through learning in virtual reality, the plane of consistency that is developed by the users of the new technology is coexistent with the realisation that virtual technology has an abundance of material content and expression. This is not the process of limitation of the universe into pixels, but the enhancement of the multiplicity of thought, and the understanding that desire for this new technology is not an elimination of previously established modes of development, but the unfolding of new dimensions, and a technologically derived interactive intellect (the global media).
The development of strata into epistrata and parastrata does not occur through simple induction. Anthony Wilden remarked that all digitalisation generates paradox at some level in the system.[29] Deleuze and Guattari spoke of a "technological lineage",[30] which converges and makes transductions that resonate between the molecular and the molar, independent of order and magnitude. The functional efficacy of any interior substances, which are independent of distance, are resonated by the introduction of virtualisation for the benefit of proliferation and even the interlacing of forms, which is in itself independent of code. Abstract machines work wherever we find a "constellation of singularities",[31] which prolong operations that converge and that make operations converge upon one or several assignable traits of expression. This is why the introduction of computers into the classroom may be seen to be one of the most significant steps in postmodern, media-based education. The PC is a multi-task device that expands and transforms the learning process. Pupils are increasingly able to make their own decisions as to the best method for progression, and the number of outcomes that we might expect to any project is radically expanded by the introduction of digital manipulation. The convergence of music making facilities, the digital rearrangement of image and video, the manipulation and presentation of different types of text, the resources on the internet, the expression of videoconferencing; all present a constellation of the virtual that communicates through the abstract machine of learning through virtual reality and the media. The interface between virtualisation and analogue process is not oppositional. Virtualisation develops strata, which resonate analogue communication systems by increasing their complexity and certain dynamic structurations (for example videoconferencing). Propagation and diffusion mark these lines of innovation, and they are bends in the technological lineage, where digital coding has increased and as a result expanded the flexibility of manual forms or traits, for example, the manipulation of photographs and video images in the media.
The plane of consistency, beneath contents and expressions, emits and combines particle-signs that set the most asignifying of signs to functioning in the most deterritorialized of particles.[32] The plane transforms indexes into absolute values. That is to say, the abolition of metaphor is importantly located on the plane; everything that it consists of is real (or the mediated hyper-real). For example, "Eros never grew a beard."[33] All differences exist only by means and in relation to the strata. In terms of education, the curriculum is irrevocably altered by the reality of the abstract machine that works through it in the use of the virtual. The cultural, historical, scientific, poetic, philosophical, religious or linguistic objects that are studied in the name of the curriculum are placed closer together; making it more difficult to extract singular skills from their usage, but also indicating that their study is more open to emulsified and combinatory intellect. For example, palaeontology may be studied in virtual reality as a dynamic and exciting way in which the reality of dinosaurs and knowledge about their actual environment may be presented to the learners. Knowledge about dinosaurs would be communicated, and interest in the particulars of the dinosaurs galvanised, as the learners would be more likely to ask penetrating questions about lifestyle and habit from the interactive experience that they would gain from the learning procedure. However, the learning in virtual reality might also make the learner keen to know how the effects in virtual reality have been created, leading to an interest in the media or film or video production.
A further example that intersects the worlds of philosophy, literature and religion is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, which could be said to be a pervasive myth and allegorical tale at the zenith of modernity. This demonstrates its function as a complex abstract machine even before it is subjected to the abstract machine of the virtual learner. Abstract machines are inseparably linked because they are "political, economic, scientific, artistic, ecological, perceptive, affective, active, thinking, physical and semiotic."[34] Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is published as a book, referenced through the internet, discussed on late night TV, inspires music, is disregarded then rediscovered. Abstract machines also operate by convergence, which is called the mechanosphere. In terms of virtualisation, the binary abstract machine of the computer accelerates convergence; it proliferates through console gaming and electronic music and erupts globally; this is the virtual technosphere or the media where any communicative possibility is permissible.
Notes —————
[1] Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche & Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, London: The Athlone Press, 1983, p. 6.
[2] Richardson, John. Nietzsche’s System, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 264.
[3] Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam,New York: Zone Books, 1991,pp. 79-80.
David R Cole is a lecturer in literacy and English Education at the University of Tasmania. He has worked as an international teacher in Argentina, Colombia, Egypt and England. He studied education, philosophy & literature at the University of Warwick, and was a collaborator at the Virtual Futures conferences, 1995 and 1996.
Our relation, even our critical, political relation to visual culture today should take into account [the various] complications [of the premise that vision is at the heart of Western thought]. They have nothing to do with one sense dominating the other, [but] rather, with another structure of general technoprosthetic virtual possibility — Jacques Derrida [1]
It is probably not without good reason that there exists, today, no mass of scholarship on the forms and functions of silent television. The very idea flies in the face not only of common sense but also of our accepted histories of television’s formation as a cultural and communicative technology. Notwithstanding the tendency to analyze it as an exemplary instance of visual culture, that is, television confronts us as an intractably "audio-visual medium," such that silent television appears, as Herbet Zettl insists, fundamentally unthinkable "from an information, as well as aesthetic, point of view." [2] Such an observation, routinely made in the name of registering the differences between television and cinema, recalls the principle, once sacred in media studies, of attending to the specificity of each medium. Thus silent television’s inconceivability stands, according to Michel Chion, in contrast with cinema, [3] whose "pre-history" as a silent medium is widely known and often studied.
What would it mean, then, to propose a history of an inconceivable phenomenon? And what would be the implications of such a history for understanding the complex of technologies, political-economic structures and cultural practices that we more regularly refer to as "television"? Insofar as its apparent impossibility is regularly tied to the medium’s defining characteristics, the inconceivability of silent television, as soon as it is identified as such, presents a challenge to any form of criticism that aspires to address the distinctness of television as a cultural form. For despite its apparent inconceivability, references to this unimaginable phenomenon have been made on a number of occasions — not least of all in the negations of it proposed by Zettl and by Chion — and so the unthinkability of silent television may turn out to be not so much fundamental as it is virtual. To pursue an unlikely history of a virtual impossibility — to write a history, not of silent television as such, but rather of the thought of its apparent im/plausibility — need not, therefore, be confined to an exploration of television’s most general features. In that regard, it is perhaps not irrelevant that the "impossible" thought of silent television should resurface at a time when television’s identity is being made over by the development of "new" media and by the related momentum of media and cultural "convergence," which are together presumed to give TV audiences the voice that broadcast television has historically denied them. When the question of television’s identity is thus already being asked (as it were) at the practical level of its "everyday" use, the foundations are in place to approach the history of "silent television" with an eye to the fact of television’s divergence — attending to the ways in which television diverges from "itself" as much as from the regularities that define our entrenched perceptions of other, related media. It is by way of the metonymic case of televisual silence, therefore, that the following discussion proposes to reflect on a complex of issues pertaining to the variable relations between television, sound, art and cultural participation.
SOUND
Straightforward negations of the phenomenon of silent television are ultimately premised on a simple and implicitly understood historical fact: in terms of its technical capabilities, broadcast television has always been an audio-visual medium. Modelled on existing radio broadcasting technologies, television from the time of its introduction as a public communications system has been conceived and operated as a means of transmitting images and sounds concurrently. Perhaps more significantly, not only has television always possessed the power to speak, sing and ring, but the medium was born at a time when a range of aesthetic, production and recording techniques for employing sound in conjunction with images were already being developed and had been more or less established by a highly successful cinema industry. To the extent, moreover, that "the question of [television's] content" during its formative years "was resolved … parasitically" [4] — particularly through the simultaneous televisual transmission of radio programming and through the broadcast of Hollywood-produced "tele-films" — television was effectively "predestined" (with all due respect to Raymond Williams) to emerge fully-fledged as an audio-visual medium.
Unlike cinema, then, broadcast television had no soundless "pre-history" that could be retrospectively identified as constituting "talking" television’s prevenient phase. By the same token, what we today call "silent films were, in fact, rarely seen in conditions of silence," as Steve Neale among many others has argued. [5] Indeed, the "silent film," in Raymond Fielding’s words, "is a myth. It never existed." [6] In the event of their screenings, so-called silent films were filled (or filled in) with all kinds of sounds, both theatrical and incidental, from scripted sound effects and orchestrated music, through the casual chatter of audience members, to the plurivocal "monologue" of the cinematic occasion’s "master of ceremonies," whom Fielding describes as having performed a number of functions:
First, as a master of ceremonies, he provided a link between the new and somewhat disreputable motion picture and the more respectable music hall and vaudeville traditions with which audiences were familiar. Second, he read the subtitles, which were then, as they are today, crucial in introducing abstract ideas of any intellectual complexity into the silent motion picture experience…. Finally, he interpreted the motion picture artistically for the members of the audience — a crucial contribution at a time when the form and the structure of the film, particularly insofar as it involved changes in camera position or editing, was likely to confuse audiences. [7]
What was born with the advent of the "talkies," then, was not film sound as such, but "an entirely different kind of sound" — the mechanized reproduction of a standardized "soundtrack" that enabled "the same sound performance" to accompany a given "film from day to day, theater to theater, screening to screening." [8] With the introduction of the new sound recording and playback technologies, moreover, came the standardization and entrenchment of a particular form of aural address, [9] one defined by a more perfect synchronization of sound with the image of action and by a corresponding decrease in the use of non-diegetic sound outside of the film score. [10] The standardization and synchronization of sound were particularly significant of course for the purpose of introducing the voice — spoken dialogue — into the film text. But perhaps the more notable effect is the one such dialogue had on the film-going experience, as Alexander Walker argues:
The addition of dialogue did not simply add a dimension to the experience; it replaced an attitude towards it…. Silent movies had enabled the casual customer to drop in, and within a minute or two be locked into the story and characters. Mime-acting made the characters’ predicaments easily intelligible; sub-titles gave people emotional cues to follow rather than narrative points to recall. But dialogue changed all this: it demanded attention, it enforced silence on the audiences who had hitherto been able to swap comments on the movie below the music of the pianist or pit orchestra. Now one had to shut up, sit up and pay attention to a plot that more and more was conveyed in words, not pictures. [11]
The transition from "silent" to "talking" motion pictures can be marked, therefore, not by the appearance of a soundtrack that had been formerly absent from film exhibition, but by the emergence of a new regime of listening[12] marked by a demand for aural attentiveness to the film text itself and, simultaneously, by a synthesis of image and sound in a one-directional causal relationship. If the former feature appears to grant sound a newly privileged place in the cinematic event, moreover, the second undermines that standing with the demand that the soundtrack be "identified with, and subordinated to, the image" of action, [13] a "naturalism" in sound production and reception that ensures film carries on as vision first, audio second — pictures with sound, not the inverse. [14]
Given this continuing privilege granted to cinema’s visuality, it’s not surprising that the history of that form should continue to be commonly understood in terms of an abrupt transition from its early, static "silent" phase and its sudden arrival as a fully-matured, albeit incrementally optimizable, multi-modal aesthetic enterprise. And it is in the purview of this reconstituted history that the inconceivability of silent television is itself able to be imagined — notwithstanding the fact that the aurality of television, at least at the time of its introduction, probably owed much more to the production techniques and routines of consumption associated with radio than it did those that governed the talking motion picture. Hollywood "tele-film" production formed only a small component of television content up until the mid-1950s, with the US networks up to that point "resisting filmed programming" and clinging to live television instead, with the aim of "control[ling] program supply and national advertising distribution." [15] The bulk of television programming before that time took the form of live broadcasts (including talk shows, sportscasts, dramatic performances and variety shows) often modelled on formats developed for radio — hence the recurring description of television as "radio with pictures." In this way, the history of television ought to be more readily depicted as sound first, image second — as an initial "blindness" before the attainment of vision — than imagined in terms of an antediluvian phase of silence. It is a testament, therefore, to the power of the naturalist (or formal-realist) regime of listening ushered in by the standardization of film sound that the myth of the "silent film" lives on not merely as an emblem of cinema’s formative years but also as the near-exclusive model for conceiving of silent television’s impossibility.
And so it should come as no surprise that Lynn Spigel’s recent speculation on silent television turns for evidence of its plausibility, not to closed-circuit television (CCTV) — which from a technological perspective would surely count as silent TV’s definitive form — but to the pantomime and sight gags of television comedian Ernie Kovacs. [16] For Spigel, Kovacs’ Saturday Night Color Carnival (aired on NBC in 1957) stands as a stark counter-example to Chion’s argument that silent television is inconceivable. [17] Eschewing the prevailing norms of commercial television, the "Silent Show," as Kovacs’ half-hour special was widely known, "turned to silent cinema for models" and "evoked the physical mayhem of the silent clowns." [18] Recalling the image of Buster Keaton in particular, Kovacs’ sketches consisted of sight gags, pantomime, musical montages, and surreal sketches premised on visual tricks and on "the incongruity of sight against sound." [19] Apart from a brief opening monologue, the "Silent Show" was characterized by a complete lack of speech. In its place, viewers were treated to the antics of Kovacs’ mute Chaplinesque character, Eugene, whose movements within his fictional world generated some surprisingly unnaturalistic results:
When Eugene looks at a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, the painting laughs. When Eugene opens a book titled, "Digging the Panama Canal," we hear the crashing sounds of heavy machinery. Similarly, when Eugene opens up Camille, the novel emits sounds of a coughing woman. When Eugene dials a telephone…, the soundtrack plays loud machine gun noises in lieu of normal dial tones. [20]
Rather than an alternation of voices, then, Kovacs’ television skit foregrounds a cacophony of noises. As a program thus virtually bereft of verbal communication, the "Silent Show" marks a manifest divergence from the established conventions of the medium.
But perhaps the most interesting aspect of Kovacs’ work is captured in Spigel’s argument that the "Silent Show" was "directed at wider social anxieties about the disruptive and distasteful noise of the new commercial television culture." [21] Produced at a time when public displeasure about "television’s relentless chatter and offensive commercial din" was increasingly expressed, Kovacs’ silent special consciously sought to provide relief for its audience from television’s incessant "conversation," as testified by the show’s invitation to its viewers, made in the opening monologue, "to spend half an hour without hearing any dialogue at all." [22] As Spigel explains, the 1950s were characterized by much vexation over television’s perceived faults and evils — its potential for deceit and even fraud; its predilection for "tasteless," "lowbrow" entertainment — which came to be metonymized by perceptions of the medium’s "noise": its constant barrage of canned laughter, over-modulated advertisements, and excessively vocal ex-radio entertainers. Such concerns about TV noise thereby created the conditions for exploring "new forms of silent television," providing a popular base for the virtually avant-garde nature of the Saturday Night Color Carnival. [23] Indeed, according to Spigel, the popular and commercial interest in silence as a respite from television’s aural assault not only spawned Kovacs’ special but "gave way to a rash of television programs that also experimented with silence and silent-film techniques." [24] And while the "Silent Show" perhaps demonstrated Kovacs’ most sustained experiment with silent TV, it was far from an isolated event: Kovacs took his taste for pantomime and non-verbal humour into most of his television endeavours, peppering his subsequent television appearances with sketches featuring little dialogue, or none at all, and even producing a number of largely non-verbal advertisements for his favorite sponsor, Dutch Masters Cigars. [25]Contra Chion, then, far from being inconceivable, silent television appeared, for a time, on the verge of becoming the medium’s pre-eminent form.
Fast-forward — or, indeed, "skip" — forty years, to a more recent event in television history: Episode 10 from Season IV of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Buffy). Titled "Hush" (1999), the episode of the Joss Whedon-created television series — about a super-powered young woman who is fated to battle vampires, demons and the forces of evil with the aid of her high-school friends (the "Scooby gang") — is notable for its 26 consecutive minutes featuring virtually no dialogue. The main plotline centers on a group of fairytale monsters known as "the Gentlemen" who arrive undetected at Sunnydale (the fictional town in which Buffy is set) with the intention of stealing seven human hearts — for reasons known neither to the characters nor to the audience, but understood implicitly by all as inhumanly evil. As the only thing that can slay the monsters is a human scream, the Gentlemen use their supernatural powers to capture the voices of the Sunnydale population, thereby providing the narrative premise for the lack of dialogue during the second and final acts. Meanwhile, the episode advances a number of season story arcs concerning the relationships between the main characters, most significantly the one between Buffy and her new love interest, Riley, whom Buffy has not been able to inform of her fantastical calling (nor of her feelings for him), and who likewise has an aspect of his identity — the fact that he is a soldier in a secret military "Initiative" — that he is hiding from Buffy. As the episode progresses, Buffy and Riley attempt, separately and in ignorance of the other’s efforts, to determine the cause of the Sunnydale population’s mysterious voicelessness and to protect the town from its as-yet unidentified attackers. In a final confrontation with the Gentlemen towards the end of the episode, Buffy, with the fortuitous assistance of Riley, regains her voice and slays the Gentlemen with a sustained, ear-piercing scream. General "normality" is thus restored, as demanded by the episodic logic of television, but the fate of the developing relationship between Buffy and Riley is not so secure, each of the pair having learnt that the other has something to hide, and neither of them knowing quite how to tell the other about their own secret identity.
While the experimentation of "Hush" may fall short of the exemplar set by Kovacs’ NBC special, its deliberate suspension of dialogue conjures once again the unconventional thought of silent television. Not only does the episode make use of many of the narrative devices of silent cinema — pantomime performances, sight gags and written communication of narrative points — it also incorporates several self-conscious and self-reflexive allusions to the role of sound in the viewing experience. One scene, in particular — crucial in terms of relaying information both to the characters and to audiences — unfolds as a kind of postmodern parody of silent film exhibition. In the scene, the Scooby-gang have gathered in an auditorium, ready to attend to a silent lecture on the Gentlemen given by Giles (Buffy’s "Watcher" and the gang’s resident expert in the occult). In a move that recalls silent film’s use of subtitles, Giles places transparencies on an overhead projector to present his notes, but — absurdly — before he does so, he walks around to a cassette recorder next to the projector and plays a tape to soundtrack his presentation with appropriate theme music. From then, in a kind of abortive mimesis, members of Giles’ audience (who are simultaneously characters in a drama for our benefit) react in pantomime to the slides revealed by Giles, generating numerous sight gags into the bargain — all the while "ex-Demon" (and newest member of the Scooby gang) Anya plays the role of audience member, sitting at the back of the theater, eating popcorn and enjoying the show.
Still on another level, the silence of "Hush" reacts against a forceful history of media sound through its suspension of an industrially standard production and narrative technique. The episode is often remarked upon for its lack of dialogue, and after the episode first aired Whedon explicitly described his aesthetic goal for "Hush" in terms of breaking with the conventional techniques of television production. [26] In a comment that recalls early reviews of television as "radio with pictures" [27] as well as Chion’s argument that commercial television "is fundamentally a kind of radio, ‘illustrated’ by images," [28] Whedon complains,
One thing that I don’t love about television is that a lot of it is what I refer to as "radio with faces"…. If you want to shoot a scene quickly, just put somebody up against a wall, have them say their lines, and — boomph — it’s done…. On a practical level, the idea of doing an episode where everyone loses their voice presented itself as a great big challenge, because I knew that I would literally have to tell the story only visually.
In view of Whedon’s remark, however, the cultural significance of TV silence seems irreducible to the question of sound alone. On Spigel’s account, the apparent impossibility of silent TV stems from "the cultural and industrial demand" for television "to secure the illusion of liveness over death," following "western culture’s" association of silence with extinction and "the end of time." [29] To be sure, in "Hush" and in Buffy more generally the depiction of extermination and oblivion are par for the course, such that the show’s thematic link between silence and death appears assured. But Whedon’s commentary eschews such quasi-mystical thoughts in favor of an account of silent TV’s aesthetic effects that alludes to the medium’s distribution across a limited range of pre-existing auralities constituted in relation to prevailing production conventions and habits of listening.
To make the obvious point here, neither Kovacs’ "Silent Show" nor Whedon’s "Hush" is actually lacking a standardized soundtrack, and so the silence they promise retains a grounding in television’s normal technical processes of production. [30] Moreover, in both cases their aesthetic endeavours exploit not simply the possibilities of sound, but also the potentialities of the television image, such that their respective experiments — not with sound as such, but with television sound — cannot be understood in terms of any straightforward repetition of silent film techniques. As Spigel herself notes,
Kovacs specialized in absurd visual tricks, elaborate set pieces, and anti-realist montage symphonies that juxtaposed rapidly edited and incongruous images against music ranging from the classical compositions of Tchaikovsky to … offbeat contemporary performers…. Meanwhile, his numerous sight gags and visual tricks used sound counter-intuitively and sometimes with no particular relation to the image at all. [31]
Qua counter-intuitive, such uses of sound, whether for the purpose of avant-gardist experimentation or of "mere" popular comedy, require attention to the image if they are to have any chance of "working" aesthetically. Similarly, Whedon’s overriding aesthetic aim for "Hush" (and for Buffy generally) was to have "the show work visually," to produce something "visual and cinematic, and not just people a-yacking." In both cases, then, the absence of dialogue seems defined by its attention to the vision: "silent" TV’s enlistment of silent film models and techniques thus operates in the name of accomplishing not silence so much as relatively spectacular tele-visual feats.
By the same token, the sound of television "itself" might best be understood in terms not of the "talking motion picture" against which pre-1926 cinema stands as "silent," but of the aurality associated with television’s "blind" precursor: the modes of listening peculiar, that is, to broadcast radio. While across its history television certainly has taken what it could from the film industry (including pre-produced content, dramatic production techniques, audience formations and more), its initial anchoring in the milieu of broadcasting — hence, its communicative "flow," its heavy reliance on radio for genres of programming, its domestic context of consumption, and so on — has, from the beginning, sustained forms of engagement that are markedly different to the formal-realist listening regime established by the "talkies." Where the arrival of standardized soundtracks in cinema rewarded forms of engagement marked by attention to sound and image (or, indeed, to sounds seemingly emanating from images), television’s "pre-history" prepared its audiences for a potentially different kind of viewing experience. As "radio with pictures," in other words — and as Chion has already argued [32] — television needn’t be viewed at all, and so neither sight nor sound in broadcast television has quite the same significance as it does in the context of film production and reception.
This is as much as to note the essential in/separability of sight and sound, the simultaneously severable and inseverable bond between vision and audio. While the relationship between sight and sound is undoubtedly reconfigurable (as Kovacs’ and Whedon’s respective audio-visual experiments demonstrate), neither of those components is constituted outside the cultural, economic, and political contexts that shape the respective auralities established by divergent traditions of audio-visual production and reception. To the extent that these contexts differ markedly for television and cinema, the audio-vision relationship in television routinely diverges from that defining cinema in both its "talking" and its silent phases. In this way, the equation of silent television with silent film ultimately fails to capture the sound of televisual silence — how (silent) television is heard — and thus falls short in accounting for the latter’s properties, let alone its cultural significance. If the arrival of standardized sound in the film industry imposed silence on audiences and demanded their attention, the absence of dialogue from the television viewing experience should not be assumed therefore to release audiences from such impositions or to return to them the capacity to "drop in and out" of the narrative with ease — and this if only because broadcast television had already more or less conceded audiences this freedom, had already constituted itself around such a capacity, which had previously been acquired through a familiarity with radio. On the contrary, then, the effect of silent television’s lack of dialogue — the event of "silence" in broadcast television — can be understood in terms similar to those accounting for the arrival of sound in film, as demanding of its audiences, that is, a kind of attention that is otherwise practiced as inessential to the TV "viewing" experience. Even as it breaks the perceived natural bond between sound and image, therefore, silent television demands of its viewers that they grant the televisual text an aesthetic completeness that it is otherwise rarely given.
ART
So: what of the forty years that separates the "Silent Show" and "Hush"? The fact that Chion — a distinguished thinker of "the audio-visual contract" — had cause in 1990 to doubt the possibility of silent television without having to acknowledge the experiments with silence ushered in by Kovacs suggests not only that the dominant image of silent TV fails to capture the sound of televisual silence, but also that the effects of the industry’s early forays in that direction proved temporary or limited. Or rather, as Spigel’s analysis implies, such experiments were more likely corralled into those channels in which the attention-capturing effects of silence could be most profitably employed — into the realm, for example, of television advertising. [33] Freed from the analytical bias of the "silent cinema" model, a history of silent TV can find textual examples of televisual silence appearing with greater regularity than one might at first suspect, turning up not only in advertising, but also in the sparseness of voice-over narration accompanying nature documentaries and in the respectful attention accorded to athletes by the hushed pauses peppering certain forms of sports commentary. [34] In this regard, Chion’s remarks on silent television can be read less as a comment on the medium’s essential features than as a lament on what he saw as its limited aesthetic potential at that time. While Spigel’s study of Kovacs is presented largely as a negation of Chion’s pessimism, her very recovery of the former’s work (by means of a genealogical speculation on TV sound), and its subsequent depiction as counter-evidence does much to prove the momentary credibility of Chion’s claim. Chion’s remark can be heard as true for a time, so to speak, and to neglect the facticity of silent television’s momentary or bounded implausibility would be not only to deny, potentially, that televisual silence has a history but also to leave the ordinariness of televisual aesthetics unremarked. For silent TV seems in the first instance to be imagined always as an experimental aesthetic form and not as a regular televisual occurrence, a routine, if barely noticed, element of television’s ordinariness. That the thought of silent TV continues, moreover, to be defined in terms of a lack of dialogue says a great deal more about what telepoetic forms are practised as endemic to the medium’s artistic potential than it does about televisual silence as such. The apparent impossibility of silent television thus says something about television’s (in)conceivability as an art form, as both Whedon’s attempt to overturn the medium’s conventions and Spigel’s affirmation of Kovacs’ avant-gardism may attest.
In this regard, it’s interesting to note that the example of "Hush" happens to have emerged at a time when TV’s capacity to be imagined as art is being reconfigured in the most significant transformation to television sound to have occurred perhaps since the 1950s. While television is currently subject to a range of industrial and technological changes, one modification in particular — the embrace of DVD technology for the purpose of retailing television programming — is significant both for its potential impact on TV sound and for its capacity to redefine television as an aesthetic form. For the advent of the DVD box set has seen a veritable explosion in the packaging and marketing of televisual material for viewer purchase and collection. While the cultural significance of the DVD may appear to owe a great deal to its most immediate forbearers — notably, videotape and the home video cassette recorder — DVD technology, as Derek Kompare argues, has brought about changes the significance of which even the VCR, with its potential to turn every television receiver into a television editor, was never able to match:
With much higher resolution sound and image, random access capability, a smaller size, and most significant, a larger storage capacity, the DVD has rejuvenated the home video industry and has finally enabled television to achieve what film had by the mid-1980s, namely, a viable direct-to-consumer market for its programming.
The pivotal innovation of this achievement is the season box set: a multiple-disc DVD package containing an entire season’s worth of episodes from a particular television series. First introduced by Fox with the release of the first season of The X-Files in April 2000, the box set … extends the reach of the institution of television into home video to an unprecedented degree and functions as an intriguing aesthetic object in its own right. It culminates the decades-long relationship between television and its viewers, completing the circle through the material purchase — rather than only the ephemeral viewing — of broadcast texts. [35]
Crucial in this regard is the level of expansion that the DVD box set introduced to the television home video market, turning otherwise marginal retail and viewer practices into structural determinants in television production and reception. Although the VCR provided viewers with the capacity to build their own archives of televised material, that is, the commercial success of the DVD box set offers an alternative source of funding for television production (which in turn has implications for the life expectancy of particular television series), while the promise of programming’s DVD publication has the potential to dramatically alter TV viewing habits. Most notably, DVD box sets literally objectify an audio-visual text that previously had been accessible in and as televisual flow. As Kompare argues, then,
in the wake of innovative cultural artifacts like The X-Files box sets, home video is a much more significant factor in the cultural lifetime of a television series, and the experience of popular culture in general, than it was only a few years ago. As the television of the twenty-first century takes shape … perhaps the flow of television is [now measurable] not only … in time but in physical commodities, as cultural objects placed in the permanent media collection alongside similarly mass-produced media artifacts (books, recordings, films on home video). [36]
When broadcast television meets with DVD technology and direct-to-consumer marketing, TV thus diverges from itself, diverging away from the indistinct form of "ordinary television" and its associated regimen of ephemeral, inattentive viewing to the extraordinary form of aesthetic object and cultural artifact. TV diverges, that is, into two forms: mundane, ephemeral flow and distinct, appreciable publication; "ordinary television" and "special television." [37] And in this way the DVD is helping to reshape television — or at least certain aspects of it — as an aesthetic enterprise. For its literal objectification of television programming introduces a practical basis not only for generating wider levels of consumption than broadcast television — extending television’s reach across both geographical and temporal, potentially generational boundaries — but also for undertaking repeated and close "readings" of television texts in a way unimaginable in the context of broadcast viewing. And so DVD technology makes critical, aesthetic reflection on television texts more plausible than ever before, concomitantly granting television’s serial form a cultural respectability that it had previously struggled to achieve.
Perhaps critical in this respect is the fact that, as Kompare states, "DVD box sets provide the content of television without the ‘noise’ and limitations of the institution of television." [38] As it was for Ernie Kovacs, then, it seems that once again TV’s status as art form is won at the moment that television ceases to sound like television. And so DVD technology can be read not only in terms of its potential to commodify and fetishize particular (predominantly dramatic) events within the televisual flow, but also in terms of its initiation of a radical transformation to television’s sound-image relationship. For not only does DVD publication extract the program narrative from the sea of sounds that form the backdrop to its broadcast — in effect silencing everything that we would otherwise call television — but, unlike videotape, the technology also introduces the possibility of packaging any number of alternative soundtracks alongside the vision, a capacity which is routinely put to use for the purpose of bundling commentary tracks with the original soundtrack. Indeed, the "Director’s commentary" has fast become not only a standard feature, but a key selling point for the DVD publication of both television and film.
In principle, of course, there is nothing about the DVD format which demands that its storage capacity and the data access features be employed for the purpose of laying commentary over the dramatic production. But from the perspective of the history of silent television, such use takes on particular significance. For the DVD commentary recalls without reproducing certain dimensions of the sound of silent cinema. Predominantly (if not purely) non-diegetic in form, for example, the overlaid commentary shatters the "naturalism" of sound that has dominated audio-visual production since the late 1920s. In place of that former unity, the commentary affords a service comparable to that provided by silent film’s "master of ceremonies," whose voice, as Neale explains, would "oscillat[e] between its function as an extension of the film itself (speaking the characters’ dialogue, generally amplifying the drama of the story) and its role as a source of information and authority outside it (perhaps giving technical information about the film and those involved in its production)." [39] Of course, as an aspect of film exhibition, the role of MC in silent cinema was open to be performed potentially by anyone, and, in principle, the same could be said of the role of DVD commentator. Indeed, the option exists for multiple commentaries from all kinds of sources, their number limited only by the overall data capacity of the disc (which the newer Blu-ray format promises to increase significantly). In practice, however, access to the role of commentator is almost exclusively the privilege of the television narrative’s writer/director/series creator.
In this regard, a significant difference between the silent film MC and the DVD Director’s commentary is the generic imperative in the latter to employ the first person, such that a director is not only authorized but expected to say "I," to state his or her intentions. And in this way external expert commentary is transformed into authorial exegesis, breathing new life into a putatively dead author. Accordingly, Whedon (for example) uses his commentary track on "Hush" to provide all manner of insight (as cited earlier) into his ambitions for Buffy and his aesthetic aims for that particular episode. In a gesture that vividly illustrates the potential for DVD commentary to deepen audience understandings of the industrial nature of television, Whedon also speaks at length on the various constraints that the production conventions and schedule demands place on the development of serial television. But perhaps reiterating the fact of silent television’s inevitable attention to vision, the bulk of his observations focus on the obstacles confronting the composition of images — lighting issues, the spatial and temporal considerations involved in set design and use, the challenges that long one-takes present for editing to program length, and so on. In fact, aside from a couple of brief remarks concerning the use of music, Whedon’s few observations on the nature of television audio deal exclusively with the aesthetic and thematic significance of the episode’s suspension of dialogue. In a remark thus validating (as it were) the argument that "silent" TV is characterized not by the formal absence of sound but by the aesthetic question of verbal communication, Whedon informs us that "Hush" is "about" language, that it is about the idea
that when people stop talking they start communicating, that language can interfere with communication, because language limits. As soon as you say something, you’ve eliminated every other possibility of what you might be talking about; and we also use language to separate ourselves from other people; we also use language as white noise; … we also misuse it horribly. All of these things appear in the show, because once I realized that the episode was about communication, I then found that absolutely everything I wrote was completely on theme. [40]
Thus "Hush" unfolds: as a warped, nightmarish counterpart to Rousseau’s discourse on the origin of language, a fantasy in which the loss of our capacity for speech, despite being accompanied by the most unspeakable of horrors, is what finally gives us the power to truly communicate. But in the choice between non-invasive linguistic violence and involuntary heart removal, speech must surely prove to be the lesser evil, and so prudential calculation, if nothing else, demands that normal channels of communication be restored post haste. Enter: Buffy and Riley to kick some monster butt, as the Slayer would put it. But "once we get our voices back," Whedon warns, "we stop communicating, after we’d been doing so well."
Packaged as it is alongside the program itself, Whedon’s account of the narrative is granted an official, literally authoritative status. In an age in which the author-function thus triumphs over even the widely conceded fact of television’s collaborative nature, the auteur’s corpse stands re-animated (if indeed it ever truly died). Having cast serial television as an object worthy of aesthetic inspection, in other words, DVD publication opens the door to an entire discourse on art, paving the way for television’s acceptance as an aesthetic enterprise, though perhaps at the cost of critical engagement with its more distinctive features. While literary theory has done much to challenge the author’s sovereignty over cultural production, then, the force — and, indeed, the profitability — of traditional aesthetic discourse appears far from diminished. Standing in for the long-presumed (or long-enforced) silence of its audience, DVD commentary shadows the main feature, providing an audible, material check on "the cancerous and dangerous proliferation … of meaning." [41] In its specific form as Director’s commentary, moreover, DVD’s extended audio capability amounts to the convergence of artistic and commercial control over television sound even after the event, privileging authorized contexts of interpretation — not least of all the idea that the accompanying narrative is a product of authorial intent, complete in itself and unified by its artistic vision — and thereby potentially silencing alternative interpretations of cultural texts.
As ever, such systems of control are far from perfect. [42] Not only does the very existence of the parallel commentary track thrust upon viewers a limited interactivity and a kind of direction over the narrative, in the form of a menu of audio-visual options, but — as it happens in the case of "Hush" — the Director’s commentary can sometimes be heard, quite audibly, to undercut its own account of the narrative’s significance. In the first place, there’s the irony of Whedon’s observations taking the form of a verbal commentary track over the (audio)visually communicative text, which ought, by its own logic, convey what the episode is all about far more effectively than Whedon’s speech. Beyond such performative paradoxes, the narrative events themselves routinely show up Whedon’s notion of a more authentic form of expression for the fantasy that it is. Indeed, the episode’s many hilarious sight gags are essentially premised on the realization that non-verbal forms of communication are susceptible, no less than speech, to misuse, misinterpretation and misdirection. A great deal less genial is one tension-filled scene, in which one character’s knocks on her neighbours’ doors, made in a frantic attempt to raise the alarm, are met with fear and suspicion from the rooms’ occupants, leaving the Gentlemen’s would-be victim to fend for herself. Voicelessness, "Hush" thus consistently shows (against its "author’s intentions"), promises no access to more direct, reliable and sincere forms of communication, only more confusion, misunderstanding and violence. Worse still, loss of the power of speech simply adds to the horror of our communicative condition, precisely through the removal of one of our most ready means of calling for help.
PARTICIPATION
As the introduction of recorded-sound playback in film and the advent of the Director’s commentary already indicate, the history of silent television is necessarily entwined with images of the television audience. To be sure, in the early days of mass communication theory the unidirectional nature of the television transmission was routinely taken as relegating audiences to the role of passive, voiceless media receivers. Uncritical and unproductive, TV viewers of yore would — theoretically — sit in silence as they watched and absorbed programming produced by a privileged few. Today, however, the image of the silent viewer seems particularly obsolete, as the development of the Internet (especially "web 2.0") and the corresponding emergence of a "convergence culture" are read for their role in giving audiences a "voice" that a former age of mass media seemingly denied them. "Interactivity," "participatory media," "citizen journalism," "content co-creation," "produsage" and "user-generated content" (UGC) are all by now familiar tropes in media criticism and all point to the increased potential, granted primarily by the development of web-based communications, for what were once called "media audiences" to play an active role in the production, circulation and criticism of what was once called "media content." [43] From reader-submitted book reviews and personal weblogs, through Flickr and MySpace Music, to machinima and media mashups uploaded to YouTube, the opportunities for "non-professional" (new)media users to produce, publish and distribute cultural texts of all kinds have never been so abundant as they are today. And so the era in which television audiences’ voices could be registered only through the restricted decision to watch or not to watch — as measured and interpreted by an industry-managed ratings system, no less — would seem to be well and truly over.
Of course, there’s more than a little hyperbole to this story of a new media-generated transition from silent spectatorship to babelic net-working. As José van Dijck has argued, "the implied opposition between passive recipients defined by old media (e.g. television) and active participants inhabiting digital environments, particularly UGC sites, is a historical fallacy." [44] There is, for example, a documented history of the "receivers" of mass cultural forms becoming content producers themselves. Most notably, Janice Radway’s study of readers of romance fiction identifies, as an element within a gift-economy running parallel to the system of commercially-driven mass cultural production, the significant incidence of romance readers going on to become romance writers. [45] Likewise, Spigel notes in her discussion of Kovacs that his "experiments with sound and image inspired viewers to create their own experimental art," with "numerous fans" having sent him "unusual drawings, trick photographs, and descriptions of performances modeled on Kovacs’s interest in sound-image experimentation." [46] Such "amateur" productions, moreover, have even made their way on occasion into primetime television via the various national productions of the Funniest Home Video franchise, [47] the latter counting perhaps as a kind of precursor to the now seemingly ubiquitous UGC interface YouTube. Beyond these examples of media-receiver-turned-producer (as the latter is conventionally defined), there is a strong tradition of audience analysis emphasizing the intrinsic capacity of media audiences to "co-create" media texts by way of "active interpretation." In fact, since at least the 1980s, most theories of textual meaning and audience reception have insisted not just on the possibility but on the necessity of such sense-making (inter)activity on the part of audiences for media texts to be "received" in the first place. Audiences, in other words, have always participated in the creation of media texts to varying degrees, have always interacted with their preferred (i.e. chosen) media sources — and this because "participation," "interactivity" and "co-creation" are not qualities of particular kinds of technology (the Internet, computers, video games, etc.) but rather functions of the event of reception itself. As the old saying has it, "there’s always the off button." Indeed, there’s always the volume control, too, which remains an unobtrusive yet ever-present totem of the TV audience’s capacity to "co-create" silent television at will.
By the same token, if media reception has always been structured by the potential for a certain kind of "produsage," it would be folly to suggest that modes of participation and capacities for co-creation aren’t distributed and activated in historically and situationally variable ways. In this regard, it must be recognized that the rapidly expanding availability of computing and Internet technologies has significantly supplemented "audience" members’ access to the semiotic means of critical and creative production by providing increased opportunities to generate not just ideational and linguistic "texts" but multi-media texts, too, and to distribute them on a potentially large scale. What is thus different in the digital era, as van Dijck puts it, "is that users have better access to networked media, enabling them to ‘talk back’ in the same multi-modal language that frames cultural products formerly made exclusively in studios." [48] The question, then, concerns not whether but what kind of voice the Internet, et al. have given the viewing public: in what ways, that is, and to what extent have digital and networked communications technologies transformed television audiences’ presumed conditions of silence?
One particularly visible transformation to viewers’ capacity to "speak" to the television industry as well as amongst themselves lies in the Internet’s provision of opportunities to publish — hence to make widely available and semi-permanent — interpretative and evaluative responses to broadcast programming. Even before it earned its "2.0" tag, the web produced many outlets for at least some users, the so-called "early adopters," to express themselves on topics that concerned them the most. From as far back as the early-90s, free web hosting services such as Tripod, Angelfire and the recently defunct GeoCities, followed by freeware Internet forum packages and services like ezboard, phpBB and Yahoo! Groups, helped establish the virtual conditions for media audiences to voice their opinions on cultural forms of all kinds, including television. [49] In a kind of direct democracy of TV criticism as against the indirect representation of audience interests provided by self- or industry-appointed TV critics, then, viewer response to televisual programming was able to move outside the traditional domains of the living room and the proverbial office water-cooler and into forums whose audience reach was in-principle (albeit virtually never in fact) as large as some television shows themselves. And in this way, such online forums offered the promise not only of completing the feedback loop — providing TV Networks with the means for gauging audience sentiment seemingly directly, which is to say in the form of reactions registered by viewers on a TV program’s "official" online discussion forum — but also the chance for viewers to present their own assessments and readings of televisual materials in a marked challenge to the cultural authority of the paid TV reviewer.
The relative stability of such audience criticism, however, remains a significant question. While some conceptions of the Internet may offer a seductive image of the technology’s archival potential, the silent closure of GeoCities in October 2009 provides a signal of the comparatively fragile, even transient nature of Internet publication. [50] As the vast majority of online discussion of cultural texts takes place in forums hosted and administered not by audience members or private Internet users but by commercial organizations, control over the continuity and duration of publication remains in the hands of those commercial providers of website-hosting services. Accordingly, the continuing existence of whole petabytes of audience feedback, criticism and interaction becomes not a simple fait accompli grounded in technological development but also a contingency in commercial decision-making. This is particularly true for audience response and debate published in forums attached to a given program’s "official website" — within a space, that is, hosted by the TV Networks themselves. Because these websites are more likely to be administered according to the exigencies and temporality of program promotion than established on the basis of heritage-minded ideals of eternal reposition, the critical output of entire communities is routinely lost to the ether — as anyone seeking to revisit the discussions that unfolded at UPN’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer online forum ("The Bronze") at the time of its broadcast would soon learn. As measured particularly against the becoming-permanence that DVD publication is now granting select televisual programming, then, audience-generated criticism enjoys (or suffers) a relatively more ephemeral existence.
If the loss of this form of audience activity to the ravages of television time seems a somewhat trivial concern, a challenge merely to the naïve "web 1.0" fantasy of comprehensive storage, it nevertheless provides some portent of the potential for affirmations of participatory media to overlook the continuing recourse of new media user-producers to services provided by corporate media. [51] Indeed, the entire rhetoric of "produsage" all too readily disguises the distinction between content producer and content host (or distributor) — a distinction which takes on particular significance in the context of claims made for the potential of UGC sites such as YouTube to enable audiences to "talk back" in the languages of audio-visual production, where the costs of archiving and streaming are significantly higher than is the case for primarily text-based discussion forums. As Julie Levin Russo has argued, "as long as the infrastructure for video hosting remains prohibitively expensive, not to mention legally delicate, grassroots producers who wish to participate in the culture of streaming depend on commercial social media sites for distribution." [52] Such dependence not only forces users to share (if not sign over) their intellectual property rights with the hosting service [53] but also leaves users with "a lack of recourse" in the event that the latter decides unilaterally to suspend the former’s submissions. [54]
At the same time, the design of UGC interfaces themselves inevitably furrow channels or pathways to particular content in ways which potentially regulate user participation. [55] YouTube’s home page, for instance, promotes specific clips (and, ultimately, specific forms of content) through its prominent display of thumbnails and links to "Featured Videos" — chosen by YouTube "editors" in a process that is entirely hidden from the YouTube "community" but which results in astronomical increases to the featured clips’ view rates and to their uploaders’ profiles. [56] Also promoted on the home page are selected clips from a range of categories defined in terms not of textual content but of user activity. While ostensibly these categories constitute simple reflections of viewing practices (e.g. "Videos Being Watched Now," "Most Popular," "Top Favorited"), they are not for that reason free from the regulatory effects of YouTube’s commercial goals and operational structure — not least of all because the videos are necessarily selected on the basis of "algorithms, the technical details of which remain undisclosed." [57] As Jean Burgess and Joshua Green argue, for instance, YouTube’s "popularity metrics"
are not representations of reality, but technologies of re-presentation. Because they communicate to the audience what counts as popular on YouTube, these metrics also take an active role in creating the reality of what is popular on YouTube: they are not only descriptive; they are also performative. [58]
While it would be wrong, therefore, to discount the role of "practices of audiencehood" in constructing the "YouTubeness of YouTube," [59] the site’s interface, itself very much a product of the organization’s operational goals, unavoidably plays a part in regulating those audience practices. Such is the seductive power of the logic of participation, however, that Burgess and Green, having noted the productive force of YouTube’s popularity metrics, choose to return to an image of user equality by describing "all those who upload, view, comment on, or create content, whether they are businesses, organizations, or private individuals, as participants." [60] Notwithstanding their attention to the "performative" dimension to certain features of the site, that is, Burgess and Green end up defining "the cultural logic of YouTube" in terms solely of its users and without reference to the structuring role of YouTube-as-service-provider, whose "contribution" could never be reduced to that simply of one "participant" among others.
To be sure, "popularity" is hardly unique to UGC platforms — uneven distribution of audience attention being perhaps one of the few constants across all media systems. The visibility that the YouTube interface affords the various measures of popularity, however, arguably serves not just to promote particular kinds of content but also to amplify the cultural value of popularity itself. In this respect, it’s perhaps not surprising to find that view "requests on YouTube seem to be highly skewed towards popular files." [61] In a communications culture shaped or underpinned by the operations and imperatives of an "attention economy," moreover — where consumer attention is "an intrinsically scarce resource" [62] and where "the more something is shared the more valuable it becomes" [63] — the cultivation of popularity amounts to a key commercial strategy. The ultimate goal in this regard must be the production of Internet memes whose popularity allow them to break out of an otherwise bounded economy (relatively speaking) of viewer attention and to attract non-habitual and first-time "users" and, ideally, the attention of the mainstream media. In this way, YouTube’s popularity feedback loop might be thought to constitute a kind of media concentration — a concentration of user attention — and thereby to play its part in the development of a different kind of silent television. For the discourse of popularity underscores the extent to which user-generated content, understood as a form of audience speech, needs to be heard about in order to be heard. Neither hi-falutin’ media theory nor pop philosophies about falling trees and empty forests are needed to question whether user-uploaded clips that are rarely (if ever) viewed by anyone other than their uploaders really count as audiences "talking back" to the mainstream media — or at least, whether they count in the way champions of social media participation routinely claim. In the context of media hyperabundance and attention-scarcity, then, whether formerly silent audiences are now able to "talk back" to the mainstream media matters less perhaps than whether anybody is actually listening, or indeed garners the opportunity to listen. "Silence" might thus be imagined to derive not simply from an incapacity to speak but also from failure to become an object of speech — a point of communication and a locus of communion. And if, as van Dijck argues, citing an OECD investigation into UGC production and use, "participation is … a relative term when over 80 percent of all users are in fact passive recipients of content," [64] it is all the more so when seemingly half of all YouTube videos collectively can earn as little as 2% of aggregate views. [65] While YouTube undoubtedly provides opportunities for non-professionals to circulate their diverse audio-visual productions, therefore, its mechanisms for capturing and channeling attention have significant implications for the strength of any given contributor’s voice — as any YouTuber whose video has ever been officially "Featured" could probably attest.
By the same token, if the discursive and disciplinary effects of popularity sees many a produser’s creations receiving relatively little viewer attention, the "Recommended for You" feature recently added to the YouTube home page serves as a reminder that UGC users actually communicate far more than they necessarily know or intend. Like all targeted recommendation systems, YouTube’s works by tracking user’s viewing history and suggesting similar content on the basis of video tags and rankings. While such recommendation functions ostensibly work to "optimize" user satisfaction, they also make apparent the potential for advanced digital technologies to facilitate "the tracking of individual social behaviour." [66] YouTube’s integration with Google’s multifarious web services (web search, email, advertising, document creation, traffic analysis) means that user-behaviour tracking goes well beyond the scope of capturing video selection data for the purpose of recommending similar content, potentially generating, moreover, a wealth of information about audiences that would have been unimaginable in the context of broadcast television. Personal details captured through registration processes but also "metadata" — information about media use, web search histories, and other online movements — obtained from IP addresses, clickstream data, cookies and so on provide a boon for advertisers and niche-marketers aiming to draw up detailed images of the UGC user demographic. As van Dijck puts it,
the metadata Google harvests from UGC traffic and clickstreams is much more valuable to advertisers than the content users provide to these sites. Metadata are not merely a by-product of user-generated content: they are a prime resource for profiling real people with real interests. [67]
Crucial in view of the image of audience silence is the fact that YouTube users "have no power over data distribution," [68] every seemingly private act of media consumption being registered, aggregated and traded as the property of YouTube. Accordingly, the apparent (qualified, uneven) agency at the level of content production is won at the same time as "users" "lose their grip on their agency as consumers as a result of technological algorithms tracking their behaviour and refining their profile." [69] With every action, every communication, on the part of an individual aiding media service providers in their quest for market dominance, the result, as Charles Fairchild has observed in a different context, is that "the cultural studies shibboleth that institutions use strategies to dominate while individuals use tactics to resist has become a blurry maxim at best." [70] In an era of increasingly surveillant media, then, the audience "silence" that was once was taken as the very measure of media domination becomes, instead, precisely that form of agency which the viewing subject is most aggressively denied.
SILENCE AND VOICELESSNESS
It is by now hardly revolutionary to note that television’s divergence across a range of variable technological, industrial and cultural contexts precludes coherent description of its "essential" features. Precisely for that reason, though, when faced with the alternative between judging silent television as impossible as such or finding it readily observable in a voicelessness that has accompanied television almost from the beginning, neither conclusion would seem entirely satisfactory. Televisual silence escapes such accounts, of course, because the sound of television is likewise variable across TV’s divergent forms. Sound is, from the outset, multi-modal, divided across contexts of production and reception, subject to interpretation and speculation, willed and unwitting, standardizable yet event-like — in a word, virtual. Accordingly, far from marking a lack, televisual silence sounds in response to investigations into the artifactual nature of audio-visuality, the objectification of television as art, and the fragile, uneven and divided character of audience participation.
Understood in this way, the cultural significance of televisual silence lies foremost in its exposure of the analytical influence of the myth of silent film, the enduring discursive force of author-ity, and the customary rendering of audience passivity/powerlessness as an inability to speak. The discursive effect of such views is to construe debates over silent TV in terms of the theme of "voice" (as dialogue, as sign of presence of intent, as audience participation), rendering voice and voicelessness as polar states in a binary system ("on" and "off"). While the productive potential of that theme should not be underestimated — providing, as it does, some insight via the thought of silent television into the oft-unacknowledged reversibility of television’s aesthetic conventions and the historico-technological variability of television’s communicative power vis-à-vis its audiences — the image of silence as voicelessness can often obscure as much as it reveals. For the construction of presence of voice as the antithesis of silence risks neglecting not just the role played by mediated modes of listening in the achievement of sound or silence, but also the fact of the unspoken as unwitting revelation in the event of communication, and the uneven distribution of the voice "itself" across a number of constitutive and regulatory mechanisms (speaker, transmitter, ritual, receiver, and more). The analytical reduction of silence to voicelessness thus functions both as a sign of the technoprosthetic "nature" of orality-aurality and as a measure of the sway that the myth of the indivisibility and self-sufficiency of communicative acts continues to hold over the study of communication and visual culture. Against this reduction, the thought of silent TV’s virtual im/plausibility paves the way for approaching silence and sound as intermingling and interchangeable, as reconfigurable elements within a structure of general technoprosthetic virtual possibility. And it is perhaps only when televisual silence is thus apprehended that the body of scholarship on the forms and functions of silent television — indeed, television more "generally" — can be found to warrant further investigation than may at first be imagined.
Notes ——————-
[1] Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars, ed. Paul Patton and Terry Smith (Sydney: Power Publications, 2001), 22.
[2] Cited in Nikos Metallinos, Television Aesthetics: Perceptual, Cognitive, and Compositional Bases (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 40.
[3] Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 165.
[4] Raymond Williams, "The Technology and the Society," in The Anthropology of Media: A Reader, ed. Kelly Askew and Richard R. Wilk (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 36.
[5] Steve Neale, Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Colour (London: Macmillan Education, 1985), 91.
[6] Raymond Fielding, "The technological antecedents of the coming of sound: An introduction," in Sound and the Cinema: The Coming of Sound to American Film, ed. Evan William Cameron (New York: Redgrave, 1980), 5.
[10] The synchronization of sound and image was, and remains, far from perfect, of course. Indeed, its fallibility was famously exploited for comedic and narrative purposes in Singing in the Rain (1952).
[11] Alexander Walker, The Shattered Silents (London: Elm Tree Books, 1978), 97.
[12] More precisely, the "talkies" arguably ushered in a regime of listening formerly restricted to contexts of cultural reception defined by the centrality of spoken or musical performance (opera, theater, lectures) and largely absent from sites of film exhibition.
[14] It’s worth noting, too, that the formal-realist mode of listening that has come to dominate commercial cinema production generates a proclivity to treat all instances and elements of film sound as diegetic, including those that are otherwise not contiguous with the image of action (e.g. "voice-over" narration, which is far more often than not composed as the utterance of a character from within the "world" of the narrative). With one important exception to be discussed below, music is today the sole remaining use of non-diegetic sound in mainstream cinema — though even in this case it is far from uncommon for a non-diegetic soundtrack (in the form of a popular song, for instance) to be rearticulated as diegetic (e.g. by synchronizing the abrupt cessation of the music soundtrack with an image of a hand switching off a car radio, say), such that the use of music soundtracks increasingly responds to and reinforces the formal-realist mode of listening that demands the soundtrack be "explained" diegetically.
[15] Peter Lev, The Fifties: Transforming the Screen 1950-1959 — History of American Cinema, vol.7 (Irvine: University of California Press, 2006), 137. In the very early days of television, moreover, the major Hollywood studios declined to license their feature films to television stations "for a variety of reasons, including their relationship with exhibitors and talent unions, their involvement in alternative exhibition schemes such as theater and subscription TV, and their dissatisfaction with the prices offered by the networks for quality films" (138).
[16] Lynn Spigel, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
[26] Whedon’s account of his aesthetic aims for "Hush" and for Buffy generally are taken from the commentary on that episode, available on the DVD release of Season IV — the significance of which fact I will return to below.
[30] The soundtrack for the "Silent Show" was produced live, of course, as per the routine production processes of late-50s live television production. But the program’s soundtrack is no less standardized for that reason, to the extent that studio recording and transmission technologies mean that, with the exception of sounds produced live at the point of reception, the same soundtrack accompanied the program’s "exhibition" during its initial and subsequent broadcasts.
[34] One feature of silence in sports commentary worth noting here is that such silences "work" only in relation to particular kinds of sports. Silence in football commentary would seem incongruous, a sign of technical fault, but for test cricket, lawn bowls, golf and even tennis such silence is ordinary. In other words, the volume (as it were) of the commentary mimics the expected or required silence of the spectators on the ground, such that silence does not function as a self-identical sign of death, of TV’s essential distance from the event, but rather counts among the tools with which the "liveness" of sports coverage may be produced.
[35] Derek Kompare, "Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of Television," Television & New Media 7 (November 2006): 337-8.
[37] I borrow this distinction from Frances Bonner, who argues that much critical analysis of television neglects a whole range of programming — game shows, lifestyle programmes, chat shows, advertising and other forms of continuity — and who seeks to make sense of these "genres" in terms of television’s regularities and "everydayness." For Bonner, such "ordinary television" stands against "special television": "It is as much a characteristic of special television that it disrupts regular scheduling, as it is of ordinary television that it constitutes it" (Ordinary Television: Analyzing Popular TV [London: SAGE, 2003], 43). To the extent that DVD publication enables schedule-disruption on demand (as it were), it plays a significant part in making particular forms of television "special."
[39] Neale, Cinema and Technology, 92. In this regard, it’s worth noting that commentary tracks tend to be superimposed over the dramatic soundtrack, leaving an audible trace of the latter rather than taking its place, and thereby positioning the commentator as viewing companion.
[40] Joss Whedon, "Hush: Director’s Commentary", Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV Series) [DVD], Episode 10, Season IV.
[41] Michel Foucault, "What is an author?," in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 158-9.
[42] Henry Jenkins argues, for instance, that "fans reject the idea of a definitive version, produced, authorized, and regulated by some media conglomerate" (Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide [New York and London: New York University Press, 2006], 256) — though it would be a mistake to treat "the fan" as indicative of audiences generally rather than as a highly vocal segment of such audiences or as one of a (limited) range of cultural dispositions available for audience members to adopt or inhabit in a potentially discontinuous fashion.
[43] For two exemplary accounts of such developments, see Jenkins, Convergence Culture, and Mark Deuze, Media Work (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).
[44] José van Dijck, "Users Like You? Theorizing Agency in User-generated Content," Media, Culture & Society 13 (2009): 43.
[45] Janice Radway, "Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological and Political Consequences of a Metaphor," Book Research Quarterly 2 (1986): 21-2.
[49] In Convergence Culture, Jenkins places his first experience of online fan activity as early as 1991, when he accessed alt.tv.twinpeaks, the fan community that formed around David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, whose readership reportedly sized as much as 25,000 readers (32). Further evincing the tendency to treat online communications media as providing TV audiences with a "voice," Jenkins describes various practices of online fan activity as being "shaped by the desire to talk back to the television set" (29).
[51] The quasi-permanence of audience-generated criticism may also have implications for audience studies and any media criticism that seeks to analyze audience responses as part of a broader cultural text. For instance, Carol Deming, in her case for "television-centred television criticism," argues that "it is the television critic’s job — perhaps in concert with the audience researcher and surely in concert with the audience — to identify the unspoken or unenacted in a text" ("For Television-Centred Television Criticism: Lessons from Feminism," in Television and Women’s Culture: The Politics of the Popular, ed. Mary Ellen Brown [Sydney: Currency Press, 1990], 51). While today the idea of "centering" television criticism on "the" medium’s idiosyncratic features seems particularly challenging, the emergence of online discussion forums nevertheless has the potential both to greatly assist and occasionally frustrate those television critics who would seek to pursue a form of criticism that is appropriate to television’s publicness.
[52] Julie Levin Russo, "User-Penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergence," Cinema Journal 48 (Summer 2009): 125.
[53] For instance, Point 6C in YouTube’s "Terms of Use" states that "you [i.e. the 'user'] retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels," http://www.youtube.com/t/terms (Accessed 2 February 2010).
[56] For one YouTube user’s account of the structuring effects of the site’s commercial and organizational activities on the site’s users, see mrblacksmoviereviews, http://www.youtube.com/user/mrblacksmoviereviews, and his video criticizing the secretive nature of YouTube’s "Featured Video" and "Partnership" programs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GtNyGXKnOU (Accessed 2 February 2010).
[57] van Dijck, "Users Like You?" 45; as Cha et al. have noted, moreover, information filters, such as search engines and recommendation systems, "typically favor a small number of popular items, steering users away from unpopular ones" (Meeyoung Cha, Haewoon Kwak, Pablo Rodriquez, Yong-Yeol Ahn, and Sue Moon, "I Tube, You Tube, Everybody Tubes: Analyzing the World’s Largest User Generated Content Video System." Internet Measurement Conference: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement [San Diego, 2007]: 6, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1298306.1298309).
[58] Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 41.
[61] Cha et al., "I Tube, You Tube," 4. Again, concentration of audience attention on popular texts is not at all unusual, and indeed conforms to the regularly observable Pareto principle, or 80-20 rule, which in this context would suggest that the top 20% of videos as ranked in terms of popularity would receive 80% of the view requests, with the remaining 80% of videos earning only 20% of the requests. By contrast, Cha et al. find YouTube requests to follow a more skewed distribution, with the top 10% of videos receiving 80% of the total views (3-4), providing some small warrant to suspect that there is something about YouTube’s interface that intensifies the mobilizing power of popularity.
[70] Charles Fairchild, Pop Idols and Pirates: Mechanisms of Consumption and the Global Circulation of Popular Music (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), 86.
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Robert Briggs teaches in the School of Media, Culture & Creative Arts at Curtin University. His work has appeared in Angelaki, Cultural Studies Review, Social Semiotics and many other international journals of philosophy, literature and culture.
Virilio’s Theory of Catastrophe, Apocalypse, Globalisation
In Virilio’s view contemporary global society is a catastrophic society. This much is evident from recent texts, such as The Information Bomb[1], Unknown Quantity[2], The Original Accident [3], and The University of Disaster[4]. These texts show how the expansive project of modernity has reached its limit in the light speed colonization of terrestrial time and space by technology and media, and has now started to contract back towards a singularity of infinite density that is uninhabitable for embodied humans and only really liveable as virtual or spectral space. Beyond his consideration of the exorbitant notion of exo-planets advanced by physicists such as Stephen Hawking [5], who suggest that it will soon be time for humanity to vacate the exhausted planet in search of a new home, Virilio illustrates the catastrophic nature of what we might call completed modernity in his view of the recent economic crisis.
In a 2008 Le Monde interview with Gerard Curtois and Michel Guerrin entitled ‘The Current Crash Represents the Integral Accident Par Excellence’ [6], Virilio suggests that we should understand the economic crisis in terms of a catastrophe of modern or hyper-modern speed and an accident of global proportions waiting to happen. In this way he follows Hannah Arendt’s view, which she explains in her The Origins of Totalitarianism[7], that progress and catastrophe are two sides of the same coin. This view also recalls Walter Benjamin’s [8] theory of the catastrophic nature of modernity. He recalls these comparisons by showing how the market crash may be evidence that the hyper-modern project of capitalist globalisation that began with Benjamin Franklin’s assertion that time is money has reached its conclusion in a catastrophic mode of post-modern or disaster capitalism [9] that takes place at the level of virtuality, but is no less real in its effects.
This tension between processes of virtualisation, which Virilio [10] links to the hyper-modern achievement of mediation, light speed, and instantaneity, and the catastrophe of the life world of embodied humanity, is important for the thesis I want to present in this chapter. This is because it allows me to show how Virilio recasts the secular idea of catastrophe in terms of the virtual, metaphysical, mystical, and ultimately theological idea of the Christian apocalypse. I believe this notion may be seen to link his work to both the messianic political theology of Arendt [11], Benjamin [12], and Heidegger [13] and the contemporary return of religiosity to the centre of the political scene of global society. In other words, my view is that Virilio’s theory of the catastrophic nature of processes of virtualisation for embodied humanity – and his subsequent hope that the careful interpretation or illustration of accidental events may reveal or illuminate the catastrophic other side of the modern or hyper-modern progress towards virtualisation thus enabling humanity to find a new way of living with technology – should be understood as a quasi-theological theory of post-modern apocalypticism comparable to those of Arendt, Benjamin, and Heidegger, who hoped that a similar turn may occur in the future. Even reading his short Le Monde interview offers a glimpse into the way in which Virilio understands the recent economic crash.
In my view the catastrophic financial crash is apocalyptic in Virilio’s terms not simply because of its effects on large numbers of people who have lost their homes. This is a condition which we must understand first individualistically, in terms of the personal catastrophe for the individuals involved; second socio-politically, through the idea that globalisation has produced the forced liberation of people from their environment and led to the emergence of a world of flows; and third phenomenologically-existentially, insofar as this event realises the theory of humanity torn from its environment, made homeless, and cast out into an alien world. But the crash is apocalyptic not simply for these reasons, or because of the ways that it can be seen to reveal the completion or limit of the light speeds of globalisation and hyper-modern marketisation in the collapse of these forms into chaos. Rather, I would suggest that beyond these markers, which may be seen to locate the event as a secular catastrophe, we should regard Virilio’s take on the financial crash as truly apocalyptic in nature because of the ways in which he understands the location of the crash on the virtual, textual, and metaphysical level of signs and information. That is to say that I think we should see Virilio’s apocalypticism in the ways in which he imagines the virtuality or textuality of this catastrophe of signs as an esoteric text inviting the revelation of the destructive capacity of hyper-modernity for humanity and suggestive of the idea that we must use this revelation to discover some new form of technological society habitable for embodied human beings who cannot but live in the world.
But what is it that the apocalyptic economic crash reveals in Virilio’s view? Reading the Le Monde interview through the lens of his wider thought I would suggest that for Virilio the apocalyptic crash reveals the destructive capacity of progress, and in particular progress towards virtualisation. In his view it is this process of virtualisation that signals the emergence of a quasi-theological spectral body that denatures, dehumanises, and alienates humanity from itself in a state of pure or perma war where everybody is aware of the precariousness of their situation. Here precariousness is understood in both socio-economic terms of a position in the labour market and phenomenological-existential terms of a torn relation to the life support systems of the terrestrial environment itself [14]. It is on the basis of these catastrophic effects that Virilio suggests that the futurism of the hyper-modern utopia of speed needs to be critically re-thought. Unfortunately, we know that this is highly unlikely to happen without severe catastrophic effects because from the point of view of neo-liberal capitalism, the hegemonic socio-economic system of the empire of speed which remains the great blind-spot of Virilio’s thought, violent crashes and accidental events are ultimately productive in ways illustrated by Schumpeter’s [15] theory of creative destruction and more recently Klein’s [16] analysis of disaster capitalism.
Although I would risk the claim that the capitalist view of the productivity of violence, destruction, and catastrophe may be shaken by accidents that threaten the coherence of the socio-economic system or certainly the environmental life support system itself, it is not at all clear that this is the case and that capitalism will reform its practices when it looks like the world is about to end. This is because the high priest of neo-liberal economics, Milton Friedman [17], would regard the total collapse of the socio-economic system in apocalyptic terms, as an opportunity to re-boot the system in a more successful, more efficient form, rather than as a wake up to reform the mode of production in a general sense. In this respect, I think we must remain cautious of Virilio’s [18] Augustinian theory of apocalyptic hope, which parallels Girard’s [19] view that the contemporary world is balanced somewhere between the mimetic war of all against all and an apocalyptic turn that will usher in a new mode of being together. As Žižek [20], Badiou [21], and Kroker [22] explain, and Virilio knows all too well, contemporary capitalism is itself an apocalyptic world-less form rooted in metaphysics, science fiction, and the kind of quasi-theological mysticism that Der Derian [23] finds at the heart of the American military-industrial-media-entertainment network and the related project of virtuous war. As such, and because we must understand that post-modern capitalism may well not only survive, but also profit from the end of the world, we should recognise the importance of Virilio’s [24] notions of critical space. What this idea captures is the possibility that we are currently balanced on the apocalyptic edge of the socio-economic system, on the line between violent destruction and the extinction of humanity as being-in-the world, and the turn to a new ecological mode of living able to reconcile our identity as natural, social, and technological beings.
Given this concern for the apocalyptic nature of hyper-modernity, and Drew Burk’s [25] account of Virilio as the apocalyptic thinker of revelation, critical distance, and the scenic imagination par excellence, I want to claim that we should emphasise the link between Virilio’s concept of critical space and his ideas of the museum of accidents [26] and more recently the university of disaster. [27] Through these notions he suggests the need to reveal the catastrophic nature of the empire of speed, to open up a space for critical engagement with our culture of disaster that is otherwise prohibited by the collapse of knowledge and thought into the ecstasy of communication and information [28], and ultimately to enable the turning or transformation of global society to a more humane form.
I want to suggest that we should regard Virilio’s ideas of the museum of accidents [29] and the university of disaster [30] as attempts to present a theory of the institutionalisation of the critique of the globalised empire of speed that may tip the apocalyptic balance against the world-less mysticism of neo-liberal post-modern capitalism and towards the humanitarian demand for a more liveable world where technology works for humans, rather than the other way around. Against what he calls the twilight of place [31], which condemns humanity to, at best, a life on the move and, at worst, the living death of a disembodied and spectral existence, Virilio shifts into reverse through the idea of critical space that can institutionalise the Ancient Socratic call to ‘Know Thyself’; such a call has been disappeared by the culture of speed that leaves no time for reflection, but remains hidden, a kind of unconscious supplement in our world of light speed trajectories and velocities, awaiting the moment when time seems to stop and critical thought is possible once more. Akin to the Freudian logic of unearthing the hidden unconscious other side of psychic life, Virilio’s [32] notions of the critical space of the museum of accidents and the university of disaster seeks to reveal the other side of the modern commitment to progress and development.
Following Aristotle, who suggested that the accident reveals the substance and in doing so inspired western thinkers from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, Deleuze, and Derrida to think through a theory contrasting the system and its others, Virilio explicitly takes the case of the accident and suggests that it has the potential to reveal the substance or truth of the modern temptation to progress, speed, and totality [33]. Apart from revealing this substance, as the violence and destructiveness of modernity, especially in its hyper-active phase, it may be that what Virilio’s [34] apocalypse would also reveal would be the need for humanity to learn a sense of humility. To accept that it is not divine, but rather a limited earthbound species that cannot live without resistance or gravity. The paradox of this situation is, of course, that it is precisely humanity’s limited nature, the fact that we are not Gods, that has led us to reach for the skies only to plunge back down to earth like Icarus, the tragic figure par excellence of Greek mythology.
Like Nietzsche [35], who was well aware of humanity’s tragic nature, Virilio knows that we will always try to touch the sky. In this respect I do not see him in any way as anti-modern, even though it is possible that his critique of the excessive nature of the empire of speed may express itself in a form of social and cultural conservatism that is not easily reconciled with his radical critique of technology. Instead I believe that his problematic resides in the hubristic forgetting of tragedy that has evolved through hyper-modernity and the need to rehabilitate the Ancient idea of humanity as a tragic creature of the limit that is made necessary and possible by the apocalyptic culture of post-modernism. This culture simultaneously and paradoxically marks the moment when we run into the limit of terrestrial time and space and forget about our earthbound limited nature. In this respect my focus is less on Virilio’s conservatism or his desire to restrict humanity; rather I am interested in what I perceive to be his concern to maintain the experience of the limit in a global age where we simultaneously inhabit a state of global fullness and completion and precisely for that reason have no sense of that truth. It is this paradox, this conflation of the destructive potential of completed modernity and the total inability of humanity to understand this condition as a sign of the limitation and potential end of its own existence, primarily because of its location or immersion in a vortex of information that screens out critical thought and knowledge, that forms the basis of Virilio’s apocalypse and necessitates the creation of institutions able to think through the end times in order to pull us back from the brink. Herein resides the meaning of Virilio’s [36] idea of a politics of the very worst and his notion of the accident as an inverted miracle able to radically re-orient our relation to the world and technology.
II
Virilio’s Notion of Catastrophic Modernity
For Virilio [37] modernity must be understood as a catastrophic epoch which has led to what he calls a ‘toposcopical disaster’ characterised by humanity’s inability to properly perceive the phenomenological reality of the environment that functions as its life support system. Against this catastrophic condition – which he tells us leads to the psychopathological condition of the planet man who falls into megalomania by virtue of his inability to understand his relation to the totally mediated virtual world that has been condensed to the infinite density of a singularity by the light speeds of new media technology – Virilio explains that we need to find a new form of art suitable for illustrating our condition and illuminating our apocalyptic situation. [38] From this insight I think we can make two points. First, it is methodologically significant that Virilio discusses the redemptive quality of art, rather than critical theory, because what this illustrates is his view that complex theoretical constructions are unlikely to impact upon a high speed society where knowledge and thought have been more or less destroyed by an excess of information and communication. The value of art is, therefore, that it makes an emotional, rather than cognitive, impression upon the audience and causes them to feel, rather than necessarily theoretically comprehend their situation in an epoch where theoretical comprehension has been, at best, marginalised, and at worst, foreclosed by the light speeds of new technology. We know that Virilio [39] foregrounds this methodological approach in his work because he has the tendency to explain the ways in which his own work leaps from idea to idea without necessarily working out the connections between theories and concepts. The effect of this procedure is, therefore, to give the reader first, an impression and second, an invitation to work backwards through the theoretical connections present in his work. We can, of course, find a precedent for this approach to critical writing, which is perfectly symmetrical with the trajectivity of the post-modern empire of speed, even if it does run the risk of collapsing into the vortex of information and communication that characterises our mediated world. We can compare Virilio’s thought to the German critical theorists’ notion of the thought-image, which was similarly meant to oppose the banality of the culture industry from the inside through the construction of media-friendly critical bombs. [40] In the case of both the German critical theorists, such as Adorno and Horkheimer (and to a lesser extent Benjamin), and Virilio, I think we can, therefore, pinpoint a notion of political activism, whereby critical writing is itself an artistic activity meant to oppose the banality of technology that simply works for the sake of working, and somehow to spark critical reflection in the minds of the disorientated and stupefied masses.
As Virilio [41] knows very well, the potential problem of this strategy is that it is not possible to fight speed with speed. From the perspective of the Frankfurters, the threat is that Virilio’s user friendly critiques may be transformed into commodities through the process of knowledge exchange on the open market, thus becoming little more than fantastical representations of radical critique in a globalised system that has no other. However, my view is that there is more to Virilio’s [42] turn to critical art than the attempt to simply mimic the dynamism of the empire of speed, and that it is possible to understand this strategy in ways that render it perfectly symmetrical with his other major radical theory, grey ecology [43], or the concern with the speed limit. My view is that what Virilio’s turn to critical art seeks to achieve is a connection to the masses caught under the sign of light speed that is able to lift them out of the endless passage of events and freeze time, creating a moment of solitude, concentration, contemplation, and reflection, which in other works he calls critical space. [44] My thesis is, therefore, that it is this critical space of reflection that Virilio wants to open up in order to create the possibility of apocalyptic transformation and that understanding this strategy is key to comprehending the meaning of his political activism.
This point about Virilio’s activism is important because it shows us that his apocalypse is never immediate, but rather relies on the recognition of the catastrophic nature of modernity that his work may produce in the audience. It is only at this point that Virilio’s apocalypse, where apocalypse refers to a process of revelation, would truly appear. Herein resides the second point about the nature of Virilio’s theory of the value of art for illuminating the catastrophic nature of contemporary processes of globalisation; although the catastrophe is always already present, and taking place as we speak, the apocalypse is not now, and can never be now, without the revelatory function of representation to tip the balance away from the unthinking catastrophe of modernity that is endlessly taking place and towards the critical ecological-phenomenological demand for a new relationship between humanity, the world, and technology.
The apocalypse resides, therefore, in the moment of unveiling, in the moment or event when the catastrophe becomes so apparent that it is impossible for the audience or tele-viewer not to recognise its representation or presentation in critical art and act upon this recognition. Since this has not happened yet, and we remain caught up in the end times where catastrophe is everywhere and apocalypse nowhere, we might say that we live in the epoch of unrealised catastrophe. This is because the true realisation of catastrophe, not the basic media representation of catastrophic events that is fed to passive tele-viewers, but rather the existential realisation of the catastrophe taking place now, the endless catastrophe pushing humanity and the world to the very edge of existence, is the apocalypse. This is the true moment of revelation, that would change our relationship to both technology and the world forever, and demand us to actively reformulate our way of living in the world on the basis of that revelatory experience.
If this revelatory experience, this apocalyptic moment, is the objective of Virilio’s thought, I think that we should read his works as a history of the catastrophic nature of modernity, hyper-modernity, and the emergence of the post-modern moment of globalisation when time and space are exhausted and there is nowhere else to go. As catastrophe piles upon catastrophe in a totally mediated, totally inter-connected world where everything impacts upon everything else, Virilio’s [45] wager is that we will wake up to the catastrophe of modernity realised or post-modernity and change our situation. Shifting into reverse, and considering his now classic Speed and Politics[46], Virilio shows how modernity and the obsession with speed and progress began with the French Revolution. In his view the Revolution destroyed the immobility of the feudal universe that had reigned more or less unchanged since Aristotle considered the idea of the great chain of being, and inaugurated a society and social form ordered by the principle of futurity and modernisation. This new society was formed on the basis of science, reason, technology, and democracy and was eventually meant to reach its final destination in a utopia of techno-scientific reasoned virtue. However, as Žižek [47] has shown in his essay on Robespierre’s famous ‘Virtue and Terror’ speech, the revolutionaries, who Virilio calls dromomaniacs, knew that their new society of speed, movement, and progress could never succeed without overcoming or simply crashing through whatever obstacles lay in its path. In this respect Žižek highlights Robespierre’s insight that virtue was always bound to terror, that virtue was in fact impossible without terror, in much the same way that Virilio foregrounds the terminal relationship between speed and war, to show how the history of modernity, the epoch of speed, has always been about the violent overcoming of obstacles and limits through terrorist ballistic technologies.
This much is evident when we consider what Virilio [48] calls pure war, his term for explaining the thin or even invisible line separating war from peace in modern society. Consider the principal site of modernity, modernisation, and speed, the city, which Virilio [49] regards as a site of ‘habitable circulation’. If we think about the city, which Mumford [50] tells us is the originary site of human sociability and civilization, through the works of the Italian Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni and the German sociologist Georg Simmel, we enter a completely different scene to the foundational city painted by Mumford. In Boccioni’s The City Rises[51] or Simmel’s The Metropolis and Mental Life[52] we are presented with the image of the city as a place of enormous energy and vitality, but also abstraction, alienation, and violence.
In both cases Virilio’s [53] view that the modern city is governed by a dictatorship of movement is appropriate. There is no resting place, or hiding place, in either Boccioni or Simmel. Moderns are fatally exposed to speed and must learn to adjust to the new epoch. While Simmel was, of course, critical of the new modern city of speed, because of the ways in which it fostered a culture of distance and estrangement, Boccioni, perhaps the master Futurist artist, thought that humanity had to evolve to live with the new speeds of modernity. Hence his classic sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, can in many ways be seen as a prefiguration of the totalitarian man captured in the writings of Ernst Jünger [54], and critically discussed by Klaus Theweleit [55] in his two volume psychoanalytic study of the proto-Nazi Freikorps para-military group that terrorised Weimar Germany in the 1920s.
We know that neither Boccioni or Simmel were concerned with war in any conventional sense; yet that they clearly relate to the modern prophets of technological war, Marinetti, Jünger, and later the totalitarians, Hitler and Stalin, whom Arendt [56] characterised by their obsession with movement, dynamism, and the notion of violent progress towards a pre-defined ideological utopian conclusion, is of central importance. What this link illuminates is what Virilio [57] means by pure war as the collapse of the relationship between peace and war and the endo-colonisation of everyday life by the warrior ethos. Despite the rejection of the violent utopianism of the totalitarians in the wake of the discovery of the horrors of Auschwitz and the Gulag Archipelago, it would be wrong to imagine that pure war or the obsession with speed and movement has in any way left the scene of post-modern liberal society. As Virilio [58] explains, speed remains the hope or key utopian principle of the west. He tells us that movement is the only law of the modern, hyper-modern, or post-modern world and that the failure to move is a sign of decay, decline, and ultimately death.
That the futurism of speed remains central to life in western liberal and neo-liberal society should not surprise us since the founder of the liberal tradition, Thomas Hobbes [59], was himself concerned with the movement and the progress of men through life. In his political science he imagined society as smooth Euclidean space populated by atomised men or precise ‘subjectiles’ bound by the rules of the road set out by the Leviathan and expected to follow these rules on pain of death. For Hobbes, life was a race, and a struggle for power, where power refers to the difference between the relative speeds of men. In the context of this situation, the rule of the Leviathan was meant to legislate against fatal collisions. These would, in the state of nature, lead to catastrophic accidents between men, resulting in the end of one of their trajectories through life, immobility, and as a consequence, death [60].
Beyond Virilio’s [61] location of the emergence of modernity, the epoch of speed, in the event of the French Revolution, it may well be that we should also think about the ways in which Hobbes’ theory of the state as traffic cop from the mid-17th century also contributed to the origin of the new society of movement, dynamism, and progress. Here, we may also consider how Hobbes’ work built upon the new physics of Galileo and the theory of inertia that posited a universal law of movement and undermined the Aristotelian orthodoxy that imagined a universe of order, stasis, and organisation, and regarded all movement as progress towards this natural end point. Given the radical break between the ancient-medieval physics based upon Aristotle’s thought and Galileo’s new modern paradigm that Hobbes took as a model of the endless dynamism of early capitalist society, it is possible to see the French Revolutionary break, which ushered in the society of the epoch of totalitarianism, as an attempt to rediscover the ancient notion of a telos that the Spartans and Plato had sought to defend against Herodotus’ [62] notion of history, and combat the revolutionary conditions later represented by Boccioni and Simmel.
In this way, it is possible to construct an historical time-line explaining the emergence of the current catastrophic empire of speed that Virilio believes has reached its limit and started to burn out under conditions of globalisation. This time-line would run from the historical destruction of Sparta and Plato’s related utopian city outlined in The Republic[63], evolve through Aristotle’s theory of movement towards natural ends, take in the destruction of Aristotle’s theory by Galileo and the new modern physics and Hobbes’ political science of society as a race, before reaching Marx and the anti-capitalist reaction to the new violent society of speed. This anti-capitalist turn may in turn be related to the totalitarian attempts to re-discover a modernist version of the ancient utopia of stasis, leading finally to a consideration of the rise of post-modern neo-liberal capitalism in the wake of the collapse of the totalitarianisms that has liberated speed from all ideas of limitation.
The central point about the end of this time-line is, of course, that the post-modern neo-liberal liberation of speed from all ideas of limitation, where ideas of limitation refer to either utopian ends or social speed limits such as trade regulations meant to govern the movement of capital, is evidence of the hubris and the forgetting of tragedy that Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Virilio all see as the core problematic of the modern society of nihilism, technology, and speed [64]. In each case I think it is possible to argue that Nietzsche and Heidegger, and now Virilio, recognise that the inability of humanity to appreciate the necessary phenomenological resistance of the world upon its movement and speed will produce catastrophic consequences in the form of the emergence of a last man bored by a technological world that he can no longer relate to and that completely prohibits his continued movement through space. This is, of course, the famous theory of inertia that Virilio [65] employs to show how the empire of speed has started to collapse into a society of immobility and stasis characterised by walls, borders, camps, and prisons that he generalises through the ideas of global foreclosure, incarceration, and lock down.
In this new global crash culture, where the ideology of global capitalism talks about freedom of movement and works off the idea that increased proximity in a society where it is impossible to evade the other will lead to more love, sharing, and community, Virilio’s [66] point is that reality is defined by surveillance, suspicion, paranoia, security, hatred, petty jealousy, revulsion towards the other, and ultimately pure war. This, then, is the catastrophe of the empire of speed without limits. This is the catastrophe awaiting a revelatory moment to transform it into an apocalyptic event that may enable us to enact radical, revolutionary, change. The challenge remains, of course, to find some way to produce this apocalyptic moment, to produce this moment of revelation, through artistic endeavour and critical thought in a society of speed where everything is reduced to the status of information, communication, and commodity to be exchanged and passed on. In other words, there is no apocalyptic moment in the empire of speed because the empire of speed is defined by what we might variously call following Kroker [67] and Wilson [68] post-modern, virtual, hyper, or supercapitalism.
In the hyper-capitalist world, if we choose to adopt Kroker’s name for the new form of high speed, high tech, totally virtual capitalism, there is no telos, there is no apocalyptic end, no fatal moment of collapse, since, as Wilson [69] points out, death is distributed across the system. In this vision of the new capitalist world, mortality invades every aspect of life in the form of a death drive that compares to Virilio’s concept of pure war [70] which shows how war is no longer contained in a discrete event, but rather exists everywhere, nowhere, and is at the same time never and always on. For Virilio [71] this death drive is explained by America’s attachment to the idea of the frontier, or what he calls, citing Jackson, the frontier effect, which has led the land of the free towards a form of nihilism set on the destruction of the environment for the sake of development, modernisation, progress, and creation of what Deleuze and Guattari [72] call smooth space. That is to say that the American determination to conquer or overcome obstacles, to create smooth space suitable for the speed of movement for capital and human flows, in many respects reproduces Hobbes’ capitalist metaphysics of legalised movement in real space. It is this innovation that transforms the phenomenological world of embodied experience into a metaphysical or virtual abstraction that humans, or perhaps we should say those post-humans plugged into the network society, experience through inter-face with technology. Virilio’s [73] America, the land of Hobbesian materialist metaphysics realised, is for this reason comparable to Baudrillard’s [74] Nietzschean land of fascinated banality. It exists as a land of deserts, a featureless landscape, a smooth Euclidean space, that has come to define post-modern globalisation as a catastrophic space awaiting the arrival of its apocalypse.
What is more is that we know that the apocalypse is on the American mind. Consider the born again Christian fundamentalists. They understand the endless war in the Middle East, the lands of deserts, Iraq, the birth place of human culture and civilization, and Armageddon, the site of the final battle between the forces of good and evil, as the scene of the coming apocalypse where the saved will be separated from the damned and the world will learn what America already knows, that it is the land of God. Again we can discern the strange virtualisation of the world, which Virilio [75] understands as characteristic of the light speeds of globalisation, where metaphysics and theology stand in for politics, define the direction of our world, and set the scene for an apocalyptic moment that will transform the basic co-ordinates of human reality. Unfortunately, the contemporary American apocalypse, which updates Winthrop’s theory of the city upon the hill in popular and official culture ranging from Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind[76] books to the Bush regime’s PNAC, is not the apocalypse imagined by Virilio [77]. Whereas his theory suggests creating speed limits or a ‘political economy of speed’ in order to enable humans to live together in the world, the American vision of the apocalypse is about destroying what little environmental resistance there is left in the world in order to completely liberate humanity from its reliance on natural life support systems.
In practical terms this is, of course, about spreading the American way, and perhaps military, economic, and cultural imperialism, but what is important about Virilio’s vision is that it enables us to understand that behind the commitment to practical principles of freedom, individualism, democracy, capitalism, and technology resides a metaphysical imperative to salvation through virtualisation. Paraphrasing Virilio paraphrasing Heidegger who noted that technology cannot be understood technologically but rather must be thought metaphysically, it may be the case that we cannot understand the American-led process of globalisation politically or economically, but instead must think about it metaphysically in terms of speed and the death drive towards virtuality. This view, which describes the way Virilio [78] understands processes of globalisation and the creation of the dromosphere is certainly supported by Der Derian’s [79] theory of virtuous war. Der Derian’s theory explains a mode of pure war, slimmed down in terms of its understanding of political complexity in order to meet the needs of speed, so that the world is divided along the lines of Carl Schmitt’s [80] violent friend / foe dichotomy where the virtuous chosen people face off against the evil others who are set to burn in Hell in an apocalyptic fight to the death, and transformed into a media abstraction by high technology, which virtualises reality, making the environment subordinate to the smooth spaces of the map. For Der Derian [81], America, the land of apocalyptic virtuous war, the mode of pure war that fuses a theological belief in virtue with a high tech commitment to virtuality, was always fated to take this road. It was, after all, named after Amerigo Vespucci, the great cartographer-explorer, and has always been the land of maps and the refusal of the world.
III
Virilio’s Apocalypticism
In his piece On Exactitude in Science[82] Jorge Luis Borges tells us that:
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. [83]
In many ways Borges’ fable perfectly captures the meaning of Virilio’s thought by illuminating the uselessness of what we might call the worship of maps, cartography, and representation. Related to this view the fable also captures Virilio’s utopian belief that, in the future, we may discover this ‘uselessness’ and turn away from the obsession with metaphysics and virtualisation and come to value the hard core of lived reality in its immediacy. It is, of course, impossible for humanity to ever really obtain direct unmediated access to reality because, as thinkers from Kant through Heidegger to Žižek have shown, there will always be some minimal distance between our comprehension of the world and our direct being in the world. But what Borges’ story illustrates is Virilio’s [84] key thesis, which is that this distance between our cognitive apprehension of the world and the world itself has been totalised by modernity, post-modernity, and the globalised empire of speed to the extent that we have caused what he calls the ‘desertification of the world’. In his essay on this new desert world, The Twilight of the Grounds[85], Virilio explains how this process of the desertification of the world has led to the destruction of the three bodies that define our embodied reality. The territorial body is destroyed by instantaneous media that collapses distances and transforms the planet into a singularity of infinite density, the social body is torn apart by the fragmentation of the city as high speeds and new forms of communication make deep social discourse more or less impossible, and the animal body collapses before processes of biopolitical endo-colonization that transform corporeality into information or code to be manipulated and worked upon. Under these conditions the new post-modern minimal man, the 21st century brother of Boccioni’s running man and Jünger’s super soldier, leaves his body behind to become an avatar, a cyber, metaphysical, or virtual tech no-body that parallels the Pauline theory of the body of Christ in his resentment of gravity and corporeality [86].
Akin to the apocalyptic body of Christ, which Paul described as the metaphysical, communistic, body with whom true believers would find communion in the afterlife, Virilio’s [87] theory of the physiological desertification of the post-modern individual captures the idea of the catastrophic liberation of man from the flesh in what Kroker [88] calls the humiliation of the flesh. But in the emergence of this catastrophic condition, Virilio finds a potential apocalyptic turning point, a moment of redemption that could save humanity from the fate of Mengele, the great sadistic artist of corporeal manipulation who refused the reality of the miserable human body. However, Virilio’s theory – which suggests that apocalyptic revelation in the desert that is simultaneously the end and the beginning of the world may re-establish our relationship with our own fleshy bodies, our fellow humans, and the environment that surrounds and supports us – seems to run counter to the dominant hegemonic understanding of the logic of Christian apocalypticism, precisely in the way in which it spins the idea of the liberation of the flesh towards notions of humiliation and cruelty [89].
As such, I think we must conclude that contrary to the Christian fundamentalism of the American right, which we might suggest has simply made explicit a theological commitment to virtuality present in modernity from the beginning, Virilio’s theory of speed and apocalyptic crashes turns off a materialist version of Christianity that folds the standard Nietzschean [90] interpretation of the religion as a Platonism of the masses committed to the destruction of the body, back into an idea of Christianity as a theory of the revolutionary potential of the poor and the miserable who experience their bodies and live through corporeal embeddedness in the world. In many respects, then, Virilio reads Christianity and the Christian apocalypse against the contemporary fundamentalist grain, and, akin to Žižek [91], understands the idea of God’s sacrificial offering up of Christ as a kind of integral accident, or event, that could allow humanity to pass through the desert of mutilation, cruelty, and virtuality in order to return to their bodies, each other, and the world provided by their maker.
In conclusion, then, I think that Virilio’s thought revolves around a critique of the modern, hyper-modern, and post-modern empire of speed that has defined the west perhaps from Herodotus’ [92] discovery of history or Hobbes’ [93] notion of the state as traffic cop, and certainly since the French revolution and the epoch of the totalitarian ‘dromomaniacs’ right up to our contemporary globalitarian society characterised by the deserter or planet man who is always on the move without really going anywhere. In Virilio’s [94] view, the globalitarian society, which is defined by media light speeds that mean that departure and arrival collapse into one moment of infinite density, is a kind of utopian non-place, a black hole, symbolised by what he calls ‘the inertia of the dead centre’. Inside this black singularity, comprised of a vortex of information, communication, and spectral bodies, suicide and pure war are the principal expression of what Virilio [95] calls the logic of disappearance that can explain socio-political catastrophes from the dirty war in Argentina, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the American bombing campaigns in Kosovo and Iraq, and the contemporary Islamic suicide bomber.
In each case, Virilio’s work shows that it is possible to discern a rejection, revulsion, and will to overcome the phenomenological constraints of reality, so that in Argentina and Cambodia entire populations were disappeared, in Kosovo and Iraq the wholesale destruction of territory, city, and body was enabled by a myopic focus on the abstract geography of the map, and in the case of the Islamic suicide bomber, the body is exploded in the name of some superior metaphysical version of reality. Similar examples abound throughout the history of modernity, taking in Hobbes’ [96] abstract vision of early capitalist space, Boccioni’s image of man in motion, and the totalitarians’ utopian theory of some pure future defined by either a lack of class or racial diversity, to enable us to understand that the problem of modernity, hyper-modernity, and post-modernity resides in the inability of humanity to recognise the necessity of the resistance of the world and the tragic consequences that follow from this necessary feature of existence.
In Virilio’s [97] view, the principal effect of the modern inability to recognise resistance and respect limits has been a crepuscular dawn, a twilight of space and time, where the obsession with speed and movement has led to the collapse into a culture of bunkerisation, suffocation, and incarceration, at the very limits of terrestrial space and time. Reading the signs of the end times, such as media immediacy, everyday war, bunkerisation, information overload, and the transformation of humanity itself into code, Virilio [98] discerns the desertification of the world and the coming of a potentially revolutionary moment that would allow humanity to find its feet and live through territory, community, and its own body once more. But before this can happen, before we can transform the catastrophe that keeps piling rubble upon rubble in front of our fascinated eyes, Virilio [99] understands that we must employ our scenic imagination in order to found a truly apocalyptic mode of representation that can shock us out of our stupor where catastrophes, disasters, and accidents are not only normal, but also an essential part of our obsession with speed and events. This is, then, the essential problem of Virilio’s apocalypse. How is it possible to translate catastrophe into apocalypse in a society that is obsessed with catastrophe, where everything is endlessly on the move, and there is no time for thought and reflection? Apart from putting his faith in apocalyptic representation, Virilio also suggests the institutionalisation of the critical imagination in a museum of accidents [100] and a university of disaster [101] in the hope that these negative monuments to the modernist obsession with speed – which would include the great works of Gericault, Goya, and Picasso, as well as representations of and references to the Titanic, Chernobyl, 9 / 11, and Iraq – may come together to reveal the catastrophic substance of modernity in a frozen moment, thus enabling us to re-humanise the world in order to save ourselves as an embodied species. This, then, is Virilio’s apocalypticism, the critical imaginary capable of translating the everyday catastrophe of modernity that has led our world to the point of infinite density into an apocalyptic sign that may enable us to overcome our technological thirst for annihilation and re-think our phenomenological being as bodies embedded in society and world.
Notes ——————-
[1] Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (London: Verso, 2000).
[2] Paul Virilio, Unknown Quantity (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003b).
[3] Paul Virilio, The Original Accident (Cambridge: Polity, 2006).
[4] Paul Virilio, The University of Disaster (Cambridge: Polity, 2009b)
[5] Paul Virilio, ‘Stop Eject’ in Native Land: Stop Eject eds. Depardon and Virilio (Paris: Fondation Cartier, 2009), 177-237.
[6] Paul Virilio, ‘The Current Crash Represents the Integral Accident Par Excellence’ Le Monde, 18th October, 2008.
[7] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1973).
[8] Walter Benjamin ‘On the Concept of History’ in his Selected Writings: Volume 4: 1938-1940, Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003) 389-401.
[9] Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).
[12] Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ 389-401.
[13] Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (London: Harper Perennial, 1977). And Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume I & II (London: Harper Collins, 1991).
[14] Paul Virilio, Pure War (New York: Semiotext(e), 1998).
[15] Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy (London: Harper, 1962).
[19] Rene Girard, ‘The Evangelical Subversion of Myth’ in Politics and Apocalypse ed. Hamerton-Kelly (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008), 29-51.
[20] Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009)
[21] Alain Badiou, The Logic of Worlds: Being and Event II (London: Continuum, 2009).
[22] Arthur Kroker, The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).
[23] James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment-Network (London: Routledge, 2009)
[24] Paul Virilio, ‘Critical Space’ in The Virilio Reader ed. Der Derian (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 58-73.
[25] Drew Burk, ‘Introduction’ in Paul Virilio Grey Ecology ed. Hubertus von Amelunxen (New York: Atropos Press, 2009a), Pg 15-25.
[26] Paul Virilio, Landscape of Events (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001).
[27] Paul Virilio, The University of Disaster (Cambridge: Polity, 2009b).
[28] Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988) .
[29] Paul Virilio, Landscape of Events (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001).
[54] Ernst Jünger, Storms of Steel (London: Penguin, 2004).
[55] Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Volume I: Women, Floods, Bodies. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Also Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Volume II: Psychoanalysing the White Terror (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
[71] Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (London: Verso, 2000).
[72] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Volume II (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
[73] Paul Virilio, ‘The Twilight of the Grounds’ in The Desert ed. Thesiger, Depardon, Khemir, and Virilio, (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 102-119.
[74] Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1989).
[75] Paul Virilio, Open Sky (London: Verso, 1997).
[76] Tim LaHaye And Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Books,1998) .
Mark Featherstone is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Keele University, UK. His areas of specialism are social and political thought and psychoanalysis. His current research focuses on notions of utopia and dystopia in social and political thought and he recently published a monograph on this topic entitled Tocqueville?s Virus (Routledge). He is currently working on the second volume of this study, entitled Planet Utopia: Utopia, Dystopia, and Globalisation, which will be published by Routledge in 2011. Apart from his focus on utopia in social and political theory, he is also interested in urbanisation, particularly in relation to processes of globalisation.
The eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century were dominated by physiognomic theories of madness, which posited a one-to-one correspondence between mental states and body states: the body was seen as an undistorted image of the mind. Paradoxically, at a time when an ‘objective’ recording device (the camera) had not been invented yet, skepticism had not yet proven itself as serious a problem as it would become after the invention of photography. Indeed, I would argue that precisely the absence of an external recording/mirroring device (the camera) made it possible to assume the presence of an internal mirror i.e., to conceive of the body as an ‘image’ of the mind. In the second half of the nineteenth century the new media of photography and film contributed to a shift in the understanding of attention, thereby influencing the development of the new sciences of mind (psychology and psychiatry). Challenging the assumption of the mind and the body as ‘co-expressible’ — functioning as ‘mirrors’ of each other — photography and film foreshadowed the ‘discovery’ of the unconscious and were instrumental in the reconceptualization of pathology and in the transition from physiognomic to psychological theories of madness. As materialist theories constructing madness as purely organic and visually inscribed gradually gave way to a new understanding of consciousness and sanity in terms of attention, it became increasingly clear that inattention, distraction, automatism or absence from oneself, are, in fact, primary rather than secondary states. Paradoxically, precisely when a sophisticated technology for providing visual records of pathology was introduced, theories of pathology as visually inscribed became obsolete and pathology came to be seen as inherent in normal psychological processes.
Photography and film undermined physiognomic theories of insanity, thus blurring the distinction between sanity and insanity and contributing to the ‘discovery’ of the unconscious in three significant ways. First, photography and film gave rise to a new concept of the self as inherently theatrical and, by extension, of insanity as performative. Second, through its inherent, technicalautomatism photography revealed at the heart of any photographed movement — not only the movements of those diagnosed with some form of insanity — a similar, previously unsuspected, human automatism. Instantaneous photography demonstrated that what appear to be rational, purposeful movements/actions are often carried out automatically or unconsciously. Distraction and inattention — absence from oneself — which had previously been considered particular types of pathology now appeared to be inherent in normal psychological processes. Third, while photography was expected to provide objective records of insanity, most scientific applications of photography were driven by aesthetic concerns. To grasp the specific ways in which photography and film challenged materialist theories of insanity, it is helpful first to trace the historical transition from physiognomic to psychological theories of madness.
I. FROM PHYSIOGNOMIC TO PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES OF INSANITY
Early physiognomic theories of mind assumed the equivalence of mental and brain states, positing the mind and the body as ‘mirrors’ of each other. In Physiognomy, or the Corresponding Analogy between the Conformation of the Features and the Ruling Passions of the Soul (1775-1778) J.C.Lavater argued for "a certain native analogy between the external varieties of the countenance and form, and the internal varieties of the mind."[1] He praised physiognomy for its ability to distinguish "what is permanent in the character from what is habitual, and what is habitual from what is accidental."[2] The repetitious, regulated contraction of facial muscles, he argued, produces normal facial expressions that become deformed when an element of disproportionate change and randomness is introduced into the habitual work of the muscles. Lavaterthusidentified the normal with the habitual/recognizable and the pathological with the accidental/unpredictable;by extension, immobility (the immobile body/face) was a sign of normality whereas mobility (the body/face in motion) signified abnormality. In ATreatise on Insanity (1801) Pinel claimed to oppose the popular view of insanity as a result of an organic lesion of the brain, considering it instead a ‘functional disturbance’ produced by psychological causes. Nevertheless, he listed numerous exceptions demonstrating a connection between "certain malconformations of the cranium [and] a state of insanity."[3] Building on the work of Lavater and Pinel, in The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases (1843) Sir Alexander Morison linked sanity to the habitual contractions of facial muscles, which produce a visually recognizable expression: "The appearance of the face is…dependent upon the state of the mind; the repetition of the same ideas and emotions, and the consequent repetition of the same movements of the muscles of the eyes and of the face, give a peculiar expression, which, in the insane state, is a combination of weirdness, abstraction or vacancy."[4]
The connection Benjamin Rush and J.E.D. Esquirol drew between inattention and madness — a connection reinforced by popular studies like Robert Macnish’s The Philosophy of Sleep (1830)[5] which compared madness to dreaming — were the first cracks in dominant physiognomic theories. In "Of Reverie, or Absence of Mind," chapter XVI of his Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind (1812), Rush described insanity in terms of inattentiveness, a predisposition to reverie or distractedness that could be induced either by "the stimulus of ideas of absent subjects being so powerful as to destroy the perception of present objects [or] by a torpor of mind so great as not to feel the impressions of surrounding objects upon the senses."[6] In Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity (1845) Esquirol also identified the loss of attention and thus of the ability to reason, an ability not natural to us, as the essential feature of insanity: "[W]e are not naturally reasoning beings…our ideas are not conformed to objects, our comparisons exact, our reasonings just, but by a succession of effort of the attention, which supposes in its turn, an active state of the organ of thought."[7]
In The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression (1862) G. B. Duchenne de Boulogne recorded the results of his experiments with ‘localized electrization’, the purpose of which was to ‘decompose’ general facial expressions — the elongated face of the melancholic or the changeful features of the maniac — into the series of particular facial muscles that produced them in the first place. On the basis of his accidental discovery that a single contraction of a facial muscle does not cause all other muscles to contract, he classified the isolated or combined contractions of the face as ‘expressive on their own’, ‘expressive only in a complementary way’, or ‘partly expressive’. Duchenne was essentially thinking of facial expression, on analogy with language, as a universal, immutable code: "To be universal, the language must always be composed of the same signs or, in other words, depend on muscular contractions that are always the same. [...] [E]ach emotion is always represented on the face by the same muscular contractions, which neither fashions nor whims can change."[8] Reviving Lavater’s ideas, he proposed thata ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ facial expression is formed by the habitual contractions of the same muscles working in harmony to produce a general visuallyrecognizable expression that can be compared to similar ones in the past. Conversely,Duchenneconsideredthe face in motion as an example of deformity or abnormality: a deformed expression is not immediately recognizable because it is no longer the product of the habitual contraction of the same series of muscles; instead, individual muscles contract in new, unpredictable (non-habituated) ways. Duchenne thus defined pathology as a failure of recognition as a result of excessive localization (the autonomous and random manner in which isolated muscles contract). The physical deformity of the face (and the internal deformity it pointed to) was analogous to the disruption of the codified, conventionalized relation between signifier and signified, resulting in a dispersal and randomization of meaning. In such abnormal cases, even if a person’s internal state of mind remained the same (e.g. melancholy) the system of facial muscles (signifiers) that used to produce that particular expression in the past was disrupted, with the result that the individual contractions of isolated facial muscles failed to produce one recognizable expression i.e. a single, recognizable signified (melancholy).
Duchenne’s major contribution to the new sciences of mind lies in his novel conception of mental deformity as a kind of illegibility: the deformed mind cannot be ‘read’ through/’on’ the body. His experiments challenged the conventional belief in the correspondence between the visible (body) and the invisible (mind). Even as he held on to the familiar notion of physical deformity (the contraction of the facial muscles in non-habituated ways) as a sign of mental deformity, Duchenne’s emphasis on the illegibility (the ‘non-habituated’ as ‘illegible’) of the visible (physical deformity) pointed to a parallel illegibility of the invisible (mental deformity). Abandoning Esquirol’s holistic theory of correspondence, Duchenne proposed instead an analytic conception of the subject and of facial expression, underscoring the fragmentary/illegible nature of the body and, by implication, the fragmentary/illegible nature of the mind. By distancing himself from earlier physiognomic theories and using photography to capture the ephemeral and the instantaneous, Duchenne was already beginning to understand the human face cinematically: "instead of seeking a permanent physical imprint of fate or character [Duchenne] sought to understand the face in motion, describing facial expressions as a mobile muscular phenomenon."[9] With Duchenne, "the human face became less a realm described in generalities [as had been the case with physiognomy which focused on classifying faces into types] than a zone of intense scrutiny on an individual basis."[10]
The heyday of physiognomic theories was 1810-1840; by the 1870s and the 1890s the scientific basis of such theories was beginning to be seriously challenged.[11] In Degeneration (1892) Max Nordau argued that the main causes and symptoms of insanity were mental rather than physical: degeneracy is the result of a breakdown of the normal association of ideas, which depends on habitual responses to external stimuli based on the memory-images of similar past stimuli. The mind of the insane stops functioning as a screen for external stimuli: instead of taking the path of least resistance it allows presentations that have nothing to do with the present stimulus and fails to match past perceptions with present ones based on the four laws of association.[12]
[A]ttention is the faculty of the brain to suppress one part of the memory-images which, at each excitation of a cell or group of cells, have arisen in consciousness, by way either of association or of stimulus-wave; and to maintain another part, namely, only those memory-images which relate to the exciting cause i.e. to the object just perceived. [...] Inability to be attentive accompanies all forms of exhaustion. Untended and unrestrained by attention, the brain activity of the degenerate and hysterical is capricious, and without aim or purpose.[13]
Nordau conceived of degeneracy in terms of a gap between the input of external stimuli and the subject’s motor response to those stimuli (the transformation of idea into action):
With the incapacity for action there is connected the predilection for inane reverie. The degenerate is not in a condition to fix his attention long, or indeed at all, on any subject, and is equally incapable of correctly grasping, ordering or elaborating into ideas and judgments the impressions of the external world conveyed to his distracted consciousness by his defectively operating senses. It is easier and more convenient for him to allow his brain-centers to produce semi-lucid, nebulously blurred ideas and inchoate embryonic thoughts, and to surrender himself to the perpetual obfuscation of a boundless, aimless, and shoreless stream of fugitive ideas.[14]
Reviving a line of thought going back to Rush and Esquirol, Nordau described degeneracy as a form of inattentiveness, a break in the psychic-motor apparatus of stimulation and response[15] i.e., he assumed that that the structuring of the random series of associations into conscious/voluntary thought and action is a natural process which, when stopped or prevented, leads to degeneracy.[16] Nordau’s account of degeneration in terms of a lack of discrimination or inattentiveness could just as well be read as a reference to the non-discriminatory nature of the photograph. Early photographers struggled with the medium’s automatism, its tendency to record disinterestedly all kinds of disorderly, irrelevant incidents, suggesting that the instrument was only partially under the photographer’s control. It is likely that the unprecedented overabundance of irrelevant details recorded automatically by the camera shaped contemporary views (including Nordau’s) of ‘the insane, degenerate mind’ as similarly inattentive, automatic and prone to digressions. Simply put, the degenerate mind functioned like a camera: failing to screen out the irrelevant or the incidental it recorded everything.
Nordau identified dual personality as the epitome of degeneracy, referring to the explanation given by Pierre Janet, in Les actes inconscient et le dédoublement de la personnalité (1886) and his brother Paul Janet, in L’Hystérie et l’hypnotisme d’après la théories de la double personnalité (1888): "Every person consists of two personalities, one conscious and one unconscious. Among healthy persons both are alike complete, and both in equilibrium. In the hysteric they are unequal, and out of equilibrium. One of the two personalities, usually the conscious, is incomplete, the other remaining perfect."[17] The conscious part is incomplete inasmuch as it has no recollections of the actions of the unconscious part, whereas the unconscious part is fully aware of the primary (conscious) state and is, therefore, complete. Degeneracy, Nordau concluded, manifests as a certain lack of self-presence (in this case, one-directional amnesia). A few years later, however, Breuer and Freud put forward the hypothesis thatlack of self-presence, inattention, diffusion and reverie represent our natural state of mind rather than a form of pathology, that mental pathology is rooted in normal psychological processes, for example day-dreaming.[18] Based on their analysis of the case of Anna O., in Studies in Hysteria (1895), Breuer and Freud concluded that pathology results from the compartmentalization of consciousness, part of which continues to exist automatically in the real world (usually performing some kind of mechanical action) while another part becomes dissociated. They attributed this process of dissociation to particular private or social circumstances, in this case Anna O.’s monotonous private and public life, which left a large amount of her mental energy unemployed. Breuer and Freud proposed to think of consciousness and the unconscious in terms of attention and energy: being unconscious begins in the normal state of being inattentive or distracted, which presupposes the availability of surplus energy that has not been tapped into. The dissociation of personality starts out as a dissociation from reality, which fails to make a strong enough claim on the individual thereby leaving her free to disengage that surplus energy somewhere else (in unconscious acts, reveries, and hallucinations). Anna developed a
second state of consciousness which first emerged as a temporary absence and later became organized into a ‘double conscience’. [...] But whereas the paralysis experimentally provoked by Charcot in his patients became stabilized immediately…[Anna's] contracture, as well as the other disturbances that accompanied it, set in only during the short absences in her ‘condition seconde’ and left her during her normal state in full control of her body and possession of her senses.[19]
Freud and Breuer believed that the second state, which disposed of everything ‘mentally toxic’, was necessary for the proper functioning of the normal self. Studies in Hysteria was symptomatic of an important shift in the conceptualization of pathology: since consciousness, understood in terms of attention, functioned mostly as a mechanism inhibiting the normally diffused, involuntary, and multiple self, inattention, involuntariness and automatism could no longer be construed as pathological. By the time Ribot published The Psychology of Attention (1890) the old hierarchy of conscious and unconscious, attention and inattention, recognition and amnesia, had been reversed. Whereas in his earlier study, The Diseases of the Will (1884), Ribot described the hysterical constitution in terms of inattentiveness and inconstancy, in The Psychology of Attention he posited attention as an abnormal state, the natural state supported by consciousness being diffusion: "The normal condition is plurality of states of consciousness, or…polyideism. Attention is the momentary inhibition, to the exclusive benefit of a single state, of this perpetual progression: it is a monoideism."[20]
Numerous studies corroborated Ribot’s claim that diffusion, rather than attention, is the natural state of consciousness, thereby encouraging the conceptualization of consciousness as aninhibitory mechanism and reversing the negative associations of ‘the unconscious’, ‘the diffused’ and ‘the multiple’ with ‘insanity’. Various cases reported at the end of the century demonstrated the difference between spontaneous and artificial somnambulism. In 1875 L’Académie de Médicine de Belgique asked M. Warlamont to do a report on the subject of ‘double conscience’, of which there had been many reported cases. His report insisted on "la realité scientifique du phenomena dit ‘dédoublement de la vie’, ‘double conscience’, ‘condition seconde’, états qui peuvent être spontanés ou provoqués."[21] Warlamont recounted a 1875 case of a girl who fell into ‘somnambulism avec catalepsie’ whenever she worked "à des bontonnieres" — a line of work requiring great focus — and concluded that "c’était une hystérique qui s’hypnotisait elle-même."[22] The more famous case of "Felida X" was discussed in Dr. Eugene Azam’s study Amnésie périodique ou dédoublement de la personnalité (1877). Significantly, Azam’s use of the term "dédoublement de la vie" departed from the dominant terminology in American studies at the time, ‘fragmentation of the ego’. In most other cases of amnesia, the patient felt as if they were double but had no memory of their double existence; however, Felida had no such feeling and in her ‘second’ state she had perfect memory of her first state. Indeed, Felida did not think of herself as being a different person — she always felt ‘semblable à elle-même."
These studies reinforced the already established tendency to conceptualize consciousness and memory in terms of attention. The cataleptic girl became somnambulist whenever she engaged in some form of activity requiring absolute attention: her somnambulism was the result not of a memory dysfunction but of an imbalance of attention. The part of her existence to which she was not paying attention while she was focusing on her button-work became irrelevant — it did not produce a strong enough impression upon her or made no immediate demands upon her — and, therefore, forgettable/unreal/non-existent. Her case raised the question whether, given our ability to consciously or purposefully regulate our attention — our ability to focus on something to the exclusion of everything else — we are also capable of ‘hypnotizing ourselves’: indeed, Warlamont claimed the girl was capable of inducing a somnambulistic state herself. Along similar lines, Azam interpreted Felida’s amnesia as a loss of attention rather than the result of a memory dysfunction. As he put it, it is not that one forgets because one cannot remember (amnesia is not the result of memory disturbance); rather, one forgets that of which one was not completely conscious (or completely attentive to) in the first place, and which therefore left an "insufficient impression" upon him. Amnesia has nothing to do with memory in the conventional sense of memory as ‘the ability to recollect’ the past. Instead, amnesia presupposes at least a minimum awareness that we have lost something: whatever fails to register or become conscious, thus producing amnesia, must have still ‘registered’, however slightly, or else we wouldn’t be able to ‘have no memory’ of it.
For Bergson, as for Azam, amnesia no longer had to do exclusively with the past: to be amnesiac was not to be fully conscious of/attentive to what is going on ‘now’. In Matter and Memory (1896)[23] Bergson defined consciousness in terms of memory — matter is deprived of memory — thereby linking amnesia to the unconscious: the ‘forgotten’ is simply that which we have not perceived consciously i.e., the unconscious.Elaborating further on Ribot’s premise that the normal state of consciousness is diffusion, Bergson identified both madness (particularly the doubling/multiplication of personality)[24] and dreams as the substratum of mental life, insisting that the real question is not why some people are mad but rather why we are not all mad or dreaming all the time. Bergson’s refusal to distinguish categorically the waking state from the dream state, or perception from memory,[25] was an implicit attack on essentialist theories of sanity and madness for it suggested that the processes assumed to be symptomatic of insanity are always already going on under normal circumstances[26] but are "prevented from emerging, when about to appear, by one of those continually active inhibitory mechanisms which secure attention to life."[27] It was becoming increasingly clear that attention — and therefore sanity — was by no means a state one would describe as ‘natural’ to us; on the contrary, sanity and consciousness now appeared as ‘selections’ within a vast, nebulous realm alternatively called Pure Memory (Bergson) or the unconscious (Freud). Inasmuch as the photograph framed a portion of the world, it served as an appropriate metaphor for the new understanding of the brain/mind relationship in terms of ‘selection’. Bergson made use of that metaphor when he compared the brain to a frame and the mind to a picture:
The frame determines something of the picture, by eliminating beforehand all which has not the same shape and size. [...] So also with the brain and consciousness. Provided the comparatively simple actions — gestures, attitudes, movements — in which a complex mental state would be materialized, are such as the brain is ready for, the mental state will insert itself exactly into the cerebral state. But there are a multitude of different pictures which would fit the frame equally well; consequently the brain does not determine thought and, at least to a large extent, thought is independent of the brain.[28]
II. THE NEW MEDIA AND PATHOLOGY
It is now time to consider the three ways in which photography and film contributed to the transition from physiognomic to psychological theories of insanity that I traced above.
1. Theatricality
At the fin de siècle photography and film played an important part in the rethinking of selfhood as a specular process. Writing in the 1880s and 1890s, French sociologist Gabriel Tarde argued that selfhood originates in imitation, a process he compared to "inter-psychical photography" i.e., "the action which consists of a quasi-photographic reproduction of a cerebral image upon the sensitive plane of another brain."[29] The self is constructed by adopting the gestures and behaviors of those around us in a process similar to taking photographs. If self-consciousness is a product of imitation, early cinema made this self-objectification manifest.[30] According to Jonathan Auerbach "the early movie camera functioned as a distinct apparatus of self-objectification, at once triggering self-consciousness and registering it as a visual process."[31] However, this self-objectification had already happened in still photography. In 1856 Dr. Hugh W. Diamond pioneered the use of photographic portraits in the study and treatment of the insane.[32] Rather than trying to isolate specific signs of malfunction, Diamond was interested in capturing the overall appearance of his patients. He would show them a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ photograph (e.g. the patient during a manic attack versus the patient convalescing) so that they could see the improvement they had made in the course of their treatment.The photographs made patients aware of their illness, sometimes provoking a degree of self-consciousness that allowed them to objectify their condition as a sort of performance from which they could distance themselves instead of being trapped by it. One patient imagined herself a Queen but when she was presented with a photograph of herself ‘posing’ as a Queen she found the photograph ludicrous. Although patients had no choice but to pose, since the technology available at the time depended on long exposure times, Diamond remained convinced that the use of professional models did not undermine the evidential value of photography. By 1859 Diamond’s photographs were being criticized, in The Photographic News, not for failing to be objective or scientific but, on the contrary, for lacking the justification of an art work.[33]
Diamond’s photographs inspired a series of essays by John Conolly on The Physiognomy of Insanity, published in 1858 in the Medical Times and Gazette. Conolly’s essays were illustrated with lithographs based on Diamond’s photographs, but there were some significant differences between the two, differences that undermined photography’s claim to provide an objective record of insanity. In her unpublished study Frames of Mind: An Investigation into the History of the Photography of Psychiatric Patients (1993)[34] Kamilla Porter draws attention to one particular photograph of a woman suffering from melancholy:
The two pictures are similar and clearly of the same patient, but in Conolly’s illustration the subject looks downwards, whereas originally she was gazing directly into the camera (2.7) [...] Had this particular patient been photographed in a different pose, for example without resting her cheek on her hand, and if she had not been wearing a crucifix, the diagnosis of religious melancholy would no doubt have been far less obvious to the observer of the photograph (2.8). [T]he diagnosis of melancholy depended on the reproduction of a classic image of melancholy, which in turn demanded that Diamond’s original photograph be slightly modified in order to fit that image. Ultimately, the medical diagnosis depended on the patient’s pose rather than on the photographic medium’s supposedly inherent objectivity.[35]
On the basis of her examination of the casebooks of photographs by Hering at Bethlem (c. 1850), by Diamond at the Surrey County Asylum (c. 1856) and by Dr. Clarke at Wakefield (c. 1869) Porter concludes that by the late 1860s photography was used not to study the physiognomy of the insane but rather for identification and record keeping, especially once new technological improvements allowed photographs to be taken more efficiently. Porter wonders whether the very development of photography might have contributed to the decline of physiognomic interpretations of insanity.
The writings of Albert Londe, medical researcher and chronophotographer appointed as head of the photographic service at La Salpêtrière, suggest that the decline of physiognomic theories might have to do with a growing awareness of ability of the camera to reproduce the object it is supposed to record. Londe emphasized the reproduction capacity of photography, which made possible a taxonomy of madness since different types of madness could be recognized only through comparisons across patients and across time. He derived the persistence or recurrence of the visual signs in which madness manifested itself — which he read as essential or inherent precisely because of its recurrence — from the reproducibilityof reproductions (photographs).[36] The very nature of the apparatus — its ‘double identity’ insofar as it offered a means of mechanical reproduction but it also made possible the application of exactly the same process of reproduction to the result obtained through reproduction i.e., to the photographs themselves — reproduced the object of which it claimed to provide a record:
Il est même certaines affections qui donnent au malade une physionomie toute spéciale, qui ne frappe pas l’observateur dans un cas isolé, mais qui devient typique si on la retrouve chez d’autres personnes atteintes de la meme maladie. La comparison de photographies prises quelquefois à des années de distance permettra, comme l’a fait M. le Professeur Charcot a la Salpêtrière, de décrire la facies proper à telle ou telle affections dy système nerveux. Ce résultat est important; car le type, une fois défini, reste gravé dans la mémoire et il peut, dans certain cas, être précieux pour le diagnosic.[37]
Londe was aware of the danger of theatricality due to the sheer presence of the camera: "Il est évident, en effet, que si nous voulons saisir des attitudes, des mouvements qui soient pris sur le vif, il ne faudra pas éveiller l’attention de nos modeles involontaires qui ne manqueraient pas de se croire obligés de poser."[38] Indeed, he understood that the behavior of the insane more often than not conformed to the apparatus used to represent it, an apparatus that functioned according to the same principle of decomposition and analysis that governed the attacks of the hysteric or the epileptic and was thus unusually suitable for recording them:
Dans sa clinique des maladies du système nerveux M. le professeur Charcot a toute une série de maladies atteints de paralysie, d’hystérie, d’épilpsie, de chorée etc., qui semblent mettre au défi la Photographie; il s’agit, en effet, d’étudier des tremblements, des attaques, de les analyzer et de les decomposer. D’ou la nécessité d’un appareil spécial qui permet de prendre un certain nombre d’épreuves à des intervalles quelconques, aussi rapproches ou aussi eloigner qu’on le voudra les uns des autres. Prenon comme type l’attaque hystéro-épileptique, attaque qui se subdivise en périodes parfaitement distinctes, composées chacune de mouvements rythmes et caractéristiques. Le medicin a interet a décomposer: 1. l’attaque en periodes caractérisées par le mouvement; 2. le mouvement lui-même.[39]
For E. Frippet, one of Londe’s students at La Salpêtrière, the good photographer was recognized by how artistic — well-posed — his photographs were. Frippet devoted himself to the study of different lighting conditions and the exact ‘temps de pose’ corresponding to each, for he believed that instantaneous photography had to be as exact as possible in its simulation of a natural attitude: "Il faudra donc, pour avoir d’excellents resultants, recourir a la pose, et avoir soin de placer son modele dans les meilleures conditions possible au point de vue de la lumière, tout en lui donnant une attitude naturelle."[40] The inherent sincerity and precision of photography soon came to be seen as obstacles to its establishment as a true art:
Cette precision excessive, aveugle même, precieuze dans certain cas, sera ici plutôt un obstacle. Il faudra donc que l’opérateur compose son sujet de manière a attirer l’attention sur l’objet principal, qu’il l’éclaire de manière à mettre en lumière tel ou tel point, qu’il lui donne une attitude naturelle, qu’il fasse ressortir la physionomie qui lui est habituelle, en un mot qu’il exécute ce travail préparatoire tout comme le ferait un artiste; mais comme, d’autre part, il se sert d’un instrument particulier qui, àcertains points de vue, peut modifier les effects, qui’il prevoie tout, qu’il calcule tout.[41]
In the course of explaining why he could not use the fusil photographique of his excellent colleague Marey, Londe inadvertently acknowledged the extent to which the recording of madness and mental illness depended on the precise match between the mechanical progress of the apparatus and the ‘natural’ progress of the hysterical or epileptic attack: "la durée de l’attaque n’a absolument rien de régulier, et [il] fault pouvoir régler la marche de l’appareil sur celle de l’attaque. De plus l’appareil doit obéir au médicin, de facon que celui-ci puisse agir au moment précis qu’il croira utile de choisir."[42] There was something pathological in the very capacity of photography to freeze time, a kind of technological catalepsy matching the ‘natural’ catalepsy of which it provided a record: "Catalepsy retains by way of the body what photography retains by way of the camera: it freeze-frames and retains the body in isolated position that can be viewed and theorized outside a sequence of motion.[43]
The possibility of taking multiple records of the insane over a period of time in order to study the effect of various treatments and to perform other kinds of comparative analysis rendered the idea of an essentially unified and static self obsolete. Indeed, that idea had already been put into question by the ‘boom’ in hysteria cases at the end of the nineteenth century. Hysteric patients could reproduce poses that were suggested to them under hypnosis as if there was a second self ‘in’ them. By the end of the century this second personality, associated with automatism, was recognized as the unconscious, a concept that would undergo numerous redefinitions and destabilize traditional definitions of ‘sanity’ and ‘insanity’. The privileged place of hysteria in fin de siècle culture can be attributed to its role in the development of the idea of the unconscious in terms of ‘performance’. Charcot’s name features prominently in histories of dynamic psychiatry, especially in relation to hysteria and the theatricalization of the cogito by the emerging new media.[44] Charcot contributed to the development of dynamic psychiatry by drawing a distinction between ‘dynamic’ and ‘organic’ paralyses: the latter resulting from a lesion of the nervous system, the former provoked through auto-suggestion or hypnosis and thus reversible. Similarly, he demonstrated that unlike organic amnesia, which involved the irreversible loss of memories, patients suffering from dynamic amnesia were capable of recovering their lost memories. Dynamic amnesia and dynamic paralysis were thus, in a manner of speaking, ‘simulations’. Charcot went on to argue that, like dynamic amnesia and dynamic paralysis, hysteria was the result of suggestion and could therefore be cured in the same way, by suggestion. His studies depended on the analogous dynamics of popular melodrama: at the Bal des Folles, very popular with the public, Charcot induced, through hypnosis, localized hysterical symptoms, which the patients then ‘acted out’ in front of an audience.[45] Conversely, after the introduction of film hysterical patients would often imitate cabaret performers and early film comedy actors, thus drawing attention to what Rae Beth Gordon calls ‘the performative nature of corporeal pathologies’:[46]
Is there a relationship between ways that movement was staged in early cinema and corporeal pathologies — contractures, tics, catalepsy, and convulsive movement — related to hysteria and epilepsy? [...] It seems plausible that café-concert performers provided models for potential hysterics who couldn’t resist imitating the tics, grimaces, and convulsive movements that later came to characterize the medical journal Nouvelle Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière.[47]
According to Kamilla Porter, Charcot’s use of photography differed from that of his predecessors:
Charcot’s approach to hysteria emphasized the external and visual rather than the unseen and purely psychological. [...] Thus Charcot’s use of photography differed from that of Diamond and Conolly in that he was interested in recording the bodily postures of the patients and not just their facial expressions. Also, Charcot’s photographs were more elaborately framed and staged than Diamond’s pictures and some of the patients were photographed many times to the extent that some made sort of a career out of modeling for the iconographies.[48]
The presence of the photographic camera destabilized the ontology of the mental state of which it sought to provide ocular proof. If ocular demonstration and record were essential to the continued study of madness and mental illness, then the camera was called upon to keep producing and reproducing the object of study (madness): to demonstrate the cure meant to provide the illness first. Even as the camera claimed to be the most objective and technologically advanced method of studying insanity, its sheer presence challenged the reality of the object it was supposed to represent objectively.
As soon as photography and film were ‘invented’ they were used for medical documentation. In 1885, ten years before the first film screening of the Lumière brothers, the first clinical case of a multiple, Louis Vivet, was photographed in his ten personality states. Two years later Albert Dad, the first person whose dissociative fugues were studied in detail, was photographed in his three states (normal, hypnotized and during a fugue).[49] Between 1899 and 1902, Romanian neurologist Gheorghe Marinescu wrote (for French medical journals) a series of articles on hysteria, basing his research on cinematographic documents. In 1883 Albert Londe studied the ‘large hysterical arc’ with serial cameras. And yet, as early as 1910 Dr. Hans Hennes of the Provinzial-Heil-und Pflegeanstalt Bonn observed (in his treatise Cinematography in the Service of Neurology and Psychiatry) that, paradoxically, film ‘produced’ madness precisely by providing reliable records of it. Although film was instrumental in what Hacking calls the re-conceptualization of the ‘soul’ — under the new disguise of ‘memory’ — as an object of scientific inquiry, it also contributed to the theatricalization of the cogito, provoking a shift in our understanding of rational thought from Descartes’ notion of the cogito as "a perpetual recession of the body" to the cinematic proof of the cogito through the "perpetual visibility of the self, a theatricality in my presence to others, hence to myself."[50] Overexposed by the film camera, constantly on display, the cogito would from now on derive the proof of its own existence only from the realm of appearances: the camera compromised the previously stable distinction between reason and unreason, opening it up to manipulation. By offering incontrovertible visible evidence of the reality of a mental illness like multiple personality, for instance, film also demonstrated the increasing obsolescence of the idea of a transcendental subject, thereby contributing to a new discourse of the self as inherently multiple and reproducible, existing in a constant state of metaphysical embarrassment, a ‘perpetual theater’ involving other minds. The camera introduced an element of theatricality or insincerity that would eventually permeate the larger intellectual climate of modernity and play a central role in the birth of existentialism with its emphasis on the inherent inauthenticity or theatricality of the self (Sartre). By registering automatically both our conscious and unconscious movements/gestures, the camera condemned us to a perennially exposed mode of existence, of which it provided an inevitable surplus of proof.
Film did not only contribute to the anxiety of drift that Leo Charney identifies, in Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity and Drift,[51] as the defining experience of modernity; it also participated in the total restructuring of attention at the fin de siècle. Insofar as film perception mimicked the drifting, distracted perception of the flâneur, film was just one manifestation, among many, of modernity’s tendency to drift; on the other hand, film served as a bulwark against the threatening tendency to drift by structuring the viewer’s attention — structuring contingency — into ‘peaks and valleys’. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive [52] Mary Ann Doane identifies the tension between contingency and rationalization (the rationalization of time and space)[53] as central to modernity, and to film. Early cinema, argues Doane, was about instants and their accountability with respect to meaning: cinema resolved the pressing conflict between meaning and contingency by offering an automatic inscription of contingency (as distinguished, for example, from Impressionist painting’s purposeful attempts to capture contingency) thereby making rationalization tolerable. Contingency was thus constructed both as a lure (film’s promise of indexicality, of the re-materialization and archiving of time) and a threat (the threat of nonsense, illegibility and arbitrariness: any — empty — moment can be filmed). Film’s role in the structuring of attention exposed the natural predisposition of consciousness to drift, to ‘valleys’ rather than ‘peaks’, to involuntary rather than voluntary perception and memory: film promised to keep at bay the vertigo of drift by arresting time into moments that give us the illusion of presence.
The ambivalence toward film that informs both Benjamin’s writing (film embodies the modern experience of being overwhelmed by the constant shocks to the eye but, at the same time, it holds the key to the ‘optical unconscious’)[54] and Charney’s and Doane’s takes on modernity (the discourse of ‘drift’ as both a danger and a lure) informs, as well, Stanley Cavell’s writing on film, in which he seeks to demonstrate film’s potential to function as a defense against the skepticism brought about precisely by photography’s and film’s challenge to physiognomic theories that positioned body and mind as mirror images of each other.[55] According to Cavell, Freud’s unique contribution was his suggestion to look at the body’s relationship to the mind not simply in terms of expression but in terms of exposure, betrayal and embarrassment (e.g. Freud’s description of Dora’s ‘symptomatic acts’ as a ‘pantomimic announcement’)."[56] Even the ultimate failure of psychoanalysis, which, while promoting itself as a new ‘science of the mind’ deteriorated from a critique of metaphysics to a kind of quasi-metaphysics, did not lead to absolute skepticism, simply because, argues Cavell, the modern cogito exists in the mode of having always already betrayed itself. Under the present circumstances — the alienation of the cogito from itself — the human survives only in the body’s unconscious gestures.
Cavell analyzes the court scene in Frank Capra’s film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), in which the protagonist’s sanity is put into question,[57] in order to demonstrate that the importance of cinema lies in "returning the mind to the living body,"[58] in recording thinking, which is not limited to ‘intellectual processes’ but is enacted in ‘universal fidgetiness’, the little involuntary gestures and movements of the human body. Cavell calls such recordings ‘somatograms’, claiming that they belong to "what Walter Benjamin calls cinema’s optics of the unconscious."[59] Here lies the value of cinema as a bulwark against skepticism: by automatically (unconsciously) recording the body’s automatic gestures, cinema reassures us that there is still something left of the human, something that is not fully conscious and thus not fully rationalized/constructed. In the scene Cavell analyzes Mr. Deeds delivers a speech, in which he argues that involuntary gestures and actions are a form of thinking too, though they do not conform to the common idea of thinking as a purely intellectual act:
And I take it that Deeds’ insight is that a reverse field of proof is available by way of the motion picture camera, so that while thinking is no longer secured by the mind’s declaration of its presence to itself, it is now to be secured by the presence of the live human body to the camera, in particular by the presence of the body’s apparently least intelligent property, its fidgetiness, its metaphysical restlessness. In Descartes the proof of thinking was that it cannot doubt itself; after Emerson the proof of thinking is that it cannot be concealed. [...] Am I saying that the camera is necessary to this knowledge? [...] Must I commit myself to saying that my existence is proved (only) each time the camera rolls my way? I ask a little license here. My idea is that the invention of the motion picture camera reveals something that has already happened to us. [...] We can think of what the camera reveals as a new strain either in our obliviousness to our existence or in a new mode of certainty of it. [60]
If there is a threat to speak of here, it is not the threat of skepticism but the opposite threat of overexposing the cogito: "If the price of Descartes’ proof of his existence was a perpetual recession of the body…the price of an Emersonian proof of my existence is a perpetual visibility of the self, a theatricality in my presence to others, hence to myself. The camera is an emblem of perpetual visibility. Descartes’ self-consciousness thus takes the form of embarrassment."[61]
2. Automatism
The ‘ghosting’ of 19th century photographs — the appearance of incomplete, blurred images — along with photography’s basic technical property, the latent image, account for the fact that the discourse of scientific objectivity to which the new medium seemed to belong was from the very beginning enmeshed with another, contradictory discourse of the uncanny, the magical, and the latent. The notion of photography as nature’s "spontaneous reproduction," which translated the medium’s inherent automatism into objectivity, was from the start undermined by the opposite reading of the very same characteristic of the medium — its automatism — as an instance of natural magic. Indeed, in slightly more than a decade after the invention of photography, it became associated with the idea of the double and the uncanny.
Early photography was more often than not discussed as a ‘discovery’ — "a discovery of nature’s capacity to register its own image" — rather than as an ‘invention’. Photographs were said to be "’obtained’ or ‘taken’, like natural specimens found in the wild."[62] Photography’s claims to scientific status were based on its promise to capture the instant.[63] However, no one expected that instantaneous photography, which managed to capture fleeting expressions and transient effects of light, would reveal something immobile, dead, and strangely distorted at the very heart of life. Albert Londe wrote:
Depuis le milieu du siècle, la photographie promettait l’instantané. Tout semblait y conduire. Mais personne ne s’attendait a ce qu’un gain de rapidité, au lien de traduire plus fidèlement le mouvement, engender un estrange suspens visual. Chutes et sants, corps maladroits, contortions incongrues, positions cocasses: devant ces clichés d’autant plus immobiles qu’ils auraient dus etre plus animés, la révélation de l’involuntaire, la pure apparition de l’accidental causent an choc imprévu.[64]
Through its ability to freeze time photography exposed the inhuman, the mechanical, and the inanimate inherent in the human, exacerbating the fear of death or absolute immobility. Photography not only afforded views that had been forbidden to the naked eye but transformed the body into a mannequin or a puppet seemingly devoid of an inner spirit. The photographed body appeared soulless; the free movements once attributed to the body were now exposed as an illusion concealing a series of maladroit, contorted postures: "L’émotion provoquée par l’instantané ne tient pas seulement à l’isolement d’un phenomena que l’ail n’avait jamais perçu. Il dépend fondamentalement de la représentation d’un corps, sous un mode aberrant qui le transforme en objet: une sorte d’inverse absolu de l’idéal du portrait."[65] Instantaneous photography exposed the essentially aleatory, nonessential nature of every individual act and gesture by de-contextualizing them and suspending them outside time, robbing them of the potential to register as part of a chain of signification: Lessing’s ‘pregnant moment’ was replaced by the ‘aborted’ or ‘empty’ moment, what Deleuze calls the ‘any-moment-whatever’.[66]
Earlier I suggested that the introduction of an ‘external’ mirror (the camera) had the effect of undermining the belief in an ‘internal’ mirror (the body as an image of the mind). I have to slightly modify my claim. By arresting movement, instantaneous photography revealed something dead, mechanical, automatic or unconscious at the very core of life (life=movement) thereby undermining the notion of a singular, absolutely self-present self that expresses or manifests itself fully and purposefully through its movements. Paradoxically, the discovery that the mind and the body are not absolutely co-expressible depended on reaffirming exactly the assumption that was being challenged in the first place: it was precisely because on some level the body continued to be thought of as an ‘image’ (or mirror) of the mind that it was now possible to conclude — based on the photographic evidence of the body’s automatism (the mechanical, the dead, or the automatic exposed through the arresting of supposedly purposeful, fully conscious movements) — that the mind is not absolutely self-present either but rather inherently dual or even multiple. On the other hand, instantaneous photography’s ability to arrest movement further undermined the previously assumed mirror relationship between mind and body: by arresting movement, instantaneous photography exposed every movement as made up of multiple meaningless, random, empty moments devoid of any significance outside of a sequence of uninterrupted movement. These autonomous instants failed to signify and were sometimes even ‘guilty’ of mis-signification. Whereas an uninterrupted movement could convey a body’s exhaustion, for instance, the arresting of the body’s uninterrupted movement produced a series of de-contextualized instants whose ‘meaning’ (the state of exhaustion they were supposed to express) could be easily misread as conveying, in fact, the opposite impression of energy: an individual instant could create the impression of an energetic body whose exhaustion became evident only when the whole movement unfolded uninterrupted.
Motion studies by Eadweard J. Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Albert Londe demonstrated that a movement can be broken down into multiple, increasingly smaller constitutive elements; when viewed in its entirety, the movement appeared to be the repetition of this series of elements/fragments. That a movement could thus be broken down and analyzed suggested not only that it is internally constituted by repetition but, more importantly, that the movement itself is inherently repeatable/analyzable (e.g. comparable to other similar or dissimilar movements, and thus demanding a taxonomy of movements). By underscoring the habitual nature of simple daily movements (such as walking, running, bending) the camera also pointed to their inherently obsessive or neurotic nature (insofar as obsession/neurosis is defined in terms of repetition). At the same time, instantaneous photography provided shocking views of movement suspended in distorted, unnatural postures, demonstrating that what one had previously considered ‘normal’ movements might conceal deep-seated pathologies. Insofar as instantaneous photography suggested the possibility of all movements being inherently neurotic — analyzable into a series of repetitions — the line separating normal from abnormal movements became increasingly blurred. If all movements were constituted by repetition, it was no longer possible to maintain that the unconscious, repetitive, automated movements of the mentally ill/the insane were symptoms of some underlying mental disturbance.
3. The aesthetics of science
Instead of providing evidence in support of physiognomic theories, photography exposed the aesthetic nature of supposedly ‘pure’ scientific questions thus drawing attention to madness and sanity as performative tropes.[67] For instance, Duchenne de Boulogne defended his scientific method[68] on the ground of its applicability not only to anatomy and physiology but also to art, in particular painting and sculpture.[69] He famously criticized Laocoön, whose forehead he deemed anatomically incorrect, provoking critics to accuse him of reducing art to anatomical realism. Duchenne justified his use of photography in scientific experiments on account of its technological superiority to art: "Skillful artists have tried in vain to represent the faces of my subjects; for the contractions provoked by the electrical current are of too short a duration for an exact reproduction of the expressive lines that develop on the face to be drawn or painted. Only photography, as truthful as a mirror, could attain such desirable perfection."[70] However, he acknowledged that the success of his scientific experiments depended, to a large extent, on achieving a certain artistic effect: "Art does not rely only on technical skills. For my research, it was necessary to know how to put each expressive line into relief bya skillful play of light."[71] Indeed, he argued in favor of the technical imperfections of the apparatus he was working with — which caused parts of some of his photographs to be better focused than others — by pointing out that such imperfections produced an appropriate (desirable) aesthetic effect so that "the distribution of light is quite in harmony with the emotions that the expressive lines represent"[72]: for example, the somber passions (aggression, pain, suffering) were represented, appropriately, in chiaroscuro.
The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression contains a list of illustrations followed by two sections, a scientific and an aesthetic one. In the scientific section Duchenne speaks of his dedication to the truthful representation of his subjects’ expressive lines; however, in the aesthetic section he underscores the importance of an overall aesthetically pleasing picture of his subjects. In the notes on individual plates he describes each plate as a ‘scene’ and narrates it as though it were a mini narrative; as he tries to explain the particular emotion represented there he often makes use of terms like "depict" and "portray," which one would expect to find in an art review rather than in the account of a scientific experiment. It was precisely Duchenne’s strong interest in the aesthetic appeal of his scientific experiments that prompted him to take into consideration his readers’ complaints that his original subjects were too ugly, eventually repeating his experiments with more aesthetically pleasing subjects.
This merging of aesthetic with scientific concerns informed, as well, another pioneering work of the period, Charles Darwin’s 1872 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals[73] devoted to the study of ‘abnormal’ faces (those of infants, the insane, and the ‘racially other’). Darwin included both photographs and engravings in his book but the majority of the engravings were used to illustrate the sections dealing with expression in animals and "insane people." Although cost must have certainly been a factor in his choice (engravings were cheaper than photographs), the engravings were used to add dramatic emphasis, which set them apart from the photographs of normal expressions.[74] Darwin reproduced some of Duchenne’s photographs, but he also solicited the London commercial photographer Oscar Rejlander. Given Darwin’s desire to produce an objective study of expression, his decision to collaborate with Rejlander was odd at best since Rejlander was mostly known for advocating photography as an art form rather than a research instrument. Indeed, Rejlander posed for some of the illustrations himself, artificially inducing, like Duchenne had done before him, particular facial expressions.[75] His photographs were ultimately closer to simulation than to evidence. Although Duchenne and Darwin contributed to the establishment of photography’s use in scientific research, their work demonstrated that photography did not simply reaffirm the positivist, essentialist view of insanity as permanent, visually inscribed and recordable but, instead, revealed the performative nature of insanity. Ironically, precisely at the moment when the camera made its first appearance, apparently offering an objective record of pathology, scientists and philosophers began to question the idea of pathology as visually inscribed, wondering instead whether pathology might not be visually inaccessible i.e., psychological and whether it was not, in fact, inherent in normal physical and psychological processes.
CONCLUSION
The limitations of photography’s uses in psychiatry were rooted in photography’s claims to universality. H. Oppenheim, a leading 19th century neurologist, justified the analysis of static representations of expression by referring to Lessing’s Laocoön. Oppenheim argued that static images of expression (sculpture, photography) can serve as means of examining the total range of expressions. It was precisely this notion of the universal/static nature of expression that film would challenge, emphasizing instead the individual/transitory/relative nature of madness. Charles Darwin was among the first to question the assumed objectivity of psychiatric photography: "Though photographs are incomparably better for exhibiting expression than any drawing, yet I believe it is quite necessary to study the previous appearance of the countenance, its changes, however small, and the living eyes, in order to form any safe judgment."[76] Once serial photography made it possible to represent the fleeting, transitory nature of insanity, instead of capturing a single, static moment and abstracting it into a general pattern, once the physical characteristics of insanity became as fluid as the mental aberrations they were supposed to reflect, the boundaries separating the sane from the insane grew increasingly blurred. Film played an important role in the transition from static, universalizing psychiatric paradigms, which constructed madness in terms of fixed, stylized states, to increasingly dynamic styles of psychiatry.
Cinema modernized psychiatry. Arguments to that effect inform the very first work of film theory, Münsterberg’s The Photoplay (1916), as well as recent research on the intersection of psychiatry and new media technologies (e.g. F. Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 1999). From the point of view of Münsterberg’s ‘psychotechnology’, each psychic apparatus is also a technological one, and vice versa: film techniques are not simply objectifications of particular mental functions (e.g. the flashback as an objectification of memory); rather, mental functions constitute the interface of media technologies. Recently, proponents of ecological cognitivist film theory have posited a correspondence between basic cognitive processes and particular film styles (e.g. editing styles), suggesting that radical revisions of the narrative schemas we have been using for reasons of convenience or accessibility (e.g. Hollywood classical cinema) eventually leave a mark on the cognitive skills matching these schemas i.e., changes in film styles have the potential of affecting — indeed transforming — our mental functions.[77]This line of research suggests that as technologies for representing madness continue to evolve, making it possible to visualize with increasing authenticity the experience of mentally ill people, our mental functions are likely to ‘adjust’ accordingly, thereby becoming increasingly ‘malfunctioned’ in new, ‘creative’ ways. Some have already argued that new digital technologies, in combination with standard film editing styles, disturb and deregulate our mental functions, provoking the postmodern ‘speed death of the eye’ (thus reviving the discourse of modernity’s pre-cinematic, shock-to-the-eye mode of visuality).[78] Recent technological innovations have made mental malfunctions available to anyone: e.g. a new type of 3-D virtual reality simulator, Mindstorm, allows viewers to experience an average day in the life of a schizophrenic. Mindstorm‘s simulations, set in everyday locations and situations, move from simulation to hallucination so quickly that critics have already prophesied its use as a ‘fun ride’ in amusement parks.[79] Researchers at Harvard and McGill University are now working on an amnesia drug that blocks or deletes bad memories by disrupting the biochemical pathways that allow a memory to be recalled (this was the premise of the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, an interesting fact that once again brings into focus the looping effect that joins together cinema and scientific research).[80] Inasmuch as it seeks to ‘improve upon’ various kinds of mental disorders resulting precisely from the repression of memories, science now offers us a rational way of becoming mad.
Notes ——————-
[1] J.C.Lavater, Physiognomy, or the Corresponding Analogy between the Conformation of the Features and the Ruling Passions of the Soul (London: T. Tegg, 1775), 3. Welcome Library Rare Books Collection.
[3] Philippe Pinel, A Treatise on Insanity. trans. D. D. Davis, M.D. (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1962) (1801), 121. Welcome Library Collection.
[4] Sir Alexander Morison. M.D., The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases (London: Longman, 1840), 1. Welcome Library Rare Books Collection.
[5] Robert Macnish, The Philosophy of Sleep, 3rd ed. (Glasgow: W. R. M’Phun, 1830). Welcome Library Rare Books Collection.
[6] Benjamin Rush, M.D., Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1962) (1812), 310. Welcome Library Collection.
[7] Jean Etienne Dominique Esquirol, Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity (New York and London: Hafner Publishing Company, 1965) (1845), 28. Welcome Library Collection.
[8] G. B. Duchenne de Boulogne, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression. ed. and trans. R. Andrew Cuthbertson (New York: Cambridge UP, 1990) (1862), 29-30. Welcome Library Collection.
[9] Tom Gunning, "In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film." The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880-1940, ed. Mark S. Micale (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004, 141-172), 149.
[10]Ibid, 148. Conversely, R. Andrew Cuthbertson, Duchenne’s editor and translator, claims that Duchenne’s work remained pre-cinematic since "it did not encompass the sequential nature of facial expression. [...] While Duchenne broke the facial mask into its individual constituent facial muscle actions, Muybridge fragmented movements of the whole body into a temporal serial sequence." R. Andrew Cuthbertson, "The Highly Original Dr. Duchenne," The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression (225-242), 231.
[11] Physiognomic theories remained somewhat influential as late as 1900. See, for instance, Frank Ellis, Physiognomy: The Science of Physiognomy Explained in the Form of Question and Answer (Blackpool: The Ellis Family, 1901).
[12] By the end of the century, insanity stopped being equated with a loss of the ability to reason (a breakdown in the association of ideas): "Reason is the just comprehension of cause and effect, or common sense. Now only a part of the accepted varieties of insanity imply disturbance of this, the crowning power of the mind. Mania is only an unusual hurrying of the psycho-physical action of the higher mammals involving as essential no disturbance other than one of a temporal sort. Melancholia is, on the other hand, a too long continuance of painful thoughts. It is in paranoia that we see a loss in reason in the technical sense of the word" (510). George V. Dearborn, "The Criteria of Mental Abnormality," Psychological Review 5 (1898): 505-510.
[15] It is instructive to juxtapose Nordau’s account of degenerates’ ‘defective attention’ with early French film theory. For Nordau, when a perception arouses a representation, which in turn provokes a series of other associated representations, the healthy mind suppresses those representations contradictory or not rationally connected with the first perception; by contrast, early film theorists (e.g. Jean Epstein) praised cinema’s potential to bypass the automated, rational association of ideas, encouraging instead the free, playful association of contradictory or irrational ideas.
[16] Interestingly, photographers — assumed to produce objective visual records of degeneracy — were not immune to degeneracy. In a paper read to the Photographic Society in 1893, P. H. Emerson observed that photography, "when not scientific or topographical, is a pastime dangerous in many respects, as apt to foster morbid vanity in the degenerate." P.H. Emerson, "Naturalistic Photography and Art," a paper read to the Photographic Society, March 1893, included as ch.4 in Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, 3rd ed., 1899, New York: Arno Press, 1973).
[23] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1990).
[24] The notion of doubling is essential to Bergson’s philosophy, in which the present is always split into actual (perception) and virtual (memory). Déjà vu is the ultimate proof of the inherently double nature of the subject.
[25] Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) (1919).
[26] Nevertheless, he distinguished morbid or abnormal mental states into those characterized by a general impoverishment of mental life (amnesia, aphasia, paralysis) from those that actually enrich mental life (hallucination, delirium, obsession).
[29] Cited in Jonathan Auerbach, "Caught in the Act: Self-consciousness and Self-rehearsal in Early Cinema." Le Cinématographe, nouvelle technologie du XXe siècle/The Cinema, A New Technology for the 20th century, ed. Andre Gaudreault, Catherine Russell, and Pierre Veronneau (Cinéma: Editions Payot Lausanne, 2004), 94.
[30] Fin de siècle formalized self-reflexiveness: crucial to the shift in this period within Freud’s work from Studies of Hysteria to Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) and The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) was the relationship between ego-formation and narcissism. See Jan B. Gordon, "’Decadent Spaces’: Notes for a Phenomenology of the Fin de Siècle." Decadence and the 1890s, ed. Ian Fletcher (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), 31-58.
[31] Auerbach 91. Tom Gunning also draws attention to an internal split within the early (proto-schizophrenic) spectator, whether it is between illusion and reality (Gunning) or between consciousness and self-consciousness (Auerbach). See "Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus," Le Cinématographe, nouvelle technologie du XXe siècle, 43.
[32] Diamond’s photographs are reproduced in Joel-Peter Witkin, Harm’s Way: Lust and Madness, Murder and Mayhem: A Book of Photographs (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 1994).
[33] Adrianne Burrows and Iwan Schumacher, Portraits of the Insane: The Case of Dr. Diamond (London and New York: Quartet Books, 1990) (1979), 35-49. New York Public Library Special Collections (Photography Room). On the debates surrounding photography’s relation to art and science, see Mary Warner Marien, Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural History, 1839-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), chapter 5.
[36] On the implications of the production of multiple reproductions of reproductions, see Marien, chapter 1.
[37] Albert Londe, Officier d’Académie, Directeur du service photographique à l’hôpital de la Salpêtrière, La Photographie dans les arts, les sciences et l’industrie (Paris: Gauthier de la Bibliotheque Photographique, 1888), 23-24. Microfische. Bibliothèque National de France.
[38] Albert Londe, La Photographie Instantanée: Théorie et Pratique (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, Impremiur-Librairie, 1886), 142. Microfische. Bibliothèque National de France.
[39] Albert Londe, La Photographie Moderne (Paris: Cripto, 1986), 1.
[40] E. Frippet, La Pratique de la Photographie Instantanée par les appareils a main (avec méthode sur les agrandissements et les projections et notes sur le cinématographe, ed. J. Fritsch. Preface de Albert Londe (Paris: Librairie Scientifique et Industrielle, 1899), 72. Microfilm. Bibliothèque National de France.
[41] Albert Londe, Officier d’Académie, Directeur du service photographique à l’hôpital de la Salpêtrière. La Photographie dans les arts, les sciences et l’industrie (Paris: Gauthier de la Bibliothèque Photographique, 1888), 12. Microfische. Bibliothèque National de France. One way the photographer can manipulate his subject in order to produce a more realistic photograph, Londe advises his students, is to always situate the subject in his corresponding environment i.e., embodying his social role: "Un bûcheron dans le bois, un pêcheur sur le bord de la rivière ne seront pas déplacés. Évitez le monsieur en chapeau haute-forme et en redingote qui vient souvent faire tache dans une épreuve d’ailleurs fort réussie." Ibid, 14.
[43] Ulrich Bauer cited in Tom Gunning, "Bodies in Motion: The Pas de Deux of the Ideal and the Material at the Fin de Siècle." Arrêt sur image, fragmentation du temps. Aux sources de la culture visuelle moderne. Stop Motion, Fragmentation of Time. Exploring the Roots of Modern Visual Culture, ed. Francois Albera, Marta Braun, and Andre Gaudreault (Cinéma: Editions Payot Lausanne, 2002), 26. Recent work on madness and cinema continues to draw attention to the inherent predisposition to madness of the cinematic apparatus (cinema’s displacement of space and time is fundamental to a range of mental illnesses): "Le déire et les stratégies du montage larguent aisément les amarres de l’espace et les coordonnées chronologiques du récit. La folie de [Kubrick's] Shining est complice des puisances du cinéma. Les effets, procedes, truquages, raccourcis, jongleries du décor et passé-passe du temps ne sont pas étrangers aux processualités muettes de la psychose, ni aux programmes technologiques d’une schizophrénie ‘mondialisée’. See Jean-Claude Polack, "Une delire nostalgique." La raison en feu, ou la fascination du cinéma pour la folie. Ouvrage coordonné par Carole Desbarats (Saint-Sulpice-sur-Loire: L’ACOR, 1999), 23-27.
[44] One of the ways in which the new sciences of mind attempted to establish their authority was by emphasizing the link between their epistemology and the popular history of mental illness. For instance, Charcot sought to affirm his somatic view of illness by foregrounding the visual continuity between photographs of the insane included in the Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière and the first French illustrated atlases of mental illness, for instance Esquirol’s: "For Charcot, older images from high and popular art had validity as proof if their visual structures could be echoed in modern, high-tech media such as photography" (Gilman, Picturing Health and Illness, 22-23).
[45] Gunning reminds us that Charcot was not a neutral observer merely recording the hysterical attacks of his patients: "Charcot occasionally provoked an attack of hysterical epilepsy in his female patients by means of a sudden flash of brilliant electrical light within a darkened room, the very flash which made the photograph of their reactions possible" ("Bodies in Motion" 26).
[46] Gunning follows the influence of this freezing of the body-in-motion in absurd and ungainly postures in the work of Dega, Rodin and Duchamp, linking their representations of the body out of control, the sick and decadent body, to Charcot’s hysterical bodies. The obsession of Charcot and his contemporaries with using various technical means to record deviations from normality shows that "[p]hotographic technology served as a means of rational defense against the lack of physical and mental control of hysteria" ("Bodies in Motion" 26).
[47] Rae Beth Gordon, "From Charcot to Charlot: Unconscious Imitation and Spectatorship in French Cabaret and Early Cinema" in The Mind of Modernism, 93-124. 94.
[49] Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Science of Memory. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 31.
[50] Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979), 128.
[51] Leo Charney, Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity and Drift (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998).
[52] Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002).
[53] See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003).
[54] Benjamin argues that the modern subject is increasingly incapable of registering and integrating new experiences. Bombarded with visual and audio stimuli, his consciousness shrinks back from new shocks, leading to an ‘impoverishment of experience’; the loss of immediate experience forces the subject to replace it with memories in a vain attempt to compensate for the loss. However, considered from a different point of view, this so-called ‘impoverishment of experience’ appears almost as a blessing in disguise: Benjamin goes on to celebrate cinema’s potential to unlock ‘the optical unconscious’ — which includes all direct experiences that have remained un-integrated, accessible only to involuntary memory — thereby tapping into a formidable source of surprising, fresh experiences that are simply ‘waiting’ for the camera to reveal them. In A Small History of Photography (1931) Benjamin makes explicit the causal relationship between the invention of photography and the ‘discovery’ of the unconscious by arguing that photography’s automatism reveals reality’s inherent ‘automatism’ i.e. its ‘optical unconscious’.
[55] In On Photography (New York: Delta Books, 1977) Susan Sontag also links the birth of photography to skepticism. She describes the 19th century as "the new age of unbelief [which] strengthened the allegiance to images" (153). On film and skepticism, see D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007).
[56] Stanley Cavell, "Psychoanalysis and Cinema: the Melodrama of the Unknown Woman," The Cavell Reader, ed. Stephen Mulhall (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), 244.
[57] Stanley Cavell, "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004), 190-208.
[62] Ian Jeffrey, Photography: A Concise History (New York and Toronto: Oxford UP, 1981), 10. On the idea of photography as nature’s spontaneous reproduction, see Mary Warner Marien, 1-21. The notion of photography as a component of nature and as an idea predating the technical development of photography foreshadows Bazin’s ontology of the film image (film affects us as a thing of nature) and his notion of ‘total cinema.’
[63] Charles Musser examines the debate around photography and truth (and by implication the distinction between ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’) by formulating the question thus: do the precision and supposed neutrality of photography prove that photography captures the truth, or is it that precisely because of its precise and factual nature photography misses the truth? See Charles Musser, "Changing Conceptions of Truth in Photography, Chronophotography and Cinematography, 1887-1900." Arrêt sur image, 69-90.
[64] Albert Londe, Photographie Moderne (Paris: G. Masson, 1888), 166. Londe discusses the radical shift in the conceptualization of hysteria as a representative mental illness, from Charcot’s notion of hysteria, which stressed its physical manifestations, to Freud’s redefinition of hysteria emphasizing its linguistic expression.
[66] Critics like W. de W. Abney argued that instantaneous photographs were untrue and artistically incorrect and urged photographers "to represent only those phases of action which approach that of rest." Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography: from 1839 to the Present Day (New York: MOMA, 1964), 86.
[67] On the role of aesthetic considerations in medical training and diagnosis, and on the artistic intertextuality of images of health and illness, see chapter 2 in Gilman, Picturing Health and Illness.
[68] Duchenne explains his method as follows: "Au moyen d’électrodes, il contracte séparément un ou plusieurs muscles de la face, composant a volonté les expressions les plus diverses. Mail la contraction est passagère: l’irritabilité [du muscle], après quelques seconds d’action continue, semble s’affaiblir sous l’influence d’un courant a intermittences tres rapprochies. De la vient la nécessité de photographier rapidement les expressions produites par l’expérimentation électro-physiologique" (83).
[69] Indeed, he insisted on the validity of his scientific experiments by drawing a parallel between his experiment and a work of art (a painting). For example, he claimed that his experiments with facial muscles served to unmask a similar illusion in art, the illusion that when certain colors or shades are placed next to each other they appear differently than when we see them isolated.
[73] Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. 3rd ed. (London and New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1998) (1872). Welcome Library Collection.
[74] Phillip Prodger, "Photography and the Expression of the Emotions" in Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions, 399-410. 400.
[75] On Rejlander’s high art photography, see Marien, 86-91.
[76] Darwin cited in Gilman, Seeing the Insane, 182-183. Freud, of course, would insist on the exclusion of photography and any visual representations of insanity from psychoanalysis, emphasizing the importance of ‘the third ear’ over ‘the eye’. See P. Morel et C. Quetel, "Reflexions sur les représentations iconographiques de l’áliené au XIXe siècle" in Art et folie, ed. Y. David-Peyre (Université de Nantes: 1984), 155-173. "Si de la physiognomie à la phrenology, on a pu aboutir en 1861 avec Broca a une théorie neurologique des localizations cérébrales le passage de la physiognomie au portrait ‘didactique’ d’áliené et aux supports idéologiques qu’il suppose, échappe a son propos car il ne correspond pas finalement a l’objet de la psychiatrie. Non pas seulement parce que l’élimination de tout aspect dynamique rend l’image inadequate mais surtout, parce que, des le fin du XIXe siècle, les apports de la psychologie des profondeurs et en particulier de la psychoanalyse, allaient montrer que la discipline psychiatrique est affaire d’écoute plutôt que de regard. Et depuis un quart de siècle, l’illustration a disparu des ouvrages de psychiatrie…en attendant le relais des nouvelles techniques audiovisuelles" (169).
[77] Joseph Anderson, The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1996).
[78] Tim Blackmore, "The Speed Death of the Eye: The Ideology of Hollywood Film Special Effects," Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Vol. 27, No. 5 (2007): 367-372.
Temenuga Trifonova is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at York University in Toronto. She is the author of The Image in French Philosophy (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007) and European Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 2008). Her articles have appeared (or are forthcoming) in journals such as Cineaste, CineAction, Film and Philosophy, SubStance, European Journal of American Culture, Quarterly Journal of Film and Video, Kinema, Scope, Postmodern Culture, International Studies in Philosophy, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies and in several edited collections.
