Tesco (every little helps)

At the cash register in Tesco the cashier is a slim Indian (guessing) woman, with a narrow face. Her skin looks dried up and she is wearing glasses in a metal frame. Before scanning the contents of a trolley she pulls few plastic bags of a peg and pulls the sides of the bags apart. Standing in line I am watching her removing the bags, pulling the sides and dropping them on the counter. When it is my turn to be processed she pulls few more bags, looks at me and says: “Every day I have to open thousands of bags, think about it, thousands” I am slightly shocked by her admission, not sure if she is sharing an amusing fact with me or crying for help from the bottom of her soul. “I have my own bags” I say. She looks away.

Raymond Williams: The Technology and the Society

From: Television and Cultural Form. Hanover, N. H.:Westleyan University Press, 3-25, 1992. 1st printing London.

• We are used to statements about technologies that alter our world. We got so used to statements of this kind that we fail to realise their specific meanings.
• When we discuss the effect of some technology on social behavior we tend to take for granted that technology is the cause. In order to avoid superficial observations we must look at the notions of cause and effect between technology and society, technology and culture, technology and psychology.
• Questions about cause and effect between society and technology may seem very difficult and impractical, yet they are intensely practical. Without them it is impossible to establish if technology is the cause or the effect, these questions form an important part of our cultural arguments.
• I will try to analyise television according to three headings; (a) versions of cause and effect in technology and society. (b) the social history of television as technology; (c) the social history of the uses of television technology.
• A. versions of cause and effect in technology and society:
  (i) what does it mean that television altered the world? it can mean several things:
  (ii) Television was invented as a result of technological research. Its power as news and entertainment medium was so great that that it altered all preceding media of news and entertainment.
  (iii)Television was invented as a result of technological research. It altered social relationships.
  (iv)Television was invented as a result of technological research. As an electronic medium it altered our perception of reality and our relation with each other and the world.
  (v) Television was invented as a result of technological research. together with other inventions it altered the scale and form of our societies.
  (vi) Television was invented as a result of technological research. It had unforeseen consequences on family, cultural and social life.
  (vii) used as an investment vehicle.
  (viii) emphasized passivity.
• The first class of opinions (i-v) states that the technology is accidental, i.e. there is no particular reason why this technology was invented. Similarly, the consequences are also accidental. If television was not invented certain cultural forms would not develop.
• The second class of opinions (vi-viii) state that television is a technological accident, but its significance lies in its uses, which are symptomatic of some order of society or some qualities of human nature.

• The first class of opinions is known as “technological determinism”
• Second class is less determinist. It sees any particular technology as a by–product of a social process that is otherwise determined. (Lets call it “social determinism” – DR)
• These are the two main positions in our thinking about technology, both make important points but in the end they are sterile, because both abstracted technology from society.
• It is possible to outline a different kind of interpretation which will allow us to see the history of television in a more radical way, by restoring the intention to the process of research and development. Technology is researched and developed with certain purposes already in mind.
• B. The social history of Television as a Technology
• A whole range of technologies was developed over several centuries in connection with and in response to social and economic changes. Developments in the fields of electricity, telegraphy, photographic imaging, cinema and radio where at once incentives and responses within a phase of general social transformation.
• C. The social history of the Uses of Television Technology
• Unlike all previous communication technologies, radio and television were systems primarily devised for transmission and reception as abstract processes, with little or no definition of preceding content.
• Broadcasting was a social product of the tendency towards mobility on one hand and self-contained family unit on the other.

Jean Francois Lyotard “The Tensor”

The Tensor

Semiotic sign

• The ‘Thing’ can always be treated as a sign. The sign is a code that needs to be decoded to retrieve information.
• The ‘Thing’ replaces the ‘information’, which can mean one of two things: 1) The sign replaces what it signifies. 2) Signification itself is made of signs, so we only get cross references. All signs are substitutes for one another.
• Out of proposition 2) follows that all material is annihilated. Is this dematerialization is the work on the capital? Or is it the case that dematerialization gives rise to the refinement and intensification of affection? Isn’t this dematerialization at the same time a cartography of a material voyage in areas of sound, colour, sculpture, politics eroticism and language, which thanks to the dematerialization are becoming pure impulses, offering the libido new opportunities to intensify itself.

To sumarise so far:The process of signification causes dematerialization. Dematerialization makes culture immaterial, turning it into impulses. Culture becomes an arena for the libido.

• We no longer have anything but signs. That has several consequences: 1. Because signs get endlessly substituted, recurrence becomes a fundamental quality of the system. We never get presence itself. Additionally, we always have the job of determining the conditions under which our subject of study operates. 2. with the sign begins the search. This is a metaphysical search disguised as a scientific search for a discourse that can produce predictable changes.
• All signs are about power. This search is the avant-garde of the capital. Capitalist imperialism is the process of dematerialization and signification. We experience foreign cultures as signs that must be decoded.
• Signification inspires an endless conquest in which the finishing line is constantly postponed. This conquest is driven by desire.
• There is no escape from signification. Even by supporting the oppressed we are still playing the signification game.
• Another condition of the sign is that there is always a subject who perceives the sign. The self exists in the sign.
• Semiotics operates in concepts. A sign is a concept. As such signs are searching for their own limits and are happy to uncover the opposite and accommodate it. ex: ‘stupid imperialism disguised as tragic laborism.’
• Semiotics is nihilism. It is a religious science because it believes that someone is speaking to us and at the same time the final meaning always evades us.

Network Subjects or the ghost is the message / Nicholas Mirzoeff

• New media is not new. The network is both from the past and still to come.
• The repeated pronouncements that “photography is dead” reinforce the myth that photography’s essence is its indexical relationship to reality. Photography was never a purely indexical medium, rather “the real became structured like its photograph”. “The digital subject’s desire to photograph has reconfigured itself accordingly, denoting a self-reflexing space of inside/inside in which the medium is the object and subject of its ow desire.”
• Batchen showed that there was no single instant in which photography was invented. What is under examination here is the the complex field of relations between the apparatus, the user, the viewer and the medium.
• I suggest that since enlightenment there is a desire for a clarity of vision which enabled both photography and surveillance.
• The Camera Obscura is a metaphor for the Descartes’ cogito – the point of view is singular, reinforced by the use of one point perspective.
• Enlightenment thinkers tried to eliminate the uncertainties of vision.
•  The term “visuality” is the product of the period between 1780–1830: between the first ideas about the panopticon and the construction of the first panoptic structures.
• Pure indexicality was a fantasy of panopticism.
• Life in an advanced capitalist society is now lived and imagined within the mediascape.
• Webcams: desire wants to see itself desiring, using the closeted camera to reveal and conceal at once.”I am doing jennycam not because I want other people to watch but because I don’t care if people watch.”
• The networked subject is everywere on screen, but no one is watching, least of all himself.

What is new media / Lev Manovich

• Is new media a list of technologies such as CD-ROM, 3-D animations, photographs?
• New media is identified as distribution through computers rather then as produced with computers.
• This view is limiting.
• We are now in the middle of a new media revolution which shifts all culture to computer mediated forms of production, distribution and communication. This revolution is more significant than the previous ones: printing press, photography, because it affects all types of media.
• New media represents the convergence of separate historical trajectories: computing and media technologies: Babbage’s Analytical Engine and Daguerre’s daguerreotype.
• The announcement of the Daguerreotype process on August 19, 1839 created the first media frenzy.
• Charles Babbage began designing “the analytical engine” in 1833, it contained most of the key features of a modern computer. However, not a single copy of it was completed.
• Babbage used punch cards in his analytical engine, and idea he borrowed from an invention of J.M. Jacquard who used punch cards to control a loom that was used to weave intricate images.
• It is not by accident that modern media and computing developed around the same time. Both media machines and computing machines were absolutely necessary for the functioning of modern mass societies. Mass media and data processing are complementary technologies; they appear together and develop side by side, making modern mass society possible.
• in the 1890s still photographs were put in motion.
• 1890 was crucial decade for the development of computing. electric tabulating was adopted by goverment agencies and businesses to cope with the need to process large volumes of information.
• In 1936 Alan Turing published a seminal paper “On computable Numbers”. “The Universal Turing Machine” writes and reads on an endless tape. The diagram for his machine looks like a film projector.
• The cinematic apparatus and the computer have this in common: both record data to a medium and then read it off.
• A computer built in 1936 by Konrad Zuse uses discarded 35mm film to punch in binary data.
• The iconic code of the cinema is discarded in favor of the more efficient binary one.
• Half a century later the two separate historical trajectories finally meet. Media and computer merge into one. The result: graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces and texts become computable, that is, simply sets of computer data. Media become new media.
• This meeting changes the identity of both media and the computer itself. The computer becomes a media processor.

“Memories” by Wilem Flusser

“Memories” was published in “Ars Electronica: Facing the Future” (ed. Timothy Druckrey with Ars Electronica), MIT Press 1999

Summarising Flusser is perhaps the most futile undertaking, as Flusser’s writing is already distiled to the most succinct statements. It is nevertheless useful to follow his line of argument which always takes as its starting point a commonplace occurrence or phenomena and unpicks its deeper meaning with precision and exactitude. Flusser rarely points to external texts in his writing, instead he creates his own terminology assigning commonly used words with specific meanings. The essence of this text can be summarised in one sentence: Since we accept that preservation of memories is what makes us human, by creating machines with electronic memories we are forced to redefine what human is. DR

MEMORIES

• Human beings pass to future generations not only genetic, but also acquired information. The ability to pass cultural memories to future generations is what makes humans unique. At present, electronic memories reshape our cultural memory.
• Memory is a storage of information. Memories are to be found everywhere in nature. The biomass which emerged on the surface of the earth several billion years ago is an example of an information storage system which stores genetic information. The information stored is passed by copying. Mistakes that occur in process of copying generate new information – this is evolution. Artists (scientists) who intend to work with the genetic code will have to deal with the fact that memory of the biomass makes mistakes and cannot be viewed as trustworthy.
• Cultural memory is even less reliable. Most information acquired by humans has fallen into oblivion. Humans don’t have reliable memory aids for the preservation of information. Two of the aids used since we began becoming human are airways and hard objects.
• Airways are used by “oral cultures”, information transmitted through the airways is stored in the recipient’s nervous system.
• Hard objects (stones and bones) can store information for a long time. Their disadvantage is that they are also used as tools, so the information stored in them becomes eroded. The totality of hard objects that store information is called “material culture”.
• 3,500 years ago alphabet was invented. The alphabet allows to link the advantages of oral culture to those of material culture, therefore creating much more functional cultural memory. This development led to a radical change in thought and action. Linear writing affected thinking – it also became linear, and historically conscious action and technology became possible.
• Linear writing gave rise to a new cultural memory – the library. The library came to be viewed as a sacred because of its power to save humans from entropy. Western values are based on the following schema by Plato: The library (the superhuman memory) stores immutable information according to the rules of logic. We feel from The Library into the world of simulacra (deceptive phenomena) and forgot the true meaning of things. All information that we acquire in the world of phenomena is deceptive, only re discoverable inborn information is true. The process of rediscovery is to look with an inner eye. We can also recall immutable information by logical discipline. In this way we not only regain eternal information, but we also become immortal.
• Because we erroneously think that cultural memory is sacred, we identify ourselves with this sacred cultural memory. We have a dualistic view of ourselves as the material extensions of the immaterial library. Our role is to pass information from the material world of the phenomena to the library. Our ability to store information is views as sacred. The question of body and mind, and other “eternal” questions are rooted in viewing cultural memory as sacred. The invention of electronic memories will help to end such nonsense.
• Electronic memories simulate some of the brain functions. They were invented to improve human memory, but at the same time electronic memories allow us to attain a critical distance from human memory. This critical distance will cause the greatest changes to our culture.
• Electronic memories can store all the information which previously had to be stored by the human brain. The brain is now free to do other things. People will not longer have to memorise facts, but learn how to store, recall and vary data. This kind of data processing is called “creativity”. We are now facing a true burst in human creativity.
• Electronic brains linked to automatic machines (robots) can do work. People will be relieved of work and will have time to work out “programs” – patterns of information automatically imprinted on objects.
• Electronic memories can be easily rewritten. This permits disciplined and critical compilation of acquired information. In the future, “history” (the process of accumulation of information) will be a much more disciplined and critical process.
• The root of the cultural revolution we are witnessing is in the critical distance from the memory function that has been made possible by electronic memories.
• The experience of electronic memories forces us to recognise that information is passed through objects, such as computers or human organisms. This understanding of the way humans function in the transmission of information calls for a new anthropology: If in the past we thought that the ability to store information is what makes us human, now we can see that computers can do the same thing.
• This will cause us to be released from notions of individuality identity and subjectivity. Electronic memory is not the only reason why we should be free from the ideology of individuality. Other areas of knowledge show that concrete facts are to be found in interhuman relations, and not in the existence of individuals.
• Electronic memories force us to recognise that we don’t have a ‘hard core’, or self or ego. It also stops us from seeing our ability to store information as scared.
• Some of the consequences can already be seen: we will have to replace the category of “subject-object” with “intersubjectivity”, which will invalidate the distinction between science and art. both will emerge as intersubjective disciplines.
• If the experience of electronic memory will force us to give up the ideology we had about our identity, our obscure ability to resist nature’s tendency towards decay will become even more obscure. It will become even more evident that this ability to resist decay is doomed to fail in the end.
• This text is the result of research in many areas. It was written in order to clarify a very difficult situation.

Image simulations, computer manipulations: some considerations by Martha Rosler

This is a summary of the article that appeared in digital dialogues issue of “Ten8” in 1991.

• The question at hand is the danger posed to truth by computer-manipulated photographic imagery.
• We keep hoping that the control over time and space provided by imaging devices will offer freedom on a personal level.
• Consumer culture centers on the manipulation of desire, as desire exists only in the present, machines that manipulate time and space satisfy our need for control.
• Technology makes photographic manipulation very easy. For some, this is the end of photography’s claim for truth. The ability of photography to communicate facts is near exhaustion in some areas, but it is not true to say that “truth is dead” or that “photography is used up”. Manipulation was always integral to photography.Production of photographic images involves a whole range of decisions which manipulate the final image. The context in which the image is placed affects the meaning too.
• Charles Darwin engaged Oscar Rejlander to produce photographic representations of facial expressions of emotion from terror to loathing – the distinction between representation and falsification was not of interest here. Nineteenth-century photographer of landscapes was likely to make exposures of skies to be superimposed over images of terrain because the orthochromatic film did not have enough latitude to capture both at once. Any outdoor photo was likely to be a montage, posing no problems of veracity for maker or viewer. All these manipulations were in the service of a truer truth, one closer to conceptual adequacy.
• The identification of photography with objectivity is a modern idea. Faking photographs for political aims has a long history.
• Restaging or faking is always an issue in war photography. Journalistic veracity and objectivity – the absence of an invested point of view – are early 20th century concepts.
• In commercial and entertainment photography manipulation of images is routinely accepted.
• In these images the visual appeal and cleanliness, not photographic accuracy, are most important considerations. But interpretive representations in which elements are literally manipulated are anathema to photojournalists.
• Art photography defines itself by stressing its distance from the camera. Photo-journalism does the opposite.
• The simplest misrepresentation of a photograph is its use out of context, there are ample anecdotal examples of misuse.
• In digitization there may be no original, no negative – only copies, only information. Computerized images make it more likely that images will be manipulated by technicians – not by photographers. This opens the way for another possible loss of relative autonomy for the photographer, who may become, like the TV news-camera operator, merely a link in the electronic chain of command.
• Montage is a more positive use of manipulated images. In every photomontage there is an implicit message that photography alone cannot “tell the truth” and also a reminder that fact itself is a sociological construction.
• Digital image enhancement and manipulation used in entertainment and commercial photography, medicine (enhancement of CAT scans and ultrasound). For the home market, interested not in strict accuracy but in prestige enhancing aesthetic values, manipulation of portraits, increase in sharpness and reduction of grain, removal of unwanted features.
• Discussion of the effects of computerization on modern society tends to bifurcate: either the concern with the reception of computerised images, or the impact of computerisation on production and experience of labor. For Baudrillard the TV is not means of surveillance (as it is for Orwell) because the TV prevents people from talking to one another so there is no possibility of subversion to monitor.
• Computers can be used for monitoring the computer-operating worker. The term surveillance conveys the aggressive quality of this monitoring.
• Computerization brings about a culture who’s common currency is the production of images and signs. Baudrillard believes that truth is no longer an issue, since all signs are interchangeable. He writes that “everything that appears on the TV is YOU”. The problem with Baudrillard’s approach is that does not describe causes or real life experiences. Yet he is right in saying that it is difficult to distinguish the real from the artificial. This position follows a line of thought that includes McLuhan, Frankfurt School and the French situationalists, notably Guy Debord, who in 1967 book “La Societe du Spectacle” quotes Feuerbach who says in 1841 that “the present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence,… illusion only is sacred, truth is profane.”
• What shall we think of computer-enhanced imagery, which may produce copies with no original, and about its relation to photographic documentation? One endangered use is the provision of legal evidence. But governments might be willing to pay this price if it also means diminished circulation of images in the public sphere.
• Political activity among citizens depends on the ability to communicate about events and situations not directly experienced, including the experiences of Others. Without adequate discussion of context and meaning of the social relations represented images can not work, unless the audience already shares a knowledge of what things mean. The question is not whether to manipulate images but how – and also how to use them straight to tell the truth.
• Concerns about manipulation of still photographs center on political, ethical, judical and other legal issues (such as copyright), as well as the broader ideological ramifications of how culture deploys ‘evidence’. Complications posed by questions of reception, such as those raised by post-structuralist critics and philosophers, have themselves fueled a pessimism about the ability to communicate meaning.
• Nevertheless, meaning can be communicated and a photograph as evidence is not dead. The idea of the photograph as a raw evidence has a very short history. The delegitimization of photographic truth is partly a product of political failure – it is the result of declining faith in the project of modernity and its religion of progress.
• Social meanings and their perception are not fully determined by the technologies used in their production but rather are circumscribed both by wider hegemonic ideological practices and by the practices and traditions of those who oppose them.

Technorati Tags: digital, photography, digital, political, social

Adorno on driving

From Adorno’s Minima Moralia section 19:

 

And which driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children and cyclists? The movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment.

Adorno’s concern with technology is not dissimilar to his arch-enemy Heidegger in “The question concerning technology”. For both technology redefines the relationship between people and the world around them, bringing forward brutality, self-interest and ultimately, destruction. But equally important is the difference between the two – For Adorno, machines are designed in a way to make us all Fascists. For Heidegger, it is the National-socialism that has the power of restoring a better relationship with nature, by providing an alternative to the mechanistic, spiritless age of machines.

Technorati Tags: Everyday, philosophy

Adorno on emigration

Adorno, in Minima Moralia is bitter, angry and ridden with guilt, all of which makes him an all together more pleasant and agreeable companion. He is ready to pull a fast paradox, and expects the reader to be constantly on guard. In this passage there is a striking similarity with Simone Weil: Adorno suggests that also there is no remedy to doom, at least one can be aware of it and through awareness “rob it of its dreadful violence”. Compare with Weil when she says that the revolution can bring no hope to the oppressed, but there is some hope in acknowledging this hopelessness as opposed to believing in the salvation that revolution might bring.

Protection, help and counsel, – Every intellectual in emigration is, without exeption, mutilated, and does well to acknowledge it to himself, if he wishes to avoid being cruelly apprised of it behind the tightly-closed doors of his self-esteem. He lives in an environment that must remain incomprehensible to him, however flawless his knowledge of trade-union organisations or the automobile industry may be; he is always astray. Between the reproduction of his own existence under the monopoly of mass culture, and impartial, responsible work, yawns an irreconcilable breach. His language has been expropriated, and the historical dimension that nourished his knowledge, sapped. The isolation is made worse by the formation of closed and politically-controlled groups, mistrustful of their members, hostile to those branded different. The share of the social product that falls to aliens is insufficient, and forces them into a hopeless second stuggle within the general competition. All this leaves no individual unmarked. Even the man spared the ignominy of direct co-ordination bears, as his special mark, this very exemption, an illusory, unreal existence in the life-process of society. Relations between outcasts are even more poisoned than between long-standing residents. All emphases are wrong, perspectives disrupted. Private life asserts itself unduly, hectically, vampire-like, trying convulsively, because it really no longer exists, to prove it is alive. Public life is reduced to an unspoken oath of allegiance to the platform. The eyes take on a manic yet cold look of grasping, devouring, commandeering. There is no remedy but steadfast diagnosis of oneself and others, the attempt, through awareness, if not to escape doom, at least to rob it of its dreadful violence, that of blindness. Utmost caution is called for, particularly in the choice of private acquaintances, as far as choice still remains. Above all, one should beware of seeking out the mighty, and “expecting something”of them. The eye for possible advantages is the mortal enemy of all human relationships; from these solidarity and loyalty can ensue, but never from thoughts of practical ends. Hardly less dangerous are the mirror-images of the mighty, lackeys, flatterers and cadgers, who ingratiate themselves with those better off than they in an archaistic manner that can flourish only in the economically extraterritorial circumstances of emigration. While they may bring their protector trivial advantages, they drag him down the moment he accepts them, as he is ceaselessly seduced to do by his own helplessness in a strange country. If in Europe the esoteric gesture was often only a pretext for the blindest self-interest, the concept of austerity, though hardly ship-shape of watertight, still seems, in emigration, the most acceptable lifeboat. Only a few, admittedly, have a seaworthy example at their disposal. To most boarders, it threatens starvation or madness.

Technorati Tags: emigration, philosophy

Panopticon

Comments on Panopticon. The medieval control model is based on summary execution of a criminal. This had its problems: Crowd control and the perceived heroism of the victim, (see for example the execution scene in “Braveheart”). The execution puts the criminal in the center of attention, the scaffold resembles the cross, the accused, resembles Jesus. The crowd is excited and hard to control. This kind of execution is a spectacle in which the criminal is the main hero, the focus of all the action. The modern period sees a new model of punishment, in which the criminal is transformed from the center of attention to an object of observation. The panoptic model puts the criminal away from the eyes of the crowd, under the constant observation of a guard. The notion of heroism is being replaced by docility.

In the classic model, the criminal is a gladiator who in his death entertains and informs the crowd, the cite of the public execution is a descendant of the coliseum. The Panopticon is a coliseum inverted. The criminal is moved from the center to the perimeter, and the central stage is occupied by the guard. Instead of being observed by the crowds, the criminal is observed by a single person. The show is over. The crowd dispersed. The panoptic model does not provide a spectacle, instead it erects a silent towering monument in the heart of the city.

Technorati Tags: philosophy