Thursday, December 23, 2010

a response to Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media

After the publication of Understanding Media in 1964, Marshall McLuhan became for a while perhaps the most famous North American thinker. His fame was likely due to his use of memorable slogans which distilled his beliefs to what in the television industry is termed a ‘catch-phrase’. It is within these terms that McLuhan is best understood. While this paper intends to summarise rather than critique McLuhan’s thinking, I will suggest a few concerns which I will later examine in greater detail in the final term paper.

Perhaps the most egregious and obvious fault of the text is McLuhan’s continual use of broad generalizations when providing examples to support his arguments. This tendency is most notable, and perhaps the least excusable, when McLuhan describes human characteristics and subjective positions as contingent with national identity. One can piece together a list of national characteristics to which McLuhan alludes throughout his text, for example: “The African insistence on group participation and on chanting and shouting during films...” (287); “the Eskimo no more needs to look at a picture right side up...” (191), or the numerous references to “the American”, “the Russian”, and “the Chinese”. However, McLuhan’s naive essentialisms should not be dismissed out of hand by a reader schooled in contemporary identity politics. His Platonic appeal to the universal forms of being Chinese, African, or otherwise can be used if placed into their proper context. When speaking about the manner in which non-literate peoples come to understand and experience photography and motion images, for example, a critic may use McLuhan’s point about the non-linear reading strategies employed by the non-literate person without reference to a national or ethnic tradition. Perhaps more optimistically, McLuhan’s use of essentialised national characteristics can be forgiven as a rhetorical device consistent with a society enmeshed in what can perhaps be described as the essentializing zeitgeist of the Cold War. In any case, such criticisms will presently be glossed in favour of their more detailed return in a future paper.

Not simply a catalogue of the various extant media, McLuhan suggests that media should be understood as a multitude of extensions of the human body. Fundamentally, he positions media as the principle manner in which the production and consumption of knowledge occurs, as determined by its expression through a technological practise. Different subject positions in the human condition can as a consequence be understood as having been produced relative to the material availability of media.

It is here that we can begin to forgive McLuhan for his essentialised national categories. “The African...”, for example, is not rendered lesser than “the North American” due to any racial or cultural features inherent to the people of the nations of Africa. Rather, when seen within the context of the historical development of both film and colonial practices, it is perfectly understandable that McLuhan should want to describe what he felt was the most likely subjective position for a person born in a society lacking access to highly technological media as “the Eskimo” or “the African”. It is the job of the contemporary scholar working with McLuhan’s ideas to understand that the national identities used by the author are convenient historical constructions and, as a consequence, to determine a more precise and flexible body of examples of different subjectivities produced by differing literacy in relation to highly technological media.

McLuhan focuses his concern on the changes to human subjectivity which have resulted from the development of electric technologies. Electricity renders the transmission and experience of information instantaneous, and as such a new degree of politics has emerged: “Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree. It is this implosive factor that alters the position of the Negro, the teen-ager, and some other groups. They can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media. ... The mark of our time is its revulsions against imposed patterns. We are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally.” (5) McLuhan’s notion of media therefore disturbs the uniqueness of external reality relative to human subjectivity. What were once objects and events rationalised as exterior entities and processes capable of receiving human agency – indeed knowledge itself – have suddenly been interiorised as extensions of the human body itself. The capacity of a subject to understand and express their existence in the world is markedly different when that subject exists within a society mobilised by electricity. Indeed, the body itself is continually involved in a process of adaptation to such ‘mutation’: "Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body." (45)

Through an interrogation of the technologies of writing and print, McLuhan demonstrates that human existence is determined by technical processes of expression. Before electricity, existence was ordered along in the framework of print, a linear and sequential process which allowed a great and rapid dissemination of both books and a new world view contingent on alphanumeric literacy. McLuhan argues that this capacity for linear order shaped human use of other technologies: "Only alphabetic cultures have ever mastered connected lineal sequences as pervasive forms of psychic and social organization. The breaking up of every kind of experience into uniform units in order to produce faster action and change of form (applied knowledge) has been the secret of Western power over man and nature alike.” (85) Thus, he is able to rationalise the militarism which dominated the twentieth century: “our Western industrial programs have quite involuntarily been so militant, and our military programs have been so industrial. Both are shaped by the alphabet in their technique of transformation and control by making all situations uniform and continuous."

Electricity is a revolutionary technology due to the fact that its instantaneous nature disrupts continuity and centralised power (and by extension, discourse).

One can begin to critique McLuhan with his distinction between hot and cold media, characterised as either hot, which are constituted by what he refers to as information presented to one or a number of senses with a high degree of depth (definition), or cold, which present information in a less defined manner. While in both cases audiences participate in their own understanding of the message being conveyed, hot media invite a low amount of audience participation, while for cold media the reverse is true. Fundamentally, the categories which he uses are too essentialising: "A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in 'high definition' High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, 'high definition.' A cartoon is 'low definition' simply because very little visual information is provided." (22) While the conception of hot and cold may each be useful, media do not unify into a coherent entity as McLuhan suggests by "a photograph is" or "a cartoon is". Minimalist photographers such as Hiroshi Sugimoto allow for McLuhan's definition of low definition, while 'cartoon' artists such as Frank Miller, Gerhard and Dave Sim, Boris Vallejo, and many among the great number of Japanese artists who work in the Manga form attest to the potential for a high definition comic book. Furthermore, it is possible to suggest that given sufficient time to mature, audiences can be seen as increasingly active media participants.


Notes

1.  See also The Medium is the Massage: “The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and                actions – the patterns of mechanistic technologies – are very seriously threatened by new methods of            instantaneous electric information retrieval” (12).

2.  Nietzsche’s conception of will to power is perhaps a more accurate phrase to replace the term                      ‘existence’ in this context.

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Francis Bacon and Augustus Comte -- notes

One of the principles of Renaissance thought was the liberation of the human subject from the limitations of authority and tradition, of which the church was perhaps the most significant influence. Francis Bacon was one of the chief proponents of what was later understood as humanism. Fundamentally, Bacon’s thought was centred upon the idea that human ingenuity and discovery was a reflection of the will and grace of God. Indeed, the hand of God was working through human invention. Scientific progress is a reflection of a divine sense of the good; as such, it flourishes during times of peace (which Bacon incorrectly points out was extant at the time of his writing). To this end, in Thoughts and Conclusions on the Interpretation of Nature as a Science Productive of Works he outlines the benefits conferred by three technologies which he considers to be representative for the triumph of human ingenuity over the natural processes which limit the human subject: printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass. Through a description of these inventions, Bacon seeks to establish the importance of the process of invention to human existence. Of cardinal significance is the notion that the acquisition of knowledge serves to improve one’s potential for acting well within world affairs, as “the improvement of man’s mind and the improvement of man’s lot are one and the same thing” (27).

Importantly, the development of the individual human subject is seen as key to the development of the body politic. Bacon suggests that scientific invention is among the most beneficial of human activities, “for the benefits inventors confer extend to the whole human race” (26). To a modern reader aware of the history and politics of European colonialism, it is difficult to avoid noting the political economy of this statement, which was written by a member of the English aristocracy who was then serving as a senior governmental bureaucrat at a time of colonial expansion. Of course, by stressing the importance of the compass, Bacon writes that England’s colonial enterprises were themselves reflections of the realisation of power through scientific processes. Through the acquisition of knowledge and the continuation of technological invention, mankind (to use Bacon’s notably gendered language) is able to expand the possibilities for action and self-realisation. In his Novum Organum, he writes that “knowledge and human power come to the same thing, for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced” (29). Much like Plato’s explanation of how leaders must understand the good in order to understand the earthly manifestation of forms, Bacon suggests that mankind will understand the truth only by avoiding what he terms the false idols of intellectual activity – Idols of the Tribe, in which perception is a human affair which “distorts and corrupts the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it” (29); Idols of the Cave, wherein Bacon adapts Plato’s Cave analogy to argue that an individual person’s traits and personality may distort an understanding of reality; Idols of the Market-place, which emerge from the relational dynamics inherent to human subjectivity, manifest in language: “Words plainly do violence to the understanding and throw everything into confusion, and lead men into innumerable empty controversies and fictions” (30); and Idols of the Theatre, the dogmas associated with established philosophy, “which have become established through tradition, credulity and neglect” (30). By means of the truth, mankind will master the self. Indeed, determined effort “devoted to sane and solid purposes could triumph over every obstacle” (28). Furthermore, “inventions come without force or disturbance ... while civil changes rarely proceed without uproar and violence” (26). On the Idols and on the Scientific Study of Nature invokes Augustine’s City of God in positing a fantastic and perfectly ordered geography of thought, with all of the various sciences operating in harmony.

In order to realise the benefits of scientific progress, Bacon calls for an examination of the methods of inquiry. Throughout most of late antiquity and the medieval period, intellectual activity first involved accepting the established authority and supplementing it with opinion. The philosophical tradition then allowed for knowledge to be produced by means of dialectics, which “look only for logical consistency” (25). Lastly, experiential data allowed for some intellectual discovery, but only by means of happenstance, not methodological rigour. To counter such trends, and to account for the fact that chance is a significant contributor to intellectual discovery, a rigorous method of scientific inquiry is required. Bacon proposed in On the Reformation of Education that the education systems then extant in Europe were insufficient for such a task. He complains that education can be seen to “have rather augmented the number of learned men than raised and rectifies the sciences themselves” (34), and furthermore that “this dedication of colleges and societies to the use only of professory learning has not only been inimical to the growth of the sciences, but has also been prejudicial to states and government” (35). Bacon thus suggests that universities be equipped with the latest laboratory and observational equipment, that universities across Europe need to network with each other to allow the sciences to flourish outside of geographical happenstance, that the salaries of Lecturers (those who research “Philosophy” and “Universality”) must be sufficient to allow the best minds to seek such a life pursuit, as lecturers “are as it were the keepers and guardians of the whole store and provision of learning” (35), and finally that logic and rhetoric, the two disciplines foundational to all intellectual activity, should be reserved for mature and sufficiently-developed minds. It is quite interesting to note retroactively that such complaints have often been levelled at universities, and the desire to reform education to the benefit of the liberated human subject has been rejuvenated in a time when corporate and business interests have proliferated, and arguably poisoned, the integrity of the pursuit of knowledge.

Humanism had become entrenched in European consciousness by the time Augustus Comte was writing about scientific progress in The Nature and Importance of the Positive Philosophy. Comte believes that a historical overview is necessary, “for no idea can be properly understood apart from its history” (45). He then seeks to systematise the development of thought by stating “that each branch of our knowledge, passes in succession through three theoretical states: the theological or fictitious state, the metaphysical or abstract state, and the scientific or positive state”. As a consequence, three methods for the pursuit of knowledge come to the fore: the theological method, which situates all phenomena as originating with divine influence; the metaphysical method, in which “the supernatural agents are replaced by abstract forces, real entities or personified abstractions” which are themselves in turn the originators of all phenomena; and the positive method, which recognizes “the impossibility of of obtaining absolute truth” and therefore “endeavours ... to discover, by a well-combined use of reasoning and observation, the actual laws of phenomena – that is to say, their invariable relations of succession and likeness”. Comte demonstrates an interesting self-awareness when he describes “the need at every epoch of having some theory to connect the facts” (46). His thinking is an extension of Bacon’s idea that the knowledge of reality must in principle come from observed phenomena. Thus, “it is no less true that, in order to observe, our mind has need of some theory or other”. However, in order to objectively navigate the near-infinite number of subjective understandings, observation of phenomena must be methodologically rigorous in order to properly understand both the self and the ‘truth’ that results from intellectual activity, for “it is experience alone which has enabled us to estimate our abilities rightly” (47).

It is to this end that he outlines the necessity of the positive philosophy, whose “fundamental character ... is to consider all phenomena as subject to invariable natural laws. The exact discovery of these laws and their reduction to the least possible number constitute the goal of all our efforts; for we regard the search after what are called causes, whether first or final, as absolutely inaccessible and unmeaning” (48). In this capacity, he rejects the metaphysical and theological arguments around the interpretation and realisation of divine will. In reductionist terms, everything necessary for the understanding of a given phenomenon is present within the phenomenon itself. The remainder of the chapter sketches “what stage in the formation of that philosophy has now been reached and what remains to be done in order to constitute it fully” (49). He argues that the pursuit of knowledge was rendered contingent with positivism first among the most simple and general of disciplines, as “astronomical phenomena ... were the first to be subjected to positive theories”, followed by a succession of physical sciences increasingly proximal to the human subject. This process originated with Aristotelian thinking and has taken place “continuously and at an increasing rate”. Comte recognizes that positive theories have not been adapted to the study of all phenomena, and there remains a great deal of research to be accomplished and a “gap” which must be bridged, as positive theories must be utilized in order to understand the dynamics of “social physics” (50).

The important dynamic inherent to Comte’s thinking is the reduction of different systems of thought to the same process of knowledge production, for when “our fundamental conceptions [have] thus been rendered homogeneous, philosophy will be consituted finally in the positive state,” at which point all theological and metaphysical methodologies and systems of thought will be rendered obsolete.The individual disciplines of scientific inquiry become established when they have “developed far enough to admit of separate cultivation – that is to say, when it has arrived at a stage in which it is capable of constituting the sole pursuit of certain minds” (51). Indeed, positivism has developed rather continuously since Bacon, to the point where Comte wishes to prove that “direct contemplation of the mind by itself is a pure illusion” (53), as the functioning of the brain is only observable from an objective position. Of course, Comte was not to live to see the developments in medical imaging technologies, which have indeed allowed the discipline of neuroscience to investigate the machinations of the brain in self-aware subjects. More provocatively, however, it is possible to interpret Comte’s statement that “interior observation gives rise to almost as many divergent opinions as there are so-called observers” (53) as prognosticating the development of psychoanalysis (which is of course one of the missing positive “social sciences”).

While Comte sates that the ancients were able to participate with significant contributions in numerous areas of scientific thought, due to the relatively immature state of their development, “it is ... impossible not to be struck by the great inconveniences which [the division into disciplines] produces.” He argues for the creation of an executive body given the task of providing an overview of the processes of each scientific discipline “to determine exactly the character of each science, to discover the relations and concatenation of the sciences, and to reduce, if possible, all their chief principles to the smallest number of common principles” (52). Scientists should be trained to have a general understanding of science before specializing. Furthermore, Comte calls for the creation of “a specific class on men, whose special and permanent function would consist in connecting each new special discovery with the general system”. To explain such a function, he emphasizes that understanding is essentially a singular discipline, and that the divisions of understanding into disciplines is an artificial principle which “by separating the difficulties, resolve[s] them more easily” (55). However, these distinctions can serve problematic when “questions arise which need to be treated by combining the points of view of several sciences”.

Comte states that positivism is the only ideological system which can be seen to be in ascent; the others have been in decline for centuries. This process will be completed once positivism has included the study of social phenomena, and furthermore that it is understood as a single and coherent theory which encompasses all of the disciplines of thought. When such has been accomplished, “the revolutionary crisis which harasses civilised people will then be at an end” (57). He concludes this section by stating that the endeavour to synthesize the various disciplines of human inquiry is not to reduce their variables to “one sole law”.  Fundamentally, the human mind is not able to realize perfection, which would be required for a valid and objective “sole law” for the understanding of all phenomena: “the resources of the human mind are too feeble, and the universe is too complicated, to admit of our ever attaining such scientific perfection”. In this context, it is interesting to note that Comte hints at the ‘holy grail’ of physics after Einstein, namely the unified field theory which seeks to harmonize theories of the macro universe (astronomy) with those concerned with the subatomic universe: “it seems to me that we could hope to arrive at it only by connecting all natural phenomena with the most general positive law with which we are acquainted – the law of gravitation – which already links all astronomical phenomena to some of the phenomena of terrestrial physics” (58). While dismissed by scholars and scientists of most disciplines, the quest for such unity remains at the heart of theoretical physics.

Borgman, Feenberg, and Heidegger: notes toward a possible dialogue

In order to examine the nature of existence within the framework of the multiple subjectivities produced by technology, Heidegger sought to essentialize the relationship between human subject and technology by means of an examination, in reductive terms, of that which is “not technological”. In the question concerning technology, Heidegger provided a framework for the understanding of technology as a means by which the production of meaning involves the ordering of reality into resources ordered and viewed as always-already on stand-by for their exploitation. While technology does indeed have the capacity for disclosure, ultimately Heidegger rejects technology as lacking the capacity for achieving the “good life” in which freedom of choice defines the subject.

         Borgmann responded to Heidegger’s negative critique of technology by means of trying to understand the capacity of technological processes to redefine the human subject. Fundamentally, he implicitly rejects Heidegger’s conception of a unified subject, which, will historically-determined, speaks with one pretechnological voice. To this end, he defines the subject in relation to that which objectivizes. Objects and practices can be seen as particular means of focus. “A focal practice is the resolute and regular dedication to a focal thing. ... [They] are at ease with the natural sciences.” focal things “are concrete, tangible, and deep, admitting of no functional equivalents; they have a tradition, structure, and rhythm of their own. They are unprocurable and finally beyond our control.” (307) focus is itself identified by means of an etymological investigation into the word as both hearth and "optical or geometric" instrument. "a focus gathers the relations of its context and radiates into its surroundings and informs them" (293-4). "to focus on something or to bring it into focus is to make it central, clear, and articulate> It is in the context of these historical and living senses of "focus" that I want to speak of focal things and practices." (294)

          It is here that Borgmann breaks with Heidegger, for he questions whether art is in fact the sole means (or focus) by which authentic disclosures can be realised. that humans look to their environment is entirely natural: "The wildernes is beyond the procurement of technology, and our response to it takes us past consumption. But it also teaches us to accept and appropriate technology" (296). Borgmann then looks at two such practices: competitive running, and the "culture of the table", in order to elaborate the notion that focal events can be mistakenly construed as "experiences in the subjective sense, events that have their real meaning in transporting a person into a certain mental or emotional state". Technology will then endeavour to more efficiently deliver and replace the state with itself, unless "we guard focal things in their depth and integrity". "To elaborate the context of focal events is to grant them their proper eloquence." (297)

          Technology comes to be realised as a process of subjective alienation due to the fact that by means of the storing of labour through time, the subject it divided against itself: satisfaction of desire and the realisation of satisfaction are rendered discontinuous. "I am a divided person; my achievement lies in the past, my enjoyment in the present." (297) Borgmann then describes the alienating experience of industrial food, which replaces the culture of the table. "eating in a focal setting differs sharply from the social and cultural anonymity of a fast-food outlet." (299). and yet, these small, seemingly mundane practices attain a degree of Benjaminian aura precisely due to their recontextualization within the technological apparatus of the modern era. “On the spur of the moment, we normally act out what has been nurtured in our daily practices as they have been shaped by the norms of our time.” (300).

         While ritual was the social means by which practices became tradition in ancient societies, for modern humans engaged in the technological process, what comes to be known as the device paradigm (in the next section) is defined: devices realize increasing efficiencies which realize states of satisfied desire. Heidegger’s critique here stands, for the creation and satisfaction of desires will itself become an autonomous and self-perpetuating process under the rule of technology. Borgmann: “If we are to challenge the rule of technology, we can only do so through the practice of engagement. ... without a practice an engaging action or event can momentarily light up our life, but it cannot order and orient it focally. Through a practice we are able to accomplish what remains unattainable through a series of individual decisions and acts.” (300)

         Borgmann posits that making “the technological universe hospitable to focal things turns out to be the heart of the reform of technology …. [for] only things that we experience as greater and other than ourselves can move us to judge and change technology in the first place” (302). And so we come to the redemptive potential inherent to technology in Borgmann’s thought. Fundamentally, what we can describe as the “good life” requires the application of our capacity for engaging with a self-defined subjective experience. engagement encompasses “the acquisition of skills, the fidelity to a daily discipline, the broadening of sensibility, the profound interaction of human beings, and the preservation and development of tradition” (304), and in the process “harmonize the variety among people but also within the life of one person”. 

         However, focal things can also subsume a person and take over the definition of the good life, which involves the mastery of the capacity to master a practice and thus a means of ordering and understanding. While not in itself either absolute or an absolution, “it is not finally decisive whether and how we succeed in securing an ordered and excellent life for worldlessly conceived subjects” (307), there remains the possibility that “a technological device or, more generally, a technological invention may someday address us as such a thing, one that, whatever its genesis, has taken on a character of its own, that challenges and fulfills us, that centres and illuminates our world?” At this point, Borgmann, surmises, technology would itself be able to “birth ... a focal thing or event”
>> 
“the reform of technology .... must be one of and not merely one within the device paradigm. ... A reform of the paradigm is ... the recognition and the restraint of the paradigm. To restrain the paradigm is to restrict it to its proper sphere. Its proper sphere is the background or periphery of focal things and practices. ... Reform must make room for focal things and practices.” (308) thus, the good inherent to a focal thing or pratice will result in ends which resonate with the means of their procural, hence the story of the environmentally-conscious runner on page 309. “To have a focal thing radiate transformatively into its environment is not to exact some kind of service from it but to grant it its proper eloquence.”
 <<
Borgmann therefore suggests that people should balance the political consequences of tehcnological enthrallment with the fact that “in one or another area of one’s life one should gratefully accept the disburdenment from daily and time-consuming chores and allow celebration and world citizenship to prosper in the time that has been gained.” (310). The good life involves a degree of social recognition for having mastered an area of focal practice, for being able to share the celebratory moments of life and success with loved ones, and “where we encounter our fellow human beings in the fullness of their capacities, and where we know ourselves to be equal to that world in depth and strength.” (310). mastery of knowledge is simply mastery “of the means rather than the ends of life. What is needed if we are to make the world truly and finally ours again is the recovery of a centre and a standpoint from which one can tell what matters in the world and what merely clutters it up. A focal concern is that centre of orientation.” (311)

         The other two articles serve to position Heidegger and Borgmann in relation to each other, and in doing so they alternatively come to agree with one thinker or the other. Thus, we can witness Dreyfus and Spinosa’s article argues in support of Heidegger’s critique of technology being “a more cogherent and credible answer than Borgmann’s” (315). They state that for Heidegger, technology is a process in which ordering increasingly supplants objects themselves, which are themselves merely a means for further ordering. Borgmann is in agreement, to the extent that “the object disappears precisely to the extent that the subject gains total control”. And yet, in gaining control “the post-modern subject is reduced to a ‘point of arbitrary desires’” (316-7). Thus, despite the displacement of objects, (hyper)reality remains determined by the satisfaction of desire: “Heidegger’s intuition is that treating everything as standing reserve or, as we might say, resources, makes possible endless disaggregation, redistridution, and reaggregation for its own sake.” Along with the object, Dreyfus argues that Heidegger eliminates subjectivity. Technology is thus “a new stage in the understanding of being.” (317) “Thanks to Nietzsche, Heidegger could sense that, when everything becomes standing reserve or resources, people and things will no longer be understood as having essences or identities or, for people, the goal of satisfying arbitrary desires”. the new subject gains meaning not through fixity, but rather through the process of connection. “Even desireing subjects have been sucked up as standing reserve.” (319)

         For Heidegger, “when a focal event such as a family meal is working to the point where it has its particular integrity, one feels extraordinarily in tune with all that is happening, a special graceful ease takes over, and events seem to unfold of their own momentum” (320). When a “thing is thinging”, says Heidegger, the divinities must be present; focal practices channel the divine by means of mortality. “So long as a people who regularly encounter a thing are socialized to respond to it appropriately, their practices are organized around the thing, and its solicitations are taken into account even when no one notices” (320). Dreyfus agrees with Borgman’s rejection of Heidegger’s pretechnological focal things to be “misleading and dispiriting” (321).

         Dreyfus argues that groups of people use technologies adaptively and in social congruence (given congruent sociability)., and furthermore that given a phenomenological concern, the fact that humans can choose to exercise from a variety of possibilities, and thus express their mortality, determines that people are “never wholly a resource” (322). “Neither equipment nor roles could be gathered, but the skills for treating ourselves as disaggregated skills and the world as a series of open possibilities are what are drawn together so that vaious dispersed skillful performances become possible. But if we focus on the skills for dispersing alone, then the dangerous seduction of technology is enhanced.”
 <<
         “Resistance to technological practices by cultivating focal practices is the primary solution Borgmann gives to saving ourselves from technological devastation. ... Heidegger’s view of technology allows him to find a positive relation to it, but only so long as we maintain skills for disclosing other kinds of worlds. Freeing us from having a total fixed identity so that we may experience ourselves as multiple identities disclosing multiple worlds is what Heidegger calls technology’s saving power.” (323). Thus Dreyfus and Spinosa can come to terms with the two authors: “as mortal disclosers of worlds in the plural, the only integrity we can hope to achieve is our openness to dwelling in many worlds and the capacity to move among them. Only such a capacity allows us to accept Heidegger’s and Borgmann’s criticism of technology and still have Heidegger’s genuinely positive relationship to technological things.” (324)
>> 
Feenberg opens his article with the condemnation of Hedegger as an institutional force. . Such, however, is not a rejection of Heidegger, but rather a circumscription of meaning as plurality which is otherwise obscured by Heideggerian thought as having been furnished with an institutional status. And yet he can agree with Heidegger that “ Technology is a cultural form through which everything in the modern world becomes available for control. Technology thus violates both humanity and nature at a far deeper level than war and environmental destruction. To this culture of control corresponds an inflation of the subjectivity of the controller” (328)

          Feenberg states that “Heidegger’s critique of autonomous technology is not without merit” (329), and wonders whether “our specifically technological engagement with the world ... is merely an attitude or it it embedded in the actual design of modern technological devices?”. The former is contingent with the historical process itself, which contextualizes the production of meaning, while the latter Feenberg argues to be rather optimistic in its causal effectiveness. “Heidegger holds that the restructuring of social reality by technical action is inimical to a life rich in meaning.” (329). Feenberg states that for Borgmann, the logic of devices is to become increasingly efficient, which is defined by a replacement of expertise, resource gathering and exploitation, and social ritural by machine functionality. However, “the generalization of the device paradigm, its universal substitution for simpler ways, has a deadening effect. Where means and ends, contexts and commodities are strictly separated, life is drained of meaning. Individual involvement with nature and other human beings is reduced to a bare minimum, and possession and control become the highest values.” (330) 

[potential reading of Apple computers]

          Feenberg argues that Borgman “offers a more understandable response to invasive technology than anything in Heidegger”, as the former “[bounds] the technical sphere to restore the centrality of meaning” (330). for Borgmann, the modern human subject mediated by the computer becomes “disposable experiences that can be turned on and off like water from a faucet. The person as a focal thing has become a commodity delivered by a device”(331). Feenberg rejects Borgmann’s conception of computer-mediated communication for being naive and incomplete, for it rejects the possibilities for the development of human subjectivities enabled by communication otherwise impossible. “Borgmann’s critique of technology pursues the larger conenctions and social implications masked by the device paradigm. To this extent it is genuinely dereifying. But insofar as it fails to incorporate these hidden social dimensions into the concept of technology itself, it remains still partially caught in the very way of thinking it criticizes.” (332)

          Feenberg argues that Heidegger “is demanding that we recognize fully our own unsurpassable belonging to a world in which meaning guides the rituals that crystallize around things.” (333). “The fourfold refers to no particular system of practices and things, but reminds us of what all such systems have in common insofar as all human lives are rooted in enacted meaning of some sort” (333). “Is the gathering thing a node in a network? ... The notion o the thing as a gathering that discloses a world can be seen as a correective to the overemphasis on the role of Dasein in disclosure in [Being and Time]. There, world was defined not as “all that is”, nor as an object of knowledge, but as the realm of everyday practice.” (334) Feenberg thus posits Heidegger’s thought as circumscribed by its objectivist (managerial) nature.


(discussion of Schindler’s list as an unethical film)

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

talking on james street north, episode 4


talking on james street north, episode 4 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.


In November of 2005, I formalised an informal talk amongst artists, writers, activists, and community organizers. Issues discussed included gentrification and economic development, the purpose of a life in and with art, the experiences of running an independent gallery, the politics of community, and the community of politics.

The participants for this episode are Jeremy Freiburger, Matt Jelly, Dane Pederson, Quintin Hewlett, Andrea Carvalho, Matt Teagel, Steve Mazza, and Gary Buttrum.

camera + sound, p + c = qzh 2005

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

talking on james street north, episode 3


talking on james street north, episode 3 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.


In November of 2005, I formalised an informal talk amongst artists, writers, activists, and community organizers. Issues discussed included gentrification and economic development, the purpose of a life in and with art, the experiences of running an independent gallery, the politics of community, and the community of politics.

The participants for this episode are Jeremy Freiburger, Matt Jelly, Dane Pederson, Quintin Hewlett, Andrea Carvalho, Matt Teagel, Steve Mazza, and Gary Buttrum.

camera + sound, p + c = qzh 2005

Monday, November 15, 2010

talking on james street north, episode 2


talking on james street north, episode 2 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.


In November of 2005, I formalised an informal talk amongst artists, writers, activists, and community organizers. Issues discussed included gentrification and economic development, the purpose of a life in and with art, the experiences of running an independent gallery, the politics of community, and the community of politics.

The participants for this episode are Jeremy Freiburger, Matt Jelly, Dane Pederson, Quintin Hewlett, Andrea Carvalho, Matt Teagel, Steve Mazza, and Gary Buttrum.

camera + sound, p + c = qzh 2005

Sunday, November 14, 2010

talking on james street north, episode 1


talking on james street north, episode 1 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.


In November of 2005, I formalised an informal talk amongst artists, writers, activists, and community organizers. Issues discussed included gentrification and economic development, the purpose of a life in and with art, the experiences of running an independent gallery, the politics of community, and the community of politics.

The participants for this episode are Jeremy Freiburger, Matt Jelly, Dane Pederson, Quintin Hewlett, Andrea Carvalho, Matt Teagel, Steve Mazza, and Gary Buttrum.

camera + sound, p + c = qzh 2005

Monday, November 01, 2010

Francis Bacon and Augustus Comte -- notes

One of the principles of Renaissance thought was the liberation of the human subject from the limitations of authority and tradition, of which the church was perhaps the most significant influence. Francis Bacon was one of the chief proponents of what was later understood as humanism. Fundamentally, Bacon’s thought was centred upon the idea that human ingenuity and discovery was a reflection of the will and grace of God. Indeed, the hand of God was working through human invention. Scientific progress is a reflection of a divine sense of the good; as such, it flourishes during times of peace (which Bacon incorrectly points out was extant at the time of his writing). To this end, in Thoughts and Conclusions on the Interpretation of Nature as a Science Productive of Works he outlines the benefits conferred by three technologies which he considers to be representative for the triumph of human ingenuity over the natural processes which limit the human subject: printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass. Through a description of these inventions, Bacon seeks to establish the importance of the process of invention to human existence. Of cardinal significance is the notion that the acquisition of knowledge serves to improve one’s potential for acting well within world affairs, as “the improvement of man’s mind and the improvement of man’s lot are one and the same thing” (27).

Importantly, the development of the individual human subject is seen as key to the development of the body politic. Bacon suggests that scientific invention is among the most beneficial of human activities, “for the benefits inventors confer extend to the whole human race” (26). To a modern reader aware of the history and politics of European colonialism, it is difficult to avoid noting the political economy of this statement, which was written by a member of the English aristocracy who was then serving as a senior governmental bureaucrat at a time of colonial expansion. Of course, by stressing the importance of the compass, Bacon writes that England’s colonial enterprises were themselves reflections of the realisation of power through scientific processes. Through the acquisition of knowledge and the continuation of technological invention, mankind (to use Bacon’s notably gendered language) is able to expand the possibilities for action and self-realisation. In his Novum Organum, he writes that “knowledge and human power come to the same thing, for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced” (29). Much like Plato’s explanation of how leaders must understand the good in order to understand the earthly manifestation of forms, Bacon suggests that mankind will understand the truth only by avoiding what he terms the false idols of intellectual activity – Idols of the Tribe, in which perception is a human affair which “distorts and corrupts the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it” (29); Idols of the Cave, wherein Bacon adapts Plato’s Cave analogy to argue that an individual person’s traits and personality may distort an understanding of reality; Idols of the Market-place, which emerge from the relational dynamics inherent to human subjectivity, manifest in language: “Words plainly do violence to the understanding and throw everything into confusion, and lead men into innumerable empty controversies and fictions” (30); and Idols of the Theatre, the dogmas associated with established philosophy, “which have become established through tradition, credulity and neglect” (30). By means of the truth, mankind will master the self. Indeed, determined effort “devoted to sane and solid purposes could triumph over every obstacle” (28). Furthermore, “inventions come without force or disturbance ... while civil changes rarely proceed without uproar and violence” (26). On the Idols and on the Scientific Study of Nature invokes Augustine’s City of God in positing a fantastic and perfectly ordered geography of thought, with all of the various sciences operating in harmony.

In order to realise the benefits of scientific progress, Bacon calls for an examination of the methods of inquiry. Throughout most of late antiquity and the medieval period, intellectual activity first involved accepting the established authority and supplementing it with opinion. The philosophical tradition then allowed for knowledge to be produced by means of dialectics, which “look only for logical consistency” (25). Lastly, experiential data allowed for some intellectual discovery, but only by means of happenstance, not methodological rigour. To counter such trends, and to account for the fact that chance is a significant contributor to intellectual discovery, a rigorous method of scientific inquiry is required. Bacon proposed in On the Reformation of Education that the education systems then extant in Europe were insufficient for such a task. He complains that education can be seen to “have rather augmented the number of learned men than raised and rectifies the sciences themselves” (34), and furthermore that “this dedication of colleges and societies to the use only of professory learning has not only been inimical to the growth of the sciences, but has also been prejudicial to states and government” (35). Bacon thus suggests that universities be equipped with the latest laboratory and observational equipment, that universities across Europe need to network with each other to allow the sciences to flourish outside of geographical happenstance, that the salaries of Lecturers (those who research “Philosophy” and “Universality”) must be sufficient to allow the best minds to seek such a life pursuit, as lecturers “are as it were the keepers and guardians of the whole store and provision of learning” (35), and finally that logic and rhetoric, the two disciplines foundational to all intellectual activity, should be reserved for mature and sufficiently-developed minds. It is quite interesting to note retroactively that such complaints have often been levelled at universities, and the desire to reform education to the benefit of the liberated human subject has been rejuvenated in a time when corporate and business interests have proliferated, and arguably poisoned, the integrity of the pursuit of knowledge.

Humanism had become entrenched in European consciousness by the time Augustus Comte was writing about scientific progress in The Nature and Importance of the Positive Philosophy. Comte believes that a historical overview is necessary, “for no idea can be properly understood apart from its history” (45). He then seeks to systematise the development of thought by stating “that each branch of our knowledge, passes in succession through three theoretical states: the theological or fictitious state, the metaphysical or abstract state, and the scientific or positive state”. As a consequence, three methods for the pursuit of knowledge come to the fore: the theological method, which situates all phenomena as originating with divine influence; the metaphysical method, in which “the supernatural agents are replaced by abstract forces, real entities or personified abstractions” which are themselves in turn the originators of all phenomena; and the positive method, which recognizes “the impossibility of of obtaining absolute truth” and therefore “endeavours ... to discover, by a well-combined use of reasoning and observation, the actual laws of phenomena – that is to say, their invariable relations of succession and likeness”. Comte demonstrates an interesting self-awareness when he describes “the need at every epoch of having some theory to connect the facts” (46). His thinking is an extension of Bacon’s idea that the knowledge of reality must in principle come from observed phenomena. Thus, “it is no less true that, in order to observe, our mind has need of some theory or other”. However, in order to objectively navigate the near-infinite number of subjective understandings, observation of phenomena must be methodologically rigorous in order to properly understand both the self and the ‘truth’ that results from intellectual activity, for “it is experience alone which has enabled us to estimate our abilities rightly” (47).

It is to this end that he outlines the necessity of the positive philosophy, whose “fundamental character ... is to consider all phenomena as subject to invariable natural laws. The exact discovery of these laws and their reduction to the least possible number constitute the goal of all our efforts; for we regard the search after what are called causes, whether first or final, as absolutely inaccessible and unmeaning” (48). In this capacity, he rejects the metaphysical and theological arguments around the interpretation and realisation of divine will. In reductionist terms, everything necessary for the understanding of a given phenomenon is present within the phenomenon itself. The remainder of the chapter sketches “what stage in the formation of that philosophy has now been reached and what remains to be done in order to constitute it fully” (49). He argues that the pursuit of knowledge was rendered contingent with positivism first among the most simple and general of disciplines, as “astronomical phenomena ... were the first to be subjected to positive theories”, followed by a succession of physical sciences increasingly proximal to the human subject. This process originated with Aristotelian thinking and has taken place “continuously and at an increasing rate”. Comte recognizes that positive theories have not been adapted to the study of all phenomena, and there remains a great deal of research to be accomplished and a “gap” which must be bridged, as positive theories must be utilized in order to understand the dynamics of “social physics” (50).

The important dynamic inherent to Comte’s thinking is the reduction of different systems of thought to the same process of knowledge production, for when “our fundamental conceptions [have] thus been rendered homogeneous, philosophy will be consituted finally in the positive state,” at which point all theological and metaphysical methodologies and systems of thought will be rendered obsolete.The individual disciplines of scientific inquiry become established when they have “developed far enough to admit of separate cultivation – that is to say, when it has arrived at a stage in which it is capable of constituting the sole pursuit of certain minds” (51). Indeed, positivism has developed rather continuously since Bacon, to the point where Comte wishes to prove that “direct contemplation of the mind by itself is a pure illusion” (53), as the functioning of the brain is only observable from an objective position. Of course, Comte was not to live to see the developments in medical imaging technologies, which have indeed allowed the discipline of neuroscience to investigate the machinations of the brain in self-aware subjects. More provocatively, however, it is possible to interpret Comte’s statement that “interior observation gives rise to almost as many divergent opinions as there are so-called observers” (53) as prognosticating the development of psychoanalysis (which is of course one of the missing positive “social sciences”).

While Comte sates that the ancients were able to participate with significant contributions in numerous areas of scientific thought, due to the relatively immature state of their development, “it is ... impossible not to be struck by the great inconveniences which [the division into disciplines] produces.” He argues for the creation of an executive body given the task of providing an overview of the processes of each scientific discipline “to determine exactly the character of each science, to discover the relations and concatenation of the sciences, and to reduce, if possible, all their chief principles to the smallest number of common principles” (52). Scientists should be trained to have a general understanding of science before specializing. Furthermore, Comte calls for the creation of “a specific class on men, whose special and permanent function would consist in connecting each new special discovery with the general system”. To explain such a function, he emphasizes that understanding is essentially a singular discipline, and that the divisions of understanding into disciplines is an artificial principle which “by separating the difficulties, resolve[s] them more easily” (55). However, these distinctions can serve problematic when “questions arise which need to be treated by combining the points of view of several sciences”.

Comte states that positivism is the only ideological system which can be seen to be in ascent; the others have been in decline for centuries. This process will be completed once positivism has included the study of social phenomena, and furthermore that it is understood as a single and coherent theory which encompasses all of the disciplines of thought. When such has been accomplished, “the revolutionary crisis which harasses civilised people will then be at an end” (57). He concludes this section by stating that the endeavour to synthesize the various disciplines of human inquiry is not to reduce their variables to “one sole law”.  Fundamentally, the human mind is not able to realize perfection, which would be required for a valid and objective “sole law” for the understanding of all phenomena: “the resources of the human mind are too feeble, and the universe is too complicated, to admit of our ever attaining such scientific perfection”. In this context, it is interesting to note that Comte hints at the ‘holy grail’ of physics after Einstein, namely the unified field theory which seeks to harmonize theories of the macro universe (astronomy) with those concerned with the subatomic universe: “it seems to me that we could hope to arrive at it only by connecting all natural phenomena with the most general positive law with which we are acquainted – the law of gravitation – which already links all astronomical phenomena to some of the phenomena of terrestrial physics” (58). While dismissed by scholars and scientists of most disciplines, the quest for such unity remains at the heart of theoretical physics.


Notes

1.  A few decades after the Bacon’s death, the French monarch Louis XIV deployed the coincidental                existence of the human subject and the state as the philosophical – and indeed procedural – basis for his        reign.

2.  It can as a consequence be deduced that this line of reasoning will result in Heisenberg’s uncertainty              principle one hundred years later.

Thursday, August 05, 2010

The Hamilton Tiger-Cats are running scared




I am a regular supporter of the TiCats, and dreamed of playing on the team through my football-playing youth. I plan on attending this Saturday's game, and look forward to a Cats victory.

However, I am deeply saddened by the manner in which the TiCats organization is bullying the city over the new stadium. I have lived for most of my life in this city, and have worked diligently in the arts and education communities to help the city to succeed. The East Mountain stadium is a step in the wrong direction, for numerous reasons having to do with the quality of life in the city, the continuation of the revitalisation of businesses downtown, and the need for our social infrastructure and development plans to move away from the 'sprawl' mentality which is completely unsustainable.

I noticed that a 'rally' is being held today at Carmen's banquet centre (who would be the only beneficiaries from East Mountain outside of the TiCats). However, it seems that this is a limited seating event which required an RSVP. Such does not a rally make, but rather an instance of people agreeing with each other without having to face opponents. The East Mountain plan was pushed through at the last minute to sideswipe City Council and avoid debating the severe shortcomings of the proposal relative to the City's interests. Furthermore, the TiCats have not provided empirical figures demonstrating that West Harbour will fail. Consequently, the only conclusion a reasonable person can reach is that the TiCats are scared of allowing the benefits of East Mountain to speak for themselves. Instead, they use bully tactics to get their way in the face of concerted grassroots opposition. Their way IS the highway in this instance.

Personally, I feel that the Stadium would be best located near Confederation Park. Given the options of East Mountain or West Harbour, the residents and city of Hamilton will only benefit from West Harbour. The reason that the TiCats want East Mountain is so that they can monopolize the incidental profits from games -- parking, concessions, merchandise, etc. Public money will be spent on the stadium, and it should not be used to support private industry in this manner. Public money needs to be spent in the interests of the public. The public is interested in West Harbour.

Our City Our Future

Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Bound in Time: Timehunter and the Art of Playing Roles



          The title of this talk suggests that I will be examining the role-playing genre in gaming, and indeed after a slightly circuitous route I will indeed get there. First, I have to spend some time elsewhere. The idea for this paper comes from the commonly-experienced reality that there is never enough time to complete all that we want to finish in life. Now that I have begun to study gaming, I am noticing that my use of time is following the precedent of my experience with cinema studies. Namely, the more that I study the medium, the less time that I have to experience the source texts themselves. In retrospect, my mother was warning me of this trend when throughout my childhood she told me that I was wasting time playing videogames. As any game player knows all too well, the real quest at the heart of any gaming narrative is the quest for more time to play. Desire left unchecked by responsible time management is often seen as an anti-social vice, harmful to both the individual and society as a whole. (Here, I must refer anti-gaming moralists to the fact that play is inherent to learning among mammalian species.) By its very nature, gameplay encourages the binding of a human subject to an “irresponsible” use of their time. One more turn, one more quest, one more dungeon, we tell ourselves as the clock passes midnight and gameplay increasingly encroaches on sleep. We are always in a sense trying to avoid the consequences of time by means of a quest accomplished or a plot thread advanced. Already we have begun to play roles that bind us in time: the human player who must complete the game;  the academic whose occupation distracts them from their muse; the child whose desire for pleasurable experience requires conscription into proper social channels.



          Which brings me to the textual example which serves to structure this paper. To materialise the ‘bondage’ process – in other words, the binding of a body to an external object – I wish to interrogate the art of digital role-playing by means of an non-digital example of fetish gameplay. Timehunter by Japanese composer Masami Akita, released under his Merzbow persona in a limited edition in early 2003, can be seen as analogous to videogame subjectivities. In order to properly experience this musical object, one is expected to consciously assume the role of professional listener by scheduling time as the composer intends using the yearly scheduler in which the audio is packaged.



         There is an obvious fetish character to the packaging. A faux-leather bound daily planner, which contains folders for writing tools, a calculator, and important documents, allows the entry of scheduling data by the listener. Importantly, the artist has scheduled when the listener is intended to play each of the musical pieces. For example, at 9:17 on the evening of Thursday, May 1, 2003, the entire first CD is meant to be played, while at 3:25 on the morning of Tuesday, December 2, 2003 the  first track from the third CD is to be played. Merzbow‘s music is digitally processed noise intended to be experienced through loudspeakers (not headphones) at high volume levels. This aesthetic is often interpreted as unlistenable to naive, immature, or unprepared listeners. As such, a listener who dutifully follows the listening schedule as Merzbow intends will have to wake up in the middle of the night or early morning, or interrupt the nine to five work day, to play what is often misunderstood as antisocial music. I myself fully committed to the year-long listening project, although since at the time I was employed by a record label, my own performance of the role of listener did not render me into a social pariah.

         The desire for a rationally predictable future is a desire to control the body: here is where I will be at this time, and this is what I will be doing. Certainly the fact that it is a tangible physical object uncommon to musical products itself renders Timehunter into a fetish; that it was released in less than a thousand copies worldwide furthers the desire to possess the object. With acquisition comes the playing of a role. The identity which is meant to be assumed by the listener is folded into the object itself. The daily scheduler invokes the lives of professionals, who must rationalise their expenditure of time for reasons bound to their careers. Thus, a listener of Timehunter performs the role of professional listener: an educated and informed listening subject who seeks to experience existence by means of binding aesthetic excess into a quantifiable, predictable, and ultimately Cartesian framework for understanding. Merzbow intends Timehunter not as a criticism of the desire to control and rationalise time in such a manner. In fact, this release, and his body of work more generally, attempt to critically navigate the pleasures released through such control.



         Much like the computer role-player, to whom I will return in a moment, the listener binds their pleasure to the completion of the performance of a role as dictated by a communal fiction. Timehunter investigates the power relationship between the subject, who experiences the piece by participating in its authorship, and the producer of the work, who requires agreeably subservient subjects in order for the work to be realised. Furthermore, the piece was chosen as the critique which it forwards is a celebration of the pleasure of its fetish within both positive and negative terms, which mirrors the guilt many role-players feel after an extended commitment to their pleasure.

         Broadly speaking, the ontology of gameplay centres on a similar assumption of identity and performance of a fiction. A person plays a role as represented by their screen avatar. This relationship is inherent to every game, whether the avatar signifies an individual agent (a character or vehicle) or a function or process wherein the avatar is abstracted into the game interface itself (witnessed in many strategy and puzzle games). However, for the purposes of clarity and brevity I will focus presently on role-playing games (RPGs). The genre itself is a reification of the relationship between player and game, as the assumption and development of a fictional and virtual identity is the fundamental gameplay mechanic. When playing such games, one is assuming two roles – that of the character or party of characters directed by the players actions, and the role of the penitent, bound relatively motionless for hours in front of a computer or television screen. A body bound – such is the foundation of bondage.

         So while I apologise for the image invoked, let me describe to you how I bound my own body to the pleasures of gaming. I must admit that despite my youthful appearance, I come from the first generation of video and computer gaming in the home. However, my experience with console gaming is limited to the Atari VCS from 1977 and the Nintendo Entertainment System from 1985. My expertise is with home computer systems which, due to their capacity to write data onto storage media, were able to allow game progress to be saved long before consoles were able to do so. Of course, early computers were notoriously difficult to use, and many computer gamers can attest to the quest-like nature of getting some games to even run – for those of you who knew computer gaming in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the quest for memory management was often a troubling and frustrating endeavour.

         The first role-playing game that I played was Temple of Apshai, released by a now-defunct company called Epyx for multiple computer platforms in 1983. The primitive character development intrigued me, but my captivation with the genre did not really happen until I played The Bard’s Tale in 1985. This game was not the first attempt at recreating the experience of playing Dungeons and Dragons – the quintessential pen-and-paper role-playing game, which I began to play after learning RPG conventions in computer games, including computer RPG franchises such as Ultima, Wizardry, Might & Magic, and Fallout.



         From there, twenty-five years of developments in computer RPGs and computers themselves kept me engaged with the genre, although I will admit presently to being a curmudgeonly grandfather who preferred how things were in “the olden days”. More than anything, I miss the material artefacts which accompanied role-playing games in the era of limited graphical representation and storage capability. Games such as The Bard’s Tale and Wizardry lacked automap functions which were to become commonplace in the 1990s, and thus required players to physically map their progress through the geography of the game. (In this capacity, I assumed the role of thief as I continually raided the supply room in my grade school for graph paper on which I charted my various gaming journeys.) Many games used printed journals, code wheels, “fantasy” language translation charts, and printed maps to both immerse the player in the fiction of the game world, and to serve as copy protection against the many computer gamers who perform the role of pirate. What I like most about these physical gameplay devices is that they remind the player that they inhabit a body which takes a certain amount of space and performs certain actions with certain consequences – I can remember spending an entire weekend in 1989 playing the second game in The Bard’s Tale series; my hand was sore from creating maps representing dozens of square kilometres, and I had difficulty finishing my classroom schoolwork the Monday following my binge. And yet, despite the responsibilities and time constraints of adult life, there are times when I would like nothing more than to bind myself to a role-playing game for days at a time, despite the complaints from friends and loved ones that I will never see them.

          Players will often commit an exceptional amount of time to develop their avatar through repetitive behaviours scripted by game designers. One slays orcs in order to more readily be able to slay orcs in the future. Players complete quests in order to gain the experience necessary to advance character traits in order to complete future quests. As with any pleasure, the pleasures of the immediate involve the anticipation of the pleasures of the future. It is here that I wish to return to the aesthetics of Merzbow’s Timehunter, in which the pleasures of future events are relative to the immediacy of the musical piece along with the scheduling of anticipation. In abstract terms, then, pleasure is a temporal phenomenon which bridges both the absence and the presence of external stimuli.

         This process is most readily apparent with the microeconomies extant in several massively multiplayer online role playing games. Players invariably need more time for gameplay than their physical life allows, while game companies continually seek to enslave players to monetise the amount of time that people are willing to commit to their games. As a result, a labour economy has emerged wherein money is exchanged for character development; one website, for example, stipulates that any World of Warcraft character can be raised to the highest level for a few hundred dollars. Fundamentally, the subjective dynamic inherent to gameplay is akin to the performance of power and subservience inherent to a bondage fetish. The addictive consequences of role-playing games, which are often elevated by popular news media as a crisis for the digital age, suggest that the slavery inherent to digital bondage is entirely consensual.

         The pleasure experienced by players is contingent with the amount of time that they are able or willing to commit to the pursuit of ‘a good performance’, itself the optimal version of the role the player believes is expected from the game’s designers. And as some of you may already have experienced, it is typical for role-playing games to require an exceptional amount of time to complete. Most of the “classic” computer RPGs can consume anywhere from several dozen to several hundred hours to complete the narrative. In the case of Massively-Multiplayer Online RPGs, where there is no linear narrative to “complete”, the end of the game is contingent with  the termination of one’s desire to play. It is this precise function – the transmutation of desire into commitment through pleasure experienced as both immanence and anticipation within a social relation of power – that I wish to address, for it is here that we encounter the dialogue between the real and the fictive.

          A conceptual evaluation of time is fundamental to any analysis of the subjective relationship between people and the games they play. Digital gaming foregrounds time in numerous ways. Players marginalise the time experienced by their physical bodies and render it into a narrative space experienced by the avatars they control. Gameplay is then a quest for pleasure gained as time is spent. And yet pleasure is an immediacy and an immanence – the location of a subject at the limnal space between the boundary of their body and an exterior object which realises pleasure as a bodily experience. Bondage is a means by which pleasure is rationalised as the impulse for self-control of the body with the internalisation of an exterior object which conscripts unbound pleasure to a usage precisely bound. It is an agreement between the possibilities for the self-creation of identity by the bodily subject and the conscribing influence  of forces external to the subject. Of course, bodies cannot but be bound in time. With perverse pleasure then – and a nod and a wink to my mother’s remonstrations – I wish to propose that the image of a body largely immobile in front of a computer screen, immersed in the game which they are controlling, is the contemporary terminus of the quest in Western philosophical discourse for the liberation of the human subject.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Home and Decor in Michael Haneke’s "Funny Games": The Domestication of Violence

Horror, at its most elemental, is predicated on a violence both visible and hidden. The consequences of dangers to the body are fetishised in the manner of a taboo. An unseen danger remains invisible to heighten suspense and is rendered visible at moments of narrative importance. Horror cinema presents an interesting point of entry into conceptions about visual representations of the body in relation to safety and violence. The existence of horror cinema traces to the dawn of the medium, perhaps as an ironic counterpoint to an ontology of cinema commonly defined by André Bazin as the ability to “reveal the hidden meaning in people and things without disturbing the unity natural to them”. And yet not without some trepidation do I wish to examine the pleasure experienced when bearing witness to the ritualisation and representation of horror. While I do not wish to suggest a causal relationship between representations and instances of violence, I do seek to interrogate elements of the dynamic by which violence is made aesthetic in order that it may be consumed. Seen within the boundaries of a consumer marketplace for entertainment media, violence, much like any other consumer product, is often domesticated when brought into the home. Mainstream cinema has embraced realistic and sensational renditions of violence, and audiences have responded by expecting that violent manipulations of the body in every film regardless of context be rendered with the same degree of (computer-generated) natural realism.

To this end, I intend for this essay to demonstrate how the visual aesthetic of the 2007 version of Funny Games serves to critique the consumption of violence as a visual spectacle. When the entertainment press reported that noted European director Michael Haneke was going to remake his controversial 1997 film Funny Games in Hollywood, most critics were perplexed at the decision. The original film had polarised art-house audiences and critics who were unsure how to address Haneke’s meditation on media violence. When combined with the filmmaker’s often noted antagonism with Hollywood films, the critical divide established by the first version of the film ensured a somewhat hostile reception for the second. Haneke has on numerous occasions mentioned that mainstream cinema, as defined and championed by Hollywood and the major transnational film companies, treats the consequences of violence in an immature and dangerous manner. Specifically in relation to Funny Games, Haneke told The Village Voice in 1998 that he intended for the film to critique “a certain American Cinema, its violence, its naivité, the way American Cinema toys with human beings”. Alternately, Haneke means to portray in his films “what mainstream movies work to take away. Namely: reality. I’m making movies that are inconsumable. And I can only do that by portraying the suffering of the victim, rather than the enjoyment of the perpetrator”. To address this last point, I will conclude this paper with a brief examination of what Haneke might mean by reality, given his conscious manipulation of the ontology of representation.

Funny Games can be seen to continue an analysis of the invasive nature of the motion camera as first explored in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, in which the killer films the murder of all of his victims, and Yoko Ono’s Rape, in which the camera silently and relentlessly stalks a random female pedestrian until she cowers in fear. In all of these films, the camera itself is the instrument by which horror is realised, at both the material and symbolic levels. In a very real sense, these films suggest the violence inherent to sight itself. The pleasure of horror-as-spectacle derives not from moral corruption, but rather from the ironic counterpoint of bodily safety assured through visibility.

Before analysing what an audience does not want to see, we must first outline the dynamic by which viewer desire is generated. Funny Games explores the desire for visibility, and why viewers often desire to witness representations of that which is rejected from daily life as horrific. In other words, if the sight of something is repulsive or causes fear, why are viewers often drawn to aesthetic events which ritualise and habitualise exposure? In this sense, it is possible to position the film as a project for peace countering the decades of media stories about violence in media begetting violence in reality and the increasing prevalence of violence in consumer entertainment products. How then might sight bring pleasure to a viewer? Most critics are in agreement that horror cinema involves social and moral transgression. Horror cinema was until recently not viewed as “proper”, by which I mean precisely the social decorum attached to the content of a film and how that film should be watched. Certainly, there is much to support the fact that for most of the twentieth century horror cinema was largely a counterculture phenomenon. However, any positioning of this argument as foundational to the ontology of horror is undermined by the fact that since the release of Psycho in 1960, horror cinema has been fully accepted into mainstream culture.

A more convincing theory elaborates the ontology of visibility as key to the self-realisation of identity. In The Practise of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau states that the ‘proper’ is “a mastery of places through sight. The division of space makes possible a panoptic practice proceeding from a place whence the eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured, and thus control and “include” them within its scope of vision. To be able to see is also to be able to predict, to run ahead of time by reading a space” (1984: 36). Fundamentally, sight ensures security through the acquisition of knowledge. Within the context of horror cinema, the spectator’s sense of bodily security is disrupted at moments when specific knowledge is lacking – the identity of the killer, the danger hidden in the darkness, an audio cue which suggests an immanence which cannot be seen. The affect produced by horror cinema can be seen therefore as a geography of play in which the sight of even the most abject grotesquerie satisfies the spectator’s need for an omniscient visibility. That the dissected or otherwise perversely manipulated body is often depicted as a repulsive object suggests that it is possible to agree with Linda Badley, who argues that “the body became the site for mythologies of self-creation” (1995: 68).

It must be noted that on a formal level, Funny Games can be seen as a postmodern genre exercise. As such, a brief overview of horror as a genre and as a cinematic device is illuminating. In an often-cited essay on horror in cinema, Noel Carroll convincingly described horror not simply as a means of categorising films into genres, but rather as a narrative trope deployed with the intention of producing a specific emotional response in a viewer (1987: 51-3). The affect produced in audiences by means of visual and aural sensations has been widely exploited by filmmakers to transfer anxieties produced by the film’s narrative to the viewer at the bodily level. More often than not, this process dictates that the audience sympathise with the victims of violence in horror cinema – namely, the audience is intended to feel scared at moments in the film in which onscreen characters are themselves scared. Here, we can witness the manifestation of genre conventions: the juxtaposition of a safe image with one suggesting danger; the use of mise-en-scène and editing to produce a targeted sense-perception response; and the use of dark lighting and confined set design to limit the information provided to the spectator, and by extension provide a degree of cohesion to the narrative, namely, the logic by which victims are diegetically “allowed” to be victimised. It is common for horror films to be set in isolated geographical locations: the cabin in the woods (The Evil Dead, Night of the Living Dead, I Spit on Your Grave), the house at the end of a deserted street (Psycho, The Last House on the Left), or an abandoned industrial or municipal area (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 28 Days Later). Similarly, low-light mise-en-scènes, often predicated on either malfunctioning lighting or a nighttime setting, further contribute to the sense of claustrophobia imparted by restricted vision. Certainly, in terms of its deployment of visual and auditory devices horror can be understood as operating wholly within Tom Gunning’s conception of the ‘cinema of attractions’, in which the novelty of affect and sense perception is favoured over narrative, thematic, or philosophical development.



By isolating the narrative to a lake house [Figure 1], Funny Games suggests that it is working within the common tropes of horror cinema. The film introduces a well-bred family whose wealth is visible by means of the conspicuous material possessions which surround them: the leather seats and high-end stereo system of a luxury SUV, a Tivoli radio for occasional use in the kitchen,

the meticulous hand-finished touches on a wooden boat used for recreational sailing in the afternoon, and most notably the summer lake home in the Hamptons which stands in for this film’s version of the deserted cabin. Haneke and cinematographer render these objects and the sets which contain them with stationary-camera, wide-aperture/deep-focus compositions which evoke the simple visual design common to interior decoration magazines and home decor product catalogues. In interior design magazines, these images often disturb the viewer as they are presented as virgin spaces devoid of human activity.

      Alternately, when humans are present in home decor magazines they often embody stereotypical functions such as housewife or the single young professional. The precise manner of how humans actually use these spaces is always elided in favour of an optimistic gesture to a future of possibility and self-actualisation (“This space could be yours!”). The capacity to see and interiorise these images of spaces imparts to the viewing subject a sense of bodily identity and safety, as the random clutter which constitutes the human condition is distilled to a singular controlled aesthetic. De Certeau can again be invoked in suggesting that the future has been predicted: the images of interiors are embodied precisely with the images of our future and controlled selves.

Such depictions of interiors do not allow the spectator to visualise their life occurring within these spaces as a history of material traces. Instead the body which represents the functions of life which occur within these spaces is rendered consumable precisely because of an absence in which the consumer inserts an idealised (consumable) version of themselves. Nothing is accomplished within such rooms, for traces of activity would preclude the understanding of the space as a messianic force authenticating and realising the desires of the consumer – and more specifically, interpellating the spectator of the image as a consumer of the space or the objects contained within. Thus, within a context of a consumer marketplace is the safety of the body of the consumer assured. For example, the image of a living room in Figure 3 does not represent even a trace of daily activity within its frame. Every visible surface is naked and immaculately (antiseptically) clean.

The kitchen in Figure 5, for example, which bears not a single trace of the organic materials which are processed into food on the surfaces depicted. These spaces are extracted from a temporality in which the viewing subject locates their material reality and becomes instead a space in which the spectator projects their desire for graceful living. In this capacity, it is interesting to notice that the meaning of the image is dependent on a spectator already made dependent on the image;  ontologically, the image is empty save for the spectator who fills it with an optimistic version of themselves. Instead of a randomly scattered assortment of accessories which one would expect to find in a livingroom – reading material on the table, movie cases by the DVD player, remote controls for the home theatre within easy reach of a viewing position – rather, such images represent an imagined space where the consumer of the image anticipates their future (self-)identity.



Haneke’s interiors are as equally orderly and antiseptic. The textures and orderly lines of the furniture design and layout [Figure 6], as well as that of the house itself [Figure 7], evoke a safe and inviting home. The white rustic of the interior design associates the house with a sense of nostalgia and tranquillity – another time in a better America, as it were [Figure 8].

This is not a space where violence would ever occur. And yet when it does, Funny Games presents the material consequences of violence with the same casually controlled manner. Unlike “a certain American cinema” – which often utilises rapid cross-cutting and the random, angular motions of a hand-held camera to intensify the affect produced by the action of the narrative by embodying the viewer within the “huddle” of the fight choreography – the editorial pacing and static camera are retained throughout the film, agnostic to the “momentum” of the narrative.

The material traces of violence, namely the blood and the corpse, are not rendered in a spectacular manner, but rather “normalised” by the clinical gaze of the camera which has rendered the violence without sensationalising the material traces it leaves on the domestic.



  Instead of serving as a meditation on the real consequences of horror, more often than not violence is deployed in contemporary cinema merely to engage the viewer in a ritualistic manner enslaved to the logic of sustaining a consumer market. While a metacritical examination of horror criticism in this regard is outside of the scope of this present review, numerous critics and sociologists warn against the social consequences of rendering violence into a spectacle. For example, in his updated edition of Dark Dreams, Charles Derry chastises contemporary cinema which has rendered the depiction of violence into an exciting spectacle dominated by the lack of consequences, including grief. As a consequence, mainstream cinema has produced “a generation of spectators who are empathy-deprived” and who enjoy being entertained by violence rather than being revolted that “humanity itself is being profaned” (2009: 5). And yet most critics of horror avoid moralising about spectator desires to witness representations of violence, especially in light of the numerous sociological studies which problematize any causal association between a spectator wanting to view media representations of violence and the commission of actual instances of violence. Instead of condemning as sadists those viewers who gain enjoyment through the affects produced by horror cinema, most critics understand the desire to witness the horrific within Freudian concepts of repression and the unconsciousness.



The desire for knowledge attained through visibility is not without consequences. Figure 11 depicts a scene in the film when the viewer’s blindness is transferred to the first of the killers’ victims. The killers play a game wherein the son is forced to wear a hood over his face while they pressure his mother to remove her clothes while they torture his father. Importantly, these two pleasures of sex and violence, which are so often linked to the most negatively influential among the influences of the media, are also invisible to the spectator. The fact that the mother’s nudity is hidden from the boy is a subtle condemnation of an American culture which allows children to consume bodies as violent images but bars them from seeing bodies in their actuality. Indeed, one of the killers makes explicit the importance of this game by stating that he is forcing the bag over the child’s face “to preserve moral decency”. Simultaneous to a concern for the well-being of his parents, the potential that the boy could die of asphyxiation produces the greatest anxieties for the spectator. The imagined violence toward the boy displaces the real violence experienced by the other two characters, and throughout this sequence it would be the horror of his death that would be most visible to them. The father is shot in a close-up compositional style which invokes the moment often visible in mainstream action and horror films when the potency of the male hero is restored after he bears with dignity the violence which has been caused to him by the evildoers in the film, while the female victim is saved at the moment of her weakness. Haneke’s cinema does not allow such a facile exit from violence.

As mentioned above, Haneke intended for Funny Games to be understood as an indictment of the representations of violence as consumable entertainments. It is precisely the need to see that is itself destructive for both the cinematic body and the body of the spectator. At several moments in the film, the killers break the fourth wall by directly addressing the audience, stating at different times that the spectator is on the side of the victims and demands believable narrative closure. As with other horror films, with each death their rhetoric suggests that they are presenting entertainment tableaus to the audience. And yet Haneke does not allow the violence in Funny Games to be pleasurable. Most importantly, except for one key moment none of the violence is visible onscreen. All of the bodily violence occurs out-of-frame.



For example, figure 12 is a frame taken from the moment when the first victim is killed. Nearly a minute passes as one of the victims is killed, in “real” time, in the non-diegetic space outside the frame. With playful irony, the killer not currently involved in the act of killing uses a knife to make a sandwich; this act is also not visible due to the framing of the scene. The antiseptic mise-en-scène emphasises the removal of the abject from the domestic. Indeed, the white outfit and gloves worn by the killer associate him with the peace and serenity of the house. The fact that the spectator can hear what is occurring in the room off-screen only increases a desire to understand what is happening. In fact, another five minutes pass before the identity of the victim is revealed, as the mise-en-scène shifts to portray the consequences of violence [Figure. 9]. The spectator’s desire for knowledge is left unsatisfied as, except for the killing of one of the murderers, the moments of violence done to the body are left off-screen in every instance. The exception is important, as it involves the viewer’s desire for vengeance to be exacted upon the characters who perpetrate the crimes onscreen.

Audiences consume entertainments which use the spectacle of violence in order to increase viewer sympathy with the victims of violence, who are thus rendered “good”, while allowing a formulaic narrative logic which suspends their initial moral abjection toward violence as a victim gets revenge against the initial perpetrators, who are thus rendered “evil”. Such is the standard narrative of violence offered in mainstream cinema. Arguably, this facile moral binary is allowed as logic within “a certain American cinema” precisely because the consequences of violence are excised from commercial products. Despite the ‘realistic’ depiction of acts of violence, as a phenomenon of the human condition violence is depicted as a readily contained and understandable phenomenon, rather than the incoherent and often uncontrollable outbreak of random impulses and necessities which characterise the reality of violence. Haneke subverts the narrative by once again addressing the spectator directly, as the remaining killer uses a home theatre remote control to ‘rewind’ the scene and play it back again to avoid the death of his fellow murderer.

While spectators may enjoy the convenience and marketability of formulaic narrative closure, in the interviews quoted above Haneke is explicit in condemning mainstream cinema for its depictions of the moment of violence in the manner of a spectacle while ignoring a realistic depiction of the consequences of violence. The elision of violence in Funny Games is a key aesthetic decision, and can ultimately be seen as commentary on the 21st-century viewing subject, who thanks to the proliferation of consumer video production equipment has seen and normalised almost everything. With an understated nod and a wink, Haneke is positioning the viewer to want simultaneously to inhabit the privileged lives on display and thus become the victims of the horrors experienced throughout the film.







Works Cited

Badley, Linda. Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic. London: Greenwood, 1995.

Carroll, Noel. The Nature of Horror. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 46:1, 1987. 51-59

Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, USA: Princeton UP, 1992.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkely: University of California Press, 1984.

Derry, Charles. Dark Dreams 2.0: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film From the 1950s to the 21st Century. London: McFarland & Co, 2009.

Gunning, Tom. The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde. Film and Theory. Eds. Robert Stam & Toby Miller. NY: Blackwell, 2000. 229-235.

Hawkins, Joan. Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Nayman, Adam. Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. Eyeweekly. March 12, 2008

Pinedo, Isabel. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. NY: SUNY, 1997.

Rancière, Jacques. Film Fables. NY: Berg, 2006.

Sconce, Jeffrey. Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.

Williams, Linda. Power, Pleasure, and Perversion: Sadomasochistic Film Pornography. Representations. 27, 1989. 37-65

Notes

1.   What Is Cinema, p. 38, as quoted in Jacques Rancière, Film Fables p. 107.

2.   As quoted in the press release for the 2007 version of the film.

3.   Interview with Adam Nayman published in the March 12, 2008 edition of Toronto’s Eyeweekly.

4.   Linda Williams explores this point in detail in “Power, Pleasure, and Perversion” (1989).

5.   For example, Joan Hawkins concludes Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde with       the suggestion that the horror genre functions primarily as a bodily experience related to                                 transgressive imagery and a concept of bodily “excess”. For Hawkins, film production and                             consumption exists as a circular continuum of cultural reinforcement and transgression. See also                     Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, edited by Jeffrey Sconce.

6.  The best and most often-quoted example is the murder of Janet Leigh’s character in Psycho. At no                 point during the murder is a knife shown penetrating the skin. Rather, the act of murder of implied in               the viewer’s mind by means of rapid cross-cutting between the danger of the knife and the safety of the         body.

7.   Here we can think of the classic examples where a moment of suspense is broken by an audio-visual             event rendered spectacle, such as an animal startling a character onscreen, or when a previously                   hidden danger is suddenly and forcefully rendered visible.

8.  The ‘cinema of attractions’ functions akin to the games and experiences found at carnivals and fairs,              where spectators first encountered early cinema. For an elaboration of this concept, see Gunning, The           Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde (1986).

9.  See, for example, Isabel Pinado Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film;            Carol Cleaver, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.

10. It should be here noted that such displays are no longer limited to horror cinema, as ‘tableaux of                   death’ are increasingly prevalent in Hollywood action and dramatic films.