Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea (Rethinking the Traffic in Photographs) Author(S): Allan Sekula Source: October, Vol

Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea (Rethinking the Traffic in Photographs) Author(s): Allan Sekula Source: October, Vol. 102 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 3-34 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779129 . Accessed: 11/08/2013 19:29

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ALLAN SEKULA

Part1: DearBill

Mysubtitle recalls an essayI wrotemore than twentyyears ago, in an effortto understand the long-held belief that photography is a "universal language," a languagelegible, as one enthusiasticearly American press report on the daguerreo- typeput it, "in the courtsof civilizationand the hut of the savage."IThe wording here was quaint,even forits time, as the white-settlerrepublic drove relentlessly west- ward, indifferentto the way a renegade Seminole, hiding out in the swamps of Florida,might have respondedto the grim-faceddaguerreotype portrait of the aged Indian-fighterAndrew Jackson. With the advent of neocolonialism,the language became less quaint, but the naive optimismpersisted unabashed. Edward Steichen recalled the "raptattention" with which Guatemalan peasants gazed at his traveling exhibitionThe Family of Man, not long afterthe 1954 CIA-backedcoup thatoverthrew the democraticallyelected governmentof Jacobo Arbenz: "The people in the audience looked at the picturesand the people in the pictureslooked back at them. Theyrecognized each other."2 This conceit,that the globalizedpictorial archive benignly conscripts subjects as members of a metaphoric "human family,"now seems quaint in its turn.It is hard (formany Americans, at least) not to look at TheFamily of Man todaywithout a tinge of nostalgiafor an exhausted liberalism.And yetisn't thisnotion of mutual recognition,of global connectednessand legibility,at the heart of the promiseof the Internet?This promise gives a humanist gloss to the archival collecting of demographic data, much as Carl Sandburg did when he described TheFamily of Man as a "multiplication table of living breathing human faces."3 Communicationstechnologies-photographic reproduction,linked computers- provide strong tools for the instrumental channeling of human desire. This

1. Allan Sekula, "The Trafficin Photographs,"in PhotographyAgainst the Grain: Essays and Photo Works1973-1983 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), pp. 76-101. Originallypublished in ArtJournal, Spring 1981. 2. EdwardSteichen, A Lifein Photography(New York:Doubleday, 1962), n.p. 3. Carl Sandburg,"Prologue," in TheFamily of Man (New York:Simon and Schuster,1955), p. 3.

OCTOBER 102,Fall 2002,pp. 3-34. ? 2002 AllanSekula.

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instrumentalismcan and indeed must be disguisedas a benign expansion of the fieldof human intimacy.This is more true of communicationtechnologies than it is of other technical forces,since, prenatal maternityexcepted, contact between humans beginswith the exchange of signs. In the age of the Internet,the liberalismof Steichen's humanistcredo- howeverflawed and compromisedat the time-has been deleted, but a socially atomized version of the old idea remains.As middle-classAmerican teenagersof the mid-1960smight have sat around sippingcheap jug wine and listeningto Joan Baez recordswhile perusingthe photographsof love, childbirth,and peasants in the best-sellingphotographic book of all time, so today they retreat,usually in solitude, to theirbedrooms, and log on to the World Wide Web, or to whatever virtualmicrocosm elicits their curiosity. This brings me up against my title. RecentlyI wrotea letterto a man who embodies the new paradigmof the global archivist,the facilitatorof the newvirtual and disembodiedfamily of man. He's no Steichen,since he refusesthe role of the grandpaternalistic editor, preferring in a more veiledmanner to manage the global archiveand retrievalsystem from which any number of pictorialstatements might be constructed.In effect,he allowshis clientsto playin the privacyof theirhomes the role of mini-Steichen,perusing vast quantitiesof images fromaround the world, cullingfreely-but for a price-with meaningin mind. I made a pointof typingthe letteron an old manual typewriter,and of sending it anonymously:both neo-Ludditegestures of sorts.The firstgesture befits a worldof slowercommunications. In theold days,messages contended with the weather,with "rainand snowand heat" as the old slogan of the U.S. Post Officewould have it. As you can see, myold-fashioned letter is appended to a documentedaction thatpushes to an extremethis idea of meteorologicalresistance to communication:

November30, 1999

Dear Bill Gates,

I swampast your dream house the other day, but didn't stop to knock.Frankly, your underwatersensors had meworried. I wouldhave likedto takea lookat WinslowHomer's Lost on the Grand Banks. It's a greatpainting, but, speaking as a friendand fellow citizen,at $30 millionyou paid toomuch. HIGHEST PRICE EVER PAID FOR AN AMERICANPAINTING!!! So whyare you so interestedin a pictureof two poor lost dory fishermen, momentarily highon a swell,peering into a wall offog?They are about as highas they'reever going to be, unlessthe sea getsuglier. They are going to die, you know, and itwon't be a prettydeath. And as foryou, Bill, when you're on theNet, are you lost? Or found ? And therest of us-lost orfound---are we on it,or in it?

Yourfriend

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AllanSekula. Dear Bill Gates (triptych).1999. All images? AllanSekula unlessotherwise attributed.

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The date of the letter,possibly suspect in lightof evidenceyet to be introduced, underscoresthe neo-Luddite resortto the manual typewriter,since it marksthe veryday of show-stoppingmass protestsagainst the WorldTrade Organizationin Seattle,the hometownand currentresidence of Mr.Bill Gates. A befuddled and slightlyhysterical New YorkTimes tried to minimize the significance of this new movement of resistance to corporate globalization, suggestingthat the WTO talks themselves were inconsequential. The article had a revealingtitle, "Shipwreck in Seattle": The administrationchose a spectacularlybad moment to pick this particular fight.With the exception of agriculture, few American industrieshave a clear agenda fortrade talksnow, and manyno longer believe that these long, endless "rounds" of negotiations are useful anymore.They involvetoo manycountries, rich and poor,with radically differentinterests. In an age ofe-mail, they move like an agingcargo ship. The co-chairmanof the Seattlehost committee for the talks,Bill Gates,barely even showedup-and his officeis only12 milesaway. [emphasis added]4

In other words,the smartpeople, who also happen to be the rich people fromthe richestcountry, sailed safelyjust outside the proverbialtwelve mile limit, unperturbed by the rusting hulk that had slammed unexpectedly into the Seattle waterfront. Throughoutthat week, manyamong the disobedientcrowds in the streets, indulgingin this fool's theaterof maritimeanachronism, sought to protecttheir eyes fromtear gas withswim goggles like those worn by the anonymousswimmer in the photograph.As someone observed,it was a veritablefashion show, a parade of rain gear,a liquid circus.

4. David E. Sanger,"Shipwreck in Seattle,"New York Times, December 5, 1999.

to?Ii!:-IW V::::

Sekula. FromWaiting for Tear Gas (slideprojection). 1999-2000.

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In an age thatdenies the veryexistence of society,to insiston the scandal of the world'sincreasingly grotesque "connectedness," the hidden mercilessgrinding awaybeneath the slicksuperficial liquidity of markets,is akin to puttingoneself in the position of the ocean swimmer,timing one's strokesto the swell,turning one's submergedear withevery breath to the deep rumbleof stonesrolling on the bottom farbelow. To insiston the social is simplyto practice purposefulimmersion. The resortto teargas servesnot onlyto "controlthe crowd,"that is, to prevent the radical redefinition of the use-value of city streets, but also to produce through chemical means the exaggerated liquid symptomsof human empathy and grief.This chemicallyinduced parodyof extremehuman emotion is in itself an assertion of robotic power. The harsh discipline of tears, mucus, sudden asthmaleads the citizenryback to the dryregimen of the everyday.Only the markets are allowed to be fluid. Meanwhile,while all thisis goingon, the "citizenand friend"is eitheron the verge of drowningor about to descend fora desperatecommando attack,treading waterwith a good kickin the cold dusk a couple of hundredyards from a guarded shore, waitingfor an answerfrom the captain of disembodied industry.A brief self-portraitof the swimmer:a chilled Kilroywinks at the winkingsemisubmerged eye of the camera. Inside the giganticBig House on the shore, it is dry,watertight, befitting a highlycomputerized environment, invisibly robotic in the efficiencyof itshospitality. There is no need to greetthe guestat the door. The butlernow residesin the data bank, programmedfor the visitor'staste in music and drink,turning off the lights in the guest's wake, like the grandmotherly attendants in dank Romanian museums. Our host, the Disembodied Industrialist,waits offstage, a misanthrope or recluse either theatricallytiming or neuroticallydelaying his appearance, like Captain Nemo. This time, leavingJules Verne behind in the old leather-boundlibrary of industrialism,it's no longer a matterof the submarine as the fullyappointed home of an exiled band of rebels,but of the privatemansion as submarine:the villa-Nautilus.Verne imagined the submarine as rogue vessel,but the submarine now offersitself as one potentialconference center for the powerfulplotters who have been drivenfrom the cities by the angrycitizens of the shore. The plotters lurklike piratesjust beyond and below the horizon. What minimumsafe distance will these officialsfrom the rich nations take from the polis?Twenty thousand leagues? Remote orbit?Perhaps, as theywere forcedto do in Genoa, theyresort to less drasticmeasures and retireto a luxurycruise ship anchored in a barricaded port, protectedfrom the eyes and shouts of the citizenrybehind hastilyerected walls of cargo containers.Nothing could be more instructivethan thisimprovised metal barrier,for it is these mundane and omni-mobile boxes that make the global factorypossible. The esoteric logos of the shippingcompanies painted on the corrugatedsteel bespeak a hidden historyof disguisedextraterritorial owner- ship and bogus national sovereignty,the very prototype for contemporary

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capitalism in general. Behind the metal curtain, frogmen inspect hulls for improbable limpet mines, and police provocateursprepare their costumes.This stage businessclears the wayfor the unfoldingof the drama of repression:the use of lethal weapons against protestors,illegal searches and confiscations,brutal beatings.At thisjuncture, Jules Verne yieldsto Joseph Conrad. It's TheSecret Agent we should be reading. Poweris now definedas the abilityto contain real and imaginedterror.5 Even discursivechallenges to power are reducibleto the model of the terroristthreat. If the stealth of submarines has served the military,it can also serve the police, especiallyas the line blursbetween the two.An expertin terror,Nemo sailed outside the networkof communication,signaling to the worldonly through violent collision. The sophisticatedmodern submarineis alwaystuned to low-frequencyradio signals fromunderground terrestrialcommand centers,gifted with the remote eyes of satellitesand drones,ever poised to launch cruisemissiles against rogue cities,down the factorychimney, into the hotellobby. Out of sight, but in touchand in theknow: the verymodel of the secretagent. Smart,not at all the mere mechanicalequivalent of a vengefulwhale. That keydifference aside, the old rebellioussubmarine and the new villa-Nautilusare both refugesfrom the oftenangry surface of the sea. The well-heeledguests, taking a cruiseoff Hawaii, are lulled into complacency by the smooth and silent underwaterfunctioning of the machine. Awed by the impressivedisplay of theirtax dollarsat work,they are shockedby the violenceof the breakingof the surface,the brutal and sudden encounterwith boats, swimmers, denizens of the upper waters,and the dwellersof the shore. Society--thefamily of man-suddenlyexists again, on thebeach, in all itsfragility. The anguishedcommander confessesto his laxityat the periscope:"Oh myGod. We've hit-we've hitsome kids." Elaborateand carefuland heartfeltapologies must be made, especiallytoour friends and allies,all thiswithout compromising the exoneratingfunction of official inquiries.6 Accidentsare the price of preparedness.In compensation,our friends,who wereonce our enemies,receive special invitationsto the premiere of the next big militaryspectacle film,which weaves an insipid romantic triangle around their long-ago surpriseattack on our navy.A fewmonths later the same entertainment companywill, in furthercompensation, open a second amusementpark in their country,this one devoted to the romance of the sea: Japan, long infatuatedwith American culture and Hollywood,is ground zerofor the globalization of the theme park industry... [emphasis added] Disney chose to build its firstsea-theme park because of the Japaneseaffinity for the ocean and marinelife, and the siteis surrounded bywater.7

5. This essaywas completedin late August2001. 6. "Collisionat Sea: The CommanderSpeaks," Dateline, NBC News,April 23, 2001. 7. Richard Verrier and Mark Magnier, "DisneySea Is Joining Wave of Theme Parks Rolling Abroad,"Los AngelesTimes, July 30, 2001.

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Anyonewho has witnessedthe finalscene of Shohei Imamura's 1998 filmKanzo Sensei (Dr. Akagi) will understand something differentabout this unthinking connection between "ground zero" and the "affinityfor the ocean." I willbe polite enoughnot to give away the details. Meanwhile, offPearl Harbor,the relativesof the victimsare ferriedby the solicitousAmericans to the site of the sinking.They peer disconsolatelyinto the blue tropicalwater, their grief photographed at a "respectful"distance with tele- photo lenses. All of thisofficial concern is consistentwith a geopoliticalobjective, the liftingof constitutionalrestrictions on the formerenemy's discreet but powerful war machine. While apologizing,don't fail to remind the Japanese that for now theirsecurity is in ourhands. But in the long term,Japan willfunction yet again as a militarypower in the Pacific,against the vastnew-old Chinese enemyto the East. A not-so-secretkey to thisdiplomacy is thatneither ally feels compelled to apologize forthe atrocitiescommitted in the lastwar, neither for Nanjing nor forHiroshima. And the submarinesof the other more recent old enemy,do theystill lurk? (The newest and most advanced Russian model has proven to be disastrously unreliable.Here also, grievingrelatives are photographedpeering down into the waves, a colder and darker arctic sea this time, the photographers close and intrusive,like family.) Are most of their submarines merelyrotting radioactive hulks,maybe rented out fromtime to time by cash-starvedofficers for the filming of pornographic movies? Or, even more frighteningfor the Americans, are unemployedRussian naval architectssecretly working for criminal cartels, building an underwater drug-smugglingfleet, as suggested by a strange discoveryin a nondescript warehouse outside of Bogotai?Refusing to divulge the top-secret answers to these questions, upon whichso muchcongressional funding depends, an Americansonar specialistlaments, "I loved the Cold War.I didn'twant it to end." Far from the sea and underground, the documents accumulate. The overwhelmingdesire fordryness extends to the Disembodied Industrialist'srecent acquisition of a salt mine in Pennsylvaniato function as repositoryfor all the world's importantphotographs, a category that includes, for a few months at least, the picturesof the grievingrelatives. There, deep inside a mountain,is the new tombfor older and less popular photographsof anonymouscitizens of the last two centuries,photographs that, not having been deemed worthyof digital rescue fromthe moldyor brittlemateriality of paper, are not offeredfor downloadable sale on the Internet.The selection proceeds slowlyand parsimoniously,according to a logic of fame,celebrity, scandal, and greatesthits. Some picturessell, and others don't. A picture may be importantenough to preserve,but that doesn't mean anyone gets to see it. This much can be said of some of the photographsthat can be conjured up electronically,the 2.1 millionof the largerinert archive of 65 million.Many depict submarinesand submarine actions,including a surprisingnumber of picturesof torpedoed ships taken throughperiscopes. But overall,the submarinearchive is weak on history;there is a reproductionof one of Leonardo's drawings(attributed

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to "da Vinci") and a few picturesof nineteenth-centuryprototypes and early U- boats. The bulk of the materialis taken fromthe copious filesof contemporary military-industrialstock photographers.Under "transportation,"the subcategory "mostpopular" offersa low-aerialhead-on viewof an Americannuclear submarine breakingthe surfaceof the sea. This picturecan be purchased for "personal use" and sent as an electronic greetingcard to friends,which suggestssomething of the moral economy of militaryKeynesianism. Pictures of whales are also popular. This maybe no more than an apparent antithesis,since the archiveis, by its very nature, undialectical. As the web page advises, with cheerful techno-economic optimism:'jump startyour creativity with pictures." The orders pour in fromthe website,resurrecting over and over the jolly submarinesthat leap likehappy fish and the scannedpicture of mighty swinging Babe Ruth launchingonly one of his manyhome runs.Other gestures,workaday gestures of lessfamous individuals, the anonymoushistory of the times,are saltedaway in filing cabinets in the dimlylit corridorsof the mine, tended by a skeletoncrew. These pictureswait like slabs of dried cod forthe revivifyingwater of the gaze, forthe laser beam of the scanner.Their rediscovery is unlikely.Researchers are forbiddento enter. Specialistsin conservationapplaud the care and thoroughnessof the operation. And yet, during a long droughtin the usuallyrainy Pacific Northwest, the Disembodied Industrialist and his familyand household retainers are-one hopes-embarrassed by reportsin the local press that theirwater consumption exceeds that of any other household in the state of Washington.It is hard to escape the liquid requirementsof the human organism.And indeed it is hard, in the cityof Seattle, takinga taxi fromthe airportfor example, not to hear stories fromex-gamblers who have taken theirchances on the go-for-brokehalibut boats, or aboard monstertrawlers in the Bering Sea. In the lull of a trafficjam, one hand gestureswith mock indifferenceat the fishhookscar in the palm of the other. Does a memoryof thisremote everyday world, this salty Seattle, surfacing from the goodold dayswhen he used to take taxis,come to the Disembodied Industrialist as he communicateswith his curatorson the floorof the auction house?

Part 2: IrrationalExuberance

Thinking back to the landscapes and seascapes of a century ago, with WinslowHomer we see a profoundAmerican turntoward the sea, consistentwith a burgeoningimperial project,but also withAmerican restlessnessand idealism, with the earlier literaryexamples of Herman Melville and Richard Henry Dana.8 ConsiderD. H. Lawrence'sassessment from 1923, looking back at those twoseafarer writers of the "American renaissance" of the 1840s and '50s. For Lawrence, Americanwriting lacked any tradition-boundsense of blood and soil, thusavoiding

8. An earlier version of this section was firstpresented as part of the Third Annual Ian Burn Memorial Lecture,at the ArtGallery of New South Wales,Sydney, Australia, May 1998.

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the oppressivelegacy of feudal land rightsand the mire of European nationalism. (Having chosen writerswhose major workswere writtenbefore the slaughterof the CivilWar, Lawrence avoided contraryevidence, though his argumentallowed implicitly for an American capacity to go to war over abstract principles.) Lawrence's insightinto American writingand the sea was echoed later by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,who spoke of the sea's offeringof a line offlight to Melville,just as Lawrence,a romanticof an earlier late-romanticgeneration, saw in the passion forthe sea an expressionof democraticidealism, a utopian longing for a perfectworld.9 Lawrence, a secretaristocrat, mocked Dana's outrage at the floggingof seafarers.It took anotherAmerican writer, the poet Charles Olson, to come up with a counter-readingof the sea's connection to American business civilization,and to see Melvilleas the criticalprophet of thatconnection: So if you want to know whyMelville nailed us in Moby-Dick,consider whaling.Consider whalingas FRONTIER, and INDUSTRY. A product wanted,men got it: big business.The Pacificas sweatshop.10

This was Olson writingin 1947,looking back a centuryto reviveMelville's radicalism with a renewed prescience, for the capitalistline of progresshad not yet been traced fromthe Pacificsweatshops of the whale ship and copra plantation to the assemblylines of the computerand apparel and toyindustries, or the modernized indenturedservitude aboard the containerizedvessels that bring these products to market. But what can Winslow Homer's modern but not yet modernist painting mean for Mr. Bill Gates of Microsoft,and for the facelessvirtual power that he extols? The whole point of the informationhighway is that one is never lost. Technical command requires constant orientation within the global matrix of informationflows. Through his Corbis agency,founded in 1989, Gates wants to collect, throughreproduction, all of the images in the world.This is a proprietary and profit-hungryambition; he wantsto controlthe trafficin images,and forthis rightsto reproductionsare sufficient.He wantsto own certainimages as originals, however.What is the statusof these selectpaintings, with their aura of uniqueness, their direct connection to the artist'shand, to the larger archive of this cyber- iconographicomnivore? A recentvisit to the Corbis website,searching under the heading "Winslow Homer,"yielded the followingresults: fifty-three pictures for "personal use" and ninety-sevenfor "professional" or licensed use. The majorityare marine paintings. For $3.95, the home customercan download a watercolor,West Indian Divers,say,

9. D. H. Lawrence, Studiesin ClassicAmerican Literature [1923] (New York: Penguin, 1977). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,A ThousandPlateaus: Capitalismand Schizophrenia,trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota,1987), pp. 186-89. 10. Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael[1947] in CollectedProse of CharlesOlson, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander(Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1997), p. 26.

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for use as a greetingcard, a pictorial giftfor the friend about to embark on a Caribbean cruise. Indeed, the entire area of the website devoted to personal picture-shoppingtreats the consumeristwork of purchasing and downloading images as ifit were a seaside vacation,a fishingtrip, or boating excursion: Choose your dream yacht and experience the joy of sailing all-year- round. ... Reel in one of our favoritefishing prints.... Transportyourself witha colorful,calming print of one of our sceniclakes.11

The archive,with its presumablywatertight bulkheads between iconic categories, is offeredup as a space of vicarious liquid immersion,dry-land two-dimensional thalassatherapy. For all that, Lost on theGrand Banks is nowhere to be found. Despite the communitarian promises of the Web-the archiveof everythingfor everybody- unalienable private property asserts itself in the last instance. Rodchenko's revolutionarycall "Sovietcitizens, photograph and be photographed!"can now be updated: "Everyonea pictureresearcher, but keep offthe grass!" But the Seattle cabdriverwith the fishhook-scarredhand is never far away. And the semanticbulkheads leak, seriously, especially if one is carelessabout limiting the termsof one's search. A look under the heading "JacksonPollock" in the professionalarchives yields over five thousand results. There are over two hundred picturesof AndrewJackson, including the daguerreotypeby MatthewBrady with whichwe began our story(IH 024498). The image trailleads yetagain to a nuclear submarine,the USS AndrewJackson, missile-launch technicians poised at the controls (RK 001223). There are 744 pictures of Michael Jackson, before and afterhis remarkablechange of face, and a whole host of otherJacksons from the worldsof sports,entertainment, politics. For all the global pretensions,the selection has a parochial American flavor,more or less like a file of pictureclippings from high school historytextbooks and Peoplemagazine. A mere twelveare reproductionsor installationviews of paintingsby Jackson Pollock, six are depictions of the actor Ed Harris, who portrayedPollock in a recent film,two are images of two very differentfishes, pollachius pollachius and gaduspollachius, and a fullforty-nine make up a bracingreportage on factorytrawlers fishing in the Bering Sea forone of the two,commonly known as pollack,the not-so-secretraw material for what the seafood industrylabels as "imitationcrab." The websitevisitor is assured by the digital archivistsat Corbis that the Seattle cabdriver'sformer comrades, clad in bright orange rough-weathergear-the betterto be spotted should theybe sweptover- board in icywaters-have all signed model releases, thus allowingthem to grace the pages of corporatereports or advertisementsfor sundry commodities likely to be associatedwith the rigorsof fishingon the high seas. Every image appears on the computer screen overlaid with the antitheft protection of the Corbis "watermark,"which resembles nothing so much as a

11. http://www.corbis.com

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satellite-radarview of a hurricane. We are entering the territoryof Borgesian deliriumhere, and it is onlythe narrowinstrumentalism of the pictureresearcher, targetedlike a cruise missileon thisor thatcategory, that prevents a dive through the eye of the storm into the abyss, thedeep, fullfathomfive. WinslowHomer was workingon a specificsequence of images on the North Atlantic fisheryof the late nineteenth century,paintings about work. In an exhibition originating at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Nicolai Cikovskyand FranklinKelly reconstructa narrativesequence, movingfrom the inshoreherring fleet to the deep-sea halibutand cod fisherieson the treacherous Grand Banks of Newfoundland,and fromtranquil, productive waters to looming disasteron the high seas.12 The three pictures, TheHerring Net, The Fog Warning,and Lost on theGrand Banks wereall paintedat the same size in 1885, and theywere shown together at the 1893 World'sColumbian Exhibition in Chicago.You can see the matchingof the volume occupied by the dories,despite their shifting orientation on the waves.The implicit triptychis a taxonomic series-the omnivorousand pleasing serialityof the fish market,with herring displayed here, flounderover there,and at the next stall,big green codfish,jaws agape, waitingfor the bakingpan: the pseudo-disclosureof the agora. But it is also at the same time a narrativesequence, in which the hidden brutalityof workon and againstthe sea is revealed.The narrativeof doomed work tugstragically downward on at the buoyantillustrative productivism of the series.

12. Nicolai Cikovskyand FranklinKelly, Winslow Homer (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1995), pp. 226-30.

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WinslowHomer Lost on the Grand Banks. 1885.

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Being lostin a doryon the GrandBanks was the dangerousoutcome of specific organization of extractiveindustry in hazardous waters. The lostness depicted becomes purelymetaphysical in its passage into Gates's possession. He findsthe painting in order to lose its specificity;the depiction of lostness stands now as the antithesisof his instrumentalprogram of total global connectedness.This is the otherness,and nonidentity,that makes the paintinginto a privilegedaesthetic object in Gates'shands, into trulyprivate property. If I were temptedto connectthis to a largerself-consciousness of contemporaryelites, the findingof the paintingof lostnessin order to aestheticallyisolate lostnessfrom the tyrannicalimperative of connectednessis consistentwith a numberof waysin whichthe sea returns,in both romanticand gothic guise, to late modernity.The promotionof cruise ships,the makingof filmslike Waterworld(1995) and Titanic(1997), Bill Gates's purchase of Loston theGrand Banks: these are all related.We are all invitedto loseourselves at sea. For most of us, this amounts to chump change in the supermarketof imaginary danger.But myguess is thatmembers of financialelites, especially those investing in the intangiblesof the "new economy,"imagine themselvesin a special wayto be venturingforth on stormyseas, liftedhigh by the irrationalexuberance of the swells, onlyto riskbeing dashed down,disastrously, beneath the waves.In theirbunkered isolationfrom the restof us, the image of the solo sailoris paramount.And to the extent that broad sectors of the middle classes are being asked to partake on a lesserscale in the same risks,that image of the isolatois paradoxicallyrationed out formass consumption.Market Ideology demands thateveryone sail alone. This much can be said about the visual field of the ocean swimmer,or the rowerin a small boat upon the open sea: in moderate to heavyseas, one is either low in the troughof the wave, or high on the bank of the swell. On the moving, foldingsurface then, fluctuating conditions of seeing,vertiginous, then enveloped, closed in by a shifting,sliding slope of water.Winslow Homer givesus thisvantage point: not omniscientlyabove the waves, but high on the swell, as if sittingin another dory like the one we see in the foreground,better able to see what the fishermenin the boats depicted are strainingto see, the moving haven of the schooner in the fog-shroudeddistance. Nonetheless,we see effortlessly,in a state of temporal suspension, what they see only fleetingly,what will be obscured momentarily.We see theirdanger. And it is theirs,not ours, since theyare at sea, and we are looking at a painting with our feet planted on the ground. The sympatheticbond imagined is one of civic concern, a queasy, morallytroubling challenge to gustatoryautomatism. There is a line,then, that connects Homer's paintingwith the social documen- taryphotography of Lewis Hine, two decades later,and even withcontemporary documentarywriters like Sebastian Junger,whose book The PerfectStorm (1997) narratesthe contemporaryworking-class world of a New England fishingport and the loss with all hands of the swordfishingboat AndreaGail on the same Grand Banks in 1991. Jungerappropriately begins his tale withan epigram fromWalter Scott: "It's no fishye're buying,it's men's lives."

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WhenI wrotethese lines, Junger's book had not yet been translated into a turgid and overwrought cinematic parable on the crisis of male identity, directed by UbootmeisterWolfgang Petersen. To understand something of the way the sea "returns"as pure media simulation, listen to this recollection by John Seale, the film'sdirector of photography: I decided that we would probably go to Cape Town, South Africa, grab a couple of look-a-likelong-liners, wrap the cameras in garbage bags and get out there amongst it. They looked at me like I was on drugs and said, "No, myboy-think Stage 16 at WarnerBrothers."13

So instead of renting out the frighteninglydecrepit Chinese fishingboats that can be seen taking on provisions next to Cape Town's perverselygentrified waterfront,one of the world'slargest soundstage filming tanks had to be excavated in the Burbank studio floor.Above the tank, a vertical bluescreen allowed for superimpositionof the digital storm.This Oz-like curtain of deepdigital blue was larger than a football field. Despite the DP's ruefullament for lost low-budget opportunitiesin the notoriousseas offthe Cape of Good Hope, expensiveartifice is discussed in the filmindustry press as if it were an autochthonous triumphof the technological sublime, unrelated to nature as such. As the DP's storytells us, Hollywood isn't reallyinterested in pursuing the challenge posed by fiction filmsactually shot on rough seas, such as Pierre Schoendoerffer'slament for French imperialism,Le CrabeTambour (1976), photographed by Raoul Coutard. And yet it's not as if brilliantfilms about the sea have not been shot entirelyon soundstages: thinkof Hitchcock's Lifeboat(1944). But the simple claustrophobic fraudulence of Hitchcock's approach is also beyond the comprehension of today'smega-directors. The PerfectStorm is symptomatic in more ways than one, and like a hypochondriac,it borrowsits symptomsfrom other films.The blueprintfor its expensive simulation of the sea is taken fromJames Cameron's remake of the Titanic story,a film of narrative trivialityand dry fraudulence bolstered not only by the painstaking auction-house authenticityof Edwardian conspicuous consumption, but the director's heroic descentto the wreckin a hired Russian submersible. The point-of-viewof the film is ultimatelythat of the treasure hunt, cleverlydisavowed in the film'sfinal gesture of tossingthe world'sbiggest diamondback intothe deep. Thus Titanicis about nothingbut the bracingdiscipline of the box-office,which bespeaks the desperate institutional narcissismof the entertainment industry,its inability to speak of anything but the economic conditions of its own existence, in what amounts to an unconscious parody of modernistself-referentiality. Love, rebellion,death, and the sea are mere pretexts. The sea is emptied of meaning. Or is it?

13. Quoted in Pauline Rogers,"Hell and High Water,"International Cinematographers Guild Magazine, July2000, p. 21.

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Part3: TITANIC's wake

Earlyin 1997, I photographedthe Mexican filmset for Titanic,as part of an earlier project called Dead LetterOffice (1998), a title owed obliquely to Herman Meville's Bartlebythe Scrivener (1853). Bartleby'smysterious refusal to work may have begun with the psychic trauma of his job as a post-officeclerk sorting undeliverablemail. Rereading the story,I suddenlyimagined that it was difficult and even spirituallychallenging to send a simple letterthe short distance from Tijuana to San Diego, even if Hollywoodmovie-making, a much more expensive wayof sendinga message,had alreadycrossed the border.

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Seekingto profitfrom lower Mexican wages, Twentieth Century Fox builtthe setnext to the poor fishingvillage of Popotla, on the Baja Californiacoast about forty milessouth of the U.S. border.This explainsthe long listof Mexicannames thatrolls rapidlyby in small type during the film'sfinal credits. The production facility featuredthe largestfreshwater filming tank in the world,bigger even than the one builtlater in Burbankto filmThe Perfect Storm. Mexican extras floated for many hours in the chillycoastal winter, playing the partsof anonymous passengers on theirway to an icy grave. The neighboringvillage, just to the south of the walls and guard towersof the set, has no runningwater. Efflux from the filmingtanks lowered the salinityof the coastal tide pools, damaging the traditionalmussel-gathering livelihoodof the villagers,and givingrise to vociferousand sustainedprotests by

Aboveand right:Sekula. Titanic set and musselgatherers, Popotla (diptych).From Dead LetterOffice. 1997.

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the fishermenand their families.A portion of the set has now been converted into a theme park devoted to the making of the Titanicstory. I haven't visited, but presumablythe walls between the set and the fishingvillage are still topped withshards of broken glass. The lugubrious arrogance of Titanic intrigues me. Is it a symptomof something larger? We peer morbidlyinto the vortex of industrialism's early nosedive into the abyss.The filmabsolves us of any obligation to rememberthe disastersthat followed. Quick as a wink,cartoon-like, the angel of historyis flattened between a wall of steel and a wall of ice. It's an easy,premature way to mourn a bloody century.

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Or maybe, more innocently,the movie is a bellwether of good-hearted Americanneoliberalism. When James Cameron accepted the firstof his Academy Awardsfor the film,he thrusthis Oscar statuetteinto the overheatedair above the podium and bellowedout a line fromthe film:"King of the world."(Later, looking slightlyabashed afterreceiving what seemed to be a scathingglance fromhis wife, he asked fora momentof silencefor the long-deadpassengers and crew.)Curiously, Cameron borrowedhis triumphalline fromBenjamin Britten's1951 opera based on Melville'snovella BillyBudd. Budd innocentlyexults, even as he is shanghaied and set upon a path thatleads to the yardarm.Could it be that Cameron secretly wantedto remakeBilly Budd, or thathe thinksof himselfas the "handsomesailor" even more than he identifieswith the cocky young artistplayed by Leonardo

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Aboveand right:Sekula. Bilbao (diptych). FromTITANIC's wake. 1998-1999.

DiCaprio? It's a strangethought: Melville's (and Britten's)bleak, womenless,and covertlyhomoerotic parable-a tale of goodness flawed,evil intractable,a guilt- ridden captain-reworkedto attracta repeataudience of prepubescentgirls. Five or ten yearsago, I was confidentthat the sea had disappeared fromthe cognitivehorizon of contemporaryelites.14 Now I'm not so sure. The sea returns, oftenin gothic guise, rememberedand forgottenat the same time,always linked to death, but in a strangelydisembodied way.One can no longer be as directas JulesMichelet was in his 1861 book La Mer,which begins with a blunt recognition of the sea's hostility,its essentialbeing for humans as the "elementof asphyxia." And yetBill Gates buysWinslow Homer's morbidLost on theGrand Banks for more moneythan anyone has everpaid foran Americanpainting. Frank Gehry builds a glisteningtitanium museum thatresembles both a fishand a ship on the derelict site of a shipyarddriven into bankruptcyby Spanish governmentpolicy, launching a new touristicfuture in the capital of one of the world'soldest maritimecultures. It was the Basques, afterall, who probablydiscovered America, but theypreferred to keep a secretand returnwithout competition to the rich cod-fishinggrounds of the NorthAtlantic.

14. See Allan Sekula,Fish Story (Dilsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995).

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Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum for Bilbao is a Los Angeles export product,a leviathanof Californiapostmodernity beached on the derelictriverfront of the economicallydepressed maritime-industrialcapital of the Basques. As such, it marksthe firstmove in a projectedcampaign of economic "revitalization,"tied, as one mightexpect, to land speculationand touristpromotion. Kurt Forster, who is Gehry'sbiggest defender, and who has stressedthe protean,vitalist aspect of the architect'sfish-buildings, has gone to some lengthto exemptGehry's project from these sortsof vulgarand dismaleconomic associations: [Beginning] withhis buildings of the 1980s Frank Gehryreturned to an architecturepossessed of powerfulcorporeal qualities. He does not think of the volumes of his buildings withinthe confinesof abstract space (whichis also the space of economics); rather,he engages these volumesin intimaterelationships with one another.15

The bad objects here are legion: abstraction,economics, and by implication, bureaucracy and modernism. The crypto-baroque promise of redemptive

15. KurtForster, "The Museumas CivicCatalyst," in FrankO. Gehry:Museo Guggenheim Bilbao (Stuttgart: EditionAxel Menges,1998), p. 10.

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embodiment-"corporeal qualities" and "intimaterelationships"-is not unlike thatoffered by the virtualworld of the Internet. One can of course travela shortdistance along the Bilbao riverfrontto the big cityfish market, and see thereevidence of the prodigiousSpanish appetitefor the creaturesof the sea. Here the corporealqualities of the fishthat inspire Gehry are depressinglylinked to the abstractspace of economics:boxes of merluza,previously caughtin greatquantity off the Iberiancoast, now importedfrom Namibia. But likeJames Cameron makingsure that the diamond is tossed back into the drink,Forster wants to disavowand affirmthe economic at the same time: Gehry"and his collaboratorsmade use of programsthat were originallydeveloped for the design of airplane fuselages."'16The fishis also an airplane,as the frequent referencesfound throughoutrecent writing on Gehryto titaniumas an "aerospace material" attest.The implied association of titanium cladding with the skin of advanced aircraftis somewhatinaccurate, since titaniumis typicallyused internally, alloyedwith steel forjet-turbine blades thatmust both be lightweightand capable of withstandinghigh temperatures.In fact,the mostradical innovationsin aircraft skin design have come throughplastic-polymer composites, which are crucial to so-called "stealth"technology. In fact,titanium has become a metametal,a metal that refersto high technologymetallurgy, especially in luxuryconsumer products like German-designed,high-end autofocus cameras. For Forster,as for Gehry,the main breakthroughat the level of architectural practiceis the collapse of the laborious mediationbetween drawing and executed design. On thispoint, Forster waxes utopian:"The age-old distinctionbetween the hands thatdesign and the instrumentsthat execute has been overcome."17I would be delightedto see him deliverthis argument with a straightface to the construction engineers and iron workerswho painstakinglytranslate the plan into the skewed geometryof the steel structurethat is ultimatelyobscured beneath the glistening convoluted surface. Forsterconcludes by lauding the Guggenheim Bilbao as "a monument to the productivecapacities that are now at our disposal."18In other words: a monument to the absolute hegemonyof intellectuallabor affordedby computer-basedmanufacturing. Having photographed Gehry'sbuilding, I want to ventureanother sort of reading. For all of its acclaimed "vitalism,"its primal links to the doomed carp swimmingin Gehry'sgrandmother's bathtub in Toronto,the GuggenheimBilbao is more accuratelylikened to a giganticlight modulator. It introducesa new level of specularreflectivity into a ratherdrab cityscapepreviously restricted to tertiaryhues. In effect,what it imports to Bilbao is an aestheticallycontrolled, prismatically concentrated version of the high specularitycharacteristic of the Los Angeles cityscape,the random and ubiquitous presence of shinysurfaces, glass and metal ricochetingsunlight in an inhuman,migraine-inducing glare. For thisbenign and

16. Ibid., p. 11. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid.

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restrainedversion of Americanaerospatial enlightenment, for this lighthouse and control towerfar upriverfrom the sea, the Basques, who pay all the bills for the museum, are entitled to feel grateful. Thus far, there are no Guggenheims planned forHanoi, Belgrade,Baghdad, or Basra.For insightsinto the less-restrained version of American aerospatial enlightenment, I advise the reader to see HartmutBitomsky's new filmB-52 (2001), about the venerable grayworkhorse of the Pentagon. By coincidence, one notices a certain corrosivepotential. In the container transferterminal on the downriverflank of the museum sit large cylindersof hydrofluoricacid, the extremelynasty agent used to dissolveand etch titaniumand its alloys. This powerfuloxidant is alwaysa handy chemical for the aerospace industry,since it can eat awayat metal withoutcausing the heat fatigueassociated with traditionalmachining. The touristicpostcard is smudged somewhatby this reminderof Bilbao's lingeringindustrial kinship with Seveso and Bhopal. But there is no need to entertainapocalyptic scenarios: much to the architect'sdismay, the Guggenheim's titaniumcladding is already beginning to stain and darken from exposure to the relentlessmarine atmosphereof the Bay of Biscay.Up close, the building is beginning to resemble the wreckof an old bomber,stained with the greasyresidue of burnt kerosene fuel. Given thisprotean litanyof resemblances,we can reviseanother old slogan, this one froma staple of 1950s American children'stelevision: "It's a bird, it's a plane, it's... Supermuseum!"

Part4: RefloatingThe Familyof Man

So maybewe should be lookingback, not to TheFamily of Man, but to Edward Steichen's earlier wartimeproject for the U.S. Navy,Power in thePacific, with its intense concentrationon the cacophonous battle-platformof the aircraftcarrier. Givenwhat has alreadybeen suggestedabout the military-Keynesianproclivities of the Corbiscollection, this would make sense.A seriousreminder of thewartime work also brushesagainst the currenttendency to resurrectSteichen as a celebrityand fashionphotographer, which subordinateshis global humanismand his patriotic propagandato a more contemporaryand "fashionable"idea of the propermission of aestheticallyambitious photography. This fashionidea is pervasivein the artworld, and indeed can blithelytake in even the mostcutthroat and covertforms of military expertise,as evidenced by Vanessa Beecroft'srecent performance pieces featuring U.S. NavySEAL commandosstanding at attentionin theirdress whites. Nonetheless,The Family of Man is more germane,since its humanism provides a prototype for the new post-Cold War "human rights" rationale for military intervention.The exhibition,with its claims to globality,its liberal humanism,its utopian aspirationsfor world peace throughworld law,can be reread now in the context of the contemporarydiscourse of "globalization,"the discourse being advanced by the promotersof an integratedglobal capitalisteconomic system.The

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officialAmerican perspective on this systemis that it requires the continued vigilance and command of a single global politico-militarysuperpower, which alwaysacts in the healthyinterests of the systemat large and is thus itselfmore or less exempt fromany overarchingconcept of world law. In effect,the American state claims for itself the same operational freedom in world affairsas that demanded by multinational corporations. This is an inherentlyunstable and even illogical discourse. For example, the old Dutch corporate doctrine of the "freedomof the seas," so crucial to the developmentof mercantilecapitalism, is quicklyinvoked by U.S. State and DefenseDepartment planners when the supposed threatof the Chinese navyis being countered,even though the low-wageChinese economy is crucial to the global factorysystem, and much of Chinese export production is capitalized throughTaiwan, considered to be the principal target of the Chinese threat. A scenario in which American carrier battle groups, assisted by the Japanese, protect Chinese-crewed container ships bearing Chinese-madegoods fromtorpedoes launched by Chinese submarines-a perverse replay of the Battle of the North Atlantic-would strain the imagination of a Tom Clancy,but I confess to not being up on my reading of that prolificand wildlyimaginative writer of geopolitical airportnovels. Speaking only of the discursivelevel, it is clear thateconomic questions are now paramountin the waythat political questions were paramountin the 1950s. When I wrote about TheFamily of Man twentyyears ago, my overall aim was to locate universallanguage claims for photographywithin the historicalcontext of universalizedcommodity exchange. Indeed, the homologybetween the function of the photograph as a universallyexchangeable "abstract equivalent" of its worldlyreferent and the circulationfunction of paper currencyhad alreadybeen recognized in the 1850s by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Today,the all-encompassing regime of the market,the global imperium of the dismalscience, seems all the more pertinentto the discussionof archivesand culture.As MargaretThatcher so cynicallyand triumphantlyput it, "There is no alternative." On looking back again at The Familyof Man, I was reminded that I had seen and noted but not yet fullycomprehended that the exhibition and book are rife with images of aquatic immersion: "The final photograph in the book is quite literallya depiction of the oceanic state, a picture ... of churningsurf." But at the same time an image is offeredof a world territorializedand exploited on strictlyterrestrial lines. TheFamily of Man gives us an earthbound workaday world,so thateven fishermenare depicted not as voyagersupon the high seas but as peasants afloat, seeminglynever far fromthe littoralspaces of the shore. For example, consider the strikingabsence of the remarkablework of the French photographer Anita Conti, an absence as strikingas the fact of its current rediscoveryby Africanscholars. There is no comparison between the rigor and intimacyand sensitivityto violence of her viewsof Senegalese sharkfishermen, or of French cod fishersworking the Newfoundland Banks, and the easy Alfred Eisenstaedtphoto of Gold Coast boatmen chosen by Steichen.The keyto her best

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::(::-t: ft Detailoffrontispiece photoby Pat English 77%::?: forThe Familyof Man. 1955. workis her discoveryof a point-of-viewcloser to the fishthan to the fishermen.By contrast,The Family of Man reservesthe image of immersionfor homo ludens and for the ultimateutopian telos of the storyof humanity.19 The exhibitiontoured the world,thanks to sponsorshipby the United States Information Agency and corporate cosponsors such as Coca-Cola. For all its globe-trotting,The Family of Man failed to registerthe actual diasporic movement of populations-largely via crowdedmaritime transport-in the decade afterthe end of World War II. Think of the mass migration of formerBritish colonial subjects fromIndia and the Caribbean to Britain in search of livelihood. The invisibilityof these migrantsis all the more startlingwhen one realizesthat the sea of humanitydepicted on the endpapers of the deluxe clothbound edition of the book is in factan apparentlyall-white, all-English crowd witnessing the coronation of Elizabeth II, a ritual not exactlylinked to human progressor to concepts of citizenship. This is the familyof man,not the rightsof man. The invisible short people in thiscrowd, floating beneath the surfaceof thissea, could be immigrant children.But how can we know?All we can see are their handmade periscopes, searchingfor a submarineview of the youngqueen. Leo Lionni's abstractdesign for the cloth coverof the same editionbespeaks an even more programmaticadherence to earthlyand racialboundaries: a more or less constructivistmaplike array of embossedmetallic pigmentation samples, ranging fromblack to silverwhite through an intermediaryzone of coppers,golds, and grays, all floatingin a sea of blue, as if the worldwere one contiguouscontinental land- mass,and each race its own nation,stepping forth into the global marketplaceof neocolonialism with its own coinage. Lionni gives us the prototype of the postliterate,universally legible transnationalcorporate logos that would emerge

19. See AnitaConti: La damede la mer,with texts by Anita Conti and Laurent Cojeun (Paris: Editions Revue Noire, 2001).

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more than twentyyears later.It is no accident that Lionni was the chief graphic designerfor Fortune magazine in the 1950s,where precisely this fusion of de-radical- ized constructivismand the businessman'simperative had a lineage stretchingback to the 1930s.His arrayof rectanglesand trapezoidsalso givesus an abstractedimage of the mode of installationof the exhibitionitself, of the comparativeand contigu- ous visualensemble derived from a processof archivalselection. By implication, the archive itselfis treated as a kind of earthly,mineral resource, to be mined for meaning,pointing the way to the Corbissalt mine in the mountainsof Pennsylvania. The hidden telosof TheFamily of Man is to escape the drycompartmentalization of the archive,to imaginean eroticand utopian returnto the sea, a solitaryquest conducted in the name of humanity.The model for this can be found in Alfred Stieglitz'sretrospective remark on thatmonument of photographicmodernism The

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Re-installationofThe Family of Man, Chateaude Clervaux, Luxembourg.2000.

Steerage(1907), a photographthat has come to standout fromall the restas the very exemplar of the antiarchivalimage. Mixing tropes of modernism,the pastoral, oceanic rapture,and bourgeoisself-loathing, Stieglitz's spoke of his "newvision ... of people, the common people, the feelingof ship and ocean and sky,and the feeling of release thatI was awayfrom the mob called the rich."20 In TheFamily of Man, a small flotillaof images breaks loose fromthe filing cabinets on the shore. Gary Winogrand gives us a photo of lovers frolicking among bathersin the shallows,Steichen himself offers a god's-eyeview of a naked child belly-floppingwith a joyfulsplash, and EwingKainin portraysa blond naiad burstingto the surface,her ecstatic smile and closed eyes half-visiblethrough a

20. AlfredStieglitz, "Four Happenings,"Twice a Year,nos. 8-9 (1942), p. 128.

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cascading veil of water.And thereis the large photographby Nell Dorr of a Venus emergingfrom the waves,garlanded withhibiscus flowers. The regressivelonging for immersioncomes at us recurrentlyas we move throughthe exhibition.It is perhaps consistentwith the pan-denominationalreligiosity of TheFamily of Man, reinforced by text editor Dorothy Norman's predilection for pithy shards of timeless wisdom extracted from a wide range of sacred texts. Or as Steichen himselfput it, "Photographsconcerned with the religiousrather than religions." The notion of the "oceanic feeling"-of an undifferentiatedego restoredto a primal sense of oneness withthe world-enters psychoanalyticdiscourse in the late 1920s, in an exchange of letters between Romaine Rolland and Sigmund Freud. Freud recapitulatesthe exchange in the firstchapter of Civilizationand Its Discontents,crediting Rolland withthe idea, but demurringat Rolland's suggestion, provokedby reading TheFuture of an Illusion,that la sensationoceanique lay at the origin of all religious sentiment. Deeply engaged in the study of the Indian nineteenth-centurymystic saint Ramakrishna,Rolland was certainlyfamiliar with a range of metaphorsfor immersion and dissolutionof the self,particularly those centered on the mother-goddess Kali, creator and destroyerof life. Freud's intellectual bias towardthe psychiclogic of monotheismled him to a different notion of religiousorigins. Religious faith followed from the ego's encounterwith a hostileworld, and religionwas the search fora protective,"enormously exalted" father.Steichen's overhead photograph of the divingnaked child can be said to be poised between these two contraryviews of religion: one monotheisticand the other polytheisticand "oceanic." The photographer-editoris the "exalted father," but he longs to become again the child mergingwith the liquid element. (In Lacanian terms,Rolland's "oceanic feeling" corresponds to the domain of the imaginary,while Freud's "exaltedfather" stands on the side of the symbolic.)21 Freud's earthbound predilectionsmade him skeptical about transcendent claimsfor oceanic immersion.He concludes the firstchapter of Civilizationand Its Discontentswith a line fromFriedrich Schiller's early romantic poem "Der Taucher" ("The Diver,"1797). The poem is based on the fableof a Sicilianking who, offering his daughteras a prize, commandsa youthto make a second dive into the abyss. Having triumphedonce over the terrorsof the deep, the diverlaments before his second,fatal plunge: "Let him rejoicewho livesup here in roseatelight." Freud, like JulesMichelet, understood that the sea, beforeit was anythingelse, was "the element of asphyxia,"the archetypeof the hostileworld, although Michelet was more sensitive to the nurtureprovided by the oceans. Freud'smeditation on the oceanic feelingled him,yet again, to the deathinstinct, already explored in Beyondthe Pleasure Principle. But thisintellectual ground had also been traversedby Freud's disciple Sandor Ferenczi,in a remarkablebook called Thalassa:A Theoryof Genitality, published in

21. SigmundFreud, Civilizationand ItsDiscontents [1930], trans.James Strachey(New York:Norton, 1961), pp. 11-20. See also J. MoussaieffMasson, The OceanicFeeling: The Originsof Religious Sentiment in AncientIndia (Dordrecht,Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers,1980).

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1923 but datingback to interruptedspeculations developed duringhis serviceas an army doctor during World War I, speculations with which Freud was familiar. Ferenczi's basic argument derives primarilyfrom the biologist Ernst Haeckel's erroneoustheory that ontogeny-the developmentof the individualorganism from the germ cell-is a recapitulationof phylogeny--orevolutionary history. Secondly, Ferenczi,like Freud, draws from the thermodynamicconcept of entropy.From these source ideas the psychoanalyst,seeking the keyto the formationof genitaldrives, intuitsthat the intrauterineexperience of land mammalsrecapitulates their aquatic evolutionaryprehistory. For male mammals,coitus is the expressionof a regressive longingfor an entropicreturn not onlyto the inertfloating passivity of the prenatal state,but to the liquid originsof the species.The last sentenceof the book sums it up, althoughalong the wayFerenczi is forcedby his own logic to admitthat female psycheand sexualityare more complex,less "primitive"than that of the male: The male memberand its functionappears as the organic symbolof the restoration-albeit only partial-of the fetal-infantilestate of union with the mother and at the same time with the geological prototype thereof,existence in the sea. [Emphasisin original]22

Thus can be discovereda keyto the Schillerian"infant bliss" at the heart of TheFamily of Man. As I put it long ago withouthaving fully developed the argument, "the exhibitionmoves fromthe celebrationof patriarchalauthority--which finds its highestembodiment in the United Nations-to the final constructionof an imaginaryutopia thatresembles nothing so much as a protractedstate of infantile, pre-Oedipalbliss." This infantilismis consistentwith the demise of politicalsubjects in the classicalenlightenment sense, and the emergenceof new consumersubjects. For this reason, TheFamily of Man was received with great intereston Madison Avenue,even thoughit portrayeda worldin whichFordist consumerism was largely invisible. The ecstatic bathers of The Familyof Man were recruitedas shills for mentholcigarettes and beer. The path thatopened here has led fiftyyears later to Corbis.com and the nonjudgmentalfun of shoppingfor pictures and takinga cruise withoutan "enormouslyexalted father" leading the way.

Part5: Anti-Titanic

Titanic,Waterworld, and ThePerfect Storm tell an old story:men sacrificethem- selvesat sea so thatwomen can nurturecivilized values, or even revivecivilization itself.The instincts,which are assigned no gender by psychoanalytictheory, are

22. Sandor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theoryof Genitality(London: Karnac, 1989), p. 107. See also ChristopherL. Connery,"The Oceanic Feeling and the Regional Imaginary,"in Rob Wilsonand Wimal Dissanayake,eds., Global/Local:Cultural Production and theTransnational Imaginary (Durham, N.C.: Duke UniversityPress, 1996), pp. 284-311. Respondingto "PacificRim discourse,"Connery has developed a compelling argumentlinking Charles Olson's idea of the Pacific as "worldocean," Anglo-American imperialambitions, and a Ferenczianpsychoanalytic reading of the cult of swimming.

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subordinated in these films to the traditional sexual division of labor. (This traditionalismcuts deeper than the superficialfeminism found in Titanicand PerfectStorm, which allows bourgeois women to seek love freelyand to be outspoken and propheticpatrons of the avant-gardeand permitsworking-class women to be fishing-boatskippers.) These melodramas pretend that the "male" death instinct servesthe "female"life instinct, as if in optimisticrejoinder to Freud's pessimistic conclusion to Civilizationand ItsDiscontents. It goes almostwithout saying that this traditional view,which can never be honest about the fact that its "morality" instrumentalizesthe instinctuallevel of the psyche,has servedas one of the principal ideological justifications for war, for organized aggression on a grand scale. Consider the motleycrew of "smokers"in Waterworld,ensconced as postapocalyptic galley slaves and pirates aboard the rottinghulk of the Exxon Valdezunder the command of a maniacal Dennis Hopper. On the one hand, we can be sure that this is an intentionallyself-parodic projection onto the lumpenproletariat of the petroleum-consumption patterns of your average successful SUV-driving Hollywoodscreenwriter. But the smokersalso epitomizethe bad habitsthat qualify a societyfor rogue nation status, for elevation to the targetlist for the nextbarrage of cruise missiles.In the filmthe "bad" death instinctof the smokerscan only be thwarted(or, more precisely,gratified) by the "good" death instinctof the thalassally regressedmutant fish-man Kevin Costner, who is byvirtue of his enhanced swimming abilitya kind of human torpedo. It would be absurd for me to say that these are "militarist"films, but theirtherapeutic and homeostaticapproach to the problem of human destructiveenergies puts them in line with the new rhetoricof state violence, which is alwaysviolence exercised in the interestof abstract human rights,or, more concretely,for the future of the children. Not long ago I was able to see the recentlyrestored travelingexhibition version of TheFamily of Man at its permanenthome, the Chatteaude Clervaux in Luxembourg, near the site of the Battle of the Ardennes. An old U.S. Army Sherman tank, presumably a relic of that battle, welcomes the visitor at the entranceto the castle.What was moststriking about the meticulousreconstruction undertakenby Steichen's natal countryis that now one can see how modestand slow-pacedthe spectacle-cultureof the 1950s was by contrastwith the Hollywood blockbusters,mega-exhibitions, and digital image-streamsof today. By current standards,the scale of the photographsis farfrom superhuman, and I saw a group of German high school studentsslipping into a kind of solemn,attentive reverie as theymoved patiently among the monochromaticpanels, as ifthis were very different fromtheir experience of going to the movies,playing a computergame, or clicking on a web link. Perhaps this is the ultimatemuseological destinyof TheFamily of Man: to become the immobilizedrelic of a global road show that provided the model forthe travelingmuseum blockbusters of today.Does the veryobsolescence of TheFamily of Man open up a plethoraof possibilities? Justfor a moment,imagine that the restoredFamily of Man had been installed insteadaboard a ship,and thatthe ship sailed around the world,visiting all the port

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cities that had originallytaken the exhibition,from New York to Cape Town to Jakarta,and maybea fewothers that weren't on the originalitinerary. In some cities, a rich menu of competing cultural choices combined with general urban indifferenceto the waterfrontwould bring fewvisitors: maybe no more than fifty people in New York,despite the freeadmission. In otherscities, maybe in Karachi, the shipwould be so swampedwith visitors that it would almostheel overand capsize at the dock: an audience of thirtythousand in one day.In the richercountries, caps and T-shirtswould be sold; in poor countries these would give way to free sou- venirs. It would be a simple no-frillscargo ship, so there would be none of the connotations of protectedluxury that accrue to a chaiteauor to the cruise vessel commandeered in Genoa by the frightenedleaders of the rich nations. In many cities,dissident and human-rightsgroups would be invitedto convenepublic forums in a conferenceroom builtinto one of the holds. These same groupswould provide hospitalityfor the crew.A websitewould trackthe vessel'sprogress. The ship would flythe flag of landlocked Luxembourg,or maybe that of the United Nations, or perhaps an unrecognizableflag, unrelated to any knownsovereign entity, perhaps bearing a portraitof Steichen'smother holding a freshlybaked apple pie. It would not flythe flagof the UnitedStates, nor would it displaythe ensignof the Museumof Modem Art,and therewould be no Shermantank lashed to the hatchcovers. This would be the ghostship imagined by the New YorkTimes: the aging cargo shipin theage ofe-mail. What I am describinghere, takingonly modest license, is the 1998-2000 circumnavigationof the GlobalMariner, an 18,000-deadweight-ton general cargo vessel carryingin its convertedholds a remarkableexhibition about workingconditions at sea, and-in a broader sense-about the hidden social costs and probable consequences of corporate globalization. Sponsored by the InternationalTransport Workers Federation, a London-basedumbrella organization of over 450 transport-workers'unions around the world,the ship was actuallythe brainchildof a group of German and Britishseafarer activists who also happened to be disaffectedveterans of Greenpeace, interestedin the problem of an international linkage of labor and environmentalstruggles. Their primaryconcern was the systemof flag ofconvenience shipping, a lawyerlyruse inventedby American shippersin the mid-1940s thatallows wealthy ship ownersto registertheir vessels in poor nations offeringwhat is oftentermed paper sovereignty: a flag for a fee. The systemis rifewith abuses, and indeed itsvery purpose is abuse: shieldingexploitative labor conditions and substandardvessels behind a bewilderinglegal maze. The ITF has been waging a campaign against this systemfor fiftyyears, tryingto enforceminimum standards of pay and safetyfor seafarers. The solution of the ITF activistswas to connect thisvenerable and not always very successful fightto the broader campaign against corporate globalization. Here it is worthnoting thatsince 1995 keyworking-class resistances to neoliberal policies-reduced social security,casualization of workin the name of "flexibility," union-busting, and privatization of public infrastructure-have come from workersin the transportsector: railwayworkers in France, dockers in Australia,

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Chile, and Brazil, bus driversand airline crews in Mexico, and deliverydrivers in the United States. These battles against the doctrine of the untrammeled marketpredate Seattle. The GlobalMariner was a floatingversion of the agit-train,reconceived in the context of an eclectic and decidedly post-Bolshevikleft-wing politics. (The ITF had its originsin solidarityactions linking Dutch and Britishdockers and seafarers at the end of the nineteenthcentury, and remained close to the traditionsof the old socialistSecond Internationalfor much of its history.)The quixotic agit-ship was nonetheless indebted to the experiments of radical productivistart in the young Soviet Union, and also to the photomontagesof John Heartfieldand the workers'theater of ErwinPiscator. Remember that Steichen had alreadyborrowed from the big-scale presentational techniques of Russian designers and photographersof the 1920sfor his thematicphoto exhibitionsof the 1940sand '50s: there are ghostlyshadows of El Lissitskyand Rodchenko in TheFamily of Man. Having witnessedthe absorptionof these once-radicaldevices into the tool kitof corporateliberalism and advertising,one could saythat now the GlobalMariner has reappropriatedthis tradition to forgea new-oldweapon againstthe neoliberalism of the twenty-firstcentury. But beforethe exhibition,with its big computer-generatedphotomurals and its eerie post-Stockhausensoundtrack, there is the factof the shipand thevoyage in and of themselves,readymade-like in the subtletyof their ambiguous status as alreadyexisting but transformed object and context. The Lady Rebecca(as "she" had been christenedtwo decades before on the NorthSea coast of Britain),had gone throughfive names, a seriesof superimposed reinscriptionsof bow and stern,each prior name an increasinglyobscure trace beneath the bright white paint announcing the new identity.The calculated amnesia of the worldof internationalshipping offers a lessonto thosewho celebrate the postmodernflux of identity.One of the strangerstories of thiscommon practice: in mid-passagea captain receivesa telex noting that the ship has been sold and must be renamed. The captain politelyasks the new name and is told to send a crewmanover the side-risky businesswhen under way-to paint out everyother letterof the old name. What would Mallarme make of this?The concrete poetry of the contemporarymaritime world, the nominativemagic workedout between the telex machine and the paint locker: here we returnto Melville'sBenito Cereno (1856), but confrontnot the ambiguitiesof insurrectionand mutinybut a mastery that disguises itself. Whose ship? Which ship? A palimpsest of disguises and deceits,a deliberatemuddying of the waters. Nearing the end of its/herworking life, the ship formerlyknown as the Lady Rebeccaentered a stateof dangerousdecrepitude, owned by a Hong Kong shipping company,flagged, I believe,to Panama,crewed by Filipinos, and finally-atthe literal end of her ropes-moored at offshoreanchorage in the bustlingport of Pusan, on the southeastcoast of Korea,waiting. For what?A shadybuyer willing to squeeze out the lastbit of profitfrom the laboriousand ploddingand dangerousjourneys of an

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agingvessel, a deathship in the making.Or, the ownermakes the finalblunt decision, almostthat of a farmerin itsfrank brutality, though less intimatethan one based on veterinaryobservation, since thisis a decisionmade at a distance-in Hong Kong or London or Zurich-without poking at the rustbreeding on the ladders and the hatch coaming,or pokingat the cracksin the hull,or readingthe engine room log withits depressingcatalogue of failingvalves and pumps. From the pastureof the anchorage,the ship embarkson the long voyageto the renderingplant. Send "her" to the gentlysloping beaches of India, to be run ashore at high tide by a skeleton crew:engines full ahead onto the oilysand, to be brokenby the sledgesand cutting torchesof vast crews of gauntlaborers, the abattoirof the maritimeworld, the shipre- mannedfor the last time by the last toiling victims in thecycle of oceanic exploitation. Then miraculously--althoughhere other metaphors, those of rescue and redemption,are also to be used as ifthis were fiction-the shipwas purchasedby the InternationalTransport Workers Federation in the summerof 1998, reflaggedto Britain, and arduouslyrefitted at the Mipo dockyardsof Hyundai,just north of Pusan, and then sailed by a Croatian crew to the German port of Bremerhaven, whereit was furtherfitted out withthe exhibition,and then,only a fewmonths after the initialpurchase-all thiswas done at breakneckpace-it embarkedwith a new name on a twenty-monthcircumnavigation, setting out to visiteighty-three cities around the world.The crewwas a polyglotmix: English, German, Icelandic, Filipino, Burmese,Scottish, Croatian, New Zealander,Ukrainian, Russian, Japanese, Dutch, and Irish. Depending on the politicalsituation of the local unions who invitedthe ship, the visitscould be militantand combative.For example,the crewjoinedthe dockers of Valparaisoin theirfight against Chilean governmentplans forport privatization, demonstratedalongside exiled Burmeseseafarers and otherdemocracy campaigners outsidethe Myanmarembassy in Bangkok,and stageda protestin supportof striking Americanshipyard workers in New Orleans. Two fastlaunches were stowedon top of the rear hatch cover,and these allowed for rapid, Greenpeace-styleactions. In other instances, the ship was isolated from public contact by unsympathetic governments,as happened in Hong Kong, a citywhose crypto-"market-Stalinist" chief executive happens to be the formerhead of an internationalcontainer- shipping line. An invitation to Greece scheduled for the very last day of the millenniumwas rescindedat the eleventhhour by a seafarers'union unwillingto challenge powerfulGreek shipowners.Faraway political events could change the tenorof the ship's reception,as happened in Istanbula fewweeks after the Seattle protestsagainst the World Trade Organization. For the firsttime, the ship was greeted at the dock by workers bearing banners specifically denouncing globalization.And indeed the ship'svisit to Seattle in the springof 1999 had been one of a numberof local eventsleading up to the Novemberprotests.23

23. The visitof the GlobalMariner to Seattle was sponsored by the West Coast dockworkers'union, the ILWU, and bya numberof othermaritime unions. The ILWU also cosponsoredthe Seattleexhibition

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International TransportWorkers Federation.Postcard ofthe Global Mariner.1998.

If, as Michel Foucault has suggested, ships are the very exemplar of heterotopias (real spaces that call other spaces into question), the GlobalMariner was the heterotopiaof heterotopias.Or ifyou want,this was a metaship,representing and figuringwithin itself, within the exhibition that was its only cargo, all the otherinvisible, ignored, and silentships of the world.The GlobalMariner had to be a real ship functioningin an exemplaryway, to be the Good Ship thatsocial justice demanded other shipsshould and could be, but it was also an emptyvessel carrying nothing but ballast and a message. This "emptiness" may have provoked the hostile captain of one substandardvessel targeted by the ITF to referto the Global Marineras a toyship, as if it had been de-realizedby the absence of heavycargo. And yet thiswas a vessel of old-fashionedself-sufficiency, equipped withonboard cranes that allowed it to load and dischargecargo at terminalswithout dockside equipment,the sortof vessel commonlyseen tradingin more remotethird-world ports.The GlobalMariner functioned in markedcontrast to the specializedcontainer and bulk shipsof today'sshipping world, which only work by being integratedinto a larger machine ensemble of dockside cranes and conveyors. Its functional autonomyand versatilityallowed the GlobalMariner to become a large mobile art space thatcould efficientlyinstall, transport, and displayits exhibition.

of myproject Fish Story at the HenryArt Gallery, in conjunctionwith the Labor Studies Center at the Universityof Washington,an unusual occurrencein Americanmuseum practice, given the hegemony of corporatepatronage. Between February and May of 1999, FishStory became a focal pointfor a series of meetingsand events-including the GlobalMariner's visit-addressing Seattle's militant labor history and problemsof working-classresponses to globalization.The ILWU shut down all ports on the West Coast and in Hawaii during the subsequentWTO meetings,and rank-and-filedockworkers-men and women-took a big role in the streetdemonstrations, thus earning the scorn of apologistsfor globalization,such as Thomas Friedmanof the New YorkTimes. I firstvisited the GlobalMariner when it made port in Los Angeles on its wayup the Pacificcoast, and subsequentlysailed withit fromSan Francisco to Portland,from Durban to Cape Town,and fromthe Mediterraneanup throughthe Black Sea and back down to the Adriatic.On the Seattle protests,see AlexanderCockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair,and Allan Sekula, FiveDays thatShook the World: Seattle and Beyond(London: Verso,2000).

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The GlobalMariner was also embarkedon whatcan onlybe seen as an ironic counterenactmentof an older project dating back to the veryorigins of modern imperialdominion, namely the firstcircumnavigation of the globe byMagellan. This was Magellanin reverse.Indeed, the ritualsignificance of circumnavigationcannot be under-emphasized.These epochal voyageswere firstreenacted in the epoch of high imperialism,serving as theatricalassertions of a naval power's emergence on the world stage, as was the case withthe circumnavigationof AdmiralDewey's "White Fleet" afterthe decisiveAmerican victory over Spain in Manila Bay in 1898. In the Americancase, the grand,global navalparade, showingthe flag, in navalparlance, put the musclebehind the geostrategicambition expressed by the naval theoristAlfred ThayerMahan. In the latertwentieth century, the solo circumnavigatorritually revitalizes the individualistunderpinnings of the capitalistspirit of adventure,while simultaneously obscuring-throughthe drama of solitaryendeavor and extremeself-sufficiency- the industrialand social dimensionof the world-spanningproject. The fascination withsuch voyages,manifested in the tragicallyill-fated work of Bas JanAder, or more recentlyin a numberof intriguingprojects by Tacita Dean, is entirelyconsistent with a returnto a seeminglyexhausted romanticism, and an effortto divorceadventure fromits historicallinkage with plunder and conquest.That romanticismshould only seek itssurvival in oceanic immersion,hypersolitude, and the extremeextraterritori- alityof the middlepassage is a signof the desperationencountered in itsrescue from generalizedcultural debasement. Today thispostmodern, quasiromantic "return" to the sea mustbe understoodas fundamentallydifferent from its Byronicprecedent, since it contends with a sea that is both depleted of resources and sublimely threateningin a new waywith the adventof global warming,a sea thatkills and is being killed,a sea that is also subject-in the developed world-to a ubiquitous varietyof hyper-realrepresentations, from aquatic theme parksto the species-rich aquariumsthat have become a fixtureof everyurban waterfront leisure complex. The GlobalMariner insisted, on the contrary,in itsplodding ordinary way on the returnto social questions.Speaking with the caution of a Cold War liberal,Steichen had claimed that TheFamily of Man was about "human consciousness,not social consciousness."24The greatstrength of the GlobalMariner experiment was to raisethe question of society from the veryspace that is imagined to be beyond society. Nothingspecial: a shiplike many others, so ordinarythat one Seattleresident, seeing the ship being ceremoniouslywelcomed by the fireboatsof thatstrong union city, wonderedwhat the fusswas all about. In otherwords, here was the sortof welcome one would expect foran aircraftcarrier or the QE2, but not foran old 'tweendecker, presumablycarrying coffee or pulp paper,or some otheranonymous bulk commodity. It is all the more profoundthat this ship should seek to representthe workings of empireat a timewhen the global economyis assumedto be entirelyvirtual in its connectedness,magically independent of the slow maritimemovement of heavy

24. EdwardSteichen, "Introduction," The Family of Man, p. 5.

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Installationviews ofthe lower holds of theGlobal Mariner.1999. things.The arrogantconceit of the cyber-economy,for that matter of thevery idea of the postindustrialera, is thatwe disavowour dim but naggingawareness that nearly all energy--whetherconverted to electricityor derivedfrom direct combustion-comes fromoil or otherhydrocarbon fossil fuels, or fromfissionable uranium refined from yellow-cakeore: solids,liquids, and gases thatare extractedfrom the earthand trans- portedin bulk.The veryslowness of the GlobalMariner's voyage, the twentymonths of its circumnavigation,reminds us of the durationof early-modernseafaring under sail,and also of the contemporarypersistence of slow,heavy transport flows. This was the anti-Titanic.The Glaswegianquartermaster aboard the Global Mariner,a wiryveteran seafarer by the name of JimmyMcCauley, made the point verysuccinctly, referring to the steadyaggregate loss of life at sea, crews of twentyat a timeon bulkore carriersthat mysteriously break in half,sometimes in calm seas, or the myriadFilipino passengers crammed onto decrepit ferriesthat capsize or burn in the Sulu Sea: "A Titanichappens everyyear, but no one hears

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about it."The exhibitionitself brought this home witha narrativeprogram that took the visitorfrom a happyand optimisticview of seafaring--amix of shippingindustry propaganda and tourist fantasy-to an increasinglydark and dismal view of calamities and dangers at sea, culminatingin a meticulousmodel of the ill-fated Swedish ferryEstonia underwater in a fish-tankvitrine. This last amounted to a morbid seafarers'joke on the displaytechniques of maritimemuseums. As one descended fromupper to lower holds, and moved forwardtoward the bow of the ship, the use of archivalimages-depicting injured seafarersand atrociousliving conditions,depicting shipwrecks, fires, and oil spills-became more and more insis- tent,until one climbedto the upper hold dedicatedto public discussionand debate. Many of the photographsused were taken by the ITF's ship inspectorsin ports around the world,who are themselvesdockers and seafarers.This documentary imperativebrings openness to an industrytraditionally veiled in secrecy.In fact,the currenttendency to extend forensicinvestigations to nonmilitaryshipwrecks, using deep submersibleswhen necessary, is largelytraceable to precedentsset by the ITF. Miren del Olmo, chief mate aboard the GlobalMariner, told me a story.A Basque froma poor fishingvillage on the outskirtsof Bilbao, daughterof a retired shipyardworker, she recalledhaving crossed the Nervi6nRiver on her wayto English class one Saturdayin the late 1980s,preparing for the linguafranca of a lifeat sea. Hearing commotionin the distance,she glancedback at the bridge,just nextto the soon-to-be-closedshipyard that would ten years later provide the site for Frank Gehry'sGuggenheim. The roadwayand pylonssuddenly disappeared in a fogof tear gas. Displaced weldersand shipwrights-herfather's comrades-were battlingwith the riotsquads of the NationalPolice. She told the storyas she stoodwatch late one December nighton anothersort of bridge,as the GlobalMariner made its waywest across the Black Sea. It occurredto me thatwe were doubtlesscrossing the course taken almosta centuryearlier by the mutinousbattleship Potemkin, as it zigzagged fromOdessa to Constanzaseeking shelter from the czaristfleet. The ship shuddered throughheavy winter swells, seemingly going nowhere. Aftera long silence,broken only by the intermittentcrackle of radio voicesspeaking the terse and variablyaccented Englishof the sea lanes, Miren remarkedthat she had yetto spend enough timeat home in Bilbao to be able to visitthe new museum. But in her unprofessionalopinion, speaking frankly to an American,it looked like it had been built"from every can of Coke drunkin Bilbao." As Melville's Bartleby,broken by the post office,put it to his boss: "I would prefernot to." On August3, 2000, havingcompleted its missionas a good ship,an exemplaryship, a ship representingall the other invisibleships of the world,the GlobalMariner, bearing a cargo of steel coil, was rammedand sunk at the mouth of the Orinoco River in Venezuela, not far fromthe fictionalrefuge of Robinson Crusoe,a shipwreckedisolato from an earliermercantile era. Thanksto Bill Gatesand his minions,I received this news by e-mail,but not in writing.Instead, without warning,a startlingpicture rolled downward on the screenof mycomputer: a ship I knewwell, sinking, photographed from a lifeboatby one of the crew.

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