a quarterly of art and culture Issue 13 FUTURES CABINET US $10 Canada $15 UK £6 cabinet Cabinet is a non-profit 501 (c) (3) magazine published by Immaterial Immaterial Incorporated Incorporated. Contributions to Cabinet magazine are fully tax-deductible. 181 Wyckoff Street Brooklyn NY 11217 USA Donations of $25 or more will be acknowledged in the next possible issue. tel + 1 718 222 8434 Donations above $500 will be acknowledged for four issues. All contributions fax + 1 718 222 3700 will be noted on our website for the world to see. Checks made out to “Cabinet” email [email protected] can be sent to our address. Please mark the envelope “Balm from Gilead.” www.cabinetmagazine.org Cabinet wishes to thank the following foundations and individuals for their Editor-in-chief Sina Najafi generous support of our activities during 2004: Senior editor Jeffrey Kastner Editors Frances Richard, David Serlin Guest editor for “Futures” section Daniel Rosenberg $100,000 Managing editor & graphic designer Brian McMullen The Flora Family Foundation UK editor Brian Dillon Editors-at-large Saul Anton, Naomi Ben-Shahar, Mats Bigert, Brian Conley, Chris- $30,000 toph Cox, Jesse Lerner, Debra Singer, Allen S. Weiss, Gregory Williams, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Jay Worthington Website Luke Murphy & Kristofer Widholm $15,000 Associate editor Sasha Archibald The Greenwall Foundation Assistant editor Steven Villereal Editorial assistants Gabrielle Begue, Hannah Kasper, Ryo Manabe, Tal Schori $10,000 - $14,999 Development consultant Alexander Villari Stina & Herant Katchadourian Contributing editors Joe Amrhein, Molly Bleiden, Eric Bunge, Cletus Dalglish- The National Endowment for the Arts Schommer, Pip Day, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, The New York State Council on the Arts Dejan Krsic, Roxana Marcoci, Phillip Scher, Rachel Schreiber, Lytle Shaw, The Peter Norton Family Foundation Cecilia Sjöholm, Sven-Olov Wallenstein $7,500 Prepress Zvi @ Digital Ink Artslink Founding editors Brian Conley & Sina Najafi $3,000 Printed in Belgium by the perfectionists at Die Keure The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs
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Submissions Cabinet accepts unsolicited manuscripts and artist projects. For guidelines, cover: The cast and crew of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes take a break see www.cabinetmagazine.org or email [email protected]. from filming on the campus of University of California, Irvine in 1972. The seven-year-old campus was chosen as the film’s location because of its Contents © 2004 Immaterial Incorporated & the authors, artists, and brutalist buildings and barren landscape. Courtesy University of California, translators. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction of any material Irvine. Special thanks to Diana Palmer. here is a no-no. The daring views published in this magazine are not necessarily those of the writers, let alone the conformist editors of Cabinet. page 4: Pamela Jackson, The Futuremen, 1998. columns 7 colors / khaki ben marcus For the potential Hemingway in all of us
9 inventory / fallen figures & heads: leon golub’s lists david levi strauss The poetry of the archive
12 ingestion / the shelf-life of liquefying objects jamer hunt Monuments go limp
15 leftovers / what to do with a worn-out koran michael cook A question of disposition
maIN 19 edison’s warriors christoph cox Deceive to defeat
23 triskelion sasha archibald The migrations of a symbol
26 border sound files: excerpts from an audio essay josh kun Into Tijuana, through the aural aleph
33 borderline archeology jesse lerner Janus-faced geography
37 data and metadata: an interview with murtha baca & erin coburn Eve meltzer & Julia meltzer You say Ugolino Lorenzetti, I say Bartolommeo Bulgarini
41 100,000 bottles of beer In the wall paul collins Alfred Heineken’s recycling program
44 cutaneous: an interview with steven connor brian dillon On, in, through, and beneath the skin
49 the figurative incarnation of the sentence (notes on the “autographic” skin) georges didi-huberman Dermographia and the inscribed body
54 the hand up project: attempting to meet the new needs of natural life-forms elizabeth demaray A new home for the hermit crab
FUTURES 59 thinking futures daniel rosenberg & susan harding Conspiracy, prophecy, and utopia
62 very slow scan television gebhard sengmüller & Jakob Edlbacher Tune in, turn on, wait
66 desert modernism joseph masco From the Nevada Test Site to Liberace’s sequined suits
75 special cd insert: past forward curated by brian Conley & Christoph coX
78 artist project: Naturalia aziz + cucher 81 the use of drugs to influence time experience Heroin to “lose the present,” alcohol to make time “go faster”
82 the day before the day after Waiting for JFK: Austin, Texas, 22 November 1963
85 the trouble with timelines daniel rosenberg The measure of it all
86 A Timeline of Timelines sasha archibald & Daniel Rosenberg A device turned on itself
92 phases of life 1: the artificial foster-mother samantha vincenty The birth of the incubator
94 phases of life 2: the family room of tomorrow joseph masco The domestic dreamspace, after the bomb
96 phases of life 3: living at death’s door nicholas sammond Not dead yet
98 hummingbird futures daniel rosenberg Theodor Nelson and the creation of hypertext
107 the veterans of future wars susan hamson Patriotism, prepaid
108 the sexual archipelago jessica sewell Simon Spies’s hydraulic pleasure palace
111 the eight-fold path to knowing ra greg rowland Space is the place
114 the martian variations Covering War of the Worlds
116 scent from the future miryam sas The first English translation of the 1921 Japanese Futurist Manifesto
121 The Cabinet Time Capsule A call for contributions
ANd postcard: Message to the future, 1897 Gallop, Wilkins, Sainsbury, chester & Pickernell
bookmark: Alien Timeline Joe Nickell Look near the subscription cards
Contributors Joseph Masco teaches anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he Sasha Archibald is an associate editor at Cabinet. writes about technology, politics, and aesthetics.
Aziz + Cucher are a collaborative team based in Brooklyn. They are Eve Meltzer is currently a Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of represented by Henry Urbach Architecture, NY. For more information, Art and Art History at Stanford University, where she teaches contemporary art see www.azizcucher.net history and theory. She is working on a book about language and information in art practices of the 1960s and 1970s. Harald Bode (1909-1987) was a key figure in the history of electronic music. He invented a range of electronic musical instruments (the Warbo Formant organ, Julia Meltzer is a media artist and executive director of Clockshop, a non-profit the Melodium, the Melochord, the Polychord and others) used in the earliest media and art organization. She lives in Los Angeles. electronic music compositions, and, later in life, composed electronic music for television, film, and live performance. Carlos di Napoli (a.k.a. crlos) is an architect and musician based in Santa Fe, Argentina. Albert Casais (a.k.a. omnid) is a sound artist based in New Jersey. Joe Nickell is a Senior Fellow with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation Paul Collins edits the Collins Library imprint of McSweeney’s Books, and is of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). Nickell is a regular contributor to Skepti- the author of Banvard’s Folly and Sixpence House. His newest book is Not Even cal Inquirer magazine and author of numerous books, including Real-Life X-Files: Wrong. Investigating the Paranormal (University Press of Kentucky, 2001).
Brian Conley is an artist and an editor-at-large at Cabinet. In October 2004, Daniel Rosenberg is Assistant Professor of History in the Robert D. Clark Honors Pierogi gallery will host an exhibition of his work. College at the University of Oregon. His next book concerns the history of the past. Michael Cook is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He has worked on various aspects of the history of Islam Greg Rowland is Contributing Editor at the Idler magazine. He also sells and the Islamic world, and has recently published A Brief History of the Human semiotics to multinational corporations. He is based in London, England. Race (W. W. Norton, 2003). Nicholas Sammond is Assistant Professor in the Media and Society program Christoph Cox is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hampshire College and at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He is the editor of Steel Chair to the Head: an editor-at-large at Cabinet. He is the author of Nietzsche: Naturalism and Inter- Essays on Professional Wrestling (Duke University Press, Fall 2004) and the pretation (Univerrsity of California, 1999) and editor of Audio Culture: Readings author of The Uses of Childhood: The Rise of Walt Disney and the Generic in Modern Music (Continuum, forthcoming). American Child, 1930-1960 (Duke University Press, Spring 2005).
Elizabeth Demaray is an artist whose work explores the connection between Luz Maria Sánchez is a sound/installation artist and the founder of TPS, an the named world and the real. She is co-founder and co-curator of the Concep- artist-run space in San Antonio, Texas. Her work has been shown in galleries tual Art Store.com and teaches at Rutgers University at Camden where she is and festivals in the UK, France, Spain, Cuba, Mexico, and Egypt. She is working head of sculpture. on her doctorate at the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain.
Georges Didi-Huberman teaches at the École des hauts études en sciences Miryam Sas is associate professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies at sociales in Paris. the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism, was released by Stanford University Press in 2001. Brian Dillon is the UK editor for Cabinet and a regular contributor to Frieze, She is currently working on a new book about postwar Japanese performance. Modern Painters, and the Irish Times. His first book, In the Dark Room, will be published in 2005. Janek Schaefer is a London-based sound artist noted for his creative work with vinyl recordings and turntables. His multi-function three-arm Tri-Phonic Jakob Edlbacher is an industrial designer based in Vienna. Turntable is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as “the world’s most versatile record player.” Susan Hamson is a project archivist at Princeton University Library where she manages a staff of three in the processing of over 2,200 linear feet of Gebhard Sengmüller is an artist working in the field of media technology, University records. Previously, she was the archivist at the Chemical Heritage currently based in Vienna, Austria. Since 1992, he has been developing projects Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. and installations focusing on the history of electronic media; creating alternative ordering systems for media content; and constructing autogenerative networks. Susan Harding is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, His main project for the last few years has been VinylVideo, a fake piece of Santa Cruz. She is the author of The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist media archeology. See www.itsallartipromise.com. Language and Politics (Princeton, 2000), among other works. Jessica Sewell is Assistant Professor at the Department of Art History at Boston Jamer Hunt is Associate Professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia University. Her current book project is “Gendering the Spaces of Modernity: where he is Director of the Master’s Program in Industrial Design—a graduate Women and Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915.” laboratory for postindustrial design. Samantha Vincenty is a crossword editor and former research assistant for Manuel Rocha Iturbide is a sound artist and composer from Mexico City, where Cabinet. She lives in Brooklyn. he curates the International Sound Art Festival. Achim Wollscheid is a sound artist from Frankfurt whose audio art has been Pamela Jackson’s recent projects include The Doll Games (on the web at released on the Ritornell and Selektion labels. A catalogue of his recent work, www.ineradicablestain.com/dollgames/) and a multimedia work-in-progress, Achim Wollscheid: Selected Works 1990-2000, was published in 2001 by Mood Organ. She lives in Los Angeles. Selektion and Errant Bodies.
Josh Kun is a Los Angeles-based writer who teaches in the English Department Aaron Ximm (a.k.a. the Quiet American) is a sound artist from San Francisco at UC Riverside. His arts column, “Frequencies,” appears in the San Francisco who works primarily with field recordings. His latest releases are Rockets of the Bay Guardian, Boston Phoenix, and Los Angeles Alternative Press. He is currently Mekong and Plumbing and Irrigation of South Asia. writing a book about Tijuana.
Jesse Lerner is a documentary filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His book F is for Phony: Fake Documentaries Undoing History, Identity and Truth (with Alexandra Juhasz) is forthcoming.
David Levi Strauss is the author of two recent books of essays on art and politics: Between the Eyes (Aperture, 2003) and Between Dog & Wolf (Autonomedia, 1999).
Kara Lynch is a multimedia artist who teaches video production at Hampshire College. Her feature-length film, Black Russians, was completed in 2001. She is currently at work on Invisible, a speculative, non-linear black liberation narrative.
Ben Marcus is author of The Age of Wire and String and editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. columns “Colors” is a column in which a guest writer responds to a spcif- ic color assigned by the editors of Cabinet. / “Inventory,” a new colors / khaki ben marcus occasional column, will feature and sometimes examine a list, regis- ter, or catalogue. / “Ingestion” is Allen S. Weiss’s column on cuisine, aesthetics, and philosophy. Jamer Hunt is stepping in for Weiss, who To Daniel Harris is absent this issue. / “Leftovers” is a column that examines the significance of cultural detritus. If any clothing color is meant to corroborate the spasms of a fantasy that we are not really living in cities or towns where all danger from animals has been removed; that instead some forested adventure awaits us for which we must be properly outfitted; that in fact we are secretly rugged safari people who at any moment will ditch our offices for an impromptu hunt of treacherous elephants, a jeep trip through uncharted veldt; then that color is khaki. No other tint of clothing has so aggressively been used to link mundane office life, well-fed fraternity catatonia, or the Haldol atmosphere of country clubs with robust wilderness trekking and free-spirit nomad- ism—the kinds of behavior, in short, that are the least likely to occur. Now a staple pants color of corporate casual Fridays, it is those Fridays that, rather than encouraging comfort, are meant to announce to our co-workers, as the dumb half of show-and-tell, who we really are, lest they miss it behind our suits and ties: When we wear khaki, we are potential Hemingway characters ready to take up arms against the wild- life, and then to repose over mojitos in cabanas. In truth, khaki is the ultimate wasteland camouflage, what will finally hide people when the last buildings have been demolished and we are reduced to wandering over the desert. The old camouflage of Rorschach greens, browns, and grays, was designed for a planet that still lived and breathed, where warfare might occur in a dripping, ozone-fresh greenhouse, when hiding meant taking cover under a tree. Since those sectors are now either demolished or ossified by longing tour- ists, and the new warfare is conducted in the sand and dust, with our fondness for green fading into nostalgia, khaki makes the most invisible outfit for the future, a covert skin for battling atop the dead, colorless planet. Khaki is so entrenched as a textile concept that one can refer to pants as “khakis” and court no confusion. Are there any other garments so ubiquitous that we identify them by their colors? While blue jeans can faintly evoke the wild west, there is little wild west anymore to evoke—the myth has been severally punctured—though jeans still (the non-designer ones) bespeak yard labor and trade labor and other sorts of activities that make a person dirty. Their blueness is secon- dary to the actual texture of their material. Khakis, meanwhile, announce leisure and the aftermath of activity, the sense that something strenuous just happened but has now been cleaned up. Khakis signal repose after the hunt, a patrician costume of earned relaxation that acknowledges the environ- ment of dust and sand but still appears wealthy and dressy. It is no wonder, then, that khaki is the iconographic garment for the well-behaved, well-paid American “person,” who defaults to that color choice because it is apparently the most comfortable; because it seems easy and simple, inoffensive while still slightly stylish, and imminently durable. But since when does color alone provide sufficient sensual comfort against the skin, particularly in the climate-controlled interiors we frequently navigate? And why does almost no one wear myth). In khaki clothing, we have managed to dramatize khakis that are not khaki-colored, even though marketers both our past and future, however fictitiously, while render- frequently pin their hopes on magenta and compost-colored ing a present that is bland and nearly invisible, translucent pants cut just like their khaki counterparts? Witness the without being revealing, immensely fragile, however sturdy commercial arc of Banana Republic, at first a retail outlet for it appears. We will soon be bumping into people we did not the “suburban safari” enthusiast, a ludicrously unsuggestive know were there, and khaki will become another name we phrase (wouldn’t wilding count as suburban safari?). Hats, use for nothing. whips, chaps, rucksacks, survival gear, hard-weather performance material, facial salves to toughen the cheeks against desert zephyrs: These were the ingredients of the inventory / Fallen Figures & Heads: early marketing efforts at Banana Republic, and this is the Leon Golub’s Lists identity it still traffics in, even if those products are no longer David Levi Strauss on sale, even while Banana Republic has fully shifted its line from outdoor to indoor, desert to office, wilderness to city. This issue marks the debut of “Inventory,” Cabinet’s new What happened to the buckaroo mascot and the gutted jeep occasional column tracking the types of linguistic and chassis that punctuated the shop floors? Entering now, one cultural surplus to be found in the structures and content finds instead a rabidly generic set of corporate uniforms of lists, registers, and catalogs. The inaugural installment of in no way linked to the khaki foundation, neat stacks of the column brings together two collaborators and friends, supposedly staple outfits for men and women that manage painter Leon Golub and writer David Levi Strauss. It was to be both extremely unimpressive and readily identifiable as in a published conversation between the two men that BR wear. The lighting is cold and uniform, so unlike the bril- Cabinet’s editors first learned of the extensive classificatory liant sunsets of the savannah. One must push all the system created by the artist for his archive of thousands of way to the back of the store to find its origins, tables heaped photographs. Cut out from books and periodicals over the in khaki pants with names like Dawson and Emerson, years, these pictures function as source material for his insinuations of rugged individualism rather than what khaki signature scenes of physical, psychological, and social really is: a team uniform for dead people, wishful wear for extremity. In the following essay, Strauss not only sketches lifestyle-free people. the etymological, socio-historical context of lists in general, If we desire a clothing color for something that will but also identifies a kind of latent poetry that resides in never happen to us, it is only because nearly nothing Golub’s specific categories. physical happens to us of our own volition, and we must independently generate the suspicion that it once has or that The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more it will again. Clothing is the ultimate vehicle for this physi- wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis. cal advertisement of self, a mating hypothetics we require —Umberto Eco of each other to share secrets and fantasies, to dramatize our disgusts with our real lives, to show off to others what People are divided over them. Either one makes lists or one we might do if we were really alive. Like weekend cyclists doesn’t, and the ones who do are changed by them. They in the park who wear elaborate gear not connected to start making lists as an aid to memory and to bring a sense better cycling performance—Lycra jerseys emblazoned of order into their lives. But in time, the lists work so well that with Italian advertisements, corporate logo colors disfigur- their makers drift into amnesia and chaos. They develop un ing torsos, insignias of sponsorship covering every body healthy attachments to their lists, as their work is increasingly part—these accessorizing gestures are meant to announce cut out for them. Finally, they are left helpless and listless. one’s dreamed inclusion in a theatrical sporting affair that This progression is presaged in the etymology of lists, others should admire, since these hobbyists have caught where the boundaries between list and lust, or list and listen, themselves admiring televised cyclists and wish to ape, if are quite porous. The currently prevalent sense of list as “cat- not the skill, then the costume of the professionals. These alogue” has a Teutonic origin, including the German leiste, cyclists identify each other’s seriousness of purpose by “a border or edging,” which was eventually transferred to a their gear, but their purpose is not necessarily to cycle. It is “strip” of paper or parchment containing a “list” similar to fans who advertise the same companies as their of names or numbers arranged in order for some specific sports heroes. The only difference is that the professional purpose. But the parallel sense of list meaning “to choose, is getting paid for his endorsement. And if khaki is not a desire, or have pleasure in” is never far away, and this one textual advertisement, it is a spiritual one, though one that includes lust, from the Anglo-Saxon lystan, “to desire.” The has so collectively possessed the nation that it now appears desire or inclination of a ship to lean one way or the other like “basic” clothing, a staple, rugged wear for unexpected makes it list, and a person is described as listless when he times—even if it is decidedly unrugged, made of ever- or she exhibits a lack of inclination, leading to an overly cheapening cotton—something that belongs in everyone’s upstanding stasis. pants drawer. It is innocuous and innocent, free of overt subtext (in other words, it is a successful opposite: The Sahara desert, north of Timbuktu, Mali. OLDER MEN STANDING I, II EROTIC LOOKING UP MEN – STANDING I, II, III HORSING AROUND LOOKING DOWN FAT MEN BACK VIEWS LEFT PROFILE FIGURES – DISTORTED PERSPECTIVE GUNS, ETC RIGHT PROFILE GESTURES I, II, III, IV DRESSING WOMEN DRINKING + SMOKING GESTURES – MEN IN SUITS TANKS – PLANES DRINKING SEATED MEN I, II, III AUTOS / TRUCKS CIGARETTES KNEELING / BENDING OVER I, II WHITE WOMEN – HEADS BLACK MEN I, II SEATED WOMEN I, II FRONTAL OLDER BLACK MEN CHILDREN LEFT PROFILE OLDER BLACK WOMEN WOMEN I, II, III, IV, V RIGHT PROFILE BLACK WOMEN OLDER WOMEN LOOKING DOWN MALE FIGURES ANATOMY, MAPPLETHORPE LOOKING UP HERALDIC + MYTHIC + ANAMORPHOSES ANATOMY I, II OVER THE SHOULDER LIONS / EAGLES DETAILS – ANATOMY CRYING OR PAIN PRISON SKELETONS OLDER WOMEN TITLES, SLOGANS – I, II SKULLS BLACK WOMEN – HEADS POLITICA FIGURES ARMOR FRONTAL CURRENT I, II, III, IV HERALDIC + MYTHIC OVER THE SHOULDER FUTURE PROJECTS I, II, III SPACE/COLOR I, II, III LOOKING DOWN SPHINX / LIONS JAMES NACHTWEY LOOKING UP LIONS / EAGLES DISTORTED PERSPECTIVE I, II LEFT PROFILE LIONS I, II DISTORTED PERSPECTIVES – HEADS – HANDS RIGHT PROFILE DOGS, CURRENT EXTREME EXAMPLES, ETC. I, II CRYING OF PAIN DOGS ALPHABETS OLDER BLACK WOMEN – HEADS SPECIAL I, II, III, IV FLAGS FRONTAL FRONTAL YOGA RIGHT PROFILE LEFT PROFILE HORSES LEFT PROFILE RIGHT PROFILE EAGLES OVER THE SHOULDER DOGS – BOOK PROJECT BULLS LOOKING DOWN COSMOGINIES I, II SNAKES LOOKING UP DRAWINGS, GRAFFITI, I, II FEET WHITE MEN – HEADS GRAFFITI / SLOGANS I, II EYES / MOUTH FRONTAL I, II, III, IV DRAWINGS, GRAFFITI EARS OVER THE SHOULDER DRAWINGS I, II MEN LOOKING DOWN ITALIAN GRAFFITI LEFT HAND LOOKING UP IMAGES I, II, III, IV, V RIGHT HAND RIGHT PROFILE I, II TATTOOS BOTH HANDS LEFT PROFILE I, II MALE – HEADS WOMEN CRYING OR PAIN FEMALE – HEADS LEFT HAND OLDER WHITE MEN – HEADS HEADS POLITICAL RIGHT HAND FRONTAL PORTRAITS / SPECIAL BOTH HANDS OVER THE SHOULDER THRENODY / GESTURES NAPALM LEFT PROFILE ACTIVE FIGURES EXAGGERATED EXPRESSIONS WOMEN I, II RIGHT PROFILE GYMNAST, GREEK ATHLETES EXAGGERATED EXPRESSIONS MEN I, II LOOKING UP GREEK – SPORTS – WAR MERCS I, II, III, IV LOOKING DOWN ALPHABETS SPORTS I, II, III CRYING OR PAIN AMERICAN / EL SALVADOR PRISONERS + HEADS BLACK MEN – HEADS COMPUTER IMAGES USED / UNUSED PRISONERS I, II, III FRONTAL CURRENT, I, II PRISONER, FALLEN FIGURES, DRAGGED OVER THE SHOULDER MALE FIGURES RIOTS I, II, III, IV, V RIGHT PROFILE CLASSICAL FALLEN FIGURES + HEADS LEFT PROFILE FALLEN FIGURE I, II LOOKING UP MISC: CHAIRS, WOOD, FIRE, ETC. LOOKING DOWN UNIFORM DETAILS, GESTURES CRYING OR PAIN POLICE ACTION OLDER BLACK MEN – HEADS MISC I, II, III FRONTAL LE MONDE Á L’ENVERS OVER THE SHOULDER Eco’s wondrous instrument points to the work of lists succinct “Modernism Is Kaput”), I was encouraged to draw as sketches, outlines, or patterns, and the Greek hupotuposis more poems from Leon’s lists: derives from tipos, “an impression, form, or type.” When lists become compendious, they list toward the rhetorical figure Extreme Examples, Etc. of hypotyposis, “by which a matter [is] vividly sketched in words” (according to Liddell & Scott’s Greek English The Dogs’ current book project, Lexicon). Sextus Empiricus titled his summary of the doc- “Le Monde à L’Envers,” entails trine of skepticism The Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes. their distorted perspectives Writers are especially susceptible to a kind of list-lust on tattoos, black men crying, that borders on womb-envy, since lists were there at the women drinking and smoking, misty beginnings of literacy, in those lists of sacks of grain Italian graffiti, and heads of cattle inscribed on clay tablets at Uruk, in what and James Nachtwey. is now Iraq. In lists, writers intimate origins. They hear the Homeric catalogues, the Biblical genealogies, Whitman’s Fat men in armor, Leaves, and Ginsberg’s Howl. The list is the linguistic looking up and looking down, reflection of the unstructured world; it’s what’s left when sport the exaggerated expressions of structure is pulled out. Paradoxically, the list may also be prisoners or fallen figures; the ultimate structure. When everything is compressed to while white women, its least complicated form and relation, it’s all a list. Life horsing around with lions and eagles, consists, finally, of one damn thing after another. create flags and yoga. When I first spoke with Leon Golub about his use of photographic images as source material for his paintings, But eventually, all of these he told me that he has “huge files of images and image- active figures, with their fragments. I virtually sense myself as made up of photos sometimes erotic (over the shoulder) back views, and imagistic fragments jittering in my head and onto the become mere skeletons with uniform skulls canvas.” So when he sent me the list of headings in his due to the actions of political figures image files, I took them as a kind of self-portrait, and with titles and slogans, immediately began making poems out of them, for Leon. using images and napalm. Actually, the first one, written from only the first page of the list, was a double portrait of Leon and his wife, artist So, a new form of imagism— list imagism, or, as Leon might Nancy Spero: have it, “jittery image-jism”—was born. Leon’s lists of image files refer to real filing cabinets Extreme Examples containing actual, rather than virtual, folders and documents, (for Leon & Nancy) so the items on this roll name images one can hold in the hand. This physical referent, along with the abrupt juxta- I saw positions of the headings, increases what Derrida called “archival violence” (laying down the law and giving the the anatomy of current order), and gives this list the edgy aggressiveness of Leon’s older men, standing paintings (recalling the old sense of list as “a place of combat with armored skulls, or contest”). And the pared down, fragmentary quality of the ears, eyes/mouth, and feet list—highly compressed language with large gaps between like alphabets. fragments—is also much like Leon’s recent paintings, done in what he’s called his “Late Style,” after Adorno, who wrote And seated women, bending over that late works by significant artists are “relegated to the eagles, bulls, and snakes outer reaches of art, in the vicinity of document.” in distorted perspective— current, too, The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is heraldic and mythic the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works as flags. themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance Then I remembered a poem I’d written long ago in of art. Of the works themselves it leaves only fragments Venice, an agnostic hymn to modernism called “Peg’s House,” behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through formed from titles of works in the Peggy Guggenheim the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself. collection, which began “Blu su blu in her bedroom, / to see how the modern has aged.” Since this rhymes pretty well with Leon’s various wry proclamations about 11 modernism in his works and writings (including the ingestion / Both movements inclined towards architectural monumen- The Shelf-Life of Liquefying Objects talism, grounding themselves in transcendental values. Jamer Hunt Dali, on the other hand, juxtaposes to all this a base and inglorious act—eating—and in the process throws into high Beauty shall be edible or nothing. relief the former’s puffed-up attempts to trump time. In a per- –Salvador Dali1 haps apocryphal anecdote, he recounts an exchange with that model of proper Modernism, Le Corbusier. Food rots. It becomes waste matter. Its shelf-life is momentary. The act of eating is hardly grandiose. It is a When I was barely twenty-one years old, I happened to common ritual practice—ordinary, domestic, sensual, and be having lunch one day ... in the company of the masochis- repetitive. It engages taste and waste, the senses and the tic and Protestant architect Le Corbusier who, as everyone body, but also the digestive system, elimination, and then, knows, is the inventor of the architecture of self-punishment. ultimately, even more food. We take food in, consume it, and Le Corbusier asked me if I had any ideas on the future of his it becomes us. Then we repeat. Each meal is an act of art. Yes, I had. I have ideas on everything, as a matter of fact. production and consumption, creation and destruction. I answered him that architecture would become “soft and A subject’s relation to the object of desire is unmediated— hairy.” ... In listening to me, Le Corbusier had the expression of or almost literal. It is a corporeal act mostly, a cerebral one one swallowing gall.3 only occasionally. Buildings, on the other hand, are made to last. They Yearning for a revolution in daily life, and not just in salon can mark a landscape for years, decades, or centuries; they culture, Surrealists like Dali envisioned themselves laying outlast generations. For this reason the practice of archi- waste to hide-bound, traditional values. Food, then (or more tecture inspires visions of immortality and transcendence. precisely the consumption of food) assumes a critical role Archi-tectural monuments are time-preservers pregnant that belies its usual modesty. That is, eating emerges as an with symbolism. They are bulwarks against decay and the ordinary practice ripe with the potential for altering our processes of memory loss. Monuments congeal the present perceptions of everyday life and politics. into (semi-) permanent physical form. What Dali referred to by the classification “Modern This uneasy dialectic—quivering between the enduring Style architecture” in his essay’s title was actually the Art and the evanescent—is, as Henri Lefebvre would later point Nouveau style of architectural design that seemed to be out, the mark of the everyday. That is, it illustrates two sprouting up from and overgrowing—literally—the streets of competing temporal vectors: on the one hand, the cyclical, Paris. Hector Guimard, its principal purveyor, incorporated which ties us back to more traditional repetitions (birth plant, animal, and insect motifs into the detailing of building and death, seasons, day and night); on the other hand, the facades, subway entrances, and street lamps. Tendrils modern, which is linear, productive, and transformative and shoots spread out over a building’s curvaceous, undu- (business, fashion, news). Into the slippery gap between rot lating surface, giving it a hybrid appearance somewhere and intransience—between food and architecture—slides between animal, vegetable, and mineral. While eventually Salvador Dali. disparaged by the design cognoscenti, and especially the Despite his later descent into facile mediocrity and emerging Modernists, Art Nouveau provided for Dali the commercialism, Salvador Dali’s essays from the 1930s opportunity to exercise his voracious imagination. still provoke and gleefully disorient the reader. In these, “I believe that I was the first ... to consider the delirious his spastic, incontinent prose rarely coheres into any- Modern Style architecture as the most original and the most thing digestible, yet it lingers, like dyspepsia. The early extraordinary phenomenon in the history of art, and I did Dali belongs to a kind of outsider Modernist lineage not so without a shadow of humor.”4 It is necessary to pause only because of his interest in penetrating and disrupt- momentarily upon his rationale for celebrating this specific ing placid bourgeois ritual, but through his predilection architectural vogue. Art Nouveau, with its obsessive for the ordinary forces of expenditure and decay. These decorativism, was for Dali an approach that surpassed strict themes emerge most brilliantly in a delirious essay entitled, functionalism. As a hodgepodge of historical quotations “The Terrifying and Comestible Beauty of Modern Style and technical borrowings, Art Nouveau espoused nothing Architecture,” in which Dali de-bones monuments and useful: “Everything that was the most naturally utilitarian liquefies caked-on urban infrastructure with the base and functional in the known architectures of the past materials of bodily subsistence. Originally published in suddenly ceases, in Modern Style, to serve any purpose Minotaure2—the lavishly illustrated and influential arts jour- whatever.” Folding together narrative ornament with nal produced in Paris between 1933 and 1939—his essay surface treatment, Art Nouveau pushed toward the layered gnaws away at the reigning conceits of the two early realm of dreamwork—or, as Dali describes it, “that fright- 20th-century architectural orthodoxies—the neo-classical ful impurity that has no other equivalent or equal than the tradition, which claimed an unimpeachable formalist
vocabulary, and International Style, which pre- opposite: Hans Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus (“theater of five thousand”), 12 sumed a coolly universalist, atemporal geometry. remodeled from a Berlin circus building in 1918. Later demolished. immaculate purity of oniric [sic] intertwinings.” “Modern barrier—but in this case the merger is not so much physical Style” is a condenser then, in the Freudian sense, that as it is psychic. Desire is a connective tissue entwining blends together opposing, unrelated elements into an over- the subject and the object. The innervated object is never determined but highly charged whole: “Gothic becomes free from the tendrils of desire that envelop it and produce metamorphosed in Hellenic, into Far-Eastern and, should it it as desired. The only means of satisfaction then is to occur to one—into Renaissance ... all in the feeble time and incorporate fully the object of desire, to fuse subject with space of a single window.”5 object so that they are forever indistinguishable. Thus the But it is misleading to imply that Dali saw absolutely no “fugitive” and “feeble” materializations that Dali writes of in usefulness in the vegetal motifs of Art Nouveau. They do act relation to architectural ornamentation do have a use: they as the material objectifications of desire. Dali was arguably incite desire, they whet appetite. the most resolute Freudian of all the Surrealists—and an Dali recognized that desire does not distinguish. That unvarnished neurotic. His work throughout this period and is to say, there is no perceptible difference between the the narratives he employed to explain it veer little from the registers of representation of a desired thing. In that Freudian straight and narrow. So it is of little surprise that endless play of substitutions that Freud called fetishism, he attributes the origins of his fixation on these peculiar the drives displace themselves onto whomever or whatever stylings to the functioning of his pulsating drives. All archi- is available to the psyche. The goal for the subject, however, tectural details serve only one purpose, “the ‘functioning is always the same: to incorporate completely the object of of desires,’ these being, moreover, of the most turbid, desire. Dali effectively sexes-up building details as just the disqualified and unavowable kind.”6 Dali then escalates into latest “feeble materialization” of his own ardent appetite: a hyperbolic mode that only he is capable of sustaining: Thus in my view it is precisely (I cannot emphasize this Grandiose columns and medium columns, inclined, point too strongly) the wholly ideal Modern Style architecture incapable of holding themselves up, like the tired necks of that incarnates the most tangible and delirious aspiration of heavy hydrocephalic heads, emerge for the first time in the hyper-materialism. An illustration of this apparent paradox world of hard undulations of water sculptured with a photo- will be found in a current comparison, made disparagingly it graphic scrupulousness of instantaneity until then unknown. is true, yet so lucid, which consists of assimilating a Modern They rise in waves from the polychrome reliefs, whose imma- Style house to a cake, to a pastry-cook’s exhibitionistic and terial ornamentation congeals the convulsive transition of the ornamental tart. ... The nutritive and edible character of this feeble materializations of the most fugitive metamorphoses kind of house is thus alluded to without any euphemism, these of smoke, as well as aquatic vegetations and the hair of those houses being nothing other than the first edible houses, the new women, even more “appetizing” than the slight thirst first and only erotizable buildings, whose existence verifies caused by the imaginative temperatures of the life of the that urgent “function,” so necessary to the amorous imagina- floral ecstasies into which they vanish. These columns of tion: to be able quite really to eat the object of desire.8 feverish flesh (37.5˚ C) are destined to support nothing more than the famous dragon-fly with an abdomen soft and heavy In this “new Surrealist age of the ‘cannibalism of objects,’” as the block of massive lead out of which it has been carved in buildings must be edible because they do not differ in a subtle and ethereal fashion ... [It] cannot fail to appear to us any substantial way from any other kind of object of desire. as the true “masochistic column” having solely the function of They are like the Kleinian part object, a rematerialization “letting itself be devoured by desire,” like the actual first col- of a severed lost part that, through its subsequent intro- umn built and cut out of that real desired meat toward which jection, or incorporation, completes the subject wholly. Napoleon, as we know, is always moving at the head of all real The subject absorbs the building just as the building and true imperialisms which, as we are in the habit consumes its inhabitants. of repeating, are nothing but the immense “cannibalisms of Consumption is not representational or symbolic. history” often represented by the concrete, grilled and tasty It does not stand for anything beyond the moment. Instead lamb-chop that the wonderful philosophy of dialectical it only ties us more tightly to the humbling effects of pleasure, materialism, like a new William Tell, has placed on the very rot, and decay. Whereas the Futurists conceived of solid head of politics.7 matter as just the illusion of permanence in a world of light, energy, and motion, Dali’s dematerializations are tied more It is hard to stop. The imagery builds to an orgiastic height tightly to the psyche. He perceives the landscape and that only seems to keep mounting. Yet it is hardly random. objects around him bending and twisting under desire’s Throughout the passage above, for example, tropes distorting pressures. Rock-hard pilasters and buttresses oscillate meticulously between the hard and the soft, the are simply momentary consolidations of matter in space formed and the formless (columns become tired necks; and time. Desire moves in pulsating cycles and ebbs and sculptures become water; materializations become fugitive flows. Like the “pointillist iridescences” on Gaudi’s rubbery metamorphoses of smoke; and lead becomes soft). Dali buildings, time moves “in an asymmetrical and dynamic- was determined to liquefy the membranes of the instantaneous succession of reliefs, broken, syncopated, 14 material object—to melt that subject/object entwined.”9 Time and matter contort under the same force and with the same vicissitudes. They swell to afford the full who assembled these scrolls left us with a clue to what they measure of a satisfaction (nearly) experienced. They throb were up to: here and there could be found annotations, in the and detumesce along with the erratic appetite of the drives. same language and script as the original fragments but in Consumption unites. It is common, repetitive, destructive, manifestly different hands, describing the texts as “all and regenerative. Time bends like a soft watch. Monuments written” or the like. In other words, these were texts of go limp. which new copies had been made, and they were now being marked as ready to be discarded. The monks must
1 Salvador Dali, Dali on Modern Art: The Cuckolds of Antiquated Modern Art (Mineola, have had to go through this process quite often, since birch NY: Dover Publications, 1996), p. 45. This edition reprints the English translation from bark is a fragile material once it dries out, far weaker than the bilingual edition published by the Dial Press in 1957. paper. It seems, then, that the fragments of disintegrating 2 The article was first published as “De la beauté terrifiante et comestible, de manuscripts were made up into scrolls more or less at l’architecture Modern style” in Minotaure 3–4 (Paris: Editions Albert Skira, 1933). The random and placed in clay pots, presumably for burial full body of the essay appears in translation in Dali on Modern Art (note 1 above). All sub- (suggestively, we also find pieces of human bone in such sequent citations will refer to page numbers from that Dover edition. pots). So this appears to be a Buddhist solution to the 3 Dali, pp. 29-31. problem of manuscripts too damaged to be worth keeping 4 Dali, p. 33. but too sacred to be treated as garbage. But this can only 5 Dali, p. 37. be inference, since the monks who assembled these junk 6 Dali, p. 37. scrolls have left us no explicit record of their intentions, and 7 Dali, pp. 37-9. parallels from elsewhere in the Buddhist world are scarce. 8 Dali, p. 41. A few centuries later, the Jews proved more helpful. 9 Dali, pp. 43-5. A passage in the Babylonian Talmud cites two views on the disposal of a worn-out Torah scroll. One 4th-century rabbi states that it may be buried with a scholar; another, more in LEFTOVERS / WHAT TO DO WITH A line with our Buddhist monks, says it should be put in a clay WORN-OUT KORAN pot. Such practices were to have a long history in Jewish Michael Cook communities, but they have not attracted much attention except in one very unusual case: the Cairo Genizah, a vast Say you’re a Bible-reading Christian, with the result that trove of Jewish texts dating from around the 11th century of eventually your Bible is in tatters, and it’s time to replace it. our era. Here the materials to be disposed of were not buried Getting a new one is no problem. But what are you to do or otherwise dispersed, but deposited in a room in with the old one? There are no generally accepted rules a synagogue, whence they eventually reached the hands about this in mainstream Western Christianity, so you could of modern scholars. What makes the collection particularly perfectly well dump your old Bible in the trash-can. But you valuable is the fact that the texts are not exclusively probably don’t feel comfortable with this option, and you no scriptural. They range from religious literature of various longer have room for the dog-eared volume on your book- kinds to personal documents and letters—anything written shelf. For lack of anything better to do, you very likely end in the Hebrew script seems to have been regarded as fair up putting it at the back of a closet, where you can at least game. The result is to give us a unique window onto the forget the problem till the next spring cleaning. At that everyday life of the medieval Near East. point you could maybe pass the buck by donating it to the Unfortunately for historians, medieval Muslims did Salvation Army. not have a comparable concern for the Arabic script, and Even if you are not a Bible-reading Christian, or any kind tended to confine such protective practices to the disposal of Christian, you should have no difficulty sensing that there of worn-out copies of the Koran. With this limitation, we is some kind of dilemma here. But our modern Western cul- possess at least two bodies of early Islamic material reminis- ture does not address it. Some other cultures, by contrast, cent of the Cairo Genizah. One was discovered in a small have their acts together on this issue. building in the courtyard of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus A few years ago, the British Library acquired a collec- in 1893; the texts found there, overhelmingly Koranic, were tion of 13 birch-bark scrolls containing Buddhist texts dating taken by the Ottoman authorities to Istanbul, where they from the first century of our era, together with a large clay form part of the collection of the Museum of Turkish and pot in which they had reportedly been found.1 The prov- Islamic Art. The other cache came to light in a closed-off enance was unknown, but it would be a good guess that the part of the roof-space of the Great Mosque in Sanaa, the cache came from Afghanistan. The peculiar thing about the capital city of Yemen, in the course of repairs to the building scrolls was the way they had been assembled. Rather than in 1972. This material remains in Yemen; it has been studied containing a single continuous text, a typical scroll consisted by a group of German scholars, though as yet they have of a patchwork of fragments taken from a variety of original published very little about it. In the nature of things, such scrolls—and fragments that must have derived from the material does not have much to tell us about everyday life. same original scroll would show up in several But it promises to interest scholars concerned with the 15 different scrolls. Fortunately the Buddhist monks history of the Koranic text, and in this respect the earliest fragments from Yemen are reported to display some sig- written on the celestial “guarded tablet” or on the mundane nificant archaic features, such as divergent orderings of the tablets of schoolboys, whether inscribed on stone or on chapters of the Koran. paper, whether memorized in the heart or spoken on the For us, the interesting thing about the Muslims is that tongue. Whoever said otherwise, he added, was an infidel they have much more to say about the problem of disposing whose blood might be shed and from whom God has of worn-out scripture than the Jews, let alone the Buddhists. dissociated Himself. A small treatise on the subject by Güzelhisari,2 a Turkish But there is always the possibility that modern techno- scholar of the late 17th century, sums up the methods logy is heralding the dawn of a new era. If you call up virtual already discussed by earlier Muslim jurists: burning the scripture on your computer screen, and then close the file, material, burying it, washing off the writing, setting the texts what is there left to burn, bury, wash off, or set aside?3 aside in a clean place where impure hands would not touch them (as in the cases of the collections from Damascus and Sanaa), or some combination of these procedures. 1 See Richard Salomon, Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhara: The British Library Güzelhisari himself favors burning. But it becomes clear Kharosthi Fragments (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), chapter 4. from his account of the various choices that none was felt 2 See Joseph Sadan, “Genizah and Genizah-like Practices in Islamic and Jewish to be entirely satisfactory. Burning, as one scholar cited Traditions,” Bibliotheca Orientalis, vol. 43 (1986), cols. 36-58, with further material from by Güzelhisari argues, implies disrespect—indeed it was numerous sources. the kind of thing one did with heretical books. With burial 3 This article is an expansion of a couple of paragraphs in my book The Koran: A Very there are two problems. One is that the text may be defiled Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 60-61. by contact with the earth (so it should at least be wrapped before being buried). The other is that people may tread the ground above with their feet. Washing writing off works well enough with parchment, but try doing it with paper; even then, there is the problem of disposing of the residue of inky water left behind by the departed scripture. We are not told what was wrong with putting the text aside in a clean place; perhaps, like the back of your closet, it seemed too much of a stop-gap solution—had it found general favor, we would surely have come upon many more such collections hidden away in the older cities of the Islamic world. These problems have not gone away. In 1997, the Taliban banned the use of paper bags in the part of Afghanistan under their control, for fear that they might con- tain recycled Koranic texts that would then be defiled. Two thousand years after the Buddhists had assembled their junk scrolls for disposal, in a land in which Buddhism was now utterly forgotten, the old concern of the monks was still nag- ging at the hearts of true believers. But what exactly is this concern? Just what is it that stops you dumping your worn-out scripture in the trash- can? It might be a purely subjective anxiety—you could feel that it wouldn’t do God’s word any harm, but that it would nevertheless be disrespectful on your part. Or it might be an objective concern—you could think that you would do damage to God’s word by defiling it, whatever the precise nature of that damage might be. Since people don’t generally address this issue, it’s hard to know what they think, if indeed they think anything at all. But we can perhaps say one thing. The more directly you identify the book on your shelf as God’s very word—as opposed to, say, a copy of a translation of a version of God’s word—the more likely you are to think in terms of an objective process of defilement independent of your own attitudes. And such direct identifi- cation is strongly present in orthodox Islam. For Tabari, a famous scholar in early 10th-century Iraq, the Koran was
God’s uncreated word however it was written or opposite: Koran frontispiece fragment, c. 8th century, from the Great Mosque 16 recited, whether in heaven or on earth, whether in Sanaa, Yemen.
maIN EDISON’S WARRIORS Christoph Cox
Real security can only be attained in the long run through confusion. — Hilton Howell Railey, commander of the Army Experimental Station1
Simulantur quae non sunt. Quae sunt vero dissimulantur. — Motto of the 23rd Special Troops2
In “The Invisible Generation,” an experimental text from 1962, William S. Burroughs unveiled a proposal to unleash urban mayhem via the use of portable tape recorders. “Now consider the harm that can be done and has been done when recording and playback is expertly carried out in such a way that the people affected do not know what is happening,” he wrote. “Bands of irresponsible youths with tape recorders playing back traffic sounds that confuse motorists,” Burroughs gleefully imagined, could incite “riots and demonstrations to order.”3 Championing the productive (and destructive) powers of portable audio, “The Invisible Generation” is an emblematic text in the history of sound art and DJ culture. Yet, nearly 20 years earlier, Burroughs’s vision had already been conceived and deployed by none other than the United States Army, whose “ghost army,” the 23rd Special Troops, included several units dedicated to “sonic deception” and its results: enemy confusion and carnage.4 The first division in American Armed Forces history assigned exclusively to camouflage and deception, the 23rd was a military oddity. Despite the centrality of deception in the history of warfare from the Trojan Horse on, soldiers drilled in the West Point code of duty, honor, trust, and integrity were ill-suited to a life of simulation and dissimulation; and American officers tended to dismiss deceptive tactics as underhanded, a sign of weakness in every sense.5 It’s not surprising, then, that the 23rd consisted primarily of a population with an occupational predisposition to deception, invention, and fabrication: artists. Actors, painters, graphic designers, set designers, fashion designers, and special effects experts (among them Ellsworth Kelly, Bill Blass, Art Kane, and George Diestel) were recruited from New York art schools and Holly- wood studios to paint camouflage, build inflatable rubber guns and tanks, set off fake explosions, and publicly impersonate offi- cers and soldiers from other divisions. At the helm were two high-profile hucksters: Hollywood heartthrob Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and public relations genius Hilton Howell Railey, who had discovered Amelia Earhart, attempted to raise the sunken Lusitania, and assisted Admiral Byrd in his expedition to the Antarctic. It was Fairbanks who was responsible for marketing “sonic deception” to America’s military brass. In the early 1940s, a family friend, Lord Louis Mountbatten, told Fairbanks about a secret British unit, based in a castle in Scotland, which was experimenting with sound effects, broadcasting recordings of tanks, aircraft, armored cars, and soldiers’ voices under the cover of fog or 19 smoke screens. The British had already experimented above: Two unauthorized insignias designed by men of the 23rd Special Troops. with sonic tactics in the North African desert, hiring an development of wire and tape recorders in the early 20th Egyptian film company to broadcast sound effects in an century marked a break in the history of military deception effort to confuse the Italians and Germans. Keen on selling analogous to the shift from silent to sound film. It’s fitting, sonic deception to the US Army and Navy, Mountbatten then, that sonic deception was brought to the Armed Forces trained Fairbanks in the practice of audio warfare and sent by Fairbanks, Jr., whose film career is distinguished from him on missions into occupied France. his father’s—silent film star Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.—by the Returning to the US in 1942, Fairbanks eventually advent of sound cinema. convinced the Navy to set up a special deception unit dubbed The ear is deceived more readily than the eye. Passive the “Beach Jumpers.” At the BJ’s camp in Virginia, Hollywood and reactive, its most primitive function is to alert the creature special effects expert Fletcher Stevens gave lessons in pyro- to impending danger. And, unlike seeing, hearing is immersive technics. Fairbanks lectured on the use of smoke screens and and communal. Whether or not we want to, we hear from dummy paratroopers. And acoustical engineer Harold Burris- all directions at once. Hence, without visual evidence of Meyer—who had recently developed the stereo sound system the source, the ear easily mistakes the copy for the original, for Disney’s Fantasia—briefed the troops on state-of-the-art Memorex for the live event. As the National Defense Research tactics of audio wizardry and sound camouflage. Committee put it in its report “Sonic Deception: The Repro- Burris-Meyer’s early projects were hilariously low-tech. duction, Transmission, and Reception of Deceptive Sounds,” Impressed by the terrifying sirens used on German planes “An observer, under the strain of an impending attack and during bombing raids, he attempted to simulate the experi- under conditions of poor visibility, such as moonlight or ence by tossing bottles out of an airplane, hoping that the dawn, will transform a suggestive noise, faintly heard, into a air moving across the mouths of the bottles would produce strong illusion of a concentration of enemy forces and may an eerie whine. When the bottles fell silently to the ground, firmly believe that he sees as well as hears them.”6 Burris-Meyer opted for a more high-tech approach. Exploiting these sensory characteristics and the new art Before the arrival of sound recording, sonic tactics had and science of sound recording, Fairbanks and Burris-Meyer little role to play in military deception. Soldiers could set off set to work perfecting a strategy for sonic deception known decoy explosions or use noise to deceive the enemy about the as Project 17:3-1: “The Physiological and Psychological size of an invading force. But Edison’s invention of 20 the phonograph in 1877 and the subsequent above: World War II-era inflatable tank. Effects of Sound on Men in Warfare.” They recruited Harvey and direction of each sound under every possible weather Fletcher, director of acoustic research at New Jersey’s Bell condition and in every possible landscape. Meteorological Telephone Labs and an inventor who, in the 1920s, had trucks were built to accompany the sonic cars into battle. patented stereo headphones and an early hearing aid. The By the summer of 1944, Railey’s unit was ready to roll. crew began work in February of 1942, and, by the fall of that In war games across Pine Camp’s 100,000 acres, the year, were ready for a test run. 3132nd Signal Service Company Special (as the unit was On the night of 27 October, a fleet of specially-outfitted called) operated like a mobile collective of DJs. Shrouded by fishing boats followed Navy and Coast Guard vessels out of smoke screens spread by accompanying “chemical units,” New York harbor toward the Jersey shore. Three hundred the audio camoufleurs faded and mixed sounds on multiple infantrymen waited on the beach at Sandy Hook, expecting recorders to produce a perfect blend of surround-sound an attack but not knowing from which direction it would verisimilitude. Relaying sounds from one car to another, they come. The fishing boats anchored at the south end of the could perfectly simulate the movement of a platoon and beach, hidden behind a smokescreen dropped by overhead avoid location by enemy technology. planes. Tossed about by choppy seas, crewmen laid com- Meanwhile, Burris-Meyer was at work on his most mercial sound-effects records on portable phonographs fantastic project yet: a torpedo housing a recorder, a floating and blasted them through 500-watt amplifiers and public speaker, and a timer. Fired from a submarine, the torpedo address speakers. Though the rough seas caused the would travel a distance and then surface. When the timer hit needles to skip about on the records, the beach troops were zero, the torpedo would eject the speaker and start the tape fooled. Their commander sent them to the southern flank, recorder, which would play a program of sound effects and while the amphibious troops landed from the north. Watching then self-destruct. the show from the Dixonia, a luxury yacht loaned by the All this research, technology, and training took place millionaire Walgreen family, Fairbanks was gleaming. while the war was raging abroad. Fairbanks’s Beach Hilton Howell Railey was also aboard the Dixonia to Jumpers made it to the European theater in the fall of 1943; witness the “Battle of Sandy Hook.” While Fairbanks took the but Railey’s 3132nd didn’t see action until a year later. Beach Jumpers to North Carolina to work on Naval deception, Nonetheless, the two units took part in more than a dozen Railey set up the Army Experimental Station at Pine Camp operations. The Beach Jumpers diverted Axis armies during in upstate New York near the Canadian border. Eager to get the invasions of Sicily and southern France and broadcast into battle as soon as possible, Fairbanks was satisfied with false radio signals during campaigns in the Pacific. The the existing technology—turntables, P.A. speakers, and stock 3132nd deployed their sonic tactics throughout Europe, sound effects records. Railey wanted and needed more hi-fi successfully simulating tank movements, truck convoys, gear. Working with the engineers at Bell Labs, he replaced the motorboat crossings, and bridge and camp construction. turntables with magnetic wire recorders that spun two-mile The successes of the 3132nd led to the organization and spools of stainless-steel carrying 30 minutes of continuous deployment of another sonic deception unit, the 3133rd, sound. And he contracted Jensen to manufacture weather- which shipped off to Europe displaying the banner “Railey’s proof boxes housing 40-watt speakers with impeccable Rodeo—192 clowns and 10 featured artists.” The 3133rd audio fidelity. The recorders, speakers, and gas generators— took part in two operations before the surrender of the all 800 pounds of them—were installed in “sonic cars,” Army Japanese and the war’s end. vehicles fitted with shock-proof mountings and speaker The end of the war notwithstanding, Railey continued to cranes, and rigged to explode if captured by the enemy. press the Army to allow him to continue his work on sonic Electronics geek Walter Manser was hired to record a deception. Denied the necessary funding, he planned to tour custom library of sound effects. For three weeks, he directed the country demonstrating the powers and possibilities of tanks and cars to start, stop, idle, approach, retreat, drive deceptive tactics. But in November of 1945, the Army over bridges and up and down hills, while he recorded Experimental Station was officially shut down, its equip- the sounds onto glass disks in a portable studio set up in the ment dismantled and dispersed, and its troops instructed to back of a van. Building an exhaustive audio catalogue of keep silent about their operations for at least 50 years. Inter- military activity, he recorded soldiers’ voices, bulldozers, the viewed recently at a reunion of the 23rd, Lt. Dick Syracuse racket of bridge construction, and every sound that might be wryly remarked: “None of this ever happened—there was no of use in a deceptive operation. Learning that the Japanese deception unit. No sonic company, no camouflage company, peasant infantry superstitiously associated the sound of no 23rd Special Troops. We staged this whole reunion. We barking dogs with impending death, Manser had his men never did any of it.”7 round up and record packs of noisy canines, whose barking Following World War II, the US Armed Forces seemed and yapping he embedded in ambient sounds recorded in to have lost interest in the art of deception. Yet, during the the Panamanian rainforest. Reagan administration, the Army and Department of Aided by Bell Labs technicians, the crew also conducted Defense sought to revive it. In October 1988, as George exhaustive research into “sound ranging.” Measuring all the Bush, Sr. was campaigning for the presidency, the Army physical characteristics of sound, they determined issued a field manual calling military deception a “lost art” 21 the projection distance and the appropriate volume and urging its revitalization.8 “Today, commanders use little deception in planning, directing, and conducting combat operations,” the manual noted. “As a result, many deception- related skills that have served our Army well in the past have been forgotten, and where remembered, have not been made part of our war-fighting capabilities Armywide.” The manual included a description of “sonic deception” that sounded like it might have been written by Railey a half- century earlier. Whether or not the Army heeded this advice, we probably won’t know for another half-century. But, true to Burroughs’s vision, sonic warfare has spilled out from the battlefields and onto the streets. Since the late 1960s, police have controlled crowds and dispersed riots using acoustic cannons that emit the infrasonic “brown sound,” so-called for its bowel-churning properties. And from Sydney, Australia to Charlotte, North Carolina, malls and bus stations pump out Bing Crosby, smooth jazz, and French opera to scare off loitering teenagers. Yet, artists—one-time collaborators with military and law enforcement—have begun to appropriate these tactics and technologies for themselves. Martin Kersels’s kinetic sculpture Brown Sound Kit (1994) brought the punishing effects of infrasound into the aesthetic domain. Carsten Nicolai sprayed “sound graffiti” throughout the town of Kassel during 1997’s Documenta X. And M. W. Burns’s Posing Phrases heckled Chicago pedestrians with disem- bodied voices run through hidden speakers. Such isolated acts of guerilla audio forecast an age of full-scale sonic terrorism once-again prefigured by Burroughs, this time by his “Subliminal Kid,” who “took over bars cafés and jukeboxes of the world cities and installed radio transmitters and microphones in each bar so that the music and talk of any bar could be heard in all his bars and he had tape recorders in each bar that played and recorded at arbitrary intervals . . . so he set waves and eddies and tornadoes of sound down all your streets.”9
1 Quoted in Jonathan Gawne, Ghosts of the ETO: American Tactical Deception Units in the European Theater 1944–1945 (Havertown, Pennsylvania: Casemate, 2002), p. 69. 2 “Simulate what does not exist. Dissimulate what does exist.” Jack Kneece, Ghost Army of World War II (Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican, 2001), p. 16. 3 William S. Burroughs, “The Invisible Generation,” from The Ticket that Exploded, reprinted in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader, ed. James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg (New York: Grove Press, 1998), pp. 220, 222. 4 My account is drawn from three histories of the 23rd unit: Gawne, Ghosts of the ETO, Kneece, Ghost Army of World War II, and Philip Gerrard, Secret Soldiers: The Story of World War II’s Heroic Army of Deception (New York: Dutton, 2002). 5 Gawne, Ghosts of the ETO, pp. vii, 68. 6 Quoted in Gerrard, Secret Soldiers, p. 52. 7 Quoted in Gerrard, Secret Soldiers, p. 338. 8 “FM 90-2, Battlefield Deception,” Headquarters, Department of Army, Washington, DC, 3 October 1988,
right: Authorized insignia of the Army Experimental Station. 22 opposite: Manx Airlines airsickness bag. Triskelion Sasha Archibald
The three-pronged rotating disk pictured on this vomit bag is a stylized version of the triskelion, an ancient symbol with a long history akin in breadth, if not emotional resonance, to the swastika. The Manx Airlines logo is only one of many adapta- tions of the emblem, whose history is commonly said to have begun in Asia Minor, although versions of the symbol have been found in ancient Sanskrit, the rock engravings of Hopi Indians in North America, and Norse mythology. Regarded as having a meaning identical to that of the swastika— emblematic of the sun’s movement through the heavens and, hence, of good fortune and prosperity—the triskelion is nonetheless slightly more curious, with its trinity of figurative legs. The symbol is presumed to have begun as a pictograph of the sun whose curved rays were anthropomorphized, perhaps in reference to the deities who personified the sun. The symbol becomes associated as early as the 6th century BC with Sicily, then a Greek colony, purportedly because of the island’s three promontories. It remains the country’s official emblem. It is also the proud symbol of the Manx people of the Isle of Man, who seem to have the right, following the movement of traditional Breton inadvertently inherited it from the Sicilians via a long chain dances and processions (a leftward-turning symbol would of royal marriage and conquest. The triskelion makes its first imply hostility) and is encircled by a gold ring emblazoned appearance on the Isle of Man on the Manx Sword of State with the text “Wheresoever you throw it, it will stand.” in 1266, the year in which the Normans ceded the island During World War II, the symbol was associated with to Alexander III of Scotland. How Alexander III became a different maxim; soldiers of the 23rd Special Troops, or the acquainted with the Sicilian triskelion is a somewhat con- “Ghost Army,” designed their insignia by combining the tri- voluted story. Historian John Newton postulates that the skelion with three bolts of lightning and the unconventional migration of the symbol began with Alexander III’s marriage to motto, “Deceive to Defeat.” A troop of soldiers with art and Margaret, a daughter of Henry III.1 Margaret’s sister, Isabella, design backgrounds who specialized in deception-based married the Norman king of Sicily, Frederick III, but bore him warfare, the Ghost Army created innovative camouflage no male heir. When Frederick died and his illegitimate son techniques, used sound recordings of soldier activity to took the regency, Pope Innocent IV solicited Henry III’s assis- disorient or mislead the opposition, and fabricated inflatable tance in organizing a coup against the son. In exchange for decoys. The Ghost Army’s existence remained classified his help, Henry demanded that Sicilian rule be awarded to his information until 1995; their insignia of legs without faces, child son (Margaret’s younger brother), Prince Edmund. The unauthorized by the Army and only secretly circulated Pope agreed to Henry’s terms. Alexander III and Margaret amongst members of the troupe, aptly conveys the regiment’s apparently visited England in 1254, a visit that coincided with covert operations. the extravagant celebrations honoring Prince Edmund’s new The triskelion might also be recognized as the central title—celebrations that would have undoubtedly venerated visual motif of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 4 (1994), which the Sicilian symbol. Alexander, apparently impressed by the takes place on the Isle of Man and richly alludes to the island’s emblem, recycled it for the Isle of Man when he was ceded folklore and mythology. In the film, three teams, the Ascending the territory 12 years later. Hacks, the Descending Hacks, and the Loughton Candidate, Manx citizens, however, seem to prefer an official a satyr wearing a suit, compete in a race that alludes to the history of the symbol that reaches back to ancient Norse, Isle of Man’s annual Tourist Trophy motorbike races. The not Scottish influence; in fact, their unofficial motto for the triskelion is the racers’ emblem, emblazoned on motorcycle symbol jeers: “The Arms of Man are three legs: One kneels sidecars and helmets, but also provides the shape of the race to England, another kicks at Scotland and the third spurns itself. The teams furiously travel in three arcs—one to the left, Ireland!” Norse mythology relates the symbol to the Celtic one to the right, while the Loughton Candidate burrows triplicity in unity—the wave of the sea, the breath of the wind, downward through the earth—towards their finish line: the and the flame of the fire form an equilateral triangle around central axis of the triskelion’s spinning legs and point of the earth element—and this tripartite structure is also appar- fusion, collision, and consummation. ent in the trident of Mannanan, the ancient sea-god whose
home was the Isle of Man and for whom the island is 1 John Newton, “The Armorial Bearings on the Isle of Man,” Proceedings of the Literary 23 named. The Isle of Man’s triskelion pointedly turns to and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, no. XXXIX 1885), p. 207. above left: Small silver coin (drachma) from Syracuse, c. 317-310 BC. above center: Coin from Aspendos, Greece, 440-400 BC. Courtesy the British Museum. above right: Rendering of 1733 Manx coinage. below left: Isle of Man flag c. 1700, from a flag chart by C. Dankerts. below center: Pommel of the Manx Sword of State, c. 1266. below right: Bicyclo[3.3.3]undecane molecule, called “Manxane.” opposite above: Postcard from the Isle of Man. opposite below: Matthew Barney, preparatory sketch for Cremaster 4, 1994. © Matthew Barney. Courtesy Barbara Gladstone & Guggenheim 24 Museum.
Border Sound Files: ExceRpts from an Audio Essay Josh Kun
I. Opening Sound Mix
[Track 1: Play Manu Chao, “Bienvenido a Tijuana.”]
‑[Track 2: Play opening 45 seconds of Zoo Sonico, “Speed Trip,” then fade down and continue playing on low vol‑ ume.]
II. Tijuana, Mexico I am in my car, waiting, in a sea of at least a hundred other cars, in a cloud of early morning exhaust, pan dulce fumes, and wet concrete steam, to cross the border. I am waiting to leave a city where drug barons live by the sea and Indians live between refrigerator boxes and discarded doors on crowded muddy hillsides for San Ysidro, a city that is a gateway to all the other cities del norte, all the other cities that are becoming more and more like Tijuana everyday. The more times I do this, the less I see what’s all around me—vendors selling leather back cushions, men in white suits holding white church collection buckets, fading reward posters for the murderous Arellano-Felix narco brothers who only two years ago woke 21 Pai-Pai Indians from their beds in Ensenada and opened fire on them and who only eight years ago recruited members of San Diego’s Thirteenth Street gang to gun down Cardinal Ocampo—and the more I hear what’s all around me, the barked pitches, the alms pleas, the rattling mufflers, the radio crossing reports that bounce out of rolled-down windows. “Fifty cars in lane one. Sixty cars in lane two. Forty cars in lane three.” It’s a soundscape like no other, a sonic symphony of banda and Sum 41, Los Panchos and Avril Lavigne, conducted by globalization’s invisible 9-to- 5 crunch and played with determination by urban rancheros in shining Ford Rangers, import/export assistants on their way to San Diego offices, gringos in college sweatshirts heading home after mountain biking in Ensenada, and Tijuana mothers on their way to JC Penney in Chula Vista. Local Tijuanenses have a name for all this. Before getting in their cars to cross, they turn on the radio para escuchar la linea. To listen to the line. When I finally pull up to the border patrol agents, they search the car, probing between the seams of the seats and emptying my trunk. I know if I look at them I will look guilty of something that I have not done. So instead I just keep my eyes on the bend of road ahead and keep listening to a future that’s already happening.
[Fade track 2 back up for 30 seconds, then fade out.]
III. Buenos Aires, Argentina In 1941, the Argentinean poet Carlos Argentino called Jorge Louis Borges on the telephone. Argentino was panicking; his family home where he was now living and in the midst of finishing a poem, was about to be destroyed to make 26 room for a confectionery. He told Borges, who was blind in one eye and partially blind in the other, that the US city on the other side back in the 1958 B-movie Touch demolition must stop. In the dining-room cellar of the of Evil—no fences, no walls, no car searches—all you house was something he needed desperately in order heard was Henry Mancini. to finish writing—an aleph. [Track 4: Play Henry Mancini, “Touch of Evil: Main An aleph, Borges is told in the 1945 parable in which Title.” Fade up at 0:36 and fade out at 1:19.] he describes it, “is one of the points in space containing all points, ... the place where, without any possible confusion, When they did it again in 1998, you heard a lot more. all the places in the world are found, seen from every angle.” Now Los Robles didn’t just have a soundtrack, it produced When Borges goes over to the house to see the aleph first sound, and not a single sweep of sound but a piecemeal hand, he lacks language to describe what he sees within montage of sound that moved from style to style as its 2-3 centimeters of diameter—the vocabularies do not Heston and Leigh moved from border space to border exist, there is no discipline of knowledge to which the space. Now the car bomb ticked between mambo- aleph belongs that could effectively express the enormity mutated conga hiccups and braying goats, and now of the convergence, the boundless cosmic space of over- each bar that Vargas and his new white bride walked lapping realities, that Borges witnessed in Argentino’s past had its own music: swinging jazz out of one doorway, cellar. “I saw millions of delightful and atrocious acts,” he dragging dirty blues out of another. wrote, “none astonished me more than the fact that all of The difference was crucial, not just for how much them together occupied the same point, without super- better it got the reality of border sound—a polyphonic position and without transparency.” crossroads of channel-zapped north and south, folklorico In 1974, the French writer Georges Perec wrote a and pop, city and country—but for how much closer it book called Species of Spaces and in the middle of it, stuck to the original vision of the film’s director, Orson rather suddenly, he asked: “Is the aleph, that place in Welles. Back in 1957, the studio took control of the picture Borges from which the entire world is visible, anything away from Welles and edited the final cut themselves other than an alphabet?” without his supervision. When he saw the studio cut— What if Borges were still alive? What if Carlos Argen- the same cut which debuted in theaters the following year tino was living in Tijuana or Nogales or Juarez or Mexicali and that has been the Touch of Evil that generations of and what if his house was about to be torn down to make film audiences have known—he was so outraged that he room for a maquiladora or if his cellar was being gradually wrote a 58-page memo detailing the changes he wanted destroyed by moist earth contaminated with toxic runoff to be made. Chief among them was the removal of Henry from a nearby smelting plant? And what if Borges went Mancini’s symphonic “Main Title” score. Nobody listened. over to see the aleph but instead of finding it in the cellar Forty years later, the film was re-cut to answer Welles’s and instead of finding it in the alphabet, he finds it by look- lengthy edit memo by expert sound engineer Walter ing out of Argentino’s window, out at the world created by Murch. Murch found not only Welles’s original source but a line drawn in the sand and then “a hidden layer of sound effects … allowing the audience re-drawn with wire fences and then re-drawn with steel to hear the town, the footsteps of the pedestrians, their walls and then re-drawn with steel walls wired with voices, the laughter of the crowds, the sirens—even the electronic sensors and digital cameras? And since ocular bleating of a pack of goats stuck in the middle of the road.” vision was not the usual way that Borges saw the world, [Track 5: Play Walter Murch edit, “Touch of Evil: Main what if instead of seeing the convergences of all points Title” and fade out at 0:38.] in space, he heard them? Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the “The plan was to feature a succession of different and entire world is audible, anything other than the border? contrasting musical numbers,” Welles wrote in the memo. As Borges reminds us, the aleph is the first letter of “In honky-tonk districts on the border, loudspeakers are the Hebrew alphabet and in the Jewish mystical text over the entrance of every joint, large or small, each of the kabbalah, the aleph is ein-sof, “limitless and pure blasting out its own tune by way of a ‘come on’ or a ‘pitch’ divinity.” Near the San Ysidro-Tijuana crossing point, on for the tourists. The fact that the streets of these border the Mexican side, there is a large piece of quarry stone towns are invariably loud with this music was planned as meant to mark the border line. It reads “Limite de La a basic device throughout the picture.” Welles wanted Republica de Mexico.” The border, the limit without limits, “mambo-type rhythm numbers with rock-and-roll” el limite sin limite. because he had listened to the border long enough to know that the border is where sound is restless, not where [Track 3: Play Control Machete, “Te Aprovechas de it rests. By 1958, mambo had already hit the United States Limite?” and fade out at 0:22.] after being cultivated by Perez Prado in Mexico City and IV. Los Robles, Mexico rock-and-roll had already hit Tijuana with bands like Los The first time Janet Leigh and Charleton Heston (in brown- Locos del Ritmo and Los Rockin Devils. Welles understood face as Mexican narco-cop Mike Vargas) walked 27 from “the Paris of the border” into the unnamed opposite: Tourists pose for a souvenir photo postcard. that the border between Los Robles and the United States—a white outcast on the lam, a white preppy looking for cheap border inspired by the one that separates Tijuana from San sex, or a neo-Beat bohemian searching for illicit anti- Ysidro—was a space of sonic multiplicity where rock bumps authoritarian kicks. The dealer is Chicano and he’s looking up against mambo, blues interrupts Latin jazz, and Murch across the border not just for refuge but for a role model. He’s never stops cutting the sounds against and into each other as looking to be the next Joe Grandi. long as Vargas and his bride keep moving. On the cover of the album Frost’s song appears on, There is one sound that remains constant—the sound of When Hell LA Freezes Over, he’s standing in white camou- the radio in the car, the car that will by the end of the 3 minutes flage in front of a silver military Humvee. Behind him, only and 20 seconds, explode, its sound turning the heads of 10 minutes from the Venice Beach back lot that doubled Heston and Leigh, its sound the one that keeps bringing both as Touch of Evil’s Los Robles, is downtown Los Angeles, sides of the border together for the rest of the film. the original center of what was once Mexican Los Angeles, But a cut-up of Touch of Evil’s original sound source before there was a border, before there was any line between actually surfaced before Murch’s 1998 re-edit, at the hands of Los Robles and the other side, before there was any line that perhaps a less likely suspect, the Chicano rapper and you had to walk across. producer Frost. A year before Murch re-cut the opening [Track 7: Play Charles Mingus, “Tijuana Gift Shop,” and score, Frost was busy sampling dialogue from the film’s story fade out at 0:50.] of a corrupt US cop working in conjunction with a local drug cartel. The song the sample appears on is “Mexican Border” V. Los Angeles, California and it details the exploits of a young East LA drug dealer who When Charles Mingus, a jazz bassist who could count black, sells drugs smuggled from Mexico in his Southern California white, Indian, Asian, and Mexican in his bloodline but self- neighborhood. In the song, he is on his way down to the identified as a “half-schitt-colored nigger,” left LA for Tijuana Mexican border to pick up his latest shipment from Sinaloa in 1957, he ended up in a five-dollar-a-night hotel with a fleet when he is stopped by a cop for speeding. The cop ends up of Mexican hookers. He had sex with 23 of them. Or at least dead, and the dealer keeps heading south down I-5 in a Chev- that’s how Mingus told it in his 1971 autobiography, Beneath rolet. As he passes through Oceanside and gets close to San the Underdog. There his famed trip to Tijuana with drummer Ysidro, he channels the voice of narco boss Uncle Joe Grandi Dannie Richmond is one extended fuck-a-thon dubbed in bad (played by Russian actor Akim Tamiroff) as he threatens the Mexican accents (“Sí, señor. We come, fooke everybody. life of Mike Vargas, the saintly Mexican cop with a white fian- Party. Sí. You pay.”) that finds Mingus doing what he does cée who will eventually bring Grandi to his knees. throughout the book: grappling with the constrictions of American race by buying, selling, and dominating women [Track 6: Play Frost, “Mexican Border.” Fade up at 2:40 with a gargantuan sexual architecture. and fade out at 3:05.] With Mingus, the fiction of experience was more The border of Touch of Evil is the border of Hollywood arche- important than the fact of it; after all, this is a guy who origi- type, a place of sin and corruption, of fortune tellers and nally wanted Beneath to be bound in white leather and prostitutes, where the Puritanical values of the North have titled “Holy Bible.” The fictions of his Tijuana adventure led no authority once they cross the line. “Tijuana is nothing,” to the fact of Tijuana Moods, an entire album (his first stereo Raymond Chandler made Phillip Marlowe say in The Long recording, and his first for a major label) that celebrates the Goodbye, “All they want there is the buck. The kid who sidles Tijuana that only exists in the collective imagination of North over to your car and looks at you with big wistful eyes and American mythology. says, One Dime Please Mister, will try to sell you his sister in Tijuana. Our pueblo of donkey shows and gambling the next sentence.” houses. Our pueblo of 24-hour sin and self-serve salvation. It is the border that every Hollywood outlaw and criminal Our pueblo of Protestant release and Mexican divorce. wants to make a run for, its lawlessness—the last frontier Like Mingus’s sexcapades, the Tijuana of legend and that US lawmen could not cross—a sanctuary for those living lore is itself a composite of fact and fiction—a city that only outside the law. One of Hollywood’s earliest productions, began to register in the US brain during Prohibition, when its Charlie Chaplin’s 1923 The Pilgrim, ends with Chaplin— Agua Caliente casino became a fave playground for party- a thief on the run from the law—straddling the Texas-Mexico starved Hollywooders and bars on La Revo were the only borderline, with one foot in the land of the law and the other places you could get a decent drink in public. in the land where law no longer applies. In 1971, Sweet The cover of Tijuana Moods describes the album’s task Sweetback headed for Tijuana at the finale of his Baad as re-creating “an exciting stay in Mexico’s wild and con- Asssss Song with police dogs barking at his feet, and in troversial border town.” In the liner notes, Mingus gushes 2003, Charlie’s Angel Drew Barrymore fled her assassin about the city’s “wine-women-song-and-dance.” The songs ex-boyfriend by hiding out in a Tijuana dive, even though it splice castanets, free improv, and rolling blues into odes to was really a hipster margarita bar in West Hollywood. strippers (“Ysabel’s Table Dance”), cheap souvenirs (“Tijuana The dealer in Frost’s song is just another of these on-the- Gift Shop”), nightclubs (“Flamingo”), and nomadic mariachis run outlaws headed south for safety, “headin’ down 28 to the Mexican border,” but Frost’s dealer is not a opposite and overleaf: US-Mexico border fence. Photos Josh Kun.
(“Los Mariachis [The Street Musicians]”). And on the cover, Let my children hear Mingus. a Mexican prostitute in a tacky brothel gown flashes her Permite que mis niños escuchen a Mingus, black garter, drags on a cigarette, and leans, come-hither a Mingus, style, against a jukebox. desde Cuernavaca a Los Angeles, In his biography of Mingus, music critic Gene Santoro desde Los Angeles a Tijuana, explains Mingus’s obsession with this mythic Tijuana as just permite que mis niños escuchen a Mingus. another example of northern bohos looking for sexual sal- vation in the brown otherness of Mexico. Which is certainly [Track 9: Play Kingston Trio, “Tijuana Jail,” and fade out true but it’s not enough, because Tijuana and Mexico were at 0:52.] also more than that for Mingus. They were key places for this self-avowed “mongrel” to both figure out and escape the VI. Tijuana, Mexico entrapping, often suffocating racial binaries of civil rights When the Kingston Trio, three white Ivy League folksingers in America. plaid pants who tried to cash in on the Calypso craze of Mingus was born on the border (in Nogales) and died, the 1950s and ended up as the catalysts for the 1960s folk of Lou Gehrig’s disease, in Cuernavaca (where he had been revival, went down to Tijuana in 1959, they spent a wild night living in the care of a Mexican healer). He grew up in Watts drinking and gambling in one of the city’s notorious casinos going to school with and dating Mexican kids and had family and ended up in an equally notorious Tijuana jail. When they in New Mexico who spoke Spanish. His mother’s “Indian performed their song “Tijuana Jail” on The Jack Benny Show features” often led to her being mistaken for Mexican, and that same year, they sang it inside a mock jail cell with War- Mingus himself passed to get admitted into the Musicians’ ner Brothers vocal chameleon Mel Blanc— Union. Mingus was too black to be white and too light to the same man responsible for the voice of Mexican rodent be black. Speedy Gonzalez since 1955—handling the “sí señors” of “He wanted to be one or the other,” Mingus wrote of the Mexican cops. himself, “but he was a little of everything, wholly nothing, There is nothing dated about the Kingston Trio’s jail of no race, country, flag, or friend.” Mingus was beaten up by fantasy. Its mythologization of Tijuana criminality and Anglo blacks for looking Mexican and beaten up by Mexicans for debauchery remains very contemporary. For starters, the being black. 1983 film Losin’ It, starring a young Tom Cruise, basically Mingus loved his make-believe Tijuana, his “expected built its script from the plot of the song. The “it” was Cruise’s dream” of it, because it gave him a way out of all this. It virginity and the process of its loss began with shots of him was the archetypal border town and Mingus spent his life and his buddies flexing their adolescent muscles and stuffing struggling with the borders of race (so much so that he often their underwear in front of the mirror. “Hey, where you going?” said he wanted to retreat to “a colorless island”). Tijuana was a cheerleader asks the guys, and they respond, “to the nasti- somewhere where all these designations fell apart, some- est, raunchiest, most bitchinist place in the world... where that wasn’t the US, where the freedom he was Tia Juana!” promised hadn’t already soured into the “bullschitt freedom” As they cross the checkpoint, the sound mix goes from he decried up north. Tijuana was somewhere he could figure Eddie Conchran’s “Summertime Blues” to The Champs’ out, however violently, however destructively, his relation- “Tequila” until they end up in a strip club with an ex-pat ship to himself. gringo on stage leading a strip revue. “Tia Juana!” he shouts. Mingus left a legacy there. His son, Eugene, lived there “Tia Juana who?” the crowd shouts back, “Tia Juana bring for awhile, working as a manager and occasional sound man your mother to the gang bang.” By night’s end, after a donkey for the punk band Tijuana NO, whose recent album Contra show and a bar fight, one of them gets thrown in the Kings- Revolución Avenue set out to overturn all the Tijuana myths ton Trio jail. that Mingus needed to make true in order to survive. Last The Tijuana Jail has also been recreated as a room in year, a young Tijuana poet named Miguel Angel Soria and the FantaSuites theme-hotel chain, which allows paying two African-American jazz musicians from San Diego put customers the chance to spend a night alone in a mock jail their ear to the Tijuana-San Diego border zone and heard its cell complete with stone walls covered in graffiti, a queen geography through the thick steel plucks of Mingus’s bass. bed hanging from the ceiling by chains, and a copy of the Kingston Trio on the stereo. [Track 8: Play Miguel Angel Soria, “Geografia Con When Herb Alpert, a young Russian-Jewish trumpet Mingus.” Fade in at 2:33 and fade out at 3:27.] player from Boyle Heights who had cut his teeth writing hits One of the more notorious non-musical moving images of for Sam Cooke, went down to Tijuana in 1962, he ended up in Mingus comes from the 1968 documentary Mingus which a Tijuana bullring. Alpert had been working on an instrumen- captured him in the middle of being evicted from his New York tal, “Twinkle Star,” and hit a wall. So he went to the City loft. He is smoking a pipe and wearing a sombrero, and bullring for inspiration, came back to Los Angeles with then he fires his shotgun into the ceiling that closes in on-site recordings of crowd noise, and recorded his first solo on him. hit “The Lonely Bull” with a group of LA session players. He 31 named them The Tijuana Brass, but they were really “four salamis, two bagels, and an American cheese” who were out to Americanize the sound of Mexican mariachis. “Some- thing in the excitement of the crowd, the traditional mariachi music, the trumpet call heralding the start of the fight, the yelling, the snorting of bulls,” Alpert said, “it all clicked.”
[Track 10: Play Herb Alpert, “The Lonely Bull,” and fade out at 0:40.]
The song was the title track to Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’ debut recording which, according to the album’s liner notes, was meant to capture the sound of a mythologized Tijuana, “the noisy Mexican-American voices in the narrow streets, the confusion of color and motion.” On the back cover he called Tijuana “a spectacle, a garish border town” and on the front cover sat in a cardigan and loafers doing tequila shots out of a pewter cup. The San Francisco Chronicle called Alpert’s project “a corny Latin American minstrel show.” Both Alpert and The Kingston Trio, with their jails and casinos and bullrings, gave us the quintessential US version of Tijuana, and it was literally a US version, the tourist Tijuana built and financed by white American businessmen dur- ing Prohibition to meet the pleasure needs of gringos with money to spend, a Tijuana run by Americans for Americans, the Tijuana of race tracks and the Agua Caliente casino, the Tijuana of Sin City, the Tijuana that has never actually existed except when it was created by US money, the Calcutta of the West with its donkey shows and johns pimping their sisters to Navy men on weekend shore leave, the Tijuana where everything is cheaper, everything more transgressive— the licentious evil twin of its conservative sibling that lurks one border fence, one border wall, and a fleet of migra trucks to the north. As one Tijuanense put it in a local study on tour- ism, “Tijuana was the emporium where gold from gaming tables spilled onto the floors but gringos took it home; for Tijuana, there was only its shame.” The Tijuana of Alpert and the Kingston Trio, besides being one built on layers of North-on-South myth and fantasy, is the Tijuana forced to subsist at the mercy of the false trickle-down economic promises of a tourist economy that—not unlike the maquiladora economy of globalization that would later follow it—leaves Tijuana residents picking up the tab for US prosperity. The bullring and the jail are still there, but even if they weren’t, people north of the border would still find a way to visit them.
[Track 11: Play Fussible, “Rom u Rosa,” and fade out to silence at 0:45.]
32 BORDERLINE ARCHEOLOGY Jesse Lerner
Surrounded by emptied quart bottles of Tecate beer and a pair of television monitors showing giant, shifty eyeballs, the renowned 7th-century ruler Lord Pacal, Maya noble of the ancient city of Palenque, has taken the form of a blond child bedecked in green feather boas and crossed the US-Mexico border in his pre-Columbian lunar module. Alongside his Olmec moon unit, a colossal head perched on gold-trimmed low-rider landing gear, the fearsome Aztec goddess Coatli- cue dons her space suit and, like Neil Armstrong, salutes the US flag. One highly inebriated eagle has landed. This halluci- natory scene is a vision of Chicano science fiction, a futuristic fantasy of a post-NAFTA North American space program, and part of a mixed media installation by the brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre. The pair moved from conservative, hyper-Catholic Guadalajara to beachside Orange County while still in elementary school. They grew up there in the 1970s, surfing, getting stoned, watching pseudo- archeological documentaries like In Search of Ancient Astronauts, and reading speculative accounts of pre-Con- replicas, and copies, all struggling collectively to assert the quest space travel, such as the immensely popular Chariots national mythology and history always in danger of receding. of the Gods by Erich von Däniken. Today they divide their Every such instance of the public display of pre-Colum- time between San Diego and Ensenada. Their over-the-top bian replicas in the border region is Janus-faced, simultane- installation introduces us to the strange ously looking anxiously northward, to draw the free-spending transformations that occur when Mexico’s ancient cultural tourists (while warding off the encroaching cultural menace heritage reaches that country’s northern border, in this case, they represent), and looking south to that most delirious zone at the border’s western extreme.1 Mexico City, the gravitational center of national narratives. This region, where San Diego’s military bases and million- For the North American tourist, these objects function as dollar ocean-view homes rub against Tijuana’s post- signposts of alterity, highly visible markers of Mexico’s other- apocalyptic landscape wasted by neo-liberalism, is a space ness, indicators that the traveler has left the US behind. They where the hybrid and the syncretic are the norm, and where proclaim that Mexico is heir to a long and impressive cultural mutations, no doubt induced by the tons of toxins dumped by heritage, and that the “zonkey” (a Tijuana donkey painted the area’s many maquiladoras, proliferate madly.2 with zebra stripes to pose for the characteristic tourist photo) Prior to Spanish colonization, what is today the and the all-the-tequila-you-can-drink special are not the sum northwestern Mexican state of Baja California Norte was total of Mexican culture. Certain examples, by virtue of their inhabited by Tipai, Paipai, Kiliwa, and Nakipa Indians. Their placement or their English language signage, seem to prin- nomadic lifestyle and modest form of social organization are cipally have this function. This is the primary function of the the reasons that the region lacks the spectacular pre- Olmec, Teotihuacán, and Maya replicas that line Tijuana’s Columbian ruins that bring thousands of tourists to Mexico’s Avenida Revolución, the most touristic thoroughfare offering central valley and southern (Maya) region. The popular at all hours plentiful alcohol in themed bars (Red Square, the American mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner pushed Baja’s inevitable Hard Rock Café), “Aztec massage” parlors, and murals as an attraction, but the tourists come looking for gentlemen’s clubs catering to visitors. an essential, “deep” Mexico, and this means pyramids and For the Mexican, the archaeological replicas have an colossal Mesoamerican sculptures. The petroglyphs and altogether different function. Their presence in the cityscape cave paintings that the region’s early inhabitants left behind reconnects the center with Tijuana, a problematic place for in remote parts of Baja do not hold the same drawing power nationalists at the furthest margin of the country, distant as do massive structures associated with stories about from the interior of the nation and its centralist myths and human sacrifices. As if to compensate for this perceived identity. Like ancient Rome and its empire, Mexico City and lack, we find constructions of a much more recent epoch: the the rest of the republic exist in a highly asymmetrical relation numerous examples of displaced Totonac, Maya, Zapotec, of power, one that must be continuously reasserted and rene- and other ancient cultures rendered in plaster, fiberglass, or gotiated. Residents of the capital fear that the border breeds plastic, simulacra scattered throughout Baja’s largest city, a dangerous drift of identity, subject to the nearly Tijuana, and beyond. In their northward migration these
objects undergo every kind of transformation, above: Einar & Jamex de la Torre, “Colonial Atmosphere,” mixed media 33 suggesting a virtual taxonomy of miniatures, installation, 2002. Courtesy Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California. irresistible pull of the larger northern neighbor. Residents of the border, they like to say, speak Spanglish (a bastardized Pocho slang or Caló) rather than proper Spanish, and too readily embrace other markers of a North American (US) identity. It is tempting to read these Chilango (Mexico City) criticisms as a reflection of their own anxieties about the erosion of national traits in an era of globalization. But in this context, statues like the monument of the last Aztec emperor Cuauhtemoc on the Paseo de los Heroes anchor Tijuana within national narratives. Even as these objects function as ties binding the Mexican republic’s most distant urban out- post to the center, they reveal those gaps that separate its precarious border realities from those of the interior. The latter-day archeological objects in Tijuana derive from different practices and motivations, ranging from commercial impulses to commissioned, high-profile exercises in site-specific art installation. The most readily visible examples are simply money-making ventures, like thousands of plaster of Paris miniatures of the Aztec “calendar stone” airbrushed with neon and reflective metallic paints, the Chac Mool ashtrays, and all the rest of the kitsch tourist art that abounds. If it is true, as Josiah Wedgwood claimed, that copies of ancient objects “most effectively prevent the Return of Ignorant and barbarous Ages,”3 then Tijuana is surely in the vanguard of this struggle against barbarism. The art world produces multiples as well. Seated on a row of steel stepstools attached to the fence that demarcates the international boundary, 111 identical plaster figurines rep- resenting the Aztec goddess of filth and putrefaction, Tlazoltéotl, grimace in the pain of childbirth. These replicas form a site-specific art piece by the contemporary conceptual artist Silvia Gruner, as part of the international arts showcase InSITE ‘94. The setting for the installation was Tijuana’s working-class Colonia Libertad, a neighborhood that at the time was often used by undocumented immigrants as an embarkation point for the dangerous northward crossing.4 Suspended in the act of giving birth, Tlazoltéotl is a liminal fig- ure, forever between pregnancy and motherhood, installed within a liminal space, the threshold between the US and Mexico, between the First World and the Third, between North and South. For the migrants passing through the area, this dangerous crossing point marks the space between home and exile, citizenship and “alien” status. The original jade upon which Gruner’s figurine is modeled is itself a border-crosser. Purportedly from Central Mexico (though the American Museum of Natural History’s Gordon Ekholm used to insist that it is a fake), an officer of the defeated Emperor Maximilian brought the object to Paris, where a description of it was first published.5 Subsequently, diplomat and art collector Robert Woods Bliss acquired the sculpture, and it is currently exhibited as part of his collec- tion at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown. Gruner’s reuse of the figurine as the prototype for multiple ceramic replicas perched on the fence in Tijuana completes a circu- itous migration that corresponds to imperial claims 34 on Latin America, first from the Old World, then from the Yankees. Multiplied over and over, the Tlazoltéotl figure mouths), a bamboo banister straight out of a Tiki bar, a water- returns to Mexico not as repatriated cultural heritage, but as fall cascading down the building’s façade, and the a signpost for the border crosser, an incongruous aberration inexplicable stand of papyrus reveal an eclectic sensibility on the very visible marker of the international line that is the reminiscent of the Mexican structure at Epcot Center. This border fence. past summer, the building opened as a neo-Maya borderland Nowhere in Mexico is the nation’s architectural heritage discotheque. The presence of both Mexitlán’s miniature miniaturized on a scale comparable to the failed theme park Palenque ruins and the disco Palenque in such proximity called Mexitlán, Ramírez Vázquez’s enormous roof-top redoubles Tijuana’s search in the ruins. Nashville, celebration of Mexico’s architectural heritage located just Tennessee, has only one Parthenon, after all, and Slobozia, a few blocks from the busiest international border crossing Rumania, has only one Eiffel Tower (and one replica of the in the world. Of all the pre-Columbian figurines, replicas, Southfork Ranch, as featured on TV’s Dallas). Tijuana, a place degraded copies, and striking likenesses found in Tijuana, where less is never more, could not settle for one. The disco this is by far the most ambitious. In the spirit of the models Palenque is streamlined and altered to accommodate its new at Surrey’s Thorne Park, the Netherlands’ Madurodam, the function, and is principally identifiable as Palenque because 1939 New York World’s Fair speculative miniatures of New of the multistoried tower, unique in Mesoamerica. Mexitlán’s York in the year 1960, Beijing’s “World Park,” and Shenzhen’s miniature Palenque is more complete, and includes not “Splendid China,” Mexitlán’s miniatures of the pyramids at only the palace with its tower but also a scale model of the Chichén Itzá, Teotihuacán, Tlatelolco, and of the Great Temple of the Inscriptions, where the mortal remains of Lord Temple of pre-Conquest Tenochtitlán are all rendered Pacal—and the relief carvings that inspired the de la Torre skillfully and meticulously. Tijuana and the rest of the border brothers—were found. In that temple, in region, lacking any architecture that (by the criteria operat- distant Chiapas, in the far south of Mexico, the Mexican ing here) rate as significant, is not represented, though just archeologist Alberto Ruz discovered in 1952 that the stone beyond the perimeter of the park the oversized signage for a slabs of the floor concealed a staircase leading down into Smart and Final store insistently reminds the visitor of border the structure’s interior and descending to a large, corbelled realities. The nation is reduced to a scale at which its entirety chamber containing the king’s sarcophagus. The lid depicts can be surveyed in a glance. Not one to be guilty of false the ruler in an ecstatic state, curled up and reclining back- modesty, Ramírez Vázquez includes one of his own build- wards. Archeologists understand the relief as representing ings, the National Anthropology Museum from Mexico City, the king’s rapturous entry into the underworld upon his among the scaled-down survey of the nation’s architectural death, but more fanciful viewers have interpreted this as highlights. Though unquestionably impressive on an aesthetic proof of pre-Columbian space travel, noting the similarity level, Mexitlán has not been successful economically. It is with the characteristic position assumed by astronauts in not hard to imagine why this might be, as it is at once not fun flight. Crash landing over the delirious landscape of Tijuana enough to be an amusement park, too expensive for most like the exploding Columbia shuttle, scattering chunks of Tijuana residents, not meaningful to most tourists (who don’t detritus hither and yon, these ersatz pre-Columbian artifacts know the original buildings referenced), and not educational are true mutant landmarks within a heady border geography. enough to be a museum. After the initial public response proved disappointing, the owners removed some of the 1 The installation was created for “Mixed Feelings,” an exhibition at the University of models and began to book local punk bands on weekends. Southern California’s Fisher Gallery about the border metropolis. They found they had to install temporary fences to prevent 2 Maquiladoras are factories run by multinationals just inside Mexico’s border with slam dancers from stage-diving on to the miniature National the US. Palace of Fine Arts or pogo-ing onto the diminutive Temple of 3 Quoted in David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge the Inscriptions from Palenque. Even this desperate effort to University Press, 1985), p. 306. bring in crowds was not enough to make Mexitlán financially 4 Subsequently, the reinforcement of the border fence, part of a continuing militarization viable. Today, the park is closed, the architectural models of the international border, has forced this illicit migration further eastward. stored unceremoniously on their sides in the structure’s park- 5 E. T. Hamy, “Note sur une statuette méxicaine,” in Journal de la Société des Américan- ing garage. Only the weather-worn sign, a giant, istes, vol. 3, no. 1 (1906), pp. 1-5. decaying plastic piñata, and the nearly life-size replica of the Atlante of Tula on the sidewalk by the front entrance now mark the spot of this once-fabulous exercise in replication. A few blocks away, in a tourist development called the Pueblo Amigo, another replica of Palenque, this one closer to the scale of the original, has recently been completed. The architects responsible have clearly learned as much from opposite: Tourists visiting (top) a Tijuana statue of Tlaloc, the Aztec God of Rain; Las Vegas as they have from the Maya. Synthetic materials and (bottom) a Tijuana trinket shop. cover the structure to approximate the appearance of hewn overleaf: Silvia Gruner, The Middle of the Road/La mitad del camino, mixed stone. Feathered serpents copied from Teotihuacán media installation on the border fence, 1994. Courtesy inSITE/Installation Gal- 35 (enhanced with water spouts emerging from their lery, San Diego.
Data and metadata: An Interview with Murtha Baca & Erin Coburn Eve Meltzer & Julia Meltzer
As museums, art institutions, and art libraries digitize their collections for greater accessibility, the question of how to categorize and define works of art becomes increasingly important. The Getty Research Institute, a program of the J. Paul Getty Trust, spearheads a program to standardize the vocabularies used to define artworks so that as digital data about collections is created, a common form and language can be used. The challenges are many: What is a “standard” language for defining an art object and how is this deter- mined and agreed upon? Who should comprise the commu- nities who establish these standards? On what criteria do we base standards in a field for which the very notion is already controversial? Murtha Baca is the head of Digital Resources Management and the Vocabulary Program at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. She oversees the creation of digital resources relating to the collections of the Getty Research Institute. Erin Coburn is the Data Standards Administrator at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Her work focuses on data standards and the creation and use of controlled vocabularies for describing and accessing information on the Getty Museum’s collection, and providing descriptive metadata for the Museum’s collection online. Eve Meltzer and Julia Meltzer met them in September 2003.
What are so-called “vocabularies” and how did the Vocabu- lary Program begin at the Getty Research Institute?
MB: Vocabularies gather all the different ways—right and wrong—of calling things, so that people of different levels of expertise can find things within a collection. The Getty Vocabulary Program, working as a unit with the Getty Standards Program, builds, maintains, and disseminates vocabulary tools for the visual arts and architecture. The vocabularies produced by the Getty include: the Art & Architecture Thesaurus® (AAT), the Union List of Artist Names® (ULAN), and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN)®. These resources are intended to aid in the documentation and retrieval of automated information about art, architecture, and material culture.
Can you give us a brief history of museum standards?
MB: More than a decade ago, Categories for the Description of Works of Art, or CDWA, was initiated. The director of what was then called the Art History Information Program at the Getty determined that art museums and other cultural heritage institutions needed a metadata standard the way the library world has MARC. MARC is the main data “con- tainer” for bibliographic information in the library world; it stands for MAchine-Readable Cataloging format. MARC defines a data format that emerged from a Library of 37 Congress-led initiative that was begun 30 years ago. It provides the mechanism by which computers exchange, Why is it necessary to have standards? use, and interpret bibliographic information—its data elements make up the foundation of most library catalogues EC: Because data is very labor intensive to produce. In order used today. The archival world has a couple of metadata to have an information system, you have to buy computers, containers that information goes into, but the art museum other hardware, and software. All of that can cost a lot of world didn’t have that. So CDWA was initiated in the late money. But one of the costliest factors often overlooked is 1980s. As in the library world, this set of data categories was the human labor to create and maintain the data. If you do it developed through consensus. You get all the people who consistently, it’s easier to migrate when you buy a new system are the experts in the different fields into the same meetings later. It also makes it easier to contribute to consortiums. again and again and again and they debate and debate For example, with a big consortium of art museum informa- and debate and they come to a consensus on the necessary tion, the only way you can really manage the information categories. efficiently and create meaningful access to it is if everyone agrees upon a shared standard and the same “buckets” of Who are the people who attend those meetings? information that they can map the data to. Theft is also a big issue when it comes to justifying the importance of MB: The kinds of people who were in those meetings were documenting collections. Consider what happened at the not just information systems people but also curators—they Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad. If they had had better actually recruited curators who were experts in various documentation, it would now be easier to identify found areas, such as Asian art, so it wasn’t just folks in the typical objects as belonging to the Museum. It’s amazing how fields of western European art. They also recruited people many collections aren’t properly documented. who work with different types of media: curators, librarians, registrars—all the various types who are needed to contrib- MB: For example, two core metadata elements of Object ID ute to an information system. There were, as well, experts are: 1) ownership—i.e., who does the object belong to—and from major institutions such as the Getty, the Guggenheim, 2) distinguishing marks. What if you have a whole bunch MoMA, and the Met. of little statues of Buddha? Unless you’re an expert, you would not know the difference between them, but if you’ve Then out of CDWA came Object ID? documented them and noted some distinguishing mark like a scratch, that can also help you identify the object as a form of MB: Yes, both Object ID and the VRA (Visual Resources cultural property. Association) Core Categories are two other metadata element sets that are really subsets of CDWA. CDWA is huge: EC: Standards are also important because people don’t it’s comprised of hundreds of categories. VRA Core is recognize how complex it could be on the back end. You a metadata “container” for the data necessary to catalogue might say that a photograph is from Paris, but there’s more works of art and material culture artifacts; unlike CDWA, VRA than one Paris in the world. And so, without having some sort Core focuses on visual “surrogates” of works of art (slides, of standards in place, “Paris” by itself is meaningless, unless photographs, digital images). Object ID is another metadata you say, “Paris, France,” or “Paris, Texas.” element set: it’s only ten elements and that’s really looking at the art object as a piece of property that What kind of struggles did you come up against in the can be stolen or protected or taken across national creation of standards, specifically in working with curators boundaries. So CDWA cares about the context in which or administrators and their particular modes of thinking? a work was created—the social and historical context: who the patron was, why the object was created, its original MB: That’s a huge issue. We’ve even struggled with the location, and so on. Object ID does not care about that. nomenclature itself. In general, people tend to fear the word Object ID is used to identify works of art as cultural property. “standards.” They don’t understand what an “authority file” It really cares about what the thing looks like and how you is, but it just sounds bad. “Controlled vocabulary” sounds can identify it. really scary, too. No one wants to be controlled. So a lot of it is psychological education. You need to emphasize that When you say “metadata element set,” what do you mean? standards are good: they’re going to liberate, not imprison. What we say is that the curator can call an object anything he EC: The categories of information that you need to describe or she chooses. If they want to call it a lekythos or an étagère something—well, not always to describe, but the kind of or a cartonnier—that’s fine. The word desk, for example, metadata we’re talking about is descriptive metadata. So, might make a curator run out of the room screaming, “That’s I need to know the title, who created it, how big it is. That is not a desk, it’s a cartonnier!” In effect, vocabularies gather all the kind of information you begin with and then you populate the different ways of designating or naming things, as well those fields with data values from a controlled vocabulary. as more generic and more specific terms and names, so that people of different levels of expertise can effectively find 38 what they are looking for, or what is there to be found. But the issue is really one of trust. It’s also a big change in What is controlled about controlled vocabularies? terms of practices of administration. And it was a big psy- chological change. It’s a big change in the way people think MB: A controlled vocabulary designates a preferred form. about their work. In order to do this kind of work, you have Again, this is a vestige of library language. For example, let’s to be on teams with all different sorts of people, from the say I’m doing research on a particular 14th-century Italian curator to the guy who scans the images, to the cataloguer painter. I search for “Ugolino Lorenzetti” and I get back a who is one of the most important people. So it also presents record for “Bartolommeo Bulgarini.” Here’s what is controlled, people with a different way of thinking about their work. especially in the library world: the Library of Congress would say that if you’re a cataloguer and you’re cataloguing books Is the Getty at the forefront of defining these standards? about this particular artist, you should use “Bulgarini, Bartolommeo,” spelled exactly that way, and in inverted MB: Yes, the Getty Museum has been at the forefront of order. So if you’re cataloguing a book about this artist, even producing and controlling information correctly and appro- if the title of the book is The World of Ugolino Lorenzetti, priately, and exposing the public to it. We pioneer in the the preferred term in the Library of Congress Name Authority implementation of standards and controlled vocabularies for File (LCNAF) is “Bulgarini, Bartolommeo.” art museum information. The Getty Information Institute— This is a vestige of how libraries are physically ordered. some of whose programs, including the Vocabulary Program, I’ve got to go look under the B’s to find this artist. Now in the are now part of the Getty Research Institute—together with online environment, all of the different names or spellings are the College Art Association spearheaded the development of potential access points. So, if a museum prefers to call this CDWA. And we’ve been developing our three vocabularies artist “Master of the Ovile Madonna,” we don’t care. for 20 years. Nobody else in the art information world really We don’t say, “Oh no, you must call him Bulgarini, Barto- has anything like that. The Library of Congress Subject lommeo,” because the controlled vocabulary “knows” that Headings have been an established authority in the library all those name forms refer to the same artist. I picked this one world for many years, but they’re quite user-unfriendly, and because it’s a dramatic example. Over time, the works don’t focus on just art and architecture. The Art & Archi- by the same person have been assigned dramatically tecture Thesaurus (AAT) was begun in 1980, and the Union different names. Let me explain—you see, Master of the List of Artist Names (ULAN) began in the late 1980s; they Ovile Madonna was a designation used for a particular both focus on art and material culture. The Thesaurus “hand” that had been associated with several paintings, of Geographic Names (TGN) focuses on places that are including the so-called Ovile Madonna. Then in the early important for art, but it’s worldwide coverage and you can 20th century, Bernard Berenson, who was a famous critic, use it for anything. In fact, our vocabularies get licensed by basically made up the name Ugolino Lorenzetti for this art- travel agencies and commercial vendors. Again, the way ist, because he was a follower of the Lorenzetti brothers. So people search on the Internet for now, and for the foresee- there’s a lot of literature about this artist calling him Ugolino able future, is through words. So if the end user is searching Lorenzetti. Then later, they actually discovered documents for Firenze but I’m calling it Florence in my database, then that the artist’s real name was Bartolommeo Bulgarini. So, he won’t find what he’s looking for. So we cluster together what we do is we cluster together all these different forms; all the forms of names associated with a particular person, we don’t suppress the “wrong” or old forms, and we don’t place, or thing. force people to use our preferred form.
Can you tell us about thesauri? EC: Here’s another good example that demonstrates a controlled vocabulary: let’s search in the ULAN on Tiziano MB: Thesauri are another type of controlled vocabulary in Vecellio, or “Titian.” See the first name? Normally an artist is which there are hierarchical relationships. You could have a known by his vernacular name, and Titian’s vernacular name controlled vocabulary that is just an alphabetical list: a list of was Tiziano Vecellio. But in all the literature, he is known everybody who works in your company with their preferred as “Titian.” So the very first one in the list is “Titian”—it’s names and other relevant data. That’s a type of controlled “preferred,” and it’s the display name and it’s English vocabulary. A thesaurus has a hierarchical structure. For preferred. But you will also get many weird spellings; they example, in the TGN, Europe is the continent, then Italy, come from archival documents. At the Getty, we allow an infi- and underneath those terms are the different regions and nite number of variant names because we see them provinces of Italy. And it is also very powerful for searching: as potential access points. using the AAT, a user could say, “Go get me all the desks” in a particular collection and he would also retrieve a secrétaire Do you include misspellings? à abattant, even though he had never heard that expression before. EC: Good question. We include published misspellings, such as “Georgia O’Keefe” (there should be two f’s), but we don’t include every possible misspelling that a user might use; 39 fuzzy searching algorithms can handle some of that. How do you get other institutions to adhere to these standards?
MB: That’s the hard part. In the library world, you have to use MARC or you can’t live—you’re just not a library. Libraries also have to use Library of Congress Subject Headings and names. Not only are you not a library if you don’t use MARC or LCSH, you also can’t contribute to the big bibliographic utilities. So if I want to contribute to the RLIN bib file—that is, the Research Library Information Network where you can search all of the major research libraries in North America at the same time—I’ve got to contribute my records in MARC format. They just won’t take it any other way. These standards didn’t exist before in the museum world. Now the task before us is to develop big consortial entities of information and the struggle arises due to the fact that data exists in every kind of form you can imagine.
EC: It’s been an up-hill battle, but recently, especially because we now have a real life example to show with the Getty Museum, we can say this is why it pays to use standards—because you show how the searching works on our own website and on Google. Then people see the benefit in using data standards and controlled vocabularies.
MB: Today the Getty vocabularies are used all over the place—by museums and cultural heritage institutions. People who are totally outside of the art world use the TGN . Between them, the three vocabularies get about 150,000 searches per month on our website. TGN is always in the top two or three web pages that are accessed at the Getty. People can also license the data and then use it in their own systems.
What do you do about coming up with terminology for contemporary art?
MB: It’s not that big a deal. Not too long ago, I was asked by a colleague to help develop a workshop around catalogu- ing contemporary art and we started having big arguments about it. This person believed that that it was a whole different ball game; that you need different metadata elements and different vocabularies for contemporary art. I said I can’t teach this workshop with you because I can’t go to a national conference and say that you need different standards for contemporary art. As I see it, it is simply not true. You’ve got creator information and you’ve got title information whether it’s a painting of the Adoration of the Magi or if it’s a guy nailing himself to a wall in a gallery.
40 100,000 Bottles of Beer in the Wall Paul Collins
I saw Tom Kelly’s house many years ago; I was with some friends, spending spring break poking around Death Valley for really no good reason at all. It was across the Nevada border that we found Rhyolite, an old mining town that had 10,000 inhabitants at its height. But that was before the silver ran out. Now Rhyolite is as empty as an old beer bottle—or so we thought. When we approached the old Kelly house, we were in for a surprise. STAY AWAY, read the letters painted across the roof. A survivalist array of vehicles was parked out front; we noticed, around our feet, a number of rusted cans pitted with buckshot. Then we fled. And that was too bad, because I really did want to see inside that house. Its walls consisted of 51,000 bricks, of a sort—bricks that once held Busch Beer, scavenged from the town’s hard-drinking saloons while the house was being built in 1905. It was a house built of beer bottles. Such houses exist across the US, though demolition and earthquakes have shattered a few of them. The house built by saloonkeeper Wash them out and slap on some cement: instant stained- Tom Kelly is an intriguing example, because unlike most glass shantytown. Heineken’s WOBO was, notes Martin builders, Kelly didn’t bother to wash out his Pawley in his 1975 history Garbage Housing, “the first mass bottles first. Water was too precious in Rhyolite for such production container ever designed from the outset for niceties. Beer, on the other hand, was everywhere. Dipso- secondary use as a building component.” mania is a boon for such builders: a similar honeycomb-like Back in Rotterdam, Heineken contracted architect John structure of bottles and mortar, built by a pharmacist in Habraken to redesign bottles into a buildable container. Hillsville, Virginia in the 1940s, was nicknamed The House A beer bottle standing upright is, surprisingly, up to code, of a Thousand Headaches for all the hangovers it held.1 But bearing 50 kg per square centimeter. But bottles are not any container will do, really: in Post City, a turn-of-the-century easily vertically stacked. Laid on their side, though, they Texas town founded by an eccentric breakfast cereal tycoon, crush too easily. Habraken’s solution was to develop one Edwardian home featured a fireplace built of blue vertically stackable Chianti-like bottles with long necks and snuff bottles.2 recessed sides that nested into and supported each other. These were scattered efforts, the stuff of local oddball It was a brilliant compromise, but Heineken’s marketing anecdotes. But there was once a serious attempt at mass- department rejected it as “effeminate”—a curious description producing houses from bottles: the WOBO (World Bottle). considering that the bottle consisted of two bulbous Had it worked, untold thousands in developing countries compartments surmounted by a long shaft. We can only would wake up each morning under an unearthly glow: assume that Habraken did not anticipate why the men of sunlight filtered through dark green beer bottles. Curaçao might not want to hold this up to their lips. So Habraken went horizontal. His next design was for a • • • thick rectangular bottle—much closer to Heineken’s original In 1960, brewing magnate Alfred Heineken was visiting Cura- notion of a brick that held beer. The bottom was dimpled in çao, off the Venezuelan coast, when he noted with a pattern identical to the bottle’s stubby neck, so that the top dismay the acres of trash underfoot—a good part of it of one bottle would interlock with the bottom of the next. The produced by his own company. Heineken Breweries had an sides had a nubbled surface, to make them both easier to efficient bottle-return system in Holland, where the average hold and to apply mortar onto. Still, there were some trade- bottle was used 30 times before being discarded. But without offs: the glass had to be thickened for the disadvantaged modern distribution, bottles in Curaçao were used once and horizontal orientation, and its blockier corners made thrown out. There was no lack of resulting trash: what the it more susceptible to chipping in shipment. island did lack, however, was affordable housing. Heineken But it is, even today, a remarkably utilitarian-looking had a flash of brilliance: make beer bottles that you can bottle—a triumph of practical design. Habraken proposed build houses out of. that shipping pallets made of plastic could be reused as Rather than the eccentric form of American bottle sheet roofing. Plans for a workable WOBO house were houses—where the containers, mortared in parallel to drawn up; bottle construction would be so simple that the floor, created walls bristling with open necks—Alfred
Heineken imagined less a beer bottle reused as a above: Large and small versions of Heineken’s WOBO (World Bottle), designed 41 brick than a glass brick that happened to hold beer. by John Habraken. instruction could be printed on the beer label. And this is simply too ugly. “I tried one design which was still the boxy what truly sets WOBO apart in the annals of design: the horizontal orientation,” she explains. “However, my design totality of the concept. You consumed the beer; you reused had indents along the sides for better grip to accommodate the bottle and the shipping container; the instructions were pipes and wiring to run through the bottle walls. But it was available on every bottle. It is a self-contained system of still ugly.”7 latent architecture, a building in a bottle. • • • Heineken filed patents, insisting to colleagues that it was going to be on the cover of Time magazine someday. Ugly or not, there has always been de facto reuse of even the A test run of 100,000 WOBO bottles were produced, and plainest containers. Stolen milk crates were so universally in 1965 a prototype glass house was built near Alfred beloved as student furnishings that manufacturers finally Heineken’s villa in Noordwijk, outside Amsterdam. Yet the woke up and started selling them new and sans the telltale architectural success of the new design was irrelevant. The dairy stenciling. Emptied-out Maxwell House coffee cans company’s marketing department persisted in its rejections: have an unassailable place as nail bins and turpentine jars Heineken was, after all, a premium beer. How would it look at American workbenches; innumerable Flintstones jelly if poor people built houses out of the stuff? jars were reused as drinking glasses in the 1970s; and one The WOBO project soon fell to the wayside. Sixty can hardly guess at how many Altoid peppermint tins have thousand unused bottles remained in a warehouse in become stash boxes. Reuse even occurs, in spite of their Rotterdam—enough for an entire house. marketing department, with Heineken’s standard containers. In my closet is a lunchbox cleverly made of flattened Heineken • • • beer cans—a contrivance that a friend of my wife’s found in A press release on Heineken’s website trumpets their latest Mali and Senegal. packaging innovation: sleek aluminum bottles, developed Manufacturers tacitly understand this reuse: back in by Heineken Brasseries of France. It is a handsome, striking the 1930s, American milling firms sold flour in colorfully design. “The objective was to attract young adult customers,” patterned sacks, because they knew that poor families would we are told. “Brasseries Heineken guarantees its exclusive- reuse the sack cloth for clothing.8 But millers weren’t includ- ness through limiting both its availability in outlets and the ing sewing patterns with their sacks. The crucial number of bottles.” The release then matter-of-factly notes difference with WOBO was its stated intent: these bottles that “the consumer price was high,” and that such designs were specifically designed for reuse, to the point of including are “suitable for dimly-lit outlets such as clubs.”4 Well, that’s blueprints. One can see why a beverage giant’s legal where the money is. department would become nervous. What if a bottle house It is, perhaps, asking too much to expect a beer company collapsed? Would brewers get socked with lawsuits every to provide housing for the developing world. That Heineken time an earthquake hit a poor city, or whenever a badly mor- ever even contemplated it already sets them apart from tared bottle fell and hit a passerby? virtually every other manufacturer. Yet the WOBO concept Without indemnifying a brewer, it would be very hard for continues to haunt designers. Two decades later, in 1979, an it to answer these concerns. Were WOBO to be made now, it International Conference of Garbage Architects was held at might have to be without instructions, without Florida A&M, attracting such notable participants as obvious sanction for reuse. It might need to appear, in other architect Witold Rybzcynski. In 2002, the WOBO was cited words, like virtually every other object in consumer packaging. among the best 100 consumer product designs in the Phaidon Its secondary use would be surreptitious but slyly implied. Press collection Spoon.5 But the most curious tribute to Considering the perversity of human nature, I think this could WOBO came recently with the Eco/Ergo Bottle, developed be achieved with the following notice on its label: by Esther Ratner, Associate Professor of Industrial Design NOT FOR USE AS A BUILDING MATERIAL. at Arizona State University.6 Ratner re-imagined WOBO as a vertically oriented container with an ergonomically curved 1 There is an extensive site on Bottle Houses at
The skin is our original image of the legible: of concealment and betrayal. “Nor doth it onely draw the busy eyes,” writes John Donne, “but it is subject to the divinest touch of all, to kissing, the strange and mysticall union of soules.” The skin asks to be read, demands to be touched and traversed, but wards off touch and vision with its cultural armory of alluring barriers: oils, unctions, and inscriptions. We live in our skins as if, as we say, they might give us away. In The Book of Skin, Steven Connor, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College, University of London, offers a history of the cultural significance of the body’s surfaces. Connor has described his work as a kind of “cultural phenomenology”: he is interested in “substances, habits, organs, rituals, obsessions, pathologies, processes and patterns of feeling.” He has previously written on the history of ventriloquism, and his next book, he says, will be “a book of air.” Brian Dillon spoke to him in London.
Your book proposes three stages in the cultural history of skin: screen, membrane, milieu. Can you describe those?
The problem with stages is that there are always three of them. I quote Michel Serres’s model of history as a spread- out handkerchief which you then crumple up in your pocket. I wanted to spread out the skin and then to twist it up, to do a sort of historical origami, because it seemed to me that the skin is not a universal but is a universal background or horizon for human experience. This gets conceptualized differently at different moments, but there’s never a moment at which the skin is not implicated in a whole lot of other things: modes of thought, ways of feeling thought, the way in which thought becomes affective, becomes lived through the body, and through the imaginary body too.
And the first of those moments has to do with the skin as a frontier or barrier.
The skin as screen: where its primary function is to register other things, primarily the state of health or what up until the 17th century was called your complexion, which originally meant the folding together of lots of different elements or tendencies in your constitution. It’s interesting that our word constitution has taken over from complexion: something which is constituted, something which stands, and is as it were in place, rather than something which is folded together out of multiple elements. But the skin stood for that, as if this was written on the skin without the skin being visible, so that the skin is everywhere spoken of, but somehow not ever itself in the frame.
When does skin start to be thought of in its own terms?
44 The second stage is a period when, in medical history, the the surface of things. And those surfaces turned out to be body begins to be understood by being disarticulated, by a mountainous terrain, to be, precisely, environments: being broken down into different autonomously functioning epidemiological, parasitological environments. The skin systems and organs: the period, broadly, of the Enlightenment. turned out to be a whole functioning system on its own; The skin is thought of very much in terms of a kind of switch one began to understand that the skin was a sort of ecology. or regulator between inside and outside (a very dominant This is in the 16th and 17th centuries. conception of the skin even now). Its primary role is as a kind of gate or barrier which maintains—hydraulically, mechani- Is there a sense in which photography later gives that notion cally—the stable relations between inside and outside. another twist, encouraging a further intimacy between the ways we think about touching and seeing the skin? But that stable significance of the skin begins to dissolve later. I have a very strong apprehension that photography is much In the third stage, which we are still inhabiting and which is more fundamentally an art of touch, or the idea of touch, than still unfolding, the skin explodes once again into a multiplicity we’ve gotten used to recognizing. I think it was very clear of functions, but without now becoming invisible. The skin in the beginning, when photographers were people who becomes a topic of concern; it becomes self-reflexive. And processed their own photographs, when there was, as we that is the skin as milieu—a term I draw from Michel Serres— put it, hands-on experience of the photograph. But it’s still or as a mid-place: the skin not so much as a thin membrane, the case that there’s a very privileged relationship between but as a whole habitat, as deep or voluminous. So it’s by photography and touch. If that weren’t the case, why would means of the notion of milieu that I then, rather perversely, the texture of photographs be so important? Shine and gloss: having established this seemingly neat frame, attempt to in one sense locking the photograph up, inviolably, like a read all the other historical instances. The book sort of starts protective skin or membrane; on the other hand, rendering it again at that point and says: what if the handkerchief weren’t vulnerable, as a skin does. We look at a photograph and want in fact spread out flat but were crumpled together, what to touch, and know that we mustn’t touch; so there’s a kind would that be like? of preciousness that comes from the glossy photograph, and by reference to that, other kinds of textures that are always So you couldn’t say, for example, that there’s a single implicated in the photograph. moment at which the idea of the thickness of the skin appears? This is actually a very ancient way of thinking about vision.
There might be two moments. The first moment would be Here is an example of one of those foldings of ancient and the work of Vesalius, who was the first anatomist to include modern, which returns us to that Epicurean conception of an account of the skin, in 1543. Everyone talks about the skin, vision as tactile. More specifically: the theory that vision is but as the stuff you’ve got to get out of the way. The a literal casting off of simulacra or idola or effigies from the traditional way of describing anatomy—deriving from object: skins of atoms, sometimes called fleeces of atoms, Galen—is to start in the middle and move outwards, but you which are shed from everything at enormous speed—what get to the middle by going through all of those layers, and in we would now call the speed of light—and either enter the those anatomies you never get back to the skin. The skin has eyes directly (fall upon the eyes like a sort of dust or hail already been discarded and is flapping loosely around the of vision) or are met halfway—this is Plato’s conception— ankles of the écorché. by an eye-beam which, as it were, gathers them. It’s a bizarre theory—one that Newton still believed, and he knew a thing or What does Vesalius add to that picture? two about optics—and I think it’s a theory that photography allows us not to abandon. Vesalius for the first time says that what we mean by skin is something deep. It has layers, and, indeed, in different parts Is this bound up with the idea of the skin’s shininess, which of the body its depth varies and it’s hard to be sure where the seems to denote both imperviousness and sensitivity? skin stops and the rest starts. He doesn’t have much to say about the skin, but he does have something, and I think that This is immensely complex. Shininess means inviolability. But inaugurates a new possibility. shine also suggests sensitivity. That which shines is like those parts of us which are not as protected as the skin. The surface And the second moment? of the eye is the most lustrous part of the visible body. Why is it lustrous? Well, partly because it’s moist; it’s part of the cere- A second moment would be microscopy, because with bral apparatus, so it’s the inside that’s visible on the outside. microscopy—which is developed very early on, in the late It is, unlike other mucous parts of the body, secret—revealed 16th century about 100 years before anyone could find but secret—and of course immensely sensitive. The sensitivity anything interesting to do with a microscope—the about touching such things is like the sensitivity about being 45 thing that people looked at, almost always, was skin, touched. Something which is moist is living. Yet we tend to talk about that luster in terms of the skin’s in English matches the French crème, which is the name for “radiance,” as if the light came from within, rather than being chrism or holy oil. So in French it doesn’t quite work; oil is reflected by a wet or greasy surface. cream, and the very name of Christ contains a reference to chrism: Christos/chrism. Christ is oil. The sense that life consists in the spilling of light: that’s the evidence of life, as it were. The sense that there is an imaginary Can you say something about the phenomena of itching and light that is shining through the skin is at work in many scratching? different examples of luster, whether it’s the oiling of weight- lifters or in cosmetics. I became, to my surprise, very interested The idea of itching and scratching seems a very simple idea, in cosmetics and in the displaced ritual practices of contem- one that lies, subliminally, below the threshold of critical porary life for a chapter that’s about the application of the attention. It’s a little thing, it’s a microscopic disturbance. second skin of greases, oils, fats, and creams in religion. I wondered what a history written in terms of this tiny titil- lation and its meaning might look like. And as it turns out The vocabulary of cosmetics advertising sets up a lot of there was a convenient little detective story about how a ambiguous pairings: between penetration and absorption, particular kind of itch—scabies, caused by the attentions of protection and nourishment. The main distinction seems to a particular parasite—came to attention, was discovered, be between oiliness and creaminess. forgotten, discovered, forgotten again, discovered again. And how that might connect up, surprisingly, with very big I think this is quite local: that is to say, a Western phenomenon, issues about the nature of human community, the kinds of or more accurately a Northern phenomenon, in terms of collective creatures we are. culture. It’s a Protestant phenomenon. Now, the creaminess of milk comes from the oil in it; milk is creamy because it’s One of the odd experiences one has with an itch is that you greasy, but we’ve learned to make a separation between can get rid of it by scratching somewhere else, an adjacent those things, so that although you are sold oils, it’s always spot. It seems to suggest a metaphorical drift or creep. suggested that those are oils from plants. Aromatherapy insists that the things you’re applying to yourself are “essential The thing about investigating itches is that you somehow oils.” But there’s no real chemical definition of what an oil never see itch itself. If you follow the fortunes of the word or is; it’s an entirely cultural, phenomenological category. metaphor of itch, it takes you everywhere, away from that Previously—I mean up to 1552—oils, whatever their source, physical sensation. It takes you into ideas of premonition— and perhaps especially oils which had animal sources, were “by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way regarded as luxurious, purifying, precious. comes”—or it takes you into sexual desire, or to the desire for writing. One could say that the primary action of scratching What happens in 1552? at the page—which Derrida, for example, has analyzed in his book Spurs—says something about the way we consider It marks the date of the revised version of the Anglican prayer the relation between matter and consciousness. The fact book that does away with holy oil and the rituals of unction. that so many of our recording techniques involve the incis- That seems a convenient way of specifying this inauguration ing of traces, how all of that seems in a curious way to be a of a disgust with the oily, which of course part of this universe of transformations of the idea of itching continues to coexist with our sense that oil is luxurious, that and scratching, which at root is of the skin but is not just of it’s like an imaginary, infinitely extensible, magic skin that will the skin because it’s always skipping off somewhere else in protect us, that will enlarge us. And we still think this when metaphorical transfer. we apply suntan oil. None of us think of ourselves as sausages sizzling in a pan; we think it’s a kind of shield against the sun. The notion of the stigmata, in particular, is at once gruesomely Still, we’re disgusted by oil, because it seems to belong to literal and extravagantly metaphorical. an economy of concealment, subterfuge, deception, and it’s become an image of animalistic or brutal The thing that struck me about the stigmata was the way in intentions or appetites, concealed under a show of civilization. which it reduced the body to a kind of shorthand: the cardinal points of the body, as though the body were being conceived We’ve found a way of hanging onto the balminess of oil, of as a kind of jointed puppet. As a matter of fact, Giotto’s while rejecting its unctuousness. painting of St. Francis receiving the stigmata is precisely that: St. Francis is like a puppet with strings coming from the We prefer instead the idea of cream, which is also, like oil, points of the stigmata to the originating figure of the crucified something which is extruded through the skin—the nipple is Christ up in the sky, as it were in some kind of kite (this is how part of the skin—and this was not lost on 17th-century theo- Deleuze describes him). More than the brute reality of the logical writers, who would talk about the sweat of Christ as stigmata, I was struck by this notion of the body reduced to a kind of unction. But the disgust grows with that, so 46 we have to distinguish the holy oil of cream, which opposite: Dried head from a medical cabinet, Paris, 1847. 47 cardinal points, and the idea of the body as foldable or refold- skin, or two states: the good, entire skin, the skin in which you able, as a repertoire of possibilities. can be happy, or the disturbed, damaged, incomplete state of the skin, in which the world is leaking in and you are leaking What happens when this schematized body is no longer teth- out. ered to Christian iconography? And this model is too crudely dichotomous, as well as, It was very striking to read of the interest in religious stig- actually, rather bleak? mata of Charcot and the analysts of so-called hysteria at the Salpetrière in Paris, who also were interested in demarcated I think the analyst of culture, the historian of culture, even— zones of the body, and in some of the phenomena of trans- though I wouldn’t necessarily call myself this—the poet of migration of senses and sensibilities. It’s as though there is a culture, has to be interested in states other than those fantasy that the body, conceived of as a folded skin, could be, of damage or pathology. And it’s a great mistake to think of through the idea of the stigmata, folded in some other way, healthiness as simple wholeness. The word healthy comes or folded to another template. This suggested to me bizarre from the word whole, as does the word heal. But, actually, analogies with other kinds of bodily markings, such as moles to be healthy is not to be whole; it is to be multiple, it is to and freckles and other kinds of seemingly spontaneous, be able to be multiple. To be unhealthy is to be whole, to be endogenous appearances on the surface of the body. This entire, locked or sealed in your suffering, your wound, or in was the body obeying or displaying some other logic of orga- your means of dealing with your wound. nization, some sacred syntax. So there’s a kind of optimism in your thinking about the skin. You suggest that moles are a randomized version of the stigmata, or the stigmata are a systematized version of the I realized at quite a late stage that being an adolescent and more cryptic implications of moles. Why are moles so having a moderate to severe case of acne made me feel important historically? divided from myself and taught me a kind of resignation. I remember a moment when I thought: “I must let my skin I think it has to do, if one wants a quick answer to it, with have its way,” and it could do its thing but I had a life to lead. an analogy between skin and sky, the skin as a source for We’re friends again now, but we’re still wary of each other. epidermal astrology. You can find it enlarged on in literature; There’s a levity as well as a gravity in thinking about the skin Romeo and Juliet is full of sky and skin analogies. I think and its possibilities. we’ve lost the sense of mole lore nowadays, but we certainly haven’t lost the sense of the ominousness or portentousness of moles. I think that notion went to sleep for a few decades or centuries, but it didn’t take much to wake it up with skin cancer: the idea that there is something in store with a spot or a mark. There’s a wonderful joke about a man who goes to the doctor with a frog growing out of his head, and the doctor says to him: “Well, how did all this begin?” And the frog answers: “Well, it all started with this pimple on my ass.”
It’s commonplace to think of the skin as an expression of our selves, but you talk about the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, who argues that the self is actually structured by the experience of being in our skins.
He summed up the principle of his work very succinctly by saying: for Lacan the unconscious is structured like a language; for me the unconscious is structured like a body, and in particular like the outside of a body. In the first edition of his book The Skin Ego, there are said to be nine functions of the skin. The interesting thing about these nine functions is that they don’t all cohere, they don’t form a coherent topology, and that was the thing that created explosions of possibility in my mind. The unfortunate thing about Anzieu— not unfortunate for his patients, but perhaps for some of his readers—is that he was a clinical therapist and his interest was in suffering and how to remedy it. It turns out 48 that in practice there are only two functions of the The Figurative Incarnation of the Sentence (Notes on the “Autogaphic” Skin) Georges Didi-Huberman
In 1862, when Jean-Martin Charcot assumed the position as head of the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris, he described its 5,000 inmates as offering “a kind of living museum of pathology,” one especially rich in neurological and mental disorders, areas already within his field of specialization. At this time, Charcot was becoming acquainted with photography to document symptomatology and, thereby, to classify certain disorders by means of their visual appearance. This predilec- tion toward the visual example is already apparent in his reference to the clinic as a museum. Therefore, when he noted a pattern of mock epileptic seizures among a group of convulsives assigned to the hospital, he named the symptom grande hystérie, began to document it photographically and, by the late 1880s, had appointed Albert Londe as resident photographer. The creation of this post was the first of its kind, and indicates Charcot’s fascination with noting and fixing the image of a human disorder. In formulating the concept of grande hystérie, Charcot noted its three stages—lethargy, catalepsy, and finally somnambulism—and associated them with specific physi- cal attitudes and gestures. His linking of illness and image became so firmly entrenched that many patients caught the suggestion and began to perform according to his expecta- tions. As a reward, they were frequently photographed, elevated to a kind of star status, and thereby participated in an extraordinary way within the relationships of power in the closed world of the clinic. For several months during 1885 and 1886, Sigmund Freud attended these demonstrations. The sojourn was to be important in his eventual clarification of the nature of hysteria, the uses of hypnosis, and in the development of his own clinical method. While noting Charcot’s many attributes, Freud ultimately characterized him as a visuel, not a “thinker” but an “artist.” Indeed, the artistic is prominent within Charcot’s work. He and an associate, Paul Richer, published Les démoniaques dans l’art (1887) and other work illustrating the correspondence between Charcot’s “icono- graphy” and representations of similar disorders throughout the history of the fine arts. In addition, Richer had also begun to make drawings, then etchings, which further distilled the photographic images into composite exempla of symptom- atology. The two men also founded what was to become a monumental serial publication combining photographs and textual diagnoses, the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (1876-1880) and the Nouvelle Iconographie (1888-1918), which continued after Charcot’s death in 1893. Together, these publications are an important document in the history of 19th-century photography and medicine. Charcot’s work at the Salpêtrière is replete with signifi- cance concerning the pitfalls of classification, the power 49 exerted by clinical method, and the allure of a certain kind identical with each other. It is a remarkable psychological fact of imagery as an index to truth. It is worth noting that Freud, that though we distinctly feel the object and distinctly feel our in one of his many departures from Charcot, abstained from own body and its surface, yet they do not touch each other using photographs of patients to illustrate his work, thereby completely. They are not fused together. There is a distinct acknowledging the unreliability of physical appearance to space between. In other words, object and body are psycho‑ describe emotional and psychic reality. logically separated by a space in between. The following text is an abbreviation of a longer essay by It is an interesting experiment to diminish the pressure Georges Didi-Huberman which treats a particularly meaning- of the fingers against the object. We feel the object less and ful event in the history of Charcot and the Salpêtrière—the less and the fingers more and more. When the fingers are fascination with the phenomenon of dermographism, writings finally only just touching the object, the object is scarcely upon the human skin. It is an instance that illustrates much perceived any longer, but we have a distinct feeling in the tips about the complex iconography of Charcot and the relation- of our fingers. We can now observe a paradoxical sensation. ship between images and the exertion of power. What is It is as if the skin were protruding over the surface and forming more, since most of the patients subjected to these experi- a slight cone, which almost reaches for the object.6 ments were women, all under the control of male clinicians, the question of sexual gender is placed squarely in the center We might consider more seriously this discrete magic of skin of the drama. which swells up and “reaches for the object” at the moment of contact. The phenomenon is one of “touching-without- The skin, between verre and ver touching,” an instance in which contact exists simultaneously The notion of skin exists as a lacuna in speculation relating with estrangement. Consider this chiasmus of the surface, to the nature of surfaces.1 Is it “tegument,” that which merely how it swells between vision and touch, like something blind covers, or is it “dermis,” that which is uncovered and sensitive? which gropes for sight and expression. Descartes, although he conceived of the body as res extensa I will base my remarks on an “observation,” as it is called, (a unitary concept of expanse that accounts for both exter- in Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière (1904) in which nal and internal space), was himself obliged to equivocate the curious life of the skin is revealed with unusual coherence regarding what he calls “the surface areas.” On one hand, and richness. We have the story of a 27-year-old woman, there is the skin as glove, a skin which separates. This is a Eugénie, diagnosed by her doctors as “catatonic dementia surface without sensation, which covers the sensible nerves praecox.“ In fact, it is perhaps just as accurate to say that below. Here, the skin is an intervening surface between she suffers from a fate like that of Narcissus, the fall into the internal and external. In the same way, the membrane which abyss of “seeing-dying,” a term no more fictive than the clinical covers the eye allows for the passage of light to the optical description. The doctor notes her visual hallucinations, apparatus, leaving it completely undisturbed.2 However, especially one in which she imagines a worm which surfaces there is also in Descartes the notion of “dermis,” the skin of and mounts her body whenever she eats. The trope of depth non-separation. The human placenta is, for instance, such a and surface reappears in her convulsive fear of drowning, generative and integral covering, a kind of origin of the skin elicited even when she hears the sound of liquid being itself.3 In a similar fashion, Descartes speculates about the poured into a glass. At other times, she surrenders to the veins lying under the human skin, imparting color to the trope by attempting to drown herself in a nearby river. surface, but separated from it by the infinitely subtle Between the worm of the depths and the reflective “First Element.”4 surface of the water lies the corporeal presence of the The skin is then a complex structure, reticular, defying patient. Bound up with these images is the substance of geometric thinking, separating and non-separated, inter- glass: Eugénie compulsively throws her hands through the vening yet indistinct. It is not without reason that Descartes panes of the windows at the clinic, breaking their clear, opposes the eye and the skin, in spite of Aristotle’s classifica- reflective surface and tearing her skin. The ver (worm) tion of touch as the primary human sense.5 The skin compli- surfaces into the visible by means of the verre (glass) which cates clear and distinct visualization because of its curious cuts the surface of the flesh. Apart from these outbursts— dynamics, phenomena described by the psychiatrist Paul dramas enacted upon the skin—Eugénie lives in a state Schilder in the following passage: which is nearly catatonic. This frantic flight away from the ver to the verre becomes Another astonishing fact is that when subjects compare a pun on word and image written upon the skin, the lacera- what they feel and perceive tactually on their body with the tion of which is both the patient’s fear and desire. The trope optic imagination or the optic perceptions of the body, they of the pierced surface is elaborated by the scratching of her find that there is a discrepancy. The skin that is felt is distinctly flesh with her fingernails and, in calmer moods, by her favor- below the surface of the optic perception of the body. It is of great interest to study the changes which occur in the feel‑ ite pastime, sewing. These acts of textual inscription are in ing of our skin and of the tactile surface of our body, when an fact more complex and eloquent than her intermittent vocal object is touching the skin or when we touch an object with tirades. Her text is meant to be seen rather than to be heard. our hands or with another surface of the body. At this very moment, the surface becomes smooth, clear, and opposite: The word Urticaria (an alternative for dermographia) written on 50 distinct. The tactile and the optic outlines are now patient’s arm, 1887. Photo George Fox.
What is more, it is always in the process of being The body is paralyzed, unable to react. Instead, it writes and violently rewritten. The “text” lies below, like the worm records a stigma received from the Other. In this instance, beneath the surface, ready to spring up—an action which the subject is dominated over, just as Eugénie is “inscribed” both delineates and does violence. When Eugénie is asked by the doctors. Barthélémy’s descriptions always note some why she mutilates herself, she replies, “Because my blood is element of violence within the clinical method: not circulating. The blood has accumulated in my hands, like “If the patient is told that the marking instrument is a hot an abscess, which must be lanced.” Blood becomes a secret iron rod, a red stripe appears on the skin, then a blister. The ink, secreted from underneath toward the surface. The scab can take up to three weeks to heal.”15 doctors, taking their cue, note that “during the four or five days preceding her menstrual period, the patient is more agitated, negative, and more insolent than usual.” Blood The skin, between sense and sentence and insolence become the signs that a text is about to be In the dermographic experiments carried out at the end of produced. the 19th century, the clinicians’ intention is to transform the There is a final effect which Eugénie employs to raise patient’s body into an icon, a surface to be rendered icono- herself to iconographic status, definition, and celebrity. graphic and, at the same time, to represent a complex This is her complicity with the doctors, her ability to provide amalgam of connotations. Frequently, doctors inscribed their dermographic pictures which the clinicians lightly sketch own names on the subject’s skin, thereby appropriating the upon her skin, then photograph, display, and study. The body as a “work.”16 The dermographic symptom becomes a skin-image and the photographic image are deeply related. vehicle for medical authority to exert its power, a fact noted by Baudelaire when he labeled the experimental The skin between blood and meaning method “the ethic of the plaything.”17 The early formulation The dermographic symptom was first noted in 1879 and was of hysteria also bears resemblance to an act of prostitution, described as the “autographic” capacity of the skin, a phe- wherein the female patient acquiesces to the domination of nomenon both figurative and scriptural.8 That is to say, the the male clinician, each participant receiving a kind of “favor” markings can appear unassisted, or can be lightly imprinted from an act upon the feminine flesh. The dermo-graphic text by another.9 These markings then swell into clear delinea- given and received creates a heterograph wherein possession tion. What is more, in these descriptions, a complex notion of and stigma operate with a wide range of meaning. desire is associated with the phenomenon, one which links The concept of the stigmata figured in the understanding the redness of the skin, the rising of blood, and the connota- of dermographism during this period. It was, however, always tions of a sexual rising of color and tissue.10 Throughout the associated with diabolical possession and religious ecstasy, last quarter of the 19th century, clinicians frequently studied issues also bound up with the associations adhering to dermographism and emphasized the hysteria. From this point of view, dermographism belongs conjunction of the tactile and the optical in the production of historically to that which Barthélémy calls “sacred derma- a visible sign, or text. At the same time, the clinical attention tology,” or “diabolical dermatology,” wherein “the demon left never seriously departed from repeatedly invoking the the image of his hand upon the body of the possessed girl.”18 symptom in order to ratify a judgment about the patient and, In fact, clinical descriptions of dermographic experimentation thereby, to inscribe upon the body its own “sentence.” For describe the infliction of the doctor’s hand upon the skin of example, the phrase “démence précoce” was written on the patient, eliciting the image of the palm upon the flesh and Eugénie’s neck by one of her doctors.11 The dermographic inscribing the subject within the context of illness, abnormal- skin becomes an intervening surface between the desire of ity, and, even, demonic possession.19 the patient and the desire of the doctors who control and Throughout Barthélémy’s work, the word “Satan” served render her “readable.” as an experimental signifier; it was inscribed on the side of As early as 1846, dermographism was associated with a woman “from the upper classes” as well as upon the back patients suffering from delusions, problems of vision, and of a woman from a lower economic sphere.20 Each patient from a sensitivity to hypnosis, a predilection toward which exhibited entirely different traits of personality and tempera- was linked with hysteria as it was formulated before Freud’s ment, but both were included within the category of hysteria redefinition.12 In 1893, Barthélémy noted the conjunction and possession because of their dermographic capacity. of the menstrual period, dizziness, and a propensity for The inscription written by the demon is, in fact, the text inexplicable irritations of the skin, all prerequisite to the written by the hand of clinical experimentation, one disposed dermographic manifestation.13 He noted a pattern in which to its own mode of violence: “If one lightly touches the patient, the patient suffers a crisis of vision, “falls” into vertigo, and the dermographism does not always manifest itself. If, produces a text which “surfaces” into the visible. however, one gives a quick slap or flick to the skin, one soon This involuntary sequence of events has a corollary sees the entire finger or hand take shape as a swelling.“21 in the extreme suggestibility of dermographic patients. The early experimentation with hypnosis is intimately Barthélémy describes an instance in which a mother sees her related to the dermographic phenomenon and to the child nearly beheaded by a falling chimney damper. creation of a clinical fact shaped by a fiction and by a drama 52 Taken with fright, a welt rises around her own neck.14 of power and control. Barthélémy relates a pertinent case history: a patient is hypnotized; the doctor writes his own 1 For discussion of the genesis of the concept of the “autographic” skin, see Georges name on the patient’s forearms with a rubber stylet and Didi-Huberman, “Une notion du corps-cliché aux XIXème siècle,” Parachute no. 35 (June- issues the following suggestion: “This evening, at 4 p.m., August 1984), pp. 8-14. after falling asleep, you will bleed from the lines that I have 2 René Descartes, Treatise of Man (1664), tr. Thomas Steele Hall (Cambridge: Harvard drawn on your arms.” At the appointed time, the patient University Press, 1972), p. 153. obliges. The characters appear in bright relief upon his skin, 3 René Descartes, La description du corps humain (1648), Oeuvres, vol. XI, ed. Adam and droplets of blood rise in several spots. The words persist and Tannery (Paris: Cerf, 1909), pp. 283-284. for more than three months.22 4 Ibid., pp. 254-255. Thou shalt bleed where I write, thou shalt bleed on the 5 Aristotle, De Anima, III, 13, 435b, 2-20. very letters of your name. The word “sentence” is pregnant 6 Paul Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body (New York: International with meaning. It is not surprising that, even before the first Universities Press, 1950), pp. 85-86. publication of the data in 1879, doctors at the Salpêtrière 7 L. Trepsat, “Un cas de démence précoce catatonique avec pseudo-oedème compliqué clinic had practiced dermographic experiments on their de purpura,” Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière, vol. XVII (1904), pp. 193-199. favored hysterics, notably on Augustine, in 1877, and on a 8 Cf. G. Dujardin-Beaumetz, “Note sur des troubles vaso-moteurs de la peau observés sur patient identified only as “W,” on whose abdomen the doctors une hystérique (femme autographique),” L’Union médicale, no. 144 wrote the name of the clinic.23 (9 December 1879), pp. 917-922. This text is reprinted in Parachute, no. 35 (June- The most radical instance of the “autographic sentence” August 1984), pp. 8-14. is probably that inflicted upon Célina, Charcot’s “accursed” 9 Dujardin-Beaumetz, op. cit., p. 919. hysteric. It is she who breaks what might be called the icono- 10 Cf. F. Allard and H. Meige, “Effets produits par les différents modes d’excitation de graphic contract. Physically unattractive, she is forever la peau dans un cas de grand dermagraphisme,” Archives générales de médecine, 8th agitated and uncontrollably lewd. She thwarts any attempt series, vol. X (1898), vol. II, pp. 40-42. See also T. Barthélémy, Etude sur le dermag- to heroize her illness and presents herself as a “hater of raphisme ou dermoneurose toxivasomotrice (Paris: Société d’Editions Scientifiques, images.” The doctors retaliate: “With a pin, letters are written 1893), pp. 24-26. on the upper part of her chest.” Her body is compared to a 11 L. Trepsat, op. cit., p. 197. wax manikin and treated like a kind of magic writing tablet, 12 E. Mesnet, “Autographisme et stigmates” in Bulletin de l’Académie de médecine, despite her furious attempts not to cooperate, not to “repre- vol. XXIII (1890), meeting of 25 March, pp. 367-368. Cf. C. Binet-Sanglé and L. Vannier, sent.” Her agitation and resistance are unabated. She is “Noevus veineux et hystérie” in Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière, vol. XIV (1901), cauterized on the cervix four times with a hot iron. During the pp. 214-237. operation, her face becomes covered with “red erythemic 13 T. Barthélémy, , op. cit., pp. 163, 22, 126. blotches,” a variant of the dermographic phenomenon. Her 14 Ibid., p. 82. body is assaulted by subcutaneous injections, inhalations, 15 Ibid., p. 97. showers, metalloscopies, leeches, ovarian compressions. 16 Cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, op. cit. She dies in 1879, without the cause of death noted in her 17 Charles Baudelaire, “Morale du joujou” (1853), Oeuvres Completes, vol. I (Paris: Gal- dossier. In that year, Dujardin-Beaumetz establishes a clinical limard, 1979), p. 587. proof of dermographism with his concept of the femme-cli‑ 18 E. Mesnet, pp. 362, 370, 380, op. cit. Cf. J.M. Charcot and P. Richer, Les démoni- ché, the “photographic woman.” Regardless of her aques dans l’art (Paris: Delahaye et Lecrosnier, 1887), reprinted by Macula, Paris, 1984. resistance, “W” is transformed into an example, a medical 19 Cf. C. Richer, L’homme et l’intelligence. Fragments de physiologie et de psychologie icon. Dermagraphism produces here a kind of thanato- (Paris: Alcan, 1884), p. 553. See also T. Barthélémy, op. cit., pp. 86-120. graphy, 24 a sentence which controls the destiny of the 20 T. Barthélémy, op. cit., p. 130. patient and which incarnates the corporeal to corpse. 21 Allard and Meige, op. cit., p. 43. 22 T. Barthélémy, op. cit., pp. 83-84. ”Our sentence does not sound severe. Whatever com‑ mandment the prisoner has disobeyed is written upon his body 23 Cf. D. M. Bourneville and P. Régnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière by the Harrow.” ... “Does he know his sentence?” “No. ... There (Paris: Aux Bureaux du Progres médical, Delahaye et Lecrosnier, 1876/1880), vol. II would be no point in telling him. He’ll learn it on his body.” ... (1878), pp. 128-141; vol. III (1880), pp. 19, 111-113. ”But surely he knows that he has been sentenced?” “Nor that 24 Ibid., vol. 1 (1876/1877), pp. 119-120, 129-130, 150-151; vol. III (1880), pp. either.” ...”No,” said the explorer, wiping his forehead, “then he 93-96. Cf. Georges. Didi-Huberman, “Le cynisme iconographique,” Études françaises, can’t know either whether his defense was effective?” “He has special issue, “Écrire l’image,” 1984. had no chance of putting up a defense,” said the officer. 25 25 Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” in Kafka: The Complete Stories (New York: Shocken Books, 1971), pp. 144-145. The essay by Georges Didi-Huberman, “L’incarnation figurale de la sentence (note sur la peau ‘autographique’),” appeared in Scalène no. 2 (October 1984), pp. 143-169. An abbreviated version of the text based on a translation by Caryn Davidson and accompanied by an introduction was printed in the Journal of the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in its Spring 1987 issue. Cabinet thanks Geoffrey Batchen and Meg Cranston for their help in preparing this article for reprinting.
53 HERMIT HOUSING PROJECT EARTH AND ENVIRONS
DRAWn BY ASSEMBLY # DATE 010-0032 10/13/95 CHECKED BY DRAWInG # REV nOTE i-CRAB.DWG A
The Hand Up Project: biologists have been able to identify the exact features that Attempting to Meet the New Needs crabs find most desirable when they are assessing and of Natural Life-forms selecting dwellings. Elizabeth Demaray Shelter: A Crab’s Perspective Right now, 30 percent of all hermit crabs on our shorelines The shells that hermit crabs seek are made by marine gastro- are living in shells that are too small for them. In the spring- pods that secrete calcium carbonate from their mantel— time, when the animal has its growth spurt, this shortage the organ that covers their soft bodies. The shell is built up in skyrockets to 60 percent. Hermit crabs, whose own bodies deposits until the calcium carbonate becomes a crystalline provide only thin exoskeletons, must scavenge and appropriate structure held together via thin membranes of organic mate- hard-walled shells abandoned by marine gastropods for rial. Depending upon the crystalline structure and the type shelter. The problem is that there currently are not enough of animal making it, the shell differentiates into numerous shells left on our beaches for hermit crabs to use. This forms. The univalve-type shells that hermit crabs prefer to situation is not only uncomfortable but dire. Marine hermit adopt are spiral in shape. The marine gastropods that make crabs depend upon properly fitting shells for protection from these shells form them in layered bands. These bands build predators (Hazlett, 1981), mating success (Hazlett, 1989) and a cavity that spirals from the shell’s small center to succes- reproduction (Childress, 1972). The present lack of housing is sively larger areas of internal volume at the periphery. so severe that biologists now routinely find land hermit crabs This formation affords the growing gastropod within the hard attempting to shelter themselves in glass jars and whatever shell an ever-increasing area in which to expand. other ill-fitting forms of refuse they may find at their immedi- Hermit crabs are scavengers and often locate these ate disposal. borrowed dwellings by smell, when the original gastropod The reason for this housing shortage is generally inhabitant dies and begins to decay. Once a hermit crab assumed to be pollution and the collection of seashells by adopts a shell, it will keep it until the shell is outgrown, carrying humans. However, because scientists have a difficult time it continuously as a shield, wherever it goes. This is no easy asserting causal relationships in uncontrolled (that is, feat, considering that a properly fitting shell must be larger natural) models, we are unable to state specifically all the than the hermit crab that wears it, and will often significantly causes of this lack. On the other hand, due to the fact that outweigh the crab itself. In order to carry its home, one of the hermit crabs exhibit choosing behavior in relation to selecting
shelters, this population has been studied extensively. above: Synthetic hermit crab shells on the drawing board. 54 In controlled situations that offer ample housing, opposite: Shell prototypes. crab’s front claws is completely dedicated to clutching the by smell simultaneously. When this occurs, a choreographed shell. This claw bends backward and holds on to the spool activity may take place. The crabs line up next to each other, of calcium carbonate at the shell’s center. In order to move, according to size, with the largest situated next to the new, the animal must first use this claw to lift the shell and heave it recently fondled dwelling. The largest crab will then vacate onto its back. In spite of such difficulties, the drive to remain its shell in favor of the new one. The shell that has just been housed is so strong in this species that a typical hermit crab emptied will be passed to the crab next in size down the line. would rather be torn limb from limb than be pulled out of its This crab will look it over and possibly adopt it, in turn hand- shell. The only time that the animal will willingly leave its shell ing its own shell down to the crab next in size, and so on. The is 1) if it locates another, more suitable one, or 2) if it is shed- practice is precise and fast, resulting in the greatest number ding its exoskeleton—a process which can only be accom- of crabs achieving properly fitting homes while affording all plished by fully exiting its dwelling just long enough the least amount of time spent outside their shells, unshel- to wriggle out of its own exfoliated shell casing. tered from predators. When a hermit crab that has grown too large for its current home locates a new one, it determines the structure’s The Hand Up Project suitability via a process called fondling. During this activity, Based on what we know about the new needs of these the hermit crab will explore the shell’s surface and its internal animals in their current environment, the Hand Up Project volume-to-weight ratio by rolling the shell over and gently proposes to manufacture alternative forms of housing, spe- rocking it back and forth. Since hermit crabs actually choose cifically designed for use by land hermit crabs, out of plastic. the shells that they inhabit, there is a large body of information This solution offers multiple benefits. Not only will the project concerning shell selection. It has been shown that there is a afford the animal badly needed additional forms of shelter, specific volume-to-weight ratio that crabs like. Shells with a but we also contend that, by utilizing current high internal volume-to-weight ratio are the most in demand. technology, we may now be better equipped to meet the These more desirable shells facilitate growth by providing needs of this life-form than nature ever has. the crabs ample space in which to physically expand, while The use of plastic in manufacturing these new homes saving locomotive energy by being light in weight. is key. This material affords the crab an almost ideal dwell- As might be imagined, even without the current housing ing. Being much lighter than calcium carbonate, these new shortage, the finding and exchanging of shells is a preoccu- houses do not take as much energy to carry during locomo- pation amongst this species. Hermit crabs routinely take over tion. Plastic is also structurally strong, which affords large shells that have been vacated by their fellows. Peri- areas of internal space in the new structures. This results 55 odically, multiple crabs will locate a single new shell in the greater internal volume-to-weight ratio that the crab prefers. Of additional benefit is the longevity of this material and distribution costs by licensing the houses for advertising. coupled with the way these crabs recycle and share their In exchange for financial support, each plastic shelter may shelters. Because plastic is non-biodegradable, these new be readily produced bearing a corporate logo. From this forms may potentially outlast the life-span of the crab itself, perspective, the longevity of these dwellings is also a plus, thereby assuring many generations access to additional in that their existence will guarantee the perpetuation of hand-me-down housing. advertising across a time-span best described as evolutionary. We acknowledge that such trans-species caregiving While we recognize that this funding solution will may in fact be a form of control. In recognition of this increase the current proliferation of corporate logos on paradox, the new structures are aesthetically based on the beaches and in other apparently pristine environments, we architecture of Giuseppe Terragni, an Italian Fascist active in do feel that it is appropriate to utilize these insignias of global the 1930s. Physically, the design of the new forms has been capital, and the wealth they symbolize, in the service of tailored to the animal’s needs. The structures are offered for ameliorating environmental problems that have been caused various body sizes. The shell spiral in the middle has been by humans in the first place. eliminated, reducing the overall weight of each house and This effort is a minor, genuine attempt to give a struggling increasing its internal volume. Instead of this central core, life form a hand up. The project maintains that innovative the new design offers an internal flange attached to the front technological solutions can be brought to bear upon a great opening for the crab to clutch with its holding claw. Shelter number of problems involving the present existence and while foraging has also been considered. Similar to the hood- future survival of many life forms. The intended audience like structure found in a traditional shell, the new form offers of the Hand Up Project is someone who, while walking on a an overhang for additional protection in situations where the beach, might pause to contemplate a slowly ambulating body must be extended outside the dwelling. Color can also be hermit crab, wearing on its back a tiny, man-made plastic adapted to the needs of the animal. The prototype houses are house bearing a corporate logo. tinted beige, which affords the wearer maximum camouflage on many of the beaches in North America. The color can, how- References ever, be visually matched to a specific population’s native J. R. Childress, “Behavioral Ecology and Fitness Theory in a Tropical Hermit Crab,” in environment for optimal protection. Ecology, vol. 53, (1972), pp. 960-964. In its beta version, the Hand Up Project was a great B. A. Hazlett, “The Behavioral Ecology of Hermit Crabs,” in Annual Review of Ecology and success. Twenty-five percent of the initial crab population Systematics, vol. 12 (1981), pp. 1–22. chose to move into a new, fabricated home when presented B. A. Hazlett & L. C. Baron, “Influence of Shells on Mating Behavior in the Hermit Crab with the novel structures for a period of two months. The Calcinus tibicen,” in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, vol. 24, (1989), pp. 369-376. beta version involved crabs in captivity, where body growth is more gradual and, consequently, shell exchange occurs less frequently. Due to this fact, there is reason to believe that, in the wild, where growth is more rapid, these numbers will be even better. This first generation of houses was produced using rapid prototyping. The design was drawn in AutoCAD. Each form was then created in one piece, via a stereo lithography process, where a laser deposits thin layers of plastic to create the overall structure. This procedure allowed the houses to be made without the use of separate parts, so that the new “shells” could be created without using glues or solvents that could harm the animals. These seamless structures have also proven to be quite strong. In its final version, the project will use die injection molds to manufacture the new houses. While the start-up cost is significant, this method will allow the structures to be mass-produced with few seam lines and at an enormous reduction in cost from the initial method of fabrication. The funding needed to manufacture and distribute these shelters is significant. It is also significant that—notwith- standing the contradictions inherent in current scientific knowledge—this production is purely altruistic in its intent. The scope of the project is global, and accordingly, corporate funding has been targeted as a potential revenue source. The project is currently soliciting corporate 56 and commercial sponsorship to fund manufacturing opposite: Hmmm.... 57
FUTURES Introduction Thinking Futures Daniel Rosenberg & Susan Harding Almost two years ago, Daniel Rosenberg approached Cabinet to see if the magazine might be interested in having him guest- The Future is not what it used to be. edit a thematic section dedicated to “Histories of the Future.” –Theodor Nelson Daniel had not come empty-handed. He proffered several essays from a forthcoming book of the same title that he We have been living through boom times for the future. was co-editing with Susan Harding for Duke University Press. Even before the escalating storms of the early 21st century, Several of these, Daniel suggested, could be re-edited for our cultures and industries collaborated in a remarkable the magazine context and printed in advance of the book proliferation of words and images about this impossible (forthcoming in 2005). What encouraged us, besides the object. In recent years, the very thought “future” has been caliber of the essays, was Daniel’s curiosity, openness, and spectacularized in extraordinary ways. Whether in modes intellectual passion. Two years on, we have not changed of progress or apocalypse, our media have overflowed with our minds on any of those counts, but can add stamina and anticipations of things to come, with utopias, dystopias, sto- a sense of humor to the list. Without these qualities, the ries of time travel and artificial intelligence, with accounts of thematic section (now presented under the title “Futures”) acceleration and progress, of doom and imminent destruction, would have remained only a potential future, never to be with scenarios, predictions, prophecies, and manifestos. actualized. We are very happy that Daniel has established Since the rise of the digital economy, even the benighted “sci- in our pages the heretofore unexplored concept of guest- ence” of futurology has come back into style.1 editorship, and we thank him for everything he has brought In the first years of the 21st century, representations of to this project. –Eds. the future have cycled wildly through a historical repertoire, from the ray-gun gothic of the 1930s to the noir and the endism of the 1940s and 1950s to the plastic modularity of the 1960s and back again. As if following a kind of Moore’s Law scaling principle, futures today seem to be reproducing themselves faster and more cheaply than ever. At the same time, their shelf-lives appear to be getting shorter. Any child can historicize them for you, can tell you in a minute which future is up to date and which is already over, which doesn’t run fast enough on the current microprocessor and which doesn’t run at all. In the computer world, an entire sub- industry has sprung up in what is called legacy software, programs written on old platforms, modified and translated to run on new machines as if it were still 1979 and the first wave of chunky Galaxians were twirling madly toward the missile defense systems and video arcades of our Earth. More and more, our sense of the future is conditioned by a knowledge of futures that we have already lost. Indeed, nostalgia for the future has become so pervasive today that it has even developed a distinctive set of commercial uses. As Arjun Appadurai suggests, contemporary mass consumption “is not simply based on the functioning of simulacra in time, but also on the force of the simulacra of time.”2 If different modes of production imply different forms and experiences of temporality, our current habits of consumption appear to imply a nostalgia for productivity in general and for all of the different experiences of temporality that it might be able to generate.3 Today, our futures feel increasingly citational— each is haunted by the “semiotic ghosts” of futures past.4 The rise of this kind of nostalgia points up something both formally and historically important. The future is not an empty category. Even if we accept a skeptical critique of prophecy, we must acknowledge that for us the future is not so much undetermined as overdetermined. Our lives are constructed around knowledges of the coming that are as full (and flawed) as our knowledges of the past. Often these 59 future knowledges are profoundly freighted, since they involve anticipatory hopes and fears energized by pasts that ever partial. The contingent futures that emerged during the are with us still. Our futures are not merely geometrical exten- Enlightenment never fully displaced the necessary futures sions of time. They haunt our presents, obeying architectural of prophecy. In some instances, such as that of Auguste laws that look more like Gaudi than Euclid, arising in diverse Comte, modern visions of progress themselves took on a and peculiar ways. providential character. In others, such as the 19th-century In historical terms, the development of future-nostalgia Uchronie of Charles Renouvier, contingencies piled on con- also points to a crisis in modern futurity. From the begin- tingencies seemingly without end.9 Moreover, the religious ning, the modern was constituted through a rejection of prophets did not oblige anyone by going away. As it turns prophecy. The philosophy of the Enlightenment required that out, what most characterizes the modern problem of the time would be open to human achievement and that events future is not its historical distance from the mode of prophecy could gain meaning from their interrelation, rather than from but rather its hybrid and contradictory relationship to it. their relationship to absolute, Biblical beginnings and ends. The modern period saw a proliferation of techniques By bracketing eschatological questions, the Enlightenment for imagining, predicting, and narrating futures—many in effectively “sealed off” the future from prophetic knowledge.5 an ambiguous terrain “between science and fiction”—and a But this development had paradoxical consequences. In developing cultural consciousness of the instability of this no way did it amount to a going-out-of-business for futuro- new temporal landscape. By the end of the 19th century, logical workshops. The Enlightenment proscription against according to contemporary observers, time itself appeared traditional prophetic practices turned out to produce new to be accelerating, and futures—big and small alike—seemed and intensified imaginative demands on the future and new to be coming and going with breathtaking speed. And this techniques of narration and prognosis.6 The very possibility sense of acceleration did not abate. Instead, it became some- of an open-ended time elicited an outpouring of grand thing like second nature, so that by the late 20th century, narratives from Condorcet and Kant to Hegel and Comte. the problem was no longer how to account for historical This effect was by no means limited to high philosophy. In acceleration, but how to account for the acceleration of the arena of fiction, for example, the late 18th century saw acceleration itself. an efflorescence of future fantasies. And, for the first time in At the same time, the coming and going of futures literary history, these futures took place not in some vague became such a regular feature of modern life that it has hereafter but in a chronological expanse freed from the fini- sometimes seemed as if it could have no history at all. tude of sacred history, in the profane historical future, in the Witness the turning of the recent millennium. Although the years 2440, 1850, 1900, and 7308.7 event itself did not occasion the level of cult activity or Of course, these future narratives were also morality terrorism anticipated by many observers, it did provoke an tales for the present, but in them the present was material- outpouring of futurological speculation. Prophets, prognosti- ized through striking new kinds of proleptic imagining. The cators, predictors, fortune-tellers, astrologers, millennialists, new futurisms of the 18th and 19th centuries allowed—and apocalyptics, visionaries, seers, and their journalistic and even required—the thinking of alternative timelines: in them, academic fellow-travelers clogged airwaves, magazines, the present was not just the past of the future, but the “the newspapers, bookstores, and pews with their wares. As we past of future, contingent presents.”8 It is difficult to overes- approached 2000, the clock of discourse ticked louder and timate the implications of this new possibility. But 60 it is equally crucial to note that its victory was only above: Business 2.0 magazine subscription solicitation. louder, and the future itself seemed to shrink to fit the placeholder, a placebo, a no-place, but it is also a common- narrowing frame left until the calendar turned over. When place that we need to understand in all of its cultural and all was said and done, though, 2000 could not have been any- historical density. thing but an anticlimax to the countless stories in which To this end, the articles and artifacts gathered here it played an anticipatory role. There was something vampiric highlight everyday future-making practices: each works to about the moment: a thousand flashbulbs popped, but nothing illustrate and to understand the how of our anticipations showed up in the picture. Still, invisibly, it was everywhere. It as much as the what. The following section is a hypertext. haunted us. While its subjects are diverse, they are also pervasively At the same time, the millennium set off a kind of world- linked—technologies of time and trauma; the hope and wide explosion of future kitsch and marketing, of gadgets, hubris of the manifesto; conspiracy, prophecy, and utopia— blockbusters, and pageants, an entire world of media turned subjects both deeper and more mundane than we usually Busby Berkeley for a year. New York City took out a trade- recognize. mark and made itself the official world capital of the “event.” Airline tours were devised in order to allow paying passengers This themed section was developed in coordination with the Histories of the Future the experience of two or more millennial New Year’s Eves, project organized by Susan Harding at the University of California Humanities Research and one South Pacific island went so far as to change its posi- Institute. The book Histories of the Future features contributions from Susan Harding, tion on the international date line in order to offer wealthy Jamer Hunt, Pamela Jackson, Susan Lepselter, Jonathan Lethem, Joseph Masco, Christo- tourists a guaranteed experience of arriving at the 21st pher Newfield, Elizabeth Pollman, Vincente Rafael, Daniel Rosenberg, Miryam Sas, Kath- century before anyone else in the world. leen Stewart, and Anna Tsing. We wish to thank Duke University Press for its permission Even skeptics rushed into this boom future market. to use extracts from several of these articles and the Humanities Research Institute for its Rationalists assured us that “the millennium” was only a kind sponsorship of the project. of folie à plusieurs based on a scientifically meaningless fascination with round numbers. But, at the same time, they 1 Susan Harding and Kathleen Stewart, “Bad Endings: American Apocalpysis,” traded in the fascination. In the months leading up to the Annual Reviews in Anthropology(1999), p. 28 . turn-of-the-millennium, anticipations of the year 2000 trans- 2 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization formed into fears of a Y2K computer bug, and for a while the (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). See also Fredric Jameson, “Nostalgia future was now. As Y2K, the future acquired a technical, a for the Present,” in Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars (Durham, N.C.: rational, and especially, an economic profile. Its importance Duke University Press, 1992), pp. 253–73. was to be measured in the amount of money spent prevent- 3 E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture ing it, or cleaning up the mess that it created; Y2K gave us (New York: New Press, 1993). something to believe in and anticipate when we were barred 4 William Gibson, “The Gernsback Effect,” in Burning Chrome (New York: Ace, 1994). from hoping for something mysterious. It also had the effect 5 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present of spectacularizing a new world order—as, according to the (New York: Verso, 2002). experts, only the hypertechnologized and the primitive would 6 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe be spared. It would be those technological and political strag- (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). glers of the second world, principally the former 7 I. F. Clarke, The Pattern of Expectation, 1644–2001 (New York: Basic Books, 1979); Communist world, who would be at risk, perhaps punished. Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (Garden City, N.Y.: At Y2K, the big story turned out to be the non-story. Doubleday, 1973); Bronislaw Baczko, Utopian Lights: The Evolution of the Idea of Social As hours passed on New Year’s Eve and nations of the Progress, trans. Judith L. Greenberg (New York: Paragon, 1978). Earth passed in cohorts from the 20th to the 21st centuries, 8 Niklas Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society, trans. Stephen Holmes and Charles CNN and the networks reported “success” in nearly every Larmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). locality. There were scattered reports of problems released 9 Charles Renouvier, Uchronie (l’Utopie dans l’histoire): Esquisse historique apocryphe from the bunker-style headquarters of our own Federal du développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été tel qu’il aurait pu être “Y2K Preparedness Center,” but none of these turned out (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1901). to be serious. Certainly none approached the level of crisis 10 Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi created months later by the hacker-induced failures of several (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). major web portals or the simple computer virus called the 11 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard Love Bug. University Press, 1983). But the failure of the Y2K apocalypse did not lessen its historical importance. Like any other national pageantry, Y2K in all its dimensions—cultural, commercial, political, and technological—energized an entire economy of anticipation, and produced a powerful expressive performance of a still- unstable global culture business, vying for metanarrative control over the future. The events of Y2K lavishly demon- strated that the future in the modern West is always 61 already dense with meaning. “The future” is a Very Slow Scan Television characters with personalized messages. Even the Russian Gebhard Sengmüller & Jakob Edlbacher Space Station MIR has been transmitting SSTV pictures recently!” Very Slow Scan Television (VSSTV) is a new television format VSSTV uses broadcasts from this historic public domain that we have developed building upon Slow Scan Television television system—available anytime over freely accessible (SSTV), an almost 50-year-old image transmission system frequencies—and regular bubble wrap to construct an analo- used by Ham Radio amateurs. In contrast to regular TV, gous system in which the packing material functions as the SSTV runs on a dramatically reduced frame rate. aperture mask. (See overleaf for a technical diagram). Just as Developed in 1957 by Copthorne Macdonald, Slow Scan a Cathode Ray Tube mixes the three primary colors to create Television uses the shortwave radio band (Ham Radio) to various hues, VSSTV will utilize a plotter-like machine to fill transmit television images. Ham Radio not only broadcasts the individual bubbles with one of the three primary CRT information (as is the case with conventional radio), but colors (red, green, and blue), turning them into pixels on the also uses the radio spectrum for personal communications, VSSTV “screen.” Observed from a distance, the clusters of usually on a point-to-point basis over a previously negoti- pixels/bubbles will merge into the transmitted image. Large ated frequency. In contrast to telephone conversations, this television images will be the result, images that take the idea communication is open and can be listened to by anyone of slow scan to the extreme. The SSTV format transmits at who happens to be tuned into the same frequency. The Ham the rate of up to one frame every eight seconds; in our process, Radio band was reserved for the purpose of voice transmis- the frame rate decreases to one per day. An observer can wit- sion, and therefore uses only a small amount of bandwidth. ness the extremely slow transformation of the “blank” bubble Broadcasting images within this narrow bandwidth requires wrap into an image over the course of 20 hours. reducing their quality and rules out transmitting moving images. Furthermore, the visual information has to be con- Thanks to Charles Gute and Paul Sengmüller. verted into an audio signal. According to British Ham Radio operator Guy Clark (N4BM), “The original idea was to find a method of trans- mitting a television picture over a single speech channel. This meant that a typical (at that time) 3MHz wide television picture had to be reduced to around 3kHz (1000:1 reduction). It was decided at the outset that the scanning rates must be very slow, which precludes the use of moving pictures. The choice of time base for synchronizing was the readily avail- able domestic power supply at 50 or 60 Hz (depending on the country of origin). This gave a line speed of 16.6Hz and 120 or 128 lines per frame (against the then UK standard of 405 lines (now 625) per frame), giving a new picture frame every 7.2 or 8 seconds. … The original SSTV systems were based on ex- government radar screens and cathode ray tubes with very long persistence (“P7”) phosphors. This allowed an image to be painted on the screen over a period of a few seconds.” The modulation technique often transmits defective images, evident in trapezoid distortions in the image caused by time synchronisation problems. SSTV may suggest a parallel TV universe, one that devel- oped during an era in which television monopolies were consolidating their hold over mass media culture. But it also shows similarities to current streaming and netcasting tech- nologies where personal flair and taste determine the range of images broadcast. Texts and pictures refer to the location of the sender and his or her identifier. Self-referential features dominate. Guy Clark writes: “What kinds of pictures are sent? Reviewing pictures saved during the last few weeks I found: Hams in their shacks, lots of pet dogs, a frog, kangaroo, astro- nauts in the Space Shuttle (SSTV has been transmitted from some missions!!!), bridges, birds, Elvis Presley, rock forma- tions, an old-fashioned microphone, antique cars, flowers, children, Jupiter, a cow, someone playing bagpipes, 62 a UFO, many colorful butterflies, boats, and cartoon opposite: Bubble wrap as image matrix.
VSSTV: functional diagram
Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 SSTV (Slow Scan Television) signals An open-air antenna, together with a An SSTV scan-converter recognizes The image processing PC selects a are continually broadcast by Ham short wave radio receiver, tunes into the and decodes the images carried by the random sequence of individual pictures Radio operators around the world on SSTV band and receives the Ham Radio sound signal. A monitor displays the from the SSTV converter. A program several short wave bands used for signals. Speakers play back the sound images while an oscilloscope renders rasterizes these images into pixels and voice communications (e.g. 3.845 signals to illustrate the process. individual scanlines, making visible the breaks them down into their RGB MHz, 7.171 MHz, 21.340 MHz). gradual flow of the image (X-resolution: components. The same PC also takes amplitude, Y-resolution: time). on the role of process controller in the following steps. Step 5 Step 6 Step 7 Step 8 The mechanics: Bubble wrap sheeting The mechanics: a carriage (also The print head consists of three needles Pixel by pixel, line by line, the bubble (width: 2 m. in bulk from roll) is fed controlled by the PC) vertically fed by three tanks holding red, blue, wrap is colored in accordance with the between two cylinders for horizontal positions the print head. and green ink. Controlled by the PC, underlying SSTV image. Assuming transport. A photo sensor, together with these needles inject the bubbles with 10 seconds per pixel, this will result in the PC controlling the process, man- the exact amount of colored ink cor- a new VSSTV display every 20 hours ages the exact, real-time positioning of responding to the brightness and hue (75 lines per image). Viewed from an the sheeting via a feedback loop. of the pixel. A miniature, closed-circuit appropriate distance (approximately video camera mounted on the print 5 meters), the individual dots of ink head captures the process and the resolve into distinct colors. An overall resulting image is displayed on a video image emerges and becomes visible. monitor. Desert Modernism sketches attest to the contradictions of a disabled master Joseph Masco narrative of progress which now saturates daily reality with unruly new forms of imaginative agency, projections that are Too much of a good thing is wonderful. simultaneously exhilarating, excessive, apocalyptic— –Liberace American.
The contemporary American desert exists as (post)modernist Day One—On Mythic Masculinity: The Nevada Test Site frontier and sacrifice zone, simultaneously a fantasy play- Our guide is utterly charming. A 35-year career at the Nevada ground where individuals move to reinvent themselves, and Test Site (NTS) making detonation mechanisms for nuclear a technoscientific wasteland where the most dangerous weapons has obviously been good to him. He carries himself projects of a militarized society are located. In the past with the cool assurance of someone who has performed century, the desert Southwest has become a space of vexed well at the center of a national undertaking, a Cold Warrior in excitement, where the challenge of an expansive wilderness the truest sense.1 Even after the demise of the Soviet Union, has been met by monumental efforts to dislocate its indig- and his own retirement, he upholds the Test Site’s mission enous inhabitants, redirect its rivers, populate its interior with by conducting these tours—educating the public about roads and cities, and fill its air with jet and missile contrails. “what really went on,” articulating the continued need for US In the phantasmagoria of the neon oasis, the wonder of the weapons of mass destruction, and reiterating the critical role built environment is now offered up for intimate comparison played by the NTS in managing a global order of proliferat- with the natural world. ing danger and constant threat. Physically impressive, with Las Vegas is currently the fastest growing city in the a great sense of cowboy humor, this is no Dr. Strangelove. United States, consuming water as if it were surrounded by More a favorite story-telling uncle. ocean. It is also an island of public commercialism within a Driving us through the NTS, he points out details in a military-industrial crypto-state, that vast section of Nevada seamless history: “That’s Sedan Crater, the second-biggest backcountry where secret military technologies are designed, in the US—part of the nonmilitary use-of-nuclear-explosives atomic bombs detonated, and chemical weapons and nuclear program. Astronauts trained there before going to the moon. waste stored. Nevertheless, the desert can still today take on That’s the Chemical Spill Test Facility, the only place in the the appearance of pristine possibility, unrolling toward the country where you can create a major toxic accident to study horizon as a rugged tabula rasa, a dreamspace for spectacular how to clean it up. That’s the new Device Assembly Facil- progress. This ability to reinscribe desert “purity” requires ity—miles of underground tunnels—we can’t go there.” I ask constant effort, as the pursuit of utopian potential is predi- him when, in his experience, was the best moment to be cated on a continual emptying-out of dystopian realities— working at the Test Site. “From 1962 to 1988,” he replies with- in this case, those of nuclear weapons, waste, and war. Thus, out hesitation. This era extended from the implementation of if the desert in the post-Cold War American imagination the above-ground nuclear test ban to the near-collapse of the still signifies hope for an endlessly renewable frontier, such industry, when revelations about the scope of environmental migration from self and nation remains fraught, as escapees damage in places like Hanford, WA, Rocky Flats, CO, and Fer- to the western interior run headlong into an equally imagina- nald, OH, brought heightened public suspicion and expand- tive military-industrial economy that constructs the desert ing new regulatory restraints. During this 26-year period, our as a hyper-regulated “proving ground” for the super-secret, guide says, nuclear weapons research paused only once. the deadly, and the toxic. To negotiate these conflicting “JFK was assassinated on a test day,” he tells us, “and we approaches to the epic West, both citizens and officials have postponed the ‘shot’ for 24 hours but then got come to rely on tactical amnesias, temporal sutures enabling back to work.” a precarious—if addictive—cosmology of progress, fueled For this man, working at the Test Site provided access to by high-octane combinations of risk, silence, utopian expec- the some of the best minds in the world, the scientists at the tation, and paranoid anxiety. It is this dual process of mythol- national laboratories (Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia). ogizing and monumentalizing through cognitive erasure that But it also demanded constant negotiation of the military I call “desert modernism.” mindset. Once, he simply pulled the detonating mechanism During the Cold War, desert modernism took on a out of a nuclear device, stowed it in the trunk of his car, and decidedly masculine form, combining military science with drove away—putting anxious colonels and a multi-million corporate capitalism in a highly gendered national perfor- dollar test on hold until he felt confident of its success. In the mance. The four sketches that follow, gathered during a tour realm of Cold War masculinity, the buck stopped there. But it of Nevada in the spring of 1997, offer a dialectical or compos- was also obviously so much fun. There are tales of midnight ite portrait of Cold War culture’s masculinist afterimage. In helicopter rides, hints at secrets he’s not allowed to share. fin-de-siècle Nevada, we can watch a specific 20th-century His commentary constantly registers the pleasure of com- optimism (for technology and the possibility of endless manding earth-shattering technoscience, the satisfaction self-reinvention) circle back to confront itself in the lives of
weapons scientists, tunnel engineers, conspiracy opposite: Atomic blast of house #1, Yucca Flats, Nevada Test Site, 17 March 66 theorists, and sequined entertainers. Indeed, these 1953. Courtesy US Department of Energy (DOE).
68 of having unlimited state resources to support it, and a race and airplanes, but on soldiers ordered to march into fallout with a real enemy to give it meaning. clouds, and on uninformed civilians. We know now that most Our tour focuses on remnants of 1950s “weapons- of the continental US was affected by radioactive fallout from effects tests”—tanks, bridges, and buildings deliberately the NTS, contributing significantly to national thyroid cancer blasted to see what would happen. He shows us, for rates. But when I ask about fallout, our guide states simply, example, a safe used in a 1957 test code-named Priscilla. “that was before my time.” The building was completely destroyed by the 37-kiloton And this, it seems to me, is desert modernism in its pur- explosion, but the safe and the money inside came through est form, a profound belief in an unending and conceptually just fine. Next, we visit the waste storage site, an enormous clean progress, but one made possible by strategic forgetful- trench filled with neatly stacked wooden boxes and metal ness and sublimated technophilia. Just as the desert drums—entering a nearby office building, we encounter a constantly threatens to overrun the Test Site, introducing poster explaining how site workers mobilized to relocate a weeds and blowing sand where shiny metal should be, the family of foxes living in the dump. Thus, while asking ques- cosmology of the desert modernist requires a constant tions about radioactive waste and pondering the 100,000- patrolling of the cognitive field to prevent ambiguity from year threat posed by some nuclear materials, we are taking root. As we leave the NTS, I ask about the future of presented with images of protected mammal babies and nuclear weapons. “The Soviets—” our guide begins, then carefully documented signs of worker environmentalism. with a private half-smile, “I mean Russians—” he states are When we ask about contamination, our guide assures us still dangerous, and concludes that developing nuclear that he has walked “every inch of this site” and suffered “no weapons remains a means of protecting the “free world.” ill effects.” There is some contamination, he acknowledges, However, since his narrative cannot afford to acknowledge but it is contained and poses no public risk. The reference to the local consequences of nuclear testing or assess the radioactivity is countered with a story about a rattlesnake legacy of radioactive waste, the signs of nuclear nationalism that bit into our guide’s cowboy boot and wouldn’t let go. revealed in our tour are not drawn from the current weapons He had the boots, snake included, bronzed. Dangers at NTS, complex—which is busily re-inventing itself in a world with in his presentation, are natural or international, but never only one superpower. Instead, his performance is a carefully nuclear or technoscientific. edited reiteration of mid-century nuclear culture, and by Our final stop is the Apple II site, where in 1955 the the end of our visit, it’s difficult not to conclude that nuclear US military built a “typical” American suburb for the sole weapons, despite our guide’s proclamations about the purpose of dropping an atomic bomb on it. A fire station, future, are now located in the past. We’ve seen no real a school, a radio station, a library, and a dozen homes were evidence that they remain the foundation of US national filled with everyday items (televisions, refrigerators, furniture, security or a multi-billion-dollar-a-year operation, with 1997 food, etc.), populated with white-skinned mannequins, and budgets exceeding levels from the height of the Cold War. neatly annihilated. All that remains are a brick ruin and what The vast desert landscape, combined with the aged quality looks like an abandoned wooden house, “a real fixer-upper” of the buildings and the lack of any substantive evidence of according to our guide. The only indicator of anything dra- ongoing science, minimize the scale of the nuclear project, matic is that the chimney is cracked and wildly off- center, and seemingly, its claim on the future. This may be a public suggesting a powerful explosion but only hinting at the relations tactic, but it might also be a structural effect of des- 29-kiloton bomb that detonated one mile away, vaporizing ert modernism. For how could those inhabiting the the rest of “survival town.” After the test, scientists held epicenter of the nuclear security state assess their own a feast in which they ate the food not incinerated—again, history? In order to do that, we must look more closely at the as our guide informs us, “suffering no ill effects.” In the neighboring communities that live with the consequences of serious play of the NTS, the meal was a kind of reverse last nuclear nationalism. supper, where any signs of post-blast life were celebrated as absolute victory. Day Two—On the Poetics of Rock Bolts: I ask our guide if the US could survive a nuclear war. The Yucca Mountain Project “Oh, yes, I believe we could,” he replies, but later he seems On the western periphery of the Nevada Test Site stands unsure, acknowledging that nuclear war would be an “act of Yucca Mountain, currently in preparation to become the insanity—the end of everything.” This is the only ambiguity principal nuclear waste storage facility in the United States.2 in a nearly perfect performance. The seamlessness of his If the NTS presents desert modernism optimistically, then the narrative, in fact, registers his discipline: He neither confirms Yucca Mountain Project is its flip-side, an arena where the nor denies anything that makes the NTS suspect. In fact, dreamspace of absolute technical mastery slips out his history is largely restricted to the era of above-ground of joint. For, in this mountain—a spiritual center for the dis- nuclear testing (1951-1962), after which testing—and most placed indigenous cultures of the Southwest—the industrial of its visual consequences—went underground. This was, waste of the nuclear-powered state proves uncontainable, however, also the era of the most extreme environmental
damage, when studies of blast-effects included opposite: entrance to Yucca Mountain Project, future home of the US’s nuclear 69 experiments not only on banks, tanks, houses, waste. Courtesy Yucca Mountain Project. exceeding the power of its producers to predict its future. if the 10,000-year plan has affected his work in any way. “No,” From a distant coast, the Department of Energy has ruled he replies testily. Startled, I press on. “Do you ever feel that that any permanent nuclear waste depository in the US must you’re building something for the ages here, like the have an operative plan that will make it safe for 10,000 years. pyramids?” “I don’t like to think about those kinds of things,” Such a plan is unprecedented in human history, though it he replies. Then, looking directly in my eyes, he says, would account for only a fraction of the life-span of the most “I’ll guarantee this tunnel for 100 years. After that I hope dangerous nuclear materials, which will remain radioactive they’ll have someplace else to put this stuff.” As the zeros for hundreds of thousands of years. Nevertheless—a 10,000- drop off the 10,000-year master plan, the Yucca Mountain year safety plan—consider the astonishing Project assumes the appearance of a national hoax, its confidence this regulation reveals, the certainty it registers confidence fractured unredeemably. Cold War apocalypti- about the eternal reliability of the American government. cism—the fear of a sudden fiery end that propelled fission We arrive at Yucca Mountain for a safety lecture before and ballistics science and created deterrence theory— plunging into a cave that U-turns for a mile through the assumed that the nation would end abruptly in an atomic mountain. Donning red hard-hats, goggles, and fluorescent flash, a prediction requiring radical action in the here and orange earplugs, we strap emergency-breathing filters around now. The Yucca Mountain Project, however, now assumes our waists and are briefed on emergency procedures—in an eternal nation-state founded on the stability of “good case of fire, we should use our filters even though they might rock,” and a government-to-be that will diligently uphold scorch our lungs. Thus weighted down, we walk single file 20th-century laws and watch over 20th-century waste. At along railway tracks into the darkness. Deafening machine- Yucca Mountain, the nostalgic desert modernism of the NTS noise mixed with the long shadows of artificial light and the formally confronts its future, and in that effort is expanded smell of stale earth greet us. About 75 yards into the moun- exponentially, to the point of self-contradiction and failure. tain, we enter a large chamber where we meet the tunnel engineer, a middle-aged man who wears his protective gear Day Three—Paranoid Surveillance: Rachel, Nevada with practiced ease. If nuclearism at the Nevada Test Site represents the focus The engineer explains how waste is to be shipped to of a certain kind of modernist planning, and Yucca Mountain the site in barrels, where it will be stacked, and contingencies embodies the fallacies of science upheld by government for retrieving specific barrels once stored. He is clearly hubris, then what is it like to live on the outside, to be nervous, aware of the intense politics around the Project, and surrounded by nuclear nationalism but denied access to its he gains my sympathy, for he is not a public relations expert hierarchies?3 Ninety minutes north of Las Vegas, one finds or a policy maker—he builds tunnels. He seems most com- the little town of Rachel—population 100—a dozen or so fortable providing technical information, and our mobile homes parked beside a two-lane highway. The calm attention moves to the rock walls and ceiling, which are is broken by military aircraft from Nellis Air Force base, the covered with countless metal spikes secured by netting. We NTS, and the mysterious Area 51, also known as Dreamland, ask about them, and our engineer lights up. “Well, you see, where Stealth fighter technology was invented (some locals there are two kinds of rock: good rock and bad rock. This is say) by reverse-engineering crashed UFOs. Rachel is a hub for bad rock.” “Bad” rock crumbles and needs mechanical conspiracy theorists and UFO believers, a point of pilgrimage reinforcement, while “good” rock is internally reliable. where the legacy of secrecy, security, and science becomes Yucca Mountain has both good and bad rock, and is largely prolific, permeating everyday life and encouraging those on dependent on rock bolts to compensate for both. With the edge to assume the existence of secret power centers. alarming ease, in fact, all the debates about the scientific We start at the Little A’le’Inn Café, where the walls are viability of Yucca Mountain as a waste storage site—the covered with photographs of fuzzy disc-shaped things that 20-plus years of acrimonious technical and political debate, might be spaceships, and talk turns to cover-ups and disinfor- the hundreds of thousands of pages of technical reports mation, why “They” are here and “what’s going on.” You can arguing potential risks and advantages, the 10,000-year discuss government black budgets and black helicopters, plan—are all reduced to the power of the rock bolt. Brilliantly or explore the latest theories on cattle mutilations and human simple and reassuringly tangible, the rock bolt presents abductions, secret genetic experimentation, and New desert modernism in primordial form, for these bits of metal World Orders. Who is really behind the United Nations, the promise to hold the mountain together, to discipline the earth International Monetary Fund, the Trilateral Commission? through millennia. Was the Cold War really a battle with the Soviets or merely In the desert, however, one is never far from under- a way for both countries to arm against invading extrater- standing that reality is mandated not only by official restrials? Is the current fascination with UFOs a giant discourse, but by the cycles of wilderness. Yucca Mountain campaign to hide the Truth, or is the government preparing is and always will be a living organism, one that stands on us for the news that They have been here a long, long time? several major fault lines, whose roots touch the water table Above all—what’s coming next? that sources much of the Southwest. It is subject to tectonic While we eat lunch, a conspiracy theorist takes center shifts, erosion, and other planetary processes far stage, singing country & western songs and playing an 70 beyond the reach of the rock bolt. I ask our engineer electric organ. A waitress joins him. They’re having a good aware of its effects—mysterious illnesses, invisible forms of surveillance, lights in the night sky—conspiracy theorists mobilize to fill the gaps. A half-century of government policy to “neither confirm nor deny” questions about nuclear nation- alism has produced a proliferating discursive field where citizens must rely on their imaginations. In this way, the café conversations present a displaced mirror-image of nuclear nationalism, for the programming at the NTS, Yucca Moun- tain, Area 51 and life in Rachel all assume that the world is ultimately knowable, that there are no coincidences, and that careful observation of everyday life can reveal the hidden master-narrative of existence. This attention to the scripting of appearances in the desert West, however, now exceeds the national security state, having evolved into a resilient new kind of American expressive culture simulta- neously apocalyptic, narcissistic, sensational. time, and between tunes, he introduces himself. I recognize Day Four—Delirious Excess: The Liberace Museum him, having seen one of his self-financed videos on UFOs. One of the most remarkable attributes of the Nevada Test On tape, he argues that UFO sightings are masterminded by Site is its location.5 Founded on the need for concealment, an “international cabal” and warns that sometime in the late- it lies adjacent to a city famous for its extravagant display— 1990s a “major UFO incident” will be staged at Area 51 as Vegas is the town where anything goes and the nation-state a carefully planned media distraction to enable a global take- is somehow conceptually absent. But the serious politics over. Today, he has some new information, an 11-by-14 inch of concealment at the NTS and the (seemingly) frivolous aerial image of a parking lot surrounded by trees and contain- politics of display in Las Vegas are mutually reinforcing, like ing several olive-green army vehicles and one bright yellow those at the NTS, Yucca Mountain, and Rachel. If there is a Ryder moving van. “This photograph was taken in April of seam in the structure of desert modernity that links the intro- 1995 at a military base near Oklahoma City, a few days before version of one to the extroversion of the other, it becomes vis- the Oklahoma bombing.” He shows another picture of the ible in the Liberace Museum, located in a shopping same lot, same jeeps, but no van. “This was taken a few days complex just off Tropicana Avenue. later. Now, I think this is very interesting. What is a Ryder van One of the most popular attractions in town, the doing in a military parking lot? I’m not saying the government Liberace Museum houses the entertainer’s famously sequined was directly involved, but I think it’s interesting. Before the costumes, his jewel-encrusted pianos and candelabras, bombing of the Murrah Federal Building there is a Ryder van custom-built cars, and other mementos from a career that on the military base, and after, it is gone. I think this is very opens a unique window into the hypermasculinity of the significant.…” He drifts back to his music, leaving us to con- Cold-War American West. Indeed, Liberace, Las Vegas, and template what it would mean if, in fact, a secret organization the NTS were coincident from the beginning. The NTS opened with access to US Army facilities had bombed in 1951, and by the mid-1950s the two biggest shows in a US federal building and implicated a white supremacist Nevada were nuclear explosions and Liberace, who earned group as part of a calculated plan to take over the world. $50,000 a week at the new Riviera casino, performing his Conspiracy theorists are a necessary by-product of the signature pastiche of high and low musical genres in a black desert modernism pursued by the national security state. The tuxedo studded with 1,328,000 sequins. A favorite pastime of people of Rachel live only a few miles from Area 51—some the era was to take a cocktail up to the top of a casino in the residents have worked there and trace their current health morning, to search the northern horizon for a flash of light or problems to on-the-job toxic exposure. They also know that, a mushroom cloud and toast America’s superpower ascen- for years, one of the best and most readily available dancy. photographs of Area 51 was made by a Soviet surveillance Like JFK, that other icon of Cold War masculinity, satellite. Yet, despite this experiential knowledge and a Liberace drew his fame in part from a public fascination with significant presence in popular culture (for example, in the his sexuality that included its explicit constructedness and film Independence Day), the US Air Force will only acknowl- which encouraged audiences to participate in that construc- edge an “operational presence” in the Groom Lake area. tion. At a moment when to be gay was to occupy the cultural Officially, Area 51 does not exist.4 position of the Communist, subject to McCarthyite assaults, For Rachel’s residents, nuclear modernity and its after- Liberace successfully sued newspapers that questioned math have thus become a convoluted open secret, requiring his heterosexuality, even as he lived with male partners. His those who want to “live free” to track the signs of a military- charm derived from his exaggerated scripting of appearance, industrial complex that impinges upon their lives 71 in visceral ways. Excluded from the system but well above: It’s all about the rock bolts. Courtesy Yucca Mountain Project. which enabled fans to enjoy his overt artistic and class Thus, even as we wonder today at the danger and discipline transgressions and mimetic gender play without feeling required to perform in a life threatening mass of sequins, the threatened. Thus, one need not be a conspiracy theorist to nuclear future at Yucca Mountain maintains its radioactive wonder at the synchrony that brought down two mid-cen- glow. tury icons on the same November night in 1963. As news of
Kennedy’s assassination swept the nation, Liberace collapsed 1 For a remarkable introduction to the Nevada Test Site, see Center for Land Use Interpre- in the midst of his memorial concert, poisoned by dry-clean- tation, The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to America’s Nuclear Proving Ground (Los Angeles: ing chemicals accumulated in his fabulous costumes. Toxic The Center for Land Use Interpretation, 1996), and Kathleen Stewart, “Bitter Faiths,” in shock took him into kidney failure. Unconscious and on life Technoscientific Imaginaries: Conversations, Profiles, and Memoirs, ed. George Marcus support, he was given last rites and thought lost. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For historical analysis of above-ground From the 100,000-year half-life of the waste at Yucca nuclear testing, see Richard L. Miller, Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing Mountain to the poisons collected in Liberace’s sequined (New York: Free Press, 1986), Philip L. Fradkin, Fallout: An American Nuclear Tragedy suits, desert modernism is, as I’ve suggested, necessarily (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1989), and Barton C. Hacker, Elements of blind to its own excess. True to form, Liberace claimed later Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons that in a vision a white-robed nun not only healed him, but Testing, 1947-1974 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1994). For studies of commu- actually blessed his love of opulent display. Indeed, after his nities suffering health effects from work at the NTS, see Carole brush with death, he sought to re-invent himself with each Gallager, American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993) new costume, and was soon fighting an arms race of his own and Valerie L. Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American with entertainers like Elvis Presley for command of the most West (New York: Routledge, 1998). For an assessment of Cold War human radiation over-the-top performance. By the 1970s, his sequined outfits experiments, see Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, The Human had grown to more than 200 pounds, making each night on Radiation Experiments: Final Report of the President’s Advisory Committee (New York: stage a delicate balancing act. In this light, Liberace’s Vegas Oxford University Press, 1996). For a 10,000-page, county-by-county assessment of career might be taken as an index for certain aspects of Cold radioactive fallout and its impact on national thyroid cancer rates, see The National War culture, in which the hyperproduction of nuclear weap- Cancer Institute, “Estimated Exposures and Thyroid Doses Received by the American ons—70,000 in all, enough to destroy every major city on the People From Iodine-131 in Fallout Following Nevada Atmospheric Nuclear Bomb Tests,” planet dozens of times over—also registered a national fas- 1997
74 Past Forward video/audio installation that extrapolates upon a documentary photograph Curated by Brian Conley & Christoph Cox of a mother and son lynched from a bridge in Oklahoma circa 1911. Church is a time capsule: the moment a photo is taken. The shutter opens and quickly 1. Woodrow Wilson, Address to the American Indians (1:46) closes—as quickly as a breath held by a new devotee dressed in white at the Shortly after becoming President of the United States in 1913, Woodrow river’s edge dunked gracelessly by the pastor and then coming up panting for Wilson delivered this speech, assessing the history of “the white man’s air, saved. As quickly as the knot tightens and the neck breaks. Suspended, this dealings with the Indian.” After briefly noting the “dark pages in [that] moment rises above the river below, taunting gravity. It lengthens. history,” Wilson went on to catalogue evidence of the “remarkable progress We remember. We blink. We see the horizon. We take it with us. We sink. toward civilization” the red man had achieved under the white man’s “wise, We listen and voices carry us. We float. We blink and it’s over. It’s like it never just, and beneficent” tutelage. “The Great White Father,” concluded Wilson, happened and we feel it in our bones.” All sound recorded on location during “now calls you his brothers, not his children.” Juneteenth Celebration 2003 in Galveston, TX and in Okema, OK, June 2003. Thanks to R. Jones Sanchez, B. Kruger, L. Nelson, and L. Chua. 2. Janek Schaefer, His Master’s Voices (3:22) T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” (1936), the first of his Four Quartets, offers a 5. Luz Maria Sanchez, Radio1 (6:05) meditation on time and eternity that opens with the famous lines: “Time Suddenly there was the possibility to say anything to everyone, but upon present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time reflection there was nothing to be said. —Bertolt Brecht future contained in time past.” Here, Eliot reads the poem with the aid of Janek “The telegraph, the telephone, the radio—these devices arguably Schaefer’s “Tri-Phonic Turntable,” a turntable fitted with three reshaped the course of the last century. But, in effect, they merely preserve tonearms. The piece was recorded live in 1997 and released as a limited and propagate fragments of historical data—information disassociated from edition LP on Schaefer’s audiOh! record label. both source and recipient that can be rearranged with the turn of the dial. Radio technology emerged—heralded by waves of optimism and great 3. Achim Wollscheid, Ulysses (excerpt) (2:46) expectations—only to be absorbed, transformed into wartime propaganda “In 1986, the Goethe Gymnasium in Neu-Isenburg, Germany had 1026 machines, junk peddlers, and glorified jukeboxes.” students, as many as the German edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses has pages. “Reflecting this deflation of purpose, when taken to an extreme, the Although it deals with the course of just one day, it takes the single reader act of electronic transmission abates the communicative potential of speech. about two weeks to read this book. The group of students—each one reading In the electronic realm, words dissipate as soon as they are uttered, rendered one single page—coped with the body of text in about 7 minutes.” Originally into pulses of electricity floating in space. Each discernable unit is, in effect, the released on the CD Acts (Selektion, 1998) and digitally remastered in self-contained delivery of a thought, concept, or dormant history—that December 2003. can be rearranged at will to form new realities. In Radio1 the human voice is abstracted, effectively obliterating its communicative capacity. Once discern- 4. Kara Lynch, Church (8:09) able words, all culled from the public airwaves, become the mere coupling of An excerpt from a multimedia work-in-progress titled Invisible. “In 2099, the tones delivered as a sensory rather than informative message.” transatlantic slave trade never happened. The event disappeared from the Radio1 is a quadraphonic sound piece for tape. This is a stereo version. history books. A strange cult keeps the false memory alive through ritual bond- age and transport of bodies across imaginary borders. above: Video stills from Frankfurt TV’s unbroadcast coverage of Achim Wolls- 75 Church is an audio excerpt from Episode 03, an outdoor cheid’s Ulysses, 1986. 6. Manuel Rocha Iturbide, . . . even . . . (introito) (3:40) 12. The Quiet American, Rockets of the Mekong (11:04) “Introito” is the first movement of the composition titled . . . even . . . , an “Rockets of the Mekong is composed from a collection of field recordings electro-acoustic Catholic marriage ceremony. The piece attempts the joining recorded in Laos in November 2001 in the small rural town of Pak Tha, where of opposed elements—past and future, ritual and modernity, mythology and a the River Tha meets the Mekong, in northern Laos. The piece is named after disenchanted present—through an alchemical ritual of redemption that blends “rocket boats,” hand-built, very shallow draft, thin-nosed speedboats with all of these into a union that comprises them all. huge outboard motors that are the taxis of the Mekong. The pilots, and fortunate passengers, wear crash helmets (and earplugs) as the Mekong is 7. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address (9:57) treacherous with just-submerged sandbars and rocks, and a sudden stop On 17 January 1961, in his last official address as President of the United at speed would be very dangerous. The recording also uses a passing small States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former commander of the Allied forces in motorcycle, the constant buzz of cicadas, the sounds of children kicking a World War II, delivered this address to the nation. Intended as a warning about soccer ball, and a young girl saying “sabadee,” the Laos version of “sawat-dii,” the rise of military and corporate power, the speech turned out to forecast the Thai greeting of respect. American history up to and including the present. “A field recording is a future history of a non-existent present. Field recordings constitute a documentary history of an imaginary, not a real, world. 8. Harald Bode, Phase 4-2 Arpeggio (4:51) From the moment of its making. a field recording’s interpretations multiply An unsung pioneer of electronic music, Harald Bode was responsible for and overtake its documentary value. Even for the field recordist who makes it, some of the earliest and most influential electronic instruments. Already in a given recording documents only in part the moment of personal experience the late 1930s, he built keyboard-driven synthesizers. In 1947, he invented the that witnessed its making. In short, the field recording is an audible mirage. Melochord, a monophonic keyboard instrument prominently employed in early It is a documentary object that fails to contain the present. Or: it contains not electronic compositions produced at the WDR studio in Cologne by the present, but a non-existent present. Or: it contains many non-existent Herbert Eimert, György Ligeti, Henri Pousseur, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and presents, one for every listener. Or: it contains a new present on every others. In the 1960s, he contributed to the production of the Moog modular listening.” Originally released on Rockets of the Mekong (Quiet American, synthesizer, and in the mid-1970s he introduced the Vocoder, a voice- 2003). Courtesy Grain of Sound. processing device that would be used in countless electro-funk hits. Composed in 1964 while Bode was experimenting with various phasers, This CD was engineered by Brian Conley. Thanks to Kim Cascone, Andrew filters, and frequency shifters, this track anticipates disco and electro by Deutsch, and Guillermo Santamarina of Ex Teresa Arte Actual. more than a decade, and acid house by nearly a quarter century.
9–10. microsound.org, City of the Future In the spring of 2003, shortly after the US invaded Iraq, the.microsound.org list invited members to submit compositions based on a portion of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris. List owner Kim Cascone explains: “I’ve always had a favorite part of Solaris—the ‘City of the Future’ as it is titled on the DVD release. The entire scene is recorded from the point of view of the astronaut as he drives to the city on the highway. The sound design for this particular scene has always haunted me. I thought the title was fitting due to the current world situation. It is not an overt political theme for the project but it implies hope for a city in the future. So while this could mean ‘Baghdad,’ it could also mean the city you live in/near or a city you would like to visit. A city could also represent any large collection of various types and races of people. In any event, this is meant to be a productive, constructive, creative theme expressing hope for the future.”
The list received 42 submissions, available at
11. George H. W. Bush, On the Commencement of the Bombing of Iraq (6:38) On 16 January 1991, President George H. W. Bush announced that American troops had begun to bomb military targets in Iraq and Kuwait in order to force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. Bush defends the attack against critics who would have continued to push for a peaceful settlement. Bush notes that the attack is in accordance with U.N. Resolutions and that its aim is to destroy Sad- dam Hussein’s chemical and nuclear weapons facilities. 76 This speech set in motion a series of events that are still unfolding. overleaf and page 82: Aziz + Cucher, Naturalia, 2001.
the Use of Drugs to Influence Time Experience
Alcoholics Drug Addicts Users of Psychedelics % Preferred Drugs % Preferred Drugs % Preferred Drugs
THE PAST
To forget 46 Alcohol 89 Heroin; Heroin mixtures*; 20 Cannabis**, alcohol, and a wide the past Narcotic-Hypnotic mixtures; variety of other drugs of all sorts LSD
To relive 43 Alcohol 67 Heroin; Heroin mixtures*; 40 LSD with Cannabis**; LSD; the past Narcotic-Hypnotic mixtures Alcohol
THE PRESENT
To “lose” 54 Alcohol; 84 Heroin; 45 Cannabis**; LSD; LSD with the present Marijuana Hypnotics Cannabis; and a variety of other drugs
To make the 58 Alcohol; 95 Heroin; Heroin mixtures*; 95 Misc. drug; LSD with Cannabis**; present more Alcohol with Marijuana misc. depressants** Cannabis** enjoyable and Marijuana
THE future
To lose sight 46 Alcohol; 53 Heroin; Narcotic-hypnotic 20 LSD with Cannabis**; Alcohol of the future Alcohol with Marijuana mixtures; Hypnotics with other non-narcotic drugs
To “live in” 8 Alcohol 39 Heroin; Heroin-Cocaine mixture; 21 LSD; LSD with other major the future Marijuana and LSD Psychedelic and Cannabis*** ; Marijuana & misc.
time rate
To make time 8 Alcohol 47 Heroin; 20 Cannabis**; LSD Psychedelic- “go slower” Marijuana Cannabis mixture***
To make time 50 Alcohol 63 Heroin; Amphetamines; 15 Amphetamines or “go faster” Narcotic-hypnotic mixtures Amphetamine-hypnotic mixture; Marijuana
To make time 33 Alcohol 21 Marijuana; Heroin; 35 LSD with Cannabis**; “stand still” Narcotic-hypnotic mixtures DMT, other psychedelics***; Cannabis narcotic mixture
chart adapted from Stephens Newell, “Chemical Modifiers of Time,” in Henri M. Yaker, ed.,The Future of Time (New York: Doubleday, 1971).
* Heroin with Codeine, Cocaine, Marijuana, Hypnotics, etc. ** Cannabis: Marijuana and Hashish; derivative and preparations of the Marijuana (Cannabis) plant. *** Peyote, Mescaline, etc. and/or mixtures of these with LSD.
81 the day before the day after
On 22 November 1963, the Austin American announced the schedule of the visiting presidential couple. Although the afternoon’s events in Austin are mapped with the precision of foreknowledge, they never took place. Is it possible in retrospect to read the schedule and its surrounding items— including the matter-of-fact ad for air rifle shot on page two— without a sense of paranoid anticipation?
82
84 The Trouble with Timelines least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to Daniel Rosenberg make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself In 1765, Joseph Priestley published a chart representing the perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help lives of famous men by means of lines arrayed chronologically standing still to look at than he can fly.”4 against a scale of 2950 years. Priestley’s Chart of Biography Both Priestley and Sterne point to the technical ingenuity was not the first timeline. It had a direct precedent in Jacques and the intensity of the labor required to support a fantasy Barbeu-Dubourg’s 1753 Chronological Chart and earlier of linear time. Over the course of the 19th and the 20th roots in chronologies and genealogies, calendars and canon centuries, the convention of the timeline was progressively tables, and traditional forms of narrative imagery depicting naturalized. But its development tended also to raise new historical events. Despite the persistence of cyclical gestures, questions. Filling in an ideal timeline with more and better a 1627 chart of the events of the coming apocalypse by data only pushed it toward the absurd. Dubourg’s Chrono- Joseph Mede already has something of the modern timeline logical Chart, mounted on a scroll and encased in a decorative about it. But none of this made Priestley’s chart any less box, was already 54-feet long. Later attempts to re-anchor striking in its day. In fact, the idea of a timeline was still the timeline in material reference, as in the case of Charles- strange enough in the mid-18th century that it required a Joseph Minard’s 1861 diagram, Figurative Chart of the certain amount of explanation. As Daniel Headrick has noted, Successive Loss of Men in the French Army in the Russian Priestley argues that although time in itself is an abstrac- Campaign, 1812-1813, produced results that were beautiful tion that may not be “the object of any of our senses, and no but ultimately put into question the promise of the modern image can properly be made of it, yet because it has a timeline. The visual simplicity of the diagram is paradigmatic relation to quantity, and we can say a greater or less space as is the numbing pathos of its articulation across the space of time, it admits of a natural and easy representation in our of the Russian winter. At the same time, through color, angle, minds by the idea of a measurable space, and particularly and shape, Minard’s chart marks the centrality of the idea of that of a LINE.”1 reversal in the thinking and telling of history. Minard’s chart After Priestley, the form of the timeline caught on. may be more accurate than Priestley’s, not because it car- In addition to its visual effectiveness, the timeline amplified ries more or better historical detail but because it reads in conceptions of historical progress that were becoming the way a story might be told. The same could be said for the popular at the time. The relationship was mutually reinforcing. branching timeline in Charles Renouvier’s 1876 Uchronia As Priestley himself suggests, the timeline filled in as a kind (Utopia in History): An Apocryphal Sketch of the Develop- of fantasized visual referent for an object without material ment of European Civilization Not as It Was But as It Might substance. In its simplest form, it appeared to guarantee the Have Been, depicting both the actual course of history and simplicity and directionality of past and future history. But the various alternative paths that might have been if other Priestley’s commentary points to a problem too. History had actions had been taken. never actually taken the form of a timeline or of any other The problems presented by 20th-century versions of line for that matter. And simplicity, the great advantage of the timeline arise from different sources. In most important the form, threatened also to be its greatest flaw. The timeline respects, the conceptual issues were already on the table in could function as “the most excellent mechanical help to the the 18th century. But the 20th century brought developments knowledge of history” because it could impress the imagina- in time reckoning that gave timelines new poignancy. tion “indelibly.”2 For the same reason, a century later, Henri In 1945, it became relevant for the first time to tell world Bergson would refer to the “imaginary homogeneous time” history in terms of milliseconds, and, very soon, it also depicted by the timeline as a deceiving “idol.”3 became necessary to start thinking in practical terms about But already in Priestley’s day, the problem of the linear the transmission of information over the course of the very representation of time was posed with precision by writers long term. There is something more than a little sobering such as Laurence Sterne whose 1760 Tristram Shandy about the recurrence of the cyclical form in the US govern- satirized the idea of telling a story straight. Sterne’s novel ment glyph for the declining radioactivity of nuclear waste even includes a set of sketches indicating the digressive form stored in Yucca Mountain. In it, there may be an echo of a story well and truly told. In fact, Sterne and Priestley are of Joseph Mede’s indecision about the appropriateness of much more similar than they may appear. For Priestley, the applying the linear form to an apocalyptic narrative. timeline is a heuristic, an “excellent mechanical help.”
For Sterne, the linear representation of time is a construction. 1 Joseph Priestley, Description of a Chart of Biography, 7th ed. (London: J. Johnson, “Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer 1778), p. 6; Daniel Headrick, When Information Came of Age (New York: Oxford drives on his mule,—straight forward;—for instance, from University Press, 2000), p. 124. Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his 2 Joseph Priestley, Description of a New Chart of History, 6th ed. (London: J. Johnson, head aside either to the right hand or to the left,—he might 1786), pp. 11-12; Headrick, p. 125. venture to foretell you an hour when he should get to his 3 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: journey’s end,” Sterne writes. “But the thing is, mor- Zone Books, 1988), p. 207. 85 ally speaking, impossible. For if he is a man of the 4 Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), p. 26. a timeline of timelines sasha archibald & daniel rosenberg
Scale: 4mm = 1 year. 1654 James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, publishes a Timeline “folds” to maintain absolute scale. 10th ceNtuRy widely influential calculation of Biblical chronology, An anomalous graph appears in an edition placing the beginning of time at 23 October 4004 of Macrobius’s commentary on Cicero’s In BC. Twenty-five years later, Thomas Guy begins Somnium Scipionis, an analysis of physics printing Bibles annotated with Ussher’s chronology; and astronomy. The drawing, probably Bibles inscribed with Ussher’s dates remain in print added to the text by a transcriber, plots until the early 20th century. 527 planetary and solar movement as a function Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus of time. Although the graph does not seem introduces the convention of dating to convey accurate information, it is none- events “Anno Domini.” theless the first known example of changing 1493 values measured against a time axis. 1655 The Nuremburg Chronicle of the World depicts the creation of the In Praeadamitae, Isaac Lapeyrère argues that earth with seven concentric circles. Also of note, the Chronicle Scripture authorizes belief in human existence represents royal ancestry with portraits interconnected with vines to 530 prior to Adam. 12th ceNtuRy indicate marriage and parenthood, thereby participating in a broader Rule of St. Benedict organizes devotional Moses Maimonides promotes tradition that associates genetic lineage and arboreal growth. 2ND ceNtuRy AD practice around the “canonical hours“ use of the mundane era among Jewish scholar Jose ben Halafta measured by the clock. Jewish scholars. calculates the exact length of c. 1500 1663 time between Creation and the Leonardo da Vinci is both the first to use Christopher Wren’s weather clock is destruction of the Second Temple. rectangular coordinates to analyze the velocity one of a plethora of new mechanic self- By the Julian calendar, existence of falling objects and the first to recognize a registering devices that produce begins on Monday, 7 October 3761 643 correlation between the particular climate and automated moving graphs of various BC at 10:10 pm. Muslim year 1 established precipitation of a given time period and the natural forces; Wren’s weather clock, by Caliph Umar I as 622. shape of the resultant tree rings. for example, generates a continuous line graph of temperature and wind direction.
1433 Leon Battista Alberti’s I Libri della famiglia insists on the importance of a literal accounting of the hours of the day.
14-15th ceNtuRy 415 A genre of illuminated private prayer books, Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of the 12-13th ceNtuRy the Book of Hours contains the texts of Biblical chronology forms a framework for Jesse Trees, pictorial depictions of Christ’s royal certain prayers to be said at the canonical interpreting human history according to the ancestry as given in Matthew, proliferate in medieval hours; the devotionals are often prefaced 1627 “six ages of man.” manuscripts, murals, and stained glass windows. with a richly illustrated 12-month calendar, Jesse, the father of King David and the claimed Religious and political ferment in England produces numerous depicting events common to each month or Key of the Revelation ancestor of the Virgin, is typically pictured at the apocalyptic tracts including Joseph Mede’s . season. Key base of the scene, the tree’s trunk growing from The maps the end of history onto a complex graphical figure combining cyclical and linear forms. his navel. 1260 The pivotal year in humanity’s transition to the third and final “state” of history according to 1608 Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202). Twelfth- and Galileo plots the speed of a rolling ball on a time axis. thirteenth-century renderings depict Joachim’s system of historical states (status) and phases 325 1583 (aetates) as trees, chains, and ladders. In his Chronicle, Eusebius of Caesarea innovates 725 In his Opus novum de emendatione temporum, Joseph Scaliger the “canon table,” a device to coordinate chrono- In De Temporum Ratione, Bede calculates attempts to produce a complete and self-contained chronology of the beginning of time at 3,952 years before world history including translation tables for integrating all existing logical events depicted in the Bible. Abraham’s 13th ceNtuRy the Incarnation. In The Ecclesiastical chronologies. His Thesaurus temporum (1606) collects and arranges life structures the chronicle; events are matched Following the Franconian reforms, music becomes a History, Bede implements the “Dionysian all of the available ancient chronological sources. to the age of Abraham and then to the year of true time series. Franco of Cologne’s (c.1240-c.1280) system” of dating in relation to the birth of various monarchies. Eusebius calculates the treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis codifies a system of Christ. beginning of time as 5,198 years before the music notation that fixes the durational value of Incarnation. notes, while their relative value is measured against the breve, Franco’s base unit of musical time. 1654 James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, publishes a 10th ceNtuRy widely influential calculation of Biblical chronology, An anomalous graph appears in an edition placing the beginning of time at 23 October 4004 of Macrobius’s commentary on Cicero’s In BC. Twenty-five years later, Thomas Guy begins Somnium Scipionis, an analysis of physics printing Bibles annotated with Ussher’s chronology; and astronomy. The drawing, probably Bibles inscribed with Ussher’s dates remain in print added to the text by a transcriber, plots until the early 20th century. 527 planetary and solar movement as a function Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus of time. Although the graph does not seem introduces the convention of dating to convey accurate information, it is none- events “Anno Domini.” theless the first known example of changing 1493 values measured against a time axis. 1655 The Nuremburg Chronicle of the World depicts the creation of the In Praeadamitae, Isaac Lapeyrère argues that earth with seven concentric circles. Also of note, the Chronicle Scripture authorizes belief in human existence represents royal ancestry with portraits interconnected with vines to 530 prior to Adam. 12th ceNtuRy indicate marriage and parenthood, thereby participating in a broader Rule of St. Benedict organizes devotional Moses Maimonides promotes tradition that associates genetic lineage and arboreal growth. 2ND ceNtuRy AD practice around the “canonical hours“ use of the mundane era among Jewish scholar Jose ben Halafta measured by the clock. Jewish scholars. calculates the exact length of c. 1500 1663 time between Creation and the Leonardo da Vinci is both the first to use Christopher Wren’s weather clock is destruction of the Second Temple. rectangular coordinates to analyze the velocity one of a plethora of new mechanic self- By the Julian calendar, existence of falling objects and the first to recognize a registering devices that produce begins on Monday, 7 October 3761 643 correlation between the particular climate and automated moving graphs of various BC at 10:10 pm. Muslim year 1 established precipitation of a given time period and the natural forces; Wren’s weather clock, by Caliph Umar I as 622. shape of the resultant tree rings. for example, generates a continuous line graph of temperature and wind direction.
1433 Leon Battista Alberti’s I Libri della famiglia insists on the importance of a literal accounting of the hours of the day.
14-15th ceNtuRy 415 A genre of illuminated private prayer books, Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of the 12-13th ceNtuRy the Book of Hours contains the texts of Biblical chronology forms a framework for Jesse Trees, pictorial depictions of Christ’s royal certain prayers to be said at the canonical interpreting human history according to the ancestry as given in Matthew, proliferate in medieval hours; the devotionals are often prefaced 1627 “six ages of man.” manuscripts, murals, and stained glass windows. with a richly illustrated 12-month calendar, Jesse, the father of King David and the claimed Religious and political ferment in England produces numerous depicting events common to each month or Key of the Revelation ancestor of the Virgin, is typically pictured at the apocalyptic tracts including Joseph Mede’s . season. Key base of the scene, the tree’s trunk growing from The maps the end of history onto a complex graphical figure combining cyclical and linear forms. his navel. 1260 The pivotal year in humanity’s transition to the third and final “state” of history according to 1608 Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202). Twelfth- and Galileo plots the speed of a rolling ball on a time axis. thirteenth-century renderings depict Joachim’s system of historical states (status) and phases 325 1583 (aetates) as trees, chains, and ladders. In his Chronicle, Eusebius of Caesarea innovates 725 In his Opus novum de emendatione temporum, Joseph Scaliger the “canon table,” a device to coordinate chrono- In De Temporum Ratione, Bede calculates attempts to produce a complete and self-contained chronology of the beginning of time at 3,952 years before world history including translation tables for integrating all existing logical events depicted in the Bible. Abraham’s 13th ceNtuRy the Incarnation. In The Ecclesiastical chronologies. His Thesaurus temporum (1606) collects and arranges life structures the chronicle; events are matched Following the Franconian reforms, music becomes a History, Bede implements the “Dionysian all of the available ancient chronological sources. to the age of Abraham and then to the year of true time series. Franco of Cologne’s (c.1240-c.1280) system” of dating in relation to the birth of various monarchies. Eusebius calculates the treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis codifies a system of Christ. beginning of time as 5,198 years before the music notation that fixes the durational value of Incarnation. notes, while their relative value is measured against the breve, Franco’s base unit of musical time. In an attempt to synchronize Biblical history with new Introduction of French Florence Nightingale, a major innovator of geological ideas, Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of Revolutionary calendar declaring statistical graphs and diagrams, submits the Earth argues that the great deluge was the result of September 1792 as the beginning her “Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in waters underneath the earth’s surface breaking through of the new “Year One.” the Army in the East” as part of her Report the earth’s crust, thereby destroying what Burnet to the Royal Commission on the Health of believed to be the earth’s pre-flood state—a perfectly the Army. The diagrams demonstrate smooth, featureless surface, like that of an egg. The Laurence Sterne’s novel, Tristram Shandy, includes that over the course of the Crimean book’s frontispiece is a series of drawings depicting the a set of sketches indicating the non-linear path of a War, British deaths owe principally to cycle of stages in the geological history of the Earth well-told story; narrative digressions appear as “preventable or mitigable” diseases rather beginning at Creation and culminating in the Apocalypse. deviations from a straight line. than battlefield wounds. The patenting and marketing of graph paper—preprinted with a rectangular coordinate grid— Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia attests to the growing use of mathematica proposes a theory of absolute time. The German philosopher and scientist J. H. Lambert is credited Cartesian coordinates in scientific Newton’s posthumous Chronology of Ancient with observing that diagrams may do “incom-parably better data analysis. Kingdoms Amended (1728) uses astronomical service“ to the sciences than tables. Lambert’s Pyrométrie (1779) observations to argue that the Kingdom of Israel includes tabular data of the rise and fall of annual temperatures, antedated those of Egypt and Greece. from which a curved line can be easily extrapolated.
In La Scienza Nuova, Giambattista Vico criticizes both the astronomical and mathematical basis of 17th-century Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Felix Bodin’s Le Roman de l’avenir Charles Darwin’s Origin of chronology and proposes a new universal chronology based Population, argues that while human gives the first historical account of Species traces species’ on a theory of cyclical human progress. La Scienza Nuova population tends to increase geometrically, futuristic fiction. genealogies back more than includes a chronological table that aligns the histories of the In his Les Époques de la nature, the means of human subsistence can only 300 million years. Hebrews, Chaldeans, Scythians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, the French naturalist Buffon increase arithmetically. Greeks, and Romans beginning with the Deluge. argues that the Earth may be as much as 75,000 years old. In un-published manuscripts, he speculates that it may be more than 3 million years old.
Louis-Sébastien Mercier publishes perhaps the first future fiction. The Year 2440 describes French society and culture after seven centuries of progress.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck publishes Zoological Sebastian Adams, The convention of dating Philosophy containing an evolutionary family Synchronological Chart events BC becomes popular. tree branching out from simpler to more complex or Map of History, an organisms. encyclopedic chart Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique based on Ussher’s treats figures from secular and religious dating system. A later version by Charles sources within a single scholarly apparatus. The The Encyclopædia Britannica contains a fold-out chart Deacon and Edward second edition concludes with an exhaustive designed by Adam Ferguson “representing at one view the Hull continues to 10-page “Chronological Table of all the Eminent rise and progress of the principal state and empires of the be available and Persons Treated in this Dictionary.” The table known world” from the Deluge in 1656 Anno Mundi to reprinted under the begins with Adam and ends in 1700. 1900 Anno Domini (the years after 1797 are blank). title Wall Chart of World History.
Last volume of Johann Gottfried Herder’s Courtesy American Philosophical Society Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind published. Joseph Priestley, an English chemist, publishes the first of several timelines that contemporary audience would recognize Charles Joseph Minard’s Carte as such: “A Chart of Biography” compares the life spans of figurative de pertes successives 2,000 celebrated men from 1200 BC to 1750 AD, using bars set Joseph Priestley’s timeline was shortly en hommes de l’Armée against a linear time axis to denote their life spans. followed by political economist William Française dans la campagne de Playfair’s invention of the bar chart, an Russie 1812-1813. Among the innovation whose merits remained unrealized finest of Minard’s graphical for several decades. As a young man, Playfair Jacques Barbeu-Duborg, the French works, this chart plots the worked in the shop of James Watt, the translator and disciple of Benjamin Franklin, catastrophic loss of men in inventor of the steam engine, where he was creates his Carte chronologique, a 54-foot relation to place, time, and likely acquainted with Watt’s self-registering timeline of history from Creation contained temperature during Napoleon’s device for measuring steam pressure. in an iron case. march to Moscow. Courtesy Princeton University Library In an attempt to synchronize Biblical history with new Introduction of French Florence Nightingale, a major innovator of geological ideas, Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of Revolutionary calendar declaring statistical graphs and diagrams, submits the Earth argues that the great deluge was the result of September 1792 as the beginning her “Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in waters underneath the earth’s surface breaking through of the new “Year One.” the Army in the East” as part of her Report the earth’s crust, thereby destroying what Burnet to the Royal Commission on the Health of believed to be the earth’s pre-flood state—a perfectly the Army. The diagrams demonstrate smooth, featureless surface, like that of an egg. The Laurence Sterne’s novel, Tristram Shandy, includes that over the course of the Crimean book’s frontispiece is a series of drawings depicting the a set of sketches indicating the non-linear path of a War, British deaths owe principally to cycle of stages in the geological history of the Earth well-told story; narrative digressions appear as “preventable or mitigable” diseases rather beginning at Creation and culminating in the Apocalypse. deviations from a straight line. than battlefield wounds. The patenting and marketing of graph paper—preprinted with a rectangular coordinate grid— Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia attests to the growing use of mathematica proposes a theory of absolute time. The German philosopher and scientist J. H. Lambert is credited Cartesian coordinates in scientific Newton’s posthumous Chronology of Ancient with observing that diagrams may do “incom-parably better data analysis. Kingdoms Amended (1728) uses astronomical service“ to the sciences than tables. Lambert’s Pyrométrie (1779) observations to argue that the Kingdom of Israel includes tabular data of the rise and fall of annual temperatures, antedated those of Egypt and Greece. from which a curved line can be easily extrapolated.
In La Scienza Nuova, Giambattista Vico criticizes both the astronomical and mathematical basis of 17th-century Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Felix Bodin’s Le Roman de l’avenir Charles Darwin’s Origin of chronology and proposes a new universal chronology based Population, argues that while human gives the first historical account of Species traces species’ on a theory of cyclical human progress. La Scienza Nuova population tends to increase geometrically, futuristic fiction. genealogies back more than includes a chronological table that aligns the histories of the In his Les Époques de la nature, the means of human subsistence can only 300 million years. Hebrews, Chaldeans, Scythians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, the French naturalist Buffon increase arithmetically. Greeks, and Romans beginning with the Deluge. argues that the Earth may be as much as 75,000 years old. In un-published manuscripts, he speculates that it may be more than 3 million years old.
Louis-Sébastien Mercier publishes perhaps the first future fiction. The Year 2440 describes French society and culture after seven centuries of progress.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck publishes Zoological Sebastian Adams, The convention of dating Philosophy containing an evolutionary family Synchronological Chart events BC becomes popular. tree branching out from simpler to more complex or Map of History, an organisms. encyclopedic chart Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique based on Ussher’s treats figures from secular and religious dating system. A later version by Charles sources within a single scholarly apparatus. The The Encyclopædia Britannica contains a fold-out chart Deacon and Edward second edition concludes with an exhaustive designed by Adam Ferguson “representing at one view the Hull continues to 10-page “Chronological Table of all the Eminent rise and progress of the principal state and empires of the be available and Persons Treated in this Dictionary.” The table known world” from the Deluge in 1656 Anno Mundi to reprinted under the begins with Adam and ends in 1700. 1900 Anno Domini (the years after 1797 are blank). title Wall Chart of World History.
Last volume of Johann Gottfried Herder’s Courtesy American Philosophical Society Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind published. Joseph Priestley, an English chemist, publishes the first of several timelines that contemporary audience would recognize Charles Joseph Minard’s Carte as such: “A Chart of Biography” compares the life spans of figurative de pertes successives 2,000 celebrated men from 1200 BC to 1750 AD, using bars set Joseph Priestley’s timeline was shortly en hommes de l’Armée against a linear time axis to denote their life spans. followed by political economist William Française dans la campagne de Playfair’s invention of the bar chart, an Russie 1812-1813. Among the innovation whose merits remained unrealized finest of Minard’s graphical for several decades. As a young man, Playfair Jacques Barbeu-Duborg, the French works, this chart plots the worked in the shop of James Watt, the translator and disciple of Benjamin Franklin, catastrophic loss of men in inventor of the steam engine, where he was creates his Carte chronologique, a 54-foot relation to place, time, and likely acquainted with Watt’s self-registering timeline of history from Creation contained temperature during Napoleon’s device for measuring steam pressure. in an iron case. march to Moscow. Courtesy Princeton University Library 1930-1932 Andrew Ellicott Douglass founds the field of Victor Houteff publishes his dendrology by inventing a system whereby religious philosophy in The known sequences of events (floating Shepherd’s Rod Vol. 1-2; his 2000 chronologies) can be fixed to specific years illustrative timelines convey the Throughout the late 20th century, (absolute chronologies) via the scientific analysis fast-approaching end of the professional semioticians struggle with the of tree rings. world. Followers of his teachings problem of constructing an iconographic include David Koresh. language capable of communicating radiation dangers long after the death of current languages. Several of these 1948 symbolic systems are prepared for nuclear The Olympic Games in London make use facilities, including the US government of Omega’s photofinish camera. nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
1948 Charles Renouvier’s counterfactual Uchronie Invention of the atomic clock. In 1967, the includes a chart depicting the theoretical length of the second will be redefined by relationship between the actual course of history use of this device. and possible alternative paths.
In Time and Free Will, Henri 1933 Bergson argues for a distinction In a presentation to the Board of Trustees at between the homogeneous the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr, the mathematical conception of time museum’s founding director and an amateur 1968 and heterogeneous experience of military historian, outlines the (soon abandoned) Electronic time-keeping duration. He insists that the collection plan of MOMA with sketches of time devices entirely replace live experience of time cannot be as a torpedo. As the torpedo moves ahead judges in certifying race represented in a linear fashion. through time, the work positioned at the back of winners at the Olympics in Courtesy American Museum of Natural History Barr’s torpedo passes from MOMA’s collection Mexico City. to that of the Metropolitan, allowing MOMA to stay on the cusp of the modern. 1905 Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
2000 The year 2000. 1878 The word “graph” is coined in English by the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester. (Lambert referred to his graphs as “figuren,” Watt as “diagrams,” and Playfair as “lineal 1895 arithmetic.”) H. G. Wells’s Time Machine.
1870s Eadweard Muybridge and E. J. Marey each 1930 begin work in “chronophotography.” English philosopher Olaf Stapleton investigates the future of the human race throguh fiction. Stapleton’s two- billion year narrative, Last and First 1913 Men, includes a series of timelines In their 19th-century notebook highlighting the difficulty of translating sketches, evolution theorists conventional scales of human history represented cross-generational into an evolutionary framework. reproduction with concentric circles. In the case of this eugenics diagram, Arthur Estabrook and Charles Davenport use these visual 1950 Studies of the damage wrought by atom cues to chart the members of the 1929 bombs prompt timelines broken into infinitely Nam family, aiming to convey the Invention of the quartz clock. dizzying expansiveness of smaller fragments of time. degenerates’ unchecked reproduction. 1930-1932 Andrew Ellicott Douglass founds the field of Victor Houteff publishes his dendrology by inventing a system whereby religious philosophy in The known sequences of events (floating Shepherd’s Rod Vol. 1-2; his 2000 chronologies) can be fixed to specific years illustrative timelines convey the Throughout the late 20th century, (absolute chronologies) via the scientific analysis fast-approaching end of the professional semioticians struggle with the of tree rings. world. Followers of his teachings problem of constructing an iconographic include David Koresh. language capable of communicating radiation dangers long after the death of current languages. Several of these 1948 symbolic systems are prepared for nuclear The Olympic Games in London make use facilities, including the US government of Omega’s photofinish camera. nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
1948 Charles Renouvier’s counterfactual Uchronie Invention of the atomic clock. In 1967, the includes a chart depicting the theoretical length of the second will be redefined by relationship between the actual course of history use of this device. and possible alternative paths.
In Time and Free Will, Henri 1933 Bergson argues for a distinction In a presentation to the Board of Trustees at between the homogeneous the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr, the mathematical conception of time museum’s founding director and an amateur 1968 and heterogeneous experience of military historian, outlines the (soon abandoned) Electronic time-keeping duration. He insists that the collection plan of MOMA with sketches of time devices entirely replace live experience of time cannot be as a torpedo. As the torpedo moves ahead judges in certifying race represented in a linear fashion. through time, the work positioned at the back of winners at the Olympics in Courtesy American Museum of Natural History Barr’s torpedo passes from MOMA’s collection Mexico City. to that of the Metropolitan, allowing MOMA to stay on the cusp of the modern. 1905 Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
2000 The year 2000. 1878 The word “graph” is coined in English by the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester. (Lambert referred to his graphs as “figuren,” Watt as “diagrams,” and Playfair as “lineal 1895 arithmetic.”) H. G. Wells’s Time Machine.
1870s Eadweard Muybridge and E. J. Marey each 1930 begin work in “chronophotography.” English philosopher Olaf Stapleton investigates the future of the human race throguh fiction. Stapleton’s two- billion year narrative, Last and First 1913 Men, includes a series of timelines In their 19th-century notebook highlighting the difficulty of translating sketches, evolution theorists conventional scales of human history represented cross-generational into an evolutionary framework. reproduction with concentric circles. In the case of this eugenics diagram, Arthur Estabrook and Charles Davenport use these visual 1950 Studies of the damage wrought by atom cues to chart the members of the 1929 bombs prompt timelines broken into infinitely Nam family, aiming to convey the Invention of the quartz clock. dizzying expansiveness of smaller fragments of time. degenerates’ unchecked reproduction.
Timeline co-designed by Tal Schori. phases of life 1: Propped up to face the audience and periodically fed The Artificial Foster-Mother by wet-nurses, the incubated “performers” delighted Samantha Vincenty crowds at the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition, the 1901 Buffalo Pan-American, and the 1939 New York World’s In 1878, an obstetrician at the Paris Maternité named Etienne Fair. Although Couney’s sideshows spawned several imita- Tarnier visited the poultry incubation house at the Paris Zoo tors— Barnum and Bailey offered their own version—the and forever changed the course of what would come to be longest running show was Couney’s Premature Baby Incu- known as neonatology. Spurred by what he considered a bators building in Coney Island, which opened in 1903 and fatalistic consensus within medicine that prematurity was showcased underdeveloped infants (including, for a brief a hopeless condition, Tarnier commissioned the zoo director time, Couney’s own daughter) for almost 40 years. Accord- to build the first couveuse, or incubator, for human children.1 ing to a 1939 New Yorker profile, Couney kept careful watch There had been several other means of treating premature over the diets of his wet-nurses and the behavior of his hired infants in this period—such as placing them in warming tubs guides, many of whom were actors, to ensure that they that provided heat from hot water encased between its double stuck to the sober script he had written for them, as they steel walls—but Tarnier’s invention provided the unique had the tendency to pepper the lectures with “smart-aleck benefit of a glass enclosure, ideal for both heat retention and wisecracks.”4 The sideshows drew little criticism despite optimal observation. Like their predecessors in the hatchery, the fact that it was selling peeks at children—many of whom multiple infants were placed in this first model; after several were struggling with respiratory ailments, a leading cause of more revisions to its design and heating methods, each death among preemies—right on the Midway, or in the case newborn enjoyed privately heated containers. of Coney Island’s Dreamland park, alongside Lilliputia, the The exhibition of the incubator lay very close to its roots midget community, and Hell Gate, the thrill ride that started as a zoo exhibit. In 1888, another French doctor, Alexander the infamous Dreamland fire. Aside from an initial visit from Lion, recognized the visually compelling power of babies- the Brooklyn Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children under-glass. Lion had developed the first commercially and a handful of negative editorials, the shows were largely available incubator, revolutionary in its regulated heating regarded with reverence. As historian Jeffrey P. Baker has system and its portability. His machine’s ability to function written, “Even the Barnum and Bailey show was described in independent of a hospital setting allowed Lion to establish a sober and scientific terms by an American medical journal.”5 storefront maternity ward in Nice. In order to finance his char- The 1939 World’s Fair featured the last touring incubator ity and garner the attention of both the public and the medi- baby sideshow. Since the technology had become main- cal community, Lion threw open the storefront’s doors and stream, the Coney Island building ended its nearly 40-year began charging admission to see the “babies just big enough run shortly thereafter. The incubator sideshows offered a to put in your pocket.”2 By 1896, four more storefront incuba- nascent form of edutainment while creatively funding an tor institutes had opened in France. apparatus that boasted a very high survival rate: about 7,500 Promoting the technology abroad seemed like the next out of 8000 babies “graduated” from the Coney Island side- logical step. This would soon be accomplished at world’s show; at the 1939 World’s Fair, the American Medical Asso- fairs and international expositions, which were at the height ciation reported that 86 of the 96 infants exhibited survived.6 of their popularity. At the 1901 Pan-American in Buffalo, Pres- Dr. Couney will not be remembered for innovations in neo- ident McKinley proclaimed them “the timekeepers of prog- natology, but his shows catalyzed a new era in childbirth and ress.... They stimulate the energy, enterprise and intellect of neonatal medicine. The advent of the incubator came at a the people and quicken human genius”3—unfortunately for time when childbirth was already in the midst of moving from McKinley, this Expo was to be his last glimpse of “progress,” the home to the hospital; maternity wards were no longer as he was assassinated the day after making these remarks. mainly occupied by poor and unmarried women. The incu- A Paris Maternité alumnus named Martin Couney had bet- bator was a whole new venue for caregiving, mediated by ter luck than McKinley when he presented his first incubator medicine and entirely divorced from the mother if necessary. baby sideshow at the 1896 Berlin Exposition, which featured The emerging evidence that science could indeed work six newborns from the Berlin Charité hospital. Although the miracles, presented in the guise of entertainment, may have Charité’s doctors believed that the infants were terminal, all allayed the collective anxieties that attended such uncharted six of them survived—and, within two months, Couney’s Kin- technological territory and distracted onlookers from the derbrutanstalt (“child hatchery”) had attracted over 100,000 visitors. After a second show in London—which cultural tug-of-war between obstetrics and home birthing. featured Parisian infants, since British hospitals refused to participate in what they perceived to be an exploitative 1 Jeffrey P. Baker, The Machine in the Nursery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1996), p. 26. spectacle—Couney brought his exhibit to the US. 2 Smith. Strand Magazine (London) 12:770-776, 1896. See
Hummingbird Futures Daniel Rosenberg
Welcome to the Xanadu™ Millennium “We stand at the brink of a new age,” says a voice of the information future. Soon, the written word will change, “and civilization will change accordingly.” A universal hypertext network will make “text and graphics, called on demand from anywhere, an elemental commodity. ... There will be hundreds of thousands of file servers—machines storing and dishing out materials. And there will be hundreds of millions of simultaneous users, able to read from billions of stored documents, with trillions of links among them.” Within a few short decades, this network may even bring “a new Golden Age to the human mind.” 1 The voice belongs to Theodor Holm Nelson, inventor of the terms “hypertext” and “hypermedia,” apostle of the home computer, Web visionary, self-appointed “officer of the future,” and forecaster of so much that we now take for granted in the electronic universe. If the tenor of this statement from the 1980s is more triumphant than most, the discourse is readily recognizable. Indeed, by now, the rhetoric of information explosion must strike us as less surprising than the timeframe of the forecast: decades—didn’t that seem an awfully long time to wait? Since the 1960s, Ted Nelson’s prescience has been his trademark. Before the first home computers, he called for a home computer revolution. He dreamed of a word processor before one was designed. Already in the 60s, he argued that the information future would materialize as an inter- connected network. And, most famously, he dreamed that the computer would free writing from the strictures of linearity, that electronic text would take the form of an open and multi-dimensional linking structure that in 1965 he named “hypertext.” 2 Nelson is not known principally as a technical innovator; he has primarily been thought of as a seer. His most famous writing, a hypertext manifesto called Computer Lib/Dream Machines self-published in 1974, remains an underground classic of hackerdom.3 His more recent work, especially his 1980 Literary Machines, revolves around the still-in-progress design of a “transclusive” hypertext network called Xanadu™. To many, this project seemed chimerical before the rise of the Internet and the graphic and textual interfaces of the World Wide Web. Since then, perceptions of the informa- tion universe have changed, and perceptions of Nelson have changed with them. Indeed, some have argued that the important parts of Nelson’s dream have already been achieved. Nelson disagrees. His concept of Xanadu involves a dynamic structure more powerful and more flexible than the currently available network. Nonetheless, the Web has made it clear that the electronic word is reformulating many of our assumptions about how textuality and information operate, in ways that have given Nelson’s ideas new currency. In the last decade, he has been cited more and more in academic and popular contexts. His older 98 work has been reissued. As he put it, with the above: Drawing by Theodor Nelson from Computer Lib/Dream Machines. explosion of the Web, he has been “abruptly promoted from this perspective, literature appears not as a collection of Lunatic to Visionary.”4 independent works, but as “an ongoing system of intercon- But for all its resonance with Nelson’s career, the label necting documents.”10 We read and write, in other words, in a “visionary” has never quite fit. His perspective was always world bigger than books, and Nelson refers to this theoretical paradoxical. Like many of his contemporaries, in the 1960s realm of lexical plenitude as the “docuverse.” In the docuverse and 1970s Nelson regarded the future with both hope and there is literally no hierarchy and no hors-texte. The entire fear. He predicted coming social and ecological disasters, but paratextual apparatus inhabits a horizontal, shared space. he argued against accepting such predictions as written in stone, believing it is up to us “to make ... predictions come out Back to the Future wrong.”5 For Nelson in the 1970s as now, whatever hope we As his discussion of hypertext suggests, Nelson never might have lies in a (computer-aided) multiplication of avoided the futuristic rhetoric of information revolution. intellectual pathways and possibilities, in the system of At the same time, his conception of computerized possibility “envisioning complex alternatives” that he named “hypertext.” always looked as much backward as forward. All of his works make it clear that he cherishes what functions well What Is Hypertext? in traditional textuality. Viewed from an elastic perspective, The term “hypertext” conjures something radical and techno- print literature might actually offer a more sophisticated logical, with four dimensions perhaps, like a “hypercube,” picture of hypertextuality than do electronic writing and or subject to space-time distortion, as in “hyperspace.” But networking as we know them, and in his later work, Nelson hypertext is an ordinary kind of writing. All text interconnects reverts consistently to what he calls “the literary paradigm.” in non-linear ways. You use hypertext whenever you click on Our design [for the hypertext system Xanadu™] is a link in an electronic text and travel to a different document, suggested by the one working precedent that we know of: or to a different place in the document that you are reading, literature. ... We cannot know how things will be seen in the though it is not necessary to use a computer to read or write future. We must assume there will never be a final and in hypertext. A printed book presenting two adjacent ver- definitive view of anything. And yet this system functions. sions of a text (as in a critical literary edition) is hypertextual.6 LITERATURE IS DEBUGGED.11 The same might be said of footnotes or marginalia, of nested glosses such as those in the Talmud or medieval manuscripts, Technology, he argues, allows us to see dimensions of or of “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories. Such texts allow literature that remained obscured in the print era. At the readers to move by shifts, jumps, and returns that confound same time, literature and scholarship as traditionally the notion of textual linearity.7 construed offer an intellectual and cultural model which, According to Nelson, with the exception of the most while far from perfect, has nonetheless proved capable of rudimentary examples, all text points to other text outside expressing complexity, ambiguity, and responsibility. of the single, supposedly closed sequence; all sources are The assertion that “literature is debugged” captures ringed by satellite sources that encourage readers to make much of what makes Nelson different from his technologi- explicit or implicit comparisons, mental leaps, and intellectual cally-oriented peers in information theory. But his “systems choices. As he explains in Literary Machines, humanism” is also echoed by a number of contemporary critics who have taken a middle road in what is often a Many people consider [hypertext] to be new and drastic depressingly binary debate on the value of electronic writing. and threatening. However, I would like to take the position J. Hillis Miller, for one, appreciates both the Proustian pos- that hypertext is fundamentally traditional and in the main- sibilities inherent in hypertextual errancy and the hypertex- stream of literature. Customary writing chooses one expository tual quality of Proust’s own meditations. At the same time, sequence from among the possible myriad; hypertext allows many, all available to the reader. In fact, however, we constantly he warns against a naïve implementation of hypertext, and depart from sequence, citing things ahead and behind in the especially against naïve readings in it. For example, in his text. Phrases like “as we have already said” and “as we will review of a hypertexted version of Tennyson, Miller argues see” are really implicit pointers to contents elsewhere in the that the very paths and links offered by the system imply that: sequence.8 a Victorian work ... is to be understood by more or less traditional placement of the poem in ... its socio-economic and This broad conception of hypertext explains how electronic biographical context, by reference, for example, to the build- writing can be understood as sharing characteristics of other ing of canals in England at the time. The apparent freedom for written forms. “Hypertext can include sequential text, and the student to “browse” among various hypertext “links” may is thus the most general form of writing. (In one direction of hide the imposition of predetermined connections. These may generalization, it is also the most general form of language.)”9 reinforce powerful ideological assumptions about the causal No writing or utterance travels in a straight line. None stands force of historical context on literary works. ... Hypertext can alone. Hypertext in the largest sense is both the interconnec- be a powerful way to deploy what Kenneth Burke called “per- tive tissue of lexias that make up a given textual unit such as spective by incongruity,” but it can also be conservative in its a “book” and the matrix of external references from implications.12 99 which every “book” must draw its filaments. From Likewise, for Terrence Harpold, to treat “the link as purely a structure in the clouds).” A reporter once asked Nelson directional or associative structure is ... to miss—to disavow— whether the transclusive Xanadu paradigm might not be the divisions between the threads in a hypertext. ... What you symptomatic of a generalized attention deficit disorder. see is the link as link, but what you miss is the link as gap.”13 He responded, “We need a more positive term for that. Both arguments point to advantages in Nelson’s concept of Hummingbird mind, I should think.”18 And it may be that the Xanadu interface as opposed to the systems of electronic hummingbird mind has finally found its technology. The strik- hypertext and the Internet as currently configured. The point ing success of hypertext and hypermedia systems in of Xanadu is to make intertextual messiness maximally all sorts of applications, from reference works and technical functional, and in that way to encourage the proliferation and manuals to works of literature, art, and games, attests to the elaboration of ideas. generality of Nelson’s vision. But there is more. Vivid and sensitive a writer that he is, Nelson also captures something Xanadu™ and Transclusion like the unconscious of these practices. While the general concepts of hypertext and the docuverse apply equally to all textual mechanisms, not all textual mecha- Magic Place of Literary Memory nisms function identically. The key feature distinguishing For Nelson, the challenge of hypertext is in some senses Xanadu from the Web is what Nelson calls “transclusion.”14 autobiographical, a way of arguing against historical time Traditional print works by “inclusion.” External references and its expected closures. The very name Xanadu™ expresses are embedded as quotations, becoming integral parts of the the problem of narrative endings as Nelson sees it. referring text. While quotation is also employed on the Web, XANADU™ a separate technical principle is at work. Using a typical One of the great unfinished dreams of the computer field Web link, you change context and engage with new text as ... Literary System, Storage Engine, Hypertext and Hypermedia you might by going to a library and following a citation from Server, Virtual Document Coordinator, Write-Once Network book to book, pursuing a parallel rather than an “inclusive” Storage Manager, Electronic Publishing Method, Open Hyper- relationship. As an alternative to both, Nelson proposes medium, Non-Hierarchical Filing System, Linked All-Media transclusion, a system combining aspects of inclusion and Repository Archive, Paperless Publishing Medium, and Read- linking. A transclusive network implements links so as to dressing Software. The Magic Place of Literary Memory™. combine documents dynamically, allowing them to be read Xanadu, friend, is my dream. together as mutual citations while they remain technically The name comes from the poem; Coleridge’s little story distinct.15 of the artistic trance (and the Person from Porlock) makes Such a structure has a variety of advantages. Nelson it an appropriate name for the pleasure dome of the creative sees a guarantee of intellectual property: “This system allows writer. The Citizen Kane connotations, and any other all the appropriate desiderata of copyright to be achieved: connotations you may find in the poem, are side benefits. one, payment for the originator; two, credit for the originator; I have been working on Xanadu, under this and other three, nothing is misquoted; four, nothing is out of context.”16 names, for fourteen years now. The goal of Xanadu, on one hand, is total instantaneous Make that twenty-seven years.19 information access. On the other, it is continuous revelation of interconnectedness without the dilution of specificity. At Nelson’s narrative echoes the associative logics of the Xan- one pole stands the dream of a universal archive, at the other, adu system. It also self-consciously recalls the way in which the fragmented and nomadic appropriation of knowledge of the Romantic poets put into question the idea of all sorts. Hypertext becomes a system for the production and completion itself. Hence Nelson’s fascination with management of such “loose ends.” Coleridge’s famously unfinished poem, Kubla Kahn. The The question of loose ends has always been crucial poem is a curious object. It is a vision of paradise that came for Nelson. A meticulous taker and retaker of notes, he was to the poet unmediated, in a dream state, or so Coleridge a sociology student in the early 1960s when he first encoun- claims. But Coleridge never gives his reader access to this tered computers and imagined Xanadu. In that pre-word- moment. He tells us that the published poem is only a processing age, it was evident to Nelson that computers fragment, the bit of writing that he was able to do before his could not only be used as typewriters, but that they could transcription was interrupted by a visitor from Porlock. What function as archiving, database, and communication systems. is interesting about the poem is that it is in every way a model If, as he believed, the problem with conventional writing hypertext. In the first instance, the apparently unmediated is that it tends to limit intellectual options by channeling version of the poem is already a vision of a vision, Coleridge’s them in only one direction, then electronic hypertext could quotation of what the Khan saw. And in the version that we mirror and supplement the lightness and fluidity of creative get as readers, it is citational on another level: it is Coleridge’s thought. Fishing Vonnegut-like for a name that might capture transcription and annotation of his own memory. Moreover, the humor and complexity of hypertextuality, he spoke of in keeping with the Romantic resonance of the poem “grandesigning, piece-whole diddlework, grand fuddling, (“a vision in a dream, a fragment”), Nelson’s narrative of Xan- metamogrification, and for that most exalted adu also goes back to childhood. He contrasts his own expe- 100 possibility, tagnebulopsis (the visualization of rience in school with the free play of ideas that he observes among contemporary groups of computer kids. According to chiasmatic prism of the computer screen. Xanadu holds up Nelson, schools are the principal enforcers of the fictions of one such negative mirror, reflecting and thus creating a linearity. “The very system of curriculum, where the world’s temporal “elsewhere.” subjects are hacked to fit a schedule of time-slots, at once At the same time, hypertext embodies the fantasy that transforms the world of ideas into a schedule (Curriculum the computer screen might open. Here, the organizing means ‘little racetrack’ in Latin.) A curriculum promotes a principle is not time’s arrow but the human body. To date, false simplification of any subject, cutting the subject’s many perhaps the most interesting meditation on this metaphor interconnections and leaving a skeleton of sequence which is Shelley Jackson’s pioneering “hypertext novel” Patchwork is only a caricature of its richness and intrinsic value.”20 The Girl, which weaves together elements of Mary Shelley, goal of Xanadu, he says, is to make the world “safe for smart L. Frank Baum, and varieties of literary criticism. Jackson children.” He might just as well have said, “smart children explicitly energizes the body metaphor by leading her reader of all ages,” for among smart children, he clearly includes through phrenological maps and anatomical graveyards, himself.21 inciting the construction of multiple “Patchwork Girls.”26 For Nelson, writing or reading is always a process of Nelson’s metaphorizing of bodily rather than linear time, restoring something lost. If, in the more mundane sense, meanwhile, includes a figuration of the light pen (which he every act of composition is an act of creation, in the terms of uses rather than a mouse) as a scalpel to cut across the screen. the docuverse, every act of creation is, in effect, a mapping Of course the body metaphor is in no special way the province of forgotten hypertextual space. At a deeper psychic level, of hypertextual representation. From the cabalistic mapping every linguistic act is an act of contact with a lost body of Scripture onto the flesh to metaphors like the ship of state, through a “magic place of literary memory.” Info-discourse the body provides a natively comprehensible trope for provides us with a newly structured figure of memory. functional interconnection and/or hierarchy. But, as Anne It at once speaks of system storage, of the unexamined Balsamo and others have pointed out, the human body and recaptured links between ideas, and of the problem of also plays a central role in fantasies of cyberspace precisely consciousness slipping from our grasp. because these fantasies so often rely on an assumed negation Xanadu, then, operates as prosthetic memory. It stores or evacuation of it.27 As much as the computer screen is fanta- everything in alternate versions. Nothing need be lost. sized as a new domain of freedom for consciousness, it also A mistaken path can always be retraced, a lost reference seems always to hint at corporeal amputation or atrophy. recovered, a silenced voice revived. Nelson even compares Consider, for example, “fantics,” Nelson’s term for a this process of “versioning” to time-travel, in which “the past science that would include the theoretical structure of can be changed.”22 Users of the Xanadu prototype notice virtualities, but also the old terrain of psychology, physiology, that the cursor takes the shape of an hourglass. “TO UNDO and epistemology—everything that concerns the possible SOMETHING, YOU MERELY STEP ‘BACKWARD IN TIME’ address of our perception. It is “the art and science of getting by dragging the upper part of the hourglass with the light ideas across, both emotionally and cognitively.”28 pen. ... You may then continue to view and make changes as Should I have called it TEACHOTRONICS? SHOWMAN- if the last ... operations had never taken place.” Historically, SHIPNOGOGY? INTELLECTRONICS? ... THOUGHTOMATION? of course, writing has often figured as a transit across time; MEDIA-TRONICS? ... Okay, so I wanted a term that would as Friedrich Kittler puts it, “every book is a book of the dead.” connote, in the most general sense, the showmanship of ideas In this respect, electronic writing is no different from other and feelings—whether or not handled by machine. kinds. But electronic writing also energizes the fantasy that I derive “fantics” from the Greek words “phainein” (show) and death might not be permanent, that the text would not only its derivative “phantastein” (present to the eye or mind). testify to past activities, but that those activities themselves You will of course recognize its cousins fantastic, fantasy, might be re- or unwritten. Through the chiasmatic X of Xan- phantom. ... The word “fantics” would thus include the adu, the sands of time pass back and forth. showing of anything.29
Screen Memory Nelson’s argument for the reality of “fantic space” should What is the relationship between compulsive return to not come as a surprise, steeped as we now are in promo- memory and prophesy of the future? In Invisible Cities, Italo tions of “virtual reality.”30 What is interesting about his state- Calvino proposes a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kub- ment is that he dispenses with any hard and fast distinction lai Khan, in which Polo describes cities that he has visited, between the presentation of “reality” and that of “virtuality.” while Khan imagines seeing or conquering them. “‘Journeys In theorizing screen-based display, fantics examines the to relive your past?’ was the Khan’s question ... a question ghost of the physical body—which persists in the term, like a which could also have been formulated: ‘Journeys to recover phantom limb. In the Xanadu universe, an electronic Rapture your future?’ ... And Marco’s answer was: ‘Elsewhere is a is supposed to take place in word and image, and our bodies negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, as well as our minds will link up with machines. As Nelson discovering the much he has not had and will never have.’”25
In Nelson’s imagination, there are two worlds, present overleaf: The covers of Theodor Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines. 101 and past, refracted and reversed through the The two books are bound together, upside down and back-to-back.
explains, “Everything has a reality and a virtuality. Good time travel, Xanadu gives body (back) to acts of textual imagi- examples are buildings, equipment, cars. ... The extreme nation. The model is less Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths” cases are the movie, which is all virtuality, and the fishhook, than it is Jackson’s operationalized L. Frank Baum: the which has no virtuality—no conceptual structure or feel to encyclopedic dream as electronic story book. the victim—until too late.”31 The fantic computer, in his con- In one respect, such observations might be made of much ception, becomes an extension of ourselves. For better or hypertext writing and theory in the last 30 years. There has worse, the computer becomes prosthetic. been a general movement to highlight the intellectual and But, in contrast to most of his contemporaries, Nelson imaginative potential of non-linear form, and literary utopia understands this eventuality not so much as a passage into has evolved into hetero- or hypertopias. What is most inter- the future as a passage into a certain kind of past, into the esting about Nelson is not his undeniable role in propelling childbody of the mind. What we see in the image of the child this movement, but his scrupulous problematization of a glued to the computer screen (an image repeated throughout materiality that is often absent from the work of other Nelson’s works) is an imagined experience of communion, writers. Even as Nelson releases the multidimensionality body and mind reunited in dreamspace. of seemingly traditional, linear texts, he insists upon the value of so-called traditional writing, upon its protection Almost everyone seems to agree that Mankind (who?) is from everything that might seek to supplant it or its appeal on the brink of a revolution in the way information is handled, to the creative imagination. and that his revolution is to come from some sort of merging The storybook analogy suits Nelson. Like instructive of electronic screen presentation and audio-visual technology fables, his work helps us to discriminate among the rhetorics with branching, interactive computer systems. ... Professional people seem to think this merging will be an intricate mingling and practices of our possible information futures. These of technical specialties. ... I think this is a delusion and a con- networks of praxis are stitched from traditional fabrics of game. I think that when the real media of the future arrive, future and past: fabrics of progress, revolution, and millen- the smallest child will know it right away (and perhaps first). nium; of nostalgia, memory, and return. In this respect, what ... When you can’t tear a teeny kid away from the computer is important in Nelson’s work is not the idea or practice of screen, we’ll have gotten there.32 non-linearity per se, but rather the insistence that our futures were never all that linear to begin with. The seams of the This is the present experience toward which all of Nelson’s patchwork show. Whatever else it is, Xanadu is a system for work aims. Hypertext is a name for this physical pleasure marking intellectual paths, and unlike so many information of thought, for a kind of representation that reinforces and and cybernetics theorists, Nelson’s primary concern has operationalizes hummingbird mind. Nelson’s efforts do not never been speed or scope in itself. Xanadu is distinctive revolve around the fantasy of the dissolution of the body into principally because it presents itself as patchwork, because it data, but rather celebrate the re-access of the lost, free insists that in fantic space all the joints be left showing. childbody through the medium of fantic space. Of course there are elements of what Xanadu promises that This is the special sense of Xanadu as a “magic place” are utopian, nostalgic. But if Xanadu is a phantasm, and if of memory, a realm of unchained creativity that is always time will not turn backward because we touch a floating hypereventually present. The design expresses Nelson’s hourglass with a magic cursor, it is equally true that our imagination of the information future as a hyperexperience futures make no sense unless we reckon with our longing for of childhood, the chiasmatic return through the looking-glass such possibilities.33 of the computer screen to a pre-curricular mind. Via a kind of 1 Theodor Holm Nelson, Literary Machines: The Report on, and of, Project Xanadu™ Concerning Word Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Thinkertoys, Tomorrow’s Intellectual Revolution, and Certain Other Topics Including Knowledge, Education, and Freedom, revised ed. (Sausalito: Mindful Press, 1987), 0.11-12. 2 The basic literature on hypertext is George Landow, ed., Hyper/Text/Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 3 Theodor Holm Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Self-Published, 1974); idem., Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Press, 1987). The two books are bound together, upside down and back-to-back. Citations are from the 1987 edition. 4 Nelson, Computer Lib, p. 16. 5 Nelson, Computer Lib, p. 175-176. 6 Nelson, Dream Machines, p. 50. 7 Nelson, Dream Machines, p. 50. 8 Nelson, Literary Machines, 1.17. 9 Nelson, Literary Machines, 0.3. 10 Nelson, Literary Machines, 2.2. 11 Nelson, Literary Machines, 2.9-2.11. 12 J. Hillis Miller, “The Ethics of Hypertext,” Diacritics 25.3 (Fall 1995), pp. 27-28. 13 Terrence Harpold, “The Contingencies of the Hypertext Link,” Writing on the Edge 2.2 (1991), p. 134. 14 See also Theodor Holm Nelson, “Opening Hypertext: A Memoir,” in Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers, in Myron C. Tuman, ed., (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992). 15 Nelson, “Opening Hypertext,” p. 55. 16 Nelson, “Opening Hypertext,” pp. 55-56. 17 Nelson, Dream Machines, p. 37. 18 Gary Wolf, “The Curse of Xanadu,” Wired Magazine 3.06 (June 1995),
opposite and overleaf: Photos and illustrated text from Computer 105 Lib/Dream Machines.
The Veterans of Future Wars the treasury, the joke was old, and national attention had Susan Hamson switched to the Roosevelt-Landon presidential campaign. Operations were suspended in the fall, and in April 1937, with “Soldiers of America, Unite! You have nothing to lose.” In a the treasury showing a deficit of 44 cents, the Veterans of time of political uncertainty, threatening war, and economic Future Wars closed their books forever. depression, such was the rallying cry of the Veterans of Future With the onset of the Korean War in 1950, some efforts Wars, a Princeton University undergraduate group formed were made to revitalize the group, but enthusiasm died out in 1936 in response to the new Harrison Bonus Bill, which almost as quickly as it began. In the 1930s, anti-war sentiment allowed World War I veterans to collect their war bonuses was high as many watched events in Europe with great trepi- in that year rather than in 1940. The legislation, the conse- dation. But overwhelming US victories in World War II and the quence of intensive lobbying by the American Legion and growing threat of communism made the general population the Veterans of Foreign Wars, had struck the students as an less skeptical of American involvement in foreign conflicts. unconscionable raid upon the United States Treasury for In this respect, the Future Veterans remains very much a the benefit of an organized minority. Modeling their demands product of its time. But what happened to the students who after the bill’s supporters, the group maintained that given founded the organization? “With the exception of one under- the “inevitability of war,” future soldiers should be given their graduate injured in an automobile crash in 1936,” notes bonuses—$1,000 in cash—before the war as “any will be killed historian Richard D. Challener, “every one of the Princetonians or wounded in the next year and, hence they, the most deser- who founded the Future Veterans served in the United States ving, will not get the full benefit of their country’s gratitude.” armed forces after Pearl Harbor. And, presumably, qualified The students went all out. They rented office space, held for World War II benefits and bonuses.” a campus rally, traveled to Vassar to institute a woman’s auxiliary (the “Home Fire Division,” after the name “Future below: Cover of Lewis J. Gorin’s Patriotism Prepaid. Courtesy Seeley G. Mudd Gold Star Mothers” was protested by a disapproving Manuscript Library, Princeton University, and J. B. Lippincott Co. administration at the school), had their own salute (“The Outstretched, Itching Palm”), and incorporated with the approval of the State of New Jersey. The Future Veterans consisted of a National Council and a network of nationwide collegiate posts. The National Council, based in Princeton and staffed by its founders from the classes of 1936 and 1937, was led by National Commander Lewis Gorin, Jr., with Jack Turner as Secretary, Thomas Riggs, Jr. as Treasurer, and Robert Barnes in charge of public relations. Riggs, Jr. shared the role of Acting Commander with Barnes after summer recess in September until the group's disbanding in the spring of 1937. The Princeton Press Club sent out stories, the wire services got interested, and all across the country, newspapers ran articles on the Future Veterans. Overnight, local chapters mushroomed on college campuses; at its height, the organization boasted over 60,000 members and had 534 chartered posts throughout the country. What made the Future Veterans an instant success was their appeal to both conservatives and liberals. Conserva- tives saw the group as a strong ally against FDR’s government spending. College liberals who were pacifist, anti-war, and anti-military embraced the opportunity to rally against war and the military. But through it all, the Future Veterans stayed true to their “cause,” and played the joke to its last breath. Indeed, Christian Gauss, Dean of Princeton, who had not altogether embraced the movement, considered that the Future Veterans “might have consequences that no one can yet see and that it demonstrates the determination of youth to rebuild the disordered world of their fathers a little closer to sanity.” The Future Veterans were a short-lived phenomenon; formed in the spring of 1936, they just barely 107 survived summer vacation. There was no money in The Sexual Archipelago button on the red control panel, projecting slides simul-tane- Jessica Sewell ously onto the walls, floor, ceiling, and window shades. It is uncertain to what extent the utopian visions of the In the 1960s, the future promised freedom from reproduction, 1960s were successful or might still be successful in another marriage, hang-ups, and even, maybe, gender. The structure time. To Simon Spies, the Villa looked like a solid answer, and fabric of sex were changing, literally. Unisex clothing built into the landscape of the sexual archipelago. had just come onto the scene as “good fun” for “with-it young In retrospect, the design of the Villa looks more like the couples.”1 Unisex was supposed to free the wearer from architecture of a question. constricting traditions, from a world in which gender deter- mined who you were or what you wore. It offered hope that 1 Life, 21 June 1968, p. 87. there might be life beyond gender and that sex could be 2 Juliet Kinchen, “Interiors: Nineteenth Century Essays on the ‘Masculine’ and ‘Feminine’ about hedonistic pleasure without power relations. Perhaps Room,” in Pat Kirkham, ed., The Gendered Object (Manchester: Manchester University a future of the sort envisioned in the orgy in Antonioni’s Press, 1996), pp. 12-29. Zabriskie Point (1970) in which it is only bodies that matter, 3 “Playboy’s Penthouse Apartment,” Playboy, September 1956, pp. 53-60; “Playboy’s not what kind of bodies. Penthouse Apartment—A Second Look” Playboy, October 1956, pp. 63-70. Earlier design demanded distinctions between the 4 Mikael Askergren, Villa Spies (Stockholm: Eriksson & Ronnefalk Förlag, 1996). masculine and feminine. In the 19th century, decorating 5 See, for example, Phyllis Birkby, “Herspace,” in Heresies 11: Making Room: Women and books instructed that masculine rooms should be brown and Architecture (1981), pp. 28-29. green, with dark wood and leather, while feminine rooms 6 See
preferred not to share their aural pleasures. Visually, opposite and overleaf: The hydraulic shaft in Villa Spies in operation. 108 the space could be transformed at the push of a Photos Staffan Berglund.
The Eight-Fold Path to Knowing Ra Greg Rowland
Sun Ra was the most far-out cat that ever lived. He led a large band that made a joyful Space Jazz Noise Vibration from the early 50s up until Ra’s planetary departure in 1993. He was from the planet Saturn.
Anti-success Ra knew that time was on his side. He didn’t run about town chasing a record deal or getting record pluggers to hype his records into the charts. This would have been kind of difficult anyway, as most of Sun Ra’s 7-inch singles—produced by his own independent record company Saturn—had runs of a few hundred copies, sometimes just fifty. Often, the covers to his many singles and albums would be hand-painted. He said:
In my music there’s a lot of little melodies going on. It’s like an ocean of sound. The ocean comes up, it goes back, it rolls. It might go over people’s heads, wash part of them away, reenergize them, go through them, and then go back out to the cosmos and come back again. They go home and maybe 15 years later they’ll say “Whoa, that music I heard 15 years ago in the park ... it was beautiful!”
Self-mythologizing In one earthly prosaic version of events, he who is Ra was born Herman Blount in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914. You can forget this, because Ra did. He was actually a messenger from the planet Saturn, like Elijah blowing Gabri- el’s Horn, to inform and prepare us for serious cosmic shit. He described himself as The Jester of the Creator. His mission can be best explained by the business plan sent to register his company Ihnfinity Inc.—which can still be found amidst the dusty files of Chicago’s Board of Trade— and distinguished by its cosmological aura of space-peace and optimism:
To perform spiritual-cosmic-intergalactic-infinity research works relative to worlds-dimensions-planes in galaxies and universes beyond the present now known used imaginations of mankind, beyond the intergalactic central sun and works relative to the spiritual advancement of our presently known world. To awaken the spiritual conscious of mankind putting him back in contact with his “Creator.” To make mankind aware that there are superior beings (Gods) on other planets in other galaxies. To help stamp out (destroy) ignorance destroying its major purpose changing ignorance to constructive creative progress. To use these spiritual- cosmic values for the greater advancement of all people of earth and creative live beings of the galaxy and galaxies beyond the central sun. To establish spiritual energy refilling houses where people can come to refill themselves with spiritual ener- gy and to seek their “natural Creator” (God). To perform works as the “Creator” wills us, “Ihnfinity,” to perform.
Space Sun Ra and space go together like Shakespeare and a 111 convoluted metaphor. The Solar-Myth Arkestra, one of about 60 different names that the band performed under, was Mysticism like a crew for a heliocentric space-ship that had only been Sun Ra was the most mystical a human can get before trans- invented in the quasi-dimensional world of harmony and mogrifying into a Pure Cosmic Trace. Perhaps because of timbre. But they were well trained. Romantic involvement his love of jokes and conceptual conflict, many saw him as was frowned upon, and drugs of all kinds absolutely forbidden. something of a kooky guy. Yet his cosmological philosophy They had more important stuff to do. They had to prepare was steeped in learning, comprising intimate knowledge of the world for the coming of the Spaceways. Ra was a True Egyptology, Biblical exegesis, Rosicrucianism, African myth, Fundamentalist of Modernism. numerology, and crypto-linguistics. Ra was as much Yeats as Blavatsky, a modernist squeal through the brass tubes of Politics mysticism, a clinker and a clanker in a junkyard that doesn’t Through one important Percepto-Lens, Ra made an enormous exist here yet. Ra brings us back to everything that was far contribution to the aestheticization of black resistance to out in that first blast of the modern, the sense of the auto- oppression. Africa, and especially Egypt, via the Cosmo-Sun matic, the inversion of leftover histories, the exploration of Connection, the heliocentricity that put the Sun in Ra and the “an uncertain borderland for which ordinary language is not Ra in Sun, became a powerful floating metaphor. Yet, within shaped.” the free-floating domain of non-causality, the Cosmic-Egypt- Creator complex serves as an exploration of an ultimate How to Buy a Sun Ra Record Otherness drawn to the centre of our experience. You should never choose to buy a Sun Ra record—it should Though Ra’s music had an arcane meaning, it also spoke choose you. Go to a record shop and find the section marked to anyone who wished to change dancing partners in the Sun Ra. Shut your eyes and slowly flip through the covers. Eternal Waltz of Self and Other. Stop when a strange heliocentric sub-pulse wave vibration emanation occurs. Select the record you were touching at Music that precise moment and purchase in the normal manner. Ra was like a Medieval Kabbalist, playing both sides of an But you should read John F. Szwed’s brilliant Space is argument with equal force and passion. He encouraged his the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra. It’s one of the best band to play “the wrong way,” because any old bunch of books ever written about anything. schmucks could play music the right way. He once told his bassoonist James Jacson:
Jacson, play all the things you don’t know! You’ll be surprised by what you don’t know. You know how many notes there are between C and D? If you deal with those tones you can play nature and nature doesn’t know tones. That’s why religions have bells, which sound all the transient notes. You’re not musicians, you’re tone scientists.
Ra explored every conceivable musical genre, and many that defy earthly classification. He always used a big band, embracing the whole jazz tradition from swing to the avant- garde to the blues to classical. It was all music—and it was all good. Sun Ra released the single “Disco 3000” in 1975, 20 years before Pulp made “Disco 2000.” This puts things in an appropriate perspective.
Technology While Kraftwerk were still wearing short lederhosen, Ra was experimenting with early electronic instruments. Electric Pianos, Moog synthesisers, theremins, strange homemade clavinets, found objects and an African Space-Drum all found their way into the band. He also used a lightning drum, a space harp, a space-dimension mellophone, a space master piano, an intergalactic space organ, solar bells, a sunhorn, Egyptian Sun Bells, an ancient-Egyptian Infinity Drum, a boom-bam, and a cosmic tone organ. Some of these were opposite: Film still from John Coney’s 1974 film Space is the Place. regular instruments transformed by intentionality into a Courtesy Plexifilm. new cosmic purpose. Others were altogether more overleaf: Covers of 50 editions of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. 112 mysterious. Courtesy Dr. Zeus. See
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1967 1968 1972 1972 1972 1997 1998 1998 2001 2002 Scent from the Future Hirato reveled in the hard words and misogyny of Mari- Miryam Sas netti, and praised him for his disruptions of syntax and his love of the cinematograph: Hirato Renkichi’s “truth” Aging futures have a special scent. In Tokyo, one of them was a lightning dance of instantaneous changes. With its smells like coffee. Old-fashioned grinders and French presses continuously gyrating text, Hirato’s manifesto seems a surround the quietly reading customers in the Caravan Cafe desperate effort to lift off from the weight of his own sickly, in Iriya, a neighborhood in a corner of the shitamachi, Tokyo’s decaying body. Hirato’s writing is composed of bright, old “downtown.” With its partly empty concrete high-rises momentary flashes mixed with shadows—the underside of and the 10-story furniture store, Hayamizu, that recently went the city, its decay, degeneration, and contagions f low under under, Iriya has taken a hit in the economic downward spiral, the surface of velocity he evokes in his text. In particular, the shaking of the postwar dream of ever more growth and the prose-poem “Wish-Toys” appended to the manifesto is velocity. But customers at Caravan seem hardly to care. In weighed down by images of illness. Was Hirato himself, the slow bubble of water boiled individually for each who would die the next year, circulating contagion as he demitasse, in the sound of beans ground fresh for every cup, passed his manifesto along with his breath through the air the passage of time seems irrelevant. The grandmother and of the city? grandfather who run the shop keep it open for limited hours Futures always have their hauntings—the frailties of only four days a week. The aging wood of the walls exudes both machine and flesh. They have their vanishings, like the the atmosphere of coffee. pause in time (does it still exist?) and reflux provoked by the Sometimes, as I rush by toward the station, past the very air of the Iriya Caravan. Along with his hopes for the tran- cheap smoke-filled beast of Doutour, the chain store that scendent collective and the brilliant dynamo-electric light of speckles the landscape of Tokyo, I wonder how long Caravan forward progress, Hirato gives us a glimpse of those pauses, will last. Other times, with attendant guilt, I jump in and out those moments of disappearance, that flicker of chaos and of Doutour myself to grab the 60-second mechanized “cap- erosion. There is more than a whiff of Marinetti’s fascism in puccino.” Velocity and rushing, the feeling of being pressed the Japanese Futurist Manifesto, but this odor mixes with a for time, pulses through and around the city today everywhere, more organic scent of desiring-machines and the decompos- in the f low of traffic and the subterranean passages, but it is ing possibilities of the sublime. also everywhere interrupted and held in check. There is no flux without reflux, as Walter Benjamin has written—and that reflux, those moments of ebbing or backward f low, can bring with them astonishment. When Hirato Renkichi distributed the First Manifesto of Japanese Futurism, he did not imagine that it would be read in the 21st century. He did not believe in preserving the past: “Try sniffing the abominable stench behind piles of books,” he wrote. “How many times superior is the fresh scent of gasoline!” Legend has it that he stood on a corner in Hibiya Park one winter day in 1921, just outside the Imperial Palace, handing out this self-published leaflet to crowds that he took to be the newly constituted “masses.” In fact, his leaf- let itself played a part in making of that unending flow of human bodies the collective “we” that was mirrored proleptically in his prose. He celebrated the power of the teeming numbers that partake of the urban technological sublime: the world of “speed and light and heat and power.” At the time when Hirato Renkichi wrote this First Manifesto, the concepts of Futurism had already been introduced in Japan, mostly through the visual arts and art criticism. Mori O¯ gai had translated Marinetti’s manifesto three months after its appearance in the French Le Figaro, for the May 1909 issue of Subaru journal. The year before Hirato distributed his Manifesto, Russian Futurist David Burljuk had caused a sensation in Tokyo with an exhibition of Russian contemporary and Futurist paintings. Hirato’s Manifesto was among the first Japanese works to respond directly. The work appeared in two parts, a section that took
a form parallel to Marinetti’s own manifesto, and a opposite: Hirato Renkichi’s Japanese Futurist Manifesto, featuring a photo 116 prose poem called “Wish Toys” that followed. of the author.
Manifesto of the Japanese Futurist Movement Tokyo === Hirato Renkichi Futurist poets sing the praises of the many engines of civi- lization. These enter directly into the internal growth of the Mouvement Futuriste Japonais latent movement of the future, and sink deeply into a more Par R —— H Y R A T O mechanical and rapid will; they stimulate our unceasing cre- ation, and mediate the speed and light and heat and power.
Trembling heart of the gods, the central active energy of “The chameleon of dancing truth” === multicolored humanity emerges from the core of collective life. The city is —— composite —— a diatonic scale of light seen in the bois- a motor. Its core is dynamo-electric. terous dance of a kaleidoscope.
The gods’ possessions have been conquered by the arms We, who like to be instantaneous and quick on our feet, of humans, and what was once the gods’ power generator are much indebted to Marinetti, who loved the bewitching has today become the city’s motor, participating in the func- changes of the cinematograph; we tioning of the humanity of millions. adopt onomatopoeia, of course, and mathematical symbols, and all possible organic methods to The instinct of the gods has been transferred to the city, try to participate in the essence of and the city’s dynamo-electric has jolted and awakened creation. As much as possible, we humanity’s fundamental instinct, and has appealed to that destroy the conventions of diction power that attempts to push forward directly and vigorously. and syntax, and most of all we dis- pose of the corpses of adjectives and adverbs; using the infinitive The control formerly possessed by the gods has moved and mood of verbs, we advance to become the organic relations of all life, and here dark animal unconquerable regions. fate, that stagnated discord, is beckoned out of its subservi- ent condition; the straightforward mechanical disposition becomes a brilliant light, becomes heat, becomes constant There is nothing in futurism that deals in flesh rhythm. —— freedom of the machine —— generosity —— direct move- ment === only the value of absolute power’s absolute.
MARINETTI —
We are in the midst of a powerful light and heat. We are the Fermentation ...... brrrr, boura, biyurrra, babiyurrrr, children of this powerful light and heat. We are ourselves this biyurrr ...... the small explosion of a basic element that can’t be powerful light and heat. seen. Felt in her , the itchy clamor of tomorrow. The unknown brilliance of the alchemist, bbbau .... byuxxxx = tens of thousands boiling over in my head. Intuition should be substituted for knowledge; the enemy of Futurism’s anti-art is the concept. “Time and space have City of Tokyo enveloped in the stench of hospitals. Like already died, and we already live in the absolute.” We must the Holy mother who prays for the red jewel-colored setting quickly volunteer ourselves, dash forward blindly, and create. sun above you, I pray for roads of good asphalt. I pray for the All that remains is simply the active energy of humanness that music of the citizens walking. City of Tokyo covered over with attempts to feel directly a supreme rhythm (god’s instinct) in roses, for the brightness of stars, to people... the chaos before one’s eyes. Girl with a diseased eye man wrapped in a bandage phos- phorescent stolen child tuberculosis beriberi drippy nose Most graveyards are already unnecessary. Libraries, art weakling college student —— specimen of a nervous break- museums, and academies are not worth the noise of one car down —— the feebleness of you and women, powerless to gliding down the street. As a test, try sniffing the abominable resist —— kikku, kukkokku, keekku, kerokku, hiyara, vuvuvuvu- stench behind the piles of books —— how many times supe- vuvu, fuyangihiyaXXXXhu —— ha —— hu —— ha —— hu —— ha rior is the fresh scent of gasoline! —— hu —— haXXXXXXXXvorura, vuwibonda, borurura, do, dodo —— dodo —— doni —— doni, vavau —— vavya, vyau —— vurara —— rarararararara —— dodo —— doni === automobile === seeing off facefacefacefacefaceXXXX an invalid’s fear and shuddering. city city city city city city city city city— — people people people people people people people people— get sick.
Automobile —— sidewalk doctor —— passing glint of light. Orphan of originary humanity. Strong light and heat and orphan —— me —— my aspirations!
Decorate with a rose, muddy ditches of Tokyo —— the tene- ment houses and old Japanese houses mildew of office build- ings on the rooftops where the sun never shines —— decorate all these jails of servitude the embankments the roads, deco- rate them with the flowers of the drops of blood of a beautiful woman, that surround the millionaire’s villa.
APHRODITE! APHRODITE! Splendor of beauty, her blinding fire, go back home to the inherent nature of woman, commit suicide, you housewives who stink of rice-bran. Scatter roses, anoint yourselves with aphrodisiacs, music of the flesh —— indulgence of the faint life on the surface of the skin —— into the nuance of fatigue and fire, give a strong masculine breath. Nirvana of reality. Snow white, pink, cream, fauve —— in the reflection of the multicolored roses, grasp the light of silver and pearl eternity.
Vanish from my sight! Sun • moon • stars and all brilliances that silhouette black human forms. Idealist Catholic priest philosopher whose manteau reverses to vermilion and velvet. If the strong light that makes you hesitate on the threshold were to come, if there were a strong strong light greater than sun, moon, stars, lamps ..... Vanish from my sight!
Spiral By Hirato Renkichi forthcoming Futurist Poetry Staircase Collection
forthcoming By Hirato Renkichi No Day Futurist Novel
Welcome to the imagination of a new era! Tokyo Naka-Shibuya 819 Hirato Renkichi
Translation: Miryam Sas
The Cabinet Time Capsule remain a magazine-in-the-making, possibly with no readers, or none whose existence we can predict. In this way, it will Coined in 1939 by Westinghouse publicist G. Edward be, perhaps, not unlike the magazine you are holding in Pendray on the occasion of the company’s seven-foot-tall, your hands. torpedo-shaped container built for the 1939 Word’s Fair, the phrase time capsule gained full acceptance into language For more information on time capsules, see the website for the International Time when the Oxford English Dictionary opened its hallowed Capsule Society run by Paul Stephen Hudson.