a quarterly of art and culture Issue 17 LAUGHTER CABINET US $10 Canada $15 UK £6
inside this issue SPRING-A-DINGTIME 2005 Sasha Archibald • Mats Bigert • Robert Bowen • Steven Brower • Paul Chan • Simon Critchley • Brian Dillon • Sean Dockray • Matt Freedman • Daniel Heller-Roazen • Jim Holt • Edward Jessen • Colin Jones • Jeffrey Kastner • H. Lan Thao Lam • Robert J. Lang • Jesse Lerner • Jennifer Liese • Lana Lin • Paul Lukas • Marco Maggi • Brian McMullen • Joe Milutis • Geoffrey O’Brien • Michael Rakowitz • Steve Rowell • David Serlin • Maud Skoog Brandin • Christopher Turner • Kazys Varnelis • Lawrence Weiner • Margaret Wertheim • Fiona Whitton • Slavoj Zizek cabinet Cabinet is a non-profit 501 (c) (3) magazine published by Immaterial Incorporated. 181 Wyckoff Street Contributions to Cabinet are fully tax-deductible. Our survival is dependent on Brooklyn NY 11217 USA such contributions; please consider supporting us at whatever level you can. tel + 1 718 222 8434 Donations of $25 or more will be acknowledged in the next possible issue. Dona- fax + 1 718 222 3700 tions above $250 will be acknowledged for four issues. Checks should be made email [email protected] out to “Cabinet.” Please mark the envelope “There, there.” www.cabinetmagazine.org Cabinet wishes to thank the following visionary foundations and individuals Spring 2005, issue 17 for their support of our activities during 2005. Additionally, we will forever be indebted to the extraordinary contribution of the Flora Family Foundation from Editor-in-chief Sina Najafi 1999 to 2004; without their generous support, this publication would not exist. Senior editor Jeffrey Kastner Thanks also to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for their two-year Editors Jennifer Liese, Christopher Turner grant of 2003-2004. We would also like to acknowledge that as of the next Managing editor & graphic designer Brian McMullen issue Cabinet will be operating out of an office in DUMBO, Brooklyn generously UK editor Brian Dillon donated by David Walentas/Two Trees. Editors-at-large Saul Anton, Naomi Ben-Shahar, Mats Bigert, Brian Conley, Christoph Cox, Jesse Lerner, Frances Richard, David Serlin, Debra Singer, $15,000 Margaret Sundell, Allen S. Weiss, Eyal Weizman, Margaret Wertheim, The Greenwall Foundation Gregory Williams, Jay Worthington The National Endowment for the Arts Associate editor Sasha Archibald Assistant editor Ryo Manabe $10,000 – $14,999 Assistant designer Leah Beeferman Stina & Herant Katchadourian Website directors Liza Ezbiansky, Luke Murphy, Kristofer Widholm The Peter Norton Family Foundation Website assistant Steven Villereal The American Center Foundation Editorial assistants Caitlin Berrigan, Kate Fox, Chelsea Goodchild, Catharine Maloney Contributing editors Joe Amrhein, Molly Bleiden, Eric Bunge, Pip Day, Charles $5,000 – $9,999 Green, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Dejan Krsic, Roxana The New York State Council on the Arts Marcoci, Phillip Scher, Lytle Shaw, Cecilia Sjöholm, Sven-Olov Wallenstein Helen & Peter Bing Cabinet National Librarian Matthew Passmore The Frankel Foundation Special Thanks Tracy Jenkins, Chester Prepress Zvi Lanz @ Digital Ink $3,000 or under Founding editors Brian Conley & Sina Najafi The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Steven Rand Printed in Belgium by the patient perfectionists at Die Keure $2,500 Cabinet (USPS # 020-348, ISSN 1531-1430) is a quarterly magazine published by The Fifth Floor Foundation Immaterial Incorporated, 181 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217. Periodicals Postage paid at Brooklyn, NY and additional mailing offices. $2,000 or under Nick Debs Postmaster: Terry Winters Send address changes to Cabinet, 181 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217 $1,000 or under Individual subscriptions Janine Antoni 1 year (4 issues): US $28, Canada $34, Western Europe $36, Other $50 The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation 2 years (8 issues): US $52, Canada $64, Western Europe $68, Other $95 Walter Sculley Debra Singer Please either send a check in US dollars made out to “Cabinet,” or mail, fax, or email us your Visa/MC/AmEx/Discover information. Subscriptions $500 or under also available online at www.cabinetmagazine.org or through Paypal The Dowd/Freundlich Calvert Giving Fund, Julia Meltzer ([email protected]). For back issues, see the last page of this issue. $250 or under Institutional subscriptions Monroe Denton, Sarah Feinstein, Friends of Jesse Kaufman Institutions can subscribe through EBSCO or Swets, or through our website. $100 or under Advertising Caroline Berley, Elizabeth Casale, Walter Cotten, Jane Daye, Spencer Finch, Email [email protected] or call + 1 718 222 8434. Emily Larned, Effie Phillips Martinez
Distribution Cabinet is available as a magazine in the US and Canada through Big Top Newsstand Services, a division of the IPA. For more information, call + 1 415 643 0161, fax + 1 415 643 2983, or email [email protected]. Big Top distributes via Ingram, IPD, Tower, Armadillo News, Small Changes, Last Gasp, Emma Marian, Cowley Distribution, Kent News Agency, Media Solutions, The News Group, Primary Sources, Total Circulation, Ubiquity, Newbury Comics, Disticor, and Don Olson Distribution.
Cabinet is available worldwide as a book (with ISBN) through D.A.P./ Distributed Art Publishers, 155 Sixth Avenue, 2nd floor, New York, NY 10013 Tel: + 1 212 627 1999, Fax: + 1 212 627 9484, Email: [email protected]
Cabinet is also available in Europe and elsewhere through Central Books, London. Email: [email protected]
Submissions See www.cabinetmagazine.org or email [email protected].
Contents © 2005 Immaterial Incorporated and the authors and artists. All rights in the magazine reserved by Immaterial Incorporated, and rights in the works contained herein reserved by their owners. Fair users are of course free to do their The photograph on page 4 was taken by OK Hyun Anh. thing; we’ve been known to use fairly ourselves. Any other unauthorized reproduc- tion of any material here is a no-no. The views published here are not necessarily Cover: photo Werner Wolff, ca. early 1960s. those of the writers and artists, let alone the slaphappy editors of Cabinet. Back cover: “The Last Laugh” by Brian McMullen. COLUMNS MAIN
7 Colors / GRAY 19 BLOCKING ALL LANES GEOFFREY O’BRIEN Sean Dockray, Steve Rowell & Fiona Whitton Nowhere all over the place Sig-Alerts, detection loops, and the management of traffic
8 InGESTION / DON’T SLICE THE HAM TOO THIN 27 CENTRIPETAL CITY JEFFREY KASTNER KAZYS VARNELIS Fred Harvey and the prehistory of fast food The myth of the network
12 INVENTORY / Regalia 34 THE ARTIST AS VOLCANO PAUL LUKAS JESSE LERNER The decline and fall of a ribbon empire The seismic imagination of Dr. Atl
15 lEFTOVERS / ASHES TO DIAMONDS 39 THE MATHEMATICS OF PAPER FOLDING: TOM VANDERBILT AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT LANG Turning grandma into a Treasured Family Heirloom™ MARGARET WERTHEIM Adventures in computational origami
44 How to make your own Square-based origami bud
46 ARTIST PROJECT: THE TED TURNER COLLECTION— rEPORT FROM THE BATTLEFIELD (PAPER ON UCCELLO) MARCO MAGGI
51 DO NOT MINGLE ONE HUMAN FEELING JOE MILUTIS Jenny Lind and the mysteries of protophonographic notation
56 H & CO. DANIEL HELLER-ROAZEN The fate of aitch
61 ARTIST PROJECT: return to sender Robert BOWEN
64 ARTIST PROJECT: EVEN THE TREES WOULD LEAVE H. LAN THAO & LANA LIN LAUGHTER AND
69 TEARS OF LAUGHTER postcard: Yours sincerely, CHRISTOPHER TURNER WASTIng away Darwin and the indeterminacy of emotions MICHAEL RAKOWITZ
74 stimuli eliciting smiling and laughing Bookmark:The Laff Box In children at different ages No longer near the subscription cards
76 ARTIST PROJECT: LAUGHTER, INTERRUPTED (INTRODUCTION)
77 ARTIST PROJECT: LAUGHTER, INTERRUPTED (RUEFUL) PAUL CHAN
78 VERY FUNNY: AN INTERVIEW WITH SIMON CRITCHLEY BRIAN DILLON Toward a philosophical history of humor
82 THE PRACTITIONER: An Interview with Maud Skoog Brandin MATS BIGERT Laughing without reason in Sweden
84 INFECTIOUS LAUGHTER DAVID SERLIN Kuru as metaphor
86 ARTIST PROJECT: LAUGHTER, INTERRUPTED (CRUEL) LAWRENCE WEINER
87 THE ART OF LAUGHTER JIM HOLT Three ways to be funny
91 ARTIST PROJECT: LAUGHTER, INTERRUPTED (MALICIOUS) MATT FREEDMAN
92 THE CHRISTIAN-HEGELIAN COMEDY SLAVOJ ZIZEK “God is dead,“ and other classic one-liners
96 ARTIST PROJECT: LAUGHTER, INTERRUPTED (PERVERSE) STEVEN BROWER
97 INCORRUPTIBLE TEETH, Or, the French Smile revolution COLIN JONES Laughter and the birth of dentistry
101 WIDE at the bottom, narrow at the top Sasha Archibald King Louis-Philippe and the pear
102 ARTIST PROJECT: Laughter scoreS Edward jessen
103 No laughing matter JENNIFER LIESE A short, sad history of the smiley face This issue of Cabinet is dedicated to the memory of our friend and contributor Luis Miguel Suro
May 12, 1972 – December 17, 2004 Contributors
Sasha Archibald is associate editor of Cabinet and a Helena Rubenstein Joe Milutis is a writer, media artist, and Assistant Professor of Art at Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. the University of South Carolina. His book, Ether: The Nothing that Connects Everything, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press in October Robert Bowen is a New York-based artist and designer who teaches in the 2005. MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media Department at the School of Visual Arts. His exhibition “Return to Sender: Virtual Postcards from Impossible Geoffrey O’Brien is the author of many books of prose and poetry, including Places” is on view at MF Adams Gallery in Brooklyn until mid-April 2005. The Phantom Empire, The Browser’s Ecstasy, and, most, recently, Sonata for Jukebox (Counterpoint) and Red Sky Café (Salt). He is editor-in-chief of Steven Brower is an artist based in New York. The Library of America and lives in New York City.
Paul Chan is an artist who lives in New York. Michael Rakowitz is an artist living in New York. A solo exhibition of his work will open this April at Lombard-Freid Fine Arts in New York City and his work will Simon Critchley is professor of philosophy at the New School for Social also be featured in “SAFE: Design Takes On Risk” at the Museum of Modern Art, Research, New York and at the University of Essex. He is author of many New York City in 2005. Rakowitz is currently Professor of Sculpture at the books, including On Humour (Routledge, 2002), Very Little...Almost Nothing Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. (second edition, Routledge, 2004) and Things Merely Are (Roultedge, 2005). Steve Rowell is a designer, photographer, and videographer. He is co-director Brian Dillon is UK editor for Cabinet and writes regularly on art, books, and of The Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles. His 2005 research culture for Frieze, ArtReview, Scotland on Sunday and The Wire. His first book, will focus on the growing disaster-scenario culture and structures of extreme In the Dark Room, will be published in October 2005. He lives in Canterbury. duration and containment in America, as well as on developing a series of remote monitoring devices. Sean Dockray is an artist at the Department of Design|Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a co-producer of Building Sound, David Serlin is an assistant professor of communication and science studies a program dedicated to exploring radio as a medium for architectural at the University of California, San Diego, and an editor-at-large for Cabinet. representation. See
Jim Holt is a gossip columnist for New York Magazine. He also writes about Kazys Varnelis
Jeffrey Kastner is senior editor at Cabinet. Fiona Whitton is an architectural designer and curator. She is the director of Telic Gallery, a media arts space in Los Angeles. H. Lan Thao Lam is a Vietnamese-Canadian artist based in New York. Her fourth attempt to escape Vietnam was successful in 1980, the same year as her Slavoj Zizek, a dialectical-materialist philosopher, is the Co-Director of the sister’s eleventh attempt. Her mother’s second attempt succeeded in 1986. International Center for Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London. His latest publications are Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (Verso, 2004) and Robert J. Lang has been a scientist, engineer, and inventor in lasers and fiber The Puppet and the Dwarf (MIT, 2003). optics, but has had a lifelong interest in the art of origami, a field in which he is recognized worldwide, both for his many compositions and sculptures, and for his investigations into the relationships between origami, science, and mathematics. He lives in northern California.
Jesse Lerner, an editor-at-large at Cabinet, is a documentary filmmaker based in Los Angeles. He is the co-programmer of this year’s Robert Flaherty Seminar.
Jennifer Liese is an editor of Cabinet.
Lana Lin is an artist and filmmaker based in New York.
Paul Lukas lives in Brooklyn, where he writes about the picky little details of just about everything.
Marco Maggi lives and works in Montevideo, Uruguay. His work was recently included in the Fifth Gwangju Biennial, Korea; the VIII Havana Biennial, Cuba; the 25th Sao Paulo Biennial, Sao Paulo, Brazil. His next solo exhibition “The Ted Turner Collection” will open in April 2005 at Josee Bienvenu Gallery in New York. This year, his work will be featured in Vitamin D, a survey on contemporary drawing published by Phaidon Press.
Brian McMullen is managing editor and graphic designer of Cabinet. He has just founded a General Catalogue of Non-Essential Stock Photographs, which you can browse at the Believer magazine website,
COLUMNS “Colors” is a column in which a guest writer responds to a specific colors / GRAY color assigned by the editors of Cabinet. / “Ingestion“ is a column geoffrey o’brien that explores cuisine, aesthetics, and philosophy. / Inventory” is an occasional column that features and sometimes examines a There are no gray popsicles or balloons or children’s bath list, register, or catalogue. / “Leftovers” is a column that examines toys. America’s favorite newspaper, USA Today—the one the signifcance of cultural detritus. they slide under the door of the desert motel—is, according to its ads, “never gray.” A reviewer of pop music says, “It’s not in the American character to rest in that gray place.” A bureaucrat asked about the broader consequences of a proposed policy change says, with muted contempt, “That’s a gray area,” as if pointing to a wide and useless undeveloped tract of land, overrun with weeds and discarded shopping bags. They despise gray, or fear its influence. It reminds them of dust, or worse. Gray functions like the weeds that creep out through cracks in the pavement. It is what finally takes over: aimlessly oppressive, fogged-out, lichened-over, drained of youthful coloration, devoid even of specifiable characteristics, at once unbeckoning and inescapable. It goes nowhere all over the place. Gray hair, gray skies, the “gray matter” of a brain spinning bodiless within its own circuitry: the flag of a country without sun or flesh or vegetation, the rubble-strewn wilderness that extends between the unattainable purities of black and white. A limbo whose denizens never quite graduate. Even the word “gray” can drain life from language. It is the unimaginative short-hand for the death of the imagination, the erosion of moral passion, the stealthy dis- appearance of individual character and enlivening surprise. In an Arthur Miller play, a neurotic woman has a dream in which “everything is sort of gray,” and it amounts to saying that her erotic life, her hope for any kind of fulfillment, is over. In a certain kind of Scandinavian detective novel, the whole field of vision is gray: the streetcars, the tollbooths, the harbor, the corrugated shed, pieced together from aban- doned construction materials, where drug-addicted high school students are found murdered. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit of fifties mythology was supposed to be the man who buried every last trace of adventure, transgression, rebellion, to become a perfectly functioning cog in a social machine that was itself embodied in grayish variants of steel, asphalt, cement, the worn-out faces of coins, and the toxic effluvia of smokestacks. Gray is the color to which the mind returns as to a prison, where gray uniforms move within a labyrinth of institutional walls of uniform gray. There is a memory loop of descending repeatedly into a basement where the janitor’s buckets are stored, among pipes and canisters that are themselves painted over in thick swaths of gray. From here the subterranean corridors branch out through which we were led unwillingly—or walked even without being led because we could not imagine any other course of action— though they led inevitably to a room we did not want to enter: the room where we would be tested for infection or maladjustment, where we would be forced to remember sequences of numbers, or, worse, to sit and wait in silence, with nothing, not so much as a joke from a package of bubblegum at hand to distract. If acts have color, gray might be the color of passive waiting for an outcome anticipated poem consisting entirely of the word “gray,” a word which without enthusiasm. in that context—a universe stripped bare of distinguishing We wake years later to discover that among the rooms characteristics—would mean city, cloud, veil, wall, cliff, to which those corridors led is the one we ended up living in. ocean, silence, shadow? To plunge into blackness is to die. We stare up through its airshaft to discern a patch of gray, To plunge into gray? Perhaps merely to succumb to the lure or down to see the square of cracked paving condemned to of cloudiness, a morphine-induced dimness, the backdrop stare blindly back. We had spent our days devising curtains for a dreamlike play by some Belgian symbolist of the fin de and disguises, floral displays, trails of mascara, anything to siècle. Act One: A clearing by a lake. Clouds have gathered. avoid looking too long at the cement-and-metal framework Water and sky merge into a tremulous blur. The barrier of of that housing project. It was immense enough to contain mist is no barrier at all. It denies edges altogether. It hangs within itself railroad depots and airports so as to ensure the in space like some impossibly huge canvas by Mark Tobey. A constant necessary flow of utensils and battery oil. Indeed it block of gray, simple and empty, with no trace of the jabbing was immense enough to have its own sky. insistence of sunlight. It lacks both splendors and miseries, No, we didn’t live there, couldn’t have: that imagined lets you vanish into the act of looking at it, neither makes a space must have come from somewhere else, some final demand nor gives an answer. Eastern European enclave of Stalinism, where thought It is not human. Animal, perhaps: the hide of an ele- police in gray uniforms ride gray cars with blacked-out win- phant blocking everything else from view as it passes, or the dows past miles of state-sponsored apartment blocks built skin of a gigantic prehistoric reptile filling a frame in a comic over demolished churches and concert halls. In that city it book as it emerges from between rock walls. The comic is always raining. Discontented people think about suicide book was Turok, Son of Stone, a fifties adventure in which but lack the energy for the decisive act. The mail is late or two American Indian hunters were trapped in a sealed-off lost, the shop closed permanently for repairs. The families canyon where they spent their time—years and years of hoard cracked photographs of ancestors in bulging broken it—doing battle with the dinosaurs who had survived there. suitcases that hold all that is left of the place they came In that world all was gray: either lifeless rock or devouring from. They speak to each other in hoarse whispers as if to reptile. The humans darted among crevices and caverns, convey that anything spoken is some form of unappreciated living to fight another day but never finding a way out. Their intrusion into that silently nurtured suffering—that poison- presumed despair was alleviated only by the bright flat blue ous mix of rancor and regret—that is their only solace. They of the Southwestern skies under which they struggled. have been there so long they love the place, down to the last A gray rock streaked with ash-smears: toward some crumbling bit of soap and the sofa with the broken springs. such natural altar you come in the end, even if not daring to I saw them in a movie that was nothing but tones of pray for more than a change in the weather. That at least is gray arranged in blocks of shape: a constructivist paradise in the realm of what can reasonably be expected. After the where people existed to supply an occasion for interesting tedium of sunshine, there is almost a lust for the transforma- angles or patterns, epic crane shots of crowds geometri- tions that announce the approaching storm. In the theatrical cally surging. The tanks rolling through the smashed wall space between black clouds and surging whitecaps, gray provided an optical delight. The movie could have gone on runs through all its changes. “The poetry of destructive forever, since patterns are continuously generated wherever energy”: the phrase hangs in the air a moment before being human bodies move among structures of stone and metal swept away by the first blast. and there is a camera to register their movements. Now The wintry air-mass pushes forward. The sky in that the airplanes are coming, smoke rises from the residential quarter resembles a solid wall of wet cement. The somber neighborhoods, the crowds are forced toward the pit, the wet gray must be Eden, the color of what is not yet hard- torture unit seals off the street, and it is all a “bracing” ened, not yet built. or “exhilarating”—or perhaps the appropriate and thus unspeakable word is “soothing”—set of variations of gray. Does the prisoner come to love his prison? So much INGESTION / that he can scarcely distinguish between the geometric plea- DON’t SLICE THE HAM TOO THIN sures of the black-and-white war movies and the paler, airier jeffrey kastner swirls of an early thirties Paramount picture, where blonde tresses and semitransparent negligees, champagne bubbles The story of fast food is a classic American one, evoking and luminous dance halls, translate into slight but crucial all the charms, and contradictions, of the country’s cheer- variations of gray? The figures that move in that ether are fully unapologetic brand of gung-ho capitalism: efficient more like life than life itself. They might well look pityingly but routinized, dependable but homogenous, seductive down on a spectator who can only dream of such invulnera- but probably unhealthy in the long run. Its hall of fame ble buoyancy. Color photography would make them artificial. includes maverick entrepreneurs like J. G. Kirby and Dr. R. Any conceivable heaven would be gray.
Or is this the final temptation, to harbor (in the opposite: Not available from your Good Humor Man (frozen milk and ink face of every form of decay) the desire to write a on a stick). Photo Ryo Manabe.
W. Jackson who, in 1921, created the Pig Stand, the Dallas for food service into a multimillion-dollar empire of nearly 50 restaurant that was the first to offer “curb service,” where restaurants that stretched from California to Texas to Illinois. people were served their meals in their cars; root beer stand The Harvey House chain revolutionized the idea of restaurant owner Roy Allen, who around the same time opened the first dining, using standardization techniques and strategic ser- A&W drive-in with his partner Frank Wright in a Sacramento vice models to replace the dangerously greasy spoons that parking lot, refining the idea of “car hops” or outdoor wait- characterized railway dining with reasonably-priced meals, ers; Carl Karcher, the California hot dog vendor who started served by pleasant waitstaff in clean and even elegant set- with one cart in 1941 and eventually made Carl’s Jr. one tings—meals expressly designed to be eaten in the brief of the largest fast-food companies in the US; and, perhaps amount of time (usually less than twenty minutes) it took for most famously, Ray Kroc, a traveling milkshake-maker a train to make its whistle stop at a particular station. salesman who used Dick and Mac McDonald’s “Speedee Harvey, born in London in 1835, began his life in Service System” to transform what in 1948 was a single America as a dishwasher in New York City. After bounc- San Bernadino drive-in into a $20 billion per year global ing around in the food trade for a decade, he ended up in hamburger business that still bears the family name of its St. Louis, where in 1959 he briefly had his own restaurant. founding brothers. When it went under, Harvey took a job as a freight agent for Yet for all its colorful history, the roots of the fast food the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, where he saw chain restaurant can actually be found deeper still in the first-hand the horrible quality of the food available to railroad American historical landscape. True, its development was passengers. Drawing on his former career as a fledgling tied to emergence of new forms of transportation and the restaurateur, Harvey approached his bosses with the idea social patterns these modes of travel enabled. Yet the real of opening a series of eateries along their growing railway beginnings of the industry lay not in the rise of Southern Cal- network. When they balked, Harvey went to the competing ifornia car culture in the first half of the 1900s, but rather a Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad and gave them the half-century earlier with the first expansion of the West and same pitch. The AT&SF bit, agreeing to share the construc- the creation of the railroads. If characters like Karcher and tion costs and in 1876, the first Harvey House restaurant Kroc are fast food’s founding fathers, its great grandfather opened in the Santa Fe depot in Topeka, Kansas. is Fred Harvey, an English immigrant who came to America Like most successful entrepreneurial pioneers, Harvey in 1850 with little more than the clothes on his back had a missionary zeal that went beyond the basics of his 10 and over the next half century turned a new concept business model. He would serve good food at reasonable prices in record time, but he would also do it in a way that ahead to the restaurant, where the cooks would begin would serve to civilize the rough denizens of the new territo- preparation. When the train got within one mile of the town, ries. From the very first, Harvey insisted on linen tablecloths a large brass gong at the entrance to the restaurant would and fine table settings (the faux Wedgewood design and be rung to alert the kitchen and floor staff of the imminent color of Harvey’s dinnerware is said to have given rise to the arrival of the next group. As the patrons were seated, one phrase “blue plate special”). Men were to wear coats in his group of waitresses made the rounds to verify menu selec- dining rooms; a supply was kept on hand for those without. tions and take drink orders, which they signaled for the next And Harvey himself was fond of making surprise inspections group of servers by a coded arrangement of the diners’ cups of his dining rooms, hunting down tarnish or dust with a (right side up in the saucer meant coffee; upside down, hot white glove. But if the Harvey House settings were anoma- tea; upside down and off the saucer, milk, and so on). The lous in the gritty environment of the frontier, the food to be entrees, served on plates kept warm on steamers, were found there was even more so. Because of his symbiotic immediately brought out and the guests then had the bulk of relationship with the railroad, fast becoming the dominant their 20 minutes to enjoy their meals. mode of goods transport around the country, Harvey was From the Girls to the table settings to the food, the able to bring victuals as elegant as that of any big city dining formula worked and the Harvey Company continued to room to customers more familiar with charred steak and grow over the next twenty years. Fred Harvey died in 1901— rotgut whiskey. One late 1880s menu, for instance, included legend has it that his last words, in keeping with his lifelong such delicacies as Oysters on the Half-shell, Whitefish with obsession with hospitality, were “Don’t slice the ham too Madeira Sauce, Young Capon with Hollandaise Sauce, Roast thin!” By then, his empire had come to include restaurants Sirloin of Beef Au Jus and Lobster Salad; for dessert, diners (and, eventually, hotels) in 12 different states, as well as on- could choose from Charlotte of Peaches with Cognac Sauce, board rail dining cars. Yet it was already becoming clear that Cold Chantilly Custard and Mince Pie, as well as cakes and the twentieth-century trajectory of the company would par- ice cream, a selection of fresh fruit and cheeses, and even allel that of the railroad industry itself. Harvey’s sons shifted a cup of “French Coffee.” The price: 75 cents (25 cents for the emphasis of the company—the local pottery, rugs, railroad employees). baskets, and jewelry offered for sale at Harvey House hotels As if the promise of gourmet food in elegant surround- and restaurants now became a main commercial focus ing weren’t enough, Harvey also hit on an idea that would of the firm, which also began to promote “Southwestern become the chain’s greatest selling point. After a melee adventure” tours, complete with visits to Indian pueblos and among the male waiters at one of his dining rooms, Harvey opportunities to buy real Native American crafts. Indeed, the decided to employ an all female waitstaff and began placing Harvey company is widely credited with the popularization ads in east coast newspapers for “women of good character, of indigenous Southwestern culture—and the development attractive and intelligent, 18 to 30” to come west and work of its lucrative craft and souvenir industry—in the first three for the company as waitresses. The first “Harvey Girls,” decades of the twentieth century. as they came to be known, were paid $17.50 per month, By the end of World War II, the Harvey House era was plus tips, room and board, and free train passes. Some coming to a close. In 1968, the company was sold. Today estimates suggest as many as 100,000 women eventually Fred Harvey’s name—and even his likeness—lives on in the headed west, constituting one of the first and largest groups logo of the Fred Harvey Trading Company, a division of Xan- of single working women in the US. The young women terra Parks and Resorts®, “America’s largest park and resorts brought the Harvey Houses a certain glamour—despite the management company,” which operates 52 souvenir shops rigorous behavioral codes and highly modest uniforms of around the country, including those at Yellowstone, Mount black long-sleeved dresses and starched white aprons they Rushmore, and the Grand Canyon. According to their web- all had to wear—meanwhile gaining an unusual degree of site, “Xanterra’s approach to providing and exceeding guest independence for unmarried women of the time. Living services in our retail operations revolves around establishing together in boarding house-style residences near the prem- exacting merchandising standards that separate us from ises, the “girls” were supervised by a matron between their other retailers.” Fred Harvey would, no doubt, approve. eight-hour-a-day shifts; nevertheless, as many as 20,000 were said to have met their future husbands on the job. Further reading: Such was their fame that in 1946 MGM had a box office George H. Foster, The Harvey House Cookbook: Memories of Dining Along the Santa Fe smash with The Harvey Girls, a musical starring Judy Gar- Railroad George (Longstreet Press, 1996). land as an Ohio girl that goes west and finds love in one of Barbara Haber, From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Fred Harvey’s dining halls. Cooks and Meals (Penguin Books, 2003). In real life, the Harvey Girls were part of a clockwork Lesley Poling-Kempes, The Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened the West (Treasure operation that presaged many techniques that would come Chest Books, 1991). to be part of the fast food business. As a train approached a station with a Harvey House in it, the brakeman would go
up and down the carriages with a menu, asking for opposite: A Harvey House lunchroom in Deming, NM, late 1800s. Courtesy 11 riders’ meal choices. These would be telegraphed Cline Library, Northern Arizona University. Many of these groups are now defunct, as fraternal organizations no longer play a significant role in American life. “But we still do some of that work,” says Andy Web- ster. “Lineage societies like the Daughters of the American Revolution, they come to us for their regalia ribbons. That’s pretty steady stuff. And we still do things for the Order of the Eastern Star and the Shriners, but probably not in the same volume as in the past. They just don’t decorate themselves like they used to.” But if fraternal groups are on the wane, the contempo- rary ribbon market boasts a growth sector that wasn’t yet on the horizon in the days of the old catalogue: symbolic causes, like AIDS awareness ribbons and “Support Our Troops” ribbons (the latter of which have become so iconic that they’re now depicted on car magnets—a symbol of a symbol). “It started with the yellow ribbons for the hostages in Iran during the late 1970s,” says Webster. “If you didn’t have that product on the shelf, you were in trouble. And INVENTORY / REGALIA then after September 11, the red-white-and-blue ribbon got paul lukas popular. We’d always manufactured that, so I had plenty of it on the shelf, and I sold every last stitch I had. But I didn’t run There are lots of ways to measure the changes wrought by out and make more, because most of that stock had been modern life. Andy Webster measures them like this: “In the sitting there for ten years. old days,” he says, “if you got a present that was wrapped It’s that kind of savvy ribbon acumen that has kept the with a ribbon, you saved the ribbon. Today you just toss the company going since 1899, when it was founded in Philadel- ribbon away.” Webster speaks with some authority on this phia by one John Wick. The firm remained in Wick’s family subject, because he owns the Wick Narrow Fabric Company, until 1974, when his son-in-law’s son-in-law sold the opera- a New Jersey operation that’s been making ribbons for tion to Webster’s father. “The company’s first order was for over a century. I became interested in the firm after coming the guys coming back from the Spanish-American War,” across one of its old salesman sample catalogues from the explains Webster. “It was for the first medal that was mass- 1940s. Like most trade sample books, the old Wick cata- produced, called the Dewey Medal, and we did the ribbons logue provides a window into the particulars of an industry for that. We bid on it with the federal government, and our that most of us never think about. Although ribbons and rib- bid was selected. It was the first piece of business we did.” bon imagery are fairly ubiquitous—encompassing everything Webster, whose product is manufactured at a mill in from ribbon-cutting ceremonies and blue ribbon commis- upstate New York, says the biggest difference between sions to “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree”—you today’s ribbon business and the one represented in the probably haven’t given much thought to how ribbons are old catalogue is in the fabrics. “When we started, we were designed, manufactured, or sold. making ribbons out of silk. Now the industry is mostly tex- The old Wick catalogues are filled with colorful swatch tured polyester, which is a yarn that’s frizzed out so much samples, and hundreds of ribbon varieties: badge ribbons, that it looks bulkier than it is, but there’s hardly anything regalia ribbons, convention ribbons; silk ribbons, satin there—it’s a very cheap yarn.” Although Webster uses a fila- ribbons, pleated ribbons; moiré and velvet, taffeta and ment polyester, which he says has “a silkier feel” than the cotton-filled. It’s a textile fetishist’s wet dream. There’s also textured poly, he acknowledges that standards have gener- an impressive degree of functional specificity, from awards ally gone to hell. “If someone wants a sash, they might not for “horse, dog and poultry shows” to Bible bookmarks to care anymore if it’s an actual woven piece, or if it’s what we Masonic funerals. call a cut-edge ribbon, which is made out of a thermoplastic The funeral ribbon is part of a two-page spread of rib- yarn like an acetate. You don’t see those ribbons in that cata- bons designed specifically for use by the Masons, and the logue you’ve got, because that technology didn’t exist until catalogue also features ribbons for many other secret societ- after World War II—it’s much cheaper.” ies, fraternal organizations, and heritage groups, including All of which helps explain why people now toss away the Sons of Italy, the Knights of Columbus, the Order of the their ribbons instead of saving them. Is Webster disap- Eastern Star, the Woodmen of the World (not to be confused pointed by the decline in ribbon standards and status? “Oh, with the Modern Woodmen or the Woodmen Circle, both I suppose, in a way,” he says. “But you know, time marches of which are also represented), the Knights of Pythias, the on.” Fortunately, a fixed moment from that march can be Order of the Golden Sceptre, the United Commercial Trav- preserved in a document like the old Wick catalogue. elers, the Order of Owls, the Elks, and the Luther 12 League. opposite and overleaf: Wick Ribbon catalogue, 1940s. Photos Ryann Cooley.
leftovers / ashes to diamonds tom vanderbilt
In 1999, heralded by a small advertisement that read “Death Got You Down?,” a company called Investors Real Estate Development unveiled a memorial-park concept titled “Final Curtain.” More theme park than traditional cemetery, Final Curtain allowed the future deceased to design their own premature memorials, which ranged from a neon sign reading “Nick is Dead” to giant Etch-a-Sketches and Ant Farms that incorporated funereal ashes as their medium. Final Curtain was later revealed to be the latest conjuration of the notorious media hoaxist Joey Skaggs; as with any successful prank, it was initially received with certain genuflections of credulity. Behind the risible veneer of Final Curtain was a tacit kernel of truth; i.e., that the “American way of death,” as Jessica Mitford called it, was becoming gradually liber- ated from its hoary reliance on marble headstones, lavish statuary, and carefully apportioned plots in increasingly dear neighborhoods. The leading economic indicator of this was the rate of cremation: From a mere 3.56% in 1963, to a projected 32.5% in 2010. This itself was also driven by economics—burial costs now account for less of the GDP than they did in 1960—and by social changes, such as the Vatican’s 1963 lifting of its prohibitions against cremation (having banned the practice in response to its adoption as an anticlerical practice in the wake of the French revolution). With a rising turn toward cremation, there has been a certain rematerialization of death, a move away from fixed rites and territories of mourning—where marble and stone are the only tactile markers—and towards a condition where the remains of the dead, which now become the markers themselves, can be incorporated into a whole new array of ceremonies and objects. Where cremated remains, or “cre- mains,” in industry parlance, have for a long time mostly been stored in urns or scattered across specific places, there has recently emerged a panoply of novel end-uses for the ashes of the deceased. Eternal Reefs, for example, a Deca- tur, Georgia-based company that manufactures artificial reefs, will merge cremains with marine-grade, non-acidic concrete to create what it calls “reef balls,” vaguely wiffle- ball-like orbs whose spheres are intended to encourage the growth of coral. Those not content to sleep with the fishes can turn to Houston-based Celestis, which will launch a vial of ashes into stellar orbit for roughly a grand per ounce (Tim- othy Leary and Gene Roddenberry are among the company’s more famous clients). Those aiming for nearer atmospheres have incorporated cremains into everything from pyrotech- nic displays (as His Dark Materials author Phillip Pullman did for his father-in-law) to paintings. One of the most striking new forms, however, comes in a “memorial product” sold by the Illinois-based firm Life- Gem. As the company describes it, “The patent pending LifeGem is a certified, high-quality diamond created from 15 the carbon of a loved one as a memorial to their unique life.” Starting at roughly $4,000 for a quarter-carat (available in with the car running. There has even been a movement princess, round, or radiant cut), LifeGem will take a certain afoot to replace traditional cremation techniques in which a portion of cremains (usually about eight ounces, or a tenth wooden coffin is burned, as that releases carbon dioxide into of the total remains) that they have collected from a special the air, which denigrates the ozone layer and will someday cremation process in which oxygen levels are controlled to be the death of us all. prevent the body’s carbon from coverting to carbon dioxide. One imagines a host of new and perhaps awkward The resultant black powder (“his dark materials”?) is then social situations as LifeGems begin to become more submitted to ultra-high temperatures in a vacuum, convert- prevalent. Will the earnest fiancé still achieve the desired ing it to graphite; the graphite is then placed in autoclaves romantic effect when he presents a ring that did not, as meant to mimic the convulsive pressures and temperatures such things usually go, “belong to my grandmother,” but by which diamonds are formed in nature. As LifeGem points in fact is largely comprised of his grandmother? Will the out, “a diamond that takes millions of years to occur natu- diamond industry risk a backlash in declaring that LifeGems rally can now be created from the carbon of your loved one are not “real diamonds,” or perhaps could “real diamonds” in about eighteen weeks.” conversely lose value as they come to be seen as cold, The reader may note with some curiosity, and perhaps impersonal relics of a prehistoric volcanic flume reaching alarm, this strange convergence of two industries—each of to the earth’s molten core, and not the shining eternal light which deals in its way with what might be termed the com- of a dearly departed? Actually, though the technology of modification of emotion—that have come under scrutiny LifeGems is new, the idea behind it is not. In Victorian Eng- for less than reputable business practices. At least since land, for example, “mourning jewelry” was a quite accepted, Mitford’s The American Way of Death, the funeral business even revered, form of personal adornment; e.g., lockets that has been regarded with skepticism, as operators endeavor housed a strand of hair or even necklaces woven from the to “upsell” bereaved (and thus vulnerable) patrons more hair of the deceased. The fashion spread to nineteenth- elaborate means of burial than they can afford. Similarly, the century America, as in a letter-press advertising pamphlet diamond industry—a closely guarded cartel that artificially from a hair braider in Athens, Georgia, titled Hair Braiding manipulates to its own financial end the available supply of Every Style and Pattern, which announced a particular and distribution of diamonds (often obtained under dubious specialty of bracelets, crosses, and necklaces fashioned social circumstances)—works to “educate” consumers with from hair, including “special attention paid to interbraiding a vocabulary of desirable cuts and has managed to insert the hair of deceased friends into mementos and keepsakes, itself into virtually every marriage ceremony of this century of any pattern desired.” and the last (when it is not busy trying to craft new occa- Perhaps the LifeGem, or any of the other novel cremains sions for the purchase of diamonds by, say, single women); of the day, will actually help us, in their physical immediacy, it now trots out the phrase “a diamond is forever” as if it get closer not only to the actual dead person but to the idea were some ancient folk koan and not the sudden inspiration, of death in general, moving us away from such palliative one afternoon in 1947, of a copywriter for the N. W. Ayer phrases as “loved ones” and “passed” (as in, “he passed”) advertising agency. and into more honest appreciations of the cycle of life and “Unlike men, diamonds linger,” sang Shirley Bassey mortality. It may also provide the rather shocking contours in Diamonds Are Forever, in a line that takes on new mean- of our materiality, our thingness that puts us on a molecular ing post-LifeGem (“Men are mere mortals,” she continued, spectrum that includes living trees and dead hunks of coal. “who are not worth going to your grave for.”) There is, of The LifeGem reminds us that we may be what we make of course, something entirely appropriate and perhaps poetic ourselves, but in death, it is from ourselves that things are about the company’s viewable remains. For one, carbon made. As John Webster wrote in the Renaissance drama The is a primary component in the human body and the sole Dutchess of Malfi, “Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or component of diamonds (coal, by contrast, is about 92% lust, Like Diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.” carbon). Carbon is what is known as an allotrope: mean- ing, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, that which is “susceptible to a change as to nutritive or physiological properties, without any change in physical or chemical characters.” Depending on its molecular structure, it can be diamond, graphite, or “fullerene,” named for the similarity of its molecular structure to the hexagonal “Buckyball” cre- ated by Buckminster Fuller; fullerene has been located in the burnt wicks of candles. Carbon is thus inextricably bound up with the cycle of life and death, and we might even say our lives are marked by a series of allotropic encounters with carbon: writing one’s name in graphite pencil on a piece of opposite: “The unique characteristics of each person’s carbon causes our paper milled from a tree; burning leaves in the back- LifeGem Created Diamonds to have these unique shades of yellow. No two 16 yard; even taking one’s own life in a sealed garage diamonds are exactly alike.” maIN Blocking All Lanes Sean Dockray, Steve Rowell, & Fiona Whitton
The word traffic is always a little slippery, one of those words that escapes us when we try to pin it down. When engineers say traffic, they mean the movement of vehicles along a roadway, or what you’d find if you consulted a dictionary. For the rest of us civilians, however, traffic has come to mean the exact opposite: that phenomenon of vehicles crowding a roadway until everything slows down to a frustrating crawl. Roughly ten years and 400,000 automobiles into the twentieth century, the phenomenon was given its own name by the Saturday Evening Post: the traffic jam. While this seems quaint to a driver accustomed to four-hour-long rush hours, engineers continue to categorize it as “traffic conges- tion” even if there’s no consensus on what that means. Is it slowness at a point over time—or over an area at a point in time? If so, how slow? Or maybe it’s just a feeling? In cities all over the world, congestion is becoming the rule, which is to say that it is simply becoming “traffic.” The word “traffic” originally referred to the movement of commodities; only in the last two centuries did it explicitly take on vehicles and people. In the modern definition, we are traffic (which reminds us that it was once quite acceptable for one to be a “computer” or a “typewriter”1). Of course, we don’t talk that way: we say that we are “in traffic,” but we never admit to being traffic. This point was made into a German roadside ad campaign (“You’re not stuck in a traffic jam. You are the traffic jam.”2), but it hasn’t found traction in our speech. Our attachment to the preposition is an expression of our profound ambivalence to driving. The automobile, the capitalist vehicle par excellence, promises freedom while the often frustrating experience of driving leaves us feeling quite out of control. We hold onto the idea that although we might be stuck now, there is a way out. But what if our agency was underpinned by an organizing, computational mechanism? We stop. We go. We turn. We yield. What if these were not simply rules to follow (code as law), but instructions to follow (code as program), an instruction that gives a green light?
History It’s impossible to say where the first traffic jam was, but modern traffic control probably originated in 1722 in response to “the great inconvenience and mischiefs which happen by the disorderly leading and driving of cars, carts, coaches, and other carriages over the London Bridge, whereby the common passage there is much obstructed.”3 Here, the Lord Mayor ordered that three able-bodied men be appointed as public servants to keep traffic to the left, and keep it moving. Beginning in 1860, New York City’s police department was given the task of regulating the increasingly competitive
19 right: Crowsnest, ca. 1915 and reckless drivers of horse-drawn buses. Not long before, development towards automated traffic control accelerated. the City Council had given permission for the livery corpora- The explosion of automobile use in the first two decades of tions to franchise, and many pedestrians were killed in the the twentieth century put an unusually large strain on police aftermath as drivers raced each other to their destinations. departments in major metropolitan areas. Until the early The police officers who brought order to the streets were 1920s, traffic control, even in its most advanced forms, had not ordinary men: they were some of the tallest on the force been a series of independent installations—traffic signal (“Broadway’s Finest” were all over six feet tall) so that they systems had not yet been born. In New York and Detroit, could be seen above the confusion of carriages and pedestri- officers positioned in a series of traffic towers synchronized ans, and they would point and wave, moving traffic with their with one another to allow automobiles to flow freely in one hands, and shouting through it all to eliminate uncertainty. direction. Houston built this logic into a string of electroni- It is the policeman who marks the origin of modern cally interconnected signals in 1922. The police officer was traffic control. He represents a system of rules and enforces practically unnecessary in such an automatic, “simultaneous them, apprehending violators. But he does more than system.” this—he also directs the traffic and his professional pres- ence keeps traffic from degenerating into a stall. As Burton Systems Marsh wrote in 1927, “The officer can take advantage of Not all urban plans were conducive to this design, however, variations in the volume of traffic on the two streets and give and other methods were introduced in the following years: to each street that proportion of time best suited to it at that the alternate system, which created staggered movement minute.”4 In the beginning, each officer was a responsive, through cross-traffic; and the flexible-progressive system, real-time traffic control system. which allowed for the tuning of timing gears within each There were problems with this immediately. It was diffi- individual signal. By 1926, Chicago had a room in the base- cult enough for any single officer to coordinate his activities ment of City Hall full of such timers, so that from there an with another officer, one block away. But it was practically individual could immediately control dozens of important impossible for that officer to work with officers at the four intersections. Strangely, the space of traffic control migrated adjoining intersections, each of whom might be coordinat- from elevated towers to subterranean bunkers. In 1930, ing with three more intersections, and so on, throughout Philadelphia put the “master controller” (both a device and a the urban grid. Over time, the traffic cop was slowly trans- person) of its flexible-progressive signal system in the base- formed: his hands took on white gloves for visibility; his ment of its City Hall; the groundbreaking Automated Traffic voice was replaced by a whistle; eventually, he was elevated Surveillance and Control (ATSAC) center, created for traffic in a tower and communicated with the traffic via signs or management during the 1984 Olympics, operates four floors colored lights. The police officer slowly vanished, his body below City Hall in Los Angeles. evolving into mechanical and electrical devices. His hands Once envied for its vast, efficient freeway system, Los were replaced by standardized, colored signals. His eyes Angeles eventually became the smoggy symbol of destruc- were replaced by sensing actuators, such as microphones, tive automobile dependence and gridlock. Both images, pressure sensors, electromagnets, or video cameras. All that however, are outdated. With one of the earliest and now was left was to replace his brain. most extensive traffic management systems, L.A. has A very early experiment with non-human control become paradigmatic for “intelligent” urban traffic con- occurred in London in 1868. There, the first ever traffic trol worldwide. The Los Angeles district of the California signal using colored lights was installed at a busy intersec- Department of Transportation (CALTRANS) operates a traf- tion near the Houses of Parliament. These gas-powered fic management center (TMC) in a fortified building, blocks semaphores attracted throngs of Londoners, and merchants, away from the ATSAC center. ATSAC & CALTRANS combine selling food and drinks, rounded off the spectacle. Part of with the Los Angeles County Public Works TMC to handle the intrigue of this sort of innovation was the premise that traffic flow throughout the region. a machine could do some aspect of the policeman’s job. Examining Los Angeles further as a case study in both These sorts of innovations proliferated in the 1920s, during traffic and traffic management, we find a feedback loop which time most regulated intersections were equipped between the environment and the system: the environment with discrete signals. William Phelps Eno, “Father of Traffic can be described as the collective movement of vehicles Safety,” and author of New York’s first printed traffic regula- across the urban grid; the system is the infrastructure tions in 1903, wrote a quarter-century later that “students of designed to measure, monitor, and control the environment. traffic are beginning to realize the false economy of mechan- ically controlled traffic, and hand work by trained officers top left: The first building in the world to be entirely devoted to highway traffic will again prevail.”5 This nostalgic error was by no means control, Saugatuck, Connecticut, 1930s. unusual—it was said that the police officer could handle traf- center left: Analogue control center, New York City, 1966. Courtesy The New fic “in a way which no mechanical device could do... often York City Department of Traffic being able to ‘weave’ it through the traffic from the opposite center right: Digital control center, Los Angeles, 2005. Photo Steve Rowell direction without entirely stopping either line.”6 bottom: The lifespan of loop detectors can be as short as a year. Sometimes 20 In spite of these reservations, the technological one can read successive generations in the asphalt. Photo Fiona Whitton
More specifically, the system in Los Angeles has two of the signals, in exact accordance with the indications primary realms: the physical and the virtual. received.”7 In the physical realm, over 50,000 buried loop detec- When the controller “receives” and “assigns,” it does tors, the insulated wire loops that passively detect subtle so from a distance: through buried phone lines, ethernet, magnetic field changes from vehicles, combine with over microwaves, or whatever communication technologies are 700 weatherproofed video cameras, some of which are available at the time. Data circulates incessantly through remotely controlled to pan and zoom, to monitor and control these connections, animating the devices. It is as much a traffic flow. Loops automatically trigger software in switch- part of the story of traffic control as the hardware, but it is ing boxes linked to intersection signals, but also send data ephemeral and dynamic, useful only in the present. As new to TMCs that allow traffic engineers to monitor flow pat- data supplants old data, the old fades into obsolescence, terns and adjust timings remotely. A simple click of a mouse inscribed only in the strange memory of traffic patterns. button can start or stop the flow of movement on the grid. Some of this data is disseminated through the internet The surveillance power of 700 cameras seems oppres- to the public, so that motorists can make adjustments based sive, but neither CALTRANS, which controls 250 freeway on current traffic conditions and by intercepting this feed- cameras, nor ATSAC, which controls 350 street cameras, are back of information, we have been able to collect the data allowed to archive footage or to feed a single frame of video before it is deleted and lost forever. In this data, one experi- to the Los Angeles Police force. Apparently, privacy con- ences the elastic city through abbreviated narratives cerns outweigh the value of surveillance on this scale. Aside of minor mishaps, inexplicable slowdowns, and tragedy. from monitoring, an increasing number of these cameras The four diagrams that accompany this essay can actually control traffic flow through sophisticated soft- represent part of Los Angeles on Friday, 11 June 2004, the ware interfaces. As vehicles pass in designated zones of the day of Ronald Reagan’s funeral. Ever since Lincoln’s body frame, they are counted and measured for speed and direc- was preserved by the—then unconventional—process of tion. The policeman and the loop detector are replaced. embalming, Presidential funerals have taken full advantage of the nation’s transportation infrastructure. After beginning
Data the day in a ceremonial horse-drawn caisson in Washington Taken together, actuators, control centers, and signals D.C., Reagan was flown from Andrews Air Force Base to largely comprise the physical infrastructure of traffic control Point Mugu Naval Air Station in California, and then taken by in Los Angeles (and many other highly populated regions). motorcade to his namesake library for burial. As the motor- Cameras and inductive loop detectors transmit data to a cade headed east on the 101 at the tail end of rush hour, centralized location, from which computers can adjust signal crowds along the route waved flags, and traffic going west timing and freeway metering—a process resembling the came to a halt. “sense-think-act” cycle of classical artificial intelligence.
In 1935, twenty years before the birth of experimental AI, above: Advances in software design and functionality is outpacing developments Bernard Schad wrote that “the control mechanism is the in hardware. Here, cameras feed live video to computers which monitor and most important part of this so-called ‘robot’ system. Its func- control speed and flow autonomously. Video grab courtesy ATSAC, Los Angeles. tion is to receive the impulses from the detectors opposite: Time-time diagrams, mapping two Los Angeles freeways in two 22 and assign the right-of-way ‘intelligently’ by means directions. Created by Sean Dockray 10 WEST 405 NORTH
AA
A C F D DD E C B
BC D
A Just south of Devonshire Street 6:21am Clothes in all lanes
B Just north of Palms Boulevard A Just west of Los Angeles Street 10:02am 3 vehicles blocking the transition road 2:56am Male changing tire on vehicle in slow lane C Just north of National Boulevard B Just west of Walnut Grove Avenue 11:10am Vehicles on right shoulder 11:35am It cannot be repaired 11:13am 97 Black Dodge Dakota partly in slow lane
C At Kellogg Drive D Just south of Montana Avenue 12:15pm Solo vehicle hit center divider 1:15pm Mercedes on right shoulder
D Just east of Frazier Street E On Montana Avenue offramp 2:45pm Black SUV versus a Cadillac on the right shoulder 3:18pm Green Dodge Caravan on right shoulder of offramp F Just south of Jefferson Boulevard 3:46pm 2 vehicle traffic collision in slow lane several cars still going
10 EAST 405 SOUTH
A B C E A L D I C B L K D J E F K K G J H G I
H F
A Just north of Century Boulevard 2:08am Pickup truck involved versus right shoulder A Just east of Overland Avenue 2:08am Vehicle facing wrong way 4:38am Brush fire starting on right shoulder B Just south of Manchester Boulevard B At the 60 2:48am Is the light pole knocked down 7:05am Large amount of shredded paper in roadway 2:50am Light pole is down completely off of its base
C Just east of Western Avenue C At Lennox Boulevard 8:32am Under the bridge in slow lane - very large dead dog 3:06am White vehicle with damage on right shoulder
D Just west of Normandie Avenue D Just north of Waterford Street 9:01am Orange dog 7:54am Pickup truck hit center divider and overturned 9:01am Injured dog on the right shoulder 7:56am Red pickup truck rolled over
E Just west of Vermont Avenue E Just north of Burbank Boulevard 9:32am Possibly dead dog in the slow lane 8:48am Big rig versus vehicle on right shoulder 9:05am Silver Ford with front end damage F Just west of Normandie Avenue 9:42am Dog in the slow lane F Just north of Sunset Boulevard 9:24am Carpool lane 2 vehicles G At southbound 710 connector 9:29am Suspicious black Toyota pickup truck hit several cars still going approaching Getty Center 10:01am Tree in the roadway 9:30am Suspicious vehicle have hit 3 vehicles
H At the 60 G Just north of Getty Center Drive 11:41am Pickup truck stalled in the #4 lane 9:30am 3 lanes blocked
I At north bound 710 H Just north of Avalon Boulevard 1:00pm Small blue car in center divider 2:13pm Silver vehicle and blue vehicle on right shoulder
J At Alameda Street I Just south of Getty Center Drive 1:10pm Reporting party is following a delivery truck that rolled back and hit his car 2:23pm Suspect vehicle originally hit reporting party from behind
K At Santa Fe Avenue J Just north of Wilshire Boulevard 1:20pm Fire 2:28pm Toyota Tacoma versus Ford F150 pickup truck
L Just east of National Boulevard K Just south of Washington 2:44pm Vehicle facing wrong way 3:20pm Green Nissan Maxima partially blocking slow lane on right shoulder
M Just west of Overland Avenue L Just north of Getty Center Drive 2:55pm Toyota Corolla with front-end damage 3:38pm Silver BMW 325i and a green Buick completely burned on right shoulder There is one diagram for each direction of two Los Loyd C. “Sig” Sigmon. Mr. Sigmon developed a customized Angeles freeways. The center corresponds to one end of radio receiver and tape recorder that would detect a particu- the freeway and the outer edge to the other—the distance lar tone and record the bulletin, providing radio announcers between them corresponds to the amount of time required with an analogue database of recent traffic incidents. This to drive from one to the other. As one traces the shape relieved dispatch from answering phone calls from the clockwise, from top to bottom, one passes from midnight to press. The first use of this device was in 1955 when doctors noon. Continuing from the bottom, up along the left edge, and nurses were requested to respond to a train derailment and back to the top, one passes from noon to the following outside the Los Angeles Union Station. A traffic jam was the midnight. A perfect day would be a set of concentric circles; unintended result. It’s oddly appropriate that Mr. Sigmon as traffic builds, however, the circles deform outwards. was to pass away only days before President Reagan’s post- Beneath each diagram are the “incidents” that occurred over mortem journey from a Santa Monica funeral home to Simi the course of the day.8 Valley, north of Los Angeles, shutting down miles of the Traffic, unlike weather and the stock market, is a com- busiest stretch of freeway in the country (the 405), causing plex system without a popular visual representation that multiple Sig-Alerts in surrounding areas. would allow it to be remembered and internally differenti- Most incidents are accidents, meaning that they ated. What is the analogy to the swirling radar image of a are unplanned events occurring without control by par- hurricane cloud or the plunging graph of a market crash? ties involved. Incidents also include planned events that How can one day’s traffic be distinguished from another’s? interfere with the flow to the driver’s dismay. Hollywood The traditional topographical map of Los Angeles is radically production companies close entire blocks in downtown Los divorced from each motorist’s perception of it, expanding Angeles, affecting not only immediate parking and routing, and contracting over time. These diagrams provide an alter- but entire flow patterns if crucial one-ways are blocked. native way of imagining the city, centered at an individual Detour routes can send drivers into unknown areas of the point—a person at an origin—and outwardly directed to any drastically divided downtown sectors. Construction crews number of destinations. and LAPD officers interact with convention guests, who are Of the three complex, chaotic systems, traffic is one pitted against jaywalking pedestrians in skid row between that exists at the human, bodily scale, which is perhaps why the business districts and Little Tokyo; commuters, exiting it is so fascinating for us. We built the roads; we created its the freeway to avoid a fuel spill, are routed to avoid rigging rules; we drive the vehicles, and yet it remains an inacces- trucks and make-up trailers through throngs of Lakers’ fans sible mystery. As the possibilities for adding highways (or in front of the Staples Center, causing confusion and com- even lanes) dwindle in many cities, most progress is made pounding delays. at the level of code (both legislative and software-related). During the course of incident response, field units and To put off the inevitable stall, a truly monumental traffic jam, management centers continue working until the block- we incrementally transfer agency to optimizing algorithms. age is removed, the disruption relieved, and steady flow But still, in the heart of the rational system, there is the reinstated. Dispatch relays information via voice and text incessant irrationality of human behavior, the imprecision of messaging to units in the field. The same infrastructure reflex, and a perpetual reappearance of chance. used to monitor traffic patterns is put into use here. People do talk to people to report incidents and route response
Incidents crews, but, increasingly, data is streamed and automatically Despite the success of the Los Angeles traffic management routed and detected by devices on the grid—the comput- system and its contributions to the evolution of systems in ers autonomously interacting before relaying information other cities, states, and nations, the environment is organic to their masters. Responders typically communicate with and is ultimately impossible to fully control. “Incident” is the management centers during the course of an incident, pro- term used for this breakdown of the system. Drivers lose viding greater detail for a report, and enriching the potential control of their vehicles; vehicles malfunction and dump narrative by providing an interaction of code. This code is cargo; animals stray onto roadways; wind-blown fires engulf intercepted by the public in many ways: through radio traffic mountain passes, and mudslides bury highways. reports and scanners, internet traffic sites, and via real-time When traffic incidents occur, the system acknowledges monitoring on consumer-grade GPS-enabled mobile gad- and responds in various ways depending on the technologi- gets. Compelling to the public observer, this new, truncated cal level of the area’s infrastructure. In the case of most vocabulary is assimilated into the vernacular. freeways or major intersections in the city itself, cameras are This is an example of an email alert dynamically issued the first observers, recording the collision or obstruction and from sigalert.com: the immediate effect on the surrounding flow. An extreme incident is known as a Sig-Alert and is defined by the Califor- 10:56 AM 405 South Before Getty Center Dr / Possible Fatality nia Highway Patrol as “any unplanned event that causes the 10:56 AM 4 Vhs and Motorcycle Blocking #1, 2 and 3 Lanes closing of one lane of traffic for thirty minutes or more, as 11:02 AM Car Pool, #1, 2 Lane is Blocked--Please Issue Sigalert opposed to a planned event like road construction, 24 which is planned separately,” and is named after 11:02 AM Rider Hit Possible By a Taxi That is Still On Scene Lines of Flight 11:03 AM Transportation Management Center Copies Message/Item Delivered Media and Chiefs As bodies-in-vehicles are captured by cameras, averaged into speed data, and described in the machine-prose of 11:08 AM Per 64 Says the #1, 2 Lanes Blocked on the North Lanes of the 405--Please Update the Sigalrt incident reports, the informational essence of the body is amplified. Data streams to and from the central computer. 11:12 AM Per S3 the Body is Blocking the North Lanes of the 405 Freeway 9 The motorist’s foot presses and releases to the rhythm of red lights. One gets the feeling that the optimizing algorithm On neighborhood streets or on remote stretches of highway connects everything, that a car going a little too slow at outside of the reach of the system’s network, visual report- Point A will produce a shorter green light, on the other side ing by a passerby with a cellphone is the only immediate of the city, at Point B. link. The California Highway Patrol’s website provides the Still, commuters find openings in the traffic system. public with the raw data: Engineers at ATSAC—and who would know better?—move to outlying cities and customize their work schedule around Location: BARSTOW unusual commute times. Some have stopped driving and 7:08 AM SIL NISS 4D SPUN OUT TO R/S INTO DESERT 10 rely on underfunded public transportation, while others drive Location: SAN BERNARDINO motorcycles between lanes in a refusal to participate. But 7:58 PM AUTO VS COMMUNITY MAILBOX. PIECES OF MAIL the population of the Los Angeles area grows, the open- EVERYWHERE11 ings become fewer, and motorists dream of escape. For Los Engineers take note of the calls or the camera feeds and Angelenos, the Mojave Desert to the north and east provides speed graphs and notify the appropriate dispatch offices of a blank canvas for the traffic-weary driver. If the steep and the police, highway patrol, fire, public works, and/or animal narrow passes can be navigated, escape velocity is possible. response team. Extreme incidents might involve ATF or the As an analogue to subatomic particles hurtling away from a National Guard. Incidents involving spills and animals call densely packed nucleus, energy is scattered as each vehicle for less drastic action, but are still a constant problem and spins from the city in limitless directions into this void. become an element in the feedback loop. Where there is no grid, there should be no gridlock. There will certainly be a time when maintenance ceases 7:37 AM GREEN TOMATOS, OR GRAPES, SPILLED ACROSS THE ROAD and detection loops short-circuit, cameras rust, signal lights 8:03 AM NEED SAND FOR 200 YARDS OF SPILL burn out, and the asphalt cracks and splinters at its edges, 8:03 AM NOTIFY CALTRANS, GRAPES AND GRAPE JUICE, IN BOTH LANES ------the roads becoming overgrown with weeds. One can’t help but wonder where we will be when the traffic system sinks 8:05 AM Incident: 0350 Type: Traffic Hazard—Animal Location: 3604 N FERNDALE AV Zoom Map: 547 7B Info as of: 7/31/2004 8:13:20 AM back into the Earth’s geology.
ADDITIONAL DETAILS: 8:05 AM 1144 CAT IN THE ROAD 8:05 AM KIDS ARE IN THE ROAD TO LOOK AT THE CAT12 Some elements of this article appeared in the exhibit “Loop Feedback Loop: The Big Picture of Traffic Control In Los Angeles” in March 2004 at the Center for Land Use Inter- pretation in association with the Institute for Advanced Architecture. An online version is at:
1 See Katherine Hayles’s book My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Liter- ary Texts, forthcoming later this year from University of Chicago Press—or the sentence from Anne Balsamo’s Technologies of the Gendered Body that inspired her title: “My mother was a computer, but she never learned to drive.” 2 Cited in Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press,1997). 3 R. A. Paxton, “Traffic Engineering and Control Before the Motor Vehicle,” in Traffic Engineering & Control, August 1969. 4 Burton Marsh, “Traffic Control,” in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, July 1927, p. 91. 5 William Phelps Eno, in Nation’s Traffic, December 1927. 6 Burton Marsh, op. cit. 7 Bernard T. Schad, Traffic Control at Signalized Street Intersections (dissertation, University of Michigan, 1935), p. 101. It should also be noted that, according to the OED, the word robot once referred to automatic traffic signals in South Africa. 8 The incident stream inexplicably went down at the time of Reagan’s funeral. 9 From: [email protected], Subject: Possible Fatality—405 South Before Getty Center Dr, Date: April 06, 2004,16:26:29 PDT. 10
above: Devoid of vehicles, the grid gives way to nature’s inevitable reclamation of material. Centripetal City Kazys Varnelis
On 19 July 2001, a train shipping hydrochloric acid, computer paper, wood-pulp bales and other items from North Carolina to New Jersey derails in a tunnel under downtown Baltimore. Later estimated to have reached 1,500 degrees, the ensuing fire is hot enough to make the boxcars glow. A toxic cloud forces the evacuation of several city blocks. By its second day, the blaze melts a pipe containing fiber-optic lines laid along the railroad right-of-way, disrupt- ing telecommunications traffic on a critical New York–Miami axis. Cell phones in suburban Maryland fail. The New York- based Hearst Corporation loses its email and the ability to update its web pages. Worldcom, PSINet, and Abovenet report problems. Slowdowns are seen as far away as Atlanta, Seattle, and Los Angeles, and the American embassy in Lusaka, Zambia loses all contact with Washington. The explosive growth and diversification of telecom- munications in the last three decades have transformed how we exchange information. With old divisions undone, email, telephone, video, sound, and computer data are reduced to their constituent bits and flow over the same networks. Both anarchistic hackers and new-economy boosters proclaim the Internet to be a new kind of space, an electronic parallel universe removed from the physical world. It is tempting, when our telecommunication systems function properly, to get caught up in the rhetoric of libertarians like George Gilder and Alvin Toffler, who praise cyberspace as a leveler of hierarchies and a natural poison to bureaucracies, or to listen to post-Communist radicals as they declare social, digital, and economic frameworks obsolete, and profess their faith in Deleuzean “rhizomatic” networks—multidirec- tional, highly interconnected meshworks like those created by the roots of plants. It is easy, on a normal day, to believe that the Net exists only as an ether, devoid of corporeal sub- stance. But this vision is at odds with the reality of 19 July 2001. When the physical world intrudes, we confront the fact that modern telecommunications systems are far from rhizomatic, and act instead as centralized products of a long historical evolution. The utopian vision of a network without hierarchies is an illusion—an attractive theory that has never been implemented except as ideology. If telecommunications disperses individuals, it concen- trates structures, reinforcing the fundamental simultaneity of centrifugal forces that drive capital and the modern city. This is nothing new: downtown has always been dependent on both suburbs and rural territories. The remarkable density of the nineteenth-century urban center could develop only when homes and factories were removed from the city core via the spatially dispersive technologies of the commuter railroad and the telephone, while industrial, urban capital required the railroad and steamship to facilitate exploitation of the American continent and connection to global markets. As the Baltimore train wreck demonstrates, new infrastruc- tures do not so much supercede old ones as ride on top of 27 them, forming physical and organizational palimpsests—telephone lines follow railway lines, and over the cash register, invented in 1882 to prevent theft, could time these pathways have not been diffused, but rather collect sales data by 1884. Modern adding machines and etched more deeply into the urban landscape. calculators emerged in the later half of the decade and, in Modern telecommunications emerged in the mid- the 1890s, the mimeograph made possible the production of nineteenth century. The optical telegraph, invented in the copies by the hundred. 1790s and based on semaphore signaling systems, had by The result transformed the city. Commuter rail allowed the 1830s formed a network across Europe, allowing mes- white collar workers to live outside the downtown business sages to be transmitted from Paris to Amsterdam and from districts and, as industry came to rely more and more on Brest to Venice. In 1850, at its peak, the French system rail for shipment, production left the increasingly congested alone included at least 534 stations, and covered some core for the periphery, where it was based in buildings that, 3,000 miles. But optical telegraphs were hampered by bad for fireproofing purposes, were physically separated from weather, and the expense of manning the closely-spaced each other. The telephone tied building to building, and stations largely limited them to serving as early warning linked the rapidly spreading city to its hub. Understanding systems for military invasion.1 It took American artist Samuel that the phone was reshaping the city, phone companies F. B. Morse’s invention of the electric telegraph in 1837 to and municipalities worked closely together, the former rely- make possible an economical system of telecommunica- ing for their network expansion on zoning plans legislated by tions. Initially Morse’s simple system of dashes, dots, and the latter.7 silences was received with skepticism. Only with the open- Eventually, Bell’s company came to dominate the ing of a line between New York and Philadelphia in 1846 telephone system, while Western Union controlled the did the telegraph take off.2 By 1850, the United States was telegraph. Initially, however, this relative equilibrium in the home to 12,000 miles of telegraph operated by twenty dif- industry was far from certain. Between 1877 and 1879, ferent companies. By 1861, a transcontinental line was Western Union had begun to diversify from telegraph ser- established, anticipating the first transcontinental railroad vices by producing telephones based on alternative designs by eight years and shuttering the nineteen-month-old Pony by Thomas Edison and Elisha Gray. Bell filed a lawsuit claim- Express with its ten-day coast-to-coast relay system. In ing patent infringement, and an out-of-court settlement left 1866, a transatlantic cable was completed, and Europe’s him in possession of a national monopoly. Opportunities for optical telegraph declined swiftly, leaving only a scattering competition arose again when Bell’s patents expired in 1893 of “telegraph hills” as traces on the landscape. and 1894, and thousands of independent phone companies The electric telegraph’s heyday, however, was also arose, serving rural hinterlands where Bell did not want to short; invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell go. But, by refusing to connect his lines to these indepen- in 1876 gave individuals access to a network previously lim- dents, Bell ensured that long distance service—a luxury ited to telegraph operators in their offices. By 1880, 30,000 feature—was available to his subscribers only.8 phones were connected nationwide, and by the end of the This desire to eliminate competitors was not universally century there were some 2 million phones worldwide, with appreciated in the Progressive era. In 1910, Bell’s company, one in every ten American homes. Still, the telegraph did which had taken the name Atlantic Telephone and Telegraph not merely fade away. It retained its popularity among busi- in 1900, purchased the larger and better-known Western nessmen who preferred its written record and continued to Union. This move stimulated anti-corporate sentiment, and dominate intercity traffic for decades to come.3 the risk of governmental antitrust action loomed—a far At the turn of the century, telephone and telegraph from idle threat given the 1911 breakup of the Standard Oil teamed with the railroad to simultaneously densify and Company. In late 1913, AT&T took preemptive measures, in disperse the American urban landscape. Making possible the form of a document called the Kingsbury Commitment. requests for the rail delivery of goods over large distances, The giant agreed to sell off Western Union, and to permit telecommunications stimulated a burst of sales and pro- the independents access to its lines. Over the next decade, ductivity nationwide. This produced a corollary growth in a partnership evolved between AT&T and the government, paperwork, which, in turn demanded new infrastructures, with an understanding that in exchange for near-monopoly both architectural and human. Vertical files and vertical status, the company would deliver universal access to the office buildings proliferated as sites of storage and pro- public by building a network in outlying areas. AT&T thus duction and a new, scientifically oriented manager class avoided antitrust legislation to emerge in total control not emerged.4 In 1860, the US census listed some 750,000 only of the long-distance lines but, through its twenty-two people in various professional service positions; by 1890, regional Bell operating companies, of virtually every signifi- the number ballooned to 2.1 million, and by 1910 it had cant urban area in the country. AT&T owned everything from doubled again, to 4.4 million. In 1919, Upton Sinclair dubbed the interstate infrastructure to the wiring and equipment in these people “white collar” workers.5 Often trained as civil subscribers’ homes.9 and mechanical engineers, they tracked the burgeoning This early period established a topology of communica- commerce through numerical information.6 New machines
aided them: the mid-1870s saw the development opposite: 1867 map graciously carrying its own caption. Source: Library 28 of the typewriter and, soon after, carbon paper; of Congress. tions that existed until the Bell Systems’ breakup in 1984. The popular idea of the Internet as a centerless, distrib- Individual phones were connected to exchanges at the com- uted system stems from Baran’s eleven-volume proposal for pany office (to this day, one’s distance from the company a military network that could survive a nuclear first strike and office determines the maximum speed of one’s DSL connec- maintain the centralized, top-down chain of command. Such tion) and these exchanges connected to a central switching a system was essential, Baran felt, so that the other alter- station inevitably located in the city core, where the greatest native—giving individual field commanders authority over density of telephones would be found. In 1911, the same nuclear weapons—would not be necessary. year that Bell bought Western Union, General George Baran proposed a new military network for telephone Owen Squier—then head of Army’s Signal Corps, and the and data communications to be located entirely outside of future founder of Muzak Corporation—developed a technol- strategic targets such as city cores. He identified three forms ogy called multiplexy. By modulating the frequency of the of networks: centralized, decentralized, and distributed. signals so that they would not interfere with each other, In the centralized network, with the loss of the center, all multiplexy permitted transmission of multiple, simultaneous communications cease. Decentralized networks, with many messages over one cable. Multiplexed connections were nodes, are slightly better, but are still vulnerable to MIRV used on long distance lines beginning in 1918.10 After World (Multiple Independently-targeted Reentry Vehicle) warheads. War II, however, the high cost of copper wire comprising Baran’s network would be distributed and hard to kill: each the multiplexed network—coupled with rising demand for point would function as a node and central functions would bandwidth and growing fear that nuclear war would wreak be dispersed equally. havoc on continuous wire connections—led engineers to Designed not for present efficiency but for future surviv- develop microwave transmission for long distances. In the ability even after heavy damage during nuclear war, Baran’s 1950s and 1960s, adopting the motto “Communications is system broke messages down into discrete “packets” and the foundation of democracy,” AT&T touted its microwave routed them on redundant paths to their destinations. Errors “Long Lines” network as a crucial defense in the Cold War. were not avoided but rather expected. This system had the Then, in 1962, AT&T launched Telstar, the world’s first com- advantage of allowing individual sections of messages to mercial communications satellite, which they hoped would be rerouted or even retransmitted when necessary and, allow them to provide a 99.9% connection between any as computers tend to communicate to each other in short two points on the earth at any time, while further increasing bursts, would also take advantage of slowdowns and gaps in communications survivability after atomic war.11 Ironically, communication to optimize load on the lines. Baran’s model, Telstar operated only six months instead of a planned two however, was never realized. Baran’s proposal itself fell years, succumbing to radiation from Starfish I, a high-alti- victim to a military bureaucracy unable to see its virtues.12 tude nuclear test conducted by the United States Army the Instead, the Internet as we know it is the outgrowth of day before Telstar’s launch. ARPANET, another military project that produced the first Even with the development of the microwave trans- successful intercity data network. Established in 1958 to mission system and the hardening of key buildings against ensure US scientific superiority after the launch of Sputnik, atomic attack, the vulnerability of satellites to enemy the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects destruction remained an open question. American computer Agency was implanted in universities throughout the coun- scientist Paul A. Baran, a researcher at the Cold-War think try. ARPANET was designed to overcome isolation between tank the RAND corporation, felt that continued use of the these geographically separated offices, without undoing the centralized model of communications left the country vul- nerable to extreme disruption during a nuclear first strike. above: Paul Baran’s diagrams of three types of networks. Produced as part With the loss of the city center and the destruction of the of a research project for the Rand Corporation, 1964. central switching station, Baran realized, all intercity opposite: One Wilshire, the major carrier hotel for the West Coast. Photo 30 communications would be destroyed. Kazys Varnelis wider range of possibilities created by diversity in location. With the exponential growth of the Internet following Initially, the focus was on data-sharing and load-sharing. privatization, its tendency toward centralization on the local (The latter was facilitated by the range of continental time or regional level continues. The commercial Internet has fol- zones: as one technician slept, a colleague in another time lowed the money, thereby reinforcing the existing system of zone would take advantage of otherwise idle equipment.) networking.14 The Internet and telephone system are inextri- Few experts thought communication could become a cably tied together today: not only are analog modems and significant use of the data network, and when email was DSL connections run over telephone lines, but faster T1 and introduced, in 1972, it was only as a means of coordinating T3 lines are, also, simply dedicated phone lines. To under- seemingly more important tasks. ARPANET’s internal struc- stand how today’s Internet is built, then, we need to turn ture was a hybrid between distributed and decentralized. back to the telephone system. But, as it leased telephone lines from AT&T, its real, physical AT&T’s breakup into the Baby Bells in 1984—together structure could not overcome the dominance of metropoli- with subsequent legislation further deregulating the tan centralization.13 industry—triggered competition at every level. But it did With computer networks like ARPANET proliferating, not fundamentally change the centralization of telephone researchers developed an internetworking system to pass service. As before, the key for long distance carriers was information back and forth. First tested in 1977 and dubbed interface with the local system at the central office. But the the Internet, this single system is the foundation for the central office was now controlled by whichever Baby Bell global telecommunicational system we know today. During provided regional service. By 1990, fiber optics had sur- the 1980s, the Internet opened to non-military sites through passed satellite technology as a means of intercontinental the National Science Foundation’s NSFNet, a nationwide communication, and had even begun to challenge the domi- network that connected supercomputing sites at major nance of microwave towers. AT&T’s vast Cold War project universities through a high-capacity national “backbone.” Through the backbone, university-driven computing super- centers, such as Ithaca, New York, and Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, became as wired as any big city. To counter this dominance, the NSFNet made these universities, and even- tually other non-profit institutions as well, act as centers of regional networks. Again, Baran’s distributed network was rejected, replaced by a decentralized model in which—even if there is no national center for the Internet—local topolo- gies are centralized in command-and-control hubs. The NSFNet grew swiftly while the ARPANET became obsolete, its dedicated lines running at 56-kilobits-per- second—as fast as today’s modems. In 1988 and 1989, ARPANET transferred entirely to the NSFNet, ending military control over the Internet. As a government-run entity, the backbone was still restricted from carrying commercial traffic. In 1991, however, new service providers teamed up to form a Commercial Internet Exchange for carrying traffic over privately owned long-haul networks. With net- work traffic and technology continuing to grow, in 1995 the government ended the operation of the NSFNet back- 31 bone, and operation of the Internet was privatized. 32 was forced into obsolescence, and the company auctioned a major carrier hotel or a central switching station could its “Long Lines” system to cell phone carriers seeking sites result in the loss of all copper-wire and most cellular tele- for towers. But fiber is expensive, and cost-effectiveness phone service in a city, as well as the loss of 911 emergency dictates that it is more difficult to create new pathways than services, Internet access, and most corporate networks. it is to follow existing infrastructural routes and right-of-way Given that many carrier hotels on the coasts are also key easements: hence the fiber optic cable in the train tunnel nodes in intercontinental telephone and data traffic, losing in Baltimore. these structures could disrupt communications that we Within cities, lines concentrate in carrier “hotels,” depend on worldwide. otherwise known as telco or telecom hotels. The history of The Net may appear to live up to Arthur C. Clarke’s the carrier hotel at the One Wilshire tower in Los Angeles idea of a technology so advanced that it is indistinguishable is an example of the current system. In Los Angeles, the from magic. But whenever we see magic we should be on central switching station, now owned by SBC, is at 400 S. guard, for there is always a precarious reality undergirding Grand, downtown. Although competing carriers are, by the illusion. law, allowed access to the lines at the central switching station, SBC does not have to provide them with space for their equipment. Over a decade ago, in order to house their 1 Anton A. Huurdeman, The Worldwide History of Telecommunications (Hoboken, N.J.: competing long-distance lines in close proximity to the J. Wiley, 2003), p. 37. 400 S. Grand station, MCI—which had its own nationwide 2 Huurdeman, 55-61. Also Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story microwave network—mounted a rooftop microwave station of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers (New York: Walker and on One Wilshire, which is only three thousand feet from Co., 1998), pp. 22-56. the central switching station and was at the time one of the 3 Standage, 196-200. See also Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of tallest buildings downtown. With One Wilshire providing the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 33-37. a competitor-friendly environment, long-distance carriers, 4 Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. “The Information Age in Historical Perspective: An Introduction,” ISPs, and other networking companies began to lay fiber A Nation Transformed: How Information Has Shaped The United States from Colonial to the structure. While the microwave towers on top have Times to the Present, ed. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and James W. Cortada (New York: Oxford dwindled in importance—they are now used by Verizon for University Press, 2000), p. 18. connection to its cellphone network—the vast amount of 5 Donald Albrecht, Chrysanthe B. Broikos, and National Building Museum, On The Job: Design and the American Office (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), p. 18. underground fiber running out of One Wilshire allows com- 6 On systematic management, see JoAnne Yates, “Business Use of Information and Tech- panies many possibilities to interconnect. These attractions nology During the Information Age,” A Nation Transformed, pp. 107-135. allow One Wilshire’s management to charge the highest per- 7 See John Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) and square-foot rents on the North American continent. Robert Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Such centralization defies predictions that the Internet Press, 2001). and new technologies will undo cities or initiate a new era 8 George P. Oslin, The Story of Telecommunications (Macon, GA: Mercer University of dispersion. The historical role that telecommunications Press, 1992), pp. 220-231. has played in shaping the American city demonstrates that, 9 Fischer, pp. 37-59. although new technologies have made possible the increas- 10 Huurdeman, pp. 334-335. ing sprawl of the city since the late nineteenth century, 11 Oslin, 341-357. A number of web sites chronicling the activities of the AT&T long they have also concentrated urban density. Today, low- and lines division exist. Among the best are
In these night watches of apprentice painters the first Returning to my little camp, step by step, admiring the signs of revolution appeared in Mexican art. The Mexican had volcano’s solemn southern side, the earth shook, and amid been a poor colonial servant, incapable of creating or thinking detonations the base of the cone, next to the great dark for himself; everything had to be imported readymade from lump, sprouted bouquets of fire wrapped in clouds of dust. A European centers, for we were an inferior and degenerate river of lava ran down towards me. The heat suffocated me. race. They let us paint, but we had to paint the way they did I wanted to flee, but my legs refused to move. Clinging to a in Paris, and it was the Parisian critic who would pass upon little trunk of an oak I felt myself burn. There was nothing left the result and pronounce the final verdict … In the nightly to do but to look before dying. The wide river of lava hurled sessions in the Academy, as we listened to the fervent voice down a cascade, while from the igneous fountain surged an of that agitator Dr. Atl, we began to suspect that the whole enormous whirlpool of thick red flames, as other whirlpools of colonial situation was nothing but a swindle foisted upon dust accompanied it in a fantastic dance. The burning column us by international traders. We too had a character, which extended its high point into the shape of a cloud. I thought was quite the equal of any other. We would learn what the vaguely of running, but I could not move. My arms were ancients and the foreigners could teach us, but we could do slipping from the trunk of the little tree, and I should have as much as they, or more. It was not pride but self-confidence fallen onto the ground. Unexpectedly the west wind pushed that moved us to this belief, a sense of our own being and our the dust, flames and heat along the base of the cone. I could destiny.6 breathe and recover my senses, but I remained stuck to the ground. I waited a long while, and, a bit recovered, I got up; Several years later, with the country now deep in the throes slowly I approached the edge of the lava, which had stopped of the Revolution, Atl returned from a second European visit a few meters from my camp.8 and briefly served as director of the San Carlos Academy. His tumultuous term was marked by efforts to enlist the Atl’s literary output reflects the wide range of his interests. students’ talents and energies in the revolutionary project, A preliminary review of his publications reveals four volumes efforts interrupted when Constitutionalist government of of short stories, an autobiographic novel, a collection of General Venustiano Carranza had to abandon the capital city prose poems about Mexican volcanoes, an unclassifiable to the troops of Villa and Zapata, and take temporary refuge philosophical science-fiction novel, a book on petroleum in Veracruz. and another on gold, an eccentric, rabidly anticlerical novel Atl’s contributions to Mexican visual arts went beyond populated with an eclectic mélange of historical characters, his administrative and promotional roles. As a champion of the aforementioned speculative tract on Atlantis, two stud- Mexican handicrafts, he led the post-Revolutionary, national- ies of volcanoes, catalogue essays on popular Mexican arts ist campaign for greater recognition of popular styles and and colonial architecture, an essay on landscape painting, a local, folk aesthetic. He invented a new drawing medium, and numerous political writings. But further research in the a kind of pastel-like crayon still manufactured today, which National Library’s Atl archive tells of an even broader scope he named after himself: Atlcolors. He also proposed 36 what he identified as a new genre of painting, which opposite: Dr. Atl, El Popocatépetl desde un avión, 1948. of pursuits. His plans for an open-air museum in Mexico 1 Included in Homenaje del pueblo y del gobierno de Jalisco al pintor Gerardo Murillo, City’s Chapultepec Park would have surely made a welcome “Dr. Atl,” en el primer aniversario de su fallecimiento (Guadalajara: Gobierno del Estado addition to the city. Not one to shy away from embarking de Jalisco, Instituto Jalissciense de Bellas Artes, 1965), pp. 7-8. Translation mine. on large-scale projects in disciplines where he had no train- 2 Dr, Atl, Quiénes ganarán la Guerra? (Mexico City, 1940), pp. 4-5. Translation mine. ing or experience, he proposed an even more ambitious 3 For more on Olinka, see Mario Brant, “Dr. Atl,” Américas vol. 17, no. 9 (1965), p. 37; redesign of Central Mexico City, an enormous exercise in as well as Cuauhtémoc Medina, “El espejo celeste” Mandorla, no. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 197-219. urban planning that, like the open-air museum, remained on 4 This history is summarized in Jean Charlot, Mexican Art and the Academy of San Car- the drawing board. Evoking the support Baron Hausmann los, 1785-1915 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962). received from Napoleon III, Atl lamented the absence of 5 José Clemente Orozco, An Autobiography, trans. Robert C. Stephenson (Austin: Uni- a strong, autocratic leader who could make these dreams versity of Texas Press, 1962), p. 16. a reality: “The first thing needed to solve the multiple and 6 Ibid., pp. 19-20. complicated problems of the capital is a dictator.”9 Though 7 A copy of this manifesto, Un nuevo genero de pintura: el aeropaisaje, is found in the the ends sought do not justify the desired means, Atl’s Fondo Atl in Mexico City’s Biblioteca Nacional. arguments for urban planning are all the more relevant in 8 Dr. Atl, ¿Cómo nace y crece un vocan? El Paricutín (Mexico City: Editorial Stylo, 1950), a city as chaotic and dysfunctional as today’s Mexico City. pp. 59-60. Translation mine. As problematic as some of Atl’s proposals may be, Diego 9 From an unpublished manuscript in the Atl archive, Planificación urbana, un ante- Rivera was undoubtedly right when he pronounced that cedente importante y una proposición lógica. Translation mine. “Dr. Atl is one of the most curious personalities born to the 10 Included in Homenaje del pueblo, p. 19. Translation mine. modern New World—his story is the most picturesque of all the painters, impossible to recount in fewer than several below: Dr. Atl, Paricutín, 1943. volumes.”10 opposite: Fiddler Crab, Opus 446, by Robert Lang.
38 The Mathematics of Paper Folding: An Interview with Robert Lang Margaret Wertheim
Robert Lang is a pioneer in the emerging field of computa- tional origami, a branch of mathematics that explores the formal properties and potentialities of folded paper. Like the study of knots, pioneered by mathematicians and physicists in the late nineteenth century, computational origami and its practical offshoot origami sekkei or “technical folding,” turn out to have a surprising range of applications to real world problems, from working out how to fold up stents so they can be threaded into arteries, to designing thin-film telescopes that are packed into the hold of a space shuttle. Lang is the inventor of the TreeMaker computer program, which allows him to design and calculate crease patterns for a wide range of origami models—including intricate insects, crustaceans, and amphibians. He has been one of the very few Western columnists for the Japan Origami Academic Society and is the author of eight books, including Origami Design Secrets: Mathematical Methods for an Ancient Art. Lang received a doctorate in physics from Caltech and spent twenty years as a laser physicist before becoming a full-time paper folder. Margaret Wertheim, Director of the Institute for Figuring, interviewed him in October 2004, when Lang was in Los Angeles to deliver a talk at the Institute.
You spent two decades working as a physicist. What made you decide to give that up and become a professional origamist?
I’ve been interested in origami my entire life. In fact, my interest in physics started sometime in college, but I’ve been folding since I was a child. Through the years I was a professional physicist, I found that the tools I had learned doing physics and engineering—the mathematics and the approach to breaking down problems and studying the underlying theory—could be applied to origami as well. So that helped me to develop my origami art to a fairly high level. It just grew, and the number of different facets 39 I was involved in—the art, the science, the underlying mathematics, the applications to technology—eventually What sort of packaging requires a professional origamist? got to a point that I felt I could occupy myself full-time doing origami, consulting, lecturing, and making art. I made that Typically it’s a package that has some dual purpose. One change three years ago and never looked back. purpose would be when you have to enclose several dif- ferent objects and you want to use the same container for Can you explain what the term “technical folding” means? all of them, so that it has to fold between several different states. I don’t know if they need a professional origamist, but It applies to origami that’s complex enough that it probably someone who has been folding for twenty years knows a lot wasn’t discovered by accident. The word “technical” really of different structures. Usually I manage to come up with refers to techniques; you’re using specific techniques for something they haven’t seen before. designing specific features. And while it had its roots as early as the 1970s, it really blossomed in the 1990s when You’ve also helped the Lawrence Livermore Lab develop a various origami artists developed mathematical and geomet- space-based telescope. rical principles for folding—they developed an understanding of how the crease patterns turn into geometric shapes in The idea was to make a telescope with a 100-meter aperture the folded object. So if they needed to make an object that that could be deployed in space, meaning the main lens of has five parts (arms, legs, wings, and whatever), they could the telescope would be approximately a football field across. start to figure out what type of geometric shapes to put into The lens itself would be a diffractive lens, a pattern of the crease pattern that would assemble into those parts. In grooves formed on a thin, plastic substrate, like ones used effect they developed a set of building blocks for origami. in overhead projectors. So now they had the problem of a 100-meter sheet of plastic that needs to be taken into space And does this enable you to do things that weren’t possible and the only way we have to take things into space is a with traditional origami techniques? rocket or a space shuttle, which are only a few meters across. That pretty much stipulates some form of folding. Pretty much. The traditional origami designs were generally They built a five-meter prototype based on a design I pro- simplified and abstract, and when people tried to do sub- posed that was very successful in their tests. jects that had very complicated shapes—the case-in-point being insects and arthropods which have lots of long, skinny That suggests there is a general class of subjects to which legs—they found that traditional folding styles weren’t able origami is applicable: something that needs to be folded up to give them the features they wanted. And even if they got in order to ship it or launch it, but later on, its end state has an insect with, say, six legs, they had to be sort of stumpy to be much bigger. little points because they didn’t know how to get really long, skinny points. What technical folding allowed us to do was That’s a pretty good description. Whenever you have an to create all the features with all the dimensions that we object that exists in a large state that is generally a surface, really wanted to capture. something that’s roughly flat, and it also has to exist in a much smaller state, usually for transportation, then origami So what creatures have you been able to develop with these plays a role. In the space program, that shows up in things techniques? like folded lenses, solar sails, various types of collapsible antennae, and collapsible shrouds or shields. In the area The things that drove me to develop my techniques were of medicine, there are various types of implants, such as cervids, horned animals—deer, elk, moose, antelope, and stents, that go into the body, and which need to be put in the like. White-tailed deer, moose, and elk all have different through as small a hole as possible. Or maybe it goes in branching patterns in their antlers and I wanted to be able to through a blood vessel. Again, folding is a way of collapsing make each species. That required one to specify the lengths the structure down so it can be threaded through an artery of the points, the numbers of points, and how they’re con- or inserted into an incision and expanded once it’s close to nected to each other with a great degree of precision. But its final resting place. another class of subjects that this worked really well for was insects and the broader class of arthropods—everything Haven’t origami techniques also been used for working out from crabs and lobsters to scorpions and spiders. how to pack airbags into steering columns in cars?
In addition to your own designs you also do origami consult- Actually, in that case it was for a computer simulation of an ing. Whom do you consult for? airbag rather than the actual airbag. If you’re simulating an airbag, you need to know where the crease-lines form when National laboratories like Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the airbag is collapsed. In this project, a German firm, EASi Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and a variety of commercial Engineering, was developing a software tool for simulating companies that are doing product development in airbags, so that automotive manufacturers could figure 40 areas like medical devices and packaging. out whether a certain airbag design would work without having to actually crash a bunch of Mercedes. They came to me because I had published some papers about algo- rithms for folding things flat, and it turned out that one of these algorithms was right for their needs.
What is the technical problem regarding how to fold things flat?
Mathematically the problem is very simple. Given a poly- hedral surface, can you construct creases so that when you fold on all the creases, all of the faces of the polyhedra lie on the same plane. That can be reduced to another problem: given an arbitrary polygon, can you construct creases so that when you fold on all the creases, all of the boundaries of the polygon lie along a single straight line? That has a purely mathematical solution that is of interest maybe only to mathematicians, yet it turns out to have these practical applications as well.
What other mathematical problems are technical folders interested in?
I think one of the most vibrant is the question of what distances and shapes can be constructed just by folding alone, without doing any measuring. That harkens back to an ancient problem in pure mathematics—what’s called compass and straight edge construction. This goes back to the early Greeks, who wondered what shapes and distances could be constructed using just a compass and a straight edge for making arcs and drawing straight lines. And there is an origami analogue of that problem, which asks what distances and shapes you can construct just by making folds in a sheet of paper without being allowed to measure any distance with a ruler. It turns out that the field of shapes you can construct with folding is richer than what you can construct with compass and straight edge. For example, just with folding you can solve the prob- lem known as trisecting the angle—this means dividing a given angle into thirds. For 2000 years, people tried to find a way to do this with a compass and unmarked ruler until finally in the late nineteenth century mathematicians proved that it could not be done at all. But in the 1980s, a French folder named Jacques Justin and a Japanese folder named Tsune Abe independently showed how it could be done with origami. Mathematically, trisecting an angle is the equivalent of solving a particular cubic equation—an equation involving x to the power of three. Using straight edge and compass you can only solve equations with x to the power of 2. Once cubics were done with origami, the question was naturally asked, “Well, can you solve higher order equations with folding?” Just recently I have shown that in fact origami can solve fifth-order equations—ones involving x to the power of 5. That’s pretty interesting, I think.
Are there any practical applications for these constructions? above: Scorpion varileg, Opus 379, by Robert Lang.
Absolutely none that I can think of outside origami—it’s One thing that’s fascinating about technical folding is that appreciated purely for the mathematical beauty. it’s both a physical and an intellectual process. You have to have an analytical mind to design the structures, but then One area in which I gather technical folding is proving useful you also need to have a great deal of practical skill in terms is one of the major problems in biology. We know that with of folding them, as they are actually quite difficult to make. proteins often the most important thing about them is not the chemical composition, per se, but the shape they I think of it like music. In fact there are a lot of analogies eventually fold up to. between origami and music. You can compose both simple melodies and symphonies with a lot of different instruments There’s both relevance and differences here, because and themes moving in and out. It’s the same with origami. paper folding is two-dimensional and a protein is roughly There are simple beautiful folds, in the same way that there a one-dimensional shape, a linear chain with a bunch are simple melodies, but if you’re trying to do these very of joints in the chain. Protein folding is actually much more complicated structures, you need practice to get good at it. complicated than paper, in that folds can happen only at certain angles and there are bits that stick together if you Is there a limit to the complexity of the models you can get them close. There are also other molecules jostling make with origami? around that can knock the protein about as it’s folding. But the fundamental theory of folding is the same, and if Mathematically, there’s no limit. Theoretically, you can take youcan develop general concepts that apply across dimen- a finite sheet of paper and you can fold a star shape that sions—from one-dimensional to two-dimensional, and even has an infinite, arbitrarily large perimeter—10,000 miles, if higher-dimensional problems—then the results that you you like. That shape’s points would have millions of layers derive are going to be applicable to these very fundamental in them. So, that’s a problem you can do mathematically issues like protein folding and biological activity. but not in practice, because, in the real world, paper has a finite thickness and you’re limited in what you can do by the It reminds me of another branch of mathematics—knot tensile properties of the paper. In the last five to ten years, as theory. In the late nineteenth century, mathematicians people have designed more complex figures, their ability to and physicists became interested in how many different fold these figures has also been enhanced by improvements ways there were to tie a knot. And it’s turned out in the late in the field of papermaking. So you can now get extremely twentieth century that some physicists believe knot theory thin, strong papers that can be folded into shapes that prob- might explain the nature of subatomic particles. Mathema- ably couldn’t have been folded fifteen years ago. ticians seem to have this way of taking what seem to be unbelievably trivial things and developing from them incred- You’ve written a computer program, called TreeMaker, that ibly powerful abstract techniques. Do you think paper fold- will work out very complicated designs and calculate the ing may one day have some relevance to our understanding crease pattern. Yet traditional folders won’t even allow the of fundamental physics? use of a ruler to make measurements. Is it somehow cheat- ing to bring a computer into the origami design process? Whenever you’re developing new mathematics, there’s always that possibility. The hallmark of these sorts of There are people who get deeply nervous about the idea of surprise applications is that they always turn out to have using a computer as a tool in design. The general consen- been a surprise. There is a great example of this that is close sus, I think, is that when it comes to using a ruler, it’s fine if to origami. In technical origami when we’re designing you’re using it for designing the model, as long as you don’t complicated forms like many-legged insects, we use make the person trying to follow the instructions use a ruler. a technique called “circle packing” which basically asks the Long before I wrote my computer program, and even today, question how can you efficiently pack a bunch of circles I still use a pencil and paper to sketch out and calculate a into various shaped containers. Now over the years draft of the crease-pattern. In that sense, the computer is mathematicians have also studied how to pack spherical no more of a tool than a pencil and paper. I’ve done designs objects into higher-dimensional spaces and how close where I’ve intentionally asked the folder to measure with a a packing you can get. Well, it turned out that in twenty- ruler just because it was a bit provocative, but in my own four dimensions there is a particularly dense packing. folding I don’t consider a design to be finished until I have a That sounds about as irrelevant an idea as you can get, sequence that I can do with just with a square of paper and except it turns out that twenty-four-dimensional packing my hands, not using any devices. gives a very dense compression algorithm for sending data. So using this twenty-four-dimensional sphere packing result has become the basis for developing a very efficient code for twenty-four-bit binary words. Now, who would have opposite: Robert Lang’s crease pattern for the scorpion printed on the previous predicted that? page. Detailed folding instructions available in Lang’s Origami Insects II 43 (Gallery Origami House, 2003). HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN Next, bring the four corners of your creased square together. square-based ORIGAMI “bud” (The printed side should become the inner, “hidden“ part.) You will almost certainly have to encourage and refine your With just a pair of scissors, a scoring tool1, and a little creases as you do this. patience, you can turn a photocopy of the opposite page into a three-dimensional “bud” that looks like this:
The corners of your square are now triangular flaps. To start, photocopy the opposite page onto a light card stock To complete your bud, fold all flaps in a clockwise direction. (70 lb “cover weight“ is ideal) and cut out the square. Then, tuck each flap into the underside of the model. Properly tucked flaps will allow the model to hold itself Score each printed line firmly, but don’t press as hard as together. you can. Overscoring could cause the card stock to crack when you crease it. For best results, score on a flat, padded surface, like a newspaper or your copy of Cabinet.
Next, begin creasing the scored lines, using the following photograph as a guide.2 This is the trickiest step. It takes time and patience—at least fifteen minutes, probably—to coax all the curves into proper creases. You may have to work around the whole square a few times before your creases are defined and flexible.
1 Many origamists use an empty ballpoint pen for scoring. If you happen to have a bone folder or other round-tipped embossing tool, you could use one of these instead. If you have none of these things, you could try using a full ballpoint pen, since all your score marks will be hidden on the inside and underside of the finished object. But you’d have to be extra careful about fingerprints and smearing. 2 Specifically: Note that there are two kinds of dotted line. All the “dash-dot-dot“ lines will crease to form “mountains.” The other lines—made of dots of consistent length— will crease to form “valleys.” The photograph illustrates how your square will look if you crease 44 it according to these rules. This origami bud was designed by Dr. Jeannine Mosely, an electrical engineer who designs and codes geometric modeling software. Mosely is an expert on business card origami and minimalist origami, in which one is restricted to just four folds. She has constructed an entire alphabet—both upper and lower cases—of minimalist origami letters, and is currently completing a model of a level-3 Menger Sponge, the first three-dimensional fractal that mathematicians discovered. Dr. Mosely’s Sponge is composed of 66,048 business cards folded into 8000 2-inch cubes linked together. The construction, which now resides in Mosely’s garage, will be completed in the spring. The Ted Turner Collection: Report from Page 47 the Battlefield (Paper on Uccello)* Marco Maggi, DDDrawing on Tradition, 2004** Marco Maggi Cuts on paper, paper on Uccello 8” x 10” DNA: Watching a hair for hours doesn’t allow us to identify its owner, even though that hair includes much more infor- Pages 48 & 50 mation than any high-resolution picture. It’s now possible Paolo Uccello, The Battle of San Romano (detail), 1456 with a single strand of hair to reconstruct genetically even Tempera on wood the most intimate details of a person. Knowing that a file as 72” x 127” simple as “hair.zip” has embedded within it a forest of signs and codes that we cannot see or read has produced in us a DIRECTIONS new sense of myopia or illiteracy. Place a cutting mat between pages 50 and 51. Using an X-ACTO knife (blade no. 11), cut and lift slivers of paper to CNN: Watching the news for months doesn’t allow us to create your own DDDrawing on Tradition. An example of a identify the reality behind an issue covered by the press. An DDDrawing on Tradition has been provided on page 47. infinite sequence of simultaneous, precise, and live reports is not enough to understand the difference between live ** DDDrawing: “The technical route of three-dimensional imaging systems in the his- broadcasting and death, between democracy and business. tory of art has been comprehensively traced by art historians, from the development of We are condemned to know more and understand less. This geometrical perspective in painting. This began with Brunelleschi and Alberti and soon is not a contradictory process; it’s semiotic indigestion. became evident in such work as The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello.” (Source: Margaret Benyon, “The Prehistory of Holographic Art,” 1997.) If something moves as fast as a bullet, it becomes invisible and supersonic. If something moves as slowly as a minute hand, it becomes still and uninteresting.
Examining a ream of the best-quality white paper proves that it is impossible to find a single absolutely white, silent sheet in 500 examples.
Seeing two pages printed with the same image con- firms there are no two identical visual experiences. (Even McDonald’s has never cooked two burgers of identical shape, color, taste, texture, temperature, and context.)
* “Turner, Ted: (born 1938), US broadcasting and sports executive, born in Cincinnati, Ohio; president of Atlanta Braves baseball team and chairman of the board of Atlanta Hawks basketball team; head of Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., whose properties include station WTBS and news station CNN; bought over 3,000 movies to televise and received criticism for colorizing many classics. (Source: Britannica Student Encyclopedia, 2002).
46
Do Not Mingle One Human Feeling Joe Milutis
What first intrigued me about Jenny Lind was a sheet music souvenir of her “Concerts in America.” It was not uncom- mon for sheet music to be advertised “as sung by Jenny Lind” in the same way it’s not uncommon to see Bing Crosby on the cover of songs that he sang. The difference with this piece of sheet music is that there was an effort to painstakingly transcribe, in the era before the phonograph, Lind’s exact interpretation (the analogy might be to have the various “bu-bu-bu-buhs” of Bing inserted into the tablature). This piece of sheet music contradicts the idea that music is the material text that must be interpreted, and spiritual- ized, by performance. Instead, this copy of “Do Not Mingle One Human Feeling” is protophonographic, since it tries to capture the essence of the particular performer, rather than providing a material touchstone for future performers. In the case of Lind, the attempt to capture her elusive presence verged on mania. For those who do not know her story, the mythical 1850 American tour of the Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind, transformed a physically unas- suming European diva into “the most popular woman in
the world.”1 For some she even came to be called “the New
Messiah”2 since it was thought her voice was from God. In fact, there was a rumor that Jenny Lind looped her hair at
the sides of her head because she had no ears,3 an image
above: Jenny Lind as Amina (from the 1831 opera “La Sonnambula”). Frontispiece of Bellini’s “‘Do Not Mingle, One Human Feeling,’ As Sung By Madlle. Jenny Lind, at her Concerts in America.” Published by S. C. Jollie 51 and Firth, Pond and Co. Milwaukee Public Library Sheet Music Collection. that suggests a body that is the pure fount of an elusive, that seem to presage phonographic grooves, as language original source, a singer who does not control her voice tries to approximate these lines never to be repeated in time through the feedback loop of listening, but who is rather and space. Most commentary is unanimous on the powers merely a medium. Since no recording technologies were of this line, Lind’s “groove.” The New York Herald claims available at the time, the stunning fact of the case of Jenny that her song “spins out from her throat like the attenu- Lind was that the quality of her voice was taken merely on ated fiber from the silkworm, dying away so sweetly and so faith. P. T. Barnum himself, who had just recently featured gradually, till it seems melting into the song of the seraphim the famous spirit communicators, the Fox Sisters, in his and is lost in eternity”6; The Spirit of the Times writes “As act, risked his fortune to bring this other type of medium a bird just alighted upon a spray begins to sing, he knows to America, without ever having heard her voice. Yet, despite not why, and pours forth the increasing volume of his voice the absence of radio or phonograph play, enormous crowds from an instinct implanted within him by that Power which paid exorbitant sums for tickets—which, in the first known made him vocal,—as flowers unfold their petals to the air, as instance of scalping, would then be resold at higher sums— zephyrs breathe, as rivulets leave their founts, as thoughts to Jenny Lind’s “Concerts in America” which began on flow, as affections rise, as feelings develop,—so this won- 11 September 1850 at Castle Garden in New York City’s derous creature sang. It was not Art. It was a manifestation
Battery Park. of Nature.”7 Even her perambulations were subject to the It’s hard not to be fascinated by the scene of the first proto-phonographical device of American journalism as each concert as it is described. Beletti, the opening singer, fin- day newspapers printed a column entitled “The Movements ishes his number, followed by polite applause. Then a hush. of the Swedish Nightingale”8; recording the available minu- Lind is escorted onto the stage. She starts nervously, a bit tiae of her daily activities and public encounters, the news too humanly. But as soon as she gains her confidence and transformed the merest biographical detail into a continua- gives herself over to the song, the audience is swept into her tion of her song. magnetic vortex; as the song ends, there is exultant standing But it is through the vehicle of sheet music that the vari- and stomping and shouting. What publicity had—seemingly ous registers of the absent Lind are brought together. From hyperbolically—created was now actually manifest before the buttery, cartoonish depiction of Lind on the frontispiece them, the voice of the divine. As the tour continued, audi- (whom the more realistic technology of the daguerreotype ences became more and more unbelieving of the praise that reveals in a much less romantic light) to the specifics of her preceded her; yet in concert after concert—from Philadel- vocal flights, there is an attempt to reconstruct the presence phia to Cuba—suspicion melted (at different degrees and of Lind outside the charmed circle of performance. In these with different rates) as she sang. From her first appearances glyphs of Lindiana—evidence of the soul and originality of in the northeast metropoles to the strange adventure of her Lind—is the trace of her peculiar virtuosity, as these notes concert in an Indiana slaughterhouse,4 we see America won glide far beyond the already challenging standard melodic over by her spiritual charm. line. I wonder about the veracity of these traces, since no As the memory of Lind’s presence faded, the void recording mechanisms were available. Because no proof would be filled by a universe of totems and memorabilia— remains of how her performance got to paper, there is what collectors term Lindiana—where saintly relic meets always the possibility that the transcription and transcrib- commercial tchotchke. Sometimes, Lindiana was phantas- ability of these notes is merely a cultured phantasm. Did mic in nature, and just as ephemeral as the performance copyists attend the concert, able to intellectually discern itself: for example, a coachman who helped Lind off her each note and immediately transcribe it—not like the needle rockaway in Boston sold kisses of his hand for five dollars of the phonograph, but as would a sympathetic mind? Or a piece,5 in what I think of as an early example of sampling. were there elaborate sessions in which the performer “sat” These tokens memorialize a momentary visual and physical for the transcriber in a controlled environment in much the presence, more than they do the elusive continuity of song. same way that one sat for a portrait or daguerreotype? But what of the memory of the song itself?
One can surmise it in descriptions of the partic- above: Detail of “Do Not Mingle, One Human Feeling:” “ci formiamo un ciel 52 ular melodic line of Lind’s performance, descriptions d’amor.” (“we will form a Heav’n of love.”) Strangely, these scenarios are not beyond possibil- Countering the musical and spiritual histrionics of the ity, since the quality of Lind’s voice made it consummately Southern European—the emotional virtuosity of Italian sing- transcribable, her flights of emotion easily captured with ers—Lind’s strange popularity depended on her ability to Western notation. But, for a performance to be faithfully reinforce an idea of white supremacy over the “Southern noted by a score that remains, the performance would have races” which had dominated music up until this point. In to have been evacuated of any noise, emotion, or intensity. addition, her performance of northern uprightness was It would be an aria without air, as it were. Indeed, those also placed in contradistinction to the minstrel show, but who did not like Lind’s singing recognized most keenly this not necessarily in contradistinction to black music—which airless quality—her sonic signature. For example, Walt Whit- in its “authentic” form was seen by some critics as just as man, while he was still a hack reporter, ambulance chaser, genuine as Lind’s arias. Yet this appreciation of authentic- and music critic for the Brooklyn Eagle and other New York ity is intimately tied to racialist notions of the origins of and papers, wrote cynically of this quality of Lind’s artistic essential access to musical emotion and soul, creating hier- singing: archies that “would only allow black culture to be performed and written . . . as a representation of slavery’s spiritual The Swedish Swan, with all her blandishments, never pain.”13 The main racial division that is created is not then touched my heart in the least. I wondered at so much vocal dexterity; and indeed they were all very pretty, those leaps one between authentic and inauthentic, but between music and double somersets. But even in the grandest religious airs which is highly disciplined, commensurable to rational nota- … executed by this strangely overpraised woman in perfect tion (paradoxically transcendent), and music which, while scientific style, let critics say what they like, it was a failure; soulful (transcendent in another way), is such because it for there was a vacuum in the head of the performance.9 exceeds and challenges written notation, referencing not heaven but the materiality of the performer’s worldly pain. In some ways, Lind’s rationalistic arias appealed to a more The question of musical soul, then—uncapturable, Northern European brand of spirituality, and for many her invisible, unquantifiable—would impinge on not only plainness, combined with what could be interpreted as a the definition of American music, but also the notion of cold performance, was the chief attraction. American identity in general. It is precisely in the attempt In a time when minstrelsy and Italian opera were the to visualize, analyze, and understand more invisible notions reigning modes of popular music, Lind’s performance was of performance—such as soul, emotion, and anything that heralded for its intellectual control and “transcendence” of might fall under the “spiritual” interpretation of musical emotionality. Indeed her legend made it seem as if she was material—that the notion of race as a visible index of soul able to transcend the very source of emotionality, the body intersects with the way in which sheet music, and the whole itself. Yet this body—conceived as rising above anxieties and visual culture surrounding musical production, shores up the divisions stemming from questions of race to which popular absence of the performer. It also, perhaps more powerfully, music was and is intimately tied—was enacting what Gus- but less obviously, intersects with the scientific under- tavus T. Stadler calls a “whiteface” performance, “aesthetic standing of the sound wave, and the march of visualization excellence as a kind of raced, classed, gendered, de-nation- technologies that begins in the late nineteenth century. As alized drag.”10 As if to parody the myth of her non-racial American music began to define itself against the elaborate transparency, Lind travesties were a part of minstrel shows and calculated aria, the emerging science of ethnomusicol- well before her “Concerts in America.”11 Yet many bought ogy, while instrumental in giving this definition legitimacy, into the idea that Lind, synonymous with her sonic line melt- would substitute elaborate scientific devices for European ing into air, held the possibility of a pure music that could musical rationality in order to understand music that transcend the unsettlingly embodied music of slaves, immi- exceeded written notation. As we will see, this soft science grants, and Southern Europeans. As John Sullivan Dwight of ethnomusicology may also have been a way to manage wrote at the time: the racial anxieties that accompanied American noise. In the now mostly forgotten 1928 book, Phonophotog- True, you would not say of her, in the conventional Ital- raphy in Folk Music: American Negro Songs in New Notation ian sense of the word, what is often said in first acknowledg- ment of a good singer: “She has style” … Mdlle. Lind has (published after the Jazz Singer but before The Broadway more than style; she has genius—Northern genius, to be Melody and Hallelujah!), early ethnomusicologist Milton sure, which is precisely what she should have to make her Metfessel introduced a new notation that would become greatness genuine. … The Northern muse must sing her les- quickly obsolete as advances in sound film made the pro- son to the world. Her fresher, chaster, more intellectual, and cess of archiving and analyzing folk music much simpler. For (as they only seem to some) her colder strains come in due Metfessel, new scientific advances in sound-wave capture season to recover our souls from the delicious languor of a and representation would finally provide “scientific” means music which has been so wholly of the feelings, that, for want with which to analyze “primitive” performances, which, in of some intellectual tonic, and some spiritual temper, feeling large part, had a tenuous relation to the standard notation. has generated into mere sensibility, and a very cheap kind If Jenny Lind represented the perfect rationalistic singing of superficial, skin-deep excitability that usurps the that would vindicate standard Western notation, African- 53 name of passion.12 American music represented to ethnomusicologists “noise” previously untranslatable into clear notation, providing a the tics that partake of the past? When I first came upon challenge that justified the use of and investment in new Jenny Lind’s “Do Not Mingle One Human Feeling”—more recording technology. than a hundred and fifty years after its performance in Amer- Metfessel’s phonophotographic device, built into a ica—I was struck by the vanguard feeling of the title and its suitcase, is a primitive dual-system set-up, with a silent- sentiment, as if the world had already been secretly experi- film camera capturing images at the same time that a encing, in the guise of electronic music and its philosophical phonelescope picks up sound waves and inscribes them counterparts, a Lind revival. If Metfessel at one point dis- on a surface in a way similar to an oscilloscope. The sound covered that all music has in common a trace of unstable wave information is then transcribed into a notational humanity, this discovery came precisely at the point where system invented by Metfessel. When combined with image, one could begin to recognize another commonality—the the promise of phonophotography would, in addition to non-human matrix that sends a song out into the ethers of recording an unnotatable music, unlock the psychological information. Our music is an index of how the comminglings dimensions of artistic singing—typified by African-Ameri- of the non-human compete with the clamor of the cardiac. can song. As Metfessel explains, “With the objective facts I wonder if someday soon (or has this someday already in hand, we may correlate the vibrato with principles of passed?), I will find myself going on about the vicissitudes neural discharge, showing the relation of artistic expres- of the past, only to have my companion remind me, with a sion in music to nervous instability in terms of neurological touch of dispassionate condescension, that the heart, after concepts, for a tender emotion is a condition of nervous all, is just another low-frequency oscillator. instability.”14 In concentrating on the sonic qualities of vibrato— seen by some as evidence of vulgar or unskilled singing—the 1 M. R. Werner, It Happened in New York (NY: Coward-McCann, 1957), p. 175. most radical contribution of Metfessel was to point out that 2 Ibid., p. 145. these emotional flutterings, challenging clear registration of 3 Joan Bulman, Jenny Lind: A Biography (London: James Barrie, 1956), p. 243. pitch, do not belong merely to folk music but are the source 4 W. Porter Ware and Thaddeus C. Lockard, Jr., P. T. Barnum Presents Jenny Lind: The of all artistic expression in music. In his books, he places the American Tour of the Swedish Nightingale (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University pitch inconsistencies of African-American amateurs in the Press, 1980), pp. 88-9. company of charts comparing the quaverings of classical 5 Gladys Denny Shultz, Jenny Lind: The Swedish Nightingale (NY: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), p. 212. singers.15 Exploding the myth that there could be, as was presumed with Lind, a purely rational performance, Metfes- 6 Cited in Werner, p. 157. sel placed musical emotion back in the irrational locus of 7 Cited in Ibid., p. 157. the body—even as he paradoxically attempted to rationalize 8 Werner, p. 149 and Bulman, p. 243. this vital origin with excessive quasi-scientific rigor, remi- 9 Cited in Ibid., p. 158. 10 Gustavus T. Stadler, Suspicious Minds: The Cultural Politics of Genius in the United niscent of more contemporary white sound-artists’ almost States, 1840-1890, ms (forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press), p. 97. scientific obsessions over black noise. (Think, for example, 11 Ibid., p. 122. of Steve Reich’s early phase-loop pieces—“Come Out” and 12 Cited in Ibid., pp. 101-02. “It’s Gonna Rain”—which sample African-American voices; 13 Ibid., p. 125. or John Oswald’s deconstruction of racial musical identity in 14 Milton Metfessel, Phonophotography in Folk Music: American Negro Songs in Plunderphonics, especially his pieces “Black,” “Brown,” and New Notation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1928), 5. See also Milton “White”; or Neil Rolnick’s electroacoustic literalization of Metfessel, “The Vibrato in Artistic Voices,” The Vibrato, University of Iowa Studies in the Robert Johnson fetishization in “Robert Johnson Sampler.”) Psychology of Music, Vol. 1, ed. Carl E. Seashore (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, Repeatedly zeroing in on a presumed essence of African- 1932), pp. 14-117. American music that paradoxically only white technologists 15 Metfessel was an ambiguous product of his time. His analysis of this data oscillates could know, the scientific analyses of Metfessel et al. should between the impulse to perceive a universal quality in all artistic singing—influenced by come off as a shield for racial (or performance) anxiety. How- the models of cultural relativism coming out of anthropology at the time—and the habit ever, Metfessel’s democracy of vibrato potentially dissolves of couching his descriptions in the hierarchical vocabulary of a an older, racist anthropol- this shield. He made clear that there was something that all ogy. Even his apparently more enlightened moments are fraught with the unexamined music had in common, a sort of prime mover at the subsen- complexities that his use of technology brings to the study. See the brief discussion of sory level. Hidden within the folds of every wave of song, Metfessel and ethnomusicology’s origins in Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman’s like the slips in language that Freud attempted to unlock, introduction to Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, is that elusive thing to which heaven is barred, the human 2000), pp.22-23. instability that is covertly celebrated in musical rites and is neither possible nor desirable to eradicate from performance. Could it be that in the future, however, it will only be a matter of historical curiosity that humans once appreciated
in music its flaws, slips, and off-notes—traces of opposite: A graph of Metfessel’s new notation and selection from an 55 emotion locked forever in the materiality of the body, accompanying film. From Phonophotography in Folk Music (1928). H & Co. DANIEL Heller-Roazen
A letter, like everything else, must ultimately meet its fate and, over time, every written sign of speech falls out of use. No matter how eminent its place in the idiom to which it belongs, a letter ultimately grows quaint, then rare, falling finally into utter obsolescence. A grapheme, however, has more than one way to go. Its demise can be more or less a matter of nature, as it were, the result of a gradual and irrevocable occurrence that owes nothing to resolutions on the part of a writing community. One thinks of the archaic Hellenic letters that had already begun to vanish from Greek scripts before the classical literary tradition as we know it came to be transcribed: from the most illustrious and often commented upon of the set, the semi-consonantal digamma ( ), which was once the sixth letter of the alphabet and whose traces can still be found in Homer, to the koppa ( ), Ϙ the sampi ( ) and the san ( ), to name only three figures Ϡ Ϻ to whom the memory of marks has not been kind.1 But one need not look as far away in space and time as ancient Greece for evidence of the disappearance of members of alphabetic systems. English suffered its own losses: after the invasion of the Normans, the Anglo-Saxon eth ( ), thorn ( ), ð þ aesc ( ), ash ( ) and wynn ( ) slowly went their way, and the F æ ƿ last of the representatives of the old script, the yogh ( ), fol- ʒ lowed them soon afterwards, once a contrasting continental g established itself in the abecedarium of the language.2 Elements of writing, however, can also grow obsolete on account of deliberation and decision. For better or worse, their fates can rest on the judgment of those who would, or would not, write them. A glance at the history of writ- ing reveals the brute fact: letters can be forcibly evicted from the scripts to which they once belonged. In a drastic orthographic reform of 1708, Peter the Great, for example, decreed that a series of rare figures of Greek origin (such as the , the , and the ) were to leave the Cyrillic alphabet θ ξ ψ immediately, and shortly after the October revolution, the linguistic representatives of the new Soviet state declared that a host of letters were in truth superfluous and hence- forth never again to be printed. 1917 thus became the year of the official obsolescence of an unusual z-mark (the зеʌо, ), two rare types of i-graphs (the and ҫ восьмиричное, і, the ), and a sign for a vowel (a closed e) of десятиричное considerable age and respectability (the ), which had ять, ҍ entered the script from that most venerable of tongues, Old Church Slavonic, and which found itself, in revolutionary times, suddenly banished to the linguistic terrain of Bulgaria (where, it should be added, it did not last long, removed in turn from the Balkan script in 1945).3 Letters can also vanish more than once, and, like spirits, they can return to make themselves perceptible long after some would pronounce them quite defunct. A classic case is the grapheme h, from the spelling of whose current English name, “aitch,” the letter itself, tellingly, is by now absent. The sign of the sound characterized by linguists as a pure aspiration or a glottal fricative, h belongs to the alphabets of almost all the languages that make use of the Roman more sizeable than a period, and which closely resembled script. But the value it designates remains often impercep- our modern apostrophe. Hence the final form of the graph- tible in speech; and in the passage between languages, it eme in the Hellenic script: ‘, designated by the specialists of is almost always the first to go. The implications of this fact the Greek tongue ever since not as a letter but as a “spirit” can be severe, as Heinrich Heine, a poet of mutiple h’s and (to be exact, a “rough breather,” spiritus asper or πνευ̑να two distinct types of aspiration (the pure [h] and the more , as distinguished from the “smooth breather,” δασει̑αν constrictive [X]), knew well. In the memoirs he composed spiritus lenis, or , which indicated the absence πνευ̑να ψιλή between 1850 and 1855, he commented on the alteration of aspiration before vowels). his name had undergone following his emigration from Ger- On the surface, the Latin script, by contrast, recognized many. “Here in France,” he wrote, h as a full-fledged member of its alphabet. But the grapheme of the Roman language seems to have represented a sound my German name “Heinrich” was translated into of as little substance as the Greek aspirate: “basically a weak “Henri” just after my arrival in Paris. I had to resign myself to articulation,” as one historical linguist has written, “involving it and, finally, name myself thus in this country, for the word no independent activity of the speech-organs in the mouth, “Heinrich” did not appeal to the French ear and the French and […] liable to disappear.”6 It is no doubt for this reason make everything in the world nice and easy for themselves. that the Romans themselves seem to have been unsure of They were also incapable of pronouncing the name “Henri the exact status of the letter in their language. In a passage Heine” correctly, and for most people my name is Mr. Enri of the Institutio oratoria, Quintillian, for example, voiced Enn; many abbreviate this to an “Enrienne,” and some called doubts about whether h constituted a “letter” at all.7 Despite me Mr. Un rien.4 appearances, his was a generously open-minded position: From “Heinrich Heine” to “a nothing” in four steps: later grammarians, such as Priscian and Marius Victorinus, the “translation,” geographic and linguistic, was in this defined the mark in no ambiguous terms as “not a letter, case more than treacherous. Had the poet chosen to move but merely the sign of breathing” (h litteram non esse osten- not westwards, but eastwards, however, the consequence dimus, sed notam aspirationis,we read, for instance, in the could have been at least as grave. For he might in his own influential De arte grammatica).8 Like its Hellenic counter- lifetime have assumed an equally unrecognizable appella- part, the Roman sound seems to have been infirm by nature, tion, in which the initial letter of his first and second names apt to vanish from whatever position in the word it occupied. vanished into not “a nothing” but “a something” at least as Its historical demise was thus both gradual and irrevocable. startling: Geynrich Geyne ( ), as he is known First it vanished in the classical period between vowels (ne- Геинрих Геине to this day in Russia. hemo became nemo); then it disappeared, in the middle of The truth is that the breathy letter posed delicate prob- the word, after certain consonants (dis-habeo became diri- lems from the beginning. Pre-Euclidean Greek inscriptions beo); finally, by the end of the Republic, it departed from its contained an h, no doubt the distant ancestor of the Roman last hold-out, the beginning of the word (in common inscrip- letter. The mark of a consonantal aspirate, it is thought to tions, Horatia, hauet thus became Oratia, auet).9 derive from an earlier letter (–), which represented an adap- Before long, only the most educated among Latin H– tation of the Semitic letter h. e¯ t (which, in turn, engendered speakers could be sure where the elusive sound had once both the Hebrew and the Arabic ). The Greek h, however, been. The stakes of subtracting—or adding—a breath or � ח did not last long, at least as the sign of an aspirate. By the two became quite marked. In a poem, Catullus ridiculed one early fifth century B.C., the grapheme h came to acquire Arrius, who, to produce the appearance of erudition, added a vocalic value, which eventually brought it to its classical aitches at the start of his words, where they did not in fact form as the Greek letter eta ( ); at the same time, the aspi- belong.10 And in a famous passage of the first book of his ệ rate phoneme, by contrast, came to be indicated in writing Confessions, Augustine, denouncing the teachers of his day, by a “half-h,” namely, .5 From there, h followed a double took as his target the grammatical obsession with aspiration l- path to obsolescence, both as a sound and as a sign. In the among Carthaginian magistri. “O Lord my God,” he wrote, course of the centuries during which classical Greek was be patient, as you always are, with the men of this world spoken, the once consonantal phoneme gradually gave as you watch them and see how strictly they obey the rules way to a soft but audible “initial aspiration.” In Hellenistic of grammar which have been handed down to them, and yet times, the weakened aspiration began to leave the language ignore the eternal rules of everlasting salvation which they altogether, and documentary sources indicate that by the have received from you. A man who has learnt the traditional fourth century AD, if not sooner, the sound was long gone. rules of pronunciation, or teaches them to others, gives greater During the same period, the graph, a fragment of its l- former self, shrank in size, losing its rights to a full position opposite: Ornamental H from page 68 verso of the Book of Kells, a vellum in the writing of letters. The philologists and grammarians manuscript of the four Gospels now in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. of Ptolemaic Alexandria reduced it to a small mark placed The manuscript, which was completed in about 800 AD by Columban monks above the letter it modified. Still later, scholars and copyists on the remote island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland, contains 680 pages abbreviated the sign further, making of it a diacritic, (or 340 folios). Just two of the pages are without ornament, while about thirty 57 placed before the modified vowel, which was barely folios, including some major decorated pages, have been lost. scandal if he breaks them by uttering the first syllable of scrutiny. Starting in the mid-fifteenth century, grammar- “human being” [ominem] without aspiration than if he breaks ians, typographers, and teachers in Italy, Spain, France, and your rules and hates another human being, his fellow man.11 England called the grapheme to the court-house of national orthography, often threatening to do away with it altogether. The teachers’ punctilious attention to orthography was At one extreme, there were the Italians. The first to extol the clearly meant to distinguish them from the uncouth mul- rights of the vernacular in the face of Latin, they were inevi- titude, which knew nothing of the etymologically correct tably also the most hostile to this classical mark. In Il Polito, placement of breaths. a treatise on orthography published in 1525, Claudio Tolomei Amongst themselves, however, even the learned of thus considered the possible functions of the grapheme at the age expressed some uncertainty about the reasons for some length, before reaching his verdict, which was unspar- which certain words possessed, or lacked, aspirations. Aulus ing: “I say,” he declared, “that no force obliges us to want
Gellius, for example, lived a good two centuries closer to the this h among our letters.”14 And in the same years, Giovan original aspirate than Augustine, but he was already well Giorgio Trissino recalled in his Grammatical Doubts that h “is aware of the problematic status of the Latin “letter,” and in a no letter,” subsequently adding: “it is a totally useless mark passage of his Attic Nights he devoted a chapter to the ques- of breath” (in his reformed spelling, nota di fiat t talmente ω ω tion of its presence at the beginning of selected words in the zioSa).15 ω language. It was, he argued, an entirely gratuitous addition, The grammarians of French and Spanish seem to have made by the Romans of ancient times who had wanted to been more moderate in their judgments of the old aspirate. increase the “force and vigor” (firmitas et vigor) of certain Like the Italian Humanists, they were of course aware of its expressions and, at the same time, to recall the characteris- singularity as a sign. In his 1529 Champ Fleury: Art and Sci- tic accents of the classical Athenians. “The letter H,” Aulus ence of the True Proportion of Letters, Geofroy de Tory, for wrote, example, qualified h as “neither a Vowel, nor a Consonant, nor a Mute, nor a Liquid, and by consequence no Letter at or perhaps it should be called a spirit rather than a let- all.”16 And in his ground-breaking Book of the Differences of ter—was added by our forefathers to give strength and vigor Languages and the Variety of the French Language of 1533, to the pronunciation of many words, in order that they might Charles de Bovelles remarked of the sound indicated by the have a fresher and livelier sound; and this they seem to have mark that “one barely notices it on the lips of the French, done from their devotion to the Attic language, and under its unless the eyes come to the aid of the confused and almost influence. It is well known that the people of Attica, contrary ‘ indistinct perception of the ears.”17 But the philologists to the usages of the other Greek races, said hikhthus (ιγθύς, ‘ nowhere suggested that h be removed from the script of fish), hippos (ιππος), and many other words besides, aspirating the first letter. In the same way our ancestors said the language. Antonio de Nebrija, the first grammarian of lachrumae (tears), sepulchrum (burial-place), ahenum (of Spanish, justified the modern use of the figure in systematic bronze), vehemens (violent), incohare (begin), helluari (gor- terms in his Rules of Orthography in the Castilian Language mandize), hallucinari (dream), honera (burdens), honustum of 1517. Going so far as to treat h as a letter in its own right, (burdened). For in all these words there seems to be no rea- he argued that it “held” no fewer than “three offices” in the son for that letter, or breathing, except to increase the force modern language, in addition to recalling the aspirations and vigor of the sound by adding certain sinews, so to speak. that had once been sounded in Latin. It marked the Spanish (In his words, enim verbis omnibus litterae seu spiritus istius successor of the Latin f (as in hago, which represents the nulla ratio visa est, nisi ut firmitas et vigor vocis quasi quibus- modern form of facio); it helped in several cases to separate dam nervis intenderetur.)12 the vowel and the consonant, marking a vocalic u (as in huerto [uerto]); and, finally, when placed after c, it indicated A graphic sign with no semantic “reason” of its own, h “that sound that is proper to Spain, for which we have no had clearly become in Aulus’ time a thing of some mystery. other letters, mucho, muchacho” (in modern linguistic terms,
The erstwhile aspirate phoneme was, at least by the second the constrictive consonant [ ]).18 ч century AD, a breath in need of explanation. The threatened mark found at least as many friends Since it had been marked by an orthographic figure and in early modern England. Modern English, to be sure, had identified as such by the grammatical authorities of classical erected itself over the tomb of Anglo-Saxon aspiration. By and late antiquity, the ancient “breather” did not vanish in the sixteenth century, the modern l had completely eclipsed the centuries that followed the demise of the Roman Empire. the older hl- (as loaf had taken the place, for example, of It persisted in the written language of the schools and uni- the Old English hla-f), the solitary n- was well established versities of the Middle Ages; and even those such as Petrus there where hn- had once dwelt (nut, for instance, being the Helias who, following Priscian, later denied it the status of modern form of hnutu), and the single r- had acquired all a “letter,” did not go so far as to question its place in the rights over those positions that had belonged to the hr- in - alphabet.13 The real challenge to the letter came later. With the older tongue (roof, in this way, having supplanted hrof).19 the emergence of the grammatical sciences of the modern The English grammarians, one could imagine, were perhaps European vernaculars in early modernity, the “spirit” unwilling to lose that last remnant of breath designated 58 suddenly found itself the object of the most critical by h. The first orthographers of the language were in any case united in their defense of the contested grapheme. Sir breath,” an act of unmotivated aggression against a being Thomas Smith, the author of the first published treatise on whom “speech-brooders [Sprachgrübler] have more than
English spelling (the De recta et emendata lingua anglicae once wished to recognize as a letter.”25 Why, the apologist scriptione of 1568), declared himself aware that “some wondered, had Damm so singled out h, among all the let- people, over fond of the Greek, have, as it were, expelled h ters, for reproach? Hamann recalled that if the letter’s fault from the senate of letters” (quidam nimium græcissantes, è lay in its unsoundedness, the double l, the double s (or ß), litterarum tanquam senatu moverunt),” and that still others and the double t, all unquestioned, would also have to go.26 had “replaced” it. Nevertheless, like Nebrija, he treated the He sketched the dire consequences that would surely issue sound alongside all the letters, maintaining that, “whether from such changes in the landscape of the German tongue: you choose to call it a letter or a spirit,” the English “use it “What fragmentation! What Babylonian confusion! What freely.”20 And in 1669, over a century later, Holder argued in hodge-podges of letters!”27 And he dismissed, in a gesture, a similar vein that even if certain authorities rejected h as a Damm’s attempt to convince his readers that “foreigners” letter in the full sense of the term, there were in truth good considered the Germans to be “barbarians” on account of grounds for its official and integral inclusion within the ter- their silent aitches. Did not the English, the French, and ritory of the English language: “in that it causes a sensible, the Latins before them all behave with the same “irre- and not incommodious discrimination of sound,” he wrote, sponsibility” (Unverantwortlichkeit) with the regard to the
“it ought to be annexed to the alphabet.”21 etymological h they too had inherited from antiquity? Well after the establishment of the canons of grammar At the end of his tract, the self-styled apologist revealed and spelling in the modern European vernaculars, the ques- that his commitment to the letter was an interested one, tion of the precise status of the elusively pure aspirate came in a double sense: it was, he explained, both professional to achieve a central place in the intellectual program of the and more intimate. Hamann now assumed a persona ficta, Enlightenment. In 1773, C. T. Damm, a distinguished theolo- claiming for himself the mask of a poor school-teacher, gian and disciple of Christian Wolff, published a “Reflection who wished nothing more, in his modest life, than to impart on Religion” in which he provided a reasoned and methodi- some sense of spelling to his three classes, who awaited cal critique of the traditional German practice of employing him with growing impatience even as he wrote. The author the grapheme in the middle and at the end of certain words, claimed, moreover, to be bound to the disputed grapheme where, he argued, it could not possibly reflect any conven- by his own Christian name: Heinrich. In fact, the pseud- tion of speech. “Universal, sound, and practical human onym, however, concealed the more pressing pertinence of reason,” Damm wrote, “authorizes our German minds newly the question for the author, who was far more profoundly to say how the letter h, which is never pronounced, came implicated in the entire affair than he wished to reveal. For to be inserted between syllables by careless, unthinking the thinker’s surname made him, quite literally, an “h man”: bread-writers and so-called pulpiteers [unachsamen, unbe- precisely a Ha-mann, as the German language has it, in both denkenden Brodtschreibern und so genannten Kanzellisten], spelling and sound. It was perhaps for this reason that the and to say that the aforementioned h must be done away apologist-author felt qualified, in the closing paragraph of his with [abgeschaffen], insofar as it is a useless, unfounded and essay, to give the last word to the contested character him- barbaric practice which is insulting to our nation in the eyes self. “The small letter h,” “Heinrich” now wrote, “may speak of all foreigners.”22 That more than “the aforementioned h” for himself, if there is any breath at all left in his nose.” So itself was at issue in such a “reflection” became particularly the “New Apology” proper ended, and thus began its appen- clear in the final lines of Damm’s polemic. Here the Protes- dix and conclusion: “The New Apology of the Letter H by tant theologian declared, in threatening terms, that “he who, Himself” (Neue Apologie des Buchstaben H von ihm selbst) in spelling, is unfaithful with respect to that little letter, h, is in which the aspirate briefly rehearsed the schoolmaster’s also, in the great revelations and mysteries of the universal, argument, defending himself at last, not without certain sound, and practical human religion, willingly unfaithful and traces of impatience, in his own name. “Do not be amazed,” unjust.”23 H explained, “that I address you with a human voice, like the Today Damm’s “Reflection” is best known on account dumb and encumbered beast, to punish you for your misde- of the response it provoked by one of the dissenting voices meanors. Your life is what I am—a breath!”28 of the age, Johann Georg Hamann, who quickly came to the In the course of the long and repeatedly threatened defense of the grapheme in a “New Apology for the Letter life of h, Hamann’s apology was hardly the last. A little over H” also published in 1773. Accepting the challenge of what a century later, Karl Kraus, to name only one of the graph- he called an “orthographic duel” (orthographischer Zwei- eme’s other great defenders, composed a poetic memorial kampf),24 Hamann reflected on the two reasons adduced for the fallen letter, “Elegy on the Death of a Sound” by his adversary for the proposed spelling reform: that h is (“Elegie auf den Tod eines Lautes”), whose opening stanza not pronounced; and that, when unsounded but written, it sounded the following passionate injunction: “May the God cannot but bring disgrace upon the German nation among of language protect this h!” (Daß Gott der Sprache dieses h the peoples of Europe. Hamann concluded that both reasons behüte!).29 But the eighteenth-century essay was perhaps were spurious. Damm’s proposal, it followed, was the first vindication of the sign on its own terms, as it were, 59 a barely disguised “crusade against an innocent neither as a consonant nor as a vowel but as the singular being it had been held to be since the inception of gram- 12 The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellus, trans. John C. Rolfe (Cambridge: Harvard University matical learning in classical antiquity: a written “breath.” In Press, 1984), pp.128-29. this defense of the obsolescent mark, there spoke, if only 13 See Petrus Helias, Summa super Priscianum, ed. Leo Reilly (Toronto: Pontifical once, and if only in a whisper, the most illustrious member Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1993), vol. I, p. 83: “H littera non est, sed cum aspirationis of the company of dead letters: the one letter of the spirit. nota propter solam figuram in abecedario scribitur intra litteras.” One might also call it the spirit of every letter. For there is 14 Trattati sull’ortografia del volgare, 1524-1526, ed. Brian Richardson (Exeter, Devon: no written sign, however widely recognized its rights and University of Exeter, 1984), p. 95. however well respected its functions, whose sound does 15 Giovan Giorgio Trissino, Scritti linguistici, ed. Alberto Castelvecchi (Rome: Salerno not pass through the mute medium of the “rough breather”; Editrice, 1986), “I Dubbî grammaticali,” p. 110. there is none that does not come into being and fade away 16 Geofroy Tory, Champ Fleury, Art et science de la vraie proportion des letters into nothingness in the aspiration and exhalation designated (facsimile reproduction of the 1567 edition, Paris: Bibliothèque de l’Image, 1998), Iiij. by letter now called aitch. H, to paraphrase a poet who once 17 Charles de Bovelles, Sur les langues vulgaires et la variété de la langue française, removed it from his name, is the trace that our breathing Liber de differentia linguarum et Gallici sermonis varietate (1533), ed. Colette Dumont- leaves in language.30 That is perhaps why, in one way or Deamizière (Paris: Klincksieck, 1973), Chapter 32, De nota aspirationis H. another, it will not leave us: the rhythms of its appearances 18 Antonio de Nebrija, Reglas de orthografía en la lengua castellana, ed. Antonio Quilis and disappearances are those of the inevitable, if irregular, (Bototá: Publicaciones del Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1977), pp. 139-140. expirations of our own speech. 19 See Knud Schibsbye, Origin and Development of the English Language, vol. I: Phonology (Copenhagen: Nordisk Sprog- og Kulturforlag, 1972), pp. 96-97. 20 Sir Thomas Smith, Literary and Linguistic Works, ed. Bror Danielsson, part III: 1 On the development of Greek scripts, see L. H. Jeffrey, The Local Scripts of Attic A Critical Edition of De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione, Dialogus Greece: A Study of the Oirgin of the Greek Alphabet and its Development from the (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International, 1963), p. 108. Eighth to the Fifth Centuries B.C., revised with a supplement by A. W. Johnston 21 Holder, 1669, p. 68, cited in John Wallis, Grammar of the English Language, with an (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 24-25 and, on the vau, pp. 326-327. introductory grammatico-physical Treatise on Speech (or on the formation of all speech 2 On the continental g, see Thomas Pyles and John Algeo, The Origins and Development sounds), ed. and trans. J. A. Kemp (London: Longman, 1982), p. 59. of the English Language (4th ed., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993), 22 See Johann Georg Hamann, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Joseph Nadler vol. III: Schriften pp. 139-140; on English orthography more generally, see D. G. Scragg, A History über Sprache, Mysterien, Vernunft 1772-1788 (Wuppertal: R. Brockhaus; Tübingen: of English Spelling (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974). Antiquariat H.P. Willi, 1999), “Neue Apologie des Buchstaben h,” pp. 89-108, p. 91. 3 On the Old Church Slavonic alphabet, see, among others, August Leskien and 23 Ibid. A. Rottmann, Handbuch der altbulgarischen (altkirchenslavischen) Sprache: Grammatik, 24 Ibid., p. 92. Texte, Glossar (11th ed., Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2002), pp. 9-19. 25 Ibid. 4 Heinrich Heine, Werke, ed. Helmut Schanze, vol. IV: Schriften über Deutschland 26 Ibid., p. 94. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1968), p. 558. Heine also has the letter h also appear in a 27 Ibid. dream to the poet Yehuda Halevi: see “Jehuda ben Halevy,” Hebräische Melodien, 28 Ibid., p. 105. Book III, in Werke, vol. I: Gedichte, ed. Christoph Siegrist (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1968), 29 Karl Kraus, Schriften, ed. Christain Wagenknecht, vol. 9: Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: pp. 199-226. Suhrkamp, 1989), pp. 40-44, p. 40. 5 See W. Sidney Allen, Vox Graeca: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Greek (3rd 30 See Paul Celan, né Antschel, Werke: Tübinger Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Wertheimer, ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 52-56, on which the following Der Meridian: Endfassung – Entwürfe – Materialen, ed. Bernhard Böschenstein and summary is based. Heino Schmull, with Michael Schwazkopf and Christine Wittkop (Frankfurt am Main: 6 W. Sidney Allen, Vox Latina: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin (2nd ed., Suhrkamp, 1999), p. 115: “The poem: the trace of our breathing in language [or speech]” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 43. For what follows, I am indebted to (Das Gedicht: die Spur unseres Atems in der Sprache). Allen’s economical summary, pp. 43-45. 7 Institutio oratoria, I, iv, 9; I, v, 19. 8 Prisician, I, viii, 47. Cf. Mar. Vict., vi, 5: “H quoque adspirationis notam, non litteram existimamus.” 9 See Allen, Vox Latina, pp. 43-44. 10 Catullus, Tibullus, Pervegilium Veneris, trans. F. W. Cornish, J. P. Postgate, J. W. Mack- ail, 2nd ed., revised by G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), LXXXIV, pp. 160-162: “Chommoda dicebat, si quando commode vellet dicere, et insidias Arrius hinsidias, / et tum mirifice sperabat se esse locutum, / cum quantum poterat dixerat hinsidias”; “Arrius if he wantedto say ‘winnings’ used to say ‘whinnings,’ and for ‘ambush’ ‘hambush;’ and thought he had spoken wonderfully well whenever he said ‘hambush’ with as much emphasis as possible.” 11 Confessions, I, ch. 18: “uide, domine…quomodo diligenter a prioribus locutoribus…; ut qui illa sonorum uetera placita teneat aut doceat, si contra disciplinam grammaticam sine adspiratione primae syllabae ominem dixit, displiceat magis hominibus quam si opposite: Robert Bowen, Wave and Beached, 2004 contra tua praecepta hominem oderit”; English in Augustine, Confessions, page 62: Robert Bowen, Reclaimed Mine and Diversion Tunnel, 2004 60 trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin Books, 1961), pp. 38-39. page 63: Robert Bowen, Airport and Depression, 2004 return to sender robert bowen
Even The Trees Would Leave stretches of land with a lucrative business plan. At last, H. Lan Thao Lam & Lana Lin Hong Kong reclaims its own land. Not long ago, no one could bring sports equipment into these areas for fear that
August 23, 2008 it would be turned into weapons; now even without a club She watches a special story, broadcast as part of the televi- membership, for HK$40 she can drive unlimited balls for half sion coverage for the Olympics, detailing the history of golf. an hour. Nets as high as the former barbed wire fences A Chinese professor asserts that golf can be traced back to as now restrain high-flying golf balls. She stares at the row early as tenth-century China, though it is popularly thought of golfers’ silhouettes that adorn the bathroom, monotone to originate from Scotland. She examines a Ming dynasty and unresisting. This is how they wanted the refugees—as treasure hanging in Beijing’s Palace Museum. The painting’s mute and abiding as these painted figures. This is not the five elegantly dressed court women, playing what appears bathroom that served thousands of Vietnamese. It is air- to be a game of golf, disproves the acronym Gentleman Only conditioned, clean, too small. Ladies Forbidden. Chui (to hit, strike, or whack) Wan (ball) was apparently the Imperial Palace maids’ favorite past time. July 28, 2001 The painting looks easily as if it could have been altered. This She flips through a special issue of Refugees magazine would not be too far-fetched for her to imagine, given China’s celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations ceaseless drive to claim the origins of practically every facet Convention on Human Rights. The black and white photo of civilization. of the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention is typical of such legal ceremonies: nineteen men and three women gather June 20, 2005 around a central figure putting weight into his official Her family convenes for a reunion on a Malaysian island stamp. This is the document that protected her sister when hosted by Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie. Any Vietnamese were considered more desirable. Her brother site can become a tourist site, she thinks, any day a was not as lucky. commemoration.
June 20, 2001 January 17, 2004 The UN General Assembly adopts a resolution to celebrate Finals of the amateur Hole-in-One competition take place at World Refugee Day on June 20. Golf & Fun Driving Range, Whitehead, Hong Kong. A hole- in-one earns HK$1 million.1 She might also win a car. The May 31, 2000 publicity pamphlet asks: “Overwhelmed by routine? Longed Hong Kong’s last Vietnamese refugee camp—Pillar Point for fresh air, sunshine, and getting some exercise? With Vietnamese Refugees Centre, Tuen Mun—closes at midnight. magnificent ocean view, Golf & Fun is your place of desire.” She hears that there are proposals to turn it into a crema- Golf is not just an elegant sport to her. She practices her torium, a theme park, or a botanical garden. The last of the swing because it oils business relations. 230,000 Vietnamese that have passed through Hong Kong are free to “stand on their own feet.” December 26, 2003 She steps off the bus, and notices the sign: Pillar Point March 3, 2000 Refugee Camp. She is surprised that they have not changed She encounters the term “land reclamation” in the Hong the name of the bus stop, since the camp has been closed Kong Museum of History in an exhibit called “Hong Kong for several years. She ventures to the New Territories for Story.” She reads about how Hong Kong re-claims land for “Sleepout Hong Kong” at River Trade Golf Driving Range commercial use, and asks aloud, “reclaims it from what?” and BBQ Centre, Tuen Mun. The Sleepout invites everyone In unison, an elderly, distinguished Asian couple responds to help needy children in China who have not had a chance from across the hall: “from the sea.” to learn how to write their own names. “Build your own cardboard shelter. Enjoy the company of your friends and February 22, 2000 co-workers for one night. For HK$290, you will be provided The Widened Local Resettlement Scheme is initiated, with bread and water, so that you can experience the hard- allowing 1400 VRs and VMs2 who have no prospects for ships that children in our Motherland face.” acceptance elsewhere to apply for resettlement in Hong Kong. Removal allowance ranges from HK$3,950 to $11,410. October 8, 2003 Entering the recreation site, she’s greeted by a towering golf January 9, 1998 ball at least two feet taller than she is. Cars pull in for the The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government preliminary rounds of the HK$1 million Hole-in-One shootout abolishes the “Port of First Asylum” policy. Vietnamese illegal at Golf & Fun Driving Range, Whitehead. Had the Hole-in- arrivals after this date are treated as illegal immigrants, as One sponsors noticed the footprint left from a structure that opposed to refugees. was once called the biggest prison in the world? 65 An entrepreneur nabbed these vast unoccupied July 1, 1997 July 2,1982 The Government of the United Kingdom transfers sovereignty “Closed camps” are set up to deter more Vietnamese from over Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China. This is flooding Hong Kong like a wave. She must give up her job at also the deadline China announces for the complete removal the hotel and clean the camp kitchen instead. of VMs from Hong Kong. September 23, 1981 January 3, 1997 Grim faces greet the news that Hong Kong will no longer In Calgary, Canada, she reads the headline: “Saga of grant automatic asylum. It is Wednesday and they dine on Vietnamese Boat People Nears End.” Whitehead Detention chicken wings as usual. This morning her uncle was given Centre, where she spent almost twelve years of her life, his “first chicken wing”. In camp lingo this means he will not closes. At the height of the refugee influx, it contained fly to the West on a real jet wing; with chicken wings one 29,000 asylum-seekers. cannot fly. But he will appeal to the Refugee Status Review Board. He has two more tries before he is sent back.
May 10, 1996 Another massive riot breaks out at Whitehead in protest May 15, 1980 against forced repatriation. Over 500 tear gas canisters are She squats in line with the others, a first of many lines: emptied. Fortunately, some families had the idea of making waiting to identify herself, waiting for the bathroom, waiting gas masks out of knitted hoods with plastic drink bottles cut for cans of beans, instant noodles, and Tang. A well-known out as visors. Vietnamese song is amplified and distorted through loud- speakers: “Tomorrow you leave; the sea remembers your
February 3, 1994 name; calls it to return...” The song was banned both in President Clinton lifts the nineteen-year US trade embargo North and South Vietnam, but here it is played freely each on Vietnam. time fellow campmates leave for their new countries. When she hears it after eighteen days at sea—her seventh attempt
November 1, 1991 to flee—she could not hold back her tears. The sea may As a result of the Orderly Repatriation Programme, her plastic remember her name, but on this land, she is just one of thou- shopping bag is packed with clothes collected from dona- sands of boat people. In the sea, she had placed all her hopes tions. Some people dress in their best clothes. Two days ago for an unknown future. From inside the camp, the sea is what they wore the same outfits for group photos. This time they separates her from the free world. didn’t smuggle the film out to be developed. It will be done more cheaply in Vietnam. She waits with fifty-nine others April 30, 1976 to be repatriated. At the airport, Hong Kong Correctional For the first anniversary of the fall of Saigon, her father gives Services Officers form a barricade lest anyone try to escape. the children a lesson on the Law of the Sea. Preparing to The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees will escape Vietnam, they should know their rights. She likes the give her US$50 when she registers in Vietnam. sound of “Eleanor of Aquitaine”—the woman who brought admiralty law to England; its syllables come out of her mouth
June 16, 1988 like a poem. She wonders whether Eleanor became interest- All VMs arriving in Hong Kong undergo mandatory ed in the law of the seas because her name refers to water. screening to determine whether they are genuine refugees Her sisters copy maps and flags of different countries from or economic migrants. “Non-refugees” are repatriated to the back of a Larousse French dictionary for their father to Vietnam. She has managed to learn a little bit of English, navigate their journey. but they keep introducing new words. She cannot hear their words. Encamped on an unused military airstrip, she hears May 4, 1975 only the roar of jets flying overhead. Will she ever board one The Communist takeover of the South precipitates a massive of them? Heading west or east? exodus from Vietnam. Those departing tear away from their ancestral roots. People say even the trees would leave if they
April 16, 1985 could. The Danish container ship Clara Maersk containing A volunteer lectures her on the competition for land in Hong 3,743 Vietnamese refugees enters Hong Kong’s waters. Kong. To these tiny 1100 square kilometers of land, crowded with 6.8 million people, piled in high-rises standing on an artificial shoreline fashioned out of rubbish and imported 1 US $1 = HK $7.8 soil, thousands of Vietnamese have fled. Hong Kong receives 2 According to the Hong Kong government’s official acronym, VR is a Vietnamese them under the “Port of First Asylum” policy. refugee and VM is a Vietnamese migrant.
66
LAUGHTER TEARS OF LAUGHTER Laughter was considered vulgar in the eighteenth century Christopher Turner as well, a variant of contempt, and decorum dictated that it should be strictly regulated. In a letter to his son in 1748, “Between the expressions of laughter and weeping there the moralist Lord Chesterfield proclaimed, “In my mind there is no difference in the motion of the features,” Leonardo is nothing so illiberal and so ill-bred as audible laughter,” da Vinci wrote in his posthumously published Treatise on especially by virtue of “the disagreeable noise that it makes, Painting, “either in the eyes, mouth or cheeks.” With the and the shocking distortion of the face that it occasions.” difference between the physical expression of emotions In his Laocoön (1766), Gotthold Lessing describes a portrait so subtle, artists had a challenge on their hands: How to of the philosopher and libertine Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, differentially depict, in the words of Sir Joshua Reynolds, in which he is depicted as Democritus, or the “laughing the “frantic joy of a Bacchante and the grief of a Mary philosopher.” For Lessing, the philosopher’s gaping mouth Magdalen”? is a worrying stain; the laugh degenerates into a foppish To do so, artists relied on a staged iconography of and repulsive grin, which fills him, he writes, with “disgust expression and posture, codified in handbooks such as and horror.” In The Analysis of Beauty (1753), William Charles Le Brun’s A Method to Learn to Design the Passions Hogarth complained, in a similar vein, that “excessive (1667), in which Le Brun adapted Descartes’s Passions of the laughter, oftener than any other, gives a sensible face Soul (1649) into a visual lexicon of twenty-four emotions. a silly or disagreeable look, as it is apt to form regular pain Here, a menacing portrayal of the laughing face immediately lines about the mouth, like a parenthesis, which sometimes precedes the illustration of a crumpled, crying one, almost appears like crying.” as if the expressions were modulations of one another, but Nearly half a millennium after Leonardo, contemporary with certain differences artificially accentuated, especially scientists have discovered a neurological explanation for in relation to the ruffling of the brow. Thus Le Brun created the affinity between physical expressions and emotional a stylized, histrionic vocabulary of the passions easily sensations of joy and grief. In the centuries between, scien- recognizable as tragic or comic on both canvas and stage. tists took over where artists left off in urgently pursuing the Despite such expert guidance in the depiction of laughter, in the history of art there are very few images above: The Swedish photographer Oscar Rejlander mimicking the facial of people laughing. Le Brun, who was painter to the king at expression of Ginx’s Baby, as his portrait of a screaming infant was known. Versailles, systematized the passions amid an atmosphere On the back of these photographs, which were taken for Charles Darwin, of courtly restraint, as if by categorizing these Rejlander wrote: “There I laughed! Ha! Ha! Ha!… In the other I cried—e, e, e, e, … 69 turbulent invasions he could tame them. Yet how similar the expression.” Courtesy Darwin Archives. question. Charles Darwin notably fused the two approaches, embarked on an infamous series of experiments in an effort using the art of photography to further his scientific inquiry. to explain the workings of facial musculature. His process In order to formulate The Expression of the Emotions in Man involved administering a constant flow of electric current to and Animals (1872) with scientific veracity, Darwin broke human facial muscles, which contorted the face into various with both schematic artistic representations of the passions expressions and held them long enough for photographs and aristocratic conventions preventing extreme displays of to be taken. emotion. He hoped to use photography to portray emotional Duchenne took as his primary subject “an old, toothless subtleties—like the close similarity between the laughing man, with a thin face, whose features, without being abso- and crying face—with a renewed realism. lutely ugly, approached ordinary triviality and whose facial Capturing particular expressions, inherently transitory, expression was in perfect agreement with his inoffensive volatile, and ephemeral, at first seemed almost impossible character and his restricted intelligence.” The man suffered with the long exposure time photography then required. from palsy, which paralyzed his face and made him impervi- (Eadweard Muybridge had only just begun his experiments ous to the pain of the electricity. Using his electrical devices, recording sequences of a horse in motion the year Expres- Duchenne could “fake” emotions in his subject, activating sion came out.) Darwin described the spasms a laughing and fixing expressions without inflicting torture, as though fit provoked, which would have rendered any photograph he were, as he put it, “working with a still irritable cadaver.” a blur: “During excessive laughter the whole body is often The results are disturbing; the use of electrodes, and the thrown backward and shakes, or is almost convulsed. The hands that hold them in place toward the bottom of the respiration is much disturbed; the head and face become frame, create a distinct impression of sadism. Darwin must gorged with blood, with the veins distended; and the orbicu- have noted this, for in his book, the hands are only visible lar muscles are spasmodically contracted in order to protect in the plates depicting benign expressions such as the smile; the eyes. Tears are freely shed,” he noted, appending a key observation, “Hence... it is scarcely possible to point out any above: Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne stimulating facial muscles with difference between the tear-stained face of a person after a electrodes in order to illustrate certain expressions. The subject suffered from paroxysm of excessive laughter and after a bitter crying-fit.” palsy and had no feeling in his face. In the right-hand photograph two different Darwin found a ready-made solution to the problem emotions are illustrated in a single expression: “moderate crying” on the left, of how to capture raw expression in a set of extraordinary and “fake laughter” on the right. pictures taken by the French doctor Guillaume Duchenne opposite: Joseph Wolf’s drawings of a monkey, which he entitled Cynopithecus de Boulogne and reproduced in his book, Mécanismes de niger, in a Placid Condition, and The same titillated by sitting on a crawling la physiognomie humaine (1862). Duchenne prac- turtle. Both were reproduced in Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the 70 ticed medicine at the Salpêtrière hospital, where he Emotions in Man and Animals. Courtesy Darwin Archives. indeed, for the picture Darwin used to illustrate horror and Why would the uncanny similarity between the expressions agony, he instructed the engraver to remove the menacing of laughter and crying have so intrigued Darwin? In short, electrical apparatus and the hands that press it to the skin. it helped confirm his theory of evolution. Darwin thought In one of Duchenne’s pictures, which Darwin refers to that monkeys, like humans, laughed. In this, he disagreed but does not reproduce (Plate 48 of the Mécanismes), Duch- with Aristotle, who claimed that humans were the only crea- enne galvanized each side of his subject’s—or victim’s—face tures who laughed. Darwin’s purpose was to show that the with a different expression: one half is given a fake smile; expressive facial muscles had evolved from animals and that the other is made to weep. Duchenne’s intention was to therefore man was not a separate, divinely created species. show that the similarity of the two expressions stemmed Duchenne kept a pet monkey and reported to Darwin that from the underlying musculature in the marked naso-labial he’d often seen it smile, but Darwin relied on his own empiri- fold, which runs from the wings of the nostrils to the cor- cal experiments to argue that primates laughed as well. “If ners of the mouth, wrinkling both cheeks, and which is a a young chimpanzee be tickled—the armpits are particularly characteristic of both the laughing and crying face. Darwin sensitive to tickling, as in the case of our children—a more was apparently less than impressed with the results of this decided chuckling or laughing sound is uttered,” Darwin particular experiment: “Almost all those (viz. nineteen out of wrote, “Young Orangs, when tickled, likewise grin and make twenty-one persons) to whom I showed the smiling half of a chuckling sound and . . . their eyes grow brighter.” the face instantly recognized the expression,” Darwin wrote, Along the way, however, Darwin noted that apes didn’t “but, with respect to the other half, only six persons out of shed any tears when they laughed. To prove that tears of twenty-one recognized it—that is, if we accept such terms laughter were a definitively human feature, Darwin, a keen as ‘grief,’ ‘misery,’ ‘annoyance,’ as correct.” armchair anthropologist, sent a questionnaire to a number Darwin then turned to the Swedish photographer of colonial functionaries in the far outreaches of the British Oscar Rejlander, who taught photography to Julia Margaret Empire, asking “whether tears are freely shed during exces- Cameron and Lewis Carroll, to investigate these similarities sive laughter by most of the races of men.” The answer and differences. Rejlander was famous for his large, alle- was affirmative. Sir Andrew Smith had seen “the painted gorical photographs and self-portraits; he once portrayed face of a Hottentot woman all furrowed with tears after a himself in a toga and with a leering grin as Democritus, the fit of laughter”; Rajah C. Brooke reported that the Dyaks of laughing philosopher who had so offended Lessing. At the Borneo had an expression which meant “we nearly made invitation of Darwin, Rejlander posed for four photographs in Expression. He even had his moustache trimmed so as not to obstruct the pantomimic grimaces and decorous gestures he acted out for the camera. But his most famous contribu- tion was his picture of a screaming child, known as Ginx’s Baby, illustrating the chapter on “Low spirits, anxiety, grief, dejection, despair.” Rejlander sold 300,000 prints of this photograph, which almost single-handedly kept his foundering studio afloat. In the Darwin archive at the University of Cambridge there is a photograph of Rejlander next to Ginx’s Baby. The famous image rests on an easel and by it sits the photog- rapher, mimicking his subject’s expression, his arm around the picture of the baby. Another, almost identical picture appears alongside it, like a stereoscopic slide. “Fun, only,” he wrote on the back of the photograph, “There I laughed! Ha! Ha! Ha! Violently—In the other I cried—e, e, e, e,... Yet how similar the expression.” It is almost impossible to tell them apart. Also in the Darwin archive is a slide produced by the London Stereoscopic Company that depicts two sculptures by Adolphe Itasse of babies in bonnets, one crying, the other laughing. Normally, a stereoscopic slide would contain two identical images, which would create a 3-D effect when seen through the viewfinder. Here, however, the two sculp- tures would appear superimposed, their expressions blurring into each other. The composite image would flicker between the two emotional extremes like a hologram.
71 • • • tears from laughter”; and Mr. Swinhoe informed him that of scientists in white lab coats, who began to crack up too the Chinese, more curiously, “when suffering from deep because her laughter was contagious. grief, burst out into hysterical fits of laughter.” By poking about in this adolescent girl’s head, neu- Darwin’s efforts to wring various emotions from our roscientists had discovered, by mistake, what they called evolutionary forefathers were tireless. As well as tickling the “laughter center,” a piece of the brain roughly one inch apes under the armpits, he gave snuff to chimpanzees to square, in which our sense of humor seems to be located. make them sneeze, made faces at orangutans, and watched The 65-year-old woman’s mind revealed what one might baboons recoil in horror from a stuffed snake. One such term, by extension, the “crying center,” source of all our experiment involved hiding a turtle under a heap of straw in misery and grief. It turns out these points abut each other London Zoo’s monkey cage. Darwin was hoping to shock in the left-frontal lobe of the brain, and their close proximity the monkeys, thereby evoking expressions of astonishment provided neuroscientists with a clue as to why laughing and or terror. The animal illustrator Joseph Wolf, who Darwin crying are so interconnected. claimed had “an eye like photographic paper,” was on hand Whereas Darwin had sought to explain away the conflu- to record the results: “The Monkeys suspected something ence in terms of excess nervous energy—“It is probably due and kept looking down from on high,” Wolf wrote in his to the close similarity of the spasmodic movements caused memoir, “Clever fellows! I shall never forget that. The keeper by these widely different emotions,” he wrote, “that hysteric then retired, and presently the heap of straw began to move. patients alternately cry and laugh with violence, and that The turtle came out, and instead of showing fear, the Mon- young children sometimes pass suddenly from the one to keys crept nearer. The back-crested ape came and looked the other state”—contemporary scientists have found an at it, and walked in front of the turtle as it crept under him. answer in the very bedrock of the brain. Among the sources Finally he went and sat on the Turtle. Darwin was much of their discovery is a rare disorder known as Pathological amused, and asked for a drawing of the incident.” Laughter and Crying (PLC), which was first diagnosed in the The sketch of the scene is illustrated in Expression early twentieth century. The condition illustrates the jumble as Cynopithecus niger, in a placid condition, and the same of the two emotions in startlingly graphic form: patients suf- titillated by sitting on a crawling turtle. The monkey who is fering from PLC suddenly burst into Tourettic fits of giggles riding the turtle is depicted with his impressive crest of hair or tears. flattened back, and with the corners of his mouth drawn One well-documented case of PLC is that of a 51-year- backwards to reveal a frightening set of chattering teeth old landscape gardener, referred to simply as C.B. by his with which, according to Darwin, he was making a “slight doctor, Antonio Damasio. C.B. suffered a mild stroke in 1999 jabbering noise.” Only “those familiar with the animal,” that damaged both his brainstem and the cerebellum, which Darwin admitted, could be absolutely sure he was not baring neurologists now believe controls the laughter and crying his teeth but grinning with happiness. Years later Wolf added centers, adjusting behavior to the appropriate context. As a a skeptical note to his sketch: “I never believed the fellow result, he’d laugh riotously in response to sad news and sob was laughing, although Darwin said he was.” irrepressibly in response to a joke—or, indeed, in response to anything at all. A laughing fit would sometimes turn into a • • • crying one, but never vice versa, and the patient noted that after a long bout of laughter or crying, he would eventually Five years ago, at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, where feel correspondingly jolly or sad. Neuroscientists concluded Duchenne had distorted faces with a galvanized rod, that “feelings were being produced, consonant with the Professor Yves Agid implanted an electrode into the brain of emotional expression, and in the absence of any appropriate a 65-year-old woman in the hope of discovering a cure for stimulus.” In other words, one can manufacture or summon her Parkinson’s disease. The electric current would some- up an emotion, much as an actor might, by assuming the times alleviate her symptoms, but this time something quite desired expression. If this is so, one can only imagine the unexpected happened. A melancholy expression came over internal pleasures or horrors experienced, while scientists the patient, her head slumped forward, and she tilted to the and philosophers preoccupied themselves with the surface right. She began sobbing uncontrollably. “I no longer wish of things, by Duchenne’s paralyzed old man. to live, to see anything, hear anything, feel anything,” she wept, “I’m fed up with life.” With another flick of the switch her dark mood was immediately lifted. She smiled and said apologetically, “What was all that about?” In Los Angeles, California, around the same time, another surgeon, Itzhak Fried, inserted the tip of an elec- trode into the skull of a 16-year-old girl to investigate her severe case of epilepsy. When a low voltage was applied she began to smile. As it increased she started giggling, until opposite: A stereoscopic slide of two sculptures by Adolphe Itasse. The laugh- finally she fell about in paroxysms of laughter. “You ing and crying infants would blur together when looked at through the view- 72 guys are just so funny,” she guffawed at the team finder. Courtesy Darwin Archives.
Stimuli eliciting smiling AND laughing in children at different ages
AGE STIMULI ELICITING SMILING STIMULI ELICITING LAUGHTER
Birth Stimulation of erogenous zones; Intra-organic stimulation; — Tickling, shaking, patting; Gentle rocking, turning on stomach
First Month State of comfort on waking; Normal digestive function; — Tickling under chin; Nursing
First Week Tickled on Cheek; Comfort; Father
Second Week Preceding regurgitation; Bright light —
Third Week Persons Nursing
Fourth Week Contentment; Talking or mimicry; Touch of nipple on — cheek; Hand and arm shaken playfully; Curtain drawn back from cradle
Second Month State of comfort; Adult smiles, domestic baby talk; Laughing, prattle, and comfort Exteroceptive stimuli substituted for intraorganic ones
Fifth Week Dropping asleep after feeding; During sleep; Pleasant — looks; Physical comfort after sleep
Sixth Week Persons; Squeaking sound; Pleasure when looking at mother Persons; Incipient laugh
Eighth Week Mood lasting all day; Rubbing with oil; Sweet high-pitched Artificial light; Tickling on belly; talk—lively face; Silver rattle; Social stimulation; Peek-a-boo Varied motion of his own or another’s body (cloth over subject’s face)
Ninth Week Mirror image Presence of grown-ups; Taking nourishment
Third month Friendly looks; Mirror image; Adult conversation; Gestures; Social stimulation Mirror image of aunt; Pinch on nose or cheek; Rhythmical knee drop
Fourth Month Nods, prattles, cuddling; Tumbling about; tossed in air; Boisterous play or frolic; Adult uncovered face and slid down knees; Sister’s antics; Satiety; Sneeze; approached; Droll, meaningless sound; Mother saying Pinafore over face withdrawn; Mirror image; Threatening things in a funny way; Mirror image; Threatening head head; Elevator play; Tickling
Fifth Month High pitched question; Piano; Sister’s antics; Aunt “Joy” stimulation; Rhythmical hand clapping; Rhythmical appearing frequently through closed doors; Good health knee dropping; Elevator Play; Sudden reappearance of and high spirits; Peek-a-boo (cloth between the examiner examiner from under table; Peek-a-boo; Tickling and the subject); Sudden reappearance from under table; Rhythmical hand clapping; Reappearance of examiner from cupboard; Special experimental apparatus
Sixth Month Kind smiling face; Peek-a-boo Experimenting with own body; Frolic with father, later same day, seeing father; Teasing (pulling father’s beard); Good health and high spirits; Smiles, nods, laughs, pats, tickles, jumping up and down, waving leaves, children jumping about, quick movements of toys or bright objects, near faces, kiss, children with balloons; When adults do; Sensations of laughter caused laughter; Great pleasure; Pulling sister’s hair; Sudden movements of one’s head, reappearance; Sudden movements of one’s head with ducking; Rhythmic motions or sounds ending in a jolt; Hearing or trying to say “papa” or ”poopoo”; Swinging or tossing to arms of another
Seventh Month Coquetry; Child’s name called by stranger; Gratified desire Other’s laughter; Looking sidelong; Pretending to disobey; Queer guttural sounds; Tickling; Outdoor; Expectation and surprise
Eighth Month Special smile for friends Sitting on a blanket in sun; Fruit juice; Bumps, if laughed with; Kitten (with fear signs also)
Ninth Month — New pleasing object; Creeping away from pursuers; Sudden reappearance of examiner from cupboard AGE STIMULI ELICITING SMILING STIMULI ELICITING LAUGHTER
Tenth Month — Very little laughter because of interest in self-activity; Letting go after pulling herself up
Eleventh Month Being allowed to walk; To attract attention to pleasure Long strides of nurse; Being laughed at; Blowing whistle in a peach (sense of power); Grasping at image; Creeping toward object and being pulled back
Twelfth Month — Purely physical cause, tickling; Appearance of intelligence; Prospect of being nursed; Quick play-like movements of heavy adults; Disorderliness in hair or dress of others, especially superiors; New noises (thunder, gargling); Special experimental apparatus
One to Three Years — Social stimuli
Two to Five Years Own success; Humorous situation or story; At others; Active play; Loud noise; Chair upset; Peculiar face or noise When others smiled at him made by other child; Others laughing; Taught to make others laugh; Own mistake; Other’s mistake; Unusual event and absurdities; Adult’s suggestion in funny story; Physical movement; Physical movement and verbal movement
Three to Five Years — Motion by self, objects or others; Noises by self, objects, or others; Socially unacceptable situations; Grimaces by self or others; Inferiority of others; Pleasure in occupation or accomplishments; Appreciation of humor; Word play; Imitative laughter; Make believe; General well being
Five Years — Visual type of humor
Three to Six Years Experimental situations involving: (a) surprise or defeated Same expectation; (b) Superiority and degradation; (c) Incongruity and contrast situations; (d) Social smile; (e) Relief from strain; (f) Play situations
Seven Years — Transition to elementary play upon words
Eight Years — Misfortunes of others; fairy stories
Nine Years — Funny stories and jokes
Twelve Years — Exaggeration
from Toronto University Studies Child Development Series, No. 7: A Study of Laughter in the Nursery School Child (1936), by William E. Blatz, Kathleen Drew Allin, and Dorothy A. Millichamp Laughter, Interrupted
“‘Tis good to laugh at any rate,” observed John Dryden, “and if a straw can tickle a man, it is an instrument of happiness.” The inspiration for the commissioned artist projects present- ed on the following pages began with a discussion within our editorial group about the causes of laughter. Could we ask artists to devise a machine—a sort of post-Industrial Revolution version of Dryden’s seventeenth-century piece of straw—that would act as an “instrument of happiness,” or, more specifically, cause laughter? What might it look like? How would it work, and what types of laughter might it provoke? Anticipating that the assignment might simply produce a succession of glorified Rube-Goldbergian tickling machines, we abandoned the idea. The question of laughter types, however, stuck. In the end, we invited a number of artists to choose a particular kind of laughter from a list provided by Cabinet and to deconstruct it—essentially to supply a “recipe” for the production of the given laughter type, a scenario that might suggest the conditions required for its creation without necessarily attempting to produce it in the readers themselves. What we hoped to get was something akin to explaining a joke without ever telling it. Perhaps predictably, no one chose “joyful.” “Sinister,” “ironic,” and “nervous” also went unclaimed. But Paul Chan, Lawrence Weiner, Matt Freedman, and Steven Brower picked right up on “rueful,” “cruel,” “malicious,” and “perverse,” respectively, sug- gesting that the straight-faced take on laughter holds little appeal nowadays. (The artists who chose “drug-induced” and “hysterical,” which might have lent a note of levity to our laughter types, are absent as their dogs ate their projects just before deadline.)
Artist: Paul Chan. Laughter type: rueful, 2005. Page 77 Artist: Lawrence Weiner. Laughter type: cruel, 2005. Page 86 Artist: Matt Freedman. Laughter type: malicious, 2005. Page 91 Artist: Steven Brower. Laughter type: perverse, 2005. Page 96
76 very funny: On Humor is in part, he says, the mirror image of his an interview with simon critchley previous book on tragedy, mourning, and death, Very Little, brian dillon Almost Nothing. But the latter is a curiously light-hearted book, the former actually rather dark: Critchley, in the end, In the early 1590s, in one of his short prose fragments is interested in what he calls, following Samuel Beckett, the entitled Paradoxes, the poet John Donne took apparent “mirthless laugh.” Simon Critchley is Professor of Philoso- exception to a certain traditional view of laughter as a sign phy in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social of foolishness. The essay conjectures “That a Wise Man is Research, New York. His other books include The Ethics of Known by Much Laughing.” Donne writes: “By much laugh- Deconstruction and Continental Philosophy: A Very Short ing thou mayst know there is a foole, not that the laughers Introduction. In 2004, he released a CD with John Sim- are fooles, but that amongst them there is some fool at mons entitled Humiliation. His new book, Things Merely Are, whome wise men laugh.” The notion of a wise ribaldry is sly- was published in March 2005. Brian Dillon spoke to him in ly overturned, however, in the second half of Donne’s text. London. Laughter, it turns out, is merely a function of the “supersti- tious civility of manners”: we laugh to let it be known to How and why does a philosopher become interested in those around us that we recognize folly when we see it. humor? Which is to say, according to a conventional affinity between laughter and abject deformity or even madness, that we I’ve got a theory of impossible objects; I’m attracted to become fools in order to prove ourselves wise. things that philosophy cannot appropriate or conceptual- True wisdom, philosophy has often insisted, is a ize. I’ve always been very drawn to the idea of philosophy, sober state, not given to laughing at others, nor (perhaps as a discourse, confronting things which resist it, and especially) at itself. But there also exists a long history of then watching what happens in that play of resistance and philosophical reflections on humor: from Aristotle’s lost attraction. And the three things I’ve focused on in the last sequel to the Poetics (in which he famously turned from few years have been humor, poetry, and music. I’ve got dif- tragedy to address the genre of comedy) to Freud’s reflec- ferent strategies of impossibility with all three, but one is tions on the obscene or tendentious witticism in Jokes the humor book: to write a book about humor from a philo- and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). Three broad sophical point of view. Humor in itself as a social practice is philosophical models for humor can be adduced from this what’s interesting. I’m convinced that there are deep philo- lineage: humor as the expression of a felt superiority, as the sophical insights yielded through the practice of humor. release of certain repressed psychological or social energies, and as the sudden, witty spark across the poles of an appar- Has that opposition between humor and philosophy always ent contradiction or incongruity. In his book On Humor, the been present in philosophy itself? philosopher Simon Critchley offers both a history of this
tradition and a meditation on the stark and less than above: George Humphrey’s print shop in St. James Street, 12 August 1821. 78 consoling truths which humor teaches. Caricature by Theodore Lane. It’s a very complicated issue, and there are different ways of humor as something jocular (and not as the doctrine of of telling the story. One story would be: the history of the humors in classical medicine) is tied to the development philosophy is the history of the repression of laughter, or of what we now think of as liberal democracy. The first the attempt to suppress laughter, and that suppression is theorist of humor is Shaftesbury—in his Characteristics of obviously there in Plato, in the Republic, where the guard- Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, in 1711—and his idea is that ians of the polis are not meant to laugh. That continues humor is a form of common sense—sensus communis—and into religious traditions, particularly monastic traditions, that it is something which civilized gentlemen in a demo- where it was initially proscribed for monks to laugh. So one cratic, Protestant culture have in common. What civilized philosophical strategy is the exclusion of laughter because gentlemen in a liberal democratic country share is this ability laughter is animalistic and bestial. Another strategy is to to exercise raillery. contain it conceptually, to write about it, and there are some remarks in Aristotle: this is what we would have had if we There seems, in that case, to be an analogy between humor had the second book of the Poetics, on comedy. and taste, the other category in that period which is also thought of as natural or intrinsic to the individual, but is at At the same time, the philosopher’s seriousness is tradition- the same time, of course, cultivated: a product of society ally an object for ridicule. and common sense.
Another story would be that nobody takes this story (of the The word that would translate humor in Latin in Cicero is philosophical exclusion of laughter) seriously; nobody in urbanitas; so humor is urbane, it’s urban, it’s a consequence their right minds.... Zizek has a wonderful analysis of totali- of city life, maybe even of metropolitan life. It’s what civi- tarianism: the usual liberal analysis of totalitarianism is that lized people do, share, have in common; so it’s very much it has to suppress laughter. Laughter is an unruly force, and like taste. The rise of taste and the rise of humor: you the great hero of this would be Bakhtin, who in Rabelais could probably plot similar genealogies for both concepts. and his World talks about the lower bodily stratum and the Certainly, in Shaftesbury, his whole aesthetic theory is a materiality of laughter; this is a site of popular resistance theory of taste. One place this goes is into Kant: taste for to totalitarianism. Zizek turns that on its head and says the him is something which is artificial, cultivated, but has to be thing about totalitarianism was that nobody ever took it universalizable. There has to be a universal voice, as he puts seriously. It was a joke, and the only people who took it seri- it, at work in judgments of taste: which is another way of ously were Western liberals who thought it was serious. You thinking about common sense; the universal voice would be could say very similar things about other, seemingly total- common sense. izing discourses, like Christianity, which has been an unruly, comic discourse. Its official discourse might be one thing; Is it possible to say how the shift is effected from humoral but nobody took that seriously, and you can take this all the theory to a theory of humor? The two meanings seem to way back to Plato. Does one take Plato’s exclusion of laugh- compete briefly in the seventeenth century. Why does the ter seriously? It’s really a moot point. In Plato’s dialogues, modern usage lose that earlier sense of physical, bodily or Socrates is the great ironist, the great comedian in a way, medical being? and the levels of irony in the dialogues are infinite. They’re certainly not meant to be read at face value at all; it’s as like- The first recorded usage, according to the OED, which of ly that these things are meant to invite ribaldry and laughter. course you should never believe, is in 1688. There’s obvi- ously a shift—in Elizabethan England, in Shakespeare or Your book is specifically on humor, rather than laughter or Jonson—from a man in his humor, in a certain mood, to the comic. Is it possible to separate these categories with something else. We know that shift happens in the sev- any real rigor? What does the idea of humor offer the phi- enteenth century, but I’ve got no idea why it happens and losopher that these others don’t? why it happens in one particular culture. I hesitate to say “in England.” There is an idea of humor as an essentially This was initially going to be a book about comedy, but that English concept; various people make that claim, and the seemed too broad a focus, and the really peculiar thing, most famous of them is Diderot. In the article on humor in working on non-serious topics, is that there are definitional the Encyclopédie, he begins by saying that humor belongs problems. No one can agree what comedy is, what comedy essentially to the English mind: l’esprit Anglais. And then, is not, what the difference is between irony, humor, satire: as an example of English humor, he talks about Swift, who these are incredibly contested and contestable topics. I he doesn’t seem to realise is the contrary of Englishness. chose humor, partly, because I can tell a clear historical story There’s a tradition of humor, with Shaftesbury in the about it: humor begins as a concept in the English language eighteenth century, which is tasteful, urbane, refined, or at the end of the seventeeth century, with the shift from Horatian—it’s light, genteel—and against that you have the medical theory of the four humors to the modern idea another tradition of humor, embodied in Swift, which of humor. You can locate it, and its location is one is Juvenalian, dark, brooding, cruel, vicious; and in that 79 that you can tell a story about in so far as the birth case it’s Irish. The Anglo-Irish dynamics of humor are very interesting in the way in which this language, English, is similar to the operation that you find in Bergson’s defini- internally subverted by traditions of Irish satire. You can tion of comedy. Bergson has two formulations of the same trace that, beginning with Swift, and going on to include thought: comedy is the encrusting of the mechanical onto Beckett, Flann O’Brien, and others. the organic, and comedy occurs when we take a person for a thing. Wyndham Lewis very amusingly turns that thought You would, presumably, need to include Wilde in that tradi- on its head and says what makes us laugh is not when a tion; though with Wilde you have a complicated relation to person becomes a thing but, on the contrary, when a thing the idea of genteel English humor: his aphoristic dandyism becomes a person. A cabbage reading Flaubert: that’s funny. is appropriated from a cultivated English wit, but is also a Humor takes place in that gap between the human and the scurrilous subversion of its conventions. He seems to con- inhuman, between the mechanical and the organic, the flate the two figures that English culture would like to keep living and the dead. It’s a negotiation between those catego- separate: the witty fop and the humorous clown. Can one ries: something we do every day. maintain a distinction between wit and humor? Although the theory of humor and comedy deals often with The genealogy of foppery: that would make a good research the failure of the body or the collapse of logic, it rarely tack- project. As for wit and humor: I don’t think you can make a les the failure of a joke itself (which is one formal difference hard and fast distinction. One thing I discuss in the book is from the discourse on taste. Taste is made up of distastes: George Eliot’s article on Heine: a brilliant piece, where she to express aesthetic revulsion is one way of marking your- makes a distinction between the English and the Germans. self as a connoisseur, but not laughing at a bad joke doesn’t I think one of the interesting things about humor is that the immediately give you a reputation for having a keen sense ugly issue of national identity surfaces in a very powerful of humor). Is that moment, of the failed joke, something that way, and I think it should. I think we have an easy and com- can be talked about philosophically? placent internationalism which simply doesn’t acknowledge that we are, all of us, rooted in national traditions which are I have much experience with failure myself: trying to talk ugly and horrible and make us what we are. George Eliot about humor, with examples, and just not getting laughs, divides it up into the English and the Germans, and she’s and that can be simply painful. For example, I gave the same thinking of wit as Witz, as the putting together of unlikes talk on humor to a group of Cambridge graduate students in a momentary likeness, and that producing a laugh. And and, three days later, to a group of psychoanalysts. You that’s indeed true; but then, that would also be true of would have thought the psychoanalysts would understand humor or jokes. In terms of national characteristics, there’s a humor, would have some investment in it. I got big laughs powerful tradition of Witz in German, which begins with the from the Cambridge graduate students and nothing—it was German Romantics. It’s also the word that Freud uses in his like a morgue—from the psychoanalysts. And I came to the 1905 book on jokes. But, to make matters even worse, the conclusion that it was to do with a sort of intellectual security Germanophones are taking the notion of Witz from the con- or assurance those graduate students had. Whether it was cept of esprit, which is what the French are meant to have; real or legitimate or not, they had it and felt comfortable just think of Molière. So, according to this fantastic geog- laughing, and the analysts didn’t have that so didn’t feel raphy, what would distinguish the French and the English comfortable laughing. Very odd. Maybe they were would be wit versus humor. My point is that in relation to analyzing me. nonserious concepts you can create all sorts of historical and geographical narratives in order to distinguish them, but Is there something to be said, then, not only about what we basically they are just terribly muddled. might learn from laughter, but about the place of humor in teaching? A good deal of critical or philosophical thinking about laugh- ter seems to depend on this very idea of the actual, comic This is a delicate matter because the way in which I work porousness of supposedly hard distinctions. Can you say is very simple: if I had the ability, I’d do something else. something about the comedic opposition, for example, I’d have been a novelist, or a musician, poet, or a dancer. between thought and the body? Because I don’t have that ability, I can be a philosopher and write about those things. In relation to humor, there are I think this distinction between thought and the body takes people who are genuinely funny, who’ve got funny bones, on a decisive form in modernity. Let’s consider Descartes. who I laugh at. I’m not one of them, so I can write about Descartes looks out of his window in his Meditations and humor, and if people don’t find me funny or don’t find my wonders to himself whether what he sees are human beings book amusing, that’s okay. But as a teacher, I suppose I’d like himself or automata, robots, dolls, puppets. This is the like to think that I’m using laughter effectively. Such is van- seed of the problem of skepticism: how can I know that ity. The students might be thinking: he’s a total bloody idiot. these people are robots or are humans? The philosophical And they should; at a certain point I want them to think I’m a operation of thought that gives birth to the notion total bloody idiot. Students should both admire you and then 80 of skepticism is a comic operation, and it’s very be repulsed by you. The art of teaching is managing that play of attraction and repulsion; in psychoanalytic terms, of mak- ing the transference and breaking it and not letting teaching turn into the crass discipleship one sees too much of in the United States. The interesting thing about the structure of laughter is that you’re opened up in the laugh and that’s when you can be hit. So I try to use humor in teaching to make serious points; it’s only when you’ve opened yourself up through humor that you can be wounded. That’s what it should do, and God knows we need that right now.
There’s a particular sort of tragedy about the teacher, or the philosopher, who tries to make us laugh and fails, as if the gulf between philosophy and the world is suddenly revealed. As a philosopher of humor, you have to court that failure to an even greater degree.
Take a great English comedian like Frankie Howerd: his entire humor was in the fact that he couldn’t tell jokes. But that’s only funny because he’s funny. I think there are people with funny bones: they can tell failed jokes, but it’s because they’re funny. Why are certain people funny? I don’t know. But there are people who are genuinely funny. We want to believe that those people are miserable. The only way we can bear the thought that there are people who are incred- ibly funny is that they’re miserable; think of the tradition of depressed comedians. But the terrifying thought is that there are people who are genuinely funny and lead quite happy lives, and I think we should resent them for that. As philosophers, the pedagogical task we face is forcing people out of their manic happiness and into normal human mis- ery. We live in cultures of increasing mania and imaginary obsessions, where there’s lots of laughter but it’s deeply humorless.
In your work, Beckett is an important corrective in that regard.
Ah, Beckett. In Beckett’s Watt, you’ve got a distinction between three forms of laughter: the bitter, the hollow, and the mirthless. The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, the hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, but it is the mirthless laugh that is the most interesting, what Beckett calls the “pure laugh,” the risus purus. The mirth- less laugh is the highest laugh and it laughs at that which is unhappy. True humor is therapeutic insofar as it allows us to recover from the delusory happiness of ideology into the lucidity of seeing things for what they are. When we see things for what they are—and this is a very philo- sophical thought and it is the other item that I borrow from Beckett—then we do not laugh, we smile. I end my book on humor with a discussion of smiling, which I see as the final acknowledgment of our humanity. This happens when we look at ourselves from outside ourselves and find ourselves ridiculous. It’s the acknowledgment of one’s ridiculousness in a smile that finally interests me.
81 The Practitioner: An Interview with What does the cell phone laugh sound like? Maud Skoog Brandin Mats Bigert You pretend to be on your cell phone and you laugh.
We do not laugh because we are happy—we are happy I see, so it’s not that you have to sound like a cell phone. because we laugh. —William James No, it’s a trick so that you can laugh on the street without being classified as a nutcase. In March 1995, Indian doctor Madan Kataria read Norman Cousins’ book Anatomy of an Illness in which the author How did you become a laughter instructor? describes how laughing made him recover from an incurable disease of the spine. Kataria decided to go to a local park in I was feeling burned out in my job as the head of the Kalmar Mumbai and speak to people there about starting a laughter Community Council and was taking sedatives. One day I club. Originally met with ridicule, the idea grew into laughter saw something on TV about these laughter clubs in India. I clubs across India and then abroad. thought it sounded great, so I found Dr. Kataria online and To begin with, all the participants would gather in a contacted him. He invited me to come to India and study the circle and each would take turns telling jokes. Sessions techniques and I decided to go right away. I resigned from would last around twenty minutes. Partly in response to my job and after three weeks, I had finished my training and the sexist nature of many of the jokes, Dr. Kataria began brought the laughter movement back to Sweden with me. to wonder if it was possible to laugh simply for the sake of laughing. Kataria’s technique of “laughter without reason” Is it possible to measure the positive effects of laughter? is now the organizing principle for over 2,500 laughter clubs around the world. Mats Bigert met with Maud Skoog Bran- One hundred laughs is the equivalent of a thirty-minute din, the woman who introduced the movement to Sweden. workout. Fifty years ago, the average person laughed eigh- teen minutes a day; today, that figure is down to six minutes What does a laughter instructor do? a day. So it’s something we really need!
A laughter instructor is like an aerobics instructor who’s So we’re supposed to have it 300% worse than in the 1950s? leading a laughter session instead. Some people call it laughter yoga. To make it work, you have to be able to do it I don’t know but that’s a number that was cited during the on command. So, for example, the laughter instructor says humor convention in Basel. to everyone in the room, “Now we’re going to do the 82 ‘cell phone laugh.’” The humor convention in Basel? That sounds made up! No, it really exists. room. It’s absolutely necessary that you mingle with the participants to get the group going. When I later asked the What distinguishes a laugh produced on demand from a person who’d invited me what they were all going to do spontaneous one? afterwards, he said that they were about to find out who was going to be laid off. Absolutely nothing. Laughter is a physical phenomenon. It is not the intellectual stimulation that makes a body release Can you give the readers a short description of how they endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine, and creates a feeling can adopt laughter therapy at home? of well-being and relaxation. It’s of no importance whether the laughter was triggered by someone slipping over a After breakfast, go to the bathroom and stand in front of banana peel or if it’s put on. the mirror. It’s going to take five to ten minutes, so prepare yourself mentally. Now think that you are going to take The laughter that the laughter clubs promote is purely func- charge of your day; no one else is going to do that. Look tional and doesn’t express any specific feeling. Spontane- yourself in the eyes and fill them with energy. It’s possible ous laughter is defined in accordance to the feeling that pro- if you want to do it. If you don’t, it won’t work. Relax with duced it, for example, scornful laughter, hysterical laughter, a smile and stretch your body. Then begin with a “Ho ho schadenfreude, and so on. Is there some specific category ho, Ha ha ha” followed by a deep breath. Repeat this a few of laughter that you aim for? times. Then you can continue with some specific laughs. Energize your eyes, stick out your tongue, and do the “lion The ironic thing is that you are naming different types of laugh.” Then you can simulate being at the dentist and do laughter with negative connotations. But they are just as the “ouch laugh.” The “I told you so laugh” always works. beneficial physically as if the person had laughed in a hearty Shake your finger at your mirror image and laugh, “Ho ho, or friendly way. We try to infect the person with laughter. It’s ha ha ha!” End it with a crazy “elephant trunk laugh.” You’re the only kind of harmless infection that we have. My favorite guaranteed to feel better than if you’d spent the ten minutes laughs are the “ouch laugh” and the ”lion laugh.” looking at the news.
Does it always work? Have you ever not been successful with a group?
Yes, once, when I was invited to the Red Cross. It began with me having to have a sign language interpreter beside above: Brandin demonstrating her technique. From left to right: The “I told me who would translate for the deaf Red Cross you so laugh,” the “cell phone laugh,” the “ouch laugh,” and the “lion laugh.” 83 workers, which meant I couldn’t move around the Photos Mats Bigert Infectious Laughter for that matter—has never fully been engaged by the David Serlin aesthetics of taste, even among gourmets, and continues to provoke visceral repulsion and disgust. Even a B-grade In the days before public health campaigns had all but horror film like Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), typically eradicated maladies like smallpox and polio, the singular interpreted as a generic Cold War allegory about communist distinction for being the rarest disease on the planet was invasion, capitalized on the public’s fascination with the held by kuru. Kuru first came to international attention in arrival of cannibalistic marauders who served as potent meta- the late 1950s after D. Carleton Gajdusek, an American phors for the invasion of the individual body and the body virologist and pediatrician, was invited to investigate a mys- politic. In the film, aliens materialize as voracious crabs that terious and fatal illness that was devastating the Fore tribe eat human brains and absorb the voices and memories of in New Guinea. Between 1957 and 1968, over 1,100 of the their victims. A decade later, George A. Romero’s cult clas- Fore died from kuru, the vast majority of whom were adult sic Night of the Living Dead (1968) allegorized the specter of females and children.1 Kuru marks its epidemiological terri- kuru more closely by depicting a band of virtually unstop- tory through what observers called the “laughing sickness” pable zombies who banquet upon human brains and other or “laughing death,” a distinct set of physical effects that body parts. Romero’s film, and the wave of 1970s horror include hysterical laughter, dementia, bodily spasms, and a films that followed it, reveled in the gory excrescences of broad, terrifying smile across the face of its hapless victim. blood feasts and serial killings, luring audiences to imagine Kuru is usually identified as a prototypical example of that human cannibals were a far more likely phenomenon a culture-specific disease, that is, one that only emerges than brain-eating alien invaders. Staking their claim at the in the context of a particular society and is found nowhere intersection of psychologically-driven horror and Grand else on earth. After studying the Fore’s formal customs and Guignol-inspired humor, such films suggest that our revul- daily activities, Gajdusek postulated a link between those sion toward and fascination with eating brains not only who had contracted kuru and their participation in funeral excavates a deep-seated social taboo but, like all taboos, rites, which for the Fore people included mortuary cannibal- perpetually gives license to the mind to wander into ism and the eating of human brains. Challenging the idea uncharted territory. that kuru was hereditary, Gajdusek argued that it was the As a kid growing up in the 1970s, I was both repelled consumption of diseased brains that was responsible for and consumed by the existence of kuru, as well as by the delivering kuru’s fatal blow. Anthropologists later found that possibility that it might turn me, my family, and my closest women and children had been the most likely to contract friends into hysterical cannibals. The rarity of the disease kuru because feasting on human brains was among the only served to convince me of the inescapable likelihood few methods by which non-male members of the gender- of its transmissibility. I remember reading about kuru in a stratified tribal hierarchy received any protein. Gajdusek copy of our family encyclopedia and staring for hours at the convinced the Fore elders to discontinue the tribe’s cannibal grainy black-and-white image of a laughing Fore tribesman. practices, and as a result the number of kuru deaths began The colonial dimensions of the photograph notwithstand- to decline. By the 1970s, fatalities from kuru had declined ing, the image of a laughing, brain-eating cannibal seemed precipitously and the symptoms of the “laughing death” to me incompatible with the gravity of the disease, since seem to have all but disappeared. laughter itself seemed incompatible with cannibalism. The discovery of kuru amidst post-World War II cam- For me, the true horror implicit in the photograph derived paigns focused on global standards of living, like those of not simply from the prospect that this human actually ate the Marshall Plan or the World Health Organization, must human brains—a seemingly inhuman act—but that such have played like something from a horror film that revealed savagery resulted in peals of echoing, maniacal laughter. an uncharted world impervious to the golden touch of Here was laughter that was neither silly nor charming nor modernity. For Westerners, the practice, let alone the exis- charismatic—what my young mind understood to be the link tence, of cannibalism is unsettling, though it also entices us between the sensation of laughing and the experience of to reflect upon our insatiable curiosity about the rituals of happiness. Instead, here was a visual depiction of a sensa- so-called primitive peoples. Eating animal organs known as tion I feared even as I tried desperately to imagine it. “sweetbreads,” such as the pancreas and thymus of a calf or Many years later, I learned that the kuru victim depicted lamb, holds high status in some gastronomic circles. in that photograph was not in fact laughing and, indeed, 84 But eating human brains—or any part of any human, the idea that kuru produces “laughing sickness” was something of an oversimplification focused on the most BSE into the free market even while banning the consump- telltale effect of the disease. Gajdusek’s findings on kuru in tion of tainted beef in their own countries, contributing to the 1960s, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1976, laid the appearance of CJD in India and parts of Asia. Clearly, the groundwork for Stanley B. Prusiner, a viral neurologist the exoticism that we once attributed to the cannibalistic who discovered the existence of prions, proteins capable rituals of primitive tribes has come home to us through of passing disease from the brain of one organism to that the widespread practices of industrial farming and modern of another. For Prusiner, who won the Nobel Prize in 1997, pharmaceuticals, thereby recalibrating the cycle of taboo prions were instrumental in understanding the molecular according to the politics of feast or famine. With the specter basis of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the human coun- of “mad cow” on the horizon, it has become virtually impos- terpart to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), known sible for me to eat those triangle-shaped wedges of soft colloquially as “mad cow” disease. One of the common processed cheese imported from France known as La vache elements found in diseases like BSE, CJD, and kuru is that qui rit [“the laughing cow”] with anything approaching the they all deprive their victims of muscle control and induce ironic gusto with which I enjoyed it only a few years ago. In what might be perceived as manic behavior—hence the so- the era of BSE, the image of a cow laughing, no matter how called madness at the core of “mad cow.” During the initial stylized or nostalgic, reminds me too much of the provoca- period of the disease, the body submits to uncontrollable tive misalignment between signifier and signified. physical spasms and audible outbursts; after a short time, it When is laughter a sign of true happiness, and when succumbs to complete passivity until all physical movement it is a sign of sickness? When is laughter something else comes to a standstill. altogether? Just as kuru is discussed as an essentially What I believed the image of a Fore tribesman told me culture-specific disease, our understanding of smiling and about the maniacal laughter of flesh-eating cannibals was laughter is just as specific, shaped as much by culture and so utterly different from what the image actually depicted geography as it is by the relativistic assumptions that societ- that I have come to regard kuru as something of a modern ies attribute to them. During his time researching kuru in object lesson. The allegedly hysterical laughter attributed to New Guinea in the 1950s and 1960s, D. Carleton Gajdusek kuru is not a subjective, personality-driven reaction to the posed for photographs among grateful members of the joys of cannibalism, as I had imagined it. It is an involuntary Fore tribe. In image after image, Gajdusek is surrounded by neurodegenerative reaction resulting from the collapse of all smiling and laughing adolescent boys, most of whom his physical constraints. Laughter, the essential charm of which research had saved from an almost certain death. But like derives from its evanescence, becomes with the onset of the encyclopedia’s image of the hysterical cannibal, these kuru an eerily empty signifier unmoored from any recogniz- photographs of Gajdusek, read in retrospect, assume a sin- able system of meaning except, perhaps, for signaling one’s ister dimension that challenges our expectations of what imminent mortality. Similarly, the broad smile that appears laughter is supposed to signify. In the mid-1990s, at pre- on the victim’s face is not a deliberate expression of pleasure cisely the same time that “mad cow” disease was making or contentment. It is, instead, the smile’s terrifying opposite: international headlines, Gajdusek pleaded guilty to charges the confirmation of the complete collapse of one’s neuro- that he had engaged in sexual relations with several of the physiologic system. The smile brought on by kuru is the Fore boys whom he had formally adopted and to whom he inscrutable grimace of a face seemingly stripped of legibility. had given his own surname. In 1998, after a brief period of According to recent health statistics, smallpox has incarceration at a Frederick, Maryland, penitentiary, a fed- replaced kuru as the rarest disease on the planet. Since the eral judge offered him the opportunity to leave the United mid-1960s, however, a number of neurodegenerative dis- States, never to return again. Gajdusek chose to settle in eases related to kuru have been reportedly on the rise: not Paris, a safe haven for serious gourmets and social outcasts among brain-feasting cannibals but among members of the alike, and home to the corporate headquarters for Bel, the civilized West. During the period in which kuru was virtually manufacturer of the cheese marked by the sign of the laugh- eradicated from the Fore tribe, for example, many women ing cow. If it is possible to accept that laughter is a medium and children—the same demographic groups that con- capable of both illumination and illusion, of revealing inner tracted kuru—in the US, Europe, and parts of Asia and Africa joy and signaling hidden suffering, how will we ever be able contracted CJD as a result of injections of growth hormones to tell the difference? and fertility drugs distilled from pituitary glands harvested from BSE-infected animals.2 Before the mad cow scares of the mid-1990s, cattle and sheep were regularly pulverized 1 Shirley Lindenbaum, Kuru Sorcery (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1979), p. 113. and used as food sources for other cattle and sheep, which 2 Lynette J. Dumble, “The Third World And Infertile Women: The Would-Be Victims And made it possible for the disease to pass to healthy animals Invisible Victims Of Mad Cow And Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Imperialists,”
THE ART OF LAUGHTER Jim Holt
It involves the contraction of some fifteen facial muscles, along with the simultaneous stimulation of the muscles of inspiration and those of expiration, resulting in a series of respiratory spasms accompanied by a burst of vowel-based notes. Healthful side-effects of this experience are believed to include oxygenation of the blood, reduction in stress hormones, and a bolstering of the immune system through heightened T-cell activity. If the experience is sufficiently intense, however, cataplexy can set in, leading to muscular collapse and possible injury. In rare cases the consequences are graver still. Anthony Trollope had a stroke while under- going this experience in response to the now-forgotten nineteenth-century novel Vice Versa. And, according to tradition, the ancient Greek painter Zeuxis, reacting to the portrait of a hag he had just made, actually died of it. What I have been describing, of course, is laughter. What is it about the humorous situation that evokes this response? Why should a certain kind of cerebral activity issue in such a peculiar behavioral reflex—a “luxury” reflex, moreover, that serves no obvious evolutionary purpose? As Voltaire mockingly observed in the entry under “Laughter” in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), “Those who know why this kind of joy that kindles laughter should draw the zygomatic muscle ... back toward the ears Rather, he was specifically attracted to jokes—a subgenre are knowing indeed.” of the humorous—because of their many likenesses to It is an oft-registered complaint that philosophers do dreams. (When Wilhelm Fleiss was reading the proofs of not devote enough attention to laughter and humor. In the The Interpretation of Dreams in the fall of 1899, he com- Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995), for example, the plained to Freud that the dreams seem to contain an awful entry under “Humour” opens, “Although laughter, like lot of jokes.) In both jokes and dreams, Freud observed, language, is often cited as one of the distinguishing features meanings are condensed and displaced; things are repre- of human beings, philosophers have spent only a small sented indirectly or by their opposites; fallacious reasoning proportion of their time and pages on it and on the allied trumps logic. Jokes, like dreams, arise involuntarily (and, topic of amusement when compared with the volumes also like dreams, tend to be swiftly forgotten). From these devoted to the philosophy of language.” The entry under similarities, Freud inferred that jokes and dreams share a “Laughter” concludes by noting that “The topic deserves common origin in the unconscious and are both essentially more attention in the philosophy of mind.” Scattered aper- means of outwitting the inner “censor.” Yet there is a criti- çus can be found throughout the Western philosophical cal difference, he added. Jokes are meant to be understood; canon; Plato deemed the proper object of laughter to be indeed, this is crucial to their success. Dreams, by contrast, human vice and folly, and Aristotle declared the laughable remain unintelligible even to the dreamer, and are therefore to be a species of the ugly. Spinoza—a rather agelastic totally uninteresting to other people. In a sense, a dream is fellow himself, according to contemporaries—observed in a failed joke. his Ethics (1677) that “Laughter is merely pleasure” and, as There are three competing theories of jokes. The such, is “in itself good.” Hobbes, Kant, and Schopenhauer “superiority theory,” which can be traced back to Plato and all hazarded somewhat elliptical theories of humor as asides Aristotle, holds that we find something risible when we feel in major writings. Only Henri Bergson devoted an entire superior to it. The classic statement of this theory was treatise to the subject; in Le rire (1899), he defined the comic as “the encrustation of the mechanical on the living”—the opposite: Lawrence Weiner, Laughter type: cruel, 2005. paradigm case, disappointingly, being a man slipping on a above: A 3-D reconstruction of an MRI scan of a 16-year-old girl suffering from banana peel. severe epilepsy; the scan shows sites in the left hemisphere of her brain where Yet no figure in the philosophical tradition has produced electrical stimulation evoked behavioral responses. Key to colors: red, laugh- a sustained account of humor and laughter that bears ter; yellow, disruption or arrest of speech; blue, disruption or arrest of speech, comparison with Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation naming and manual activity; black, motor movements involving the lower to the Unconscious (1905). Freud’s interest in the and upper extremities; green, tingling sensations in the right lower extremity. 87 problem of humor was not primarily philosophical. (From Itzak Fried et al, ‘Electric Current Stimulates Laughter’, Nature, 1998) supplied in the seventeeth century by Hobbes, who incongruous, but they cause feelings of pain, anger, sad- declared that laughter expressed “a sudden glory arising ness, loathing, rather than mirth.” (Bain was a Victorian with from some conception of some eminency in ourselves, little capacity for the darker forms of humor, but there is by comparison with the infirmity of others.” On this theory something to his point.) all humor is at root mockery and derision, all laughter a slightly spiritualized snarl. • • • A second traditional theory of humor, the “incongru- ity theory,” was hinted at by Aristotle (in the Rhetoric he The idea that all jocularity was harmful to moral character observed that a good way to get a laugh was to set up your was widespread at the beginning of the Victorian era. The audience to expect one thing and then to hit them with a reason for this disapproval is not hard to fathom: by long surprising punchline) and worked out in detail by Kant in tradition, laughter had been associated with blasphemy, his Critique of Judgment (1790), and by Schopenhauer in with scorn for the outcast and infirm, and, above all, with The World as Will and Representation (1819). The gist of obscenity. As folklorists have documented, the vast majority the incongruity theory is that we laugh when two things of jokes in oral circulation have always been about sex. Such normally kept in separate compartments in our mind are “dirty jokes” served to lure the innocent into sexual degrada- unexpectedly yanked together. On this rather intellectualist tion, it was believed. Women, in particular, were supposed account, a joke forces us to perceive incongruities: between to be too good to laugh. Only slightly less corrupting was the decorous and the low, the ideal and the actual, the the sort of pitiless laughter directed at the misfortunes and logical and the absurd. vices of others, at the drunkard, the cripple, the cuckold, Finally there is the “relief theory” of humor, which was the foreigner. It was the duty of the decent, charitable man pioneered by Herbert Spencer and given its most elaborate to refrain from jests directed at such butts. (This sentiment, statement by Freud. Laughter, Freud submitted in Jokes and by the way, was not confined to the priggish Victorians. Their Relation to the Unconscious, is essentially a release Baudelaire, in his essay “De l’essence du rire”, denounced of excess energy. Where does this energy come from? laughter as springing from “the idea of one’s superiority— From the temporary lifting of an inhibition. Keeping down a satanic idea, if ever there was one!”) forbidden impulses, Freud held, requires an expenditure of In the mid nineteenth century, however, a shift in psychic effort. When the cunning devices of a joke force attitude can be detected. The joke impulse—once seen such a thought or feeling to be entertained (by presenting it as actuated by feelings of superiority, aggression, and in an outwardly innocent guise), the energy used to maintain lust—came to acquire something of an intellectual aura. the inhibition against it suddenly becomes superfluous. It is Comic theorists like Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and Sidney therefore available to be discharged through the facial and Smith, taking a leaf from Kant and Schopenhauer, began to respiratory muscles in the form of laughter. put witty paradox at the heart of jocularity. It is significant Of these three theories of humor, it is the incongruity that the meaning of “wit” has evolved from referring to theory that is taken most seriously by philosophers today. intellect in general, to the ability to perceive connections It too, however, is open to objections. Why should incon- between ideas, to a quickness at perceiving incongruous gruity be a source of pleasure? Shouldn’t the asymmetrical, resemblances that evoke delighted surprise. A really good the disorderly, and the absurd cause bewilderment and witticism reveals a discrepancy between the ideal and the anxiety in rational creatures like ourselves, not merri- real, it was argued; laughter had a kind of logical power to ment? The nineteenth-century philosopher Alexander Bain destroy solemn untruths, allowing truth, in all its robust- observed, “There are many incongruities that may produce ness, to survive. It was a powerful weapon against bigotry anything but a laugh. A decrepit man under a heavy burden, and false enthusiasm. Joke-making ceased to be thought of five loaves and two fishes among a multitude, and all unfit- as entirely disreputable, and susceptibility to jokes, at least ness and gross disproportion; an instrument out of tune, a those of the drier, more cerebral sort, became a social plus. fly in ointment, snow in May, Archimedes studying geom- Leslie Stephen, writing in the Cornhill Magazine in 1876, etry in a siege, and all discordant things; a wolf in sheep’s remarked that “a fashion has sprung up of late years regard- clothing, a breach of bargain, and falsehood in general; the ing the sense of humour as one of the cardinal virtues.” multitude taking the law into their own hands, and every- A few decades later, Max Beerbohm observed that a man thing of the nature of disorder; a corpse at a feast, parental would sooner confess to lacking a sense of beauty than to cruelty, filial ingratitude, and whatever is unnatural; the lacking a sense of humor. entire catalogue of vanities given by Solomon—are all Perhaps the reason it is so hard to pin down the essence of jokes is that it doesn’t hold still. It is not an opposite, clockwise from top: “The Giggling Laugh, excited by Boisterous Fun unchanging Platonic form, but something that evolves over and Nonsense.” “The Obstreperous Laugh, instigated by Practical Jokes or time. Born of lewdness and aggression, the jocular impulse Extreme Absurdities.” “The Hearty Laugh of the Gentler Sex.” “The Stentorian aspires to the delicate perception of pure incongruity. At Laugh of the Stronger Sex.” “The Superlative Laugh, or Highest Degree of what rarefied telos is this evolutionary process aiming? Laughter.“ From The Philosophy of Laughter and Smiling, George Why, the Jewish joke, of course—or, to be more precise, 88 Vesey, 1877. Courtesy New York Historical Society. the Talmudic joke. The abiding themes of Jewish humor
One can imagine the wave of Homeric laughter that must have spread through the audience on this occasion. But what, exactly, did it express? Albert Rapp, in The Origins of Wit and Humor (1951), argued that all human laughter evolved from a pre-linguistic “roar of triumph in an ancient jungle duel,” a roar that would pass contagiously from the victorious combatant to his kin standing on the sideline. Are we to suppose, then, that the laughter evoked by Mor- genbesser’s quip was a collective roar of superiority at the slaying of an opponent by a philosophical counterexample? Or are we to suppose, with Freud, that it was a mass dis- charge of psychic energy freed up by the temporary lifting of an inhibition against being frivolous at academic confer- ences? If we assume, as the incongruity theory would have it, that the philosophers were simply relishing an especially neat inversion of logic, then why all the noisy and convulsive are not sex and superiority, but logic and language. Take chest-heaving? How did such a peculiar motor response get this rather feeble specimen cited (and explicated at some attached to the aesthetic enjoyment of the incongruous? length!) by Freud: Two Jews met in the neighborhood of the Though it takes place in the most recently evolved part bath-house. “Have you taken a bath?” asked one of them. of the human brain—the higher cortices—amusement at “What?” asked the other in return, “is there one missing?” the contrived absurdities of jokes taps into more primitive Jewish humor deploys crazy logic as a way of coping circuitry that we share with our apish cousins and thereby with the incomprehensible. This places the Jewish joke produce laughter. Brain damage can rob you of your sense very close to another jocular genre of great rarefaction, the of humor, just as surely as it can impair your ability to grasp philosophical joke. The best philosophical jokes tend to be metaphors and make creative connections. It appears to evoked by the most persistent incomprehensibilities. Take be the right frontal lobe that is crucial for “getting” jokes. the question that Martin Heidegger deemed the deepest Patients with lesions in this area have a terrible time dis- and darkest in all of philosophy: Why is there something tinguishing humorous from neutral statements (humorous rather than nothing? When I posed it to the Columbia phi- example: a sign in a Tokyo hotel—GUESTS ARE INVITED TO losopher Arthur Danto a few years ago, he replied rather TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE CHAMBERMAID), and are little sharply, “Who says there’s not nothing?” On another occa- inclined to laugh. sion I pressed Danto’s colleague, (the recently deceased) Jokes are products of human ingenuity that, at their Sidney Morgenbesser with the same question. “Even if driest and most refined, fall within the domain of art. Yet I there was nothing,” Morgenbesser wearily said, “you still know many people who abhor them—even people blessed wouldn’t be satisfied!” Many years ago, the Oxford philoso- with a rich sense of humor. Perhaps that has to do with the pher J.L. Austin was delivering a paper about language to a origins of most jokes. Freud claimed that the most com- big audience at a conference. In the course of his address, pulsive jokesmiths are neurotics, because they are most Austin raised the matter of the double negative. “In some plagued with strong impulses from their unconscious. languages,” he observed, (here I paraphrase) “a double Sociologically speaking, the most fecund sources for jokes negative yields an affirmative; in others, it yields a more would seem to be Wall Street traders and inmates of pris- emphatic negative. But in no language, natural or artificial, ons. We have all been tortured by amateur comics who does a double affirmative yield a negative.” At which point cannot repress the urge to tell jokes, and some have even Morgenbesser piped up from the back of the room, “Yeah, been tortured by being made to tell jokes. Evelyn Waugh, yeah.” convinced that his son James had no sense of humor, forced the poor child to tell him a new joke every day as a kind of above: The subject of the brain cross-sections on the left is silently laughing remedial therapy. “In desperation,” Waugh’s biographer along with audio recordings of other people’s laughter, while the one on Selina Hastings tells us, “James bought a book of a thou- the right is reading a joke book. Courtesy Dean Shibata, MD, University sand and one American jokes, and stammered through each of Washington. day’s installment at lunchtime, while his father sat stony- opposite: Matt Freedman, Laughter type: malicious, 2005 faced, refusing to laugh.”
90 91 THE CHRISTIAN-HEGELIAN COMEDY not a person with two substances, immortal and mortal. Slavoj Zizek Perhaps, this would also be one way to distinguish between pagan gnosticism and Christianity: the problem with Gnosti- A patient in a large hospital room with many beds com- cism is that it is all too serious in developing its narrative of plains to the doctor about the constant noise and cries other ascent towards Wisdom, that it misses the humorous side patients are making, which are driving him crazy. After of religious experience—Gnostics are Christians who miss the doctor replies that nothing can be done if the patients the joke of Christianity. (And, incidentally, this is why Mel are like that, that one cannot forbid them from expressing Gibson’s Passion is ultimately an anti-Christian film: it totally their despair since they all know they are dying, the patient lacks this comic aspect.) goes on: “Why don’t you then put them in a separate room For Hegel, the passage from tragedy to comedy con- for dying?” The doctor replies calmly and glibly: “But this cerns overcoming the limits of representation. While in a is a room for those who are dying…” Why does anyone tragedy the individual actor represents the universal charac- who knows a little bit about Hegel immediately discern a ter he plays, in a comedy he immediately is this character.2 “Hegelian” taste in this morbid joke? It is precisely because The gap of representation is thus closed, exactly as in the of the final twist in which the patient’s subjective position is case of Christ who, in contrast to previous pagan divinities, undermined: he finds himself included into the series from does not “represent” some universal power or principle (as which he wanted to maintain distance. in Hinduism, in which Krishna, Vishna, Shivu, etc., all “stand And, since one is dealing with Hegel here, one is imme- for” certain spiritual principles or powers such as love, diately tempted to conceive of this joke as the first term hatred, reason). As this miserable human, Christ directly is of a triad. Thus, since the basic turn of this joke resides in God. Christ is not also human distinct from being a god; he the inclusion into the series of the apparent exception (the is a man precisely insofar as he is God, i.e., the ecce homo complaining patient is himself dying), its “negation” would is the highest mark of his divinity. There is thus an objective be a joke whose final turn would, on the contrary, involve irony in Pontius Pilate’s “Ecce homo!,” when he presents exclusion from the series, i.e., the extraction of the One and Christ to the enraged mob. Its meaning is not “Look at this its positing as an exception to the series. In a recent Bosnian miserable tortured creature? Do you not see in it a simple joke, for example, Fata (the proverbial ordinary Bosnian’s vulnerable man? Have you not any compassion for it?” but, wife) complains to the doctor that Muyo, her husband, rather, “Here is God himself!” makes love to her for hours every evening, so that, even However, in a comedy, the actor does not coincide with in the darkness of their bedroom, she cannot get enough the person he plays in the sense that he plays himself on the sleep—again and again, he jumps on her. The good doctor stage, that he “is what he really is” up there. It is rather that, advises her to apply shock therapy: she should keep at her in a properly Hegelian way, the gap that separates the actor bedside a strong lamp so that, when she gets really tired from his stage persona in a tragedy is transposed into the of sex, she can all of a sudden blind Muyo, and this shock stage persona itself. A comic character is never fully identi- will for sure cool off his excessive passion. That same eve- fied with his role; he always retains the ability to observe ning, after hours of sex, Fata does exactly as advised—and himself from outside, “making fun of himself.” Recall the recognizes the face of Haso, one of Muyo’s colleagues. Sur- immortal Lucy from I Love Lucy whose trademark gesture prised, she asks him, ”But what are you doing here? Where when something surprised her was to bend her neck slightly is Muyo, my husband?” The embarrassed Haso answers, and cast a direct fixed gaze of surprise into the camera—this “Well, he is there at the door, collecting money from those was not Lucille Ball, the actress, mockingly addressing the waiting in line…” And the third term in the Hegelian triad public, but an attitude of self-estrangement that was part of would be here a kind of joke-correlative of the “infinite judg- “Lucy” (as a screen persona) herself. This is how Hegelian ment,” the tautology as supreme contradiction, as in the “reconciliation” works: not as an immediate synthesis or joke about a man who complains to his doctor that he often reconciliation of opposites, but as the redoubling of the gap hears voices of people who are not present in the room. The or antagonism—the two opposed moments are “reconciled” doctor inquires, “Really? In order to enable me to discover when the gap that separates them is posited as inherent to the meaning of this hallucination, could you describe to one of the terms. In Christianity, the gap that separates God me under what precise circumstances you usually hear the from man is not effectively “sublated” directly in the figure voices of people who are not present?” “Well, it mostly hap- of Christ as God-man, but only in the tensest moment of cru- pens when I talk on a phone…” cifixion when Christ himself despairs (“Father, why have you As is often the case, Kierkegaard is here unexpectedly forsaken me?”). In this moment, the gap that separates God close to Hegel, officially his greatest opponent. Kierkegaard from man is transposed into God himself, as the gap that insists on the comical character of Christianity: is there separates Christ from God-Father. The properly dialectical anything more comical than Incarnation, this ridiculous trick here is that the very feature that appeared to separate overlapping of the Highest and the Lowest, the coincidence me from God turns out to unite me with God. of God, creator of the universe, and a miserable man?1 And,
again, the point is that the gap that separates God opposite: Mask of Domingo Cavallo, Minister of Economy in Argentina, 92 from man in Christ is purely parallactic: Christ is 1991–1996. Thanks to Lara Correa. Photo Josefina Tommasi 93 And this brings us back to comedy: for Hegel, what the same as with a couple’s love which only becomes actual happens in comedy is that the Universal appears directly. It in their offspring (at least within a certain traditional per- appears “as such,” in direct contrast to the mere “abstract” spective). And it is not difficult to see the extreme proximity universal which is the “mute” universality of the passive of the sublime and the ridiculous in these cases: there is link (common feature) between particular moments. In something sublime in stating, “Look out! The World Spirit other words, in comedy, universality directly acts. How? itself is riding a horse there,” but also something inherently Comedy does not rely on the undermining of our dignity comical. with reminders of the ridiculous contingencies of our terres- Comedy is thus the very opposite of shame: shame trial existence. On the contrary, comedy is the full assertion endeavors to maintain the veil, while comedy relies on the of universality, the immediate coincidence of universality gesture of unveiling. More closely, the comic effect proper with the character’s/actor’s singularity. Or to ask it another occurs when, after the act of unveiling, one confronts the way, what effectively happens when all universal features of ridicule and the nullity of the unveiled content—in contrast dignity are mocked and subverted in a comedy? The nega- to encountering behind the veil the terrifying Thing too trau- tive force that undermines them is that of the individual, of matic for our gaze. Which is why the ultimate comical effect the hero with his attitude of disrespect towards all elevated occurs when, after removing the mask, we confront exactly universal values, and this negativity itself is the only true the same face as that of the mask. A supreme case of such a remaining universal force. And does the same not hold for comedy occurred in December 2001 in Buenos Aires, when Christ? All stable-substantial universal features are under- Argentinians took to the streets to protest against the cur- mined, relativized, by his scandalous acts, so that the only rent government, and especially against Domingo Cavallo, remaining universality is the one embodied in Him, in his the Minister of Economy. When the crowd gathered around very singularity. The universals undermined by Christ are Cavallo’s building, threatening to storm it, he escaped wear- “abstract” substantial universals (presented in the guise of ing a mask of himself (sold in disguise shops so that people the Jewish Law), while the “concrete” universality is the could mock him by wearing his mask). It thus seems that very negativity of undermining abstract universals. at least Cavallo did learn something from the widely spread This direct overlapping of the Universal and the Singular Lacanian movement in Argentina—the fact that a thing is its also poses a limit to the standard critique of “reification.” own best mask. And is this also not the ultimate definition While observing Napoleon on a horse in the streets of Jena of the divinity—God also has to wear a mask of himself? after the battle of 1807, Hegel remarked that it was as if Perhaps “God” is the name for this supreme split between he saw there World Spirit riding a horse. The Christologi- the absolute as the noumenal Thing and the absolute as the cal implications of this remark are obvious: what happened appearance of itself, for the fact is that the two are the same, in the case of Christ is that God himself, the creator of our that the difference between the two is purely formal. In this entire universe, was walking out there as a common indi- precise sense, “God” names the supreme contradiction: vidual. This mystery of incarnation is discernible at different God—the absolute irrepresentable Beyond—has to appear levels, up to parents’ speculative judgment apropos a child as such. What one encounters in tautology is thus pure dif- that “out there our love is walking,” which stands for the ference, not the difference between the element and other Hegelian reversal of determinate reflection into reflexive elements, but the difference of the element from itself. This determination. The same happens with a king when his is why the Marx brothers’ “This man looks as an idiot and subjects see him walking around: “Out there our state is acts as an idiot; but this should not deceive you—he is an walking.” Marx’s evocation of reflexive determination (in idiot!” is properly comical: when, instead of a hidden ter- his famous footnote in Chapter 1 of Capital) falls too short: rifying secret, we encounter behind the veil the same thing individuals think they treat a person as a king because he is as in front of it, this very lack of difference between the two a king in himself, while, effectively, he is a king only because elements confronts us with the “pure” difference that sepa- they treat him as one. However, the crucial point is that rates an element from itself. this “reification” of a social relation in a person cannot be According to an anecdote from the May ’68 period, dismissed as a simple “fetishist misperception”; what such there was a graffito on a Paris wall that read “God is dead. a dismissal itself misses is something that, perhaps, could Nietzsche.” Next day, another graffito appeared below it: be designated as the “Hegelian performative.” Of course “Nietzsche is dead. God.” What is wrong with this joke? a king is “in himself” a miserable individual, and of course Why is it so obviously reactionary? It is not only that the he is a king only insofar as his subjects treat him like one. reversed statement relies on a moralistic platitude with However, the point is that the “fetishist illusion” which no inherent truth; its failure is deeper, and it concerns the sustains our veneration of the king has in itself a performa- form of reversal itself. What makes the joke a bad joke is tive dimension—the very unity of our state, that which the the pure symmetry of the reversal—the underlying claim of king “embodies,” actualizes itself only in the person of a king. the first graffito (“God is dead. Signed by [obviously living] Which is why it is not enough to insist on the need to avoid Nietzsche”) is turned around into a statement which implies the “fetishist trap” and to distinguish between the contin- “Nietzsche is dead, while I am still alive. God.” There is a gent person of a king and what he stands for. What well-known Yugoslav riddle-joke: “What is the difference 94 the king stands for only comes to be in his person, between the Pope and a trumpet? The Pope is from Rome, and the trumpet is made from tin. And what is the difference between the Pope from Rome and the trumpet made from tin? The trumpet made from tin can be from Rome, while the Pope from Rome cannot be made from tin.” In a similar way, one should redouble the Paris graffiti joke: “What is the difference between ‘God is dead’ and ‘Nietzsche is dead’? It was Nietzsche who said, ‘God is dead,’ and it was God who said ‘Nietzsche is dead.’ And what is the difference between Nietzsche who said, ‘God is dead’ and God who said, ‘Nietzsche is dead’? Nietzsche who said, ‘God is dead’ was not dead, while the God who said ‘Nietzsche is dead’ was himself dead.” Crucial for the proper comical effect is not difference where we expect sameness, but, rather, sameness where we expect difference,3 which is why, as Alenka Zupancic has pointed out, the materialist (and there- fore properly comic) version of the above joke would have been something like: “God is dead. And, as a matter of fact, I also do not feel too well…” Is this not a comic version of Christ’s complaint on the cross? Christ will die on the cross not to get rid of his mortal envelope and rejoin the divine; he will die because he is God. No wonder, then, that, in the last years of his intellectual activity, Nietzsche used to sign his texts and letters also as “Christ”: the proper comical supple- ment to Nietzsche’s “God is dead” would have been to make Nietzsche himself add to it: “And, as a matter of fact, I also do not feel too well…”
1 See The Humor of Kierkegaard. An Anthology, edited and introduced by Thomas C. Oden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 2 I rely here heavily on Alenka Zupancic’s unpublished manuscript on comedy. 3 This is why the “What is the difference between…” jokes are most efficient when differ- ence is denied, as in: “What is the difference between toy trains and women’s breasts? None: both are meant for children, and with both it is mostly adult men that play.”
95
INCORRUPTIBLE TEETH, or, THE FRENCH SMILE REVOLUTION Colin Jones
In 1787, Madame Vigée-Lebrun, painter to France’s royal and aristocratic elite, displayed a canvas at the Paris Salon. It was a self-portrait depicting the artist in an affectionate embrace with her daughter. Vigée-Lebrun is smiling—a sweet, broad smile revealing white teeth. There is little about this pose that seems in any way exceptional, yet exception was furiously taken. “An affectation which artists, art-lov- ers and persons of taste have been united in condemning,” wrote an anonymous commentator, “and which finds no precedent amongst the Ancients, is that in smiling she shows her teeth. This affectation is particularly out of place in a mother.” What was so shocking, and what was so new, in a gesture—the white-toothed smile—that has become in the modern world an anodyne marker of individual identity? In the twenty-first century, we associate that gesture most with the Great American Smile, that cultural icon (and investment opportunity) which stares down at us from every billboard and every political campaign poster. Madame Vigée-Lebrun offers a timid, un-American antecedent; why France first? And just what was at stake in the world of art—and indeed the world of smiles—as France limbered up for the more evi- dently world-historical episode inaugurated in 1789? One dimension of the smile revolution had to do solely
opposite: Steven Brower, Laughter type: perverse, 2004. 97 above: Vigée-Lebrun’s controversial 1787 painting. with the world of painting that Madame Vigée-Lebrun celebrated theorist of physiognomy, Lavater, was in agree- inhabited. Representational conventions in place since ment. The French were always smiling: “I know them chiefly Antiquity (as our anonymous critic noted) dictated that an by their teeth and their laugh.” open mouth in Western art had very negative connotations. Did French pride in their teeth owe something to supe- It showed, first, that a person was plebeian. An open mouth rior mouth care? It did indeed. It was the French, in the could often reveal a lack of teeth that only the “low” would eighteenth century, who invented scientific dentistry. In own up to. Eighteenth-century teeth were often bad. The fact, they invented the word dentiste too, before it spread mass ingestion of sugar across Western Europe from the into other languages. In the past the noble art of tooth-pull- late seventeenth century—in the form of sweets and bon- ing had been practiced by showmen who traveled from bons, chocolate and sugared drinks like coffee, tea, and fair to marketplace, yanking out painful teeth in full public lemonade—meant that teeth were probably in worse shape view before a gawping populace (and sometimes offering than at any previous stage in human history. Open mouths tightrope walking and commedia dell’arte performances on in painting were fathomless black holes, Rabelaisian orifices the side). The dentist, in contrast, prided himself on surgi- emitting foul smells and provoking simple hilarity. They also cal legerdemain, medical book-learning, and gentlemanly signified that individuals were not fully in control of their respectability. reason. Such individuals might be insane or demented on The emergence of dental science and a body of profi- one hand, or else children who had not yet attained the age cient dentists came more slowly in other countries, allowing of reason. France to develop an international hegemony in this domain. The scandal over Madame Vigée-Lebrun’s 1787 smile When Austrian empress Maria Theresa wanted the teeth of brought to public attention a shift that had been going her daughter (the future queen Marie-Antoinette) straight- on outside the art world too. The French smile—relaxed, ened, she summoned a French dentist. When George open-mouthed, good-humored, and hopefully white- Washington had toothache troubles on campaign in the War toothed—was something to which other authors paid homage. For the Italian savant Caraccioli, Paris shook with above: Thomas Rowlandson’s 1811 print of French dentist Dubois de Chemant “a moderated gaiety which consists not of great showing off the mouth of a woman fitted with a double row of his mineral 98 bursts of mirth but of a smiling countenance.” The paste teeth and gums. of Independence, he sent for an expatriate French dentist ing a Specimen of his Artificial Teeth and False Palates.” to lend succor. When the salon conversationalist, the Abbé Under the heading “Mineral Teeth,” we read, “Monsieur de Galiani, was finding that the progressive loss of his teeth Charmant from Paris”—not much of a disguise for Dubois was making it difficult for his Neapolitan friends to under- de Chémant—“engages to affix from one tooth to a whole stand what on earth he was saying, he sent for a Paris-made set without pain. Monsieur Dubois can also affix an artificial set of dentures to restore his articulacy. His dentures were, palate or a glass eye. He also distils.” The French smile was he stated, his “parliament”: they restored a voice to the den- ridiculous because the mouth gaped open, but also because tally disenfranchised. it revealed the ridiculous French contraption of porcelain Within France, better provision for the care of teeth and dentures in the mouths of English individuals who had been smiles was registered in a buoyant market for mouth-care duped by a quack—and who should have known better products of every description. Newspaper advertisements anyway than to attempt the French smile. and handbills proclaimed the virtues of every kind of com- The English gentleman on the right of Rowlandson’s modity that promoted good teeth and a healthy mouth: engraving, caught admiring the French (porcelain) smile, tooth-files, toothpicks, tongue-scrapers, tooth-powders and showed teeth in the kind of state that made the appeal of dentifrices, tooth-whitening agents, lipsticks, mouth deodor- porcelain dentures understandable. Teeth were bad; but ants and the like. The toothbrush—and Paris-made brushes dental caries appear to have been no worse in France than were recognized across Europe as the very best—became elsewhere in western Europe—indeed French teeth may the center of what was to become a daily morning ritual. So, have been better than those of the English, whose per capita for some, did artificial dentures, another energetically mar- sugar consumption seems to have been exceptionally high. keted commodity. The fact that scientific dentistry evolved in France before One of the most famous of the new breed of dentists England and elsewhere showed that explanations for the was Nicolas Dubois de Chémant. A Paris surgeon by train- phenomenon are more social and cultural than biological. ing, Dubois had an epiphanic moment in 1788, as he reeled Part of the explanation for “Why France First?” lies in with horror after an evening spent in the company of a soci- the buoyant world of French medicine and surgery from ety lady with artificial teeth and very strong halitosis. Dubois which scientific dentistry had evolved. But there was a hit on the idea of creating porcelain teeth rather than using demand as well as a supply side to the phenomenon. The the smelly and perishable human and animal teeth hitherto French in the eighteenth century seem to have prided employed in dentures. Using the hard-paste porcelain that themselves on white teeth. The cornucopian profusion of was only just coming into use in France, he launched a mouth-care commodities on offer is unimaginable without a series of manufacturing trials for “mineral dentures,” even strong demand from within French society. The notion that drawing on the expertise of workers at the top-of-the-range the good-hearted smile was a national characteristic of the porcelain factory at Sèvres to create a product that was French also seems linked to changes going on in the French comfortable, natural-looking, and resistant to surface crack- economy. A proto-consumer revolution, no less, was in train, ing. By 1789, he had invented what became known as his with individuals even well down the social scale dressing, “Incorruptible Teeth,” and had had them approved by the primping, and presenting themselves in ways more recep- most prestigious academies and learned societies. tive to fashion and exchange. A new body was emergent, There was an enthusiastic launch amongst France’s more soigné and cared for, more self aware, more individu- social elite for a product that put the French smile at the alistic in appearance, and yet also more attuned to emergent disposal even of those who had lost all their teeth. Yet codes of politeness and to the dictates of fashion. The priz- Dubois de Chémant was soon following many of his aristo- ing of a healthy and preferably beautiful mouth appears to cratic clients into emigration. In 1793, he settled in Soho, have been an offshoot of these overarching developments. London, home to a solid phalanx of political émigrés from To a considerable extent the new smile was only possible in Revolutionary France. In 1797, he even became a natural- the context of a new body. ized Englishman, switched his paste-supplier from Sèvres to The new body was a bourgeois body. The plebeian body Wedgwood, and peddled his wares to an upper-class Eng- was still a Rabelaisian retort, recklessly spilling out odors lish clientele as well as to fellow Frenchmen. and infections. At the other end of the cultural spectrum, Sales of the new “mineral, incorruptible teeth” were not the aristocratic body lagged behind the cultural changes at all bad. Dubois de Chémant’s advertising material in 1797 emerging out on the Great Chain of Buying characteristic of boasted of having sold 3,000 sets of dentures; by 1816, the bourgeois commodity culture. The great German sociolo- figure would be 12,000. Yet, in England, retailing the French gist Norbert Elias’s contention that the royal court was the smile—especially an artificial version of it—was fraught fons et origo of the civilizing process in the West is far off with problems. After all, these were years in which the Eng- the mark where teeth were concerned. The royal body had a lish were honing their sense of national identity on blatant closed mouth: teeth were immaterial. In public, the French undercurrents of Francophobia. The wearers of Dubois’s king’s speeches were read for him. The king’s body embod- new contraptions had to put up with a considerable degree ied sovereignty. He did not need to open his mouth to assert of mockery, as exemplified in Thomas Rowlandson’s it; his presence sufficed. At a more mundane but in its way 99 famous 1811 engraving, “A French Dentist Shew- no less significant level, moreover, Louis XIV had had the indignity of losing the upper part of his jaw in an over- On the eve of the French Revolution of 1789, the new enthusiastic bout of tooth-extraction in the 1680s—well smile which was making its revolutionary way in western before, of course, the advent of the dentist and the smile culture was thoroughly French. Yet if the open-mouthed, revolution. For the rest of his life he could not eat soup white-toothed smile went on to greater things, it also lost without spraying his plate through his nose—a spectacle its close Gallic association. To some extent, prosaically, we that must have enlivened the public dining which was a can attribute this to the decline of French dentistry. When in feature of court life at Versailles. (Such a gesture would of 1802 the legislature re-organized the medical professions, it course be unimaginable in the world of modern politics: made no provisions at all for the practice of dentistry. Skilled Tony Blair is more famous for his Hollywood grin than for dental practitioners had hitherto to practice on terms of legal his table manners.) equality with a whole army of tooth-pulling quacks and char- Power in ancien régime France was thus encoded and latans. The personal dentist of Napoleon I had been a trained embodied in the closed mouth: Rigaud’s famous swagger practitioner in Paris under the ancien régime; yet the dentist portrait of Louis XIV has the monarch showcasing those of his nephew, Napoleon III, in the 1850s and 1860s, was dancer’s legs—but with no attempt to camouflage the an American citizen. It was as though by mid nineteenth- sunken cheeks of toothless aging and reckless toothpull- century, the decline of French dentistry and the French smile ing. Kings did not care much for smiling anyway. Louis XV’s was opening up space in which American dentistry could decision to have one of his eyeteeth extracted, a courtier establish a new and enduring brand leadership. noted, “will disfigure him in talking and laughing.” No French hegemony over the smile had in fact been matter: the tooth went. As for Louis XVI, he might have “a shaken before the reorganization of the medical profes- fine leg,” another courtier opined, but “his teeth were badly sions. The Revolutionary decade which followed Madame arranged and made his smile rather ungraceful.” As for the Vigée-Lebrun’s portrait was full of open mouths. In the long future king, Charles X, he had “his mouth continually open,” term, however, the Revolution would be more about maimed in a hopelessly gormless manner. The French smile revolu- mouths than winsome smiles, especially once Terror came tion—pace Elias—was not made at court. It was made out in on the scene. The revolutionary crowd of 10 August 1792 the bourgeois public sphere. which overthrew the monarchy had a vilely expressive There was something mildly democratic about the atrocity to offer, whose obscene memory lingered over the new French smile as it became increasingly evident in following century: once they had killed Marie-Antoinette’s the decades leading up to Madame Vigée-Lebrun’s 1787 alleged lesbian lover, the Princesse de Lamballe, they cut gesture. It was as though eighteenth-century France was off her head, plonked it on the end of a pike, and smeared in the process of becoming an “open-mouthed society.” around its mouth, in a kind of chillingly grotesque mous- This was witnessed not only in the ceaseless patter of tache, the princess’s own pudenda, before going on to wave mouth-care advertisements but also, more importantly, in this ghastly object in the face of the imprisoned queen. the profusion of writing and in the loquacity of Enlighten- If late eighteenth-century France had seemed to launch ment sociability from salon to coffee-house. This contrasted a French smile Revolution, the political maelstrom of strikingly with the habitual taciturnity of Bourbon closed- the 1790s took the French smile in quite a different mouthedness. In this context, painting—in the shape of direction. The characteristic French smile of the 1790s Madame Vigée-Lebrun’s 1787 self-portrait—was a late- was the acme of horror and terror: the rictus of the gaping, comer to the smile party. mutilated mouth.
100 wide at the bottom, narrow at the top sasha archibald
In the wake of new press freedoms won by the July Revolution of 1830, France’s King Louis-Philippe found himself just as popular a target of caricature as his despised predecessor, Charles X. Accordingly, the support of the “Citizen King” for free expression quickly cooled. Between November 1830 and April 1831, a period described in detail in Robert Justin Goldstein’s Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France, no less than four press laws were passed expressly to limit the publication of images. The primary target of these laws was La Caricature, a tabloid-style weekly founded by twenty-eight-year-old Charles Philipon in November 1830. Philipon’s extraordinary penchant for caricature was outdone only by his zealous commitment to indicting the King. As he goaded the talents of such greats as Daumier, Grandville, and Traviès toward forwarding his cause, Philipon endured a steady barrage of harassment, lawsuits, fines, seizures, and raids, as well as multiple imprisonments. But even prison could not stop him: Philipon directed La Caricature and even launched a new caricature journal, the daily Le Charivari, from behind bars. The most caustic weapon in La Caricature’s imagistic arsenal was a figure suggesting the ostensible resemblance of King Louis-Philippe’s face to a pear. Prosecuted in May 1831 for publishing two drawings in La Caricature that depicted men who looked like the King, Philipon’s defense ran that if all drawings resembling the King were to be censored, artists would have little left to draw. The government certainly couldn’t censor everything wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, Philipon continued, and to prove his point, he quickly sketched the king’s trans- formation into a plump pear. Immediately following his widely publicized acquittal, the pear drawings appeared in La Caricature. The likeness resonated with the people of France, and the symbol took off. Pears decorated the walls and buildings of Paris; caricaturists churned out drawings of pears in compromising positions; and common parlance began to denote La Caricature as The Pear. Stendhal’s Lucien Leuwen, Hugo’s Les Miserables, and the memoirs of Thac- keray, Heinrich Heine, and Baudelaire all refer to the fruity representations ubiquitous in Paris between 1830 and 1835; an entire book of puns on the theme, Physiology of the Pear, was published in 1832. La Caricature followed the first draw- ings with several more: The allegorical Liberty constrained by a pear-shaped ball and chain; the king stooping to help a child draw a pear on a city wall; pear trees watered with blood; and pear-shaped arrangements of type. In 1833, Philipon published a particularly incendiary drawing depicting a monument in the shape of a pear placed on the site of Louis XVI’s guillotine death. In the ensuing court trial, the prosecution argued that the drawing constituted “a provocation to murder.” To this Philipon replied, “It would be at most a provocation to make marmalade.”
101 laughter scores Edward Jessen
I began scoring laughter in 1994, when Jason Griffiths and Alex Gino entered an architectural competition to build a Temple of Laughter, and asked me to contribute. (Their design went on to win.) They explained that their small build- ing, basically a shipping container that could be transported around the country on the back of a truck, would support a kind of “laughter system” which would both encourage visitors to laugh by playing them canned laughter and record their laughter responses as well. The idea was to create a building that would contain an ever-expanding cacophony of laughter. My job was to make distinctions between the different categories of laughter—the giggle, the guffaw, the bellow, etc.—by recording samples from friends, children, and the TV and then making musical notations of them. It became immediately evident that the process of faithfully transcrib- ing pure sounds of emotion was going to be enormously difficult. Unlike speech, which generally has a decipherable pitch, laughter seemed to be ecstatic, more like the sound of forced air and involuntary pitchless spasms. Therefore, with each example of laughter I resolved to take impressions of the vowels, the speeds and the curvature in the way that a court artist might quickly sketch a villain during a big murder trial—not the deepest likeness, yet not unrecognizable either. The impressions are based on a series of closer and closer approximations. A person should be able to look at the notes and execute the same sounds in an accurate and, with any luck, emotive manner.
102 no laughing matter: a short, sad history of the smiley face jennifer liese
4.
1.
3.
2.
1. and now this: For the past decade or so Native-American The “original” smiley face was drawn in 1963 by commercial activists have fought and mostly lost a series of battles artist Harvey Ball for a campaign to boost morale among against new commuter highways linking suburban develop- employees brooding over an ominous merger at State ments to downtown Albuquerque—built right alongside Mutual Life Assurance of Worcester, Massachusetts. the Petroglyph National Monument, home to 20,000 sacred Ball’s fee: $45. petroglyphs.
2. 4. By the early 1970s, the smiley had become a ubiquitous Mars’s Galle Crater, better known as the “Happy Face peace icon-cum-cheerleader, thanks to Bernard and Murray Crater,” photographed by the Mars Global Surveyor Orbiter Spain, two brothers from Philadelphia who made fortunes in 1999. Wrought by a meteor, it’s about 134 miles across. off their sundry smiley products (50 million buttons alone (According to NASA’s website, “It looks like Mars is happy were sold). Sales spiked when the Spains gave voice to their to see us!”) Current NASA funding for the Spaceguard cash cow, bestowing its enduring exhortation: “Have a Nice Survey, the primary means of earth’s defense against aster- Day!” Ball, who never made another cent off his design, was oids and comets: $4 million per year. Estimated cost for said to have found the expression “insipid.” George W. Bush’s man-on-Mars space initiative: $500 billion to $1 trillion. 3. But of course Ball’s wasn’t the very first smiley. This smiley 5. petroglyph was found in Frijoles Canyon, New Mexico, The emoticon, first posted on an online bulletin board in where the Pueblo Indian culture dates back 3,000 1982 by Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie 104 years. Millennia of drought, relocation, conquest, Mellon University, was invented as a way to indicate humor 7.
6.
8.
5. :-)
or sarcasm. Who knew digital epistles would turn out to be 7. so much funnier than their paper forebears? “It didn’t seem Remarkably protean, the smiley serves infinite happy like a big deal at the time,” Fahlman reflects. Today, anecdot- agendas. al evidence suggests that more blossoming love affairs have been called off over one party’s horror at discovering the 8. other’s use of emoticons than over differences on abortion, If Harvey Ball’s son, Charlie Ball, has his way, the smiley political affiliation, and capital punishment combined. will soon adorn every license plate in Massachusetts—or at least 1,500 of them. Since March 2003, Ball fils has been on 6. a mission to gather the 1,500 applications Massachusetts And who can forget the “smiley face bomber,” Luke Helder, DMV requires to produce a specialty plate. According to the 21-year-old art student arrested in 2002 for planting smileyplate.com, by mid-January 2005, Ball had 1,002 18 pipe bombs in mailboxes across the US heartland? applications in hand. “Just 498 to go!” Bay State residents Having set off the eyes in Nebraska and on the Iowa/Illinois take note: You just might make this a happy ending after all. border, he had just begun the mouth in Colorado and Texas
when he got caught. The pipe bombs, which produced inju- Harvey Ball photo reprinted with permission of the Worcester Telegram & ries but no deaths, were delivered along with a photocopied Gazette. Vintage smiley buttons from the collection of Nathaniel Levtow. anti-government rant signed “Someone Who Cares.” The Petroglyph photo by Sally King, Bandelier National Monument. Mars photo name of his rock band—Apathy—notwithstanding, Helder courtesy NASA. Pipe bomb images source: CNN. Those three tiny smileys in #7 was invariably described by friends as “cheerful.” Indeed, are Ecstasy pills. “Bob,” a kind of Windows- meets-virtual-reality-for-dummies pictures show him grinning widely while being escorted (1995), is Microsoft’s worst-selling product of all time. Smiley Swastika pin by between jail and court, finishing off that smile one way ManWoman. Proposed Massachusetts license plate design courtesy Charlie or another. Ball and the Harvey Ball World Smile Foundation. the last laugh Terms of this offer: Who do you trust? I’m givin’ away free money!
—The Joker, to Gotham City 1 We can honor only one Enemy request per US state, and one per foreign country. First come, first serve. No purchase necessary. Deadline for requests: 30 July 2005. Many non-profit organizations will call you a “Friend” when 2 All questions about Enemyhood, including requests to participate, must be emailed to you make a modest cash donation. You’ll be thanked, and