wrong assumptions: analog= indexicality index vs digital
p302 "In that case, indexicality becomes just a subset of analog inscription, for it is minimally defined as including some element of physical contact between referent and sign." "(n)ot the analog in general but the indexical becomes the opposing term, against which the digital may be defined and which it surpasses."-- digital utopia
hybridity -- confuses the opposition between digital and indexical
digital indexicality
p307 The "pure" of "pure data" cannot mean the obliteration of referential origins, for without referential entities or events preexisting the data itself, that data would have no informational value as survaillence. (note: he is talking about digital surveillance of military spy satellites)
p308 It (note : a digital camera)gathers light like a traditional camera but does not record its presence by chemical reactions on photosensitive substances. Instead, it is a machine for encoding light intensities as numbers on a magnetized substrate, and the perceived image is actually composed of pixels with assigned color values arranged along Cartisian coordinates.
P309-310
Andy Darley has proposed dividing this history up to the present into two phases, which overlap but are defined by different dominant tendencies. The early phase peaked during the 1960s, when cutting-edge developments in computer imaging technologies and techniques often partook of the rhetoric and rationales of high modernist abstraction. ....
But following this early period, according to Darley, the dominant tendency in computer imaging turned depictive, emphasizing forms of pictorial versimilitude to achieve what has come to be called simulation.
some references:
Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1991)
Miriam Hansen, "Early Cinema,late Cinema: Transformation of the Public sphere," in Viewing positions: Ways of seeing film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1994)
Andy Darley, "From Abstraction to Simulation: Notes on the history of computer imaging," in Culture, Technology, and creativity in the late Twentieth century, ed. Philip Hayward (London: John Libbey, 1990)
Gene Youngblood Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970)
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
change mummified
Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory Philip Rosen (Minneapolis·London: University of Minnesota Press 2001)
p6 But more indicative is his(my note: Bazin's) general conception of the history of filmic textuality as an ongoing, never-completed dialectical sequence of representation strategies attempting to move toward total flexibility and completeness in encountering the real.I would emphasize two related temporal assumptions of this mode of thinking first, the present is always already different in some respect from the past, and second, reality is definitionally temporalized, in the sense that it always involves change or at least the consistent potential for change. In chapter 3, we will see that these are fundamental assumptions of modern historicity.
p12 Bazin is quite consistent in his phenomenological solution to the subject-object split. For his phenomenology, the subject's projections toward exteriority are definitive, and Bazin can almost be read as analyzing the status of the objective for the subject. That is, "objective" here can be put in quotes with greater clarity, for the "objective" is always inflected by the "subjective," never available except through the processes of the later. Bazin often expresses this with the terminology of abstract and concrete,which should again remind us of his continental philosophical heritage: the world can never present itself or write itself apart from the abstracting drive of the subject to find meaning; the pure, brute concrete real in his totality and apart from the intentionality of a subject is simply unavailalbe as such to humans.
p15 It is not surprising that those who objected to 1970s film theory made perspective a major are of engagement.... Another recent alternative is Jonathan Crary's more or less Foucauldian position. While agreeing with 1970s film theorists such as Comolli that perspective constructs an ideal subjectivity, or position of "the observer," he argues that by the time of cinema appeared in the nineteenth century, the Renaissance spectatorial ideals emphasized in 1970s film theory had already eroded. The notion that it was possible to objectively or reliably map space according to the procedures of scientific optics (philosophically associated with the camera ob-scura and its successor mechanisms) had been replaced by another, more relativistic model. This model was associated with research on perceptual illusions , the bodily temporality of perception and so forth. It was part of a discursive field stated on the thesis that there is always on a subjective shaping of objectivity in visual and other perception, as opposed to a single ideal position of knowledge. (my note: discursive field for Bazin's theory, especially his phenomenological take)
p 16 In fact, the function of perspective in Bazin's theory invites us to displace consideration of the special appeal of cinematic "realism" from spatial similarity or dissimilarity between image and world to issues of temporality.
p17 This historical function can be described by saying that perspective provides a sort of credible code -- to put it in necessary oxymoronic terms, a reliable illusion--whose credibility can then be lent to automatically produced images. But then, by a peculiar inversion, it ultimately becomes the mechanical process that was previously a supplement to the spatial illusion of likeness, which, once established, lends its credibility, to the spatial configuration of the image. Thus, there is a distinction between perspective and the special credibility of the automatically produced image.
P17 It is precisly the activity and desire of the subject-- "our obession with realism"-- that makes indexicality the crucial aspect of the cinematic image for Bazin.
p23 So what is usually regarded as Bazin's ontology describes a subjective intentionality for automatically produced images based on a preservative obsession.
p27 Since the ground for Bazin's position is an account of a generalized subjective obsession, he must finally make imagination, fantasy, the illogical a root of any true realism.
(note: Bazin sees in film, and perhaps art in general, an generalized subjective obsession with preserving the past)
p31-32 In Bazin's work generally, the explicit concern with the flow of time and the various ways a subject obsessively apprehends the past is pertinent not only the filmic subject, but for the theoretical/critical subject-- sucha as Bazin himself. In Bazin's critical writings, filmic procedures are consistently conceived within the history of cinema, film style, and, to some extent, their wilder contexts.
P32 (w)e may also ask whether his work does not include a subtext on the compulsion and fascinations of history, the sublimations and attractions of the past, even outside cinema.
p32 It is possible to section Bazin's interest in historicity, considered as manifestations of the human concern with "pastness" in cinema carried to the prestigious knowledge claims of historiography. The most obvious and influential sector of this interest is surely his dialectical-evolutionary history of filmic styles.
(myth-- total film, American Western, soviet film)
p36 For even if there are individual and cultural variations in the ways that this projective desire of subjectivity is met, the desire is itself posited outside of change and history.
p37-38 The universality of the ambition for perfect reproduction of the world is the universality of the preservative obsession, the characterization of the subject that is Bazin's founding theoretical axiom. The axiom here finds reconfirmation in history. But the consequence is a waffling on any historical explanation of transformations among media and styles.
(note: To Bazin, the preservative obsession becomes a historical explanation for film history)
modern time awareness time-oriented labor cinema as kind of junction of indexicality and rationalization
"indexing history" p109 An emphasis on critically examined primary source materials in the training and work of historian has been extraordinarily functional in justifying the establishment of and claims to professional disciplinarity.
(note: the primary sources can be understood a species of indexical signs)
p6 But more indicative is his(my note: Bazin's) general conception of the history of filmic textuality as an ongoing, never-completed dialectical sequence of representation strategies attempting to move toward total flexibility and completeness in encountering the real.I would emphasize two related temporal assumptions of this mode of thinking first, the present is always already different in some respect from the past, and second, reality is definitionally temporalized, in the sense that it always involves change or at least the consistent potential for change. In chapter 3, we will see that these are fundamental assumptions of modern historicity.
p12 Bazin is quite consistent in his phenomenological solution to the subject-object split. For his phenomenology, the subject's projections toward exteriority are definitive, and Bazin can almost be read as analyzing the status of the objective for the subject. That is, "objective" here can be put in quotes with greater clarity, for the "objective" is always inflected by the "subjective," never available except through the processes of the later. Bazin often expresses this with the terminology of abstract and concrete,which should again remind us of his continental philosophical heritage: the world can never present itself or write itself apart from the abstracting drive of the subject to find meaning; the pure, brute concrete real in his totality and apart from the intentionality of a subject is simply unavailalbe as such to humans.
p15 It is not surprising that those who objected to 1970s film theory made perspective a major are of engagement.... Another recent alternative is Jonathan Crary's more or less Foucauldian position. While agreeing with 1970s film theorists such as Comolli that perspective constructs an ideal subjectivity, or position of "the observer," he argues that by the time of cinema appeared in the nineteenth century, the Renaissance spectatorial ideals emphasized in 1970s film theory had already eroded. The notion that it was possible to objectively or reliably map space according to the procedures of scientific optics (philosophically associated with the camera ob-scura and its successor mechanisms) had been replaced by another, more relativistic model. This model was associated with research on perceptual illusions , the bodily temporality of perception and so forth. It was part of a discursive field stated on the thesis that there is always on a subjective shaping of objectivity in visual and other perception, as opposed to a single ideal position of knowledge. (my note: discursive field for Bazin's theory, especially his phenomenological take)
p 16 In fact, the function of perspective in Bazin's theory invites us to displace consideration of the special appeal of cinematic "realism" from spatial similarity or dissimilarity between image and world to issues of temporality.
p17 This historical function can be described by saying that perspective provides a sort of credible code -- to put it in necessary oxymoronic terms, a reliable illusion--whose credibility can then be lent to automatically produced images. But then, by a peculiar inversion, it ultimately becomes the mechanical process that was previously a supplement to the spatial illusion of likeness, which, once established, lends its credibility, to the spatial configuration of the image. Thus, there is a distinction between perspective and the special credibility of the automatically produced image.
P17 It is precisly the activity and desire of the subject-- "our obession with realism"-- that makes indexicality the crucial aspect of the cinematic image for Bazin.
p23 So what is usually regarded as Bazin's ontology describes a subjective intentionality for automatically produced images based on a preservative obsession.
p27 Since the ground for Bazin's position is an account of a generalized subjective obsession, he must finally make imagination, fantasy, the illogical a root of any true realism.
(note: Bazin sees in film, and perhaps art in general, an generalized subjective obsession with preserving the past)
p31-32 In Bazin's work generally, the explicit concern with the flow of time and the various ways a subject obsessively apprehends the past is pertinent not only the filmic subject, but for the theoretical/critical subject-- sucha as Bazin himself. In Bazin's critical writings, filmic procedures are consistently conceived within the history of cinema, film style, and, to some extent, their wilder contexts.
P32 (w)e may also ask whether his work does not include a subtext on the compulsion and fascinations of history, the sublimations and attractions of the past, even outside cinema.
p32 It is possible to section Bazin's interest in historicity, considered as manifestations of the human concern with "pastness" in cinema carried to the prestigious knowledge claims of historiography. The most obvious and influential sector of this interest is surely his dialectical-evolutionary history of filmic styles.
(myth-- total film, American Western, soviet film)
p36 For even if there are individual and cultural variations in the ways that this projective desire of subjectivity is met, the desire is itself posited outside of change and history.
p37-38 The universality of the ambition for perfect reproduction of the world is the universality of the preservative obsession, the characterization of the subject that is Bazin's founding theoretical axiom. The axiom here finds reconfirmation in history. But the consequence is a waffling on any historical explanation of transformations among media and styles.
(note: To Bazin, the preservative obsession becomes a historical explanation for film history)
modern time awareness time-oriented labor cinema as kind of junction of indexicality and rationalization
"indexing history" p109 An emphasis on critically examined primary source materials in the training and work of historian has been extraordinarily functional in justifying the establishment of and claims to professional disciplinarity.
(note: the primary sources can be understood a species of indexical signs)
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
internaltionalism and cultural experience: soviet films and popular chinese understanding of the future in the 1950s
by Tina Mai Chen cultural critique No.58 (autumn, 2004), pp82-114
internationalism, film consumption
"Nor do analysts generally consider forms of consumption located in noncapitalist contexts that promote alternative globally situated subjects."
"soviet union's Today is our tomorrow."
"how consistency, in the domain of the popular, of slogans that associated the (good) Soviet Union with China's future enabled a malleable internationalism to remain 'popular' even across the divide of the Sino-Soviet split at the end of the 1950s. " "internaltionalism referred not only to Sino-Soviet relations; it invoked a utopian vision of an alternatively ordered world order premised on international proletarian revolution as well as the pragmatic politics of a Cold War world in which the strength of nation-states figured prominently."
Korean War-- soviet films "gongke bolin" elements of a larger ongoing common struggle
model women
reference: Tina, Tina Mai. "Female Icon, Feminist Iconography? Socalist Rhetoric and Women's Agency in 1950s China." Gender & History 15, no.2 (August 2003):268-95
internationalism, film consumption
"Nor do analysts generally consider forms of consumption located in noncapitalist contexts that promote alternative globally situated subjects."
"soviet union's Today is our tomorrow."
"how consistency, in the domain of the popular, of slogans that associated the (good) Soviet Union with China's future enabled a malleable internationalism to remain 'popular' even across the divide of the Sino-Soviet split at the end of the 1950s. " "internaltionalism referred not only to Sino-Soviet relations; it invoked a utopian vision of an alternatively ordered world order premised on international proletarian revolution as well as the pragmatic politics of a Cold War world in which the strength of nation-states figured prominently."
Korean War-- soviet films "gongke bolin" elements of a larger ongoing common struggle
model women
reference: Tina, Tina Mai. "Female Icon, Feminist Iconography? Socalist Rhetoric and Women's Agency in 1950s China." Gender & History 15, no.2 (August 2003):268-95
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Plastic (1957 Roland Barthes)
Despite having names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyetheylene), plastic, the products of which have just been gathered in an exhibition, is in essence the stuff of alchemy. At the entrance of the stand, the public waits in a long queue in order to witness the accomplishment of the magical operation par excellence: the transformation of matter. An ideally-shaped machine, tubulated and oblong (a shape well suited to suggest the secret of an itinerary) effortlessly draws, out of a heap of greenish crystals, shiny and fluted dressing-room tidies. At one end, raw, telluric matter, at the other, the finished, human object; and between these two extremes, nothing; nothing but a transit, hardly watched over by an attendant in a cloth cap, half-god, half-robot.
Doing Cooking (Luce Giard)
One day finally, when I was twenty, I got my own small apartment, apart from school barracks, that included a rudimentary but sufficient facility in which to prepare my meals. I discovered myself invested with care of preparing my own food,delighted with being able to to escape from the noise and crowds of college cafeterias and from the shuttling back and forth to face preordained menus. But how was I to proceed? I did not know how to do anything. It was not a question of waiting for or asking advice from the women in the family because that would have implied returning to the maternal hearth and agreeing to slip back into that discarded feminine model. The solution seemed obvious: just like everything else, these sorts of things could be learned in books. All I had to do was find in a bookstore a source of information that was 'simple','quick','modern' and 'inexperience', according to my then naive vocabulary. And in order to secure the means to do so (at least, so I thought), I undertook the close study of a paperback cookbook devoid of both illustrations and 'feminine' flourishes. To my mind, this absence endowed the book with eminent practical value and sure efficiency.
From the groping experience of my initial gestures, my trials and errors, there remains this one surprise: I thought I had never learned or observed anything, having obstinately wanted to escape from the contagion of a young girl's education and because I had always preferred my room, my books, and my silent games to the kitchen where my mother busied herself. Yet, my childhood gaze had seen and memorized certain gestures, and my sense memory had kept track of certain tastes, smells and colors. I already knew all the sounds: the gentle hiss of simmering water, the sputtering of melting meet drippings, and the dull thud of the kneading hand. A recipe or an inductive word sufficed to arouse a strange anamnesis whereby ancient knowledge and primitive experiences were reactivated in fragments of which I was the heiress and guardian without wanting to be. I had to admit that I too had been provided with a woman's knowledge and that it had crept into me, slipping past my mind's surveillance. It was something that came to me from my body and that integrated me into the great crops of women of my lineage, incorporating me into their anonymous ranks.
I discovered bit by bit not the pleasure of eating good meals (I am seldom drawn to solitary delights), but that of manipulating raw materials, of organizing, combining, modifying, and inventing. I learned the tranquil joy of anticipated hospitality, when one prepares a meal to share with friends in the same way in which one composes a party tune or draws: with moving hands, careful fingers, the whole body inhabited with the rhythm of working, and the mind awakening, freed from its own ponderousness, flitting from idea to memory, finally seizing on a certain chain of thought, and then modulating this tattered writing once again. Thus, surreptitiously and without suspecting it, I had been invested with the secret, tenacious pleasure of doing-cooking.
From the groping experience of my initial gestures, my trials and errors, there remains this one surprise: I thought I had never learned or observed anything, having obstinately wanted to escape from the contagion of a young girl's education and because I had always preferred my room, my books, and my silent games to the kitchen where my mother busied herself. Yet, my childhood gaze had seen and memorized certain gestures, and my sense memory had kept track of certain tastes, smells and colors. I already knew all the sounds: the gentle hiss of simmering water, the sputtering of melting meet drippings, and the dull thud of the kneading hand. A recipe or an inductive word sufficed to arouse a strange anamnesis whereby ancient knowledge and primitive experiences were reactivated in fragments of which I was the heiress and guardian without wanting to be. I had to admit that I too had been provided with a woman's knowledge and that it had crept into me, slipping past my mind's surveillance. It was something that came to me from my body and that integrated me into the great crops of women of my lineage, incorporating me into their anonymous ranks.
I discovered bit by bit not the pleasure of eating good meals (I am seldom drawn to solitary delights), but that of manipulating raw materials, of organizing, combining, modifying, and inventing. I learned the tranquil joy of anticipated hospitality, when one prepares a meal to share with friends in the same way in which one composes a party tune or draws: with moving hands, careful fingers, the whole body inhabited with the rhythm of working, and the mind awakening, freed from its own ponderousness, flitting from idea to memory, finally seizing on a certain chain of thought, and then modulating this tattered writing once again. Thus, surreptitiously and without suspecting it, I had been invested with the secret, tenacious pleasure of doing-cooking.
Monday, January 10, 2011
comments on the society of the spectacle
Guy Debord translated by Malcolm Imrie (London, NewYork :Verso 1990)
P8-9
In 1967 I distinguished two rival and successive forms of spectacular power, the concentrated and the diffuse.... Since then a third form has been established, through a rational combination of these two, and on the basis of a general victory of the form which had showed itself stronger: the diffuse. This is the integrated spectacle, which has since tended to impose itself globally.
....
The intergrated spectacle shows itself to be simultaneously concentrated and diffuse, and ever since the fruitful union of the two has learnt to employ both these qualities on a grander scale. Their former mode of application has changed considerably. As regards concentration, the controlling center has now become occult: never to be occupied by a know leader, or clear ideology. And on the diffuse side, the spectacle has never before put its mark to such a degree on almost the full range of socially produced behaviour and objects. For the final sense of the integrated spectacle is this-- that it has integrated itself into reality to the same extent as it was describing it. As a result, this reality no longer confronts the integrated spectacle as something alien. When the spectacle was concentrated, the greater part of surrounding society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part; today,no part. The spectacle has spread itself to the point where it now permeates all reality....
It is in these conditions that a parodic end of the division of labour suddenly appears, with carnivalesque gaiety; all the more welcome because it coincides with the generalised disapperance of all real ability. A financier can be a singer. a lawyer a police spy, a baker can parade his literary tastes, an actor can be president, a chef can philosophise on cookery techniques as if they were landmarks in universal history. Anyone can join in the spectacle, in order publicly to adopt, or sometimes secretly practise, an entirely different acticity from whatever specialism first made their name....
P8-9
In 1967 I distinguished two rival and successive forms of spectacular power, the concentrated and the diffuse.... Since then a third form has been established, through a rational combination of these two, and on the basis of a general victory of the form which had showed itself stronger: the diffuse. This is the integrated spectacle, which has since tended to impose itself globally.
....
The intergrated spectacle shows itself to be simultaneously concentrated and diffuse, and ever since the fruitful union of the two has learnt to employ both these qualities on a grander scale. Their former mode of application has changed considerably. As regards concentration, the controlling center has now become occult: never to be occupied by a know leader, or clear ideology. And on the diffuse side, the spectacle has never before put its mark to such a degree on almost the full range of socially produced behaviour and objects. For the final sense of the integrated spectacle is this-- that it has integrated itself into reality to the same extent as it was describing it. As a result, this reality no longer confronts the integrated spectacle as something alien. When the spectacle was concentrated, the greater part of surrounding society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part; today,no part. The spectacle has spread itself to the point where it now permeates all reality....
It is in these conditions that a parodic end of the division of labour suddenly appears, with carnivalesque gaiety; all the more welcome because it coincides with the generalised disapperance of all real ability. A financier can be a singer. a lawyer a police spy, a baker can parade his literary tastes, an actor can be president, a chef can philosophise on cookery techniques as if they were landmarks in universal history. Anyone can join in the spectacle, in order publicly to adopt, or sometimes secretly practise, an entirely different acticity from whatever specialism first made their name....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)