Home > Notes from the Underground
I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Friday, May 23, 2008
An article questions the resurgence of graphics in modern fiction:"The Lazarus Project features a twin narrative, telling the story of a murder in 1908 and a present-day writer investigating the death. In both cases, the images are intended to add depth and resonance to both stories. The effect, however, is the opposite: their inclusion only suggests that Hemon lacks confidence in his present-day narrator, and the verisimilitude of his historical reconstruction. Last week, I asked a friend, and fellow Hemon admirer, what he thought about it all. "Sebald has a lot to answer for," he said.
WG Sebald subtly altered the literary landscape with his fiction/travel/history books. Melancholic, digressive and erudite, his unsettling narratives are punctuated with photos, landscapes, diary entries and other images. It's the tension between these two elements - between what is real and fake, what words can describe and what they can't - that gives his books their dream-like power. It also allows Sebald to give a direct line into the mental landscape of his narrator, one that is visual as well as linguistic.
Sebald was a master of this device, but it's a technique that can scupper otherwise good novels... Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer's image heavy second novel, also suffers under the weight of its artistic leanings. I'm still undecided as to whether the last pages which depict a man falling from the Twin Towers, are an ambitious attempt to prove that sometimes words are not enough, or whether it's a final tricksy passage to a book over-stuffed with visual stimuli."
It's not particularly new; prior to the advent of the printing press, image and text were inextricably entwined. With the Victorian period, the love of medievalism led to a revival of sorts; editions of works by Chaucer issued by the Kelmscott Press were illustrated by Burne Jones. In parallel, Paget's illustrations for Conan Doyle were sufficiently powerful to create an image of Sherlock Holmes that failed to resemble that described in the text. The same followed for Phiz and Cruikshank's illustrations for Dickens and in the case of Tenniel's Alice in Wonderland; although modern readers might find themselves reading an edition illustrated by Mervyn Peake. George Eliot had her novels illustrated by no less a figure than Lord Leighton. Much of Dore's work was done as book illustrations, while Rossetti served as both writer and illustrator. Photographs occurred in fiction as early as Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte, followed by the work of Andre Breton. In a sense, modern fiction has been aberrant for relying solely on text. Nonetheless, the above comments immediately brought an essay by Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line to mind:"Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself--and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.
Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces, and embracing graphical or sensorial ones--a trend that accounts for the success of both Microsoft and Disney? Part of it is simply that the world is very complicated now--much more complicated than the hunter-gatherer world that our brains evolved to cope with--and we simply can't handle all of the details. We have to delegate. We have no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or programmer at Apple or Microsoft to make a few choices for us, close off some options, and give us a conveniently packaged executive summary.
But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.
A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people's minds."
Update: on a related note:"Our ancestors couldn't have foreseen, however, the sheer quantity of visual distractions which, while they aid, also hinder our readerly mind's eye. Indeed, surveys carried out in schools confirm that non-illustrated texts produce more mental images than illustrated ones. While there's a text/image balance to be struck as a means to training youthful brains in the art of visualising, we know that as adults the extent to which book covers, and even author photographs, while helping us situate a text before we crack open the pages, quite often mislead.
I'm not quite arguing that, in order to focus our minds we go back to minimalist Editions de Minuit style book covers as practiced over here in France - by their very austerity, they convey to the reader the immediate impression of the publishing house's chilly prestige. I am intrigued, rather, by the practice of certain readers like Nabokov, who produced for his Cornell students mock-serious diagrams of the comparative states of mind of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or drew up sketches of beetle-man Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis."Labels: Images, Literature
posted by Richard 8:01 pm
Monday, May 15, 2006
An interesting manifesto from this website:"Non-photography day is an effort on my part to revive the moment by putting down the camera. It is a day to think about how life exists, in essence and not appearance and to understand the inadequacy of the photograph in describing this essence, to bring awareness of the perils of living through the view finder or the display screen…
This day was made after trekking through the Jungle on the Thailand/Burma Border with a group of travellers. As you would expect we came across many wonderful views, villages and creatures on our way; however I noticed that the people around me were living in these moments through their camera, and as soon as we stopped and were still, all reached for their camera... I felt my fellow travellers rarely really appreciated the essence of the moment they were in or engaged in any relationship between themselves and the places we stopped. They were more concerned with gaining the pattern the camera made. I felt sad for them, as it seemed they were missing out on so much reality through their obsession, an act of possession- of wanting to own the appearance of the place, as if this was all it had to give and photographs were their way of taking it."
What interested me about this was that this was the view I originally held but have since completely changed my mind. Originally, I felt that photography was a mechanical way of viewing the world, which only served to dim the immediacy of experience. Since then, I've come to see it as a way of slowing experience and regaining observation of intricacy and detail (as Susan Sontag put it, "All photographs are memento mori"). I'm thinking of how neuroscience has come to describe consciousness as a series of individual moments, which like a flickbook are asembled to create the illusion of a continuous stream; photography or painting return us to the moment that lies underneath the illusion:"Consciousness also does funny things with time. A good example is the “cutaneous rabbit”. If a person’s arm is tapped rapidly, say five times at the wrist, then twice near the elbow and finally three times on the upper arm, they report not a series of separate taps coming in groups, but a continuous series moving upwards?as though a little creature were running up their arm. We might ask how taps two to four came to be experienced some way up the forearm when the next tap in the series had not happened yet. How did the brain know where the next tap was going to fall?"
Nonetheless, I still feel to some extent that any form of art, photography included since it is every bit as contrived a representation of reality as impressionist or cubist painting (certainly in my own photography I have gradually become increasingly conscious of different techniques and styles I was repeatedly using without having thought that at first that it was anything other than a transparent reflection of my subject), is an objectification of experience, something that necessarily involves standing outside life and at a remove from it. In that sense, I think of a line from Derek Jarman's film of Caravaggio; "all art against life."
posted by Richard 5:23 pm
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Daniel Barenboim's Reith Lectures have provided some interesting thoughts about the respective roles of sight and hearing:"Antonio DeMasio, has taught us many things about human emotion, about the human brain, and also about the human ear, and he says that the auditory system is physically much closer inside the brain to the parts of the brain which regulate life, which means that they are the basis for the sense of pain, pleasure, motivation - in other words basic emotions. And he also says that the physical vibrations which result in sound sensations are a variation on touching, they change our own bodies directly and deeply, more so than the patterns of light that lead to vision, because the patterns of light that lead to vision allow us to see objects sometimes very far away provided there is light...
... And not only we neglect the ear but we often repress it, and we find more and more in our society, not only in the United States, although the United States I think was very active in starting this process, of creating opportunities to hear music without listening to it - what is commonly known as muzak."
Camille Paglia's once observed that cinema was always implicit in Western culture and it's certainly true that literature is replete with visual description and imagery in a way that is not nearly as marked for the tactile or auditory senses. Nonetheless, it seems to me that much of the difficulty identified by Barenboim stems not from neglect as such but from both hearing and sight being abused in much the same way. Just as we are bombarded each day with imagery, so too are we bombarded with sound. For instance, while it is obvious why Barenboim feels that muzak devalues the concept of listening to the intricacies of music, it nonetheless seems to be the case that muzak is very far from simply being background music. I'm thinking of Brian Eno's experiments in ambient music, where Eno's sleevenotes for Music for Airports described his idea thus:"The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces - familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention.
Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.
Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten' the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. "
The theory behind ambient was, and remains, a fascinating one but it nonetheless seems clear that theory never translated into practice. Modern muzak continues to be too intrusive to truly qualify as background noise, while the influence of ambient on dance music only saw it too becoming more complex, more engaging and less minimal. Equally, it has become much more common to have TV screens in public areas, allowing imagery to be piped as easily as music.
Update: A related piece from Stylus Magazine (via here) on how the dynamic range of modern music has become increasingly compressed, with less variance between the quieter sections of a record and the louder:"Levels have crept up over the last decade though, and alarmingly so. Nevermind is 6-8dB quieter than, say, Hopes & Fears by Keane—to contextualise this, those 6-8dB will make Nevermind sound approximately half as loud....
By the time you've listened closely (or tried to) to a whole album that's heavily compressed, you end up feeling like Alex at the end of A Clockwork Orange—battered, fatigued by, and disgusted with the music you love... The story goes that Brian Eno “invented” ambient music after a car accident, when he was forced to stay in hospital dosed on painkillers, and someone left a radio playing so quietly that he couldn’t properly hear the music it emitted no matter how much he strained... It strikes me that the way many people are listening to music these days—on trains, in offices, on the street—is not a normal listening experience. It is neither conscious engagement nor ambient enhancement. It’s a hermetic seal, a blockade to the outside world. It’s the opposite of ambient music, in that it doesn’t become a part of or complement the environment it is played in, but rather destroys it."
posted by Richard 7:28 pm
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Spiked Online has been pondering the role of photography in our culture in the wake of such phenomena as reality television and Iraqi prisoner abuse photos:"The growth of photography, said Sontag, was about taking a 'chronically voyeuristic relation to the world'. With camera in hand, the world and its occupants become prey for our amusement, with our subjects expected to pose, to expose themselves on film. The effect, said Sontag, 'is to convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation'...
As Sontag argued in On Photography, photos provide a false sense of understanding. 'Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks.' It is the reduction of everything to surface impressions, giving up on the task of probing beneath appearance to find out why things look as they do."
It's a disturbing point. As a child I found my parents prediliction for photography irksome and saw the camera as a barrier between the subject and experience. Relying on photograhs rather than memory seemed a poor, vicarious experience at best. But as one grows older memory seems less of a certain quality and I now find myself behind the camera. Indeed, my photography often seems remorsely driven by a personal aesthetic, with considerable time spent waiting for a shot to be cleared of the human vermin that stand between my camera and the object of the photo. That object is usually architectural or artistic, reflecting a young fogey's love of past periods whose aesthetics and culture seem far more preferrable than our own in almost everything respect. Reality is most certainly turned into an object of aesthetic appreciation.Labels: Images
posted by Richard 10:39 pm
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Camille Paglia has published a new piece in Arion, on the theme of the increased importance of the image to Western culture:"Young people today are flooded with disconnected images but lack a sympathetic instrument to analyze them as well as a historical frame of reference in which to situate them... The visual environment for the young, in short, has become confused, fragmented, and unstable. ... the style of cultural analysis currently prevalent in universities is, in my view, counterproductive in its anti-media bias and intrusive social agenda. It teaches students suspicion and paranoia and, with its abstract European terminology, does not offer an authentic anthropology of the North American media environment in which they came to consciousness. Post-structuralism and postmodernism do not understand magic or mystique, which are intrinsic to art and imagination. It is no coincidence that since postmodernist terminology seeped into the art world in the 1980s, the fine arts have receded as a major cultural force. "
It's an interesting thesis, namely that the increased importance of the visual imagination has led to an increased dimunition of the reasoning faculty, something that works through language rather than any visual medium. The particular interest for me is that I have always been most at home with language rather than with music or the visual arts; it took me years before I could appreciate music without lyrics. As always with Paglia, the problem lies with her inconsistency. Her magnum opus, Sexual Personae, suffered considerably from this, in that it suggested two opposed tendencies as dominating Western culture but presented a shifting picture of how each tendency should be considered. Paglia seemed unable to suggest which of the two should be allowed to surmount the other, and seemed equally unable to define any dialectical relation between the two. Accordingly, her tone was alternately moralistic and anarchic. Something of the same problem applies here.
The particular problem is that if Paglia's thesis is correct, then her proposed remedy of 'imagology' (a unified study of art, history and criticism) seems to run the risk of being collaboration rather than resistance (if the only course of action is to dwell on study of the visual imagination, then it may well be that post-structuralism and postmodernism were wise to be suspicious of magic and mystique). Contrast Paglia's argument to that of Neal Stephenson in his essay In the Beginning was the Command Line. Stephenson has a similar argument to Paglia in many respects:"The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding thoughts--the only medium--that is not fungible, that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media... A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts."
Stephenson is wary of relying on the visual imagination; he sees it as offering mediated experiences and sees mediated experiences as being unreliable in comparison to the written word. By contrast, Paglia veers between proposing a course of education that simply adapts to this changed world and denouncing it, most obviously with the unintentionally ironic conclusion to her suggested visual studies:"But it is only language that can make sense of the radical extremes in human history, from the ecstatic spirituality of Byzantine icons to the gruesome barbarism of Aztec ritual slaughter. It is language that fleshes out our skeletal outline of images and ideas. In a media age where books are no longer the primary medium for information storage and exchange, language must be reclaimed from the hucksters and the pedants and imaginatively reinforced. To save literature, educators must take command of the pre-rational world of images. The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words."
Update: I've noticed a few other blogs criticising Paglia on a number of grounds. The most obvious is the dated nature of her argument, rehashing Mcluhanite theories at a time when the Internet has arguably restored text to primacy over images. Certainly, the Internet is in many ways a good analogue for the Victorian telegraphy system and by virtue of being initially conceived for military applications evolved through a completely different route to technologies such as television and DVD.
posted by Richard 4:22 pm
