A relationship between two attractive people where neither cheats on the other because they know their lover would have equal opportunities to do so.
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March 2009
March 30, 2009
March 29, 2009
Slatternalia
A raucous gathering of messy people.
March 27, 2009
Pixicrats
1. Self-appointed custodians and archivists of the Pixies' musical output, anecdotal history and legacy. 2. New Age-ish profiteers marketing trinkets about fairies and other "little folk." 3. Lifelong officials of the Girl Scouts of America. 4. Pushers of highly addictive sticks filled mostly with sugar.
March 23, 2009
FaceBook Self-Fashioning
One of Facebook's more prominent features is the profile picture, and the amount of control it gives users over how they picture themselves to others. I’ve been reflecting on this lately because I’ve been looking at self-portraits by photographers I admire like Lee Friedlander and Jo Spence. Whether it’s Friedlander’s wry detachment or Spence’s uncomfortable familiarity, they both unsettle conventional portraiture, which usually presents a more idealized image of the self.
I’m hardly the first to point out that Facebook, whether you play it brash or coy, is in part a personal marketing campaign. It’s a lot more, but it does give users an unprecedented ability to manage the degree, scope, and settings of their interactions with others. The most obvious arena for self-presentation is the profile picture. Whether it’s no picture, deliberately low-key, glossy, or whatever, it sends messages about how you see yourself and would like to be seen.
As I’ve played around with various profile pictures, I was surprised to find how uncomfortable some of them made me. None of them were exactly studio shots, but some of them fit well into a quirky, offbeat discourse that isn’t as far removed from some successful marketing strategies as I might like to claim: me as an eleven-year old Batman on Halloween, for instance. Others, like me shouting at the dawn, or insistently embodied, right down to the skin pores, I found hard to look at, especially when paired with my comments.
I’m not quite sure where to go with this yet. Simply pointing out that FB involves self-marketing and that even offbeat or uncomfortable images participate in this marketing is true enough but also facile. It’s facile because it erases qualitative differences between how different images function on Facebook, and substitutes an easy cynicism for actual insight.
I think I’ll have more interesting things to say about this once I’ve read a little more about the history of portrait photos and where they fit into the wider uses of personal photographs (documenting travel, children, etc.).
What I do feel clear about is that while Facebook is an emergent technology giving people more control over how they use portraits and other personal photos, the content of most photos seems traditional. Even experimental horsing around with the camera dates back to the time that Kodak made taking one’s own photos reasonably affordable. Nothing wrong with traditional uses, but surprising to me.
Perhaps, though, the direction to explore is about recognition. This can be both the "aha" experience others have ("that's the Warren I know"), and the recognitions our self-images seek ("look at the kind of person I've become.") I think what most interests me, though, is neither of these dynamics. What happens when our self-images present things neither we nor our old friends recognize? Potentialities that escape the self-reinforcing loops of identification and recognition? Aspects that fly off from our recognized selves into arenas and combinations that we can't foresee?
March 22, 2009
March 20, 2009
March 19, 2009
Simulacral Qualifications
I think the point about the photographic & simulacra is not that photographs and their subsequent manipulations have no history. They do have histories and genealogies that can sometimes be traced and sometimes are real but irretrievable.
Instead, in a simulacral environment, it is rarely worth the effort it would take to trace such a history, a photograph’s pedigree and record of its copies and manipulations. It would tell us little about a how a photograph functions in a specific context, and instead set us off on a search for illusory origins. The primal scene in which the photograph was taken may turn out to be more phantasmic than real.
Perhaps this is why so much critical effort has shifted instead to the description, history, and analysis of photographic practices and contexts. The provenance of a Farm Security Administration photograph from the 1930s may be difficult to trace, only worth the effort in extraordinary cases such as Dorothea Lange’s image of Florence Owens Thompson (better known as “Migrant Mother”). Instead, we interrogate the practices of the FSA and the ways in which documentary photography was understood at the time. As Fred Jameson argues in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, theory itself may be a response to the difficulty of placing our objects. Instead we attempt to place their places, or more precisely, past practices of placing.
Deleuze’s thought is (predictably) interesting to me here in a couple of regards:
1> He believes we can analyze something like a photograph as a force in itself, acting on us in describable ways. Because his linguistics is based not in Saussure, but Pierce and Hjelmslev, he has tools at his disposal that are unfamiliar to many of us educated in a line from Saussure to Austin to Derrida & after. Another way to put this, I think, is to say that Deleuze has not given up on ontology.
2> In an appendix to The Logic of Sense, Deleuze gives a more interesting and useful account of simulacra than Baudrillard (I think Deleuze’s account also predates Baudrillard’s discussion of them).
2> In an appendix to The Logic of Sense, Deleuze gives a more interesting and useful account of simulacra than Baudrillard (I think Deleuze’s account also predates Baudrillard’s discussion of them).
Hrrrhgm! As Rorschach might say in Watchmen. More puzzles to think through.
Photographic Motion
The increased awareness we now have of how photographic images can be manipulated has highlighted the ways that photographs are (and always have been) in motion.
Rather than a static recording of an instant, a traditional photographic print is a pause in an ongoing process. For example: inspiration, framing, exposure, development & printing (including all kinds of decisions about toning, contrast, removal of undesired objects, cropping, etc.), display venues, viewing by various individuals in various settings, including perhaps books and classes. All of these are encounters in time and in different contexts that result in a different photograph.
The photograph itself, even if printed in an archival format and carefully stored, is in motion. A very slow motion, perhaps on a different plane of perception than we are used to using in relation to human vision. It’s much easier to see the motion of it appearing embedded in differing contexts, or how a single setting (say a museum) changes as history moves on, as the museum’s function changes, as the photograph is put into dialog with other photos that will be taken, and so on and so on.
Perhaps it’s useful to think of digital imaging (the so-called shift from the photograph to the photographic) as something which speeds up these processes. Digital manipulability makes visible the motion that photographs have always been subject to. Now the contexts change with the ease of a mouse click. Now the manipulations that were always part of photography occur, not at the local drugstore’s photo counter, but on our own computer desktops and at our own discretion.
March 18, 2009
To Think Is To Experiment, Not Judge
from John Rajchman's The Deleuze Connections:
Deleuze tries to show that in contrast to the traditional logical sense, there exist such zones of indetermination, secretly accompanying most forms of organization, and that thinking has a peculiar relation to them. For to think is to experiment and not, in the first place, to judge.
Deleuze's way out of the great Kantian philosophical figure of the judge at the tribunal of reason was to depart from the presumption of a "common sense," logical, moral, aesthetic, that underlies Kant's philosophy ...
A map of connections ... is thus a map for a "we" not given through a presumption of common sense--for a people that is missing, not already there, unable to find its place in the distinction between public and private ... It is a map meant for those who want to do something with respect to new uncommon forces, which we don't quite yet grasp, who have a certain taste for the unknown, for what is not already determined by history or society.
For it is through such experimentation that we escape from the nostalgia of "antiquarian" history as well as "progressivism" that already knows what is to come." (5-6)
Deleuze's way out of the great Kantian philosophical figure of the judge at the tribunal of reason was to depart from the presumption of a "common sense," logical, moral, aesthetic, that underlies Kant's philosophy ...
A map of connections ... is thus a map for a "we" not given through a presumption of common sense--for a people that is missing, not already there, unable to find its place in the distinction between public and private ... It is a map meant for those who want to do something with respect to new uncommon forces, which we don't quite yet grasp, who have a certain taste for the unknown, for what is not already determined by history or society.
For it is through such experimentation that we escape from the nostalgia of "antiquarian" history as well as "progressivism" that already knows what is to come." (5-6)
