Art, Time and Technology (Culture Machine)

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Art, Time and Technology

CULTURE MACHINE SERIES Series Editor: Gary Hall ISSN: 1743-6176 Commissioning Editors: Dave Boothroyd, Chris Hables Gray, Simon Morgan Wortham, Joanna Zylinska International Consultant Editors: Simon Critchley, Lawrence Grossberg, Donna Haraway, Peggy Kamuf, Brian Massumi, Meaghan Morris, Paul Patton, Paul Rabinow, Kevin Robins, Avital Ronell The position of cultural theory has radically shifted. What was once the engine of change across the Humanities and Social Sciences is now faced with a new ‘post-theoretical’ mood, a return to empiricism and to a more transparent politics. So what is the future for cultural theory? Addressing this question through the presentation of innovative, provocative and cuttingedge work, the Culture Machine series both repositions cultural theory and reaffirms its continuing intellectual and political importance. Published books include City of Panic Paul Virilio Forthcoming books include Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip Clare Birchall Anti-Capitalism: Cultural Theory and Popular Politics Jeremy Gilbert

Art, Time and Technology CHA RLI E GERE

Oxford • New York

English edition First published in 2006 by Berg Editorial offices: First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW , UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA © Charlie Gere 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gere, Charlie. Art, time, and technology / Charlie Gere. p. cm.—(Culture machine series, ISSN 1743-6176) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-134-0 (hardback) ISBN-10: 1-84520-134-5 (hardback) ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-135-7 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 1-84520-135-3 (pbk.) 1. Art and technology. 2. Time and art. 3. Art, Modern— Philosophy. I. Title. II. Series. N72.T4G47 2006 700.1'05—dc22 2006009886

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13 978 1 84520 134 0 (Cloth) 978 1 84520 135 7 (Paper) ISBN-10 1 84520 134 5 (Cloth) 1 84520 135 3 (Paper) Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn.

www.bergpublishers.com

Contents

Introduction

1

1

Breaking the Time Barrier

13

2

Morse’s Inventions

35

3

The Writing of Van Gogh

53

4

Taking Off

73

5

John Cage’s Early Warning System

89

6

Art in Real Time

113

7

Is it Happening?

139

8

Short Films about Flying

159

Bibliography

179

Index

189

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Introduction

In the fields we are concerned with, knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows. Benjamin, The Arcades Project

This book is concerned with the question of the role of art in the age of real-time systems. (By ‘art’ in this instance I generally refer to visual art, rather than literature, music or film for example.) The term ‘real-time systems’ refers to the information, telecommunication and (multi)media technologies that have come to play an increasingly important part in our lives, at least in the so-called ‘developed’ countries. It is almost impossible to overstate the ubiquity and importance of the technologies in question. Real-time computing underpins the whole apparatus of communication and data processing by which our contemporary techno-culture operates. Without it we would have no email, word processing, Internet or World Wide Web, no computer-aided industrial production and none of the invisible ‘smart’ systems with which we are surrounded. ‘Real time’ can also stand for the more general trend toward instantaneity in contemporary culture, involving increasing demand for instant feedback and response, one result of which is that technologies themselves are beginning to evolve ever faster. The increasing complexity and speed of contemporary technology is the cause of both euphoria and anxiety. The book asks and tries to answer the question about what kind of role art might play in a world increasingly dominated by such technologies. At first it might seem that the increasing importance of real-time systems is still of comparatively little relevance to the status and continuing 1

2

Ar t, Time and Technology

development of art, which generally operates according to a different, slower rhythm than that engendered by such technologies. In general artists do not exploit or engage with the possibilities offered by real-time technologies. If artists do use new technologies, such as video or image processing, it is usually to produce the kind of static, unchanging object that can be easily accommodated in a museum or gallery. There are of course notable exceptions, some of whom will feature in this book. Since the beginning of the last century some artists have attempted to come to terms with the technological developments of their time, including those involving information-communication technologies; and, since the 1960s, artists have engaged seriously in the possibilities of realtime technologies for the making of art under various banners, including computer art, art and technology, new media art, and, most recently, net.art and internet art. On the whole such work has been ignored or marginalized by the mainstream art world and gallery system. Yet, the fact that most artists do not either use or appear to engage explicitly with the challenges and possibilities of real-time technologies, nor have yet done so, does not mean that they have not responded to such developments. Indeed I argue first that the history of modern art can be read, at least in part, as a history of various artistic responses to the increasing speed and accelerating evolution of technology in the modern era and, secondly, that if art is to have a role or a meaning at all in the age of real-time technologies it is to keep our human relation with time open in the light of its potential foreclosure by such technology. Another title for this book could be ‘the work of art in the age of realtime systems’. This of course echoes Walter Benjamin’s famous and much copied formulation ‘das Kunstwerk in Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, ‘the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ (or ‘in the age of its technical reproducibility’ as it is more accurately translated). Benjamin’s essay with that title is one of the first positive attempts to come to terms with the relationship between artistic and technological developments. Benjamin was concerned with the effects of mechanical, or what we might now call analogue, technologies of reproduction, such as photography and film, on art. Unlike his contemporary Martin Heidegger, who, in his essay on ‘the question concerning technology’, opposed poiesis to techne and to the

Introduction

3

Gestell or ‘enframing’ of technology (Heidegger, 1977: 3–35), Benjamin saw the effects of mechanical reproduction on art as potentially liberatory and transformative. In particular he suggested that mechanical reproduction erodes the ‘aura’ of a work of art, which results from its unique existence in a time and a place, which revolutionized the social function of art and allowed it be used for politics rather than ritual (Benjamin, 2002: 103–6). Benjamin was writing in a specific context, in response to the threat of Fascism and its ‘aestheticisation of politics’ against which he wished to posit the ‘politicisation of aesthetics’ enabled by mechanical reproduction (ibid.: 122). After the end of the Second World War Benjamin’s work was comparatively little known, especially in Anglophone countries. It was only in the late 1960s, when some of his essays were first translated, that his reputation began to be revived, and his importance appreciated. John Berger acknowledged the influence of Benjamin and the ‘Work of Art’ essay in his television series and subsequent book Ways of Seeing (Berger, 1972: 34). It is interesting that this revival of interest should come at that particular moment. The late 1960s saw the very beginnings of the widespread use of real-time computing and networking with, among other developments, the establishment in 1969 of the ARPANet, the ancestor of the Internet. To some extent Benjamin’s ideas seem prescient, and they have been – and continue to be – applied to further our understanding of the transformations wrought by new information-communication technologies (see for example Nichols, 1996). At the same time, the changes brought about by developments such as the ARPANet and its successors and other aspects of real-time computing offer a different set of problems and possibilities to those of mechanical reproduction. Paul Virilio, who sees real-time technologies fundamentally altering our relationship with space, is probably the best-known critic and analyst of the effects of such technologies. The passage below, which can stand for other similar declarations by Virilio, is worth quoting at length. Meeting at a distance, in other words, being telepresent, here and elsewhere, at the same time, in this so-called ‘real time’ which is, however, nothing but a kind of real space-time, since the different events do indeed take place, even if that place

4


is in the end the no-place of teletopical techniques (the man-machine interface, the nodes or packet-switching exchanges of transmission). Immediate teleaction, instantaneous telepresence. Thanks to the new practices of television broadcasting or remote transmission, acting, the famous teleacting of remote control, is here facilitated by the maximum performance of electromagnetism and by the radioelectric views of what is now called optoelectronics, the perceptual faculties of the individual’s body being transferred one by one to machines – but also, most recently, to captors, sensors and other microprocessor detectors, capable of making up for the lack of tactility at a distance, widespread remote control preparing to take up where permanent tele-surveillance left off. What then becomes critical is not so much the three dimensions of space, but the fourth dimension of time – more precisely, the dimension of the present since . . . ‘real time’ is not the opposite of ‘delayed time’, as electronic engineers claim, but only of the ‘present’. Paul Klee hit the nail on the head: ‘To define the present in isolation is to kill it.’ This is what the teletechnologies of real time are doing: they are killing ‘present’ time by isolating it from its here and now, in favour of a commutative elsewhere that no longer has anything to do with our ‘concrete presence’ in the world, but is the elsewhere of a ‘discrete telepresence’ that remains a complete mystery. (Virilio, 1997: 10–11, bold and ital. in orig.)

Friedrich Kittler is equally apocalyptic, though his analysis starts from a different viewpoint. He suggests that the installation of optical-fibre networks is driven by Pentagon plans to construct a communications network which would not be disrupted by the electro-magnetic pulse that accompanies a nuclear explosion. Before the end, something is coming to an end. The general digitisation of channels and information erases the differences among individual media. Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface. Sense and the senses turn into eyewash. Their media-produced glamour will survive for an interim as a by-product of strategic programs. Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without

Introduction

5

image, sound, or voice. And once optical fiber networks turn formerly distinct data flows into a standardized series of digitized numbers, any medium can be translated into any other. With numbers, everything goes. Modulation, transformation, synchronization: delay, storage, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping – a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium. Instead of wiring people and technologies, absolute knowledge will run as an absolute loop. (Kittler, 1999: 1–2)

Meanwhile Andreas Huyssen suggests that one response to the ever-greater ubiquity of real-time systems is an increasing interest in memory. Writing about the building of Holocaust memorials Huyssen observes that Both personal and social memory today are affected by an emerging new structure of temporality generated by the quickening pace of material life on the one hand and by acceleration of media images and information on the other. Speed destroys space, and it erases temporal distance. In both cases, the mechanism of physiological perception is altered. The more memory we store on data banks, the more the past is sucked into the orbit of the present, ready to be called up on the screen. A sense of historical continuity or, for that matter, discontinuity, both of which depend on a before and an after, gives way to the simultaneity of all times and spaces readily accessible in the present. (Huyssen, 1994: 253)

Elsewhere he proposes that Our obsessions with memory functions as a reaction formation against the accelerating technical processes that is transforming our Lebenswelt (lifeworld) in quite distinct ways. [Memory] represents the attempt to slow down information processing, to resist the dissolution of time in the synchronicity of the archive, to recover a mode of contemplation outside the universe of simulation, and fast-speed information and cable networks, to claim some anchoring space in a world of puzzling and often threatening heterogeneity, non-synchronicity, and information overload. (ibid.: 7)

In Memoires: For Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida invokes ‘the immense questions of artificial memory and of modern modalities of archivation’ and suggests that, today, they affect

6


. . . according to a rhythm and with dimensions that have no common measure with those of the past, the totality of our relation to the world (on this side of or beyond its anthropological determination): habitat, all languages, writing, ‘culture’, art (beyond picture galleries, film libraries, video libraries, record libraries), literature (beyond libraries), all information or informatization (beyond ‘memory’ data banks), techno-sciences, philosophy, (beyond university institutions) and everything within the transformation which affects all relations to the future. This prodigious mutation not only heightens the stature, the quantitative economy of so-called artificial memory, but also its qualitative structure – and in doing so it obliges us to rethink what relates this artificial memory to man’s so-called psychical and interior memory, to truth, to the simulacrum and simulation of truth, etc. (Derrida, 1989: 107–8)

The comments quoted above would seem to confirm Richard Beardsworth’s suggestion that ‘[O]ne of the major concerns of philosophical and cultural analysis in recent years has been the need to reflect upon the reduction of time and space brought about by contemporary processes of technicization, particularly digitalisation’. Beardsworth proposes that the ‘thinking of technicity is a necessary consequence today of Continental Philosophy’s “mourning” of metaphysics, re-articulating it within a broader movement of technical supplementarity’ (Beardsworth, 2000: 235). Beardsworth traces the beginnings of this metaphysics to Plato’s Meno, and in particular the famous ‘aporia of memory’, in which the problem of thought is ‘solved’ by the myth of reminiscence (anamnesis) in which the immortal soul ‘recollects’ knowledge (ibid.: 237). Positing a distinction between the immortal soul and the body condemned to death and corruption institutes the binary oppositions which structure Western metaphysics, those between logos and techne, form and matter, the finite and the infinite, the transcendental and the empirical. Many of the above quotations would seem to perpetuate these kinds of binary division. According to Beardsworth, this set of oppositions lies behind ‘the question of being in Greek philosophy, the ontological argument of God in mediaeval and rationalist philosophy and haunts the question of transcendental method in both Kantian critique and modern phenomenology and hermeneutics’ (ibid.: 237–8). But, as Derrida’s analysis of Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry’ and his consequent notion of archiécriture demonstrated, writing and by extension technics more generally

Introduction

7

are the conditions for the transcendental logic of Western metaphysics, which is predicated on a disavowal of inscription as the condition of movement of the transcendental and, by extension, the ‘originary technicity’ of the human (ibid.: 239–40). Chapter 1, ‘Breaking the Time Barrier’, explores these ideas in relation to the philosopher Georges Bataille and the palaeoanthropologist André LeroiGourhan, whose work offers the basis for rethinking our understanding of the relationship between technics, time and hominization. This has been influential on a number of contemporary thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, Régis Debray and Bernard Stiegler, whose monumental philosophical study Technics and Time further develops Leroi-Gourhan’s insights. Stiegler claims that it is only through technics that humanity has access to time and history and he is particularly interested in how transformations in our experience of the event are brought about by real-time technologies. He takes his cue from the idea, originally proposed by Ernst Jünger and taken up by Maurice Blanchot, that humanity is experiencing the ‘breaking of the time barrier’, as technology has evolved faster than culture, thus bringing the whole question of the human, history and time in question. This is followed by a discussion of Derrida’s ideas of the aporetic and contingent aspects of time, the messianic, the event and the gift, as offering an openness to the future, otherwise seemingly foreclosed by the increasing speed of technology. Following Duchamp’s characterization of the Large Glass as a ‘delay in glass’, art in the age of real-time systems is seen as a ‘gift of time’. Next, chapter 2 ‘Morse’s Inventions’ puts the ideas into a broader historical context by going back to one of the first modern artistic crises brought about as a result of technological developments. It starts with an account of the relation between the artistic career of the American painter Samuel Morse and his later achievement as one of the inventors of the electric telegraph. It suggests that these two aspects of Morse’s life, normally thought of as mostly separate, should be regarded as more closely connected and as parallel responses to the crisis of culture brought about by new technologies of communication. Morse’s failure as a painter was bound up with the changing conditions in the United States as a result of industrialization and democratization, in which the monarchical and aristocratic system of academic painting no longer operated effectively as an appropriate means

8


of representation or as an agent of communication. Morse’s invention can be understood as an attempt to develop a means of communication more appropriate to these changing conditions, and in particular to the speeding up of communications of the period. Morse’s shift from painting to telegraphy is analysed with reference to Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘aura’, but with the emphasis on mechanical circulation of messages rather than visual reproduction. The development of the electric telegraph coincided with the invention of photography, of the typewriter and of paint in tubes, and with the beginnings of the international postal system. Chapter 3 ‘The Writing of Van Gogh’ looks at the effects of these phenomena, which together instigated a period in which the sign simultaneously became increasingly circulated, standardized and autonomous. It examines how this was later manifested in the work of Vincent Van Gogh, who is now regarded as the paradigm of the idea of the artist as genius, but can also be understood as exemplary of an age in which the circulation of signs became both faster and more widespread. The chapter shows how Van Gogh’s artistic career was made possible by this increasing circulation of people and signs, and proceeds to examine how his painterly style reflects a concern with writing in the sense of making marks for the purposes of distant communication over time and space (or, in other words, tele-graphy). This is turn is analysed in terms of projectiles and subjectiles, following the work of Antonin Artaud and Jacques Derrida, and in terms of the explosive, radiant, sacrificial quality of his work as examined by Georges Bataille, as well as in relation to the messianic and the avant-garde. The theme of projection is continued in chapter 4 ‘Taking Off ’, which is concerned with the work of Russian Constructivist Kazimir Malevich, and with his interest in the idea of satellites and space travel. This is traced back to the Russian tradition of Prometheanism and the work of Nikolai Federovitch Federov proposing travel to the stars, as well as cryonics as means of defeating death and achieving immortality. Some of theses ideas were taken up by Federov’s protégé Konstantin Eduardovitch Tsiolkovski, who wrote some of the earliest treatises on the practicalities of interplanetary travel. As well as laying the foundations for future Russian and Soviet developments in space travel, Federov was also influential on a generation of

Introduction

9

Russian artists and writers, including Malevich. His famous abstract works such as Black Square and White on White can be understood in relation to these developments as much as to the history of abstract art, as Moholy-Nagy understood. The latter work can be seen as prefiguring the kinds of means of representation and inscription, such as radar, that would be developed as a result of the Second World War. Next, chapter 5 ‘John Cage’s Early Warning System’ starts with an examination of the relation between the crisis of time brought about by the Cold War and the work of John Cage, and in particular his famous silent composition, 4’ 33”. Cage’s silent piece is presented as an exemplary motif for Marshall McLuhan’s suggestion that ‘art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it’. Cage’s work is discussed in relation to theories about the end of musical and cultural development promulgated by Gunther Stent and Leonard Meyer, with particular reference to the idea that it radically eschewed any notion of progress and teleology. This is related to the Cold War conditions in which Cage’s piece was composed and related back to McLuhan’s dictum. By ‘distant early warning system’ McLuhan was referring to the ‘DEW’ or ‘Distant Early Warning’ Line, a chain of radar and communications stations designed to detect and discourage any nuclear attack by the Soviet Union taking place by way of the North Pole. Cage’s 4’ 33” anticipated and expressed ideas about radical changes in our conceptions of history, time, speed and attention brought about by technological developments and made evident by the threat of nuclear conflict; ideas which found different kinds of expression in the development of real-time information and communications technologies, and in concomitant later developments such as interactive, real-time multimedia systems, as well as certain technological tendencies within the avant-garde. Chapter 6 ‘Art in Real Time’ looks at the development of the artistic interest in the possibilities and meaning of the ‘real-time’ technologies that Cage’s work prefigured, and their application to artistic practice. This is examined through the work of two theorists, John McHale and Jack Burnham. As part of the Independent Group, connected to the newly formed Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, McHale was involved with a number of exhibitions in the 1950s, including This Is Tomorrow at the

10


Whitechapel Art Gallery. This led him to formulate a number of radical ideas about the role of art in an age of instantaneous mass media. Some of these were taken up and extended by Jack Burnham, in particular in his essays ‘The Systems Esthetic’ and ‘Real-Time Technologies’, as well as in his 1970 exhibition Software, Information Technology, its New Meaning for Art. This period was both the apogee and end of art and art theory’s engagement with the possibilities of real-time technologies. After this point the realtime technologies discussed by Burnham began to render such engagement redundant, as the promises of artistic experimentation with technology began to be realized by industry. This is turn led to a retreat by artists into ironic immaterial practices such as conceptual art. Then, chapter 7 ‘Is it Happening?’ starts with a discussion of JeanFrançois Lyotard’s 1985 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Les Immatériaux, particularly in relation to his conceptions of the sublime and the question of ‘is it happening?’ derived from Burke and, to a lesser extent, Kant. For Lyotard, work produced through new technologies in being determined by calculation prevents what he calls the possibility of experiencing or ‘passibility’, which is something that happens to us, that seizes us, which cannot happen with something that has been programmed or plotted conceptually. In a later interview with Richard Beardsworth, however, he does concede that that there is no reason why it is not possible to create works of art with the new informational, digital machines, given that ‘artists have always used every possible kind of support, every possible kind of material, every possible kind of tool’. But he suggests that the issue is not a question of tools but of the enigmatic sexual impetus that drives creativity, which he finds in the work of Duchamp. Finally, chapter 8 ‘Short Films about Flying’ starts with a discussion of 2001 A Space Odyssey and its predictions about the future in relation to actual developments in computing. This leads to a discussion about the relation between the monoliths in the film and minimalist sculpture. This is connected to Michael Fried’s famous critique of minimalism, ‘Art and Objecthood’, and the relationship between minimalism and contemporary technological developments. The fictional 2001 is counterpointed by the real 2001, now forever connected with the terrorist atrocities of September of that year. This is examined in relation to a recent work of ‘net.art’,

Introduction

11

Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead’s Short Films about Flying, in which live feed from airport webcams, internet radio stations and chatrooms is mixed together to produce ‘short films’, made up of apparently pre-determined though in fact entirely ‘live’ random, elements. Given particular force by the events of 9/11, Thomson and Craighead’s piece encapsulates the ironies of trying to make artistic statements in a time when the very status of art is brought radically into question by the speed of technology.


CHAPTER 1


In the introduction I suggested that the history of modern art can be read, at least in part, as a history of various artistic responses to the increasing speed and accelerating evolution of technology in the modern era and, secondly, that if art is to have a role or a meaning at all in the age of realtime technologies it is to keep our human relation with time open in the light of its potential foreclosure by such technology. In order to understand the second argument, which underpins and underwrites the first, it is necessary to go back several tens of millennia, to the first examples of what we would now describe as art. Writing in the 1950s about the drawings in the Lascaux caves, Georges Bataille explicitly connected the birth of art with the emergence of tool use: There have been two capital events in the course of human history: the making of tools (with which work was born); the making of art-objects (with which play began) . . . The birth of art has its obvious connections with the prior existence. Not only requiring the possession of tools and some acquired skill in fashioning and handling them, art had in relation to utilitarian activity an opposite importance or value: it was a kind of protest against the hitherto existing world . . . itself indispensable to articulating the protest . . . At its outset art was primarily a game. In a major sense it still is. (Bataille, 1955: 27)

For Bataille tool use is instrumental in introducing humans to the idea of time: Only through working stone did man make an absolute break with the animal. What caused this scission was the exclusively human thinking work demands. 13

14


Work anticipates, presupposes the object that does not yet really exist, which is presently being made, and which is, simply, the reason the work is being done. Two sorts of objects immediately come into exist in the worker’s mind: actually present objects and objects later to come. This already dual aspect is completed by the object of the past; therewith, all the gradations of objective existence range themselves in proper order. From incoherent barkings of desire, man can advance to distinct speech now that, labelling the object with a name, he is able to make an implicit connection between the material it is made of and the work required to get it from the old state to the new in which it is ready for use. Thenceforth, language firmly anchors the object in the stream of time. But man, designating the object, has been wrenched out the world of nameless feeling – of sensibility. Though drawn back to this world, man cannot re-enter it unless, through his labour, he makes not only useful things, but creates a work of art. (ibid.: 28)

Tool use also introduces humans to knowledge of the concept of death, in that they can see that tools can outlive them (ibid.: 29). With this knowledge comes awe and terror, which in turn leads to the first prohibitions: Man’s behaviour with regard to death, manifested his recognition of a new value: the dead, at least the faces of the dead, fascinated, overawed the living, who made haste to forbid that they were to be approached: these were not ordinary objects, to be eyed casually or heedlessly neglected. In raising this barrier of prohibition round what fills him with awe and fascinated terror, man enjoins all beings and all creatures to respect it: for it is sacred. The very ancient attitude of men vis-à-vis the dead signifies that the fundamental categorizing of objects had got under way: some were singled out as sacred and forbidden, the rest were considered profane, touchable and unrestrictedly accessible. This categorizing dominates the process that goes into forming the human . . . (ibid.: 31)

The taboo about death was part of what Bataille described as a ‘world bound together by the idea of prohibition, pervaded throughout by taboos’ in a ‘tight-knit scheme of prohibitions’, which also included those concerning sexuality: Prohibitions preserve intact – if and when possible, and as far and as long as possible – the world work organizes and shelter it from the disturbances


15

repeatedly provoked by death and sexuality: the enduring animality in us forever introduces raw life and nature into the community: prohibitions exist to quell these uprisings and spread oil on the sea of insurgent animal passion and unruliness. (ibid.: 37)

But, at the same time, prohibitions are overstepped, ‘in play, in art, in religion’ (ibid.: 34). The transgression of prohibitions could only properly take place in the knowledge of the toll they will exact. ‘Authentic transgression caused a profound distress, but in time of holiday, the intense excitement alleviated it’ (ibid.: 37). Bataille refers in particular to the ritual of sacrifice, which is connected to the feast in which it is ‘a moment of paroxysm’ and in which the sacrificer violated the ban on murder (ibid.: 38): only art expresses that prohibition with beseeming gravity, and only art resolves the dilemma. It is the state of transgression that prompts the desire, the need for a more profound, a richer, a marvellous world, the need, in a word, for a sacred world. Transgression has always adopted marvellous forms of expression: poetry and music, dance, tragedy, or painting . (ibid.) A work of art, a sacrifice contains something of an irrepressible festive exuberance that overflows the world of work, and clash with, if not the letter, the spirit of prohibitions indispensable to safeguarding this world . . . every sacrifice has its cause in the quest for a sacred instant that, for an instant, puts to rout the profane time in which prohibitions guarantee the possibility of life. (ibid.: 39)

Thus Bataille shows how art, time and technology are bound together. Art emerges as a response to and alleviation of the apprehension of time and thus of mortality that comes with the use of tools. Yet Bataille’s account fails to answer an obvious question: without already having an apprehension of time and the future, how could an early human make the tool which made work – and thus an apprehension of time – possible in the first place? Further, if tool use is a concomitant of hominization as many have suggested, how can it be an event in the course of human history? A possible answer to these questions may be found in the notion of ‘originary technicity’, which proposes that hominization and technicization

16


develop in tandem.This idea can be found in the work of palaeoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, who developed his understanding of the relation between the human and technics – and in particular language – following the discovery by Louis B. Leakey in the late 1950s of early hominoid remains, which were upright, bipedal and bearing evidence of tool use, yet had comparatively small brain capacity. For Leroi-Gourhan the emergence of human language and tool use is thus the result not of expanded brain capacity but of becoming upright. As he put it, ‘everything begins with the feet’ (Leroi-Gourhan, 1993: 143–5). ‘The brain was not the cause of locomotor adaptation but their beneficiary’ (ibid.: 26). He traces the evolution of upright bipedality as one result of a series of structural transformations and ‘successive liberations’ in pursuit of mobility, including ‘that of the whole body from the liquid element, that of the head from the ground, that of the hand from the requirements of locomotion and finally that of the brain from the facial mask’ (ibid.: 25). The achievement of upright posture frees the hands for tool use, which in turn eventually frees the lower jaw for language. The upright posture also enables the spinal column to support a heavier braincase enabling the expansion of the cortical fan in the cerebellum, the cortex being the area of the brain that controls speech (ibid.: 74ff.). Leroi-Gourhan proposes that tool use, far from being the result of expanded intelligence, is a zoological and evolutionary phenomenon, much like the acquisition of a claw exuded from the body (ibid.: 106). This is a liberation from the ‘fixed sequences established at the confluence of the individual’s internal biological environment and the exterior’ (ibid.: 221). The human capacity for making and using tools and language creates what Leroi-Gourhan describes as a ‘social memory’, which exists outside of the body (ibid.: 227). This leads to the apparently paradoxical situation in which the human brain is empty at birth and is thus capable of thinking everything, unlike insect societies, in which ‘[E]ach individual must possess the entire capital of collective knowledge, and the society can evolve only at the rate of the palaeontological drift’ (ibid.: 228). The externalization of human memory is a process that, for Leroi-Gourhan, starts with the earliest flint tools and continues right up to ‘punched cards and electronic memory’ (ibid.: 264).


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The development of language, made possible by the freeing up of the jaw from its role in grasping and manipulating, develops in lockstep with tool use. This has important implications for the development of representation. According to Leroi-Gourhan, for the greater part of the existence of the ‘human’ representation, in terms of the parallel development of spoken language and of mark making, there is a question of balance and interconnection between the twin poles of hand/eye and ear/mouth. The earliest human marks are not naive figurative representations but, possibly, abstract materializations of the rhythmic motor movements of the hands made by priests in rituals and ‘are graphic building blocks, without any descriptive binder, the support medium of an irretrievably lost oral context’ (ibid.: 190). Thus graphism, the making of visual marks, which was aligned to the hand and eye and which are neither simply proto-writing nor naive forms of figurative representation, and oral language, which was bound up with the mouth and ear, developed in parallel and lockstep, but in balance, with neither dominating the other. To quote Leroi-Gourhan, Two languages, both springing from the same source, came into existence at the two poles of the operating field – the language of hearing, which is linked with the development of the sound-coordinating areas, and the language of sight, which in turn is connected with the development of the gesture-coordinating areas, the gestures being translated into graphic symbols. If this is so, it explains why the earliest known graphic signs are stark expressions of rhythmic values. Be that as it may, graphic symbolism enjoys some independence from phonetic language because its content adds further dimensions to what phonetic language can only express in the dimension of time. (ibid.: 195)

Thus ‘primitive’ representation is ‘radial’, cosmic and multidimensional. It is what Leroi-Gourhan describes as a ‘mythogram’, a manual counterpart to mythology as verbal and multidimensional (ibid.: 191). Leroi-Gourhan sees a direct link between ‘the technoeconomic development of the Mediterranean and European group of civilizations and the graphic tool they perfected’: the linear, phonetic, alphabetic representation of speech (ibid.: 209). The development of metallurgy and large-scale

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urbanization saw the rise of alphabetic writing, originally as a means for accountancy and a concomitant shift from mythological to rational thinking and the replacement of picto-ideographic representation with the linearity of phonetic writing, in which graphism is subordinated to spoken language ‘and the whole of human linguistic apparatus becomes a single instrument for expressing and preserving thought – which itself is channeled increasingly toward reasoning’ (ibid.: 210). According to Leroi-Gourhan, [w]riting thus tends toward the constriction of images, toward a stricter linearization of symbols. For classical as well as modern thinking, the alphabet is more than just a means of committing to memory the progressive acquisitions of the human mind; it is a tool whereby a mental symbol can be noted in both word and gesture by a single process. Such unification of the process of expression entails the subordination of graphism to spoken language. It avoids the wastefulness of symbols that is still characteristic of Chinese writing, and it parallels the process adopted by technics over the course of its development. However, it also entails an impoverishment of the means of nonrational expression. If we take the view that the course humankind has followed thus far is wholly favorable to our future – if, in other words, we have complete confidence in settled agriculture and all its consequences – then we should not view the loss of multidimensional symbolic thought otherwise than we do the improvement achieved in the running ability of Equidae consequent upon the reduction of the number of their digits to one. But if, conversely, we tend to believe that human potentiality would be more fully realized if we achieved a balanced contact with the whole of reality, then we may ask ourselves whether the adoption of a regimented form of writing that opened the way to the unrestrained development of technical utilitarianism was not a step well short of the optimum. (ibid.: 212)

It is perhaps not surprising that Leroi-Gourhan’s radical ideas about linearity were seized upon by Jacques Derrida, who reviewed Gesture and Speech when it came out in the mid-1960s, and then invoked its arguments in his own Of Grammatology (1976: 83–6).1 Derrida suggests that the traditional concept of time, an entire organization of the world and of language is


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bound up with the linearity of the symbol. But writing, including phonetic writing, is rooted in a past of non-linear writing, which had to be defeated to assure ‘greater security and greater possibilities of capitalisation in a dangerous and anguishing world’. Thus ‘a war was declared, and a suppression of all that resisted linearisation was installed’, the first victim of which is the mythogram, ‘writing that spells its symbols pluri-dimensionally . . .’ and is not ‘subjected to successivity, to the order of a logical time, or to the irreversible temporality of sound’ (Derrida, 1976: 85). Derrida suggests that ‘Leroi-Gourhan recalls the unity within the mythogram, of all the elements of which linear writing marks the disruption: technics (particularly graphics), art, religion, economy. To recover access to this unity, to this other structure of unity, we must de-sediment “four thousand years of linear writing”’ (ibid.: 86). Leroi-Gourhan’s ideas have also been of great importance for the work of the philosopher Bernard Stiegler (who studied with Derrida), in his analysis of the relation between ‘technics and time’. According to Stiegler, for LeroiGourhan ‘it is the tool, that is, tekhne¯, that invents the human, not the human that invents the technical’, or ‘the human invents himself by inventing the tool – by becoming exteriorized techno-logically’ (Stiegler, 1994: 141) in the form of tools such as flint axe heads. But for Stiegler the concept of exteriorization is problematic, in that it presupposes an interior that can only come into existence in the process of ‘exteriorization’ (ibid.: 142). Interiority and exteriority constitute the terms of what the philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon called a ‘transductive’ relation: a relation that constitutes these terms, meaning that a term in the relation cannot exist outside of that relation, and is constituted by the other term of the relation (ibid.: 152). It is through technics that the human is given access to the ‘already there’, to a past that he or she did not inhabit and does not otherwise have access to, and it is through this ‘already there’ that the human comes to be able to anticipate and thus to know about his or her mortality (Stiegler, 1994: 159). Thus, as Bataille also suggests, technicity not only constitutes one part of the transductive relation out of which the human emerges, but also makes possible the human apprehension of time. As Richard Beardsworth puts it, writing about Stiegler’s critique of Heidegger’s conception of time, ‘[T]here can be no access to the past, no anticipation

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of the future without technical objects . . . technical objects constitute the very process of Dasein’s experiencing of time, that is, of remembering and anticipating’ (Beardsworth, 1996: 151). Stiegler proposes that the capacity to conserve experience in a form exterior to the human body, in our technics, constitutes a third kind of memory, following that which we inherit through our genes, and that which we accumulate in our lifetime: the memory of our central nervous system (Stiegler, 1994: 177). He points out that all the higher animals have individual experiences engraved in the memory of their nervous systems, which allow them to adapt themselves individually to this or that local environment. Yet if someone trains an animal and it dies, nothing that it has been taught is transmissible to his species because the individual experience of living beings is not inheritable by its species, and is effaced with each individual death (Stiegler, 1998: 191). If there is not an accumulation of experience for animals, in that the species do not inherit the experience of the individuals of which they are composed, it is on the contrary the possibility of transmitting individual experience that makes possible the process of exteriorization. And this is what we call culture. With the emergence of the being called ‘human’, that is to say the being that develops itself by the production of tools, something of great importance is produced: the essence of individual experience is concentrated precisely in the relations with a tool and in the tool itself. The tool is the organ of hunting and of defence, that is, of the survival of the species, and it is in the tool that all the experience of survival and death is brought together, the same for a weapon or for a work tool. And yet the fact that this tool is an exteriorization of life in an organ that is not itself living, when the maker of the tool dies, the individual experience preserved in his nervous system disappears with him, but his tool remains, the trace of his experience or a part of that trace remains in the tool. In recovering the tool his descendant inherits a portion of his experience. All this is to say that technics is above all a memory, a third memory, neither genetic, nor simply epigenetic. I have called it epiphylogenetic, because as the fruit of experience, it is originally epigenetic, and because this individual experience was brought together, and this memory technics made possible a transmission and a heritage, a phylum which opens up the possibility of a culture, it is equally phylogenetic. (ibid.: 191–2, my translation and italics)


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But the relation between technics and the human is not straightforward. Through his reading of Leroi-Gourhan, Stiegler recognizes in technics another order of beings, a third kingdom, as Stiegler puts it, between those unorganized inorganic beings which are the concern of physics, and those organic beings which are the concern of biology (ibid.: 188–9). As such this third order, which Stiegler describes as being composed of ‘organized inorganic beings’, is subject to the morphogenetic laws of the evolutionary process, as much as the order of living beings. Relative to the rhythm of technical evolution, the human had more or less stabilized biologically about 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. This is why the post-Neanderthal human was already, in biological terms, modern. Our genetic structure seems to have been stabilized at about this moment. But technical evolution has continued and accelerated since that point.2 In the transductive relation between our ancestors and technology that produced the human it is only technics that has continued to evolve (Stiegler, 1998: 190–1). But if this is so, it is only recently that this has become evident, and its implications recognized. Stiegler suggests that certain effects of recent technical developments, those of ‘real time’ computing and ‘live’ media distort ‘profoundly if not radically what could be called “event-ization” [événementialisation] as such, that is to say the taking place of time as much as of space’ (Stiegler, 1994, p 15). Stiegler suggests that such developments reveal the fact that industrial civilization rests on an ever more intense development of the process of permanent innovation, which results in ‘a divorce, if not between culture and technics, at least between the rhythms of cultural evolution and the rhythms of technical evolution. Technics evolves more quickly than culture. More accurately put, the temporal relation between the two is a tension in which there is both advance and delay, a tension characteristic of the extending [étirement] that makes up any process of temporalization; it is as if time had leapt outside itself: not only because the process of decision-making and anticipation (in the domain of what Heidegger refers to as ‘concern’) has irresistibly moved over to the side of the ‘machine’ or technical complex, but because, in a certain sense, and as Blanchot wrote recalling a title of Ernst Jünger, our age is in the process of breaking the ‘time barrier’. Following the analogy with the breaking of the sound barrier, to break the time barrier would be to go faster than time. A supersonic device, quicker than its own sound, provokes at the breaking of

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the barrier, a violent sonic boom, a sound shock. What would be the breaking of a time barrier if this meant going faster than time? What shock would be provoked by a device going quicker than its ‘own time’? Such a shock would in fact mean that speed is older than time. For either time, along with space, determines speed, and therefore there could be no question of it happening, or, more radically, speed is older than time, which, like space, is only thinkable in terms of speed (which remains unthought). (Stiegler, 1998: 15)

According to Stiegler this requires to grasp that speed is quite possibly prior to time and space and, indeed, that it determines them. Speed does not mean simply the action quality or capability of moving quickly or rapidly – it means, simply, rate of progress or motion. In that everything, even things which are ostensibly not moving, has a rate of motion or progress, and that an object’s speed can only be perceived in relation to that of other objects, speed is pure difference. Only through the perception of different rates of movement can we apprehend time and by extension, space. Recognizing the priority of speed allows us to move away from the conception of time as an overarching, stable, homogenous framework in which things happen, and to acknowledge the complex heterogeneous forces of mobility, velocity and acceleration out of which it is composed. Within this play of forces things move at different speeds and velocities. As Derrida puts it in his essay of ‘nuclear criticism’, ‘No Apocalypse: Not Now’, ‘[A]t the beginning there will have been speed’ (Derrida, 1984: 20). Parodying both the Gospel of St John (‘in the beginning there was the word’) and Goethe’s Faust (‘in the beginning there was the act’), he proposes that speed is ‘faster than the word or the act’. He continues that the essence of technics is speed in that ‘every invention’ is ‘the invention of a process of acceleration, or, at the very least, a new experience of speed’ (ibid.: 20). Thus for Stiegler our human relationship with time is governed by the technical means by which we apprehend it. With the rise of real-time technologies, this relation is brought into question. He suggests that the conjunction between the question of technics and of time made evident by the speed of technical evolution and by the ruptures in temporalization and ‘event-ization’ it provokes call for a new consideration of technicity, in which it is understood as constitutive of temporality as well as of spatiality (Stiegler, 1998: 17).


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Stiegler points to a ‘technicization of all domains’ being ‘experienced on a massive scale’. This is leading to ‘countless problems’, including the installation of a generalized ‘state of emergency’ caused not only by machines that circulate bodies but by data-transport networks: the growing paucity of ‘messages’, illiteracy, isolation, the distancing of people from one another, the extenuation of identity, the destruction of territorial boundaries; unemployment – robots seeming designed no longer to free humanity from work but to consign either to poverty or stress; threats surrounding choices and anticipations, owing to the delegation of decision-making procedures to machines that are on one hand necessary since humanity is not fast enough to control the processes of informational change (as is the case for the electronic stockmarket network), but on the other hand also frightening since this decision making is combined with machines for destruction (for example in the case of polemological networks for the guidance of ‘conventional’ or non-‘conventional’ missiles, amounting to an imminent possibility of massive destruction); and, just as preoccupying, the delegation of knowledge, which not only modifies radically the modes of transmission of this knowledge but seems to threaten these forms with nothing less than sheer disappearance. (Stiegler, 1994: 86)

This includes the ‘extraordinary influence on behaviour by the media, which controls the production of news that is transmitted without delay to enormous population masses of quite diverse cultural origins, by professionals whose activity is “rationalised” following exclusively marketoriented criteria within an ever more concentrated industrial apparatus’. Stiegler suggests that In this age of contemporary technics, it might be thought that technological power risks sweeping the human away . . . Work, family and traditional forms of communities would be swept away by the deterritorialization (that is, by destruction) of ethnic groups, and also of nature and politics (not only by the delegation of decision making but by the ‘marketization’ of democracy), the economy (by the electronization of the financial activity that now completely dominates it), the alteration of space and time . . . not only inter-individual spaces and times, by the globalization of interactions through the deployment of telecommunication networks, the instantaneity of the processes, the ‘real time’ and the ‘live’, but also the space and time of the ‘body proper’ itself, by tele-aesthesia or ‘tele-presence’. (ibid.: 88)

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If, in particular, our transductive relationship with technics is the basis of ‘what we call culture’, then its accelerating development, especially as measured against the comparative stasis of human evolution, brings ‘culture’ to a point of crisis. Richard Beardsworth proposes that ‘at stake . . . lies the human experience of time. Most immediately, it is clear that with the digitalisation of memory support systems, our experience of time is being rapidly foreshortened’. Through advances in, among other things, genetic manipulation and machine intelligence, ‘present conceptions of history, inheritance, memory and the body will need to be dramatically reorganised, if the “selection” of what is “human”, and what is not, is not to become the monopoly of an organisation between the technosciences and capital’ (Beardsworth, 1996: 147–8). But against the speed of contemporary technics it is possible to posit the aporia of time, of delay, the impossibility grasping time in the light of difference and deferral central to Derrida’s politics of deconstruction. The incalculability of the passage of time exceeds both its logical disavowal and its technical organization. According to Beardsworth, For Derrida, despite real time’s reduction of the human experience of the passage of time, the passage of time . . . cannot be technicized, it cannot absolutely be reduced; and this is what makes any organization contingent . . . Technical invention (which in the coming years may be less and less organised by what we understand now as ‘the human’) cannot reduce or ‘figure’ the aporia of time. (ibid.: 149).

As Beardsworth puts it, ‘the absolute future of technical determination, the “messianic” promise that trembles in every technical invention, delivers the latter over to contingency, a contingency that marks precisely the finitude of all organisations, thereby giving human organisation its chance’ (ibid.: 150). He continues that ‘subordinated to the passage of time, technics is . . . finite and the future contingent’ (ibid.). In his essay ‘Psyche: Inventions of the Other’, Derrida points out that to invent can mean both to find for the first time, such as in the case of ‘a technical apparatus that did not exist before’ among which can be counted ‘printing, a vaccine, nuclear weapons, a musical form, an institution – good or bad – and


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so on’, and to find in the sense of discover, as in the invention of the Cross by Saint Helena (Derrida, 1989b: 43). In either case, to invent does not mean to produce out of nothing, to create ex nihilo, which is solely the prerogative of God, but to find what is already there, whether in the sense of ‘unveiling what was already found there’, or to produce by putting together ‘from a stock of existing and available elements, in a given configuration’ (ibid.). Derrida distinguishes between two kinds of invention, that ‘which returns to the same’ – or in other words has been extrapolated from what already exists and has been institutionalized, and thus, paradoxically invents nothing – and that which through ‘a merging of chance and necessity’ produces ‘the new of the event’. The only possible invention is the invention of the impossible. ‘An invention has to declare itself to be the invention of that which did not appear to be possible; otherwise it only makes explicit a program of possibilities within the economy of the same’ (ibid.). Derrida takes for his example of the latter kind of invention a short poem by Francis Ponge, ‘Fable’, in which the title is followed with the words ‘par le mot par commence donc ce texte’ (‘by the word by this text thus begins’) (ibid.: 31). As J. Hillis Miller has pointed out, Derrida’s analysis of Ponge’s ‘Fable’ connects to his deconstruction of the American Declaration of Independence. Invited by Roger Shattuck at a conference to make a textual analysis of the American Declaration of Independence, Derrida responded with an analysis of the way in which this document is both constative and performative. It describes what it produces and produces what it describes. The undecidability between the constative mode and the performative is not, according to Derrida, a contradiction that can ever be resolved – it is, rather, a requirement for the production of the desired effects (Derrida, 2002: 49). The people in whose name the document is signed, whose existence is part of the state of affairs which it affirms, are also, at the same time, produced by the document. Derrida points out the complex set of actions required to make this document possible, from its ‘drafting’ by Jefferson, through to the various revisions made by those representatives for whom he undertook this duty, who in turn will sign the document for others, who in turn will represent the will of others, and so on (ibid.: 48).3 This potentially infinite regress, or mise-en-abîme, of authority is only closed through the name of God, or rather, ‘God’ is the name of the act

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of closure (ibid.: 51–2). Thus the invocation of God in the Declaration of Independence is a disavowal of time and différance in exchange for the fantasy that everything ‘should concentrate itself in the simulacrum of the instant’ (ibid.: 51). The existence of a free and independent subject, capable of appending his signature to the document, is only produced in the act of signing (‘his’ in this case, as at that time women were clearly not regarded as subjects capable of signing such a document). The signature is therefore possessed of a ‘fictional’ or ‘fabulous’ (fabuleuse) retroactivity (ibid.: 50). The signature is thus a ‘fabulous’ or ‘fictional’ event, which ‘implies the structure of the trace’ and which, as a movement of the futur antérieur, or future perfect (the tense that allows one to say that ‘this will have been the case’), ‘reveals the inadequation of a present to itself ’ (ibid.). Thus, as Beardsworth puts it, ‘[T]he unsurpassable violence of law (its aporia) is predicated on the delay of time’. The violence of any act of law reveals in an exemplary manner that ‘time is the (self-) deferment of time to itself, or différance’ (Beardsworth, 1996: 100). Like the poem, the Declaration is a ‘fabulous event’ made possible through the ‘fabulous’ retroactivity of the signatures that produce the very subjects capable of signing it. The Declaration thus produces those subjects and thereby the conditions that make it and the United States of America possible (Miller, 2001: 123–4). This poem ‘creates nothing, in the theological sense of the word’ and ‘invents only by having recourse to a lexicon and to syntactic rules, to a prevailing code, to conventions . . .’ but nevertheless ‘gives rise to an event . . . and produces a machine by introducing a disparity or gap into the customary use of discourse, by upsetting to some extent the mind-set of expectations and reception that it nevertheless needs’ (ibid.: 43). It is only thus that invention can allow the other to come [à venir] (ibid.: 28–9). Bound up with the question of invention is that of ‘decision’. It is only through an openness to the unknown that one can assume responsibility for the future which can only come through the ‘decision’. Derrida, responding to an interview question, suggests the following: If it’s often said that history is going quicker than in the past, that it is now going too quickly, at the same time it’s well-known today that acceleration – a


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question of rhythm and of changes of rhythm – doesn’t simply affect an objective speed which is continuous and which gets progressively faster. On the contrary, acceleration is made up of differences of rhythm, heterogeneous accelerations which are closely related to the technical and technological developments you are alluding to. So, it makes no sense to ‘fetishise’ the concept of acceleration: there isn’t a single acceleration. There are in fact two laws of acceleration: one derives from the technosciences, it concerns speed, the prodigious increase in speed, the unprecedented rhythms which speed is assuming and of which we are daily feeling the effect. The political issues which you evoke bear the stamp of this form of acceleration. The second is of a quite different order and belongs to the structure of decision. (Derrida, 1992: 250)

Elsewhere he suggests that a decision, if there is one, cannot take place without the undecidable, it cannot be resolved through knowledge . . . As to a decision that is guided by a form of knowledge – if I know, for example, what the causes and effects of what I am doing are, what the program is for what I am doing, then there is no decision; it is a question, at the moment of judgment, of applying a particular causality. When I make a machine work, there is no decision; the machine works, the relation is one of cause and effect. If I know what is to be done . . . then there is no moment of decision, simply the application of a body of knowledge, of, at the very least, a rule or norm. For there to be a decision, the decision must be heterogeneous to knowledge as such . . . Otherwise there is no responsibility . . . Even if one knows everything, the decision, if there is one, must advance towards a future that is not known, that cannot be anticipated. If one anticipates the future by predetermining the instant of decision, then one closes it off, just as one closes it off if there is no anticipation, no knowledge ‘prior’ to the decision. At a given moment, there must be an excess or heterogeneity regarding what one knows for a decision to take place, to constitute an event. (Derrida, 2002: 231–2)

The event is thus always monstrous: A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future; it would already be predictable, calculable and programmable tomorrow. All experience open to

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the future is prepared or prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant, to welcome it, that is, to accord hospitality to that which is absolutely foreign or strange, but also, one must add, to try to domesticate it, that is, to make it part of the household and have it assume the habits, to make us assume new habits. This is the movement of culture. Texts and discourses that provoke at the outset reactions of rejection, that are denounced precisely as anomalies or monstrosities are often texts that, before being in turn appropriated, assimilated, acculturated, transform the nature of the field of reception, transform the nature of social and cultural experience, historical experience. All of history has shown that each time an event has been produced, for example in philosophy or poetry, it took the form of the unacceptable, or even of the intolerable, of the incomprehensible, that is, of a certain monstrosity. (Derrida, 1992: 387)

This returns us to the question of art. According to media theorist Bernard Siegert, the increasing speed of technology sees the development of realtime networks leading to the end of art: The impossibility of technologically processing data in real time is the possibility of art . . . As long as processing in real time was not available, data always had to be stored intermediately somewhere – on skin, wax, clay, stone, papyrus, linen, paper, wood, or on the cerebral cortex – in order to be transmitted or otherwise processed. It was precisely in this way that data became something palpable for human beings, that it opened up the field of art. Conversely it is nonsensical to speak of the availability of real-time processing . . . insofar as the concept of availability implies the human being as subject. After all, real-time processing is the exact opposite of being available. It is not available to the feedback loops of the human senses, but instead to the standards of signal processors, since real-time processing is defined precisely as the evasion of the senses. (Siegert, 1999: 12)

Art exists only within a certain ‘economy’ of time produced by the materiality and temporality of culture’s means of inscription, storage and exchange. At the same time it must exceed the restricted economy of programmatic calculability, which forecloses the possibility of the event and of the decision. In his essay ‘Economimesis’, Derrida analyses Kant’s Third Critique in terms of the economics and aneconomics of art. Kant


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proposes that ‘liberal’ or ‘free’ art, what we might call fine art, ‘must not enter into the economic circle of commerce, of offer and demand; it must not be exchanged’ (Derrida, 1981). It must be capable of ‘pure, that is non-exchangeable productivity’ (ibid.: 438). In other words the work of art operates something like the logic of the gift, as defined by Marcel Mauss, in his famous work on the subject, The Gift (Mauss, 2000). For Mauss the gift, especially as understood in certain native American cultures, was a form of excessive donation that escaped the logics of economic exchange. Georges Bataille was greatly influenced in his thinking by Marcel Mauss’s work. Of particular interest to Bataille was Mauss’s investigation of the practice of ‘potlatch’, the excessive and destructive rituals of giving practised by tribes in the American Northwest. Inspired by this counter-example to the rational models of restricted economy found within capitalism, Bataille advanced a conception of the ‘general economy’, in which the universe is implicated through, for example, the flow of energy from the Sun, which is excessive for the needs of and produces excessive and useless results in plants and flowers. He suggests that the capitalist model of the economy as a harbouring of scarce resources is only one form of economic structure and proposes that the problem in many societies is not the increased accumulation of wealth but the annihilation of excess, through sacrifice or art (Bataille, 1991). Lewis Hyde, also influenced by the work of Mauss, explicitly describes the work of art as a gift, as opposed to a commodity (Hyde, 1983). As Hyde himself admits at the end of the book, this is somewhat simplistic (ibid.: 273). Art cannot avoid the restricted economies of financial exchange and critical and public reception. Nor should it be supposed that artists would want to eschew either the possibility of remuneration or of critical and public admiration. In his book Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, Derrida analyses Mauss’s idea and suggests that the gift is impossible, in that the moment it appears as a gift it enters into a system of reciprocity, exchange and debt. Any gift implies the expectation of another gift in return. Even if the giver does not expect any literal return, the act of giving ‘makes a return payment to oneself ’ (Derrida, 1994a: 23). Thus the gift can only be a gift if its status as gift is completely forgotten, and is not even lodged in the unconscious. But Derrida points to two intriguing aspects of Mauss’s ideas. One is the

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notion of the excessive, which is an integral part of the operations of the potlatch. The other is the relation between the gift and time. Even if a gift ritual involves exchange and reciprocity, time must elapse before a gift can be responded to in kind. This is what Derrida describes as ‘the most interesting idea, the great guiding thread of The Gift’: The gift is not a gift, the gift only gives to the extent it gives time. The difference between a gift and every other operation of pure and simple exchange is that the gift gives time. There where there is gift, there is time. What it gives, the gift is time, but this gift of time is also a demand of time. The thing must not be restituted immediately and right away. There must be time, it must last, there must be waiting – without forgetting . . . It demands time, the thing, but it demands a delimited time, neither an instant nor an infinite time, but a time determined in other words, a rhythm, a cadence. The thing is not in time, it is or has time, or rather it demands to have, to give, or to take time – and time as rhythm, a rhythm that does not befall a homogenous time but that structures it originally (ibid.: 4).

But the work of art involves a gift, in that it ‘gives time’ by refusing to be restituted right away. It gives the time needed for understanding, for the understanding to catch up with and recuperate the avant-garde, the advance guard of artistic development, for the reception and domestication of the monstrous or, as Lyotard puts it, for the infinite time required to ‘“consume” (experience, comment upon)’ works of art. Lyotard was writing specifically about Duchamp’s La Marié mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), otherwise known as The Large Glass and Etant Donnés. It is the former that Duchamp described as a ‘delay in glass’ (Duchamp, 1975: 26). Thus the description by Calvin Tomkins with which he begins his life of Duchamp: Just under nine feet high and five and a half feet wide, freestanding between aluminum supports, The Large Glass dominates the Duchamp gallery in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It is too big to take in at one glance. Your eyes travel over it in random patterns, over it and through it, to other viewers moving and stopping, and to the narrow window in back, which overlooks an outdoor courtyard with its central fountain. Prey to distractions of all kinds, the sexual comedy of the Glass verges on farce. Marcel Duchamp called it a ‘hilarious’ picture. (Tomkins, 1996: 1)


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Tomkins then describes Duchamp’s notorious suggestion for what The Large Glass actually was. He also insisted that it was not a picture. In one of the working notes that he collected and published in The Green Box, Duchamp refers to it as a ‘delay’. Use ‘delay’ instead of picture or painting . . . It’s merely a way of succeeding in no longer thinking that the thing in question is a picture – to make a delay of it in the most general way possible, not so much in the different meanings in which delay can be taken, but rather in their indecisive reunion. Like so many of the Green Box notes, this one has been chipped away at and drilled into and bombarded by generations of Duchamp explainers, an international tribe whose numbers increase each year. Laboring to unlock the mystery of that little word, ‘delay’, they have linked it, among other things, to Henri Bergson’s theory of duration, to the medieval practice of alchemy, and to a subconscious fear of incest on Duchamp’s part. One Duchampian has suggested that it be read as an anagram for ‘lad[e]y’, so that ‘delay in glass’ becomes glass lady. Duchamp adored puns and perpetrated a lot of them, but his were never as heavy-footed as that. Generally overlooked in the ongoing analysis and microanalysis of Duchamp’s wordplay is that it is play. He played with words, juggling a variety of senses and non-senses and taking pleasure in their ‘indecisive reunion’. As he went on to say in that Green Box note, a delay in glass as you would say a poem in prose or a spittoon in silver. (ibid.: 1–2)

The aim here is neither to add to the chipping and drilling which Duchamp’s suggestion has inspired, nor to make a simplistic connection between his use of the term of delay and Derrida’s notion of delay, difference and deferral. Yet Duchamp seems to have anticipated something of Derrida’s analyses of the complex relations between time, inscription and experience, as Tomkins’s description of the continuing, and possibly neverending process of interpretation tends to confirm. What Duchamp also indicates with the idea of the delay is the degree to which the avant-garde has always been concerned with time. Writing at the end of the 1960s, the critic Michael Kirby called his book of essays on the avant-garde The Art of Time. It is possible to argue that an explicit engagement with time is one of the factors that differentiates the avant-garde from artistic modernism. The avant-garde is, according to one fairly simplistic

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definition, ‘art that is ahead of its time’. The term ‘avant-garde’ itself comes, of course, from the French military term for ‘advance guard’ or ‘vanguard’, and was first employed in its current artistic context by the utopian socialist Count Henri de Saint Simon in the early nineteenth century to denote the role artists would play in his ideal society as harbingers of future social progress. The very idea that the future can be anticipated, declared or produced acknowledges implicitly that ‘the time is out of joint’.

NOTES 1. It is also worth noting that Gesture and Speech was published a year before Theodor (Ted) Nelson first spoke in public about his concept of nonlinear text, or ‘hypertext’. Given that it is unlikely that Nelson knew about Leroi-Gourhan’s work, this suggests that the idea of the nonlinear text was in the air at the time. 2. The idea that technology was developing faster than culture went back to the nineteenth century with the work of Antoine Augustin Cournot among others, which proposed that this meant the end of history and the advent of a state of benign technocracy. In the early 1920s William F. Ogburn developed the idea of ‘cultural lag’ to denote the way in culture takes time to catch up with technological progress (Winner, 1977: 77). But it is the Second World War in which this process becomes most evident. The development during and after the War of radar, jet propulsion, digital computing and atomic weaponry presented vivid proof of the speed and reach of technological evolution. Soon after the War the German sociologist Arnold Gehlen published his major work Der Seele im technischen Zeitalter, later translated as Man in the Age of Technology (Gehlen, 1980), which suggested that technological progress had outpaced that of human evolution (Neaman, 1999: 199). Gehlen suggested that, while the evolution of technology continues, culture has crystallized, because its transformative potential has already


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been realized. Thus the appearance of great social change conceals the actual crystallization of culture. Thus we have entered what Gehlen called posthistoire. As Lutz Niethammer has shown, the idea of posthistoire, the ‘end of history’ was highly influential after the War. In France it was developed by the Left and derived in particular from Alexandre Kojève’s influential lectures on Hegel’s phenomenology. In Germany it was the province of the Right, and found expression in the work of Gehlen, the novelist and critic Ernst Jünger as well as his friend Martin Heidegger, and the political philosopher Carl Schmitt, who collectively spearheaded a powerful post-war revival of conservative thinking (Niethammer, 1992). Posthistoire is one aspect of what, following Frank Kermode (1967), might be called ‘the sense of an ending’, which characterized much of the thought that emerged after the Second World War. This has been manifested not just in apocalyptic predictions of nuclear disaster, ecological catastrophe or overpopulation, but also in analyses of less tangible kinds of endings. These include discussions of the end(s) of man, of the human, of history, of grand narratives, of philosophy, religion, art and science. Common to these analyses is a sense of confronting limits beyond which the structures through which we have traditionally understood the world no longer operate. Much posthistoire thinking is highly critical of the role of technology, as can be seen in Heidegger’s essays of the 1940s and 1950s, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ and ‘The Turning’ (both in Heidegger, 1977). In these works Heidegger analysed the essence of technology as Gestell or ‘enframing’, which he sees as the culmination of the Western project of metaphysics initiated by Socrates and Plato. In his Discourse on Thinking, written soon after the War, Heidegger suggested that No one can foresee the radical changes to come. But technological advance will move faster and faster and can never be stopped. In all areas of existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology. These forces which everywhere and every minute claim, enchain, drag along, press and impose upon man under the form of some technical contrivance or other – these forces . . . have moved long since beyond his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision. (Heidegger, 1966: 51)

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3. The initial resolution, that the ‘Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States’ was introduced on 7 June. It was debated on 8 and 10 June. Further consideration was postponed until 1 July. In the meantime, a committee to draft a Declaration was appointed, which consisted of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, R. R. Livingston and Roger Sherman, following which a draft was submitted on 28 June and debated by the Congress, acting as a committee, on 1 July and then adopted. The draft was adopted by the full Congress on 2 July, debated again on 2, 3 and 4 July, and finally adopted with amendments on 4 July 1776. On 19 July it was ordered to be ‘engrossed on parchment’ and ‘when engrossed be signed by every member of Congress.’ The ‘engrossed resolution’ was not signed until August.

CHAPTER 2


The Gallery of the Louvre by Samuel Morse is not, at first glance, the most obvious painting with which to start an account of the effects of real-time technologies on art. It shows a group of mostly young people admiring and in one or two cases copying the masterpieces of European art in the Salon Carré of the Louvre and thus appears to be a conventional example of an academic genre, that of the Kunstkammer, devoted to showing collections of art in grand rooms. Nor does it evince any of the radical experimentation with painting techniques that would characterize the work of Morse’s near contemporaries such as Turner and Constable or, later in the century, that of the Impressionists and Postimpressionists. Yet, in a roundabout way, it has a good claim to being an important artefact for the history of modern art, not in terms of any influence it might have had on future artistic developments, but on the effects its commercial failure had on Morse’s career. Samuel Finlay Breeze Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1791. He was the son of Jedidiah Morse, a distinguished geographer and Congregational clergyman. To begin with at least, there was little sign of Morse following his father in terms of zeal or success. He was sent to be educated first at Phillips Academy, Andover, where he was an eccentric pupil, and then to Yale where he was an indifferent student (Silverman, 2003: 6–12). His interest was most aroused by science and technology, in particular through lectures he attended on the subject of electricity, and by the painting of miniature portraits, which he practiced much to his parents’ horror (ibid.: 13–14). But when, after graduating, painting continued to be his main interest, they helped him travel to England in 1811 to study at the Royal Academy of Arts (Staiti, 1989: 13–22). It was there that he

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developed both his artistic abilities and his political views. In particular the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain led him to become passionately and vocally pro-American, in response to the anti-American sentiments which that conflict engendered in England (ibid.: 18–21). He also learnt to paint according to accepted English artistic standards and in the English ‘historical’ style involving romantic portrayals of legends and historical events (ibid.: 27–31). Unfortunately for Morse, work of that sort was not popular in the United States, to which he returned in 1815. He was forced reluctantly to make his living as an itinerant painter of portraits, moving from New England to New York and to South Carolina, settling eventually in New York in 1824 (ibid.: 116). Despite his qualms his career as a portraitist was highly successful, both commercially and in terms of the quality of work he achieved. But Morse had greater ambitions. He was particularly inspired by John Trumbull’s mural, The Declaration of Independence, a depiction of one of the most famous events in American history, representing the actual moment at which the United States was brought into being by the act of signing the eponymous declaration (Staiti, 1989:74). (As we saw in chapter 1, this fabled instant at which the United States was created in this act of signing never really happened.) The Declaration of Independence is an example of the specifically American contribution to the grand genre of history painting. Regarded since the seventeenth century as the most important genre of painting, history painting traditionally involved the representation of subjects from classical history and mythology and from the Bible. The depiction of contemporary historical events was pioneered by American artists educated in England, such as Trumbull, Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley. Morse chose as his subject the House of Representatives. Between 1821 and 1823 he laboured on what would be ‘the centrepiece of [his] career as a painter, a summa of his artistic, cultural, and political philosophy, a true expression of his millennial hopes, and a key work in the history of American art’, but was also the ‘quintessential example of Morse’s failure to acquire a popular audience’ (Staiti, 1989: 71). The House of Representatives was Morse’s first attempt to produce the kind of epic picture he preferred. On a vast scale, and representing an idealized vision of its subject, it embodied Morse’s belief in an elitist republicanism threatened by burgeoning popularism and


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democracy and ‘the metaphysical fall of American government into the abyss of democracy’ (ibid.: 93) in the Jacksonian era. Indeed, far from being a representation of the actually deeply divided and quarrelsome House of Representatives, it was Morse’s vision of the heavenly Jerusalem that Calvinists believed God had ordained for America. A reincarnation of John Winthrop’s theocratic city on a hill, Morse’s House was a Zion resplendent in spiritual bliss and social harmony. It is covenant in which persons bound together in a body politic assume responsibility for the common weal. As a rhetorical effort that represses the political realities of the moment, the House of Representatives is a morally and religiously guided construction that leads the way to the millennial future. (ibid.: 94)

Thus The House of Representatives is not simply a representation of what it portrayed, however idealized. It was an invention of how it should be and how it might be in the future. That said, Morse’s vision is as nostalgic as it is proleptic. Morse’s polite, passive, spacious fiction, when seen against the reality of angry debate, crude behavior, and factional voting, is a rhetorical effort to rescue a dying system and resurrect the utopian beliefs of an earlier age. Morse’s salubrious vision of Congress is an attempt to will a mythic past into modern existence. (ibid.: 93)

Morse’s attempts to exhibit the painting for money at venues around the country met with public apathy and little or no revenue. Eventually it was sold to an Englishman for a thousand pounds. Staiti puts the picture’s failure to win public acceptance down to Morse’s refusal to produce an overt narrative, and his representation of Congress in terms of hieroglyphic emblems in which the past was petrified. He thus failed, deliberately perhaps, to take account of ‘the prerequisites of visual, political, and religious literacy [the] public needed in order to read his emblematic language’ (ibid.: 100). Staiti goes so far as to suggest that the issue was not that ‘Morse was incapable of phrasing his picture in [the public’s] common declarative language, but that, subliminally, he did not want to; relinquishing his elite

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discourse to the “lower classes,” even if it meant his public humiliation in a public referendum, was too frightening a prospect to contemplate’ (ibid.). Staiti continues that [I]n serving his own need to contain his fear of social chaos and the disintegration of American civilisation, Morse eroded the affective value of his pictures. In refusing to relinquish his private representational codes for public ones he created a private gallery of emblems, a personal house of representation, in which a private language operates behind his public rhetoric. Morse did not reconstruct social reality; he vanquished it and substituted his own tropes . . . With its diverse signs competing for signification, the House of Representatives could not possibly offer a clear reading, because the picture everywhere deconstructs itself. It leaves the viewer confused by the inadequacy of any text – public or private – to yield a stable reading. (ibid.: 101)

The failure of the American public to appreciate the kind of grand art he wished to undertake did not dint his patriotism. Indeed as time progressed he became more pro-republican, more pro-United States and passionately anti-monarchical and anticatholic as well as virulently xenophobic, a trait inherited from his father. Like his father and like many Protestants in America and in Britain, he regarded the Catholic Church and European monarchy as corrupt and dangerous (ibid.: 176). But this did not stop him admiring European art and, starting in 1829, undertaking a grand tour of Europe (ibid.: 176ff). He intended to use such a trip in preparation for his ambition to gain a commission to paint one of the murals for the rotunda in the Capitol building. After travelling to London and Paris and through Italy, seeing much of Europe’s finest painting and undertaking several commissions from patrons in the United States on the way, he returned to a Paris in turmoil after the 1830 revolution. Morse’s friend, subject and hero of the American War of Independence the Marquis of Lafayette had engineered the coup that toppled Charles X in the mistaken belief that Louis-Philippe would lead a constitutional monarchy based on republican principles (ibid.: 186–7). When Morse arrived, Lafayette, though deposed as commander of the National Guard, was still active in fighting for his republican ideals, a struggle with which Morse happily involved himself.


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It was in this context that Morse conceived of his late masterpiece, The Gallery of the Louvre. Through this work he intended to convey to the American public the greatness of European art, while protecting them from the corruption and licentiousness of Catholicism and monarchical government. He intended to do the paintings to be found in the Louvre in situ in the Salon Carré where, traditionally, the greatest treasures were displayed. But Louis-Philippe had instituted a new regime, in which the room was dedicated solely to French painting, which did not suit Morse’s purpose at all (ibid.: 189–90). Morse’s solution, which he pursued with indefatigable energy, was to construct a kind of virtual gallery, in effect, by shifting his six-foot-by-9-foot canvas and his easel through the corridors of the Louvre to find the paintings he wished to occupy the space, and to place them, often distorted in size, in such a way that his composition remained unified, while respecting the style and effects of the originals (ibid.: 190–1). Working at great pace, in the midst of a terrifying cholera epidemic, Morse finished his work in the Louvre in September 1832, and completed the frame and the figures back in the United States in August 1833 (ibid.: 191). The resulting picture contained thirty-seven copies of old master paintings, mostly from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reflecting Morse’s taste and understanding of art. The Gallery of the Louvre is a far more interesting and unusual work than it might seem. It is a kind of proto-collage, in that Morse has assembled the various elements from different sources, rather than simply portraying the gallery as it was then set up. This in itself is not exceptional. Many paintings in the Kunstkammer tradition would have been composed in such a manner. But Staiti points out that in some essential ways it is a radical departure from the typology of the Kunstkammer. For example, virtually every seventeenth- or eighteenth-century gallery picture falls into one of the following subject categories: connoisseurs in conversation amid a private collection, real or imaginary . . . mythologies . . . allegorical interpretations of an artist’s studio . . . commemorations of exhibitions . . . or group portraits. By contrast, Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre contains no phantom pictures; it does not glorify a private collection or a salon show; it does not depict a mythology in the conventional sense; and it is not

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a group portrait. There are no connoisseurs, collectors, dealers, monarchs, or muses present. What had for centuries been a stereotype of aristocratic genre painting became in Morse’s hands an image of bourgeois education. Instead of showing connoisseurs examining artworks as precious objects, Morse was depicting students analysing and extracting secrets from the intellectual patrimony of Europe. He replaced the elitist trappings that had marked every traditional variety of gallery picture with an image of discipline, ideation and effort. Everyone in the Gallery of the Louvre is a student copying, discussing or studying art intensively. (Staiti, 1989: 193)

Morse’s purpose was thus to present for the edification and artistic education of the citizens of the United States the works of art portrayed in the picture shorn of their tainted associations with Catholicism, monarchy and old-world aristocracy. This is made evident in the choice of figures portrayed by Morse as enjoying the works in question. Unlike conventional Kunstkammer works, Morse’s picture shows earnest members of the American bourgeoisie, including James Fenimore Cooper’s daughter Susan and Morse himself, studying the works intently for the purposes of personal edification (ibid.). In the case of The Gallery of the Louvre, neither the arrangement of paintings nor the depicted audience actually existed in the place where he represented them. This too was of great significance. As Staiti puts it ‘[T]he eclectic arrangement of pictures, piled up without any regard for nationality or date, was a political act, for Morse destroyed the old context of the pictures and gave them a new “republican” one’ (ibid.: 196). This resonates, deliberately, with Walter Benjamin’s ideas about the political potential of mechanical reproduction, in his famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’, published almost exactly a hundred years after Morse painted The Gallery of the Louvre. In particular photography, in enabling the reproduction of a work of art, erodes its ‘aura’ and brings it closer, making it possible to meet the beholder or listener in his or her own particular situation. Freed from tradition and ritual, and thus from the grip of the ruling classes, art can be based instead on politics (Benjamin, 2002: 103–4). Mechanical reproduction facilitates the performative dimension of the work of art by bringing out its iterable aspects. It enables works of art


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or parts of those works to be brought together in different configurations and to be placed in different contexts. Morse’s proto-collage technique was a form of appropriation permitting his reproductions of old-master paintings to meet new beholders in their own particular situations. By his acts of appropriation Morse was able to strip these works of their ritual functions in the context of monarchical Catholic Europe, and to find new purposes and meanings for them in Republican America. In a sense Morse was trying, performatively, to invent a new form of cultured American bourgeoisie. Morse was a committed, evangelical Republican and vocal supporter of the divine destiny of the United States, against the moribund and corrupt old world of Europe (Staiti, 1989: 202–6). This he inherited from his father, Jedidiah Morse, who was the architect of the Second Great Awakening, orthodox Calvinism’s crusade against liberal theology represented by Unitarianism (ibid.: 2–3). Morse followed his father’s beliefs, not just in terms of his Calvinism, but also in passionate adherence to many of the beliefs with which it was sustained, including the millennialist perception that the American Revolution was the first step on the road toward a heavenly Jerusalem and that America was destined as the site of the millennium (ibid.: 3). This was accompanied by a passionate loathing of the Roman Catholic Church, the ‘ecclesiastical whore of Babylon’ according to Jedidiah, and a corresponding belief in the ascent of American culture, through the ‘growth of industrial economy, technology, wealth and mass communication as agents of freedom and progress and thus as tangible signs of God’s favour (ibid.: 4). Such ideas were promulgated by Jedidiah through aggressive evangelicism with a fervour that Morse inherited, though in his case as a crusading artist rather than as a clergyman. Unfortunately for Morse The Gallery of the Louvre was not the success he had hoped it would be. Like his earlier attempt at an epic composition, The House of Representatives, and despite good notices in the press, it attracted few visitors when on public display in New York in October 1833. The public apparently preferred the sensational attractions of Francis Darby’s The Sixth Seal, a dramatic and bombastic work with an apocalyptic theme (Staiti, 1989: 199–201). Eventually Morse sold the painting in 1834 to George Hyde Clark for $1,200. He was considerably affected by its failure, to the extent of giving up painting altogether (ibid.: 201–2).

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For all his republicanism and anti-monarchism, and his revolutionary aspirations for his art, Morse’s understanding of the role of art was inherited from the traditions developed through royal patronage. He even studied painting at the Royal Academy of Arts, whose name suggested the need for the fine arts to ally themselves with the court. Nor, despite his republicanism, was Morse much of a democrat. He believed in the rule by the elite, rather than by the mass. Thus for the communication of Morse’s elitist conceptions painting was in one sense ideal. In realizing his ideas in the form of large canvasses, difficult to move, and hard to reproduce without great loss of effect, Morse grounded his work in the auratic tradition of works of art fostered by the patronage of the powerful. At the same time it was his intention with both canvasses that they should communicate his ideas to the American people, which explains his decision to show both works publicly for money, rather than by exhibiting them at the National Academy of Arts or the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he could have basked in the critical approval of his peers. As we have seen, such public displays of his work were disastrous. This disappointment led him to develop his other interest in new technologies of communication, which led ultimately to the invention for which he is most famous, his development of the electric telegraph. He had been inspired by a conversation about electromagnetism in which he had participated while on the ship returning from France in 1832. Through his amateur scientific knowledge he realized that electric current could convey information over wires. Morse was not the first with the idea of the electric telegraph, which can be traced back to the middle of the eighteenth century. At the same time the need for efficient forms of telecommunications was increasing, especially for military purposes. These needs along with a number of discoveries concerning the properties of electromagnetism inspired Morse, from 1832 onward, to develop a working model of an electric telegraph, using home-made materials for a receiver prototype, which Staiti, describes as having a ‘curious Duchamp-like appearance’ (ibid.: 226).1 Morse worked on his ideas for five years, more or less in secret. It was only when what appeared to be a similar system, devised by two French inventors, was announced in the American press that he realized that others might have the same ideas as his. In fact the system in question was a form of optical


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telegraphy, and therefore not just different, but potentially much less useful. Nevertheless Morse was sufficiently alarmed to engage in a number of preemptive actions, designed to show that he was the first to have the idea. His brother Sydney, who worked for the newspaper that had reprinted the report of the French invention, accompanied the reprinted article with an account of the work of ‘a gentleman of our acquaintance’ who had already achieved greater feats some years earlier. Sydney caused the name of the gentleman in question to be revealed as that of Morse in another paper (Silverman, 2003: 147–50). Meanwhile, believing that his ideas may have leaked out, Morse wrote to almost all his fellow passengers on the ship Sully, in which he had returned from France and where he had had the conversations that inspired his development of the telegraph. He wished to know if they recalled the conversations in question, and whether it was he who came up with the idea of telegraphic communication. Almost all agreed with him. Only Charles Jackson, a physician, who had been aged 28 at the time of the voyage back to America, disputed Morse’s account and tried to claim equal responsibility (ibid.:157). This led to a furious exchange of letters and the threat of legal action against Jackson on Morse’s behalf. According to Kenneth Silverman’s account of this dispute, it was motivated by both men’s ‘shared conception of the Lone Inventor, creating ex nihilo from his lofty imagination, an ideal in Morse’s case reinforced by his imperious conception of the painter, independent of all ties to patrons’ (ibid.: 157–9). This concern with the origin of the idea of the telegraph is not merely an issue to do with intellectual property rights, but with the whole status of the invention itself, as invention. As Derrida puts it, Every invention supposes that someone or something comes a first time, something or someone comes to someone, someone else. But for invention to be an invention, to be unique (even if the uniqueness has to be repeatable), it is also necessary for this first time, this unique moment of origin to be a last time: archaeology and eschatology acknowledge each other in the irony of the one and only instant. (Derrida, 1989: 29)

But any invention must also be assimilable into the culture in which it emerges, through the conventions of legality and also of repeatability.

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Never does an invention appear, never does an invention take place, without an inaugural event. Nor is there any invention without an advent, if we take this latter word to mean the inauguration for the future of a possibility or a power that will remain at the disposal of everyone. Advent there must be, because the event of an invention, its act of inaugural production, once recognised, legitimised, countersigned by a social consensus according to a system of conventions, must be valid for the future (à-venir). It will only receive its status of invention, furthermore, to the extent that this socialisation of the invented thing will be protected by a set of conventions that will ensure for it at the same time its recording a common history, its belonging to a culture: to a heritage, a lineage, a pedagogical tradition, a discipline, a chain of generations. Invention begins by being susceptible to repetition, exploitation, reinscription. (ibid.: 28)

With the help of two partners, Leonard Gale, a professor of science at New York University, and Alfred Vail, Morse had built a working device by 1837, although its effectiveness was hampered by a complicated system of encoding messages, which was later solved by the development of a series of dots and dashes to represent letters (Silverman, 2003: 167). After this and several private demonstrations Morse undertook an ill-advised journey to Great Britain and Europe to try to secure patents in various countries. During his time abroad, Morse came across a number of researchers who had been working on similar schemes, including two British scientists, Sir Charles Wheatstone and Sir William Fothergill Cooke, who had patented a similar, though more complex device (ibid.: 175–7). Morse had particular trouble in both Britain and France is getting a patent for his invention. In the latter case he put the difficulty and delays down to the ‘French mentality’ (ibid.: 181–2). It was while in Paris that Morse encountered the stage and diorama designer Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, who was also becoming celebrated for an invention which he had helped to develop, and which would become known as ‘photography’. Morse had anticipated the possibilities made available by photography, in recontextualizing the separate elements of his painting The Gallery of the Louvre, though at the time of its painting Morse could have barely been aware of its potential, which had only just been developed, the first successful attempt to capture the effects of light on


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chemicals to represent a scene having been achieved by Joseph Nicéphore Niepce in 1826. Within a decade this process had been made considerably more efficient through the efforts of Niepce’s business partner Daguerre, who developed a means of reducing exposure time from eight hours to half an hour and for making the image permanent by immersing it in salt to produce what he called a ‘daguerreotype’ (Silverman, 2003: 189–90). When Daguerre’s work was made public in 1839, and the French government had acquired the rights to exploit the process, this technique of making images was also given a name by the English scientist Sir John Herschel, ‘photography’, literally ‘writing with light’. Another Englishman, William Henry Fox Talbot, working at the same time as Daguerre, produced the solution to the major drawback of the daguerreotype process, that it could only produce one image. Fox Talbot’s calotype, by contrast, allowed numerous positive images to be produced from a single negative, which meant that it, rather than Daguerre’s method, became the basis of almost all photography since, despite the latter’s higher quality. Morse obtained Daguerre’s manual describing the process of making a daguerreotype and claimed to have brought the first copy to the United States and to have been the first American to have taken a photograph, though both claims are now disputed (ibid.: 195). Nevertheless Morse was a pioneer of photography in the United States and wrote the earliest first-hand account of it to appear in the American press (ibid.: 190). Like many of the American pioneers of photography, Morse experimented with different chemicals to speed up the process. This was particularly useful in photographic portraiture, which Morse began to practice enthusiastically. He engaged in a friendly dispute with French pioneers about which country was first to reduce the exposure time sufficiently to take pictures of people. Morse conceded that the French were first in this matter, but was able to claim that he and his partner, John William Draper, were the first to take photographic portraits of sitters ‘with the eyes open’ (ibid.: 198). In their studio in New York Morse and Draper were able to reduce exposure time to two minutes or less, by ingenious use of mirrors to throw light on the sitter (ibid.:198–9).2 It is interesting that Morse should choose portraiture as a focus in his photography (especially, given the irony that he always resented the need to make a living painting portraits, when he was

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an artist.) Walter Benjamin saw the interest in portraiture shown by early photographers as the last vestige of the cult value of art. In photography, exhibition value begins to drive back cult value on all fronts. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It falls back into a last entrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait is central to early photography. In the cult of remembrance of dead or absent loved ones, the cult value of the image finds a last refuge. In the fleeting expression of a human face, the aura beckons from early photographs for the last time. This is what gives them their melancholy and their incomparable beauty. (Benjamin, 2002: 108)

Roland Barthes made a similar point in his analysis of the photograph by Alexander Gardner of Lewis Payne, the young man who, in 1865, tried to assassinate US Secretary of State W. H. Seward. Looking at the photograph Barthes is struck by the thought that ‘he is going to die’ and that ‘this will be and this has been’ (Barthes, 1982: 96). Meanwhile interest in Morse’s own invention grew slowly. In 1842 he persuaded Congress to provide $30,000 in support of his plan to string wires across the United States (Silverman, 2003: 220–1). In 1844 he gave the first public demonstration, sending a message from the chamber of the Supreme Court to the Mount Clair train depot in Baltimore. Appropriately, given Morse’s evangelicism, the message was a quote from the Bible, ‘What hath God wrought?’ Given how momentous the transmission is supposed to have been it actually attracted little attention (ibid.: 236–7). Three days after the debut public transmission Morse and Vail created more of a stir by first telegraphing the results of the Democratic convention in Baltimore to Washington, then, the next day, actually involving the telegraph in the process of choosing a running mate. Other notable early achievements include the first game of chess played by telegraph and the first remote-controlled explosion, in the Supreme Court building, set off by Samuel Colt in Baltimore. The Antarctic explorer Captain Charles Wilkes used the telegraph to determine differences of longitude. This enabled the introduction of uniform national time throughout the United States by accurately determining the Meridian distances more accurately (ibid.: 237–40).


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The extraordinary speed and reach of Morse’s invention astonished Americans, who were baffled by its operations and how it ‘annihilated time and space’ (ibid.: 240). It was widely regarded as being almost supernatural, and one of the commonest descriptions of its operation was in terms of lightning. The telegraph was called the ‘lightning line’ and Morse himself ‘Lightning Man’ (ibid.: 244). In particular the ‘lightning line’ ‘annihilated time and space’, enabling messages to arrive almost instantaneously and even before they had been sent, owing to time differences. Anticipating the response to the first computers, the telegraph was even considered to think and represent a ‘new species of consciousness’ (ibid.: 241), in which mind could be everywhere. The Christian Observer described the spread of the telegraph as leading to a ‘sensorium of communicated intelligence’ (ibid.: 242). Morse himself described the telegraph system as being like the central nervous system. Many years later, in 1866, when a successful attempt to lay a permanent working telegraph line across the Atlantic succeeded, Morse combined both metaphors to suggest that ‘the great system of nerves that will make the world one great Sensorium’ (Silverman, 2003: 417–18). The idea of the telegraph as a nervous system was a metaphor that had political implications as the United States expanded and threatened to become ungovernably large. Along with the railroads the telegraph would, in theory at least, unite the nation. By the mid-1840s, largely through exploitation by private companies, the telegraph had spread through the United States, following and sometimes preceding the spread of the railroads. For Morse the telegraph offered the possibility of communicating messages more effectively to the large and disparate public of the United States where painting had failed. Morse saw painting and the telegraph as achieving the same aim. Paul Staiti writes that Not only did Morse consider both pictorial and technological invention to be divine in origin, he also felt that both were Christian instruments redeeming and unifying society by carrying divine messages of ‘peace and Love’. (Staiti, 1989: 223)

Nor was Morse alone in this belief.

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Protestant leaders were so excited by the moral potential of technology that they believed the machine might succeed in moral reform where oratory, missionaries and (in Morse’s perspective) pictures had failed. (ibid.: 224)

In this Morse and his Protestant colleagues were early examples of what James Carey and John Quirke call the ‘electrical sublime’ which, as part of the ‘mythos of the electrical revolution’, saw the increased capacity for communication as the means of achieving social harmony (Carey, 1992: 113–41). The early responses to telegraphy, much like those to the World Wide Web 150 years later, saw it as bringing about redemption and ‘universal brotherhood’. When the Atlantic telegraph cable was at last successfully laid, after a number of failed attempts, this rhetoric of universal brotherhood became even more hyperbolic. In front of Astor House in New York a large banner read ‘The Atlantic Telegraph transmits the Lightning of Heaven, and binds together 60,000,000 of human beings’. Even more hyperbolically, a photographic-supply shop suggested that the telegraph had made ‘all nations The United States’ (an echo of the supposed performative, transformative instance of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, described in chapter 1). The New York Tribune declared that a ‘mighty though silent transformation in the condition of human existence has just been effected (Silverman, 2003: 375–6). Ralph Waldo Emerson included a description of hearing the news of the transatlantic telegraph in his long poem The Adirondacks, a Journal: A spasm throbbing through the pedestals Of Alp and Andes, isle and continent, Urging astonished Chaos with a thrill To be a brain, or serve the brain of man. The lightning has run masterless too long; He must to school and learn his verb and noun And teach his nimbleness to earn his wage, Spelling with guided tongue man’s messages Shot through the weltering pit of the salt sea. (Emerson, 1994: 155–6)


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But the optimism of Morse and others about the effects of telegraphy was not to be realized. Despite his claims that the telegraph would ‘bind man to his fellow-man in such bonds of amity as to put an end to war’ (Lepore, 2002: 140), the burgeoning industrialization it helped to foster had the opposite effect. At the time when Morse was first developing his version of the telegraph the United States was still largely an agrarian society. But by the middle of the nineteenth century rapid industrialization in the North of the country was changing that. It was also leading to an increasingly obvious imbalance in population distribution between the North and the South, already divided over the question of slavery. Between 1800 and 1850 the proportion of the population in the South was reduced from half to one-third of the total (much of which was made up of slaves who had little or no rights to political representation), with a concomitant reduction in representation in Congress. Using the threat to slavery posed by the surprise election of the moderate Republican Abraham Lincoln as an ostensible motive, several Southern states attempted to secede from the Union in 1860. These circumstances led to the American Civil War, which was possibly the first major conflict of the machine age. It employed and further developed the full range of technologies then available, including modern armaments, photography, the railroads and telegraphy. The capacity for weapons production it caused to be set up greatly facilitated the wholesale industrialization and modernization of the United States after its end. The War may have been precipitated by political tensions about slavery and fought over its causes, but the hostilities were clearly also a response to the differentials in the speed of technical evolution and cultural development. Slavery was fought over and abolished not just because it was wrong, though it undoubtedly was and is, but also because it was increasingly irrelevant to needs of a United States in the throes of industrialization. In an era of steam power and telegraphy, slavery was increasingly obsolete, as were the social and cultural structures and the property relations it embodied. For Walter Benjamin, war is the inevitable result of society and culture failing to respond to the developing possibilities of technology and the more efficient means of production it offers:

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[I]f the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. (Benjamin, 1977: 244)

It is in the space created by the increasing disparity between technological evolution and cultural and social development that the avant-garde would emerge. The very beginnings of the avant-garde and the invention of the telegraph, the first instance of a ‘device going faster than its own time’, happen at more or less the same time. The latter was crucial for the organization and management of modern industrial capitalism. As Derrida points out, ‘capitalization – or capitalism – always has the structure of a certain potentialization of speed’ (Derrida, 1984: 20). This, bizarrely, is Morse’s most notable contribution to the history of art. His paintings have been, to a large extent, forgotten. The failure, as he saw it, of his most ambitious works, The House of Representatives and The Gallery of the Louvre, led him to abandon painting and devote his time to technology instead. Yet the technological invention for which he is most famous was part of a set of dramatic cultural and social shifts, which was manifested as much in art as elsewhere. The dramatic speeding up of communication enabled by the telegraph as well as the increasing autonomy of the signifier it helped bring about reverberated through the subsequent development of modern art. The dilemma he resolved by abandoning art altogether finds expression in the oscillation found in the work of artists, art movements and even in individual works of art, between taking advantage of new means of communication and its effects on the signifier, at the cost of abandoning artistic autonomy, and preserving that autonomy or its vestige by cleaving to slower auratic forms of cultural production and reception. More directly his invention, and others that were developed later, such as the telephone, film, television, video and the computer, opened up new possibilities for the production of art and new ways of thinking about its role, from the Futurists, Moholy Nagy and his ‘Telephone’ paintings, John


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Cage and his use of radios and other technologies, Mail Art as practised by the Nouveaux Réalistes, Fluxus and Ray Johnson among others, video art, computer and cybernetic art and, of course, the recent development of net. art and other practices intended for the Web. It is unlikely that Morse would have recognized any of this as art, yet his invention, developed as a result of the failure of his paintings to communicate as he had hoped, was part of the set of dramatic shifts out of which artistic modernism, the avant-garde and current media practice all emerged. In 1846 Yankee Doodle magazine published a cartoon showing an arid landscape traversed by telegraph poles, captioned ‘Professor Morse’s Great Work of Art’. The cartoonist, who thought he was making a sardonic point about the transformations performed by the telegraph, was also more prescient about the future of art than he would ever have guessed.

NOTES 1. In fact the receiver specifically resembles Duchamp’s Large Glass, to the extent of being divided horizontally in two. As Linda Dalrymple Henderson has shown, in her study of science and technology in The Large Glass and related works, Duchamp was fascinated and influenced by telegraphy (Henderson, 1998: 98–115). This has been picked up by commentators such as Lebel who refer to the Bride’s ‘system of telecommunication’, or Tomkins’ description of the Current Pistons as a ‘kind of telegraph system’. Duchamp encouraged such speculation when, in 1959, he produced a drawing entitled ‘Cols alités’ (literally ‘sleeping mountains’, but also a pun on ‘causality’), which showed a telegraph pole superimposed on an image of The Large Glass. 2. This concern with speed was appropriate in a world in which saving time was becoming increasingly important. It is indicative that Morse’s return journey from Europe in 1839 in a screw-propelled iron steamship took three weeks, rather than the fifty eight days his return journey from England had taken in 1815 (Silverman, 2003: 191).


CHAPTER 3


According to J. Hillis Miller, the ‘second industrial revolution was the shift in the West, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century but accelerating ever since, from an economy centered on the production and distribution of commodities to an economy increasingly dominated by the creation, storage, retrieval, and distribution of information. Even money is now primarily information, exchanged and distributed all over the world at the speed of light by telecommunications networks. (Miller, 2000)

In his description of his development of the telegraph Morse emphasized that his particular contribution was what he described as the ‘philological position’, based on the literal meaning of the Greek tele graphos, ‘I write at a distance’ (Silverman, 2003: 420). Unlike previous forms of telecommunication or even other electric telegraphs, Morse’s invention actually inscribed the messages, rather than relying on an operator to transcribe them as they were transmitted. This was evinced in a number of developments and transformations in the means of communication and concomitant shifts in how language and writing operated and were understood, which took place between 1800 and the 1840s and coincided with the emergence of new, more efficient and faster means to circulate signs, goods and people. Without the telegraph it would not have been possible to manage the complexities of the railway system. It also enabled the rise of the modern commodity. Increased communications both encouraged the growth of markets and changed the nature of those markets. According to James Carey, the telegraph along with the railroad enables a radical shift from local markets’ conditions of supply and demand to national 53

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markets in which the price of goods responds to national conditions, and this is responsible for the development of widespread futures trading (trading in time) rather than arbitrage (trading in geographical price differences) (Carey, 1989: 217–20). What was traded was information rather than actual products. To begin with this meant the warehouse receipts from grain elevators along the railroad line, which were traded instead of the grain itself. In order to facilitate this kind of trade, products had to be standardized and homogenized so that they could be bought and sold without inspection. Carey goes on to suggest that this process of divorcing the receipt from the product can be thought of as ‘part of a general process initiated by the use of money . . . the progressive divorce of the signifier from the signified, a process in which the world of signifiers progressively overwhelms and moves independently of real material objects’ (ibid.: 220). The telegraph was thus a crucial element in what James Beniger calls the ‘control revolution’, the drive toward more efficient control and management of the processes of production and distribution that emerges in the nineteenth century (Beniger, 1986: 226–37). Above all it offered a means of almost instantaneous communication over great distances. Similarly Jonathan Crary points out that the photograph was the most significant, in terms of cultural and social impact, of the ‘new field of serially produced objects’ that characterized modernity. As he puts it: ‘The photograph becomes a central element not only in a new commodity economy but in the reshaping of an entire territory in which signs and images, each effectively severed from a referent, circulate and proliferate’ (Crary, 1990: 13). At about the same time as those developments, in 1840, Sir Roland Hill established the system of Penny Postage in Great Britain. This later became the basis of the Universal Postal System. As Friedrich Kittler writes ‘[O]nce there is a world postal system, signifiers have standardised prices that mock all meaning. Once there are telegrams and postcards, style is no longer the man, but an economy of signs’ (Kittler, 1990: 191). Kittler makes a similar point in relation to another invention of the period, the typewriter, in which ‘writing was no longer the handwritten, continuous, transition from nature to culture. It became selection from a countable, spatialized supply’ (ibid.: 194).


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The invention of the telegraph, of the typewriter and of photography, and the introduction of the Penny Post coincide almost exactly with important developments in paint technology. By the beginning of the nineteenth century it was possible to grind paint mechanically, rather than by hand, as had been the practice hitherto. Mechanically ground paint was, to begin with at least, too coarse for use by artists and was sold for coach or house painting. But, by the mid-1830s, colour merchants were offering mechanically ground artists’ colours. One result of this was that the nature of paint changed considerably, first because machine production tended to lead to overgrinding, which meant that the subtle differences between pigments that hand grinding brought out were lost (Callen, 1993: 22–3). Combined with the use of additives, this created a uniform buttery texture for all paints, which was very different to the subtle differences to be found in hand-ground paints. The binder also had an important effect on how paint was used. In the nineteenth century the use of poppy oil began to supersede that of linseed (ibid.: 23). The latter smoothes out the paint on the canvas, but is prone to yellowing if applied thickly and is best used in thin layers, the technique preferred by the old masters. The former by contrast retains the texture of the brush, which ‘encouraged the development of the textural, descriptive brushwork characteristic of Impressionistic techniques’ (ibid.). Mechanical grinding of paints led to another important development, that of paint in tubes. Mass-producing paint mechanically meant the need for some means of storing colours, which would otherwise be liable to spoil and become unsellable. Though forms of storage such as pigs’ bladders had been used since the seventeenth century, they only preserved the paint up till the point when the container was breached. It was only in the early 1840s that collapsible tin tubes of paint that could be resealed were first developed (ibid.). The development of paint in tubes had a number of effects. It did not, as is often supposed or claimed, free the artists from their studios. Artists had been painting en plein air since at least the seventeenth century1. But it did encourage and make more widespread the practice of painting in the open air. More importantly, paint in tubes greatly enabled ‘industrialisation’s penetration into artistic practice’ (Eisenman, 1994). This relates to the way in which the mechanized production of paint and its storing in sealable tubes – as opposed to its production by hand – standardized colour, both literally

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in that additives such as wax and oil tended to efface the differences between pigments, and conceptually in that it turned colours into a series of discrete, universal signs, ‘cadmium red’, ‘magenta’ and so on (or rather, foregrounded the sign aspect of the pigment). Like writing with the universal post and telegraph system, colour becomes a universal and interchangeable economy of signs. So painting becomes the assembly of a series of discrete marks chosen from, in Kittler’s words, a ‘countable, spatialized supply’, which also echoes Carey’s analysis of the effect of the telegraph and the railroads on the commodity. It is also precisely the point made by Marcel Duchamp when he declares that ‘[S]ince the tubes of paint used by the artists are manufactured and ready-made products we must conclude that all paintings in the world are “readymades aided” and also works of assemblage’ (quoted in de Duve, 1998: 163). The distinctive techniques of the Impressionists can perhaps be understood as resulting from a combination of a number of factors – including the development of paint in tubes – with the concomitant changes in the paint quality and in its possibilities, as well as, more generally, ubiquity of the commodity and of commodification and industrialization. These interlinked and overdeterminedly connected phenomena make possible the distinctive impressionist ‘tache’ (or sometimes ‘trait’), the coloured stroke or mark (Bomford et al., 1991: 92). With this kind of mark-making, and in contradistinction to the thin layers of the old masters, the whole surface – whatever is supposedly depicted – is treated in the same manner, and with the same weight. Eisenman explicitly connects this homogenization to the commodity. He suggests that the Impressionist world is one where ‘usevalue has been banished, and exchange-value – which posits the universal equality of things – enshrined instead’ (Eisenman, 1994: 247). Thus the Impressionist painting technique facilitated by industrial paint production and paint in tubes, along with the separate but interlinked developments of telegraphy, photography, the universal postal system and typewriting, all emerge in the context of a burgeoning system of industrialized capitalism, and are part of the general facilitation of the circulation of signs, goods, people and capital which such a system demands for its operation. As such they can all be understood, in relation to their historical context, as part of the general process of the industrialization of culture and of its increasing standardization and even dehumanization.


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At another level, they can be thought of as different ways in which the structural necessity of the sign being able to circulate is foregrounded and prioritized. The notion of colour as sign instigated by paint in tubes and the paradigm of telegraphic signification results in painting tending toward a kind of writing, consisting of discrete marks assembled on a surface. That said, the Impressionist use of the mark is still fundamentally optical. Indeed, as the term ‘impressionist’ – originally applied pejoratively by a critic – suggests, their work was concerned with capturing, in the most direct way possible, the impressions of light on the surface of their retina (Shiff, 1992: 184 and Eisenman, 1992: 189–98). In this their work exemplified Baudelaire’s demand that the ‘painter of modern life’ should capture the present moment (Baudelaire, 1995). This focus, perhaps unsurprisingly, became increasingly criticized in the 1880s and 1890s. Many of the Impressionists began to eschew the immediacy of their outdoor work for more considered and finished studio productions. Some, such as Cézanne, Monet or Pissaro, began to explore the formal qualities of painting itself with far greater explicit attention than thitherto. Others, including pre-eminently Seurat, engaged with the possibilities which new scientific understandings of colour perception offered. Gauguin and other artists of a later generation started to use the heightened palette first employed by the Impressionists as a means to express inner ideas and symbols. Later these artists would come to be known as ‘postimpressionists’.’. It was only in the early twentieth century that the English critic Roger Fry coined the phrase ‘post-impressionism’ for an exhibition he organized in 1910 of what he considered to be neglected impressionist artists. Both the use of the prefix ‘post’ itself and its ‘post hoc’ application to a previously undefined movement, or rather a movement that did not exist until it was named, is perhaps worth remarking upon, as is the delay in the name being widely adopted. Though Fry coined the term it was not until the 1950s, when it was revived by John Rewald for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, that it was widely used in its current meaning (Rewald, 1956). Though the use of ‘post’ as a prefix, meaning both ‘behind’, and ‘after’, ‘following’, can be traced back to the sixteenth century, Fry was one of the first to apply it specifically to a cultural phenomenon. In an essay about post-structuralism, Robert J. C. Young pointed out that this doubling of

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meaning is a kind of Freudian Nachträglichkeit or deferred action (1982: 4). Commenting on this suggestion, Nicholas Royle suggested that this could apply to ‘every and any postism’ (1999: 3). The use of the term ‘post’ does of course bring with it, unintentionally perhaps, an allusion to the postal system. The ‘postal’ is another way of thinking about writing in the terms described and defined by Derrida: [A]s soon as there is, there is difference (and this does not await language, especially human language, and the language of Being, only the mark and the divisible trait, and there is postal manoeuvring, relays, delay, anticipation, destination, telecommunicating network, the possibility, and therefore the fatal necessity of going astray. (Derrida, 1987a: 62–7)

The term ‘post-impressionist’ could be read as referring to someone whose work is impressed upon, stamped, by the ‘postal’, or which makes an impression of the ‘postal’. As Richard Shiff puts it, ‘[T]he term “impression” can bear very physical signification, as when it is synonymous with “imprint”’; he also points out, ‘[I]t suggests the contact of one material force or substance with another, resulting in a mark, the trace of the physical interaction that has occurred’ (Shiff, 1992: 184), or in other words, perhaps, a ‘stamp’. The emergence of what would later become known as Postimpressionism coincides with the invention of the World Postal System, instigated in 1874, following on from the British concept of the Penny Post and the invention of the postcard, first proposed in 1865, by Heinrich Stephan at the fifth conference of the German-Austrian Postal Union, and made popular as a means for troops to communicate with their families during the FrancoPrussian War of 1870 (Siegert, 1999: 139). In The Postcard, Derrida pointed out that the first picture postcard was only authorized in 1894 (Derrida, 1987a: 139). Writing about The Postcard, J. Hillis Miller proposes that, for Derrida, [T]he postcard stands as a proleptic anticipation of the publicity and openness of the new communications regimes. A postcard is open for anyone to read, just as email today is by no means sealed or private . . . I can make myself or am magically made into its recipient. The postcard message, or the email letter, that


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falls under my eye, is meant for me, or I take it as meant for me, whatever its addressee. (Miller, 2000)

He continues that ironically allegorized in The Post Card in somewhat obsolete forms . . . in the many telephone conversations the protagonist (or protagonists) have with their beloved or beloveds but also in an old-fashioned remnant of the rapidly disappearing culture of handwriting, print, and the postal system: the postcard . . . [O]ne of Derrida’s main points in The Post Card is that it is a feature of the new regime of telecommunications to break down the inside/outside dichotomies that presided over the old print culture. (ibid.)

The old print culture was also the culture of royal monopoly, of print, the post and of artistic patronage and education, the last being the system that Morse could not find his way out of, as an artist. The artist who best exemplifies the art of the postal/postimpressionist era is Vincent van Gogh.2 In her essay ‘Van Gogh and Holland: Nationalism and Modernism’ (Orton and Pollock, 1996: 107), Griselda Pollock discusses Van Gogh’s extraordinarily peripatetic life, which led to living in eighteen different locations from the age of 15 to his death at 37, to speak in several languages and to read extensively in four – Dutch, French, German and English. For Pollock, Van Gogh’s ‘access to European culture of the nineteenth century . . . was a direct product of modernisation: the international distribution of culture through books, prints, magazines, photographs’. She points out that through his employment by the art dealers Goupil he was a participant in the process of ‘international distribution of cheaper books and, as importantly, engravings, prints and photographic reproductions’. Van Gogh was thus both . . . symptom and effect of the expanded systems of communication and new media, international systems of distribution facilitated by new rail networks and steam boats, telegraph communication, international exhibitions celebrating colonial power and commerce. (ibid.)

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Thus, despite the fact that he produced only ten prints (nine lithographs and one etching), out of a total of over 2,000 artworks (870 paintings, more than 1,000 drawings, 148 watercolours, and even 133 sketches in his letters), Van Gogh was emphatically an artist of the ‘age of mechanical reproduction’. Or, to put it a different way, he is an artist in and of the age of ‘the increasingly powerful historical expansion of a general writing’ (Derrida, 1977: 195). Orton and Pollock describe Van Gogh as having a notion, derived from the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, ‘of the world as one vast symbol – or the universe as a great book of hieroglyphs’ (Orton and Pollock, 1996: 36). (Van Gogh’s fascination with books and reading is well known and well attested in his letters and his paintings of books and readers.) This was prefigured by the extraordinary achievement of Jean-François Champollion in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. As Shawn James Rosenheim points out, Champollion’s work was important for dispelling the thitherto widely held notion that language had or could have some natural relation to what it signifies. Champollion demonstrated that, contrary to previous understandings, hieroglyphs were in general not pictograms but in fact quasi-alphabetic. This undermined their privileged status in the search for an ‘Adamic’ language in which, like the language supposedly spoken by Adam in the Garden of Eden, signs would have a natural relationship with things in the world (Rosenheim, 1997: 53–4). The decoding of hieroglyphs held a particular fascination for those interested in language and writing. As Derrida points out, in the Encyclopaedia Hegel compares the body of the sign to an Egyptian pyramid, a comparison that also invokes the association of so¯ma, body, with se¯ma, sign (Derrida, 1982: 82). Champollion’s work had important ramifications far beyond Egyptology. Preceding as it does the invention of the telegraph by little more than a couple of decades, it prefigures the increasing dominance of codes of transmission and communication which would come to be such a feature of modernity, as well as the understanding of language as unmotivated. Before becoming a painter, Van Gogh went through a number of other careers, including art dealer, teacher and evangelist. In each case he became engaged in work involving the circulation and transmission of signs of one sort or another, which involved him in a great deal of wandering. As an art


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dealer he was sent to the London branch of the firm Goupil, which, unlike the continental branches, was solely concerned with reproductions, rather than original works of art. (Van Gogh sold photographs.) It also possibly made more necessary his lifelong assiduousness in letter writing. It is telling that his first sermon as an evangelist, preached in South West London, was on the theme of pilgrimage and journeying, and starts with Psalm 119, verse 19. ‘I am a stranger on the earth, hide not Thy commandments from me’, and continues ‘[I]t is an old belief and it is a good belief, that our life is a pilgrim’s progress – that we are strangers on the earth, but that though this be so, yet we are not alone for our Father is with us. We are pilgrims, our life is a long walk or journey from earth to Heaven.’ (Here perhaps we can hear an echo of Leroi-Gourhan’s contention, quoted in chapter 1, of the relation between hominization and an upright gait; ‘it all begins with the feet’.) Though the sermon betrays Van Gogh’s yearning for some place of final rest and contentment, which would later find expression in his fascination with Japan, the South of France and other idealized locales, it also reveals his essential errancy. Sometimes described in terms of saintliness, Van Gogh is more like an errant knight, seeking absolution through abasement, the committing of gestures of courtly love and, literally, the rescuing of young women in distress. In this he most strongly resembles Don Quixote, Cervantes’s seventeenth-century (anti-)hero. It also necessitated or encouraged his prodigious letter writing. It is little wonder that one of his principle portrait subjects in Arles was M. Roulin, the local postman, and his family. The theme of errancy, of wandering, that so concerned Van Gogh, was also beginning to find expression elsewhere, but shorn of its element of religious hope. A little before Van Gogh began to preach and study for the ministry, Friedrich Nietzsche, then a little-known professor of classical philology at Basel University, had started to publish a series of books which would eventually transform Western philosophy via his critiques of metaphysics and theology. Nietzsche too was greatly taken with the image of the wanderer and has Zarathustra, the ‘hero’ of his most famous work Also Sprach Zarathustra, declare that ‘I am a wanderer and a mountain climber . . . I do not like the plains and it seems I cannot sit still for long’ (Nietzsche, 1961: 173). Unlike Van Gogh’s pilgrim searching for God,

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Zarathustra is concerned to declare His death. The death of God, at least in His ontotheological manifestation, is a concomitant of the historical expansion of writing and its massive extension beyond and exceeding of the logo- and phonocentric. No longer underwritten by and foreclosed in the name of God, language itself becomes errant or, rather, reveals itself to be writing, orphaned signs, condemned or perhaps freed to wander (Taylor, 1984: 149–69). Writing in both its restricted and expanded meanings can be seen to impress itself on Van Gogh’s work. This can be seen in the works he made during and after his stay in Paris in 1886–88, where he came into contact with the Impressionists and other experimental painters. It was through such contacts that he developed his later style, which involved more vivid use of colour and of distinct, discrete marks. The latter is obvious in many of the later drawings, particularly those done with pen and ink. This is Van Gogh’s most distinctive style, his ‘signature’ trait with which he signs his pictures even before he has actually written his name on them. Though clearly still representational and based on observation, these works seem to oscillate on the edge of becoming something more like a sign for what they depict or, to use André Leroi-Gourhan’s term, a pictogram (Leroi-Gourhan, 1993: 192). Peter Brunette and David Wills suggest that It was attention to the effects of mediation constituting the so-called mimetic arts that led to the developments of modernism and abstraction, for when painters became interested in the play of light and took their easels outside in an attempt to enter into a more natural relation with the artistic object, they also drew attention to the apparatus that constitutes the medium and that forever prevents such a natural relation. If at first that attention may have been unwitting, it soon became more explicit in the experimentation with the stuff of painting itself, paradigmatic in the case of Van Gogh, that led to the abstract experience. (Brunette and Wills, 1993: 4)

They continue, [T]he idea of the trait, referring to whatever is drawn, as well as more specifically in French to the brushstroke, that the graphic form emerges, forming the basis


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for both the visual arts and all forms of writing, even traditionally conceived. The trait might thus be called the trace of integral contamination, mark of the structural heterogeneity that constitutes the act of drawing as much as the act of painting . . . because the trait is always already a retrait, necessarily subject to repetition and subdivision. (ibid.)

The idea that Van Gogh’s art involved this ‘integral contamination’ was first explored by Antonin Artaud in his famous vituperative rejection of Van Gogh’s pathologization as insane, Van Gogh, le suicidé de société: Van Gogh is a painter because he re-collected nature as if he had re-perspired it and made it sweat, made it spurt forth in luminous beams onto his canvas, in monumental clusters of colors, the secular crushing of elements, the fearful elementary pressure of apostrophes, stripes, commas, bars, and we can no longer believe, after him, that the natural aspects of nature are not made up of these things. (Artaud, 1963: 150–1) . . . with color seized as if just pressed out of the tube, with the imprint of each hair of his brush in the color, with the texture of the painted paint, distinct in its own sunlight, with the I, the comma, the period of the point of the brush itself screwed right onto the hearty color that spurts forth in the forks of fire which the painter tames and remixes everywhere. (ibid. 155–6)

Artaud also characterizes Van Gogh’s paintings in terms of explosions. Van Gogh will give us an inkling of the nitrogen peroxide in a canvas that depicts just enough sinister things to force us to get our bearings . . . I have seen Van Gogh’s face red with blood in the explosions of his landscapes coming at me:

in a bombing, in a bombardment, in an explosion. (ibid.: 155) Writing about Artaud’s drawings, and thus by implication, those of Van Gogh, Derrida suggests that these ‘works no longer belong to Art if the

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latter implies representation, reappropriation, reintegration, transposition, or figurative translation of the same (Derrida, 1998: 116). Derrida compares Artaud’s drawing to a ‘pictogram’ in which ‘drawing and writing do not tolerate any division, neither that of different arts not that of genres, nor that of supports and surfaces’ (ibid.: 78). Writing about Artaud’s inclusion of apparently nonsensical words in his description of Van Gogh’s painting, he points out that Artaud wants pictography to be ‘taken literally’: ‘At the moment when the description of the painting gets carried away, crosses the limit, and renounces all its efforts, Artaud lets glossolalia in. Letters describe phonemes which seem to belong to no natural language. . .’ (ibid.: 80). But he also warns that ‘[W]e can only speak of this whole pictographic work by insertion and precipitation, by the acceleration of a rhythmical projection and the inscription of a projectile, beyond what we calmly call words and images’ (ibid.: 79). Derrida concentrates on Artaud’s use of the apparent neologism ‘subjectile’, which can be defined to mean simply the ‘underlying support of canvas, paper, text’ (Caws in Derrida, 1998: xi), but which Derrida understands in a more complex manner, as ‘something’ that ‘is not yet a given’ (ibid.: 63). Julian Wolfreys compares Derrida’s understanding of the subjectile to ‘the work of writing, which supports meaning and places meaning on its surfaces, and yet which is never that meaning, never what is indirectly represented’ (Wolfreys, 2004, p 86). ‘What is the subjectile exactly?’ asks Derrida, and suggests it is ‘the support and the surface, the representation and the unrepresentable, a figure of the unfigurable, the impact of the projectile, its target and its destination’ (Derrida, 1998: 134). Artaud compares the experience of looking at Van Gogh’s sunflowers to a ‘meteoric bombardment of atoms falling grain by grain’ (Artaud, 1965: 91). Derrida glosses this as the ‘force of the bomb’ and an ‘atomic bombardment’ (Derrida, 1998: 90–1). Replying to a question about Artaud’s drawing and writing at the Sidney seminars of 1999, Derrida is even more explicit: For [Artaud], drawing and painting was a way of throwing, of striking a blow – in other words, the projection of a projectile. One can find in many of his drawings the representation of this blow, this projectile, these bullets, sometimes these weapons which are thrown on the subject, on the surface. You refer to the language in which he describes his relation to drawing, painting and poetry


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(because he would not separate the two). It is a language of war, of throwing, projecting, sending projectiles, missiles on to the surface as aggressions. (Derrida, 2001: 34)

This can be compared to one of the more negative of early critical responses to Van Gogh’s work, by Charles Merki, in a review of an 1893 exhibition featuring his work. Concerned to defend the traditional qualities of ‘excellent brush work’, ‘acquired knowledge’ and ‘skill of hand’ (quoted in Heinich, 1996: 16), Merki proclaimed that Van Gogh has fought with his canvases. He has hurled clay pellets at them. He has taken mortar from a pot, and flung it before him while tasting the scoundrel’s joy in striking blows. Whole trowelfuls of yellow, red, brown, green, orange, and blue, have burst into flower like the fireworks of a basket of eggs thrown from the fifth story. He has brought this to the pump and, with his eyes closed, has drawn a few lines on it with a finger soaked in gasoline. Apparently this represents something, pure chance, no doubt. And, as a wag has it, one cannot quite make out ‘whether conscientiousness is a pair of shoes, or the shoes conscientiousness’. (quoted ibid.: 17)

The idea of Van Gogh’s work as expressing an explosive violence is also found in Georges Bataille’s two essays on his work and life. In ‘Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh’, writing about his representations of both the Sun and of sunflowers, he compares Van Gogh’s cutting off of his own ear with other supposedly psychotic automutilations and to acts of ritual sacrifice found throughout other cultures, the excessiveness of which correspond to the violent radiance of the Sun (Bataille, 1985: 61–72). He continues this theme in ‘Van Gogh as Prometheus’ (Bataille, 1986), in which he declares that ‘Van Gogh, who decided by 1882 that is was better to be Prometheus than Jupiter, tore from within himself rather than an ear, nothing less than a SUN’ (ibid.: 59). Bataille goes on to say that human existence requires stability, the permanence of things. The result is an ambivalence with respect to all great and violent expenditure of strength; such

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expenditure, whether in nature or in man, represents the strongest possible threat. The feelings of admiration and ecstasy induced by them mean that we are concerned to admire them from afar. The sun corresponds most conveniently to that prudent concern. It is all radiance, gigantic loss of heat and of light, flame, explosion; but remote from men, who can enjoy in safety and quiet the fruits of this great cataclysm. (ibid.)

After he cut off his ear, ‘Van Gogh began to give the sun a meaning which it had not yet had. He did not introduce it into his canvases as part of a decor, but rather like the sorcerer whose dance slowly rouses the crowd, transporting it in its movement. At that moment all of his paintings finally became radiation, explosion, flame, and himself, lost in ecstasy before a source of radiant life, exploding, inflamed’ (ibid.). Bataille says further that Vincent Van Gogh belongs not to art history, but to the bloody myth of our existence as humans. He is of that rare company who, in a world spellbound by stability, by sleep, suddenly reaches the terrible ‘boiling point’ without which all that claims to endure becomes insipid, intolerable, declines. For this ‘boiling point’ has meaning not only for him who attains it, but for all, even though all may not yet perceive that which binds man’s savage destiny to radiance, to explosion, to flame, and only thereby to power. (ibid.: 60)

These explosive, projective metaphors cast Van Gogh as both a projection toward the future and, in anticipation of the logic of nuclear deterrence, a projectile returned from the future. In one of the first articles about Van Gogh, Georges Albert Aurier describes him in explicitly messianic terms: ‘The obsession which haunts Van Gogh’s brain, of the current necessity of a man, a messiah, a sower of truth, who would regenerate the decrepitude of our art and perhaps of our stupid industrialist society’ (quoted in Heinich, 1996: 11–12). Natalie Heinich describes Van Gogh as an anchorite, a desert father, seeking solitude in the wilderness in company of a small band of disciples (ibid.: 51–2). She compares his letters to the writings of the desert fathers, as a means for the ‘very construction of [his] virtually hermitlike existence’ (ibid.: 54). The anchorite does without the support of the ‘rule


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and ethic predetermined by the ecclesiastical authorities. Similarly, artists in the desert cannot find the truth of their works in a technique and aesthetic preconstituted by the academic authorities, and therefore made before and separate from themselves’ (ibid.). The artist in the desert and the anchorite look for consolation not in ‘their current misery and solitude’ but in the hope of some future fulfilment in which they sometimes ‘dare to believe’. Such fulfilment is predicated on the possibility of a bond being formed in posterity with those who will come after, the future ‘generation’ for which the way must be prepared ‘without doubting or flinching’. (ibid.: 55)

But this living for the future also leads to despair, as it necessarily involves a sense of the incompleteness of the present. Those whose experience leads them beyond the beaten paths or instituted communities can experience this feeling of incompleteness in two ways: in aspiring to a future invested in potentialities that have not yet been actualized in the present; in aspiring to a form of self-expression invested with capabilities that have not yet been exteriorized for others. (ibid.: 55–6)

It is out of this projection toward the future combined with the need to engage with a ‘minimal sharing’ with an ‘us’ that leads to the ‘crystallization’ of the avant-garde, ‘blazing a trail and gathering together the small number of the elect’ (ibid.: 56). ‘The notion of the avant-garde, which makes the past obsolete and the present impure, gives a temporal dimension to success, and makes it possible to reverse the meaning of failure: contemporary incomprehension can become a promise of future recognition’ (ibid.: 57). According to Heinich, it was in Van Gogh’s lifetime that the ‘new ethic of singularity, and the projection into posterity that crystallized the notion of the avant-garde in French artistic circles’ (ibid.: 56). But she also remarks that Van Gogh did not use the term, which would still have been incongruous. Instead he characterized himself as a cab horse hauling ‘a coach load of people out to enjoy the spring’ (ibid.: 57). It is of course, as Heinich points out, the sight of such a horse being beaten that led to Nietzsche’s final descent into madness, the same year as that of Van Gogh (ibid.).

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In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh describes his ambitions for one of his portraits, that of Dr Gachet, that it should ‘appear after a century to the people living then as apparitions’ (Van Gogh, 1958: 470). Van Gogh, mythologized as a failure in his own time, continues to return to haunt us, not so much as a spectre from the past as one from the future. ‘Spectrality’ is another of the terms with which Derrida deconstructs traditional ontology, in this case through what he calls a ‘hauntology’, an analysis of the paradoxical state of the spectre, who both is and is not. Spectrality exemplifies Derrida’s concern with apparent opposites, which are always already contaminated with, haunted by each other. Like terms such as ‘trace’, ‘iteration’, ‘différance’ and ‘repetition’, ‘spectrality’ engages with the complex and interrelation of present, past and future. Spectrality is always a ‘question of repetition: a spectre is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back’ (Derrida, 1994b: 11). It is thus necessarily implicit in any discussion of technologies of representation and circulation, which are also explicitly spectral. As Richard Beardsworth points out, the process of spectralization is ‘unthinkable without the technicization of the world’ and ‘the “spectral” is nothing less than a way of describing the effects of technicization’ (Beardsworth, 1996: 147). As Derrida’s later works have indicated, writing is ‘messianic’, in that it always operates according to a structure of repetition, delay and deferral, which cannot absolutely be mastered and programmed and which therefore opens out the future, the ‘to-come’ to the arrival of the unexpected, the contingent and the wholly other (Derrida, 1994b: 89). More or less ignored in his lifetime, after his death Van Gogh’s work and life were almost immediately subject to endless interpretations and revisions. These range from the early re-evaluation in the early part of the twentieth century by critics such as Emile Bernard to the enormous amount of psychiatric and psychoanalytical literature Van Gogh’s work has engendered, including the responses by Artaud and Bataille quoted above. One of the most famous episodes in this history of posthumous interpretation is perhaps the debate between the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the American art historian Meyer Shapiro over the meaning of the various representations by Van Gogh of a pair of shoes or boots. This dispute was later brilliantly and wittily deconstructed by Derrida in his essay


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‘Restitutions’ (Derrida, 1987b: 285–382). That the dispute concerns boots or shoes, and their restitution, is noteworthy in the light of Van Gogh’s own errancy, which thus becomes a sign of the openness of his work to interpretation. Van Gogh has also been the subject of a large number of responses by other artists and by those working in other media. He is, arguably, the most reproduced artist in history, not just in terms of his works, but in terms of his image. The first novel about his life was published by 1913 by one M Irwin. He has been the subject of several pop songs, including, most famously perhaps, Don McLean’s ‘Vincent (Starry Starry Night)’. Perhaps the most uncanny of Van Gogh’s returns is in a series of paintings by Francis Bacon from the 1950s, based on a photograph of a painting destroyed in the Second World War. Bacon’s paintings capture the spectral quality of Van Gogh’s continuous return. (They also show Van Gogh walking, which again refers back to his errancy and wandering.) This spectrality is also to be found in Van Gogh’s continuous ghostly appearances on film, a medium he missed by five years. He has been the subject of an extraordinary number of representations on film – according to the catalogue of the Amsterdam exhibition Vincent Van Gogh on Film and Video: A Review, 1948–1990, between 1948 and 1990 there were eighty-two films and videos about Van Gogh, including four animations and thirty-three feature films (Heinich, 1996: 100), and there have been more since. A number of famous or wellrespected directors have made feature films about his life, including Vincente Minelli (Lust for Life, 1956, with Kirk Douglas as Vincent, which also led to a documentary, Darkness into Light, directed by Fritz Goodwin), Paul Cox (Vincent, 1987), Robert Altman (Vincent and Theo, 1990), Akira Kurosawa (one section of Dreams, 1990), and Maurice Pialat (Van Gogh, 1991). Less surprisingly perhaps, Van Gogh and his work have also been the subject of numerous animations, shorts and documentaries, starting with Alain Resnais’ Van Gogh of 1947 (the only film about him that was made before the general advent of colour cinema). Perhaps most interestingly of all, Van Gogh is unique among artists – as far as I know – in that he has featured as a character in a number of films involving time travel. In both Besuch bei Van Gogh, directed by Horst Seeman in 1985 and Starry Nights, written and directed by Paul Davids in 1999, Van

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Gogh travels to the present, while in Vincent et Moi (1991, directed by Michael Rubbo), the young protagonist goes from the present back to Van Gogh’s time. In Wheatfield with Crows, directed by Brent Roske in 2002 and named after Van Gogh’s last painting, his story is updated and transported to the current-day popular music industry. Though such films may not achieve or even be interested in attempting to achieve the quality of the better-known productions about Van Gogh, they do perhaps articulate something more interesting about his curious relation to time. On 15 May 1990 The Portrait of Doctor Gachet was sold within three minutes for $82.5 million to Ryoei Saito, Japan’s second-largest paper manufacturer (though Christie’s recently bought the work back from Mr. Saito for oneeighth of the price he paid for it), then a record price for a work of art, which has only recently been beaten by the sale of Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe for $104 million. It was then crated up, along with Renoir’s Au Moulin de la Galette, and flown to Japan, a country that not only greatly influenced Van Gogh’s art through his love of Japanese woodblock prints but also, along with the South of France, represented a kind of ideal landscape. Van Gogh’s interest in and exposure to Japanese culture was, to some extent, a symptom of burgeoning globalization and the increased circulation of goods and signs at the end of the nineteenth century. The idea of The Portrait of Dr Gachet travelling in a jet plane across the world to Japan seems oddly apt as a kind of metaphor for his work understood as a projection into the future. Decades after Van Gogh’s death the image of Japan in the West as an exotic place of beauty and serenity would be superseded by a different kind of orientalist vision of a hypercapitalist economy, directed toward and even already living in a technologized future. If Van Gogh’s art is symptomatic of the emergence of a world increasingly dominated by the sign and the circulation of signs in the service of capitalism, then Japan, in the 1990s at least, appeared to be that world’s triumph and apogee.

NOTES 1. See for example A Brush With Nature: The Gere Collection of Landscape Oil Sketches (2003) by Christopher Riopelle and Xavier Bray, as well as Peter


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Galassi’s account of ‘photographic’ seeing before photography, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography (1981). 2. The circumstances of his birth would seem to have predetermined his relation to such ideas, in that he was born exactly a year after his mother gave birth to a stillborn son, also named Vincent. His very name is already bound up in the structure of repetition and iterability which makes the name’s singularity and that of its bearer possible, and which also presupposes the possibility of his or her death. As Derrida puts it in The Ear of the Other, ‘Only the name can inherit, and this is why the name, to be distinguished from the bearer, is always and a priori a dead man’s name, a name of death’ (Derrida, 1985: 7).


CHAPTER 4

Taking Off

For the Russian avant-garde artist Kasimir Malevich, Vincent Van Gogh was the precursor of what he called ‘Futurist Dynamism’, while Paul Cézanne anticipated Cubism. According to Malevich, Van Gogh ‘began to express dynamics with great force by means of the splitting and scattering of things thrown by energic power onto the path of universal unity of movement towards conquest of the infinite’. Malevich defines the Futurism which Van Gogh anticipates as rejecting ‘all the signs of the vegetable world, and of flesh and bone’, and of discovering ‘forms of expression in a new iron world’, and ‘a new sign: the symbol of speed, the machine which is preparing to run in a million forms onto the new beaches of the future’ (Malevich, 1969: 110). Whether Van Gogh would have recognized himself as a precursor of Futurism is open to conjecture, though his influence on the consequent development of the avant-garde is beyond question. For Malevich, Van Gogh’s work was part of a process by which art engaged with the possibilities of liberation from the earthbound world of material static objects. In the first half of the nineteenth century, developments such as the steam engine and the railways, the electric telegraph, photography and the Universal Postal System had made possible unprecedented degrees of mobility for people, goods and signs. The period between the 1870s and 1890s had witnessed the extraordinary achievements of the Impressionists and the Postimpressionists, which took place in a world transformed by the industrial, technical and social developments of earlier in the century. Yet it remained bound to the earth and to the body. Even with the most radically innovative of such work, for example by Cézanne or Van Gogh, there remains the strong sense of the artist’s presence in an environment in

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which he is located and to which he is responding. The next generation of the avant-garde in the early twentieth century responded in different ways to the liberations and dislocations of a culture undergoing even more profound scientific, cultural and technological transformations. At the turn of the twentieth century the greater mobility already made possible by technological advances in the mid-nineteenth century was increased and indeed overhauled by the possibility of far greater freedom of movement. The internal-combustion engine liberated powered transport from the rail track, while wireless liberated telecommunications from the fixed lines of the telegraph and radically dematerialized communication, and would make possible both radio and later television. The Wrights’ achievement made possible the liberation of humankind from the earth itself, albeit temporarily. This sense of liberation found expression in the arts. The Italian Futurists famously celebrated the new freedom and excitement offered by the internal-combustion engine, by flight and by the new culture of speed such developments offered. The Cubists deconstructed the static viewpoint of Albertian perspective to offer multiple viewpoints of the same object on the same canvas, a technique which Gertrude Stein compared to the view from a plane (Kern, 1983: 245). Of the various avant-garde movements that emerged in the early twentieth century, Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematism is possibly the most explicitly concerned with transcendence and with leaving the earth. The series of paintings of black squares, painted from 1915 onward, were for Malevich almost literal means to transcend the Earth and to travel to space. From his earliest published writings, one of his principle concerns is to find the means, through art, to leave the earth behind. In a letter to Mikhail Matiushin, Malevich declares that [T]he keys of Suprematism lead me to the discovery of the still unrealised. My new painting does not belong to the earth exclusively. The earth is thrown away like a house eaten up by termites. And, in fact, in man, in his consciousness, there lies a striving towards space, the pull of a ‘take-off ’ from the earth. [In] Futurism, in Cubism, space, almost exclusively, is cultivated, but its form, being connected with objectness, does not convey even to the imagination the

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presence of world space; its space is limited to the space shared by things on the earth. The hung plane of painted colour on a white canvas sheet gives a strong sensation of space directly to our consciousness. I am transported into endless emptiness, where you sense around you the creative points of the universe. (Quoted in Douglas, 1976: 53–4)

Perhaps the most radical statement by Malevich about the cosmic intentions of his art comes in the introduction to the catalogue Suprematism: 34 Drawings: If every form is the expression of purely utilitarian perfection, then the Suprematist form also represents, surely the signs of a force that has been recognised – the acting force of utilitarian perfection in concrete world. The form clearly indicates a state of dynamism and, as it were, is a distant pointer to the aeroplane’s path in space – not by means of motors and not the conquering of space by disruption, caused by a clumsy machine of totally catastrophic construction, but by the harmonious introduction of form into natural action, by means of certain magnetic interrelations in one form. This form will perhaps consist of all the elements, emerging from interrelations between natural forces, and for this reason will not need motors, wings, wheels and petrol, i.e. its body will not be built from various organisms creating one whole. The Suprematist apparatus, if one may call it so, will be one whole without any fastenings. A bar is fused with all the elements – like the globe, in itself bearing the life of perfection – so that every Suprematist body that is built will be included in a natural organisation and form a new satellite. One only has to find the interrelationship between the two bodies speeding through space: the earth and the moon; perhaps a new Suprematist satellite can be built between them, equipped with all the elements, which will move in orbit, creating its own new path. Studying the Suprematist form in motion we come to the conclusion that the only way that movement to any planet can be achieved along a straight line is by a circular movement of intermediate Suprematist satellites which create a straight line of rings from one satellite to another. (Malevich, 1969: 123–4)

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Thus, several decades before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first orbital satellite, Malevich had already conceived of his Suprematist art orbiting the world. This is more than simply prescient science fiction. It represents, rather, one example of the close relationship between some of the ideas that animated the avant-garde and simultaneous technological developments and advances. Malevich’s ‘cosmism’ derives from a number of sources and tendencies. Of course, like many Russian artists of the time, he was highly influenced by the successive revolutions in artistic practice that had taken place in Europe and in particular in France in the late nineteenth century, from Impressionism through to Cubism and Futurism, as well as by ideas of philosophers such as Henri Bergson and concepts such as the fourth dimension and beyond then being popularized by Ouspenski and others. But Malevich’s particular cosmic utopianism also owed much to contemporary elements of Russian culture. In his classic work on the history of Russian culture, The Icon and the Axe, James Billington identifies three dominant intellectual strands in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, which he calls ‘constitutional liberalism’, ‘dialectical materialism’ and ‘mystical idealism’ (Billington, 1970: 434–72). The first two were obviously concerned with politics, while the last engaged more with questions of religion and aesthetics. The most important proponent of mystical idealism was Vladimir Solov’ev, whose ideas, inspired by successive visions of ‘sophia’ or the divine feminine principle, offered the major philosophic rival to Marxist materialism (ibid.). Following his visions Solov’ev developed a belief of the all-pervasiveness of the supernatural and in the idea that all things in the world are in search of a unity which is to be realized concretely through ‘sophia’ (ibid.: 465). Thus, in seeking mystical union with sophia, man can commune with the ideal ‘all-unity’ (vseedinstvo), that pervades God’s cosmos (ibid.: 466). Central to Solov’ev’s system of thought were the three general attitudes and preoccupations that would come to dominate Russian cultural life in the brief period in the early twentieth century before the repressions of Stalinism took over. Billington names these as prometheanism, sensualism and apocalyptism (ibid.: 478). Of these the first, prometheanism, is the most relevant to Malevich’s cosmic ambitions. The idea, derived from the myth of Prometheus, that

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man can totally transform the world, once he becomes fully aware of his powers, was a major preoccupation for radical romantics, including Goethe, Byron, Shelley and, perhaps most importantly, Marx (ibid.). In Russia prometheanism emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century and was seen as a means by which art might be applied to and solve social questions. Among the artists and movements that emerged in the context of Prometheanism were Russian Symbolist poets Alexander Blok and Andrei Biely, the Futurist group of poets, which included Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexei Kruchenykh and Vladimir Mayakovski, the composers Alexander Scriabin and Igor Stravinsky, who was also instrumental in the extraordinary achievements of the Ballet Russe, along with Diaghilev, Nijinski, Benois and Bakst (ibid.). Perhaps the most extreme example of prometheanism in Russian thought in the nineteenth century was that of Nikolai Federovitch Federov. Born in 1828, Federov (sometimes also spelt Fyoderov) was the illegitimate son of Prince Pavel Ivanovich Gagarin and Elisaveta Ivanova. Though Federov and his family had to leave the family estate when he was four, following the Prince’s death, provision continued to be made for their welfare. Starting in 1868, after a truncated higher education and several years working as a teacher of history and geography at various provincial secondary schools, Federov worked for 25 years as a librarian with the Rumiantsev Library (later the Russian State Library). Federov’s ideas appear both highly eccentric and oddly prescient. In keeping with the Promethean tendency in Russian thought, he proclaimed that though mankind was a weak animal, subject to the forces of nature, to birth, procreation, death and decay, nevertheless God had endowed him with reason and thus with the duty of transforming nature and introducing reason into an irrational universe (Federov, 1990: 23). In order to achieve this, the division between the ‘learned’ and the ‘unlearned’ had to be overcome. The former were concerned solely with abstract reasoning, while the latter simply toiled in the fields (ibid.: 36–7). The ‘learned’ should therefore devote their time not merely to understanding nature as it is or, worse, to developing the means of industrialization and military force and to the systems of law and security to protect their wealth, but to nature as it should be. At the same time the ‘unlearned’ should be educated so that they will no longer feel obliged

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to turn to socialism and to violent revolution (ibid.: 37). In this manner everybody can become a student and an object of study and thus involved in the ‘common task’ of achieving brotherhood by the rationalization of nature (ibid.: 40). When Federov turns from terrestrial matters to the earth’s relationship to the cosmos, his ideas become even more extraordinary. Pointing to scientific estimations that ‘our solar world has already passed its youth’ he suggests that if any other star consciousness had arisen, it failed to become the governing reason of that world undoubtedly because those conscious beings limited themselves to the procreation of similar ones, to laboratory experiments (experimental science), and wasted their time in internecine squabbles, in local government and constitutional intrigues (political and social work) or in idle contemplation. Meanwhile the energies of that world became diffused and spent themselves into extinction. Our sun is dimming, however slowly, and we are right to say that the hour will come when it will no longer give light, that ‘the time is at hand’. The extinction of stars (sudden or slow) is an instructive example, a terrifying warning. The growing exhaustion of the soil, the destruction of forests, distortions of the meteorological processes, manifested in floods and droughts – all this forebodes ‘famines and plagues’ and prompts us to heed the warning. Apart from a slowly advancing end, we cannot be certain whether a sudden catastrophe may not befall the earth, this tiny grain of sand in the vastness of the Universe. (ibid.: 88)

‘What should we do?’ Federov asks. Taking as his starting point V. N Kazarin’s idea – in an 1814 letter to one of Emperor Alexander II’s courtiers – for using balloons to raise lightning conductors to bring down rain from thunderclouds, Federov proposes a wholesale scientific transformation of the globe: Just for the sake of argument, let us develop Karazin’s idea and assume that electrical currents have been sent in certain directions, perhaps with the help of telegraph cables encircling the Earth in a spiral formation or in some other way – then our huge siderolite, our natural magnet, becomes an electro-magnet. This might enlarge the magnetic field of the Earth, and bring in the small siderolites that are said to move in Earth’s orbit . . . These could be condensed

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like vapour or diffused to affect the intensity of solar radiation; they could be made to increase the mass of the Earth, or to form rings or spirals in the path of the Earth or around the sun. They could control the magnetic field of the sun itself. Experimentation would no longer be confined to laboratories – it would become literally infinite. And however incredible and impossible such assumptions may sound from the point of view of present-day science, to reject them out of hand would be criminal. It would mean rejecting the elimination of crime – the crimes of revolution, disorder, turmoil and war. It would also mean rejecting the criminals, who in this case would not be the worst but the best people, the most gifted, whose strengths, nurtured by the expanse of continents and oceans, need greater escape . . . Now they would be the explorers, the new explorers of celestial space. (ibid.: 96)

Thus for Federov the rationalization of nature turns the world into a spacecraft for exploring the cosmos, which is God’s plan for mankind: Earth itself has become conscious of its fate through man, and this consciousness is evidently active – the path of salvation. The mechanic has appeared just as the mechanism has started to deteriorate. It is absurd to say that nature created both the mechanism and the mechanic; one must admit that God is educating man through his own human experience. God is the king who does everything for man but also through man. There is no purposefulness in nature – it is for man to introduce it, and this is his supreme raison d’être. The creator restores the world through us and brings back to life all that has perished . . . Therefore humanity must not be idle passengers, but the crew of its celestial craft propelled by forces the nature of which we do not even know – is it photo-, thermo- or electropowered? We will remain unable to discover what force propels it until we are able to control it. (ibid.: 97)

Central to Federov’s vision of the future is his belief in the divinely ordained necessity of achieving the physical resurrection of the dead through science. The achievement of this goal is at the heart of the common task of mankind, as it will allow for the participation of all men, past and present in the accomplishment of salvation and make possible true love of one’s forefathers, rather than simply ancestor worship. The achievement of resurrection is also a precondition of man’s expansion into the cosmos:

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[F]or the sons of man the celestial worlds are the future homes of the ancestors, since the skies will be attainable only to the resurrected and the resurrecting. The exploration of space is only the preparation for these future dwelling places’. (ibid.)

It is this aspect of Federov’s thought that most excited contemporaries such as Tolstoy, who had an extreme fear of death. It is also one of the reasons for recent interest in his work, particularly in relation to the development of ideas such as cryonics and to related considerations of the means by which interplanetary travel may be achieved. While working at the Rumiantsev Library, Federov encountered the 17-year-old Konstantin Eduardovitch Tsiolkovski, the son of a Polish immigrant. Deaf as a result of scarlet fever, Tsiolkovski had little formal education, and had taught himself through reading all the books in his father’s library. Federov tutored Tsiolkovski and gave him a place to work in the library, thus offering him the closest to a university education he would receive. Inspired by the Cosmist ideas of Federov and the novels of Jules Verne, Tsiolkovski devoted the rest of his life to exploring the practical possibilities of space travel. By the time he was 30 Tsiolkovski had already written a number of manuscripts describing space travel, rocket propulsion and the effects of gravity-free existence. In 1903 he published a paper in a Russian aeronautics journal entitled ‘Research into Investigation of Worldspaces by Reactive Vehicles’ (Tsiolkovski, 1968: 51–82). With great prescience and accuracy it described the state of weightlessness and the use of rockets and liquid propellants for travel in the vacuum of space. Tsiolkovski continued to publish scientific papers all his life, on similar topics, as well as discussions of rocket propulsion to make possible highspeed trains, ‘cosmic rocket trains’ and aeroplanes. He also found time to write science fiction, much of which appears to be little more than a vehicle for techno-scientific speculation and didacticism. Though on the whole Tsiolkovski’s scientific writing and even his fiction were both mostly concerned with practical matters, he did occasionally express more philosophical and metaphysical ideas. In his later life he wrote a number of metaphysical treatises. In various correspondences he wrote that ‘[A] planet is the cradle of mind, but one cannot live in a cradle

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forever’, and that ‘[M]ankind will not remain on the earth forever, but in the pursuit of light and space will at first timidly penetrate beyond the limits of the atmosphere, then will conquer the space around the sun’ (ibid.: 331). He ended his 1911–12 paper ‘Investigation of World Spaces by Reactive Vehicles’ with a passage that clearly shows the influence of his mentor Federov: If transportation of mankind to another sun is possible, then why our fears about the light-giving span of life of our presently bright sun? Let it grow dim and become extinct! During hundreds of millions of years of its glory and brilliance man will be able to build up supplies of energy and emigrate with them to another seat of life. The gloomy views of scientists about the inevitable end of all living beings on the earth, and its cooling off due to the loss of the heat of the sun should not now have the merit of indisputable truth. In all likelihood, the better part of humanity will never perish but will move from sun to sun as each dies out in succession. Many decillion years hence we may be living near a sun which today has not yet even flared up but exists only in the embryo, in the form of nebulous matter designed for eternity and for high purposes. If today we are able to believe somewhat in the infinitude of mankind, what will it be like several thousand years from now when our knowledge and reason will have increased? Thus, there is no end to life, to reason and to perfection of mankind. Its progress is eternal. And if that is so, one cannot doubt the attainment of immortality. Advance boldly, great and small workers of the human race, and you may be assured that not a single bit of your labours will vanish without a trace but will bring to you great fruit in infinity. (ibid.: 126–7)

In the same paper he expressed ideas about the future technological evolution of mankind that prefigure contemporary concepts of the posthuman.

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At the present time, the more advanced layers of humanity strive to put their life in frameworks that are more and more artificial. Does this not represent progress? The fight against inclement weather, high and low temperatures, the force of gravity, beasts and harmful insects and bacteria – do not all these activities create around man a situation that is purely artificial? In ethereal space this artificiality will simply be extended to the very limit, but then man too will find himself in conditions that are most favourable for him. Over the course of the centuries, new conditions will create a new species of beings, and the artificiality which surrounds them will be diminished and perhaps disappear completely. Wasn’t it like this that aquatic animals once crawled out upon the land and little by little turned into amphibians and then land animals; the latter, but perhaps also the aquatic animals (flying fish for example) started the line of animals of the air, the flying birds, insects and bats. Perhaps the conquest of the air will be followed by the conquest of ethereal space: will not the creature of the air turn into a creature of the ether? These creatures will be born citizens of the ether, of pure sunshine and the boundless expanses of the cosmos. (ibid.: 124–5)

As Billington points out, Tsiolkovski was making practical preparations for the space travel for which Malevich was a prophet (Billington, 1970: 485). Both were inspired by the work of Federov, as were many artists and writers, and by the promethean and cosmic yearnings typical of Russia in the period between the 1880s and the 1920s. Billington suggests that, in the twentieth century, space tended to replace the sea as the dominant symbol of purification, deliverance from the ordinary and the annihilation of the self, within Russian culture. Russian Prometheans did not speak of ‘an ark of faith’ or a ‘ship at sea’, as their predecessors had, but of new crafts that would take them to outer space (ibid.: 485–6). In one of his poetic fragments, ‘The Rock from the Future’, the Futurist poet Khlebnikov described future humanity living in floating cities in gravity-free environments (Néret, 2003: 65). Even Malevich’s fellow artist, the ostensibly more earthbound Vladimir Tatlin, devoted much of his later life designing an insect glider, which he called Letatlin, after a combination of his own name and the Russian

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word for ‘to fly’ (Billington, 1970: 486). Meanwhile, in 1918 Malevich abandoned painting for a decade, devoting his time to a series of speculative, idealized architectural models, ‘architektons’, mostly resembling extruded three-dimensional versions of Suprematist paintings, which he also called ‘planites’ from the Russian for aeroplane. According to Billington, an extreme and historically important manifestation of Prometheanism in Russian culture of the period was the movement known as ‘God-building’ (Bogostroitel’stvo), which sought to realize Marx’s injunction to change rather than simply explain the world, and to enable man to assume a state of divinity (Billington, 1970: 486–7). Principle among its exponents were Maxim Gorki, Anatol Lunacharski and Alexander Malinovski, better known by his assumed name Bogdanov, or ‘God-gifted’. In Promethean mode both Lunacharski and Gorki proclaimed the conquest not just of hunger but also of death through labour (ibid.: 487). The fusion between Marxism and Prometheanism is well expressed in an anonymous Marxist pamphlet of 1906, quoted by Billington, which proclaims that man is destined to ‘take possession of the universe and to extend his species into distant cosmic regions, taking over the whole solar system. Human beings will be immortal’ (ibid.: 488). Bogdanov was the founder of a revolutionary movement he called the Universal Organizational Science, or Tectology, which attempted to unify spiritual culture and the working collective, and which is regarded by many as a precursor of later forms of systems theory (ibid.: 489). (Bogdanov was also a near contemporary of the Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadski, who was responsible for developing the concepts of the biosphere and the noosphere, which were later taken up by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and also prefigured systems thinking.) Bogdanov also wrote two utopian novels, the most popular of which, Red Star, is set on Mars as it is being transformed by Promethean Socialist labour (ibid.). After their annexation of power in 1917 Bogdanov allied himself wholeheartedly with the Bolsheviks and set up Proletkult, an organization for the creation of Proletarian Culture. Lenin quickly subordinated this to the Commissariat for Education and then abolished it altogether, while Bogdanov was made Director for ‘the Struggle for Vital Capacity’ and died in 1928 in a botched experiment to transfuse his own blood. More extreme even than God-building was its offshoot Cosmism, which flourished briefly

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in the Civil War period of 1918–21, and which proclaimed the ‘imminent transformation of the entire cosmos’ (ibid.: 490). It was in the extraordinary conditions of the period immediately after the Revolution and during the Civil War that Malevich also became involved in his own project for helping to change society. In 1920, along with El Lissitsky, he was instrumental in founding UNOVIS, a group of artists and designers based at Vitebsk, dedicated to the exploring the possibilities of Suprematism and to collaborative work and the political potential of art. It was while he was based in Vitebsk that Malevich published statements such as ‘On New Systems in Art’ and the introduction to Suprematism: 34 Drawings, quoted above. Members of UNOVIS also staged Alexei Kruchonykh’s opera Victory over the Sun with designs by Malevich. It was during this time that Malevich wrote one of his most extraordinary statements. ‘God is Not Cast Down’ was probably first given as a lecture at the Petrograd Museum of Artistic Culture in 1922 and is an attack on materialist art and criticism, an attack on the Marxist project of totalized knowledge, and a proclamation of his ideas about the non-objective world. In it he directly compares the human skull to the universe: Man’s skull represents the same infinity for the movement of conceptions. It is equal to the universe, for in it is contained all that it sees in it. Likewise the sun and the whole starry sky of comets and the sun pass in it and shine and move as in nature; similarly, comets appear in it and disappear, inasmuch as they do in nature; all projects for perfection exist within it. Epoch after epoch, culture after culture appear and disappear in its infinite space. Is not the whole universe that strange skull in which meteors, suns, comets and planets rush endlessly? And are they not simply concepts of cosmic thoughts, and are not their entire movement and space and they themselves non-objective? For if they were objective no skull could contain them. Thought moves, for stimulus moves, and in their movements they create real conceptions, or else in their creation compose what is real as actuality, and all that is created changes and passes into the eternity of non-evidence, just as it comes from eternal existence. (Malevich, 1969: 193–4)

In 1918, Malevich painted one of his most famous works, a development of and as influential on the course of modern art as his Black Square of a

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few years earlier. White on White, one of a number of white paintings, shows a slightly tilted white rectangle painted on a white background. According to Malevich, ‘the white square is a purely economic movement of the form, which embodies the whole new white world building. It also evokes the establishment of world building as “pure action”, as self-knowledge in a purely utilitarian perfection of “all man”’ (ibid.). As with Black Square, White on White is open to many interpretations and much can be and has been said about it. Among those who had been highly influenced by Malevich was the Hungarian artist, designer and polymath László Moholy-Nagy. Moholy-Nagy had helped produce one of the first foreign-language publications of Malevich’s writings, Die Gegenstandslose Welt (The Non-Objective World) of 1927/28. Moholy-Nagy showed his appreciation of Malevich’s cosmist ambitions by including photographs of aeroplanes in formation and of the earth seen from the air. In his book The New Vision, Moholy-Nagy describes White on White in the following terms: The Projection Screen. Here is to be found the interpretation of Malevich’s last picture – the plain white surface, which constituted an ideal plane for kinetic light and shadow effects which, originating in the surroundings, would fall upon it. In this way, Malevich’s picture represented a miniature cinema screen. If the projection is directed on a film sensitive to light, a photograph or photogram results. It seems – from the standpoint of technical development – that a picture painted by hand is surpassed by the physically pure, ‘unblemished’ light projection. Ever since the invention of the motion picture, painters have concerned themselves with this problem: projection, motion, interpenetration of color and light. Photography is undoubtedly a bridge. (Moholy-Nagy, 1947: 39)

The Surrealists and Dada exploited the possibilities of new media forms such as film, combined, in the case of the former, with the insights provided by psychoanalysis, which had emerged simultaneously with the invention of cinema. It is unsurprising that Moholy-Nagy characterized Malevich’s White on White in terms of media with which he would have been familiar. By the late 1920s, when The New Vision was published, cinema was already more than

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30 years old. But it is also obvious that cinema is not really the model he is seeking to describe Malevich’s painting, as the next excerpt shows: The play of refracted light. In the continuation of this work we must undoubtedly come to the manipulation of moving, refracted light (color); we must ‘paint’ with flowing, oscillating prismatic light, in lieu of pigments. This will allow us a better approach to the new conception of space-time. These means existing today – polarization, interference of light, and the control of artificial sources – offer an opportunity not to be underestimated, even if for the time being they fall into the hands of the creative artists only by chance or indirectly – mainly in work with electrical advertising signs, or in stage settings (ibid.: 40)

Elsewhere in The New Vision, in the section on ‘Neoplasticism; Suprematicism; Constructivism’, Moholy-Nagy ponders the possibilities of photograms, mirrors, transparencies and other new media: These actual reflections and mirrorings bring the surrounding surface into the picture, attaining through this a pliability of surface which has been striven for ever since the first days of impressionism. The surface becomes part of the atmosphere, of the atmospheric background; it sucks up light phenomena produced outside itself – a vivid contrast to the classical conception of the picture, the illusion of an open window. (ibid.: 39)

Here, Moholy-Nagy is clearly not thinking about a medium such as cinema, in which images are merely projected, but something far more radical, which will enable artists to manipulate light and colour in ‘real time’. By the early 1920s Moholy-Nagy was clearly aware of the potential of real-time telecommunications as a basis for art. He reputedly produced the first work of art to exploit the telephone system in its production. According to his own account, In 1922 I ordered by telephone from a sign factory five paintings in porcelain enamel. I had the factory’s color chart before me and I sketched my paintings

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on graph paper. At the other end of the telephone, the factory supervisor had the same kind of paper, divided into squares. He took down the dictated shapes in the correct position. It was like playing chess by correspondence. (MoholyNagy, 1947: 79)

Though it’s unlikely he would have been aware of it, the period in which Moholy-Nagy was writing The New Vision also saw the early developments of the first ‘real-time’ electronic visual technologies, such as television and radar. In 1921, a few years after Malevich painted White on White, 14-year-old Philo Farnsworth allegedly conceived how electronic television would work, apparently while ploughing a field, an insight he was able to put into practice seven years later. A year after J. L. Baird in England and C. F. Jenkins in the United States, both started to experiment with mechanical methods of image transmission using the Nipkow principle with a neon gas-discharge lamp, while in the same year V. K. Zworykin first patented his iconoscopic camera tube. In the period between the early 1920s and mid-1930s, Robert Watson-Watt and others developed working radar. Without such technologies, which allowed data and images to be transmitted and received nearly instantaneously, many of the technological developments that took place in the post-war era would not have been possible, including, of course, the development Malevich most famously predicted and prefigured, that of space travel. Malevich perhaps fulfils the role ascribed to poets by Ezra Pound (who was fascinated by electric telecommunications), as ‘the antennae of the race’ (Pound, 1961: 58), later to be updated by Marshall McLuhan, who described artists as culture’s ‘early warning system’ (McLuhan, 1964).1

NOTE 1. Duchamp and lesser-known artists such as the Czech Frantisek Kupka were influenced or at least intrigued by wireless telegraphy, X-rays and other ‘real-time’ technologies. Kupka wrote extensive treatises on the notion of art as a form of telegraphy or telepathy (Henderson, 1998:

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100–3). During the First World War the first art works actually to use telecommunications networks appeared. Some of the Futurists serving in the army sent back letters praising war, intended as art works. In 1916 Duchamp also sent four postcards to his then neighbour, containing syntactically plausible but meaningless writing. These may be the first example of what would be known later as ‘mail art’. As Linda Henderson has shown in Duchamp in Context, her study of the technological and scientific bases of Duchamp’s work, Duchamp’s Large Glass was full of references to wireless telegraphy, telepathy and radio control (ibid.: 103–15). Indeed Marconi’s invention of wireless held a particular fascination for avant-garde artists, particularly those connected with movements such as Futurism. In 1912 Marinetti proclaimed the Futurists’ invention of ‘wireless imagination’ in his ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’. Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars both wrote poems and stories invoking wireless telegraphy and the Eiffel Tower as a symbol of its power to communicate over long distances (ibid.: 99–100).

CHAPTER 5


Malevich and Tsiolkovski’s dream of space travel would be made achievable by developments in weaponry at the end of the Second World War. In particular the technology that made possible the V1 and V2 missiles with which Hitler had hoped to alter the course of the war was later employed by the United States in the ‘space race’ that culminated in the Moon landing. The same technology was also, of course, used for post-war nuclear and conventional missiles. At the same time, parallel developments in jet propulsion offered the possibility of far greater speeds for manned flight. During and immediately after the war it led to a ‘speed race’ in which the aim was to achieve ever-greater speeds in the air. But these foundered as pilots approached the speed of sound, otherwise known as Mach 1, after Ernst Mach, the physicist who had determined its existence. Though the actual speed varied according to altitude and other factors, it appeared in all circumstances an insurmountable challenge. As Tom Wolf puts it in his book The Right Stuff, Evil and baffling things happened in the transonic zone, which began at about .7 Mach. Wind tunnels choked out at such velocities. Pilots who approached the speed of sound in dives reported that the controls would lock or ‘freeze’ or even alter their normal functions. Pilots crashed and died because they couldn’t budge the stick . . . Geoffrey de Havilland, son of the famous British aircraft designer and builder, had tried to take one of his father’s OH 108s to Mach 1. The ship started buffeting and then disintegrated, and he was killed. This led engineers to speculate that the g-forces became infinite at Mach 1, causing the aircrafts to implode. They started talking about ‘the sonic wall’ and ‘the sound barrier’. (Wolf, 2001: 49–50) 89

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Despite such fears the US Army Air Force considered the achievement of supersonic flight crucial, and dedicated money and resources to that end, resulting in eventual success. On 14 October 1947 Captain ‘Chuck’ Yeager flew the X-1 jet aircraft at a speed of Mach 1.06, a little faster than the speed of sound, with apparently little trouble. In doing so he ‘broke the sound barrier’, the invisible wall between subsonic and supersonic flight, that so many had considered unbreachable. The only discernible effect was the ‘sonic boom’ predicted by physicist Theodore von Karman many years before. This was caused by the air-pressure waves beginning to pile up ahead of the aeroplane and compress and, while moving out and back from the plane toward the ground, producing a sudden change in pressure manifesting as a booming sound when the shock wave hits somebody’s eardrum. The breaking of the sound barrier may not have had the cataclysmic physical effects some had feared, but it did create a number of cultural resonances. ‘I have heard it said that we are in the process of crossing the time barrier’, declares one of the voices in Maurice Blanchot’s essay ‘Dialogue on a Change of Epoch’. Blanchot was responding to the title of Ernst Jünger’s An der Zeitmauer (1959), a book-length essay engaging with the themes of technology, history and time, under the new conditions of a world threatened by atomic destruction, as well as with the momentous changes wrought more generally by technological progress. For Jünger such conditions have produced the necessary impetus for a dramatic change in humankind’s conception of itself, its history and its relation to the earth. Jünger encapsulates the idea of such momentous change in the title of the book, which translates as ‘By the Wall of Time’, and which involves a play on the German word for sound barrier, Schallmauer, literally ‘sound wall’, the German equivalent of the English term ‘sound barrier’. For Jünger, when technology goes through the time wall, when it progresses faster than history, an analogous culture shock is produced. But, according to him, breaking through the time wall does not signal certain disaster but offers, rather, the means of entering a new age of human history, or even the end of history as we understand it. Jünger pursues this theme through An Der Zeitmauer, starting with a curious defence of astrology as offering guidance for man in understanding his cosmic being, and follows with a Hegelian analysis of the progress and final phase of history, in which harnessing the


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forces inherent in the earth becomes the focus of man’s energies. In a passage that echoes the work of both the Jesuit palaeontologist and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and media theorist Marshall McLuhan Jünger declares that technology is the ‘form and beginning of a new spiritualization of the earth in the closing stages of historical time’ and that it is changing the face of the earth by copying the functions of the central nervous system. As Jünger puts it, electronic systems speak, hear and compute using cables simulating vital nervous systems (Neaman, 1999: 203). As the references to Teilhard and McLuhan suggest, An Der Zeitmauer is a manifestation of a way of thinking about the relations between culture and technology current in the 1950s and 1960s, in which apocalyptic foreboding is combined with millennial and eschatological belief in epochal transformation and the ‘end of history’. As such it anticipated many of the ideas that would circulate in counter-cultural circles a decade later. Indeed Jünger anticipated such thinking in his astrological speculations by proclaiming the coming ‘Age of Aquarius’. In his essay, written in the form of a dialogue in response to Jünger’s ideas, Blanchot is less optimistic. In reply to the first voice’s statement that ‘I have heard it said that we are in the process of crossing the time barrier’ the other counters that this use of metaphor suggests to us something important and troubling: that we are at the end of one discourse and, passing to another, we continue to express ourselves in an old unsuitable language. That is the greatest danger. It is even the only one. The street is wiser than the painstaking thinkers who wait until they have new categories with which to think what is happening. I would remind you that theologians have sometimes spoken of ‘the smell of the end of time’, a sort of sui generis experience that, amid real historical phenomena, would allow one to discern the break through: being headed for its end. (Blanchot, 1995: 176)

To which the first voice replies ‘[N]o doubt the smell of atomic explosion’ (ibid.). Later in the dialogue, one of the voices notes that the bomb ‘is but a sign, a crude sign, of the extreme peril that necessarily marks the passage from one time to another, and perhaps from history to a trans-historical epoch’ (ibid.: 181). The same voice continues to say that ‘through the force

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of modern technology the way is being paved for an attack that makes the explosion of the bombs signify little in comparison’ (ibid.). He suggests that The danger does not really lie in the Bomb. It is not in the unwonted development of energy and technology’s domination; it is first of all in our refusal to see the change of epoch and consider the risk of this turning. The threat will grow as long as we have not determined it as risk. (ibid.)

For Blanchot the historical rupture initiated by the Bomb is a ‘limit experience’, a point at which the notion of the human, and therefore of history, is brought radically into question, not least because the language we are still obliged to use is no longer adequate or even relevant. Against Jünger’s romantic optimism about transhistorical transformation he holds up the impossibility of knowing the future, and even the importance of remaining ignorant of it. The more immediate historical result of the Bomb was the Cold War, in that the threat of atomic and nuclear annihilation kept the hostility between Western and Communist powers from heating up. At first, through the 1940s and 1950s, the public – in the United States at least – was comparatively unperturbed by the dangers of atomic and, later, nuclear war. Though there was clearly some anxiety there was also a general belief in the nation’s military and industrial power, particularly in the light of the unprecedented post-war prosperity and the accompanying rise of the consumer culture. This in turn led to a generally conformist and conservative society, with what Margot Henriksen has called an ‘unnerving and unnatural’ quality in the placidity of America in this period (Henriksen, 1997: 91). Yet each Cold-War flare up, each declaration by government spokesmen such as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles about ‘brinkmanship’ or ‘more bang for the buck’, brought Americans face to face with the stark facts of nuclear conflict, and made their serenity seem ‘nothing less than an insane denial of reality’ (ibid.). Gradually the reality of the situation became too overwhelming to be repressed and Americans woke up to the need to properly consider civil defence. Throughout the 1950s numerous plans were proposed and debated. These plans interestingly led to ever-greater popularity for living in the suburbs, which was seen as more likely to enable survival (ibid.: 96).


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Norbert Wiener, the developer of cybernetics, even advocated encouraging the building of out-of-town supermarkets as useful in the context of possible post-war social infrastructures (ibid.: 95–6). One of the most widely taken pieces of advice concerned the need to build bomb shelters. In the early 1960s Americans in their millions built shelters in a kind of frenzy (ibid.: 193ff). Despite such action and the increasingly available government advice on what to do in the event of an attack, it had already become fairly obvious that the chances of surviving a nuclear attack were minimal, and such life as might be lived after might not be worth it. Mental-health problems proliferated in the United States (ibid.: 125–6). A generation of schoolchildren were made intensely aware of the fragility of their existence through the constant drilling in how to behave in the event of air raids (ibid.: 108). What differentiated the fears kindled in the Cold War was the hopelessness and utter destructiveness promised by the Bomb as well as the pervasive state of generalized paranoia, in which being able to identify whether a film actor was a communist intent on subtly undermining American morale and whether an object in the sky was a Soviet bomber were both urgent matters of national security. It is little wonder that the post-war era saw a great deal of conspiracy theorizing and paranoia, as well as the beginnings of phenomena such as UFO sighting and alien abduction. In a sense, this generalized paranoia was the flipside of concepts such as cybernetics, where the idea that everything is connected becomes a question of conspiracy. Many early UFO sightings were made by members of the Ground Observer Corps (GOC). The GOC was an early and desperate response to the possibility of unprovoked or at least unpredicted attack (a fear that goes back to Pearl Harbor and forward to 9/11). Originally founded in the Second World War, it consisted of some 300,000 volunteers whose job was to supplement the inadequate radar defences. Volunteers sat in wooden huts positioned at strategic points in the United States and Canada. Their job was to watch and listen for aeroplanes, paying particular attention to their jet contrails and their shapes. With the help of a booklet issued by the Air Force they had to identify passing planes. Any sighting had to be reported immediately to the local ‘Filter Center’ with the words ‘Aircraft Flash Aircraft Flash’. In the Filter Center the report would be interpreted and compared with other reports and with radar data. In theory any sighting

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could have been of Soviet bombers, at which point the apparatus of military defence and retaliation and civil defence would have been put into motion, with schoolchildren presumably ‘ducking and covering’ under their desks, as they had been taught to do in numerous drills. In fact no Soviet bomber was ever spotted by the GOC. (For a comprehensive history of the GOC and other civil defence measures, see Schaffel, 1991.) The GOC was revived in 1952 by President Truman under the name Operation Skywatch. In August of the same year, in Woodstock, a town then best known for its artistic colony and later to become a metonym for sex, drugs and rock and roll, the pianist David Tudor took part in a concert of works for piano being held at the Maverick Concert Hall. For the last piece in the programme Tudor sat down and raised the piano lid, but to the audience’s consternation he did not touch the keys. This went on for thirty seconds. He then lowered the lid, raised it again, and again did nothing, this time for two minutes and twenty-three seconds, during which time the noise of the plane passing over was clearly audible. He then lowered the lid a second time, raised it again, and played nothing for one minute and twenty seconds (Revill, 1992: 165–6). The audience in the Maverick Concert Hall were bemused, confused and in some cases angry, and the reverberations or shockwaves of the performance were felt far beyond Woodstock. What they had just heard was, of course, the first performance of John Cage’s 4’ 33”, the so-called ‘silent piece’. Despite being referred to as such, not least by Cage himself, it is not actually about silence. According to Cage it was inspired, in part at least, by his experience in Harvard University’s anechoic chamber, where he failed to hear the silence he expected (ibid.: 163). What he heard instead, according to his own account, was the noise of his nervous system. This experience taught him that silence as such was not possible, or at least that it is impossible to hear silence (Cage, 1968: 98). Thus 4’ 33” is about dismantling the boundaries between noise and music and between the performer(s), the audience and the environment. In this case this meant the noise of wind in the trees outside, of the confused and even angry murmurs of the audience, of cars driving past the concert hall and a solitary plane.1 The work 4’ 33” was an extraordinary achievement. It was a kind of ground zero of the post-war avant-garde, clearing the way for subsequent


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developments in one apocalyptic gesture. It was and indeed remains controversial and has generated a great deal of critical noise. It succeeded partly because of Cage’s patent sincerity and engagement. Though as a number of commentators have pointed out, this did not prevent him from editing and embroidering the story of its creation. Nevertheless, along with Cage’s other famous production of 1952, the untitled event performed at the Black Mountain College, 4’ 33” expressed, in artistic form, ideas about radical changes in our conceptions of history, time, speed and attention brought about by technological developments and made evident by the Cold War and the threat of nuclear conflict; ideas which found different kinds of expression in the development of real-time information and communications technologies, and in concomitant later developments such as interactive, real-time multimedia systems. In particular Cage’s piece drew attention to the need to pay attention to the immediate environment and to be able to interpret the noise it produced as signal. President Truman’s revival of the GOC coincides more or less exactly with the first performance of 4’ 33”. While Cage’s work was rarely explicitly political, and it would be simplistic to suggest that 4’ 33” was in any explicit sense a comment on questions of nuclear paranoia and defence, at a deeper level it can be read as symptomatic of a context in which new forms of attention and new understandings of time were necessary. The bemused audience at the first performance of 4’ 33” and the members of the GOC are both new kinds of observers, necessitated by a context in which the time available to pay attention is radically attenuated. Cage was also inspired to compose 4’ 33” by the all-white paintings of his friend Robert Rauschenberg (which in turn were influenced by Malevich’s experiments in radical abstraction), and which were immediately preceded by his extraordinary early collage Mother of God, which took its title from the Catholic Hail Mary: ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen’, which may be seen both as a religious prayer uttered at the moment of nuclear apocalypse, and as a vernacular epithet of horror and outrage. The picture consists of a number of black and white city maps over which a white circle has been crudely painted, invoking both diagrams of blast areas, with which the American public were probably familiar, and the round screen of the radar. The theme of nuclear annihilation lends additional

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irony to the collaged caption at lower right that reads: ‘An invaluable spiritual road map. As simple and fundamental as life itself – Catholic Review.’ Rauschenberg started on the white series immediately after Mother of God, and it is hard not to read the nihilism of the latter in those paintings. Yet Cage famously refused to see these works as empty, describing them instead as environments or surfaces in which events may take place. He even described them as ‘landing-grounds’ for dust (Cage, 1968: 103). Thus Cage repudiated the implicit nihilism of Rauschenberg’s use of white by suggesting that empty spaces, whether visual or audial, can become the space in which something happens, something goes on happening. Art can thus cease to be about objects and become the space in which things happen, anything happens, and people communicate. In fact Cage himself was in a good position to appreciate such scientific and technical concepts. His father was an occasionally successful inventor (Revill, 1992: 20–1) and Cage himself had been incorporating communication devices such as radios and gramophones in his work since the 1930s (ibid.: 63–5). Cage was also exempted from military service during the Second World War, on the grounds that he was helping his father’s researches on radar (ibid.: 81–2). Radar is particularly relevant to Cage’s notions of noise and silence, in that it used sound to map the surrounding environment. Even more appropriately, given the close relationship between the aural and the visual in Cage’s work and his interest in the theatrical, is that the information that is generated by the sound is rendered visually. Cage’s piece drew attention to the need to pay attention to the immediate environment and to be able to interpret the noise it produced as signal. Thus 4’ 33” is a kind of anticipation of real-time technologies of attention that were beginning to emerge as a result of the Cold War.2 The development of digital and other information communication technologies was greatly facilitated by the work of engineers such as Claude Shannon, whose information theory presents some interesting parallels to Cage’s work of the same period. Shannon’s concerns were how to find the most efficient way of encoding what he called information in a particular coding system in a noiseless environment and how to deal with the problem of noise when it occurred (Shannon, 1948). ‘Noise’ was Shannon’s term for the elements of a signal that are extraneous to the message being transmitted


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(ibid.: passim). Through these means Shannon developed a successful general theory for mathematically calculating the efficiency of a communications system that was applicable to both analogue and digital systems. After the War Shannon’s theory was of great use in the burgeoning development, expansion and technological advance of telecommunications, telegraphy, radio and television, as well as in servo-mechanical devices using feed-back signals, and in digital binary computers, for which his emphasis on binary logic made the application of his ideas particularly appropriate. He also developed the concept of redundancy, which showed that messages often contained extraneous and repetitive elements to ensure transmission despite the presence of noise (ibid.: 14–15). In a sense Shannon’s concept of communication is the exact inverse of Cage’s strategy in 4’ 33”, in that Cage seeks to show that, in Shannonian terms, noise is signal.3 Shannon adopted the term ‘entropy’ from thermo-dynamics to refer to the measure of a communication system’s efficiency in transmitting a signal, which was computed on the basis of the statistical properties of the message source (ibid.: 10). For Shannon the greater the disorder, or higher the entropy of a message, the more choices are available and therefore the more information that the message contains. Though this formulation works for Shannon’s purposes in thinking about communication, it remains controversial in terms of the uncertain relation between information and the physical sciences. For some the problem is simply one of semantics and there is no connection between the concerns of physics and those of information (Campbell, 1982: 51–2). For others, particularly those involved with chaos theory and complexity theory, the conflation of thermodynamics and information shows that randomness, understood as maximum information, is ‘the source of all that is new in the world’ (Hayles, 1990: 51). This idea was crucial for theorists thinking about the application of information theory to the creative arts. Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics incorporated a great deal of thinking about information, in much the same terms as those Shannon had proposed, as well as elements from a number of other disciplines and areas of interest. During the Second World War, Wiener had worked at Bell Laboratories on an electronic gun-sight system, which would compute and predict the path of an enemy plane, thus allowing the gun to be aimed at a probable

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future location. Wiener’s research into concepts of self-regulation as well as other work investigating the random behaviour of particles, called Brownian motion, led him to propose a statistical solution to predicting the plane’s path. Like Shannon he recognized that information was bound up with uncertainty. A message is made up of a series of individual elements that make no sense in themselves. Until a message is completed its meaning is uncertain. Only as the sequence unfolds is its meaning made progressively clearer. At any one point along the sequence there is a range of possibilities for what might come next, ranging from the probable to the improbable (though not the impossible: any message that violates the basis of communication, by for example being nonsense, cannot convey any information). Wiener thus developed a statistical method for estimating the most probable path taken by a plane, though whether his ideas were actually successful in enabling more efficient air defence is difficult to ascertain. The relationship between Cage’s work and Shannon’s and Wiener’s concepts of information was directly posited in the late 1960s by Gunther Stent, Professor of Molecular Biology at University of California Berkeley, in his book The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress (1969). Cage had encountered Stent in 1967 when, along with Margaret Mead and a number of other respected thinkers, he participated in a seminar on ‘Biology and the History of the Future’ in Mexico, organized under the auspices of the International Union of Biological Sciences by C. H. Waddington. In his book, a short polemic, Stent attempted to show how science and culture more generally have reached the limits of their potential progress. Cage was clearly fascinated and influenced by Stent’s work, as is evinced by the many times the scientist is mentioned in his writing. Stent also admired Cage’s work and ideas, and incorporated his suggestion of a link between DNA and the I-Ching in the final version of The Golden Age (ibid.: 64–5). More importantly for Stent, Cage’s work represents the limit case for music, the point beyond which it cannot progress. In The Coming of the Golden Age Stent used Shannon’s ideas about Information Theory to show how Cage represented the end of art. Stent follows the work of musicologist Leonard Meyer whom he quotes as arguing that ‘musical meaning arises when an antecedent situation [of tone sequences], requiring an estimate [by the listener] of probable modes of pattern continuation,


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produces uncertainty about the temporal nature of the expected consequent’ (ibid.: 100). This definition derives from information theory, in which, as Stent puts it, the ‘amount of information embodied in any event is the higher the greater the number of alternative events which the percipient would expect to occur given the antecedent situation’ (ibid.: 100–1). Thus for an event to have meaning ‘its occurrence must not only have been uncertain, but it must be capable also of modifying the probabilistic appreciation of the consequences of the earlier antecedent situation’ (ibid.: 101): As a piece of music unfolds the listener is constantly modifying what he expects to hear on the basis of what he has already heard. The listener also estimates what he thinks will come next on the basis of his knowledge of the style in which the piece of music has been composed, and he is only able to make such an estimation if he is aware of the style in question. The more rigid the adherence to the style the more predictable its likely sequence and the less information it contains. On the other hand, if the adherence to style is too lax, then there is too much unpredictability . . . there is plenty of information but the speed at which it impinges upon the listener may be too fast and exceed his ‘channel capacity’. Thus for a listener to perceive a significant structure in a musical composition it must present him with a temporal-tonal sequence which is neither too certain nor too uncertain. (ibid.: 102)

From this, Stent extrapolated the idea that music must evolve toward greater freedom, as listeners get more sophisticated owing to the accumulated capital of previously created significant structures (ibid.). Thus for Stent the history of music is a process of the achievement of successive freedoms in which styles emerge and their possibilities are exhausted, necessitating the development of new styles with greater degrees of unpredictability. In the course of this history this process of stylistic evolution has accelerated, particularly because of the parallel progress in the technological means of ‘securing the accumulation of musical capital against the vagaries of human memory’ (ibid.: 103–4). This starts with musical notation but increases speed with printing and then the advent of the phonograph, radio, the LP and tape. ‘Thus listener sophistication could rise at an ever greater rate, allowing in turn for an ever-faster stylistic evolution’ (ibid.: 104). Stent proposed that

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[A]s artistic evolution unfolds the artist is being freed more and more from strict canons governing the method of working his medium of creative expression. The end result of this evolution has been that, finally, in our time, the artist’s liberation has been almost total. However the artist’s succession to near-total freedom of expression now presents very great difficulties for the appreciation of his work: the absence of recognisable canons reduces his act of creation to near randomness for the perceiver. In other words, artistic evolution along the one-way street to freedom embodies an element of self-limitation. The greater the freedom already attained and hence the closer the approach to the random of any artistic style for the percipient, the less possible for any successor style to seem significantly different from its predecessor. (ibid.: 98)

For Stent, Schönberg’s serial music, though radically evolved toward almost total freedom, still has rules. But the final stages of this evolutionary process have been reached with the work of Cage, which relies for its effects either on pure chance or on the eschewal of any predetermined goal. ‘For here almost all rules that would allow communication to the listener of a musical structure have been abandoned . . . With this development, music as an art which endeavours to communicate truths about the world has reached the end of the line’ (ibid.: 104). Stent suggested that in order to understand what composers such as Cage are attempting it is necessary to understand their view of the world, which is radically different to that associated with rationality. Stent quotes Meyer’s notion of ‘transcendentalism’, which ‘show strong affinities to the precepts of Zen Buddhism’: [T]he transcendentalist believes that concrete, particular sense experiences are the only truths to be found in the world. Any attempt to construct a reality by inferring imaginary causal relations between or among these sense experiences obscures rather than reveals the essential truth of existence, mainly that every fact of the universe is unique. It becomes apparent at once to anyone holding such a belief the very idea is anathema that the meaning of a piece of music for the listener devolves from the structure he perceives in the probabilistic connections of its temporal-tonal sequence. Instead for a transcendentalist the music is just there, and that any analytical cerebrations only interfere with its experience as primary fact. (ibid.: 105)


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For Meyer, the transcendentalist mode entails a rejection of what he describes as goal-orientation or teleology in music, and more generally of the notion of progress. He quotes the composer Christian Wolff (from Cage’s book Silence) as saying that The music has a static character. It goes in no particular direction. There is no necessary concern with time as a measure of distance from a point in the past to a point in the future . . . It is not a question of getting anywhere, of making progress, or having come from anywhere in particular. (Meyer, 1994: 72) Thus the end of time in music and the threatened end of human existence through nuclear annihilation converge in 4’ 33”. In 1969 Cage featured in a special edition of Marshall McLuhan’s DewLine Newsletter. Part of this edition is in the form of a pack of cards, the ‘Distant Early Warning Deck’. (In keeping with McLuhan’s interest in the form of media, many of the newsletters took unusual and experimental form.) Each card has a quotation from a different thinker or artist. The five of diamonds is dedicated to Cage, and bears the following: ‘[S]ilence is all the sounds of the environment at once.’ McLuhan started the Dew-Line Newsletter in the late 1960s as a way of presenting his ideas and those of his collaborators in a comparatively immediate form. Its title comes from his update of Ezra Pound’s idea of artists being the antennae of the human race. McLuhan suggested instead that ‘[A]rt at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it’ (McLuhan, 1964). By ‘distant early warning system’ McLuhan was referring to the ‘Distant Early Warning’ or DEW Line, much of which was sited in his native Canada. It is possibly the Canadian connection that gave the DEW Line a particular meaning for McLuhan, beyond its obvious Cold War resonance. To him, as a Canadian who had spent much of his early career in the United States, the relation between one of the world’s two superpowers and its northern neighbour was obviously an interest and a concern. When understood in relation to the system that inspired it, the McLuhan comment takes on a different and more sinister meaning than at

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first might appear. Far from being a system for warning about distant events, art must respond to what is happening right now, to events and situations that have potentially apocalyptic meanings and consequences, and which, like the nuclear catastrophes the DEW Line was supposed to anticipate, radically alter our relationship with time and history. Systems such as the DEW Line were first constructed at almost exactly the same time as the first performance of 4’ 33”, when the inadequacies of Cold War defence systems such as the GOC began to be addressed. In 1951 installation of the ‘Pinetree’ line of 30 or so early-warning radar stations along the 50th parallel was started. Three years later the Mid-Canada line with 98 sites along the 54th and 55th parallels was instigated, and in 1955 work began on the DEW Line. This was a chain of more than sixty radar and communications stations stretching 3,000 miles from the northwest coast of Alaska to the eastern shore of Baffin Island opposite Greenland. It was designed to detect and discourage any attack by the Soviet Union taking place by way of the North Pole.4 The increasingly complex task of coordinating data from these networks led to the development of centralized computer control systems, such as the Strategic Air-Ground Environment or SAGE. The idea was to build a national-perimeter radar air defence, controlled by computers, which would not only detect incoming planes, but also issue flight vectors to intercepting aircraft. This would involve not just thousands of radar stations but also the development of extremely powerful and reliable computers, incorporating many innovative technologies. Though SAGE did not in the end contribute much in practical terms to air defence, it was of enormous importance in the development of computers. In practical terms it enabled the development of almost all of the technology we now take for granted as part of computing and multimedia. Among specific technologies it made possible or helped to develop are magnetic memory, video displays, effective computer languages, graphic-display techniques, simulation techniques, analogue-to-digital and digital-to-analogue conversion techniques, multiprocessing and networking. This list comprises some – if not the majority – of the most important developments in computing. It might be said that SAGE was in effect the beginning of computing, as we now understand it, as a ‘real-time’ technology, as well


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as making possible computer multimedia. It was the means by which the computer ceased to be regarded as simply a number cruncher and became instead something more like radar, a real-time symbolic representation and manipulation machine (Edwards, 1996). SAGE and other developments in digital technology made possible by the Defense Department embodied the military need for speed and instant ‘real-time’ response in calculation and communication as well as for dealing with different kinds of data. In the late 1960s and early 1970s such systems played a major role in the restructuring of capitalism into a more flexible, responsive and globally distributing form. The rise of computer multimedia as a publicly available media form is, arguably, an epiphenomenon of this process of transformation, in which we apprehend and engage with the world using the technologies of nuclear paranoia. McLuhan clearly regarded Cage as a kind of artistic early warning system. This is what Cage perhaps foresaw on his own radar screen, and about which 4’ 33” constitutes a warning. A world of blank screens and empty spaces in which events can happen, without warning, and in which it may no longer be possible or even necessary to distinguish noise from signal; a world demanding new understandings of time, speed and history and requiring new forms of attention. It is a tribute to Cage’s optimism that he could embrace such emptiness as an opportunity for the new and the unexpected. Confronted with the abyssal nature of nuclear destruction few would have felt so positive about such technologies. And perhaps confronted now with the speed and reach of globalized capitalism made possible by the technologies of nuclear paranoia his optimism may still seem misplaced, even if we have, so far, avoided nuclear apocalypse. It is worth noting that, exactly ten years later, he produced an even more radical sequel to 4’ 33” – 0’ 00” (4’ 33” no. 2), which consisted of the instructions ‘in a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action’. The title suggests perhaps that in the ten years between the two pieces time had become even more attenuated. The other achievement of 4’ 33” is to make a cogent statement about time in the nuclear era. (It is entirely coincidental but interesting nevertheless that the eponymous length of the piece was a close to the legendary ‘four-minute warning’, which was supposed to take place between an attack

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being detected and the bombs exploding.) The threat of annihilation in a few hours or, eventually, minutes meant that previous linear models of development and progress, whether at a personal or societal level, were no longer tenable. 4’ 33” was about paying attention to the now, in a time when time itself appeared radically foreshortened, not just because of the threat of nuclear annihilation, but also because technological advances had led to what Ernst Jünger and Maurice Blanchot described as ‘the breaking of the time barrier’, the point where technology overhauls culture and brings the very existence of history and the human into question. 4’ 33” seems intent on forestalling the very acts of protention and retention through which consciousness synthesises time (and for which the ordered experience of music is a privileged instance), and replacing them with the inchoate experience of the now, or what Christian Wolff calls ‘Zero Time’. Thus Cage’s ‘transcendentalism’ is not merely the working through of a historical process of musical development. It is a response to the radical attenuation of time itself. This may explain Cage’s interest in Zen Buddhism, to which Stent and Meyer both allude. The post-war surge of interest in Zen can be understood as a particularly Cold-War phenomenon, indicating a need among younger people for some instant spiritual and ecstatic experience that was not bound up with teleological notions of time, progress and futurity, and therefore more appropriate to a world threatened by instant annihilation. It is worth noting that Cage’s knowledge of Zen came largely through the writings and teachings of D. T. Suzuki, who was a follower of the Rinzai School that emphasized sudden enlightenment through the use of the koan, the paradoxical anecdote, as opposed to the Soto School which preferred the slower route through meditation. This interest in such immediate enlightenment was echoed in the fascination exerted by psychedelic drugs, such as LSD. Cage’s work showed that it was possible to make art in an age of instantaneous real-time technologies, media and communication, an age in which art should, in theory, no longer be possible or necessary. Cage of course created the future as much as he predicted it. He was highly influential for avant-garde music practice, for performance art, for installation art and for those who, from the late 1950s through to the early 1970s, sought to use ideas such as cybernetics and technologies such as those described


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above as the basis for their art practice. Any list of artists, movements and works that were influenced by Cage would be long, and would possibly encompass almost all of the post-war avant-garde, and in particular those who were interested in using technology. Kathleen Woodward shows how, against the grain of romantic opposition to the machine, he embraced its possibilities wholeheartedly (Woodward, 1980). This was evinced not just in his work from the 1960s onward, where he frequently employed advanced technological means, but also in his writings. In particular his ‘diary’, ‘How to improve the world (you will only make matter worse)’, not only refers to the techno-utopian ideas of contemporary pundits such as McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller and others, but also employs deliberately technological means to construct the texts (ibid.: 177–82). Woodward suggests that Cage’s embrace of technology was entirely in keeping with his interest in the mechanics of self-effacement demanded by his Zen Buddhism (ibid.: 177). At the same time, Cage is part of a tradition of technological utopianism that James Carey and John Quirke call the ‘electrical sublime’, going back to the early nineteenth century and encompassing Samuel Morse among others (Carey, 1989: 114). In Cage’s ‘Mushroom Book’, originally published in 1972 as a limited edition, and reprinted in M: Writings ’67–’72, the following passages occur in juxtaposition. . . . that this poisonous species and some edible ones cannot be distinguished from each other at this stage except by studying the cuticle of each button under the microscope. (Alexander H. Smith) Is it or was it too late? (Apocalypse.) Gunther Stent said human brain worked up until 1850 (Cage, 1973: 121)

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In 1954 John Cage had moved to Woodstock, upstate New York, with his partner Merce Cunningham and a number of friends. It was there that he first became seriously interested in mushrooms. Bringing the same kind of intensity to the study of fungi that he devoted to music, painting and writing, Cage soon became an expert mycologist (Revill, 1992: 181–2). Cage, predictably, did not ascribe any significance to his interest in mushrooms. This would not have been in keeping with his interest in Zen and his wish to escape the cage of selfhood. He did, however, invoke them frequently in his writings, particular in the anecdotes that fill his books. In these stories he describes both the pleasures and dangers of mycology, and in particular the ever-present risk of poisoning. But, despite the folksy style of Cage’s mycological anecdotes, it is hard to believe that he did not appreciate the multivalent richness of the mushroom as a sign for indeterminacy and uncertainty. As such it is, to say the least, overdetermined, in that it expresses this at so many levels. Obviously mushrooms are most well known for being potentially either good to eat or poisonous. To hunt mushrooms, as Cage did, is a highly risky occupation and books on the subject almost always make this clear. Mushroom hunting was one area in Cage’s life in which he did not apply ‘chance operations’, appreciating that to do so could be fatal (ibid.: 180–2). Mushrooms are also ontologically indeterminate (or at least were so until recently). Until fungi were classified as a kingdom of living things in themselves, they oscillated between being thought of as animals and as plants, without clearly being either. This indeterminacy is played out in the mushroom’s metaphorical and cultural applications of the period. In the 1950s the mushroom most famously came to signify the shape of the cloud resulting from an atomic or nuclear explosion, and thus, metonymically, atomic and nuclear conflict (Weart, 1988: 402–4). At the same time, through the researches of Gordon and Valentina Wasson and Aldous Huxley among others, the psychedelic potential of certain fungi was beginning to be appreciated (an aspect of mycology Cage rigorously eschewed). Thus the mushroom could simultaneously represent two crucial aspects of the post-war era, the terror of total global destruction through technology, and the promise of revelation, transcendence and even dramatic evolutionary change. These two aspects are not as contradictory as one might think. In


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the work of Ernst Jünger, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and others, the Bomb is presented as a means by which humanity will be forced to move to a higher evolutionary plane or perish. Later in the 1960s psychedelics were regarded by their advocates as one of the means of achieving such progress. Even Albert Hofmann, the scientist responsible for synthesizing LSD, made the connection. In a 1996 speech reflecting on his most famous achievement, Hofman suggested that Considered from a personal perspective, the psychedelic effect of lysergic acid diethylamide would not have been discovered without the intervention of chance. Like many tens of thousands of substances annually synthesized and tested in pharmaceutical research, then found to be inactive, the compound might have disappeared into oblivion, and there would have been no history of LSD. However, considering the discovery of LSD in the context of other significant discoveries of our time in the medicinal and technical field, one might arrive at the notion that LSD did not come into the world accidentally, but was rather evoked in the scope of some higher plan. In the 1940s the tranquilizers were discovered, a sensation for psychiatry. These constitute the precise pharmacological antipodes of LSD. As indicated by their name, they tranquilize and cover-up psychic problems; while LSD reveals them, thus making them accessible to therapeutic treatment. At about the same time nuclear energy became technically usable and the atomic bomb was developed. In comparison to traditional energy sources and weapons, a new dimension of menace and destruction became accessible. This corresponded to the potency-enhancement realized in the field of psychopharmaka, something like 1:5000 or 1:10,000fold, comparing mescaline to LSD. One could make the assumption that this coincidence might not be accidental, but rather was brought on the scene by the ‘Spirit of the Age’. From this perspective the discovery of LSD could hardly be an accident. One might reflect on a further idea, that LSD might have been predestined by some higher power to arise precisely at the time when the predominance of materialism with all its consequences over the past 100 years was being understood. LSD as an enlightening psychopharmakon along the path to a new, spiritual age! (Hofmann, 1996)5

That the mushroom should symbolize such ambivalence is appropriate, given that it is potentially both poison and nourishment. In this sense it can

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be thought of as a pharmakon, the ancient Greek term meaning both poison and remedy. This term has, of course, become familiar through the work of Jacques Derrida, and in particular his early essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in which he analyses its use in Plato’s dialogue, the Phaedrus. Derrida shows that the indeterminacy of the term pharmakon unsettles the dialogue and comes to stand for Plato’s own complex relations to writing and rhetoric, the subjects of the Phaedrus (Derrida, 1993: 61–120). Cage anticipates Derrida’s interest in the indeterminacy of language by remarking that his interest was piqued by the fact that ‘mushroom is next to music in many dictionaries (though only in English)’, a statement that neatly reprises Saussure’s notion of difference and anticipates its radicalization by Derrida as différance. Writing as pharmakon and nuclear war are explicitly connected by Derrida in a later essay, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)’, his contribution to ‘nuclear criticism’. For Derrida the threat of nuclear war is ‘fabulously textual’ inasmuch as it has not, as yet, taken place and exists only in terms of the rhetoric and sophistry of mutually assured destruction. The ‘horror of nuclear catastrophe . . . which, according to some, is already degrading our world in its totality, or improving it by the same token, according to others . . . this absolute pharmakon ‘installs humanity in its rhetorical condition’ (Derrida, 1984: 24). Derrida characterizes the nuclear arms race and nuclear war, or its threat, as a ‘cours de vitesse’, a ‘speed race’. For Derrida this places us in an economy of speed in which a few seconds ‘may decide, irreversibly, the fate of what is still now and then called humanity – plus the fate of a few other species’. He continues that ‘no single instant, no atom of our life (of our relation to the world and to being) is not marked today, directly or indirectly, by that speed race’. Thus our relationship with time, space and speed has been put radically into question. This is not simply a question of acceleration or increased velocity, but of an entirely altered experience of temporality and historicality that have characterized the human subject’s relationship with time (ibid.: 20). Above it all it offers the ‘possibility of an irreversible destruction, leaving no traces of the juridico-literary archive – that is, total destruction of the basis of literature and criticism’ (ibid.: 26). Derrida talks of the ‘extraordinary sophistication of [nuclear war’s] technologies – which are also the technologies of delivery, sending,


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dispatching, of the missile in general, of mission, missive, emission and transmission, like all technè’ (ibid.: 24). Peter Schwenger wittily glosses this idea by pointing out that, according to the principle of deterrence ‘[A]ll missiles (missives) are marked “return to sender”’ (Schwenger, 1992: 10–11). According to Derrida, the economy of speed of the nuclear epoch involves ‘the crossing of certain thresholds of acceleration within the general machinery of a culture, with all its techniques for handling, recording and storing information’ (Derrida, 1984: 20). Principle among such techniques is ‘real-time computing’, which was developed as a direct response to the threat of nuclear destruction during the Cold War, with projects such as the SAGE continental air defence system, the ARPANet, which later became the Internet, as well with research into computer graphics, interfaces, artificial intelligence and cybernetics. They embodied a situation in which the technical achievement of ever-greater speed has become a matter of survival, particularly with the development of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, which combined the range and speed made possible by rocket technology with the destructiveness of nuclear weaponry. The development of complex real-time systems such as SAGE was a reaction to the capacity to wage war and wreak destruction at distance and at great speed. These Cold War technologies began to find civilian applications in relation to the economic and social crises of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The deregulation of finance following the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement in the early 1970s was accompanied by the increasing application of real-time computer technology to financial trading. This in turn greatly enabled the globalization of finance. The expansion which has accompanied this globalization is on a scale that now dwarfs the financial activities of most nation states. It also, as events at the end of the 1990s have shown, brings with it considerable dangers, with markets handling trillions of dollars a day and able – even obliged, because of developments in communications technologies – to make immediate responses to world events. The technologies in question developed out of the military needs for unprecedented levels of attention and communication. The global market now operates with the same hair-trigger responsiveness as those on nuclear alert, and using the same kind of equipment. The trader on the stock market floor is using real-time computing technology directly descended

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from SAGE, the ARPANet and other interactive technologies developed for nuclear defence. Thus the nuclear economy of speed becomes the speed of the economy. In 1975, more than twenty years after the first performance of 4’ 33”, Lou Reed released his album Metal Machine Music. It consists of four sides of feedback, constituting an act of extreme aural violence. It has been voted regularly as one of the worst albums of all time, and also declared, by ‘gonzo’ music critic Lester Bangs, to be ‘the greatest album ever made in the history of the human eardrum’ (Bangs, 1988: 200). It is rumoured that Reed made the album by sticking microphones in front of speakers and simply recording the feedback (without necessarily being in the studio at the time). It is also suggested that Reed recorded it simply in order to fulfil his onerous contractual obligations to RCA Records. In fact there is too much going on in it to suggest that its production was entirely random. Be that as it may, and despite the advocacy of Bangs and others, Metal Machine Music is an exceptionally difficult and even unpleasant record to listen to. What makes it interesting is that it can be seen as both a development of and a riposte to 4’ 33”. As with many other such works of the sonic avantgarde, it would not have been possible without the earlier piece, especially given the various connections between Cage and Reed. At the same time it undermines Cage’s optimistic intent to allow the spectator to perceive environmental sound as music. It fills its silence with electronic feedback, so as to demonstrate, perhaps, that in the twenty years that separate the two pieces the environment had become entirely mediated by electronic information communications technologies. The mid-1970s, when Metal Machine Music was released, was part of a period of economic and cultural upheaval, which saw the West shift from an industrial to a post-industrial economic model. Cage’s work thus anticipates the later insights of Derrida in understanding that the real issue with the threat of nuclear war, this utterly rhetorical, ‘fabulously textual’ event, is that of its effects on the machinery of communication and information within culture. Cage’s interest in mushrooms acts perhaps as a kind of pharmakon, a small metonymic dose of the poison that can then act as a remedy. Metal Machine Music showed that what Cage’s work offered, as a cure for the poison of Cold War politics and nuclear fear, was simply a palliative for the ills of


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late capitalism, and as such another form of poison. In the end the promise of untrammelled communication between people and the dissolution of the barriers between art and life promised by electronic technologies and prefigured by 4’ 33” was never fulfilled. Such technologies became, instead, the means by which the human element was – and indeed is still – being increasingly marginalized by a system which is too complex and operates too fast to tolerate such elements.

NOTES 1. No contemporary accounts of the first performance mention the sound of a plane, only rain and the audience itself. I owe the idea of the plane to Paul Morley’s Words and Music, in which in the middle of a long footnote describing the performance of 4’ 33” he asks a series of questions, one of which is ‘[D]id Cage organise that plane passing overhead?’ (Morley, 2003: 277). I am also grateful to Perry Sloan, whose website AirTimes, A Source for Airline History (Sloan, 1997) is an excellent resource and fascinating in its own right. According to Sloan it would have been possible for a scheduled upstate New York or Montreal flight to pass in the Hudson Valley and Woodstock area on the way either to or from the New York or Newark airports at that time, as well as unscheduled civil or pleasure aircraft. However, he has also pointed out that there is no way to reconstruct today the specific departure and arrival times or flight paths of scheduled flights from those days. While flight details would be recorded by tracking computers today, air-traffic control was far less sophisticated 50 years ago. Except in immediate terminal areas, it was pretty much free-flight, and a national radar system wasn’t developed until after a collision of airliners over the Grand Canyon in 1956 (email correspondence). 2. Radar, one of the most important inventions of the War, has had a far greater influence on our contemporary culture than is usually acknowledged (for a comprehensive account of the history of the radar,

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see Buderi, 1998), and is in some senses as important a development as the original digital computer for contemporary real-time interactive technologies and multimedia. It is only when the computer is combined with the radar in the 1950s as part of nuclear defence that the current understanding of the computer as a real-time technology began to be realized. The radar also embodied many of the issues concerning feedback and communication that animated research into information and communication systems. Above all it was the first instantiation of the apparatus of real-time attention and response that was further developed in the Cold War, and consequently enabled the restructuring of capital and finance in the 1970s and 1980s. 3. Another aspect of Cage’s life and work that may also be relevant is his homosexuality, about which he was extremely reticent. Jonathan Katz has suggested that both Cage’s reticence and his interest in silence were connected to his status as a gay man in an intolerant period, and represented his form of resistance (Katz, 2001: 41–61). Cage did talk about his homosexuality on occasion and, in an interview with Thomas Hines in the late 1980s quoted by Katz, recalled cruising in the parks in Santa Monica along the Palisades (ibid.: 43). This would necessitate developing a sensitivity to detecting the signal of a potential sexual encounter among the noise of the heterosexual environment, or what is now sometimes known humorously as ‘gaydar’. 4. There is a fascinating connection between Cage and the DEW Line, in that the radar arrays were housed in geodesic ‘radomes’ designed by Cage’s mentor and friend R(ichard) Buckminster Fuller (Martin, 2003: 187–8). 5. Interestingly, one of the most distinguished acolytes Hofmann accrued was none other than Ernst Jünger, a relationship described in Hofmann’s book LSD: My Problem Child (Hofmann, 1980).

CHAPTER 6

Art in Real Time

In his book on art in the 1960s David Mellor suggests that [A] dream of technical control and of instant information conveyed at unthought-of velocities haunted Sixties culture. The wired, electronic outlines of a cybernetic society became apparent to the visual imagination. (Mellor, 1993: 107)

This chapter looks at two exhibitions which took place at either end of this period (taking a view of the ‘Sixties’ as extending both before and after the actual decade of the 1960s) – This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1956, and Software, Information Technology, its New Meaning for Art, held at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1970 – and at the work of two individuals, John McHale and Jack Burnham, each of whom was closely connected with one of the exhibitions. John McHale was an a member of the ‘Independent Group’, the loose grouping of artists, architects and theorists who represented a youthful and progressive faction at the recently founded Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. Along with Lawrence Alloway he was responsible for introducing the Independent Group to the work of Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener. McHale’s ‘Transistor’ series of collages of the early 1950s were perhaps some of the very earliest artistic representations of the new electronic-media technologies then being developed. The transistor had been invented in the late 1940s and was a crucial component in the continued development and increasing miniaturization of real-time devices such as the radio and the digital computer. In these works McHale used coloured paper

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along with ripped up newspapers and magazines to represent ideas about communication in a mass-mediated society. In 1955 McHale went to Yale to study colour theory and the use of industrial materials with Joseph Albers, but was far more taken with American popular culture. The glossy magazines he brought back to England from America provided the material for one of the sections in This is Tomorrow, the 1956 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, in which the Independent Group participated. As the name suggests This is Tomorrow was a response to the world that was then emerging and being made possible by advances in technology and developments in communications and media. It was intended as a collaboration between art, architecture and design, and featured the work of artists such as Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull, Victor Pasmore, and Kenneth and Mary Martin, architects such as Erno Goldfinger and Colin St John Wilson, and designers including Germano Facetti, as well as many others now less well known. The catalogue featured essays by Laurence Alloway and David Lewis, and a number of poems by Reyner Banham. Lewis’s essay invoked a number of precedents for the exhibition’s intentions in bringing sculpture and architecture together, including de Stijl, Suprematicism, Constructivism and the Bauhaus, and proclaimed their common goal as seeking to break down ‘the separations of modern life and to promote integration and living wholeness’. The exhibition was divided into twelve sections, each to be constructed by a team of artists, designers and architects. The twelfth and final section of the exhibition was the most directly concerned with theories of systems and communications. In the catalogue a text by Geoffrey Holroyd, Toni del Renzio and Lawrence Alloway describes its concerns thus: This section of This is Tomorrow represents the basis of collaboration between architect and artist as part of a general human activity rather than as the reconciliation of specialised æsthetic systems. It is communications research which offers a means of talking about human activities (including art and architecture) without dividing them into compartments. Hitherto the conventional definition of the artist and architect has limited their efficacy to narrow mutually exclusive areas. It is this that has made collaboration difficult.

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Seeing art and architecture in the framework of communications, however, can reduce these difficulties by a new sense of what is important. (Alloway et al., 1956)

Accompanying the text are two diagrams. At the top of one page is a handdrawn representation of the structure of communication as defined by Shannon (though he is not acknowledged), with a square labelled ‘source’ extruding an arrow pointing to a triangle labelled ‘encoder’, which points to a circle marked ‘signal’ which points in turn to a triangle labelled ‘decoder’ and finally a square marked ‘destination’. At the bottom of the same page a similar diagram is shown, but this time there are two ovals each surrounding one half of the structure and intersecting, Venn-diagram-style, around the ‘signal’ circle. Next to the lower diagram there is a legend that reads as follows: All communication depends on the transmission of signs. Fig 1 [the top image] is a simple diagram of a communication system. In an efficient communication system the field of accumulated experience must be similar in both encoder and decoder (see fig 2 [the lower image]), because without learned responses there is no communication. However learned responses become stereotyped and stale in time and need to be revised. (ibid.)

Over the page a further diagram, spread over both pages, attempts to map the different means by which efficient communication can be achieved. At the bottom of the left-hand page there is a text which states: There has always been a variety of channels available for communications but modern technology has increased the scope of communication and the audience has increased in size. This chart suggests a way to organise this multiplicity of messages by reference to the characteristics of different channels. By its use the visual arts can be set in new relationships, free of the learned responses of composition, experiment and so on. (ibid.)

Above this text there are three columns of lists, thus:

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Table from Alloway, Banham and Lewis (1956), no pagination. PHYSICAL OBJECTS

ARRANGED IN OR ON

OPERATED OR PRODUCED BY

marks

sand

stick

marks

slate

chalk

marks inscriptions

stone clay

stylus chisel

marks

paper

pen pencil

letters

paper

typewriter and fingers

letters

paper books

printing press hands motor

coloured painting

cave canvas

paints and brushes

photos

film prints

camera

gestures

space

body

fingers

hands

body

pebbles

slab

hands

tallies notches

stick

knife

beads

rods in frame abacus

hands

counter wheels

desk calc machines

hands motor

punched tape cards

punched card machine

motor and input instructions

magnetic surfaces wire tape dics

machinery

motor and input instructions

Horizontal lines connect items across the three categories and to another diagram on the opposite page. This features five headings, ‘low cost’, ‘little space’, ‘permanence’, ‘erasability’, ‘versatility’, below each of which are found

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the words YES and NO and two columns of circles (ibid.). The idea was, presumably, that readers of the catalogue could use the circles to indicate whether each of the methods described in the left-hand diagram fulfilled the criteria indicated in the headings in the right-hand diagram. In these few pages, which might have appeared somewhat beside the point to the contemporary reader of the catalogue, two important ideas are introduced. The first is one of the first statements, in the English language at least, about art as a system, understood in terms of communications and information theory. The other is the mention of the computer and other computing machinery as potential means of making visual art. This was prescient given that research into visual and multimedia computing was only just beginning, largely in conditions of great secrecy, as part of the United States’ preparations for nuclear defence. It is likely that Alloway, del Renzio and Holroyd would have only encountered computers in the form of large ‘number crunchers’ that were hard to use and to which access was limited. Given this it is hardly surprising that the show did not feature computers as such. The nearest it got to such technology was Robby the Robot from the film Forbidden Planet, which Richard Hamilton brought to the opening. Nor was it entirely utopian about technology. In particular the Patio and Pavilion section, designed by Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson and Nigel Henderson, presented a highly dystopian and bleak vision of the future. On the other hand section two, put together by Richard Hamilton, John McHale and John Voelcker, and featuring, among other exhibits, the installation ‘Fun House’ and Hamilton’s collage constructed out of the material McHale brought back from the States, ‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’ was far more optimistic about the possibilities of technology, or at least in its capacity to generate pleasure and distraction. Section twelve itself eschewed the use of technology, consisting as it did of a tackboard with a complex colour-coded array of visual material, including images of palmistry diagrams, a nuclear explosion superimposed over a map of the east coast of the United States, a computer depicted as a large building, and a seventeenth-century engraving of a swindler. These were placed on yellow panels for images with some kind of relationship exchange, blue for those with a space-time emphasis and red for object-based

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relationships. The display had been inspired by the architect Geoffrey Holroyd’s encounter with Charles and Ray Eames in California, which led to Holroyd, Alloway and Frank Newby presenting the Eames film A Communications Primer at the ICA, and section twelve was intended to resemble the Eames’ famous House of Cards. In 1957 Holroyd, along with William Turnbull, Theo Crosby and Edward Wright, proposed a show called ‘Signs and Symbols’ to the ICA, which would have developed some of the ideas about communication expressed in section twelve, but the idea never went any further. Though This is Tomorrow was not an Independent Group exhibition as is sometimes presumed, they were major collaborators and part of the show bore the imprint of their thinking, especially in sections one, two and twelve. The Independent Group are now best known for being ‘fathers of pop’, the first artists and theorists to celebrate popular culture, particularly as manifested in the United States. In fact the Independent Group had a far broader range of interests, including science, non-aristotelian logic, cybernetics, sociology and new technologies (Massey, 1995: 91). These found expression in the various exhibitions the group mounted at the ICA, their sections in This is Tomorrow, and elsewhere, as well as the talks and seminars they arranged there. Though the members of the Independent Group did not in general experiment with the use of new media in their practices, their embrace of technology, science and popular culture and their repudiation of the hierarchical understanding of art and culture represented by establishment figures such as Herbert Read made such experimentation possible. It is surely far from coincidental that the first outsider to write about the Independent Group was Jasia Reichardt, who, as deputy director of the ICA, was to organize in 1968 one of the most famous shows of computer art, Cybernetic Serendipity, which was a high-water mark of newmedia art in its early heroic period. Out of the associates of the Independent Group it was McHale who perhaps took the Independent Group’s interest in technology furthest in his post-Independent Group career. In the late 1950s he produced a number of extraordinary images of mechanized or technologized heads, which, though they bear a superficial resemblance to some of Paolozzi’s work of the same period, operate in a different, far less humanist register. Paolozzi seems

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to be lamenting the human condition in anticipation of some apocalyptic event, while McHale seems to wish to embrace the post-human future. In 1959 he published an extended essay in two successive issues of Architectural Design, entitled ‘The Expendable Ikon’, in which he proclaimed that ‘the acceptable and usable images of human action and experience are to be found now more in the technological folk arts – the mass media’ (McHale, 1984: 19). He goes on to suggest that the ‘accelerated changes in the human condition’, brought about in part at least by the mass media, ‘require an array of symbolic images of man which will match up to the requirements of constant change, fleeting impression and a high rate of obsolescence. A replaceable, expendable series of Ikons’ (ibid.). This theme is continued in a lecture given at the ICA in 1961, and later published as ‘The Plastic Parthenon’, which he starts with a trenchant declaration about the emerging conditions in which art is being made: Our emergent world society, with its particular qualities of speed, mobility, mass production and consumption, rapidity of change and innovation, is the latest phase of an ongoing cultural and social revolution. It has few historical precedents as a cultural context. Industrial technologies, now approaching global scale, linked to an attendant multiplicity of new communication channels, are producing a planetary culture whose relation to earlier forms is as Vostok or Gemini to a wheeled cart. World communication, whose latest benchmark is Telstar, diffuse and interpenetrate local cultural tradition, providing commonly shared cultural experience in a manner which is unparalleled in human history. Within this global network, the related media of cinema, TV, radio, pictorial magazine and newspaper are common cultural environment sharing and transmuting man’s symbolic needs and their expression on a world scale. Besides the enlargement of the physical world now available to our direct experience, these media virtually extend our physical environment, providing a constant stream of moving, fleeting images of the world for our daily appraisal. They provide psychic mobility for the greater mass of our citizens. Through these devices we can telescope time, move through history and span the world in a variety of unprecedented ways. (McHale, 1969a: 98)

The lecture went on to discuss the means by which value can be sustained in a world in which cultural objects can be endlessly reproduced and manufactured. McHale ended with a prediction about the future of art:

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As the apparatus of cultural diffusion becomes increasingly technological, its ‘products’ become less viewable as discrete, individual events, but rather more as related elements in a continuous contextual flow, i.e., the book-novel as compared to TV. The artwork, as, for example, in Rauschenberg-type ‘combines’, moves towards a continuous format, juxtaposing ‘still’ images with live radio, and TV sets spill out of the frame into the general environment. The future of art seems no longer to lie with the creation of enduring masterworks but with defining alternative cultural strategies, through a series of communicative gestures in multi-media forms. As art and non-art become interchangeable, and the master work may only be a reel of punched or magnetized tape, the artist defines art less through any intrinsic value of art object than by furnishing new conceptualities of life style and orientation. Generally, as the new cultural continuum underlines the expendability of the material artifact, life is defined as art – as the only contrastingly permanent and continuously unique experience. (ibid.: 109–10)

This utopian optimism was confirmed by McHale’s future career. In the early 1960s he gave up being an artist to emigrate to the United States and work with the extraordinary utopian futurist engineer and inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller, about whom he published a book (McHale, 1962). (Fuller was a crucial influence on the political and technological ideas of John Cage.) From then on he and his wife Magda devoted themselves to studying developments in technology, the use of world resources and human needs. The McHales were thus pioneers of what became known as ‘futurism’ or ‘futurology’, the study of potential futures and of the means by which they might be managed. This kind of thinking had its beginnings in the Second World War, much like cybernetics, systems theory, information theory and games theory. In the United States at least it was a direct development of World War Two ‘operations research’. The first civilian organization to study the future in these terms was founded by General H. H. Arnold to continue the collaboration between military and civilian experts, which had proved so useful in military planning in that conflict. Known as RAND (short for Research And Development), it was and remains famous for its assessment of various military and civilian risks, especially in relation to nuclear warfare, and suggestions about how they might be forestalled or managed. RAND was the model for the many such institutions that followed, including the

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Hudson Institute, founded by the doyen of futurology, Herman Kahn, the Institute for the Future, the Systems Development Corporation and the Institute of Defense Analysis. Later strands of futurology were less militaristic in their aims and background. In the mid- to late 1960s, thinking about the future, as practised by the McHales, Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Alvin Toffler, among others, became as much a liberal as it was a Cold Warrior’s game. At the same time, great advances were being made in the development of information and communication technologies.The defence needs of the Cold War provided the impetus for the transformation of the computer from a large ‘number cruncher’ to an information manipulation and communication machine. The need to put in place effective nuclear early warning systems led to the building of the SAGE/Whirlwind system, for which many of the components and capacities of modern interactive real-time computing were developed. Anxiety at the Soviet technological progress suggested by the launch of Sputnik led to the formation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which facilitated the development of, inter alia, computer graphics, windows-based computing, hypertext and the Internet. J. C. R. Licklider, head of the Information Processing Office (IPTO), the section of ARPA most directly concerned with digital technology, was particularly interested in what he called ‘man-machine symbiosis’ – the name of a paper he published in 1960 – which advocated a model of integration between the machine and its human operators that went far beyond simple automation. At the same time, such ideas led the engineer Manfred Clynes to invent the word ‘cyborg’, from ‘cybernetic organism’, with particular reference to astronauts, whose survival in space depended on their close relationship with the technical apparatus of space travel. It was in this context that McHale wrote his major work of futurology, The Future of the Future, published in 1969, which presented an extraordinary vision of the earth being managed according to criteria of ecological efficiency and productivity. Chapter 4, ‘Man Plus’, which concerns the prosthetic nature of the human and the possibilities for prosthetic enhancement afforded by new technologies (McHale, 1969b: 98–122), echoes the work of Marshall McLuhan and, in a very different vein, that of Jacques Derrida and anticipates that of Bernard Stiegler (though, like McLuhan, McHale does

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not propose that the prosthesis or supplement is in any sense originary). The penultimate section, ‘The Future of the Future’, looks at the prospect of human colonization of outer space in terms that are highly reminiscent of Tsiolkovski’s ideas, described in chapter 4 of this volume. Though The Future of the Future is mostly concerned with questions of technology and the environment, the final section returns to the question of art. McHale returns to some of the ideas he expressed in relation to his idea of the ‘ikon’ earlier in the decade: The world we now live in, with its particular qualities of speed, mobility, rapidity of change and communication, has no historical precedent as a cultural context. Man can now see farther, move faster, produce more than ever before. Devices such as high-speed cameras, radio telescopes, and the orbital satellites have extended the range of our sensory experience far beyond that ever imagined. Besides enormously enlarging the extent of the physical world available to our direct experience in an ordinary lifetime, such new means provide us – through the multimedia, TV, motion pictures, picture magazines and newspapers – with what is virtually an extension of our culture world. A constant stream of moving, fleeting images of the world is presented for our daily appraisal. Through these means we extend ourselves psychically, telescoping time, moving through history, spanning the world through unprecedented visual and aural means of experience. (ibid.: 295)

McHale suggests that this calls for a ‘rich profusion of symbolic images, messages, stories, and impressions that may enable man to locate in, learn, and adapt himself to his society. Their constant re-creation and renewal matches the requirements of his more mobile and changing social experience.’ This is compared to earlier forms of ‘high’ or ‘fine’ culture, which ‘arose in vertical societies’ and which was ‘maintained by a privileged elite’ (ibid.: 296). By contrast, McHale proclaims the power of the ‘copying machine’ ‘in combination with the telephone and other devices’ to ‘allow an extraordinary flow of personalized information between people’ (ibid.: 299), while the ‘ubiquity and low-cost availability of printing, duplicating and other means’ makes possible the ‘“underground” newspapers, journals and books’ forming ‘the autonomous information

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network of the younger generation’ (ibid.: 300). At the same time, ‘cameras, tape recorders, and movie-making apparatus are more available to more people at less cost’, spurring a ‘new creative wave in underground movies and other art forms, which have diffused swiftly into the even more complex technologies of the multimedia-theater-dance-image-light presentations and collaborations’ (ibid.). For McHale this meant that such developments are characterized by ‘individual initiative and direct participation in the control of complex processes’. ‘There are no spectators; everyone is involved in one way or another in the performance’. Finally, repeating some of the examples and ideas first discussed in ‘The Plastic Parthenon’, he invokes Cage and Rauschenberg to make some bold claims for the present and future importance of art: Art work, as in the Cage ‘concert’ or the Rauschenberg ‘combine’ is less viewable as a discrete event or series of object relations. The ‘event’ is one of temporal immersion in a continuous contextual flow of communicated experiences. The technological means, media, or channel of that communication is no longer an obtrusive constraining element. The masterwork in these emerging forms may only be a reel of punched or magnetized tape, or some other invisible sequencing mode of transmitting the experience. As there is little either/or exclusivity, it may also be produced in a durable, replicable, product form for wider circulation. The future of cultural forms already has many more dimensions of rich diversity. The promise within the newer media is of a greater interpenetration and interaction of life-art-culture rather than the forms-objects-images that preserved and isolated social life. As for the larger communication and understanding implied in a shared planetary culture, it is more than obvious today that we must understand and cooperate on a truly global scale, or we perish. (ibid.: 300)

From the mid-1960s onward the development of new technologies had apparently already started to make possible McHale’s vision of art as a means of planetary communication and cooperation. By the early 1960s artists such as Nam June Paik, David Medalla and Roy Ascott had already begun to explore the possibilities of new technologies and of ideas such as cybernetics. Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) was founded in 1966 by

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Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg, and held its most famous event, Nine Evenings, at the Armory in Brooklyn in the same year. Maurice Tuchman’s Art and Technology programme at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), in which artists were invited to work with engineers to produce works involving technology, was started in 1967. In 1968 Jasia Reichardt curated Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA in London, the same year that the Museum of Modern Art in New York put on its famous show, The Machine as seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, which was accompanied by Some More Beginnings, an exhibition of art and technology by EAT at the Brooklyn Museum. In 1969 the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art put on an exhibition entitled Art by Telephone for which artists were invited to telephone the museum with instructions for making an artwork. The radical vision of art proposed by McHale was perhaps most thoroughly developed by the artist, critic and theorist Jack Burnham. Born in 1931, Burnham spent the early part of his career, from 1955 to 1965, working as an artist, making light sculptures. He then turned to art criticism for Arts magazine, to which he contributed from 1968 and where he was Associate Editor from 1972 to 1976, and Artforum, for which he wrote from 1971 to 1973, and where he was Contributing Editor from 1971 to 1972. In 1968 he published the book for which he is best known, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (1968). Beyond Modern Sculpture ends with a chapter devoted to what he saw at that time as a possible future for sculpture and art in general, with works that invoked or operated as systems. These ideas are taken up and extended in two essays he wrote for Artforum, ‘Systems Esthetic’, published in 1968 and ‘Real Time Systems’, published a year later (both reprinted in his 1973 collection of essays Great Western Salt Works). The first proclaimed the advent of the eponymous ‘systems esthetic [sic]’. He claimed that we are ‘now in transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates not from things, but from the way things are done’ (1973: 16). He expanded this definition thus: The priorities of the present age revolve around the problems of organisation. A systems viewpoint is focused on the creation of stable, ongoing relationships between organic and non-organic systems, be these neighbourhoods, industrial

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complexes, farms, transportation systems, information centers, or any other of the matrixes of human activity. All living situations must be treated in the context of a systems hierarchy of values. Intuitively many artists have already grasped these relatively recent distinctions and if their ‘environments’ are on the unsophisticated side, this will change with time and experience. (ibid.)

Out of this Burnham constructed a radical vision of the role of the artist in an ‘advanced technological culture’. He saw the notion of a systems aesthetic as a more useful way of understanding current artistic practice than concepts such as ‘theatrical’ or ‘literalist’ art, or the idea of a ‘postformalistic esthetic’: The systems approach goes beyond a concern with staged environments and happenings; it deals in a revolutionary fashion with the larger problem of boundary concepts. In systems perspective there are no contrived confines such as the theater proscenium or picture frame. Conceptual focus rather than material limits define the system. Thus any situation, either in or outside the context of art, may be designed and judged as a system. Inasmuch as a system may contain people, ideas, messages, atmospheric conditions, power sources, and so on, a system is, to quote the systems biologist, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a ‘complex of components in interaction’, comprised of material, energy, and information in various degrees of organization. In evaluating systems the artist is a perspectivist considering goals, boundaries, structure, input, output, and related activity inside and outside the system. Where the object almost always has a fixed shape and boundaries, the consistency of a system may be altered in time and space, its behavior determined both by external conditions and its mechanisms of control. (ibid.: 17)

Burnham looked at the work of a number of artists who exemplify these ideas, including Marcel Duchamp, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the GRAV group, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Carl André, Dan Flavin and Hans Haacke. These artists repudiate the traditional craft function of art as a means of producing material entities. Instead their aesthetic impulse manifests itself through a concern with ‘the means of research and production’. Haacke’s work in particular, which at the time was mostly concerned with systems and feedback, rather than politics, exemplifies the systemic and cybernetic ideas that Burnham was interested in. ‘Systems Esthetics’ was Burnham’s

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attempt to understand and delineate the shape and form of the art practices emerging in the late 1960s, which were becoming known as ‘conceptual art’, ‘land art’ and ‘minimalism’. For him they prefigure humankind’s necessary transformation, in the emerging technocratic ‘superscientific culture’, from homo faber to homo arbiter formae, the ‘maker of aesthetic decisions’ (ibid.: 24), and the arbiter of how the increasingly advanced tools of industrial civilization will be used. This will ‘control the quality of all future life on earth’. In such a situation, ‘the most important artist best succeeds by liquidating his position as artist vis à vis society’ (ibid.: 16). A year after he published ‘Systems Esthetics’ and following a period as Fellow at Gyorgy Kepes’ Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he used a time-sharing computer at the Lincoln Laboratory, Burnham followed up some of the same ideas in another paper, also published in Artforum, entitled ‘Real Time Systems’. Here he developed a full-blown systems theory of art, starting with the trenchant observation that ‘[P]resently it will be accepted that art is an archaic information processing system, characteristically Byzantine rather than inefficient’ (ibid.: 27). He compared art to a large computer system in which artists are ‘programs and subroutines’ which ‘prepare new codes and analyze data in making works of art’. Such activities are supervised by ‘metaprograms’, which ‘consist of instructions, descriptions, and the organizational structures of programs’. Examples of metaprograms include ‘art movements, significant stylistic trends, and the business, promotional and archival structures of the art world’ (ibid). Finally, the top level of this hierarchical command structure contains a self-metaprogram which, on a long-term basis, reorganizes the goal of the art impulse. The self-metaprogram operates as an undetected overseer, establishing strategies on all lower levels in terms of societal needs. Because we have no comprehensive picture of human life, these needs remain rather obscure (Zeitgeist is not sufficiently teleologic to express the anticipatory monitoring function of the self-metaprogram). (ibid.)

Burnham extended this informational metaphor by describing art in terms more familiar from business management, as he admits. The

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self-metaprogram is the source of values, but they in turn are simply the result of ‘long-term information processing structures’, such as galleries, museums and art historians. The survival strategy of such institutions is to transform ‘preferred information into values’. Thus ‘critics, magazines, galleries, collectors and historians exist to create information out of unprocessed art data [i.e. the stuff that artists produce]. History is uncertainty about art minimized.’ This understanding of art as an information system allowed Burnham to dispense with a ‘major illusion of the art system’, that ‘art resides in specific objects’. He pointed out that, without the support system of the institutions that process art data to make information, the object ceases to be defined as a work of art, but the system can continue to operate and support the notion of art without objects. Thus art is no longer restricted to ‘canonical or given forms’ but can embrace ‘every conceivable experiential mode, including living in everyday environments’ (ibid.). Burnham compared this to the difference between computer hardware and software. He suggested that if one recognizes the distinction between the message and its material substrate, analogous to that between software and its ‘physical transducer’, then all the means by which the ‘information processing cycle of art, books, catalogues, interviews, reviews, advertisements, sales and contracts can be recognised as the software extensions of art.’ This meant that [T]he art object is, in effect, an information ‘trigger’ for mobilizing the information cycle. Making, promoting, and buying art are real-time activities. That is to say, they happen within the day-to-day flow of normal experience. Only Art Appreciation happens in ideal, nonexistential time. (ibid.: 28)

Burnham contrasted the real-time activities of the art cycle to the idealized notion of art derived from the classical frame of reference, which simplifies and idealizes art experience and removes it from the flow of time. But this view, which is consonant with the idealizing and isolating activities of classical science, is no longer adequate to the emerging cybernetic and systems view of the world, or to the rapid development of information and communications technologies. Following McHale and Marshall McLuhan, Burnham proclaimed the then fashionable idea that, through

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such developments, the world is becoming recognizable as a ‘total organism with its own metabolism’ (ibid.: 29). Objectively we know very little about the rules of this metabolism. But we know that organic stability is predicated upon extensive communications networks, including memory, feedback and automatic decision-making capacities. The rudiments of such networks already exist, in the form of large-scale digital computer control systems. SAGE, the first computer-based air defense system, Project Mercury, the first real-time digital support system for space flight; Telefile, the first online banking; and SABRE, the first computerized airline reservation system are a few of many operating real time systems which gather and process data from environments, in time to effect future events within those environments. (ibid.)

Thus Burnham’s software metaphor was also intended to be taken literally: Emotionally most humanists share an instinctive antipathy for these immensely complex computer systems. Their Orwellian overtones far overshadow their conceivable use as artists’ tools. But practically it is imperative that artists do understand them – both technically and philosophically. These computer systems deal with real time events, events which are uncontrived and happen under normal circumstances. All of the data processing systems I have referred to are built into and become part of the events they monitor. Already a large part of the information used to run the military and commercial interests of the United States is real-time oriented. It is not proposed that artists have the choice between traditional media or using the computer. What I am saying is that the real-time information processing mode is rapidly becoming the routine style of handling information. (ibid.: 30)

For Burnham the emergence of real-time systems challenged the role of art as traditionally perceived since the Renaissance, which has been ‘predicated upon nostalgia’. He continued that ‘[W]hat a few artists are beginning to give the public is real time information, information with no hardware value, but with software significance for effecting awareness of events in the present’ (ibid.). He presented a number of examples of what he meant through work by artists such as Hans Haacke, Dennis Oppenheim,

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Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, the art-engineering group Pulsa, and Les Levine, as well as a description of the Berkeley People’s Park as a ‘real time work of art’. Near the end of the essay, following a description of Les Levine’s Levine’s Restaurant project, which involved opening a fully functioning Irish-Jewish-Canadian restaurant, Burnham stated that [A]t present the art communication and education structure is hardly prepared to handle such a broad conception of art as Levine’s. For that matter it breaks down frequently with current definitions. Any fundamental shift will probably involve the complete absorption of art into the media. But the reality of art continues to reside in its unreality. Any progress in the development of real time art recognizes that conceptual focus must keep the two apart . . . To use [a] cybernetic analogy, artists are ‘deviation-amplifying’ systems, or individuals who, because of psychological makeup are compelled to reveal psychic truths at the expense of the existing societal homeostasis. With increasing aggressiveness, one of the artist’s functions, I believe, is to specify how technology uses us. (ibid.: 37–8)

Many of these ideas were also expounded in a lecture Burnham gave at the Guggenheim in 1969, entitled ‘The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems’, which also followed from his experiences as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. In the talk, he made the connection between emerging art practice and developments in computing technology even more explicit. Although the art of the future could take any one of a number of directions, it seems to me that, with the steady evolution of information processing techniques in our society, an increasing amount of thought will be given to the aesthetic relationship between ourselves and our computer environments – whether or not this relationship falls into the scope of the fine arts. (Burnham, 1970a: 95)

For Burnham the example of such technologies offered an entirely new form of aesthetics: The continued evolution of both communication and control technologies bodes a new type of aesthetic relationship, very different from the one way

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communication of traditional art appreciation as we know it . . . [t]he ‘aesthetics of intelligent systems’ could be considered as a dialogue where two systems gather and exchange information so as to change constantly the states of each other. (ibid.: 96) As our involvement with electronic technology increases, however, the art experience may undergo a process of internalisation where the constant twoway exchange of information becomes a normative goal. We should rightfully consider such a communication shift as an evolutionary step in aesthetic response. (ibid.: 100)

It must be noted that Burnham was writing at a time when the potential for computers to be communications and control devices was far from generally obvious. As Burnham himself points out, We tend to think of the computer at its present stage of development as a super-fast calculator or data file, few of us conceive of it as a system which can reorganise many remote environments and channel them into a sustained and coherent experience. (ibid.: 100)

But the actual potential of computers for making art was not Burnham’s only concern, even if he did devote much of the talk to current developments, for example the work of computer scientists such as A. Michael Noll and the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the ICA, as well as work going on in artificial intelligence and cybernetic systems, including work by Nicholas Negroponte and Marvin Minsky at MIT. His interest was as much in the more general shift in art practice that mirrored developments in computing technology, and reflected upon the world it was bringing about. To this end he discussed the work of Dennis Oppenheim, Douglas Huebler, Hans Haacke and other artists involved in constructed environments and responsive works of art, as well as those more explicitly involved with technology, such as James Seawright, Pulsa and Les Levine. He also admitted that It is unrealistic to expect artists to begin to use computers the way they use paints, canvas and wielded steel. As a rule, new and exotic technology has not led

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to the production of great or even good art. Somehow the aesthetic implications of a technology become manifest only when it becomes pervasively, if not subconsciously, present in the life-style of a culture. In terms of a public utility, we are at least ten to fifteen years away from the kinds of machine creativity I have discussed. But if I have tried to make an argument for an eventual evolution toward two-way communication in art, it is because present circumstances point in that direction. (ibid.: 119)

He continued in similar prescient mode to point out that computers will radically reorganise social values, although in the first stages they may do it badly. I believe that they will be seen as one of the few reasonable alternatives to continued social, technical and ecological chaos. My hope is that the initial complexity of these information systems will not prevent substantial numbers of artists from thinking about and using them. (ibid.: 120)

It was a result of hearing this talk that Karl Katz, Director of the Jewish Museum in New York, invited Burnham to curate a show that would embody his ideas. This resulted in Software, Information Technology, its New Meaning for Art, which opened in 1970. The title derived from Burnham’s metaphorical description of the difference between an artwork’s material substrate and its message in terms of computer hardware and software. In Software Burnham was able to put into practice his ideas about the future of art in a world increasingly dominated by information communication technologies. As Burnham wrote in the catalogue It demonstrates in a limited sense the effects of control and communication techniques in the hands of artists. Most importantly it provides the means by which the public can personally respond to programmatic situations structured by artists . . . In just the past few years, the movement away from art objects has been precipitated by concerns with natural and man-made systems, processes, ecological relationships and the philosophical-linguistic involvement of Conceptual Art. All of these interests deal with art that is transactional in that they deal with underlying structures of communication and energy exchange instead of abstract appearances. (Burnham, 1970b: 10)

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True to his earlier proclamations Burnham refused to distinguish between art and non-art in his choice of exhibits, though he did divide the show up structurally according to a scheme derived from Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass. The bottom two floors were mostly computers and experiments, while the third floor consisted of work by conceptual artists. Such an apparently simple description fails to convey the peculiarly eclectic mix of exhibits that made up the show, which, far from being simply divided into two approaches, ran along a spectrum between straightforward technological application and immaterial conceptualism. At one end of the spectrum were a number of research applications of computing and electronic technology, including the Smith-Kettlewell Institute of Visual Sciences’ Vision Substitute System which aimed to turn visual imagery into some form of tactile sensation, and Sonia Sheridan’s Interactive Paper Systems, which demonstrated various artistic uses of a 3M Thermofax Machine, an early colour photocopier. At the other extreme there were a number of works of conceptual art, including John Baldessari’s Cremation Piece, for which he proposed to have all his extant art works burned in a mortuary and interred in the Jewish Museum; Douglas Huebler’s Variable Pieces and Location Pieces, which are composed entirely of instructions to the viewer/participant; Donald Burgy’s Selected Mental Characteristics of Donald Burgy, which consisted of a range of medical and scientific data about the artist,and his Question-Answer, which was a transcript of a conversation along with the results of a polygraph (lie detector); Lawrence Weiner’s text piece, An Accumulation of Information Takes from Here to There; Alan Kaprow’s happening, Work, in which a hall was painted and repainted over three weeks; and perhaps the most extreme, Vito Acconci’s Room Situation, for which he proposed to stand near people visiting the show, and intrude on their personal space. (Though Nam June Paik’s contribution may be considered more immaterial, consisting as it did, of a polite and poetic refusal to participate, which was reproduced in the catalogue.) Perhaps the most highly developed conceptual work was Joseph Kosuth’s The Seventh Investigation (Art as Idea as Idea) Proposition One. This work displayed the same text in a number of different contexts: a billboard in English and Chinese in the Chinatown neighborhood of lower Manhattan; an advertisement in The Daily World; and a banner in Turin (in Italian, which was temporarily on display at the Museum of Modern Art’s Information exhibition).

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In many ways the most interesting work in Software was that which lay between the two extremes. Part of the interest lies in how difficult it is to respond to these works and to place them in an art-historical context. Unlike the purely technical exhibits, which can be considered as research, or the conceptual pieces described above, which have been enfolded into the canon of contemporary art history, these works remain strangely intriguing and provocative. For example, Agnes Dene’s Dialectic Triangulation, A Visual Philosophy is almost impossible to grasp, from the catalogue at least, even from its instantiation as a computer display, Matrix of Knowledge and Trigonal Ballet, though it is also described in Lucy Lippard’s Six Years (1997: 107–8). Other works included Theodosius Victoria’s Solar Audio Window Transmission, in which the windows of the Jewish Museum were connected up to solar batteries and radio units, in order to transmit broadcasts from various public-service channels; Scott Bradner and Jack Nolan’s Floor Show, in which computer-controlled and interactive spots of light were projected onto the floor to mimic the behaviour of fish; Allen Razdow and Paul Conly’s COMPOSER, which used the latest in synthesizer technology to present an interactive, random music-making machine; and Robert Barry’s Ultrasonic Wave Piece, in which ultrasonic waves were reflected off interior surfaces, filling the selected area with invisible changing patterns and forms. Carl Fernbach Florsheim’s Boolean Image/Conceptual Typewriter showed the potential of a computer to produce concrete poetry, while John Giorno set up a series of daily radio transmissions to broadcast programmes of poetry readings within the Museum. The most important works to explore the use of technology at a practical as well as theoretical level were probably Ted Nelson’s Labyrinth, Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Architecture Machine Group’s Seek and the two works by Hans Haacke, Visitor’s Profile and News. In retrospect the first would appear to be little more than an electronic database, or what Nelson called an ‘interactive text retrieval system/catalogue’, but it was also described as ‘the first public demonstration of a hypertext system’ (Burnham, 1970b: 18). In this it anticipated many of the developments in computing that would take place over the next couple of decades, including that emerging from XeroxPARC, later taken up by Apple, which led to the first commercial instantiations of hypermedia or what later became known as multimedia,

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as well as the structure of the World Wide Web. Seek was a curious art/ research hybrid involving a collection of metal cubes, a computer-controlled grabber arm and a number of gerbils. The idea was that the gerbils would disrupt the ordered cubes and the arm would re-order them. In some ways it is a paradigmatic piece of cybernetic art. Of Haacke’s two pieces, News is comparatively banal, involving some ticker-tape machines to ceaselessly spew out their tape. Visitor’s Profile on the other hand was far more ambitious. The idea was to collect, collate and tabulate data gathered from visitors by questionnaires via a DEC PDP 8 computer. Unfortunately the computer, which also controlled a number of the other exhibits, failed to work properly for the first month. This, along with other problems, including fights among the gerbils used for Seek and the budget being greatly exceeded, meant that the show did not transfer to the Smithsonian as planned, and was widely considered to be a failure. Agnes Denes was sufficiently disgusted by both the absence of adequate computing equipment and the attitude of the technicians to write to Studio International, a protest supported by a number of other artists in a letter published in the same issue. The show also drew fire on account of its sponsorship by American Motors Corporation. Burnham certainly considered it to have failed, and in the end refused to have anything to do with the show. In the mid-1970s he published a melancholy and even bitter essay entitled ‘Art and Technology, the Panacea that Failed’ (Woodward, 1980: 200–15), in which he describes the major art and technology initiatives of the late 1960s and early 1970s. These included Cybernetic Serendipity, Maurice Tuchman’s 5-year-long Art and Technology project at the Los Angeles County Museum, the work of EAT, and of the Centre for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT as well as Software. In each case he speculates why they had not succeeded and, more generally, why the use of new technologies and related ideas such as cybernetics by artists had failed to be the – or even a – future of art. Though prepared to accept technical or aesthetic incompetence as part of the problem, he also proposes that, at a deeper level, between art and technology there is a ‘radical dissimilarity as systems of human semiosis’. He suggested that [M]y experiences with semiology and iconography lead me to believe that the enormous vitality and will-to-change behind Western Art is in a sense an illusion,

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just as technology harbours its own illusionary impulses. Only within the past ten years have we begun to accept the possibility that technological solutions are not universal panaceas. Gradually but surely, much of it in unspoken terms, we are beginning to accept evidences that scientific research and technological invention have their boundaries. Such a speculation would have been nearly unthinkable fifteen years ago when scientific grants were plentiful and the avant garde was the key to artistic success. Perhaps technology is only a matter of man-made or artificial negentropy which because of its enormous productive capacity and ability to aggrandize perception into convenient and coherent package of ‘information’, we perceive as invincible, life-stabilizing, all-meaningful and omnipotent. (Woodward, 1980: 212)

At the time, however, the failure of art and technology and of the systems aesthetic was not so obvious. In the early 1970s artists, theorists and critics were still suggesting that the coming together of art and information communications technologies represented the future of art. In 1970 Gene Youngblood published Expanded Cinema, one of the most futurist conceptions of the future of art and technology, in which systems theory, cybernetics, the ideas of Buckminster Fuller (who wrote the introduction) and John McHale, are invoked in relation to examples of experimental film and video work. Jonathan Benthall’s Science and Technology in Art Today was published in 1972 as part of Thames & Hudson’s World of Art series, and a year later Artforum published a dialogue between John McHale and Alvin Toffler discussing the ‘future and functions of art’ in distinctly futurological terms. Also in 1973, Douglas Davis published Art and the Future, which unabashedly presented the future of art as likely to develop from art and technology initiatives. In one sense the coming together of art and real-time technology was part of a broader set of movements and strategies, described by Adrian Henri as ‘total art’, which also included performance, multimedia environments, installation art, video art, destruction in art, land art, mail art as well as what was beginning to be known as conceptual art. In his Total Art, Environments, Happenings, and Performance, he devotes four or so pages out of about two hundred to art and technology (Henri, 1974: 70–4). In one sense this is a perfectly adequate reflection of the comparative status of such work, as it was perceived at the time, and considerably more generous than more

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recent histories of the period, which tend to ignore or at least completely marginalize such art and technology initiatives. But, at another level, work of this sort came closest to expressing the ‘systems consciousness’ that permeated much of the art of the period, but which was mostly disavowed. Whatever its acknowledged or explicit intentions, the post-war avant-garde strongly reflected the context in which it developed, in which new systemic, cybernetic and informational ways of thinking and new forms of technology were of increasing importance. It is possible to speculate that part of the problem with art and technology and its apparent disappearance after the early 1970s was that it revealed and even celebrated the technical and technocratic nature of avant-garde art, especially in light of the increasing criticism of the instrumentality of modern technology and technological thinking by pundits such as Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger, as well as the use of hi-tech means in the Vietnam War and elsewhere. Nevertheless, art involving the explicit use of technology continued to be made, by Roy Ascott, Stelarc, Robert Adrian, Woody and Steina Vasulka and others. But by 1970 the writing was, in one sense quite literally, on the wall. Earlier in the same year as Software, the Museum of Modern Art put on a show that, ostensibly at least, was looking at very similar ideas. The introduction to the catalogue of Information, written by its curator Kynaston McShine, suggested, in the light of ‘the general social, political, and economic crises that are almost universal phenomena in 1970’, that [O]ne necessity is . . . to move with the cultural stresses and preoccupations (as if you had a choice), particularly with the obvious changes in life style. The art cannot afford to be provincial, or to exist only within its own history with its own history, or to continue to be, perhaps, only a commentary on art. An alternative has been to extend the idea of art, to renew the definition, and to think beyond the traditional categories – painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, film, theatre, music, dance and poetry. Such distinctions have become increasingly blurred. Many of the highly intellectual and serious young artists represented here have addressed themselves to the question of how to create an art that reaches out to an audience larger than that which has been integrated in contemporary art in the last few decades. Their attempt to be poetic and imaginative without being either aloof or condescending has led them into the communications areas that INFORMATION reflects. (McShine, 1970)

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This sounds similar to the aspirations Burnham had for Software, and some artists exhibited in both shows. Yet Information showed none of the more technologically oriented work that had been such a feature of Software, and which was being actively pursued by Maurice Tuchman with his Art and Technology project at LACMA, or by EAT. Though video and film was included, the majority of the work could be described as conceptual art, and as such was concerned with a critical engagement with language and systems of signification. Information can thus be thought of as the moment when art and technology and conceptual art went their separate ways, the former to a couple of decades of obscurity and the latter to become the dominant paradigm of art practice. Recent scholarly work, most particularly by Edward Shanken (1999, 2002) and Simon Penny (1999), has been dedicated to recovering the forgotten heritage of art and technology and to show its disavowed relation to conceptual art. Perhaps the real issue about art and technology was not that it failed, but rather than it succeeded too well. Or rather, that the promises made by art and technology for the future of technology were realized to such an extent that the role of the artist, as a mediator between society and accelerating social change, became irrelevant, or even impossible. As we have seen, in his 1969 essay ‘Real-Time Systems’ Burnham had written about the emergence of the eponymous ‘real-time systems’, such as SAGE and SABRE, which ‘gather and process data from environments, in time to effect future events within those environments’. Burnham imagined the role of the artist as also giving the public ‘real-time information, information with no hardware value, but with software significance for effecting awareness of events in the present’. He suggested that this would lead to a situation in which ‘the most important artist best succeeds by liquidating his position as artist vis à vis society’. Burnham was unusually prescient, but even he could not have foreseen the rate at which real-time and network computing was developed and has become part of everyday life. When he was writing such statements computers were still largely inaccessible and esoteric. It is possible that, for Burnham and other advocates of their use in art, it was that very inaccessibility that made them interesting. They were as much fantasy objects upon which utopian ideas about the future could be projected as they were practical tools for artists to use in their everyday practice.

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It is with this in mind that we can understand the relation between art that uses new technologies and conceptual art. At the end of the 1960s it was sometimes hard to distinguish between the two. Burnham certainly conflated them and regarded both as similar kinds of response to a world increasingly mediated and dominated by complex real-time systems of technology. But, by the early 1970s conceptualism was becoming the dominant mode of practice within contemporary art, while art using new technologies was beginning to disappear. This was partly because much of what such art represented or sought to achieve was co-opted by the computer industry, as part of its pursuit of greater effectiveness in its operations. Hypertext, inter/ multimedia and the fostering of networks of communication all became part of the ‘expanded field’ of computing as it developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile, confronted with the possibility of real-time systems, conceptual art represented a strategy of resistance to the performativity and instrumentality of the use of language they represented. By concentrating on the problems of communication and language, conceptualism was thus a kind of delay in the processes of information transmission, a node at which they were interrupted and diverted, or, in Shannonian terms, ‘noise’. By interrupting the smooth transmission of information it was possible to interrogate the structures and systems of power by which it was enabled.

CHAPTER 7

Is it Happening?

By the 1970s the dream of Cybernetic society that had haunted the 1960s seemed to be on the verge of being realized. In France at the end of the 1970s two academics, Simon Nora and Alain Minc, wrote a report for President Giscard d’Estaing which declared the ‘computerization of society’ and the advent of ‘telematics’, meaning the coming together of computers and telecommunications (Nora and Minc, 1980). Among other things, this led to the installation of Minitel, the networked public computer information system. In the late 1970s the possibilities offered by telematics inspired a number of artists to put together projects involving computers and telecommunications networks. One response to the Nora/Minc report was also a report, in this case commissioned by the government of Quebec from the philosopher JeanFrançois Lyotard on the state of knowledge in the Western world. The result, La Condition postmoderne, was published in French in 1979 (with an English translation in 1984). It can be considered not just a riposte to Nora and Minc’s futurological prognoses, but also a response to the world made possible by systems thinking and the technologies it had fostered. The first chapter defines the field quite explicitly as ‘knowledge in computerised societies’ (Lyotard, 1984: 4), and as such is concerned with the transformation of knowledge into information necessitated by the ‘proliferation of information-processing machines’ and their effect on the ‘circulation of learning’ (ibid.). Later, in 1985, Lyotard curated a massive exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Les Immatériaux, which aimed to show the cultural effects of new technologies and communication and information. Les Immatériaux

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was open between the end of March and the end of July of that year. At the time it was the most expensive exhibition the Pompidou had hosted, costing 8 million francs, taking two years and fifty people to put together. It occupied the whole of the fifth floor of the Centre, which had been entirely transformed into a maze of metal and grey gauze. The show’s physical and organizational size and complexity was matched by its philosophical ambitiousness. The ‘subject’ of the exhibition was how the existence of ‘new materials’, or rather, ‘immaterials’, mostly generated by computer and electronic technosciences, mediates and effects human activity and indeed the idea of the human. According to Lyotard the aim of the show was not just to examine the effects of such materials on culture, but to ‘question the idea of Man as a being who works, who plans and who remembers: the idea of an author’ (Lyotard, 1996: 159): Man’s anxiety is that he is losing his (so-called) identity as a ‘human being’. One aspect of ‘immaterials’, and by no means the most important, is that they imply just such a loss of identity. Just as material is the complement of a subject that masters it in order to attain his own particular ends, so also does the ‘immaterial’, in its contradictory concept, signify a material which is no longer matter (whether ‘brute’ or not) for a project. It reveals, for ‘Man’, a dissolution which is comparable to his own. Most of these ‘immaterials’ are generated from computer and electronics technosciences, or at least from techniques which share their approach. This very approach interferes with the identity of ‘Man’, understood as mind and will, or as consciousness and liberty. The word ‘human’, as substantive adjective, designates an ancient domain of knowledge and intervention which the technosciences now cut across and share; here they discover and elaborate ‘immaterials’ which are analogous (even if they are in general more complex) to those examined and detected in other fields. The human cortex is ‘read’ just like an electronic field; through the neurovegetative system human affectivity is ‘acted’ upon like a complex chemical organisation composed of information transmitted by media and according to diverse codes connected by interfaces where ‘translations’ take place. (ibid.: 162–3)

Lyotard expands this as follows: The exhibition attempts to characterise an aspect of our contemporary situation, associated with the new technological revolution. Whereas mechanical servants

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hitherto rendered services which were essentially ‘physical’, automatons generated by computer science and electronics can now carry out mental operations. Various activities of the mind have consequently been mastered. Thus the new technology pursues and perhaps accomplishes the modern project of becoming master and possessor. But in doing so it forces this project to reflect on itself; it disturbs and destabilises it. It shows that the mind of man is also part of the ‘matter’ it intends to master; and that, when suitably processed, matter can be organised in machines which in comparison may have the edge over mind. The relationship between mind and matter is no longer one between an intelligent subject with a will of its own and an inert object. They are now cousins in the family of ‘immaterials’. (ibid.: 165)

According to Lyotard the ‘operator’ for the exhibition is that of ‘communications or of “pragmatics” in the linguistic sense’ first formulated by Norbert Wiener and Harold Laswell and developed by Roman Jakobson, in which ‘all objects are messages’. This can be represented by two sets of two poles, joined by lines crossing each other. In the original scheme a message, which can be any object, is disseminated along the horizontal line, from a ‘sender’ pole to a ‘receiver’ pole. The vertical line has as one pole the distribution of the discrete elements that is the code of the message, which contains at least one bit of information about the other pole, the referent of the message (what it refers to). In the middle, at the point where the lines meet is the material instantiation and support of the message itself, in which the distribution of discrete elements out of which it is composed is actually embodied. As Lyotard points out the ‘general idea’ of this scheme is that, first, each of the poles is only relevant with respect to its relation to other poles and that any modification in the function of one of the poles leads to a destructuring and restructuring of the whole, in which case it becomes another message. Onto this scheme are mapped five terms generated from the Sanskrit root ‘mât’, meaning ‘to make by hand; to measure; to build’; ‘material’ itself along with ‘materiel’, ‘maternity’, ‘matter’ and ‘matrix’. Material stands for the support of the message, materiel for what handles its acquisition, transfer and collection, or in other words, the receiver, maternity for its sender, matter for its referent, and matrix for the message’s code (ibid.: 163–5).

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This scheme and these terms became the basis of the exhibition layout. The fifth floor of the Beaubourg was divided into five ‘zones’, one for each of the terms derived from ‘mât’. Each zone was composed of a number of ‘sites’. Each of the sixty or so sites was given a name representing a theme relevant to its particular term and to the show’s theme in general. In between the sites there were what Lyotard described as ‘desert’ or neutralized regions (ibid.: 169). Lyotard described the arrangement of the exhibition as being organized according to a ‘postmodern space time’, in contradistinction to the modern space time of the traditional exhibition in which the subject uses only one of his [sic] senses, sight, to experience in a unified manner views (vedute) of heterogeneous data, and thereby to constitute himself as a subject of culture (ibid.: 167–8). The traditional gallery, according to Lyotard, is thus a means by which character is formed, much as, in narratives from The Odyssey to Joyce’s Ulysses, the hero travels to have adventures and returns fully formed. By contrast, postmodern space time is more like the experience of the modern city or of the contemporary conurbation, which is neither town, nor country, nor desert. The opposition between a centre and a periphery disappears, as does even the opposition between an inside (the city of men) and an outside (nature). You have to change the car radio wavelength several times, as you go through several different broadcasting zones. It is more like a nebula where materials (buildings, highways) are metastable states of energy. The streets and boulevards have no facades. Information circulates by radiation and invisible interfaces. (ibid.: 168)

This technologized, post-modern experience of space and time is what Lyotard and his collaborators intended to reproduce in the exhibition. ‘The eye will be deprived of the exclusive privilege it enjoys in the modern gallery. Nor will there be a clearly signposted itinerary, given the uneasy reflection which the exhibition wishes to provoke’ (ibid.). To emphasize this point the part of the catalogue that actually describes the contents of the exhibition, the Inventaire, is in the form of unbound sheets, with a separate sheet for each site, thus allowing them to be put into any order, much as the sites themselves could, in theory at least, be visited. To some extent this was a little disingenuous. Much as the physical limitations of the gallery dictated

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many aspects of the visitor’s experience, so the Inventaire still of necessity resembles a book, albeit without binding, with a title page and introductory matter and a general, linear organization. To randomly mix together the sheets might engage with some of the organizers’ philosophical ideas, but would render the document fairly useless. In order, it offers a helpful view of the show’s organization as well as its contents, especially when used in tandem with the map supplied on one of the sheets and also in the Album section of the catalogue. Ironically, given the critique of the totalizing nature of the book form and of the exhibition that Les Immatériaux was engaged in, the Inventaire is one of the only remaining means, apart from the few descriptions from contemporary reviews and accounts, through which to gain some sense of what the show was like to visit. What neither the Inventaire nor contemporary accounts can offer, of course, is any sense of the multimedia and interactive aspects of the show – the elements, in other words, which engaged with senses other than the visual. Indeed it was the extra-visual elements of which visitors were first made aware. Before entering they were given headphones, through which they would be able to hear different, highly localized broadcasts for each zone of appropriate texts, accompanied by musical sound effects. These included sections from works by Beckett, Blanchot, Proust, Zola, Michaux, Virilio, Barthes, Borges, Yves Klein, Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll and others. After passing an Egyptian bas-relief in the entrance to the show, accompanied by the sound of whispering on the soundtrack, the visitor enters the first space, a mirrored vestibule, entitled the Theatre of the NonBody. Here to the accompaniment of a section from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable they were confronted by five tableaux, ‘boîtes’, put together by Beckett’s set designer, Jean-Claude Fall, each showing a kind of stage scene or other space, devoid of figures or much in the way of props. As the Inventaire put its, ‘each box introduces visually one of the five sequences which govern the exhibition’s concept: not the body [pas le corps]: material; not speech: matrix; not the other: materiel; not history: matter; not me: maternity; this vast site suggests the resistance of the body (me, here, now) to the dematerialisation of its contexts in the mediated existence’ (1985). These tableaux served as introductions to each of the five paths or zones that comprised the exhibition.

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Furthest from the entrance was start of the ‘Material’ zone or path. This was comprised of twelve sites – ‘futile body’; ‘second skin’; ‘angel’; ‘singing body’; ‘shattered body’; ‘“ultra-thin”’; ‘lost surface’; ‘indiscernibles’; ‘dematerialised material’; ‘luminous painting’; ‘to paint without a body’; ‘all the copies’. Among the objects shown in this section were photographs by Muybridge, plastic skin, music videos by Elvis Costello and others, paintings of exploded body elements such as cells and tissue, electro-microscope images of dust, paper and various metals, various works of art relating to invisibility by Duchamp and others, works of art involving light by MoholyNagy, Takis, Fontana, Flavin, Ryman and others, hyperrealist paintings by Jacques Monory (a particular favourite of Lyotard), and photocopies of various objects including some Emmental cheese. The next zone down was ‘Matrix’. Here there were nine sections – ‘all the skins’; ‘dietary allowance’; ‘all the noises’; ‘living language’; ‘game of draughts’; ‘code number’; ‘hidden variables’; ‘small and invisible’; ‘flat architecture’. Objects shown included photographs of people in uniform by Irving Penn, musical notation, images of DNA, a computer game of draughts, photographs of stars overlain with astronomical data, a computer with a questionnaire for members of the public, rooms with the same decoration but with different forms of lighting, architectural plans. The third zone was ‘Materiel’, which had only six sites – ‘invisible man’; ‘habitacle’; ‘fast eater’; ‘musician in spite of himself ’; ‘self-engendering’; ‘stellar hollows’. This zone included holographs, Japanese sleeping cells, tableaux representing different kinds of meal from the family repast to fast food, a room in which the visitor’s movements made music, film showing a polystyrene car maquette made by an automatic manufacture system, and a panoramic projection showing stellar activity. The fourth zone, ‘Matter’, had eleven sites – ‘shadow of the shadow’; ‘trace of the trace’; ‘reciprocal space’; ‘light undressed’; ‘the unpresentable’; ‘calculated images’; ‘painted smell’; ‘simulated aroma’; ‘simulated visits’; ‘simulated depth’; ‘inverted reference’. Here the works included a piece by Joseph Kosuth on representations of shadows, a selection of anonymous photographs, images made by laser and by mathematical calculation, paintings by Seurat, Balla, Delaunay, Malevich and others, in which light is the subject as well as the means (‘vertige de l’autoréférence’ enthuses the catalogue

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text), tables of various kinds of data, paintings and images by Duchamp, Chardin, Kounellis and Manzoni representing smells, rooms with synthesized images and smells of fruit, simulated rides on public transport, architectural models and an attempt at a holographic film. The final section, ‘Maternity’, had seven sites – ‘life-style’; ‘the three mothers’; ‘pre-cooked, pre-spoken’; ‘today’s currency’; ‘business painting’; ‘forgotten land’; ‘all the authors’. Among its objects were images of clothing, of foetuses and pregnant women, computers which could engage the visitor in ‘false dialogue’ accompanied by tableaux of ‘pre-cooked food’, screens showing financial information from around the world, paintings of images of business from Metsys to Warhol, images of bricks and other materials used by famous architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto. Beyond the five zones was the ‘Labyrinth of Language’. This was an area mostly devoted to computer systems supporting a number of different programs, including original work by artists made for telematic systems, videodiscs of images, IQ testing machines, maths games machines, machines that solved problems posed by the public, machines that produced permutations of stories or songs, or that allowed users to make up their own stories, interactive stories, programs for generating literature devised by ALAMO, a group of literary experimentalists, with a special interest in the use of computers, closely allied with the experimental literature group, Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (OULIPO), and videos of spectrographic analyses of voice and text. Perhaps the most interesting element of the Labyrinth of Language area was the ‘Writing Tests’ area. This gave the visitor access to a number of dialogues or conversations between thirty writers and thinkers, on fifty topics relevant to the exhibition. These dialogues were conducted over a period of two months via networked computers on France’s Minitel system, and were, in effect, a proto-bulletin board system. Visitors were able to read the ensuing discussions on terminals in the exhibition, as well as read them in transcripts printed as part of the catalogue material. Among the topics discussed were ‘Artificial’, ‘Code’, ‘Interface’, ‘Nature’, ‘Time’, ‘Language’, and ‘Voice’. The more well-known among those involved in the discussion included Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Daniel Buren, Michel Butor, Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Isabelle Stengers.

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It is noteworthy that, in an exhibition devoted to the cultural implications of new technologies, Lyotard included very little art made using such technologies (with the peculiar exception of some holographic work), though a great deal of interesting work was being done at the time in this area. For example in 1979 Bill Bartlett organized Interplay, a computer communications project, involving near-instantaneous response, for the Computer Culture conference of that year in Toronto. This led to the founding in 1980 of ARTBOX, an electronic mailbox program for artists to organize communications projects. In 1982 ARTBOX was renamed ARTEX, under which name it hosted a number of important telematic projects. Among the most well-known of these was Roy Ascott’s La Plissure du Texte, proposed for ELECTRA 1983, and Frank Popper’s survey of the use of electricity in art, held at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1983. For La Plissure du Texte, which was on-line for twelve days, 24 hours a day, Ascott invited artists and groups from eleven cities to help create an evolving, participatory fairy tale. Another important venue for such work was a short-lived series of festivals, which took place in the imaginary city Wiencouver, i.e. between Vienna (Wien) and Vancouver. According to one of its founders, Hank Bull, Wiencouver was conceived and initiated when Bull flew from Vancouver to Vienna to attend Audio Scene 79, in order to set up networks of correspondence between the two cities. The following year Wiencouver II involved a mail art exchange exhibition, in which contributions were shown simultaneously in venues in each city. A special global artists’ telecom conference was also organized by Bill Bartlett, which involved communicating with a dozen other cities through slowscan video, and collaging an enormous text by computer. Wiencouver III, 1982, was one of the venues for The World in 24 Hours, one of the most important telematic art events of the period. It was conceived of and directed by Robert Adrian X, and also based at the Ars Electronica. The latter festival had first been held in Linz, Austria, in 1979 was developed especially to explore the cultural effect of computers and electronic technologies. The World in 24 Hours connected artists in sixteen cities on three continents from noon on 27 September to noon the next day. The available media were slow-scan television, telefacsimile, sound transmission and computer. Using these means artists were invited to exchange works, improvisations and information. Wiencouver IV in 1983, the last in the series,

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hosted Telephone Music (TelefonMusik), in which sound and music performances by artists communicating by phone in several cities, were amplified. Les Immatériaux did contain an eclectic range of materials and exhibits, including scientific imaging, rock videos, photographs, film as well as paintings and sculpture. It is also noticeable that the representatives of the last two categories remained mostly avant-garde. Among the artists featured in Les Immatériaux were Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Takis, Lucio Fontana, Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, Jacques Monory, Joseph Kosuth, Georges Seurat, Giacomo Balla, Robert Delaunay, Kazimir Malevich, Marcel Duchamp, Jannis Kounellis and Piero Manzoni. This concentration on the canonical avant-garde was not just a reflection of Lyotard’s own taste, but an expression of his strongly held belief that only such work could properly express or invoke the sublime. For Lyotard it is the canonical avant-garde that fulfils what he sees as the ‘task’ of art since the late nineteenth century; to ask the question ‘what is painting?’ In an interview with Bernard Blistène in Flash Art he takes the then-emerging school of neoexpressionist or transavantgarde painters to task for evincing ‘a vague return with the enjoyment experienced by the viewer’ (Blistène, 1990: 131). Lyotard’s exclusion of such work has been strongly criticized by Paul Crowther. He suggests that such an exclusion is based on a conflation of an empirical theory about a changed sensibility founded on technoscientific advance on the one hand, and an idea about the canonical avant-garde as authentic on the other (Crowther, 1992: 197). Furthermore, according to Crowther, the latter is, ironically, nothing more nor less than an example of the kind of emancipatory metanarrative about which Lyotard was so critical in The Postmodern Condition. As Crowther points out, the eclectic, pleasurable and playful experimentation of the neoexpressionists actually confirms Lyotard’s conception of art by showing that ‘painting can be developed in an inexhaustible number of directions’ (ibid.). Rather than explicitly presenting the unpresentable space of infinite possibility, ‘each new work simply demonstrates that the idea of totalised, “definitive” absolute painting is nonsense – there is always more to be done’ (ibid.). One explanation for Lyotard’s investment in the formal strategies of the canonical avant-garde is to be found in his essay on ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ in which he discusses the work of the abstract painter Barnett

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Newman. For Lyotard, Newman’s famous ‘zip’ pictures, featuring single vertical stripes of colour, devoid as they are of almost any content, elicit a sense of the sublime by providing access to the time of the event, the ‘is it happening?’, prior to any conceptualization, which can only be approached through a state of privation (Lyotard, 1991: 90). Newman’s paintings thus offer an experience of the sublime as defined by Burke (rather than Kant, with whose conception of the sublime Lyotard is usually associated). For Burke the sublime is ‘kindled by the threat of nothing further happening’. This is bound up with Burke’s notion of ‘terror’. ‘Terrors are linked to privation: privation of others, terror of solitude: privation of light, terror of darkness: privation of language, terror of silence: privation of objects, terror of emptiness: privation of life, terror of death. What is terrifying is that the It Happens does not happen, that it stops happening’ (ibid.: 99). The contemplation of these terrors from a point of safety or their lessening or suspension also causes a privation, the deprivation of the threat of being deprived of light, language, life, the ‘it is happening’ (ibid.). The relief of thus being deprived brings what Burke calls ‘delight’ and is, for him, the source of the sensation of the sublime (ibid.). This is contrasted with the technical manipulation of time within contemporary capitalism in which ‘[T]he massive subordination of cognitive statements to the finality of the best possible performance – which is a technical criterion’ brings with it ‘the disappearance of the temporal continuum through which the experience of generations used to be transmitted’ (ibid.: 105). The availability of information is the only criterion of social importance. Now information is by definition a short-lived element. As soon as it is transmitted and shared, it ceases to be information, it becomes an environmental given, and ‘all is said’, ‘we know’. It is put into the machine memory. The length of time it occupies is, so to speak, instantaneous. Between two pieces of information, ‘nothing happens’, by definition. (ibid.: 105–6)

Actually the situation is not quite as simple as it might appear. Lyotard suggests that ‘there is a kind of collusion between capital and the avant garde’ and that the scepticism and destruction it brings into play ‘encourages among artists a mistrust of established rules and a willingness to experiment

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with means of expression, with styles, with ever-new materials’. He suggests that ‘there is even something of the sublime in the capitalist economy’ in that it is regulated by the Idea of ‘infinite wealth or power’ which cannot be verified and therefore makes ‘reality increasingly ungraspable, subject to doubt, unsteady’ (ibid.: 105). But in the end capitalism confronts the terror that nothing further will happen through ‘the cynicism of innovation’, which ‘means to behave as though lots of things happened, and make them happen’. The difference between avant-garde experimentation and capitalist innovation is that [T]hrough innovation, the will affirms its hegemony over time. It thus conforms to the metaphysics of capital, which is a technology of time. The innovation ‘works’. The question mark of the Is it happening? stops. With the occurrence the will is defeated. The avant-gardist task remains that of undoing the presumption of the mind in respect to time. The sublime feeling is the name of this privation. (ibid.: 107)

Lyotard did not think art made using new technologies was capable of invoking this sublime feeling. In his 1985 essay ‘Something like: “Communication” . . . without Communication’, he most directly considered the relationship between art and new technology. Originally given as a paper at the ‘Art and Communication’ conference held at the Sorbonne in 1985, it concerned the possibility of art as something that is necessarily ‘universally communicable without the mediation of a concept’ (ibid.: 108). Here Lyotard took his cue from Kant, in suggesting that, unless art communicates without mediation, without concept, to a subjective but universal sensus communis, then it cannot claim to be beautiful and therefore cannot claim to be art (ibid.: 109). Lyotard suggests that ‘[T]his communicability, as it developed in the analysis of the Beautiful, is well and truly “anterior” to communication in the sense of “theories of communication”, which include communicative pragmatics’ (ibid.). For Lyotard, ‘[T]his is . . . what governs our problematic of “new technologies and art”, or, put differently, “art and postmodernity”’ (ibid.). He goes on to ask how this ‘community . . . irreducible to theories of communication . . . this communicability persist when the forms which should be its occasion are conceptually determined, whether in their

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generation or their transmission? What happens to aesthetic feeling when calculated situations are put forward as aesthetic? (ibid.: 110). For Lyotard, work produced by ‘the new techne’ by being determined by ‘one or more calculations, whether in their constitution and/or their restitution, or only in their distribution’ prevents what he calls the possibility of experiencing or ‘passibility’, which is something that happens to us, that seizes us, which cannot happen with something that ‘we have first controlled, programmed, grasped by a concept . . . or has first been plotted conceptually’ (ibid.: 110–11). He asked ‘[H]ow can it test us if we already know, or if we can know – of what, for what, it is done?’ Prior to any conception, and to any aesthetic philosophy and any theory of communication there must be something given to us, some ‘matter of sensation’ as opposed to its form, which can only come from some sort of Other or in Heideggerian terms, Being. ‘There does have to be something given first. The feeling is the immediate welcoming of what is given’ (ibid.: 111). Aesthetic feeling thus presupposes what is forgotten in representation – i.e., presentation, the fact of something existing now in time and space. The arts of representation hide the question of the here-and-now. As Lyotard put it, How can there be aesthetic feeling issuing from calculated re-presentation alone? How could the traces of the conceptual determination of the forms proposed by the new techne leave the free play of reflexive judgment which constitutes aesthetic pleasure? How could the communicability constitutive of this pleasure, which remains potential, promised and not affected, not be excluded by the conceptual determination of what is communicated in the product of these new technologies? (ibid.: 112)

Lyotard suggested that the issue is that, in modernity or postmodernity, there is a crisis of time and space, as ‘forms of donation of what happens’ (ibid.). For Kant, space and time are a priori forms of intuition, immediately available to us by means of sensibility. In the third Critique it is these forms of intuition that make feeling possible, and it is feeling that makes it possible to apprehend the ‘objects that float freely in time and space’ (ibid.: 113). But there are two forms of such feeling; the beautiful and the sublime, and

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the latter is manifested when the presentation of such free forms is lacking. Thus the sublime is directly related to the crisis of time and space as forms of donation. Lyotard related this to Heidegger’s notion of the retreat of being, which is also the retreat of donation. For Heidegger there is no longer the place and moment to welcome the sensory, the meaning embodied in the here and now before any concept, and this is what ‘signifies our current fate’ (ibid.). Thus for Heidegger the ‘Gestell’ or enframing of modern technology betokens the opposite kind of receptivity to the poetic form he perceived as being manifested in Ancient Greece. Lyotard points out that, while Heidegger was thinking of nuclear science as the apogee of techno-scientific thinking, ‘the in-stallation (same ‘root’ as stellen) of the concept of spacetime is infinitely more fine in the new technologies than it was with what Heidegger was familiar with’. Computer science and communication are one of the products of the general regime of the principle of reason that emerged with Leibniz (ibid.: 113–14). Lyotard engaged with this question through a reference to Hölderlin’s ‘Remarks on Oedipus’ in which he points out that the real tragedy of Oedipus is not the events in Oedipus Tyrannos, such as the murder and the incest, but in Oedipus at Colonus, in which nothing more happens to the hero, because his fate is already accomplished. Nothing happens is the essential feature of the drama, as well as of the question Lyotard intended to delineate, because ‘it is clear that communication is always, in every case, that nothing happens, and we are not destined’ (ibid.: 114). Lyotard quoted another ‘remarkable’ sentence of Hölderlin’s, in which he remarks that ‘[A]t the end extreme limit of distress, there is in fact nothing but the conditions of time and space’ (ibid.). This he takes as the melancholic condition of modernity, as delineated by Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit at the beginning of the nineteenth Century, in which ‘space and time have their truth not in themselves, that there is no here-and-now, that the sensible is always already mediated by the concept’ (ibid.: 115). Once time is alwaysalready a concept then there can be no art, other than by accident, thus the hegemony of the concept brings with it the end of art. According to Lyotard the avant-gardes have exploited this situation of there remaining only time and space without fate and thus without plot or narrative. They have been

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‘inflexible witnesses to the crisis of these foundations of which theories of communication and the new technologies are other aspects’ (ibid.). Lyotard then returned to the question of ‘passibility’ (which is not to be confused with the passive or opposed to the active): The demand for an activity or ‘interactivity’ instead proves that there should be more intervention, and that we are through with aesthetic feeling. When you painted, you did not ask for ‘interventions’ from the one who looked, you claimed there was a community. The aim nowadays is not that sentimentality you still find in the slightest sketch by a Cézanne or a Degas, it is rather that the one who receives should not receive, it is that s/he does not let him/herself be put out, it is his/her constitution as active subject in relation to what is addressed to him/her: let him/her reconstitute himself immediately and and identify himself or herself as someone who intervenes. What we live by and judge by is exactly this will to action. If a computer invites us to play or lets us play, the interest valorized is that the one receiving should manifest his or her capacity for initiative, activity, etc. We are thus still derivatives from the Cartesian model of ‘making oneself master and possessor . . .’ It implies the retreat of the passibility by which we alone are fit to receive and, as a result, even to modify and do, and perhaps even to enjoy. This passibility as jouissance and obligatory belonging to an immediate community is repressed nowadays in the general problematic of communication, and is even taken as shameful. But to take action in the direction of this activity which is so sought-after is only to react, to repeat, at best to conform feverishly to a game that is already given or installed. (ibid.: 116–17)

Lyotard finished the essay with a final set of questions: The question raised by the new technologies in connection to their relation to art is that of the here-and-now. What does ‘here’ mean on the phone, on television, at the receiver of an electronic telescope? And the now? Does not the ‘tele’ element necessarily destroy presence, the ‘here-and-now’ of the forms and their ‘carnal’ reception? What is a place, a moment, not anchored in the immediate ‘passion’ of what happens. Is a computer in any way here and now? Can anything happen with it? Can anything happen to it? (ibid.: 118)

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But, earlier in the essay he had offered a more positive view of what the world brought about, in part, by new technologies might offer: Is it the case that in this crisis, which bears on the conditions of space and time (with its two expressions: modern – there no longer remains anything but space and time; and postmodernism – we no longer even have space and time left) – is it the case that in this work, which we take up under the aspect of communication, there is simply the loss of something (donation or presentation) without there being some gain? We are losing the earth (Husserl), which is to say the here-and-now, but are we gaining something and how are we gaining it? Can the uprooting which is linked to the new technology promise us an emancipation? (ibid.: 116)

In the second volume of his work La Technique et le Temps Bernard Stiegler criticized Lyotard for making an untenable opposition between art and the cultures of digitization and thus ignoring the fundamental technicity of all art (Stiegler, 1996: 167). Responding to this criticism in an interview with Richard Beardsworth, Lyotard admitted that there are works of art that ‘pass through informational multimedia’ and ‘circulate in virtual memory’. But, he suggested, they are ‘culture’ not ‘art’, because they operate according to different temporalities, with art ‘not entering the circuit for fifty years or more’. He did say, however, that there is no reason why it is not possible to create works of art with the new informational, digital machines, given that ‘artists have always used every possible kind of support, every possible kind of material, every possible kind of tool’ (Beardsworth, 1999). The issue here is not a question of tools but of the sexual impetus that drives creativity. This means that ‘artists are going to complicate the “bit” of information, the digital. This is already happening, as you know. The electronic – video, television, film, the digital – is not negligible in itself. Here is a support that allows for the most astonishing, strange, unexpected operations’ (ibid.). But, Lyotard continued, [what] I would always want to insist on is the fact that a work is enigmatic. A work is absolutely there where one finds remainder. There is silence, a remainder, even in a book (perhaps more in a book than elsewhere, although it

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uses language). It is not true that a reading can exhaust the force of a work, that it can precisely draw it out in informational terms. This is because it partakes of a secret. The affective force of a work consists precisely in the fact that it will never be exhausted (in informational terms, for example). One may try to measure a work, in terms of its success, for example: this is culture. The power (puissance) of a work consists in this work reserving this silence of the sexual which drove it to being produced in the first place. (ibid.)

Sexuality is only a stage in the process of ‘negentropic complexification’ that Lyotard described in his essay ‘A Postmodern Fable’ (Lyotard, 1997). It is ‘postmodern’ for Lyotard, because it eschews and repudiates the eschatological and teleological hopes that underpin the grand narratives of modernity. In effect it proposes an understanding of the history of the universe, and of humankind’s place in it, in terms of the organization of energy against the effects of entropy. The fable Lyotard tells purports to see, for the purposes of the fable at least, the beginnings of life on earth, the development of scissiparity and of sexual reproduction, the emergence of the human and of human prostheses and tool use (which is understood in terms clearly derived from André Leroi-Gourhan), the invention of language, the rise of competition and of collective systems of control and regulation, as a long process of differentiation and complexification aimed at countering entropy. At this half-way point in the expected lifetime of the Sun, it appeared that the systems labelled liberal democratic showed themselves to be the most appropriate at exercising these regulations. They in effect left the control programs open to debate, they in principle allowed each unity to accede to decision functions, they thereby maximised the quantity of human energy useful to the systems. This flexibility turned out in the long run to be more efficient than the rigid fixation of roles in stable hierarchies. In opposition to the closed systems that had emerged in the course of human history, liberal democracies in their very core admitted a kind of competition between the units of the system. This space favored the blossoming forth of new material, symbolic and communitarian techniques. Of course, there thus resulted frequent crises that were sometimes dangerous for the survival of these systems. But on the whole, the performativity of the latter found itself increased. This process was called progress. (Lyotard, 1997: 89–90)

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Thus, according to the fable ‘the open systems won out completely over all the other systems’ (ibid.: 90). The only thing liable to check this progress, or ‘development’ as Lyotard also called it, is the ‘disappearance of the entire solar system’, a contingency for which the system is already planning, even though at the time of the telling of the fable the Sun is halfway through its projected existence, and will last for a further four and a half billion years. Thus ‘all research in progress [is] being directed to this aim’ including ‘logic, econometrics and monetary theory, information theory, the physics of conductors, astrophysics and astronautics, genetic and dietetic biology and medicine, catastrophe theory, chaos theory, military strategy and ballistics, sports technology, systems theory, linguistics and potential literature. Thus the human and his or her brain, or perhaps the brain and its human, whatever that would resemble at the time, will be enabled to ‘function with the aid only of the energy resources available in the cosmos’ and thus to be able to ‘leave the planet forever, before its destruction’ in the ‘final exodus of the negentropic system far from the earth’ (ibid.: 90–1). Lyotard pointed out that ‘development is not an invention made by humans. Humans are an invention of development. The hero of the fable is not the human species, but energy’ (ibid.: 92). But ‘[T]he hero is not a subject.’ Energy says nothing, knows nothing and wants nothing. ‘It obeys blind, local laws and chance’ (ibid.: 93). The human species may be the ‘most complex organisation of energy we know in the Universe’ but it is also transitory, and destined to be replaced by more complex forms if there is to be any hope of escaping solar death (ibid.). ‘The pursuit of greater complexity asks not for the perfecting of the Human, but its mutation or defeat for the benefit of a better performing system’ (ibid.: 99). Thus, as part of the process of negentropic complexification, the human is in the process of becoming ‘inhuman’. But, in the introduction to his collection The Inhuman he asserted that there are two sorts of ‘inhuman’, which must be disassociated. One is that of the ‘system’, otherwise known as ‘development’, which is concerned with speed and the ‘saving of time’ in ‘order to retain only the information which is useful to it’ and the ‘forgetting of what escapes it’. Against this Lyotard posited the other sort of the ‘inhuman’, the slow reading and writing and searching for the thing ‘within’. This ‘anamnesis’ is the ‘other of acceleration and abbreviation’ (Lyotard, 1991: 2–3).

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For Lyotard this enigmatic quality, this silence of the sexual, is exemplified in the work of Duchamp. Talking about the Large Glass, with its ‘stripping bare’ of the Bride and Étant Donnés, with its ‘discovery of the obscene body’, he suggests that they are ‘a plastic gamble, an attempt to outwit the gaze (and the mind) . . . to give an analogical representation of how time outwits consciousness’: the time it takes to ‘consume’ (experience, comment upon) these works is, so to speak, infinite: it is taken up by the search for apparition itself (the term is Duchamp’s) . . . Apparition means that something that is other occurs . . . One never finishes recounting The Large Glass and Étant Donnés. The Bride is enveloped in the story, or stories, induced by the strange names sketched on the scraps of paper of the Boxes, etched on the glass, represented by commentators. In the instructions provided for the installation of Étant Donnés, narrativity is held back and almost disappears, but it governs the very space of the obscene crèche. (ibid.: 78)

Lyotard pursues some similar thoughts in his essay ‘Can Thought Go On Without A Body?’ in which he suggests that creative acts involve more than just the selecting and tabulating of data, but of data giving themselves and of offering themselves for selection. This involves a kind of emptying of the mind and a suffering in order to open up to the thought, to receive it. ‘Thinking, like writing or painting, is almost no more than letting a givable come towards you’ (ibid.: 18). He compares this process to the working through or Durcharbeitung process of thought described by Freud. This kind of thinking cannot be reduced to the act of combining symbols with a set of rules (ibid.: 19). It has to wait for its rule. Thus the question is, how will artificial thinking machines be able to achieve this kind of thinking, that requires waiting, and that does not yet know what it will think? How will they be able to suffer the waiting needed for this kind of thinking? Will they suffer? Thinking is suffering, because it is hard to find new and different ways of thinking and to produce new things when thought is already inscribed and contained within culture (ibid.). In parentheses he remarks that

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we think in a world of inscriptions already there. Call this culture if you like. And if we think, this is because there’s still something missing in this plenitude and room has to be made for this lack by making the mind a blank, which allows the something else remaining to be thought to happen. (ibid.: 20)

That which is unthought is uncomfortable because we are comfortable with the already-thought. Thinking is the accepting of the discomfort that the unthought brings and trying to think the new in the forlorn hope that things will get better (ibid.). ‘That’s the hope sustaining all writing (painting, etc.): that at the end, things will be better (ibid.). For any machine to start thinking requires them to suffer because of what is not thought and because of what they remember, the ‘burden of memory’ (ibid.).


CHAPTER 8

Short Films about Flying

In 1972, a conversation between John McHale and Alvin Toffler, author of pop-futurology classic Future Shock, was published in the journal ARTNews on ‘the future and functions of art’ (Toffler and McHale, 1972). The image that introduced the article was a still from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, showing the astronaut Bowman in the Stargate. McHale observes that in the current context ‘the art work dissolves, the boundaries between the art work and life become permeable. The painting on the wall is not the important thing. It’s the total environment, the range of experiences’ (ibid.: 25). In reply Toffler suggests that we are also witnessing a shift from the collection of ‘things’ to the collection of ‘experiences’. We are moving toward what I call ‘experiential’ art. If that is correct, it implies other big changes. If we are going to buy experiences, we can use technology to do it. Holography, for example, or interactive video. (ibid.)

They discussed the idea of ‘tapping in more directly through ‘electronic brain stimulation’ (ibid.). McHale speculates about the possibility then of personalized kits of experience extending quite a long way, apart from the capacity to stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain. One could take an interior such as the room we’re in, and with various kinds of projection, with a certain amount of collapsibility – being able to collapse things down; say, plastics with memory – you could transform this rather contemporary setting very quickly into a Louis XIV interior with the feel of authenticity. And you could have the appropriate music, and whatever. (ibid.)

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Toffler points out that McHale has just described one of the final scenes in 2001. He goes on to suggest that it might be possible to ‘to create a kind of music of the spheres – this time I mean the spheres of the brain – by inputting electronic impulses [which] could indeed be structured and designed as a work of art’, and which could also be carried out ‘through drugs or chemistry’: One could, for example, think not only of sending electronic impulses to the brain, but also of creating experiences through drugs in which the pattern of the experience is in fact predetermined by the ‘chem artist’ who put the capsule together. (ibid.)

This vision of the future of art in terms of ever greater immediacy was entirely consonant with the ‘haunting’ of 1960s culture by the ‘dream of technical control and of instant information conveyed at unthought-of velocities’ noted by David Mellor and expressed by McHale, Burnham and others. The notion of real time art is taken to its logical conclusion, in which the experience of art no longer takes place by way of an external material instantiation and is beamed directly into the brain. In one of the most famous scenes of the film, Kubrick cuts between the arc of ascent of the thigh bone thrown up in triumph by the ape that (or perhaps who) has realized its usefulness as tool and weapon, and the slow, graceful drift downward of a space shuttle leaving Earth an orbiting space station some three million years later. The realization on the part of Kubrick’s apes that the thigh bone can be used as a tool represents what Kubrick calls the ‘Dawn of Man’. In the instant that separates the two frames Kubrick compresses the entire history of the relationship between the technical and the human, and makes a direct correlation between the first and most primitive tool use and the most sophisticated technological achievements of modern humanity (Debray, 2004: 6–7). It is interesting to speculate whether he had encountered the work of Leroi-Gourhan, given that Le Geste et La Parole was published in 1964, the same year in which Kubrick started work on 2001. Kubrick was well known for the extensive research he undertook for his films. His biographer Vincent LoBrutto describes his ‘capacity to grasp and disseminate information . . . like a human

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computer’ (LoBrutto, 1998: 257). Doubtless he familiarized himself with then-current research on the emergence of humankind and prehistoric tool use as a preparation for filming the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence. The scene with the thigh bone is preceded by the appearance of mysterious monoliths, upright, rectangular, black and smooth, which appears to a group of proto-hominoid ‘apes’ in the sequence set in the African plains, three million years ago. Through some unexplained and probably inexplicable means, it enables this particular group to conceive of the use of tools, thus granting them an inestimable advantage over rival groups and other animals. Another monolith is discovered on the Moon in the late twentieth century by the descendants of this group, whose capacity for tool use has now evolved to the point of being able to travel in space. The third, floating in space near Jupiter, appears to David Bowman, the surviving member of the spaceship that had been sent to trace the direction of the radio signal transmitted by the Moon monolith. The fourth and last appears to the aged Bowman in the bizarre eighteenth-century-style hotel room he discovers at the other side of the Stargate. The monolith is, literally in visual terms, a kind of ‘black box’, which is also the engineering term for a technical process whose inputs and outputs are known but whose inner processes are not understood. Mark Midbon goes so far as to suggest that the best way to understand the monolith is as a ‘monolithic integrated circuit enlarged a hundred times for symbolic purposes’ (Midbon, 1990: 8). A monolithic integrated circuit is a semiconductor integrated circuit formed upon a single wafer – or ‘chip’ – of silicon, which is in contrast to hybrid devices distributed upon more than one substrate. Such devices were just being developed by the 1960s by companies such as IBM, and given that he researched extensively and even used computer technology for the making of 2001, it is likely that Kubrick would have encountered such developments. The part of the film most directly concerned with new technologies is the middle section that deals with the relationship between HAL 9000, the intelligent computer on board the spaceship Discovery, and its crew. Kubrick’s conception of HAL’s capabilities, based on legitimate artificial-intelligence research of the period, is wildly optimistic. But this allowed Kubrick to present him/it as more lively and even ‘human’ than the actual humans on

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board the ship, who appear curiously passive and disengaged in contrast. The contradictions in HAL’s programming lead him/it to murder most of the crew, leaving Bowman as the only survivor. Though this might appear to be a warning about the future progress of machine intelligence, it can also be read as a comment on our present relationship with computers, which are already full of agency. As Donna Haraway puts it in the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, ‘[O]ur machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert’ (Haraway, 1991: 152). HAL is an optimistic but serious extrapolation of the future progress of artificial intelligence (AI), as seen from the late 1960s. Kubrick consulted with AI experts such as Marvin Minsky to make HAL as scientifically plausible as possible. Now that the year 2001 has come and gone it is obvious that AI has largely failed to fulfil most of its original claims for future developments. But despite its failure to progress as was expected in the early days, AI remains a highly funded endeavour to which many academics, scientists and engineers are dedicated. Yet Artificial Intelligence is a long way from achieving its aim of making machines intelligent or conscious. It is very possible that AI will never succeed in such an aim and that the very premises upon which it is based are fallacious. AI has been the subject of strong and convincing criticism by philosophers as different as Hubert Dreyfus, John Searle, Hilary Putnam and Jean-François Lyotard. In this context it is possible to understand AI not as a plausible scientific endeavour, but as a way of coming to terms with our rapidly changing relationship with technology. ‘In this age of contemporary technics’, writes Bernard Stiegler in Technics and Time, ‘it might be thought that technological power risks sweeping the human away’ (Stiegler, 1994: 88). Stiegler follows Maurice Blanchot in seeing the world made possible by contemporary technology as ushering in a new era. According to Blanchot, modern technics, ‘the collective organization on a planetary scale for the calculated establishment of plans, mechanization and automation, and finally atomic energy’ (ibid.: 89), allows mankind to achieve what, hitherto, only stars could accomplish. Thus the human itself has become a star. This has a dramatic effect on the human relation to temporality ‘which was once conceived as that of a sublunary world whose bearings were constituted from the standpoint of the stars’ (ibid.). The new astral era ‘no longer belongs to the measures of


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history’, which ‘belonged to the divide separating the human world from the stars. Humanity (the human world) was history. . .’ (ibid.). The end of history is perhaps the end of the contingent world of sublunary humanity and its supercession by astral humanity, for whom technics renders the world entirely amenable to planning and control. But paradoxically it is also the point at which technics threatens to sweep away the human. AI research is possibly an attempt to mediate and represent this supercession and to preserve some sense of the human in this situation. But in truth human intelligence is always already artificial, as it is always bound up with its prosthetic external storage devices, its flint axes, language systems, books, archives, databases and expert systems. Ironically AI, far from being the means by which machines will supersede humans, is in fact the last redoubt of humanness, in which ‘thought’ is rendered at something like human speed and routed through systems of symbolic representation, which attempt to mimic human thinking. While Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil and others are making their usual apocalyptic predictions, in which machines will become more intelligent than humans in 2020, 2030 or whenever is just long enough away to be plausible, machines may well have long since bypassed the problems of intelligence and consciousness. Thought is, perhaps, merely an epiphenomenon of our technically mediated relationship with the world, an increasingly unnecessary loop in the systems of data storage, manipulation and exchange that characterize the astral era. The human and all that it is defined by, including history and art, is a momentary episode before realtime processing renders the human superfluous. Discussing 2001 in his book on Minimalism, Edward Strickland points out that, hitherto, in Cold War American cinema ‘neighbours from the stars were depicted as humanoid mutants’, and continues that As I came of age, earth was visited yet again in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – this time with greater consequences than just another hostile takeover attempt. These aliens were neither monsters of organic mutation nor totalitarian robots, neither vegetable nor mechanical nor near-human in crustacean make-up and/or what passed for futuristic couture at the time. Instead the nonhuman arrived in utterly nonhuman form: black monoliths ten feet tall. They were not invaders from Mars, Alpha 7, or Planet X. It was not the invasion of the

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body snatchers, the star creatures, or the saucer men. It was the invasion of the Minimal sculptures and if not civilisation, anthropomorphic art as we knew it was at an end. (Strickland, 1993: 257)

It is most likely that Kubrick’s conception of the monolith is a product not of exposure to Minimalist sculpture, but of the same general concerns and impulses that animated Minimalism. The drive toward simplicity, the concern with form, the repudiation of any meaning beyond that offered by the material itself, and the eschewal of the expression of emotion and interior states, produced an art that resonated with the increasing visibility and importance of information and information technologies. Minimalism is a response to, in part at least, and a product of a world of cyborgs, computerization and technological utopianism. Though Minimalist artists, unlike many of their contemporaries, did not explicitly engage with or employ new information and communication technologies in their work, their concern with constructing objects out of the simplest elements and in the most formal and even algorithmic manner clearly resonates with the means of storing manipulating data employed by computers. Similarly the ‘cool’ aesthetic of Minimalist work resembles that of informationprocessing machines and environments. Photographs of computer systems such as the IBM/360 in operation look, to contemporary viewers at least, very like Minimalist sculptures, as does Kubrick’s stunning realization of the inner workings of HAL 9000, the sentient computer controlling the Discovery, the spaceship sent to investigate the source of the monolith’s radio signal. Nor is this coincidental. Much as Minimalism preceded and anticipated the ‘dematerialisation of the art work’ with conceptualism, the increasing importance of computing in everyday life helped bring about the ‘dematerialisation’ of information and, by extension, the increasing irrelevance of the body. Strickland points out that the film was made in the ‘heyday’ of minimal art, and that the ‘distinctive’ work of artists such as Michael Steiner, Ronald Bladen and John McCracken bore a family resemblance to Kubrick’s space invaders. He suggests that the astonished apemen in the film ‘were no more non-plussed by the apparition of monoliths on the savannah than many of their descendents [sic] had been at their recent apparition in galleries and


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museums’ (Strickland, 1993: 257–8). Among those most famously nonplussed was art critic and theorist Michael Fried, who expressed this in his famous and controversial attack on Minimalism from the late 1960s, ‘Art and Objecthood’ (Fried, 1995). Fried was concerned to criticize Minimalist, or what he described as ‘literalist’ art, for its theatricality, which he saw as manifested in its setting up a particular relation between the beholder as subject and the work as object, which necessarily takes place in time and which therefore has duration. Kubrick’s vision of the proto-humans in Africa dancing frenziedly in front of the monolith, or indeed the astronauts on the Moon several million years later in front of another monolith, look like perfect illustrations of Fried’s conception of Minimalist sculpture as theatrical. Fried contrasted Minimalist theatricality with the more general trend in artistic modernism precisely to defeat theatre and to suspend both objecthood and temporality. He contrasts this with modernist works, such as paintings by Noland or Olitski or sculptures by Anthony Caro or David Smith, in which ‘at every moment the work itself is totally manifest’. He goes on to say that [I]t is this continuous and entire presentness, amounting, as it were, to the perpetual creation of itself, that one experiences as a kind of instantaneousness: as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it. (ibid.: 146)

And it is by virtue of their ‘presentness’ and ‘instantaneousness’ that ‘modernist painting and sculpture defeat theatre’. Fried prefaced the essay with a quote from the theologian Jonathan Edwards to the effect that ‘we every moment see the same proof of a God as we should have seen if we had seen him create the world at first’, and that the last words of the essay are ‘presentness is grace’ (ibid.: 147). Here it is hard not to be reminded of Derrida’s analysis of the Declaration of Independence, discussed in chapter 1 of this volume, which involved a potentially infinite regress, or mise-enabîme, of authority, which is only closed through the name of God, which is, in turn, a disavowal of time and différance in exchange for the fantasy that

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everything ‘should concentrate itself in the simulacrum of the instant’ (Derrida, 2002: 51).1 For Fried, ‘literalist’ works set up conditions of inexhaustibility. ‘One never feels one has come to the end of it’, he wrote of the experience of works by Donald Judd, Tony Smith and Robert Morris (ibid.: 143). Such works are not inexhaustible because they are ‘full’, which Fried claimed as the true inexhaustibility of art, but ‘because there is nothing there to exhaust’ (ibid.: 144). They are endless as a road might be, if it were circular. This endlessness is a presentiment of endless or indefinite duration. He quotes Tony Smith’s description of not seeing works of art in a second, but continuing to read them, as well as Robert Morris’s statement that ‘the experience of the work of art necessarily exists in time’ (ibid.: 144–5). This preoccupation with the ‘duration of the experience’ on the part of literalist artists is what, according to Fried, makes their work fundamentally theatrical (ibid.: 145). Fried cites as theatrical not just the work of Literalist or Minimalist artists such as those mentioned above but also, in a footnote, the work of ‘figures as disparate as Kaprow, Cornell, Rauschenberg, Oldenberg, Flavin, Smithson, Kienholz, Segal, Samaras, Christo, Kusama . . . The list could go on indefinitely’. The work of many of these artists is, in one way or another, oriented toward performance, duration and the temporal, and thus, by implication a concern with the body. It is perhaps not surprising that it was artists engaged in this kind of work who first looked at the artistic potential of new technologies such as video and computers. Rauschenberg, for example, was one of the co-founders of Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), along with the engineer Billy Klüver, to foster collaborations between artists and engineers. At the same time or soon after, artists such as Douglas Davis, the Raindance Corporation – founded by artists Frank Gillette, Paul Ryan and journalist Michael Shamberg – and Dan Graham were making work that explored the possibilities of new media such as computers, satellite communications, television, including CCTV and slow scan technologies. In 1969 Graham was invited to contribute a chapter to a book to be entitled Ecological Art and edited by John Gibson, which was never published. It was to accompany an exhibition, held in May of that year, featuring the work of various artists whose work evinced ecological interests or sensibilities. His contribution, ‘Subject Matter’, which he included in his book End Matter,


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was both a confirmation of and a riposte to Fried, in that he looked at the work of artists who included the body of the viewer and the space as part of the artwork (Pelzer, 2001: 112–15). In the following decade Graham made a number of pieces that would engage with precisely such questions, particularly in relation to time. Pre-eminent among them was his series of time-delay pieces, such as ‘Time Delay Room’, of 1974, which he made in six different versions. In each of these he placed a video surveillance camera and two video monitors in two equal-sized rooms. One of the monitors showed what was happening in the other room, while the other showed what was happening in the room it was in, but with an eight-second delay. Graham describes the reasoning for this setup: The time-lag of eight seconds is the outer limit of the neurophysiological shortterm memory that forms an immediate part of our present perception and affects this ‘from within’. If you see your behavior eight seconds ago presented on a video monitor ‘from outside’ you will probably therefore not recognize the distance in time but tend to identify your current perception and current behavior with the state eight seconds earlier. Since this leads to inconsistent impressions which you then respond to, you get caught up in a feedback loop. You feel trapped in a state of observation, in which your self-observation is subject to some outside visible control. In this manner, you as the viewer experience yourself as part of a social group of observed observers (instead of, as in the traditional view of art, standing arrested in individual contemplation before an auratic object). (Stemmrich, 2002: 68)

In this work and others of a similar sort, Graham takes the theatricality that Fried recognizes as a constituent part of Minimalism and foregrounds it. His Time Delay pieces are about nothing other than the relation between the viewer and the object. Furthermore, in what Graham would call a ‘feedback loop’, the viewer has become the object. What is particularly noteworthy about these pieces is the focus on the temporality of the act of perception. Graham does not just present the viewer as the object viewed. This not only would be banal, it would only require a mirror to be put into effect. By interposing a short delay in the closed-circuit transmission, Graham brought to the fore the temporal nature of perception itself, with all its

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implications for human consciousness. We are never fully in the present, but always involved in a process of retention and protension. At another level this use of time delay has broader implications. Graham was making his Time Delay pieces at the moment when real-time digital technologies were first becoming more widely used. The mid-1970s, for example, is the period when computer networks were first employed in financial trading. Graham’s work can be read as a kind of assertion of the temporal rhythm of human perception, against the increasing dematerialization and acceleration being brought about by technology. Some twenty years after Graham made these pieces, the British artist Graham Gussin made a video work, Beyond The Infinite (Multiplied), which appears to be a homage to both 2001 and to Graham’s Time Delay work. Gussin takes the final scene of the film, in which Bowman, having passed through the Stargate, enters a bizarre space, resembling a hotel room decorated in Louis Seize style, without windows and illuminated solely from the floor (a particularly uncanny effect). Still in his spacesuit, the younger Bowman looks into the room and is apparently confronted by the sight of his much older self, eating at a table. The older Bowman appears to sense the younger man’s presence, but turns to see nothing. In the film this sequence is followed by that featuring an even older Bowman, lying on the bed, as if near to death, being confronted, once again, by the monolith. Gussin takes this sequence and mixes it, so that it runs in a coherent loop, that can – in theory, at least – go on forever, with the older and younger Bowman’s continually seeing and sensing each other. Gussin’s work points to a pervasive melancholy that underlies the euphoric vision of the future that 2001 might appear to offer, and which Dan Graham’s work also seems to express. In his 1970 book Expanded Cinema, Gene Youngblood asserts that 2001 is a symptom of what he calls the ‘new nostalgia’. Writing about the section in which one of the astronauts aboard the Discovery receives a birthday message from his parents, Youngblood is concerned to counter the prevailing notion that the astronaut’s apparent lack of emotion represented ‘an indictment of the “dehumanizing” effects of technology’ (Youngblood, 1970: 139) in which the ‘astronaut is seen as a kind of “space zombie” because he appears indifferent to the effusions of his parents’ (ibid.: 143). Youngblood cites Kubrick’s use of the adagio from


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Aram Khachaturian’s Gayaneh Ballet Suite, which is ‘mournful, melancholy, with a sense of transcendental beauty’ and ‘invests the scene with an overwhelming mood that invites only one interpretation: it is obviously a sad event’ (ibid.: 141–2). For Youngblood, [T]his sadness is a manifestation of the new nostalgia . . . Not only does he live in a different world from [that of] his parents on a conceptual level, he has physically left their natural world and all of its values. Of what possible significance could a birthday be to him? He doesn’t even share a common definition of life with his parents. His companions aboard the Discovery are preserved in a cryogenetic state of suspended animation . . . The melancholy of the new nostalgia arises not out of sentimental remembrance of things past, but from an awareness of radical evolution in the living present . . . We are transformed by time through living within it; but technologies such as television displace the individual from participant to observer of the human pageant, and thus we live effectively ‘outside’ of time . . . The new nostalgia is a symptom of the death of history. The more we learn about the present, about humanity’s perception and interpretation of the present, the more suspect history becomes . . . The present has discredited the past, while the history of the present is recorded by machines, not ‘written’ by men, and is thus out of our hands as a ‘man-made’ phenomenon. ‘The computer’, says McLuhan, ‘abolishes the human past by making it entirely present.’ We don’t ‘remember’ the assassination of John F. Kennedy because we never experienced it directly in the first place. For millions of people who were not actually present in Dallas, Kennedy’s death exists only in the endless technologically-sustained present. We ‘remember’ it in the same way that we first ‘knew’ it – through the media – and we can experience it again each time the videotapes are played. Since we see and hear and feel only the conditioning of our own memory, a great flood of nostalgia is generated when technology erases the past and with it our self-image. (ibid.: 143–4)

It is instructive here to replace the reference to the assassination of Kennedy with one to the events of 11 September 2001, and possibly the reference to videotapes with the World Wide Web. Apart from anything else this reminds us of the disjunction between our projections of the future and the reality of that future when it becomes the present. The image of flight that the actual year 2001 presented was not that of a spaceship gliding

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through the Solar System on a rendezvous with a monolith, but rather two passenger- and fuel-laden airliners crashing into the World Trade Center (WTC). Yet there is a kind of connection between 2001 and 11 September 2001. Like the monoliths in the film, the WTC was a thoroughly Minimalist artefact. In his book on Minimalism Edward Strickland goes so far as to remark that what ‘Chartres is to the Gothic and St Peter’s to the Baroque, the World Trade Center is to Minimalism’ (Strickland, 2000: 9). The events of 9/11 thus might be said to have enacted the idea of Minimalist sculpture as theatre on a vast, grotesque scale.2 The extraordinary loss of the WTC seems to confirm a sense that even the most solid and apparently unmoving of objects in our lives is subject to the possibilities of withdrawal and absence. Writing about Derrida’s conception of mourning, David Farrell Krell asks [D]oes the most powerful presence of a beautiful thing, the commanding stature and status of a statue, for example, wield its power in and as withdrawal and absence . . . Is it absurd to say that when we stand in front of Nôtre Dame on a brilliant Sunday afternoon in July the building is lost to us? Surely, it looms over us – lapidary, dependable, unmoving? Yet what does it mean when we turn away and continue our path across Paris with the thought ‘Yes, I really am here’ as though the ‘really’ were an affirmation rescuing us from our drab quotidian existence, to which Nôtre Dame – and Paris – seem so utterly foreign? If Nôtre Dame causes the everyday to slip away for an instant, can the very power of its presence nevertheless also be described as a kind of withdrawal? Is it precisely as a ruin, and is all beauty always running to its ruin, hence, in a sense, ruinous? (Krell, 2000: 8)

Despite its apparent solidity, the WTC itself was part of what Richard Beardsworth describes as ‘the reduction of time and space brought about by contemporary processes of technicization, particularly digitalisation [sic]’ (Beardsworth, 2002: 235). Writing days after 9/11, Slavoj Zizek suggested that [I]f there is any symbolism in the collapse of the WTC towers, it is not so much the old-fashioned notion of the ‘center of financial capitalism’, but, rather,


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the notion that the two WTC towers stood for the center of the VIRTUAL capitalism, of financial speculations disconnected from the sphere of material production. (Zizek, 2002)

News of the atrocity was transmitted all over the world almost immediately it had happened. It was, and remains, a paradigmatic event of the age of realtime systems, intended by its instigators to be witnessed across the globe practically in real time, through the Internet and through rolling news and live television. The very name by which it has become known is itself a kind of abbreviation that appears to be designed to save time. In an interview with the Italian philosopher Rosa Borradori about the events of ‘9/11’, Derrida points out that even the economical naming of the event as a date, the ‘telegram of this metonymy’ as he calls it, is an endless repetition and a ritual incantation designed to conjure away the fear or terror the event inspired, and the fact that ‘we do not recognise or cognise’ what it actually is (Borradori, 2003: 86–7). In particular the repetition of the images on television and elsewhere is, in fact, intended to neutralize, deaden and distance the trauma (ibid.: 87). Part of this is a kind of memorialization, intended to foreclose the event, to suggest that, awful as it was, it is now over and therefore can be mourned and got over. But, Derrida points out, the most traumatic aspect of 9/11 is not that it has happened, terrible though it was, but that it presages worse in the future. ‘Traumatism is produced by the future, by the to-come, by the threat of the worst to come, rather than by aggression that is “over and done with”’ (ibid.: 96–7). Eighteen months later, British artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead first showed their ‘networked installation’ Short Films about Flying. It consists of a series of sequences in which live feed from a webcam installed at Boston’s Logan Airport, showing airplanes landing and taking off, is projected onto the wall, accompanied by randomly chosen net radio excerpts from different parts of the world, and interrupted by short text intertitles, again randomly chosen, this time from chatrooms and message boards. Each bit of text is surrounded by quotation marks and prefixed by ‘He said’ or ‘She said’, thus giving the appearance of an ongoing dialogue. Each sequence lasts two minutes and forty-five seconds, and is prefaced by film leader and titles.

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Though all the elements are randomly selected, they are presented as if they make up a coherent narrative – this effect is greatly enhanced by the fact that the streaming video from the webcam comes via a commercial website where visitors can control the camera itself and thus give the impression of directorial decision-making. Thomson and Craighead describe this as a ‘form of coherent yet evocative combination of elements that produce an endlessly mutating edition of low-tech mini-movies that we call Template Cinema’ (Thomson and Craighead, 2003). Short Films about Flying would also seem to embody something of a crisis of the archive brought about by the ‘reduction of time and space’ noted by Beardsworth. This is perhaps particularly evident in the ironic ‘remediation’ of the inscribed and recorded form of the film onto the new, real-time medium of the World Wide Web. What is present now can only be understood as a repetition of an already extant memory. At another level, the kind of parodic or ironic strategy of mimicking older media that Short Films about Flying undertakes is itself an ironic repetition of older, also ironic avant-garde strategies that work to complicate the question of the avantgarde’s already complex relations to time, the past and the future. Short Films about Flying is not about the events of 11 September. But metonymically, its subject matter – real-time images of planes taking off and landing at an American airport – cannot help but invoke them. The dialogue presented in the intertitles also brings to mind the extraordinarily poignant mobile telephone calls that took place on the planes that crashed into the twin towers and elsewhere. But perhaps, in its repetition of the scenes of planes landing and taking off, Short Films about Flying most cogently deals with the questions of the archive and the event. Unlike the supposedly successful mourning that would allow us to interiorize the trauma in question and ‘move on’, Short Films about Flying presents an image of failed mourning, a repetition of fragments, signs, that cannot be assimilated. The fact that the images are live and that we do not know whether, at any moment, something unprecedented will happen, brings into sharp focus the contingency of our modern technologized existence. By making a real-time transmission, happening right now, look as if it is repeatable, archivable, and the separate elements, taken out of their original context, iterated, grafted, and continuously repeated, Thomson and Craighead articulate, in an elegant


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manner, what is at stake for art, the archive, memory and mourning in the age of real-time systems. Short Films about Flying is an example of work made using the World Wide Web. When ‘user-friendly’ browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape came out in the early to mid-1990s, the possibilities of the Web as a medium were seized upon by a number of artists who, in the mid-1990s, started producing work under the banner of ‘net.art’. This meant work that was at least partly made on and for the World Wide Web and could only be viewed on-line. The term ‘net.art’ was supposedly coined by net.artist Vuk Cosic in the early 1990s to refer to artistic practices involving the Web, after he had received an email composed of ASCII gibberish, in which the only readable element was the words ‘net’ and ‘art’ separated by a full stop. Since then there has been an extraordinary efflorescence of work done under the banners of network art, net.art or net art. Despite the problems of display, curation and archiving that such work necessarily and deliberately entertains, and despite its avowed aim of avoiding the processes of institutionalization and commodification which have compromised previous avant-garde art movement, net.art has been highly successful in terms of critical and institutional acceptance. Featuring in Documenta X, recent Venice Biennales, major shows such as Bitstreams at the Whitney, 010101: Art in Technological Times at SFMoma, and Art and Money Online at Tate Britain, ongoing virtual spaces such as the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Artport, as well as exhibitions in specialist spaces such as ZKM, it also has its own virtual spaces for debate, discussion and curation, such as Rhizome and Nettime. For some of its exponents the short life of net.art as a viable artistic practice is already over. It has supposedly failed in its aims to remain independent and to narrow the widening gap between art and life. But this pessimistic attitude misses one of the most important aspects of net.art, which is its relationship to those institutions whose concern is to collect, curate, archive and display works of art, and which are therefore confronted by the challenges of an ephemeral, immaterial, network-based, non-commodifiable form of art-making. It is here, in the ‘crisis of the archive’ which such work provokes, that the real interest of net.art lies. Net.art is intrinsically resistant to recuperation by the art gallery as an institution, at least as it is presently constituted. Its existence threatens to destabilize the whole

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archival enterprise that the gallery represents. Net.art is thus not simply another genre or practice that presents challenges to the gallery or museum, but which eventually succumbs to recuperation and institutionalization. It is, rather, a means of investigation of the very conditions of representation and archivization in the age of real-time systems, and thus – by extension – memory and mourning. Thus, for example, what strikes one in viewing Short Films about Flying is the fact that the scene portrayed is happening right now, is what transforms a banal scene, a cliché, into a riveting experience. The ‘liveness’ of the scene is what Roland Barthes would describe as its ‘punctum’, or its ‘point’ at which the contingent enters the image (Barthes, 1982: 26–7). As Mary Ann Doane has pointed out in The Emergence of Cinematic Time (2002), in an increasingly rationalized society in which time is abstracted and regulated for the purposes of capitalist production, the contingent becomes a highly cathected site of both pleasure and anxiety. ‘Contingency appears to offer a vast reservoir of freedom and free play, irreducible to the structuring of “leisure time”’. Yet it is critical that, even as it is ‘antisystematic’ (Doane, 2002: 11), this contingency is produced in a form that is ‘graspable and representable’ (ibid.: 10). Thus for Doane photography and film are means which both threaten to overwhelm us with ‘floods’ or ‘a blizzard’ of images and also offer the means to archive the contingent and ephemeral (ibid.: 33). As such it sits on the sharp edge of the tensions between the modernist desire to both ‘seize the instant’ in its plenitude and to make it archivable. Thomson and Craighead cleverly emphasize this uncanny quality of this live experience by presenting it, ironically, in the form of a film, a medium that represents something that has happened previously and to which we have only deferred or delayed access. What a piece of film represents happened once, but is not happening now. By contrast streaming video on the Web is happening right now in ‘real time’. Thus Short Films about Flying exemplifies what Paul de Man identified as one of the great tensions in modernity. De Man proposes that one of the constitutive ideas of modernity is to be, in Arthur Rimbaud’s words, ‘absolutely modern’ (de Man, 1983: 147). Starting with his interest in instantaneity rather than memory, De Man pointed out how, for Baudelaire, the capacity to display the ‘essential “present-ness” of the present’ was to be found in the work of the artist and printmaker Constantin Guys,


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the eponymous subject of his essay ‘Le peintre de la vie moderne’ (ibid.: 157–9). De Man suggested that Baudelaire’s emphasis on the ‘present as a constitutive element of all aesthetic experience’ is close to other founding documents of modernism, including the second of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, ‘Of the Use and Misuse of History for Life’ (ibid.: 157). For both Baudelaire and Nietzsche it is necessary, as for Rimbaud, to eschew history and anteriority to live in the present. Thus according to de Man ‘[M]odernity invests its trust in the power of the present moment as an origin’ (ibid.: 149), but as he points out, this brings with it an impossible contradiction, in that ‘any experience of the present’ is ‘a passing experience that makes the past irrevocable and unforgettable, because it is inseparable from any present and future’ (ibid.). This means that ‘in severing itself from the past [modernity] has severed itself from the present’ (ibid.). Thus it is not possible to escape the anterior or the past without, at the same time, losing the present. This paradoxical situation is captured unwittingly by Baudelaire’s very language. De Man notes that when Baudelaire writes about the ‘representation of the present’, he is combining the instantaneous and the repetitive, ‘without apparent awareness of the incompatibility’ (ibid.: 156). Indeed, throughout the essay he uses terms such as ‘representation’, ‘memory’ and ‘time’, all of which suggest perspectives of distance and difference within the apparent uniqueness of the instant’ (ibid.: 157). Thus the precondition of art is inscription, différance. As Derrida put it ‘[art] has dealings only with the absolute past – that is, the immemorial or unrememberable, with an archive that no interiorising memory can take into itself ’ (Derrida, 1989a: 67). Derrida, following Freud, claims that ‘[E]verything begins with reproduction. Always already: repositories of a meaning which was never present, whose signified presence is always reconstituted by deferral, nachträglich, belatedly, supplementarily: for the nachträglich also means supplementary’ (Derrida, 1978: 266). The Freudian concept of nachträglichkeit, or ‘deferred action’, refers to the deferred effect, by which an experience only assumes a traumatic dimension upon repetition and the delayed assumption of a sexual meaning. In his book The Return of the Real, Hal Foster describes the repetition by the post-war neo-avant-garde of older pre-war avant-garde strategies in terms of that Nachträglichkeit. As Foster puts it,

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one event is only registered through another that recodes it; we come to be who we are only in deferred action . . . Historical and neo-avant-gardes are constituted in a similar way, as a continual process of protension and retension, a complex relay of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts – in short, in a deferred action that throws over any simple scheme of before and after, cause and effect, origin and repetition. (Foster, 1996: 29)

He continues that on this analogy the avant-garde work is never historically effective or fully significant in its initial moments. It cannot be because it is traumatic – a hole in the symbolic order of its time that is not prepared for it, that cannot receive it, at least immediately, at least without structural change. (ibid.)

Thus despite its continued repressions, failures and supercessions, the avant-garde continues to return, but, as Foster puts it, ‘it returns from the future’ (ibid.). It opens out the future to the contingent and the incalculable and thus the promise of the to-come. The avant-garde, of which net.art is perhaps the most plausible modern instantiation, is the archive of the future. Commenting on net.artist Vuk Cosic’s training as an archaeologist and Cosic’s own proclamation of the similarities between net.art and archaeology, Julian Stallabrass suggests that Net art, then, is seen as an archaeology of the future, drawing on the past (especially of modernism), and producing a complex interaction of unrealised past potential and Utopian futures. (Stallabrass, 2002: 49, my emphasis)

As Derrida puts it, the question of the archive is a question of the future, the promise of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what that meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps. (Derrida, 1995: 36)


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NOTES 1. It should be pointed out that, in his introduction to his collected art criticism, Fried claims that ‘what was at stake in my invocation of that concept was something other than mere instantaneousness (however that is defined), which incidentally is why dutifully rehearsing Derrida’s deconstruction of the Husserlian “now” has no bearing on my arguments. (Note too my reliance in the passages quoted above on constructions involving “as though,” which by itself should have ruled out taking instantaneousness literally, so to speak.)’ (Fried, 1998: 46–7). Fried now suggests that what he meant was that ‘at every moment the claim on the viewer of the modernist painting or sculpture is renewed totally’ (ibid.: 47). 2. Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 25 September, Julia Spinola castigated composer Karlheinz Stockhausen for his remarks about the terrorist attacks of 11 September on the World Trade Center, given at a press conference for the Hamburg Music Festival (Spinola, 2001). Karlheinz Stockhausen famously had commented that [W]hat happened there is – they all have to rearrange their brains now – is the greatest work of art ever. That characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of, that people practice madly for 10 years, completely, fanatically, for a concert and then die. That is the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos. I could not do that. Against that, we composers are nothing.

A year after the attacks Rebecca Allison in the Guardian newspaper reported a radio interview given by British artist Damien Hirst, in which he suggested that [Y]ou’ve got to hand it to them on some level because they’ve achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible – especially to a country as big as America. So on one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing. The thing about 9/11 is that it’s kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. (Allison, 2002)

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Unsurprisingly perhaps, such comments were widely condemned and Stockhausen and Hirst were forced to apologize. In comparing the events of 9/11 to a work of art, both Stockhausen and Hirst were both right and wrong. Right in the sense that avant-garde art and terrorism are in some ways quite similar, and could possibly be shown to have developed out of the same historical context. Many avant-garde artists, from the Futurists through Dada to the Destruction in Art Symposium and beyond, have used art as a kind of cultural ‘terrorism’ and have pursued strategies of staging spectacular events, which are intended to shock people out of their complacency and thus, in theory at least, to change the world, much like terrorism. But the comparison is also wrong at a deeper level. To describe an act of terrorism as a work of art is a kind of category error, which fails to take into account the ineluctable differences between terrorism and art.

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Index

Aalto, Alto, 145 Abraham Lincoln, 49 Acconci, Vito, 132 Adams, John, 34n3 Adrian X, Robert, 136, 146 Albers, Joseph, 114 Alexander II, 78 Allison, Rebecca, 177n1 Alloway, Lawrence, 113, 114, 117, 118 Altman, Robert, 69 Andersen, Hans Christian, 143 André, Carl, 125 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 88n1 Arnold, General H. H., 121 Artaud, Antonin, 8, 63–4, 68 Ascott, Roy, 123, 136, 146 Asimov, Isaac, 121 Aurier, Georges Albert, 66 Bacon, Francis, 69 Baird, J. L., 87 Bakst, Leon, 77 Baldessari, John, 132 Balla, Giacomo, 144, 147 Bangs, Lester, 110 Banham, Reyner, 114

Barry, Robert, 133 Barthes, Roland, 46, 143, 174 Bartlett, Bill, 146 Bataille, Georges, 7, 8, 13–15, 19, 29, 65, 68 Baudelaire, Charles, 57, 175 Beardsworth, Richard, 6, 10, 19, 24, 26, 68, 153, 170, 172 Beckett, Samuel, 143 Beniger, James, 54 Benjamin, Walter, 1, 2, 3, 8, 36, 40, 46, 49 Benois, Aleksandr, 77 Benthall, Jonathan, 135 Berger, John, 3 Bergson, Henri, 76 Bernard, Emile, 68 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, 125 Biely, Andrei, 77 Billington, James H., 76, 82, 83 Bladen, Ronald, 164 Blanchot, Maurice, 7, 21, 90–2, 104, 143, 162 Blistène, Bernard, 147 Blok, Alexander, 77 Bogdanov, see Malinovski, Alexander Borges, Jorge Luis, 143

189

190

Borradori, Rosa, 171 Bowman, Dave, 159, 168 Bradner, Scott, 133 Bray, Xavier, 70n1 Brunette, Peter, 62 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 145 Buderi, Robert, 112n2 Bull, Hank, 146 Buren, Daniel, 145 Burgy, Donald, 132 Burke, Edmund, 10, 148 Burnham, Jack, 9, 10, 113, 124–38, 160 Butor, Michel, 145 Cage, John, 9, 51, 94–111, 111n1 Cage, John Sr, 96 Carey, James, 48, 53, 56, 105 Carlyle, Thomas, 60 Caro, Anthony, 165 Carroll, Lewis, 143 Cendrars, Blaise, 88n1 Cervantes, Miguel, 61 Cézanne, Paul, 57, 73 Champollion, Jean-François, 60 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon, 145 Charles X, 38 Christo, 166 Clarke, Arthur C., 121 Clynes, Manfred, 121 Colt, Samuel, 46 Conly, Paul, 133 Constable, John, 35 Cooke, Sir William Fothergill, 44 Cooper, James Fenimore, 40 Cooper, Susan Fenimore, 40 Copley, John Singleton, 36

Index

Cornell, Joseph, 166 Cosic, Vuk, 173 Costello, Elvis, 144 Cournot, Antoine Augustin, 32 Cox, Paul, 69 Craighead, Alison, see Thomson and Craighead Crary, Jonathan, 54 Crosby, Theo, 118 Crowther, Paul, 147 Cunningham, Merce, 106 Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé, 44–5 Darby, Francis, 41 David, Paul, 69 Davis, Douglas, 135, 166 Debray, Régis, 7 Delaunay, Robert, 144, 147 Dene, Agnes, 133, 134 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 6, 7, 8, 18–31 passim, 43, 50, 58, 60, 63–4, 68, 71n2, 108, 111, 121, 145, 165, 170–1, 175–6, 177n1 Descartes, René, 152 Diaghilev, Sergei, 77 Doane, Mary Ann, 174 Documenta X, 173 Draper, John William, 45 Dreyfus, Hubert, 162 Duchamp, Marcel, 7, 10, 30–1, 42, 51n1, 56, 87–8n1, 125, 132, 144, 145, 147, 156 Dulles, John Foster, 92 Eames, Charles, 188 Eames, Ray, 118

Index

Edwards, Jonathan, 165 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 48 Facetti, Germano, 114 Fall, Jean-Claude, 143 Farnsworth, Philo, 87 Federov, Nikolai Federovitch, 8, 77–80, 82 Flavin, Dan, 125, 144, 147, 166 Florsheim, Carl Fernbach, 133 Fontana, Lucio, 144, 147 Foster, Hal, 175–6 Fox Talbot, William Henry, 45 Franklin, Benjamin, 34n3 Freud, Sigmund, 58, 175 Fried, Michael, 10, 165–7, 177n1 Fry, Roger, 57 Fuller, Richard Buckminster, 105, 112n4 Fyoderov, see Federov, Nikolai Federovitch Gagarin, Prince Pavel Ivanovich, 77 Galassi, Peter, 71n Gale, Leonard, 44 Gardner, Alexander, 46 Gauguin, Paul, 57 Gehlen, Arnold, 32n Gillette, Frank, 166 Giorno, John, 133 Giscard d’Estaing, President Valéry, 139 Goethe, Wolfgang, 22 Goldfinger, Erno, 114 Goodwin, Fritz, 69 Gorki, Maxim, 83 Goupil, 59, 61

191

Graham, Dan, 166–7 Gussin, Graham, 168 Guys, Constantin, 174 Haacke, Hans, 125, 128, 130, 133–4 Hamilton, Richard, 114, 117 Haraway, Donna, 162 Havilland, Geoffrey de, 89 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 33n2, 60, 90, 151 Heidegger, Martin, 2, 3, 19, 33n2, 68, 136, 150–1 Heinich, Natalie, 66–7 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 51n1, 88n1 Henderson, Nigel, 117 Henri, Adrian, 135 Henriksen, Margot, 92 Herschel, Sir John, 45 Hill, Sir Roland, 54 Hines, Thomas, 112n3 Hirst, Damien, 177n2 Hofmann, Albert, 107 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 151 Holroyd, Geoffrey, 114 Huebler, Douglas, 129, 130, 132 Husserl, Edmond, 6, 154, 177n1 Huxley, Aldous, 107 Huyssen, Andreas, 5 Hyde Clark, George, 41 Hyde, Lewis, 29 Irwin, Margaret, 69 Ivanova, Elisaveta, 77 Jackson, Charles, 43 Jakobson, Roman, 141

192

Index

Jefferson, Thomas, 34n3 Jenkins, C. F., 87 Johnson, Ray, 51 Joyce, James, 142 Judd, Donald, 166 Jünger, Ernst, 7, 21, 33n2, 90–2, 104, 107, 112n5 Kahn, Herman, 121 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 10, 28, 148–50 Kaprow, Alan, 132, 166 Karman, Theodor von, 90 Katz, Jonathan, 112n3 Katz, Karl, 131 Kazarin, V. N, 78 Kennedy, John F., 169 Kepes, Gyorgy, 126 Kermode, Frank, 33n2 Khachaturian, Aram, 169 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 77 Kienholz, Ed, 166 Kirby, Michael, 31 Kittler, Friedrich, 4, 54, 56 Klee, Paul, 4 Klein, Yves, 143 Klüver, Billy, 124, 166 Kojève, Alexandre, 33n2 Kosuth, Joseph, 129, 132, 144, 147 Kounellis, Janis, 145, 147 Krell, David Farrell, 170 Kruchenykh, Alexei, 77 Kubrick, Stanley, 159–65, 168 Kupka, Frantisek, 87n1 Kurosawa, Akira, 69 Kurzweil, Ray, 163 Kusama, Yayoi, 166

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 145 Lafayette, Marquis of, 38 Laswell, Harold, 141 Latour, Bruno, 145 Leakey, Louis B., 16 Lebel, Robert, 51n1 Lenin, Vladimir, 83 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 7, 17–21, 32n1, 61, 62, 154, 160 Levine, Les, 129–30 Lewis, David, 114 Licklider, J. C. R., 121 Lippard, Lucy, 133 Lissitsky, El, 84 Livingston, R. R., 34n3 Lloyd Wright, Frank, 145 Louis-Philippe, 38 Lunacharski, Anatol, 83 Lyotard, Jean-François, 10, 30, 139–56, 162 MacCracken, John, 164 Mach, Ernst, 89 Malevich, Kasimir, 8–9, 73–7, 82–7, 144, 147 Malinovski, Alexander, 83 Man, Paul de, 5, 174–5 Manzoni, Piero, 145, 147 Marconi, Guigliemo, 88n1 Marcuse, Herbert, 136 Marinetti, Filippo, 88n1 Martin, Kenneth, 114 Martin, Mary, 114 Marx, Karl, 77 Matiushin, Mikhail, 74 Mauss, Marcel, 29 Mayakovski, Vladimir, 77

Index

McHale, John, 113–24, 127, 135, 159–60 McHale, Magda, 120 McLean, Don, 69 McLuhan, Marshall, 9, 87, 91, 101–3, 105, 121, 127, 169 McShine, Kynaston, 136–7 Mead, Margaret, 98 Medalla, David, 123 Mellor, David, 113, 160 Merki, Charles, 65 Metsys, Quentin, 145 Meyer, Leonard, 9, 98, 100–1, 104 Michaux, Henri, 143 Midbon, Mark, 161 Miller, J. Hillis, 25, 53, 58 Minc, Alain, 139 Minelli, Vincente, 69 Minsky, Marvin, 130, 162 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, 9, 85, 125, 144, 147 Monet, Claude, 57 Monory, Jacques, 144, 147 Moravec, Hans, 163 Morley, Paul, 111n1 Morris, Robert, 125, 166 Morse, Jedidiah, 35, 41 Morse, Samuel, 7, 8, 35–51, 105 Muybridge, Eadweard, 144 Negroponte, Nicholas, 130, 133 Nelson, Ted, 32n, 133, Newby, Frank, 118 Newman, Barnett, 147–8 Nicéphore Niepce, Joseph, 45 Nichols, Bill, 3 Niethammer, Lutz, 33n2

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 61–2, 67, 175 Nijinski, Vaslav, 77 Nolan, Jack, 133 Noland, Kenneth, 165 Noll, A. Michael, 130 Nora, Simon, 139 Ogburn, William F., 32n Oldenberg, Claes, 166 Olitski, Jules, 165 Oppenheim, Dennis, 128, 130 Orton, Fred, 60 Ouspenski, P. D., 76 Paik, Nam June, 123, 132 Paolozzi, Eduardo, 114, 117, 118 Pasmore, Victor, 114 Payne, Lewis, 46 Penny, Simon, 137 Pialat, Maurice, 69 Picasso, Pablo, 70 Pissaro, Camille, 57 Plato, 6, 33n2, 108 Pollock, Griselda, 49–60 Ponge, Francis, 25 Popper, Frank, 146 Pound, Ezra, 87, 101 Prometheus, 65, 76–7 Proust, Marcel, 143 Putnam, Hilary, 162 Quirke, John, 48, 105 Rauschenberg, Robert, 95–6, 120, 123–4, 166 Razdow, Allen, 133

193

194

Read, Herbert, 118 Reed, Lou, 110 Reichardt, Jasia, 118, 124 Renoir, Auguste, 70 Renzio, Toni del, 114, 117 Resnais, Alain, 69 Rewald, John, 57 Rimbaud, Arthur, 174–5 Riopelle, Christopher, 70n1 Robby the Robot, 117 Rosenheim, Shawn James, 60 Roske, Brent, 70 Roulin, Joseph, 61 Royle, Nicholas, 58 Rubbo, Michael, 70 Ryan, Paul, 166 Ryman, Robert, 144, 147 St John Wilson, Colin, 114 Saint Simon, Count Henri de, 32 Saito, Ryoei, 70 Samaras, Lucas, 166 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 108 Schaffel, Kenneth, 94 Schmitt, Carl, 33n2 Schönberg, Arnold, 100 Schwenger, Peter, 109 Scriabin, Alexander, 77 Searle, John, 162 Seawright, James, 130 Seeman, Horst, 69 Segal, George, 166 Seurat, Georges, 57, 144, 147 Seward, W. H., 46 Shamberg, Michael, 166 Shanken, Edward, 137 Shannon, Claude, 96–9, 113, 115, 138

Index

Shapiro, Meyer, 68 Sheridan, Sonia, 132 Sherman, Roger, 34n3 Siegert, Bernard, 28 Simondon, Gilbert, 19 Sloan, Perry, 111n1 Smith, Alexander H., 105 Smith, David, 165 Smith, Tony, 166 Smithson, Alison, 117 Smithson, Peter, 117 Smithson, Robert, 125 Socrates, 33n2 Solov’ev, Vladimir, 76 Spinola, Julia, 177n2 Stallabrass, Julian, 176 Stein, Gertrude, 74 Steina, Vasulka, 136 Steina, Woody, 136 Steiner, Michael, 164 Stelarc, 136 Stengers, Isabelle, 145 Stent, Gunther, 9, 98–101 Stephan, Heinrich, 58 Stiegler, Bernard, 7, 19–23, 121, 153, 162 Stockhausen, Karheinz, 177n2 Stravinsky, Igor, 77 Strickland, Edward, 163 Suzuki, D. T., 104 Takis, 144, 147 Tatlin, Vladimir, 82 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 83, 91, 107 Thomson and Craighead, 11, 172 Thomson, Jon, see Thomson and Craighead

Index

Toffler, Alvin, 121, 135, 159 Tolstoy, Leo, 80 Tomkins, Calvin, 30, 51n1 Truman, Harry, 94–5 Trumbull, John, 36 Tsiolkovski, Konstantin Eduardovitch, 8, 80–2, 122 Tuchman, Maurice, 124, 134, 137 Tudor, David, 94 Turnbull, William, 114 Turner, J. M. W., 35 Vail, Alfred, 44, 46 Van Gogh, Theo, 68 Van Gogh, Vincent, 8, 59–70, 71n2, 73 Venice Biennale, 173 Vernadski, Vladimir, 83 Victoria, Theodosius, 133 Virilio, Paul, 3, 143 Voelcker, John, 117 Waddington, C. H., 98 Warhol, Andy, 145 Wasson, Gordon

Wasson, Valentina, 107 Watson-Watt, Robert, 87 Weiner, Lawrence, 132 West, Benjamin, 36 Wheatstone, Sir Charles, 44 Wiener, Norbert, 93, 97–8, 113, 141 Wilkes, Captain Charles, 46 Wills, David, 62 Winthrop, John, 37 Wolf, Tom, 98 Wolff, Christian, 101, 104 Wolfreys, Julian, 64 Woodward, Kathleen, 105 Wright, Edward, 118 Wright, Orville, 74 Wright, Wilbur, 74 Yeager, Captain Chuck, 90 Young, Robert, J. C., 57 Youngblood, Gene, 135, 168–9 Zizek, Slavoj, 170 Zola, Emile, 143 Zworykin, V. K., 87

195

Art, Time and Technology (Culture Machine)

Great Time Machine Hoax

The Time Machine

Great Time Machine Hoax

technicolor time machine

Great Time Machine Hoax

Time Machine (Saddleback Classics)

The Time Machine

Great Time Machine Hoax

The Accidental Time Machine

Conrad's Time Machine

Technicolor Time Machine

The Time Machine

Accidental Time Machine

The Technicolor Time Machine

Conrads Time Machine

Great Time Machine Hoax

The Time Machine

Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine

Art and Culture: Critical Essays

Art and Culture: Critical Essays

Machining Technology: Machine Tools and Operations

The Time Machine and the Invisible Man

The Time Machine and The Invisible Man

The Time Machine and the Invisible Man

The Time Machine and the Invisible Man

The Time Machine and The Invisible Man

Time Machine and The Invisible Man

The Time Machine and the Invisible Man

The Time Machine and The Invisible Man

Machining technology: machine tools and operations

Art, Time and Technology (Culture Machine)

Great Time Machine Hoax

The Time Machine

Great Time Machine Hoax

technicolor time machine

Great Time Machine Hoax

Time Machine (Saddleback Classics)

The Time Machine

Great Time Machine Hoax

The Accidental Time Machine

Conrad's Time Machine

Technicolor Time Machine

The Time Machine

Accidental Time Machine

The Technicolor Time Machine

Conrads Time Machine

Great Time Machine Hoax

The Time Machine

Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine

Art and Culture: Critical Essays

Art and Culture: Critical Essays

Machining Technology: Machine Tools and Operations

The Time Machine and the Invisible Man

The Time Machine and The Invisible Man

The Time Machine and the Invisible Man

The Time Machine and the Invisible Man

The Time Machine and The Invisible Man

Time Machine and The Invisible Man

The Time Machine and the Invisible Man

The Time Machine and The Invisible Man

Machining technology: machine tools and operations

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