Detouring the New City

Détournement -- to turn aside, turn against, to go without going somewhere -- was a key element of the practices of the Situationist International under the guidance of Guy Debord. He and his minions would branch out and wander the streets of Paris, deliberately going about their routeless routes, leaving only footprints in the dust and the occasional graffito "Ne Travaillez Jamais!" (Never Work!).

Latter-day theorists of the quotidian -- the imperceptible action of behavior that, because it was so ordinary, had not previously been thought to count for much -- such as Michel de Certeau took the Situationists' idea one step further: rather than claiming a practice for the intellectual few who consciously chose the path of diversion, De Certeau regarded all walking, all movement, as a performative act, within with the purposeful ("I am leaving the factory to head home"), the purposeless ("I will stop and gawk at this building") and even the perverse ("After petting the cat, I will drop it in the wheelie bin") as all, fundamentally, acts. Such seemingly non-productive acts, however small and"capillary" in their action, constitute another kind of work, work diverted from the production and consumption of capitalism, a anti-work or sorts that de Certau called "bricolage." Alongside the detoured walk, there could be detoured objects: the paper clip twisted into a sculpture, the office xerox machine used to xerox one's own face, or poetry, or shaped into music such as that of the "Xerophonics." Even the pigeons are getting in on the game.

So how might one view -- or apply -- these concepts in one's own life? Being conscious of the effort is not a disqualification; neither is it a requirement. Here are some potential instructions, which of course themselves might be further detoured:

1. Drive in circles for ten minutes on the way home. Then, don't go home.

2. Wear an unnecessary item of clothing (a scuba mask, party hat, clown shoes) to work.

3. Throw you cell phone into the ocean.

4. Tear out a page from a book you love, insert it into a sandwich, and eat it.

5. Learn to speak backwards (here are instructions).

6. Acquire a dead language, such as Old English or ancient Greek, and speak to everyone in it.

7. Wear only clothing manufactured prior to December 31, 1985.

8. The next time you see an advertisement, buy the product immediately.

9. Spent 10 hours clipping coupons, then put them through a shredder.

10. Send a child to work in your place, and spend the day in a sandbox, or reading children's books.

Reading as technology

We are accustomed to think of books, and print in general, as old and familiar things. To us, books are the "real" which may or may not be supplanted by the "virtual" -- Kindles, Nooks, and Google e-books. This makes it a bit difficult for us to recover the sense that the book, like the scroll before it, and the clay tablet before that, is a technical development, one which initially seemed strange to a world which had not known any means of preserving words and keeping them "stored" for another day. There's a video, which I like to call "Book 1.0" on YouTube that illustrates this perfectly. The book is no more a "natural" object than is a smartphone or an automobile; it has simply been around so long that we have gotten used to it, and now begin to fear that we may "miss" it.

Walter J. Ong, the brilliant Jesuit scholar and pupil of Marshall McLuhan, was one of the first scholars to realize and emphasize the technological status of writing. For Ong, writing not only changes our practical lives, it actually restructures our consciousness. This happens in a number of ways; our tendency to think of knowledge as persistent, as capable of being stored elsewhere -- and with it our sense that we ourselves don't have to precisely remember anything -- is one key effect. Beyond this, though, our whole sense that by naming, cataloging, and finding form in things that we are in fact re-figuring the world; that our mental abstractions seem to have shape and permanence; that there can even be a thing such as "capitalism," "Marxism," or "psychology" are also after-effects of writing and print. Print, by making massive amounts of text cheap to make, distribute, and preserve, accelerated these changes; with the dawn of the internet, this process has taken another enormous leap. The disappearance of objects -- the book, the music CD, the videocassette or DVD -- and their replacement by the mere making available of media streamed from somewhere else, is one notable result of this accelerating process.

At the same time, Ong emphasized the complexity and sophistication of the non-literate mind (he disliked the term "pre-literate" at it presumes a progression toward writing as inevitable). The ancient Irish bards had to memorize hundreds of lengthy poems; in the 1920's in Yugoslavia, Ong's mentor Walter Lord found pairs of men who could, by singing interlocked lines back and forth between each other, reproduce an epic poem of tens of thousands of lines. Such poems are as ancient as speech itself, and a few -- the Elder Edda, Beowulf, the Kalevala, and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey -- survived into the manuscript era, the print era, and are now downloadable as e-books. And yet, in this disposable era, when computers and cellphones complete the circuit from shiny new tech devices to e-rubbish in a landfill in a few short years, the old belief -- that writing something down preserves it -- may yet be reversed.

Some say that E-books aren't proper books at all. Some point to events such as Amazon's silent deletion of copies of George Orwell's Animal Farm from Kindle readers as a cautionary tale. The Pew Charitable Trust recently completed a survey of books and readers, and some of its findings are quite unexpected.

So where do we go from here? Will e-readers be the death of the book? Will a dusty old paperback become a sort of weird antique, joining 78 rpm records, 16 mm film, and Betamax cassettes in the dead media junkpile? Or will we always, whatever else we have with them, have books?

On Photography

The arrival of photography was not, as we conceive of it now, the arrival of the possibility of accurate representations of reality. The eyes of the times were as yet untrained to decipher the "real" within photographical realism. The Duke of Wellington complained that his nose looked too big (never mind that his nickname in the Army had been "Old Nosey"), and many public figures avoided photography as though it were the plague. In the cartoon shown here, Punch magazine satirized the "Interesting and Valuable Result" of a family photograph; to many at the time, the camera's eye seemed a lie, almost an instant caricature of the sitter's worst qualities.

The Daguerreotype, the very first commercial process, was expensive and time-consuming; early sitters had to remain still for at least three minutes, assisted in this task by a metal neck-brace. The cost of the photo was based on the size of the copper plate from which it was made; a "sixteenth plate" was the smallest, and cost the modern equivalent of more than $100; a quarter- or half-plate such as was ideal for a family portrait could cost well over $500. Daguerreotypes were also "one offs," in that the plate was the positive and (because opaque) could not be printed off. Yet at around the same time, William Henry Fox Talbot developed his "Talbotype" process (also known as a Calotype), using sensitized paper to produce a negative image. From this paper negative, any number of positives could be made, although since their medium was paper, the outlines were far less sharp than with Daguerreotypes. Finally, the invention of glass-plate negative processes such as the Ambrotype (also known as a Collodion Positive) created a medium in which many excellent copies could easily be made from a single negative. By the era of the American Civil War, inexpensive photographic processes such as the Tintype meant that very few soldiers went off to battle without leaving a photo behind, and quite often took a family photo with them. The final step in cheapness and availability was George Eastman's invention of flexible celluloid film, which was used both in still and and moving picture cameras; with its inexpensive "Brownie" box cameras and rolled film that could be processed anywhere, Eastman and Kodak (who later merged) made the "snapshot" a part of the American, and the world, landscape.

In the 1880's, the "photogravure" process made it easy to reproduce photographs in magazines and newspapers, and the era of the mass-produced image was in full swing.

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin's influence on the fields of media and cultural studies is so fundamental that it risks being a truism. Many times at academic conferences, I've had to suppress the urge to strangle some theory geek who starts every other sentence with "As Benjamin says ... " But well beyond this sort of slavish ipse dixit, there's a good reason Benjamin is so often cited: his analysis of modern culture is not only a perceptive one for his time but -- because his time was such a seedbed for technologies to come -- a prescient one. Nevertheless, we must work to read his text not to ask "What would Benjamin say" but rather what, if we proceed as did he, do we say?

His essay, usually translated as "On the Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction," is a case in point. In Benjamin's day, the new technologies of reproduction were things like colored lithographs of paintings, photographs, phonographs, and engravings. He could hardly have imagined the plethora of reproduction that is the Internet, where an image search for "Mona Lisa" produces not only thousands of copies of Da Vinci's painting, but hundreds of thousands of variations, ranging from Lego Mona Lisa to Osama Bin Laden Mona Lisa.

For Benjamin, reproducing an artwork changes it fundamentally: he identifies as the "aura" that ineffable quality of presence that an original work of art possesses, and which -- for him -- is missing in any mere copy. The democratization of art -- the ability of anyone, even the most humble, to own a reproduction of a great work of art -- does not, for Benjamin, entirely compensate for this loss; indeed, by pretending that a copy can supply the meaning of the original, it actually harms and cheapens the experience.

If that's actually so, then images of art would seem to be irreparably cheapened -- and yet large art exhibitions continue to sell tickets, and most museums are thriving. It would seem that the Internet has succeeded in making the question of reproduction moot -- which of many mathematically identical digital images is the "original" anyway? In other areas, such as music and film, the original -- by its very nature -- is lost already. The "actual" voice of Bessie Smith or the guitar solos of George Harrison disappeared the moment they were being recorded, and all that the spinning discs can give us is a captive reproduction. Similarly, in film, the actors' performances vanish into a machine -- for us, the Marx Brothers, Lauren Bacall, and Charlie Chaplin will always be alive -- but that's because, in the form we knew them, they were already copies.

And such copies has an aura of their own, perhaps -- the smell of warm popcorn, the squeak of a theater seat, the beam of light as it cuts through the air over our heads and materializes into magic -- all the attendant joys of going to 'the movies' are all associated with what is, in its essence, a copy.