The panorama, developed as a form of spectacle at the end of the eighteenth
century, clearly preceded aspects of the reception of images addressed by
Walter Benjamin. It was a technical invention for enveloping the viewer's
body in the restricted space of the panoramic drum. The usage of the
panorama rapidly moved from an object of cultural curiosity to a means of
capital accumulation, as the experience became one of popular
entertainment. The high admission charges for visiting the first of these
devices were lowered as the surprise value of the experience for the
aristocracy wore thin.
The spatial arrangement of the panorama was to position the viewer at the
centre to look at the image placed on the inside of the faces of the
circular building. The patent for the panorama stressed the importance of
establishing the correct distance from viewer to image, (to obscure the
painted production of the image), the role of the multi-perspectival
formats, and the importance of shrouding the passage way from the outside
to the viewing position, or platform. The logic of this last instruction
was developed further in the careful screening of the means of support of
the viewer, the screening of the top and bottom edges to the image, and
the different sources of illumination. The importance of the controls for
the illusion of equipment free reality, of an illusion itself - the
painting, the cinema projection - was shown in the mid-nineteenth century
development of sceneographic foregrounds made of rocks, mud and vegetation,
positioned in the space between the viewer and the bottom of the painting.
The arcades were a notable development in that they were a singular social
space for the display of commodities, (prior to the development of the
capital, and forms of mass production and mass retailing). At their outset
these were seemingly spaces of a singular economy of bodies, and forms of
exchange. The arcade was a linear panorama of the exclusive
"commodity-on-display". They were not the spaces for the display
of scenes but the reflecting lustre of desire, arranged within the
perspectival axis of the arcades.
The early arcades were a discreet social space, unlike that of the streets
and for instance, the boulevards organised, (conceptually and
administratively), by Haussmann in second empire Paris. The occupation of
the streets could be subject to varying and sometimes conflicting interests
and practices - transit, purchase, barter, driving animals and stock,
military passage, security, habitation, flight, criminality, dissoluteness,
marginal and subsistence trades, and more. In these spaces different and
sometimes conflicting social classes passed and to an extent 'encountered '
each other.
In connecting the arcades and the world fairs, SBM develops the argument
for the political economic function of the displays and spaces of
spectacle. In particular she marks the mystification of the role and
productive function (and exploitation) of the working class in the
manufacture of the objects displayed, whilst distracting them with the
gloss of the spectacle of these objects. These obviously become key devices
for the development of forms of expression whilst maintaining the political
and social logic of distribution of property.
cul-de-sac: the image of the crowd - from in front and above - taken from
a position which is not quite the point of focus of the look of the
participants. Such imaging makes the collective moment the object of
spectacle, notionally of itself, (here as an image), but also in the
football match (see Mexican Wave), the cinema crowd (read opera for
bourgeois class), and obviously, when coded as political subjects, the
participants (equivocal use of active noun), of a spectacle of power. The
congregational display of Nuremberg was part of a politics organised to
aesthetic effect - to use bodies to 'express' a relation of power in which
the organisation and diagrammatic form of the crowd, Nuremberg/Halifax
Building Society advertisement, is used as a false representation of the
'will of the people', whether as a complicity to political authority or
political economic dogma - National Socialism or the accountability of an
organisation of international financial capital.
[one of the images referred to is that of the crowd in the form of the
swastika on the political field of Nuremberg Stadium; another is an
advertising image of a group of 'representative' bodies (a 'cross-section'
of the labour force of this mortgage and savings company) arranged in the
form of a cross.]
How then to understand 'expression' in the context of digital technology?
Under this technology 'expression' might be defined as the construct of
assembled informations, treating this as the property/ownership of the
assembler. Notionally technology is neither socialist nor reactionary; it
is the uses to which it is put; nor is it a single social object but rather
contains usable properties. The fallacy of such a position is that the
current waves of technology, such as computers and digital linkages, like
those preceding digital such as the internal combustion engine, are by
their use and development a map of continuing territorial changes of one
political-economic scheme against another, affecting labour, urban and
non-urban occupation, of bodily motion. The displacement of certain modes
of labour in western industrialised societies by this technology, and the
investment and disruption in cities of so-called developing countries, is
not some natural event but a stage in capital's constant seeking of the
maximum exploitation of resources, including that of the cheapest labour
and the most profligate/inexperienced consumers. What then develops in
western countries at least in the shadow of such directed investment, is
the formation of privileged labour classes, i.e. digital over manual.
However continuing social class divisions of labour within specific digital
industries are maintained.
It is difficult not to consider digital technology and especially that part
of it that falls into the category of super-added value, i.e. cultural, as
a means by which the middle class maintain their roles in modes of
production, in a political economy of information and 'information +'. This
play-tool technology constitutes analogously the privileged access to the
restricted display of the commodity in the early arcades. All the while
other social groups are subject to the intense deformative pressures and
social mal-adjustment of the mood-swings of capital in emplacing these
technologies.
This technology is not neutral but a motivated instrumental social, and
therefore political, agent. Likewise information, as evident in the extreme
cases of the Union Carbide plant in India, of BSE research and analysis in
the UK, and of tobacco companies generally. These are examples of the
control of information. The translation of particular knowledges, both
local, historic and cultural to the information mode, continues as part of
a schema of production by various capital factions, (such as that of
Knowledge Capital of the corporate universities and its employees).
>From the sitting position 'things are brought closer as part of the process
of overcoming every reality by accepting its [informational] reproduction',
image and text and sound. The closeness here is of a form of knowing.
Information flattens out the historic differences and contradictions of
media and representational schemas: a process of cancelling out the logics
of cultural form and taking up material as loosely assembled signifiers and
concepts. The information of 'things' is brought to an explicit state of
commodity relations, to be circulated globally as digital image text
sound.
The digital prophets argue that this circulation is the point of access and
therefore the 'use' of the material. Commentators upon digital technology
frequently presume a McLuhanite end to class divisions of labour and
consumption. The technology seems to mark the end of class congregation of
arcades, theatre, fairs, cinema. These are being replaced in part, so the
argument runs, by digital assembly in habitual domestic spaces, to which
are transmitted a vast compendium of informational material, all reproduced
in the zone of the small screen.
The act of viewing is described as both singular and massive: massive in
terms of the crassest propositions of universal applicability and access;
singular in that the selection of digital material is notionally modelled
on the banal consumptive predilection of the viewer. The basis of provision
of digital material has now changed, with the addition of corporate capital
to that of the State capital of education, and the placing of technologies
in the home - as a way of extending the scheme of commodity-body from a
mass relation to a supposed individual relation.
Clearly anything digital has displaced the spatial-social construction of
the 'aura' of art, that which could have been construed by the architecture
of the former ruling classes, whether of the Church, prince or merchant
bourgeois. This was an architecture that functioned in part to control
access to these objects, or set a spatial sequence prior to viewing them.
Those engaged with the recent technologies have no such spatiality - their
distance is one of the secretarial posture and the monitor screen. The
social distance here is made in the part collapse of the figures of
production and the spaces and substantiality of each - such as the farmer,
scientist, author, machinist, artist, though not of course as a
displacement of the systemic capitalisation of the relations of production,
exchange, or circulation of 'art', genetic analysis, or tooling sequences.
The current emplacement of digital technology is part of the a continuing
process to undervalue labour, (both manual and trendy digital labour)
whilst fascinating the viewer with myriad digital widgets.
[Robin Serjeant]
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of
Seeing
Theodore Adorno, Dialectics of Enlightenment
Andrew Ross - "Gadget Love", in, Artforum, Dec. 1996.