The first level continues: Cinema is a line of a certain type, which opens towards certain possibilities, an illumination of the dark corners of topography. For Walter Benjamin, what is to be valued is the ‘optical unconscious’, cinema’s machinic vision of a world that is itself machined with a dense grid of lines. Cinema can expand or shrink space, extend or compress time, it can cut together images of diverse scales or forms — intimations of topology. It creates a ‘Speilraum’, a playroom, for dividing up the machine world otherwise. Contra Lukács, Benjamin opens towards the formal properties of the line at the expense of its representation of an historical situation as a totality. But what doesn’t change is that the spectator, like the reader, is external to the line itself.
062.
The first level ends: The novel languishes. Cinema fails to realize its allegorical potential. Guy Debord: “But this life and this cinema are both equally paltry; and that is why you could actually exchange one for the other with indifference.” Boredom reigns.
063.
The second level begins: Radio is a line of a certain type, which opens towards certain possibilities. For Brecht, what is to be valued in it is a certain unrealized potential for the line to point both ways: “radio is one-sided and it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him.” Radio could be like a public telephony. But it is all flow; it lacks a code. It radiates from one point to every other, without distinction. It lacks the transformational geometry of topology, where any three specific points could be connected, anywhere, and still make the same ‘triangle’ connecting sender and receiver and the third ‘line’ — telesthesia itself.
064.
The second level continues. Television expands the line of radio, but does it add much to it? Does it yield much by way of a space of possibility? Fredric Jameson: “The blockage of fresh thinking before this solid little window against which we strike our heads being not unrelated to precisely that whole or total flow we observe through it.” Television appears as an analog flow. The digital has not yet prevailed.
065.
The second level ends: The tension between the topographic and topological is also one between a declining sphere of representation, will and interest, and one a new topos that is statistical, digital, simulated — algorithmic. The topographic is incomplete. It can project its lines across space and annihilate time, but it cannot yet mark or measure out the space it encloses. It has some feeble mechanisms — the opinion poll, for example. Through the laborious means of seeking out and recording opinion, topological space can be given the appearance of agency. Jean Baudrillard: “It is, paradoxically, as a game that the opinion polls recover a sort of legitimacy. A game of the undecideable; a game of chance… Perhaps we can see here the apparition of one of these collective forms of the game that Caillois called alea — an irruption into the polls themselves of a ludic, aleatory process, an ironic mirror for the use of the masses.”
Just a detail, but for accuracy’s sake, i comes before e in “Spielraum”… Pardon my fastidiousness!
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Ken,
Remember CB radio? What a game that was! That invisible yet interactive sector of the public sphere — twenty-three slots on the Hertzian waves — that had its heyday in the mid seventies, in the wake of the Vietnam war, before being rendered obsolescent by the global technology blitz beginning in the 1980s, that spearheaded the new post-Fordist economy. This “Citizens’ Band” was a horizontally organized network, and as such the symbolic forebear of the Internet forums of today. CB is something of a case study of how and why such and such technology “makes it” and some other doesn’t. For it is not merely a technical but also an ideological question as to why the collective banter of CB-space yielded to the individualism of portable phones.
Although the sales pitch always presented CB as a user-friendly informational tool — warning people about traffic jams and similar hazards of consumer society — it actually had far less to do with content than with pure talk; it was always more about networking and communicating (truckers keeping each other awake at night) than about the message communicated — though it had the potential for content. Unlike the cell phones that replaced it, CB was inherently about group communication: everybody was on the same 23 channels; strictly private conversations were not for the airwaves. And unlike “Ham” radio, the licensing scheme was very open (no test of Morse code, for instance), so it was open to whoever could spring for the $200 set at the local radio shack.
There’s a song — not much of a song, really, but it was a big hit in 1976 — by American country & western singer C.W. McCall called Convoy, which celebrates not only long-haul truckers but their preferred vector of communication: CB radio. It is, in its own corny way, a song about anti-authoritarian and open-ended community building: it’s about an unconventional group of red-neck truckers, hippies and civil libertarians, all of whom despise the liberty-hating police, and who use their CBs to get a cross-country convoy going, breaking down all the barricades the cops set up. It’s a very American song, but it does say something about what CB meant in the collective imaginary — it made CB seem somehow an exciting, potentially subversive gamespace.
I remember ‘Convoy’! CB was interesting in that it cut across the now supposedly immutable divide between red states and blue states. It could be a hippie thing or a trucker thing.
If i was to unpack this rather short history of communication, tehre would be lots of moments like CB, when new media open themselves up to new kinds of social experiment.
And get shut down again!
[quote]when new media open themselves up to new kinds of social experiment.
And get shut down again! [/quote]
*grimaces as net neutrality is passed over in Congress.
Yes, its the real eclipse of the atopian promise of the itnernet.
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There is great potential still in television, for paralleling while disrupting linear time, for inserting the viewer into an infinitely manipulable world through an invincible avatar. And always there is the potential for great violence. Witness “24″ with all of its various screens within screens, interiors within interiors, parallel to each other, and so very close to us.
24, with its screens within screens, is the fantasy of a televisual world that still has some effect. But perhaps it only discovers this reflexivity at the point at which it is obsolete. The owl of minerva will be back after the commerical break.
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first line: “is also one between a declining sphere of representation, will and interest, and one a new topos that is statistical, digital, simulated — algorithmic.”
I think this ould be clearer (more grammatically correct?) if you the second “one”. No?
thanks!
haha. Somehow you got that despite the typos. Of course I meant:
“I think this would be clearer (more grammatically correct?) if you deleted the second “one”. No?”
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