CABINET a quarterly of art and culture Issue 13 futures

CABINET
a quarterly of art and culture
Issue 13 FUTURES
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cabinet
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Founding editors Brian Conley & Sina Najafi
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Contents © 2004 Immaterial Incorporated & the authors, artists, and
translators. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction of any material
here is a no-no. The daring views published in this magazine are not necessarily
those of the writers, let alone the conformist editors of Cabinet.
$1000
Helen & Peter Bing
Debra Singer
$500 or under
Seong Chun & Nick Winter
James Cohan Gallery
Nathalie & Amir Farman-Farma
Beth Rudin DeWoody
$250 or under
Elizabeth & Christopher Apgar, Jennifer Bacon & Filippo Fossati, Joe Barron &
Bill Gutmann, Allison Berglas & Jonathan Kalsched, Molly Bleiden & Scott Pfaffman, Marianne Boesky Culman & Liam Culman, Susan Bratton, Steven Cohen,
Thomas M. Clark, Fred Clarke, Donna & James Clovis, Rebecca H. Cort, Hesu
Coue & Edward Wilson, Barbara & Richard Debs, David Deitcher,
Elizabeth Demaray, Peter Dudek, Michael Duffy, Rachel & Jon Edelson, Ben
Feldman, Marc Freidus, Willis Ganis, Robert Goff & Matthew McAlpin, Mary
Ann Hopkins, Evan Gaffney, Joy Garnett & Bill Jones, Pamela & Paul Johnson,
Carin Kuoni & John Oakes, Rebecca Lawton, Dave Leiber & Janina Quint, Sheri
Levine, Brett Littman, Jon Lyon, Julia Meltzer, Sara Meltzer Gallery, Chris &
Christine Peddy, Aaron Plant & Tom Gleeson, Magda Sawon, Stephanie
Schumann, Melanie Shorin & Greg S. Feldman, Lisa Sigal & Byron Kim, Laine
Siklos, Lisa Singer & Charlie Moran, Michele Snyder, Nancy Spero & Leon Golub,
Margaret Sundell, Susan Swenson & Joe Amrhein, Austin Thomas, Henry
Urbach, Jil Weinstock & Eric Freitag, Mark Welsh, Allan & Ellen Wexler,
Jaime Wolf, Debra Yu & Lee Etheredge
$100 or under
Stephen Abramson, David B. Allison, Eric Anderson, Safi Bahcall, Erik Bakke,
Ted Bonin, Walter Cotten, Thomas Cregan, Sachin Divecha, Stephen Frailey,
Robert Goldsmith, Anne Hamilton, Jane Hammond, Robert Hammond, Jim
Hodges, Cecily Horton, Craig Kalpakjian, Mark Kennedy, Rachel Knecht & David
Scher, Moukhtar Kocache, Alexandra Marshall, Scott McCormack,
John Melick, Linda J. Park & Cotter Luppi, Anne Pasternak & Michael Starn,
Cay-Sophie Rabinowitz & Christian Rattemeyer, Andrea Robinson, Alexis
Rockman, William Sabatier, Richard Serra, Virginia Cowles Schroth, Andrea
Scott, Charity Scribner, Laura Shabe, Steve Shane, Adam Sheffer, James Siena,
Rebecca Smith, Carol Stakenas, David Sternbach, Nina & Michael
Sundell, Lanka Tattersall, Alexander Villari, Arnold Zwicky
cover: The cast and crew of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes take a break
from filming on the campus of University of California, Irvine in 1972. The
seven-year-old campus was chosen as the film’s location because of its
brutalist buildings and barren landscape. Courtesy University of California,
Irvine. Special thanks to Diana Palmer.
page 4: Pamela Jackson, The Futuremen, 1998.
columns
7
colors / khaki
ben marcus
For the potential Hemingway in all of us
9
inventory / fallen figures & heads: leon golub’s lists
david levi strauss
The poetry of the archive
12
ingestion / the shelf-life of liquefying objects
jamer hunt
Monuments go limp
15
leftovers / what to do with a worn-out koran
michael cook
A question of disposition
maIN
19
edison’s warriors
christoph cox
Deceive to defeat
23
triskelion
sasha archibald
The migrations of a symbol
26
border sound files: excerpts from an audio essay
josh kun
Into Tijuana, through the aural aleph
33
borderline archeology
jesse lerner
Janus-faced geography
37
data and metadata: an interview with murtha baca & erin coburn
Eve meltzer & Julia meltzer
You say Ugolino Lorenzetti, I say Bartolommeo Bulgarini
41
100,000 bottles of beer In the wall
paul collins
Alfred Heineken’s recycling program
44
cutaneous: an interview with steven connor
brian dillon
On, in, through, and beneath the skin
49
the figurative incarnation of the sentence (notes on the “autographic” skin)
georges didi-huberman
Dermographia and the inscribed body
54
the hand up project: attempting to meet the new needs of natural life-forms
elizabeth demaray
A new home for the hermit crab
FUTURES
59
thinking futures
daniel rosenberg & susan harding
Conspiracy, prophecy, and utopia
62
very slow scan television
gebhard sengmüller & Jakob Edlbacher
Tune in, turn on, wait
66
desert modernism
joseph masco
From the Nevada Test Site to Liberace’s sequined suits
75
special cd insert: past forward
curated by brian Conley & Christoph coX
78
artist project: Naturalia
aziz + cucher
81
the use of drugs to influence time experience
82
the day before the day after
85
the trouble with timelines
daniel rosenberg
Heroin to “lose the present,” alcohol to make time “go faster”
Waiting for JFK: Austin, Texas, 22 November 1963
The measure of it all
86
A Timeline of Timelines
sasha archibald & Daniel Rosenberg
A device turned on itself
92
phases of life 1: the artificial foster-mother
samantha vincenty
The birth of the incubator
94
phases of life 2: the family room of tomorrow
joseph masco
The domestic dreamspace, after the bomb
96
phases of life 3: living at death’s door
nicholas sammond
Not dead yet
98
hummingbird futures
daniel rosenberg
Theodor Nelson and the creation of hypertext
107
the veterans of future wars
susan hamson
Patriotism, prepaid
108
the sexual archipelago
jessica sewell
Simon Spies’s hydraulic pleasure palace
111
the eight-fold path to knowing ra
greg rowland
Space is the place
114
the martian variations
Covering War of the Worlds
116
scent from the future
miryam sas
The first English translation of the 1921 Japanese Futurist Manifesto
121
ANd
The Cabinet Time Capsule
A call for contributions
postcard: Message to the future, 1897
Gallop, Wilkins, Sainsbury, chester & Pickernell
bookmark: Alien Timeline
Joe Nickell
Look near the subscription cards
Contributors
Sasha Archibald is an associate editor at Cabinet.
Aziz + Cucher are a collaborative team based in Brooklyn. They are
represented by Henry Urbach Architecture, NY. For more information,
see www.azizcucher.net
Harald Bode (1909-1987) was a key figure in the history of electronic music. He
invented a range of electronic musical instruments (the Warbo Formant organ,
the Melodium, the Melochord, the Polychord and others) used in the earliest
electronic music compositions, and, later in life, composed electronic music for
television, film, and live performance.
Albert Casais (a.k.a. omnid) is a sound artist based in New Jersey.
Paul Collins edits the Collins Library imprint of McSweeney’s Books, and is
the author of Banvard’s Folly and Sixpence House. His newest book is Not Even
Wrong.
Brian Conley is an artist and an editor-at-large at Cabinet. In October 2004,
Pierogi gallery will host an exhibition of his work.
Michael Cook is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at
Princeton University. He has worked on various aspects of the history of Islam
and the Islamic world, and has recently published A Brief History of the Human
Race (W. W. Norton, 2003).
Joseph Masco teaches anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he
writes about technology, politics, and aesthetics.
Eve Meltzer is currently a Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of
Art and Art History at Stanford University, where she teaches contemporary art
history and theory. She is working on a book about language and information in
art practices of the 1960s and 1970s.
Julia Meltzer is a media artist and executive director of Clockshop, a non-profit
media and art organization. She lives in Los Angeles.
Carlos di Napoli (a.k.a. crlos) is an architect and musician based in Santa Fe,
Argentina.
Joe Nickell is a Senior Fellow with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation
of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). Nickell is a regular contributor to Skeptical Inquirer magazine and author of numerous books, including Real-Life X-Files:
Investigating the Paranormal (University Press of Kentucky, 2001).
Daniel Rosenberg is Assistant Professor of History in the Robert D. Clark Honors
College at the University of Oregon. His next book concerns the history of the
past.
Greg Rowland is Contributing Editor at the Idler magazine. He also sells
semiotics to multinational corporations. He is based in London, England.
Christoph Cox is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hampshire College and
an editor-at-large at Cabinet. He is the author of Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (Univerrsity of California, 1999) and editor of Audio Culture: Readings
in Modern Music (Continuum, forthcoming).
Nicholas Sammond is Assistant Professor in the Media and Society program
at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He is the editor of Steel Chair to the Head:
Essays on Professional Wrestling (Duke University Press, Fall 2004) and the
author of The Uses of Childhood: The Rise of Walt Disney and the Generic
American Child, 1930-1960 (Duke University Press, Spring 2005).
Elizabeth Demaray is an artist whose work explores the connection between
the named world and the real. She is co-founder and co-curator of the Conceptual Art Store.com and teaches at Rutgers University at Camden where she is
head of sculpture.
Luz Maria Sánchez is a sound/installation artist and the founder of TPS, an
artist-run space in San Antonio, Texas. Her work has been shown in galleries
and festivals in the UK, France, Spain, Cuba, Mexico, and Egypt. She is working
on her doctorate at the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain.
Georges Didi-Huberman teaches at the École des hauts études en sciences
sociales in Paris.
Miryam Sas is associate professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies at
the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory
and Japanese Surrealism, was released by Stanford University Press in 2001.
She is currently working on a new book about postwar Japanese performance.
Brian Dillon is the UK editor for Cabinet and a regular contributor to Frieze,
Modern Painters, and the Irish Times. His first book, In the Dark Room, will be
published in 2005.
Jakob Edlbacher is an industrial designer based in Vienna.
Susan Hamson is a project archivist at Princeton University Library where
she manages a staff of three in the processing of over 2,200 linear feet of
University records. Previously, she was the archivist at the Chemical Heritage
Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Susan Harding is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California,
Santa Cruz. She is the author of The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist
Language and Politics (Princeton, 2000), among other works.
Jamer Hunt is Associate Professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia
where he is Director of the Master’s Program in Industrial Design—a graduate
laboratory for postindustrial design.
Manuel Rocha Iturbide is a sound artist and composer from Mexico City, where
he curates the International Sound Art Festival.
Pamela Jackson’s recent projects include The Doll Games (on the web at
www.ineradicablestain.com/dollgames/) and a multimedia work-in-progress,
Mood Organ. She lives in Los Angeles.
Josh Kun is a Los Angeles-based writer who teaches in the English Department
at UC Riverside. His arts column, “Frequencies,” appears in the San Francisco
Bay Guardian, Boston Phoenix, and Los Angeles Alternative Press. He is currently
writing a book about Tijuana.
Jesse Lerner is a documentary filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His book
F is for Phony: Fake Documentaries Undoing History, Identity and Truth (with
Alexandra Juhasz) is forthcoming.
David Levi Strauss is the author of two recent books of essays on art and
politics: Between the Eyes (Aperture, 2003) and Between Dog & Wolf
(Autonomedia, 1999).
Kara Lynch is a multimedia artist who teaches video production at Hampshire
College. Her feature-length film, Black Russians, was completed in 2001.
She is currently at work on Invisible, a speculative, non-linear black liberation
narrative.
Ben Marcus is author of The Age of Wire and String and editor of The Anchor
Book of New American Short Stories.
Janek Schaefer is a London-based sound artist noted for his creative work
with vinyl recordings and turntables. His multi-function three-arm Tri-Phonic
Turntable is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as “the world’s most
versatile record player.”
Gebhard Sengmüller is an artist working in the field of media technology,
currently based in Vienna, Austria. Since 1992, he has been developing projects
and installations focusing on the history of electronic media; creating alternative
ordering systems for media content; and constructing autogenerative networks.
His main project for the last few years has been VinylVideo, a fake piece of
media archeology. See www.itsallartipromise.com.
Jessica Sewell is Assistant Professor at the Department of Art History at Boston
University. Her current book project is “Gendering the Spaces of Modernity:
Women and Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915.”
Samantha Vincenty is a crossword editor and former research assistant for
Cabinet. She lives in Brooklyn.
Achim Wollscheid is a sound artist from Frankfurt whose audio art has been
released on the Ritornell and Selektion labels. A catalogue of his recent work,
Achim Wollscheid: Selected Works 1990-2000, was published in 2001 by
Selektion and Errant Bodies.
Aaron Ximm (a.k.a. the Quiet American) is a sound artist from San Francisco
who works primarily with field recordings. His latest releases are Rockets of the
Mekong and Plumbing and Irrigation of South Asia.
columns
“Colors” is a column in which a guest writer responds to a spcific color assigned by the editors of Cabinet. / “Inventory,” a new
occasional column, will feature and sometimes examine a list, register, or catalogue. / “Ingestion” is Allen S. Weiss’s column on cuisine,
aesthetics, and philosophy. Jamer Hunt is stepping in for Weiss, who
is absent this issue. / “Leftovers” is a column that examines the
significance of cultural detritus.
colors / khaki
ben marcus
To Daniel Harris
If any clothing color is meant to corroborate the spasms of
a fantasy that we are not really living in cities or towns where
all danger from animals has been removed; that instead some
forested adventure awaits us for which we must be properly
outfitted; that in fact we are secretly rugged safari people who
at any moment will ditch our offices for an impromptu hunt
of treacherous elephants, a jeep trip through uncharted
veldt; then that color is khaki. No other tint of clothing has so
aggressively been used to link mundane office life, well-fed
fraternity catatonia, or the Haldol atmosphere of country
clubs with robust wilderness trekking and free-spirit nomadism—the kinds of behavior, in short, that are the least likely to
occur. Now a staple pants color of corporate casual Fridays,
it is those Fridays that, rather than encouraging comfort, are
meant to announce to our co-workers, as the dumb half of
show-and-tell, who we really are, lest they miss it behind
our suits and ties: When we wear khaki, we are potential
Hemingway characters ready to take up arms against the wildlife, and then to repose over mojitos in cabanas. In truth, khaki
is the ultimate wasteland camouflage, what will finally hide
people when the last buildings have been demolished and we
are reduced to wandering over the desert. The old camouflage
of Rorschach greens, browns, and grays, was designed for a
planet that still lived and breathed, where
warfare might occur in a dripping, ozone-fresh greenhouse,
when hiding meant taking cover under a tree. Since those
sectors are now either demolished or ossified by longing tourists, and the new warfare is conducted in the sand and dust,
with our fondness for green fading into nostalgia, khaki makes
the most invisible outfit for the future, a covert skin
for battling atop the dead, colorless planet.
Khaki is so entrenched as a textile concept that one can
refer to pants as “khakis” and court no confusion. Are there
any other garments so ubiquitous that we identify them by
their colors? While blue jeans can faintly evoke the wild west,
there is little wild west anymore to evoke—the myth has been
severally punctured—though jeans still (the non-designer
ones) bespeak yard labor and trade labor and other sorts of
activities that make a person dirty. Their blueness is secondary to the actual texture of their material. Khakis, meanwhile,
announce leisure and the aftermath of activity, the sense
that something strenuous just happened but has now been
cleaned up. Khakis signal repose after the hunt, a patrician
costume of earned relaxation that acknowledges the environment of dust and sand but still appears wealthy and dressy.
It is no wonder, then, that khaki is the iconographic garment
for the well-behaved, well-paid American “person,” who
defaults to that color choice because it is apparently the most
comfortable; because it seems easy and simple, inoffensive
while still slightly stylish, and imminently durable. But since
when does color alone provide sufficient sensual comfort
against the skin, particularly in the climate-controlled interiors
we frequently navigate? And why does almost no one wear
khakis that are not khaki-colored, even though marketers
frequently pin their hopes on magenta and compost-colored
pants cut just like their khaki counterparts? Witness the
commercial arc of Banana Republic, at first a retail outlet for
the “suburban safari” enthusiast, a ludicrously unsuggestive
phrase (wouldn’t wilding count as suburban safari?). Hats,
whips, chaps, rucksacks, survival gear, hard-weather
performance material, facial salves to toughen the cheeks
against desert zephyrs: These were the ingredients of the
early marketing efforts at Banana Republic, and this is the
identity it still traffics in, even if those products are no longer
on sale, even while Banana Republic has fully shifted its line
from outdoor to indoor, desert to office, wilderness to city.
What happened to the buckaroo mascot and the gutted jeep
chassis that punctuated the shop floors? Entering now, one
finds instead a rabidly generic set of corporate uniforms
in no way linked to the khaki foundation, neat stacks of
supposedly staple outfits for men and women that manage
to be both extremely unimpressive and readily identifiable as
BR wear. The lighting is cold and uniform, so unlike the brilliant sunsets of the savannah. One must push all the
way to the back of the store to find its origins, tables heaped
in khaki pants with names like Dawson and Emerson,
insinuations of rugged individualism rather than what khaki
really is: a team uniform for dead people, wishful wear for
lifestyle-free people.
If we desire a clothing color for something that will
never happen to us, it is only because nearly nothing
physical happens to us of our own volition, and we must
independently generate the suspicion that it once has or that
it will again. Clothing is the ultimate vehicle for this physical advertisement of self, a mating hypothetics we require
of each other to share secrets and fantasies, to dramatize
our disgusts with our real lives, to show off to others what
we might do if we were really alive. Like weekend cyclists
in the park who wear elaborate gear not connected to
better cycling performance—Lycra jerseys emblazoned
with Italian advertisements, corporate logo colors disfiguring torsos, insignias of sponsorship covering every body
part—these accessorizing gestures are meant to announce
one’s dreamed inclusion in a theatrical sporting affair that
others should admire, since these hobbyists have caught
themselves admiring televised cyclists and wish to ape, if
not the skill, then the costume of the professionals. These
cyclists identify each other’s seriousness of purpose by
their gear, but their purpose is not necessarily to cycle. It is
similar to fans who advertise the same companies as their
sports heroes. The only difference is that the professional
is getting paid for his endorsement. And if khaki is not a
textual advertisement, it is a spiritual one, though one that
has so collectively possessed the nation that it now appears
like “basic” clothing, a staple, rugged wear for unexpected
times—even if it is decidedly unrugged, made of evercheapening cotton—something that belongs in everyone’s
pants drawer. It is innocuous and innocent, free
of overt subtext (in other words, it is a successful
myth). In khaki clothing, we have managed to dramatize
both our past and future, however fictitiously, while rendering a present that is bland and nearly invisible, translucent
without being revealing, immensely fragile, however sturdy
it appears. We will soon be bumping into people we did not
know were there, and khaki will become another name we
use for nothing.
inventory / Fallen Figures & Heads:
Leon Golub’s Lists
David Levi Strauss
This issue marks the debut of “Inventory,” Cabinet’s new
occasional column tracking the types of linguistic and
cultural surplus to be found in the structures and content
of lists, registers, and catalogs. The inaugural installment of
the column brings together two collaborators and friends,
painter Leon Golub and writer David Levi Strauss. It was
in a published conversation between the two men that
Cabinet’s editors first learned of the extensive classificatory
system created by the artist for his archive of thousands of
photographs. Cut out from books and periodicals over the
years, these pictures function as source material for his
signature scenes of physical, psychological, and social
extremity. In the following essay, Strauss not only sketches
the etymological, socio-historical context of lists in general,
but also identifies a kind of latent poetry that resides in
Golub’s specific categories.
The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more
wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.
—Umberto Eco
People are divided over them. Either one makes lists or one
doesn’t, and the ones who do are changed by them. They
start making lists as an aid to memory and to bring a sense
of order into their lives. But in time, the lists work so well that
their makers drift into amnesia and chaos. They develop un­­­
healthy attachments to their lists, as their work is increasingly
cut out for them. Finally, they are left helpless and listless.
This progression is presaged in the etymology of lists,
where the boundaries between list and lust, or list and listen,
are quite porous. The currently prevalent sense of list as “catalogue” has a Teutonic origin, including the German leiste,
“a border or edging,” which was eventually transferred to a
“strip” of paper or parchment containing a “list”
of names or numbers arranged in order for some specific
purpose. But the parallel sense of list meaning “to choose,
desire, or have pleasure in” is never far away, and this one
includes lust, from the Anglo-Saxon lystan, “to desire.” The
desire or inclination of a ship to lean one way or the other
makes it list, and a person is described as listless when he
or she exhibits a lack of inclination, leading to an overly
upstanding stasis.
opposite: The Sahara desert, north of Timbuktu, Mali.
OLDER MEN STANDING I, II
MEN – STANDING I, II, III
FAT MEN
FIGURES – DISTORTED PERSPECTIVE
GESTURES I, II, III, IV
GESTURES – MEN IN SUITS
SEATED MEN I, II, III
KNEELING / BENDING OVER I, II
SEATED WOMEN I, II
CHILDREN
WOMEN I, II, III, IV, V
OLDER WOMEN
ANATOMY, MAPPLETHORPE
ANATOMY I, II
DETAILS – ANATOMY
SKELETONS
SKULLS
ARMOR
HERALDIC + MYTHIC
SPACE/COLOR I, II, III
JAMES NACHTWEY
DISTORTED PERSPECTIVE I, II
DISTORTED PERSPECTIVES – HEADS – HANDS
EXTREME EXAMPLES, ETC. I, II
ALPHABETS
FLAGS
YOGA
HORSES
EAGLES
BULLS
SNAKES
FEET
EYES / MOUTH
EARS
MEN
LEFT HAND
RIGHT HAND
BOTH HANDS
WOMEN
LEFT HAND
RIGHT HAND
BOTH HANDS
NAPALM
EXAGGERATED EXPRESSIONS WOMEN I, II
EXAGGERATED EXPRESSIONS MEN I, II
MERCS I, II, III, IV
SPORTS I, II, III
PRISONERS + HEADS
PRISONERS I, II, III
PRISONER, FALLEN FIGURES, DRAGGED
RIOTS I, II, III, IV, V
FALLEN FIGURES + HEADS
FALLEN FIGURE I, II
MISC: CHAIRS, WOOD, FIRE, ETC.
UNIFORM DETAILS, GESTURES
POLICE ACTION
MISC I, II, III
LE MONDE Á L’ENVERS
EROTIC
HORSING AROUND
BACK VIEWS
GUNS, ETC
DRESSING
TANKS – PLANES
AUTOS / TRUCKS
WHITE WOMEN – HEADS
FRONTAL
LEFT PROFILE
RIGHT PROFILE
LOOKING DOWN
LOOKING UP
OVER THE SHOULDER
CRYING OR PAIN
OLDER WOMEN
BLACK WOMEN – HEADS
FRONTAL
OVER THE SHOULDER
LOOKING DOWN
LOOKING UP
LEFT PROFILE
RIGHT PROFILE
CRYING OF PAIN
OLDER BLACK WOMEN – HEADS
FRONTAL
RIGHT PROFILE
LEFT PROFILE
OVER THE SHOULDER
LOOKING DOWN
LOOKING UP
WHITE MEN – HEADS
FRONTAL I, II, III, IV
OVER THE SHOULDER
LOOKING DOWN
LOOKING UP
RIGHT PROFILE I, II
LEFT PROFILE I, II
CRYING OR PAIN
OLDER WHITE MEN – HEADS
FRONTAL
OVER THE SHOULDER
LEFT PROFILE
RIGHT PROFILE
LOOKING UP
LOOKING DOWN
CRYING OR PAIN
BLACK MEN – HEADS
FRONTAL
OVER THE SHOULDER
RIGHT PROFILE
LEFT PROFILE
LOOKING UP
LOOKING DOWN
CRYING OR PAIN
OLDER BLACK MEN – HEADS
FRONTAL
OVER THE SHOULDER
LOOKING UP
LOOKING DOWN
LEFT PROFILE
RIGHT PROFILE
WOMEN DRINKING + SMOKING
DRINKING
CIGARETTES
BLACK MEN I, II
OLDER BLACK MEN
OLDER BLACK WOMEN
BLACK WOMEN
MALE FIGURES
HERALDIC + MYTHIC + ANAMORPHOSES
LIONS / EAGLES
PRISON
TITLES, SLOGANS – I, II
POLITICA FIGURES
CURRENT I, II, III, IV
FUTURE PROJECTS I, II, III
SPHINX / LIONS
LIONS / EAGLES
LIONS I, II
DOGS, CURRENT
DOGS
SPECIAL I, II, III, IV
FRONTAL
LEFT PROFILE
RIGHT PROFILE
DOGS – BOOK PROJECT
COSMOGINIES I, II
DRAWINGS, GRAFFITI, I, II
GRAFFITI / SLOGANS I, II
DRAWINGS, GRAFFITI
DRAWINGS I, II
ITALIAN GRAFFITI
IMAGES I, II, III, IV, V
TATTOOS
MALE – HEADS
FEMALE – HEADS
HEADS POLITICAL
PORTRAITS / SPECIAL
THRENODY / GESTURES
ACTIVE FIGURES
GYMNAST, GREEK ATHLETES
GREEK – SPORTS – WAR
ALPHABETS
AMERICAN / EL SALVADOR
COMPUTER IMAGES USED / UNUSED
CURRENT, I, II
MALE FIGURES
CLASSICAL
Eco’s wondrous instrument points to the work of lists
as sketches, outlines, or patterns, and the Greek hupotuposis
derives from tipos, “an impression, form, or type.” When lists
become compendious, they list toward the rhetorical figure
of hypotyposis, “by which a matter [is] vividly sketched
in words” (according to Liddell & Scott’s Greek English
Lexicon). Sextus Empiricus titled his summary of the doctrine of skepticism The Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes.
Writers are especially susceptible to a kind of list-lust
that borders on womb-envy, since lists were there at the
misty beginnings of literacy, in those lists of sacks of grain
and heads of cattle inscribed on clay tablets at Uruk, in what
is now Iraq. In lists, writers intimate origins. They hear the
Homeric catalogues, the Biblical genealogies, Whitman’s
Leaves, and Ginsberg’s Howl. The list is the linguistic
reflection of the unstructured world; it’s what’s left when
structure is pulled out. Paradoxically, the list may also be
the ultimate structure. When everything is compressed to
its least complicated form and relation, it’s all a list. Life
consists, finally, of one damn thing after another.
When I first spoke with Leon Golub about his use of
photographic images as source material for his paintings,
he told me that he has “huge files of images and imagefragments. I virtually sense myself as made up of photos
and imagistic fragments jittering in my head and onto the
canvas.” So when he sent me the list of headings in his
image files, I took them as a kind of self-portrait, and
immediately began making poems out of them, for Leon.
Actually, the first one, written from only the first page of
the list, was a double portrait of Leon and his wife, artist
Nancy Spero:
Extreme Examples
(for Leon & Nancy)
I saw
the anatomy of current
older men, standing
with armored skulls,
ears, eyes/mouth, and feet
like alphabets.
And seated women, bending over
eagles, bulls, and snakes
in distorted perspective—
current, too,
heraldic and mythic
as flags.
Then I remembered a poem I’d written long ago in
Venice, an agnostic hymn to modernism called “Peg’s House,”
formed from titles of works in the Peggy Guggenheim
collection, which began “Blu su blu in her bedroom, / to see
how the modern has aged.” Since this rhymes pretty well
with Leon’s various wry proclamations about
modernism in his works and writings (including the
11
succinct “Modernism Is Kaput”), I was encouraged to draw
more poems from Leon’s lists:
Extreme Examples, Etc.
The Dogs’ current book project,
“Le Monde à L’Envers,” entails
their distorted perspectives
on tattoos, black men crying,
women drinking and smoking,
Italian graffiti,
and James Nachtwey.
Fat men in armor,
looking up and looking down,
sport the exaggerated expressions of
prisoners or fallen figures;
while white women,
horsing around with lions and eagles,
create flags and yoga.
But eventually, all of these
active figures, with their
sometimes erotic (over the shoulder) back views,
become mere skeletons with uniform skulls
due to the actions of political figures
with titles and slogans,
using images and napalm.
So, a new form of imagism— list imagism, or, as Leon might
have it, “jittery image-jism”—was born.
Leon’s lists of image files refer to real filing cabinets
containing actual, rather than virtual, folders and documents,
so the items on this roll name images one can hold in the
hand. This physical referent, along with the abrupt juxtapositions of the headings, increases what Derrida called
“archival violence” (laying down the law and giving the
order), and gives this list the edgy aggressiveness of Leon’s
paintings (recalling the old sense of list as “a place of combat
or contest”). And the pared down, fragmentary quality of the
list—highly compressed language with large gaps between
fragments—is also much like Leon’s recent paintings, done
in what he’s called his “Late Style,” after Adorno, who wrote
that late works by significant artists are “relegated to the
outer reaches of art, in the vicinity of document.”
The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is
the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works
themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express
itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance
of art. Of the works themselves it leaves only fragments
behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through
the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself.
ingestion /
The Shelf-Life of Liquefying Objects
Jamer Hunt
Beauty shall be edible or nothing.
–Salvador Dali1
Food rots. It becomes waste matter. Its shelf-life is
momentary. The act of eating is hardly grandiose. It is a
common ritual practice—ordinary, domestic, sensual, and
repetitive. It engages taste and waste, the senses and the
body, but also the digestive system, elimination, and then,
ultimately, even more food. We take food in, consume it, and
it becomes us. Then we repeat. Each meal is an act of
production and consumption, creation and destruction.
A subject’s relation to the object of desire is unmediated—
or almost literal. It is a corporeal act mostly, a cerebral one
only occasionally.
Buildings, on the other hand, are made to last. They
can mark a landscape for years, decades, or centuries; they
outlast generations. For this reason the practice of architecture inspires visions of immortality and transcendence.
Archi-tectural monuments are time-preservers pregnant
with symbolism. They are bulwarks against decay and the
processes of memory loss. Monuments congeal the present
into (semi-) permanent physical form.
This uneasy dialectic—quivering between the enduring
and the evanescent—is, as Henri Lefebvre would later point
out, the mark of the everyday. That is, it illustrates two
competing temporal vectors: on the one hand, the cyclical,
which ties us back to more traditional repetitions (birth
and death, seasons, day and night); on the other hand, the
modern, which is linear, productive, and transformative
(business, fashion, news). Into the slippery gap between rot
and intransience—between food and architecture—slides
Salvador Dali.
Despite his later descent into facile mediocrity and
commercialism, Salvador Dali’s essays from the 1930s
still provoke and gleefully disorient the reader. In these,
his spastic, incontinent prose rarely coheres into anything digestible, yet it lingers, like dyspepsia. The early
Dali belongs to a kind of outsider Modernist lineage not
only because of his interest in penetrating and disrupting placid bourgeois ritual, but through his predilection
for the ordinary forces of expenditure and decay. These
themes emerge most brilliantly in a delirious essay entitled,
“The Terrifying and Comestible Beauty of Modern Style
Architecture,” in which Dali de-bones monuments and
liquefies caked-on urban infrastructure with the base
materials of bodily subsistence. Originally published in
Minotaure2—the lavishly illustrated and influential arts journal produced in Paris between 1933 and 1939—his essay
gnaws away at the reigning conceits of the two early
20th-century architectural orthodoxies—the neo-classical
tradition, which claimed an unimpeachable formalist
vocabulary, and International Style, which pre12
sumed a coolly universalist, atemporal geometry.
Both movements inclined towards architectural monumentalism, grounding themselves in transcendental values.
Dali, on the other hand, juxtaposes to all this a base and
inglorious act—eating—and in the process throws into high
relief the former’s puffed-up attempts to trump time. In a perhaps apocryphal anecdote, he recounts an exchange with
that model of proper Modernism, Le Corbusier.
When I was barely twenty-one years old, I happened to
be having lunch one day ... in the company of the masochistic and Protestant architect Le Corbusier who, as everyone
knows, is the inventor of the architecture of self-punishment.
Le Corbusier asked me if I had any ideas on the future of his
art. Yes, I had. I have ideas on everything, as a matter of fact.
I answered him that architecture would become “soft and
hairy.” ... In listening to me, Le Corbusier had the expression of
one swallowing gall.3
Yearning for a revolution in daily life, and not just in salon
culture, Surrealists like Dali envisioned themselves laying
waste to hide-bound, traditional values. Food, then (or more
precisely the consumption of food) assumes a critical role
that belies its usual modesty. That is, eating emerges as an
ordinary practice ripe with the potential for altering our
perceptions of everyday life and politics.
What Dali referred to by the classification “Modern
Style architecture” in his essay’s title was actually the Art
Nouveau style of architectural design that seemed to be
sprouting up from and overgrowing—literally—the streets of
Paris. Hector Guimard, its principal purveyor, incorporated
plant, animal, and insect motifs into the detailing of building
facades, subway entrances, and street lamps. Tendrils
and shoots spread out over a building’s curvaceous, undulating surface, giving it a hybrid appearance somewhere
between animal, vegetable, and mineral. While eventually
disparaged by the design cognoscenti, and especially the
emerging Modernists, Art Nouveau provided for Dali the
opportunity to exercise his voracious imagination.
“I believe that I was the first ... to consider the delirious
Modern Style architecture as the most original and the most
extraordinary phenomenon in the history of art, and I did
so without a shadow of humor.”4 It is necessary to pause
momentarily upon his rationale for celebrating this specific
architectural vogue. Art Nouveau, with its obsessive
decorativism, was for Dali an approach that surpassed strict
functionalism. As a hodgepodge of historical quotations
and technical borrowings, Art Nouveau espoused nothing
useful: “Everything that was the most naturally utilitarian
and functional in the known architectures of the past
suddenly ceases, in Modern Style, to serve any purpose
whatever.” Folding together narrative ornament with
surface treatment, Art Nouveau pushed toward the layered
realm of dreamwork—or, as Dali describes it, “that frightful impurity that has no other equivalent or equal than the
opposite: Hans Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus (“theater of five thousand”),
remodeled from a Berlin circus building in 1918. Later demolished.
immaculate purity of oniric [sic] intertwinings.” “Modern
Style” is a condenser then, in the Freudian sense, that
blends together opposing, unrelated elements into an overdetermined but highly charged whole: “Gothic becomes
metamorphosed in Hellenic, into Far-Eastern and, should it
occur to one—into Renaissance ... all in the feeble time and
space of a single window.”5
But it is misleading to imply that Dali saw absolutely no
usefulness in the vegetal motifs of Art Nouveau. They do act
as the material objectifications of desire. Dali was arguably
the most resolute Freudian of all the Surrealists—and an
unvarnished neurotic. His work throughout this period and
the narratives he employed to explain it veer little from the
Freudian straight and narrow. So it is of little surprise that
he attributes the origins of his fixation on these peculiar
stylings to the functioning of his pulsating drives. All architectural details serve only one purpose, “the ‘functioning
of desires,’ these being, moreover, of the most turbid,
disqualified and unavowable kind.”6 Dali then escalates into
a hyperbolic mode that only he is capable of sustaining:
Grandiose columns and medium columns, inclined,
incapable of holding themselves up, like the tired necks of
heavy hydrocephalic heads, emerge for the first time in the
world of hard undulations of water sculptured with a photographic scrupulousness of instantaneity until then unknown.
They rise in waves from the polychrome reliefs, whose immaterial ornamentation congeals the convulsive transition of the
feeble materializations of the most fugitive metamorphoses
of smoke, as well as aquatic vegetations and the hair of those
new women, even more “appetizing” than the slight thirst
caused by the imaginative temperatures of the life of the
floral ecstasies into which they vanish. These columns of
feverish flesh (37.5˚ C) are destined to support nothing more
than the famous dragon-fly with an abdomen soft and heavy
as the block of massive lead out of which it has been carved in
a subtle and ethereal fashion ... [It] cannot fail to appear to us
as the true “masochistic column” having solely the function of
“letting itself be devoured by desire,” like the actual first column built and cut out of that real desired meat toward which
Napoleon, as we know, is always moving at the head of all real
and true imperialisms which, as we are in the habit
of repeating, are nothing but the immense “cannibalisms of
history” often represented by the concrete, grilled and tasty
lamb-chop that the wonderful philosophy of dialectical
materialism, like a new William Tell, has placed on the very
head of politics.7
It is hard to stop. The imagery builds to an orgiastic height
that only seems to keep mounting. Yet it is hardly random.
Throughout the passage above, for example, tropes
oscillate meticulously between the hard and the soft, the
formed and the formless (columns become tired necks;
sculptures become water; materializations become fugitive
metamorphoses of smoke; and lead becomes soft). Dali
was determined to liquefy the membranes of the
14
material object—to melt that subject/object
barrier—but in this case the merger is not so much physical
as it is psychic. Desire is a connective tissue entwining
the subject and the object. The innervated object is never
free from the tendrils of desire that envelop it and produce
it as desired. The only means of satisfaction then is to
incorporate fully the object of desire, to fuse subject with
object so that they are forever indistinguishable. Thus the
“fugitive” and “feeble” materializations that Dali writes of in
relation to architectural ornamentation do have a use: they
incite desire, they whet appetite.
Dali recognized that desire does not distinguish. That
is to say, there is no perceptible difference between the
registers of representation of a desired thing. In that
endless play of substitutions that Freud called fetishism,
the drives displace themselves onto whomever or whatever
is available to the psyche. The goal for the subject, however,
is always the same: to incorporate completely the object of
desire. Dali effectively sexes-up building details as just the
latest “feeble materialization” of his own ardent appetite:
Thus in my view it is precisely (I cannot emphasize this
point too strongly) the wholly ideal Modern Style architecture
that incarnates the most tangible and delirious aspiration of
hyper-materialism. An illustration of this apparent paradox
will be found in a current comparison, made disparagingly it
is true, yet so lucid, which consists of assimilating a Modern
Style house to a cake, to a pastry-cook’s exhibitionistic and
ornamental tart. ... The nutritive and edible character of this
kind of house is thus alluded to without any euphemism, these
houses being nothing other than the first edible houses, the
first and only erotizable buildings, whose existence verifies
that urgent “function,” so necessary to the amorous imagination: to be able quite really to eat the object of desire.8
In this “new Surrealist age of the ‘cannibalism of objects,’”
buildings must be edible because they do not differ in
any substantial way from any other kind of object of desire.
They are like the Kleinian part object, a rematerialization
of a severed lost part that, through its subsequent introjection, or incorporation, completes the subject wholly.
The subject absorbs the building just as the building
consumes its inhabitants.
Consumption is not representational or symbolic.
It does not stand for anything beyond the moment. Instead
it only ties us more tightly to the humbling effects of pleasure,
rot, and decay. Whereas the Futurists conceived of solid
matter as just the illusion of permanence in a world of light,
energy, and motion, Dali’s dematerializations are tied more
tightly to the psyche. He perceives the landscape and
objects around him bending and twisting under desire’s
distorting pressures. Rock-hard pilasters and buttresses
are simply momentary consolidations of matter in space
and time. Desire moves in pulsating cycles and ebbs and
flows. Like the “pointillist iridescences” on Gaudi’s rubbery
buildings, time moves “in an asymmetrical and dynamicinstantaneous succession of reliefs, broken, syncopated,
entwined.”9 Time and matter contort under the same force
and with the same vicissitudes. They swell to afford the full
measure of a satisfaction (nearly) experienced. They throb
and detumesce along with the erratic appetite of the drives.
Consumption unites. It is common, repetitive, destructive,
and regenerative. Time bends like a soft watch. Monuments
go limp.
1 Salvador Dali, Dali on Modern Art: The Cuckolds of Antiquated Modern Art (Mineola,
NY: Dover Publications, 1996), p. 45. This edition reprints the English translation from
the bilingual edition published by the Dial Press in 1957.
2 The article was first published as “De la beauté terrifiante et comestible, de
l’architecture Modern style” in Minotaure 3–4 (Paris: Editions Albert Skira, 1933). The
full body of the essay appears in translation in Dali on Modern Art (note 1 above). All subsequent citations will refer to page numbers from that Dover edition.
3 Dali, pp. 29-31.
4 Dali, p. 33.
5 Dali, p. 37.
6 Dali, p. 37.
7 Dali, pp. 37-9.
8 Dali, p. 41.
9 Dali, pp. 43-5.
LEFTOVERS / WHAT TO DO WITH A
WORN-OUT KORAN
Michael Cook
Say you’re a Bible-reading Christian, with the result that
eventually your Bible is in tatters, and it’s time to replace it.
Getting a new one is no problem. But what are you to do
with the old one? There are no generally accepted rules
about this in mainstream Western Christianity, so you could
perfectly well dump your old Bible in the trash-can. But you
probably don’t feel comfortable with this option, and you no
longer have room for the dog-eared volume on your bookshelf. For lack of anything better to do, you very likely end
up putting it at the back of a closet, where you can at least
forget the problem till the next spring cleaning. At that
point you could maybe pass the buck by donating it to the
Salvation Army.
Even if you are not a Bible-reading Christian, or any kind
of Christian, you should have no difficulty sensing that there
is some kind of dilemma here. But our modern Western culture does not address it. Some other cultures, by contrast,
have their acts together on this issue.
A few years ago, the British Library acquired a collection of 13 birch-bark scrolls containing Buddhist texts dating
from the first century of our era, together with a large clay
pot in which they had reportedly been found.1 The provenance was unknown, but it would be a good guess that the
cache came from Afghanistan. The peculiar thing about the
scrolls was the way they had been assembled. Rather than
containing a single continuous text, a typical scroll consisted
of a patchwork of fragments taken from a variety of original
scrolls—and fragments that must have derived from the
same original scroll would show up in several
15
different scrolls. Fortunately the Buddhist monks
who assembled these scrolls left us with a clue to what they
were up to: here and there could be found annotations, in the
same language and script as the original fragments but in
manifestly different hands, describing the texts as “all
written” or the like. In other words, these were texts of
which new copies had been made, and they were now
being marked as ready to be discarded. The monks must
have had to go through this process quite often, since birch
bark is a fragile material once it dries out, far weaker than
paper. It seems, then, that the fragments of disintegrating
manuscripts were made up into scrolls more or less at
random and placed in clay pots, presumably for burial
(suggestively, we also find pieces of human bone in such
pots). So this appears to be a Buddhist solution to the
problem of manuscripts too damaged to be worth keeping
but too sacred to be treated as garbage. But this can only
be inference, since the monks who assembled these junk
scrolls have left us no explicit record of their intentions, and
parallels from elsewhere in the Buddhist world are scarce.
A few centuries later, the Jews proved more helpful.
A passage in the Babylonian Talmud cites two views on the
disposal of a worn-out Torah scroll. One 4th-century rabbi
states that it may be buried with a scholar; another, more in
line with our Buddhist monks, says it should be put in a clay
pot. Such practices were to have a long history in Jewish
communities, but they have not attracted much attention
except in one very unusual case: the Cairo Genizah, a vast
trove of Jewish texts dating from around the 11th century of
our era. Here the materials to be disposed of were not buried
or otherwise dispersed, but deposited in a room in
a synagogue, whence they eventually reached the hands
of modern scholars. What makes the collection particularly
valuable is the fact that the texts are not exclusively
scriptural. They range from religious literature of various
kinds to personal documents and letters—anything written
in the Hebrew script seems to have been regarded as fair
game. The result is to give us a unique window onto the
everyday life of the medieval Near East.
Unfortunately for historians, medieval Muslims did
not have a comparable concern for the Arabic script, and
tended to confine such protective practices to the disposal
of worn-out copies of the Koran. With this limitation, we
possess at least two bodies of early Islamic material reminiscent of the Cairo Genizah. One was discovered in a small
building in the courtyard of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus
in 1893; the texts found there, overhelmingly Koranic, were
taken by the Ottoman authorities to Istanbul, where they
form part of the collection of the Museum of Turkish and
Islamic Art. The other cache came to light in a closed-off
part of the roof-space of the Great Mosque in Sanaa, the
capital city of Yemen, in the course of repairs to the building
in 1972. This material remains in Yemen; it has been studied
by a group of German scholars, though as yet they have
published very little about it. In the nature of things, such
material does not have much to tell us about everyday life.
But it promises to interest scholars concerned with the
history of the Koranic text, and in this respect the earliest
fragments from Yemen are reported to display some significant archaic features, such as divergent orderings of the
chapters of the Koran.
For us, the interesting thing about the Muslims is that
they have much more to say about the problem of disposing
of worn-out scripture than the Jews, let alone the Buddhists.
A small treatise on the subject by Güzelhisari,2 a Turkish
scholar of the late 17th century, sums up the methods
already discussed by earlier Muslim jurists: burning the
material, burying it, washing off the writing, setting the texts
aside in a clean place where impure hands would not touch
them (as in the cases of the collections from Damascus
and Sanaa), or some combination of these procedures.
Güzelhisari himself favors burning. But it becomes clear
from his account of the various choices that none was felt
to be entirely satisfactory. Burning, as one scholar cited
by Güzelhisari argues, implies disrespect—indeed it was
the kind of thing one did with heretical books. With burial
there are two problems. One is that the text may be defiled
by contact with the earth (so it should at least be wrapped
before being buried). The other is that people may tread the
ground above with their feet. Washing writing off works well
enough with parchment, but try doing it with paper; even
then, there is the problem of disposing of the residue of inky
water left behind by the departed scripture. We are not told
what was wrong with putting the text aside in a clean place;
perhaps, like the back of your closet, it seemed too much of
a stop-gap solution—had it found general favor, we would
surely have come upon many more such collections hidden
away in the older cities of the Islamic world.
These problems have not gone away. In 1997,
the Taliban banned the use of paper bags in the part of
Afghanistan under their control, for fear that they might contain recycled Koranic texts that would then be defiled. Two
thousand years after the Buddhists had assembled their junk
scrolls for disposal, in a land in which Buddhism was now
utterly forgotten, the old concern of the monks was still nagging at the hearts of true believers.
But what exactly is this concern? Just what is it that
stops you dumping your worn-out scripture in the trashcan? It might be a purely subjective anxiety—you could feel
that it wouldn’t do God’s word any harm, but that it would
nevertheless be disrespectful on your part. Or it might be
an objective concern—you could think that you would do
damage to God’s word by defiling it, whatever the precise
nature of that damage might be. Since people don’t
generally address this issue, it’s hard to know what they
think, if indeed they think anything at all. But we can perhaps
say one thing. The more directly you identify the book on
your shelf as God’s very word—as opposed to, say, a copy of
a translation of a version of God’s word—the more likely you
are to think in terms of an objective process of defilement
independent of your own attitudes. And such direct identification is strongly present in orthodox Islam. For Tabari,
a famous scholar in early 10th-century Iraq, the Koran was
God’s uncreated word however it was written or
16
recited, whether in heaven or on earth, whether
written on the celestial “guarded tablet” or on the mundane
tablets of schoolboys, whether inscribed on stone or on
paper, whether memorized in the heart or spoken on the
tongue. Whoever said otherwise, he added, was an infidel
whose blood might be shed and from whom God has
dissociated Himself.
But there is always the possibility that modern technology is heralding the dawn of a new era. If you call up virtual
scripture on your computer screen, and then close the file,
what is there left to burn, bury, wash off, or set aside?3
1 See Richard Salomon, Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhara: The British Library
Kharosthi Fragments (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), chapter 4.
2 See Joseph Sadan, “Genizah and Genizah-like Practices in Islamic and Jewish
Traditions,” Bibliotheca Orientalis, vol. 43 (1986), cols. 36-58, with further material from
numerous sources.
3 This article is an expansion of a couple of paragraphs in my book The Koran: A Very
Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 60-61.
opposite: Koran frontispiece fragment, c. 8th century, from the Great Mosque
in Sanaa, Yemen.
maIN
EDISON’S WARRIORS
Christoph Cox
Real security can only be attained in the long run through
confusion.
— Hilton Howell Railey, commander of the Army
Experimental Station1
Simulantur quae non sunt. Quae sunt vero dissimulantur.
— Motto of the 23rd Special Troops2
In “The Invisible Generation,” an experimental text from 1962,
William S. Burroughs unveiled a proposal to unleash urban
mayhem via the use of portable tape recorders. “Now consider
the harm that can be done and has been done when recording
and playback is expertly carried out in such a way that the people
affected do not know what is happening,” he wrote. “Bands of
irresponsible youths with tape recorders playing back traffic
sounds that confuse motorists,” Burroughs gleefully imagined,
could incite “riots and demonstrations to order.”3
Championing the productive (and destructive) powers
of portable audio, “The Invisible Generation” is an emblematic
text in the history of sound art and DJ culture. Yet, nearly 20
years earlier, Burroughs’s vision had already been conceived
and deployed by none other than the United States Army,
whose “ghost army,” the 23rd Special Troops, included
several units dedicated to “sonic deception” and its results:
enemy confusion and carnage.4
The first division in American Armed Forces history
assigned exclusively to camouflage and deception, the 23rd
was a military oddity. Despite the centrality of deception in the
history of warfare from the Trojan Horse on, soldiers drilled in
the West Point code of duty, honor, trust, and integrity were
ill-suited to a life of simulation and dissimulation; and American
officers tended to dismiss deceptive tactics as underhanded,
a sign of weakness in every sense.5 It’s not surprising, then,
that the 23rd consisted primarily of a population with an
occupational predisposition to deception, invention, and
fabrication: artists. Actors, painters, graphic designers, set
designers, fashion designers, and special effects experts
(among them Ellsworth Kelly, Bill Blass, Art Kane, and George
Diestel) were recruited from New York art schools and Hollywood studios to paint camouflage, build inflatable rubber guns
and tanks, set off fake explosions, and publicly impersonate officers and soldiers from other divisions.
At the helm were two high-profile hucksters: Hollywood
heartthrob Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and public relations genius
Hilton Howell Railey, who had discovered Amelia Earhart,
attempted to raise the sunken Lusitania, and assisted Admiral
Byrd in his expedition to the Antarctic. It was Fairbanks who
was responsible for marketing “sonic deception” to America’s
military brass. In the early 1940s, a family friend, Lord Louis
Mountbatten, told Fairbanks about a secret British unit, based
in a castle in Scotland, which was experimenting with sound
effects, broadcasting recordings of tanks, aircraft, armored
cars, and soldiers’ voices under the cover of fog or
19
smoke screens. The British had already experimented
above: Two unauthorized insignias designed by men of the 23rd Special Troops.
with sonic tactics in the North African desert, hiring an
Egyptian film company to broadcast sound effects in an
effort to confuse the Italians and Germans. Keen on selling
sonic deception to the US Army and Navy, Mountbatten
trained Fairbanks in the practice of audio warfare and sent
him on missions into occupied France.
Returning to the US in 1942, Fairbanks eventually
convinced the Navy to set up a special deception unit dubbed
the “Beach Jumpers.” At the BJ’s camp in Virginia, Hollywood
special effects expert Fletcher Stevens gave lessons in pyrotechnics. Fairbanks lectured on the use of smoke screens and
dummy paratroopers. And acoustical engineer Harold BurrisMeyer—who had recently developed the stereo sound system
for Disney’s Fantasia—briefed the troops on state-of-the-art
tactics of audio wizardry and sound camouflage.
Burris-Meyer’s early projects were hilariously low-tech.
Impressed by the terrifying sirens used on German planes
during bombing raids, he attempted to simulate the experience by tossing bottles out of an airplane, hoping that the
air moving across the mouths of the bottles would produce
an eerie whine. When the bottles fell silently to the ground,
Burris-Meyer opted for a more high-tech approach.
Before the arrival of sound recording, sonic tactics had
little role to play in military deception. Soldiers could set off
decoy explosions or use noise to deceive the enemy about the
size of an invading force. But Edison’s invention of
20
the phonograph in 1877 and the subsequent
development of wire and tape recorders in the early 20th
century marked a break in the history of military deception
analogous to the shift from silent to sound film. It’s fitting,
then, that sonic deception was brought to the Armed Forces
by Fairbanks, Jr., whose film career is distinguished from
his father’s—silent film star Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.—by the
advent of sound cinema.
The ear is deceived more readily than the eye. Passive
and reactive, its most primitive function is to alert the creature
to impending danger. And, unlike seeing, hearing is immersive
and communal. Whether or not we want to, we hear from
all directions at once. Hence, without visual evidence of
the source, the ear easily mistakes the copy for the original,
Memorex for the live event. As the National Defense Research
Committee put it in its report “Sonic Deception: The Reproduction, Transmission, and Reception of Deceptive Sounds,”
“An observer, under the strain of an impending attack and
under conditions of poor visibility, such as moonlight or
dawn, will transform a suggestive noise, faintly heard, into a
strong illusion of a concentration of enemy forces and may
firmly believe that he sees as well as hears them.”6
Exploiting these sensory characteristics and the new art
and science of sound recording, Fairbanks and Burris-Meyer
set to work perfecting a strategy for sonic deception known
as Project 17:3-1: “The Physiological and Psychological
above: World War II-era inflatable tank.
Effects of Sound on Men in Warfare.” They recruited Harvey
Fletcher, director of acoustic research at New Jersey’s Bell
Telephone Labs and an inventor who, in the 1920s, had
patented stereo headphones and an early hearing aid. The
crew began work in February of 1942, and, by the fall of that
year, were ready for a test run.
On the night of 27 October, a fleet of specially-outfitted
fishing boats followed Navy and Coast Guard vessels out of
New York harbor toward the Jersey shore. Three hundred
infantrymen waited on the beach at Sandy Hook, expecting
an attack but not knowing from which direction it would
come. The fishing boats anchored at the south end of the
beach, hidden behind a smokescreen dropped by overhead
planes. Tossed about by choppy seas, crewmen laid commercial sound-effects records on portable phonographs
and blasted them through 500-watt amplifiers and public
address speakers. Though the rough seas caused the
needles to skip about on the records, the beach troops were
fooled. Their commander sent them to the southern flank,
while the amphibious troops landed from the north. Watching
the show from the Dixonia, a luxury yacht loaned by the
millionaire Walgreen family, Fairbanks was gleaming.
Hilton Howell Railey was also aboard the Dixonia to
witness the “Battle of Sandy Hook.” While Fairbanks took the
Beach Jumpers to North Carolina to work on Naval deception,
Railey set up the Army Experimental Station at Pine Camp
in upstate New York near the Canadian border. Eager to get
into battle as soon as possible, Fairbanks was satisfied with
the existing technology—turntables, P.A. speakers, and stock
sound effects records. Railey wanted and needed more hi-fi
gear. Working with the engineers at Bell Labs, he replaced the
turntables with magnetic wire recorders that spun two-mile
spools of stainless-steel carrying 30 minutes of continuous
sound. And he contracted Jensen to manufacture weatherproof boxes housing 40-watt speakers with impeccable
audio fidelity. The recorders, speakers, and gas generators—
all 800 pounds of them—were installed in “sonic cars,” Army
vehicles fitted with shock-proof mountings and speaker
cranes, and rigged to explode if captured by the enemy.
Electronics geek Walter Manser was hired to record a
custom library of sound effects. For three weeks, he directed
tanks and cars to start, stop, idle, approach, retreat, drive
over bridges and up and down hills, while he recorded
the sounds onto glass disks in a portable studio set up in the
back of a van. Building an exhaustive audio catalogue of
military activity, he recorded soldiers’ voices, bulldozers, the
racket of bridge construction, and every sound that might be
of use in a deceptive operation. Learning that the Japanese
peasant infantry superstitiously associated the sound of
barking dogs with impending death, Manser had his men
round up and record packs of noisy canines, whose barking
and yapping he embedded in ambient sounds recorded in
the Panamanian rainforest.
Aided by Bell Labs technicians, the crew also conducted
exhaustive research into “sound ranging.” Measuring all the
physical characteristics of sound, they determined
21
the projection distance and the appropriate volume
and direction of each sound under every possible weather
condition and in every possible landscape. Meteorological
trucks were built to accompany the sonic cars into battle.
By the summer of 1944, Railey’s unit was ready to roll.
In war games across Pine Camp’s 100,000 acres, the
3132nd Signal Service Company Special (as the unit was
called) operated like a mobile collective of DJs. Shrouded by
smoke screens spread by accompanying “chemical units,”
the audio camoufleurs faded and mixed sounds on multiple
recorders to produce a perfect blend of surround-sound
verisimilitude. Relaying sounds from one car to another, they
could perfectly simulate the movement of a platoon and
avoid location by enemy technology.
Meanwhile, Burris-Meyer was at work on his most
fantastic project yet: a torpedo housing a recorder, a floating
speaker, and a timer. Fired from a submarine, the torpedo
would travel a distance and then surface. When the timer hit
zero, the torpedo would eject the speaker and start the tape
recorder, which would play a program of sound effects and
then self-destruct.
All this research, technology, and training took place
while the war was raging abroad. Fairbanks’s Beach
Jumpers made it to the European theater in the fall of 1943;
but Railey’s 3132nd didn’t see action until a year later.
Nonetheless, the two units took part in more than a dozen
operations. The Beach Jumpers diverted Axis armies during
the invasions of Sicily and southern France and broadcast
false radio signals during campaigns in the Pacific. The
3132nd deployed their sonic tactics throughout Europe,
successfully simulating tank movements, truck convoys,
motorboat crossings, and bridge and camp construction.
The successes of the 3132nd led to the organization and
deployment of another sonic deception unit, the 3133rd,
which shipped off to Europe displaying the banner “Railey’s
Rodeo—192 clowns and 10 featured artists.” The 3133rd
took part in two operations before the surrender of the
Japanese and the war’s end.
The end of the war notwithstanding, Railey continued to
press the Army to allow him to continue his work on sonic
deception. Denied the necessary funding, he planned to tour
the country demonstrating the powers and possibilities of
deceptive tactics. But in November of 1945, the Army
Experimental Station was officially shut down, its equipment dismantled and dispersed, and its troops instructed to
keep silent about their operations for at least 50 years. Interviewed recently at a reunion of the 23rd, Lt. Dick Syracuse
wryly remarked: “None of this ever happened—there was no
deception unit. No sonic company, no camouflage company,
no 23rd Special Troops. We staged this whole reunion. We
never did any of it.”7
Following World War II, the US Armed Forces seemed
to have lost interest in the art of deception. Yet, during the
Reagan administration, the Army and Department of
Defense sought to revive it. In October 1988, as George
Bush, Sr. was campaigning for the presidency, the Army
issued a field manual calling military deception a “lost art”
and urging its revitalization.8 “Today, commanders use little
deception in planning, directing, and conducting combat
operations,” the manual noted. “As a result, many deceptionrelated skills that have served our Army well in the past
have been forgotten, and where remembered, have not
been made part of our war-fighting capabilities Armywide.”
The manual included a description of “sonic deception” that
sounded like it might have been written by Railey a halfcentury earlier.
Whether or not the Army heeded this advice, we
probably won’t know for another half-century. But, true to
Burroughs’s vision, sonic warfare has spilled out from the
battlefields and onto the streets. Since the late 1960s, police
have controlled crowds and dispersed riots using acoustic
cannons that emit the infrasonic “brown sound,” so-called for
its bowel-churning properties. And from Sydney, Australia to
Charlotte, North Carolina, malls and bus stations pump out
Bing Crosby, smooth jazz, and French opera to scare off
loitering teenagers. Yet, artists—one-time collaborators with
military and law enforcement—have begun to appropriate
these tactics and technologies for themselves. Martin
Kersels’s kinetic sculpture Brown Sound Kit (1994) brought
the punishing effects of infrasound into the aesthetic domain.
Carsten Nicolai sprayed “sound graffiti” throughout the town
of Kassel during 1997’s Documenta X. And M. W. Burns’s
Posing Phrases heckled Chicago pedestrians with disembodied voices run through hidden speakers.
Such isolated acts of guerilla audio forecast an age
of full-scale sonic terrorism once-again prefigured by
Burroughs, this time by his “Subliminal Kid,” who “took over
bars cafés and jukeboxes of the world cities and installed
radio transmitters and microphones in each bar so that the
music and talk of any bar could be heard in all his bars and he
had tape recorders in each bar that played and recorded at
arbitrary intervals . . . so he set waves and eddies and
tornadoes of sound down all your streets.”9
1 Quoted in Jonathan Gawne, Ghosts of the ETO: American Tactical Deception Units in
the European Theater 1944–1945 (Havertown, Pennsylvania: Casemate, 2002), p. 69.
2 “Simulate what does not exist. Dissimulate what does exist.” Jack Kneece, Ghost Army
of World War II (Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican, 2001), p. 16.
3 William S. Burroughs, “The Invisible Generation,” from The Ticket that Exploded,
reprinted in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader, ed. James Grauerholz and Ira
Silverberg (New York: Grove Press, 1998), pp. 220, 222.
4 My account is drawn from three histories of the 23rd unit: Gawne, Ghosts of the ETO,
Kneece, Ghost Army of World War II, and Philip Gerrard, Secret Soldiers: The Story of
World War II’s Heroic Army of Deception (New York: Dutton, 2002).
5 Gawne, Ghosts of the ETO, pp. vii, 68.
6 Quoted in Gerrard, Secret Soldiers, p. 52.
7 Quoted in Gerrard, Secret Soldiers, p. 338.
8 “FM 90-2, Battlefield Deception,” Headquarters, Department of Army, Washington, DC,
3 October 1988, <http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm90-2/toc.htm>.
9 William S. Burroughs, Nova Express, reprinted in Word Virus, p. 240.
22
right: Authorized insignia of the Army Experimental Station.
opposite: Manx Airlines airsickness bag.
Triskelion
Sasha Archibald
The three-pronged rotating disk pictured on this vomit bag is
a stylized version of the triskelion, an ancient symbol with a
long history akin in breadth, if not emotional resonance, to the
swastika. The Manx Airlines logo is only one of many adaptations of the emblem, whose history is commonly said to have
begun in Asia Minor, although versions of the symbol have
been found in ancient Sanskrit, the rock engravings of Hopi
Indians in North America, and Norse mythology. Regarded as
having a meaning identical to that of the swastika—
emblematic of the sun’s movement through the heavens
and, hence, of good fortune and prosperity—the triskelion is
nonetheless slightly more curious, with its trinity of figurative
legs. The symbol is presumed to have begun as a pictograph
of the sun whose curved rays were anthropomorphized,
perhaps in reference to the deities who personified the sun.
The symbol becomes associated as early as the 6th
century BC with Sicily, then a Greek colony, purportedly
because of the island’s three promontories. It remains the
country’s official emblem. It is also the proud symbol of
the Manx people of the Isle of Man, who seem to have
inadvertently inherited it from the Sicilians via a long chain
of royal marriage and conquest. The triskelion makes its first
appearance on the Isle of Man on the Manx Sword of State
in 1266, the year in which the Normans ceded the island
to Alexander III of Scotland. How Alexander III became
acquainted with the Sicilian triskelion is a somewhat convoluted story. Historian John Newton postulates that the
migration of the symbol began with Alexander III’s marriage to
Margaret, a daughter of Henry III.1 Margaret’s sister, Isabella,
married the Norman king of Sicily, Frederick III, but bore him
no male heir. When Frederick died and his illegitimate son
took the regency, Pope Innocent IV solicited Henry III’s assistance in organizing a coup against the son. In exchange for
his help, Henry demanded that Sicilian rule be awarded to his
child son (Margaret’s younger brother), Prince Edmund. The
Pope agreed to Henry’s terms. Alexander III and Margaret
apparently visited England in 1254, a visit that coincided with
the extravagant celebrations honoring Prince Edmund’s new
title—celebrations that would have undoubtedly venerated
the Sicilian symbol. Alexander, apparently impressed by the
emblem, recycled it for the Isle of Man when he was ceded
the territory 12 years later.
Manx citizens, however, seem to prefer an official
history of the symbol that reaches back to ancient Norse,
not Scottish influence; in fact, their unofficial motto for the
symbol jeers: “The Arms of Man are three legs: One kneels
to England, another kicks at Scotland and the third spurns
Ireland!” Norse mythology relates the symbol to the Celtic
triplicity in unity—the wave of the sea, the breath of the wind,
and the flame of the fire form an equilateral triangle around
the earth element—and this tripartite structure is also apparent in the trident of Mannanan, the ancient sea-god whose
home was the Isle of Man and for whom the island is
23
named. The Isle of Man’s triskelion pointedly turns to
the right, following the movement of traditional Breton
dances and processions (a leftward-turning symbol would
imply hostility) and is encircled by a gold ring emblazoned
with the text “Wheresoever you throw it, it will stand.”
During World War II, the symbol was associated with
a different maxim; soldiers of the 23rd Special Troops, or the
“Ghost Army,” designed their insignia by combining the triskelion with three bolts of lightning and the unconventional
motto, “Deceive to Defeat.” A troop of soldiers with art and
design backgrounds who specialized in deception-based
warfare, the Ghost Army created innovative camouflage
techniques, used sound recordings of soldier activity to
disorient or mislead the opposition, and fabricated inflatable
decoys. The Ghost Army’s existence remained classified
information until 1995; their insignia of legs without faces,
unauthorized by the Army and only secretly circulated
amongst members of the troupe, aptly conveys the regiment’s
covert operations.
The triskelion might also be recognized as the central
visual motif of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 4 (1994), which
takes place on the Isle of Man and richly alludes to the island’s
folklore and mythology. In the film, three teams, the Ascending
Hacks, the Descending Hacks, and the Loughton Candidate,
a satyr wearing a suit, compete in a race that alludes to the
Isle of Man’s annual Tourist Trophy motorbike races. The
triskelion is the racers’ emblem, emblazoned on motorcycle
sidecars and helmets, but also provides the shape of the race
itself. The teams furiously travel in three arcs—one to the left,
one to the right, while the Loughton Candidate burrows
downward through the earth—towards their finish line: the
central axis of the triskelion’s spinning legs and point of
fusion, collision, and consummation.
1 John Newton, “The Armorial Bearings on the Isle of Man,” Proceedings of the Literary
and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, no. XXXIX 1885), p. 207.
above left: Small silver coin (drachma) from Syracuse, c. 317-310 BC.
above center: Coin from Aspendos, Greece, 440-400 BC. Courtesy the
British Museum.
above right: Rendering of 1733 Manx coinage.
below left: Isle of Man flag c. 1700, from a flag chart by C. Dankerts.
below center: Pommel of the Manx Sword of State, c. 1266.
below right: Bicyclo[3.3.3]undecane molecule, called “Manxane.”
opposite above: Postcard from the Isle of Man.
opposite below: Matthew Barney, preparatory sketch for Cremaster 4, 1994.
24
© Matthew Barney. Courtesy Barbara Gladstone & Guggenheim
Museum.
Border Sound Files:
ExceRpts from an Audio Essay
Josh Kun
I. Opening Sound Mix
[Track 1: Play Manu Chao, “Bienvenido a Tijuana.”]
‑[Track 2: Play opening 45 seconds of Zoo Sonico, “Speed
Trip,” then fade down and continue playing on low vol‑
ume.]
II. Tijuana, Mexico
I am in my car, waiting, in a sea of at least a hundred other
cars, in a cloud of early morning exhaust, pan dulce fumes,
and wet concrete steam, to cross the border. I am waiting
to leave a city where drug barons live by the sea and Indians
live between refrigerator boxes and discarded doors on
crowded muddy hillsides for San Ysidro, a city that is a
gateway to all the other cities del norte, all the other cities
that are becoming more and more like Tijuana everyday.
The more times I do this, the less I see what’s all around
me—vendors selling leather back cushions, men in white
suits holding white church collection buckets, fading reward
posters for the murderous Arellano-Felix narco brothers who
only two years ago woke 21 Pai-Pai Indians from their beds in
Ensenada and opened fire on them and who only eight years
ago recruited members of San Diego’s Thirteenth Street
gang to gun down Cardinal Ocampo—and the more I hear
what’s all around me, the barked pitches, the alms pleas, the
rattling mufflers, the radio crossing reports that bounce out
of rolled-down windows. “Fifty cars in lane one. Sixty cars in
lane two. Forty cars in lane three.” It’s a soundscape like no
other, a sonic symphony of banda and Sum 41, Los Panchos
and Avril Lavigne, conducted by globalization’s invisible 9-to5 crunch and played with determination by urban rancheros
in shining Ford Rangers, import/export assistants on their
way to San Diego offices, gringos in
college sweatshirts heading home after mountain biking in
Ensenada, and Tijuana mothers on their way to JC Penney
in Chula Vista.
Local Tijuanenses have a name for all this. Before getting
in their cars to cross, they turn on the radio para escuchar la
linea. To listen to the line.
When I finally pull up to the border patrol agents, they
search the car, probing between the seams of the seats and
emptying my trunk. I know if I look at them I will look guilty
of something that I have not done. So instead I just keep my
eyes on the bend of road ahead and keep listening to a future
that’s already happening.
[Fade track 2 back up for 30 seconds, then fade out.]
III. Buenos Aires, Argentina
In 1941, the Argentinean poet Carlos Argentino called Jorge
Louis Borges on the telephone. Argentino was panicking;
his family home where he was now living and in the midst of
finishing a poem, was about to be destroyed to make
26
room for a confectionery. He told Borges, who was
blind in one eye and partially blind in the other, that the
demolition must stop. In the dining-room cellar of the
house was something he needed desperately in order
to finish writing—an aleph.
An aleph, Borges is told in the 1945 parable in which
he describes it, “is one of the points in space containing all
points, ... the place where, without any possible confusion,
all the places in the world are found, seen from every angle.”
When Borges goes over to the house to see the aleph first
hand, he lacks language to describe what he sees within
its 2-3 centimeters of diameter—the vocabularies do not
exist, there is no discipline of knowledge to which the
aleph belongs that could effectively express the enormity
of the convergence, the boundless cosmic space of overlapping realities, that Borges witnessed in Argentino’s
cellar. “I saw millions of delightful and atrocious acts,” he
wrote, “none astonished me more than the fact that all of
them together occupied the same point, without superposition and without transparency.”
In 1974, the French writer Georges Perec wrote a
book called Species of Spaces and in the middle of it,
rather suddenly, he asked: “Is the aleph, that place in
Borges from which the entire world is visible, anything
other than an alphabet?”
What if Borges were still alive? What if Carlos Argentino was living in Tijuana or Nogales or Juarez or Mexicali
and what if his house was about to be torn down to make
room for a maquiladora or if his cellar was being gradually
destroyed by moist earth contaminated with toxic runoff
from a nearby smelting plant? And what if Borges went
over to see the aleph but instead of finding it in the cellar
and instead of finding it in the alphabet, he finds it by looking out of Argentino’s window, out at the world created by
a line drawn in the sand and then
re-drawn with wire fences and then re-drawn with steel
walls and then re-drawn with steel walls wired with
electronic sensors and digital cameras? And since ocular
vision was not the usual way that Borges saw the world,
what if instead of seeing the convergences of all points
in space, he heard them?
Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the
entire world is audible, anything other than the border?
As Borges reminds us, the aleph is the first letter of
the Hebrew alphabet and in the Jewish mystical text
of the kabbalah, the aleph is ein-sof, “limitless and pure
divinity.” Near the San Ysidro-Tijuana crossing point, on
the Mexican side, there is a large piece of quarry stone
meant to mark the border line. It reads “Limite de La
Republica de Mexico.” The border, the limit without limits,
el limite sin limite.
[Track 3: Play Control Machete, “Te Aprovechas de
Limite?” and fade out at 0:22.]
IV. Los Robles, Mexico
The first time Janet Leigh and Charleton Heston (in brownface as Mexican narco-cop Mike Vargas) walked
27
from “the Paris of the border” into the unnamed
US city on the other side back in the 1958 B-movie Touch
of Evil—no fences, no walls, no car searches—all you
heard was Henry Mancini.
[Track 4: Play Henry Mancini, “Touch of Evil: Main
Title.” Fade up at 0:36 and fade out at 1:19.]
When they did it again in 1998, you heard a lot more.
Now Los Robles didn’t just have a soundtrack, it produced
sound, and not a single sweep of sound but a piecemeal
montage of sound that moved from style to style as
Heston and Leigh moved from border space to border
space. Now the car bomb ticked between mambomutated conga hiccups and braying goats, and now
each bar that Vargas and his new white bride walked
past had its own music: swinging jazz out of one doorway,
dragging dirty blues out of another.
The difference was crucial, not just for how much
better it got the reality of border sound—a polyphonic
crossroads of channel-zapped north and south, folklorico
and pop, city and country—but for how much closer it
stuck to the original vision of the film’s director, Orson
Welles. Back in 1957, the studio took control of the picture
away from Welles and edited the final cut themselves
without his supervision. When he saw the studio cut—
the same cut which debuted in theaters the following year
and that has been the Touch of Evil that generations of
film audiences have known—he was so outraged that he
wrote a 58-page memo detailing the changes he wanted
to be made. Chief among them was the removal of Henry
Mancini’s symphonic “Main Title” score. Nobody listened.
Forty years later, the film was re-cut to answer Welles’s
lengthy edit memo by expert sound engineer Walter
Murch. Murch found not only Welles’s original source but
“a hidden layer of sound effects … allowing the audience
to hear the town, the footsteps of the pedestrians, their
voices, the laughter of the crowds, the sirens—even the
bleating of a pack of goats stuck in the middle of the road.”
[Track 5: Play Walter Murch edit, “Touch of Evil: Main
Title” and fade out at 0:38.]
“The plan was to feature a succession of different and
contrasting musical numbers,” Welles wrote in the memo.
“In honky-tonk districts on the border, loudspeakers are
over the entrance of every joint, large or small, each
blasting out its own tune by way of a ‘come on’ or a ‘pitch’
for the tourists. The fact that the streets of these border
towns are invariably loud with this music was planned as
a basic device throughout the picture.” Welles wanted
“mambo-type rhythm numbers with rock-and-roll”
because he had listened to the border long enough to
know that the border is where sound is restless, not where
it rests. By 1958, mambo had already hit the United States
after being cultivated by Perez Prado in Mexico City and
rock-and-roll had already hit Tijuana with bands like Los
Locos del Ritmo and Los Rockin Devils. Welles understood
opposite: Tourists pose for a souvenir photo postcard.
that the border between Los Robles and the United States—a
border inspired by the one that separates Tijuana from San
Ysidro—was a space of sonic multiplicity where rock bumps
up against mambo, blues interrupts Latin jazz, and Murch
never stops cutting the sounds against and into each other as
long as Vargas and his bride keep moving.
There is one sound that remains constant—the sound of
the radio in the car, the car that will by the end of the 3 minutes
and 20 seconds, explode, its sound turning the heads of
Heston and Leigh, its sound the one that keeps bringing both
sides of the border together for the rest of the film.
But a cut-up of Touch of Evil’s original sound source
actually surfaced before Murch’s 1998 re-edit, at the hands of
perhaps a less likely suspect, the Chicano rapper and
producer Frost. A year before Murch re-cut the opening
score, Frost was busy sampling dialogue from the film’s story
of a corrupt US cop working in conjunction with a local drug
cartel. The song the sample appears on is “Mexican Border”
and it details the exploits of a young East LA drug dealer who
sells drugs smuggled from Mexico in his Southern California
neighborhood. In the song, he is on his way down to the
Mexican border to pick up his latest shipment from Sinaloa
when he is stopped by a cop for speeding. The cop ends up
dead, and the dealer keeps heading south down I-5 in a Chevrolet. As he passes through Oceanside and gets close to San
Ysidro, he channels the voice of narco boss Uncle Joe Grandi
(played by Russian actor Akim Tamiroff) as he threatens the
life of Mike Vargas, the saintly Mexican cop with a white fiancée who will eventually bring Grandi to his knees.
[Track 6: Play Frost, “Mexican Border.” Fade up at 2:40
and fade out at 3:05.]
The border of Touch of Evil is the border of Hollywood archetype, a place of sin and corruption, of fortune tellers and
prostitutes, where the Puritanical values of the North have
no authority once they cross the line. “Tijuana is nothing,”
Raymond Chandler made Phillip Marlowe say in The Long
Goodbye, “All they want there is the buck. The kid who sidles
over to your car and looks at you with big wistful eyes and
says, One Dime Please Mister, will try to sell you his sister in
the next sentence.”
It is the border that every Hollywood outlaw and criminal
wants to make a run for, its lawlessness—the last frontier
that US lawmen could not cross—a sanctuary for those living
outside the law. One of Hollywood’s earliest productions,
Charlie Chaplin’s 1923 The Pilgrim, ends with Chaplin—
a thief on the run from the law—straddling the Texas-Mexico
borderline, with one foot in the land of the law and the other
in the land where law no longer applies. In 1971, Sweet
Sweetback headed for Tijuana at the finale of his Baad
Asssss Song with police dogs barking at his feet, and in
2003, Charlie’s Angel Drew Barrymore fled her assassin
ex-boyfriend by hiding out in a Tijuana dive, even though it
was really a hipster margarita bar in West Hollywood.
The dealer in Frost’s song is just another of these on-therun outlaws headed south for safety, “headin’ down
28
to the Mexican border,” but Frost’s dealer is not a
white outcast on the lam, a white preppy looking for cheap
sex, or a neo-Beat bohemian searching for illicit antiauthoritarian kicks. The dealer is Chicano and he’s looking
across the border not just for refuge but for a role model. He’s
looking to be the next Joe Grandi.
On the cover of the album Frost’s song appears on,
When Hell LA Freezes Over, he’s standing in white camouflage in front of a silver military Humvee. Behind him, only
10 minutes from the Venice Beach back lot that doubled
as Touch of Evil’s Los Robles, is downtown Los Angeles,
the original center of what was once Mexican Los Angeles,
before there was a border, before there was any line between
Los Robles and the other side, before there was any line that
you had to walk across.
[Track 7: Play Charles Mingus, “Tijuana Gift Shop,” and
fade out at 0:50.]
V. Los Angeles, California
When Charles Mingus, a jazz bassist who could count black,
white, Indian, Asian, and Mexican in his bloodline but selfidentified as a “half-schitt-colored nigger,” left LA for Tijuana
in 1957, he ended up in a five-dollar-a-night hotel with a fleet
of Mexican hookers. He had sex with 23 of them. Or at least
that’s how Mingus told it in his 1971 autobiography, Beneath
the Underdog. There his famed trip to Tijuana with drummer
Dannie Richmond is one extended fuck-a-thon dubbed in bad
Mexican accents (“Sí, señor. We come, fooke everybody.
Party. Sí. You pay.”) that finds Mingus doing what he does
throughout the book: grappling with the constrictions of
American race by buying, selling, and dominating women
with a gargantuan sexual architecture.
With Mingus, the fiction of experience was more
important than the fact of it; after all, this is a guy who originally wanted Beneath to be bound in white leather and
titled “Holy Bible.” The fictions of his Tijuana adventure led
to the fact of Tijuana Moods, an entire album (his first stereo
recording, and his first for a major label) that celebrates the
Tijuana that only exists in the collective imagination of North
American mythology.
Tijuana. Our pueblo of donkey shows and gambling
houses. Our pueblo of 24-hour sin and self-serve salvation.
Our pueblo of Protestant release and Mexican divorce.
Like Mingus’s sexcapades, the Tijuana of legend and
lore is itself a composite of fact and fiction—a city that only
began to register in the US brain during Prohibition, when its
Agua Caliente casino became a fave playground for partystarved Hollywooders and bars on La Revo were the only
places you could get a decent drink in public.
The cover of Tijuana Moods describes the album’s task
as re-creating “an exciting stay in Mexico’s wild and controversial border town.” In the liner notes, Mingus gushes
about the city’s “wine-women-song-and-dance.” The songs
splice castanets, free improv, and rolling blues into odes to
strippers (“Ysabel’s Table Dance”), cheap souvenirs (“Tijuana
Gift Shop”), nightclubs (“Flamingo”), and nomadic mariachis
opposite and overleaf: US-Mexico border fence. Photos Josh Kun.
(“Los Mariachis [The Street Musicians]”). And on the cover,
a Mexican prostitute in a tacky brothel gown flashes her
black garter, drags on a cigarette, and leans, come-hither
style, against a jukebox.
In his biography of Mingus, music critic Gene Santoro
explains Mingus’s obsession with this mythic Tijuana as just
another example of northern bohos looking for sexual salvation in the brown otherness of Mexico. Which is certainly
true but it’s not enough, because Tijuana and Mexico were
also more than that for Mingus. They were key places for
this self-avowed “mongrel” to both figure out and escape the
entrapping, often suffocating racial binaries of civil rights
America.
Mingus was born on the border (in Nogales) and died,
of Lou Gehrig’s disease, in Cuernavaca (where he had been
living in the care of a Mexican healer). He grew up in Watts
going to school with and dating Mexican kids and had family
in New Mexico who spoke Spanish. His mother’s “Indian
features” often led to her being mistaken for Mexican, and
Mingus himself passed to get admitted into the Musicians’
Union. Mingus was too black to be white and too light to
be black.
“He wanted to be one or the other,” Mingus wrote of
himself, “but he was a little of everything, wholly nothing,
of no race, country, flag, or friend.” Mingus was beaten up by
blacks for looking Mexican and beaten up by Mexicans for
being black.
Mingus loved his make-believe Tijuana, his “expected
dream” of it, because it gave him a way out of all this. It
was the archetypal border town and Mingus spent his life
struggling with the borders of race (so much so that he often
said he wanted to retreat to “a colorless island”). Tijuana was
somewhere where all these designations fell apart, somewhere that wasn’t the US, where the freedom he was
promised hadn’t already soured into the “bullschitt freedom”
he decried up north. Tijuana was somewhere he could figure
out, however violently, however destructively, his relationship to himself.
Mingus left a legacy there. His son, Eugene, lived there
for awhile, working as a manager and occasional sound man
for the punk band Tijuana NO, whose recent album Contra
Revolución Avenue set out to overturn all the Tijuana myths
that Mingus needed to make true in order to survive. Last
year, a young Tijuana poet named Miguel Angel Soria and
two African-American jazz musicians from San Diego put
their ear to the Tijuana-San Diego border zone and heard its
geography through the thick steel plucks of Mingus’s bass.
[Track 8: Play Miguel Angel Soria, “Geografia Con
Mingus.” Fade in at 2:33 and fade out at 3:27.]
One of the more notorious non-musical moving images of
Mingus comes from the 1968 documentary Mingus which
captured him in the middle of being evicted from his New York
City loft. He is smoking a pipe and wearing a sombrero, and
then he fires his shotgun into the ceiling that closes in
on him.
31
Let my children hear Mingus.
Permite que mis niños escuchen a Mingus,
a Mingus,
desde Cuernavaca a Los Angeles,
desde Los Angeles a Tijuana,
permite que mis niños escuchen a Mingus.
[Track 9: Play Kingston Trio, “Tijuana Jail,” and fade out
at 0:52.]
VI. Tijuana, Mexico
When the Kingston Trio, three white Ivy League folksingers in
plaid pants who tried to cash in on the Calypso craze of
the 1950s and ended up as the catalysts for the 1960s folk
revival, went down to Tijuana in 1959, they spent a wild night
drinking and gambling in one of the city’s notorious casinos
and ended up in an equally notorious Tijuana jail. When they
performed their song “Tijuana Jail” on The Jack Benny Show
that same year, they sang it inside a mock jail cell with Warner Brothers vocal chameleon Mel Blanc—
the same man responsible for the voice of Mexican rodent
Speedy Gonzalez since 1955—handling the “sí señors” of
the Mexican cops.
There is nothing dated about the Kingston Trio’s jail
fantasy. Its mythologization of Tijuana criminality and Anglo
debauchery remains very contemporary. For starters, the
1983 film Losin’ It, starring a young Tom Cruise, basically
built its script from the plot of the song. The “it” was Cruise’s
virginity and the process of its loss began with shots of him
and his buddies flexing their adolescent muscles and stuffing
their underwear in front of the mirror. “Hey, where you going?”
a cheerleader asks the guys, and they respond, “to the nastiest, raunchiest, most bitchinist place in the world...
Tia Juana!”
As they cross the checkpoint, the sound mix goes from
Eddie Conchran’s “Summertime Blues” to The Champs’
“Tequila” until they end up in a strip club with an ex-pat
gringo on stage leading a strip revue. “Tia Juana!” he shouts.
“Tia Juana who?” the crowd shouts back, “Tia Juana bring
your mother to the gang bang.” By night’s end, after a donkey
show and a bar fight, one of them gets thrown in the Kingston Trio jail.
The Tijuana Jail has also been recreated as a room in
the FantaSuites theme-hotel chain, which allows paying
customers the chance to spend a night alone in a mock jail
cell complete with stone walls covered in graffiti, a queen
bed hanging from the ceiling by chains, and a copy of the
Kingston Trio on the stereo.
When Herb Alpert, a young Russian-Jewish trumpet
player from Boyle Heights who had cut his teeth writing hits
for Sam Cooke, went down to Tijuana in 1962, he ended up in
a Tijuana bullring. Alpert had been working on an instrumental, “Twinkle Star,” and hit a wall. So he went to the
bullring for inspiration, came back to Los Angeles with
on-site recordings of crowd noise, and recorded his first solo
hit “The Lonely Bull” with a group of LA session players. He
named them The Tijuana Brass, but they were really “four
salamis, two bagels, and an American cheese” who were
out to Americanize the sound of Mexican mariachis. “Something in the excitement of the crowd, the traditional mariachi
music, the trumpet call heralding the start of the fight, the
yelling, the snorting of bulls,” Alpert said, “it all clicked.”
[Track 10: Play Herb Alpert, “The Lonely Bull,” and fade
out at 0:40.]
The song was the title track to Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’
debut recording which, according to the album’s liner notes,
was meant to capture the sound of a mythologized Tijuana,
“the noisy Mexican-American voices in the narrow streets,
the confusion of color and motion.” On the back cover he
called Tijuana “a spectacle, a garish border town” and on the
front cover sat in a cardigan and loafers doing tequila shots
out of a pewter cup. The San Francisco Chronicle called
Alpert’s project “a corny Latin American minstrel show.”
Both Alpert and The Kingston Trio, with their jails and
casinos and bullrings, gave us the quintessential US version
of Tijuana, and it was literally a US version, the tourist Tijuana
built and financed by white American businessmen during Prohibition to meet the pleasure needs of gringos with
money to spend, a Tijuana run by Americans for Americans,
the Tijuana of race tracks and the Agua Caliente casino, the
Tijuana of Sin City, the Tijuana that has never actually existed
except when it was created by US money, the Calcutta of the
West with its donkey shows and johns pimping their sisters
to Navy men on weekend shore leave, the Tijuana where
everything is cheaper, everything more transgressive—
the licentious evil twin of its conservative sibling that lurks
one border fence, one border wall, and a fleet of migra trucks
to the north. As one Tijuanense put it in a local study on tourism, “Tijuana was the emporium where gold from
gaming tables spilled onto the floors but gringos took it
home; for Tijuana, there was only its shame.” The Tijuana
of Alpert and the Kingston Trio, besides being one built on
layers of North-on-South myth and fantasy, is the Tijuana
forced to subsist at the mercy of the false trickle-down
economic promises of a tourist economy that—not unlike
the maquiladora economy of globalization that would later
follow it—leaves Tijuana residents picking up the tab for US
prosperity.
The bullring and the jail are still there, but even if they
weren’t, people north of the border would still find a way to
visit them.
[Track 11: Play Fussible, “Rom u Rosa,” and fade out to
silence at 0:45.]
32
BORDERLINE ARCHEOLOGY
Jesse Lerner
Surrounded by emptied quart bottles of Tecate beer and a
pair of television monitors showing giant, shifty eyeballs, the
renowned 7th-century ruler Lord Pacal, Maya noble of the
ancient city of Palenque, has taken the form of a blond child
bedecked in green feather boas and crossed the US-Mexico
border in his pre-Columbian lunar module. Alongside his
Olmec moon unit, a colossal head perched on gold-trimmed
low-rider landing gear, the fearsome Aztec goddess Coatlicue dons her space suit and, like Neil Armstrong, salutes the
US flag. One highly inebriated eagle has landed. This hallucinatory scene is a vision of Chicano science
fiction, a futuristic fantasy of a post-NAFTA North American
space program, and part of a mixed media installation by
the brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre. The pair moved
from conservative, hyper-Catholic Guadalajara to beachside
Orange County while still in elementary school. They grew up
there in the 1970s, surfing, getting stoned, watching pseudoarcheological documentaries like In Search of Ancient
Astronauts, and reading speculative accounts of pre-Conquest space travel, such as the immensely popular Chariots
of the Gods by Erich von Däniken. Today they divide their
time between San Diego and Ensenada. Their over-the-top
installation introduces us to the strange
transformations that occur when Mexico’s ancient cultural
heritage reaches that country’s northern border, in this case,
that most delirious zone at the border’s western extreme.1
This region, where San Diego’s military bases and milliondollar ocean-view homes rub against Tijuana’s postapocalyptic landscape wasted by neo-liberalism, is a space
where the hybrid and the syncretic are the norm, and where
mutations, no doubt induced by the tons of toxins dumped by
the area’s many maquiladoras, proliferate madly.2
Prior to Spanish colonization, what is today the
northwestern Mexican state of Baja California Norte was
inhabited by Tipai, Paipai, Kiliwa, and Nakipa Indians. Their
nomadic lifestyle and modest form of social organization are
the reasons that the region lacks the spectacular preColumbian ruins that bring thousands of tourists to Mexico’s
central valley and southern (Maya) region. The popular
American mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner pushed Baja’s
murals as an attraction, but the tourists come looking for
an essential, “deep” Mexico, and this means pyramids and
colossal Mesoamerican sculptures. The petroglyphs and
cave paintings that the region’s early inhabitants left behind
in remote parts of Baja do not hold the same drawing power
as do massive structures associated with stories about
human sacrifices. As if to compensate for this perceived
lack, we find constructions of a much more recent epoch: the
numerous examples of displaced Totonac, Maya, Zapotec,
and other ancient cultures rendered in plaster, fiberglass, or
plastic, simulacra scattered throughout Baja’s largest city,
Tijuana, and beyond. In their northward migration these
objects undergo every kind of transformation,
33
suggesting a virtual taxonomy of miniatures,
replicas, and copies, all struggling collectively to assert the
national mythology and history always in danger of receding.
Every such instance of the public display of pre-Columbian replicas in the border region is Janus-faced, simultaneously looking anxiously northward, to draw the free-spending
tourists (while warding off the encroaching cultural menace
they represent), and looking south to
Mexico City, the gravitational center of national narratives.
For the North American tourist, these objects function as
signposts of alterity, highly visible markers of Mexico’s otherness, indicators that the traveler has left the US behind. They
proclaim that Mexico is heir to a long and impressive cultural
heritage, and that the “zonkey” (a Tijuana donkey painted
with zebra stripes to pose for the characteristic tourist photo)
and the all-the-tequila-you-can-drink special are not the sum
total of Mexican culture. Certain examples, by virtue of their
placement or their English language signage, seem to principally have this function. This is the primary function of the
Olmec, Teotihuacán, and Maya replicas that line Tijuana’s
Avenida Revolución, the most touristic thoroughfare offering
at all hours plentiful alcohol in themed bars (Red Square, the
inevitable Hard Rock Café), “Aztec massage” parlors, and
gentlemen’s clubs catering to visitors.
For the Mexican, the archaeological replicas have an
altogether different function. Their presence in the cityscape
reconnects the center with Tijuana, a problematic place for
nationalists at the furthest margin of the country, distant
from the interior of the nation and its centralist myths and
identity. Like ancient Rome and its empire, Mexico City and
the rest of the republic exist in a highly asymmetrical relation
of power, one that must be continuously reasserted and renegotiated. Residents of the capital fear that the border breeds
a dangerous drift of identity, subject to the nearly
above: Einar & Jamex de la Torre, “Colonial Atmosphere,” mixed media
installation, 2002. Courtesy Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California.
irresistible pull of the larger northern neighbor. Residents of
the border, they like to say, speak Spanglish (a bastardized
Pocho slang or Caló) rather than proper Spanish, and too
readily embrace other markers of a North American (US)
identity. It is tempting to read these Chilango (Mexico City)
criticisms as a reflection of their own anxieties about the
erosion of national traits in an era of globalization. But in this
context, statues like the monument of the last Aztec emperor
Cuauhtemoc on the Paseo de los Heroes anchor Tijuana
within national narratives. Even as these objects function
as ties binding the Mexican republic’s most distant urban outpost to the center, they reveal those gaps that separate
its precarious border realities from those of the interior.
The latter-day archeological objects in Tijuana derive
from different practices and motivations, ranging from
commercial impulses to commissioned, high-profile
exercises in site-specific art installation. The most readily
visible examples are simply money-making ventures, like
thousands of plaster of Paris miniatures of the Aztec
“calendar stone” airbrushed with neon and reflective metallic
paints, the Chac Mool ashtrays, and all the rest of the kitsch
tourist art that abounds. If it is true, as Josiah
Wedgwood claimed, that copies of ancient objects “most
effectively prevent the Return of Ignorant and barbarous
Ages,”3 then Tijuana is surely in the vanguard of this struggle
against barbarism.
The art world produces multiples as well. Seated on a
row of steel stepstools attached to the fence that demarcates
the international boundary, 111 identical plaster figurines representing the Aztec goddess of filth and putrefaction,
Tlazoltéotl, grimace in the pain of childbirth. These replicas
form a site-specific art piece by the contemporary conceptual
artist Silvia Gruner, as part of the international arts showcase
InSITE ‘94. The setting for the installation was Tijuana’s
working-class Colonia Libertad, a neighborhood that at the
time was often used by undocumented immigrants as an
embarkation point for the dangerous northward crossing.4
Suspended in the act of giving birth, Tlazoltéotl is a liminal figure, forever between pregnancy and motherhood, installed
within a liminal space, the threshold between the US and
Mexico, between the First World and the Third, between
North and South. For the migrants passing through the area,
this dangerous crossing point marks the space between
home and exile, citizenship and “alien” status.
The original jade upon which Gruner’s figurine is
modeled is itself a border-crosser. Purportedly from Central
Mexico (though the American Museum of Natural History’s
Gordon Ekholm used to insist that it is a fake), an officer of
the defeated Emperor Maximilian brought the object to Paris,
where a description of it was first published.5 Subsequently,
diplomat and art collector Robert Woods Bliss acquired the
sculpture, and it is currently exhibited as part of his collection at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown. Gruner’s
reuse of the figurine as the prototype for multiple ceramic
replicas perched on the fence in Tijuana completes a circuitous migration that corresponds to imperial claims
34
on Latin America, first from the Old World, then from
the Yankees. Multiplied over and over, the Tlazoltéotl figure
returns to Mexico not as repatriated cultural heritage, but as
a signpost for the border crosser, an incongruous aberration
on the very visible marker of the international line that is the
border fence.
Nowhere in Mexico is the nation’s architectural heritage
miniaturized on a scale comparable to the failed theme park
called Mexitlán, Ramírez Vázquez’s enormous roof-top
celebration of Mexico’s architectural heritage located just
a few blocks from the busiest international border crossing
in the world. Of all the pre-Columbian figurines, replicas,
degraded copies, and striking likenesses found in Tijuana,
this is by far the most ambitious. In the spirit of the models
at Surrey’s Thorne Park, the Netherlands’ Madurodam, the
1939 New York World’s Fair speculative miniatures of New
York in the year 1960, Beijing’s “World Park,” and Shenzhen’s
“Splendid China,” Mexitlán’s miniatures of the pyramids at
Chichén Itzá, Teotihuacán, Tlatelolco, and of the Great
Temple of pre-Conquest Tenochtitlán are all rendered
skillfully and meticulously. Tijuana and the rest of the border
region, lacking any architecture that (by the criteria operating here) rate as significant, is not represented, though just
beyond the perimeter of the park the oversized signage for a
Smart and Final store insistently reminds the visitor of border
realities. The nation is reduced to a scale at which its entirety
can be surveyed in a glance. Not one to be guilty of false
modesty, Ramírez Vázquez includes one of his own buildings, the National Anthropology Museum from Mexico City,
among the scaled-down survey of the nation’s architectural
highlights. Though unquestionably impressive on an aesthetic
level, Mexitlán has not been successful economically. It is
not hard to imagine why this might be, as it is at once not fun
enough to be an amusement park, too expensive for most
Tijuana residents, not meaningful to most tourists (who don’t
know the original buildings referenced), and not educational
enough to be a museum. After the initial public response
proved disappointing, the owners removed some of the
models and began to book local punk bands on weekends.
They found they had to install temporary fences to prevent
slam dancers from stage-diving on to the miniature National
Palace of Fine Arts or pogo-ing onto the diminutive Temple of
the Inscriptions from Palenque. Even this desperate effort to
bring in crowds was not enough to make Mexitlán financially
viable. Today, the park is closed, the architectural models
stored unceremoniously on their sides in the structure’s parking garage. Only the weather-worn sign, a giant,
decaying plastic piñata, and the nearly life-size replica of
the Atlante of Tula on the sidewalk by the front entrance now
mark the spot of this once-fabulous exercise in replication.
A few blocks away, in a tourist development called the
Pueblo Amigo, another replica of Palenque, this one closer
to the scale of the original, has recently been completed. The
architects responsible have clearly learned as much from
Las Vegas as they have from the Maya. Synthetic materials
cover the structure to approximate the appearance of hewn
stone. Feathered serpents copied from Teotihuacán
35
(enhanced with water spouts emerging from their
mouths), a bamboo banister straight out of a Tiki bar, a waterfall cascading down the building’s façade, and the
inexplicable stand of papyrus reveal an eclectic sensibility
reminiscent of the Mexican structure at Epcot Center. This
past summer, the building opened as a neo-Maya borderland
discotheque. The presence of both Mexitlán’s miniature
Palenque ruins and the disco Palenque in such proximity
redoubles Tijuana’s search in the ruins. Nashville,
Tennessee, has only one Parthenon, after all, and Slobozia,
Rumania, has only one Eiffel Tower (and one replica of the
Southfork Ranch, as featured on TV’s Dallas). Tijuana, a place
where less is never more, could not settle for one. The disco
Palenque is streamlined and altered to accommodate its new
function, and is principally identifiable as Palenque because
of the multistoried tower, unique in Mesoamerica. Mexitlán’s
miniature Palenque is more complete, and includes not
only the palace with its tower but also a scale model of the
Temple of the Inscriptions, where the mortal remains of Lord
Pacal—and the relief carvings that inspired the de la Torre
brothers—were found. In that temple, in
distant Chiapas, in the far south of Mexico, the Mexican
archeologist Alberto Ruz discovered in 1952 that the stone
slabs of the floor concealed a staircase leading down into
the structure’s interior and descending to a large, corbelled
chamber containing the king’s sarcophagus. The lid depicts
the ruler in an ecstatic state, curled up and reclining backwards. Archeologists understand the relief as representing
the king’s rapturous entry into the underworld upon his
death, but more fanciful viewers have interpreted this as
proof of pre-Columbian space travel, noting the similarity
with the characteristic position assumed by astronauts in
flight. Crash landing over the delirious landscape of Tijuana
like the exploding Columbia shuttle, scattering chunks of
detritus hither and yon, these ersatz pre-Columbian artifacts
are true mutant landmarks within a heady border geography.
1 The installation was created for “Mixed Feelings,” an exhibition at the University of
Southern California’s Fisher Gallery about the border metropolis.
2 Maquiladoras are factories run by multinationals just inside Mexico’s border with
the US.
3 Quoted in David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), p. 306.
4 Subsequently, the reinforcement of the border fence, part of a continuing militarization
of the international border, has forced this illicit migration further eastward.
5 E. T. Hamy, “Note sur une statuette méxicaine,” in Journal de la Société des Américanistes, vol. 3, no. 1 (1906), pp. 1-5.
opposite: Tourists visiting (top) a Tijuana statue of Tlaloc, the Aztec God of Rain;
and (bottom) a Tijuana trinket shop.
overleaf: Silvia Gruner, The Middle of the Road/La mitad del camino, mixed
media installation on the border fence, 1994. Courtesy inSITE/Installation Gallery, San Diego.
Data and metadata: An Interview
with Murtha Baca & Erin Coburn
Eve Meltzer & Julia Meltzer
As museums, art institutions, and art libraries digitize their
collections for greater accessibility, the question of how to
categorize and define works of art becomes increasingly
important. The Getty Research Institute, a program of the
J. Paul Getty Trust, spearheads a program to standardize the
vocabularies used to define artworks so that as digital data
about collections is created, a common form and language
can be used. The challenges are many: What is a “standard”
language for defining an art object and how is this determined and agreed upon? Who should comprise the communities who establish these standards? On what criteria do we
base standards in a field for which the very notion is already
controversial?
Murtha Baca is the head of Digital Resources
Management and the Vocabulary Program at the Getty
Research Institute in Los Angeles. She oversees the creation
of digital resources relating to the collections of the Getty
Research Institute. Erin Coburn is the Data Standards
Administrator at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Her work focuses
on data standards and the creation and use of controlled
vocabularies for describing and accessing information on
the Getty Museum’s collection, and providing descriptive
metadata for the Museum’s collection online. Eve Meltzer
and Julia Meltzer met them in September 2003.
What are so-called “vocabularies” and how did the Vocabulary Program begin at the Getty Research Institute?
MB: Vocabularies gather all the different ways—right and
wrong—of calling things, so that people of different levels
of expertise can find things within a collection. The Getty
Vocabulary Program, working as a unit with the Getty
Standards Program, builds, maintains, and disseminates
vocabulary tools for the visual arts and architecture. The
vocabularies produced by the Getty include: the Art &
Architecture Thesaurus® (AAT), the Union List of Artist
Names® (ULAN), and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic
Names (TGN)®. These resources are intended to aid in the
documentation and retrieval of automated information about
art, architecture, and material culture.
Can you give us a brief history of museum standards?
37
MB: More than a decade ago, Categories for the Description
of Works of Art, or CDWA, was initiated. The director of what
was then called the Art History Information Program at the
Getty determined that art museums and other cultural
heritage institutions needed a metadata standard the way
the library world has MARC. MARC is the main data “container” for bibliographic information in the library world;
it stands for MAchine-Readable Cataloging format. MARC
defines a data format that emerged from a Library of
Congress-led initiative that was begun 30 years ago.
It provides the mechanism by which computers exchange,
use, and interpret bibliographic information—its data
elements make up the foundation of most library catalogues
used today. The archival world has a couple of metadata
containers that information goes into, but the art museum
world didn’t have that. So CDWA was initiated in the late
1980s. As in the library world, this set of data categories was
developed through consensus. You get all the people who
are the experts in the different fields into the same meetings
again and again and again and they debate and debate
and debate and they come to a consensus on the necessary
categories.
Who are the people who attend those meetings?
MB: The kinds of people who were in those meetings were
not just information systems people but also curators—they
actually recruited curators who were experts in various
areas, such as Asian art, so it wasn’t just folks in the typical
fields of western European art. They also recruited people
who work with different types of media: curators, librarians,
registrars—all the various types who are needed to contribute to an information system. There were, as well, experts
from major institutions such as the Getty, the Guggenheim,
MoMA, and the Met.
Then out of CDWA came Object ID?
MB: Yes, both Object ID and the VRA (Visual Resources
Association) Core Categories are two other metadata
element sets that are really subsets of CDWA. CDWA is huge:
it’s comprised of hundreds of categories. VRA Core is
a metadata “container” for the data necessary to catalogue
works of art and material culture artifacts; unlike CDWA, VRA
Core focuses on visual “surrogates” of works of art (slides,
photographs, digital images). Object ID is another metadata
element set: it’s only ten elements and that’s
really looking at the art object as a piece of property that
can be stolen or protected or taken across national
boundaries. So CDWA cares about the context in which
a work was created—the social and historical context: who
the patron was, why the object was created, its original
location, and so on. Object ID does not care about that.
Object ID is used to identify works of art as cultural property.
It really cares about what the thing looks like and how you
can identify it.
When you say “metadata element set,” what do you mean?
EC: The categories of information that you need to describe
something—well, not always to describe, but the kind of
metadata we’re talking about is descriptive metadata. So,
I need to know the title, who created it, how big it is. That is
the kind of information you begin with and then you populate
those fields with data values from a controlled vocabulary.
38
Why is it necessary to have standards?
EC: Because data is very labor intensive to produce. In order
to have an information system, you have to buy computers,
other hardware, and software. All of that can cost a lot of
money. But one of the costliest factors often overlooked is
the human labor to create and maintain the data. If you do it
consistently, it’s easier to migrate when you buy a new system
later. It also makes it easier to contribute to consortiums.
For example, with a big consortium of art museum information, the only way you can really manage the information
efficiently and create meaningful access to it is if everyone
agrees upon a shared standard and the same “buckets” of
information that they can map the data to. Theft is also a
big issue when it comes to justifying the importance of
documenting collections. Consider what happened at the
Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad. If they had had better
documentation, it would now be easier to identify found
objects as belonging to the Museum. It’s amazing how
many collections aren’t properly documented.
MB: For example, two core metadata elements of Object ID
are: 1) ownership—i.e., who does the object belong to—and
2) distinguishing marks. What if you have a whole bunch
of little statues of Buddha? Unless you’re an expert, you
would not know the difference between them, but if you’ve
documented them and noted some distinguishing mark like a
scratch, that can also help you identify the object as a form of
cultural property.
EC: Standards are also important because people don’t
recognize how complex it could be on the back end. You
might say that a photograph is from Paris, but there’s more
than one Paris in the world. And so, without having some sort
of standards in place, “Paris” by itself is meaningless, unless
you say, “Paris, France,” or “Paris, Texas.”
What kind of struggles did you come up against in the
creation of standards, specifically in working with curators
or administrators and their particular modes of thinking?
MB: That’s a huge issue. We’ve even struggled with the
nomenclature itself. In general, people tend to fear the word
“standards.” They don’t understand what an “authority file”
is, but it just sounds bad. “Controlled vocabulary” sounds
really scary, too. No one wants to be controlled. So a lot of it is
psychological education. You need to emphasize that
standards are good: they’re going to liberate, not imprison.
What we say is that the curator can call an object anything he
or she chooses. If they want to call it a lekythos or an étagère
or a cartonnier—that’s fine. The word desk, for example,
might make a curator run out of the room screaming, “That’s
not a desk, it’s a cartonnier!” In effect, vocabularies gather all
the different ways of designating or naming things, as well
as more generic and more specific terms and names, so that
people of different levels of expertise can effectively find
what they are looking for, or what is there to be found.
But the issue is really one of trust. It’s also a big change in
terms of practices of administration. And it was a big psychological change. It’s a big change in the way people think
about their work. In order to do this kind of work, you have
to be on teams with all different sorts of people, from the
curator to the guy who scans the images, to the cataloguer
who is one of the most important people. So it also presents
people with a different way of thinking about their work.
Is the Getty at the forefront of defining these standards?
MB: Yes, the Getty Museum has been at the forefront of
producing and controlling information correctly and appropriately, and exposing the public to it. We pioneer in the
implementation of standards and controlled vocabularies for
art museum information. The Getty Information Institute—
some of whose programs, including the Vocabulary Program,
are now part of the Getty Research Institute—together with
the College Art Association spearheaded the development of
CDWA. And we’ve been developing our three vocabularies
for 20 years. Nobody else in the art information world really
has anything like that. The Library of Congress Subject
Headings have been an established authority in the library
world for many years, but they’re quite user-unfriendly, and
don’t focus on just art and architecture. The Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) was begun in 1980, and the Union
List of Artist Names (ULAN) began in the late 1980s; they
both focus on art and material culture. The Thesaurus
of Geographic Names (TGN) focuses on places that are
important for art, but it’s worldwide coverage and you can
use it for anything. In fact, our vocabularies get licensed by
travel agencies and commercial vendors. Again, the way
people search on the Internet for now, and for the foreseeable future, is through words. So if the end user is searching
for Firenze but I’m calling it Florence in my database, then
he won’t find what he’s looking for. So we cluster together
all the forms of names associated with a particular person,
place, or thing.
Can you tell us about thesauri?
MB: Thesauri are another type of controlled vocabulary in
which there are hierarchical relationships. You could have a
controlled vocabulary that is just an alphabetical list: a list of
everybody who works in your company with their preferred
names and other relevant data. That’s a type of controlled
vocabulary. A thesaurus has a hierarchical structure. For
example, in the TGN, Europe is the continent, then Italy,
and underneath those terms are the different regions and
provinces of Italy. And it is also very powerful for searching:
using the AAT, a user could say, “Go get me all the desks” in
a particular collection and he would also retrieve a secrétaire
à abattant, even though he had never heard that expression
before.
39
What is controlled about controlled vocabularies?
MB: A controlled vocabulary designates a preferred form.
Again, this is a vestige of library language. For example, let’s
say I’m doing research on a particular 14th-century Italian
painter. I search for “Ugolino Lorenzetti” and I get back a
record for “Bartolommeo Bulgarini.” Here’s what is controlled,
especially in the library world: the Library of Congress would
say that if you’re a cataloguer and you’re cataloguing books
about this particular artist, you should use “Bulgarini,
Bartolommeo,” spelled exactly that way, and in inverted
order. So if you’re cataloguing a book about this artist, even
if the title of the book is The World of Ugolino Lorenzetti,
the preferred term in the Library of Congress Name Authority
File (LCNAF) is “Bulgarini, Bartolommeo.”
This is a vestige of how libraries are physically ordered.
I’ve got to go look under the B’s to find this artist. Now in the
online environment, all of the different names or spellings are
potential access points. So, if a museum prefers to call this
artist “Master of the Ovile Madonna,” we don’t care.
We don’t say, “Oh no, you must call him Bulgarini, Bartolommeo,” because the controlled vocabulary “knows” that
all those name forms refer to the same artist. I picked this one
because it’s a dramatic example. Over time, the works
by the same person have been assigned dramatically
different names. Let me explain—you see, Master of the
Ovile Madonna was a designation used for a particular
“hand” that had been associated with several paintings,
including the so-called Ovile Madonna. Then in the early
20th century, Bernard Berenson, who was a famous critic,
basically made up the name Ugolino Lorenzetti for this artist, because he was a follower of the Lorenzetti brothers. So
there’s a lot of literature about this artist calling him Ugolino
Lorenzetti. Then later, they actually discovered documents
that the artist’s real name was Bartolommeo Bulgarini. So,
what we do is we cluster together all these different forms;
we don’t suppress the “wrong” or old forms, and we don’t
force people to use our preferred form.
EC: Here’s another good example that demonstrates a
controlled vocabulary: let’s search in the ULAN on Tiziano
Vecellio, or “Titian.” See the first name? Normally an artist is
known by his vernacular name, and Titian’s vernacular name
was Tiziano Vecellio. But in all the literature, he is known
as “Titian.” So the very first one in the list is “Titian”—it’s
“preferred,” and it’s the display name and it’s English
preferred. But you will also get many weird spellings; they
come from archival documents. At the Getty, we allow an infinite number of variant names because we see them
as potential access points.
Do you include misspellings?
EC: Good question. We include published misspellings, such
as “Georgia O’Keefe” (there should be two f’s), but we don’t
include every possible misspelling that a user might use;
fuzzy searching algorithms can handle some of that.
How do you get other institutions to adhere to these
standards?
MB: That’s the hard part. In the library world, you have to use
MARC or you can’t live—you’re just not a library. Libraries
also have to use Library of Congress Subject Headings and
names. Not only are you not a library if you don’t use MARC
or LCSH, you also can’t contribute to the big bibliographic
utilities. So if I want to contribute to the RLIN bib file—that
is, the Research Library Information Network where you can
search all of the major research libraries in North America
at the same time—I’ve got to contribute my records in MARC
format. They just won’t take it any other way. These standards
didn’t exist before in the museum world. Now the task before
us is to develop big consortial entities of information and the
struggle arises due to the fact that data exists in every kind of
form you can imagine.
EC: It’s been an up-hill battle, but recently, especially because
we now have a real life example to show with
the Getty Museum, we can say this is why it pays to use
standards—because you show how the searching works on
our own website and on Google. Then people see the benefit
in using data standards and controlled vocabularies.
MB: Today the Getty vocabularies are used all over the
place—by museums and cultural heritage institutions.
People who are totally outside of the art world use the TGN
. Between them, the three vocabularies get about 150,000
searches per month on our website. TGN is always in the top
two or three web pages that are accessed at the Getty.
People can also license the data and then use it in their own
systems.
What do you do about coming up with terminology for
contemporary art?
MB: It’s not that big a deal. Not too long ago, I was asked by
a colleague to help develop a workshop around cataloguing contemporary art and we started having big arguments
about it. This person believed that that it was a whole different
ball game; that you need different metadata elements and
different vocabularies for contemporary art. I said I can’t
teach this workshop with you because I can’t go to a national
conference and say that you need different standards for
contemporary art. As I see it, it is simply not true. You’ve got
creator information and you’ve got title information whether
it’s a painting of the Adoration of the Magi or if it’s a guy
nailing himself to a wall in a gallery.
40
100,000 Bottles of Beer in the Wall
Paul Collins
I saw Tom Kelly’s house many years ago; I was with some
friends, spending spring break poking around Death Valley
for really no good reason at all. It was across the Nevada
border that we found Rhyolite, an old mining town that had
10,000 inhabitants at its height. But that was before the
silver ran out. Now Rhyolite is as empty as an old beer
bottle—or so we thought. When we approached the old
Kelly house, we were in for a surprise. STAY AWAY, read the
letters painted across the roof. A survivalist array of vehicles
was parked out front; we noticed, around our feet, a number
of rusted cans pitted with buckshot. Then we fled.
And that was too bad, because I really did want to see
inside that house. Its walls consisted of 51,000 bricks, of a
sort—bricks that once held Busch Beer, scavenged from the
town’s hard-drinking saloons while the house was being built
in 1905. It was a house built of beer bottles. Such houses
exist across the US, though demolition and earthquakes have
shattered a few of them. The house built by saloonkeeper
Tom Kelly is an intriguing example, because unlike most
builders, Kelly didn’t bother to wash out his
bottles first. Water was too precious in Rhyolite for such
niceties. Beer, on the other hand, was everywhere. Dipsomania is a boon for such builders: a similar honeycomb-like
structure of bottles and mortar, built by a pharmacist in
Hillsville, Virginia in the 1940s, was nicknamed The House
of a Thousand Headaches for all the hangovers it held.1 But
any container will do, really: in Post City, a turn-of-the-century
Texas town founded by an eccentric breakfast cereal tycoon,
one Edwardian home featured a fireplace built of blue
snuff bottles.2
These were scattered efforts, the stuff of local oddball
anecdotes. But there was once a serious attempt at massproducing houses from bottles: the WOBO (World Bottle).
Had it worked, untold thousands in developing countries
would wake up each morning under an unearthly glow:
sunlight filtered through dark green beer bottles.
• • •
In 1960, brewing magnate Alfred Heineken was visiting Curaçao, off the Venezuelan coast, when he noted with
dismay the acres of trash underfoot—a good part of it
produced by his own company. Heineken Breweries had an
efficient bottle-return system in Holland, where the average
bottle was used 30 times before being discarded. But without
modern distribution, bottles in Curaçao were used once and
thrown out. There was no lack of resulting trash: what the
island did lack, however, was affordable housing. Heineken
had a flash of brilliance: make beer bottles that you can
build houses out of.
Rather than the eccentric form of American bottle
houses—where the containers, mortared in parallel to
the floor, created walls bristling with open necks—Alfred
Heineken imagined less a beer bottle reused as a
41
brick than a glass brick that happened to hold beer.
Wash them out and slap on some cement: instant stainedglass shantytown. Heineken’s WOBO was, notes Martin
Pawley in his 1975 history Garbage Housing, “the first mass
production container ever designed from the outset for
secondary use as a building component.”
Back in Rotterdam, Heineken contracted architect John
Habraken to redesign bottles into a buildable container.
A beer bottle standing upright is, surprisingly, up to code,
bearing 50 kg per square centimeter. But bottles are not
easily vertically stacked. Laid on their side, though, they
crush too easily. Habraken’s solution was to develop
vertically stackable Chianti-like bottles with long necks and
recessed sides that nested into and supported each other.
It was a brilliant compromise, but Heineken’s marketing
department rejected it as “effeminate”—a curious description
considering that the bottle consisted of two bulbous
compartments surmounted by a long shaft. We can only
assume that Habraken did not anticipate why the men of
Curaçao might not want to hold this up to their lips.
So Habraken went horizontal. His next design was for a
thick rectangular bottle—much closer to Heineken’s original
notion of a brick that held beer. The bottom was dimpled in
a pattern identical to the bottle’s stubby neck, so that the top
of one bottle would interlock with the bottom of the next. The
sides had a nubbled surface, to make them both easier to
hold and to apply mortar onto. Still, there were some tradeoffs: the glass had to be thickened for the disadvantaged
horizontal orientation, and its blockier corners made
it more susceptible to chipping in shipment.
But it is, even today, a remarkably utilitarian-looking
bottle—a triumph of practical design. Habraken proposed
that shipping pallets made of plastic could be reused as
sheet roofing. Plans for a workable WOBO house were
drawn up; bottle construction would be so simple that
above: Large and small versions of Heineken’s WOBO (World Bottle), designed
by John Habraken.
instruction could be printed on the beer label. And this is
what truly sets WOBO apart in the annals of design: the
totality of the concept. You consumed the beer; you reused
the bottle and the shipping container; the instructions were
available on every bottle. It is a self-contained system of
latent architecture, a building in a bottle.
Heineken filed patents, insisting to colleagues that it
was going to be on the cover of Time magazine someday.
A test run of 100,000 WOBO bottles were produced, and
in 1965 a prototype glass house was built near Alfred
Heineken’s villa in Noordwijk, outside Amsterdam. Yet the
architectural success of the new design was irrelevant. The
company’s marketing department persisted in its rejections:
Heineken was, after all, a premium beer. How would it look
if poor people built houses out of the stuff?
The WOBO project soon fell to the wayside. Sixty
thousand unused bottles remained in a warehouse in
Rotterdam—enough for an entire house.
• • •
A press release on Heineken’s website trumpets their latest
packaging innovation: sleek aluminum bottles, developed
by Heineken Brasseries of France. It is a handsome, striking
design. “The objective was to attract young adult customers,”
we are told. “Brasseries Heineken guarantees its exclusiveness through limiting both its availability in outlets and the
number of bottles.” The release then matter-of-factly notes
that “the consumer price was high,” and that such designs
are “suitable for dimly-lit outlets such as clubs.”4 Well, that’s
where the money is.
It is, perhaps, asking too much to expect a beer company
to provide housing for the developing world. That Heineken
ever even contemplated it already sets them apart from
virtually every other manufacturer. Yet the WOBO concept
continues to haunt designers. Two decades later, in 1979, an
International Conference of Garbage Architects was held at
Florida A&M, attracting such notable participants as
architect Witold Rybzcynski. In 2002, the WOBO was cited
among the best 100 consumer product designs in the Phaidon
Press collection Spoon.5 But the most curious tribute to
WOBO came recently with the Eco/Ergo Bottle, developed
by Esther Ratner, Associate Professor of Industrial Design
at Arizona State University.6 Ratner re-imagined WOBO as
a vertically oriented container with an ergonomically curved
grip. Unlike WOBO, Ratner even found a use for the cap.
“If used as a building material, the bottle is designed to use
a small sphere the size of a marble as a spacer,” she explains
in an e-mail. “In the next iteration I am looking into a cap
design that incorporates a sphere that could be removed for
use as the spacer.”
Structural strength is the obvious appeal of Eco/Ergo’s
vertical design. But what also led Ratner away from the
brick-like form, she says, was simple aesthetics: WOBO was
simply too ugly. “I tried one design which was still the boxy
horizontal orientation,” she explains. “However, my design
had indents along the sides for better grip to accommodate
pipes and wiring to run through the bottle walls. But it was
still ugly.”7
• • •
Ugly or not, there has always been de facto reuse of even the
plainest containers. Stolen milk crates were so universally
beloved as student furnishings that manufacturers finally
woke up and started selling them new and sans the telltale
dairy stenciling. Emptied-out Maxwell House coffee cans
have an unassailable place as nail bins and turpentine jars
at American workbenches; innumerable Flintstones jelly
jars were reused as drinking glasses in the 1970s; and one
can hardly guess at how many Altoid peppermint tins have
become stash boxes. Reuse even occurs, in spite of their
marketing department, with Heineken’s standard containers.
In my closet is a lunchbox cleverly made of flattened Heineken
beer cans—a contrivance that a friend of my wife’s found in
Mali and Senegal.
Manufacturers tacitly understand this reuse: back in
the 1930s, American milling firms sold flour in colorfully
patterned sacks, because they knew that poor families would
reuse the sack cloth for clothing.8 But millers weren’t including sewing patterns with their sacks. The crucial
difference with WOBO was its stated intent: these bottles
were specifically designed for reuse, to the point of including
blueprints. One can see why a beverage giant’s legal
department would become nervous. What if a bottle house
collapsed? Would brewers get socked with lawsuits every
time an earthquake hit a poor city, or whenever a badly mortared bottle fell and hit a passerby?
Without indemnifying a brewer, it would be very hard for
it to answer these concerns. Were WOBO to be made now, it
might have to be without instructions, without
obvious sanction for reuse. It might need to appear, in other
words, like virtually every other object in consumer packaging.
Its secondary use would be surreptitious but slyly implied.
Considering the perversity of human nature, I think this could
be achieved with the following notice on its label:
NOT FOR USE AS A BUILDING MATERIAL.
1 There is an extensive site on Bottle Houses at <www.agilitynut.com/bh>.
2 Charles Dudley Eaves and C. A. Hutchinson, Post City, Texas: C.W. Post’s Colonizing
Activities in West Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1952), p. 54.
3 WOBO’s history is recounted in two books: pages 17-34 of Martin Pawley’s Garbage
Housing (London: Architectural Press, 1975), and on pages 97-98 of Nigel Whiteley’s
Design for Society (London: Reaktion Books, 1993).
4 “Rare and Exclusive: New Aluminum Bottle is Groundbreaking Packaging Innovation.”
Press release dated 13 June 2003, at <www.heinekeninternational.com/library/
articles.jsp>.
5 Spoon (New York: Phaidon Press, 2002), p. 418.
6 The Eco/Ergo bottle is described in “Building a Better Bottle,” at <www.3dgate.com/
opposite: The first and only WOBO house, built in 1965 near Alfred Heineken’s
42
techniques/001030/1030razdan.html>.
villa in Noordwijk, Holland. Later demolished. All images courtesy
7 E-mail interview with Esther Ratner, 12 October 2003.
Heineken International.
8 Forrest Wilson, “Building With the Byproducts of Society,” AIA Journal, July 1979, p. 41.
43
cutaneous:
An Interview with Steven Connor
Brian Dillon
The skin is our original image of the legible: of concealment
and betrayal. “Nor doth it onely draw the busy eyes,” writes
John Donne, “but it is subject to the divinest touch of all,
to kissing, the strange and mysticall union of soules.” The skin
asks to be read, demands to be touched and traversed, but
wards off touch and vision with its cultural armory of alluring
barriers: oils, unctions, and inscriptions. We live in our skins
as if, as we say, they might give us away.
In The Book of Skin, Steven Connor, Professor of
Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College, University
of London, offers a history of the cultural significance of the
body’s surfaces. Connor has described his work as a kind of
“cultural phenomenology”: he is interested in “substances,
habits, organs, rituals, obsessions, pathologies, processes
and patterns of feeling.” He has previously written on the
history of ventriloquism, and his next book, he says, will be
“a book of air.” Brian Dillon spoke to him in London.
Your book proposes three stages in the cultural history of
skin: screen, membrane, milieu. Can you describe those?
The problem with stages is that there are always three of
them. I quote Michel Serres’s model of history as a spreadout handkerchief which you then crumple up in your pocket.
I wanted to spread out the skin and then to twist it up, to do
a sort of historical origami, because it seemed to me that the
skin is not a universal but is a universal background or horizon
for human experience. This gets conceptualized differently at
different moments, but there’s never a moment at which the
skin is not implicated in a whole lot of other things: modes of
thought, ways of feeling thought, the way in which thought
becomes affective, becomes lived through the body, and
through the imaginary body too.
And the first of those moments has to do with the skin as a
frontier or barrier.
The skin as screen: where its primary function is to register
other things, primarily the state of health or what up until the
17th century was called your complexion, which originally
meant the folding together of lots of different elements or
tendencies in your constitution. It’s interesting that our word
constitution has taken over from complexion: something
which is constituted, something which stands, and is as it
were in place, rather than something which is folded together
out of multiple elements. But the skin stood for that, as if this
was written on the skin without the skin being visible, so that
the skin is everywhere spoken of, but somehow not ever itself
in the frame.
When does skin start to be thought of in its own terms?
44
The second stage is a period when, in medical history, the
body begins to be understood by being disarticulated, by
being broken down into different autonomously functioning
systems and organs: the period, broadly, of the Enlightenment.
The skin is thought of very much in terms of a kind of switch
or regulator between inside and outside (a very dominant
conception of the skin even now). Its primary role is as a kind
of gate or barrier which maintains—hydraulically, mechanically—the stable relations between inside and outside.
But that stable significance of the skin begins to dissolve later.
In the third stage, which we are still inhabiting and which is
still unfolding, the skin explodes once again into a multiplicity
of functions, but without now becoming invisible. The skin
becomes a topic of concern; it becomes self-reflexive. And
that is the skin as milieu—a term I draw from Michel Serres—
or as a mid-place: the skin not so much as a thin membrane,
but as a whole habitat, as deep or voluminous. So it’s by
means of the notion of milieu that I then, rather perversely,
having established this seemingly neat frame, attempt to
read all the other historical instances. The book sort of starts
again at that point and says: what if the handkerchief weren’t
in fact spread out flat but were crumpled together, what
would that be like?
So you couldn’t say, for example, that there’s a single
moment at which the idea of the thickness of the skin
appears?
There might be two moments. The first moment would be
the work of Vesalius, who was the first anatomist to include
an account of the skin, in 1543. Everyone talks about the skin,
but as the stuff you’ve got to get out of the way. The
traditional way of describing anatomy—deriving from
Galen—is to start in the middle and move outwards, but you
get to the middle by going through all of those layers, and in
those anatomies you never get back to the skin. The skin has
already been discarded and is flapping loosely around the
ankles of the écorché.
What does Vesalius add to that picture?
Vesalius for the first time says that what we mean by skin is
something deep. It has layers, and, indeed, in different parts
of the body its depth varies and it’s hard to be sure where the
skin stops and the rest starts. He doesn’t have much to say
about the skin, but he does have something, and I think that
inaugurates a new possibility.
And the second moment?
A second moment would be microscopy, because with
microscopy—which is developed very early on, in the late
16th century about 100 years before anyone could find
anything interesting to do with a microscope—the
thing that people looked at, almost always, was skin,
45
the surface of things. And those surfaces turned out to be
a mountainous terrain, to be, precisely, environments:
epidemiological, parasitological environments. The skin
turned out to be a whole functioning system on its own;
one began to understand that the skin was a sort of ecology.
This is in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Is there a sense in which photography later gives that notion
another twist, encouraging a further intimacy between the
ways we think about touching and seeing the skin?
I have a very strong apprehension that photography is much
more fundamentally an art of touch, or the idea of touch, than
we’ve gotten used to recognizing. I think it was very clear
in the beginning, when photographers were people who
processed their own photographs, when there was, as we
put it, hands-on experience of the photograph. But it’s still
the case that there’s a very privileged relationship between
photography and touch. If that weren’t the case, why would
the texture of photographs be so important? Shine and gloss:
in one sense locking the photograph up, inviolably, like a
protective skin or membrane; on the other hand, rendering it
vulnerable, as a skin does. We look at a photograph and want
to touch, and know that we mustn’t touch; so there’s a kind
of preciousness that comes from the glossy photograph, and
by reference to that, other kinds of textures that are always
implicated in the photograph.
This is actually a very ancient way of thinking about vision.
Here is an example of one of those foldings of ancient and
modern, which returns us to that Epicurean conception of
vision as tactile. More specifically: the theory that vision is
a literal casting off of simulacra or idola or effigies from the
object: skins of atoms, sometimes called fleeces of atoms,
which are shed from everything at enormous speed—what
we would now call the speed of light—and either enter the
eyes directly (fall upon the eyes like a sort of dust or hail
of vision) or are met halfway—this is Plato’s conception—
by an eye-beam which, as it were, gathers them. It’s a bizarre
theory—one that Newton still believed, and he knew a thing or
two about optics—and I think it’s a theory that photography
allows us not to abandon.
Is this bound up with the idea of the skin’s shininess, which
seems to denote both imperviousness and sensitivity?
This is immensely complex. Shininess means inviolability. But
shine also suggests sensitivity. That which shines is like those
parts of us which are not as protected as the skin. The surface
of the eye is the most lustrous part of the visible body. Why is
it lustrous? Well, partly because it’s moist; it’s part of the cerebral apparatus, so it’s the inside that’s visible on the outside.
It is, unlike other mucous parts of the body, secret—revealed
but secret—and of course immensely sensitive. The sensitivity
about touching such things is like the sensitivity about being
touched. Something which is moist is living.
Yet we tend to talk about that luster in terms of the skin’s
“radiance,” as if the light came from within, rather than being
reflected by a wet or greasy surface.
The sense that life consists in the spilling of light: that’s the
evidence of life, as it were. The sense that there is an imaginary
light that is shining through the skin is at work in many
different examples of luster, whether it’s the oiling of weightlifters or in cosmetics. I became, to my surprise, very interested
in cosmetics and in the displaced ritual practices of contemporary life for a chapter that’s about the application of the
second skin of greases, oils, fats, and creams in religion.
The vocabulary of cosmetics advertising sets up a lot of
ambiguous pairings: between penetration and absorption,
protection and nourishment. The main distinction seems to
be between oiliness and creaminess.
I think this is quite local: that is to say, a Western phenomenon,
or more accurately a Northern phenomenon, in terms of
culture. It’s a Protestant phenomenon. Now, the creaminess
of milk comes from the oil in it; milk is creamy because it’s
greasy, but we’ve learned to make a separation between
those things, so that although you are sold oils, it’s always
suggested that those are oils from plants. Aromatherapy
insists that the things you’re applying to yourself are “essential
oils.” But there’s no real chemical definition of what an oil
is; it’s an entirely cultural, phenomenological category.
Previously—I mean up to 1552—oils, whatever their source,
and perhaps especially oils which had animal sources, were
regarded as luxurious, purifying, precious.
What happens in 1552?
It marks the date of the revised version of the Anglican prayer
book that does away with holy oil and the rituals of unction.
That seems a convenient way of specifying this inauguration
of a disgust with the oily, which of course
continues to coexist with our sense that oil is luxurious, that
it’s like an imaginary, infinitely extensible, magic skin that will
protect us, that will enlarge us. And we still think this when
we apply suntan oil. None of us think of ourselves as sausages
sizzling in a pan; we think it’s a kind of shield against the sun.
Still, we’re disgusted by oil, because it seems to belong to
an economy of concealment, subterfuge, deception, and it’s
become an image of animalistic or brutal
intentions or appetites, concealed under a show of civilization.
We’ve found a way of hanging onto the balminess of oil,
while rejecting its unctuousness.
We prefer instead the idea of cream, which is also, like oil,
something which is extruded through the skin—the nipple is
part of the skin—and this was not lost on 17th-century theological writers, who would talk about the sweat of Christ as
a kind of unction. But the disgust grows with that, so
46
we have to distinguish the holy oil of cream, which
in English matches the French crème, which is the name for
chrism or holy oil. So in French it doesn’t quite work; oil is
cream, and the very name of Christ contains a reference to
chrism: Christos/chrism. Christ is oil.
Can you say something about the phenomena of itching and
scratching?
The idea of itching and scratching seems a very simple idea,
one that lies, subliminally, below the threshold of critical
attention. It’s a little thing, it’s a microscopic disturbance.
I wondered what a history written in terms of this tiny titillation and its meaning might look like. And as it turns out
there was a convenient little detective story about how a
particular kind of itch—scabies, caused by the attentions of
a particular parasite—came to attention, was discovered,
forgotten, discovered, forgotten again, discovered again.
And how that might connect up, surprisingly, with very big
issues about the nature of human community, the kinds of
collective creatures we are.
One of the odd experiences one has with an itch is that you
can get rid of it by scratching somewhere else, an adjacent
spot. It seems to suggest a metaphorical drift or creep.
The thing about investigating itches is that you somehow
never see itch itself. If you follow the fortunes of the word or
metaphor of itch, it takes you everywhere, away from that
physical sensation. It takes you into ideas of premonition—
“by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way
comes”—or it takes you into sexual desire, or to the desire for
writing. One could say that the primary action of scratching
at the page—which Derrida, for example, has analyzed in his
book Spurs—says something about the way we consider
the relation between matter and consciousness. The fact
that so many of our recording techniques involve the incising of traces, how all of that seems in a curious way to be a
part of this universe of transformations of the idea of itching
and scratching, which at root is of the skin but is not just of
the skin because it’s always skipping off somewhere else in
metaphorical transfer.
The notion of the stigmata, in particular, is at once gruesomely
literal and extravagantly metaphorical.
The thing that struck me about the stigmata was the way in
which it reduced the body to a kind of shorthand: the cardinal
points of the body, as though the body were being conceived
of as a kind of jointed puppet. As a matter of fact, Giotto’s
painting of St. Francis receiving the stigmata is precisely
that: St. Francis is like a puppet with strings coming from the
points of the stigmata to the originating figure of the crucified
Christ up in the sky, as it were in some kind of kite (this is how
Deleuze describes him). More than the brute reality of the
stigmata, I was struck by this notion of the body reduced to
opposite: Dried head from a medical cabinet, Paris, 1847.
47
cardinal points, and the idea of the body as foldable or refoldable, as a repertoire of possibilities.
What happens when this schematized body is no longer tethered to Christian iconography?
It was very striking to read of the interest in religious stigmata of Charcot and the analysts of so-called hysteria at the
Salpetrière in Paris, who also were interested in demarcated
zones of the body, and in some of the phenomena of transmigration of senses and sensibilities. It’s as though there is a
fantasy that the body, conceived of as a folded skin, could be,
through the idea of the stigmata, folded in some other way,
or folded to another template. This suggested to me bizarre
analogies with other kinds of bodily markings, such as moles
and freckles and other kinds of seemingly spontaneous,
endogenous appearances on the surface of the body. This
was the body obeying or displaying some other logic of organization, some sacred syntax.
You suggest that moles are a randomized version of the
stigmata, or the stigmata are a systematized version of the
more cryptic implications of moles. Why are moles so
important historically?
I think it has to do, if one wants a quick answer to it, with
an analogy between skin and sky, the skin as a source for
epidermal astrology. You can find it enlarged on in literature;
Romeo and Juliet is full of sky and skin analogies. I think
we’ve lost the sense of mole lore nowadays, but we certainly
haven’t lost the sense of the ominousness or portentousness
of moles. I think that notion went to sleep for a few decades
or centuries, but it didn’t take much to wake it up with skin
cancer: the idea that there is something in store with a spot
or a mark. There’s a wonderful joke about a man who goes
to the doctor with a frog growing out of his head, and the
doctor says to him: “Well, how did all this begin?” And the
frog answers: “Well, it all started with this pimple on my ass.”
It’s commonplace to think of the skin as an expression of
our selves, but you talk about the psychoanalyst Didier
Anzieu, who argues that the self is actually structured by
the experience of being in our skins.
He summed up the principle of his work very succinctly
by saying: for Lacan the unconscious is structured like a
language; for me the unconscious is structured like a body,
and in particular like the outside of a body. In the first edition
of his book The Skin Ego, there are said to be nine functions
of the skin. The interesting thing about these nine functions is
that they don’t all cohere, they don’t form a coherent
topology, and that was the thing that created explosions of
possibility in my mind. The unfortunate thing about Anzieu—
not unfortunate for his patients, but perhaps for some of his
readers—is that he was a clinical therapist and his interest
was in suffering and how to remedy it. It turns out
that in practice there are only two functions of the
48
skin, or two states: the good, entire skin, the skin in which you
can be happy, or the disturbed, damaged, incomplete state of
the skin, in which the world is leaking in and you are leaking
out.
And this model is too crudely dichotomous, as well as,
actually, rather bleak?
I think the analyst of culture, the historian of culture, even—
though I wouldn’t necessarily call myself this—the poet of
culture, has to be interested in states other than those
of damage or pathology. And it’s a great mistake to think of
healthiness as simple wholeness. The word healthy comes
from the word whole, as does the word heal. But, actually,
to be healthy is not to be whole; it is to be multiple, it is to
be able to be multiple. To be unhealthy is to be whole, to be
entire, locked or sealed in your suffering, your wound, or in
your means of dealing with your wound.
So there’s a kind of optimism in your thinking about the skin.
I realized at quite a late stage that being an adolescent and
having a moderate to severe case of acne made me feel
divided from myself and taught me a kind of resignation.
I remember a moment when I thought: “I must let my skin
have its way,” and it could do its thing but I had a life to lead.
We’re friends again now, but we’re still wary of each other.
There’s a levity as well as a gravity in thinking about the skin
and its possibilities.
The Figurative Incarnation of
the Sentence
(Notes on the “Auto­graphic” Skin)
Georges Didi-Huberman
49
In 1862, when Jean-Martin Charcot assumed the position as
head of the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris, he described its 5,000
inmates as offering “a kind of living museum of pathology,”
one especially rich in neurological and mental disorders,
areas already within his field of specialization. At this time,
Charcot was becoming acquainted with photography to
document symptomatology and, thereby, to classify certain
disorders by means of their visual appearance. This predilection toward the visual example is already apparent in his
reference to the clinic as a museum. Therefore, when he
noted a pattern of mock epileptic seizures among a group of
convulsives assigned to the hospital, he named the symptom
grande hystérie, began to document it photographically and,
by the late 1880s, had appointed Albert Londe as resident
photographer. The creation of this post was the first of its
kind, and indicates Charcot’s fascination with noting and
fixing the image of a human disorder.
In formulating the concept of grande hystérie, Charcot
noted its three stages—lethargy, catalepsy, and finally
somnambulism—and associated them with specific physical attitudes and gestures. His linking of illness and image
became so firmly entrenched that many patients caught the
suggestion and began to perform according to his expectations. As a reward, they were frequently photographed,
elevated to a kind of star status, and thereby participated in
an extraordinary way within the relationships of power in the
closed world of the clinic.
For several months during 1885 and 1886, Sigmund
Freud attended these demonstrations. The sojourn was to
be important in his eventual clarification of the nature of
hysteria, the uses of hypnosis, and in the development of his
own clinical method. While noting Charcot’s many attributes,
Freud ultimately characterized him as a visuel, not a “thinker”
but an “artist.” Indeed, the artistic is prominent within
Charcot’s work. He and an associate, Paul Richer, published
Les démoniaques dans l’art (1887) and other work
illustrating the correspondence between Charcot’s “iconography” and representations of similar disorders throughout
the history of the fine arts. In addition, Richer had also begun
to make drawings, then etchings, which further distilled the
photographic images into composite exempla of symptomatology. The two men also founded what was to become a
monumental serial publication combining photographs and
textual diagnoses, the Iconographie photographique de
la Salpêtrière (1876-1880) and the Nouvelle Iconographie
(1888-1918), which continued after Charcot’s death in 1893.
Together, these publications are an important
document in the history of 19th-century photography and
medicine.
Charcot’s work at the Salpêtrière is replete with significance concerning the pitfalls of classification, the power
exerted by clinical method, and the allure of a certain kind
of imagery as an index to truth. It is worth noting that Freud,
in one of his many departures from Charcot, abstained from
using photographs of patients to illustrate his work, thereby
acknowledging the unreliability of physical appearance to
describe emotional and psychic reality.
The following text is an abbreviation of a longer essay by
Georges Didi-Huberman which treats a particularly meaningful event in the history of Charcot and the Salpêtrière—the
fascination with the phenomenon of dermographism, writings
upon the human skin. It is an instance that illustrates much
about the complex iconography of Charcot and the relationship between images and the exertion of power. What is
more, since most of the patients subjected to these experiments were women, all under the control of male clinicians,
the question of sexual gender is placed squarely in the center
of the drama.
The skin, between verre and ver
The notion of skin exists as a lacuna in speculation relating
to the nature of surfaces.1 Is it “tegument,” that which merely
covers, or is it “dermis,” that which is uncovered and sensitive?
Descartes, although he conceived of the body as res extensa
(a unitary concept of expanse that accounts for both external and internal space), was himself obliged to equivocate
regarding what he calls “the surface areas.” On one hand,
there is the skin as glove, a skin which separates. This is a
surface without sensation, which covers the sensible nerves
below. Here, the skin is an intervening surface between
internal and external. In the same way, the membrane which
covers the eye allows for the passage of light to the optical
apparatus, leaving it completely undisturbed.2 However,
there is also in Descartes the notion of “dermis,” the skin of
non-separation. The human placenta is, for instance, such a
generative and integral covering, a kind of origin of the skin
itself.3 In a similar fashion, Descartes speculates about the
veins lying under the human skin, imparting color to the
surface, but separated from it by the infinitely subtle
“First Element.”4
The skin is then a complex structure, reticular, defying
geometric thinking, separating and non-separated, intervening yet indistinct. It is not without reason that Descartes
opposes the eye and the skin, in spite of Aristotle’s classification of touch as the primary human sense.5 The skin complicates clear and distinct visualization because of its curious
dynamics, phenomena described by the psychiatrist Paul
Schilder in the following passage:
Another astonishing fact is that when subjects compare
what they feel and perceive tactually on their body with the
optic imagination or the optic perceptions of the body, they
find that there is a discrepancy. The skin that is felt is distinctly
below the surface of the optic perception of the body. It is of
great interest to study the changes which occur in the feel‑
ing of our skin and of the tactile surface of our body, when an
object is touching the skin or when we touch an object with
our hands or with another surface of the body. At this very
moment, the surface becomes smooth, clear, and
distinct. The tactile and the optic outlines are now
50
identical with each other. It is a remarkable psychological fact
that though we distinctly feel the object and distinctly feel our
own body and its surface, yet they do not touch each other
completely. They are not fused together. There is a distinct
space between. In other words, object and body are psycho‑
logically separated by a space in between.
It is an interesting experiment to diminish the pressure
of the fingers against the object. We feel the object less and
less and the fingers more and more. When the fingers are
finally only just touching the object, the object is scarcely
perceived any longer, but we have a distinct feeling in the tips
of our fingers. We can now observe a paradoxical sensation.
It is as if the skin were protruding over the surface and forming
a slight cone, which almost reaches for the object.6
We might consider more seriously this discrete magic of skin
which swells up and “reaches for the object” at the moment
of contact. The phenomenon is one of “touching-withouttouching,” an instance in which contact exists simultaneously
with estrangement. Consider this chiasmus of the surface,
how it swells between vision and touch, like something blind
which gropes for sight and expression.
I will base my remarks on an “observation,” as it is called,
in Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière (1904) in which
the curious life of the skin is revealed with unusual coherence
and richness. We have the story of a 27-year-old woman,
Eugénie, diagnosed by her doctors as “catatonic dementia
praecox.“ In fact, it is perhaps just as accurate to say that
she suffers from a fate like that of Narcissus, the fall into the
abyss of “seeing-dying,” a term no more fictive than the clinical
description. The doctor notes her visual hallucinations,
especially one in which she imagines a worm which surfaces
and mounts her body whenever she eats. The trope of depth
and surface reappears in her convulsive fear of drowning,
elicited even when she hears the sound of liquid being
poured into a glass. At other times, she surrenders to the
trope by attempting to drown herself in a nearby river.
Between the worm of the depths and the reflective
surface of the water lies the corporeal presence of the
patient. Bound up with these images is the substance of
glass: Eugénie compulsively throws her hands through the
panes of the windows at the clinic, breaking their clear,
reflective surface and tearing her skin. The ver (worm)
surfaces into the visible by means of the verre (glass) which
cuts the surface of the flesh. Apart from these outbursts—
dramas enacted upon the skin—Eugénie lives in a state
which is nearly catatonic.
This frantic flight away from the ver to the verre becomes
a pun on word and image written upon the skin, the laceration of which is both the patient’s fear and desire. The trope
of the pierced surface is elaborated by the scratching of her
flesh with her fingernails and, in calmer moods, by her favorite pastime, sewing. These acts of textual inscription are in
fact more complex and eloquent than her intermittent vocal
tirades. Her text is meant to be seen rather than to be heard.
opposite: The word Urticaria (an alternative for dermographia) written on
patient’s arm, 1887. Photo George Fox.
What is more, it is always in the process of being
violently rewritten. The “text” lies below, like the worm
beneath the surface, ready to spring up—an action which
both delineates and does violence. When Eugénie is asked
why she mutilates herself, she replies, “Because my blood is
not circulating. The blood has accumulated in my hands, like
an abscess, which must be lanced.” Blood becomes a secret
ink, secreted from underneath toward the surface. The
doctors, taking their cue, note that “during the four or five
days preceding her menstrual period, the patient is more
agitated, negative, and more insolent than usual.” Blood
and insolence become the signs that a text is about to be
produced.
There is a final effect which Eugénie employs to raise
herself to iconographic status, definition, and celebrity.
This is her complicity with the doctors, her ability to provide
dermographic pictures which the clinicians lightly sketch
upon her skin, then photograph, display, and study. The
skin-image and the photographic image are deeply related.
The skin between blood and meaning
The dermographic symptom was first noted in 1879 and was
described as the “autographic” capacity of the skin, a phenomenon both figurative and scriptural.8 That is to say, the
markings can appear unassisted, or can be lightly imprinted
by another.9 These markings then swell into clear delineation. What is more, in these descriptions, a complex notion of
desire is associated with the phenomenon, one which links
the redness of the skin, the rising of blood, and the connotations of a sexual rising of color and tissue.10 Throughout the
last quarter of the 19th century, clinicians frequently studied
dermographism and emphasized the
conjunction of the tactile and the optical in the production of
a visible sign, or text. At the same time, the clinical attention
never seriously departed from repeatedly invoking the
symptom in order to ratify a judgment about the patient and,
thereby, to inscribe upon the body its own “sentence.” For
example, the phrase “démence précoce” was written on
Eugénie’s neck by one of her doctors.11 The dermographic
skin becomes an intervening surface between the desire of
the patient and the desire of the doctors who control and
render her “readable.”
As early as 1846, dermographism was associated with
patients suffering from delusions, problems of vision, and
from a sensitivity to hypnosis, a predilection toward which
was linked with hysteria as it was formulated before Freud’s
redefinition.12 In 1893, Barthélémy noted the conjunction
of the menstrual period, dizziness, and a propensity for
inexplicable irritations of the skin, all prerequisite to the
dermographic manifestation.13 He noted a pattern in which
the patient suffers a crisis of vision, “falls” into vertigo, and
produces a text which “surfaces” into the visible.
This involuntary sequence of events has a corollary
in the extreme suggestibility of dermographic patients.
Barthélémy describes an instance in which a mother sees her
child nearly beheaded by a falling chimney damper.
52
Taken with fright, a welt rises around her own neck.14
The body is paralyzed, unable to react. Instead, it writes and
records a stigma received from the Other. In this instance,
the subject is dominated over, just as Eugénie is “inscribed”
by the doctors. Barthélémy’s descriptions always note some
element of violence within the clinical method:
“If the patient is told that the marking instrument is a hot
iron rod, a red stripe appears on the skin, then a blister. The
scab can take up to three weeks to heal.”15
The skin, between sense and sentence
In the dermographic experiments carried out at the end of
the 19th century, the clinicians’ intention is to transform the
patient’s body into an icon, a surface to be rendered iconographic and, at the same time, to represent a complex
amalgam of connotations. Frequently, doctors inscribed their
own names on the subject’s skin, thereby appropriating the
body as a “work.”16 The dermographic symptom becomes a
vehicle for medical authority to exert its power,
a fact noted by Baudelaire when he labeled the experimental
method “the ethic of the plaything.”17 The early formulation
of hysteria also bears resemblance to an act of prostitution,
wherein the female patient acquiesces to the domination of
the male clinician, each participant receiving a kind of “favor”
from an act upon the feminine flesh. The dermo-graphic text
given and received creates a heterograph wherein possession
and stigma operate with a wide range of meaning.
The concept of the stigmata figured in the understanding
of dermographism during this period. It was, however, always
associated with diabolical possession and religious ecstasy,
issues also bound up with the associations adhering to
hysteria. From this point of view, dermographism belongs
historically to that which Barthélémy calls “sacred dermatology,” or “diabolical dermatology,” wherein “the demon left
the image of his hand upon the body of the possessed girl.”18
In fact, clinical descriptions of dermographic experimentation
describe the infliction of the doctor’s hand upon the skin of
the patient, eliciting the image of the palm upon the flesh and
inscribing the subject within the context of illness, abnormality, and, even, demonic possession.19
Throughout Barthélémy’s work, the word “Satan” served
as an experimental signifier; it was inscribed on the side of
a woman “from the upper classes” as well as upon the back
of a woman from a lower economic sphere.20 Each patient
exhibited entirely different traits of personality and temperament, but both were included within the category of hysteria
and possession because of their dermographic capacity.
The inscription written by the demon is, in fact, the text
written by the hand of clinical experimentation, one disposed
to its own mode of violence: “If one lightly touches the patient,
the dermographism does not always manifest itself. If,
however, one gives a quick slap or flick to the skin, one soon
sees the entire finger or hand take shape as a swelling.“21
The early experimentation with hypnosis is intimately
related to the dermographic phenomenon and to the
creation of a clinical fact shaped by a fiction and by a drama
of power and control. Barthélémy relates a pertinent case
history: a patient is hypnotized; the doctor writes his own
name on the patient’s forearms with a rubber stylet and
issues the following suggestion: “This evening, at 4 p.m.,
after falling asleep, you will bleed from the lines that I have
drawn on your arms.” At the appointed time, the patient
obliges. The characters appear in bright relief upon his skin,
and droplets of blood rise in several spots. The words persist
for more than three months.22
Thou shalt bleed where I write, thou shalt bleed on the
very letters of your name. The word “sentence” is pregnant
with meaning. It is not surprising that, even before the first
publication of the data in 1879, doctors at the Salpêtrière
clinic had practiced dermographic experiments on their
favored hysterics, notably on Augustine, in 1877, and on a
patient identified only as “W,” on whose abdomen the doctors
wrote the name of the clinic.23
The most radical instance of the “autographic sentence”
is probably that inflicted upon Célina, Charcot’s “accursed”
hysteric. It is she who breaks what might be called the iconographic contract. Physically unattractive, she is forever
agitated and uncontrollably lewd. She thwarts any attempt
to heroize her illness and presents herself as a “hater of
images.” The doctors retaliate: “With a pin, letters are written
on the upper part of her chest.” Her body is compared to a
wax manikin and treated like a kind of magic writing tablet,
despite her furious attempts not to cooperate, not to “represent.” Her agitation and resistance are unabated. She is
cauterized on the cervix four times with a hot iron. During the
operation, her face becomes covered with “red erythemic
blotches,” a variant of the dermographic phenomenon. Her
body is assaulted by subcutaneous injections, inhalations,
showers, metalloscopies, leeches, ovarian compressions.
She dies in 1879, without the cause of death noted in her
dossier. In that year, Dujardin-Beaumetz establishes a clinical
proof of dermographism with his concept of the femme-cli‑
ché, the “photographic woman.” Regardless of her
resistance, “W” is transformed into an example, a medical
icon. Dermagraphism produces here a kind of thanatography, 24 a sentence which controls the destiny of the
patient and which incarnates the corporeal to corpse.
1 For discussion of the genesis of the concept of the “autographic” skin, see Georges
”Our sentence does not sound severe. Whatever com‑
mandment the prisoner has disobeyed is written upon his body
by the Harrow.” ... “Does he know his sentence?” “No. ... There
would be no point in telling him. He’ll learn it on his body.” ...
”But surely he knows that he has been sentenced?” “Nor that
either.” ...”No,” said the explorer, wiping his forehead, “then he
can’t know either whether his defense was effective?” “He has
had no chance of putting up a defense,” said the officer. 25
22 T. Barthélémy, op. cit., pp. 83-84.
Didi-Huberman, “Une notion du corps-cliché aux XIXème siècle,” Parachute no. 35 (JuneAugust 1984), pp. 8-14.
2 René Descartes, Treatise of Man (1664), tr. Thomas Steele Hall (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1972), p. 153.
3 René Descartes, La description du corps humain (1648), Oeuvres, vol. XI, ed. Adam
and Tannery (Paris: Cerf, 1909), pp. 283-284.
4 Ibid., pp. 254-255.
5 Aristotle, De Anima, III, 13, 435b, 2-20.
6 Paul Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body (New York: International
Universities Press, 1950), pp. 85-86.
7 L. Trepsat, “Un cas de démence précoce catatonique avec pseudo-oedème compliqué
de purpura,” Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière, vol. XVII (1904), pp. 193-199.
8 Cf. G. Dujardin-Beaumetz, “Note sur des troubles vaso-moteurs de la peau observés sur
une hystérique (femme autographique),” L’Union médicale, no. 144
(9 December 1879), pp. 917-922. This text is reprinted in Parachute, no. 35 (JuneAugust 1984), pp. 8-14.
9 Dujardin-Beaumetz, op. cit., p. 919.
10 Cf. F. Allard and H. Meige, “Effets produits par les différents modes d’excitation de
la peau dans un cas de grand dermagraphisme,” Archives générales de médecine, 8th
series, vol. X (1898), vol. II, pp. 40-42. See also T. Barthélémy, Etude sur le dermagraphisme ou dermoneurose toxivasomotrice (Paris: Société d’Editions Scientifiques,
1893), pp. 24-26.
11 L. Trepsat, op. cit., p. 197.
12 E. Mesnet, “Autographisme et stigmates” in Bulletin de l’Académie de médecine,
vol. XXIII (1890), meeting of 25 March, pp. 367-368. Cf. C. Binet-Sanglé and L. Vannier,
“Noevus veineux et hystérie” in Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière, vol. XIV (1901),
pp. 214-237.
13 T. Barthélémy, , op. cit., pp. 163, 22, 126.
14 Ibid., p. 82.
15 Ibid., p. 97.
16 Cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, op. cit.
17 Charles Baudelaire, “Morale du joujou” (1853), Oeuvres Completes, vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), p. 587.
18 E. Mesnet, pp. 362, 370, 380, op. cit. Cf. J.M. Charcot and P. Richer, Les démoniaques dans l’art (Paris: Delahaye et Lecrosnier, 1887), reprinted by Macula, Paris, 1984.
19 Cf. C. Richer, L’homme et l’intelligence. Fragments de physiologie et de psychologie
(Paris: Alcan, 1884), p. 553. See also T. Barthélémy, op. cit., pp. 86-120.
20 T. Barthélémy, op. cit., p. 130.
21 Allard and Meige, op. cit., p. 43.
23 Cf. D. M. Bourneville and P. Régnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière
(Paris: Aux Bureaux du Progres médical, Delahaye et Lecrosnier, 1876/1880), vol. II
(1878), pp. 128-141; vol. III (1880), pp. 19, 111-113.
24 Ibid., vol. 1 (1876/1877), pp. 119-120, 129-130, 150-151; vol. III (1880), pp.
93-96. Cf. Georges. Didi-Huberman, “Le cynisme iconographique,” Études françaises,
special issue, “Écrire l’image,” 1984.
25 Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” in Kafka: The Complete Stories (New York: Shocken
Books, 1971), pp. 144-145.
The essay by Georges Didi-Huberman, “L’incarnation figurale de la sentence (note sur
la peau ‘autographique’),” appeared in Scalène no. 2 (October 1984), pp. 143-169. An
abbreviated version of the text based on a translation by Caryn Davidson and accompanied
by an introduction was printed in the Journal of the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary
Art in its Spring 1987 issue. Cabinet thanks Geoffrey Batchen and Meg Cranston for their
help in preparing this article for reprinting.
53
HERMIT HOUSING PROJECT
EARTH AND ENVIRONS
DRAWn BY
CHECKED BY
nOTE
The Hand Up Project:
Attempting to Meet the New Needs
of Natural Life-forms
ASSEMBLY #
DRAWInG #
010-0032
DATE
i-CRAB.DWG
10/13/95
REV
A
biologists have been able to identify the exact features that
crabs find most desirable when they are assessing and
selecting dwellings.
Elizabeth Demaray
Shelter: A Crab’s Perspective
Right now, 30 percent of all hermit crabs on our shorelines
are living in shells that are too small for them. In the springtime, when the animal has its growth spurt, this shortage
skyrockets to 60 percent. Hermit crabs, whose own bodies
provide only thin exoskeletons, must scavenge and appropriate
hard-walled shells abandoned by marine gastropods for
shelter. The problem is that there currently are not enough
shells left on our beaches for hermit crabs to use. This
situation is not only uncomfortable but dire. Marine hermit
crabs depend upon properly fitting shells for protection from
predators (Hazlett, 1981), mating success (Hazlett, 1989) and
reproduction (Childress, 1972). The present lack of housing is
so severe that biologists now routinely find land hermit crabs
attempting to shelter themselves in glass jars and whatever
other ill-fitting forms of refuse they may find at their immediate disposal.
The reason for this housing shortage is generally
assumed to be pollution and the collection of seashells by
humans. However, because scientists have a difficult time
asserting causal relationships in uncontrolled (that is,
natural) models, we are unable to state specifically all the
causes of this lack. On the other hand, due to the fact that
hermit crabs exhibit choosing behavior in relation to selecting
shelters, this population has been studied extensively.
54
In controlled situations that offer ample housing,
The shells that hermit crabs seek are made by marine gastropods that secrete calcium carbonate from their mantel—
the organ that covers their soft bodies. The shell is built up in
deposits until the calcium carbonate becomes a crystalline
structure held together via thin membranes of organic material. Depending upon the crystalline structure and the type
of animal making it, the shell differentiates into numerous
forms. The univalve-type shells that hermit crabs prefer to
adopt are spiral in shape. The marine gastropods that make
these shells form them in layered bands. These bands build
a cavity that spirals from the shell’s small center to successively larger areas of internal volume at the periphery.
This formation affords the growing gastropod within the hard
shell an ever-increasing area in which to expand.
Hermit crabs are scavengers and often locate these
borrowed dwellings by smell, when the original gastropod
inhabitant dies and begins to decay. Once a hermit crab
adopts a shell, it will keep it until the shell is outgrown, carrying
it continuously as a shield, wherever it goes. This is no easy
feat, considering that a properly fitting shell must be larger
than the hermit crab that wears it, and will often significantly
outweigh the crab itself. In order to carry its home, one of the
above: Synthetic hermit crab shells on the drawing board.
opposite: Shell prototypes.
crab’s front claws is completely dedicated to clutching the
shell. This claw bends backward and holds on to the spool
of calcium carbonate at the shell’s center. In order to move,
the animal must first use this claw to lift the shell and heave it
onto its back. In spite of such difficulties, the drive to remain
housed is so strong in this species that a typical hermit crab
would rather be torn limb from limb than be pulled out of its
shell. The only time that the animal will willingly leave its shell
is 1) if it locates another, more suitable one, or 2) if it is shedding its exoskeleton—a process which can only be accomplished by fully exiting its dwelling just long enough
to wriggle out of its own exfoliated shell casing.
When a hermit crab that has grown too large for its
current home locates a new one, it determines the structure’s
suitability via a process called fondling. During this activity,
the hermit crab will explore the shell’s surface and its internal
volume-to-weight ratio by rolling the shell over and gently
rocking it back and forth. Since hermit crabs actually choose
the shells that they inhabit, there is a large body of information
concerning shell selection. It has been shown that there is a
specific volume-to-weight ratio that crabs like. Shells with a
high internal volume-to-weight ratio are the most in demand.
These more desirable shells facilitate growth by providing
the crabs ample space in which to physically expand, while
saving locomotive energy by being light in weight.
As might be imagined, even without the current housing
shortage, the finding and exchanging of shells is a preoccupation amongst this species. Hermit crabs routinely take over
shells that have been vacated by their fellows. Peri55
odically, multiple crabs will locate a single new shell
by smell simultaneously. When this occurs, a choreographed
activity may take place. The crabs line up next to each other,
according to size, with the largest situated next to the new,
recently fondled dwelling. The largest crab will then vacate
its shell in favor of the new one. The shell that has just been
emptied will be passed to the crab next in size down the line.
This crab will look it over and possibly adopt it, in turn handing its own shell down to the crab next in size, and so on. The
practice is precise and fast, resulting in the greatest number
of crabs achieving properly fitting homes while affording all
the least amount of time spent outside their shells, unsheltered from predators.
The Hand Up Project
Based on what we know about the new needs of these
animals in their current environment, the Hand Up Project
proposes to manufacture alternative forms of housing, specifically designed for use by land hermit crabs, out of plastic.
This solution offers multiple benefits. Not only will the project
afford the animal badly needed additional forms of shelter,
but we also contend that, by utilizing current
technology, we may now be better equipped to meet the
needs of this life-form than nature ever has.
The use of plastic in manufacturing these new homes
is key. This material affords the crab an almost ideal dwelling. Being much lighter than calcium carbonate, these new
houses do not take as much energy to carry during locomotion. Plastic is also structurally strong, which affords large
areas of internal space in the new structures. This results
in the greater internal volume-to-weight ratio that the crab
prefers. Of additional benefit is the longevity of this material
coupled with the way these crabs recycle and share their
shelters. Because plastic is non-biodegradable, these new
forms may potentially outlast the life-span of the crab itself,
thereby assuring many generations access to additional
hand-me-down housing.
We acknowledge that such trans-species caregiving
may in fact be a form of control. In recognition of this
paradox, the new structures are aesthetically based on the
architecture of Giuseppe Terragni, an Italian Fascist active in
the 1930s. Physically, the design of the new forms has been
tailored to the animal’s needs. The structures are offered for
various body sizes. The shell spiral in the middle has been
eliminated, reducing the overall weight of each house and
increasing its internal volume. Instead of this central core,
the new design offers an internal flange attached to the front
opening for the crab to clutch with its holding claw. Shelter
while foraging has also been considered. Similar to the hoodlike structure found in a traditional shell, the new form offers
an overhang for additional protection in situations where the
body must be extended outside the dwelling. Color can also be
adapted to the needs of the animal. The prototype houses are
tinted beige, which affords the wearer maximum camouflage
on many of the beaches in North America. The color can, however, be visually matched to a specific population’s native
environment for optimal protection.
In its beta version, the Hand Up Project was a great
success. Twenty-five percent of the initial crab population
chose to move into a new, fabricated home when presented
with the novel structures for a period of two months. The
beta version involved crabs in captivity, where body growth
is more gradual and, consequently, shell exchange occurs
less frequently. Due to this fact, there is reason to believe
that, in the wild, where growth is more rapid, these numbers
will be even better.
This first generation of houses was produced using
rapid prototyping. The design was drawn in AutoCAD. Each
form was then created in one piece, via a stereo lithography
process, where a laser deposits thin layers of plastic to create
the overall structure. This procedure allowed the houses to
be made without the use of separate parts, so that the new
“shells” could be created without using glues or solvents that
could harm the animals. These seamless structures have
also proven to be quite strong. In its final version, the project
will use die injection molds to manufacture the new houses.
While the start-up cost is significant, this method will allow
the structures to be mass-produced with few seam lines and
at an enormous reduction in cost from the initial method of
fabrication.
The funding needed to manufacture and distribute these
shelters is significant. It is also significant that—notwithstanding the contradictions inherent in current
scientific knowledge—this production is purely altruistic in
its intent. The scope of the project is global, and accordingly,
corporate funding has been targeted as a potential revenue
source. The project is currently soliciting corporate
56
and commercial sponsorship to fund manufacturing
and distribution costs by licensing the houses for advertising.
In exchange for financial support, each plastic shelter may
be readily produced bearing a corporate logo. From this
perspective, the longevity of these dwellings is also a plus,
in that their existence will guarantee the perpetuation of
advertising across a time-span best described as evolutionary.
While we recognize that this funding solution will
increase the current proliferation of corporate logos on
beaches and in other apparently pristine environments, we
do feel that it is appropriate to utilize these insignias of global
capital, and the wealth they symbolize, in the service of
ameliorating environmental problems that have been caused
by humans in the first place.
This effort is a minor, genuine attempt to give a struggling
life form a hand up. The project maintains that innovative
technological solutions can be brought to bear upon a great
number of problems involving the present existence and
future survival of many life forms. The intended audience
of the Hand Up Project is someone who, while walking on a
beach, might pause to contemplate a slowly ambulating
hermit crab, wearing on its back a tiny, man-made plastic
house bearing a corporate logo.
References
J. R. Childress, “Behavioral Ecology and Fitness Theory in a Tropical Hermit Crab,” in
Ecology, vol. 53, (1972), pp. 960-964.
B. A. Hazlett, “The Behavioral Ecology of Hermit Crabs,” in Annual Review of Ecology and
Systematics, vol. 12 (1981), pp. 1–22.
B. A. Hazlett & L. C. Baron, “Influence of Shells on Mating Behavior in the Hermit Crab
Calcinus tibicen,” in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, vol. 24, (1989), pp. 369-376.
opposite: Hmmm....
57
FUTURES
Introduction
Almost two years ago, Daniel Rosenberg approached Cabinet
to see if the magazine might be interested in having him guestedit a thematic section dedicated to “Histories of the Future.”
Daniel had not come empty-handed. He proffered several
essays from a forthcoming book of the same title that he
was co-editing with Susan Harding for Duke University Press.
Several of these, Daniel suggested, could be re-edited for
the magazine context and printed in advance of the book
(forthcoming in 2005). What encouraged us, besides the
caliber of the essays, was Daniel’s curiosity, openness, and
intellectual passion. Two years on, we have not changed
our minds on any of those counts, but can add stamina and
a sense of humor to the list. Without these qualities, the
thematic section (now presented under the title “Futures”)
would have remained only a potential future, never to be
actualized. We are very happy that Daniel has established
in our pages the heretofore unexplored concept of guesteditorship, and we thank him for everything he has brought
to this project. –Eds.
59
Thinking Futures
Daniel Rosenberg & Susan Harding
The Future is not what it used to be.
–Theodor Nelson
We have been living through boom times for the future.
Even before the escalating storms of the early 21st century,
our cultures and industries collaborated in a remarkable
proliferation of words and images about this impossible
object. In recent years, the very thought “future” has been
spectacularized in extraordinary ways. Whether in modes
of progress or apocalypse, our media have overflowed with
anticipations of things to come, with utopias, dystopias, stories of time travel and artificial intelligence, with accounts of
acceleration and progress, of doom and imminent destruction,
with scenarios, predictions, prophecies, and manifestos.
Since the rise of the digital economy, even the benighted “science” of futurology has come back into style.1
In the first years of the 21st century, representations of
the future have cycled wildly through a historical repertoire,
from the ray-gun gothic of the 1930s to the noir and the
endism of the 1940s and 1950s to the plastic modularity of
the 1960s and back again. As if following a kind of Moore’s
Law scaling principle, futures today seem to be reproducing
themselves faster and more cheaply than ever. At the same
time, their shelf-lives appear to be getting shorter. Any child
can historicize them for you, can tell you in a minute which
future is up to date and which is already over, which doesn’t
run fast enough on the current microprocessor and which
doesn’t run at all. In the computer world, an entire subindustry has sprung up in what is called legacy software,
programs written on old platforms, modified and translated
to run on new machines as if it were still 1979 and the first
wave of chunky Galaxians were twirling madly toward the
missile defense systems and video arcades of our Earth.
More and more, our sense of the future is conditioned
by a knowledge of futures that we have already lost. Indeed,
nostalgia for the future has become so pervasive today that it
has even developed a distinctive set of commercial uses. As
Arjun Appadurai suggests, contemporary mass consumption
“is not simply based on the functioning of simulacra in time,
but also on the force of the simulacra of time.”2 If different
modes of production imply different forms and experiences
of temporality, our current habits of consumption appear to
imply a nostalgia for productivity in general and for all of the
different experiences of temporality that it might be able to
generate.3 Today, our futures feel increasingly citational—
each is haunted by the “semiotic ghosts” of futures past.4
The rise of this kind of nostalgia points up something
both formally and historically important. The future is not
an empty category. Even if we accept a skeptical critique of
prophecy, we must acknowledge that for us the future is not
so much undetermined as overdetermined. Our lives are
constructed around knowledges of the coming that are as
full (and flawed) as our knowledges of the past. Often these
future knowledges are profoundly freighted, since they
involve anticipatory hopes and fears energized by pasts that
are with us still. Our futures are not merely geometrical extensions of time. They haunt our presents, obeying architectural
laws that look more like Gaudi than Euclid, arising in diverse
and peculiar ways.
In historical terms, the development of future-nostalgia
also points to a crisis in modern futurity. From the beginning, the modern was constituted through a rejection of
prophecy. The philosophy of the Enlightenment required that
time would be open to human achievement and that events
could gain meaning from their interrelation, rather than from
their relationship to absolute, Biblical beginnings and ends.
By bracketing eschatological questions, the Enlightenment
effectively “sealed off” the future from prophetic knowledge.5
But this development had paradoxical consequences. In
no way did it amount to a going-out-of-business for futurological workshops. The Enlightenment proscription against
traditional prophetic practices turned out to produce new
and intensified imaginative demands on the future and new
techniques of narration and prognosis.6 The very possibility
of an open-ended time elicited an outpouring of grand
narratives from Condorcet and Kant to Hegel and Comte.
This effect was by no means limited to high philosophy. In
the arena of fiction, for example, the late 18th century saw
an efflorescence of future fantasies. And, for the first time in
literary history, these futures took place not in some vague
hereafter but in a chronological expanse freed from the finitude of sacred history, in the profane historical future, in the
years 2440, 1850, 1900, and 7308.7
Of course, these future narratives were also morality
tales for the present, but in them the present was materialized through striking new kinds of proleptic imagining. The
new futurisms of the 18th and 19th centuries allowed—and
even required—the thinking of alternative timelines: in them,
the present was not just the past of the future, but the “the
past of future, contingent presents.”8 It is difficult to overestimate the implications of this new possibility. But
60
it is equally crucial to note that its victory was only
ever partial. The contingent futures that emerged during the
Enlightenment never fully displaced the necessary futures
of prophecy. In some instances, such as that of Auguste
Comte, modern visions of progress themselves took on a
providential character. In others, such as the 19th-century
Uchronie of Charles Renouvier, contingencies piled on contingencies seemingly without end.9 Moreover, the religious
prophets did not oblige anyone by going away. As it turns
out, what most characterizes the modern problem of the
future is not its historical distance from the mode of prophecy
but rather its hybrid and contradictory relationship to it.
The modern period saw a proliferation of techniques
for imagining, predicting, and narrating futures—many in
an ambiguous terrain “between science and fiction”—and a
developing cultural consciousness of the instability of this
new temporal landscape. By the end of the 19th century,
according to contemporary observers, time itself appeared
to be accelerating, and futures—big and small alike—seemed
to be coming and going with breathtaking speed. And this
sense of acceleration did not abate. Instead, it became something like second nature, so that by the late 20th century,
the problem was no longer how to account for historical
acceleration, but how to account for the acceleration of
acceleration itself.
At the same time, the coming and going of futures
became such a regular feature of modern life that it has
sometimes seemed as if it could have no history at all.
Witness the turning of the recent millennium. Although the
event itself did not occasion the level of cult activity or
terrorism anticipated by many observers, it did provoke an
outpouring of futurological speculation. Prophets, prognosticators, predictors, fortune-tellers, astrologers, millennialists,
apocalyptics, visionaries, seers, and their journalistic and
academic fellow-travelers clogged airwaves, magazines,
newspapers, bookstores, and pews with their wares. As we
approached 2000, the clock of discourse ticked louder and
above: Business 2.0 magazine subscription solicitation.
louder, and the future itself seemed to shrink to fit the
narrowing frame left until the calendar turned over. When
all was said and done, though, 2000 could not have been anything but an anticlimax to the countless stories in which
it played an anticipatory role. There was something vampiric
about the moment: a thousand flashbulbs popped, but nothing
showed up in the picture. Still, invisibly, it was everywhere. It
haunted us.
At the same time, the millennium set off a kind of worldwide explosion of future kitsch and marketing, of gadgets,
blockbusters, and pageants, an entire world of media turned
Busby Berkeley for a year. New York City took out a trademark and made itself the official world capital of the “event.”
Airline tours were devised in order to allow paying passengers
the experience of two or more millennial New Year’s Eves,
and one South Pacific island went so far as to change its position on the international date line in order to offer wealthy
tourists a guaranteed experience of arriving at the 21st
century before anyone else in the world.
Even skeptics rushed into this boom future market.
Rationalists assured us that “the millennium” was only a kind
of folie à plusieurs based on a scientifically meaningless
fascination with round numbers. But, at the same time, they
traded in the fascination. In the months leading up to the
turn-of-the-millennium, anticipations of the year 2000 transformed into fears of a Y2K computer bug, and for a while the
future was now. As Y2K, the future acquired a technical, a
rational, and especially, an economic profile. Its importance
was to be measured in the amount of money spent preventing it, or cleaning up the mess that it created; Y2K gave us
something to believe in and anticipate when we were barred
from hoping for something mysterious. It also had the effect
of spectacularizing a new world order—as, according to the
experts, only the hypertechnologized and the primitive would
be spared. It would be those technological and political stragglers of the second world, principally the former
Communist world, who would be at risk, perhaps punished.
At Y2K, the big story turned out to be the non-story.
As hours passed on New Year’s Eve and nations of the
Earth passed in cohorts from the 20th to the 21st centuries,
CNN and the networks reported “success” in nearly every
locality. There were scattered reports of problems released
from the bunker-style headquarters of our own Federal
“Y2K Preparedness Center,” but none of these turned out
to be serious. Certainly none approached the level of crisis
created months later by the hacker-induced failures of several
major web portals or the simple computer virus called the
Love Bug.
But the failure of the Y2K apocalypse did not lessen its
historical importance. Like any other national pageantry,
Y2K in all its dimensions—cultural, commercial, political, and
technological—energized an entire economy of anticipation,
and produced a powerful expressive performance of a stillunstable global culture business, vying for metanarrative
control over the future. The events of Y2K lavishly demonstrated that the future in the modern West is always
61
already dense with meaning. “The future” is a
placeholder, a placebo, a no-place, but it is also a commonplace that we need to understand in all of its cultural and
historical density.
To this end, the articles and artifacts gathered here
highlight everyday future-making practices: each works to
illustrate and to understand the how of our anticipations
as much as the what. The following section is a hypertext.
While its subjects are diverse, they are also pervasively
linked—technologies of time and trauma; the hope and
hubris of the manifesto; conspiracy, prophecy, and utopia—
subjects both deeper and more mundane than we usually
recognize.
This themed section was developed in coordination with the Histories of the Future
project organized by Susan Harding at the University of California Humanities Research
Institute. The book Histories of the Future features contributions from Susan Harding,
Jamer Hunt, Pamela Jackson, Susan Lepselter, Jonathan Lethem, Joseph Masco, Christopher Newfield, Elizabeth Pollman, Vincente Rafael, Daniel Rosenberg, Miryam Sas, Kathleen Stewart, and Anna Tsing. We wish to thank Duke University Press for its permission
to use extracts from several of these articles and the Humanities Research Institute for its
sponsorship of the project.
1 Susan Harding and Kathleen Stewart, “Bad Endings: American Apocalpysis,”
Annual Reviews in Anthropology(1999), p. 28 .
2 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). See also Fredric Jameson, “Nostalgia
for the Present,” in Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1992), pp. 253–73.
3 E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture
(New York: New Press, 1993).
4 William Gibson, “The Gernsback Effect,” in Burning Chrome (New York: Ace, 1994).
5 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present
(New York: Verso, 2002).
6 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).
7 I. F. Clarke, The Pattern of Expectation, 1644–2001 (New York: Basic Books, 1979);
Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1973); Bronislaw Baczko, Utopian Lights: The Evolution of the Idea of Social
Progress, trans. Judith L. Greenberg (New York: Paragon, 1978).
8 Niklas Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society, trans. Stephen Holmes and Charles
Larmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
9 Charles Renouvier, Uchronie (l’Utopie dans l’histoire): Esquisse historique apocryphe
du développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été tel qu’il aurait pu être
(Paris: Félix Alcan, 1901).
10 Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
11 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1983).
Very Slow Scan Television
Gebhard Sengmüller & Jakob Edlbacher
Very Slow Scan Television (VSSTV) is a new television format
that we have developed building upon Slow Scan Television
(SSTV), an almost 50-year-old image transmission system
used by Ham Radio amateurs. In contrast to regular TV,
SSTV runs on a dramatically reduced frame rate.
Developed in 1957 by Copthorne Macdonald, Slow Scan
Television uses the shortwave radio band (Ham Radio) to
transmit television images. Ham Radio not only broadcasts
information (as is the case with conventional radio), but
also uses the radio spectrum for personal communications,
usually on a point-to-point basis over a previously negotiated frequency. In contrast to telephone conversations, this
communication is open and can be listened to by anyone
who happens to be tuned into the same frequency. The Ham
Radio band was reserved for the purpose of voice transmission, and therefore uses only a small amount of bandwidth.
Broadcasting images within this narrow bandwidth requires
reducing their quality and rules out transmitting moving
images. Furthermore, the visual information has to be converted into an audio signal.
According to British Ham Radio operator Guy Clark
(N4BM), “The original idea was to find a method of transmitting a television picture over a single speech channel.
This meant that a typical (at that time) 3MHz wide television
picture had to be reduced to around 3kHz (1000:1 reduction).
It was decided at the outset that the scanning rates must be
very slow, which precludes the use of moving pictures. The
choice of time base for synchronizing was the readily available domestic power supply at 50 or 60 Hz (depending on the
country of origin). This gave a line speed of 16.6Hz and 120 or
128 lines per frame (against the then UK standard of 405 lines
(now 625) per frame), giving a new picture frame every 7.2 or
8 seconds. … The original SSTV systems were based on exgovernment radar screens and cathode ray tubes with very
long persistence (“P7”) phosphors. This allowed an image
to be painted on the screen over a period of a few seconds.”
The modulation technique often transmits defective images,
evident in trapezoid distortions in the image caused by time
synchronisation problems.
SSTV may suggest a parallel TV universe, one that developed during an era in which television monopolies were
consolidating their hold over mass media culture. But it also
shows similarities to current streaming and netcasting technologies where personal flair and taste determine the range
of images broadcast. Texts and pictures refer to the location
of the sender and his or her identifier. Self-referential features
dominate. Guy Clark writes: “What kinds of pictures are sent?
Reviewing pictures saved during the last few weeks I found:
Hams in their shacks, lots of pet dogs, a frog, kangaroo, astronauts in the Space Shuttle (SSTV has been transmitted from
some missions!!!), bridges, birds, Elvis Presley, rock formations, an old-fashioned microphone, antique cars, flowers,
children, Jupiter, a cow, someone playing bagpipes,
a UFO, many colorful butterflies, boats, and cartoon
62
characters with personalized messages. Even the Russian
Space Station MIR has been transmitting SSTV pictures
recently!”
VSSTV uses broadcasts from this historic public domain
television system—available anytime over freely accessible
frequencies—and regular bubble wrap to construct an analogous system in which the packing material functions as the
aperture mask. (See overleaf for a technical diagram). Just as
a Cathode Ray Tube mixes the three primary colors to create
various hues, VSSTV will utilize a plotter-like machine to fill
the individual bubbles with one of the three primary CRT
colors (red, green, and blue), turning them into pixels on the
VSSTV “screen.” Observed from a distance, the clusters of
pixels/bubbles will merge into the transmitted image. Large
television images will be the result, images that take the idea
of slow scan to the extreme. The SSTV format transmits at
the rate of up to one frame every eight seconds; in our process,
the frame rate decreases to one per day. An observer can witness the extremely slow transformation of the “blank” bubble
wrap into an image over the course of 20 hours.
Thanks to Charles Gute and Paul Sengmüller.
opposite: Bubble wrap as image matrix.
VSSTV: functional diagram
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4
SSTV (Slow Scan Television) signals
are continually broadcast by Ham
Radio operators around the world on
several short wave bands used for
voice communications (e.g. 3.845
MHz, 7.171 MHz, 21.340 MHz).
An open-air antenna, together with a
short wave radio receiver, tunes into the
SSTV band and receives the Ham Radio
signals. Speakers play back the sound
signals to illustrate the process.
An SSTV scan-converter recognizes
and decodes the images carried by the
sound signal. A monitor displays the
images while an oscilloscope renders
individual scanlines, making visible the
gradual flow of the image (X-resolution:
amplitude, Y-resolution: time).
The image processing PC selects a
random sequence of individual pictures
from the SSTV converter. A program
rasterizes these images into pixels and
breaks them down into their RGB
components. The same PC also takes
on the role of process controller in the
following steps.
Step 5
Step 6
Step 7
Step 8
The mechanics: Bubble wrap sheeting
(width: 2 m. in bulk from roll) is fed
between two cylinders for horizontal
transport. A photo sensor, together with
the PC controlling the process, manages the exact, real-time positioning of
the sheeting via a feedback loop.
The mechanics: a carriage (also
controlled by the PC) vertically
positions the print head.
The print head consists of three needles
fed by three tanks holding red, blue,
and green ink. Controlled by the PC,
these needles inject the bubbles with
the exact amount of colored ink corresponding to the brightness and hue
of the pixel. A miniature, closed-circuit
video camera mounted on the print
head captures the process and the
resulting image is displayed on a video
monitor.
Pixel by pixel, line by line, the bubble
wrap is colored in accordance with the
underlying SSTV image. Assuming
10 seconds per pixel, this will result in
a new VSSTV display every 20 hours
(75 lines per image). Viewed from an
appropriate distance (approximately
5 meters), the individual dots of ink
resolve into distinct colors. An overall
image emerges and becomes visible.
Desert Modernism
Joseph Masco
Too much of a good thing is wonderful.
–Liberace
The contemporary American desert exists as (post)modernist
frontier and sacrifice zone, simultaneously a fantasy playground where individuals move to reinvent themselves, and
a technoscientific wasteland where the most dangerous
projects of a militarized society are located. In the past
century, the desert Southwest has become a space of vexed
excitement, where the challenge of an expansive wilderness
has been met by monumental efforts to dislocate its indigenous inhabitants, redirect its rivers, populate its interior with
roads and cities, and fill its air with jet and missile contrails.
In the phantasmagoria of the neon oasis, the wonder of the
built environment is now offered up for intimate comparison
with the natural world.
Las Vegas is currently the fastest growing city in the
United States, consuming water as if it were surrounded by
ocean. It is also an island of public commercialism within a
military-industrial crypto-state, that vast section of Nevada
backcountry where secret military technologies are designed,
atomic bombs detonated, and chemical weapons and nuclear
waste stored. Nevertheless, the desert can still today take on
the appearance of pristine possibility, unrolling toward the
horizon as a rugged tabula rasa, a dreamspace for spectacular
progress. This ability to reinscribe desert “purity” requires
constant effort, as the pursuit of utopian potential is predicated on a continual emptying-out of dystopian realities—
in this case, those of nuclear weapons, waste, and war. Thus,
if the desert in the post-Cold War American imagination
still signifies hope for an endlessly renewable frontier, such
migration from self and nation remains fraught, as escapees
to the western interior run headlong into an equally imaginative military-industrial economy that constructs the desert
as a hyper-regulated “proving ground” for the super-secret,
the deadly, and the toxic. To negotiate these conflicting
approaches to the epic West, both citizens and officials have
come to rely on tactical amnesias, temporal sutures enabling
a precarious—if addictive—cosmology of progress, fueled
by high-octane combinations of risk, silence, utopian expectation, and paranoid anxiety. It is this dual process of mythologizing and monumentalizing through cognitive erasure that
I call “desert modernism.”
During the Cold War, desert modernism took on a
decidedly masculine form, combining military science with
corporate capitalism in a highly gendered national performance. The four sketches that follow, gathered during a tour
of Nevada in the spring of 1997, offer a dialectical or composite portrait of Cold War culture’s masculinist afterimage. In
fin-de-siècle Nevada, we can watch a specific 20th-century
optimism (for technology and the possibility of endless
self-reinvention) circle back to confront itself in the lives of
weapons scientists, tunnel engineers, conspiracy
66
theorists, and sequined entertainers. Indeed, these
sketches attest to the contradictions of a disabled master
narrative of progress which now saturates daily reality with
unruly new forms of imaginative agency, projections that are
simultaneously exhilarating, excessive, apocalyptic—
American.
Day One—On Mythic Masculinity: The Nevada Test Site
Our guide is utterly charming. A 35-year career at the Nevada
Test Site (NTS) making detonation mechanisms for nuclear
weapons has obviously been good to him. He carries himself
with the cool assurance of someone who has performed
well at the center of a national undertaking, a Cold Warrior in
the truest sense.1 Even after the demise of the Soviet Union,
and his own retirement, he upholds the Test Site’s mission
by conducting these tours—educating the public about
“what really went on,” articulating the continued need for US
weapons of mass destruction, and reiterating the critical role
played by the NTS in managing a global order of proliferating danger and constant threat. Physically impressive, with
a great sense of cowboy humor, this is no Dr. Strangelove.
More a favorite story-telling uncle.
Driving us through the NTS, he points out details in a
seamless history: “That’s Sedan Crater, the second-biggest
in the US—part of the nonmilitary use-of-nuclear-explosives
program. Astronauts trained there before going to the moon.
That’s the Chemical Spill Test Facility, the only place in the
country where you can create a major toxic accident to study
how to clean it up. That’s the new Device Assembly Facility—miles of underground tunnels—we can’t go there.” I ask
him when, in his experience, was the best moment to be
working at the Test Site. “From 1962 to 1988,” he replies without hesitation. This era extended from the implementation of
the above-ground nuclear test ban to the near-collapse of the
industry, when revelations about the scope of environmental
damage in places like Hanford, WA, Rocky Flats, CO, and Fernald, OH, brought heightened public suspicion and expanding new regulatory restraints. During this 26-year period, our
guide says, nuclear weapons research paused only once.
“JFK was assassinated on a test day,” he tells us, “and we
postponed the ‘shot’ for 24 hours but then got
back to work.”
For this man, working at the Test Site provided access to
the some of the best minds in the world, the scientists at the
national laboratories (Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia).
But it also demanded constant negotiation of the military
mindset. Once, he simply pulled the detonating mechanism
out of a nuclear device, stowed it in the trunk of his car, and
drove away—putting anxious colonels and a multi-million
dollar test on hold until he felt confident of its success. In the
realm of Cold War masculinity, the buck stopped there. But it
was also obviously so much fun. There are tales of midnight
helicopter rides, hints at secrets he’s not allowed to share.
His commentary constantly registers the pleasure of commanding earth-shattering technoscience, the satisfaction
opposite: Atomic blast of house #1, Yucca Flats, Nevada Test Site, 17 March
1953. Courtesy US Department of Energy (DOE).
68
of having unlimited state resources to support it, and a race
with a real enemy to give it meaning.
Our tour focuses on remnants of 1950s “weaponseffects tests”—tanks, bridges, and buildings deliberately
blasted to see what would happen. He shows us, for
example, a safe used in a 1957 test code-named Priscilla.
The building was completely destroyed by the 37-kiloton
explosion, but the safe and the money inside came through
just fine. Next, we visit the waste storage site, an enormous
trench filled with neatly stacked wooden boxes and metal
drums—entering a nearby office building, we encounter a
poster explaining how site workers mobilized to relocate a
family of foxes living in the dump. Thus, while asking questions about radioactive waste and pondering the 100,000year threat posed by some nuclear materials, we are
presented with images of protected mammal babies and
carefully documented signs of worker environmentalism.
When we ask about contamination, our guide assures us
that he has walked “every inch of this site” and suffered “no
ill effects.” There is some contamination, he acknowledges,
but it is contained and poses no public risk. The reference to
radioactivity is countered with a story about a rattlesnake
that bit into our guide’s cowboy boot and wouldn’t let go.
He had the boots, snake included, bronzed. Dangers at NTS,
in his presentation, are natural or international, but never
nuclear or technoscientific.
Our final stop is the Apple II site, where in 1955 the
US military built a “typical” American suburb for the sole
purpose of dropping an atomic bomb on it. A fire station,
a school, a radio station, a library, and a dozen homes were
filled with everyday items (televisions, refrigerators, furniture,
food, etc.), populated with white-skinned mannequins, and
neatly annihilated. All that remains are a brick ruin and what
looks like an abandoned wooden house, “a real fixer-upper”
according to our guide. The only indicator of anything dramatic is that the chimney is cracked and wildly off- center,
suggesting a powerful explosion but only hinting at the
29-kiloton bomb that detonated one mile away, vaporizing
the rest of “survival town.” After the test, scientists held
a feast in which they ate the food not incinerated—again,
as our guide informs us, “suffering no ill effects.” In the
serious play of the NTS, the meal was a kind of reverse last
supper, where any signs of post-blast life were celebrated
as absolute victory.
I ask our guide if the US could survive a nuclear war.
“Oh, yes, I believe we could,” he replies, but later he seems
unsure, acknowledging that nuclear war would be an “act of
insanity—the end of everything.” This is the only ambiguity
in a nearly perfect performance. The seamlessness of his
narrative, in fact, registers his discipline: He neither confirms
nor denies anything that makes the NTS suspect. In fact,
his history is largely restricted to the era of above-ground
nuclear testing (1951-1962), after which testing—and most
of its visual consequences—went underground. This was,
however, also the era of the most extreme environmental
damage, when studies of blast-effects included
69
experiments not only on banks, tanks, houses,
and airplanes, but on soldiers ordered to march into fallout
clouds, and on uninformed civilians. We know now that most
of the continental US was affected by radioactive fallout from
the NTS, contributing significantly to national thyroid cancer
rates. But when I ask about fallout, our guide states simply,
“that was before my time.”
And this, it seems to me, is desert modernism in its purest form, a profound belief in an unending and conceptually
clean progress, but one made possible by strategic forgetfulness and sublimated technophilia. Just as the desert
constantly threatens to overrun the Test Site, introducing
weeds and blowing sand where shiny metal should be, the
cosmology of the desert modernist requires a constant
patrolling of the cognitive field to prevent ambiguity from
taking root. As we leave the NTS, I ask about the future of
nuclear weapons. “The Soviets—” our guide begins, then
with a private half-smile, “I mean Russians—” he states are
still dangerous, and concludes that developing nuclear
weapons remains a means of protecting the “free world.”
However, since his narrative cannot afford to acknowledge
the local consequences of nuclear testing or assess the
legacy of radioactive waste, the signs of nuclear nationalism
revealed in our tour are not drawn from the current weapons
complex—which is busily re-inventing itself in a world with
only one superpower. Instead, his performance is a carefully
edited reiteration of mid-century nuclear culture, and by
the end of our visit, it’s difficult not to conclude that nuclear
weapons, despite our guide’s proclamations about the
future, are now located in the past. We’ve seen no real
evidence that they remain the foundation of US national
security or a multi-billion-dollar-a-year operation, with 1997
budgets exceeding levels from the height of the Cold War.
The vast desert landscape, combined with the aged quality
of the buildings and the lack of any substantive evidence of
ongoing science, minimize the scale of the nuclear project,
and seemingly, its claim on the future. This may be a public
relations tactic, but it might also be a structural effect of desert modernism. For how could those inhabiting the
epicenter of the nuclear security state assess their own
history? In order to do that, we must look more closely at the
neighboring communities that live with the consequences of
nuclear nationalism.
Day Two—On the Poetics of Rock Bolts:
The Yucca Mountain Project
On the western periphery of the Nevada Test Site stands
Yucca Mountain, currently in preparation to become the
principal nuclear waste storage facility in the United States.2
If the NTS presents desert modernism optimistically, then the
Yucca Mountain Project is its flip-side, an arena where the
dreamspace of absolute technical mastery slips out
of joint. For, in this mountain—a spiritual center for the displaced indigenous cultures of the Southwest—the industrial
waste of the nuclear-powered state proves uncontainable,
opposite: entrance to Yucca Mountain Project, future home of the US’s nuclear
waste. Courtesy Yucca Mountain Project.
exceeding the power of its producers to predict its future.
From a distant coast, the Department of Energy has ruled
that any permanent nuclear waste depository in the US must
have an operative plan that will make it safe for 10,000 years.
Such a plan is unprecedented in human history, though it
would account for only a fraction of the life-span of the most
dangerous nuclear materials, which will remain radioactive
for hundreds of thousands of years. Nevertheless—a 10,000year safety plan—consider the astonishing
confidence this regulation reveals, the certainty it registers
about the eternal reliability of the American government.
We arrive at Yucca Mountain for a safety lecture before
plunging into a cave that U-turns for a mile through the
mountain. Donning red hard-hats, goggles, and fluorescent
orange earplugs, we strap emergency-breathing filters around
our waists and are briefed on emergency procedures—in
case of fire, we should use our filters even though they might
scorch our lungs. Thus weighted down, we walk single file
along railway tracks into the darkness. Deafening machinenoise mixed with the long shadows of artificial light and the
smell of stale earth greet us. About 75 yards into the mountain, we enter a large chamber where we meet the tunnel
engineer, a middle-aged man who wears his protective gear
with practiced ease.
The engineer explains how waste is to be shipped to
the site in barrels, where it will be stacked, and contingencies
for retrieving specific barrels once stored. He is clearly
nervous, aware of the intense politics around the Project, and
he gains my sympathy, for he is not a public relations expert
or a policy maker—he builds tunnels. He seems most comfortable providing technical information, and our
attention moves to the rock walls and ceiling, which are
covered with countless metal spikes secured by netting. We
ask about them, and our engineer lights up. “Well, you see,
there are two kinds of rock: good rock and bad rock. This is
bad rock.” “Bad” rock crumbles and needs mechanical
reinforcement, while “good” rock is internally reliable.
Yucca Mountain has both good and bad rock, and is largely
dependent on rock bolts to compensate for both. With
alarming ease, in fact, all the debates about the scientific
viability of Yucca Mountain as a waste storage site—the
20-plus years of acrimonious technical and political debate,
the hundreds of thousands of pages of technical reports
arguing potential risks and advantages, the 10,000-year
plan—are all reduced to the power of the rock bolt. Brilliantly
simple and reassuringly tangible, the rock bolt presents
desert modernism in primordial form, for these bits of metal
promise to hold the mountain together, to discipline the earth
through millennia.
In the desert, however, one is never far from understanding that reality is mandated not only by official
discourse, but by the cycles of wilderness. Yucca Mountain
is and always will be a living organism, one that stands on
several major fault lines, whose roots touch the water table
that sources much of the Southwest. It is subject to tectonic
shifts, erosion, and other planetary processes far
70
beyond the reach of the rock bolt. I ask our engineer
if the 10,000-year plan has affected his work in any way. “No,”
he replies testily. Startled, I press on. “Do you ever feel that
you’re building something for the ages here, like the
pyramids?” “I don’t like to think about those kinds of things,”
he replies. Then, looking directly in my eyes, he says,
“I’ll guarantee this tunnel for 100 years. After that I hope
they’ll have someplace else to put this stuff.” As the zeros
drop off the 10,000-year master plan, the Yucca Mountain
Project assumes the appearance of a national hoax, its
confidence fractured unredeemably. Cold War apocalypticism—the fear of a sudden fiery end that propelled fission
and ballistics science and created deterrence theory—
assumed that the nation would end abruptly in an atomic
flash, a prediction requiring radical action in the here and
now. The Yucca Mountain Project, however, now assumes
an eternal nation-state founded on the stability of “good
rock,” and a government-to-be that will diligently uphold
20th-century laws and watch over 20th-century waste. At
Yucca Mountain, the nostalgic desert modernism of the NTS
formally confronts its future, and in that effort is expanded
exponentially, to the point of self-contradiction and failure.
Day Three—Paranoid Surveillance: Rachel, Nevada
If nuclearism at the Nevada Test Site represents the focus
of a certain kind of modernist planning, and Yucca Mountain
embodies the fallacies of science upheld by government
hubris, then what is it like to live on the outside, to be
surrounded by nuclear nationalism but denied access to its
hierarchies?3 Ninety minutes north of Las Vegas, one finds
the little town of Rachel—population 100—a dozen or so
mobile homes parked beside a two-lane highway. The calm
is broken by military aircraft from Nellis Air Force base, the
NTS, and the mysterious Area 51, also known as Dreamland,
where Stealth fighter technology was invented (some locals
say) by reverse-engineering crashed UFOs. Rachel is a hub for
conspiracy theorists and UFO believers, a point of pilgrimage
where the legacy of secrecy, security, and science becomes
prolific, permeating everyday life and encouraging those on
the edge to assume the existence of secret power centers.
We start at the Little A’le’Inn Café, where the walls are
covered with photographs of fuzzy disc-shaped things that
might be spaceships, and talk turns to cover-ups and disinformation, why “They” are here and “what’s going on.” You can
discuss government black budgets and black helicopters,
or explore the latest theories on cattle mutilations and human
abductions, secret genetic experimentation, and New
World Orders. Who is really behind the United Nations, the
International Monetary Fund, the Trilateral Commission?
Was the Cold War really a battle with the Soviets or merely
a way for both countries to arm against invading extraterrestrials? Is the current fascination with UFOs a giant
campaign to hide the Truth, or is the government preparing
us for the news that They have been here a long, long time?
Above all—what’s coming next?
While we eat lunch, a conspiracy theorist takes center
stage, singing country & western songs and playing an
electric organ. A waitress joins him. They’re having a good
aware of its effects—mysterious illnesses, invisible forms
of surveillance, lights in the night sky—conspiracy theorists
mobilize to fill the gaps. A half-century of government policy
to “neither confirm nor deny” questions about nuclear nationalism has produced a proliferating discursive field where
citizens must rely on their imaginations. In this way, the café
conversations present a displaced mirror-image of nuclear
nationalism, for the programming at the NTS, Yucca Mountain, Area 51 and life in Rachel all assume that the world is
ultimately knowable, that there are no coincidences, and that
careful observation of everyday life can reveal the hidden
master-narrative of existence. This attention to the scripting
of appearances in the desert West, however, now exceeds
the national security state, having evolved into
a resilient new kind of American expressive culture simultaneously apocalyptic, narcissistic, sensational.
time, and between tunes, he introduces himself. I recognize
him, having seen one of his self-financed videos on UFOs.
On tape, he argues that UFO sightings are masterminded by
an “international cabal” and warns that sometime in the late1990s a “major UFO incident” will be staged at Area 51 as
a carefully planned media distraction to enable a global takeover. Today, he has some new information, an 11-by-14 inch
aerial image of a parking lot surrounded by trees and containing several olive-green army vehicles and one bright yellow
Ryder moving van. “This photograph was taken in April of
1995 at a military base near Oklahoma City, a few days before
the Oklahoma bombing.” He shows another picture of the
same lot, same jeeps, but no van. “This was taken a few days
later. Now, I think this is very interesting. What is a Ryder van
doing in a military parking lot? I’m not saying the government
was directly involved, but I think it’s interesting. Before the
bombing of the Murrah Federal Building there is a Ryder van
on the military base, and after, it is gone. I think this is very
significant.…” He drifts back to his music, leaving us to contemplate what it would mean if, in fact, a secret organization
with access to US Army facilities had bombed
a US federal building and implicated a white supremacist
group as part of a calculated plan to take over the world.
Conspiracy theorists are a necessary by-product of the
desert modernism pursued by the national security state. The
people of Rachel live only a few miles from Area 51—some
residents have worked there and trace their current health
problems to on-the-job toxic exposure. They also know that,
for years, one of the best and most readily available
photographs of Area 51 was made by a Soviet surveillance
satellite. Yet, despite this experiential knowledge and a
significant presence in popular culture (for example, in the
film Independence Day), the US Air Force will only acknowledge an “operational presence” in the Groom Lake area.
Officially, Area 51 does not exist.4
For Rachel’s residents, nuclear modernity and its aftermath have thus become a convoluted open secret, requiring
those who want to “live free” to track the signs of a militaryindustrial complex that impinges upon their lives
71
in visceral ways. Excluded from the system but well
Day Four—Delirious Excess: The Liberace Museum
One of the most remarkable attributes of the Nevada Test
Site is its location.5 Founded on the need for concealment,
it lies adjacent to a city famous for its extravagant display—
Vegas is the town where anything goes and the nation-state
is somehow conceptually absent. But the serious politics
of concealment at the NTS and the (seemingly) frivolous
politics of display in Las Vegas are mutually reinforcing, like
those at the NTS, Yucca Mountain, and Rachel. If there is a
seam in the structure of desert modernity that links the introversion of one to the extroversion of the other, it becomes visible in the Liberace Museum, located in a shopping
complex just off Tropicana Avenue.
One of the most popular attractions in town, the
Liberace Museum houses the entertainer’s famously sequined
costumes, his jewel-encrusted pianos and candelabras,
custom-built cars, and other mementos from a career that
opens a unique window into the hypermasculinity of the
Cold-War American West. Indeed, Liberace, Las Vegas, and
the NTS were coincident from the beginning. The NTS opened
in 1951, and by the mid-1950s the two biggest shows in
Nevada were nuclear explosions and Liberace, who earned
$50,000 a week at the new Riviera casino, performing his
signature pastiche of high and low musical genres in a black
tuxedo studded with 1,328,000 sequins. A favorite pastime of
the era was to take a cocktail up to the top of a casino in the
morning, to search the northern horizon for a flash of light or
a mushroom cloud and toast America’s superpower ascendancy.
Like JFK, that other icon of Cold War masculinity,
Liberace drew his fame in part from a public fascination with
his sexuality that included its explicit constructedness and
which encouraged audiences to participate in that construction. At a moment when to be gay was to occupy the cultural
position of the Communist, subject to McCarthyite assaults,
Liberace successfully sued newspapers that questioned
his heterosexuality, even as he lived with male partners. His
charm derived from his exaggerated scripting of appearance,
above: It’s all about the rock bolts. Courtesy Yucca Mountain Project.
which enabled fans to enjoy his overt artistic and class
transgressions and mimetic gender play without feeling
threatened. Thus, one need not be a conspiracy theorist to
wonder at the synchrony that brought down two mid-century icons on the same November night in 1963. As news of
Kennedy’s assassination swept the nation, Liberace collapsed
in the midst of his memorial concert, poisoned by dry-cleaning chemicals accumulated in his fabulous costumes. Toxic
shock took him into kidney failure. Unconscious and on life
support, he was given last rites and thought lost.
From the 100,000-year half-life of the waste at Yucca
Mountain to the poisons collected in Liberace’s sequined
suits, desert modernism is, as I’ve suggested, necessarily
blind to its own excess. True to form, Liberace claimed later
that in a vision a white-robed nun not only healed him, but
actually blessed his love of opulent display. Indeed, after his
brush with death, he sought to re-invent himself with each
new costume, and was soon fighting an arms race of his own
with entertainers like Elvis Presley for command of the most
over-the-top performance. By the 1970s, his sequined outfits
had grown to more than 200 pounds, making each night on
stage a delicate balancing act. In this light, Liberace’s Vegas
career might be taken as an index for certain aspects of Cold
War culture, in which the hyperproduction of nuclear weapons—70,000 in all, enough to destroy every major city on the
planet dozens of times over—also registered a national fascination with excess and exhibitionism, and involved a precarious dance with death. It is important to remember that
after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US nuclear arsenal was
officially designed never to be used. It was intended merely
to display American might. The explosions at the NTS and the
elaborate concealment of Area 51 were never merely tests
or secrets, they were expressive national performances. But
while this careful scripting of appearances seemed to deny
the possibility of a future on any terms but those of the desert
modernist, it left accumulating toxic legacies in its wake.
Thus, even as we wonder today at the danger and discipline
required to perform in a life threatening mass of sequins, the
nuclear future at Yucca Mountain maintains its radioactive
glow.
1 For a remarkable introduction to the Nevada Test Site, see Center for Land Use Interpretation, The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to America’s Nuclear Proving Ground (Los Angeles:
The Center for Land Use Interpretation, 1996), and Kathleen Stewart, “Bitter Faiths,” in
Technoscientific Imaginaries: Conversations, Profiles, and Memoirs, ed. George Marcus
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For historical analysis of above-ground
nuclear testing, see Richard L. Miller, Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing
(New York: Free Press, 1986), Philip L. Fradkin, Fallout: An American Nuclear Tragedy
(Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1989), and Barton C. Hacker, Elements of
Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons
Testing, 1947-1974 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1994). For studies of communities suffering health effects from work at the NTS, see Carole
Gallager, American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993)
and Valerie L. Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American
West (New York: Routledge, 1998). For an assessment of Cold War human radiation
experiments, see Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, The Human
Radiation Experiments: Final Report of the President’s Advisory Committee (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996). For a 10,000-page, county-by-county assessment of
radioactive fallout and its impact on national thyroid cancer rates, see The National
Cancer Institute, “Estimated Exposures and Thyroid Doses Received by the American
People From Iodine-131 in Fallout Following Nevada Atmospheric Nuclear Bomb Tests,”
1997 <http://rex.nci.nih. gov/massmedia/fallout/contents.html>. For the environmental
impact of military nuclear technology, see International Physicians for the Prevention
of Nuclear War and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Radioactive
Heaven and Earth: The Health and Environmental Effects of Nuclear Weapons Testing
In, On, and Above the Earth (New York: Apex Press, 1991). For a detailed accounting of
the nearly $6 trillion spent on US nuclear weapons in the 20th century, see Stephen I.
Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons
Since 1940 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998).
2 On 23 July 2002, President George W. Bush approved Yucca Mountain as the nation’s
primary commercial nuclear waste repository. Numerous pending lawsuits notwithstanding, Yucca Mountain will open in 2010. See Kuletz, The Tainted Desert; Michael Taussig,
Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University
opposite: Aerial view of non-existent Area 51. Courtesy Terraserver.
73
Press, 1999); and Daniel Rosenberg, “No One Is Buried in Hoover Dam,” in Modernism,
above: Two examples of spectacular technologies. Courtesy DOE
Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital, eds. Jani Scandura and Michael Thurston (New York: New
and the Liberace Museum.
York University Press, 2001).
3 On Area 51 conspiracy theories, see Susan Lepselter’s “Why Rachel Isn’t Buried at
her Grave: Ghosts, UFOs, and a Place in the West,” in Susan Harding and Dan Rosenberg,
eds., Histories of the Future (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming) as well as
David Darlington, Area 51: The Dreamland Chronicles (New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1997). See Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding, “Bad Endings: American
Apocalypsis,” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 285-310 on American
apocalypticism, and Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theory: Secrecy and Power in American
Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) on conspiracy theory. See
Eileen Welsome, The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold
War (New York: The Dial Press, 1999) for discussion of covert human experimentation
during the Cold War; Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1988) for a cultural history of nuclear anxiety; and Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)
for an analysis of U.S. secrecy since World War II. See Joseph Masco, “Lie
Detectors: On Secrets and Hypersecurity in Los Alamos,” Public Culture 14, no. 3 (2002):
441-467 for a discussion of post-Cold War secrecy and security concerns within the US
nuclear complex.
4 In September 2001, President George W. Bush renewed a Clinton Administration executive order exempting an “unnamed” Groom Lake Air Force facility from environmental
laws. This rule has been justified under national security protocols, but also has the effect
of suppressing lawsuits filed by former employees regarding toxic exposure.
In other words, the state can now argue that since the base does not officially exist, how
could anybody have worked there, let alone been poisoned on the job? See the Federation
of American Scientists study of satellite imagery, “Area 51-Groom Lake, NV,” at <http://
www.fas.org/irp/overhead/ikonos_040400_overview_02-f.htm>.
5 Biographical information on Liberace is based on the presentation at the Liberace
Museum, as well as Liberace: An Autobiography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973),
and Bob Thomas, Liberace: The True Story (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).
For analysis of Cold War gender roles, see Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American
Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 1995). For policy assessment of US security clearances and sexual orientation, see
US General Accounting Office, Security Clearances: Consideration of Sexual
Orientation in the Clearance Process (Washington, D.C., 1995). For more on Las Vegas
and the culture of above-ground nuclear testing at the NTS, see Constandina A. Titus,
Bombs in the Backyard: Atomic Testing and American Politics (Reno and Las Vegas:
University of Nevada Press, 1986).
74
Past Forward
video/audio installation that extrapolates upon a documentary photograph
Curated by Brian Conley & Christoph Cox
of a mother and son lynched from a bridge in Oklahoma circa 1911. Church is
1. Woodrow Wilson, Address to the American Indians (1:46)
closes—as quickly as a breath held by a new devotee dressed in white at the
Shortly after becoming President of the United States in 1913, Woodrow
river’s edge dunked gracelessly by the pastor and then coming up panting for
Wilson delivered this speech, assessing the history of “the white man’s
air, saved. As quickly as the knot tightens and the neck breaks. Suspended, this
a time capsule: the moment a photo is taken. The shutter opens and quickly
dealings with the Indian.” After briefly noting the “dark pages in [that]
moment rises above the river below, taunting gravity. It lengthens.
history,” Wilson went on to catalogue evidence of the “remarkable progress
We remember. We blink. We see the horizon. We take it with us. We sink.
toward civilization” the red man had achieved under the white man’s “wise,
We listen and voices carry us. We float. We blink and it’s over. It’s like it never
just, and beneficent” tutelage. “The Great White Father,” concluded Wilson,
happened and we feel it in our bones.” All sound recorded on location during
“now calls you his brothers, not his children.”
Juneteenth Celebration 2003 in Galveston, TX and in Okema, OK, June 2003.
Thanks to R. Jones Sanchez, B. Kruger, L. Nelson, and L. Chua.
2. Janek Schaefer, His Master’s Voices (3:22)
T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” (1936), the first of his Four Quartets, offers a
5. Luz Maria Sanchez, Radio1 (6:05)
meditation on time and eternity that opens with the famous lines: “Time
Suddenly there was the possibility to say anything to everyone, but upon
present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time
reflection there was nothing to be said. —Bertolt Brecht
future contained in time past.” Here, Eliot reads the poem with the aid of Janek
Schaefer’s “Tri-Phonic Turntable,” a turntable fitted with three
reshaped the course of the last century. But, in effect, they merely preserve
tonearms. The piece was recorded live in 1997 and released as a limited
and propagate fragments of historical data—information disassociated from
edition LP on Schaefer’s audiOh! record label.
both source and recipient that can be rearranged with the turn of the dial.
“The telegraph, the telephone, the radio—these devices arguably
Radio technology emerged—heralded by waves of optimism and great
3. Achim Wollscheid, Ulysses (excerpt) (2:46)
expectations—only to be absorbed, transformed into wartime propaganda
“In 1986, the Goethe Gymnasium in Neu-Isenburg, Germany had 1026
machines, junk peddlers, and glorified jukeboxes.”
students, as many as the German edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses has pages.
Although it deals with the course of just one day, it takes the single reader
act of electronic transmission abates the communicative potential of speech.
about two weeks to read this book. The group of students—each one reading
In the electronic realm, words dissipate as soon as they are uttered, rendered
one single page—coped with the body of text in about 7 minutes.” Originally
into pulses of electricity floating in space. Each discernable unit is, in effect, the
released on the CD Acts (Selektion, 1998) and digitally remastered in
self-contained delivery of a thought, concept, or dormant history—that
December 2003.
“Reflecting this deflation of purpose, when taken to an extreme, the
can be rearranged at will to form new realities. In Radio1 the human voice is
abstracted, effectively obliterating its communicative capacity. Once discern-
4. Kara Lynch, Church (8:09)
able words, all culled from the public airwaves, become the mere coupling of
An excerpt from a multimedia work-in-progress titled Invisible. “In 2099, the
tones delivered as a sensory rather than informative message.”
transatlantic slave trade never happened. The event disappeared from the
Radio1 is a quadraphonic sound piece for tape. This is a stereo version.
history books. A strange cult keeps the false memory alive through ritual bond-
75
age and transport of bodies across imaginary borders.
above: Video stills from Frankfurt TV’s unbroadcast coverage of Achim Wolls-
Church is an audio excerpt from Episode 03, an outdoor
cheid’s Ulysses, 1986.
6. Manuel Rocha Iturbide, . . . even . . . (introito) (3:40)
12. The Quiet American, Rockets of the Mekong (11:04)
“Introito” is the first movement of the composition titled . . . even . . . , an
“Rockets of the Mekong is composed from a collection of field recordings
electro-acoustic Catholic marriage ceremony. The piece attempts the joining
recorded in Laos in November 2001 in the small rural town of Pak Tha, where
of opposed elements—past and future, ritual and modernity, mythology and a
the River Tha meets the Mekong, in northern Laos. The piece is named after
disenchanted present—through an alchemical ritual of redemption that blends
“rocket boats,” hand-built, very shallow draft, thin-nosed speedboats with
all of these into a union that comprises them all.
huge outboard motors that are the taxis of the Mekong. The pilots, and
fortunate passengers, wear crash helmets (and earplugs) as the Mekong is
7. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address (9:57)
treacherous with just-submerged sandbars and rocks, and a sudden stop
On 17 January 1961, in his last official address as President of the United
at speed would be very dangerous. The recording also uses a passing small
States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former commander of the Allied forces in
motorcycle, the constant buzz of cicadas, the sounds of children kicking a
World War II, delivered this address to the nation. Intended as a warning about
soccer ball, and a young girl saying “sabadee,” the Laos version of “sawat-dii,”
the rise of military and corporate power, the speech turned out to forecast
the Thai greeting of respect.
American history up to and including the present.
“A field recording is a future history of a non-existent present. Field
recordings constitute a documentary history of an imaginary, not a real, world.
8. Harald Bode, Phase 4-2 Arpeggio (4:51)
From the moment of its making. a field recording’s interpretations multiply
An unsung pioneer of electronic music, Harald Bode was responsible for
and overtake its documentary value. Even for the field recordist who makes it,
some of the earliest and most influential electronic instruments. Already in
a given recording documents only in part the moment of personal experience
the late 1930s, he built keyboard-driven synthesizers. In 1947, he invented the
that witnessed its making. In short, the field recording is an audible mirage.
Melochord, a monophonic keyboard instrument prominently employed in early
It is a documentary object that fails to contain the present. Or: it contains not
electronic compositions produced at the WDR studio in Cologne by
the present, but a non-existent present. Or: it contains many non-existent
Herbert Eimert, György Ligeti, Henri Pousseur, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and
presents, one for every listener. Or: it contains a new present on every
others. In the 1960s, he contributed to the production of the Moog modular
listening.” Originally released on Rockets of the Mekong (Quiet American,
synthesizer, and in the mid-1970s he introduced the Vocoder, a voice-
2003). Courtesy Grain of Sound.
processing device that would be used in countless electro-funk hits.
Composed in 1964 while Bode was experimenting with various phasers,
This CD was engineered by Brian Conley. Thanks to Kim Cascone, Andrew
filters, and frequency shifters, this track anticipates disco and electro by
Deutsch, and Guillermo Santamarina of Ex Teresa Arte Actual.
more than a decade, and acid house by nearly a quarter century.
9–10. microsound.org, City of the Future
In the spring of 2003, shortly after the US invaded Iraq, the.microsound.org
list invited members to submit compositions based on a portion of Andrei
Tarkovsky’s film Solaris. List owner Kim Cascone explains: “I’ve always had
a favorite part of Solaris—the ‘City of the Future’ as it is titled on the DVD
release. The entire scene is recorded from the point of view of the astronaut as
he drives to the city on the highway. The sound design for this particular scene
has always haunted me. I thought the title was fitting due to the current world
situation. It is not an overt political theme for the project but it implies hope for
a city in the future. So while this could mean ‘Baghdad,’ it could also mean the
city you live in/near or a city you would like to visit. A city could also represent
any large collection of various types and races of people. In any event, this is
meant to be a productive, constructive, creative theme
expressing hope for the future.”
The list received 42 submissions, available at <www.microsound.org/city>.
Here are two samples:
9. crlos, cityoffluxes (4:23)
10. omnid, frozen duplicates (5:52)
11. George H. W. Bush, On the Commencement of the Bombing
of Iraq (6:38)
On 16 January 1991, President George H. W. Bush announced that American
troops had begun to bomb military targets in Iraq and Kuwait in order to force
Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. Bush defends the attack against critics who
would have continued to push for a peaceful settlement. Bush notes that the
attack is in accordance with U.N. Resolutions and that its aim is to destroy Sad-
76
dam Hussein’s chemical and nuclear weapons facilities.
This speech set in motion a series of events that are still unfolding.
overleaf and page 82: Aziz + Cucher, Naturalia, 2001.
the Use of Drugs to Influence Time Experience
Alcoholics
Drug Addicts
Users of Psychedelics
%
%
Preferred Drugs
%
Preferred Drugs
Preferred Drugs
THE PAST To forget
the past
46 Alcohol
89
Heroin; Heroin mixtures*;
Narcotic-Hypnotic mixtures;
LSD
20 Cannabis**, alcohol, and a wide
variety of other drugs of all sorts
To relive
the past
43 Alcohol
67
Heroin; Heroin mixtures*;
Narcotic-Hypnotic mixtures
40
To “lose”
the present
54
Alcohol;
Marijuana
84
Heroin;
Hypnotics
45 Cannabis**; LSD; LSD with
Cannabis; and a variety of
other drugs
To make the
present more
enjoyable
58
Alcohol;
Alcohol with Marijuana
95
Heroin; Heroin mixtures*;
misc. depressants**
and Marijuana
95 Misc. drug; LSD with Cannabis**;
Cannabis**
To lose sight
of the future
46
Alcohol;
Alcohol with Marijuana
53 Heroin; Narcotic-hypnotic
mixtures; Hypnotics
20 LSD with Cannabis**; Alcohol
with other non-narcotic drugs
To “live in”
the future
8
Alcohol
39
21
To make time
“go slower”
8
Alcohol
47 Heroin;
Marijuana
20 Cannabis**; LSD Psychedelic
Cannabis mixture***
To make time
“go faster”
50 Alcohol
63 Heroin; Amphetamines;
Narcotic-hypnotic mixtures
15
Amphetamines or
Amphetamine-hypnotic
mixture; Marijuana
To make time
“stand still”
33 Alcohol
21 Marijuana; Heroin;
Narcotic-hypnotic mixtures
35
LSD with Cannabis**;
DMT, other psychedelics***;
Cannabis narcotic mixture
LSD with Cannabis**; LSD;
Alcohol
THE PRESENT
THE future
Heroin; Heroin-Cocaine mixture;
Marijuana and LSD
LSD; LSD with other major
Psychedelic and Cannabis*** ;
Marijuana & misc.
time rate
chart adapted from Stephens Newell, “Chemical Modifiers of Time,” in Henri M. Yaker, ed., The Future of Time (New York: Doubleday, 1971).
* Heroin with Codeine, Cocaine, Marijuana, Hypnotics, etc.
** Cannabis: Marijuana and Hashish; derivative and preparations of the Marijuana (Cannabis) plant.
*** Peyote, Mescaline, etc. and/or mixtures of these with LSD.
81
the day before the day after
On 22 November 1963, the Austin American announced the
schedule of the visiting presidential couple. Although the
afternoon’s events in Austin are mapped with the precision
of foreknowledge, they never took place. Is it possible in
retrospect to read the schedule and its surrounding items—
including the matter-of-fact ad for air rifle shot on page two—
without a sense of paranoid anticipation?
82
84
The Trouble with Timelines
Daniel Rosenberg
In 1765, Joseph Priestley published a chart representing the
lives of famous men by means of lines arrayed chronologically
against a scale of 2950 years. Priestley’s Chart of Biography
was not the first timeline. It had a direct precedent in Jacques
Barbeu-Dubourg’s 1753 Chronological Chart and earlier
roots in chronologies and genealogies, calendars and canon
tables, and traditional forms of narrative imagery depicting
historical events. Despite the persistence of cyclical gestures,
a 1627 chart of the events of the coming apocalypse by
Joseph Mede already has something of the modern timeline
about it. But none of this made Priestley’s chart any less
striking in its day. In fact, the idea of a timeline was still
strange enough in the mid-18th century that it required a
certain amount of explanation. As Daniel Headrick has noted,
Priestley argues that although time in itself is an abstraction that may not be “the object of any of our senses, and no
image can properly be made of it, yet because it has a
relation to quantity, and we can say a greater or less space
of time, it admits of a natural and easy representation in our
minds by the idea of a measurable space, and particularly
that of a LINE.”1
After Priestley, the form of the timeline caught on.
In addition to its visual effectiveness, the timeline amplified
conceptions of historical progress that were becoming
popular at the time. The relationship was mutually reinforcing.
As Priestley himself suggests, the timeline filled in as a kind
of fantasized visual referent for an object without material
substance. In its simplest form, it appeared to guarantee the
simplicity and directionality of past and future history. But
Priestley’s commentary points to a problem too. History had
never actually taken the form of a timeline or of any other
line for that matter. And simplicity, the great advantage of
the form, threatened also to be its greatest flaw. The timeline
could function as “the most excellent mechanical help to the
knowledge of history” because it could impress the imagination “indelibly.”2 For the same reason, a century later, Henri
Bergson would refer to the “imaginary homogeneous time”
depicted by the timeline as a deceiving “idol.”3
But already in Priestley’s day, the problem of the linear
representation of time was posed with precision by writers
such as Laurence Sterne whose 1760 Tristram Shandy
satirized the idea of telling a story straight. Sterne’s novel
even includes a set of sketches indicating the digressive form
of a story well and truly told. In fact, Sterne and Priestley are
much more similar than they may appear. For Priestley, the
timeline is a heuristic, an “excellent mechanical help.”
For Sterne, the linear representation of time is a construction.
“Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer
drives on his mule,—straight forward;—for instance, from
Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his
head aside either to the right hand or to the left,—he might
venture to foretell you an hour when he should get to his
journey’s end,” Sterne writes. “But the thing is, morally speaking, impossible. For if he is a man of the
85
least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to
make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can
no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself
perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help
standing still to look at than he can fly.”4
Both Priestley and Sterne point to the technical ingenuity
and the intensity of the labor required to support a fantasy
of linear time. Over the course of the 19th and the 20th
centuries, the convention of the timeline was progressively
naturalized. But its development tended also to raise new
questions. Filling in an ideal timeline with more and better
data only pushed it toward the absurd. Dubourg’s Chronological Chart, mounted on a scroll and encased in a decorative
box, was already 54-feet long. Later attempts to re-anchor
the timeline in material reference, as in the case of CharlesJoseph Minard’s 1861 diagram, Figurative Chart of the
Successive Loss of Men in the French Army in the Russian
Campaign, 1812-1813, produced results that were beautiful
but ultimately put into question the promise of the modern
timeline. The visual simplicity of the diagram is paradigmatic
as is the numbing pathos of its articulation across the space
of the Russian winter. At the same time, through color, angle,
and shape, Minard’s chart marks the centrality of the idea of
reversal in the thinking and telling of history. Minard’s chart
may be more accurate than Priestley’s, not because it carries more or better historical detail but because it reads in
the way a story might be told. The same could be said for the
branching timeline in Charles Renouvier’s 1876 Uchronia
(Utopia in History): An Apocryphal Sketch of the Development of European Civilization Not as It Was But as It Might
Have Been, depicting both the actual course of history and
the various alternative paths that might have been if other
actions had been taken.
The problems presented by 20th-century versions of
the timeline arise from different sources. In most important
respects, the conceptual issues were already on the table in
the 18th century. But the 20th century brought developments
in time reckoning that gave timelines new poignancy.
In 1945, it became relevant for the first time to tell world
history in terms of milliseconds, and, very soon, it also
became necessary to start thinking in practical terms about
the transmission of information over the course of the very
long term. There is something more than a little sobering
about the recurrence of the cyclical form in the US government glyph for the declining radioactivity of nuclear waste
stored in Yucca Mountain. In it, there may be an echo
of Joseph Mede’s indecision about the appropriateness of
applying the linear form to an apocalyptic narrative.
1 Joseph Priestley, Description of a Chart of Biography, 7th ed. (London: J. Johnson,
1778), p. 6; Daniel Headrick, When Information Came of Age (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000), p. 124.
2 Joseph Priestley, Description of a New Chart of History, 6th ed. (London: J. Johnson,
1786), pp. 11-12; Headrick, p. 125.
3 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York:
Zone Books, 1988), p. 207.
4 Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), p. 26.
a timeline of timelines
sasha archibald & daniel rosenberg
Scale: 4mm = 1 year.
Timeline “folds” to maintain absolute scale.
10th ceNtuRy
An anomalous graph appears in an edition
of Macrobius’s commentary on Cicero’s In
Somnium Scipionis, an analysis of physics
and astronomy. The drawing, probably
added to the text by a transcriber, plots
planetary and solar movement as a function
of time. Although the graph does not seem
to convey accurate information, it is nonetheless the first known example of changing
values measured against a time axis.
527
Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus
introduces the convention of dating
events “Anno Domini.”
2ND ceNtuRy AD
Jewish scholar Jose ben Halafta
calculates the exact length of
time between Creation and the
destruction of the Second Temple.
By the Julian calendar, existence
begins on Monday, 7 October 3761
BC at 10:10 pm.
530
Rule of St. Benedict organizes devotional
practice around the “canonical hours“
measured by the clock.
12th ceNtuRy
Moses Maimonides promotes
use of the mundane era among
Jewish scholars.
643
Muslim year 1 established
by Caliph Umar I as 622.
415
Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of the
Biblical chronology forms a framework for
interpreting human history according to the
“six ages of man.”
325
In his Chronicle, Eusebius of Caesarea innovates
the “canon table,” a device to coordinate chronological events depicted in the Bible. Abraham’s
life structures the chronicle; events are matched
to the age of Abraham and then to the year of
various monarchies. Eusebius calculates the
beginning of time as 5,198 years before the
Incarnation.
12-13th ceNtuRy
Jesse Trees, pictorial depictions of Christ’s royal
ancestry as given in Matthew, proliferate in medieval
manuscripts, murals, and stained glass windows.
Jesse, the father of King David and the claimed
ancestor of the Virgin, is typically pictured at the
base of the scene, the tree’s trunk growing from
his navel.
725
In De Temporum Ratione, Bede calculates
the beginning of time at 3,952 years before
the Incarnation. In The Ecclesiastical
History, Bede implements the “Dionysian
system” of dating in relation to the birth of
Christ.
1654
James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, publishes a
widely influential calculation of Biblical chronology,
placing the beginning of time at 23 October 4004
BC. Twenty-five years later, Thomas Guy begins
printing Bibles annotated with Ussher’s chronology;
Bibles inscribed with Ussher’s dates remain in print
until the early 20th century.
1493
The Nuremburg Chronicle of the World depicts the creation of the
earth with seven concentric circles. Also of note, the Chronicle
represents royal ancestry with portraits interconnected with vines to
indicate marriage and parenthood, thereby participating in a broader
tradition that associates genetic lineage and arboreal growth.
c. 1500
Leonardo da Vinci is both the first to use
rectangular coordinates to analyze the velocity
of falling objects and the first to recognize a
correlation between the particular climate and
precipitation of a given time period and the
shape of the resultant tree rings.
1655
In Praeadamitae, Isaac Lapeyrère argues that
Scripture authorizes belief in human existence
prior to Adam.
1663
Christopher Wren’s weather clock is
one of a plethora of new mechanic selfregistering devices that produce
automated moving graphs of various
natural forces; Wren’s weather clock,
for example, generates a continuous
line graph of temperature and wind
direction.
1433
Leon Battista Alberti’s I Libri della
famiglia insists on the importance
of a literal accounting of the hours
of the day.
14-15th ceNtuRy
A genre of illuminated private prayer books,
the Book of Hours contains the texts of
certain prayers to be said at the canonical
hours; the devotionals are often prefaced
with a richly illustrated 12-month calendar,
depicting events common to each month or
season.
1260
The pivotal year in humanity’s transition to the
third and final “state” of history according to
Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202). Twelfth- and
thirteenth-century renderings depict Joachim’s
system of historical states (status) and phases
(aetates) as trees, chains, and ladders.
13th ceNtuRy
Following the Franconian reforms, music becomes a
true time series. Franco of Cologne’s (c.1240-c.1280)
treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis codifies a system of
music notation that fixes the durational value of
notes, while their relative value is measured against
the breve, Franco’s base unit of musical time.
1627
Religious and political ferment in England produces numerous
apocalyptic tracts including Joseph Mede’s Key of the Revelation.
The Key maps the end of history onto a complex graphical figure
combining cyclical and linear forms.
1608
Galileo plots the speed of a rolling ball on a time axis.
1583
In his Opus novum de emendatione temporum, Joseph Scaliger
attempts to produce a complete and self-contained chronology of
world history including translation tables for integrating all existing
chronologies. His Thesaurus temporum (1606) collects and arranges
all of the available ancient chronological sources.
In an attempt to synchronize Biblical history with new
geological ideas, Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of
the Earth argues that the great deluge was the result of
waters underneath the earth’s surface breaking through
the earth’s crust, thereby destroying what Burnet
believed to be the earth’s pre-flood state—a perfectly
smooth, featureless surface, like that of an egg. The
book’s frontispiece is a series of drawings depicting the
cycle of stages in the geological history of the Earth
beginning at Creation and culminating in the Apocalypse.
Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia
mathematica proposes a theory of absolute time.
Newton’s posthumous Chronology of Ancient
Kingdoms Amended (1728) uses astronomical
observations to argue that the Kingdom of Israel
antedated those of Egypt and Greece.
Laurence Sterne’s novel, Tristram Shandy, includes
a set of sketches indicating the non-linear path of a
well-told story; narrative digressions appear as
deviations from a straight line.
The German philosopher and scientist J. H. Lambert is credited
with observing that diagrams may do “incom-parably better
service“ to the sciences than tables. Lambert’s Pyrométrie (1779)
includes tabular data of the rise and fall of annual temperatures,
from which a curved line can be easily extrapolated.
In La Scienza Nuova, Giambattista Vico criticizes both the
astronomical and mathematical basis of 17th-century
chronology and proposes a new universal chronology based
on a theory of cyclical human progress. La Scienza Nuova
includes a chronological table that aligns the histories of the
Hebrews, Chaldeans, Scythians, Phoenicians, Egyptians,
Greeks, and Romans beginning with the Deluge.
In his Les Époques de la nature,
the French naturalist Buffon
argues that the Earth may be as
much as 75,000 years old. In
un-published manuscripts, he
speculates that it may be more
than 3 million years old.
Louis-Sébastien Mercier publishes perhaps
the first future fiction. The Year 2440
describes French society and culture after
seven centuries of progress.
The convention of dating
events BC becomes popular.
Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique
treats figures from secular and religious
sources within a single scholarly apparatus. The
second edition concludes with an exhaustive
10-page “Chronological Table of all the Eminent
Persons Treated in this Dictionary.” The table
begins with Adam and ends in 1700.
Courtesy American Philosophical Society
Joseph Priestley, an English chemist, publishes the first of
several timelines that contemporary audience would recognize
as such: “A Chart of Biography” compares the life spans of
2,000 celebrated men from 1200 BC to 1750 AD, using bars set
against a linear time axis to denote their life spans.
Jacques Barbeu-Duborg, the French
translator and disciple of Benjamin Franklin,
creates his Carte chronologique, a 54-foot
timeline of history from Creation contained
in an iron case.
Courtesy Princeton University Library
Introduction of French
Revolutionary calendar declaring
September 1792 as the beginning
of the new “Year One.”
Florence Nightingale, a major innovator of
statistical graphs and diagrams, submits
her “Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in
the Army in the East” as part of her Report
to the Royal Commission on the Health of
the Army. The diagrams demonstrate
that over the course of the Crimean
War, British deaths owe principally to
“preventable or mitigable” diseases rather
than battlefield wounds.
The patenting and marketing of
graph paper—preprinted with a
rectangular coordinate grid—
attests to the growing use of
Cartesian coordinates in scientific
data analysis.
Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of
Population, argues that while human
population tends to increase geometrically,
the means of human subsistence can only
increase arithmetically.
Felix Bodin’s Le Roman de l’avenir
gives the first historical account of
futuristic fiction.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck publishes Zoological
Philosophy containing an evolutionary family
tree branching out from simpler to more complex
organisms.
The Encyclopædia Britannica contains a fold-out chart
designed by Adam Ferguson “representing at one view the
rise and progress of the principal state and empires of the
known world” from the Deluge in 1656 Anno Mundi to
1900 Anno Domini (the years after 1797 are blank).
Charles Darwin’s Origin of
Species traces species’
genealogies back more than
300 million years.
Sebastian Adams,
Synchronological Chart
or Map of History, an
encyclopedic chart
based on Ussher’s
dating system. A later
version by Charles
Deacon and Edward
Hull continues to
be available and
reprinted under the
title Wall Chart of World
History.
Last volume of Johann Gottfried Herder’s
Reflections on the Philosophy of the
History of Mankind published.
Joseph Priestley’s timeline was shortly
followed by political economist William
Playfair’s invention of the bar chart, an
innovation whose merits remained unrealized
for several decades. As a young man, Playfair
worked in the shop of James Watt, the
inventor of the steam engine, where he was
likely acquainted with Watt’s self-registering
device for measuring steam pressure.
Charles Joseph Minard’s Carte
figurative de pertes successives
en hommes de l’Armée
Française dans la campagne de
Russie 1812-1813. Among the
finest of Minard’s graphical
works, this chart plots the
catastrophic loss of men in
relation to place, time, and
temperature during Napoleon’s
march to Moscow.
Andrew Ellicott Douglass founds the field of
dendrology by inventing a system whereby
known sequences of events (floating
chronologies) can be fixed to specific years
(absolute chronologies) via the scientific analysis
of tree rings.
Charles Renouvier’s counterfactual Uchronie
includes a chart depicting the theoretical
relationship between the actual course of history
and possible alternative paths.
In Time and Free Will, Henri
Bergson argues for a distinction
between the homogeneous
mathematical conception of time
and heterogeneous experience of
duration. He insists that the
experience of time cannot be
represented in a linear fashion.
Courtesy American Museum of Natural History
1905
Albert Einstein’s special
theory of relativity.
1878
The word “graph” is coined in English by the
mathematician James Joseph Sylvester.
(Lambert referred to his graphs as “figuren,”
Watt as “diagrams,” and Playfair as “lineal
arithmetic.”)
1895
H. G. Wells’s Time Machine.
1870s
Eadweard Muybridge and E. J. Marey each
begin work in “chronophotography.”
1913
In their 19th-century notebook
sketches, evolution theorists
represented cross-generational
reproduction with concentric
circles. In the case of this eugenics
diagram, Arthur Estabrook and
Charles Davenport use these visual
cues to chart the members of the
Nam family, aiming to convey the
dizzying expansiveness of
degenerates’ unchecked
reproduction.
1930-1932
Victor Houteff publishes his
religious philosophy in The
Shepherd’s Rod Vol. 1-2; his
illustrative timelines convey the
fast-approaching end of the
world. Followers of his teachings
include David Koresh.
1948
The Olympic Games in London make use
of Omega’s photofinish camera.
2000
Throughout the late 20th century,
professional semioticians struggle with the
problem of constructing an iconographic
language capable of communicating
radiation dangers long after the death of
current languages. Several of these
symbolic systems are prepared for nuclear
facilities, including the US government
nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca
Mountain, Nevada.
1948
Invention of the atomic clock. In 1967, the
length of the second will be redefined by
use of this device.
1933
In a presentation to the Board of Trustees at
the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr, the
museum’s founding director and an amateur
military historian, outlines the (soon abandoned)
collection plan of MOMA with sketches of time
as a torpedo. As the torpedo moves ahead
through time, the work positioned at the back of
Barr’s torpedo passes from MOMA’s collection
to that of the Metropolitan, allowing MOMA to
stay on the cusp of the modern.
1968
Electronic time-keeping
devices entirely replace live
judges in certifying race
winners at the Olympics in
Mexico City.
2000
The year 2000.
1930
English philosopher Olaf Stapleton
investigates the future of the human
race throguh fiction. Stapleton’s twobillion year narrative, Last and First
Men, includes a series of timelines
highlighting the difficulty of translating
conventional scales of human history
into an evolutionary framework.
1929
Invention of the quartz clock.
1950
Studies of the damage wrought by atom
bombs prompt timelines broken into infinitely
smaller fragments of time.
Timeline co-designed by Tal Schori.
phases of life 1:
The Artificial Foster-Mother
Samantha Vincenty
In 1878, an obstetrician at the Paris Maternité named Etienne
Tarnier visited the poultry incubation house at the Paris Zoo
and forever changed the course of what would come to be
known as neonatology. Spurred by what he considered a
fatalistic consensus within medicine that prematurity was
a hopeless condition, Tarnier commissioned the zoo director
to build the first couveuse, or incubator, for human children.1
There had been several other means of treating premature
infants in this period—such as placing them in warming tubs
that provided heat from hot water encased between its double
steel walls—but Tarnier’s invention provided the unique
benefit of a glass enclosure, ideal for both heat retention and
optimal observation. Like their predecessors in the hatchery,
multiple infants were placed in this first model; after several
more revisions to its design and heating methods, each
newborn enjoyed privately heated containers.
The exhibition of the incubator lay very close to its roots
as a zoo exhibit. In 1888, another French doctor, Alexander
Lion, recognized the visually compelling power of babiesunder-glass. Lion had developed the first commercially
available incubator, revolutionary in its regulated heating
system and its portability. His machine’s ability to function
independent of a hospital setting allowed Lion to establish a
storefront maternity ward in Nice. In order to finance his charity and garner the attention of both the public and the medical community, Lion threw open the storefront’s doors and
began charging admission to see the “babies just big enough
to put in your pocket.”2 By 1896, four more storefront incubator institutes had opened in France.
Promoting the technology abroad seemed like the next
logical step. This would soon be accomplished at world’s
fairs and international expositions, which were at the height
of their popularity. At the 1901 Pan-American in Buffalo, President McKinley proclaimed them “the timekeepers of progress.... They stimulate the energy, enterprise and intellect of
the people and quicken human genius”3—unfortunately for
McKinley, this Expo was to be his last glimpse of “progress,”
as he was assassinated the day after making these remarks.
A Paris Maternité alumnus named Martin Couney had better luck than McKinley when he presented his first incubator
baby sideshow at the 1896 Berlin Exposition, which featured
six newborns from the Berlin Charité hospital. Although the
Charité’s doctors believed that the infants were terminal, all
six of them survived—and, within two months, Couney’s Kinderbrutanstalt (“child hatchery”) had attracted over
100,000 visitors. After a second show in London—which
featured Parisian infants, since British hospitals refused to
participate in what they perceived to be an exploitative
spectacle—Couney brought his exhibit to the US.
Propped up to face the audience and periodically fed
by wet-nurses, the incubated “performers” delighted
crowds at the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition, the 1901
Buffalo Pan-American, and the 1939 New York World’s
Fair. Although Couney’s sideshows spawned several imitators— Barnum and Bailey offered their own version—the
longest running show was Couney’s Premature Baby Incubators building in Coney Island, which opened in 1903 and
showcased underdeveloped infants (including, for a brief
time, Couney’s own daughter) for almost 40 years. According to a 1939 New Yorker profile, Couney kept careful watch
over the diets of his wet-nurses and the behavior of his hired
guides, many of whom were actors, to ensure that they
stuck to the sober script he had written for them, as they
had the tendency to pepper the lectures with “smart-aleck
wisecracks.”4 The sideshows drew little criticism despite
the fact that it was selling peeks at children—many of whom
were struggling with respiratory ailments, a leading cause of
death among preemies—right on the Midway, or in the case
of Coney Island’s Dreamland park, alongside Lilliputia, the
midget community, and Hell Gate, the thrill ride that started
the infamous Dreamland fire. Aside from an initial visit from
the Brooklyn Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
and a handful of negative editorials, the shows were largely
regarded with reverence. As historian Jeffrey P. Baker has
written, “Even the Barnum and Bailey show was described in
sober and scientific terms by an American medical journal.”5
The 1939 World’s Fair featured the last touring incubator
baby sideshow. Since the technology had become mainstream, the Coney Island building ended its nearly 40-year
run shortly thereafter. The incubator sideshows offered a
nascent form of edutainment while creatively funding an
apparatus that boasted a very high survival rate: about 7,500
out of 8000 babies “graduated” from the Coney Island sideshow; at the 1939 World’s Fair, the American Medical Association reported that 86 of the 96 infants exhibited survived.6
Dr. Couney will not be remembered for innovations in neonatology, but his shows catalyzed a new era in childbirth and
neonatal medicine. The advent of the incubator came at a
time when childbirth was already in the midst of moving from
the home to the hospital; maternity wards were no longer
mainly occupied by poor and unmarried women. The incubator was a whole new venue for caregiving, mediated by
medicine and entirely divorced from the mother if necessary.
The emerging evidence that science could indeed work
miracles, presented in the guise of entertainment, may have
allayed the collective anxieties that attended such uncharted
technological territory and distracted onlookers from the
cultural tug-of-war between obstetrics and home birthing.
1 Jeffrey P. Baker, The Machine in the Nursery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1996), p. 26.
2 Smith. Strand Magazine (London) 12:770-776, 1896. See <www.neonatology.org/
classics/smith/smith.html>.
3 Baker, The Machine in the Nursery, p. 93.
opposite top: Early incubator design by Dr. Thomas Rotch, 1893.
92
4 A. J. Liebling. “Patron of the Preemies,” The New Yorker, 3 June 1939.
opposite below: Incubators at the Chicago Lying-In Hospital and Dis-
5 Baker, p. 92.
pensary, c. 1900. Courtesy Northwestern Memorial Hospital Archives.
6 See <www.neonatology.org/classics/silverman/silverman1.html>.
phases of life 2:
The Family Room of Tomorrow
Joseph Masco
We forget today how fundamentally the atomic bomb
changed our relationship to the future. The Family Room
of Tomorrow recovers this future/past, revealing a moment
when Americans first needed an explicit promise of a
tomorrow. With its leisure chairs and board games, its neatly
stacked cabinets and electronics, the image seems to offer
everything necessary to bring a family together. Indeed,
it presents a domestic space already charged with the expectation of shared intimacy (in games, conversation, and
contemplation), and as domestic refuge, requires nothing—
except perhaps a window to the outside world.
Part of a larger 1950s Federal Emergency Management
Agency project to convince citizens that a nuclear war was
winnable, the Family Room of Tomorrow aims both to
normalize and beautify the nuclear present (i.e., note the
decorative throw pillows). By offering voluminous plans and
diagrams that could elevate the dutiful citizen to survivor in
a moment of ultimate crisis, the US civil defense program
sought to shift responsibility for domestic defense from the
state to its citizens. Officials wanted to mobilize America’s
frontier spirit to engage a looming nuclear future, arguing
that with preparation, training, and the proper commodities,
the American “can do” spirit could overcome any obstacle
or turn of events. In promoting a dual-purpose American
home—a beautified bunker that was both good for family
togetherness and safe from thermonuclear attack—the
Family Room of Tomorrow presents a basic paradox of the
nuclear age. We can see this most clearly in the two images
adorning the walls of this imagined space, the cave painting
and the geopolitical map. One suggests a return to a prehistorical state, a world untainted by electricity or the
nation-state, while the other presents a globe as coordinated
as any family room pantry, contained and organized under a
unified nuclear present. According to the propaganda of
the civil defense program, the imagined inhabitants of the
Family Room of Tomorrow would know that the bomb would
produce at worst merely an alternate future, presenting
an opportunity to rebuild the world on new, if possibly radioactive, terms.
This 1950s Civil Defense Project, however, quickly failed
an American imagination undermined by the escalating
Cold War arms race. The terror of the bomb inevitably shortcircuited such a calculated deployment of pasts and futures
by the state. Citizens came to understand that if there were
any survivors of nuclear war, they would be produced as
much by sheer luck as by civil defense measures, and that
opposite: Designed by the American Institute of Decorators at the request
of the federal government, the Family Room of Tomorrow was featured at a
Chicago furniture show in January 1960 and in Life magazine that year.
The shelter came with a television set, even though the question of who would
94
be transmitting television programs after a nuclear war was never
addressed.
those not living in a suburban dream space would be literally
locked out of the Family Room of Tomorrow. From another
perspective this image of the future has proved prescient:
for today, citizens are once again being asked by the state to
fortify their home spaces with duct tape and canned goods,
to coordinate pantries and escape routes, to contemplate the
home as domestic bunker. In this way, the Family Room of
Tomorrow still has a claim on our collective future: for
in contemplating its unpopulated terrain, we engage a
domestic dreamspace that promises that our families will
always be together regardless of time, place, or war, and that
checkers and hopscotch are all we need to negotiate our
uncertain tomorrow.
phases of life 3: Living at Death’s Door
Nicholas Sammond
The living room of tomorrow will serve as a conduit between
the quick and the dead. An example: after his passing in
1966, a rumor surfaced that Walt Disney had himself placed
in a cryogenic suspension capsule to be preserved until he
could be revived in a more medically sophisticated future.
(One version of this legend has only Disney’s head frozen—perhaps to be attached to an audio-animatronic body at
some later date. Another has him, like a pop-capitalist Mao,
producing a series of filmed five-year plans through which he
could direct his employees’ activities in perpetuity.)1
Though it is well-established that Disney was cremated
two days after his death, the legend persists to this day. This
is perhaps due to his company’s pioneering automation of
live performance via audio-animatronics, or to his reputation
for rendering the inanimate lifelike. But it is also tied to his
apparent fascination with technologies of the future. During
the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, Disney produced the
General Electric Carousel of Progress, in which an audioanimatronic family moved through four scenes that demonstrated the centrality of electricity to the lives of today and
tomorrow. Shortly before his death, Disney also made a film
promoting EPCOT—the Experimental Planned Community
of Tomorrow—which was to be the centerpiece of Disney
World. EPCOT, which didn’t open until 1982, was to be a fully
function-ing and completely self-contained community, a
bubble of the future suspended in the medium of the present.2
Disney’s death was also bracketed by several important
developments in the history of suspended animation. In 1964,
the concept of cryonic suspension caught the popular imagination with the publication of Robert Ettinger’s The Prospect
of Immortality.3 After a few tragic failures, in 1967 the
first (perhaps) successful cryonic suspension was performed
on Dr. James Bedford. Since the 1970s, cryonic suspension
societies and companies have come and gone, but the
idea lives on.
Ultimately, though, we don’t know what linked Walt
Disney so firmly to the notion of cryonic suspension. We do
know, however, that he had long traded on his association with
childhood and with children, who are often imagined as time
machines in their own right, engrams of the future that we
can program in the present. Perhaps more important, though,
was the way that Disney spoke of the future. In the Disney
lexicon, the future was not distant; it was simply “tomorrow,”
as in Tomorrowland, achingly close, but just out of reach.
Yet EPCOT had less in common with modernism’s hall
of mirrors than it did with another architectural vision of the
future made manifest: Archigram. Founded in 1963, this
British architectural collective celebrated an architecture of
the future driven by consumer capitalism and imagined as a
bubble floating in eddies formed by the currents of history
as they swirled past the rectilinear forms of a dying high
modernism. Although Archigram ultimately produced no
actual buildings, the architectural future they imagined lingers
in such diverse forms as blow-up furniture and inflatable
tennis courts. By the end of the 1960s, collective members
Mike Webb and David Greene would reduce the modular,
transparent fantasy of futuristic communalism epitomized by
the work of Mies Van der Rohe to the Cushicle and
Inflatable Suit-Home. These self-contained body suits
provided the wearer with food, water, radio and television,
replacing the exhibitionistic skin of the modernist high-rise
with the monadic privacy of absolute self-containment.4
It is a small step from Archigram’s living room of the
future, which brought space travel down to earth, to the cryogenic chamber as time capsule. The living room of the future
becomes not the fantasy of an ideal domesticity set in a
proximate future (à la EPCOT or George and Jane Jetson),
but a destination that the future itself will visit. It doesn’t
require the transparency that Mies imagined would erase
the spatial boundary between inside and outside, public
and private. Nor does it necessitate the less congenial selfcontainment of Cushicle, in which the synthesis of consumption, entertainment, and elimination removes the need for
other forms of either social or spatial intercourse. There is
only one piece of furniture in cryonics’ living room of the future:
a freezer. Still, it is imagined as a bubble, and one around
which history will flow as it bobs in its stream. Or, as the Alcor
Corporation, purveyor of cryonic suspension puts it, the occupants of its cryonic chambers “are being transported to future
medicine.”5
Yet perhaps where cryonics most differs from other
architectures of the future is that it has its better and worse
neighborhoods. While occupants of Alcor’s quarters are
suspended in shiny stainless-steel cylinders in a modern
industrial park, others who await a visit from the future
inhabit less ostentatious digs. The building that houses the
living room of “Grandpa” Bredo Morstoel—whose suspension
is celebrated annually in the Nederland, Colorado, Dead Guy
Days festival—is a Tuff Shed somewhere in the mountains
outside of Nederland. His freezer unit is made of aluminum
and he is stored in common dry ice. Yet Bredo’s caretakers
insist that Grandpa will nonetheless one day return, “Just like
Walt Disney. ... Except Uncle Walt has a nice, cozy, 24-hour
monitored, high tech LN (Liquid Notrogen) [sic] Dewar he
lives in ... like a penthouse.”6
1 For a summary of this myth, see <http://www.snopes.com/disney/waltdisn/ frozen.
htm>.
2 Actually, EPCOT is annually renamed—as in ‘EPCOT 2004’—to reflect its location in
the present and its inclination toward a future that is always almost immediate. See Dave
Smith, Disney A to Z: The Official Encyclopedia (New York: Hyperion, 1996). EPCOT is
also not so much a planned community as it is a running infomercial for corporate sponsors interested in linking their products to an ideal future. Disney’s actual planned community, the nearby Celebration, actually trades on an ideal past.
3 Robert Ettinger, The Prospect of Immortality (New York: Doubleday, 1964).
4 Joel Sanders, “Archigram: Designs on the Future,” Artforum, October 1998.
96
opposite: Stages 4 and 6 of Archigram’s Cushicle as it expands to
5 <http://www.alcor.org/AboutAlcor/>.
create a complete environment for the wearer. Courtesy Archigram.
6 <http://www.frozendeadguy.com/history.htm>.
Hummingbird Futures
Daniel Rosenberg
Welcome to the Xanadu™ Millennium
“We stand at the brink of a new age,” says a voice of the
information future. Soon, the written word will change, “and
civilization will change accordingly.” A universal hypertext
network will make “text and graphics, called on demand
from anywhere, an elemental commodity. ... There will be
hundreds of thousands of file servers—machines storing and
dishing out materials. And there will be hundreds of millions
of simultaneous users, able to read from billions of stored
documents, with trillions of links among them.” Within a few
short decades, this network may even bring “a new Golden
Age to the human mind.” 1
The voice belongs to Theodor Holm Nelson, inventor
of the terms “hypertext” and “hypermedia,” apostle of the
home computer, Web visionary, self-appointed “officer of
the future,” and forecaster of so much that we now take for
granted in the electronic universe. If the tenor of this statement
from the 1980s is more triumphant than most, the discourse
is readily recognizable. Indeed, by now, the rhetoric of
information explosion must strike us as less surprising than
the timeframe of the forecast: decades—didn’t that seem
an awfully long time to wait?
Since the 1960s, Ted Nelson’s prescience has been his
trademark. Before the first home computers, he called for a
home computer revolution. He dreamed of a word processor
before one was designed. Already in the 60s, he argued
that the information future would materialize as an interconnected network. And, most famously, he dreamed that the
computer would free writing from the strictures of linearity,
that electronic text would take the form of an open and
multi-dimensional linking structure that in 1965 he named
“hypertext.” 2
Nelson is not known principally as a technical innovator;
he has primarily been thought of as a seer. His most famous
writing, a hypertext manifesto called Computer Lib/Dream
Machines self-published in 1974, remains an underground
classic of hackerdom.3 His more recent work, especially his
1980 Literary Machines, revolves around the still-in-progress
design of a “transclusive” hypertext network called Xanadu™.
To many, this project seemed chimerical before the rise of
the Internet and the graphic and textual interfaces of the
World Wide Web. Since then, perceptions of the information universe have changed, and perceptions of Nelson
have changed with them. Indeed, some have argued that
the important parts of Nelson’s dream have already been
achieved. Nelson disagrees. His concept of Xanadu involves
a dynamic structure more powerful and more flexible than
the currently available network. Nonetheless, the Web has
made it clear that the electronic word is reformulating many
of our assumptions about how textuality and information
operate, in ways that have given Nelson’s ideas new
currency. In the last decade, he has been cited more and
more in academic and popular contexts. His older
98
work has been reissued. As he put it, with the
above: Drawing by Theodor Nelson from Computer Lib/Dream Machines.
explosion of the Web, he has been “abruptly promoted from
Lunatic to Visionary.”4
But for all its resonance with Nelson’s career, the label
“visionary” has never quite fit. His perspective was always
paradoxical. Like many of his contemporaries, in the 1960s
and 1970s Nelson regarded the future with both hope and
fear. He predicted coming social and ecological disasters, but
he argued against accepting such predictions as written in
stone, believing it is up to us “to make ... predictions come out
wrong.”5 For Nelson in the 1970s as now, whatever hope we
might have lies in a (computer-aided) multiplication of
intellectual pathways and possibilities, in the system of
“envisioning complex alternatives” that he named “hypertext.”
What Is Hypertext?
The term “hypertext” conjures something radical and technological, with four dimensions perhaps, like a “hypercube,”
or subject to space-time distortion, as in “hyperspace.” But
hypertext is an ordinary kind of writing. All text interconnects
in non-linear ways. You use hypertext whenever you click on
a link in an electronic text and travel to a different document,
or to a different place in the document that you are reading,
though it is not necessary to use a computer to read or write
in hypertext. A printed book presenting two adjacent versions of a text (as in a critical literary edition) is hypertextual.6
The same might be said of footnotes or marginalia, of nested
glosses such as those in the Talmud or medieval manuscripts,
or of “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories. Such texts allow
readers to move by shifts, jumps, and returns that confound
the notion of textual linearity.7
According to Nelson, with the exception of the most
rudimentary examples, all text points to other text outside
of the single, supposedly closed sequence; all sources are
ringed by satellite sources that encourage readers to make
explicit or implicit comparisons, mental leaps, and intellectual
choices. As he explains in Literary Machines,
Many people consider [hypertext] to be new and drastic
and threatening. However, I would like to take the position
that hypertext is fundamentally traditional and in the mainstream of literature. Customary writing chooses one expository
sequence from among the possible myriad; hypertext allows
many, all available to the reader. In fact, however, we constantly
depart from sequence, citing things ahead and behind in the
text. Phrases like “as we have already said” and “as we will
see” are really implicit pointers to contents elsewhere in the
sequence.8
This broad conception of hypertext explains how electronic
writing can be understood as sharing characteristics of other
written forms. “Hypertext can include sequential text, and
is thus the most general form of writing. (In one direction of
generalization, it is also the most general form of language.)”9
No writing or utterance travels in a straight line. None stands
alone. Hypertext in the largest sense is both the interconnective tissue of lexias that make up a given textual unit such as
a “book” and the matrix of external references from
99
which every “book” must draw its filaments. From
this perspective, literature appears not as a collection of
independent works, but as “an ongoing system of interconnecting documents.”10 We read and write, in other words, in a
world bigger than books, and Nelson refers to this theoretical
realm of lexical plenitude as the “docuverse.” In the docuverse
there is literally no hierarchy and no hors-texte. The entire
paratextual apparatus inhabits a horizontal, shared space.
Back to the Future
As his discussion of hypertext suggests, Nelson never
avoided the futuristic rhetoric of information revolution.
At the same time, his conception of computerized possibility
always looked as much backward as forward. All of his
works make it clear that he cherishes what functions well
in traditional textuality. Viewed from an elastic perspective,
print literature might actually offer a more sophisticated
picture of hypertextuality than do electronic writing and
networking as we know them, and in his later work, Nelson
reverts consistently to what he calls “the literary paradigm.”
Our design [for the hypertext system Xanadu™] is
suggested by the one working precedent that we know of:
literature. ... We cannot know how things will be seen in the
future. We must assume there will never be a final and
definitive view of anything. And yet this system functions.
LITERATURE IS DEBUGGED.11
Technology, he argues, allows us to see dimensions of
literature that remained obscured in the print era. At the
same time, literature and scholarship as traditionally
construed offer an intellectual and cultural model which,
while far from perfect, has nonetheless proved capable of
expressing complexity, ambiguity, and responsibility.
The assertion that “literature is debugged” captures
much of what makes Nelson different from his technologically-oriented peers in information theory. But his “systems
humanism” is also echoed by a number of contemporary
critics who have taken a middle road in what is often a
depressingly binary debate on the value of electronic writing.
J. Hillis Miller, for one, appreciates both the Proustian possibilities inherent in hypertextual errancy and the hypertextual quality of Proust’s own meditations. At the same time,
he warns against a naïve implementation of hypertext, and
especially against naïve readings in it. For example, in his
review of a hypertexted version of Tennyson, Miller argues
that the very paths and links offered by the system imply that:
a Victorian work ... is to be understood by more or less
traditional placement of the poem in ... its socio-economic and
biographical context, by reference, for example, to the building of canals in England at the time. The apparent freedom for
the student to “browse” among various hypertext “links” may
hide the imposition of predetermined connections. These may
reinforce powerful ideological assumptions about the causal
force of historical context on literary works. ... Hypertext can
be a powerful way to deploy what Kenneth Burke called “perspective by incongruity,” but it can also be conservative in its
implications.12
Likewise, for Terrence Harpold, to treat “the link as purely a
directional or associative structure is ... to miss—to disavow—
the divisions between the threads in a hypertext. ... What you
see is the link as link, but what you miss is the link as gap.”13
Both arguments point to advantages in Nelson’s concept of
the Xanadu interface as opposed to the systems of electronic
hypertext and the Internet as currently configured. The point
of Xanadu is to make intertextual messiness maximally
functional, and in that way to encourage the proliferation and
elaboration of ideas.
Xanadu™ and Transclusion
While the general concepts of hypertext and the docuverse
apply equally to all textual mechanisms, not all textual mechanisms function identically. The key feature distinguishing
Xanadu from the Web is what Nelson calls “transclusion.”14
Traditional print works by “inclusion.” External references
are embedded as quotations, becoming integral parts of the
referring text. While quotation is also employed on the Web,
a separate technical principle is at work. Using a typical
Web link, you change context and engage with new text as
you might by going to a library and following a citation from
book to book, pursuing a parallel rather than an “inclusive”
relationship. As an alternative to both, Nelson proposes
transclusion, a system combining aspects of inclusion and
linking. A transclusive network implements links so as to
combine documents dynamically, allowing them to be read
together as mutual citations while they remain technically
distinct.15
Such a structure has a variety of advantages. Nelson
sees a guarantee of intellectual property: “This system allows
all the appropriate desiderata of copyright to be achieved:
one, payment for the originator; two, credit for the originator;
three, nothing is misquoted; four, nothing is out of context.”16
The goal of Xanadu, on one hand, is total instantaneous
information access. On the other, it is continuous revelation
of interconnectedness without the dilution of specificity. At
one pole stands the dream of a universal archive, at the other,
the fragmented and nomadic appropriation of knowledge of
all sorts. Hypertext becomes a system for the production and
management of such “loose ends.”
The question of loose ends has always been crucial
for Nelson. A meticulous taker and retaker of notes, he was
a sociology student in the early 1960s when he first encountered computers and imagined Xanadu. In that pre-wordprocessing age, it was evident to Nelson that computers
could not only be used as typewriters, but that they could
function as archiving, database, and communication systems.
If, as he believed, the problem with conventional writing
is that it tends to limit intellectual options by channeling
them in only one direction, then electronic hypertext could
mirror and supplement the lightness and fluidity of creative
thought. Fishing Vonnegut-like for a name that might capture
the humor and complexity of hypertextuality, he spoke of
“grandesigning, piece-whole diddlework, grand fuddling,
metamogrification, and for that most exalted
100 possibility, tagnebulopsis (the visualization of
structure in the clouds).” A reporter once asked Nelson
whether the transclusive Xanadu paradigm might not be
symptomatic of a generalized attention deficit disorder.
He responded, “We need a more positive term for that.
Hummingbird mind, I should think.”18 And it may be that
hummingbird mind has finally found its technology. The striking success of hypertext and hypermedia systems in
all sorts of applications, from reference works and technical
manuals to works of literature, art, and games, attests to the
generality of Nelson’s vision. But there is more. Vivid and
sensitive a writer that he is, Nelson also captures something
like the unconscious of these practices.
Magic Place of Literary Memory
For Nelson, the challenge of hypertext is in some senses
autobiographical, a way of arguing against historical time
and its expected closures. The very name Xanadu™ expresses
the problem of narrative endings as Nelson sees it.
XANADU™
One of the great unfinished dreams of the computer field
... Literary System, Storage Engine, Hypertext and Hypermedia
Server, Virtual Document Coordinator, Write-Once Network
Storage Manager, Electronic Publishing Method, Open Hypermedium, Non-Hierarchical Filing System, Linked All-Media
Repository Archive, Paperless Publishing Medium, and Readdressing Software. The Magic Place of Literary Memory™.
Xanadu, friend, is my dream.
The name comes from the poem; Coleridge’s little story
of the artistic trance (and the Person from Porlock) makes
it an appropriate name for the pleasure dome of the creative
writer. The Citizen Kane connotations, and any other
connotations you may find in the poem, are side benefits.
I have been working on Xanadu, under this and other
names, for fourteen years now.
Make that twenty-seven years.19
Nelson’s narrative echoes the associative logics of the Xanadu system. It also self-consciously recalls the way in which
the Romantic poets put into question the idea of
completion itself. Hence Nelson’s fascination with
Coleridge’s famously unfinished poem, Kubla Kahn. The
poem is a curious object. It is a vision of paradise that came
to the poet unmediated, in a dream state, or so Coleridge
claims. But Coleridge never gives his reader access to this
moment. He tells us that the published poem is only a
fragment, the bit of writing that he was able to do before his
transcription was interrupted by a visitor from Porlock. What
is interesting about the poem is that it is in every way a model
hypertext. In the first instance, the apparently unmediated
version of the poem is already a vision of a vision, Coleridge’s
quotation of what the Khan saw. And in the version that we
get as readers, it is citational on another level: it is Coleridge’s
transcription and annotation of his own memory. Moreover,
in keeping with the Romantic resonance of the poem
(“a vision in a dream, a fragment”), Nelson’s narrative of Xanadu also goes back to childhood. He contrasts his own experience in school with the free play of ideas that he observes
among contemporary groups of computer kids. According to
Nelson, schools are the principal enforcers of the fictions of
linearity. “The very system of curriculum, where the world’s
subjects are hacked to fit a schedule of time-slots, at once
transforms the world of ideas into a schedule (Curriculum
means ‘little racetrack’ in Latin.) A curriculum promotes a
false simplification of any subject, cutting the subject’s many
interconnections and leaving a skeleton of sequence which
is only a caricature of its richness and intrinsic value.”20 The
goal of Xanadu, he says, is to make the world “safe for smart
children.” He might just as well have said, “smart children
of all ages,” for among smart children, he clearly includes
himself.21
For Nelson, writing or reading is always a process of
restoring something lost. If, in the more mundane sense,
every act of composition is an act of creation, in the terms of
the docuverse, every act of creation is, in effect, a mapping
of forgotten hypertextual space. At a deeper psychic level,
every linguistic act is an act of contact with a lost body
through a “magic place of literary memory.” Info-discourse
provides us with a newly structured figure of memory.
It at once speaks of system storage, of the unexamined
and recaptured links between ideas, and of the problem of
consciousness slipping from our grasp.
Xanadu, then, operates as prosthetic memory. It stores
everything in alternate versions. Nothing need be lost.
A mistaken path can always be retraced, a lost reference
recovered, a silenced voice revived. Nelson even compares
this process of “versioning” to time-travel, in which “the past
can be changed.”22 Users of the Xanadu prototype notice
that the cursor takes the shape of an hourglass. “TO UNDO
SOMETHING, YOU MERELY STEP ‘BACKWARD IN TIME’
by dragging the upper part of the hourglass with the light
pen. ... You may then continue to view and make changes as
if the last ... operations had never taken place.” Historically,
of course, writing has often figured as a transit across time;
as Friedrich Kittler puts it, “every book is a book of the dead.”
In this respect, electronic writing is no different from other
kinds. But electronic writing also energizes the fantasy that
death might not be permanent, that the text would not only
testify to past activities, but that those activities themselves
might be re- or unwritten. Through the chiasmatic X of Xanadu, the sands of time pass back and forth.
chiasmatic prism of the computer screen. Xanadu holds up
one such negative mirror, reflecting and thus creating a
temporal “elsewhere.”
At the same time, hypertext embodies the fantasy that
the computer screen might open. Here, the organizing
principle is not time’s arrow but the human body. To date,
perhaps the most interesting meditation on this metaphor
is Shelley Jackson’s pioneering “hypertext novel” Patchwork
Girl, which weaves together elements of Mary Shelley,
L. Frank Baum, and varieties of literary criticism. Jackson
explicitly energizes the body metaphor by leading her reader
through phrenological maps and anatomical graveyards,
inciting the construction of multiple “Patchwork Girls.”26
Nelson’s metaphorizing of bodily rather than linear time,
meanwhile, includes a figuration of the light pen (which he
uses rather than a mouse) as a scalpel to cut across the screen.
Of course the body metaphor is in no special way the province
of hypertextual representation. From the cabalistic mapping
of Scripture onto the flesh to metaphors like the ship of state,
the body provides a natively comprehensible trope for
functional interconnection and/or hierarchy. But, as Anne
Balsamo and others have pointed out, the human body
also plays a central role in fantasies of cyberspace precisely
because these fantasies so often rely on an assumed negation
or evacuation of it.27 As much as the computer screen is fantasized as a new domain of freedom for consciousness, it also
seems always to hint at corporeal amputation or atrophy.
Consider, for example, “fantics,” Nelson’s term for a
science that would include the theoretical structure of
virtualities, but also the old terrain of psychology, physiology,
and epistemology—everything that concerns the possible
address of our perception. It is “the art and science of getting
ideas across, both emotionally and cognitively.”28
Screen Memory
Nelson’s argument for the reality of “fantic space” should
not come as a surprise, steeped as we now are in promotions of “virtual reality.”30 What is interesting about his statement is that he dispenses with any hard and fast distinction
between the presentation of “reality” and that of “virtuality.”
In theorizing screen-based display, fantics examines the
ghost of the physical body—which persists in the term, like a
phantom limb. In the Xanadu universe, an electronic Rapture
is supposed to take place in word and image, and our bodies
as well as our minds will link up with machines. As Nelson
What is the relationship between compulsive return to
memory and prophesy of the future? In Invisible Cities, Italo
Calvino proposes a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, in which Polo describes cities that he has visited,
while Khan imagines seeing or conquering them. “‘Journeys
to relive your past?’ was the Khan’s question ... a question
which could also have been formulated: ‘Journeys to recover
your future?’ ... And Marco’s answer was: ‘Elsewhere is a
negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his,
discovering the much he has not had and will never have.’”25
In Nelson’s imagination, there are two worlds, present
101 and past, refracted and reversed through the
Should I have called it TEACHOTRONICS? SHOWMANSHIPNOGOGY? INTELLECTRONICS? ... THOUGHTOMATION?
MEDIA-TRONICS? ... Okay, so I wanted a term that would
connote, in the most general sense, the showmanship of ideas
and feelings—whether or not handled by machine.
I derive “fantics” from the Greek words “phainein” (show) and
its derivative “phantastein” (present to the eye or mind).
You will of course recognize its cousins fantastic, fantasy,
phantom. ... The word “fantics” would thus include the
showing of anything.29
overleaf: The covers of Theodor Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines.
The two books are bound together, upside down and back-to-back.
explains, “Everything has a reality and a virtuality. Good
examples are buildings, equipment, cars. ... The extreme
cases are the movie, which is all virtuality, and the fishhook,
which has no virtuality—no conceptual structure or feel to
the victim—until too late.”31 The fantic computer, in his conception, becomes an extension of ourselves. For better or
worse, the computer becomes prosthetic.
But, in contrast to most of his contemporaries, Nelson
understands this eventuality not so much as a passage into
the future as a passage into a certain kind of past, into the
childbody of the mind. What we see in the image of the child
glued to the computer screen (an image repeated throughout
Nelson’s works) is an imagined experience of communion,
body and mind reunited in dreamspace.
Almost everyone seems to agree that Mankind (who?) is
on the brink of a revolution in the way information is handled,
and that his revolution is to come from some sort of merging
of electronic screen presentation and audio-visual technology
with branching, interactive computer systems. ... Professional
people seem to think this merging will be an intricate mingling
of technical specialties. ... I think this is a delusion and a congame. I think that when the real media of the future arrive,
the smallest child will know it right away (and perhaps first).
... When you can’t tear a teeny kid away from the computer
screen, we’ll have gotten there.32
This is the present experience toward which all of Nelson’s
work aims. Hypertext is a name for this physical pleasure
of thought, for a kind of representation that reinforces and
operationalizes hummingbird mind. Nelson’s efforts do not
revolve around the fantasy of the dissolution of the body into
data, but rather celebrate the re-access of the lost, free
childbody through the medium of fantic space.
This is the special sense of Xanadu as a “magic place”
of memory, a realm of unchained creativity that is always
hypereventually present. The design expresses Nelson’s
imagination of the information future as a hyperexperience
of childhood, the chiasmatic return through the looking-glass
of the computer screen to a pre-curricular mind. Via a kind of
time travel, Xanadu gives body (back) to acts of textual imagination. The model is less Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths”
than it is Jackson’s operationalized L. Frank Baum: the
encyclopedic dream as electronic story book.
In one respect, such observations might be made of much
hypertext writing and theory in the last 30 years. There has
been a general movement to highlight the intellectual and
imaginative potential of non-linear form, and literary utopia
has evolved into hetero- or hypertopias. What is most interesting about Nelson is not his undeniable role in propelling
this movement, but his scrupulous problematization of a
materiality that is often absent from the work of other
writers. Even as Nelson releases the multidimensionality
of seemingly traditional, linear texts, he insists upon the
value of so-called traditional writing, upon its protection
from everything that might seek to supplant it or its appeal
to the creative imagination.
The storybook analogy suits Nelson. Like instructive
fables, his work helps us to discriminate among the rhetorics
and practices of our possible information futures. These
networks of praxis are stitched from traditional fabrics of
future and past: fabrics of progress, revolution, and millennium; of nostalgia, memory, and return. In this respect, what
is important in Nelson’s work is not the idea or practice of
non-linearity per se, but rather the insistence that our futures
were never all that linear to begin with. The seams of the
patchwork show. Whatever else it is, Xanadu is a system for
marking intellectual paths, and unlike so many information
and cybernetics theorists, Nelson’s primary concern has
never been speed or scope in itself. Xanadu is distinctive
principally because it presents itself as patchwork, because it
insists that in fantic space all the joints be left showing.
Of course there are elements of what Xanadu promises that
are utopian, nostalgic. But if Xanadu is a phantasm, and if
time will not turn backward because we touch a floating
hourglass with a magic cursor, it is equally true that our
futures make no sense unless we reckon with our longing for
such possibilities.33
1 Theodor Holm Nelson, Literary Machines: The Report on, and of, Project Xanadu™
Concerning Word Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Thinkertoys, Tomorrow’s
Intellectual Revolution, and Certain Other Topics Including Knowledge, Education, and
Freedom, revised ed. (Sausalito: Mindful Press, 1987), 0.11-12.
2 The basic literature on hypertext is George Landow, ed., Hyper/Text/Theory (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary
Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
3 Theodor Holm Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Self-Published, 1974); idem.,
Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Press, 1987). The two books
are bound together, upside down and back-to-back. Citations are from the 1987 edition.
4 Nelson, Computer Lib, p. 16.
5 Nelson, Computer Lib, p. 175-176.
6 Nelson, Dream Machines, p. 50.
7 Nelson, Dream Machines, p. 50.
8 Nelson, Literary Machines, 1.17.
9 Nelson, Literary Machines, 0.3.
10 Nelson, Literary Machines, 2.2.
11 Nelson, Literary Machines, 2.9-2.11.
12 J. Hillis Miller, “The Ethics of Hypertext,” Diacritics 25.3 (Fall 1995), pp. 27-28.
13 Terrence Harpold, “The Contingencies of the Hypertext Link,” Writing on the Edge 2.2
(1991), p. 134.
14 See also Theodor Holm Nelson, “Opening Hypertext: A Memoir,” in Literacy Online:
The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers, in Myron C. Tuman, ed.,
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992).
15 Nelson, “Opening Hypertext,” p. 55.
16 Nelson, “Opening Hypertext,” pp. 55-56.
17 Nelson, Dream Machines, p. 37.
18 Gary Wolf, “The Curse of Xanadu,” Wired Magazine 3.06 (June 1995), <http://www.
wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html>. Nelson took issue with aspects of Wolf’s
article. See Theodor Holm Nelson, “Errors in ‘The Curse of Xanadu’ by Gary Wolf,” 17
December 2002, <http://www.xanadu.com.au/ararat>.
19 Nelson, Dream Machines, p. 141.
20 Nelson, Literary Machines, 1.20.
21 See also, Theodor Holm Nelson, “Barnumtronics,” Swarthmore College Alumni
Bulletin (Dec. 1970), pp. 13-15 (cited in Nelson, Dream Machines, p. 5).
22 Nelson, Dream Machines, p. 43.
23 Nelson, Dream Machines, p. 49.
24 Friedrich Kittler, “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,” trans. Dorothea von Mücke,
October 41 (1987), p.107.
25 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1974),
p. 29.
26 Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl by Mary/Shelley and Herself (A Graveyard,
A Journal, A Quilt, A Story, & Broken Accents) (Cambridge: Eastgate Systems, 1995),
environment: Storyspace.
27 Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham: Duke, 1996).
28 Nelson, Dream Machines, p. 75.
29 Nelson, Dream Machines, p. 75.
30 Nelson, Dream Machines, p. 78.
31 Nelson, Dream Machines, p. 68.
32 Nelson, Dream Machines, p. 74.
105
opposite and overleaf: Photos and illustrated text from Computer
Lib/Dream Machines.
The Veterans of Future Wars
Susan Hamson
“Soldiers of America, Unite! You have nothing to lose.” In a
time of political uncertainty, threatening war, and economic
depression, such was the rallying cry of the Veterans of Future
Wars, a Princeton University undergraduate group formed
in 1936 in response to the new Harrison Bonus Bill, which
allowed World War I veterans to collect their war bonuses
in that year rather than in 1940. The legislation, the consequence of intensive lobbying by the American Legion and
the Veterans of Foreign Wars, had struck the students as an
unconscionable raid upon the United States Treasury for
the benefit of an organized minority. Modeling their demands
after the bill’s supporters, the group maintained that given
the “inevitability of war,” future soldiers should be given their
bonuses—$1,000 in cash—before the war as “any will be killed
or wounded in the next year and, hence they, the most deserving, will not get the full benefit of their country’s gratitude.”
The students went all out. They rented office space, held
a campus rally, traveled to Vassar to institute a woman’s
auxiliary (the “Home Fire Division,” after the name “Future
Gold Star Mothers” was protested by a disapproving
administration at the school), had their own salute (“The
Outstretched, Itching Palm”), and incorporated with the
approval of the State of New Jersey. The Future Veterans
consisted of a National Council and a network of nationwide
collegiate posts. The National Council, based in Princeton
and staffed by its founders from the classes of 1936 and
1937, was led by National Commander Lewis Gorin, Jr., with
Jack Turner as Secretary, Thomas Riggs, Jr. as Treasurer, and
Robert Barnes in charge of public relations. Riggs, Jr. shared
the role of Acting Commander with Barnes after
summer recess in September until the group's disbanding
in the spring of 1937. The Princeton Press Club sent out
stories, the wire services got interested, and all across the
country, newspapers ran articles on the Future Veterans.
Overnight, local chapters mushroomed on college
campuses; at its height, the organization boasted over
60,000 members and had 534 chartered posts
throughout the country.
What made the Future Veterans an instant success
was their appeal to both conservatives and liberals. Conservatives saw the group as a strong ally against FDR’s government
spending. College liberals who were pacifist, anti-war, and
anti-military embraced the opportunity to rally against war
and the military. But through it all, the Future Veterans stayed
true to their “cause,” and played the joke to its last breath.
Indeed, Christian Gauss, Dean of Princeton, who had not
altogether embraced the movement, considered that the
Future Veterans “might have consequences that no one can
yet see and that it demonstrates the determination of youth
to rebuild the disordered world of their fathers a little closer
to sanity.”
The Future Veterans were a short-lived phenomenon;
formed in the spring of 1936, they just barely
107 survived summer vacation. There was no money in
the treasury, the joke was old, and national attention had
switched to the Roosevelt-Landon presidential campaign.
Operations were suspended in the fall, and in April 1937, with
the treasury showing a deficit of 44 cents, the Veterans of
Future Wars closed their books forever.
With the onset of the Korean War in 1950, some efforts
were made to revitalize the group, but enthusiasm died out
almost as quickly as it began. In the 1930s, anti-war sentiment
was high as many watched events in Europe with great trepidation. But overwhelming US victories in World War II and the
growing threat of communism made the general population
less skeptical of American involvement in foreign conflicts.
In this respect, the Future Veterans remains very much a
product of its time. But what happened to the students who
founded the organization? “With the exception of one undergraduate injured in an automobile crash in 1936,” notes
historian Richard D. Challener, “every one of the Princetonians
who founded the Future Veterans served in the United States
armed forces after Pearl Harbor. And, presumably, qualified
for World War II benefits and bonuses.”
below: Cover of Lewis J. Gorin’s Patriotism Prepaid. Courtesy Seeley G. Mudd
Manuscript Library, Princeton University, and J. B. Lippincott Co.
The Sexual Archipelago
Jessica Sewell
In the 1960s, the future promised freedom from reproduction,
marriage, hang-ups, and even, maybe, gender. The structure
and fabric of sex were changing, literally. Unisex clothing
had just come onto the scene as “good fun” for “with-it young
couples.”1 Unisex was supposed to free the wearer from
constricting traditions, from a world in which gender determined who you were or what you wore. It offered hope that
there might be life beyond gender and that sex could be
about hedonistic pleasure without power relations. Perhaps
a future of the sort envisioned in the orgy in Antonioni’s
Zabriskie Point (1970) in which it is only bodies that matter,
not what kind of bodies.
Earlier design demanded distinctions between the
masculine and feminine. In the 19th century, decorating
books instructed that masculine rooms should be brown and
green, with dark wood and leather, while feminine rooms
were to be light, casual, and full of fabric.2 As late as 1953,
Playboy’s Penthouse Apartment followed these rules,
translating them into a modernist idiom.3 By 1969 these rules
appeared to be coming apart, most spectacularly in
the Villa Spies, a modernist dwelling on an island in the
Stockholm Archipelago, designed by Staffan Berglund for
Simon Spies, the head of a Danish travel agency and charter
airline company.4 Now abandoned and closed to visitors, at
the time the Villa Spies embodied a wholesale refusal of the
old rules of gender, combining feminine lightness and
masculine technology to create the ultimate unisex space.
But as strong a modernist statement as it is, the Villa
remains a curious semiotic hybrid. The colors echo the space
station lounge in 2001: A Space Odyssey—clean, futuristic,
scientific, and modern white, accented with red. But, unlike
the hard floors of the space station, the floors of the Villa
Spies are plushly carpeted, creating a soft, feminine space.
The curvaceousness of the Villa Spies fulfilled stereotypes
of feminine architecture in its form.5 Inside, it was womblike,
soft, and nonhierarchical. Moreover, the Villa looks like a
giant dispenser of birth-control pills, that essential tool
of non-reproductive sex.6 Like the original 60s-era pill
container, the Villa Spies is arranged in concentric circles,
with much of the action going on at the edges, occupied by
the bedroom, bathroom, a TV area, and a sunken crescentshaped couch that faces the outdoor pool. But the Villa Spies
also harnessed the masculine pleasures of technology prominent in the Playboy Penthouse.
The center of the Villa is occupied by its number one
technological toy, a hydraulic shaft containing a dining room,
topped by two white plastic “Pastil” chairs, the whole
moveable in seconds from the ground floor to the main
floor. The entire space was a technological marvel, with
built-in speakers that could be used to move sounds around
the space, wandering from one of the twenty speakers to
another, and a wireless headphone system for those who
preferred not to share their aural pleasures. Visually,
108 the space could be transformed at the push of a
button on the red control panel, projecting slides simul-taneously onto the walls, floor, ceiling, and window shades.
It is uncertain to what extent the utopian visions of the
1960s were successful or might still be successful in another
time. To Simon Spies, the Villa looked like a solid answer,
built into the landscape of the sexual archipelago.
In retrospect, the design of the Villa looks more like the
architecture of a question.
1 Life, 21 June 1968, p. 87.
2 Juliet Kinchen, “Interiors: Nineteenth Century Essays on the ‘Masculine’ and ‘Feminine’
Room,” in Pat Kirkham, ed., The Gendered Object (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1996), pp. 12-29.
3 “Playboy’s Penthouse Apartment,” Playboy, September 1956, pp. 53-60; “Playboy’s
Penthouse Apartment—A Second Look” Playboy, October 1956, pp. 63-70.
4 Mikael Askergren, Villa Spies (Stockholm: Eriksson & Ronnefalk Förlag, 1996).
5 See, for example, Phyllis Birkby, “Herspace,” in Heresies 11: Making Room: Women and
Architecture (1981), pp. 28-29.
6 See <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/pill/gallery>.
opposite and overleaf: The hydraulic shaft in Villa Spies in operation.
Photos Staffan Berglund.
The Eight-Fold Path to Knowing Ra
Greg Rowland
Sun Ra was the most far-out cat that ever lived. He led a large
band that made a joyful Space Jazz Noise Vibration from the
early 50s up until Ra’s planetary departure in 1993. He was
from the planet Saturn.
Anti-success
Ra knew that time was on his side. He didn’t run about town
chasing a record deal or getting record pluggers to hype his
records into the charts. This would have been kind of difficult
anyway, as most of Sun Ra’s 7-inch singles—produced by his
own independent record company Saturn—had runs of a few
hundred copies, sometimes just fifty. Often, the covers to his
many singles and albums would be hand-painted. He said:
In my music there’s a lot of little melodies going on. It’s
like an ocean of sound. The ocean comes up, it goes back,
it rolls. It might go over people’s heads, wash part of them
away, reenergize them, go through them, and then go back
out to the cosmos and come back again. They go home and
maybe 15 years later they’ll say “Whoa, that music I heard
15 years ago in the park ... it was beautiful!”
Self-mythologizing
In one earthly prosaic version of events, he who is Ra was
born Herman Blount in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914.
You can forget this, because Ra did. He was actually a
messenger from the planet Saturn, like Elijah blowing Gabriel’s Horn, to inform and prepare us for serious cosmic shit. He
described himself as The Jester of the Creator.
His mission can be best explained by the business plan
sent to register his company Ihnfinity Inc.—which can still be
found amidst the dusty files of Chicago’s Board of Trade—
and distinguished by its cosmological aura of space-peace
and optimism:
To perform spiritual-cosmic-intergalactic-infinity research
works relative to worlds-dimensions-planes in
galaxies and universes beyond the present now known used
imaginations of mankind, beyond the intergalactic central
sun and works relative to the spiritual advancement of our
presently known world. To awaken the spiritual conscious
of mankind putting him back in contact with his “Creator.”
To make mankind aware that there are superior beings (Gods)
on other planets in other galaxies. To help stamp out (destroy)
ignorance destroying its major purpose changing ignorance to
constructive creative progress. To use these spiritualcosmic values for the greater advancement of all people of
earth and creative live beings of the galaxy and galaxies beyond
the central sun. To establish spiritual energy refilling houses
where people can come to refill themselves with spiritual energy and to seek their “natural Creator” (God). To perform works
as the “Creator” wills us, “Ihnfinity,” to perform.
Space
111
Sun Ra and space go together like Shakespeare and a
convoluted metaphor. The Solar-Myth Arkestra, one of about
60 different names that the band performed under, was
like a crew for a heliocentric space-ship that had only been
invented in the quasi-dimensional world of harmony and
timbre. But they were well trained. Romantic involvement
was frowned upon, and drugs of all kinds absolutely forbidden.
They had more important stuff to do. They had to prepare
the world for the coming of the Spaceways. Ra was a True
Fundamentalist of Modernism.
Politics
Through one important Percepto-Lens, Ra made an enormous
contribution to the aestheticization of black resistance to
oppression. Africa, and especially Egypt, via the Cosmo-Sun
Connection, the heliocentricity that put the Sun in Ra and the
Ra in Sun, became a powerful floating metaphor. Yet, within
the free-floating domain of non-causality, the Cosmic-EgyptCreator complex serves as an exploration of an ultimate
Otherness drawn to the centre of our experience.
Though Ra’s music had an arcane meaning, it also spoke
to anyone who wished to change dancing partners in the
Eternal Waltz of Self and Other.
Music
Ra was like a Medieval Kabbalist, playing both sides of an
argument with equal force and passion. He encouraged his
band to play “the wrong way,” because any old bunch of
schmucks could play music the right way. He once told his
bassoonist James Jacson:
Mysticism
Sun Ra was the most mystical a human can get before transmogrifying into a Pure Cosmic Trace. Perhaps because of
his love of jokes and conceptual conflict, many saw him as
something of a kooky guy. Yet his cosmological philosophy
was steeped in learning, comprising intimate knowledge of
Egyptology, Biblical exegesis, Rosicrucianism, African myth,
numerology, and crypto-linguistics. Ra was as much Yeats
as Blavatsky, a modernist squeal through the brass tubes of
mysticism, a clinker and a clanker in a junkyard that doesn’t
exist here yet. Ra brings us back to everything that was far
out in that first blast of the modern, the sense of the automatic, the inversion of leftover histories, the exploration of
“an uncertain borderland for which ordinary language is not
shaped.”
How to Buy a Sun Ra Record
You should never choose to buy a Sun Ra record—it should
choose you. Go to a record shop and find the section marked
Sun Ra. Shut your eyes and slowly flip through the covers.
Stop when a strange heliocentric sub-pulse wave vibration
emanation occurs. Select the record you were touching at
that precise moment and purchase in the normal manner.
But you should read John F. Szwed’s brilliant Space is
the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra. It’s one of the best
books ever written about anything.
Jacson, play all the things you don’t know! You’ll be
surprised by what you don’t know. You know how many notes
there are between C and D? If you deal with those tones you
can play nature and nature doesn’t know tones. That’s why
religions have bells, which sound all the transient notes. You’re
not musicians, you’re tone scientists.
Ra explored every conceivable musical genre, and many
that defy earthly classification. He always used a big band,
embracing the whole jazz tradition from swing to the avantgarde to the blues to classical. It was all music—and it was
all good.
Sun Ra released the single “Disco 3000” in 1975,
20 years before Pulp made “Disco 2000.” This puts things
in an appropriate perspective.
Technology
While Kraftwerk were still wearing short lederhosen, Ra was
experimenting with early electronic instruments. Electric
Pianos, Moog synthesisers, theremins, strange homemade
clavinets, found objects and an African Space-Drum all found
their way into the band. He also used a lightning drum, a
space harp, a space-dimension mellophone, a space master
piano, an intergalactic space organ, solar bells, a sunhorn,
Egyptian Sun Bells, an ancient-Egyptian Infinity Drum, a
boom-bam, and a cosmic tone organ. Some of these were
regular instruments transformed by intentionality into a
new cosmic purpose. Others were altogether more
112 mysterious.
opposite: Film still from John Coney’s 1974 film Space is the Place.
Courtesy Plexifilm.
overleaf: Covers of 50 editions of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.
Courtesy Dr. Zeus. See <http://drzeus.best.vwh.net> for full collection.
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Scent from the Future
Miryam Sas
Aging futures have a special scent. In Tokyo, one of them
smells like coffee. Old-fashioned grinders and French presses
surround the quietly reading customers in the Caravan Cafe
in Iriya, a neighborhood in a corner of the shitamachi, Tokyo’s
old “downtown.” With its partly empty concrete high-rises
and the 10-story furniture store, Hayamizu, that recently went
under, Iriya has taken a hit in the economic downward spiral,
the shaking of the postwar dream of ever more growth and
velocity. But customers at Caravan seem hardly to care. In
the slow bubble of water boiled individually for each
demitasse, in the sound of beans ground fresh for every cup,
the passage of time seems irrelevant. The grandmother and
grandfather who run the shop keep it open for limited hours
only four days a week. The aging wood of the walls exudes
the atmosphere of coffee.
Sometimes, as I rush by toward the station, past the
cheap smoke-filled beast of Doutour, the chain store that
speckles the landscape of Tokyo, I wonder how long Caravan
will last. Other times, with attendant guilt, I jump in and out
of Doutour myself to grab the 60-second mechanized “cappuccino.” Velocity and rushing, the feeling of being pressed
for time, pulses through and around the city today everywhere,
in the flow of traffic and the subterranean passages, but it is
also everywhere interrupted and held in check. There is no
flux without reflux, as Walter Benjamin has written—and that
reflux, those moments of ebbing or backward flow, can bring
with them astonishment.
When Hirato Renkichi distributed the First Manifesto
of Japanese Futurism, he did not imagine that it would be
read in the 21st century. He did not believe in preserving
the past: “Try sniffing the abominable stench behind piles
of books,” he wrote. “How many times superior is the fresh
scent of gasoline!” Legend has it that he stood on a corner in
Hibiya Park one winter day in 1921, just outside the Imperial
Palace, handing out this self-published leaflet to crowds that
he took to be the newly constituted “masses.” In fact, his leaflet itself played a part in making of that unending flow
of human bodies the collective “we” that was mirrored
proleptically in his prose. He celebrated the power of the
teeming numbers that partake of the urban technological
sublime: the world of “speed and light and heat and power.”
At the time when Hirato Renkichi wrote this First
Manifesto, the concepts of Futurism had already been
introduced in Japan, mostly through the visual arts and art
criticism. Mori Ō gai had translated Marinetti’s manifesto
three months after its appearance in the French Le Figaro,
for the May 1909 issue of Subaru journal. The year before
Hirato distributed his Manifesto, Russian Futurist David
Burljuk had caused a sensation in Tokyo with an exhibition
of Russian contemporary and Futurist paintings. Hirato’s
Manifesto was among the first Japanese works to respond
directly. The work appeared in two parts, a section that took
a form parallel to Marinetti’s own manifesto, and a
116 prose poem called “Wish Toys” that followed.
Hirato reveled in the hard words and misogyny of Marinetti, and praised him for his disruptions of syntax and his
love of the cinematograph: Hirato Renkichi’s “truth”
was a lightning dance of instantaneous changes. With its
continuously gyrating text, Hirato’s manifesto seems a
desperate effort to lift off from the weight of his own sickly,
decaying body. Hirato’s writing is composed of bright,
momentary flashes mixed with shadows—the underside of
the city, its decay, degeneration, and contagions flow under
the surface of velocity he evokes in his text. In particular,
the prose-poem “Wish-Toys” appended to the manifesto is
weighed down by images of illness. Was Hirato himself,
who would die the next year, circulating contagion as he
passed his manifesto along with his breath through the air
of the city?
Futures always have their hauntings—the frailties of
both machine and flesh. They have their vanishings, like the
pause in time (does it still exist?) and reflux provoked by the
very air of the Iriya Caravan. Along with his hopes for the transcendent collective and the brilliant dynamo-electric light of
forward progress, Hirato gives us a glimpse of those pauses,
those moments of disappearance, that flicker of chaos and
erosion. There is more than a whiff of Marinetti’s fascism in
the Japanese Futurist Manifesto, but this odor mixes with a
more organic scent of desiring-machines and the decomposing possibilities of the sublime.
opposite: Hirato Renkichi’s Japanese Futurist Manifesto, featuring a photo
of the author.
Manifesto of the Japanese
Futurist Movement
Tokyo === Hirato Renkichi
Mouvement Futuriste Japonais
Par R —— H Y R A T O
Futurist poets sing the praises of the many engines of civilization. These enter directly into the internal growth of the
latent movement of the future, and sink deeply into a more
mechanical and rapid will; they stimulate our unceasing creation, and mediate the speed and light and heat and power.
Trembling heart of the gods, the central active energy of
humanity emerges from the core of collective life. The city is
a motor. Its core is dynamo-electric.
“The chameleon of dancing truth” === multicolored
—— composite —— a diatonic scale of light seen in the boisterous dance of a kaleidoscope.
The gods’ possessions have been conquered by the arms
of humans, and what was once the gods’ power generator
has today become the city’s motor, participating in the functioning of the humanity of millions.
We, who like to be instantaneous and quick on our feet,
are much indebted to Marinetti, who loved the bewitching
changes of the cinematograph; we
adopt onomatopoeia, of course,
and mathematical symbols, and
all possible organic methods to
try to participate in the essence of
creation. As much as possible, we
destroy the conventions of diction
and syntax, and most of all we dispose of the corpses of adjectives
and adverbs; using the infinitive
mood of verbs, we advance to
unconquerable regions.
The instinct of the gods has been transferred to the city,
and the city’s dynamo-electric has jolted and awakened
humanity’s fundamental instinct, and has appealed to that
power that attempts to push forward directly and vigorously.
The control formerly possessed by the gods has moved and
become the organic relations of all life, and here dark animal
fate, that stagnated discord, is beckoned out of its subservient condition; the straightforward mechanical disposition
becomes a brilliant light, becomes heat, becomes constant
rhythm.
MARINETTI — <Après le règne animal, voici le règne
méconique qui commence.>
We are in the midst of a powerful light and heat. We are the
children of this powerful light and heat. We are ourselves this
powerful light and heat.
Intuition should be substituted for knowledge; the enemy
of Futurism’s anti-art is the concept. “Time and space have
already died, and we already live in the absolute.” We must
quickly volunteer ourselves, dash forward blindly, and create.
All that remains is simply the active energy of humanness that
attempts to feel directly a supreme rhythm (god’s instinct) in
the chaos before one’s eyes.
Most graveyards are already unnecessary. Libraries, art
museums, and academies are not worth the noise of one car
gliding down the street. As a test, try sniffing the abominable
stench behind the piles of books —— how many times superior is the fresh scent of gasoline!
nothing in futurism that deals in flesh
There
is
—— freedom of the machine —— generosity —— direct movement === only the value of absolute power’s absolute.
Wish-Toys
Fermentation ...... brrrr, boura, biyurrra, babiyurrrr,
biyurrr ...... the small explosion of a basic element that can’t be
seen. Felt in her
, the itchy clamor of tomorrow.
The unknown brilliance of the alchemist, bbbau .... byuxxxx =
tens of thousands boiling over in my head.
City of Tokyo enveloped in the stench of hospitals. Like
the Holy mother who prays for the red jewel-colored setting
sun above you, I pray for roads of good asphalt. I pray for the
music of the citizens walking. City of Tokyo covered over with
roses, for the brightness of stars, to people...
Girl with a diseased eye man wrapped in a bandage phosphorescent stolen child tuberculosis beriberi drippy nose
weakling college student —— specimen of a nervous breakdown —— the feebleness of you and women, powerless to
resist —— kikku, kukkokku, keekku, kerokku, hiyara, vuvuvuvuvuvu, fuyangihiyaXXXXhu —— ha —— hu —— ha —— hu —— ha
—— hu —— haXXXXXXXXvorura, vuwibonda, borurura, do,
dodo —— dodo —— doni —— doni, vavau —— vavya, vyau ——
vurara —— rarararararara —— dodo —— doni === automobile
=== seeing off facefacefacefacefaceXXXX an invalid’s fear
and shuddering.
city city
—
city city city
people people people
city city
people people people
city city—
people people—
get sick.
Automobile —— sidewalk doctor —— passing glint of light.
Orphan of originary humanity.
Strong light and heat and orphan —— me —— my aspirations!
Decorate with a rose, muddy ditches of Tokyo —— the tenement houses and old Japanese houses mildew of office buildings on the rooftops where the sun never shines —— decorate
all these jails of servitude the embankments the roads, decorate them with the flowers of the drops of blood of a beautiful
woman, that surround the millionaire’s villa.
APHRODITE! APHRODITE!
Splendor of beauty, her blinding fire, go back home to the
inherent nature of woman, commit suicide, you housewives
who stink of rice-bran.
Scatter roses, anoint yourselves with aphrodisiacs, music
of the flesh —— indulgence of the faint life on the surface of
the skin —— into the nuance of fatigue and fire, give a strong
masculine breath. Nirvana of reality. Snow white, pink, cream,
fauve —— in the reflection of the multicolored roses, grasp
the light of silver and pearl eternity.
Vanish from my sight! Sun • moon • stars and all brilliances
that silhouette black human forms. Idealist Catholic priest
philosopher whose manteau reverses to vermilion and velvet.
If the strong light that makes you hesitate on the threshold
were to come, if there were a strong strong light greater than
sun, moon, stars, lamps ..... Vanish from my sight!
By Hirato Renkichi
Futurist Poetry
Collection
By Hirato Renkichi
Futurist Novel
Spiral
Staircase
forthcoming
No Day
forthcoming
Welcome to the imagination Tokyo
of aNaka-Shibuya
new era!
819
Hirato Renkichi
Translation: Miryam Sas
The Cabinet Time Capsule
Coined in 1939 by Westinghouse publicist G. Edward
Pendray on the occasion of the company’s seven-foot-tall,
torpedo-shaped container built for the 1939 Word’s Fair, the
phrase time capsule gained full acceptance into language
when the Oxford English Dictionary opened its hallowed
covers and allowed the American term into its 1989 edition.
But the concept predates the wording, if not language itself.
The Babylonians and Sumerians, for example, inscribed
messages to the future on clay tablets in their building
foundations, and many ancient cultures buried artifacts
along with their dead for future use. One feature, however,
distinguishes the contemporary American notion of the time
capsule from its precursors: the instruction that the capsule
be re-opened at a specific date. Historians usually credit Mrs.
Charles Diehm, a Civil War widow, as having masterminded
the first time capsule to achieve its targeted retrieval date.
Sealed in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition, the Century
Safe was to be opened during celebrations for the US bicentennial. When President Gerald Ford, presumably accompanied by Betty Ford, opened the capsule in 1976, among its
contents was a book on temperance. The first scientific time
capsule waited for assembly until 1940, when Dr. Thornwell
Jacobs, president of Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia,
devised the Crypt of Civilization to be opened in 8113 AD—
a date as far into the future as 1940 was from 4241 BC, the
presumed year in which the Egyptian solar calendar was
established. The Crypt’s carefully selected array of items was
meant not only to offer a full record of life in 1936 but also to
preserve all the accumulated knowledge of mankind up until
that time. It remains buried on the grounds of the college.
For this issue, Cabinet is gathering material for a time
capsule of its own. Being a magazine, we will traffic in what
we know best: words and images. We therefore encourage
you to send for our time capsule either a small photograph
(4 by 6 inches or so) taken on 1 September 2004 of the sky
immediately above your house, or the most interesting
sentence you read on that same date. The gathered photographs and texts—an ersatz magazine of sorts—will be
placed in a sealed container and interred in the Burial Plot at
Cabinetlandia, the tract of scrubland in New Mexico owned
and operated by the magazine (confused or otherwise
incredulous readers should please refer to issue 10).
Since we would not like the US government to accuse us
of any Sumerian tendencies, we will set a date for the
capsule’s retrieval: 1 September 2014. It may, of course,
transpire that the magazine is no longer active then and that
the capsule will not be retrieved. In that case, its contents will
opposite: Miscellaneous objects from the Westinghouse time capsule created
for the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair. The metal cylinder was buried 50 feet
below the surface of the Westinghouse pavilion grounds alongside the earlier
Westinghouse time capsule created for the 1939 World’s Fair. The two capsules were intended to survive 5000 years and be opened in the 7th millenium
121
AD. A marker in Flushing Meadow Park in Queens indicates
the internment site. Photo courtesy Westinghouse Corporation.
remain a magazine-in-the-making, possibly with no readers,
or none whose existence we can predict. In this way, it will
be, perhaps, not unlike the magazine you are holding in
your hands.
For more information on time capsules, see the website for the International Time
Capsule Society run by Paul Stephen Hudson. <www.oglethorpe.edu/about_us/
crypt_of_civilization/international_time_capsule_society.asp>