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In the New Republic of Digital (Re)Production

Posted on: Thursday, 17 March 2005, 03:00 CST

A brief historical account of the unfolding of photography as a weapon of the state against revolutionaries and troublemakers serves as context for our description of recent developments in digital imaging production and reproduction. We distinguish specific photographic and digital imaging practices from oppressive state security practices using the same technology.

We have a new master of the subtle, concealing, and transpolitical art of transparency (Baudrillard 9-10). "Terrorism is terrorism.""When I say I'm a patient man, I mean I'm a patient man." Distancing himself from his libertine predecessor, the new master transcends the ambiguities of the meaning of "to be." securing a dynasty in the veritable tradition of neutralizing the opposition, the Commander-in-Chief leads by commanding: "get your ass over here, and I mean get your ass over here." In fact there is some evidence for the suspicion that some bodies have begun to take leave of their clothing in ironic attempts to insist on the legal right of habeas corpus. What is less clear, however, is whether there are really invisible people who have been whisked from their garments or perhaps have simply taken leave of them to avoid being detained without legal representation. Whatever the case, garment- removal and the disappearance of people "of interest" are not new phenomena. There are, for example, the dead communists of 1871 and some Americans from the 1950s, another period of anti-liberal consolidation and cowardly conformism, whose traces we will soon follow. Missing bodies sometimes return, unexpectedly.

Despite some pretenses of navet, the commanding of docile bodies is not news for the public. We know and applaud the pedagogy of the various "bubbas" who commandeer our police departments, courts, and prison systems. Hard bodies everywhere, lean-and-mean machines that prefer ripping a good piece of ass to making love any day of the week. So, we know what the Chief wants when he says "get your ass over here." The enlisted personnel at Abu Ghraib understood and made digital displays for the Chief's purview. What could be clearer: the transpolitical politics of "Do you share our values?" rules over the subjection of dark bodies. "Make love not war" might soon become a cynical, neo-con caption attached to these digitally transmitted images from Abu Ghraib. If your body isn't hard, rich, and white, it had better disappear before it gets twisted in terrorist detention cells.

But, many might protest, the American government would never go after ordinary, law-abiding citizens. These are difficult times. Extraordinary measures are necessary to defend ourselves against terrorists. And besides, everyone holding an exemption or deferment from search, seizure, and armed service loves a sacrifice or two. Those of us who can recall (not very fondly) the old Selective Service easily recall (with even less fondness) those privileged ones with deferments from military duty. These higher beings (a.k.a. Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft) have the heavy responsibility to arrange that lesser beings such as Private Lynndie England take the necessary fall to assure us, once again, that, despite certain regrettable negative aspects, sacrifices are necessary for the realization of the higher good. These are memorable Halliburton moments, brought to us by the new world communications of the corporate media. A writ of habeas corpus presumes too much innocence in general. There can be no presumed innocence for those in the axis of evil.

Terrorism is terrorism, of course. Yet it becomes real in the sense of a felt quality only when you lose your exemptions. A change in your status changes the way you see things. Things become crisper when you are "1A" (number one for military draft), which is something quite different from being "A1," as in the steak sauce used to cover traces of bleeding animals. Excellence is like being rich; it is always achieved at the expense of others. The best and the brightest know how to kick ass. Transforming intelligence into a weapon of mass destruction represents one of Western civilization's most successful sublimations. You don't have to be a certified Selective Service agent or rocket scientist (an "illuminating" metaphor) to know the difference between "1A" and "A1" types.

When twisted bodies aren't human, we do not feel their pain and humiliation as much as our own. What Descartes once said about animals is today said about things: the inorganic might squeal but it doesn't experience pain. After centuries of suffering, some animals have made the "friends of humans" security category. Not many, but a few. Most are still tortured for the sake of humans, but at least we have progressed to the point of knowing that they suffer as we torture them-some sort of Orwellian advance is thus announced. But things...well, they simply exist for our sake, without feelings, without minds, without influence on their masters. That's how things stand, or fall, at the moment; you're either ON or OFF, you either get it or you don't, it's ALL or NOTHING time. In brief, it's digital time with a few analogue or retro moments tossed in for a little reality effect. One of the latter might go something like the following.

Some still believe there should be articulate protests against injustice. Animals protest, but higher beings with deferments do not see, hear, or feel their protests. So animals in protest must be heard through the voices of people able to translate their squeals into something akin to human articulations. Who, for example, except the likes of George Orwell and Pete Singer, will speak for the cows, chickens, and pigs? For things, the situation is even worse. "All creatures great and small" was never meant to include things. And it's worse for things since they are excluded from the theological "creature" category. Nor is it likely that the new quantum physics will be sufficient to erase the hard line of distinction between them and us. Nevertheless, we are entangled with animals and things. Confronted with twisted bodies, our minds will continue to remain inhibited by things it cannot articulate. There are always those thing-residues forming our unconscious that we haven't been able to completely translate into our discourse of mastery (Laplanche 93- 8).

However, we are informed by those supposed-to-know that higher beings, not things, are our proper concern. There are no species of things, only nominal kinds. Still, in another retro moment, we note a historical item: what was first done to things is eventually done to animals and humans (Adorno 232). A kind of evolutionary cruelty seems to characterize the human condition. Nietzsche, perhaps prompted by the then nascent spiritual consumerism that has now matured to the total annihilation level, called its sublimated form "spiritual cruelty." Spiritual consumerism thus evolved to save us from the theological evil of really liking the things we are. Transcendence, the quintessential mark of human distinction, at least according to the high priests of spiritual consumerism, carries us away from the dumbness of things to the sublime heights of contemplation and the mind's victory over pain, suffering, and death (Kant 119-23). Or, so it is said. However, nous and our minds are different things, and, we suspect, not even related. The mind's story and ours have not and never will come together -this is the main, although twisted, lesson of Hegel's Phnomenologie der Geist.

Nevertheless, what could form a working alliance are individual minds and things. This is not a reference to the metaphysical concept of correspondence of word/concept and thing, but rather to something like an interaction during which things would look at us while we are looking at them, a double-sided mutuality of reflection. Ernst Bloch gives a beautiful description of such a thing:

That man is seated within himself, looking out, is a simple observation that dawns on one quite early in life. Of course, children do not take it that way only, even when they realize that they are "I"s. They do not just look out at things, but things look at them: the water winks at them with its watereyes, and the cupboard spies them as they pass; it can be very frightening. And if we try to grasp something with too smooth a surface, the polished part seems unfriendly and rejects our grip, whereas something fashioned in another way, something which is graspable, places itself in the enclosing hand. (22-3)

Things looking at us while we are looking at them-that is quite unnerving, especially for the classicist intellectuals and those political powers deriving their support from peoples' conscious and unconscious adherence to what Dewey called the spectator theory of knowledge (23). The pernicious and persistent belief in a realm of being independent of and superior to practical activity continues to support the denigration of things like photography and digital imaging, castigating the products of both as mere semblances and evil simulacra. The excellent ones with the deferments have taught us well: the fixed and unchangeable realm of ideas is as foreign to lowbrow practitioners of the visual arts as it is to all those working under and according to the heavy-handed realism of postindustria\l management. The more materialized and unpredictable the art, the lower its status in the theocratic empire of realism. That's the way it is! Do you get it? There is more than a little irony in the event of digital imaging liberating photography from its "realist" cast given the Realism of those using digital imaging techniques and equipment without any knowledge of either for purposes of making their dissimulating messages perfectly transparent truths. Perhaps virtual liberations are better than the old-fashioned analogue ones. Which brings to mind another retro moment.

About the same time photographic techniques were reaching a high degree of perfection, Nietzsche warned that God's shadows would hang around for quite some time. For the "All or Nothing" world of excellence, the fall of the "All" from power entailed the total destruction of the created realm, and the sooner the better. Nihilism, in other words, was just beginning to cook at high heat. There was evil everywhere. And only "The Shadow," a radio program metaphor for the new American Empire, knew the evil lurking in the hearts of men. This Shadow Empire was just beginning to demand everything and to command everyone. Instead of Nietzsche's "gay science," the Shadow Empire began its ascent to noontime by demanding a new positivism, a new theology of certainty:

Metaphysics is still needed by some; but so is that impetuous demand for certainty that today discharges itself among large numbers of people in a scientific-positivistic form. The demand that one wants by all means that something should be firm (while on account of the ardor of this demand one is easier and more negligent about the demonstration of this certainty)-this, too, is still the demand for a support, a prop, in short, that instinct of weakness which, to be sure, does not create religious, metaphysical systems, and convictions of all kinds but-conserves them. (Nietzsche 288)

The new secular Empire born in revolutions had to restore Certainty after the death of God. Science and industry are enlisted for this fundamentalist project, which they serve, but not without also yielding unpredictable and uncontrollable effects.

Prefiguring the birth of the secular Empire, the effects of telescoping and microscoping lenses were uncontrollable by the powers of church and state. Galileo revealed the absence of the Christian god in the imperfect heavens of his telescope. Leeuwenhoek and his microscopes paved the way for anatomical research and the demise of the absolute separation of human and animal. Evolutionary thinking had begun even before Louis XVI lost his head in Paris. As photographic syntax and lenses became further refined, it was clear that the Christian god was nowhere far or near. Lenses got bigger and faster, as did cameras and films, everything expanding in the direction of a new secular empire in pursuit of Certainty. Industrial capitalists waged war against the plantation capitalists in the New World, advancing the Empire towards noontime. Photographer-for-hire Roger Fenton carefully posed battle scenes as millions of expendables were slaughtered, obscenely from the camera's point of view. Fenton's financiers were especially sensitive about the families of the soldiers, whom they didn't want frightened by the horrors of war. As Madonna would say to her viewers many years later, "Strike a pose."

Posing is a ritual required by Realism and its politics. Realism is censorship and posing, both taking the form of a mandate for the new art of photography. But, as the civil war photographs of Matthew Brady and his team show, there is always a counter-realism to Realism. Brady and his team photographed the Civil War head on, an unposed realism or experimentalism countering the staged effects of Realism. To its dismay, Empire on the way to noontime had to now deal with this anti-Realism realism.

In 1871, hundreds of photographs were taken of celebrating Communards during the short-lived Paris Commune. When the Commune fell under the force of the French Empire, the police used these photographs to identify the revolutionaries. Since Benton was not at hand for the job, no photographs were taken at their executions. However, an unidentified photographer did take a photo of seven of the twenty thousand insurgents murdered by the Versailles troops during May 21-28 in 1871. The seven dead Communards are shown in their coffins and only partially covered with sheets. Apparently, these poor bodies lost their garments to passersby. Today, before being put on display, they would lose their internal organs as well.

With the exception of a few raw photographs, photography refined became an instrument of Empire against terrorists. Strike a pose! Posing and being posed are, however, different practices. Consider what Dewey wrote in 1929: "The theory of knowing is modeled after what was supposed to take place in the act of vision. The object refracts light to the eye and is seen; it makes a difference to the eye and to the person having an optical apparatus, but none to the thing seen. The real object is the object so fixed in its regal aloofness that it is a king to any beholding mind that may gaze upon it. A spectator theory of knowledge is the inevitable outcome" (23). But something hostile to Empire happens when the mind that gazes sees not regal aloofness but rather the horrendous effects of management. Near the end of the nineteenth century, some photographers began to practice social criticism with their cameras. The Danish photographer Jacob A. Riis published his How the Other Half Lives in 1890. Between 1908 and 1914, the sociologist- photographer Lewis W. Hine photographed the exploitation of children in the American sector of Empire (Freund 103-14; Barthes 11). The subjects of Mine's photographs were posed in the realist manner for counter-realist purposes. Hine and the New Deal Farm Security Administration photographers were the anti-Realist realists who first showed us the visible effects of unrestrained capitalism and the Great Depression.

What we are calling photographic anti-Realist realism refers to specific forms of resistance within the constellations of power employed by Empire. In 1930, Bertolt Brecht coined the phrase Umfunktionierung to designate the alternative and transformative practices working within but against the deployments of Empire's powers. Functional transformation is the central motif of Walter Benjamin's 1934 essay "The Author as Producer" (768-82). Realism advocates the purely mental and vertical form of transcendence first articulated by Plato and Aristotle. Photographic anti-Realist realism, however, shows the effects of that transcendence on those falling under its yoke. It is a practice of freedom within the bound and oppressive conditions of work reduced to mindless execution under management by non-workers (i.e., higher beings). It is a bound, horizontal form of transcendence that the later Michel Foucault described as simultaneous critique and self-formation (18). Those selected for service sometimes spread out horizontally, connecting in ways that effectively counter the vertical integration and assimilation techniques of excellence.

The idea of a timelessspaceless perfection has been the backdrop for posing subjects. And subjects continue to be posed according to this model of excellence, always distorting and sometimes completely obliterating the unique characters of subjects formed by their own practices and experiences. From workers and peasants posed in stiff collars and other accoutrements of the leisure class to those endless scrapbooks of little boys dressed as sailors and little girls as Easter parade models, we come upon the rituals of vertical transcendence to which we all have been subjected. Caring for one's self requires examination and critique of one's modes of subjection. We are created beings but we can also recreate ourselves, as well as the others who perhaps had something to do with creating us. Now, however paradoxical it may seem, we are getting closer to digital time.

Between 1953 and 1958, Billy and Barbara collected and organized some photographs into an album. These images, although greatly varied in content, could all be categorized as "snap shots" since they apparently document some of the experiences that Barbara and Billy had during this period. As things usually go, fifty years later the album and the photographs were purchased at an estate sale. Now we present them here in digitally manipulated form, announcing a new digital republic emerging within the Empire of Certainty and transparency.

As the snapshots of Barbara and Billy illustrate, the rituals of posing have changed very little. A "snap shot" has its own conventions for posing and capturing, conventions derived from the hunting and killing activities of the higher beings of Empire. The photographed bodies of Barbara and Billy confirm these rituals and thus beckon viewers to engage a certain framework of looking. What Roland Barthes called the "Spectrum" of the photograph (9) is the captured little simulacrum that people carry around close to their hearts or other body parts. Snap shots are little museums for ordinary folks. Paradoxically, captured likenesses inhabit the various and increasing museal spaces of our lived world. After all, our commitment to vertical transcendence requires that our everyday lives reflect our philosophical beliefs. However, we did something else with the spectrums of Barbara and Billy-philosophical perversity can be a photographic practice, especially in this age of technical (re)production.

Today an increasing number of images are filtered through computers and imaging programs. The possibilities created by these digitized translations problematize the idea that photographs represent what is really out there. The photograph as document has the modern meaning of "warning," which still has a connecti\on to its earlier meaning of "lesson." What was dropped in the metaphysics of photographic realism, however, is the addendum informing us that the lesson should be carefully examined before it is imbibed. Such an examination requires more than intellectual contemplation; it requires practices and their conceptualization. Digital imaging thus revives the addendum. Somewhere between the input and output of digital imaging, the metaphysical tradition of photographs as selfevident evidence, as documentation, as unambiguous marks of times and places, and as uncoded likenesses of people and things, becomes unfocused. Remember, however, that if you are selected for serving Empire, issues become as crisp as their urgency. The lesser being selected for service also wants to make things less focused for the higher beings of the selection process. In this spirit of perverse compliance, the fact that we can now seamlessly reconstruct an output image also means that we can conceal the very manipulations that blur the distinction between analogue and digitized images.

For example: "Is it real or is it Memorex?" comes by means of a digital platform for the old metaphysical purpose of deceptive Realism. To be sure, digital coding does rely on traditional concepts of linearity and continuity but it also disrupts these concepts. Whereas the metaphysical theory of organic unity of composition comes to us from Plato and his insistence that we carve only at the joints, in the digital republic natural joints are precisely those places where cuts can be made. The metaphysical distinctions of natural and artificial and of form and matter are replaced in the digital republic by a pragmatic program of democratic purposes, problems, and available techniques. The new digital republic of images is as anti-foundational as the bornagain "Do you share my values?" Empire is anti-democratic. The Empire at noontime uses digital manipulation but always as cynical, cultic employments of new techniques for the purpose of reinstalling oligarchic hierarchies and their metaphysical correlates. What we democratic artisans must deny in the new digital republic are all claims to transcendent foundational criteria for deciding where to make cuts in the so-called natural order of things. The only criterion that is workable within a democratic, non-hierarchical social context must be as contingent and fragile as the finite human beings adhering to it. The very best we can do in the new digital republic of images, as Richard Rorty has said, is to become aware of and sensitive to the pain, suffering, and humiliation of others who are or may be involved in our manipulation of images.

By scanning Billy and Barbara's photographs into the computer as high-resolution images, the "original" photographs became mathematically rendered redescriptions that are both more complex and more simplified than the photographic redescriptions. Then there are the numerous filters and tools of Adobe Photoshop that also employ algorithms not found in the originals. Consider also the possibility of constructing other filters that could be used to further alter these images. Throughout the process of redescription, the purpose should be kept in mind. As John Dewey pointed out, means and ends form a continuum.

Detective George Reis, who works for the Newport Beach Police Department, recently designed a plug-in filter. This plug-in, based on probabilities, enhances and reconstructs partial fingerprints obtained from crime scenes. Combined with the Automated Fingerprint Idenification System-a database of digitized fingerprints created in 1984-these digital reconstructions are now described as having increased the speed and accuracy of criminal identifications by improving fingerprint matching by 300 percent. Whereas most of us would agree that removing criminals from the streets is a good thing, the use of digital techniques and mathematical algorithms for the purpose of global surveillance raises important questions about their coordinated use by governmental intelligence agencies. We have to ask what happens to "Billy" and "Barbara" (and the rest of us) after they enter systems called "Total Information Awareness"? Do citizens understand the processes and techniques used to create the systems that today describe and classify them? Are citizens still under the yoke of authority telling them their patriotic duty is not to reason why but only to consume and die?

Consider the cynical world of advertising. Do we understand how advertising images are constructed and for what purposes? The pursuit of profits is well understood, but we should ask if the illusion of Truth in advertising is understood as well. Is advertising today simple deception or the confused and confusing result of the cultural valorization of liberal over mechanical arts brought to us by practitioners of the latter in the employ of managers of the former? Or, is the demand for "Truth" in advertising the crazy flipside of the cynicism proclaiming all imagery to be the work of the devil?

The fate of "Billy" and "Barbara" is in our hands. The blue frame made when the light of the scanner reflects against its plastic top contains the surface of the images of Billy and Barbara. This blue frame is evidence of the digitized process reproducing the photographs of Billy and Barbara. Yet, the digitized images can be printed on photographic paper and then placed in a likewise digitally reproduced and appropriately (chemically) aged album. As the secret service agencies have proven, no one could then tell the difference between the "real" Billy and Barbara album and its copy. Have there ever been "originals"? Perhaps everything and everyone is a copy. Copiers, in the hands, so to speak, of some make "original" works of arts. The original is thus a copy that has no original. This is paradoxical only if you continue to think in terms of a Platonic metaphysics-hierarchically. A different way of thinking is relational. If you think relationally, Empire at noontime is only the shadow of the God it murdered. The real criminal is the Empire that displaces its guilt onto the others it commands into service. Maybe we should sentence Empire to "life in prison without benefit of parole"? Here we are faced with the most decisive and difficult aspect of the death sentence question. It is worth noting that President Bush and Pope John Paul have joined hands not on the matter of war but on how to deal with the death sentence question. Together they inform us lesser beings that "the church [Empire] is not a democracy, and no one from below can decide on the truth" (Spillane 6).

So, yes, the culture of the copy does have something to do with countering the culture of the good old boys: "the higher truth sought by men trying to elude the hunchback becomes, for Claude Torey, an other truth, images from la machine-mere-, the machine- matrix, as she presses parts of her body to its face and returns with unforeseen images of herself, freed from traditional representations of the female body" (Schwartz 241). Empire, in other words, can never be too reflective about how it is doing what it's doing. Digitally enhanced images are used as evidence without mention or examination of the algorithms and techniques used to produce these images. Take the example of the Commander-in-Chief claiming on the basis of secret and digitally enhanced, pixilated satellite images that Saddam Hussein was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. Even if these images were declassified and made public, would we then be looking at "possibilities of translation" or "evidence"? How we see depends not only on what we do but also on the ensemble of beliefs and ideals we inherit and find institutionalized in the hierarchy of power relations not yet democratized.

Empire's deceptive use of digital imaging should be contrasted with the digital revolution in popular culture that began in the late 1980s. In 1990, for example, the popular comic book hero "Batman" entered the digital age. Pepe Moreno brought us Batman: Digital Justice, created on a Macintosh computer using computer- aided design, 3-D imaging programs, high-resolution and direct-to- film printers, graphic scanners, and colour monitors. Moreno's updating of the popular Batman legend followed the radical transformation of the Batman story by Prank Miller in 1986. The Dark Knight Returns has its setting in the bizarre world of a media- created image of Reagan as the postmodern President. Distorting Marshall McLuhan beyond recognition, the mass media cynics and CEOs celebrate the death of the old truth and reality. For these avant- gardists, Reagan must be seen as postmodern precisely because, with such media-created simulacra, American politics enters the age of the press conference and the thirty-second campaign advertisement. Reagan, stuttering, hemming, and hawing, with no grasp of either the issues or the significance of the questions, is a perfect choice for this cynical media formulation of postmodernism. Reagan thus appears on the national political scene as the new information age is being transformed into one of flamboyant and decadent style. The rich and powerful are of course very pleased. For the most part, the American public is about to undergo a duplicitous seduction by means of a mythical rhetoric of patriotism, ahistoricity, and the new Christian world order. A new spirit of "standing tall and taking no crap" is in the making. With Reagan and his media creators, we learn to desire what never was but should have been.

Reagan was a product of excellence at work in the media of deception. "Reagan" gave us what we wanted and, unfortunately, what we deserved. Everywhere we looked, from Lebanon to Latin America to Asia to Europe, peoples, governments, and terrorists thumbed their noses and lobbed hand grenades at us. But we stood tall and proud, not having to do anything, analyzeanything, or make difficult decisions. Reagan simply appeared on our enchanted televisions and assured us that everything was well in hand. Ours was one nation, under God. Yet it is precisely the issue of Reagan's competence (or, more precisely, his incompetence) that leads to a remarkable transformation of popular culture.

With the appearance of The Dark Knight Returns, we saw Batman transformed from a quaint apolitical "caped crusader" into a political activist, whose postmodernity is something quite different from that of his president, Ronald Reagan. The Dark Knight eventually takes off his mask and becomes the leader of the mutant gang. It is a different Batman than the one in Tim Burton's movie version and its simple black and white world of the postmodern Reagan. Miller depicts a labyrinth, grey-shaded world of complex, partial, and fragile truths. The Dark Knight's world is one of connections unknown to the science and social studies school books fed to our kids. The old Batman was at home among the towering spires of Gotham. But the new Batman is no longer privileged, no longer a symbol of wealth and the use of powerful technology against enemies in the darkened streets. In the shadowy interstices beneath the gleaming Gothic hierarchies, the Joker appears, throwing stolen money at us. While the Joker watches us scramble, Reagan announces "trickle down" economics. It is an old trick in cynical garb. To counter this deception, Miller portrays a new popular hero for whom presidents are archaic remnants of first principles, monarchs of death and world destruction. The new Batman continues his battle against crime, but he knows that to do that today one must battle the city and its laws. By 1990, however, it is clear that battling Gotham's laws means doing battle with Empire's use of new digital codes. So, counterculture graphic artists now go to work on computers.

The Joker has become a metaphor for state-generated computer codes and viruses. Statoids battle the mutants; Reagan's kids against Nietzsche's kids. Reagan's kids are good consumers; they play team sports, and incubate the gerontological resentment of their father. They hate queers and say "no" to drugs. Subjectivated as zero-sum-tolerance types, they take exams and do well on them but never examine the lessons they're being taught. Above all, Reagan's kids become fascinated by cute but false forms of presentation. This, after all, is what the culture wars are all about: aesthetic fascination versus the anti-aesthetic practices of the irrational mutant gangs. In 1984, A.D. Coleman told us:

The charmingly antiquated commitment to aestheticized forms of presentation-galley/museum exhibits, artists' books, and the like- on the part of so many contemporary documentarians and even photojournalists necessarily restricts their work to a select and extremely limited audience. In effect, they commit themselves to preaching to the converted. Their insistence on remaining within the confines of contemporary art activity leaves an enormous vacuum at the center of the emergent communications environment. That vacuum may well be filled by corporate forces which will surely recognize the importance of these new forms, if documentarians and photojournalists persist in staring into their rear-view mirrors. The time for radical workers to engage experimentally with these technologies is now, at their birth. (72-3)

We should add that culture, in the traditional aristocratic sense, exists only because of and for an extremely limited audience: culture is excellence codified and disseminated among the best and the brightest. Lowbrows simply don't get it.

It would be a costly mistake to assume that the aristocratic sense exhausts the meaning of culture, or, for that matter, ever exhausts the meaning of anything. What Frank Miller and Pepe Moreno did and how they did it is just as important as what they had their creations say and do. Speaking with cameras, computers, and other prostheses is actually more powerful than speaking only with mouths shaped by years of rhetorical or operatic training. The aristocratic tradition comes to us courtesy of servitude. From the theoretical life of the Greek philosophers and the otherworldliness of Christian ascetics to the modern aristocrat so accurately played and depicted by the Marquis de Sade, the separation of idea, concept, and thinking from all types of doing and practice has all the force of the actual division of society into free denizens versus the many who must work for a living. The very idea of "free time" means "not working," or not under the compulsion of following orders. To work with and on things is to become thing-like, and this is largely the reason we don't talk seriously with the hired help. Workers are talked-to, not talked-with. Perhaps we can demonstrate the strength of this tradition by examining a passage from someone very much opposed to this tradition and its philosophical establishment:

Babies and the more attractive sorts of animal are credited with "having feelings" rather than (like photoelectric cells and animals which no one feels sentimental about-e.g., flounders and spiders) "merely responding to stimuli." This is to be explained on the basis of that sort of community feeling which unites us with anything humanoid. To be humanoid is to have a human face, and the most important part of that face is a mouth which we imagine uttering sentences in synchrony with appropriate expressions of the face as a whole. To say, with common sense, that babies and bats know what pain and red are like, but not what the motion of molecules or the change of seasons is like, is just to say that we can fairly readily imagine them opening their mouths and remarking on the former, but not on the latter. To say that a gadget (consisting of a photoelectric cell hitched up to a tape recorder) which says "red!" when and only when we shine red light on it doesn't know what red is like is to say that we cannot readily imagine continuing a conversation with the gadget. (Rorty 189)

But if we follow Rorty's historicist recommendations and place the phrase "we cannot readily imagine continuing a conversation with the gadget" in different historical contexts, it becomes more or less clear that what "gadget" sometimes refers to is what today we take to be a human being. When slaves became two-fifths of a human being, they were still mostly gadgets excluded from human conversation. In other words, the ontological distinction between human, animal, and thing is historical rather than eternal. Cows are dumb but it would be a dummheit to think that that condition is natural rather than one of our own making. Loyalty to eternal verities requires us to regard Vegans as perverts. And not just Vegans!

We might here also mention Niels Bohr, whose notion of complementarity drives certain aristocrats to despair. Bohr's thought followed the trail of ramifications left by Max Planck's 1901 discovery of the universal quantum of action. According to the operative social generality called common sense, our action of observing something does not, under usual conditions of civility, alter what we are observing. However, there are artists, especially visual artists, who claim to know that things can be portrayed only after they have returned our look (Aristotle 418A, 1-7). Bohr came to insist, however, that descriptions of experimental arrangements and the recording of observations must be expressed by everyday language. This, he believed, followed upon the requirements of public testing and verification. So, at the macro level of appearances, both quantum actions and language must cohere. But Bohr also insisted that in all cases when the universal quantum of action cannot be ignored, separate accounts of the interactions between measuring instruments and the atomic objects being measured are not possible because in these cases we must renounce the unlimited combination of space-time coordination as well as the conservation laws of momentum and energy (Bohr 8-16). This has the effect of precluding any possibility of any descriptions of a reality or realities above or beneath the level of appearances. Bohr's commitment to both everyday (macro) language and atomic objects thus required renouncing any depth or ontological reality other than what is manifested within experimental arrangements. For Bohr, therefore, there is no prosthetic-free existence. Although Bohr never used the terminology, we would have to see Bohr as an advocate of the cyborg. As Donna Haraway puts it, "It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine" (177).

Which brings us to one of the most cynical forms of Empire's ersatz postmodernism-Reality TV. Apparently what now sells well on television makes pale the old forms of public embarrassment. Together with the continuing annihilation of public discourse, corporate television is now making huge profits by cranking up the humiliation business, which has proven much cheaper than non- reality programming. Audiences, it seems, love to watch the humiliation of their fellow citizens. The New York Times recently reported the case of Philip Zelnick, who was confronted by someone at an airport in Bullhead City, AZ, wearing a security guard uniform. Zelnick was told that new security regulations required him to lie down on a conveyor belt and pass through an X-ray machine. The conveyor belt was only stopped after Zelnick had acquired many bruises, and his body had started to bleed (reproduced in Times Picayune 1, A6). His screams of pain added to the wonderful humiliation effect. Unfortunately, we will not get a chance to see this particular episode since (as of this writing) Zelnick is suing "Candid Camera." Perhaps Zelnick should contact General Motors, the born-again corporate giant of the automotive world, to see if one of their recently sponsored Christian roc\k groups can schedule a massive audience pray-in for him. One would expect Jesuspaloozas to be friendly towards humiliation victims.

The new digital republic is the on-going creation of all artisans working against the deceptive use of digital imaging. In this new republic within Empire there is nothing surprising about the fact that most young people take Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" as their most reliable news source. That Empire has become material for shtick bodes well for the future of anti-Realism realism. The new republic of digital (reproduction is a metaphor, indeed the return of metaphor by those who insist on understanding how things are done, doing it themselves without management from above, and refuse to use their intelligence against others.

WORKS CITED

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.

Aristotle. "De Anima." The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941. 566-67.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Trans. James Benedict. London: Verso, 1993.

Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Vol. 2: 1927-1934. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.

Bloch, Ernst. A Philosophy of the Future. New York: Herder and Herder, 1970.

Bohr, Niels. "The Unity of Human Knowledge." 1960. The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Vol. III. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1987. 8-16.

Coleman, A.D. The Digital Evolution: Visual Communication in the Electronic Age: Essays, Lectures and Interviews 1967-1998. Tucson, AZ: Nazraeli Press, 1998.

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Freund, Gisle. Photography tir Society. London: Gordon Fraser, 1980.

Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.

Laplanche, Jean. Essays on Otherness. London: Routledge, 1999.

Miller, Frank. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. New York: DC Comics, 1986.

Moreno, Pepe. Batman: Digital Justice. New York: DC Comics, 1990.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980.

Schwartz, Hillel. The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles. New York: Zone Books, 1996.

Spillane, Margaret. "The People's Church." The Nation. 6 January 2003. 5-6.

Times Picayune. New Orleans. 7 January 2003. A1, A6.

JAMES R. WATSON is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University in New Orleans, Louisiana and president of the Society for the Philosophic Study of Genocide and the Holocaust. His publications include Thinking With Pictures (1990), Between Auschwitz and Tradition (1994), Portraits of American Continental Philosophers (1999), and Contemporary Portrayals of Auschwtiz (2000). His current research concerns the degradation of work and its effects on concept formation.

TRISH MAUD is currently completing work for her Masters of Fine Arts at Columbia University. She is an exhibiting graphic artist and specializes in digital imaging.

Copyright MOSAIC Mar 2005

Source: Mosaic : a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature

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