On April 8, 2009, we met to discuss theoretical work on visual media by Lev Manovich and Carol Armstrong. Emily Setina G6 led our discussion of Manovich's "From the Externalization of the Psyche to the Implantation of Technology" and The Language of New Media and Armstrong's Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843-1875. Many thanks to Emily for running the session, and to all who came for joining the discussion! Minutes follow after the jump; further comments welcome.
Participants: If AG has erred in his note-taking, please contact him and he will emend!
Present: Emily Setina, Anne DeWitt, Julia Fawcett, Colin Gillis, Andrew Goldstone, Gabriele Hayden, Susannah Hollister, Jessica Pressman.
Emily Setina: Introduction.
Oppositions in Manovich: internal, private, mental, individual, unique, unobservable, interior versus external, standard, media, public, reproducible and mass-reproduced, communicable.
Main issues in Manovich excerpts: interactivity; role of new media in increasing externalization and objectification of mental life; standardization.
Main issues in Armstrong/James: authorship, artifact; James on the photographic versus novelistic imagination.
ES wants to show Armstrong using James. The linking theme among the readings is the relationship between imagination and media.
Manovich has a dystopian view and a flamboyant style. He creates his own mythology of the doomsday of technological "standardization." His idea of new media as a language (handout: from the introduction to The Language of New Media): "it was important for me to use the word language to signal the different focus of this work: the emergent conventions, recurrent design patterns, and key forms of new media. I considered using the words aesthetics and poetics instead of language, eventually deciding against them."
The two Manovich excerpts were similar, but ES is interested in the way in which the book frames the "Externalization of the Psyche" thesis with the discussion of digital media and interactivity. Manovich relates modernism to interactivity. He criticizes the idea that interactivity must be physical--related, in his view, to the trend of "externalization."
For Manovich, the languages of new media become our languages for describing the mind: technology determines our models of psychology, and in particular we assume an isomorphism between mental representations and the manipulation of visual media.
ES diverges from Manovich on standardization: for Manovich, the externalization of the psyche causes the "private and individual [to be] translated into the public and become regulated" (60). For ES, it's not just about regulation. Literature is a good place to see this. And anyway, isn't all language about making the private public? But in Manovich, technology seems to come nearer and nearer to representing the mind, "objectifying" private states.
ES criticizes the absence of authorship in Manovich, his tendency to talk about the mind as a storage device. Authorship is meanwhile a central issue in Armstrong. Armstrong's book focuses on the discrete artifact, insisting on the irregularity and physicality of the books she discusses. For James in the Golden Bowl preface, the photograph does not standardize but personalize.
James' "shop of the mind" is not "taken from" anywhere but he still wants Coburn to get a picture of it.
Jessica Pressman asked ES how she uses Manovich in her own work. ES' dissertation introduction is about how modernist writers have used technology to write about mental process. Manovich discusses media models of mind.
Anne DeWitt asked ES how she uses Armstrong. ES pointed out Armstrong's heavy use of Barthes in Scenes. Camera Lucida is still a dominant text in photography studies, even though everyone knows it's problematic as a theoretical framework. For example, its most widely influential term, punctum, is its most slippery--according to Barthes, the punctum escapes language, is what you can't talk about. Armstrong argues that Barthes recovers a nineteenth-century relation to the photograph, before the mass-produce image. Cf. Armstrong: "The punctum, the raw datum of those early articles, now exists in a medium, in the studium of the mechanical reproduction. From the present reperusing perspective of our own mass media moment, it might look as if it always already had been" (432).
JP is interested in Armstrong's discussion of the halftone process. She is reminded of Marshall McLuhan on the newspaper and the text-image.
ES emphasizes Armstrong's focus on the language of photograph--its relationship to writing.
Julia Fawcett asked about authorship and the unconscious: Gertrude Stein's automatic writing; Julia Margaret Cameron's deliberate imperfections in her photographs. Is authorship the intentional stamp of an author, or something else?
ES relates this question to debates about the status of photography as art. Are choices about framing, etc. subjective expression? Michael North's essay "Authorship and Autography" [JSTOR] relates the Barthes of Camera Lucida to the Barthes of "The Death of the Author."
ES has worked on Proust and the unconscious through his metaphors of the mind as darkroom, where images develop. The structure of the Recherche is, with its repeating, developing scenes, itself influenced by this metaphor.
JP commented on Manovich's description of the desire to externalize the mind as "modernist."
Andrew Goldstone wondered whether this involved a kind of "techno-determinism," in which technological changes somehow cause shifts in thinking.
Colin Gillis pointed out that one needn't be determinist about it, if the technology is serving as a helpful metaphor. ES, concurring, is interested in Proust's own interest in photography.
Gabriele Hayden remarks that these technological metaphors can be applied as models after the fact.
JF and AD expressed skepticism about a certain media-studies trend towards asserting that the Internet (etc.) changes the way we think.
ES remarks on this as a persistent issue in film studies, particularly in the work of David Bordwell and Jonathan Crary. Crary's Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century takes up the argument that our senses are changed by technological change. ES is skeptical of this argument.
JP comments that Manovich's role in media studies is to be the straw man, making outrageous claims and sweeping gestures. She adds that more recent media studies--including Crary's most recent work--have tended to argue not that technology changes the mind itself but that it changes the way we use it.
AG suggests that you probably still need to be a strong determinist about the relationship between technology and cultural development if you want to use technological change to explain apparently unrelated changes in artistic form. CG argues, alternatively, that you could see technology and ways of seeing (etc) as evolving together. But AG thinks this begs the question, since you'd still need to know what drives the joint evolution.
JP thinks AG is being too linear. (AG protests.) She remarks on the tendency of causal or genealogical approaches to make nothing seem new. Everything comes out of something earlier: film from photography, etc.
GH still wants to know: what's new about new media?
ES points out Manovich's debunking of many ideas about the definition of new media. She contrasts the work of William J. Mitchell in The Reconfigured Eye, who argues that the digital is totally new.
For JP, new media studies shouldn't have to make a stark choice between "new media is new" and "new media is old."
CG doesn't understand Manovich's nostalgia for an untouched interior self. JP wonders whether this is how LM feels. Susannah Hollister criticizes Manovich's naive internal/external distinctions. GH points out that the "externalization of the psyche" is much older: as in Aristotle's image of memory as a storehouse.
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