Culture

The Protest Will Be Pervasively Documented

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

The picture below was taken Wednesday night by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a blogger at The Atlantic. The picture depicts one slice of the Million Hoodie March for Trayvon Martin that took place in New York City. It is a parable of our age.

Image by Ta-Nehisi Coates (click image for source)

To begin with, as Coates put it in a previous tweet, “Crazy just a week ago this was just a few bloggers reporters and activists.” In the age of digital/social media, things move quickly. A great deal, of course, has already been written on social media and protests or even revolution, particularly with reference to the Arab Spring. But that is not what I want to focus on here.

What struck me in this image was the double-mirror-like effect of a photograph of people photographing an event. In short, we live in an age of pervasive documentation. What difference does this make, that’s the question.

What difference does it make for the marchers? What difference does it make for the present spectators? What difference does it make for those who experience (if that’s the right word) the event through its pervasive documentation? Thorough answers to those questions would probably yield book length discussions. In the space of a blog post, I’ll offer a few tentative considerations that suggest themselves to me.

First, of course, the march becomes a performance. Naturally, all such protests and marches have always been performative, that is their nature. So perhaps it is best to say that they are performative in a different key. Or, maybe that all such actions were in the past symbolic actions and now they are symbolic actions and something more. What is that something more though? I’m not sure, I’m not a student of protest movements, but I would venture to say the solidity of the record yielded by pervasive documentation foregrounds the individual dimension of the action. The gaze of the camera hails the participant in their potentially distinguishable individuality.

In other words, if the march was only being witnessed and not documented, as a participant the experience would feel more collective. The self is subordinated to the crowd in its collective symbolic gesture. When the symbolic action is being pervasively documented, the self then comes to the fore because my image, my face now becomes potentially distinguishable when the documented record becomes (more) permanent and public.

This is, I should make clear, entirely speculative on my part.

Secondly, for the witnesses present at the scene, those seen documenting the event in Coates’ photograph, the act of documentation changes the experience of witnessing. The witness becomes a documenter, and the two are not equivalent. The consequence, it would seem, is that the event is objectified by the process of documentation. It is no longer an event in whose thrall I am in, it is now an object to me that I seek to capture. This has the effect of stripping the symbolic action of its power, to some degree. The witness is in some sense in the event, while the documenter stands outside of it. I would also suggest that the documenting stance is also in some sense a rationalist, or rationalizing stance. It is creates a different mode of experience — removed, quasi-analytic, detached.

At the same time, however, it may also yield a heightened sense of participation of a different kind. To tweet a picture, for example, or post one to Facebook adds to the totality of the event. The witness has not only witnessed, but also acted in a way that expands the reach of the event. But the action is complex because in a sense the focus is no longer necessarily on the event and its symbolic power, but rather on the witness/documenter’s presence at the event.

Perhaps we could speak of such symbolic actions before pervasive documentation as enacted (rather than preformed) and such actions in an age of pervasive documentation as both enacted and performed. The former locks the participants and witnesses into a mutually constituted field of experience. The latter disintegrates the field into its individual parts, making the participants more conscious of their selves as actors in a spectacle. This is further complicated and heightened when the participants are self-documenting their own participation, which while not capture by this particular photograph as far as I can tell, undoubtedly happened. Also in the latter case, the witnesses are likewise distanced from the event as individuals documenting and publicizing.

The parting question, then, is still what difference does this all make. What difference does it make for the power and influence of such events?

Selling the Future

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Again, from Laura Burd Schiavo’s “Modern Design Goes Public” in Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s:

“From their start, expositions were meant to incite consumer desire.”

The evolution of display techniques:

“In pavillions dedicated to the display of goods, exhibits showcased row upon row of clocks, glassware, and, as industrial production heated up, pyramids of ketchup bottles and other mass produced goods, as well as the machines that made them possible.”

“By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, displays had become more sophisticated, advancing from showcasing product to demonstrating production. The ultimate express of this trend came at the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915, where Henry Ford installed an assembly line that churned out as many as twenty-five Model Ts a day.”

“During the 1920s and 1930s corporations were involved in the development of an increasingly sophisticated public relations strategy … World’s fairs became prime venues for designers to experiment with how design innovation could visually and viscerally dramatize the promise of industrial capitalism … they sought to provide innovative and engaging exhibits that shared a vision of the future, a sense of the power and promise of industry, and an image of the place of consumers in that world.”

Compare Walter Benjamin’s comments on the Paris expositions of the late nineteenth century:

“The world exhibitions glorified the exchange-value of commodities. They created a framework in which their use-value receded into the background. They opened up a phantasmagoria into which people entered in order to be distracted. The entertainment industry made that easier for them by lifting them to the level of the commodity. They yielded to its manipulations while savouring their alienation from themselves and from others.”

Test driving Fords on the "Road of Tomorrow" (NY 1939)

Corporate Modernism

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

From Laura Burd Schiavo’s “Modern Design Goes Public” in Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s:

“[The world’s fairs of the 1930s] were decidedly public. They introduced modern design to the tens of millions who visited the fairs and those exposed to them through extensive coverage in popular periodicals, on the radio, and in newsreels. What might have been an aesthetic experiment or marketing ploy before 1929 soon became an urgent response to crisis. During the Great Depression, the spectacular demonstrations aligned modern design with a vision of a better future that celebrated consumer progress and trumpeted mass production and corporate leadership. The world’s fairs were popular interpretations of what it meant to be modern in the 1930s, lessons that could be taken home and applied to everyday lives.”

Historian David Nye dubbed this collusion of modernist aesthetics with corporate interests, “corporate modernism” (fittingly enough):

“The future that corporate planners imagined no longer had the neoclassical overtones expressed in the architecture at the pre-1915 fairs in Chicago, Buffalo, St. Louis, and San Francisco. The fairs of the 1930s adopted the geometrical forms and flat surfaces of the international style … Indeed the invention of ‘corporate modernism’ was one of the more remarkable adaptations of business to the 1930s. Part of the impulse came from increasing competition among manufacturers, whose products often performed equally well, and who therefore needed styles that set their products apart … To repackage products they turned to industrial designers to rework the appearance of objects, emphasizing sleekness, streamlined contours, and functional appearance. The demand for ‘the new’ beams incessant: last year’s style began to seem second-hand; and corporations increasingly advertised and packaged products as innovations recently arrived from the future.”

Intersection of Tomorrow, Futurama Exhibit
GM Building designed Albert Kahn and Norman Bel Geddes

Displacement and Nostalgia

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

Another tumblr-style post with excerpts from Casey’s Getting Back Into Place:

“… each of us is caught in the toils of displacement. As moderns and postmoderns in the Eurocentric West, we too are displaced persons … and inescapably so.”

The symptoms of this displacement, Casey claims, are “disruptive and destructive”:

“Among these symptoms, nostalgia is one of the most revealing. At the moment, our own culture suffers from acute nostalgia. Proust, living on the edge between the modern and the postmodern periods, described the drama of an entire life delivered over to nostalgia. But we do not need to turn to literature for evidence of the pervasive presence of nostalgia; we witness its cinematic expression in certain of Woody Allen’s films and its commercial exploitation in Disney World.”

This was, of course, before Midnight in Paris.

In Casey’s view, our displacement is in part a function of a faulty conceptualization. The triumph of abstraction over the particular:

“… the placeless is the thoughtless; and if we fail to honor and remember places, this is a direct reflection of our unthinking and increasingly ill condition. Another telling sign is the fact that ‘for the modern self, all places are essentially the same: in the uniform, homogeneous space of a Euclidean-Newtonian grid, all places are essentially interchangeable. Our places, even our places for homes, are defined by objective measures.'”

“The uniformity of space and the equability of time have replaced, or more exactly displaced, the priority of place. If nostalgia is a characteristically modern malaise, this may be due to its covert recognition that a time once existed when place was ‘the first of all things,’ when time and space in their modern (dis)guises were not yet fatally at work. For in the pathos of nostalgia, ‘space and time [are] not yet separable concepts, [they are] scarcely concepts at all.’ But in the modern era we have accepted and incorporated space and time in their objectivity and (in)difference … We calculate, and move at rapid speeds, in time and space. But we do not live in these abstract parameters; instead, we displaced in them and by them.”

For related musings see Fatal Nostalgia and Generalized Anxiety.

Encultured Place, Implaced Culture

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Again, from Edward S. Casey’s Getting Back Into Place:

“Thus we are driven to acknowledge the truth of two related but distinct propositions: just as every place is encultured, so every culture is implaced.”

“Implacement is an ongoing cultural process with an experimental edge. It acculturates whatever ingredients it borrows from the natural world, whether these ingredients are bodies or landscapes or ordinary ‘things.’ Such acculturation is itself a social, even a communal, act. For the most part, we get into places together. We partake of places in common — and reshape them in common. The culture that characterizes and shapes a given place is a shared culture, not merely superimposed upon that place but part of its very facticity.”

“Place, already cultural as experienced, insinuates itself into a collectivity, altering as well as constituting that collectivity. Place becomes social because it is already cultural.”

“The cultural dimension of place — along with affiliated historical, social, and political aspects and avatars — adds something quite new to the earlier analysis … This dimension contributes to the felt density of a particular place, the sense that it has something lasting in it.”