The Gods of Empire

His prayers are evil who hopes to have someone to hate or to fear in order to conquer them. If, therefore, it was by waging 'just wars,' not impious or iniquitous ones that the Romans were able to acquire so great an empire, why shouldn't Foreign Iniquity also be worshiped by them as a goddess? For we see that She has contributed much to the extension of empire, she who fabricated unjust foes so that there would be enemies with whom the Romans could wage just wars and augment their empire. Why, moreover, shouldn't Iniquity also be a goddess -- at least one of foreign nations -- if Trembling Fear, Pale Terror, and Fever have merited being Roman gods?

- Augustine Of Hippo, The City of God

(Thanks to wood s lot.)

Photography and the Unconscious Panopticon: Part Four

The British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, in 1785, designed a theoretical prison system called the Panopticon. The design was revolutionary in that the prison cells radiate outward in a circle from a central point. At the center of the radius is a warden's room where prison officials have the ability to observe the prisoners at all times while not being seen themselves. The prisoners are isolated from each other by the walls that separate them and are further rendered powerless by their exposure to the constant gaze of the guards. The flow of visual information is always in the control of the prison system. Social isolation and constant surveillance remove all chance of revolt or retaliation from those imprisoned.

This radial model of isolation and visual flow of information has been recreated in some of the technological innovations of this past century. Through the explosion in the ubiquity of media saturation throughout western society, we have created a kind of cultural panopticon in which viewers are divided up into cells that are psychically and geographically separate from each other, each partaking in a radial flow of information inside of their own isolation. Only in the new model the flow of visual information is reversed; in this prison, the viewers receive the visual information, although they have little control over it.

Similarly to the prisoners in the original design, viewers are isolated from each other and incapable of influencing the central hub of power beyond their own individual voice. The visual information flows directly to them in their isolated position and is theirs to consume as they will. The media companies at the hub have tools such as Neilson ratings and so on that allow them to see the aggregate responses of viewers while the viewers themselves have little to no vision into the worlds of the content producers.

Since the primary goal in the media industries is market share, content is carefully crafted to gather as much attention as it can. It does this in part by making the consumption of its programs easy and largely unchallenging. They are designed to attract a broad audience and they do so by appealing to common denominator qualities and unconscious content. Content is designed to evoke familiar and desired affect in a somewhat predictable manner without upsetting much in terms of the form of the experience.

The unconscious effects of the panopticon stretch out beyond the realm of television, radio and print into every aspect of image and content distribution. At the other far end of the spectrum from the distribution model of the television is the curent evolution of social media and networking on the internet. With such complete lateral freedom to reach across boundaries and experience such diversity in the enormous amount of information that is out there, one would think that the radial model of isolation would be broken. But it seems that people in the face of such freedom and choice are not reaching laterally across the internet but rather are dividing up into ever more homogeneous groups. Instead of seeking diversity within the breadth of the internet, people are trending to seek out ideas and information that is similar to or reinforces what they already possess. In effect, the radial walls of the panopticon divide the experience of the internet, only this time the barriers are being established by the choices of individuals as much as the limiting forms of the medium.

The above sketch is by Jeremy Bentham, courtesy of Wikipedia. You can see a contemporary rendering here.

This is part four in a summer serial posting. Stay tuned.

Photography and the Unconscious Panopticon: Part Three

In Wender's film, the characters encounter an experience of the visual unconscious that has never occurred before. They are able to watch actual recordings of their dreams. We rarely are conscious while dreaming, and so the images come back to us in our waking lives as memories, with all the problems that such an ephemeral format entails. Here, the dreams are recorded as little films that can be watched again and again. Where memory is flexible and changing, video is not.

Of course still pictures and moving pictures are quite different in the ways that they work. Film and video carry the viewer along in a visual and aural experience that has a built in sense of time. If nothing else, there is the time that it takes to watch the piece. And then there is the internal structure of how the piece creates or defeats a time-line or narrative. Even the dreamiest of film pieces have a start, a middle and an ending, which is to say that they are a narrative and cannot fail to establish control over the forward motion of time in the viewer.

Photographs are different. They are fixed. Because they are moments frozen and recreated from the past, they are pre-made histories, relics of events that are receding in time away from the present. But unlike narratives, which have a built in experience of time, from the moment that they are taken, photographs are fixed as images. They exist exactly static. The viewer can look at them as long as they like, and the same image will still be there. Because of this, the photograph escapes the narrative and becomes something beyond it, perhaps having more in common with pre-modern paintings than with cinema.

(Might it be possible that photography helped to liberate painting from the representational excesses of the nineteenth century? By carrying the cultural load of image production does photography free painting from its pictorial bounds and release it into the widely varied and wonderful modernist experiments that it achieves in the twentieth century?)

Photographs are outside of time and although they are remnants of things past, they operate singularly in the present. In this way photographs can project history forward in time, and the best photographs escape time by activating inner experience in a present audience.

This is part three in a summer serial posting. Click Here for part four.