Category: city
-
The image is already fading
This post was recently found in the drafts folder, lost in the database for some five years. Meh.
1.
The image is already fading. This is perhaps the only thing we might want to accelerate within capitalism, although capitalism is not the source of the image, or the fading. Both image and fading have, however, been transformed and accelerated, in some sense, through capitalism.
It is not to excuse capitalism from any of its horrors to ask, as Marx clearly did, what is capitalism productive of? The horrors are the most important, the specificity of those horrors compared to analogous events in other socio-economic forms. Of less importance however, although still not without importance, there are numerous other effects of capitalism. The vampire is not without its virtues. The question is, is there some virtue of capitalism that we might want to increase in intensity, so as to provide a route through which to escape capitalism as such.
Roughly, the answer would be yes. Capitalism does something that must be acknowledged to be a virtue – it makes knowledge productive in a way that is unprecedented. Science, a concept that is highly charged, is internally compromised by the sheer voracity of the capitalist virtue of making knowledge productive. A limit is revealed, the limit of the transparency of knowledge.
The image is already fading. The image of the human, the image of thought, the image of the future. Walking down London Road, high on the walls, stands the reminder of a time before neon and the public relations industry, the ghost sign of W.J.Andrew, Family Grocer, Provision Merchant. Tomorrow someone will discover that the new filter setting on their phone is called ‘ghost sign’.
There’s a curiosity between generations in popular music. The eighties and nineties return, like the repressed, in something that might seem like nostalgia, as though there is no future for the past to fade away from. It cannot be nostalgia, since that would assume there was some time when today was listening to the past, when in fact today’s listeners hadn’t even been born. It isn’t nostalgia, or any other lack. It is instead the flatness of time gradually appearing, through the expanding database. Database flatness, edges of the former times now appear as ragged, those times now, those befores, are less partially inscribed in images and data than now. Yet it is a transition phase, towards the new database times. (Or barbarism). Forward or death, yet there will be no more forward in database time, simply coordinate space. Without the ‘forward’ it smells like death. The problem is whether the future is a future with or without temporality? The image of time is fading in the face of the database. Everything will be dated, but nowhere will time be found. (A new aeon).
“Is there not already in the Stoics this dual attitude of confidence and mistrust, with respect to the world, corresponding to the two types of mixtures – the white mixture which conserves as it spreads, and the black and confused mixture which alters? In the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the alternative frequently resounds: is this the good or bad mixture? This question finds an answer only when the two terms end up being indifferent, that is, when the status of virtue (or of health) has to be sought elsewhere, in another direction, in another element – Aion versus Chronos”. (Logic of Sense, 23rd Series of the Aion, p162).
The ‘black and confused mixture which alters’ has flown its flag, still flies it, yet indifference reigns. Even when indifference is not the order of the day, amongst those activists and organisers and leftists for example, their stance is now so hysterically moral and lacking any future as to suggest it is no longer actual rebellion but merely the inverse symptom of generalised indifference. Moral outrage infects what were once the ‘forces of the future’ with a proto-fascism that will spawn when the conditions call for it. The demand is to negate the forces of capitalism with the idea of the future, a conception of another world, a transcendence of property and profit, yet without weapons (not words) such negation is, like all negation, hollow. The candle in the eye of the cow.
Is this a good or a bad mixture? The image is fading, time is shifting, temporality undergoing a transition as fundamental as the introduction of clock time and Saint Monday may even make it’s return. The aion of capitalism has offered us a peculiar time, needs to offer us a peculiar time, at once Chronos crossing labour but simultaneously Aion forcing exchange. As each moment becomes measured and quantified, de facto, in labour time, each moment also becomes exchangeable, de jure, for any other. In this tense dynamic the image is already fading.
2.
How can we distinguish the image from the event? Through it’s fading. This intimacy of the paint peeling, the emulsion yellowing, the edges fraying, the memory failing, this intimacy of fading is in part the ground of the image. An image that never fades is simply no longer an image. Yet what if this fading itself was becoming ungrounded, fading out, as we cross-fade into the new form. The black mixture that alters has wreaked havoc (through the ‘digital revolution’) on the image, that black mixture made up of the bodies of cameras and lcd screens and red buttons, drifting across the earth and our eyes.
During the late nineties there was an argument amongst film-makers, particularly those who had come into the practice in part because of the digital revolution (the horrors of Blair Witch as symptom). The dominant position of this argument essentially claimed that emulsion-based techniques were little more than neutral tech that would soon be superseded by the CCD improvements. ‘CCD’ stands for ‘Charge Coupled Device’. Within digital cameras the CCD is often referred to as the ‘chip’ of the camera, although it is not the same sort of ‘chip’ that is found within a modern PC. A CCD essentially converts input into electrical charge, as distinguished from emulsion techniques where the film would converts input into chemical charge. The pro-digital proponents pushed the propaganda that the CCD process was, effectively, better than emulsion because it was more accurate. Arguing for emulsion was reduced to ‘clinging to a fetish’. The debate was framed into a ‘forwards/backwards’ push, the digital proponents akin to proto-accelerationists, the emulsion fans converted into something like a luddite technician.
The real question, however, was always the one of the virtues of the mixture. The real error was the functionalism of the proto-accelerationist pro-digital fans, the idea that image capture and production was a functional process. Like all good functionalists, if the process is a function then it is possible to instantiate it in multiple forms and, whilst these forms might have some specificity, this ‘idiosyncrasy’ of the technology was little more than noise in the functional process that could be eliminated in time. Given the right CCD and the right light the mixture would be functionally indistinguishable from emulsion based processes. Digital could be made to look like film. Except it couldn’t, not really, and once that was realised it was soon argued that such attempts to ‘make digital look like film’ were redundant aesthetically.
The real mixture into which the luddite emulsionites and the accelerationist CCD-lovers were thrust was not driven by image capture and production, it was instead driven by commodities, the basic cell of the capitalist body. The new digital cameras were a boost in commodity forms, a new gadget to get, crashing the actual cost of image production and capture. The ‘digital revolution’ occurred not because of the advance of digital technology but because of the cost of film-making. The debates about fidelity, dynamic range, colour constancy, focal depth and various other arcane aspects of the tech were all strange symptoms of a process that demanded the sale of camcorders.
-
City psychosis.
The twentieth century witnessed the rapid urbanization of the world’s population. The global proportion of urban population increased from a mere 13 per cent in 1900 to 29 per cent in 1950 and, according to the 2005 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects, reached 49 per cent in 2005. Since the world is projected to continue to urbanize, 60 per cent of the global population is expected to live in cities by 2030. The rising numbers of urban dwellers give the best indication of the scale of these unprecedented trends: the urban population increased from 220 million in 1900 to 732 million in 1950, and is estimated to have reached 3.2 billion in 2005, thus more than quadrupling since 1950. According to the latest United Nations population projections, 4.9 billion people are expected to be urban dwellers in 2030. – Source: World Urbanization Prospects: the 2005 Revision
Inspired by a reading of Lewis Mumford’s ‘The city in history’ I’m currently beginning a slow process of thinking about the role of the City in the human ecology. I turned to Mumford because of the scattered references to his work in Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ project, and that has already proved productive, not least because of the realization that the ‘paranoid/schizoid’ poles that run throughout that project seem to have some roots in Mumford that I had not registered before. In Chapter Two, for example, Mumford develops his idea of the City as an ‘implosion’ event in human culture that arises from a dynamic between neolithic ‘villages’ and paleolithic ‘hunters’ which gradually produces the role of Kingship, the catalyst for the implosion event of the City. With this implosion event, dominated by a central authority, a new “collective personality structure” (p.60) develops. The idea that this new collective personality structure is one that connects a paranoid to a schizoid position is clear, for example, in the following:
Not merely did the walled city give a permanent collective structure to the paranoid claims and delusions of kingship, augmenting suspicion, hostility, non-cooperation, but the division of labour and castes, pushed to the extreme, normalized schizophrenia; while the compulsive repetitious labour imposed on a large part of the urban population under slavery, reproduced the structure of a compulsion neurosis. (p59-60)
Mumford is enjoyable to read, so far at least, because of his richly interpretative and evocative approach. He develops a very broad synthesis of ideas and histories in order to tell something like an ‘origin myth’ and this is both the strength and weakness of his book so far. At times he seems to be simply telling a story, at other times attempting to synthesise existing knowledge, always hovering on the edge of actually showing anything to be the case, instead maintaining this suggestive dynamic, hence why it seems akin to an ‘origin myth’ that is being presented. That said, this is only the initial impression from the first couple of chapters of the work and is something that I hope changes as I work through his large text. It would be disappointing to find that ‘origin myth’ style continues for all 650 or so pages, which I doubt it does, but it’s still interesting to encounter it.
Reading Mumford prompted me to look at some of the data regarding urbanization and some very limited research brought up the recent ‘transition point’ shift taht made the news around about 2006. The shift from rural to urban world population crossed the 50% urban population mark in 2006-2007 and is still climbing. Using data from the World Bank, as presented by Google, this shift can be seen in the following:
(UPDATE: missing graph it was here once but got lost in server migrations at some point and reconstructing it now would be a right pita, ML 2022)
Although a more interesting graph is the one that represents this growth in terms of regions, as follows:
(UPDATE: again, missing graph it was here once but got lost in server migrations at some point andreconstructing it now would be a right pita, ML 2022)
In the regionally differentiated graph it’s clear that all areas of the world are subject to the same basic direction of urbanisation, although unsurprisingly it is North America that has the highest ratio of urbanised population.
Now graphs are terrible things in many ways, delusion engines of the highest degree if taken uncritically, and so I’m not exactly sure quite what these graphs show and wouldn’t want to make any claims about what’s really going on behind these data sets. However, graphs derive their delusionary capacities from their ability to present ‘seemings’, that is, to show how something seems to be operating. Given this rather large caveat, one of the things that seems to be shown in these graphs is that there is a rather uniform and reasonably drastic increase in urbanisation between the years of 1960 and 2012. It also seems that the data within this particular window is a little odd. I haven’t been able to find an easy source for data that goes back, say, to 1860, let alone 1760 or even earlier but one of the things that seems rather obvious is that whatever the function that is operational within the 1960-2012 framework, it must be a different function from that which was operating, for example, between 1760 and 1960 and that seems to be the case for one very simple reason. If we were to take the left hand side of the graph and simply push the numbers down to zero on the basis on some sort of pattern available from the snapshot in the graphs (Rational Health Warning, see footnote *1), it would seem that such a ‘zero urban population point’ would occur around about 1850. That seems a little odd, not least because the City is a function of human life for far longer than the last 170 years. In fact it might reasonably be thought that the City has been one of the central, perhaps even the most central, feature of human life for anywhere between the last two to four thousand years (cf. Mumford). Of course, ‘urbanization’ and the ratio of the urban to rural population is a different phenomena from ‘the City’ so it might be wrong to conflate the two and in addition the ‘1850’ origin moment points towards something like the heart of the industrial capitalist revolution.
What this data suggests to me is two-fold. Firstly, that it seems like the urbanization dynamic is strong and rapidly transforming the social relations of the world on a grand scale. Secondly, more speculatively, that this is a new dynamic. It’s this second point that interests me after beginning the Mumford and in particular after encountering his idea that the City itself is an implosion event, one that operates like a threshold moment the effects of which are a rapid development of productive forces. If the new rise of the city, the rapid increase in urbanization, is a contemporary event then one thing that suggests itself is that a new ‘implosion event’ might be on the horizon or – more likely – might be the horizon within which we are living. Whilst this is deeply connected to capitalist social relations, in may ways it’s also a separate and autonomous dynamic. If the first implosion event of the City brought forth, as Mumford suggests, a quite radical development of the productive forces then it seems reasonable to think that a new implosion event might do something similar. Given that the first implosion event also involved some shift in the collective personality, it would again seem reasonable to extrapolate another such shift. The question that suggests itself, then, is what sort of city psychosis is developing? If the Kingship role is no longer dominant and the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ spectrum that goes with it is perhaps being superseded, what is the city psychosis of the future?
(Citations from Lewis Mumford, The city in history, Pelican 1984.)
*1. I’m talking, very very informally, about interpolating the data in the graph, which would perhaps best be done with some statistical analytical tools. I’m not equipped to do this but just using data points taken at decade long intervals and noting the difference between one decade and another there is, very roughly, something like a 3% increase from decade to decade, although this does increase in more recent decades reaching 4.92% difference between 2000 and 2010. On the basis of a 3% increase decade by decade, and working back from 33.51% at 1960 gives us a 110 year span for the subtraction to hit zero. This is pretty crude and may well hide some obvious problems, so large pinches of salt please, this is just idle speculation on my part at this moment. For example, the difference in growth between decades from 1960 to 2010 increases each year, from 3.08% between 1960 and 1970 to 4.92% between 2000 and 2010. If I were to look at the pattern of this increase, rather than stop at 3%, then I might find that the increase decreases each decade as we move back in time. The increase would then ‘disappear’ at some point, possibly well before 1850, and a ‘stability’ arise in which urban populations remain steady, or relatively steady. This, intuitively, seems far more likely to be the actual case. It seems, intuitively, that there is some point at which urbanisation moves from relatively stable population to relatively dynamic growth, a point which I would imagine coincides somewhat with the rise or industrial capitalism, but I need to find more data sources (and develop my statistical analytical skills) before I could say anything about this. No doubt there is a lot of work already done on this within geography and so I’ll be looking around in that area for some more material. The ‘World Urbanization prospects’ report linked above notes that in 1900 the world urban population was around 13 per cent in 1900, which would still, very roughly, fit the very rough ‘3% of total per decade’ increase model, since that model gives 15% at 1900.
razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution 