LAST POST OF THE YEAR!!!
I am doing that reading thing that I do. I finally accepted that I am okay engaging with Psycho-analysis. I just can’t work with Lacan. It doesn’t work for my thinking. I’ve read a few things that have allowed this to be okay. Currently I am reading Kelly Oliver’s The Colonization of Psychic Space. It has been fantastic for me. It let me know that my thinking was on the write track and gave me many tools, quotes, and citations to explain why so much of the theoretical canon does not work for my project. So, as I speak into the abyss of the digital, I really want to say think you to Kelly Oliver for writing this book.
One of the things that I am loving is she does such a wonderful deep engagement with Fanon. When I took my Fanon course, and wrote my paper, it was all about getting out of the net of colonization that he speaks about and creating new worlds by taking what exists and imagining it differently.
So when I got to this part on page 42?
If the true revolution is one of imagination, it requires not only the creation of positive values for those abjected by dominant culture but also the revaluation of values such that the very structure of valuation is opened up for transformation. It requires throwing off not only Marx’s imaginary chains but also chains that bind the imaginary and thereby restrict psychic space.
There was a audible yes said and then some frantic typing.
But what does this have to do with Digital Media?
I’ve been thinking through my project and imagination in terms of Performance Studies. That seems like a natural fit. When I read this, it hit me that it is just as valid in terms of engagement with Media Studies as well. The Digital is a realm that allows us to actively engage in imagination towards world making. By being able to pick and choose what we see, what we share, what we put together, we create worlds that encapsulate both alienation and community/communal-ness, while at the same time, directly engaging what Western epistemology has deemed the ultimate form of meaning making (and world making), the Archive. The role of the curator has been expanded. Rather than having a lead curator, there are always multiple curators, putting things together and taking things apart in ways that were not possible before. The level at which this happens goes out of the past realms of possibility (in terms of pace, size, and scale). That isn’t to say new media of the past didn’t change things in similar ways (see the electronic age happened). The Digital is different though. The element of imagination is built into the scripts. While other forms of media engage imagination, I’m thinking especially video games, the biggest difference I see in previous media is that script has a set ending. While technically digital media runs on scripted programs, the script tends to be open ended. It is really a space where the user is asked to imagine the possibilities and make what they will/want. When we couple digital media with social media, we are asked to imagine the possibilities in a way that changes the world we live in, not just the world on the screen, with people we have the possibility of speaking with instead of just speaking to or about. Depending on how we use these tools, the ability to imagine different types of social engagement and create the networks that enable those engagements with the click of a send/post button and the proper hashtag or keyword in miliseconds seems pretty revolutionary to me. And that is awesome.
Image from amazon.com
I came across a book. I’ve since played with the book, looked through it, learned about it, and digitally cut bits and pieces of it up and put them back together again as collages. I realized in speaking to others about this book, that if this book was digitized in its entirety, if in the digital format it could still be recognized as a book, or, as individual photographs, it would lose too much. We would lose too much.
The book is The Secret Museum of Anthropology (The Secret Museum). It was a privately printed book created by the American Anthropological Association in the 1930s. It is authorless and not officially recorded (the inside cover says “privately printed”). There are no marks on it indicating it was ever catalogued. It never received wide circulation, something that is built into its design as a privately published book. Despite being in an area with a plethora of Universities, there is no library around here that has it. But I do. I was able to purchase a used copy online. I know had I found this book in a library, my thoughts on it might be a little bit different. I did not though. Acquiring the book was unique experience in and of itself that helped me frame where my thoughts are headed. Thumbing through the book changed some of my thoughts on digitization.
The book is a collection of photographs that were pirated from a German book titled Das weib bei den naturvolkern : eine kulturgeschichte der primitiven frau (Primitiven frau), published in 1928. The rough translation from Google Translate is “The female in aboriginal peoples: a cultural history of the primitive woman”. Primitiven frau was digitized and is available through the Internet Archive project. The feeling of the two books, even as they contain the same photographs is completely different. The Secret Museum is a carefully edited version of the Primitiven frau, with the photographs chosen for their erotic nature. This editorial liberty limits the ability to look at the book as though it is an anthropological work rather than a pornographic one. That doesn’t mean whoever was responsible for putting this private collection together didn’t try to play as though it were real scientific anthropology. The part of the book I present/perform is the part that does just that. Part of the interactive installation piece I created is a video which can be seen below. It features a series of simple line drawings from the middle of The Secret Museum that attempt to catalog and number different types of breasts found in the photographs of the women whose photographs grace the pages of the book:
When I first received The Secret Museum, the image of the “different types of female breasts and nipple formations” made me laugh, not because it was funny, but because it made me say “of course”. The display of these breasts was the sole purpose of this book. Once I confirmed the source of the photographs, Ferdinand Freiherr von Reitzenstein, and looked up his books only to find that Primitiven frau, the book that contained these photographs originally was digitized, I was shocked. I saw flesh and bones and words instead of just flesh and crude drawings of flesh. In fact, there are more pages of words in Primitiven frau than there are of photographs and x-rays. The drawing included in The Secret Museum, appears on page 61 of Primitiven frau in a section that is 17 pages of analysis where breasts are discussed.
Entwicklung und Grundformen der weiblichen Brust (Development and basic forms of the female breast.), Primitiven frau, p. 61
Instead of seeing this drawing as a numbered series that reduces the women in the book to only the drawings themselves, they exist in a larger context. While the context is problematic, at best, we are able to see the intent of Ferdinand Freiherr von Reitzenstein. Rather than simply creating a book of pornographic imagery, he did attempt to create an anthropological work on “primitive women”. Furthermore, though they are few, in addition to the photographs of nude and partially nude women Primitiven frau contains drawings of jewelry and women participating various acts, and other cultural items, such as songs with music and lyrics. There is even a photograph with fully clothed women. Additionally, the book contains an index. The Secret Museum renders the women anonymous in a way that they can never be confronted as though they existed. The index in Primitiven frau prevents this from happening, because at the very least, we know where the women we are seeing existed. Despite the problematic nature of the book, it has a wealth of information to offer us, even as we look to day in the post-post colonial age.
If The Secret Museum were to be digitized, we would lose the covertness of its creation. For me, that is the most important thing the book has to offer. The seediness of its production and purpose would be lost if the book was publicly and freely accessible. The act of having to search for the book, and find a “deal” on it, or having the book presented with the caveat that it is rare and was never published for a wide audience, the ability to touch and feel the book, to smell and see the pages and random ink colors, creates a performative experience with the book that digitization does not have. Making the book digital would erase so much of what this book does. It would allow us to lose the idea that the original audience that this book was designed for will remain forever hidden. Further, the ability to see the physical product against the digital version of what it was pirated from, on a screen where we can see page upon page of text, creates an interesting conversation around what happens when we lose text. I think seeing the physical book coupled with the digital text truly illustrates some of the issues digitization causes for certain artifacts.
It isn’t that I don’t want people to see The Secret Museum. To the contrary, the more people who can experience the book, the better we can understand, especially in the academy, whose bodies our disciplines were built upon and to what ends. It’s just that I want people to do more than see the book. I want them to experience the book. When looking through the screen at a digital version of a book, or a photo, I find it is too easy to forget that we are seeing something real that existed in a larger context that affected and affects different people differently. To lose the bodies first through a photograph and then through the digitization of a book we lose too much. The material experience of a book that can be taken out of a little bag, the method I choose to unveil the book in my installation performance, takes away the ability to show and remember how easily books like this were, and continue to be, hidden. I fear that in this digital culture of openness and access we forget that even today, there is so much that remains out of reach.
I would like to stress that I do not think the limits of digitization are a bad thing. In fact, I think they are wonderful things that open up new possibilities. The Digital’s tendency to reduce the experience of certain things is the space where I like to play. It is the space that is inherently made of breaks and new paths, breaks and paths that I am exploring in my own dissertation work. Because this is the space of my work though, I think it is important to realize and remember that there are places where digitization cannot translate, where the losses created by access and openess are too great.
Currently reading Cruising Utopia, The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz (Ha! he has a wikipedia page). It made me think of the image Your fictions become history (a current side obsession). It is reminding me that I have a very specific temporal position I work from. I think that it is something I need to… not get over… but be mindful of as I approach people working in different temporal frameworks. How/where we see the importance of time changing so much about how we approach the world. Truly. Also, I feel really dirty for having a temporal framework.
My Basic Temporal Configuration
Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your fictions become history), 1983photograph and type on paper9 5/8 x 6 1/4 inches (24.4 x 15.9 cm
I believe the now is transient at best.
(really, it is fleeting.)
I believe the past is about the future.
(as such, we create both the past and the future)
I believe that this means that the past is the key to the future.
(and the now is a combination of both the past and the future)
I believe memory is how we remember the past.
(it is also the key to how we imagine the future)
I believe that what we remember is faulty.
(and the past determines how we fill in the gaps in the future)
I believe the Digital fundamentally changes how we conceptualize & interact with Memory.
(and this is a big part of what I’m exploring in my dissertation)
I’ve been out of school since I completed my MA at NYU’s Institute of French Studies in 2005. During my studies, I enjoyed looking at the complexity of French identity of marginalized populations in the metropole and DOM/TOMs because it was so different from the US experience, yet so familiar at the same time. Unfortunately, there was not a lot of work being done at the time on the modern version of this complex relationship of Frenchness and Otherness. I always found this problematic because it seemed like the idiosyncrasies that defined the post-colonial age had evolved in to something new.
Since being out of school things have changed. Quite a few book have been published on the issues of identity that modernity has created for populations that exist on the margins of French society. This means I have a ton of books to read this summer to catch up on my old interests. Lucky for me my old intrests seem to be falling in line with the work I hope to do during my PhD and beyond.
While reading Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, And Transnationalism by Dominic Thomas, (I just started it, very good so far), I came across the following passage:
“[M]igritude” symbolizes a kind of “third space” that comes from a “questioning of certain prevalent discursive configurations” and “simultaneous disengagement from both the culture of origin and the receiving culture … within a new identitarian space” (Chevrier, “Afrique(s)-sur- Seine,” 99)
The new “identitarian space” where I am interested in exploring migritude is digital media. For me, almost everything that happens in digital media is taking place in a “third space”, one that is neither personal or social, but both at the same time. It is at once anonymous and personal, meaningful and meaningless, defined by both the producer and consumer. The space between these points, that is what fascinates me and that is where I want to explore identity. What is amazing to me is that these dichotomies never seem to actually cross paths. For me, that space is the digital media space.
So, right now, the questions I am thinking about as I read are:
Can we define blackness in digital media spaces? What are the characteristics of blackness that make it a specific identity in digital media? How does this compare to expressions of blackness using other media?
Anyway, back to the book… and I need to find a copy of Afrique(s)-sur- Seine and add it to the list.