Art in the Age of Greasy Surfaces, Pt. 3

This is part of a three-part series relating contemporary aesthetic philosophy to early modern print culture. I freely admit that I have never taken a class in philosophy, art history, or multimodal composition. Please excuse my amateurish attempts at all three.

3. Everything New is Old Again

The medium is the message, right? In McLuhan's thought, media have certain agentic qualities that I'd like to relate to the preceding two blog posts.

I have a few propositions. First, the digital era is a subset of the alphabetical era. This comes from my limited understanding of McLuhan. Second and subsequently, digital networks are a subset of ontological networks. This comes from Harman. Third, networked ontologies--in the sense of Harman's OOO--express their depth through their inexhaustibility. Inexhaustible ontologies imply that technical collaborations are not unique to digital "collaborators," as Sterling proposes.

Let me explain.

The California job case, above, resembles the typecases used by early printers like Aldus or de Worde. These printers represented knowledge in a significantly different way than what had come before in European society--disconnected from either a time or an acoustic space (as in the bardic transmission of information), or a particular, identifiable scribal hand (as in the secretarial transmission of information)--and our contemporary digital technologies amplify print modes of signification--again, across time and space, and distinct from personal allographs (the same differences, as it were).The digital turn promotes the digits 0 and 1 to represent the rest of the case, provided sufficient encoding. That encoding provides the illusion of Sterling's "virtual buddies," but only because machines can "read" certain kinds of alphabets and digits. Yet I contend that this is a narrow view of both reading and human-machine interaction. "Translation" is Bruno Latour's term for any interaction between actants, which Whitehead might otherwise call "prehension."

Digital networks, touch-sensitive screens, internetworked computer systems--these strike contemporary first-worlders as technologies apart and above technologies like the printing press, yet none of these are infused with any magical, vital phlebotinum. Computers operate in meatspace, even though humans can't normally sense the electronic exchanges that occur in microprocessors. Microprocessors made of processed metals and plastics that come from conflict-ravaged resource-rich countries. Your iPhone connects you to Foxconn as materially as fox.com.

Both digital texts and print texts are, after all, inexhaustible. Humans can perceive them in a handful of ways (digital texts can be perceived in a few more, since they might interfere with the relay of interior sensory information: eg, a pacemaker interacts with pulmonary stretch receptors through electronic pulses), but we can also discover our own ignorance through the progress of technology. Radiography, for example, revealed elements of printed texts only visible as high-frequency light or magnetic topology--translated by our technologies into lower-energy light for ocular input. These modes of perception display interactions between texts and other objects not designed for functional purposes. If we impute agency to things whose interactions exceed our designs, and if we discover that the material print--just like Sterling's virtual buddies--exceeds our designed interactions, then we ought impute agency to the material print. Just as the depth, alienation, and inexhaustibility of digital texts led Bruce Sterling to treat them as "collaborators," so too can print technologies be understood as such.

What's the pay-off for this high-fallutin' argument that can be mis-read to say that books are people? First and most flippantly, this provides us a presentist sympathy to the early moderns who discussed printed books as people with souls, voices, etc. They were not cavemen, unprepared for their own technological creations. Second and more seriously, the theories discussed provide us a consistent materialist account of the interrelation between political or economic history and literary history, via bibliography. Third and most seriously, these posts suggest that we treat persons in the circuit of early modern book production and survival not only as collaborators with other humans, but also with materials. The archivalist cuts deals with paper: if the archivalist provides suitable climates, the paper will slow its acidification. Paper shows its agency in its depth of material interactions, namely, its oxidization in certain climates. Likewise, the printer collaborates with his greasy surfaces. A bad batch of paper can ruin an edition, and that paper can show its agency with high or low pliability, or overly smooth felting, or several other characteristics that only illustrate the inexhaustibilty of paper's being.

To copy-change Sterling,

The real issue now is this intimate participation of machinery in cultural production. Practically everything we did in the early modern era that was novel, and different, and challenging, had some kind of material flavor.Forms of creative practice have arisen that are co-discovery with matter. They’re brain-bibliography mashups and hybrids.

Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare

PRIMARY SOURCE: Venus and Adonis (1593)
Context

• Publication: Probably composed between June 1592 and May 1594, during a plague closure. Entered with the Stationers' on April 18, 1593. Printed by Richard Field, a fellow Stratfordian.By 1600, Venus and Adonis became a widely quoted poem, integral to Shakespeare's transition from dramatist to poet. Venus and Adonis was positively noted by Gabriel Harvey and many Cambridge undergraduates. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars read Venus and Adonis to understand Shakespeare's Ovidian and Renaissance influences, and to treat the issue of erotic love in Shakespeare's poetry.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon.

Content

• Form: Iambic pentameter in six-line stanzas, ABABCC
• Genre: Heroic romantic poem.
• Conceit: Adonis is a delight to all, but doesn't desire love. Venus goes to meet him during a hunt, and forces him to listen and recline with her. Adonis doesn't reciprocate her affection, and breaks away to go home--but his horse runs away in romance. Venus appeals again to him, but faints after he scorns her. He aids her, she recovers, and Venus forsees Adonis' death. Adonis refuses her advances again, and refuses earthly lust in favor of heavenly love. Venus follows the sounds of the hunt and comes upon a wounded dog and a dead Adonis. Venus then curses love, at which time Adonis evaporates and is replaced by a purple and white flower.
• Other notes: Most of the amorous arguments are recycled from the sonnets, especially the self-consuming waste and self-consuming selfishness.
  
  Written with notes.

The Reformation of the Image by Joseph L Koerner

CITATION: Koerner, Joseph L. The Reformation of the Image. Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2008. Print.

Understanding

• Question: What did Protestant iconoclasts do with art?
• Answer: Protestants interject texts into visual representation, distancing the representation from its represented, just as they struggled with the paradox in Christ's broken-iconicity.
  "... I shift the focus from the iconoclasts' complaints to the images the iconoclasts themselves produce... I discern an iconoclasm in the Christian image itself." (80)
• Method: Koerner evaluates the underpinnings of German Protestant visual arts, especially those by Cranach the elder, through a litany of paintings, pamphlets, altarpieces and architecture.
  Koerner also briefly mentions a collaboration with Bruno Latour, invoking Latour's translational semiotics to highlight a paradox central to iconoclasm: the iconoclast believes in the fundamental connection between represented and representation, yet the representation never gets to the represented directly.
  In each chapter, Koerner moves from an ecumenical and established, but ultimately empty, site of iconoclasm outward to new sites of signification in society.
• Assumptions: Koerner responds to a view of the Reformation as antithetical to art, a view that is apparently a well-established as trope in art history. 
• Sententiae:
• Indeed the whole picture with its pairing of image and text, object and word, act and exegesis, reads like the key to such an exam [as the catechism]. here stand distinguished and explain the legal, social and doctrinal bases of the evangelical church. (21-22)
• In its profusion in Lutheran pictures, language itself reveals an opacity at odds with a hermeneutics of inner sense. Like the crosswords of letters common in early Lutheran school primers, the inscriptions in Reformation art, often illegible or abbreviated, recall that, for a culture of limited literacy, writing functioned as a token, rather than as a vehicle of sense. (36)
• [Franz von Sickingen] affirms an exclusive space where images can be appreciated for their 'art and beauty' alone. Church is for everyone but its seductive pictures belong in 'beautiful chambers' of nobles like himself. This has been a dominant story of the origin of the category 'art.' Transferred from church to collection, images become neutral objects of aesthetic experience. (59)
• People had long believed that harm or help could come from seeing a thing, that the eye either touched the object's surface through extramission or was intromissively touched by the eidola emitted by the object, and that the eye was itself the soul's window... Seeing the host achieved a Communion as effective as eating it. (71)
• Basil's formula, invoked by Christian iconophiles since the Byzantine image controversy, does not merely tell people how they ought to pray. It describes what prayers to images of Christ, the Virgin and the saints will always automatically do. Add to this the diagram of the semiotic circuitry of pictures, Emser and Eck add variations on the doctrine--as canonical as the image-prototype distinction itself--of the threefold function of church pictures, as Bibles for the illiterate, memory aids and incitements to devotion. This is what images do for Christians. Not the abomination of those perennial Others, the idolaters; the use of images is rule-bound and reasonable. Unfortunately, this rationality-conviction is challenged on two fronts. On the one hand, the abominable idolaters would surely also reply that they can distinguish between the gods and their statues. On the other hand, the iconoclast will know all these alibis and more, but not believe them. (97)
• Images are tautological. They show what they show--that a wound is there, not what the wound means. (139)
• The word 'mysticism' comes from myo, meaning 'to close the eyes.' ... In the language of Meister Eckhart, image 'de-image' [sic] (entbilden). They allow the mystic to encounter Christ negatively, in the blackness of death, and in the uncanny darkness of Christ's empty grave. (140)
• The premier image-maker of northern European culture in 1500, Durer recognized that pictures are, at best, mediators, affectincg without determining what their viewers see in them. Or as Bruno Latour puts it, 'Images count... because they allow one to move to another image, exactly as frail and modest as the former one--but different.' 
• The notion that thoughts are pictures is powerful and old. It stands suspended in the word 'idea,' which, deriving from the Greek 'to see,' is etymologically linked to eidolon or 'visible image.' Plato and Aristotle famously compared the mind to a wax tablet into which sensible objects impress their form; the Church Fathers used the word eikon to denote paintings and sculptures as well as thoughts, concepts, and analogies; and even the young Wittgenstein espoused a picture theory of meaning (which he later worked hard to dismantle). Pushed to an extreme, the theory that words make mental pictures suggests that pictures are the better medium. The eighth-century patriarch Nicephoros, writing against iconoclasts, argued that words and pictures were equally images of reality. But since words, to be understood, had to be translated into images (through a thought-process Nicephoros called analogismos), they were less direct and comprehensible than graphic representations which were images already. More so than sermons or writ, icons could offer unmediated knowledge of God. (162-3)
• When, in his 1525 treatise on measurement, Albrecht Durer showed how to make high-up inscriptions legible from the ground, the text he used for his illustration was the VDMIE motto in German... each element of which is sized relative to a positioned beholder. Words cannot 'remain eternal' if they are to stay readable from different points of view. Northern European art's first writer on perspective therefore teaches a method for writing in perspective. Erasmus evoked a similar condition of language as surface or inscription when he cited two types of illegibility: one where the alphabet is foreign and the letters do not 'look back at us'; the other, where the words are far off and eyeglasses are necessary. Although the text on Durer's monument affirms the absolute reference of the words--'the word [that] is Christ'--his perspectivist scenography, treating words as things, reveals the contingency of their inscription. (284-5)
• The founder of modern hermeneutics and the renewer of Luther's faith, Friedrich Schleiermacher, banned from poetry all verses 'that look like an axe or bottle.' In his view, picture poems conveyed messages through their external form; they therefore violated the primacy of inner sense that hermeneutics assumed--religiously--for language. (295)
• [Reactionary legal theorist Carl] Schmitt attributed to Protestantism the replacement of this realist politics [that the Church solely represents Christ] by a fiction of personal responsibility and impersonal representation. Displaced to the abstract principle of 'the people,' representation became empty: 'a plurality of copies' substituted for 'a unique existence,' as Walter Benjamin wrote from quite the opposite politics. (364)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Like Duffy's, this is a book so large I couldn't do it justice. Nevertheless, I can attest to Koerner's exhaustive research and effective inversion of "iconoclasm" as a trope among art historians.
• Synthesis: In my notes for O'Connelll, I had over-read a claim that the sight of Christ's suffering implicated the viewer: Koerner's introduction to the eidolon provides the means of visual empathy; the eidolon provides the limit. It seems that sacramental sight was in decline in the late middle ages, and it's highly doubtful that the same ideology could be transferred by early modern audiences to the play-house.
• Application: Koerner's treatment of the intra-Reformation feuds, especially between the Lutherans, Zwinglians, and Calvinists provides a provocative jumping-off point for analyzing and distinguishing the  Dutch refugee printers in early modern London. Did the Calvinists flee Geneva to maintain their craft of engraved printing? Did the Lutherans continue to proselytize with illustrated pamphlet covers?

“The Ecstasy” by John Donne

PRIMARY SOURCE: "The Ecstasy" (1635)
Context

• Publication: Likely composed at the same time as the Satires in residence in London, ca. 1593-6, and circulated in manuscript. Up to this point in his life, Donne only struggled with his closeted Catholicism and choice of profession, not the financial, legal, and marital woes that would consume him later. "The Ecstasy" was published in Donne's Songs and Sonnets four years after his death in 1631, in 1635. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars read Donne as one of the foremost metaphysical poets, though not in communication with others due to his purported manuscript circulation. Scholars also read Donne as a Catholic at war with himself.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, metaphysical poetry.

Content

• Form: Alternating quatrains in iambic tetrameter.
• Genre: Love poetry, meditation.
• Conceit: The lovers in bed join souls, and perfect one another.
• Other notes: 
• This is Diadima's idea of love from the Symposium. 
• Famous quote:
  "When love with one another so
  Interanimates two souls,
  That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
  Defects of loneliness controls. "

Art in the Age of Greasy Surfaces, Pt. 2

This is part of a three-part series relating contemporary aesthetic philosophy to early modern print culture. I freely admit that I have never taken a class in philosophy, art history, or multimodal composition. Please excuse my amateurish attempts at all three.

2. What I Talk About When I Talk About Surfaces

Here is one recipe for greasy Renaissance ink, adapted from Andrew Pettegree's The Book in the Renaissance:

1. Gather up some wine lees from your buddy, the vintner.
2. Don't feed it to the pigs! Burn it for a nice black soot.
3. Add some varnish to the soot, such as linseed oil. Mix well.
4. The current mixture will probably be a little thin. Crack an egg and separate the yolk. Mix the whites with the soot-varnish mixture. You can feed the yolk to the pig, or add it to your table beer.
5. Print while drunk.

Here's another recipe from Jo Wheeler's Renaissance Secrets, Recipes and Formulas:

1. (Start early on this step.) Order some German vitriol (iron sulphate) from Venice. It should be yellowish green upon arrival. Also order some arabic gum.
2. Gather some oak galls. Crush. Soak for six days in water.
3. Reduce the gall mixture, add the German vitriol and arabic gum.
4. Print while fresh.

If you cut either recipe with water or another additive, you'll get runny ink that stains too much and doesn't stick on the page. Vellum and rag-paper are excellent vehicles for grease.

I wrote about digital networks and greasy surfaces in the last post, and I pointed to the philosophical pairing of the network and the surface: in a word, relational aesthetics. I wonder whether there's a meaningful sympathy in the comparison of an ontological surface and an artist's surface, or a computer network and a network of being. I learned about the network-surface binary through Graham Harman's synthesis of networks and being. Networks with independent objects are two of the basic tenets of a subset of speculative realism known as Object Oriented Ontology. While most people deploy Object Oriented Ontology for its nonhuman ontology--and typically, then, an ecocritical politics--OOO also contains a powerful critique of correlation. Harman wants Actor-Network Theory to dig below the surfaces, and he wants to add a second dimension of or intentional objects to the network.Networks, in this sense, refer to Bruno Latour's ontology. Harman quotes Latour's germinal anecdote in Prince of Networks:

I knew nothing, then, of what I am writing now but simply repeated to myself: 'Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else'... It and me, them and us, we mutually defined ourselves. And for the first time in my life I saw things unreduced and set free. (13)

Latour's thought wipes out substance from ontology. Each actant resembles an event in Whitehead's thought, yet without recourse to God (as in Whitehead) for correlation with other actants. Instead, one actants is always separated from a second by a third. To refer again to Harman's Prince of Networks:

Whenever one actant has some effect on another, this can be described as 'action at a distance'--all actants, by the mere fact of being themselves, are distant from each other, split off from others by unknown firewalls. (48)

Harman uses the language of the internet, as in the term "firewalls," but I do not mean to naively apply Latour's network to the internet anymore than I would apply Heidegger's surfaces to JK Keller's. In fact,

• the challenge posed by Sterling et al. asks whether the internet is actually interacting (in the sense of an actant) with meatspace, 
• and the challenge posed by Keller's art asks whether humans can ever engage beyond the surface of our technology (with the inhuman actant of technology).

In a lecture at Carnegie Mellon's Institute of Fine Art, Harman makes a few cool moves towards a non-relational aesthetics. The central point, however, is that there are firewalls between relations, and relations can never exhaust objects. But to answer the above questions from an OOO perspective:

• Is the internet actually interacting? Absolutely! But the internet also has alliances with things like electrical grids, and objects in those alliances engage each other in ways we can't access.
• Can humans engage beyond the surface? Not quite! Depth eventually triumphs over surface. A work of art is neither entirely autonomous nor entirely surface.

What, then, about the other greasy surface--the rag-paper print? The printed page is another object, with its own firewalled history and alliances. The printed rag-paper page has a strong alliance with a vat of linen rags, yet a firewalled relationship with electronic media. The printed page also has a strong alliance with illustrations, yet a firewalled relationship with sculpture.

Following McLuhan, however, digital objects enhance the alphabetical properties of print culture yet obsolesce the chemical properties of rag-paper. In the next post, I want to bring more early modern print culture into this discussion: more, that is, than ink recipes.

Art in the Age of Greasy Surfaces Pt. 1

This is part of a three-part series relating contemporary aesthetic philosophy to early modern print culture. I freely admit that I have never taken a class in philosophy, art history, or multimodal composition. Please excuse my amateurish attempts at all three.

1. The Brief and Wondrous Life of the New Aesthetic

In DIS magazine, Nick Scholl asked, "Okay, are we done talking about post-internet, new aesthetic, death of painting, etc.?" Scholl was referring to JK Keller. JK Keller creates patterns of oil on iPhone screens, captures those reflective screens on video, and then transforms the video into .gifs for the internet. (Go look at some.) The .gifs animate light reflected across a jeejah screen after a hundred oily finger-swipes. The finger-swipe medium is grimy, as grimy as all of the dirt missing from Apple's perfectly white and silver surfaces. Indeed, Keller's surfaces subvert easy analogy of [ digital : surface :: physical : depth ] . Keller reminds us that we see the internet through a glass darkly. Dark, stinky and oily, meatspace (in the parlance of the cyberpunks) obfuscates our access to the Realm of (digital) Forms: the internet.

The internet, according to the New Aesthetic, found its way into meatspace; better, it has enjoyed "an eruption of the digital into the physical." "Eruption"--a fantastically Freudian word that exposes the masculinist tendencies of the tech-design crowd--is conspicuously absent in the introduction to the New Aesthetic by James Bridle. Birdle eschews "eruption" in favor of total epistemological tearage. Bridle articulates that tearage by way of Tom Taylor: "It’s 2011, and I have no idea what anything is or does anymore." "Anything is or does" interchangeably, within Taylor's apparently functionalist system. Against modernist functionalism, David Pye wrote in 1964 that,

The concept of function in design, and even the doctrine of functionalism, might be worth a little attention if things ever worked. It is, however, obvious that they do not (The Nature of Design, 10). 

Tom Taylor may have no idea what anything is or does anymore, but Bruce Sterling does. In a pair of outstanding essays, Sterling takes issue with the very clutteredness of the New Aesthetic, then its disposition to "our virtual buddies." First,

These are the forms of imagery that Bridle’s collaborators have thrown over his transom. There’s lots, they’re all cool, and most are rather interesting, and some are even profound, but they don’t march together.
Those cats just don’t herd yet; that puzzle is still in its pieces. One can try to cluster them, in a vague ecumenical way, by saying, “This is how contemporary reality looks to our pals, the visionary machines.” But that’s not convincing... Let’s critically nitpick a little, shall we? Dazzle camouflage has nothing to do with “machine vision.” Machines are incapable of a state of mind like “dazzle.” Camou is all about human vision.

And second,

The real issue now is this intimate participation of machinery in cultural production. Practically everything we do in this era that is novel, and different, and challenging, has some kind of computational flavor.
Forms of creative practice have arisen that are co-discovery with machines. They’re cognition-computation mashups and hybrids. 

Sterling asks us to think of the internet and the New Aesthetic as computational collaborators in our cognitive discoveries. What, then, is the co-discovery of JK Keller and his jeejah?  The easy answer is that there is none: Keller reasserts the supremacy of meatspace by turning his computational co-discoverer back into a shiny surface. The digital seemed to have erupted into the physical, and the physical seems to be re-enveloping the digital. But is this necessarily beyond the boundaries of the New Aesthetics?

I think Sterling, Pye, and Taylor are all confouned by the limits of relational aesthetics. In the next installment, I'll discuss Graham Harman's relevance to the art of greasy surfaces.

The Temple by George Herbert

PRIMARY SOURCE: The Temple (1633)
Context

• Publication: Herbert graduated Trinity and worked as a Reader, than as an orator, at Cambridge. In 1624 he was elected to represent Montgomery in Parliament. He become Rector of Fugglestone in 1630, and died of TB three years later. There is a popular narrative set in 1633, when a dying Herbert gave his manuscript to Nicholas Ferrar with orders to publish or destroy. The narrative explains several salient factors. Nicholas Ferrar founded Little Gidding as an Anglican community in 1625, and in 1633 a scribecreated the Bodleian manuscript Tanner 307.
  I read a diplomatic edition based on Tanner 307, the Bodleian manuscript of Herbert's poems. Thomas Buck published a version of Herbert's collection in 1633, referred to by Mario Di Cesare as "a deft kind of Tottelization." (WELL I NEVER.) The book was printed in eight editions by 1690. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: In the ODNB, Colin Burrow set Herbert among the "central figures" of metaphysical poetry, along with Cranshaw, Marvell, and Vaughan. TS Eliot shaped discussion of the metaphysical poets, so scholars commonly debate Herbert's high-church tendencies, or his use of conceits. Stanley Fish summarized this debate between the catechistic and chaotic Herberts. Fish promoted a synthesis that ultimately favors the chaotic Herbert, though he found The Church Militant to be anticlimactic.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, ekphrasis, figure poetry.

Content

• Form: The Temple is divided into the Church-porch, the Church, and the Church Militant. The Church-porch is entirely in six-line iambic pentameter stanzas (ABABCC) advocating (first) virtues of moderate living, (second) social virtues, and (third) virtues of devotion. The Church is a mixture of poems devoted to church architecture, Biblical geography, the liturgy, scriptures, virtues, parable figures, and other rhetorical figures. The Church Militant is a progressive history in iambic pentameter couplets.
• Genre: Devotional poetry, metaphysical poetry.
• Conceit: The three sections of The Temple describe the church before, during, and after Christ's reign. The Church is the most interesting within this scheme, since Christ's presence through metaphor suggests that Herbert endorsed an amillennial eschatology.
• Other notes: "The Window" is of unique interest to my project.