This chapter adopts a media-ecological perspective to explore parallels between biological extinction and technical obsolescence. It is set against the background of the current transformations in our media landscape, whereby many objects traditionally considered stable or fixed—photographs, imaging systems, technological networks—are radically changing both their identity and their visibility. In this context, the photographic image can be said to exist in a dynamic set of entangled media relations, and hence be seen as a process taking place in a network of material-cultural infrastructures rather than regarded as a discrete object.1 This rethinking of photography in more dynamic and media-ecological terms encourages a broader discussion of producing, curating, studying, and looking at images today—but also of the constantly updated apparatuses that are helping produce these images. Picking up the Anthropocene thread, I want to suggest that, instead of becoming too preoccupied with the frequently pronounced “death of photography,” we should turn our attention to the multiple deaths of cameras and other equipment—and to the piles of e-waste resultant from those “deaths.” The argument of this chapter is anchored in the notion of “photographic fossils”2—remnants of our human history of making images that will continue long into a posthuman future as discarded techno-trash, materials decomposing in the air, soil, and oceans, as well as cosmic debris. Through this media-geological exploration of various sites of our fossilized media past, I offer a meditation, across different temporal scales, on our human relation to devices and materials that we create and discard, on the desire for new products that fuels so-called innovation, and on the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of waste. The argument outlined here, speculating as it does on photography’s nonhuman future, provides a follow-up to the nonhuman history of photography outlined in the previous chapter.
Returning to the concept of extinction discussed earlier in the book, the chapter zooms in on a set of processes associated with the becoming-extinct of media technology, i.e., with technological obsolescence, decay, and death. However, if the relationship between physis and tekhne, or nature and artifice, is itself a product of the human mind and thus a cultural imprint upon temporal unfoldings that are just different in scale and duration rather than in kind,3 then extinction and obsolescence can perhaps be treated as two facets of the same phenomenon. This argument draws inspiration from Stanisław Lem’s 1964 philosophical treatise Summa Technologiae, in which this Polish writer, best known for his science fiction novels, postulates two types of evolution: biological and technical. Identifying a technical tendency in the bio-logic of life, he argues: “Every technology is actually an artificial extension of the innate tendency possessed by all living beings to gain mastery over their environment, or at least not to surrender to it in their struggle for survival.”4 Lem goes on to identify a number of parallels between biological and technical evolution:
It is not only that the first amphibians were similar to fish, while the mammals resembled small lizards. The first airplane, the first automobile, or the first radio owed its appearance to the replication of the forms that preceded it. The first birds were feathered flying lizards; the first automobile was a spitting image of the coach with a guillotined shaft; the airplane had been “copied” from the kite (or even the bird), the radio from the already existing telephone.5
In tracing conceptual and material parallelism between extinction and obsolescence, I would nevertheless like to signal that the proposition to interpret what may more obviously present itself as an insatiable capitalist desire for innovation in evolutionary terms is not aimed at naturalizing, and hence depoliticizing, the production process. On the contrary, my goal here is to highlight precisely the mobilization of what we could call a “banalized Darwinism” which reduces the undetermined zigzags of evolution to a linear progression in order to justify the constant need for technological upgrade. Adopting the ecological—and geological—perspective in my study of media technologies, including photography, will also allow me to draw attention to the hubris behind the innovation agenda that fuels the global economy, and that produces seemingly infinite amounts of technological fossils in the process. The intensified outpouring of variations of the same merchandise at a particular moment in the production cycle is a case in point.
To illustrate this process, let us look at the camera stock available at the time of writing (April 2016) from the Japanese optical equipment manufacturer Canon. Its list of interchangeable lens digital cameras includes EOS-1D X Mark II, EOS-1D X, EOS-1D C, EOS M10, EOS M3, EOS 7D Mark II, EOS 6D, EOS 80D, EOS Rebel T6s (called 760D outside the US); EOS Rebel T6i (750D outside the US), EOS Rebel T6 (1300D outside the US), EOS Rebel T5 (1200D outside the US), EOS Rebel T5i (700D outside the US), EOS Rebel SL1 (100D outside the US), EOS 60D, EOS 60Da, EOS 5D Mark III, EOS 5DS, and EOS 5DS R. This list is accompanied by eighteen variations of Canon’s advanced compact PowerShot models and three entry-level IXUS models. Even though results for the financial quarter for Canon Inc. show that its overall operating profit is up 7.6% year over year, in 2015 the company recorded its net income at 49.2 billion yen, 15.6% lower than the previous year, year over year. The Imaging Resource website explains that these figures “tell a story we’ve been hearing for a number of years now—sales are down and not necessarily looking any brighter. … Canon’s camera sales are a continually sinking ship, but what stands out and confirms what we’ve all but known is that the sales of lower-end compact cameras are not just falling, but taking a nosedive. Year-over-year, compact camera sales are down a whopping 29% [while] interchangeable lens cameras are … down 17%.”6 The current Canon provision, with its seemingly endless issuing of variations of the same product (and similar analyses could be conducted for Canon’s competitors, such as Nikon or Sony), seems to reflect what Lem has described as “elephantiasis, so typical of the predecline blossom of dying evolutionary branches.”7 Lem goes on to compare the last zeppelins of the 1930s, or the last exemplars of the steam-driven freight train before it was made obsolete by diesel and electric locomotives, with the atlantosauruses and brontosauruses of the Cretaceous period, where the size of provision—be it in terms of the actual dimensions, market share, or “evolutionary radiation”—is the last breath of life before the line’s extinction or obsolescence (in our case, before the ultimate victory of the camera phone in the majority of media-ecological niches).
To accompany this industry-based perspective, in his cultural history of photography, Jakub Dziewit analyzes the behavior of members of Internet forums dedicated to photography by drawing on naturalistic rhetoric. He describes these amateur photographers as “breeders” of personalized and rarefied collections, which consist of carefully chosen camera and lens specimens. Many photographers posting on such forums display an almost organic commitment to growing their collections, coupled with a conviction about the superiority of their specimens over those of the other posters—as manifested in the overzealous defense of their brand/genus, with all its characteristics. This desire is rarely driven by the ambition to take better pictures—indeed, relatively few photographs get posted on equipment forums, such as dpreview—rather, it is focused on achieving the perfection of the breed. It is precisely the aspiration to develop the ideal breed of photographic equipment, which Dziewit compares with a desire to breed the perfect Arabian horse, that he believes underpins the efforts of many users.8 The affective attachment to the process of cultivating one’s collection tends to overshadow any economic, political, or ethical issues: indeed, any discussion of those, limited to frequent threads about whether it is moral to use Amazon’s generous return policy to test equipment and return it if it is simply not to one’s liking, usually gets foreclosed rather quickly, or leads to flame wars. The majority of discussants on camera forums, posting predominantly from the relatively affluent regions of the world, seem unwilling to acknowledge the fact that, as Gay Hawkins puts it, “The capacity to overconsume is a minority privilege that masks not only the conditions of production—but also the ecological consequences of an economy driven by the logic of growth at all costs.”9 Yet what I offer here is not just a study of exuberant media consumers in the world “out there.” This minority privilege is also something that I, as a passionate photographer, frequent buyer of photographic equipment, reader of industry magazines on the topic, and user of its Internet forums, find myself very much enveloped in. Its interrogation here is therefore designed as a way of turning the critical mirror back on myself as both media scholar and equipment geek to raise the ethico-political problem of photographic obsolescence in the wider context of our changing media ecologies.
Shallow media geology
There already exists much scholarship in media studies on the ecological aspects of media obsolescence. One can mention here Sean Cubitt’s EcoMedia, Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller’s (rather human-centric) Greening the Media, Jennifer Gabrys’s Digital Rubbish, and Jussi Parikka’s A Geology of Media as well as his edited “living book” Medianatures.10 Drawing on aspects of this research, with its extensive tracing of specific material deposits such as “plastics, wood, plywood, copper, aluminum, silver, gold, palladium, lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, selenium, hexavalent chromium and flame retardants” that make up media components,11 I will retell the story of the photographic ecomedia as an embodied story of human perception and human responsibility for the universe whose tiny corner we presently occupy. The term “ecomedia” builds on work by Cubitt, who, in an attempt to make “a contribution to ecological politics,”12 introduced the concept in his eponymous book to examine how popular culture deals with environmental themes, but my use of this term extends its scope to more nonhuman and postnatural contexts.13 For me, “ecomedia” stands for media that is concerned with ecological themes while also revealing its own entanglement with biotechnical ecologies of our planet that transcend what we conventionally understand as media networks. In this view, we humans are an inherent part of those media ecologies—rather than merely media producers or users who represent ecological themes in a certain way, and who affect “nature” positively or negatively. Ecomedia, the way I see it, pursues what I would call, after Timothy Morton, an “ecology without nature”14—an ecological predisposition that does not evoke a discrete prelinguistic realm of natural resources separate from the human, and requiring protection against human activities. To say this is not to proclaim that there is nothing outside human cognition or perception, but rather that the human notion of nature is already a truncated set of concepts and material entities, carved out along human cognitive and sensory lines. (To try to “unthink” this notion, consider the following: What would “nature” would look like for a dolphin, a mycelium network, or a stone?)
With this approach, I aim to update my earlier work in Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (2014) by focusing on several specific geophysical locations. Whereas in that book I considered a more general position on ethics as a way of living a good life when life itself was declared to be under a unique threat, while also reflecting on what counted as goodness in those circumstances,15 my method here is that of an amateur geologist-philosopher-artist, one whose dirty process involves an affective-material excavation of the past mixed with a textual and visual speculation about the future. My way of working differs from the more brazen, albeit more ambitious, exploratory pursuits in which (predominantly male) media archaeologists and media geologists thrust their probes into deep time across cosmic scales, offering a God’s-eye view of the universe’s geological, biological, and art historical strata. What I aim to do here is much more modest in scope in that it offers a “view from somewhere” of a universe that “exceeds and incorporates” me—and within which I am only temporally at home.16 Tentatively described as “shallow media geology,” my excavatory pursuits will lead me to look around, probe the folds of matter at hand, play with the dust, check out the dirt under my fingernails. Specifically, the chapter will dig into three localized material and conceptual “fossil sites”: (1) the global: photographic images of e-waste by Pieter Hugo, in which photography is mobilized to tell a wider story of ecomedia; (2) the national: displays of old photographic equipment at the National Media Museum in the north of England which serve as a memento to both the medium and the geographical region that hosts them; (3) the domestic: everyday media infrastructures that preserve and enable photomedia setups and their networks.
The untimely death of photography
Before we embark on our dig, we should tackle one of the biggest myths about photography itself: its regularly pronounced obsolescence and death. The foundations of this myth need to be looked at not just because they tell us something about our investments in, and disavowals of, different media and art forms (which the next chapter will address in more detail), but also because they provide some actual building material for our media pasts and futures—and for our stories about them. Those suffering from medium nostalgia misrecognized as fondness for medium specificity—represented in this chapter by theorist Nick Mirzoeff, artist Tacita Dean, and journalist Antonio Olmos—initially greeted the arrival of digitization as the premonition of the analog medium’s death. And thus in the 1999 edition of An Introduction to Visual Culture, Mirzoeff concluded, “After a century and a half of recording and memorializing death, photography met its own death some time in the 1980s at the hands of computer imaging.”17 (A foremost theorist of the complexities of visual culture and an advocate for its vibrancy, Mirzoeff has significantly revised this position in his subsequent works—as evident in his idea of “Photography 2.0.”)18 Tacita Dean, commenting on the waning of the traditional 35mm film (which was both subject and matter of her 2011 Tate Modern installation “Film”) rather than on photography as such, issued the following lament: “This beautiful medium, which we invented 125 years ago, is about to go. … How long have we got? I hope we’ve got a year left. It’s that critical.”19 London-based Mexican photojournalist Antonio Olmos, in turn, commented as late as 2013 that “Photography has never been so popular, but it’s getting destroyed. There have never been so many photographs taken, but photography is dying.”20 Chapter 6, which zooms in on Dean’s artistic practice and the critical discourses surrounding it, probes what is behind such pronouncements and what it is that their authors are actually afraid of losing (evidence? truth? depth? authenticity?). It also outlines a different trajectory of the photographic medium, and a less hysterical story about it, in light of digitization. For now, I want to pick up on the 2013 post in the New York Times’s blog Bits, which rebuked claims of the last rites supposedly being read for photography—this time because it was being replaced by online video technology—with a statement that “the reports of the death of photography have been greatly exaggerated.”21 The Times’s skepticism relates to the way in which the human mind is said to construct memories around single images, rather than moving sequences. Photographs stay with us, literally: they are mnemonic devices that mark the passage of time and help us build narratives around them.
Also, if we track the ongoing changes to the photographic market and what is often seen as the progressing decline of the traditional photographic apparatus, we can raise further questions about this story of photography’s premature demise. Drawing on its analysis of the data from Japan-based CIPA (Camera & Imaging Products Association), the online photography platform PetaPixel has concluded that, even though “the sales of dedicated cameras have been shrinking by double digit figures each of the following years,” with traditional camera companies such as Canon recording diminishing profits, as discussed earlier, if you “[m]ix in data for smartphone sales,” the growth of camera sales has been phenomenal.22 The shrinking of the media-ecological niche of amateur cameras—both advanced amateur DSLRs and low-end point-and-shoots, not to mention film cameras—has occurred at the expense of the growth of functionality and, more important, instant accessibility of camera phones. Camera phones are therefore an example of what Robert Capps of Wired magazine has called “good enough tech.” According to Capps, the overall acceleration and increasing connectivity of our everyday lives has altered what we expect of our portable devices: “We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished.” As a result, “companies that focus on traditional measures of quality—fidelity, resolution, features—can become myopic and fail to address other, now essential attributes like convenience and shareability. And that means someone else can come along and drink their milk shake.”23 This perhaps explains why well-established names in camera manufacturing such as Olympus, Pentax, Minolta, or Kodak have either entirely disappeared or considerably reduced their market share. We have also witnessed firmer embedding into the camera market of electronics manufacturers such as Sony, Panasonic, and Samsung, companies whose successes in the photographic domain can be explained by their involvement in the production of affordable mirrorless cameras that are smaller than their DSLR counterparts and are also “good enough”—or, in many cases, better—to replace them. Then there are newcomers such as GoPro, whose unique product, a head- or bike-mountable rugged camera, allows adventure buffs to take pictures and videos of themselves in action. The combined geology and futurology of photography has to take into account Internet-enabled and thus networked smartphones and other “good enough” hybrid devices as well as the whole media ecologies in which they participate: “the camera” as a 35mm analog film-fed, standalone object is no longer indicative of the supposed health or decline of the medium.
Yet something obviously is disappearing—and then reappearing again, transformed into a different shape, form, and medium. The changing media landscape is being driven by the ethos of planned obsolescence that has been with us since the 1930s but that has intensified in the era of plastic, networked culture, and “the digital.” But, rather than pursue the narrative of “never-ending technological evolution and progress,” I want to follow Jennifer Gabrys in adopting a “perspective of transience” in order to trace “continual cycles of novelty and obsolescence” and the impact of those cycles upon our “material cultures, economies, and imaginaries.”24 Transient photomedia ecologies, I suggest, open up a different viewpoint through which we can see ourselves inhabiting what we call the world—and to grasp its “naturecultural” transformations. As John Durham Peters points out, “Media are not only about the world; … they are the world.”25 Those media ecologies also issue a call to us humans to give an account of the thickenings of matter around us—of what we see, make, and make obsolete. Together with Peters, I am working here with an expanded understanding of the concept of media borrowed from early Canadian media theory, which understood media in terms of infrastructures, not just communication devices. Peters argues that it was only in the twentieth century that “media” “came to mean the mass media of radio and television, cinema, newspapers, magazines, and sometimes books, but the term never completely lost its environmental meaning; indeed, mass media were so pervasive and elemental that they could fit nicely into the long lineage of medium as ambiance, and some, such as McLuhan and his followers, sought a more expansive (and ancient) notion of media ecology.”26 From that earlier, “infrastructural” understanding of media, he deduces, with McLuhan’s help, an ethical call. Unlike the moralism of much of contemporary environmental theory,27 this is first and foremost a call for “media awareness,”28born out of a desire to awaken the somnambulists who ignore their technological habitats from their “media narcosis.”29 The ethical call of photomedia, however, even if originally issued by the media themselves, needs to be picked up and augmented by a media theorist. Or, to put it another way, a media theorist, in this view, is someone who is already attentive, open to the demand of media, to its rustling ontology and changing temporality. It is therefore also someone who hears—and smells—media rot.
Site I: Pieter Hugo’s Permanent Error
This media-theoretical role does not have to be played only by those who deal in the medium of linear language: philosophers, writers, storytellers. Visual artists and in particular photographers have made a significant contribution to the general understanding of the Anthropocene and related media-ecological problems by bringing to the fore issues of media decay. South African photographer Pieter Hugo’s project Permanent Error,30 consisting of a series of large-format photographs taken at the electronic waste dump called Agbogbloshie on the outskirts of the Ghanaian capital Accra, is a case in point (figures 5.1 and 5.2). The images are portraits of predominantly male young workers, shot against the background of burning e-junk being transformed into sublimely menacing tongues of black smoke. The muted color palette of beiges, browns, and rusty reds, coupled with the stillness of the sitters (or, more appropriately, standers), gives Hugo’s photos a sense of preindustrial timelessness, making them look like retrofitted stills from a bizarre square-format video game in which all action has somehow expired. The viewer’s eye lingers over some intriguing detail: a bird’s-nest wire bundle on a man’s head, a white apron, the pointy ribs of a beautifully formed white cow. We may be tempted to interpret these images as examples of the aestheticization of poverty for the visual pleasure of first-world spectators—or perhaps as representations of the inhumane labor conditions in Africa, aimed at evoking moral outrage in (and delivering moral redemption for) those who look at them in Western art galleries. However, as photography writer Sean O’Toole points out, “Permanent Error is not singularly a record of privation and toil. Hugo is a fabulist, a wonderfully accomplished one at that. He is also, more prosaically, someone who notices things.”31
The images do indeed reveal the gloomy story of wealthy economies’ media rot that has been deposited out of our sight and mind, in poorer regions of the world. The billowing smoke does point to the carcinogenic activity of burning electronic debris in order to extract copper and precious metals out of its plastic carcasses, even if the moodily beautiful two-dimensional flattening of the scene excises the stench of animal and mineral putrefaction. The youth of the workers and the thinness of the animals does signal the precarity of life and labor in soil that is contaminated with “lead, mercury, thallium, hydrogen cyanide and PVC.”32 Yet, commenting on Hugo’s practice of using actors in his previous works and thus foregrounding the eerily performative aspect of these documentary but also “stagey” images, O’Toole encourages us to read them beyond “poverty porn”:
Irrespective of the opinion his photos prompt—because looking without some form of thought or consciousness is just dumb gawping—it bears stating, without any desk thumping theatrics, that Hugo’s magnetic portraits demand attention. They are, quite simply, hard to ignore. The compulsion to look, to not turn away, is, I think, an outcome of his work’s pin-sharp formalism, craftsman-like finesse, acute silence and exaggerated pageantry, the latter often an outcome of simply placing a human subject within a square frame.33
Permanent Error makes a demand on us, unwittingly perhaps mobilizing the Levinasian framework of ethics as a demand to respond to the alterity of the other. For Emmanuel Levinas, we, i.e., human witnesses faced with events unfolding before our eyes, are being called to respond. We are being called to acknowledge that something is occurring outside our conceptual and material horizon; that an “otherwise than being”—a place of absolute alterity that cannot be subsumed by the conceptual categories at our disposal—accuses and makes a demand on us.34 It is not too much of a leap to suggest that photography stages an ethical situation per se because, as Victor Burgin explains, its signifying system already occupies a particular point of view—that of “the technical apparatus itself.”35 Even the most human-centric and humanist photography therefore bears a nonhuman trace. And it is precisely this nonhuman position that is “bestowed upon the spectator.”36With any kind of photograph, we are looking at a scene that has been carved out for us; we arrive at the scene which has already been seen. This moment of finding ourselves at the scene, at the always already seen, is precisely the context from which Levinas develops his philosophy of alterity and his ethics of dealing with what exceeds our visual or conceptual grasp. Ethics as responsibility for the infinite alterity of the other is not a result of some transcendental imperative for him, but rather emerges from what may be described as a pragmatic condition of finding oneself seen by the other, i.e., arriving into the world which the other already inhabits.
Working with the Levinasian framework, I also want to suggest that Hugo’s project opens up Levinas’s theory to the nonhuman agency of an ethical demand.37 Unlike in Levinas, it is not just the human face that reaches to us from the pictures—although in many of the portraits the gaze of the featured worker reaches and pierces that of the viewer on the other side of the photo panel. I would argue that it is the image itself—the material artifact of the photograph—that touches us and calls us to responsibility. To say this is to highlight something different than just a moral response to the representation of human suffering, as a result of which we are supposedly elevated and driven to perform a good deed. Indeed, I am rather skeptical about these kinds of moralistic responses, given how fleeting they tend to be. We can think, for instance, of the highly emotional reactions to the photograph of a drowned three-year-old Syrian boy named Aylan Kurdi, whose body washed up on a Turkish beach as his family tried to reach Europe in September 2015. Published by worldwide media, the image “spread to 20 million screens around the world in just 12 hours.”38 Researchers at the University of Sheffield’s Visual Social Media Lab conducted a study of this photograph’s travels in order to demonstrate how “a single image transformed the debate on immigration.”39 Yet merely a few months later, any emotional stirrings evoked by the photograph gave way to much more hostile sentiments toward refugees, with the initial hospitable response withdrawn and any sense of responsibility withheld.
The argument I am beginning to sketch out here about the ethical demand of the image differs from the humanist and human-centric ethics of images outlined by Lillie Chouliaraki and Bolette B. Blaagaard, for whom “The ethics of images is … a crucial aspect of the public cultures of the West as the primary mechanism of moral education through which the West becomes the witness of other people’s suffering. This is because the realities that images represent work not only to depict the world as it is but also to evoke emotions and visions about how the world might or should be.”40 Chouliaraki and Blaagaard’s argument is premised on the assumption that commonality exists among all humans and that humanitarianism is a naturally ensuing response to representations of suffering. It is very much the content of those images, i.e., what they represent or even perform, that is crucial, according to these authors, in teaching the public a lesson in moral response and moral behavior. However, I would argue that the potential collapse of the distinction between morality and its ugly twin, moralism,41 poses a danger of making this kind of Western “ethics of images” anti-ethical in the last instance, with moral sentiment easily giving way to boredom, disillusionment, or even rage. (Again, responses to images and stories about refugees and immigrants provide a good illustration of this affective cycle.)
Going back to Hugo’s images, I would therefore venture that something else is making a demand in them, apart from their content. The visual pleasure of the compositionally elegant photographs is broken by a cut of the horizon that slices the image into seemingly incompatible sections. We could describe it as a ninety-degree flip of a line that cuts across Baruch Barnett Newman’s paintings whereby, in spite of the impending chaos, Lyotard writes, “the flash of the Tzim-tzum, the zip, takes place, divides the shadows, breaks down the light into colours like a prism, and arranges them across the surface like a universe.”42 I would thus like to make a more minimal suggestion about the ethical claim of images than the one issued by Chouliaraki and Blaagaard. Hugo’s photographs do indeed call upon us and call us to responsibility, but not by asking us to devise a whole new environmental ethics of human and nonhuman relations; instead, they challenge our—or, indeed, my—ethos, or what Levinas calls “my place under the sun.”43 Ethos here, after Gay Hawkins and Rosalyn Diprose (whom Hawkins quotes extensively), stands for both “habitat” and “habitual way of life,” “dwelling” and “character.” Ethics as ethos is therefore first and foremost concerned with “modes of being in the world,” with being embodied in the world.44 In Ethics of Waste, Hawkins poses the following question: “Could our most visceral responses to waste be a source of new ethical practices?”45 In light of the etymological discussion above, it is important to note that she is not looking for new morals but rather for new habits—that is, new ways of inhabiting spaces of media—and of us living with and as media. Seen in this light, ecomedia images of this kind become a fossil site for a media geologist who wants to do something other than either take delight in the aesthetic or moralize. The images impress themselves upon her, push to be read in context; they also open up to other territories, conversations, and sites. Permanent Error thus emerges as a site of fossilization, but not only in the sense of recording and preserving “media fossils” in the form of discarded electronics: it also enacts the process of “impressioning” upon our media archaeologist, whereby impressioning (also called fossilization), as we learned from the previous chapter via photographer and geologist Jerome Harrison, is in itself a photographic process. The images thus show us that there is photography in photography—just as, in Serbian artist Bojan Šarčević’s video, there is water in the water.46 The active act of looking becomes a way of carving a space between the viewer and the image surface—but it also carries a risk of drowning.
Kaja Silverman suggests that the human look is always fueled by a fantasy of omnipotence, where powers residing elsewhere in the field of vision are overlooked at the expense of the masterly capture of a scene. We can see this mastery posited by Silverman in iterations of the train of thought that is no doubt traversing many a viewer’s mind: “This is such a moving scene … The man’s face has so much dignity … Thank God I’m not an Agbogbloshie worker … My laptop is so slow and will probably need changing soon … Isn’t it terrible, having to inhale deadly media vapors!” Silverman acknowledges that “there is nothing we can consciously do to prevent certain projections from occurring over and over again, in an almost mechanical manner.”47 Yet she also calls on viewers to work though the originary impulses, desires, and fantasies involved in “just looking,”48 and try to look again, “productively.” This countervisual strategy of what we might term “affect override” constitutes for her an important ethical task. Silverman writes: “The ethical becomes operative not at the moment when unconscious desires and phobias assume possession of our look, but in a subsequent moment, when we take stock of what we have just ‘seen,’ and attempt—with an inevitably limited self-knowledge—to look again, differently.”49 I therefore want to reiterate my earlier claim that photography itself—as a medium, genre, and material object—resists and undoes this tendency toward scoptophilic possession, and that it lays an ethical horizon before us. There is no such thing as just looking at photographs50 because, before we can look, we are always already looked at: the photograph has looked at us. In the glossiness of its paper, the tonality of its surface, and the materiality of its frame or screen, the photograph possesses a nonhuman agency of its own, which it unwittingly mobilizes to take away what Burgin calls “our command of the scene.” Burgin writes: “To remain long with a single image is to risk the loss of our imaginary command of the look, to relinquish it to that absent other to whom it belongs by right—the camera. The image then no longer receives our look, reassuring us of our founding centrality, it rather, as it were, avoids our gaze, confirming its allegiance to the other.”51 Letting oneself be unsettled by an image, being temporarily thrown out of our habitus, signals the possibility of an ethical opening—although of course there can be no assurances of the subsequent occurrence of an ethical act.
Site II: National Media Museum
Let us now step away from the precipice of a singular image to take in a larger vista: that of the photographic medium itself, together with its histories, practices, apparatuses, and institutions. My geological pursuits take me to a zone where photography as both a medium and a monument to this medium can be encountered and experienced: the National Media Museum (NMM) in Bradford in the north of England. NMM holds the largest collection of photographic artifacts—both photo-imaging equipment and the outcomes of various historical photographic processes—in the United Kingdom. I visited the museum in March 2016 for a “shallow dig” for photographic fossils, hoping to have an experiential-affective encounter with cameras old and new (figure 5.3). Rather than plan in advance what I was going to investigate, I decided to wait and see what was to be seen, to let the material impress itself upon me, to speak to me, and maybe even tell me a story.
Figure 5.3 Self-portrait in the Small Object Store of the National Media Museum in Bradford, 2016. Photo by Joanna Zylinska.
In approaching NMM as a site of both historical memory and material e-waste, I was following Gabrys’s suggestion that
Some of the best places to witness the unwitting decay of electronics are in the very spaces where they would be preserved. Many electronics relegated to museums undergo such a rapid scale and rate of demattering that preservation is rendered problematic. Preservation becomes another word for managed decay, for a delay within the extended process of disposal. The museum may also be construed as a space of disposal.52
I therefore wanted to discover not only what NMM displays but also what it does not show, and was also curious to see how the lines between showing and not showing were drawn on a curatorial and practical level. With this, I was interested in learning how the museum tells the story of photography through its apparatuses old and new.
Figure 5.4 The “Capturing Light” wall in the National Media Museum, Bradford. Photo by Joanna Zylinska.
Figure 5.5 Close-up of the “Capturing Light” wall: a portable reflex camera obscura c. 1800. Photo by Joanna Zylinska.
The photography exhibition at NMM is staged in a basement space called Kodak Gallery, which was launched in 1989 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the photographic medium. Yet, due to its cryptlike positioning and shadowy interior, it is tinged with a certain nostalgia about the analog medium’s—and Kodak’s own—heyday. The very first exhibit the visitor sees upon entering the space is an ochre wall called “Capturing Light,” with the title inscribed, in gold, on what looks like a classical frieze (figure 5.4). Underneath are panels featuring information about the nature of light, about the camera obscura as an aid to draftsmen across centuries, and about the discovery of the light-responsive aspect of chemicals such as silver salts that eventually allowed an image obtained with a camera obscura to be fixed on a photosensitive surface. I cannot help but see the similarity between the black-and-white information panels, with their neoclassical patterned ornamental framing, and Central European–style obituaries that are usually posted around the building and living area of a deceased person. Indeed, the whole wall, surrounded by a burgundy carpet featuring a white Persian geometric frieze, has something of a funeral parlor about it. This association is further exacerbated by the placing of a small physical exhibit behind a dark glass pane in the center of the wall. A wooden box resembling an urn or a tiny coffin on closer inspection turns out to be a “portable reflex camera obscura c 1800” (figure 5.5).
Figure 5.6 Early cameras on display in the National Media Museum. Photo by Joanna Zylinska.
The overall narrative about photography outlined through the Kodak Gallery is straightforwardly linear, as is often the case in traditional institutions of knowledge. After the brief introduction to the early days of photography via the sepulchral wall described above, visitors are presented with early box cameras, including the world’s first commercially produced camera, the Giroux “Daguerreotype,” as well as Fox Talbot’s small camera obscuras affectionately called “mousetraps” by his wife Constance. At the risk of pushing this sequence of funereal associations too far, the small cameras are neatly arranged in long brown wooden cabinets which very much look like open caskets we have seen in both fairy tales and real life, with the photographic equipment on show suspended between the anticipation of Sleeping Beauty and the dashed hopes of Lenin (figure 5.6). Theodor Adorno was indeed correct in pointing out that “Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association.” For Adorno, “The German word ‘museal’ [museumlike], has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present. … Museums are like the family sepulchers of the works of art.”53
Figure 5.7 Close-up of a diorama at the National Media Museum, incorporating glass reflections. Photo by Joanna Zylinska.
The strangely devivified story of photography at NMM is not told solely through its equipment: the cameras on display are accompanied by various other artifacts, such as a reproduction of Fox Talbot’s first negative (because “[t]he original is too fragile to be displayed and is kept safe and secure in our archives”), showing a latticed window in Lacock Abbey, and a “modern replica of the first heliograph made by Niépce” around 1926, which I discussed in chapter 2. The exhibition also encompasses that quintessential genre of monumental reenactment—a diorama—which mummifies the past as permanent present. In the words of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, who has developed an extensive series of diorama images shot in the American Museum of National History (discussed in chapter 4), “However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.”54 In NMM the past is mummified as present twice over, as the diorama in question is a reenactment of a daguerreotype, also on display, featuring “Jabez Hogg photographing Mr Johnson in Richard Beard’s Studio, ca 1843” (figure 5.7). The display also features a model of a photographic daylight studio that made photography desirable among upper and middle classes,55 before moving on to show the popularization of the medium with the Kodak Brownie. There is a premonition of things to come, with multiple iterations of the Brownie being accompanied by displays of dusty rows of faded equipment, of closed camera stores, and of the ironically self-reflexive exhortation “Adapt or die” featured in one of the glass cases (figures 5.8 and 5.9). The Brownie display is somewhat excessive, resembling what we may call an exuberant evolutionary radiation that signals the last gasp on the medium’s evolutionary trajectory before its extinction—that is, its move to the “digital.”
Figures 5.8 and 5.9 Ominous-looking signs (“Adapt or Die” and “Closed”) in the Kodak Gallery at the National Media Museum, featuring various iterations of the Kodak Brownie. Photos by Joanna Zylinska.
During my visit I was fortunate to be offered a tour of the museum’s storage rooms. I was particularly keen to look at the spaces where “photographic fossils” are stowed away, but I also appreciated being able to see them as part of the wider media infrastructures in various states of preservation and decay. The storage rooms at NMM serve as a perfect illustration of Gabrys’s insight into the politics of archiving:
Often, the museum and archive collect and stow away objects that have for most purposes been disposed of and removed from the spaces of everyday circulation. The museum collects objects in storage, much the same as the electronics lingering in closets, attics, and warehouses; but the objects in the museum must be continually sorted and deaccessioned in order to make way for new objects. Moreover, the migration of archived materials to digital formats has shortened the life of most museum objects, tied as they are to the life of electronic data.56
This negotiation between preservation and decommissioning, between use value and obsolescence, is clearly visible in NMM’s attempts to establish some kind of relationship between chaos and order, with the Large Object Store and Small Object Store vying for the rare visitor’s attention with two different types of aesthetics. The first room is reminiscent of a jumble sale, with intriguing pieces of equipment large and small, such as box cameras, tripods, reflectors, and projectors gathered under the vintage “Kodak supplies” sign (figure 5.10). I was mesmerized by the space, basking in its warm light and dusty atmosphere. It felt as if I’d found myself on a decommissioned film set, with action having moved on elsewhere, while there was still so much fun to be had in this place! I was keen to wander around the tangled semisculptural arrangements of machines and cables, to run my fingers along the assembled objects, to play with a domestic table lamp with a fringed yellow shade. But then it was time to move on to the Small Object Store, which turned out to be the exact opposite of the first storage room (figure 5.11). Clinically tidy and linearly structured, it hosted long rows of refrigerator-like metal cabinets containing now obsolete cameras and other image-making equipment. The majority of apparatuses in the cabinets were multiple iterations of film cameras, from large-format machines to portable 35mm devices.
Figure 5.10 Large Object Store, National Media Museum. Photo by Joanna Zylinska.
Figure 5.11 Small Object Store, National Media Museum. Photo by Joanna Zylinska.
Perhaps surprisingly, the digital is very much an afterthought in the photographic exhibition at NMM. (The museum does feature a new permanent gallery called “Life Online” which offers a more contemporary—even if not necessarily more informative—take on digital cultures. Its aim is to “showcase the evolution of internet and computing technology” via a “range of inspiring interactives and fun games.”) Yet “the digital” is also where things get really interesting in the underground Kodak Gallery because digitality is already staged here as obsolescence. Unwittingly echoing the ironic statement by Lem that “[n]othing ages as fast as the future,”57 visitors’ encounter with the digital—a technology that, as we know (but are not explicitly told in the Kodak gallery), precipitated Kodak’s self-inflicted downfall—involves a relatively small mauve glass case headed by the slogan “The Digital Revolution” in a blocky old-fashioned typeface. Several early-model Kodak cameras are displayed, including Kodak DC20, DC40, and DC2010 Digital Zoom Camera, shown alongside Sony’s Mavica, featuring a floppy disk for its camera memory, as well as Apple’s first foray into digital imaging, the binoculars-resembling QuickTake 150. Yet the information that it was a Kodak engineer, Steve Sasson, who first “proposed the idea of a ‘filmless camera’”58 in 1975 is nowhere to be found. This omission is perhaps explained by the now rather embarrassing fact that, on being presented with Sasson’s demonstration, Kodak executives were unable to comprehend “why anyone would ever want to look at images on a TV screen.”59 They were also unwilling to invest in what looked like a threat to their main source of revenue at the time: print film. Kodak Gallery at NMM sidesteps this unfortunate yet also decisive chapter in Kodak’s history, as it does the company’s 2012 filing for bankruptcy and its subsequent shedding of its core film and digital business to focus on commercial imaging. Kodak’s unfinished story of its own obsolescence is rather telling. The company’s demise was partly inaugurated by the very gesture to construct a Kodak Gallery nearly three decades ago, long before the financial troubles of the company made themselves known. The decision to install such a gallery thus started the process of monumentalization, with historically arranged displays of past artifacts always, inevitably, being a testament to failure.60 Gabrys contends that “Any museum or archive in which electronics are held is a collection of repeated obsolescence and breakdown,” yet she also goes on to argue that “failure is only one part of this story. Whether in a state of decay or preservation, obsolete devices begin to express tales that are about something other than technical evolution cases full of cameras old and new.”61
It is therefore perhaps possible to retrace the exhibition path at NMM in search of an alternative story of photography, one that would be not so much about the explicit obsolescence of the analog medium and the implicit extinction of the company that thrived on it but rather about our wider cultural desires, economic investments, social frustrations, and political disappointments. “Failure presents the fossils of forgotten dreams, the residue of collapsed utopias,” writes Gabrys. “Through the outmoded, it is possible to move beyond those more ‘totalizing’ aspects of technology, such as progress, teleological reasoning, or the heroism of invention.”62 Interestingly, the photographic fossils on display, both in the storage rooms and in the main part of the museum, present a very Western, even US-centric, story of photography. But at the same time, they also foreground a failure of the American Dream, with its belief in technological progress and infinite consumer spending, and its promise of growing affluence for all, translated into a version of universal happiness. For me, as someone who grew up on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the photographic display at NMM offers an interesting trip down somebody else’s memory lane. I am rather surprised that, apart from a few scattered Eastern European devices, there is almost no recognition in the exhibition of the parallel technological developments, and of the sociocultural narratives that accompanied them, in other parts of the world. Looking at glass cases full of German Rolleiflexes, Kodak Brownies, and Japanese Nikons, I remembered my first-ever camera: a Soviet 35mm manually operated Smena 8M, produced by LOMO. This was followed in 1989 by a more advanced Zenith TTL model, which automatically measured light reflected from an object through its lens, and then, two years later, an East German Praktika. All these Eastern bloc devices were eventually superseded by a Canon purchased with scholarship money when I was an exchange student at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands in 1993. The painfully expensive Canon broke after just six months when its electronic module failed irreparably, planting in me the first seeds of doubt about the combined narrative of technological progress and Western technological supremacy.
Figure 5.12 The exterior of the National Media Museum. Photo by Joanna Zylinska.
These reflections about technological progressivism evoked by my visit to NMM are unfolding against a unique temporal horizon: a period when the museum itself is undergoing a significant repositioning in its core mission (figure 5.12). In February 2016 it announced that around 400,000 objects from its three-million-strong photography collection would be transferred to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, while NMM changes its focus and agenda. “The move reinforces Director Jo Quinton-Tulloch’s new focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and maths) at the National Media Museum, heralded by a new £1.5 million interactive light and sound gallery due to open in March 2017,” proclaims the museum’s website.63 From this vantage point, NMM reveals itself to be a “fossil of forgotten dreams,” with photography, especially in its artistic guides, being slowly elided from the cultural spectrum. The first steps in that direction had already been taken in 2006, when the institution formerly known as the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television changed its name to the National Media Museum. Yet this more recent shift in the museum’s planned operations is particularly significant as it has occurred against the wider background of cuts to the funding of public cultural institutions—universities, libraries, research councils, parks, festivals—in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The museum directorate’s turn to STEM, so familiar to the academic community, is therefore perhaps understandable in the current climate of the economic depletion of public coffers, a situation which is reflected in the undermining of arts and humanities as both academic disciplines and repositories of cultural practices, at the expense of the supposedly more useful—and potentially more profitable, or at least “fundable”—science subjects.
Of course, contrary to the story of photography’s obsolescence narrated by NMM, with its limp last chapter called “The Digital Revolution,” the photographic medium has never been as exuberant as it has become in this era of the networked camera in which we have all become photographers. Nevertheless, the museum’s Kodak Gallery (which will no doubt undergo a reconfiguration sometime soon) presents photography as an industrial cultural practice belonging to a bygone era of mechanical reproduction. Photography as art is not entirely disappearing from the United Kingdom’s cultural landscape, though—it is “just” relocating to London, the capital city that has a monopoly on British culture in all its different guises, and that is still seen as worth investing in. The fact that London’s biggest industry is the finance sector, and that the majority of newly built high-rise properties serve as moneyboxes in the sky for an international elite who often never even visit their investments, testifies to the wider cultural politics of the United Kingdom. London is seen as exciting to international buyers not only thanks to the country’s relative economic and political stability and its propitious corporate tax regime, but also because it has a nebulous aura of “culture.” It therefore pays to invest in London, to furnish it with cultural products that are seen as fossils elsewhere, because London is still capable of turning those fossils into economic fuel. With this, London offers a contrast to the location of NMM, Bradford—a city with a glorious industrial past in textiles, in particular wool. Like many other places in the north of England, Bradford has suffered years of unemployment and underinvestment as a result of the collapse of heavy industry. Its spectacular Victorian architecture, like its museum, is also a fossil of a manufacturing-era utopia when regional networks of wool, coal, and iron ore ensured a balanced development and growth across the British Isles. Bradford is now positively multicultural, except that what conventionally counts as “culture” is being siphoned off to London, with the region’s multiculturalism reduced to an “immigration problem.” It is therefore understandable why Simon Cooke, Conservative leader of the opposition at Bradford Council, has described the decision to transfer art photography to V&A “an appalling act of cultural vandalism.”64This is perhaps what the ruination of the eco-eco crisis of the Anthropocene looks like on a regional scale, with whole tranches of culture, understood as Raymond Williams’s “ways of life,”65 becoming extinct. It is perhaps also strangely apposite that my guided tour around the museum’s storage rooms should have been conducted by a curator who has just been laid off as part of NMM’s repositioning of its core mission.66
Site III: The vanishing object of technology
Figure 5.13 Joanna Zylinska, The Vanishing Object of Technology II, 2012.
The site of my third “shallow dig” in this chapter shifts from the international and national contexts of media e-waste and media fossils to focus on the changing ecology of our domestic technical setups. By this I mean something quite specific: the gradual disappearance of cables, leads, and wires from behind our computers, music systems, TV sets, kitchen equipment, and other domestic devices that rely on the continuous supply of electricity for their functioning. In line with my geological approach, I am not going to offer a materialist analysis of the economics behind the altered nature of global design, production, and distribution of technical equipment; or a culturalist reading of what such altered technological setups mean for us (even though both types of analysis could no doubt tell us something interesting about what we designate as “the world” as well as about the way in which we perceive “it” in its multiple unfoldings). Instead, by way of some very shallow digging, I want to propose a poetic meditation on, and mediation of, the aesthetic of such workaday entanglements. As I suggested along with Sarah Kember in Life after New Media, “mediation” can become an alternative framework for “understanding and articulating our being in, and becoming with, the technological world, our emergence and ways of intra-acting with it, as well as the acts and processes of temporarily stabilizing the world into media, agents, relations, and networks.”67
The etymological similarity between “meditation” and “mediation” is not accidental. Both terms contain the prefix “med-,” which means “to measure, limit, consider,” and both refer to the practice of limitation and suspension—of analysis and critique as distanced modes of engagement with the world. Mediation entails recognizing one’s locatedness within the media, being always already mediated—a state of events that pertains to us humans as much as it does to other entities from which we attempt to differentiate ourselves. However, by engaging in any philosophical or creative activity, by trying to think, write about, or otherwise capture the material entanglements around us (of which we are part), it is necessary to perform an act of découpage, to make a cut through the flow of particles, things, and images, to “measure, limit and consider” what perhaps in its very nature escapes measurement. It is precisely from such dual spatial positioning—of being in the middle of “this aggregate of images” that Bergson calls “the universe,”68 and of trying to carve some specific images out of it that capture a unique technical sensibility—that my poetic mediation arises.
In offering an intertwined textual and visual engagement with a unique moment in the history of technology, I aim to enact a way of philosophizing with a camera as much as with a pen or keyboard. While the photographs included in the Site II section of this chapter serve as illustrations of my visit to NMM and my subsequent argument, the relationship between text and image changes in Site III. The images presented here constitute an inherent part of the argument itself, with the textual part serving as their supplement (figure 5.13). The project started in early 2011, when I began photographing tangles of cables and wires in domestic and office settings as well as taking notes about the setups captured. The drive for this work came from the increasing inconvenience I was experiencing when having to carry my laptop, iPad, cell phone, and camera charger, all spouting long leads—an inconvenience made even more pronounced through frequent travel and through having half of my luggage space taken up by a bunch of wires. But I also became ever more fascinated by the tangled dusty arrangements behind both my own and other people’s desks and media consoles, with numerous devices such as monitors, speakers, external hard drives, printers, scanners, DVD or Blu-ray players, satellite or cable TV boxes, additional USB ports, extensions, and other pieces of equipment (some of which may have become obsolete but which cannot really be removed for fear of disrupting the setup) all connected to form a wiry sculptural mess.
The project is meant to offer more than just a nostalgia trip inspired by the supposedly vanishing technology; a retro-fashion tribute aimed at reminiscing about “old media” just for the sake of it. Nor do I want it to be a celebration of the brave new world of improved technological design, or even a prediction of wirelessness as a new technological condition, as interrogated by Adrian Mackenzie in the book of the same title.69 My ambitions are much more minimal: I just want to stabilize that moment of the gradual disappearance of wires from our human view, to make it a moment worth contemplating, to see what happens before it happens.
The curators of the (now defunct) 20minutesintothefuture website have no doubt that this is indeed what is happening right now. They boldly pronounce:
Wired connections will exist for only the largest of machines, the common man will never need to use a wire for connectivity or indeed for power. The cable tie will [be] found only in museums. The disappearance of cables from our lives is inevitable. We already have working prototypes of devices using wireless electricity and wireless charging. We’ve been using Wi-fi for many years now and the approaching introduction of 4G/LTE networks means that entire cities can have wireless access to fast broadband. We are already decreasing the number of cables we need by designing devices according to standards, thus e.g. most modern phones and portable devices can be charged using a USB cable—no need to have a separate cable/adapter for each one.70
This kind of futuristic rhetoric is fueled by the desire of the technoscientific industry to make technology friendlier and supposedly “more intelligent”—which often amounts to attempts to disguise any visible technological aspects of machines in an effort to make them look and behave more “like us.” Thus, the Swedish furniture manufacturer IKEA has collaborated with the Chinese electronics company TCL to offer a furniture-TV called UPPLEVA. “One of the central value proposition[s is] the disappearance of cables (or at least hiding them better) and a better integration of the TV in the furniture,”71 explains Mark Laperrouza. Such undertakings usually end up mystifying the technological process even further as a result of the delegation of our everyday existence to “the experts,” i.e., designers and technocrats, as already predicted by Jean-François Lyotard in his report on the state of knowledge for the government of Quebec, subsequently published in 1979 as The Postmodern Condition.72
Significantly, the “vanishing cable” ambition only applies to smaller domestic and small office settings. As the BBC reported in 2012, “For the first time since 2001, client PC shipments have declined sequentially for three consecutive quarters and have been below historical averages for the last seven quarters,”73 while more and more people now rely on portable electronic devices to perform the few functions they do every day—social networking, text messaging, online shopping, email. Even so, Google was involved in financing an undersea cabling system called Unity between Japan and the United States, which was completed in 2010. Together with Facebook, it is now developing the Pacific Light Cable Network which will directly connect Los Angeles to Hong Kong by 2018. As Mackenzie poignantly indicates, “Wirelessness struggles against wires, and the extensive tying and knotting of wires called ‘networks.’”74
It is precisely this extensive tying and knotting of wires as stabilized into unwitting sculptural objects that is of interest to me. We could perhaps say that such wire tangles are part of an “accidental aesthetics,” understood as something that emerges over time, as a result of the historical accumulation of various technical objects to which those wires are attached, of those wires being kicked around or rearranged with someone’s foot while she is sitting at a desk or vacuuming, coupled with the accumulation of layers of dust and grime on their surfaces. If conscious aesthetic decisions are ever made about wire arrangements, such decisions are usually focused on minimizing the visibility and presence of the wires: on gathering them into a wire holder, pushing or pinning them behind furniture or along skirting boards. Wire tangles and knots thus serve as a testament to the everyday struggle between order and chaos in everyday media ecologies. They are intrusions into the oft minimalist or functionalist arrangements of living or work spaces, a material reminder of the excess of the everyday that cannot be swept away. They reveal a unique slippery-obstinate tactility, one we encounter when trying to tidy them up or tidy up around them—that is, when trying to bring order into what is inherently a disorderly arrangement. But cables and wires are also a way of domesticating entanglement, stilling it, making it present. We could therefore perhaps go so far as to say that this aesthetic presencing of the wired tangle has an ethical dimension, too: it is a demand placed on the human inhabitant of domestic or office spaces by second-rate objects connected to other objects. And even though aesthetic arrangements are something that has caught my attention, literally and photographically, it is the ethical call of these arrangements that is really of primary concern to me.
This idea of the ethical call of objects expands on my argument from Bioethics in the Age of New Media, in which I positioned bioethics as an originary philosophy, situated even before ontology. That idea was inspired by the work of Levinas, although, as already mentioned in this chapter, I parted ways with him over the humanist limitations of his ethics, whereby a primordial responsibility exerted upon me always came from human others. In my bioethics, understood as an “ethics of life,” the human is called upon to respond to an expanded set of obligations that affect her, make an impression on her, allow for her differentiation from the world around her, and demand more than just a reaction. This is to say that while I do recognize, together with other theorists of posthumanist thought, that “it is not all about us,” I also acknowledge the singular human responsibility to make a decision to respond—or to withhold such a response. The bioethics of expanded obligations thus becomes a way of taking responsibility for the world around us and of addressing the tangled ecology of everyday connections and relations.75
This is where imagistic practice such as, for example, photographic work performed with a camera stops being just an aesthetic endeavor, and where it opens a passageway to ethics. To say this is not to suggest that image-based practice such as mine is ethical per se or that it entails a moral lesson for us all. My claim, to return to my earlier formulation, is much more minimal than that: it is a way of signaling that turning images of wired tangles into photographs is a way of visualizing these acts of the presencing of the world, this demand that objects in the world place upon us, and also of carving and slicing the world in a particular way as an inevitably violent yet also pragmatic gesture of arranging it into particular objects and setups. Photography can be a way of reminding ourselves that there are setups in the first place by stabilizing and hence creating them as setups—such as the particular ones seen here, which we have coordinated at a certain scale by connecting equipment in this and that way—and yet the photographic process is open to so many different influences and activities: production; transfer of particles of electricity; linkage to objects, systems, and bodies we are not familiar with or cannot even envisage. With this, photography takes over from our human perception the task of “cut[ting] inert matter into distinct bodies.”76 It is precisely the relationship between flux and setup, between duration and cut, that, according to Bergson, organizes or even makes the world for us. He posits that “things are constituted by the instantaneous cut which the understanding practices, at a given moment, on a flux of this kind, and what is mysterious when we compare the cuts together becomes clear when we relate them to the flux.”77 The wired tangles are then more than just symbols: they are actual bundles of duration and stoppage, foregrounding some processes and connections while also hinting at other invisible ones across different scales. They are a reminder to us that there is life behind a machine; that, as Jane Bennett puts it, “deep within is an inexplicable vitality or energy, a moment of independence from and resistance to us and other bodies: a kind of thing-power.”78 If, as announced in a think piece in New Statesman, “Today if you are not often wired, you do not exist,”79 the knots and entanglements of cables may prompt us to enquire what such different forms of being wired entail, and may tell us that it does matter who and what we are connected to, when, and why. They may also ask us to account for the kinds of ecologies we exist in and help shape.
As helpless as during the last ice age
So-called technological progress carries with it various kinds of debris: broken promises, discarded ideas, obsolete machines, decomposing infrastructures. “Using technologies as its organs,” writes Lem, “man’s homeostatic activity has turned him into the master of the Earth; yet he is only powerful in the eyes of an apologist such as himself. Faced with climactic disturbances, earthquakes, and the rare but real danger of the fall of meteorites, man is in fact as helpless as he was during the last ice age.”80 Of course we now know that some of the climactic disturbances we face are actually the consequence of our attempt to exert mastery over the Earth, yet this knowledge, as Lem correctly observes, still leaves us helpless. We simply do not know what to do with the mess we have made. Is seeing media fossils as a cosmic remorse the best we can hope for? Or can ecomedia become part of a solution that involves revisualizing the world as a more ethical space, making it more habitable and more resilient not just for us but also for future humans—and future nonhumans? Renouncing any fantasy of returning to the purity of nature, we should perhaps rather conclude, after Hawkins, that [w]aste is inevitable.” If this is indeed the case, then “how we deal with this, what sort of calculations and values we create to make this incontrovertible fact meaningful,”81 becomes a most pressing ethico-political task.
