I have intimated that, especially
in a secular context, a commonly desired ultimate foundation or
ground is full unity, community, or consensus, which is often, if not
typically, figured as lost or perhaps lacking, usually because of the
intrusive presence of others seen as outsiders or polluters of the
city or the body politic. One may, however, insist that such unity,
community, or consensus is absent and that the sociopolitical
problem is how to deal with that absence as well as the differences
and forms of conflict that accompany it.
Dominick LaCapra, "Trauma, Absence,
Loss" [1]
The Mojave Phone
Booth. Courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/eyetwist
This paper will argue for the relevance of
a phenomenology of presence to a discussion of where and how a
"community domain" is possible.
As an ideal within modernity, community
has enjoyed remarkable staying power. Dreams of universal
language, perfectly organized spaces, and augmented conversation
never seem to lose their allure. But as the refuse of failed utopias
mounds high, many people question whether ideals of community
have not hurt more than they have helped. Among the skeptics are
philosophers and political theorists, artists and historians of
technology. Significant about this body of critique is that
communication itself, and the technological means by which it is
achieved, have emerged as an important and material way in which
ideals of community are habitualized and inscribed into
culture.
Community,
Communication, and Communion
In Speaking into the Air, a History of the Idea of
Communication, John Durham Peters examines
communication as a historicized cultural form, one that has
inhibited our ability to actually relate to one another. In Peters'
history, ideal and authentic communication between individuals
typically takes the form of wordless exchange, a perfect transfer in
which mediation falls away to allow for fusion of souls. As far back
as Plato, and driven home by modern mass communication, missed
connections drive the desire for a less material form of social
relations. Our ideals and technologies trap us within a cycle of
utopia and dystopia. "Too often," Peters writes,
"'communication' misleads us from the task of building worlds
together. It invites us into a world of unions without politics,
understandings without language, and souls without bodies, only to
make politics, language and bodies reappear as obstacles rather
than blessings." [2]
Figure 1. An orientalized naif listens closely for a voice that
will never come.
The Questioner of the Sphinx,
Elihu Vedder, 1863. Courtesy of http://www.artcyclopedia.com  "The fully realized
person of individualistic or communistic humanism is the dead
person," writes Jean Luc Nancy in a related work, The
Inoperative Community. [3] Nancy shares with Peters a
concern for how often difference is treated as a barrier to be
overcome, or a boundary that defines the fully realized person.
Where Peters urges us to celebrate the mutable and faulted nature
of language, Nancy calls for a new definition of subjecthood. As
singular beings, rather than individuals, we come into being
through recognizing the boundaries of the self at another.
Community results not from fusion with another or through
autonomous subscription to a common body, but through mutual
acknowledgment of difference. Selfhood emerges only where one
person ends, and another (or even death) begins. Nancy
writes:
Communication consists
before all else in this sharing and this [co-appearance] of finitude:
that is, in the dislocation and in the interpellation that reveal
themselves to be constitutive of being-in-common - precisely
inasmuch as being-in-common is not a common being [...] Only in
this communication are singular beings given - without a bond and
without communion, equally distant from any notion of connection
or joining from the outside and from any notion of a common and
fusional interiority. [4]
Common to the problematic ideals
identified by Nancy and Peters is a failure to account for absence
– the absence of being and selfhood beyond the limits of
one's own sensorium. [Fig. 1] Instead of recognizing the limits of
death or difference as that which we hold in common, utopian
communicants attempt to transcend death through pursuit of
universal language, or extension of the self into a common being
that cannot abide difference.
Enacted
Absence
Importantly for new media practitioners, Peters believes that we
realize and routinize such reactions to absence through our
technologies of communication. He traces a helpful and now
familiar history in which 19th-century spiritualism directly
influences early understanding of telegraphy, telephony, eventually
satellites and even the search for extra-terrestrials. [5] Across these
attempts to communicate lies a common test for presence, a test
coincident with the test for limits to the self. At the seance, a
medium "pings" the wooden table to see if a spirit will
rap in return – contact with the world beyond is constituted
through an echo, an aural mirror, but also a disjuncture of sense
and belief. The presence of an other is only achievable through a
break of time and space, a detachment of the senses.
Leigh Eric Schmidt demonstrates how
such an epistemological break serves even secularist agendas,
through a "re-education of the senses" based on
enacted absence. In his book Hearing Things: Religion,
Illusion and the American Enlightenment, Schmidt tells of
scientists examining oracular statues with stethoscopes, and
traveling magicians who re-create Delphi through props and
speaking tubes. [6] Each performance of simulated aural revelation
concluded by pulling back the curtain, allowing audience members
to then speak through the mouth of a goddess.
In these histories of telepresence,
absence is either quickly filled (even haunted), or left gaping to
revisit as a fetishized site of trauma – the structural trauma
of realizing one's own finitude, and the impossibility of community
(or sometimes divinity). In his study of the concept of
"ether," by which absence is often materialized, Joe
Milutis quotes the early Russian radio artist Khlebnikov:
Where has this great stream of sound
come from, this inundation of the whole country in supernatural
singing, in the sound of beating wings, this broad silver stream full
of whistlings and clangor and marvelous mad bells surging from
somewhere we are not, mingling with children's voices singing and
the sound of wings?
Over the center of every town in the
country these voices pour down, a silver shower of sound. Amazing
silver bells mixed with whistlings surge down from above. Are these
perhaps the voices of heaven, spirits flying low over the farmhouse
roof?
No. [7]
Our technologies of presence set us up
to expect communication and connection where it will never
happen, to imagine community in ways that are bound to fail. How
might telepresent technology instead acknowledge absence without
fetishizing it, abhor the void without filling it? Neither Peters nor
Nancy address this question in detail, though their analyses fully
articulate the need. If the histories related by Schmidt and others
are any indication, we will need to answer this question through
practice as well as theory. First however, I would like to enlist one
other area of discourse – that of trauma and memory,
especially as manifest in memorial spatial, aural, and pictorial
practices.
The Trauma of
Absence
Failures to confront absence in communication bear a
close resemblance to failures to confront and work
through the experience of trauma. As we benefit from
a large body of work analyzing material responses to trauma,
perhaps we might answer the calls of Peters or Nancy through some
cross-disciplinary discussion.
Telemediated experience, photography
and even the recorded voice rely on some small set of data to
bridge a temporal-spatial gap between persons. Likewise, recovery
from trauma involves the utilization of present sensory experience
to bridge a temporal gap introduced by traumatic dislocation of
sense and consciousness. Victims of trauma "work
through" their experience after having perceived it; as the
brain cannot comprehend the event in real-time, only remnants are
available for examination. As part of recovery, victims and
witnesses revisit the site of trauma through material recreation or
inscription.
Important to this possibly dangerous analogy, however, are some
distinctions made by Dominick LaCapra. He describes recovery from
trauma as a process of separating absence from loss, where loss
involves a particular historical event, and absence the perception of
something as "missing" that was never present to begin
with. Conflation or confusion of these is part of traumatic
experience, but could also result from inappropriate identification
with another's loss, mistaking felt absence for experienced loss.
Failure to properly distinguish between the two can have disastrous
consequences.
When absence is converted into
loss, one increases the likelihood of misplaced nostalgia or utopian
politics in quest of a new totality or fully unified community. When
loss is converted into (or encrypted in an indiscriminately
generalized rhetoric of) absence, one faces the impasse of endless
melancholy, impossible mourning, and interminable aporia in which
any process of working through the past and its historical losses is
foreclosed or prematurely aborted. [8]
Treated as loss, absence pushes
witnesses to fill voids that cannot be filled, through retaliation, or
through misplaced identification with real victims. Alternately, a
witness or victim may choose to preserve the void, and revisit the
site of perceived historical loss with compulsive regularity.
To blur the distinction
between, or to conflate, absence and loss may itself bear striking
witness to the impact of trauma and the post-traumatic, which
create a state of disorientation, agitation, or even confusion and
may induce a gripping response whose power and force of
attraction can be compelling. The very conflation attests to the way
one remains possessed or haunted by the past, whose ghosts and
shrouds resist distinctions (such as that between absence and loss).
Indeed, in post-traumatic situations in which one relives (or acts
out) the past, distinctions tend to collapse, including the crucial
distinction between then and now wherein one is able to remember
what happened to one in the past but realize one is living in the
here and now with future possibilities. I would argue that the
response of even secondary witnesses (including historians) to
traumatic events must involve empathic unsettlement that should
register in one's very mode of address in ways of revealing both
similarities and differences across genres (such as history and
literature). But a difficulty arises when the virtual experience
involved in empathy gives way to vicarious victimhood, and
empathy with the victim seems to become an identity. And a post-
traumatic response of unsettlement becomes questionable when it
is routinized in a methodology or style that enacts compulsive
repetition, including the compulsively repetitive turn to the aporia,
paradox, or impasse. [9]
LaCapra's descriptions of conflated absence and loss are
reminiscent of utopian attempts at community or communication,
which typically blur distinctions between self and other, then and
now, here and there. Reading Nancy or Peters through LaCapra, the
absence of perfect communion with others is sometimes
misconstrued as an Edenic loss, a historic Fall from which we must
struggle to recover. For all three of these scholars, we ignore this
void or fill it to the peril of ourselves and others. In a secularized
world, there has been no golden time of communion, no perfect
place of immanence and clear transfer of thought, nor will there be.
Yet new media are both lauded and derided as the progenitors or
destroyers of such a place. [10]
LaCapra alludes to ways in which
absence misunderstood as loss can manifest itself in destructive
forms of nationalism. He also identifies in such confusion a more
subtle violence towards difference, through misplaced empathy that
folds the other (the real victim) into the self. To violently empathize
is to expand the space of the self, constructing social symmetry
where there is none.
Certainly there are echoes here of the
ways in which telecommunication constructs symmetrical social
experiences that mask or obscure the real power dynamics at work.
Alternately, if in communication we decline to fill the void of
absence, we are still often predisposed to fetishizing it, revisiting
the wound with compulsive regularity. We scan the stations for a
signal, lift the receiver to see if anyone is on the party line, perhaps
even compulsively re-check our email. Like Donnie Darko's Beckett-
hero Roberta Sparrow, we spend our days pacing back and forth to
see if the void is still there in the mailbox. [Fig. 2]
Figure 2. Roberta Sparrow (aka
"Grandma Death") checks her mail again in
Donnie Darko.
Representing
Traumatic Loss: Space
Turning back to the comparison of absent community and
trauma, what might we learn from memorial responses to traumatic
loss? Remaining alert to the danger of equating absence with
historical loss, what might we learn from spatial, pictorial, or aural
attempts to recover from trauma?
In his book Present Pasts: Urban
Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Andreas Huyssen
surveys recent attempts to grapple with loss through monument
and public space. With Berlin as a focus, he discusses Christo's
wrapping of the Reichstag and the commercial redevelopment of a
war-razed Potsdamer Platz before turning to Libeskind's Jewish
Museum. Maya Lin's popular Vietnam Memorial prompted a near
institutionalization of the physical void as a way of remembering
loss, and Berlin has more than its share of holes. Huyssen outlines
some of the dangers of preserving absence before lauding
Libeskind's design, in which a jagged meander of a building is
transected by a series of inaccessible spaces. Visitors encounter
these humanless voids through interior windows from every floor,
but can never enter. He writes:
There is a danger of romanticizing or
naturalizing the voided center of Berlin, just as Libeskind's building
may ultimately not avoid the reproach of aestheticizing or
monumentalizing the void architecturally. But then the very
articulation of this museal space demonstrates the architect's
awareness of the dangers of monumentality: huge as the expansion
is, the spectator can never see or experience it as a whole. Both the
void inside and the building as perceived from outside elude the
totalizing gaze upon which monumental effects are predicated. [11]
Huyssen is aware of the dangers outlined
by LaCapra, especially when manifest in the design of public space.
To pretend as if there had been no loss would of course be unjust,
and would inhibit recovery from trauma. On the other hand, to
fetishize the void (through piles of shoes, or the glass chairs of
Oklahoma City, or the reconstructed footprint-holes of the World
Trade Center) is to encourage mourning that is both non-specific
and too easily grasped. At best it facilitates inappropriate
identification with the victims, and at worst endangers the memory
of specific atrocities through abstraction.
Figure 3. A visitor looks into the void
at Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, Berlin.
For Huyssen, Libeskind avoids these
dangers through the construction of a void that is beyond full
human comprehension, but which is still visible from the periphery.
[Fig. 3] Like historical loss, the void in the Jewish Museum has a
finite shape and existence in the world, but it is not one easily
known or ordered, appropriated. Though only a simple axis,
Libeskind's void emerges unpredictably, asserting itself back into
the path of the museum visitor. We are prevented from projecting
ourselves fully into these spaces, as there are always some portions
obscured from view – they cannot be ours. The design
preserves rather than obscures the traumatic break between
knowledge and perception – the real loss remains larger than
we can imagine, beyond rational scale, yet we are given an
analogical sensory experience that resists metonymy, and perhaps
even metaphor.
Libeskind has facilitated a site for
recovery from trauma that utilizes space to make loss physical,
sensory, and thus seemingly obvious, yet ultimately not assumable
into experience. For witnesses as distant as those born in another
century and another continent, the experience still attempts to
bridge a gap of sense, yet without succumbing to the ungrantable
desire to know "what it was like."
Representing
Traumatic Loss: Image
Where Huyssen and Libeskind seek to facilitate recovery
through spatial organization, others have approached the process
as temporal, through image or sound. In Spectral
Evidence, Ulrich Baer explores the interrelated temporalities
of trauma and photography, with an emphasis on representations of
the Jewish Holocaust. Some pictures, according to Baer, resist
conventional comprehension as a frozen moment within a stream of
time. As in traumatic experience, these images seem to establish
their own time, remaining apart from history, and defying
contextualization. He goes on to wonder if perhaps all photography
might share this quality:
If we analyze photographs
exclusively through establishing the context of their production, we
may overlook the constitutive breakdown of context that, in a
structural analogy to trauma, is staged by every photograph. In
some photographs, the impression of timelessness coincides with a
strange temporality and contradictory sense of the present
surrounding the experiences depicted. To analyze images that
focus on such interruptions and loss of context, therefore, it is not
sufficient to refer to the extrapictorial "social and psychic
formations of the [photograph's] author / reader." Rather, we
must consider such photographs in the light of what Eduardo
Cadava has identified as the peculiar structure that lies between
"the photographic image and any particular referent,"
which is, in fact, "the absence of relation." This absence
of relation may come into focus when reading photography through
trauma theory – and vice versa, when reading trauma theory
through the startling effect of reality created by photography.
Photographs present their referents as peculiarly severed from the
time in which they were shot, thus precluding simple recourse to
the contexts established by individual and collective forms of
historical consciousness. [12]
Baer's account invites us to see pictures
as analogous to the sensory evidence of a traumatic event. Though
we may desire a reconstruction of the original event using available
data, the gap between sense and history is ultimately impossible to
close. A picture invites either inclusion in the present or placement
in a specific past, through attachment to a particular referent. For
Baer, neither is fully possible, nor desirable.
 For examples of this, he looks
to the concentration camp photographs of Mikael Levin [Fig. 4] and
Dirk Reinartz. In each case, the picture is neither conventionally
picturesque nor compositionally resistant to the gaze; instead of
architectural ruins or other obvious signs of trauma, we see an
unremarkable yet accessible landscape. A title or published context
invites closer inspection, in order to place a banal image in the
context of known historical atrocities.
Because they do not contain
evidence of their importance, these photographs ask to be regarded
on strictly modernist terms – as if their significance and
merit derived not from our knowledge of context but from intrinsic
formal criteria alone. By representing the Holocaust in such
stringently formal terms, Reinhartz and Levin force us to see that
there is nothing to see there; and they show us that there is
something in a catastrophe as vast as the Holocaust that remains
inassimilable to historicist or contextual readings. Just when they
posit the event as radically singular, and thus when they risk
investing absence with spiritual meaning, Reinartz and Levin retract
the promise that we can transcend the photographed void to reach
some comprehensive, and thus consoling, meaning. [13]
We are left with a picture that refers only
to absence, an absence that implicates us in our desire to assimilate
another time into ours. Referring to the images more often
associated with death camps, Baer writes, "The rush of moral
indignation that often accompanies the encounter with other
graphic pictures of atrocities may be narcissistically satisfying, but
it may also free us from the responsibility of placing our own
experiences in relation to something that remains, finally,
incomprehensible." [14] Like the gaps between beings, like
the end of self, these atrocities invite assimilation into our world,
but ultimately refuse it.
Through the use of perspective and
conventional pictorial composition, the photos of Reinartz and Levin
invite involvement by the viewer. Textual identification of the
horrible, invisible histories of these sites pushes the viewer back
out again. Baer describes this tension as catching the viewer
between place (belonging) and space (exclusion), leaving her to
confront her own "subject-position," a phrase he
borrows from LaCapra. The only ways out of this dilemma are
sentimental identification with a lost victim, or restoration of sense
to the image through its location within an archive. The former
violently asserts subjectivity at the expense of acknowledging an
unknowable loss; the latter uses objectivity as pretense for an
equally violent refusal to confront the singularity of the event.
Like Nancy's "singular being,"
a visitor to Berlin's Jewish Museum remains no more or less isolated
from others, or from loss. Likewise, viewers of Baer's photographs
confront the gap between their time and that of a victim's
downfall. They look, and compare, at first experiencing
confusion before growing gradually more aware of their own
position in a space of multiple and discontinuous times and
histories. At the limit of photography, a viewer discovers her
beginning.
Figure 5. Poster for a film version of
Basinski's The Disintegration Loops.
Courtesy of
http://www.mmlxii.com/
 Representing
Traumatic Loss: Sound
Responsible application of memorial
practice toward a technologized sensorium of beings-in-common
requires that we examine the aural as well as the spatial, temporal,
and pictorial. Sonic representations of traumatic loss are not hard
to find; the events of September 11, 2001, yielded numerous and
powerful artifacts. We could listen to the recordings of artist
Stephen Vitiello, who before 9/11 captured wind noise on a window
of the World Trade Center's 91st floor; or to Mark Bain's record of
the sounds of impact and collapse via seismic recordings made in
Manhattan; Janet Cardiff's 40 Part Motet, coincidently
on display at P.S.1, became a de facto monument to loss for many;
the aspirationally democratic Sonic Memorial collected
audio artifacts in an online archive; we might even listen to
recently-released recordings of emergency calls by stranded Trade
Center workers. In these eerie "cut-ups," the victims'
voices have been edited out by court order, though breathing is still
audible over the responses of dispatchers.
Ultimately, however, the most
applicable artifacts for our project are the unlikely sonic
monuments of Richard Basinski's The Disintegration
Loops. [Fig. 5] What began as a formal exercise in private
melancholy suddenly found enormous public resonance, eventually
reaching critical acclaim and unheard-of popularity for an avant-
garde experiment.
During August and September of 2001, Basinski digitally recorded
the degradation of decades-old magnetic tape loops, remnants of
former projects. On each track, a simple and pastoral musical
phrase repeats regularly, dirge-like and elegeic, for as little as 12
minutes or as long as an hour, until the tape loop presumably falls
apart. Gaps and distortions grow progressively worse – to
play these fragile loops was literally to destroy them, and we are
hearing their last performance. Already a poignant meditation on
ephemerality and the passing of one form to another at millenium's
end, The Disintegration Loops found a whole new
function on September 11. As the artist worked that day, he
watched the planes hit and the towers fall through his window in
Brooklyn. Basinski and friends then went to the roof, where he
finished the project as the smoke continued to rise, and the world
sank into a whole new political dynamic.
The four compact disks of The
Disintegration Loops are incredibly and surprisingly moving.
Each disk's cover contains the same image at different stages of
dusk, a view from afar of the World Financial Center dome, visible
beneath a plume of smoke in the growing darkness. Like Baer's
chosen photographs, Basinski's tracks invite an unverifiable
association through contextual narrative. Listening to the
recordings, we hear nothing to indicate the presence of the burning
pile across the river. As the piece is more musical than pictorial, we
lack even the benefit of perspectival space to invite us in. In its
place, however, we are offered sentiment, the sentiment of Satie-
like melodies, of Eno's ambience, and two decades or more of
moody electronic synthesis. The phrases invite emotion,
constructing safety through repetition and assuring chords.
As each loop breaks down, however, two
things happen – the music forms an analogical relation to
the Trade Center and the lives lost, and we are literally prevented
from listening to it. The closer Disintegration Loops
comes to closing the gap between representation and referent, the
more impossible it is for us to hear it.
Less satisfactory examples reveal the
power of Basinski's project. Compare this work to the equally
repetitive video clips on network news at the time, or to the
sensational sound collage that begins Michael Moore's
Fahrenheit 9/11. In the former, repetition
compulsively preserves the traumatic site of perceptual disjuncture;
in the latter, an attempt at reconstructive representation invites us
to imagine that day in vivid detail, yet without a space for mourning
or reflection.
The Disintegration Loops
preserve absence without fetishizing or colonizing it; they leave the
gap of sense and consciousness intact, but facilitate mourning
through separation of absence from loss. The people and places of
the World Trade Center were lost, along with perhaps a particular
identity for New York. We may feel that we lost other things
–security, for example, or a continuous and rational sense of
time, or a reliable sensorium in which perception results in
comprehension – but these were never present to begin with.
Critic David Keenan wrote in his review of the project for The
Wire:
Its process of (de)composition
mirrors one way people work through their memories of disaster.
Basinski describes both processes as simply "letting go of the
important sustains." But the music speaks for itself and in
much more poignant terms than any act of 'auto-destructive' art for
art's sake. Subjected to the uncontrollable chance factor of tape
decay, The Disintegration Loops is sound as matter being seized by
time, the remorseless logic of its destruction counterpointing the
staggered decay of memory. [15]
Among the most unsettling qualities of
Basinski's project is that once each loop has died, we can push a
button to replay the digital record, resurrecting the dead only to re-
experience the process of passing. Though the tendencies toward
unhelpful preservation of absence through repetition are there, this
discontinuity also maintains distance between the representation
and referent – the loops, in the end, were simply tape; the
listener-subject imagines any other connection.
Design for a Phenomenology of
Acknowledged Absence
Nancy and Peters only begin to demonstrate the
destructive effects of expecting community or communion where
there can be none; indeed some of the more traumatic events of the
past century can be linked to just such utopias.
In the end, though, comparison of failed
communication to trauma functions better at the level of structural
and phenomenological experience than at the political or even
moral levels. Particularly in the example of telecommunication, both
trauma and communication involve a temporal or spatial break, in
which present phenomena provide the only bridge to "the
other side" as well as confirmation of the impossibility of
closing the gap.
This paper's cited examples demonstrate
ways in which this gap may be negotiated using built space or the
technologies of recorded sound or image. We require bodily,
sensory manifestations of felt absence, as a way of enacting the
limits to communication, and of reminding ourselves about
difference. We also need to be wary of the dangers of abstracting
such absences, preserving them solely for the purposes of vicarious
participation in the suffering of others, or of re-experiencing
trauma as way of realizing autonomy.
Based on this brief survey of embodied
memorial practices, I would venture the following guidelines for
constructing more constructive and progressive telepresent
experiences:
1. Create an experience that is bigger
than the body's sensory capacities, but not so big as to be
perceived as monumental or ineffable.
2. Work through synchronization, simultaneity or spatial
illusion to facilitate perceived co-presence, but do not leave this
illusion undisturbed.
3. Design for specific ruptures and breaks at the levels of
form, content or context. Take care not to let these ruptures form
the focus or end of the work.
Certainly these suggestions resemble
familiar modernist approaches to media as simultaneously
transparent and opaque, "hot" and "cool."
Heeding LaCapra's warning, however, I discourage such reflexivity
or remediation solely in the service of paradox. There are a myriad
ways in which two persons might share a space, a time, a
perceptual set, without pretending to union, or retreating to
isolation. For Jean Luc Nancy's Inoperative
Community, reflexivity constitutes acknowledgment of the
Other, not the self.
We need interfaces and networks that
facilitate just this sort of connection, and we need them to appear
unexpectedly, not in the safe spaces of the gallery or festival.
Others have examined how the human operator-experts of our
networks once functioned in this way, as agents or mediums
through which information flowed with varying degrees of ease and
attention to the process. Even apart from the politics of placing
persons in such a position, we are certainly beyond the
technological need for such a labor-dependent network. Perhaps,
however, as our artificial agents and operators grow smarter, we
might train them to facilitate remote connection with more
attention to the need for resistance, for reminders of the chasms
that constitute community.
Appendix /
Application
Unfortunately, examples of new media projects that demonstrate
constructive acknowledgment of absence are hard to find. Since
negative examples could serve an applied discourse as well, I will
offer here a brief discussion of some better and worse attempts at
telemediated "community domain." Any of these works
would merit a longer examination – this effort is intended to
briefly demonstrate application of this paper's premise.
PostSecret
http://postsecret.blogspot.com
Frank Warren
On this blog, Frank Warren posts, without comment, the
handmade, mailed postcards of anonymous people who wish to
share a "secret." Whether or not the project originated in
a new media discourse, PostSecret applies a strategy that is quite
common in explicitly social applications of digital media. As in any
number of projects, viewers are invited to contribute to the
perceived shared space of a webpage; one at a time, strangers get a
chance at the podium of a weekly blog post, where they share a
secret no one else has heard. (These participants have certainly
found an audience – as I write, the project in book form
ranks at #75 on Amazon's popularity list.)
The problem with this strategy, as in
many such works, lies in the identification and production of
subjectivity with self-contained difference, through formal
variation. Each postcard's distinguishing hand-made qualities
metonymously represent the speaker, lend authenticity to the
secret, and lend the project an appearance of inclusivity and
diversity. A particular "community domain" is here
comprised of an atomistic archive in which no individual stands in
different relation to any other. Though Warren provides links to a
suicide hotline, and even a testimonial as to how the page helps
others "know that they are not alone in their secrets," I
would argue that such projects ultimately fetishize solitude and
compound the pain of isolation. The project facilitates no
substantive interrelation between contributors, or between
contributors and readers, despite the painful, polemical and
politicized content of some of the secrets. In a departure from
normative blog practice, not even comments are allowed.
PostSecret almost perfectly captures the
non-participatory status of representative democracy in the United
States, and the role of formalism or style as a substitute for
subjectivity in capitalism. Like the worst attempts at memorializing
public loss, Warren's domain ignores a gaping absence of discourse
under the guise of facilitating a safe public space, and encourages
vicarious participation in the pain of others. PostSecret relies on
fear of communication between familiars as motivation for
participation in a "community" of strangers that owe
each other nothing, and yet appear to be part of something. Here
one gets the appearance of filled absence, without surrendering the
fetishized void.
IN
Network
http://turbulence.org/Works/innetwork/
Michael Mandiberg and Julia Steinmetz
Commissioned by Turbulence.org, IN
Network consisted of a month-long multimedia blog. For all
of March 2005, the couple Michael Mandiberg and Julia Steinmetz
posted every image, text message, or phone conversation shared
between them. As they had been recently separated by Mandiberg's
move to New York, this was no small amount of information; the
pair pushed their service-provider's offer of free "in
network" calls past the limit, including at least one night
spent sleeping "together" over a live cellular
connection.
The project presents a curious
intersection of alienation and banality. Like most surveillance
footage, there is almost nothing of interest here for the voyeur, and
in fact the invitation into another couple's world is quite
exclusionary. Seemingly no recognition of an outside audience
takes place – we do not know what they are talking about
half the time, and even the text messages are presented just as
sent, in abbreviated and opaque IM-speak. Due to the original
deployment of the project through podcasts and RSS feeds,
reception after the fact takes some Memento-like
reconstruction – the posts appear in reverse order for each
day. The opacity and insularity of the project begs the
question of why they made the exchange public at all.
IN Network is an elaborate
fiction – by never alluding to the presumably watching
public, but purposely pushing everything (except e-mails) out there
for us to see, Steinmetz and Mandiberg construct an opaque (and
fairly boring) narrative for us. What do they achieve for themselves
and others? Admittedly, I have not listened to every sound file, but
it troubles me that they never seem to explicitly address their
relationship to each other or to us as determined and shaped by
these chosen media. Beyond some cloying exchanges about
"how many seconds" remain until they are re-united, we
see no overt comparison of telemediated experience to shared
physical experience, and so I assume they must be content with the
product offered them by commerce. It is hard not to see the couple
as blithe to the impact of absence on relationships.
The two might have better included the audience through a more
structured performance, or a more overt and faulted exploration of
their own limits. By refusing to do so, these artists
demonstrate utopian faith in the power of networks to supply
surrogate presence. The month's documentation becomes like one
giant Postsecret card, dismissable as the sentiment of
an isolated couple who believe themselves to be one despite the
geographical gap between them. If their demographic did not
represent a dominant power (young, white, cosmopolitan, and
mobile), the project could be accused of exoticization through
refusal to address the function of public display. Otherness is left
totally unexamined, through their own lack of mutual exploration
and their neglect of our role in the process.
This project could learn a thing or two
from Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena's Couple in the
Cage, or even Dan Graham's Past Future / Split
Attention.
Figure 6. Charlie on the line at the Mojave Phone
Booth. Image courtesy of Desert Tripper.
Mojave Phone Booth
http://www.deuceofclubs.com/moj/mojave.htm
(760) 733-9969
N35'17'07.3" W115'41'04.2"
The Mojave Phone Booth [Fig. 6] was an
accidental telemediated experience, a highly unusual physical and
virtual destination for a few years until the Park Service removed it.
The remnant of a once-busy mining community, the functional
phone booth appeared as a dream-like apparition of urban
infrastructure in the middle of a remote desert landscape. Boosted
by word-of-mouth and early Internet exposure, the phone became
a busy hub of activity for callers and drivers from around the world.
Through incoming calls from people who found the number online
or in print, or through outgoing calls from tourists on the hunt for a
legend, the desert payphone sometimes stayed busy around the
clock. Visitors to the booth often camped out all night, taking shifts
answering anonymous calls.
The site held a beautifully complex,
yet finite nexus of communicative scenarios. Consider all of the
possible callers:
- The person who calls from outside
and has visited the booth
- The person who calls from outside and has never
visited the booth
- The person who answers the phone on site
- The call out from the booth to friends or family who
have never visited (or perhaps even heard of) the booth
- The call out from the booth to friends or family who
have visited the booth
- The person who calls out from the booth to a stranger
- The call to the booth answered
- The call to the booth unanswered
- The call from the booth answered
- The call from the booth unanswered
Consider all the combinations therein,
the ways in which each completed or incompleted call varies. Every
case involves some combination of familiar and unfamiliar, known
and unknown, for the caller and the receiver. As gathered from the
documentary Mojave Mirage, a typical scenario might
go like this:
[phone rings, someone standing
around the booth answers]
Caller: "Am I really calling a phone booth in the
middle of a desert?"
Receiver: "Yes, believe me, I'm right here, it's crazy,
you wouldn't believe it if you saw it – who is this, where are
you calling from?"
Caller: "Germany, in Berlin!"
Receiver: "(laughs) No way! For real? I've never
talked to anyone from Germany, what's it like?"
The project retains a perceptual rupture
– neither caller can really imagine what the other is seeing,
and perhaps even doubts the veracity of the claim. Telemediated
conversations between strangers or familiars alternate between
attention to the medium ("Can you believe this thing? It's
surreal!") and attention to the other person or site through
description or questions. Of course, as in any such opportunity for
anonymous and distanced interaction with strangers, callers on
either end explored and crossed lines of intimacy. Here, however,
the recipient of an unwanted advance held the full and public power
to respond through hanging up, cutting off the other from access to
the experience, before sharing the experience with others.
("What did he say? .... Ewww, what a pig!")
Callers and visitors describe achieving a
sense of communitas, of elated and temporary belonging. (One
caller is quoted: "It helps make people, people again!")
The Mojave Phone Booth fulfilled the desire for connection, for
community, for communication, without pretending to remove the
gaps and differences between persons. Each call brought home the
contrast between two spaces and two people, but that disparity
became a subject of wonderment that propelled conversations
forward. Simultaneous and heterogeneous networks grew over at
least two forms of telecommunication, intersecting with and
embedded in the physical world. These networks were temporary
and ephemeral but not dystopian, contingent, and even vulnerable
without aestheticizing the void.
Transitions
http://www.fusedspace.org/show_contribution.ph
p?id=96
Ulrika Wachtmeister
This project exists only as a proposal, but still serves as a
useful example. The winning entry from 2004's Fusedspace
competition, Transitions asks us to imagine a particular
epistemological, social, spatial scenario, one that richly engages
absence between strangers as a site for contemplating loss.
Wachtmeister's project identifies an
important need in the process of separating absence from loss after
the death of a loved one. Those who grieve without a specific and
finite space for social, public remembrance risk forgetting historical
loss, leaving only the absence of a companion or family member.
For those who choose secular means of burial, in particular through
the dispersion of cremains to the wind, earth, or sea, no such space
exists.
Transitions imagines a new
company that meets this need in two parts: one physical /
geographical, the other virtual. Through provision of online
memorials via websites, Pepparholm Ltd. invites survivors to engage
in "personal memorial pages, condolences, correspondence,
[and] support-groups." Where this virtual space serves as a
finite destination for intentional visitors, the coterminous physical
site consists solely of transitory anonymous encounters. There,
Wachtmeister proposes a field of solar-powered lamps that light up
on occasion of a visit to one of the virtual memorials. She locates
this field on the artificial island of Pepparholm, which currently
hosts only a transition from bridge to tunnel for commuters
between Copenhagen and Malmo; no one may stop on Pepparholm,
they only pass through.
A passenger or driver passing through
Pepparholm at night glimpses a lit lamp before vanishing into a
tunnel. Assuming she is aware of the project, we can imagine her
thoughts going to at least two absent persons – the grieved
and the grieving. Both are strangers to her, but were familiar to
each other. Both are absent from our commuter's perception; one
by an immeasurable and unknowable distance of time and space,
the other by an immeasurable physical distance but a finite
temporal gap. She knows where and when in virtual space the
grieving survivor is located; this knowledge is reciprocated through
the survivor's awareness of a public manifestation on Pepparholm.
The two share a moment, as well as a constructively asymmetrical
experience of absence.
The commuter experiences death in this
project only as an abstraction, but is aware that an unreachable
specificity is painfully clear to another person. As if the names on
Maya Lin's monument were visible only to the families of the lost,
Transitions forgoes creation of unfounded empathy or connection
with others in favor of mutual recognition of the distance caused by
loss.
Spanning memorial and communicative
practices, Transitions employs telemediation and
multiple physical and virtual spaces to produce an assymetrical and
temporary connection between strangers. Founded on loss, but
refusing anyone a permanent stay, Wachtmeister's connection is
another helpful example of founding community on the
impossibility of communion.
Isophone
http://web.media.mit.edu/~stefan/hc/projects/iso
phone/
Human Connectedness Group, MIT Media Lab Europe
James Auger, Jimmy Loizeau, Stefan
Agamanolis
Isophone originated within a research group of the now
defunct European branch of the MIT Media Lab. The mission and
projects of this group, now a static archive, bear deep examination
in light of this paper's premise. Much of the work represents a likely
application of "acknowledged absence" to telemediated
experiences, and finds continued resonance in other research
efforts. Examination and historicization of the lab's rhetoric and
products would assuredly help hone an applied phenomenology of
absence; ultimately, however, many of the projects fall prey to
utopian and individualist ideals.
LaCapra offers a sobering warning
against misplaced desire in the form of limitless pursuit of "an
infinite series of displacements in quest of a surrogate for what has
presumably been lost." Such pursuit inevitably takes the form
of melancholy:
When absence, approximated to loss,
becomes the object of mourning, the mourning may (perhaps must)
become impossible and turn continually back into endless
melancholy. The approximation or even conflation of absence and
loss induces a melancholic or impossibly mournful response to the
closure of metaphysics, a generalized "hauntology," and
even a dubious assimilation (or at least an insufficiently
differentiated treatment) of other problems (notably a limit-event
such as the Holocaust and its effects on victims) with respect to a
metaphysical or meta-metaphysical frame of reference. [16]
This description uncannily captures the
collected projects of the Human Connectedness group (and
admittedly, of the more dangerous applications of this paper),
particularly when examined in light of the group's location within a
research-driven consumerist economy. Isophone is among the most
captivating of their efforts, as well as the most sobering.
For this project, illustrated in a
melancholic video, two individuals separated by great distance are
united via a symmetrical telemediated experience. Each person (in
this case, perhaps a woman and her ex-boyfriend) enters a
swimming pool and dons a singular piece of headgear. The
Isophone helmet wholly encloses the face and head, obscuring
vision and supplying a live audio connection with the other
communicant. Three attached buoys allow the user to hang from
the helmet like a noose, an arrangement that looks surprisingly
comfortable on video.
Here, sensory deprivation appears to
create a common space, a perceptual bridge intended to parallel the
telephonic link. Isophone's creators describe it as "a
telephonic communication space of heightened purity and
focus." On the video, the reunited couple catches up on where
each of them lives, which friends they are in touch with. As in IN
Network, we are invited (for the sake of documentation) to observe
one couple's attempt at connection; also like that project, the effort
appears to be a success ("We should try to do this more
often," she concludes.)
It is an uncomfortable experience to
watch for very different reasons. The camera is forced to choose
between views of the head or views of the swimsuit-clad body
beneath the surface, an uncanny and objectifying gesture that
colors any understanding of the concept. We watch two mobile
young white people willingly adopt stances of immobility as an
attempt to bridge absence, in a weird inversion of contemporary
torture techniques, in which prisoners are forced to stand immobile
as a way of creating self-inflicted solitude.
Though Isophone's relation
to absence would likely vary depending on context of use, it
depends on an unpromising sensory premise – that any
input from the present world is merely a distraction to achieving
union with another. More contingent, even agitational conditions
might help prevent this couple from sinking into the melancholy of
the video's accompanying electronica soundtrack. Sensory isolation
sets Isophone's users up for a fall, through an initial promise of
common space that eventually slams them back into knowing
nothing but what they hear, what they depend on from
technology.
Kevin Hamilton
Assistant Professor, Painting and New Media
School of Art and Design
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
408 East Peabody Drive
Champaign, IL 61820
217-390-4619
kham@thing.net
http://kevinhamilton.org
References:
[1] Dominick LaCapra, "Trauma, Absence, Loss,"
Critical Inquiry 25 (1999), pp. 696-727.
[2] John Durham Peters, Speaking
into the Air, a History of the Idea of Communication
(University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, 1999), p. 30.
[3] Jean-Luc-Nancy, The
Inoperative Community (University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, 1991), p. 13.
[4] Ibid., p. 29.
[5] Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted
Media (Duke University Press: Durham, NC, 2000); Leigh Eric
Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the American
Enlightenment (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA,
2000); Craig Baldwin, Spectres of the Spectrum, DVD
(Other Cinema: San Francisco, CA, 2001); Avital Ronell, The
Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech
(University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 1989).
[6] Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing
Things: Religion, Illusion and the American Enlightenment
(Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2000).
[7] Joe Milutis, Ether: the Nothing
that Connects Everything (University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, 2006).
[8] Dominick LaCapra, "Trauma,
Absence, Loss," Critical Inquiry 25 (1999), p.
698.
[9] Ibid., p. 699
[10] Doreen Massey, "A Global
Sense of Place," in D. Massey (ed.), Space, Place and
Gender (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN,
1994).
[11] Andreas Huyssen,
Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory
(Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA, 2003), p. 69.
[12] Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence:
the Photography of Trauma (The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA,
2002)
[13] Ibid., pp. 66-67.
[14] Ibid., p. 84.
[15] David Keenan, review of The
Distintegration Loops, The Wire (August
2002).
[16] Dominick LaCapra, "Trauma,
Absence, Loss," Critical Inquiry 25 (1999), p.
708.
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