Charles R. Acland (ed),
Residual Media.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4472-1
US$25.00 (pb)
400pp
(Review copy supplied by the University of Minnesota Press)
Obituaries for old media, as standard news practice dictates for superannuated or terminally ill celebrities, have the peculiar fate of being written prior to the actual consummation of death. Prophets of the digital revolution speak of an inevitable time not so far away in which print has gone extinct and all our textual matter is commodiously compressed on to computer or Kindle™-ish devices, and our movies, if we still venture outside the increasingly high-def spaces of home-viewing, are translated to the screen via digital files rather than reels of sprocketed celluloid. Such are the visions we are called upon to entertain, even as those visions are, at present, still imperfectly realized in a world where book sales may be slumping but the super-sized chain bookstore is a viable bourgeois haunt, and cineplexes don’t quite turn enough profit from extortionately priced soda and popcorn to bankroll their own state-of-the-art make-overs.
The familiar rhetorical gesture of pronouncing that such and such a medium “is dead” relies on a proleptic logic that in retrospect often proves not so much to be wrong categorically – for, on the digital front, surely a massive sea-change is upon us – as miscalculated in ways undivined by the diviner of death. In a late poetico-speculative essay never published in her lifetime, Virgina Woolf traces the elusive fate of “Anon”, her collective term for the balladeers, storytellers, playwrights, and so forth, who composed their words under conditions in which “no one trie[d] to stamp his own name, to discover his own experience, in his work.”[1] Although Woolf pines for the bygone world prior to the advent of the Author, in which the artist was free to be irresponsible and unselfconscious, to “borrow” and “repeat” and “say what every one feels” (p. 397), her conception of the interrelationship between old and new media significantly complicates the essay’s keening towards an irretrievably lost object.
It was the printing press that finally was to kill Anon. But it was the press that also preserved him. When in 1477 Caxton printed the twenty one books of the Morte D’Arthur he fixed the voice of Anon forever. There we tap the reservoir of common belief that lay deep sunk in the minds of peasants and nobles. There in Malory’s pages we hear the voice of Anon murmuring still. (p. 384)
Woolf’s act of commuting the murder charges against Gutenberg to a more ambiguous indictment, acknowledging print as both a destroyer and a retainer of Anon, provides an object lesson that might be exported to several key moments in media history in which a new technology appears to eradicate its predecessors.
In her probing essay “Film and Theatre,” Susan Sontag approaches the Woolfian insight from another angle, drawing an analogy between omnipresent claims about the demise of the theatre, blamed on the cinema, to nineteenth-century claims about the threat of extinction posed to painting by photography. Reminding us that “predictions of obsolescence amount to declaring that a something has one peculiar task (which another something may do as well or better),”[2] Sontag reasons that, “If the painter’s job had been no more than fabricating likenesses, the invention of the camera might indeed have made painting obsolete. But painting is hardly just ‘pictures,’ any more than cinema is just theatre for the masses, available in portable standard units” (p. 351). For Sontag, pitting old media against new media in a sensationalized, winner-takes-all clash encourages a false opposition that obscures what is incommensurable about each medium, meanwhile denying possibilities for hybrid and even parallel development.
Against such models of technological change premised upon displacement and supersession, Residual Mediagathers a series of essays by contemporary scholars who, in the words of the anthology’s editor Charles R. Acland, seek to explore the “tenacity of existing technologies or…their related materials and practices that do not magically vanish with the appearance of each successive technology” (p. xxiii). The volume’s intended focus is thus a kind of zombie phenomenon in which one glimpses the multiple permutations of “‘living dead’ culture” (p. xx).
As if such things had never quite disappeared, contributors revisit the typewriter, vinyl records, analog photography, as well as several other less familiar outmoded media artifacts. In two deft, overlapping essays, Sue Currell and Acland explore the various tachistoscopic or “swift view” technologies arising in the nineteenth-century that sought to gauge – and ultimately to expand – the human subject’s threshold for processing visual information by flashing text on a screen at precise, almost Eisensteinean velocities. Such efforts defied an entire tradition of slow, meditative reading advocated by the likes of Thomas de Quincey, and were soon deployed by advertisers eager to pinpoint the bare minimum of time required for, say, a billboard to impinge upon the (un)consciousness of a passing tram passenger, and by educationalists and business managers hoping to improve the efficiency and productivity of their subordinates. Today, the original hardware of the Metronoscope, the Stereo-Optical Tachitron, the Flashmeter, and the Speed-I-O-Scope have all but faded from cultural view. However, their hopes of extending Taylorite principles to the spheres of perception and mind live on in vast numbers of self-help books promising prodigious speed-reading ability and keys to so-called “brain building.” One could even make a good case for our universities still inculcating such habits and ideals by requiring students to write entrance exams – the SAT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, DAT, GMAT – that all include stringently clocked tests of reading comprehension.
Another useful batch of essays looks at the various unevennesses or hold-overs marking the transition from traditional live performance to mechanical reproduction, and from one mode of mechanical reproduction to another. Using archival sources from Montreal in the late 1920s and early 1930s, JoAnne Stober shows evidence of a curious revival of vaudeville, and a clinging to mixed programmes, in the immediate wake of The Jazz Singer (USA 1927), as audiences proved not so easily won over by the newly, synchronically talking medium. Stober thus pushes forward the dates of sound film domination, while never exactly explaining what then eventually secured that domination for the talkies. In “The Musicking Machine,” Jody Berland gives a breathtaking history of the “player piano” from its inception to its mass commercialization, enticing consumers with the promise of a melodious parlor room untethered from the rigours of practice, to its relegation to residual status by the phonograph and radio. Berland identifies as a constant through all these shifts a particularly modern obsession with time-saving and bodily abstraction – an obsession against which we now see residualist reactions in the hyping of “so-called slow food, craft, yoga, and piano lessons” (p. 325).
One of the dangers of the volume, never wholly averted even in some of its most rewarding pieces, is that the call to arms for attending to the residual can degenerate into the commonsense upshot that, well, history is a force that matters – the residual effectively being dissolved into the more capacious category of the historical. The argument that old things or aspects of the old endure, and that new things, like all things, are bound to genealogical matrices smacks of a kind of unrevelatory, unobjectionable correctness. A pressing question of the undertaking thus becomes: just what are the extremist elements necessary to be in place that would justify the vociferous reassertion of such a reasonable perspective?
Acland positions the anthology as a “corrective to contemporary scholarship’s fetishization of the ‘new'” (p. xiv), but interestingly neglects to produce the name of a single serious scholar of media (“new” or otherwise) willing to dismiss the past wholesale. “Those who speak with unqualified conviction of a uniformly new practice or form” (p. xxi) remain a conspicuously shadowy lot, quite like those vague but ever reliable armies of believers in an utterly inflexible core self who are the butt of so much rotely argued, late-stage deconstructive criticism. Strawman tactics aside, however, it’s not as if there isn’t a legitimate target within the collection’s wider purview. I’m just not so sure that those willing to place “unqualified conviction” in a dubious logic of the new are those trying to peddle credible academic theses.
Whereas it would be hard to imagine such hypothetical scholars not being summarily called out for their hyperbole, in an unregulated economic sphere jangling with advertiser claptrap, where nonsense logic is the norm, fetishism of “the new” indeed thrives without much objection or qualm. The essays assailing “the new” as it pertains to commodity production are therefore those that seem to me best suited to articulate the anthology’s reformist mission. Readers familiar with the 2006 documentary on the photographer Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes (Canada 2006), will vastly enlarge their grasp of the pseudo-mountain ranges of junked electronics pictured there in such striking panoramic endlessness. Capitalists have long been encouraging mindless consumption and disposal habits through policies of planned obsolescence, though, as Jonathan Sterne points out in a standout contribution, makers of digital media have applied such policies more thoroughly than ever before with their insistence on new media that are “‘new’ primarily with reference to themselves” (p. 19). Glittering new lines of computers boast updates that are largely arbitrary and cosmetic, intentional snags against backward compatibility, and, above all, insurance for future profits. Far from realizing the dream of a tidily “virtual” future, the digital industry generates, and then represses from public view, a grossly material underside that direly threatens the health of the planet, and the populations who happen to live in close proximity to the unbiodegradable hazard zones. Compounding the problem, as Sterne and Lisa Parks (in a related piece on electronics salvaging) observe, vast quantities of the West’s technological trash ultimately end up being exported to developing countries where environmental regulations are more lax, thus raising the spectre of a corporate-driven neo-imperialism.
In the context of this global economic situation, the attempt to develop inventively steadfast relationships to those technologies deemed obsolescent or residual by the market can serve as a means of protesting capitalism’s root hostility to sustainability. All of which brings us round to the question of the politics of the residual, or more specifically, to the question of whether the residual as such has a politics, and an intrinsically leftist one at that. There is a strong urge for this to be true, for the residual to be a heroic source and site of resistance, owing in large part to the two theoretical patron saints of the anthology: Raymond Williams and Walter Benjamin. For Williams, from whom the term is directly borrowed, the residual is an element formed in the past yet still active in the present that has the potential for establishing “an alternative or even oppositional relation to the dominant culture.”[3] In Benjamin’s ruin and disjecta filled writings, one major form the residual assumes is that of the collectible, which takes on an almost utopian valence through the collector’s act of removing the commodity from the cycle of exchange and downplaying its “functional, utilitarian value.”[4]
These are provocative suggestions, propulsive starting-points, but one is startled by how readily attackable they are once they cease to be accepted on faith. Contributors writing about collecting again and again come up against the problem of the secondary market, of the reinvestment of outmoded things with exchange value, often at exponentially inflated rates – the rare “collector’s item” fetching an astronomical sum. To address this difficulty John Davis cites a distinction between terminal and instrumental collecting – collecting in-itself (viz. Benjaminian collecting) versus collecting as a means to an end – though one wonders if the distinction is always so clear, if those who wouldn’t dare part with things also appraised by the world of exchange as treasures are not themselves immune from that value-awareness, and indeed if that knowledge doesn’t in significant ways inflect the nature of their cherishing.
For all its wonderful eccentricity and counter-intuitive charge, Benjamin’s casting of the collector as an anarcho-revolutionary deserves more thorough interrogation than most contributors drawing upon it subject it to. How is it that this notoriously hermetic figure aspires to achieve, by cocooning things from the world, a changed world? How exactly does disengagement reveal itself as engagement? The skulkers of garage-sales and makeshift weekend symposia at high school gyms speak touchingly, justly on behalf of realms of objects that time or the mainstream has cast aside. However, such pathos doesn’t automatically cancel out some of the darker, less celebratory undercurrents often implicated with collecting – the burrowing, the willful obscurantism, the obsessive-compulsiveness, the possessiveness – that might seem incompatible with, or even antagonistic to, socially transformative activity. (Seymour, the vinylphile character played by Steve Buscemi in Ghost World(USA/UK/Germany 2001), almost perfectly encapsulates this twinning of compelling rage against an inane present with almost entropic frustration and impotence at being able to better his own mildewy existence). At the very least, one might ask to what sort of not purely symbolic or hollow-gestured revolutionary project the Benjaminian collector contributes?
Perhaps all one can confidently say is that the revolutionariness of the residual remains a dimly glowing potentiality. And indeed this is what Michelle Henning, who claims to be “interested in the political effectivity of the appropriation of obsolescent and ‘lo-fi’ materials and techniques” (p. 56) almost begrudgingly concludes: “To see obsolescent material and residual practices as the material for utopianism rather than (necessarily) outright opposition is to make a more modest claim for them, without excluding the possibility of resistance” (p. 58). Thus downgraded, such an argument for the residual again risks diffuseness, compelling one to press even further and inquire what category of things doesn’t have the potential to be shaped for subversive ends, or, to put the question more forgivingly, why might the utopian promise of the residual necessarily be stronger or more likely to be fulfilled than that of other sorts of things?
Here it’s worth recalling a statement of Kurt Schwitters, whose Merz collages, unbigoted assemblies of the tattered traces of everyday modern life (bus tickets, posted stamps, newspaper clippings, candy wrappers), helped launch much residual or “found” practice in the visual arts in the twentieth-century: “The material is as unessential as myself. The only essential thing is giving form.”[5] More recently, in answer to a questionnaire circulated by October in a special issue on obsolescence, Douglas Gordon, the artist most well known for a project in which he slowed down Psycho (US 1960) to last an entire day, writes:
I suppose I can understand what you mean by ‘resistance’ and I like to fantasize about the politics and positioning of what that term implies. However, I like to think that the artists I respect and look toward are working with the means available to them. If this means that Pierre Huyghe’s works look politically positioned because of the technology they use, rather than their site, subject, and mediation, then I would not bother to participate in anything other than the kit list that accompanies the work.[6]
Political radicality (“resistance”) is not an in-built property of media, residual or otherwise, but rather depends on an interplay between materiality and the uses to which it is put. Indeed, unless one counts any recombinative activity as ipso facto belonging to a residual practice, then why can’t the domain of the dominant be just as easily conscriptable for subversive purposes? Certainly there are whole swathes of art whose resistance is predicated on the refashioning of profusely ready-at-hand materials. One might cite just about any post-Warholian engagement with consumer culture and mass media – the taking of what is most visible, mostup-to-date, and spitting it back out in altered form. Even Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho relies, for its challenge to traditional modes of spectatorship, on the repurposing of not just any old, black-and-white film, but a bonafide classic, rife with iconic images, that has only gained in popularity since its release. All of which points up the problem of making claims to the intrinsic resistance capability of one category of raw material over another, which even then brackets the more primordial problem of being able to disentangle categories from one another, as in the case of Gordon.
Skepticism towards a concept can serve as an act of care, a bulwark against the tendency in theory to privilege a certain term to such a point of calcification that one forgets why one is rooting for it in the first place. To me this is the right kind of skepticism that should be brought to the residual, rather than another kind harbingering some ultimate rejection, if only so that we can better tap its power by more finely surveying its range.
Some months ago, during the first real outbreak of winter in Canada’s coldest large city where I live, I joined a handful of people in an unheated basement in a still relatively downcast and incompletely “revitalized” area of downtown to watch a series of 16mm features that were junked because of an issue with storage space at the university where they were kept, and where in the pre-video days they formed the cornerstone of film education. For extended periods the subtitles were illegible, faded and merged into the white of the background, requiring the audience to shout in their own approximate, or insolently inapproximate, dialogue. The reel changes took forever because the projectionist’s fingers were frozen, and even when the reels were spinning, the images would stutter in the gate, and seem as if on the verge of snapping. (Incidentally, the moment inPersona where that actually happens caused considerable head-swiveling.) During an arid, seemingly choiceless interval of the Hollywood release calendar, this felt like an exercise of a much worthier kind of depressiveness, tinged with a vague recalcitrance and sensation of uncanny (could it be?)…newness. As the imperatives to digitize, upgrade, and perfect blare indefatigably around us, why might such ventures matter?
A tantalizing, often contestable collection, Residual Media provides a fertile space for struggling with such questions, deserving to spawn sequels from several disciplines and spheres of critical practice.
Jonah Corne,
University of Manitoba, Canada.
Endnotes
[1] Virginia Woolf, “Anon.” ed. Brenda R. Silver. Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 25, No. 3/4, Virginia Woolf Issue (Autumn-Winter, 1979), p. 397.
[2] Susan Sontag, “Film and Theatre.” In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Third Edition. ed. Mast and Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 351.
[3] Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 122.
[4] Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library.” In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 60.
[5] Kurt Schwitters, “Merz (1921).” In Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Kolocotroni et al (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 282.
[6] Douglas Gordon, “Artist Questionnaire: 21 Responses.” October, Vol. 100, Obsolescence (Spring, 2002), p. 46.