technical images and linear text

I was writing what I intended to be a brief note on a Deleuze quote I planned to use in a paper, and it kind of spiralled out of control into a rough statement of where I want to take my investigations of Deleuze, Derrida and lingustic différance / vs ontological differenc/tiation (I had to throw that in, just to emphasize that Deleuze’s more stark prose is certainly not bereft of some fun typographical quirks). Anyway, since it seems this blog has at least one or two hypothetical Readers, I thought I’d start throwing some of these fragments up for some less hypothetical comments. You readers, hypothetical as you are, are floating around on some sort of virtual plane of immanence, at least from my frame of reference. So why not actualize yourselves a bit?

In ‘The interpretation of utterances’ (a text whose entire authorship is a bit uncertain, but doesn’t specifically indicate anybody but Deleuze, so I am assuming this is D. himself), Deleuze says that “Freud continually misunderstands infantile sexuality. He interprets, and therefore misunderstands. He clearly sees that the child is completely indifferent to the difference between the sexes; but he interprets it as if the child were reacting to castration anxiety by maintaining its belief in the existence of a small penis on the girl. This is not true: the child has no castration anxiety before being reduced to a single sex. The child lives as having n sexes that correspond to all the possible arrangements into which the materials common to girls and boys enter but also those common to animals, things…” (Two regimes, 94-95)

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So, it’s been a considerable amount of time since I’ve posted much of anything on here. And I have a serious need of getting back into the discipline of thinking in text according to my own ideas, and I’ve also been having this really weird thought in my head since last night. I’m poring over the Critique of Pure Reason this morning, and this little germ of an idea keeps building upon itself in the ol’ think-box, so in a useful concatenation of mental state and external necessity, I’m going to walk said idea through a little bit of digital exegesis. In the interest of starting things off in a fun and provocative way, here is the most reactionary form of this ‘thesis’ that’s in my head: wrestling is sublimated homosexual rape. My goals with this exegesis are to uncover some of the interesting subconscious detritus which underpins wrestling and its curious subculture, but also to engage in a little bit of critical thinking with regard to rape and homosocial desire.

Here we go!

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“Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out:: with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. . . With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental. This much is certain: today photography and the film are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.” – Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

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“Apparatuses are… not superhuman but subhuman — bloodless and simplistic simulations of human thought processes which, precisely because they are so rigid, render human decisions superfluous and non-functional” (Flusser 74).

In honour of Vilém Flusser, who in his later years refused to purchase any books, instead quoting from memory and the books that were given him as gifts, this shall be a sparsely cited essay on the nature of the human condition. My goal is not to respond to Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography, but rather to undertake a certain sort of exegetical expansion, whereby I shall be using some snippets of his work to trace the framework for my own thoughts. Flusser’s notions of the system and the apparatus are incredibly useful ones, and yet their implementation in this work might make these very concrete and analytically distinct categories seem quixotic and ambiguous. And so, in the tradition of Flusser’s own philosophical investigations, as well as Deleuze’s philosophical technique of ‘buggery,’ I will be employing Flusser’s concepts in a more analytically specific fashion that is at once implicit in Flusser’s text and altogether my own.

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How is digital imagery like the plastic arts? The simplest, and perhaps most flippant response, is that with digital imagery, the characteristic ‘look’ of the plastic arts has been reduced to a set of simple and effective algorithms. The ’styles’ cultivated by so many of history’s great artists are reduced by Adobe Systems Inc. into a simple and electronically-reproducible set of image filters. Thus, we have perhaps the truest and clearest expression of the convergence between photography and the painted image in the digital realm: the ‘watercolour filter.’ But to assume that this glib and self-evident response plumbs the depths of this relation would be absurd. As such, rather than giving my slapdash digital image-painting more critical attention than it deserves, I would like to explore the problematic contemporary relation between truth and the digitized image by way of a number of other intriguing examples of this inter-media cross-pollination.

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