IN RELATION TO LIGHT ON EARTH
THE ORACLE, YOU HAVE ALREADY MADE THE CHOICE NEO
Oracle: Well, come on. I ain’t gonna bite you… Come around here and let me have a look at you… My goodness, look at you. You turned out all right, didn’t you? How do you feel?
Neo: I…
Oracle: I know you’re not sleeping. We’ll get to that. Why don’t you come and have a sit this time.
Neo: Maybe I’ll stand.
Oracle: Well, suit yourself.
(Neo sits on the bench)
Neo: I felt like sitting.
Oracle: I know. So… let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way.
Neo: You’re not human, are you?
Oracle: It’s tough to get any more obvious than that.
Neo: If I had to guess, I’d say you’re a program from the machine world. So is he.
Oracle: So far, so good.
Neo: But if that’s true, that could mean you’re part of this system… another kind of control.
Oracle: Keep going.
Neo: I suppose the most obvious question is…how can I trust you?
Oracle: Bingo. It is a pickle, no doubt about it. Bad news is… there’s no way you can really know if I’m here to help you or not. So it’s really up to you. Just have to make up your own damn mind… to either accept what I’m going to tell you or reject it. Candy?
Neo: Do you already know if I’ll take it?
Oracle: Wouldn’t be much of an oracle if I didn’t.
Neo: But if you already know, how can I make a choice?
Oracle: Because you didn’t come here to make the choice. You’ve already made it. You’re here to try to understand why you made it. I thought you’d have figured that out by now.
PASSAGE FROM: 1984, GEORGE ORWELL
War is peace
The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting. The frontiers between the three super-states are in some places arbitrary, and in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general they follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.
In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the centres of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changed its character. More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged have changed in their order of importance. Motives which were already present to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentieth century have now become dominant and are consciously recognized and acted upon.
To understand the nature of the present war—for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war—one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their natural defenses are too formidable. Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces, Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in a material sense, anything to fight about. With the establishment of self-contained economies, in which production and consumption are geared to one another, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and death. In any case each of the three super-states is so vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries. In so far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labour power. Between the frontiers of the super-states, and not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population of the earth.
It is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling. In practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the endless changes of alignment. All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies.
The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely. It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia and Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claim to enormous territories which in fact are largely uninhabited and unexplored: but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary to the world’s economy.
They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war. By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure of world society, and the process by which it maintains itself, would not be essentially different. The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work.
The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient—a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete—was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago.
Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process—by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute—the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction—indeed, in some sense was the destruction—of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and per- haps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which WEALTH, in the sense of personal pos- sessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while POWER remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals. Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity.
But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed.
A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter—set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call
‘the proles’.
The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival. War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war.
It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of DOUBLETHINK. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.
All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest as an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually acquiring more and more territory and so building up an overwhelming preponderance of power, or by the discovery of some new and unanswerable weapon. The search for new weapons continues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any outlet. In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for ‘Science’. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.
The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance—meaning, in effect, war and police espionage—the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter.
The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life. In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine under the water, or an aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others explore even remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun’s rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth’s centre.
But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near realization, and none of the three super-states ever gains a significant lead on the others. What is more remarkable is that all three powers already possess, in the atomic bomb, a weapon far more powerful than any that their present researches are likely to discover. Although the Party, according to its habit, claims the invention for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as early as the nineteen-forties, and were first used on a large scale about ten years later. At that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on industrial centres, chiefly in European Russia, Western Europe, and North America. The effect was to convince the ruling groups of all countries that a few more atomic bombs would mean the end of organized society, and hence of their own power. Thereafter, although no formal agreement was ever made or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped. All three powers merely continue to produce atomic bombs and store them up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come sooner or later.
And meanwhile the art of war has remained almost stationary for thirty or forty years. Helicopters are more used than they were formerly, bombing planes have been largely superseded by self-propelled projectiles, and the fragile movable battleship has given way to the almost unsinkable Floating Fortress; but otherwise there has been little development. The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use. And in spite of the endless slaughters reported in the Press and on the telescreens, the desperate battles of earlier wars, in which hundreds of thousands or even millions of men were often killed in a few weeks, have never been repeated. None of the three super-states ever attempts any maneuver which involves the risk of serious defeat. When any large operation is undertaken, it is usually a surprise attack against an ally. The strategy that all three powers are following, or pretend to themselves that they are following, is the same.
The plan is, by a combination of fighting, bargaining, and well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire a ring of bases completely encircling one or other of the rival states, and then to sign a pact of friendship with that rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years as to lull suspicion to sleep. During this time rockets loaded with atomic bombs can be assembled at all the strategic spots; finally they will all be fired simultaneously, with effects so devastating as to make retaliation impossible. It will then be time to sign a pact of friendship with the remaining world-power, in preparation for another attack. This scheme, it is hardly necessary to say, is a mere daydream, impossible of realization. Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except in the disputed areas round the Equator and the Pole: no invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken. This explains the fact that in some places the frontiers between the superstates are arbitrary. Eurasia, for example, could easily conquer the British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe, or on the other hand it would be possible for Oceania to push its frontiers to the Rhine or even to the Vistula. But this would violate the principle, followed on all sides though never formulated, of cultural integrity. If Oceania were to conquer the areas that used once to be known as France and Germany, it would be necessary either to exterminate the inhabitants, a task of great physical difficulty, or to assimilate a population of about a hundred million people, who, so far as technical development goes, are roughly on the Oceanic level. The problem is the same for all three super- states.
It is absolutely necessary to their structure that there should be no contact with foreigners, except, to a limited extent, with war prisoners and coloured slaves. Even the official ally of the moment is always regarded with the darkest suspicion. War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.
Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three super-states are very much the same. In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of the Self. The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense.
Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare. It follows that the three super-states not only cannot conquer one another, but would gain no advantage by doing so. On the contrary, so long as they remain in conflict they prop one another up, like three sheaves of corn. And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers are simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their lives are dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that it is necessary that the war should continue everlastingly and without victory. Meanwhile the fact that there IS no danger of conquest makes possible the denial of reality which is the special feature of Ingsoc and its rival systems of thought. Here it is necessary to repeat what has been said earlier, that by becoming continuous war has fundamentally changed its character.
In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.
Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past. Newspapers and history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practised today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.
But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police. Since each of the three super-states is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practised. Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life—the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top-storey windows, and the like. Between life and death, and between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all. Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be.
They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they choose. The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.
The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This—although the vast majority of Party members under- stand it only in a shallower sense—is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.
PASSAGE FROM: TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
If one considers the basic concepts image, apparatus, program and information, one discovers an internal connection between them: They are all based on the ‘eternal recurrence of the same: Images are surfaces above which the eye circles only to return again and again to the start. ing point. Apparatuses are playthings that repeat the same movements over and over again. Programs are games that combine the same elements over and over again. Pieces of information are improbable states that break away again and again from the tendency to become probable only to sink back into it again and again. In short: With these four basic concepts, we no longer find ourselves in the historical context of the linear, in which nothing is repeated and everything has a cause yielding consequences. The area in which we find ourselves is no longer ascertainable by means of causal but only by means of functional explanations. Along with Cassirer, we shall have to leave causality behind: 'Rest, rest, dear spirit. Any philosophy of photography will have to come to terms with the ahistorical, post-historical character of the phenomenon under consideration.
Besides, we have already started to think spontaneously in a post historical fashion in a whole range of areas. Cosmology is an example of this. We see in the cosmos a system tending towards states that are becoming more and more improbable. It is true that by chance more and more improbable states are coming into being; however - of necessity - these sink back into the tendency to become probable. In other words: We see in the cosmos an apparatus that contains an original piece of information in its output (the big bang) and that is programmed to realize and exhaust this information necessarily through chance ('heat death’).
The four basic concepts image, apparatus, program and Information, support our cosmological thinking quite spontaneously and in so doing; quite spontaneously prompt us to reach out for functional explanations. The same applies to other areas such as psychology, biology, linguistics, cybernetics and information technology (to mention only a few). We think, quite spontaneously, across the board in an imaginary, functionally programmatic and information technological fashion. The hypothesis proposed here thus argues that we think like this because we think in photographic categories: because the photographic universe has programmed us to think in a post-historical fashion.
This hypothesis is not as bold as it first seems. It is a hypothesis that has been around for a long time: Human beings create tools and in so doing take themselves as the model for this creation - until the situation is reversed and human beings take their tools as the model of themselves, of the world and of society. Hence the well-known process of alienation from one’s own tools. In the eighteenth century, human beings invented machines, and their own bodies served as a model for this invention - until the relationship was reversed and the machines started to serve as models of human beings, of the world and of society. In the eighteenth century, a philosophy of the machine would simultaneously have been a criticism of the whole of anthropology, science, politics and art, i.e. of mechanization. It is no different in our time for a philosophy of photography: It would be a criticism of functionalism in all its anthropological, scientific, political and aesthetic aspects.
The matter is not all that simple, however. For a photograph is not a tool like a machine; it is a plaything like a playing card or chess-piece. If the photograph is becoming a model, then it is no longer a matter of replacing a tool with another tool as a model, but of replacing a type of model with a completely new type of model. The hypothesis proposed above, according to which we are starting to think in photographic categories, argues that the basic structures of our existence are being transformed. We are hot dealing with the classical problem of alienation, but with an existential revolution of which there is no example available to us. To put it bluntly: It is a question of freedom in a new context. This is what any philosophy of photography has to concern itself with.
It goes without saying that this is not a new question: All philosophy has always been concerned with it. But in being so concerned, it was located within the historical context of linearity. In a nutshell, it formulated the question like this: If everything is to have causes and consequences, if everything is 'conditioned; where is there space for human freedom? And all answers, likewise in a nutshell, can be reduced to the following common denominator: The causes are so complex and the consequences so unpredictable that human beings, these limited beings, can act as though they were 'unconditioned?
In the new context, however, the question of freedom is formulated differently: If everything is based on chance and necessarily results in nothing, then where is there space for human freedom? In this absurd climate, the philosophy of photography has to address the question of freedom.
We observe, all around us, apparatuses of every sort in the process of programming our life through rigid automation; human labour is being replaced by automatic machines and most of society is starting to be employed in the 'tertiary sector; i.e. playing with empty symbols; the existential interests of the material world are being replaced by symbolic universes and the values of things are being replaced by information, Our thoughts, feelings, desires and actions are being robotized; 'life’ is coming to mean feeding apparatuses and being fed by them. In short: Everything is becoming absurd. So where is there room for human freedom?
Then we discover people who can perhaps answer this question: photographers - in the sense of the word intended in this study. They are already, in miniature, people of the apparatus future. Their acts are programmed by the camera; they play with symbols; they are active in the 'tertiary sector, interested in information; they create things without value. In spite of this they consider their activity to be anything but absurd and think that they are acting freely. The task of the philosophy of photography is to question photographers about freedom, to probe their practice in the pursuit of freedom.
This was the intention of the foregoing study, and in the course of it a few answers have come to light. First, one can outwit the camera’s rigidity. Second, one can smuggle human intentions into its program that are not predicted by it. Third, one can force the camera to create the unpredictable, the improbable, the informative.
Fourth, one can show contempt for the camera and its creations and turn one’s interest away from the thing in general in order to concentrate on information. In short: Freedom is the strategy of making chance and necessity subordinate to human intention. Freedom is playing against the camera.
However, photographers only provide such answers when called to account by philosophical analysis. When speaking spontaneously they say something different.
They claim to be making traditional images - even if by non-traditional means. They claim to be creating works of art or contributing to knowledge - or being politically committed. If one reads statements by photographers, for instance in the usual works on the history of photography, one is faced with the prevailing opinion that with the invention of photography nothing really far-reaching took place and that everything is basically proceeding just as it did before; only, as it were, that alongside the other histories there is now a history of photography as well. Even though, in practice, photographers have been living for a long time in a post-historical fashion, the post-industrial revolution, as it appears for the first time in the shape of the camera, has escaped their consciousness.
With one exception: so-called experimental photographers - those photographers in the sense of the word intended here. They are conscious that image, apparatus, program and information are the basic problems that they have to come to terms with. They are in fact consciously attempting to create unpredictable information, i.e. to release themselves from the camera, and to place within the image something that is not in its program. They know they are playing against the camera. Yet even they are not conscious of the consequence of their practice:
They are not aware that they are attempting to address the question of freedom in the context of apparatus in general.A philosophy of photography is necessary for raising photographic practice to the level of consciousness, and this is again because this practice gives rise to a model of freedom in the post industrial context in general.
A philosophy of photography must reveal the fact that there is no place for human freedom within the area of automated, programmed and programming apparatuses, in order finally to show a way in which it is nevertheless possible to open up a space for freedom. The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in face of the chance necessity of death.
Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us.
“IF IT HASN’T BEEN ONE OF COLOR”: INTERVIEW WITH ROY DECARAVA
MILLER: In what other ways does your philosophy affect your process?
DECARAVA: What happens is that the subject is reinterpreted through my printing.
It is my particular view. The print is my attitude toward the object. The picture has something of me. The question is, “how much of me is there in the photograph?” And I try to get as much of myself as possible in it, because that’s what it is about. It’s not really about the object as much as it is my attitude toward the object. Sometimes this means I must work contrary to the rules of photography. For instance, I have printed a photograph that was taken in broad daylight, with sunlight streaming down, and it now looks like it is night. I did that because that’s the way it worked for me. It didn’t work the other way. I kept printing it over and over, darker and darker, and the next thing you know, I had a night scene.
MILLER: So you alter the light only in the dark room?
DECARAVA: I alter not so much the light, but the image. Whatever is necessary for me to express the feelings I have, I do, for instance this hallway [in photograph].’ If I were to print it lighter, it would be more factual, you would get more information.
But the photograph isn’t so much about the hallway, it was more about the light, and the kind of claustrophobic sense that one had in walking in a hallway like that.
Some of my students in the ‘60s thought that the darker tones were part of a black aesthetic, but I think that is a little simplistic. Some thought black skin was beautiful, therefore black images were beautiful also. It was a rebellion against the idea that black was bad, and white was good. In a way, that is part of the black aesthetic, a conscious defiance of the detrimental dominant values of society.
MILLER: In what ways are you defying the dominant values of society?
DECARAVA: By staying alive, by being myself and speaking my truths. I get a little angry, for example, with some of my friends who insist that I listen to classical music because it is really music, or that I listen to opera because it is the truth. I say this is simply a European perception. There are other perceptions in the world about music.
I happen to find opera very simplistic. I find classical music very rigid, needing almost a slave and master relationship to make music. The conductor is the master, the musicians are the tools with which he forges someone else’s music; they do what he wants them to do.
To me, the idea of jazz, the right and the need of the individual to express his uniqueness, which is what jazz, and even folk music is about, is also music. I resent the idea that classical music is the only music and that therefore I am suspect, I’m not quite civilized, if I don’t embrace it.
MILLER: How would you describe your themes of jazz visualization?
DECARAVA: I worked with Coltrane and Dolphy the same way I work with everything. I respect what I’m looking at. I do not intrude. I stay back, and I wait until something happens. And then I take my picture, and then I wait again. I do not get up in front of people and poke my camera in their faces. I sit back and keep as quiet and invisible as I can, and I wait. Because I know something is going to happen. I know that it’s beautiful. It’s just a question of my timing and my ability to be open enough to see what is there. I do this with everything. I don’t brush the lint off. I don’t move around for a better view.
MILLER: How does this connect with your concept of “sound visualization” in photography?
DECARAVA: I respect the people and the music. I listen to it. I photograph musicians as people, not as musicians. I don’t feel it’s necessary to photograph them while playing. What I respond to is their commitment to what they do. The intensity that they bring to life at that moment. This is something that I admire in people, and of course all people do it. Humans have the facility to bring concentration and direction to something they care about. It is one of the most wonderful things to experience; when people become so focused on a particular task that they become one with something other than themselves. It is this identification with something beyond the self that to me is one of the positive things about being human. The musician expresses this in one of the most visual ways. It’s almost a shame to take a picture because it is so easy!
There is so much intensity and involvement that it is hard not to photograph it well
MILLER: So a theme in your work is “listening.”
DECARAVA: Absolutely. Seeing in the same way that one listens. To listen means to concentrate and focus on something that you are listening to. Seeing is the same thing.
And waiting. Time is more important than all of that. Time and patience and the knowledge that something is there, and will happen. If you think it’s not going to happen, then you won’t wait. How many people think about that? I don’t know…I do.
If I were to photograph a painter, I wouldn’t just show him at the canvas, there would be moments when he would step back, and this “thing” would come over his face, which would be so beautiful and remarkable. The transformation of the face by a thought, an idea, or an attitude. That’s what I admire. And I tend to photograph those things that I admire, that I care about. To carry it further, it’s not just the transformation but my idea of that transformation that I try to photograph.
PASSAGE FROM: ZEN IN THE ART OF ARCHERY
“I understand well enough,” I said, “that the hand mustn’t be opened with a jerk if the shot is not to be spoiled. But however I set about it, it always goes wrong. If I clench my hand as tightly as possible, I can’t stop it shaking when I open my fingers. If, on the other hand, I try to keep it relaxed, the bowstring is torn from my grasp before the full stretch is reached unexpectedly, it is true, but still too early. I am caught between these two kinds of failure and see no way of escape.” “You must hold the drawn bowstring,” answered the Master, “like a little child holding the proffered finger. It grips it so firmly that one marvels at the strength of the tiny fist. And when it lets the finger go, there is not the slightest jerk.
Do you know why? Because a child doesn’t think I will now let go of the finger in order to grasp this other thing. Completely unselfconsciously, without purpose, it turns from one to the other, and we would say that it was playing with the things, were it not equally true that the things are playing with the child.” Maybe I understand what you are hinting at with this comparison,“ I remarked.
"But am I not in an entirely different situation? When I have drawn the bow, the moment comes when I feel: unless the shot comes at once I shan’t be able to endure the tension. And what happens then? Merely that I get out of breath. So I must loose the shot whether I want to or not, because I can’t wait for it any longer.”
You have described only too well,“ replied the Master, "where the difficulty lies. Do you know why you cannot wait for the shot and why you get out of breath before it has come? The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You do not wait for fulfillment, but brace yourself for failure. So long as that is so, you have no choice but to call forth something yourself that ought to happen independently of you, and so long as you call it forth your hand will not open in the right way like the hand of a child. Your hand does not burst open like the skin of a ripe fruit.”
I had to admit to the Master that this interpretation made me more confused than ever. “For ultimately,” I said, “I draw the bow and loose the shot in order to hit the target. The drawing is thus a means to an end, and I cannot lose sight of this connection. The child knows nothing of this, but for me the two things cannot be disconnected.”
“The right art,” cried the Master, “is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.” “But you yourself have told me often enough that archery is not a pastime, not a purposeless game, but a matter of life and death!”
“I stand by that. We master archers say: one shot-one life! What this means, you cannot yet understand. But perhaps another image will help you, which expresses the same experience. We master archers say: with the upper end of the bow the archer pierces the sky, on the lower end, as thoush attached by a thread, hangs the earth.
If the shot is loosed with a jerk there is a danger of the thread snapping. For purposeful and violent people the rift becomes final, and they are left in the awful center between heaven and earth.” “What must I do, then?” I asked thoughtfully. “You must learn to wait properly.” “And how does one learn that?”
“By letting go of yourself, leaving yourself and everything yours behind you so decisively that nothing more is left of you but a purposeless tension.”
“So I must become purposeless on purpose?” I heard myself say. “No pupil has ever asked me that, so I don’t know the right answer.” “And when do we begin these new exercises?” “Wait until it is time.”
EXCERPT FROM: THE HEART OF THE BUDDHA’S TEACHING, CHAPTER ON THE FIVE AGGREGATES (PERCEPTION), THICH NHAT HANH
The Third Aggregate is perceptions (samjña). In us there is a river of perceptions. Perceptions arise, stay for a period of time, and cease to be. The aggregate of perception includes noticing, naming, and conceptualizing, as well as the perceiver and the perceived. When we perceive, we often distort, which brings about many painful feelings. Our perceptions are often erroneous, and we suffer. It is very helpful to look deeply into the nature of our perceptions, without being too sure of anything. When we are too sure, we suffer. “Am I sure?” Is a very good question. If we ask this, we’ll have a good chance to look again and see if our perception is incorrect. The perceiver and the perceived are inseparable. When the perceiver perceives wrongly, the things perceived are also incorrect.
A man was rowing his boat upstream when, suddenly, he saw another boat coming towards him. He shouted, “Be careful! Be careful!” But the boat plowed right into him, nearly sinking his boat. The man became angry and began to shout, but when he looked closely, he saw that there was no one in the other boat. The boat had drifted downstream by itself. He laughed out loud. When our perceptions are not correct, they can cause us a lot of unpleasant feelings. We have to look deeply into things so we will not be led into suffering and difficult feelings. Perceptions are very important for our wellbeing.
Our perceptions are conditioned by the many afflictions that are present in us; ignorance, craving, hatred, anger, jealousy, fear, habit energies, etc. We perceive phenomena on the basis of our lack of insight into the nature of impermanence and interbeing. Practicing mindfulness, concentration, and deep looking, we can discover the errors of our perceptions and free ourselves from fear and clinging. All suffering is born from wrong perceptions. Understanding, the fruit of meditation, can dissolve our wrong perceptions and liberate us. We have to be alert always and never seek refuge in our perceptions. The Diamond Sutra reminds us, “Where there is perception, there is deception.” We should be able to substitute perceptions with prajña, true vision, true knowledge.
PASSAGE FROM: THE LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE. CHAPTER ON THE DIALECTIC OF SOLITUDE, OCTAVIO PAZ
Solitude — the feeling and knowledge that one is alone, alienated from the world and oneself — is not an exclusively Mexican characteristic. All men, at some moment in their lives, feel them¬ selves to be alone. And they are. To live is to be separated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the mysterious future. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature — if that word can be used in reference to man, who has “invented” him¬ self by saying “No” to nature —consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.
The foetus is at one with the world around it; it is pure brute life, unconscious of itself. When we are born we break the ties that joined us to the blind life we lived in the maternal womb, where there is no gap between desire and satisfaction. We sense the change as separation and loss, as abandonment, as a fall into a strange or hostile atmosphere. Later this primitive sense of loss becomes a feeling of solitude, and still later it becomes awareness: we are condemned to live alone, but also to transcend our solitude, to re-establish the bonds that united us with life in a paradisiac past. All our forces strive to abolish our solitude. Hence the feeling that we are alone has a double significance: on the one hand it is self-awareness, and on the other it is a longing to escape from ourselves. Solitude — the very condition of our lives — appears to us as a test and a purgation, at the conclusion of which our anguish and instability will vanish. At the exit from the labyrinth of solitude we will find reunion (which is repose and happiness), and plenitude, and harmony with the world.
Popular language reflects this dualism by identifying solitude with suffering. The pangs of love are pangs of solitude. Communion and solitude are opposite and complementary. The redemptive power of solitude clarifies our obscure but vivid sense of guilt: the solitary man is “forsaken by the hand of God.” Solitude is both a sentence and an expiation. It is a punishment but it is also a promise that our exile will end. All human life is pervaded by this dialectic.
Death and birth are solitary experiences. We are born alone and we die alone. When we are expelled from the maternal womb, we begin the painful struggle that finally ends in death. Does death mean a return to the life that precedes life? Does it mean to relive that prenatal life in which rest and motion, day and night, time and eternity are not opposites? Does dying mean to cease existing as a being and finally, definitively, to be? Is death the truest kind of life? Is birth death, and is death birth? We do not know. But although we do not know, our whole being strives to escape the opposites that torment us. Everything — self-awareness, time, reason, customs, habits — tends to make us exiles from life, but at the same time everything impels us to return, to descend to the creative womb from which we were cast out. What we ask of love (which, being desire, is a hunger for communion, a will to fall and to die as well as to be reborn)is that it give us a bit of true life, of true death. We do not ask it for happiness or repose, but simply for an instant of that full life in which opposites vanish, in which life and death, time and eternity are united. In some obscure way we realize that life and death are but two phases — antagonistic but complementary — of a single reality. Creation and destruction become one in the act of love, and during a fraction of a second man has a glimpse of a more perfect state of being.
In our world, love is art almost inaccessible experience. Everything is against it: morals, classes, laws, races and the very lovers themselves. Woman has always been for man the “other,” his opposite and complement. If one part of our being longs to unite itself with her, another part — equally imperious — rejects and excludes her. Woman is an object, sometimes precious, sometimes harmful, but always different. By converting her into an object and by subjecting her to the deformations which his interests, his vanity, his anguish and his very love dictate, man changes her into an instrument, a means of obtaining understanding and pleasure, a way of achieving survival. Woman is an idol, a goddess, a mother, a witch or a muse, as Simone de Beauvoir has said, but she can never be her own self. Thus our erotic relationships are vitiated at the outset, are poisoned at the root. A phantasm comes between us, and this phantasm is her image, the image we have made of her and in which she clothes herself. When we reach out to touch her, we cannot even touch unthinking flesh, because this docile, servile vision of a surrendering body always intrudes. And the same thing happens to her: she can only conceive of herself as an object, as something “other.” She is never her own mistress. Her being is divided between what she really is and what she imagines she is, and this image has been dictated to her by her family, class, school, friends, religion and lover. She never expresses her femininity because it always manifests itself in forms men have invented for her. Love is not a “natural” thing. It is something human, the most human trait of all. Something that we have made ourselves and that is not found in nature. Something that we create — and destroy — every day.
These are not the only obstacles standing between love and ourselves. Love is a choice…perhaps a free choosing of our destiny, a sudden discovery of the most secret and fateful part of our being. But the choosing of love is impossible in our society. In one of his finest books — Mad Love — Breton has said that two prohibitions restrict it from the very outset: social disapproval and the Christian idea of sin. To realize itself, love must violate the laws of our world. It is scandalous and disorderly, a transgression committed by two stars that break out of their predestined orbits and rush together in the midst of space. The romantic conception of love, which implies a breaking away and a catastrophe, is the only one we know today because everything in our society prevents love from being a free choice.
Women are imprisoned in the image masculine society has imposed on them; therefore, if they attempt a free choice it must be a kind of jail break. Lovers say that “love has transformed her, it has made her a different person.” And they are right. Love changes a woman completely. If she dares to love, if she dares to be herself, she has to destroy the image in which the world has imprisoned her.
A man is also prevented from choosing. His range of possibilities is very limited. He discovers femininity as a child, in his mother or sisters, and from then on he identifies love with taboos. Our eroticism is conditioned by the horror and attraction of incest. Also, modern life stimulates our desires excessively, while it also frustrates them with all sorts of prohibitions: social, moral, even hygienic. Guilt is both the spur and rein of desire. Everything restricts our choice. We have to adjust our profoundest affections to the image of what our social group approves of in a woman. It is difficult to love persons of other races, cultures or classes, even though it is perfectly possible for a light-skinned man to love a dark-skinned woman, for her to love a Chinese, for a “gentleman” to love his maid. And vice versa. But these possibilities make us blush, and since we are prevented from choosing freely, we select a wife from among the women who are “suitable.” We never confess that we have married a woman we do not love, a woman who may love us, perhaps, but who is incapable of being her true self. Swann says: “And to think that I have wasted the best years of my life with a woman who was not my type.” The majority of modern men could repeat that sentence on their deathbeds. And with the change of one word, so could the majority of modern women.
Society denies the nature of love by conceiving of it as a stable union whose purpose is to beget and raise children. It identifies it, that is, with marriage. Every transgression against this rule is punished, the severity of the punishment depending on the time and place. (In Mexico the punishment is often fatal if the transgressor is a woman, because — like all Hispanic peoples — we have two sets of morals: one for the “señor,” another for women, children and the poor.) The protection given to marriage would be justifiable if society permitted free choice. Since it does not, it should accept the fact that marriage is not the supreme realization of love, but rather a legal, social and economic form whose purposes are different from love’s. The stability of the family depends upon marriage, which becomes a mere protection for society with no other object but the reproducing of that same society. Hence marriage is by nature profoundly conservative. To attack it is to attack the very bases of society. And love, for the same reason, is an antisocial act, though not deliberately so. Whenever it succeeds in realizing itself, it breaks up a marriage and transforms it into what society does not want it to be: a revelation of two solitary beings who create their own world, a world that rejects society’s lies, abolishes time and work, and declares itself to be self-sufficient. It is hardly strange, then, that society should punish love and its testimony — poetry — with equal malevolence, condemning them to the confused, clandestine world of the forbidden, the absurd, the abnormal. Nor it is strange that both love and poetry explode in strange, pure forms: a scandal, a crime, a poem.
As a result of this protection afforded to marriage, love is persecuted and prostitution is either tolerated or given official blessing. Our ambiguous attitude toward prostitution is quite revealing. Some peoples consider the institution to be sacred, but among us it is alternately contemptible and desirable. The prostitute is a caricature of love, a victim of love, a symbol of the powers that are debasing our world. But even this travesty of love is not enough: in some circles the bonds of marriage are loosened so much that promiscuity is the general rule. The person who goes from bed to bed is no longer considered a libertine. The seducer — the man who cannot transcend himself because women are always instruments of his vanity or anxiety —is a figure as outmoded as the knight errant. There is no longer anyone to seduce, just as there are no maidens to rescue or ogres to destroy. Modern eroticism has a different meaning from that of Sade, for example. Sade was a tragic character, a man who was completely possessed, and his work is an explosive revelation of the human condition. There are no heroes as desperate as his. Modern eroticism, on the other hand, is almost always rhetorical, a complacent literary exercise. It is not a revelation of man; it is simply one more document describing a society that encourages crime and condemns love. Freedom of passion? Divorce has ceased to be a conquest. It is not so much a way of casting off established ties as it is of permitting men and women to choose more freely. In an ideal society, the only basis for divorce would be the disappearance of love or the appearance of a new love. In a society in which everyone could choose, divorce would become an anachronism or a rarity, like prostitution and promiscuity and adultery.
Society pretends to be an organic whole that lives by and for itself. But while it conceives of itself as an indivisible unit, it is inwardly divided by a dualism which perhaps originated when man ceased to be an animal, when he invented his self, his conscience and his ethics. Society is an organism that suffers the strange necessity of justifying its ends and appetites. Sometimes its ends — disguised as moral precepts — coincide with the desires and needs of those who comprise it. But sometimes they deny the aspirations of important minorities or classes, and too often they even deny man’s profoundest instincts. When this last occurs, society lives through a period of crisis: it either explodes or stagnates. Its components cease to be human beings and are converted into mere soulless instruments.
The dualism inherent in every society, and which every society tries to resolve by transforming itself into a community, expresses itself today in many ways: good and evil, permission and taboo, the ideal and the real, the rational and the irrational, beauty and ugliness, dreams and vigils, poverty and wealth, bourgeoisie and proletariat, innocence and knowledge, imagination and reason. By an irresistible movement of its own being, society attempts to overcome this dualism and to convert its hostile, solitary components into a harmonious whole. But modem society attempts to do this by suppressing the dialectic of solitude, which alone can make love possible. Industrial societies, regardless of their differing “ideologies,” politics and economics, strive to change qualitative — that is, human — differences into quantitative uniformity. The methods of mass production are also applied to morality, art and the emotions. Contradictions and exceptions are eliminated, and this results in the closing off of our access to the profoundest experience life can offer us, that of discovering reality as a oneness in which opposites agree. The new powers prohibit solitude by fiat…and thus they also prohibit love, a clandestine and heroic form of communion. Defending love has always been a dangerous, antisocial activity. Now it is even beginning to be revolutionary. The problem of love in our world reveals how the dialectic of solitude, in its deepest manifestation, is frustrated by society. Our social life prevents almost every possibility of achieving true erotic communion.
Love is one of the clearest examples of that double instinct which causes us to dig deeper into our own selves and, at the same time, to emerge from ourselves and to realize ourselves in another: death and re-creation, solitude and communion. But it is not the only one. In the life of every man there are periods that are both departures and reunions, separations and reconciliations. Each of these phases is an attempt to transcend our solitude, and is followed by an immersion in strange environments.
The child must face an irreducible reality, and at first he responds to its stimuli with tears or silence. The cord that united him with life has been broken, and he tries to restore it by means of play and affection. This is the beginning of a dialogue that ends only when he recites the monologue of his death. But his relations with the external world are not passive now, as they were in his prenatal life, because the world demands a response. Reality has to be peopled by his acts. Thanks to games and fantasies, the inert natural world of adults — a chair, a book, anything — suddenly acquires a life of its own. The child uses the magic power of language or gesture, symbol or act, to create a living world in which objects are capable of replying to his questions. Language, freed of intellectual meanings, ceases to be a collection of signs and again becomes a delicate and magnetic organism. Verbal representation equals reproduction of the object itself, in the same way that a carving, for the primitive man, is not a representation but a double of the object represented. Speech again becomes a creative activity dealing with realities, that is, a poetic activity. Through magic the child creates a world in his own image and thus resolves his solitude. Self-awareness begins when we doubt the magical efficacy of our instruments.
Adolescence is a break with the world of childhood and a pause on the threshold of the adult world. Spranger points out that solitude is a distinctive characteristic of adolescence. Narcissus, the solitary, is the very image of the adolescent. It is during this period that we become aware of our singularity for the first time. But the dialectic of the emotions intervenes once more: since adolescence is extreme self-consciousness, it can only be transcended by self-forgetfulness, by self-surrender. Therefore solitude is not only a time of solitude but also of great romances, of heroism and sacrifice. The people have good reason to picture the hero and the lover as adolescents. The vision of the adolescent as a solitary figure, closed up within himself and consumed by desire or timidity, almost always resolves into a crowd of young people dancing, singing or marching as a group, or into a young couple strolling under the arched green branches in a park. The adolescent opens himself up to the world: to love, action, friendship, sports, heroic adventures. The literature of modern nations — except Spain, where they never appear except as rogues or orphans — is filled with adolescents, with solitaries in search of communion: of the ring, the sword, the Vision. Adolescence is an armed watch, at the end of which one enters the world of facts.
Solitude is not characteristic of maturity. When a man struggles with other men or with things, he forgets himself in his work, in creation or in the construction of objects, ideas and institutions. His personal consciousness unites with that of others: time takes on meaning and purpose and thus becomes history, a vivid, significant account with both a past and a future. Our singularity — deriving from the fact that we are situated in time, in a particular time which is made up of our own selves and which devours us while it feeds us — is not actually abolished, but it is attenuated and, in a certain sense, “redeemed.” Our personal existence takes part in history, which becomes, in Eliot’s phrase, “a pattern of timeless moments.” During vital and productive epochs, therefore, a mature man suffering from the illness of solitude is always an anomaly. This type of solitary figure is very frequent today, and indicates the gravity of our ills. In an epoch of group work, group songs, group pleasures, man is more alone than ever. Modern man never surrenders himself to what he is doing. A part of him — the profoundest part — always remains detached and alert. Man spies on himself. Work, the only modern god, is no longer creative. It is endless, infinite work, corresponding to the inconclusive life of modern society. And the solitude it engenders — the random solitude of hotels, offices, shops and movie theaters — is not a test that strengthens the soul, a necessary purgatory. It is utter damnation, mirroring a world without exit.
The dual significance of solitude — a break with one world and an attempt to create another — can be seen in our conception of heroes, saints and redeemers. Myth, biography, history and poetry describe a period of withdrawal and solitude — almost always during early youth — preceding a return to the world and to action. These are years of preparation and study, but above all they are years of sacrifice and penitence, of self- examination, of expiation and purification. Arnold Toynbee gives many illustrations of this idea: the myth of Plato’s cave, the lives of St. Paul, Buddha, Mahomet, Machiavelli, Dante. And all of us in our own lives, and within our limitations, have lived in solitude and retirement, in order to purify ourselves and then return to the world.
The dialectic of solitude —“the twofold motion of withdrawal- and-return,” to use Toynbee’s words — is clearly revealed in the history of every people. Perhaps the ancient societies, less complex than ours, are better illustrations of this double motion.
It is not difficult to imagine the extent to which solitude is a dangerous and terrifying condition for the persons we refer to — complacently and inaccurately — as “primitives.” In archaic societies, a complex and rigid systems of prohibitions, rules and rituals protects the individual from solitude. The group is the only source of health. The solitary man is an invalid, a dead branch that must be lopped off and burned, for society as a whole is endangered if one of its components becomes ill. Repetition of secular beliefs and formulas assures not only the permanence of the group but also its unity and cohesion; while religious ritual, and the constant presence of the dead, create a center of relationships which restrict independent action, thus protecting the individual from solitude and the group from dissolution.
To the primitive man, health and society are synonymous terms, and so are death and dispersion. Lévy-Bruhl says that anyone who leaves his native region “ceases to belong to the group. He dies, and receives the customary funeral rites.” Permanent exile, then, is the same as a death sentence. The social group’s identification with the spirits of its ancestors, and its identification of these with the land, is expressed in this symbolic African ritual: “When a native brings back a wife from Kimberley, they carry with them a little dirt from his home place. Every day she has to eat a bit of this dirt…to accustom herself to this change of residence.” The social solidarity of these people has “a vital, organic character. The individual is literally part of a body.” Therefore individual conversions are rare. “No one is either saved or damned on his own account,” and each person’s actions affect the entire group.
Despite all these safeguards, the group is not immune to dispersion. Anything can break it up: wars, religious schisms, changes in the systems of production, conquests. … As soon as the group is divided, each of its fragments is faced with a drastic new situation. When the source of health —the old, closed society — is destroyed, solitude is no longer merely a threat or an accident: it is a condition, the basic and ultimate condition. And it leads to a sense of sin — not a sin resulting from the violation of some rule, but rather one that forms a part of their nature. Or, to be more precise, one that now is their nature. Solitude and original sin become one and the same. Also, health and communion again become synonymous, but are located in a remote past. They constitute the golden age, an era which preceded history and to which we could perhaps return if we broke out of time’s prison. When we acquire a sense of sin, we also grow aware of our need for redemption and a redeemer.
A new mythology and a new religion are then created. The new society — unlike the old — is open and fluid, since it is made up of exiles. The fact of having been born within the group no longer assures a man that he belongs: he has to be worthy of belonging. Prayer begins to take the place of magic formulas, and initiation rites put more and more emphasis on purification. The idea of redemption fosters religious speculation, theology, asceticism and mysticism. Sacrifice and communion cease to be totem feasts (if that is what they actually were) and become means of entering the new society. A god — almost always a god who is also a son, a descendant of ancient creation-gods — dies and is resurrected at fixed periods. He is a fertility god but he is also a redeemer, and his sacrifice is a pledge that the group is an earthly prefiguration of the perfect society awaiting us on the other side of death. These hopes concerning the next life are in part a nostalgic longing for the old society. A return to the golden age is implicit in the promise of salvation.
Of course it is difficult to discover all these factors in the history of any one society. Nevertheless, there are various societies that fit the scheme in almost every detail. Consider, for instance, the birth of Orphism. The Orphic cult arose after the destruction of Achaean civilization, which caused a general dispersion of the Greek world and a vast reaccommodation of its peoples and cultures. The necessity of reforging the ancient links, both social and sacred, created a number of secret cults in which the only participants were “uprooted, transplanted beings…who dreamed of fashioning an organization from which they could not be separated. Their only collective name was that of ‘orphans.’”(I should mention that orphanos means both “orphan” and “empty.” Solitude and orphanhood are similar forms of emptiness.)
The Orphic and Dionysiac religions, like the proletarian religions that flourished during the collapse of the ancient world, show very clearly how a closed society becomes an open one. The sense of guilt, of solitude and expiation, plays the same dual role as it does in the life of an individual.
The feeling of solitude, which is a nostalgic longing for the body from which we were cast out, is a longing for a place. According to an ancient belief, held by virtually all peoples, that place is the center of the world, the navel of the universe. Sometimes it is identified with paradise, and both of these with the group’s real or mythical place of origin. Among the Aztecs, the dead returned to Mictlán, a place situated in the north, from which they had emigated. Almost all the rites connected with the founding of cities or houses allude to a search for that holy center from which we were driven out. The great sanctuaries — Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca — are at the center of the world, or symbolize and prefigure it. Pilgrimages to these sanctuaries are ritual repetitions of what each group did in the mythical past before establishing itself in the promised land. The custom of circling a house or city before entering it has the same origin.
The myth of the labyrinth pertains to this set of beliefs. Several related ideas make the labyrinth one of the most fertile and meaningful mythical symbols: the talisman or other object, capable of restoring health or freedom to the people, at the center of a sacred area; the hero or saint who, after doing penance and performing the rites of expiation, enters the labyrinth or enchanted palace; and the hero’s return either to save or redeem his city or to found a new one. In the Perseus myth the mystical elements are almost invisible, but in that of the Holy Grail asceticism and mysticism are closely related: sin, which causes sterility in the lands and subjects of the Fisher King; purification rites; spiritual combat; and, finally, grace — that is, communion.
We have been expelled from the center of the world and are condemned to search for it through jungles and deserts or in the underground mazes of the labyrinth. Also, there was a time when time was not succession and transition, but rather the perpetual source of a fixed present in which all times, past and future, were contained. When man was exiled from that eternity in which all times were one, he entered chronometric time and became a prisoner of the clock and the calendar. As soon as time was divided up into yesterday, today and tomorrow, into hours, minutes and seconds, man ceased to be one with time, ceased to coincide with the flow of reality. When one says, “at this moment,” the moment has already passed. These spatial measurements of time separate man from reality — which is a continuous present — and turn all the presences in which reality manifests itself, as Bergson said, into phantasms.
If we consider the nature of these two opposing ideas, it becomes clear that chronometric time is a homogeneous succession lacking all particularity. It is always the same, always indifferent to pleasure or pain. Mythological time, on the other hand, is impregnated with all the particulars of our lives: it is as long as eternity or as short as a breath, ominous or propitious, fecund or sterile. This idea allows for the existence of a number of varying times. Life and time coalesce to form a single whole, an indivisible unity. To the Aztecs, time was associated with space, and each day with one of the cardinal points. The same can be said of any religious calendar. A fiesta is more than a date or anniversary. It does not celebrate an event: it reproduces it. Chronometric time is destroyed and the eternal present — for a brief but immeasurable period — is reinstated. The fiesta becomes the creator of time; repetition becomes conception. The golden age returns. Whenever the priest officiates in the Mystery of the Holy Mass, Christ descends to the here and now, giving himself to man and saving the world. The true believers, as Kierkegaard wished, are “contemporaries of Jesus.” And myths and religious fiestas are not the only ways in which the present can interrupt succession. Love and poetry also offer us a brief revelation of this original time. Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote: “More time is not more eternity,” referring to the eternity of the poetic instant. Unquestionably the conception of time as a fixed present and as pure actuality is more ancient than that of chronometric time, which is not an immediate apprehension of the flow of reality but is instead a rationalization of its passing.
This dichotomy is expressed in the opposition between history and myth or between history and poetry. In myth — as in religious fiestas or children’s stories — time has no dates: “Once upon a time… “In the days when animals could talk…” “In the beginning…” And that beginning, which is not such-and- such a year or day, contains all beginnings and ushers us into living time where everything truly begins every instant. Through ritual, which realizes and reproduces a mythical account, and also through poetry and fairy tales, man gains access to a world in which opposites are reconciled and united. As Van der Leeuw said, “all rituals have the property of taking place in the now, at this very instant.” Every poem we read is a re-creation, that is, a ceremonial ritual, a fiesta.
The theater and the epic are also fiestas. In theatrical performances and in the reciting of poetry, ordinary time ceases to operate and is replaced by original time. Thanks to participation, this mythical time — father of all the times that mask reality — coincides with our inner, subjective time. Man, the prisoner of succession, breaks out of his invisible jail and enters living time: his subjective life becomes identical with exterior time, because this has ceased to be a spatial measurement and has changed into a source, a spring, in the absolute present, endlessly re-creating itself. Myths and fiestas, whether secular or religious, permit man to emerge from his solitude and become one with creation. Therefore myth — disguised, obscure, hidden — reappears in almost all our acts and intervenes decisively in our history: it opens the doors of communion.
Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them. Many of our scientific truths, like the majority of our moral, political and philosophical conceptions, are only new ways of expressing tendencies that were embodied earlier in mythical forms. The rational language of our day can barely hide the ancient myths behind it. Utopias — especially modern political utopias (despite their rationalistic disguises)—are violently concentrated expressions of the tendency that causes every society to imagine a golden age from which the social group was exiled and to which man will return on the Day of Days. Modern fiestas —political meetings, parades, demonstrations and other ritual acts — prefigure the advent of that day of redemption. Everyone hopes society will return to its original freedom, and man to his primitive purity. Then time will cease to torment us with doubts, with the necessity of choosing between good and evil, the just and the unjust, the real and the imaginary. The kingdom of the fixed present, of perpetual communion, will be re-established. Reality will tear off its masks, and at last we will be able to know both it and our fellow men.
Every moribund or sterile society attempts to save itself by creating a redemption myth which is also a fertility myth, a creation myth. Solitude and sin are resolved in communion and fertility. The society we live in today has also created its myth. The sterility of the bourgeois world will end in suicide or a new form of creative participation. This is the “theme of our times,” in Ortega y Gasset’s phrase; it is the substance of our dreams and the meaning of our acts.
Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed.
PASSAGE FROM: THE PRINT. CHAPTER ON VISUALIZATION AND THE EXPRESSIVE IMAGE, ANSEL ADAMS
The making of a print is a unique combination of mechanical execution and creative activity. It is mechanical in the sense that the basis of the final work is determined by the content of the negative. However, it would be a serious error to assume that the print is merely a reflection of negative densities in positive form. The print values are not absolutely dictated by the negative, any more than the content of the negative is absolutely determined by the circumstances of subject matter. The creativity of the printing process is distinctly similar to the creativity of exposing negatives: in both cases we start with conditions that are “given,” and we strive to appreciate and interpret them. In printing we accept the negative as a starting point that determines much, but not all, of the character of the final image. Just as different photographers can interpret one subject in numerous ways, depending on personal vision, so might they each make varying prints from identical negatives. The techniques of printing and enlarging are far more flexible than those involved in the processing of the negative. We generally have only one chance at exposing and developing a negative, and must thus exert strict controls to ensure a good result. In printing, on the other hand, we reach our final version by progressing through stages of “work” prints. This procedure affords us great latitude for creative variation and subjective control, and we should take expressive ad- vantage of this facility. A great amount of creativity lies in the making of a print, with its endless subtle variations which are yet all tied to the original concept represented by the negative. I have often said that the negative is similar to a musician’s score, and the print to the performance of that score. The negative comes to life only when “performed” as a print. To repeat: visualization is the most important factor in the making of a photograph. Visualization includes all steps from selecting the subject to making the final print. I emphasize the importance of practice in visualization - the constant observation of the world around us and awareness of relationships in terms of shape and potential form, value interpretation, and emotional and human significances. All these come together as we develop our ability to visualize, to see as our photographic equipment and materials “see.” It is surprising how our vision intensifies with practice. I have previously stressed the great value of critically examining images other than your own (of al types) and trying to “revisualize” them in your own way. In addition to the considerations of point of view and negative exposure controls, we are now ready to consider the actual image values. Of course, we cannot be certain of the physical limitations of camera location, or of the quality of the light, or even of what our emotional reaction might be in the presence of the actual subject. But we can make valuable assumptions and enhance our picture-viewing experience by attempting to revisualize the original subject.
In our own photographs, the negative can be thought of as containing the basic information for the print image. As we observed our subject, we applied image management concepts to control the optical image, and the Zone System afforded us a framework for mentally making the transition from subject luminances through negative density values to the desired print values. We paid particular attention to giving adequate exposure to low values in the subject, lest these be underexposed and lack the required detail, nothing can be done in printing to create texture and value where they do not appear in the negative. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that we can take an inferior negative (inferior in the technical sense, but of expressive significance) and work wonders with it by imaginative printing procedures.We cannot create something from nothing - we cannot correct poor focus, loss of detail, physical blemishes, or unfortunate compositions- but we can overcome (to some extent) such accidents as overexposure and over- or underdevelopment with reduction or intensification of the negative and numerous controls in printing. However, nothing is as satisfactory as a direct line of procedure from visualization to finished print with everything falling well in place along the way! The truth is that in a large body of work (even that of a photographer of great experience) there will be many printing problems and subtle variations of interpretation. Thus the print is our opportunity to interpret and express the negative’s information in reference to the original visualization as well as our current concept of the desired final image. We start with the negative as the point of departure in creating the print, and then proceed through a series of “work” prints to our ultimate objective, the “fine print.” The term “fine print” (or “expressive print” as I think of it) is elusive in meaning. The fine print represents, to me, an expressive object of beauty and excellence. The difference between a very good print and a fine print is quite subtle and difficult, if not impossible, to describe in words. There is a feeling of satisfaction in the presence of a fine print - and uneasiness with a print that falls short of optimum quality. The degree of satisfaction or lack of it relates to the sensitivity and experience of the photographer and the viewer.
There appear to be people who are “value blind,” just as there are people who are tone deaf. Practice and experience may overcome such deficiencies, at least to a degree, and the viewing of original fine prints is perhaps the best instruction. A fine print has been generally assumed to have a full range of values, clear delineation of form and texture, and a satisfactory print “color.” But what a catastrophe it would be if all photographs only met these criteria! True, a note of pure white or solid black can serve as a “key” to other values, and an image that needs these key values will feel weak without them. But there is no reason why they must be included in all images, any more than a composition for the piano must include the full range of the eighty-eight notes of the keyboard. Marvelous effects are possible within a close and subtle range of values. There are different schools of thought in photography that emphasize different palettes of print values, and it would not be appropriate to insist on a particular palette for all photographs. Some photographers stress extreme black and white effects with very strong print contrasts, perhaps disregarding what the basic mood of the subject or the image itself may be. Others work for a softer effect; Edward Weston’s prints are much “quieter” than many realize. Their power lies in the “seeing” and the balance of values Weston achieved. Such contemporary photographers as Lisette Model and Bill Brandt express themselves with great intensity, yet their image characteristics are completely different and not interchangeable. A print by Alfred Stieglitz from 1900 is different in many ways from a print by Brett Weston in 1980, although both are compelling expressions in their differing styles.
I wish to make it clear that the approach to the fine print I profess in this book is not directed to limitations of “straight” photography as defined by the use of glossy papers and emphasis on value and texture. Apart from the fact that I prefer the simplest and most direct revelation of the optical image, I stress these qualities because I believe they are basic to the medium. But it is also true that exploration in al directions of style and craft is not only valid, but often vital for individual creative growth. One problem in discussing fine prints is the matter of verbally describing intangible qualities that are meaningful only in their visual effect. We thus rely on subjective terms like “flat,” “tired,” “harsh,” “chalky,” “brilliant,” “luminous,” and others. Such terms are vague. For example, I find it always necessary to stress the fact that we cannot equate brilliance with contrast. I recall about twelve years ago measuring the reflection densities of several of Frederick Evans’s platinum prints from the late nineteenth century, which conveyed an astonishing sense of brilliance. Much to my surprise, I found that the actual range of reflection densities was only 1.20 (1:16) or less, far lower than I had expected. The apparent brilliance of the prints was explained by the subtle relationship of values, rather than by actual contrast. For most fine prints the density scale of the negative should be approximately matched to the paper contrast, but the emotionally satisfying print values are almost never direct transcriptions of the negative values. If they are, the print may be informative, but often no more than that. The illusion of “reality” in a photograph relates primarily to the optical image; the actual values are usually far from reality. In some instances the physical or social meaning of a subject may demand only a “factual” representation. But once you admit your personal perception or emotional response the image becomes something more than factual, and you are on the doorstep of an enlarged experience. When you are making a fine print you are creating, as well as re-creating. The final image you achieve will, to quote Alfred Stieglitz, reveal what you saw and felt. If it were not for this element of the “felt” (the emotional-aesthetic experience), the term creative photography would have no meaning.
I do not suggest that there is only one “right” print, or that all prints from one negative must be identical. Consistency may be required when making a number of prints at one time (when printing a portfolio, for example), but as months and years pass the photographer refines his sensibilities and may change the value relation- ships within an image according to his evolving awareness. I have compared this with the interpretive variations in the performances of music and drama. I think I make “better” prints as time goes on; I find them more intense and revealing. But there are people who prefer earlier printings of some of my negatives, which they apparently find “quieter” and more lyrical. All I, or any photographer, can do is to print an image as I feel it should be printed at a particular time. I once prepared an exhibition for the University of California, consisting of a group of 5×7 contact prints of general subjects. The prints were very deep in value and richly toned. I had gone through a “high-key” period when I stressed buoyancy and lightness, and I wanted to return to more solid effects. My friends asked if the prints were not rather dark, and several reviewers wrote that the images were interesting but printed heavily. I stoutly defended the prints. They were returned after the show (none sold), and I put them away. When looked at the prints about a year later, I was appalled at their heaviness - how could I have printed them so dark? In reviewing the situation I realized that I had “tuned” my judgment to an imposed idea: I was determined to get away from a high-key tendency, and I simply went too far, without having the judgment at the time to realize it. I do not believe that anyone can (or should) attempt to influence the artist in his work, but the artist should always remain alert to comment and constructive observations - they just might have potential value in prompting serious thought about the work. Artists in all media find themselves in “grooves” at times, and some never escape. It is best to leave to critics and historians the dissecting of subtle differences in our work over time. The photographer should simply express himself, and avoid the critical attitude when working with his camera…
In many ways, I find printing the most fascinating aspect of black- and-white photography. It is especially rewarding to me, when I am going through the thousands of negatives I have never printed (at least in fine-print form), to find that I can recall the original visualization as well as discovering new beauty and interest which I hope to express in the print.
The procedure I then typically apply is as follows: I examine the negative on a light box, to become aware again of the densities and the information they convey. I may measure the densities on a densitometer to note the range of values, as an aid in selecting a printing paper that matches the negative. This is as far as I would go in pursuing mechanical information for printing. I also visually assess the values in the negative and relate them in my mind to the values I desire in the print. Since my expressive print is never a direct duplication-in-reverse of the negative, this stage is something of a voyage of discovery where I work not only to re-create the original visualized image, but to enhance it fi possible. I then prefer, as my first step in the darkroom, to make a very soft (low-contrast] work print, to reveal in positive values all the content of the negative. I find it preferable to work up to the desired contrast from a too-soft proof or first print, rather than trying to guess the final paper contrast and processing from the start. It is more difficult for me to “retreat’ to softer printing during one darkroom session than to raise the contrast. Ideally, if I have visualized the image and fi I know my craft, I should always produce a negative that contains the required information and from which I should readily be able to make prints that fulfill the visualization, perhaps with moderate burning or dodging for local control. I can say that I achieve this in the majority of cases, but in honesty I must also admit that I can make doleful errors of judgment or calculation. The lens extension for close subjects can easily be overlooked, or we can expose for a different film than we are actually using; our shutters can fail inexplicably or our exposure meters go awry. A photographer is reminded that he is human, after all, and his equipment is not infallible. To assume otherwise is folly. It is fortunate that the printing process is as flexible as it is! I should emphasize, however, that it is important to make the most consistent negatives possible, rather than relying on the flexibility of the printing process to correct for deficiencies in the negatives. With negatives of good general quality the subtleties of the printing process may be applied to correct the occasional fault, and for creative purposes. Each photographer will inevitably develop his own variations of thought and procedure. The point I wish to emphasize is the dual nature of printing: it is both a carrying-to-completion of the visualized image and a fresh creative activity in itself. As with other creative processes, understanding craft and controlling the materials are vital to the quality of the final result. You will find it a continuing delight to watch prints emerge in the developer and see that your original visualization has been realized, or in many cases enhanced by subtle variations of value. Naturally you will recall the subject, and it is not easy to divorce your judgment of the print before you from your sense of the subject. You should strive to remember the visualization - what you saw and felt - at the moment of making the exposure. Do not become trapped in rigid process; the essence of art is fluidity in relating to an ideal concept.
THE HOUSE OF XAVIER CORBERÓ, CORBERÓ (ON PROCESS) INTERVIEW BY ALBERTO MOYA
Moya: What was going through your mind when you started building the house?
Corberó: Perhaps the primal reason that moved me to start building was that I found the last fine spot on a street in Esplugues, a municipality of the Barcelona metropolitan area. I thought that it could conceal the ugly bit, it could end up looking pretty nice. And that’s how I have spent the last 50 years of my life.
It all began in 1960 and we have been building and building and building ever since. Everything that I have ever done can be found here. This house grew on me. I’ve kept on creating while getting older. This space is around 5,000m. I began living on the other side of the street. Later, I moved across the way. So I have been moving around during construction. When I first arrived, the space was a potato field. Works began in 1968-69 and we are still working on it. I had a plan and drew almost everything. It’s now beginning to be like what I had hoped-although I never really expected to see it take shape, because I didn’t have a penny. Yet we have found ways to pay for most of it. I am now trying to see it I can pay for what’s left. The new area I’m working on at the moment is rather big, with many windows. It’s quite expensive.
Moya: What did you have in mind when designing this house? Was there any specific place, any point of reference? New York, maybe? Anything you wanted to bring from elsewhere?
Corberó: No. this was what I had always wanted to do, and that is how drew it.
Moya: What exactly did you want to do?
Corberó: I wanted there to be a spot from which almost everything else could be seen. To create, to the extent feasible, a continuum: a place in which the mental space-not the real one-is what matters. I also wanted it to be similar to when you listen to a piece of music by Bach; if you stop and start again, it doesn’t matter that much, nothing really happens, because it’s a series of things that are happening at once, but a series of things that become one same thing. That’s to say, the poem is one, but the words that compose it are several. I also wanted to play with the lighting; I had this idea of having a circular patio, but then I realized that these octagonal windows could form a kind of kaleidoscope, creating these unexpected and beautiful reflections. With this I created some sculptures, too.
Ultimately, I make sculptures, and the houses just happen to come from these sculptures, which you could say come from the beast itself. You never really know why they come out as they do. My aspiration is to create poetry with anything I put my hands on, be it sculpture, architecture, or space. What interests me is that the final result can become a poem, which for me is the mother of everything. Poetry should be simple: a poem is literature that didn’t reach the age of a page.
In other words, with just one page you can say a lot, and that’s largely how I see my work.
Moya: Do you think music is necessary to understanding this house? Is this something you try to incorporate when someone is visiting the space?
Corberó: Yes, I do. I really like music. I have always thought that when a space has the right scale, music will always sound beautiful. Just like when an exterior has the right scale, trees grow; there is no need to plant them. Here, there is a fig tree right in the middle, and there is another patio upstairs with another fig tree right in the middle. And I bought neither of them, nor a single palm tree of the many I own. They grow because they are happy here! So with music it’s the same; it sounds right when the space’s scale is right. I wasn’t aware of that before, but now l know. Music will always go well with the space; it contributes to the poem.
Moya: When you were designing the house, were you thinking about your own needs and seeing yourself alone in the space, or were you thinking more about your family? Or was it both at once?
Corberó: I most definitely wasn’t thinking of the family, but nor was I thinking of myself. I try to step aside from everything when working to stay very neutral. My priority is that which I’m making. When engaged in that project, there is definitely one way to make it more perfectly than other ways, and there’s also a way that is the most perfect of all. The idea is to get as close as possible to the most perfect way. More than thinking, you have to constantly doubt that you’re already doing your best. You have to observe, look at it over and over again, and, where necessary, make more mockups to see if the scale and the different components are right. We can never keep track of every detail. And, of course, this is more than a matter of thinking-it’s a matter of looking and seeing. Nowadays it’s not so common to look. We all go to school, we are all handed the diploma, everybody thinks, but no one looks. I often think of the sushi cooks who spend eight years just looking, and by the end of it they know how to cut the fish. Of course you could also explain how to cut the fish, but it’s useless. You have to observe how the fish is cut. People think it’s enough just to think. But the most essential action is to look. Going to school is important up to a point—no one teaches you how to kiss at school. So I wouldn’t say there was a specific feeling, emotion, or need that drove me when designing the house. I did it in the same way I do sculptures: I don’t think too much. I only think afterwards, when I see it. I prepare drawings, then I do mockups, and then I do dummies because I don’t trust myself.
Moya: Would you say there are any aesthetic trends that predominate here?
Corberó: No. For me, a house is like a diary. And, here, every object has its own personal story. These two pomegranates, that teapot over there— and what about the dialogue between the different materials and the whole house? I guess these are ruled by life, different moments and experiences one has had.
Moya: When you were designing the house, how did you see the connection between beauty and necessity? Was one of them more relevant to you?
Corberó: The idea of necessity was the same one that leads me to make sculptures, something that can become pretty mysterious at times. When creating a piece, you think it must turn out as you imagined it. This makes you sharpen your wit so the piece is the closest it could be to the mental image.
But you’re surprised because you have only anticipated one percent of what actually happens, just like what happens with filmmaking or anything else. A written piece is not the same as a film on screen. Now there is a tendency to think that all this can be solved with all the virtual resources we have today. Today, most architects work digitally, so between virtual reality and theory we are forced to sit on chairs where we can’t even sit. Or we find ourselves in spaces where it’s impossible to relax because if’s awkward-such as in a hotel where you would think you’d feel comfortable, but it feels more like the waiting room of a gloomy airport. What I try to do does not stem from reason. Ot course l use reason to construct and to make sure the building stands on its own, but the rest is all due to a variety of reasons. Reasons that have an ethical and/or an aesthetic dimension—two terms that work together-as well as divine. The spirituality of the whole thing is indefinable. If it were definable it would no longer be spiritual. It would be rational, I guess. And that is the problem with very rationalist architecture: it’s by no means wrong, it’s perfectly fine, but you don’t feel all right in it. If I dedicated myself to building houses for lords and masters, guess I’d think more carefully about how they are going to be used. But I would rather take the thought as such, for its own sake. This sitting room is not meant to have big important meetings, it’s meant to be as it is, a space where I can place a sculpture, a piece of furniture, all contributing to make it look more beautiful. The thought relates to what it is in itself, not its purpose. Otherwise I’d do it differently.
Moya: Tell us about the floor plan of the house, its structure, its relation with the space.
Corberó: I was mostly interested in the mental space. My intention was to make it possible to see most of the space at once. It’s not like I consider it that much. I draw and then make; that’s it. I guess the key is that I’m always looking, over and over. I don’t believe very much in inspiration; I believe much more in perspiration. Work is what is most inspiring. The more you work the more inspired you are. And if you wait for inspiration to work, you never start. So it’s true that this is my main working tool, and that I work a lot here, thinking about work. You could call that inspiration. I just don’t know.
Moya: Talk me through the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of the house.
Corberó: In the end, aesthetics is the power to convince whoever is coming next that what you did was beautiful. However, whether or not something is beautiful is difficult to define. Hardly anything about all this can be defined, and that is why it’s so difficult to learn anything in a place where people say they teach. It makes more sense to learn by being an apprentice: a place where there is no teacher, just someone who is learning. He carefully observes and pays attention, and that is how he learns. I think we are now going back to those days. Anyone who’s making anything good out there today does not come from a university but from an apprenticeship.
Moya: What is it that you most enjoy doing when you find yourself at home?
Corberó: What I most enjoy is doing those things I have imagined in my head but that I have never found the time to do. Things I would love to see come true someday. The difficult bit is finding the time to do all those things. Most days, by the time I get home I am so exhausted I just go straight to sleep, and I must say I have a wonderful sleep. And when I wake up in the morning, I always find something that surprises me; things I didn’t think were there but are. And these things take you to other things, as happens with sculpture. A sculpture takes you to another sculpture, and all together it’s hard to explain, but to me that’s how all things work. I never feel lonely if I find myself alone at home. I like being alone; in fact, it’s when I’m at my best. To be able to think or make anything, it’s always better when you’re alone.
Moya: Any visits from people you admire?
Corberó: Yes, many! My two greatest masters were Salvador Dalí and Russell Page, a landscape architect disciple of Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier, who to me was the greatest ever.
Moya: Did you collaborate at all with Dalí?
Corberó: Yes, I made the eggs for Dali. All the eggs. The ones adorning the top of the Dalí Theatre-Museum, as well as the ones in Cadaqués. It all comes from those days in which we would see each other and he would ask, ‘What are you up to?’ and I would answer, I’m learning to lay eggs, because I thought that was the best business of all-laying eggs. And also because I consider making artworks to be a bit like laying eggs. It’s something that comes out naturally and you just keep on going, you keep on laying. We were very good friends with Dalí. He was my first client. He bought everything I had in an exhibition at the Hispano-American Biennial in Barcelona in 1955. Later, he called and said, 'Allo, allo, it is Dali’. I thought it was someone pulling my leg, because I was only 19, so I said, And I am the bishop of Barcelona’, and hung up. Then he called back and spoke to my father, but my father never told me. I didn’t hear from him again until five years later, at my first one-month show in New York, where Dalí came in every day. I asked him why he came every day. And he said, 'Well, because I’m interested in your work; it’s a pity you are so rude. I asked what I had done. He responded, 'No, it’s what you didn’t do!’ I didn’t understand what he meant. Finally, he explained. He said that it was a pity because someone had told him that I liked Zippos, the lighters used by the military, so he’d asked Cartier to make one for me. But as didn’t appear he gave it to Baron de Redé. Anyway, what is rather strange is that some 25 years later, I had an operation in Dallas, for lung cancer. I was in an elevator in New York and this very beautiful lady recognized me. She was French, and we became good friends. On the day of my birthday she said, 'Sorry, I didn’t remember to buy you anything, but I’m going to give you something you might like, which was given to me by a friend I looked after in hospital. And she gave me the lighter, because the friend was Baron de Redé. So I went to see Dalí and told him, 'Look, I have it’. And instead of saying, 'Oh, that’s funny!’ he said, 'Of course’. As if it were the most natural thing in the world that 25 years later, I would receive the lighter via such a strange set-up.
PASSAGE FROM: CRIMES OF WAR. CHAPTER ON THE AVOIDANCE OF REALITY, GABRIEL KOLKO
The twentieth century has been so full of tragedy and barbarism that it is natural for a historian to be reluctant to attach some unique significance to American war crimes in Vietnam. Yet both for the world, and most certainly for the U.S., the war the American Government has been waging in Vietnam is distinctive and without parallel. The openly justified, systematic, and continuous effort at the destruction of a population of an entire nation by an external enemy is quite rare in modern history. The Nazis carried on such a policy against the Jews, and it was far more “successful” on its own terms because European Jewry, unlike the Vietnamese, was unable or unwilling to resist. But the essential difference is that the Nazis concealed from the German masses their genocidal efforts, which they attempted to hide for fear civilization’s taboos regarding mass murder might damn them in the eyes of their own people. In Vietnam, the U.S. Government has no shame about the effects of its warfare. The daily press and TV have for years revealed everything one needs to know about the magnitude of the horror and the consequences of the war.
The real question of war crimes in the Vietnam War is no longer the facts themselves but rather the justification Washington has employed for its systematic terror. And, above all, it is the failure and seeming unwillingness of the American people to translate their knowledge of specific inhumanities and events, of the countless Son Mys, into a larger political perception of the objective of American foreign policy or a comprehension of the essential human and moral significance of the war in Vietnam. For the absence of a far greater sense of abhorrence, one based essentially on empathy with the sufferings of the Vietnamese rather than only with that of unwilling American boys sent to die in a distant land, potentially marks a moral and political immunization of a nation that has far greater significance for the future of American society and politics than I for one care to imagine. It is not possible to refer to a “public” response to the Vietnam War and crimes Washington commits on its behalf, for American society is not, and has never been, an undifferentiated mass. The U.S. is a nation of powerful and powerless, rich and poor, white and black, and complex as well as simple variations of class strata and castes, and a great many Americans have also been victims of violence and oppression at home.
There are also men and women of good will who remain, either out of perverse choice or genuine naïveté, ignorant of the horrors and significance of Vietnam, and such powerless individuals may be found taking every conceivable position on the future of the war. The inability of such individuals to define the war for what it is, but their desire also to retain a capacity to express a sense of outrage and their unwillingness to grasp an ideology that makes a virtue or justifiable necessity of reality, is both a political and moral fact we must confront. Robert Lifton will consider here the psychological dimensions and moral immunization of such Americans. I wish briefly to discuss yet another aspect of this common but essential problem of why the great mass of Americans good, powerless, and institutionally guiltless people-have not yet defined the Vietnam War as an intrinsically criminal undertaking or joined to a far greater extent the opposition and resistance to it.
Essentially, most Americans have neither the ideological nor intellectual perceptions, much less a descriptively accurate language of politics, capable of characterizing the social and human consequences of their government’s foreign policy.
This is true of the average man as well as of the typical academic. Candor is far less palatable than paying obeisance to an abstract commitment to “truth” that ruffles no sensibilities or interests. Accuracy is reserved in the universities for the crimes and follies of other nations, not for our own. Other nations are called imperialist, but I know of no text on American diplomacy published in this country that is willing to so describe the omnivorous policies of the U.S. in this century, or even to substitute another concept that conveys this reality.
So too with “body counts” in Vietnam, which trumpet the death inflicted each day or in each battle on those caught in America’s mechanized death maw. Americans do not probe the significance of what their rulers are doing because they have been educated from the beginning, in universities as well as grade schools, to avoid universal categories of explanation which also describe social and historical phenomena in this country as well as in Europe. The United States duns itself into believing-which most politicians generally do with the greatest sincerity even if they are in power-that somehow it is uniquely “open,” “liberal,” “rational,” and most certainly not predatory. Aberrations from conduct and goals consistent with such a society are regarded as errors and scarcely as the essence of the game. In brief, the nation has for some decades been intellectually and culturally mystified in a drugging official ideology of liberalism, one that historians are obligated to dissect and microscopically describe before most individuals are willing to perceive the real nature of the socially diseased and destructive organism. At the time of this writing, also, there is no widely accepted comprehensive alternative model of what American society and capitalism truly are at home and abroad.
This liberal myopia immunizes most Americans to the dominant political facts, experiences, and trends of our age—to war, repression, and war crimes everywhere. Such illusions become a defense against reality as well as a means for its perpetuation, and this mentality makes it impossible for many citizens to recognize war crimes in Vietnam just as they cannot perceive racism and repression at home-and generalize upon it in a manner that leads to fundamentally new alternative visions of society or political strategies. For once the conventional wisdom that blocks out a clear vision of reality is pushed aside, opening our view to the meaning and causes of our malaise at home and the terror and misery America inflicts abroad, then we also close the door on the seemingly easy, but in reality futile, widely accepted means of solving problems-which is to say, we fundamentally doubt the official theory of the American political process and the requisites for changing it. At that point, we have attained the precondition for ceasing to painlessly, rationally seeking to transform power with reason, petitions, and electoral charades.
To fully comprehend American war crimes in Vietnam, therefore, is to understand the war, the reasons why the U.S. became involved in Vietnam in the first place, and the sources and objectives of American power in the world today. Hence Americans, including many who oppose the war, reject considering the barbarism in Vietnam as intrinsic to Washington’s confrontation with the Third World in modern times, much less as simply one more variation of the only role the United States is capable of playing in a world in upheaval and revolution. Apart from the psychological blocks and terror, for Americans to confront war crimes in Vietnam is not merely to examine the degradation and perversity that the war has revealed in their soldiers, but also the human and moral consequences of American power as much of the outside world now regards it.
Most Americans are still incapable of such a searing reappraisal of their cherished assumptions and vision of society, which will come, if at all, only in response to internal crises at home which they themselves must experience. However, the Son My massacre, which was the most publicized and dramatic example of the war’s criminal nature, was met by some Americans not with shock, silence, or confusion but with accolades.
After all, Son My was so bestial that once it was revealed even the Pentagon reluctantly stigmatized those alleged to be responsible for it. The rather triumphant welcome various political and veteran organizations gave Lieutenant Calley reveals that terror and barbarism have their followers and admirers at home as well as in Vietnam. Conventional liberal wisdom cannot tell us what this implies for the future of American society, just as it cannot anticipate war crimes as a routine outcome of American efforts abroad or police and courts at home that are repressive and corrupt. We should not dismiss lightly the Yahoos who welcome Calley, or who regard student radicals and black militants as something other than human.
For they evoke the dread thought that the same men who urge maximum violence in Vietnam, and to whom the present Administration caters in the hope of winning their political backing and also because of a very real consensus both share, may someday bring home even more of Vietnam than we have hitherto experienced. For the exercise of repression as a principle, once admitted, is limited only by the interests and stakes involved and the power and resolve of the potential executioners. Son My and the war crimes in Vietnam, therefore, have told us much about the intrinsic nature of that war, about the frightful dimensions of American power as applied today, its implications for our own future, and how liberal theory has disarmed our comprehension of such realities. But if it has caused the realities to move blindingly into our vision, and the advocates of terror to surface along with them, we should not ignore the more impersonal, mechanistic aspects of the Vietnam War and the condition of our society, for the true architects of terror are respectable men of manners and conventional views who calculate and act from behind desks and computers rather than in villages in the field. For like virtually everything the U.S. has done in Vietnam, Son My and the endless parallel crimes were programmed-and predictable.
If violence is random and of short duration, and quite purposeless, it may be based on personal idiosyncrasies and guilt. Individual decisions then become the rule. But the U.S. effort in Vietnam is grounded on former Secretary of Defense McNamara’s concepts of cost effectiveness, which weighs firepower and available resources against political-military needs and objectives. To pay for such a vast undertaking, and rationalize expenditures to Congress, violence is carefully calculated and its intended outcome translated into military and economic terms, with the relative “body counts” becoming a vital measure of results. Such mechanized, dehumanizing slaughter assumes mass death, from the air, from artillery shells, in fields and prisons.
In the following pages the reader may judge for himself the quality and objectives of Washington’s policies in Vietnam. Any consistent and careful survey of the daily press over a period of time will probably produce sufficient facts to reach the same estimate of reality. Indeed, for some readers the facts in this volume may sound familiar, even stale. Yet the understanding of their significance is not likely to be so widely accepted. And for this reason we must again ask ourselves: How did conventional wisdom and theory prepare us to predict and explain America’s torture of a whole nation in an intense sea of fire and death?
PASSAGE FROM: THE PRINT. ON SENSITOMETRY, ANSEL ADAMS
It is my opinion that the photographer need not devote much time to the theoretical study of print sensitometry. Such matters as the exposure range can be established in practical terms by testing of the materials and processing, a more useful form of knowledge for the photographer than abstract sensitometric measures. As I have stated, producing expressive prints depends entirely upon visual appraisal of the tonal values. It is a different matter with negatives; since each negative is unique and usually cannot be redone, a some- what greater reliance on technical and mechanical control is necessary than for prints. However, a short discussion of the sensitometric principles of papers may help establish understanding of the exposure and density scales.
For those interested, standard technical works can provide more detailed information on the theory of tone reproduction. As with negatives, we can plot for any paper a characteristic curve which indicates its response to light and processing. The density read from a print is referred to as reflection density (R.D.), which is measured with a reflection densitometer. This instrument directs a beam of light on a very small print area, and measures the fraction of the incident light reflected from that area, called its reflectance (this is analogous to transmission with a negative). Reflection density is the log10 of the reciprocal of the reflectance, or D = log10 (1/R). Thus if half the incident light is reflected from a given print area, it has a reflectance of 0.5 (50 percent), and 1 divided by 0.5 equals 2. The reflection density for this area is the log of 2, or 0.30.
The print characteristic curve consists of a horizontal exposure scale in log units and a vertical scale of density (which is already a logarithmic unit). We can look at a paper curve and find the points where it approaches pure “white” and full “black.” By drawing lines from these points down to the log exposure scale, we can then determine the range of exposures required with this paper to achieve a print-value range from textured white to black. For example, we can determine the effective contrast scale of a paper by the following test: we find the exposure required to produce a value just perceptibly lower than the white paper base, and then find the exposure required to produce a black (Dmax). Assume these exposures are 1 second and 25 seconds; we then have a paper expo- sure range of 1:25. By converting to logarithms, we arrive at a log exposure range of 1.40 required with this paper to achieve a full scale from black to white. In practice, the range of exposures a paper receives is determined by the density scale of a negative. A negative with opacity range (arithmetic) of 1:25 has a density range (logarithmic) of 1.40.
In principle, such a negative should be an ideal match for this paper, yielding the appropriate range of exposures to achieve a full range of print values. Note, however, that we may require a “softer” or “harder” paper for expressive reasons; if so we are not violating sensitometric principles, but merely adapting them to informational or aesthetic objectives. The usefulness of graded papers lies in their ability to produce full-range prints from negatives of differing density ranges. If we have a “flat” negative, we will want a paper with a fairly “steep” curve so the short exposure range provided by this negative will still translate into a full scale of densities. This is the situation when we choose a higher-than-normal paper grade for printing a low-contrast negative.
Similarly, when printing a contrasty negative, we will need a paper with a much flatter curve, so that the extremes of the print density scale will be reached over the longer exposure range provided by this negative. In determining their paper grades from print curves, most manufacturers exclude the extreme ends of the scale — the toe and shoulder of the paper curve —as these extremes are not considered within the “useful” response of the emulsion. Actually, the subtleties of the lightest and darkest tones involve the entire range of the paper’s sensitivity, and often the qualities characterizing a truly fine print may be found in the delicate variations of the extremely light and dark values. Thus the designations of paper grades are often confusing if we attempt to understand them in sensitometric terms.
There is little standardization among manufacturers as to the sensitometric response of each grade. Even among the products of one manufacturer the contrast-grade indications for different types of paper may not be alike. Furthermore, the characteristic curves of various papers are often dissimilar, some having a longer toe or shoulder than others, and such qualities are not conveyed in the paper-grade designation. It is for these reasons that I do not consider paper sensitometry as important as practical tests and the visual evaluation of print materials and image qualities. Remember, the print is a “performance,” not a literal translation, of the negative “score.”