Writing Acts

‘Scapegoating the rotten apples at the bottom of the military’s barrel may not be a slam-dunk escape route from accountability anymore.’

Frank Rich, The real-life ‘24′ of summer 2008, IHT

I was, admittedly, a little taken aback when I first read this sentence in an article by Frank Rich in the International Herald Tribune. (I am an old-fashioned fan of printed newspapers.) But, reflecting on the subject matter of the article, it seems apt. There is a certain incredulity which resonates throughout the piece, as Rich compares ‘The Final Days’ of the Nixon administration with ‘The Dark Side’ of the outgoing Bush administration. That this incredulity should find its voice in mixing three metaphors seems an accurate reflection between the argument of the piece and the form of the piece - it draws attention, an attention which the subject screams for.

{For the origins of the word ’scapegoat’, which is a mistranslation from Hebrew into English of the word/name of a fallen angel, Azazel, see here.}

The truth of photography is that of the ‘eye’ of the camera as being the objective observer, detached from perception, attention and all those other messy sensoria which interrupt visual hunger. In the digital age, this truth is even more questionable; with the ability to manipulate images at everyone’s fingers, it is almost better to assume that an image has been manipulated rather than not.

Adding to the meeting of ‘truth’ and photography is Julian von Bismarck’s Fulgurator, which interrupts the signal as it is sent from the camera eye to the storage device, adding another layer to the image.

“When you are criticizing the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.”

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p.71.

For an image of a Lavey Automatic Electronic Phrenometer, go to Getty, and look for image #2636815.

The cover designs for the latest volume of Penguin’s Great Ideas series are here. My personal favorite is Benjamin’s The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction. (Although the alternative translation of the title as The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility is better.)

Some of my recent research has thrown up an article from the late eighteenth century on how to build an electric spider, and following a rebirth of an obsession with eighteenth century science, I came across this image from the seventeenth century (allegedly) of hearing tubes.

Following Foucault’s use of Bentham’s panopticon prison as a model for the operation of power, there is a focus on vision as the underpinning of the systems of control and discipline. But as this image asks, what about sound?

Penguin run an annual student competition to design a paperback book cover. This year the books were On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and On Beauty by Zadie Smith. The 2008 winner and shortlist is available here, and, although more monochromatic than last year, the list shows how diverse, engaging and talented UK student graphic designers are. I would happily own more copies of the Kerouac and Smith books, just for the cover designs.

A beautiful online magazine.

I had always presumed the phrase ’standing on the shoulders of giants’ had something to do with the ancient gods, pre-Zeus. Or from Archimedes, who is famously quoted as saying give me a place to stand and I will move the earth (known as the Archimedes Lever). But no - it comes from an entirely different myth-making era. The 1960s. And the field of sociology, specifically exploring how knowledge is transferred in the sciences.
Reference: Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants, New York: Free Press, 1965.

‘In 1860s and 1870s, male employees at Mutual of New York routinely used the basement vault area for fistfights to settle office disputes.’

(From Engendering Business by Angel Kwolek-Folland, p.124.)