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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822394242 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/24/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Bishnupriya Ghosh is Professor of English and affiliated faculty in the departments of Film and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel.
Read an Excerpt
GLOBAL ICONS
APERTURES TO THE POPULARBy Bishnupriya Ghosh
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2011 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5016-3
Chapter One
MOVING TECHNOLOGIES
One could begin simply anywhere. But perhaps it is best to begin in a place familiar to those who might read this book. Best to begin in the "wired world," which privileged users often mark as "global," where many of us encounter icons every day. The computer screen lights up; we point and click on a graphic inscription. It is one of the many globe-like icons, a graphic likeness to what it offers. It will open into an infinite horizon we know as "Google Earth," where we select a site. The visual fragment inaugurates a subjective itinerary: a home left behind; a friend's house; a reference someone made over dinner; a plot of land we hold in escrow. We could be, and often are, overwhelmed by the immensity of where the icon takes us; we know we cannot ever access those immensities. Yet our increasingly interconnected planetary space—too many pathways, too much territory—is instantly rendered graspable, if in infinitesimal proportion, by the glowing graphic mark.
In our age of mass production, where the producer is no longer easily located in networks of exchange, the artist is missing. It hardly matters who invented Google Earth. What matters is where it gains legibility: the site of enunciation where one recognizes the sign as shorthand legible to digitally networked users with access to personal computing, a network that excludes large swathes of the world's current population. Formally resembling something greater than itself—chaos variously configured as matter, divinity, or nature—the graphic inscription we might think of as the iconic image therefore depends on convention, on one's location in a shared field of cultural reference where one recognizes it as iconic. To gaze on a material object as icon is always an epistemological encounter.
Google Earth is at some level just an everyday icon, instrumental in its capacities. But its familiarity tells us something about the iconic image, a highly condensed formal resemblance to an "original" image—in this case, our imaginary projection of the globe—rendered recognizable by its iteration. Google inscribes the globe, turning it into information; we look through it (and not at it) to enter some other place. Yet our encounter is also an embodied one, as N. Katherine Hayles notes, etching the dialectic between inscription (transmitted from site to site without friction) and incorporation (specific and instantiated sense perceptions of materiality); even in vertiginous flights across the globe, we live as materially constrained embodied subjects. I shall argue that the distinction of the icon as a graphic and minimal, or unfinished, "inscription" makes it reliant on "incorporation" to complete its operations. Incomplete, incorporative forms, icons mandate the study of embodied consumption, and not simply of their production. Toward the close of the chapter, I will emphasize the logic of incorporation as fundamental to this sign, whose corporeality remains somewhat under-theorized in scholarship preoccupied with its cognitive effects. Even as we track and detect in high cognitive mode, the workaday Google Earth calls forth the sensible, both sensory and affective responses.
Google Earth hardly invites the intensity of affective response garnered by the global icons under scrutiny in this book. But the dialectic of the inscriptive and the incorporative in virtual worlds, I would argue, is as salient to bio-icons and, indeed, to all icons—even those (such as liturgical artifacts) most distant from the virtual image. In fact, scholars of religion also speak of icons as minimal inscriptions (of the divine), icon worship opening us into infinite space. If liturgical icons inaugurate an experience of (divine) alterity, when we click on Google Earth we become strangers in relation to all the vast planetary space that beckons.
We reflect on these unconscious habits only when we recognize the materiality of the iconic image—only when the familiar sign is dislodged from its regular function, revitalizing our response to it. Such a tear in the habitual can occur when the icon is deliberately re-focalized for artistic or political purposes. When another virtual icon—the @ sign—was exhibited as one of twelve everyday icons in a show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from April 18 to August 5, 1997, its materiality changed because of its framing as art object. Suddenly "@" was historical. The exhibit narrated the origin of the "@," officially known as the "commercial a," as harking back to the early days of a technology that changed the world. Its author was the computer address designator Ray Tomilson, who coined the shorthand while helping to design Arpanet, the predecessor of the Internet, in 1972. In such reassembling of the iconic image in another text, the curator's blurb focalizing the @ for us, the ordinary sign became available for reinterpretation at this specific site of consumption. It became a curiosity of immense significance, a material object that had changed the world. Legitimized by its exhibition at an established institution, the @ became imbued with new cadences so that it would, on the one hand, now represent the elegance of technical prowess that makes complex systems accessible to laypersons, and on the other, enable the fetishistic consumption of a hoary past where computer technology was an eclectic pursuit.
So we begin to see the complexity of the iconic sign. We begin to intuit the formal relations that constitute it: its grammar. Moving further, now into its history, we establish our (subjective) relation to its (objective) materiality: We understand its economy, the organization of relations in dynamic processes of becoming. Central to these processes is the icon's ability to communicate, an ability properly grasped when we look more closely at the formal architecture (design, relations, logics) that governs our relationship to its history and, therefore, to its operations in the social. In short, we begin with its semiotic economy. I will argue that all icons—ranging from the seemingly disembodied virtual image to the physically tactile liturgical artifact—share a distinctive semiotic economy. While "bio-icons" are the genre I pursue here, in this chapter I assemble them taxonomically alongside other types (a diagram, a logo, a photograph) to precisely illustrate the generality of this economy drawn from semiotics.
When we turn to those who have had the most impact on the distinction of the icon as a sign type, two figures loom large: Roland Barthes, the toast of the Anglo-American academy in the heydays of poststructuralism, whose Saussurian semiology continues to inform any materialist analysis of signs, including the present effort, and the American pragmatist philosopher and logician Charles Peirce, whose realist metaphysics (which influenced intellectuals such as William James and John Dewey) led to his dismissal by a critical theory informed by Saussurian linguistics. It is only in the second half of the twentieth century that art historians, film studies scholars, and new media studies scholars actively turned back to Peirce's meditations on the graphic, pictorial, and spatial figuration of images to recuperate the icon, and shortly we shall see why. Together the two theorists widen the itineraries of the icon so that it comes to represent the cultural mechanism we recognize today.
ROLAND BARTHES: THE MYTHIC LURE
Barthes brought the icon, hitherto a material object that had preoccupied art historians, into the study of mass and popular cultures, even though he only tangentially referred to the "iconic" message within his larger exploration of myths (Barthes 1976). References to the icon emerge throughout his oeuvre, but it compels investigation only because it illustrates the dangerous, yet utopian, possibilities of the optic regime in photographs. While clearly critical of the naturalizing effects of the photograph's indexicality, in "The Rhetoric of the Image" (1964) Barthes nevertheless ascribes a certain Edenic state to the photographic message. Cleared of connotation, the mechanics of photography (a chemical reaction following the passing of optical rays on a real thing in the world) guarantees the image as a trace of reality.
However, Barthes underscores our grasp of the "non-coded iconic message" alongside a "coded iconic," one that requires cultural knowledge. In a famous explication of the Panzani advertisement for packaged pastas and sauces, Barthes noted that the actual photograph of vegetables tumbling out of a string bag has a continuity with the real world that renders it "innocent"; writing before computer-generated imagery, one could rarely intervene in the object photographed—except by trick effects, as Barthes acknowledges. Yet the careful arrangement of the objects in the photograph's frame follows painterly conventions of still life, imposing artifice even before we get to connotations or "the discontinuous world of symbols" (Barthes 1964, 37). The chaos of "innocence" is thereby territorialized as art. To communicate "Italianicity" as its "message," the poster relies on cultural conventions: the knowledge of still-life paintings and the colors—the red (tomatoes) and green (peppers)—of the Italian flag. The danger of the objective innocence of the non-coded message, in Barthes's view, lies in its capacity to conceal the operations of this highly conventional knowledge; the indexical charge enables artifice to masquerade as natural. Such becoming natural of the cultural presents rather fecund opportunities for justifying contingent truths as mythic or eternal ones, a recurrent problem, as we shall see, with global icons. We know that global icons communicating particular aspirations as universal ones—a red-and-white graphic signaling that Coca-Coca refreshes, Coca-Cola is for everybody—fulfill a hegemonic function. For this they rely on the stability of the "message" the icon beams telegraphically: an immediate, indisputable, and therefore natural signal whose clarity obscures the artifice of production.
Most memorably, in Mythologies (1957) Barthes evokes the image of a Negro saluting the French flag, a "spontaneous" and "innocent" photographic impression "tamed" to represent French imperialism by artifice (Barthes 1972, 118). The photographic image, already a sign ("a black man saluting a flag"), is emptied of its materiality when it becomes a signifier harnessed to "shapeless associations" (in this case, "a purposeful mixture of Frenchness and militariness" [Barthes 1972, 116]) to become myth—a form that "steals" speech, since now the man and the flag's materiality, their histories, no longer matter. Barthes's "Negro," an anthropomorphic figure that conceals its own history, provides a point of departure for an elaboration of the grammatical organization of the icon (its elements, design, and relations). But lest readers wonder why Barthes's analysis of photographs in the pre-digital era might still be relevant to iconic images today, perhaps a closer look at a homologous photographic impression from our post-1989 period is in order. It is a memorable image, widely circulated through mass-media networks (distributed through news agencies such as Reuters for newspapers and picked up on satellite television): the famous photograph of the Tank Man. Now the subject of an entire film, the image of the lone man facing down tanks in Tiananmen Square, captured by Jeffrey Widener of the Associated Press in 1989 (figure 9), is well worth scrutinizing, if only for the stability of the message it is still capable of transmitting—a message that participates unequivocally in worlding, in conjuring a shared globality defined by the human drive for freedom.
As the graphic mark of the tiny figure saw iterations in mass-media traffic, Wang Weilin (the citizen thought to be the Tank Man) became an icon. The graphic likeness to human form that made up the core element of the icon's design incorporated a concept (human defiance) that produced surplus value, yet it unmistakably acquired this cadence from an ex-corporated object we might commonly think of as a prop: the tank (signifying the totalitarian state). Together, the recursive mark of man and tank naturalized a culturally particular aspiration (the demand for political rights from a regime that had lost its revolutionary horizons) into a universal human condition (everyone wants democracy). As the image circulated, man and tank were incorporated into each other in the grammatical sense, the linguistic union of two parts of speech, but also in spatial connotation. (When the term "incorporation" entered the English language in 1398, it described spatial relations.) Man and tank, black soldier and flag, or Mother Teresa and little brown baby illustrate how elements of the iconic sign are incorporated into each other, yoked in syntagm so that together they become graphic shorthand.
Part of the Tank Man's lure derives from the enduring promise of the news photo. Despite computer-generated images, the news photo is still largely considered indexical: The graphic impression of the tiny figure in the photograph's left-hand corner confronting diagonally placed tanks extending into the shot's depth of field first and foremost had a reality effect as a shocked world looked on, hungry for trickles of news from China. The thrilling narrative of how the photograph was smuggled out of China we find in Charles Cole's sensational account (in the Frontline documentary on the Tank Man) would lend the news photo an extreme indexical charge of the real. At one level, the photographic capture of the Tank Man is simply a graphic inscription indexical in its operations: The image refers back to an original image consumers imagine the photographer once encountered. Such a movement back to the image's ground of representation, evoking an "original" image projected on the consumer's imaginary—the sense of being present in Tiananmen Square—is a distinctive quality of the iconic sign. The material sign opens, aperture-like, into its recessed ground of representation.
This is why I characterize the iconic signs as apertures. Generally, the "aperture" is the opening in an optical system that determines how a bundle of rays might alight on the image plane. Obviously, my choice of the term is governed by the concept's materiality as physical apparatus: Just as apertures change with technological development, icons materialize in different forms (liturgical support to virtual image) with evolving media technologies. Whether the icon is made in publicity or in the labor of personal adoration, it is a physically expressive sign, incorporating as its quality sensations circling between subject and object and calling forth a decorative eye. Here, aperture intimates the sensory dimension of the encounter relevant to the corporeal dynamism of the global icons in question. Aperture is further appropriate to a graphic inscription like the icon, which relies on an epistemology of looks—that is, even as the icon stimulates synaesthesia, "seeing" remains the privileged sense perception in encountering icons, in an organization of the general experience I shall unpack in greater detail in the next chapter. Since any change in the aperture can fundamentally alter the image projected, apertures are inherently unstable, just like the volatilized icon. Hence, the physicality of the aperture underscores the historical materiality of the icon and the look, the object and its regimes, developed in this book.
The aperture returns us to the Barthesian anxiety over the indexical image. Since the index ambiguously points to its ground of representation (the bullet hole intimates that a murder has taken place), a nuance Peirce extensively develops, we can think of icon consumption as a movement back into a there—the ever receding ground of history. At its most fetishistic, such a "ground"—the reach toward the material relations constitutive of the historical image—is contained, symbolically anchored by a horizon of common good where all historical differences disappear. This is the work of the icon as myth, in Barthes's cautionary tale, its operation as a hegemonic form that conceals its ground of representation and shores up a universal common horizon (everyone wants democracy). At such moments, the consumer luxuriates in the promise of the universal, indulging in the famed passivity of mass consumption. But when this hegemonic form is contested, its conceit laying bare the interests of the few, we open into the sign's recessed ground; we see it as a historical image, a hegemonic construction limited by its materiality that is hardly universal or eternal. Hence, the symbolic values it once embodied are rendered historical: They belong to an elsewhere to which we are connected as we "enter" the sign. In such fissure, the consumer refers back to something beyond the graphic inscription—perhaps those shadowy forces that define our materiality. The iconic sign functions as an incorporative mechanism for moving the historical subject toward its social other.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from GLOBAL ICONS by Bishnupriya Ghosh Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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