Random notes from 'Ghost in the Shell; Photography and The Human Soul'

On dark glass, (cristal oscuro)

"shatter the glass and each broken shard will be transparent or reflective depending on its position. The human face acts like a dark glass that is alternately transparent, reflective, and fractured. at time we privy to the illuminations of interior states of emotions or feelings, at others we see only what we consciously or unconsciously project, and at still other times we are witness to arrangements of expressions suggestive of multiple meanings, interpretations, and subjectivities. But what lies behind the face-within the person being observed or depicted and beyond any grasp of objectivity, requires a different metaphor, one that alludes to the ineffable nature of whatever it is that makes us human, (or even for that matter trans-human or post-human). In oreder then to differentiate between the container and the contained let us consider the human machine, or more particularly its face, as something of a malleable shell that encompasses and reveals the unnameable ghost)s) residing within each of us. "

References Leo Marx's The Machine in the garden-

The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America is a work of literary criticism written by Leo Marx in 1964. Marx identifies a major theme in literature of the nineteenth century--the dialectical tension between the pastoral ideal in America and the rapid and sweeping transformations wrought by machine technology. This tension is expressed "everywhere" in literature by the recurring image of the machine in the garden--that is, the sudden and shocking intrusion of technology into a pastoral scene. "Within the lifetime of a single generation," Marx writes, "a rustic and in large part wild landscape was transformed into the site of the world's most productive industrial machine. It would be difficult to imagine more profound contradictions of value or meaning than those made manifest by this circumstance. Its influence upon our literature is suggested by the recurrent image of the machine's sudden entrance into the landscape" (343).

But Marx isn't interested so much in historical changes to the physical landscape. Instead, he looks at the interior landscape--"the landscape of the psyche"--and it is literature that he believes offers us the most direct access to the psyche. While popular culture of the traded on "puerile" and sentimental pastoralism--that is, the simple and unreflective urge to find a "middle ground" between the overcivilization of the city and the "violent uncertainties of nature" (28)--serious literature took a hard look at the contradictions in American culture--and particularly the conflict between the old bucolic image of America and its new image as an industrial power (26). It is the "role" of literature, argues Marx, to role to show us the "contradiction" of our commitment to both rural happiness and "productivity, wealth, and power" (226).

One example of this image occurs in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In Twain's 1885 masterpiece, the garden is the raft, and the machine is the steamboat that smashes it apart--and along with it, the (impossible) dream of a free and independent existence for Huck and Jim. As the raft drifts ever southward, deeper and deeper into slave territory, it is increasingly clear that this existence is unsustainable. The raft, like Thoreau's cabin, represents an escape from society, freedom from restriction, and a sense of plenty all associated with the pastoral idea. It "embraces all of the extravagant possibilities of sufficiency, spontaneity, and joy that had been projected upon the American landscape since the age of discovery" (330). The steamboat represents the intrusion of social realities into this dream--and not just the reality of slavery. It is a representation of how machine technology conflicts the pastoral ideal, and in the case of Huck and Jim, onto the southward-floating raft (330).

Marx concludes that literary artists--and Twain, Melville, and Hawthorne in particular-- raised important issues and exposed important contradictions in American culture, showing how "the aspirations once represented by the symbol of an ideal landscape have not, and probably cannot, be embodied" and that "our inherited symbols of order and beauty have been divested of meaning." However, Marx does not believe that these artists offer any solutions to the problems they raise. They have "clarified our situation" but have not created the "new symbols of possibility" we need (365). Literature can expose problems, but it is politics that we should look to for solutions.

"For the 20th century the photographic became the crucial domain of conflict between the real and the reproduced. It put on a series of masks ranging from the supposedly pure social presence of the documentary, to the pure abstract materialism of formal experiment... but both extremes of the photographic stage their signification through an implicit notion of the absolute: thus photography becomes the ghost in the machine of rational and universalist knowledge, the very flicker of the God-Form" - John Welchman, "Face(t)s: Notes on facility"

"Diderot described expression as 'the image of a sentiment' " <-title of my series sentiments on the void, lack of expression void. EPIC.

Physiognomy- the belief that a persons character, subjectivity, or even soul could be read in the features of the face. In short the outward signs of a person's face signified the inner character of that person.

Minor-White "If any subjectivity or 'state of feeling' were mirrored in the face it was that of the photographer, or the viewer." -If I give my subject the control, do they not control a small aspect of the photo? Or is the simple prompt from me enough to say, 'why yes, you are the the maker of the image, and the audience retains the soul right of interpreter'?

On Modern photographers-

"instead of trying to reveal the inner personality, character, and subjectivity of the sitter, modernists photographers turned the camera onto themselves as it were, and sought to express their own artistic agendas through the vacant faces of others. But no matter how blankly, clinically, and soullessly the modernist portrait is rendered, we are still tempted to read physiognomy.... Even the most affectless and mute faces portrayed by Sander, Avedon, Chuck Close, or Thomas Ruff contain at least the suggestion of some subjectivity behind them and at the very least present arenas on which we may project our own versions of what went before and came after the instant of the photograph... what concerns us is that it does signify an other, another's face: an announcement of communication, the begging of countless dramatics, a locus of potential passions, an allegory of the human soul, and a potential embodiment of personal ethics."