Sam Hind

lecturer in digital media and culture at the University of Manchester, UK.

sam.hind@manchester.ac.uk

  • Mengele’s Skull

    I posted back in August about Keenan and Weizman’s upcoming Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics and have now got round to reading it. Firstly, it’s a small and short book with a fair number of colour images. It is these pictures that are critical to Keenan and Weizman’s narrative. Although I don’t want to spoil it for those who maybe haven’t had the chance to read it (an earlier version can be found in Cabinet here), or have not been acquainted with the Forensic Architecture project more broadly, I do still want to say a few things.

    The exhumation of (supposedly) Josef Mengele’s body inaugurated (page 11) a rather unique form of war criminal investigation. One different to that of either the testimony of the witness (of which Adolf Eichmann was sentenced under), or that of the textual document that many traditional criminal investigations are centred upon (Nuremberg Trials). That of the forensic.

    Each type of investigation, say Keenan and Weizman, operates in a particular space or ‘forum’. Or better still (as the space does not pre-exist it’s operation) is constructed through a set of investigative performances, where disputed and otherwise fractious entities (human/non-human; scientist/skull) are brought together for a particular purpose. In this case, an inversion of the perhaps now standard CSI approach; an interrogation of the skeleton with different presumptions and inverse purpose.

    It was not a case of asking the skeleton “how did you die?”, but – with the identity of the person in question: “who are you?” (17-18). As Keenan and Weizman point out, “the Mengele investigation was conducted in much the same way as a missing persons investigation would be” (19). Perhaps ironically, the many people who were ‘forcefully disappeared’ by dictatorial forces in South American during the 1970s were re-identified using the very same techniques employed during the Mengele investigation. In doing so, this ‘methodological proximity’ helped to move such investigation “beyond the ethical categories of victim and perpetrator” (61), and establish it firmly within a material forum (with identity the only aim).

    The success of the Mengele investigation was in many ways down to German forensic scientist Richard Helmer, who had developed a technique he called ‘electronic visual mixing’. In essence, an apparatus whereby Helmer could superimpose an image of the individual (Mengele) onto a clay cast (Mengele’s skull) and work a video camera between the two to establish a match between photo and cast. These image overlays could be produced in different splits so as to produce a rather haunting image of the skull cast complete with pictorial facial features from the photograph (even with Mengele’s felt hat perched upon it). In doing so, Helmer was able to persuade, quite decisively, many of the other forensic scientists and anthropologists involved in the investigation. Moreover, it was this process that also persuaded the many other victims, witnesses, state officials and media personnel eager to hear of the results of the investigation. This analytical method served as a foundational moment in forensic anthropology, and the construction of a faithful ally in the pursuit of now-dead war criminals (the skeletal object or ‘super-subject’ as a truthful witness[66]), whom in death had escaped the legal, juridical, bodily and political repercussions of their crimes.

    But of course, this notion of the truthful ‘super-subject’ has something of a twist. Whilst one of the most prominent members of the Mengele investigation, Clyde Snow, said that “[b]ones make good witnesses” (quoted on 66) – it is indeed this construction of the truthful object that forms the most crucial point of this event. Snow, Helmer and all the other scientists were present to do one thing: persuade. It was up to them to persuade all relevant parties as to their level of doubt. Previous to the introduction of Helmer’s techniques, the doubt, arguably, would have been much higher. How would the skeleton otherwise have been interrogated? If they had not succeeded in persuading all parties how would forensic anthropology look now? Would forensic anthropology even exist? Moreover, how would the witness and textual investigations fare considering this apparent failure in a new investigatory technique? As Keenan and Weizman say:

    Something which was not perceivable, which did not count, made its way into the domain of evidence and judgement, and in doing so had to alter the stage on which it appeared. (68)

    Helmer’s ‘electronic visual mixing’ not only transformed the field of forensic science/anthropology, but also radically changed the shape of war crimes fora. The assignation of the bones of Mengele with an agential – and legal – force the scientists in the Mengele investigation allowed them, as Snow says above, ‘to speak’. Not only a political act of expanding such fora to include the otherwise non-human but also a transformation of the protocol, discourse and procedure within. Alongside the witness and the textual document stood the object; imbued with all the power to speak (or, more correctly, be spoken for), to be discussed and to be disputed.

  • Cities without ground

    Via BLDGBLOG I came across a wonderful book called Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook. It’s a book about a city (Hong Kong, obviously) so dense, interconnected and labyrinthine the notion of ground really doesn’t hold much weight. Both physically (HK is built on steep slopes) and culturally (there is no concept of ground). Instead, ‘verticality’ is order of the day. From their website:

    Cities Without Ground explores this condition by mapping three-dimensional circulation networks that join shopping malls, train stations and public transport interchanges, public parks and private lobbies as a series of spatial models and drawings. These networks, though built piecemeal, owned by different public and private stakeholders, and adjacent to different programs and uses, form a continuous space of variegated environments that serves as a fundamental public resource for the city. The emergence of the shopping malls as spaces of civil society rather than of global capital— as grounds of resistance— comes as a surprise. (Emphasis added)

    I love the last sentence. What could be more intriguing than re-conceiving these centres of exhaustive, voracious consumer capitalism as fertile spaces of resistance? There’s also some great maps of the kinds of routes one (as a pedestrian) can take through these multi-level, public-private passages. Moreover, what does this mean for the map itself? The kinds of maps the Cities Without Ground authors (Jonathan Solomon, Clara Wong and Adam Frampton) have created are somewhat awkward and don’t really look like they have any navigational use. This, of course, is why they are so fantastic. They really say something about the difficulty of delineating the very messy spatial characteristics of a city like Hong Kong. Something that many other cities just don’t have.

    The photo below is from their website: Citieswithoutground.com

    Image

  • Traces = Tracks = Lines = Mappings

    There is this question of the traces that we produce. When I called you earlier today, I produced traces; every time I do a search on Google, I produce traces. But I do not believe anything that consists in saying we must prevent the development of trace-ability. We are now in an industrial society that rests on the recording of traces. And it is not worthwhile trying to make us believe that we should prevent it—it’s just wrong. That’s what I personally believe. The question is not how to prevent the recording of traces; the question is to create a consciousness of the recording of traces, a politics of the recording of traces. (467-468)

    The emphasis was added by myself. This is from the same Stiegler interview as quoted from in the last post. Interesting for thinking through how one might re-act to the tracing/tracking of human bodies (that, is with GPS).

  • Stiegler interviewed by O’Gorman

    In Configurations 18 (3) Fall (2010). There’s a mention of Latour within:

    Latour is a high-ranking philosophy professor [agrégé de philosophie], a philosopher, but he is in a state of philosophical denial [une dénégation philosophique]. For example, he will not put up with phenomenology, he will not bear transcendental questions, etcetera. He asserts an empiricism, an associationism, which is certainly something very efficient and very fruitful. But at the same time, I always have the impression, because of this denial, that there is a certain blindness, a certain naïveté even, in Latour’s reasoning process, a certain cynicism. (463-464)

    Stiegler finds interest in Latour’s focus on the ‘banal “thingness” of the thing’ (464) that he thinks philosophy has had a tendency to pass by. Ultimately though it seems he’s a little put off by Latour’s distaste for phenomenology and transcendentalism that I think Stiegler still sees as being the experiential seeds of life (albeit an already technical one). Latour believes this is a narrowing of the world to mere human experience (whether or not this is a technical one). Presumably, then, Latour and Stiegler are going to contest whether the ‘thingness’ of the thing is separate from our conception of it – or whether the human subject’s access to the thing is thus the only way to conceive of the thing. Latour doesn’t think so; Stiegler does (?).

    In another passage he discusses Simondon and his theory of individuation:

    He shows that psychic individuation is never purely psychic; it is always already social. I believe that if psychic individuation is always already collective, it is because it is also a technical individuation. I have tried to show, drawing on Simondon, that psychic individuation attains social individuation by means of technical individuation, and by interiorizing technical individuation. And this is what I call the phenomenon of transindividuation—it’s a phenomenon of selection. (466)

    It’s this psychic as collective that’s so important to Stiegler’s (political) project. Moreover, it’s that the psychic individuation as already collective individuation is courtesy of/via technical individuation that enables Stiegler to focus on the technicity of human life and it’s wiring through technical objects. Again though I think Stiegler has a tendency to not only downplay the autonomy of technical objects but also to assume a uni-directional role (technology writing/scripting/defining humans). His enduring aim is to re-evaluate the constitution of humanity through technology, and that as memory aids, technical objects structure human life from within that life (or, ‘stabilizes a repetition’ – 462).

    Latour’s (1996 – Aramis) notion of ‘quasi-objects’ moves two degrees beyond Stiegler, I think. Not just that this is a bi-directional process (technology writing/scripting/defining humans and humans w/s/d technology) like a game of table tennis, but that this is an already human-technical collective/assemblage (albeit with kernels of human and object withdrawn – like Graham Harman might suggest). Thus I think Stiegler doesn’t pay enough attention to the ‘event’. That is, the instances, moments or situations in which this techno-human life is played out, when one can maybe pull apart, interrogate, unravel etc. the human and non-human – however difficult this may prove. Rather, he too quickly assumes a generalized ‘we have always been technical’ thesis.

    I’m going to read another interview with Stiegler in Theory, Culture & Society tomorrow and will go through ‘Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon’ (2012) at Culture Machine too.  I’ll post if anything sparks my interest.

     

  • Constant Nieuwenhuys, New Babylon and Henri Lefebvre

    Presentation screengrab

    I’m in the process of putting together a research presentation for January. It’s something all first year PhD students in sociology at the University of Warwick have to do, and it’s a nice way to introduce your thesis to the other students, as well as helping formulate your own plans. I’ve started to put the bulk of it into MS PowerPoint but decided I’d have a little play about with Prezi, which is great for adding a few neat visual touches and is far more flexible than PowerPoint.

    After trying a couple of their pre-formatted designs I decided I’d search for a suitable background image. I first typed in something general like ‘digital maps’ and ‘map game boards’ because I wanted to re-create the sequential format Prezi seems to like, with arrows and frames and also play on the urban exploration side of mapping. Then I had a bit of a brainwave and searched for some Situationist artworks/maps; the perfect combination of maps, play and ‘flow’. The classic image of the cut-out map segments with red arrows darting from section to section seemed perfect (see a selection here). Alas, I couldn’t find an image with a good enough resolution for the levels of zooming Prezi requires so I had to ditch them.

    Then I came across a post on the [polis] blog on the Moscow Occupy movement. Their main picture was an image by Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920 – 2005). Taken from his New Babylon project, the image was part of a selection of “models, sketches, etchings, lithographs, collages, architectural drawings, and photocollages, as well as …manifestos, essays, lectures, and films” (Wigley 1998; text available here) that together formed a utopian vision of an anti-capitalist city. His work was strongly interconnected with the Situationists of the 1950s/60s.

    In two, perhaps not so, coincidental moves I found a translation of an interview with Henri Lefebvre on Nieuwenhuys, Guy Debord and the Situationists, and also a reference to the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga and his homo ludens concept. Nieuwenhuys wanted his utopian city to be populated with the ‘playing man’ (homo ludens) in opposition to the ‘bourgeois shackles’ (Goldhagen 2006; direct link) the working man had to contend with in the modern city.

    A subsequent image I found from Nieuwenhuys’ same New Babylon project was perfect for the background to my presentation. Good quality and a perfect colour scheme (here). Close up I think it looks like either a microscopic image of a biological cell or a computer circuit board. It also gives me an opportunity to pick out individual elements in the collage (as I think it originally was) and link them into the different sections in the presentation.

    If you want to know a little bit more about Constant himself there’s an interview by Linda Boersma at the art magazine BOMB here from 2005. I’d like to think my attempts to introduce the digital map (and mobile device) as a ‘new terrain’ for situationist-style explorations draws on some of themes Constant envisaged in New Babylon.