Hpm2010seminar1

100-583 History and Philosophy of Media PART ONE: MEDIA HISTORIOGRAPHY

ONE: Problems of periodisation 1: colour

A: periodising

Venus of Willendorf c. 24,000-22,000 BCE, Oolitic limestone, 43/8 inches (11.1 cm) high

Cubeiform script, Sumer, c.26th century BCE (2600)

detail of tablet measuring 9.2×9.2×1.2 cm.

Inscriptions on tomb in Yang he, Uixian County, Shan dong Provincec.2500 BCE

Manuscript of Archimedes, c.200 BCE Dead Sea Scroll, Ist centurey BCE

Gutenberg 42-line Bible c. 1455

The Great Eastern arriving in Heart’s Content, Newfoundland in 1866 with first successful transatlantic telegraph cable (after failures in 1858 and 1865)

some basic periods:

prehistory: rock art and carving, ritual and dance, cities and ar-chitecture . . .

writing, the alphabet and mathe-matics; tablets, scrolls and books

printing

global telecommunications

broadcast media

network media

100-583 History and Philosophy of Media PART ONE: MEDIA HISTORIOGRAPHY

ONE: Problems of periodisation 1

B: colour case study

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Isaac Newton, sketch of experiment with prism, 1672

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18-year-old William Perkin synthesises first aniline mauve dye in his bedroom in Shadwell

in 1856

CIE LAB colour space 1931

Typical colour gamuts mapped to the CIE LAB diagram

The abyss of total freedom experienced as nightmare rather than liberation, a nightmare which is as irrefutable as the Bomb and in so many ways shares its derivation from that imbrication of economy and politics which was in those days described as the military-industrial complex: this is the situ-ation of colour after digitisation. The general accident which Virilio sees implicit in every technology has not spared the technologies of light.

The mathematicisation of colour, which lies so close to the origins of modern science and industry, lies also near the heart of modern social order, and most of all to the challenge of meaning in a fragmented world. Fashion here is vitally sig-nificant. The fashion for a specific colour or range of tones (as in 'brown is the new black') can produce the sense of com-munity to the extent that it produces a statistically significant shift in behaviour, at the scale of populations. Independent of both individuals' idiosyncratic tastes and of a shared grammar from which colours might derive meanings, fashion in colours operates at the level of biopolitics, of shifts in behaviour but not shifts in meaning. Subjectively, such fashionable changes may be experienced with a sense of belonging to a community of taste, but it is a community tied together by the slenderest of threads, more a tribute to our longing for community than our ability to build one. The way each generation mocks the fashions of the one before and the one after it proves the fick-leness of drifts in the performance of taste, the randomness of arbitrary difference without the structuring rule of a syntax.

This is the context in which we must understand what has happened to colour, for colour, that most sensuous of opti-cal effects, once removed from its position in hierarchies of meaning, is exiled to the realm of taste, which itself has be-come increasingly individuated. Fundamentally, the direction of capital is inimical to the construction of meaning. Politics is a way of squaring the circle, making it possible to carry on as if meaning were still available. Ideology is only part of the pro-cess, the ideology of choice. The management of populations is equally significant. Meaning is the undergirding of the social, the particular mode of mediation required to create sociality, collectives, groups. Without it, other means have to be found, from sovereignty to discipline to control and now the reduc-tion of mathematics to the enumeration of experiences, the numbering of colours on the basis of a statistical norm of per-ception, averaged samples, the unit grid, privatised and increas-ingly monopolistic systems, and the shrinkage of the spectrum to what can be shown on a screen or printed.