Learning from history

Compared to a display in a sex-shop window by Port Philip Councillor Andrew Bond, parts of Paul Yore's photo collage Everything Is Fucked at St Kilda's Linden Gallery were seized by local police on Saturday after a week of controversy in the local press. No charges have been laid, although News and Fairfax media are speculating loudly about "child pornography offences". Link. Link. Link.

The police raid came a month after LNP Queensland Senator and Shadow Attorney General George Brandis passionately defended both free speech and artistic freedom in an address to the Sydney Institute on May 7. ALP State MP Martin Foley, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Arts, used his Twitter account to "oppose Liberal Party taking us back 60 years". Liberal State MP Clem Newton-Brown tweeted back "I'm curious @martinfoleymp as to whether you are still defending the works of this artist today?"

The police raid came nearly one year to the day after the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee tabled its "Report on the Review of the National Classification Scheme: achieving the right balance" in the Australian Senate.  Chaired by the former Liberal Senator for Tasmania Guy Barnett, the committee examined the role of Australia's national classification scheme (NCS) in the visual arts and the application of the NCS to works of art and the role of artistic merit in classification decisions.

I'm quoting the Arts Law Centre here because the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee's actual report seems to have disappeared from the Australian Senate's website.

The Australian Arts-Law centre commented:


Despite the media hype, the Committee did not recommend the classification of all artworks by the Classification Board. Fundamentally their approach appears to be "business as usual" but encourages artists to take a responsible self-censorship approach

The committee commends the actions of artists who have sought classification of their work prior to public exhibition or display. In the committee's view, obtaining classification assists in ensuring that audiences can be provided with appropriate advice (and, where necessary, warnings) regarding the nature of the artwork.

To this end, the Report notes that the cost of classification of artworks is problematic for artists and recommends that classification of artworks should be exempt from classification fees (Recommendation 7) 

There is a process for applying for a fee waiver outlined on the Classification Board's website.


The Commonwealth Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) Act 1995 defines Australia's classification and censorship system as a cooperative scheme between all the States and Territories of Australia. Enforcement of the scheme is through a Classification Enforcement Act enacted by State and Territory, with the Australian Classification Board (ACB) acting as a national clearing house.

The ACB was asked to review photographs by Bill Henson seized from  the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington in 2008. The Board said its review found nudity in the photographs was "mild and justified".

Most artworks would not need to be classified to be exhibited in Australia. An exception  is for what the ACB calls submittable publications - those which contain material that would cause them to be restricted to adults if they were classified. This includes material that is unsuitable for a minor to see or read, or material that is likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult.

Artists, curators and galleries may submit works to the ACB to be evaluated, for a fee. The fee may be waived at the Board's discretion.


A NSW working party on Child Pornography observed (pdf)

Artists found to legitimately exercise artistic purpose should not have their work legally defined in the same way as the horrific images that pervade the Internet of child sexual abuse. To do otherwise is to undermine the gravamen of the exploitation and abuse of children that does occur in the creation, possession and dissemination of child pornography, both in Australia and overseas. (p22)

The Australian classification system provides certainty, and protection from political agendas,  for artists, curators and galleries involved in the planning of a public exhibition of works which may be controversial. It is lamentable, and kind of contemptuous of all the hard work done in this area over the past two decades, that the Linden Gallery management followed an ultimately failed policy of both assuming an exemption from the classification regime, and simultaneously issuing a self-assessed advisory, outside of the national framework, to visitors.

On Photography - Piss Christ and Kulturkampf

I don’t believe in culture. Don’t believe artists produce it, for example, or that television advertisements create it. Analysis of culture, for example from a marxist perspective on capitalist monopolies, or from an epidemiological perspective on the causes of violence, require some initial leap of faith: you have to believe in culture as deterministic, cause and affect, a mechanism, or a force-field, when there is scant evidence of any of those.

In many theoretical perspectives culture is presented as a fog that needs peering through, an organisational chart, a guided tour rather than a lived experience. The word is a handy generalization, sure. You can look at the edges, borders and overlaps between geographies, histories, circumstances, and what those might have in difference or in common. But boundaries, epistemologies and zeitgeists are fluid, liminal, shifting, and no great help for getting to the heart of what's inside.

It would be dishonest, though, to leave what are popularly called the culture wars out of a discussion of modern photography. Conjoining culture and war leaves an impression in my mind of...something shapeless and vague, shadows in twilight perhaps, or Goya's giants endlessly bludgeoning each other.

Thinking about this is further complicated by the strategy I’m using that follows  Elaine Scarry’s critique of aesthetic critiques in On Beauty And Being Just. I’m using beauty in the sense of notability, like that black eye is a real beauty, or (from football) what a mark, you beaut!. Something notable, in other words, rather than something of beauty in the ordinary sense of being pleasing to the eye. Elaine Scarry wrote:

The political critique of beauty is composed of two parts. The first urges that beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social arrangements.
and
The second argument holds that when we stare at something beautiful, make it an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the object.
(Elaine Scarry (2006) On Beauty And Being Just, Duckworth, London, pp58)

Both arguments are in play in consideration of Andres Cerrano’s photograph Piss Christ. The photograph itself is described here, the artist’s website is here. I didn’t see the photograph when it was exhibited. I’m not familiar with the artist’s work, methods or rationale, or the series of photographs of objects in fluids of which it is part. My interest here is solely in the idea that its exhibition in Melbourne is storied as an engagement in a larger war of and on culture.

It will be no help referring to European statesman Otto Von Bismarck's difficulties with Catholicism in 1870s Western Europe, or referencing early twentieth century Italian Marxism, or the 1933 Säuberung.

I want to leapfrog those ideas into recent experience, into modern Melbourne. A further complication for me is some ideas from the study of macro economics. I have no background in the study of economics at all, but I am going to borrow ideas about exchanges from discourses on macro economics. My (limited) understanding is not all exchanges have to do with money, some are to do with ideas and associations and even making friends, but nevertheless play their part in a whole that is often, but not always, described as an economy.

The facts are straightforward. Pre publicity for an exhibition of Andres Cerrano’s photographs at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997 saw the photograph or its description included in prominent print and electronic media. The Catholic Church in Australia sought an order preventing the photograph from public display at the gallery in the Victorian Supreme Court, arguing precedents in both Canon and Common Law on blasphemous libel.

The Catholic Church argued "Both the name and the image Piss Christ not only demean Christianity but also represent a grossly offensive, scurrilous and insulting treatment of Christianity's most sacred and holy symbol. It is calculated to outrage the feelings of Catholics and other Christians."

The National Gallery of Victoria argued the photograph had been the subject of a television documentary, published in newspapers and books and its exhibition would not add to any perceived offence against the Catholic Church.

The Victorian Supreme Court rejected the application as having no foundation in law, and found no legal basis to prevent the exhibition.  "A plural society such as contemporary Australia operates best where the law need not bother with blasphemous libel," the court decided.

In the week after the exhibition opened the photograph was vandalised twice, leading to the arrest of three men, two of whom had acted in concert. Concerned that it could not prevent such determined attacks, gallery management closed the exhibition.

Using the term ‘calculated’ to describe the production and exhibition of this image places ideas about determinism, conspiracy, authenticity, and deception on the table. To paraphrase: blasphemous libel is a wrong social arrangement. In labelling the photograph art, including it in an exhibition, making it on object of sustained regard, the gallery is a willing accomplice to, or alternatively an unwitting element in, an overarching - devilish perhaps - subterfuge.

Holding the photograph in high regard certainly led to attempts to destroy it. But there is no evidence to support the existence of a calculating, conspiratorial, organized enemy force, no sign of an evil empire poised to make revolution for or against ideology, national self-determination or even religion. If it really were an engagement of a culture war there are no visibly organised protagonists beyond a few  ivory towers blasting away at each other’s values at megaphone volume.

The photograph did not produce a force field that compelled individuals to act in these ways. The artist didn’t produce a predetermined train of events. With no epidemiology of violence to trace, and no rapacious capitalist to blame, or media personality to boycott, the episode has become a muted controversy over artistic and curatorial freedom. But it is explicable in terms of spontaneity and self-organisation, terms often used to describe market economies and a free exchange of goods, or in this case ideas.

Arguments for and against exhibiting the work became more sophisticated. The second act of vandalism was more determined and certainly more complex, and through use of distraction and concurrent action, demonstrably more innovative than the first. These might not be predicted in theories of culture, but they are predicted and comprehensible in theories of markets. I guess the absence of any concrete transaction, for example money for service, undermines an economic perspective. But call the events a series of exchanges, rather than transactions for profit, with outcomes the result of self-organisation rather than any centrality of planning, and you get a glimpse of a free population testing, contesting, reformulating, rejigging, muddling through, as one economist I read put it, one way and another, the limits of its own freedom.

It just might be, from a secular Australian perspective,  that is all the culture wars are.

The last post in this series is here

On Photography - damned either way

Public interest in wrong social arrangements are the heart of most photographic controversies.

Two images come to mind in particular that illustrate tests of public interest,  one far too ordinary, the other not ordinary enough. Both were said, by contemporaries, to distract from, or amplify, somehow, wrong social arrangements.

There is a photograph archived in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, of  Alexandra Feodorovna, Anastasia and Olga Nikolaevna bathed in light, women of the Russian royal family in 1915, seemingly unposed.  The family are busy with needlework, one has her feet up, relaxed, ordinary, familiar even: there is a wrinkled rug in the foreground.  It feels candid, unforced, intimate, real, a photo from a family album, although it is not any more.  It is a moment and a history all at once, and now part of a greater story the library's collection frames - revolution, dislocation, suffering, murder. But perhaps "rare" is a somewhat misleading description: after the Soviet Union disbanded an estimated 150, 000 photographs of the Russian royal family were discovered in secret government archives, suppressed,  in the public interest, from public view by their communist successors for nearly 100 years

There is a photograph of film star Julia Roberts by Mario Testino for a L'Oreal cosmetics advertising campaign in 2010, happy, bright-eyed and unblemished. The photograph  and advertising campaign was banned by the British Advertising Standards Authority after complaints from Scottish  Liberal Democrat member of parliament Jo Swinson that the images were digitally altered, and "not representative of the results the product could achieve." Swinson is a long time campaigner against what she describes as overly perfect and unrealistic images of women in magazines and advertisements.

Communist political parties are, of course, long time campaigners against royal families. But it seems to me that the absence of any regal trappings in the photograph, the ordinariness of the setting and the commonplace and all too human appearance of the Russian royal family posed the greatest threat to the new russian ruling class.  Demonising a ruling elite is one thing. Disappearing women that look like someones sister, aunt or wife is something else altogether. The humanity of the women that belies perceptions of wrong social arrangements had to be disappeared as well.

In modern times it is "overly perfected and unrealistic images of women", and the "deification of beauty", that must be disappeared. Photographs of supermodel Christy Turlington and actress  Rachel Weisz have also disappeared from English magazines. Ms Swinson told the UK Daily Mail  there was sound medical evidence that faked - airbrushed or photoshopped -  images cause harm. "There needs to be much more diversity in advertising – different skin colours, body shapes, sizes and ages."

What was ideologically impermissible somewhere a century ago is essential to the public interest somewhere now. In parts of the world such contradictions are avoided by suppressing images of human bodies altogether. In Western tradition, the human body is central to our humanist  heritage and what we think and say about ourselves, although depictions of it are often contested.


Upon the Protestant reformation the Catholic Church compiled and circulated huge lists of forbidden books, and demanded the censorship of painting:

... all lasciviousness be avoided; in such wise that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust...

Seventeenth Century poet, polemicist and propagandist John Milton is often quoted arguing against clerical censorship:

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties (1644)

Ironically, by 1744, Samuel Johnson was observing that a century of democratization of writing and publishing had rendered traditional systems for evaluating their worth shambolic. It was easy to publish and obtain books but difficult to trust their contents.

There are echoes of Johnson's world-weariness in controversies on photography today, and echoes of the old religious and political dogmas in conversations about them. Ironically, it may be that the failure of both religious dogma and political ideology to solve problems of wrong social arrangements that keep those controversies relevant.


The Australian Christian Lobby argued

...it is problematic to measure community standards by the number of complaints generated by a a particular broadcast or telecast. It would come as news to a great number of people within the community to learn that their view of the contemporary media environment was judged solely on their formally complaining...  (2011 Submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee Inquiry into the Australian film and literature classification scheme pp10)


Historian Ross Fitzgerald wrote in the Canberra Times

...the fact that an image or a bunch of words may offend someone and is therefore a reason to ban or severely restrict them is a Draconian and intolerant position. I'm offended by lots of things these days - Question Time, alcohol and cigarettes sold in supermarkets, reality TV and religious fundamentalism - but I don't use this as a reason to try to ban these things merely because it's just my opinion.

A very modern case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The previous post on this topic is here

On Photography - An Angry Country?

Much has been written about the 2008 seizure of Australian artist Bill Henson’s photographs, and their subsequent restoration to his Sydney dealer, innocent, along with the artist, of overwrought allegations against them.

Child protection campaigners labelled Henson’s images of a nude thirteen year-old pornographic. Art critics argued the images were, well, art. Ultimately the independent Office of Film and Literature Classification gave the images a PG (Parental Guidance advisory) classification, and State prosecutors advised the child pornography charges against the artist would not succeed.

Watching an art gallery’s contents emptied into a truck on television I was grateful to whoever had thought the operation through: the police seizing artworks weren’t visibly armed. Later, as Henson’s photographs disappeared from the walls of Australian public spaces I wondered for how long?

There is, rightly, a great deal of sympathy and support for child protection campaigners. And like any other special interest involved in the political process those campaigners are expected to vigorously prosecute their agendas. However, as noted by sociologist Frank Ferudi and others, populist policy actors of all colours who adopt child protection agendas as their own simply cannot be trusted to act upon anything except self-interest, in the end. There have been some notable witch hunts in modern times that have ended without any beneficial outcomes at all, save for the self-advancement of those involved.

Worse, rapists have had their sentences cut, and victims brought to tears and bewilderment as newspapers seek to increase circulation with name and shame gambits. Criminal investigations, especially those involving crimes against children, have not been well served by regimes of continuous speculation. And there is evidence - for example the labelling of corporations as pedophiles - that the current panic over child protection serves only the political ends of ivory towers. Frank Furedi wrote:

Mention the word ‘child’ and people will listen. Raise the moral stakes by claiming that a ‘child is at risk’ and people will not just listen but endorse your demand that ‘something must be done’. For instance, campaigners against poverty understand that they are far more likely to gain sympathy for their cause by focusing attention on what is now called ‘child poverty’. It is as if abstract socio-economic injustices are simply not compelling enough on their own terms: they have to be recast as something afflicting children

Spiked Editor Brendan O'Neill writes: 

Everyone treats the ideal or at least the word freedom seriously. Everyone pays lip service to it...This does not mean, however, that freedom as a lived experience is not under threat. It absolutely is. Many of our core freedoms, especially freedom of speech, are being undermined by a political class that doesn’t trust us to live freely. But here’s the thing: such is the value still attached to the idea of freedom that now even attacks on freedom get dressed up as an expansion of freedom. Even the killing of freedom is disguised as freedom.

It seems fair to say that contemporary Australian creatives: artists, photographers, writers, publishers, film makers, polemicists, poets, and their audience, regard each other with suspicion. Photographs, web pages, television programs, newspaper articles, internet cartoons, broadcast pranks, speeches and even privately expressed opinions have all been discussed, dissected, boycotted, divested and otherwise sensationally prosecuted during the past few years.

There is a mood to compel the media to act for the public good, an expansion of media regulation to include public interest tests put to parliament (but defeated), a looming general election contested in part on issues of public interest and in part upon issues of free speech.  Where once free speech and public interest seemed inextricable, polemic is inexorably wedging them apart.

Newspapers’ circulation has fallen off a cliff.  Newspaper journalism is routinely outsourced overseas, our commercial TV networks are two-thirds owned by foreign banks, our commercial radio networks caught in spirals of cost-cutting and falling audiences. And Australians have turned their collective backs on government-approved and financed Australian films.

It is as if people can only bear to see and hear what is already known and agreeable.

The speed at which issues are churned online is overtaken only by the almost instantaneous coagulation of opinion around them. The occasional scholarly article lamenting, for example, media coverage of climate change issues, is liked and twittered and decontextualized and resignified at breakneck speed, contested and deconstructed and decried at length and likely to be of historical interest only long before any old fashioned op-ed or editorial response appears in the next edition of a daily tabloid or weekend broadsheet.

The sclerotic nature of internet discourse has been noted by many, an interesting counterpoint to what is  otherwise imagined as fluid lines of communication. To venture an opinion, for example on a blog, is to risk deletion. Anything you say can be held against you. Simultaneously, anything you say can be turned into something else - fixed! Somehow, it all seems to make sense, even if your original post had nothing to do with cats.

Durning the past few years Australians have campaigned for sackings, boycotts, internet filters, seizures, closures, divestments, damages, apologies, corrections, and even arrests over cultural artefacts, published words, pictures, videos, sounds, that for one reason or another became controversial. Alongside the large mass media outlets other, lesser, publishers have come under pressure: notably film festivals but also art dealers and even the management of assorted privately owned and operated public venues, like those hired for controversial Dutch politician Gert Wilders and British climate-change sceptic Lord Monckton.

But while there is a mood to allow the display of those publications, artworks, photographs, books, magazines, films, ideas, only if they are in the public interest, there is next to no clarity about what the public interest might be. Outrage has replaced clarity in so much of public discourse we can start to think about crossing out lucky and substituting angry in front of country.

At the very moment the freedom of unlimited communication beckons we rush to shackle ourselves in chains of mindless rage.

The previous post on this topic is here

On Photography - Eyes In Skies

There is a scene in Ridley Scott's 1982 movie Blade Runner which goes something like this:

Deckard: (pretending to be from the American Federation of Variety ArtistsConfidential Committee On Moral Abuses)  Oh yeah. I'd like to check your dressing room if I may.
Zhora: For what?
Deckard: For, uh, for holes.
Zhora:  Holes?
Deckard:  You'd be surprised what a guy would go through to get a glimpse of a beautiful body.
Zhora: No, I wouldn't.

Although it seems a little redundant to say so, the AustralianOffice of The Information Commissioner says there is a high level of community awareness of the use of surveillance cameras in our public places.

Former Assistant Privacy Commissioner Mark Hummerston says it is difficult to offer a single, consolidated figure of the number of surveillance cameras in Australia.  There are already 53 fixed surveillance cameras and 2 mobile camera-equipped vans operating in public places in central Melbourne alone.  Last year the Victorian State Government offered Melbourne local councils three million dollars to install more. At 30,000 dollars each, that’s an extra 100 to add to the unknown quantities already installed in public places.

The Australian Lawyers Alliance told ABC news last year “There’s a study out of the UK which shows, certainly in London, surveillance cameras have been responsible for solving one crime for every thousand cameras.” The Victorian Government recently ordered Victoria Police to audit the number and type of surveillance cameras in the State.

Despite Australian national privacy principles requiring that, where practicable, consumers must have the option to transact anonymously, every Melbourne taxi, automatic teller machine, train, tram, bus is camera equipped and many retailers photograph their customers. The Office of The Information Commissioner says concerns about surveillance cameras include misuse of stored photographs or videos, loss of anonymity, discomfort about being watched and the effectiveness of surveillance cameras achieving  their stated goal of crime prevention. Around eighty percent of people responding to surveys about surveillance cameras expressed no concerns about them at all. Five percent were 'very concerned.'

Last year the Melbourne Age newspaper bemoaned the spread of surveillance cameras as undermining “the sense of liberty that is part of the fabric of this city and this nation” (Saturday Age Editorial September 29 2012)  Brenna Krenus wrote a few days later that more cameras: “will not engender feelings of safety: they will heighten feelings of fear” (The Age October 2 2012).

Despite their ubiquity surveillance cameras do not unexpectedly present “an intentional intrusion (whether physical or otherwise) upon the situation of another (whether as to the person or his or her personal affairs) where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy; and the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities” (D Butler '(2005)'A Tort of Invasion of Privacy in Australia?’  Melbourne University Law Review 11)

What does present as intrusive, invasive and unexpected is a new generation of cheap, lightweight airborne cameras mounted on surveillance drones. There is a good example of their capabilities here on youtube

ABC journalist Mark Corcoran told the Sydney Morning Herald "The day is fast approaching where the small personal drone will be an obligatory part of the tool box for journalists, photographers and bloggers"

The Australian Privacy Foundation worried that Kate Middleton “and many other people besides can rest assured that their bare breasts are fair game, anywhere, any time,” after Australian Woman's Day published candid photographs of the pregnant Duchess in a bikini. It is legal to operate a remotely piloted drone in Australia below four hundred feet for non commercial purposes.  In Victoria it is illegal to knowingly use an ‘optical surveillance device’  to record a private activity without consent.

Anxieties about surveillance technologies are often expressed in the same vein as general concerns about photography: a potential loss of anonymity, discomfort about the photographic ‘gaze’, misuse, for example through publication, and the offensiveness of the images themselves. In one notorious case photographs of a dead child were obtained from a helicopter and published without the family’s knowledge.

The grieving parents wrote:

"We are not arguing the fact that the media have an important role to play, what we want is the media acting in a responsible, sensitive and ethical manner for grieving families such as ours and many others...At the time of Molly's loss of life we would have greatly appreciated the opportunity to share with the media in our own time and in our own words the story of her life”

As if to confirm the worst of general anxieties about photography, so-called ‘body scanners’,  cameras that see through clothes to the naked human body, are installed at eight Australian airports.

The Australian Government says The current generation body scanner is equipped with automatic threat recognition technology. This removes the need for screening officers to view detailed or ‘naked’ images and instead highlights areas of concern on a generic ‘stick’ figure. In addition, the body scanner is not able to store personal information about passengers or the screen display generated from individual scans.

The previous post on this topic is here

Photography - issues - Robert Rooney's photographs

I think that Robert Rooney's black and white photographs of young boys taken between 1956 and 1958 with his Box Brownie camera and currently being shown at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne are exquisitely beautiful in the way that he draws the viewer's eye to minute movements of the body that we don't generally see. Time is slowed in these somewhat languid depictions of school boys in their usual day to day interactions with each other. I was absolutely fixated on that slight movement of the boys left hand and right leg, caught so precisely and the almost slipping shoulder bag on the boy in the middle of the photograph whose back faces us in this first photograph below. This image also acutely depicts the intimacy of the group and the loneliness of the boy who is walking past them.

Some of the photographs, like two above, appeared magnificently choreographed; a strange dance of uniformed figures. If we walk into this exhibition with sinister thoughts about pedophiles and school boys, molestation and school uniform pedophiles then we broach these photographs in a manner not intended by the photographer who was himself at that time, a student at Swinburne Technical College in Melbourne. Fascinated by childhood and repetition Rooney has also included in this exhibition beautiful images of young boys playing in the local Rubbish Tip and/or just hanging out in the street - usual behavior for children at that time in Melbourne. Going to the rubbish tip was certainly a memory of mine, since many 'still good' objects could be found at the tip and made new again.

I showed these photographs here (they are Rooney's photographs rephotographed by me when I saw the exhibition last Saturday) to contribute to the conversation being raised by Steven Middleton in his previous post. On Photography - In Trouble. I truly believe that the intent of the photographer is paramount and we as viewers should not make assumptions based solely on the content.

On Photography - In Trouble?

A woman meets relatives in a busy inner city shopping strip. There is banter, hugs, and before they say their goodbyes, a moment to take a couple of photographs. Later, she relaxes over a coffee in a nearby cafe, peeking at the photos on her camera’s liquid crystal display.

The woman, a friend, a respected artist/photographer, writer and academic, had her camera out again several days later when she was approached by the cafe's owner, who said he'd had complaints from four other patrons that she was 'photographing children'  Being a mother herself and a woman of standing, she was naturally upset and confused by what sounded to her as an accusation and was prompted to write this account:

...I was thoroughly shocked, insulted and offended yesterday when a Manager/Owner of a coffee shop in Camberwell said when he saw me with my camera, that if I brought out my camera again then they would not serve me. Apparently (according to him) he'd had four complaints from people saying that they didn't want their children photographed...

We often speak of transformative technology breathlessly, as if it were a desired, rather than lived, experience. Perversely, the lived experience of transformative technologies is often a negative one.

Anxieties about cameras are as old as the manufacture of film. The tools of photography are notionally extensions of natural, embodied phenomena - the camera a prosthetic eye and the photograph an augmentation of memory - that provided the basis for modern visual communication and began to globalize human experience long before the internet.

The incident itself bears the postmodern imprint of internet-speed culture. Something is remarked upon, there are likes, a critical number is reached, a moderator implements a ban - fixed!  In a spasm of autonomic reflex an artifact with no place in the social body is ejected, and the symbolic order of things restored.

The internet changed photography. Analyses of contemporary photographic practice give next to no account of the wirelessly interconnected lenses embedded in and peeking from everyday artifacts. Everywhere you look, they look back. From doors, walls, cars (both inside and outside), telephones, tablets, television screens and more, existing predominantly not to augment human bodies, but to make and store and categorize recordings of them.

Anxieties about surveillance are as ancient as writing itself. We live in times where old fears are magnified at every turn by experiences of photography as command and control. Those experiences are not novel in Western culture. Whole categories of people, for example those with disabilities, suffer forms of surveillance for the whole of life. The experiences are not novel but have become much more common, and have brought the invisible aspects of photography, the composing eye and controlling hand, to prominence in discussions about photography.

Where the photographer was previously almost invisible, a tabula-rasa upon which events imprinted themselves through an indifferent mechanism, now the question of what is not in a photograph is as salient as the question of what is. The composing eye is inexorably linked in culture on the one hand with expressions of power, and on the other with perversions of it. Chris Munroe writes, in Tracker, of Norman Tinsdale famous 1930s photographs of Aboriginal peoples:

Critics suggest the forlorn expressions staring back at the camera tell a tale of a sorrowful people treated like museum exhibits, firstly measured, weighed then forced to pose awkwardly for photos whilst clutching serial numbers. Many have compared the exploitative look of the images to those of police mug shots. A closer examination of the Tindale genealogical photographic collection reveals almost none of his subjects are smiling at the camera or seemingly engaging at all in the compulsory process either. They look resigned and defeated – an enduring reminder of the dark days of mission life and the Protection Board era.

There is a photograph by Bettina Rheims of style icon Kate Moss, bare-breasted, part of Rheims's Modern  Lovers series. In 1989, when the photograph was taken, Moss was 15. News columnist Andrew Bolt poses a problem with Rheims's photograph better than most:

Hear how Moss herself has described the pain that is the reason for laws to protect children from being forced to expose themselves for the sexual pleasure of others.

and

...This is art, we are told, not pornography. Perfectly fine to stare in a state gallery at a picture not too different from those for which a Melbourne stalker now faces jail. So ogle away, dear art lovers...

 (Herald-Sun, Melbourne, Thursday February 14 2013 pp15)

Despite previous controversies over the works of Bill Henson and Ella Dreyfus, the Art Gallery of NSW said it had ''no issue'' displaying Rheims's photograph of Moss. "We exhibit art, not pornography" the gallery told anyone who asked.

Controversies over photography often inhabit a kind of cultural underbelly and are often conducted at megaphone volume between contesting ivory towers. We have all seen politicians, for example, falling over each other on the way to denounce the latest photographic outrage. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, for instance, denouncing a photographic exhibition he hadn’t seen by an artist he’d previously never heard of discussed in a newspaper column he hadn’t read. While many claim outrage, few talk sense, and I think Chris Munroe and Andrew Bolt succinctly express cultural anxieties about who is  watching and why.

Here then are a couple of peaks, or ivory towers, landmarks in the cratered landscape contemporary photography finds itself labouring over. Cultural tensions over history, power, privacy, nudity, art versus porn - a battle some cast as ultimately between good and evil extremes.

Professor of Aesthetics Elaine Scarry provides a substantial contribution to the controversy, from an academic ivory tower, in On Beauty and Being Just

The political critique of beauty is composed of two parts. The first urges that beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social arrangements.

and

The second argument holds that when we stare at something beautiful, make it an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the object.

(Elaine Scarry (2006) On Beauty And Being Just, Duckworth, London, pp58)


I'm interested in the first axis of argument because it directly states (but does not solve) a problem often raised. It seems to me that wrong social arrangements are at the heart of Andrew Bolt’s critique of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Beauty has the capacity to wound, not only others but also is itself at risk from the attentions it draws. This line of inquiry goes directly to the heart of anxieties over photographs of children. To paraphrase, innocence is at risk of destruction from the attentions of photography.

Around the same time the Art Gallery of NSW was organising school tours of its new photographic exhibition, Chi Magazine published photographs of a bikini-clad, pregnant, Duchess of Cambridge.

The controversy over those photographs of the Duchess of Cambridge turned upon ideas about public and private moments, privacy versus surveillance. In the photographs themselves the subjects are unaware and unposed, the (anonymous) photographer concealed from their view. The British Royals were reportedly “outraged”, inside their  white-walled palace.

"They are images of such unexceptional normality that there is only limited mention of them on the cover of the magazine," Chi's editor, Alfonso Signorini, told the BBC.

There was, however, many lengthy mentions of the photographs on the covers of other publications. I don't know how many covers above normal circulation a bikini clad aristocrat is good for, but you can bet that every editor who published those photographs worked it out beforehand. Style sells, celebrity sells, and I want to place by example in this geography of mind a market, not in any particular point,  but one which can displace the landscape anywhere, inconveniently, like a blemish upon an already cratered and pockmarked cultural underbelly.

Australian Woman's Day editor Fiona Connolly told News Limited she had no qualms about running the photographs of the Duchess, claiming they were taken by a fellow holiday maker on the Caribbean island of Mustique rather than a paparazzo. "It wasn’t a hard decision to run these photos," she said, and  "we are sensitive to photos that shouldn’t be published, for instance I haven’t laid eyes on the nude photos of Kate."

Nude photographs of the Duchess, also covertly obtained, were published in Grazia Magazine earlier this year. Designer Bella Freud, speaking to Vanity Fair last December about her time as a stylist with a large fashion retailer, describes walls and mood boards pinned with pages torn out of Grazia Magazine of daily sightings of (Kate) Moss. “Whole clothes lines have been made out of one look she put on one morning.” Grazia is typical of many such style, scandal and surveillance pictorial magazines sourcing photographs from long-lensed paparazzi and advertising from the fashion industry. Nudity sells, and what it sells is, paradoxically, apparel.

It seems to me that objections to these photographs are along the lines suggested in Elaine Scarry's second axis of argument, that when we stare at the beautiful Duchess, make her an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the Duchess. The immediately visible destruction is of her privacy, but that is only the beginning. Publication of private moments pose a danger to her moral integrity as well, and none more serious than to the childlike Kate Moss.

Fashion ivory towers Vogue Magazine and Cosmopolitan have traded blows over what Connolly described as sensitivity to photographs of Moss that shouldn't be published.

Corinne Day’s photographs, styled by Cathy Kasterine, of Moss for British Vogue “showing how we all wear our underwear when we’re hanging around the bedroom” as Kasterine put it, were described by competitor Cosmopolitan’s outraged editor as “Hideous and tragic. I believe they can only appeal to the pedophile market. If I had a daughter who looked like that, I would take her to see a doctor”. Moss herself shoots back “Ridiculous. I must have been 19. I’m standing in my underwear. Really controversial.” But Moss has described herself as depressed, and pressured to bear her breasts for the cameras as a sixteen year old in the famous Calvin Klein heroin chic advertisements. New York is a beating heart of uber capitalism, and Moss’s work experience there frames one of the best arguments I know for unionism and the formation of industry associations dedicated to protecting members from moral exploitation.

Photography polarizes opinion at every turn. Worse, dialogue about moral issues are from a distance between the vested interests in ivory towers that sense some worth in their being conducted at megaphone strength. Photography is in trouble. Part of the problem is discourse. At the very moment the camera became ubiquitous, leaders of public opinion, who might be expected to step up and fulfil their self-proclaimed roles as authorities of specification and delineation, are divided and defensive behind the walls of their ivory towers.

Photography is in trouble. At any moment a photographer’s work might be seized, even photographs that previously hung with pride in public spaces, as happened to Bill Henson’s works in recent times. Or a child might be declared a sex offender for life, for posting a naked picture of someone somewhere from their phone, or downloading one to it in an email.

At any moment a woman with a camera in her handbag might become the object of scurrilous whispers and unwelcome attentions. Since one way or another we all carry cameras with us now, the problem can only get worse.

Beginning with this and continuing in the next few few posts on the topic, I'm going to attempt to sketch what I see as marking the boundaries of the problem, and the pathways to them, a geography of mind pursuing the tangled landscape of Civilization itself.  And I'm hoping against hope that it does not follow a trajectory of the photograph from treasured memory to the scene of a crime.

a post industrial post

captain of industry

may or may not be true

I was wandering through some ideas I had about ecosophy on these pages, making a few assertions and generalizations that may or may not be true. Medieval philosophy dealt with the place of human bodies in a cosmology. Ecosophy addresses the place of the human species in an ecology. Ecosophy has much in common with medieval ideas about allegiances, alliances, and mutual obligation.

Western philosophy's preoccupation with the individual as a rational being - Descartes I think therefore I am - was an irrevocable break with the philosophies learned by people born in medieval times to feudal and religious obligation. Modern philosophy's preoccupation with individuals and freedom may be fundamentally irreconcilable with ecosophy's preoccupation with the obligations of whole species to ecosystems.

Whenever words like irreconcilable and irrevocable pop up I wonder whether it is only because I'm out of ideas. Superficially ecosophy looks like many other extropian projects to repair and restore human bodies. The feature which distinguishes ecosophy from extropianism is its emphasis on limiting the affect of bodies upon ecospheres. Ecosophy emphasizes disempowering bodies, where extropians want to increase, usually with science, embodied empowerment over environments.

Donald Worster's 1995 declaration in The Shaky Ground of Sustainability:

...the progressive, secular materialist philosophy on which modern life rests, indeed on which Western civilization has rested for the past three hundred years, is deeply flawed and ultimately destructive...

and Florentine Friar Savonarola's 1498 sermon

'''In these days, prelates and preachers are chained to the earth by the love of earthly things...They have not only destroyed the Church of God. They have built up a new Church after their own pattern...

take similar positions. Human activity has damaged the cosmology/ecology to such an extent that an apocalypse is likely. If you believe you have an obligation to act.

In these circumstances simply being born is fraught, and life an ordeal. I tried to characterize Savonarola's influence over Quattrocento Florence as an ordeal, a trial of ideas that mirrored the medieval concept of life as a pilgrimage, but perhaps the man was simply mad. Burning books by Petrarch, Virgil, Ovid, Tibullus, Catullus and Terence seems ideological, bad. Laying them out on an octagonal pyramid, ninety feet high, topped with an image of Satan, with stratified firewood representing the seven levels of hell, seems just crazy, mad.

In a perfect cosmology bodies with original sin are excluded by being imperfect. By simply existing, imperfection threatens the perfection of the cosmology as a whole. The fourth platform principle of ecosophy is

The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.

In an overpopulated ecosphere human bodies are surplus as soon as they are born. Living, their redundancy poses a threat to the perfection of the ecosystem that cannot be mitigated, not even by the most extropian technological ordeal.

Perhaps ecosophy just is irreconcilable with humanism in general and extropianism in particular. Doesn't seem right to labour mightily to reconcile in death the ideas of those who never agreed in life.

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burning vanities: mesmerizing science

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"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it" , wrote George Santayana, joining a long list of scholars disillusioned with public affairs.

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history"

Aldous Huxley

"What experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it"

G. W. F. Hegel

"History repeats itself because no one was listening the first time"

Anonymous

R.W. Emerson wrote (in History) "...stand before every public and private work; before an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson, before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem hanging of witches, before a fanatic Revival, and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in Providence..and reach the same height or the same degradation, that our fellow, our proxy, has done."

Emerson makes a reference perhaps to the many official investigations of the theories of Franz Mesmer, a famous European Doctor (and patron of Mozart) using magnetism and hypnosis in his cures. Early in his controversial career, Mesmer had confronted famous Priest and Exorcist Johann Gassner at the Munich Academy of Sciences in a notorious clash of knowledge and belief. All Gassner's achievements, Mesmer asserted, were explicable as natural forces, requiring no particular belief or other at all. While the Priest was sincere, the recently discovered natural force of Animal Magnetism produced tides in wounded bodies, allowing the life force to flow more freely through them. Additionally, Mesmer diagnosed, the Priest was a natural hypnotist.

It was vanity, said the scientists, self-delusion wrought buy religious fervour, that allowed Priests to interpret natural forces as the will of God. It was vanity, said the religious, self-delusion wrought from the deadly sin of pride, for any man to claim to understand a world made by God, and interpret the forces of nature as anything but the will of Heaven.

Hyponotism might have been just one fad amongst many in Enlightenment Europe, if it were not such a dagger at the heart of new ideas about individual will. Mesmerism arouses deep suspicion even now. Mind control threatens the core from which Cartesian sciences proceeded, that God would not give me eyes, only to allow them to be deceived.

Emmanuel Kant (in Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?) saw the Enlightenment as "Mankind's final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error." However it was also a time when attempts were made to circumscribe the limits of individual reason. “A high degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people’s intellectual freedom, yet it also sets up insuperable barriers to it. Conversely, a lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough room to expand to its fullest extent” he wrote.

In A Social History of Truth, Steven Shapin argues that during Enlightenment times reason was required to be expressed according to the rules of civil society. Otherwise it could not be believed. The law may overturn reason, it was argued, but reason may never overturn the law, and the brave new society it sustained.

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burning vanities: huddled masses yearning

Medieval times were diverse, perhaps beyond modern comprehension; a polyglot of local and regional customs, laws, allegiances, obligations, justice, historical privileges and tax regimes. Not only man-made but physical laws as well were thought by many to vary from place to place, and a great many locales offered cures for diverse illnesses, either by the virtues of a particular place itself, or more recently the intervention of a virtuous Saint, whose remains were displayed sometimes piecemeal in the great Cathedrals of Europe.

The highways of Europe were clogged, in those days, with bands of travelers; groups of men following the obligation of Christians of the day to Holy Pilgrimage along the pilgrim routes to Santiago de Compostela, to Rome, and Jerusalem. And lesser places, with their own histories, Saints, Holy Relics, hospitals and monasteries. Pilgrimage itself was one obligation amongst many acquired by men of action in Medieval times. Italian Archeologist Giovanni Cassieli identified the route described by Sigeric, Tenth Century Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury, as he walked the 1200 kilometers of the Via Francigena, an ancient Pilgrim Way, from the centre of European Catholicism to its Northern edge.

I laughed out loud the other day when someone on TV announced "the poor are always with us". This is such a medieval idea (but perhaps a more enlightened one than the more modern idea that poverty can be "cured"). Medieval peasants would not work without obligation to work, so the logic went, otherwise they would work only enough to feed themselves and their families and laze around the rest of the time. The lazy peasant argument was revived, in recent times, in the junk science of environmental determinism. But it was an argument against the modern politics of Absolutism, in the day, for the lazy peasant would not respect power if it were far away, like most Kings of the time were. Far better for the Local Lord to have an obligation to provide land for local lazy peasants to grow food on, and the lazy peasant family to have an obligation to work, from time to time, on any nation-building a local lord might be obliged to do in discharge of their own obligations to higher powers. As people had done since unremembered times.

Absolutism was a political philosophy popular amongst European royal houses I guess because it offered a good chance of their dynastic longevity, or a least-worst one. The continuance of a dynasty was the best hope for political stability and peaceful prosperity amongst the competing noble houses of Europe, a least-worst opportunity to transfer power and avoid a bloodbath. So the faceless bureaucrats of an increasingly influential European merchant class must have believed, just looking at the vast amounts of private money spent to prosecute absolutist causes.

Medieval society had for centuries depended upon diversities of obligation, lengthy chains of social causation that stretched from the lowliest beggar to the highest in the land, and beyond life itself to Heaven, or Hell, if fate so conspired. Now, the winds of change began to blow, the power of Rome to anoint monarchs was threatened, and the natural order symbolized by the bands of pilgrims traveling the Via Francigena shook at the sudden chill.

Absolutism was to Medieval times what Just In Time Inventory Management is to modern capitalism - both a revelation and a sure bet on vastly increased profits. The assumption of absolute power by a king rendered a great deal of Medieval infrastructure redundant, and many seats of local power were razed, looted, and plundered. The wealth of regions flowed instead to absolute monarchs, and the merchant class who backed their success from the major port-cities of the day. Importantly, Absolutism promoted the idea that God could and did speak to mortal men, unmediated by the priest class that had formerly announced the legitimacy of kings.

It is impossible, perhaps, to imagine the religious devotion of the vast majority of medieval peoples. One measure is perhaps the rate at which the scythe of reform cut them down. Tens of thousands died during the Reformation in England, for instance. The average person was on a pilgrim's progress to heaven, or hell, staking their immortal soul on good guidance, knowing that everything could be lost upon a single slip. And they fought like the Devil to protect the religious institutions that, mostly, were obliged to take an interest in their welfare.

The Fourteen-Nineties were the best of times and the worst of times for the City-State of Florence. The European Renaissance of ancient ideas about art and science flowered under the patronage of influential Florentines. Skillful diplomacy with the regional superpowers kept the governance of Florence for the most in the hands of Florentines, and the city had vassals, notably Pisa, amongst the lesser surrounding regional centres.

Florentine achievements came under pressure from all quarters. Success depended upon the capacity of its institutions to navigate the complex hierarchies of obligation which characterize Medieval politics, inside and outside the city walls. One slip might, and sometimes did, bring about the destruction of not only aspirations but entire cities and their inhabitants.

Florence's Monastery San Marco is, like so many of the great Florentine institutions, a symbol of the intellectual and moral influence the Nation-Sate enjoyed in Medieval Europe. The Monastery's Dominican Friars were custodians not only of the building but also Florentine achievements and the intellectual heritage of Medieval Europe itself, symbolized in part by the Scholastic achievements of Thomas Aquinas, and the fresco paintings of Fra Angelico.

King Charles VIII of France, called Affable by his acquaintances after his friendly demeanor, marched into Italy with an army of mercenaries at the invitation of Pope Innocent VIII, and confronted a Florentine army before the walls of Pisa, a Florentine vassal state. Piero Medici, son of the legendary Lorenzo, capitulated, accepted humiliating terms, and forfeited Pisa, which declared itself a republic independent of Florence.

The oligarchy ruling Florence fell, Piero himself fleeing to Rome, where the new Borgia Pope and his allies took alarm at France's intervention in the Italian peninsula. The people of Florence turned to the past and future simultaneously, declaring a Christian Republic with Jesus at its head, a nod to both Florence's glorious Roman Republican past, and the new politics of Absolutism. Earthly power, in the new order, rotated between different factions of the laity, clerics, and what noble houses and merchants that had not fled.

Again, it is impossible to imagine what terror the ordinary Florentine felt as they gave up every vanity they had to be burned on the Shrove Tuesday bonfire in the Piazza della Signorina, a century's worth of independent thought, along with the recently rediscovered ancient texts that inspired them. Strict rules of attire were adopted, to clearly signify the ranking of bodies according to their nature. Regional trade and local commerce were severely curtailed, as the burghers of Florence considered their own position in the order of things and played it safe.

Inquiry, what we would call knowledge, was discredited completely, and people looked to prophecy, signs, and revelation for clues. Rumours swept the Via Francigena and other pilgrim ways: the Antichrist was in Rome, the Moon rose red with blood, and the dead stalked the living and knocked on their doors, crying for justice. It is often said that the light of civilization rose in the East and travelled Westward. But civilization's progress, quickened during the Quattrocento Renaissance in Florence, was abandoned, condemned as corrupt, self-serving and vain. The endeavors of men could not prevent invasion from France, neither could they prevent the destruction of the whole natural order by Absolutism, except in alliance with the forces of Heaven. Huddled within its city walls, Florentines gathered instead in the Piazza San Marco, before the Monastery San Marco, waiting to be saved, not only from northern Absolutism but also from themselves.

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burning vanities: looking for justice

In a previous post I left charismatic Dominican Friar Savonarola atop a scaffold in the Piazza San Marco in Florence, waiting for God to strike him dead, three days short of Lent in 1497.

Seeking justice, the revolutionary cleric invoked the spirit of the Judicium Dei, the wager, or ordeal, administered by European clerical courts from the ninth to thirteenth centuries CE to settle difficult legal cases "where truth is not otherwise attainable". An accused would be deliberately wounded, for instance by boiling water or hot iron, and the wound examined after three days for infection. An infected wound signaled a guilty person. The wager that heaven would intervene to prevent an innocent's wound from festering has its biblical (Daniel 3:23) origins in the story of Sidrac, Mesac and Abednego, followers of God who were condemned to be burned by Nebuchadnezzar, and saved from death by an Angel which led them from the fire to freedom. Now Savonarola would wait out three days wagering that heaven would intervene, freedom walking the hard, nine yards of the ordeal holding a hot iron of political power delivered him by the King of France in the coup d'etat of 1494.

Politics in Europe in the Quattrocento were framed as God-given Absolutism. It was an ordering of hierarchies structured around mutual obligation that made little distinction between the physical and metaphysical. An individual was expected to cultivate allies and make enemies in both spheres as they navigated the medieval world. Savonarola claimed an alliance with the Holy Virgin, as well as the King of France, in a war of words with Rome. "Oh prostitute church, thou has displayed thy foulness to the whole world...Earth and Heaven, the angels, the good and the wicked, all shall accuse thee", he railed.

It is perhaps difficult for us to imagine the world in which Savonarola found himself, in fifteenth century Florence. Centuries before, the Dominican Cleric Thomas Aquinas had noted

"we observe that in nature things happen always or nearly always for the best; which would not be the case unless some kind of providence directed nature toward good as an end" (Summa Theologica, question 103, article 1)

and

"We must bear in mind that there are two kinds of sciences. There are some which proceed from a principle known by the natural light of intelligence, such as arithmetic and geometry and the like. There are some which proceed from principles known by the light of a higher science: thus the science of perspective proceeds from principles established by geometry, and music from principles established by arithmetic. So it is that sacred doctrine is a science because it proceeds from principles established by the light of a higher science, namely, the science of God and the blessed. Hence, just as the musician accepts on authority the principles taught him by the mathematician, so sacred science is established on principles revealed by God". (Summa Theologica question 1, article 2)

Savonarola lived in two worlds at once, the physical and metaphysical. The nature and structure of the natural and metaphysical worlds, and the politics of Absolutism, remained undisputed. As Voltaire would ironically write centuries later, everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. At issue was the corruption of the natural world caused by the immoral behaviors of rulers in Rome and Milan. Savonarola preached

"The earth teems with bloodshed, yet the priests take no heed; rather by their evil example they bring spiritual death upon all. They have withdrawn from God, and their piety consists in spending their nights with harlots..."

Savonarola's war of words on Rome, and the Dominican power play in Florence, had provoked condemnation from the Pope in Rome, and from the Duchy of Milan, who Florence had formerly paid tribute to. By 1497, his causes bogged down in the curial court, and condemned by both Rome and a resurgent Milan, Savanorola cried to Heaven for justice, and undertook three days of ordeal as proof that his alliance with the Holy Virgin and the forces of Heaven were divinely ordained.

We see here a commitment to not only the political system of Absolutism, and its systematic ordering of mutual obligations, but also to a belief in universal, what we might call in modern times "self-evident", truths. At stake was nothing less than the future of the world, doomed to be irrevocably corrupted by the immorality and heresy of the modern church.

Anticipating a positive outcome for Savonaroloa's wager, his followers had stacked the vanities of Florence in a bonfire ninety feet high in the Plaza della Signoria. In a previous post I describe it as a vision of hell, of Lucifer and the seven deadly sins enthroned upon a snake, adorned with busts of contemporary and historical Florentine women, the literary works of Petrarch, Virgil, Ovid, Tibullus, Catullus and Terence, contemporary works of rhetoric and poetry, vanities and distractions of all kind, including those of the pre-Lenten carnival, confiscated in Florence from its residents over the previous twelve months.

The Bonfire of Vanities was a reaction against Quattracento modernity, the rejection of diversity of thought and expression as vanities, and the re-establishment of political and personal Absolutism, based upon the universal values of the Holy Church. Although often described as a precurser to Sixteenth-Century Reformation, Savonarola's Dominicans wanted to turn back the clock to a time when the population thought less for themselves and more of their obligations to the metaphysical world, which would provide all things, including an end to disease, the "French Pox" which had ravaged Florence for a few years. For its return to curial law, the Friar's Heavenly allies would provide that nature always, or nearly always, acted for the best for the people of Florence.

On the third and final day of his ordeal a large crowd gathered in the Piazza della Signoria on rumours that Savonarola would walk amongst the flames of the Bonfire of Vanities with an angel, as Sidrac, Mesac and Abednego had. Instead, violence erupted between supporters and opponents, after an argument about the conduct of Savonarola's ordeal.

Savonarola had no doubt that his visions of Heaven, the Holy Virgin, the future of Florence and the corruption of the Roman Church were perfect. Like Descartes, Savonarola protested The Almighty would not give me eyes, only to cruelly deceive them. His visions accorded in every respect with doctrine, with what he expected to see. However, the wager, or trial by ordeal Savonarola engaged in was banned by Denmark in 1216, England in 1219, Scotland in 1230, Flanders in 1231, and in most of Italy by 1240, after Pope Inncocent III had condemned the practice in Canon 18 of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1213.

It is unclear whether the bonfire of vanities was lighted (supporters wrote it was) or pulled down (opponents wrote it was). At any rate, Savonarola's star began to wane, and on Ascension day in May 1497 there were riots, taverns reopened and the citizens of Florence began to dance, sing, and gamble in public again. The charismatic Friar was arrested, and executed in May 1498 in the Piazza della Signoria, where the Bonfire of Vanities had stood. He remains a heroic figure for many. Erasmus refused to become a Protestant after reading Savonarola. Paradoxically, the Friar is characterized by Protestant scholars as a forerunner of the Protestant Reformation because of his strident criticisms of the Church of Rome.

The age of Absolutism has long since passed, although quaint echoes, like the recently revived doctrine of mutual obligation, persist. Is it possible at all to formulate and preserve ideas about universal truth, in this age of postmodern uncertainty?

Which makes me wonder: if humans are to join a coalition with not humans in order to save the world, as Ecosophy suggests humans ought, how will humans find justice amidst that new world order? What over-arching set of principles might apply? And from where will they spring?

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taxing hot air

I would rather sit in a dentist's chair than have lunch on an inner Melbourne footpath. So the tax on local restaurants using outdoor heating introduced in my 'hood to "discourage the use of outdoor gas heaters" won't change my alfresco dining habits one bit.

But I am interested in the reasoning behind the introduction of a tax on hot air. One commentator writes:

Diners who choose to dine outside on very cold days should wear appropriate attire instead of using external gas heaters installed by the business owners. Most of the heat is wasted in warming up the open air, and only small proportion benefits the diners. Such inconsideration reflects on the naivety and hypocrisy of the diners on climate change and global warming argument.

Scrutiny of dress and behaviour, the preoccupation of moralising writers since ancient times, places this tax on outdoor heaters in a moral sphere. Lacking experience, wisdom and judgement, diners are not conforming to moral standards or beliefs to which they profess to aspire. Like wayward children, diners at restaurants that use outdoor heating will be encouraged to act morally by adopting uniform attire, in this case a government issued blanket.

“I would like to start to build a culture in outdoor dining areas of people using a blanket rather than a heater,” one local official told Melbourne media.

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd labelled what the correspondent I quoted refers to as the global warming argument the greatest moral issue of our time.

Around seventy cafe's in the 'hood use outdoor heaters on footpath dining areas. Those heaters are estimated to produce fifty five tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, around three-quarters of a tonne per cafe per year. By contrast, Hazelwood power station in the Latrobe Valley, which supplies around a quarter of the electricity used in my 'hood, produces sixteen million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, capped at a net four hundred and fifty million tonnes over time. If global carbon dioxide emissions are changing the weather, as seems likely, common sense suggests that some kind of debate over what to do about that must follow. But I doubt that framing the debate in moral terms will produce any useful outcome.

The platform principles of the deep ecosophy movement (which I have been rather painstakingly working through on this blog for a while now) attempts to frame the debate in rational terms. Those who subscribe to the platform principles "have an obligation to directly or indirectly try to implement the necessary changes." Taxing fifty five tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions smacks of tokenism, and a lack of intellectual rigour, in what ought to be a debate over human interference in nonhuman life. It is simply not good enough to frame this earth-shaking debate as a moral argument, and rail against the hypocrisy of those who are hungry and cold. We need to do better, and I fear we are incapable of rising above the condemnatory rhetoric of everyday moralising, inevitably a domain of the intellectually bankrupt.

monoculture and perfection II

Whatever is made must first be made up, somehow. Not every made-up thing is made real, for example imagining peace does not make peace. But preceding every artifact, even those which remain unmade, is an act of imagination.

Realizing, making-real, never fully displaces imagining, making-up. Imagining a thing that fits some need in a certain situation exactly, or for a certain purpose precisely, like for instance a perfect hamburger, is perhaps an exercise of mind which can never be fully concretized in an imperfect world. But the making real which follows an act of making-up is potentially an act of perfecting, of striving for, or becoming, perfect.

I use the term perfection here, like I did in the previous post in this thread, as meaning finished, a state of completion beyond which nothing of the kind could be better. Perfecting, making perfect, requires in this context some accompanying unmaking, discarding and eliminating. In the previous post I linked to ideas about inventory management called Just In Time. Those were developed by Toyota executives and implemented in capitalist enterprises worldwide because JIT inventory management consistently increases profitability in comparison to enterprises managed differently. JIT inventory management is an example of perfecting, of becoming perfect, by eliminating, discarding; an unmaking that accompanies making.

The unmaking intrinsic in acts of making a perfect hamburger served fifty million times a day in a hundred countries might involve the exclusion of superfluities of all kinds from all the organizations, people, technology, activities, information and resources involved. The perfect meat, for example, requires a perfect kind of animal raised and fed upon a perfect clover. All other clovers and cows are superfluous to the enterprise. With perfect lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, onions and buns baked from the perfect flour milled from a particular wheat, one perfect hamburger requires countless redundancies, fifty million an unimaginable amount.

It is perhaps equally as difficult to imagine fifty million hamburgers cooked and served fifty million ways. It is nearly as hard to imagine the diversity of lettuce, tomato, wheat, flour and bun that might be available in one hundred countries to make a hamburger with. Taste is possibly the most idiosyncratic sense of all, so it is easy to imagine just one, cooked and served just the way you like it. It gets much harder to imagine how one capitalist enterprise could possibly turn a profit from such unimaginable diversity.

Human beings may not be well served by those ancient ideas of perfection intrinsic in Western culture. No longer discussed as robustly as they were before Descartes and the Humanist perspective, ideas about perfection are driving the management of monocultures in the world almost without argument. I say almost, because of course the fledgling philosophy of ecosystems, ecosophy, makes an attempt to scope the problem in the first three platform principles of the Deep Ecology movement.

1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.

2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realizations of these values and are also values in themselves.

3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital human needs.

If we are to unmake monoculture before it unmakes us a closer examination of some principles of universality rejected by Descartes are necessary. In a previous post I left the zealot Friar Savonarola in a fifteenth century Florentine piazza waiting to be struck dead. My next post in this thread will attempt to unpack some ideas about diversity, perfection and the problem of universals that Descartes abandoned altogether, but which plagued the Burghers of Florence at the Fifteenth Century's end.

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monoculture and perfection I

I wanted to briefly inject into this thread a note about perfection and monoculture, a subject much larger than it appears.

Imagine a perfect hamburger, if you can. And imagine it eaten fifty million times a day in more than one hundred countries, and the effort involved in not only cooking and packaging, but farming and processing and transporting ingredients for one meal that tastes the same, everywhere, twenty billion times a year.

Perfection is often thought of as rare, but its original meaning, from Latin, is finished, and from the Greek, teleos, complete. Thomas Aquinas introduced the idea that perfection is something so good that nothing of the kind could be better; something perfectly serving its purpose. Many have learned from modern capitalism the meaning of redundant, of being superfluous to perfection, an idea borrowed from mathematics.

A perfect number is one divisible by numbers that themselves add up to the number. Six, for example, is divisible by one, two, and three, and 1+2+3=6. If the sum of the divisors is greater than the number itself, as, for example, the divisors of the number twelve are, the number is more than, or superfluous to, perfection (plus quam perfecti).

Ideas of perfection, of perfect divisibility, of just enough, of excluding the superfluous, are intrinsic to monoculture. There is no distinction, in capitalist monoculture, between what is essential and what is profitable. In modern capitalism, thrift is the new waste. Anything superfluous to the moment is unprofitably redundant, and therefore excluded. The (JIT) Toyota Production System excludes diversity from the soil in which wheat is grown, the clover upon which cattle graze, as surely as it excludes excess inventory from manufacturing processes.

Ideas about perfection are so bound up with monoculture that diversity and superfluity and redundancy are not so much excluded as discarded, useless and undesired. But a monoculture is a perfection of unison, a plainsong. And I wonder how harmony or even discord is possible, without some accompanying change in perspective on perfection.

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(this post was edited on 2011.04.27 to simplify the paragraph about perfect numbers)

burning vanities: unmaking and making the world

I raised the Dark Ages in a previous post, and in one before that, in the most general and vernacular sense of separating history into an Age of Reason and all history that came before, by implication several ages of unreason, of superstition, demagoguery and fear. And religious conflict so intense that at the moment the Catholic Church emerged triumphant from its battle with earthly powers it lost the war for the hearts and minds of people in the great reformations, or Renaissance, preceding the European Enlightenment.

The Dark Ages then refer in part to a triumphant universal Church, and its efforts to supplant diversity in human life, especially diversity of thought, with Christian monoculture. In Medieval culture Lent was an important period of prayer, repentance, charity and self-denial leading to Easter, and the death and resurrection of God. In the period before Lent, all rich food and drink had to be discarded, and its consumption in a giant party preceding Lent, and involving the whole community, is considered the origin of carnival.

The Roman festivals of Saturnalia and Bacchanalia may be the precursors of Italian carnival, originating themselves perhaps in the Dionysia and Oriental festivals of ancient Greece. While medieval pageants and festivals assumed a Christian tone, carnival was additionally the celebration of medieval folk culture based on local, pre-Christian, observances.

In Medieval Florence carnival offered opportunities for demonstrations of patrician largesse, and power. The Medici and other patrician families are known to have supported the efforts of lower class Florentines to stage entertainments like mock battles, horse and buffalo racing, re-enactments of history and myth, and other frivolities, together with a bonfire in the Piazza della Signoria on Shrove Tuesday to mark the Florentine carnival's end.

The end of the fifteenth century was an apocalyptic time in Florence. The Medici had fled, and the power of the patricians reduced by, the annexation of Florence by France. A Christian republic was declared, with God as the head of state, and the Dominicans of the Monastery of Saint Mark became the dominant republican faction. The Dominicans also seized control over the Florentine carnival season, re-organising it it exclude all unchristian things. The last Dominican republican Shrove Tuesday bonfire, in 1498, was their greatest achievement of all.

It resembled an octagonal pyramid, ninety feet high, topped with an image of Satan, with stratified firewood representing the seven levels of hell, more devils inhabiting its base. Under Satan artifacts classified by their intensity of sinfulness: paintings on canvas and wood; statues of women by great masters like Donatello; games and amusements of all kinds; musical instruments and scores; ornaments, make-up, mirrors, perfumes; books and manuscripts (amongst them lavish editions of Dante's Inferno); masks, wigs, and carnival ornaments. A vision of hell, of Lucifer and the seven deadly sins enthroned upon a snake, adorned with busts of contemporary and historical Florentine women, the literary works of Petrarch, Virgil, Ovid, Tibullus, Catullus and Terence, contemporary works of rhetoric and poetry, vanities and distractions of all kind, including those of carnival itself, confiscated in Florence from its residents over the previous twelve months.

Medieval times were diverse beyond imagination. Twelfth century chronicler William of Newburgh, an Augustinian Canon from Yorkshire, England wrote "one would not easily believe that corpses could rise out of their graves to terrify the living, were there not so many cases supported by ample testimony." In the Medieval mind living and dead were in coalition to such an extent that living and dead commingled physically at times. The dead stalked the world of the living, and the living explored the afterlife of the dead. Dante's Inferno lay upon the Bonfire of Vanities not so much for being fiction, but for its perceived inaccuracy compared to Dominican accounts.

The Shrove Tuesday bonfire of 1498 was the greatest of all bonfires of vanities in medieval Florence. The Sunday before, charismatic Dominican Friar Giralamo Savonarola had mounted a pulpit erected in the Piazza San Marco, and, while thousands prayed, invited his enemies, and Pope Alexander VI, to pray to God to strike Savonarola dead right there. A few years previously the charismatic Friar had made a pilgrimage to Heaven itself, from where he returned, after outwitting the Devil with logic, climbing jewel encrusted walls of Paradise to the throne of the Virgin, receiving a crown and the promise of an era of prosperity, and a message from God that

"Whereas Florence has been placed in the centre of Italy, like a heart in the midst of the body, God has chosen to select her, that she might be the centre from which this prophetic announcement should be spread abroad all Italy"

1498 was a year of famine in Florence, which Savonarola blamed on Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, whose name became a byword for corruption. Savonarola preached:

"In these days, prelates and preachers are chained to the earth by the love of earthly things. The care of souls is no longer their concern. They are content with the receipt of revenue. The preachers preach to please princes and to be praised by them. They have done worse. They have not only destroyed the Church of God. They have built up a new Church after their own pattern. Go to Rome and see! In the mansions of the great prelates there is no concern save for poetry and the oratorical art. Go thither and see! Thou shalt find them all with the books of the humanities in their hands and telling one another that they can guide mens’ souls by means of Virgil, Horace and Cicero..."

Pope Alexander condemned Savonarola's sermons, forbade him to preach, and issued an excommunication, proclamations contested by Savonarola's Dominicans in the Roman Curial Courts.

Savonarola offered, like Descartes a century later, ontological proof of a benevolent God who, providing human life with a working mind, would not then let it be deceived. Since the heaven revealed in Savonarola's pilgrimage to it was perfect it followed that his vision of it was also perfect. Contrary visions, especially those arising from human knowledge and reason following from experience of only the natural world, were therefore artifices of the vanity of those who experienced them. For truth was, eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge impaired for all time the ability of humans to be perfect, and so it followed that the ideas and knowledge of human beings were inevitably imperfect, and any contrary argument arose from a known imperfection: vanity.

That the dead could rise from their graves to cry out against the living by name and pollute them with all manner of misfortune and disease was common knowledge. Archaeologists find everywhere in Europe remains of medieval dead buried (or perhaps reburied), decapitated, with heads placed between their legs to prevent them from walking amongst the living. The idea that the words and works of the dead reached from their grave to pollute the already imperfect living, appears, by comparison, not so extreme.

Christian visionaries, wandering mendicants, and even prophets, had burned vanities in Florence before. But those had been itinerants arriving at carnival time, who afterward went on their way. Savonarola controlled the city's principal monastery, San Marco, itself recently adorned with the works of Fra Angelico. Savonarola became the spiritual leader of the Christian republic of Florence after the Medici family was exiled. Under his spiritual guidance the city warred upon Florence's former vassal Pisa, whose citizens defeated the Florentines in 1497. War led to shortages, especially of food, and Savonarola, and his vision of Florentine perfection, which had included a glorious victory over the Pisans, lost popular support.

On the Sunday preceding the Shrove Tuesday of 1498 Savonarola stood in the Piazza San Marco, where a large crowd had gathered, waiting for God to strike him dead. Nearby, in the Piazza della Signoria, stood the largest bonfire of vanities Florence's festival season had ever produced, waiting to burn. It had been a year in the making, symbolizing nothing less than the unmaking of the contemporary world, and its remaking in the unpolluted perfection of Christian monoculture.

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