The pathos of monopoly
Sep. 19th, 2005 01:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
Yesterday Hisae and I went to the Hamburger Bahnhof and saw a rather wonderful photography show, Typologies of Industrial Buildings by Bernd and Hilla Becher. (Click here for a better view.) "The exhibition presents blast furnaces, winding towers, water towers, cooling towers, gas tanks and coal bunkers in all their diversity," said the catalogue. Of course I'd seen the Bechers' work before, but never so much of it in one place, arranged so schematically in "typologies" (grids of 12 or 15 pictures showing variants on the same industrial building type). Room after room of the stuff.These austere photos contain some lovely contradictions. On the one hand they're photographed with frigid detachment and icy objectivity, on the other hand you can't help entertaining intense personal fantasies of living in them, or opening clubs, lofts or museums there (the Hamburger Bahnhof itself is a repurposed industrial space, formerly housing the main Berlin-Hamburg railway line). The buildings are freakishly different from the kind of structures we see on our daily paths through cities, yet, arranged typologically, they draw our attention to their conformities, making us focus on small variations between different examples (always photographed against a flat grey sky).
Thinking about yesterday's entry about diversicide and monopoly, I began to scribble down notes. "The pathos of monopoly", read the first one. These buildings, once proud cathedrals of industrial might, are now frail and ghostly, remnants of a bygone era. Many have already been demolished, and are preserved only in these photographs (and the memories of the generations of workers who toiled there, making ceramics and paint, mining coal, smelting iron, bolting steel...) I imagined myself in frock coats, a hundred years ago, pointing to the structures and blaming them for erasing diversity (displacing villages, flattening forests, scarring the landscape). And yet here they are now, in these photographs, arranged in typologies of structural strangeness, advertising diversity. It's ironic.
I thought of a John Harris article in the Guardian I quoted with approval last year. "In 2004, there are but a handful of international musical superstars," it lamented, "Beyoncé, 50 Cent, Justin Timberlake, Eminem, Norah Jones, Coldplay." Already that list reeks of "the pathos of monopoly". Some of these artists are struggling to maintain their dominance. It's not that monoculture doesn't exist, it's that it's never quite clear which culture gets to play in mono, and for how long. Even Microsoft's massive dominance is by no means guaranteed. Five years, in the computing world, is time enough for the Roman Empire to decline and fall.
The dominant and the diverse, the one and the many, the "it" and the "others", these can all change places at the drop of a hat — that's the message the Becher pictures seemed to convey. They also prompted the thought that these relationships don't just change over time, they change according to the way you type, group and classify the relationships between things. Diversity can be present or absent depending on how close you get to the thing you're studying. For instance, jeans might all look the same from a certain distance, but get closer and you begin to see all sorts of distinguishing features (stitching, cut, texture and colour, weight, style allusion) — features which can have big meanings vested in them, like the difference between one class affiliation and another. You can zoom and crop the picture so that similarity fills the frame, or so that difference does. Uniformity just forces the play of difference down to ever-smaller and more subtle details; the kind of tricks I used to play when I customised my school uniform, wearing the V-neck backwards or fattening the tie. Little details took on a lot of importance, became the symbolic repositories of all individuality, all diversity.
It's always difficult to say exactly what people and things represent monoculture this year, and for how long they'll be doing it. Traditional Korean court music may seem like "diversity" when it's performed in today's Germany, but once, back home, it may well have been a dominant, erasing monoculture. The bully out of context is free to pose as a victim. Sure, monoculture does exist, but when it comes to specifying it all we can say is that we know it when we see it.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-18 11:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-19 12:20 am (UTC)I think there's an answer lurking in your essay; what makes culture monoculture is the configuration of cultural production, who "controls the means", as it were. Nothing inherently evil about the music of Norah Jones, it's just her position in a the capitalist ecology of music, where a certain company wants to move as many units of one product within one quarter as they possibly can. Are we really post-industrial?
When history has swept away particular configurations of cultural production, and we're left only with the product, perhaps we can then see the small gradations of difference undetectable in the clamor of the present.
I'm basically just re-iterating what you said more awkwardly-- but these were a good essay, and the ideas will accompany me as I go about my week.
Cheers.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-19 12:40 am (UTC)Here in the U.S. the christian right are trying to make the case that christianity is under attack. Any time someone points out the benefits of keeping government and religion separate they claim they are being persecuted because they are, for example, barred from erecting a nativity scene on the courthouse lawn. Chistianity is the dominant religion here, to put it mildly, and yet they do a very good job of convincing people that this persecution is real. I suppose the bully sees an advantage in being percieved as a victim.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-19 01:15 am (UTC)I love Japanese culture just as much as you and the rest of your readers. The wonderful Japanese culture, however--the one that cynical anti-globalists fear may be disappearing slowly due to creeping Western influence--was once the "monoculture" that more or less wiped out the original Ainu language and culture. So, it's all relative. Things may disappear. It doesn't mean something beautiful won't replace it.
Playtime
Date: 2005-09-19 03:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-19 06:53 am (UTC)Here be dandyism.
This series of photographs brought my old shell collection to mind.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/lord_whimsy/2004/08/22/
~W
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-19 07:06 am (UTC)"Perhaps an effective means by which to introduce oneself to Diaphanism is to become a collector, for nothing brings out the minute, barely discernible details of an object than to place it among others like itself: let’s say collecting stones or shells; aeolian harps of differing tones; improperly working light bulbs that flicker at different intervals; old rotary telephones that spin at different speeds, etc. Start by gathering a relatively wide variety of very similar objects. Over time, one’s collection may be pared down to a very small continuum, ultimately gathering objects that—to the uninitiated eye—are barely discernible from one another. Eventually the objects disappear, leaving only the vast medley of nuances between them."
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-19 07:33 am (UTC)As a boy, I would squeeze myself into the crevices between the jetty rocks, and pore over the minute differences between the hundreds of mussels. Nothing was more satisfying than to lay out the small pebbles from the day, and sort them by theme.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-19 07:41 am (UTC)http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1573403,00.html
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-19 08:10 am (UTC)Jacques Attali once put it like this: "The tragedy of Britain is that it shares a language with one of the most creative nations the world has ever known." Attali was comparing the cultural life of London and Paris on the Late Show. He thought that London had a better musical life, but that its cinema, television etc were fatally undermined by the Atlanticist monocultural flow.
It's perfectly true that Paris has a much better range of world cinema and world music than anywhere in the US or the UK. USUK cultural products are distinctly provincial, unaware of, or indifferent to, other ways of being, other cultures. I watch Arte, and every day there are documentaries about non-Western peoples, or Cuba, Borneo, China, Mongolia, whatever. If I zap to the BBC, all I get is ticker tapes about the London and New York stock exchanges, as if ultimate reality were contained in those evanescent figures. And my memory of US TV is that it's all about the commercials, the charismatic anchor, and the weather. It's not that it's "evil", more that it's super-provincial. The system seems set up to filter out other people's perspectives.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-19 08:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-19 08:26 am (UTC)Dr. Theopolis' Bookmobile
Date: 2005-09-19 08:35 am (UTC)Based on your post today, I'd like to suggest that you give "Bunker Archeologie" (1975) by Virilio a read.
Best,
R.
Re: Dr. Theopolis' Bookmobile
Date: 2005-09-19 09:58 am (UTC)Rob.
Fancy Comming to Redmond?
Date: 2005-09-19 12:53 pm (UTC)There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear.
Re: Fancy Comming to Redmond?
Date: 2005-09-19 01:00 pm (UTC)Re: Fancy Comming to Redmond?
Date: 2005-09-19 01:11 pm (UTC)I am a simple Information Worker! That loves LINQ...
I guess memory barriers are useful sometimes :)
Re: Fancy Comming to Redmond?
Date: 2005-09-19 01:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-19 03:27 pm (UTC)http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/fares-tickets/2005/oyster/general.asp
Re: Fancy Comming to Redmond?
Date: 2005-09-19 04:30 pm (UTC)http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html
Re: Fancy Comming to Redmond?
Date: 2005-09-19 04:52 pm (UTC)persecuted Christians
Date: 2005-09-19 08:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-19 10:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-19 10:37 pm (UTC)long time reader first time poster...
Date: 2005-09-19 11:31 pm (UTC)say, this country is mostly relativists, or we don't like this country because they are not family oriented and don't favor monogamy ..
and could it be that humans inherent nature is to polarize themselves regardless of whatever color their ideology is?: possibly an evolutionary byproduct to keep the colony strong or favorable?
recently i heard salmon rushdie speak on paki/indi relations. he didn't believe in the concept that cultures just attack out of blind nationalism defined by their borders- the "clash of civilizations idea".
but,
it just seems to me that communism vs. capitlism is no different than islam vs. hinduism.. just a polarizing mechanism that has little to do with its actual meaning..
any thoughts?
Re: long time reader first time poster...
Date: 2005-09-20 12:06 am (UTC)Do you actually mean to polarize this conversation by setting up the binary "polarization / actual meaning"?
Re: long time reader first time poster...
Date: 2005-09-20 12:22 am (UTC)Re: long time reader first time poster...
Date: 2005-09-20 12:24 am (UTC)http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DoubleBind
OT
Date: 2005-09-20 08:16 am (UTC)der.
Re: OT
Date: 2005-09-20 09:21 am (UTC)By the way, did you come to the DJ event in the end?
Re: OT
Date: 2005-09-20 10:11 am (UTC)Re: OT
Date: 2005-09-20 04:20 pm (UTC)