Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Mathesis?
Author(s): Johanna Drucker
Source: Leonardo, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2001), pp. 141-145
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1577017
Accessed: 15-01-2018 14:57 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Leonardo
This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 15 Jan 2018 14:57:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Digital Ontologies: The Ideality of ABSTRACT
O 2001 ISAST This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 15 Jan LEONARDO, Vol.UTC
2018 14:57:46 34, No. 2, pp. 141-145, 2001 141
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
that perception from their ideal form, the concept of image/form and code lated visual information, is more
then does that ideality necessarily fall storage as a single, unitary truth. Thesimulacral than fictional (it is about sur-
into the category of "self-identity" or crucial point is that this is true evenface
of image as effect, not narrative cred-
"unity" of form, which is anathema to the digital itself, not merely of what ibility),
it but it is a mere half-step from
Adorno? It is anathema because when the photographic antics of the young
represents; thus I would strongly assert
empirical and/or positivist logic invades women to those of Campus. Any num-
that the real materiality of code should
culture to such an extreme that replace repre- the imagined ideality of code.ber of critics have pointed out that there
sentation appears to present a unitary To focus this discussion, I want to con-
is much more continuity than disconti-
truth in a totalizing model of thought, centrate on the issue of digital images,
nuity in the shift from darkroom to digi-
then that leaves little or no room for the since many of the questions about the tal [4]. The notion that photographic
critical action or agency that are essen- truth, fiction, or simulacral identitytruth
of was based on a pure, unmediated
tial to any political basis for agency. digital imagery have been asked in the representation of a "real" referent was
These two frameworks define the name of the presumed distinction be- shattered even earlier than Griffiths'
poles within which I will examine tweenthe traditional darkroom photogra-and Wright's loss of innocence, since the
premises on which "mathesis" functions phy and digital photography. I wantuse to of multiple exposures, multiple
in current conceptions of digital data. I for instance, a recent digital
compare, negatives and alterations of the plate in
suggest that there is an underlying, image byor artist Peter Campus with theblatant reworking of the metaphysically
even overt, positivist ideology in fictions the wayproduced by those two young, endowed-with-truth "light" let in by the
the myth of digital code is being early twentieth-century adolescents
con- lens, as well as careful manipulation of
ceived in the public imagination. Frances
Fur-Griffiths and her friend Elise the exposure and print, were all tools of
ther, this gives validation to digital Wright,
repre- whose paper cutouts of fairies,
the photographer's trade almost from its
sentation on the basis of that premise in photographed by them in aorigin
expertly gar- in the early nineteenth century.
a way that forecloses interrogation of
den setting, This
passed as sufficiently real to argument can be pursued and nu-
that premise. My double agenda is to dis-
elicit anced, following Hubertus Amelunxen's
great debates. Alice and the Fairies
close the ideological assumptions(1917)
in theis just such an image, in whichdiscussion, by contrasting the two types of
way the ontological identity of thethe mimesis
inconceivability of deceit is linked
digital as defined by Plato: eikon/likeness
image is posed and to suggest that much to cultural expectations about andthe
semblance/simulacral and the dis-
graphesis (embodied information) can innocence of adolescent girls as ittinctions
is to these terms allow in the discus-
challenge mathesis. Or, to paraphrase, Ithe credibility of fairies' actual existence
sion of photographic imitation of light/
assert that the instantiation of the form in English gardens. Peter Campus'slife as truth [5]. In brief, the contrast is
Wild
in material can be usefully opposedLeaves to between the indexical traces of actual
(1995), with its digitally manipu-
light and the codes of verisimilitude that
come to occupy a position of cultural au-
thority
Fig. 1. Jack P. Citron, Digital Graphicfrom a Curve Generating Program, computer dominating ideas of what truth
graphic
image, early 1970s. (? Jack P. Citron) "looks like." I am not particularly con-
cerned to pursue the upped ante and
constant trumping of the realm of in-
creasing degrees of virtuality and halluci-
natory reality that continue to evolve.
The skills and entertainment-industry val-
ues that successfully deceive (some of)
the senses raise philosophically charged
questions. But I want to pursue the sim-
pler, more fundamental question of as-
sumptions about the truth value assigned
to digital images as code.
Unlike traditional photographic
"truth" (darkroom or digital varieties),
the "truth" of the digital image is not, I
would argue, posed as an index to the
instant of exposure or as encoding the
experience of "natural" visual percep-
tion as it has been familiarized by the
camera. As has been well established in
makes them attractive to revisit, espe- form, content and ontological conditiontheme was the subject of a number of
cially as they embody one major strain of of being, but in its capacity to function
other works from the early 1970s, almost
computer graphics work. Citron's Digital schematically, as a form with a as graphic
if the very essence of the problem of
form as mathematical ideal and form as
Graphic from a Curve Generating Program identity that presumes to be a manifesta-
(Fig. 1) is an image in which the algo- tion of ideal form, it has much in com-
instantiation were paradigmatic issues
rithm preceded the visual image, and mon with Besant's work. for computer graphics. Georg Nees's
This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 15 Jan 2018 14:57:46 Drucker,
UTC Digital Ontologies 143
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
simulacral monster image whose algo-
rithmic reality, such as it is, follows from
the manipulation of data in visual form
on the screen? In the visual practice of
an information design, in which graphic
artists create schematic versions of the
This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 15 Jan 2018 14:57:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
eralized and reductive, a mere category the cultural status of the digital to aa premise, with no critical distance, in a
and placeholder within the cognitive sys- system in which everything is reduced to
place of mythic "mathesis," in which the
tem (even if assumed to exist in some sense of an inevitable and seamless in-
data and equivalents. Mathesis makes
ontological sense outside cognition), this
terchangeability replaces the idea of a claim, and when it makes this claim
rather than a replete and specific "form" differentiated and resistant material within the cultural realm of representa-
in the sense that the word is understood instantiation of form. tion, then it needs to be beaten back
by artists. This line of argument allows Such arguments have implications in into its place-a kind of whack the mole
that the idea of "graphesis" (defined ashow the transformation of "form" from approach to overreaching ideology-
knowledge manifest in visual and traditional media and representationalsince its claims presume a premise that
graphic form) contains an understand-systems into digital formats do or do not brooks no interrogation. Graphesis, on
ing of form as replete, instantiated, em-privilege aspects of these forms as "infor-the other hand, is always premised on
bodied, discrete and particular. mation" to be encoded (what gets lost inthe distinction between the form of in-
formation and information as form-in-
As a final contrast, consider a neo-clas-translating a text into ASCII format, for
sical image of The Invention of Drawing, of instance). The tension between material. Graphesis is premised on the
mathesis
the act of formgiving, by eighteenth-cen-and graphesis returns us to the problemsirreducibility of material to code as a sys-
tury painter Karl Fredrich Schinkel. Theof form pondered by Adorno. His cri-tem of exchange; it is always a system in
which there is loss and gain in any trans-
image inverts (perversely) Pliny's tale oftique of instrumental rationality can be
Dibutades, the daughter of the potter,aptly brought to bear on the ways information that occurs as a part of the
tracing the outline of her departed loverwhich digital media depended upon anprocessing of information.
and changing it into an image of femaleunquestioned assumption of mathesis as
References and Notes
beauty objectified and reified as an idealtheir premise for understanding infor-
mation. If "form" is conceived in math-
by the male gaze. This is an image of aes- 1. P. Osborne, "Adorno and the Metaphysics of Mod-
thetic form-giving as inadequate copy, asematical terms, it can be absorbed into ernism: The Problem of a Postmodern Art," in A.
Benjamin, ed., The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and
lesser truth than the real. Then consider an absolute unity of essence and repre-
Benjamin (London and New York: Routledge, 1989)
an advertisement forJohnny Walker Red sentation, while if "form" is conceived inpp. 23-48. H. Brunkhorst, "Irreconcilable Moder-
Scotch, from the late 1990s. In the ad, a terms of graphesis, then it resists this
nity: Adorno's Aesthetic Experimentalism and the
Transgression Theorem," in M. Pensky, ed., The Actu-
sockless but well-heeled young man sits unity in part through the specificity im- ality of Adorno (Albany, NY: State Univ. of New York,
in khakis and topsiders on a deck, parted by material embodiment. This1997). P. Dews, "Adorno, Poststructuralism, and the
Critique of Identity," in A. Benjamin, ed., The Prob-
beachside, with his laptop computer materiality cannot be fully absorbed into
lems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin (London and
open in front of him. On his screen is a (or made one with) the "ideality" of form New York: Routledge, 1989) pp. 1-22.
wireframe image of a dolphin while in as idea, ideal or "pure" code. Digital me-
2.J. Derrida, Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An
the background we see the beast itself, dia have their own materiality (and mate- Introduction (Lincoln, NB, and London: Univ. of
leaping up and out of theJohnny Walker rial history to be sure), but it is in the gap
Nebraska Press, 1989).
Red sea. The image on his screen and between mathesis and graphesis that the 3. Brunkhorst [1].
the image of the "real" dolphin emerg- resistance to the totalizing drive of the
4. M. Lister, ed., The Photographic Image in Digital
ing from the waves don't match. Their digital can be articulated. Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).
directions, temporal moment, and other I return, for a final moment, to theH. Amelunxen, S. Iglhaut, F. Ratzer, A. Cassel and
N.G. Schneider, eds., Photography after Photography
details are out of synch. But which is Prueitt image of digital snowfields, in
(Basel, Switzerland: G&B Arts International, 1996).
bringing the other into being? In this in- which, as Amelunxen says of such work,
5. Amelunxen et al. [4]; and Lister [4].
stance, the visual image confuses the hi- the algorithmic-numerical image is sepa-
erarchies of original and copy. The com- rated from its origin so that there is "no
6. A. Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, Thought Forms
(London and Benares: Theosophical Publishing
puter graphic seems to generate reality shadow" cast by the space between ori- Society, 1905).
or, at the very least, function on an gin and image, original and manifesta-
7. I am thinking of the context in which Wilhelm
equal, autonomous level as a form-pro- tion [11]. The crisis is not, as commonly Worringer's work is produced, for instance, or that
ducing environment. Paul Virilio, in The discussed, a crisis of the copy, of origi-
of Wassily Kandinsky: that early twentieth-century
Vision Machine, creates a specter of a nality, or of authenticity or truth. No, investment in the aesthetic systems of correspon-
dence and universals that came out of late nine-
sightless visuality, one in which image the argument that must be made is for teenth-century symbolism.
exists as uploaded signal in the codes/ an investment in reinscribing, always in-
8. Herbert W. Franke, Computer Graphics Computer
currents of a closed system of informa- scribing, form into matter. This act situ- Art (New York and London: Phaidon, 1971).
tion processing, a "non"-visible legibility ates representation in human cultural
9. Melvin Prueitt, Art and the Computer (New York:
of information readable by and for ma- and social systems where the condition McGraw Hill, 1984).
chines [10]. In such a situation, form is of materiality permits and/or requires
10. P. Virilio, The Vision Machine (Cambridge, MA,
only code signal, material in its own ex- critical considerations of the ways mate-and London: MIT Press, 1995).
istence, participating in the production rial form participates in and helps repli-
11. Amelunxen et al. [4].
of some "other" sentience than the hu- cate cultural mythologies. In the case of
man. Whether such contexts have use digital images, this is a mythology in
which code passes for truth, as if the
for or attend to the materiality of code Manuscript received 31 May 2000.
easy and complete interchangeability of
storage is a matter for open speculation.
image into code and back into image is
But what is at stake is not the question
of whether there is a "truth" to this idea driven by a myth of the techno-superior-
that the stored "code" exists and can be ity of mathematical premises. As a cul-
Johanna Drucker is a writer and artist con-
made use of without graphic manifesta- tural myth, this is a "truth" so fundamen-
cerned with theoretical and critical issues in
tion, and that it is stored materially.tal it is never (or rarely) questioned. In
digital media. She directs the Media Studies
mathesis, code presumes self-identity as
What is at stake is that this idea pushes program at the University of Virginia.
This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 15 Jan 2018 14:57:46 UTC
Drucker, Digital Ontologies 145
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms