Convergence

Zach Horton

Category: Culture (page 1 of 2)

Why Trump’s Electoral Victory is an Opportunity for the Left

In my social and professional circles, the election of Donald Trump, perhaps the most hateful candidate ever to grace a major party ticket in the U.S. for the office of President, has occasioned mostly shock, despair, and depression. I would like to briefly share some reasons to view Donald Trump’s victory as a significant opportunity for radical politics.

There is no question that Trump’s presidency itself is a horrible step backwards, an already-extant disaster for people of color, women, Muslims, and the environment, and a potential disaster for world peace, prosperity, and safety. I am not arguing that Trump’s presidency is a good thing, but I am arguing that Trump’s electoral victory has and will produce many new opportunities for an invigorated politics of the left. Not the same opportunities that always exist in the form of opposition to right wing rule, but something entirely new, something to which we must become freshly and uniquely attuned lest it slip away. This opportunity takes the form of invaluable lessons that will help us re-assess America’s political situation with eyes wide open, the removal of powerfully conservative forces that have hitherto prevented any radical change from percolating through mainstream politics, and a political and social landscape that will be ripe for the creative application of unconventional political leadership.

In the liberal and left-leaning group that generally make up my social networks, the most oft-expressed opinion on social media feeds the day of the election was some variant of “thank god the election is here, so we can finally make Trump go away.” The sentiment here was that an electoral defeat would finally give Trump his comeuppance for his raciest, xenophobic, misogynistic campaign rhetoric and hateful fear mongering. The conventional wisdom, shared by liberals, leftists, and media commentators, was that no one as deeply bigoted as Donald Trump could ever be elected President. I shared this view, and it ensured that I was completely blindsided and unprepared for Tuesday night’s result.

However, the naïve view that Trump’s hate-filled discourse could be defeated with the victory of Hillary Clinton was the first sign, for me, that something was terribly wrong. This was smug, wishful thinking that not only ignored the strength, breadth, and tenacity of Trump’s populist movement, but also framed the magical solution as a return to establishment politics. How had the left painted itself into this corner?

All we could really see of Trump was his bigotry, and that made a democratic victory literally unthinkable and ultimately inevitable (whether in this election or the next). Our complacent reliance on the Democratic Party was already doomed. Here are some of the things that, in my view, we got so wrong, and why it’s better that they came to light sooner rather than later:

1. Our analytic categories were too narrow.

Racism, sexism, misogyny, and Islamophobia are categories that progressives, and especially academics, are well-trained to spot, analyze, and combat at the discursive level. Trump and his most egregious followers (the “basket of deplorables”) lit up this radar with such overwhelming regularity and intensity that the analytic machinery behind it was saturated and failed to function properly. Not much else got through.  Here we were our own victims of an essentialist and inflexible analytic framework. We have become perhaps too good (and too reflexive) at recognizing certain patterns at a certain scale, and could no recognize larger ones and larger scales, let alone entirely new shapes emerging in our cultural-social-medial assemblages. When it turned out that Trump’s support on election day stretched far beyond the basket of deplorables, that just didn’t compute for most of us. But the issues (speech and representation) that are most salient to us are not necessarily the most salient or important to the voting public at large. This should have been obvious, but we were blinded by our own proficiency, by habit and by…

2. Smugness.

Liberals have been winning in U.S. politics for awhile, and tend to view themselves as far more enlightened on social issues than their political adversaries. This contributed to the narrowing of our analytic categories and policy concerns (see below) and convinced us that Hillary Clinton couldn’t really lose, because the Trump camp was so in the wrong. But it is clear now that however despicable Trump is, many of his followers had good reasons to vote for him other than expressing their hatred of women, people of color, etc. More white women voted for Trump than Clinton, and Trump garnered almost 30% of the Latino/a vote, which seems inconceivable if race was the primary issue for voters. Most significantly, the voters that handed Trump the election were rust belt working class whites that had voted for Obama in the past, and had now switched to Trump (without the Democratic party even noticing). This is what turned the map red and handed Trump the election.

To sum up: bigotry seemed to liberals, radicals, and mainstream pundits to be the most salient issue of the election, and it turned out not to matter to at least half of the voting public. This is in and of itself deeply troubling from a social justice perspective, but the important point here is that the biggest drivers of voter behavior in this election trumped bigoted speech acts (no pun intended). A lot of this is just about priority. As Connor Kilpatrick argues persuasively in this article, racism is fungible: some voting communities in the U.S. have historically flopped multiple times from racist to progressive and back. This suggests that it is a subsidiary issue for many independent voters: when racial anxiety can be made to align with their biggest concerns, racism flares up; when liberalism can be made to align with their biggest concerns, they become progressive. On the left, we have tended to essentialize racism, which makes it far more difficult for us to understand this phenomenon and identify the most important issues to these voters. (Note: race is the most important issue for some voters, and they unquestioningly constitute Trump’s most rabid base, but those aren’t the voters who handed him this election.) This is not to downplay the significance of racism or suggest that it wasn’t an important aspect of Trump’s campaign, but only to note that the issue has been approached by liberals and radicals in a manner that is simplistic, essentialist, and  self serving (when discourse places you in the position of the morally righteous and makes you feel superior to your opponent, this should send up a huge red flag).  Liberal moralizing on this issue not only failed to sway half of the electorate, but actually made the problem far worse: it signaled a deep misunderstanding and disconnect between liberals and the concerns of the working class, and heaped insult upon injury by morally condemning voters for voting in their own economic interests. What could have been a stronger message to the effect that liberalism had abandoned the working class? That message was heard loud and clear, as was Trump’s message of radical change.

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3. Neoliberalism

The left has had neoliberalism in its crosshairs ever since it appeared on the scene, but liberals—who have been in the driver’s seat of mainstream politics for the past quarter century—have embraced it so thoroughly that it has become orthodoxy in the Democratic Party. Neoliberalism, implemented as a set of policy objectives by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, was a right-wing platform until Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council mainstreamed it in the 1990s. The core philosophy of neoliberal economics is that all dynamics are best rationalized and optimized if they can be driven by and as markets. Those markets should therefore be “free” in the sense of self-governing; any external force that constrains markets prevents them from fully optimizing the underlying dynamics into which they have been unleashed. This means that public property (such as water, land, infrastructure, utilities, universities, etc.) should be privatized, government regulation should be scaled back or eliminated, and every possible market should be opened up for exploitation.

In other words, capitalism should be spread to every aspect of life on this planet and any impediment to free markets should be eliminated. In policy, this is done through free trade agreements, international lending (through the IMF and World Bank) to countries in trouble in exchange for drastic changes to their laws and the privatization of their resources. Trade agreements preempt other laws such as those ensuring social and environmental protection, weakening signatory governments vis-a-vis global corporations, which can actually sue a government for doing anything (such as protecting some part of the population or element of the natural environment) that would hamper business. Neoliberalism is essentially a grand tuning of the world to transform it into a capital (monetary surplus) producing machine. The benefactors are the corporations, companies, investors, and their political allies who reap the profits. The losers are just about everyone else. However, in particularly wealthy countries, the biggest (human) losers are the working class, because neoliberal policy ensures that labor will be outsourced to the regions of the world where it is cheapest, and labor is always cheapest in regions in which laborers can be most exploited. So while the upper classes in all countries benefit from this arrangement, the working classes get the short end of the stick. The resulting disparity of wealth and lack of employment in formerly productive regions of the U.S. (e.g. the rust belt) has disenfranchised a lot of people. Trump spoke to those people. Partly he blamed Latinos for stealing what jobs remain, but mostly he blamed free trade agreements that moved those jobs out of the U.S. in the first place. That message resonated with those disenfranchised by neoliberal policy. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party didn’t even put up a fight.

4. A Compromised Democratic Party

To prevail electorally against Reaganism, the Democratic Party sold its soul. The Clintons lead that pivot, and three decades of rabid neoliberalism created, as Naomi Klein argues here, the very conditions that swept Trump into power. The Democratic Party became so rich and complacent through this platform, so corrupt, and so complacent, that it not only couldn’t see this coming, not only abandoned the very class that had at one time made up its core constituency (the working class), but actively quashed all attempts within the party to re-connect with its roots. Its leadership conspired to thwart democracy and ensure that Hillary Clinton received the nomination, despite her many flaws and vulnerabilities as a candidate. As perhaps the most neoliberal candidate available in the Democratic party, she was the worst possible one to field against Trump. Even though this was obvious, the overwhelming neoliberal power bloc within the party, along with corruption from the top, conspired to quash a candidate who could actually pull the rug out from under Trump: Bernie Sanders. This is particularly tragic because as I noted above, the left has long attacked neoliberalism; it simply hasn’t been able to breach the firewall within the Democratic party to mainstream the issue. Bernie Sanders attempted to do just that, and he was crushed by the Democratic Party machine. If he, or another non-neoliberal candidate (possibly Elizabeth Warren) had been fielded by the Democratic Party, the left could have claimed the very ground that Trump took to the ballot box.

Moving Forward

For those who feel, as I did, shocked, dismayed, and depressed (or worse, for many: targeted and scared) by the results of this election, I think the first step is to learn these four lessons. The left has failed America, and we need to understand why and how. On the day after the election one of my students noted, “we did everything we could, and it didn’t make any difference.” Yes, we worked hard to combat the racism, xenophobia, sexism, and ignorance that Trump exuded, but I think we can take heart, perhaps paradoxically, in the fact that we could have done better. We are not helpless. In fact, we can and must not only continue to do all we have in the past… we need to step up our game. We need to widen our understanding and analytic categories for grappling with this election. If you’ve found yourself coping with the election results by concluding that half of the electorate is composed of hopelessly racist, xenophobic, misogynistic people hell bent on recovering a position of white supremacy, then you’re still living inside what Michael Moore called, even before the election, “the bubble.” This conclusion is not only wrong in important ways (see my colleague Iza Ding’s post here on the limitation of generalization and the importance of nuance when identifying voting blocs in electoral politics), but also hopelessly self serving.  Instead of choosing the narrative that makes us feel superior to the white working class, lumping all of their concerns into a single category, we need to consider the strategic as well as ideological role of racism, acknowledge its contingency, and effectively analyze its relationships with other ideologies and practices.  To do so is not to back down on the fight against bigotry, but to deepen and nuance it.

It is time to take some responsibility. Hope starts with knowledge and wisdom, and this election has provided that for those who are wiling to accept that they were shortsighted and smug. I’m guilty as charged, but I soon realized that my own attitude and analytic categories were contributing to my blindness and depressed affect. Regaining political agency means grappling with these hard truths, but the affective payoff is great: instead of despair at an imagined onslaught of bigots that we cannot defeat politically, realizing that we face (among other things) a populist movement against neoliberalism opens up a path forward. This is a battle we can win, if we take off the blinders. This certainly does not mean backing down from social justice struggles—on the contrary, we must continue to fight against hatred and prejudice in every possible way. What this does mean, however, is an accurate characterization of our enemy, and in this case, it turns out that one of our biggest enemies was in our own midst in the form of neoliberal policy and philosophy. The Trump voters who turned the election in his favor, the portion of the working class that supported Obama but got little from the Democratic Party in return, aren’t really our enemies at all, and can be turned into our allies.

Creative Politics

Having Donald Trump as our president is unquestionably a disaster in the short term. But the forces that he unleashed were already there, had to explode at some point, and weren’t going to go away even if Clinton won the election. Now, instead of deluding ourselves, or patting ourselves on the back for being so morally superior, we can have a conversation about neoliberalism. Trump’s opposition to free trade started a movement that should have been lead by the left. The good news here is that Trump’s anti-NAFTA stance is hopelessly compromised by his own interests (his wealth was the result of neoliberalism) and other pro-neoliberal policies (deregulation, tax cuts to the wealthy, exploitation of U. S. coal and oil reserves, etc.) That means that the fight against neoliberalism can still be taken back by the left, and will in fact become far more potent when coupled with a broad-based platform of social and environmental justice. The forces that prevented this from happening in the past—the bipartisan consensus of the political class that neoliberalism was axiomatic and the influence of the Clinton dynasty within the Democratic Party in particular—have now been dealt a fatal blow by Trump. The coalition that I’m imagining here, should it materialize (and we can certainly make it materialize) now has more space to breathe than any other time in the past thirty years.

On a more general level, Trump has shaken up the establishment, making a return to business/politics as usual in either of the two parties a lot less likely (even if his administration morphs into a traditional Republican one). The political possibilities are, for the first time in my lifetime, completely open ended. This is not, then, a time for depression or helpless anger, but rather a time for creative imaginings. The worst thing we can now do is to double down on our old assumptions and habits. Our affect should be positive, not negative; active, not reactive. We should be building—not rebuilding, but building… something new, something better. A lot of women and girls (and men) saw their dream of a female president heartbreakingly deferred this past Tuesday. But this dream will have its time soon enough, and that time will be so much more. Facing a Trump presidency, we should not be downsizing our goals, losing the gleam in our eyes, but dreaming bigger, working together toward something that, like Trump’s presidency, was unthinkable so very recently.  We lost an election, but gained something far larger, less defined, more dangerous, and more challenging.  I’m willing to wager, however, that in our current cultural context, any opportunity to write the rules of a new game is far more valuable than an advantageous move in the old one.

Academic Jobs and the Alchemy of the Future

After a year and a half of navigating the torturous academic job market, I accepted a tenure track position at the University of Pittsburgh, as a media scholar in their English department.  I look forward to continuing my work at this institution, which seems to be very supportive of the many strange things that I do.  I want to take this moment to reflect, however, on the nature of this academic job market that is far less kind to most.

Academia serves a number of social functions, from education (disseminating the world’s storehouse of knowledge, teaching students how to think critically and produce new knowledge) to basic research (investigating the world) to applied research (figuring out new ways to do things: innovation) to community outreach, etc.   In our neoliberal economy, the value of academia is often framed in terms of employment.  From the student’s perspective, the academy makes her employable (or more desirable as an employee); from industry’s perspective, the academy ensures an unending supply of fresh workers.

In the humanities we frequently debate the degree to which the university should be framed in neoliberal terms.  After all, shouldn’t we (as a society) value knowledge for knowledge’s sake?  Shouldn’t we be promoting activities that will make society better, even if that means researching and teaching in fields and subfields that are of little interest to capitalists?  Shouldn’t we be producing citizens that can think and act beyond the confines of neoliberal capitalism?  Rather than serving the interests of power, shouldn’t knowledge be revolutionary?

There are a lot of things universities, students, and the general public can do to de-neoliberalize the university, but I won’t go into those here.  I simply want to acknowledge a white elephant that haunts such efforts more generally (and particularly in the humanities): the university is, as one of it’s most significant functions, an employer.  This is particularly significant for those who are determined to speak truth to power instead of enrolling themselves in power’s commodity factory.  The university employs researchers and teachers who are working for a greater good (even if a nebulous, future-tense good) instead of feeding  some company’s bottom line.  This is an absolutely vital function, not only for the academy, and for future students, but also for society as a whole.  Just as seed banks preserve the world’s biodiversity against the potential calamities of monoculture, academia (at its best) preserves and builds on ideas and knowledge that, while not useful to the rich and powerful of today, must nevertheless (in fact for that reason) be nurtured until their time is ripe.  This is reason enough to de-neoliberalize the university, but I digress.

Just about everyone in the humanities knows that the academic job market is broken.  For one thing, the university is structured as a pyramid, with relatively few professors (along with many adjunct faculty members) overseeing many more graduate students than can ever join their ranks, who in turn do a great deal of the teaching of many more undergraduates than can ever join their ranks.  None of this is a problem if you consider the university’s role to be an employment feeder for capitalistic enterprise.  But when research and teaching revolve around those areas of less interest to capitalists (such as basic research in science, philosophy, or cultural analysis), the system needs somewhere for its best and brightest to go.  Many of the best and brightest currently have nowhere to go.

Most universities are making this problem worse rather than better, by making the following mistakes:

  • Placing too much emphasis on partnering with business and subordinating their functions to the needs of those businesses.
  • Placing too much emphasis, in student recruitment and other forms of official discourse, on employability rather than radical innovation and thinking–in other words, the production of new ways of life outside of corporate employment.
  • Formulating job calls according to the categories of the past rather than the open-ended categories of the future (in the humanities, this takes the form of asking for rickety categories tied to specific time periods and regions).
  • Maintaining, in the formation of new jobs, rigid disciplinary boundaries.

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Faced with hesitant, conservative job ads, the great thinkers and researchers of tomorrow, facing terrible odds, are forced to become neoliberal themselves.  They stop taking risks, endlessly prep themselves as salespeople, learning how to narrativize their own interests and research into the narrow categories of official job vacancies.  At best, this diverts attention on all sides away from innovative potential scholarship.  At worst, it irreparably impairs scholarly creativity, innovation, and boldness. The process of neoliberalization does not begin when a promising scholar enters the academic job market, but much earlier, when considering what to study and how.  The job market is like a narrow sluice whose primary effect is not the dividing of the river, but the dividing of the headwaters.

What kind of academic jobs should we be creating, promoting, and supporting?  Innovative jobs that break down disciplinary boundaries, mix time periods, cross borders and are open to new methods and ideas.  It is not a question of “modernizing” these jobs to fit the needs of today’s business or today’s cultural trends (for the oldest ideas, objects, and cultural forms are often the most radical), but promiscuously mixing categories both old and new, with an eye on the future.  Rather than endlessly rehearsing the same categories of knowledge, we need to take seriously the academy’s role as idea bank for a future society.  We need a little more alchemy in the academic job market.  And we need to make alchemists a little more welcome.

Pentacon 6: The History of the Cold War in a Camera System

As a follow up to my last piece about visiting the legendary Ernemann building in Dresden, Germany, I want to reflect a bit on the professional, medium format camera ecology known as the Pentacon 6 (or more colloquially, “P6”). I refer to this as a “camera ecology” because a number of different companies (and individuals) have built cameras, lenses, or accessories for this system over the course of the past sixty years, to the extent that no one entity or ideology can lay claim to the system. What follows are some notes on the history of this development, which spanned the Cold War and was inextricably interwoven with its political, technical, economic, and ideological dynamics. Tracing the tangled history of this camera system, and its photographic affordances, will give us insight into the differential economic and ideological systems of communism and capitalism.

Photographers primarily interested in understanding the differences between P6 cameras and lenses may wish to consult my reference pages on P6 cameras and P6 lenses.

 

1. Wartime Rumblings

 

Early Exakta 66

Pre-war Exakta 66, in the Pentacon museum. Photo by Zach Horton.

As detailed in my previous post, Dresden became, in the first decades of the 20th century, the European epicenter of photographic innovation. Praktica and Exakta were two brands of extremely innovative 35mm camera systems that were sold the world over. In the late 1930s, Exakta decided to push the envelope even further and release two medium format cameras based upon their 35mm bestsellers. These cameras, both called “Exakta 66” (one a Twin Lens Reflex in vertical orientation and the other a supersized Exakta horiztonal SLR) were high-end cameras for professional users. They used rolls of 120 film and recorded images 6cm x 6cm in size (about four times larger than 35mm film). However, they didn’t have much time to catch on before Hitler began his invasions and forced German industry, including especially camera and lens makers, to convert to wartime production of militarized products. During the war, the German army was equipped with some of the best optical equipment in the world, a definite advantage given the absolute importance of reconnaissance in that conflict (and all conflicts). Only the American army was (barely) a match for the Germans in optical and recording technology, due entirely to the parallel wartime efforts of the giant Eastman Kodak Company in the US. Unhampered by enemy bombing raids on their factory complex, and with similar help from the government, and an even larger budget, Kodak produced some of the most impressive lenses and cameras that the world had ever seen… but that’s remains to be chronicled in a later post!

There is a persistent and intriguing legend about an innovative new Nazi camera prototype that appeared during the final years of the war. Like the pre-war Exakta 66s, it shot a 6×6 medium format image, but additionally had exchangeable film backs. This would allow different types of film (fast and slow, for example) to be used with the camera, without the necessity of finishing one roll before starting another. Which German company made this quite possibly apocryphal camera is unspecified. What happened to it at the end of the war? The German camera manufacturers were decimated by wartime bombings or dismantling by the post-war occupying forces, or both. It took a number of years for them to start up again, and this camera (if it existed) was never mass-produced by them. However, two almost identical 6×6 camera systems appeared at the end of the war: the Hasselblad 1600 in Sweden and the Kiev 88 in Soviet Ukraine. The Kiev was clearly a copy, and inferior in construction to the Hasselblad, but accepted identical lenses (the Hasselblad used lenses made by Kodak; the Kiev 88 used lenses made by the Arsenal factory in Ukraine). The Arsenal factory was built in Ukraine by the Soviets using captured plans and equipment from the Soviet zone of occupied Germany.

The planned Soviet economy required the production of a wide range of goods, from basic supplies to advanced camera and lens equipment. It is no surprise that with engineers overtaxed with this awesome task, many designs were copied from products in other countries. The many captured plans and tooling from Germany jump-started many of these new products. It is important to note, however, that Soviet engineers didn’t simply copy products part-for-part, but rather modified designs to fit their needs: often to make them simpler or cheaper to manufacture, removing features or options deemed unnecessary, and sometimes making designs more robust. The Kiev 88, for instance, used a different gearing system for its film backs and a modified shutter mechanism. The surprising outcome was this: the Hasselblad camera proved so unreliable in its shutter operation that Victor Hasselblad eventually gave up the mechanism and removed the focal plane shutter from his 6×6 system entirely. Most Hasselblad cameras to this day rely upon leaf shutters inside individual lenses rather than a single shutter inside the camera body. Meanwhile, the Kiev 88 proved finicky as well, but was deemed a success. When Hasselblad switched to leaf shutters, the Kiev 88 soldiered on with its focal plane (in body) shutter, ensuring that lenses could be manufactured much less expensively (not requiring complex design compromises to be engineered around leaf shutters, and avoiding the complexity of a shutter system in each lens). Here Soviet ideology led to the continued development of an inexpensive and easily extensible system while the premium Swedish brand, sold throughout capitalist countries to very rich clients, chose the best possible system from a technical standpoint, at the cost of extremely expensive lenses that required far more frequent and extensive maintenance. The pattern for high-end goods in Western Europe and the Soviet Bloc was now set: the West produced the best possible products, without much concern about development or manufacturing costs. These products could be purchased only by wealthy individuals. High-end Soviet gear, on the other hand, was produced with economics and extensibility in mind, and the result was that far more individuals could afford professional equipment.

 

2. State Consolidation and Rationalization

 

Pentacon Six camera.  Photo by Zach Horton.

Pentacon Six camera. Photo by Zach Horton.

After WWII, both the Dresden camera manufacturers and the Zeiss optical company in Jena ended up in the Soviet zone, which would soon become the DDR, or East Germany. Some members of these companies (some owners, some management, and some engineers) moved into West Germany in order to continue their enterprises under capitalism. Others stayed to rebuild their companies in their original locations, now under communist control. One such camera manufacturer, Kamera Werk Niedersedlitz, launched a brand new 6×6 camera system in 1956, called the Practisix. It was successful, but not wildly so.

During the next decade, East German industry was largely reorganized by the state. Many camera companies were combined into a single, more-efficient entity, “Pentacon VEB.” No longer competing with one another, they could concentrate on building a more consolidated line of products. This was a case where state control lead to a more streamlined manufacturing base and more focused products. Once these companies had fully merged into the new, titan-like Pentacon, the Praktisix was chosen as the flagship medium format camera system. It was upgraded and expanded with a host of new accessories. The latest version, now renamed the “Pentacon Six,” was released in 1966.

Meanwhile, after a rancorous trademark dispute between the original Zeiss company and a new one formed by defectors to West Germany, the the communist one was forced to change its name to Carl Zeiss Jena. They had designed and manufactured a few lenses for the Practisix from the beginning, and now refined their own line, eventually settling upon five outstanding lenses (covered in detail on my page devoted to P6 lenses). These lenses were world class optics, and did a lot to sell the camera system both within and without the Soviet bloc. The camera was inexpensive and had a full range of features, but was inherently finicky by design, and was easy to misuse or break. This would always be its limitation, and can be traced to a set of priorities similar to that of the Russians/Ukrainians: such equipment was meant “for the people,” not for the rich, and thus needed to be designed for easy mass production.

Even Che Guevara used a P6 (likely a Praktisix with leather sheath).

Even Che Guevara used a Pentacon (likely a Praktisix, with leather sheath).

Much of this equipment was top notch, due to extremely high quality engineering and manufacturing, but this design philosophy was certainly different from the West’s, which emphasized different tiered products, not for different use scenarios (amateur vs. professional, etc.), but for different income levels. Thus cameras made by Leica or Hasselblad, or lenses made by (the new) Zeiss or Schneider Kreuznach could cost ten times as much as equivalent products made by Pentacon or Carl Zeiss Jena, but might be perhaps 20% less likely to fail, or have 10% higher performance (I base these numbers on my own experiences, which are corroborated by many other accounts, but are admittedly anecdotal). The capitalist system, including both wealthy customers and high-end manufacturing capabilities, thus produced the technically best products as well as the largest selection of products, but at completely disproportionate prices. Thus the average East German could afford much higher quality photography equipment than the average West European or American. The East German system was also much more efficient, with its rationalized products and streamlined internal structure.

 

3. Russian Pragmatism

 

The Pentacon Six system was extremely successful. It was affordable, easy to use, and produced results as good as anything made in Western Europe. While exported and highly marked up in the West, most of its sales were in the Eastern bloc. It is significant, then, that in 1971, when the Russian photography industry released a new medium format camera system, it was not copied from any Western design, but rather from the East German Pentacon Six! The Soviet version, called the Kiev 6C, used the same “supersized SLR” form factor, film type, frame, shutter, and P6 lens mount. The rest of its internal mechanisms and aesthetics were, however, redesigned. The camera become larger, heavier, more robust, and significantly uglier. It’s graceful lines were eliminated in favor of a simple to manufacture blocky shape mostly covered with synthetic leatherette and black paint (far more forgiving of manufacturing defects and rough handling). It is very clear that the Soviet designers were not at all concerned about aesthetics; this is probably the ugliest camera ever produced! However, it improved upon the Pentacon Six in a number of ways: it had a brighter and larger ground glass screen, was more reliable (with less of a frame-spacing issue) and less easy to break. If the East German camera is a precision device capable of taking the most technically demanding photographs but requiring careful, expert handling, the Russian camera is a cruder, simpler device that almost anyone can use without problems. It was produced under the same rationalized, centralized economic-political system, but reflected the Russian goals of even greater mass production and usability, while significantly sacrificing aesthetics and the sensuousness of the object. This camera is aggressively pragmatic.

Kiev 60 with Volna 3 lens.

Kiev 60 with Volna 3 lens. Photo by Zach Horton

The Kiev 6C was improved in 1980, and again in 1984, at which point it was renamed the Kiev 60. It was manufactured continuously at the Arsenal factory in Ukraine until 2009, when the entire factory shut down. This makes it the longest running camera model in P6 history: 25 years in its final form, 38 years in total. I’m quite certain that the Russians/Ukrainians got their return on investment with this model.

Because the giant Arsenal factory was run by the Russian state, no new partnerships had to be formed in order to generate lenses for the Kiev 6C. The factory simply developed a new lens mount based upon the East German lenses and released slightly modified versions of their Kiev 88 lenses. At the drop of a hat the vast engineering and manufacturing apparatus could be directed to churn out new product lines or variations upon them, without licensing agreements, capital raising, or market concerns. This system, then, is an example of Soviet industry responding to competition from Pentacon by producing an even cheaper and more practical system that was a drop-in replacement to their cameras and lenses (lenses from Germany and Ukraine were compatible with either camera system). Instead of engineering a complex system that navigated patent encumbrances and cost a fortune to produce, the Soviets simply retooled their existing strengths (the large line of Kiev 88 medium format lenses) to function with the P6 system, and then produced a camera cheap and rugged enough to serve the needs of a large number of people. In capitalist industry, such broad cross-compatibility is almost unheard of. Companies do everything possible, mechanically and legally, to prevent interoperability with competitive products. (For more information on Russian P6 lenses, see my P6 lens page.)

The Kiev 60 camera and Arsat lenses produced excellent results, but were mechanically clunkier than their East German or Western counterparts, with significantly less sophisticated finish. For example, focusing helicoids were rougher to the touch, machining marks were often visible, metal work was less precise, blemishes on surfaces were often visible, and painted numbers and text were less precise. This is often attributed to poor worker morale and worn equipment. There is no doubt much truth in this, but it also seems to me that these issues fall broadly under the category of “aesthetics” and were thus under-prioritized compared to cost of manufacture.

 

4. Western Innovation

Exakta 66 camera.  Photo by Zach Horton.

Exakta 66 camera. Photo by Zach Horton.


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The P6 system, in its Zeiss Jena, Pentacon, and Kiev incarnations, were so successful in the Eastern Bloc, and popular in the West as well when they could be obtained, that by the 1980s, West German companies began to take note. Leica, Hasselblad, and (the Western) Zeiss were doing well in rich countries, and a reconstituted Exakta in West Germany, part of a conglomerate that also included high-end lens maker Schneider Kreuznach, wanted their own camera system. They decided to develop their own P6 camera and line of lenses, much as the Russians had done over a decade before. In the capitalist West, well-marketed, premium products aimed at rich consumers could be extremely profitable; however, there was significant cost and risk in developing products as complex as high-end photography ecosystems. In this case, Exakta realized that they could avoid raising too much capital for development costs if they simply imported the very inexpensive Pentacon 6 and enhanced it for a Western market. This is exactly what they did, purchasing thousands of bodies from the Pentacon factory in East Germany, then disassembling them and transferring their mechanical innards into a newly developed body. Based on high-end West German military binoculars, their innovative rubberized body and impressive styling made the camera a one-of-a-kind aesthetic object. As a nod to the well-known Exakta line of cameras, and the pre-war legacy of 6×6 camera development, they gave this camera system the old pre-war name: Exakta 66. This camera, its name signaled, would have continuity with Germany’s pre-communist past, skipping over the interim period and gesturing toward an innovative path forward, encoded into the camera’s futurist aesthetic. Ironically, of course, the camera was only made possible through the efficiency of communist mass production; Exakta’s innovations were quite impressive, but amounted to a new set of capitalist clothes on a communist body.

Schneider Kreuznach Curtagon 60mm lens.  Photo by Zach Horton.

Schneider Curtagon 60mm lens. Photo by Zach Horton.

Schneider Kreuznach, however, designed a set of world-class lenses for this system. As I detail on my P6 lens page, these are some of the best lenses ever made for any medium format system: optically, mechanically, and aesthetically they set new standards for quality and inventiveness. Exakta also released a large number of matching accessories and high-tech components (e.g., a fully coupled metering prism), significantly expanding the system ecology into territory unexplored by either East Germany or Russia/Ukraine. In the West, a camera of the people had been transformed into a niche, almost fetishistic product, where accessorization, aesthetics, and ability to function as a status symbol were at least as important as central function. Accordingly, Exakta sold this camera and its lenses at Hasselblad-level prices, which were only affordable by very successful photographic professionals or extremely wealthy amateurs.

The Exakta 66 system was so expensive that very few people could afford it, despite its amazing lenses and slick aesthetics. In a bid to lower costs for an entry-level system, Exakta decided to use the same tactics for the “normal” lens as they had for the camera body: they purchased large quantities of the optical components of Carl Zeiss Jena’s 80mm lens, then re-housed them in Schneider lens barrels, rebranding them in the process. Even today, thirty years later, these lenses sell on Ebay for approximately six times the price of their optically identical CZJ brethren. This demonstrates what the Exakta 66 designers knew very well: in a capitalist economy, branding and aesthetics drive sales more than functionality, and perceived value is inversely proportional to availability and price. This is diametrically opposed to the logic that drove East German and Russian design of P6 components. The capitalist entries are somewhat more advanced in terms of aesthetics, maximum possible quality, and customizability, but are accessible to only a tiny percentage of the population.

 

5. Post-Soviet Capitalism

 

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Germany faced the difficult task of reintegrating two different political, economic, and aesthetic regimes. A state organization was set up to privatize East German companies and sell them to capitalists from West Germany or elsewhere. Of course, this meant evaluating such companies based upon their profitability in the marketplace. In other words, German industry was reorganized according to the logics of West Germany. In this sense it wasn’t a reunification or negotiation, but rather more like the sale of one half of the country to the other. The massive Pentacon VEB was split up into several smaller companies. Its camera making department was sold to (Western) Exakta and Rollei, where it was drastically downsized and continued for some time making components for the Exakta 66 and other camera systems. Most of the company was simply liquidated. The West German photographic companies that were doing the purchasing were all in the business of selling luxury goods, and had no use for companies geared to produce high-quality components on a mass scale (this was a market that Japanese companies aggressively sought during the 1980s).

Carl Zeiss Jena was similarly broken up. One cluster of the company continued to make the Exakta 66 80mm lenses. Most of the company was sold to its breakaway West German Zeiss, which promptly liquidated all of its camera lens manufacturing operations. Instead, the East German division of Zeiss was renamed Jenoptik and continued to make high-end medical equipment (digital camera sensors and optics). In other words, all of these components were converted into niche production clusters. Its central capability, the mass production of high-end camera equipment affordable by a large percentage of the population, was eliminated entirely. As the system was absorbed into West German capitalism, the differential that enabled the West to appropriate the East’s mass products cheaply disappeared, and Germany turned to much poorer countries to do their manufacturing. With these changed circumstances, Exakta lost its ace in the hole. They continued to produce the Exakta 66 system for a number of years, but sales trickled to a standstill, and they stopped selling the system in 2000.

After the collapse of the Soviet economy and government, the Arsenal factory became an asset of newly independent Ukraine. Engineering and production continued much as before. In Ukraine’s hybrid economy (capitalistic but with a great deal of central government control, as in Russia and China today) the expertise and manufacturing capability of the Arsenal facility were significant assets. They continued to produce their cameras and lenses inexpensively and sell them on the world market until 2009. During the 1990s, however, they responded to market changes with product changes, releasing new lenses (of very high quality) and discontinuing many older lines.

Kiev 88CM with CZJ Flektagon 50mm lens.  Photo by Zach Horton.

Kiev 88CM with CZJ Flektagon 50mm lens. Photo by Zach Horton.

In Kiev, a number of former employees of the Arsenal factory began opening their own businesses, refurbishing, upgrading, and repairing Arsenal’s products. The two largest operators were Hartblei and Arax (the latter is still in business today). They began creating significantly modified versions of official Arsenal cameras. Two of these improvements included making a version of the Kiev 88 compatible with Hasselblad film backs and giving the Kiev 88 a P6 mount. Thus in the 1990s, an entirely new P6 camera was introduced to the market, capable of taking the Russian, East German, or West German lenses, as well as multiple film backs. In this case, capitalism drove the production of new market niches for the system, attractive to a small but significant number of users.

This led to changes at the Arsenal factory. In 1999, the Kiev 88 line was officially changed to the Kiev 88CM, which had a factory P6 mount. All Arsat lenses were now manufactured with a P6 mount. These are certainly changes brought about through competition in a global market. Even after the demise of the Arsenal factory, Arax is thriving as a company offering upgrades to Kiev 60s and Kiev 88s as well as specialized versions of P6 cameras and lenses and newly produced accessories.

With the rise of the new artisanal culture, driven by open source development, 3D printing, and crowdfunding, the P6 system continues to have an afterlife. In 2014 an individual optics enthusiast designed and released a new, specialty lens for the system, based on the nineteenth century petzval formula, which produces distortions that are becoming more and more desirable by amateur photographers in the digital age. I have myself produced a few 3D printed components for the P6 system, including a custom lens hood that mates with Schneider P6 lenses.

 

6. Conclusion

 

Exakta 66 camera and Arsat 30mm lens.  Photo by Zach Horton.

Exakta 66 camera and Arsat 30mm lens. Photo by Zach Horton.

Both the Russian/Ukrainian Kiev P6 components and the West German P6 components reveal the best and worst of their respective political-economic-ideological systems. The capitalist portion of the ecosystem pushes further into more niches, but typically only at the top of the food chain. It is maximally innovative, fighting against the biggest and most aggressive competitors for a slice of the market. However, many of these innovations principally aim at incremental improvements, marginally useful gadgetry, and aesthetic improvements. These impressive efforts certainly come at the expense of accessibility for a larger portion of the population. Of course, capitalism can produce cheap goods for lower income consumers as well, but only if labor is outsourced to factories able to mass produce goods at significantly lower costs. The Exakta 66 system clearly demonstrates this, with core components coming from the Pentacon factory. Most strikingly, the re-badged 80mm Biometar lens was made desirable though its fancy Exakta 66 livery, but made affordable through the appropriation of East German labor and manufacturing methods. The greatest technical achievement of the system, the specialty lenses produced by Schneider, were then and continue to be more expensive than 99% of the population can afford.

On the other hand, the Russian components of the P6 system suffer from quality control problems. They are significantly less attractive and less versatile. All of these components improved in design over time, but competing options were almost nonexistent. There is only one option, the optimized one, given the logics of mass production and maximum affordability, and core functionality. As a result, the Russian system is an excellent value: it can do 85% of what the West German system can accomplish at 1/10 the price. At the same time, it dictates how it can be used: its constraints cannot be easily overcome. Its core functionality is excellent, but the quality of its construction and finish are unreliable. Given alternatives it is not the most desirable P6 system, even if it is the most accessible one.

In this context, the East German P6 components strike an interesting balance. They are aesthetically pleasing and involve many more options and accessories—their use cases are extended significantly, at the cost of a slightly higher price and some finicky behaviors. They cost about 1/6 of their West German counterparts. These characteristics are shared by the characteristics of the DDR’s manufacturing sector more generally: significant attention paid to aesthetics, design, and quality, within an overall systemic push for mass accessibility. However, this system could not exist within a capitalist milieu. The reunification of Germany eliminated any possibility of its continuance.

Today, then, the rich 60-year legacy of the P6 ecology is enjoyed and admired by many photographers and collectors, but its actualized dream of high-end equipment accessible to a majority of the population has no current analog.

 

dwarfed

Photo by Zach Horton. Taken with Pentacon Six and CZJ Biometar 80mm lens.

Further resources on this site:  P6 camera comparison, P6 lens discussion

Swerve’s Futures

It’s hard to believe, but after nearly five years of work, we have completed the first academically produced, nonprofit, science fiction epic: Swerve. This cinematic exploration of nanotechnology, virtuality, ecology, corporate-industrial patriarchy, and the relationship between data, the body, and the environment is over three and a half hours long, divided into ten chapters. Each functions as part of the larger narrative and as a thematic whole. This surreal, cyberpunk, Deleuzean, feminist, philosophical science fiction film would never have been possible to make in a commercial system. To accomplish this, over 150 people worked in one capacity or another on this mammoth project, which has been housed in the English Department at UCSB from 2010 to the present.

Why did we make such an unconventional film, and how?

The original concept for this project was hatched by Lindsay Thomas and myself during our second quarter of graduate school, in Alan Liu’s “Literature +” seminar. Alan challenged us to build innovative collaborative projects, and we hatched the idea of a science fiction film that would be collaboratively produced by students at the University out of content generated by the academic humanities. Instead of the endless reproduction of tropes for their own sake exhibited by commercial media, and instead of academic media that merely responds to cultural production “out there,” we thought that it would be interesting to scramble the codes, to bring some commercial tropes into contact (or collision) with academic theory produced by the humanities, with the challenge of making our own fictional, speculative product. We thought that the genre of cyberpunk was ripe for such an exercise.

Still from Swerve.

Still from Swerve.

As literary fiction, cyberpunk rose to prominence in the 1980s along with the first wave of home computers, exploring electronically networked culture, navigating an infoscape or datascape that seemed the inevitable future heralded by ubiquitous computing. What new identities, dangers, and possibilities would emerge within this new world of digital virtuality? After William Gibson’s visionary cyberpunk trilogy in the 1980s, the 1990s saw the proliferation of flashy, virtual-reality-driven versions of cyberpunk in both literature and film. The alterity of cyberspace (a concept invented by Gibson in his 1983 novel Neuromancer) was becoming tamed, literalized, and linearized (using the terminology of philosopher’s Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, reterritorialized) as the digital gamescape. Indeed, this subgenre finally reached its cinematic apotheosis with the Matrix Trilogy, which thematically and aesthetically combined the video game with live action. The convergence was complete: the genre was exhausted.

Still from Swerve.

Still from Swerve.

And that’s why we chose it. As a genre that was about visualizing the new spaces that could arise out of ubiquitous, networked computing, it had been caught and perhaps exceeded by Facebook. Cyberspace was no longer alien territory. It was everywhere. That is the starting point for Swerve. Virtual technologies have become so ubiquitous that they are no longer visible. The interesting question is no longer how to visualize datascapes but rather, how to visualize non-datascapes? Not a historical space before digital technology, but a future space that exceeds itself. This means both a return to the visionary qualities of 1980s cyberpunk, which sought to imagine a completely alterior space, as well thinking about potential paths forward, ways to take back the agency of systems subject to technocratic logics of ubiquitous surveillance, forced upgrade cycles, the gamification of labor, and the commercialization of behavioral data. Swerve takes on both of these tasks, narrativizing the process of disengaging from invisible technologies of virtualization into the shockingly new space where technology is visible, tangible, and embodied, as well as considering the potential for new spaces that are ineluctably virtual and actual at the same time. One of the ways to explore this paradox emerged later in the form of the character Charlie, who fuses an enthusiasm for technologies of virtualization (especially simulation) with the notion of virtuality developed by French philosopher Henri Bergson—that is, the virtual as an atemporal space of pure potentiality that is concentrated to a single point of becoming by the mind. (Charlie is also an homage to Afrofuturism, a celebratory movement in the 1970s to the 1990s that explored African identity in the context of high-tech, cosmic science fiction motifs.)

Still from Swerve.

Still from Swerve.

One of Swerve‘s primary mechanisms for collaboration and visionary exploration of potentials is combinatoric. Different characters embody different philosophical stances toward technology, identity, virtuality, and ecology. The ten chapters of this long film allow various combinations to clash or coalesce into different material-symbolic-philosophical assemblages, each of which charts potential futures.

The raw content for these philosophies, theories, and fictional experiments came from discussions in graduate seminars around related topics at UCSB. Participants in those seminars fed their thoughts into forums, which were then accessed by a team of world builders who synthesized this rich academic work into narratives, characters, and a fictional world. Others wrote script segments, poetic fragments, etc. Over multiple years, I worked all of this material together into a coherent script. While this long-term unfolding remained true to the original plot outline, segments were only written in cycles of six months or so, allowing the script to emerge as segments were filmed. The filmmaking process thus mirrored the feedback loop between the virtual and actual worlds that is depicted within the film. The process itself is documented in the form of its ideal circuit diagram here.

Still from Swerve.

Still from Swerve.

Because Swerve is about a sense of expanded ecology—an ecology of the “natural” world combined with an ecology of the virtual—many people from the “world builders” to location hunters to the cast had to work together to produce a milieu that functioned as a complex, ecological whole. We filmed over a three year period around Santa Barbara, Ventura, Ojai, Los Angeles, and the incredible Sedgwick Reserve, once Edie Sedgewick’s family’s ranch, and now operated as a research reserve by the University of California. More than one member of the cast or crew lost themselves, seduced by this hypnotic landscape that may be from the past, or may be from the future.

Still from Swerve.

Still from Swerve.

I brought my own aesthetic to the project, my love of analog film stock (used to portray the virtual world in the film, in jerky, unstabilized 8mm), my background as an independent film director, and many of my friends who work in the film industry. Our all-volunteer cast and crew was formed from the ranks of incredibly talented professionals, alongside passionate students learning the ropes. Many of these latter have gone on to work in film or other creative industries. Several undergraduate students on the crew started when they were freshmen, worked throughout their college years, and graduated before the film was completed! I have never worked with a more passionate, gracious, brilliant, and giving group of people. I cannot thank you all enough for your incredible work.

I hope that Swerve demonstrates that when enough people contribute enough passion, time, and energy to a project, it is possible to make something that would never happen in a commercial system. The point here was not to make something using alternative means of funding (“independent” filmmaking), but to make something that absolutely cannot make a profit, that must live and die by its own rules and perverse desires. I hope that it will live on for a very long time, enjoyed by science fiction fans, casual viewers, academic theorists, and whoever else is willing to embark on this strange journey. Further, I hope this film will be used in classrooms. It is meant to be not only a film, but a creative ecosystem of ideas, a form of pedagogy, and the jumping off point of new speculative imaginings.

Still from Swerve.

Still from Swerve.

The film is free and always will be. It can be streamed, downloaded, remixed, re-authored… We provide the disc images and cover art to produce your own DVD or Blu Ray set, and hope you do so. (The film is so long that it spans three discs.) If you are reading this blog, Swerve should probably be on your shelf!

Swerve was made on a miniscule budget, provided by a grant from the Princess Grace Foundation in New York, a starter grant from UCSB, a very modest IndieGoGo campaign, and a number of direct donations from beautiful souls when the going got rough. Still, this 3.5 hour film cost about as much as shooting only three days on an average ultra-low-budget independent feature. That was only possible due to the incredible dedication and generosity of this cast and crew. Many faculty members at UCSB worked on or helped to facilitate this project. I’d like to give a special shout out to Doug Bradley, who served as production designer and general engineering genius, and Alan Liu, who has supported this project all of these years, and even donated a chunk of his own research funds to purchase the Avid system upon which it was edited. (And which is serving us still, as I edit a streamlined theatrical version meant for screening in one sitting.)

Adelle-and-Kaja-with-orchids

Still from Swerve.

The “swerve” of the film’s title refers to Roman poet Lucretius’ concept of clinamen, the fundamental nature of chance, or non-determinism, that enables single atoms to change course, setting into motion radical systemwide effects, escaping the homogeneity of matter. The swerve irrupts and determines the present, and is the hope (or fear) of difference, of the new. (The title of the film is not derived from Stephen Greenblatt’s book, titled The Swerve, which shares Swerve’s derivation from Lucretius, but was subsequent to it.)

Making this film has been a strange and wonderful journey for many of us, and I am deeply grateful to everyone who made it a (virtual and actual) reality. So much for history. What, I wonder, will be Swerve‘s futures?

 

SWERVE LINKS

All chapters can be viewed and downloaded from the main swerve site: www.swerveinterface.com

This site also contains a “theory wiki” with ties to the film, behind the scenes photos, and a complete cast, crew, and participant list.

Please like our Facebook page here.

Please consider contributing a vote and/or a review of the film at IMDB.

You can help spread the word by sharing this blog post, the Swerve site, or individual Vimeo files on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

And of course, please subscribe to this blog, only updated with occasional essays.

Still from Swerve.

Still from Swerve.


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Doors

Swerve-door

8mm still from Swerve, by Zach Horton

The door, simultaneously barrier and threshold, invites us to approach, awakens our desire to pass through, to enter (or to exit), but bears the power of refusal. The brute inertia of the door, its solidity of both material form and cultural decree, can give pause to even the most tenacious of trespassers.

A room without a door, the most horrific vision Poe could conjure up, appears again and again in his speculative architecture, from “The Pit and the Pendulum” to that improvisatory room in “A Cask of Amontillado.” The most diabolic deed is surely to wall someone in, when no provision is made for a door. Perhaps of his literary brethren, only Kafka would disagree. Worse by far, he might say, is to have too many doors, leading to too many corridors, an overdetermination of possible passages that ensures that you never reach your destination. One always dies between two doors.

Poe, haunted by those doorless rooms, died outside.

Rome- Forum- copper doors- Temple of Romulus- 1700 years old

1700 year old copper doors in the Temple of Romulus, in the Roman Forum. Photograph by Zach Horton.

Most doors are meant to keep others out. As such they are signs (VERBOTEN), but they are also sorting devices (UNLESS…). Do you know the keeper of the house? Do you know the password? Do you know the combination? If so, the door will let you pass, and you will become sorted across that threshold. Rules and sorting. The nineteenth century made much of this mechanism: Maxwell’s demon, on one hand, was a thought experiment that posited a small creature who opened or closed a small door between two chambers whenever a molecule of a certain type approached. With only passive doorkeeping, claimed James Clerk Maxwell, the demon could build up potential energy in the form of difference. This was the opposite of entropy, of homogeneity. Was it therefore possible to cheat death, the universe’s heath death, the eventual state of maximum homogeneity that would leave no energy differential to do any useful work?

Dresden- ELREMA 1959 accounting computer

1959 ELREMA Computer, East German. Photograph by Zach Horton.

 

The second sorting machine of the nineteenth sentry, invented by Charles Babbage, went further: by representing numbers with mechanical cogs on wheels, those numbers could, through complex sorting—transfer from one mechanism to another—be manipulated in theoretically unlimited ways. The universal, programmable computer had come into being. The threshold it mediated was between the material and the symbolic. The latter could be manipulated in theoretically limitless ways; the challenge then became encoding, or the representation of the material within homologous data structures. Later computer engineers, and particularly Alan Turing, realized that the simpler the logical structure, the more universal the machine, in both representation and manipulation. The universal binary computer was born (with Konrad Zuse), using only two characters to represent any arbitrarily large structure. Best of all, it could be materially instantiated by something far simpler than Babbage’s complex machinery: the any electromagnetic switch, vacuum tube, or transistor. Each of these serves the function of a logic gate. One input, two possible outputs: 0 or 1, on or off, in or out. At the heart of the computer, and everything the computer generates, is a humble door.

Of course, not all doors are meant to be opened. Some are there to remind you that none shall pass, or that the pleasure, even necessity, of exit is but an illusion.

Rome- doorway

Chalk door in Rome. Photograph by Zach Horton.


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Other doors may be obliging, but serve to obscure the other side. Who will be brave enough to exit the known for the unknown? Contestants of Let’s Make a Deal had to ask this question of themselves. More lucratively, so do cat-burglars. I simply wonder who is behind each of those cold doors in the hotel hallway.

As I finish my Ph.D. and enter the academic job market, I’m thinking a lot about doors. That which they conceal, the thresholds they guard, and whether or not they lock behind you.

I discovered my favorite door by accident one day in Rome. Having thrown away my map, determined to wander aimlessly, I ended up on a narrow, unremarkable street with a solid wall lining one side. As I wiped the sweat from my brow, I noticed, with a start, that the wall had sprouted a head. It was made of the same red clay and jutted outward defiantly. A wall that refused to remain flat. I followed its gaze and discovered a second head, and then an ear, an eye, and a nose. I walked on, dumbfounded at the community of body parts embedded within this wall. Finally, I came to the door. And here, amidst this anthropomorphic wall, the door framed a question: what or who was behind this wall?

Rome- Artists house 6- doorway

Door to residence in Rome, Italy. Photograph by Zach Horton.

I considered ringing the off-kilter doorbell or intercom. I stood for nearly a half hour studying the clues provided by this threshhold. Finally, I turned and began to walk away.

A rusty creak rang out behind me. I spun just in time to witness the door opening by just a crack. A young Italian woman slipped out, carrying a handful of laundry. The door closed again, before I could make out any detail within. She walked in my direction.

“How is it,” I managed to ask in a blunt English that she might or might not understand, “that you came to live behind that door?”

She stopped, regarding me quizzically. “My father,” she finally said by way of explanation, “is an artist.” She smiled and continued away on her errand.

Why was it that this encounter affected me so sharply? Was it the incongruous presence of a human where there should only have been a silent door, waiting through the ages? Was it that the granting of my wish, to have experienced the inside behind this door, was accomplished only through a shift of modality, from the material to the symbolic? I had nothing but the word “artist,” a signifer, to show for my adventurous curiosity and humble patience. (This is, after all, within the purview of the door’s alchemical magic.) Or was it, quite simply, that in my phenomenological egocentrism I had forgotten that other great function of the door? To open, not to allow entry, but to facilitate an emergence?

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