12.12.21 | this will kill that

In a chapter titled "This Will Kill That" of Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo presents his thoughts on the death of architecture, or rather, on the migration of civilizational content from the walls of the building to the pages of the book. Historical events, religious laws and cultural symbols were all, up until the fifteenth century, embedded in architecture. Statues, bas-reliefs, murals, and all the manner of other decorative techniques were used to inject the symbols of civilization into the architecture of a building, to let the stones carry and spread their meaning. With the invention of the printing press, that content migrated to the pages of a book, and this happened not only because printing was cheaper and easier in comparison to architecture, but because it was also more permanent. This was a new sort of permanence, not the permanence of the stone, which erodes and wears away over centuries, but the permanence of replication, the ability to produce an unlimited number of copies of the same thing.

But the permanence of books rests on them being read. An unopened book is less a part of our consciousness than an architectural element which the forces of nature and time defaced beyond recognition. Where the latter is little more than a carcass of its former self, the former is nothing it all. And so, as symbols of civilization made their way from the facades of our buildings onto the pages of the book, they unwittingly walked into a medium that not only had the power to keep them alive, but the power to extinguish them. And that is exactly what happened. As we moved into the post-modern era, the era of mass consumption, attention shifted away from those great books in which the history and meaning of our civilization was recorded to the products of entertainment. Having first moved out of sight, away from the daily interaction with us on the streets, the symbols of civilization have been moved out of mind, buried in the little wooden coffin of the closed book.

fromhere.


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To extend this thought to digital media: not only do our media/art/cultural objects exist in a 'closed' book, in the sense that it remains unseen until specifically called upon (locked behind an app or an "off" screen), but it is practically nonexistent until called upon. Until we desire to consume it, it does not exist in the form in which we intend to consume it.

Something like streaming is a summoning; we offer our money at the altar of Netflix or Amazon or whatever and conjure up the spirit of a work of art to exist specifically for our enjoyment and consumption, and as soon as we are done with it, it vanishes back to the nebulous, unintelligible-to-us region where it mingles as 0's and 1's with every other work of art — music, movie, photograph, text — in a form that we rely on our computers to translate into something palatable.

Part of the reason why I like radio and broadcast TV is that it belongs to an older form of dissemination of art -- the art that I'm consuming doesn't exist solely for me in this moment, but in fact is being broadcast either to listening ears (other people watching/listening) or deaf ears (radio off), but either way it is being propagated, not because *I* summoned it, but because someone else decided it should be propagated. When you tune in to an ABC family movie that you would never elect to watch by yourself, there is a minor and, for me, completely inalienable comfort to the knowledge that countless other anonymous people are also experiencing the same texture simultaneously.

This also sketches at why I'm so skeptical of streaming as a substitute for the ownership of art. We are getting too used to the summoning of art from a well that we can't access under special conditions (are you online, do you have a reliable internet connection, have you paid your subscription) and over which we have no real claim to possession. It freaks me out...