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Maybe nothing matters, maybe everything matters – On the value of things, 方丈記, and the weight of hardships

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Words by Oliver Cheung

I have a buddy named Wren in my Japanese class. She’s a master’s student in Classical Japanese Literature. Even as somebody who’s studying the language, I have no idea why you’d want to look into an infinitely more difficult version of this language that’s already kicking my GPA down the road like a rusty can. I guess the difference between myself and her is the fact that she’s actually good at speaking, I’m just some bum who’s in too deep to quit. Still, one day she brought up the topic of her own field of study, and she sent me the EPUB for Anthology of Japanese Literature, translated to English, of course. I gave it a read, I was a fan of Rashomon so I figured I would like this, and I did. I highly recommend it. But there was one short story that popped out to me, being An Account of My Hut, which was a tale by an old man writing on how the world around him had gone to smithereens and he had retired to renounce all his worldly possessions in the name of being a monk and lived alone in a hut on the side of a mountain. 

Ten square feet, at the end of the world

Also known as Hōjōki (方丈記), the story was written by Kamō no Chōmei in 1212, during the early Kamakura period. It regales the life of the author as he watches the current kingdom rise and fall, the changing of human values, and eventually his quiet life on the side of Mt. Ohara. It opens with the following quote:

The flow of the river never ceases,
And the water never stays the same.
Bubbles float on the surface of pools,
Bursting, re-forming, never lingering.
They’re like the people in this world and their dwellings.

This has become a significant passage in Japanese literature for being an embodiment of the concept of mujō (無常), referring to the impermanance of things, which is a key component of Buddhism. Things in our human life never stay as they are, and are never as they seem. We exist in fleeting pockets of space, only ever briefly affecting and sometimes never at all. Just as bubbles and pond scum will simmer to the surface of the lake, they burst and disappear all the same, and Chōmei ascribes this quality to people as well.

The story opens with Chōmei recounting his time in the old capital of Kyoto. He writes of the old ages of prosperity, but also just as quickly shifts the tone to that of disaster. A great fire rips through the city, followed just as soon by a whirlwind that causes the city to vanish near overnight. The values of people change, old samurai families are brought to indignity, and beggars tear apart the gold-inlaid pillars of temples for firewood. All the treasures in the world have been laid low as the war between the Minamotos and the Tairas (one of the biggest conflicts in Japan’s medieval history, but a story for another time) persist through the decades. Eventually, the capital was relocated to Fukuhara for a time.

“The mansions whose roofs had rivaled one another fell with the passing days to rack and ruin. Houses were dismantled and floated down the Yodo River, and the capital turned into empty fields before one’s eyes. People’s ways changed completely—now horses were prized and oxcarts fell into disuse. Estates by the sea in the south or west were highly desired, and no one showed any liking for manors in the east or the north.”

As they say in latin, sic transit gloria mundi, “glory fades.” That much isn’t new, however, everyone knows of the empires of old. Camelot, Rome, Alexandria, everything returns to dust one way or another. As living beings on this Earth, we are cursed with impermanence, and everything we are is what we bury. But the significance of Hōjōki and Chōmei’s retelling is how it ends.

As I mentioned earlier, Chōmei would live through this and renounce the world, living as a monk “into his sixth decade” and building himself a ten-foot-square hut of mud on the mountainside of Mt. Ohara, located in what is now Tochigi City. That’s where the story ends. But what does this have to do with media theory? I didn’t think much of it either, until I came to understand that Chōmei’s concept of mujō and our understanding of subjective value are actually quite similar.

Nothing good was built to last

Tim Ingold was onto something actually very Buddhist in his recounting of value, being that real value is shown in decay and in desolation, through usage and lived experience. Items take on new lives of their own in human hands, a love taken miles to forge. I found this concept extremely compelling as I reread Hōjōki again with a media theorist’s lens.

Chōmei treats objects as Ingold would, as possessions that ebb and flow and exist as the companions to people, for better or for worse. And yet, within the desolation, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief through the tragedy as these manors and mansions of old, treated as travesty by Chōmei, were repurposed by survivors or retaken by nature. For their purpose in one life had ended, and they have found different meaning in the constant movement of life, time itself had given them new value. Oxcarts were abandoned to moss, giving way to the admiration of the equine, and Buddhist artifacts that had sat collecting dust were sold and circulated for survival’s sake. In wordly pain, the movement of objects, the foundation of new value became necessary. Is this just a long-winded way of saying that human beings are resourceful and will do anything to secure their continued existence? Yes. That’s exactly what it is. But that’s what also drove me to become so interested in Ingold’s theory of value and creation.

Buddhism is centred around the concept of everything. Everything exists in context of everything else and everything is just as beautiful as everything else. If you wanted to be media theorist-y about it, you could say that all objects exist in relation to materials within a space. But that space must exist in time, and different times require different objects that then carry that memory of usage. And that’s the true humanity that lives in Chōmei’s story – the world can go to ruin however many times over, through fire, wind, and by our own hand. And yet, we do whatever it takes, making value out of anything to get our way, live another day.

The story closes with Chōmei commenting on how his own method of escape, his ten-square-foot hut, has become precious to him. He had inititally used it as a form of temporary seclusion, angry at the state of the world, but in his time on Mt. Ohara, he came to love his tiny hut for it had become more like a home than any other residence he had before. Bollmer would account this to Ahmed’s definition, but it’s far more poetic to say it how it is.

When we use something, we come to love it. When we live somewhere, we come to feel like we belong. We live in relation with everything else, and everything else is beautiful.

By Oliver Cheung

Keene, Donald. Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Grove Press, 2014.

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, 2013.

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Paley: Natural Theology in Ingold’s Making

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Who is Paley?

William Paley was an 18th century British philosopher and Anglican priest. A former student and professor at Cambridge University, his works on natural theology and utilitarianism made him well known within the scholarly community in Europe at the time. In his last book before his death in 1805, entitled Natural Theology: Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, Paley constructed the teleological argument for which he is most famous today. 

Preview to The Watchmaker Argument

As we will explore in depth later on, Paley’s argument for the existence of God uses analogies and inductive reasoning to support a primary claim that there is a divine designer who created all living things. According to Paley, contrivances of the world (such as the complex machinery of eyes and ears) were purposely developed in order to teach intelligence and complex reasoning to humanity. People, made in God’s image, could then carry on the process of design with which they were gifted. Influenced heavily by Paley’s work was the young Charles Darwin, whose studies on the Galapagos Islands ended up leading him to develop his theory of natural selection. This work– the keystone for our modern theory of evolution– tore big holes into Paley’s argument from Natural Theology; and yet the work remains remarkably relevant to scholars and theorists of today.

On Natural Theology 

In Making, Tim Ingold cites natural theologist William Paley’s work many times throughout chapter five, entitled The Sighted Watchmaker. Paley’s book, Natural Theology for short, is famous for its arguments which attempt to prove that, by design, living beings were created by a god to move and reproduce– and to the select few, to think and create. 

Paley begins his book, Natural Theology, with his state of the argument: 

“In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there: I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there […]. This mechanism being observed, the inference, we think, is inevitable; that the watch must have had a maker.” (Paley, 1-3). 

Paley explains that the watch has many parts (cogs, gears, springs), each arranged particularly for the purpose of keeping time. All these parts work together in coordination, therefore proving that the watch could not have just appeared as a rock had. From this concept Paley infers that just as a watch implies the existence of a watchmaker, the complex, orderly world implies the existence of a world maker– God.

Continuing the explanation of Paley’s argument, Ingold cites extensions made by Paley which ask the audience to imagine a watch that can self replicate. Upon first thought, one might think that this implies no need for a designer/watchmaker, as the watch can now make itself. Paley believes the opposite: “There cannot be a design without a designer; contrivance without a contriver; order without choice; arrangement without anything capable of arranging…” (Paley, 12). For Paley, each generation of watches is made by its predecessor, but the first watch, ‘Watch Zero’, must have been designed. The whole chain of replication ultimately depends on an original, intelligent design. 

Take special consideration too of things that can reproduce themselves; despite the continuity of living things, the capacity to reproduce must have been integrated into the original design, and the structure, order, and purpose of nature is therefore evidence of divine intelligence. The first watch was “made” in an entirely different way from that in which the first watch “makes” the second, third, etc. The former is intelligent design, and the latter is mechanical execution. Humans in the “image of God”, may only replicate that which God has ultimately designed first.

Ingold’s usage of Natural Theology 

The next natural question to ask now is “so what?”. Why should we care about a long-debunked paper on how God is real because our eyes are weird? And what is it doing in the book about weaving baskets? Ingold suggests that while the religious aspects of Natural Theology have been refuted, Paley’s assumptions about the nature of design and designer that underwrite these arguments have not. His arguments about function, design, and intent are still relevant, and we can apply them critically in our modern lives regardless of our faith. Whether the responsibility for the design is attributed to God or natural selection does not affect the logic of Paley’s “there is no design without a designer”, argues Ingold. 

Paley’s arguments also allow us to think about where design is. First, Ingold argues the answer will differ depending on whether the designed is an artifact (e.g. a watch) or a living being (e.g. a bat). If you happen to see a bat, you are not looking at a design for a bat, but the bat itself, right? An artifact’s design tends to be in the mind of the creator who, looking forward, thought thoroughly about said design. Working off what Paley argued and how other scholars like Dawkins responded, Ingold then suggests that our understanding of a bat’s design is dependent on the eyes of those observing it, and in the bat’s own behaviours:  


“Without design engineers, there would certainly be no missiles. Bats, on the other hand, would be around and would have evolved, without any scientists to observe them. Designs for bats, however, would not.” (Ingold, 67)

Ingold encourages us to re-invent our understanding of what a designer’s task is yet again; a designer is not only a trickster, but also an assembler. A watchmaker designing a clock to tell time, in a way, is the same as a bird designing a nest to lay their eggs, bringing pieces together to make them correspond to one another purposefully in a single creation. Next time you design a Canva website or an Insta photodump, you can relate yourself to a bird carefully assembling their nest– each decision is vitally different.

In conclusion, Ingold mainly uses Paley’s original arguments about design to tie back to his ideas of transduction and perdurance: designers, just like any makers, interact with the material flow with the use of a transducer, be it a pottery wheel or a set of watchmaker’s lenses and tweezers. These interactions shape us and our environments – a cycle of evolution, in a way. Whether Paley intended it or not, his paper on the naturalistic view of theology would be used to support Ingold’s argument almost two hundred years after it was written, and it won’t have to do anything with God, but everything to do with the act of Making. 

“It is precisely where the reach of the imagination meets the friction of materials, or where the forces of ambition rub up against the rough edges of the world, that human life is lived.” (Ingold, 73)

Works Cited

Ingold, Tim. Making. Routledge, 2013. 

Moore, Randy. “William Paley, 1743-1805.” NCSE (National Center for Science Education), 2009, ncse.ngo/william-paley-1743-1805. 

Paley, William. Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. Cambridge University Press, 2009. Digital scan of first-edition, published in 1805 by R. Faulder in London

Written by Allie, Bara, Celeste, and Naomi

Cover art by Celeste

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The Materials, The Readymade, and The Counterfeit: Inauthenticity of Objects According to Ingold and Eco

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“The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture” courtesy of The New Yorker.

Introduction

We tend to think of our objects as authored: whether they are made according to the drawing of a designer, the externalization of an artist’s emotions, or the disciplinary work of a scientist with a particle accelerator. Objects, as we have been studying, are a kind of media– the study of which is full of discussions around the auteur, authorship, and authorial intention versus audience perception. Both Tim Ingold and Umberto Eco question the assumption of authorship in object creation as a part of their scholarship. For Ingold, Chapter 2 of Making, “The materials of life”, sharply criticizes the hylomorphic model (aka, our understanding of objects as static forms born from a predestined image in the mind of a maker). For Eco, a semiotician, the idea of the counterfeit object relies on a complex ethical system for understanding what qualifies as a falsification. His understanding of objects in the essay “Untruths, Lies, Falsifications” (found in On the Shoulders of Giants), is that their authorship is fleeting and highly conditional. 

The Materials

At the beginning and the end of an object’s life cycle are materials. Ingold introduces a model in Making to help readers reframe their understanding of objects as final products, born from a design and static for all time. Instead, objects are mere “stoppage” points along a flow of materials, just as images are stoppage points along a flow of consciousness (20). The image and the object can correspond, Ingold says, but it is not one that determines the other. To illustrate this point, he gives us two salient examples of how objects transform from their presumed final state: one according to human intention, and the other according to natural forces.

“Householders might think of pots and pans as objects […] but for the dealer in scrap metal, they are lumps of material” (19). The process of regeneration and the value of objects and materials is here called into question. The notion of value in the object and its subsequent replications is also interesting to Eco, as I will explain later on. Human intention is seemingly both a force that informs an object’s creation, and also one that determines the object’s fraudulency. 

Secondly, Ingold provides an example of making as a process of growing and changing by describing the natural form-generating process: “The difference between a marble statue and a rock formation such as a stalagmite […] is not that one has been made and the other not. […O]nly this: that at some point in the formative history of this lump of marble, first a quarryman appeared on the scene who, with much force and with the assistance of hammers and wedges, wrested it from the bedrock, after which a sculptor set to work with a chisel in order, as he might put it, to release the form from the stone. But as every chip of the chisel contributes to the emergent form of the statue, so every drop of supersaturated solution from the roof of the cave contributes to the form of the stalagmite. When subsequently, the statue is worn down by rain, the form-generating process continues, but now without further human intervention” (21-22). 

The Readymade

The world of art and art history has taken major issue with this subject of form generation, in no way more obvious than in trying to define the “readymade object”. What happens when an artist takes something already composed from materials and puts it in a new context? Is this act of human intervention a form of making itself? To this question, Ingold might respond by asking an artist to describe their engagement with the materials in the work (in this case, the readymade object or objects, plus any other mediums used). “Even if the maker has a form in mind, it is not this form that creates the work. It is the engagement with materials”, he says. “Time and again, scholars have written as though to have a design for a thing, you already have the thing itself. Some versions of conceptual art and architecture have taken this reasoning to such an extreme that the thing itself becomes superfluous. It is but a representation – a derivative copy – of the design that preceded it (Frascari 1991: 93). If everything about a form is prefigured in the design, then why bother to make it at all?” (22). If the evolution of the object only exists in the mind of an artist or a viewer, has anything really been made at all?

The idea of originals and copies is exactly where Umberto Eco’s work comes in to expand Ingold’s ideas and consider what our current normative understanding of creation/ authorship versus copying/ counterfeit comes from. His work is also especially relevant to the art world, where collector’s items, originals, and fakes are fetishized and contentious. In particular, the passing of replica paintings for their originals has had unimaginable monetary and emotional costs. 

The Counterfeit

What is a counterfeit? “The counterfeiting of a pseudo-double lends itself to false identification that occurs when A (legitimate Author), in historical circum-stances t1, produces O (Original Object) while C (Counterfeiter) in historical  circumstances t2 produces CO (Counterfeit Object). But CO is not necessarily a forgery because C could have produced CO as an exercise or for fun” (183-4). Here Eco starts his argument by assuming the innocence of the counterfeiter. What really gets our goat, he argues, is how a third party– which he nicknames the Identifier– evaluates the original versus the copy. “A double is a physical token that possesses all the properties of another physical token, insofar as both have the pertinent features prescribed in an abstract type. […] Instead, we are dealing with pseudo-doubles when only one of the tokens of the type assumes, for one or more users, a particular value”(185). 

This may sound like a simple argument that explains how historical or sentimental value attached to the “original” version of a particular object is reflected in its cultural and/or monetary value. However, Eco’s argument then digs in and questions the fidelity of original works with the following paragraph:

“Sometimes C transforms the authentic object into a counterfeit version of itself. For example, unfaithful  restorations are carried  out on paintings or statues that transform the work, censor parts of the body, and break up a polyptych. Strictly speaking, those ancient  works  of  art  that  we  consider  originals  have  instead  been  transformed by the action of time or men—and have undergone amputations, restorations, alteration or loss of color. We need only think of the neoclassical ideal of a ‘white’ Hellenism, whereas the original temples and statues were multicolored. But, given that any material is subject to physical and chemical alterations from the very moment of creation, then every object should be seen as a permanent counterfeit of itself”(186-7).

Here is where I believe Ingold and Eco to be taking two different approaches towards the same issue. Ingold would say that a Greek sculpture is undergoing a continual process of growth as time and the elements wear away its colourful paint. Meanwhile, Eco would say that the image in our heads of an “original Greek sculpture” actually corresponds to a counterfeited version. The only difference between counterfeit like this and fraudulent counterfeit, he suggests, may be owed to the human intention behind the act of creating a copy or altering an original. 

Conclusion

“What happens if the authentic object either no longer exists, or has never existed– in any case, if it has never been seen by anyone?” Eco asks innocently, breaking his unending flow of evidence and reference (187). His argument suggests to us that the image of the original is actually ascribed such importance culturally and societally, that no matter how much the materials of an object flow– whether they are renovated and mended, or reduced to ruins and rubble– the image remains fixed at its “stoppage point”. 

Ingold details how we work through and make meaning from materials, and yet Eco supports a theory that we work through and make meaning from images. When our conscious experiences as a society join around these common images, perhaps we understand one another better through a shared culture. Both Ingold and Eco can be “correct” in their dialectical understandings of the object and the image, but who will help us to understand Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, or photos animated with Snapchat AI? The questions of making, re-making, and counterfeiting– and what these processes might entail– feel equally if not more important to media studies today than discussing the death of the author. Their relevance to us both as to makers and consumers of media is exceptionally strong.

Works Cited

Eco, Umberto. “8. Untruths, Lies, Falsifications”. On the Shoulders of Giants, Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2019, pp. 170-195. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674242265-009

Ingold, Tim. “The Materials of Life.” Making, Routledge, New York, NY, 2013, pp. 17–31, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/reader/download/f3935efc-cf5e-4c85-ab70-2e61f46e8689/book/pdf 

Blog post written by Naomi Brown

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The Test of Time: Media and Memory Through Eco and Ingold

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Davide Ferrario’s film, Umberto Eco: A Library of the World memorializes many of Eco’s theories, particularly the relationship between media and memory, which works through its connection to history. Eco himself is staunchly committed to physical media, blatantly exhibited through his sprawling library which is featured in the film’s opening credits. These themes of media and memory pervade throughout the film and are evident through the glimpses Eco gives the viewer of his own personal philosophy and conduct. His emphasis on physical media and the unique qualities he attributes to it align with the philosophies that Tim Ingold describes in his book Making. Ingold’s propositions recommending a re-evaluation of how we approach the concepts of learning and making are complementary to Eco’s valuation of physical media. Both theorists approach media in the same way, just from two directions: Eco reflects on a ‘finished’ product, while Ingold proposes restructuring our understanding of media from its inception. 

Physical Media and Memory

Eco espouses the benefits of physical media’s permanence. There are books that are hundreds of years old which can still be read and observed, yet “today’s computers are unable to read what we recorded two decades ago”(Ferrario 21:00-21:20). This longevity sustains physical media’s connection to history–and subsequently memory–in a way that is impossible for digital media.

The immediacy of the digital, while convenient, is not conducive to creating longlasting media that is tied to memory. By lacking memory, digital media offers little learning opportunity in the way that Ingold defines it: the process of accruing knowledge by being taught by the world rather than simply intaking information about it (2). Though the easy discussion forums presented by online media appear to help the flow and interexchange of knowledge, they primarily orchestrate an excessive influx of information that is designed to be consumed quickly and easily, not to facilitate effective and educational discussion. These discussion forums then become performative opportunities for interaction that are dictated by algorithms designed to cater information based on its audience.

Physical media, like Eco’s books, is a published thing. The source information cannot be changed on the same whim as that online, yet it’s this stagnation that allows for further reflection and change of perception over time. This temporal aspect of physical media is what truly makes it a conduct of memory. By remaining the same, the information is the finished object within the dynamic thing of the book (Ingold 85). The book can be altered physically, and through correspondence, because its information is not adapting to the audience.

Physical Media vs. Digital Media

During an interview featured in the film, Umberto Eco is discussing his own digital media habits and how he recently downloaded a copy of Proust’s Recherche onto his iPad. He then expresses frustration that he “could not underline any passage, [he] could not make dog-ears, [he] didn’t smear the pages with [his] dirty thumb”(Ferrario12:18-12:37). Evidently, Eco wants to alter his books as he reads them. He wants to impart his own thoughts onto the already published media, which is a far more dynamic process than simply absorbing the information that the book’s words offer. In this desire, Eco aligns himself with both Ingold’s philosophies of learning, and his views on the treatment of art. Ingold deems the role of students–or in this case readers–is not to mindlessly consume the information offered by an established source, but to “collaborate in the shared pursuit of understanding”(13). Similarly, he encourages us to view art as things that give “direct correspondence [to] the creative processes that give rise to them” rather than simply as “works to be analyzed”(Ingold 7).

Books: An Object or a Thing?

A pillar of Making is Ingold’s discernment between objects and things. An object “is complete in itself” and we cannot “join with it in the process of its formation”(85). Conversely, things are “with us” and allow us to correspond with their materials (Ingold 85). This distinction mirrors that of Eco’s explanation of bibliophiles versus bibliomaniacs. A bibliomaniac reserves his books to himself “because he would fear thieves from all over the world would flock to steal it”, while a bibliophile would “share his wonder with everybody and they’d be proud they knew it was his”(Ferrario 16:52-17:00). 

By this definition, bibliomaniacs view books as prized assets of information, to be hoarded and kept away, effectively rendering them stagnant objects of observation and considering them complete, despite this state of futility. If no one is around to read the books, there is no further knowledge to be gained than that which is printed on their pages. Meanwhile, bibliophiles share the information in their collections, inviting discussion and utilizing books as vessels to obtain further knowledge. Eco’s definition of bibliophile is one that exists harmoniously within Ingold’s definition of learning.

Eco deems books as “irreplaceable”(Ferrario 12:45). Books, and any other physical media, are inherently unique. Walter Benjamin defines this uniqueness using the concept of aura, which is congruent to the memory instilled into a physical medium and is not present in its replications as it is “embedded in the fabric of tradition”(6). The physical process of making a book, and its distribution to its eventual owners, is entirely distinct to another printing of that same book. The initial individuality and aura of physical media again cooperates with Ingold’s definition of making. 

Per Ingold, the process of making does not end with its finished ‘product’, as other factors will continue to act upon it over time (22). In this way, making is “a process of correspondence: not the imposition of preconceived form on raw material substance, but the drawing out or bringing forth of potentials immanent in a world of becoming”(Ingold 31). These ideas readily translate to Eco’s beloved physical media. No two books are affected by the world around them in the same way, but a pdf of a text will remain generally unchanged no matter whose device it is on. Furthermore, Ingold defines making as a “process of growth” wherein artists and other forces–in this case, the books’ audiences–work in tandem with the materials they are manipulating/experiencing (21). This approach to making and artistry is synonymous to the way Eco creates a reciprocal relationship between his books and his thoughts.

Mass Media 

The concept of mass media provides an interesting nuance to these theories. It, like any other form of media, must be made. Ingold further defines making as a process of correspondence, where transducers allow interaction between the kinaesthesia and material flow until they become indistinguishable, parallelling John Durham Peters’ definition of media as “symbolic connectors” between messages, means, and agents (Ingold 102, Peters 266). By these definitions the means/transducer creates a bridge from the kinaesthesia/message to the material flow/agents, ultimately creating the media that is observed or discussed. However, a defining characteristic of mass media is the distance and distinction between the senders and receivers, rather than each party taking on an interchangeable role (Peters, 267).

This differentiation of author and audience intrinsically opposes Ingold’s aforementioned definition of learning. The purpose behind mass media is to communicate to the masses (Peters, 268). With this purpose, the process of making is centred around the dissemination of the final product and any discussion that this media spurs is generally between two receivers, not the sender. In this way, mass media features something consumable, not collaborative. 

Mass media as consumption is far more relevant when considering digital mass media versus physical mass media. With the sheer amount of content created and its potential for profit, digital media often becomes a transaction. It attempts to balance its message with enough ease of digestibility, often diluting or changing its message in the name of profit. Through this, digital media becomes a stagnant object because of its dynamic form. The message gradually changes for its audience so it is always meant to be consumed at face value, not discussed at length. In our modern digital media landscape, everything is meant to attract our attention instantly. This quickens the pace at which we consume digital media and the extent to which it is mechanically reproduced effectively removes any aura or memory that was once attached to it, reinforcing Benjamin’s relative disdain for mechanical reproduction (4). Finally, the ease of mechanical reproduction works against the integration of memory into digital media. Umberto Eco says it best: “when everything is recorded, we don’t feel the need to remember it”(Ferrario 22:49-22:53).

Conclusion

Umberto Eco loved his books and, considering Ingold’s theories on making and learning, the opposing affordances between physical and digital media, and Benjamin’s resolution in the plight that is mechanical reproduction, it’s easy to see why. 

Citations

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction”, Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, 1969.

Ingold, Tim. Making. Routledge, 2013.

Peters, John Durham. “Mass Media”,  Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T Mitchell and Mark, B.N. Hansen, The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 266-279.

Umberto Eco: A Library of the World. Directed by Davide Ferrario. Performance by Umberto Eco, Zoe Tavarelli, and Giuseppe Cederna. 2022.

Photo by Molly Kingsley

Written by Molly Kingsley