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DOI: 10.1177/1470357210372718 2010 9: 273Visual
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Victor BuchliThe prototype: presencing the immaterial
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DOI 10.1177/1470357210372718
AR T I C L E
The prototype: presencing the immaterial
V I C TOR BUCH L IDepartment of Anthropology, University College
London, UK
A BS TRAC T
This article explores the social effects and materiality of the
prototype. Three diverse cultural contexts and prototyping
technologies are examined: the early Christian prototype in the
Byzantine iconographic tradition; the rise of rapid prototyping in
20th-century industry; and the emergence of rapid manufacturing in
the 21st century. Despite evident technological differences and
complexities and divergent cultural contexts, the author argues
that all three technologies work in a similar way through varying
concepts of the prototype to produce and presence the immaterial
and thereby create novel forms of social and material life. He
shows how the prototype, as a con-cept, functions to overcome
seemingly insurmountable obstacles of time, space and the material,
whether through the creation of the Christian sub-ject and the
ancestor of Euro-American notions of the universalizing human-ist
subject or through the radically disruptive effects of rapid
manufacturing (or three-dimensional printing) within late
capitalism and with it the fraught emergence of the neo-liberal
subject.
KEY WORDS
icons immateriality prototypes rapid manufacturing technologies
of presence
I
This article considers two traditions of the prototype: the
early Christian pro-totype at the beginning of our Common Era and
the technologies surrounding rapid prototyping and rapid
manufacturing in the present. It will be argued that the prototype
as seen through these examples represents a particular kind of
technology in order to produce and presence the immaterial in
powerful and disruptive scales and forge new forms of sociality. In
particular, the senso-rial dimension in which the prototype works
is key towards understanding its efficacity and its ability to
forge and presence the immaterial and effect
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274 V i s u a l C ommun i c a t i o n 9 ( 3 )
the terms of social life: either in terms of the immaterial
divine (as we shall see with the technologies of the prototype
surrounding the Christian icon) or in terms of immaterial digital
code in relation to the emergence of rapid manufacturing at the
beginning of the 21st century. In particular, the issue of haptic
forms of vision, such as touch, will be examined and the types of
social engagements they produce. Such types of vision challenge
dominant under-standings of visual communication which privilege a
certain understanding of disembodied vision at the expense of
understandings that consider vision in a more sensual, tactile and
embodied fashion.
In considering the prototype, the figure of Christ as the
original pro-totype is compelling, not just in terms of this
figures role in forging the terms of Euro-American universalism
(Cannell, 2006) and the universal Christian subject. But more
emphatically for our purposes, it is the assertion within the
Christian tradition indebted to St John of Damascus that, with
Christ, the divine appears in material form and is thereby
apprehensible, represent-ing the significance of the material for
presencing and producing the divine and immaterial. This assertion
that the material can presence the divine in a fashion that is not
considered idolatrous lies at the heart of this tradition. The
material makes available for apprehension and emulation the
divinity of God. With this assertion is an understanding of how the
material can pres-ence the absent other worldly and in particular
how the Christian prototype produces a distinctive understanding of
the relationship between the mate-rial and the immaterial.
In the first centuries of the Christian church, ascetic and
ascetical prac-tices figured prominently in terms of presencing the
divine in Christian life. Through mimetic practices, the ascetic
was able to emulate the life of Christ and bring about this
material manifestation of the divine. Viewers of such ascetics and
their practices both in person and in oral and textual
reitera-tions were able to participate and witness how the Christ
prototype could be instantiated through mimetic practices that
attempted to overcome time, geography, tradition and the quotidian
to presence the divine and create the universal Christian
subject.
Harpham (1987) describes the ascetic body of early Christianity
as an exemplary artefact that through the rigours of ascetic
practices assumes an almost thing-like disposition (see also Rio,
2009). This is exemplified in the figure of St Simeon the Stylite
who reputedly sat on a column for 36 years, becoming in effect a
hybrid thing-like column/man. Such mortifications and disciplinary
practices were attempts to repeat the original prototype of Christ
himself. Thus, through these ascetic practices, the emulation of
the prototype according to Gregory of Nyssa could be seen to be in
accord with the charac-ter of the Archetype and thereby a reworking
of the ascetic as an image of the invisible God (Harpham, 1987:
24). In this way, the mortifications of the flesh which could
produce boasts amongst ascetics, such as I am deader than thou (p.
26) were attempts to realize in as perfect a way as possible a
reiteration of
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the original form of Christ through the production of this
almost object-like (and therefore dead) reiteration of the divine
prototype.
Inherent within this process is the necessary failure of any
attempt to realize the divine prototype completely, in all its
thing-like and monumental form. To realize it fully is to be
literally dead and, in the eyes of later church fathers, this was
seen to be also the realization of the sinful demonic tempta-tion
of perfect imitation (p. 43) which could be seen to compete with
the original prototype. Rather Harpham notes propos the early
Christian writer Athanasius in his hagiography of St Anthony that
the very imperfectability of the prototype is part of its
generative power. Virtue lies in the reiteration indefinitely into
the future. It would have no social and theological power if it
were not necessary to constantly and incompletely reiterate it into
the future, assuring the continuity of the prototype and its power
indefinitely across time and space. The imperfectability of the
prototype is precisely what makes it available for extensive and
future iterability thereby sustaining its generative power.
Part of its key generative power is the ability of the ascetic
practices in imitation of the prototype to produce a universality
and fixity where intrigu-ingly, the task facing believers who would
follow the pattern consists of the imitation of an original model
whose distinction lay in programmatic self-abuse (p. xiv). As this
might suggest, more significantly, the power of such reiterations
of the prototype was realized more in the production of form than
through systemic physical abuse, mortification and decay with which
to reiterate the prototype. Key to this process was the importance
of vision. The mortified ascetic body was made available to
pilgrims and readers of their nar-ratives in visual form as a means
both for emulation but also (more important for this discussion)
for presencing. Ascetic programmatic self-abuse not only reiterated
the prototype but, because of the significance of existing theories
of haptic vision, the prototype was actually sustained and extended
through time and space by these mimetic practices.
Vision and touch in our modern understanding are typically
separate. But haptic notions of touch rely on a theory of
visibility in which vision and touch are linked, based upon
Aristotelian traditions of vision in which it is considered a form
of touch of rays emanating from the thing perceived and actually
touching the viewer. Following this concept, magical contagion is
facilitated and with it the transmission and sustenance of divine
powers. Individual men and women become active, tactile viewers
able to touch the prototype as well as being touched by it through
their eyes, thereby presenc-ing the divine and facilitating its
transmission and sustenance across time and space. As Georgia Frank
(2000) observed, such ascetic narratives operated in this way so
that to become was to see (p. 33) and, as she notes, further
quoting a Coptic preacher: What the eye sees it appropriates
(Frank, 2000). This was a form of tactile piety as Frank (2000)
remarks where the haptic function allowed vision to reach into the
past and sanctify the present (p. 133).
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The apprehension of the ascetic body, visually and imaginatively
through narrative, created a form of tactile vision that allowed
the viewers to see past the decrepit conditions of the ascetic body
towards the light emanat-ing from within. Such an eye had
penetrative powers that could see past divin-ity, functioning like
an index where smoke is seen as an index of fire and is physically
connected to it. So here the decrepit ascetic body serves to index
and physically instantiate the divine prototype through the tactile
vision of the viewer and by means of this tactile piety to sustain
and project the prototype forward across time and space through the
power of haptic vision. As Frank notes: one gazed at external
features in order to gaze through them (p. 169) becoming face to
face encounters in a setting where the desert and paradise elide
(p. 100).
The work of haptic visuality is further articulated by the role
of bread, bone and image for the reiteration of the prototype.
Where bone is consid-ered in relation to relics and the prototype,
the haptic eye is able to touch and reconstruct the prototype.
Early Christian fathers such as Jerome observed how relics were
merely a bit of powder wrapped in a costly cloth (Frank, 2000:
176); however, haptic vision was able to reconstruct and reiterate
the relics as the prophet indexed, as if they beheld a living
prophet in their midst (p. 176). Likewise, fragments of the cross
could function in terms familiar to us as a DNA metaphor through
haptic vision. Paulanus of Nola describes how this occurs:
Let not your faith shrink because the eyes of the body behold
evidence
so small; let it look with the inner eye on the whole power of
the cross
in this tiny segment. Once you think that you behold the wood
on
which our Salvation, the Lord of Majesty, was hanged with nails
whilst
the world trembled, you too must tremble, but you must also
rejoice.
(p. 177)
The image works in a similar fashion to presence the divine and
reiterate the prototype by virtue of haptic visuality. According to
Barber (2002), the icon/image is a means of extending the relics
touch through a tangible reiteration. This is possible in terms of
haptic vision because such vision looks at rather than past to
achieve tactile contact with the divine prototype and through the
principle of magical contagion is able to presence it within the
sensuous hap-tic circuit of viewericonprototype. Following
Brubaker, Barber describes the icon as
a devotional image that served as an intermediary between the
viewer
and the person represented the sacred portrait is best
understood as
a transparent window that the viewer looks through (to the
prototype,
the actual person represented) rather than at: the gaze does not
stop at
the surface of the panel, but goes to the prototype. (p. 29)
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Rather than it being an image in a modern sense, the icon is
also a relic, both original and copy. It is a copy because it is a
reiteration of the prototype and it is a relic because haptically
it has direct and physically contagious contact with the prototype,
thus becoming a site of physical exchange and contagion with divine
power surmounting conventional scales of time and space and
produc-ing a universality and undifferentiated presence across time
and place. Within such a setting, it is difficult to disentangle
the various elements of viewer, icon/relic and prototype it is hard
to see where one thing ends and another begins within the circuit
of tactile piety such distinctions that conventional disci-plinary
terms of analysis require are misleading here.
The iconoclastic controversies of the 8th and 9th centuries in
Byzantium debated the relative efficacity of icons to adequately
reiterate the divine proto-type. The media of mundane materials,
such as wood, paint, etc., were ques-tioned in relation to
alternative means of presencing notably the Eucharist because of
Christs own iteration of his prototype through his own words: this
is my body and this is my blood. Thus the iconoclastic Emperor
Constantine V asserted the Eucharist as more effective for
reiterating the divine prototype: The bread which we take is also
an icon of his body, having fashioned his flesh so that it becomes
a figure of his body (Barber, 2002: 80). Chosen by Christ himself,
these media were believed to be superior to others.
In contrast, Nikephoros argued for the superiority of icons to
reiterate the divine prototype on similar grounds:
The icon has a relation to the archetype and is the effect of a
cause.
Therefore, because of this, it necessarily is and might be
called a relative.
A relative is said to be such as it is from its being of some
other thing,
and in the relation they are reciprocal Likeness is an
intermediate
relation and mediates between the extremes, I mean the likeness
and
the one of whom it is a likeness, uniting and connecting by
form, even
though they differ by nature [thus] making the absent
present
by manifesting the similarity and the memory of the shape [the
icon]
maintains [with its archetype] an uninterrupted relation
throughout
its existence. (cited in Barber, 2002: 116, 119)
Therefore, when icons regained favour in terms of their
efficacity for presencing and extending the divine prototype
through time and space, we can see how this worked in terms of
Aristotelian haptic visuality in the homily delivered by the
Patriarch Photios in 867 at the unveiling of the apsidal mosaic of
the Enthroned Theotokos in St Sophia in Constantinople
(Istanbul):
No less then these, but rather greater, is the power of sight.
For surely
whenever the thing seen is touched and caressed by the
outpouring
and emanation of the optical rays, the form of the thing seen is
sent
on to the mind, letting it be translated from there to the
memory for
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278 V i s u a l C ommun i c a t i o n 9 ( 3 )
the accumulation of a knowledge that is without any error.
(cited in
Barber, 2002: 136, see Figure 1)
I I
Gells (1998) technical explication of the prototype conforms
with the early Christian accounts just described. The prototype
itself is generative of all the possible variations of the
prototype over time and space, creating what Gell refers to as the
distributed artefact, where the discrete three-dimensional
mate-rial entity is merely an instantiation within a fourth
dimension of the various instantiations of the prototype. As such,
it represents a powerful force for the creation of entities outside
the conventional parameters of time and space, and even biological
life span, as Gell demonstrates with the Maori meeting house whose
three-dimensional manifestation is merely an instance of the four
dimensions in which the house extends over time and space and the
biological life span of the individual that is defined in terms of
the larger genea-logical entity of the Maori meeting house itself,
which eventually absorbs the individual. Similarly, the ambiguity
between the various instantiations of the prototype in three and
four dimensions make it unviable to be considered in segregated
discrete instances, where three-dimensional instantiations and the
extended prototype over four dimensions are impossible to
disentangle con-ceptually. The Aristotelian haptic principle in the
late Antique examples show how this in fact difficult to achieve
despite modern sensibilities.
Figure 1 Hagia Sophia, the Enthroned Theotokos, Istanbul. Photo
Victor Buchli.
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These modern sensibilities undergo a similar challenge when
confronted with the rise of the technologies of rapid prototyping
and rapid manufactur-ing in the present day where conventional
dualisms regarding the immaterial/material, signified/sign
subject/object are called into question by a new tech-nology of the
prototype: rapid manufacturing. Rapid manufacturing or
three-dimensional printing produces objects directly from the CAD
(computer aided drawing) code used to describe it. Any imaginable
object of any shape or con-figuration that can be modelled in CAD
can be printed three dimensionally on a three-dimensional printer
much like a conventional laser printer but in three dimensions
along the z-axis using highly fluid media of polymer, ceram-ics, or
metal, typically in powdered form. What this means is that the
distinction between code and object is difficult to make, that is
the distinction between prototype and every subsequent
instantiation is difficult to achieve as in the examples presented
here of the early Christian prototype.
The technology of rapid manufacturing derives from rapid
prototyp-ing which itself emerged from two late 19th-century
inventions, namely the contour map and photo sculpture. The contour
map modelled three-dimen-sional space to small scales, building up
each layer of three-dimensional space according to a specific
increment along the z-axis. This process is essentially what the
three-dimensional printer does, using various media to be built up
layer by layer to create the three-dimensional object. The second
invention is Franois Wilhelms Photo Sculptures which created
three-dimensional sculp-tures from two-dimensional photographs. The
technique was simple but its effects were very sophisticated. The
subject of the Photo Sculpture was placed in the centre of a
circular room around which 24 cameras were evenly placed along the
perimeter and a photograph was taken. Each image was then used to
produce a contour in which the 24 cameras could be assembled in the
round to produce a mould that could then be used to cast a
three-dimensional por-trait sculpture in any medium that could be
cast within the mould. Wilhelms studio only lasted a few years in
Paris, yet his clientele represented the famous, such as Daguerre
himself, and the aristocracy, such as the Royal Family of Spain, as
well as attracting the interest of the sculptor Rodin. Typically,
only portrait sculptures of named individuals were produced not
allegorical, his-torical or mythological representations.
These two 19th-century innovations laid the groundwork in the
sec-ond half of the 20th century for the creation of rapid
prototyping machines that could produce models and moulds for
industrial use. However, with advances in CAD and the production of
more sophisticated printers, the intermediary model and mould phase
became increasingly irrelevant for manufacturing.
The technologies of rapid manufacturing that subsequently
emerged from rapid prototyping were basically immaterial
technologies based on inchoate formless powders and ephemeral
digital codes. In fact, the only stable element of the technology
was its immaterial digital code and nothing
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much else: its material iterations were paradoxically much more
unstable. As a consequence, industry observers heralded the
emergence of rapid manufacturing as the second Industrial
Revolution because of the radical challenges it posed for our
understanding of manufacture and materiality (Hopkinson et al.,
2006). Emerging as it did from rapid prototyping, this new
technology produced three-dimensional objects of any imaginable
shape that were once impossible to create by any other method thus
offering what engineers refer to as total geometric freedom. Put
simply, an object is con-ceived three dimensionally on a computer
(in CAD software) and the digital information (translated into an
.stl [standard triangulation language] file) is then used to build
up the object additively, unlike conventionally subtractive
methods, through highly fluid media such as powdered polymers, or
met-als (amongst others) with a micro layering technique (such as
laser sinter-ing and stereo lithography) into an actual
three-dimensional artefact. These three-dimensional printers can
range from free-standing personal factories (Perfactory) about the
size of a small copy machine to units large enough to print out a
three-dimensional life-size figure of a person and even much larger
ones that can print out architectural and aeronautical components.
The CAD image can be created anywhere in the world and transmitted
digit-ally anywhere else to be built up virtually instantaneously
depending on scale and media. No solid materials are being
manipulated only a binary digital code, powdered elements and
liquids. Its uses are wildly diverse, producing anything from
medical prostheses to automobile components, lampshades, spare
parts on space missions, aeroplane wings and fruit bowls.
Described as a disruptive technology by many observers and
devel-opers of this technology that upsets traditional design and
manufactur-ing practice (Hopkinson et al., 2006), rapid
manufacturing poses a series of problems for conventional modern
understandings of materiality at the beginning of the 21st century.
At stake are long-standing assumptions criti-cal to Western thought
such as the ontological separation of living and dead matter, of
thought and thing, nature and culture, subject and object, and of
creativity and authenticity, which rapid manufacturing further
disrupts almost completely. Because it can print out objects three
dimensionally, it is able to avoid almost entirely the conventional
restrictions of matter and manufacturing constraints. It can
construct solid objects that can be com-posed of hybrid materials,
ceramic to polymer to metal, for instance, all fused at the micro
level. Its largest commercial applications are for dental implants,
hearing-aid cases and medical prostheses. Human bones, teeth, etc.
can be scanned and printed three dimensionally in various materials
to cre-ate prostheses based on the precise dimensions of an
individual. Currently, there is production and research in progress
that enables the three-dimen-sional printing of human tissue, using
living cells, that is currently available commercially as the
Envisiontec 3-D Bioplotter that can print human tissue for
implantation.
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Rapid manufacturing thus challenges a number of our prevailing
assumptions of artefacts and their social dimension as well as our
understand-ings of presence, suggesting, I would argue, an
alternative understanding of presence in terms of propinquity, that
is in terms of relations of analogy, near-ness in time, or nearness
of place, rather than in terms of visual and physical co-presence
as would be the case in colloquial empirical terms. Furthermore,
our understanding of artefacts once thought of as the passive
reflections of our intentions and more recently understood in terms
of their recalcitrance and their ability to resist our projects by
virtue of their multilayered mate-riality what Keane (2005) refers
to as bundling are problematized by this new technology. This
recalcitrance has been taken as an indication of a certain
independent agency manifested as an irreducible datum that shapes
our social and material worlds. The technologies of rapid
manufacturing call these con-ventional understandings of material
recalcitrance within anthropology and the social sciences into
question. For within this emergent technology, objects begin to
exhibit, it would seem, apparently no recalcitrance at all in fact,
what we create can be almost as exact as we want it to be relative
to the restric-tions imposed by traditional manufacturing.
Traditional material resistances encountered in conventional
manufacturing are negligible, if non- existent. As a second
Industrial Revolution, rapid manufacturing calls into question the
great social edifices of the first Industrial Revolution, with its
contingent social hierarchies and inequalities so trenchantly
criticized by Marx and generations of historians and social
scientists since then. Rapid manufacturing suggests that the
classical social structures associated with production are further
chal-lenged: creator and producer, worker and capitalist, are one,
distanced physi-cally from one another only by the proximity of
their machines. In this light, questions of propinquity rather than
conventional presence in relation to issues of labour and
migration, global flows of investment and capital are all
profoundly implicated when artefacts can be purchased online,
instantly cus-tomized and then printed out anywhere in the world.
This is well illustrated by a recent collaboration between the
Rabih Hage Gallery in London with the German company Eon, a 3-D
manufacturing developer with their first iteration of a rapid
manufactured architectural structure: a pavilion. As the Rabih Hage
Gallerys March 2008 press release plainly suggests: the CAD data
(drawings) can be sent via email. This data can be used to
manufacture the pavilion on an E-Manufacturing machine anywhere in
the world, therefore incurring no shipping cost, taxes or duties.
Whole realms of space, geography, time, the nation state, tax
regimes and labour markets, including trade union agreements, are
superseded by the click of a mouse. The vicious bifurcation
(Whitehead, 2000) that has constituted our understandings of the
empiri-cal world and girded the productive dualisms constituting
social life, and the objects and subjects forged therein, are
almost conflated and entirely oblit-erated in the creative and
manufacturing processes underlying rapid manu-facturing when the
digital representation and physical thing are difficult to
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meaningfully differentiate in time and space much like we have
seen occur with the Christian icon and the prototype. Propinquity
in terms of physical and visual co-presence is confounded as the
artefact can be seen to exist in a distributed spatial and temporal
context that is outside colloquial understand-ings of empirical
presence.
This leads to another issue: the new terms by which people and
things are refigured and assembled. Rapid manufacturing emerging
within the social changes wrought by neo-liberal globalization and
digitization forces us to rethink our received understandings of
social relations within traditional notions of production and
exchange and their attendant productive dual-isms. For instance,
the classical problem of the alienated worker and ruptured social
bonds is potentially even further exacerbated by the extreme
individua-tion suggested by the personal factory (Perfactory). The
classic 19th-century industrial town and its institutions of labour
and social life, vast landscapes and distributive networks, and
material infrastructures that might produce a given part are
supplanted by the highly individualized personal factory in ones
office. Normal flows of globalization are disrupted as objects can
be cre-ated at point of need at any time rather than produced
somewhere else with traditional tooling and materials at another
location/country and transported (by air, sea, or land) to the
point of use.
As our conventional understandings of life, the real, virtual
and authentic become unstable and are further challenged when
considering printed human tissue, so too are notions of time
associated with the manu-factured object, which is based on a past
prototype and accumulated expe-rience upon which innovations are
based, contingencies planned for and produced. Traditional
anthropological notions in the social sciences of con-sumption,
appropriation, authenticity and alienation are entirely refigured
when the increasing trend towards mass customization in
manufacturing, and their attendant social and political hierarchies
are conflated with rapid manufacturing. This is the dilemma that
manufacturers must confront when considering whether a branded
commodity is customized by an individual customer to such a degree
that it might cease to be recognized as belonging to that brand.
Additionally, time takes on a new and unexplored social dimen-sion.
As can be expected within such a radical reconfiguration, our
tempo-ral focus shifts past linear modes for envisioning future
scenarios based on cumulative patterns of previous experience are
replaced by an open-ended futurity. Unanticipated needs are met at
unanticipated times. All contin-gencies are apparently mastered. As
we have seen with the emergence of the Christian prototype that
created a radical new frame within which to presence the divine
universally within a distinct temporal and geographic frame, so too
rapid manufacturing produces a new frame within which to consider
the nature of the artefact and temporality. If the only stable
entity is the ostensibly immaterial code and if its iterations in
three-dimensional print are technically endless and limitless, what
is the status of the artefact in terms of its location
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in time and space, and what is its configuration within these
dimensions? How might it be collected and what might collecting
actually mean if the only stable entity is the digital code as an
.stl file or as an iteration of given printing in physical form, in
terms of physical and visual co-presence? Is it the code that is to
be collected or the artefact itself? The stability of the code as
opposed to the instability of the infinitely printable object
subject to decay, breakage and misuse, suggests that it is the code
itself, the .stl file that must be preserved. As such, the highly
intangible and immaterial digital code is paradoxically the element
that achieves all the status of stability, solidity and coherence
that we normally associate with a physically dense artefact. This
is the case in terms of intellectual property, where it is the code
itself that is protected much like digital music files and not the
manufacturing process or the artefact itself. Ostensibly, one could
copy (i.e. not reprint) an object, but it would never be a
reiteration of the original code. Furthermore, what kinds of social
commit-ments and collectivities can then be seen to ensue? What
might be the status of conventional notions of the empirical?
Questions regarding the simulacrum and aura from Benjamin to the
question of the distributed artefact of Alfred Gell take on a
renewed significance within this disruptive technology, much as the
original Christian prototype did at the beginning of our Common Era
with a new understanding of presence in terms of propinquity and
nearness.
A brief case study is appropriate here to give a sense of the
profound implications of this form of the prototype. Roger Spielman
(2006) of Sold Concepts describes how rapid manufacturing is used
in the production of a part, namely a capacitor box for the
International Space Station. All parts to be used on the
International Space Station need to be flight certified but to do
so requires an extensive paper trail to document every aspect of
the produc-tion and certify every part used. The decision to use
rapid manufacturing to produce a capacitor box raised a number of
problematic issues, namely what precisely would be flight certified
in the absence of traditional materials and manufacturing. The SLS
(Selective Laser Sintering) machine and the software specifications
for the part could be controlled and accounted for in the
con-ventional terms. However, neither the machine nor the software
were quite the part, but yet neither was the nylon powder that
would be built up by the SLS machine according to the
specifications created within the software. This could only be
achieved by subjecting the powder itself to quality control in
terms of colour, uniformity and sieve analysis. Once this was done,
the pow-der ceased to be just a powder. It was separated from other
similar powders at the SLS station used for prototyping and was
repackaged as flight material only, achieving status as flight
certified and moving from inchoate powder to part by being labelled
at this stage as flight certified material. The proc-ess of
transforming inchoate powder into a flight certified part was
further consolidated by accountancy procedures to document and
establish quality control through manufacturing operations record
books (MOR) the legal document that identified the entire
manufacturing process step by step as
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284 V i s u a l C ommun i c a t i o n 9 ( 3 )
well as the history of qualifications of the individuals engaged
on the project (Spielman, 2006).
However, the architectural and disciplinary location of the
manufac-ture had an unexpected importance for achieving its status
as a part in the wider social context of the organization of
labour. This was because the part was not produced in a
manufacturing group; rather it was done in a room occupied by
engineers with their SLS machine. Though the nylon powder entered
the room as a raw material, once it had been graded within the
room, become flight certified and had been built up by the
Sinterstation, it became a part. Once it became a part, it could
only leave the room under the control of what Spielman (2006) calls
a different bargaining unit (commonly called a union) (p. 246). If
it were moved out of the room to be further processed or used
elsewhere without union personnel, the union would file a
grievance. Thus all the post-processing was done in the room of the
engineering facility and the inspectors were also brought in across
the threshold of that space to perform their final verifications.
Then the former inchoate powder emerged as a fully flight-certified
part once it crossed the threshold of the room to be moved by union
personnel as a part under union control to be delivered according
to union agreements to where it needed to be used further in the
construction of the International Space Station.
The speed with which the part could be built and the ability for
the machinery to exist outside the normal spatial frames of
manufacturing destabilized the existing terms of disciplinary
expertise, spatial location and labour relations to create a
radically localized and singular locus for manu-facturing within
the confines of the room outside the normally regulated spatial and
disciplinary contexts of factory setting. Because the capacitor box
can be produced in one space within the factory complex, it is able
to upset long-established labour relations. The threshold of the
engineers room became transformative (Taussig, 1993). As soon as
the powder for the laser sintering machine passes over the
threshold, it ceases to be relatively worth-less powder and goes on
to become a part, a part that is certified accord-ing to experts
who enter the room subject to union and quality assurance
guidelines. Once in, however, it cannot leave except under union
authority. Thus the radical localization that the technology
facilitates is able to con-centrate in a circumscribed space a
series of operations and transformations that would have once taken
place over vastly different scales of time and place and the social
organization of labour. The technology in terms of its radical
localization is able to disrupt what was the product of many years
of labour history and agitation. As the case study suggests, the
radically destabilizing effects of this new technology of the
prototype are only now beginning to be felt. Spatial boundaries,
such as thresholds, take on new trans-substantiative powers within
the nexus of threshold, space, intensely individualized tech-nology
and labour union agreements.
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285Bu c h l i : T h e p r o t o t y p e
A B I T O F POWDER WRAPPED I N COS T L Y C LO TH
Therefore if we consider worthless powders and prototypes in
both the Byzantine and late modern contexts, we can see how two
forms of proto-typicality work. Both technologies serve to
reconfigure understandings of the immaterial and material substance
to transform quite radically existing understandings of time and
space. Within these reconfigurations, existing understandings of
personhood and subjectivity also change. In the Christian context,
it creates the possibility with which the notion of the universal
Christian subject can arise. Similarly, within the late capitalist
context, rapid manufacturing creates a context within which extreme
forms of individuation and localization are made possible, forms
that override existing communal interests such as the work of
labour unions, as demonstrated in the example of the International
Space Station. More significantly, both technologies of the
prototype produce and exploit qualities of the immaterial in order
to achieve these powerful transformations. In the case of the
Christian prototype, the relative immateriality of the icon as
worthless wood and paint or the relative insignificance of powder
as relics or mundane bread are able to be marshalled within the
technology of the prototype to presence the divine and effect the
universal Christian subject. Similarly, the immateriality of rapid
manufactur-ing as code and powder may be employed to effect changes
of extraordinary scale and power that challenge accepted modern
dualisms structuring social life. Such technologies of the
prototype are able to do this because of the means by which the
immaterial is produced and forged within these technologies of the
prototype that actively exploit the power of this produced
immateriality to confound existing settlements. However, unlike the
Christian prototype, the iteration is perfect and is the same
anywhere and at any time, given the same media and printing
machine. In a sense, it is a demonic technology that can assure its
perfectibility in relation to the original code and the owner of
copyright. If the imperfect iterability of the Christian prototype
secured its generative power that could produce the universal
Christian subject and cre-ated the terms of an ever expanding
sociality that permitted the incorpora-tion of new subjects within
the Christian ecumene indefinitely and without limit over time and
space, then the perfect iterability of the rapidly manu-factured
object does not have that same generative potential. Its
iterability is perfect and thereby fixed and circumscribed, and not
infinitely generative (a view opposed to some visionary engineers
who imagine rapid manufacturing machines able to produce other
rapid manufacturing machines indefinitely over time and space),
thus securing the value of the commodity in terms of capitalist
value and circulation.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
With special thanks to Damien Whitmore for a rainy day in
Istanbul.
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R E F ERENCES
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Cannell, F. (2006) (ed.) The Anthropology of Christianity.
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Frank, G. (2000) The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living
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Social Analysis of Material Things, in D. Miller (ed.) Materiality.
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Gell, A. (1998) Art and Agency. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Harpham,
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and Dickens P. (eds) (2006) Rapid Manufacturing:
An Industrial Revolution for the Digital Age. Chichester: John
Wiley.Rio, K. (2009) Subject and Object in a Vanuatu Social
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Material Culture 14(3): 283308.Spielman, R. (2006) Space
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B I OGRAPH I CA L NO T E
VICTOR BUCHLI is Reader in Material Culture in the Department of
Anthropology, University College London. Some of his previous books
include An Archaeology of Socialism (Berg, 1999); Archaeologies of
the Contemporary Past (Routledge, 2001, with Gavin Lucas); The
Material Culture Reader (Berg, 2002) and Urban life in Post Soviet
Asia (Routledge, 2007, with C. Alexander and C. Humphrey). He is
founding and managing editor of Home Cultures.Address: Department
of Anthropology, University College London, Gower Street, London
WC1E 6BT, UK. [email: [email protected]]
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