amazon unveiled
Posted: August 19th, 2008 | Author: grant wythoff | Filed under: media aesthetics | Tags: amazon, brecht, photography, publishing | 1 Comment »
I took this screenshot of a couple months ago because I just thought it was pretty amazing to actually see some of the inner workings behind the ubiquity of Amazon placed right on its front page, which sometimes feels like nothing more than a print-on-demand operation. The image gives us a small peek into the heart of its distribution operation–a warehouse stocked with goods waiting to be shipped, in this case the Amazon Kindle.
But this momentary alignment of Amazon’s glossy, digital public face with its byzantine material reality does little to give us a sense of the corporation as a whole, a possibility which was realized even in the first decades of the 20th century to be near impossible. Brecht, upon seeing a photograph of the interior of the Krupp factory by Renger-Patzsch, said “the situation is rather complicated by the fact that less then ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works … tells us next to nothing about these institutions. The reification of human relations – the factory, say – means that they are no longer explicit. Something must in fact be built up, something artificially posed.” (qtd. in Benjamin’s Little History of Photography).
I was struck by the same thing–only now did I get a chance to read this post and agree! I think Brecht’s point is hit home too by the sort of conceptual mise en abyme created by the picture being of, not books to be read–the things Amazon distributes–but the thing that will allow you to read… again you are one remove from the thing itself, the book, just as you already are at your computer there. In other words, we’re not seeing products, but only boxes full of another interface with which to see the products. Makes you really feel that the medium isn’t the message–its the only thing there is. Points or nodes are able to be set up within it, it seems, infinitely, which keep you from or delay your actually hitting the thing itself–a sort of mechanized Xeno’s paradox.