© Mårten Lange from the series 'The Mechanism'
Cinema and even before that, literature has accustomed us to a dystopian vision of the city of the future. I'm thinking of Metropolis Fritz Lang's masterpiece. A silent film that already listed many of the thematic assumptions that we will find again during the twentieth century. At the center, there is always a conflict between man and technology. But where does this conflict take place? Is it about people's minds or society? Or rather, what is really in question: progress, changes, achievements of intelligence, discoveries, or the very way of thinking of man, and of thinking about the world. In the wake of these reflections that accompany civilization's development, and in particular, the abrupt acceleration of the last two centuries, Mårten Lange's photographic takes place.
Image of the book 'The Mechanism' by Mårten Lange
Image of the book 'The Mechanism' by Mårten Lange
Image of the book 'The Mechanism' by Mårten Lange
Image of the book 'The Mechanism' by Mårten Lange
The Mechanism is a portrait of the society in the age of technology, at the time of rampant urbanism, the growing economic domination of cities, and the consequent surveillance of capital. To do this, the Swedish author constructs a sort of sci-fi story which, by speculating on architectural models, details that are careful to convey feelings of alienation, and a distant human presence bent to the rhythms of productivity, is able and very useful in sketching a physiognomy of the machine. This specific attention does not surprise me, and it is enough to read the titles of his previous works (Machina, Anomalies, Citizen, Another Language) to understand. 'The Mechanism' appears as a scenographic album in which we can see the plots of possible tales in the style of masters such as Dick, Orwell, Ballard, Gibson, and others. The invitation to reflect on the future is obvious. The human species appears to be more of a victim than an architect. One wonders then, as in the best cyber-punk traditions, who is behind the power. And here, another field of investigation opens up, which leads us to re-read the French theorist Foucault. The people photographed by Mårten Lange appear more as "resources employed" in filling the mechanical system than as individuals endowed with a certain reason and autonomy. Therefore, the same architectural structures already incorporate asymmetrical relationships of power that shape the individual within the social organization. An organic, anatomical vision of space, therefore, which influences and disciplines behaviors, in turn determining new forms of identity, or rather of identification.
© Mårten Lange from the series 'The Mechanism'
Having said this, we can now ask ourselves other questions. First of all, what is the machine? It is necessary to recognize an attitude in cinema, literature, and photography, which is prejudicial towards the machine as a synonym of mechanical rather than spontaneous, artificial rather than natural. This dichotomy that is familiar today comes from afar. Certainly, from the Cartesian thought, which compares man to a machine, operating a historical reductionism, a tectonic split comes as a wave to our days. A thrust that pushes everything not fitting the equation into the side of spiritualism, art, and the superfluous. The photographs in this book are in fact, an excellent example. Everything is austere, essential, almost abstract; there seems to be no room for biodiversity. But has it always been like this? The title "Mechanism" brings us to the origin of the word machine or from the Greek "makhana" which indicated the potentiality of the "instrumental" man since there is no homo without an instrument. Ingenuity is human because evolution has led us to devise "exosomatic" tools for living. The camera is just another extension of the natural body into the artificial one. Giambattista Vico already distinguished human history as a continuation of natural history, but if this is the case, then man's history is the history of a social machination. And this assumption negates the Cartesian formulation.
© Mårten Lange from the series 'The Mechanism'
© Mårten Lange from the series 'The Mechanism'
© Mårten Lange from the series 'The Mechanism'
Then, what can we still ask ourselves? What are the consequences of this evolution? We must understand how the context, the social class, is embodied in the biological. Marx and Engels understood this when they noticed that the Manchester workers' health was considerably worse than that of their superiors. Therefore, the natural body's life cycle is strongly conditioned by the social status of belonging, transmitted (now we also know genetically) to subsequent generations. Just as the same mentality, and therefore our words, are forged by the machines we co-inhabit or co-belong.
© Mårten Lange from the series 'The Mechanism'
So, summarizing, we can read this book at least in two ways. The first is the testimony of a thinking device that, for a long time, led us to observe the machine in antithesis to the human being. The second is what partly frees us from this thought, or rather, it helps us understand that our thought is a gimmick. A sort of self-recognition, and this makes the photographic tool formidable. The word itself is a machination, or rather a convention that originally unites us before dividing us. Even what I'm writing here. As philosophers such as Heidegger and Adorno had already noticed, it is the language that speaks to us. The machine, even the verbal ones, is a metaphor. The language we speak and a photo camera are a machination we have at our disposal to stay in the world. Of course, this can lead us to live in a dystopian context, or rather harmful to our survival, which is a real paradox or allows us to circumscribe the thirst for knowledge in a way that will enable us to remain in the human condition, for some time, without harming ourselves.
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INFO BOOK
'The Mechanism'
Mårten Lange
Hardcover
96 pages
22 x 28 cm
Publication date: May 2017
ISBN: 978-1-910164-82-2
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