The Prototype: Sensing the Immaterial

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DOI: 10.1177/1470357210372718 2010 9: 273Visual Communication

Victor BuchliThe prototype: presencing the immaterial

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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


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


275Bu c h l i : T h e p r o t o t y p e

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).



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)



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



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.



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



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.



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



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



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



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.



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.



R E F ERENCES

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Cannell, F. (2006) (ed.) The Anthropology of Christianity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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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]]


The Prototype: Sensing the Immaterial

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