Images Never Again Witnessed/Concepts Never Again Thought: (nostalgia) and Utopia in the Aporia of Aesthetic Theory

Matthew D. Noble-Olson Art History and Communication Studies McGill University, Montreal June 2008

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the degree of Master of Arts.

© Matthew D. Noble-Olson 2008 Table of Contents

Abstract-3

Acknowledgements-4

Aufheben das Denkbild-7

Catastrophic Enigmas-19

Damaged in Absence-42

The Critique of Utopian Reason-64

Haunting the Dialectical Imagination-81

Bibliography-84

2 Abstract

Using Hollis Frampton’s 1971 film (nostalgia), this thesis works to negate the dominance of the concept over the artwork. This will be accomplished by thinking through (nostalgia), rather than about it. In other words, (nostalgia) will be the logical grounds upon which the concepts must prove themselves. The very form of the film will determine the manner in which the concepts develop. This thesis strives to understand (nostalgia) not so much by analyzing it from outside of its own immanent purpose, but through an imitative analysis. Using this method, texts by Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, and Ernst Bloch will be interpreted. Therefore, the concepts of these thinkers will act according to the objective demands of the film itself. This is an analysis that does not focus on the artwork as a topic, but as an epistemic model for analyzing aesthetic concepts.

En se fondant sur le 1971 filme (nostalgia) de Hollis Frampton, cette thèse s'emploie à nier la domination de concepts au-dessus de l'œuvre d'art. Ce sera fait en pensant avec (nostalgia), plutôt que d’y penser comme objet. En d'autres mots, (nostalgia) sera une logique motif pour lesquels les concepts doivent prouver eux-mêmes. La forme même du film permettra de déterminer la manière dont les concepts se développe. Cette thèse cherche à comprendre (nostalgia) non pas par l'analyse de l'extérieur de son propre but immanent, mais à travers une analyse imitatif. En utilisant cette méthode, les textes de Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, et Ernst Bloch va être interprété. Par conséquent, les concepts de ces penseurs agira selon les exigences objectives du film lui-même. Il s'agit d'une analyse qui ne se concentre pas sur l'œuvre d'art comme un sujet, mais comme un modèle épistémique pour l'analyse de concepts esthétiques.

3 Acknowledgements

This thesis developed throughout my time as a student in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at

McGill University. The ideas that are presented here have evolved out of discussion with students and faculty in both seminars and less formal settings. In particular, I would like to thank Romy Poletti, Jackie Reid, Tara Rodgers, Paul Sutton,

Jessica Santone, Sylvie Simonds, Trevor Stark, and Justina

Spencer. tobias van Veen deserves a special thanks as a fellow traveler through Detroit Techno and its environs. Tim Hecker has always shared many of my concerns and interests and is a valued friend and colleague. Neal Thomas has occupied the role of friend, roommate, translator, as well as numerous others as the situation has demanded. Darin Barney has forced me to take the thinking of Heidegger and others much more seriously, which I have very much appreciated. I consider myself fortunate to have had the opportunity to take a seminar with Bronwen

Wilson before she left the department. I thank her and all of the participants in her “Things and Paths” seminar for an extraordinary semester. I have been extraordinarily lucky to have Jonathan Sterne as my thesis supervisor. Jonathan knows precisely where to push me further in my thinking without leading me directly toward anything in particular. He has given

4 my work all of the attention that I could have hoped for. This thesis would certainly not be what it is without his advice and assistance. My parents and grandparents deserve a tremendous thank you for their countless hours over the years assisting me with copyediting and any number of other things. Finally, my partner, Maura has been supportive and patient with my choice to pursue an academic career. I could not possibly thank her enough for that and so much else in the space here. This thesis could only be dedicated to her.

5 [A]ny memory-image that is capable of interpreting our actual perception inserts itself so thoroughly into it that we are no longer able to discern what is perception and what is memory.1

Authentic philosophic interpretation does not meet up with a fixed meaning which already lies behind the question, but lights it up suddenly and momentarily, and consumes it at the same time.2

1 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, Translated by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. (New York: Zone, 1991), 103. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Telos 31(Spring 1977): 127.

6 Aufheben das Denkbild

Hollis Frampton’s 1971 film (nostalgia) is concerned with a constantly shifting relation between past and present, image and description, thing and concept, and ultimately subject and object. The structure of the film itself is remarkably simple, comprising only a static camera and a simple voice-over narration. With these simple elements Frampton manages to develop an artwork of considerable depth and complexity.

(nostalgia) presents the physical destruction of a series of

Frampton’s own photographs by placing them on a hotplate and allowing them to burn. The entire visual experience of the film is in observing the photographs—through a series of static shots— slowly ignite, incinerate, and crumple until they are reduced to a scrap of carbon. Once the photograph has passed into ash the film cuts to the next photograph. While the photographs burn a voice (that of the filmmaker Michael Snow) narrates what initially seems to be the images as they are presented. Intuition would suggest that the description would match the photograph with which it is temporally linked. However, while looking at the photographs and listening to the narrative it becomes apparent that this initial intuition was wrong and that the voice does not describe the image that is currently burning. As it becomes obvious that the narration and the images are mismatched, it is

7 subsequently revealed that the narration is actually describing the image that is to follow the one that is at that moment burning and on display. This continues through twelve photographs, and it lasts for just over thirty minutes. This pattern that could seemingly be played out into infinity breaks down at the beginning and the end of the film. At the beginning of the film, there is a photograph that we never hear described.

The description that hovers over it is actually of the second photograph, and so this photograph remains as a pure image, uncontaminated by language. The end of the film runs into a similar difficulty. As Frampton describes the final photograph that he produced, the last photograph that is visually displayed in the film burns, but it is not the image that he describes. The viewer is never shown the final image that Frampton describes, even though its description is by the far the most compelling of the film. The final image remains as the imagined future yet to be realized and yet to be destroyed. This sentiment, however, provides little comfort because of the terror that Frampton describes in looking at the image that is captured in this photograph.

Frampton’s film work has received a fair amount of critical attention since it was first released, though possibly less than might be expected considering the high regard for

8 Frampton and his films within academic and artistic circles.

Much of this criticism has come from leading figures in avant- garde cinema scholarship such as P. Adams Sitney and Annette

Michelson. The journal October (of which Michelson is a founding editor) has published two issues dedicated to

Frampton since his death in 1984. More recently, Rachel Moore has written a book that deals specifically with (nostalgia).

Moore’s text analyzes (nostalgia) along one thematic similar to what I plan for my thesis in that it deals extensively with a relationship between Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image and Frampton’s film. However, Moore has other concerns as well. Much of Moore’s text is concerned with the internal structure of (nostalgia) and its place within the New

York City art world of the late-1960s and early-1970s, both in textual analysis and biographical detail. Moore traces the film’s initial reception and covers an in-depth analysis of the development of the film, analyzing in detail many of the photographs on display and their relationship to the mismatched narrative as well as the significance of the title of the film. Like

Moore’s text, my thesis will deal with (nostalgia) in a highly intimate manner. However, it will differ from her text in significant ways. This difference is primarily in the way that the film will act within the text. Rather than focusing upon the film

9 itself as a topic to be dissected, historicized, and contextualized, the primary purpose of the film in this thesis will, in a manner of speaking, act as the hotplate does in the film itself: burning, damaging, and disintegrating that which it comes into contact with as a manner of conceptual elucidation. (nostalgia) will be the focus of the thesis, organizing three concepts that are brought to bear against it into a significant constellation; it will serve as a prism through which to read aesthetic philosophy.

Through this means of disintegration as explication, my thesis will attempt an immanent analysis of (nostalgia) through its engagement with aesthetic philosophy. My intention is to subject these concepts to the immanent objective demands of the film itself. This means that the aesthetic concepts will, in a sense, be placed upon the film in a manner similar to the way photographs in the film are placed upon the hotplate. Thus, my thesis will demonstrate how concepts act as they disintegrate upon the heat of an art object; the concepts will disintegrate and burn as they reduce into a remnant of themselves. The art object will produce a sort of conceptual entropy so that in this process the concept conforms itself to the art object rather than the obverse.

As is clear, my essay is not focused solely upon

Frampton’s film. It is equally concerned with twentieth-century

10 aesthetic philosophy. In the “Epistemo-critical Prologue” of The

Origin of German Tragic Drama Walter Benjamin writes: “For knowledge, method is a way of acquiring its object—even by creating it in the consciousness; for truth it is self- representation, and is therefore immanent in it as form.”3

Benjamin’s emphasis upon the formal component of philosophy is instructive for my thesis. Rather than merely speaking about

(nostalgia) as a topic in my essay, the goal is to also utilize the formal components of the film in order to discuss the aesthetic concepts under consideration. This formal aspect is the destruction of the photographs in the film; an action that will be reenacted upon the concepts as they confront (nostalgia).

The first essay will approach Theodor W. Adorno’s posthumous Aesthetic Theory as a way to think about the configurational form of philosophy and the relation between art and aesthetics. This portion of the thesis will explain and justify the formal component of the project. As I have explained above, the form of the film itself will largely determine the manner in which the film as a thematic concern relates to the aesthetic concepts and, additionally, the behavior of the concepts as autonomous from the thematic concerns of the film. However, and in agreement with Adorno, it is imperative that while this

3 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 2003), 29-30.

11 division of art from aesthetics is to be crossed back and forth, the boundary itself should not be dissolved entirely. Art remains distinct from philosophy; their difference is not to be discounted or dismissed. And while the metaphor of the hotplate in this thesis does import the artwork into the conceptual realm, this should not be read as a dismissal of the category of either the artwork or the concept. Both must exist in the dialectical tension that this thesis seeks to explore in order for any relation between art and philosophy to be possible. The essay will focus on Adorno’s concept of enigmaticalness, as discussed in

Aesthetic Theory. For Adorno, enigmaticalness is the resistance of the artwork to complete understanding, its maintained objectivity, and the question that it poses within its own structure. Enigmaticalness is the simultaneous presentation of the question of the artwork and the revelation that no satisfactory answer is possible. Enigmaticalness reveals the extent to which the question of the artwork is entangled within the very structure that makes answering that question impossible.

The second essay will approach (nostalgia) through

Roland Barthes’s concept of the punctum introduced in his final book Camera Lucida. Barthes’ final text is about photography, partially initiated by an undisclosed picture of Barthes’

12 deceased mother as a child. Barthes introduces two terms for thinking about the composition of a photograph: studium and punctum. Barthes writes of the studium: “To recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer’s intention, to enter into harmony with them, to approve or disapprove of them, but always to understand them, to argue them within myself, for culture (from which the studium derives) is a contract arrived at between creators and consumers.”4 The studium is what is observed in the photograph, the derived meaning. It does not approach us or impose any excess meaning beyond itself. The studium sits passively for the consumer of the photograph to activate it. While the studium is the intentional meanings of the photograph, what we are meant to see, the punctum is the unintentional detail of the photograph that catches our attention. Barthes writes: “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”5 The punctum breaks the hold of the intentionality of the studium. The particularity of the punctum punctures the assumed totality of meaning that is the studium.

The punctum captures the impossibility of absolute meaning that is inscribed in the studium. The relation of the punctum to

4 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 27-28. 5 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 27.

13 (nostalgia) is in the impossibility of ever capturing the meaning of any one photograph or any one description. They do not match, and, when we do finally see the photograph that we have heard described, we are only allowed to give it partial attention as there is a new description that we must attempt to envision.

The punctum appears in the film as the rupture in meaning that initiates the photograph’s burning. The punctum pushes through the photograph to rub against the subject and the other photographs. It is this friction that produces the flame that engulfs each photograph in turn. As Barthes argues, the photograph is always pulling us back to the moment when the photograph was first taken. In (nostalgia) this is an ever- disappearing past and, therefore, all the more important that it be recognized before it is entirely lost.

The final essay will engage what Ernst Bloch calls the

“utopian function” of art. Bloch writes, “The look forward becomes even more powerful the brighter it becomes aware of itself…The not-yet-conscious itself has to become conscious of its own doings; it must come to know its contents as restraint and revelation.”6 Frampton’s film is an attempt at becoming aware of what the look forward entails and the danger inherent in that look. This relationship is inscribed in the film’s form.

6 Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988),105.

14 When the film’s narration describes the image that is yet to appear, there is a necessity to look forward, but, because we are presented with the present image, there is always a danger of sacrificing the present for the possibility of the future. Although this danger is presented throughout, the contours of it are demonstrated most explicitly in the final moments of the film.

The narration describes Frampton’s last attempt to make a photograph, an attempt that is almost aborted. Frampton makes a single exposure on his way back to his apartment from a long day with no success. When Frampton develops the photograph, he believes that he sees in a double-reflection something terrifying. The narration explains that he developed the photograph many times, blowing it up each time in order to identify and confirm what he believes he has seen. Each successive attempt to intensify the image only obscures it further, diminishing the resolution of the image in the focus upon the grain of the film. Frampton never names what it is that he believes he saw that terrified him. However, as the film ends he demands that we look at the image and asks if we can see what he thinks is there. This is the end of the film and it expresses the danger and uncertainty of the look forward, the danger of utopian thought that seems to escape Bloch. This final essay will explore this simultaneous danger and necessity of the

15 utopian look forward, a look that (nostalgia) simultaneously demands and very nearly prohibits.

These concepts are not chosen at random. Each speaks to

(nostalgia) in very specific ways. As Benjamin suggests, concepts draw connection between objects in a manner similar to a constellation of stars: “Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.”7 This thesis, while remaining true to what

Benjamin intended, is an attempt to place the object at the center. Thus, to follow out the cosmic metaphor, (nostalgia) will act as the illuminated center around which the texts of Adorno,

Barthes, and Bloch orbit.

These authors belong to a tradition of Twentieth-Century

European essayists who break from a more conventional model of writing about aesthetics. Each author, in different ways, is concerned with a rejection of systematic approaches in aesthetics. They seek to approach the artwork in a more singular, immanent, and specific manner. In fact, (nostalgia) itself seems to demand this form of analysis. Therefore, each of these aesthetic concepts deals with the possibility and danger of hope—utopia and catastrophe—a constitutive concern in

(nostalgia). Each concept, engaged in this form of highly specific critique, is what Gerhard Richter identifies as a

7 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 34.

16 Denkbild (thought-image) that in (nostalgia) presents the semblance of utopian longing before it is sacrificed on the pyre of the artwork.

Richter’s recent Thought-Images: Frankfurt School

Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life chronicles the Denkbild in the writing of Adorno, Bloch, Benjamin and Siegfried

Kracauer.8 Roland Barthes is not a part of the specific (i.e.

German) intellectual tradition of which these other writers belong, but his writing has many similar concerns and is, thus, not anomalous as an inclusion in this context. The Denkbild is a conceptual break from conceptual thought; it is the textual form of micrological analysis. For Richter, the importance of studying these particular writers is in their specific status as writers, as literary agents in addition to their role as philosophers. Richter writes:

My guiding assumption is that much of what is most valuable in these writers, and what connects them as a group of thinkers who pay close attention to the status of writing itself, is the view that what they say cannot be thought in isolation from how they say it, that any philosophical truth-content their writing may contain invariably is tied to, and mediated by, its specific and potentially unstable figures of presentation.9

8 Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). 9 Richter, Thought-Images, 2.

17 Richter’s focus on the formal-poetic aspects of these authors’ writing provides a model for how these authors should be read in the context of my thesis. Their thought is not merely a method for explicating the film, but, rather, they are to be read as important in their own right, and on their own terms;

(nostalgia) provides the context in which they will be read, rather than their being the context in which (nostalgia) is viewed. The Denkbild, in this thesis, is the philosophical equivalent of the photograph in (nostalgia).

The Denkbild is a short textual intervention that combines elements of philosophy and poetry. Richter writes:

[T]he philosophical miniatures of the Denkbild can be understood as conceptual engagements with the aesthetic and as aesthetic engagements with the conceptual, hovering between philosophical critique and aesthetic production. The Denkbild encodes a poetic form of condensed, epigrammatic writing in textual snapshots, flashing up as poignant meditations that typically fasten upon a seemingly peripheral detail or marginal topic, usually without a developed plot or a prescribed narrative agenda, yet charged with theoretical insight.10

Thus, the Denkbild is a reconfiguration of the relationship between aesthetic production and philosophical reflection. My goal is to take this compelling notion of the Denkbild and highlight the relationship between conceptual and aesthetic

10 Richter, Thought-Images, 2.

18 thought through Frampton’s film. This will be carried out in order to refigure the relationship of art and philosophy.

Rather than the application of philosophical critique to an art-object, this thesis seeks to, in a sense, reverse the relationship. Therefore, (nostalgia) will act as the conceptual entity, outlining the manner in which to read the Denkbild of

Adorno, Barthes and Bloch. Each thought-image will be confronted by (nostalgia) in a manner that mimics Frampton’s photographic images in their contact with the hotplate. Thus, the concepts under consideration will be made to conform to the objective demands of the artwork. As with the photographs in

(nostalgia), the result for the concepts will ultimately be destruction, at least in their initial form.

The concepts will follow the fate of the photographs. As the concepts come into contact with the contradictory and enigmatic status of the artwork they will come apart, burning along their own axes of construction and revealing their own historicity and constructedness. These acts of destruction will serve as a sublation of the concepts in question. As the concept is destroyed it is simultaneously preserved; it is transcended in the radical transformation of the concept itself. The destruction of the concept is its transcendence within its own material; the concepts will be destroyed in order that they might survive their

19 own demise. These thought-images will be sublated in

(nostalgia).

The form of writing employed in this thesis is contingent to (nostalgia), and a different form is demanded by each individual artwork. However, this should not be read as an unqualified defense of nominalism; it is necessary to maintain a totalizing conceptual apparatus. However, as this thesis demonstrates, the universality of the concept is mediated through the particularity of the artwork to the same extent that the particular only comes through the universal. This dialectical stance is necessitated by the demands of thought under late capitalism. The understanding of the artwork is only achievable as an imitation because of the status of the artwork within society—standing both inside and outside. Entering into the artwork is, thus, not a retreat from the harshness of the material world that the artwork, in its materiality, stands against. The artwork is only comprehensible in its unique position through a process that slowly works its way through the infinite layers of enigmatic meaning, a process that should illuminate the contradictions of late capitalism. Thus, imitative form does not lead into the artwork and away from the world, but, instead, it attempts to trace the catastrophe of world history through the specific movement and construction of each

20 artwork.

The essays in this thesis, like the constellated concepts for

Benjamin, do not follow from one another or build upon the insights of each other. They are not organized in a clear progression from one to the next; the concerns of each concept hold an autonomy about them. The concepts orbit around

(nostalgia), at times moving closer to or further from both

(nostalgia) and the other concepts. In this sense, there will be points in the essays where they seem to speak to one another, where they seem to almost meet in their orbit around

Frampton’s film. The purpose of this thesis is to set the artwork itself at the center of aesthetic critique, not by negating or dismissing the concepts but by encapsulating the concept within the artwork, subjecting the concept to the artwork’s own critique. The task of aesthetics, according to this thesis, is to open the artwork from within this enclosed space, not in a violent mode but with the recognition that its survival is tied to the maintenance of the artwork’s autonomy.

21 Catastrophic Enigmas

Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is his final and unfinished work. At the time of Adorno’s death in August 1969,

Aesthetic Theory was in a state of advanced revision. After

Adorno’s death the material for Aesthetic Theory was assembled and edited by his widow, Gretel Adorno, and his student, Rolf

Tiedemann. Since its posthumous publication, the status of

Aesthetic Theory, probably more than any of Adorno’s other writing, has often seemed uncertain. Often charged with impenetrability, and suffering from many of the same charges of elitism that plague Adorno’s entire oeuvre, Aesthetic Theory suffered from a particularly problematic first English translation

—a translation that ironically attempted to smooth over some of these difficulties and “correct” Adorno’s distinctive prose style— that hindered its reception in Anglo-American scholarship in particular. Despite the crudity of the attempt to simplify

Adorno’s writing and thought, the difficulty of the text cannot be denied. One of the elements of the work that makes it particularly difficult is the degree to which reading it demands an aesthetic eye to appreciate. Thus, Adorno’s final work is true to its title, in that, not only is it a theory of aesthetics, but it is also a theory that is itself aesthetic.

Aesthetic Theory attempts to break through the

22 separation of aesthetics from art. This barrier is primarily present in philosophy but has been crossed numerous times from the other direction by prominent figures of the artistic avant-garde. Aesthetics has largely concerned itself with the investigation of such concepts as meaning and beauty while often ignoring the objectivity of any actual art or artistic practice. Robert Hullot-Kentor, in his “Translator’s

Introduction” to Aesthetic Theory, writes,

Anyone turning to aesthetics would expect that, to call itself aesthetics, it would be allied with what is exceptional in the experience of its object. But what is covered instead is a discipline that throughout its history has worked at the conceptual undergirding of standards of beauty, the sublime, taste, art’s dignity, and so on, while failing to achieve the standard of the experience of what it purports to treat…Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory means to breach this externality of aesthetics to art.11

The breach that Hullot-Kentor describes is a manifestation of the importance that Adorno affords the object in his philosophy.

Thus, while aesthetics has generally attempted to fit artworks into a preconceived and universal framework, Adorno’s aesthetics attempts to understand the artwork according to the objective demands of the particular artwork. For Adorno, this understanding is achieved by entering the logical world of the artwork and understanding it within those specific and

11 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xii.

23 particular demands, even as that particularity is mediated through the universality of the social totality. According to

Adorno, it is only through the imitation achieved in an intimate tracing of the artwork’s formal characteristics that it may be actually understood, however, this understanding is merely contingent as any absolute understanding would rid the artwork of its own concept, violating its autonomous dignity. Adorno writes, “If artworks do not make themselves like something else but only like themselves, then only those who imitate them understand them.”12 And, “If in Kant discursive knowledge is to renounce the interior of things, then artworks are objects whose truth cannot be thought except as that of their interior.

Imitation is the path that leads to this interior.”13 For Adorno, the task of aesthetics is not to build a universal methodology for apprehending each individual artwork, but, instead, it is an attempt to mediate the universalizing nature of concepts through the particularity of the artwork. In Adorno, the analysis of each artwork is so tightly wound around that particular object that is not transferable; the analysis of one artwork does not provide a template for unpacking the Artwork. My thesis, then, is an attempt to enact Adorno’s principle of imitation through a single artwork, Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia).

12 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 125. 13 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 126.

24 The imitative form of the essays that compose this thesis will be enacted by placing concepts against (nostalgia) in a manner similar to Frampton’s placement of photographs against a hotplate in his film. The desired effect is that the concept (or photograph) begins to degrade and break down against the heat of the artwork (or hotplate). The internal tensions that constitute the artwork will push through the concept, leaving it as a remnant of its original form as it begins to form itself onto the shape of the artwork, rather than forcing the artwork into the simultaneously rigid and imprecise space of conceptual identity thinking. (nostalgia) will turn the violence of identical thought around toward identical thought itself; the concept will react to the artwork and even begin to disintegrate against its heat. This method is an attempt to enact the primacy of the object by using the art-object as that through which the concepts will be read, rather than the inverse. Thus, this thesis will be an attempt to enact an object-oriented analysis of conceptual thought. The Adornian concept that will be placed against the artwork in this essay is enigmaticalness, and in relation to form. In the face of (nostalgia), enigmaticalness becomes a cipher of the world-historical catastrophe. However, this essay is simultaneously an argument for the type of philosophy that it is attempting to develop. Further, and through

25 this discussion of enigmaticalness and the elaboration of an object-oriented philosophy, the relation of art and philosophy will be considered. Thus, this essay will elaborate the methodology and importance of the entire thesis, promoting the centrality of form in writing and the necessary elimination of the externality of art to aesthetics that an object-oriented aesthetics entails.

In both conceptual development and formal expression, to the extent that they can be distinguished from one another in

Adorno’s philosophy, the power of the subject is mediated through a focus on the object that draws it into a confrontation with difference, and its own objective status. There is no discernible universal experience because aesthetic experience must contend with the irreducible particularity of the artwork.

For Adorno, conceptual thinking necessarily implies a certain totality; the totality of the concept mirrors the necessarily illusionary totality of the subject. “Non-identity” is Adorno’s term for the insurmountable, yet necessary, conflict between the totality and universality of the subject-oriented concept and the particularity of the object. To that end, this thesis will be an attempt to understand three concepts of aesthetic philosophy through their engagement with a single artwork and, in the process, demonstrate that the presumed universality of the

26 concept is altered in its confrontation with the particularity of the artwork. Adorno writes, “No concept that enters an artwork remains what it is; each and every concept is so transformed that its scope can be affected and its meaning refashioned.”14

This refashioning is what I hope to bring to the concepts under consideration here in relation to (nostalgia).

The Adornian primacy of the object does not abstractly negate the status of the concept but, instead, sets the object in a more balanced relation to the concept. This dialectic between concept and object transforms the entities in question so that each begins to perform as the opposing term in their confrontation. The universality of the concept is not shed, but it is mediated through the particularity of the object, and in the process the concept becomes an object of consideration within the logical development of the object. As a result the object becomes a prism through which to view the concept and thus takes on conceptual qualities of its own—abstracting and attempting to describe the concept. Rather than the domination of the object by the abstracting universality of the concept, in

Adorno’s aesthetics the concept is made to fit the particularity of the object through a series of negations. These negations tamp down the empty space between concept and object in

14 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 122.

27 order to fit it more successfully, but the concept then takes on the particularity of the object, forcing it to start anew with each object if it is to behave in a manner that does not dominate. The mimetic action of the concept in relation to an art-object sublates that concept. The concept is thoroughly transformed in the confrontation with the object but not lost; it is simultaneously negated and preserved. The space, however small, developed by the dialectic between the concepts universality and its inability to capture fully the being-in-itself of the object is the non-identity of the relation between concept and object. The goal is not to achieve a perfect match between concept and the object that it purports to describe, for that would inevitably detonate both to the detriment of meaning itself. The concept inhabits, rather than envelops, the object in

Adorno’s epistemology and aesthetics—the object is used to refract the concept into a reconfiguration of its original status.

Similar to the primacy that the object is afforded in relation to the concept, the form of Adorno’s writing also strives to impart an expressive power to the object. Adorno’s Aesthetic

Theory is constructed in a peculiarly anti-systemic manner, bracing itself against the doxa of aesthetic thought that moves from a prima philosophia into subsumptive statements about the universality of subjective aesthetic experience. In contrast,

28 Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is not constructed as a linear, systematic elaboration of a theory of the artwork. Instead, it engages the field of aesthetics in an immanent dialectical criticism that does not introduce a plethora of neologisms to explain art. Neither does it attempt to trace a lost truth through long utilized concepts that have become thoroughly static.

Rather, Adorno takes the already existing conceptual field of aesthetics and subjects it to a critique on the basis of the materiality of the artwork. Adorno charges that aesthetics has left actual artworks out of its discussions of aesthetic experience; the artwork is reduced to an abstract universality that seeks identity with all artworks while achieving it with none. This failure is never recognized. For Adorno, concepts approach identity with artworks by turning away from them; the most radical difference is a more true intimacy than any strained sameness. The artworks appear to have no effect upon the thinking about them; they are merely an afterthought, an opportunity to awkwardly fit into the conceptual apparatus already built up by aesthetics. Aesthetic Theory rejects this deterministic approach to aesthetic experience. Adorno builds no trajectory or deterministic argument into his aesthetics; it is built as a series of passages that are equally weighted and equally distant from an absent center. Shierry Weber Nicholsen

29 notes this character of Adorno’s aesthetics, “…the initial experience of reading Aesthetic Theory is of a field (paratactic parts of equal weight) in which a recurrent, small-scale pattern

(the dialectical movement from assertion to negation) plays over an endless surface without depth.”15 Adorno’s paratactical organization underscores his attempt to dismantle any trajectory in writing about the experience of art. This rejection of progress in art is a manner of maintaining allegiance to the victims of history and the expression of human suffering.

The palimpsestic redrawing of the concept’s porous boundaries is essential to the possibility of revealing the truth content of artworks. Adorno discusses truth content throughout

Aesthetic Theory, and it is made clear that this content is only recognized in the course of the interpretation of art by philosophy. Adorno writes, “Artworks, especially those of the highest dignity, await their interpretation. The claim that there is nothing to interpret in them, that they simply exist, would erase the demarcation line between art and nonart…Grasping truth content postulates critique.”16 He continues, “Artworks have no truth without determinate negation; developing this is the task of aesthetics today.”17 The truth content of an artwork

15 Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 104. 16 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 128. 17 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 129.

30 is its unfolding through critique, and yet it does not reduce into a simple message or answer. The truth content of an artwork is not its judgment of the world, what the artist intended, or some hidden absolute truth that is to be uncovered. Rather, truth content is the artwork’s ability to convey meaning in the face of critique without settling upon a singular meaning, or even necessarily any meaning at all. There is every possibility that the meaning of an artwork can be to question, or even attempt to negate meaning itself; Adorno’s example in this case would undoubtedly be the plays of Samuel Beckett. The truth content of artworks comes into conflict with the irreconcilable falsity of the social totality. This conflict is not to be pushed aside as insignificant, as in l’art pour l’art, but pushed to the forefront of concern for contemporary aesthetics. The falsity of artworks as an element of their participation in the false world plays a role in their truth content; or, at least, it does not diminish their truth content. The truth of the artwork and the truth of the artwork’s expression of the social totality is, in Aesthetic

Theory, an unimportant distinction. Adorno writes,

The separation of what is true in itself from the merely adequate expression of false consciousness is not to be maintained, for correct consciousness has not existed to this day, and no consciousness has the lofty vantage point from which this separation would be self-evident. The complete presentation of false consciousness is what

31 names it and is itself truth content.18

For Adorno, there is no simple demarcation between the truth content of the artwork and the uninhibited expression of the falsity of the world in which it was produced. The truth content that artworks maintain is their opacity even in the face of their interpretation, and even because of their interpretation. That art requires interpretation to uncover its truth content and yet resists interpretation to maintain this truth content is the essential quality of the artwork, if such an essence were possible to determine.

The task of aesthetics is to provoke the truth content of the artwork to briefly reveal its shadow. The truth content of the artwork is, in a negative sense, the utopian character of the artwork. Adorno writes, “But because for art, utopia—the yet-to- exist—is draped in black, it remains in all its mediations recollection; recollection of the possible in opposition to the actual that suppresses it; it is the imaginary reparation of the catastrophe of world history; it is freedom, which under the spell of necessity did not—and may not ever—come to pass.”19

18 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 129-130. 19 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 135. This passage bears a faint whisper of the angel of history in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Published in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 253-264. Benjamin’s angel of history is more than merely a parable. The art object itself, as much as what it depicts, stands in as the angel in Benjamin’s writing. The

32 Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) stages a version of this forestalled utopia. Frampton’s film is a constant attempt to grasp the future as it disintegrates before our eyes. As each photograph burns and the descriptions push ahead, (nostalgia) tries to combine the image of the future with what we were told about that future, but as we reach for this perfect union of image and description, this perfected and reconciled future, its possibility becomes more difficult to realize as the image is physically destroyed and the past description is displaced by the longing for a new and as yet undamaged future. What Adorno says of mediations recollection is transformed in (nostalgia) into something that is not draped in black but is, rather, constantly on the verge of combustion. It is not draped in black, but rather it reduces to a burnt, black remainder. Utopia is not hidden, but painting reaches beyond its own materiality to observe the actuality of the world as an unfolding disaster before it. The angel faces forward in the painting, looking out upon the empirical world in which “the pile of debris before him grows skyward.” What is most significant is the gaze of Klee’s angel that peers out of the painting towards the catastrophe of history while it is forever blown by the wind of progress back into the utopic realm of the artwork. However, the artwork is no refuge from the blowing debris of history. The artwork is itself not a repository of truth in a world that is false; as a product of an untrue world, the artwork is ultimately a failure. The totality of the artwork is no refuge from the totality of society. The force of progress presses the angel back from the possibility of reconciling the catastrophe or lingering too long upon the ruins. It is by the will of progress that the angel remains merely contained in the artwork, unable to unite what is ultimately broken—the world of the artwork and the empirical world.

33 it is in danger of being corrupted or destroyed altogether as it is placed in plain view. Adorno’s point is that images of the future are always mediated through a memory of the past. The dream of being able to realize the hope of an imagined future is held out in (nostalgia) through the impossibility of ever matching description and image; the possibility of reconciliation is forever just out of reach and out of sight. Fredric Jameson’s essay, “The

Politics of Utopia” is helpful in concretizing this engagement with utopia in both Adorno’s thought and Frampton’s film. At the outset of Jameson’s essay on the continued efficacy of the concept of utopia, he writes: “Utopia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation.”20 Jameson questions whether utopia has lost any significance in the era of late capitalism and the numerous millenarian projections that have dominated much of contemporary thought. Towards the end of his essay, Jameson turns to Adorno’s work to answer how utopia can live on beyond its own demise:

…Adorno clarifies the self-interest implicit in this final judgement philosophically, by suggesting that the ideological prejudices and characterological deformations of class society are the marks of the so-called instinct of self-

20 Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review 25 (Jan Feb 2004): 35.

34 preservation with which it indoctrinates us. Utopia will then be characterized by the falling away of that imperious drive towards self- preservation, now rendered unnecessary.21

Thus, utopia is characterized by the ruin of the concept of utopia itself. It is not that utopia does not exist, but in the end, it is the possibility that utopia was not what we envision—perhaps even not what we envisioned because we envisioned it.

Utopia, what Adorno defines as the “yet-to-exist,” is not explicitly set out as the unbroken or reassembled harmony that is often ascribed to it, but, rather, it means exactly what it says: it is the immanent difference and historical possibility of the future. But as the title of Frampton’s film suggests, this future is irremediably understood through a relationship to the past.

Frampton’s film does not merely express the difficulty of holding onto any vision of the future but also the inherent, and even primordial, danger of looking too closely into the future. The attempt to envision the future in (nostalgia) is bought with the truth that when that future does arrive, it will not resemble what we had hoped. Our image of the future is destroyed as we attempt to realize it. This aporia of (nostalgia) is what Adorno calls its enigmaticalness—that is, the problem of the artwork that refuses to relinquish its solution.

Enigmaticalness is, in a sense, the comprehension of the

21 Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” 51.

35 incomprehensibility of the artwork. To understand the enigmaticalness of a particular artwork is to trace the problem that it poses, but rather than recognizing the answer to that problem, it recognizes the impossibility of reconciling the problem that is posed in the accumulated material that composes the artwork, either in its own historical moment or in its contemporary echoes. This irreconcilability of the artwork is not a mistake but an essential component of its construction.

The particularity of the artwork is unable to reconcile with the falseness of the total society that it attempts, and necessarily fails, to stand outside. An artwork that provided an answer would ultimately have reconciled itself with an irrefutably irreconcilable world. For Adorno it is only through a distance from humanity that the artwork maintains its promise as the expression of suffering—that of humanity and its other—nature.

Adorno writes, “[A]rtworks that unfold to contemplation and thought without any remainder are not artworks.”22 The refusal to fully oblige demands of comprehension is the artwork’s way of maintaining this distance from humanity. The enigma of artworks invites critique, but it does not submit to that critique.

Adorno writes, “…artworks are enigmas. They contain the potential for the solution; the solution is not objectively given.

22 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 121.

36 Every artwork is a picture puzzle, a puzzle to be solved, but this puzzle is constituted in such a fashion that it remains a vexation, the preestablished routing of its observer.”23 Thus, as the artwork begins to reveal what appears to be the answer to the question that is posed, it pulls back from fully revealing itself.

(nostalgia) plays out this game for its viewer with each photograph, but it is most exquisitely demonstrated in the totality of the art-object. As the film begins, the inability to match the photograph that is viewed and the photograph that is described initiates the problem. As the photograph begins to burn and disintegrate, the viewer strives to recognize something of what is being described in the vanishing recognizable space of the photograph. Soon the photograph has disappeared and the description is mere memory. The second photograph is more perplexing, and yet uncannily familiar; the observer recognizes some of the details mentioned, but attempts to remember from where are disrupted by the artwork’s insistence upon immediacy. Instead, the viewer is again busy, trying in vain to match the present description with the fleeting details of the photograph presently on view. This photograph seems to match more closely the description the observer is hearing: it is said to be of Frampton himself and the image on display is indeed of a

23 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 121.

37 human figure. This is unlike the previous image, where the viewer is told that it was of Carl Andre, while the image displayed no recognizable figure but, rather, what appears to be a darkroom. It is not until the third, or perhaps fourth, photograph that the observer realizes the trick of the film—that the description matches the subsequent photograph, not the one that it is matched with in time. This realization is only the solution to the problem that is posed by the structure of the film’s narrative; it only brushes against the enigma of

(nostalgia). While this revelation does begin to unravel what

(nostalgia) presents, it does not recognize the immaterial character of the film’s enigma.

The enigma of (nostalgia) is the inability to reconcile the present against either the future or the past without a sacrifice of one against the others. (nostalgia) is composed in such a way that it is impossible to recognize the past without misrecognizing the future. Even if we were to sacrifice the present entirely in the interest of recognizing the past and future, it would not allow us to view them as undamaged. As the sacrificed present passes it becomes an already damaged past.

(nostalgia) represents the immanent destruction of the present in the past and the future; it is the obliteration of history in images dominated by nostalgia and utopia. (nostalgia)

38 demonstrates the degree to which utopia and nostalgia are entangled with one another. Utopia is only available for viewing through its negative, and utopia always implies a reality that more closely resembles dystopia and catastrophe. The semblance of utopia is viewed only as a reflection of a reflection.

Utopia is the look into the past that conjures the future; this is what Adorno means by the mediation of recollection. (nostalgia) does not present a vision or imagination of utopia, but instead it formalizes the act of imagining or envisioning itself. (nostalgia) is a witnessing of the evaporation of history as we attempt to capture it and hold it—utopia is most present in artworks where it is most radically extinguished.24 The loss of the image in

(nostalgia) is an eradication of this very imagination, but it is also a protection against any premature reconciliation. This maintenance of difference—the possibility of historical difference—is achieved in the artwork through the development of its own failure as that which is expressed—the endangered truth that lives on in a world that has all but eradicated such quaint notions.

Successful artworks are composed in such a fashion that the recognition of their failure is the very measure of their success. The truth that is to be exposed in art is the

24 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 135.

39 impossibility and danger of any complete exposure. The negativity of art is its refusal to submit to an external demand for transparency; this demand is the attempt to bestow a use- value upon art in a world that is dominated by exchange. As

Adorno argues, art maintains the dignity of use-value by holding onto its own indignant uselessness. Thus, meaning is demanded of the artwork in an attempt to answer the question about art’s purpose. Under present conditions this question has no acceptable answer. The enigma of art is the refusal of this question. Enigmaticalness pushes back against the precepts for art in late capitalism. The task of philosophy is not to aid in the violent prying open of the artwork that a final answer would represent; rather, its task is to open the artwork along its own lines of fracture, to demonstrate the expression inherent in the way that the materials have coalesced. The question of the artwork is posed in such a way that it reappears anew each time that an answer is given; each time that the question is asked it is changed. Every answer elicited from the artwork is given in the form of a question. If an artwork were to commit to a final answer and open itself unrepentantly to interpretation, it would forfeit its status as art. (nostalgia) refuses to relinquish itself to explanation. Each time that a photograph is revealed the temptation to remember what was said presents itself, and yet

40 each time that possibility of remembrance is bought with a sacrifice of the present. (nostalgia) is composed in such a fashion that each time a solution to one problem appears it only creates multiple others. The problem of (nostalgia), as with all successful artworks, is posed by the attempt to answer the initial question asked. Form provides this question with its material expression. Through form, the question of art is posed in the otherwise disorganized material. Form rescues the artwork from mere meaning.

According to Adorno, the most successful artworks are so meticulously composed that they demonstrate their own failure.

In other words, successful artworks integrate their own failure to reconcile the world as an element of their construction. Form is the mode by which this simultaneously immanent and transcendent negativity is achieved. The artwork is mediated in itself: this mediation is the immanent negation of every cohered element. Form develops the enigmatic quality of the artwork in this immanent negation. Every time that an answer starts to develop in one element of a work it is silenced by the organized dissonance of the totality of the work. However, this dissonance is not an arbitrary noise; the dissonance of the artwork appears to approach harmony only in its negation of perceived harmony.

The most exquisitely formed artworks develop this dialectical

41 element as a part of the content. Thus, the only answer to the problem posed by the artwork is not an answer, but rather, the further distancing of the echoing refrain just out of range. The artwork does not provide an answer to the question that it poses; it is an ever-evolving problem whose dynamic changes through historical contingency. The enigma that is posed by

(nostalgia) concerns this very historical contingency.

Frampton’s (nostalgia) demonstrates its actuality in evacuating any stable contemporaneity from itself. (nostalgia) denies any stable temporal space from which to gain perspective; the present is always fully enmeshed in the past and the future, always trying to remember a previous description or imagine the photograph being described, and this is possible only once the playful ordering of the film is recognized. Prior to this recognition, the viewing subject is only trying to recognize an absent photograph in an annoyingly imprecise and inexact description. Each new photograph presents the possibility of recognizing the formula for understanding the film; and yet, even as the temporal displacement of image from description becomes apparent, the film’s meaning remains troubled and, perhaps, further from understanding. (nostalgia) presents its own temporal dimension and, consequently, its own epistemic framework. The ability to

42 hold onto any meaning as something permanent and unquestioned is severely troubled. That each photograph is incommensurable with the description that it is temporally concurrent with confounds the possibility that any description could describe an image. The space that exists between image and description in (nostalgia) is the dialectically mediated and ultimately dirempted chasm between subject and object. Each meaning that we attribute to a photograph is destroyed with the photograph. Thus, the form of (nostalgia) constructs the logicality of the film’s enigma.

The enigma of the artwork is posed in the accumulated material through form. Adorno argues that form is one of the more difficult concepts to grasp because it is implicated by all other aesthetic concepts and thus resists any precision of definition. However, it is for this reason that it is so important.

Adorno suggests that form is the groundwork of all logicality; it is the very reason that any meaning inheres in the artwork.

Form leads the way through the dense material, but, instead of pushing towards a safe ending, it continues its movement through the work and motivates the movement of the work itself. The form of (nostalgia) is such that any comfortable conclusion is refused: the beginning and the end of the film demonstrate this principle. It is not that no answer is given—art

43 is not silent—but rather, that any answer that is given only leads towards further questions. As Adorno says, the artwork is a picture puzzle, objectively demanding interpretation while constantly escaping at the last minute before any ultimate meaning may be bestowed. (nostalgia) develops this principle into the films enigmatic expression. It is form that poses each element of an artwork against every other. Form is art’s immanent critique; philosophy is needed to bring the critical element of form to expression. In modern works, form becomes an element alongside all the others, and this is true in

(nostalgia). Thus, form becomes an element of its own construction: it is a thing to be formed in the artwork as it becomes more developed in modern art.

Form is often defined in contrast to content, but for

Adorno they are inextricably linked. However the contradiction that exists between the two terms should not be dismissed.

Rather, form must be understood through its mediation in content and vice versa. Form could be thought of as the unifying element of an artwork, and this is so especially in modern works when it is used against any unity. Form articulates the assembled material into the enigmatic character of the artwork; it is the organization of the material according to the demands of the contemporary social situation. (nostalgia) demonstrates

44 the difficulty in distinguishing between form and content. The temporal disjuncture that characterizes the film places the images into a particular relationship with their description and with one another. But the temporal disjuncture of the film is also an element of the film itself. It is not in fact possible to easily identify the form as one thing in the film, or even what is not the form of the film. Adorno writes, “The enigmaticalness of artworks is less their irrationality than their rationality; the more methodically they are ruled, the more sharply their enigmaticalness is thrown into relief. Through form, artworks gain their resemblance to language, seeming at every point to say just this and only this, and at the same time whatever it is slips away.”25 Form is simultaneously radically material and immaterial. Form is the artwork’s organization of its own material, and is thus material. In the case of (nostalgia), it is the manner in which the photographs interact with one another, their description, the hotplate, and the film itself that is recording the events.

This interaction transforms the material into what it was not and thus makes the material into something more than itself. Form is immaterial as that which brings something out of the material that would not be there if they were not organized

25 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 120.

45 in precisely this way. Adorno points to this when he suggests that artworks only seek identity with themselves. Artworks that succeed at identity with themselves are then the radical other of everything else; they present a semblance of what a reconciled history would look like but only as mediated through a memory that does not exist. Thus, the artwork’s formal immateriality is the attempted rescue of the material world.

(nostalgia) is a critique of its own material and its own concept. This is nowhere more obvious than in the central motif of the film—the destruction of the photograph by the hotplate.

And while there is something of a narrative of moving from the medium of photography to that of film, the very structure of the film also suggests a critique of its own media. The film mimics the manner in which filmic movement is produced, achieved through quickly passing still images in front of a light in order to project them in close succession and thus producing the illusion of movement. (nostalgia) plays a revised version of this process out in slow-motion. But in lingering over the heat and light the photographs burn. The images of film are seen for only 1/24 of a second. They are unable to linger against the heat of the light that is needed to illuminate film. Doing so would only present a still image. Viewers of a film do not ever see the individual images of which it is composed. (nostalgia) pays the price for its

46 contemplation of the images by destroying them in the process.

Photography is destroyed in the attempt to resemble its apparent successor in visual imagery.

Film and photography both mimic the dual-reflective character of utopia. In both media, images are recorded onto film and then used to project images either onto light sensitive material or a screen. The tension between the mediums, and

Frampton’s own shift from one to the other, is carried out in the photograph’s destruction in film. Rather than recollecting the past as is implied in the very concept of both mediums recording of forever past images, (nostalgia) pushes both mediums to recognize their relationship to the future and to imaginings of utopia. This is accomplished through an acknowledgement of utopia’s mediation in history. Thus, the form of the film works against the constitutive character of the mediums at issue in it.

What is described in the images of either film or photography is always inextricably linked to the past. Frozen images on film are a sign of the past; they are never immediate but always pulling the past into the present. (nostalgia) forces the technologies of projection to acknowledge their concern with the future; the temporal form of the film develops this critique. Thus, the inherent projection of these media becomes in the film the imaginative projection into the future. In (nostalgia) the present

47 is simultaneously pulled into the past and the future, diminishing its own actuality. In this sense, (nostalgia) diminishes its own importance, undermining the moment in which it appears and amplifying the danger of sacrificing the present in favor of past and future.

In bringing the artwork to articulation, form is in allegiance with critique. The artwork is brought to identity with itself through form. Form develops the disparate material of the artwork into a totality that maintains its otherness to the world through an adherence to identity with itself. Adorno writes,

“Form converges with critique. It is that through which artworks prove self-critical; what in the work rebels against any untransformed residue is really the bearer of form, and art is disavowed wherever support is given to the theodicy of the unformed, whether under the name of musicality or ham acting.”26 Form is the internal critique of the artwork; it critiques the artwork in its own construction. This is true in

(nostalgia) to the extent that it refuses to allow the photographs to go on existing if they are unwilling to act as film, and yet in their destruction they begin to take on some filmic qualities such as movement. The material of (nostalgia) is destroyed as it attempts to remain static. The aporia for the photograph is that

26 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 144.

48 it resists the impetus to movement that film demands.

Photography wants to retain its own dignity in the face of its perceived improvement, to maintain its own concept. In

(nostalgia), photography is unable to win this struggle. If it moves from the heat it risks approaching the blasphemy of movement that film is committed to, and if it remains where it is, unmoving, it faces an inevitable destruction. As it turns out, photography loses on both fronts in (nostalgia). It is destroyed and is forced into movement in the process of its own destruction. This is the brutality of form in artworks; it does not only win, but it seeks to humiliate its target by forcing it to become what it is not.

Enigmaticalness, as read through (nostalgia), becomes a concept of temporal disjuncture that holds the present in a constant state of tension against the past and future. In this context, enigmaticalness becomes a direct confrontation with the world-historical catastrophe of the present; a present that

Fredric Jameson argues is bereft of any historical affect. For

Jameson, experience is no longer an experience of continuity with a recognizable past and future; instead the contemporary situation is experienced as a never-ending series of presents, depthless within their own singularity, each following from the last with no direct connection or knowledge of one another.

49 Jameson writes, “…our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism.”27 There is only an eternal present, and thus the radical return of the repetition of nature as history—prehistory.

(nostalgia) forces the present to recognize the difference of the past and the future, and presenting the possibility of a future historical difference without sacrificing the actuality of present conditions. (nostalgia) is a material enactment of the epistemic process of utopian imagination.

27 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 16.

50 Damaged in Absence

Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes’ final book, was published in 1980, the same year as his death. Beyond its temporal proximity to Barthes’ own passing, Camera Lucida is itself deeply concerned with death, most explicitly expressed in the reflection on Barthes’ mother. Shortly after Barthes’ death,

Tzvetan Todorov reflected on this spectral aspect of the text:

“For me, Barthes’ death will remain linked to that other experience concerning him: reading La Chambre claire. For death is everywhere in this book: as Death; as Barthes’ mother’s death; as his own.”28 In his reflection, Todorov argues that

Camera Lucida, along with Roland Barthes and A Lover’s

Discourse, belongs to Barthes’ late period. This period of

Barthes’ work, Todorov suggests, is characterized by a lack of

“…any tutelary system whatever, any authoritative discourse

(not even a quoted one or one that is slightly distorted, slightly perverted).”29 Todorov continues, “The conquest of this genre of

‘egoism,’ contrary to what we might suppose, is anything but easy: it is achieved by dint of renunciations.”30 Todorov argues that this radical subjectivity crystallizes most definitively in

Camera Lucida through the use of the first-person singular

28 Tzvetan Todorov, “The Last Barthes,” Critical Inquiry Vol. 7 No. 3 (Spring 1981): 449. 29 Todorov, “The Last Barthes,” 452. 30 Todorov, “The Last Barthes,” 453.

51 pronoun with the passé simple tense, and then, specifically in the sections dealing with the death of Barthes’ mother. Barthes’ renunciation of any presumptions to a universal discourse, in fact, allows him to speak to the universal through its mediation in the particular, that is, himself. If Barthes makes his own being the mediator of photography, then this experience of photography belongs solely to Barthes, and it is this renunciation of declarative statements about photography that initiates an ontology for Barthes. The look into the Photograph becomes a look into subjectivity itself in Camera Lucida; subjectivity objectivates itself once it becomes an object of contemplation. Thus, the noeme of photography, to use Barthes’ term, is recognized only in its expression in the subject. The universal, the Photograph, is expressed through the experience of subjectivity and is, thus, simultaneously, the particular and the radical contingency that Barthes locates in the Photograph.

This is the exquisite achievement of Barthes’ final work: it achieves the objective through a painful and difficult retreat into the most private corners of the subject that is played out through the course of the text. In Camera Lucida, both death and photography become this convergence of subject and object/particular and universal. Death is at once the most personal moment of life, the moment when the subject truly

52 retreats into itself, and the most universal of experiences, the ultimate triumph of the object over the subject. Death is nature exerting its inescapable power over the pretensions of the subject—the passage of animate to inanimate, a process that it holds in common with photography.31

Barthes states at the outset of Camera Lucida that he is seeking the essence and distinction of photography—an ontology of photography. Barthes’s search for this essence, mediated through himself, borrows certain language from the project of phenomenology, but, as Barthes himself notes, it is a highly heterodox and uncooperative form. And to believe

Todorov, it is all but unrecognizable. Rather, Barthes’s engagement with the medium of photography is determined by the degree to which a given photograph strikes him. What is significant for Barthes is the manner in which the photograph becomes important to him, and only to him. But unlike phenomenology, Barthes’s retreat into the subject does not build out towards a universal subject in a direct relationship, but instead, it is the universal as mediated in the particular.

Barthes’s famous dual neologisms, studium and punctum, are meant to designate the manner in which photography affects its

31 In fact, all media could be considered in this regard. See Chapter 4 of John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 137-176.

53 observer. Broadly defined, the studium is the intentionality of the photograph while the punctum is the unintentionality that strikes an individual subject as significant, an involuntary

Proustian remembrance; that which is important in the photograph removed from its logical component. It is that which is simultaneously present and absent in the photograph. The punctum is the contingency of the already contingent photograph.

This essay will place the concept of the punctum against

Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia). The importance of the dialogue between the punctum and Frampton’s film is twofold and it concerns a dialogue between Barthes’s two intertwined definitions of the punctum. The burning of the photographs in

Frampton’s film is a simultaneous result of the rubbing of the photographs against the viewer and the pushing of the photographs against one another as the punctum of the final, unseen image pushes through the rest of the photographs, through the temporal remove, in order to puncture the subjectivity of the observer. The photographs in (nostalgia), intensely personal as they are for Frampton, begin to disintegrate as the punctum in each one pushes against

Frampton through the narration. This friction of the surface of the photographs against the subject, a contact that occurs

54 through the punctum, ignites the photographs in flame, destroying them. While the punctum is a destructive element as

Frampton’s film is read through it, the punctum is also damaged in the contact between artwork and concept. The punctum is not torn apart—one half dirempted from the other—in reaction to

(nostalgia), but, rather, the concept is pulled through itself. One side of the concept is pulled through the other, entangling the two sides of the punctum—the subjective and the objective— further within one another. These oppositions within the singularity of the concept of the punctum are considered in roughly equivalent space. They are each played out respectively, within the two halves along which Camera Lucida is divided.

Barthes begins “Part One” of Camera Lucida by expressing his desire to differentiate the photograph from other forms of the image. “I was overcome by an ‘ontological’ desire: I wanted to learn at all costs what photography was ‘in itself,’ by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images.”32 Barthes’s verdict is that the photograph is, in a sense, an invisible carrier of the object that it represents. Barthes refers to it as a “pure contingency,” a direction to look, in each photograph “…the referent adheres.”33

For Barthes, the photograph is an absent signifier; it behaves

32 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 3. 33 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 6.

55 only as a vessel. In spite of this apparent invisibility, Barthes seeks the affective essence of photography. In other words, how does the photograph damage, wound, or puncture the viewing subject? What is it about the specifically invisible character of the photograph that injures the subject? Barthes introduces the terms studium and punctum to explain the affective quality of the photograph, and to distinguish the meaning of a particular photograph from its affect.

Barthes’s studium is the collected meaning of the object to which the photograph directs an observer; it is what is represented within the frame of the photograph. It is the voice that the photograph uses to direct the viewer toward the representation that it contains. The studium is what the photographer intended, what the viewer is supposed to see; it is not simply the focus or subject of the photograph but the intended composition, contrasting elements, and anything that was consciously placed there. Barthes writes, “To recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer’s intentions, to enter into harmony with them, to approve or disapprove of them, but always to understand them, to argue them within myself, for culture (from which the studium derives) is a contract arrived at between creators and

56 consumers.”34 It is the shared meaning of a particular photograph, what is deemed important in the photograph to anybody that sees it, and therefore that which speaks only silence to subjectivity: it is without affect. The studium, in speaking to everyone, fails to affect anyone. For Barthes, any meaning that is broadly recognizable risks being irrelevant, for the reason that it loses any particularity in achieving the status of meaningfulness. In contrast, the punctum is Barthes’s term for the particular, the specificity of the photograph; it is that which calls upon subjectivity and is, therefore, distinct for each observer.

The punctum is often defined, in opposition to the universality and intentionality of the studium, as the particular and accidental, the detail that speaks out of the photograph, as something that was not intended to be noticed or even present in the photograph. This interpretation of the punctum, although correct, simplifies the matter somewhat, reducing the trace of the observer’s subjectivity that is found in the photograph to a mere detail in which the affect is transplanted rather artificially.

Reducing the punctum to a mere detail removes it from any relation to subjectivity, and, instead, it becomes merely a method for anonymously reading any given photograph. The

34 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 27-8.

57 punctum as method or abstract concept loses the specificity that it holds; its concept is damaged in attempting to realize the implied universality of its status as a concept. This difficulty is raised by its status as a concept of contingency, a concept beyond the identical nature of conceptual thought.

It is because of this very difficulty that Barthes must adopt an egoist position—renouncing the very basis of the totalities that are essential to the conceptual—in writing about photography. Is this renunciation the only way for Barthes to conceptualize photography and its affect? Barthes writes, “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”35 The punctum is the detail that inhabits the photograph with a personal poignancy for the observer (or perhaps just Barthes), but unlike the studium, the punctum is only significant outside of any cultural encoding; it is important to the observer as a bruise inflicted upon their subjectivity. Can the punctum be discussed in relation to an affect beyond Barthes’s own? If something becomes recognizable as meaningful beyond the individual it can no longer be named as punctum. To name something as a punctum draws it into the realm of the studium, the realm of meaning.

Barthes’s examples of the punctum in “Part One” of Camera

35 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 27.

58 Lucida are primarily details in specific photographs that he notices, that he is unable to turn his attention from, that often recall memories in his own past, or even unrecognizable significations in the photograph that do not ease their grasp of his attention.

The photographs that prompt these reflections are ones that Barthes comes across in magazines and other public spaces, photographs to which he has no personal attachment.

His reflections on these photographs are, however, highly personal and specific to him. For example, Barthes’s identifies the punctum for himself in James Van Der Zee’s “Family

Portrait” as the strapped pumps that one of the women in the portrait wears. For Barthes, this detail dominates the photograph and fixes his attention. But the arbitrary nature of this detail demonstrates that it is ultimately outside of any larger cultural significance: the strapped pumps would not hold the same, or even any, significance for other observers of the photograph. And thus, Barthes writes, “The studium is ultimately always coded, the punctum is not (I trust I am not using these words abusively).”36 According to Barthes, the punctum, “…whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already

36 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 51.

59 there.”37 The punctum that Barthes identifies is a detail that becomes significant to an individual through an association, a relation, that is brought to the photograph by that subject; it is a detail that exists in the photograph, but is pulled forward in relation to a specific individual, and that falls back once the attention paid to the photograph is broken. The subject intrudes upon the autonomy of the photograph, violating it, just as the photograph does not ask the subject’s permission. These photographs of anonymous or unknown figures elicit the subjective version of the punctum. That is to say, Barthes’ engagement with these photographs, photographs that might have a more universal relevance, are significant to him only through the thoroughly subjective realm of the punctum, the detail that becomes significant to him in an almost involuntary manner, that reach up to him out of the photograph when he looks at it and that once again fall back to the photograph once he puts them aside.

Frampton’s ruminations upon photographs (most of which he himself has produced) in (nostalgia) resemble the type of reflections that Barthes relates throughout “Part One” of

Camera Lucida in demonstrating the punctum. The difference is that Frampton’s photographs are not the impersonal type that

37 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 55.

60 Barthes describes throughout “Part One,” but instead they are his own photographs, each with personal significance for

Frampton, and his descriptions contain the type of detail and intimate knowledge that only the operator would know. There is scant commonality in the descriptions of the photographs, it is simply Frampton reflecting upon what is important to him in a particular photograph: when and where it was taken, why he likes or dislikes it, and various musings about people or things in the photograph. There is no method or set of statistics to relay about each photograph, just simple personal reflections. It is sometimes difficult to locate something that is described by

Frampton in the way that Barthes defines the punctum because

Frampton is the photographer for most of the photographs and the things that he chooses to stress are most often things that he intended to include in the photographs. However, in the final description of the photograph that is absent, Frampton clearly describes what Barthes would call a punctum.

The final description of the film does not correspond to any photograph; no photograph approximates the visual image of what is described in the end. Further, the film breaks off, severing the possibility of this description meeting any visual equivalent. The break in the film’s disjointed narrative is precipitated by the absence of the final image. The absence of

61 the final image is the precipitation of an eternity: without this image the viewer is left to imagine the terror that Frampton describes. The film pulls the viewer closer into the absent photograph, such that the final photograph acts as the double reflection that it describes with such terror. From this absent image, the film reaches into both a history without origin and a future without end—each reflecting off the other into simultaneous infinity and oblivion. This oblivion is signaled by the viewer’s inability to provide an affirmative answer to

Frampton’s final query: “Do you see what I see?”

The concurrently circular and teleological nature of

(nostalgia) demands the absence of this final image. As the final description does not match with any photograph, the first photograph is not matched by any description, and there does not appear to be any link between the Polaroid of an anonymous darkroom at the beginning and the final scene that Frampton describes. Were the film to, as it were, close the circle, the enigma of the film would ultimately fade. It would be no task to connect the film in an endless loop and imagine that it could have started and ended with any of the photographs, inserting a new meaning with each new suture and ensuring that the melancholic loss that is felt with the burning of each photograph is eased with the guarantee that the image will reappear in the

62 next rotation. (nostalgia) provides no such guarantee; as each photograph burns it seems that it has been abjectly tossed aside by Frampton, attempting to rid himself of his former, and now disdained, relationship with photography. It is only when the viewer reaches the final image and description of the film that a possible reason for this disdain of photography is intimated. The terror that Frampton finds in the final image that he describes provides his justification for the destruction of the previous photographs.

I will quote the complete final description of (nostalgia) at length:

Since 1966 I have made few photographs. This has been partly through design and partly through laziness. I think I expose fewer than fifty negatives a year now. Of course I work more deliberately than I once did, and that counts for something. But I must confess that I have largely given up still photography. So it is all the more surprising that I felt again, a few weeks ago, a vagrant urge that would have seemed familiar a few years ago: the urge to take my camera out of doors and make a photograph. It was a quite simple, obtrusive need. So I obeyed it. I wandered around for hours, unsatisfied, and finally turned towards home in the afternoon. Half a block from my front door, the receding perspective of an alley caught my eye…a dark tunnel with the cross street beyond brightly lit. As I focused and composed the image, a truck turned into the alley. The driver stopped, got out, and walked away. He left his cab door open. My composition was spoiled, but I felt a perverse impulse to make the exposure

63 anyway. I did so, and then went home to develop my single negative. When I came to print the negative, an odd thing struck my eye. Something, standing in the cross-street and invisible to me, was reflected in a factory window, and then reflected once more in the rear-view mirror attached to the truck door. It was only a tiny detail. Since then, I have enlarged this small section of my negative enormously. The grain of the film all but obliterates the features of the image. It is obscure; by any possible reckoning, it is hopelessly ambiguous. Nevertheless, what I believe I see recorded in that speck of film, fills me with such fear, such utter dread and loathing, that I think I shall never dare to make another photograph again. Here it is! Look at it! Do you see what I see?38

This is the last description by Frampton in (nostalgia). It drives the tension between film and photography that plays throughout, but it is also the cause of the destruction of the other photographs. This absent photograph is so terrifyingly present as to cause Frampton to burn his past photographs, obliterating any trace of the medium. However, there is a less literal reason for the final images destructive urging. The punctum of the final photograph is read, or perhaps felt, all the way at the beginning of the film. The punctum of the absent image acts as a magnifying glass held under the sun, burning through the delicate surface of the photographs from the back

38 Quoted in Rachel Moore, Hollis Frampton: (nostalgia) (London: Afterall Books, 2006), 88.

64 to the front. The detail that Frampton attempts to identify through multiple enlargements becomes the point of heat that shines against each previous photograph in the sequence, initiating the combustion of the photographs. Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca, in discussing Camera Lucida, highlight

Barthes’s allusion to his own “burning” when he comes into contact with certain photographs that present a semblance of a recognized figure:

In his discussion of the question of resemblance, Barthes claims that when he gets close to a photograph, when he feels he almost can touch his ‘desired object, his beloved’s body,’ he finds himself ‘burning,’ as if consumed by a kind of fire. This experience of burning registers not only extremity of his desire and love but also, at the very edge of this extremity, the conflagration of his identity.39

Cadava and Cortés-Rocca point to Barthes’ description of desire for a resemblance in a photograph as a burning becomes self- destruction; the burning felt is of one’s subjectivity. In

(nostalgia) the burning of the photographs indeed resembles the burning that Barthes describes. Frampton’s feeling is closer to abjection than desire, but the intensity of focus is indeed similar. However, the analogy may be more literal than it initially seems. While Barthes describes a burning of his own

39 Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca, “Notes on Love and Photography,” October 116 (Spring 2006): 22-23.

65 subjectivity in the encounter with the photograph, in Frampton it is the photographs that ignite, not Frampton. Again we return to the final photograph, where the question of what so terrified

Frampton remains. Is it possible that a self-reflection is what terrifies Frampton? Is Frampton destroying the semblance of himself in the photograph in an attempt to sublimate the image of his own death that a self-portrait would contain? It would be the unexpected image of the self that would be so terrifying, as

Frampton has already presented and destroyed a self-portrait that he took some years earlier, an image of himself of which he was aware, an image in which he recognized himself. The unexpected image of the self, if perhaps not recognized as the self, would present a disembodied, uncanny specter to

Frampton, simultaneously a semblance of his own being and yet horrifyingly distant and removed. In other words, Frampton may have confronted his own deathly reflection in his final and absent image, an image that is apparently only viewed by

Frampton himself.

Frampton’s insistent question about whether we can see what he sees is denied by the conspicuous absence of the photograph that Frampton describes. But like the Winter

Garden photograph that is both present and absent from

Camera Lucida, Frampton’s final image is seemingly only in

66 danger of inflicting damage to his own subjectivity. To view

(nostalgia) is to view the final image in each of the photographs that precede it. The terror that Frampton identifies is on view as the surface of each photograph breaks into flame, as the heated focus of the absent image meets the surface of the individual photographs. Only in absence is the true affect of this final photograph felt. As the absent Winter Garden photograph becomes for Barthes the noeme of Photography, so the final, absent image of (nostalgia) does for Frampton.

The final image is, in fact, not absent, but rather, it is already destroyed when it is reached. The deathly, absent image has expended itself in the destruction of the previous photographs. The final image ignites each of the previous photographs, until at the point that we would finally reach it, the photograph itself is already beyond recognition; it has been reduced to a spectral presence that lingers over the film, haunting each preceding image. For Frampton, it is not merely that a detail becomes the obsession of the photograph, but that the detail itself becomes the image. This is quite literally true in what Frampton describes. His obsession motivates him to enlarge that detail of his negative that entices him, making the image completely unrecognizable, literally igniting the image with the illuminating heat and light necessary to make the print.

67 This heat and focus burn their way through all of the previous images, destroying the corpus of work that Frampton presents.

No image can exist in the face of Frampton’s final image, the final image that is, in fact, the most present image in (nostalgia) because it resides behind all of the other images, shaping and reshaping each previous photograph in its own invisible likeness. This raises the issue of the second, and potentially more interesting, implication of Barthes’ punctum and its relation to Frampton’s (nostalgia).

Michael Fried has recently argued that the conventional understanding of Barthes’ punctum does not fully comprehend the implications of this most opaque of concepts. Fried contends that the conventional understanding of the distinction between studium and punctum, while correct, misses much of the potential in Barthes’ text, “…placing all of the emphasis, as is usually done, on the viewer’s purely subjective response to the punctum ends up missing Barthes’ central thought or, at any rate, failing to grasp what ultimately is at stake in his central distinction.”40 Fried’s argument, following a similar vein in his own work, is that Camera Lucida makes an antitheatrical statement for the photograph. That is to say, Barthes rejects any sense of theatricality in the photograph, and this moves beyond

40 Michael Fried, “Barthes’s Punctum,” Critical Inquiry 31 (Spring 2005): 539.

68 any mere staging that is intentionally performed for the camera.

In the course of making this argument, he makes his observations about the constrained manner in which the punctum is conventionally defined. Fried writes,

Time, in Barthes’s sense of the term, functions as a punctum for him precisely because the sense of something being past, being historical, cannot be perceived by the photographer or indeed anyone else in the present. It is a guarantor of antitheatricality that comes to a photograph, that becomes visible in it, only after the fact, après-coup, in order to deliver the hurt, the prick, the wound, to future viewers that Barthes evidently craves.41

Fried’s essay, beyond a perhaps narcissistic interest in theatricality, is correct in pointing beyond the obvious, and now second-nature, interpretation of Barthes’ punctum. Fried’s point is that Barthes is interested in the photograph for its capture of time, outside of any attempt to make the image timeless.

Barthes is interested in those hints within subjectivity that reaches beyond itself when pricked by the photograph. But, the punctum is not restricted to a detail of a photograph that may somehow damage the subject. Rather, there is a manner in which the punctum comes to inhabit the entirety of the image.

The second half of Barthes’ book brings out this more nuanced definition of the punctum.

41 Fried, “Barthes’s Punctum,” 560.

69 Above I have argued that “Part One” of Camera Lucida presents a subjective version of the punctum in Barthes’ engagement with a set of anonymous photographs. In contrast,

“Part Two” approaches an objective version of the punctum through an engagement with Barthes’ intimately personal photographs. “Part Two” of Camera Lucida begins with Barthes narrating a recent evening spent looking through a collection of his mother’s photographs shortly after her death. As Barthes looks through the photographs he is unable to recognize the truth of his mother in any of the images before him. “Now, one

November evening shortly after my mother’s death, I was going through some photographs. I had no hope of ‘finding’ her, I expected nothing from these ‘photographs of a being before which one recalls less of that being than by merely thinking of him or her’ (Proust).”42 Finally, Barthes comes across a single photograph that he feels captures his mother’s essence, her truth. Barthes writes, “These same photographs, which phenomenology would call “ordinary” objects, were merely analogical, provoking only her identity, not her truth; but the

Winter Garden Photograph was indeed essential, it achieved for me, utopically, the impossible science of the unique being.”43

For Barthes, this photograph of his mother becomes the object

42 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 63. 43 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 70-1.

70 through which all of photography becomes legible; it is, as he says, an impossibility, in that it represents a universal methodology that is to be applied to the object of absolute particularity and contingency—photography. Barthes centers in upon this single photograph in the collection that he has been studying. “The photograph was very old. The corners were blunted from having been pasted into an album, the sepia print had faded, and the picture just managed to show two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory, what was called a Winter Garden in those days.”44 This photograph becomes Photography for

Barthes, the essence of the medium, the very concept itself.

“Something like the essence of the Photograph floated in this particular picture. I therefore decided to ‘derive’ all photography (its ‘nature’) from the only photograph which assuredly existed for me, and to take it somehow as a guide for my last investigation.”45

Barthes’s “last investigation” (the implications for

Barthes’s entire oeuvre should be noted here) is into the objective side of the punctum, that aspect of the concept that reaches out of every photograph. Working with the so-called

“Winter Garden Photograph,” Barthes determines that “The

44 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 67. 45 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 73.

71 name of Photography’s noeme will therefore be: ‘That-has-been,’ or again: the Intractable.”46 The photograph is the proof that something has existed, that something, for some period of time, existed in front of a camera. In this way, the photograph is more evidence of a specific past than an impetus to remember.

Barthes writes, “The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been.”47 The photograph freezes in time an alienated moment, a moment removed from its historical place and reintegrated into the present. Thus, photography does not serve or assist memory, but rather it attempts to replace memory; it is a materialization of something immaterial. Barthes writes, “Not only is the

Photograph never, in essence, a memory…but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.” And further, “The photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because nothing in it can be refused or transformed.”48 For Barthes, the photograph becomes a false memory, the imagined placeholder that allows one to substitute an image for a memory. It is in this sense that the photograph becomes a fetish for the perceived shortcomings of memory. Thus, the photograph begins to stand

46 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 77. 47 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 85. 48 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 91.

72 in for actual memory. This is the violence of the photograph that

Barthes describes. The image that stands in for memory is essentially static, always returning to the image as the basis of memory. But the violence of the photograph extends into the photograph’s noeme: what Barthes calls the “that-has-been” character of the photograph.

The evidentiary character of the photograph, the freezing of a moment in time, develops the deathly character of photography. Barthes writes, “All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of death.”49 Beyond the petrifying of a moment into an image that it performs, photography’s allegiance to death concerns a recognition that the figure captured in this photograph will die, that it cannot remain as it is imagined in the portrait, that a photograph’s contingency is no refuge from the inescapability of time. For

Barthes, time becomes the punctum, overtaking the detail as punctum that is invoked throughout “Part One”. In fact, time becomes the detail at the back of all photography, the quality that is evident yet invisible. Barthes writes, “This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (‘that-has-been’), its pure

49 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 92.

73 representation.”50 Barthes’s example, though it seems to be implied in all photographs, is a portrait of a prisoner named

Lewis Payne while he is awaiting his execution, taken by

Alexander Gardner in 1865. The portrait shows the prisoner in a small and dark cell with restraints. Payne looks straight into the camera, seeming to confront his fate with little concern— defiance. The noeme of photography imports death into this photograph, and all others. Recognizing that the scene before us in the image of Payne is something that-has-been is to recognize that this execution was carried out long ago, presumably moments after this particular photograph was made. Barthes writes,

The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.51

As Barthes argues, death is implicated in the very concept of photography. Each photograph, even those that are not

50 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96. 51 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96.

74 portraits, is a signifier of the future in the objectified past that is the photograph. The future exists in each portrait as the moment in which it is observed. The frozen past of the photograph reaches forward to what Barthes terms “an anterior future.” The convergence of this notion of the punctum for

(nostalgia) should become apparent as the concept develops.

The position of the past and the future is in constant movement in (nostalgia). With each photograph the position of past and future switches, so that the initial contact with an image is as an imagined future, something that is out of reach to our vision, but fully accessible as description, as the immaterial. The future is derealized in its realization. As the image is obliterated and passes into history, the description of the image that is being destroyed is already a past. The structure of (nostalgia) is such that the description of, and attempt to conceptualize, the future is always in the past and the realization of that future in viewing the image is always a future. This truth holds if we are to connect the image with the description that seems to match it, but it is reversed if we consider the more important relationship to be that between the image and the description that are temporally concurrent. In this case, the image is always reaching towards a past that is disappearing in our memory and an image that is depleting before our eyes. The description is

75 always moving toward the image that is not yet apparent; the description is the striving for the future, forever unable to fully align itself with the image before it passes into ash. These contradictory positions of the film are complemented by what

Barthes argues about the punctum in “Part Two” of Camera

Lucida. The realization of the past description in the presence and depletion of the image in the present speaks to the manner that the objective punctum is described by Barthes. However, as in the film, for Barthes, the past, present, and future are not distinct entities that are able to be wrested from one another; they are inextricably linked. Although the punctum cannot be pulled apart into distinct relations to different temporalities, its exposure to (nostalgia) does leave it damaged. The concept develops scars in the confrontation with the artwork.

Rather than tearing the punctum in two, it would be more accurate to suggest that (nostalgia) turns the punctum inside out, pulling it through the photographs in the film, from back to front. The punctum is dragged from the end of (nostalgia) towards the beginning, brushing against each photograph as it does. Each photograph pushes the outside shell of the punctum aside as the concept is pulled through the center of each photograph, igniting them as it passes them by in developing a momentary intimacy with the subjectivity of the viewer. As each

76 photograph burns, and the subject is bruised and burned by the punctum of the photographs, it also develops scars. The engagement of (nostalgia) with the punctum has left the concept damaged, different from its original form, but it is not obliterated, it lives on for further confrontations.

The final photograph, in its absence, develops a different relation to time than the other photographs in (nostalgia).

Although the final photograph is at the temporal end of the film, this absent image is, in fact, at the center of (nostalgia). The final image is the double reflection that it claims to represent.

As an absent presence, its realization is forever forestalled. It holds out against the alignment of the descriptions with their images. It is the keystone of the film, simultaneously linking and holding apart the images and descriptions of (nostalgia). It reflects the future and past off of its non-identical present, refusing to reconcile the catastrophe of world history. If for

Barthes the punctum is the terror at the catastrophe that has already occurred, then (nostalgia) forces the punctum into recognition of the ever-present nature of this catastrophe. The actuality of this catastrophe does nothing to alleviate the fear that it is already beyond salvation. In (nostalgia), the punctum is a recognition of the complicity, and even centrality, of the subject in this continuously evolving catastrophe.

77 78 The Critique of Utopian Reason

Ernst Bloch, although a major figure in Twentieth-Century continental philosophy, is more obscure than the other authors discussed in this thesis, inspiring only a fraction of the critical literature of either Adorno or Barthes. Bloch is the philosopher of the Twentieth-Century most associated with rehabilitating utopia as a central concept in the aesthetic and political debates of Western Marxism. Bloch’s first major work, The Spirit of

Utopia (1918), was a touchstone for figures such as Benjamin and Adorno, for whom it was one of the most important texts of their intellectual development. But Bloch’s significance is greater than just as an early influence upon younger and more widely read theorists. Bloch is significant in his own right, and his philosophy deserves the sort of careful reading and attention afforded to figures such as Adorno and Barthes.

Bloch does not easily conform to any particular school of thought or immediately recognizable group of intellectuals. He was a close friend of Georg Lukács during their early years and one of his primary antagonists in the debates during the 1930s over Realism and Modernism.52 Bloch is also often mentioned as a peripheral figure to the Frankfurt School in a manner similar to Siegfried Kracauer or Walter Benjamin, but he was always

52 Theodor Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007).

79 kept at a distance by Max Horkheimer because of Bloch’s continued sympathies for the Soviet Union. Thus, Bloch was simultaneously too sympathetic towards Soviet Marxism to be accepted by the group around Horkheimer and too heterodox in his Marxism to be accepted by Lukács and his followers. He is most often recognized, as noted in the introduction to this thesis, among a loose-knit group of philosophers and essayists that includes such figures as Adorno, Benjamin, and Kracauer among others. Partially as a result of this intellectual homelessness, and despite the great importance of his writing,

Bloch has had a marginalized influence within contemporary critical theory. Jack Zipes notes this in his introduction to a collection of Bloch’s writing: “Ernst Bloch’s disturbing contradictions have always made it difficult to write about this philosopher of Marxist Humanism and revolutionary utopianism.”53 It is my hope that this final portion of my thesis will rectify this disparity in some small way.

The focus will be an essay written by Bloch in 1959 on the role of hope in literature, art, and philosophy. Titled “The

Conscious and Known Activity within the Not-Yet-Conscious, the

Utopian Function,” this essay outlines one of Bloch’s most significant conceptual innovations—the utopian function and its

53 Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, xi.

80 antecedent, the not-yet-conscious. As in the previous essays of this thesis, and to finish out the metaphor, Bloch’s concept will be placed upon Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) as a way to elucidate the contingency of the relationship between concept and art-object.

Bloch’s project for a renewed and reinvented focus upon hope in the face of what he took to be an increasingly harsh and alienated world does not approach hope or the possibility of utopia from an abstract perspective; utopian thought is to be a materialist project. For Bloch, this means that utopia is not something to wish for or envision in specific ways but a manner of thinking about the future that does not shrink from the realities of the present. Bloch writes about the disparity between supposedly utopian thought and what he has in mind:

“None of these midriff-prophets, from Sybil to Nostradamus, has an understandable word to say about the future in their predictions that goes beyond the already known, not a word to say that is not just a rearranging of what we already know. In contrast, Bacon, who is not a prophet but a remarkable utopian, saw an amazingly genuine future in his Nova Atlantis.”54 Utopia, for Bloch, must be grounded in reason and the objective demands of past and present social conditions. As demonstrated

54 Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 104.

81 in the above quote, Bloch only certifies as utopian that type of thought that engages with the empirical world, casting off as ideology those visions toward the future that make unfounded predictions or prophecies. In order for any hope to become significant it must be grounded in an objective reality—the state of the world is neither denied nor reshaped in order to advance the possibility or tenability of hope. Under the conditions of late capitalism hope must be recognized and pursued in the hopeless. In this context, hope is not an irrational escape from reality but a pursuit of reason in the face of its pending eradication. Bloch is arguing against what he sees as the mystical and ultimately false dictates of supposedly utopian thought, what he characterizes as merely cyclical. It never moves beyond the confines of the present and known world.

This aporia is key to understanding Bloch’s thought: the utopian thought that remains tethered to the reality of the present in constructing its imagination of the future should be doomed to a mere rearrangement of the present while what Bloch terms concrete utopia necessarily moves beyond the known in presenting itself, effectively acknowledging that the future is an unknown quantity. In fact, this is the dialectical tension within the concept of utopia; it is this incoherence that Bloch is attempting to clarify in his thought.

82 The utopian function is an attempt to concretize thinking about the future by moving beyond a mere reorganization of the present. It must not use the present as a model of the future because that would limit the possibility of the very potentiality that is to be developed. However, the utopian function must also ground itself in present social conditions so that the image of the future is not a mere vision, a simple dream, but one that is radically materialist. The utopian function seeks to transform a deeper engagement with the present into an open-ended vision of the future and, at the same time, use the rejection of the confines of the present moment as a prelude to a more prescient and radical future. The utopian function is itself an internally divided concept, always at war with itself. However, both sides of this concept find a common ground in subjectivity.

Of the concepts discussed throughout this thesis Bloch’s most closely resemble the internal dynamic of (nostalgia). Each is concerned with the inherent danger and possibility of a utopian look toward the future, a look that presumes to catch a glimpse of a future that is beyond a mere wish, a look that is grounded in the materiality of the present. Although Bloch’s concepts may hold the closest semblance to (nostalgia) this does nothing to guarantee their safety when they come into contact with the artwork. Rather, this apparent intimacy actually places

83 Bloch’s concepts in a particularly precarious position in regards to (nostalgia). The utopian function risks a radical reorganization as it enters the logical world of Frampton’s film.

Also, because the concerns of (nostalgia) are so similar to those of the utopian function, there is a risk that the film will eclipse

Bloch’s concept entirely, replaced with (nostalgia)’s own preferred version. If in their meeting, a concept’s development is too similar to the movement of an artwork then the concept risks seeming an easy fit with that artwork. The inherent non- identity of concept and artwork risks being ignored and not developed; the apparent likeness of (nostalgia) and the utopian function encourages a laziness in exploring the unique space that exists between the two. The danger is that (nostalgia) will silence Bloch’s thought before any dialogue is able to occur. If the density of the artwork were to envelop the concept entirely it would deactivate the dialectical tension between the two.

Despite, or, even, because of this danger, the closeness of

Bloch’s utopian function to (nostalgia) provides unique insight into both, and this intimacy will be utilized in a critique of the utopian function as it is pushed against the heat of (nostalgia).

While there may be an apparent likeness between

(nostalgia) and the utopian function, they actually work in a contrary fashion to one another. Bloch’s utopian function is an

84 attempt to objectify the unconscious desire for an improved future condition into a conceptualization of the impossibility to ever predict this future. In other words, the dynamic of Bloch’s thought is forward moving, it wants to move into the future, if only in the realm of thought, and recognize the future, if only as an unknown quantity. By contrast, Frampton’s (nostalgia), while making gestures toward a past and a future, is radically grounded in an investment in the present. Instead of moving toward the future, (nostalgia) brings the imagination of the future into the present. It forces the future to share the same temporal space as the future. With this difference in mind, the issues that arise from the meeting of these texts circle around subjectivity and temporality. Subjectivity is the base of Bloch’s not-yet-conscious, it is the location of, and the engine that drives the need to imagine a different social condition in the future.

Meanwhile, the present moment is the base from which the utopian desire pushes forward. The two find their link in Bloch’s attempts to push the subject beyond the present into the future through an attempt to recognize the desire to move toward that future. In (nostalgia) the present is extended, drawn out beyond itself into both past and future. As a result the desire of subjectivity to move beyond the present, as expressed in the utopian function, is blocked. (nostalgia) does, however, provide

85 a model of looking to the future that does not sacrifice the present, it also demonstrates the very danger of that look; there is the ever-present possibility that the future will scar the present, further damaging any last hope in historical difference.

As the title of this essay suggests, Bloch’s project could be considered a utopian reason, an attempt to move utopia beyond mere speculation and into the realms of critical thought but also to push critical reason to consider an improved social condition

—a changed historical trajectory. Utopian reason is not the ability or attempt to rationally achieve utopia but, rather, the ability to recognize the utopian residue within reason itself. This utopian reason is contrasted with Frampton’s (nostalgia), a text that explicitly moves with an eye to the future, always striving to marry contemporary imaginings of the future with that future’s actuality—a union that is forever held apart in

(nostalgia). Using this very dynamic of (nostalgia) the internal tension within the concept of the utopian function will be developed and divided along its two halves, exposed in its grinding against the movement of the film. The internal tension of Bloch’s concept is actively antagonized as it is thought through (nostalgia), driven against the oncoming force of the films contrary direction.

Bloch’s project, to make reason itself into a utopian

86 project, is carried forward in Marxism; he ties his argument regarding a materialist self-consciousness to the class struggle in a manner reminiscent of Georg Lukács’ History and Class

Consciousness.55 Bloch writes, “The proletariat understands itself as the active antagonistic contradiction to capitalism, consequently the one that gives the bad developments the most trouble.”56 Thus, the proletariat, once aware of itself as the antithesis of capitalism, becomes the subject of its own history as it begins to understand itself in direct confrontation with present conditions. However, unlike Lukács, one side of Bloch’s thought does not seek to resolve this dialectical struggle in a

Hegelian end of history—communism for Lukács. Bloch seeks to negate this aspect of the dialectical movement, following closer along the lines of Adorno’s negative dialectic that seeks to rescue difference from an undesired and violent reconciliation.

In this manner, Bloch’s utopian function appears to argue against any historical reconciliation by demonstrating the unknown possibility of the future while still retaining subjectivity as the expectant telos of that future. Bloch writes,

Concrete utopia designates precisely the power and truth of Marxism, which pushed the cloud in the dreams forward without extinguishing the fire of the dreams but rather

55 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 83-223. 56 Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 109.

87 strengthened them through concreteness. It is in such a manner that the consciousness- knowledge (Bewusstsein-Gewusstsein) of an intentional expectation has to prove itself to be the intelligence of hope—amidst the immanently ascending, material-dialectically exceeding light. Thus, the utopian function is the only transcending one that has remained, and it is the only one worth keeping: a transcending one without transcendence.57

The solidity upon which Bloch’s concrete utopia is constructed is subjectivity—the heir apparent of Metaphysics. Bloch believes that the task for Marxism is to update the tradition of

Metaphysics into a material philosophy that is able to crystallize in the utopian function. As Bloch says, the utopian function is the only transcendental function that remains. The key for Bloch is to ground utopian thought in its own possibility: what Bloch calls, “a transcending one without transcendence.” This is the subject attempting to move beyond itself according to its own means: reason. The utopian function is, for Bloch, the only remnant of transcendental subjectivity that has survived. This demonstrates both the dialectical movement of utopian reason and its direct link to the Idealist philosophy from which it tries to escape.

The not-yet-conscious is the subject that has not yet apprehended the future as an objective entity in the subject’s own thought. For Bloch, the subjective ground of the utopian

57 Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 107.

88 function is not an afterthought or insignificance; it is constantly defended as the backdrop for the utopian function. Bloch writes,

“But without the power of an ‘I’ and a ‘we’ in the back, even hoping becomes flat. There is nothing soft about the conscious, known hope; rather it has a strong will: this is the way it should be, this is the way it has to be. The inclination to wish and to want bursts forth with zest, the intensity of excess, of surpassing.”58 The “conscious, known hope” is solid for Bloch because it finds its origin in subjectivity. Without the subject, the conscious hope is insignificant, or even non-existent.

Subjectivity is the means by which hope becomes aware of itself; it is also the arena in which this awareness initially develops. Bloch argues that the need to envision a better future condition is an excess of the subject—an excess that indeed confirms the basis of subjectivity itself.

Horkheimer and Adorno argue in their Dialectic of

Enlightenment that subjectivity is itself based in a sacrifice of the present for the future, confirming the subjects move beyond the instinctual motivation of the animal. Thus, concern for the future is one manner in which humanity defines itself against its other as subject. Horkheimer and Adorno write, “The formation of the self severs the fluctuating connection with nature which

58 Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 108.

89 the sacrifice of the self is supposed to establish. Each sacrifice is a restoration of the past, and is given the lie by the historical reality in which it is performed.”59 For Horkheimer and Adorno the formation of the subject is only bought at the expense of the alienation of nature. And it is in this very separation that the subject gains an appreciation for any temporal differentiation, any sense of a past or a future—history. In this context, the formation of the self initiates the search for the utopia that the very continued existence of the self in fact prohibits.

The not-yet-conscious is the condition of subjectivity that is unaware of its own forward temporal boundary; it is an abstract and longing look into an unrecognized and unconceptualized thought of the future. But the not-yet- conscious is not prior to the subject. It is a particular type of thought that is directed toward the future that inhabits the not- yet-conscious. Thus, the utopian function is the subject coming to recognize its own cognitive teleology, coming to own an awareness of the possible forward movement of history. To become the utopian function the not-yet-conscious must become an objectification of the hope that is present for the future under contemporary circumstances. This objectification takes place in the subjective consciousness, uniting the present with

59 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 41.

90 the future and the subject with the object. This reconciliation occurs as the subject moves beyond the incoherence of the not- yet-conscious by becoming conscious of its own future—bringing the subject itself into the very future that it must become aware of in the process. Thus, while Bloch negates the notion of a universal history in his insistence upon the unknowability of the future, he maintains an Idealist reconciliation in bringing the utopian function into being out of the not-yet-conscious—a process that itself repeats the very universalizing history that

Bloch is attempting to cast off. In other words, through the initiation of the utopian function as a conceptualization of the possibility of the future, that future already becomes a part of the subject; it develops alongside the subject as a real possibility only as it exists within that subject. Thus, as Bloch attempts to sublate a universal history through a thinking of the unthought, the forward-looking motion of that very thought transfers into a dialectical reconciliation within the subject—in the subject’s existence in the present.

Against this reconciliation, Bloch argues that the future cannot be captured in advance, the possibility of utopia remains forever open, but only ever as a possibility. These two sides of his thought are constantly vying for dominance within his writing. Bloch writes,

91 Only when reason starts to speak, then hope, which has nothing false to it, will begin to blossom again. The not-yet-conscious itself has to become conscious of its own doings; it must come to know its contents as restraint and revelation. And thus the point is reached where hope, in particular, the true effect of expectation in the dream forward, not only occurs as an emotion that merely exists by itself, but is conscious and known as the utopian function.60

For Bloch it is not enough that there be a simple and unreflective hope; any utopian desire must be based in a recognition of its own capacity as such. Utopian desire, in order to avoid pure speculation and the descent into a hope that fuels real hopelessness, must confront itself as a desire for an improved future condition. The not-yet-conscious must become aware of itself as the impossibility of capturing the future, of being unable to assign the future to the same catastrophe as the past and the present, even while any vision toward that future is necessarily grounded in that very catastrophe. The utopian function is the self-conscious reflection by the subject upon the faint possibility of a transformed history; it does not promise any salvation, but, rather, it holds out the possibility of the future specifically because it is impossible to know it. Thus, the future is the holder of the unknown possibility of history: the only possible salvation of history is this future repair. This possibility

60 Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 105.

92 is what the utopian function maintains for subjectivity: the inability to cast the future off as hopeless and descend into narcissism. But this is also the possibility of subjectivity itself to become something more than what it is, beyond its need to dominate nature and eliminate difference. It must become conscious as the utopian function; it cannot function as the not- yet-conscious. The not-yet-conscious is precisely what it says: it is the unknown future that is unrecognized within the subject’s own thought. The utopian function represents the subject’s fear of difference; it is the subject’s need to make the future like itself. The not-yet-conscious is precisely the unknowable that should remain as such.

Bloch’s subjectively grounded hope appears to recede against the horizon when confronted by (nostalgia), which pushes against the obliteration of difference in subjectivity. But

(nostalgia) is not a forecast of hopelessness or ultimate defeat.

Rather, it seems to undermine the subjective ground upon which Bloch seeks to base his utopian function; it diminishes the ability of the present to act as a moment from which to look towards a more promising future. (nostalgia) interacts with

Bloch’s utopian function as though they were well-fitted gears that run in opposite directions. This is not to say that subjectivity is abstractly negated in (nostalgia), but the utopian

93 possibility of subjective consciousness is far more troubled in the film than Bloch seems to allow. Bloch is unable to express that subjectivity must be universally condemned and vigorously defended, simultaneously.

(nostalgia) begins with an image of what appears to be a darkroom and a voice narrating the particulars of a photograph, though not this one. This simple structure becomes the film’s model for the present moment: a fleeting image that is in the process of disappearing, accompanied by a voice that does not describe the image upon which it rests. Defining this seemingly simple temporal dimension of (nostalgia) is essential to understanding its relation to the utopian function. For

(nostalgia) this initial moment of the film is the present in its most uncontaminated form. The structure of the film is such that this simplicity of the moment is not a given, but it also necessitates an understanding that the only contemporaneity of the film is each specific moment in the film, even as that moment is drawn out to an artificially long length in each individual photograph. In other words, each photograph is its own temporal universe; the present of each photograph exists in the time that each photograph appears, drawn out and diminished as the photograph passes into ash. Each photograph relates to the others before and after it but not as a past and a

94 future. Every photograph has its own past and future as figured in the structure of the film, but each moment exists for itself at the moment that it occurs. Because each photograph contains its own past and future, the entire film is its own eternal, though meaningful, present. (nostalgia) forces an extended present into the same space as a constant consideration for the past and the future. All of this is played out in a manner that mirrors Bloch’s struggle for utopian consciousness.

As the seemingly banal process of the film proceeds, a voice narrates a description of each photograph. The disjuncture between the image and the description upsets what initially seemed to be a simple exercise in a destruction of the image. Thus, any stable self-conscious subjectivity in the film is thrown into disorder, initially unable to locate any temporal markers. If each photograph in the film represents its own autonomous present; then it becomes impossible to navigate among them. However, the film does find a way to move forward even in the context of its own temporal evacuation. It begins to become clear how the images and descriptions relate to one another, and the film does not so much proceed forward as it pulls the future toward the present. (nostalgia) is akin to a reverse teleology that terminates at the very place from where it began.

95 (nostalgia) appears to pull back where the utopian function pushes forward. For Bloch, becoming conscious of the necessity of looking forward is the means by which the not-yet- conscious becomes a meaningful concern as the utopian function. Bloch writes,

The ideas of the imagination stand in contrast to those of recollection, which merely reproduce perceptions of the past and thereby increasingly hide in the past. And in this instance the ideas of the imagination are not of the kind that merely combine the already existing facts in a random order (the sea of stone, the golden mountain, etc.), but carry on the existing facts toward their future potentiality of their otherness, of their better condition in an anticipatory way. The imagination of the utopian function that is determined in this way differs from mere fantasy in that only the former possesses an expectable not-yet-existence; i.e., it does not play around in an unoccupied potentiality and does not go astray but anticipates a real potentiality in a psychical way.61

The process of the not-yet-conscious becoming aware of itself is in Bloch an attempt to gain stability, to become sure of one’s position regarding the future. The utopian function does not reorganize the present into an imagined future; the future that is envisioned in the utopian function is not a distorted reflection of a distorted present. Rather, what Bloch appears to be arguing for is an immanent development of the present into an improved future potentiality. The present is to be sublated into an

61 Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 105.

96 improved future, pushing the conditions of the future beyond their present state while not introducing false possibilities.

Bloch’s dialectical theory of utopian thought is, thus, an attempt to push through present conditions on the very terms that those conditions necessitate.

Bloch’s thought is an attempt to recognize the future’s radical otherness, connected to subjectivity by an implicit potentiality. In making this future conscious it both becomes the object and is integrated into the subject. The future becomes the internal difference of both subjectivity and the present moment. Bloch writes, “The upright gait is a prerequisite, i.e., a will that cannot be overruled by anything that has been. The uprightness is the will’s proviso. This peculiar point, where the subject can stand and from where it reacts, is designated abstractly in the stoic self-consciousness: when the world collapses, the debris will hit an undaunted person.”62 Thus, the subject stands beyond the objective conditions of the world, separated from the world and history through conceptual thought. (nostalgia) presents a critique of Bloch on the grounds that the future must be considered from the present, a position that Bloch seeks to occupy. However, in attempting to conceptualize an unknown future the subject is propelled into

62 Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 108.

97 that future, inhabiting it and diminishing its utopian possibility before it has begun. (nostalgia) grinds against Bloch’s conception of the utopian function, breaking away pieces and forcing it to confront the self-imposed teleology that it seeks to eliminate from reason, hidden beneath the layers of utopic imagining.

Despite the reversed teleology, the narration of

(nostalgia) does attempt to propel the film forward, always hoping to describe the photograph in such a way that it is not forgotten, highlighting just those details that will be significant for the viewer before the photograph is lost. However earnest this effort may be it seems a losing fate. Despite the seeming extension of the present there is a simultaneous frenetic panic as the film attempts to record its own future. The preemptive narration imparts an urgency in trying to evaluate the future before it arrives. This tension reaches its apex in the final moments of the film, in the final narration and its absent image.

In these final moments, as Frampton describes the terror that the absent image inspired in him, the desire to look into the future is questioned. If this is the end of the teleology, this terror and uncertainty that is so present in the final description, then the future is perhaps not the path of hope after all. Unlike

Bloch, Frampton seems to confront the immanent danger of

98 utopian desire.

The movement of (nostalgia) is its very stasis. Thus, it is not so much that the film propels itself ever forward, but, rather, it is as though the film were forcing the future into the same space as the present. The narration in the film pulls the future towards the present, seeking to ensure that the future pay the present its due. Bloch seeks no such assurances. For

Bloch, the utopian function is a way to break free from the strictures of the present, and while he does not guarantee that the future will bring any improvement, he also never acknowledges the danger inherent in his utopian reason. Bloch writes, “The awareness of the frontline position is the best illumination for it; the utopian function, as the comprehended activity of expectation, of a hopeful presentiment, keeps the alliance with everything dawning in the world. Thus, the utopian function knows about explosive powers since the utopian function is itself a condensed form of them: the utopian function is the unimpaired reason of a militant optimism.”63 The problem with Bloch is that there is no sense that there is anything to be lost in the utopian desire, and it is this unproblematic embrace of the future that is so vexing. As (nostalgia) demonstrates, the future is not always an improvement over the present. It seems

63 Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 107.

99 fitting, then, at this point, to end with a quotation from Walter

Benjamin, whose own wariness of the future was tragically confirmed in his own demise: “Marx says, revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But perhaps it is really totally different. Perhaps revolutions are the grasp by the human race traveling in this train for the emergency brake.”64

64 Walter Benjamin quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School (New York: The Free Press, 1979), 60.

100 Haunting the Dialectical Image

This thesis endeavors to place the artwork at the center of aesthetic philosophy. (nostalgia) has been the model for both the thinking and the writing through each of the three essays.

The effect of this model has been the destruction of the concepts as they previously existed. As the photographs crumple and darken in the film, so the concepts do in confronting the film itself. However, each acted in a specific manner in relation to (nostalgia). Adorno’s enigmaticalness became intertwined with Frampton’s film throughout the essay.

Barthes’ punctum was pierced by (nostalgia), sewing one side of the concept into the other. In Barthes, it was as though the concept had been dragged backwards through the film, exhibiting burns from each successive image destroyed. Bloch’s utopian function fit with the immovable form of Frampton’s film, but they moved in contrary direction, and as a result, they pushed against one another, grinding the excess away from the concept. This destruction is not carried out in an attempt to negate conceptual thought in a reckless manner. Rather, it is a recognition of the contingency that exists in all conceptual thought. To think about an object is to catch it in a moment of surprise—shock. Following Adorno, conceptual is useful as an initiation of the principal of non-identity. That is to say, the

101 concept is to be recognized as simultaneously descriptive of the concept and missing something, or reaching too far, rounding up more than is warranted. Non-identity does not ignore this discrepancy, but, instead, develops it. The non-identical is the continued existence of difference in identity.

This absolute contingency that Frampton identifies in his meta-title is mirrored by the stylistic concern that Richter locates in the Denkbild. Richter’s insistence that we read philosophy itself aesthetically, read it as writing, is the other main point that this thesis has been raising. In this context, it is important that the relationship between the art-object and the concept be reciprocal; they need to speak to one another. Not only does this strain the dominance of the concept over the object—as something to be applied to something else—but, it also reintroduces the philosophy as an object of study, again highlighting its importance as writing, not merely an abstract form of thought, but one with specificity.

This thesis aspires to invigorate aesthetic philosophy with a need to respect the particularity of the artwork, to account for its objectivity. Imitation is the chosen method for elucidating the artwork’s contingency in this case, and, therefore, form becomes an important issue. It is helpful at this point to return to the title of this thesis: images never again

102 witnessed/concepts never again thought. This title expresses a link to the type of visual thought that occurs in (nostalgia) with the type of thought that Gerhard Richter identifies as a

Denkbild. The ominous tone of the title is meant to reflect the fleeting character of (nostalgia) as the photographs are destroyed, forgotten as they pass into ash. But, it is also a way of thinking that recognizes its own limitation and fleeting nature

—Adorno’s non-identity. It is a recognition of the impossibility of ever finding a static truth that resides within each artwork, awaiting its own discovery and resolution. But (nostalgia) itself is a reflection of this transitory meaning, destroying its own media and concluding with an ominous and unidentified danger.

The very title of (nostalgia), lower case and in parentheses suggests a further diminishing of its own permanence and importance. Further, while (nostalgia) is its own individual text, it is also the initial film in a series of seven that Frampton released between 1971 and 1973; as a set they are titled Hapax

Legomena. According to Frampton, “Hapax Legomena is Greek scholarly jargon; it means ‘said one time.’ Things said once.”65

65 Peter Gidal, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” October 32 (Spring 1985): 103.

103 Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W. “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Telos 31(Spring 1977): 120-133.

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Adorno, Theodor W., Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács. Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso, 2007.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: Verso, 2003.

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone, 1991.

Bloch, Ernst. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Translated by Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.

Buck-Morss, Susan. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. New York: The Free Press, 1977.

Cadava, Eduardo and Paola Cortés-Rocca. “Notes on Love and Photography,” October 116 (2006): 3-34.

Dusinberre, Duke and Ian Christie. “Episodes from a Lost History of Movie Serialism: Interview with Hollis Frampton,” Film Studies 4 (2004): 104-118.

Frampton, Hollis, “The Invention Without a Future,” October 109, (2004): 64-75.

Fried, Michael, “Barthes’s Punctum,” Critical Inquiry 31, (2005): 539-574.

104 Gidal, Peter, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” October 32 (Spring 1985): 93-117.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.

Jameson, Fredric. Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 1990.

Jameson, Fredric, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review 25 (Jan-Feb 2004): 35-54.

Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972.

Michelson, Annette, “Frampton’s Sieve,” October 32, (1985): 151-166.

Moore, Rachel. Hollis Frampton: (nostalgia). London: Afterall Books, 2006.

Nicholsen, Shierry Weber. Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.

Peters, John Durham. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Richter, Gerhard. Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.

Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Todorov, Tzvetan, “The Last Barthes,” Critical Inquiry 7, (1981): 449-454.

Weiss, Allen S., “Frampton’s Lemma, Zorn’s Dillema,” October 32, (1985): 118-128.

105 Windhausen, Federico, “Words into Film: Towards a Genealogical Understanding of Hollis Frampton’s Theory and Practice,” October 109, (2004): 76-95.

Zryd, Michael, “History and Ambivalence in Hollis Frampton’s Magellan,” October 109, (2004): 119-142.

106