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Declining Images Declining Images Photographic Visibility, Spectatorship and the Apparatus Ignaz Cassar Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies June, 2009 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. Acknowledgements One cannot do a PhD alone. Many people are to be thanked. My supervisor Gail Day who went along patiently with my changing ideas and who has intervened incisively in the right moments to open my mind to new areas I would otherwise not have considered exploring. I would also like to acknowledge Roger Palmer and thank him for his involvement in earlier stages of this work. The path of this research has been marked by great excitement, stress, sheer luck, disappointment, exhilaration, serious doubts, institutional obstacles and many other ups-and-downs but doing a PhD is an amazing and privileged route of intellectual discovery. This discovery could not have happened without the financial support of several funders to whom I would like to express my gratitude: the University of Leeds for awarding me a three-year doctoral research scholarship; the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies for supporting my research and conference attendances; the College Art Association for offering me a travel grant to their 2007 conference in NYC; the Autonomous Province of Bolzano/Bozen, Italy, for granting me a bursary for my studies; and my family in Italy who has added not only much extra money when it was most needed but has also made sure that there were moments when life would not simply always be turning around the thrills of academic work. Further thanks must go to: the inspirational and intellectually generous environment fostered by the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History, and its director Griselda Pollock; the editorial team of parallax, Barbara Engh, Martin McQuillan, Lynn Turner and Marcel Swiboda, for sharing their professional opinions on the past and future of cultural studies and the networks of academic publishing; Joanne Crawford, for her early morning Hegel lessons; Alexandra Parigoris, for polishing up my French; Fred Orton, for triggering my interest in the endeavours of the social history of art. Many ideas in this thesis have been further stimulated and moulded into greater clarity (I hope!) in dialogue with others: Andrew Warstat (allegory and other tropes), Eve Kalyva (conceptual art and its discontents), Mark Dawson (psychoanalytic encryptions), Liz Watkins (filmic matters), Miglena Nikolchina (sublation’s doings), Miranda Mason (for everything else), Cornelia Vismann (thinking ‘in camera’), Sas Mays (open archives), Eric Prenowitz (reading more Derrida), Peter Mörtenböck (sustaining latency’s potentialities), Peggy Phelan (the 2 stage of inversion), Nicola Foster (philosophizing photography), Diane Morgan (translation matters), Lee Rodney (Canadian paradoxes), Uriel Orlow (the rhetorics of research), Jay Prosser (photography’s withouts), Andrea Fitzpatrick (politicizing contemporary art). PhD experience, in England and beyond, was also shared with: Francesco Ventrella, Michelle Gewurtz, Branislava Kuburović, Fiona Philip, Alex Hannay, Isabelle de la Court, Ha Young Joo, Rowan Bailey, Silvia Casini, Manuel Ramos, Ian Balch, Jennifer Pollard, Aikaterini Tsola, Suzy Freake, D. Ferrett, Mike Belshaw, Yuk Hui, Anna Johnson, Patrick Duggan, Inge Wierda, Melinna Kaminari, Zowie Davy, Fabienne Collignon, Sophie Orlando, Peter Kilroy, Aaron Levy. Very special thanks go to Paris: to Maroun H. Salloum and Nabil Mourani without whom Facing Lacan could not have been realized; and to Peter Mucha for his generous hospitality and support – against all odds! Additional backup I received from: Claire Harbottle reminded me of darkroom procedures; Dominique Begin looked closely at my works and texts and also told me about la vie montréalaise; James Mackay shared his memories of Jarman and entrusted me, for a day, with a film reel of Blue; Morten Norbey Halvorsen actualized a brilliant online presence; Lara Pawson and Julian Richards continue to make me laugh. I am also indebted to the folks at Goldsmiths, London: Gavin Butt, Nicole Wolf, Paul Halliday, Irit Rogoff, Astrid Schmetterling, Lisa Blackman. And to David Dibosa, for being there. This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Theresia and Josef. 3 Abstract The thesis provides a critical framework for addressing a range of modalities of visibility within the field of photography. Such modalities are explored under the rubric of three key terms: latency, inversion and sublation. Each of these terms is deployed as a means of attending to three photographic spaces: the latent image; the photographic negative; the archived photograph. The drive of the thesis moves towards a consideration of a plurality of photographic forms, among them forms that have hitherto remained marginal within representational economies that invest in definitive images. Declining Images renders the photograph in its latent state as a ground for understanding the constitution of the photographer’s subjectivity in relation to libidinal attachments to the image. The photographic negative acts as a means of disinvesting critical attention away from authorized images and returning instead to the processual work that sustains image-production. Alongside this, the archived image offsets its potential for visibility through an emphasis on its assignment to sequestered space. The photographic forms outlined above, conventionally seen as tangential to the circulation of images, proffer an occasion for a series of theorizations. The discussion of latency compares the elaboration of the term within Freudian psychoanalytic theory to the conceptual reception of latent images in the field of photography. The debate around inversion addresses the refusal of the photographic negative to deliver meaning in favour of the inconclusive and the non-normative. The arguments around sublation address archivization, foregrounding the implications that Hegelian thought might have for the role of the photograph in the archive. The work of the thesis draws one back to the constitution of the photographic act in phenomena that have been systematically occluded in the theories and histories of art and photography: the latent, the negative and the archived. Such phenomena are integral to the exploration of the epistemological entwinements of photography and visibility. 4 Contents Acknowledgements 2 Abstract 4 Contents 5 Figures 7 Introduction Declining Images 8 Topologies: Larger Pictures of Photography 9 Sensing Remotely 11 The Withouts of Photography 14 The Photographs of Art History 17 Writing – Photographically and Academically 20 Intentionalities, or some Notes on Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 22 Apparatuses, Visibilities, Spectators 26 Chapter I Images of Latency 37 Apertures: Weakening Images 38 Appeals of the Latent 42 Interpreting the Latent 45 Irrational Kernels 47 Images, Verdichtend and Derealizing 50 Photography Without Photographs 52 Stories of/in Nachträglichkeit 56 Speaking the Unspeakable 59 444 Archives 73 Chapter II Images of Inversion 79 In the Beginning, the Negative 80 History in the Aftermath of the Negative 87 Photography and the Colouring of Race 91 White, by Default 95 Looking into the Spectacle of the Inverting Mirrors 97 Identifying (with) Lacan 103 ‘Framing’ the Photographic Negative 105 The Photographic Negative as/in Reproduction 107 Facing Lacan 124 5 Chapter III Images of Sublation 130 Searching for Sublation in Hegel’s Archive 131 Aufhebung After Derrida 134 Aufhebung – Hegel’s Blind Spot? 137 Aufhebung’s Appearances 139 Revealing, Lifting, Translating: Aufheben 142 Sublation as Archival Mode 148 The Photograph’s Archive 150 Documents, Disciplines, Histories 153 An Epilogue as After-effect 156 Fields 164 Postscript Towards a Criticality in the Now 171 The Rhetorics of Practice 172 Desiring the Lead of Practice 175 Uncoupling 182 Bibliography 190 6 Figures Figure 1. Alain Fleischer, Le regard des morts. Visual Documentation on DVD included in Alain Fleischer, La vitesse d’évasion, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Léo Scheer/Centre Georges Pompidou/La Maison Européenne de la Photographie, 2003). Figures 2, 3, 4. Atom Egoyan, Ararat (Momentumpictures, 2002). Film stills from DVD, scene 4. Figure 5. Mathew B. Brady, Portrait of an Unidentified Couple. Ambrotype, 1860. Dimensions: 15.0 x 11.7 cm. Figure 6. Gavin Jantjes, ‘Colour these Blacks White’, sheet from A South African Colouring Book. © Tate London. Published as Gavin Jantjes, A South African Colouring Book (Geneva: International University Exchange Fund, 1978). Figure 7. Jacques Lacan, ‘L’expérience du bouquet renversé’. Illustration included in Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre 1, Les écrits techniques de Freud, 1953-1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p.92. Figure 8. Jacques Lacan, ‘Schéma simplifié des deux miroirs’. Illustration included in Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre 1, Les écrits techniques de Freud, 1953-1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p.160. Figure 9. Thomas F. Barrow, Flight Field, from the series Cancellations (Brown). Gelatin silver print, 1974.
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