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Title Photography As the Aesthetic Determination of Difference Type Thesis URL Title Photography as the Aesthetic Determination of Difference Type Thesis URL http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/9493/ Date 2013 Citation Rubinstein, Daniel (2013) Photography as the Aesthetic Determination of Difference. PhD thesis, Birmingham City University. Creators Rubinstein, Daniel Usage Guidelines Please refer to usage guidelines at http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/policies.html or alternatively contact [email protected]. License: Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives Unless otherwise stated, copyright owned by the author Photography as the Aesthetic Determination of Difference Daniel Rubinstein A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of Birmingham City University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January,2013 Supervisory committee Professor Johnny Golding Dr. Steve Kennedy Birmingham City University, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design 'I certify that this work has not been accepted in substance for any degree other than that of Doctorate of Philosophy being studied at The Birmingham Institute for Art & Design (BIAD), Birmingham City University. I also declare that this work is the result of my own investigations except where otherwise identified by references and that I have not plagiarised another's work.' Signed: __ 2 I ),lIli,:1 Rubinstein I'lmtlll.:'rapily as the Aesthetic Determination 01' l)ill,'Il'lh'C Acknowledgments This thesis would never have happened without the support of my supervisor Professor Johnny Golding who not only taught me how to think but also how to seek the 'thought of the outside'. Her confidence in the achievability of this project provided me with a continuous source of intellectual and personal encouragement. I am also grateful to Dr. Steve Kennedy, my second supervisor, for his insightful comments and suggestions, I would also like to thank Brenda, Barnaby, Hannah, Lauren, Mark, Mattia, Sheena and other members of the for creating a space where one can become what one is. I would like to express my gratitude to London South Bank University for sponsoring my PhD studies and to thank my colleagues Andrew Dewdney and Katrina Sluis for their support. I would like to thank my family: Natalia Rubinstein and Ruth Amir who in their different ways helped me to bring this work to completion. My late father Boris Rubinstein introduced me to photography when I was a child. The memory of this ontological moment of difference was at the back of my mind throughout this work. Finally, my greatest thanks go to Riikka Laulainen for her love, humour and friendship, and to Freddie and Ludo for teaching me the wisdom of non- human intelligence. This thesis is dedicated to Riikka. 3 1 INTRODUCTION 7 1.1 BECOMING INVISIBLE 11 1.2 METHOD: PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES 26 1.3 TECHNOLOGY FORMERLY KNOWN AS LIFE 30 2 THE THICKNESS OF THE IMAGE 3Jl 2.1 TECHNOLOGY AND THICKNESS 44 2.2' DOUBLE ARTICULATION 56 2.3 DYNAMISM, DIFFERENCE, CHAOS 62 2.4 TECHNOLOGY, HISTORY, REPRESENTATION 66 2.5 POLITICS IN THE FIELD OF VISION 68 3 THE IMPASSE OF REPRESENTATION ,'-'-'=.!.=,,~'-,,_... 73 3.1 REPRESENTATION: SETTING THE PROBLEM 73 3.2 ONTOLOGY OF REPRODUCTION 83 3.3 ARISTOTLE: ESTABLISHING REPRESENTATION AS THE BASIS OF RATIONALITY 88 3.4 HEGEL: REFLECTION, SUBLATION, SPECULATION 100 3.5 WHAT DOES NOT WORK IN HEGEL AND HOW IT IMPACTS PHOTOGRAPHY 112 3.6 HEIDEGGER: REPRESENTATION AND IDENTITY 116 3.7 PERDURANCE: HEIDEGGER'S MOVE BEYOND DIALECTICS 126 3.8 LATENT IMAGE AS THE EVENT OF TRANSLATION 134 4 ARCHIVE, APPARATUS, EVENT , .._"'-'~.!.d4J._ 4.1 INTRODUCTION 141 4.2 THE ARCHIVE AND ITS DISCONTENTS 146 4.3 FRACTALITY AND IMMANENCE 158 4 4.4 EVENT-IMAGE AND THE SUBLIME 164 5 TIME: ECSTATIC TEMPORALITY OF THE 'IS' 174 5.1 INTRODUCTION 174 5.2 THE SUBLIME AND THE INTERVAL 177 5.3 TIME OF THE EVENT 183 5.4 HEIDEGGER AND 'PHOTOGRAPHY' 192 6 SIMULACRA AND THE LATENT IMAGE 205 6.1 POSITIONING SIMULACRA WITHIN PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK 205 6.2 BETWEEN REPRESENTATION AND SIMULACRA (OR HOW TO MAKE YOURSELF A QUASI- REPRESENTATION) 211 6.3 THE LATENT IMAGE 233 6.4 LATENT IMAGE AND SUBJECTIVITY (THE TRUTH IN PHOTOGRAPHY) 239 6.5 PHOTOGRAPHY: DIFFERENCE AT A STANDSTILL 250 7 (ONCLUSION 2(14 7.1 IMMANENCE: A PHOTOGRAPH 264 5 Abstract The original contribution of this thesis is the insight that photography is better served through the philosophy of difference than through the metaphysics of identity. This thesis takes seriously the mechanically produced image in order to claim that its technologies can be considered as the method that allows access to the SUbjective modes within difference and develops them in relation to the specifically photographic conditions of production: repetition, simulacra and the latent image. This thesis proposes that considering photography from the point of view of the content of the image is a false move as it necessarily brings in the question of the subject (a key concern for philosophy), narrowly understood as the immobile centre for which the world is represented as meaning. Rather than pursuing photography as text, which brings in the problem of language, this thesis suggests that visuality - understood as fragmentary and recursive self- replication - is nothing other than photography's pull away from representation and pointing to the way difference, as multiplicity of open-ended possibilities, could be approached as the sine-qua-non for photography. This thesis not only shows that visuality can never be fully understood as representation and requires the untamed environment of difference, but that in so doing one realises that philosophy of visuality is nothing other than photography. This has the additional outcome inasmuch as it also begins to pull away at the whole edifice of metaphysics itself, which opens up another avenue of research that leads not only out of thinking metaphysically, but also out of thinking humanly. These are wildly creative paths, and this thesis is pointing in the direction that can be taken without however solving these questions. 6 1 Introduction J This thesis began from an observation that there is something noncomunicable about photography that escapes all attempts to theorise it from the converging perspectives of visuality and the content of the image.' That which escapes because it cannot be subsumed under the aspect of identity is not an accident or aberration but constitutes the key to photographic expressivity that both exceeds and dissolves representation as the stencilling of pre-existing reality.' There is, in other words something about photography that cannot be I Martin Heidegger, the Trans. by David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 41. 2 See Walter Benjamin's suggestion that "language is in every case not only communication of the communicable but also, at the same time, a symbol of the noncomunicable." W. Benjamin, "On Language as Such". Trans. Edmund Jephcott, in 2. 2. 1931 - 193./. (Cambridge, Mass; London, England: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 74. As will be discussed later in this section, visuality and content converge around the problem of subjectivity as the implied ground of signification. 3 This thesis takes issue with the long tradition that considers the photographic image as mechanical and accurate imprint ofa pre-existing reality, not because this tradition is wrong but because it is immune to the paradoxes of subjectivity and representation. Before the invention of photography, it was considered that the produces an exact and automatic copy of the real. It is evident for instance in the notes for the by Jean Jacques Rousseau: 'It is a question of my portrait and not of a book. I am going to work, so to speak, in a and will need no other art but that of exactly tracing what I see'. Quoted in: Tracy B. Strong, the (Oxford UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002),16. While exploring the role of camera obscura as a philosophical metaphor is beyond the scope of th is thesis, it is worthy to note that Rousseau was alert to the paradox of representation in his critique of the bourgeoisie, as he saw that representative power tends necessarily to dominate and distort the civil society that it claims to represent. Pierre Mancnt, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).63-67. And yet, as evident from the above quotation, Rousseau did not extend this understanding to representation by means of a mechanical apparatus. One of the key concerns of this research is to argue that visual representation and political representation are not disconnected entities but belong to one conceptual consistency that is grounded in the enlightenment project of rationality. See Infra Chapter 3, for an in-depth analysis of representation. On captured through the discourses of verisimilitude and indexicality precisely because these two approaches are ultimately anthropological, which is to say they begin by placing the (human) subject and subjectivity at the centre of their investigations. Theoretical investigations that consider photography to be 'a type of icon or a form of visual likeness, which bear an indexical relationship to its object' take it as a given that the photographic image is a description of a pre- existing reality, independent from the image and unaffected by it.4 In contrast, this thesis will propose that photography is not only a description of an object, but is itself an object which, as the product of specific technological processes, erases and creates subjectivity: It erases a static, anthropocentric subjectivity and replaces it with multiple and divergent notion of the subject which emerges not out of representation but out of repetition, reproduction and difference.' camera obscura as an ideological metaphor see: Sarah Kofman, Translated by Will Straw. (London: Athlone Press, 1998). 4 Rosalind E. Krauss, the (Cambridge, Mass, London: MIT Press, 1985),203. She continues: 'Every photograph is the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface.' Ibid.
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