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Introduction
I came to ‘photography’ from a background in ‘art’ at a time, the late 1960s, when the artworld considered the expression ‘art photography’ to be an oxymoron. What interested me about photography was the place it occupied in everyday life. In newspapers, magazines, advertising, family photographs, and so on, it played - as it still plays - a fundamental role in the formation of the ideas, beliefs and values according to which people live. To use photography in my works for art galleries and museums therefore allwoed me to bring my visual art practice into dialogue with a significant aspect of the sociopolitical process. It moreover required that my critical thinking about my practice take account of a world beyond the ‘artworld’(1). This dual attention, moving between a photographic art practice and the broader image environment that contains it, is what unites the essays gathered in this volume. The first of these ‘Art, Common Sense and Photography’, was written in 1975 at the request of the late photographer and writter Jo Spence. She had read my longer and technically more detailed essay, ‘Photographic Practice and Art Theory’, in the British art journal Studio International (2). She asked me if I could explain the core ideas of that piece in a shorter article for issue number threee of Camerawork - the eponymous journal of the ‘left’ gallery and darkroom facility that Spence and her collaborator Terry Dennet had founded in 1975. Her request, and my essay, was a response to the glacial situation of politically interested photography practice and teaching in the mid-1970s [Sekula?]. At that time ‘ left’ photographic practice was exclusively ‘documentary’, and customarily referred to as ‘concerned photography’. Photography students were taught how to photograph the underclass much as art students were taught how to draw from the nude. It seemed to me that this kind of documentary photography, practised for its own sake, was both academic and politically irrelevent. It
brought to mind Mao Tse-Tung’s remark that: ‘A person who acts solelyy by motive and does not inquire what effect his action will have is like a doctor who merely writes perscriptions but does not care how many die of them.” (3) (I discuss the ‘artistic’ representation of victims of history in my essay ‘Face à l’histoire: Document and Interpretation’). The ‘theory’ I wished to bring to the practice of photography took place in the gulf between the then prevailing aestheticist and sociologistic attitudes. For aestheticism, the photograph was an occasion for ‘purely visual’ pleasures, to which considerations of content were largely irrelevant. For sociologism, the photograph was a window on the world, a transparent means of access to the truth of an experience, to which formal considerations were secondary. In the silent space between aestheticism and sociologism I felt it was necessary to speak of the political dimensions of visual pleasures and of the formally complex construction of photographic ‘truth’. ‘Art, Common Sense and Photography’ was a modest contribition towards thinking about the latter question. Laura Mulvey’s article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, also published in 1975(4), would open the former question to interrogation by means of psychoanalytic theory. My short piece for Camerawork differs from my long essay in that it makes no mention of psychoanalysis. However, the emphasis it places on the role of rhetorical structures in the production of meanings is fundamental to Freudian and Lacasnian theory, and my subsequent work on the analysis of images developed as a ‘psychoanalytic semiotics’. My essay ‘Preverse Space’ was written later as a ‘text book demonstration’ of semiotic and psychoanalytic approaches to a photograph for a collection of writing that would each exemplify a particular critical perspective upon a work of art. (5)
Camera heteropia and perspective
In another essay bringing psychoanalytic theory to photography, ‘Looking at Photographs’, I purpose that a reason the theory of photography was slow to emerge - behind, for example, theories of painting, or film theory - is that ‘wheras paintings and films readily present themselves as objects, photographs are received rather as an environment.” In my book of 1996 In/Different Spaces I observe that photographs, paintings and films alike have become part of the ‘teletopological puzzle’ that is the phenomenological field of visual images in the ‘developed’ world. In my 2004 book The Remembered Film I call this environment the cinematic heteropia. This train of responses to an evolving image environment makes its most recent stop in the allusions to the dissemination of camera images in algorithmic space that I make most directly in such later essays in this volume as ‘Visible Cities’ and ‘Architecture and the uncinematic’, but which are presaged in ‘Jenni’s room: exhibitionism and solitude’ and ‘Shadows, Time, and Family Pictures’.
It had long been obvious that there is no singular ‘photography’ but rather a variety of photographic practices (medical, journalistic, touristic, artistic, domestic, documentary, etc.) each with its own institutional framework. Nevertheless all were rooted in a common technology - the still camera. Today, an air of nostalgia hangs about the expression ‘still camera’. It no longer needs to be argued that the convergence of the technologies of film, photography and video has dissolved the previously categorical distinction between still and moving images - the fact is obvious to any owner of a mobile phone. The most revolutionary event in the recent history of photography, however, was not the arrival of digital cameras as such, but rather the broadband connection of these cameras to the Internet. The same virtual space in which numerical camera images now propagate also gives birth to scenes shot on immaterial cameras in ‘photorealistic’ virtual worlds. The 3D modelling algorithms at work in, for example, architectural rendering and videogame authoring software bring electronic computation to knowledge that originates in classical antiquity. They have thrown into relief a fundamental basis of Western rationailty as embodied in pictorial techniques, one that runs unbroken through painting, photography and film: perspectival representation.
The computer modelling programs I use today render space in terms of a representational system that originated in Italy around 1420, when Filippo Brunelleschi applied principals of optics and geometry to painting. Although psychology of visual perception - perspectival representation is not in itself natural. Perspective is neither without desire, as I argue in ‘Geometry and Abjection’; nor is it ideologically innocent, as witnessed in the 1920s Soviet Union debates over point-of-view summarised in ‘Photography, Phantasy, Function’, or as dramatised in the murderous conflict between 16th-century Istanbul miniaturists that Orhan Pamuk evokies in his 1998 novel My Name is Red. The pictorial traditions of Islam, and such other civilization as those of Egypt and China, demonstrate that perspectival representation is not inevitable, yet it has nevertheless become the globally hegemonic mode of representing the world - to the point that in now passes largely unremarked as a system. The emergence of the camera in the virtual space brought about by the digital revolution has revealed the essence of the camera to be immaterial, residing in optical, geometrical and mathematical principles that are independent of their physical, and now computational, forms. Histories of photography and cinema often begin with a summary account of the ‘prehistory’ of the technologies ‘from camera obscura to praxinoscope’. To consider the camera in terms of the history of perspective suggests a different periodisation, one in which we may speak of pre-modern, industrial, and digital photography: manual perspective drawing with optical aids gives way to the mechanical operation of a machine, which then cedes okace to electronic computation. We may identify correlates of this periodisation in art criticism: first, wotks of art are judged with reference to criteria of taste(6); later, they are interpreted as expressions of such things as an artist’s intentions, or the ‘spirit of the age’;then we arrive at what, following Michel Foucault, we may call an ‘archeology’, Foucault envisages an archeology of painting, which:
... would not set out to show that the painting is a certain way of ‘meaning’ or ‘saying’ that is peculiar in that it dispenses with words. It would try to show that, at least in one of its dimensions, it is a discursive practice that is embodied in techniques and effects.(7)
As the American philosopher Joseph J. Tanke puts it, this allows the analysis of an art work:
... in terms of the way of seeing that it makes possible or denies, the positions it assigns the viewer, the historical position required on the part of the artist, the theoretical reflections it gives rise to, and the transformations the work inaugurates in the visible field.(8)
Periodisations are necessarily schemnatic and provisional. The analytical criteria Tanke extrapolates from Foucault’s attention to discursive practices and formations are primary throughout the essays collected here, wheter written before or after the digital revolution.
Apparatus and amateur
Because the distinction between still and moving images is no longer definitive, because cameras are nodes in the Internet, because the camera has dematerialised, for these and no doubt other reasons there is no longer any singular objective basis to serve as material ground for the attribition ‘photography’. It is no longer possible to point to a physical mechanism - mounted on a tripod or hand-held - as anchor and guarantor of the category ‘photography’; the attribution is now made only on the basis of its apparatus. If a paradox may seem to be implied here it is an effect of language only. I am now using the word ‘apparatus’ not in the mechanical sense of the word - as when we speak of the camera as a ‘photographic apparatus’ - but in the broader institutional and discursive meaning the term has takin in cultural theory(9). At the time of ‘Art, Common Sense and Photography’ I was concerned with photographu both in the forms most typically encountered in everyday life, especially advertising, and in the forms in which it had entered art galleries and museums. While forms of advertising have evolved considerably over the ensuing four decades, ‘institutional photography’ (bunkered in foundations, festivals, fairs and auction houses) has largely lost the contact it once had with ‘real photography’ - the actually existing camera practices which today include, for example, such forms as the mashups and machinima cited in ‘Architecture and the Uncinematic’ and ‘The Film Essay and the crisis of naming’.
During the period in which the camera became independent from industrial photography, finance capitalism became independent from industrial capitalism(10. Never in the course of human history has so much been expropriated from so many by so few. One consequence has been a massive transfer of surplus funds into the artmarket, with the result that the art apparatus has become largely subordinate to the ‘economy of enrichment’(11). The final essay in this volume, ‘Now and Then: Commodity and apparatus’, compares the current situation of art with its situation in the 1970s. In speaking og the apparatus in my 2017 essay I give the example of a prize-giving. The institutional ritual of legitimation through prize-giving is consistent with the ‘winners and losers’ ethos of capitalist society. Consumer capitalism appropriates all it sees, and although photography has retained its collaborative capacities as a form of sharing, even the ubiquitous and modest commonality of the ‘selfie’ did not escape appropriation by a ‘Saatchi Selfie Prize’(12). From its inception however, photography has nevertheless obstinately remained a domain of the amateur(13). For the French literary theorist and semiologist Roland Barthes the amateur confronts the professional artist with the ideal of a practice undistorted by the market or bad faith. In an essay of 1973, he writes:
The amateur is not necessarily defined by a lesser knowledge, an imperfect technique... but rather by this: he is the one who does not put on a show (ne montre pas),... the amateur seeks to produce only his enjoyment (jouissance) ... and this enjoyment does not tend toward any hysteria. ... the artist enjoys (jouit) no doubt, but ... his pleasure must accomadate itself to an imago, which is the discourse that the Other holds on what he makes.(14)
For the French psychoanylist Jacques Lacan, whose language Barthes evokes here, the hysteric identifies with the lack in the Other, and desires to be what the Other desires. Barthes posits an ideal of amateur practice situated apart from the hierarchical space of conspicuous consumption, the place of egoism and narcissism, the hysterical show of fashion of advertising, all the parade he summarises as: ‘stupidity, vulgarity, vanity, worldliness, nationality, normality.’(15). Barthes played the piano and practised a kind of caligraphy, but to these conventionally ‘amateur’ activities we may add the ‘professional amateurism’ of his book of 1970 The Empire of Signs. Apparently a book about Japan, it is a book, as Barthes immedeately makes clear, about a ‘fictive nation’, a ‘novelistic object’, that allows him a liberty he had previously denied himself. Speaking of The Empire of Signs, he says: ‘I fulfilled the vocation of writing, whuch is the accomplishment of a desire ... I lifted the constraints of the super-ego ... I did not feel obliged to speak about capitalist Japan ...’(16) Barthes speaks much about the poetic form of haiku in this book.(17) Seventeenth-century Japan, most notably during the lifetime of the celebrated poet Matsuo Basho, was a society of the haiku, which was practised across all social classes. In a 1975 interview, Barthes says:
I can imagine a society to come, completely de-alienated, that would no longer know anything except amateur activity on the level of writing ... People would write, make texts, for pleasure, they would benefit from the enjoyment of writing without being preoccupied with the image they may elicit in others.(18)
Barthes recuses himself from the obligation to speak of Japanese capitalism, only to express the utopian dream of an egalitarian society of amateurs.(19). Photography lends itself to amateurism in Barthe’s sense, as an instrument of individuation. ‘Individuation’ is to be understood in terms of a relation of respect between a unique self and its environment - an environment consisting of the natural world and other individuals. Individuation therefore is the antithesis of the competitive individualism promoted by the apparatuses of consumer capitalism, just as it is the negation of the uniformly identical subjects presupposed by totaliarianism in all its forms, including the normative subjects of consumerism. I began to use photography in my work because, along with speech and writing, it is an instrument of inclusive individuation; its practices may be both individual and accessible. I use the term ‘accessible’ not of a work that may necessarily be easily understood, but rather of one that may in principle be emulated and its work extended by others, wether in thought or in action. I see the condition of such accessibility to lie in those practices I think of as demotic. The Rosetta Stone allowed Champollion to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics because it bears the same message written in three different forms: hieroglyphic, Greek and ‘demotic’. In ancient Egypt, hieroglyphics was a writing reserved for the priesthood and the aristocratic class. Demotic writing, a cursive form, was the medium of everyday affairs amongst the literate non-elite (for example, the merchant class). My turn, in my own practice, towards photography and away from painting and sculpture and their derivatives, is analogous to the adoption of demotic script in preference to hieroglyphics.(20) The first point to be made then is that ‘demotic’ is not necessarily to say ‘popular’ (which is measured by audience numbers and/or market share), and even less to say ‘populist’ (which is a genre of politics and political address). There are at least two ways in which photography is demotic: first, by way of its predominance in the mass media where, in association with words, it contributes to the formation of hegemonic popular common sense; second, by way of its almost universal use by the general public to exchange meanings amongst themselves. A left political aspiration for contemporary society is to see the latter gain independence from the former.
Dreaming and thinking
In a talk given in 1987 Gilles Deleuze said: ‘The dream is a terrible will to power ,,, If you’re caught in the other’s dream, you’re fucked.’(21) We are trapped in the dream of neoliberalism. One of the most faded clichés in the tapestry of received ideas woven by the art apparatus is that art is ‘subversive’. To the contrary, art has been subverted. In a society with ever-dwindling provision for a space of values between the law and the market, a whole range of intellectual and cultural activities that were at once estimated according to their own criteria now have to look for their legitimation and survival in market terms. Foremost among the criteria that researchers in British universities must now meet if they are to qualify for government funding, whether in the humanities, science or arts, are ‘contribution to economic growth’ and ‘impact on society’. The Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has observed: ‘Objectivism is a poison proper to the sciences, just as the art market ia a poison to artistic practices.’(22). The same period that has seen the university come to assess intellectual production in terms of instrumentalised economic performance, in terms of money and mass audiences, has also been the period whuch has seen the introduction of league tables of artists ranked according to their prices at auction, and lists of curators and dealers ranked according to their ‘power’.
It was not always like this. In the period from the end of 1940s to the late 1960s it was generally accepted that laissez-faire capitalism had been definitevely discredited by the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression that provided conditions favourable to the rise of Fascism. By the end of the Second World War, Fascism had been defeated and there was no question of returning to the form of government that had presided over the disasters of ther interwar years. Where the invisible hand of the market had conspicuosly failed the State now stepped in ti provide economic and social stability, and a decent quality of life for all of its citizens. In Britain, in the unfavourable circumstances of a war-ruined economy, the post-war Labour government introduced the National Health Service, public pensions and unemplyment insurance, and opened a path to free grammar school and university education for working-class children, Now, as inordanately vast accumulations of wealth are taken out of productive circulation to feed cupidity, we are told that the days of ‘unaffordable’ public services are past. The past however is never gone, it lives in present memory not only as a warning but as an example of what is possible. At the beginning of Chris Marker’s film La Jetée the camera pans across the ruins of a world devastaded by nuclear war. A voice-over narration tells us that the survivors have no way forward into any future therefore seek salvation in the past. Refusing the dream of the other demands greater freedom if movement in history and memory than may be accommodated in the relentless drive into the future of klepto-capitalism. According to Stengers: “To think practices is to try to situate ourselves, starting from the way which, in our own history, practices have been destroyed, poisoned, enslaved.(23)
While fork-lift trucks are now routinely needed to carry high investment-value products of photographic art from gallery walls into bank vualts, the camera image is recovering its essential lightness of being in digital space. Digitalisation is an example of what Jacques Derrida, following Plato, termed a pharmakon - it is both poison and cure.(24) The mobile phone may serve individualism or individuation, nothing in either technology or human nature dictates where the balance will shift. (25) Pessimism of the intellect in respect to human nature need not dampen optimism of the will. Concluding his talk, Deleuze cites the painter Paul Klee’s remark: ‘You know, the people are missing.’ Deleuze comments: ‘There is no work of art that does not make an appeal to a people that does not yet exist.’
Paris, 2018
(1)’Beyond the artworld’, and beyond prevailing discourses framing the art object. For example, consider the following replies by the American sculptor Tony Smith to questions about his six-foot steel cube sculpture, quoted in Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture’, Artforum, October, 1966.
Q:Why didn’t you make it larger so that it would loom over the observer?
A: I was not making a monument.
Q: Why didn’t you make it smaller so that the observer could see over the top?
A: I was not making an object.
There is a kind of intelligence at work here. As an art student at Yale I learned to think and see in its terms. I defend its validity, even its necessity, but I came to find it insufficient.
(2)’Photographic Practice and Art Theory’, Studio International, July/August 1975; reprinted in, Alex Streitberger (ed.), Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin, Leuven University Press, 2009
(3)Mao Tse-Tung, Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art [1942], Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1967, p.36
(4)Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, vol.16, n.3, 1975
(5)William Allen and Sthephen Bann (eds.), Interpreting Contemporary Art, London, Reaktion (1991), pp-124-38
(6)The expression ‘Fine Arts’
(7)
(8)
(9)
(10)
(11)
(12)
Contents
Introduction
Art, Common Sense and Photography (Camerawork, London 1975)
Looking at Photographs (Screen Education, n24, 1977)
Photograpghy, Phantasy, Function (Screen, 21, n1, 1980)
“Introduction
I
(...)
“The expression ‘photography theory’, outside of a strictly technical application, may need some explanation. What I am proposing as the object of theory is not restricted to photography considered as a set of techniques (although, certainly, technique is to be accounted for within the theory); it is, rather, photography considered as a practice of signification. By ‘practice’ here is meant work on specific materials, within a specific social and historical context, and for specific purposes. The emphasis on ‘signification’ derives from the fact that the primary feature of photography, considered as an omnipresence in everyday life, is its contribuition to the production and dissemination of meaning. To argue that the specifictiy of the object to be constituted in photography theory is semiotic is not to restrict the theory to the categories of ‘classic’ semiotics. Although semiotics is necessary to the proposed theory, it is not (nor would it ever claim to be) sufficient to account for the complex articulations of the moments of institution, text, distribution and consumption of photography. Confronted as it is with such heterogeneity, it is clear that photography theory must be ‘inter-disciplinary’; there can, however, be no question of simply juxtaposing one pre-existing discipline with another.
For example, at the moment perhaps the least developed aspect of the emerging theory is the sociological component. Photography is most commonly encountered in sociological texts as ‘evidence’, the sociologist operating with the common-sense intuition of photography as a ‘window on the world’. This type of sociological encounter with photography is quite simply irreleveant to the project of photography theory, which must take into acccount the determinations exerted by the means of representation upon that which is represented. More pertinent is the sociological description of photographic institutions. Here again, however, the criterion of relevance applies: a description of, say, the hierarchical structures of command governing the photogrpaher in the advertising industry would be less relevant to the theory than a description of the discourses by which the institutions inducts its functionaries, irrespective of rank, into a common belief system, constituting them as ‘advertising people’. Certainly, we may expect structures of decision-making to be imbricated within beliefs, but is the beliefs which are the ‘sharp end’ of that which informs the social effects of advertising. (Nor is this to suggest that advertisers’s beliefs are simply ‘communicated’ to their audiences.)
Photography theory is not exempt from the call made upon any theory to identify observable systematic regularitites in its object which will support general propositions about the object. This is already to establish that theory may be taught, and certainly the elaboration of photography theory constitutes an intervention, at least in principle, in the field of education. In speaking of photographic education we should distinguish between two quite different pedagogic practices. In the first, a vocational training is given for some particular branch of industry and/or commerce - as when a school trains people to become advertising photographers. In this type of course academic studies will tend to be pragmatic - their content being determined by its practical bearing on the specific form of photography being thaught. In the second type of course no particular vocational training is imposed; the student is asked, rather, to consider photogrpahy in its totality as a general cultural phenomenon, and to develop his or her own ideas as to what direction to pursue. Academic studies in the context of this latter type of course are presented as heuristic - aiming to provide the student with a wide range of facts, and a number of critical tools, in the interests of developing an informed capacity for independent thought. Contrary to their declared intent, the majority of those courses whose concern is with photography as art belong in the first category rather than the second. They offer a vocational training for that branch of the culture industry whose products are photographic exhibitions and books. The academic content of such courses tends overwhelmingly to take the form of an uncritical initiation into the dominant beliefs and values prevailing in the art institution as a whole. On such courses ‘criticism’ and ‘history’ stand in place of theory.
Photography criticism, as it is most commonly practised, is evaluative and normative. In its most characteristic form it consists of an account of the personal thoughts and feelings of the critic in confronting the work of a photographer, with the aim of persuading the reader to share these thoughts and feelings. Free reference is made to the biography, psychology and character of the photographer in question, and even to the critic him/herself. The ‘arguments’ advanced in criticism are rarely arguments, properly speaking, but rather assertions of opinions and assumptions paraded as if their authority was unquestionable. The dominant discourse of such criticism is an uneasy and contradictory amalgam of Romantic, Realist and Modernist aesthetic theories. The ‘history of photography’ predominantly supports such criticism in that it is produced whitin the same ideological framework. In such ‘history’ the unargued conventional assumptions to be found in ‘criticism’ are projected into the past from whence they are reflected inverted in status - no longer mere assumptions, they have become the indisputable ‘facts’ of history. [search Foucault’s “archeology”]
I have described the dominant mode of history and criticism of photography, in which the main concern is for reputations and objects, and in which the object inherit the reputations to become commodities: a history and criticism to suit the saleroom. Neither history or criticism are, a priori, committed to this course, and there are indications in the essays that which follow of alternative approaches to history and criticism. Such alternative approaches reject the tendency to confine discussion of photography to some narrowly technicist and/or aesthetic realm of ideas; they aim, rather, to understand photography not only as a practice in its own right but also in its relation to society as a whole. This holistic project has traditionally been that of Marxist cultural theory, which of late as become increasingly engaged with precisely that topic of the production of meaning with which I began. As all the essays in this book are extensively informed by Marxist ideas, it is appropriate that I provide at least a rough sketch of the current state of debate in Marxist cultural studies.
II
The majority of articles collected here have been written since 1975. Their common concern is with the topic of ‘representation’, over recet years increasingly a subject of analysis and debate. A precondiction for the recent emergence of this topic in the general field of cultural studies has been the break with a long-standing Marxist tradition in which cultural phenomena were theorised as ‘superstructures’ determined by contradiction in the economic ‘base’. To this general superstructure belong, in Marx’s words, ‘the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic - in short ideological forms’. ‘Ideology’ here is the name given to the complex of values and beliefs which together organise the heterogeneous and contradictory elements of class society towards common goals, concealing from them the exploitative nature of their class relations - ideology is a false consciousness of these relations. Through a historical-materialist analysis of society the analyst may see through ideological appearences to the real forms behind them. After the revolutionary transformation of the mode of economic production, the very cause itself of the distorting ideologies will have been removed, and all men and women will see reality as it really is. [put on the glasses]
The simplicity of the above sceneario derives rather more from some of Marx’s followers than from Marx himself. Other Marxist commentators, from Engels onwards,, have contested the notion that the ideological is so simply determined by the economic. In recent years, the most influential such contestations has come from Louis Althusser, most notably in his essay ‘Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation’, which was published in France in 1970 and in England the following year. Althusser conceives of all possible modes of production as necessarily structured in terms of three ‘instances’: the economic, the political and the ideological. To each of this instances correspond forms of practice which are complexly articulated together to produce a ‘society effect’, and yet which each remain ‘relatively autonomous’. In ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, Althusser sets out to theorise the operation of ideology. [for more on ideology, see Zizek’s "The Sublime object of Ideology"]
'Ideological State Apparatuses’ (ISAs) are postulated as non-coercive institutions whose function is to secure by consent the necessary ‘reproduction of the relations of production’. According to Althusser, the key ISAs are the family and the schools - amongst others he cites is ‘the cultural ISA (Literature, the Arts, sports, etc).’. The conception of control by sonsent through the ISAs, with its attendant emphasis on the necessity for ideological struggle whitin and across a complex variety of institutions, is a significan departure from a Marxist-Leninist tradition which pictures a rulling class exercising control over society through its priveleged access to overtly repressive state agencies, such as the police and the army. Althusser does not reject this picture, but he includes it within a larger one. For Althusser, ‘the ideological State Apparatuses may be not only the stake, but also the site of class struggle’.
For Althusser, ideology is not ‘false consciousness’ - a set of illusions which will be dispelled after the revolution - it is inseparable from the practical social activities and relations of everyday life and therefore a necessary condition of any society whatsoever, including communist societies. Ideology is ‘a system (with its own logic and rigour) of representations (images, myths, ideas or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a historical existence and role within a given society’ which acts on men and women ‘by a process that escapes them’. Althusser rejects a ‘humanist’ account of the individual - a free subject possesed of an irreducible human ‘essence’ (which in Marxist humanism is presented as ‘ alienated’ under capitalism). He also rejects an ‘empricist’ account of the way the individual acquires knowledge - in experience, the world simply presenting itself, via the senses, ‘for what it is’. For Althusser, both the subject and its experiences are constituted in representations: the ISAs offer ‘pictures’ of subjectivity in which the subject ‘misrecognises’ itself, as if the pictures were mirrors.
For the past ten years, Althusser’s essay has remained at the center of debates in Marxist cultural studies, engendering the present polarisation of positions between those who always thought he had gone too far and thoso who now feel he did not go far enough. A variety of terms have been used to label the respective factions, at the time of writing ‘culturalist’ and ‘post-Althusserian’ seem most favoured. ‘Culturalism’ in Britain dates from the emergence, in the late 1950s, of the ‘New Left’. New Left historians and literary critics revived a concern with ‘culture’ defined in terms of the ‘whole way of life’ of a social class. This concern set itself against a prevailing orthodoxy, derived from Matthew Arnold (by way of F. R. Leavis and I. A. Richards), in which culture was conceived of as a domain of civilising values preserved and passed down by an intellectual elite - a conception which repressed all consideration of the cultural production of the dominated class. [for more on this subject matter, see Noam Chomsky “Media Control”] The New Left concern with culture also went against that mechanistic version of Marxism in which cultural considerations were marginalised, or elided, as the superstructual epiphenomena of the economic base.
The major culturalist texts include Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), and Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). The preferred method of culturalism, as Richard Johnson has described it, is
experential, even autobiographical: witness Hoggart’s personalised memories and childhood vision, Williams’s deeply autobiographical way of approaching larger questions, even Thompson’s personalised polemic and deeply political historical partisanship. These styles went along with a popular, democratic, anti-elitist politics that centralised personal feelings and moral choices.
It is in fact essentially on the grounds of a moral choice that culturalists have rejected ‘Althusserianism’. The culturalist attack on Althusser refuses, a defence of the integrity of the (oppresed) class subject and the authenticity of his or her experience. Against what it would characterise as bloodless abstractions, culturalism opts for the vitality of lived convictions. We might note, however, that, very often, much of the indignation has been provoked by nothing more that a catergory error: the rejection of humanism (a philosophical doctrine) has been understood as a callous assault on humans (people, or more heinously, the people).
If culturalist attacks on Althusser have tended to be moral rather than theoretical in inspiration, ‘post-Althusserian’ criticism has made up the deficiency. The three major objections have been to Althusser’s account of the constitution of the subject, to the ‘functionalism’ of his description of the ISAs, and to the equivocalness of the idea of ‘relative autonomy’. Althusser describes the human subject as being in an imaginary relationship to its conditions of existence, and it is clear than in using the term he is alluding to Jacques Lacan’s work in psychoanalytic theory. The subject Althusser describes, however, is incompatible with the subject as described either by Lacan or by Freud: there is no place in Althusser’s schema for the action of the unconscious; in Lacanian perspective, there is no allowance made in Althusser’s theory for the constitution of the subject in language, or for the relation of language to ideology. In the absence of such considerations, it is argued, we are left with a picture of the subject as a coherent, uncontradictory, site for the inscripton of ‘misrecognitions’, which is not after all so very different from the subject of ‘false consciousness’ that Althusser sets out to object.
(...)
Although the culturalist defence of humanism and empiricism has contributed most emotional heat to the debate over Althusser, it is the question of the autonomy of ideology that has most theoretical significance for Marxist analysts of culture. The Marxist project in cultural studies is to explain cultural production in general, and individual cultural forms in particular, in terms of the broader social formation to which they belong. This project has been assumed, not only in vulgar ‘economism’, but also in more sphisticated analyses (not excepting those of Althusser himself), to entail explanations whuch must ultimately devolve upon the economic. Although, however, Althusser allows the conomic determinancy ‘in the last instance’, he also comments that, ‘the lonely hour of the last instance necer comes’.
What is here in danger of being lost to Marxist analysts, at the very least in respect to a theory of ideology, is Marxism itself. In a particularly influential critique of Athusser’s theory of ideology, Paul Hirst has in fact rejected the specifically Marxist form of the problematic. In the process he has also rejected the term ‘representation+ as entialling precisely the subject/object structure of knowledge which Althusser wished to evict from Marxist discourse. In Hirst’s argument, the ‘ideological’ is specified and produced in practices of signification - the term he prefers to ‘representation’ - there being no necessary correspondence between the products of signification and any ‘real’ outside of them (indeed, he has more recently argued a ‘necessary non-correspondence’). What is at stake here may be illustrated by reference to the representation of women.
One of the most generally influential achievements of the women’s movement, in the field of cultural theory, has been its insistence on the extent to which the collusion of women in their own oppression has been exacted, precisely, through representations. They have argued that the predominant, traditional, verbal and visual representations of women do not reflect, ‘represent’, a biologically given ‘feminine nature’ (natural, therefore unchangeable); on the contrary, what women have to adapt to as their ‘femininity’ (particularly in the process of growing up) is itself the product of representations. Representations therefore cannot be simply tested against the real, as this real is itself constituted through the agency of representations. A search for, or contestation of, the ‘truth’ of the representation here becomes irrelevant (for all that this violates common-sense intuition); what is to be interrogated is its effects.
My intention in referring to these debates in cultural theory has not been to ‘explain’ them (which would be impossible here) but merely to point to them, for they lie unavoidably in the path of any theory which aims to consider photography in its relation to the general sphere of culture production. We cannot go around these debates, we must go through them. I would, however, urge that we do not in the process simply confuse photography theory with a general theory of culture. To return to the observation with which I began, photography theory will develop through attention to its own specificity or it will not develop at all. For example, by comparison with, say, films like Star Wars, photographs are sensorially restrained objects: mute and motionless variegated rectangles. Looking at photographs can nevertheless occasion great interest, fascination, emotion, reverie - or all of these things. Clearly, the photograph here acts as a catalyst - exciting mental activity which exceeds that which the photograph itself provides. It follows that photography theory must take into account the active participation of the mental processes of the viewer, and that such an account will have a substantial place within the theory. To grant, say, psychoanalytic theory a certain importance within a theory of photography is not, however,necessarily to give it the same prominence within cultural theory as a whole. Reciprocally, to accept the privilege of economic, class, instance in the context of a general theory of society is not automatically to grant it the same primacy within photography theory. It is essential to realise that a theory does not find its object ‘sitting waiting for it’ in the world; theories constitute their own objects in the process of their evolution. ‘Water’ is not the same theoretical objectin chemistry as it is in hydraulics - an observation which in no way denies that chemists and engineers alike drink, and shower in,the same substance. By much the same toke, ‘photography’ is not the same object in photography theory as it is when it appears in a general theory of the social formation. Each theory will haveits own theoretical object and its own configuration of priorities (to argue otherwise, on the left, is to forget Lysenko). One of the priorities of the writings gathered here is the consideration of photography as a form of art practice, and it is to this topic that I now wish to return.
III
When photography emerged on to the mid-nineteenth-century public stage it was, unsurprisingly, conceived of within terms of mid-nineteenth-century thought. In so far as it concerned the image, and characterised most schematically, this thought was in the process of opposing Realism to Romanticism. Kantian epistemology, positing a ‘noumenal’ world behind appearences which could not be known to the intellect, had allowed aestheticians to claim the primacy of the emotions in art as the way to a ‘deep’ knowledge of the world denied to science. The attack on the philosophical foundations of Romanticism came from the Positivism of Auguste Comte: it is not the intellect which imposes its own structure upon external reality, as Kant would have it, rather it is the inherent order of the objective world which must of itself be allowed to guide our thinking; for this we must accept that the reality we can see and touch is the only one there is. Romanticism stressed the primacy of the author: Delacroix writes, in 1850, that painting is no more than a ‘pretext’, a bridge between the mind of the painter and that of the spectator. Realism, on the other hand, asserted the primacy of the world: Courbet writes, in 1861, that painting can only depict ‘real and existing things’, an entity which is abstact is not within the realm of painting.
We may note that in Romanticism and Realism alike the image was conceived of as a relay - either between one human subject and another, or between human subject and reality. [for more on the concepts of “relay” and “anchorage” relating to how meaning functions with words and images see Roland Barthes “Rethoric of the Image”, “The linguistic message” section. Present in Roland Barthe’s “Image, Music, Text”, published by Fontana Press in 1977] The painted surface - or that of the newly emerged photograph - was conceived of as a projection, a communication from a singular founding presence ‘behind’ the picture, either that of the author or that of the world. The image was thus held, paradoxically, to give presence to an absence. A decisive break with this mode of thought came with Cubism: Cubism emphasised the surface of the painted sign as a material entity, the meaning of which could not be unproblematically ascribed either to the intention of an author or to any empirically given reality. From this moment on, however, there occurs a splitting of concerns - the surface and the sign become the points of departure for two quite separate lines of development of art practice and theory.
In the course of what we know as “Modernism”, most specifically in the meaning that this word has been given in the writing os Clement Greenberg and his followers (but the essential features of which are present in the earlier writings of Clive Bell and Roger Fry), the sign was to be totally erased from the surface. The artwork was to become a totally autonomous material object which made no gesture to anyting beyond its own boundaries; the surface itself - it’s color, it’s consistency, it’s edge - was to become the only content of the work. After Cubism, Modernism was to free art from its old obligations to representation, but ‘representation’ defined in those very terms which Cubism itself had called into question: illusion and communication. Photography, however, was unable to follow painting into modernist abstraction without the appearence of straining after effect; the unprecedented capacity of photography for resemblance seemed most appropriately to determine its specific work and to distinguish it from painting. Certainly there has emerged over the modern period a form of ‘photographic modernism’ founded on concepts of ‘photographic seeing’, but, as I argue in one of my own contributions to this collection, it has only the most tenuous and uneasy purchase on those considerations of ‘content’ which remain so obstinately central to our experience of photographs.
So far as this content is concerned, to a very great extent our ways of conveiveing of photography have not yet succeeded in breaking clear of the gravitational field of nineteenth-century thinking: thinking dominated by a metaphor of depth, in which the surface of the photograph is viewed as the projection of something which lies ‘behind’ or ‘beyond’ the surface; in which the frame of the photograph is seen as marking the place of entry to something more profound - ‘reality’ itself, the ‘expression’ of the artist, or both (a reality refracted through a sensibility). The surface of the photograph, however, conceals nothing but the fact of its own superficiality. Whatever meanings and attributions we may construct at its instigation can know no final closure, they cannot be held for long upon those imaginary points of convergence at which (it may comfort some to imagine) are situated the experience of an author or the truth of a reality.
The essays in this collection, from one direction or another, all approach this central issue of the production of meaning in photography. They also refer extensively to the practice and institution of art as a site of such meaning-production, a site which is nevertheless viewed constantly in its relationship to other sites of photographic practices - most notably journalism and advertising. Walter Benjamin’s complex and subtle text (Chapter 1) introduces many of the consideration which are addressed in the essays which follow; the relations of ‘art’ practices to the broader social world it supports and contains them; the use of the image in the ‘mass media’; the aestheticising effect of ‘concerned’ photography; the political function of the artist/intellectual; the functional relation between photographic image and caption; and so on. Benjamin’s ideas emerge agains a backgroung of Soviet aesthetic debates of the 1920s with whuch he was well acquainted (his friend Tretyakov, of whom he speaks, was particularly interested in photography), and it is to these debates that we mus look for the initiation of that ‘separate line of development’ to which I have alluded.
In Russia the exploration of the objective autonomy of the art object had undergone a more accelerated development than in the West, a development which culminated in Malevich’s White on White paintings of 1918; and Melevich’s subsequent declaration, in 1920, of the end of painting, his assessment of the painter has ‘a prejudice from the past’. The Russian avant-garde received the social revolution of 1917 both as the political counterpart to their own revolution in art as a challenge to their ability to integrate their specialist concerns as artists with the broader concerns of a society in the process of self-renewal. To some of the young painters of this period, photography held the attraction of a modern technology, relatively unfettered by tradition, into the realm of necessary social production. The Russian avant-garde in criticism, unlike their counterparts in the West, were not hostile to considerations of content. The Russian Formalist school of literary critics, centred on the Moscow Linguistic Circle (founded in 1915), and OPOYAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language, 1916) were contemporaries of Bell and Fry but moving in a different direction. Initially attacking Symbolism, the Formalists rejected the Symbolist idea of form in which form, the perceivable, was conceived in opposition to content, the intelligible. They extended the notion of form to cover all aspects of a work. Todorov writes:
The Formalist approach was completely opposed to this aesthetic appreciation of ‘pure form’. They no longer saw form as opposed to some other internal element of a work of art (normally its content) and began to conceive it as the totality if the work’s various components. This makes it essential to realise that the form of a work is not its only formal element: its content may equally well be formal.
When, on the onset of 1930s, the intellectual and artistic ferment of Soviet socialist formalism was effectively repressed, the ideas of the period nevertheless continued to evolve in the West. The efflorescence of ‘Structuralism’ in France in the 1960s was extensively fed by this intellectial current from the East (not least through the physical presence of such émigrés as Roman Jakovson and Tzvetan Todorov). When Roland Barthes’s germinal ‘Elements de sémiologie’ appeared in issue 4 (1964) of the journal Communications, it was accompanied by his ‘Réthorique de l’image’, which extends the project of his longer essay into the problematical area of the photograph. In this latter article, now widely known in English translation (and for this reason only, not included here), Barthes identifies ‘anchorage’ and ‘relay’ functions of the caption in its relation to the image; the image itself, however, remains for Barthes the paradox of a ‘message without a code’ (an assertion to which he emphatically return in his final book, La chambre claire). In a short but influential passage (Chapter 2) from a longer article on film, Umberto Eco argues that while there may be no single code at work in the photographic image - no homogeneous ‘language of photography’ - there is nevertheless a plurality of codes, most of which pre-exist the photograph, which interact in the photograph in complex ways. My own essay ‘Photographic Practice and Art Theory’ (Chapter 3) seeks to synthesise Eco’s insights within Barthe’s semiology, together with a presentation of what other of the ‘classic’ work in semiotics seemed applicable to the photographic image at that time (1975).
The implication of an overly formalistic approach inherent in the trajectory of early semiotics is redressed in the subsequent essays. In Chapter 4 Allan Sekula employs a framework of semiotic concepts in an essay in practical criticism in which he examines the mythological and monotlithic opposition between ‘realism’ and ‘expression’, here exemplified in the images of Steiglitz and Hine. In Chapter 5 John Tagg also adresses the issue of realism in photography, again via a methodologu which seeks to combine the insights of semiotics with those of a social history. ‘Looking at Photographs’ (Chapter 6) is a brief account, in its application to photography, of the transition from a ‘semiotics of systems’ to a semiotics which takes account of the (psycoanalytic) subject inscribed in the system in question. Simon Watney’s article (Chapter 7) traces the extensive ramifications and reduplications of the critical concept/aesthetic strategy of ‘making strange’, addressed to this subject, demonstrating its extraordinary grip on art (and) photography from its origins in both Eastern and Western Europe to this present day. My own essay which concludes this collection (Chapter 8) returns to re-examine a particular Soviet asethetic debate of the 1920’s - centered on one particular ‘device’ for making strange - in the light of some recent theory.
It remains for me to explain an absence. There are no essays by women in this anthology. This is a matter neither of oversight nor prejudice, it is the contingent effect of a conjuncture. Much of the work by women on representation occupies different theoretical registers, and/or engages different practical projects from those of this present collection. On the one hand, the sort of writing associated with, for example, the journal m/f, is too general a level of abstraction to appear to engage the particular histories of art (and) photography addressed here; on the other hand, the work specifically on photography of, say, Jo Spence, has had its own quite distinct (albeit allied) cultural-political project (see Jo Spence’s own compilation of essays on photography, listed in the bibliography). Again, writing by women which would otherwise fit very happily into this present book is not specifically about photographs (for example, Laura Mulvey’s work on film and Griselda Pollock’s work on painting). Nevertheless, I wish to emphasize in conclusion that the theoretical project to which this book is a contribution owes itself to the initial and continuing insistence of the women’s movement on the politics of representation.
London, 1980”
Contents