SUBJECT: IMAGE. (NOTES) By John Calcutt The image as a splitting and a doubling. The image as a picture of the world restaged as a picture in the world. The image as product of the mind’s factory mistaken for a demand from external reality. The image as double-agent, playing the truth of fiction against the fictitious condition of truth: conscripted by both but loyal to neither. Plato would not welcome the artist into his ideal Republic because, as maker of images, the artist deals in deception, producing copies of copies. Plato the idealist; Plato the essentialist. The image as event, an interruption of temporal progression, damming narrative’s flow, superimposing the remote upon the immediate. It isn’t that the past casts its light on the present or the present casts its light on the past: rather, an image is that in which Then and Now come into a constellation like a flash of lightning. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of the Then to the Now is dialectical – not development but image, leaping forth. (Walter Benjamin)1 The image draining fullness from ‘being’, leaving only the empty carapace of ‘appearance’. ‘The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter.’ (Heidegger) The image, according to Maurice Blanchot, as a means of grasping the object only through distancing. The image purveyed through sight and operating by means of fascination. The image as an enchantment, a bewitching, a spell, a charm: the means by which the evil eye of the real captures the viewer in its malignant gaze upon. The image as an allpervasive environmental condition. The real: unimag(in)able. The image perplexes because the more it is considered, the more elusive it becomes. It is as if the character and identity of the image multiplies continuously or, perhaps, because – endless circularity – access to the image is only by means of the image. The image, in fact, seems not only to stand in for ‘things’, but also to stand in front of them. ‘We live,’ writes Barry Schwabsky, ‘in the age of the image. But don’t ask me to define the word: its very elusiveness is of the essence.’ There may have been a moment within the history of human consciousness when the real could appear immediately present in all its plenitude, but this moment has long disappeared. The real, in its visible aspects at least, is now always already an image. More precisely, it is an image with many of the characteristics of a photograph. Both thingin-itself and image-of-something-else the photograph is finally neither. It is a stain, a trace, an impression.
Henri Bergson declared that we are acquainted with the world not through mere appearances that are somehow different in kind from things in themselves, but through what he called, precisely, ‘images’, which are part and parcel of the real. The mind, for Bergson, is less like a painter than it is like a camera, its sampled images not fundamentally other but simply quantitatively more limited than the ‘aggregate of “‘images”’ that is reality. Our perceptual apparatus is, one might say, touched by the thing it perceives as the photographic plate or film is touched by the light that comes from the object.2 And situated within this, ‘my’ image; the image of ‘me’. This image may be something that I ‘have’, but do I possess it? Is it my property (perhaps to be trafficked in the agora – the marketplace), or one of my properties (an aspect of my aura – the ‘essence’ of my unique and unassailable existence in time and place)? A few years ago I worked for a national Sunday newspaper, writing regular art reviews and occasional features. Following customary practice, the newspaper insisted that a by-line portrait photograph should accompany my words, as if they alone were insufficient, lacking foundation. So I complied. Over here. Let’s try you over there. With the jacket, and without the jacket. Standing, leaning, sitting. Look into the lens, look away from the lens. Relax. Try to look intelligent. Smile. Super. One more. And there I appeared, week after week, the very image of vacant, simpering stupidity, my self as a gormless stranger. For the rest of the world this image was of scant interest, an object of idle distraction at best. In his essay on art’s ‘mediation between sublime silence and the din of everyday sight and sound’ Homi K Bhabha refers to the former as ‘aura’ and the latter as ‘agora’.3 Focusing upon Breugel’s ‘Landscape With The Fall of Icarus’ (and on W H Auden’s poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ which also addresses itself to this painting), Bhabha notes that Icarus’s tragic plunge goes unnoticed by those who share the pictorial space with this image of hubristic failure. When aura (the attempt to transcend the mundane and contingent) confronts the agora (the distracted hustle and bustle of everyday life), its wings are clipped. Far from conveying a sense of auratic power, my relation to my (photographic) image takes the form of an accusation, indisputable visible evidence of irredeemable lack. This experience seems consistent with Jacques Lacan’s
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observations on the so-called Mirror Stage of the individual’s coming-to-consciousness of their self as an (id)entity in the world. When the infant, according to this formulation, first recognises its own image in a reflection, this moment of recognition is, simultaneously, a moment of misrecognition. The image is both ‘me’ and ‘not me’. It is ‘me’ insofar as I recognise it as my self and not that of someone other, but it is ‘not me’ in certain crucial other respects. Unlike my experience of my own bodily presence it is, for example, an ‘image’ that I can perceive in its totality. It is, moreover, spatially removed from the place in which I am located as I encounter it (I am here, and it is over there). And it is, finally, superior to me (it appears coherent and seamless, whereas my experience of my own body is incoherent – fragmented, dispersed and unco-ordinated). The self that makes an appearance in this image is the self that is known to others, not the self that is known to me. I’m not sure: can there be an image that is not in some way visual? In Ways of Seeing (1972) John Berger famously claimed: ‘Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.’ I’m really not sure. Seeing without words is perhaps an empty, blind form of seeing. This isn’t about trying to secure hegemony for the visual over other forms of representation – such as writing, for example. The conventional division between the linguistic and the pictorial is, in any event (and as with the absolute demarcation between nature and culture) an ideological ploy. The image of the writer and the images produced by the writer inform each other. Reclusive Beckett, belligerent Mailer, energetic Hemmingway, ascetic Woolf, lesbian Stein. Such images may perform what Foucault termed an Author Function in relation to the authors’ writing, taming language, enclosing its promiscuity within the limits imposed by a likeness taken as being ‘in command’. Thus the writing magically animates the image (as if these words were ‘spoken’ by a living presence), and the image serves to regulate the writing. In fact, the visual image is perhaps no image at all unless it is thoroughly implicated in something understood as non-visual. /Calligram/. Perhaps, contra Berger, the imageas-pure-visuality would be, in fact, a form of blindness. ‘It is entirely conceivable,’ claims W J T Mitchell, ‘that an intelligent, inquisitive blind observer who knew what questions to ask could “see” a great deal more in a painting than the clearestsighted dullard.’4 The image, then, does not operate within the realm of sight alone; it is shot through with a seemingly alien otherness that might seem to ‘contaminate’ the supposed purity and innocence of vision. The sun’s radiance releases vision, but it will sear the eyes of those who look directly at it. These same sunbeams, glinting
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punctually on a floating sardine can, alerted Lacan to the gaze of the world. Just as he sees the gleaming sardine can, so its point of light seems to constitute a source of vision from which the object regards him. But whereas Lacan (the subject) looks, the sardine can (the object) gazes. In this exchange, the picturing subject becomes simultaneously pictured object. I am not simply that puncitform being located at the geometrical point of viewing from which the perspective is grasped. No doubt, in the depths of my eye, the picture is painted. The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But I, I am in the picture.5 Issuing straight from the real itself, direct exposure to the gaze would subject us to the devastating incomprehensibility of the real in all its undiluted force. It would be, let’s say, like seeing the face of God. The potential trauma of such exposure is, however, averted by means of the gaze’s mediation by the ‘image screen’. Between us and the real, so to speak, is an intricate network – or screen – of heavily codified representational systems, within which the image becomes the central organising force. The devastating gaze of the real is thus converted into image in order to mitigate its catastrophic effect. Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing’, I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image. Over here. Let’s try you over there. With the jacket, and without the jacket. Standing, leaning, sitting. Look into the lens, look away from the lens. Relax. Try to look intelligent. Smile. Super. One more. I am now in the hands of the photographer and of photography. I feel anxious and at risk. How will I be perceived as a consequence of the resulting image? I decide to ‘let drift’ over my lips and in my eyes a faint smile which I mean to be ‘indefinable’, in which I might suggest, along with the qualities of my nature, my amused consciousness of the whole photographic ritual: I lend myself to the social game, I pose, I know I am posing, I want you to know that I am posing, but (to square the circle) this additional information must in no way alter the precious essence of my individuality: what I am, apart from my effigy. The words are Roland Barthes’s, but the experience is shared. The desperate hope is, as Barthes suggests, that this image will coincide with my ‘self’ – which it always fails to do. Whereas the image is ‘heavy, motionless, stubborn (which is why society sustains it), … ‘myself’ … is light, divided, dispersed.’ The photographic image turns me into a stranger to myself, dissociating consciousness from identity. It transforms me from a subject into an object, and object
possessed, moreover, by someone else. My sense of self is shattered, fragmenting into unmanageable multiplicity. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to demonstrate his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes imposture … I am neither subject nor object, but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis).6 Looking is a complex business. An active process of construction rather than a passive mode of reception, it involves anticipation, prejudice, desire, habit, knowledge, experience. It is also, claims Vilém Flusser, a form of magic, for the magical world is one that allows ‘the eternal recurrence of the same’. The scanning eye ‘can return to an element in the image it has already seen, and “before” can become “after”: The time reconstructed by scanning is an eternal recurrence of the same process.’7 If images instantiate the magical dimension of vision, Flusser also maintains that they induce amnesia. Originally intended as a ‘map’ to aid negotiation of a bewildering environment, images eventually replace reality, converting it into mere ‘scenes’. In an attempt to rescue a dissolving reality from its final erasure by this thickening screen of images, the images were dismembered, their tattered remnants rearranged into the linear script of writing. Writing thus became a code for the image, just as the image had previously been a coded form of reality. But writing itself, as Plato forecast, was destined in its turn merely to perpetuate forgetting. The image as loss and a falling away. The formless apparition of ‘me’ arising from the grave of the words I have written (even as these words address some other object) is given mortal shape by the photographic image. The words on the page do not emanate from me or from language, but from another apparent centre: my likeness. Best selling authors are frequently photogenic. But the image of the writer is not something to be possessed solely by others: it is also possessed by the writer. Borges writes of his relation to his image: The other one, the one called Borges, Is the one things happen to. [...] I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar.8 The discomfort I feel in relation to my image results from my awareness of its inadequacy to the complexity of my experience of my body, my self. In his short essay, Some Simple Reflections On the Body, Paul Valéry proposes that ‘each of us in his thought has Three Bodies – at least’.9 Our First Body
is the one which we call ‘My Body’; ‘We speak of it to others as of a thing that belongs to us; but for us it is not entirely a thing; and it belongs to us a little less than we belong to it ...’ It is, for each of us, the most important thing in the world, an object which simultaneously stands in opposition to the world but which is also reliant upon the world. It is something that either obeys or disobeys us, helps or hinders us, and for us, it has no knowable form. I have no idea of the spatial relations between ‘My Forehead’ and ‘My Foot’, between ‘My Knee’ and ‘My Back’ ... This gives rise to strange discoveries. My right hand is generally unaware of my left. To take one hand in the other is to take hold of an object that is not-I. ‘My Body’ is both ally and antagonist, constant and variable, and it has no past for it is made up wholly of events which are most obviously manifested as pleasure or pain in some of its parts or regions. This body, then, is both unknowable to us and contradictory. Our Second Body,Valéry continues, ‘is the one which others see, and an approximation of which confronts us in the mirror or in portraits. It is the body that has a form and is apprehended by the arts. This body-as-image knows no pain, ‘for it reduces pain to a mere grimace ... our knowledge of our Second Body goes little farther than the view of a surface.’ It is this body-asimage to which Lacan attaches such great significance in his theory of the Mirror Stage. This is also the body as arrested and captured by the camera. Our Third Body ‘has unity only in our thought, since we know it only for having dissected and dismembered it.’ It is the invisible interior functioning of our body. It consists of vessels, organs, fibres, fluids, and so on which we can scientifically identify and enumerate, but whose role in allowing us to transform the world through our movements and actions is mysterious to us. These Three Bodies,Valéry concludes, inter-relate in a variety of ways but, rather than elaborating, he chooses ‘to resort to a kind of fantasy. I suggest that each of us has a Fourth Body which I might call the Real Body or equally well the Imaginary Body.’ This Fourth Body precedes and exceeds knowledge. It is indivisible from the continuity of the world’s materiality – like water within water, perhaps – and in this immanence it is the incarnation of a certain Non-existence. The image (the world) will not leave me in peace: it constantly addresses me, questions me, seduces me, plays on me. When the image is a stereotype (are there any other kinds of images?), it presents the world to me as alreadythought and already-decided. I may have arrived into a world that did not ask for me, but the image is waiting for me, fitting me effortlessly into its ways and patterns: We become what we are only through our encounter,
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while growing up, with the multitude of representations of what we may become – the various positions that society allocates to us. There is no essential self that precedes the social construction of the self through the agency of representations.10 In presenting itself to me, the image also hides something from me. It saves me from the dread of finally knowing, yet it allows me a limited kind of thought. Funes the Memorious11 sprang from the fertile mind of Borges as, perhaps, the image of what Borges himself was to become: semi-invalid, solitary, an exceptional mind in a failing body. In Borges’s story an accident paralyses the young Ireneo Funes’s body, but causes his already extraordinary memory to become infallible.
that what is, is set before us, is represented to us, in general, but that what is stands before us – in all that belongs to it and all that stands together in it – as a system. […] Hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. Wherever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety.12 And now, we are told, the world as modelled by science is a world impossible to visualise. Footnotes
He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on 30 April 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding that he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Río Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising. But, unable to filter these images – unable to classify them into manageable systems – Funes is forced to inhabit a volatile, vertiginous world in which difference is never regulated by sameness. Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them … He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world. Funes’s inexhaustible memory indiscriminately accumulates everything he has ever seen ‘like a garbage heap’. His ‘dreams are like you people’s waking hours,’ yet sleep does not come easily to him. ‘To sleep is to turn one’s mind from the world,’ but even in repose Funes ‘could imagine every crevice and every moulding in the sharply defined houses surrounding him.’ To escape from this insistent pressure of relentless, unmediated experience – in short, to escape the real – ‘he would imagine himself at the bottom of a river, rocked and annihilated by the current.’ We live, says Heidegger, in the Age of the World Picture. ‘Picture’ here does not mean some imitation, but rather what sounds forth in the colloquial expression, ‘We get the picture’ [literally, we are in the picture] concerning something. […] ‘To get into the picture’ [literally, to put oneself into the picture] with respect to something means to set whatever it is, itself, in place before oneself […] But a decisive determinant in the essence of the picture is still missing. ‘We get the picture’ concerning something does not mean only
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1. Walter Benjamin, ‘N [Re The Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]’, in G. Smith (ed.) Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics, University of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 49 [translation slightly modified by Georges DidHuberman]. 2. Barry Schwabsky, ‘Painting in the Age of the Image’, from the catalogue ‘The Triumph of Painting. An Art That Eats Its Own Head.’ Saatchi Gallery, 2006. 3. Homi K Bhabha, ‘Aura and Agora: On Negotiating Rapture and Speaking Between’, in Negotiating Rapture, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1996. 4. W J T Mitchell, Iconology: Image,Text and Ideology, University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 116-19. 5. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Peregrine Books, 1986, p.96. It has been pointed out that Alan Sheridan’s translation here of Lacan (‘But I am not in the picture.’) is a mistranslation of the original, ‘Mais moi, je suis dans le tableau.’ 6. Extracts from Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Fontana, 1984, pp. 10-14. 7.Vilém Flusser, Towards A Philosophy of Photography, Reaktion Books, 2000. 8. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Borges and I’, in Labyrinths, Penguin, 1986. p.282. 9. Paul Valéry, ‘Some Simple Reflections On the Body’, in Michel Feher (ed.) Fragments for a History of the Human Body. Part Two, Zone Books, 1989, pp. 395-402. 10. Victor Burgin, ‘The Absence of Presence’, in The End of Art Theory, Macmillan, 1986, p.41. 11. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Funes the Memorious’, in Labyrinths, pp.87-95. 12. Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Zeit des Weltbildes.’ Translated as ‘The Age of the World Picture’ by William Lovitt in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).