Index of Reflections on the Index

Expanding the logic of the index from the photographic to the material.

Foreword

The term ‘index’ has several related meanings both current and obsolete. Originally used to refer to the ‘index fnger’ (with which one points), it then came to mean ‘pointer’ (late 16th century) and is now used in relation to the pointer on an instrument (hand on a clock), and fguratively something that serves to point to a fact or conclusion; hence a list of topics in a book (‘pointing’ to their location).1 The word ‘index’ is also used in more specialist felds including in relation to change, self-multiplication and relationships between things.2

Developments, re-interpretations and reworkings of these defnitions have been utilised in the felds of philosophy, semiotics and arttheory - most notably by Rosalind Krauss in her 1977 essay ‘Notes on the Index’, in which she uses the photograph as the exemplar of an indexical sign to underpin her argument for a particular approach to the painting and sculpture of her time.3

Here I ofer a close reading of Krauss’ text along with my refections on how the idea of the index can be applied and expanded into materiality. I do this in the context of a range of examples taken from contemporary art as well as natural and everyday phenomena.

Presented in the form of index, but organised spatially rather than alphabetically - one item might follow from two or more previous ones, and often several separate paths fork out from one. Presented on a single sheet of paper to facilitate this unusual spatial arrangement of text, folded like a map. This unique form of spatial indexing has been the form of my refective thinking - but I hope that by arranging the text in this way it might also begin to speak of the disruption to thinking on linear, progressive time that is ofered by spatial and material processes (a conclusion that I do not make frmly here, but that nonetheless my refections are pointing towards).

1 ‘Index’, Etymonline, <https://www.etymonline.com/word/index> [accessed 18 March 2022].

2 Change - ‘Index: (n) a system by which changes in the value of something and the rate at which it changes can be recorded, measured, or interpreted.’ ‘Index’, Collins Dictionary, <https://www.collinsdictionary.com/ dictionary/english/index> [accessed 29 March 2022].

Self multiplication - ‘Index (n) the little numbers that show how many times you must multiply a number by itself. (In the equation 3² = 9, the number 2 is an index)’. ‘Index’, Collins Dictionary, <https://www. collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/index> [accessed 29 March 2022].

One step in a sequence- ‘Index (v) (of a machine or part of one) To move from one predetermined position to another in order to carry out a sequence of operations. ‘Index’ Oxford Languages <https://www.google.com/search?q=index+definition&oq=index+definition&aqs=chrome.

.69i57j0i512l5j69i61j69i60.1990j1j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8> [accessed 29 March 2022].

3 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p58–67.

Introduction

Krauss’ defnition of the index is multi-faceted, specifcally and intentionally grounded in the photographic process and itself derived from other thinkers. From C.S. Pierce in the feld of semiotic theory she obtains the notion of the index as a ‘sign by physical connection’ - expanding his defnition to say that being ‘connected to its referent along a purely physical axis’ is an ‘indexical quality’. She then introduces Pierce’s discussion of the photograph as an exemplar of the indexical sign - ‘photographs…having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature…belong to the second class of signs [indices]’.4

Roland Barthes’ term ‘message sans code’5 is the basis of Krauss’ argument that the photograph (and by extension all indexes) are ‘distant from syntax’, that they are ‘beyond the reach of those possible internal adjustments which are the…property of language’ not ‘drawn from an institutional reserve’ and are therefore ‘not coded’.6 For Krauss the relationships between the parts inside an indexical sign (‘the connective tissue binding the objects’7) must be that of the world itself, rather than that of a linguistic or other cultural system. The logic of nature must be conserved.

Expanding the purely physical axis

In photography, light waves refect from surfaces in the world, move through the camera aperture and lens, then onto the photographic flm to imprint their image. There is no code or syntax injected into this message, and hence in her focus on the photographic process Krauss counts the passage of light in photography as operating on a ‘purely physical axis’.8

We fnd an opportunity to extend the idea of a physical axis from the physical sciences. Here light is just one example of a wave form, part of the electromagnetic spectrum that also includes non-visible light such as UV and infrared (heat) waves. Light waves transfer a property of matter (its refectance spectrum - perceived as brightness and colour, and with those shape and pattern) to another locus or site, via a transmission of energy. Other properties of things in the natural world (other than its visible light refectance spectrum) can be transferred in a similar way. For example via ultraviolet radiation, heat radiation, and sound refections (echoes).

At the surface of the photographic flm, the image comes into being via a chemical transformation (the conversion of silver halides to silver).

Considering chemical reactions on surfaces more widely presents us with second avenue for expanding the index. In Index for a Purely Physical Axis I consider other electromagnetic rays and other chemical surface reactions, and propose that these other modes of transfer, and the forms and phenomena they create, could also be said to operate ‘along a purely physical axis’.

Expanding the absence of syntax

The ability of the photographic process to avoid the insertion of a code is attributed, by Barthes, to the fact that the transformation taking place is not a distorting translation. This does not preclude all and any kind of shift or movement though. In fact the term ‘displacement’ is explicitly permitted by Krauss when she quotes Barthes in this regard saying - ‘….the photograph implies a certain displacement of the scene (cropping, reduction, fattening), but this passage is not a transformation’.9 Displacement is allowed, coded transformation is not. There must be no space for ‘internal adjustments’, no opportunity for syntax to creep in.10

Cropping, reduction, fattening - Barthes’ gives a (non-defnitive) list of photographic processes that operate in an indexical way and as such ofers an invitation to consider how we might extend this list. What other ‘non-transformational passages’ might exist ? Does this need for a lack of syntax preclude any kind of distortion or manipulation of the elements - or might there be examples where what comes out does not resemble what goes in? How might we think of non-transformational displacements of the scene outside of the context of the fat, pictorial plane of the painting or photograph? In Index of non-coded processes I consider a direct mapping of Barthes’ three photographic operations (cropping, reduction, fattening) into three-dimensions (giving operations like cutting out chunks, selecting fragments, compression or shrinking). I also challenge the non-coded nature of the rectangular crop to ofer further potential for expanding the criteria for the index.

The potential for multiple indices

The photographic process is not a single-stage operation. Unlike earlier forms of photography (for example cyanotypes, or camera obscura where the light from the world directly imprints the image onto its substrate) modern flm-based photography is a multi-stage transfer process. For Pierce, and Krauss after him, this did not preclude the photograph from being a direct imprint of the natural world‘the natural world imprints itself on the photographic emulsion and subsequently on the photographic print…beyond the reach of those possible internal adjustments which are the…property of language’.

The number of stages, the number of processes lined up in succession, does not matter then - so long as, at each step, there is no opportunity for a code to be introduced. In the feld of engineering the term ‘index’ is a verb meaning ‘to move from one pre-determined position to another in order to carry out a sequence of operations’.11 In Index of Multiple Steps I discuss ways in which, once the parameters for a ‘noncoded, purely physical axis’ are met, allowing repeated operations or successive steps provides further useful extensions to the logic of the index.

Krauss alludes to the temporal power of the index, saying that there is a “paradox of presence seen as past’ again using Barthes’ discussion of the photograph as a basis;

The type of perception [the photograph] implies is truly without precedent. Photography set up, in efect, not a perception of the being-there of an object (which all copies are able to provoke, but a perception of its havingbeen-there. It is a question therefore of a new category of space-time: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority. Photography produces an illogical conjunction of the here and the formerly. It is thus at the level of the denoted message or message without code that one can plainly understand the real unreality of the photograph. Its unreality is that of the here, since the photograph is never experienced as an illusion; it is nothing but a presence … Its reality is that of a having-been-there, because in all photographs there is the constantly amazing evidence: this took place in this way. We possess, then, as a kind of precious miracle, a reality from which we are ourselves sheltered.13

She argues that, in the paintings and sculpture she is discussing in her essay, the works success in ‘forcing the presence of the object to the surface’ comes from their indexical nature and that;

‘as this presence surfaces, it flls the work with an extraordinary sense of time-past. Though they are produced as a physical cause - the trace, the impression, the clue, are vestiges of that cause that is no longer present in the given sign. Like traces, [indexical works] represent their referent through the paradox of being physically present but temporally remote.’14

The index in its physical directness and non-codifed nature, allows true presence to seep through from the object to its indexical copy or trace. But, this presence brings with it a sense of ‘time past’ - an understanding of an event (the event that took place to make the mark) in the past, this paradox she terms as ‘physically present but temporally remote’.15

We can only see the trace after the event that made it has passed. This idea, that an index is physically present but temporally remote, assumes that the referent itself has disappeared from view. But might there be special kinds of indexes where this is not the case? Can an indexical image be coincident with - both present and visible at the same time as - its referent? Of such special indexes Krauss would concede that the ‘presence’ is still able to seep through to the surface (since there is still a direct, physical and non-coded transformation taking place) but there would now also be a temporal present (replacing the temporal remote of the ‘cause that is no longer present’). In Index for temporal nowness I propose some examples of natural phenomena that might challenge this mutual exclusivity between temporal presence and physical presence.

4 C.S Pierce, ‘Logic as Semiotic:The Theory of Signs,’ Philosophical Writings of Pierce, New York, Dover Publications, 1955, p106 quoted in Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.63.

5 Roland Barthes, ‘Rhetorique de l’image’, Communications, no4 (1964), 42 - quoted in Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.59.

6 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.59.

7 Ibid, p.60.

8 Ibid, p.63.

9 Roland Barthes, ‘Rhetorique de l’image’, Communications, no4 (1964), 42 - quoted in Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.59.

10 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p59.

11 ‘Index’ Oxford Languages

<https://www.google.com/search?q=index+definition&oq=index+definition&aqs=chrome. .69i57j0i512l5j69i61j69i60.1990j1j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8> [accessed 29 March 2022].

12 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.65.

13 Roland Barthes, ‘Rhetorique de l’image’, Communications, no4 (1964), 42 - quoted in Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.65.

14 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.65. (my italics).

15 Ibid, p.65.