Photography, Trace, and Trauma

Margaret Iversen

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780226370163, 9780226370026
• eBook ISBN: 9780226370330
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Photography is often associated with the psychic effects of trauma: the automatic nature of the process, wide-open camera lens, and light-sensitive film record chance details unnoticed by the photographer—similar to what happens when a traumatic event bypasses consciousness and lodges deeply in the unconscious mind. Photography, Trace, and Trauma takes a groundbreaking look at photographic art and works in other media that explore this important analogy.

Examining photography and film, molds, rubbings, and more, Margaret Iversen considers how these artistic processes can be understood as presenting or simulating a residue, trace, or "index" of a traumatic event. These approaches, which involve close physical contact or the short-circuiting of artistic agency, are favored by artists who wish to convey the disorienting effect and elusive character of trauma. Informing the work of a number of contemporary artists—including Tacita Dean, Jasper Johns, Mary Kelly, Gabriel Orozco, and Gerhard Richter—the concept of the trace is shown to be vital for any account of the aesthetics of trauma; it has left an indelible mark on the history of photography and art as a whole.

1

Exposure

Photography as a medium is often associated with the psychic effects of trauma. The automaticity of the process, the wide-open camera lens, and the light sensitivity of film all lend themselves to this association. Just as photography, to some extent, bypasses artistic intention and convention, so also the traumatic event bypasses consciousness. Both involve an indelible impression of something generated outside. This book is an exploration of the idea of photography as an analogue of trauma. It also considers art in other media, especially those sculptural forms, like direct casts, that can readily be understood as presenting or simulating a trace or residue of a traumatic event. This book weaves together two strands of thought—semiotic theories of the indexical sign or trace, especially those that pertain to photography, and psychoanalytic theories of individual and collective trauma. This textual material makes it possible for me to make more explicit the concerns of several artists whose practice engages with notions of trauma in the form of material traces. In this introductory chapter, I provide some background, both theoretical and art historical, to this body of thought and develop the concept of “exposure” as a term that combines both psychic and photographic connotations. An introduction to the semiotics of the index is provided in chapter 2.

Trace and Trauma

In his brief but suggestive essay “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’” (1925), Sigmund Freud proposed an analogy between a child’s toy, a “Wunderblock,” and his model of the mind, especially as regards its capacity for both receiving and retaining impressions.1 The toy, commonly known in English as a magic slate, consists of a wax tablet covered with a delicate piece of waxed paper that adheres to it and a transparent sheet of celluloid or plastic. One draws on the slate using a stylus, pressing on the sheet of plastic and making indentations in the wax below, which appear as dark traces. When the sheets of plastic and paper are lifted from the surface of the wax tablet, the marks disappear and the slate can then receive fresh impressions. The wax, however, retains all of the previous marks in a jumbled palimpsest. In Freud’s analogy, the clear plastic sheet and paper represent the faculties of perception and consciousness with their protective psychic shield against stimuli; the retentive wax below represents memory and the unconscious. The analogy neatly accommodates in one system the two key mental functions of receptivity and retention, consciousness and the unconscious: the magic slate combines the notebook’s permanent retention of marks and the chalk slate’s renewable receptivity to them. Yet elsewhere Freud declared that “becoming conscious and leaving behind a memory-trace are processes incompatible with each other within one and the same system,” for “consciousness arises instead of a memory-trace.” While consciousness must be permanently on erase, its contents expiring quickly to make way for new impressions, memory traces are “often most powerful and most enduring when the process which left them behind was one that never entered consciousness.”2 Freud understood that a great deal that is perceived is not consciously registered. Some of these mental contents are traumatic impressions, mainly formed in infancy and childhood; since they are not consciously registered, they are not integrated into experience until, perhaps, much later. This thought led Freud to propose a more high-tech apparatus as an analogy for mental functioning: the camera has the capacity to capture something unexperienced, which comes to light only later, when the film is developed.3 Walter Benjamin made the same connection when he remarked that “it is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”4

Freud’s analogy of the mystic writing pad, although somewhat crude, lends itself especially well to our aim of formulating an aesthetics or poetics of the trace and trauma, for the writing pad is itself a sort of medium of depiction. Especially suggestive is the idea of the soft, vulnerable stuff of the tablet that is so receptive and permanently retentive. As we shall see, understanding the waxy stuff as a medium implies an attitude to art-making that is the very antithesis of an approach that involves active formulation. The commonly held view of the work of art as the paradigm case of a mind-formulated artifact, wholly porous to the intentions of its maker, is here challenged by a view that understands it as constituted by an encounter with the world. The Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco is one prominent contemporary artist who is interested in figuring this kind of creative receptivity. This is particularly evident in his piece Yielding Stone (1992), a ball of soft, gray plasticine that he rolled through the streets gathering dust, fragments, and impressions made by whatever it encountered (plate 1). Benjamin Buchloh saw this as an example of “transforming a surface into a purely passive receptacle of merely accidental pictorial and indexical marks.”5 Plasticine, Orozco observed, “is hardly ever used for the definitive version of a work. . . . Its malleability and vulnerability make it unsuitable for permanent forms in a finished piece.”6 Like the waxy stuff of the magic slate, the child’s toy that Freud compared to the contents of memory and the unconscious, it is a material that retains the traces of impressions. But Orozco’s Yielding Stone has nothing comparable to the mystic writing pad’s protective celluloid layer. Rather, its touch-sensitive surface is “accidented” all over and remains vulnerable to pokes, kicks, and gravity even when it is displayed on the gallery floor. That it is intended as a surrogate self is signaled by Orozco’s statement that the ball is the same weight as himself. The dimension of latent trauma is further drawn out by a remark the artist made in an interview about the connection between a vulnerable or receptive attitude and the importance of vessels and containers in his work. I will return to Orozco’s work in chapter 5, “Index, Diagram, Graphic Trace.”

Freud’s understanding of trauma is clearly more complex than the elementary model figured in his “Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad.’” In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud elaborated the idea that the mind is susceptible to traumatic exposure when powerful stimuli breach its protective shield.7 It was the recurrent nightmares of shell-shocked soldiers treated by Freud during World War I that forced him to abandon his vision of the mind as dominated by the pleasure principle and his notion of the dream as its playground. After the war, he came to see the connections among the psychical traumas of childhood, those of wartime, and peacetime accidents and disasters.8 In all cases, trauma involves the unexpected occurrence of an event that the subject is ill prepared for and unable to assimilate. This has the effect of dividing the subject from him or herself. In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth put it this way:

In trauma there is an incomprehensible outside of the self that has already gone inside without the self’s mediation, hence without any relation to the self, and this consequently becomes a threat to any understanding of what a self might be in this context.9

Trauma creates a disturbingly ambiguous relation between inside and outside, self and other.

Trauma also disturbs what one normally takes to be the linear temporality of experience. Freud gave the name Nachträglichkeit, usually translated as “deferred action,” to the curious retrospective temporality of trauma. He discovered that memory traces, specifically unconscious ones from infancy, are revived in later life by some, perhaps anodyne, experience, which is then given disproportionate significance and emotional weight. The initial event, hardly experienced, otherwise lies dormant; it only becomes traumatic retroactively. In the case of accident or war trauma, the event is received in a numbed state and only later reexperienced as nightmare or hallucination. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud drew the analogy between photographic and psychic deferred action: the latter may be made “more comprehensible by comparing it with a photographic exposure which can be developed after any interval of time and transformed into a picture.”10 While these temporal displacements cannot be figured by the model of the mind conveyed by the mystic writing pad, it nevertheless functions as a productive metaphor for the psyche’s receptivity to and retention of accidental impressions that subtend conscious experience.11

We have seen how Freud’s account of the retroactive causality of trauma points to the limitations of the mystic writing pad analogy. Neither it nor photography can deal properly with the relation between the indexical trace that initiates trauma and its subsequent symptoms, unconscious elaborations, and repetitions. Traumatic impressions are liable to be dreamed or recollected in analysis in distorted ways. To take one example, the traumatic impression in Freud’s case history of the so-called Wolfman was his witnessing in infancy his parents’ copulation.12 But the traumatic disturbance was only triggered years later in a dream of wolves sitting in a tree outside his bedroom window. Because of this disjunction, Freud likened the task of the analyst to that of the archaeologist obliged to construct an artifact out of fragments. What has been forgotten is hinted at in traces that come to light in free association or the transference. Yet Freud also insists that unconscious impressions are in fact preserved whole, like the remains of Pompeii: “Even things that seem completely forgotten are present somehow and somewhere, and have merely been buried and inaccessible to the subject.”13 Freud’s model of the unconscious, then, is of traces laid down that are indelible, although they may manifest themselves in displaced, distorted forms. One consequence of my focus on artists who deploy indexical procedures to summon notions of memory or trauma is that this first moment of trauma is emphasized more than its “fictive” elaborations. However, my final chapter, on Thomas Demand, is aimed at addressing the issue of fictive elaborations of trauma, not as symptom, but as a means of assimilating traumatic impressions into experience and memory proper.

Photography

The surrealists were quick to respond to Freud’s theorization of trauma. André Breton’s conception of “objective chance” is a case in point. By the time he wrote Nadja (1928) and L’amour fou (1937), Breton had read Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which was translated into French in 1927. In these texts, Breton took up and elaborated Freud’s theory of trauma in his formulations of the chance encounter and the lucky find spotted amid the detritus of a flea market. These sorts of occurrence bypass one’s consciousness and intentionality. Breton’s “modern materialist” definition of chance allied it with the idea of a traumatic encounter: “Chance is the form making manifest the exterior necessity which traces its path in the human unconscious.”14 Just as traumatic events bypass the psychic defenses of consciousness, the “protective shield against stimuli,” leaving behind an indelible trace, so also does the chance encounter breach that shield and touch an exposed nerve. Breton evoked photography’s affinity with trauma by emphasizing its unguarded quality and referring to the camera as a “blind instrument.”15

As we’ve seen, the conjunction of the terms chance, trace, and trauma bears closely on photography. This is especially true of photography as imagined in Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” (1931), a text deeply indebted to both Beyond the Pleasure Principle and surrealism. In that essay, Benjamin was attentive to photography’s ability to record the trace of the trauma. He imagined the camera as an eye wide open, with no protective shield, that is, with no buffer against shock. For example, he wrote of the photographer Karl Dauthendey’s self-portrait with his fiancée, who was later to commit suicide, that it fills one with “an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency” left behind by the reality that has “seared” the subject.16 Although the portrait is formal and posed, Benjamin seeks in the distant gaze of the young women a sign of her future despair. He seems to be offering here an account of photography that is not so much auratic as traumatic.17

Photography can be understood, then, as a medium that registers without consciousness of registration. As literary theorist Ann Banfield put it, “What the photograph is sensible of can be outside the ego, a thought unthought, unintended, involuntary and without meaning.”18 The indexicality of the medium is usually credited with making the absent object present, but, as Banfield points out, it also has the effect of absenting the viewing subject as the camera records a world without a subject: “The photograph records the contingency of the subject as such; this is the nature of death in it.” It does this “by conjuring away the subject who observes, whether photographer or viewer.”19 Mary Ann Doane has also argued that photography made possible what had previously seemed impossible—the inscription of contingency: “Anything and everything in the order of materiality could be photographed, filmed, or recorded, particularly the unexpected, the rupture in the fabric of existence.”20

Another writer who has recently reflected on the nature of photographic contingency is the German art historian Peter Geimer. He argues that

photographers are only partly aware of what they are doing, and the aesthetic or epistemic value of their pictures often depends precisely on this blind spot. Much about a photograph is calculable, foreseeable, and leaves open the potential for formal intervention. However, there is also a dimension of the unforeseen. A photograph is, in this respect, also an occurrence: something in the image occurs or something falls into the image.21

Although photographic contingency has been viewed as a positive condition of the medium since its earliest beginnings, it has been especially favored within particular art historical movements, including surrealism. The American photographer Moyra Davey, for instance, claims that her own photography and writing are governed by the principle. In her book Photography and Accident, she tells of opening John Cage’s book Notations at random and reading, “I mix chance and choice somewhat scandalously.” She continues, “I copy this phrase into a notebook, a perfect encapsulation of my own desire for contingency within a structure. I decide to allow chance elements, the flânerie, as it were, of daily life, to find their way into this essay.”22 It also finds its way into her pho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1  Exposure
• 2  Indexicality: A Trauma of Signification
• 3  Analogue: On Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean
• 4  Casting, Rubbing, Making Strange
• 5  Index, Diagram, Graphic Trace
• 6  The “Unrepresentable”
• 7  Invisible Traces: Postscript on Thomas Demand
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates