Releasing the Image

From Literature to New Media

Jacques Khalip, Robert Mitchell, Giorgio Agamben, Cesare Casarino, Peter Geimer, Mark Hansen

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780804761383
  9780804761376
• eBook ISBN:
  9780804779111
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

It has become a commonplace that "images" were central to the twentieth century and that their role will be even more powerful in the twenty-first. But what is an image and what can an image be? Releasing the Image understands images as something beyond mere representations of things. Releasing images from that function, it shows them to be self-referential and self-generative, and in this way capable of producing forms of engagement beyond spectatorship and subjectivity. This understanding of images owes much to phenomenology—the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—and to Gilles Deleuze's post-phenomenological work. The essays included here cover historical periods from the Romantic era to the present and address a range of topics, from Cézanne's painting, to images in poetry, to contemporary audiovisual art. They reveal the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of the project of releasing images and provoke new ways of engaging with embodiment, agency, history, and technology.

PART ONE

Origination and Auto-Origination of the Image

ONE

“Self-Generated” Images

PETER GEIMER

Translated by Michael Powers

1. “Not by man’s hand”

One normally encounters the term “self-generated images” [von selbst entstandene Bilder] in scare quotes. Such quotation marks are, as a rule, a means of establishing distance. One writes down a term and yet flanks it at the same time with quotation marks in order to make clear that a certain measure of precaution concerning the statement should be preserved. Quotation marks are insignia of inauthenticity, rhetorical separators, or—as Jacques Derrida formulated it—”speech act condoms, to protect our language from contamination.”¹ In the case of “self-generated images,” the unreasonable demand from which the scare quotes protect us exists in the presumption that an image (or a plurality of images) without any identifiable causation could be generated of its own accord. The image that “generates itself” seems to be a monstrosity, a non-thing [Unding], if one assumes that people produce images; that is, that images do not come into being absent an intentional act but are rather the results of conscious or unconscious intentions. Here, in this essay, this term will also be handled less as an empirical statement or historical finding, and more—like the quotation marks that accompany it—as an indicator of a problem area in image theory.

In Homo Pictor, philosopher Hans Jonas contends that “[t]he external intention of the maker lives on as intrinsic ‘intentionality’ in the product—the intentionality of representation, which communicates itself to the beholder.”² This stream of intentionality is suspended in the case of self-generated images. The effects of an authorship that has become problematic take center stage whenever terms such as “automatically,” “randomly,” “naturally,” or “self-generated” images are utilized: there, where a subject, a motif, a conscious or an unconscious intention is typically at work, a void emerges, and the need to elucidate this latter is provisionally occupied by the formula “self-generated.” Who or what the possible cause may be remains undetermined at first—the only certainty being that no person was involved. In this respect, speaking of a “self-generated” image is, as a general rule, a negative discourse: it signifies who is not worth considering as the producer of the image, and marks first and foremost an absence.

In what follows, I will briefly discuss an early image-theological application of this concept, in order to then develop a more extensive examination of the “autonomy” of photographic image practice. The Byzantine image tradition is well acquainted with acheiropoietoi, images not made by hand.³ It has been said of these images that they either miraculously generated themselves or arose through mere contact (with the countenance of Christ). Here already there are indications of an interest in the conditions of origination surrounding images. The question is not (or at least not exclusively), what does the image in question make visible? but rather, first and foremost, in what manner did the visible materialize? Both aspects, visibility and visualization, are inseparably interconnected to one another. The observation or veneration of the image draws life from the knowledge concerning its special mode of production; more specifically, from the knowledge concerning how it purportedly did not originate, through manual intervention. As Georges Didi-Huberman writes, it deals with “traces of the divine,” whose meaning rests upon “non-contact of humans.”⁴

No medium is more strongly implicated in this idea of automatism than photography. The first photographic images, produced in the 1830s, made use of this notion of self-generating images, here serving as a rather suggestive interpretive model: “[I]t is not the artist who makes the picture,” noted William Henry Fox Talbot, the pioneer of photography, “but the picture which makes itself.”⁵ Once again, emphasis is placed on the absent intervention of the hand; again, the void initiated by the unique methods of production is occupied by supernatural and miraculous figures. The visibility of the image is ultimately bound to the specifics of its visualization. Photography, writes Talbot, is a “little bit of magic realized—of natural magic. . . . A person unacquainted with the process, if told that nothing of all this was executed by the hand, must imagine that one has at one’s call the genius of Aladdin’s lamp.”⁶

Later variations on this theme show that such an understanding of photography should not be explained solely in historical terms, that is to say, as a consequence of interaction with a new medium that is still unusual and in need of explanation. According to Mary Ann Doane, the negative definition of photography was applied as early as Peirce’s meditations on indexicality. As is well known, Peirce classified photographs under the “index” sign-type in his sign theory. Such signs stand in direct physical continuity with the object that they signify.

The index is reduced to its own singularity; it appears as a brute and opaque fact, wedded to contingency. In this way, Peirce theorizes the index as potentially outside the domain of human subjectivity and meaning.⁷

In this respect, the photographic image is the perfect manifestation of the index. “In photography, for the first time, an aesthetic or spatial representation could be made by chance, by accident, without human control” (95). The following passage from André Bazin’s meditations, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945), reads like a compressed, revised version of the thoughts already formulated by Talbot regarding photographic automatism:

For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. The personality of the photographer enters into the proceedings only in his selection of the object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind. Although the final result may reflect something of his personality, this does not play the same role as is played by that of the painter. All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence.⁸

It is no coincidence that Bazin comes to speak in this context of the “the Holy Shroud of Turin,” which “combines the features alike of relic and photograph” (8). The motif of the acheiropoietoi is invoked once again, this time in reference to the shroud preserved in Turin that allegedly contains the only authentic reproduction of Christ. Roland Barthes also considers photography to be “magic, not an art” and explicitly associates it with the image-theological tradition mentioned previously: “might we not say of it what the Byzantines said of the image of Christ which impregnated St. Veronica’s napkin: that it was not made by the hand of man, acheiropoietos?”⁹ In contrast to the effect of the acheiropoietoi, the autonomy implicit in photography is now considered as a purely natural phenomenon. The Byzantine images employed miracles as the proof of their authenticity. “That made it desirable for images to declare themselves authentic by performing miracles, the classic proof of authenticity” (Likeness and Presence 47). There are no known comparable incidents in the case of photographic images. Indeed, the origin of images, their cause, and authorship were all equally questionable to the pioneers of photography, albeit in a somewhat different manner. At first it was widely held that they themselves (i.e., the pioneers) brought the images onto paper or glass with the help of a camera, light, and various chemicals. They selected the motif, decided the camera position, determined the exposure time, and so on. And yet, the distinction from other more traditional forms of creating images was inescapable. A glimmer of that “self” from “self-generating” always remains in the photograph, a portion that is neither predictable nor entirely under control.

Countless details can self-position themselves into an image simply by being on-site at the moment that a photograph is taken and are therefore—whether consciously or unconsciously—recorded alongside the rest. This is what Walter Benjamin refers to as a “spark of chance . . . with which reality has, as it were, seared the character of the picture.”¹⁰ Roland Barthes refers to this same occurrence as the “not intentional”: “it does not necessarily attest to the photographer’s art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object” (Camera Lucida 147). Much about a photograph is calculable, foreseeable, and leaves open the potential for formal intervention. However, there are also modes of photography that demand the unpredictable. A photograph is, from this perspective, also an occurrence [Vorfall]. Something in the image occurs [fällt vor], or something unintended seems to fall into [fällt ins] the image. In his essay “Photography—Being and Expression” Rudolf Arnheim describes the most extreme degree of this partial passivity—a photographer who snaps an image, without looking at what appears in the viewfinder of his camera. For Arnheim this action participates in the “uncanny”:

What is uncanny about photography is that the picture comes into being the moment one presses, without previously having been involved in any way, the trigger on the little machine. Neither the hand nor the eye needs to do anything further. And since the part played by the apparatus seems so great, and that played by the human being so small, one hesitates to call such a product a “photograph,” if by that one understands something created by humans.

Here Arnheim describes, as he himself adds, an “extreme case” of image production. But its probability or empirical frequency is of little concern for his argument, for even the unlikely case of a blind photographer “illustrates a property that belongs to all photographs.”¹¹ Arnheim points out that the photographer does not necessarily have to act consciously, see, or even be present at the moment of producing an image. It goes without saying that the creative interventions of the photographer are of deciding importance for an artistic assessment of photographic images; however, they do not represent a necessary prerequisite for the production of an image. The “part played by the apparatus” and the part played by the photographer complement one another, their respective emphases varying from case to case.¹² That Arnheim refers in the same text to “machinations . . . with which one falsifies photos at will by turning them into statements tinged with undeniable personal interest [in bestimmt gefärbte Aussagen]”makes clear that the emphasis on automatism does not necessarily include a theory of photographic objectivity (37). Like natural phenomena, the products of photography are by no means fraudulent, but when taken by themselves, they present no statement concerning that which is shown: “there is in photography always a certain opulence and contingency, just as there is in nature, for nature is not statement but being” (39).

Various authors and theorists of photography have developed different ways of filling in this void of the “self” in photography. Talbot’s initial stance was that the image creates “itself.” At another point in time he describes his house—portrayed in one of his first photographs, which he showed the members of the London Royal Society in 1839—as what he believes “to be the first that was ever yet known to have drawn its own picture.”¹³ A role reversal seems to take place, as the object to be captured in the photograph places “itself” in the image. With this same notion in mind, Barthes refers to the “matter itself,” to an “emanation of the referent” (Camera Lucida 80). Finally, Rudolf Arnheim cites the stake of the apparatus in the picture-making process and so accentuates the technical agency involved in making a photograph.

At least three different agents of the “self” were made responsible for the specific form of photographic image-making: the image itself, the photographic “matter itself,” and the “apparatus” that mediates between the two. The discussion concerning this issue in the theory of photography during the last decades either categorically dismisses the “self” in “self-generated” or takes the form of an undecided meandering back and forth between these poles.¹⁴ The frequently encountered recourse to Peirce and his definition of the index has only further muddied the question. It seems extraordinarily difficult to arrive at a positive designation of photographic autonomy. As in the case of the acheiropoietoi, mostly negative definitions succeed: something in the image occurs and is obviously not made by hand. Against the negative determinations of photography one can doubtlessly object that they withdraw the medial aspects of photography from thought. Where one expects a positive explanation for the transfer of the object in the image, the negative explanations speak of unintentionality, unpredictability, and automatism. Moreover, Barthes’s comparison with the non man-made images of Christ, Arnheim’s appeal to the “uncanny” in photography, or Bazin’s emphasis on their “irrational force” may in themselves already carry the features of a mythification or fetishization of the photographic image.¹⁵ So long as the negative determination does not suddenly change over into metaphysics or a search for an unexplainable being behind the technology, it remains a legitimate indication of the partial inaccessibility of photography.

The art historian Wolfgang Kemp has recently criticized this as a “falling back” on an “archaic view” that sought to downplay the role of the photographer.¹⁶ It is, however, by no means a matter of minimizing or denigrating the artistic and creative share in the image. That is to say, the “participation [Beteiligung] of the photographer” that Kemp mentions is not a static category. It varies according to author, intention, function, and method of image-capture. This is why Georges Didi-Huberman reminds us that a constructivist critique of photography runs the risk of “losing sight of photographic power itself, as well as the (problematic) point where the image touches the real.”¹⁷ This point is, as Didi-Huberman adds, “problematic” because the insistence on the efficacy of the real can easily make it seem as though the insights, already acquired, into the aesthetic, epistemic, historical, or social dimension of all things produced should be revoked on behalf of a new ontolo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part One Origination and Auto-Origination of the Image
• Part Two The New Media of Images (Video, Sound, Digital)
• Part Three Past and Future Itineraries of The Image-Concept
• Notes
• Index