technical images and linear text

Allan Sekula proposes that ‘every proper portrait has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the police” (5), and thereby equates the idealistic representational mode of photography with the more repressive. Sekula’s “Body and the Archive” is a particularly provocative piece, insofar as it refuses to consider photographic practices in isolation: police photography and artistic photography are not two discrete modes of expression which coincidentally make use of the same apparatus, but rather, along the lines described by Flusser, the apparatus in effect produces both modalities of its use. “The freedom of the photographer is a programmed freedom;” thus, the program of the camera implies the contemporary artistic and penal programs alike. Following Flusser’s philosophy of photography even further into Sekula’s piece, we might state that the production of the categories of the ‘criminal’ and ‘ethnic’ other were only the beginning. Existence is defined by difference, and thus it would make sense that society should devote itself first to cataloguing its ‘others,’ by way of the photography of the criminal, the ethnic, and those other subaltern groups in opposition to which ‘respectable’ society forms its identity. And yet, with the world of ‘otherness’ thoroughly catalogued, it seems that Western society is now led inexorably on to the cataloguing of itself.

This is perhaps part of Flusser’s objection to amateur photography; the cataloguing of the other is certainly problematic, as Sekula’s piece outlines. This is not a new development, however. As Sekula states, “‘the potential for a new juridical photographic realism was widely recognized in the 1840s, in the general context of systematic efforts to regulate the growing urban presence of the ‘dangerous classes’” (3). The desire to regulate the other has been a human impulse for all of recorded history. It is only with the rise of modernity, however, that the instigators of social regulation realized that regulation could be far more efficiently implemented not through spectacular manifestations of power, but through surveying, cataloguing, and disciplinary institutions, as described by Foucault. The medieval was a time of myths, of symbols, and of men; modernity is a time of maps, of signs, and of subject-positions. This is why Sekula argues that ‘photography is modernity run riot’ (3). Photography is neither cause nor symptom of modernity, but rather the cultural practice which is most symbolic of the character of the modern age.

I am not referring to ’symbolic’ here in the conventional sense, so derided by Walter Benjamin is his ‘Origin of German Tragic Drama,’ by which one calls anything which represents another thing a ’symbol.’ For Benjamin, the ’symbolic’ mode of expression is one in which the ’symbolized’ object is immanent within the symbolic object; this sense of the ’symbolic’ is derived from a theological sense, and thus demands representation immanence along the lines of the immanence of the divine within the profane. Of course, with our growing uncertainty towards the divine, and the notion of divinity in general, this particular form of symbolism is in decline, supplanted by allegory. Allegory, by contrast to the symbolic, is a form of representation signification in which the ’symbolic’ objects only symbolize by way of their position within an ordered construction. As such, this would cover nearly any instance of ’symbolism’ as we moderns tend to use the term, since, lacking a belief in divine immanence, one only has the structure of language to appeal to for representational purposes.

I will return to the concept of the allegorical in a second. First, however, I should like to unpack why I propose, rather anachronistically, that photography is symbolic of modernity, and perhaps in the process make the distinction between these two modes more clear. The camera is a ’symbol’ of modernity in the conventional sense, that is, we can interpret the rise of photography as an allegorical representation for the character of modernity: as a modern technological apparatus, and one whose usage determined much of the character of modernity, photography is an allegory for modernity. However, modernity is also in some sense immanent within the camera. The rise of modernity would not have been what it was without photography, while photography would not have developed as it did in any context but the modern. Photography neither ‘represents’ modernity, nor ‘constitutes’ it, but rather, modernity is immanent to the program of photography, and vice versa.

This symbolic anachronism is paradoxically responsible for turning the world into allegory. When Sekula states that “‘for Bertillon, the criminal body expressed nothing” (28), he is in fact describing the allegorization of the human body. In the classical mode of thought, as evinced by discredited pseudosciences like phrenology, the human body was taken to be symbolic of the human character: one’s character was not determined by the slope of one’s forehead or the bumps on the skull, nor vice versa, but rather the criminal character was taken to be immanent within the cranial geography. With Bertillon’s allegorization of the criminal body, however, the body was no longer a symbol of the character: the character was in no way necessarily ‘present’ in the structure of the body. Rather, the body was merely a sign which, by way of its position within the structure of society and history, could point to any particular character type. No longer was there a general theory of the criminal physiognomy: on the contrary, the key to the criminal psyche took up residence in the particular. The only way to gain control of the criminal element within society was therefore to catalogue its position within the larger structure. Just as a dictionary catalogues the linguistic sign, so did Bertillon’s photography of deviance catalogue the ‘criminal sign,’ that is, the criminal body.

It is impossible, however, to catalogue one pole of an opposition. The attempts of penal reformers like Bertillon or Bentham were ‘flawed’ in that they restricted themselves to the criminal. The problem with this approach is that one can only catalogue deviance by simultaneously cataloguing that which is deviated from. In Sekula’s terms, “”for Bertillon, the mastery of the criminal body necessitated a massive campaign of inscription, a transformation of the body’s signs into a text” (31): note that the mastery of the criminal body necessitates a transformation of the body’s signs. In order to catalogue criminality, one must catalogue corporeality in general.

And thus, in perhaps the most telling proof of Foucault’s theories with regard to the ‘internalized gaze,’ we see in modernity a simultaneous explosion of photography for artistic and disciplinary purposes. As Sekula argues, photography constitutes “a system of representation capable of functioning both honorifically and repressively” (4); few other cultural phenomena fit this description. One does not go to a prison for recreation, or create art with an MRI machine: why, then, do we catalogue ourselves for fun? It seems this must necessarily be a consequence of the allegorization of the body. The categories which we create for the Other have a tendency of reproducing themselves in unwanted contexts: if the criminal body could no longer be symbolic of ‘evil,’ no longer could the law-abiding body be symbolic of ‘good.’ Allegory gives us a way to make sense of the world without recourse to divine organizing principles: we can interpret the allegory according to the laws of its own structure, rather than any externally-imposed order, and thus the objects within the allegorical constellation are elevated. The signification of the allegorical object lends it a certain secular sanctity, as in the “look up at one’s betters” Sekula describes (8); it also implicitly devalues the individual object, since it only signifies with reference to a larger whole. And thus we have the obsessive impulse towards systematization, cataloguing, categorizing. The only means by which the allegorical body can interpret itself is for it to perceive the structure of which it forms a part, and thus it travels around ripping fragments from reality to perceive the construction of the whole. The ‘public looks’ (Sekula of the photographic serve to situate our own subjectivity with regard to the subjectivity of others: we interpret our positions within the public sphere by determining who we stand above, and who stands above us. By cataloguing our reality with photographs, we can create for ourselves a hierarchy from these panoptic fragments, and thereby seize some provisional meaning from the absurd system that is the modern world.