Prof. Steven Shaviro posted on his blog a few days ago a brief meditation on Daniel Day-Lewis’ (now Oscar-winning) performance in There Will be Blood, responding to Salon’s rather scathing review of said performance. Quite a fascinating post really, and one which linked to and generated a number of very interesting comments. Definitely worth taking a look, particularly for those of us who aren’t satisfied with just enjoying a wonderful movie like this, and insist upon analysing it theoretically (with reference, of course, to M. Deleuze).

While reading his post and the resultant comments, I was left hesitating between the implicit claims being made by Shaviro and by commenter LB: isn’t there a much more productive and Deleuzean way of thinking about Daniel Plainview’s character? One which doesn’t neatly fit into the category of ‘nonpsychological subject’ or Homo Economicus, or that of ‘disillusioned but still-sentimental misanthrope?’ And so, instead of getting started on this stack of semiology papers I’ve got to mark, I decided to write up a little dilettantish critique of Day-Lewis’ performance in response to these interesting theses.

What can we call the affective state of this fictive Homo Economicus but a state of disaffected misanthropy, in which a preexisting assemblage of desires (BwO) recognizing the inadequacy of bourgeois sentimentality seeks to channel all of its drives according to the imperatives laid out by capital? On this interpretation (perhaps more in line with the sentiments of Shaviro than LB), Plainview is neither wholly unsentimental, nor an unfortunate victim of the curse of capital. To decisively propose either reading seems foolish. There is something strange about DD-L’s calculated affect, but a ‘non-psychological’ subject or pure homo economicus is simply a convenient fiction, and I credit Paul Thomas Anderson’s characterization with a bit more verisimilitude than that.

The quote Shaviro provides from American Stranger’s blog seems particularly perceptive, especially in the light of Deleuze & Guattari’s thoughts on masks and faciality (visagéite) in Mille plateaux. Plainview adopts the mask of the tycoon in order to achieve his desires for fortune: this is a mask which (as we all should know from our own experiences with an increasingly media-friendly batch of tycoons) demands far more calculation than sincerity. And so DD-L’s extremely calculated affect, his ‘heavy cloak’ of technique is very appropriate here. Following the formula of D&G (which in its original context rather tellingly refers to the ‘despot-god’), Plainview’s mask “does not hide the face, it is the face” (MP 115). The mask of the disaffected and calculating tycoon does not simply conceal a hidden reserve of sentimentality, nor does it define Plainview’s character in its entirety. Instead, the film clearly dramatizes the mechanisms by which the mask of the tycoon gradually supplants the naive and uncalculating sentimentality of Plainview-the-father (more apparent in the early portions of the film) and replaces it with the calculating, amoral emptiness of Plainview-the-tycoon. Neither the tycoon-mask nor the familial mask is Plainview’s ‘real’ face, but rather each mask corresponds with certain possibilities and impossibilities for Plainview-the-individual. The familial mask is warmer and more impassioned, while the tycoon mask is colder and more calculating; likewise, it seems that both masks correspond with certain movements of territorialization and deterritorialization, with family carving out a territory which is constantly deterritorialized by capital. Nevertheless, neither mask, it seems, corresponds with “Plainview himself” (insofar as this term has any referent at all).

It seems that Shaviro is quite right to question the rather staid critiques put forth by Salon: Day-Lewis’ calculated, ‘obvious’ acting is not a deficiency, but precisely what his character demands. But I’m not sure why he would claim that “even Plainview’s rashest and most impulsive acts, like the murders he commits, are crimes of calculation, or at least of mechanism, rather than crimes of passion.” Plainview’s murders are clearly not ‘just’ crimes of calculation; indeed, I’m not so sure that a murder can ever be purely calculating or mechanistic. (NB: I’m about to spoil the ending for you, if you haven’t seen it.) His first murder corresponds with a resurgence of the tycoon-mask after a period in which it gets tentatively replaced with a brother-mask: Plainview seems to let his guard down somewhat when he meets his ‘brother,’ slipping into a familial mask which was apparently discarded once he sends away his now-’useless’ deaf son. But when he finds out that this brother is an impostor, the disaffected tycoon-mask (not without its own cold and sadistic passions), demands that he slay this witness to the less-guarded fraternal mask.

Likewise, it seems that if Plainview were really as calculating and cold as the visage his tycoon-mask presents, he would not be so threatened by Eli Sunday the impassioned preacher. The dialectic of these two characters turns on the question of passion, and it shows up the inadequacy of any reading in which one character is purely ‘calculating’ and the other purely ‘passionate.’ On the surface, this reading works just fine: Eli seeks salvation for his people through charismatic religion; Plainview seeks only to work out a calculated bargain with these same people, trading their rights to the land for the right to a (tiny) share of the capital sequestered beneath it. Eli is therefore the impassioned foil to the calculating Plainview. But it’s not even close to this simple: both characters must ultimately compromise their values, and their masks are decisively shattered by the end of film. Perhaps this even happens at the beginning: either Eli leads Plainview to the oil on his family’s farm (hiding behind a pseudonym, the identical mask of his ‘twin’), or it’s the work of a real twin brother. In either case, it is someone who shares Eli’s face, someone who hides behind an identical mask, that brings Plainview to the Sunday ranch in search of oil.

More significantly, however, the two most compelling scenes of the film are the scenes in which Plainview and Sunday’s masks are shown for what they are. In the scene where Plainview is baptized and humiliated by Sunday, we can see the depth of Plainview’s passion straining against the tycoon-mask he has adopted for himself as he is forced to shout again and again: “I have abandoned my boy!” In the comfort of his own calculating world of capital, Plainview can sustain the mask of the tycoon without contradiction: he sent his son away simply because the oilfield was no place for a deaf child, because a boarding school could offer him far better care than he, etc. etc. But when he is forcibly dragged out of this world and placed in the charismatic sphere of the church, the essentially non-calculating thought at the basis of his calculating mask is laid bare. Without his impassioned, irrational desire for wealth, Plainview could never sustain this calculating visage: he would have given it up for the sake of his child. Plainview-the-tycoon is in no way ‘purely’ calculating, but is sustained by an underlying passion for calculation. This is what Eli hopes to lay bare in his baptismal ceremony, but although he draws out the passions which underly Plainview’s calculating nature, the tycoon-mask is too firmly entrenched: Plainview-the-tycoon returns as soon as the ceremony is finished, and he sees the entire drama as simply a means to an end.

But this is not the only resurgence of the passions of Plainview, the drives of his body-without-organs which forever transgress the limits set out by one mask or another. Somewhere, subconsciously, this character ‘knows’ exactly what happened in the church, and will never forgive Eli for subverting his mask in this way. The last scene of the film only makes sense in this context. In the baptismal sequence, Eli, finding himself in a position of power over Plainview, attempted to lay bare the passions which sustain Plainview’s calculating mask; in the final sequence, Plainview, finding himself in a position of power over Eli, seeks to lay out the fundamentally calculating quality of Eli’s passions. While Plainview was forced to admit the essentially irrational quality of his calculating greediness, Eli is forced to admit the essentially calculating quality of his faith by admitting that his God is nothing more than a useful fiction. This is of course an essentially Hegelian contest, in the master-slave sense of a struggle for identity: the impassioned, pious thinker seeks to exert mastery over the calculating one by showing that his mode of thought is more fundamental, and vice versa. The contest, however, makes clear that neither term of this opposition is wholly separate from the other, but in fact contains the germ of the other within itself, as its vital or animating force. Plainview, alone in his mansion, desperately seeks to prove the value of his own mask by showing up Eli’s disguise. And he’s far from wrong about Eli: why else would Eli have sought to publicly humiliate Plainview in front of his congregation, except as a calculated move to undermine (in the eyes of the people) Plainview’s mode of thought and buttress his own? Eli clearly has no qualms about supporting his faith through calculation (which makes me think that Eli and his ‘twin’ are one and the same character). But Plainview’s calculating qualities are clearly only made possible by an underlying passion. After all, the last scene presents is no public humiliation for Eli, but simply Plainview’s irrational desire to prove to himself the superiority of his own way of thinking. This scene shows Plainview desperate to sustain the calculating mask of the tycoon, but his desperation is anything but calculating. Eli proves his fundamentally calculating nature by his willingness to admit that God is nothing more than a fiction; but in this epic struggle for recognition, this admission is profoundly unsatisfying to the impassioned Plainview. As in Hegel’s formulation of the master-slave dialectic, the recognition of mastery is attained by the forced submission of the slave: Plainview’s mastery, the mastery of capital and calculation, is at long last recognized by Eli. But this recognition can bring no satisfaction to the master, since it depends upon the recognition of the slave: the mastery of capital demands the submission of the passions, but it is nothing without these passions and their submissiveness. And so, in a final act of desperation, Plainview seeks to decisively abolish the passions, to affirm the joint dominance of capital and calculation once and for all by murdering the man of faith.

But bludgeoning a man of God to death with a bowling pin has to be about the furthest thing from calculated: the vicious bludgeoning with whatever heavy object is ready-to-hand is perhaps the archetypal crime of passion (cf. of course Cain and Abel). The last scene dramatizes the fact that calculation is always sustained by passion. We might, like Shaviro, be quite uncertain as to whether Plainview will ever be punished for his misdeeds. But Plainview-the-tycoon is far from victorious in this combat. In the submerged violence of his face-to-face encounters with Eli, and in the accomplishment of this violence in murder, Plainview’s existence is revealed to himself as absurd. (I would love to expand more on these connections with Levinas, but this is getting far too long already.) Plainview has long confused the disaffected and calculating mask of the tycoon with his own reflection, and even come to accept it as his true face: archetypal méconnaissance. With the death of the impassioned Eli, he finally comprehends the truth that ought always to have been in plain view. Behind the rationalizing mask of the tycoon, there is no rational subject, no unified ground of economic calculation, but only an assemblage of irrational passions. And so Plainview’s ambiguous final words are his most profound, and his most sincere. In shattering Eli’s mask and his face, he has finally slain his specular double, his passionate foil, and so he might finally considered homo economicus, a being of pure calculation without passion: so he says, “I’m finished,” implying that his project is finally accomplished. This accomplishment, however, can only be attained at the expense of his subjectivity (cf. Levinas’ reading of murder), in a combat which subverts the very mask it seeks to support. These last words might therefore also be read as an implication that Plainview has finally metamorphosed into a pure mask of capital, or the homo economicus referred to by Shaviro. Thus, at the end of the film, Plainview has become a space of dissimulation bereft of any independent subjectivity: a mask which conceals no face, but only an infinite regress of disguises. And so Plainview’s last line of dialogue is to be interpreted as the unutterable “je suis fini” in opposition to the possessive finitude of the subjective “j’ai fini.” These are not the words of a subject of enunciation – “I have finished!” – but the utterance of a mask which conceals no subject, a mask whose ‘I’ is itself ‘finished.’

so, on the last day of my holiday freedom-of-thought, i’ve been catching up on a favourite comic book of mine, Bill Willingham’s Fables. and comic books have long been a  guilty pleasure of mine: i’m not the kind of dogmatic comic-book booster who is endlessly trying to lift their preferred medium onto a pedestal alongside the classic works of ‘high’ art, since this is clearly absurd and counterproductive given the actual content of comic books as compared to, say, the ‘Ring Cycle.’ nevertheless, i’m also fervently opposed to all those latent dogmata within the ‘media-studies’ set, whereby even though various new media (film, television, internet – take your pick) may be permitted the status of ‘art,’ comic books must remain the sort of puerile fodder for children that have yet to grow up. this is absurd, given that it is founded upon a certain artistic essentialism: new media can be admitted to the ‘art’ party, so long as they play by its long-standing rules and hierarchies. thus a ‘good’ film or television show can be judged according to the same pat criteria with which foolish critics have always congratulated themselves as having understood ‘art’ as such.

this is about to turn into a spiralling tirade against all artistic essentialism, as inspired by my recent time spent in NYC at the Met and MoMA. since i saw Damien Hirst’s incredible exhibition in the lobby of Lever House (entitled “School: The Archaeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge”) i have been taking my own little philosophical tour through the various reactions to Hirst’s work and ‘conceptual art’ in general. such reactions span the gamut of reaction-formation from fawning capitalist adoration to quasi-totalitarian ‘nouveau essentialism,’ but all seem to fundamentally miss the point of both conceptual art, and of the ‘concept of art’ itself. instead of spiralling out of control right at this moment, i will hopefully blend today’s thoughts into an upcoming series of posts which i have planned on dogmatic thought-processes more generally. for the time being, however, i read a lovely little snippet from an interview in the closing pages of Fables #50 that simply demanded a bit of public reproduction and comment. thus i have inaugurated a new ‘category’ of this blog, for little fragmentary ’snippets’ of thought like these that aren’t quite of the caliber my own narcissistic thought demands for a full ‘post,’ but nevertheless fascinating.

in this snippet, i think that Willingham, in spite of his often troubling political views (cf. the Big Bad Wolf’s curious love for the state of Israel in this same issue), has really gotten to the heart of what makes comic books fantastic, and what makes his particular comic book a fantastic one, amidst the plethora of so-called ‘realistic’ or ‘gritty’ comics that are presently dominating the mainstream. even in the world of ’superhero’ comics, with Watchmen and Frank Miller’s wonderful deconstruction of Batman, this sort of verisimilitude, with its thoroughgoing anti-idealist style, is taking hold: thus Captain America has to die, and everywhere the classical purity of the comic-book narrative begins to fall apart. against this tendency, we have Fables, which invades the real, ‘mundane’ world of grime and violence with the gleeful naiveté of fable characters. this ‘childish’ idea is nevertheless as modern and topical as any other interesting text we can name, dealing as it does with the pressing theme of the subordination of childlike wonder and beauty to rationalizing, automatizing forces (the Adversary’s armies of puppets).

on to the snippet: Bill’s co-author, Matt Sturges, begins with a statement that is really only marginally a ‘question.’

“Matt: Moving on. You and I have both discussed our desire to live in the world of Broadway musicals, a world in which everyone’s innermost thoughts are expressed with the accompaniment of a full orchestra, and a crowd of strangers can at any moment burst into a perfectly choreographed dance number. What I’m not clear about, though, is the mechanics of such a universe. Is it like a psychic thing, or does everyone get a score in the mailbox each morning, or what?

Bill: I suppose it would be like the ultimate jam session. When it’s time for song and dance, you’d better be able to join in and improvise on the fly, or you’re kicked out of the big show and relegated to the bad side of town where they only do high school productions of Hello, Dolly.”

thus Fables (following the pattern of all ‘traditional’ comic books) enacts a certain necessary deconstruction of all those totalitarian, essentialist notions of ‘high and low’ art, whereby Wagner exists on a superior plane of being to the vulgar parade of ‘musical theatre.’ Willingham’s work, ‘fantastic’ in every sense, abandons the tragic idealism of all those who would remake popular media in the image of ‘high art:’ he does so by simply affirming the value of base ‘entertainment’ in the face of a fictive artistic ‘edification.’ certainly, no critic should be unable to draw the significant distinctions between Wagner and, say, Andrew Lloyd Webber: Wagner, it goes without saying, is the ‘greater’ artist, the superior talent, and we can remain justifiably disgusted at Webber’s pretensions, inherited from the dogma of ‘high art.’ (thus we might observe the comic musical is infinitely more ‘attuned’ to the nature of its own medium than the schlock that is Phantom.) the danger is simply when we reify this distinction, when we assume that there is some objective distinction between the ‘good copy’ of the operatic art, and the inferior simulacrum of the popular theatre. this reification is that which leads a classicist such as Adorno into the very same artistic dogmatism supported by the Third Reich.

against all dogmata which would slay art by subordinating it to an ideal state, those who truly love culture must constantly affirm the value of the inferior repetition in the face of the ‘great work.’ between the tragic opera and the Broadway comedy, or between the Great Novel and the lowly comic book, there are no doubt an infinite array of differences, which it becomes the task of the attentive critic to discern. yet the critic must always avoid that narcissism whereby his or her own distinctions of taste become absolute, whereby one set of artistic values is posited as ‘naturally,’ or ‘absolutely’ superior to another. this is the dogmatic tendency inherent to all criticism, whereby the critic may feel that they have ‘mastered’ art itself by subordinating it to their own constructed categories. not only does this dogmatism exclude the most vital, popular modes of artistic expression from the artistic ‘canon,’ but it is fundamentally in affinity with all totalitarian, essentialist modes of thought. such artistic essentialism betrays art itself: this is the immanent danger of a criticism run amok, whereby the differences which make life and art possible are subordinated in bad faith to some fictive ideal, to the identity of some absolute Work.

“Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out:: with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. . . With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental. This much is certain: today photography and the film are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.” – Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

If we were to follow the method of Komar and Melamid’s “Most Wanted Paintings,” and survey Canadians to determine what their ‘most wanted’ painting might be — not that the Canadian art market would ever merit such close and particular scrutiny — we might come up with something fairly similar to the Bruegel reproduced above. After all, we are so little different from the United States in terms of our ‘masses,’ we might even be able to use the American ‘most wanted’ painting. As Komar & Melamid state of the general public in the United States: “To a surprising extent, the public tends to agree on what it like to see in a work of art. Americans generally tend to prefer, for instance, traditional styles over more modern designs; they also express a strong preference for paintings that depict landscapes or similar outdoor scenes. In addition, most Americans tend to favor artists known for a realistic style over those whose artworks are more abstract or modernistic.” None of the paintings that they develop on the basis of their survey data are really particularly unique, varying only in size, season, and ambiguous ‘national’ signifiers; thus, Denmark’s painting features a Danish flag and is the size of a ‘refrigerator door,’ while Kenya’s is identical but for its size (’small filing cabinet’) and the inclusion of a hippopotamus. Thus the natural setting of the Bruegel, with the addition of snow, to suit our masochistic Canadian taste for winter, is made ‘national’ by the inclusion of some skaters, perhaps playing hockey, that great national Canadian game, incidentally invented by the Dutch. The ravens add just the necessary touch of allegorical morbidity, representing our conflicted relationship to the landscape and its harshness, while the traditional ‘realist’ style ensures that the painting induces no problematic thoughts in those who live their lives in avoidance of such.
And so, we have another bland work of traditionalist art, differentiated from the others on a purely surface level. Why is this the ‘art we want?’ Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction gives us, as always, the tools to comprehend the forces implicated in this grand homogenization of the world. As he states, in the age of mechanical reproducibility, the artwork is no longer premised on its use value for ritual, but on its exhibition value to the greatest number of people. No longer was the function of the artwork to communicate with the Divine or to regulate social conduct, but instead the artwork became an ‘object’ of looking, and insofar as that object was looked at by the greatest number of people, it was ’successful.’ This is the ‘qualitative transformation’ of the nature of the artwork described in the quote above: for Benjamin, ‘art’ was a certain historically specific notion of cultural production, with a balance between these two poles of signification, the ‘cult value’ and the ‘exhibition value.’ For the earliest artists, the work of art was purely an instrument of magic, and thus was not a ‘work of art’ as such, but rather a ritual object par excellence; today, the ritual value has been almost entirely excluded from the function of art, and thus the art is a commodity, or more specifically a public spectacle like any other. The artistic function, the equivalence between the poles of ritual value and exhibition, is discarded, in favour of the primacy of the commodity function.

This is of course problematic, and most of us would instinctively agree. However, we ought to unpack more carefully exactly that which is problematic about this absolute emphasis on the exhibition value of the artwork. Komar & Melamid’s piece is incredibly significant for just this reason; it implicitly deconstructs some of the central assumptions of modern corporate-administered capitalism, namely, the primacy of ‘public opinion,’ the homogenization of the world through polls, and the depredation of individuality in favour of the supposedly omniscient body politic. ‘Opinion polls’ have to some extent taken the place of truth in the contemporary discourse: as Michael Govan states in the introduction to Komar & Melamid’s project, “we believe in numbers, and numbers never lie. Numbers are innocent. It’s absolutely true data. It doesn’t say anything about personalities, but it says something more about ideals, and about how this world functions. That’s really the truth, as much as we can get to the truth. Truth is a number.” Govan’s own orientation toward the ‘truth’ of numbers is ambiguous, but he does recognize that this faith in numbers is not solely a contemporary phenomenon: “In a way it was a traditional idea, because a faith in numbers is fundamental to people, starting with Plato’s idea of a world which is based on numbers. In ancient Greece, when sculptors wanted to create an ideal human body they measured the most beautiful men and women and then made an average measurement, and that’s how they described the ideal of beauty and how the most beautiful sculpture was created.” Yet Plato’s mode of relating to the world is not our own. Numbers have always been the primary mode of relating to ‘the masses,’ and as such essential in a democratic society ostensibly governed by those ‘masses.’ However, we have a contemporary faith in numbers which I think seems fundamentally different from that of Plato.

There were a vast array of characteristics which separated Athenian democracy from our own. The ownership of slaves, for instance, made the leisurely existence of the intellectual class possible, and made the engagement of the citizenry with the political system practical. The size of the city-state and the homogeneous ethnic and gender group that was the ‘polis‘ ensured that the citizens could remain involved with the life of the state, and the state with the lives of the citizens. The ‘public interest’ was simply taken to be the interest of a small group of Greek landowning men, and the issue of ‘public opinion’ was thereby bracketed, worked out in public discourse: agourein. In our contemporary technologically-mediated democracy, we have taken the enlightened steps of including previously-marginalized groupings in our polis, and extending the geographical boundaries of the democratic state across the entire widths of continents. No longer could the question of ‘public interest’ in fact be discursively determined by all the individual members of the public, but instead, the public would have to be allegorized: allos agourein, an ‘other’ discourse, a discourse which speaks for the ‘other,’ in this case being the idealized ‘public.’ And so this ideological necessity, of knowing the ‘public opinion,’ begat our contemporary obsession with the cataloguing and quantification of the ‘masses,’ that takes its most egregious form in the guise of the opinion poll.

There is certainly a great deal to be said for the opinion poll, and for the extension of the franchise, and for democracy. These are all things which are said constantly, at great volume, across the various media systems that constitute our simulated public discourse, and they are not ‘incorrect’ per se. Rather, they are merely a veiling the true nature of democracy, which, like art, should ideally balance the interests of the individual and the polis. Athenian democracy, in spite of its self-evident flaws, balanced the interests of rational individuals in public discourse, and then determined the general course of society according to this aggregated interest of individuals. Contemporary democracy produces ‘opinion polls’ which demand only the most reactionary, simplistic responses, and then passes those off as indicative of the ‘public opinion.’ These opinion polls have an evident function, as a gauge of the public’s opinion. This is unproblematic. The issue arises when opinion polls are taken to be normative, and the data presented in polls is presented as truth. When the actual opinion of the public, and the course of society as a whole, is informed only by the mediated ‘public opinion,’ there is no means by which the individual or the society can develop. As Benjamin states, in this society founded on mechanical reproduction, “the conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.” The end result is a lack of anything new.

Opinion polls are, it must be said, a privileging of the opinions of the wise and the stupid alike. The opinion poll gives equal weight to truth and fallacy, to true belief and blind faith, to mass conformity as to individual genius. This is something which always ought to be recognized: the public opinion is not ‘the truth,’ but is rather a syncretic blend of the truth and lies. They can be taken as a guide to the opinion of the masses, but never as a guide to action. Komar and Melamid’s project, were it instigated by a government for the purpose of determining what art was positive and what was ‘degenerate,’ might seem like a fascistic or communistic endeavour, and yet when we truly consider the matter, it would be the pinnacle of ‘true democracy.’ And thus we ought to be led to question the nature of ‘true democracy.’ After all, ‘rule’ by the demos is nothing more than mob rule: the nature of contemporary democracy stems from the constitutional strictures we apply to the will of the masses. This is something which should be recognized in culture as in politics: ‘the public’ as a quantified and egalitarian mass should never make any real ‘decisions.’ This is why we don’t live in a society governed directly by mobs, but one governed by representatives. The ‘public interest’ should be determined as the aggregate interest of individuals: and so, the ‘public,’ that bizarre construction of opinion polls and administrative research should have no say in determining ‘what is art.’ Art is a question for individuals. The beauty of the market system — itself of course not without its own problems — is that it offers a niche for the public and a niche for the individual. Those individuals whose tastes have been so thoroughly monotonized by a relentless stream of mass culture and public opinion that they crave the sort of sappy medium represented by Komar & Melamid’s paintings have a ‘public’ forum in which they can indulge their specious tastes, in the guise of those Holiday-Inn art sales; those who have constructed for themselves an identity so oppositional that they crave pure individuality can spend millions at Sotheby’s on a work of the Abstract Expressionists. The rest of us will go on, as always, balancing our appreciation of ‘pop’ universality with individual genius and carving out our own artistic convictions, bearing little resemblance to the opinions of this mathematic fiction of “the public.” And some of us can thereby continue to adore the pure abstraction, the almost Lettrist brilliance of Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire, which I think we can indisputably state represents the Canadian public’s “least wanted” painting. The power and beauty of Lettrist hyper-abstraction is almost wholly lost on the general public, and yet no less valid for it. 100 million people, as the aphorism goes, can and often have been woefully, unbelievably wrong, especially about art., for artistic genius is the mark of the individual, not of the ‘public.’ This cultivation of the balance between individual taste and shared cultural practice is thereby of utmost importance in the realm of art, wherein homogenization and governance by opinion poll could only mark the end of art altogether. Art is the expression of the individual genius par excellence; though it functions in a communitarian system of signification, the individual spirit must always be of prime importance to the work of art, else our culture will ultimately be left with nothing but one infinitely-reproduceable lithograph of a cat hanging from a tree, and a 50 Cent CD.

“Apparatuses are… not superhuman but subhuman — bloodless and simplistic simulations of human thought processes which, precisely because they are so rigid, render human decisions superfluous and non-functional” (Flusser 74).

In honour of Vilém Flusser, who in his later years refused to purchase any books, instead quoting from memory and the books that were given him as gifts, this shall be a sparsely cited essay on the nature of the human condition. My goal is not to respond to Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography, but rather to undertake a certain sort of exegetical expansion, whereby I shall be using some snippets of his work to trace the framework for my own thoughts. Flusser’s notions of the system and the apparatus are incredibly useful ones, and yet their implementation in this work might make these very concrete and analytically distinct categories seem quixotic and ambiguous. And so, in the tradition of Flusser’s own philosophical investigations, as well as Deleuze’s philosophical technique of ‘buggery,’ I will be employing Flusser’s concepts in a more analytically specific fashion that is at once implicit in Flusser’s text and altogether my own.

When Flusser states that the photographic ‘universe’ functions as a “feedback mechanism for the reprogramming of society,” it becomes immediately clear that his interest in photography extends well beyond the basic issues of artistry and mimesis spoken to by theorists of the photographic content like Sontag, Barthes, or most others. His text is one which, rather tellingly, contains no images; the ‘content’ of the image is entirely bracked in Philosophy of Photography. This is in part a McLuhanesque move, in that Flusser is seeking to ‘bracket’ the question of content in order to interrogate more thoroughly the nature of the photographic form and its social context; to consider the place of photography at what McLuhan, following Bernard Lonergan, called the ‘empirical level of perception.’ This is necessary because of the same classic opposition of form and material to which Flusser speaks in The Shape of Things. As creating beings, humans are necessarily posed to ignore form in favour of content; the particular table simultaneously obscures the tableness of the table, and its table-function — it becomes a wooden platform for putting things on, and the change in patterns of human existence marked by this form, ‘table,’ are obscured as somehow ‘natural.’ But the table is the furthest thing from natural, indeed, as opposite to nature as a ‘thing’ can be. And this leads us to the implicit question of Philosophy of Photography, which is the relation of the human being to the apparatus.

The table is no apparatus, however, but instead a structure. And the system, it seems, is something of an entirely different character. And so before we can begin to consider the relation of the human to the apparatus, we must situate these disparate but similar concepts in a more coherent framework.

The first premise of that framework is this: that the condition of humanity is a condition of precarious balance between Nature and the System, two poles which (like all binary oppositions) are not in fact opposite. This is to say, that the distinct nature of human Being, rather than Being-as-such, comes from the fact that our Being is not entirely reducible to Nature. Rather, human history is the story of naked apes carving out an Other to Nature, that first and totalizing system which accepts no such Otherness. The structure and the apparatus are both distinct subsets of the larger set of systems.

First, though, the system itself requires definition. The system is simply put, a human strategy which overlays nature and regiments an organic chaos according to the functions and positions of its component parts. The human in a biological sense is merely a complex of systems, with the endocrine and central nervous systems being themselves merely the functions of the system of evolution, itself dependent on a position within the solar system, and ultimately the system of the universe itself. The system is a natural order; one must recognize first, however, that the system as such is not the product of Nature, but the product of the human encounter with Nature. Nature itself has no systems, or types of being, but merely is; all order which is supposedly seen ‘in’ nature comes from a human systematization of the precession of natural states. The significance of the system is that humankind is compelled to impose meaning on nature; we cannot relate to nature qua nature, but must regiment it according to our own notions of order. The system is therefore an organic development, the primary instantiation of which was language, or more specifically parole or speech, whereby humanity ‘naturally’ regimented an array of utterances into a system of intersubjective signification, which is the foundation for all future systematization.

If parole is the primary instance of the system, however, then langue is the primary instance of the structure. The system is an organic human construct overlaid upon a natural state of affairs, and although the system of language provides the foundation for both system and structure (the system of parole represents the metaprogram by which all systems are programmed), structure has its own distinct character. Structure is a synthetic human construct with no relation of equivalence to any natural state, exemplified of course by writing — graphein. Parole is an organic system which is nevertheless too chaotic for the needs of a centralized and regimented society, and which thereby needs to be supplemented by the inorganic rigidity of the structure of writing. And so, as the system of speech underpins the systematization of the natural world, so too does the structure of writing underpin the structuration of the human world (to borrow Giddens’ useful term). The structural equivalents to the nervous system and solar system are the structures of medicine and commodities, respectively. Of course, this does not imply that the two worlds are in any sense hermetically sealed; indeed, as I will be going on to show, cross-pollination between these two realms is in fact the problem.

The last concept at issue is that of the apparatus, the definition of which is quite simple: an apparatus is a functional structure. So whereas structures like language, commodities, or medicine are generalized structures which we as human subjects effectively inhabit (to paraphrase Le Corbusier) and which enable a wide array of activities, apparatuses are specific structures to which we relate in a capacity of use, or equipment (Zeug). The apparatus is a teleological structure, one which serves to make ready some object in the world. This of course begs the question — to ‘make ready’ for what? This is the problem which Flusser seeks to address in Philosophy of Photography.

The answer, it seems, is that the apparatus serves to make the world ready for further structuration; “as they extend they reach further into the natural world and tear objects from it more powerfully and quickly than the body could do on its own.” (23) There is at once something tremendously underwhelming and tremendously problematic about this discovery. The underwhelming part is that this ‘tearing-from-nature’ is what defines the human condition; our very ‘unnaturalness’ is our natural place within the world. To be human is to systematize and construct meanings from the chaos of the natural world, and to propose that we should somehow allow ourselves to be determined by ‘our nature’ is in this sense delusional. And yet to propose the opposite is perhaps even worse.

This is why I say that the human condition is one of a precarious balance. The anxieties expressed in our postmodern parables about robot uprisings and the like stem from a realization that in a world governed by the logic of the structure, the robot is the ideal. And so while none of us pine for the days of swinging from trees and picking lice from our acquaintances, and thus ought not to argue for a regression to a natural system, we must recognize that human conduct is increasingly governed by structural logic. As Flusser states, “previously the tool was the variable and the human being the constant, subsequently the human being became the variable and the machine the constant” (24).

The image which opens this piece is Matthew Barney’s Field Emblem, a symbol which he uses throughout his work. The oval bisected by a straight line represents the culmination of Barney’s almost Lettrist drive toward symbolic purity; the line in effect represents the imposition of a human conception of order onto a natural state of affairs. I use the symbol here for its profound evocation of the overall human condition as described by Flusser. That is, the human condition is one in which we must walk the middle path between the monkey and the robot, a condition of balance between our organic nature and the Other to nature we have carved out for ourselves. The structure is a subordinate form of system, constructed by humans for instrumental purposes; when the contingent structures of human organization are elevated above the organic systems from whence they came, we run the risk of making the entire system of human beings subordinate to its own structures.

I will get into photography stuff more specifically in my paper, using these preliminary definitions as my starting point.

The simple answer to Martha Rosler’s question of “which political battles have been fought and won by someone for someone else” (307) is every one. That is to say, in the political sphere, there is no individual action. This is a structural necessity, insofar as the ‘political sphere’ is the realm of the polis, not of the individual subject. And so, every political movement is necessarily one driven by a committed vanguard, behind whom the masses can rally, but without whom the movement would cease to exist.

And so, dramatic though Martin Luther King’s quarter-million-strong March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom may have been, it represented only a minuscule fraction of the African-American population of the United States. Simply because the 30 million black Americans who didn’t march that day shared a skin colour with those who did does not imply that they were fighting ‘their own’ political battle. Instead, the civil rights won for American blacks by Dr. King’s movement were ‘won’ by a small vanguard of intellectuals and revolutionaries, for the entire black polis.

Those political movements which we the bourgeois and enfranchised often idolize as indicative of an organic push for self-determination nearly always have an externally-determined character. Indeed, we live in a society founded upon the delegation of one’s political battling. The system of democratic representation is nothing more than a complicated arrangement whereby the privileged can get someone else to fight their political battles for them.

Which, of course, raises the question: who fights the political battles of those without privilege? This is the central issue of Rosler’s piece, in which she bemoans that “the exposé, the compassion and outrage, of documentary fueled by the dedication to reform has shaded over into combinations of exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, psychologism and metaphysics, trophy hunting – and careerism” (306). This lament comes even as she recognizes that the lost ‘meliorism’ (304) of a Jacob Riis or Lewis Hine meant that their photographs were taken within the explicit framework of a certain ideal of ‘social-work propagandizing,’ which according to Rosler, “presented an argument within a class about the need to give a little in order to mollify the dangerous classes below” (304).

The central problem of Rosler’s text is the issue of agency. To put it bluntly: Is it ‘Okay’ for a bunch of wealthy Caucasian progressives to congratulate themselves for having taken pictures of the poor, beige masses of the world? Rosler seems to be arguing, on the whole, that it is not. Though her piece maintains the veneer of objectivity, the latent vitriol in places is self-evident. She implicitly decries Edward Murrow’s House of Shame, for instance, noting with a disgusted tone that Murrow exhorted his viewers to “write to their congressmen to help the migrant farm workers, whose pathetic, helpless, dispirited victimhood has been amply demonstrated for an hour… because these people can do nothing to help themselves” (306-307).

This is certainly a troubling undertone in any instance of documentary production by the privileged. It is often difficult even to analytically separate the noble impulse – that those with power should be using it to help those without – from the vicarious, ‘trophy-hunting’ element derided by Rosler. The issue of agency is still more problematic, however, in that it seems almost implicit within the documentary form – produced by and for privileged whites – to deny the agency of those being photographed. After all, if they were able to help themselves, then the documentarian’s function would be considerably diminished. Particularly in our digital context, however it becomes difficult to understand why we need a privileged white man like James Nachtwey to ‘bring back’ photographs of global poverty. When the instruments of photography and dissemination have become widespread and cheap enough that indigenous documentary production is possible, the attitudes of documentary photographers toward the significance of their own products seems vastly overinflated. In the most egregious examples raised by Rosler (the VISA ad and the version with the Guadeloupian boy, for instance – 312), documentary photography even seems to have been at times inhabited by the spirit of colonialism.

This is the problem that Rosler describes when she states that “documentary, as we know it, carries (old) information about a group of powerless people to another group addressed as socially powerful” (306). This claim is at once more troublesome and less troublesome than it may seem. It is first less troublesome, because this seems like the only conceivable way by which the politically powerless could ever obtain political power. The political sphere functions as a system of inclusion and exclusion; there are those actors within the polis who determine its politics, where there are those outside who are subject to the political authority without having any say in its governance. The extent of the polis is historically variable, of course, and contingent upon social norms. And yet, without delving too deeply into its structure, it should be immediately apparent that the system of politics offers no way for the powerless to obtain power. Those outside the polis are powerless: the only ones with power are those within the polis. Therefore, the only means by which the powerless will ever obtain power is if the powerful can be convinced of the necessity of granting it them. This is the traditional function of documentary: to induce the powerful to sympathize with the powerless, to the point of perhaps granting them (some limited form of) power. This is also an impulse clear in the work of Riis; though ostensibly included within the polis, the homeless are perhaps the most politically disenfranchised individuals within the modern system.

The implications of Rosler’s statement are also more troublesome than it may first appear, however. This is because by perpetuating this particular mode of documentary production, documentarians are in some sense also perpetuating the status quo with regard to the nature and distribution of power. Rosler herself even seems to be tied to a certain understanding of power which is to some extent archaic and reductive, in that neither her piece, nor the instances of documentary production she cites, ever questions the equivalence of power and political power. I mentioned at the beginning of my piece that every political battle was fought and won by ‘someone else.’ This stems from the nature of political power as described in the previous system: without political rights, one has no voice within the polis to demand such rights (and the power which accompanies them). Consequently, the system of political power seems like a universal absolutism – which is certainly what all systems of power hope to become. But the example of César Chavez, which Rosler lauds as an example of an organic effort toward self determination (in contrast to the Murrow example, 306), gives the lie to this reductive understanding of ‘power.’

César Chavez’ Farm Workers’ Organizing Committee was not successful because its members realized they were powerless, and decided to use documentary production to demand the power they lacked. Rather, they obtained political power by using the power of documentary production to emphasize the power they already had. The same is true of any mass movement for self-determination. The only way to obtain political power without the voluntary intervention of those who already have such power, is to leverage another form of power against the political establishment and demand such power. Before AFL-CIO, farm workers were politically powerless; to claim, like Murrow’s documentary, that they themselves were powerless, is nevertheless a distortion. Agriculture feeds nations; farm labourers are thereby an exceedingly powerful group when mobilized appropriately. Power exists in manifold configurations, and functions within a discursive system of exchange. Perhaps the only group that is after all, truly ‘powerless’ are the homeless, since they have neither labour, reputation, nor property to leverage as power.

In sum, then, the problem with traditional ‘social-work propagandizing’ is that in seeking to aid the powerless by informing the powerful, it replicates the very same categories of power that are responsible for the seeming ‘powerlessness’ of marginalized groups. In closing, however, it is intriguing to note that the ‘problems’ described by Rosler with regard to contemporary ‘trophy-hunting’ documentary work can perhaps be traced to the same issues of discursive power. Insofar as the ‘social-work’ style of documentary is intended to provide information about the powerless to the powerful, it seems as though the decline in that style of documentary is traceable to the fact that postmodern subjects no longer consider themselves ‘powerful.’ Where a certain modernist, neo-Enlightenment notion of power could accept that we bourgeois whites were ‘powerful’ simply by virtue of our participation in a political system, the subject in postmodernity sees itself only as a functionary, a prisoner of that very same system of power. And so, instead of presenting images of poverty and decay according to the trope of ‘informing the powerful,’ postmodern documentary simply asks its powerless viewer to identify with its powerless subject.

How is digital imagery like the plastic arts? The simplest, and perhaps most flippant response, is that with digital imagery, the characteristic ‘look’ of the plastic arts has been reduced to a set of simple and effective algorithms. The ’styles’ cultivated by so many of history’s great artists are reduced by Adobe Systems Inc. into a simple and electronically-reproducible set of image filters. Thus, we have perhaps the truest and clearest expression of the convergence between photography and the painted image in the digital realm: the ‘watercolour filter.’ But to assume that this glib and self-evident response plumbs the depths of this relation would be absurd. As such, rather than giving my slapdash digital image-painting more critical attention than it deserves, I would like to explore the problematic contemporary relation between truth and the digitized image by way of a number of other intriguing examples of this inter-media cross-pollination.

How are digital images like photographs, and how are they like paintings? In the simplest sense, a digital photograph remains a photograph. Right? The digital image remains, as Sontag would have us believe, in some sense a ‘piece of the real,’ (4) the traces of light captured from reality and re-expressed elsewhere. And yet, when we consider it, even on the most basic physical level, the digital image is nothing like the photographic print. Light is less ‘captured’ or ‘traced’ than it is simply ‘sensed‘ and translated into electronic signals. And when we view the digital image, we are not viewing a secondary reflection from a trace of reality fixed to paper, but rather, we are viewing an entirely new pattern of light, transmitted over time, space, and universal serial bus, and reformed ex nihilo for our gaze. These simple physical disparities translate into a vast phenomenological gap between these two media which share the name photography. In classical photography, the light is the law: it is captured by film, and fixed into permanence. As Sontag aptly notes, even in this older and more autocratic form of photography, images are “reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out” (4). And yet she nevertheless adheres to the by-now archaic position that a photograph is ’stenciled directly off the real, like a footprint or a death mask’ (154).

Why archaic? Because in the era of the digital image, light has ceased to be the law of the image, and has become only its origin. The digital image (usually – but we’ll return to this later) begins as light, just like the filmed image. But where the image on film remains a form of congealed light, always dependent on the control and manipulation of light for its development, post-production, and ultimate exhibition. And that which is dependent on natural light is thus subject to its vagaries: the traced reality of the image-on-film can be manipulated, to be sure, but nothing new can be plausibly created. For we can almost always tell when a negative has been sliced, or an image painted over the negative. We have little trouble distinguishing the Cottingley Fairies as fakes, for instance — though it is perhaps telling that its contemporary audiences were by no means as discriminating.

With digital imagery, the photographer is freed from the tyranny of the photon. We know little about manipulating the ephemeral particles that make up our universe, and what we do know is used for ends predominantly descriptive and destructive. We know a great deal about the systems we have created for ourselves, however, and by translating light into the binary vernacular, we are able to remake reality creatively. This, like most developments of the twentieth century, was driven by pornography. No longer was it necessary for one’s preferred object of desire to actually appear unclothed in public view in order to match one’s fantasies to an image. Indeed, no longer were consumers of pornophotography required to ‘collect photographs of anonymous examples of the desirable as an aid to masturbation’ (16). Instead, the face of a recognized celebrity could be digitally grafted upon the body of such an anonymous sex-object: digital-erotic chimerism. The ‘celebrity fake’ is perhaps the most prominent instance of digital photography’s increasingly shady commerce with truth. The levels of absurdity can be peeled away like an infinite onion. By pasting a celebrity’s face – herself really only desirable anonymity, named and photographed – onto the body of an anonymous model, one only compounds the anonymity of the composition and the celebrity system as a whole. The celebrity, as anonymous sex-object, is so generic, that any old pair of breasts will do.

And yet, the technology and ideology of digital imagery are developing quickly beyond the prurient, and indeed are starting to take on some of the best elements of the plastic arts. I have always found that one of the most questionable tenets of photography theory is the notion that photography somehow creates a more ‘realistic’ image than painting. Merleau-Ponty submitted this notion to a certain form of critique in ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ drawing from the psychology and phenomenology of human perception to critique the notions of ‘photorealism.’ The photograph does indeed trace directly from ‘the real,’ but to proclaim that the photographic image is universally more realistic than the painting is extremely problematic. I recall the quote that Mitchell draws from Aaron Scharf, who asserts that Eadweard Muybridge’s horse photography meant that ‘the meaning of the term ‘truth to nature’ lost its force: what was true could not always be seen, and what could be seen was not always true’ (25). There is certainly a grain of truth to this statement: often, in isolating a moment from the progression of time, we can see what is obscured by temporal isomorphism. But to assert that the photograph is more ‘true’ than the human gaze is to remove all humanity from the notion of truth, and to judge human experience by the standard of a machine.

It is certainly not always the case that a photograph is more ‘real’ or ‘true’ than the human experience of reality. This is self-evident in the case of a doctored photograph, but perhaps more difficult to pick out in the case of an unretouched original. The origin of this discrepancy lies in the fact that vision, like reality and truth, is a temporal process. When we observe a scene, we do not observe it in undifferentiated clarity, or as a static whole. Rather, our eyes jump from place to place, adjusting to the light in each corner, picking out each salient aspect, and constructing a mental image — this mental image is what the painter paints. By contrast, the image of the camera is a product of a single cyclopean and static eye, capturing a (relatively) instantaneous and uniformly exposed pattern of light. This scientific uniformity of exposure might represent a coherent and elegant definition of ‘reality’ to those of a particular Enlightenment ideology, and yet it has little to do with our actual perception of the world. The image of an instant is useful, fascinating, even; but it remains a supplement to human vision, not the standard by which it is to be judged. This is fundamentally tied to the ‘reality effect’ that Mitchell gestures towards, in that photographs have acquired such a profound connotation of realism, that reality itself has unfortunately come to be judged with reference to the photograph.

Consider, for instance, even a work of great power, like Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes: this is an image which could never be conventionally photographed. The same goes for nearly anything by Monet, Cézanne, and practically all other artwork that came after the advent of photography. The problem with photography is that it matches a scientific and institutional notion of reality, but often corresponds little with our actual perception of the world. Shadows are too dark, bright spots too bright; the vagaries of film exposure have long been the bugbear of the amateur photographer. Painting after photography sought to respond to this by replicating those quirks and ‘inadequacies’ of human perception on canvas.

Digital imagery, however, has to some extent addressed these issues. Consider a beautiful, arresting image like this (click for large size):

This is evidently a photograph, and yet any photographer looking at it would know that there is something almost ‘unnatural’ about it. Even an amateur photographer can tell that ’something’ isn’t right about this photo. Everything is too well exposed: there is an eerie, painting-like quality about it. Flickr user Trey Ratcliff made this image using his digital camera, and a recently developed imaging technology called ‘High Dynamic Range’, which uses a number of exposures of the same image to obtain a range of contrast unattainable with one aperture and exposure setting. HDR imaging effectively replicates the human gaze far better than conventional photography, by allowing the photographer to replicate the entire range of contrast and saturation that we perceive in our mental image of a scene.

Interestingly enough, the digital convergences between photography and the plastic arts are being initiated from both sides. While many in academia have proposed that realism as a virtue in art all but died off with the advent of photography, there is an intriguing subculture of those who aspire to photorealism in their hand-created digital images. These efforts toward photorealism have gone to sometimes-absurd lengths. Consider, for instance, this blog posting in which the author uses a series of image layers in photoshop to make it appear as though he hand-drew the photorealistic image in question; it was later revealed in his comments that it was in fact a photograph, to which the erstwhile poster had applied a series of transformations in order to decompose the photograph into progressively less detailed images.

And finally, perhaps the most interesting example of convergence between the plastic and photographic arts, however, is ‘Ray tracing,’ a form of computer graphics which generates the image by effectively simulating a photograph. This image (note: huge file) is almost indistinguishable from a photograph, even at full resolution. It was created using a ray tracing program, which creates a static image of a constructed scene by selecting the perspective of the ‘camera’ and then mathematically working backwards, modeling the trajectory of each individual ray of light that would arrive at the camera. Thus, the plastic arts have become like photography, in that the only acceptable ‘realism’ is one based on scientific calculation and instrumental ‘tracing’ from a mathematical model. Ray tracing is simply the tracing of a reality that just happens not to be real.

For the contemporary Western audience, this is a photograph steeped in otherness. We are presented with all the conventional signifiers that have long since melded together into an indistinct and diaphanous notion of the ‘oriental,’ or, more particularly, the moyen-oriental – the Middle East. The tight, concentric rings of the man’s turban; his dense, wiry beard; his ornate robe and archaic blade; all of these signify a specific (albeit unreliable and frustratingly reductive) notion of a certain ethnic, racialized Other. His complexion and bone structure seem likely Turkic, perhaps Persian or Mongolian, although such ethnic distinctions are likely beyond the grasp of the average North American interpreter of today, overshadowed as they are by the man’s evidently foreign accoutrements. With his right hand posed over his genitals, and his left hand clasped about that troubling second phallus, those of a Freudian bent might propose that the Other in this photo is overtly threatening to colonialist notions of masculinity.

Those of a Freudian bent would have had to wait for many years following the creation of this photo to bend in such a fashion, however, as our dear Sigmund was but fifteen years of age when it was taken. In this lies the most striking Otherness of the photo, the temporal otherness which lays bare the contingent and constructed nature of the ethnic other. This photograph, now encountered in a perverse digital medium, was taken by one Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (above) in 1911. Prokudin-Gorskii was granted a special dispensation by Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, to travel around the entire Russian Empire, documenting what Nicholas evidently hoped would be his legacy. Of course, the true historical fascination with these photographs is expressly because Gorskii’s photographs were greatly overshadowed by that other notable event in the reign of Tsar Nicholas: its end. Only six years after this photograph was taken, the Bolshevik Revolution would sweep the Russian Empire and forever reshape Western notions of the great Asiatic empire and its people. Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographs thus constitute some of our only surviving visual contact with a pre-Communist Russia, all the more incredible for their vivid colour and absurdly high resolution (to speak in an anachronistic digital vernacular). Indeed, the subject of the photo in question, one Mohammed Alim Khan, Emir of Bukhara, and last descendant of Genghis Khan to rule a nation, would find his tiny emirate overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1920, a brief nine years after the creation of this photograph. A great deal of my fascination with Prokudin-Gorskii’s work stems from my awareness of what was to come, which, given my historical distance, constitutes almost a sense of dramatic irony. I know what’s going to have happened — and the Emir didn’t.

Thus, the allure of this photo comes from a trinitarian juxtaposition of ethnicity, history, and ephemerality, speaking through a discourse of saturation and hue which has come to signify the modern. The discourse through which the photograph speaks, however, is of preeminent importance in this case. I am oddly reminded of an old story arc in Calvin and Hobbes wherein Calvin’s father successfully convinces Calvin that the world prior to 1960 was in fact only black and white; the story is likely a familiar one to many, from any number of different sources. The phenomenological truth in such comedic little anecdotes is that our relation to history is necessarily a technologically-mediated one, and one which is also necessarily mediated by a number of archaic historical technologies. The entire notion of colour as expressed in ‘grayscale’ is the product of technology. Saturation and lightness have always been easier to capture than hue, but prior to the technological harvesting of photons, these abstractions of ‘colour space’ were simply inconceivable. The gray scale was the product of technological inadequacy, and yet it is no longer encountered as such. Why would there still be productions in black and white, but for the fact that the gray scale has become a signifier in itself, a connotative framing of the entire image as historical, archival material? The grayscale thus also breeds an implicit distance between the viewer and the subject of the photograph, almost a reassurance that history is indeed well and truly past. Thus, this image, when we know its age, becomes utterly compelling: the (relatively, in postmodern terms) ancient world speaks in the dialect of the modern. This is especially so when viewing the image on a computer screen: we can even see its digital resolution in the top of our browser window, and know that Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographic method has resolution equivalent to nearly ten megapixels.

When considered in its historical context, what might otherwise have been simply a nondescript picture of a Middle Eastern man takes on a number of new levels of signification, all of which operate simultaneously. The emir’s cocked eye might lead one to question whether he was already thinking of the future of his realm, for instance, which might lead us to certain other questions concerning his attitude towards the Russian photographer of the piece. Did he regard Gorskii’s expedition as a noxious colonialism, or was he pleased at the prospect of having his picture set down for posterity? What of his medals? In which battles were they won, and for what? Indeed, his entire costume raises interesting questions, not simply regarding its utility (what might that braid be for?), but also the position of ethnic groups vis-à-vis certain styles of dress. Like Rosler’s photographs of the native family, historical photographs of subjugated ethnicities recall a time when traditional dress was merely tradition, rather than reified and saleable Otherness. There is therefore a certain orientalist fascination with the Khan’s garb in the photograph, in that we can appreciate it in itself, without that nagging liberal self-consciousness that is endlessly questioning authenticity.

The other principal interaction of the photograph is between the everydayness of the colour snapshot, and the foreign, posed construction of Gorskii’s colour plates. Black and white photography not only signifies historicity, but it also signifies and generally accompanies a certain staid, constructed, and formal quality which is common to almost all photos of a certain era. Most historical photos to which we are exposed are black and white portraits, which largely adhere to the conventions of artistic portraiture, while most modern photos are ’snapshots’ or candid moments, which adhere to their own banal documentary logic. Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographs took as long, and perhaps longer to create than other greyscale photographic processes of the era. And yet, the ‘in the world’ setting and vivid colour of the image means that it seems to follow the documentary conventions of modern photography more than most other photography of the early twentieth century. The effect is difficult to shake, even when one is fully aware that the photograph is necessarily a posed image which nonetheless speaks in the dialect of its era. Something about this image makes me feel somehow phenomenologically ‘closer’ to the subject than I feel when encountering black and white photographs of my own ancestors. Posed as they are according to archaic notions of elegant portraiture, something always rings false when I examine them.

And thus we see the true power of this photograph. When colour comes to signify the present, a history in colour underlines the ever-present presence of the historical. Black and white photographs present us with history as history, since the absence of hue has itself taken on a layer of signification. Since the absence of hue must signify the historical, its presence must signify the contemporary: and so, the immediate visceral impact of Prokudin-Gorskii’s work stems from the fact that it presents us with history, without any intervening time having passed. The history of the present is accomplished through the presence of history: a history in colour.

See ‘the image in question’ here.