‘Pointing To’: Ostension, Trauma and the Photographic Document

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes A version of this essay was presented at the conference ‘Photography and the Limits of the Document’, Tate, 2003, and the ‘Conference for the Society of European Philosophy’ University of Essex, 2003. 1 The exception being, Susan Sontag's, On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), and Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin Books, 2004). 2 Rom Harré, The Philosophies of Science: An Introductory Survey (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p.161. 3 For example the extraordinary medical photographs, collected by Ernst Friedrich, of German WW1 soldiers with the most terrible facial injuries, at the end of Krieg dem Kriege (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1980). 4 For a discussion of ostension and linguistic communication, see Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson, Relevance (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). 5 Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, in Selected Writings: Volume 2 – 1927-1934, ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999). 6 See Salvador Dali, ‘Psychologie Non-Euclidiene d'une Photographie’, Minotaure, 7 (1935), reprinted in Qui, 2 Denoël/Gorthier (1971). 7 W.V.O. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University, 1969). 8 Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, ‘On the Psychical Mechanisms of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication’ 1893, Studies in Hysteria (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p.57. 9 In his essay ‘Psychologie Non-Euclidiene d'une Photographic’ Dali advances a theory of the centrifugal content of the photograph, in which barely seen or hidden details subvert or transform the ostensible manifest content of the image. Here the incidental detail is a barely visible – or indeed non existent – cotton spool in the gutter in front of a group of people standing in front of a Parisian shop. For Dali, this lost or ignored item threatens the empirical equanimity of the depicted scence. Dali here shares with Benjamin, and later Barthes, a post-Freudian account of the submerged fragment or detail as a psychic ‘quilting point’ (Lacan). This is indebted to the nineteenth century physician Giovanni Morelli's theory of authorship, in which the significant meaning of a painting is identified with its unnoticed or marginal features. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982). 10 Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, trans. Luke Thurston (London: Routledge, 1999), p.80.