The Temporal Dialectics of Photographic Viewing

An idea that I located in several different places could be reduced to the instruction: “create a photo that initiates a temporal tension between the past and the present.” To clarify this point a little and provide some dialectically fruitful disparities, I will list a few of the places from The Cinematic that seem to orbit around this larger point.

The essay which explores this concept most explicitly is Thierry de Duve’s “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox” in which de Duve inverts Barthes description of photographic time as the juxtaposition “the here and the formerly” to the “now and there.” While Barthes’s conceives the present of the photograph (here) as spatial and its past (formerly) as temporal, de Duve merely inverts this description in order to emphasize the temporality of the photograph's present (now) and the spatiality of its past (there).

I think the important thing to remember about this parsing of the experience of photographic temporality is that neither de Duve nor Barthes are interested in an imposition of analytical dissection onto phenomenological continuity but are rather focused on displaying the generative conceptual capacity of image logic in reformulating our relationship to time.

In addition, the image itself functions as the material means of reformulating this relationship. Although it is important to describe how images do this, the unique trauma of photography allows the viewer to be intuitively saturated into this relationship and inhabit the ontological dimension of time that language cannot reach in the same way. This is what de Duve describes as the difference between “reading” an image and “relating” to an image.

I’m not sure if this is the image of the soldier to which de Duve refers, but I think it works as one example of the kind of “paradoxical conjunction” of a past that has already/never will happen. Perhaps a specific instruction from de Duve on this point would be to create an image that brings you to the point of action and then stalls, allowing the imagination’s invocatory nature to carry you into the here and now of the present only to have the image pull you back to the precipice from which you threw herself. This is the “unresolved oscillation” of viewing experience (60).

Another good instruction on this point comes from Susan Gaensheimer in her description of the dialectical struggle between narrative and image in Bill Viola’s slow motion film The Greeting. The time in this film is slowed to the point that the viewer is caught in an internal struggle between viewing sequences of single shots and the complete action of the piece. Although it might be technically difficult, it would make for an interesting felt to create a film such as Viola’s which is designed for slow motion viewing. Gaensheimer writes that Viola filmed The Greeting at 300 fps in order to “produce extreme slow motion and at the same time maintain the pristine pictorial quality of a film made at the normal speed of 24 fps” (70-71).

Finally, Raymon Bellour writes in his essay "The Pensive Spectator" that when a photograph is present within a film "two kinds of time blend together, always and inextricable, but without becoming confused" (123).

Locating Desire(s)

In his lecture on painting, Lacan spends a few moments regressing on the “value of artistic creation.” Starting from Freud, Lacan mentions the impossibility of locating an objective substance that undergirds art or even a criteria through which such value could be tracked down. When analyzing a painting, Freud focused on “the function that the original artist’s phantasy played in his creation,” a rather concise definition of the typical role that psychoanalysis plays in film and literary theory, and which Lacan notes “always produces a shocked reaction on the part of the listener” (109). Conversely, Lacan wants to approach art less in terms of its subjective relationship to the individual creator/viewer and more in terms of its collective relationship within a social structure.

As discussed in my last post, this is a move from essence (which I read here as intention) to function (relations). In prefacing his main claim, Lacan is quick to note the analytical difficulty in locating causal links within an area of culture as overwrought as artistic production. He writes, “If one considers all the modulations imposed on painting by the variations of the subjectifying structure that have occurred in history, it is clear that no formula can possibly embrace those aims, those ruses, those infinitely varied tricks” (109). Furthermore, Lacan’s purpose in focusing on art (or, more accurately, “pictures”) in this lecture is not a synchronic historicity (“the function of painting at a particular moment, for a particular author, at a particular time”) but merely “the radical principle of [its] function” (110).

Integral to this function of art and its relationship to society is the notion of “sublimation,” which I think is related to what Lacan refers to as “dompte-regard,” or the taming of the gaze that occurs in artistic consumption. Extrapolating this notion, Lacan refers to the way in which art “has something profitable for society” in the way that it “calms people, comforts them.” However, this “comfort” is a very specific kind of comfort. It is comforting to the viewer because it shows her a circumstance in which another is “living from the exploitation of their desire” (111). This is an interesting point because Lacan seems to be arguing that the “satisfaction” of artistic consumption is accompanied by a simultaneous introjection of the other’s (the artist’s) desire in artistic production. This is the way in which the gaze is “tamed” through the subject’s contemplation of desire as it arrives paradoxically  from the other within the subject.

Lacan continues by describing how this circulation of desire between/within subject and other is tied to “the painting of a veil” which is less important ontologically (a thing/substance it might conceal) than it is relationally: the veil is what provokes the viewer “to ask what is behind it [the painting]” (112). This “other thing” is the “petit a” which, as Ulmer claims, is an “ambassador of desire.”

In formulating an instruction from the theoretical material gathered in this post, I am reminded of our discussion about the importance of position within Julien’s text and how a knowledge and recognition of the implications of one’s position in a system can increase an agent’s ability to increase efficacious alignments with the events in the system. Relating Julien’s position-efficacy correlation to Lacan’s ideas regarding the social functions of art might allow us to rethink our position(s) as viewers/consumers of art by drawing attention to the vacillation of desire between viewer and artist, subject and other.

With this in mind, here is an instruction: As you consume art/media, ask yourself “where is my desire coming from?” I think this instruction might also be related to the “mood” section of the metaphysics, morality, and mood criteria established in Internet Invention in the way that it asks the subject to respond to an experience (desiring) that has already taken place.