This book is the result of a long gestation process, in which I have continually returned to photography in order to chew at it again, like a dog with a recalcitrant bone. Indeed, this duality of photography—its intractability and restless assertiveness—is something that is not only mentioned by many writers on photography, but in certain instances has constituted the very ground of engagement with its form and history, as in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. This book is no different. For what makes photography worth returning to and chewing over again (and again) is precisely its unstable and destabilizing character, or what I call its productive capacity for violation. By this I mean that photography’s capacity for “pointing at” as an act of disclosure invites the ruination of self-identity and the denaturalization of appearances, which, as such, far from these powers of ostension objectifying or reifying persons or things, are indivisible from photography’s claims to truth. Indeed, what gives photography its politically exacting and philosophically demanding identity is, first and foremost, its unquenchable social intrusiveness and invasiveness, and, as such, its infinite capacity for truth-telling. “Pointing to” as an act of violation, then, opens up a space of nonidentity between the visible identity of a person or thing and its position within the totality of social relations in which the representation of the person or thing is made manifest. That is, in a photograph there exists empirical evidence of the palpable truth of appearances (“this looks like…”), but also evidence of the social determination of these appearances (“this looks like…because of…”); and this evidence will thereby form the causal and interpretative basis for the discursive reconstruction of the image. Hence when I talk of violation, I am talking not simply about how some well-composed photographs expose social contradiction or the mechanisms of ideology in a self-evident way (the starving African child next to a well-fed aid worker), and, therefore, how such photographs offer an image that is unambiguously grievous or shaming, but about how violation is, in a sense, built into the photographic reproduction of appearances: that is, photography is the very act of making visible and, therefore, is conceptually entangled with what is unconscious, half-hidden, implicit. This is why violation is in itself embedded in, and is an effect of, power relations and materials interests external to the act of photography itself. Photography violates precisely because social appearances hide, in turn, division, hierarchy, and exclusion. But this does not mean that the photographer willingly invites this violating power into his or her practice, even if the violations of photography act objectively against the conscious intentions of the photographer. The photographer, rather, is always faced, given the circumstances under which he or she photographs, with an ethical choice: to secure or advance photography’s truth-claims on the basis of these powers of violation or to diminish or veil these powers in order to either protect those in power (the conservative option) or “protect” the integrity of persons and things (the left/liberal option). Photography’s immanent powers of violation, therefore, are something that constantly challenges and tests the photographer at the point of production and in the darkroom or at the computer. Thus, whatever political content accrues to a photographer’s powers of violation in any given social context, these powers of violation are not in and of themselves a univocal progressive force, as if everything needs to be made visible, at all times, under all circumstances, and with the same level of intensity and candor. On the contrary, what in some circumstances might need to be made visible at all costs in other circumstances may need to be occluded or veiled, made apparitional or allegorical. Yet violation in the form of “pointing to,” as inscribed in the documentary photograph, is the motive force of photography’s truth-telling powers, and as such, predetermines other claims to truth on the part of other kinds of photographic practice.
So having published The Impossible Document in 1997, and The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography, and the Everyday in 1998, I return in Photography and Its Violations to some of the key problems and issues that preoccupied me in the earlier texts: namely, what is particular to the photographic document that makes it different from other forms of image-production? And, as such, in what ways is photography’s relationship to truth to be best understood and defended?
In the earlier work I placed a strong emphasis upon the legacy of philosophical realism and its embodiment in the documentary tradition in order to try to answer these questions, defying the rise, at the time, of various antirealisms in photographic theory and relativistic accounts of photographic truth. But what distinguished my claims at the time from traditional defenses of the document was a fundamental insistence on the continuity between modernism and realism, the avant-garde and realism, within the space of the claims for photographic truth in the twentieth century. This was to avoid two related and persistent problems in photographic theory and history: on the one hand, the recurrent tendency toward a version of positivism when photographic truth is attached to a defense of documentary practice as a source of value against the rise of staged and fictive photography, and on the other hand, the failure to recognize that staged and fictive modes are themselves embedded in the social-relational framework or social ontology of the photographic document. The social appearances of photography’s fictive and staged modes continue to have a causal and indexical relationship to the truth-claims of the photographic document, for there can be no social relation between their constructed naturalism and the world without this prior relationship to the index. This bypasses, then, the problem of identifying realism and the truth-telling claims of photography solely with the document, and conversely, antirealism with staged and fictive photography. If the claims of realism are both the outcome of the decision-making of the photographer and the recognition of his or her implication in the constructedness of the photographic act, and in turn, of the critical judgments and interpretation of the spectator, document and staged image alike are part of a conceptual and critical continuum. Yet despite this continuity certain problems and trouble spots remain, and it is these problems and trouble spots that are picked up and developed in Photography and Its Violations.
The relationship between what I call figural (staged, digitally amended) and nonfigural (documentary) photography is not a mutually interdependent one, insofar as the relationship rests on a fundamental asymmetry. Photography may possess many different modes and functions (microscientific, aerial-topographic, pornographic-affective, state-coercive, commercial-appellative) but its primary and globalizing function rests on its infinite reproduction of social appearances and relations as a making visible of some part of the world. And it is precisely this primary social relation that grounds, or overdetermines, all of photography’s other functions. For, imagine a world in which the two primary functions of photography were the studio setup, controlled down to the very last detail by the photographer and his or her assistants, and the micro-photographing of various natural processes and phenomena, in which the reproduction of exacting invisible detail outweighs all other visual considerations; our emplotment and sense of place in the world would not only become obviously constricted, but troublingly autistic, blinded as it would be by a delimiting finitude and technical reification. There are two aspects to the social ontology that are crucial here: firstly, that the photographer in principle is able to arrive unannounced, and thereby is able to disclose what prefers not to be disclosed, producing what I call an existential imperative on the part of the photographer to get in the way of the world; and secondly, that the social-relational content of the photograph is not simply descriptive-historical, but affective and empathic: in short, it provides an emotional “hold.” Indeed, to arrive unannounced is what, in many instances, makes photography the affective and empathic thing it is, and as such there can be no claims to truth in photography without this. This is why Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980) is one of the most important books written on the photograph since the 1930s, yet, paradoxically, as a book purportedly on photography, politically and philosophically it also one of the weakest theoretically.1 His unprecedented recognition that photographs wound us psychologically in distinct ways is a profound contribution to the defense of the social ontology of photography. But for Barthes this codification of the “wound” (for Barthes, the punctum) separate from the exigencies of the photographer arriving unannounced (despite Barthes’s tentative “dialectical” meeting between punctum and studium) lifts photography’s affective and empathic power into a subjectivist and aestheticist détente with the world. This is reflected in Barthes’s general distaste for photographs that subordinate the spectator to the violence of appearances, expressed early on in his writing on photography in his attack on war photography. Such photographs, he argues, relieve him of his “freedom” to judge aesthetically. The construction of the “pensive” spectator (the spectator who is free to highlight the most insignificant detail in a photograph as a sign of spectator freedom at the expense of the photograph’s manifest content) is alive and well today in Jacques Rancière’s and Michael Fried’s writing on photography. Both adopt a version of the pensive spectator as an explicit critique of the social ontology of photography and of the documentary tradition, as a judgment on politics as an imposition on the spectator, and, therefore, in their respective ways becalm photography.
In the light of the affective and empathic function of photography, there is therefore something bigger at stake than the familiar playing off against one another of photography’s various operational functions in a kind of pluralistic compendium of “creative options.” On the contrary, photography possesses a social imperative that both drives the greater part of photographic practice, whether amateur or professional, artistic or commercial-appellative, and links these producers, as well as (importantly) the users of photography, to a broader process of socialization and critical self-reflection. In other words photography in its various social-relational modes is one of the primary means through which individuals inhabit, experience, and reflect on the world in which they find themselves, but also, equally importantly, through which they experience and reflect on those worlds in which they don’t find themselves or don’t recognize themselves. As such, the unannounced identity of the photographer and the affective and empathic effects of photography both play a constitutive role within the production and mediation of the political.
The diminishment—or out-and-out forgetting—of this fact in the generalized epistemological attack on documentary practice in the 1980s and 1990s is, therefore, a damaging misconstrual of the wider social forces that have shaped the political economy of photography since its inception, or certainly since its development into a programmatic encounter with the social world at the beginning of the twentieth century (in Lewis Hine’s work, for example). Photography is not divisible simply into “documentary practice” and “art-photography,” technical photography and commercial photography, but rather, in its overwhelming embodiment as a social relation between photographer, world, image, and user, is an endlessly englobing and organizational process in which representations of self, other, “we,” and the collective are brought to consciousness as part of everyday social exchange and struggle. This is the social ontology of photography.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND ITS ACTANTS
Recently this socially englobalizing dynamic has come to play a more pronounced role in the theory and history of photography, drawing on what has been a very fragmented legacy of realist theoretical engagement with photography’s social relation and empathic function.2 Of particular note as part of this shift are Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography (2008), Susie Linfield’s Azoulay-influenced The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (2010), and Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History (2005). All place an emphasis on photography’s participation in this social dynamic as a way of variously contesting the notion of documentary practice as an objectification of the “other” (Azoulay), the notion that photography should somehow protect the sensibilities of the spectator from the violence of the world (Linfield), and the notion of photography as a failed or corrupt or unreliable historical witness (Morris-Suzuki). All set store, then, by the capacity of photography in its social-relational form to break through the constraints of the dominant media culture and the prevailing theoretical nihilism, and construct the conditions for an active, engaged, reflective, empathetic spectator. Azoulay speaks for much of this prodocumentary, prorelational thinking, when she argues that photography is “actually deeply embedded in the active life (vita activa); it attests to action and continues to take part in it, always engaged in an ongoing present that challenges the very distinction between contemplation and action. The photograph always includes a supplement that makes it possible to show that what “was there” wasn’t necessarily in that way.”3
And this supplement is, essentially, the historical space left by what the photographer, photographed, and extant spectator cannot know or predict at the point of the photograph’s production and initial reception. That is, photography establishes a constellation of places between photographer, photographed, and spectator (immediate and futural) that is never stable temporally, in the sense that the image is never “possessed” by the photographer, photographed, or spectator (what I shall call here the various actants of the photograph) irrespective of who speaks for, or who criticizes, the photograph at a particular time. The truth of the photograph always exceeds these given places of social exchange, given that it participates at all points in an unfinished process of truth-disclosure that is coextensive with the transformative and universal claims of the historical process itself. Take one of Azoulay’s examples—Dorothea Lange’s well-known portrait of an impoverished American migrant mother from 1935 (Migrant Mother). This image is not reducible to Lange’s own account of her subject (the pitiful conditions of Southern US migrant workers in the 1930s), or to that of her editors and the mass media (the tragic face of the Depression), historians (the exemplary ethnographic field work of the Farm Security Administration [FSA]), or the subject of the photograph herself, Florence Owens Thompson (who thought it a grave distortion of who she once was as a person, and as such an image that should be withdrawn from circulation), insofar as each of these positions is a partial account of what the photograph signifies to each of its actants under given conditions at a particular time. Indeed, the most ideologically invested of these positions, Lange’s own (as producer) and Thompson’s (as subject), are the most tendentious, firstly, because Lange’s view is so closely bound up with the contingent demands of taking a good picture, and secondly, because Thompson’s view of her former self is utterly particularist, failing to recognize how this image of herself (not herself) has entered world history, and thus now functions well beyond her own control, or anybody else’s, as a space for the reconstruction of historical consciousness. To want the image removed from the historical record, or to demand some kind of recompense for its purported “distortions,” is to say this event did not happen and I had no place in it. In other words it perpetrates a greater violation than the violation produced by the initial encounter. Similarly, the idea prevalent in much photo theory in the 1990s, after the publication of John Tagg’s The Burden of Representation (1988), that such an image represents the conflation of the documentary tradition with the state control of the working-class body as victim or deserving poor, and therefore is ipso facto injurious and repressive, is equally tendentious, in that the presence of the state in the production and conditions of reception of the photograph does not thereby determine the reception of the image tout court. By constructing what is essentially a monological position based on the conflation of the actant position of the social historian (the meaning of the image is ultimately in the hands of those who control its reception and distribution) with that of the actant position of the photographed subject (“this doesn’t not represent me!”), Tagg actually desubjectivizes and dehistoricizes the meaning of the FSA archive, driving documentary practice into nihilistic collusion with the state. Hence, the notion that the subjects of documentary photographs are fixed in their “otherness” or conditions of production and as such are unable to talk back historically, or can only talk back in historically delimited ways as the “other,” is one of the main targets of Azoulay’s book. And in this respect, her writing extends the dialogic work done on enunciation and reportage within the realist tradition in the 1990s, which I have already mentioned.4 Her work on nineteenth-century American slave photographs as voices that speak to us through their visible subjugation is extremely valuable in this respect.
Consequently, to expand Azoulay’s argument at this point, we might talk about each of these actant positions (of photographer, photographed, spectator present and futural) as fundamentally nonequivalent to the particularist claims of the material interests and discourses in which they are embedded: that is, none of the material interests and discourse positions inscribed in the production and reception of the Migrant Mother photograph—the producer (photo history and art history), the editor (popular journalism), the historian (social history), or the subject (first person reminiscence)—speaks for the truth of the photography. Each of these actant positions may participate individually in shaping the truth-discourse of the photograph, but in the final analysis, they cannot control, in their own interests and image, the ends (emancipatory, counterintuitive, or reactionary) to which the image will be put. Or perhaps another, and better, way of putting it: the possible emancipatory or critical content of the photograph is always in a state of emergence from the image’s competing conditions of reception and interpretation; and therefore this emergent emancipatory content will be dependent on the social and historical conditions of its future reception.
Now Azoulay’s rejection of the monological and instrumental accounts of documentary practice prevalent in some quarters in the 1980s and 1990s is compelling and a powerful advance even on those redoubtable defenders of documentary practice during this period.5 In this respect her defense of the exceptional social character of the photodocument is both culturally persuasive and philosophically robust. She offers a view of photography that places it unapologetically within the bounds of knowledge production and social exchange. “The widespread use of cameras by people around the world has created more than a mass of images; it has created a new form of encounter between people who take, watch, and show other people’s photographs, with or without consent, thus opening new possibilities of political action and forming new conditions for its validity.”6 And this is something that has been going on, under various political conditions and to various political ends, and with varying degrees of power and alacrity, since the beginning of the twentieth century. Photography, then, in its modern forms of production and distribution is not the story of the subject’s perfected objectification and successful subjection to photography’s commodity-forms; rather, it is the space of an unfolding egalitarian encounter between producers and spectators, insofar as the production and reception of the photograph are two of the few practices where those without advanced professional skills of one sort or another can, in taking and looking at and talking about photographs, establish a critical distance between themselves and commodity relations. Famously Walter Benjamin recognized and developed this function of photography in the 1930s in his essay “The Author as Producer.” Moreover, it is precisely the proliferation of the photographic document (under photography’s social-relational form) that actively guarantees this political space. There are always more photographs to be taken and looked at in order to defend and reconstitute this nonimaginary egalitarian community. Hence the idea that what photography best needs is an ecology of the photograph as a break with the power of spectacle—once famously proposed by Susan Sontag and echoed by many others since—is thus self-defeating and politically antipathetic to photography’s social ontology.7
This proliferation of the photograph and the expansive and irrepressible system of symbolic exchange are what Azoulay describes as the essential citizenship at the heart of the dialogic character of photography, citizenship meaning here subordination not to a sovereign power and its national interests, but to the construction of a nonparticularist global “political community.” “The civil contract of photography organizes political relations in the form of an open and dynamic framework among individuals, without regulation and mediation by a sovereign.”8 From this perspective she offers a striking critique of the dominant post-Debordian, post-Situationist, post–Frankfurt School, post-Tagg disciplinary line on the production and reception of the image under mature capitalist conditions. Indeed, in an echo of Jacques Rancière’s recent writing on the image,9 she infers that the society of the spectacle is, in fact, a nihilistic myth that only works to misrepresent how the ordinary photographic document or snapshot actually operates under capitalist conditions. Thus what characterizes the everyday photograph is not the ease with which it is subject to state control, patterns of political exclusion and censorship, and the strictures of commodity relations generally, but, on the contrary, how it consistently outruns these constraints, even in instances where all the forces of the state are engaged in its suppression or destruction—for instance, famously, the Abu Ghraib photographs. What capitalism dislikes about the photographic document is precisely this uncontrollable volatility of the photograph, in which even images that are supposedly secure within the very heart of the system spill out to be used and reframed by others to defame and embarrass the state, particularly in a world now dominated by instant image transmission. This position, then, is extremely important in moving the debate on photography beyond the dualistic account of an active dominant media and a passive audience subject to its dictates; the arrival of the Internet and a multitude of forms of cheap camera technologies have undoubtedly contested this arrangement, encouraging sharing and discussion. But nevertheless Azoulay’s account suffers from a number of significant political and critical weaknesses that reflect badly on how the social ontology of photography and its possibilities are currently being constructed politically across much of photo theory and cultural theory today.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND “BARE LIFE”: A STATE OF EXCEPTION?
Azoulay is certainly correct to defend the supplemental logic of photography; and she is certainly right to insist on the proliferation and exchange of photographs as an essentially egalitarian force and, as such, a constitutive presence in the formation of political and historical consciousness. This position is a critical imperative for anyone looking at the political economy of photography beyond the labored categories of “art” and “documentary”; and her defense is admirable. But for all her commitment to the social-relational ontology of photography and, in turn, to the productive violations of the photographic enterprise, Azoulay’s political understanding of photography is remarkably indifferent to questions of class, labor, and real abstraction (the quantitative, naturalizing character of commodity relations that precede thinking and praxis under capitalism and, therefore, constitute the prereflective formation of subjects and thus spectators) and, in turn, hegemony. Indeed her understanding of the social-relational form of photography is premised on a highly underdetermined notion of the political. By identifying with the state of exception of the noncitizen in photographs taken in the occupied territories in Israel, she confines the possible political relation between photographers and spectators to a humanitarian solidarity between citizens with papers and citizens without papers. In this, she says, the spectator is forced to confront the ideological disavowal that lies at the heart of bourgeois citizenship: in rejecting or fearing the immigrant as an alien or illegitimate presence, citizens identify with their own national state as “protector” and forget they are themselves governed. Such photographs then recall us as spectators to a citizenship “beyond” sovereign power: “we must find the means for rehabilitating citizenship as a negotiating position vis-à-vis the governmental power in which all of the governed participate.”10 This seems an extraordinarily open-ended way of constructing a progressive political “we” or a concept of the collective, expanding the social ontology of photography into solidarity with those who are without political “identity” under bourgeois law. Now this is not to say Azoulay has no space for other struggles or cannot incorporate these struggles within her interpretation of the social ontology of photography, but her other major subject in The Civil Contract of Photography, the nonrepresentation of rape within the public realm, suggests that photography primarily interests her as space for the representation of “bare life,” the life lived without “state” protection or recourse to the implementation of “rights.” (As is well known, prosecution for rape in the West is depressingly low, and in war zones nonexistent.) The concept of “bare life,” after Giorgio Agamben11 (and its efflorescence under the war on terrorism), has of course functioned primarily as a universal sign of increasing human superfluity under a late capitalism in crisis (the growing reserve army of labor and the increased exclusion of workers from waged labor, under-employment in the Western economies, the massive increase in pauperization globally and the proletarianization of increased layers of nonproductive workers, the vast increase in violence against women globally, particularly in war zones, and the unpreparedness of states for climate change and manmade and natural disaster). Azoulay thus identifies this superfluity of labor and bodies as the real and global “state of exception,” the exceptional-unexceptional state that is now held to be normative and commonplace, requiring photography to repay “in kind.”
This repoliticization of the social ontology of photography through this “state of exception” can be seen, therefore, as part of a broader political recomposition on the left, in which the loss of faith in organized labor as part of universal emancipatory project is channeled into an increase in support, on the one hand, for the implementation of “human rights” “from above” (certainly in the imperialist war zones), and, on the other, for a fractured resistance of the marginal and dispossessed “from below” (in the Western metropolitan centers), in a kind of revival of Mikhail Bakunin’s politics of the margins (those outside of waged labor and the productive system).12 Azoulay’s construction of a new spectator for the social ontology of photography is clearly indebted to this new space—postsovereign citizenship being the mediating link between the dispossessed victim and human rights discourse.13 The social ontology of photography is exemplary in these terms, therefore, for Azoulay, because of the way those without any rights and recourse of reply to sovereign power can speak through the disseminated image of their subordination and exclusion. In this respect, as she notes, many Palestinians who have suffered brutality insist on being photographed; or, the friends and comrades of those who been shot or injured insist on a photographer nearby photographing their friend, because they know at some point the photographing of their friend’s injuries will possibly encourage someone at some point to speak up and defy state silence about such atrocities. The citizenry of photography, then, for Azoulay, is largely formulated through a state of exception in which the prevailing social relation of the content of photography’s social ontology is that of witness to the trauma of those “without” speech. But this is not a defense of the atrocity picture as a short cut to consciousness-raising or an assumption that atrocity pictures can speak the political truth of that which they depict; Azoulay is not an old-fashioned defender of documentary as invitation to the worst, believing that by raising the ideological heat through such photographs, political consciousness will follow. At all times she is a modernist constructionist sensitive to the demands of spectatorship: images have to be given time, based on the requirements of attentive reconstruction, through the spectator’s exposure to other images and to the labor of knowledge hard won. “Careful construction, not only of what is visible in them, but also of the photographic utterance in general circumstances of repression.”14 Indeed she has pushed the discursive boundaries of “careful construction” to the point where the truth of atrocity is no longer correlate with the bodily referent in the photograph at all: “a photograph pictures atrocity when it is created under disaster circumstances regardless of what it captures, even when no visible trace of the atrocity is actually left in it.”15 Yet despite this, there is a sense in which the conditions of exception are the most exacting and demanding that photography can bare witness to in the current period, insofar as the undocumented—noncitizens—speak for us all living under this global “state of exception.”
So perhaps, it’s no surprise that she doesn’t give any space to a discussion of the left-modernist and realist traditions that shaped and framed photography’s social ontology in the twentieth century. Perhaps she feels that the neoliberal destruction of this politicized culture of the image over the last forty years and the rise of what is taken to be this state of exception warrant a fundamental break with these older political formations, and therefore the need for the construction of a new politics of the image. Or perhaps the destruction is simply too hard to take, and is not worth reclaiming or reconstructing today. Anyway, advertently or inadvertently there is no “looking backward” in her book, no lineage building. As a result, the book’s retheorization of the social ontology of photography operates curiously adrift from any discussion of its critical precursors: early US reform photography, revolutionary Soviet reportage, European and US workers’ photography in the 1930s, European and US reportage in the 1960s. It means that her theory of the citizen photographer, citizen spectator, and citizen subject of photography is divorced from any wider critical perspective on the political fortunes of documentary practice over the last eighty years, or from an account of the actual political conditions of the would-be egalitarian community of producers and spectators of photography in the current period. Furthermore, The Civil Contract of Photography lacks any sense that her own commitment to the “modernist” spectator as a counter to the positivization of photography’s social ontology has itself a history within twentieth-century documentary practice. Thus in place of a discussion of realist-modernist history, and, as such, a social ontology of photography from below, what we get is a social ontology of the “victim.”
This problem of political focus is also reflected in a different way in Susie Linfield’s account. But whereas Azoulay uses the social ontology of photography to repoliticize its field of vision, Linfield defends the social ontology of photography only to dissolve the viability of its possible political audience today. Thus in a revealing contradiction in the introduction to The Cruel Radiance, she says on the one hand (in the spirit of Azoulay), “I believe that we need to respond to and learn from photographs rather than simply dissemble them”;16 and on the other hand, The Cruel Radiance is “against the progressive view of history…that the arc of modern history bends towards freedom and justice.”17 Linfield therefore seems to position herself somewhere “between” the defense of the social ontology of photography and the forces of its nihilistic critique. Thus, although she is highly critical of the epistemological attack on the social ontology of photography in the critical postmodern theory of the 1980s and the critique of representation more generally in this period (Tagg, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Douglas Crimp, Martha Rosler, Claude Lanzmann, Janina Struk), she is quick to divorce this defense of social ontology from any broader emancipatory project: “Photographs teach us that we will never master the past. They teach us about human limits and human failures.”18 In this sense all that remains of the social ontology of photography is a kind of humanitarian empathy with the worst, echoing Azoulay’s photography of the unexceptional exception. But if the focus of this state of exception is Israel for Azoulay, for Linfield it is the permanent state of war in Africa as a symptom of what she argues is the unrelenting separation of global political violence from what we might call, following Walter Benjamin, the “righteous violence” of earlier working-class and national struggles. Across Africa and the Middle East there is a glorification in arbitrary violence as a condition of inflexible ideological assertion. The notion that the “permanent” violence of Africa is somehow unmoored from conflictual material interests and, therefore, is somehow more pathological than the violence of other civil wars is highly contentious. The persistence of the violence in Africa and the Middle East is a consequence of proxy and direct imperialist interests being played out in these states. And the increased and persistent violence is therefore a condition of how high the political stakes continue to be, expressly over the control of natural resources. Nevertheless Linfield uses this contentious sense of “unmoored” violence to pinpoint, in the wake of this, three significant downward pressures on the social ontology of photography in the current period: (1) the increased difficulty of photography to actually enter these wars zones; (2) the increased inability of photography to identify, if it does manage to enter these zones, with progressive forces within these zones (rather than simply with the victims of these conflicts); and (3) the lack of any viable political culture of reception that might receive and use these images, because the images either are censored or exist in clandestine form, or when they do circulate are unable to find a stable symbolic currency, because of the overwhelming desire on the part of many people first and foremost to protect the victims of such struggles against the violations of the photographer. So in a significant sense, for Linfield, the social-relational form of photography doesn’t freely apply where it should apply in these cases—bringing into view the political consequences of such atrocities as part of photography’s egalitarian and public function—for there is no progressive culture of reception for these images, such images either being censored before they are able to find a public resonance, or being dismissed or occluded as evidence of the pornography of violence and the “victimization of the victim” all over again. Recently this is reflected in a kind of allegorical withdrawal from the representation of the effects of combat in the work of a number of photographers working in the imperialist war zones, such as Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye (see chapter 5). This photography after-the-event, or aftermath-photography, produces a combat photography “without” combatants in a kind of recognition of the ideological limitations of “closeness.” Distance is identified with the “totalizing” vision of history painting, closeness with a kind blindness, even madness (the “closeness” that drove the African-based photographer Kevin Carter to suicide after witnessing the near death of a starving child he photographed in Sudan).19 Indeed, lying behind these aftermath-photographs is a rejection of the existential imperative of the unannounced photographer, and as such a desire to protect the subject in the very act of violating disclosure; arriving after the event allows a reflection on the transhuman dynamic of the historical process.
In this respect Linfield offers an instructive corrective to Azoulay’s tendency to dehistoricize the social ontology of photography. The social ontology of photography is not the essence of photography, but a set of resources and affects, that function in a position of constant negotiation with the state, collective politics, and the market. On this basis, then, we might say that the critique of the disciplinary image is premature. The social ontology of photography has to operate in and define itself through the forces of reification and of real abstraction. And the most powerful of these forces is the collusion between the dominance of the nonsymbolic in the public sphere (the restricted production and circulation of certain genres of images and certain contents in order that commodity relations reproduce themselves as smoothly as possible) and the exclusionary powers of the state. This interrelationship has, of course, always defined the modern relationship between the state and mass culture as hegemonizing spaces of control. Today, though, after 9/11 and the “war on terror,” the exclusionary powers of the state have become more explicit, certainly in the West. The rise of various restrictions on photographing in public spaces and the limitations on distribution have transformed a state of exception into a permanent condition of reasonable security, in which the state becomes “the arbiter of what is, and is not, a subject of photographic interest.”20 And it is this normalizing of the “exception” that can be said to hide another reality: the increasing incapacity of capitalism to reproduce itself free of the deepening crisis of capitalism’s social nonreproduction, heightening the state’s anxiety about the social-relational power of photography. As a result the struggle to sustain the social ontology of photography today is freighted with increasing pressure from above. Because of this, in contrast to Azoulay’s more sanguine and ahistorical account, Linfield bases her argument on a notional assessment of what has actually been lost politically for photography.21 In emphasizing the contemporary nihilistic separation of the social ontology from an emancipatory politics, she reminds us where social ontology and political process have coincided: namely, the 1930s, and in particular the work of Robert Capa during the civil war in Spain. Here photographer, photographed, and spectator shared, she argues, a sense of the possible transformative effects of photography’s violations (specifically the representation of violence). The problem with this historical perspective, however, is that it inflates this progressive triangulation of photographic actants—photographer, photographed, and spectator—in this period into a mythologization of the documentary tradition as such. Documentary practice in these forms suffered as much from censorship and exclusion, and the vicissitudes of political repression, as photography does today. Moreover, as I stress in chapter 5, by the late 1920s photography was also formally and culturally subordinate to the new film culture, producing documentary practice’s own filmic, modernist revolution. But what is different today—and Linfield is right in this respect—is that the nature of certain struggles (such as the Spanish civil war) brought photographers and spectators into various conflicts as partisans. Even those Western photographers, who photographed on the front line in the Vietnam war, and were critical of American intervention, rarely produced their work for and in the name of the Vietnamese themselves.
Anyway, Linfield’s attempt to historicize the social ontology of photography points to how this ontology is subject to pressures and structures that photography must negotiate at all times. But her post-Enlightenment reading of this history suffers from a similar abstractedness to that of Azoulay. Where Azoulay defends a poststatist humanitarianism based on active citizenship, Linfield defends a bleak humanitarianism devoid of collective ideology: for her there is no place for a new progressive citizenship inside a global state of exception, only the advocacy of human rights stretched to their very limits. “The establishment of human rights is a project—a life-and-death project—to build a kind of “species solidarity” that is deeper and stronger than culture, nation, religion, race, class, gender, or politics.”22 In other words, what photography’s ostensive powers can at least do, Linfield appears to be suggesting, is provide a moment of emotive connection with our own finitude, a moment of connection and catharsis. This is because, above all else, photography, through its empathic powers, is able to show with utmost candor what people struggling without rights—in the realm of “bare life”—actually look like. Again, the construction of a concept of the political here drawn from a notion of state of exception is dangerously underdetermined politically, resituating the social ontology of photography back within the space of humanism’s “weak universality,” the very thing that the rise in critical photo theory in the 1980s was attacking—the most we can hope for is to bring some of the images of darkness back into the realm of the living. What Linfield gives with one hand she takes away with the other.
AGAINST PERSPECTIVALISM
What these two positions on photography reveal is how a defense of the social ontology of photography needs to bring a discussion of photography’s ostensive, affective, and empathic powers, its egalitarianism and dialogic function, under a dialectical account of the political economy of photography. The defense of the social ontology of photography is not enough. For the defense of the social ontology of photography is not a historical given or set of attributes that can be mobilized at will, or conversely, something that is historically fixed in an image of prevailing capitalist relations. Its content and possibilities shift; the social ontology is available for emancipatory uses and is constrained simultaneously. This is why the three key premises of photography’s social ontology—social relationality, egalitarianism, and empathic-affective power—need more than an affirmation or disaffirmation of photography’s social-relational form. Rather they need, firstly, a history of realism and modernism; secondly, a concept of real abstraction (of the commodity-form and state); thirdly, a theory of reification or social abstraction (of the effects of the nonsymbolic); and fourthly, a theory of capitalist crisis (or nonreproduction). Without these distinctions, photography risks falling back into the realm of the positivistic and merely humanistic, or into an endless rage against the forces of nihilism. Consequently a critique of the political economy of photography needs to mobilize and redialecticize these categories in a way that resists both the overdetermination of the disciplinary regime thinkers of the image (from Debord to Baudrillard, Foucault, and Tagg) and those who assume the social ontology of photography is simply a standing reserve that can be adopted at will and not something that is at all times under threat and susceptible to retreat and marginalization. Thus, a critique of the political economy of photography requires both a historicization of the social ontology of photography and a realist-conjunctural assessment of its possibilities today.
In a sense these two defenses of the social ontology of photography show how difficult it is to write about photography in the current period with any degree of political flexibility and long-term social engagement: for, just as it is easy to assert the disciplinary function of photography over photography’s social ontology in order to say we live in the worst of times, it is just as easy to presuppose an autonomy for photography’s social ontology without the disciplinary realities of the state and market. Similarly, in the wake of the state restrictions on the social-relational functions of photography, it is easy to talk about the end of photographic realism and the end of a photography of, and by, labor and the need for a “photography of exception” or the margin. Or conversely, it is easy to insist on the critical autonomy of photography as art as a defense of photography as such, against the downward pressures on the social relation of photography; in this, the studio becomes the sanctuary of progressive practice. Thus, in insisting on the critical autonomy of photography, it is also easy to prioritize the staged image against the ostensive and affective powers of the photodocument in the belief that because of these downward pressures on the social ontology of photography the photodocument is irredeemably weakened. However, none of these options and oppositions can in themselves provide an adequate understanding of the photograph today, not because they depluralize the photographic landscape, but precisely because they fail to dialecticize both the social ontology of photography and its relationship to its “others.”
The social ontology of photography is certainly indivisible from the disciplinary forces of the state, producing as a consequence a self-censorship among amateur and professional photographers alike, reflected in the sharp decline in street photography. A fear of being thought of as a “snooper” meets the increasing desire of the state to control all photographic representation in the public sphere. Open street photography has become largely impossible; clandistinity, with the help of cell phone cameras is the preferred option. Similarly the dominant circuits of distribution of images seek to dissolve the critical/egalitarian effects of the social ontology of photography, subjecting it to the non-symbolic: the available spaces for images are invariably taken up by commodified networks and circuits of exchange; indeed, the commodified image continually excludes the social-relational function of photography, with the exception, of course, of natural disasters and terrorist attacks, where the social relational content of the photograph and commodity relations meet in a beautiful symmetry. But, however delimiting these pressures are, they are to be expected; the social ontology of photography is defined, produced, and negotiated within the consensual and coercive borders of the state. And one of the downward pressures of this coercion is to permanently or semipermanently exclude photography from the factory and other workplaces and “sensitive” sites of national security. This is why the civil part of Azoulay’s version of the social ontology of photography’s contract is asked to do far more than the actual class actors producing the photographs—those actants represented in the photographs and those looking at the photographs—can actually do. This is not a recipe for pessimism or the enclosing of thinking and the imagination against the multiple actants of the photographic enterprise. Rather, it is a recognition that the social ontology of the photograph is, as it was at its origins, caught up in the machinery of capitalist reproduction. Thus today photographic theory needs more than goodwill—it needs a good old-fashioned dose of political realism. For today, we see something else enter this picture: the increasing pressure of nonreproduction on reproduction.
The rise of neoliberalism over the last forty years, in an attempt to revive the profitability of the capitalist system to postwar levels (1945–73), has been largely unsuccessful. The downward trend in profitability since the height of the postwar boom remains the same. Various parts of the system have certainly increased their profitability (the US economy through the 1990s steadily expanded), but globally overall across all sectors it is down.23 Now this does not mean that the system has not become more productive in certain sectors. Falling rates of profit indeed are not incompatible with increased productivity, or the expansion of the world economy as whole (in 2006–07 growth rates across the system were faster than at anytime in the previous thirty years). This is because fewer workers are now producing more in a shorter period of time. In the United States, for example, fewer workers do more for less or the same; real wages have largely stagnated since the 1970s, with the shortfall being made up by workers working—when possible—overtime, and the availability of cheap credit. But, with the long-term decline in profitability comes the increasing inability of capitalism to reproduce many of its basic state functions (those functions that, in the phantasms of the right, far from being restrictions on the liberty of people, serve necessarily to reproduce the social structures that reproduce labor power as efficiently as possible). The right’s attack on the state therefore is, despite the rhetoric, not an attack on the state as such, but a covert way of saying that certain elements of state expenditure that workers have taken for granted will have to be covered in part or whole by workers themselves. Nonreproduction, consequently, at the sharp end, is felt mostly by the working class. But of course, there can be no “social state” produced by and consumed solely by workers: the middle class uses roads, public buildings, and public amenities and state offices as much as workers do, and suffer accordingly when they are eroded, fall into decay, or are withdrawn. Anyway, it is no surprise, then, in the light of this that a “state-of-exception politics” has emerged during the last twenty years, for essentially this politics is a symptom of this long drawn out, if uneven, period of capitalist nonreproduction. As a result, it is also no surprise that the social ontology of photography is being squeezed ideologically, for the institutions and agencies (cultural and labor) that had an interest in defending its critical claims have gone or are in retreat, along with other labor and radical-cultural institutions. So this book, in a sense, is a product of this dismantling; and as such, in response to this, it represents an attempt to put some of the fractured elements of the recent period not necessarily back together again, but into some renewed critical and proximate relationship, as a way of thinking through current problems and issues. This is why photography needs to mediate its critical possibilities and limitations not just through a state-of-exception—or its cousin, the atrocity image—even if these things represent the extreme points of the social ontology of photography in the current period and should be defended as evidence of systemic crisis. On the contrary, photography needs to think again, in the sense that those commitments to the connection between the social ontology of photography and the avant-garde in the 1920s and 1930s thought the possible links between image and concept, image and form.
Thus what needs to be stressed is that the social ontology of photography is not strictly identifiable with traditional documentary practices. Documentary practice certainly falls under the social ontology of photography, but it is not in and of itself that which guarantees the political and critical claims of photography, for documentary in its historic forms is one of the outcomes of this social ontology. Hence the category of documentary is necessarily open to transformation through the changing political and technical and technological conditions and fortunes of photography’s encounter with the real. Consequently, just as we need to separate the photodocument from documentary practice, we also need to see documentary practice as open to new forms and challenges. Hence, this book defends the social ontology of photography as the space through which, and in which, claims on photographic truth across the categories of “documentary” and “art,” across the photodocument and the avant-garde, across the roles of amateur and professional, and across practices of analogue and digital photography can be pursued. The worst thing, then, is to rush to a premature assessment of “where photography stands today.” For in a sense photography stands where it has always stood in the modern period, as a subordinate threat and source of dissensus, in which its powers of recall, conceptualization, and violation bring the appearances of the world into discursive view. This is why the rush to move on from earlier accounts of the social ontology of photography and the eagerness to move into a postideological or humanitarian position are to fall prey to perspectivalism; rather, what photography needs, more than ever, is an englobalizing vision, in which the social ontology of photography is placed foursquare within a dialectics of the image.
In this respect, the first part of the book looks at the relations between documentary practice and modernism, figurality and nonfigurality, as a reflection on the place of the photographic index and ostension in art and the figural complexities of the document. The second part looks at the affective and empathic as necessary corollaries to photographic violation, and the relationship between photography’s social ontology and real abstraction and social abstraction. Both parts, though, focus essentially on the relationship between the photodocument and the category of art; in this sense this book is a product of the debates on the document and the social ontology of photography within contemporary art discourse, and not from within what remains of the traditions of documentary and photojournalistic practice.