Introduction

11

raphy confronts us, the past persisting in the present and haunting it like aghost (Barthes 1977a: 44). Thinking Photography provokes a peculiar blurring of temporality andchronology in other ways as well. First, this is related to the contents of theanthology. While most of the essays were written in the few years previousto 1982, the collection opens with Walter Benjamin’s essay from 1934, ‘TheAuthor as Producer’.The initial function of Benjamin’s essay is undoubtedly togive some historical depth and foundation to the theoretical paradigm Burginsets out to promote by placing it in clear alignment with a radical Marxisttradition. However, while there are chronological reasons for its location at thestart of the volume, the prominence he gives it is undoubtedly also due to itscontent. The essay is not wholly, or even in large part, about photography perse , but about the social role of the artist and intellectual. Benjamin operateswith an expanded concept of cultural production, in which barriers betweenspheres of activity that remain discrete and self-contained under capitalism aredismantled. While Benjamin foregrounds the barriers separating writers fromvisual artists, his comments might equally apply to the barriers between artistsand critics. Burgin’s contextualization of ‘The Author as Producer’ invites usto read it as a template for those engaged in intellectual action, be it as artistsor as theorists – a template that the remaining essays in the volume seek toexemplify.For an intellectual to be properly revolutionary, suggests Benjamin, ‘consistsin an attitude which transforms him, from a supplier of the production appa-ratus, into an engineer who sees his task in adapting that apparatus to the endsof the proletarian revolution’ (Burgin 1982: 31). The role of the intellectual,argues Benjamin, is to find innovative ways to subject the dominant social orderand its cultural production to critical scrutiny, and thereby help contribute to itsdownfall. In doing so, he lends support to Burgin’s argument in the introductionthat the concern of those engaged with the photographic object should be torevolutionize our understanding of it and not to contribute to its market value.The apparently easy coexistence of Benjamin’s essay with those by Burgin,Tagg and others suggests that it has trans-historical relevance, and that it cantranscend and travel without difficulty between different historical and culturalmoments (invites us to draw comparisons, indeed, between the ThatcheriteBritain of the early 1980s and the Nazi Germany of the 1930s).Second, the presence of Roland Barthes both in and around Burgin’svolume illustrates how the temporality and chronology of theoretical ideas canbecome warped by their passage from one academic and cultural context toanother, with often complex consequences. The next part of the introductionconsiders in more detail the striking conjunction that sees the publication of Thinking Photography follow on from that of La Chambre claire and its Englishtranslation, and the ensuing battle for theoretical supremacy which Burginand the other defenders of a more politically-engaged photography studiesfelt obliged to fight.