Mindless photography

29

‘the imaginary of management’ (1997: 31). It was not, therefore, only a rhetoricthat was at stake. It was, rather, a cultural–political strategy – a strategy of govern-ance, a politics of representation, an instrumentalization, as always, of ‘Culture’itself as what is essential to politics. This takes us a long way from notions of aprogressive documentary tradition or of the democratization of visual culture.If documentary documents anything, it is only a certain strategy of power anddesire. If documentary captures anything, it is only a certain subject – subject tothat strategy of power and to that strategy of desire: the subject of documentary,hit at the midriff, as John Grierson demanded, and yanked up to ‘the plane ofdecent seeing’ (Grierson 1981: 39). 8 We may seem to have come a long way from machinic enslavement and thehard-wiring of the body into the circuits of a mindless assemblage through amachinery of visualization. Yet the mechanism that plugs the viewer into ‘theplane of decent seeing’ is a political technology that effectively has nothing todo with corporeal vision but merely works through visual recruitment to holdthe viewer in place: to capture the viewer as a function of the State. I have said somuch about the weight of the years that separate us from Thinking Photography ,but here is something that has not changed: the indictment of the State as amachinery of technical enslavement; the indictment of the State as a mechanicsof disembodiment; the indictment of the State as the Culture of dead things.That is why I look back with lingering regret to a time in the late 1970s when,in the euphoria of political delusion, we half believed that this State could besmashed and that the first brick could be thrown by photographic theory.

Notes

1 See Your Guide to the Central London Congestion Charge (2004) and London CongestionCharging Technology Trials Stage 1 Report, prepared by the Traffic and Technology Teamwithin the Congestion Charging Division of Transport for London (February 2005). Seealso, ‘Chaos Hits London Traffic Charge Plan’ (anon 2002) and Monaghan (2004).2 Images that are unclear and that might lead to questioning of the evidential recordcompiled by the automatic number plate recognition technology are also, as the technicalreport puts it, somewhat enigmatically, reviewed ‘manually’. London Congestion ChargingTechnology Trials, Stage 1 Report , p. 25.3 For the little I understand of the science here, I am entirely indebted to Paul Goldsmith,the James A. Weeks Professor of Physical Sciences at Cornell University. The TaurusMolecular Cloud Survey is a joint venture of Cornell University and the University ofMassachusetts at Amherst, funded in part by the National Science Foundation.4 See also Ihde (1991).5 The term ‘postbiological’ comes from Moravec (1988). ‘Posthuman’ is the term preferredin N. Katherine Hayles’s discussion of disembodiment in cybernetics and informationaltheory (Hayles 1998). ‘The new machinic enslavement’ is discussed by Gilles Deleuzeand Félix Guattari (1987: 456–9). Hayles, I should add, would want to stress the counter-argument, that, by participating in systems whose cognitive capacity exceeds individualhuman knowledge, human capability is expanded as the parameters of the cognitivesystem it inhabits expand. The difference here is largely a matter of how one assesses thepolitical technology into which the machinic assemblage is articulated. But it is also a