Thinking photography beyond the visual?

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away from the sensory: from aesthetics (in the original sense of the domain ofthe sensory) to anaesthetics, a numbing of the sensorium. For Roland Barthes(1981: 80–1), indexicality is a radiation from the real body which touches himand is ‘a sort of umbilical cord [that] links the body of the photographed thingto my gaze’, becoming redolent with an implied tactile quality of shared skin.Meanwhile,Victor Burgin (1986b) in his essay ‘Seeing Senses’, writes within apsychoanalytical framework of the way in which language and mental imagesrange across the sensory order. And where Barbara Stafford (1997: 5) has drawnattention to the way in which the Saussurean ‘linguistic turn’ of textualism,which has impacted on so much photographic theory, has ‘emptied the mindof its body, obliterating the interdependence of physiological functions andthinking’, Michael Taussig (1993) has argued for the necessity of rethinking theterm ‘vision’ in relation to other sensory modalities.The inseparable entanglement of the visual in other sensory modes hasrecently received increasing critical attention within visual culture studies itself.For instance, Mitchell describes this phenomenon as ‘braided’, in that ‘onesensory channel or semiotic function is woven together with another more orless seamlessly’ (2005: 262). Whereas Mieke Bal has argued for the ‘impurity’ ofthe visual, pointing out the absurdity of an essentialized form of ‘the visual’:

The act of looking is profoundly ‘impure’ … this impure quality is also …applicable to other sense-based activities: listening, reading, tasting, smelling.This impurity makes such activities mutually permeable, so that listeningand reading can also have visuality to them. (Bal 2003: 9) 10

A similar position has been argued by anthropologist Webb Keene whodescribes the ‘bundling’ of sensory and material affects in which an object isdefined through the co-presence of the visual with other qualities – such astexture, weight, size (2005: 188).In art history, this position has been articulated most recently in the work ofHans Belting (2005: 302), who, as part of his broader Bild-Anthropologie project,reconfigures Mitchell’s emphasis on the trio of image, text and ideology as setout in the 1986 Iconology , to posit a matrix of image, medium, and body as a way‘to grasp images in their rich spectrum of meanings and purposes’.That is to say,this matrix becomes the agent through which meaning is transmitted, which, inthe case of the photograph, turns on its status as a social object and the body asthe perceiving body, on which meaning ultimately depends.A further reworkingof the boundaries between people and things, vision and the haptic, is to befound in neurophysiology, where there is a corpus of work in cognition theorythat posits that skin is an arbitrary boundary and that things are, in fact, part ofthe mind. In this formulation, the mind is not so much a series of language-likedata structures and symbol manipulations; rather, echoing Jackson’s anthropo-logical phenomenology, it is ‘the tuning of basic responses to a real world that