"Blackness and maternity play huge roles in the analytic of photography
Roland Barthes lays down in Camera Lucida , Barthes’s extended and
elegaic meditation on the essence of photography that revolves around
an unreproducible, unobservable photograph of his mother as a young
child (the “Winter Garden Photograph”), a woman remarkable to
Barthes in part because, he says, she made no observations. Blackness
is the site or mark of the ideal object, the ideal spectator (and these
are everything for Barthes’s analytic since the doing or operation of
photography is bracketed and set aside early on in Camera Lucida ).
Blackness is the embodiment of a naïveté that would move Barthes, the
self-styled essential phenomenologist, back before culture to some pure
and unalloyed looking. The paradox, here, is that the reduction phenomenology
desires seems to require a regression to a prescientic state
characterized by what Husserl, after Hegel, would call the incapability
of science. Those who are incapable of science are those who are outside
history, but that exteriority is precisely the desired starting point
for phenomenology, which would move not through philosophical tradition
but directly toward and in the things themselves. And indeed, this
is how empire makes phenomenology possible, figuring a simplicity
structured by regression, return, and reduction refigured as refinement.
Empire’s mother fixation is phenomenology’s obsession with blackness.
Blackness is situated precisely at the site of the condition of possibility
and impossibility of phenomenology and, for Barthes, that’s cool because
the object and the spectator of photography reside there as well. This
interstitial no-space is where photography lives, this point of embarkation
for the europhallic journey to the interior, to the place of the other,
the dark continent, the motherland that is always coded as an imperial
descent into self. This regressive return to “that-has-been” and/or to
where-you-been is the staging area for the performance of that violent
and ruptural collision that is both the dramatic life of blackness and the
opening of what is called modernity. The lynching and photographing
of Emmett Till, the reproductive display of his photographed body
by his mother, the Barthesian theory of photography that is founded
in part on a silencing invocation of that mother and of his, are all part
of the ongoing production of that performance. It ought not be surprising,
then, that Barthes’s analysis in Camera Lucida is structured by
a set of problematic moves: a disavowal of the historical in photography
that reduces it to a field of merely “human interest”; a figuring of
photographic historicality as overwhelmed by that univocal intentionality
of the photographer that can only ever result in “a kind of general
enthusiastic commitment . . . without special acuity”; an ontological differentiation
between photography and the photograph; and a semiotic
neutralization of the unorderable or nonmeaningful phonic substance
of photography. It is especially the first and last of these elements
that emerge here:
The photograph is unary when it emphatically transforms “reality” without
doubling it, without making it vacillate (emphasis is a power of cohesion):
no duality, no indirection, no disturbance. The unary Photograph
has every reason to be banal, “unity” of composition being the first rule
of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: “The subject,” says one
handbook for amateur photographers, “must be simple, free of useless
accessories; this is called the Search for Unity.”
News photographs are very often unary (the unary photograph is
not necessarily tranquil). In these images, no punctum: a certain shock
but no disturbance; the photograph can “shout,” not wound. These journalistic
photographs are received (all at once), perceived. I glance through
them, I don’t recall them; no detail (in some corner) ever interrupts my
reading: I am interested in them (as I am interested in the world), I do not
love them.
Barthes’s turn from the vulgar, unary photography of the shout and
toward the refined photography of the prick or wound is tied to an
ontological questioning that is founded on the unreproducibility of a
photograph and the theological veiling of the original in the interest
of a theory of photographic signification. Against the backdrop of
Emmett Till, the silencing of a photograph in the name of that interstitial
space between The Photograph and Photography is also the
silencing dismissal of a performance in the name of that interstitial
space between Performance and Performativity. And, again, paradoxes
are here produced seemingly without end, so that Barthes’s critique
of the unary photograph is based on the assumption of the unary
sensuality of photography. And this is a prescriptive assumption—photography
ought to be sensually unary, ought not shout so that it can
prick. Wounding photography is absolutely visual; that’s the only way
you can love it.
[...]
It is the split in which totality is a/voided in the interest of historical particularity
and it is displaced, in Camera Lucida , by a reified ontological concern
with studium and punctum , a phenomenological privileging of essence
that reveals history to be fundamentally personal, fundamentally deictic,
and thus still forecloses not only the totality Barthes already disavows
in the earlier text but the singularity he desires in the later one. In other
words, historical particularity becomes what Bertrand Russell would
have called egocentric particularity. So that this is about how listening
carefully to the muted sound of the photograph as it resonates in
Barthes’s texts on photography, through his repression and denigration
of it, gives you some clues about the inevitability of a certain development
in which egocentrism and ontologism, perhaps each to the other’s
regret, are each tied to the other in theory, which is to say, in epistemologies
of unalloyed looking. And perhaps whatever speech and writing
that comes after or over a photograph or a performance should deal
with this epistemological and methodological problem: how to listen to
(and touch, taste, and smell) a photograph, or a performance, how to
attune oneself to a moan or shout that animates the photograph with an
intentionality of the outside. Barthes is interested in, but, by implication,
does not love the world.
[...]
It is in the interest of a certain defeat or at least deconstruction of death, a
resurrective or (second) reconstructive improvisation through death’s
pride and through a culture that, as Baraka points out in a recent poem,
“believe[s] everything is better/Dead. And that everything alive/is [its]
enemy[,]” that Till’s body was shown, was seen and that the photograph
of Till’s body is shown, is seen. But Barthes wasn’t trying to hear the
sound of that display, the sound of the photograph’s illumination of facticity
that holds an affirmation not of, but out of death. Black Art, which
is to say Black Life, which is to say Black (Life Against) Death, which
is to say Black Eros, is the ongoing production of a performance, the
ongoing production of a performance: rupture and collision, augmented
toward singularity, motherless child, childless mother, heartrending
shriek, levee camp moan, grieving lean and head turn, fall, Stabat mater ,
turn a step, loose booty funk brush stroke down my cheek, yellow dog,
blue train, black drive. The ways black mo’nin’ improvises through the
opposition of mourning and melancholia, disrupts the temporal framework
that buttresses that opposition such that an extended, lingering
look at—aesthetic response to—the photograph manifests itself as political
action. Is the display of the picture melancholic? No, but it’s certainly
no simple release or mourning either. Mo’nin’ improvises through
that difference. You have to keep looking at this so you can listen to it.
So in the name of this bright section of winds, some variations
on Alexander’s question: Can you look at this, which is to say, can
you look at this again (such repetition being a constitutive element of
what it means and is to be BLACK )? Can you be BLACK and not look
at this (again)? Can you look at this (again) and be BLACK ? There is
a responsibility to look every time, again, but sometimes it looks like
that looking comes before, holds, replicates, reproduces what is looked
at. Nevertheless, looking keeps open the possibility of closing precisely
what it is that prompts and makes necessary that opening. But such an
opening is only held in looking that is attentive to the sound—and
movement, feel, taste, smell (as well as sight): the sensual ensemble—of
what is looked at. The sound works and moves not just through but
before another movement, a movement that is before even that affirmation
that Barthes didn’t hear. A photograph was seen, was shown, in a
complex path, a dissonant and polyphonic drive. In the death of Emmett
Till, insurrection and resurrection are each insistently before the other
waiting for a beginning that is only possible after the experience of
all of what is held in the photograph. What is held in a photograph is
not exclusive to the photograph, but this photograph moves and works,
is shown, was seen, shone, says, is animated, resounds, broken, breaking
song of, song for, something before, like The Music that is, as
Mingus says, not just beautiful, but terribly beautiful."
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