On the punctum - Lone Bertelsen (unpublished)

"Remember that it is wonder that moves Barthes to write Camera Lucida in the first place, and photographic wonder that produces the thought of this book. It is particularly with the punctum – as considered in previous chapters – that Barthes’ engagement with the photograph can be seen to be one with mobilising wonder rather than immobilising astonishment (at least in the way in which Descartes distinguishes between them).[i]

In sum, in Camera Lucida, despite moments of stasis and fixation, wondering in encounter with specific photographs emerges from the affective punctum. Yet if wonder is situated in the affective aspect of the punctum it also makes sense to consider the punctum in relational terms. When thought in relational terms, the punctum belongs neither to the photograph nor to the emotional state of the viewer. Instead, like wonder, the punctum concerns relation. It enables the relation itself to become (Massumi ref). So the punctum is never to be determined in terms of the desire of the viewer alone. To reiterate: the punctum, inflected by wonder operates in the in-between, in the middle of a larger affective field. This field does not start from a concern with subject/object relations. Rather, it is a generative and affective field that concerns becoming.

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I find Barthes’s discussion of the affective qualities of the punctum more useful than the various aspect of the photographic ‘essence’ focussed upon by numerous commentators. The affective punctum opens up and crucially brings movement into photo-thought. Significantly it enables us to move away from what has often, and traditionally, been discussed in terms of stasis and arrest. Rather than stasis and arrest, the punctum (particularly when rethought in relation to the matrixial) can be understood as the grin of the Cheshire Cat, as an affective relationality – wonder – opening up the viewing situation. 

[...]

Could the same be said of the non-artistic approach to photography taken by Barthes? Although Barthes also confronts the limit, at first it appears that, it is a little harder for the Barthesian punctum to carry out a refolding. A little like philosophical wonder, according to Aristotle and Hegel, the Punctum, at times, may not always fully renew itself in Barthes writing. This is because, although the Punctum in Barthes does, as we have seen in previous chapters, confront the limits of signification, it does not always – at least obviously – seem to renew this limit.

Yet, through mobilising the relational virtuality of the punctum, in the previous chapter, I hope to have demonstrated that a matrixial punctum is indeed capable of a refolding and co-emerging. This is a refolding not directed solely to a testimony to the ‘that-has-been’, but also to co-emergence of past and a punctum mobilised towards a future time beyond that of current signification.

Barthes’ punctum could be – needs to be – thought as the place and time of wonder. As such, temporality – withouth neither being released from history not being stuck on a personalised that-has been, as possibility in Barthes – would allow us to conceptualise wonder and the photowork in a future tense.

In terms of the viewing of photographs, wonder could in fact be seen as the very process of the actualisation of the potentiality of the virtual. It is perhaps in this very process that the Punctum opens the productive and transformative middle space beyond viewer and photograph and allows for the possibility of the production of new subjectivities and the creation “of a new space-time” (Irigaray, 75). Wonder here moves beyond a concern with the question of being, knowledge and truth towards a productive and generative becoming-world.

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[i] Tensions exist between Barthes’s seeming fixation of the photographic referent and his engagement with its affective and subjectivising qualities.