What Is A Camera Or, HIstory in The Field of Vision

What Is a Camera?, or: History in the Field of Vision Author(s): Kaja Silverman Reviewed work(s): Source: Discourse, Vol.
15, No. 3 (Spring 1993), pp. 3-56 Published by: Wayne State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41389284 . Accessed: 11/02/2013 16:41
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Wayne State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Discourse.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded on Mon, 11 Feb 2013 16:41:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
What History in
Is the
a Camera?, Field of
or: Vision
Kaja Silverman
1. Camera and Eye It has long been one of the governingassumptionsoffilmtheory thatthe cinema derivesin some ultimatesense fromthe Renaissance, via interveningtechnologies like the camera obscura, the stillcamera, and the stereoscope - thatitsvisual fieldis defined to a significant degree bythe rules of monocular perspectiveand their accompanying ideology. Since within cinema, as within the photography, camera definesthe point fromwhich the specrendered intelligible, maintenance ofthe perspectivai the tacle is illusion is assumed to depend upon a smooth meshing of the spectator with that apparatus. Both times that Christian Metz he invokesquattrocento Signifier goes on paintingin TheImaginary to speak about the importance of what he calls immediately "primary" identification,or identificationwith the apparatus (49, 97) . Jean-Louis Baudry also maintains that withincinema of the ideological effects perspectivedepend upon identification withthe camera ("Ideological Effects"295) , and Stephen Heath explicitlystates that "in so far as it is grounded in the photograph, cinema will . . . bringwithit monocular perspective,the in withthe positioningof the spectator-subject an identification camera as the point of a sure and centrallyembracing view" 77). ( Questions For both Metz and Baudry, there is a certain inevitability about this identification.Thus Metz writesthat "the spectator with the camera . . . which has can do no other than identify looked before him at what he is now looking at and whose sta-
Discourse 15.3
tioning . . . determines the vanishingpoint" (49), and Baudry representsprimaryidentificationas the necessary preliminary to other identificatory relations (295). Significantly, successful a withthe camera is seen as implying only not imaginaryalignment an access to vision,but an access to a seeminglyinvisible vision; Metz remarks that "the seen is all thrustback on to the pure object" (97). The spectator constitutedthrough such an alignment seeminglylooks froma vantage outside spectacle. Primary identification also implies a vision which is exteriorto time and the body, and which yields an immediate epistemological mastery. Althoughboth Metz and Baudryare quick to denounce this invisible, disembodied, timeless and all-knowingvision as an ideological construction,theyneverthelesssee its illusorypleasures as an almost unavoidable featureof the cinematic experience. The viewing subject is constituted in and through this fiction. Feminist film theory has qualified the claims of Metz and Baudry somewhat by suggestingthat classic cinema makes primore available to certain spectatorsthan to maryidentification others.Laura Mulveyand othershave argued thatHollywood not only enforces an equation between "woman" and "spectacle," but effects closed relaybetween the camera, male characters, a and the male viewer.1 However,although showingthatthe equation of camera and eye is qualified in complex waysby gender, feministfilmtheorystillimplicitly assumes that the "ideal" or "exemplary" cinematic spectator is constructed through an identificationwith the camera, and hence with transcendent vision. However, the theoreticiansof suture articulate a more disrelationbetweencamera and eye.2 junctive and even antipathetic maintain, depends upon the occluSpectatorial pleasure, they sion of the enunciatorypoint of view and the seeming boundlessness of the image. At the moment that the frame becomes apparent, the viewerrealizes thathe or she is only seeing a pregiven spectacle, and the jouissanceof the original relation to the image is lost. The theoristsof suture also thematizethe camera as an "Absent One," therebyfurther emphasizing the distance which separates it from the spectatorial eye. It representsthat which is irreducibly Other, thatwhich the subject can never be. Not onlydoes the Absent One occupy a site exteriorto the specbut tator, itexercisesan enunciatoryforceoverthe latter'svision. The spectatoris consequently,as Hitchcock would say,a "made" to-order-witness.
Spring1993
And although Metz and Baudry have perhaps more than any other filmtheoristsconfirmedthe capacityof the eye to accede to imaginarily the place of the camera, thereare elementswithin each of their writings which belie that capacity.As Mary Ann Doane has recently pointed out, the argument advanced by Baudryin "The Apparatus" positsa verydifferent spectatorthan that assumed by "Ideological Effectsof the Basic CinematographicApparatus" (85) . Whereas the earlier essaypresentscinema as an instrument for the perpetuation for the idealist illusion of a transcendentalspectator,the later essaystressesthe permeabilityof the boundary separatingthe spectatorfromthe spectacle. The viewerdescribed by"The Apparatus" is no longer situated at a distinctremovefromthe image but is instead envelfromit. Baudry stressesthat oped byit,or even undifferentiated at the cinema, as in our dreams,thereis "a fusionof the interior withthe exterior" ("The Apparatus" 311), or - to statethe case slightly differently a crossingof the eye over into the field of vision. And Metz begins that section of The Imaginary Signifier tided "The All-Perceiving Subject" withan analogy between cinema and the mirrorstage,an analogywhichonce again calls into question the firmdemarcation between spectatorand spectacle. Although he subsequentlydistinguishesthis kind of identification fromthatwhich the viewerostensibly formswithrespect to the camera, he also stresses thatitis onlyas a resultoffirst passing through the actual mirrorstage that the subject can formsuch an identification(45-49) . Primary identification thusimplicitly is routed through the image, according to a kind of retroactive Nowell-Smith logic. Geoffrey suggeststhatitis not onlyextra-cinthat the mirrorstage mightbe said to enable identifiematically cation with the camera, but withinthe cinema itself."So-called secondary identifications,"he writes,"tend to break down the of pure specularity the screen/spectatorrelation in itselfand so displace it into relations which are more properlyintra-textual - thatis,relationsto the spectatorposited fromwithinthe image and in the movement from shot to shot" (31). A particularly instance of thisdisplacementwould seem to be the articstriking ulation of shot/reverseshot relationships along the axis of a fictional look, which gives identificatory access to vision only fromwithinspectacle and the body.The theoreticiansof suture argue that it is only through such specular mediations that the viewercan sustain an identification withthe camera. But withinfilmtheoryit is probably Jean-Louis Comolli who has insistedmoststrenuously upon the non-matchof camera and spectatoriallook. "At the verysame timethatitis thusfascinated
Discourse 15.3
and gratified the multiplicity scopic instruments of which lay by a thousand viewsbeneath its gaze," he writes,"the human eye loses itsimmemorialprivilege;the mechanical eye of the photograph machine now sees in itsplace,and in certain aspects with more sureness. The photograph stands as at once the triumph and the grave of the eye. There is a violent decentering of the place of masteryin which since the Renaissance the look had come to reign" ("Machines" 123). Comolli argues thatthe photographrepresentsthe "triumph" of the eye because itconfirms the perspectivailawswhichhave forso long constitutedtheWestern norm of vision - because it showswhat we have learned to accept as "reality."It representsthe "grave" of the eye because it is produced byan apparatus capable not only of "seeing" this more preciselythan itcan, but of doing so autonomously.3 reality In thisrespect the camera mightbe said not so much to confirm as to displace human visionfromitsostensible locus of mastery. Jonathan Crary has recently expanded upon and enormously complicated Comolli's argument. In Techniques the of Observer calls into question perhaps the most fundamental he assumption about cinema's visual organization, an assumption which even Comolli does not question: he disputes the notion, thatis, thatan uninterruptedseries of optical devices lead from the camera obscura to the camera. Crary argues convincingly that the nineteenth century witnessed the shift from a "geometrical" to a "physiological" optics (14-16). Techniques of theObserver deploys the camera obscura as the privilegedexample of the earlier of these optics because, unlike a conventional perspectivaiconstruction,it does not prescribe a fixed site for the spectator but permitsa certain degree of physical mobility and so fostersthe illusion of spectatorial freedom. Since the viewermust physically enter the camera obscura in order to see the images which it produces, it also implies "a spatial and temporal simultaneity of human subjectivity and [optical] apparatus" (41) and an emphatic sequestrationof the eye from the world (39). It consequentlyprovides a figurenot only for a "free sovereignindividual" (39) , but fora visionwhich is unburdened bythe body and whichis sharply differentiated fromwhat it sees. The observer constitutedby the camera obscura "confrontsa unified space of order, unmodified by his or her own sensory and physiologicalapparatus, on which the contents of the world can be studied and compared, known in terms of a multitudeof relationships" (55). Whereas the camera obscura providesCrarywithhis primary metaphorforthe geometricalopticsofthe seventeenthand eigh-
Spring1993
teenthcenturies,the stereoscope supplies the emblematic apparatus for the physiological optics which emerged in the nineteenth century.It enjoys thisstatusnot only because it provides a heterogeneous and planar apprehension of space ratherthan but one which is homogeneous and perspectivai, because itforethe differencebetween its own principles of organizagrounds tion and those of human vision. The stereoscope contains two images, one of which addresses the lefteye, and the other the but the stereoscopic spectatorsees neither;instead, his or right, her bipolar sensory apparatus conjures forth a fictiveimage which is a composite of the twoactual images, throughwhich it is furtherdistinguished by its apparent depth-of-field. Crary remarksthat"the stereoscopicspectatorsees neitherthe identity of a copy nor the coherence guaranteed by the frame of a window. Rather,what appears is the technical reconstitutionof an already reproduced world fragmented into two nonidentical models, models thatprecede anyexperience of theirsubsequent perception as unified or tangible" (128). It thus represents a radically differentrelation to visual representation than that implied by the camera obscura or perspectivaipainting. More is at issue here than the dramaticdisjunctionof eye and optical apparatus. The stereoscope shows human vision to be for radicallydeficientas an instrument measuring and knowing the externalworld.Indeed, itcalls into question the verydistinction upon which such mastery between the relies,the distinction look and the object. What the eye sees when peering into the stereoscope is not a specular order from which it is itself detached but "an undemarcated terrainon whichthe distinction between internal sensation and external signs is irrevocably blurred" (24). The stereoscope thus precipitates a referential crisis.This referential crisishas less to do withthe displacement of the real by the simulacrum than with a loss of belief in the eye's capacityto see whatis "there." Relocated withinthe "unstaand temporality" the body (70), human vision ble physiology of no longer serenelysurveysand mastersa domain fromwhich it imagines itselfto be discrete. WithinCrary'sargument,the stereoscope is also emblematic of nineteenth-century about the eye in thatit is waysof thinking in a sense "about" that organ; it is a direct extension of the thatthe human subjecthas binocular ratherthan mondiscovery ocular vision. Techniques theObserver of suggests that from the 1820s on, vision came increasinglyto function as the object rather than as the subject of optical knowledge. This investigadiminishbelief in itssupposed tion of the eye worked to further
Discourse 15.3
Not onlywas a blind spot uncovered at and authority. objectivity the point at which the optic nerve opens onto the retina (75), but visual apprehension was shown to fluctuateover time (98). Color came to be understood less as an inherentattribute the of than as an extension of the viewer's physiology(67-71), object and discoveryof the afterimage, which feeds directlyinto cinema, suggested once again that the human eye is capable of a counter-factual perception. Although the inventionof the stereoscope postdates thatof the camera, Craryargues thatthe latteris part of the same epistemologica! rupture as the former (5). Indeed, he locates the in beginning of thistransition the 1820s (5, 27), therebyclosely it to the emergence of the camera. However,whereas the tying new spatial field,the camera stereoscope opens onto an entirely entertains"an ambivalent. . . relationto the codes of monocular space and geometricalperspective" (127). thatphoCrarymaintainsearlier in Techniques theObserver of like the stereoscope, "is an element of a new and tography, homogeneous terrainof consumption and circulationin which an observer becomes lodged" (13). "Observer" is the term he uses to designate a viewerwho no longer regardsthe consistently world from an ostensiblytranscendentand masteringvantage point - a viewer whose unreliable and corporeally circumscribed vision locates him or her withinthe field of vision and knowledge. Presumablythen (although he does not argue this case in any specificity) Crarymeans to suggest that because of , its autonomy fromthe human eye and its capacity to "see" diffrom the latter,the camera dislodges that organ from ferently the seeminglyprivilegedposition it occupies withinthe camera obscura. But laterin Techniques the of Observer Craryproposes that the stereoscope was doomed to extinctionbecause it makes too manifestthe nonreferential nature of human vision. Photography - and later cinema - prevailed in its place because its continued reliance on earlier pictorial codes, most particularly those of perspective,make it an apparent "window" onto the world and so resecuresthe viewerin a position of seeming visual "The prehistory the spectacle," Crary concludes, of authority. "is lodged in the newlydiscovered territory a fully of embodied but [its] eventual triumph. . . depends upon the denial viewer, of the body,itspulsingsand phantasms,as the ground ofvision" (136). Like Comolli, then, he suggeststhatwhereas the stereoonlytheeye's disjunctionfromthe camera, scope makes manifest the conventional photographic image also affordsthe eye an illusory"triumph."
Spring1993
However, there is a strangeway in which, even withinphotography,the maintenance of the referential illusion, upon which that triumphdepends - or, to state the case slightly difthe attributionto the image, and by extension to the ferently, human look, of a "truthful"vision- overtly depends upon the isolation of camera fromhuman look. In a crucial passage from Andr Bazin suggestsnot only thatknowledge earlyfilmtheory, of the discretenessof camera and human look maybe tolerable withthe "real," but provided the photograph seem synonymous thatsuch knowledge mayseem at momentsthe necessarycondition for sustainingthe belief in that equivalence. "For the first time," he writes in "Ontology of the Photographic Image," "between the originating object and itsreproductionthereinterof venes only the instrumentality a nonlivingagent. For the first time an image of the world is formedautomatically, withoutthe interventionof man. . . . The objective nature of photography confers upon it a credibilityabsent from other picture-making ... we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced" (13). And of course one of the privilegedtextual sitesout ofwhichcinema mightbe said to develop is Muybridge's serial photographs of trotting horses,whichwere produced precisely in order to dispel one of the illusions of the eye - the illusion thata horse in motion alwaysmaintainsat least one foot on the ground.4We are thus obliged to consider the possibility thatthe codes of perspectivemaysurvivein cinema and photogof raphywithoutthe close identification eye and optical apparatus that was implied in the case of the camera obscura. The relation between camera and the human optical organ maynow seem less analogous than compensatory,the formerpromising to make good the deficiencies of the latter and to shore up a distinction which the eye cannot sustain - the distinction between vision and spectacle. Crary suggestsat one point that whereas the connection betweenthe eye and the camera obscura was articulated according to a metaphoric logic, the connection between vision and the camera is articulated according to mtonymie logic; the photographic apparatus and the human eye,he are "contiguous instruments the same plane of operon writes, ation." Although he goes on to saythat "the limitsand deficiencies ofthe one [are] complemented bythe capacities of the other and vice versa," a formulationimplying certain reciprocity, a he concludes that the camera representsnot so much a tool as a machine. As such it is less an instrumentto be used than an apparatus thatuses the human subject; the latteris subordinate to the camera in "a relation of . . . part to other parts, and of
10
Discourse 15.3
exchangeability" (131). And Vilem Flusser,another recent theoristof the camera, proposes that the photographer is nothing more than a "functionary"of thatapparatus (19). But the concept of the "observer" implies not only an embodied and spectacularized eye whose relation to the camera is prostheticratherthan organic but one whose operations have been subjected to a complex rationalization- an eye which has been rendered socially productive,and exists in a subordinate relation to the camera. "Almost simultaneouswiththe finaldissolution of a transcendentfoundationforvision emerges a pluof ralityof means to recode the activity the eye," Crarywrites: " and [means] to regimentit,to heightenitsproductivity prevent its distraction.Thus the imperativesof capitalist modernism, while demolishing the field of classical vision, generated techniques forimposingvisual attentiveness, rationalizingsensation, and managing perception" (24) . AlthoughCrarymayseem here to be relyingclosely upon a Foucauldian paradigm, he himself at one point underscores the crucial point which distinguishes his argument from a text like Disciplineand Punish. Whereas Foucault opposes spectacle and vision, Crary at least partially as collapses thatbinarism;he representsmodernity the situation of the eye withinthe domain of the image, and he then attempts to think through what that "visualization" implies. In this has more affinities with the respect, Techniques theObserver of Lacanian than withthe Foucauldian project. 2. Camera and Gaze In FourFundamental Lacan not only Concepts Psychoanalysis of insistsas emphaticallyas Craryupon the disjunction of camera and eye,but he deploys the first those termsas a metaphor of of the gaze. The passage in which he does so locates the subject withinthe fieldofvisionand attributes the camera/gaze to firmly a constitutive function:"What determinesme, at the most profound level,in the visible,is the gaze thatis outside. It is through the gaze thatI enterlightand it is fromthe gaze thatI receive its effects.Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and throughwhich ... I am " (106). photo-graphed However,although Lacan, like Crary, emphasizes the exteriof the camera to the look, his use of that apparatus as a ority metaphor for the gaze works to problematize the historical demarcations drawn by Techniques theObserver. of Crary's insis-
Spring1993
11
tence upon the camera as an apparatus specificto the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies, in other words, places his model in seeming opposition to Lacan's, which maintainsthe permanent dislocation of eye and gaze. The gaze, which is significantly absent fromTechniques theObserver ; seeminglyhas no temporal of specificity. to However,what appears at first be the simple theoretical of incompatibility two competing theoretical models turns out upon closer inspection to provide the basis fora productivedialogue. Rather than arguing for the primacyof Techniques the of Observer over SeminarXI, or SeminarXI over Techniques the of Observer would like to suggestthatwe use each to complicate ;I the other. Lacan's emphasis upon the irreducible exteriority of the gaze indicates the distance that has at all points separated the eye fromthe optical devices which metaphorize ideal vision, even during those historicalmoments at which the two would seem closely aligned.5 However, Crary's insistence upon the break between the camera obscura and photography suggests thatthe human subject's experience of the gaze mayvarymarkedlyfromone period to another,and thatdifferent optical apparatuses may play a keyrole in determiningthisvariation.It thus introduceshistory into the visual paradigm elaborated byLacan in Seminar XI. Since I have discussed thatparadigm at considerable length elsewhere,6I will reiterate only its primary features before extending it in some of the directions indicated here. Lacan elaborates the field of vision throughthe three diagrams reproduced below:
12
Discourse 15.3
of The first these diagrams representsthe preliminarystep in an exhaustivedeconstructionof the assumptionsupon which the system perspectiverests.In it the subject is shown looking of at an object fromthe position marked "geometral point." S/he seeminglysurveysthe world froman invisible,and hence tran" scendental, position. However,the intervening"image, which coincides withthe "screen" in diagram 2, immediatelytroubles this apparent mastery;the vieweris shown to surveythe object not throughAlberti'stransparent pane of glass but throughthe mediation of somethingwhich is both "opaque" and structuring. He or she can only see the object in the guise of the image/screen and can consequently lay claim to none of the epistemological authority implicitin the perspectivaimodel. 2 situatesthe subject at the site marked "picture" Diagram and the gaze at thatmarked "point oflight." It thusdramatically separates the gaze fromthe human look and locates the subject within visibility. The gaze represents not only the point from which light irradiates,but what Lacan calls "others as such." It can perhaps best be understood as the intrusionof the symbolic into the fieldofvisionor - to statethe case somewhatdifferently - as that "unapprehensible" agency throughwhich we are ratifiedor negated as spectacle. The gaze is Lacan's wayof stressing thatwe depend upon the Other not only for our meaning and our desires but forour veryconfirmation "self." To "be" is in of effectto "be seen." Once again a thirdtermmediates between the twoends of the diagram,indicatingthatthe subject is never "photographed" as "himself' or "herself' but always in the shape of what is now designated the "screen." The thirddiagramsuperimposesthefirst that two,suggesting diagram 1 is alwayscircumscribedbydiagram 2; even as we look, we are in the "picture," and so a "subject of representation." (The gaze now occupies the site of the "object" in diagram 1, and that of "point of light" in diagram 2, again at an emphatic remove fromhuman vision.) The superimpositionof diagrams 1 and 2 suggeststhatmore is involvedhere than the articulation of the subject as a bodilyimage,whichwas the focus of myearlier discussion of Seminar XI; the eye itself would seem to be "visualized" or - to state the case somewhat differently defined throughitsrelationto the gaze. Once again thatrelation is mediated, now bysomethingthatcould be called the "image," the "screen," or the "image/screen." arrivedat thatjuncture withinthe Although we have finally Lacanian paradigm where it intersectsmost decisivelywith the , we argument put forwardin Techniques theObserver have not of
Spring1993
13
its withinitwhichwould facilitate reconas yetisolated anything specific terms. In order to ceptualization in more historically effectsuch a reconceptualization,we must focus upon the cate, Lacan elaborates Concepts goryofthe screen. In FourFundamental in thatcategoryexclusively termsof the determiningrole itplays in the visual articulationof the subject. However,I suggested in at Male Subjectivity theMargins that since it intervenes not only between gaze and subject but between subject and gaze, it must necessarilydetermine not onlyhow the subject but how the gaze I is "seen." Unfortunately,accounted forthe image/screen only ' in termsoftheformer. 'AlthoughFourFundamental does Concepts not do so," I wrote,"it seems . . . crucial thatwe insistupon the ideological statusof the screen bydescribingit as thatculturally generated image or repertoireof images throughwhich subjects in are not only constituted,but differentiated relation to class, and nationality"(150). race, sexuality, age, At the time thatI wrotethe chapter in Male Subjectivity the at Marginsdevoted to an elaboration of the field of vision,myprimaryconcern in theorizingthe screen as something mediating between us and the gaze was to finda wayof accounting-for how the latter,which is itselfunrealizable and "inapprehensible," has forso long seemed to us masculine. Although I understood that in order for the gaze to be perceived as male it had necessarilyto be aligned withthe camera, and although I saw thatthe endless subordination of woman-as-spectaclewas necessary to the establishmentof thisalignment,itdid not occur to me to ask the question posed in the titleto thisessay: "what is a camera?" As soon as thatquestion is asked, it becomes evidentthatmy to definitionof the screen is not sufficient account for how a transcultural and transhistorical is culturally and historically gaze It is not enough, that is, to suggest that the screen specified. with the throughwhich we apprehend the gaze is synonymous which a given society articulates authoritative images through indicates that at least since the vision. Techniques theObserver of Renaissance optical devices have played a central role in determining how the gaze is apprehended, and such devices cannot simplybe reduced to a set of images. Crary'sremarksabout the camera obscura are equally applicable to the camera, which is less a machine or the representationof a machine than a complex field of relations. "What constitutesthe camera obscura," he writes, its as is precisely multiple its identity, "mixed"status an episa order and an object within discursive temologica! figure
14
Discourse 15.3 withinan arrangement culturalpractices. of The camera obscurais . . ."simultaneously inseparably machinic and a and an assemblage enunciation"[Deleuze and of assemblage Guattari is 504], an objectaboutwhichsomething said and at thesame timean objectthatis used. It is a siteat whicha discursive formation intersects withmaterial (30practices. 31)
Those optical metaphors throughwhich the gaze manifests itself most emphaticallyat a givenmoment of timewillalwaysbe those which are most technologically,psychically, discursively, economically, politically,and culturallyoverdetermined and specified.However,as should be apparent bynow,each of those metaphorswillalso articulatethe fieldofvisual relationsaccording to the representational logic of a specific apparatus. The meaning of a device like the camera is consequentlyboth extrinsic and intrinsic a consequence both of its placement within a largersocial and historicalfieldand of a particularrepresentational logic. Since - as Lacan implies - that device is stillthe preeminent optical apparatus through which the gaze is metaphorized,an analysisof it both as a representationalsystem and a networkof materialpracticeswould seem a crucial extension of the largerproject to whichboth Seminar and Techniques XI theObserver contribute. of Because Harun Farocki's 1988 film, Bilder derWelt Inschrift und desKrieges only offers extended meditationon the reprenot an sentationallogic of the camera but conceives of it as an intricate and constantly field of relations,it is to it that I suggest shifting we now turnin an attemptto understandthe primary metaphor throughwhich we apprehend the gaze. An examination of this textwillhelp to clarify both the points of continuity and those of between thatapparatus and earlier visual technoldiscontinuity elaboration of the waysin ogies. It will thus facilitatea further which a fundamentally and historia-temporalgaze is culturally callyspecified. As we willsee, Bilderinsistsas strenuously Craryupon the as of camera and eye,and in wayswhich almost uncandisjunction nilyecho Lacan. Not onlydoes thatoptical apparatus emerge at a site equivalent to the gaze in Four FundamentalConcepts, but human vision is once again situatedmanifestly withinspectacle. But Bilderis not contentmerelyto disassociate camera/gaze and eye and to establishthe placement of the human subject within the purviewof thatapparatus. It also interrogates another of the functions - both what might be called its camera/gaze's
Spring1993
15
effect.In addi"memorializing" functionand its "mortifying" tion, Bilderscrutinizesthe social as well as the psychicfield of relationswithwhich the camera is synonymous, and some of the waysin which the latterimpingesupon the former;it looks, that is, at some of the exemplary material practices through which the camera's disjunctionfromthe eye,the articulating role which itplayswithrespectto human subjectivity, memorializingfuncits effecthave been historically tion, and its mortifying exploited and discursively specified.Moreover,both gender and race come into play there in complex ways; although Farocki reiterates again and again thatitis onlythroughthehyperbolicspecularization of the female spectacle that the disjunction between the camera and the male eye can be masked, he also shows how this paradigm can be complicated by other formsof cultural difference. Finally,Bilderattemptsto indicate what,ifnot the domain of the camera/gaze, mightbe said to representthe province of the look. It will consequently provide the occasion not only for a further elaboration of how the gaze is figuredwithinthe social but fora richertheorizationof the look, and one whichwill field, returnus to Techniques theObserver. of 3. The Look as Spectacle BilderderWelt und Inschrift Krieges des begins witha series of images of a laboratory built in Hannover for the studyof the movementof water.These images are not easilyassimilatedinto the complex montage thatfollows, since theyseem at first glance outside the associative networkthe filmweaves. However, the commentary accompanying a later repetition of one of these images will connect it to Auschwitzunder the mutual sign "labwordsutteredbythe disembodied female oratory,"and the first voice-overimmediately introducesthe issue of seeing, encouraging us to finda relation between it and the images of controlled water. "When the sea surges against the land, irregularly, not haphazardly," she observes, "this motion binds the look [ den Blick withoutfettering and sets free the thoughts.The surge it ] thatsets the thoughtsin motion is here being investigated scienin tifically its own motion - in the large wave channel at Hannover."This brieftextestablishes oppositionnot onlybetween an and and free,but between regularity irregularity, fettering setting - which is here shown to involvea whole scientific observation range of visual technologies - and the look, which, far from masteringits object, is itselfimplicated or "tied up" withit.
16
Discourse 15.3
An extraordinary series of shots follows the Hannover of to sequence, which worksfurther diminish the authority the look by dislocatingit fromthe gaze and placing it withinspectacle. This series begins with a shot of a drawing from Drer's in Instruction Measurement ,whichconformscloselyto Lacan' s first in one extremely detail. In ita human important diagram except is shown looking fromone end of a triangleat an object figure which stands at the other end (figure 1). However, the eye is located not at whatLacan calls the "geometral point" but rather at the wide end of the triangle,where he situatesthe gaze. The model of Drer drawing is used here to represent a different one providinga vision fromthe one withwhichwe are familiar, potent metaphor for the delusory supremacy of the eye - a model ofvision,available to the Greeksand operativein theWest in until the thirteenth century, which lightwas assumed to proceed fromthe look ratherthan object, much like a projector or As flashlight.7 thisimage comes onto the screen,thefemalevoiceoversays,"Enlightenment- thatis a wordin the history ideas of " The word " " willaccrete - in German 4 Aufklrung? Aufklrung additional meanings over the course of the film,but here it is literallythe firstword spoken by the voice-overafter the text quoted above, a textwhich ends with the word "light." It thus establishes a close analogical connection between the rationalism and humanismof the Enlightenment projectand the notion
Figure1
Spring1993
17
of human vision as an agent of illumination and clarification which the Drer drawingis made to figure. But at the moment that the voice-over utters the word " that drawing gives way to a radically different Auflilrung," On the rightside of the drawing, where the human figure image. of standsin the preceding image, is drawna dot reminiscent what Lacan calls the "geometral point" (figure2). (I will be arguing that within all of the diagrams and drawingsused by Bilderto figurethe place of the human subject withinthe field of vision, that subject is alwayssituated on the right,in another echo of Lines forminga triangularpattern FourFundamentalConcepts.) toward this point, but we are not shown where they converge lead; the other end of the triangle is occluded. This drawing would seem to schematize thatmodel ofvisionwithwhichwe are in more familiar, whichlightemanates not fromthe eye but from the object of vision. Because Bildereffectssuch a tight metaphoric join between the earlier model of vision and the aspiration towardmasteryand knowledge,the reconfiguration the of site occupied in itbythe human eye as a geometral point cannot help but effecta diminutionof thatorgan's powers,particularly since it is now positioned more as the object than as the agent of comes vision;we are not even shownthe siteat whichitostensibly to rest.With the thirdimage in this series of shots, the look is even more overtly specularized. That image shows the lefteye of
Figure2
18
Discourse 15.3
a model, whose face is being elaboratelymade up (figure3) . Her eyelids are weighted-downwith powder, and she blinks as the makeup man rubs around her eye witha cotton puff.This is an eye which is less seeing than seen. Bildermakes clear both throughthis shot, and through the many other images of women woven into its discourse, that the from the camera/gaze human eye is no sooner differentiated than itis gendered "female." The femalesubject,in otherwords, is obliged to bear the burden of specularityso that the look of her male counterpartcan be aligned withthe camera. We need at onlyrememberthatitis mosttypically thelevel of the spectacle - classicallythrough the shot/reverseshot formation- that woman is subordinated to the male look to realize how precarious or even impossible thisalignmentis. This three-shotsequence is followed by a storyabout the a severseye discoveryof scale photography, storywhich further fromgaze and which figuresthe latterthrough the camera. In 1858, the voice-overexplains, a local governmentbuilding officer named Meydenbauer almost lost his life while performing scale measurementsofa cathedralfroma basketsuspended from the roof. It subsequentlyoccurred to him thatit mightbe possible to effect scale measurementthroughphotography. "The idea of obtaining measurements through photography came to Meydenbauer afterhe was suspended between life and death";
Figure3
Spring1993
19
the voice-overadds, "That means: it is dangerous to hold out on physically the spot. . . . Arduous and dangerous, to hold out on the spot. Saferto takea pictureand evaluate itlater, physically protected from the elements, at one's desk." Human vision is and thus associated withdanger and mortality, witha kind of in mediasreswithrespect to the field of vision. As we listen to this we narrative, look again at the geometral point and the model's Anotherofthe imageswhichaccompanies the Meydenbauer eye. narrativealso warrants mention in thiscontext,since itpositions in the camera so overtly the place where Lacan situatesthe gaze. That image showsa trianglepointed in the same directionas the uses. On the leftside, Drer drawing,but put to verydifferent where the object is located in the Drer drawingand where the trianglenarrowsto a point,stands the camera (figure4) . It phowhere the human figure tographsan object located on the right, stands in the Drer drawing,suggestingthatinsofaras the camera is concerned, each of us is less subject than object. This point is driven home by another detail as well. The wide end of the trianglecoincides withthesitewhichhas bynow been established as the human locus, as it does in the Drer drawing.But to be situated at the wide end of the triangleno longer signifiesto be the source of light,but rather to be lit up by an illumination which has its origin elsewhere,an illuminationwhich is perhaps better metaphorized by the projector than the camera. It thus
Figure4
20
Discourse 15.3
no longer signifies visual mastery, it does in the Drer image, as but rather "to-be-in-the-picture," "photographed" by the camIn effect, then, this image performs the same era/gaze. deconstructionof the Drer drawingas Lacan's second diagram withrespectto his first, indicatingthateven as we look, performs we are withinspectacle. Later Bilderwill repeat this deconstruction twice in quick succession. As the female voice-overremarks,"Enlightenment - Aufldrung that is a word in the historyof ideas," we are asked to look at a Leonardo drawingof the human eye, replete withhumanistsignificance(figure5). However,the immediately preceding shot focuses once again upon the model's eye, even more heavilymade up than before (figure6) , and the following shot revealsa blue computercross-section an eye,whichis now of not merelyspecularized but measured and quantified (figure7) . Bythe timewe arriveat the fourth image in thissequence, which shows a Renaissance artistproducing a picturewiththe aid of a perspectivaigrid,again occupyinga position on the rightside of the image (figure8), itscelebration of man's visual masterycan of only be read as a radical mconnaissance the field of vision. Some found footage later in the filmsuggestseven more forcethan the computer cross section of the eye thatthe latteris fully situated irreduciblywithinspectacle. Taken from a filmabout ergonomie research, it shows a male pilot wearing a device
Figure5
Spring1993
21
Figure6
Figure7
22
15.3 Discourse
Figure8
Figure9
Spring1993
23
Figure10 designed to record the movements made by his eyes during a shortflight(figure9) . Those movementsmanifestthemselvesas white marks moving across the terrainat which the pilot looks (figure10), in a veritablecollapse of the distinctionbetween the eye and what it sees. 4. The Camera as Social Apparatus As I have already indicated, one of the material practices throughwhich Bildershows the disjunction of camera fromeye In to be sociallyspecifiedis scale photography. the Meydenbauer scale photographyrepresentsthe deploymentof the camstory, era for purposes of quantification,but Bilderis careful to note thatifit can be used forsuch ends thatis because the images that based. The "rules of proitproduces are themselvesnumerically at one point emphasizes, jective geometry," as the voice-over precede "depiction by photographic means . . . Leonardo depict[ed] the projection of the whole earth spectacle onto the surface,the level of the two-dimensionalpicture. Drer, again, took measurements of objects, from the study of nature he obtained numbers and rules. The calculating machines of today
24
Discourse 15.3
make picturesout of numbers and rules. Here Piero della Francesca, then pictures into measurements,today measurements into pictures." The camera thus emerges within Bilder as an apparatus for the production of quantified and quantifiable images. From this vantage point, the invention of the camera representsless a moment of rupturewithearlier visual technologies than the moment at which theirimplicitdisjuncturefrom the eye becomes manifest.(As I will indicate later in this essay, Bilderrepeatedly associates the eye with a highlysubjectivized and non-quantifiablevision.) The use of aerial photographyduringWorldWar II provides another of the material practices throughwhich Bilderdefines the camera and throughwhich it dramatizesitsautonomyfrom the look. The second time the female commentatoruttersthe words, ''Enlightenment - Aufklrung that is a word in the of ideas," she adds, "In German Aufklrung also has a history reconnaissance. Flightreconnaissance." Over military meaning: a series of shots showing airplanes on a bombing mission, a camera strapped to a pigeon, a map designatingthe itinerary of a bombing mission,an aerial photograph of Auschwitz, Farocki war photographs,and an looking at it,military figuresstudying aerial viewof a war production plant,thevoice-overrecountsthe storybehind the production of the Auschwitzphotograph (figure 11), an image to which the filmwill repeatedlyreturn:
Figure11
Spring1993 Americanaircraft takenoffin Foggia,Italy, had and flown in towards for targets Silesia- factories synthetic petroland rubber. . . On theflight theIG Farbencompany . over factory stillunder construction, pilotclickedhis camera shutter a and took photographs of the Auschwitzconcentration takenin April1944arrived evalufor camp. . . . The pictures ation in Medmenhan,England.The analysts discovereda a a underconstruction station, carbide power factory,factory forBuna and another petrol for hydrenation. Theywerenot underordersto look fortheAuschwitz camp,and thusthey did notfindit.
25
Not onlydoes the camera here manifestly "apprehend" whatthe human eye cannot, but the latterseems strikingly handicapped by its historicaland institutional placement, as ifto suggestthat militarycontrol attemptsto extend beyond behavior, speech, dress,and bodily posture to the verysensoryorgans themselves. This sequence indicates,in other words,thatmilitary discipline and the logic of warfarefunction to hyperbolize the distance separating look fromgaze and to subordinate the formercompletelyto the latter.The voice-overadds thatthe photograph of Auschwitzremained imperceptible to the human viewer until 1977, when itwas studied bytwoCIA employeeswhose historical and institutional vantagemightbe said to have rendered itfinally legible. ; Slightlylater in Bilder one of the images from this aerial montage is repeated as the voice-overprobes more deeply into the waysin which the military establishmentboth exploited and helped to define the autonomyof the camera fromthe eye durOver a photograph recordingsome of ing the twentieth century. the destruction effectedduring a bombing mission, the commentatorobserves,"Because bomber pilotscannot properlyestimate whether theyhave hit their target and to what effect,in WorldWar II theybegan to equip bomber planes withcameras." A moment latershe adds, "The bomber pilotshad the first workin which a camera was employed to control effectivity," place indicatingagain thatat thatjuncture at which the camera intersects withthe military establishmentit is not only distinctfrom but antinomic to the eye. If cameras were placed in World War II bomber planes, Bildersuggests,it was as much to "observe" the pilots as to record what theycannot see. The immediately followingsequence, which showsa computerized camera checkdoor, also stresses ing the specificationsof a factory-produced the usefulnessof thatoptical device as a mechanism forcontrol-
26
Discourse 15.3
now not merely in bomber planes but ling worker efficiency, industrialsites. But Bilderis not content merelyto analogize war and industrialproduction. Immediately after commentingupon the inabilof the Allied analysts to see Auschwitz in the aerial ity photographs taken on April 4, 1944, the voice-over remarks, "how close the one is to the other: the industry the camp," and Farocki showswithhis thumband forefinger how littlegeoand political distance separates the IG Farben plant graphical fromAuschwitzon an aerial photograph. Bilderthus connects the camera not only to scale measurementand modern warfare but to mass production. And once again that connection is enabled by the disjunction of optical apparatus and look, to which it in turngivesnew meaning. A lengthy meditation upon metal pressing follows the sequence devoted to the aerial photographs of Auschwitz.Like the Hannover footage, this meditation does not seem immediatelyrelated to the restof the film.However,itultimately permits Bilderto articulate the autonomy of camera and eye in terms which make evident photography'sintimate relation to industrialproduction, and which tightenthe linkage between the latter and modern war.At first voice-overstressesthe apparent the affinities photographyand metal pressing;coexistingforover of a century,both are forms of reproduction. Moreover, during WorldWar II metal sheetswere pressed "forsearchlights show to in up aircraft the sky."The airplanes, in theirturn,"threwlight bombs,like a lightning flash,to illuminatethe earthfora photo." However, the voice-overmakes clear these were only apparent convergences,made possible bywhat Marx would call "uneven development." Although not much older than photography, metal pressingis shown to representa radicallydifferent formof reproduction. "The skill of metal pressing traces back to the trades of belt-maker and armoury smith," the voice-over remarks. The still photographs over which the commentator speaks, moreover,stressthe intimate connection between the metal presser and the object he produces (figures12 and 13); theynot only attestto the subordination of hammer and metal press to the human hand and eye but reveal the tracesleftupon the end-productby the force of each blow.Although seemingly metal pressingwas artisacontemporaneous withphotography, nal. It was hence inimical to war production, which is - Bilder insists- "mass production." The camera is consequentlyshownto representa verydifferent formof reproductionfrommetal pressing.Firstof all, as we
Spring1993
27
the have alreadyseen, it inverts hierarchy implicitin the relation of workerto tool; whereas the metal presser's hammer is subordinate to his arm, the camera mightbe said to "use" the pilot who is obliged to click its shuttereverytime he drops a bomb. because ofitsautonomyfromthe human eye Moreover,precisely - because, as Benjamin would say,it constitutesa mechanical form of reproduction8- the camera can be used not only for the surveillance of pilot and target, but forthe massproduction of a production in excess both of the human workerand images, the human consumer.As iffurther emphasize thislast point, to the voice-overtwicemaintainsthat "More pictures of the world [were taken during World War II] than the eyes of the soldiers [were] capable of consuming" or "evaluating." Bildersuggeststhat the field of vision implied by the camera has also been shaped in part by the uses to which the institution of the police has put thatapparatus, uses which again capitalize upon the latter'sautonomyfromthe eye. However,since what is at issue in police photographyis less the camera's capacity to quantify, participate in mass production, or regulate efficiency, than itscapacityto name and identify, manifests disjuncture it the of camera/gaze and look by situatingthe subject much more withinspectacle than do the other material prachyperbolically tices upon which Bilderfocuses. The moment at which thatfilm introduces police photographyis consequently the moment at
Figure12
28
Discourse 15.3
Figure13 which it firstshiftsattention dramaticallyaway from what it means to photograph, to what it means to be photographed. 5. How to Face a Camera first addresses At the beginningof the section in whichBilder the the issue of police photography, commentatorasks: "How to even the partial answerwhich face a camera?" Not surprisingly, the film gives to this question immediately necessitates an which are engagement withthose twoformsof social difference most dependent upon a visual articulation:gender and race. As the question is posed, we are shown an image of an Algerian woman (figure14) , and itis followedbya seriesofothers (figures 15-18). At first glance, these images seem fullycompatible with the sequence beginningwiththe Drer drawingand concluding withthe image of the Dior model. As I have already indicated, through the attention which Bilderlavishes upon the heavily made-up eye of that model, it makes clear that although every is subject depends upon the "affirmation"of the gaze, visibility distributedwithinthe domain of representation, differentially than and woman is oftenobliged to "live" hers much more fully
Spring1993
29
Figure14
Figure15
JO
15.3 Discourse
Figure16
Figure17
Spring1993
31
is her male counterpart,who is, within many discourses and material practices, the privileged "functionary" of the camera/gaze. Consequently, within certain cultural contexts, the not female subject mightbe said to signify only "lack" but "spectacle." By focusing upon another female face at the point that the voice-over asks, "How to face a camera?" Bilder appears thatpoint,whileextendingitin the direcintentupon reiterating like sexual tion of race - upon suggestingthatracial difference, difference,is often inscribed as a hyperbolic specularity.However,it becomes almost immediately apparent thatin the case of The the Algerian women things are not so straightforward. which accompanies the question "How to face a camera?" image remindsus that although our culture maintainsa close connection between the terms"woman" and "spectacle," sexual difference can manifestitselfin other wayswithinthe field of vision and can be complicated by other kinds of culturally constituted in differences, thiscase most manifestly race. by The images of Algerianwomen around which thissequence is organized are eventuallyshown to derive fromthe pages of a book. The voice-overexplains thatthese images are identity photographs,produced forthe French colonial authoritiesin 1960 bya conscriptsoldier,Marc Garanger,forpolicing purposes. For the French, to rule is to render visibleand "legible." Again, the " now in the sense of "clearing word " Aufklrungcomes into play,
Figure18
32
Discourse 15.3
up the case." French rule also implies the imposition of a Western system sexual differentiation, the camera clearlyfuncof for tionsto constitutetheseAlgerianwomen not onlyas colonial but as subjectswho are, withina Westerncontext,manifestly female. However, Bilderis at pains to show that the enactment of this imperativeviolates the terms through which Algerian culture itselfconstructssexual difference;"femininity" there demands the veil and hence signifiespublic invisibility. Bilderdoes not of adjudicate between these two systems sexual differentiation, but it does workto challenge the conventionalWesternassumption thatremovingthe veil fromthe face of the Algerianwoman would in all situationsrepresent"liberation." The veil,thevoiceoversuggests, not onlyrendersitswearerpubliclyinvisible, also it a kind of shield. It provides protection not so much provides fromthe gaze, which is itself both inapprehensible and neutral, and which is in some guise necessarilyalready a part of these women's lives,as fromthatexperience of itwhich is mediated by the colonial deploymentof the camera - a deploymentwhich can only be characterized as a violation and subjugation. "The horror of being photographed forthe first time," the commentatorobserves over the second image in thissequence, "The year 1960 in Algeria:women are photographed forthefirst time.They are to be issued withidentity cards. Faces which up tillthen had worn the veil. Only those close have looked on these faces without the veil - family and household members." Thus although withinthe context of Algerian culture,the veil is obviouslyone of the primarysignifiers woman's subordinate status,it perof forms a very different function within the context of French colonialism. "Visibility"is similarly not complicated, signifying but "colonialism." merely"femininity" A moment later the commentator suggests that when attemptingto account for the "horror of being photographed forthe first time" itis necessaryto take into account not onlythe material practices in which the camera is embedded, and throughwhich it derivesitsvalue, but the representationallogic specificto thatapparatus. She approaches thislogic bydifferentiatingthe camera/gaze once again fromthe eye. "When one looks into the face of an intimate,"the commentatorobserves, "one also brings in something of the shared past. The photograph captures the moment and thus crops away past and future."The commentatoralso drawsattentionto another of the camera's intrinsicproperties and one which makes it such a potent metaphor for the gaze. She suggests that photography mightbe said to severa moment fromthe temporal continuum
Spring1993
33
within which it occurs and to "carry" it away into another domain. She thus comments upon thatfeatureof photography which most distinguishesit fromother representationalsystems - the factthat it conventionallyrequires the physicalpresence of an object in order to produce an image of it and thatit might hence be said to intervene in the phenomenal domain. This featurehas inspired manypaeans to the "realism" of photographyand itssisterart,cinema, but Bilderpresentsa verydifferent argument.It suggeststhat the photographyintervenesin a real in which it paradoxicallycannot itself participate,a real which it in factcan onlyworkto derealize. It is consequentlypreciselyan antirealistrepresentationalsystem. Bilderthus accounts forphotographyin termsverysimilarto those suggested by Metz in "Photography and Fetish." In that texthe characterizesphotographyas "a cut inside the referent," by which he means to suggest that it produces images only by seizing upon the real. This capture permitsa piece of the real to escape the vicissitudesof time,but only at the cost of a kind of death. "The snapshot, like death," Metz writes,"is an instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of time . . . the photographic takeis immediate and definitive. . . Photography. . . cuts offa piece of . a , [the referent] a fragment, part object, for a long immobile journey ofno return" (158) . Althoughthe photograph mightbe said to immortalizethe moment which it depicts, Metz suggests it does so only through a devitalizingsublation, by liftingthat moment out of life into the frameof representation.The preservation photographyaffordsis thus simultaneouslya destruction,a point upon which- as we willsee - Bilderalso more than once insists. and second parts of the AlgeInterveningbetween the first rian sequence is a set of images suggestinganother wayin which photography acts destructively upon the real, and one which provides a more direct answer to the question of what it means to face the camera/gaze. A woman's face appears on a blue video screen and has superimposed upon itfirst spectacles and eyes the of two other people, and then the hair and mouth of another (figures 19-21). Ostensibly a demonstration of the process wherebya composite police "sketch" is produced for purposes of apprehending a suspect, this sequence brilliantly illustrates the projection of the screen onto the subjectbythe camera/gaze. It consequently serves as an importantreminder that the latter intervenesin the real not onlybyabducting it but also byinstalling the image in its place.
34
Discourse 15.3
Figure19
Figure20
Spring1993
35
Figure21 If Metz's "Photography and Fetish" provides an exemplary s account of the relationshipof photograph gloss of Bilder' first to referent,a passage from Barthes's CameraLucida offersthe definitive commentary on that implied by the composite "sketch." Perhaps because Barthes is concerned here less with the camera/gaze's relation to the object than with the subject's relation to that apparatus - because, that is, he attempts to answerpreciselythe question "How to face the camera?" - the screen comes into focusforhim in a waythatitdoes not forMetz. Barthes stresses that when the subject faces the camera/gaze somethingis conjured into existencewhichwas not therebefore, as somethingwhichhe calls "an otherbody,"and "myself other." "Once I feel myself observed by the [camera] lens," he writes, in "everythingchanges: I constitutemyself the process of 'pos'I make anotherbodyformyself, transform I ing. instantaneously in advance into an image. ... I feel that the Photograph myself creates mybody or mortifies . . . the Photograph is the advent it of myself other,a cunning dissociation of consciousness from as identity"(10-12). In thispassage, Barthes articulatesthe relation of subject to camera in wayswhich enable us to see whythe camera has survived for almost two centuries as a privilegedfigurationof the
36
Discourse 15.3
the gaze. Like the former, latterconfersidentity onlythroughan exteriorimage which intervenesbetween it and the irreducibly subject. And like the camera, the gaze provides the subject with a specular body at the same time thatit mortifies or her real his Death, in other words,is something that happens to the body. real withinwhich the camera intervenes,as well as to the real thatitcarriesaway.In thisrespect,the photograph resemblesthe screen, which confers identityupon the subject only at the expense of his or her "being." (It should be evidentbynow thatI am imputingto the relation of subject,screen, and gaze a logic which is in excess of the imaginary.As I suggested earlier,the gaze exercises a symbolic function;it representsOtherness withinthe field of vision. The screen, moreover,not only provides the subject witha specular but a meaningful body, one marked by all kinds of differential values. Thus although the relation of subject, screen, and gaze should not be confused withthe relation of subject to signifier, it nevertheless, too - as Barthessuggests induces not onlythe subject'salienationin theimagebuta certain"fading"ofthereal.) Of course I am farfromsuggestingthatthe Algerianwomen whose photographs Bildershows us came into existence as subjects only at the moment that the colonial camera was trained upon them and provided them with a specular image. What is perhaps most immediatelystrikingabout the faces shown by these photographs is how fullyculturallyinscribed they are. Indeed, in several cases those faces are so elaboratelytattooed that it almost seems as though the cultural screen has been onto them,in a literalization thatthree-dimenof directly grafted sional photographyof which Roger Caillois speaks in his essay on mimicry.9 how then are we to understand the "cut inside So the referent"in relation to the Algerian sequence? I would like to propose a two-fold answerto thisquestion, and in so doing to indicate furtherhow the representationallogic of the camera can be both exploited and inflectedby a materialpractice - in thiscase colonialism. Insofaras none of us can ever be said to be fully"inside" either language or the images which define us, each utterance and each specular captation might be said to induce all over again the "fading" of our being. To face the camera/gaze is then alwaysto experience a certain "horror" or "mortification"even as we embrace itsconstitutive effects. However, there is also a way in which the French colonial camera mightbe said to repeat the same drama at anotherlevel,thistime byinstallingitsown screen in place of the Algerian screen. With the the "clicking" of Garanger's camera shutter, latterin effect
Spring1993
37
"fades" away and is replaced by one connoting "femaleness," and "subordinate race." The one "exoticism," "primitivism," emblematized by the veil, must in effect"die" in order image, forthe other to prevail. Justas Bilderis not content merelyto dramatize the disjunction of camera and eye but insistsupon showing as well some material specificationsof that disjuncture,so it not only foregrounds the photograph's memorial function and mortifying effect but drawsattentionto some of the extrinsicuses to which have been put. The filmrepeatedlyfocuses upon the milithey tarydeploymentof the camera as one which literalizesthese two featuresof photography.Thus we learn that Meydenbauer was not only the firstto use the camera for the purpose of scale measurement but that he later "initiated the establishmentof memorial archives,which creates a correlation,in the sense that the military destroyand the curatorsof monuments act to preserve." Later we are shown an extraordinary image of a World War II bomb approaching itstarget, momentbefore the latter's a destruction(figure22) . The voice-over comments,"The preservthe destroyingbomb - these two now press ing photograph, together." Bilderthus suggeststhat the photograph's memorial functionis so closelyimbricatedwithitsmortifying effect thatit becomes the ideal agent forrepresenting thathas fallenunder all the sentence of death.
Figure22
38
Discourse 15.3
The question "How to face a camera" gives rise to a second meditation upon a photographic image of a woman. Because that photograph shows a Jewishprisoner immediatelyafterher and presumablyshortly arrivalin Auschwitz, before her death, it marks the point of conjunction for a literalmemorializaagain tion and mortification. "The camp run bythe SS shall bringher to destructionand the photographerwho captures her beautyis fromthe same SS," observes the voice-over,"How the two elements interplay, preservation and destruction!" As in the the sequence involving Algerianwomen,questions of sexual and racial differenceare also once again complexlyat the forefront of this meditation upon the subject's relation to the camboth bythevoice-over era/gaze. The image whichis interrogated and byFarocki's camera, whichframesit in three different ways, shows in its fullestexposure the figureof a woman in mediumshot,movingin frontof a line ofJewishmen being inspected by a Nazi soldier and wearinga starof David (figure23). She occupies the center of the frameand looks towardthe camera which one of photographs her. Over thisimage, and twoof itsvariants, which positions her on the rightside (figure24) , in a position and diagrams occupied bythe human eyein thevariousdrawings the fieldofvision,thereby her schematizing differentiating look - which organizes the image - fromthe and the other of gaze, which centersher in closeup (figure25) , makingher drama the
Figure23
Spring1993
39
focal point of the photograph, the commentator utters these words: A womanhas arrived Auschwitz; cameracaptures at the her in movement. The photographer his camera installed has and as thewomanpassesbyhe clicksthe shutter in the samewayhe wouldcasta glanceat herin thestreet, because she is beautiful. The womanunderstands how to pose her faceso as to catchtheeyeof thephotographer, how to and a lookwith slight she sideways glance.On a boulevard would at lookin thesameway a shopwindow pasta mancasting just his eye over her,at a shop window, and withthissideways into a worldof bouleglance she seeks to displaceherself Far here. vards, men,and shop windows. from This text is at first shocking in its imputation to the Jewish woman and her Nazi photographer of viewingrelations which we associate with "normality" and which seem unthinkable within a context like Auschwitz.However, one of the primary functions of this sequence is to stress that although the male subject is at mosta privileged"functionary"of the camera/gaze, the latteris defined as a masculine extension through a whole confluence of institutional,discursive, and representational determinants.At least withinthe West,the same determinants posit the female subject as the specular object par excellence.
Figure24
40
Discourse 15.3
Figure25 Givenhow overdeterminedthese relationsare, therewould seem to be no context- even one as givenover to death as Auschwitz - withinwhich theycould not be somehow inscribed. The starof David specularizes theJewishwoman in a second like otherNazi concenwayas well,remindingus thatAuschwitz, tration camps, subjected its inmates to a hyperbolic visibility, strippingthem of theirclothes and possessions and maintaining those who were not immediatelyconsigned to death withinan extenunceasing surveillance.This surveillanceis but a further sion of the ideology of "detection" through which the Nazis attempted to root out theJewishbody fromitsAryan counterwas defined as a compelling parts;withinthisideology,semitism series of visual signifers. At firsteach of these two kinds of visibility would seem to or magnify other.However,as withthe sequence the compound devoted to the identityphotographs, things are not so simple here. The narrativethroughwhich Bilderreads the photograph of theJewishwoman defines the specular relationsby means of whichsexual difference manifests itself withinthe conventionally Western field of vision as a refuge from those implied by Auschwitz.It thereby suggeststhatNazism not onlyplaced theJewish withinthe spectacle,but interposedbetween body hyperbolically
Spring1993
41
it and the gaze a much more profoundlyde-idealizing screen is than thatthroughwhich "femininity" conjured into existence - or, to state the case more precisely, one withoutthe latter's erotic equivocations. Withinthe sequence devoted to theJewishwoman, how one is seen becomes literallya matterof life or death. The critical problem faced by the Auschwitz inmate is how to be "photographed" differently how to motivatethe mobilization thiscrisisin a waythat of another screen. But Bildernarrativizes once again troubles our usual waysof thinkingabout visuality and sexual difference.Because the Jewishwoman attemptsto situateherselfelsewhere,in a world"farfromhere," bysoliciting the male look and the screen of "femininity" (ratherthan - for - asserting her "Germanness"), the realization at instance which the spectator almost inevitablyarrivesby means of the trainof thoughtthissequence setsin motion is thatin a situation like thisracial difference Withinthe preemptssexual difference. context dramatized by the photograph, in other words, the inscriptionof semitismworksto cancel out gender. Bilderthus is suggeststhatthe screen of "femininity" alwaysmore available to certain female subjects than to others. Although we have grown accustomed to thinkingof that screen in terms of the disadvantagesitimposes,italso impliescertainlimitedprivileges,
Figure26
42
Discourse 15.3
and those privilegesmaybe precluded byrace, class, age, nationand other formsof social discrimination. ality, s Audiences are sometimesdisturbednot onlybyBilder' invoin cation of sexual difference the contextofAuschwitzbut byits superimposition of a narrativeupon the image of the Jewish woman. We are invitedto "see" somethingwhich is not "in" the photograph. The voice-overperformsa similarfunctionlater in the film.As we look at a detail fromanother photograph ta:ken by a Nazi camera that shows a closeup of a Jewishgirl standing in an Auschwitzline (figure26) , it remarks:"Among the shaven heads, a girl who smiles. In Auschwitz,apart from death and work,therewas a black market,therewere love storiesand resisfor tance groups." To object to the commentary imputingmeanto these two photographs which was not available to the ing camera, and whichcannot be historically documented, is to overlook another crucial featureofBilder' interrogation thevisual s of field- its discourse upon the human look. 6. The ResistantLook As I indicated earlier,I derive the distinctionbetween the XI gaze and the eye fromLacan. However,Seminar is much more the former than upon the latter.In passing, expansive upon Lacan comments there upon a passage fromSartre's Beingand which suggeststhat it is perhaps most in a keyhole Nothingness thatthe look is likely experience the exteriority the to of position and to feel shame in relationto it (84) . Lacan also proposes gaze that the eye experiences its dislocation fromthe gaze as castration (73). These fewreferencesto the economy of the look led me to propose in Male Subjectivity the at Marginsthat,unlike the the look is withindesire. I also suggestedthatit is inscribed gaze, by lack, withwhose disposition it is centrallyconcerned. While these few remarks still seem to me to touch upon something fundamental about the look, theyconstituteonly the most preliminarybeginning of a definition.However,the textualmatrix which has made possible thisattemptat a historicalspecification of the gaze and itsmore precise differentiation fromthe human also facilitates fullerelaboration of the look. a eye As we have seen, the first the trianglesfromFourFundaof mental what it calls the "image" between the eye Concepts places and the object, indicatingthatour apprehension of the world is While stillinsisting alwaysmediated byrepresentation. upon this mediation, I now want to emphasize more than previouslythe
Spring1993
43
"errant" nature of the look, bywhichI mean not onlyitssuscepto , but tibility mconnaissance itsresistanceto absolute tyranny by the material practices that work to determine how and what it sees. Although it is certainlythe case that human vision always occurs throughthe frameof representation, maynot alwaysbe it so easyto controlwhichframe. Norman Brysonhas eloquently As suggested, "The life of vision is one of endless wanderlust,and in its carnal formthe eye is nothingbut desire."10 Once again Techniques theObserver be used to complican of cate the Lacanian model in productiveways.Crarythere argues against the opposition that is usually maintained between phoon and modernism tography the one hand and late romanticism on the other,an opposition made on the basis of the one's ostensible objectivity and the other's manifest He subjectivity. suggests that both dramatize the dislocation of eye from gaze, but to different ends. In the case ofphotography, separation oflook the fromcamera worksto buttress latter'sclaims to a truthful the and scientific vision. In the case of romanticismand early modernism,the opposite is true;freedfromitsalignmentwiththe optical rooted in apparatuses which define objective vision,and firmly a body which oftenthreatensto overwhelmit,the eye can abandon itsvain project to see what the camera sees and instead see whatitcannot. As Craryputsitin Techniques the , "once of Observer vision became located in the subjectivity the observer, two of intertwinedpaths opened up. One led outward toward all the of and autonomy of vision multiple affirmations the sovereignty derivedfromthe newlyempowered body.. . . The other path was toward the increasing standardization and regulation of the observer that issued from knowledge of the visionary body" (150). But even as I draw once again upon Crary formulation,I 's want to softenthe severity itshistoricaldemarcations.While it of is indisputedlythe case that romanticismand earlymodernism exploit and celebrate subjective vision to a hitherto unprecedented degree, we cannot impute to those movements the inception of that "wanderlust" of which Bryson speaks. If, as I have been arguing,the look has never coincided withthe gaze, although certain optical technologies have worked to deny the distance which separates them,thismeans not only thatthe eye has neverpossessed the mastering and constitutive functionsthat have traditionally been attributed it,and thatit and the body to to which it stubbornly belongs have always been positioned withinspectacle, but thatit has all along possessed the capacity to see otherwisefromand even in contradictionto the gaze. The
44
Discourse 15.3
eye, in other words, is always to some degree resistantto the discourseswhich seek to masterand regulateit,and can even on occasion dramatically oppose the representational logic and material practices which specifyexemplary vision at a given moment in time. The commentator of Bilderrepeatedly associates the look withthe capacityto see thingsthat the camera cannot see. The firstoccasion on which it does so provides a startlingly direct dramatization of Crary's suggestion that late romanticismand modernism celebrate the eye's independence fromthe optical devices which earlier defined it. Coming immediatelyafterthe sequence beginning with the Drer drawing and concluding withthe model's eyeis a sequence showingartstudentssketching female nudes. Although theyare all ostensibly non-perspectival the same model, a black woman, thereis no consistency drawing fromone easel to another.As Bilder ofrepresentation emphasizes when it returnslater to more footage fromthe same modelling not session, each student "sees" somethingdifferent only from other student (figures27-29), but - most dramatically every fromthe camera (figure30) . Moreover,as Bilderinsistsbyfocusing at particularlengthupon the motion of a hand whichrepeatthe edly blurs and shifts outer boundaries of the human formit is in the motion of drawing(figure29) - not onlyas ifto suggest the impossibility fixingthose boundaries foronce and forall of
Figure27
Spring1993
45
Figure28
Figure29
46
Discourse 15.3
but also as ifto inscribethe hesitationsand passions of the drawing hand itself the eyelooks froma vantagewithintemporality and the body. As I have alreadynoted, the commentatoralso distinguishes the eye fromthe camera/gaze in the meditationon theAlgerian thatwhereasthe latter"captures the moment photos bystressing and thus crops awaypast and future,"the formeris capable of puttingthe presentonce again in contactwithwhatwentbefore. "When one looks into the face of an intimate," she observes, "one also brings in something of a shared past." Bilder thus a proposes thatifthe camera/gaze performs memorialfunction, thatis, thatwhereas the the look is allied to memory.It suggests, formercan perhaps bestbe characterizedin termsofarticulation and mortification,the latter accommodates temporalityand change; itapprehends the otherless as a clearlydelineated object than as a complex and constantlyshifting conglomeration of which at all points implicate the self.The commentator images makes thispoint even more forcefully laterin the film. we look As at more of the identity photographsofAlgerianwomen taken by Marc Garanger, she differentiates"the picture of a human being" - bywhich she seems to map out the domain of the eye - fromwhatthe camera can "see" in termsof the instability and she of uncertainty the former'sobject ofvision.Significantly, also
Figure30
Spring1993
47
valorizes the indeterminacyof that "picture" over the determiphotograph: nacy of the identity The police,hereand elsewhere, haveon filephotographs of millions people, criminal of How can thefaceof a suspects. human being be describedwithcertainty thatit can be so recognized everyone? everyone also bya machine. by By a The policearenotyet able toregister How todescribe face? of thecharacteristics a humanfacethatremainthesame,in The police youthand old age, in happinessand in sorrow. does not know of whatitis,thepicture a humanbeing. Bilderelsewhere reiteratesthe connection between the look and recollection,while extendingthe latter'ssemantic range. At one point, as the camera showsus some drawingsbyAlfredKantor,a concentrationcamp survivor(figures31 and 32), the commentator associates the look with what might be called the "memory trace." "AlfredKantor,who survivedthree concentration camps, including Auschwitz,drew these pictures immediatelyafterthe Liberation," she remarks.Some were "based on sketcheskeptbyfellow-prisoners, [but] most [were] based on his own visual imprints." The characterization of the look as an "imprint" emphasizes itsreceptivity, suggestingonce again that it is not only acting but acted upon, and thatwhat it sees is less the object than the markwhichthe perception ofthe latterleaves
Figure31
48
Discourse 15.3
upon the self. To associate the look with memories or visual is withdesire and the imagimprints also to stressitsimbrication or to put the matterslightly its inary, differently, grounding in In TheInterpretation Freud suggeststhatthe Dreams, subjectivity. of flowof perceptions across the psycheleaves memory"traces" or behind. These memorytracesare farfromprovidinga imprints of registration the "rea 1" (see Freud 536-41). As perceptionsflow across the psyche, prior to arrivingat consciousness, they are worked over in all kinds of waysby censorship and fantasy, and thisprocess is a continuingone at the level of memory. Given itsunreliability a gauge of external reality, look as the seem a strangesite at whichto locate resistance,but Bilder might does not hesitate to do so. Late in the film,over a series of concentration camp photographs, the voice-over tells a story which those photographsmanifestly to dramatize.That story fail involves two Auschwitz inmates who escaped from the camp, reached Slovakia, and wrotea reportabout the "final solution." The commentatorremarksupon the riskiness theirenterprise of in termswhich link it directly an embodied, mortal,yetnevto erthelessresistantlook. She first suggestsas a general principle that"it was dangerous to be an eyewitness" eventsatAuschwitz to and then twice characterizes the testimony offeredby the two as "[giving] witness."And once again memorycomes escapees into play in thisspecular revolt;Wexler,the voice-over centrally
Figure32
Spring1993
49
notes, "had worked in the clerical office" of Auschwitz,where he "committed to memorythe date, countryof origin,and the number of the new arrivais." At one point the commentatorstressesthe "factual" nature of the visual imprintsthatcertain concentrationcamp survivors carried awayfromAuschwitz, and hence theircapacityto substitute for photographs. However, almost immediatelyshe foreof grounds once again the incommensurability the formerand the latter.Kan tor's visual imprintsshow a place "which cannot possiblybe conveyedbyphotographic images." They communicate a "truth" which the camera could never capture precisely because it "sees" witha mechanical and decorporealized lens a truthwhich is inseparable fromthe subjectiveand embodied experience of being a Jewishinmate in a Nazi concentration camp. and formal Although this "truth" lacks temporal stability it coherence, and although it cannot be "objectively"verified, is elsewhere shown to provide the basis fora political revolt.Bilder concludes withan account of an uprisingon the part of a group ofAuschwitzinmateswhichresultedin the partial destructionof a crematorium, and it overtlylinks this uprising to its larger disquisition upon spectacle and vision. As the camera focuses numbers,each upon a photograph showinglines of handwritten fromthe othersbya comma (figure33) , thevoice-over separated
Figure33
50
Discourse 15.3
induces us to visualize once again what that apparatus cannot show: "Numbers once again. These numbersare coded messages from Auschwitz prisoners who belonged to a resistantgroup. They set the date foran uprising."A closeup of thisphotograph provides the penultimate image of Bilder(figure34) , and, as it materializes, the commentator links its numbers, like those of which underpin the system perspective,to the production of an image: "Despair, and a heroic courage," she concludes, "made out of these numbers a picture." However,the numbers serving as coded messages for a prisoner revolt have nothing and quantifiwhateverto do withmathematicalsystematization cation; what theypermitus to "see" is somethinginapprehensible by the camera/gaze. As should bynow be evident,the disjunctive and oppositional relation between the camera/gaze and the look is oftenmaterialized in Bilderthrough the disequivalence of word and image. The aerial photograph ofAuschwitz whichwe are shown earlyin the filmhas wordswritten it identifying various buildings on the the camp, buildingswhich remained unidentifiable comprising until theywere recognized by survivors, again characterized as Here the look not only sees what the camera "eyewitnesses." cannot, but imposes new meaning upon the photographs produced by the latter- meanings which cannot be factually but but which are not forthatreason "actualized," onlysubjectively
Figure34
Spring1993
51
Figure35
Figure36
52
Discourse 15.3
as anyless compellingly"true." Similarly, we have seen, the commentatorspeaks "over" the photographsof theAlgerianwomen and theJewishconcentrationcamp inmate,attempting appreto hend and to make us apprehend something the photographs themselves cannot show: the subjective experience of being "inside" those particularbodies, as a camera caught in a particular representationalsystem and embedded in certain material was trainedupon them. In the Algerian sequence, this practices process is taken even furtherthan I have already suggested. Farocki's hand literally reveilsthe face of one Algerian woman 35) as the commentatorsays, "The veil covers mouth, (figure nose and cheeks and leaves the eyes free," and then coversfirst the mouth and nose of anotherwoman (figure36) , and then her eyes (figure 37), as the commentatoradds, "The eyes must be accustomed to meet a strangegaze. The mouth cannot be accustomed to being looked at." The voice-overis thus at moments closely aligned with the look. It articulatesor bears witnessto what the photograph might be said activelyto repress - the corporeal and psychic"reality"of being female and Algerian in a French colonyin 1960, or femaleand Jewishin Germanyin the early 1940s. I hope thatthisreading of Bilder, ; whichhas drawnso liberally both upon JonathanCrary'sTechniques the and of Observer Lacan's Seminar has facilitateda fullerarticulationof the difference XI,
Figure37
Spring1993
53
between the eye and the camera/gaze. I also hope that it has gone some way toward the specification of the intrinsicand extrinsicrelations which constitutethat apparatus which, more than any other,stilldefines the gaze withinWesternculture and hence towarda betterunderstandingof what is both historical and transhistorical withinthe field of vision. Finally,I hope thatthisessayhas managed to demonstrate, the mediation of via Bilder Techniques theObserver, Seminar not only thatthe , ; and XI, of look is withinspectacle and thatit is coerced in all kinds of ways by the material practices and representational logic through which the gaze makes itselffelt,but that it is never purely the effectof those practices and that logic. The disjunction of the eye from the camera/gaze implies not just that it can never but occupy a site of visual mastery, thatit sees in wayswhich are at least implicitly subversiveof the fixity, coherence, and transcendence upon which such mastery depends. Preciselybecause the look is located within desire, temporality, and the body, because it sees through the framesof fantasy and the "moi" it can reanimate and open to change whatthe camera/gaze would both mortify and memorialize. It can consequently provide the locus fora resistantand even transformative vision. The finalshot of Bilder attests to thattransformative precisely created afterthe partial potential.It showsan image ofAuschwitz destructionof crematorium4 (figure38) . Although it is ostensi-
Figure38
54
Discourse 15.3
one of the materialpracblythe product of aerial photography, ticeswhich Bilderhas shown to define the camera/gaze, it is not legible withinthe termsof thatapparatus; it more closelyresembles an abstractpainting than a photograph. Moreover,since it is ultimatelyto this image that the last words spoken by the it commentatorrefer, mightbe said to emerge out of verydifferent numbers than those underpinning perspective - out of those shown in the penultimateshot. Since there is a cause-andeffect logic implicitin thejuxtaposition of thelatter'sink-spotted notations with the photograph of the damaged crematorium, Bildersuggeststhroughit not only the oppositional potential of the look but itscapacityto intervenewithinthe fieldof visionits capacity not merely to see what is inapprehensible to the camera/gaze but to alter what that apparatus "photographs/' The words with which Sally Potter concludes The GoldDiggers mightthusserveas a second epigraph to the "picture" generated by the handwrittennumbers: "I know that even as I look and even as I see, I am changing what is there." Notes "FilmBody"; 3-26;see also de Lauretis 1-36; Williams, Mulvey and The 222-36. Fischer; Flitterman; Silverman, Subject Semiotics of 2 The theorists sutureare Miller25-26;Oudart;Heath, "Notes of on Suture" and "Anato Mo"; Dayan; and Silverman, Subject The of Semiotics 194-236. 3 Comollialso stresses thatthecameraexceeds the eyein "Technique and Ideology"135-36. 4 For an discussion Muybridge's of and interesting photographs, theirbearingupon the issue of photography's ostensible"realism," Hard Core see Williams, 34-48. 5 Martin a discussion the"Jansenist of anxJay provides fascinating ietiesaboutbeingtheobjectoftheothers'look" whichsurface the in theater Racine,anxieties of that suggesting even duringthe Enlightenment"visualserenity" to gavewayat times a disquieting apprehension of theexteriority thegaze. See Downcast of The Eyes: Denigration of Vision Twentieth-Century Thought in French , chaptertwo. 6 See Silverman, MaleSubjectivity 125-56. 7 The Drer in is drawing used, in otherwords, wayswhichare rather different from thoseimpliedbythetext from whichitis taken. 8 For a discussion of photography a mechanical as form reproof see duction, Benjamin. 1 See
Spring1993
55
9 In as e "Mimicryand Legendary Psych th nia," Roger Caillois in as 4 speaksabout mimicry 'a reproduction three-dimensional " space or better solidsand voids:sculpture-photography with (28). teleplasty For a discussionof the uses to whichLacan puts thisessayin Four 148-49. Fundamental , see Concepts myMaleSubjectivity 10This Eyes, Jay passageis quoted by in Downcast chapterthree. WorksCited "The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches Jean-Louis. Baudry, in and of to theImpression Reality Cinema."Trans. JeanAndrews Rosen 286-98. Bertrand Augst. of Apparatus." "IdeologicalEffects theBasicCinematographic Rosen 299-318. Trans.AlanWilliams. on Trans. Roland. Camera Lucida ReflectionsPhotography. Rich: Barthes, ard Howard.NewYork: Hill, 1981. Is Vol. U Bazin,Andr.What Cinema? 1. Trans.Hugh Gray. Berkeley: of California 1967. P, "The Work Artin theAge ofMechanicalReproof Walter. Benjamin, Trans.HarryZohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. duction."Illuminations. NewYork: Schocken,1969.217-51. and Trans. Caillois, John Psychasthenia." Roger."Mimicry Legendary October (1984): 17-32. 31 Shepley. "Machinesof theVisible." TheCinematic Comolli, Jean-Louis. Apparatus.Ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath. New York:St. 1980. 121-42. Martin's, Depth-of"Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Film Reader (1977) : 128-40. Field." Trans.Diana Matias. 2 On and in Jonathan. Techniquesthe of Observer: Vision Modernitythe Crary, MIT P, 1990. Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Dayan, Daniel. "The Tutor-Codeof Classical Cinema." Moviesand Methods. BillNichols. Ed. U P, Berkeley: ofCalifornia 1976.438-51. Teresa.Alice Doesn't: Cinema. de Lauretis, Feminism, Semiotics, Bloomington:Indiana UP, 1984. A Plateaus: and FlixGuattari. Thousand and Deleuze, Gilles, Capitalism Trans. U Minneapolis: ofMinnesota Schizophrenia. BrianMassumi. P, 1987. Ann.Femmes Fatales: Film Doane, Mary Feminism, Theory , Psychoanalysis. 1991. NewYork: Routledge, of Fischer, Lucy."The ImageofWomanas Image:The OpticalPolitics London: Routledge, The Dames Genre: MusicalEd. RickAltman. ." 1981. 70-84.
56
Discourse 15.3
and Desire,and theLook: Feminism the Flitterman, Sandy."Woman, in Enunciative 2.1 Apparatus Cinema." Cin-Tracts (1978): 63-68. a Vilem.TowardsPhilosophy Flusser, Gottingen, of Photography. Germany: 1984. EuropeanPhotography, : and Trans. Foucault,Michel.Discipline Punish TheBirth the of Prison. 1977. Alan Sheridan.NewYork: Pantheon, Vol. 15 of TheStandard Freud,Sigmund.TheInterpretation ofDreams. Freud. and Ed. Works Sigmund Edition the Psychological of of Complete London: Hogarth, 1953. Trans. JamesStrachey. 17.4 (1976/77): 49-66. Heath,Stephen."AnatoMo." Screen 18.4 (1977/78): 48-76. "Noteson Suture."Screen Indiana UP, 1981. Questions Cinema. Bloomington: of in Downcast The Martin. of Eyes: Denigration Vision Twentieth-Century Jay, French Thought. Forthcoming. Four Fundamental Trans. Lacan,Jacques. of ConceptsPsycho-Analysis. Alan 1978. Sheridan.NewYork: Norton, The and Metz,Christian. Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis theCinema. Ben Brewster, Alfred Trans.Celia Britton, and Williams, Annwyl IndianaUP, 1982. Guzzetti. Bloomington: and on Image: Essays Contem"Photography Fetish."TheCritical Ed. CarolSquiers.Seattle:Bay,1990. 155-64. Photography. porary "Suture (Elementsof the Logic of the SigniMiller, Jacques-Alain. 18.4 (1977/78): 24-34. fier)."Screen Pleasures. Indiana UP, Laura. Visualand Other Bloomington: Mulvey, 1989. "A 76 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. Noteon History/Discourse." Edinburgh London: BFI, 1976. 'Avant-Garde. Cinema/ Magazine: Psychoanalysis/ 26-32. "Noteson Suture."Screen 18.4 (1977/78): 35-47. Oudart, Jean-Pierre. New Rosen,Philip,ed. Narrative , Apparatus , Ideology. York:Columbia UP, 1986. at the NewYork:Routledge, Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity Margins. 1992. Oxford TheSubject Semiotics. York: New UP, 1983. of of CinLinda. "FilmBody:An Implantation Perversions." Williams, Tracts A (1981): 19-35. Pleasure Hard Core: Power, , and the of Visible. Berkeley: Frenzy the U of California 1989. P,

What Is A Camera Or, HIstory in The Field of Vision

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

What Is A Camera Or, HIstory in The Field of Vision

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

What Is A Camera Or, HIstory in The Field of Vision

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

What Is a Camera?, or: History in the Field of Vision Author(s): Kaja Silverman Reviewed work(s): Source: Discourse, Vol.

You might also like