J o h n n y G o l d i n g
sometimes, wilder, sensations of attraction, limit, destruction, reason, taste. But most of all, and no matter how different each darkroom might be from the other, they all have one thing in common, one thing that puts them into this realm of the dark: each, in their own way, explicitly colonises the present – makes it inhabitable and, indeed, makes the instant of time itself come alive. There is no abyssal logic or reference to self-reflexive unities so often characterising traditional notions of the “now” as something quite a bit different than the Hegelian reconfiguration of a negative/naught time. Lyotard might put it like this:
(T)his is what you, Western philosophers, understand under the name of reflection: the protracted unfolding, the extended run of concepts, answers, and dramatic actions through which you imagine the mind coming to itself. The slow odyssey you dream of – that the mind returns experienced, and in agreement with itself. Such returns are the law of the (hi)stories, even those (hi) stories that narrate the absence of return. But reflection has nothing to do with them; it is their secret victim. […] Presence is sacrificed in these (hi)stories: holiness. So that, on this expeditious slope, the unthought dominates, as does the lay person, who believes her or himself to be in possession of the reason of her or his life, and of her or his thought, within her/ himself; who believes her or himself to have paid the price by sacrificing her/himself. But the holiness of the instant never
finds reparation in a sacrificial (hi)story.1
Instead, each of these darkroom spatialities mentioned above work off the collapse of the past and the future into an immediate intensity that draws together, and indeed swallows up, subject, object, anything in between or in its path; swallowed all up into a black-hole cogito, a black-hole cogito dot of a “being-there”, right here, right now. Let’s unpack this last remark. In saying “a black-hole cogito dot of a being-there, right here, right now,” I mean that all the expertise(s), curiosities, wonderments and so on, specific to each spatiality as named above, creates a bond – let’s say it’s something akin to a “magnetic” attraction with rough-edged consequences; that is to say,
consequences emerging out of something quite different than rational/ logical deduction. In this case, that is to say, in “the darkroom” case, one is not only “in the moment”, one is the moment. But there is more: for this “self” in that darkroom is not some kind of homogeneous
Sherlock Holmes in search of the Truth; nor is it necessarily a “room” with discreet boundaries (like walls and floors and ceiling wax). Rather, it is a multiplicity/slice-fragment of self, fastening onto what lies to hand, where the fastening (as it were), not to mention the “that which lies to hand” is couched (Heidegger might say, “enframed”) precisely by a double-helix set of relations.
This “double-helix set” is, on the one hand, coloured by one’s actual abilities, established, say, through discipline, knowledge- practice; (i.e., being good at your trade: be it art, sex, rock n roll). It is created on the other, by the spatial-temporality of a “being-there- interior” (i.e. the darkroom itself), kitted out with well-chosen (or at any rate, more or less chosen) tools of that trade, ingredients including the smells, sounds and contours of the odd-bod materialities inadvertently or otherwise laying to hand. This heady, volatile mix, creates a “coincidence” in the strongest sense of the word to “co-inside” and, in so doing, drags the spectator-subject-fractal-sliced-
self into the mix, the “being-there-interiority” mix, simultaneously, violently, brilliantly, instantaneously, penetrating that “cogito-fractal-
self” and, immediately also, being penetrated by it.2 It sets up what
Jean Luc Nancy calls a “contagion”, a “viral attraction” of distance and withdrawal alongside an immediacy (of intensity), a present/ing
that creates, to quote Nancy, “a force that forces form to touch itself”.3
And what is this ‘force that forces [makes/compels/demands] form to touch itself’ (in the fullest, sensuous, masturbatory meaning of “touching oneself”)? It is nothing more nor less, than a radical intensity, an immediacy shot through (and with), indeed “corrupted” by, the senses.
Let’s try it again: And what is this ‘force that forces [makes/ compels/demands] form to touch itself: it is the attraction (erotic, curious, hungry, chemical) of a cogito dot of a “being-there-
interiority” right now, able to touch itself, whilst simultaneously able to dis-appear (as in to disjunctively take a step apart, create a distance all the while – durationally-touching, in the fullest sense to lick, to penetrate and be penetrated, apart and yet together). An odd kind of “black-hole” aesthetics, this ontologically productive, substantive, sensuous (forced to touch and be touched) cogito, both dis-appearing and, simultaneously, re-presenting “itself” – not as a “model” or as a “representation” – but as radical intensity. This “radical intensity” is so
named because in this carnal dance of touch-and-be-touched surface interiorities, a kind of plural or multiply dimensional materiality – an ana-materiality – neither real nor unreal, neither time stamped but
completely temporal, is made manifest. The “thing” (das Ding) that is made manifest has a very common name: image. Thus, and as Jean-Luc Nancy neatly summarises in his The Ground of the Image:
‘Cogito es imago’.4
And now, it gets worse (or perhaps it gets better). But for better (or for worse), three points follow from this claim: First: one begins to “see” that the “image”, not to mention cogito (both “the mind’s eye” and the cogito-dot of a being-there-interiority) is, to echo the work of Henry Rogers in his The Words I thought I Saw, and to
paraphrase Nancy: the image is neither world nor language.5 It is a
surface that eats and is eaten by this double dance, emboldened by darkroom aesthetics. Cogito es imago. Second: because this “cogito = image”, this “visual-thing”, is “forced to force form to touch itself”, it leaps out of the realm of the Hegelian “idea” to establish at the very instant of its “coming to presence” the “holy” – in the sense of the word “sacred”; that is, something able to “stand apart” whilst being
“together”.6 Third and final: the image, which “stands apart whilst
being-there” does not embolden or inhabit identity – or indeed have anything to do with identity. For this “standing apart, whilst standing together” touching, penetrated/penetrating etc., is not the same as the rather infamous Heideggerian restatement of the A = A identity equation, whereby the emphasis is placed on the “=” connecting A
to itself.7 It is not about a Heideggerian “belonging” (or, indeed, any
belonging) nor is it forming a totalised unity sutured and cohered via a thesis/antithesis sublation. For its very presence, the presence of “image” is precisely and nothing other than radical connectedness, radical sur-face self-coincidence, the fatal attraction of black-hole darkrooms, embodying/dis-robing the senses themselves in all their fractal iterative roughness. A “dis-identity”. Over to Jean-Luc:
In coming to the fore [the image] goes within. But it’s “within” is not anything other than its “fore”: its ontological content is sur-face, ex-position, ex-pression. The surface, here, is not relative to a spectator facing it: it is the site of a concentration in co-incidence. That is why it has no model [and that is why it makes no sense to speak of it in terms of “representation” “semiotics” or even dialectical materialism, not to mention “social agency”]. Its model is in it; it is its “idea” or its energy. It
is an idea that is energy, a pressure, traction and an attraction of sameness. Not an “idea” ([in the Hegelian sense as] idea or eidolon), which is an intelligible form, but a force that
forces form to touch itself. If the spectator remains across from it, facing it, that spectator [self – she who stands in front and “rationalises” the image] sees only a disjunction between resemblance and dissimilarity. [But] If she enters into this self-coincidence, then she enters into the image, [she] no longer looks at it – though [she] does not cease to be in front of it. [He or She] penetrates it, is penetrated by it: by it, its distance and its distinction, at the same time. […]One could say that the image – neither world nor language – is a “real presence”. […] This presence is a sacred intimacy that a fragment of matter gives to be taken in and absorbed. It is a real presence because it is a contagious presence, participating and participated, communication and communicated in the distinction of its intimacy… But in this way, it does not exist, it is there. Sense exists, or rather, it is the movement and flight of exiting: of ex-ire, of going outside oneself, exceeding, exiling. Sense
essentially disidentifies.8
We have travelled on the “there” of sense and sensualities, a complicated journey of image and imagination. Perhaps now, Heidegger’s well-worn phrase ‘technology has nothing to do with the technological’, may begin to make more sense, especially now when it comes to the discussion of photography, the digital, the human being (or any other kind of being) – and the image. Analogue or digital technological advancement/enhancement is not really the issue. But neither is it about a “logic of techné” nor a poetic per se (that is, a logic relying on the ability to grasp an “out there” (Dasein) to create that “relation” of “little b: being/entity” to “Big B: Being” in all its
glorious folds, dwellings and onto-theo-logics).9 In fact we can go
one lateral step further: the “gathering” is far more wildly libidinal, far more electric, far more uncertain, more jagged and though it is has its logic, it is without a necessary “rationality”. Indeed, it is radically uncertain, whilst being iteratively “connected” in the carnal- knowledge cogito sense of the senses.
Dirty, dirty: those darkrooms of life, those fractalities of sonorous, sensuous image/ing.
As is well known, Baudelaire was very worried about photography. He thought (rightly) that it had a “common” alliance with “the people” (which he called “the mob”) and, just like the mob, photography, since its birth, has just refused to “know its place”. Like a rusty old school master admonishing an unruly pupil, Baudelaire tut-tutted his fears:
If photography is permitted to supplement some of art’s functions, they will forthwith be usurped and corrupted by it, thanks to photography’s natural alliance with the mob. It must therefore revert to its proper duty, which is to serve
as the handmaiden of science and the arts.10
How upset would he be, were he alive today! For not only has photography gone and corrupted art; it has corrupted the very bastion of civilization: philosophy.
Notes
1. Jean-Françoise Lyotard, “La Presence/Presence,” in his
Que peindre? Adami, Arakawa, Buren / What to Paint? Adami, Arakawa, Buren, translated by Antony Hudek, Vlad Ionescu and Peter W. Milne, (Leuven University Press: 2013), Vol. 5, 144-145. Emphasis mine.
2. The use of the word fractal is not standing-in for “fraction”, the
latter of which implies being a segment of a whole or totality; the former implying being a “splice” without necessarily invoking (or being dependent upon) a bounded unity. This point, which draws a rather different “picture” than that of the kind fragment Jean-Luc Nancy and others will come to rely upon, will be developed later in the argument. But for the concept of fractal as that which algorithmically conceptualises “roughness,” see Benoît Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1983), espe- cially Parts i-iii, 1-83. For an account of the recursivity of ‘roughness’ for the less mathematically inclined see Mandelbrot’s, The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012). For a thoroughly enjoyable romp through the fractalist forests of science and of light, see Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, Will Rood & Ralph Edney, Introducing Fractals: A Graphic Guide, (London: Icon Books, 2009).
3. Jean-Luc Nancy, in his The Ground of the Image, translated by
Jeff Fort, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy Series, (New York: Fordham, 2005).
4. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 8-9. For a detailed elaboration
of Jean-Luc Nancy’s significant revision of Heidegger’s concept of the “thing” (das Ding), see Nancy, Being Singular Plural, translated by Robert Richardson and Anne O’Brien as part of the series, Cross- ing Aesthetics, (Stanford: Standford University Press, 2000), especially Chapter 1: Of Being Singular Plural, 1-100. See also Simon Critchley, “With Being-With? Notes on Jean-Luc Nancy’s Rewriting of Being and
Time, in spp, Vol. 1, No. 1, 53-67, available at http://after1968.org/app/ webroot/uploads/critchley-nancy-singulier.pdf. [accessed 23/05/2013]. For Heidegger’s initial development of das Ding, see his, ‘Lecture given at the Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen on June 6, 1950’, printed in the Jahrbuch der Akademie, Band I, Gestalt und Gedanke 1951, 128ff.
5. Henry Rogers, ‘The Words I thought I Saw’, in Rogers (ed), I See
What You’re Saying (Birmingham: ikon Books, 2013), 7-19.
6. Lyotard, Que peindre?/What to Paint?, 127ff.
7. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, translated by Joan Stambaugh, (New York: Harper and Row/Harper Torch Books, 1969), 23-42. But see especially where he writes: ‘The formula A=A speaks of equality. It doesn’t define A as the same. […] But that unity is by no means the stale emptiness of that which, in itself without relation, persists in monotony. […] For the proposition really says: “A is A.” What do we hear? With this “is,” the principle of identity speaks of the Being of beings. As a law of thought, the principle is valid only insofar as it is a principle of Being that reads: To every being as such there belongs identity, the unity with itself.’ 24, 26, respectively.
8. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 9-10 and 68, respectively. 9. For a snapshot sense of techne as linked to poetics, see Heidegger’s
well known ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by W. Lovitt, (New York: Harper & Row, 1977, 3-35. For a more detailed argument, see his ‘The Thinker as Poet’, and ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’, in Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 1-14 and 15-86, respectively.
10. August Baudelaire, Salon O (1865), as quoted by Walter
Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, in his The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media,
edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin; translated by Edmund Jepchott, et al., (Cambridge, ma: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2008), 294.