Photography, the Body and the Archive

We can use Freud and Foucault, introduced in last week’s readings, to help us understand this week’s topic: “how the law of the archive has been inscribed in the definition of the document and the body.” Benjamin and Derrida expand on Freud while Ricouer and Sekula exemplify Foucault.

Benjamin uses Freudian analogies in describing the optical unconscious that is revealed to us in photos just as the instinctual unconscious comes through in psychoanalysis.
He says we assume there is some truth that will be revealed to us about the “here and now” the moment captured in the photograph. I remember the first time I saw a daguerrotype up close and in person. It was such a small, fragile thing in a metal case, meant to be held in your hand. Viewing it was an intimate experience, one on one, like a session with a psychoanalyst. I had to catch the light at just the right angle to make the image appear. Once all the details came into view I was mesmerized. Some people believed that the subject in the image could actually see the viewer. Others refused to have their photos taken for fear that a part of themselves would be lost and trapped in the photographic image. I could understand these impressions. I felt as if the person I was looking at was about to take a breath and speak to me. There was a definite aura about the image, its uniqueness and immediacy was evident. I looked up old photos by Eugene Atget to understand what Benjamin meant by his description of Atget’s photos as “cleared out like a lodging that has not yet found a new tenant.” He goes on to say this set the stage for the separation of the object from its aura, of man from his surroundings in Surrealist photography giving “free play” to the politically educated eye.

My own experience with both the daguerrotype and Atget’s photos was that I was transported to a space of contemplation described by the German philosopher Schiller as “free play” before we abstract, objectify or use the image for some other purpose.

This brings me to the application of Foucault’s theories in Sekula’s description of how the photography became an instrument in the creation of a 19th century discourse of criminology. Physiognomy becomes destiny as the bourgeoisie congratulate themselves on their superiority over those inferior criminal types who could be distinguished by their appearance. The perpetrators of crimes (often poor and socially inferior) could be blamed for their own behavior. (Although Farnham was interested in rehabilitating those criminals who were seen as redeemable turning them into useful citizens within a patriarchal social structure.) Physiognomy and phrenology help form the archive of photos of types that they claim to interpret. Photographs are describes as exchangeable and interchangeable-like paper currency. A photo could be isolated to demonstrate its representation of a criminal type- or to demonstrate racial inferiority. Joseph T. Zealy’s daguerrotypes of African American slaves in S. Carolina, commissioned by scientist Louis Agassiz in 1850 to show their affinity with lower forms of life (seen in Carrie Mae Weem’s work) are heartbreakingly poignant because what really comes across is their humanity.

Ricouer cautions against the tendency to see data within a database as superior to documents within an archive if we think that this would move us beyond the ideological uses and intentions of information by those in power. Like Agamben, he supports returning the individual to the center of the discourse on the use of the archive. Even if any trace left in the past can become evidence to be used by historians to support any chosen theory or narrative, he contends (and I agree) that “As soon as the idea of a debt to the dead, to people of flesh and blood to whom something really happened in the past, stops giving documentary research its highest end, history loses its meaning.”

Derrida’s riff on Freud’s death drive and the archival impulse reminded me of Boltanski’s and Kabokov’s descriptions of fighting the erasure of human existence through death by accumulating material evidence of our lives. What comes to mind for me are opposing forces working simultaneously: one building toward unity and cohesion, the other dismantling this effort. Derrida describes the death drive so poetically: it is mute, it doesn’t leave a trace of itself unless it is disguised as lovely impressions or memories of death and it threatens to annihilate the archive. It is “archive fever!”