Primary
Translated by Gaspard Lefaises
Who would you sit next to on a long journey? I mean if you could pick anyone. Anyone alive that is, and a real person. My choice would be Dr Tovar, Professor Emeritus Transgalactus, without a doubt. He can visualise in dimensions that no one else can. And the way he uses Primary – I would do anything for that skill. I have watched hours and hours of his ideas – shame they are all months old. I always I start to feel nauseous from the bad system updates of the recordings. But I can’t stop watching. He is the reason why I started studying the Primary language in the first place. I only wish he would have presented more ideas so that there would be more to see. Or what if really old stuff were still available, like months2 or something archived? Where are those archives? I think I have spent half of my short life watching Tovar and feeling gravity-sick. You know the feeling when you gone from space to terrestrial life and your body has still not adjusted? How does the visual do that to you?
Anyway, there is a little red light on top of the seat next to me. It has been reserved by someone. As I sit here day-dreaming about having a proximate, vivid conversation with professor Tovar, I enjoy watching all the women, men and vemen enter the shuttle. There’s all sorts in this orderly society we live in – just enough variety to make sense and keep it interesting. I spot a dark-haired vemen. Her eyes are large and curious. She is amused about something and seems to be trying to hide it, which only makes her sexier. She walks up the aisle towards me. Shit! Here we go, starting to squirm in my chair. I really do not want to feel like this for three solid hours. Why does it happen? Just then a short, bald and chubby man slides his impressive rump on to the seat next to me. Problem solved. He has a long beard. And I mean long, and it seems to be hanging from his chin. Doesn’t he know how unhygienic beards are? He reeks – must have eaten at one of those illegal street kitchens that everyone knows about but no one has ever been too. Which is odd, since they are always packed with customers.
“You are a recorder,” the man says.
It is not a question but a statement. He obviously has seen the recorder next to my seat. I grunt and don’t bother to answer. What could this uneducated old man know about the great philosophy of Primary?
The old man, still looking at me: “I know some things about the Primary as well,” he says.
All I can think is ‘Shit!’ This is going to be a long ride. Now he is going to show me his recordings in Primary and ask what I think about them. Everyone is a recorder, now. Or maybe he is one of those idiots who thinks that making recordings in Primary is some kind of art. He’ll probably ask if me to make his recording. I hate when people do that. They always think that the recording will miraculously make them look better than they actually do. If you are ugly, you also record ugly. I am not a fracking magician, I simply make recordings of visualisations. And that is it. Why is he still looking at me? I mutter some syllables in the Secondary language. He lifts his eyebrows, which makes the skin on his skull wrinkle in an odd way. His posture changes too; it now looks like he wants to challenge me.
“Do you think doing Primary is art?” he asks, almost too excited to hear the answer, babbling away like a stroboscopic light I wish I could switch off.
What is this guy doing? Saying the A-world aloud? I don’t want to be questioned upon arrival. And a debate about Primary is clearly not a something someone like him could handle. Still, there is something familiar in him I cannot pinpoint. Whatever. I know how to silence him.
“Well according to an ancient Earth scholar, Jean-Marie Arouet de Foucault, there is no such thing as the author. I believe your idea about art comes from this old, false notion of authorship. For that reason it is more meaningful to look at content, and since Primary language is transparent it is rather easy to do.” I say.
“Yes, Michel Foucault thought that it is not the artist we should concentrate on, but rather on the world that creates that artist. But that really takes away the voice of the artist and gives it to academics. So, as I was saying earlier, I can see you are a recorder. Are you an artist or not?” the old guy insists.
What the 3-E!?. What does he mean? Who is this guy? Art is something no creature should talk about.
T: Are you going to answer my question?
J: I see no purpose to your question other than breaking the law. Let me redirect it. Do you agree or not that Primary is transparent?
T: Interesting.
J: And?
T: Well, if Primary is the medium through which you communicate, as people used to do with the Secondary language, then the answer is yes.
J: Then you admit I am right!
T: Yes, but there is nothing particularly amazing or glamorous about that. I mean about primary being transparent when considered a communication medium. The scholars think so, of course, but their job is to place dye in the water the fish swims in, so as to see it. It’s helpful to scholars, but doesn’t do the fish much good.
J: So according to you transparency is cloudy? That’s clear. The point is that you look through the Primary language in search of something else, and all that is there is the world itself. Everyone has this pathetic urge to see something in the recordings that is not really there. They want some kind of expressive recording of themselves, but it’s just them experienced through Primary. People desperately want to believe that there are some great mysteries - in themselves and out there in the worlds. Like some still believe that being recorded by Seven Studios is like being blessed with some sacred oil.
T: So it is objective?
J: At least in ways the Secondary language was not capable of. Primary can show multiple dimensions and past and future version of the present. Thanks to it, we see lines of sight and lateral possibilities, not just the illusion of things. We see what is real.
It would be so weird if we could only visualise the present moment? That would be like living seeing only the shadows of the real world.
T: When one tries to compare Primary to reality, one always comes to the question of what reality or truth is. Primary is just the illusion of things because you cannot feel it, touch it, smell it, taste it.
J: Yet.
T: And I suppose you also think it is the most democratic medium to date because anyone can do it?
J: Well, at least most of us have the third eye (3-E) living on our tongues to enable us to visualise our thoughts. Without it we could not communicate with each other very well or with vemen at all. Sure, there are some of us who can still make some archaic sound waves, but no one would know what we were visualizing.
And no-one would want to know either. Sound hurts.
T: That’s the point. Primary has completely changed how we think and communicate forever. People used to use their ears for more than just balance. People used to talk and write. Those skills have totally degenerated because of the symbiotic relationship with 3-E. If your 3-E were to suddenly go on a strike, you would be completely blind. You would not even understand the three dimensional images that your normal eyes in theory can grasp.
J: Yeah, yeah, there is no use crying about what has changed – there is purpose now.
T: On the subject of purpose, have you never asked yourself how we came to have a shift in language? How what we call the Primary language came to be so? Why it was universally adopted and taught, unlike what you might call its clumsy subjective antecedents?
J: Haven’t we just been through that? We have a symbiotic relationship that makes it possible.
T: Quite right. But that hasn’t always been the case. Have you never asked yourself how it came about?
Such a mistake talking to this guy. Who is he anyway?
J: No, not really, it’s how we evolved.
T: Yes, of course, I am not asking you to rewrite natural history. Rather, I am asking you to consider the cultural history that’s resulted from it. Our belief in purpose.
J: Purpose is not a belief. It is a fact. Check with the IPA.
T: Facts change. Do you know how different our screen memories used to be? Think about the fact that the natural memory and artificial memory were once separate things. Can you visualise that? Don’t you think it is important to consider how we have changed as species as a result?
J: We can see everything now, we don’t need to consider or remember, which means put back together. We need to work on meaningful things that serve a definite purpose. I’m not interested in doing the opposite. So what is the point? We are better than people in the past were. Lucky us.
T: That is not the point. Nor do I agree. The point is that we still need to focus and exclude. Using Primary is always a question of cropping. The whole galaxy does not fit into a single visualisation.
J: Well of course not. That is an obvious point.
He’s right but surely he hasn’t read Professor Tovar’s thesis, On Primary. “The recording of reality must always hide more than it discloses….Only that which narrates can make us understand.
T: Which is why it is often overlooked.
What does he mean? Am I seeing wrong or is he fiddling with his 3-E? I did not that was possible. Why is he putting his finger in his mouth. He is using his finger to…?
T: Have you ever felt like you were not in control of your imagination? Have you ever wondered why? Have you ever recorded by mistake, and been glad that you did?
J: Yes...why?
T: Because you have to go back to the origin of things, to make the obvious appear.
I don’t see where he is going with this. What does he really mean? Does any of this make any sense?
J: What do you mean?
T: Accidents. They are what take us forward.
J: No, purpose does: choices, work, skill.
T: Those things equate to conventional practice. Accidents permit you to fall outside that practice space. When chance is permitted you get what they used to call translation, which is moving from one side to another. And something you could never have planned for happens though your plan was not without purpose.
J: OK.
Fine, I’m listening.
T: We have not discovered purpose as truth because we are better than people in the past. We are just different so we have different beliefs. That is why purpose will cease to be truth in the future once is replaced by purposes and truths that will lead us in new unforeseen directions.
J: What you are saying is illegal and impossible!
T: I am only trying to point out that we have revealed the truth of purpose because of the type of people we are, a case which in turn is determined largely by the type of language we use. We are different from our ancestors because of the evolution we have undergone with 3-E. The physical difference is obvious, as are the technological advances it brings. But we must also consider how each of those differences has changed the type of meanings we believe in and operate according to.
J: And the point being?
T: Well, for example, the old names for the Primary language indicate what a different world the founders of Primary were living in. We no longer talk or think about writing anymore. But they did obsessively. The change happened because we are a civilization of the image. So just as their mental activity and professional lives were caught up with the tools they used to model and communicate thoughts, our job is to analyse, correct, critique…this supposedly empty, transparent thing which is not really there.
J: OK, good. We are back to transparency.
Finally!
T: But what would you say to those who might agree that the language, when taken as a tool and practice, is transparent, but its uses are anything but transparent, or disinterested and objective? For example the visualisation records of the ISA.
J: You mean the language is not objective so much as a tool used to objectify, as some have claimed. That is no doubt true, but even the most ancient primary languages were guilty of that as well. So it is not an inherent characteristic of the language. It is not a flaw, as people like you always claim in the interest of maintaining what little power remains to the analysis of ancient eyes and tongues. No, clearly power is the issue, not objectification.
T: What if I said, as many have, that the language does not objectify, it is the object itself, freed of the constraints of time and space?
J: So Primary is not a tool to make objects, but an object itself? Fine, but if it is freed from time and space it fails to meet the fundamental conditions for existence in the known universe. It’s a fairy tale.
T: Yes, it’s an absurd position to take. A narrative. As are most things we do. At least we can agree on that. But let’s get back to the language as a tool in the hands of various historical and contemporary hegemonies and vested interest groups. It’s hard to argue with the fact that this or any other language we can think of has and will be used by those in power to maintain their position through the oppression of others and the suppression of inconvenient ideas.
J: You are switching back and forth between a transparent tool and the object itself, so which one is it?
I need to release, tell me the answer already. There is a research saying that people make better and decisions when they really need to release. I don’t think it applies to me.
T: There is the mechanical argument, that 3-E has replaced skill and knowledge together with intuition and spontaneity.
J: Yes, our symbiosis. Are we going anywhere with this, ever?
I really need to release, but I don’t want him to think that he has won the argument.
T: The mechanistic argument is easily toppled with one word: specificity. As soon as you look at the many specific ways in which Primary is put to use by professionals and amateurs alike, you realize that you are really talking about a collection of numerous practices and technologies.
J: So? I am a recorder, remember? That’s old news to me.
T: Yes, people’s jobs matter. It was the academics who defined the Primary language in the first place, and they did it by using the Secondary language. And these academics had only amateur knowledge of Primary. It is like dancing to show a structure of a building or pissing an image. Not necessarily bad, but not good enough on its own. So the Primary has never been used to define itself.
J: So what?
My bladder is full. I wish I could piss an image. One drop more. Could it explode? Will my bits go with it in the blast?
T: And that is the point I’ve been trying to get at.
What point? Me releasing? Yes, like a roaring waterfall….
T: Specific practices need unpacking in order to reveal the diversity and complexity of the many forms of use from which this so called Primary language is comprised. In other words we need to study what you and your peers do with recordings and how you do it.
J: So called! So now you wouldn’t even call it a language? What would you call it?
T: Unma(h)lerlich- It’s a nice term. I really like how the 3-E makes it appear. Simple and elegant. It implies that Primary is not a primitive task master that enslaves people to mixing and brushing viscous liquids on to bits of cloth and wood over the course of several months to create bad imitations of the world. As they used to do in ancient times. I have seen it via the interface of old archives. It was called something like ‘painterly’. It distances itself from such soiled origins, but it does not hide them. The term says at once what a primary recording is and is not, what it was and what it has become. But I suppose I am always too lyrical and verbose for the academic world’s laws of purpose. Maybe Eidos, the name for this great gift of our times, is more suitable. That would be noble, mystical and a bit romantic. No, that won’t do, come to think of it. I’ve heard younglings call vemen’s sexual organs ‘keidos’. Too easy to mix-up. Although there would something nicely phallic about that. Something that considers Primary as a universal data model communication device....
I just stare at the man. What is this monologue? Who cares what term one uses when visualizing the Primary itself? And, anyway, it already has a definition: Primary. Call it something else and it is still going be the same thing. Maybe his 3-E is intoxicated or something. His visualizing is starting to make me nauseous. He probably wouldn’t even notice if I just went to have a release. Maybe I could just get up.
T: Or perhaps you’d prefer the name: Perceptio – the idea that documentation is all there is. The language sets us free by recording what is there; thoughts are no different from matter in that respect. But that would be as stupid as calling it the Primary language. The commercial recorders would like to call it Total freedom, to imply a kind of universality without burden or responsibility making clear that you can do anything and everything with it. But we are clearly not just talking about ‘click the button and we’ll do the rest’, so it is out of the question, and their sense of freedom is well…completely utopic.
Silence would be utopia at this point.
On the other hand the Primary language’s origins could also be defined as an uncoded message, a sort of Cod-ex – so why not call it that? This is a presence. Without these two elements the visualisation it is insignificant. A visualisation is surprising when one does not know why it was taken. In the end who knows what Primary actually is? A fantasy machine? Like guns and cars, recorders are fantasy machines whose use is addictive. Maybe I am just holding the leg of an elephant and other blind people are senselessly pawing the stomach and ears of the creature. Even my 3-E might view it differently, and they might as well be controlling the world, as science fiction stories suggest.
Ok, Now I am going to go release. He is way more senile than I thought. He wants the impossible. Why don’t we just make a map of the entire world on a scale of 1:1. Although how do I know that is not already happening? I need to release 1:1.
T: Wait! May world in its worlding be the nearest of all nearing that nears, as it brings the truth of Being near to man’s essence, and so gives man to belong to the disclosing bringing-to-pass that is a bringing into its own.
J: That is totally meaningless.
Oddly, there were some familiar words in that sentence, but...
T: Makes it no less true.
J: You are completely off topic, and clearly insane, proving with every word why Primary is in need of scholarship to assign meaning to it. And not some supposed artistic insight! Which I don’t even like to mention aloud in case someone overhears us. The central point here is, simply, whether or not in its current use and form, the Primary language remains a message without a code, of the world.
T: Which is the point: to problematize and through doing so reveal.
J: I hope you are not going to explain how that offensive A-word, which as you know is an illegal position according to the law of purpose, somehow refers to superior beings.” What about embodiment? Does that mean nothing to you? The Primary language spread because the only thing you need for it is a 3-E, which everyone has. That achieved, it was democratized. You didn’t have to be especially skilled or powerful like an athlete to make use of it. Does that fact mean nothing, then?
T: “Perhaps if singers banded together in sufficient numbers, they could convince musicians that the sounds they produced through their machines could not be art because of the essentially mechanical nature of their instruments."
J: So you’ve memorized that one too. Now who is putting the Primary language to extensive and sophisticated use?
T: Impressed?
J: Shocked. I presumed you wouldn't consider Primary a language, based on all you've said.
T: That’s true. I don’t agree with the term or it’s definition. Not historically or it is current use. What difference does it make that things have moved from flat to sculptural? Still to mobile? There are more important issues at stake.
J: What difference does it make? You've been carrying on about medium specificity and now you say what difference does it make! As Professor Tovar put it in the last seminar I saw…it went something like: “If visualisation is to be understood as a medium always and deliberately productive of meaning in the same sense as books in the old days, this will require a rich and thorough understanding of the myriad decisions that precede the production of the visualisation, ranging from the conceptual and obtuse to the mundane and pragmatic.”
T: That’s it, word for word.
J: And? Suddenly it doesn’t matter who does what or to what effect?
T: You are quite right. It matters a great deal, in fact. I would go so far as to say “a study of Primary could be conducted through investigating the key institutions that use it… The sociological anatomy of these institutions might reveal the systems by which these objects are produced, the arteries of power and decision making, or even the creative space that artists are supposed to occupy.”
J: Again, nice Tovar quote. But what are you getting at?
T: Binary Oppositions. We are so fond of creating them that we don’t even see they are nothing more than a heuristic device, a convenience. I am not saying there are none: black/white, hot/cold, up/down… but if you stop to think of it even those simple divisions can each be broken down into shades or degrees of separation.
J: It makes things less complicated. Things are easier to grasp when there are only two options and not two thousand. If one would always take into account all possible possibilities decision could never be made. There is a purpose in binary oppositions.
T: Yes, but it’s also a dangerous way of controlling the truth.
J: How?
T: By oversimplifying.
J: Making decisions is oversimplifying?
T: It’s also a way of lying. All binary oppositions can be shown to be false. And then there are the categorical fallacies, for example, that someone can’t be both sexy and smart. That is not binary opposition at all, just a commonplace based on prejudice and stupidity.
J: Why does any of this matter?
T: Because what you see depends very much on what you are looking for and how you measure it. Reality has to do with your default beliefs and the questions you ask.
J: Aren’t you creating your own binary opposition: your beliefs against mine? Me and you. These oppositions are unavoidable.
T: No, what you see as your argument versus mine is false, as I believe both are parts of a larger whole. The only fact I am aware of is that everyone is in the world, even the so-called hegemonies that pull the strings.
J: So nothing matters and everything is just perspectival. Great. Another dead-end.
T: No, because it means you start looking less at things and more at practices. The definition and canalization of Primary by forms of power is one of those practices we can look at. But why must one stop there? Why not also apply the same critical eye to beliefs and artefacts?
J: Then do it, don’t just whine. What are you waiting for?
T: Our arrival.
J: Then you haven’t long to wait. Unlike me. But answer me this, why do you insist upon being so purposeless? If you would just adopt the spirit of the times, let yourself be a part of something instead of remaining apart, you might find you enjoy the results.
T: What is your position?
J: Mine? The only tenable one, of course.
T: Which is?
J: As if you didn’t know. Purpose. Purpose is meaning and meaning is purpose. Without purpose there is no progress. Without it you are working in the dark.
T: So is there no place for the purposeless? What was it someone once said? “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless."
J: Never heard it. Who said that?
T: I forget.
J: I am off to the toilet.
Translator’s note: It is believed this neologism operates on two levels simultaneously as indicated by the brackets around the letter a. With the letter excluded, the word might mean something like ‘not-painterly’ as is attested by the subsequent dialogue. However, the inclusion of the letter is something of mystery; it is possible to presume the speaker was referring to an ancient musician of the same name, though what in turn that would signify is too open ended for meaningful conjecture.
Translator’s note: Painting is an art of arrangement. Every relation between forms in a painting is to some degree adaptable to the painter’s purpose.
Translator’s note: What we now call visualisation or Primary language was been identified by a succession of terms through history, such as: photography, image making, videography, painting, sculpting, drawing and writing. These early stages of visualisation differ from our own in technique, technology and scope; thus, they should not be regarded as entirely the same as our present day language.
Translator’s note: The IPA was the Intergalatic Primary Agency. The speaker is referring to a paper presented at the 26th conference on Primary which states: A computational picture language similar to the primary language of today has existed in the past. The universal language of Babylon was a graphic pictorial Hieroglyphic language of Egypt. It was a mechanical language infinitely reproducible with limitless iterations which spoke its people with ever-greater harmony and clarity the more they spoke it. Upon the political dissolution of Babylon the universal language fragmented. During that period, there were several inroads towards our current state of purpose. The first the work of Ramon Llull, particularly the Ars Generalis Ultima (1305 in the Gregorian Calendar). The basic elements of his Characteristica would be pictographic characters representing unambiguously a limited number of elementary concepts. Leibniz was next great link in the chain between man then and pur-son now, from whom the term "alphabet of human thought” comes. The primary language, has been developed to the point that it is automatic, transparent and universal. Hence it provides the medium for an alphabet of human thought.
Interstitial
Translators note: This is the journal entry of a conversation abandoned in the Fog. It was recorded on Primary whilst its status as such was still being contested on an archaic personal data device in an older version of the Primary language, expressed through Three-Eye symbiosis and translated into archaic form of Secondary, which is still partially spoken in some parts of the galaxy. Because of the fundamental differences of the languages all things visualised cannot be accurately translated. Nuances of the vocal and visual registers of each are difficult to transpose or transliterate, and impossible to fully translate. The intentional clarity of one speaker and the poetics of the other are problematic differences which no longer occur or have meaning in the current form of the Primary language. Unfortunately, the speakers names were never mentioned during the course of the conversation. However, the identity of T is made clear contextually. Furthermore, intelligence suggests that the journal belonged to respected academic, Professor J, who lived in the immediate post-terrestrial era. Despite his vast academic output and signficant advancements in the refinement of Primary, J is better known as one of the leaders of the revolution against purpose.
Translator’s note: It is possible the speaker is in error. Scholars have discovered an ancient text by the author Roland Barthes proclaiming the death of the author, but a Michel Foucault it seems authored a book two years after the death of the author in which he asked just what an author is. Mistakes such or purposeless diversions as these are difficult to render in Primary.
2 Part of the reason for the academic treatment of photographs might stem from the fact that most academics are skilled with written language use whilst few of the people writing about photography are themselves practitioners in the field. Peter Sloterdijk in the Critique of Cynical Reason, writes:
We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world – indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states – the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities . http://www.stanford.edu/~mvr2j/sloterdijk.html
That reading club is still in force and they’ve chosen new gods.
3 Martin Heidegger states in Being and Time that: “phenomenology’ means – – to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.” Against this statement we think it is instructive to read Latour’s critique of Heidegger ‘On Technical Mediation’, which starts on page 31. Technology is not just about meaning but also translation. Technology changes what you can think about and how you think, write, talk about it. There is some translation in all communication. But it becomes more blatant when practitioners – users of a technology – talk to non-practitioners. It also happens to a greater degree when practitioners in one field use their vocabulary and experience to talk about another.
1 Walton states in Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism' that “Photographs are transparent. We see the world through them”(86). This argument is the starting point for our own counter argument: photographs are of many sorts, made by and for different practitioners with varied skills and reasons for working. Behind the talk of transparency, we believe there is a sort of visual illiteracy derived from ignorance of (or lack of interest in) professional photographic practices (commercial and fine art). We claim that the time, effort, money and skill that goes into making photographs means they are more like paintings than transparent windows, because how you see is as carefully constructed and contrived as what you see.
6 “What is real is not just the material item but also the discursive system of which the image bears is part.” (Tagg 4).
7 When comparing photography to the real world one always ends with the question what is reality or truth. (Seppänen 94).
8 Mika Elo writes: “The Finnish verb tuntea used for touch-sensations combines the meanings of “touch”, “feeling” and “knowledge” and is thus an excellent example of how obscure the boundaries between the three are from the viewpoint of body as the scene of life. Touch, feeling and recognition are mixed and implicate a sentience that can be articulated as either cognitive apprehension or an affective tone.” http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00098/full
4 Much of the established discourse on photography, which is repeated, paralleled and at times parodied during the course of this dialogue is addressed by Geoffrey Batchen in Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. The idea that photography is transparent, must be analysed through semiotics, and is simply a tool in the service of various systems of power informs our perspective. Here in particular we are drawing from the section where Batchen paraphrases Victor Burgin: “you look through a photograph in search of something else” (11).
5 Kari Pyykönen. “Regarding portraiture and ideal self – Studio Harcourt revisited”. Aalto University. Helsinki Photomedia Conference. Hämeentie 135, Helsinki. 28 March 2014.
24 Geoffrey Batchen is crucial here, too, because he realised the importance of the fact that photography was created within artistic, philosophical and scientific communities, it did not come out of nowhere (21).
26 See Martin Heidegger: The Question Concerning Technology, (72). The point he makes there is important, but we are mainly wondering if anyone will read this far into the notes. Which we think is important, too.
27 This is of course a swipe at Sartre’s take on what it means to be human, but equally we think it sounds like the kind of marketing slogan used by camera manufacturers.
28 This was Kodak’s famous advertising slogan for the Brownie camera: "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest".
29 Code-ex is an obvious play on words: Code, Codex. On the one hand we seek to parody the importance placed on certain key interpretations of photography, repeated to the point where they are enshrined in belief and placed high on the altar of the history of thought. Like dusty old books, or codexes.
30 This is a reference to the much-quoted slogan of Cartier-Bresson about the decisive moment being everything in photography – a sort of artist/hunter’s snapshot. However, whilst he obviously thought much of one’s reflexes, he stated ‘thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards, never while actually taking a photograph’ (116).
31 Susan Sontag claims On Photography, that cameras are intentionally made to remind us of guns “a camera is sold as a predatory weapon” and from there she goes on to talk about its addictive quality. They are not lethal, she says, only marketed as such, but they are the fantasy gun, knife, penis, car which can be used to violate people through the imagination channelled through this grown-up toy (14).
22 We think Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s, Can the Subaltern Speak?, is the most relevant of several important post-colonial discourses on the right to a voice. We see that the discussion about photography has been colonised by scholars and that the actual practitioners have lost their voice.
23 Perhaps the idea of the disparatif is useful here. We are guilty of reading as little of Althusser as Althusser did Marx; however, as we all know, he was concerned with what he called Ideological State Apparatuses. In his essay on Ideology, he points out two crucial things: that ideology can exist outside of time and that it is dependent upon subject. He writes: “there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects. Meaning, there is no ideology except for concrete subjects, and this destination for ideology is only made possible by the subject: meaning, by the category of the subject and its functioning” (128).
25 Additionally, we are interested on statements made by Batchen about binaries – nature/culture, postmodernism/formulism, etc.—because of the simple frames they create articulating discourse in a way that marginalises countless beliefs and practices not focussed upon We take his goal to rearticulate the complexity of photography adding to it our own professional practices and the imagined future viewpoint from which this article is seen (21).
18 Roland Barthes stated a position which we argue is no longer valid: “it is not very accurate to talk of a civilization of the image – we are still, and more than ever, a civilization of writing,” (274). However, as there is an entire cottage industry built around disparaging and discrediting the assertions made by Barthes in that little book towards the end of his life. However, he is anything but irrelevant for our survey of writing (Secondary) about photography (Primary). There is an emergent rulebook across photography scholarship: mention Barthes by refuting him, act like you are the only one interested in Deleuze and Guattari, show that you understand Heidegger, but are not indifferent to or ignorant of Hegel…
19 “Like the state, the camera is never neutral. The representations it produces are highly coded, and the power it wields is never its own…[p]hotography as such has no identity. It status as a technology varies with the power relations which invest it” (Tagg 63–64).
20 Whilst discussed by many people from Lacan to Foucault, we direct the reader to Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, as the most relevant lens through which to focus on the subject of objectification. (Swedberg 1989).
21 “The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it” (Bazin 13).
15 Juha Varto writes, in Song of the Earth: “Man is originally not a willing or knowing subject, but a sensitive interface in which the world realises its emergence into us and our emergence” (71). We think this point is crucial as a means of questioning the religion of purposeful, directed, planned action.
16 For a discussion of photographic conventions see David Bate’s Key Concepts: in general (1), aims of the art museum (14), semiotics (33), literary (46), rhetorical (56), smiling (77), and landscape painting (101); see also: Martin Lister and Liz Wells in the Handbook of Visual Analysis (60-89).
17 Translation is another key, not just between versions of secondary, but as a primary condition for the discussion of primary. Bruno Latour has much to say on this point in the article cited, in which he claims that translation means “displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies two elements or agents” (32).
14 Professor Tovar’s character has some intellectual qualities borrowed from Juha Varto. He says: “The imagined will soon lead us to dictate what others should be imagining, so as something that builds ideology and promotes arbitrary secrecy, it is just as futile as any other hegemonic power” (Varto 38).
See also: Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: "Ideas come when they want to, not when we want them to".
Tertiary
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Print.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010; Image-Music-Text. New York: Hill and Wang,1978; Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang; 2013. Print.
Bate, David. Key Concepts, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009; “The Memory of Photography”, Photographies Volume 3, Issue 2, 2010; 'The Real Aesthetic: Documentary Noise’, Portfolio Contemporary Photography. no 51, May 2010. Print.
Batchen, Geoffrey. Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Print.
Batchen, Geoffrey (2008) SNAPSHOTS, Photographies, 1:2, 121-142, DOI:10.1080/17540760802284398
Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” Classic Essays on Photography, New York: Leete's Island Books, 1980. Print.
Bedford, Christopher. “Qualifying Photography as Art, or, Is Photography All It Can Be?” Words Without Pictures. Ed Alex Klein. Internet. http://visualstudies.buffalo.edu/coursenotes/art314/words.pdf
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Internet. http://www.berk-edu.com/VisualStudies/readingList/06b_benjamin-work%20of%20art%20in%20the%20age%20of%20mechanical%20reproduction.pdf
Lynn Berger (2011) Snapshots, or: Visual Culture's Clichés, Photographies, 4:2, 175-190, DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2011.593922. Print.
Bullock, Allen & Trombley, Stephen (Eds), The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, London: Harper Collins, 1999. Print.
Carnap, Rudolf. Logische Syntax der Sprache (English translation The Logical Syntax of Language, New York: Humanities, 1937. Print.
Chomsky, Noam. Internet. http://www.openculture.com/2013/06/noam_chomsky_slams_zizek_and_lacan_empty_posturing.html
Elo, Mika. Internet. http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/rt/printerFriendly/14982/19828
Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method. New York: Verso, 1988. Print.
Flusser, Vilem. Into the Universe of Technical images. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2011. Kindle Ebook.
Fried, Michael. Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Print.
Gautier, Theophile. Mademoiselle de Maupin, Paris: Charpentier, 1866.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967. Print.
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. Internet. http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1217
Krauss, Rosalind. Notes on the Index. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986. Print.
Latour, Bruno. ‘On Technical Mediation’. Internet. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/54-TECHNIQUES-GB.pdf
Tod Papageorge, ‘The Snapshot’. Aperture. volume 19, issue 1. 1974. Print.
Rubenstein, Daniel. “Towards Photographic Education” Photographies, Volume 2, Issue 2, 2009, pp 135-142 http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpho20?open=2#vol_2 Print.
Seppänen, Janne. Teoriaa ja metodeja mediakuvan tulkitsijalle. Tampere: Vastapaino, 2005. Print.
Sloterdijk, Peter. Critique of Cynical Reason. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press. 1988. Internet. http://www.stanford.edu/~mvr2j/sloterdijk.html
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. London: Picador, 2001. Print.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak. Internet. http://www.mcgill.ca/files/crclaw-discourse/Can_the_subaltern_speak.pdf
Swedberg, Deborah. "What Do We See When We See Woman/Woman Sex in Pornographic Movies". NWSA Journal 1 (4): 602–16. Print.
Swift, Jonathan. A Modest Proposal. Internet. http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html
Tagg, John. Burden Of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1993. Print.
Varto, Juha. Song of the Earth. Aalto University Publication Series, Helsinki: 2011, A Dance With the World. Towards an Ontology of Singularity, Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture. Helsinki: 2012. Print.
Van Leeuwen, Leo and Jewitt, Carey. Handbook of Visual Analysis, London: Sage, 2001. Print.
Walton, Kendall L., Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts”. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.
Weston, Edward. “Seeing Photographically.” Classic Essays on Photography, New York: Leete's Island Books,1980. Print.
Wilde, Oscar. A Picture of Dorian Grey. Internet. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/174
9 The snapshot presumption when talking about photographs and photography is another deeply entrenched prejudice we wish to address with this paper. A snapshot is a subcategory of the photograph; however, the two words are not necessarily interchangeable and the assumption that a photograph is always spontaneous and requires no skill (because ability has been outsourced to the camera) means it is very difficult to talk about photography in a way that rings true to most practitioners. For more on the snapshot, see Batchen (2008), Berger (2011),
and Papageorge (1974).
10 Benjamin writes in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that “[d]uring long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well” (219). The point is returned to and developed at great length by Vilem Flusser in several books, but especially in Into the Universe of Technical Images. The point is that sense perception has been altered by the arrival of photography and more recently again by the digital image.
12 David Bate addresses this subject directly in “The Memory of Photography,” where he discusses how individual and collective memory has changed, and introduces the Freudian term “screen memory” (244). Both points were illustrative in the scripting of this narrative, for they point to the idea of a technologically altered perception – one constructed particularly through screens and memory machines.
11 Moritz Schlick interprets Wittgenstein's position as follows: philosophy "is that activity by which the meaning of propositions is established or discovered"; it is a question of "what the propositions actually mean. The content, soul, and spirit of science naturally consist in what is ultimately meant by its sentences; the philosophical activity of rendering significant is thus the alpha and omega of all scientific knowledge" (Carnap, 284).
13 We’ve had difficulty not leaning on too heavily Susan Sontag’s every quotable word. This particular quote was selected because it fits, but also because it is less often referred to than other aspects of her critique (Sontag 23).
32 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (49).
33 Noam Chomsky’s recent attack on Zizek seems a fair example of this sort of attitude: What you’re referring to is what’s called “theory.” And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing–using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Zizek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying. Jacques Lacan I actually knew. I kind of liked him. We had meetings every once in awhile. But quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential.
http://www.openculture.com/2013/06/noam_chomsky_slams_zizek_and_lacan_empty_posturing.html
34 Roland Barthes: “the sign of this message is not drawn from an institutional stock, is not coded and we are brought up against the paradox… of a message without a code” (272).
35 Obviously several theorists (Peirce, Barthes) will come to mind here, but we would like to direct the reader here to something in particular written by Krauss in Notes on the Index Part I: “As distinct from symbols, indexes establish their meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to their referents. They are the marks or traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object they signify. Into the category of the index, we would place physical traces (like footprints), medical symptoms, or the actual referents of the shifters” (198).
36 A reference to the scientistic "view that the characteristic inductive methods of the natural sciences are the only source of genuine factual knowledge and, in particular, that they alone can yield true knowledge about man and society" (Bullock & Trombley 775). Which ties closely with the famous treastise Against Method:
Science can stand on its own feet and does not need any help from rationalists, secular humanists, Marxists and similar religious movements; and... non-scientific cultures, procedures and assumptions can also stand on their own feet and should be allowed to do so... Science must be protected from ideologies; and societies, especially democratic societies, must be protected from science... In a democracy scientific institutions, research programmes, and suggestions must therefore be subjected to public control, there must be a separation of state and science just as there is a separation between state and religious institutions, and science should be taught as one view among many and not as the one and only road to truth and reality (Feyerabend viii).
37 Edward Weston makes this beautiful statement in “Seeing Photographically” in Classic Essays on Photography (171).
38 Christopher Bedford, raises the issue for the need to articulate the practices of photographers in “Qualifying Photography as Art, or, Is Photography All It Can Be?”. We claim that the narrative about the ontology of photograph, which has been written by scholars, has a very partial perspective. It leaves out the practical details of photographic work, which are equally important to the understanding of photography as are academic issues (11).
39 Equally, if you are going to look at how people work you will have to look at the people and institutions they work for. This point is raised by David Bate on the very first page of his book about key concepts in photography. We are trying to take up that point as a call to action.
40 Once again we refer here to Batchen, Burning With Desire (21).
41 David Bate, here as elsewhere, is instructive when read alongside Batchen, Bedford and Latour. The idea of photographic reality is contingent to any idea about reality, to begin with. Unless you realise that limitation, you wind up talking in circles (41).
42 Here we think Daniel Rubenstein dovetails nicely with Bedford and Bate when he writes that we must “engage all producers and users of images in a dialogue about the ways in which images are being manufactured, interpreted, distributed and stored and about the ideologies that are being furnished within these processes” (Rubenstein 141).
43 At this point we turn to Kant’s famous discussion from the third critique (quoted below); but we also try to introduce the idea of purpose as an all encompassing Raison d'être to posit the trajectory of present day scientific and economic rationalization taken as the sole measures for meaningful activity. Kant writes in Movement One § 15.: The judgement of taste is quite independent of the concept of perfection:
Purposiveness without purpose is quite independent of the concept of the good.
That is because the good [like Plato’s forms] suggests an objective Purposiveness (the purpose of comparing one object to the standard of the good). Objective Purposiveness is either external (utility) or internal (perfection) That is it can either have a purpose (tendency to pleasantness) in regards to the viewer, or in regards to an internal good (i.e. in-and –of itself standard of beauty).
We need both types to give a full judgment of purpose.
44 This quote, taken from the preface to Oscar Wilde’s, A Picture of Dorian Grey, is itself a paraphrase of Théophile Gautier: “Il n'y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir à rien; tout ce qui est utile est laid (21).