The convention of captioning: W. G. Sebald and the release of the captive image

Abstract

Thesis 1: That the treatment of images in social science texts is stuck in a positivist/modernist time warp, and is out of sync with the present cultural climate.

Thesis 2: That the work of W. G. Sebald indicates how images may be more appropriately used in relation to words in post‐positivist and postmodernist texts.

Notes

1. Moving images are outside the scope of this article. As for still images, I have focused on photographs because they are the images that social scientists most often use – being relatively cheap and easy to make, and having a history of showing evidence convincingly.

2. The Hiroshima Pictures, Channel 4, 27 August 2005, 8.10 p.m.

3. In conversation (August 2005) with art historian Stephen Chaplin, Chaplin commented that in a fine art context the history of writing on canvas in the West has its own discourses in terms of art history and economic history –for example, Venetian sixteenth‐century painting in the context of the availability of large canvases in an economy based on seafaring (sail!). However, this history leaves intact the author's argument.

4. Coincided? Several sociologists have remarked upon this phenomenon, either in more or less factual terms (Howard Becker), or as a matter of ideological significance (Allan Sekula, Victor Burgin).

5. Though, interestingly, not outside the remit of the sociology of scientific knowledge.

6. A phrase borrowed from Chaudhuri (2004). He quotes Derrida on social scientists

conserving all these old concepts within the domain of empirical discovery while here and there denouncing their limits, treating them as tools that can still be used. No longer is any truth value attributed to them: there is a readiness to abandon them, if necessary, should other instruments appear more useful. In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which they themselves are pieces. This is how the language of the social sciences criticizes itself.

7. Wandsworth Museum in South London has sent out a brochure advertising activities for half‐term – one for six‐year‐olds upwards involves taking digital photographs of favourite objects in the museum and then downloading them on to a computer (8 September 2005).

8. ‘Meaning abhors a vacuum’: as essentially cultural creatures we are compelled to give meaning to our world, to explain it somehow. Anything new or strange must be made sense of. Cultural beings cannot tolerate lack of meaning.

9. That seemingly throw‐away figure can be justified as follows: Vintage (2002) printed 36,845 paperback copies of The Emigrants. The number of hardback copies from the Harvill Press (1960) is not known. Vito von Eichborn Verlag (1993) produced hardback and paperback copies in the original German, under the title Die Ausgewanterten. Four other books by Sebald containing uncaptioned images and text have been issued in paperback, three of these by Penguin – the name itself usually a guarantee of reasonably high‐volume sales.

10. See the experiment conducted by Jean Mohr – ‘What did I see?’ (Berger and Mohr 1982, 41–57).

11. The final evidence of uncaptioned images in social science texts may well be nuances of verbal meaning.