RELATIONALITY AND THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGE

Abstract

This paper develops a political ontology of relationality that can account for the dramatic impact that photographs of the plight of others can have on the course of the political. The aim of this analysis is to develop a better understanding of the power of photographic images of the plight of others, particularly images that count as true, to mobilise the affectivity of a populace and direct relationality either toward fear, blame, and revenge or, conversely, toward hope, compassion, and responsibility for the well-being of others. The central claim is that the potency and impact of the image can be explained if we allow that the same ontology of relationality is at play in both the spectator’s “perception” of the image and the agency of the persons caught up in the events that the photograph portrays. The analysis of the potency of the image begins with Kant’s rationalist account of the sublime experience and Barthes’s materialist account of press photography. The model of relationality that emerges in the analysis is derived more directly from the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy (with some help from Arendt’s political ontology). This explains relationality in terms of the corporeal, affective “sharing of singularity,” and the unethical in terms of stripping others of all relationality (or standing by and watching that happen) and thus abandoning others to “utter loneliness,” as Arendt puts it. Perhaps it is the ability of a photograph to depict such an “intolerable reality” that, paradoxically, prompts the spectator into action that attempts to restore relationality as separation through sharing.

Keywords:

• potency of images
• sharing singularity
• political agency
• Barthes
• Merleau-Ponty
• Jean-Luc Nancy

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at a symposium on the topic of “Relationality” hosted by Simone Drichel at the University of Otago in November 2015. I am grateful for the feedback that the paper received at that forum, for Simone’s helpful editorial comments, and for those of Angelaki’s anonymous reviewers.

1 As all the photographs discussed in this paper are widely available on the web, rather than reproducing them here I have provided URLs to the most reliable sites. Adams’s photograph “Saigon Execution” can be viewed at <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42864421> (accessed 30 Apr. 2018). Ut’s photograph, entitled “Napalm Girl,” can be viewed at <https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/1973/world-press-photo-year/nick-ut> (accessed 30 Apr. 2018).

2 Carter’s photograph first appeared in the New York Times on 26 March 1993. It can be viewed at <http://100photos.time.com/photos/kevin-carter-starving-child-vulture> (accessed 30 Apr. 2018).

3 Aylan Kurdi drowned with his brother, Galip, and mother, Rehan, when their overloaded rubber dinghy capsized en route to the Greek island of Kos from their refugee camp in Turkey. The photograph appeared in print and digital media outlets across the world on 2 September 2015.

4 The photograph is now known as “The Falling Man” following Tom Junod’s article of the same name. Junod’s article and Drew’s photograph are available at <https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a48031/the-falling-man-tom-junod/> (accessed 30 Apr. 2018).

5 Geoffery Batchen argues that Barthes thus gives the press photograph the special status of

a paradoxical sort of sign because it is simultaneously “objective” and “invested,” natural and cultural. But it also makes it a powerful ideological weapon because photography works to naturalize a view of the world that is, in fact, always political and interested. (7)

6 As Christine Battersby explains, the precursor to the camera, the camera obscura, was initially used for this purpose of containing the sublime: viewing “nature through the lens of the camera obscura” was said to “improve” nature whilst rendering it artificial (11).

7 Moira Gatens provides a thoughtful critique of Massumi’s theory of a “pre-personal, asocial, intensity […] unbounded by meaning or signification” (22), especially for how it misinterprets Spinoza (and Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza). Other forms of neo-Deleuzian materialism that are more compatible with the notion of relationality developed here include Anna Munster’s use of Deleuze’s concept of “folding” in her notion of the “baroque” to characterise the (aesthetic) experience of digital images that “places body and machine, sensation and concept, nature and artifice in ongoing relations of discordance and concordance with each other” (5). See also Lone Bertelsen and Andrew Murphie’s insightful adaptation of Guattari’s approach to affect and image in their “relational” account of the politicisation of images associated with Australian asylum-seeker policy.

8 I do not have the space to explore the motif of the “death mask” here, but see Louis Kaplan’s account in “Photograph/Death Mask: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Recasting of the Photographic Image,” which I have found most useful for its wider analysis of Nancy’s ontology of the photographic image.

9 Ross’s paper “Image-Politics” provides an exceptional account of Nancy’s notoriously difficult ontology of the image, which plots the connections between his thoughts on the image, his political ontology, and his critiques of aesthetic theory.

10 One of Barthes’s more convincing examples is Koen Wessing’s photograph called “Nicaragua 1979,” taken during the “Sandinista revolution,” where two nuns “happen to be” passing by some soldiers. See this and other photographs from Camera Lucida at <https://www.pinterest.com.au/pin/552042866793525223/> (accessed 30 Apr. 2018).

11 Bell’s exceptional analysis of the “vitality” of the photograph traces three different ways a photograph of Fernando Brodsky has acted to impact the political: it has acted as testimony to the extremes of “biopolitical” government in Argentina’s “Dirty War,” as a “silent” witness to crimes against humanity in subsequent trials (in 1983), and as an agitator in its “appearance” (including to Bell) in art exhibitions since then. While Bell’s analysis takes a different path to that of this paper, our accounts of the potency of an image are compatible in so far as she suggests that the photograph’s vitality rests on the “tension between the singularity of the person [depicted in the image] and the becoming-archive, or perhaps simply History (Barthes)” (81).

12 I provide a more detailed account of Arendt’s conception of relationality, including with regard to her notion of the political and compared to Nancy’s idea of being-singular-plural, in chapter 2 of Arendt, Natality and Biopolitics (see especially 32–74).