Value of nothing

ABSTRACT

Critical approaches to photography have one thing in common: they share an understanding that photographs must be approached visually. They take it as a given that photographs are pictures to be looked at, and they all agree that it is only through looking that photographs communicate. Whatever subsequent interpretations follow, the priority of vision in relation to the image remains unperturbed. This belief in the visibility of the photograph imperceptibly bonded together otherwise dissimilar and sometimes contradictory methodologies, preventing them from noticing that which is the most unexplained about photography: the precedence of looking itself. This self-evident truth of visibility blocks the possibility of inquiring after everything that is non-visual in a picture. However, the digital image forces a reevaluation of visibility because it is clear that the visible cannot account for images that begin their life as binary data, developed algorithmically and driven to various points across the network not as individual pictures but as packets of data. Through a reading of Heidegger, Deleuze and Benjamin this paper suggests that digital-born photography cannot be explained away in representational terms; rather it calls for a theory that can account for proliferation and self-replication as the purveyors of meaning online.

KEYWORDS:

• Philosophy of photography
• new media
• undecidability
• network
• identity
• invisibility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Daniel Rubinstein is a philosopher, writer and teacher who has published extensively on contemporary visual culture, photography and digital art. His current work investigates the radically fractal nature of images with a specific link to desire and memory. He is the editor of the journal Philosophy of Photography, co-director of the Centre for the Research of the Networked Image (CRNI) and Course Leader of MA Photography at Central Saint Martins.

Notes

1. One of the most damning criticisms of the Work of Art essay comes from Theodor Adorno: ‘Benjamin’s theory of the artwork in the age of its technical reproduction may have failed to do full justice to this [locating the irrational within the rational – DR]. The simple antithesis between the auratic and the mass-reproduced work, which for the sake of simplicity neglected the dialectic of the two types, became the booty of the view of art that takes photography as its model and is not less barbaric than the view of the artist as creator’ (Adorno 1997, 72). It is however worthy of note that Benjamin authored a second version of the same article, translated to English as The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, in which some inroads are laid for recovering the auratic within the technological (2008).

2. The logic of identity finds its fullest expression in Hegel’s dictum: ‘What is rational is real’ (Hegel 2005, xix). In The Thing Heidegger raises the question of nothing (non-being) in order to extract it from the dialectical formula set up by Hegel: ‘Death is the shrine of nothing, namely of that which in all respects is never some mere being, but nonetheless essences, namely as being itself. Death, as the shrine of nothing, harbours in itself what essences of being. As the shrine of the nothing, death is the refuge of being’ (Heidegger 2012, 17). In treating being and nothing not as dialectically opposed entities but as the ‘belonging together’ of being and nothing Heidegger overcomes Hegel’s key dictum that ‘what is rational is real’ and opens a path for considering the limitations imposed by dialectical reasoning.

3. Or as Deleuze puts it: ‘The crystal-image has these two aspects: internal limit of all the relative circuits, but also outer-most, variable envelope, at the edges of the world, beyond even moments of the world’ (1989, 80–81).

4. ‘The recent rise to prominence of technologies of digitalization has offered possibilities of understanding the image beyond this premise of ocularcentrism, for digital images emphasize the extent to which the indexicality of photographic or cinematic images–the sense of an ontological link between representation and the “real” objects or actions that it represents–can be produced through manipulation of algorithms’ (Khalip and Mitchell 2011, 2).

5. The notion of difference is a staple of post-metaphysical thought. For Heidegger difference is that which lies so near to us that we never notice it, and yet it is difference that allows for identity (and for representation) to happen. His conception of difference is most clearly articulated in the lecture The Onto-Theo-logical constitution of Metaphysics. See also Deleuze’s monumental critique of representation in Difference and Repetition. For an overview of the problem of difference (see Widder 2002).

6. Deleuze clarifies this point succinctly: ‘The diversity of narrations cannot be explained by the avatars of the signifier, by the states of a linguistic structure which is assumed to underlie images in general’ (1989, 137).

7. This understanding of difference as the pre-condition of identity is drawing on Deleuze: ‘Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse. Difference is not phenomenon but the noumenon closest to the phenomenon’ (Deleuze 2004, 280).

8. Alphonso Lingis wrote at length on the noise in the message and on the message of the noise: ‘Is it not also false to suppose that only the meaning attached to words by a code, fixed or evolving, communicates? The rhythm, the tone, the periodicity, the stammerings and the silences communicate.[…] This noise is not analytically decomposable, as communication theory would have it, into a multiplicity of signals, information-bits, that are irrelevant or that conflict […] (Lingis 2000, 105). Specifically on noise as the aesthetic determination of networked, non-Euclidian environments (see Nechvatal 2011, 2009).

9. For Foucault this kind of archive is never closed, never completed, never achieving the totalizing and universal state of ‘truth’, and yet it is productive of a form of existence that reclaims difference from representation, a surface out of depth and singularity out of homogeneity: ‘[I]t dissipates that temporal identity in which we are pleased to look at ourselves when we wish to exorcise the discontinuities of history: it breaks the thread of transcendental teleologies; and where anthropological thought once questioned man’s being or subjectivity, it now bursts open the other, and the outside’ (1989, 131).