https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1981-9468
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Abstract
This article focuses on the genre distinction between artistic and legal photographs of faces: while the artistic portrait tends to express the singular soul of the person pictured, the biometric mugshot aims to scan singular physical traits without any psychological expression. How do these photographic genres allow us to identify the represented person? What do each of them seek to recognize? To grasp our metaphysical expectations of photographic technology, and thus to bridge the gap between discursive styles of these two photographic genres, I revise Derrida’s deconstruction of the law of genre. Further, I argue that Derrida’s and Nancy’s subversive readings of Kant’s concepts of parergon and schema help us to understand the rhetorical setting of the human mind, which organizes the photographic work of framing fragments. Finally, I explain the metaphysical conditions of possibility for both photographic genres by situating their opposite goals in the interval of personal recognition constructed by metonymical schematism.
Notes
1 This paper is the result of Metropolitan University Prague research project no. 93–01 “Political Science, Media and Anglophone Studies” (2022) based on a grant from the Institutional Fund for the Long-term Strategic Development of Research Organizations.
2 See Kendall L. Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” Critical Inquiry 11, no. 2 (1984), pp. 246–277 and Catharine Abell, “The Epistemic Value of Photographs,” in Philosophical Perspecives on Depiction, eds. Catharina Abell and Katerina Bantinaki (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010), pp. 81–103.
3 The topic of photographic realism has been discussed many times in philosophy, aesthetics, and theory of art. Roland Barthes, among others, contributed to this discussion in his Camera Lucida, where he mentions the photographic imprint of light is capable of keeping us un touch with the past pictured. Not only it let us believe that “this-has-been,” it even produces illusion of emanation of the pictured events. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Note on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang 1981), pp. 80–81. Derrida himself admits that “It is in this way that I would be tempted to understand what Barthes called ‘emanation’. This flow of light which captures or possesses me, invests me, invades me, or envelops me is not a ray of light, but the source of possible view: from the point of view of the other.” Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television (New York: Polity Press 2002), pp. 122–123. In this respect, Derrida shares with the late Barthes his suggestion of a double reception of photographic pictures, but instead of keeping Barthes‘conceptual polarity of studium and punctum as an unbridgeable binary opposition between the conventional and the dreamy mode of reception, he suggests understanding it as two poles delimiting the interval of gaze, where an encounter with imaginary “spectres” occurs.
4 Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): p. 56.
5 Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” p. 56.
6 Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” p. 57.
7 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge 1992), p. 16.
8 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law,” p. 25.
9 Petra Gehring, “Force and ‘Mystical Foundation’ of Law: How Jacques Derrida Addresses Legal Discourse,” German Law Journal 6, no. 1 (2005): p. 163.
10 This topic is elaborated in Fišerová’s paper “On Deferral,” where she explains Derrida’s interest in Kafka’s literary work, in his subversive understanding of parasitical legal representation. See Michaela Fišerová, “On Deferral. Kafka and Derrida before the Law,” in Lessons from Kafka, eds. Tomáš Koblížek, Petr Koťátko (Praha: Filosofia 2021), p. 183–205.
11 As Max M. Houck explains, alongside the standardized double—front view and profile—photographic image of the criminal’s face, Bertillon entered his measurements on a data card, with additional information such as hair, beard, and eye color. These photographs were the precursors to today’s “mugshots.” Bertillon called his cards a portrait parlé, a spoken portrait, that described the criminal both through measurements and words. Later on, Bertillon developed this evidence picture into a “metric” photography based on the rule of absence of facial expression that he expected to help him “precisely reconstruct the dimension of a particular space and the placement of objects in it, or to measure the object represented.” Max M. Houck, Forensic Science: Modern Methods of Solving Crime. (London: Praeger, 2007), p. 26.
12 As Kelly Gates puts it, the authority of biometric identification relies on a direct link to bodies: “biometric technologies promise to stabilize the messy ambiguity of identity, to automatically read a stable, individual identity directly off the body. To be effective, the connection that biometric technologies establish between identity and the body must appear natural and self-evident.” Kelly A. Gates, Our Biometric Future. Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance. (New York: New York University, 2011), p. 14.
13 According to Gates, “the assumption that biometrics are derived from and link directly to physical bodies conceals a complex technological process of mediation, as well as a whole set of historical relationships that create the very conditions of possibility for biometric identification.” Kelly A. Gates, Our Biometric Future. Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance, p. 15.
14 Kelly A. Gates, Our Biometric Future, p. 23.
15 Gates observes that “we are perfectly comfortable cutting them off from our bodies by photographing them and treating those images as objects-in-themselves. Our photographed faces do not diminish our subjectivities, our identities, or our relations with others. Rather, photography is now used as a means of constructing, facilitating, and enhancing these dimensions of what it means to human. Of course it is also used to classify and individuate us in ways over which we have no control.” Kelly A. Gates, Our Biometric Future, p. 23.
19 As Jacobs puts it, “During a session, your subject moves almost continually between shots, and successful portraits depend on friendly rapport to signal ‘stop there’.” Lou Jacobs, The Art of Posing (Buffalo: Amherst Media, 2010), p. 7.
20 Natalie Dybisz, Creative Portrait Photography. Innovative Digital Portraiture to Reveal the Inner Subject (East Sussex: The Ilex Press, 2012), p. 8.
21 Natalie Dybisz, Creative Portrait Photography, p. 6.
22 Photographic portrait produces the same “effects of representation” as painted portrait in Louis Marin, Portrait of the King (Macmillan, 1988), pp. 23–33. Both generate signifying and powerful representation of a pictured person. However, unlike Marin’s work, my distinction of two specific genres helps to understand two divergent discursive ways of representation of the same person in photography.
26 Jacques Derrida, Trace et archive, image et art (Paris: Ina Éditions 2014), p. 39.
27 Jean-Luc Nancy, A plus d'un titre. Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 2007), pp. 11–12.
28 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Elliptical Sense,” in Derrida: a Critical Reader, ed. David Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 39.
29 Jacques Derrida, Trace et archive, image et art (Paris: Ina Éditions 2014), p. 37.
30 Jacques Derrida, Trace et archive, image et art, p. 38.
31 See Jakub Mácha’s account of the deconstructable paralogic of exemplarity in Jakub Mácha, “The Logic of Exemplarity,” Law and Literature 34. no. 1 (2020): 67–81.
32 Jacques Derrida, On Touching (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2005), p. 17.
33 Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2001), p. 61.
34 In Feu la cendre Derrida deals with the metonymy of cinders. As any remain, cinders haunts by its incomplete presence, its partial character that forces to recall the past event, of which it is a remain. In this sense, photography and cinders provoke the same metonymical expectation of returning the past: if I touch cinders, I do not touch fire; if I see a photograph, I do not see the past event. See Jacques Derrida, Feu la cendre (Paris: Des femmes 1987), p. 19.
35 Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, “Starting out from the Frame (Vignettes),” in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts. Art, Media, Architecture, eds. Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 118.
36 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 273.
37 Nancy emphasizes that the Kantian subject produces unity of images as successive. “That is its primary schematism, or its pure imagination, the condition of possibility of any image, of any (re)presentation: the condition for their being an image, and not a chaotic flux (without this singular image being simply one and unified: what it does, simply, is present itself).” Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image (New York : Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 81–82.
38 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 82.
39 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 272.
40 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 273.
41 In Derrida, photographs are understood as metonymical remains: in the fragmentary paralogic of photographic visuality, what is accidental is also essential and inevitable. Contrary to the metaphorical disposition of painting, photographic picture is technological remains, a ruin of the past percpetion, which depends of the rhetoric of metonymy. “It thus seems impossible, and that's the whole paradox, to stop this metonymic substitution. There is nothing but proper names, and yet everything remains metonymic.” Jacques Derrida, Athens, Still Remains. The Photographs of Jean-Francois Bonhomme (New York: Fordham University Press 2010), p. 3.
42 Martin Crowley, “Cutting and Letting-Be”, in Nancy and Visual Culture, eds. Carrie Giunta and Adrienne Janus (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p. 23.
43 Martin Crowley, “Cutting and Letting-Be”, p. 23.
44 The very condition of Nancy's "touching by seeing" is a functional technology of its metonymical stopping. Photography does the same thing—it suspends what would otherwise escape, holds it back before our gaze. Nancy explains this synesthetic expectation of touching by seeing as a technological ex-scription, ex-pression from one body into another. Such a touch is inseparable from cultural technical supplementarity, from “syncope inserted between contact surfaces and interrupting direct contact: Without this différance, there would be no contact as such; contact would not appear; but with this différance, contact never appears in its full purity, never in any immediate plenitude, either. In both cases, the phenomenality, or the phenomenology, of contact is interrupted or diverted; it is suspended in view of contact.” Jacques Derrida, On Touching, p. 229.
45 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 64.
46 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 63.
47 According to Derrida, “when Kant replies to our question ‘What is a frame?’ by saying: it’s a parergon, a hybrid of outside and inside, but a hybrid which is not a mixture or a half-measure, an outside which is called to the inside of the inside in order to constitute it as an inside; and when he gives as examples of the parergon, alongside the frame, clothing and column, we ask to see, we say to ourselves that there are ‘great difficulties’ here, and that the choice of examples, and their association, is not self-evident.” Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 63–64.
48 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 63.
49 Derrida claims that Kant finds parergon dangerous by its excess: “Because reason is ‘conscious of its impotence to satisfy its moral need,’ it has recourse to the par ergon, to grace, to mystery, to miracles. It needs the supplementary work. This additive, to be sure, is threatening.” Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 56. In Derrida, on the contrary, parergon comes in addition to the work, and is welcomed as its inevitable accessory, by remaining neither simply outside nor simply inside.
50 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 73.
51 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 54.
52 Nancy observes that the genre of portrait is based on supposition of self-expression, ex-pression of the soul by corporeal techné, by technology of muscles and nerves of the body. If one can be recognized after her portrait, it is not because portrait represents or reproduces the pictured person: “the portrait does not constitute simply a revelation of an identity”; its aim “is no longer to reproduce, therefore, not even to reveal, but to produce the exposition of the subject. To pro-duce it: to bring it forth, to draw it out.” Jean-Luc Nancy, Portrait (New York: Fordham University Press 2018), p. 14.
53 Jacques Derrida, “Une certaine possibilité impossible de dire l'événement,” in Dire l'événement, est-ce possible?, eds. Jacques Derrida, Soussana Gad and Alexis Nouss (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2001), p. 89.
54 Jacques Derrida, op. cit., p. 89.
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Michaela Fišerová
Michaela Fišerová is Associate Professor at Metropolitan University Prague (Czech Republic). She specializes in political philosophy, aesthetics, and media studies. She is the author of the monographs Sharing the Visible: Rethinking Foucault (Paris, 2013), Image and Power: Interviews with French Thinkers (Prague, 2015), Deconstruction of Signature (Prague, 2016), and Fragmentary Vision: Rancière, Derrida, Nancy (Prague, 2019). Her new monograph Event of Signature. Jacques Derrida and Repeating the Unrepeatable is to be published with SUNY Press (New York, 2022).