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The Disciplinary Frame
Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning
By John Tagg University of Minnesota Press
Copyright © 2009 Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4529-1390-2
CHAPTER 1
The One-Eyed Man and the One-Armed Man: Camera, Culture, and the State
The State apparatus is thus animated by a curious rhythm, which is first of all a great mystery: that of the Binder-Gods or magic emperors, One-Eyed men emitting from their single eye signs that capture, tie knots at a distance. The jurist-kings, on the other hand, are One-Armed men who raise their single arm as an element of right and technology, the law and the tool.
— GILLES DELEUZE AND FÉLIX GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus
There is a dark room. A shutter opens. The room is flooded with light that threatens to bleach the interior white. Instead, it leaves a carefully patterned tracery on one wall, because, in entering the room in the only way it can, this light has been tempered, corralled, and organized, transposed from a flaring effulgence into a predictable series of rays, gathered and strung like wires or threads from the single aperture that opens to the outside. Across the darkness, the fall of light is thus graphed by the grid built into the window of the converging lens and the geometry of the walls whose rectangulate architecture orchestrates the relation of the central opening to the focal plane and to the frame marked by the boundaries of that plane's flat surface. This carefully constructed room has an old name. It is a camera. A room, but a room with a purpose: the training of light, graphing it — quite literally, photographing, subjecting light to the punctual rule of the room's inbuilt geometrical law. The camera is, then, a place to isolate and discipline light, like a room in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. And, like that room in the Panopticon, the cell of the camera has its utility both as a training machine and as a device for producing and preserving text.
This text appears first where light becomes substance, as a stain in the dirt on the wall — a stain on the wall's surface without yet the power to impose distance and division. This stain, however, is already a graph that projects its cryptic structure into the eye that beholds it, capturing the palpitating organ in its depths and incarcerating it in an architecture of separation that leaves the eye hanging on an object now possessed and lost — so near and so far. Something therefore happens in this making of the photo-graph that cannot be reduced to mechanical transcription or to the workings of a kind of Morse code. The object possessed and lost, conjured up for the eye by the stain in the dirt, is an object of fantasy and desire, flickering in the imaginary and, contrary to a certain semiology of the photographic image, not so easily torn from the sight to which it appeals. For even as the calcified image is unmasked as a form of trompe l'oeil, it makes a final offer that proves so hard to refuse. It offers itself, as Lacan has observed, as an appearance "that says it is that which gives the appearance": an incitement to ask and ask again what lies behind.
The photograph has us hanging. But its final offer is a dangerous one. It leads not only to the deferment of desire and the socialization of the drive — the promise and goal of the photographic system. It also threatens to double back and return us to the trauma of the splitting in which the subject of photographic seeing emerged in all its inadequacy — to the splitting choreographed by the disciplinary light machine at the moment of the traumatic encounter whose indelible traces still disturb the pacifying effects of all those magical devices that prolong our docile capture in the net of the image and that keep us repeating, "I know it is only an image, but all the same ..."
Perhaps, however, the trauma can be displaced or delayed. It is, after all, rarely a matter of an image alone. With photographs, as interest palls, things are invariably arranged so that distraction is readily to hand: Read the caption; scan the layout; turn the page; move on to the next frame, the next file, the next cabinet drawer. A whole set of graphic, editorial, and verbal devices come into play, overcoding the thinness of the photograph and renewing our traffic with it, even as the image is caught up in the elaborate visual, verbal, spatial, and temporal interplay of larger machineries of staging. Where the machinery of scopic capture falters and the fetishism of the image no longer suffices, the endless substitutability of the photograph keeps the subject hanging on, suspended not just from the picture but from the circuitry of an entire apparatus: the camera, the picture, the mount, the file, the system of classification, the machinery of storage and retrieval, the unfolding space of the archive as the scene of a prolonged ritual of adjudication. The camera has always been part of a larger assemblage, like a computer wired to its peripherals. This is how its machinery of capture works. To the magical capture of the image is harnessed the mechanics of subjection of a bureaucratic apparatus. The camera, with its inefficient chemical information-storage system, comes joined to the storage and retrieval system of the filing cabinet: the One-Eyed Man and the One-Armed Man, the two modalities of power that join in the technical-machinic enslavement of the modern State.
But we are moving on too quickly, and something is being missed as the photograph is cropped to fit its frame. Somewhere in the murky violence at the edge of the shadow cast by the frame, we lose our sense of the photograph as a material thing: a piece of stained paper, creasing at its corners, liable to tear and fray, picking up traces of oil and grease as it passes from hand to hand. Here, where the cut edge is shielded by the mat or the mount or falls under the protection of the frame, our attention is soon rebuffed and pulled back into the imaginary or hurried on into another space, where the photograph will come under other orders and be given its rank and its status within the regimens that constitute the photographic field. Meaning prevaricates now between two worlds. Their impossible juncture is masked by the invisible thickness of the frame, for the frame is one of those great, open public secrets about which it is better to say nothing, from which it is better to avert one's eyes. This is power's persistent alibi. It is knowing the secret that ensures our silence. That is why a politics of exposure or unmasking is doomed to failure.
Historians of images have learned well enough how the law of the frame touches them: image or context, that is the choice. It is better to stay with the particular or get quickly lost in the cover of the background. So, oscillating around the frame, we find Alan Trachtenberg arguing in a single essay both that "the meaning of the photograph — what the interpreter is after — is rarely a given within the picture, but is developed in the function of the picture, in its particular social use by particular people," and that the photograph gives "immediate access to a past," as "a unique historical record, one that allows us to read, to count, even to measure what once existed." It is not that either the specificity of the stain burnt into the emulsion or the particularity of the sphere of circulation, reception, and usage should be or could be avoided. But the methodological choice between the close reading of texts and the expansive reconstruction of social historical contexts begs the question of the frame as a machinery of capture and expulsion that covers the join between the image and the economy of meaning in which it comes to resonate and in which interpretation takes place.
Viewer, image, context — held together and apart, clamped in place by an apparatus less obvious than the engineering of the polished brass-and-wood devices that kept the criminal and the Bertillon-system camera operator in their respective places. Of course, they are not held there for long — not for longer than it takes. But that does not mean that, even in this instant, everything is secure. The camera is a box in Pandora's hands. The apparatus is not entirely stable and does not always work. When it does, it falls short or goes too far. And there is always the chance it will be interrupted, unsettled, undermined, sabotaged, or even smashed. But how are we to get some purchase on those disruptive events that pull the plugs and break the circuit, or that flood the channels, eroding, evading, exceeding, or assaulting the barriers that define the limited fields of play in which the troubling mobility of images and the fluctuating attentions of viewers have come to be fixed? Do we look for resistance in the irresolvability of textual systems or in the irreducible heterogeneity of the determining context? Or must we look for vulnerabilities in the joins of the frame? How can we simultaneously account both for the assimilation of photography to a segmented and flexibly adaptive institutional order, and for those continual disturbances in the structures of this order that become particularly acute in the course of the nineteenth century with the dissemination of photography, driven as this was by intensified processes of commodification, disciplinary saturation, and archival accumulation, but also by an ambiguous popular dispersal?
These are not new questions. As I have already said, they take me back to earlier arguments that must have been ill-stated or ill-read to have been construed as they sometimes have been. Revisiting these arguments now also means returning to the vague topography that came to be so confidently colonized as "the New Art History." In the mid-1970s in Britain, however, this uneven terrain seemed less like a consolidated territory than a scattering of would-be no-go areas signposted by the names of often mutually hostile journals and places: Screen, Screen Education, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Block, Old Compton Street, Birmingham, Leeds, and so on. At the time, those moving in these disjointed spaces, far from art history's marbled halls, also sought to rally themselves with their own thoughts of affirmative return: to Karl Marx and to Sigmund Freud, certainly, but also to Antonio Gramsci, to Bertolt Brecht, to the Russian formalists, to Ferdinand de Saussure, and sometimes to Melanie Klein or to Simone de Beauvoir. These were returns for which the tours all departed from Paris, where the tour guides of choice were Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and, only much later in Britain, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Luce Irigaray. There was no shortage of divergent and sometimes misdirected paths. Yet what is striking in the case of the dissenting art history of this period is that, whether for tactical reasons or not, all these different tracks came to be represented as converging somehow on the road of return to a singular site with a singular name: the social history of art.
Given its most influential evocation in 1973 in the ironic and later regretted title of the first chapter of T. J. Clark's Image of the People, the "social history of art" became, for a time, the name of a radical homeland, a place of secession: "the place," as Clark himself put it in 1974, "where the questions have to be asked, and where they cannot be asked in the old way." What was evident from the beginning, however, was that this place of return was far from a comfortably settled landscape and its occupation would bring its own conflicts. On the one hand, the social history of art constituted a wary return to the territory of Frederick Antal, Arnold Hauser, Francis Klingender, the young Meyer Schapiro, and, less familiarly, Max Raphael, since this proving ground of early Marxist art history was seen by many as offering the only available space of resistance in the history of the discipline to formalist criticism and art historical connoisseurship. On the other hand, the social history of art as reconceived in 1973 also marked a belated attempt to encompass what were still seen in Britain as new developments in Continental theory. Conflict erupted because what came through the door with this term "theory" led to an undermining of the intellectual framework and humanist commitment of the older formation of the social history of art and even, in the end, to the erosion of any notion of a unifying oppositional problematic. The fleeting attempt to hold things together with hyphens (Marxism-feminism-psychoanalysis-semiotics) hardly won the defense of the new domain any more time. Though the consequence was not always welcome, then or since, it was clear that the heterogeneity of critical practices could not be bounded or constrained by a single program.
More worrying still, it also became clear — at least to some — that in pursuing the multiple avenues of poststructuralist analysis, certain directions for critical art history had entered an intellectual terrain that would sooner or later have to be recognized as entirely incompatible with any sociology or social history of art, of culture, or of knowledge. Herein lie some of the deeper conflicts and striking political realignments of the discipline in subsequent decades, one of the signposts to which was the instructive double disaster of the celebratory plenary sessions on Marxism and on deconstruction in art history at the College Art Association of America annual conference in Houston in 1988. If these two panels were supposed to represent the competing options for new art histories, then what was striking and welcome was that neither of them was able to demonstrate its own internal coherence, let alone separate itself from its other and claim the day.
To recall these panels and their panelists (of whom I was one) is also, of course, to remember that — helped along by Margaret Thatcher's post-Marxist slogan "There is no society" — the "New Art History" in Britain had not only been fractured but also subject to a global redistribution, even before it had had time to think in what productive or restrictive ways it had been British at all. Such questioning would be left to a new wave of Black British artists, filmmakers, and critics whose presence, one may pointedly note, had hardly been allowed to trouble earlier debates in the radical history of art, even in the years immediately following the landmark publication of The Empire Strikes Back by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1982.
What I deduce from these developments — from this fracturing and this dispersal — is not that there was an organizational failure or a loss of nerve, but that the recurrent concern of new art histories with the concepts of representation, production, power, pleasure, and identity could not be contained. These concepts went on generating their own unanticipated, multiplying effects, and the resultant openness came to characterize what was interesting about the field of visual culture studies, before it too passed over into the world of textbooks and readers. It was not the openness that dissipated critical momentum, as threatened in the beginning by Clark. Rather, this openness functioned as the principal spoiler, undoing the various attempts that were made to totalize and reincorporate the productivity of critical art histories. The effects of renewed theoretical engagements with representation, power, identity, and difference were felt in other ways, too. The orbit of these concepts defied definition solely at the level of the methodological debate that was the obsessive concern of dissident art histories in the 1970s and early 1980s. Instead, it necessitated an inescapable folding over of the argument that, in turn, compelled recognition of the discursive and institutional structures of art history itself as mechanisms of framing and exclusion that continued to operate even in art histories of the newer sort.
I make no secret about welcoming this, just as I see it as far from a sign of weakness or disintegration that attempts to claim centrality for particular disciplinary paradigms and protocols keep on being overrun. It may well be that a sense of confrontation is harder to hang on to now than it was in the framework of 1970s notions of monolithic and counterposed disciplinary camps. Yet this in itself is not proof of cooptation. The proliferation of disputes eats away at the grounding and fabric of the disciplinary edifice, holding out the prospect that it will not simply be taken over and reoccupied but will be pierced, as the Communards pierced the besieged townhouses of Paris, so that its walls will be punched through by passageways and connecting corridors, and its spaces will be perforated, opened out, dispersed, and readapted.
That is not to say, however, that it will be easy, in the present conjuncture, to separate the effects of such erosion from the impact of more sweeping yet contradictory local and global economic, political, and technological processes that, with increasing rapidity since the late 1980s, have also been overhauling the economic and cultural function of art history, just as they have overtaken the institutions of national culture on which art history as a discipline has depended since its inception. The changes reconfiguring the field of visual culture and its historical representation — through the impact of new image-handling technologies, through the pervasiveness of product placements and marketing strategies, through the conflicting demands of the international museum culture and national touristic promotions, and through the social mandates of multiculturalism and consensus — have long overlaid and confused any pressure for change emanating from the so-called New Art History. Yet the double dislocation of the traditional discipline of art history still presents an opportunity, albeit one in which, for critical interventions, an analysis of the dominant economies of images and meanings cannot be detached from a continual calculation of the politics of art historical practice itself. This is an inevitable consequence of the attempt to engage with a "politics of representation," whose implications cannot but spill over from the analysis of relations of power in visual culture to seep into the workings of the art historical apparatus itself.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Disciplinary Frame by John Tagg. Copyright © 2009 Regents of the University of Minnesota. Excerpted by permission of University of Minnesota Press.
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