Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 39, November 2002
Jeffrey S. Longacre
After Photography
Deconstructing the Era of the Image
Scott McQuire _Visions of
Modernity_ London: Sage
Publications,
1998 ISBN
0-7619-5301-9 270 pp. Scott McQuire's book,
_Visions of Modernity_, expands from the implied premise
that, instead of dividing the history of the western world
into the traditionally accepted B.C.E. (Before the Common
Era) and C.E. (Common Era), it can better be divided into
B.P. (Before Photography) and A.P. (After Photography).
Although the theory that the history of vision, from the
camera obscura to the invention of photography, is
discontinuous and marked by a major paradigm shift is by no
means new (see Jonathan Crary's essay 'Modernizing Vision'
for one example [1]), McQuire's book provides both a
useful summarization of the disparate theories surrounding
the rise of photographic culture and its impact (in
particular, on memory and the recording of history), and an
intriguing deconstruction of the totalizing and positivist
roots of the photographic project. In his introduction,
McQuire states that: 'In seeking to formulate
connections which don't necessarily conform to the model of
linear narrative, there is a temptation to say everything at
once. Since this proves impossible, other means must be
found. What follows can certainly be read from beginning to
end, but this is not the only legitimate way to proceed'
(8). This is certainly true,
since each of the chapters reads like a self-contained
essay, thus facilitating random reading or browsing.
However, there is a structure to the entire book that does
unfold in a more or less linear fashion. The text is divided
into three parts (or acts if one wishes to conceptualize in
a theatrical mode). Part 1, 'The Ruins of Representation',
is mostly a succinct and well-organized narrative of the
decline of photography's supposed autonomy and the
'positivist' authority of its images from its inception in
the 1830s through the invention and rise of cinematography
in the 1890s and early 1900s. Part 2, 'Photomnemonics',
examines the crisis of individual and collective memories
that the rise of audiovisual media has caused, and the
ideological and political dilemmas inherent in the
(re)presentation of history through the camera's eye. Part
3, 'The New Plasticity of Space and Time', is an analysis of
our ever-shrinking global village, dominated by the speed
and the homogenous space created by the rise of the
televised mass media. All of these larger units are further
divided into chapters as well, with titles such as 'The
Mechanical Eye of Reason', 'Flickering in Eclipses', and 'In
the Neon Forest'. As mentioned above,
McQuire begins his study with a history of the cultural and
philosophical contexts into which photography was born.
After relating this familiar background, McQuire turns his
critical lens towards such history and begins to
methodically deconstruct the ideological assumptions of its
foundations. He writes that: 'At the historic moment in
which positivism subjugated virtually the entire field of
Western knowledge, the camera was able to fuse the realism
of geometric perspective and the theological investment in
light as the origin of truth with the scientific
valorization of the objective eye' (33). After illustrating how
photography reinforced positivist ideology and the certainty
of an objective truth, McQuire shows us how the very
technology that assured these notions began to unravel and
undermine such certainty in the faith of perception. All of
the usual arguments come up, from the selective space of the
photographic frame to the subjectivity of the individual
photographer's look. This leads McQuire into the
philosophical grey area and ambivalence that photography
embodies. In the aptly titled
chapter 'Promiscuous Meanings', McQuire writes, 'the camera
has consistently proved to be neither properly objective,
nor yet properly subjective' (50). It is in this either/or
-- or more accurately both/and -- space that photography
exists. Photographs acquire their 'promiscuous meanings'
through fragmentation, infinite reproducibility, and
dissemination. In fact, photography placed new emphasis on
the fragment as the privileged mode of meaning. McQuire
notes that both photography and psychoanalysis 'lavish
unprecedented attention on the detail, the part-object, the
fragment; especially the fragmented body as a structure of
deep psychic meaning' (51). Insights like this make one
wonder about the extent to which the invention of
photography made modern psychology possible. There is no
doubt, however, about the effect that photography had on the
modern psyche and the rise and spread of industrial
capitalism. McQuire finds the correlative of the alienation
of the modern subject in the 'profound deterritorialization
of image and meaning produced by the camera' (55). He
continues: 'In the proliferation of
disembodied visions and the wholesale portability of images,
the photographic camera offers the modern subject not an
image of totality, but an image of its own ambivalence,
suspended between the silken promise of liberation and
nostalgia at loss of anchorage' (55). In other words, the camera
helped to facilitate the alienation of the modern human by
simultaneously providing the means to capture the past and
fragment and remove it from any fixed context. Thus, the
modern era was born. Chapters 6 and 7, 'The
Mobile Frame' and 'Flickering in Eclipses', finally bring us
to cinema and how it figures into the ideological history of
photography. McQuire glosses the history of cinematic
possibility from its revolutionary beginnings: 'being
acclaimed as a tool of cultural subversion and political
awakening, cinema has come to be frequently castigated as a
mechanism of social conservatism and political narcosis'
(71). He finds this transformation to be complex and
significant: 'On one level, it belongs to the gradual
naturalization of cinematic perception over the course of
this century: where it once shocked, cinema now saturates
habitual ways of seeing' (71). Perhaps this trend -- the
shock of the new giving way to acceptance and naturalism --
is simply, sadly, indicative of all revolutions. Somewhat
ironically, incidents such as Joseph Stalin's silencing of
Sergei Eisenstein have left us with Steven Spielberg's
capitalistic fantasies. However, the political implications
underlying this trend are complex and worth investigating in
order to understand the way in which we have been
conditioned to perceive the world around us. And even though
much of the remainder of McQuire's book probes these
questions, it is Noel Burch's study of cinema and the rise
of the 'Institutional Mode of Representation' in his book
_Life to Those Shadows_ that presents a definitive word on
the subject. [2] At the heart of these
questions is the debate surrounding cinema's relationship to
mimesis: in other words, how does the real world relate to
the 'reel' world? McQuire writes: 'Because cinema offers
'real perceptions' unburdened by the necessarily real
referents that Barthes posited as the corollary of the
photograph, its mimetic aspect resides far less in plotting
direct correspondences between images and objects or events
than in the structure of its viewing experience . . .
[this] expanded the sense cinema was able to give
its spectators of not only seeing the real world
differently, but of *really seeing a different world*'
(73). With Jean Baudrillard's
aura looming in the background and Walter Benjamin's spectre
haunting his text, McQuire continues a few pages
later: 'With the photograph, one
can still dream of locating the image within lived space and
time, of referring it to a single 'real' instant which
occurred at a determinate place. With cinema, even though
individual shots may retain this aura of referentiality, the
textual system of the multi-shot scene no longer functions
with reference to a single, ostensibly real event'
(76). The problem, for many
theorists, arises with the attempt to naturalize or
normalize this cinematic grey area. However, despite the
success that Hollywood (particularly during the era of the
studio system) has had in standardizing and naturalizing
cinematic practice, the differences between real and
cinematic have never entirely been eradicated or smoothed
over. McQuire notes that: 'Despite all the attempts
to secure the spectator's relation to the moving image --
*to naturalize its frame to infinity* (Derrida) -- the
experience of cinema has remained intensely ambivalent.
Hailed as the repository of 'life itself', cinema has found
equal acclamation as life's *other*, the waking dream of a
world whose boundaries, surfaces and dimensions have become
increasingly unstable' (85). This ambivalent crisis of
representation is where the trajectory of photography and
cinema has taken us, into a no man's land of neither this
nor that. In the last chapter of Part 1, 'The Ruins of
Representation', McQuire concludes that: 'If the image-world has
today swallowed the 'real world' to produce a mutant state
of being which is neither real, nor yet simply imaginary (at
least as those terms have been customarily understood), it
is naive to envisage a political critique which could be
located entirely *outside* the world of images'
(101). Or, in other words,
'representation is no longer shaped to fit what is real;
instead, the world is called on to live up to its images'
(101). As Part 2 opens, McQuire's
stated objective is 'to examine the camera's relation to the
transformation of memory and history in the last century and
a half' (110). Citing examples such as Stalin airbrushing
people out of official Soviet photographs in order to erase
and then rewrite history, McQuire turns his attention
towards what he calls the 'emergence of *amnesic cultures*:
societies entranced by spectacle and immediacy but lacking
any sense of history' (109). He further contextualizes the
history of photography against the backdrop of
industrialization and, more specifically, the subsequent
transition from a rural cyclical idea of time to a modern,
urban idea of linear time. This idea of time moving like a
train down tracks towards a specific destination created a
crisis of memory in that memory had to be controlled in
order for time to move forward teleologically, or, as
McQuire quotes Foucault, 'if one controls people's memory
one controls their dynamism' (111). However, as the fear of
forgetting and loss that is symptomatic of a linear
conception of time became entrenched in western
consciousness, McQuire points to the ethnocentric and sexist
nature of this ideology. He writes: 'Lamentations concerning
the 'disappearance of history' so easily mask the mourning
for the disappearance of a particular kind of history: the
dream of continuous history which comforted the Western
subject with an image of its own sovereignty' (131). It is a
kind of selective memory that the colonial project ushered
in: reification of the events that connect this narrative of
progress and erasure of the histories and peoples that stand
in the way of time's train and its destination. In light of all this, one
of the great projects of the 20th century has been to give
voices to all of the forgotten histories, to try to remember
that which, in many cases, has already been lost. In the
most intriguing chapter in Part 2, 'Intolerable Memories',
McQuire discusses the problem that arises in the
representation of certain memories which may be collectively
too painful to remember, but need to be remembered
nonetheless. His focus in this chapter is the Holocaust and
the crisis, both aesthetically and ethically, of
representation that this horror of horrors brought to light.
How does one remember what our very human-ness resists
remembering? What is the best method of recording and
remembering that will do justice to the memory of those
millions killed in the Holocaust? Part of the difficulty
lies in the problem that the very methods of photographic
and cinematic naturalism that are often used to record,
expose, and memorialize historical events can also be used
to manipulate, contort, and control our understandings of
history. McQuire writes that, 'once habitualized and
hierarchized, stylistic preferences all too easily become
alibis for avoiding other questions concerning the politics
of representation and the production of realism' (135). In
other words, cinema and the mass media -- and the
naturalistic methods they often employ -- all too often
become a smokescreen to disguise any latent motives. McQuire
spends this chapter analyzing various strategies that
filmmakers have taken in approaching the Holocaust, and the
criticism that many of these films have received. From films
such as _Night and Fog_ and _Shoah_, to the German
mini-series _Holocaust_ and _Schindler's List_, he astutely
navigates a way through the thorny subjects and
philosophical dilemmas that these films raise. Without
coming to any easy conclusions, McQuire sums up his argument
thus: 'What can be learned from
these different strategies for representing 'the Holocaust'?
Most evidently that there can be no single way of
encapsulating such an 'event', which in its enormity and
complexity challenges the very concept of history conceived
as a narrative series of motivating causes and effects'
(162). This challenge of
teleological history and 'the politics of totalization'
(163) are the crux of the postmodern argument, and the crux
of McQuire's argument. The terrorist attacks that occurred
in the United States on September 11, 2001 raise new
questions about how film and the media shape our
understanding of history, but that is for another
discussion. In the last chapter of
Part 2, 'Biodegradable Histories', McQuire (borrowing a
concept from Derrida) concludes that all history, all
memory, is 'biodegradable'. He writes that biodegradable
history 'presages the end of the encyclopaedic model of
totalization' (176). Once again calling into question the
authority of any photographic image (or the totalizing idea
of a photographic archive), McQuire sums up his argument
(for Part 2 and more or less for the entire
book): 'What is called history is
never homogeneous, made up only of positivities and
positives, all that is solid, enduring, visible,
memorialized and saved, but also, and as importantly, is
formed by processes of selective amnesia, strategic
illegibility, repression, avoidance, neglect, and loss.
Recognizing that history is biodegradable, that it belongs
as much to the decay of origins and archives as to their
preservation and 'museification', demands new protocols from
those which have operated in the name of absolute origins,
authentic relics and photographic truths.' (176) This recognition that
history is biodegradable is at the heart of cinematic
representations of history as well. We must always remember
that a process of selection (and selective amnesia) is
always involved when deciding what part of history to
include and what part to leave on the cutting room
floor. Part 3 takes up many of
the theories elaborated upon in Parts 1 and 2 and applies
them to the material world of modernity. For instance,
Chapter 4, 'In the Neon Forest', explores the modern city
and the manner in which it is informed, represented, and
shaped by visual media. After photography, cinema, and
television, speed becomes the key commodity in the
solipsistic ideology of contemporary media culture. McQuire
writes: 'In one sense, 'modernity'
can be defined by this shift which affects both physical
boundaries and psychic formations: the destabilization of
architectural and geographical borders (the room, the
nation) as much as the disruption of discursive traditions
(the unity of the book, the universality of reason) are part
of the crisis of referents and dimensions currently testing
the limits of thought and experience' (189). The increasing solipsism
that television created is one of the primary points in
Chapter 6, 'Unstable Architectures', in which McQuire
writes: 'The fact that television
achieved mass audiences on a scale exceeding even Goebbles's
hopes, not by replicating the cinematic prototype, but
according to a cellular model of individuating viewing
sites, has played a major role in structuring the
contemporary social and political terrain' (234). The rise of television,
the advent of VCRs (and, more recently, DVDs), and the
ubiquity of the internet, have all led to a more solipsistic
culture of jaded individuals wallowing in the twilight zone
of the hyperreal. Through the speed of televisual
technologies and cellular communication the very far and the
strange have become as near as our living rooms. We have
come too far from Plato's cave to go back; we live in a
world, as Don DeLillo writes, that television news and
videotape has made 'Realer than real'. [3] Towards
the end of the text, McQuire writes that: 'Television's
attempts to pursue the present moment within a linear
economy of time brings what Heidegger called leveled-off
time 'to the fore'. When time becomes indifferent, every
event becomes the same' (256). It is this apparent
homogeneity of space and time that becomes frightening in
its political and cultural implications, and McQuire argues
that these trends are what must be interrogated and
deconstructed in order to understand better this brave, new
world. _Visions of Modernity_ is
a very useful book for film scholars. Particularly his
deconstruction of the history of photography and cinema with
which it begins. It is also a useful summation of many
disparate theorists and philosophers on the subjects of
vision, photography, and film. The middle and latter
portions of the book are particularly useful to those
interested in the uneasy relationship between history and
film, and the impact of television and mass communication on
different cultures. However, McQuire's text is not for the
faint hearted. His style is very academic (sometimes a
little too much so) and he brews up a heady mix of Adorno,
Barthes, Baudrillard, Berger, Benjamin, Bhaba, Crary,
Derrida, Freud, Foucault, Lacan, Kracauer, Lyotard, Virilio,
just to name a few. At times, McQuire risks drowning in this
quagmire of theorists and pulling the reader down with him.
But, overall, he keeps his chin above water and manages to
make sense out of this complex synthesis of ideas, usually
conducting an engaging discussion between these disparate
voices. In an age when networks digitally remove the logos
of rival networks in their broadcasts of location news
reporting, and virtual dinosaurs stalk the 'reel' world,
McQuire's book is essential reading for those with a desire
to understand the ideological and philosophical
undercurrents of these phenomena. After reading this book,
going to the movies and watching CNN will never be the same
again. University
of Tulsa,
Oklahoma, USA Footnotes 1. See Jonathan Crary,
'Modernizing Vision', in Linda Williams, ed., _Viewing
Positions: Ways of Seeing Film_ (New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 23-35. 2. Noel Burch, _Life to
Those Shadows_, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993). 3. See Don DeLillo,
_Underworld_, (New York: Scribner, 1998), p. 158.
Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Jeffrey S. Longacre,
'After Photography: Deconstructing the Era of the Image',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 39, November 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n39longacre>. Read a response to this
text: Scott McQuire, 'Reply to
Longacre', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 40, November 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n40mcquire>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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