C H A P T E R 5
The Pencil of History:
Photography, History, Archive
What is at issue here . . . is the violence of the archive itself, as
archive, as archival violence.
jacques derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
Records, recruitments, riots, and resistance: The line I have drawn must
seem to be one we can scarcely break off at the point I have designated
1943. The line plots a path one might well feel compelled to extend
through other points 1965, 1992 that stand like names, like markers
in the ground, not least in the Los Angeles we have just left. But, for now,
I want to make the line of argument double back on itself, double back
not only on photography but also on the question of the disciplinary
mechanisms of history and art history, which I raised in the introduction
and chapter 1 but have since left in suspension, as if the themes we have
been discussing did not weigh upon this question too. So now I want to
loop back, even at the risk of being oblique.
My chapter heading, at least, promises something with a deWnite
point. And indeed, at the outset, I had hopes it would lead to something
sharp and clearly drawn. But again, I Wnd myself breaking off and want-
ing to say something before I begin. Of course, it is already too late for
that. And what would it serve to say that, before beginning, I want to
draw out something of the history of the remarks I am about to make, to
draw back to an original context: a conference in Milwaukee whose very
title, Visual Culture: Film/Photography/History, by a tempting addi-
tion of terms, seemed to project a way beyond both the daunting recent
debates on visual culture and the internalized worlds of Wlm and photo
theory. Here History is set alongside Film and Photography,
opening Visual Culture with a slash to a luminous horizon in which
research can free itself from narrow conWnement in the claustrophobic
209
210 THE PENCIL OF HISTORY
spaces of theoretical introspection. In such an expansive light, one might
do better, perhaps, than be distracted by what are little better than
specks quite marked, certainly, yet not pronounced: two dots and two
dashes; unspoken codings that join the terms of the conference title as in
a syllogism yet dissect them, silently dividing the rubric within itself,
leaving the trace of a deep uncertainty and an unresolved incoherence.
Perhaps it is better to be distracted than to be caught. Though
even before I arrived in Milwaukee, I seemed to be hooked on one par-
ticular line and what it set in place: Photography on one side, His-
tory on the other; text and context reunited, at a stroke. Yet what is
going on here and now? What happens when I seek to delineate a his-
torical setting for my remarks and say, in the process, that I have not yet
crossed the line and begun? What happens when one conjoins photog-
raphy and history by drawing a line between them: a line of a certain
thickness, a slash that scars where the pure cut ought to have healed, a
slanted conjunction that seems to have no choice but to incline to the
right. I am suddenly reminded of Karl Werkmeister praising the exhaus-
tive documentary rigor of Nazi art-world informants while insisting that
Marxist art history means objective, documentary history, and of Thomas
Crow reviewing Donald Preziosi s Rethinking Art History and calling con-
temptuously for a return from tertiary texts to primary sources and
to the discipline of the archive.1 These are positively striking conclu-
sions for a certain kind of Marxist social history of art to have reached.
They repeat the gesture of division and restoration, even as they enact a
telling reconciliation with the deep-seated protocols of the academic
institution of history. In all events, these gestures, too, must be in play
here, if not as a context for a chapter that has not yet started, then cer-
tainly as part of its polemical Weld.
It is the summons to History and the appeal to the discipline of
the archive that bring Werkmeister and Crow to mind at this point,
alongside Milwaukee and the insertion of the oblique. This is an appeal
that has become familiar by now in these pages as a gesture of authority,
of power, secured by an entire structure of regulation. The invocation of
discipline and archive takes us back to earlier arguments about instru-
mental discourse, the development of practices of photographic docu-
mentation, and the powers invested in them and realized through them,
THE PENCIL OF HISTORY 211
framed as these arguments were by questions of the New Art History
and the politics of representation. These were arguments, therefore,
that I did not intend to leave in the nineteenth century. I also wanted
them to intrude on that enduring temptation, the claim of the Left, of
concerned documentary and of ideology critique to take a stand on
the Real, against the impositions of power to which the Real is always,
supposedly, vulnerable.
For a telling example of this, one needs to think back no further
than the time frame of the Milwaukee conference I have already invoked:
April 1992 a time, it may be recalled, when the incontrovertible pho-
tographic evidence of the pinpoint bombing of Iraq in the First Gulf
War was beginning to be hedged about by the belated hesitancy of the
Pentagon s expert readers, and when the incontrovertible photographic
evidence of the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles County was
beginning to be shown, by lawyers for the defense, to be the very model
of a process of semiosis and a sliding of the signiWer that might well take
with it any jury caught in its path. At that time, between the burning
of Baghdad and the burning of Los Angeles, it was only too tempting
to welcome one demise of evidence and damn the other. What could be
more compelling than a politics of conviction grounded on the external-
ity of Wnal truths to systems of power and on the inherent evidentiality
of the unmanipulated photographic record? Yet the fate of the Rodney
King videotape when it twice came to trial showed only that what was
at stake was not evidence of reality but the reality of evidence: the insti-
tutional struggle around the production of the real and the true. The
camera itself was wagered in this struggle. It could not bring the strug-
gle to a halt. It offered no shortcut to a space beyond dispute. For the
evidence of the image, there was no escaping the long trek across the
more uncertain ground of the conditions of witness, the status of docu-
mentation, and the politics of disputable meanings.
A paradox is at work, of course, in all political appropriations of
visual images that want, in effect, to avoid at all costs a politics of the image.
But it is a paradox, I have tried to suggest, with deWnite yields, insofar
as it can be institutionally contained and sustained. From the slums
of Quarry Hill in late nineteenth-century Leeds to the racial ghetto of
South Central Los Angeles, from the bomb sites of residential Baghdad
212 THE PENCIL OF HISTORY
to the pastoral spaces of Edwardian Surrey, a deep play of power is heav-
ily staked on what, more than 150 years ago in The Pencil of Nature,
William Henry Fox Talbot called the mute testimony of the photo-
graph, with its promise of evidence of a novel kind. 2
What I want to suggest too, however, is that we should also not
forget how much is riding on the economy of this testimony and all
that supports it for the discipline of History. For even where they eschew
any general doctrine of history, practices of historical investigation still
rest their claims to truth on protocols and hierarchies of evidence. How-
ever pragmatic, however preoccupied with the seemingly modest ques-
tions of professional technique, such practices therefore cannot escape
their own conditionality. For the court of appeal of History, as for pho-
tography, the status of evidence is always on the line. And, if recent work
on photography has opened up the apparatus to expose the cliché of the
evidential status of the photograph, what abyss of uncertainty opens in
History through the door of a history of evidence or, indeed, of a his-
tory of the archive the archive of history, the archive that constitutes
History?
But I am getting ahead of myself. I ought to begin.
The same century, Roland Barthes reminds us, invented History and
Photography. 3 Invented is a fulcrum here: These two formidable
apparatuses History, capital H, and Photography, capital P these
two steam-age engines of representation, are given to us as inventions,
devices, machines of meaning, built in the same epoch, within the same
code, in the same epistemological space, part of the engineering of the
same positivist regime of sense, under the sign of the Real. Yet such a
loaded reading rests too much on the coding of capitalization. It asks
Barthes s twin capitals to carry a burden that is, at once, overloaded and
insubstantial: a weight of meaning that is monolithic yet hollow.
As Stephen Bann has shown in The Clothing of Clio, the forms of
nineteenth-century historical imagination and by this he is referring
only to what can be found in Germany, Britain, and France were mul-
tiple and complex. To conWne history to the professional practice of his-
tory as an academic discipline would therefore constitute an unwarranted
narrowing that would fail to see the play of devices and strategies of
THE PENCIL OF HISTORY 213
what Bann calls a historical poetics 4 across a vast and sprawling
domain, which extends from historiography proper, through historical
novels to visual art, spectacle and the historical museum. 5 Indeed, even
within academic historiography, the rhetoric of historical representation
was more heterodox and strategically varied than has been suggested by
the reading of Leopold von Ranke s famous injunction to show how,
essentially, things happened as the exhaustive program of a positivist
new history. If the demand for authenticity and authentication was per-
sistently renewed throughout the nineteenth century, then it provoked
the development of a range of quite different representational possibili-
ties, just as later it invoked an ingeniously diverse array of responses to
the equally persistent effects of doubt and irony.
So, too, with photography: What Barthes s sentence presents as a
general domain was as we have seen in earlier chapters a Weld of dif-
ferences elaborated over time, as a technology of sense was speciWed and
multiplied in discursive regimes that had to be embedded, institutional-
ized, and enforced in processes we have hardly yet begun to understand.
And if, across these diversiWed Welds of historical representations and
heterogeneous photographies, there were multiple points of contact and
convergence from the facsimile to the souvenir, from the record to the
tableau then the statuses of these hybrid historical-cum-photographic
forms had to be secured in local negotiations, as the customized mecha-
nisms of two adaptive machines were coupled and bolted together to gen-
erate new powers of meaning.
The discursive Welds of history and photography are not, there-
fore, reducible to ponderous unities that we can wheel into action or into
the breaker s yard, where we can Xex our muscles dismantling the nine-
teenth century s baleful bequest. It is necessary to insist on this before
we turn to consider the strategic attempt to embed the status of his-
tory and photography in the uncontestable denotative ground of the
document and evidence. The closing of the rhetoric of historiography at
the level of the fact and the closing of the meaning of the photograph
at the level of its indexicality have operated in Welds of historical and
photographic discourse they have never saturated. Whatever their ambi-
tions, they have remained local ploys, whose grounds have always been
in dispute.
214 THE PENCIL OF HISTORY
Let us head for the local, then, to see how, in particular, the line has been
drawn or erased between a practice of History and a practice of Pho-
tography. In 1916, in London, Messrs. H. D. Gower, L. Stanley Jast,
and W. W. Topley respectively survey secretary, former curator, and
treasurer of the Photographic Survey and Record of Surrey published
what they called a handbook to photographic record work for those
who use a camera and for survey and record societies. 6 More succinctly,
they titled their work The Camera as Historian. It is a promising starting
point, though I make no historical claims for it. We are no longer, of
course, in the century to which Barthes was referring. However, Gower,
Jast, and Topley s book could certainly be read against half a century
of photographic survey work in Britain, going back sporadically to the
1850s and 1860s but gathering momentum among amateur survey soci-
eties in the late 1880s.7 Indeed, the book itself is dedicated to the late Sir
Figure 51. Photograph of Sir J. Benjamin Stone and title page of H. D. Gower, L. Stanley
Jast, and W. W. Topley, The Camera as Historian (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1916).
THE PENCIL OF HISTORY 215
J. Benjamin Stone, M.P., founder in 1897 of the National Photographic
Record Survey and, in the words of the dedication, during his lifetime
the greatest personal force in the movement for Photographic Record. 8
The term movement is signiWcant here. Yet in presenting their
own work, the authors were sure: This is the Wrst attempt to deal with
the subject in a volume. 9 Whether this claim is justiWable or not could
be said to be a matter of record. The book s catalog of photographic
survey and record activities primarily in Britain, but also in Belgium,
Germany, and the United States was, however, admittedly partial and
selective. Even so, Gower, Jast, and Topley had set themselves to give
us something honest and practical and if, as a manifesto for a move-
ment, it was belated, then nevertheless it was a manifesto that strove
to be all the more powerful for having the function of a modest and emi-
nently practical manual that simply and without any fuss collated and
conserved what common sense knew and experience had elaborated.10
It is, then, the banality of the text that is its interest. And this is
not only a matter of its exemplary attention to the microlevel of bureau-
cratic technique and its unabashed resolve to speak about the smallest
details of method, materials, rules, and equipment. We might, indeed,
be grateful for this and hesitate to condescend toward the utter serious-
ness with which the authors hold their ofWce. But the book s tone is also
part of the machinery of a particular effect that goes beyond its clubbish
earnestness.
The presentation of historical investigation as a modest set of tech-
niques and protocols, calling on no general doctrine or philosophical
schema, is crucial to the sense that, in the practical craft of history, theo-
retical decision is not in play. All we have is a practice that turns on what
Lynn Hunt has called the connoisseurship of documentary evidence, 11
within which a certain regimen of photography can then be mobilized.
Yet, as in the rules and practices of common law, which developed in
parallel to the techniques of professional history, the claim to produce
and evaluate evidence is a philosophically powerful one, which as Mark
Cousins has argued profoundly privileges the notion of the event as a
singular entity, present in time, whose existence it is the task of histori-
cal investigation to establish.12 However, while legal categories and rules
of evidence constitute truth as what may be argued, judged, and appealed
216 THE PENCIL OF HISTORY
in terms of the mode of instantiation of acknowledged law, historical prac-
tice and rules of historical veriWcation exceed even this enforced litigation
in their claim to delimit and exhaust the events of the past as having only
one mode of existence.13 In the framework of modest technique, what
the eventhood of the event consists in is decided in advance, and in this
decision without theory, the action of the discursive regime in which
eventhood is inscribed the regime of history is placed beyond dispute.
This takes us back to what common sense knows: that, as the
authors of The Camera as Historian put it, the claim of photographic
record to superiority over all other forms of graphic record is incon-
testable. 14 Later, we shall see that, as in other spheres of documenta-
tion, this superiority proves in need of the most careful protection by
organizational rules and archival protocols, but it is the unquestioned
point of departure. What it is taken to provide is a self-evident measure
of the failures of earlier illustrations, such as those in the Pugins Exam-
ples of Gothic Architecture, to accomplish the aim of displaying every
subject exactly as it exists. 15 (The echoes of Ranke s dictum in this quo-
tation from Pugin and Pugin are pointed here and are not in themselves
to be called into question.) Yet, in breaking through the limits to abso-
lute Wdelity 16 inherent in drafting techniques, photography is also under-
stood to continue to capitalize on a more general power that is taken to
reside in all techniques of visualization:
The means whereby the past, particularly in its relation to human activi-
ties and their results, may be reconstructed and visualized, can be roughly
grouped under the four headings of material objects, oral tradition, writ-
ten record, and lastly, graphic record, whether pictorial or sculptural. It is
no part of our purpose to belittle the value of any of the Wrst-named tools
of the historian or the scientist; but it will probably be conceded that in
many respects the last named has a value greatly outweighing the others.17
Since the a priori aim is visualization, one cannot help feeling
that the odds were stacked against material culture, oral tradition, and
written record. But this aside, we are not dealing with a new theme: It
haunts the nineteenth-century historical imagination and disturbs the
security of historical writing from the early years of the century. What
THE PENCIL OF HISTORY 217
moves the argument is a sense of loss, against which images on condi-
tion they are also correct representations 18 are attributed a capacity
to arrest the decay of the present and vivify the resurrection of the past.
In the words of the artist and antiquarian Charles Alfred Stothard: To
history they give a body and a substance, by placing before us those
things which language is deWcient in describing. 19
Curiously enough, Stothard is describing the Xattened engravings
of funerary monuments that illustrate his Monumental EfWgies of Great
Britain, published in parts between 1817 and 1833, twelve years after
Stothard s untimely death. We shall have to come back to this odd rela-
tion of the picture, the monument, death, and the life of the past, fore-
shadowing as it does the themes of Barthes s last work. But for now, let
us note that the printed image excites a double desire of history: on the
one hand, for the careful sifting and assembling of detailed and objective
records; and, on the other, for the restoration of history as a lived real-
ity. Yet, in each direction, the power of the image falls Xat until it is
inserted in another system: on the one side, into the cross-referenced
series of the Wle and the archive; on the other, into what Bann calls a
discourse which mimes the process of chronological sequence, 20 that is,
into a system of narration. At the same time, however, the system of the
archive and the system of narration, which encompass the image and
variously determine its vivifying effect, must also remain in some way
external to what Gower, Jast, and Topley call the absolute indepen-
dence of each print. 21 This is because the record image s discursive value
depends on its neither being seen as having its meaning in a network of
differences, nor being read as having absorbed narration into itself, lest
it be thought to have been contaminated by the suspect opulence and
sentimental melodrama that had already eroded the documentary status
of history painting.
Thus, for Gower, Jast, and Topley, narrative and archive can be
treated as the purely technical issues of labeling and storage, which
remain supplementary to the camera s work. It is, they tell us, the dis-
covery and development of photography that has placed in our hands
a power incomparably greater than existed before of enabling the rapidly
changing phases of our country and its people to be Wxed by means of
authentic pictorial record. 22 The status of the photographic record
218 THE PENCIL OF HISTORY
the assurance of its accuracy and authenticity is anchored in an on-
tology of the photographic image that, in the imaginary of history as
Stephen Bann describes it at work in the nineteenth century, promises
to annihilate the gap between the model and the copy and to realize
the Utopian possibility of a restoration of the past in the context of the
present. 23 Yet, in effect, this truth function of the image evinces little
conWdence. As Bann again has commented: the quest for historical real-
ism risked becoming a vicious circle in which the period details could
never be sufWciently copious, and the effect of resurrection never over-
whelming enough. 24 The accumulation of detail in the print will never
be enough; the accumulation of prints will never cover the Weld that is
to be surveyed.
This fear of a lack is, however, inseparable from a horror at what
may be too much. If there is always something wanting in the photo-
graphic record and the photographic archive, then there is also some-
thing more than desired, and this excess of photographic meaning must
be brought within bounds. Here, the very want of skill of amateurs is
welcomed as a relative virtue, since what is needed is a certain technical
innocence, in that, we are told,
it is often the case that the processes by which pictorial excellence are
[sic] secured in photographic work (partial suppression of detail, double
printed atmospheric effects and the like) are detrimental, if not fatal, to
the production of a useful record photograph.25
The code for photographic excess is here the inXuence of a popularized
pictorialism:
Thus, to those photographers who desire to infuse individuality into their
work, such processes as gum-bichromate or pigmoil will appeal, by reason
of the extent to which they are amenable to modiWcation of the image at
various stages.
The record worker, however, . . . will seek other qualities, and chief
amongst them may be placed permanence of the image and straightfor-
wardness of manipulation, with capacity to record detail and produce in
accurate gradation a wide range of tones.26
THE PENCIL OF HISTORY 219
Gower, Jast, and Topley s strategy therefore necessarily entails the loca-
tion of the effects of pictorialism and individuality as external to what is
proper to photography and to the workings of the camera. Ideally, the
camera should be left to itself which is why it is the camera that is,
in effect, the historian. Whereas, for the purposes of record, writing is
dangerously liable to proliferate, the camera, we are told, ensures that
the photographer must keep strictly to the business in hand, which is to
take something; and though to focus the mind upon an object to the exclu-
sion of everything else even for a few moments is a difWcult enough under-
taking for most people in these days, the camera is fortunately unable to
wander from the object upon which it is trained.27
In part, this marked concern to control photographic meaning is
driven by a utilitarian ethic that dreams of greater efWciency and pro-
ductivity in the use of the camera. This, in turn, demands that the work
of amateurs be systematically organized:
To the engineer it is abhorrent that any energy be allowed to run to waste.
But in the domain of photography the amount of horse-power
running to waste is appalling and all for lack of a little system and co-
ordination. Shall this be allowed to continue? Shall the product of count-
less cameras be in the future, as in the past (and in large measure to-day),
a mass of comparative lumber, rapidly losing interest even for its owners,
and of no public usefulness whatever? This is a question of urgency. Every
year of inaction means an increase of this wastage.28
At the same time, however, efWciency is not all that is at stake.
Pleasure is clearly at issue. For the amateur, record work provides a way
beyond the waning of the Wrst Xush of pleasure at the power photography
places in one s hands. 29 What lies beyond is the more acceptable employ-
ment of leisure hours, in other words, a regulated economy of pleasure:
in many cases the turning of one s energies to systematic photography will
open up avenues of thought and lead to studies which will enrich life with
the purer pleasures of the intellect.30
220 THE PENCIL OF HISTORY
By contrast, unbridled or undirected pleasure is incompatible with the
ethic of the archive. Out in the Weld, for example,
The practice of exposing promiscuously upon any object which happens
to attract attention is of far less value than that of selecting such subjects
only as are of importance (from a record not an aesthetic point of view).31
Or again, from the point of view of the ofWcers:
Mere aimless wandering about and casual snap-shotting is not only poorly
productive in itself, but tends to beget a slipshod attitude towards the
work which it should be the aim of Survey organizers to combat, and is
moreover less productive of enjoyment to the participants in the excur-
sion than is work intelligently directed to an end of real value.32
So, for this end and in the end, the policing of pleasure and the
themes of utility and efWciency are one. What each demands is discipline
and the imposition of systematicity. Indeed, the very deWnition of the
Survey is, for Gower, Jast, and Topley, the organization of systematic
photographic work. 33 But the demand for systematicness takes us back
to the anxieties aroused by the truth function of the Historical Survey
and Record and to a striking displacement that these anxieties provoke.
While in its aspiration to comprehensiveness the archival project always
fell short, its accumulative impetus threatened to overwhelm in an entirely
different sense. For, as the number of photographic prints grew, it was
clearly impossible to handle them or access their collective record with-
out a system of storage one in which it must be possible to insert new
prints at any point and to any extent 34 and without what the authors
call a proper arrangement :35
not only . . . some arrangement, but . . . an arrangement which will serve as
an efWcient key to the scope and contents of the collection, not merely as
it is, but as it will become.36
Here, the motifs of economy, efWciency, and systematicness return at a
new level:
THE PENCIL OF HISTORY 221
When time, labour, skill and money are to be expended in making a sur-
vey which shall do credit to the workers and beneWt the present and future
generations, it is worth the most careful consideration to so marshal the
collection that it shall yield its information in the most direct, immediate,
and speciWc way. This end can only be attained by a systematic order.37
To the evident enthusiasm of the authors, this question of order
opens on a number of rich themes. While the meaning of the photograph
can be taken as read in little more than two pages and a single strategic
plate, more than a third of the book s 260 pages is given over to ques-
tions of storage, the relative merits of boxes, drawers, and vertical Wles,
the mount and the mounting process, the masking and binding of lan-
tern slides, the label, the contributors schedules, 38 the quality of mark-
ing ink, the decimal system of classiWcation and the subject order, the
advantages of national standardization, the method of Ordnance Survey
map referencing, vertical Wle guides and their proper use, the technical
demands of the catalog and subject index, and the importance of the sec-
retary s Register of Prints.
There is, for example, the label, without which the pictorial rec-
ord this index of truth is said to be useless or next to useless. 39 But
the codes of the label are not self evident. The authors are insistent that
something more than a mere indication is required in a photographic record.
Such matters as the nature of the process employed, the time of day when
the exposure was made, the direction of the camera, and the date, above
all, the date, belong to the essentials of the record, and should be supplied
whenever possible. At the same time the information asked for should be
limited to what is really needed to make the print intelligible. . . . An histor-
ical or antiquarian fact may add greatly to the interest of the print, but the
survey label is not the place for detailed information of this kind. A reference
to an account or description in some authoritative book or article is always
worth making, when such information is at hand. But any source so named
should be authoritative, and the references should be exact and precise.40
An extraordinary expenditure of commentary and moral fervor thus de-
volves onto this little slip: how much it should say, to whom it should
222 THE PENCIL OF HISTORY
speak, and to what code it should summon both object and viewer. The
label must be a feat of condensation and, as in the voluminous writings
of contemporary museum ofWcials such as George Brown Goode of the
Smithsonian Institution, it is believed to repay the most exacting analy-
sis.41 In the museum as in the archive, the label must be mastered and
become the instrument of a reWned and connective narrative that will
impart instruction of a deWnite character and in deWnite lines, mark-
ing out the space of the archive and the space of the exhibit for useful
knowledge and expelling the wayward frivolity of mere idle curiosity. 42
A similar aura surrounds the modern vertical Wle the latest
information technology, that central artifact, as Allan Sekula calls it43
which, here, merits two full plate illustrations and a detailed descrip-
tion. As an instrument for organizing and handling the Survey archive,
Figure 52. Fig. 8. Label, Survey of Surrey, from H. D. Gower, L. Stanley Jast, and
W. W. Topley, The Camera as Historian (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1916), 73.
THE PENCIL OF HISTORY 223
the vertical Wle is said to constitute as near an approach to the ideal
as can reasonably be expected. 44 Even its cost does not weigh against it.
Like the paradigm in Saussure s linguistics, it is the structure of the
Wling cabinet and the decimal system of classiWcation it supports that
organizes the system of substitutions and equivalences within which the
photographic signs are disposed. But as in the Saussurean model, the con-
struction of meaning across this structure of differences also radically
conXicts with the notion of meaning as a fullness interior to the sign.
The primacy of the camera and the indexical realism of the print are
therefore displaced, suggesting that Gower, Jast, and Topley formalists
in their hearts might better have titled their work The Filing Cabinet
as Historian.
It could only be in the bureaucratic imagination, however, that
the modern vertical Wle could be seen as functioning like an ideal lan-
guage system. From Foucault, we have learned to see its ideal architecture
as a disciplinary machine: an apparatus for individuation and compara-
tive categorization; an instrument for regulating territory and knowl-
edge, rendering them the objects of technocratic adjudication.45 Yet, as
Figure 53. Fig. 19. Drawer of vertical file, Survey of Surrey, from H. D. Gower,
L. Stanley Jast, and W. W. Topley, The Camera as Historian (London: Sampson Low,
Marston, 1916), facing 87.
224 THE PENCIL OF HISTORY
a technology of history, the Wling cabinet has also to accommodate two
further, paradoxical, concerns: a concern for the time history takes to
function and the labor it expends (which in the logic of capital amount
in the end to the same thing), and a concern for the durability of history,
for its duration and hardness, for the survival of history against the ero-
sions of time. And at the point where these two concerns coincide, there
is the question of the expenditure of history as a machine that is used up
in the very process of the efWcient production of knowledge. On the one
hand, the soundly constructed cabinet is a means to prolong the shelf life
of history. On the other hand, at least in the imaginary of empiricism and
the economy of information handling, its rigid structure holds out the
promise of closing the circuit of reading sign referent, which is here
hardly separable from the circuit of production consumption proWt.
Already, in this cumbersome wood-and-cardboard computer, far short of
the real-time technologies of the Cable News Network, the time of
history is imagined as approaching the ideal zero time of disciplinary
knowledge and the cycle of capital: exchange in the least possible time
( real time) for the greatest possible time ( abstract or lost time). 46
These are, then, the banalities with which the model techno-
historians Gower, Jast, and Topley concern themselves: with the small
techniques [as Foucault describes them] of notation, of registration, of
constituting Wles, of arranging facts in columns and tables 47 that are
so familiar to historians; with the modest techniques of knowledge that
present themselves as procedural aids but inscribe the Photographic
Record and Survey in a new modality of power for which the workings
of the camera give us little explanation. As Sekula has said of the devel-
opment of immense police archives in the same period, for all the epis-
temological stakes in the optical model of the camera, it is, in effect, able
to secure little on its own behalf, outside its insertion into this much
more extensive, and entirely nonmimetic, clerical, bureaucratic appara-
tus.48 And the operation of this apparatus has, of course, its own discur-
sive conditions, whose institutional negotiation and effects of power and
knowledge I have tried to outline in earlier chapters.49 This need I add
again? is not to suggest that historical record photography was the
transparent reXection of a power outside itself. It is, rather, to insist that
the record photograph s compelling weight was never phenomenological
THE PENCIL OF HISTORY 225
to use Barthes s later term but always discursive and that the status of
the document and the power effects of its evidence were produced only
in the Weld of an institutional, discursive, and political articulation.
From this point of view, it would seem to be both true and untrue
to say, as Jonathan Crary sometimes appears to, that photography came
too late, seeming to reincarnate a model of the observer and a set of rela-
tions that had already been overthrown.50 Within the workings of the
archival apparatus, the linear, optical system of the camera obscura, with
its rigid positions and inXexible distinctions of subject and object, inside
and outside, could both retain its useful Wxity and be articulated into a
more pragmatic, adaptable system, capable of responding both to new,
productive uses of bodies and spaces and to the proliferating exchange of
images and signs. The look of the camera remains a crucial moment in
the machinery of the archival gaze. The absolutes of realism prove read-
ily adaptable to a new pragmatics of performance. It is this articulation
that produces the evidential effect, on which certain practices not only
of photography but also of history remain dependent. But let us be clear
about this system and what it would mean to depart from it.
The photograph, like the name in Lyotard s sense, pins the system
to the ostensible Wxity of an absolute singularity. But this singularity is an
empty referent answering to a name that by itself cannot be a designa-
tor of reality. 51 For that to occur, we must situate this name in relation
to other names by means of phrases. 52 This is a process, however, that
cannot be seen through to an end, because the inXation of senses that
can be attached to [the name] is not bounded by the real properties of
its referent. 53 The name is, therefore, as Lyotard says,
both strongly determined in terms of its location among the networks of
names and of relations between names (worlds) and feebly determined in
terms of its sense by dint of the large number and of the heterogeneity of
phrase universes in which it can take place as an instance.54
What is crucial here not least for the regimen of the instrumental
archive and the practices of history that cannot detach themselves from
it is that the phrases that come to be attached to a name (in Lyotard s
words)
226 THE PENCIL OF HISTORY
not only describe different senses for it (this can still be debated in dia-
logue), and not only place the name on different instances, but . . . also
obey heterogeneous regimens and/or genres.55
Whereas essentialism conceives the referent of the name as if it were
the referent of a deWnition, 56 the assignment of a deWnition . . . neces-
sarily does wrong to the nondeWnitional phrases relating to [the name],
which this deWnition, for a while at least, disregards or betrays. 57 For
lack of a common idiom, there can be no consensus on the meaning of
the name or the meaning of the photograph historical or not. Real-
ity entails the differend :58 The name does not designate reality so
much as mark reality as the locus of radically incommensurable dif-
ferends, 59 which summon humans to situate themselves in unknown
phrase universes. 60 To respond to this summons, the historian would
have to break with the monopoly over history granted to the cognitive
regimen of phrases, and . . . venture forth by lending his or her ear to
what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge. 61 To the camera
as historian, Lyotard would have this reply: Reality is not a matter of
the absolute eyewitness, but a matter of the future. 62
This might give us pause. But it is not quite the place at which we can
stop. There is still the quotation from Roland Barthes with which I
began but whose argument I have avoided confronting directly. Perhaps
this argument is not what we expect.
The same century invented History and Photography. Yet for
the Roland Barthes of Camera Lucida, this is a paradox. 63 History is
a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellec-
tual discourse which abolishes mythic Time. 64 Photography, however, is
not an intellectual datum. It is a certain but fugitive testimony :65 in
Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there ;66 every pho-
tograph is a certiWcate of presence ;67 photography authenticates the
existence of a certain being ;68 it does not invent; it is authentication
itself. 69
History, then, lacks the authentication on which it would seem to
depend, though it should be noted that History has to Wgure twice in
this argument I resist the temptation to say, the Wrst time as tragedy,
THE PENCIL OF HISTORY 227
the second as farce ;70 rather, it Wgures once as writing and again as the
past. Barthes wants to suggest that
Perhaps we have an invincible resistance to believing in the past, in His-
tory, except in the form of myth. The Photograph, for the Wrst time, puts
an end to this resistance: henceforth the past [Should we now say His-
tory ?] is as certain as the present.71
By contrast, no writing can give me this certainty, 72 because language
is, by nature, Wctional. 73 The Photograph, however, possesses an eviden-
tial force, though its testimony bears not on the object but on time. 74
While the photograph is literally an emanation of the referent, 75 it is
not a copy of a present reality but an emanation of past reality :76 the pure
representation of the ostensive that-has-been 77 which, from the begin-
ning, has to become the truth of a human existence, a she-has-been. 78
The contrast with Barthes s 1967 essay The Discourse of His-
tory is immediately apparent, though in a striking continuity of the
Weld of questions. Barthes, in 1967, seemed to celebrate openly the fact
that Historical narration is dying because the sign of History from now
on is no longer the real, but the intelligible. 79 From the point of view of
the structural linguistic analysis he was then practicing, the myth of the
distinction of historical discourse from other forms of narration was an
imaginary elaboration. 80 The objectivity of historical discourse turns
on a double suppression. In the Wrst place, this is a suppression of the
signs of the utterer the signs of the I in historical discourse whose
absence marks a particular, telling form of imaginary projection: the ref-
erential illusion, whose effects, Barthes says, are not exclusive to his-
torical writing.81 Such a suppression amounts to a radical censorship of
the act of uttering, which links the historian s discourse to the discourse
of the schizophrenic, in that both seek to effect a massive Xowing back
of discourse in the direction of the utterance and even (in the historian s
case) in the direction of the referent, so that no one is there to take
responsibility for the utterance. 82
In the second place, and as an inseparable consequence, it is the sig-
niWed itself that is forced out: As with any discourse which lays claim to
realism, historical discourse only admits to knowing a semantic schema
Figure 54. He is dead and he is going to die . . . . Alexander Gardner: Portrait of
Lewis Payne. 1865, as captioned in Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections
on Photography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), 95. Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Division, Selected Civil War Photographs, 1861 1865
(LC-DIG-cwpb-04208).
THE PENCIL OF HISTORY 229
with two terms, the referent and the signiWer. 83 These are posited in a
direct relation that dispenses with the fundamental term in imaginary
structures, which is the signiWed. 84 In other words, Barthes writes,
in objective history, the real is never more than an unformulated sig-
niWed, sheltering behind the apparently all-powerful referent. This situa-
tion characterizes what we might call the realistic effect.85
And, from this, Barthes concludes that
Historical discourse does not follow the real, it can do no more than sig-
nify the real, constantly repeating that it happened, without this assertion
amounting to anything but the signiWed other side of the whole process
of historical narration.86
Yet what is important, Barthes suggests at the end of his essay, is
the prestige that has attached to this it happened, to this realistic effect,
for which our culture has such an appetite, as can be seen in
the development of speciWc genres like the realist novel, the private diary,
documentary literature, news items, historical museums, exhibitions of
old objects and especially in the massive development of photography,
whose sole distinctive trait (by comparison with drawing) is precisely that
it signiWes that the event represented has really taken place.87
Here, we may note that, for all the footnoted reference to Rhetoric of
the Image, 88 the it happened of the photograph is clearly marked as an
effect of signiWcation. And this is in the context of an argument in which,
against the refusal to acknowledge the real as signiWed and in enthusias-
tic pursuit of the Red Guards of Mao Zedong s Cultural Revolution,
Barthes seems to call for a destruction of the real itself, which is never
more than a meaning, which can be revoked when history requires it. 89
So history has to make its double appearance again, even though the
destruction of the real spells the end of the secular survival of that very
sacredness which is attached to the enigma of what has been, is no longer,
and yet offers itself for reading as the present sign of a dead thing. 90
230 THE PENCIL OF HISTORY
The constant repeating of the it happened, the present sign of a
dead thing : These return us uncomfortably to the second part of Camera
Lucida and to the pure representation of that-has-been the eviden-
tial force of the photograph. Yet we should not miss the paradoxical
point that it is because of its very power as evidence that the Photo-
graph [and, here, Barthes is thinking of his mother] cannot be pene-
trated. 91 The photographic image is both full no room, nothing can
be added to it 92 and Wnite. It offers nothing but the exorbitant thing; 93
in it nothing can be refused or transformed. 94 This is its unendurable
plenitude. 95 The presence it discloses is entirely Wnished complete and
gone and no displacement to a register of cultural meaning can allay
or give voice to the suffering Barthes now experiences entirely on
the level of the image s Wnitude. 96 If the Photograph dispels disbelief
and bestows a certainty on History as the past, then it does so with the
irony 97 that there is nothing to say about it, just as there is nothing to
say about the Xat fact of Death. If the Photograph is unarguable, like the
name, it nevertheless teaches us nothing.
There is another irony to add to this. As a memorial to the past,
the photograph is frangible and Xeeting:
Earlier societies managed so that memory, the substitute for life, was eter-
nal and that at least the thing which spoke Death should itself be immor-
tal: this was the Monument. But by making the (mortal) Photograph into
the general and somehow natural witness of what has been, modern
society has renounced the Monument.98
It is at this point in the text that Barthes invokes the paradox of the
nineteenth century s double legacy: its invention of History (let us say
historiography) and Photography the one fabricated, the other fugi-
tive together ushering in the double death of Memory, the death of the
endurable, the death of the ripe, and even, eventually, the death of the
astonishment of that-has-been, witness to which seers into the Photo-
graph, and even into History as Jules Michelet conceived it, love s protest
against this loss.99
The argument begins to fold against itself, knowingly perhaps, like
the fall of a shroud that hides from view yet remains translucent, as in
THE PENCIL OF HISTORY 231
the curtains that hang at the entrance to Barthes s book. The fugitive-
ness of the photograph and the intellectual formulae of historiography
have expelled redemptive ritual and displaced the continuity of memory.
Yet they have also given us what remain our only fragile testimonies
against the facts of Death and loss. Without being able to conceive dura-
tion, however, the fullness they offer can never ripen but only be replete.
It can only be the fullness of the formula and the fullness of the Photo-
graph, a fullness that, like Death itself, precludes all transactions and is
therefore closed to meaning: irrefutable, yet telling us nothing. The cer-
tainty without meaning of what has been threatens to induce stupe-
faction, but still its prick is felt, spurring Barthes to the revelation that
such evidence can be a sibling of madness. 100
Madness proliferates in these texts by Barthes on History and Pho-
tography. Whereas, formerly, the discourse of the historian was shunned
as too close to that of the schizophrenic, now, it is the semiology and
structural linguistics of the late 1960s that have been shaken off as the
period of a minor scientiWc delirium, 101 while the closeness of the dis-
courses of history and photography to the discourse of the psychotic is
embraced as a madness, or ecstasy, 102 in which untamed affect (love,
grief, enthusiasm, pity) is an absolute guarantee of Being.103 In the midst
of the civilized code of perfect illusions, madness drives crazily into
the piteous spectacle of the photograph and wakens there intractable
reality. 104
A sibling of madness : What has been taken as Barthes s belated
reiteration and vindication of a realist position hardly yields evidence
that would stand up in court. The evidence that is without discursive
conditions is the evidence of the ecstatic, of Friedrich Nietzsche on his
knees in the gutter with his arms around the neck of a dying horse.
There can be little joy for leftist documentarism or social history in join-
ing him there.
One could follow much more closely the vicissitudes of History
and Photography in Barthes s writing: now as complicit in the imagi-
nary elaboration of the realist effect; now as paradoxical inventions of
the same epoch intellectual formula set against the message without
a code ; now, again, as substitutes for memory in a society without mon-
uments. But whether one reads here a continuity or a change of mind,
232 THE PENCIL OF HISTORY
it is clear that Barthes s Wnal ecstatic embrace of the evidential power
of the photograph is far removed from Gower, Jast, and Topley s dream
of its efWcient handling. This can hardly give satisfaction to the con-
noisseurship of documentary evidence. But, on the question of History
at least, surely Barthes s texts are more resolved: History for certain can-
not claim to be a discourse without a code.105 Yet as the analyses unfold,
history keeps doubling, and the double keeps retreating, always to another
space, another domain of existence, that the analyses exclude only to
reinvoke.
In The Discourse of History, Barthes frames the possibility of an
analysis of the narrative structures of history only by closing those struc-
tures, thereby re-creating, from what that closure expels, an external
space of history in which, as Geoff Bennington and Robert Young
point out, discursive structures and, indeed, structural analyses of his-
tory have to work their effects.106 So, too, in Camera Lucida a book
in which Barthes says his conception of photographic realism obliges
him to return to the very letter of Time 107 History is writing, for-
mula, a pure intellectual discourse. But History and Photography be-
long to the same century, to the same chronology, in which the age
of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions 108 and in which the
world of the universalized image 109 brings an end to belief, rendering
archaic what Barthes lovingly treasures, leaving him to survive as one
of the last witnesses 110 of the astonishment of a that-has-been. His-
tory and Photography belong in history, of whose past existence pho-
tography offers certain evidence. And while, beyond the civilized code
of perfect illusions, the intractable evidence of photography is terrify-
ing and ecstatic, bordering on madness, this device of madness is located
within a historical frame and, like History itself, is said to have been his-
torically invented.
So Barthes releases madness only to arrest it again. And, at this
very moment, History escapes. One is reminded of Derrida s remark, in
another context, that philosophy . . . lives only by emprisoning mad-
ness, and it is only by virtue of this oppression of madness that Wnite-
thought, that is to say, history, can reign. 111 History, on the other hand,
never does time; it is always over the wall, and it remains at large even in
Barthes s most structuralist text. It makes no sense, then, to demand that
THE PENCIL OF HISTORY 233
history be added to structuralist analysis: That is only to repeat the
action of the carceral logic, the logic of the limit, the logic of the frame,
that constitutes inside and outside, work and context, structure and his-
tory. It makes no sense, then, to choose sides. Metaphorical or not, this
penitentiary works its effects on both sides of its perimeter wall: The
space of the structural interior, about which we know something from
Barthes, and the space of empiricisms of the extrinsic, 112 about which
we know something from Gower, Jast, and Topley, are kept apart only by
a thin blue line.
This is the issue: the institution in question. And, to echo Derrida
again, we can only avoid the reconstitution of a new archivism or of
a new documentalism 113 by engagement with the problematic of the
border and of framing. 114 We come back, therefore, to the obliquity of
the line. And how else, outside appeals to the Real, will we ever be able
to show that the police or the Pentagon have once more overstepped the
mark? But there is more on the line, here. We come back not only to the
mounting of the photographic record, whose evidence is always framed,
but also to those convenient devices, those encompassing technologies,
to which we need pay no heed but whose ruling deWnes the objects of art
history, its Welds of operation, its patterns of explanation, its endless
to-and-fro of debate between the truth of history and the truth of the
art itself. But this is the opening for another chapter.
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