I presented this at Historical Materialism Toronto on Saturday May 15, 2010. Comments, criticism, and so on all welcome. Some rights reserved: cc by-nc-sa 2010 Kris Erickson.

The abstract follows immediately; the full text is after the jump.

Processing Photographs: Challenging the Legible Image

Abstract: This paper will consider the critical possibilities offered by treating images as more than simply a variety of text. By addressing photographic production as a crucial example of a contemporary image-making mode and not simply another decodable symbolic form, I intend to demonstrate how the purported legibility of imagery masks the decisive relations of production and consumption by which such images are constituted and circulated. More importantly, I intend to discuss how the dominant tendency to privilege images as meaningful – that is, rather than as spurious or ambiguous statements or gestures, as inextricably relative to the conditions under which they were constituted – obscures a version of history in which image-making is a fundamentally constitutive rather than simply reactionary practice. By briefly exploring the practices and images of worker-photographer collectives and war photographers during the 20th Century, I would like to demonstrate how photography is a particularly compelling communications technology with which to challenge the hegemony of textual meaning in contemporary social relations. This is not simply because photography is so ubiquitous in contemporary society, but also because its productive technologies are so widely accessible as means of symbolic production.

In this presentation, I want to challenge the centrality of reading as a communicative strategy. I will argue that practices organized around reading and textual interpretation privilege certain modes of knowing and understanding at the expense of others. This is particularly the case with images, which often get conflated with texts, as if an image can be read along the lines of a written text, whether semiotically, rhetorically, or otherwise. While there are similarities amongst such forms which might warrant a common, overarching label like “text”, there remain key differences that are problematic so far as they remain undeveloped.

First, I’ll address what I mean by “reading.” This is necessarily a tentative working definition. Technically, reading is a kind of action performed on or with a text in order to decode symbols into some form or embodiment of understanding. It’s assumed that a certain order prefigures and structures those symbols – a kind of grammar, and also possibly a kind of rhetoric or logic. Since a text is formed through such structuring, it’s assumed that this symbol system is therefore normative and shared rather than idiosyncratic and individual. Furthermore, because of this common grounding, the kinds of understanding that can be arrived at through a text are believed to be roughly similar amongst different interpreters. Different people reading the same thing should arrive at similar conclusions, so the idea goes. Written language certainly appears at present to have some of this reach: the spread of written English, for example, is a powerfully entrenched idea, but it’s also a material reality. English newspapers are sold and understood internationally, even if largely by being written across diversity and by downplaying local interests. Formal public schooling across at least three continents has developed elaborate systems by which reading “competency” in the language can be assessed. Even if it’s problematic, reading is still considered by many a shared, public capacity. Functional literacy, some might even argue, along with universal adult suffrage, is a de facto guarantee of a working democracy – or, at least a liberal democracy.

In terms of the sense of understanding that emerges from this symbolic decoding that I’m calling “reading,” the concept of “meaning” often gets invoked. In short, reading more commonly derives or produces meaning from texts, rather than, say, the experience of understanding. That meaning may be a reification or abstraction of specific experiences of understanding, or that reading is rife with ambiguity and vagueness and that any certainty of meaning is bound up with questions of authority, are questions I’ll have to leave aside at present.

My main concern with reading, then, is that it comes to overemphasize a particular phase of the process of textual production. It need not matter whether this emphasis rests on the moment of consumption – that is, where readings are put to use – or whether it rests on the moment of construction – that is, where, through reading, one becomes involved in creating texts. Both these senses of reading – one which canonizes and elevates certain texts and the hermeneutic traditions of which they are a part, and the other which popularizes and celebrates audience- or fan-centered reinterpretations of cultural forms – both such senses are strikingly similar in a certain light. In either case, a valorization of reading tends to minimize its complementary and necessary counterpart, writing – or, more generally, inscription – rendering this latter aspect subordinate or merely instrumental to the text, rather than a decisive political act. In short, an uneven view of reading posits that people do things to be read. In contrast to this, a corrective view, in my mind, would demonstrate how people act to inscribe only among those other things that they also do.

It is what is bound up in this idea of inscription that I’d like to recover. Speaking abstractly of the photograph, John Roberts states that it is neither simply “an effect of dominant power relations, nor evidence of the optical unconscious,” but, he continues, “a form of practical knowledge, an inscription of, and an intervention in, a socially divided world.” I take this to mean that, like all images, photographs need not simply act as objects to be read into existing discourses, institutional practices, and hegemonic uses; rather, photographs might take shape as critical statements interjected into dynamic social practices, and constituted by critical social practices of which photographic communication is but a single integrated aspect. Language isn’t symbolically fixed, in this sense, as I feel it often is under reading-centered practices; but it’s still shared, albeit in distinct and important ways.

Roberts’ words echo my reluctance in accepting that only texts and reading contribute to constituting this world. Much more of what we do exists than can be contained in a text, or can even be represented in the forms a text permits. It is curious, of course, to consider how tightly texts bind us to such a wide swath of reality: for example, from the identification and registration numbers that place us squarely within governing institutional practices and orderings of control and domination; to the aggregated data that gives our credit card spending a history that’s remarkably prescient about when we’ll shop next and where we’re likely to do it; to the numbers on the doors of our homes that not only guarantee prompt mail delivery but, when typed into the appropriate web page, will produce satellite images of our home – maybe even some taken “anonymously” of our front door seen from the street. Each of these forms of our textual existence works to bind us into particular patterns of experiencing, knowing and believing, for better or for worse. Although such examples of textually-mediated experience are nearly limitless, I don’t believe this means that such experience is total – even if it is normative and hegemonic.

While I believe the very substance of an image challenges this hegemony of reading, my examples make it clear that images don’t necessarily or automatically give us a way out. They are embroiled in such textualizing practices far too deeply to ignore. However, their more ambiguous relation to language, their inseparable connection with embodied existence, to ways of knowing based in experience rather than interpretation, and the continuous challenges they pose to any sense of reified meaning is crucial to keep in mind. To close, I want to point out two such ways images might continue to challenge a hegemony of reading: through their relation to rhetoric; and through their relation to repertoire.

Vito Signorile and Sol Worth are each interested in how images operate on their viewers – whether culturally or individually. Each asserts that, rhetorically, images function differently from texts in key ways. The simplest example found in both posits that images cannot convey a negation, since they exist only by making present that which they depict: in Worth’s phrase, “pictures can’t say ain’t”. Roland Barthes’ and Jacques Durand each contribute to the idea of a distinct rhetoric of images, and Victor Burgin applies their thinking to a specific analysis of photographs. Yet, even though visual rhetoric is now a burgeoning field in communication studies, there’s a certain tendency to employ only part of what rhetoric has traditionally represented. In most cases, from Barthes onward, rhetoric is taken to mean a set of concepts useful for naming the logic at work in an image – one, however, still taken as text. In this sense, rhetoric is little more than a means to read more precisely, regardless of what’s read: images or some other textual form.

In a traditional or classical sense, of course, rhetoric means both the naming of figures of speech one might encounter in the words of others and the capacity to utilize such knowledge and employ these strategies. In other words, one would never simply learn rhetoric in a narrow, technical sense: one would seek to embody the best of its principles and enact it in specific argumentation. Rhetorical knowledge and rhetorical activity were once inseparable. Technical skill was bound up with gaining political voice.

Perhaps with the exception of Burgin from those I mentioned, who has a substantial photographic and critical practice, rhetoric employed in the analysis of visual materials rarely coincides with rhetoric applied to their subsequent construction. Analysis is typically divorced from production, particularly where a primacy of the written text exists: in schools, as I have already hinted at, from the public school through to the university. This is also likely related to more contemporary connotations of rhetoric: these are derogatory, and paint rhetoric as a misleading, ostentatious, or superfluous use of language – and quite possibly all of the above. Such a negative connotation exists despite the fact that texts are just as rhetorical as speech, images, and so on.

In any case, the possibility that an applied visual rhetoric could exist to help agents structure a productive and not simply analytical image system is interesting to consider. Rhetoric, I’m arguing, could help structure and invigorate photographic practice. The kinds of communicative and organizational photography that emerged from the worker movements of the Weimar Republic and the Works Progress Administration provide important clues as to how visual rhetoric might meaningfully inform what we make of contemporary life and how we engage one another within it. In such photographies and photographic cultures, as in their predecessors, an assertion and articulation of diverse visual representations of everyday life would be key – images, for example, made in workplace and domestic contexts, during public meetings and rallies, and in schools; these images being a means of archiving the experiences and beliefs of an otherwise invisible strata of society, including their communicative strategies and their expressive forms. Avant-garde practices from such movements might also emerge to challenge more directly the hegemony of mainstream visual representation and its own rhetoric around commodification and consumerism, fascism, and so on.

This leads me to my final consideration of the archive in relation to visual imagery. While the archive works to unify an otherwise disparate set of texts – whether written or visual – it also tends to impose a structure of meaning on whatever it has collected together. In the case of the work of figures like John Heartfield and Alexander Rodchenko, a particularly compelling and politically charged aesthetic draws their work together, at least in formal terms. The two, of course, were working in quite different times and places, within distinct social orders, in different spoken languages, regions, circumstances, unique formal practices. An archival spirit might bring them together under one rubric or another, but at the cost of a certain imprecision related to their actual, material practice. Though this embodied, sociohistorical, and material practice might only ever be fragmentarily represented through photographs, I think it’s worth attending to in any case.

Usefully in this sense, Diana Taylor suggests the concept of the repertoire as a means to augment and complement these specific forms of knowledge and understanding that an archival form is only able to hint at. Speaking from performance studies, but also from an interest in ethnography, Taylor means by repertoire that set of practices and embodied actions that contain meaning and social value, even though they cannot be archivally documented or recorded; indeed, it is precisely because they cannot be archived that such experience is important. Repertorial knowledge – in the form of dance, for example, or cuisine, storytelling, song, teaching, or other similar, ephemeral social phenomena – complements archival, textual practice even while pointing at the latter’s incompleteness. The repertoire itself is also incomplete, of course: just as the archive cannot stand in for it, it cannot stand in for the archive. For this reason, the two are mutually dependent.

In this context, conceiving and constructing a repertoire of image system practices might help maintain knowledge of the ways image-making has been done: enacted, taught, or discussed. At the very least, such strategies might retain gestures and stories that underlie and bring context to the everyday circumstances in which such discrete images within an archive may have been made, circulated, and used. Indeed, if we can pursue my contention that we are part of a world in which significant inscriptions might be produced – rather than part of one replete with inherited products where additional contributions are only ever slight and trivial – developing the idea and practice of a repertoire might help us gain some individual and collective self-reflexivity over the processes that make such inscriptive practices possible and equitable. Such a practice might go a long way to establishing more deliberate and sustainable practices in social activism, cultural production, or historicism – important practices that in my opinion don’t converge often enough.