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Philosophy of Photography

Volume 1 Number 1

2010 Intellect Ltd Symposium. English language. doi: 10.1386/pop.1.1.41/7

POP 1 (1) pp. 4147 Intellect Limited 2010

BLAKE STIMSONUniversity of California

Photography and ontology

Photography has two distinctly appealing properties that pin its claim to universality. On the one hand, its mechanically-enhanced artistic powers can capture a moment, orchestrate an arrangement, or populate an empty frame in the blink of an eye. We might call this its vertical or qualitative axis, and plot any photographs success by whatever criteria we choose the judgment of this or that authority or our own judgment in kind. On the other hand, photography has its own technologically-accelerated powers of reproduction and distribution, promising an image factory in every pocket or handbag. We might refer to this as its horizontal, or quantitative axis, and plot the spread of photo-graphicization by the megabyte, megapixel or cumulative ISO sensitivity. The first of these two prop-erties makes its claim to universality in idealist terms and the second in materialist terms: one is metaphorical, the other metonymical, one appeals through the aesthetic register of unity and the other through the sociopolitical register of multiplicity. Because of this bipolar allure, photographys ontology is defined by a dynamic tension between the one and the all: between unity and multiplic-ity. This article will consider one opportunity arising from the meeting of those extremes a way in which the ontological subject of Being might be re-imagined or redeployed as a way into the ques-tion of the philosophy of photography now.

Ontology is the study of being qua being or the underlying ground, network or spirit of all beings. One long-standing suspicion about ontology is that it is nothing more than a figure for God because

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it assumes a monistic container for all beings with its singularized and transcendent capital-B Being. This suspicion is fair enough, of course, but we might turn it on its head and say that by not attending to ontological questions by not attending to the figure of God, by not attending to the beliefs of others we miss the ways in which ontological horizons of knowing and experiencing the world structure and determine the daily lives of all of us, whether we like it or not.

For example, regardless of his motives or sincerity, we might sense that the position taken by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a 2006 letter to George W. Bush fairly represents the views of many and thus deserved more than the casual dismissal it received:

Liberalism and Western style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic sys-tems. We increasingly see that people around the world are flocking towards a main focal point that is the Almighty God.

(Ahmadinejad 2006)

Or we might have a similar suspicion about the disregard for kindred proclamations by Pope Benedict, such as in his 2004 address to the Italian parliament when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger:

The victory of the post-European techno-secular world and the universalization of its lifestyle and thinking have spread the impression especially in the non-European countries of Asia and Africa that Europes value system, culture, and faith in other words, the very foundations of its identity have reached the end of the road, and have indeed already departed from the scene. [] There is a clear comparison between todays situation and the decline of the Roman Empire. In its final days, Rome still functioned as a great historical framework, but in practice it was already subsisting on models that were destined to fail. Its vital energy had been depleted.

(Pope Benedict XVI 2006: 66)

The problem for any substantive response to these sorts of statements from those of us in the post-European techno-secular world is not just a matter of belief whether in God or liberalism it is best understood as a technical philosophical problem for ontology. That is, it is a problem of elabo-rating the horizon of expectations that ensue from such beliefs in order to make sense of them, and, in so doing, make them our own in some meaningful way.

Ontology has long been theology, political economy, and lots of other things but its import for us lies not in its past but in its promise of a future convergence or reconciliation. Such reconciliations of the truth of God with that of liberalism, for example are ontological because ontology only admits to



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a singular truth or category of Being. If liberalism remains outside its view of God, or God outside of its view of liberalism, ontology fails. The ontological question, thus, is one of method. How do we get to liberalism from a doctrinaire notion of God, or to God from a doctrinaire notion of liberalism?

Put differently, how do we loosen our grip on our most rudimentary concepts not to give our-selves over abjectly to competing principles but to draw the truth from ourselves and others into an enlarged understanding that marks the path from the partisanship of being to the universality of Being? How do we do so in a way that is not ideological without simply claiming God-status for our own views (in the manner of Ahmadinejad), or falling into liberalisms dictatorship of relativism (in the manner of Bush)? How do we move toward common understanding in the face of Holocaust deniers like Ahmadinejad or those who would say, there is no such thing as society, as Margaret Thatcher once did, or those who run roughshod over the reality-based community like Bush and his administration? How do those of us in the reality-based community reconcile such challenges with our monism, our ontology, our metaphysic, our God reality, we might call that God, or truth, or society, or even enlightenment? What is photographys philosophy for a shrinking secular Europe in an increasingly religious world, or for the great civic institutions of modernity democratic gov-ernments, public universities, public museums, and the like in the context of their loss of influence to the ever deeper hold of private interests?

One way we might approach this problem is through the ontology of the image. Pictures are usually richer than words and that greater density lends itself to a greater agglomeration or false reconciliation of divergent meanings in ways long picked apart semiologically by the likes of Roland Barthes, or, as Guy Debord and others were want to do, by unpacking the social relationship between people that is mediated by images (Debord 1994: 11). Pictures hide, confuse, obfuscate and mislead, and ontology, with its own aggregation of meaning in the name of Being, is something like the pictures philosophical equivalent. But that same obfuscation can cut two ways it can con-ceal domination or it can cohere resistance, serve as an agent of hegemony or counter-hegemony, lie or be the truth.

Something like this idea was the original premise of aesthetic theory as it developed in the eight-eenth century and gave rise to the mature notion of enlightenment that would eventually ground its understanding in the philosophical operation known as the negation of the negation. The picture was to create a fuzzy, atmospheric world that could stand for one monism in lieu of another, one metaphysic for another, rather than merely negating metaphysics altogether. Against the empiricism of Locke, Hume, and Adam Smith, for example, and against the instrumental cog-in-the-machine experience inaugurated by the Industrial Revolution, the picture proffered a thick, absorptive, every-day aesthetics in the work of Chardin, Greuze and their like. Standing in for God or King or Leviathan and against empiricism and proletarianization, purposiveness was diffused and disseminated out-ward from any specific purpose to a fuzzy and inclusive sensus communis or general will or general


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intellect. The relative precision of words and numbers that was the province of both moral practical reason and science-like pure reason would be dulled and dispersed by an image carrying a woolly sentiment, intuition or conviction. The diffuse purposiveness of beauty was cast against the pur-poses of reason and morality, not simply to oppose them, but to overcome their false autonomy. In so doing, the empiricism and rationalism of one world view that life is a contained and directly knowable system and the moralism and legalism of another life governed by an extra-systemic authority that is not directly knowable were pit against each other to seek arbitration in a dreamy, monistic, everyday interiority. For our purposes, we can figure these two extremes as God and liber-alism, Ahmadinejad and Bush, or jihad and the market, and cast the fuzzy middle drawing them together as photography.

This dream of arbitration in the thick atmosphere of everyday life is evident everywhere in the world of photography. The name we generally give it is the snapshot, but this is misleading in the same way that it would be misleading to see a Chardin or a Greuze as simply mundane or everyday in the horizontal rather than the vertical sense. Purely horizontal readings miss the ways that images can generalize out of the particular. They miss purposiveness arising from phenomenality and the ways in which the intercourse of object and subject can be indexed in a decisive moment that attains to the exceptional humanness-cum-godliness or sensus communis of the aesthetic. Words, numbers, and concepts can generalize as well as, or better, than images, but they do so by separating meaning from phenomenal experience, from the material sensuousness of the world, thereby separating beholder and beheld. Pictures are more reliant on sense experience than cognition and imagination. For this reason they have long been the most convincing forces for myth making, for concealing contradiction, difference, and multiplicity with a false unity or false ontology. But that same force can be used for good as well as ill because pictures also have the capacity to overcome and supersede those false ontologies by substituting an ontology of their own. With Marx we might call that ontology dialectical materialism, or the negation of materialisms negation. Atheism, he wrote in 1844, no longer has any meaning (Marx 1975a: 357). While it served the bourgeoisie in their pursuit of power, socialisms starting point is something different, even opposite: the theoretically and practically sensuous con-sciousness of man and of nature as essential beings (Marx 1975a: 357). Socialism, in other words, was to be materialist Being not materialism tout court, or the positive self-consciousness of man, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion (Marx 1975a: 357). Something like this sensuous con-sciousness of essential being was the great eighteenth-century dream for the image.

In order to pursue this dream, the image has to work both of its universalist axes with equal vig-our. Photography is especially good at rooting down into the thick materiality of everyday life, but it also lends itself with ease to floating back up into the generality of the sensus communis. Think of Flickr and Facebook as a sea of faces, or imagine the seemingly infinite number of photographs strewn about the Internet and the world beyond. This ontology-as-abstract-generality is, on its own,



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an empty shell, but therein is its strength as well as its weakness: in its emptiness it stands for a hori-zon of meaning waiting to be filled with meaning, identity or purpose. This does not mean that the horizontal register of photography stands in place of categories like society, nation, humanity, Being and God, but that it exists as a material resource available to these categories. We might use one of Alain Badious terms such as ontological material to give a sense of this raw, unformed potential (Badiou 2006: 101). Marx once explained the opening provided by this material by saying that, because skill resides not in the worker but in the machine the social spirit of labour obtains an objective existence separate from the individual workers (Marx 1993: 529). Photography like indus-try, in other words, has a life of its own: a social spirit that poses both the threat of an ontology of things, of Being as the condition of objects, and the promise of human self-realization or Being as the experience of subject.

Benedict and Ahmadinejad give us one version of the former with their almighty, externalized God that separates us from ourselves. So it is with liberalism as well, which locates its authority within our world but still in a nature alien to our humanity. There are many statements we might call on to conjure the full-blooded ontology of liberalism by Bush or Thatcher, say but this parody (given by a fictional board director to a misguided critic of capitalism from the 1976 film Network) does so with particular aplomb:

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I wont have it! Is that clear? [] You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immense, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, elec-tro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU ... WILL ... ATONE!

(Lumet 1976)

Photography is still a contest of meaning, as the conventional wisdom had it at the end of the cold war, but the most pressing battle line is no longer between materialism and idealism, and the methods most needed are no longer rooted in semiotics and social history. Just as Marx shifted his attention from atheism to its positive transcendence, so the time is ripe for our own negation of materialisms negation. The battle today is between competing ontologies the contest over what Marx called the generalized theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popu-lar form, its spiritualistic point dhonneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement


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and universal basis of consolation and justification (Marx 1975b: 244). There is no greater figure today for that universal basis than photography. This is why the question of its philosophy is so vital. We might put the challenge this way: how to see our imagery of everyday life in the way the eighteenth-century European bourgeoisie saw theirs; how to experience it vertically with all the absorption of a Chardin or Greuze, rather than horizontally as if it were merely the stuff of dollars and things? How to experience the world through the eyes of living, breathing social subjectivity rather than through those of a dehumanized object at the mercy of Ahmadinejad and Benedicts almighty God or liberalisms atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things? Because it is so deeply enmeshed in daily life, because it is so intricately intertwined with our modernity, because it is so central to our self-imagining, because it is increasingly the lingua franca of our globalizing world, photography may now be a question of greater consequence for philosophy than any other.

References

Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud (2006), La Lettre de Mahmoud Ahmadinejad George W. Bush, Le Monde, 9 May, http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-727571,36-769886@51-677013,0.html. Accessed 21 September 2009.

Badiou, Alain (2006), Theoretical Writings: London: Continuum.Debord, Guy. (1994), Society of the Spectacle, New York: Zone Books.Lumet, Sidney (dir.), Paddy Chayefsky (screenplay) (1976), Network, US: MGM.Marx, Karl (1975a), Private Property and Communism, in Early Writings, London: Penguin.Marx, Karl (1975b), A Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right, in Early Writings,

London: Penguin.Marx, Karl (1993), Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, London: Penguin.Pope Benedict XVI, Marcello Pera, George Weigel and Michael F. Moore (2006), Without Roots:

The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam, New York: Basic Books.

Suggested citation

Stimson, B. (2010), Photography and ontology, Philosophy of Photography 1: 1, pp. 4147, doi: 10.1386/pop.1.1.41/7

Contributor details

Blake Stimson teaches Art History and Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis. His research explores the social and political legacy of the eighteenth-century aesthetic ideal, particularly



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the role played by photography, art, and criticism in framing that ideal for the world we find our-selves in today. Recent publications include The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation, The Meaning of Photography (co-edited with Robin Kelsey), Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (co-edited with Gregory Sholette), and Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists Writings (co-edited with Alexander Alberro).

Contact: Blake Stimson, Professor of Art History, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA.E-mail: [email protected]


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