Alchemy
Describing the nature of signs in the sixteenth century, Foucault turns to Paracelsus:
There is nothing in the depths of the seas, nothing in the heights of the firmament that man is not capable of discovering. There is no mountain so vast that it can hide from the gaze of man what is within it; it is revealed to him by corresponding signs. (OT 32)
The explicit belief that the world was “knowable” is complicated, in Foucault’s reasoning, by the limitations of the language available for use. Rereading chapter 2 of The Order of Things I was struck by a strange similarity between the nature of medieval sign systems, the works of William Blake, and the emergence of photo-textual combinations in the early twentieth century.
Lately, I have been thinking about the way that writing technologies have come and gone, been learned and lost across the ages. When students encounter prose of a different era, let alone a different century, they have a great deal of difficulty deciphering what was said. It is hard for me sometimes to “unlearn” the ease with which I read prose across a wide range of periods to find things to use as examples. The way that sign systems become foreign so quickly makes it hard for me to accept that earlier versions were somehow “impaired” when compared with the modern version—this seems to me to be purely cultural bias.
What the photo-textual combinations of the 1930s share with illuminated manuscripts and Blake’s illuminated works is a synergy between word and image. It is hard sometimes, with the latter examples, to separate a perception of alchemy from the actual significance of the work. With photography though, our modern sensibilities do not allow the same confusion. “It’s just a picture,” after all.
In the sixteenth century, real language was not a totality of independent signs, a uniform and unbroken entity in which things could be reflected one by one, as in a mirror, and so express their particular truths. It is an opaque, mysterious thing, closed in upon itself, a fragmented mass, its enigma renewed in every interval which combines here and there with forms of the world and becomes interwoven with them: so much that all these elements, taken together, form a network of marks in which each of them may play, and does in fact play, in relation to the others, the role of content or of sign, that of secret or of indicator. (OT 34)
The question of classification of the interplay between photographs in texts reflects this same sort of network. Is a photograph a sign in the linguistic sense? Is a photograph a work of art that holds an essence— a secret that must be divined? Or, is a photograph merely an indicator— an index that an object once existed. Confronting the old texts I’ve been studying it is hard to collapse these distinctions. Having been a practitioner, I find it hard to lose a sense of photography as alchemy. When students in my photography classes in high school first saw photographs appear in a tray, they would always ask:
“How does it do that?”
My teacher, Mr. Burnett, would always reply:
“It’s magic.”
Somehow, all critics of photo-texts lose sight of the potential for magic. It complicates language. Rather than writing about the mechanisms of their meaning, they remain lost in the particularities of their production. Words seem to be an adulteration of their artistry. Almost nothing is said of a potential for synergy between photograph and text.
Foucault’s appraisal of sixteenth century language seems almost a commonplace equally applicable to photography in the twentieth century:
Language stands half-way between the visible form of nature and the secret conveniences of esoteric discourse. It is a fragmented nature, divided against itself and deprived of its original transparency by admixture; it is a secret that carries within itself, though near the surface, the decipherable signs of what it is trying to say. It is at the same time a buried revelation and a revelation that is gradually being restored to ever greater clarity. (OT 35-6)
Mary Price’s observation that a photograph is “weakened by the absence of description” seems more and more like the admonition of a priestess that the “secret” of a photograph cannot be discerned without divination. Resemblance is not judged by comparison with an originary form, but rather with a series of similitudes that layer around it, cocooning it into a hard and fast symbol.
Perhaps we try to force the photograph too deeply into the linguistic criterion of “translatability.” Is it necessary, always, to construct a narrative around an image? It seems that people resist the esoteric at all costs during the production of meaning.
