Search for ‘Walter Benn Michaels’ (2 articles found)
Fried, Rancière and the Form of the Photograph (2011)
The photograph thus presents itself as a kind of theoretical antithesis to the Diderotian still life and, of course, this view is by no means limited to Barthes. On the contrary, from the very start, the claims photographers have made to be artists have been contested by critics denying that the photograph has enough “intentional meaning” “to be considered fine art. ”5 And Barthes is by no means the only recent writer to maintain some version of this position. But it’s a crucial fact about Barthes that (unlike, say, the notoriously sceptical Roger Scruton) his interest is not primarily in debunking photography’s claims to art, and not at all in claiming that because the photograph is not fully or adequately intended it cannot count as art. For, in Barthes’ own writing, art itself — with literature as the exemplary case — had already been disconnected from the question of intentional meaning.6 That is, starting at least in the mid 1960s and emerging more fully in “The Death of the Author” (1968) and “From Work to Text” (1971), there is a crucial sense in which for Barthes the irrelevance of “the author’s declared intentions” and the “removal of the Author”7 more generally had come to be seen as constitutive at the very least of modern aesthetic production and at the most of the idea of aesthetic production as such. “Writing begins,” Barthes says, when “the voice loses it origin” and “the author enters his own death.”8
Furthermore, as every student of literary theory knows very well — you learn it the minute you first read “The Intentional Fallacy” — this position was hardly unique to Barthes, or, for that matter, to Barthes and the others (Foucault, Derrida) who held some version of it. Beginning in the mid-1940s, the idea that the meaning of a literary work was not determined by its author’s intentions was foundational for American literary criticism, providing the material (although this was by no means what it was designed to do) for a potential theoretical solution to an aesthetic problem. The aesthetic problem was how to create anti-theatrical works of art at the moment when the very effort to do so (indeed, any effort at all) had begun to register as theatrical. The theoretical solution was to deny not that those efforts took place but that they were in any way constitutive of the meaning of the work of art. It was the syntactic and semantic rules of the language, not the author’s consciousness that determined the meaning of the work. Thus Fry’s strenuous but not very compelling attempt to imagine a kind of psychology for the painter’s desire not to produce an effect on the beholder (“half-conscious,” “almost unconscious,” “perfect sincerity,” “complete indifference”) is rendered supererogatory. The new theoretical anti-intentionalism rescues the critic from a psychological anti-intentionalism that, still committed to some account of the artist’s agency, can only register the artist’s actions as unconscious (and hence not fully actions) or as completely disconnected from all possible consequences (and hence, again, not fully actions). Now, the ontological irrelevance of the artist’s intentions, whatever they are, makes it unnecessary to deny that he actually had any.9
For our purposes, however, Barthes’s version of anti-intentionalism is more crucial than Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s, and for two reasons. The first is that Barthes’s is theoretical and aesthetic (in effect, the anti-theatrical aesthetic creates the necessity for the anti-intentional — i.e. theatrical — theory) whereas Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s is theoretical and methodological. Barthes is defending certain aesthetic values; Wimsatt and Beardsley were seeking to establish the “public” and “objective” character of literary meaning. Their concern was with professional literary criticism.10 And the second, which really follows from the first, is that insofar as Wimsatt and Beardsley were interested in establishing the public meaning of the text, they were just as opposed to considering the reader as they were to the writer; the companion to “The Intentional Fallacy” was “The Affective Fallacy.” Whereas Barthes is just the opposite; he explicitly links “The Death of the Author” to “the birth of the reader” and he explicitly celebrates the refusal of what he calls an “ultimate” meaning, the refusal to “fix meaning” that the shift from writer to reader makes inevitable.
Thus we have both an aesthetic solution to the problem of the artist’s agency — How do you avoid seeming to seek to produce an effect on the reader/beholder? Do nothing — and a theoretical answer to the question of the author’s agency — How do the artist’s actions determine the meaning of the work? They don’t. And just as, in Barthes, the theoretical answer immediately and (as I shall show) necessarily produces an appeal to the reader, so too does the aesthetic solution. That is, the theoretical solution to absorption’s aesthetic problem (the invention of an artist who could not be understood as performing for an audience because his intentions to produce certain effects were now understood as in principle irrelevant to the effects his work in fact produced) is simultaneously the transformation of absorption’s aesthetic indifference to the reader or beholder into a total — indeed (as I will also show), programmatic — appeal to the reader or beholder. In Camera Lucida, this is the whole point of the punctum, which is nothing but an accidental and unintended effect of the photograph on the beholder — the “detail” that can “‘prick’ me” only if the photographer has not put it there “intentionally” and that can prick me but may not prick you.11 That’s why Barthes famously doesn’t reproduce the Winter Garden photograph of his mother; it cannot have the effect on us (she’s not our mother) that it does on him — for us, no punctum, for us, “no wound.” The punctum, in other words, functions as an absorptive reproach to the “artifice” of the photographer, resisting and reproaching his inevitably theatrical efforts to produce a particular effect on the beholder while at the same time (and for the same reason) it transforms the photograph into a work dependent entirely on the beholder — a purely theatrical object. The absorptive demand of indifference to the reader/beholder becomes an insistence on the absolute primacy of the reader/beholder.
'Racecraft'
The historian Barbara Fields and her sister, the sociologist Karen Fields, open Racecraft, their collection of linked essays, by denying that there are such things as races. Race today does not, they point out, refer to ‘a traditionally named group of people’ but to ‘a statistically defined population’. So, for example, the determining factor in susceptibility to sickle cell anaemia, long thought of as a ‘black disease’, is whether you have ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, which many of the people we think of as black do not, and some of the people we think of as white do. So, too, the relevant genetic information about a person is individual and familial, not racial. A person’s height, for example is determined mainly by the height of his or her actual ancestors, partly by environmental factors and not at all by the statistical entity that counts as his or her race. Thus, against developments like the growing demand for more ‘accurate’ racial designations and the recognition of biracial and multiracial identities, the Fieldses remind us that there are no accurate racial designations and no bi or multiracial identities. Genetically speaking, it makes no more sense to describe someone with, say, a Chinese mother and a Norwegian father as a person of mixed race than it would to describe someone with a tall mother and a short father as a person of mixed height. That we even have the idea there is such a thing as mixed race is a testament to our disarticulation of race from biological facts.
Which is where racecraft comes in. If today there is widespread agreement about the inadequacy of race as a biological concept, agreement is just as widespread that race is instead a social construction or, as the Fieldses put it, a ‘social fact’ – ‘like six o’clock, both an idea and a reality’. In Racial Formation in the United States (1986), the theorists of race Michael Omi and Howard Winant urged us not only to resist the ‘temptation’ to think of race as a biological essence but also and especially to resist the temptation to conclude that if it isn’t biological it’s a ‘mere illusion, a purely ideological construct which some ideal non-racist social order would eliminate’. We aren’t, after all, tempted to think that because it’s never six o’clock in nature six o’clock is an illusion. Why should the fact that there are no races in nature cause us to doubt the existence of race?
But the neologism ‘racecraft’ is modelled on ‘witchcraft’, and is intended to suggest just such doubts. It isn’t that the Fieldses regard the commitment to race as a category as an irrational superstition. On the contrary, they are interested precisely in exploring its rationality – the role that beliefs about race play in structuring American society – while at the same time reminding us that those beliefs may be rational but they’re not true. As Tzvetan Todorov pointed out a long time ago, the fact that some women were once thought of as witches and sometimes burned as witches did not make them witches, even socially constructed ones, and the conceptual incoherence of the social construction of race is at least as clear. We no longer believe that one drop of black blood makes a black person not because we think it takes more than one drop but because we don’t think there is any such thing as black blood. What we think instead is that social practices like Jim Crow racialised both black and white populations. Of course, the people who invented and enforced Jim Crow did think there was such a thing as black blood, and although they were mistaken, their views were at least coherent: if there are such things as black blood or white genes, then the people who have them are indeed black and white. Once it was discovered that this wasn’t true, however, there were no longer grounds for people to continue treating each other as black or white. If I say that I treat you as black because I think you have black genes, I’ve given you a bad reason; if I say I treat you as black not because you have black genes but because I used to think you had black genes, I haven’t given you any reason at all.
The point is the same when people on whom race was imposed impose it instead on themselves. Some of the women who were burned as witches may have believed they were witches. But they were wrong. In an early defence of social construction, Sartre described a Jew not as someone with Jewish blood but as someone whom others take to have Jewish blood. And his advice was, essentially, choose to be what they say you are. But how, exactly, can you follow this advice? If you think you’re a Jew only because they think you’re a Jew, and they think you’re a Jew only because they believe in Jewish blood, what does your Jewishness consist in other than an endorsement of their error?
