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Neither Fish nor Flesh Author(s): John Tagg Source: History and Theory, Vol. 48, No. 4, Theme Issue 48: Photography and Historical

Interpretation (Dec., 2009), pp. 77-81Published by: for Wiley Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25621440Accessed: 19-08-2015 16:27 UTC

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History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December 2009) ,77-81 ? Wesleyan University 2009 ISSN: 0018-2656

NEITHER FISH NOR FLESH

JOHN TAGG

ABSTRACT

Against the notion of chance that Robin Kelsey proposes as the opening to a new concep tion of photography and its relationship to history, this response argues for attention to the

apparatuses that strive to "cope with chance" and guarantee meaning?apparatuses whose

effective purpose is precisely not to be undone by chance and not to be reminded of their

contingent and arbitrary nature?in other words, of their historicity. This opens another

kind of encounter with the historicity of the photographic image, as sliding from frame to frame, never quite fitting any of them, the photograph shows itself as an elusive opening, the ground of irreducibly heterogeneous and radically incommensurable stakes?never

just one definitive and well-flagged stake driven into the ground at some singular moment

in the past.

Keywords', chance, photography, frame, apparatus, historicity, future, animals, Robin Kelsey

The rhetorical scene is set. The tent flap opens and we find ourselves swept up in the parade of a "colorful" menagerie, tumbling into a ring that turns out to be shaped as a triangle, seating high-minded modems on one side and paranoid postmodems on another, both face to face with ranks of gleeful imps and orphans across the vacuum of chance into which the allegorical circus now spills. You have to laugh as the performing animals do their turns. And how could this

laughter not make us look askance at the undue seriousness of those moderns and

postmodems out there in the gloom, visibly uneasy as they are with everything capricious that escapes control? Photographic scholarship may be a big tent but we have to side with the imps, at least as long as the performance keeps our gaze from the shakiness of the rhetorical structure of staging.

Certainly, Robin Kelsey's witty zoology confirms what many have felt, that there is indeed something fishy, perhaps even something cuckoo, about the rela

tionship of photography to history?not to mention those who monkey around with it. Of course, the fish and birds and cats and flies and pigs and chimpanzees unleashed upon us are not so easy to catch?they go by so quickly?and, hard as I may have tried, it may well be that I have the wrong pig by the ear, just as it

may also be the case that I am off on my own wild goose chase. But let me take

my chance.

Chance, of course, is what Kelsey asks us to fix on here, and chance, as we

know, has had many rehearsals in the history of writing on photography, not least

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78 JOHNTAGG

since Walter Benjamin voiced that irresistible urge to search the photograph for "the tiny spark of chance, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak seared the subject."1 The chance on which Kelsey fastens is the chance that tends to undo the bonds between history and the photograph rather than the chance that stamps its supposed guarantees on the camera's image. Yet, what I wonder is

whether, in asking us to see how the stochastic madness of the photograph cuts into and across its status as historical record, Kelsey is not also still tying our at tention to those effects of chance that are, in one way or another, seared into the

photographic image, burnt into the emulsion as stochastic?Benjamin would say unconscious?traces of a reality long past.

It is striking to me that this is so often where the debate about photography and the historical event is brought to focus. But what of the photographic event

itself and its constitutive historicity?if I may open here that crucial if somewhat elusive gap between history and historicity, which it seems important to mark?

What if our attention did not always turn to the interiority of the image and to its

putative relation to some external event, but rather to what Jacques Derrida once

called "the decisive structure of what is at stake, at the invisible limit to (between) the interiority of meaning (put under shelter by the whole hermeneuticist, semi

oticist, phenomenologicalist, and formalist tradition) and (to) all the empiricisms of the extrinsic which, incapable of either seeing or reading, miss the question

completely"?2 What, then, if our attention were turned to the profoundly contin

gent (and therefore historical) structure that is not "inside" or "outside" the photo

graphic event but sets interiority and exteriority in place: the specific and yet arbi

trary machinery that, ruling out chance, frames the photographic image (whether in a newspaper, on a government poster, in a prize jury's file, on a postage stamp, or in a survey of the history of photography), labeling the photographic species and ensuring (insofar as its rule holds sway) that meaning always arrives?

Contrary to what Kelsey sees as defining of "the Western pictorial tradition," this framing of meaning, which works to put "masterpiece" and "snapshot" each

in its place, is not ruled by whether or not a particular intention was actively

present; nor is it constrained by an a priori principle of authorship or by the hier

archy of labor it implies; but no more is it a matter of luck. What we are dealing with is, rather, that assemblage of institutive devices by which "the production of

discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed"?devices

whose role in the ordering of discourse, as Michel Foucault describes it, is "to

avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponder ous, awesome materiality."3 "To cope with chance events": so the work of this

1. Walter Benjamin, "A Small History of Photography," in One-Way Street and Other Writings, transl. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), 243 (translation

modified). 2. Jacques Derrida, "Parergon," in The Truth in Painting, transl. Geoff Bennington and Ian

McLeod (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 61.

3. Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Language," transl. Rupert Swyer, Appendix to The

Archaeology of Knowledge, transl. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 216. For

the argument that the cross-referencing of Derrida and Foucault is justified here, see John Tagg, "A

Discourse with Shape of Reason Missing: Art History and the Frame," in The Disciplinary Frame:

Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

2009), chap. 6,235-263. This work also rehearses at length my view of the discursive framing of the

photograph.

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NEITHER FISH NOR FLESH 79

assemblage, this invisible machinery, is marked exactly at the threshold where

chance seemingly disappears and meaning emerges. Or perhaps it is wrong to say chance entirely disappears since, as Kelsey shows, the chanciness of the photo

graphic record becomes, in a way, the alibi of the authenticity of its meaning. But, in any event, what is interesting is the apparatus that strives to cope with chance

and guarantee meaning. Its effective purpose, we might note, is precisely not to

be undone by chance and not to be reminded of its contingent and arbitrary na

ture?in other words, of its historicity. Under its shelter, moreover, the singularity of photography, rather than representing a threat that cannot be assimilated to the

discursive order, is shown to have always already been framed?specified and

multiplied, though not without conflict and not without remainder (since there is

no question that, for all their special form of violence, discursive machineries can

"manage all contingencies of meaning with scrupulous efficiency" [76]). In a sense, this shift of attention from what is chanced upon "in" the image to

the framing and to the historicity of the photographic event is one toward which

Kelsey himself has already begun to direct us?in the first instance when he says of Rosenthal's press photograph of the flag-raising on I wo Jima that, "We value

such a photograph for what it signifies" (64). This observation immediately draws

forth a question: "But how do photographs signify?" Yet, this question, I would

say, also invites others: Do they signify once and for all? And, even in the mo

ment of what we might call its historical resonance, is the photograph adequate to what it signifies, to what it is taken to signify? In the case of the flag-raising, it

strikes me that Kelsey's unequivocal answer to this last question has to be "No."

Rosenthal's iconic image, which is far from a snapshot, simultaneously falls short

and goes too far, saying less than is wanted and more than is wished. Falls short of

and is in excess of what, however? Not of whatever happened on a hilltop in I wo

Jima on February 23,1945, against which it cannot be measured. Not even of the field of representations in which Rosenthal's picture made a difference, if only by

undermining the notion that it carried its meaning in itself. What the photograph at once falls short of and goes beyond is itself, as the event it is claimed to be, staged within the discursive frame that would hold it in place, drawing a line around the

space in which interpretation may proceed and giving the image its standing as an accomplished work. This pasting of the image in place may be what marks the

historicity of the photographic event, but the very contingent character of its ap parent finality can only undermine the certainty that what can be said to be seared into the image can be settled in a moment, or that this searing was itself a singular occurrence.

This brings me squarely up against Kelsey's claim that "The journalistic snap shot of a singular event ... is predicated on a lack of repeatability. The photo graph is a momentary opportunity grasped or lost forever."4 Yet, in an important

4.1 cite Robin Kelsey's original text here. In the present, revised version, the claim is displaced onto "the popular ideology of the historic action photograph" (Robin Kelsey, "Of Fish, Birds, Cats,

Mice, Spiders, Flies, Pigs, and Chimpanzees: How Chance Casts the Historic Action Photograph into

Doubt," History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 [December 2009], 60, this issue). This displacement, which opens a space of disavowal, also effectively undermines the subsequent insistence that we are

dealing with an actual and quite singular trait of the "historic action photograph" (formerly known as

"snapshot") that demands its own explanation or "theory."

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80 JOHNTAGG

sense, Kelsey himself shows that this is not at all the case. All photographs are

reenactments. All photographs are duplicates. And this is not only a matter of

their reproducibility. As his own account of the iconic flag-raising image draws

out, the photograph belongs to definite series: to a series of stagings that sought to turn the hill into a sign; to a larger series of related exposures that makes up the

photograph's repressed set; to a series of photographic and editorial codes within

which the picture's choices and non-choices register meaning; to a rhetorical se

ries whose iconographical landmarks Kelsey briefly traces across seven centuries; but also to an archival series or at least to a file, with its system of cross-refer

ences, of distinctions and differentiations, in which the image has meaning as rep etition. To register all this, as Kelsey has done, is already to shift attention away from what the interiority of the image, even as framed, allegedly guarantees. We are compelled to question the supposed presence of meaning in the photograph but also to recognize the effective deferment of meaning and thus to be drawn into a consideration of the duration of the photograph: the timing of its meaning, the

time of its meaning, the time its meaning takes.

This is another kind of encounter with the historicity of the photograph. The

photograph, however, has become rather slippery, hard to make out and even

harder to hold in place. Perhaps this calls for yet another zoological analogy. Like

the good Mistress Quickly, the photograph, it would seem, is more like an otter.

An otter? Why an otter? Well, as Falstaff says of the good dame, "Why? she's

neither fish nor flesh; a man knows not where to have her." Though to this, ever

sprightly, ever like an otter indeed, Mistress Quickly has her own sharp come

back: "Thou art an unjust man in saying so," she retorts, "thou or any man knows

where to have me, thou knave thou!"5 Falstaff is clearly up against a woman who

has no compunction about crossing the line. Yet, with her impish play on words, Mistress Quickly also slips away again from his grasp, making light work of the

very sexual economy that she says knows her place. The photograph, too, held

in place as the (historical) condition of its (historical) meaning, slips away. Just

when we thought that we knew where to have it, it escapes our final grasp as the

simultaneous poverty and excess of the photograph frustrate all attempts to treat

its meaning as an open and shut case, resolved in a flash. Sliding from frame to

frame, never quite fitting any of them, the photograph shows itself as an elusive

opening, the ground of irreducibly heterogeneous and radically incommensurable

stakes?never just one definitive and well-flagged stake driven into the ground at

some singular moment in the past. Staked out, perhaps, but never finally settled, the ground of photographic mean

ing remains open, and we do not know how it may yet be situated. It may be a

risky thing to say to an audience of historians but, echoing Jean-Francois Lyotard, I

would suggest that the meaning of the photograph, like the meaning of Reality, "is

5. William Shakespeare, "The First Part of Henry the Fourth," Act III, Scene III, lines 49-50, The

Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. W. J. Craig (London: Oxford

University Press, 1914); Bartleby.com, 2000. http://www.bartleby.com/70/ (accessed October 23,

2008).

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NEITHER FISH NOR FLESH 81

not a matter of the absolute eyewitness, but a matter of the future."6 Or, as Derrida

remarked in Archive Fever: "each time a historian as such decides to 'step aside

and let [such-and-such] speak,' for example to let a photographic specter ... speak, it is the sign of a respect before the future to come of the future to come. Thus they are no longer a historian."7

Binghamton University

6. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differ end: Phrases in Dispute, transl. Georges Van Den Abbeele

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), section 88, p. 53. 7. Jacques Denida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, transl. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and

London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 70 (translation modified).

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