kiddingthecity [dot] org

…Is this person gay? Is s/he British? Is this person happy? Intelligent? These are some of the strong questions participants were asked to cast their vote about when faced with the anonymous picture of a stranger in latest Christian Nold‘s provocative installation. Over 14,000 people in one month cast their vote in the ‘Community Metrics in Nottingham (UK) and decide ‘live’ who of the volunteers should be deported: a sort of ‘friendly fascism’, a dystopian version of Facebook, a tease out of many reality TV shows.

The installation prompted me to read again (that’s what is good about radical art!) Emmanuel Levinas’ ideas on ethics: for the French philosopher, whose family was wiped out by the Holocaust, ethics begins with the direct encounter with the face of the Other. This action is ethical because, rather than knowing, and hence objectifying the other, by way of static representation, in the face-to-face encounter,

‘The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves in me…the Other signals but does not present themselves’ ((E. Levinas, cited in R. Durie. Face to Face: directions in contemporary women’s portraiture’)) .

There is a sense in which, by making an image of this overflowing, by reducing the Other to a set of conventions, a-priori categories, and image-repertoire, we might be perpetrating a form of violence, which hence denies the alterity expressed by the face of the Other.

For Skeggs (2004) ((B. Skeggs, Class, Self, and Culture, 2004: 155)) , rather, in the urban context that brings people into contact, “these encounters force a reading of proximate bodies and, in some cases, generate a need for boundary maintenance. It is not just the encounter, but the relationships generated from the encounter between bodies that rely on prior systems of inscription – rhetoric, representation, discourse – that…positions some groups as the ground of fixity, otherness, strangeness and danger”.

This opens a big problem for representation, especially visual, to the extent that the object of representation always falls under the power of thought. Jacques Lacan notoriously develops a new form of epistemology based on the Four Discourses (Master, University, Hysteric, and Analyst), which produce four respective apprehensions to knowledge. As Kirsten Campbell explains it ((K. Campbell, ‘Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology’, Routledge, 2004: 37-39)) :

‘Reality is a function of discourse, for discourse produces both the world that is known, and the only world that can be known. Knowledge is contingent upon the discursive position of the knower. However, that subjective structure is necessarily an effect of discursive structure. By taking up a speaking position, the knower thereby is enmeshed in the fundamental relations of discourse…Discourse produces the known object, since the object can only be represented through signifying structures. The act of knowing is an act of representation that the stable structures of signifying chains produce. Therefore, knowledge itself has a discursive structure and thereby is rethought as the product of signification. [Crucially] In later Lacan’s epistemology, what is know is inseparable from how it is known‘ (cit: 54-55, my emphasis).

But, what is the nature of this objectification? According to Derrida ((Jacques Derrida: ‘Right of inspection’, photographs by Marie-Francoise Plissart; New York, Monacelli Press, 1998)) , there is an unequal exchange between the viewer and the subject portrayed: the former holds a position within which is inscribed the power to dominate, whilst the latter, the photographed face, is silent because it cannot express or represent itself, the source of its significance is then placed in the viewer. There is then an intrinsic rhetoric, a grammar, a symbolic practice, a pose of the act of taking photographs of others, a division of positions between ‘looking at’ and ‘looked at’, a structural binary determination that is not easily broken. How can we achieve a grammar of non-violence in visual representation?

‘A true photograph of the face – one which is not objectifying, one which does not deny the faciality of the face – would be one which ‘represents’ the unpresentable look of the face’ (Durie, cit:38).

One way of representing the face of the other respectfully is in the radical involvement of the subject within the dynamics of representation. That is, in a process that goes beyond the “shooting back” techniques of the recent years. For instance, the different techniques of self portraiture might instigate a loop of signification between the looker and the looked at, ‘a loop which excludes any possible interruptions from an outsider, who might want to determine the meaning of the subject, and hence objectifying her, from a privileged position beyond the frame’ (ibidem: 50). Or something deeper, that question the overall image of ourselves as founded on particular images which are stored in our memory and which are the product of various photographic practices (first of all the photo album, or the family portrait). Jo Spence’s and Rosy Martin’s phototherapy seems to address this difficulty: the subject is invited to re-enact their own perceptions and memories , retaining maximum control on the representation. Photo-therapy is not just about performances, but involves a relationship with the other ((“Family snaps: the meanings of domestic photography” / edited by Jo Spence and Patricia Holland. London: Virago , 1991)) . ‘The aim of the practice is to interrupt the objectifying influence of these images on our self-perception, reconstructing or reinventing the images in order that they might work with the subject in the creation of her or his self-image’ (in Durie, cit: 30). But is it there a ‘real’ face? An image of oneself to be held upon against the performative? In what sense Barthes declared: ‘The mask is the meaning”?

What these examples might imply is that, if ‘discursive structures delimit what is thinkable and signifiable as knowledge, [then] to change those structures is to change how we know the world’ (Campbell, cit: 55). In this sense, we might say with John Berger  that the relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled. Meanings exist only at risk, they are never fixed, never arrested.

Simmel wrote a brief and very important article ‘The Stranger’ (1908), in which the notion of ‘estrangement’ has some flexibility, according to the shifting notion of ‘human commonness’. As I read it, he makes a crucial link between the alterity of the stranger and the affective bond of community. I think Simmel’s position embeds the discourse on representations of types, very similar to the one highlighted in the post. Playing with the concepts of nearness and distance, he links the ’stranger-danger’ discourse to the symbolic construction of community. The ‘estrangement’ happens “when the consciousness that only the quite general is common, stresses that which is not common” ((George Simmel, ‘The Stranger’, 1908/1950: p. 3)) .
But, I ask, how do we get to that consciousness? What role has photographic representation in the construction of the symbolic community? What notions of homogeneity and togetherness are we prioritizing when we attempt to photograph what we see as a ‘community’? And, what kind of idea of community this discourse imply in the first place?
Others, like Richard Sennet, privilege the encounter with strangers as at the very heart of urban living, from which an incomplete sense of personal identity, as well as re-assembled communities (I think here of Jan-Luc Nancy and Iris Marion Young), might emerge. Others, so to speak, might refuse a blase’ attitude to the metropolis. I think there is hope in Levinas’ ethics.