All the difficulty in this ever-changing experience of the visible and in what it can teach us consists in not reducing its complexity , in not closing up what we experience in the order of the sensitive , whether before an event in which we would be witnesses or before a visual document that would itself bear witness to such an event . On both the theoretical and practical levels , we would need to know how to not immobilise the images , meaning to not isolate them from their own capacity to make perceptible a certain moment , a certain duration , a certain memory , a certain desire … in short , a certain human time where the objective and subjective dimensions of time are combined in what we call history . Yet this effort — leaving their labilities , their movements and even their turbulences to the sensitive and to time — is by no means easy . There are so many obstacles .
For history experts , the temptation to immobilise images — a way of simplifying them and thereby simplifying the lives of historians themselves — has been expressed by their reduction to a simple functional status , that of “ visual documents ”. The image then serves as a pure and simple “ iconographic index ” in history books , as can be seen in what nevertheless remains one of the masterpieces of the Annales school . I am referring here to The Royal Touch by Marc Bloch . This is a way of reducing images to a function by reducing it to an imitation of factual reality , a representation — as so many approaches to the image as history and art theory were resolutely deconstructed by Wölfflin , Warburg or Riegl , not to mention Walter Benjamin or Carl Einstein . Of course , the heirs of the Annales school certainly paid ever-increasing attention to images as “ monuments ”, and not solely as documents , of history . Yet they have most often done so by continuing to employ a notion of representation that presupposes reducing images to the status of a convenient “ mirror of mentalities ”, without taking note of the fact that the mirror , in the images — and by the images — is very often broken .
For visual arts experts , the epistemological temptation to immobilise seeing and the object of seeing — like the entomologist who kills his favourite butterfly to pin it to a cork board and can thereafter stare at it , calmly , with a gaze as dead as the animal itself — is often no less so . We immobilise the object of seeing when we consider it above all as a text to be deciphered , an enigma to be solved . Didn ’ t Erwin Panofsky envisage iconology as the discipline dedicated , before the images , to “ solving the riddle of the sphinx ”? But isn ’ t it simplifying the image to suppose it as a “ key ” of interpretation that could open all its doors ? However , the subject of seeing is immobilised when it is reduced to an assigned , irremovable “ place of the spectator ”, whether to confirm the rule of the perspectivist “ point of view ” of humanism , or else to establish a modernist system of vision according to which the visible object should be absolutely “ specific ” so that the act of seeing is extricated from all duration and all “ psychology ” ( which , with regard to our concrete experience of images , will quickly appear as a pure and simple view of the mind , even a meaningless categorical imperative ).
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Observing Memories Issue 7