Images are something quite different from butterflies pinned to a cork board for the scholarly ( but perverse and deadly ) happiness of the entomologist . They are both movements and times , all unstoppable and all unpredictable . They migrate through space and survive in history , as Aby Warburg said . They transform , they change appearance , they fly here and there and they appear and disappear in turn . They have their own “ lives ”, and these very “ lives ” are what interest us and “ look at ” us , much more than the shedding of dead skin that they can leave entirely at our disposal . The best way to look at images would therefore be to know how to observe them without compromising their freedom of movement : therefore , looking at them would amount to not keeping them for oneself but , on the contrary , to letting them be , to emancipating them from our own fantasies of “ seeing integrally ”, of “ universal classification ” or of “ absolute knowledge ”. It is by proceeding in this way — and therefore by accepting the risk of a principle of perpetual incompleteness with regard to our will to know — that the subject of seeing will be able to emancipate itself , according to Jacques Rancière ’ s apt expression .
Through this vocabulary , we sense that an epistemological decision relating to images always carries an implication that , from the aesthetic register , passes very quickly to ethical questioning and to the political position of the problem . To respond to the request made of me here to evoke , even briefly , these passages from knowledge and the sensitive — or from knowledge of the sensitive , even from sensitive knowledge — to the political field as such , I must undoubtedly recall how the notion of position mobilises , so to speak , all the modalities that I have just listed . What had struck me in the photographs of hysterical women made as early as 1875 at the Salpêtrière by Charcot and his assistants was that , where we were supposed to have visual documents reflecting a pure clinical category , I actually discovered a host of sensitive aspects in each image that tore away , so to speak , its own intelligible alibi of epistemic representation .
These images certainly showed poses , such as typical gestures and “ passionate attitudes ”: in short , instances of stopped time and movement likely to be synthesised into “ pictures ” setting the stage for a “ complete and regular ” attack of hysteria , as the doctors said . Yet upon closer inspection of the images , we discovered something else : an occasionally exorbitant supplement that turned upside down any rule of meaning , as well as visibility . First of all , they were pauses : durations . One example is when a foot stretched out to the lens showed that it had stretched out and started moving because it was blurred , unlike another part of the body . The blurred area then gave thickness to the time of the take , just as it gave motility to the still image . Even more , she showed something of a fight , of a struggle with the desire of the photographer : a counter-pose , in brief . The foot thrown forward was also a kick aimed at the camera itself . With this gesture of defiance or this aggressive demonstration , the patient was saying — or even shouting — no ! to the protocol supposed to provide visual knowledge of her suffering . In this sense , we can say that she was taking a position when she had simply been asked to strike a pose .
Against these medical photographs that attempted , under the cover of objective knowledge , to take power over her body in crisis — according to a typically fetishising and alienating visual device — the hysterical woman sometimes therefore made of her suffering the suffering of an ethically “ mistreated ” woman under the cover of being medically “ treated ”, a power of counter-effectuation . She would then happen to take a position , as if her symptom itself was equivalent , at such times , to something like an uprising . The “ sharing of the sensitive ” between the seen body and the seeing body having become asymmetrical , alienating and disagreeable , it swiftly turned to insurrectional confrontation . This made it clear — thanks , notably , to Michel Foucault ’ s studies on the combined history of madness and the clinic — that this first “ field of images ” was a political field through and through .
Deep VIEW
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