It then appeared that being before the image was nothing like a comfortable face-to-face , since the object of seeing never stopped moving in space and time — or , better , through multiple and heterogeneous times — just as the seeing subject itself never stopped experimenting with new postures or points of view . Even before the innocent frescoes of Fra Angelico , it was necessary to take a position and , in particular , to reverse or go up the conventional hierarchies of top and bottom , of iconography and “ décor ”, of resemblance and dissimilarity , of figure and place . In the threeterm relationship that plays out between an image , its object ( whose view is constructed there ) and its subject ( which constructs its vision there ), we therefore find this structural need of position everywhere . The photographed hysterical woman is not content with striking a pose : she tries , in the best of cases , to snatch a position from her status as a “ woman-object ”. The image itself is not content to take its place in a vaster whole , the pages of a medical journal in the case of the Salpêtrière or the cells of the Dominican convent in the case of Fra Angelico : this place proceeds from a montage where each figure takes on meaning , in fact , to assume its position in relation to all the others .
Finally , the seeing subject cannot be satisfied unless it is purely passive , of having a certain posture before the image : it must therefore construct a position capable of affirming something in the image on the basis not of the immobility or univocity of the gaze , but of a regulated variation of it . It then appears that any position stems from a dialectical movement . Not from a dialectic conforming to school diagrams , where everything always ends well , like in Hollywood films , via a “ synthesis ” or a “ reconciliation ”, but on the contrary from an uneasy , infinite , incompletable or irreconcilable dialectic . It is this very movement , alternately cheerful knowledge and restless knowledge , that a whole generation of modern thinkers will have carried out , readers of Nietzsche as much as of Hegel , and for whom a non-standard dialectical imagination made it possible , precisely to develop positions that were both rigorous and inventive , observant and critical , close and distanced . Even before the Frankfurt School and the “ negative dialectic ” dear to Adorno — whose history Martin Jay was able to trace under the suggestive title The Dialectical Imagination — I think of this constellation formed in the early decades of the 20th century by Aby Warburg , Walter Benjamin , Carl Einstein and Georges Bataille .
3 . Aby Warburg in the United States of America , about 1895 . Unknown photographer , Public domain , via Wikimedia Commons
2 . “ Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière ” ( Jean Martin Charcot , 1878 ).
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Observing Memories Issue 7