ON IMPRESENCE (European Graduate School Masters thesis 2018)

ON IMPRESENCE Towards Understanding the Possibility of the Space between Presence and Absence In/Through the Photograph Moises Alejandro Ramirez 2018 European Graduate School Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought MASTERS THESIS 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS: INTRODUCTORY SCHEMATICS TOWARDS A DEFINITION OF IMPRESENCE 3 Prefix + La Langue – Surfaces of the Photographic Postcard – Discontinuity and Continuity – Perceptible Decay – Mourning the Lost Presence of the Other – Impresence as Anticipation – Absolute Absence 1. The Topology of Presence in the Photograph 1.1 Presence and Premonition 35 1.2 Immanent Presence 47 1.3 Les Étoiles 49 2. Exposure of the Photograph to Death, Disaster, Destruction, and Mourning of Presence 2.1 Photographic Forensics / Traces of Fascism 52 2.2 The Photograph as Incomplete Mourning: The Mechanics of Non-release 58 2.3 Clarity and the Degradation of Images and Text through Voyeurism 64 3. On the Possibility of Impresence: Pseudo-conclusion 69 3.1 The Return of the Conclusion 70 3.2 Infinite Absence 72 3.3. The Absence as Future 75 Bibliography 76 2 AN INTRODUCTORY SCHEMATIC TOWARDS A DEFINITION OF IMPRESENCE What will be the physiognomy of painting, of poetry, of music in a hundred years? No one can tell. As after the fall of Athens, of Rome, a long pause will intervene, caused by the exhaustion of the means of expression, as well as by the exhaustion of consciousness itself. Humanity, to rejoin the past, must invent a second naivete, without which the arts can never being again. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born. Exhaustion. The dialectical subject is torn between the opposition of presence and absence. The constructed subject has become exhausted over the course of its history of binary philosophical interpolation. When introducing his analysis of being in the work of Being and Time, Martin Heidegger begins his analysis with the statement, “This question has today been forgotten,” 1 indicating that which has been forgotten is the metaphysical concept of the question of being. To become forgotten is the least desired of outcomes of which any Being, who strives to exert their presence in the World eventually succumbs to. A deterioration of presence occurs as the obscuration of beingness takes hold of the lost subject’s structural identification. The dominant compulsion which gives living things its spirit to live is related accordingly to the confrontation with each subject’s own finitude and ultimate disassociation with the real World. The subject must strive against the cold death of its release from the body-as-subject and the accorded name. A birth into death of the self leads to the becoming the collective no-Other, the no-longer-present, which relegates being towards its eternal virtual posterity only by means of the Other. Without the Other, the lost subject is forgotten. The legacy of the lost-self is inherited 1 Heidegger, Maritn. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 2. 3 by Other through their refusal to let-become-forgotten of the one who is no longer in presence. The forgotten Other is that who is rendered into silent presence by the curtain of sounds of the World that forever persists after the subject is lost. The grievances of mourning that occur when the Other falls away from presence into (of what I am claiming to be the wrongfully labelled name of) “absence” construct a framework for the living to hold onto the remains of the lost Other via the mechanisms of substitution. The Other of History perpetuates the lingering presence of the lost object by finding a substitution for it. Freud briefly agrees to a characterization made by a friend of his to the vastness of eternity by referring to it as an ‘oceanic’ 2 feeling. The pursuit of an eternality of subject, or ego, contradicts the reality that is made apparent by the nature of the act of death through which every human being are bound to experience or undergo someday. In general, when responding to the death of the Other, the human being mourns the lost-presence of the Other, and the in-availability to reconcile a lack of permanence of the Other. For Freud mourning is “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.” 3 This confrontation with finitude of being leads the subject to pre-emptively substitute his or her future loss, mediated as the future loss of the Other, to incorporate the affect associated with the mourning process towards the construction of an indefatigable presence of the Other. The Other that is re-seen in another object-scene. Memory construction, seems to follow the mechanics of transference as the passing of affect from the Other onto another thing or body. 2 Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), 24. 3 Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho- Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 243. 4 Our existence has by means of perception, interpretation, and relation exhausted the binary framework of presence and absence, and by doing so has enforced the conformity of our intelligibility to think about being in such the limited context of a duality. The subject has attained its identity and knowledge of being through the un-transformative oscillation of shifting from presence to absence and back again. Yet, one may be courageous to imagine that one need not think of the reality of things-in-the-World as either being here or not here, present or absent. The possibility to apprehend the World’s intermediary positions ought to be considered in respect to qualifying the knowable and unknowable terrains of understanding and being. Between the polarities of presence and absence, can exist a rift, a threshold that represents the intermediary differences between these two points. This rift is the existential limit of being that distinguishes the difference between presence and absence. At the threshold of this rift lies the potential for an intelligibility of a third mode of understanding this World. The World itself can be understood through the perceptual faculties appropriated by the human body and be related to the subject-that-appears through the associated rational and psychological functions of memory construction and language formation. Between the presence and absence of being lies an seemingly unknowable middle. In this unknowable middle-territory there is a luminosity peering through, escaping from the void of unintelligibility. This foreseeable territory is the existential space between presence and absence. It is this structural premonition of this territory which has not been sufficiently analyzed by the philosophers of today and yesterday as a legitimate claim. This effort strives towards re-defining an un-challengeable metaphysical tradition of the dialectic of presence and absence. Those who have been persuaded and blinded by the scientific discoveries and progresses of our modern and technological age may answer the call of the 5 occasion towards a deep-interiority and reflect on how the loss of presence of the Other is dealt with. Francios Laruelle attempts to call for a radical re-interpretation of both philosophy and the technical discipline of photography when he attempts to re-define the photograph as a transcendental object or condition. The photograph becomes a terrain itself that contains on its surface the possibility for the re-orientation of experience of an impossible encounter with a scene that has become removed from its time and place. Laruelle depicts the photograph as an object that is not constrained to the traditional world of purely philosophical interpretation. In his work, The Concept of Non-Photography, Laruelle argues, “Philosophy is perhaps born as a photographic catastrophe – in all senses of the word: as an irruption of the ‘empty’ essence of photography…,” while making the point that philosophy has always operated in the photographic way. 4 In the absence of a technique for constructing a literary history through artifacts and affective objects, the philosopher might have originally emerged from out of Ancient Greece education system in order to provide a mirror for oral speech and the initiate corresponding written record as the start of History in the shape of language. From there appeared a certain criticality towards speech and language which continued to develop and evolve during the times of the Pre-Socratics and of the ancient poets, and further on to the modern era with deeply setting roots for the emergence of philosophy as a disciple to be born. The identity of the philosopher was a construction that originated by means of attuning a sort of critical lens towards language, specifically towards the poets and the sophists of the time. Like Plato who distanced his own writing from the ancient poets, perhaps Laruelle positions himself between the public and the medium of the photograph and of philosophy itself, and then seeks to assess the truth by means of critical re-determination of photography’s place, i.e. its topos, inside 4 Laruelle, Francois. The Concept of Non-Photography, (New York: Sequence Press, 2012), 3. 6 and outside the spheres of History, Science, and Philosophy. Photography in this sense can be thought of metaphysically, as a mode of being as well as giving being to the Other or to the scene that is no longer there in presence. One must consider the questions that Laruelle asks, “Why would photography itself not be outside the World? In what utopia or pre-territorial place? The photographic act is a certain type of opening, but can we be so sure that every opening gives onto the World?” 5 In this sense, Laruelle is pushing for the transcendental nature of the photograph: is the photograph outside of itself? Is the photograph pure exteriority only intelligible through the immanent work of the mind? The potential intelligibility and reliability of this photographic space may be understood through the relationship one maintains between the phenomenological and technological aspects of the photograph. In other words, the three-part relationship between the object, the photographer and the camera. The very materiality of and essence contained in the produced photograph contains nothing of itself to present outwardly to the World. In-itself, the photograph is pure mirror. The objective lens of the camera apparatus, magnifies and imbricates its mechanical perception of its material body produces a mechanical gaze of the camera through which the photographer also comes to recognize the World. This camera-gaze produces a technical composition that neutrally reflects the World-as-it-was at a specific spatial-temporal instance. The photograph is a process of pure giving back the World to itself. It is also a process of interpretation that one must proceed to assimilate as knowledge, or as experience the photograph is that which the photographer witnessed at a precise temporal moment that he employed the camera to burn the image of the World onto film. The photograph can only show what it itself is not and can never be. The photograph and its surfaces are not the World in-itself, but rather render the World as being contained in the World as a reflection of the World. The 5 Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography, 9. 7 photograph itself is only a surface that provides the spectator with un-modifiable representation of a scene that is longer present and no longer in living-motion. What is knowable by the photograph is analogous to what is known and retained by human memory and over the course of History as an experience in-itself. To produce a photograph requires technique: a specific mechanical process that manipulates light and burns and records the image of the World onto light-sensitive stock. When developed and rendered observable, the image found therein on the surface contains the affects which produce an effect upon the mind of the future perceiver and spectator. An untouched and unmodified photograph can best yield an accurate representation of the fixed moment that is no longer, unchangeable as it is etched onto the film negative for future reproduction and transmissibility of the Other for the Other. The photograph operates like a seed, the undeveloped film negative will not decrypt its contents without the proper procedural techniques, as well as being set before under the right conditions for its future revelation. The undeveloped film negative will virtually house and retain the image until the appropriate conditions are met for the arrival of its represented spectacle of the World that is no longer present. All this is to say that there is - for humankind - a drive towards recollection, retention, and replication of being. The means to achieve this compulsion is to reproduce that which is prone to disappear materially, that being the World-in-itself, gives rise to the possibility made possible by the photographic apparatus of the camera and the role of the photographer who operates the technology of the camera. It is in the space of reproducibility that therein resides the possibility towards a new understanding of presence and absence. Perhaps this lack of consideration for the space between presence and absence may be attributed to a metaphysical obscuration made by an historical lens, a sort of refusal to blur definitions that have been repeated over time and distinguished into binaries for the sake of an objective intelligibility. 8 The capacity for language to deliver a new understanding rests entirely on the construction and clarification of ancient terminologies to reflect anew on the concrete conceptual differences of beingness. It is in this spirit, that I call for the redefinition of presence and absence, via an introduction of a third term: impresence. PREFIX + LA LANGUE Impresence, as a theoretical system of understanding being, may operate much within the rules established within the parameters of textual mechanics and the logic of writing. There is a groove within the language of these letters which holds the empty space that anticipates and awaits the arrival of the concept of impresence. There seems to be a characteristic preunderstanding of what this word already means- and upon its utterance, even without its proper arrival or introduction, the listener of the articulation of impresence already registers an understanding or natural meaning for the term. This certain chime that belongs to the word correlates to the way the human beings respond to the logic imbricated within the texture of languages. The way a prefix is applied to a word during the ordinary operation of any given language, so the concept and the term impresence arrives antecedently. The notion arrives prior to the existence of demonstrably valid evidence that can prove its existence as an existential and theoretical space between presence and absence. The prefix operates as a form of anticipation. In this way, the concept of impresence itself has already always anticipated itself, residing in the dormant arrangement of letters into the precise word. The combination of the prefix “im” with the noun (which also sometimes operates in English as a verb) “presence,” is not simply a generic mathematical composition of an inert prefix with the commonly-defined noun in the 9 calculated arrangement of: IM + PRESENCE. This seemingly benign formula of adding the prefix im to presence, prefigures that the word and concept of presence is an unchangeable and fixed term. The work of the present thesis shall philosophically and conceptually reflect on the possibility for language-itself to frame its own response to the question of the eternal based on its very own grammar to answer the following question: is there a knowable and intuitable space between presence and absence? In a translator’s note contained within his translation of an essay in Jacques Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy, Alan Bass discusses how the subtitle of the section, “plus de métaphore” is “untranslatable” because the French adverb of plus (which translates to ‘more’) – where under certain conditions, i.e. when combined with de as in plus de - acts like a negation so that plus de translated into English can mean both “more ” of and ‘no more’ of. 6 It is in this paradoxical spirit that I pre-emptively offer my personal French translation of impresence to be as follows: plus de présence. Owing to the potentially dual interpretive meaning of such an annunciation, impresence can be conceptually translated as both to mean ‘more presence’ as well as to mean ‘no more presence.’ This double-natured meaning offers an even closer definition of what this thesis and work aims to discuss by means of constructing the framework for the concept of impresence. At the heart of this thesis, the main argument shall be to think of presence and the many forms of its dissipation – through the reduction of clarity and the decreasing of proximity form the primitive beingness of the Other – each form of presence uniquely referring to an instance that shall be rendered as a distinct category in the intelligible spectrum of presence. Whereas, when one thinks and speaks of absence, absolute absence ought not to be merely thought of as a mere lack of presence, but rather absolute absence deserves its very own category 6 Alan Bass, Translator’s Preface, Margins of Philosophy. By Jacques Derrida, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1982), 219. 10 that accentuates its own form of unintelligibility. In a sense, the argument that entwines this thesis is that the true theoretical work of impresence is to best be understood in the French language as being double-natured in meaning. However, at this moment based on the current limitation of this writer’s French language skill, it would render such a task to be impossible to pursue because the appropriate technical and philosophical caliber needed to complete such an endeavor is insufficient for the task of this author. One may also take observation on the nature of languages, insofar as that which is premediated within a given language is how the socially conceived nature of specific words are the result of a Historical and cultural lineage of relations between subjects to objects and to each of their correlative references. For Barthes, modes of writing are conditioned by the actions of History: It is under the pressure of History and Tradition that the possible modes of writing for a give writer are established; there is a History of Writing. But this History is dual: at the very moment when general History proposes – or imposes – new problematics of the literary language, writing still remains full of the recollection of previous usage, for language is never innocent: words have a second- order memory which mysteriously persists in the midst of new meanings. 7 There remains in language the residues and traces of previous use. These residual meanings harbor pre-emptive future interpretations. In other words, when creating a new conceptual term, even there resides the memories of an associated History. The etymologies of the prefix IM + the history of the term presence, contains an articulation that renders impresence to have a sort of pre-meditated and understood meaning. There is almost a nostalgia that is immanent to language, 7 Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith ( New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 16. 11 housed in the constructs of its grammar. The recollection of other people’s beingness is already always contained in the context and the usage of words within their grammatical structure. This relation between structure and context is made evident at the limits of poetic wordplay. The second-order memory that Barthes refers to is about an unseen structure of the performative behavior language that is dissolved through its use over time and conditioned to fit the construct of language as does the insole of a worn-out boot. Over time, words come to settle into predictable and ordinary usages. On manifesting a possibility towards a new philosophy, Alain Badiou relates the limitations of languages when he states the following: A language always gives what I would call the color of philosophy, its tonality, and its inflexion. All these singular figures are proposed to us by language. But I would also maintain that this is not the essential principle of the organization of thought. The principle that philosophy cannot renounce is that of its universal transmissibility, whatever the prescription of style of colour, whatever its connection to such or such language. Philosophy cannot renounce that its address is directed to everyone, in principle if not in fact, and that it does not exclude from this address linguistic, national, religious, or racial communities. Philosophy privileges no language, not even the one it is written in. Philosophy is not enclosed within the pure formal ideal of scientific language. Its natural element is language, but, within that natural element, it institutes a universal address. 8 Philosophical ideas are enclosed by the language from which they originate, however, as Badiou indicates: philosophy aims towards a universality that is simply masked by the difference in its 8 Badiou, Alain. “Philosophy and Desire.” Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy, translated and edited by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens. (London: Continuum, 1998), 51. 12 lexical exhibition. The problem in asking whether there is a space between presence and absence is limited to the foundational structure which has constructed the very differences between the two polarities which is evident intuitively beyond languages. It is problematic to think of presence as having any direct relation to absence, and vice versa, without considering the substantive objects that oscillate between appearance and non-appearance, as well as the corresponding subjective relating of acknowledgment or non-acknowledgment of the event or object. The idea of mixing the two notions of presence and absence as one is not the agenda of attempting to define the space between them. Instead, the very act of designating a new term (that being impresence) in-itself posits the foundation for a new set of theoretical questions and its consequential problematics. To think the World as hosting an existential terrain of impresence is the first construction towards the possibility of understanding how the space between presence and absence operates. SURFACES OF THE PHOTOGRAPHIC POSTCARD By attempting to answer the question of whether there lies an intelligible space between presence and absence, photography, as an instrumented process that records lived-moments onto an externalized, objectified and flattened surface, shall serve as the primary means to elaborate the work of memory construction by the subject-of-history who performs the satisfaction of his innate desire, in the name of the World and its physiognomic needs, to fulfil its drive towards perpetual self-continuity. One fundamental presupposition of this work, is the belief that the presence of things imparts imprints onto the World: residues and traces on a territory which is hidden under a logical framework, yet also perceptively retrievable – i.e. as an existential and 13 material deposit of Being and beingness. This residue of existence is not only left behind unconsciously, but there is also an innate compulsion- an intentionality - by the human being that wills and desires to become and be made eternal for the Other as legacy in History. There is a natural refusal to let go and a reluctance to become absent. The human being, as well as other constituents of the World, seek to deposit and promote a continuity of Being for themselves, so that future inheritors shall possess a part of their lived-experience and render it translatable information. In a sense, any residue is an inheritance for the future subject to conform to and to also interpolate an identity of continuity of the lost ancestor. The generation of History, familial motifs, and the sagacity of knowledge all arrive to both aspects of the mind - consciousness and unconsciousness - by means of the processes of repetition, duplication, and distribution. Whether it be the presence that is accumulated over time, either that of a living and moving human body, or that of a natural and seemingly static object, such as a tree or a stone; the characteristics of Being are considered transmittable through time and across bodies. Imperceptible changes in the activities of substances and beings are unconsciously registered by the minds of those who could perceive the existence of any given object found in the plane of exteriority. Thus, what occurs in the formation of memories is the cementing of perceptions that adhere silently to the positions that the human subject has maintained over the course of his or her lived-experience. When considering the nature of a postcard, an object of representation and expression which has on one side of its surface a photograph and the on its reverse-side it often contains a short letter, or a caption, to an addressee, and the name of its addressor. The surface of the photographic side thus bears a flattened and diminished representation of a scene representing the spatial proximity of the sender. As an unity-of-surfaces, the postcard only acquires its 14 personality and meaning through the complementary process of textual expressive representation, which adds depth and dimension to the postcard object by means incorporating language and hence an articulated meaning onto its surface. Subsequently, what is written and recorded on its reverse-side suddenly gives insight or meaning to the photographic-image in a way that can establish a relation of information exchange between the sender and the one who comes across and reads the postcard. It is the language and signature of the sender-withoutaddress that gives that gives meaning and essence to the generic photograph for the recipient. Without such a personalized context, the surface of photograph remains diminished and entirely anonymous, as it remains addressed to all future potential spectators and witnesses. Considering the risks that a postcard does not make it to its intended addressee, the postcard is at the same time addresses itself to anybody and nobody. Between the surfaces of postcard, lies only the pure potentiality resembling that of undeveloped film negative being analogous to undeliverable mail. As an expression between Being and representation, and non-Being and veiled presence, the postcard only produces an effect in the World insofar as it is presented, seen, and rendered intelligible as such. Behind it’s mobius-strip like actuality, i.e. both surfaces of the postcard are entwined, that instance which is represented by the postcard is a chimera of potentiality and intentionality. The writer of the postcard has chosen the image to deliver to the addressee, and makes possible a communication of the information contained therein within its surfaces to remain both present to observer and is rendered non-present as the sender delivers it. The primary intention of the sender of the postcard is to relay a spontaneous desire to connect with the Other who is marked-as-addressee. However, since the sender requires no reciprocation of contact, its delivery requests neither receipt nor confirmation, the postcard is 15 delivered and remains in transit for an uncertain and unpredictable amount of time. The uncertainty of the deliverance combined with the uncertainty of its arrival posits the desire to be thought of, while thinking of the Other through their lack of presence. The postcard, in this case, serves as substitute for the beingness of the sender for and towards the Other. Considered in this way, the postcard is like a shout from the darkest depths of a forest, where the sound degrades into the concealed muteness and cacophony of Nature. The return of the anxiety and despair of being alone in the World requires a signal for the Other so that the subject-as-self deposits a residue of their being into the World for the Other. The postcard in transit can be thought to carry the same potentiality as the scenes contained in an undeveloped film canister. As negativity - as pure potentiality - the potential loss of encoded meaning correlates to the disintegration of the negative surface’s physical degradation by time and exposure to the natural elements of the World which slowly oxidize and destroy that which is contained as a perpetual seed that awaits the right conditions to manifest. As a manifest substitution for the Other, the postcard whose surfaces have become faded, no longer carries the original spirit and essence of the writer whose automatic desire to be recognized sends an original yet fragmentary message to the Other through time and space as an indicator of location and being. Apart from marking the spatial and temporal coordinates of the sender, the postcard marks the presence of the sender-as-subject as substitution of presence, rather than pure absence. The being of the sender is contained as representation through the intention of being made known to exist to the Other and initiate recollection of the subject, or to invoke a sense of nostalgia. 16 DISCONTINUITY AND CONTINUITY In responding to the alternative interpretation of the matters relating to Being when analyzing the difference and space between presence and absence one may consider what Georges Bataille and work on eroticism can offer to the claim towards impresence. Bataille states his position on the not-too-far-off relation between life and death by conceptually taking on the concept of continuity as follows: It is my intention to suggest that for us, discontinuous beings that we are, death means continuity of being. Reproduction leads to the discontinuity of beings, but brings into play their continuity; that is to say, it is intimately linked with death. I shall endeavor to show, by discussing reproduction and death, that death is to be identified with continuity, and both of these concepts are equally fascinating. This fascination is the dominant element in eroticism. 9 Bataille suggests that there lies a separation between each individual human being relating particularly to the boundaries of self and Other. This separation is the result of a difference of identity from one to the Other, which itself founds Bataille’s basis for claiming that we are discontinuous insofar as we are distinct beings as individuals. The pursuit towards a continuity of being, which captivates our essential human desire, is related to the acknowledgement in the potential of death of the Other, the finitude of the human being. When the subject ends as dispersion via finitude, it ceases to be and is rendered to be no more forever. Thus, as discontinuous beings, the knowledge of the oscillating presence effects our objective reality and our knowledge thereof. Thus, we strive for continuity via the progression of a lineage of an inherited generational presence. We as distinct human beings desire to perpetuate the beingness 9 Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality, (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 13. 17 of the Other of our lineage. In his diaries following the death of his mother, Roland Barthes noted down on November 26, “What I find utterly terrifying is mourning’s discontinuous character.” 10 For Barthes, the death of his mother marked the end his self because there was no longer the integral Other, that being his mother, who was necessary in the composition for the unity of his existence. Towards the end of his ailing mother’s life, Barthes had taken care of her in her illness, in the sense that she had become his “little girl,” thus this bridged and linked the essence of innocence conveyed by his mother in the Winter Garden Photograph with the final encounters he had with her; Barthes goes on to say: Ultimately, I experienced her, strong as she had been, my inner law, as my feminine child. Which was my way of resolving Death. If, as so many philosophers had said, Death is the harsh victor of the race, if the particular dies for the satisfaction of the universal, if after having been reproduced as other than himself, the individual dies, having thereby denied and transcended himself, I who had not procreated, I had, in her very illness, engendered my mother. 11 In his deepest remorse over the loss of his mother, Barthes acknowledges the universal biological compulsion for the human being to procreate, yet he metaphorically achieved this life-purpose at the final stages of his mother’s illness via the process of caring for her. Perhaps, Roland Barthes is not only mourning the loss of his mother, but in a more general sense, the loss of his impossible future physiological inheritance of his biological legacy. Barthes remains, although he remains only as discourse and through the productive lexical form of his manuscripts, diaries, essays, and books. In engendering his mother, he has himself engendered his very own legacy as a continuity of a readable spirit. 10 Barthes, Roland. Mourning Diary: October 26, 1977 – September 15, 1979, trans. Richard Howard, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 67. 11 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida, 72. 18 The photograph can be understood in such a similar manner, that being as an expressive object-form that manifests itself as it inscribes image-memories derived from World as an outcome from this human-impulse towards continuity. Language itself can be seen to function via the same operations of thought and thus one may consider written language to be an act towards the promotion of continuity. The human being strives towards continuity of its self by positing itself into the World in a reproducible way. Just as distributable as a rhymical poem, the photograph can be transferred and perpetuated as a positive image-article discoverable and distributable in the World. The being-ness of the scene is isolated and removed by the act of the photographer from its original vivacity and beingness. As a photograph, the original scene is diminished and rendered empty, flattened of the movement of life which inspired the desire to freeze the observed World and turn into physical and distributable memory. The lost encounter with the World as it was at the time the photograph was taken, i.e. lifted from its time and place, can only be re-experienced at the sake of diminishment of presence. The flattened image contained on the surface of the developed photographic picture, deposits only a fraction of the moment that had passed. The particular ways the sun and lighting, or lack thereof, challenged the photographer to question whether or not this moment deserved perpetuation in the archival process of the taking the photograph. In the place of Being, there must be some form of substitution for the lack of presence that we have commonly defined as “absence.” The photograph and language both can serve as a stand-in for presence that is no longer there in proximity, either in space or through time. In a sense, one can think of history and culture as being artifacts of the compulsion for beingness to persist. Since the photograph and written language both can serve as the stand-in for being and for presence, one can think that it is the postcard who can surmount the boundaries of the 19 limitations of beingness that is strictly static in a particular temporal and spatial zone. I, as the writer or author, can lose myself as a postcard, since the postcard demands no reply, and no affirmation, the postcard simply is. It can only exist as having been delivered, thereby it exists because of being moved in transit. At the same time, the actions of the postcard transcend the ordinary discontinuous nature of the human being. The writer does not end himself via the postcard, although he seeks no redemption of his existence. It is via payment for the stamp and the trust that the Other will deliver the message to its intended recipient. The postcard combines both the letters of correspondence and the photographic image that localizes a presence in time. Every postcard contains the registration of time, in the form of postmarked date and place. This information localizes the presence of the author/sender to an precise instance in time and country. The compulsion to send a postcard letter is correlative to the photographic impulse that the photographer sees in front of him or herself before the World. PERCEPTIBLE DECAY Being witness to the decay and discontinuity of beings and of human experience, the human subject, from out of a biological and creative compulsion, has attempted to stage an eternal mark upon the world which is temporarily sustained as a unity in which he is housed within by the positive actions he has inscribed upon the World. It is not only the physical unity of a subject which slips away into an oblivion of nothingness as the subject is lost, i.e. in some fashion of incomprehensibility, but it also the tangible decay of memory structures as well as the loss of narratives and recollection of one’s lived-experiences which have been posited as units of identifiable and distinguishable objects as Being-as-Other onto the World. Artifacts already 20 found in the World, such as sculptural monuments and tools discovered from archeological finds, teleologically deposit evidence of their own beingness as well as marking the technical and cultural erosion of its structural-value by the ecological decomposition within the World-itself. As one instrument comes to replace the prior, a form of decomposition occurs as the form of the instrument evolves towards higher efficiency. As time passes, old manners and customs are supplanted by ones that either depart wholly from the prior benchmark of usability or add an appendage of function to the already-existing form. The photograph as a concept, remains immune to the ecological erosion of its image-message, yet the photograph is suspect to the human propensity towards misunderstandings, failed analysis, and error. The photograph is also subject to the technical decomposition by means of the physical and chemical processes of which developing the image from film negative to produced photograph on the surface of photographic paper carries with it the weight of accurate representation. The photograph is utterly reliant upon the technologies of the camera-apparatus and the corresponding chemical logic required for its realization into the World of the Other. The photographic object requires a means of taking the isolated instantaneous moment and then render it distributable for the Other. This procedure rests upon a synthetic process of reproducing the lived-moment or experienced encounter with the World and transforming the perceptual qualities of the contained encounter into new formats of intelligibility. If the photograph were to remain undeveloped and unseen, its power of mythproduction will arise from out of the potentiality of the pure representative value’s passivity. As if it were an untold secret, or an unsent letter, the undeveloped photograph is pure potentiality. We may take as an example Baudrillard’s ethnological discourse of the “immediate decomposition” of the mummy of Rameses when dug out and perceived by the tools of measurement and technical observations by the anthropologists, the shroud of the mythological 21 and imaginative potential of undeveloped photographic negative and film stock dissolves into a fixed and unalterable description of reality. 12 The decomposition of the body of Ramses began the moment perceptive and technical means of observation began working upon it. Undeveloped photographic works are immanently-present based on the technical processes that have taken place to capture the moment of exposure, yet rendered mute and potential if the process of development is not carried through. Exposure to the elements and activity of beingness tends to demerit the pure presence of objects in their natural temporal space. To expose the mummy or the museum artefact outside of the ornaments (i.e. frames, crypts, tombs, caskets, boxes, etc.) and the chemicals of preservation, would render the rapid decline of the artificial integrity of being. Objects in the museum are exposed to the World via an artificial preservation that gives virtual life for the future spectator, as evidence of a being being made relatively eternal via science. It is the process of exposure which also finalizes the becoming of the photographic imprint into a material object that can be witnessed through time and passed over from one hand to the next. Baudrillard speaks of the process “museumification,” that “exterminates” the symbolic power of the mummy. 13 The photograph is a crypt of beingness which also can decompose and lose its essence of meaning over time. 12 In Simulations, Baudrillard posits: “For Ethnology to live, it’s object must die.” He describes that the discipline of ethnology, by its mere technicality of observation and study, opens the objects under scrutiny to the damaging abrasion of observation. 13 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 21. 22 ON MOURNING THE LOST PRESENCE OF THE OTHER The sudden or tragic loss of the presence of the Other initiates the process of mourning in the subject who has experienced such an event. To further investigate what impresence constitutes may be to understand impresence in relation to the process of mourning, one may consider the state of impresence as it either interferes with the completion of mourning or is the direct consequence of the mourning process itself. In his essay dedicated to the passing of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida in fragment states: These thoughts are for him, for Roland Barthes, meaning that I think of him and about him, not only of or about his work. ‘For him’ also suggests that I would like to dedicate these thoughts to him, give them to him, and destine them for him. Yet they will no longer reach him, and this must be the starting point of my reflection; they can no longer reach him, reach all the way to him, assuming they ever could have while he was still living. So where do they go? To whom and for whom? Only for him in me? In you? In us? For these are not the same thing, already so many different instances, and as soon as he is in another the other is no longer the same, I mean the same as himself. And yet Barthes himself is no longer there. 14 It is the limits of being that provides the boundaries for existence, yet through language, and specifically through correspondence to and for the absent Other, does Derrida then make the presence of Barthes near him. However, Derrida acknowledges at the same time that the writing that he is writing and the Barthes whom he addresses no longer is able to receive the communication and correspondence that he is framing, There is a correspondence with that 14 Derrida, Jacques. “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 35. 23 which no longer is in presence or able to be in presence, and he questions to whom and for whom are the words that he is writing on Barthes going to wards. The extension of Barthes’ existence as an over-reaching non-presence is promulgated through the essay in which Derrida addresses his letter of mourning the empty name that once belonged to Barthes, to himself, to nobody, and to all of his future readers. This correspondence with the dead (with the one who is no longer present and shall never return to the scene), moves like an addressed postcard to a specter, one that is only never to be received and always destined to be in transit, passing from one person or carrier to the next in a transit of perpetual emptiness and dead ends. In its own way, History is perpetuated via the refusal to mourn the loss of presence of the Other. History builds itself from the refusal to acknowledge that something as mutated its form of presence into absence, i.e. that the Other is in absentia. History is always written for the future spectator to remind them of the past that can never be sustained any longer in its original and primitive condition. It may not be a coincidence that the postcard often carries a photograph one side of its surface, and language on the reverse-side of the surface. The shape in which communication between the Other has been shaped by the technical evolution of the medium of signs and images, corresponding to the rapid social changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution insofar as the ability for communicative correspondences to travel against sprawling distances. There is no better photographic-act to convey the essence of what Roland Barthes and his work meant to Derrida, other than his very own performative use of language to depict his life, his work, and at the same time pay homage by perpetuating Barthes’ textual existence through the means of written text. Barthes himself was not a photographer, but a writer. The format of Barthes’ being is best relegated to the surfaces of paper in the pretense that a structure of the reproducibility and transmission of information was already in place by the construct of Barthes himself. 24 It was through language that Barthes came to understand the photograph and the death of his mother on October 25, 1977. 15 Camera Lucida was Barthes’ final work; apart from providing an analysis on reasons why photography affected him as an observer, the work also incorporated the mourning process over the passing of his mother. In this text, Barthes claims to find the photograph that perfectly depicted the essence of his recently deceased mother. Barthes choose not to incorporate the photograph in the work. Instead, Barthes implemented descriptive language to indicate the scene of the photograph through language, although one registers at once that the elaboration of describing the photograph of this mother is not for the sake of the reader to see his mother, but to reveal the possibility that one can find the essence of the Other in the photograph. What Barthes was describing was the way that specific photograph was able to capture that which he sought in the photograph, that being the the essence of this mother. Of course, the essence of his particular mother in the Winter Garden Photograph did not convey the motherly essence of the universal Mother. Rather, the Winter Garden Photograph merely represented the precise relationship that Barthes essentially identified his mother with. What was being invoked was the possibility for an essence to be communicated and dug from the archival haunting of the photograph. Like’s Baudrillard’s reference to the mummy (mentioned earlier), Barthes’ idealized representation of his mother was sacred and thus must not be shared at the risk of losing its sacredness by not achieving an objective and collective signification for the Other. The estimation of the value of the photograph of his mother was non-translatable for the future spectator. There is an impossible divide between the understanding of something qualifiable substantial for the self as opposed to transmitting the same intensity of the meaning for the Other. 15 Pascale-Anne Braul and Micahel Naas, Introduction to “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” by Jacques Derrida in The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001 33. 25 In correspondence with the those who are absent, there exists only the correspondence with an idealized version of the Other. In between the presence and the absence of the Other, there can be said to be the state or condition of impresence for the Other, insofar as one is to contemplate that such a relation is possible. The territory of impresence is one of an idealization of the Other, and in the construction of the phantasmatic representation, an apparition may soon replace the lost Other either by image or text. The substitution of the presence of the Other via the channels of image-text representations affords the terrain of impresence a mixture of reliability and mutability. In effect, the total presence of a new representation of the lost Other takes over the void which the lack of presence left behind. That which remains takes the shape of the imprint and conditions the structure of the substitution. The replaced presence adapts to the form of the absent presence of the Other that is no longer in proximity or range of the perceiving subject. Thus, the shape of mourning repeats the traces of the lost Other. For example, the gesture of the caring caress is transposed through mourning to have the same emotional satisfaction as does when the caress is passed on to the substitute representation. The evolution of technology has essentially removed the requirement of materiality for the communication and transmission of images capture by the photographic regime. When Roland Barthes wrote Camera Lucida, the idea of the digital photograph was not even on the horizon of reproducibility. However, structurally, the photograph has always had another substrate – that being the substrate of language. For when a camera is inaccessible, the photographer is able to capture the scene through his memory and reproduce the punctum through words and descriptions. This is made evident through Herve Guibert’s biographic Ghost Image, which was a personal response to Barthes’ Camera Lucida. In journal-like montages, Guibert descriptively paints picture he was unable to take. Guibert writes on the failed attempt of 26 photographing his own mother, “That earlier image had been totally, irrevocably reconstructed as we tried to create the chance image, the subversive image of the photograph. But that image didn’t exist. Looking through the film against the bluish light of the bathroom, we saw that the entire roll of film was unexposed, blank from one end to the other.” 16 Bereft of the moment, which he had staged in the photographing of his mother, the lost encounter with the image which he unnaturally objectified and masked over his mother, was gone. He reacts solemnly through the textual fragment that is titled “Ghost Image,” he continues, “Blank, the essential moment lost, sacrificed. It was the opposite of awakening from a nightmare: the development of the film was like awakening from a dream-session, which instead of being wiped away at once, becomes, with the reality of the absence of an image, a nightmare rather than a dream.” 17 What Guibert is relating by this statement, is the irrecuperable loss of the image of his mother that he failed to photograph had somehow escaped its intentional reality. The lost image instead of being made material on photographic substrate was rather transferred into Guibert’s memory as language. The transformed image as such, retained the power to be transmitted and returned to its transgressive will, from encounter to narrative, in the shape of a short and fragmented text. In short, the photographic montage of the lost image, finds its vestibule as written language when the appearance of the finished photograph is non-rendered. Insofar as the memory is retained, the photographic nature of his expression enters the realm of language and thus made interpretable to the generality of the Other. His creative vision and perceptions were recorded by a sector of his memory, a sector which may be involved when the photographer compulsively strives to capture something calling him or her into action. It may be a fear of total unrelinquishable absence that may drive the photographer to snap a photograph. This unknowable absence takes the place of 16 17 Guibert, Herve. Ghost Image, trans. Robert Bononno (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 14. Guibert, Herve. Ghost Image, 15. 27 photograph as language. However, since the image is transformed into written narrative and depiction, the image-as-language has not entered a state of impresence, insofar as the presence of the lost image is repeated in the form of language. Without a drive for repetition and reproduction, a drive that is attributed to Nature itself by Science, the pursuit of legacy and eternality would be rendered mute. Although cities may crumble and be rebuilt by future generations, there remains residues upon the memory banks of those witness of its prior existence. The witness loses his, her, or its body when the apparatus of technology takes over the duties and functions of memory formation. It is through the archival process from out of which the photograph assembles its ontological status as the precipitate for future ontological actions, carrying along with it as historical traces of affect- once stationed only in the context of the here and now of the past. IMPRESENCE AS ANTICIPATION The framework that is instituted by the arrangement and agreement for a plan of action constitutes the structural impresence of a future action. An action that is set to occur, occurs once the necessary conditions are met for its forecasted implementation. The outset of these conditions are those which best represents an act of impresence. For instance, when a plan is made for an event to take place at a certain time or place, then a set of protocols, a blueprint, must be first established. The preliminary processes must be lined up. The intention of the photographer is often registered as an unconscious endeavor. When the photographer places his body in a particular stance, he or she is gaining the vantage point of the environment and the objects contained therein. 28 Over the experience of one’s life, realizations about the World are the result of repeated perceptual encounters with it. Apprehension of the object for Merleau-Ponty is acknowledged via perception as the phenomenological foundation for understanding the World as it appears before the individual who absorbs the visual information presented by the World in an objective fashion. In an essay titled “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences,” Merleau-Ponty states: Should I say that the unseen sides are somehow anticipated by me, as perceptions which would be produced necessarily if I moved, given the structure of the object? If, for example, I look at a cube, knowing the structure of the object as it is defined in geometry, I can anticipate the perceptions which this cube will give me while I move around it. Under this hypothesis I would know the unseen side as the necessary consequence of a certain law of the development of my perception. But if I turn to perception itself, I cannot interpret it in this way because this analysis can be formulated as follows: It is true that the lamp has a back, that the cube has another side. But this formula, ‘It is true,’ does not correspond to what is given to me in perception. Perception does not give me truths like geometry but presences. 18 On the flat surface of the photograph, one does not have the opportunity to account for the back of the photographed lamp. There only exists a flattened and diminished version of it, diminishing the beingness of the object to a static and reduced immortality as a photograph. Although, through the operation of inference, can the photographed lamp be made whole again, however the operations are merely occurring within the interior of the psyche. The flattened image is rendered whole by the spectator who perceives the photographic image. These operations may 18 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences,” trans. James M. Edie, Primacy of Perception, (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 14. 29 constitute what impresence as a metaphysical concept establishes as a dimension of existential experience. Subjects conduct their behavior in anticipation of the forthcoming event. Each participating individual will not be expected to behave in accordance to the established plan. If there is a falling out of the plan, and the plan cannot be executed as drafted – the possibility for impresence arises. There is a moment in which the individual hesitates. There is a trace of the previous plan in his movements. However, since the plan has been abandoned, therefore all associated behaviors that would have resulted from the execution of the plan need to be immediately aborted. When a trace of the plan remains, there is a small probability that one or more of the intended behaviors will be set to action. This state of fragmented behavior is to be known as a state of impresence. There is absence of the essential elements of the plan or contract that were to be put into effect – leading to an impartial execution of the original plan in its full and total completeness. These impresent behaviors can be noticed in other fields of interest. In classical mechanics, where an object in motion stays in motion until a force acts upon it. The original trajectory is followed unless there is a different force that acts upon it causing it to change direction or to even come to a halt. The original trajectory may still exist in the behavior once it has changed. The impulse to remain on its intended track may be apparent in miniscule motions, in which the object is reluctant to fully adopt its new destination and movement. The act of motion contains information for the object to perform a certain way. Objects will behave as they are instructed to behave by conscious decision made by external subjects. Inanimate objects can never decide for themselves the shape of their destinies. The unconscious for Freud dealt with a world of repressed desires. The notion of the memory-trace fits the state of impresence. In mourning, one anticipates the arrival of the deceased. Perhaps 30 death is not eternal and immediate. The memory-trace, or the impresence, of the deceased remains with the living and is maintained only by those who continue to live and continue to bear witness to the repeated-presence contained within objects and stories. Impresence can be thought to always be attached to corresponding actions and behaviors that were produced during the lived-moment by the agents in the World. To observe the operations of impresence in the mourning individual, one will have to ask if this sadness is not simply the result of not-letting-go to the lost Other. An anticipation of arrival of the deceased that is never met or satisfied will subsist in continual mourning for the individual who has lost a loved one. Future plans that have been organized and scheduled, never to be fulfilled by the lost one, the deceased one. To think of the deceased as being lost is a misguided attempt at mourning. For if the deceased is simply lost they will have to be found in order to be fully mourned in the act of being released by the mourning individual. An anticipation is in some ways an expectation. To expect an act or behavior to occur is, in a sense, anticipation. Expectation often are met with disappointment more so than anticipation. An expectation signifies a sort of formal agreement has been reached whether explicit or implicit. An expectation can be outside of its bounds. To expect more than what has been agreed upon is not an uncommon practice. For in the art of bargaining, one must settle for what can be attained – even if that means that an anticipation is not satisfied completely. We must make a distinction between what is meant by impresence and what Freud means by memory-trace. Impresence can be thought of as the state of absolute anticipation for the lost Other. Not only can impresence be understood as the terrain which lies between presence and absence, it may also come to represent the condition of waiting for the returning arrival of the lost Other. To argue that one is not conscious of that which occurs prior to perceiving the anticipation of the loss of presence of the Other would be a shortfall in the 31 practical nature of anticipatory action. An expectation of an arrival of the lost Other creates suspense that can only be satisfied when the expected Other re-appears; this suspense is one that is already conditioned with the original arrival of the Other during their first manifestation to the subject. Furthermore, if the anticipated Other does not appear this causes confusion in the space of anticipation in which when the arrival of the Other who is expected to return is then substituted as representation by the memory-construction techniques that are formulated by the subject who waits for the Other. The new arrival of substitution will be treated in a critical way, as to how the arrived-other differs from the one that was idealized within the minds of the crowd that awaits an arrival. Yet, one must take into account the primitive understanding of loss which resides unconsciously in the knowledge of the social order. Substitution implies that the one that arrives in some way has lived up to the anticipated weight of the expected Other. Since the world is structured to account for the future loss of the Other, there are mechanisms of retaining the presence of the Other for as long as possible either by proximity or remembrance. There lingers a trace of unsatisfied desire for the one that did not arrive. In some cases, the one that is expected arrives – but arrives in an altered state or condition making he who arrives unable to satisfy or live up to the idealization of the expected other. In this case the other is both a physical body and also an immaterial body. The immaterial body is the mental conception harbored by the expecting body-subject. In this case the expectation of the other sort of creates a subjectification of the other. The Other in this case has not been objectified in the sense that they have been lessened in value, but moreover that the expected other has been drawn out within the expecting subject’s mind. The ideal figure of the Other exists within the subject who awaits insofar as the one who anticipates values the arriving Other in comparison to the one he or she has dreamed up as an idealization version of the Other. The reason for this difference in the Being that has 32 arrived and the Being that is fabricated within in the mind of the expecting subject, is precisely the virtual arrival of the Other by means of an internal process mental idealization which has already fulfilled an emotional need in the one who awaits. The waiting period is occupied by the presence of the imagined Other. This pre-presence of the anticipated Other has fulfilled an inner desire for the Other when it cannot be satisfied without the presence thereof of the Other. In this way, the words of the other can constitute presence as well. The act of stating or articulating what and how one plans to act in-itself satisfies the occurring of the act. In a way, the writing and speaking of a future action in some ways conditions its possibility. To affirm that one will finish reading the book, sets a course of behavior that will meet its conclusion once the act which is imagined in the statement comes into being, as a realized totality of a desire. The act of owning a book sometimes satisfies the condition of wanting to read the book. This can be seen in the collection of the collector of books. Although having a book one wishes to read, or at least values, that such a particular book must be read at some point, never necessitates the reading of this imagined book. The presence of owning, or of having the book within proximity does not instigate the execution of reading, much less of comprehending the book. Proximity does not correlate with being closer to the soul of the book- the substance which is anticipated to be contained therein. One can sleep with the book beneath one’s head and be furthest from the writings contained within if the book is never opened, read, and affected by the contained letters on the pages. 33 ABSOLUTE ABSENCE That which is declared to be absent is a wrongful use of metaphysical language. Like Parmenides who states, “for you cannot know what is not (for it cannot be accomplished) nor can you declare it,” one must make the distinction sufficiently clear – that being- that pure absence is unspeakable. 19 That which is unknown, belongs to the void of language and vision. The difference between the forgetting of a presence and the unknowable absence is rendered intelligible on the assumption that the absolute absence of a thing is a function of its primordial difference. When the lost Other is not captured by the memory of the mind or the narrative memory of culture, society, and art, then the absolute absence is un-identifiable, rather than a form of absence that is merely missing and lost presence. In this regard, there can be no anticipation of an absolute absence without invoking a pre-emptive presence of such an expected existence. Pure void of presence is the true articulated definition of absence. To this extent, the myth of Walter Benjamin’s lost briefcase exists in the imagination of the history and thus rendered as being in a state of impresence. Thus, the lost manuscript which is mythologized to exist, affects the curiosity of explorers and philosophers to speculate the contents of a virtual manuscript housed in a briefcase, with the myth of its author’s most important life work. To reconcile the never knowing of the lost Other, the past must first be absolved in order to absolve the future. 19 DK28B2 [ The English translation is from Parmenides of Elea, “Fragments,” Philosophy Before Socrates trans. Richard D. McKirahan, with an Introduction with texts and commentary by Richard D. McKirahan, 2nd edition (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010), 11.2146. 34 I. THE TOPOLOGY OF PRESENCE THROUGH THE PHOTOGRAPH PRESENCE AND PREMONITION The photographer, prior to initiating the technical operation of the camera apparatus, i.e. the opening and the closing of the shutter of his lens, observes the external World that exists before him; that of which can be perceived by his sensory faculties. Between the release of signal from his brain to the press and release the button on the camera, there is an almost automatic computation that occurs in his mind. A sort of contemplative computation that assesses the World and the information being presented to the subject. Unable to disconnect himself from the cultural and institutional informatics that have established his identity as a photographer in the World, he begins to unconsciously reflect on the World not only as existing before him, present in its full presence; the photographer also engages in the premonition of the product. The photographer encounters an impulse, to capture and retain the moment for its informative stance. Some sort of logical intuition or reflex that photographer wills the static moment to be rendered potential onto the film, awaiting it development. Upon development, the full actualization of the photograph will come into being and reveal the moment in its excess and its ex postfacto. This world which remains at-all-times exterior to the photographer gains its identity and value from the mere act of existing as an object to observe or bear witness to. However, one must analyze the human impulse which impels the photographer to take a photograph, to isolate and retain the moment which he or she seeks to the capture. This impulse, albeit an unconscious one that is scripted with the species, is housed within the psyche of photographer who must 35 communicate synergistically with the mechanics of the camera apparatus. The compulsion to record and manufacture a material object is a phenomenological performance. As a production of transmittable presence and information. Not only is the photograph and instance of information, it relays the isolated phenomenological scene which the camera and the photographer were in proximity to. For the material photograph of the scene to exist, the presence of the technical apparatus is essential. One ought to bear in the mind the obscuration that is evident in proceeding with such a technical outcome in mind. Hegel warns of the lens of perception when thinking about how cognition affects the thinking of the absolute, he states, “If, on the other hand, cognition is not an instrument of our activity but a more or less passive medium through which the light of truth reaches us, then again we do not receive the truth as it is in itself, but only as it exists through and in this medium. 20” The distinction between instrument or medium is a noteworthy because if one were to think of the photograph as being either an medium that conveys a past lived-experience or as an present act that acts as an instrument, we begin to think of the active and passive nature of the photograph’s presence. The presencing presence of photograph enables the spectator to inhabit temporarily a moment that is removed from the possibility of a direct encounter. If the spectator immerses himself into the presence exhibited by the photograph, this is the photograph-as-instrument rather than a medium which passively stores information of the World experienced by the photographer and those living accordingly within the time contained in the photograph. However, the photographic impulse itself which compels a person to take a photo, need not necessarily to attach itself to the presence of the camera apparatus. In this sense, we follow Laruelle’s sentiment when he states, “Photography has its own ‘intention’ – it is that quasi-field of pure photographic apparition, of the universal photographic Appearance or Fiction (that of 20 Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 46. 36 the vision-stance). And it is philosophically sterile: nothing to prove, and it doesn’t even necessarily have a will- for example, to critique and to transform the World, the City, History, etc.” 21 The photographic apparition is the coming-into-being of a new object. That which is seen on the surface of the photograph-as-object is mere apparition. The original moment and objects contained in the photograph become illusions and non-real. To the future spectator the things that appear on the surface of the photograph are mere images. When Freud discussed memory in dreams, he questioned the origins of the objects and the emergence of dreams substitution of real-World materials. Freud states: It may happen that a piece of material occurs in the content of a dream which in the waking state we do not recognize as forming a part of our knowledge or experience. We remember, of course, having dreamt the thing in question, but we cannot remember whether or when we experienced it in real life. We are thus left in doubt as to the source which has been drawn upon by the dream and are tempted to believe that dreams have a power of independent production. Then at last, often after a long interval, some fresh experience recalls the lost memory of the other event and at the same time reveals the source of the dream. 22 The photograph operates like the unconscious during the dream-state. The photograph impressed itself upon the surface an apparition for the spectator to observe. Sometimes the photograph can bring objects that have generalized meanings, for instance the photograph of a table – photographed at the proper distance, will register in the spectator the presence of a table. The photographed table itself can also inform the spectator more information that can have residual and unconscious meanings as well. The photograph, when compared to a dream-object, has the 21 22 Laruelle, Francois. The Concept of Non-Photography, (New York: Sequence Press, 2012), 24. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 45. 37 same “power of independent production” that Freud, in the above citation, relates to objectproduction with memory construction and dreams. For Freud, the object that are made manifest within the dream, have real-World causes that are picked up by the perceptive faculties of the human body. Thus, the items and things relayed as dreams can have concrete origins in the World of experience. The photograph that is un-altered, also conveys the World of experience in a total sense. The composition of the photograph is aided by the apparatus of the camera and its lens which does not intentionally obscure its means of capturing moments. What is expressed in dreams is often the result of an unconscious registration of a moment that was not apprehended by the parts of the mind which construct memory and knowledge. Photographic premonition may only refer to the standard operation of the camera apparatus. Thus, any possible intentionality is removed from the camera, however the intention of the camera is able to be modified by the lens-magnification chosen by the photographer. The camera-itself bears no imprint of intentionality on its final product, apart from the its structural makeup. One may similarly think of intentionality of the photographic expression by turning to Roland Barthes, who in his brief essay “Shock Photos,” notes the relationship between the photographer, the construction of the distributable photograph-memory of the lived-moment, and the reaction that the viewer of the photograph has upon its encounter. In the construction of the photograph, the photograph is the one who immanently feels the moment. It is the photograph itself which removes the photographer and the scene from its non-re-construable event. What the observer-as-spectator experiences in the photograph is a nothingness, rather there is a void of experience. In the following passage, Barthes makes evident the way that photographs with the intention of producing an emotion eliminates the natural and creative dimension of participation that the observer is privileged to have, he states: 38 Most of the photographs exhibited to shock us have no effect at all, precisely because the photographer has too generously substituted himself for us in the formation of the subject: he has almost always overconstructed the horror he is proposing, adding to the fact, by contrasts or parallels, the intentional language of horror: one of them, for instance places side by side a crowd of soldiers and a field of skulls; another shows us a young soldier looking at a skeleton; another catches a column of prisoners passing a flock of sheep. Now, none of these photographs, all too skillful, touches us. This is because, as we look at them, we are in each case dispossessed for our judgment: someone has shuddered for us, reflected for us, judged for us; the photographer has left us nothing – except a simple right of intellectual acquiescence: we are linked to these images only by a technical interest; overindicated by the artist himself, for us they have no history, we can no longer invent our own reception of this synthetic nourishment, already perfectly assimilated by its creator. 23 For Barthes, the photographer ought not imprint his subjectivity onto the photograph. Rather, the surface of the photograph should behave as translucence, to the extent that the smear of identity of photographer is unnoticed. The photographer in the moment without the camera at hand becomes merely an anonymous spectator. The knowledge of being photographer by the unknown Other affects the way the lived moment is executed unnaturally. What is caught by the lens of the camera is the World that understands that it is being photographed. This is not to say there is an unknown consciousness in the World, but rather, the presence of the photographer-as-such introduces a new orientation for the World to respond to. Even if the moment was perfectly composed for a monumental photograph, the mere asking permission to take the photograph disassembles the moment of encounter that first lit a spark within the photographer’s 23 Barthes. Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 116-117. 39 unconscious compulsion to make eternal the beautiful and fleeting moment that is about to disappear forever. One may be tempted to ask: can the photograph be taken without the presence of a camera? As discussed briefly in the introduction, the photographic mentality of philosophy and literature operates in the sense that language ultimately stands in for the desire to visually circumscribe experiences into History. We may talk about the relationship between existence and intentionality of the photographic disposition of the human into further elaboration. The preceding discussion on the over-intention and over-construction that Barthes elaborates in “Shock Photos,” can now be analyzed through the medium of the absence of the camera and the corresponding articulation of the memory into language. The photograph itself is the coalescent production of the work between the photographer and the camera. However, one may posit the question: can the photograph exist without a surface? In other words, is photographic paper or paper that retains words as languages the only possible mediums for the development of the photographic memory? Can we now speak of the language of the photograph? The territory which can take on this kind of reflection is the space of impresence. Francois Laruelle states, “Heraclitus’s child at play would, in the end, have been nothing but a photographer. And not just any photographer: a ‘transcendental’ photographer, since in photographing the world, he produces it; but a photographer with no camera…,” reflecting upon the origins of photography and the photographic state of mind required philosophy to produce the product of language. 24 Language is the photography of philosophy. That which is worth of being remembered as either stored into the cemetery of internal visual recollection, or externally archived as a material reproduction as photograph or text. The operations of memory construction require a medium for its deposit to take root in. 24 Franciois Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography, trans. Robin Mackay (New York: Sequence Press, 2011), 1. 40 There is evidence to argue that some literary movements and evolutions of language attempt to reconstruct a scene that was experienced in either reality or dream. For if images did not find satisfaction in being deposited in the World, the image will render itself as unconscious material longing to be rendered manifest as art or as an affective reaction. In his autobiographical work, Herve Guibert, speaks of moments in which he was not able to make use of his camera and to capture the scene of the World quick enough. Rather instead he recounted through the unreproducible image-scene as language, rendering the moment as precisely as he could through language, so much so that the imaginative reader is able to re-assemble the scene or the event which was experienced by Guibert in their own stage within their imaginary subjective scene. Guibert was following and responding to a similar gesture that Barthes employed to analyze the Winter Garden Photo of his mother - the one photo that perfectly captured her essence. These writings all occurred after the fact of being presented with a visual image that longed to be transmitted and communicated, yet their artistic capacity for creative memory conditioned the language which was used to express to the reader and bring to life a moment that no longer was present to themselves. In separating the lived-moment from the reality which was experienced at the time in the situation, they both independently made their respective experiences abstract and reduced them to a stored memory. As a pre-memory and as visual remainder, the affect of each respective moment - Barthes’ Mother and Guibert’s regret- were collected by their mind’s sensual apparatus. This sensorial apparatus which captured sensory perception then translates into the production of memory which can be returned to for themselves or for the Other. From this location comes the genesis and incorporation of the scenes innate to creative imaginations of the spectator. Everything that led to the construction of a memory was prefaced by an instinct. This instinct enabled the required attention by the mind to store the visual impressions so that 41 they may be expressed via a translation into words. This reflex of premonition has now been relegated to the respond not with the internal mechanisms of memory production, but with the press of a button on a camera. The internal visual account which fuels literary and poetic works is replaced and substituted by the unreflective product of the digital photograph. Reliance on the camera and its material representational product - the photograph-itself - whose ability for immediate capture and its simultaneous broadcast weakens the mind’s visual-linguistic aperture and dulls the biological memory construction apparatus of the mind. The photograph is thus rendered to exist as a component of a legacy, or trace, of the photographer’s particular perspective which occurred at the specific moment he or she had the compulsion to document and turn that experience into an archived document. The photographer longs to leave an imprint of his or her capacity to be a spectator in the World through the representation of the product. The faculties of his memory become transferred onto the mechanical instrument of the camera, which is capable of seeing beyond the human faculty of sight. The camera is the technical apparatus of reproduction of the historical and artistic moment which is observed principally by the photography through finally by the camera itself. The camera shapes and augments the perception of the human spectator of the event and moment he is a witness to. It is the artistic statement and vision which gets captured from the premonition that existed prior to the pressing of the shutter - the materialization and objectification of an image, coming from life and transferred into archive once the film has been developed. That moment of pre-existence of which only the photographer as spectator of the world that surrounds him is able to capture from premonition of status of moment and convey to his future and distant audience that importance and knowledge of that which he hopes to communicate. The anticipation of this imaginative moment or the presence of a historical moment is the labor of the 42 photographer who inadvertently operates as historian. In order to be able to capture the perfect moment, the photographer-as-subject must be able to anticipate not only be trained and educated to capture the subtle movements of his gaze, he must be trained to acknowledge and recognize the importance of the different components of his intended composition. We are speaking of photography as simply the reproduction of an instant moment without the alterations and manipulations some creative photographers use to obscure and confuse the audience. The camera in this sense is only an extension of the aesthetic eye, immediate present to an object or event directly. The broad claim is that is being made is that these individuals strive to leave an imprint onto the terrain of history by means of capturing and reproducing an immediate presence by means of having an intention of what that moment would come to be as a still-image. This act of imaginative premonition does not see its results until it is developed either in a photography lab or a few moments later either in an analogue Polaroid photograph or in a digital image file. As a gesture of historical recognition, the human subject wills to be remembered and never forgotten in different ways. When the photographer is compelled to take a snapshot of a moment he experienced directly, he is drawn to the idea of being able to return to the environment which was momentarily glimpsed at by means of the material representation product of the photograph. Not all photographs are made from an intentionality, meaning that there is not always a vision or premonition that is controlling the photographer’s impulses. Other times, it is a simply for the production of historical memory. To indicate presence was had at a specific location or that the object or event that was captured meant something to him and thereby can be shared and communicated to others in posterity in the non-presence of the directly immediate sensual object. According to Vilem Flusser, the camera cannot at all times capture the ‘cultural conditions’ of the time and space being rendered as history by the technical apparatus of the camera or by its 43 user who is immersed within the moment. 25 As an instrument of historical documentation, the photograph itself cannot communicate the entire sociological implications of any given photograph. The interpretation of its spectacle is left for the observer of the photographic image, rather than the photographer who documented it. The impact of the photographer’s intention is reduced simply to his gaze and the original intention his mind’s eye sought to document. The presence of that specific lived-moment of which the photographer captured can only be reimagined by a future spectator who comes equipped with his own set of intellectual and critical lenses that will re-interpret the moment. In the photograph, the unity of the moment cannot be fully represented in its product. There will be an omission of understanding when new eyes cast their perception over the recorded image. A new imagination, produced by active spectator, will take place and reconstruct new meanings far different from than the supposed original intention of the photographer with which was driven to produce the artefact. We can now turn to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose theories of perception can be taken into account. Unlike language, which rests on propositions which differentiate them from experiences of perception we can turn to the photograph and ask: what is the being represented here if not an intended unity of the moment?26 A photograph may or may not have an artistic statement that supports and explains in the form of a caption. The complete truth of the message may be incommunicable to the future spectator, thereby enabling the possibility for a misconstruction of its revived perception. In an address in 1946 relating to his work Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty sets up the following question, “If we consider an object which we perceive but one of whose sides we do not see, or if we consider objects which are not within our visual field at this moment- i.e., what is happening 25 Flusser, Vilem. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Reaktion Books: London. 2012. p.34 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences” The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 12. 26 44 behind our back or what is happening in America or at the South Pole - how should we describe the existence of these absent objects or the non-visible parts of present objects?” 27 We can apply this question to the nature of the photograph, which is incapable of showing all sides, dimensions, and textures of any given moment, and wonder what are the implications of incomplete representations. Are not all representations incomplete to some extent? With respect to the ‘non-visible parts of present objects’ we can point to any photograph and assume there is an entirely hidden context that cannot be communicated to history. We have the appearance of truth, of a picture that is more-seeing than the actual eye in that it can document more of length, width, height, with far more accuracy than the human eye and mind combined. Through a logical deduction, presence may be attributed to images. For instance, the presence of the photographer himself is naturally implied unless if an automatic timer or remote control was used to capture the instant. Today, technology has enabled sentinel cameras to capture video recordings for security purposes, where the perceiving eye can be a human watchman, but can the perceiving subject can also be mechanical- in the form of a digital or analogue recording system that automatically operates without a discerning judgment or character. The intention of the security camera is to prevent criminal activity by its presence of capturing evidence which can serve to find a perpetrator culpable of the crime he has engaged in. In a sense, the premonition of crime was imagined by the either the property owner or a security team to be capture and document, by means of a security camera, the evidence that establishes the criminal’s guilt solely on the probability that a crime can occur at the location in which it has been installed. As a type of retention and memory, the moment which is captured by the photographer is objectified and translated into material, being re-developed through chemicals in the darkroom and finally able to be grasped and gazed upon by the photographer and the Other. The Other 27 Ibid., p. 13 45 always inhabits a particular historical epoch and contains a subjectivity closely interwoven to the means disposable at the given time in history. The image remains frozen over time and shall remain artefact and testament to the conditions which enabled its solidification into object. The medium which captures the image is conditioned by the development of technology available to the photographer and artist. As intention, the will for legacy - whether it be for recognition of name or of unique perspective, the photographer as artist and archivist posits his objectified experience in fragments over the course of his life and career. The pre-vision, that which occurs prior to the photograph and which mimics a premonition, involves the activated aesthetic consciousness of the spectating photographer with respect to a historical propagation and collection of images. The premonition is a result of his education and experience and experienced as instinct. The compulsion to retain and frame moments as either memory or projection requires an audience, whether it be the self or a another. Whether the artist acts on behalf of himself or the other, there is a necessity to retain and reconstruct the moment of artistic inspiration or a moment worthy historical preservation and its subsequent reproduction for an audience of spectators. The image in the photograph is re-imagined subjectively by each spectator. Its power lies in its ability to pierce through unconscious of the spectator - this is the real space and territory of any work of art or sediment of history. To be moved without admitting oneself to be moved is the intention of the work of art. In the spontaneous and instantaneous distribution of images today, we are experiencing a dissolution of intent and integrity of the image. As such, the premonition is replaced with erase and repeat technique which digital technology affords the user of cameras today. Whereas in the past, more commitment of time was made in developing and seeing results, the process of premonition is being displaced with the repeatability and simplicity of the digital snapshot. 46 IMMANENT PRESENCE The categories of proximity and intensity of presence at this point must be given some attention to further the argument that there is a possibility of comprehending the existence of a space between presence and absence. The intelligibility of presence of an object, animal, or person is conditioned by these two categories. Does the presence of the Other reside within the self where it is always being constructed or does the defining shape of the Other find its identity as being exterior and totally outside the self that perceives? In the former, the immanence of the Other is housed within the psyche of the self, where the construction of the truth of the Other is always a relation to the knowledge acquired by the subject-as-Self. If the Other is totally foreign and exterior, the Self must incorporate the Other by means of perception and a process of identification and affect based on difference. The concepts of proximity and intensity are in a relation with one another, but this is not a necessarily mandated connection. In other words, there can be an intensity of presence without there being a correlative proximity between the object which is desired, recollected, or simply daydreamed. The subject which performs these acts of bringing into presence that which is regarded to be absent, is an internal operation of the psyche. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel guides the reader first to question and doubt the validity of the objects in the World via the process of Sense-certainty. With respect to presence, Hegel does not at this juncture does not directly speak of presence. For the objective of this thesis however, we may investigate the “failures of cognition” which Hegel pointed out for consciousness and apply Sense-certainty to presence. Hegel’s agenda was to prove whether consciousness is capable of knowing and comprehending the Absolute. For our inquiry into the possibility for an existence or space 47 between presence and absence, we need not ask whether this space is True or Absolute. The matter at hand is to speculate over the possibility of understanding presence and absence as not an entirely dualistic and binary system of understanding the world in which we exist within and which exists without and outside of ourselves, but to see the space between presence and absence as a gradient of presence in which presence vanishes towards absence on a scale of complete presence towards complete non-presence. Within this vanishing presence, we have the interplay of proximity and intensity before our perceptive faculties. At the operational level, we have sensorial perceptive systems that influence our cognition. Complementing the structure of our perception, there is a system of memory that collects the impression acquired from senseperceptions. Our bodies register and produce a material archive that welcomes representations of different sorts. Sensual substance impressions are filed and organized accordingly within our minds. These mental objects take on new meanings under the context of a subjective lifeexperiences and cultural frameworks. An analogy of the mind to the photographic film cartridge may be useful, i.e. black-and-white, color, layers of spectral sensitivity compared to the repressive operations of the unconscious and conscious dispositions. Like the spectrum of light, the spectrum of being in the World is shaped in conformity the reality which the mind and the camera capture and represent the Real and existing objects no longer in the immediate presence of the eye or the lens. Although every eye and mind function similarly, there may be a difference of interpretation of representations based on the different lived-experiences and cultural histories. As images are ingrained into the memory, they become intertwined with the language function of speech. This process of melding the images from memory to word-associations creates a space of analytic interpretations seem unlimited in scope because of these differences. 48 LES ÉTOILES As remainders of a distant and inherited past, the stars which line the seemingly endless fabric of our skies, emit pulsations of light waves that were produced many thousands of years if not countless centuries ago. The stars are impressions of chemical processes which fired up the grooves of the universe with potentially life-giving light. Scattered across the skies, one can gaze up and potentially coincide the trajectory of one’s visions with those of another – the unknowable Other that has seen the same shape of light emitted across time and space. One would not be incorrect in stating that the light which is being perceived by our retinas while we stare up into the nighttime sky is an act of experiencing an action in the universe that produced by a star long before our current historical period came into existence. In other words, the current historical period of our existence today is the respective re-generation lifetimes of subjectivity. A genealogy of perception dating back to our fathers and our forefathers. This lingering trace of the gaze has traversed the spatial-temporal conduits of uncharted intergalactic paths. The light which enters our retinas and is perceived as an unchanging, although slightly wavering if not pulsating, appearance of a star is the same act of perception that was perceived by the eyes. We have inherited the skies of our father. These stars compose constellations through which myths, histories, and epochs of monumental revelations reveal our conscious insignificance and finitude. The answers to the questions regarding the purpose and nature of our existence, for our previous human species forefathers, were said to be in the celestial heavens above - that black sky glittered and punctured with uncountable tiny silver pins all revealing an often overseen yet foundational aspect our universe: that being an underlying principle which the experience of presence and remnants of activities of objects presents to our conscious minds. The experience 49 and activities constitutive of presence of Being throughout the course of space and time, is preserved and displayed for all to take in from the museum of the skies. What needs to be understood more clearly are the varying intensities of which presence can be perceived by the observer and emitted by the object-subject Other. Although when one stares up with naked eyes at a star, no particular knowledge is being transferred from that star except for its radiating light. Our naked eye apparatus is incapable of deciphering more than the acknowledgement of the presence of the shiny spec or the constellation of multiple specs that are being housed in the nighttime sky. There is an innate persistence and permanence to the quality of the star’s activity when it reaches out to our perceiving retinas over the course of its journey throughout time and space. If the intensity of a presence of an Other shines either as brightly as stars do, or if it is represented best as the fading glow of a barely flickering bed-stand candle which has reached the end of its wick, will determine a referential point in the ability to for the perceived Other and thus inform the observer of information regarding the state of Being of the Other. Some potential states of Being as relating to presence are as follows: decaying, dying, burning, living, exploding, bursting, etc… The state or quality of presence must be assumed to be relating to the subject with a perspective that is multi-dimensional. This is to say that states of matter are not just entirely always either present or not-present. Instead, that there are in fact different perceivable states or gradients of presence. The different forms of presence range on the spectrum of being from total pure presence to total and complete non-presence. In between these two absolute conditions and limits of presence as surplus to total emptiness (plus de présence), exists a decaying trend towards an infinite absence. To think of presence and non-presence, as well as its corresponding intermediary positions of intelligibility, is not the same as thinking of the possibility of pure 50 negation that best represents a theory of infinite absence. In effect, to comprehend absence is to say that there is no spectrum which classifies absence into different layers of absence. At the same time there are psychical limitations towards relating to objects that are in varying distances from the faculties of perception. One may consider Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious insofar as the mind captures and registers imprints from reality. As memories begin to form, the actions which the mind and the Self respond to and interpret stimulus are dependent upon the conscious and unconscious structures of the human mind. These structures may be informed by cultural appropriation as well as by personal experiences relating to the reduction of tension and anxieties that the ways of identifying to the World. One may rather think instead that there is only total and complete non-presence in those states that one considers when one reflects on the nature of absence. From the moment a star emits its light, it begins to vanish from itself as it radiates into space, and much like there is a vanishing glow of the candle whose wick has found its end; the presence of light begins to disperse and dissolve into darkness. This dissipation of light can be analogous to the disintegration of memory and its original relations of sense-perception to the Real object. If it is the case that all actions, whether performed by human, animal, nature, technology, myth, rhyme, language, or even by the cosmos itself, the presence of any said event after its performance can be said to enter a state of decay in which its lingering presence and traces slowly diffuse until it no longer affects the world the way it once did at the moment of excited performance. In the context of the universe, it is only the visible which is intelligible. That which remains in darkness of the unseen quarters of the universe is unavailable to be spoken of and to be taken into account for. The revelation of beingness corresponds to the availability of visual and observable evidence. 51 II. EXPOSURE OF THE PHOTOGRAPH TO DEATH, DISASTER, AND THE MOURNING OF PRESENCE IMPRESENCE AS FORENSICS For Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman forensics, as discipline, is “not simply about science but also about the presentation of scientific findings, about science as an art of persuasion” and that which “involves, then, a relation between three components: an object, a mediator, and a forum.” 28 Forensics, taken from this perspective, takes on a philosophical nature. As such, the process and mechanisms of a forensic investigation is not dissimilar to a philosophical inquiry or of an investigation in the sense that both must be performed onto a body/object/concept by a specialist who will judge or test whether his or her argument is valid and sound before a witness or a spectating public. Philosophy has been no stranger to arguments made by skeptical and cynical thinkers ever since the time of the Ancient Greeks and this method of inquiry has been translated into the scientific disciplines, which forensics has been a member in the tradition of. The matter at hand in this work, in this investigation of impresence is to say that it to an extent can be a type of forensics. Forensics and impresence both are matter of discovering the pieces between life-death and presence-absence. In their work Mengele’s Skull, Keenan and Weizman highlight forensics as a method of both tracing, uncovering and producing an accurate history based on the material evidence of the photograph. Their analysis of the way photography served an essential forensic component to the closure of the international criminal 28 Keenan, Thomas and Weizman, Eyal. Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012),28. 52 case against Mengele before the international tribunal, provides the legitimization of the now philosophically-natured discipline of the Historical and aesthetic analysis as artefact as witness. The performance of forensics through this analysis transforms inanimate objects into speaking ones which incorporate both a voice and a narrative to the static surface of the photograph. The nature of impresence may closely resemble forensics in this exact sense: insofar as the once perceptive faculties have been impressed upon the Historical medium by an object in the World, there will be a residue and trace that remains the further the lost object gets away from the perceptual faculties of the body and technologies of representing lost encounters. The experience of the photograph in its total and immediate presence - much in the way that a forensic specialist who must recreate a narrative using the available and acquired evidence found in bones and scenes, is able to make or prove a point before an audience of judging spectators. That which makes forensics possible is the remainder of residues, of traces of existence which can be used prove identity and culpability. In this sense, forensics itself- in its general concept- is an instance or performance of impresence. At a certain moment in their analysis of forensic aethestics in Mengele’s Skull, Keenan and Weizman give an account made by forensic analyst Richard Helmer who paved the way for a specific type of optical forensics which took into account the superimposition of a photographic image of a present skull at hand with a photograph of the no-longer-in-presence individual in question while they were living. The method which Helmer used involved the combination of two separate and distinct images while superimposing a third image at the center, creating a sort of synthesis, so that he could “show Josef Mengele alternately dead and alive, half dead and half alive - a spectral presence - present and represented at one and the same 53 time.” 29 This spectral presence is characterized by the mere sense of perception of the constructed final image where the superimposition has already synthesized the third image which alternatively can be considered a type of presence that is spectral. Spectral here is to be defined as a construction of presence and representation of the loss of presence. The presence which is present is the object of the skull at hand, whereas the representation was the photographic image of the Mengele while he was still alive. The superimposition of the two has created a moment of spectrality and haunting of the memory of the missing Other. The final image appears to be both at the same moment, a presence and a representation which are melded into a new form of presence. If one were to consider what is absent at this very spectral moment, we can answer immediately that it is the life of Mengele, who sits divided between presence and representation before the forensic analyst. The performance of this forensic evidence is to be ultimately presented before a court as evidence of proof that the German war criminal Mengele was in fact dead and there before the audience only in spectrality. The use of both physical object of the skull and the photographic representation overlapped over one another is closer to conjuring a spirit, so that jurisprudence can put this subject to rest and punishment. What produces anxiety when the loss of presence of the Other occurs? If there is a parallel to be drawn from Keenan and Weizman’s account of the process from which a set of skull and bones came to officially represent and signify Nazi-war criminal Mengele’s body. We may follow their line of questioning: In most forensic examinations of human remains, the primary questions asked of the bones are, ‘What happened? How did you die?’ These questions set the traditional course of police investigations: the victim’s identity is known, and it is the cause of death that 29 Keenan, Thomas and Weizman, Eyal. Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 37. 54 must be established in order to ascertain whether a crime has been committed, and who might have done it. In Sao Paolo, however, the cause of death was not particularly pertinent… What mattered was to whom the bones belonged. The question of the bones was rather, ‘Who are you?’30 What was to be confirmed and not instead rather the circumstances under which he died under. The forensics involved, where techniques of identification, of subjectification through historical appropriation. The forensic examiners analyzed Mengele’s “biography- a timeline constructed out of documents, photographs, and medical records.” 31 The lead forensic examiner, Clyde Snow, “called his process of work on identifying human remains osteobiography, or the biography of bones. The bones, no longer the living human but not simply an object, bear the imprint of a lived life.” 32 The object of bones, which are no longer living, but have the imprint of all experiences of which the human body experienced in its lifetime, since the bones contain a “sequence of illnesses, incidents, and accidents, along with conditions of nutrition, labor, and habit - that is fossilized into the morphology and texture of bones.” 33 The historical imprint of lived experience was the subject of the forensic team’s reconstruction. Their objective of their labor was to identify the ownership of the interior structure of a missing criminal. An anxiety develops in the lack of recognition of identity. When one seeks to investigate and look for an identity that has gone missing, there surrounds the investigation with anxiety. Anxiety that a misrecognition and even a total lack of recognition is possible. 30 Keenan, Thomas and Weizman, Eyal. Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 17-18. 31 Ibid, 18 32 Ibid, 18 33 Keenan, Thomas and Weizman, Eyal. Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 19. 55 TRACES OF FASCISM When impresence is taken to function as a conceptual tool, requiring the development of critical attention in the user of the tool, one can use the concept of impresence to trace the formation and dissolution of structural political mechanisms of power throughout history’s continuous development, questions History’s existence as being purely and only a function of linear capacity. History, as we now know it and whose construction we actively participate in, can no longer be said to only have been and no longer exist due to its absence from today. History recurs and occurs through the re-apprehension of its perceptible objects in the modicum of available technologies of representation at any given historical moment. The photograph served, earlier in this work to display the retention of lived-experience through material images, an object which took the place of the mind whose original activity of memory suited the need for retaining data. The photograph is incomplete mourning, just the same as History repeats itself only to avenge a haunting memory of exacted self-revenge. Functioning as legacy with presence to affect the present, History conducts itself. History must be held responsible for the actions of yesterday and their influence upon today. As empires are ripped apart - one artefact removed from its habitat only to be relocated without proximity to its essentially defining system of reproducible objects which continually construct the semblance of identity and uniformity for its identity. The possibility for a political identity and entity is only supported by the socially accepted identity that was brought into being by means of a culturally collective agreement that secured its power of domination. Political theory must involve the relationship between the domination of cultural and sociological affects and its 56 subsequent dis-entanglement of said prerogative over the virtual grip on the cultural and hegemonic identifications. There remains a residue of idealizations with respect to the domination of image over language and the contextual relationship between fact and fiction. The supremacy of collective historical sentiments is not easy to dissolve and as subjects in a removed historical location, we must emancipate our servitude to beliefs that have worn out their welcome in the terrain and territories of our conscious life. Imprints of former laws and prior sentiments cannot be easily forgotten. With each passing generation, the youth resulted from the other’s, in fact the former’s life-experience, point of reference to the world. We return to the analysis of the image and how the image’s role shape and obscures present and future configurations of comprehensive information. To say that a death of spirit or of an ideology has occurred is to revel in the terrain of imaginative experience. It is History as fabricated and replicated image that is transmissible to the Other and one another through lineage of time. The imprint of the subject is made on the object. How was Roland Barthes able to finally come across that one photo of his deceased mother- that one object which best encapsulated the subject who was subjective to him? A defining essence was the innocence emitted by his mother that the Winter Garden Photograph conveyed to Barthes. Barthes was not open to a discourse regarding the Winter Garden Photograph and therefore unwilling to reproduce the photograph which meant so very much to himself as a writer, as a thinker, as a Being – all his life was contextualized and finalized in the Winter Garden Photograph, a representation of his very own life-drive and fantasy thereof of having satisfied the physiognomic requirement of reproduction via mythologizing of the human, the Other, of his mother through the self: Roland the son. Does the essence of a human being disintegrate once the body no longer lives? Can the essence of a 57 human be summoned, re-imagined, re-materialized, to become new once the subject ceases to be? To make matters specifically more complex, that photo which best captures his mother’s essence was taken several years before he was even born. It was a photo of his mother in her childhood standing in was considered to be the Winter Palace alongside her brother, Roland’s uncle. Who was to know or say that this single photograph captured the entire essence of a person, of a subject? Let us not forget that it only captured the essence for Roland, for an individual, whereas the mother if she were to have been asked to choose a photo that would be represent her entire life for herself, she may very likely have chosen a different photo altogether. THE PHOTOGRAPH AS INCOMPLETE MOURNING: THE MECHANICS OF NONRELEASE Jacques Derrida analyzes Roland Barthes’ depiction of his mother who he mourns in his final work Camera Lucida and whose essence Barthes seeks to encounter by means of the photograph. Derrida positions the value of the Winter Garden Photograph, which Barthes determines to contain the essence of his mother, as follows: The Winter Garden Photograph: the invisible punctum of the book. It does not belong to the corpus of photographs he exhibits, to the series of examples he displays and analyzes. Yet it irradiates the entire book. A sort of radiant serenity comes from his mother’s eyes, 58 whose brightness or clarity he describes, though we never see. The radiance composes with the wound that signs the book, with an invisible punctum. 34 In his tributary essay in the honor of Roland Barthes, Derrida has taken up the task of finding the thread, the underlying title of a text, which he argues unites Barthes’ first and last texts, while at the same time also acknowledging yet setting aside the chronologically intermediary work that Barthes produced in his lifetime. Derrida, like Barthes in his final own text, focuses elucidating the term: punctum, which is the counter-position to the studium, which Barthes elaborated in the first part of Camera Lucida. The punctum is that which pierces out to the spectator and leaves an impression, whereas the studium is that technical quality of the science of photography which can be aestheticized and judged to be good. At one moment, Barthes’ defines the term as follows, “Very often the Punctum is a ‘detail,’ i.e., a partial object. Hence, to give examples of punctum is, in a certain fashion, to give myself up.” 35 If it is the case that the punctum is only ever a partial object, this must entail that the other dimension of the punctum is that of the spectator’s subjective response to this piercing-detail. Insofar as it is subjective movement of the image to the observer, this communication of those details that have pierced Barthes in photographs over the years, remains to be one of the main critical pursuits of Camera Lucida. The photographic image becomes complete when it is assigned the power through affect from the observer. This process can only be ascertained through language, one which can correspondingly attribute the internal sensations it produces upon the viewer. When Derrida claims in the above citation on how “the Winter Photograph is the invisible punctum” of the text, he is offering the reading that he, among other readers of Barthes, find this turn in Barthes’ analysis of the photograph to be deeply moving and piercing for the 34 Jacques Derrida. “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Micahel Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 43. 35 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida, 43. 59 reader. The way Barthes’ depicts his insatiable hunt to find the perfect photograph that best represents his mother, and then furthermore refuses to print a photograph of it, alludes to the power which one tends to place into photographs. The photograph is thus raised into a new realm, an invisible realm, which must remain so, for its power and sacredness to retain the power of its myth. This is exactly what mourning the loss of presence of a person compels. The person who mourns is compelled to substitute the perceived absence with an eternalized and unbreakable and fixed representation. In effect, there is not absolute absence when mourning remains incomplete. The victim of a loss, retains and refused to let go. There is a loss of presence, that is accentuated by a positing of a new presence that is idealized and thus more potent to the subject who has constructed this mechanism to cope the loss of a loved-one. A similar process was undertaken by Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, in which Barthes describes the mourning process in which he hunted down through many, the one photograph that best represented the essence of his mother. The parallel to be drawn out with respect to the photographic image is precisely how does one filter an identification out of the image of a human being? Where is one able to truly identify the essence of a human through the static and dead image of a photograph? There remains a residue of presence when the lost object no longer appears in the spaces which it inhabited the conscious real that was acquired to the subject by means of observation and from the perceptive faculties of the spectator. After the impression hits the eyes, the human being continues to manifest the object internally through a psychical mode of reconstructing and retaining that which is no longer present at hand. The mind re-imagines that which no longer is immediately perceivable, that lost or missing object which has suddenly become spatially distant and immediately irretrievable. All that remains is but a residue of being. This residue and trace is 60 retained by the memory of the Other and by History so long as the original imprint was sufficiently affective in the unconscious terrain of memory and history formation. Although the subject may not be of total consciousness to bear witness to any given event or attain exposure to an object. When apprehending the event or the object, whether this object be physical, virtual, or idealized, the subject will harbor and retain the residue for as long as it need be. If the information was deemed to be of considerable value or itself held a momentum of its very own, then the movement of the object as either photographic surface or as literary narration and annunciation will be achieved as cultural History and memory construction. At any given moment, the existential residue of being has the potential to resurrect as a full-bodied surface and as a fully active stimulus which can affect the unconscious and conscious decision-making processes at work in the human mind of the Other. Other times, rendered as a mere fragmented hallucination, an image is able to rematerialize itself within the structure of the mind of the Other. This is achieved through the material object-surface of the photograph of which the human is capable of operating the technology of the camera and thus operate on a level that is beyond being merely human. Technology enables perpetual access to images of captured lived experience. A total mourning of the moment is not possible because the moment will survive as a fragmented archive as the photograph. Being only a still image, the photograph, will perpetually enable the spectator of the image at hand to re-imagine and apply its consciousness historical analysis over epochs to come. To think differently of the terrain of the middle ground between presence and absence, one might postulate that the binary understanding of the distinct and differentiated moments of presence and absence limits the possibilities of full understanding of the different relationships between objects in and out of presence with the identifying subject. This is so say that there is 61 information that remains in-articulated based on the limitations of considering the conditions of Being as being simply either absent of present. To be able to analyze the moments which constitute either a mutual presence-absence or an otherwise total lack of an attributable designation of one or the other, a new set of linguistic models must be introduced with the aid of clear and relatable visual and existential depictions. Although, one may be inclined to state that presence may exist in the form of presenceas-absence, or on the contrary one may attempt to think of absence in the way of absence-aspresence, both instances are rendered meaningless since these two words and concepts must act as distinct and separate notions because they stand diametrically opposed to one another. Since this is the case – that these two terms maintain a stance of irreconcilable difference with one another- therefore to effectively explore and disentangle the forms of experience that lie in between them as impresence, i.e. within this intermediary between these two ancient metaphysical poles; one ought to develop a new set of terms to articulate and re-imagine the operations at work distinctly within one other apart from each other. To say that absence retains a presence, or that presence harbors within itself a future absence, would be to confuse the conceptual framework that makes the internal differences between them. This primitive and eternal difference cannot be reconciled if a proper investigation of determining impresence were not to proceed. In both manifestations of existential beingness, presence and absence derive their meanings as respective terms and neither ought to adopt a definition that incorporates using characteristics of the other within its articulation. Even though these terms have stood in diametric opposition to one another, there has been throughout the History of philosophy a desire to obscure these differences for the sake non-complexity. To say that black is white, that forwards is backwards, that good is evil, or that presence is absence immediately raises concerns 62 over the integrity of the definition of the words found in this dualistic language play. In considering Freud’s concept of the super-ego, as the disciplinary component of the psyche, we are met with the notion of internalization of an external and non-present idea, rule, or object. We can no longer be comfortable indicating that the degredation and loss of presence is the uniquely qualifying condition for a state of absence to occur. Rather, we must identify the impossibility of rendering absolute absence as intelligible. Rather, when one speaks of the loss of the Other’s presence, one should initiate the melancholic process of mourning and indicate the terrain of this activity as being within the domain of impresence. Impresence as the trace that remains once the presence has left an impact on the subject’s experience. To signify post-presence as such is to allude to an encounter with that which was present-at-hand, whether as a physical entity or as a mental entity. In the case of the physical, the appearance of the physical is what remains as post-presence. The mental encounter with an imaginary object arrives to the subject as an apparition through recollection. This imaginary object is only an appearance that cannot be produced or revealed to the reality of others since it only appears to one in the realm of the imaginary of the subject who perceives it. Apparitions appear to one directly and immediately to the mind of the subject as a presence that is not present in the way of a haunting. If this haunting were to persist an imprint has been made to the mental constellation of the subject. This imprint remains and can be accessed by the subject at conscious will. In the schizophrenic patient, the objects that appears – whether visual or auditory hallucinations –remains within the perspective field and realm of this schizophrenic subject. The objects that are revealed to the subject cannot be revealed in the form as they appear to the subject to the other. It is through language that the schizophrenic patient is able to summon his or her visions to the other. 63 CLARITY AND THE DEGRADATION OF IMAGES AND TEXT THROUGH VOYEURSIM The photograph is cursed and blessed with the ability to bring an isolated image-moment into focus and at the same time promote an impossible clarity for the future spectator of the photograph. Insofar, as the technique of the lens apparatus is not to blur and obscure an isolated moment via magnification, the documentary-nature of the photo-journalistic encounter with the scene affords the photograph to maintain a neutrality of perception whose image-contents are only retrievable upon the development of the photograph onto the surface. The camera sees more than the naked eye sees, based on its mechanical ethos of capturing the moment in a mechanical way. The non-intelligent camera, which does not seek to use artificial intelligence to the scene for potential faces or bodies, brings into focus the scene-as-a-whole. Although the photographer can shape the focus with different lenses and zoom magnifications, the contemplation of this segment entails the unconscious and mechanical collection of experiences that are rendered hypothetically neutral. Clarity can be understood as an formal tool, for instance the way clarity is used in writing when considering the genealogy of modes of writing becoming distinct from language itself which Barthes highlights when he states, “clarity is a purely rhetorical attribute, not a quality of language in general, which is possible at all times and in all places, but only the ideal appendage to a certain type of discourse, that which is given over to a permanent intention to persuade.” 36 In arguing against clarity as being the result of subjectivity imposed by “the spontaneous subjectivity of ordinary people” 37, he defines the techniques of clarity as form of imbrication that enables a particular political stance to inform the style of writing and language 36 37 Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero, 58. Ibid, 57. 64 allowable. The use of clarity in language and writing thus deposits an authorial residue over the allowable formations of words and letters, hence limits the spontaneous and non-conforming innocence of the non-specialized or un-educated writer. When considering the photograph as harboring resonance with modes of writing and language, one may extend the concerns of clarity to the photographic and visual lexicon of images. Should one seek photograph that participate in the formalism of expressing clarity, if it is the case that clarity is apprehends the World with a specific outlook that resembles forensics and criminality, rather than the journalistic methods of a neutral, spontaneous or artistic documentation of the World? Clarity and resolution may be most useful when the photograph is used to apprehend criminals or those breaking certain laws that can be caught by the camera and instances where the photograph holds density as evidence. There is a propensity for human beings to strive towards entropy, where misrecognition may bear assumptions that implicate the Other, leading to failures of the truth and a faith in the technologies of representation and security. The photograph is believed to be machine, and thus rendered with a neutral ethos towards criminality. Culpability is assessed based on the forensic interpretations of resolution and faith in the reliability to match the real World to the one captured as photograph. The isolated instance of the invisible presence of the Other entails a psychical remainder of presence. The un-awareness of the beingness of the Other is correlative to the invisibility of the presence of the Other. Although, in this situation the lack of clarity is in the complete and total obscuration of presence, in the sense that the invisible Other’s presence may or may not be intelligible or acknowledgeable. It is in these circumstances that the technical augmentation rendered possible by technology, such as radar, motion-detectors, infrared cameras, and the 65 stillness of the photograph, reveal the invisible World before us in ways un-knowable prior to the use of such technologies. To think of the objectification of the individual in the transformation of living subject towards timeless object, one that is detached from his or her environment which consists of both a specific time and place. It may be useful to invoke Heidegger when he states, “Acts are something non-psychical. Essentially the person exists only in the performance of intentional acts, and is therefore essentially not an object”. 38 It is the performance that speaks, in a sense it is not the formalities of structures such as grammatical rules or assemblage of terms that invokes the act of being. Rather, it is the performance that captures the essence of existence and thus that is what is imprinted upon History. In voyeurism, during the act of photographing a subject, the photographer remains hidden and anonymously presents his perspective through the lens of his snapshot. The object of his composition becomes essentially an object once the film is developed. The initial act of voyeurism is repeated and infinite number times with every reproduction and transmission of the image. The gaze of the voyeur is refracted from the beingness of the object. Therefore, what is captured by the gaze of the voyeur combined with the reproducible technologies of the camera, is the innocent act of beingness. In essence, capturing the World in its innocence is exemplified by the labor of the voyeur who aims to not be seen by the World and only accurately represent the World as it appears to him or herself. In portrait-photography, there is an intentionality and fabrication of a World as image. The intentionality of the act of being photographed, renders the subject who is being captured to act inauthentically. These persons who are photographed for a specific purpose undergo a degradation of beingness. This process of becoming an eternal image involves inauthentic postures which often the result of encouragements from the photographer38 Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, 73. 66 as-director, while asking for his subject to pose a certain manner for a certain amount of time. Is anything ever an authentic representation of self once the individual becomes aware of being documented by different forms of surveillance and recording whether it be desired or not. Once captured and turned into historical evidence, the individual loses his Being- transformed into a lifeless representation which often exhibits an inauthentic and uncharacteristic depiction of self. The historical material ego, which one has cultivated for the sake of posterity, becomes refined the more one contemplates one’s physical body in view of self-documentation by means of photography, film, or even the reflections off of mirrors or glass. Benjamin’s writings on photography offer an account of this experience: “In front of all the bistros are glassed-in partitions: women see themselves here more readily than anywhere else. The beauty of the Paris woman emerges from these mirrors. Before a man glimpses her, ten mirrors have tested her out...Mirrors are the spiritual element of this city, its insignia, in which the emblems of all the schools of poets have always inscribed themselves.” 39 The art of self-comparison to the other with the use of reflections from a mirror establish the coming obsession with one’s body image, in which the way the physical body meets the world and whose aesthetic details can be scrutinized and judged by public, who is partially anonymous, within the bounds of both known and unknown environments. 39 Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, the City in the Mirror: Declarations of Love by Poets and Artists to the ‘Capital of the World’ (1929),” On Photography, Ed. and Translated by Esther Leslie (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 136. 67 III. ON THE POSSIBILITY OF IMPRESENCE : A PSEUDO-CONCLUSION Why am I claiming that there is a possibility for a third possibility, that being the possibility of a state and spatial dimension of impresence? What are the logical consequences in developing this train of thought and such a claim? Will conceiving such a possibility make any broad changes to the way we practice and gain knowledge of the aesthetics and proximities of objects? Will visual memory be compromised, and instead we turn to value the after-thoughts and tastes of the no longer present? In presence, why is most of this thesis concerned primarily with vision, where language and voice has come to dominate Derrida’s early work as opposed to visual presence and absence? Have we come to a point in time and history in which it is necessary to reevaluate presence by means of visual terms and conditions? What are the consequences to Being, in the Heideggerian sense, to make a claim that there is a possible stateof-mind and state-of-being that is between two opposites, thereby dissolving the dialectical nature of nature and of existence. Can we prove that there exists a middle layer between presence and absence? Have other thinkers and philosophers concerned themselves seriously over the possibility of a third state-of-being or state-of-mind between presence and absence? Is this an ontological claim? Is this a phenomenological claim? In what domain will the true science of impresence take place? Would it be easier to claim that there is simply a third category in the way the World operates – its nature, its events and motions? Why must our lives be dominated by the binary thoughts of a distinction between only presence and absence? We have come to live through a time where the binary systems of identification no longer remain relevant. The borders between once thought-to-be unchangeable categories have now become blurred at the 68 threhold. What is preventing the claim of the possibility of impresence: le plus de presence, from becoming a manifesto rather than remaining only just a thesis inquiry? THE RETURN OF THE CONCLUSION The image, whether it be imaginary and relegated to the domain of memory-construction, or if it is one that is immanently inscribed onto photographic surface, is that which stands in as substitute for history; an image that has formulated its identity-structure based on spoken and written discourses. Roland Barthes admits never having related to his mother in a discursive way when he solemnly states, “I never ‘spoke’ to her, never ‘discoursed’ in her presence, for her; we supposed, without saying anything of the kind to each other, that the frivolous insignificance of language, the suspension of images must be the very space of love, its music.” 40 One gets the impression, that Barthes sat in muted silence with his mother. One can only assume that the essence that Barthes sought through the photograph in mourning was merely the gesture of her being through her silent presence. The inability to say what one needs to say to retain the communicative moment and render it special and eternal causes a haunting to settle into the mind. The substitution of the lost Other is made by an idealized-Other image. For Barthes, the Winter Garden Photograph exhibited something in-the-nature of a gesture of a kind that was entirely recognizable to Barthes. To say that the text is an image, would be an unfair interpretation of what a written record leaves behind. Yes, one admittedly leaves behind a visual imprint upon the surface of paper when one leaves behind a text. However, over the course of movement of any given text, the style of its typographies in different fonts and languages, will leave different impressions upon 40 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida, 72. 69 the reader. For Barthes, it was the essential image of his mother, which he sought to find in the photograph to properly satisfy his desire to mourn the loss of the presence his real mother. A mother with whom he never presented his philosophies to, as one may image a person naturally does as discourse amongst friends or lovers. The mother, his mother, produced in Barthes a life, of which he could only respond by giving it back to her, as his testament, that being of his final text, revealed his mother purely through language of the image. At conflict with science and metaphysics, Barthes leans towards the categories that only philosophy can generate intelligibility. To know the essence of Barthes’ mother is to gain the true picture of what mourning does to a person. An incomplete mourning creates the need for a perpetual and returnable object to satisfy the desire for an eternal presence and thus manifests the construction or transference of a substitute. The photograph seems to subjectively satisfy that which one’s dreams even cannot; the dream being even more amorphous than a misrecognition of a friend in the mist of rainy city night. Barthes conveys the difficulty of pursuing the totality of his mother via the photograph, while searching he mentions his inability to find the total being of his mother in the photographs he searched. He states, “I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say that I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her altogether. It was not she, and yet it was no one else. I would have recognized her among thousands of other women, yet I did not ‘find’ her. I recognized her differentially, not essentially.” 41 When a person mourns, they seek to make up the partial loss of the Other. In other words, the Other which had helped to define the self, i.e. the intimate relationship between Barthes and his mother, when the Other leaves behind its presence during loss, the Self attempts to search for something to make it whole again in order to deal with the loss. 41 Ibid, 65-66. 70 In conclusion, we assemble and survey our blueprint for the spaces and territory between presence and absence. This sketch will serve as the beginning of a life-long exploration - a project which must continue long after my life and energies have ceased to compile towards the completion of a total understanding and comprehension of impresence. The above is by no means has entered the required depths that need to be witnessed so as to put forth a solid line of reasoning to explain the possibilities of impresence. We can now arrange the spectrum of presence as follows: pre-presence, presence, impresence, non-presence. As such, absence has no place in these categories of presence. Each of these categories of presence requires a thorough reexamination, but only at this moment a list of the summaries of the categories shall suffice. At this point, we may ask again: what lies between presence and absence and what knowledge can be gained thereof in the space between? If we have before us only pure and immediate presence, can we be too close to perform and mental constructions of knowledge thereof of such an object? That is to say that one requires distance and reflection to enable any sort of construction of knowledge-as-memory of the object which was just experienced or acted upon. There needs to be time and space in order for the object to become imprinted upon the memory faculties of the mind. It is there in the space and territory of impresence in which action can be initiated from in the moment of in-hindsight as a moment of reflection and recollection in which the experience of learning from the past encounter enables knowledge. This knowledge of the object and of the event after it has vanished from experience and is removed from being-before the spectator’s immediate gaze. 71 INFINITE ABSENCE That which one can declare to be Infinite and Absolute belongs to the nature of absence alone. As presence decays, we are left with different moments of the Being that are still relegated to the domains of mere presence and non-presence. As proximity to an object is diminished towards absolute non-presence, a remainder of the lost object shall be hard to shake off. For as the distance between the subject that perceives and the object that becomes lost, a new substitution will emerge, which will prevent it finitude from manifesting in totality. The mourning process causes the lost object to remain present, albeit transformed by the process of mourning, the lost object shifts into memories by means of shifting the weight of affect onto something else. The object or thing that was at full and immediate presence and which now becomes lost and marginalized, is still appear (or re-appear) by means of the operation and intelligibility of presence. In this regard, impresence comes to designate the areas of nonpresence which make up for the lost Other. The photographic act is an act of impresence. The total absence which cannot be strived towards, that which at all-times is always Not as such, ought to be ordained to take the territory the infinitude of absence. There can never be any recognition of true and pure Absence. That which is truly Absent, is not merely hiding or draped by an obstructive device - that which is to be deemed as Absent must be infinitely and truly absent. One is unable to take a photograph of something’s impresence. The closest articulation of impresence in an imagistic way would be to consider the nature of Benjamin’s concept of the aura. One does not seek to represent by means of photograph the process of impresence, since the photograph-itself is rendering impresence as a material construct. The photograph 72 exemplifies the return-of-presence of the lost object or person. The maintaining presence as observable article promotes the realization of the intermediary sphere that exists between presence and absence. As we conclude, the nature of Finitude and the limits of presence must be engaged with. Can we understand absence, only by means of understanding the lost presence of something? Can absence be understood and rendered intelligible on its own void entirely? The negation of presence is not merely the definition of absence. Pure absence is rather the void, it is the nothingness of existence. How can there be nothing when there is clearly something? The aesthetics of nothingness. We may feel loss and mourning of a thing that once was present, but this is not to say that the thing which has gone missing is absent. Absence entails a return of some sort. One cannot speak of absence as ultimate nihilism of presence. Matter cannot be created nor destroyed. So all that there is and all there ever will be is accounted for in this universe. What does it really mean when somebody classifies something as being absent? Is absense a state of matter? A state of consciousness? A state of awareness or perception? I may make the claim that absence is a mis-signification of non-presence. When we think of absence what we may think we are thinking of really is nothingness rather than absence - absence is a the wrong term for non-presence. How can we be certain that anything is really absent? We do not arrive at absence through a reductio ad absurdum line of reasoning. In other words, we do not need to prove total negation of presence to arrive at an understanding of absence. Absence, like presence, can be understood in a spectrum of gradients. What is at stake in this matter is the understanding we can come to have regarding objects and beings. The question of the existence and the possibility of pure and total absence- of matter (both material and immaterial) and existence- will play an 73 unspoken and silent part in this elaboration of this work. It is not typically fashioned that we promote an understanding of presence through the dissolution and negation of presence of an object. Nor is it the case that we complement the activity of negation with a continuous inquiry and examination of any given objects’ or beings’ conditions of presence that we come to know and arrive at the absence of this entity. For instance, one does not draw water from the well and pour it into an absent bucket to prove that the bucket is truly absent; one may exist within proximity and have been merely forgotten at the foot of the hill and can be remedied with a return to its direct and immediate perception at the bottom since the notion and memory of the bucket remain. To say that an object is absent is not the same as saying that a specific object does not exist somewhere else in the world or somewhere within our imagination. Our conscious mind need not put itself to a test at every decisive moment and ask itself whether things found in our immediate presence really do exist. What is the opposite of absence and non-existence, if not but presence and existence? Can there be a middle phase between the two poles? To say something has no existence does not prevent the possibility of it in the future becoming and hence it acquires the state of pre-presence. We need not reduce the experience of our understanding and perception of the world to a simple dichotomy of presence v. absence because there are the states of becoming and unbecoming that can affect and bring into question the nature of presence and absence during those states of being. For these situations call for the involvement of a space of comprehension which there are residues of presence carried throughout between objects and spectators. Some may allude that language the solution for speaking and representing an object in absence, however the mere fact of its transformed material from immediate sense-perception into symbol and language does not procure that the object is true and complete absence. 74 THE ABSENCE AS FUTURE The only instance that is representative of true absence we can argue and make a claim for is the unknowability of the Future. The Future has not yet come into being, and it rather only exists as a form of pure anticipation. Cursed with the tendency of folding back into itself via the repetitions of actions of the past, the Future is pure negativity and absolute potentiality. The Future is a pre-presence and indifferent to predictability and forecasts. Although contingency is at play, pure necessity of being, ultimately drives the body-as-subject towards a perpetuating system of oscillations between the polarities of presence and absence. One can surmise what the Future can offer the past, if it not only serves at the limit or threshold of the present, the Future abstains from understanding the past. One can only use the lessons from the past and the ongoing present to predict that which is entirely absent from our cognition. To think of time as holding a linear consistency and upholding a logical framework towards our expectations, is in fact, the nature of Faith and divination. That which exists in a yet-to-Be state of existence is entirely and absolutely absent. Since the conditions of structure coming into being from the blueprint is mere imagination and study. The true existence of the structure that has been envisioned by the architect will forever be in absence. What comes into Being is simply an attempt to make the idealized into reality. The true form of the idealized structure can only exist as a complete and pure intellectual form. This anticipation of the ideal will forever be absent from existence. The desire to approximately materialize its Being will never bring to life that which existed only as pure concept. This pure concept will forever be absent and never come into presence. The Future is absent, the Future never was. 75 BIBILIOGRAPHY Badiou, Alain. Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy, translated and edited by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens. (London: Continuum, 1998). ________. Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979). ________. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980). ________. Mythologies: The Complete Edition, in a New Translation, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012). ________. Mourning Diary: October 26, 1977 – September 15, 1979, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009). ________. The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975). ________. Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012). Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986). Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983). Benjamin, Walter. On Photography, Ed. and Translated by Esther Leslie (London: Reaktion Books, 2015). Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982). ________. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). ________. The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascalle-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001). Flusser, Vilem. Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony Matthews (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2012). 76 Freud, Sigmund (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010). ________ (1930). Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010). ________ (1917). “Mourning and Melancholia” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho- Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, trans. James Strachey. Guibert, Herve. Ghost Image, trans. Robert Bononno (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008). Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Keenan, Thomas and Weizman, Eyal. Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012). Laruelle, Francois. The Concept of Non-Photography, trans. Robin Mackay (New York: Sequence Press, 2011). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences,” trans. James M. Edie, Primacy of Perception And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964). 77