Zhang Dora - A Lens for an Eye, Proust and Photograpy

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DORA ZHANG

A Lens for an Eye: Proust and Photography

The only true voyage, the only bath in the fountain of youth, would not be to visit new lands but to possess other eyes, to see the world with the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred worlds that each of them sees, that each of them is.

—Marcel Proust1

“It must be admitted that we cannot open our eyes without being unconsciously disposed not to see some of the things before us, and to see others which are not there.” So claims Paul Valéry in a 1939 address on the centenary of photography. Our vision may be flawed, he tells us, but the photographic image offers a corrective. “The snapshot [cliché] has rec-tified our errors both of deficiency and of excess. It shows us what we would see if we were uniformly sensitive to everything that light imprints upon us, and to nothing but its imprints.”2 But what, we may ask, happens to subjec-tive vision when it encounters the objective lens, for which “impartial light” is “the only intermediary between the model and its representation?”3 When the eye is sensitive to light and nothing else, what exactly does it see?

The answer finds a concise formulation in a phrase from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: “the world seen without a self.”4 It is Proust, however, who pro-vides us with a fuller elaboration of what happens when the eye is turned, for a moment, into an objectif.5 During a famous scene in the second volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator returns home to Paris unannounced in order to see his grandmother. Thanks to her ignorance of his presence on the instant of his arrival, he sees her as if she were a photograph, or better, as if he were a photographer, or better yet, as if his eye were an object glass. The ramifications of this strange seeing could hardly be greater. In a rapid series of steps, the narrator undergoes an alienation from the loved one, a dispossession of his selfhood, and a realization of two deaths, hers and his own.

abstract Returning to a famous scene in A la recherche du temps perdu when the narrator sees his grandmother as if his eye were a lens, this paper takes seriously the objectivity attributed to photo-graphic vision in order to trace its consequences for our sense of self. I argue that objective sight is trau-matic not because it reveals the future nonexistence of things, but because it reveals the continued existence of things in our absence, signaling thereby the contingency of the perceiving subject. Representations 118. Spring 2012 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 103–25. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photo-copy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2012.118.1.103. 103

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The link between photography and death is by now well known: the pho-tograph arrests a transient moment, bears witness to that which was and is no more, and signals the inevitable end that is to come. So in his 1945 essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” André Bazin locates photogra-phy in the tradition of arts that aim to preserve the body from decay and to ensure its survival after death, a photographic portrait being in this respect simply the logical extension of mummification.6 Perhaps the most familiar account of photography’s disclosure of mortality is found in Camera Lucida. Looking at a photograph of his mother as a child, Roland Barthes writes, “I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”7

If returning to the Proustian grandmother risks overburdening an already well-worn image, it is nevertheless worthwhile, for a careful reading reveals that the logic by which this photographic seeing leads to these familiar con-clusions may be more surprising than we think. Taking seriously the objectiv-ity that has long been attributed to the lens, it will be my contention that such vision turns out to be traumatic not because it reveals to us the future nonexis-tence of things, but, rather, because it reveals their continued existence in our absence. It is not their having been and being no longer that disturbs us, but precisely the contrary: their continuing to be when we are not there—the absolute indifference of the world to our perception of it, on which it does not depend in the slightest. This latter is a truth no less difficult to realize for all its self-evidence, for, as Proust well knows, it is not so easy as we think to give up our childish belief that the world disappears when we close our eyes. In this regard, the vision figured as photographic in the Recherche leads to a decisive refutation of a kind of naive Berkeleyan idealism that amounts, essen-tially, to solipsism.

In this experience of objective sight—objective both because it is dis-joined from subjectivity and because of the instrument through which it is figured—the Proustian lover finds an affinity with a contemporaneous fig-ure who was also beginning to see through the photographic lens, the nine-teenth-century man of science. Abhorred by one and coveted by the other, mechanically objective vision reveals in both cases the disillusionment of a perfection perceived by the eye. For the narrator, this revelation is traumatic not only because it reveals the death of the object, the grandmother he knew and loved, but also because it reveals the absolute contingency of the per-ceiving subject. Just as the material world depends on no mind, he realizes with horror that his being is in no way necessary for hers. The beloved is sud-denly shown to have an independent existence for which we are completely irrelevant, it being a mere accident of chance, not the necessity of fate, that we passed some portion of our lives together. Photography signals death,

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then, not only by forecasting the time when we will cease to be, but by expos-ing the fact that we need not have been at all: not only the necessity of our nonexistence, but the nonnecessity of our existence. Such is the world seen without a self; such is the seeing of nothing but light.

The insistence on photography’s objectivity may seem willfully naive in the current critical climate, which knows, after poststructuralism and semiot-ics, that the photograph is possessed of no privileged access to truth, no more faithful in its representation of reality, only better at the deception of transparency. Even within the scientific discourses of the nineteenth century, it was recognized that objectivity could only be a regulative ideal. Such an ideal is, however, just the account of photographic vision that finds dramatic expression in a key scene in the Recherche, and if we are to follow its logic, we must first take it on good faith. I accept the lens’s objectivity, then, not as a conclusion but as a premise. My claim is not about what the camera is really like, but about how Proust’s vision of objectivity affects the narrative of sub-jectivity that subtends it. I attempt, thus, no readings of actual photographs, only a story of photographic vision, a telling tale of what happens when we see through other eyes.

Seeing Objectively

From its inception, the photographic apparatus has been distin-guished by both its champions and its detractors for exceeding the capabili-ties of the hand in recording what is observed by the eye. The earliest accounts of photography celebrated it for its fidelity to nature and its unpar-alleled accuracy. So in an 1839 report describing the photographic process, François Arago, one of its most important initial supporters, calls the images made by Nicéphore Niépce, Isidore Niépce, and above all Louis Daguerre “drawn by nature’s most subtle pencil, the light ray,” which traces details with “unimaginable precision.”8 A similar sentiment is expressed by the very title of Henry Fox Talbot’s 1844 book of “photogenic drawings,” The Pencil of Nature, in some copies of which he was forced to insert a notice to quell the disbelieving public, certifying that “the plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil. They are the sun-pictures themselves, and not, as some per-sons have imagined, engravings in imitation.”9

In advocating for photography, Arago was careful to tout the possibilities of the new technology for both art and science. In the former it met with ini-tial controversy, denounced famously by Charles Baudelaire in The Salon of 1859 for propagating the doctrine of “copy nature,” which he considered anti-thetical to art. “‘I want to represent things as they are, or rather as they would be, supposing that I did not exist,’” Baudelaire ventriloquizes the realist,

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“positivist” painter, “‘in other words, the universe without man.’” The true, “imaginative” artist replies instead, “‘I want to illuminate things with my spirit and to project their reflections on others.’”10 The tension between these two kinds of images animates in many ways the visual drama staged in Proust. For Baudelaire, the artist who wants to represent the world in his absence makes the mistake of adhering not to an aesthetic ideal but to a scientific one, and indeed it is in realm of science rather than art that the narrator’s experience of photographic vision finds a parallel.

In their history of scientific objectivity, traced through the production of scientific images, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison offer a definition of this concept: “Objectivity is blind sight, seeing without inference, interpreta-tion, or intelligence.”11 Preceded in their account by the epistemic virtue of “truth-to-nature” and followed by that of “trained judgment,” they locate the rise of “mechanical objectivity” in the mid-nineteenth century. During this time, those working in the observational sciences “began to fret openly about a new kind of obstacle to knowledge: themselves. Their fear was that the sub-jective self was prone to prettify, idealize, and, in the worst case, regularize observations to fit theoretical expectations: to see what it hoped to see.”12 So when the British physicist Arthur Worthington observed that the photo-graphs he had made of a splash’s trajectory showed greater irregularities than his hand-drawn images of the same phenomenon, he attributed the discrepancy to the overreaching tendencies of the eye. “The mind of the observer is filled with an ideal splash,” he wrote, “an ‘auto-splash’—whose perfection may never be actually realized.”13 In place of the naturalist who seeks perfection in nature, we find in the Recherche the lover who seeks per-fection in the beloved; both, however, with eyes that obey their desire.

For men of science, such eyes could not be trusted, and a key weapon in the armory of objectivity’s advocates was the new set of practices of image mak-ing made possible by the innovations of Niépce, Daguerre, Talbot, and others. The knowledge gleaned from mechanical images carried the stamp of truth guaranteed by the elimination of any intermediary subjective agent. The machine was “at once observer and artist,” and “the automatism of the photo-graphic process promised images free of human interpretation—objective images, as they came to be called.”14 Such an image is just what the Proustian narrator is described as seeing—the object shown without the mediation of any human intelligence, away from the temptation to idealize or interpret. Although skepticism grew about just how objective the photographic image really was as the century progressed, it nevertheless symbolized an ideal of pure, noninterventionist vision, one that sought the extirpation of the observ-ing subject.

In addition to the fidelity underwritten by the machine’s neutrality, objec-tive images held another distinction: unlike hand-drawn scientific illustrations,


these new mechanically produced pictures had actual and particular referents in the world. Earlier illustrations in a wide range of eighteenth-century scien-tific atlases depicted composite, perfected “types” of phenomena that ignored idiosyncrasies in specimens in order to show the unity of a species. These draw-ings had no actual referents; they showed no particular bird or plant but instead an idealized representative of that type. In contrast, mechanically pro-duced images, like the photomicrographs of snowflakes taken by Gustav Hellmann and Richard Neuhauss in 1892, depicted particular existing enti-ties. Idealized images of flakes “do not refer in the same way that Hellmann’s and Neuhauss’s do,” Daston and Galison observe. “While the idealized repre-sentations picked out entities not quite attached to any one particular frozen object, Hellmann and Neuhauss seized a specific—and inevitably flawed—individual”: not a snowflake, but this snowflake.15 Believed for centuries to be symmetrical, the snowflake’s structure was shown to be irregular. Disillusion-ment of perfection, it seems, was the price of reference.

The importance of reference in the understanding of photography also receives a well-known articulation in aesthetics. “For the first time, between the initial object and its representation, nothing is interposed but another object,” writes Bazin, “for the first time, an image of the external world is formed auto-matically without the creative intervention of man, according to a rigorous determinism.”16 Once again, the mechanical nature of photography confers on it a credibility absent from all other forms of image making, but one that lies not so much in its verisimilitude or accuracy as in its undeniable attestation to a past presence. Barthes crystallizes this emphasis when he locates the founding order of the photographic image not in art, nor in communication, but in ref-erence: the pointing finger that says, intractably, “ça-a-été ” (that-has-been).

For Barthes as for Bazin, no other system of representation can claim such a direct transfer of reality from the referent to the image. Painting can feign reality, but the photographic referent is “the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photo-graph.”17 The essence of the lens is not to invent but to record. Moreover, it cannot fail to do so: it registers the emanations of light from what is before it, nothing more and nothing less. As Michael Wood sums up this account of photography, the corollary to the claim that the camera catches reality better than any other art is that the camera cannot choose what it sees. “The sugges-tion is not that the camera cannot lie, but that it cannot close its eyes.”18 What happens, then, when for a moment these other eyes become ours?

The Look of the Stranger

The narrator’s photographic encounter with his grandmother is prefigured by an earlier scene involving another technological innovation

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of the nineteenth century: the telephone. During a call to her while he is at Doncières visiting his friend Saint-Loup, the narrator marvels at “the admi-rable faerie” who can, in just a few moments, make appear beside us, “invis-ible but present, the person to whom we wish to speak” (3:173, 2:431). The telephone becomes a magical mode of transport, allowing hundreds of miles to be covered in an instant.19 “And we are like the person in the fairy tale for whom a sorceress makes appear with supernatural clarity, at his expressed wish, his grandmother or his fiancée in the act of leafing through a book, shedding tears, gathering flowers, quite close to the spectator and yet very far, at the place itself where she really is” (3:173, 2:431). Hearing her voice evokes the beloved’s presence by conjuring up an image that, in its vividity and “supernatural clarity,” recalls a photograph. It is surely no coincidence that one of the images suggested here is that of a grandmother in the act of leafing through a book, precisely the pose in which the narra-tor will discover his own grandmother a few scenes later.20

The joy caused by the proximity of the beloved’s voice, however, quickly turns into anguish as the distance bridged is realized to be illusory, making only more palpable how far away she really is. The anguish of the “séparation effective” becomes, as is the wont in Proust, that of the “séparation éternelle,” which it antici-pates. The voice of the loved one seems to cry out from inescapable depths, provoking the anxiety of hearing this voice one day return without a body. The telephone, no less than the photograph, is a portent of mortality.

What follows is a total defamiliarization of the grandmother’s voice, fore-shadowing the fate her image will suffer later. Hearing her “voice itself” as if for the first time because he hears it isolated from the whole, the narrator realizes he has only thought, mistakenly, that he knew her well. In the disem-bodied voice sounding in its purity in “this little bell,” untainted by the banal commands and prohibitions that his grandmother issues in everyday life, he registers suddenly the independence of their two existences, a disjunction usually hidden by habit. Disburdened of “the tedium of obedience or the fever of rebellion” (3:176, 2:433) that ordinarily neutralizes his affection for her, the narrator is filled with a surge of desire to be with his grandmother. At this moment their connection is abruptly cut off. Distraught, calling her name like a forlorn Orpheus, he resolves to return to Paris at once, precipi-tating his second experience of complete estrangement from her, which could with justice be called his first experience of her death.

The narrator is desperate to deliver himself as soon as possible from the “phantom, hitherto unsuspected and suddenly evoked by her voice, of a grandmother actually separated from me, resigned, having that which I had never yet thought of her as having, an age” (3:183, 2:438). It is, however, pre-cisely this hitherto unsuspected phantom that he sees when he returns home without having notified her of his arrival and finds her reading in the drawing


room, unaware of being seen. “I was there, or rather, I was not yet there because she did not know it, and, like a woman whom we surprise engaged in a piece of needlework which she would hide if we entered, she was absorbed in thoughts which she had never allowed to be shown in front of me” (3:183, 2:438). According to this strange ontology, the condition for our presence is another’s awareness that we are present, making clear the extent to which the Proustian self is constituted by the recognition of the other.

Rendered thus a stranger to himself, the result for the narrator is an act of the voyeurism that pervades the Recherche. By definition, the voyeur is one who witnesses his own absence, indeed, the world in his absence, indepen-dent and unaware of him, as it would be if he were not there.

Of myself—thanks to this privilege which does not last but which gives us, during the brief moment of return, the faculty of suddenly being present at our own absence—there was present only the witness, the observer, in travelling coat and hat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph [un cliché] of places which one will never see again. That which took place mechanically in my eyes at the moment when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph [Ce qui, mécaniquement, se fit à ce moment dans mes yeux quand j’aperçus ma grand-mère, ce fut bien une photogra-phie]. (3:183–84, 2:438)

Nullified by the loved one’s ignorance, the narrator undergoes an ever more parsimonious reduction of selfhood in a series of metaphors: first a witness, then an observer passing through, a stranger who is not of the house, a pho-tographer who has called to take a “cliché ” of images already obsolete, and finally, the mechanical operation of a light-sensitive plate. As it was for the nineteenth-century men of science, photographic vision is identified with self-abnegation, this time not as an epistemic ideal but as a symbol of the utmost exile.

What is at stake here, it is important to note, is an act of photographic seeing. Whereas for Barthes, the loss of subjectivity in photography comes from being turned into an object before the lens (in front of the camera, “I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death [of parenthesis]: I am truly becoming a specter”), the dispossession of selfhood in Proust happens through the eye being itself turned into a lens, less the seeing of a photo-graph than seeing photographically.21 Although the Recherche contains important scenes of both taking and looking at actual photographs (of which the grandmother is a prominent subject), my focus here is, rather, the scene of photographic seeing.

During this moment of unfamiliar sight, habit—what Samuel Beckett calls “the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the

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countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correla-tive objects”—is momentarily in abeyance.22 With the pact brokered by habit broken, the narrator is left to wonder at his own blindness.

How, since into the forehead and the cheeks of my grandmother I had been accus-tomed to read all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind, how, since every habitual glance is an act of necromancy, and each face that we love a mirror of the past, how could I have failed to overlook what had become dulled and changed in her, seeing that in the most trivial spectacles of our daily life, our eyes, charged with thought, neglect, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not contribute to the action, and retain only those that can make intelligible its purpose? (3:184, 2:439)

Just as hearing his grandmother’s voice in isolation on the telephone renders it unfamiliar by extracting it from the context of daily life, so seeing her image outside the habitual pact renders her unrecognizable. “The letter of safe-conduct” has expired without renewal, and “for a moment the bore-dom of living is replaced by the suffering of being.”23 Having turned the nar-rator into a photographic plate by her ignorance, his grandmother now becomes transformed by its gaze into a stranger herself. Seeing mechanically like a lens is to see ahistorically: it is to look without awareness of a past, and what it sees is a discrete instant segregated from its place within the continu-ous whole. The fundamental characteristic of photography, Mieke Bal diag-noses, is “the detachment of the link between subjectivity and vision.”24

Subjective vision is by nature mendacious, obeying the desire of our “intelligent and pious tenderness” to guard us from the truth.25 For the nat-uralists, the objective image revealed the irregularities and asymmetries of natural phenomena, be it the shape of a snowflake or the splash of a droplet. For the lover, the objective image reveals the passage of time and the loved one’s susceptibility to change. The fact of mortality is what our eye thought-fully shields from us, and this is why the visage of the loved one is but a mir-ror of the past. Concocted from memories and seasoned with affection, the habitual image that we see of the beloved bears no one’s signature but our own, and while we have been taken up with it, she herself has quietly passed away without our taking the slightest notice.

If the eye, “charged with thought,” is unable to see or think objectively, the promise of a clearer image of the external world must lie in some other mechanism of sight.

But, if instead of our eye, it were a purely material object glass, a photographic plate, that had been watching [Mais, qu’au lieu de notre œil, ce soit un objectif purement matériel, une plaque photographique, qui ait regardé], then what we see, for example in the courtyard of the Institute, instead of the exit of an academi-cian who is trying to hail a cab, will be his tottering steps, his precautions to avoid falling on his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he were drunk or the ground covered in ice. (2:439, 3:184)


If, instead of an eye, an “objectif purement matériel” had been watching, a piece of glass that gathers the light emanating from an object and focuses the rays to produce an image, what would be revealed?

Blindsighted

Early commentators praised the lens for being a faithful recorder of what the eye sees, but it does not, for all that, see the same way. In Walter Benjamin’s oft-cited formulation, “It is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: ‘other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious.”26 It is through photography, Benjamin adds, that we first dis-cover the existence of this “optical unconscious.” The “unconsciousness” of the lens is just its absence of intention, the dream of an eye discharged of thought embodied by an instrument that sees with no awareness of what it sees, blindly. Daston and Galison comment of the paradigm of mechanical objectivity, “The observer now aimed to be a machine—to see as if his inner eye of reasoned sight were deliberately blinded.”27 The trope of blind see-ing also appears with a slightly different inflection in John Ruskin’s famous idea of “what may be called the innocence of the eye” from his 1857 The Ele-ments of Drawing, “a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify,—as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.”28

In a manuscript addition to the passage describing the tottering acade-mician as seen through an object glass, Proust makes clearer the selectivity of subjective vision that unconscious seeing highlights. “Our eye, like a classi-cal tragedy, neglecting among all the images presented by a man who walks down the street the images which do not contribute to the action, the human and rational action, shows us only the significant image which indicates the will to walk” (French edition, 2:1593). Like Ruskin’s innocent eye, which sees what “by experience you know to be a table” only as “a patch of brown, variously darkened and veined,” the lens’s unconsciousness removes what it sees from the order of reason and intention.29 It shows instead only brute fact, registering not a man walking, but a series of movements of arms and legs. “Between the state of vision as mere patches of color and as things or objects, a whole series of mysterious operations takes place,” Valéry writes, “reducing to order as best it can the incoherence of raw perceptions, resolving contra-dictions . . . imposing continuity, connection, and the systems of change which we group under the labels of space, time, matter, and movement.”30 One of the senses of “objectif,” like “objective,” is goal, aim, or intention, but unlike the eye, which shows us only the images that contribute to the action, the lens, seeing objectively, sees without objectives.

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Vision expunged of intentionality, Benjamin highlights, is also nonrecip-rocal. The camera that “records our likeness without returning our gaze” was “inevitably felt to be inhuman—one might even say deadly,” recalling the consequences of the unseeing grandmother in Proust.31 Barthes, too, observes the “aberrant” quality of the photographic look. “The Photograph separates attention from perception, and yields up only the former,” looking without seeing, “an action of thought without thought.”32 Looking, however, may reveal what seeing overlooks. Eduardo Cadava comments of Benjamin’s passage on the optical unconscious, “The photograph tells us that when we see we are unconscious of what our seeing cannot see.”33 Faith that the cam-era can reveal something we do not even know we are ignoring is why Valéry suggests that the lens provides a corrective to the eye. By showing us what we do not see, it also shows us that we do not see it.

Proust goes on to give a longer excursus on the effects of this mechanical look, whose unconsciousness de-animates what it sees. “We never see our loved ones except in the animated system, the perpetual movement of our incessant affection, which, before allowing the images that their face pres-ents to reach us, seizes them in its vortex and throws them back onto the idea that we have always had of our loved ones, making the images adhere to it, coincide with it” (3:184, 2:438–39). We know that our interpretations of what we see are conditioned by the preconceived assumptions we always carry with us. What we tend to forget, this passage highlights, is how much we supply to the very act of seeing, not only how we interpret an image after the fact but also the very fact of what we see itself. So Valéry observes of Ead-ward Muybridge’s photographs of a galloping horse that they show us “how inventive the eye is, or rather how much the sight elaborates on the data it gives us as the positive and impersonal result of observation.”34

In the Proustian universe, the center of invention lies with that tireless laborer, habit. Spurred in this case by our “intelligent and pious tenderness,” it functions “mechanically in the manner of film [mécaniquement à la façon de pellicules]” to show us “instead of the loved one who has for a long time ceased to exist, but whose death it would never want revealed to us, the new being whom it clothes a hundred times a day with a loving and mendacious resemblance” (3:184–85, 2:439). Our eye orders and filters our perceptions, making the image it produces adhere to and coincide with the one it sees. It does all of this, moreover, without our knowing or willing it, unconsciously, that is to say, mechanically. Although the mechanical has so far been squarely opposed to the subject, here it appears that habit, precisely that which makes our vision subjective, functions like a machine.

Indeed, it functions so well that we become aware of it only when some cruel trick of chance causes it to grind momentarily to a halt. During these


moments habit, in Beckett’s words, that “minister of dullness . . . [and] agent of security . . . betrays its trust as a screen to spare its victim the spectacle of reality.”35 Only when the habitual mental image falls out of sync with the world do we realize its existence at all, as when the sound of a film ceases to match the picture and we are jerked out of the world onscreen. Subjective vision, so far opposed to that of the objective lens, now appears to contain something photographic: a shared criteria of success—its own effacement. “Is this not the sole proof of its art?” Barthes asks about the photograph in a question that could apply equally to the mental image composed by habit, “to annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself?”36

In much of the Recherche, photography is firmly on the side of voluntary memory (which is likened, among other things, to an album of snapshots one can flip through at will), in contrast to the more authentic experiences of involuntary memory. In this scene, however, the revelatory nature of the objective lens and its disruption of habit place the photographic much more on the side of involuntary memory. Just as something subjective, habit, is revealed to have a mechanical nature, so something mechanical and objec-tive, the lens, is revealed have an affinity with that most subjective of all Proustian experiences. The correlate of the optical unconscious is thus what we might call the “mechanical involuntary.”37

The Contingency of the Subject

An account of the consequences of seeing through the lens is offered by Ann Banfield in an essay on the epistemology of photography, “L’imparfait de l’Objectif: The Imperfect of the Object Glass.” Banfield situ-ates the photograph in a model of the image conceived of as subjective and intentional, presenting a view from a particular vantage point, the one we ostensibly occupy when we look at it. Such is the effect of Renaissance perspective, which creates a centered space, in contrast, for instance, to the pictorial representation of the Greeks, which corresponded to the organiza-tion of the stage with multiple points of view.38 “The image implies an observer, endowed with the status of the conscious, personal subject—that designated by the first person pronoun.”39 The mechanical production pro-cess of the photographic image, however, dispenses with the assumption that what is in the image had to have been seen first by any human observer. It is the lens of the camera that sees, not the eye of the photographer. Indeed, this is precisely the fact for which the technique is celebrated.

Carried to its conclusion, moreover, the logic of the instrument makes entirely redundant the need for any operator. This point was noted by Ber-trand Russell, for whom scientific recording instruments were central in his

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analysis of “sensibilia,” sense data that are given to no actual observer.40 If the sense data of the table is the information given to our senses about what it feels, looks, and sounds like, the sensibilia of the table are what it feels, looks, and sounds like when no one is there to actually perceive it—information given to the senses without any actual sensing subject, but as they would be given were a subject to be there. This is just what is made visible by machines that record what no person in fact perceives. “Instruments can be con-structed,” Russell writes, “which, at places where there are no living percipi-ents, will make records of the sort of things that a man might perceive if he were at those places. A photographic plate can produce a picture of any selected portion of the starry heavens. A dictaphone can take down what peo-ple say in its neighbourhood.”41

Once imprinted on a light-sensitive plate, the sense data of an object are externalized from any actual person perceiving them, indeed, render-ing superfluous any such person altogether. By showing us the look of things when no one is there to perceive them, the recording instrument proves, contra George Berkeley, that the reality of the external world is not dependent on any perceiving mind.42 Vision being thus depersonalized, the subject is shown to be entirely unnecessary for perception, and conse-quently, entirely contingent for the continued existence of the world. This is evident, Banfield notes, from the first photograph: Nicéphore Niépce’s picture of the table set with no one present. “In the look of that table which needs no observer to look at it in order to continue to look like a table and therefore to be sensibilia of a table, the viewer meets with a start his own absence.”43

Such is the situation dramatized in Proust. But objectivity is not in simple opposition to subjectivity here. The photograph remains subjective insofar as it continues to present the image from a perspective, even if this perspec-tive is now emptied of any embodied perceiver. “Produced by a machine, by a scientific instrument, by a mechanical process, the recorded image is no longer anyone’s sensation, yet in a precise and restricted way it remains sub-jective,” Banfield writes.44 It is not that the dualism is resolved on the side of objectivity over subjectivity. The lens presents the world, more precisely the sense data of the world, as they would be given, were a perceiving subject to occupy the position of the instrument. This is why it is crucial that the narra-tor sees as if his eye were a lens, rather than looking at an actual photo-graphic image after it has been taken. Only thus can the scene of bearing witness to an absence be staged, and its “extraordinary fiction” depends, as Jean-François Chevrier points out, on a temporal collapse of two moments of photography, the registration of an image and its subsequent revelation, combining to form the fiction of the “instant.”45


The instantaneous image that the Proustian narrator sees is objective, then, not in the sense of being unanchored to a perspective, centerless and omniscient. On the contrary, it is a subjective view that is not, however, his own, and that is not, moreover, the view of any human observer. Recorded by an instrument, the image that results is, in Banfield’s phrase, “subjective but subjectless.”46 Such a view entails the depersonalization of the subjective while retaining the subject position, precisely the fact that renders the expe-rience of seeing photographically so traumatic for the Proustian narrator. Occupying momentarily the perspective of the instrument, he does not fill it with his subjectivity, but instead suffers its evacuation. When he sees with eyes that are truly other, they are no one’s.

The instrument records sense data as they would be given to a perceiving subject. The subjunctive here is by no means trivial. In an early appraisal of photography from 1840, Edgar Allan Poe praises the daguerreotype for being more perfect than the microscope because it gives us a world that is not only more accurately recorded, but also recognizable, “only a more abso-lute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.”47 Unlike the revelations of the microscope or the telescope, instruments that could also be said to show us the world without a self, what the objective lens of the camera shows is a world we know intimately—not terra incognita, whether of the infinite or the infinitesimal, but ground that is completely familiar, just as it would be seen by the eye. It is this identity of aspect that brings home, with full affective force, our own absence from the world in front of us. The auto-estrangement undergone by the narrator has as its pre-requisite the most profound recognition. It is no coincidence that he experi-ences the dispossession of subjectivity on the threshold of his own living room, that which is most familiar, and in view of his grandmother, that which is most dear.

The Refutation of Solipsism

The advent of photography allowed us to see things not only where but also when no one was present. Woolf captures this sentiment in “The Cinema,” describing appearances recorded on film as “shall we call it . . . more real, or real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life? We behold them as they are when we are not there. We see life as it is when we have no part in it.”48 Until that day, the narrator realizes, “when I thought of what my grandmother did when she was by herself, I had pictured her as she was with me, but eliminating myself without taking into account the effects on her of such a suppression” (3:183, 2:438). Here is the crux of the matter. Our image of our loved ones as they are in themselves

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consists of them precisely as they are when they are with us, only with ourselves quietly subtracted, without thereby disturbing the picture in the slightest. The photographic vision of the beloved in our absence shows at once the fact that we habitually perform this unconscious subtraction, and that its sums fail to add up.

Proust’s observation finds formal affinities with a scenario imagined by George Berkeley in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. “It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men,” Berkeley writes, “that houses, mountains, rivers and in a word all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the under-standing.”49 His contention is not that ordinary objects, tables and chairs, do not exist; he simply denies their independent existence without some mind perceiving them. The argument against materialism in the Principles is sur-prisingly brief, and I rehearse it here only in the barest of terms. “What are the aforementioned objects but the things we perceive by sense, and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensation; and is it not plainly repug-nant that any one of these or any combination of them should exist unper-ceived?”50 We think we perceive physical objects, but what we really perceive are the ideas we have of them in our minds. Thus, what we think of as mate-rial things are just collections of mental ideas. Since ideas exist only as long as they are perceived, and objects are ideas, it follows that objects have no existence when nothing is there to perceive them.

To see the truth of this, Berkeley tells us, we need do nothing further than imagine the existence of a sensible thing distinct from its being perceived, an injunction echoed by the philosopher’s son to the artist in Woolf’s To the Light-house as an elucidation of the problem of “subject and object and the nature of reality”: “Picture the kitchen table when you’re not there.”51 But surely there is “nothing easier than to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them,” Berkeley anticipates the rebuttal. “I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it: but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of anyone that may per-ceive them? But do not you yourself perceive or think of them all the while?”52

Proust’s insight into the conundrum of absent perception is similar to Berkeley’s in form if not in content. There is nothing easier, runs the objec-tion, than picturing the world when we are not there, life as it is when we have no part in it, our loved ones as they are by themselves. The reply of both is that the supposed ease of imagining our absence or nonperception lies in the simple fact that we are not really doing it. “When we do our utmost to conceive the existence of external bodies, we are all the while only contem-plating our own ideas,” Berkeley writes. “But the mind taking no notice of itself, is deluded to think it can and doth conceive bodies existing unthought


of or without the mind.”53 Let me be clear, I am not suggesting that Proust, like Berkeley, is arguing that an unperceived world is impossible to picture because of the metaphysical nature of reality. I point, rather, to the way these two scenarios both turn on deflating the ease with which we think we are imagining the world seen without a self.

In the Proustian case, this apparent ease comes from the fact of forgetting to reckon with our own elimination from the picture. Only when his grand-mother’s independent existence is made visible to the narrator through his momentary reduction to an instrument does he realize that he has only thought he has known it all this while. The mind that habitually “takes no notice of itself” is confronted with a start by its own activity. We cannot see the world through any perspective but our own, so we forget that this is not the world, only a perspective. With the invention of an impersonal apparatus of vision, one which records a familiar world from any number of vantage points, includ-ing ones when and where we, and in fact no human observer, is present, the Proustian narrator comes face to face with his unconscious habitual solipsism in the moment of its collapse.

An Accident of History

When subjective vision falters, the object becomes, accordingly, separated from us.

I, for whom my grandmother was still myself, I who had never seen her except in my soul, always in the same place in the past, through the transparency of contigu-ous and superimposed memories, suddenly, in our living room which belonged in a new world, that of Time, in which strangers live of whom we say, “he is aging well,” for the first time and only for an instant, for she disappeared immediately, I saw, on the sofa beneath the lamp, red, heavy and vulgar, sick, daydreaming, eyes slightly mad wandering over a book, an overburdened old woman whom I did not know. (3:185, 2:439).

The failure of subjective vision is, unsurprisingly for Proust, one of anachronism. In its tender ministrations, what habit has concealed is noth-ing less than time itself, eliding carefully all the instances of the beloved suf-fering over and over “the calamity of yesterday.”54 When the narrator sees as if through a purely material objectif, he realizes that the grandmother he knows is dead, “long since and many times.”55 His mental image of her is of someone who, in the words of Stephen Dedalus, has faded out of existence, “like a film left out in the sun.”56

The horror lies not only in registering the loved one as having an age and realizing her mortality but also in the fact that this unknown woman is no longer a part of “moi-même.” The estrangement of the object is thus always a double loss, for it also entails the loss of the self of which the loved one was a

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constitutive part (hence Proust’s description of falling out of love as “a long and painful suicide of the self”; 2:255, 1:600). Indeed, only because his grand-mother is essential to his being does she have the power to nullify him by her simple ignorance of his presence. Unlike the scientist, for whom the extirpa-tion of self is the regulative ideal, for the lover, it is the inevitable tragedy. See-ing photographically is just to register the separation of subject and object.

The consequences of this become evident in Proustian and, of course, photographic fashion only after a delay. Long after the actual event of his grandmother’s death, in another famous scene during his second stay in Bal-bec in the fourth volume of the Recherche, the narrator bends over to untie his boot when suddenly: “Upheaval of my entire being [Bouleversement de toute ma personne].” One of the rare short, incomplete sentences in Proust. Before him appears his grandmother’s image “as if in a mirror”: not the face of “that grandmother whom I had been astonished and remorseful at having so little missed,” but his “real grandmother,” of whom, for the first time since her stroke, the episode which heralded her subsequent and final decline, “I recaptured the living reality in a complete and involuntary memory” (4:210, 3:153). He finally registers her death, a year after her burial, thanks not to an image captured by a lens, but one recalled by a memory, an act of imag-ined perception.57 It is precisely at this critical moment of recovery when the narrator realizes the full impact of her hitherto unregistered loss. Tragically, he finds her and loses her again in the same instant.

In the full grip of grief, he is now tormented by the memory of every incident in which he caused her pain. He beholds an actual photograph of her, taken by Saint-Loup during their first stay at Balbec long ago, but he refuses to succumb to the comforting fiction of presence that the photo-graph promises, declining to address to it “words and entreaties as to a per-son who is separated from us but, retaining his personality, knows us and remains bound to us by an indissoluble harmony” (4:215, 3:156). The image that prompts this outpouring of belated emotion is resolutely not the mate-rial photograph of his grandmother taken by Saint-Loup, but the mental image of her furnished by his memory, seemingly just the one that was shown to be false in the earlier scene, when the eye saw for an instant as if it were a lens. Throughout the rest of this section, there is a constant oscillation of privilege between the material and the mental image, and it would be use-less to ask which is the real or true one, not simply because the text offers so many contradictory answers, but because such a question would miss the point.58 The photograph “never lies,” Barthes tells us, “or rather, it can lie about the sense of the thing, being by nature tendentious, never about its exis-tence.”59 What the narrator realizes during his second trip to Balbec is that the claim to reference does not coincide completely with the claim to truth.


Now he struggles to reconcile a contradiction in his grief. It involves, on the one hand, “an existence, a tenderness, surviving in me as I had known them, that is to say, made for me,” and on the other, “an annihilation that had effaced my image of that tenderness, had destroyed that existence, ret-rospectively abolished our mutual predestination, made of my grandmother, at the moment when I found her again as in a mirror, a mere stranger whom chance had allowed to spend a few years beside me, as she might have done with anyone else, but to whom, before and after those years, I was and would be nothing” (4:213, 3:155). The comforting promise offered by the photo-graph involves not simply a substitution of presence, the fiction that she is still there for him, but equally importantly, the fiction of reciprocity, that he is still there for her, and finally, crucially, that all of this could not have been otherwise.

Although the strength of his love for his grandmother makes the narra-tor feel as if their relationship was predestined and necessary, that she had to have been his grandmother and he her grandson, he now realizes the utter contingency of the fact that they should have had anything to do with one another. Moreover, he is struck once more by the fact that she has an existence entirely separate from him, and his irrelevance becomes not only a sign of the historical accident of their love, but also a sign of the contin-gency of his own existence whatsoever. What the earlier image captures in miniature is precisely the disillusionment of this mutual predestination; what it signals is the time when he is for her nothing, indeed, when he is nothing at all.

Barthes, consummate reader of Proust, undergoes a similar experience in Camera Lucida when looking at photographs of his mother as a young woman, when he did not yet exist for her. “Is History not simply that time when we were not born? I could read my non-existence in the clothes my mother had worn before I could remember her. There is a sort of stupefac-tion to seeing a familiar being dressed differently [autrement].”60 What is the sign of contingency but just this adverb, “autrement,” perpetually modifying the existential copula? In order to retrouve his mother, Barthes seeks in other photographs objects of hers with which he is familiar, refashioning her thereby into the person he knows, the familiar one who is an essential part of him. By showing us History, the photograph destroys the uncon-scious childlike solipsism that results from the countless treaties formed between habit and object that dull us to the independent existence of the latter. Banfield sums up succinctly, “The photograph makes clear that it is the continued existence of things outside the mind which is disturbing to the individual and not their non-existence, a solipsism which absorbs the whole world into a single subject’s perspective being rather consoling.”61

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All the Rest

The time when we did not exist for the loved one Barthes calls “History,” the name for the time of our absence. Photography appears to maintain a close connection to history, not only in showing us this absence, but also, returning to a concept evoked earlier, in its referentiality, its unas-sailable testament to what has been.62 The mere notion of photography, Valéry tells us, reduces historical knowledge to a simple question: “Could such a fact, as it is recounted [conté], have been photographed?” History, in his account, apprehends only sensible things, based on verbal testimony relayed through words. Its positive constituents can be broken down into things seen, moments witnessed that could have been caught by a photo-graphic reporter, had such a phantom spectator been present. “All the rest is literature. All that is left consists of those components of the story [récit] or of the thesis that are products of the mind [l’ésprit], consequently, imagina-tions, interpretations or constructions, bodiless things by nature impercep-tible to the photographic eye or the phonographic ear, which thus could not have been observed and transmitted in their purity.”63

The objective vision of the lens now encounters its own limit. Just as it makes visible things unseen by the eye, so there are things invisible to it. Another corrective, then, is required. Just as there are two parts in the pro-duction of the photograph, the recording of an image on a light-sensitive plate and its later development by means of a chemical solution, so there appear to be two parts of the process of photographic vision in Proust. For let us not forget the almost too obvious fact that our hero narrates this expe-rience of self-dispossession. The referential materiality of the image is both its virtue and its limitation: it can show only what is there, never what is not. The lens renders visible the perspective of no one, and thus makes clear the absence of the perceiving subject, but the experience of bearing witness to this absence requires for its expression alchemy of a different nature.

It is no accident that the grandmother’s phantom appears twice to the narrator in the act of leafing through a book. Each time she is distracted, eyes roaming confusedly over the pages, but what he reads in the image is as clear as day. The material objectif shows us the world as it is when we have no part in it, but to register this having no part, we must look to a realm unfa-miliar to a recording instrument that knows only the emanations of light. If, as Valéry writes, “it must be agreed that bromide prevails over ink whenever the very presence of visible things is sufficient,” ink proves necessary again when presence fails to suffice completely.64 If what the lens sees is the world seen without a self, history, what the eye tells is all the rest, literature.


Notes

I am grateful to Daniel Heller-Roazen, Michael Wood, and Luis Rosa-Rodri-guez for their comments on earlier versions of this paper, as well as to members of Princeton University’s Twentieth Century Forum and the Department of Comparative Literature’s Works in Progress Colloquium for their feedback when I presented this material. I have given the pagination for published Eng-lish translations where they exist, although I have made a number of silent modifications throughout. In the cases where the modifications were signifi-cant, I have cited the original and supplied the pagination for the translation in parentheses for convenience. Otherwise, all translations are mine.

1. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, 6 vols., trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York, 2003), 5:343; À la recherche du temps perdu, 4 vols., ed. Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris, 1989), 3:762. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text; the first set of numbers refer by volume and page number to the translation; the second set of numbers refer by volume and page number to the French edition.

2. Paul Valéry, “Centenaire de la photographie,” in Vues (Paris, 1948), 372; “The Centenary of Photography,” in Occasions, trans. Roger Shattuck and Frederick Brown (Princeton, 1970), 164.

3. Ibid., 373 (164). 4. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York, 1959), 287. 5. The focus of my discussion here is narrowly circumscribed, but photographic

imagery pervades the entirety of the novel in numerous ways. For more com-prehensive discussions of photography in Proust, see Mieke Bal, The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually, trans. Anna-Louise Milne (Stanford, 1997), and Rebecca Comay, “Impressions: Proust, Photography, Trauma,” Discourse 31, no. 1&2 (Winter & Spring 2009): 86–105. Proust himself was famously enthralled by photographs, especially portraits of acquaintances, which are documented in Brassaï’s book, Proust in the Power of Photography, trans. Richard Howard (Chi-cago, 2001). See also Roland Barthes, “Proust and Photography: Examination of a Little-Known Archive,” in The Preparation of the Novel, trans. Kate Briggs (New York, 2010), 305–76.

6. André Bazin, “L’Ontologie de l’image photographique,” in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (Paris, 1985); “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema, 2 vols., trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, 1967). The practice of posthumous portraits was extremely popular in the nineteenth century, and both the belief in the occult nature of photography as well as the distinction of its noninterventionism is evident in an advertising slogan from the time, “Secure the shadow ’ere the substance fade / Let Nature imitate what Nature made.” See Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present (New York, 1999), 32.

7. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard How-ard (New York, 1981), 96.

8. Dominique François Arago, “Report to the Commission of the Chamber of Deputies” (July 3, 1839), in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg

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(New Haven, 1980), 18. Arago recommended governmental pensions for Louis Daguerre and Isidore Niépce, eager to secure the French claim to the inven-tion of photography.

9. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (New York, 1969). Nicéphore Niépce described his earlier images as “heliographs,” also emphasizing the recording of light by itself in the images. See Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, “Mem-oir on the Heliograph,” in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, 5–10. See also Newhall, History of Photography, 11–16.

10. Charles Baudelaire, Art in Paris, 1845–1862, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London, 1965), 162.

11. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York, 2007), 17.12. Ibid., 34.13. A. M. Worthington, The Study of Splashes (New York, 1908), 153. These com-

ments were made during a lecture at the Royal Institute of London in 1894 when Worthington first succeeded in recording a splash photographically.

14. Ibid., 139 and 131. Daston and Galison emphasize that the photographic image is not by definition identical with objectivity. “The photograph was also criti-cized, transformed, cut, pasted, touched up, and enhanced. From the very first, the relationship of scientific objectivity to photography was anything but sim-ple determinism. Not all objective images were photographs; nor were all pho-tographs considered ipso facto objective” (125). Nevertheless, the mechanical image functioned as the symbol of an objective ideal. “Suitably deployed, and created with iron-willed self-restraint, photographs promised objectivity” (154).

15. Ibid., 151. Daston and Galison are careful to note that it was not access to a camera that distinguished Hellmann and Neuhauss from other “snow men,” but rather their belief in a strict adherence to mechanical objectivity. For instance, Wilson Bentley had produced photomicrographs of snowflakes as early as 1885, but had “improved” these images by replacing the background, incising the object, and snipping the edges. See Daston and Galison, 148–53.

16. Bazin, “L’Ontologie de l’image photographique,” 13 (1:15).17. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 76.18. Michael Wood, “Film and the Art of Forgetting,” lecture, July 17, 2009, Cam-

bridge University. A similar point is made in Michael Wood, “Other Eyes: Proust and the Myths of Photography,” in The Strange M. Proust, ed. André Ben-haïm (London, 2009), 105. Bazin, for one, is fully invested in such an account of the camera. “The aesthetic potentialities of photography reside in the revela-tion of the real. This reflection on a wet sidewalk, that gesture of a child, it is not for me to single them out within the fabric of the exterior world. Only the impassivity of the lens, stripping its object of habits and prejudices, of all the spiritual grime with which my perception covered it, could make it virginal to my attention, prepared for my love” (Bazin, “L’Ontologie de l’image pho-tographique,” 18 [1:15]).

19. For a discussion of the impact of technological developments on the percep-tion of time and space during the fin de siècle, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA, 1983). Kern notes Proust’s aware-ness of both the closeness and separation effected by the telephone on 215.

20. Rebecca Comay argues that the grandmother’s reading pose is crucial and that the scene “prefigure[s] the essential destiny of the entire book,” particularly with relation to the narrator’s highly ambiguous renunciation of theories in


the final volume, just when he is constructing his most elaborate one. See “Impressions: Proust, Photography, Trauma,” 89.

21. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 13–14.22. Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit (London, 1999),

19.23. Ibid.24. Bal, The Mottled Screen, 203. This comment arises in a discussion of the defamil-

iarization caused by the close-up. Photography allows us to see what was and is no more, and also what we cannot see with the naked eye. So when the narra-tor kisses Albertine, for instance, her neck is described as seen through a mag-nifying glass.

25. The habitual mendacity of sight applies equally to our images of ourselves. The narrator continues, “And, like an invalid who, not having seen himself for a long time and composing at every moment the visage that he does not see according to the ideal image that he carries of himself in his mind, recoils on perceiving in a mirror, in the middle of an arid and desert-like face, the slanted and pink eleva-tion of a gigantic nose, like a pyramid of Egypt” (3:185, 2:439). It is difficult not to be reminded of Freud’s story of failed self-recognition in “The Uncanny.” Here is a case of objective seeing in which one sees oneself as the object, akin to the experience described by Barthes of being mortified in front of the lens.

26. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” in Selected Writings: Volume 2, part 2, 1927–1930, ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 510. Benjamin goes on, with an example that cannot but bring to mind Proust’s academician, “Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a person actually takes a step. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret” (510).

27. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 140.28. John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, (London, 1903–1912), 15:27. Proust’s

enthusiasm for Ruskin, whom he translated into French, is well documented. For an overview, see Richard Macksey, “Proust on the Margins of Ruskin,” in The Ruskin Polygon: Essays on the Imagination of John Ruskin, ed. John Dixon Hunt and Faith M. Holland (Manchester, 1982). Significantly, Ruskin calls for the recovery of ocular innocence through painting, not a mechanical process of image making. Arguing that the adjective “innocent” is misleading in Ruskin’s appellation, Jonathan Crary describes it as, rather, “the possibility of a purified subjective vision,” “a vision achieved at great cost that claimed for the eye a van-tage point uncluttered by the weight of historical codes and conventions of seeing.” See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, 1991), 95, 96. Crary situates Ruskin’s search for a kind of “optical neutrality, the reduction of the observer to a supposedly rudimentary state,” in the context of efforts in the empirical sciences in the 1830s and 1840s to “demonstrate a form of ‘pure’ perception, by reducing the eye to its most elemental capacities . . . and by lib-erating sensation from signification” (96). The relation of a neutral, rudimen-tary, “purified subjective vision,” to the “objective” one symbolized by the machine bears more scrutiny than space allows here.

29. Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, 15:28.

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30. Valéry, “Degas, Dance, Drawing” (1935), in Degas, Manet, Morisot, trans. David Paul (New York, 1960), 41.

31. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 4:338.

32. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 111.33. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light (Princeton, 1997), 97. Cadava notes that “the

emergence of photography concurs with the advent of psychoanalysis” (97), highlighting the psychoanalytic associations of the optical unconscious.

34. Valéry, “Degas, Dance, Drawing,” 41.35. Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues, 21.36. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 45.37. The complicated relationship between involuntary memory, mechanicity, and

the will is further evident in the aesthetic theory elaborated in the final volume of the Recherche, where the claim that experience must be “translated” through art in order for life to be “made real” is figured importantly through a photo-graphic metaphor of the need to “develop” past experiences, like negatives (clichés), with the light of the intellect (6:299, 4:474).

38. See Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” cited in Ann Banfield, “L’Imparfait de l’Objectif: the Imperfect of the Object Glass,” Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory 8, 3 24(1990): 64–87, 65.

39. Banfield, “L’Imparfait de l’Objectif,” 66.40. For a fuller exposition of Russell’s doctrine of sensibilia and the epistemologi-

cal status of isolated fragments of unobserved space-time preserved by the recording instrument, see ibid. as well as Ann Banfield, “Describing the Unob-served: Events Grouped Around an Empty Center,” in The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature, ed. Nigel Fabb et al. (Manchester, 1987), 265–85.

41. Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (London, 1975), 79.42. Banfield observes carefully that Russell’s and G. E. Moore’s “refutation” of ide-

alism does not involve a straightforward denial of the doctrine, but rather incorporates George Berkeley’s solipsism while inoculating its results with the very position it meant to resist, thereby turning Berkeley’s argument against itself in the service of realism. See Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge, 2000), 67.

43. Banfield, “L’Imparfait de l’objectif,” 79.44. Ibid., 73.45. Jean-François Chevrier, Proust et la photographie (Paris, 1982), 66. Proust is aware of

the fiction, Chevrier adds, pointing to the fact that he writes, “if instead of our eye, it were a purely material object-glass, a photographic plaque, that had seen,” instead of “that sees.” The conflation of the “objectif” and the “plaque photographique” is part of the condensation of two moments of the photographic experience.

46. Banfield, “L’Imparfait de l’Objectif,” 77, my emphasis.47. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Daguerreotype” (1840), in Classic Essays on Photography,

ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, 1980), 38.48. Virginia Woolf, “The Cinema,” in The Captain’s Deathbed and Other Essays (New

York, 1950), 181.49. George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, ed.

Kenneth Winkler (Indianapolis, 1982), 24.


50. Ibid., 24–25.51. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York, 1981), 23.52. Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, 32–33.53. Ibid., 33. Berkeley’s argument here is that even when we imagine sensible

things as existing unconceived by any mind, the idea of them is thereby in our own mind, and so it is impossible to conceive of any object being unperceived because the act of trying to do so will always involve some apprehension of them on our own part. It is beyond the scope of the present discussion to dis-cuss the ramifications of this argument or Berkeleyan idealism more broadly.

54. Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues, 13.55. Ibid., 27.56. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London, 1992), 99.57. In her essay on the acts of imaginative perception performed under authorial

instruction, Elaine Scarry notes that the methods through which an author achieves vivacity in creating visualizations in the mind of the reader are with-held from characters in novels when they themselves are trying to imagine absent persons or places. Scarry argues that imagining how something looks is much more vivid under instruction than when we try to do it unprompted because we need to “suppress our own awareness of the voluntary, which inter-feres with the mimesis of perception” (18). The “involuntary” memory prompt-ing the sudden image of the grandmother in the mind of the narrator presents an interesting case in regard to both of these points. See Elaine Scarry, “On Vivacity: The Difference Between Daydreaming and Imagining-Under-Authorial-Instruction,” Representations 52 (Fall 1995): 1–26.

58. Bal argues that this interplay of the mental and the material makes explicit the structure of the entire Proustian aesthetic, in which “the raw material of this novel consists in an interweaving of the external, ‘true,’ and objectifiable image with the mental image” (The Mottled Screen, 198). She writes of these two images, “An eye for an eye: the eye that is veiled by habit, tenderness, the continual affective adjustments that we make to our field of vision, is opposed to that other eye, which is mercilessly ‘to one side,’ that is to say, the lens of the cam-era” (The Mottled Screen, 200).

59. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 87. Valéry also observes that as the widespread dissemi-nation of photography has led to a seeming eviction of the word by the image, the latter has taken on some of the former’s vices. “I might add that photogra-phy sometimes makes so bold as to practice lying, a great and ever-flourishing specialty of the word” (Vues, 367 [159]).

60. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 64.61. Banfield, “L’Imparfait de l’Objectif,” 79.62. We need think only of surveillance cameras or of documentary photojournal-

ism to evoke the network of concepts around testimony and witness that attend the lens.

63. Valéry, Vues, 371 (163).64. Ibid., 367 (159).

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