Daniel Rubinstein

Both photography and philosophy are invested in light as a form of intelligence, but while representation is central to photography as a recording practice, for Heidegger it is fundamental to the alienation of human beings from the world, and for Deleuze it is the foundation of political conservatism. This chapter brings together these critiques of representation and demonstrates that photography is both the visual form of Western metaphysics and the means for overcoming the boundaries imposed by the representational paradigm. It is argued that far from being rooted in ‘objectivity’, photography is usually interpreted through a philosophical framework that imposes upon it the concomitant ideologies of subjectivity and realism. It further contends that when photography is liberated from the totalizing effects of representation it begins to offer a fractured and fragmented ‘image’ of the interface between current technical, social and cultural norms.

Twenty two years since the arrival of the first consumer digital camera (Tatsuno 36) Western culture is now characterised by ubiquitous photography. The disappearance of the camera inside the mobile phone has ensured that even the most banal moments of the day can become a point of photographic reverie, potentially shared instantly. Supported by the increased affordability of computers, digital storage and access to broadband, consumers are provided with new opportunities for the capture and transmission of images, particularly online where snapshot photography is being transformed from an individual to a communal activity. As the digital image proliferates online and becomes increasingly delivered via networks, numerous practices emerge surrounding the image’s transmission, encoding, ordering and reception. Informing these practices is a growing cultural shift towards a conception of the Internet as a platform for sharing and collaboration, supported by a mosaic of technologies termed Web 2.0.

The original contribution of this thesis is the insight that photography is better served through the philosophy of difference than through the metaphysics of identity. This thesis takes seriously the mechanically produced image in order to claim that its technologies can be considered as the method that allows access to the subjective modes within difference and develops them in relation to the specifically photographic conditions of production: repetition, simulacra and the latent image. This thesis proposes that considering photography from the point of view of the content of the image is a false move as it necessarily brings in the question of the subject (a key concern for philosophy), narrowly understood as the immobile centre for which the world is represented as meaning, Rather than pursuing photography as text, which brings in the problem of language. this thesis suggests that visuality - understood as fragmentary and recursive selfreplication – is nothing other than photography's pull away from representation and pointing to the way difference, as multiplicity of open-ended possibilities, could be approached as the sine-qua-non for photography. This thesis not only shows that visuality can never be fully understood as representation and requires the untamed environment of difference, but that in so doing one realises that philosophy of visuality is nothing other than photography. This has the additional outcome inasmuch as it also begins to pull away at the whole edifice of metaphysics itself, which opens up another avenue of research that leads not only out of thinking metaphysically. but also out of thinking humanly. These are wildly creative paths, and this thesis is pointing in the direction that can be taken without however solving these questions.

Critical approaches to photography have one thing in common: they share an understanding that photographs must be approached visually. They take it as a given that photographs are pictures to be looked at, and they all agree that it is only through looking that photographs communicate. Whatever subsequent interpretations follow, the priority of vision in relation to the image remains unperturbed. This belief in the visibility of the photograph imperceptibly bonded together otherwise dissimilar and sometimes contradictory methodologies, preventing them from noticing that which is the most unexplained about photography: the precedence of looking itself. This self-evident truth of visibility blocks the possibility of inquiring after everything that is non-visual in a picture. However, the digital image forces a reevaluation of visibility because it clear that the visible cannot account for images that begin their life as binary data, developed algorithmically and driven to various points across the network not as individual pictures but as packets of data. Through a reading of Heidegger, Deleuze and Benjamin this paper suggests that digital-born photography cannot be explained away in representational terms; rather it calls for a theory that can account for proliferation and self-replication as the purveyors of meaning online.

In what follows I wish to argue that in the twenty-first century the importance of photography is not in freezing moments in time, nor in portraying situations and individual points of view, but in exposing the inherent contradictions of structures that take representation as their ground. As representation is one of the building blocks of our culture, from the political order, to economics to science, photography provides an insight into its abyssal paradoxes, precisely because it configures the very space of the visual. Photography is fundamental to the transition from the industrial to the information age because it allows to think about power not as the reactive logic of ideology, but as the fractal and self-referential process by which information and knowledge are produced, distributed and utilized. For this reason, the question for this chapter is not how individuals use images but how individuality is produced by the photographic image. The challenge therefore is not to describe photography as a representation of politics, but to suggest that representation is a force that molds and configures political action. Fractal photography then becomes a means to radicalize politics by making available to the gaze the dynamic techno-political forces that shape the world.

This paper considers the ontological significance of invisibility in relation to the question ‘what is a digital image?’ Its argument in a nutshell is that the emphasis on visibility comes at the expense of latency and is symptomatic of the style of thinking that dominated Western philosophy since Plato. This privileging of visible content necessarily binds images to linguistic paradigms of interpretation which promote representation, subjectivity, identity and negation over multiplicity, indeterminacy and affect. Photography is the case in point because until recently critical approaches to photography had one thing in common: they all shared in the implicit and incontrovertible understanding that photographs are a medium that must be approached visually; they took it as a given that photographs are there to be looked at and they all agreed that it is only through the practices of spectatorship that the secrets of the image can be unlocked. Whatever subsequent interpretations followed, the priori- ty of vision in relation to the image remained unperturbed. This undisputed belief in the visibility of the image has such a strong grasp on theory that it imperceptibly bonded together otherwise dissimilar and sometimes contradictory methodol- ogies, preventing them from noticing that which is the most unexplained about images: the precedence of looking itself. This self-evident truth of visibility casts a long shadow on im- age theory because it blocks the possibility of inquiring after everything that is invisible, latent and hidden.