Daniel Rubinstein

This roundtable discussion is based on an online symposium – The Promise of Photography: Scale, Measure and Proportion in a Conflicted Visual Milieu – which took place on 17 September 2021. Since its inception, photography has promised to set things to scale, to grant them measure and proportion, a series of promises that have also entailed moments of irrationality or conflict that persist in and continue to shape the era of global networked digital imaging technologies. The symposium started out from the diagnosis that, whilst photography continues to promise an ordered, proportionate and measured world in which things can be set to their proper scale, it also acts in many ways as an agent of dismeasure, disproportion and the unscalable. In light of this, the roundtable discussion presented here examines a range of different meanings that scale, measure and proportion have accrued in the photographic context and sets out to explore conceptual frameworks and research methodologies through which the current situation might be understood.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced therapists to embrace online sessions, creating a sudden shift in the therapeutic environment. However, the integration of technology into therapy was already underway, prompting the need to explore how the online environment impacts clients and the therapeutic process. This article asks what online therapy can teach about therapy. It highlights the author's experience with online therapy and the unsettling incident that occurred during a session. The article reflects on the philosophical and psychological implications of technology and online communication, suggesting that the glitches and breakdowns in online communication may reveal underlying states of the psyche. Drawing upon Heidegger's philosophy of technology and Whitehead’s process philosophy, it argues that our environment and technologies shape our consciousness and subjectivity, and that both the therapist and the client are partly a product of the media in the digital age. The article also references Freud's theory on the psychopathology of everyday life to suggest that unintentional glitches in online communication may be manifestations of unconscious thoughts and impulses. Overall, the article raises some questions about the use of technology in therapy and the implications for understanding the human psyche. It highlights the need to approach online therapy with caution and awareness of the potential limitations and disturbances that may arise.

This article explores the role of photography in the assassination of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey in 2016. The photography exhibition titled Russia through Turkish Eyes was the background for the assassination. The author argues that photography occupies a paradoxical position of a metalanguage of an event that it simultaneously announces, records, destroys and celebrates while assuming the role of an impartial observer. Photography operates as a counter-factual, exceeding the documentary, and assuming the function not of a witness but of an active participant. The author suggests that in a primitive culture like ours, some objects acquire the status of a portal that facilitates the transformation between symbolic, imaginary and real forms of existence. A camera is one such object. The article concludes that the assassination of the Russian Ambassador cannot be easily separated from the photographic event that preceded it, accompanied it and immortalized it.

This article suggests that when the engagement with photography is limited to questions of recognition and resemblance, such approach stifles our experience of the world and directs us towards monotonous homogeneity in which everything can be represented in a photograph, and a photograph is always a representation of something or other. And yet, a photograph has the potential to move our gaze beyond representation of events and situations in a way that allows us to penetrate the appearance of things and to sense their inner reality, rather than act as a mere illustration.

From Kant to postmodernism the idea of the sublime was always tied with questions of ethics and politics. Kant saw the sublime as a proof that rationality triumphs over nature, validating law and judgement through the subjective experience of pleasure and pain. Lyotard saw in the sublime a symptom of a crisis at which rationality reaches its limit, and subjectivity is confronted with its own collapse. As this chapter will show, both these approaches are inadequate to account for the sublime in 21st century. The failure of liberal democracy and the rise of populist and fascist ideologies calls for a re-evaluation of the sublime as the dissolution of the symbolic order and the coming face to face with the alternative reality of the death drive. This chapter names this reality ‘The Diogenes Complex’, after the homeless beggar who made his form of existence the manifestation of his philosophical creed. Through his performative actions Diogenes has shown that reality is sublime because it is irreconcilable with rational logic and warned against the futility of trying to act rationally in irrational times.

This radical and provocative book outlines a philosophy of photography in the age of the digital: a philosophy of photography that reacts with the increasingly fragmentary, no longer dualistically comprehensible world, the description of which the familiar thought models of representation are no longer suitable. Rubinstein argues that until recently, critical discussions of photography had one thing in common: They all started from the implicit and irrefutable assumption that photographs are media that one has to approach visually; they took it for granted that photographs were meant to be viewed, and they all agreed that it is only through the practices of viewing that the secrets of photography can be unlocked. Whatever interpretations followed, it did not affect the priority of seeing in relation to the image. The triumph of the digital image as a contemporary form of photography, however, forces a reassessment of visibility. Because the digital image makes it clear to everyone that the visible cannot stand for everything that happens to images that begin their life as binary data, then processed algorithmically and sent to various points in a network not as individual images but as data packets.

Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age challenges orthodoxies of photographic theory and practice. Beyond understanding the image as a static representation of reality, it shows photography as a linchpin of dynamic developments in augmented intelligence, neuroscience, critical theory, and cybernetic cultures. Through essays by leading philosophers, political theorists, software artists, media researchers, curators, and experimental programmers, photography emerges not as a mimetic or a recording device but simultaneously as a new type of critical discipline and a new art form that stands at the crossroads of visual art, contemporary philosophy, and digital technologies.

It is strange to live at a time when political liberalism and democracy are seeking new and more imaginative ways of damaging and even destroying themselves. Key preoccupations of liberalism are being employed specifically to undermine and discredit cultural pluralism and to advance new forms of nationalism and racism aimed at repressing the very 'other' that is the focus and the concern of progressive politics. One by one all of the staples of liberalism – such as class, gender, sexuality, race, faith, the body, diversity and identity – are being weaponised not to advance inclusion and tolerance but in order to promote the interests of specific groups, whether these are white supremacists, misogynistic gamers, autocratic nationalists or pro-life activists. In this hall of mirrors, the 'other' is no longer the LGBTQ, the black, or the woman, rather it is the defender of white masculinity, the protester against the demolition of confederate statues, and the born again Evangelical Christian.

Both the analogue and the digital snapshot still belong to the industrial age in which the greatest threat to humanity was the man-machine hybrid – the Frankenstein's monster who turns on his own maker. But as the online philosopher Kim Kardashian teaches by inviting us to look at her through touching, pinching, and swiping, the man-machine paradigm is now replaced by wo/man-image. This is not only a change in the status of the image, it is also, and for the most part, a change in the status of 'man'.

In the twentieth-century photography was the de-facto face of representation, as the visual arm of an industrial society that thought to reproduce the world as commodity for the consumption by individuals. However, in the twenty-first century this logic of mechanical reproduction is augmented by the (fuzzy) logic of algorithmic processing, which does not require individuals and commodities for its operation, but converts both to packets of data. The task of photography today is not to represent the world as an image, but to explore the conditions that make something like an ‘image’ possible.

In this article I explore the metaphysical underpinnings of ‘Art and Objecthood’ in order to tease out its reliance on several of the tenets of conservative art criticism: Plato’s theory of forms, Kant’s aesthetics and the unquestioning acceptance of subjectivity and representation. I argue that it is due to these investments that ‘Art and Objecthood’ fails to come to terms with the condition of art in the age of advanced technology and virtual reality. This argument develops by means of clarification of three key concepts: simulacrum, theatricality, and truth.

From publisher's description: "On The Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation" is a provocative and bold rethinking of photography in light of the digital transformation and its impact on art, culture and society. Addressing the centrality of the digital image to our contemporary life, the fourteen new essays in this collection challenge the traditional categories of photographic theory – that of representation, evidence, documentation and the archive – and offer a fresh approach to its impact on aesthetics, contemporary philosophy and the political. Drawing on the networked human condition of embodiment, social media and bio-politics, 'On the Verge of Photography' offers an invaluable resource for students of visual culture, researches in the field of digital imaging and artists working with new media. Rubinstein, Golding and Fisher co-edited this volume

One of the key claims in Jean-Francois Lyotard's "Discourse, Figure" is that the dialectical method tends to obscure and hide all which is invisible, illegible and sensual. Lyotard's strategy in exposing this rift within language is by way of showing that the distance between the sign and the referent should not be thought of as negation but as a form of expression. Instead of the dialectical relation between the image and the object Lyotard proposes radical heterogeneity that he names 'thickness'. This paper examines Lyotard's non-dialectical approach in relation to the title of the book and argues that the comma is positioned as the sensual technology that creates the possibility of discursive continuity

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.