What is the place of time in the experience of contemporary art? What is the role of the image? What is the significance of the photograph for the understanding of contemporary art? What connects historical time to the image?

One way to approach this set of questions is through the writings of the German critic Walter Benjamin, whose preoccupation with the changing conditions of image production marks him out as a pioneer in thinking the historical dimension of cultural forms. Benjamin was a cultural historian of images, but as a critic, he was also–indeed primarily–concerned with the future. These concerns come together in his insistence upon adopting the critical standpoint of history as a fulfilled whole: the eschatological standpoint of justice. Since the future has yet to occur, this standpoint is only available speculatively, through the mediation of experience by the idea of history as a fulfilled whole. For Benjamin, such a mediation is necessarily imagistic in form, since only in the spatiality of the image can the wholeness of history be figured. The image thus became the pivot of Benjamin’s historical thought. But what of the historically changing forms of the image? What is it about the photographic image which makes it so compelling a means of grasping historical experience through visual form?

The following remarks indicate one way in which Benjamin’s metaphysical conception of cultural forms as technologically-defined image-spaces of historical experience can contribute to our understanding of the current status and possibilities of photography. It is necessary to begin, though, with a digression. For one particular–semiotic–approach to the interpretation of photography has become so dominant that we must take a detour through the critique of the sign, if we are to find our way to a properly historical understanding of photography as an aesthetic and cultural form.

Sign and Image
Ever since Kant’s transcendental critique severed the connection of aesthetics to semiotics in the second half of the eighteenth century, the two disciplines have been fundamentally estranged. Today, aesthetics and semiotics form the torn, antinomic halves of an experience of cultural form between which contemporary criticism shuttles back and forth, in an anxious and decidedly non-dialectical oscillation. This split, which informs so much contemporary theoretical work on the image–a split between meaning and sensibility, signification and aisthesis–registers both the changing social function of images consequent upon the declining power of the church (desacralization and commodified re-enchantment) and the development of new technologies of image production. Yet these historical relations remain unreflected in the theoretical constitution of the two fields.

Kantian aesthetics severed the theorization of the formal sensible qualities of the image from its representational function. Aesthetic experience was referred not to some shared form of signification, but to the pleasure we take in the sensory forms of our apprehension of the world. Conversely, modern semiotics has come, increasingly, to treat this representational function in abstraction from both its sensible and existential qualities. At the beginning of this century, C.S. Pierce’s semiotics famously distinguished between three types of sign according to their relations to their objects–icon, index, and symbol–which signify by virtue of resemblance, causal connection, and convention, habit or “acquired law,” respectively. It also accorded primacy to the icon as that type of sign which “every assertion must contain,” if only indirectly, via “signs whose meaning is only explicable by icons.”(1) Since then, however, the icon has progressively fallen by the wayside of cultural and art theory, as the belief in natural, rather than conventional, resemblance has been subjected to mounting epistemological attack. The icon was effectively reduced by this attack to an authoritative, socially sanctioned variant of Pierce’s “symbol.” The distinctiveness of the icon was further eroded by the growing influence of Saussure’s concept of the “sign” (roughly equivalent to Pierce’s symbol), in contemporary critical and linguistic theory. Saussure’s model of signification generalizes the arbitrariness of the specifically linguistic signifier into a characteristic of signification in general; thereby effacing the intrinsically representational dimension of visual/iconic form.(2)

For followers of Saussure, insofar as it signifies, the icon is rendered equivalent to a linguistic sign. Its visual properties are reduced to non-signifying aesthetic residues, which function within the process of the production of meaning as the ‘mere means’ or support for the ‘real’ semantic process of differentiation. Hence the inherent idealism of all subsequent ‘structuralisms’ which used Saussure’s linguistics as their model. Saussurean semiotics produces and reproduces ‘aesthetics’ as its dumb, non-signifying other.

Meanwhile, however, the decline in the fortune of the icon was paralleled by a growing recognition of the historical importance of the index as a mode of signification of the real, in the context of the massive social dissemination of photographic imagery in documentation, advertising, journalism, pornography, tourism, surveillance, etc. As the photograph became the socially dominant technological form of the image in the twentieth century, so the index rose to prominence in critical theory in competition with the arbitrary or purely conventional dimension of the sign.

The specificity of the photograph
The photograph has long been considered a paradigmatic example of an indexical sign, or, as Barthes famously put it in his 1961 essay “The Photographic Message,” “a message without a code.”(3) In Pierce’s words:

Photographs [. . .] are very instructive because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect then, they belong to the second class of signs, those by physical connection. . . . The fact that . . . [the photograph] is known to be the effect of the radiations from the object renders it an index and highly informative.(4)

However, views differ as to the relationship between this indexical aspect and the photograph’s other, iconic and symbolic, dimensions. For Pierce, for example, the indexicality and iconicity of the photograph are mutually constitutive. Not only does the physical connection between object and image in the photographic process establish a relation of resemblance; but this relation (the iconic character of the image) is a condition of its interpretation as an index. That is, not only is there no indexicality without resemblance, but it is the resemblance which makes it a sign in the first place. Indexes signify qua indexes only because they visually resemble their referent, in some respect. Effects only become “indexes” of their causes when also treated as icons: things which signify through some quality they possess qua things.(5) Hence the primacy of the icon for Pierce within semiotics as a whole.

For Barthes, on the other hand, the photographic image has no iconic dimension in Pierce’s sense. It is a paradoxical co-existence of two messages–one without a code, the other with a code–whereby the one without a code (the index, or purely denotative effect of the photograph as a direct trace of the real) can function only via the one with a code (the symbolic or connotative dimension), which it serves to ground as specifically ‘photographic.’ The reason for this is that, in itself, “the photographic message proper” is continuous. Despite the purely formal (technical) acknowledgment of the resemblance of the photograph to its field of objects (via its indexical dimension), it is unreadable as a signifier for any particular set of objects, without the discontinuity introduced by a connotative symbolic supplement. Or to put it another way, its ‘object’ is indeterminate. It signifies only as a sign of ‘the photographic’–meaning the purely denotative–in general.

For Barthes, the “photographic message proper” denotes only denotation. It is simply a sign of the real. Precisely how the photograph can convey this message, however, Barthes does not, and cannot, say– outside the appeal to a technical knowledge of the photographic process (the causal connection). Yet the deployment of such knowledge in any particular case presupposes the status of the photograph as a sign. It is thus necessary to reintroduce the aesthetic dimension of the photographic image, methodologically excluded by Barthes as a result of his opposition of signification to aisthesis, if the photograph is to be properly understood. For the photograph is not just a sign; it is itself a thing in the world.

Image, indexicality and reproduction
It is the virtue of the image that it combines the aesthetic, spatio-temporal concretion of an object of sight with the element of abstraction inherent in ideas. This has always been its essential mediating function, from its understanding in ancient rhetoric as the graphic manifestation of an idea–without which, according to Aristotle, “the soul never thinks”–to the modernist and surrealist images of Williams Carlos Williams’ “no ideas but in things” and Benjamin’s dialectical historical images. Whether it be understood objectivistically, as in the Judeo-Christian tradition, as “the essential reality of a thing,” or subjectivistically, as in the proto-Romantic productive imagination, an image has always been a visual presentation of reality, at once sensuous and particular, ideal and abstract.(6)

In combining aesthetic particularity with abstraction in this way, the image shares something with the notion of form to be found in Kant’s conception of a pure, reflective judgment of taste. This is a notion of form which has become increasingly constitutive of the ‘aesthetic’ in its restrictive modern sense as the domain of the beautiful and the ugly, the domain of taste.(7) However, for all its sensuousness, this notion of form remains more abstract than the image, since it excludes all reference to a visual representational function. (Hence its suitability to Greenberg’s medium-specific, physically reductive, ‘formalism modernism.’) In its inherent representational function, the notion of the image exceeds the domain of the Kantian aesthetic, without, however, sacrificing presence to meaning, in the manner of the Saussurean ‘sign.’ In particular, its theological history of ontological surrogacy (as sensual conduit to the divine)(8) offers a conceptual model for the unification of iconicity with indexicality, which Benjamin’s materialist conception of image-spaces effectively exploits.

Benjamin replaces the simple theological unity of participation in the divine with the multi-form, materially diverse, concrete unity (unity of indexicality and iconicity) made up by the history of technical reproducibility. This is the metaphorical moment of his thought: displacement of the theological into the cultural history of technology, or the experience of technology as cultural-historical form. This, in my view, is the conceptual importance of Benjamin’s writings on the image for today: they exploit the inherent reproducibility of the image. As Adorno put it:

There is an obvious qualitative leap between the hand that draws an animal on the wall of a cave and the camera that makes it possible for the same image to appear simultaneously at innumerable places. But the objectivation [Objektivation] of the drawing vis-à-vis what is unmediately seen already contains the potential of the technical procedure that effects the separation of what is seen from the subjective act of seeing. Each work, insofar as it is intended for many, is already its own reproduction.(9)

Each work, insofar as it is intended for many, is already its own reproduction. Reproducibility is the ground of iconicity. Reproduction produces resemblance. Different techniques of reproduction (forms of indexicality) produce different (aesthetically specific) forms of iconicity. The image is what is visually reproducible, in this broad sense.

What the photograph taught Benjamin about the image in general is that the key to the icon is not ‘resemblance’ in some Platonic sense, but reproducibility: an anological relation produced by an indexical connection. This transforms our understanding of the photographic image, in at least four ways.

1. What Barthes called the “unreadable continuity of analogical perfection” constituted by the indexicality of the photographic process imparts to the photograph its own specific form of aesthetic totality, in which the determination of the frame (shot selection/cropping) predominates over all internal, compositional relations.

2. It is this specific form of aesthetic totality which signifies ‘the photographic’–the purely denotative–in general: not merely symbolically (not just by convention), but indexically, in Pierce’s sense of the index as a sign which contains an icon as a constituent part–a “Firstness” signifying through a quality which it has as a thing. That is, we need to retrieve the aesthetic dimension of Pierce’s notion of the “firstness” of the icon from the epistemological critique of ‘resemblance’ and apply it to the iconic aspect of the index, if we are to understand how a photograph can signify the real.

3. This irreducibly aesthetic dimension to the signifying function of the photographic image is the carrier of its specifically historical meaning. As Benjamin put it:

What differentiates images from the “essences” of phenomenology is their historic index . . . The historical index of the images doesn’t simply say that they belong to a specific [chronological] time, it says above all that they only enter into legibility at a specific time. . . this “entering into legibility” constitutes a specific critical point of the movement inside them.(10)

4. It is the passing of the photograph as the technically dominant form of image production, with the increasing use of ‘compositional’ digital technologies, which makes its iconic function legible today. The illusion of absolute analogy carried by the purely denotative aspect of the photographic image made it (for one hundred and fifty years) the epistemically privileged form of the image in general, to which all other forms of image production had progressively to accommodate themselves in order to produce a credible denotative effect. The continuous or ‘all-over’ image imposed by the technical form of the photographic process became a new socio-historically imposed normative form of aesthetic totality to which all other forms–painterly, musical, literary–were tendentially subject.

In short, through his understanding of photography, Benjamin both historicizes and re-cognitivises the field of aesthetics through attention to the aesthetic dimension of technological form. His conception of the image opens aesthetics out onto broader social processes, without leaving behind the experience of form. It offers new ways of thinking about the historical meaning of the latest kinds of image-production, in a world moving rapidly beyond ‘traditional’ photographic form.

1. (Back) Charles Sanders Pierce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Justus Buchler (ed.), Philosophical Writings of Pierce (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), p.105.
2. (Back) See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp.67-68.
3. (Back) Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message” (1961), in his Image-Music-Text, trans. by Stephen Heath, (London: Fontana-Collins, 1977), p.17.
4. (Back) Pierce, op. cit., pp.106, 119.
5. (Back) Ibid., pp.104, 108.
6. (Back) See W.J.T. Mitchell, “What is an Image?” in his Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University Press, 1986), pp.7-46.
7. (Back) Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p.11.
8. (Back) See Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Age of Art, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University Press, Chicago), 1994.
9. (Back) T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p.33; emphasis added.
10. (Back) Walter Benjamin, “N [Re the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]” in Gary Smith (ed.), Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History (Chicago: University Press, Chicago, 1989), p.50.