Hysteria and the helio-trope: on bodies, gender and the photograph.

What makes photographs philosophical is that they prompt and defeat theory.

- Norton Batkin(1)

Confessions

Roland Barthes's last work, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981), begins on a confessional note: "I decided I liked Photography in opposition to the Cinema, from which I nonetheless failed to separate it."(2) Today this statement may sound paradoxical. Yet when Barthes first began writing on photography in the late 1950s cinema was attracting a significant amount of theoretical attention while photography was left to bear its role as silent witness, as "still," as reproduction, or alternately, as it slowly made its way into the museum, as art. It is precisely the poverty of photography visa vis the cinema that Barthes finds significant; because "in it nothing can be refused or transformed," the photograph operates as both a window onto the past and a defiantly present surface. Thus, Barthes's opening declaration is both a challenge to his peers - a red cape waving in the theoretical bullring - and a confession of his own longing to reach beyond the parameters of analysis, and toward the "indescribable meaning" of the photograph, a desire that marks his text throughout.

Camera Lucida announces a departure that is simultaneously a return. In Mythologies (1957), written 23 years prior, Barthes charges the photograph with trickery and mendacity. In the short chapter "Photography and Electoral Appeal" he notes that the photograph works on the level of myth as a "second-order semiological system" and, consequently, obscures its own ideological investment. "Inasmuch as photography is an ellipse of language and a condensation of an 'ineffable social whole,' it constitutes an anti-intellectual weapon and tends to spirit away politics."(3) Later, this suspicion gives way to a more precise analysis of the photographic operation. Sixteen years before Camera Lucida, Barthes wrote in "The Rhetoric of the Image" that

[t]he type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes not a consciousness of the being-thereof the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then.(4)

After locating the informational and symbolic level of meaning something is left in the photograph; Barthes refers to this third meaning as le sens obtuse. Le sens obtuse appears to exist outside of culture. It belongs to the family of "pun, buffoonery, useless expenditure." It is indifferent to moral and aesthetic categories and thus troubles the photograph that resists being read entirely as either nature or art. In order to grasp le sens obtuse, Barthes looks to specific images that attract him, employing a "vague, casual, even cynical phenomenology; in Camera Lucida.(5)

Upon looking at a photograph of Napoleon's youngest brother, Barthes states with amazement, "I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor." We discern here his desire to believe in the alchemy of photographic presence. While looking at the Winter Garden photograph - an old and faded photograph of his mother as a young girl - Barthes finds in it that quality that defined his mother throughout her life, "the assertion of gentleness." Barthes finds that the viewing of this particular photograph initiates his own personal trauma - an awareness that his mother was at one time present, and is now dead. The famed semiotician allows this disturbance to infect his analysis such that the photograph is read as more than an object, rather, it is viewed in relation to both his body, and the body of its subject (his mother). The photograph is perceived as an embodied sign, but also as a corporeal form of knowledge. For Barthes, this photograph achieves "the impossible science of the unique being."(6) He is seduced by the signifier, mystified by what Andre Bazin calls the "mummy" of the photograph - a "something there" that cannot be translated and that makes the photograph indescribable.

The Winter Garden photograph is not reproduced in Camera Lucida. Barthes excludes "his" photograph, mystifying this umbilical image, when he states that "the Photograph - my Photograph - is without culture."(7) I share Barthes's "ontological desire" to explore the contradictions that make the photograph a unique form of knowledge. It is not my goal to argue against the (re)mythification of "his" photograph by attributing its enigmatic qualities entirely to discursive effect, but to explore the contradictions that have enabled the photograph to persist as a technology of the self that allows us to look into the image and see our own desires reflected back. The photograph's reference to a time past disturbs a synchronic analysis. It exists as a perceptual object, but also defines a spatial relief, an unfolding topography. Thus the photograph demarcates particular fields - locations that recombine the relations of normative space and time, operating to mark, inhibit and open onto sites of discontinuous desire.

When Barthes states that the photograph "always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see" he points to the reversibility of the photograph? Because it both touches and is touched, because it exists within perception and because it is an extension that reaches out to the same sun that kissed the emperor, the photograph touches us. Barthes emphasizes the fact that the photograph begins and ends at the body, yoking the image and desiring gaze. In order to understand photography's corporeal resistance to being understood as an entirely discursive effect, we must turn to the photograph itself, its banal and obstinate surface, and its madness, the hallucinatory interval produced through the photograph's relationship to an obtuse third meaning.

The photograph seems to be "without a code" and yet relies upon a familiar, naturalized system of signification. Now, with the advent of digital imaging - a technology that replaces the photograph as an efficient commercial medium and vehicle of information - the photograph is becoming recognizable inasmuch as it differs from this new medium. When Paul Delaroche exclaimed "from today painting is dead" approximately 150 years ago, he marked that particular historical moment when the discovery of photography annihilated and liberated painting. This exclamation anticipated the perceptual changes that photography brought to bear on painting. The death of painting meant its liberation from description. Thus, the painted image no longer needed to fulfill the burden of realism - the communication of information through resemblance. Painting was both "dead" as a viable commercial medium, and liberated to "art for art's sake." The photograph, like painting before it, is now dead. It is an object of art historical contemplation. This is, however, both a death and a birth, for the photograph emerges as a thing in itself.

And what is a photograph? The perception of the photograph as an accurate witness to an event depends upon the single fraction of a second when light-sensitive emulsion is grazed by light. The mystical and theological implications of such a moment are what give the photograph its value as a witness, almost as if it were the Gaze itself. In his essay "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" Bazin states that "photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time."(9) Bazin suggests that there are qualities particular to the photograph by which it refers to reality; the photograph is an index, a mummy, a fossil that bears in it a trace of that to which it refers. In this sense, the photographic portrait is indexically related to its referent as it "embalms" the subject standing before the camera. This is what makes the photograph a message without a code - more a moment of contact than a language. Our scientific faith in the photographic process as alchemical witness invests (or degrades) the photograph with such visual capital that its magic, when transformed into evidence, becomes banal.

Throughout history the anxiety produced by the photograph's sharp detail and simulacral properties (what Allan Trachtenberg describes as "too uncanny to be understood as just another copy of the world") trailed ghost-like behind pronouncements of its scientificity. Early accounts often note the viewer's frightened and amazed response to the life-like image. In 1912 Sadikichi Hartmann wrote of the daguerreotype:

What a strange effect, this silvery glimmer and mirror-like sheen! Held toward the light, all substance seems to vanish from the picture: the highlights grow darker than the shadows, and the image of some gentlemen in a stock or some lady in a bonnet and puffed sleeves appears like a ghostlike vision. Yet as soon as it is moved away from the light and contemplated from a certain angle, the image reappears, the mere shadow of a countenance comes to life again.(10)

The daguerreotype positions the viewer in a particular relationship to its surface, evoking a sense of presence as the image literally emerges. The "ghostlike vision" is produced when the correct angle of light and eye animates the darkly etched line into a bright likeness. Yet the wonder that the photograph inspired in its early years is not merely a record of the cultural shock induced by the introduction of a new technology. Although the burden of realism - to provide likenesses, illustrate commercial goods and act as proof of identity - soon limited the scope of its form, the peculiarities of the photographic process were keenly felt. Today, in the wake of the digital image, the photograph is again an object of curiosity. The contradictory nature of the photograph contributes to our reading of it, as Hartmann did, as a "shadow of a countenance come to life again."

Photographing Hysteria: Hystericizing Photography

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, photography's ability to record a fraction of time was employed to capture the writhing body of the hysteric. Not unlike Hartmann's amazed response to the daguerreotype, this historical event brought both frustration and fascination. Although the body of the hysteric was captured by film, the disease escaped visual comprehension. In his effort to diagnose the disease, Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot equipped the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris with the new photographic technology. Yet even with the aid of photography physicians were unable to trace the display of "excessive femininity" - compulsion, theatrical swooning and aphasia - to the body. This project was frustrated by the fact that, as a disease of imitation, the hysteric emitted symptoms that were highly theatrical yet not diagnosable, resisting a bodily referent. Specialists had two views of hysteria, either as an irritation of the female sexual organs, or as mere playacting by women. Eventually, Charcot rejected both of these diagnoses and proposed a third - that hysteria was induced by suggestion, and thus mitigated by hypnosis. (This insight led Sigmund Freud to depart from Charcot's reliance upon visual signs and to consider the psychological factors that influence neurological disorders leading, eventually, to his discovery of the "talking cure.") Hysteria was ultimately an enigma of representation: the visual sign seemed to have no direct relationship to the body.(11)

During Charcot's famous Tuesday lectures at the Salpetriere Hospital the hysterics were displayed and discussed by the physicians. These sessions were vital, since, as Sander Gilman notes "hysteria must be seen to have observable symptoms."(12) In other words, medical observation is an integral component contributing to the hysterical episode. Charcot spoke of his weekly seminar as a "theatre" and his most performative patients as his "stars." His clinic became, as he said, "a 'living theatre' of female pathology." Patients were coached in their performances for the camera, and, under hypnosis, were often instructed to strike theatrical poses. One of Charcot's most "talented" and well-known patients, the 15-year-old Augustine, was featured in the Salpetriere's journal Iconographies in various postures, illustrating hysteria as if it were a stage play.

Elaine Showalter writes of such images that "where the women themselves did not willingly throw themselves into Ophelia-like postures, asylum superintendents, armed with the new technology of photography, imposed the costume, gesture, props, and expression of Ophelia upon them." And of Augustine in particular, that "[w]ith her white hospital gown and flowing locks, [she] frequently resembles the reproduction of Ophelia as icon and actress which had been in wide circulation."(13) Showalter implies that Augustine is a performer. It is even unclear whether there is an original disease underneath the hysterical symptom or if imitation is the disease itself. Georges Didi-Huberman writes that "[M]imesis is the hysterical symptom par excellence. Hysteria, considered 'like an art; is the art and the mannerism of theatricality . . . and no theatricality would ever be able to equal such theatrics."(14) By this account as well, the hysteric is, like the actress, one who manipulates signs. Yet here the diagnostic project is abandoned; the relationship of body to sign remains enigmatic.

In Hysteria from Freud to Lacan (1989), Monique David-Menard likens the dual aspect of hysteria, its physiological and mimetic element, to "the dual aspect of the linguistic sign." Yet she notes that pain, which exists outside of language, "is bracketed, as it were (not actually suppressed), so that the object can be defined as signifiers, as systems of differential abstract elements whose organization makes it possible to build a description of the structure of language."(15) The body does not disappear, nor does pain, when we read the body as a sign. Rather, the referent is suspended when we read - as Didi-Huberman and Showalter do - hysteria as performative. However, a return to the "real" body does not resolve the paradox either. The illusion of hysteria cannot be shattered by separating body and sign, for each term is imbedded in the other. The theatricality of hysteria is not proof of its fraudulent nature but, rather, that hysteria is a strategy of both imitation and subversion - thus the hysteric has been read alternately as victim and rebel.

Charcot's Augustine, later dubbed the "pin-up girl"(16) of the French Surrealists, attempted many escapes. The hospital's last entry concerning Augustine, dated September 9, 1880, notes that she "escaped from the Salpetriere, disguised as a man."(17) Successfully recasting her role, Augustine disrupted Charcot's medical drama. Yet her gender disguise was both confessional and confounding - less a transgression than a capitulation to her medical inscription. Augustine escaped her containment by entering into mimesis, by becoming the actress she was coached to be.

Hysteria and the Postmodern Portrait

The photograph is both an icon and an index: both a resemblance and a trace of the thing to which it refers.(18) When the indexical relationship to the referent is suspended - as in the reading of the hysteric - the photograph is a questionable document. Yet we still look to the photograph for its trace of reality, we still hold it to a documentary standard even as we suspect it of operating in bad faith. In the case of the postmodern portrait, the artist utilizes the photograph's "bad faith" in order to interrogate the notion of a unified self. For example, in Chicken (1991) by Catherine Opie, the tight cropping, frontal face, flat lighting, bright ochre background and the frame's engraved brass title summon the authority of the evidentiary photograph. Yet the figure's patently false mustache and goatee operate in opposition to such visual authority. The artificiality of these details suggest that the sign of gender (the mustache, the hair, the pose) and the photograph as an index of gender is counterfeit. Yet this parody is enabled by the fact that we lend credence to the photograph to begin with. This photograph's oscillation between believability and unbelievability suggests that "Chicken" is both an effect of signification and a body that once stood before the camera. In other words, this image relies upon the nature of the photograph (both index and icon) in order to present the figure as an amalgamation of sign and body. The female model's androgynous face, wide freckled nose and left earring stand in contrast to the "oriental" mustache and painted tear. Opie challenges deterministic notions of identity by presenting stereotypical signs of gender and ethnicity as props. Yet, as Opie herself has stated, many unquestioningly read this photograph as a depiction of a male figure. Is the effect of gender so easily produced? Does this significatory effect constitute gender?(19)

Judith Butler explores such issues of gender performativity in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), further elaborating upon her theory in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993). The term performativity originates from J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts. Citing Austin, Butler states that "a performative is that discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names."(20) Butler's notion of performativity is influenced by Jacques Derrida's reading of Austin in "Signature Event Context," where he notes that a speech act is generally citational and repeatable. For Derrida, the speech act is always within writing and thus "will never be through and through present to itself and to its content."(21) Butler brings Derrida's notion of performativity to bear on the subject of gender in order to argue "[t]hat the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality."(22) According to Butler, the body produces gender in its very iteration: thus there is "no doer behind the deed." Butler's theory has enabled a more nuanced understanding of gender and the way in which its boundaries are both instated and challenged through our everyday acts. By doing so, her work challenges essentialist notions of "woman" that have haunted the feminist project from its inception. Furthermore, the theory of gender performativity acknowledges specific tactics of rebellion (with insight into the possible consequences of such acts), thus providing a map for the future as well as a critique of the present.

In Bodies that Matter, Butler intends to prove that her notion of gender performativity is within a discursive and material framework. She refutes critics who decry her neglect of matter by defining the practice of signification as "a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter," summarizing this argument by gesturing toward "the materiality of the signifier itself."(23) Yet this notion of materiality makes it an effect of discursive formations. Unfortunately, this tells us nothing of effects that exist outside of discourse. Whether we call this the pre-discursive, the Real, madness, the situation or the body, it comes to haunt the boundary, fixity and surface we call matter. The material world provides friction to the seamless production and execution of scripted acts. It is this friction that allows fortuitous accidents and failed communication to haunt any meaningful act.

Butler accounts for such fortuitous failures when she notes that since the performative does not repeat uniformly and invariably,"repetition never fully accomplishes identity."(24) This failure enables the construction of identities outside of the gender norm. What permits this failure? Butler notes that the psyche is "that which both conditions and disables the repetitive performance of identity."(25) In the visual field, it is also the conditions of the art situation that affect the seamless repetition of regulatory norms. The particularities of the art object, the spatial context, the temporality of the viewing situation and the participation of the viewer resist a consistently uniform repetition. Thus the photograph does not merely cite and repeat norms that pre-exist it, but exists as a particular and unique object within a situation. Butler reminds us of the danger in confusing the visual with the linguistic when she refutes Catherine MacKinnon's totalizing polemic against the pornographic image: "She substitutes a set of linguistic imperatives for the visual field, implying not only a full transposition of the visual into the linguistic, but a full transposition of visual depiction into an efficacious performative."(26) Yet the theory of performativity has been used in precisely this manner, reading the visual field as if it were a text.

It is not within the scope of this essay to adequately consider the performative nature of gender, but I will concentrate on the application of this theory to the visual field.(27) Many cultural theorists have extended Butler's argument concerning gender to the representation of gender, claiming that the photograph operates performatively. For example, Carole-Anne Tyler concludes "Death Masks," her catalog essay for the 1997 Guggenheim exhibit "Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography," by re-asserting Derrida's definition of performativity and summarizing her application of this notion to the realm of photography:

We are all minstrels. There is at once self-expression and self-alienation in our self-images and the love objects that help define them. The voices of the dead speak through us. We are condemned to use their words to represent the desire that we are, which is figured as the sense of something behind our masks, or the difference between them, the death we mask with life and its roles and fetishes.(28)

Unfortunately, such descriptions loosely apply the notion of performativity to the visual field, sounding trite and ambiguously liberatory. We are not all minstrels. A close analysis of the photograph disturbs such a sweeping, inclusive statement.

To return to Opie's Chicken, we notice that the mustache, the brass label and shallow representational space mime the identificatory portrait. Simultaneously, the photograph resists our reading of it as entirely performative. Particular details - for instance, the reflection in the eyes that mirrors a professional light box - suggest a "doer behind the deed" and a precise moment in time. In parody the photograph operates performatively; it cites a discursive norm and not an essential truth. But, this photograph tends toward ambivalence; parody is threatened by indexical fidelity. Chicken fluctuates between these two poles.

Jennifer Blessing, curator of "Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose," explains this polarity when she states that such photographs promote "a fantasy of total gender transformation, or, conversely, allows the articulation of incongruity between the posing body and its assumed costume."(29) This incongruity is employed by Janine Antoni as a means to critique gender roles. Even a quick glance at Antoni's triptych More and Dad (1993) betrays the figures as fraudulent. The photographs mimic the family portrait - a rectangular image with a dappled green background, flat lighting and two figures directly facing the camera. In the three photographs, Mom and Dad's features are altered such that they appear both as themselves and made up as each other. Blessing explains that Antoni "confounds the gender distinction of her parents."(30) Yet it seems that the models' features dearly contradict their pose, makeup and costume. (This is not "mother" but a man with a wig.) This tells us something about photography but little regarding gender neither why it persists nor why it matters - except, perhaps, that it cannot be photographed. Antoni's caricature of the portrait, the family and gender portrays a contradiction at the heart of the performative account of identity. Ironically, by reducing gender to gesture, and self to sign, More and Dad demonstrates that although identities are "constructed," they are also embodied, and thus they matter.

Matthew Barney's photograph Away Gown (1991) is not a critique of gender norms (like Antoni's Mom and Dad), but revels in the instability of the photograph itself. Away Gown is presented as a document of a performance that we, the audience, never witness. Barney appears in drag in a white bathing suit and wrap (a "heat-formed prosthetic plastic swimsuit") while pantomiming gestures associated with football strategy, thereby confusing the signs that separate male and female, and thus confounding our reading of gender. Yet along with the drag persona, Barney exploits the photograph's ability to operate performatively. As in Cindy Sherman's well-known Untitled Film Still series, we look for the referent, the real Barney, the real body, the site of the ostensible performance. When we cannot find it we are left with the sense of uncertainty produced by an index without a trace - like a stop sign without a road. Although Away Gown may be more theatrical than absorptive, more iconic than indexical, it relies upon the photograph's suggestion of presence in order to confound it. Barney's employment of the photograph's capacity to hover between the truth of the index and the theatricality of the icon produces a kind of hysteria. Barthes describes the photograph as a kind of madness: it trembles between civility and fanatical desire. It is this madness and ecstasy that Barney activates by disturbing the coherence of the photograph.

Barney employs the mannerism of theatricality in order to suspend the referent indefinitely, and thus travel beyond the binary of transformation and incongruity. For Barney, identity is always a becoming and, consequently, perpetually deferred. in the photograph CREMASTER 4: Loughton Manual (1994), loosely based upon Barney's Cremaster 4 video, he stars as the "Loughton Candidate." (Cremaster refers to the muscle that withdraws the male testes at the premonition of danger or fear. Thus we are presented with an image of diminished, withdrawn or in some way altered masculinity.) With the figure's rabbit-like face, meticulous white suit and limp hand resting on the horn of a goat, the image suggests a mythological metamorphosis of the male figure. The fairies that accompany the Loughton Candidate, depicted in several of the photographs entitled CREMASTER 4: Fairie Field (1994), disrupt the logic of gender as well. With their garish display of male and female anatomy, the fairies represent a third gender, which, like Barthes's "third meaning," disturbs the binary of meaning. More a fissure of logic than an alternative, this third gender is expressed as a viscous space through which, in the video, the Loughton Candidate literally falls. This gelatinous space is communicated in the photographs through both the plasticity of the fairies' bodies and the synthetic nature of the photograph itself. The photographs are not printed on paper, but on a plastic base and are encased in "self-lubricating" plastic frames. By emphasizing plasticity, lubrication and artificiality, Barney neither displays the photograph as an original nor as a simulacrum, rather, it is but one form within an unfolding morphosis. In The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents (1998), Elisabeth Bronfen notes that "[i]n its resiliently protean quality, the language of hysteria radically defies closure. The traumatic knowledge it seeks to articulate obliquely is infinitely convertible."(31) Similarly, Barney applies the language of hysteria to the photograph, as well as the hysteria of the photograph to language, disturbing the photograph as sign by emphasizing its mutability.

Since CREMASTER 4: Fairie Field is not a still from Barney's Cremaster 4 video, but based upon its narrative, and since the previous image, Away Gown, is presented as a document of a performance that we, the audience, never actually view, the question emerges: to what does the photograph refer? These projects shift from medium to medium (from film to video to photography to sculpture to performance), they refer loosely to each other, and to Barney's own invented symbols. Through perpetual mimicry the photographic referent is suspended.

Barney's employment of the hysteria of the photograph allows for an impish disruption of the terms of gender. Yet the question of the original still looms behind the flickering shadow-play of symptoms. Is there a body beyond the photograph?. Is gender subverted through such postmodern theatrics? Barney does not attempt to reclaim "the body": he remains within the hysteric's discourse, imitating an imitation, refusing metaphysical resolution. But it is the photographs hysteria that Barney utilizes in order to perplex masculinity. According to Barthes, photographic madness is tamed by its domestication in art and its banalization as evidence but he states that even "such evidence can be a sibling of madness." Using the photograph's madness, its bipolar oscillation, Barney's photographs challenge the sanity of such divisions. Between opposite poles - art and evidence, the photograph and the self - postmodernity looks for a deconstructive liberation. But we never were entirely constrained, nor are we now free. (Perhaps this is why "Chicken's" painted tear still moves me.)

Barney's artworks expose an enigma at the core of poststructuralism: the relationship of the body to language, and by extension, the issue of matter's inscrutability, yet persistence, in signifying practices. Stephen Heath argues that "to explain hysteria as 'the problem of sexual identity' is to miss and to contain the struggle it represents, the resistance it marks against the assumption of identity."(32) This instability emerges as a rupture, a "wound" or "prick" to the viewer. As Bronfen notes in her reading of Camera Lucida, "[w]hat wounds [Barthes], as the photograph broadcasts its message that something has been, is that this spectral identification unsettles the interpellating spectator in the narcissistic self-assurance of his survival: 'Why is it that I am alive here and now?'"(33)

To discuss the hysteria of the photograph, and not merely the photograph of hysteria, reverses a theoretical convention whereby the photograph is brought into the discussion as an illustration of a theory. Instead, I have proposed that the photograph has an ontology that is, at times, hysterical. Operating in this manner, the photograph supports a theory of gender performativity. But this effect, whereby the sign loses hold of its referent, is neither proof nor disproof of identity. It does suggest, however, that the materiality of the photograph itself is an essential aspect of representation.

Postmodern thought generally emphasizes the discursivity of identity while leaving to the side those elements of being that exist before or outside of the text (such as madness, oral history and the body). Thus the discussion often circles around the object without entering into it. The photograph is an index, the photograph is a resemblance; criticism circles around this conundrum. Postmodern photography exploits this paradox. But by entering into mimetic discourse, postmodernism does not resolve the question of bodies or presence, it suspends it. In this sense, postmodernism is itself hysterical. When Barthes proclaims photography as the "impossible science of the unique being," he pinpoints its most troubling aspect. Photography's relationship to time past bears theological implications that are at odds with our contemporary theoretical tools - deconstruction, the historical episteme and notions of cultural construction. The photograph (and each in its own manner) initiates a new form of knowledge that departs from our philosophical notions of reality.

Mimesis, Animism, Contact

By expanding our notion of imitation, photography's deviation from our understanding of nature may be reconciled. The photograph is not merely a likeness; it bears a complex relationship to the thing it resembles. As is suggested by Barthes's account of viewing the Winter Garden photograph, the image is touched and touches. Yet only the image that is "for us" will pierce the banality of the photograph. In such cases, the photograph is animated, bearing its index like a double ended arrow that both points away from its origin and toward its receiver.

As we know from Plato's allegory of the cave, the photograph acts as a copy that is nothing but a shadow of the object. A copy is distinct from and secondary to the original. But a copy also carries within it the possibility of becoming a fetish, an object invested with the spirit of that which it resembles. Painting in particular falls prey to the world of appearances thereby drawing the beholder away from the essence of its subject. Andrew Benjamin explains that "[w]hat the painting cannot present is the essential being of that which is presented. What paintings are constrained to present therefore, is, using the formulation of The Republic, 'the appearance as it appears:'"(34) The photograph complicates this possibility, since it operates as both imitation and as a trace of the thing imitated. Thus the photograph involves a "two-layered notion of mimesis," what Michael Taussig describes as both "a copying or imitation, and a palpable, sensuous, connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived."(35) This may help explain Barthes's equivocation over the photograph. As a critic, he suspends the photograph's "sensuous connection" in order to denaturalize the sign. As a son and a lover, Barthes refuses to forego the photograph's relationship to "the body of the perceiver and perceived." His relationship to the image is contradictory. Barthes reminds us of the moment of looking, and the "having-been-there," the time of the object, by continually shifting his reading from the subject of the photograph to its surface.

The surface, subject and viewer are brought together in the notion of animism. Animism is the proximity (both spiritual and physical) of subject to photograph, and of photograph to viewer. When the image operates as an index it takes on the qualities associated with the subject photographed. A photograph of a loved one, for example, is hidden under the pillow or carried in a locket around the neck. To be close to the photograph is to be close to the person. In this manner, the photograph acts as a messenger rather than a message.

Conversely, the photograph can be perceived as a hollow imitation of the subject so that, as Andre Adolphe Disderi, the inventor of the carte-de-visite portrait noted, we see the actor "where we believed we put the man."(36) By refusing transparency the theatrical photograph beckons the viewer in much the same way as Bertolt Brecht's V-effects engage the audience (Verfremdung, to "make strange"). This dislocation of representational space emphasizes the surface of the photograph, and in doing so, reveals the space between its surface and the viewer. Rather than transporting the viewer to an "other" location the theatrical photograph activates social space.

This technique is utilized in postmodern practices by emphasizing the theatricality of the photograph. Yet what is most distinct in, for instance, Sherman's Untitled Film Still series, is not its shattering of mimesis, its Brechtian distantiation, but a mirroring ad infinitum. Here the photograph operates as a mise-en-abyme. Sherman stars as "Cindy Sherman" as a black and white 1950s B-movie statler. In Untitled Film Still #4, (1978) the figure cautiously leans into a doorway, behind which a long and unevenly lit hall suggests a horror narrative that we immediately recognize. As we follow the image from one reference to another (movie image, "Cindy Sherman," series, back to movie image), the photograph leads the viewer from one referent to another.

The still image resonates with the narrative that it suggests. This effects us precisely because the photograph's imitative property serves to make associations with a referent that is itself mimetic (what Taussig calls "the mimesis of mimesis"). Thus Untitled Film Still #4 is animated by "the filmic," and not by a particular film. This photograph resuscitates a particular mode of perception that Walter Benjamin calls the "mimetic faculty." In "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin argues that its reproducibility brings the photograph near, which, as I have noted, is a kind of animism. The photograph's reproducibility does not shatter the aura but replaces the aura of originality (distance) with that of intimacy (closeness). Taussig explains the relevance of the mimetic faculty for a re-mystification of the signifier, a new means to "animate" critical theory:

[I]f I am correct in invoking a certain magic of the signifier and what Walter Benjamin took the mimetic faculty to be - namely, the compulsion to become the Other - and if, thanks to new social conditions and new techniques of reproduction (such as cinema and mass production of imagery), modernity has ushered in a veritable rebirth, a recharging and retooling the mimetic faculty, then it seems to me that we are forthwith invited if not forced into the inner sanctum of mimetic mysteries where, in imitating, we will find distance from the imitated and hence gain some release from the suffocating hold of 'constructionism' no less than the dreadful passive view of nature it upholds.(37)

The mimetic faculty relates the sensuous qualities of the object to the thing it resembles and thus complicates the notion of performativity. For here, the image is not merely a sign, but, like hysteria, a faculty that mobilizes "the compulsion to become the Other."

Taussig notes that "[w]ith good reason postmodernism has relentlessly instructed us that reality is artifice yet, so it seems to me, not enough surprise has been expressed as to how we nevertheless get on with living, pretending - thanks to the mimetic faculty - that we live facts, not fictions."(38) Here Taussig complicates the notion of mimesis in order to save the image from "constructionism," whereby the mimetic object is seen to have merely a discursive relationship to its object. Animism suggests one way in which "mimetic mysteries" lead us elsewhere, to imaginary sites and to other bodies. Since the object is animated by that which it resembles, the two - image and object - are intricately bound to each other. The mimetic faculty allows us to perceive these relationships through imitation; the photograph "ushers in a veritable rebirth" of the mimetic faculty.

The indexical relationship brings the body of the viewer into relationship with the body that animates the image. The punctum, the perceived index, initiates a collision that is both an association between bodies and a disruption of the studium, the cultural codes that inform the photographic text. For Barthes, the photograph brings him into contact with his mother. This contact produces a trauma that ruptures the photograph as myth, as a "second-order semiological system" as cultural text and as discourse. Similarly, Bronfen likens hysteria to a significatory failure that she terms the"navel," a traumatic site that exposes "the fragility of the body, the precariousness of the image repertoire, and the fallibility of the symbolic."(39) Like the photograph's punctum, the navel is starkly indexical and challenges the coherence of meaning: it is this site around which the hysterical display revolves.(40)

NOTES

1. Norton Batkin, Photography and Philosophy (New York: Garland, 1990), p. 81.

2. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Richard Howard, trans. (New York: Noonday Press, 1981), p. 3. Originally published as La chambre clare (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980).

3. Barthes, "Photography and Electoral Appeal; in Mythologies, Annette Lavers, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 91.

4. Barthes, "The Rhetoric of the Image," in Image/Music/Text Stephen Heath, trans. (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), p. 45.

5. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 20.

6. Ibid.,p. 71.

7. Ibid., p. 90.

8. Ibid., p. 4.

9. Andre Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," in What is Cinema?, Hugh Gray, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 14.

10. Sadikichi Hartmann, "The Daguerreotype," in The Valiant Knights of Daguerre, Harry W. Lawton and George Knox, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 142. Quoted in Allen Trachtenberg, "Likeness as Identity: Reflections on the Daguerrean Mystique," in The Portrait in Photography, Graham Clarke, ed. (London: Reaktion, 1992), p. 174.

11. Barthes was afflicted by a sense of boredom that he termed hysteria. This sensation occurred during his childhood, and later in official meetings, panel discussions and among strangers at parties - all situations in which social discourse is paramount. Louis-Jean Calvet relates Barthes's obsession with this term (derived from Hustera, or uterus) to his early "feminine universe," which was both a comfort and a form of alienation. Barthes writes: "Actually, I had no real social context in my childhood and adolescence, in the sense that the only person I was really attached to was my mother. She was my home and I did not have any social milieu." This biographical note correlates three themes found in Camera Lucida - Barthes's remembrance of his mother, his stated desire to reach beyond the banality of the photography and his effort to look at certain photographs "without culture."

Barthes's fear of illness also manifests itself as a dread of hospitals and clinics (where he was often forced to reside due to his lung condition). Ironically, after a traffic accident, Barthes was taken to the Salpetriere Hospital and died there a month later. His funeral took place at the morgue in the rear of the hospital courtyard. Jean-Louis Calvet, Roland Barthes: A Biography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 12-15 and 251-253.

12. Sander Gilman, "The Image of the Hysteric," in Hysteria Beyond Freud, Sander Gilman, et. al., eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 352.

13. Elaine Showater, "Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender," in Hysteria Beyond Freud, Sander Gilman, et. al., eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 86.

14. Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention de l'hysterie (Paris: Macula, 1982), p. 163. (Translation mine.)

15. Monique David-Menard, Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and Language in Psychoanalysis, Catherine Porter, trans. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 163.

16. Showalter also notes that for Louis Aragon and Andre Breton "Augustine was the 'delicious' embodiment of the sexy 'young hysterics' they so much admired." Showalter, "Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender," p: 312.

17. Originally from accounts of Augustine, also called "Louise" and "X..." in D. M. Bourneville, Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere, Vol. II (1878): 124-67; and Vol. III (1879-80): 187-99. Quoted in Showalter, "Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender," p. 312.

18. Charles Sanders Peirce, "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, Justus Buchler, ed. (New York: Dover, 1955), p. 106. The photograph is used by Peirce as an example of the sign which is both an index and an icon. According to Peirce, photographic resemblance is not purely conventional, but also "due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature."

19. Catherine Opie, Presentation at the Society for Photographic Education Conference, San Francisco Art Institute, November 7, 1998.

20. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge Press, 1993), p. 13.

21. Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context," in Limited Inc (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 18.

22. Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 136.

23. Ibid., p. 50.

24. Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," in The Lesbian and Gay Cultural Studies Reader, Henry Abelove, et. al., eds. (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 315.

25. Ibid., p 317.

26. Butler, "Burning Acts," in Performativivy and Performance, Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 221. In this essay Butler addresses the speech act as a form of violence. She describes a cross burning, an event which took place in front of a black family's house, as a threat that carries with it the historical correlation "between cross burning and marking a community, family, or an individual for further violence." Later in this essay she argues against MacKinnon's notion of pornography as a form of "hate speech; claiming that pornography is not necessarily a form of violence, and may be read instead as "the text of gender's unreality." Yet by her own logic we might argue that the production, distribution and consumption of pornography is also a threat that carries with it the historical correlation between the pornographic image and the marking of a body for further objectification.

Butler objects to MacKinnon's argument on two points. First, she finds that MacKinnon reads the visual field as a kind of hate speech, thus "the visual field is then figured as speaking." Butler also objects to the fact that MacKinnon conrates "the experience of reality and reality...." It is fascinating that in order to support her claim that pornography is an "allegory" of an imperative, Butler invokes both experience and the particularity of the visual field, two areas of concern I find lacking in her theory of gender performativity.

27. In response to Butler's notion of gender performativity, Elizabeth Grosz writes that "all the force and effect of her powerful arguments could, I believe, be strengthened, not through the play generated by a term somehow beyond dimension of sex, in the order of gender, but within the very instabilities of the category of sex itself, of bodies themselves. Isn't it more threatening to show, not that gender can be at variance with sex ... but that there is an instability at the very heart of sex and bodies, the fact the body is what it is capable of doing, and what any body is capable of doing is well beyond the tolerance of any given culture?" Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversions (New York: Routledge Press, 1995), pp. 213-14.

28. Carole-Anne Tyler, "Death Masks," in Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography, Jennifer Blessing, ed. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1997), p. 132.

29. Jennifer Blessing, Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography, Jennifer Blessing, ed. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1997), p. 8.

30. Ibid., p. 111.

31. Elisabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 41.

32. Quoted in Bronfen, p. 185.

33. Bronfen, p. 93.

34. Andrew Benjamin, Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde (New York: Routledge Press, 1991), p. 22.

35. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Rout;edge Press, 1993), p. 21.

36. Quoted in Stephen Bann, "Erased Physiognomy: Theodore Gericault, Paul Strand and Garry Winogrand," in Clarke, p. 33.

37. Taussig, p. XIX.

38. Ibid., p. XV.

39. Bronfen, p. 11.

40. Versions of this essay were presented at the College Art Association Conference, Toronto, February 1998 and at the Visible Evidence Conference, San Francisco State University, August 1998. I would like to thank Tom Bowen, Cathy Lee Crane and Michael Ann Holly for their editorial suggestions.

DORE BOWEN is an artist, art critic and Ph.D. candidate in the Visual and Cultural Studies Program at the University of Rochester. She is currently teaching at San Francisco State University.