Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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3.3.06 The slow pleasures of Roland Barthes

36. "...It is the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself. The noeme of language is perhaps this impotence, or, to put it positively: language is, by nature, fictional; the attempt to render language unfictional requires an enormous apparatus of measurements: we convoke logic, or, lacking that, sworn oath; but the Photograph is indifferent to all intermediaries: it does not invent; it is authentication itself; the (rare) artifices it permits are not probative; they are, on the contrary, trick pictures: the photograph is laborious only when it fakes. It is a prophecy in reverse: like Cassandra, but eyes fixed on the past, Photography never lies: or rather, it can lie as to the meaning of the thing, beng by nature tendentious, never as to its existence."

38. "The only way I can transform the Photograph is into refuse: either the drawer or the wastebasket. Not only does it commonly have the fate of paper (perishable), but even if it is attached to more lasting supports, it is still mortal: like a living organism, it is born on the level of the sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages... Attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes; there is nothing left to do but throw it away.

Earlier societies managed so that memory, the substitute for life was eternal and that at least the thing which spoke Death should itself be immortal: this was the Monument. But by making the (mortal) Photograph into the general and somehow natural witness of "what has been," modern society has renounced the Monument. A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything whic denies ripening."

For the past two days I have been sick with exhaustion, and with the existential horror of directing. The tonic has been slow, gentle swims in the sargasso syntax of Barthes' Camera Lucida, a delight of a book, impossible to read in one week, let alone in one sitting. Although I think he's labouring the point a bit at the end of 38 (what, after all, was the latter 18th century if not the Age of Revolutions?), I have been known, after a little too much bourbon and in the right company, to go on about the replacement of memory with the photographed image, and how too often things are not actually looked at, only seen long enough to be recorded - recordings which are then filed away never re-examined. The proof of the experience has become more important than the private enjoyment of the experience itself. Disagree? Next time you're at a gig, watch how many people spend the entire time taking camera-phone snaps rather than actually listening to the music.

( 1:00 PM )

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