Philosophy of Photography - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2013

A digital solution to the problems caused by US military personnel misusing their digital cameras, pixelization (the intentional post-production enlargement of pixels to obscure potentially disturbing content) has become a defining feature of newsmedia visualizations of American military atrocity during the War on Terror. Here, I consider the ethics and politics of pixelizing photographs depicting torture at Abu Ghraib, the exploits of the American ‘Kill Team’ in Afghanistan, and the carnality of US Marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban soldiers. Ostensibly, as a technique applied to those parts of the photograph that reveal the corporeal truth of war most graphically, such redaction is meant to protect the victims. But it also renders their appearance variable, subject to editorial whim, and pixelization alters not only the appearance of the photograph, but how it signifies. I query whether pixelization offers any meaningful redress for the victims and the extent to which it blunts photography’s capacity to document harm.

Photographic truth has traditionally been theorized on the basis of ‘correctness’, whereby the image’s mechanically produced correspondence to reality guarantees its truth. This article suggests that Christian Patterson’s photobook Redheaded Peckerwood (2011) engages with a notion of photographic truth that can more usefully be understood in relation to Martin Heidegger’s descriptions of truth as aletheia or ‘unconcealing’. By including ambiguity, mystery and fiction in this nonetheless seemingly truthful retelling of historical events, the work suggests that a straightforward notion of the photograph’s transparency to the world is insufficient to explain the truth of photography.

This araticle examines elements of Jean-François Lyotard’s paradoxical negotiations with aesthetic experiences in order to characterize his critical involvement with discursivized forms of knowing and explanation. These elements are offered as salient and salutary correctives to the symmetrical dogmas of disenchanting naturalisms and culturalisms currently programming typical misprisions of the aesthetic. Lyotard’s 1971 Discourse, Figure, as well as some of his later writings on visual art and artists, are not interpretatively integrated here but instead explored in terms of an anti-discursive logic that actually animates what appear to be their own anti-aesthetic commitments and conclusions. The article tracks the ambivalent, but persistent, role that perception, art-medium and sensate experience play in Lyotard’s efforts to see beyond them. This result impacts not only on the kinds of ‘demystification’ his work should be seen to espouse, but on that pervasive pseudo-category itself.

One of the key claims in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s “Discourse, Figure” is that the dialectical method (the backbone of Western philosophy) tends to obscure and hide all which is invisible, illegible and sensual. Lyotard’s strategy in exposing this rift within language (and philosophy) 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.

Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Peter Osborne (2013) London: Verso, 288 pages, ISBN 9781781680940, p/bk, £19.95.

On the performativization of action: Discussions around politics and aesthetics in non-governmental activism

Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, Meg McLagan and Yates McKee (eds) (2012) 1st ed., New York: Zone Books, 662 pp., ISBN 978-1935408246, h/bk, £25.95.

Ian Wallace: At the Intersection of Painting and Photography (2013) Vancouver Art Gallery/Black Dog Publishing, Vancouver & London, pp. 352, 1907317570, hb, £28.45.