journal of visual culture Books John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and The Capture of Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 392 pp. ISBN 978–0816642885 John Tagg’s most recent text enters a discourse on photography that is in a process of becoming, unraveling as it is being remade. It is all the more significant, therefore, that Tagg’s earlier works, most notably The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (1988), played an essential role in the production of a postmodern discourse on the status and representational strategies of the photograph. In his latest text, Tagg sharpens the arguments presented in his previous work by clarifying its reception and subsequent misreadings. He convincingly explains that his project is not simply a reductive reading of the photographic image as a reflective instrument of a surrounding cultural and political discourse. On the contrary, the strength of Tagg’s work is the manner in which he demonstrates how and why the discursive regime that we name ‘photography’ – the very medium – ‘had to be constituted’ and ‘multiply defined’ from the outset (p. xxviii). Tagg’s work explicates how and why the discursive regime ‘photography’ circumscribes meaning; in other words, it limits the multiple meanings any given photograph is capable of generating. The positivistic ‘evidential force’ claimed for the photograph is the crucial concept that Tagg deconstructs via a poststructuralist critical methodology inherited primarily from Michel Foucault. Note the language he uses to explain his work as a whole: A discursive formation, however, is not a surrounding context. Nor is a frame. Instrumentalization is not a given, but a specific, unstable discursive effect. To ask for a genealogy of the photograph’s ‘evidential force’ is not, therefore … to suggest that ‘photography’ was the transparent reflection of a power outside itself. (p. xxix) The result of this critical perspective is a persuasive dismantling of not only the putative ‘evidential force’ of the photography, but of the entire discursive formation that attempts to hypostatize meaning as an effect of the real.Tagg’s methodology journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com] SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) Copyright © The Author(s), 2010. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav Vol 9(2): 1–7 DOI 10.1177/1470412910377724 2 journal of visual culture 9(2) is inseparable from the overall force of his argument, which focuses our attention on the very grounds of dispute:‘on the contestability of systems of meaning and their effects of power and subjection; on the work of deconstruction across the space of the institution; and on the necessity of political calculation, strategic choices, and a sharpening of the stakes’ (p. xxx).Tagg exposes the cultural, sociopolitical structures that abet what he terms ‘the violence of meaning’ and what is at stake in maintaining them: a foreclosure on ‘the possibility of an event of meaning that evades capture’ thereby disrupting ‘the regimes of normative sense as it does the regimen of art historical explanation’ (p. 180). The Disciplinary Frame centers on the construction and maintenance of ‘documentary’ as a socio-political rhetoric in the 1930s that inscribes a specific mode of address and complementary structure of subjectification – a politics of capture. All the chapters in the book explicate this fold between representation and politics from the perspective of an ethics of representation and historiography. The strongest chapters are the second and third: ‘The Plane of Decent Seeing: Documentary and the Rhetoric of Recruitment’, and ‘Melancholy Realism:Walker Evans’s Resistance to Meaning’. These best summarize Tagg’s thesis on the New Deal concept of ‘documentary’ by constructing an insightful genealogy of a particular yet far-reaching stratification of the viewer–image–context relation. On this front, his work is one of the best examples of art historical practice, one that approaches what Foucault called historical research (as opposed to traditional historiography). One problem with Tagg’s text is that his argument hones and reinforces the problematic of ‘documentary’ – a position already shared by many historians and practitioners of visual culture – while it falls silent on the complex ideological return to documentation in recent years. Of course, the historical research Tagg undertakes is meant to expose the problematic nature of our statements on photographic documentation by giving the term ‘documentary’ a specific, contextualized definition. Nevertheless, I regret that someone with Tagg’s critical acumen chose not to give his attention to how the discourse of documentation is functioning in contemporary visual culture.We need more than commentaries on photomontages by John Baldessari and postmodern truisms such as ‘If we are to live, we are all constrained to strike against the frame’ (p. 263). Perhaps he has done so elsewhere, but any mention of contemporary practices of documentation is missing in this latest book and its absence lessens the overall impact of the entire argument. My desire for Tagg to address the troubling return of the photographic document stems from a wish to see the critical apparatus of postmodernism wielded in a new, highly charged arena. The recent debates in and around visual culture instigated by the photographs from 9/11, Abu Ghraib, etc. have refocused on a series of concepts such as indexicality (which nonetheless remains unclear), beauty, pain, and suffering. Additional questions arise: Are the strategies of postmodern critique still capable of exposing the fault lines between culture, politics, and representation as such? Are we to view the methodologies of critical theory as remainders of a historical moment or do they remain valuable, adaptive Books ways to think and produce visual culture in the present? As someone whose entire critical practice enacts the best aspects of what was once termed ‘New Art History’,Tagg has deconstructed the ‘violence of meaning’ imbricated within the strata of the individual image, the cultural context, the discipline as a whole, and the production of socio-political discourse; but he missed an opportunity to reiterate the necessity of a set of practices whose efficacy and relevance are being questioned yet again. Tagg’s most intriguing, most challenging, queries on this front are best articulated in the closing pages of his contribution to The Meaning of Photography, where he posits a technological evacuation of the visual that renders photography ‘irreducibly external, uninhabitable, and nonhuman’ (Kelsey and Stimson, 2008: 123). The implications of a techno-digital visual field operating in the absence of human perception and recognition are not dealt with in The Disciplinary Frame; instead, Tagg asserts that to think contemporary visual culture as a correlative space we must continually ‘find ways to work in the breach that has opened between historicity and history’ (p. xv).Working in the shared terrain of Foucault and Jacques Derrida,Tagg writes: Inside and outside, event and context, work and setting, the structural and the empirical: These coupled terms – familiar to us as those that fix polarities of an interminable methodological debate in art history – are radically displaced by Foucault’s conceptualization of the discursive event and the discursive field. (p. 245) One pressing issue remains the absence of an art historical practice that dwells in this space between formalism and social history (or whatever contending methodologies). Such a practice would be capable of thinking alongside the visual without rendering the image a mere means for socio-political commentary or, conversely, without remaking the image a fetish; it would be capable of understanding the image as an event. This requires a certain pragmatic restraint (perhaps approaching Tagg’s intriguing yet unexplored characterization of W.G. Sebald’s use of images as ‘unbearable restraint’) and a reassessment of aesthetics as a multiplicity of local, interruptive affects created by imagery. The question remains as to whether Tagg’s text provides a model of a critical practice that allows us to dwell in this space between. Here is the heart of Tagg’s argument. I would like to cite a rather long passage not only because it surveys the history of photography as a discursive field, but also because it allows Tagg to articulate the parameters of his project: Everywhere and nowhere, the status of the photograph remains a sore point, as tempting as it is troublesome to the scratching of the critics, as likely to turn out a source of infection as it is to yield to the cures of the disciplines.Too open to diagnosis and too unresponsive to remedy, it seems to call for a stricter regimen, which is invariably what it receives and what I am bent on avoiding … Photography, then, insofar as Sir John Herschel’s diplomatic coinage still has use, is a map of motley differences, identities, 3 4 journal of visual culture 9(2) jurisdictions, borders, and exclusions that charts a territorial project: the marking out of a yet-to-be-occupied landscape by the closures or power and meaning … It is, then, the mutual imbrication of power and meaning that I have wanted to pursue, not only in relation to those mechanisms of capture that constitute the discursive territory of social discipline and the State, but also … in relation to the discipline of art history itself and its own mechanisms of arrest – its own disciplinary frame. (pp. 179–80) There is something symptomatic about this passage. It surveys a series of symptoms, but offers no etiology. Tagg suggests the ‘source of the infection’, but is uninterested in offering a ‘stricter regimen’ because, in his terms, that would be only another instance of ‘violence’ or ‘capture’. Instead, he works to expose, yet again, how each and every frame renders the field of photography ‘a map of motley differences’, a ‘territorial project’ of power and meaning. As much as I agree with the necessity of this methodology, it feels too comfortable and selfassured. There is nothing risked. For, although Tagg claims that his entire project is premised on ‘the possibility of an event of meaning that evades capture’, we never get a satisfying, clear articulation of how an image, particularly a photographic image as an image – as a singularity – could ever accomplish this feat. Presumably it is as a promise of meaning, of other meanings to come, in the sense that Derrida has taught us? It is difficult to discern in Tagg’s text a sustained attempt to explain how an image deterritorializes its own discursive field. Conceiving this potentiality is essential because discursive transformation is a creative act. An image is contiguous with a discourse (a semiotic, a contingent ‘history’ or ‘medium’) – a territory – and an exceptional exteriority; an image is not simply configured by a discourse; rather, an image traverses it thereby opening it to transformations that dismantle its regimes of signs. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) argue, a transformational statement ‘marks the way in which a semiotic translates for its own purposes a statement originating elsewhere, and in doing so diverts it, leaving untransformable residues and actively resisting the inverse transformation’ (p. 136). What we need is an approach to the image as a disjunction, as an ‘and’ that is ‘neither a union, nor a juxtaposition but … a sort of active and creative line of flight’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 9–10). An image is thus an ensemble: it maps a territory as it constructs a variation or transformational statement. This is the labor to which we must attend: the becoming of a pars construens from within the pars destruens and vice versa – the pragmatics of the ‘and’. The analysis of the photographic image as a (semiotic) statement leaves one with a desire for the visible; a desire that is not symptomatic of a lack or melancholic, but rather a productive desire. Statements and visibilities are the basic elements of Foucault’s genealogy: one orders the sayable or readable, the other the visible or perceptible. (Visibilities are irreducible to the visual object or the act of perception.) It is crucial to recall what Deleuze (1988) identifies as ‘one of Foucault’s fundamental theses’, namely that there is a difference between forms of content (visibilities) and forms of expression (statements), between the visible and the articulatable,‘although they continually overlap and spill into Books one another in order to compose each stratum or form of knowledge’ (p. 61). It is only by excavating each historical formation that we are able to sense the Outside as pure exteriority, the Outside as event; only by seeing and reading an opening in the thresholds between discourses are we able to know how and why each historical formation ‘sees and reveals all it can within the conditions laid down for visibility, just as it says all it can within the conditions relating to statements’ (p. 59). At the heart of Tagg’s book, at the conclusion of its decisive essay on Walker Evans’s work, we reach an aesthetic threshold, but Tagg does not venture a step across it. It is to the last paragraph of this chapter that I keep returning, as it seems to summarize a frustration and trepidation with photography as well as its aesthetic fascination. This is the photograph Evans gives us: less than what we want and more than we desire, never adequate to our questions or to our demands, it hands us what we were not seeking and may have preferred to avoid. Inadequate and overwhelming thing, poor compensation, impossible testimony, it offers itself as a ruined monument to the inescapability of an unencounterable real. (p. 178) Here Tagg locates a threshold between the photograph-as-statement and the photograph-as-visibility, characterizing it as ‘a certain kind of resistance’ to the demands of communication (p. 174). However, Tagg then leads us into a discussion of melancholy as a limit of sense, as a relation with a real that is ‘the condition of existence and failure of all systems of meaning’ (p. 176). But why not remain with the image a bit longer? Is the recourse to the concept of melancholy productive or does it only confuse the issue even more? Is Tagg’s statement here not the beginning of a complex, theoretically-informed conception of a work of art? The disjunction between the photograph-as-statement and the photographas-visibility delineates an aesthetic threshold wherein statements and visibilities, forms of expression and forms of content, ‘mobilize knowledge in a direction that is different to that of science, allowing us to offer a definition of a literary text, or a pictorial work, while remaining within the discursive practices to which they belong’ (Deleuze, 1988: 20). Thus, the discourse of documentation, for example, is not only bounded by archives, historical strata, and the concept ‘documentary’; it is also constituted via a relation with a relative outside (aesthetics, ethics, or politics) and a ‘non-relation’ with ‘the space of the Outside’ (the non-stratified) (p. 87). Perhaps one way to venture into this aesthetic threshold is to acknowledge the violence of meaning – the definition of a photograph as a discursive object – and the ways in which that violent capture or reduction cannot account for its own relation with the Outside. More than Foucault, it is Deleuze who undertook several studies of the visual image in relation to this space of the Outside. It is toward Deleuze that Tagg orients me, despite his somewhat one-dimensional reading of Deleuze as a theorist of the politics of capture. (See chapter 1:‘The OneEyed Man and the One-Armed Man: Camera, Culture, and the State’, whose title is 5 6 journal of visual culture 9(2) from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, 1987.) The non-relation to the Outside is a threshold within knowledge wherein becoming (transformation) is a force that remains distinct yet folded within the history of forms. For the study of visual images (certainly one mode of analyzing the history of forms), visibilities and language constitute discourse, but we must not repress the ‘and’ that binds the two. It is for this reason that Deleuze allows the work of art a formal structure (a distinct discourse, a plane of composition) even as he insists on the singularity of each artwork, that is, its productive, informal relation with a series of forces outside of it.This is less a question of what is external to an image, or even of the frame that differentiates the image from its context; it is a question of an internal fold that opens each image to ‘an outside which is farther away than any external world and even any form of exteriority, which henceforth becomes infinitely closer’ (Deleuze, 1988: 86).Within this internal fold an image is not a resemblance or a representational strategy; it is an abstract machine, a diagram. A photographic image is diagrammatic; it deterritorializes visual practice, research, and art historical formations (such as Modernism). A photographdiagram is certainly a field of power-knowledge, but it disjoins statement and visibility, difference and repetition.A photograph-diagram is a multiplicity, but not in the sense of reproducibility (original versus copy); rather, multiplicity ‘remains completely indifferent to the traditional problems of the multiple and the one’ (p. 14). Multiplicity is a topological problem. A photograph becomes more than a visual archive or an unstable discursive effect; it becomes ‘a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field’ because every diagram is ‘a spatiotemporal multiplicity’ that is almost blind and mute, even though it makes others see and speak … It never functions in order to represent a persisting world but produces a new kind of reality, a new model of truth. It is neither the subject of history, nor does it survey history. It makes history by unmaking preceding realities and significations, constituting hundreds of points of emergence or creativity, unexpected conjunctions or improbable continuums. It doubles history with a sense of continual evolution. (pp. 34, 35) The diagram traces a becoming, a multiplicity; it entrains history by folding and refolding it, by conjugating it with life, that is, the very Outside that arises not before but only in the middle:‘In a multiplicity what counts are not the terms or the elements, but what there is “between”, the between, a set of relations which are not separable from each other. Every multiplicity grows from the middle’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: viii). This is the lesson Deleuze takes from Foucault, that genealogy is at best understood as a ‘theory-practice of multiplicities’ (p. 14). This theory-practice of multiplicities draws and re-creates an Outside that is ‘always an opening on to a future’ through which resistance and change are possible (Deleuze, 1988: 89). To think a photographic image in this way it may be necessary to work against Deleuze himself, who too often seems to associate the photographic with the cliché or iconic. Nevertheless, the photographic is more than ‘melancholy Books realism’ (to resituate Tagg’s phrase); it is a ‘double capture’, as Deleuze insists, that requires us to think and create alongside an image that is at once fortuitous and necessary. Only then will we grasp why art historical and aesthetic thinking ‘always comes from the outside (that outside which was already engulfed in the interstice or which constituted the common limit)’ (p. 117). Only then will we construct a line of flight that encounters images as ‘unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance’ – feral points – and perhaps it is with these points that ‘we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture’ (p. 44). Lastly, I am certain that to understand precisely why ‘photography matters as art as never before’ we must turn to Tagg’s text before many others. Despite rarely using the term ‘art’, Tagg’s text provides the best map of the territory; in it we may very well find the cardinal points from which to light out. References Deleuze, Gilles (1988) Foucault, trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Parnet, Claire (2002) Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press. Kelsey, Robin and Stimson, Blake (eds) (2008) The Meaning of Photography. Williamstown, MA/New Haven, CT: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute/Yale University Press. Tagg, John (1988) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. London: Macmillan. Jae Emerling University of North Carolina at Charlotte [email: J.Emerling@uncc.edu] 7