Didi-Huberman — Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (2008)
Part I — Images in Spite of All
In the first section of his book, D-H, with a creative hand and using four photos as exemplars, sets out to problematize the notion of the Holocaust and its concomitant acts as “unimaginable.” It is precisely the opposite and that is the paradox of the ‘unimaginable’ (p.45). For some events, all we have is the image. It is one of the most imaginable acts of horror in recent history. How did the Holocaust become unimaginable? Based on two lineages (p.26)— Aestheticism “that often fails to recognize history in its concrete singularities” and Historicism “that often fails to recognize the image in its formal specificities”. Both miss what the image does. In both of these aligned modes, we ask too much or too little of the image. When we ask too much, we ask of it the whole truth which cannot be exact. An image is, what Arendt calls, “an instant of truth”. When we ask too little, we signify the image as a simulacrum, and relegate it to the sphere of the document.
We don’t have a discourse of truth, or a cohesive narrative [about the Holocaust, but this can be stretched to include most traumatic events]. It is the photos that make up the truth, but they do not comprise the truth, they are ‘instants of truth’. Arendt argues that the ‘instants of truth’ organize the chaos and provide a semblance of the missing archives. The photos/images were there, they happened. Which is why D-H argues that we cannot sever the images from “their phenomenology, from their specificity, and from their very substance” (p.33). He is referring to the doctoring of the images by journalists? photo editors? that cropped the images, removed much of the black border, and even gave one of the naked victims a breast lift. The arguments against Photoshop and other forms of image manipulation have grown stale, because Photography 101 teaches us the subjectivity of a photograph. It is never an objective portrayal/representation of what occured — the photog had to choose the framing, the angles, what to leave out of the frame, the lighting, and so on. However, those debates center on the content of the photograph, not the life of the photograph, not the “formal procedures specific to this medium” (p.70).
The phenomenology of the image is central to my dissertation. Kim insists that I have to read the image in context, the image as it appeared on the webpage, networked with other images, text, links, with a black or white or pink background, with a blue border to link it, and so on. I also ask the women about the detailed process of taking, developing, uploading and circulating the image which almost always involved a negotiation with “not getting caught”. There was no way to take a photo, use an app to add some color to it, and the upload it to the social network of your choice. The rhythm of the images (p.46) was different. The rhythm of the images of the Holocaust presents a narrative of the production and circulation. The risk was enormous, and the images are taken in haste, they are the inexact (p.44) images of hell, but those ‘instances of truth’ are what is available, and what make the Holocaust imaginable.
“The whole problem is born of the fact that we have come to the image with the idea of synthesis […]. The image is an act not a thing.” Sartre, L’imagination, 1936.
Part II — In Spite of the All Image
The vital materialist stance, in which D-H says that the photographs were there, they happened, was heavily critiqued by French historians. They were aghast that D-H argued for the photos as ‘survivors’ ostensibly foreclosing the horrors that happened to people. D-H outlines these critiques in Part II of the book. The critics (specifically Gérard Wajman and Elisabeth Pagnoux) assume a fetishization of the image from D-H. His riposte: “I have simply attempted to see in order to know better” (pg. 56–57). Elisabeth Pagnoux argues, “for those who guard the memory of the crime, the idea of seeing yet another image … is unbearable” (qtd in p.56) I turn contemporary images of rape and violence and their ‘pornographic’ aesthetic. Is it not a fetish to bare witness to those images? Or is it the way you bare witness? Do the images negate the act? The testimony? Or do the images serve to make ‘imaginable’ the horrors we think are ‘impossible’?
D-H argues for the lacunary nature of images (p. 59). The lacunary is foregrounded in the “images that were snatched, at incredible risk, from a Real that they certainly didn’t have time to explore” but managed to (inexactly) capture (p. 60). The prisoners took the photos and moved them into the world to be seen. The transmission of affect is embdded in the photos as much as the need for an extraction of meaning for those who were not there, for us. To suggest that these images should not be viewed is to do the Nazi’s work for them, to further silence and not imagine what happened. The prisoners extracted images from the activities in Auschwitz for us to extract from these images later (p. 61). So, we must not eliminate the images of the horrors (i.e., say there is nothing to see, there exist no images, the images are too horrific to exist), but instead, rethink the image and what it must mean and what it does. The images were “snatched at incredible risk” and extracted despite it all. D-H points out that this was an undeniable hope in the transmission of these images, and as such we should take that hope seriously. That hope has no place in the unimaginable dogma that is the primary thesis of the representation of the Holocaust. Instead, H-B shows that the photographic medium makes “possible [a] point of contact between the image and the real of Birkenau in August 1944" (p.75). And even if these images are viewed as fetish-images, they do not cease to be images of other value. While Wajcman argue for the fetish-image, but the fetish covers up the object/subject in totality with its image. The object/subject is frozen at the point of the fetishization (think a Lacanian freeze-frame). There is nothing outside the fetish, it is totalizing, it is all. If Wajcman is arguing that the four photographs do not represent the totality of the horrors, (which he then critiques to show their lack) then he assumes D-H’s reading provides that, a fetishistic reading. Because the reading somehow is conflating the atrocities with the image. But D-H precisely calls the images lacunary. They, in a montage-sequence, are an “instant of truth” a fragment, and he takes them as a montage and not as separate images. To suggest that D-H doesn’t have a sensitivity to the images misses his entire argument about the phenomenology of the image.
Why are D-H’s critics so afraid of the image, the image as providing a collective forgetting of what actually happened? That they will desensitive us to the atrocities? Or worse, that capitalism will profit from it. D-H insists these images need to be read as tear-images not veil-images. It is in that the four images are an exception, not the rule. Reading them in spite of all, provides a break from the ‘unimaginable’ discourse, and can “disrupt our perception of the real, of history, and of existence” (p.83).
Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised — partly through the
very proliferation of such images of horror. One’s first encounter
with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of
revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative
epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and
Dachau which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa
Monica in July 1945. Nothing I have seen — in photographs or in real life — ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed,
it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I
saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was
several years before I understood fully what they were about.
What good was served by seeing them? They were only
photographs — of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do
nothing to affect, of suffering I could hardly imagine and could
do nothing to relieve. When I looked at those photographs,
something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that
of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my
feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is
still crying” (Sontag, On Photography, pg. 14–15)
The photos are acting as openers of knowledge, through a mediation — the moment of seeing (p.84). Like D-H says, he wants to see to know better (sa/voir). This is where the transmission of trauma comes in. D-H argues that when images, along with words and feelings, dissapear, so does transmission itself. It is the visual documents that assist in reconsituting the survivors’s own memories. How do the images then re-tell the subjects’s own narrative? The narrative of the 90s internet as now recalled through visual documents. But where is the trauma? At what point is it available? present?
We have to look to the dual system of the image — formal and phenomenological.
“Imagination is not identification, and even less hallucination. To approach does not mean to appropriate.” By analyzing the images as D-H does, we are not usurping the witness, or believing/feeling as if we were there, but attending to our own absence — a difficult ethical task which determines the readability of the image (p.88). And that is my task to come.
One of the tasks is to build an archive. An archive, “an often unorganized mass at the outset does not become meaningful unless it is patiently developed” (p.94). It is not competing for testimonial witness. Images are not replacing speech. But speech can also not replace images in what it can do. For Lanzmann and other D-H critics, the image is read as an archive image and thus again relegated to a specific predetermined task with its complexity glossed over and frozen. In that way, they create the very fetish image they accuse D-H of! The image cannot simply exist as an evidence-image as if to prove something that needs to be proven. The images I am using are not simply proof, they are actors. Further, imagination cannot be reduced to false perception. It is one thing to lose yourself in an image, and it’s another to place yourself in it and then reconstruct the real based on that affective response. (p.113).
“To speak of an image without imagination [the archive image] means literally to cut the image off from its activity, from its dynamics”. (p.113)
“With history, you begin by putting aside, gathering, thus transforming into ‘documents’ certain objects that have been distributed differently. This new cultural distribution is the first task. In reality, it consists in producing such documents by copying, transcribing, or photographing these objects, in so doing, changing their place and their status.” — Michel de Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, 1975, pg. 84
Historian Arlette Farge discusses the phenomenology of the archive to show its undulating and lacunary character. The archive is always at a lack, there’s always more than needs to be found, more to piece it together, clues that have to be stacked beside and on top of each other. The archive is not only built but maintained and analyzed as a montage — no piece can live on its own, or even have meaning on its own without a relation to another object. The researcher also brings their own history in the analysis and it is all that combined to “produce a rethough history of the event in question” (p.99) In this way, the archive nor the documents in it are “all” they are always “instants of time” because they are not pure in origin or a tabula rasa to be studied. It’s not “an immediate reflection of the real, but a writing endowed with syntax,” D-H says along with Foucault and de Certeau. But that doesn’t mean they cannot be used or studied. It is precisely that understanding that allows D-H to say that these images are in spite of all, and they are not a totalizing description of the Shoah. The images need the relation of the Other — knowledge and a spectator. The spectator needs to look at what the image does, phenomenologically, and not attempt to immediately respond to what is not in the image. While we observe the image we can quasi observe what happened, because we look to the traces in the image. We also look across archives to create the narrative of the image. D-H elegantly shows his theorizing by replying to the claims made by his critics that he is making things up and fetishizing the image. He shows, clearly, how using other testimony and other documents, that he isn’t doing that (eg. arguing that the two photos are taken from inside the gas chamber).
the fertility of knowledge through montage
“je ne crois pas que je suis ici” — from Nuit et brouillard
Godard: “Montage is what makes visible / ce qui fait voir” (p.138)
Masters of montage: Eisenstein, Benjamin, Bataille — how?
Why is D-H so excited about montage? Montage doesn’t fuse the images or reduce difference, it heightens it. Montage makes the image dialectical, meaning, as “repeated collision between words and images” (p.138) Montage makes events imaginable. It does not assimilate even if it places images in adjacent form. They may even resemble each other, but they are not the same (p.151). To confuse resemblance with identity is a grave error and leads to dismissing the image and its potentials.
The gesture of the image (p.156) consistutes the object of montage par excellence. D-H uses Ranciere to think about how it is that we come to focus so much on representation and it rising from the properties of the object. This way, the unimaginable only exists in representation and that strips it of all its meaning. It makes it into a fetish object to be consumed, and a simulacrum, which is what happens when we ask too little of the image. Because there’s only the replication of the object, as if the object itself had no meaning and only the content was needed. But the image comes with its own sets of formal and phenomenological qualities, so to suggest that the ‘content’ can be re-assembled elsewhere without its form is exactly to refuse to think the image (p.158).
If you (know you) cannot survive, you will make an archive that can survive. Where are things hidden on the internet? Easter eggs? What about feminists including their testimonies? their words? their poems? their images? Are they “buried” in websites? On servers?
What is imagination? What does imagination do? How do we enact imagination?
“A process of recognition of the similar” (p.161)? Arendt: “It is a political faculty. We are neither in communal fusion, nor in consenual truth, nor in sociological proximity. We attempt, on the contrary, to imagine what our thought would resemble if it were elsewhere.” This is what the Nazis sought to obliterate, the recognition of one’s fellow, of the similar upon which the social link is founded. This is what makes the imaginable. Obliterating this is truly to make the events unimaginable. It is ethical to then imagine what happened, to keep it imaginable in spite of all.
At the centre of this debate is the relationship between the image and the real. “On the one hand, therefore, the image deconstructs reality, thanks to its own effects of construction: unobserved objects suddenly invade the screen; the changes of scale change our view of the world; the novel arrangements produced by montage make us understand things differently” (pg.175–6) This is how the image touches time. By deconstructing the narratives, to make visible what was simply historic, it deconstructs to reconstruct with resemblance, but not as a way to flatten, but as a way to make space-time for the events.
The Myth of the Medusa teaches us in the first instance that real horror is a source of impotence. That we are unable to ever face real horror, we need a deflected image in order to make sense of it, to banish it from our lives. The horror needs to be imaginable. There is no use trying to force a death stare, this will lead us to paralysis. With Agamben, D-H argues that we need to learn how to manage the (Medusa) shield — the shield-image (which is not a veil image). In other words, that we need to ethically handle the mechanism of images, and how to see and what to do with what we see. This is the task of our memory and us as people, historians, critics, artists. If we can learn to handle the mechanism of images, and learn how to look at them differently (like Perseus does to Medusa) then we can dutifully/ethically honour them (pg.179) in spite of all — in spite of the historical contradictions to which we do not have answers we try. We imagine in spite of a torn consciousness, recognizing our role as builders of the past, as those with imagination.
