Abstract
To Siegfried Kracauer writing in 1927, photography appeared as ‘the go-for-broke game [Vabanque-Spiel] of history’,1 the ultimate, desperate gamble of a historical process faced with its own bankruptcy. Indissolubly linked through their origins in the nineteenth century, photography and historiography stood for Kracauer in a dialectical relation that turned photography both into the ultimate realisation of a certain conception of history and into its downfall. Born from the process of industrialisation and acting as a reflection of the alienation of nature brought about by it, photography is joined to nineteenth-century historicism by a certain geometrical model that figures time and space as interchangeable dimensions.2 Just as historicism believes that it ‘can grasp historical reality by reconstructing the course of events in their temporal succession without any gaps’,3 so photography constructs space as an uninterrupted surface where ‘the spatial appearance of an object is its meaning’.4 One figuring time as a linear vector, the other assimilating space to the two-dimensional plane of the photographic print, photography and historicism mark the reduction of what were previously categories of experience to abstract dimensions. There is a deadly danger in this reduction, as consciousness becomes further and further alienated from ‘a mute nature which has no meaning’, but there is also a potential for liberation in it, as a consciousness emancipated from ‘natural bonds’5 might prove to be equipped for harnessing nature itself to its own development.
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Notes
Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Photography’ in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and intro. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995), p. 61
This identification of photography with historicism is not exclusive to Kracauer’s writings but can also be found in Benjamin’s work, especially in the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ [1940], sections V, VI and XV (in Illuminatians, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973)). For a sustained study of the relation between photography and historiography in Benjamin see Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography ojHistory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
For the classical statement of this dialectic of technology, see Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ [1936] in Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973). A feminist reworking of this position is offered by Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association, 1991), pp. 149–81.
The editions I shall be referring to are Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised D. J. Enright, 6 vols. (London: Chatto, 1992); Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike, 2 vols. (London: Picador, 1995). Subsequent references will be incorporated into the main text as (S, vol., p.) and (MWQ, ch., p.).
See Peter Nicholls, Modernisnts: A Literary Guide (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 273–5 and Franco Moretti, Opere Mondo: saggio sulla forma epica dal Faust a Cent’anni di solitudine (Turin: Einaudi, 1994), pp. 194–99.
In spite of the concerted attempts at gathering from the Nachlqft indications that would lead to its resolution, The Man Without Qualities remains radically unfmished. For an overview of the debates around the Nachlafi in Musil studies see Christian Rogowski, Distinguished Outsider: Robert Musil and His Critics (Columbia: Camden House, 1994), pp. 26–31.
Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’, in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 98.
See, for instance, Walter Benjamin, ‘The Stolyteller’ [1936] in Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), pp. 83–107.
Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero [1953], trans. Annette Lavers (London: Cape, 1967), p. 27.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Cape, 1980), p. 76.
The classical analysis of the dialectic between these two types of temporality in Proust is that of J. P. Houston, ‘Temporal Patterns in A la recherche du temps perdu’, French Studies, 16 (1962): 33–45.
Mieke Bal, The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually, trans. Anna-Louise Milne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 183.
Gbrard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay inMethod [1972], trans. Jane E. Lewin, foreword Jonathan Culler (Itbara, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 116.
See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), where Jameson in fact identifies the death of historical time explicitly with the use of the aorist, even in languages such as English, where the tense does not exist in isolation from the imperfect and as a separate verbal form. Commenting on Doctorow’s Ragtime, Jameson claims that it is ‘as though Doctorow had set out systematically to produce the effect or the equivalent, in his language, of a verbal tense we do not possess in English, namely, the French preterite (or passe simple), whose “perfective” movement, as Emile Benveniste taught us, serves to separate events from the present of enunciation and to transform the stream of time and action into so many fmished, complete, and isolated punctual event objects which find themselves sundered from any present situation (even that of the act of story telling or enunciation)’ (p. 24).
As Maurice Grevisse, Le bon usage: grammaire francaise (Paris: Duoulot, 1980) points out, the French distinction between passe simple and imparfait is not repeated in the Germanic languages where one single form (‘I took’ in English, ‘Ich nahm’ in German) translates both ‘Je prenais’ and ‘Je pris’. Although Grevisse claims that the name of preterite designates only the German and English forms and not the French one of le passé simple, both Benveniste and Barthes use either the preterite or the aorist as synonyms for the French form.
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Gualtieri, E. (2003). The Grammar of Time: Photography, Modernism and History. In: Murphet, J., Rainford, L. (eds) Literature and Visual Technologies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389991_10
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