Unfinished Business

Abstract

Ajay Heble, in Landing on the Wrong Note — as if there were such a thing as a wrong note in Heble’s universe — has written the following lines: ‘Art …, does not simply reflect external reality; rather it plays a formative role in the constitution of social life, in the ways in which people take responsibility for creating their own histories, for participating in the management of their own social and political realities’. Zooming in on his subject matter, jazz, Heble ‘postulate[s] a theory of musical dissonance as social practice’ appearing in conjunction with ‘social and political dissonance’.¹ I wish to apply the concept of dissonance, decoupled from music and understood broadly as ‘disagreeing, discordant, different, in any respect’² to visual images and argue that images, rather than simply reflecting external reality, play a crucial role in the constitution of social life. I would like to understand visual dissonance as social practice linked with social and political dissonance, and I would like to see the transformation of spectators into participant witnesses as an important step towards such dissonance. I wish to emphasize what Michael Shapiro calls photography’s ‘capacity to disclose and demystify’ without ignoring that there is no guarantee that photography discloses and demystifies in fact.³ I want to stress that photography’s visual traces can be read progressively without ignoring that there is no guarantee that they are being read progressively in fact.⁴