Culture, Theory & Critique, 2009, 50(23), 165183

Magical Nominalism: Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World

Martin Jay
MartinJay Culture, 10.1080/14735780903240117 1473-5784 Original Taylor 2009 000000July-November 2-3 50 martjay@berkeley.edu & Theory Article Francis (print)/1473-5776 & Critique 2009 (online) RCTC_A_424185.sgm and Francis

Antony Gormley, WELL II, 2008, the artist.

Abstract Even since William of Ockhams critique of scholastic realism, the nominalist impulse in philosophy has been understood to undercut the inherent intelligibility of the world and abet its disenchantment. As a result, it has often been tied to a voluntarist notion of God or of human subjects who construct a world through self-assertion. Drawing on the writings of Walter Benjamin, Rosalind Krauss and most notably W. J. T. Mitchell, this paper explores an alternative version of non-conventionalist nominalism, which it calls magical based on the Adamic quest for true names. It argues that photography in certain respects exemplifies a visual expression of the same quest, which can be understood as the assertion of the world against the domination of the subject.

Among the many lessons taught us by W. J. T. Mitchell over his long and distinguished career is the virtue of theoretical eclecticism. Rather than imposing a single method whether it be psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, deconstruction or the like on a problem, it is best to take insights from whatever direction they may come and let them play off each other in the search for new understandings of the matter at hand. Any inquiry that can justly be called critical will be willing to sacrifice theoretical purity in the service of interpretative fecundity. It is in this spirit that the following exercise has been carried out. It seeks to contribute to the on-going discussion about the meaning or better put, meanings of photography by examining it in the light of a time-honored philosophical tradition, nominalism, and then mobilizing ideas from a series of recent and contemporary artists and thinkers: Marcel Duchamp, Walter Benjamin, Rosalind Krauss, and W. J. T. Mitchell himself. The question it hopes to address, although not conclusively answer, is whether photography can be understood as an example of a new

Culture, Theory & Critique ISSN 1473-5784 Print/ISSN 1473-5776 online 2009 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14735780903240117

166 Martin Jay version of nominalism, which can paradoxically be called magical, fostering the re-enchantment of the world.1 *** The history of nominalism is normally written as a story of denial, contributing to the disenchantment of the world.2 Beginning with the medieval Franciscan friar William of Ockham (sometimes spelled Occam) (c.1288c.1348), whose celebrated razor was wielded to cut away imagined entities unnecessary to explain the world of experience, nominalism has been understood as promoting a principle of parsimony or economy. It sought to purify philosophy, in particular the reigning Scholastic orthodoxy of the medieval Church, of unnecessary and excessive conceptual baggage, freeing it to confront the world as it existed in all its motley particularity. The nominalists favorite target was the alleged existence of supra-individual universals, universals that were wrongly taken to be more real than the particulars that embodied them. In this sense, nominalism has been understood as deeply anti-realist in its hostility to the essentialist Aristotelian ontology of the Scholastic tradition. For the supposed reality of inherent universals it substituted the conventionalist linguistic name that we mere humans give for shorthand convenience to groupings of individual entities that seem to share attributes in common, thus earning the designation of nominalism. Or to put it in other terms, it rejected the claim that general terms named anything different from the names we give particular objects subsumed under them. Fatherhood, to give an example, is not a reality beyond the individual fathers in the world. There is no substratum of fatherhoodness underlying the particular instances of an individual being a father, a subject having the predicate of paternity. Additional dispensable entities included abstract objects, which allegedly exist outside of time and space, leading some nominalists to employ concreteness rather than particularity as their positive counter-term.3 Here the tradition of Platonic Idealism rather than Aristotelian Realism was the intended object of critique. But in both cases, the goal is to rid thought of collective conceptual entities, such as substance, essence or intelligible form, understood as superfluous fictions which hamper the straightforward cognition of the world in all its individual uniqueness. The theological basis of the nominalist impulse has been widely acknowledged, a theology which rejects philosophical speculation about the teleological intelligibility of the world. In 1277, only three years after the death of the leading Scholastic theorist, St Thomas of Aquinas, the Aristotelian proof for the necessity of this world was condemned by the Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, as a restriction on the unfettered divine will. An omnipotent God, he suggested, implies the impotence of reason understood as an innate quality of reality itself. As Hans Blumenberg has noted, this document marks the exact point when the interest in the rationality and human intelligibility of creation cedes priority to the speculative fascination exerted by the
1 For a selection of essays that address the issue of re-enchantment in modernity, see Joshua Landay and Michael Saler (2009). 2 See, for example, Jane Bennett (2001: 6670). 3 Nominalism in Metaphysics, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World 167 theological predicates of absolute power and freedom (1983: 160). That is, any constraint on the sovereign will of God, such as the binding power of even the universal forms or rational structures previously created by that very God, is now understood as impossible. Or to put it in different terms, there is always a state of exception to the rule of even divine law, miracles are always potentially able to interrupt the apparently regular workings of the natural order. Ours is merely one of an infinity of possible worlds, and God may choose at any time to create another. Ridding the mental universe of unnecessary real universals and abstract objects, however, could open the door for something else. For when doubts about knowledge claims or the sufficiency of human reason were advanced, as they were by nominalists and many others in the broader tradition of skepticism, the way was opened for faith alone to be the sole source of certainty. We may lack the means to sense or know real universals or abstract objects, but we can still believe that they exist. For Ockham, revelation was the only access we have to such entities as the souls immortality or the inherent attributes of God, such as his unfettered sovereign will. The way was prepared for Kants later celebrated admission that he had to limit reason to make room for faith. Like Ockham, he too denied various rational proofs for the existence of God or the immortality of the soul, seeing them purely as matters of belief or perhaps a function of practical reason. When it came to more mundane matters, the nominalists opened the way for a less exalted source than Gods will. Here the categories we bestow on the world are understood to be the product of human invention, an assumption which led to the self-assertion of the species in the face of a world that could no longer be read as a legible text filled with meanings written by God and available to human understanding. That is, to cite Blumenberg again, deprived by Gods hiddenness of metaphysical guarantees of the world, man constructs for himself a counterworld of elementary rationality and manipulability (1983: 173). The sovereign will of God unconstrained by innate rational rules or essential forms is mimicked by the assertion of humankind producing an order that is less found than made. Modern science, however much it may pretend passively to discover what is the case, is indebted to this transformation, which has as its hidden corollary the domination of the pliant nature that is thus posited. Modern art, it has been even easier to argue, is fuelled by the nominalist denial of real presence in the world.4 Nominalism is, in short, primarily a theologically driven critique of rationalist and essentialist metaphysics, a denial of ontological universals and abstract objects, opening the door for faith in divine will, epistemological conventionalism and ultimately human self-assertion. What, we might ask, does this have to do with photography and visual experience?

See, for example Eduardo Sabrovsky (2001). On the modernist abandonment of the idea of real presence, originally a term denoting Christs manifestation in the Eucharist, see George Steiner (1989), where he claims that a Logos-order entails a central supposition of real presence. Mallarms repudiation of the covenant of reference, and his insistence that non-reference constitutes the true genius and purity of language, entail a supposition of real absence (96).

168 Martin Jay To begin an answer, we have to understand that William of Ockhams razor was applied as well to those basic building blocks of medieval optics, the so-called visible species which allowed an object to appear as meaningful to the eyes that beheld it (Tachau 1988).5 Sight, according to the dominant medieval ocular theory, worked through the transmissions of these forms or in the synonyms listed by Roger Bacon, similitudes, images, idols, simulacra, phantasms, or impressions (in Biernoff 2002: 74) from the object to the eye and vice versa (what was called extramission involved the sending out of species from the eye to meet those coming in through intromission). They were somehow successively reproduced through a medium like air or water and then ultimately had an impact on the sensitive membranes and humours of the eyeball, which registered their pressure. They were understood to have corporeal being, which can convey an objects visual form and meaning to the beholder, more along the lines of touch than what we would now understand as visual experience via light waves or particles. Ontological continuity is maintained through the material medium of transmission, which assures the validity of the perception. This is not the place to try to unravel the intricacies of the doctrine of visible species, which was not only the dominant medieval model for the sense of sight but for all sensual perception. What is important to understand is that Ockham rejected the entire idea as unnecessarily adding an extraneous general concept, which could be jettisoned in favor of understanding sight as an intuitive grasping of particular objects at a distance. The corporeal mediation by species like the other abstract universals derived from ancient Greek metaphysics was a fiction that was wisely abandoned. Although there was considerable resistance to Ockhams critique of visible species well into the 14th century (Tachau 1982), in the long run his demolition was effective. However we understand sight now, it is not on the basis of the successive reproduction of iconic forms through a corporeal medium. Ockhams razor was applied as well to the Scholastic concept of organic aesthetic form, which, as posited by Aquinas, involved the integrity, clarity and proportion of the object (Eco 2002). Although there was a modest place for the judgment of the beholder in Thomist aesthetics, these qualities were understood to adhere in the object itself as ontologically real. Moreover, each individual case exemplified a type, which also had substantial form. The doctrine of haecceitas introduced by Duns Scotus had stressed the individuating, singular thisness of an object rather than its essential or generic whatness. Ockham went still further in weakening the importance of integrity and proportion in the work, which did not have to conform to a prior notion of aesthetic form. As Umberto Eco puts it,

It should also be noted that even earlier during the eighth-century Iconoclasm controversy in the Byzantine Church, theologians quarreled over another relevant issue, whether or not icons were representations of essential images of saints or martyrs or merely depictions of particular differences in actual appearances. The iconophiles were in the latter camp, which we might call proto-nominalist, whereas the iconoclasts were still Platonists. See Verchinina (2008).

Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World 169 all that remains is the intuition of particulars, a knowledge of existent objects whose visible proportions are analyzed empirically; in fact, Ockham held that an intuition of particulars is possible. As for artistic inspiration, this consists in an idea of the individual object which the artist wants to construct, and not of its universal form. (2002: 89) Although there were subsequent efforts to rescue a generic metaphysics of beauty neo-Platonism returned during the Renaissance and had other moments during the l8th century, while neo-Aristotelianism could still inspire a number of aesthetic theorists well into the 20th century (e.g. the socalled Chicago School of literary criticism) the nominalist challenge was enormously influential not only on aesthetic judgment, but also on artistic practice as well. Perhaps the most notable illustration of its power came with the rise of the novel, that anti-generic genre that defies virtually all of the traditional rules of beauty and form.6 Nominalism has also been noted in musical compositions as well, for example in the works of Gustav Mahler, who denied an ontology of pre-given musical forms (Adorno 1982: 62).7 In the realm of visual art, photography played a similar role, and as a result was sometimes denied the status of genuine art by those nostalgic for more traditional representational genres, such as the painted portrait.8 In his Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno claimed that in fact all art: has been caught up in the total process of nominalisms advance ever since the medieval ordo was broken up. The universal is no longer granted art through types, and older types are being drawn into the whirlpool. Croces art-critical reflection that every work be judged, as the English say, on its own merits raised this historical tendency to the level of theoretical aesthetics. (1997: 199)9 Indeed, from the beginning, Adorno claimed, genuine art has had a strong nominalist impulse, each work attempting to transcend the limitations of its given genre, providing its own unique form from below rather than accepting it from above. But no art, Adorno went on to argue, can ever entirely free itself of the given forms it tries to transcend, forms that are its dialectical negation.

6 See Ian Watts classical account, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957). 7 He explicitly compares Mahlers music to the novel because of their shared nominalist impulse. Perhaps an even more plausible candidate would be Arnold Schoenberg during his atonal period. 8 See, for example, Roger Scruton (1983). He claims that because photographs only capture ephemeral moments of contingency they are incapable of depicting the cumulative passage of time and thus the genuine truth about the gures they depict. 9 Adornos own complex attitude towards nominalism is a subject we cannot broach now. See Fredric Jameson (1990: 15764) and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (1997: 20711).

170 Martin Jay Unchecked aesthetic nominalism liquidates just as philosophical critique does with regard to Aristotle all forms as a remnant of a spiritual being-in-itself. It terminates in a literal facticity, and this is irreconcilable with art. By being something made, artworks acquire that element of organization, of being something directed, in the dramaturgical sense that is anathema to the nominalistic sensibility. The historical aporia of aesthetic nominalism culminates in the insufficiency of open forms. (1997: 221) But what, we have to ask, of those artworks in the 20th century that explicitly resisted the idea of being made or formed by artistic intention? What of those works that were designated instead readymades by the enormously influential figure whose legacy Adorno curiously never considered in his theory of art, Marcel Duchamp? Duchamp, in fact, turns out to be very much part of our narrative because of a lapidary and cryptic note from his White Box in 1914, which reads: A kind of pictorial Nominalism (check) (1973: 78). Thierry de Duve (1991), one of the leading Duchamp scholars, significantly chose this phrase for the title of his study of the artists passage from painting to the readymade, noting that nominalism was a term that appeared throughout Duchamps writings. How does Duchampian nominalism, we now have to ask, fit with our story of denial and then with the re-enchantment of the world via photography? *** What first has to be acknowledged is the multiple function of nominalism in Duchamps powerful provocation to traditional artistic practices. Whereas mainstream modernist abstraction may have pursued the elusive goal, as Clement Greenberg never tired of insisting, of the essential purity of the medium,10 Duchamp performatively rejected that quest by decisively giving up painting itself. Abandoning not only the mimetic task of painting what was on the other side of a framed, transparent window onto the world, Duchamp also rejected the claim that the flat canvas was an opaque surface on which experiments in color, form and a texture might be pursued. Instead, he decried all retinal art meant to provide pleasure to the eye in favor of an art that was named as such by someone with the cultural capital to have his act of enunciation taken seriously. That is, one meaning of pictorial nominalism was the idea that the intrinsic qualities of the object were less important than the act of naming it a work of art and getting the legitimating institutions museums, galleries, collectors, historians of art, etc. to accept the act as valid. Eschewing the older ideal of creative genius in which the gifted artist somehow channeled the same innovative spirit that God has shown in willing the world into being, miraculously making the invisible visible, Duchamp effaced himself, or at least his talent as a traditional artist, and became the more modest designator the namer of found objects as readymade works

10 See, for example, Clement Greenberg (1961: 139, 144, 171), where purity is always put in scare quotes. Beginning with Leo Steinbergs celebrated 1968 lecture (Steinberg 1972), Greenbergs generalizations came increasingly under re.

Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World 171 worthy of display in museums. De Duve calls it his ironic asceticism (1991: 126). In this sense, pictorial nominalism was a variation of the older impulse we have already encountered in Ockham, which denied that inherent qualities existed in the world which could serve as standards of beauty. It was a radical conventionalism in which the decision of the enunciator the one who can get away with saying this bottle rack or this urinal was a work of art and should be in a museum trumped any intrinsic rules of formal beauty, such as proportion, organic wholeness, or integrity. Although the larger institutional frame of art was not repudiated by Duchamp the museum, after all, remained the privileged site of his provocation the assumption of qualitative artistic merit determining what belongs within that frame was. There was, however, another sense in which pictorial nominalism moved beyond this conventionalist usage, and gestured towards a kind of nominalism that was no longer understandable solely in terms of denial and disenchantment. It is this second kind that I want to call magical nominalism, with apologies to the masters of what has become known as magical realism in the novel.11 Duchamp wanted to reduce words to their non-communicative status, expressing nothing of the intention of the mind that might speak them or describing nothing of an external world to which they might refer. Ideally spoken by no one, they defy interpretation into something else, as well as their subsumption under a generic concept. As de Duve notes, for Duchamp, words ought to forget that they have referents, that they give birth to concepts, that they are made up of a phonic substance, so that the dictionary, linguistics, phonology, and aesthetics can all be abolished (1991: 127). If words are to be understood as names, it is not in the sense of a linguistic sign but rather that of the proper name, which does nothing to describe the characteristics of the person to whom it refers or subsume him under a concept, but rigidly designates him or her as a unique entity.12 This second sense of nominalism, which I have called magical for reasons that will be clearer shortly, has to be differentiated from the first in its relative de-emphasis of the enunciative function of the artist, on that voluntarist moment of self-assertion ex nihilo, which we have seen Blumenberg argue was a critical implication of the Ockhamist critique of real universals. As de Duve notes, a number of other modernist painters emerged out of the cubist dislocation [of traditional realist painting] with the certainty that a new hieroglyphic language had just been born and that painting had a brand new future ahead. The painter would become the semiotician of a future culture. In contrast, Duchamp sensed he could not be anything but the nominalist of a past culture (1991: 142)
11 Although the term has recently been used to characterize the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ben Okri and other novelists from Latin America and Africa who mixed realistic with supernatural phenomena, it was already in play in Weimar Germany as a synonym for the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in painting. See Franz Roh (1925). 12 For more on the issue of Duchamp and proper names, see Thierry de Duve (1996: chapter 1).

172 Martin Jay That is, the readymade is something given by the past, not created by the artist in the present, which is then re-named an art object, not even a painting or a sculpture, but simply art object. As such, it means nothing aside from that name; no longer an object of use, it is also not to be understood as an object of formal beauty within a generic tradition. Its value, we might say, lies solely in what it is now designated. Once named a readymade, it is nothing but the carrier of that name. Whether or not the two variat ions of nominalism, conventionalist and magical, can be entirely separated is, to be sure, not so clear. The transition from the original generic name in the quotidian world out of which the readymade is wrested the urinal or bottle rack or bicycle wheel is, of course, first a functional artifact before it becomes an art object is enabled, after all, only by the act of a legitimated designator. It may not be an act of creation ex nihilo, but it is also not an entirely passive act of recognition. Nor is Adornos warning that the individualist telos of nominalism reaches its limit when it is inevitably pitted against a generic tradition really refuted by Duchamps provocation. Indeed, not only did the concepts of painting or sculpture remain potent in the very act of negating them, as did the larger category of art itself, but the very word readymade also quickly became a generic concept of its own under which all its specific instances could then be subsumed. Duchamp, not surprisingly, could become known as a progenitor of conceptual art. Still, there is something worth pondering in Duchamps semi-coherent quest to pursue a pictorial nominalism that considers found objects as if they were singular proper names, with no inherent characteristics of importance in the objects themselves, something that may allow us to understand photography as a means of re-enchanting the world. To arrive at what I hope is this pay-off will require a detour through the writings of three critics, who at one time or another had illuminating things to say about art in general and photography in particular: Walter Benjamin, Rosalind Krauss, and most notably W. J. T. Mitchell. Let me take each of them in turn to build my larger argument. *** Benjamins relevance is not due, however, only to his ruminations on photography, but also to his speculations about language, which are perhaps most prominently developed in his famous essay of 1916, On Language as Such and on the Language of Man (1996).13 In this seminal work, he adopted what has been called an Adamic view of languages, in which the fall into a Babel of different tongues was preceded by an Ursprache, an original pure language. As the historian of language Hans Arsleff has put it: Also an epistemological doctrine, it held that languages even now, in spite of their multiplicity and seeming chaos, contain elements of the
13 There are many commentaries on Benjamins linguistic theory. For a helpful comparison with that of his friend Gershom Scholem, see Eric Jacobson (2003). As far as I can tell, his views on naming have never been compared with Duchamps pictorial nominalism.

Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World 173 original perfect language created by Adam when he named the animals in his prelapsarian state. In the Adamic doctrine the relation between signifier and signified is not arbitrary; the linguistic signis not double but unitary. Still retaining the divine nature of their common origin, languages were in fundamental accord with nature, indeed they were themselves part of creation and nature. They were divine and natural, not human and conventional. (1982: 25) After John Lockes demolition of innate ideas, the Adamic view of language went into hibernation, preserved in esoteric teachings like the Cabbala, but having little impact on modern linguistic theory. Benjamin had the audacity to resurrect it in his 1916 essay, which was itself left unpublished until well after his death in 1940. Benjamin began the essay be expanding the word language beyond a tool of human communication or mental expression to include everything in animate and inanimate nature. Whereas conventional notions of language Benjamin, the incipient Marxist, calls them bourgeois privilege communication between humans about a world of objects, the more expansive notion knows no means, no object, and no addressee of communication. It means: in the name, the mental being of man communicates itself to God (1996: 65). Although only God possesses the perfect language in which name is equivalent to thing, man approximates it through the giving of proper names: The theory of proper names is the theory of the frontier between finite and infinite language. Of all beings, man is the only one who names his own kind, as he is the only one whom God did not name (69). Language in this expanded sense is therefore more than mere signs, more than arbitrary conventions invented to communicate abstract ideas or enact intersubjective performatives. After the fall into Babel, however, the project of regaining the perfect language was thwarted by what Benjamin calls overnaming, which produces the melancholy of a disenchanted world of nature, no longer at one with its original names. But that something more might be hoped for, Benjamin argued, is evident in the inherent telos of translation, which is to get beyond the inadequacies of individual languages and approach the Ursprache beneath them. Significantly, translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract areas of identity and similarity it is also the translation of the nameless into the name (1996: 71). Here we have a nominalism that fully earns the adjective magical14 in the sense that it rejects both abstract universals in the Scholastic tradition and

14 In On Language as Such and the Language of Man, Benjamin in fact writes, the Fall marks the birth of the human word, in which name no longer lives intact and which has stepped out of name-language, the language of knowledge, from what we may call its own immanent magic, in order to become, expressly, as it were externally, magic (71). Benjamin continued to use this term in his unpublished 1933 fragment Antithesis Concerning Word and Name, where he writes The foundation of the name: communication of matter in its magic community (1999: 717).

174 Martin Jay conventional names in its Ockhamist nominalist opponent.15 Instead, it posits the possibility of regaining original names, true names, as designating, indeed being at one with, the specific, qualitatively unique things to which they had been equivalent before the Fall into Babel and conventionalist pluralism of different human languages. Although there is some ambiguity about how absolutely particular Adams names in the Garden were were they the Ursprache version of dog or poodle or fido? like Duchamps pictorial nominalism, Benjamins sought-after restoration of it also dislocates objects from their functional contexts of use and resituates them in a new realm in which they are without any communicative meaning beyond their existence as qualitatively distinct things. The passage from Benjamins linguistic version of magical nominalism to Duchamps pictorial alternative, however, seems puzzling, and even more so if we want so see the latter as a way-station to a consideration of photography. That is, what can it mean to call a readymade a pictorial or visual version of a proper name? Let me suggest two ways to approach this problem. The first comes from Benjamin himself, who considered visual examples of anticonceptual experience before he settled on his theory of names. As Howard Caygill has recently shown in Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (1998), among his earliest writings, mostly left as unpublished fragments, were a number of ruminations on the importance of color as a site of resistance to generic conceptual subsumption of qualitative individuality.16 Here he articulated many of the same ideas he would soon develop in his essay on language in the idiom of color. Without spelling out all the details and attempting to make his argument fully coherent it was, after all, presented in fragmentary form and never published by Benjamin in a final version one major point can be stressed. Colour, unlike form, is not sharply divisible; it is infinitely nuanced in ways that defy its subsumption under categories (thus instantiating that continua of transformation Benjamin would later attribute to translation). The words we use to distinguish colors are arbitrary impositions on a manifold that cannot be reduced to innate distinctions. Children, in their state of innocent wonder prior to reflective distantiation from the world with its straitjacket categories, are in touch with the magic of color: Because children see with pure eyes, without allowing themselves to be emotionally disconcerted, it is something spiritual: the rainbow refers not to chaste abstraction but to a life in art. The order of art is paradisiacal because there is no thought of the dissolution of
As Robert Hullot-Kentor has noted, Benjamins work was also conceived in opposition to nominalism, although the focus of his critique was distinct. It was concerned with nominalisms refutation of the expressive content of language Benjamin developed a doctrine of ideas that attempts to recover the expressive content of language in a fashion that, with idealism, justies thought as part of metaphysical contents (2006: 127). 16 Among these are The Rainbow: A Dialogue on Phantasy, Aphorisms on Imagination and Color, A Childs View of Color, Painting and the Graphic Arts, and Painting, or Signs and Marks. All but the rst of these are translated in Selected Writings, volume 1 (Benjamin 1996).
15

Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World 175 boundaries from excitement in the object of experience. Instead the world is full of color in a state of identity, innocence, and harmony. (Benjamin 1996: 51) The childs experience of color is thus not filtered through generic categories or abstract boundaries; it simply registers the qualitative intensity of the colors it sees. Ironically, without the conventional linguistic name for a color, it is able to experience something like the individual proper name of the hue it sees along a spectrum of infinite gradations. In a way, this is a visual experience of the magical nominalism that Benjamin would later attribute to the Adamic view of language before the Fall into Babel. Although the proper name is identical to itself while the continual transformation of color suggests no rigid identities, both resist the conceptual imposition of generic categories on the world. We are, to be sure, still a far cry from photography, which for a good part of its existence was, after all, black and white rather than colored. Here Rosalind Krauss influential essay of 1977, Notes on the Index, republished in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), comes to our aid. In the context of an explanation of Duchamps rejection of painting and his overcoming of his early focus on self-depiction, she turned to the importance of the photographs indexical relationship to the world. Drawing on Andr Bazins classic essay The Ontology of the Photographic Image (1967), which had argued for its superiority over painting as a way to render a likeness of an object, and re-describing it in the terms of C. S. Peirces trichotomy of icon, symbol and index, she argued that the photograph heralds a disruption in the autonomy of the sign. A meaninglessness surrounds it which can only be filled by the addition of a text (Krauss 1985: 203). Krauss then took her argument one step further by audaciously linking Duchampss readymades with the photograph: It is also, then, not surprising that Duchamp should have described the readymade in just these terms. It was to be a snapshot to which there was attached a tremendous arbitrariness with regard to meaning, a breakdown of the relatedness of the linguistic sign (203). There was, she claimed, a parallel between the ways both readymades and photographs were produced, both as uncoded events: It is about the physical transposition of an object from the continuum of reality into the fixed condition of the art-image by a moment of isolation, or selection It is a sign which is inherently empty, its signification a function of only this one instance, guaranteed by the existential presence of just this object. It is the meaningless meaning that is instituted through the terms of the index. (206)17 Krausss larger argument, which is that much of the abstract painting of the recent past also sought to signify indexically, is less important for our
17 For a later consideration of the importance of photography in Duchamps oeuvre, which takes it from the inuence of chronophotography in Nude Descending a Staircase up through his last work, the installation Given, see Dalia Judovitz (1995: 21926).

176 Martin Jay purposes than her recognition that the readymade and the photograph both resisted subsumption under traditional codes or categories, either inherent in the world or imposed by the artist. In this sense, they transcended the realist/ (conventionalist) nominalist dichotomy and approached what we have been calling magical nominalism. Theoreticians of photography have, to be sure, debated the extent to which it is entirely a message without a code, with voices like Umberto Ecos (1982) and Joel Snyders (1980) raised against the mainstream position represented by Bazin and Roland Barthes (1977).18 However important the indexical character of photographs, they argue, there is always an iconic and symbolic element that cannot be ignored. The field of vision, focal point, distance from the object, shutter speed, and exposure time all contribute, they remind us, to the photographic image as a theatrical mise en scne. Different cultures, other commentators have claimed, have from the beginning resisted the belief in the automatism of the photographic image.19 And with the advent of digital technologies, the indexical component in what is indistinguishable from traditionally produced photos is reduced still further, perhaps even entirely effaced. In this sense, photography and painting lose their inherent distinction, as has recently been argued with the work of artists like Jeff Wall.20 Still, despite the attempts to efface the difference, the stubbornly indexical moment in virtually all photography is hard to deny. Even digital photos, after all, need not be doctored. Pixels are not inherently less trustworthy than the chemical recording of light rays. In fact, as one commentator has noted, in spite of the rejection of the idea that photography has any special characteristics or monopoly on reality, recent years have seen a revitalizing of photography in art as traces or indexes in the Peircian sense What is incidental, banal and commonplace (it could be called the trivial realism of photography) is an important hallmark of most photographs not only snapshots compared with, say, paintings or drawings. Another is the special relationship of the photograph to time; the fact that it is a trace of something which has been. (Sandbye 1999: 182) Indexicality in general involves temporal delay, but photography seems to mobilize its affective impact even more powerfully than other traces of past material contact, like tracks in the snow or handprints on a wall. If, as we have seen de Duve argue, Duchamp was a nominalist of a past culture and if Benjamins nostalgia for an Adamic language of proper names prior to the fall into overnaming are transferred, as we have been suggesting they might, to
18 If the ferocity of the debate over its signicance in the collection edited by James Elkins based on the Cork Art Seminar of 2005 (Elkins 2007) is any indication, the index remains a hot button issue for photographic theory. 19 See Olu Oguibe (2002) for a discussion of the African response to the camera, which he argues prefers the idea that photographs are made rather than taken. 20 For recent considerations of this issue, see Lars Kiel Bertelsen (1999) and Diarmuid Costello (2008).

Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World 177 the photograph, then the power of this temporal displacement can be even more strongly registered. From one perspective, of course, the pastness of the photographic image has been understood as a source of deep melancholy, a reminder of our mortality and the mortality of those we love. Barthes celebrated ruminations in Camera Lucida are perhaps the locus classicus of this response, which understands delay in terms of the logic of trauma in Barthes vocabulary, punctum and spies ghosts rather than living people in the images they leave behind. But if we approach it from a less morbid perspective, its magical potential can reassert itself. As Mette Sandbye has put it, something has taken place, and photography connects us with this distance in time. It is not the consolidation in an epistemologically founded realism that fascinates us in photography; it is because like a fetish? it is both a substitute for something absent and a simulacrum, and at the same time presence and analogy. (1999: 184) Like a fetish? Mentioning fetishism moves us finally to the third of our major theorists, W. J. T. Mitchell, whose most recent collection is entitled provocatively What do Pictures Want? (2005a), and which introduces a consideration of fetishism in his response. *** Before exploring its implications, we should note that Mitchell has been concerned with the implications of nominalism throughout his career, making him suspicious of any attempts to discern the universal essence of a medium such as photography. He has, for example, clearly learned a great deal about the limits of indexicality as the basis of all photography from his on-going dialogue with his University of Chicago colleague Joel Snyder. Iconology, Mitchells path-breaking collection of 1986, includes an admiring essay on the nominalist philosopher Nelson Goodman, whose critique of neoKantian essentialism in Languages of Art he enthusiastically endorses. He extrapolates Goodmans conventionalism to included skepticism towards attempts, like those of Barthes, to privilege the indexical, realist function of the photographic image. Nelson Goodmans nominalism (or conventionalism, or relativism, or irrealism) provides, in my opinion, just the sort of Ockhams razor we need for cutting through the jungle of signs so that we may see just what kind of flora we are dealing with (63). What Mitchell finds most suggestive in Goodman is the distinction the philosopher makes between dense, replete and continuous sign systems and ones that work via discontinuous gaps and differentiations, between for example a thermometer without gradations and the alphabet with its discrete letters. Images are generally of the former kind, texts of the latter.21 In a 2001 interview, Mitchell reiterates the same argument, calling the surplus of images an intractable
21 This opposition is, to be sure, itself open to deconstruction. As Mitchell notes, A text, whether a concrete poem, an illuminated manuscript, or a page from a novel, may be constructed or scanned as a dense, analogical system, and the results may be noted without worries over whether this violates a law of nature (1986: 70).

178 Martin Jay feature of visual culture and warns against formalizing it within the straightjacket of linguistics. Nelson Goodmans argument that images are dense, analog symbol systems, in contrast to the differentiated, articulated schemes of language is relevant here (2005b: 23940).22 In so arguing, however, Mitchell subtly moves away from the radical culturalism and voluntarism of the mainstream nominalist tradition. For no matter how conventionalist Goodman with his stress on constructivist world-making (1978) may aspire to be, this contrast between dense, replete, nuanced symbolic systems and ones based on crisply defined digital oppositions is precisely the ontological distinction we have seen Benjamin draw between the colors of the rainbow with their infinite nuances, and the abstract, generic names we give them. Mitchell himself tacitly acknowledges this similarity when he concedes in a later essay in Iconology, not that Goodman utterly banishes the magic of images. One could argue that his categories of density and repleteness reinstate the basic values of modern formalism by treating these emphases on the signifier as symptoms of the aesthetic, and then Mitchell adds, Goodmans list of symptoms of the aesthetic, when coupled with his account of expression of the application of metaphorical predicates to art objects, is surprisingly close to Walter Benjamins notion of aura (1986: 153).23 Thus, although he contrasts Goodmans nominalism with the realism of art historians like Ernst Gombrich who believe images can be understood naturally and scorns the belief that images are natural signs as the fetish or idol of Western culture (1986: 90), Mitchell quietly opens the door to a nominalism that is more magical than conventionalist. In a later essay, Realism, Irrealism, and Ideology: On Nelson Goodman, reprinted in his 1994 collection Picture Theory, Mitchell moves even further through that door and away from what he calls the philosophers hyperconventionalism (1994: 351), and distances himself from the assumption that iconoclastic irrealism can explain everything in visual experience. Although still endorsing Goodmans critique of nave copy theories of representation, Mitchell argues that what we need at this point is a positive account of realism that registers the force of Goodmans critique without
22 If there is any doubt that Goodmans argument is critical is to his thinking, it should be noted that Mitchell cited the same argument at length in yet another interview (2008: 40). 23 It might be better to think of the parallel less in terms of modernist formalism than in that of the formlessness (or informe) that Surrealists such as Georges Bataille found so compelling and whose importance contemporary critics like Rosalind E. Krauss have emphasized. See in particular Krauss (1993) where she writes, let us think of informe as what form itself creates, as logic acting logically to act against itself within itself, form producing a heterologic. Let us think it not as the opposite of form but as a possibility working at the heart of form, to erode it from within (167). The importance of the blur and the out-of-focus photographic image has also been stressed by Raymond Bellour (199394). He distinguishes between photographs that are all blurred or out of focus, which he compares to painting in their imposition of a single code, and those in which there is only one element that is blurred or unfocused, which is closer to cinema and serves like Barthes punctum to interrupt the code.

Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World 179 extending it beyond its proper domain (354). Although his main point in this essay is political the model of freedom implied by irrealism is ultimately a variant of soft liberalism Mitchells unease with radical nominalist conventionalism opens the door for at least a tacit embrace of its magical alternative, a pictorial nominalism that is not utterly resigned to disenchantment. It is in his most recent collection, What do Pictures Want?, that Mitchell moves more decisively to the other side of that door to embrace a nominalism that shifts the center of gravity away from the making or judging of images by artists or spectators and back to the images in themselves. In so doing, he helps us complete our argument that photography has served to re-enchant the world. As the title of the collection suggests, Mitchell is willing to take the audacious step of attributing to images their own desires, their own vitality, instead of seeing them as the mere projection of human wants and interests. Rather than relegating the magical power of images to a pre-modern past, he argues that it remains potent in the present, indeed is a characteristic of our relation to images in general. Modern technology has failed to disenchant the world, he contends; instead, it revives ancient fetishistic, totemistic and idolatrous attitudes and practices in new guises. As vital signs, images cannot be reduced to their semiotic function in a cultural system created entirely by humans. Significantly, Mitchell cites Barthes on photography to support his claim: the punctum, or wound, left by a photograph always trumps its studium, the message or semiotic content that it discloses (2005a: 9). And he notes with admiration Bazins blatant contradiction of his own admonition not to maintain archaic superstitions by asserting a greater magic for photography than was ever possible for painting (54). Mitchell is, to be sure, sensitive enough to the obvious objections to the anthropomorphization of images to try to cover his flank against critics who wonder do you really believe that images want things? He replies, somewhat defensively: My answer is, no, I dont believe it. But we cannot ignore that human beings (including myself) insist on talking and behaving as if they did believe it, and that is what I mean by the double consciousness surrounding images (11). Can we totally cure ourselves of the illness of fetishism through a debunking iconoclasm, which would entirely eliminate the vitalism of images? Mitchell is skeptical: My own position is that the subjectivized, animated object in some form or other is an incurable symptom In short, we are stuck with our magical, premodern attitudes towards objects, especially pictures, and our task is not to overcome these attitudes but to understand them, to work through their symptomology (30). To return to our point of departure, William of Ockhams nominalism may have denied the intrinsic intelligibility of the world in terms of real universals, but, as we noted, it opened the door for faith. Magical nominalism can perhaps be understood as one variant of that faith, which is revived in visual terms most powerfully in the case of the photograph. What precisely is the object of that faith, which even if we reduce it to a symptom, as Mitchell suggests, can never be fully worked through? What do photographs want of us, to remain with his unapologetically vitalist

180 Martin Jay vocabulary?24 Why do they grab us and demand our attention, telling us to stop the flow of time and pause in our rush into the future? Here, of course, we can only conjecture. If we agree that they do not affirm a world of inherent ontological universals, or even an aesthetic canon of conventional forms, can we say that photographs somehow want to be understood as the visual equivalents of the Adamic names the true names Benjamin hoped to rescue from the over-naming of linguistic conventionalism? Do they want to remain stubbornly meaningless in the sense that they resist being paraphrased in terms that reduce their singularity to an exemplar or case of a larger category or even as a metaphor of something else? Or more precisely, despite all efforts to saturate them with meaning, do they insist that they always contain a measure of excess, like Barthes punctum, that defies paraphrastic reduction?25 What may suggest that they deserve to be understood in this way is their complex relationship to temporality, which has occasioned so much speculation in the reception of the medium. A great deal of it, as we have seen, stresses the melancholy implication of the photographic image as memento mori, as a mark of the inevitably passing of time implying our finitude. But if we see it instead as a miraculous freezing of a single ephemeral moment, a moment that is utterly irreducible to what came before or after, an uncanny moment that somehow is present when the image is later viewed despite its absence, then perhaps it can be understood to betoken something magical. As Martin Seel has argued, for this reason photographs differ radically from film: what moves the focus of rendition and perception from photography to film, from a having been there to the being-there of a thing, is the event of a moving image, which abandons any realist bonds of photography precisely because it is movement (2008: 175). Like a fetish, wrested out of the contextual flow of linear time, the conventional time of historical narrative or the cinema, the photograph resists being absorbed into a cultural whole. Like a proper name, it refers only to one singular object at one instant of its existence.26 And as such, it limits the sovereign power of the constitutive subject. As Rgis Durand has noted, painting presupposes a gesture of construction or
Mitchell himself makes the link between vitalism, the analogical resistance to digital coding and photography in a later essay in the collection entitled In the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction, where he writes: The Cyber is the judge and differentiator, the one who rules by writing the code. Bios, on the other hand, tends towards the analogical register, or the message without a code, as Roland Barthes put it in speaking of photography (2005a: 315). 25 Any essentialist generalization about photographs will inevitably come up against the objection that not all instances of the phenomenon whose precise boundaries remain historically variable and in constant ux will be compelling examples. For a selection of those that I would argue do support the argument in this paper, see the collection of Allan Chasanoff (Chasanoff 1994; 2008). 26 For an account of this issue, see Martin Seel (1996). He shows that the photographic image is more like a denotative proper name than a full sentence, a momentary conguration of things rather than a story, although of course, connotations and a story can be added to its meaning. He also notes the limits of the parallel, because proper names belong to enduring individuals, whereas photographs are of ephemeral moments when the conguration congeals.
24

Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World 181 extraction, while the photograph (in one view, at least) presupposes a simple reception, a contemplation. It is an art of the dj vu, showing the alreadyseen, and as such it plunges into a state close to the dream or hallucination (199394: 124). Although we know that photographs, even before the age of digitalization, are amalgams of the instant of their being taken and the subsequent work on them in the developing, printing and displaying processes, that instant is never entirely absorbed into those posterior interventions. It is a reminder that the world is more than human projection or construction, more than the categories we impose on it, more than the meanings we impute to it. Rather therefore than the self-assertion that Blumenberg understood to be a consequence of conventionalist nominalism, it implies what we might call the counter-assertion of the world, a world more readymade than the product of human will, a world that somehow stubbornly thwarts all of our best or is it worst? efforts to disenchant it. Ironically, the magical nominalism of the camera begins to resemble a realism of particulars, which is, to be sure, very different from the scholastic realism of universals it challenged during the era of William of Ockham. But it is a realism of proper names that paradoxically comes from the world and not the naming subject, a world that has not entirely lost its capacity to inspire awe, wonder and humility.

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