PROJECTION AS CULTURAL PRODUCTION
“Even Narcissus needs a mirror: and the best mirror ... is another pair of responsive human eyes.”
- Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics
How can the metaphysical concepts of the post-structuralists be applied to photography as a modern, ritual practice?
By taking our cue from the cluttered amalgamation of Butler, Derrida, and Flusser outlined in previous posts, the rapid growth of research into visual culture, and a pervasive sense that our technological objects are in the process of upsetting more established modes of human interaction (see Sherry Turkle's Alone Together for more on this), then it seems clear that the camera – and the institutions of the photographic apparatus that validate it – occupies a privileged representational position in our culture of communications. Photographic means of mediated reflection must ‘inform’ the modes through which the subject comes to develop a self-image. 'Reflection' in this usage is to be understood the same way that Butler and Lacan have used it, with the metaphoric mirror coming to implicitly represent the cultural gaze that constitutes the individual subject as an object of symbolic discourse.
Bringing these theories into more modern parlance, psychologists Kathy Urwin and Valerie Walkerdine have shown in their seminal book Changing the Subject that particular systems of symbolic representation can contribute to the development of system-specific forms of subjectivity, based on the negotiation of positions for the self within that discursive system (in their case study, they analyzed the way mathematics can affect the self-image of students at a young age). If the act of learning arithmetic profoundly effects a child's concept of self, then the processes of photographic subjectification should also be qualitatively different than the image presented as ‘self’ provided by traditional linguistic forms. When we capture our own image in a photograph, the camera seems to be used to not only situate ourselves in relation to others (either among peers or against unfamiliar groups), but to show us ourselves as a material subject. The camera is a performative object – a technology of the self in the purest sense of Foucault's term.
There is some kind of collective imagining going on in the performance that is modern photographic practice, and this should be evident in the nuances of individual photographic expression – including holiday snaps, party photos, and self-portraiture. I would like to propose that the performative actions undertaken by the individual in relation to the camera should be considered an act of self-projection to a potential screen. A similar idea has been proposed (though not in this terminology) by Misha Kavka, in her essay "Intimate Strangers: Big Brother and the Everyday" (see Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy, 2008). Today, this photographically configured projection of the self is one of the primary modes of identification and serves to structure cultural production more generally.
To understand the ways in which the informative nature of the photograph might effect the ontological positioning of its users, consider for a moment the linguistic significance of ‘taking a picture’ as opposed to ‘making’ or ‘producing’ one. It's worth noting this also applies to the Spanish “tomar un foto”, the French “prendre une photo”, and the German “nehmen Sie ein Foto”, indicating a discourse surrounding the camera in the West not limited to the Anglo-American tradition. It seems that in most languages, photographs are “taken” from the outside. Deconstructing the phrase, we see that there is an implication of ‘capturing’ (which is itself significant, as this is the common language of digital film editing and digital imaging more broadly) an image from a place outside the self, and a place outside the camera – a viewpoint that we are implicitly expected to associate with the other, or a quality of ‘otherness.’ The terminology brings to light the camera’s capacity – through the qualities endowed upon it by the entire techno-social apparatus of photographic imaging and the mass ritual it entails – to embody not only the other, but to lend or ‘project’ embodiment (and perhaps even existence) onto that which it captures in the image.
The camera is undoubtedly designed – and its use informed – in such a way that this objectifying, revelatory quality is central to the production and use of photographic images, particularly those snapshot images that make up the dominant mode of picture-taking for most photographic subjects. In photographic theory a "snapshot", rather than just slang, is a more or less technical term describing a relatively spontaneous mode of capture, most typically associated with the intimacy of amateur and family photography – it is the ‘silent majority’ of photographic practice (see Steven Bull's Photography for a concise history). It is snapshot photography that should be our primary concern when considering projection as a mechanism of subjectification, as snapshots not only represent an ideal combination of the power of photographic images to be both indexical and affective, but contemporary self-portraiture has also largely adopted the snapshot aesthetic of ostensible immediacy, non-professionalism, and spontaneity. This is the result of a long process of cultural and institutional adoption as much as it is a part of the technical qualities of the photographic image. (Indeed, what I am trying to point to with this combination of technical qualities - as espoused by Derrida and Flusser - and discursive social influences - as in Butler and Foucault - is that the two are actually indistinguishable.)
Flusser calls this discursive nexus surrounding photoraphic production the ‘program’ of the camera. This ‘programming’ is an intention projected into the design of the technical object by a series of cultural apparatuses and institutions of meaning that inform the use of that object:
“The camera’s program provides for the realization of its capabilities and, in the process, for the use of society as a feedback mechanism for its progressive improvement … there are further programs behind this one (that of the photographic industry, of the industrial complex, of [other] socio-economic apparatuses), through the entire hierarchy of which there flows the enormous intention of programming society to act in the interests of the progressive improvement of these apparatuses. This intention can be seen in every single photograph and can be decoded from it.”
- V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography
The Synoptic Camera - copyright Jeff Hewitt
This programmed ‘intention’ or 'affordance' to use the words of Donald Norman - see his The Design of Everyday Things for a fascinating, Flusserian look at the household objects surrounding us - and the concept of projection laid out here act as two sides of the same phenomenon. The camera (and thereby the photograph) informs the behavior of the subject, and projection on the part of the subject helps mold the both the identity of the individual and the cultural position of the camera. This implies that not only do the subjects involved with photographic production project aspects of themselves through photography, but that the camera also projects its own ‘intentions’ on the subject through its very use. However, rather than somehow instilling agential qualities onto an inanimate technical object - as has been the downfall of many theorists of information technology - this experience of the legitimacy and desirability of the photographic becomes embodied in the camera through these projective techniques. Although, seen through the theoretical lens of Butler, Flusser, Mumford, and Derrida’s work we should be well aware that there is actually nothing ‘inanimate’ about technical objects. They are constantly in a state of flux, structured by the changing discursive conditions and performative utterances in which they operate.
If the camera projects a particular rubric through which the photographic image should be produced and consumed, it is because the camera has been the vector around which an immense amount of cultural production has already taken place, informed by the technical, historical, and social apparatus of photographic imaging and the discourses that developed it in the first place. I propose that the distributed, photographic mass production within modern culture - a reflective and ostensibly legitimate feedback loop that has come to frame identity, communications, and politics - is best understood through the concept of projection laid out above. We project ourselves through the camera, and to those screens seen and unseen, while the photographic universe that surrounds us projects its own meanings onto the very core of our being.