Table Of ContentCONTENTS
PREFACE BY HOLLIS FRAMPTON
FOREWORD BY ANNETTR MICHELSON / 13
PLATFSé 25
A PENTAGRAM OR CONJURING THR NARRATIVE / 59
EADWFARD MUYBRIDG.
FRAGMENTS OF A TESSERACT? 69
FILM IN THE HOUSE OF THE WORD! 81
HONS IN HISTOR Y/SEGMENTS OF EVERNITY ¢ 87
POR A METATISTORY OF FILM:
COMMONPLACE NOVES AND ITYPOTHESES | 107
NOTES ON COMPOSING IN FILM ¢ 117
MEDITATIONS AROUND PAUL SERAND { 127
IMPROMPTUS ON EDWARD WESTON:
EVERYTHING IN ITS PLAGE! 137
THE, WITHERING AWAY OF THE STATE OF THE ART i 162
ASTIPULATION OF TERMS FROM MATERNAI HOPI}
DIGRESSIONS ON THE PHOTOGRAPHIC AGONY i
ALFCLURE?
OX HOUSE CAMEL
RIVERMOUTH
a preface
EN YEARS AGO, another filunaker aud I exchanged
prints. [is allegation, thar some quality or other of my own
work was implicated ia its genesis, made more than usually urgent
the accustomed opacity of what T received, so I resorted to an
habitual strategy of regression.
Taking the film ftom the projector, mounting it or. rewinds, re-
moved it rom serial, spectatorial time and retarned ittoa randomly
accessible space, z skeleral emalation of che conditions under which
ithad deen made, werein, | expected, the postulates of its montage
were snre of retrieval by a method that begins in imitation of a feral
unter, in search of (races of its prey, lacing a terrain with its own
invisible pathways, .. and culminates, it is imagined, in. the
exemplary historical certitudes of autopsy.
This sort of efforris likely <0 g0 on for some time:
In the end, a resident six year old required to know why I spent so
many consecntive evenings at the bench wath a film that was nor my
‘own, Because I don’t anderstand it, I scid, and he answered: you're
ot supposed 0 snderstand films, you'se only supposed to make
them.
8 CIRCLES OF CONFUSION
Iris ax remedy for some uch une superstition suet and ax
prophylaxis against the syndrome of maniowiated, insensient valor
vation which it masks and sustains, that these speetlations have
been writen during the intervening decale,
Inhis own Confessions, Augustine recalls the pretext ofa discovery
After the evening meal and Office, when Arnbrose, his abbor, the
better to be available for consultation, used eo “eave open the door of
hiscell, the youngsters in his Order repeatedly saw the old mania an
incomprehensible exercise: sitting, silent by lampligkt, staring ar a
hook lying open on his knees, now and again turning a page. Long,
years later, Augustine remembered the strange tableau, and finally
understood, in a blaze of astonishinent, just whae it was taat he had
seen hegun, complemented and completed by his own revognition,
During that prolonged moment, Ambrose, the originazor oFa new
kind of cantus and its neumic notation, part cipated in the priunary
instance of an action, at once of separarian and of closure, taat we
must regenetate, in a condition of defective understanding, exactly
because the mechanism of its understanding is under construcsion,
The existence of what we have come to call writing, in which the
representation of the unspeacable throngh a disposition of marks on
a surface superannuates the registration of phonemes by an arrange-
ment of degencrate: inmages, is entirely conditional, pivoting on the
same abyss that divided rinemonically assisted recitatior's of gospel,
episcle, martyrology ... rhe whole mass of utterance internally dif-
ferentiated only to the degree that irs text may be hicratically
guaranteed incorrupt ... from the body cagendered in the mute
cooperation, the mucual inter‘erence which maintains its own
‘energetic pactern, between isriting and reading. Together they make
up language, or the system cl words, which commends itself to our
most intimate arrention kecanse itis, for the presers, the only system
we have: by now a large part of speech, even, consists in the revacali-
zation of subsystems af graphic signs,
Nevertheless, the sysiem of words remains incomplete in chree
sens
1. The act of reading finds itself ir. momentary functional dis-
equilibrium with respect to the act of writmg. However we inay
PREFACE 3
hold, with Roland Barthes, that the reader is inevitably born out of
the desth of the author, tha: assertion still requires a particular ef
fort of belief, and taus implies a residual assumption of causal pri-
for writing, and of special privilege for its author, ... whose
is, in practice, supremely coripromised, because it may
never approach its rexr for the frst time,
2. The system ai wards cannot state the conditions of its own
‘completion, since itremains unable to deiine the terms ot a metalan-
guage (© deseribe its own limits, Neither local nor global criteria yet
obtain for deciding whether any given cement in a discourse isto be
taken as linguistic or metalinguistic, Thus our investigation of lan
guage remaits, in its uttermost reaches, an expanding iwentary of
what Kurt Godel called forsnally waderideable propositions
4. Asan Frnest Fenollosa or a Gershom Sholem wall always come
forward to remind us, writing itself must beunderstood te harbor as
its progenitor the dark reoletion of the image, And there is, ‘or the
time being, no such thing as a conscieus system of images that has
nor been assimilated, traduced, by written latiguage, from the mad-
cap aponomasia of the Middle Egyptian hieroglyph for lapis lazuli,
through tae austere poignancy of the Chinese ideogram far Being, t0
the opening montage of our own ancestral alphabet, with its collu-
sion of animal husbandry, shelter architecture, nomadic domestica
tion and geographic survey: ox, house, camel, rivermouth
Ir is only with the intervention of photography, along with irs
evolutionary progeny, film and video, that a reproducible and verif-
able stream of images begins, just as ve historic stream of words be-
gins, lor us, not with the articulating, voice but with print, the saci-
able image of language. Language and image are the substances of
which we are mads; so itis much more than a matter of interest — it
isour mostinescapable and natural desire — that we undertake toin-
vent, and to specify {using language, and even subverting, it, if we
can) the system of images. Such a project needs forbearance: even
thenotion of a geammar ofthe irange, which must, itself finally with-
ecaway in favor ofa syntax, recedes perpetually, merging impercep-
tibly into that zone where intelligence struggles zo preserve a distine-
tion between what :tay he brought into focus and what may 01
Exentually, we may come co visvalize an intellectual space in
which the systems of words and images will bath, as Jonas Mekas
10 CIRCLES OF CONFUSION
once said of semiology, “sect like half of somthing,” a universe in
which image and word, each resolvingthe contradictions inherentin
the other, will consticute the system of consciousress.
Language itself, which has been, befoze all ese, the arena and instru
menr nf power, emplices obstacles against the circumscription af its
territory, but the sciences, atleast. are long and pragmatically accus-
tomed to annihilating them, In his autobiography, Werner Heisen
berg gives us a fragmen: of conversation from one of those weekend
Alpine hikes that so bemuse Americans {even Sigmund Frend did it,
in our own Adirondacks} in which he was joined by Planck, Bo-n,
Schrodinger, Bohr and Einstein, In that pure high air the corversa-
tion was, of course, of prablems of discourse in physics. One night in
a mountain hut, it fell to Bohr and Heisenberg to clear away after
supper, and the elder scientist remarked co the younger that “our
language is like dishwashing: we have only dirty water and dirty
dishrags, and yer we manage to get everything clean.”
‘We may Ganspose Bohr’s aphorism inta an image of an image,
According to the laws of geometric opties, it is theoretically possible
to represent, as an indivisible point in the focal plane ofa camera ob-
scura, every single point in the populated space before it. In fact, the
vicissitudes of macerial and -narufacture conspize againse this, and
points appear as disks of small bu: finite diameter, These disks are
called circles of confusiun, Even the auost exact photographic tran-
scription resolves, at last, into an orderly collection of imprecisions,
bearable or useful only :o cheextencthat its degree of mexactitude is:
known... and forgiven,
Fictions excepted, this hook collects all the piewes I care to <eep,
from the intecval of their composition. That is nar intended to mean
Unt | think it complete
Circumstances. never properly allowed anatomisation of Paul
Strand’s largely tacit conversion to eryprostalinist end Croccan
esthetics; or of Edward Weston’s disastrously typical caricature of
Political tourism curing his tenure in Mexico, and his uitackusowl-
edged debts to Margrcthe Mather, Tina Modotii, and Sonya Nos-
kowiak. Muybridye looks too much the sentimental scientist, to the
neglect of his fictive strength. The predicament of film practice, al-
—_
PREFACE i
ways embattled, has altered, catastrophically, as late Capitalism,
continues in its inexorahie trajectory toward paroxysin, The aspi
tions of video have metamorphosed entirely: the geometric cheapen-
ing, of electronic technology —a consequence of the West's last
grand circus, in space—has brought to pass a Return of the
Machine, whose kingom is forever. And the landscape of photo-
graphy, ull but umtroddea 2 dozen years ago, is now crisscrossed hy
hedgerows, harhed wire, and Masters of Art.
In short, the passage of time has generated new eptions and
responsibilities for speculative writing, most of which I have left un-
ateended in the not wholly unrewarded expectation that others
inight take them up. Meanwhile, the temptation to revise has been
casy enough to resist, Aside from scattered surreptitions corrections,
in matters of fact, the reader will find my mistakes unchanged.
‘The custom of ending a pretace with thanks is too honorable far
too convenient) to diseard. Firs: of all, then, iny thanks to Annette
Michelson, whose generosity and gracious persistence as my editor,
first at Ariforum and now at Octuber, iy uiatshed only by the
warmth and exhilarating precision of her own writing, As much
thanks, too, to Marion baller, who has, 9 state the chin
cally, foresuflered every sentence, hanks to the anonymous author
‘of a postcard pointing our that Arthur Schopeahauer and Walter
Pater were not the same person.
As for the manuscr pt: by and large, [typed it miyself
Bueffalo, january, 1983
TIME OUT OF MIND:
a foreword
C ROS A-gentino Daneri, poet, invererate deecloper uf pie
ures and the crue hero of Borges’ The Aieph, “condemns oat
modern mania for having kooks prefaced, "a practice aleeady held
tip to scorn hy the Prince of Wits in his own graceful preface 0 the
Quixote,” He ducs, however, acknowledge the foreword use as
accolade,’ and proposes that ‘Barges? act as “spokesman for wwe oF
ihis} book's undeniab.e virtues — formal perfection and scientific
rigor — inasmuch as this wide garden of metaphors, of Figures oF
spocch, nFelenances, i inhospitable the feast detail not sirctly np
holding of trars.”* Borges, ke whose name stands free of inverted
commas, nowhere to my knowledge provides —not even in the Essay
fom Ancient Germanic Literature ~sanction for the delicacy of Da-
sent, trarslator of the Prose ot Minor Eda, whe felt “ne hesitation
in placing the foreword tuche .. Edda heend of the volume.” So
beit
The co-ordinates and contours of Hrampron’s Plot Eave been
traced against the exfoliating chavs ol thedecade’s dissourse on film
and phozography. Like pricters in the darkroom, we hive been
warching the develooment, in sharpered and proliferative detail, of
14 CIRC ES OF CONFUSION
a structured ficld in depch, Photography. ‘lo pursue this dazzlmgob-
‘vious simile one turn “urther, we are surprised by that row coming
into view. We had thought Time captured, arrested, but itis History
encoded within the developing economy of production that emerges
as the shap:tys, casupositional object of that presumed ares. We
‘ought, by now, to have anticipated this, and yet there is, in all the
current literature, the sense of an epiphany, delayed and rednabled
in its power. Now, we are told, 1s Paocography stuly located, and
now it is that we must set to work, establishing an archacology.
covering a ‘wradition,’ in the cuphorie constitution of an aesthet
reclaiming an indeterminate corpas, through scholarship and specu-
lacion, from the limbo to which it has been consigned.
It was in 1848 that Lamartine declared, “Icis photography’s ser-
vility which accounts for my deep contempt fer that chance inven-
tion which can never be an srt, mere'y an aptcal plagiarism of Na-
ture, Ts the reflection of glass en paper arc? No, it is a sun stroke
caught through a mancuver. But whercin liesits human conception?
Jn the crysta’, perhaps. Surely not in Man... The photograph wil:
never replace she painter: one is a Man, the other a Machire. ‘The
comparison encs there,” The refrain is by now: familiar. But itis also
Lamartine who, in the ‘twilight’ of his life, brazenly proclaims that,
“Photography is more than an artsit isa solar phenomenen in which
the artists cal'uborates with the sun.” Romanticism’s hubris had
fourcl, and has retained, its teue Accessory; it is only in the brick
Futurist inuinent propaeéeutic to revolucion that Romanticista will
call, one half-centnry later, forthe reeorciliarion and real gnmient oF
Men and Machine ina common VICTORY OVER TLE SUN.
The kreach within the reversal was one of twenty years of de.
velopment of the techniques of mechanical reproduction. Lamar-
tine’s revision of imdgmenc ratifies the alrsady suspected implica.
tions — scientific, industrial, aesthetic. of that acceleration: it docs
hot, however, project the cpistemelogical malaise generated from
the first hy the technique as such,
If we may claim a position of privilege, it is insofar as we are wit-
ness to “the retura of the repressed.” The s:ructure of & market in
formation. the natute of its exchange mechanisms, the manner in
which stendarcls are defined and imposed, the transrautation of an
ontologically inscribed plenitude into aztilicial scarcity are now
plain wo see, though sill largely unarticolared in the contemporary
discourse of shorography; scholarship and commerce are mutually
FOREWORD 15
implicared in this se:ting into alace. Thus, issues of provenance and.
value, of perceptual and sernictic analysis, a rhecoric of textual crit
Gsm are now formulated with reference to photographic process.
They derive, most evidently and in che maia, from the older tradi
ions of arthistorical and art-critical scholarship. as the commerce
of photogcaphs is shaped [Fonn the practices and institutions govern-
ing the exnibition and diffusice of prints and sculptural casts.
Theory and history of photography strain, however, to ignoze this
complicity, much as arthistorical connoissenrship feigns the dis
dain of the commerce it sustains. Ihe notions of value, af aura orau-
thenticity currently revived and adapted for photography are, as we
knows, the guaranto:s of such commezceidiscourse.
Werneed, we urgeatlyneed, a radical sociology of photography to
force upoa us, t9 disclose to view, the inescapably ideological and
historical natuce aad implications of our present photographic re-
visionism, Bernard B:leiman has, in the only rigorous study of his,
sort known to me, begun to trace the process whereby the photo.
graph begins to acquire value as originating in the sudden appear
ance of those techniques of reproduction that provoked a disequilib-
rium in established categories of description.
‘The history of this process can be divided into two parts. In the
first, the reproductive capacity is defined as imputable to the
machine itsclt. This is the arcisanal period of the mid- 19th century,
when the photographer is very much taz worker; he is then both in.
the servive of the machine and ar one with his tools: che proletarian
of ‘creativity.’ Phorography is, at this oint in history, variously des:
cribed as 9 curiosity, a toy, as useful, [e has not yet been subjec~
tivized,
the inscription of subjectivity will involve a reversal of relation
between means and end. Uhe work of the machine becomes the
work of the subject, and this work is a means of ‘creation.’ Phote-
Bfaphic reproduction then receives the mark of the subjective or in-
tellectual act of ‘erearivity,” and itis then, precisely, that ir Sepins to
be the ehject of legislative protection. The photographer moves
from the level and role of artisan to that of proletarian, and in time,
to that of the artist. For itisin the intorest of industry and of the mar
ket to guarantee, first of all, she status ef the photograph as com-
modlity, and sulsequent to this, that af the photwgrapher as artist.
‘These will in turn generate the re-crearian of scarcity which re-etl-
forces the value of the print, sevived from the pre-industrial ea,
16 TRCLES OF CONBLSION.
Above all, itengages Ute discourse of phornaraphy in the consiita
tion of an ontalog: whose ceute* 's the founding preserice of the art=
ist, author and authorizing figure, reinstating precisely at that mer
ment when the discourse cthistonogeaphyis under fire and revision,
its most suspect set of presuppositions.
Thus, in an interesting discussion organised in 1973, as if in em
mediate response 10 the ctis's inaugurated by this revision, dealers
Gebate with an historian ard a prorographer the modalities and
mechanisms of photography’s emergence inv the Five-art market,
This exchange of views 1urns, between euphoria ard ansiety. pour
one questiar value as a function af scarcity. What can thearcist and
his dealer expect to gain or lese from the recagnition thar this is a
medium of industrial multiplication? How, without absurd:ty, can
tt be restored to the: privilege of a pre-industrial form? And the
difficulties and contradictions je the problem are rehearsed in the
obsessive insisteace upar the arivileged status of the dark room as
the ‘ocus, within the producttve chain, of “the ercative provess,” 38
che ultimate origin of subjectivicy and value within photographic
production. Unel the moment oF high con:edy in which the Photo.
grapher (Aaron Siskind) acknowledges his inability to distingnish
the print made from is negatives by anuther trom thase of his own
dexeloping, In that moment, the astistiproducer :s dispossessed,
evicted from his lair, his Last reluge, as guaramer of craft, aut venice
ity, autonomy snd value.
The claims, then, of pioneers of the modernera such as Strand and
Weston, assessed by Trampton, ate informed with the catheetic
exerbitance involyed in sustaining, containing “the contradiction
hetsween the prin-acy of photoptaphic illusion ard the auzonomy af
the photetaphic artifact,” and F-ampton's diagnostic reading ol
their iniplication within this crisis supplies, for the first sine and
with asaluriry impiety, anotincr set of terms fo: their undersianding,
Weston, akemately protective and aggressive in his magisterial ap
Propriation or mapping of the world is understuod as the Forcbear
against whose erotic itnperiuun, againse whose apodietic terms,
against whose voice ~ laconic and stenterian — over and against
whose Name, one aust locate one’s own presexts and construct
one's practice
les then, within the extended moment of crisis articulated in
those claims, tat Frampton irtervenes, relaeating, cisplacing te
serrain and terms of arguinent, ¢ aborating aver twenty years et ar.
