Discussion...

Dear All
This term Helen and I are going to be posting 'discussion posts' every couple of weeks. These are posts aimed at instigating a discussion in the comments below it. For Module One and Three this is about practicing your writing and also thinking about where you stand on things and what literature informs this. For Module Two it is also instead of Task 2 (Linked-in Discussion- this term we are trying here on our blogs, as it might be easier to get everyone interacting. If you have a discussion you want to start put it on your blog or maybe, link it here in the comments also.)

Looking forward to what this brings in discussion below.

Moving to the language of I

Thinking about what moves us: I like that the word ‘move’ means something emotionally inside as if the ‘mind’ is shifted, and also something to do with our relationship with space as if the body is shifted. I am moved by a picture and remain still, and I move across the studio floor with one idea (to chaînés).

I am wary of playing with English words to make philosophical statements but I feel these uses of the word ‘move’ indicates something about how the mind and body can be positioned as the same thing. What part of ‘I’ moves when I see a painting I love, and what part of ‘I’ moves when I chaînés across the room, and how can I say one ‘I’ is more me than the other?

In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes (1981) discusses how a picture can capture something that moves you. He talks about how a picture can return us to a moment.

‘And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum…which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains… a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.’ (Barthes, 1981, p. 9)

The book is about Barthes search for a photo of his mother who had recently died. Barthes explores a fragility of memory. A fragility that time imposes because the notion of time involves our physically being present with something as if our only relationships were ones in which the sensation of our skin was involved. But we can be moved by an image or a smell or a taste that returns us to a moment we cannot touch. For me that return is real – for some without the ability to touch the remembered ‘thing’ it is not real. Do you believe in one truth or many truths in any given moment? This is something you need to consider because your relationship with truth underpins your stance on reality. You cannot remember past learning, wonder what people think, reflect on your work or do any of the things in this course without deciding at some level on what ‘reality’ is for you.

I feel there are many realities because truth is a ‘response to’, rather than ‘a frame for’ experience. Truth is a rhizome for me with many shoots all connected to each other.

‘In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.’ (Barthes, 1981, p. 13)

Barthes suggest in a picture there is the stadium that creates an interest in the picture. It is something that connects with you therefore. Then there is the punctum which pricks you. When I look at a picture of a man standing by his crops in Brazil. I read the picture and connect with a polite shared interest that the photographer has captured of a farmer in Brazil. This is something that is a mix between my own assumptions of what the picture would be off and a small shift in what I expected that the photographer manages to make in me through the angle of the photo or the use of  light perhaps. But then there is the punctum something that enters me deeply – pricks me to the core. This is not a polite shared understanding it is something so personal it collapses time. It might be the angle of the man’s fingers. That I read as an expression of working, being so familiar with my husband’s fingers forming a simular shape when he stands and talks to me about something frustrating that happened at work and my mother’s little finger as she writes, and my own habit of touching the back of my rings when I am talking to a student and feel nervous and somehow this small part of the picture I am looking at brings me to all this and I find a meaning in the man’s fingers that shapes the whole image for me. The picture that moves me.

As I hold the photo and look at the man in the picture where is the physical and where is the mental, where is the truth? And where is the reality? I love these questions. For me they do not have answers because they are about being brave enough to explore the human experience, not the ‘science’ of defining the human experience.

Finding a picture of his dead mother Barthes says:

‘I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only in me. For you , it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary”; it cannot in any way constitute the visible object of a science; it cannot establish an objectivity, in the positive sense of the term; at most it would interest your stadium; period , clothes photogeny;  but in it for you , no wound.’ (Barthes, 1981, p. 73)

So when we describe a thing, in words, in pictures in movement we inadvertently wonder through moments of punctum for ourselves and others, the wounds of experience. Unaware of when we will penetrate others and unable to avoid it in ourselves. We read into things because to give them meaning we refer to ourselves. So any languages we speak verbal, visual, physical involves layers of translation, layers of truths and realities across the experiences of who we are.

‘Language is, by nature, fictional’(Barthes, 1981, p. 87)

Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida : Reflections on photography (R. Howard, Trans.). New York: Hill and Wang.