The Machine's Dialogue by Steve Edwards

The Machine's DialogueAuthor(s): Steve EdwardsReviewed work(s):Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1990), pp. 63-76Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360389 .

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The Machine's Dialogue

STEVE EDWARDS

If we look at contemporary cultural studies in the United States, we discover a curious echo of the reverberations between Volosinov's 'two trends in the philosophy of language'. On the one hand, structuralist and post- structuralist models assert the autonomous determining force of language, its priority over human subjects. On the other hand, a more conservative and institutionally entrenched "humanist" paradigm claims to defend the autonomy of the creative subject. For those of us who are involved in photography, the polarities of this debate are quite evident, both in theory and in practice.

Allan Sekula.'

Over the last few years photographic history and theory has turned increasingly on the question of the studio as a site of ideology, even if it has not been stated in these terms. In this period, critical photographic theory has come, more and more frequently, to take as its objects those images of 'power/ knowledge' produced in the asylum, the hospital, the prison, the mission hall, and so on, all of which are studio pictures of various kinds. At the same time, radical photographic practice has moved into the studio, undoubtedly providing women and black photographers with a productive space in which to explore questions of identity and hegemonic representations. As a controlled space it has enabled those voices which are usually silent to be heard. This is forcefully demonstrated in the recent work of Jo Spence, in which photographic therapy sessions in the studio result in images which erupt as the repressed 'unofficial consciousness' of the Family Album.2 Similarly, the theoretical work elaborated around 19th-century studio pictures has allowed us to reconsider the photographic field, to look again at those practices that have been too often dismissed as 'marginal' and 'unworthy' by a dominant art historical criticism. The discovery of these 'ignoble archives' has allowed us to comprehend the part played by photography in the work- ings of social power; the way it has pressed down upon the bodies of the exploited and the oppressed. It has also alerted us to the problem of simply recon- stituting histories of these groups from archives that were, invariably, produced to do instrumental jobs.

The benefits of this work on and in the studio, however, need to be located within the general suspi- cion of the realist mode that has developed in, and around, post-structuralist theory. Anti-realism, it could be argued, is one of the forces which is boost- ing the status of the studio and reducing photography to its phantasmagorical residue. John Tagg, for instance, in his essay on Power and Photography,

which introduced many of these themes into photographic criticism, argues that realism is the dominant form of signification in bourgeois society. As a consequence, Tagg believes, a politics of representation would necessitate creating a disturbance in the production of realism that would then have repercussions throughout the social formation, from economics to sexuality. He asks:

What would it mean in photography to struggle not for 'correct consciousness' but to change the political, economic, and institutional regime of the production of truth, to detach its power from the specific forms of hegemony in which it now operates, and to project the possibility of constructing a new politics of truth?3

The answer, I believe, is that it would look like Maclntyre's nightmare in After Virtue. A dream of a world without science in which anything can be said because nothing can be tested.4 Photography is a peculiar form of representation occupying, as it does, the gap between art and science; its effects are variform - it focuses power and desire but it also produces knowledge. The effect of anti-realist epis- temology is always to negate one wing of this contradiction, elevating some practices over others; it turns knowledge into power, or into desire, and science into art.

The question of the photographer's studio might prove to be a particularly useful one around which to examine recent photographic theory. This I intend to do by drawing on the concepts of Dialogue and Monologue theorised by the Bakhtin school.5 As Raymond Williams noted in one of his last essays,6 it is a sobering thought that those methods which have come to figure so prominently in the impasse of the late 1980s, principally structuralism and post- structuralism, but also certain kinds of psycho- analysis, 'had already received decisive criticism during the 1920s at the hands of Volosinov and Medvedev. In the process of engaging with Formal- ist linguistics and the work of Freud, the writers of the Bakhtin school produced a theory of discourse that not only addressed questions which were not to become issues within cultural politics for another 50 years but, moreover, they addressed them in a mode which was thoroughly historical and materialist.

In the work of the Bakhtin school an argument about the sign's reciprocal determination, what these theorists called dialogue, constitutes the central category. In the formal sense dialogue is only one specific form of discourse but these writers use it

THE OXFORD ART JouRNAL - 13:1 1990 63



as a theoretical concept; as a category which brings into being and organizes discourse. This dialogical model of language presupposes that we orientate upon the other's word, we incorporate it into our utterance which only takes shape in relation to it. Within this perspective no utterance can ever be complete being only part of what has come before and what will follow. Volosinov insists:

Any true understanding is dialogic in nature, understanding is to utterance as one line of dialogue is to another. Under- standing seeks to match speaker's word with a counter word. Only in trying to comprehend a foreign language do we try to match word with word.7

In opposition to this dialogic form of understanding Bakhtin introduces the notion of monologue, which is, he argues, the utterance to which we are unable to formulate a reply. His major example of this is a dead language; one whose themes are no longer invested with social contradiction. Mono- logue is here linked to the forms of behavioural ideology in its refusal of the other.

All discourse according to the thinkers of the Bakhtin school lives on the boundary between its own and an alien context; it is this process that renders representation internally social. The will to reference of dialogism means that the question of whether signification can, or cannot, be related to the extra-discursive becomes a non-issue. Discourse, in fact, is only intelligible on such a basis. Without the concrete situations in which the utterance takes place, the social hierarchy that organizes those speakers and the intonations which this produces, it cannot be understood. Volosinov illustrates this theoretical argument with a passage from Dostoy- evsky in which five labourers hold a perfectly intelligible conversation in which each of them utters only one obscene word.8 Discourse, is, here, thought of as a kind of homology in which the voices, and the social interests that invest them, are always internally present. Meaning then, does not remain fixed in a sign; it is rather dependent on the sign in a position between its circulators, and this necessitates active understanding. The fact that the sign cannot be invested with eternal, stable meaning, however, does not commit us to theoretical relativism. As Ken Hirschkop has argued:

What is missing [from deconstruction] is the idea that contexts and the subject positions they entail are repeatable in both social and historical location. In fact dialogical elements are repeatable to the extent that linguistic elements need not be. There are in many situations, a variety of linguistic options which will produce the same effect. To assert that every context is absolutely unique is to reify time as the cause of history.9

What I want to argue is that the studio constitutes a monological site; for the photographier it operates as a space in which to assert mastery over the object of fascination, for repressing the uncontrolled, the

accidental and the contradictory. Those deviant objects of bourgeois fear and dread are brought into the studio so that they might become their opposite. The colonial subject or the naked woman here come to figure as the ciphers of the photographer's imagi- naire. The flux of juxtaposition and opposition that goes on outside of the studio, on the other hand, remains recalcitrant to the photographic look. Transitory and unpredictable, the spaces beyond the studio render the patternings of desire and power problematic; unlike the studio mannequin the subjects here answer back.

The studio is a site on which these patterns of contradiction can be negotiated; every day social life is collapsed into it, controlled and cleaned up. The studio might be seen as a place where the fantasies of the photographer are focused, a place where taxono- mies of power and desire are developed and roam free. In her discussion of colonial photography, Sarah Graham-Brown argued that the studio operates as a kind of symbolic appropriation of space dense with the signs of urban or geographic land- scape.10 A space which always sought to be another more private or more dubious. In one of those 19th- century manuals on the studio which typically mixed design and decorum, science and ideology, Henry Peach Robinson detailed the creation of that most symbolic space - the bourgeois drawing room. But his was a drawing room of a peculiarly fluid nature, covered in linoleum for ease of movement, carpets, and backgrounds on castors; it might at any moment change its continent.11 If Robinson refused to use the mass-produced fantasies of studio furniture or Seavey's backgrounds, the majority of photographers did not. And in a historical moment in which even the position of the horizon in a back- ground could become the battleground for a debate on the photographer's status, we need to be aware that the question of the studio wasn't simply about the images that were produced within it but was also concerned with issues closer to hand.

For Bakhtin it is necessary to separate out the human and the natural sciences as dialogical and monological respectively. He insists that while natural science contemplates things and, therefore, the only subject present is the one who does the comprehending, the human sciences, on the con- trary, can never be exact because they are a relationship between subjects. Here, the subject of study cannot be voiceless without, simultaneously, ceasing to be a subject.12 This is what happens in the studio monologue where the camera turns the subject of the photographer's fascination into an object which is, by definition, dumb. Bakhtin calls this thingifica- tion, his own term for a process we know as reifica- tion. He writes of this monologue:

Monologism, at its extreme, denies the existence outside itself of another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities, another I with equal rights (thou). With a monologic approach (in its extreme or pure form)

64 THE OXFORD ARTJOURNAL - 13:1 1990



another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness. No response is expected from it that could change everything in the world of my consciousness. Monologue is finalized and deaf to the other's response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge it any decisive force. Monologue manages without the other, and therefore to some degree materializes all reality. Monologue pretends to be the ultimate word. It closes down the represented world and represented persons.13

It is this monologic address that Foucauldian photographic criticism describes as the operation of power/knowledge. And here a consideration of that key Foucauldian figure, the prisoner, may prove useful.

As part of the 19th-century debate on photographing criminals, that indefatigable champion and cataloguer of the photographic field, H. Baden Pritchard, published several accounts of his visits to prison studios in The Photographic News. He describes the achitecture, the distinctive sounds and smells, the warders, the prisoners and the studios but his main concern is with the 'criminal' subject's response to the photographic event. In an article on Millbank Prison14 he details for us the next sitter, a man of 'stalwart build', 'docile as a dog', 'clean shaven', 'ugly' and bearing the L for Lifer on his sleeve. The tone of the photogapher's instructions

leaves us with no doubt as to the power relations of the situation. This is literally a monological event. Then, after the sitting, Pritchard is left temporarily alone with the Lifer entertaining the fantasy of being assaulted in a desperate escape attempt. But nothing happens. As Pritchard puts it the convict is:

Luxuriating in a delightful moment of release from drudging work and monotonous labour. Do what you want him to do? Will he be obedient? Why, he would stand on his head to please you and to escape for a few minutes longer his daily toil ....

Similarly, in his text on Pentonville Penitentiary,16 Pritchard is concerned to stress the ease with which convicts submit to photographic scrutiny. While he notes that occasionally the photographer might encounter an unruly sitter, undoubtedly making work difficult, this was the exception. It is, however, he insists, the exception which the public hears about, with wierd accounts published of strange devices and ingenious tricks used against the convict. He goes on to describe Sir Luke Fildes"talented picture' depicting a prisoner held in position by warders while the photographer attempted to produce a likeness. It is representations like these, Pritchard argues, that have left such a marked impression on the public mind, and he is convinced

I

*

Fig. 1. Sir Luke Fildes, The Graphic, 1873.

THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL - 13:1 1990 65



that they are erroneous for 'a more docile body of sitters than our convicts do not exist'.

While at Pentonville he evidenced the photographing of six convicts. There is the same attention to detail in his description of the men and their situation as before. The observation of their shaved heads, their dress, the chair and its absence of a head rest, the narrow boards held above the prisoners onto which their number was chalked, and the same kind of perfunctory intonation, discipline and command. He notes that while the operator pre- pares a double carte plate he rarely has to use the second because the men remain perfectly still for the seven seconds required. And then, one convict refuses to obey instructions - here at last is our refractory subject - but no, this one turns out to be merely deaf.

If Pritchard was convinced that convict sitters could be described as 'docile bodies' his focus on the question of power wasn't a personal quirk. The question was a live one among photographic com- mentators many of whom, indeed, recounted their ingenious devices and tricks. Pritchard might have been on one definite wing of the photographic estab- lishment concerned to assert monological ease but his discourse was a response to those others who understood this process as a struggle. For throughout the photographic literature there was an obses- sion with 'criminal photography' in general, and the refractory convict sitter in particular. The Photo- graphic News in particular ran article after article on 'Criminal Photography'. In addition to numerous descriptions and suggestions related to the power struggle in the prison studio it also republished material from the foreign photographic and the domestic press. In an essay by Julius F. Sachse, for instance, we are provided with a graphic counter- point to Pritchard and a virtual literary accompani- ment to the Fildes image:

The writer recollects one instance in which it took four stalwart officers to hold one prisoner while the 'artist' got his picture. The 'cabinet' not only showed the face horribly distorted, with eyes shut and tongue out, but also the hands of one officer holding his ears, the second officer holding his hair, while the hands of the third showed as if he was choking the prisoner."7

In this text, reprinted from The American Journal of Photography, Sachse pointed out that any visit to a 'rogues gallery' in a Police Station would convince you how many of the images were rendered useless by this kind of resistance. Such stories were legion with perhaps the most recurrent theme concerned with the way in which the clever 'rogue' might thwart the photographic process by distorting his or her features at the decisive moment. Such accounts were invariably accompanied by the stratagems and techniques for outwitting the prisoner; a narrative of trip wires and Blitz illumination powder, of fake cameras and hidden assistants, of secret hideaways

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Fig. 2. Cuthbert Bede, Photographic Pleasures Popu- larly Portrayed with Pen &' Pencil, 1855.

looking on to exercise yards suggests that candid photography was born of this disciplinary power. If this struggle to produce the monological image seemed like an impossible labour then at least one commentator p ointed out that social power rendered the struggle uneven, noting:

In most cases, however, a threat of shortening the rations, or increasing the labour, has been effectual in inducing the rogues to leave their features in a normal state. 18

And, if as Sachse pointed out the dryplate had made 'all such scenes fade away', enabling the photographer to seize the moment, it had been a long time in coming.

Those who contributed to The Photographic News were, however, determined to persevere for the general good and for their own. One writer insisted that it was because photography wasn't art, because it lacked imagination, that it had such a key role to play in the disciplinary apparatus.'9 It was because

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developing around photographic exchange are here called to a halt by political formation. And if the album could contain a world of deviance and resistance, that mode of display could also be read through the ideology of physiognomy in which crime is reduced to its image. Perhaps this is the best way to understand Galton's composite method - as the specific commodity logic of 19th-century crimi- nality. For, if criminals all looked the same then why not use one image for twenty.2'

Alternatively, what H. Baden Pritchard valued about 'criminal photography' was not so much this kind of physiognomic regularity, as a kind of difference in unity. He favoured the French model which he described in 'A Visit to the Prefecture de la Police'.22 There the 'rogues' were photographed in their 'natural state'; 'hairy individuals', 'unshaven' and 'unsoaped', individuals that the Prefect described with one word - 'Nihilists'. As opposed to the British system, in which all criminals were depicted with shaven heads and shaven faces, in prison grey and with their heads an inch and a quarter in length, it was the individual identity of the French pictures which, for Pritchard, enabled them to act as a system for regulation.

After much lobbying on the part of The Photo- graphic News, the Home Secretary finally announced in 1870 that it would be henceforth mandatory for all' Gaols in England and Wales to photograph their inmates and to submit those images to a central archive held by the Metropolitan police.23 But if these debates demonstrate that The Photographic News was certain about the advantages of 'criminal photography' others, representing different constitu- encies and interests, were not. A leader in The Daily News, for example, doubted the efficacy of the Home Secretary's decision. Turning the physiognomists' arguments back upon them, it asked if criminals constituted a specific type; if they were characterised by definite features, then would not all their photographs look the same and prove practically useless. The one advantage that it could see for photography was that it was more humane than branding.24 Or, an article in The Daily Telegraph25 would argue that the photographing of criminals was an infringement of liberty and that, in fact, if warders had to constrain a sitter awaiting trial, if a conviction was not secured they were in danger of being charged with assault. The Photographic News responded criticising 'the maudlin school of humanitarians' and marshalled empirical evidence and references to Dickens' criminal types.

It would be easy, however, to take these debates at face value and misrecognise the professional lobby of a journal like The Photographic News for the movement of the British state towards greater disciplinary surveillance. After all, 'criminal photography' was big business with the London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company regularly receiving requests for 2,000 prints of a particularly wanted criminal from Scotland Yard. Two~ years after the act was




introduced it was scaled down, now only selected categories of prisoner would be photographed. The reason for this about turn? The regulatory method proved to be simply too expensive and for the capi- talist mode of production such things ultimately matter. The Daily Telegraph carried details of the government report on the progress of the act in 1873.26 During the period November 1871 until its coming into force on 31 December 1872, 43,634 portraits of criminals had been sent to London at a (conservative) estimated cost of 18d. per head the total cost was calculated to be ?2,948. 18s. 3d. Over the same period the number of convictions which could be linked to photography was cited as a mere 373 cases. The Daily Telegraph was clear that this constituted a wanton squandering of public money and of silver nitrate.

If the Bakhtinian concept of monologism is useful in examining the social relations of power in the studio, this overdetermined field demonstrates, if we need to be told, that monologism can never be complete. And it is in this that the work of the Bakhtin school proves to be superior to those methods which would eradicate these contradictions. The discussion of monologic power in the work of these theorists always leaves us with an alternative-dialogue.

Formalist, structuralist or post-structuralist ap- proaches to culture work well on the monologic precisely because it is sealed off from what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia. Language for the Bakhtin circle is heteroglot; riddled with contradictions between national languages, unofficial and official languages, old and new linguistic uses, different kinds of professional jargons, forms of the workplace and the trade, the spaces of domestic language, the familial, and so on. In short, the specifics of social register constitute the material of language and at the same time shoot it through with contradictions. It is this which pre- vents dialogism from degenerating into intersubjec- tivity and thus returning us to preconstituted subjects. Heteroglossia, on the other hand, is not the same as the instabilities of deconstruction that render all language as undecidable text but, rather, the contradictions of the different material interests that use and struggle within it.

The Bakhtin school understood, in this sense, that the formalist approach to language was always complicit with the monologues of the ruling class. Because, as Allon White has argued:

'High' languages are imperialistic. They establish themselves as both 'standard' and prestige by a variety of methods, including 'objective' grammars, the prescrip- tion of norms, structural thesis of language (& even deconstruction theories) insofar as these systematically exclude the actual speech-use of the majority of people.27

In addition to this, Raymond Williams insisted, in Marxism and Literature, that the emergence of 'text' over speech is a product of the colonial encounter with unwritten languages.28 Imperialism, Williams

argued, specifically contributed to the monological model of language, developing power relationships in which the dominated peoples' languages were measured against a norm of their observers and were, not surprisingly, found wanting. In this process the constitutive and active aspects of language use were assigned inferior positions in relation to the written: langue was elevated over parole. In this sense, theoretical models which exclude resistance or actual speech must be seen as part of the forces which seek to silence dialogue. Post-structuralist accounts of colonial photography, or, criminal photography, as such, demonstrate a metaleptical structure, using methods drawn from imperialism or from the repressive apparatus to theorise these representations.

While a thinker like Foucault effectively monolo- gises language, deconstruction can be seen, as White has argued, as an attempt to rewrite heteroglossia in terms of the impossibilty of the master narrative.29 This is a real irony, for if White is correct, then deconstruction is a practice predicated upon dis- covering the marks of heteroglossia which it itself had exiled from its model, consigning it to the random and untheorisable domain of everyday speech. Heteroglossia can only be presented as a theoretical revelation on the basis of a philosophical model which argues it shouldn't be there in the first place.

The monologue/dialogue distinction could be considered around the question of what a typology of the body confronted by the camera would look like. Andre Rouille's distinction between the subject-body and the object-body (his third category element-body is much more problematic) might prove useful here.30 The distinction that Rouille makes is between those bodies which display themselves and those which are revealed. This is an issue of matching different types of power relationships between photographer and subject. Subject-body pertains above all to the bourgeois portrait while the object-body relates to those who appear powerless before the camera, certain kinds of women, dominated peoples and classes, and so on. Rouille argues that between the portrait and the nude there occurs an inversion brought about by monetary exchange, for while the one pays for its portrait the other is paid for it.3"

The bourgeois portrait, in this sense, proves to be the exception that demonstrates the studio's monologic rule. Here the object, or more specifically in this instance, the subject of the camera's gaze, the individual bourgeois, acts as co-author. In the 19th- century portrait, these powerful subjects collaborate with the photographer to determine the codes of their own appearance, producing a self-image invested with confidence and contentment. I want, here, to contrast with my discussion of the prisoner one particular problematic sub-set of this celebratory portrait, the image of the bourgeois child.

In 1869 Edwin Cocking could be found singing two ditties to his child sitters:

68 THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL- 13:1 1990



There was a little girl, Who had a little doll, And the doll sat down on a chair, She had such fine blue eyes, Just the colour of the skies, That she did nothing else but stare.

There was a little boy, Who had a big drum, And he banged this drum with his hand, Till all the other boys, Said 'Here's a jolly noise, It must be a military band'.32

Hardly great lyric verse; they are, however, heavy with the tropes of the obsessional debate on how to photograph bourgeois children in the 19th century. From the rigid gendering to the images of staring eyes and the loud noises they demonstrate a defi- nitely photographic concern with the subjects attention. For in this relationship it was the photographer's job to fix an ideological moment. The photographer was paid for turning the bourgeois sickly sweet ideal of the child into the reality of its image. This was an image which had to be created for if, as one photographer put it, children look naturally picturesque then it was necessary to do more than pose them bolt upright. He continued:

In taking groups of children, less care in posing - or perhaps I should say less apparent care - would often be an advantage. Adults, we know, will fall into ungraceful attitudes, but children are rarely able to do so, and a group of youngsters in natural positions playing with toys, or at some of their childish games, or even studying a picture book, is far preferable to a cold and studied pose, in which the children represent miniature men and women ... All I want to see is a naturalistic result - children looking happy - thoughtless, happy laughing children ....33

But if these photographers agreed with their clients that there was nothing more charming than the innocence of childhood many of them supple- mented this belief with another that children were the greatest menace the photographer might hope to face in the studio. The problem was how to make the required fantasy from the little monster in front of the camera. Charles E. Pearce posed the problem well enough when he wrote that if children possess this special beauty they are able and willing to make themselves exceedingly ugly.34

The Photographic News carried numerous graphic descriptions of the trials and tribulations of photographers faced with this dilemma; their strategies, their failure and their desperation. Photographers exchanged comments on each others errors and tips on their individual successes. A literature of proce- dure and suggestion developed which consisted of ever newer and more fanciful methods for the actual- isation of fantasy. A taxonomy of Victorian childhood could be assembled from the objects - animal,

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vegetable and mineral - used to occupy the sitter. One popular strategy was to suggest that if the child watched the camera carefully s/he would see a bird emerge from the lens, others went still further and fitted the U.S. manufactured mechanical singing birds to their cameras. Perhaps the most extravagant of these proposals argued:

Place the infant on a table, and a stout pillow behind it, well supported; place also a pillow on either side, so that the child has something to lean against and rest upon. Now dip each hand of the little model in a pot of molasses, and afterwards the left hand in a bag of feathers. The child's attention is now riveted upon the plumed hand, holds it up in astonishment, and taking courage, begins to pick each feather from the left hand; but each one naturally adheres to the right hand, and thus the play commences repeatedly from one hand to the other for an hour or two, slowly and deliberately, giving you ample opportunity to make an artistic expo- sure. It is a wonder that this has not been patented; the plan is altogether ahead of giving a child a tallow candle to eat, or frightening it with an exhibition of Punch and Judy. 35

Indeed, it was only necessary to be a little more

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THE OXFORD ART JouRNAL - 13:1 1990 69



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the same a standard picture could be supplied; after all, thousands of pictures of the Royal baby had been sold that had never been taken of him.36

As always with a literature of this kind there were contradictions and counter claims. It was suggested that those who advocated photographing babies upside down, starving children or taking them asleep were not fit to advise others.37 And, as with all such aspects of the photographic field in the 19th century the problem was not slow to be capitalised upon; there sprang up special chemical formula for children, rapid plates for children, backgrounds for children and baby lenses - as one photographer noted, at anything but baby prices.

Humorous as much of this literature now appears the point is serious. For if the technical problems of 19th-century photography should not be underesti- mated something more is in evidence here. The lines of authority were clearly demarcated between the photographer and the object-body of the prisoner; the position of the bourgeois child was, however, a different question, indexically linked to its bourgeois parent, subject-body in its own right, the photographer was here playing out fantasies that were not strictly his or her own. It was this answering word, the moment that the photographer's monologue was halted, that proved to be the source of the problem. For ultimately photographers were unsure of their

status in this relationship, uncertain as to whether they had the authority simply tell to the child to keep still. This was compounded because the child was undoubtedly accompanied by an adult, usually its mother, whose presence in the studio only made matters worse. She would invariably interfere, make unhelpful suggestions and offer advice, insist on impossible poses and what could the photographer do but humbly comply. It would take a photographer like H. P. Robinson to resolve the situation by excluding all but the nurse from his studio. The reason for this he argued was that: 'it is easier to tell the nurse she is an idiot than the mother'.38 In this way it was possible for Robinson to use the nurse's delegated parental authority to control the child while being sure of his own. But then not every photographer was H. P. Robinson, probably the most distinguished of his generation, an acclaimed painter who had exhibited at the Royal Academy before he was 21. With Robinson you paid for art and his successful portraits of children folded back to confirm that status. But if even Robinson felt he had to be respectful towards the bourgeois mother, the average operator's position was much less certain. This kind of portrait might be thought of as dialogic and its condition is economic. A relationship is set up, the basis of which is payment, on which the photographer suspends the power of his/her fantas-




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tic space. The fact that the bourgeois individual, even a child, took part in a dialogue with the photographer only reveals all the more strongly the monologue that takes place when other objects are brought into the studio by financial conducement or by social power.

If the dialogue/monologue couplet provides us with a useful tool with which to examine the dispar- ate nature of the photographic field it is also the case that within the work of the Bakhtin school these concepts are not unproblematic. At various points Bakhtin suggests that everything is dialogical. In Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics, he insists that 'life by its very nature is dialogic'.39 If this is the case, if all discourse is dialogic, then by definition monologism cannot exist. Ken Hirschkop has provided us with a solution to this problem arguing that this question cannot be settled with reference to what the texts really mean because the texts are internally contradictory on precisely this issue. The Bakhtin school opens up key new areas and new concepts but these need to be worked through rather than simply assumed. Hirschkop writes:

If we are going to continue using 'dialogism' as a theoretical term denoting a general quality of linguistic practice, then some revision of the word is needed, so that specifically monological cultural forms are understood as forms

of the dialogic - dialogical in some profound sense rather than some inexplicable perversion of the dialogical. But this also means that monologism must itself be recognised as a strategy of response toward another discourse, albeit a strategy which aims to 'ignore' or 'margi- nalize' the opposite discourse. We are thus led to a very different vision of what Bakhtin means by 'dialogue', one which includes not only the liberal exchange of views but also questions of cultural oppression and power.40

In this conception the monologue/dialogue problem emerges as the specific political opposition of a monological dominant discourse which always seeks to present itself as natural and neutral and a dialogism that insists on contradiction. The model in Bakhtin that we might use for this is his discussion, in Discourse and the Novel, of centripetal and centri- fugal forces.41 The ruling class, according to Bakhtin, always seeks to homologise discourse but social contradiction means this process can never be completed; discourse is always simultaneously flung in the opposite direction by heteroglossia. In this manner Hirschkop develops a conception of dialogue/monologue built around the sign as site of class struggle analysis. Dialogue and monologue are, thus, not two ontologies but representational positions locked together by a power struggle.

The real benefit of this analysis for historians and




theoreticians of photography is that it allows us to consider the studio, but also its outside, monologue but also dialogue. This is essential because the photographic field encompasses the celebratory as well as the repressive, the bourgeois portrait in addition to the image in the file index. Any account which attends to only one of these instances will of necessity produce a closure within knowledge; in the case of anti-realism collapsing all representation into the functioning of power or desire.

In conclusion I want to look at arguments around a specific photographer, August Sander. It is not my intention to cast Sander in the role Bakhtin had Dostoyevsky play; if we needed a photographer for that slot I could think of better candidates. Sander has been selected, rather, because his is a practice which has been pulled into the orbit of what I have been calling the monological by the recent critique of physiognomic practices. I have in mind here, principally, the comments on Sander in two essays by Allan Sekula, The Traffic in Photographs and The Body and the Archive.42

According to Sekula, Sander combined a 'faith in the universality of the natural sciences and belief in the transparency of representation'. He shared, it is argued, the common physiognomic belief of the period that the body and especially the face and

head, bore the outward signs of inner character. That Sander was committed to some kind of physiognomic programme is evident from his radio talk on photography as a Universal Language,44 where he consistently stressed its photographic merits. As a theoretical approach, physiognomy, is present in these pictures as fixed format, full-length images, and as subjects confronted with the camera and depicted in their 'life situation'. This stan- dardising of the image allowed Sander to build a taxonomic system and, as Robert Krammer has argued:

Sander also drew upon a European fascination, dating back to the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, with the depiction of various classes of society arranged in hier- archies by appointed function and trade. One traditional format was the Stadebiuch, or book of trades (Figs, 7, 8, 9).45

The Book of Trades can be seen as the model for Sander's Anlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time) which is made up of a selection of portraits produced and organised according to its classificatory logic. As with these earlier texts Sander's book begins with photographs of the peasantry, perceived of as the most elemental class, and ends with fools; in this

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Fig. 7. August Sander: Anlitz der Zeit, 1929: Three Generations of Peasant Families.




Fig. 8. August Sander: Anlitz der Zeit, 1929: The Lord of the Manor.

case the unemployed. This immense project which was to also include 45 .other volumes, each contain- ing 12 images, was never completed. In 1934 the Nazis destroyed the printer's blocks and seized all unsold copies. Here is our contradiction. Sander clearly envisaged Anlitz der Zeit as a radical work and, more importantly, it was received as such not only by the Nazis but by such critics as Alfred D6blin and Walter Benjamin.

Sekula's comments on Sander are determined by his concern not to overstate the power of the instrumental image and, in so doing, to homogenize the photographic field. To this end he maintains a view of photography as fundamentally disjunctive. In locating Sander within this terrain Sekula is at pains to stress that there are two kinds of physiognomic practice: egalitarian and authoritarian. The former, he argues, is based upon a common understanding of the language of the body for all peoples, while the latter, the dominant tendency in practice, is a strategy of domination and control. Sander is situ- ated on the liberal humanist wing of this problematic, holding a belief in a universal and critical pedagogy. Sander, for instance, always organized his typoiogy around social rather than 'racial' categories and thus maintained his distance from biological determinism.

Like all positivists, however, Sander saw difference as an inessential and superficial matter. As a conse-

Fig. 9. August Sander: Anlitz der Zeit, 1929: roung Peasants.

quence of this, Sekula argues, lurking just below the surface is Social Darwinism with its 'methods' for calibrating inferiority. Sekula writes:

One is tempted to emphasize a contrast between Sander's 'good' physiognomic science and the 'bad' physiognomy of Gunther [a Nazi race 'theorist'] and his ilk, without challenging the positivist underpinnings of both pro- jects.45

In embracing the archival mode as a fundamental component of his modernism, it is argued, Sander built into his practice aspects of the same general positivist outlook that was incorporated into the Fascist project of domination. These comments are extremely suggestive but it ought to be noted that the archival paradigm was, and is, a minority instance within the photographic field. Sander, on the other hand, earned his living on the celebratory wing of photography as a portraitist. It seems reason- able, therefore, to argue that it was this practice which was of primary importance for him. This is the position taken by Benjamiin in his essay A Small History of Photography. While Sekula sees Sander as the producer of instrumental images, Benjamin had an altogether different opinion of his work. For him Sander's pictures offered an inexhaustible stock of material with which to study German society. As Sekula himself points out, we tend to think of




Benjamin as the theorist of montage, forgetting how he constructed his modernism from an empirical model of detailed study. This is, I believe, what is at stake in his high regard for Sander whom he compared to Goethe's remark:

There is a delicate empiricism which so involves itself with the object that it becomes true theory.47

It is in this sense that D6blin's description of Anlitz der Zeit as akin to comparative anatomy, approvingly cited by Benjamin, can be seen as significant. Benjamin saw a need to learn from detail, from the look of things, interested as he was in the sign as symptom. It is precisely 'the look of things' that contemporary debates around physiognomy appear to be in danger of monologising. It seems to me that we need to reconsider what Benjamin meant when he described Anlitz der Zeit as a training manual for knowing your enemy.48 And for this the Bakhtin school may again prove to be invaluable.

One way in which we might envisage this dialogue with the appearance of things is through a consideration of Volosinov's discussion of reported speech in the final section of his Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. As we have seen, any serious understanding of language, for the Bakhtin school, turns on concrete speech performance and yet, as Volosinov argued, modern linguistic thought is concerned primarily with morphology and phonetics rather than with syntax.49 This is a trend continued today by post-Saussurian linguistics which always appears at its most comfortable when operating at the micro- level of the phoneme rather than the macro one of the utterance. In this sense Volosinov devotes a third of his book to a study of the problem of reported speech which he defines as:

... the syntactic patterns (direct discourse, indirect discourse, quasi-direct discourse), the modifications of those patterns and the variants of those modifications, which we find in language for the reporting of other persons utterances and for the incorporating of those utterances, as the utterances of others, into a bound, monologic context.50

and:

Reported speech is speech within speech, utterance within utterance, and at the same time also speech about speech, utterance about utterance.5'

The discussion of reported speech is undoubtedly the most dense and specialist section of Volosinov's text and I certainly do not intend to discuss the implications of such detailed linguistic questions as direct discourse, indirect discourse and quasi-direct discourse for photography though such a consideration might prove to be productive. Instead I want to look at the way in which a notion of the reporting of another's utterance may allow us to rethink the vexed problem of realism and documentary.

Reported speech is, for Volosinov, speech which enters discourse and becomes a constructional element within it while, at the same time, retaining some level of autonomy and coherence as the speech of another. Thus, the problem of reported speech is a question of the active inter-relationships within discourse which operate as part of the overall production of language.

Volosinov marks out two basic modes in which the reporting of speech operates. The first is to main- tain the integrity of the other's utterance, demarcat- ing its boundaries clearly and protecting it from the reporter's intonation; the second mode involves the assimilation and dissipation of reported speech with the author's retort. In this instance the boundaries of reported speech are broken and fluid. There is then, a dynamic of integrity and resistance in reported speech organised, in part at least, around a hierarchy of power; the greater eminence given to an utterance the more clearly it will be demarcated.

The implications of this discussion of reported speech, taken in conjunction with the will to reference of dialogism are very great for photography. So much post-structuralist work has monologised photography and silenced its multiple 'voices', an important part of which has consisted of arguing that all documentary photography contains an implicit will to power that would silence all other positions. A consideration of reported speech would, alternatively, allow us to think through how 'author' and 'character', as it were, 'speak' at the same time. Discourse could then be grasped as Janus-faced in which two differently orientated utterances are maintained within the same construction. This of course would make looking at photographs difficult and 'messy'. We would always have to approach the image allowing for the possibility of power's opposite. If we consider Bakhtin's typology of the forms of reported speech then we can see just how complex the possible forms of the photograph might be.

The role of someone else's word, quotation explicit and reverently emphasized, half concealed, concealed, half conscious, unconscious, correct, deliberately distorted, unintentionally distorted, deliberately reinterpreted, etc

52

Undoubtedly some of these categories propose the writer or the photographer as a preconstituted subject in control of representation; if we reinterpret them as forms of heteroglossia, however, they seem immensely suggestive. Bakhtin in constructing these lists was certainly more analytic than systematic, and, as such, the density of these forms may well be difficult to unpack. But to keep them open would seem much more useful than taking the monologue of power at face value and eradicating the answering word of those who are imaged. Volosinov's notion of reported speech would seem to provide us with a way of considering the objects of the camera's gaze as subjects. And as subjects who author themselves,

74 THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL - 13:1 1990



who make their own histories even if not in the conditions which they may choose.

One small example of reported speech in relation to Sander's work can be found in John Berger's discussion of an image from Anlitz der Zeit in which three young peasants are depicted on the road in evening, going to a dance.53 Berger states his intention to concentrate upon their suits. In 1914, he argues, these young men were probably at most the second generation who wore such suits in the countryside. The point at stake here for Berger is that these garments deform the bodies that bear them. The physicality of peasant bodies, produced by the rhythms of their labour, is, he argues, fundamentally alien to the suit.

The suit developed in Europe in the last third of the 19th century almost as a uniform of the bourgeois male. Berger writes:

It was the first ruling-class costume to idealise purely sedentary power. The power of the administrator and con- ference table. Essentially the suit was made for the gestures of talking and calculating abstractly. (As distinct, compared to previous upper-class costumes, from the gestures of riding, hunting, dancing, duelling.)54

The contradiction here should be apparent; clothes that were designed to restrict movement, to be worn unruffled and uncreased on bodies that are 'fully at home in effort'. For the peasant to submit to the suit, Berger insists, is a part of the hegemonic process, the point at which dress, experience, social formation and function coincide.

While photographic debates centred around Foucault and physiognomy produce readings of all images of the body as images of power, Berger's argument may provide us with a way of thinking about the body in terms of the semiotic. We need to listen to the 'voices' of the image and part of that dialogue necessitates being able to read traces, signs and clues from the body in the image.

The notion of reported speech and of dialogue, as such, may allow us to see Sander's practice in another light - as a dialogic process. I think it is possible to argue that while Sander may well have operated on the same political ground as the Nazis, and concemed himself with the look of the German people, he did so in a fundamentally different register. Thus, the question of appearance could become the site of class struggle. Sander's peasants, for example, have none of the uncorrupted rooted- ness that the Nazi ideal required. In such a monologic climate, for Sander to image contradiction and difference could be profoundly subversive. To insist on the heterogeneous nature of the German people, to offer multiple voices and multiple looks, to include among his work socialists, communists, Jews, the unemployed and so on, could only be con- structive. Sander's project might be stated as an attempt to keep apart those two very different signs of the German people Volk and Leute. To reduce

Sander to the physiognomic is, as such, complicit with those who would monologise the social. For the other thing that Volosinov's discussion of reported speech teaches us is the necessity of separating out the authorial from other voices.

Notes

* I would like to thank Stanley Mitchell, Adrian Rifkin and Jeffrey Steele for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay and Fred Orton for his support.

1. Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain. Essays and Photo Works 1973-1983 (Novia Scotia, 1984), p. xiii.

2. Jo Spence, 'Disrupting The Silence: The Daughter's Story', Women Artists Slide Library Journal, no. 29, June/July 1989.

3. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation. Essays on Photographs and Histories (Basingstoke, 1988) Chapter 3, 'A Means of Surveillance: The Photograph as Evidence in Law', p. 95.

4. Alisdair Maclntyre, After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory (London, 1985), Chapter 1.

5. I use 'The Bakhtin school' as a shorthand for a group of texts signed by different writers but which are subject to disputed authorship. While the work of this group - Volosinov, Medvedev, Bakhtin and now Kanaev - has been received in Britain by critics like Eagleton, Williams and White as a major contribution to the research programme of historical materialism, in the States the translators and interpreters of these texts are concerned to locate them within the liberal and even Christian traditions. This strategy involves attempting to minimize the role of Volosinov and particularly Medvedev with their known Marxist com- mitments, arguing that they imported a Marxist terminology into a body of work where it did not belong. The question of the authorship is indeed a very complex issue with equally strong arguments for and against; and at this rate it may well turn out that Bakhtin was everyone living in Moscow in the period short of Stalin himself. This said, however, like Todorov, I do not intend to remove Medvedev's name from a work that cost him his life.

The ultimate irony of this dispute is that to use the work of the Bakhtin school, or the sign 'Bakhtin', is to enter into a dialogic struggle. In this way the argument over these works among Christian, liberal and Marxist scholars, only confirms the central thesis of Volosinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, that the sign is the site of class struggle.

6. Raymond Williams, 'The Uses of Cultural Theory', New Left Review, no. 158, July/August, 1986.

7. V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cam- bridge, Mass.) 1986, p. 102.

8. Ibid., pp. 103-104. 9. Ken Hirschkop, 'Bakhtin, Discourse and Democracy', New Left

Review, no. 160, Nov/Dec 1986, p. 99 10. Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women. The Portrayal of Women in

Photography in the Middle East 1860- 950 (London, 1988), p. 21. 11. H. P. Robinson, The Studio and What To Do In It (London, 1891). 12. My understanding of this argument, for which most of the key

texts are untranslated, is taken from Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin. The Dialogical Principle (Manchester, 1984).

13. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky 's Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson (Manchester, 1984), appendix 11, 'Towards a Reworking of the Dostoyevsky Book', pp. 292-293.

14. 'At Home', At Millbank, The Photographic News, January 7, 1881. 15. Ibid., p. 3. 16. 'At Home', At Pentonville Penitentiary, The Photographic News,

January 21, 1881. At the time of Pritchard's visit, Pentonville was the largest gaol in Britain with all male prisoners spending the first part of their sentence there, and as a consequence it held the largest archive of British criminals.

17. Julius F. Sachse, 'Photography in Criminal Jurisprudence', The Photographic NVews, July 25th 1890, p. 572.

18. 'Criminal Photography', All the rear Round, Nov. 1, 1873, p. 11. 19. 'Photographing Criminals', British Quarterly Review, reprinted in

The Photographic News, November 2, 1866, p. 524.




20. 'International Criminal Photography', The Photographic News, August 30, 1878, p. 409.

21. On Galton see David Green, 'Veins of Resemblance. Photography and Eugenics', Photography/Politics: Two, eds P. Holland, J. Spence and S. Watney (London, 1986), and Allan Sekula, 'The Body and the Archive', October, no. 39, Winter 1986.

22. 'At Home', At the Prefecture de Police in Paris, The Photographic News, June 3, 1881.

23. This debate had been going on since at least the 1840s when J. A. Gardiner, the Governor of Bristol Gaol, had used photography to identify habitual criminals who attepted to pass themselves of as first time offenders. Gardiner's work was highly praised by the House of Lords' Select Committee on whose recommendations the Prison Act of 1865 was formed. On the question of photography, however, the Home Secretary ignored this advice and left the matter up to the individual Governors. See 'Photographing Criminals', The Photographic News, November 2, 1866, pp. 524-525.

24. 'Photographing Criminals', The Photographic News, May 6, 1870, p. 206; see also George Croughton, 'Photographing Criminals', The Photographic News, May 13, 1870, p. 226.

25. 'Photographing Criminals', The Photographic News, January 27, 1877, pp. 37-38.

26. 'Photographing Criminals', The Photographic News, August 22, 1873 and Criminal Photography. All The rear Round, vol. XI, November 1, 1873. The number of photographs sent to London are given as: Newgate 4,800; Coldbath Fields 2,800; Liverpool Borough 2,800; Westminster County Prison 300; Leicester 228 (including 22 duplicates); Lincoln County Prison one at a cost of 3s. 6d. The percentage of detentions due to photography were: Bedford County Prison 105; Portsmouth 33; Holloway 30; Hereford 23; Dover 6; Hertfordshire 3; Leicester 3. The majority of provincial towns stated 'Not known' or 'Not ascertained'. 5,000 prisoners were photographed in Lancashire between 1870 and the end of 1872 with singularly unsuccessful results. There were 4 cases among the 356 prisoners at Lancaster Gate, while Kirkdale with 657 prisoners, Preston with 553, and Manchester with 1,244 all replied unknown. Liverpool with 2,583 spent f155 including the construction of a studio costing f 95 and a salary of f 60 per annum, was unable to specify a single case photographic conviction. Similarly Salford with 1,263 spent f 44. Os. i d. to no avail.

27. Allon White, 'Bakhtin, Sociolinguistics and Deconstruction', The Theory of Reading, Frank Gloversmith (ed.) (Brighton, 1984), p. 140.

28. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), p. 22.

29. White, op. cit., p. 139.

30. Andre Rouille, Le Corps et son image. Photographies du dix-neuvieme siecle (Paris, 1986).

31. Ibid., p. 46. 32. Edwin Cocking, 'On Photographing Children', The British

Journal Photographic Almanac, 1869, p. 94. 33. C. Brangwin Barnes, 'Photographing Children', The Photographic

News, November 29, 1889, p. 797. 34. Charles E. Pearce, 'Children From a Photographic Point of View,

The British Journal Photographic Almanac, 1869, p. 91. 35. 'Talk in the Studio', The Photographic News, July 26, 1867, p. 363. 36. 'Punch's Scientific Register', The Photographic News, December 2,

1864, p. 588. 37. J. Walter, 'Photographing Children', The Photographic News,

August 4, 1871. 38. Robinson, op. cit., p. 126. 39. M. Bakhtin, Problems in Dostoevsky's Poetics, op. cit., p.293. 40. Ken Hirschkop, 'A Response To the Forum On Bakhtin',

Bakhtin. Essays and Dialogues of His Work, ed. Gary Saul Morson (Chicago, 1986). p. 75.

41. M. Bakhtin, 'Discourses in The Novel', The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays By M. M. Bakhtin (Austin, Texas, 1981), pp. 272-273.

42. Allan Sekula, 'The Traffic in Photographs', Photography against the Grain, op. cit., pp. 83-88 and 'The Body and The Archive', op. cit., pp. 58-59.

43. Allan Sekula, 'The Traffic In Photographs', op. cit., p. 84. 44. August Sander, 'Photography as a Universal Language', trans.

Anne Halley, Massachusetts Review, vol. XIX, no. 4, Winter, 1978. 45. Robert Krammer, 'Historical commentary', August Sander. Photo-

graphs of an Epoch 1904-1959 (Philadelphia, 1980), p. 19. 46. Sekula, 'The Traffic In Photographs', op. cit., p. 87. 47. Walter Benjamin, 'A Small History of Photography', One Way

Street and Other Writings (Verso, 1985), p. 252. 48. Ibid., p. 252. 49. V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, op. cit.,

p. 109. 50. Ibid., p. 112. 51. Ibid., p. 115. 52. M. Bakhtin, Iz predystorii romannoglslovo, cited Viach, Vs. Ivanov.

The Significance of M. M. Bakhtin 's Ideas on Sign, Utterance, and Dialogue For Modern Semiotics. Soviet Studies in Literature, Spring/Summer, 1975, pp. 198-199.

53. John Berger, 'The Suit and the Photograph', About Looking (London, 1980).

54. Ibid., p. 34.




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The Machine's Dialogue by Steve Edwards