#Punctum

[lestatdelioncoeur]

Robert Doisneau, Les Vingt Ans de Josette, 1945

[razorsadness]

A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).

—Roland Barthes, from Camera Lucida

[thinkingimages]

Le « jour » s’achève… C’est la nuit et ce dont je vais parler sera plutôt de l’ordre de la nuit. D’une nuit qui n’est pas le contraire du jour, peut-être un autre jour, au sens où le jour c’est aussi une ouverture sur un autre espace.

UN JOUR DERRIDA  | Valerio Adami, Jacques-Olivier Bégot, Daniel Bougnoux, et al.

indexicality; photography, symptom; punctum; a¤ect;universality

[nunc2020]

[kerimcangoren]

The thing the photograph is of is causally indispensable to the photograph in a way that the thing a painting is of need not be. 'That's why Sugimoto thinks of his photographs of fossils as "another set of fossils," as, in effect, fossils of fossils. And that's why although there are paintings of unicorns, there are no fossils of unicorns and there are no photographs of them either. But the fossils also make sense as a problem for photography, and for the same reason. 'The painting of a sea lily colony is a representation of it, a picture of it. The fossil of a sea lily colony is neither. The footprint is not a representation of the foot that made it; the smoke may be a sign of fire but it isn't a picture of it.

Walter Benn Michaels / Photographs and Fossils in Photography Theory edited by James Elkins, 2006 / p. 432

[kittesencula]

[marcogiovenale]

aug 29th, 'encounters at the end of the book': alessandro de francesco and craig dworkin, an online conversation

Alessandro De Francesco and Craig Dworkin in conversation at Encounters at the End of the Book August 29th, 2024 10am MT / 11am GMT-5 / 6pm CET  online, hosted by punctum books Subscribe and join HERE August 29th at 11am CT / 6pm GMT+1 time for an Encounters at the End of the Book event between punctum authors Alessandro De Francesco and Craig Dworkin. Register…

[dreams-of-mutiny]

“The voracious consumption of images makes it impossible to close your eyes. The punctum presupposes an ascesis of seeing. Something musical is inherent in it. This music only sounds when you close your eyes, when you make "an effort at silence." Silence frees the image from the "usual blabla" of communication. Closing your eyes means "making the image speak in silence." This is how Barthes quotes Kafka: “We photograph things to drive them away from the spirit. My stories are a way of closing my eyes.. »”

― Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty

[librarycards]

[I]f academic publishers, especially university presses, continue to insist on their copyrights as inviolable and to only publish books for specialized niche audiences, all claims to “advance knowledge” on behalf of a “public good” and wide “global” readerships, which they claim over and over again, then they are participating in a self-regarding system of the conferral of status upon authors whose work will likely never reach readers in the Global South who cannot afford the costs of buying these books and neither can their libraries. We do not believe this serves the “public good” and furthermore, humanistic and scientific knowledge is a human right. [...] [T]he OA movement is now being thoroughly co-opted and marketized by behemoth for-profit publishers (e.g., RELX, Wiley Global, Taylor & Francis, Palgrave Macmillan, SpringerNature, etc.), and they have made the term Open Access not only hollow and ethically suspect, but also a deception, because authors and researchers, in many cases, have to pay very high fees for what these publishers call “Gold OA” publications. And many authors simply can’t pay, and those with more money in their research accounts don’t have to worry overmuch about their ability to publish in OA outlets. This means that inequity is built into the system of OA publishing. With some despair, we realize that Aaron Swartz’s and others’ idealistic belief that “information wants to be free” has gone largely unheeded in the neoliberal capture of everything as a commodity, even publicly-funded research. Which doesn’t mean that we can’t have an open commons free from neoliberalism, but rather, as Mackenzie Wark has written of the Situationists, we must imagine “a space of play in the interstitial spaces of the policing of the city via the dérive,” which means we “now have to imagine and experiment with emerging gaps and cracks in the gamespace that the commodity economy has become.”

punctum books, A Vision Statement for Thinking, Writing, and Publishing Otherwise in the University without Condition.

[emphasis mine]

[incognitopolls]

Fun fact: that brown indent is called a punctum, and it's part of your tear duct.

–

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[eesirachs]

thinking about sacrifice as a particular response to a god who disallows self-harm. if this body—our body—cannot undergo the mutliation it demands, then that body—any body—will suffice. the moment leviticus prohibits the cutting, scarring, modification of one's own bodyscape, a sacrificial system generates itself. from sensations itching above one's own flesh emerges the cult of carving into other-flesh: but this is not properly other-flesh. not really. not even totem, but something closer. scapegoats, red cows. virgins and first-borns, the creatures whose losses are most violent. these are not animals any longer, but instead a spasm, a punctum, a fleshism. there is no sacrifice that is not an auto-sacrifice. there is no harm of an other that is not a violation of our selves. i am trying to tell you that augustine was right, just on one thing: it is you upon the altar

[nunc2020]

[soracities]

Ilya kaminsky: "we sleep in a language until it comes to wake us with its strangeness", Kafka commended books that are like an axe for the frozen sea, Roland barthes was bored of deliberately composed or arranged photographs and sought the "punctum" (prick), the accidental or incidental element that throws you off in a photo... Tbc

Ctd... Francis bacon particularly loved a self portrait of Rembrandt's where his eyes look like bottomless holes and said that "non rational marks <in a painting> convey the mystery of the fact", the entire concept of "ostranenie" - is this what art is about?

i think if you can say anything of what art is "about", it maybe lies in the fact that the more you try to pin down its "aboutness" the further it recedes (like love, like God). when i did art in school the earliest lesson we were given was to draw something by focusing not on itself, but the negative space i.e. the area around the object that isn't the object. we drew the model for each class by drawing what the model wasn't: it wasn't so much about avoiding what i knew, but what i think i knew.

kafka, barthes, ostranenie...perhaps all form a facet of what art involves and leaves us with: it is an interruption (like beauty); its intrusion throws everything around it into new relief—do we know more or less than we did before? sometimes it is one, sometimes the other. regardless, we now know it differently. a sort of chink in the veil, if you will. an invitation, perhaps.

[qqueenofhades]

Feeling confused, why slavjan people = etymologically slaves. Why would people accept that as their identity, to be slaves? Back in linguistics i remember reading that there two words while similar do not share the same origin.

Okay, buckle in, kiddos. We're about to go on a long and VERY nerdy tangent about historiography, linguistics, imperialism, and how categories and identities are constructed, perceived, and perpetuated both by formal historic narrative and by the people themselves. I'll try to make this as clear (and, uh, succinct) as I can, but yes.

First off: yes, there is debate about this, as there is debate about literally everything (especially on a topic as contentious as this). However, the most generally accepted hypothesis is that the word "slave" entered English as a series of evolutions and mutations deriving from the Latin word "sclavus." This word, as Anna Kłosowska puts it in her recent exploration of medieval slavery, has connotations both of "unfree person" and "person of Slavic origin," and this isn't necessarily a "family" of separate but closely related words, but just the same word in different contexts. All of the following cites are from her book chapter (Anna Kłosowska, "The Etymology of "Slave", in Disturbing Times: Medieval Pasts, Reimagined Futures, ed. Catherine E. Karkov, Anna Kłosowska, and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, Punctum Books, 2020. You can read the whole book -- online for free, as a PDF! -- here. This chapter starts on page 151).

Therefore, the words that sound like the word slave in Latin vs. French, Occitan, and Italian are less a family of words than a similar word in dramatically different contexts. (p. 155) [...] This section focuses on various words used to describe enslaved people, presents some summary facts on slavery, discussed in detail in a later section concerning who was enslaved where and in what proportion to the general population, and comments on the indistinctions between the medieval words slave and serf, and slave and Slav. Indeed, one of the challenges of the topic is that in Latin servus means a free person, an unfree person, or both. Similarly, Latin sclavus and related words in other languages (French, Italian, Greek, Arabic, etc.) means an enslaved person, a person of Slavic origin, or both. And, servus often designates an enslaved person of Slavic origin as well. (p. 160).

Medieval Latin did this on several levels, not just with "Slav/slave." It also began to use the name of other ethnic groups as words meaning "unfree person," "slave," or "other":

In medieval Latin vocabulary, various words now translated as slave, including sclavus, sarracenus, maurus, denote the origin or appearance of the enslaved person. (p. 162)

"Sarracenus," or "Saracen," was one of the most common words used to describe someone of non-Christian, non-European identity; it had some correlates with "sodomite [homosexual]", which it is often found in company with. Eventually, however, "Saracen" came to mean most commonly "Muslim." But since it was also used as a word for "slave," in this case it would denote an enslaved person of Muslim origin, rather than an enslaved person of Slavic origin. The same with "maurus," or "Moor," which would probably signify an enslaved person from Iberia. This chapter explores the broad variety of words used for "slave" in medieval Latin, and the semantic shifts that all of them underwent to get there, so it's worth checking out. However, the linguistic association of "slave" and "Slav" was not confined to medieval Latin, as it was also present in Arabic. See mention of:

tens of thousands of sqâliba (the word is synonymous with enslaved person, a Slav, and a eunuch, and may have signified any one or any combination of them). (p.158)

So in other words, yes: the medieval association of "Slav = slave" was well established in both the Christian (Latin) and Islamic (Arabic) historiographical narrative traditions. But there were many other words that also meant "slave" and which referred to enslaved people of different backgrounds; there was, in fact, a whole family of words used to describe slaves from various parts of the world. However, because Latin "sclavus" was imported into French as "esclave," and from there into Middle/Modern English as "slave," we only have one remaining word for "slave" from that entire grouping, and it happens to be the one that also meant "Slav." Etc. etc., linguistic change and transformation retains the original stems long past when people actually know where the words come from or what they refer to.

So, okay, if "slave" in modern English does derive from a Latinate root also used for "Slavic," why do people still call themselves Slavs, and why do we talk about "Slavic" people and "Slavic" history? Isn't that equivalent to calling them slaves? Well, once again, the answer is complicated. Let's think of it this way. The word "Russian" comes from the word "Rus'". This name for the lands that are now generally part of modern-day Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine was given by the Viking rulers of early Rus’, and is generally believed to derive from the old Swedish word ‘Ruotsi’, or ‘men who row’.[1] The word "Rus'" originally applied only to the Scandinavian ruling princes, but eventually acquired a broader semantic connotation, expanding to first the people and then the land where they lived. In the eleventh century, it also became interchangeable with ‘Slav’.

So... the name that Russians call themselves is actually Swedish, originally given by Vikings, and referred only to the ruling class of men who rowed (i.e. were seafarers who traveled on ships) and weren't ACTUALLY Russian (in the modern sense of the word) at all. Yet nobody thinks about this original connotation or thinks that they're also calling Russians sea-faring Vikings, even if that's where the word originally came from. So people who call themselves "Slavs" aren't necessarily (or even at all) also calling themselves "people from eastern and southern Europe who became slaves in the medieval era," since "sclavus" referred to both "Slav" AND "slave." It just so happens that it became imported as one word into English, and indeed, we've now semantically re-distinguished it, since the modern English words "Slav" and "slave" are spelled differently, capitalized differently, and obviously have different meanings, despite deriving from the same word and once being essentially interchangeable. That's no longer the case, but that process is still preserved in how the word got here, and how it was selected out of a number of others.

[1] Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2021), p. 25.

[zurich-snows]

ÇA-A-ETÉ? AGAINST BARTHES Joan Fontcuberta

Walter Benjamin aside, the most cited essay on photography in history is without a doubt Camera Lucida. It is Roland Barthes’ final book, and was published shortly before his death. With his poetic gaze and theoretical reflections, Barthes develops key concepts in the book, such as punctum and studium, which have since been incorporated into the heritage of photographic criticism. In one of the most significant passages, we find another central idea: “In Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality, and of the past. And since this constraint exists only for Photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of Photography. What I intentionalize in a photograph is neither Art nor Communication, it is Reference, which is the founding order of Photography. Photography's noeme will therefore be: ‘That-has-been’” [Ça-a-été].

This ça-a-été constitutes the ontological bulwark of photography’s documentary value: without the certainty of “that-has-been”, all visual testimony ends up delegitimated. This is why it could be beneficial to analyse photo-journalistic snapshots in light of this criteria. For example, as a case study, we could take the photographic archive of the now-closed Mexican journal Alerta, a tabloid dedicated to blood and guts news stories, which in Latin America is referred to as “nota roja” [red note]. If we do an analysis, we are surprised to see how frequently the iconological pattern of the gesture of pointing appears: a figure in the image (a victim, a witness, an “expert”, whoever) points with a finger at someone or something in the composition to draw attention to it. These are theatrical, artificial situations where it is clear that the model is following the reporter’s instructions, while nevertheless making doubly clear the pretension of applying he principle of ça-a-été, in a way that is as naïve as it is rudimentary. We are witness to an effect of superimposed indexicalities: one passed down through photography and the other of the finger (the index) pointing. Both the camera lens and the finger focalise our perception towards something that has gone by. Yet the staging is so naïve, rudimentary and artificial that instead of emphasising, what it does is problematise the validating value of the camera, especially in genres like forensic and news photography, which should be characterised precisely by an aseptic, derhetorized treatment of information.

Barthes, perhaps, fascinated by the theatricality he had also dedicated enthusiastic studies to, sought to pass over this drift: “What is theatricality?”, he asked in 1971. “It is not decorating representation, it is unlimiting language.” Very well, then, but if so, ça-a-été is no longer a guarantee of objectivity, inasmuch as it explores staging. A triple staging, in fact, as all photography implies the staging of the object, the gaze and of the photographic device itself. It is from the conciliation of these stagings that language emerges. We can decide to not limit it, we can grant it all freedom available to it, but at the cost of breaking the contract of verisimilitude.

Unmasked by the overplayed gesticulation of accusing or pointing fingers, we discover that the noeme heralded by Barthes is more a theatrical operation than one of reference. “That has been”, indeed, but what, in fact, has really been? It is imperative to ask this when there is no spontaneity, but rather construction. Yet worst of all is that photography, in and of itself, tells us very little about “that”. Very little beyond scenery and costumes.

Joan Fontcuberta

[chez-mimich]

Quale delle fotografie della mostra “Maria Callas, ritratti dall’archivio Publifoto Intesa Sanpaolo” aperta da qualche settimana alle Gallerie d’Italia di Milano rappresenta di più l’Upupa, come la battezzò Alberto Arbasino? Ognuno potrà scegliere la sua. Forse non questa, ma a me piace celebrare i 100 anni dalla nascita con questa foto il cui “punctum”, come lo chiamava Roland Barthes, non è il soggetto dello scatto, la stessa Callas. Non è nemmeno la sua segretaria, così diversa dalle accompagnatrici di oggi, dai body guard, ecc. è una foto di una straordinaria quotidianità, dove la divina indossa un sontuoso (e ormai politicamente scorrettissimo) pelliccione. Ma la misura del suo divismo non è dentro di lei, ma accanto, nella testa dell’uomo che si gira per guardarla probabilmente avendola riconosciuta in una via di Milano a pochi passi dalla “sua” Scala…