georges didi huberman, confronti... - lensbased.net

The Detail and the Pan 265the scene of the world and the affect that receives it ‘‘like an arrow.’’In this sense, the punctum should be construed not as a symptom ofthe image, but as a symptom of the world itself, in other words asa symptom of time and of the presence of the referent: ‘‘that-hasbeen’’—‘‘thething was there’’—‘‘absolutely, irrefutably present.’’ 63Perhaps it could be said that Camera Lucida is the book of the rentconsciousness of semiology: through the very choice of its object,photography, it is a book in which the theoretically intractable, 64 whichis basically to say the object of thought about the visible, is whollyfolded into the referent and the affect. Whereas the image—even photographic—knowshow to make an event and ‘‘point’’ us beyond anythat-has-been: as in blurring and aura effects due to ‘‘accidents,’’ intentionalor not, of photographic revelation; or the fictive highlights—‘‘scratched’’ with black pencil on the paper negative—in certaincalotypes by Victor Régnault, for example. And if Camera Lucida readslike the text of a rent consciousness, that is perhaps because Barthes,at base, did not dare or want to leave behind the semiological alternativeof the coded and the non-coded (remember his definition of thephotographic image as a ‘‘message without a code’’). Now this alternativeis, in a sense, trivial: and notably it is not in terms of code ornot-code that the symptom, in a body, in an image, will make senseor not-sense. A semiology of images, of their material causes and theirsovereign accidents will exist only to slip between ‘‘the world,’’ withoutcode, dominated by empathy, and ‘‘signification’’ dominated by anarrow understanding of the code.The other concept in relation to which the pan should doubtlessbe situated is that of the ‘‘non-mimetic elements of the image-sign,’’as defined by Meyer Schapiro in a celebrated and important article. 65I will note simply that the term ‘‘field’’ is used there quite generallyto designate a parameter, in the last resort geometric, within whichthe very organization of the image can be thought. Field, frame,‘‘smooth or prepared’’ ground, orientation, format: all of these thingsfacilitate understanding of the structural regularities of the image, fundamentalarticulations. But precisely as regularities, these mimetic elementsof the image-sign are envisaged from the side of the leastaccidental, so to speak. And when Schapiro speaks of the ‘‘image sub-