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GAZING UPON THE BORDER OF LIFE AND DEATH:
PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE REAL AND ITS
DIALECTICAL POTENTIAL FOR IDEOLOGICAL
CHANGE IN SALLY MANN’S WHAT REMAINS
Jacob Lange
University of Ulster’s Centre for Media Research, Northern Ireland
e-mail: Jakelange@hotmail.com
This paper is focused on exploring the potential of art photography, and by extension general
art practice, in disrupting modes of dominant ideology in order to bring about positive social
and ideological change. It has involved a significant study of the theories of Slavoj Zizek and
his unique Lacanian-Hegelian-Marxist approach to creating a meta-philosophy of the Real. As
such, it is particularly focused on Zizek’s notion of ‘the act’, or of ‘subjective destitution’. He
posits that such an ‘act’ is the only primary process by which revolutionary ideological
change can forcibly occur, via active engagement by a subject (individual and collective) with
the Lacanian order of Real, and involving a complete transgressive disengagement with the
Symbolic order that constitutes ideology (Myers, 2003: 59-61; Porter, 2006: 70). This paper
seeks to first outline Zizek’s theory of subjective destitution and then investigate its viability
via a case study of the photographic work of artist Sally Mann, including critical responses to
her work.
Photography is one of the few areas of popular media culture that Zizek has not prolifically
explored in his writings, and this paper seeks to find scope for new and original thought
connecting Zizek’s theories with contemporary art photography culture and practice. More
importantly, however, is that the photographs examined are from one of Mann’s recent
collections of work, What Remains (2003), which engages as directly as possible with the
subject matter of death. Death itself is can be described as the ‘ultimate limit’ of the Symbolic
order, the “one last great taboo” (Critchley, 2010). As it can never be truly known it stands
fully outside of the Symbolic order and thus continually disrupts and antagonizes ideology.
As such, death is perhaps the most powerful manifestation of the Real, and the one most
strongly rejected by the ideology it threatens to usurp. While Zizek argues that the Real, and
by conjecture death, can never be fully articulated or expressed within the Symbolic, he
emphatically argues that it can and should be approached as directly as possible as the first
step in a process of engagement that can bring about individual and collective ideological
disruption and change. (Zizek, 2000: 149-150) While an explicit engagement with the Real is
at best difficult and at worst both absolutely terrifying and socially isolating, he argues that
this is the cost to be paid to bring about such a change. This paper argues that Sally Mann’s
beautiful and disturbing images of death can be seen as an example of such an effort, as they
transgress our contemporary society’s attempt at repressing the Real of death and dying at
almost every turn. More importantly, it argues that if Mann’s audience push themselves
through the difficulty of confronting and rationally engaging with her terrible images, they