What a thrill ---
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz.

A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man ---

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when

The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence

How you jump ---
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.

The Image
Images are mediations between the world and human beings. Human beings 'ex-ist', i.e. the world is not immediately accessible to them and therefore images are needed to make it comprehensible. However, as soon as this happens, images come between the world and human beings. They are supposed to be maps but they turn into screens: Instead of representing the world, they obscure it until human beings' lives finally become a function of the images they create. Human beings cease to decode the images and instead project them, still encoded, into the world 'out there', which meanwhile itself becomes like an image - a context of scenes, of state of things. This reversal of function of the image can be called 'idolatry'; we can observe the process at work in the present day: The technical images currently all around us are in the process of magically reconstructing our 'reality' and turning it into a 'global image scenario'. Essentially this is a question of 'amnesia'. Human beings forget they created the images in order to orient themselves in the world. Since they are no longer able to decode them, their lives become a function of their own images: Imagination has turned into hallucination. 9-10

The struggle of writing against the image - historical consciousness against magic - runs throughout history. With writing, a new ability was born called 'conceptual thinking' which consisted of abstracting lines from surfaces, i.e. producing and decoding them. Conceptual thought is more abstract than imaginative thought as all dimensions are abstract from phenomena - with the exception of straight lines. Thus with the invention of writing, human beings took one step further back from the world. Texts do not signify the world; they signify the images they tear up. Hence, to decode texts means to discover the images signified by them. The intention of texts is to explain images, while that of concepts is to make ideas comprehensible. In this way, texts are a metacode of images.

This raises the question of the relationship between texts and images - a crucial question for history. In the medieval period, there appears to have been a struggle on the part of Christianity, faithful to the text, against idolaters or pagans; in modern times, a struggle on the part of textual science against image-bound ideologies. The struggle is a dialectical one. To the extent that Christianity struggled against paganism, it absorbed images and itself became pagan; to the extent that science struggled against ideologies, it absorbed ideas and itself became ideological. The explanation for this is as follows: Texts admittedly explain images in order to explain them away, but images also illuminate texts in order to make them comprehensible. Conceptual thinking admittedly analyze magical thought in order to clear it out of the way, but magical thought creeps into conceptual thought so as to bestow significance on it. In the course of this dialectical process, conceptual and imaginative thought mutually reinforce one another. In other words, images become more and more conceptual, texts more and more imaginative. Nowadays, the greatest conceptual abstraction is to be found in conceptual images (in computer images, for example); the greatest imagination is to be found in scientific texts. Thus, behind one's back, the hierarchy of codes is overturned. Texts, originally a metacode of images, can themselves have images as a metacode.

That is not all, however. Writing itself is a mediation - just like images - and is subject to the same internal dialectic. In this way, it is not only externally in conflict with images but is also torn apart by an internal conflict. If it is the intention of writing to mediate between human beings and their images, it can also obscure images instead of representing them and insinuate itself between human beings and their images. If this happens, human beings become unable to decode their texts and reconstruct the images signified in them. If the texts, however, become incomprehensible as images, human beings' lives become a function of their texts. There arises a state of 'textolatry' that is no less hallucinatory than idolatry. Examples of textolatry, of 'faithfulness to the text', are Christianity and Marxism. Texts are then projected into the world out there, and the world is experienced, known and evaluated as a function of these texts. A particularly impressive example of the incomprehensible nature of texts it provided nowadays by scientific discourse. Any ideas we may have of the scientific universe (signified by these texts) are unsound: If we do form ideas about scientific discourse, we have decoded it 'wrongly': anyone who tries to imagine anything, for example, using the equation of the theory of relativity, has not understood it. But as, in the end, all concepts signify ideas, the scientific, incomprehensible universe is an 'empty' universe.

Textolatry reached a critical level in the nineteenth century. To be exact, with it history came to an end. History, in the precise meaning of the world, is a progressive transcoding of images into concepts, a progressive elucidation of ideas, a progressive disenchantment (taking the magic out of things), a progressive process of comprehension. If texts become incomprehensible, however, there is nothing left to explain, and history has come to an end. During this crisis of texts, technical images were invented: in order to make texts comprehensible again, to put them under a magic spell - to overcome the crisis of history. 11-13

The Technical Image
Technical images are difficult to decode, for a strange reason. To all appearances, they do not have to be decoded since their significance is automatically reflected on their surface - just like fingerprints, where the significance (the finger) is the cause and the image (the copy) is the consequence. The world apparently signified in the case of technical images appears to be their cause and they themselves are a final link in a causal chain that connects them without interruption to their significance: The world reflects the sun's and other rays which are captured by means of optical, chemical and mechanical devices on sensitive surfaces and as a result produce technical image, i.e. they appear to be on the same level of reality as their significance. What one sees on them therefore do not appear to be symbols that one has to decode but symptoms of the world through which, even if indirectly, it is to be perceived.

This apparently non-symbolic, objective character of technical images leads whoever looks at them to see them not as images but as windows. Observers thus do not believe them as they do their own eyes. Consequently they do not criticize them as images, but as ways of looking at the world (to the extent that they criticize them at all). Their criticism is not an analysis of their production but an analysis of the world. 14-15

The function of technical images is to liberate their receivers by magic from the necessity of thinking conceptually, at the same time replacing historical consciousness with a second-order magical consciousness and replacing the ability to think conceptually with a second-order imagination. This is what we mean when we say that technical images displace texts.

Texts were invented in the second millennium BC in order to take the magic out of images, even if their inventor may not have been aware of this; the photograph, the first technical image, was invented in the nineteenth century in order to put texts back under a magic spell, even if its inventors may not have been aware of this. The invention of the photograph is a historical event as equally decisive as the invention of writing. With writing, history in the narrower sense begins as a struggle against idolatry. With photography, 'post-history' begins as a struggle against textolatry. 17-18

Technical images are surfaces that function in the same way as dams. Traditional images flow into them and become endlessly reproducible: They circulate within them (for example in the form of posters). Scientific texts flow into them and are transcoded from lines into states of things and assume magical properties (for example in the form of models that attempt to make Einstein's equation comprehensible). And cheap texts, a flood of newspaper articles, flyers, novels, etc. flow into them, and the magic and ideology inherent within them are translated into the programmed magic of technical images (for example in the form of photo-novels). Thus technical images absorb the whole of history and form a collective memory going endlessly round in circles.

Nothing can resist the force of this current of technical images - there is no artistic, scientific or political activity which is not aimed at it, there is no everyday activity which does not aspire to be photographed, filmed, videotaped. For there is a general desire to be endlessly remembered and endlessly repeatable. All events are nowadays aimed at the television screen, the cinema screen, the photograph, in order to be translated into a state of things. In this way, however, every action simultaneously loses its historical character and turns into a magic ritual and an endlessly repeatable movement. The universe of technical images, emerging all around us, represents the fulfillment of the ages, in which action and agony go endlessly round in circles. Only from this apocalyptic perspective, it seems, does the problem of photography assume the importance it deserves. 19-20

The Apparatus
The basic category of industrial society is work: Tools and machines work by tearing objects from the natural world and informing them, i.e. changing the world. But apparatuses do not work in that sense. Their intention is not to change the world but to change the meaning of the world. Their intention is symbolic. Photographers do not work in the industrial sense, and there is no point in trying to call them workers or proletarians. As most human beings currently work on and in apparatuses, talk of the proletariat is beside the point. The categories of cultural criticism must be thought. 25

Photographers, it is true, do not work but they do do something: They create, process and store symbols. There have always been people who have done such things: writers, painters, composers, book-keepers, managers. In the process these people have produced objects: books, paintings, scores, balance-sheets, plans - objects that have not been consumed but that have served as carriers of information. They were read, looked at, played, taken into account, used as the basis for decisions. They were not an end but a means. Currently this sort of activity is being taken over by apparatuses. As a result, the objects of information created in this way are becoming more and more efficient and more and more extensive, and they are able to program and control all the work in the old sense. Therefore, most human beings are currently employed on and in work-programming and work-controlling apparatuses. Prior to the invention of apparatus, this kind of activity was seen as being the 'service sector', as 'tertiary', as 'brain work', in short as peripheral. Nowadays it is at the centre of things. Therefore in cultural analysis the category 'work' must be replaced by the category 'information'. 25

If one considers the camera (and apparatuses in general) in this sense, one sees that the camera produces symbols: symbolic surfaces that have in a certain way been prescribed for it. The camera is programmed to produce photographs, and every photograph is a realization of one of the possibilities contained within the program of the camera. The number of such possibilities is large, but it is nevertheless finite: It is the sum of all those photographs that can be taken by a camera. It is true that one can, in theory, take a photograph over and over again in the same or a very similar way, but this is not important for the process of taking photographs. Such images are 'redundant': They carry no new information and are superfluous. In the following, no account will be taken of redundant photographs since the phrase 'taking photographs' will be limited to the production of informative images. As a result, it is true, the taking of snapshots will largely fall outside the scope of this analysis. 26

With every (informative) photograph, the photographic program becomes poorer by on possibility while the photographic universe becomes richer by one realization. Photographers endeavour to exhaust the photographic program by realizing all their possibilities. But this program is rich and there is no way of getting an overview of it. Thus photographers attempt to find the possibilities not yet discovered within it: They handle the camera, turn it this way and that, look into it and through it. If they look through the camera out into the world, this is not because the world interests them but because they are pursuing new possibilities of producing information and evaluating the photographic program. Their interest is concentrated on the camera; for them, the world is purely a pretext for the realization of camera possibilities. In short: They are not working, they do not want to change the world, but they are in search of information. 26-27

Such activity can be compared to playing chess. Chess-players too pursue new possibilities in the program of chess, new moves. Just as they play with chess-pieces, photographers play with the camera. The camera is not a tool but a plaything, and a photographer is not a worker but a player: not Homo faber but Homo ludens. Yet photographers do not play with their plaything but against it. They creep into the camera in order to bring to light the tricks concealed within. Unlike manual workers surrounded by their tools and industrial workers standing at their machines, photographers are inside their apparatus and bound up with it. This is a new kind of function in which human beings are neither the constant nor the variable but in which human beings and apparatus merge into a unity. It is therefore appropriate to call photographers functionaries. 27

The program of the camera has to be rich, otherwise the game would soon be over. The possibilities contained within it have to transcend the ability of the functionary to exhaust them, i.e. the competence of the camera has to be greater than that of its functionaries. No photographer, not even the totality of all photographers, can entirely get to the bottom of what a correctly programmed camera is up to. It is a black box. 27

It is precisely the obscurity of the box which motivates photographers to take photographs. They lose themselves, it is true, inside the camera in search of possibilities, but they can nevertheless control the box. For they know how to feed the camera (they know the input of the box), and likewise they know how to get it to spit out photographs (they know the output of the box). Therefore the camera does what the photographer wants it to do, even though the photographer does not know what is going on inside the camera. This is precisely what is characteristic of the functioning of apparatuses: The functionary controls the apparatus thanks to the control of its exterior (the input and output) and is controlled by it thanks to the impenetrability of its interior. To put it another way: Functionaries control a game over which they have no competence. The world of Kafka, in fact. 27-28

The Gesture of Photography
In order to be able to set the camera for artistic, scientific and political images, photographers have to have some concepts of art, science and politics: How else are they supposed to be able to translate them into an image? There is no such thing as naive, non-conceptual photography. A photograph is an image of concepts. In this sense, all photographers' criteria are contained within the camera's program. 36

The Photograph
The naive observer sees that in the photographic universe one is faced with both black-and-white and coloured state of things. But are there such black-and-white and coloured state of things out there? As soon as naive observers ask this question, they are embarking on the very philosophy of photography that they were trying to avoid. 41

There cannot be black-and-white states of things in the world because black-and-white cases are borderline, 'ideal cases': black is the total absence of all oscillations contained in light, white the total presence of all the elements of oscillation. 'Black' and 'white' are concepts, e.g. theoretical concepts of optics. As black-and-white states of things are theoretical, they can never actually exist in the world. But black-and-white photographs do actually exist because they are images of concepts belonging to the theory of optics, i.e. they arise out of this theory. 41-42

Black and white do not exist, but they ought to exist since, if we could see the world in black and white, it would be accessible to logical analysis. In such a world everything would be either black or white or a mixture of both. The disadvantage of such a black-and-white way of looking at the world, of course, would be that this mixture would turn out to be not coloured but grey. Grey is the colour of theory: which shows that one cannot reconstruct the world anymore from a theoretical analysis. Black-and-white photographs illustrate this fact: They are grey, they are theoretical images. 42

Long before the invention of the photograph, one attempted to imagine the world in black and white. Here are two examples of this pre-photographic manicheism: Abstractions were made from the world of judgments distinguishing those that were 'true' and those that were 'false', and from these abstractions Aristotelian logic was constructed with its identity, difference and excluded middle. Modern science based on this logic functions despite the fact that no judgment is ever either copletely true or completely false and even though every true judgment is reduced to nothing when subjected to logical analysis. The second example: Abstractions were made from the world of actions distinguishing the 'good' from the 'bad' and religious and political ideologies were constructed from these abstractions. The social systems based on them actually function despite the fact that no action is ever either completely good or completely bad and despite the fact that every action is reduced to a puppet-like motion when subjected to ideological analysis. 42-43

Black-and-white photographs belong to the same sort of manicheism, only they involve the use of cameras. And they too actually function: They translate a theory of optics into an image and thereby put a magic spell on its theory and re-encode theoretical concepts like 'black' and 'white' into state of things. Black-and-white photographs embody the magic of theoretical thought since they transform the linear discourse of theory into surfaces. Herein lies their peculiar beauty, which is the beauty of the conceptual universe. Many photographers therefore also prefer black-and-white phtoographs to colour photographs because they more clearly reveal the actual significance of the photograph, i.e. the world of concepts. 43

The first photographs were black and white and still clearly acknowledged their origin in the theory of optics. However, with the advance of another theory, that of chemistry, coloured photographs were also finally possible. It looked as if photographs first abstracted the colours from the world in order to smuggle them back in. In reality, however, the colours of photographs are at least as theoretical as black and white. The green of a photographed field, for example, is an image of the concept 'green', just as it occurs in chemical theory, and the camera (or rather the film inserted into it) is programmed to translate this concept into the image. It is true that there is a very indiret, distant connection between the green of the photograph and the green of the field, since the chemical concept 'green' is based on ideas that have been drawn from the world; but between the green of the photograph and the green of the field a whole series of complex encodings have crept in, a series that is more complex than that which connects the grey of the field phtoographed in black and white with the green of the field. In this sense the field photographed in green is more abstract than the one in grey. Colour photographs are on a higher level of abstraction than black-and-white ones. Black-and-white photographs are more concrete and in this sense more true: They reveal their theoretical origin more clearly, and vice versa: The 'more genuine' the colours of the photograph become, the more untruthful they are, the more they conceal their theoretical origin. 43-44

What is true of the colours of photographs is also true of all of the other elements of photographs. They all represent transcoded concepts that claim to have been reflected automatically from the world onto the surface. It is precisely this deception that has to be decoded so as to identify the true significance of the photograph, i.e. the photograph one is dealing with a symbolic complex made up of abstract concepts, dealing with discourses re-encoded into symbolic state of things.

Here we must agree about what we mean by 'decode'. What am I doing when I decode texts encoded in Latin characters? Am I decoding the meaning of the characters, i.e. the sound conventions of a spoken language? Am I decoding the meaning of the words made up of these characters? The meaning of the sentences made up of these words? Or do I have to look further - for the writers' intentions, the cultural context behind them? What am I doing when I decode photographs? Am I decoding the meaning of 'green', i.e. a concept from the discourse of chemical theory? Or do I have to look further, into the photographers' intentions and their cultural context? When will I decide that I have had eough of decoding? 44-45

Putting the question in this way, there is no satisfactory solution to decoding. One would be drawn into an endless process since every level of decoding would reveal another one waiting to be decoded. Every symbol is just the tip of an iceberg in the ocean of cultural consensus, and even if one got right to the bottom of decoding a simgle message, the whole of culture past and present would be revealed. Carried out in this 'radical' fashion, criticism of a single message would turn out to be criticism of culture in general. 45

To summerize: Like all technical images, photographs are concepts encoded as states of things, including photographers' concepts such as those that have been programmed into the camera. This gives photography critics the tastk of decoding these two interweaving codes in any photograph. Photographers encode their concepts as photographic images so as to give others information, so as to produce models for them and thereby to become immortal in the memory of others. The camera encodes the concepts programmed into it as images in order to program society to act as a feedback mechanism in the interests of progressive camera improvement. If photographic criticism succeeds in unravelling these two intentions of photographs, then the photographic messages will be decoded. If photography critics do not succeed in this task, photographs remain undecoded and appear to be representations of states of things in the world out there, just as if they reflected 'themselves' onto a surface. Looked at uncritically like this, they accomplish their task perfectly: programming society to act as though under a magic spell for the benefit of cameras. 48

The Distribution of Photographs
The photograph is for the time being nothing but a flyer, even if it is in the process of being taken over by electromagnetic technology. As long as it remains attached to paper in the old-fashioned way, however, it can be distributed in the old-fashioned way as well, i.e. independently of film projectors or television screens. The state of being attached like this, as in the old-fashioned way, to a material surface reminds one of the stage ot being bound to a screen in the case of ancient images, such as cave paintings or the frescoes in Etruscan tombs. But this 'objectivity' of the photograph is deceptive. If one wants to distribute ancient images, one must convey them from owner to owner; one has to sell or win control over the caves or tombs. For they are unique, valuable as objects: they are 'originals'. Photographs, on the other hand, can be distributed by means of reproduction. The camera creates prototypes (negatives) from which as many stereotypes (copies) as one likes can be produced and distributed - in which case the concept of the original, in the context of the photograph, has scarcely any meaning anymore. As an object, as a thing, the photograph is practically without value; a flyer and no more. 50-51

As long as the photograph is not yet electromagnetic, it remains the first of all post-industrial objects. Even though the last vestiges of materiality are attached to photographs, their value does not lie in the thing but in the information on their surface. This is what characterizes the post-industrial: The information, and not the thing, is valuable. Issues of the ownership and distribution of objects (capitalism and socialism) are no longer valid, evading as they do the question of the programming and distribution of information (the information society). It is no longer a matter of owning another pair of shoes or another piece of furniture, but of having another holiday or another school for one's children at one's disposal. Revaluation of all values. Until photographs become electromagnetic, they are a connecting link between industrial objects and pure information. 51

It goes without saying that industrial objects are valuable precisely because they convey information. A shoe and a piece of furniture are valuable because they are information-carriers, improbable forms made of leather or wood and metal. But information is impressed into these objects and cannot be detached from them. One can only wear out and consume this information. This is what 'makes' such objects, as objects, valuable, i.e. 'able' to be filled with value. In the case of the photograph on the other hand, the information sits loosely on the surface and can easily be conveyed to another surface. To this extent, the photograph demonstrates the defeat of the material thing and of the concept of 'ownership'. It is not the person who owns a photograph who has the power but the person who created the information it conveys. It is not the owner but the programmer of the information who is the powerful one: neo-imperialism. The poster is without value; nobody owns it, it flaps torn in the wind yet the power of the advertising agency remains undiminished nevertheless - the agency can reproduce it. This obliges us to revalue our traditional economic, political, moral, epistemological and aesthetic values. 51-52

Electromagnetic photographs, films and television images do not illustrate the devaluation of the material things nearly as well as photographs attached to paper in the old-fashioned way. If, in the case of such advanced images, the material basis of information has completely disappeared and electromagnetic photographs can be created artificially at will and processed by the receiver as pure information (i.e. the 'pure information society'), in the case of photographs of the old-fashioned type, one still holds something material, flyer-like, in one's hands; this something is without value, treated with contempt - and is becoming less and less valuable and treated with more and more contempt. In the case of classical photographs, there are still valuable bromide prints - even today the last vestiges of value attach to the 'original photograph' making it more valuable than a reproduction in a newspaper. But the photograph bound to paper nevertheless indicates the first step on the road to the devaluation of the material thing and valuation of information. 52-53

Even though the photograph remains a flyer for the time being and therefore can be distributed in the old-fashioned way, gigantic complex apparatuses of photograph distribution have come into being. Attached to the output of the camera, they absorb the images flowing out of the camera and reproduce them endlessly, deluging society with them via thousands of channels. Like all apparatuses, the apparatuses of photograph distribution also have a program by which they program society to act as part of a feedback mechanism. Typical of this program is the division of photographs into various channels, their 'channelling. 53

In theory, information can be classified as follows: into indicative information of the type 'A is A', into imperative information of the type 'A must be A', and into optative information of the type 'A may be A'. The classical ideal of the indicative is truth, that of the imperative is goodness, and that of the optative is beauty. This theoretical classification cannot, however, be applied in practice since every scientific indicative has at the same time political and aesthetic aspects, every political imperative has scientific and aesthetic aspects, every optative (work of art) has scientific and political aspects. Nevertheless, the distribution apparatuses practise precisely this theoretical classification. 53

Thus there are channels for supposedly indicative photographs (e.g. scientific publications and reportage magazines), channels for supposedly imperative photographs (e.g. political and commercial advertising posters) and channels for supposedly artistis photographs (e.g. galleries and art journals). Of course the distribution apparatuses also have borderline areas, in which a particular photograph can slip over from one channel to another. The photograph of the moon landing, for example, can slip from an astronomy journal to a US consulate, from there onto an advertising poster for cigarettes and from there finally into an art exhibition. The essential thing is that the photographs, with each switch-over to another channel, takes on a new significance: The scientific significance crosses over into the political, the political into the commercial, the commercial into the artistic. In this respect, the division of photographs into channels is in no way simply a mechanical process but rather an encoding one: The distribution apparatuses impregnate the photograph with the decisive significance for its reception. 53-54

Photographers are involved in this encoding. Even at the time of taking photographs they have their eye on specific channel of the distribution apparatuses and encode their images as a function of this channel. They take photographs for specific scientific publications, specific kinds of illustrated magazine, specific exhibition opportunities. And they do this for two reasons: first, because the channel allows them to reach many receivers; second, because the channel feeds them. 54

The symbiosis, characteristic of taking photographs, between camera and photographer is mirrored in the channel. For example: Photographers take photographs for a specific newspaper because the newspaper allows them to reach hundreds or thousands of receivers, and because they are being paid by the newspaper; in this, they act in the belief that they are using the newspaper as their medium. Meanwhile, the newspaper is of the opinion that it is using the photographs as an illustration of its articles in order to be able to program its readers, that accordingly photographers are functionaries of the newspaper apparatus. As photographers know that only those photographs that fit into the newspaper's program will be published, they attempt to fool the newspaper's censorship by surreptitiously amuggling aesthetic, political or epistemological elements into their image. The newspaper on the other hand may well discover anyways because it thinks it can exploit the smuggled elements to enrich its program. And what is true for newspapers is also true for all other channels. Every distributed photograph allows photography criticism to reconstruct the struggle between photographer and channel. It is precisely this that makes photographs into dramatic images. 54-55

It is positively disconcerting how often standard photography criticism does not read off from photographs this dramatic confusion of the photographer's intention with the program of the channel. Photography criticism habitually takes it for granted that scientific channels distribute scientific photographs, political channels political photographs, artistic channels artistic photographs. In this respect, the critics function as a function of the channels: They allow them to vanish from the receiver's field of vision. They ignore the fact that the channels determine the significance of the photographs, and thus they give support to the channels' intention to be invisible. Seen in this light, the critics collaborate with the channels against the photographers wanting to fool the channels. We are dealing here with a collaboration in the bad sense, a trahison des clercs, a contribution to the victory of the apparatus over the human being. This is characteristic of the situation of intellectuals in post-industrial society in general. The critics, for example, ask questions such as: 'Is photography art?' - as if these questions were not already being answered automatically by the channels concealing this automatic, programmed channelling and making it all the more effective. 55-56

To summarize: Photographs are silent flyers that are distributed by means of reproduction, in fact by means of the massifying channels of gigantic, programmed distribution apparatuses. As objects, their value is negligible; their value lies in the information that they carry loose and open for reproduction on their surface. They are the harbingers of post-industrial society in general: Interest has shifted in their case from the object to the information, and ownedship is a category that has become untenable for them. The distribution channels, the 'media', encode their latest significance. This encoding represents a struggle between the distribution apparatus and the photographer. By concealing this struggle, photographic criticism makes the 'media' totally invisible for the receiver of the photograph. In the light of standard photographic criticism, photographs get an uncritical reception and are therefore able to program the receiver to act as if they are under a magic spell; this action flows back in the form of feedback into the programs of the apparatus. This becomes evident as soon as we start to examine the reception of photographs closely. 56

The Reception of Photographs
The documentary photographer, just like the person taking snaps, is interested in continually shooting new scenes from the same old perspective. The photographer in the sense intended here is, on the other hand, interested (like the chess-player) in seeing in continually new ways, i.e. producing new, informative states of things. The evolution of photography, from its origins right up to the present, is a process of increasing awareness of the concept of information: from an appetite for the continually new using the same old method to an interest in continually evolving new methods. Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information'. What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being. 59

To summarize: Photographs are received as objects without value that everyone can produce and that everyone can do what they like with. In fact, however, we are manipulated by photographs and programmed to act in a ritual fashion in the service of a feedback mechanism for the benefit of cameras. Photographs suppress our critical awareness in order to make us forget the mindless absurdity of the process of functionality, and it is only thanks to this suppression that functionality is possible at all. Thus photographs form a magic circle around us in the shape of the photographic universe. What we need is to break this circle. 64

Why a Philosophy of Photography is Necessary
With one exception: so-called experimental photographers - those photographers in the sense of the word intended here. They are conscious that image, apparatus, program and information are the basic problems that they have to come to terms with. They are in fact consciously attempting to create unpredictable information, i.e. to release themselves from the camera, and to place within the image something that is not in its program. They know they are playing against the camera. Yet even they are not conscious of the consequence of their practice: They are not aware that they are attempting to address the question of freedom in the context of apparatus in general.  81

A philosophy of photography is necessary for raising photographic practice to the level of consciousness, and this is again because this practice gives rise to a model of freedom in the post-industrial context in general. A philosophy of photography must reveal the fact that there is no place for human freedom within the area of automated, programmed and programming apparatuses, in order finally to show a way in which it is nevertheless possible to open up a space for freedom. The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom  - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the ways in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us. 81-82

I observed that a photograph can be the object of three practices (or of three emotions, or of three intentions): to do, to undergo, to look. The Operator is the Photographer. The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photographs - in magazines and newspapers, in books, albums, archives... And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to "spectacle" and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead. 9

Photography transformed subject into object, and even, one might say, into a museum object: in order to take the first portraits (around 1840) the subject had to assume long poses under a glass roof in bright sunlight; to become an object made one suffer as much as a surgical operation; then a device was invented, a kind of prosthesis invisible to the lens, which supported and maintained the body in its passage to immobility: this headrest was the pedestal of the statue I would become, the corset of my imaginary essence. 13

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. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares). In terms of image-repertoire, the Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter. The Photographer knows this very well, and himself fears (if only for commercial reasons) this death in which his gesture will embalm me. 13-14

As if the (terrified) Photographer must exert himself to the utmost to keep the Photograph from becoming Death. But I - already an object, I do not struggle... when I discover myself in the product of this operation, what I see is that I have become Total Image, which is to say, Death in person... [...] Ultimately, what I am seeking in the photograph taken of me (the "intention" according to which I look at it) is Death: Death is the eidos of that Photograph... For me, the Photographer's organ is not his eye (which terrifies me) but his finger: what is linked to the trigger of the lens, to the metallic shifting of the plates (when the camera still has such things). 14-15

On Photography and Theatre
Yet it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theatre. Niepce and Daguerre are always put at the origin of Photography (even if the latter has somewhat usurped the former's place); now Daguerre, when he took over Niepce's invention, was running a panorama theatre animated by light shows and movements in the Place du Chateau. The camera obscura, in short, has generated at one and the same time perspective painting, photography, and the diorama, which are all three arts of the stage; but if Photography seems to me closer to the Theatre, it is by way of a singular intermediary (and perhaps I am the only one who sees it): by way of Death. We know the original relation of the theatre and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theatre, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theatre, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Kathakali, the Japanese No mask... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however "lifelike" we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theatre, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead. 31-32

On Brecht
The Photograph of the Mask is in fact critical enough to disturb (in 1934, the Nazis censored Sander because his "faces of the period" did not correspond to the Nazi archetype of the race), but it is also too discreet (or too "distinguished") to constitute an authentic and effective social critique, at least according to the exigencies of militantism: what committed science would acknowledge the interest of Physiognomy? Is not the very capacity to perceive the political or moral meaning of a face a class deviation? And even this is too much to say: Sander's Notary is suffused with self-importance and stiffness, his Usher with assertiveness and brutality; but no notary, no usher could ever have read such signs. As distance, social observation here assumes the necessary intermediary role in a delicate aesthetic, which renders it futile: no critique except among those who are already capable of criticism. This impasse is something like Brecht's: he was hostile to Photography because (he said) of the weakness of its critical power; but his own theatre has never been able to be politically effective on account of its subtlety and its aesthetic quality. 36

On Subversiveness
The editors of Life rejected Kertesz's photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images "spoke too much"; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning - a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks. 38

On Silent Speaking
The studium is ultimately always coded, the punctum is not... Nothing surprising, then, if sometimes, despite its clarity, the puctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and I think back on it. I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging it in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the punctum... I had just realized that however immediate and incisive it was, the punctum could accomodate a certain latency (but never any scrutiny). Ultimately - or at the limit - in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes... The photograph must be silent (there are blustering photographs, and I don't like them): this is not a question of discretion, but of music. Absolute subjectivity is achieved only in a state, an effort, of silence (shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence). 51-55

On the Punctum
When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies. Yet once there is a punctum, a blind field is created (is divined): on account of her necklace, the black woman in her Sunday best has had, for me, a whole life external to her portrait; Robert Wilson, endowed with an unlocatable punctum, is someone I want to meet. 57

The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond - as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see: not only toward "the rest" of the nakedness, not only toward the fantasy of a praxis, but toward the absolute excellence of a being, body and soul together... a few millimiters more or less and the divined body would no longer have been offered with benevolence (the pornographic body shows itself, it does not give itself, there is no generosity in it): the photographer has found the right moment, the kairos of desire. 59

That-Has-Been
... Photography's Referent is not thesame as the referent of other systems of representation. I call "photographic referent" not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often "chimeras." Contrary to these imitations, 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 exits only for Photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of Photography. What I internalize in a photograph (we are not speaking of film) is neither Art nor Communication, it is Reference, which is the founding order of Photography. The name of Photography's noeme will therefore be: "That-has-been," or again: the Intractable... According to a paradoxical order - since usually we verify things before declaring them "true" - under the effect of a new experience, that of intensity, I had induced the truth of the image, the reality of its origin; I had identified truth and reality in a unique emotion, in which I henceforth placed the nature - the genius - of Photography, since no painted portrait, supposing that it seemed "true" to me, could compel me to believe its referent had really existed. 76-77

On the Pose and the Presence
This explains why the Photography's noeme deteriorates when this Photograph is animated and becomes cinema: in the Photograph, something has posed in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever (that is my feeling); but in cinema, something has passed in front of this same tiny hole: the pose is swept away and denied by the continuous series of images: it is a different phenomenology, and therefore a different art which begins here, though derived from the first one. In Photography, the presence of the thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric; and in the case of animated being, their life as well, except in the case of photographing corpses; and even so: if the photograph then becomes horrible, it is because it certifies, so to speak, that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing. For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality fo the past ("this-has-been"), the photograph suggests that it is already dead... Photography, moreover, began, historically, as an art of the Person: of identity, of civil status, of what we might call, in all seses of the term, the body's formality. Here again, from a phenomelogical viewpoint, the cinema begins to differ from the Photograph; for the (fictional) cinema combines two poses: the actor's "this-has-been" and the role's, so that (something I would not experience before a painting) I can never see or see again in a film certain actors whom I know to be dead without a kind of melancholy: the melancholy of Photography itself. 78-79

On Authentication
No writing can give me this certainty. It is the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself. The noeme of language is perhaps this impotence, or, to put it positively: language is, by nature, fictional; the attempt to render language unfictional requires an enormous apparatus of measurements: we convoke logic, or, lacking that, sworn oath; but the Photograph is indifferent to all intermediaries: it does not invent; it is authentication itself; the (rare) artifice it permits are not probative; they are, on the contrary, trick pictures: the photograph is laborious only when it fakes. 86-87

... The realists do not take the photograph for a "copy" of reality, but for an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art... From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation. 88-89

On Dead Theatre and Memory
And if dialectic is that thought which masters the corruptible and converts the negation of death into the power of work, then the photograph is undialectical: it is a denatured theatre where death cannot "be contemplated,"  reflected and interiorized; or again: the dead theatre of Death, the fore-closure of the Tragic, excludes all purification, all catharsis... [...] Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory (whose grammatical expression would be the perfect tense, whereas the tense of the Photograph is the aorist), but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory. 90-91

The Mad Image
The image, says phenomenology, is an object-as-nothing. Now, in the Photograph, what I posit is not only the absence of the object; it is also, by one and the same movement, on equal terms, the fact that this object has indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it. Here is where the madness is, for until this day no representation could assure me of the past of a thing except by intermediaries; but with the Photograph, my certainty is immediate: no one in the world can undeceive me. The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand "it is not there," on the other "but it has indeed been"): a mad image, chafed by reality. 115