As Sontag remembers, her friend and mentor Joseph Brodsky said “there were two subjects: time and language.” It’s easy enough to understand how all photography is about time; if time is a river, photography flash-freezes the currents and chips them free, giving us petite and portable pieces of ice. But, like poetry, which sprays a kind of ink to make language visible—revealing its mutual tethers to reader and writer, speaker and hearer, showing how language attaches all of us to one another—certain photographs are not only about time, but about language.
If photography’s relationship to time is what concerns me, its love of language, expressed by its most poetic photographers, is what enthralls me.
The literary interest in photography is a niche tradition. I came to it by chance, or a series of chances. Several years ago, I’d gone through a dry spell, unable to write anything for months. One day, I managed a few hundred words of something new. It felt momentous, and so—conditioned as I am like some horribly abused laboratory gerbil—I logged onto Twitter to celebrate. Since the era of being sincere or direct online ended sometime between 2010 and 2012, I couldn’t just tweet “Finally working on something new!” so I searched for a gif—a moving image—from Tarantino’s Kill Bill. At this point in the film, the Bride has just woken from her four-year coma and is trying to “will [her] limbs out of entropy [sic].” The gif I found is about three seconds long. The Bride’s lips are moving. The camera gently approaches her face. The caption within the image reads, “Wiggle your big toe”—the actual dialogue Uma Thurman is reciting in this scene. When I posted it, I included my own additional caption—“re-learning how to write like”—which appeared just above this moving picture, as if a descriptive clause before a bulleted list. The nature of the gif is to repeat, and Thurman’s lips move over and over; the camera pans in and snaps back like the lash of a whip; the captions—both the original and my own—never disappear. A viewer can linger as long as they like: this combination isn’t going anywhere.
In the grammar of memes, the sentence was complete: “Re-learning how to write is like that scene in Kill Bill where the Bride wills her atrophied limbs back to life so she can walk and, ultimately, carry out her revenge.” A few days later, when I’d finished a first draft, I followed up with another Kill Bill motion-grab: the Bride crossing the name “Vernita Green” from a page in a notebook called “Death List.” I had, as they say, killed it.
As a novelist, I like to tell people that Some Hell’s inspiration came from a single gif—Laura Palmer, in Fire Walk with Me, waking up in the White Lodge and understanding what has happened to her. I suppose you can blame this book on Uma Thurman speaking to her foot.
Every once in a while, the structures of every day life—our habits, our consumptions, our ways of seeing and speaking—hit a bump, or they lurch and we feel their inertia, or a wheel lifts off the rails. Call it an out-of-capitalism experience; after spending so many minutes searching for images to put together a simple phrase—a phrase that is more efficiently stated in actual words—I saw what I’d done with the gif, and it fascinated me. I went out and bought my first Sontag books. At around this same time, one of my favorite novelists, Teju Cole, had just started writing about photography for The New York Times Magazine. Suddenly, I was interested in photography—especially the gif, a relative novelty.
If the primary characteristic of the photograph is stillness, the primary characteristic of the gif is motion. Developed in 1987 by CompuServe programmer Steve Wilhite, the graphics interchange format file is a multitude of images described over a fixed area. In the era of much slower modems, this meant that high-resolution images could be easily compressed and quickly transmitted. As usual, we can thank pornography for this innovation.
Today, the gif primarily provides a space for multiple images in a specific sequence, like frames in a strip of film. It expands the narrative possibilities of the still image by allowing looped animation. It doesn’t freeze a moment so much as echo it, as a scratch on a record. Yet there’s nothing cinematic, per se, about the gif. To experience cinema is to have its narrative unfold alongside you; the viewer becomes the film’s contemporary. To experience a photograph or a gif produces a kind of relativity of seeing. No one glances at a photograph as it “occurred” in real time—that is, no one looks for a fraction of a second. As Cole observes in “The Image of Time”: “Almost every photograph appears instantaneous. But of course, there’s no such thing as ‘instantaneous’: All fragments of time have a length. In a photograph, the time during which the light is refracted by the lens, enters the aperture and is allowed to rest on the photosensitive surface could be 1/125th of a second, one-eighth of a second, half a second, a whole minute, much more or much less.” When we stand before a photograph, it’s this split second of exposure time that we see, repeated as long as we wish to look. The gif, whose repetition likewise repudiates the idea of real time, is just a longer version of the photograph.
Pairing gifs with previously unassociated captions is an expansion on the most elemental construction of the internet meme: image + caption. Often, the images are familiar (babies, puppies, screenshots from popular films or television shows, cats), and the captions equally so (“me trying to get my life together”; “when he asks if you’re hungry”; “sorry to this man”). Both rotate through their possible permutations and both introduce new images or new captions as variants on the existing structure (pulling images from presidential debates or recent news stories, for example, and pairing with familiar, oft-used captions).
While the literary structure of the meme (juxtaposition) sinks its roots in metaphor itself, its continued transmission and propagation descend from metaphors of evolution. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins observes that “we need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” The Greek-ish “mimeme” (from mimesis) would have done nicely, but Dawkins wanted “a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene.’” Tying memes to genes was crucial to his metaphor: much like their biological antecedents, these cultural units would move from imagination to imagination and mutate or evolve along the way, independent of their “host’s” intent or agency. While Dawkins disavows the adoption of “meme” for use in internet memes, one could argue that internet memes are culture’s answer to genetic engineering, or at the very least meme husbandry. After all, there is no art (mimesis) that seeks to make an exact copy of life: there is always a deliberate mutation to make this piece of life visible, including introducing a boundary or a frame. Even at the level of metaphor, art never aims its arrow at exact imitation; its goal is to miss, but not so widely we don’t hold our breath as it rushes by. To keep us on edge, its goal is to miss in a different way every time. It must mutate to remain delightful. To speed this up, we’ve become deliberate.
In a 2013 interview with Wired, Dawkins called the internet’s usage of the meme a “hijacking” of his own term: rather than attempting an accurate copy, as genes do, internet memes are “deliberately altered” as they propagate themselves through culture. Each mutation now carries something of a signature.
The meme is a unit of language; it is also a unit of art. Like all units of language and most works of art, there’s something chemical—and chemically finite—about memes. Their image + caption structure is the basic formula for how we’ve expressed ourselves for thousands of years. Memes—like jokes, like most works of art—aren’t delightful for long. Like a science fair volcano’s vinegar and baking soda, it first fizzes, then fizzles, its energy soon spent in circulation. It’s a reaction anyone can begin and no one can undo. In the chemistry of language itself, words are metaphors that have long lost their spark. The fundamental units of language—tokens for irreducible concepts like sun or cut or burn or die—once gave breath to the ancient gods they inspired. Now, etymologists trace these particles back to their elemental origins, the rest of us left speaking in spent fuel.
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ransferring and disseminating information may evolve naturally from human interaction and reflection; they may also arise from deliberate mutation or violence. Linguistic conventions are often imposed by a ruling class, and dialects erased by war, disease, genocide, colonial oppression. In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure dispelled with any nineteenth-century arrogance regarding linguistic teleology, prescriptive vocabularies, or stability: “All parts of [a] language are subject to change, and any period of time will see evolution of greater or smaller extent . . . The linguistic river never stops flowing.” As this flow of language gathers momentum, “a kind of tacit convention emerges by which one of the existing dialects is selected as the vehicle for everything which is of interest to the nation as a whole.” The consequence this has on society does not necessarily reflect anything inherent about the potential, nor the efficiency, of specific dialects or modes of communication; what is ultimately selected is simply what held out against the others.
Not only can we see metaphor “fossilized” (as Emerson writes) in our modern linguistic compounds, but also traces of social struggle. “History does not merely touch on language,” Adorno writes, “but takes place in it.” There’s a buried cardinality, a cartographic grammar of light and line, that shows how different ways of telling, of showing—of reading, of seeing—abrade one another, even reject one another. Language too is a history of violence.
As units of language, gifs and other commonly used meme images occupy a semiological middle space between image and abstraction. To play off Emerson’s metaphor, memes are among the most unfossilized language units we see every day—a clear way, for those who can read them, to express oneself emotionally and intellectually, and yet still bubbling with energy; we can see them as language and as images simultaneously. In Saussure’s terminology, gifs and other memes are a river that has not yet pulled us under—a language in the process of becoming. This would not have been possible without the twentieth century’s elevation of photography as the ur-language of globalism (a cute word for imperial capitalism). If memes are becoming a language, photography became one decades ago—and with no lack of violence.
To access my social media, listen to music, check the weather, answer a text, look at porn, worry over my bank balance, read an email, or answer a call, I look carefully at my phone (sometimes bug-eyed) and wait for it to recognize me. When I sign up for a new service or website, I squint to decipher what’s called a Captcha code, which is supposed to ensure that I’m not a robot (the frequency at which I’m wrong is troubling). My computer boops when I access a new app on my phone; my phone beeps when I log in to my email on a new computer. A few years ago, I was “verified” on Twitter: a blue checkmark proves I am the real Patrick Nathan.
Much like a digital photograph or darkroom print, the image of ourselves we wish others to see requires extensive manipulation of color, contrast, light, and shadow. We develop variations on our personality depending on who is viewing, and we call these individual prints personae. Meticulously constructed and carefully exhibited, our portfolio of personae questions the concept of authentication, valid only in light of its etymological root: we are indeed, as our facial signatures suggest, the author (“originator”) of each and every one of these self-portraits.
A self-portrait is not its painter. An essay is not its author. These personae, these images of ourselves we call our selves, are only narratives. Filtered through the same algorithms and quoting a shared language of selfie poses, each projected self comes to resemble the others: we narrate ourselves based on the narratives we read in the images and personae of others.
Despite its technological aspirations toward documentation and preservation, photography has become simply one more way to tell a story.
As I write this, there are approximately 7.4 trillion photographs stored on hard drives and other digital devices. In 2021, humankind will take and upload another 1.4 trillion pictures. More than 75 percent of these photographs will be taken with mobile phones and shared on social media or some other public platform, where anyone will be able to save them, use them privately, modify them, repost them, and recirculate them.
Confronted with this daily tableau of images, the drive to make sense of them, to organize them, can be exhausting. Images are not so much looked at and copied as they are quoted. Whether plucked from social media feeds or archives, used in memes, or posted with simple and earnest captions (“me at the lake”), nearly all images are assigned meaning or provided context. The context for most consumers of images is simple: an expression of the producer’s self.
We collect images as a way to remind ourselves of what matters to us, what is important, what we want to remember. Because one likes to believe in the story, in the consistency, of oneself. Unfortunately, our actions often don’t mesh with our larger narrative. Events derail our plots. What was supposed to bring joy becomes a harbinger of anxiety, and ultimately of death.
“When we define the photograph as a motionless image,” writes Barthes, “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.” Lovely to look at, but with a cost. “I allow myself to be photographed,” Guibert writes—after Barthes—“not like someone who is still alive, but like someone who was still alive at the moment of the photograph.”
We are back to that literary tradition I mentioned earlier—how language can reflect or interact with reality. That whole Plato thing. Years ago, fascinated by what I’d done with the gif and reading Sontag for the first time, I found an eerily familiar world in the 1970s of On Photography, her most important and, decades later, most contemporary book: “Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it.” Sontag connects the development of “fun” technology (Polaroids, Super 8s) with its application for self-surveillance. Photography “is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity.” It is “atomized reality”—moments outside of time, and therefore outside understanding: “As Brecht points out, a photograph of the Krupp works [a German munitions factory] reveals virtually nothing about that organization. Understanding is based on how [something] functions. And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand.” Photography is a surrealist ethos, a democratization of nouns: “It is photography that has best shown how to juxtapose the sewing machine and the umbrella, whose fortuitous encounter was hailed by a great Surrealist poet [Lautréamont] as an epitome of the beautiful.” So flattened, the juxtaposed objects lose their accents, their stress. Photography, as a democratization of seeing—giving equal attention and compassion to a burn victim and the shadow beneath a park bench—empties subjects of their meanings. Images are presented without context, without “time” before and after to understand. So isolated, they do not narrate. There is no reference point for meaning.
In her early essay on happenings, Sontag reflected on the isolating tendency of surrealism, how it “stresses the extremes of disrelation—which is preeminently the subject of comedy, as ‘relatedness’ is the subject and source of tragedy.”
Capitalism, Sontag writes, “requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex.” In place of social change, we get “a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself,” which reduces “free political choice” to “free economic consumption.” Reading On Photography today is important not merely because we’re collectively hoarding trillions of photographs, but because our primary day-to-day experience with one another as human beings has been shattered into an ongoing incoherence of images.
Social media is a surrealistic environment that juxtaposes photographs of dying children against a snarky Wendy’s advertisement, a racist remark from the president against a friend who wants a book recom
mendation. This sensibility of flatness, of sameness, is what enables the form of social media—a frame of advertisements in need of constant content. Because of the financial incentives built into the framework itself, the only thing that matters about an image on social media is that we see it. CF. P45
Politically, photography has long flirted with the illusion that taking and distributing an image is liberating, even universal. If people see, the story goes, they will understand. This too is surreal. Today one sees this same assumption in videos of murders, photographs of incredible violence, or even footage of the president saying something terrible he thought would pass in private—with these horrors exposed, they will certainly “change hearts and minds.” This happened, a photograph says. This is real. But, Sontag goes on, “the photographer’s insistence that everything is real also implies that the real is not enough. By proclaiming a fundamental discontent with reality, Surrealism bespeaks a posture of alienation which has now become a general attitude in those parts of the world which are politically powerful, industrialized, and camera-wielding.” Rather than change, alleviate, or eliminate the suffering or strangeness of others, Sontag suspects that photography has only enabled the planet’s privileged societies to collect the sufferings or strangenesses of others: photography as visual colonialism.
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