The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction

Nine Darkroom Readings: Scenes of Maternal Photography

163 n i n e Darkroom Readings: Scenes of Maternal Photography The impossible sometimes, by chance, becomes possible as a utopia. — j a c q u e s d e r r i d a , “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” I had the impression that, by focusing on these words like a photograph, one could—and the analysis would be endless—discover within them so many “things” that their letters showed by concealing themselves, remaining [demeurant] immobile, impassive, exposed, too obvious, although suspended in broad daylight in some dark room, some camera obscura of the French language. — j a c q u e s d e r r i d a , Athens, Still Remains The figure of photography as a mortifying prosthetic mother with which we ended the last chapter is only part of story that Barthes’s text tells about the complex relation between photography and the mother in Camera Lucida. In this chapter, we will explore how photography also functions as a form of maternal writing. By looking closely at an often-overlooked passage in Camera Lucida (in which Barthes discusses the feeling of “déjà vu” stirred up by a nineteenth century photograph), we will uncover the latent traces of a very different kind of photographic maternal function. This photographic maternal conjures up an evocative and provocative relation to the past and takes the form of something we will come to call “photographic writing.” Like the belated, nonmimetic relation between the dream of wolves and the primal scene that we have been examining throughout this book, photographic writing neither proves nor documents past events; instead, it creates fantasmatic images for primordial events (like the primal Marder-Ch09.indd 163 Marder-Ch09.indd 163 11/12/2011 11:35:20 AM 11/12/2011 11:35:20 AM 164 Photo-Readings and the Possible Impossibilities of Literature scene itself) that cannot be represented. As such, photographic writing makes possible a kind of return to the mother’s body; however, this strange imaginary return is very different from the fetishistic denial of the separation from the mother that we saw at work both in the last chapter on Barthes and in Avital Ronell’s writings on the telephone earlier. By working with and from Barthes’s invocation of an evocative experience of uncanny photographic “déjà vu,” we will encounter a form of writing that emerges from an imaginary return to the scene of one’s own birth and, in so doing, paradoxically enables one to imagine a past that has never been seen before. Second Sight: The Photographic Maternal (Barthes) In one of the rare important passages of Camera Lucida that has not yet been subjected to extensive critical scrutiny, Roland Barthes invokes Baudelaire, Freud, and the maternal body in the same breath as part of a meditation on Charles Clifford’s 1854 photograph Alhambra (see accompanying figure). Alhambra (Charles Clifford, 1854) Marder-Ch09.indd 164 Marder-Ch09.indd 164 11/12/2011 11:35:20 AM 11/12/2011 11:35:20 AM Darkroom Readings: Scenes of Maternal Photography 165 Barthes’s discussion of that photograph takes place in chapter 16 of Camera Lucida and appears at first glance to be no more than a simple illustration of his declared preference that landscapes ought to be places one desires to inhabit rather than places one wants to visit. As he contemplates Clifford’s nineteenth-century image of an ancient Mediterranean urban landscape and wonders why it elicits such a powerful feeling of familiarity in him, he produces this remarkable gloss on his own response to the image: This longing to inhabit, if I observe it clearly in myself, is neither oneiric (I do not dream of some extravagant site) nor empirical (I do not buy a house according to the views of a real estate agency); it is fantasmatic, deriving from a kind of second sight which seems to bear me forward to a utopian time, or to carry me back to somewhere in myself: a double movement which Baudelaire celebrated in “Invitation au voyage” and “La Vie antérieure.” Looking back at these landscapes of predilection, it is as if I were certain of having been there or going there. Now Freud says of the maternal body that “there is no other place of which one can say with so much certainty that one has already been there.” Such then would be the landscape...