Lacan at the Scene

Lacan at the Scene

THE MIT PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETIS LONDON, ENGLAND

HENRY BOND

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This book was set in Filosofia and Univers by Graphic Composition. Printed and bound in Spain. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bond, Henry, 1966Lacan althe scene/ Henry Bond: foreword by Slavoj Ziiek. p. cm.-IShort circuits) Includes bibliographical reterences and index. ISBN 978-0-262-01342-0 Ihardcover: alk. paper) 1. Legal photography-Psychological aspects. 2. Photographic criticism. 3. Murder victims­

Pictorial works. 4. Crime scene searches­ Psychological aspects. 5. Criminal psychology. 6. Psychoanalysis. 7.

I. Title

TR822.B66 2009 363.25022'2-dc22 2008054758 10 9 876 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

SERIES FOREWORD

ix

FOREWORD: THE CAMERA'S

xi

POSTHUMAN EYE

by Slavoj Zizek ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xvii

INTRODUCTION

Hard Evidence 2

Lacanian Detectives

27

3

The Perverse Crime Scene

39

4

The Psychotic Crime Scene

91

5

The Neurotic Crime Scene

131

AFTERWORD

171

NOTES

177

INDEX

229

SERIES FOREWORD Slavoi

Ziiek

A short c i r c u it o c c u rs w h e n th e re is a fa u lty con n e ction in the n etwork-fa u lty, of cou rse, from the sta n d point of the n etwork's smooth fu n ction i n g . Is not the s ho c k o f short- c i r c u iti n g , the refore, o n e of the best m eta phors fo r a c riti c a l re a d i n g? I s not o n e of the most effe ctive c riti c a l pro c e dures to c ross wires that don't u s u a lly tou c h : to take a major c l assic (text, a uthor, notion) and read it in a short- c i rc u iti n g way, thro u g h the l e n s o f a "minor" a uthor, text, or con c e ptu a l a p p a ratu s ("m i nor" s h o u l d be u n d e rstood h e re i n D e l e uze's sense: not "of lesser q u a l ity," b ut m a rg i n a lized, disavowed b y the h e g e mo n i c id eology, or d e a l i n g with "lower," less dig nified topic)? I f the minor refere n c e i s well c hosen, s u c h a p ro c e d u re c a n l e a d to i n s i g hts wh i c h com p l etely sh atte r a n d u n d e r m i n e o u r common perc eption s . This is w h a t M a rx, a mo n g oth e rs, d i d with p h i losophy a n d re l i g ion (short- c i rc u iting phi loso p h i c a l s p e c u l ation th rou g h the l e n s o f politi c a l e conomy, that is to say, e conomic spe c u l ation); this is what Freud arTd Nietz s c h e d i d with morality (short- c i r c u iting the h i g h e st eth i c a l notions thro u g h the l e n s of the u n conscious lib i d i n a l e conomy). W h a t s u c h a r e a d i n g a c hieves is not a s i m p l e "d e s u b l i m ation," a red uction of th e h i g h e r inte l l e ctu a l conte nt to its lowe r e conomic or l i b i d i n a l c a use; the a i m of s u c h a n a p p ro a c h i s , rath e r, t h e i n h e re nt d e c e nte ring o f th e i nte rpreted text, w h i c h b r i n g s to l i g ht its " u ntho u g ht," its disavowed presu p positions a n d conse q u e n c e s. And this is what "Short C i r c u its" wa nts to do, a g a i n a n d a g a i n . The u n derly i n g premise of the series is t h a t L a c a n i a n psycho a n a lysis is a privi l e g e d instr u m e nt o f s u ch an a p p ro a c h , whose p u rpose is to i l l u m i n ate a sta n d a rd text or id eolog i c a l formation, m a ki n g it r e a d a b l e i n a totally n ew way-the long h istory of La c a n i a n inte rve ntions in philosophy, religion, the arts (from the visual arts to the c ine ma, mus i c , and l ite ratu re), id eology, and politics j u stifi es this premise. This, th en, is not a new series of boo ks on psycho a n a lysis, but a series of "co n n e ctions i n the Freudia n field"-of short L a c a n i a n i nterve ntions i n a rt , p h i losophy,

� eology, a n d id eology.

"Short Circu its" wants to revive a practice of reading which confronts a c l a ssic text, author, or notion with its own h i d d en presuppositio ns, and thus reve a l s its d i savowe d truth. The ba sic criterion for the texts t h a t w i l l b e p u b l i s h e d is that they effectuate s u ch a theo reti c a l short c i r c u it. Afte r r e a d i n g a book in this series, the r e a d e r s ho u l d not s i m p ly have l e a rn e d someth i n g n ew: the point is, rath e r, to m a ke him or h e r aware of anoth er-disturbing-side of som ethi n g he or s h e knew a l l the time.

FOREWORD: THE CAMERA'S POSTHUMAN EYE Slavoj Zizek The o n l y thing I feel q u a lified to a d d to H e n ry B o nd's o utsta n d i n g b o o k is what I s e e as its p h i loso p h i c a l presu p position: the w e i rd status of the c a m e ra 's eye. In ord e r to g r a s p t h i s status, o n e sho u l d b e g i n with M a rc e l P roust's The Guermantes Way, a novel w h i c h is part o f his I n Search o f Last Time.' Toward the e n d o f the first c h a pte r, there is a m e mora b l e scene i n which, using the phone for the fi rst time, M a rc e l (th e n a rrator of the novel) ta l ks to his g r a n d moth e�: Afte r a few se conds of s i l en c e , s u d d e n ly I h e a r d that v o i c e w h i c h I s u p posed myse lf, m ista ken ly, to know so we ll; for a lways u ntil th en, every ti m e that my g r a n d moth e r h a d ta lked to me, I h a d b e en a c c u stom e d to fol low what s h e w a s saying on t h e o p e n score o f h e r f a c e , i n w h i c h t h e eyes fi g u red s o l a r g e ly; but h e r voi c e itself I w a s h e a r i n g t h i s afte rnoon for t h e fi rst ti m e . And b e ca u s e t h a t voi c e a p p e a re d to m e to have a ltered in its p roportions from the mom e nt that it was a whol e, a n d rea c h e d m e i n t h i s w a y alo n e a n d without t h e a c co m p a n i m e nt o f h e r fa c e a n d features, I discovered for the fi rst ti m e how swe et that voi c e was . . .. It was swe et, but a lso how s a d it was, fi rst of a l l on a c co u nt of its v e ry sweetness, a sweetn ess d rai n e d a l most-more than any but a few h u man voi c e s c a n e v e r h a v e b e e n-of e v e ry e l e m e nt of resista n c e to oth ers, of all s e lfishness; fra g i l e by r e a son of its d e l i cacy it s e e m e d at every moment r e a d y to b reak, to expir e in a p u re flow of tea rs; t h e n , too, h a v i n g it alone b e s i d e me, se en/without the m a s k of h e r f a c e , I noti c e d fo r the fi rst time the sorrows that had s c a rred it in the course of a l ifetime. W h at h a p p ens h e re is d e s c r i b e d by P roust in v e ry p r e c i s e terms wh i c h unc annily point forward to L a c an i a n theory: the voi c e is s u btra cted from its "nat u r a l" total ity of the body to which it b e longs, out of w h i c h it e m e r g e s a s an a utonomous p artia l obje ct, an organ w h i c h c an m a g i c a l ly s u rvive without the body whose org a n it is-it is a s if it stands "alone b e s i d e me, seen, without the mask of h e r fac e." This s u btraction with d raws it from (ou r ordina ry) r e a l ity into the virtu a l dom a i n of the re a l , where it p e rsists a s a n , u n d e a d s p e cter h a u nti n g the s u bj e ct: '' 'Granny!' I c ri e d t o h e r, 'Gran ny! a n d wo u l d have kissed h e r, but I h a d b e s i d e m e only that voice, a phantom, a s i m p a l p a b l e a s that which wou l d come p e r h a p s to revisit m e when my g rand moth e r was d e a d." As such, this voi c e s i g n a l s s i m u lta n eously a d ista n c e (Granny i s not h e re) a n d a n o b s c e n e ove rproxi m ity, a prese n c e more intimate, more p e n etrati n g , th a n that of a n exte r n a l body in front of us: A r e a l p resence ind e e d that voi c e so n e a r-in a ctu a l s e p a rati o n. B ut a premon ition a lso of an ete rn a l s e p a ration! Ove r and a g a in, as I liste n e d in this way, without see­ i n g h e r who s p o ke to m e from so far away, it h a s seemed to m e that the voi c e was c ryi n g to m e from d e pths out of w h i c h one does not rise a g a in, and I have known the a nxi ety that was one d a y to wri n g my h e art when a voice s h o u l d th u s retu rn (alo n e , a n d atta c h e d n o lon g e r t o a b o d y whi c h I was n e v e r mor e t o s e e ) .

The term " a nxi ety" is to be read in the precise L a c a n i a n way: for L a c a n , a nxi ety d o e s not s i g n a l the loss of the o bje ct, b ut, on the contra ry, its overproxi m ity. Anxi ety a rises when the objet a d i re ctly fa l l s i nto r e a l ity, a p p e a rs in it-wh i c h is precisely what h a p p e n s when M a rc e l h e a rs his g r a n ny's vo i c e s e p a rated from h e r body, a n d discovers "for the fi rst ti m e how sweet that vo i c e was": this sweetn ess is, of course, the extra cted q u in­ tess e n c e wh i c h made Granny so he avily l i b i d i n a l ly investe d . This, i n c i d e nta l ly, is how psychoa n a lysis a p p ro a c h e s the l i b i d i n a l-subje ctive i m p a ct of new te c h nolog i c a l inven­ tions: "te c h nology is a c ata lyz e r, it e n l a rg e s and e n h a n c e s som eth i n g which is a l re a d y he re"'-i n t h i s c a s e, a fa nta sm atic v i rtu a l fa ct, l ike t h a t o f a p a rti a l obje ct. (Someth i n g l ike t h i s h a p p e ns i n a psyc hoa n a lyti c session w h e r e , precise ly, the pati e nt is re d u c e d to a voi c e: "psyc hoa n a lysis makes o u t o f t h e ord i n a ry voi c e a te l e phone voi c e .")' And, of course, this re a l i zation c h a n g e s the e ntire con ste l l ation: o n c e a fa nta sy is realized, o n c e a fantasmatic o bj e ct d i r e ctly a p p e a rs i n r e a l ity, re a l ity is no lon g e r the s a m e . Take the sex g a d g ets i n d u stry: on the m a rket tod a y is a so-c a l l e d "Sta m i n a Tra i n i n g Un it," a m a sturbatory d ev i c e w h i c h re s e m b l e s a battery l i g ht (so that, wh e n we c a rry it a ro u n d , w e a re not e m b a rrasse d): you p u t the e r e c t p e n i s i nto t h e o p e n i n g at t h e top a n d move th e th i n g u p and down u ntil satisfa ction is a c h i eved. The pro d u ct is avail a b l e i n different colors, tig htn esses, a n d textu res to i m itate the three m a i n o p e n i n g s for sex u a l p e n etration (mouth, v a g i n a , a n u s).

"'" What one buys is simply the p a rti a l obje ct (erogenous zone), de prived of the e m b a r­

rassing a d d itional b u r d e n of the e ntire p e rson. The fa ntasy (of red u c i n g the sex u a l partner to a prosth esis) is here d i rectly realized, a n d this changes the entire l i b i d i n a l e conomy of sex u a l rel ations. This b r i n g s us to the key question: what h a p p e n s to th e body when it is s e p a rated from its voi c e , when the vo i c e is s u btracted from the who l e n e ss of the pe rson? For a b r i ef mome nt, we s e e "a wo r l d ro b b e d of fa nta sy, of the affe ctive fra m e a n d s e n s e , a wo rld out of joi nt."· G r a n d moth e r a p p e a rs to M a rc e l outs i d e the fanta s m atic horizon of m e a n i n g , the rich texture of his previous long experi e n c e of h e r, which u p til l now m a d e h e r a warm, c h a rm i n g pe rson-a l l o f a s u d d e n , he s e e s h e r "re d-fa c e d , heavy a n d common, si ck, lost i n tho u g ht, fol lowi n g t h e l i n es o f a book with eyes that s e e m e d h a rdly s a n e , a d eje cted old wo m a n whom I d i d not know." P e r h a p s the best m eta phor h e re is that of a squ i d w h i c h moves e l e g a ntly in wate r, butturns into a d i s g u sti n g h e l p l e ss p i e c e o f s l i my m e at o n c e o u t of wate r: s e e n afte r t h e fateful p h o n e conve rsation, d e p rived of her fantasy fra m e , Granny is l ike a squ i d out of wate r, on d ry l a n d- h e re is P ro u st's precise d e s c r i ption of this effect: . .. when, ente ri n g the d rawin g-room b efore my g r a n d moth e r h a d b e e n tol d of my retu rn, I fou n d her th ere, rea d i n g. I was i n the room, or rather I was not yet in the room s i n c e she was not aware of my pres e n c e , a n d, like a wom a n whom one s u rprises at a p i e c e of work which she wi l l lay aside if a nyon e comes in, she had a b a n doned h e rself to a tra i n of thoug hts which she h a d n ever a l lowed to b e visi b l e by m e . Of myse lf-th a nks to that privilege wh i c h does not last but wh i c h one enjoys d u ring the brief mom ent of retu rn, the fa c u lty of b e i n g a spe ctator, so to speak, of on e's own a bsence,-th ere was present only the witness, the observer, with a hat and trave ling coat, th e stra n g e r who does not b e long to th e house, the photog ra p h e r who has c a l l e d

to take a photogra ph of p l a c e s which one wil l never see a g a i n . The p rocess th at m e­ c h a n i c a l ly o c c u rred in my eyes when I c a u g ht sight of my g ra n d moth e r was i n d e e d a photograph.We never see the people who are d e a r to us save i n the a n i m ated system, the perpetu a l motion of our i n c essa nt love for them, which b efore a l lowi n g the i m a g es that their faces present to r e a c h us c atches them in its vortex, flings them b a c k u pon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coi n c i d e with it. .. . But if, in p l a c e of o u r eye, it should be a pu rely m ateri a l o bje ct, a photographic plate, that has watc hed th e action, th e n what we shall see, in th e cou rtyard of the Institute, for example, will be, instead of th e dig nified e m e rg e n c e of an Acad e m i c ian who is goin g to hail a cab, his stagg ering gait, his precautions to avoid tu m b l i n g u pon his bac k, the para bola of his fall, as thou g h he were d r u n k, or th e g round froze n ove r. So is it when some casual sport of c han c e p reve nts o u r inte l l i g e nt a n d pious affe ction from coming forward i n tim e to hide from o u r eyes what they o u g ht never to b ehold, w h e n i t is forestalled by o u r eyes, a n d they, arisi n g first in th e f i e l d a n d having i t to them­ se lves, set to work m e c h a n i c a lly, l i ke films, a n d show us, in pla c e of the loved fri e n d w h o h a s l o n g a g o c eased to exist but whose d e ath o u r affection h a s always hith e rto kept concealed from us, the new p e rson whom a h u n d red times d aily that affection has c lothed with a d e a r a n d c h eati n g likeness. .

.

.

I, for whom my g ra n d mothe r was

sti l l myse lf, I who had n ever s e e n h e r save in my own soul, always at the sam e pla c e in the p a st, th rough th e tra nsparent s h e ets o f conti g uous, overla p p i n g m e mories, suddenly i n our d rawing-room wh i c h formed part of a n ew world, that of ti me, that.in which dwell the stra n g e rs of whom we say "H e's begun to age a good deal," for th e first ti m e and for a mome nt on ly, s i n c e s h e vanished at once, I saw, sitt i n g on the sofa, bene ath th e lamp, red-fa c e d , h e a vy a n d common, s i c k, lost in tho u g ht, fol lowi n g the l i nes of a boo did not know.

�ith eyes that s e e m e d h a rdly s a n e , a d eje cted old wom a n whom I

O n e should read this pass a g e a g a i n st its i m p l i c it Ka nti a n b a c k g ro u n d: a n etwo rk s c re e n s o u r r a w p e r c e ptions o f b e loved p e rso ns, t h a t is t o say, "b efore allowi n g the i m a g e s that their fa ces present to reach us catches th e m i n its vortex, [it] fl i n g s th e m b a c k u po n the idea that we have a lways h a d of them, m a kes the m a d h e re to it, coi n c i d e with it"; this network-the com p lex web of p a st experie n c es, affe ctions, a n d so on, wh i c h colors o u r raw perce ptions- p l a ys exa ctly the rol e o f a tra n s c e n d e ntal horizon wh i c h m a ke s o u r r e a l ity m e a n i n gful. W h e n we a re d e p rived o f t h i s tra n s c e n d e nta l n etwork, t h a t i s , o f th e fanta smatic coord i nates of m e a n i n g , we a re no lon g e r e n g a g e d p a rticip a nts in the world, we fi nd o u rselves confronted with th i n g s i n th e i r noumenal d i m e nsio n : for a mome nt,we see th e m the way they are "in th e m s e lves," i n d e p e n d e ntly of u s-or, a s Pro u st p uts it in a wonderful form u l a, the s p e ctato r becomes "a s p e ctator, so to s p e a k, of o n e's own a bse n c e. " What th is m e a n s is that, once th e fa ntasy obj e ct is s u btra cted from re a l ity, it is not only the obs e rved r e a l ity w h i c h c h a n g es, but a lso the observi n g s u bj e ct h i m s e lf: he is red u c e d to a gaze o b s e rvi n g how th i n g s look i n his own a bs e n c e (re c a l l the old Tom-Sawyer-and- H u c k-Finn fa ntasy of being p resent at one's own fun e r a lt. And is this, p recisely, not th e featu re wh i c h ma kes the photographic c a m e r a so u n c a n ny? Is a c a m e ra not our eye s e p a rated from o u r body, d rifti n g a ro u n d a n d record i n g how th i n g s look i n o u r absen c e?

xiii

What we e n c o u nter h e re is the gaze as o bje ct, free from the stri n g s wh i c h atta c h i t t o a p a rti c u l a r s u bj e ct- n o w o n d e r that Kino-Eye IKino-g/azl, Dzi g a Ve rtov's Soviet sil e nt c l a ss i c from 1924 (one of the h i g h p o i nts of revo luti o n a ry c i n e m a), takes a s its e m b l e m p r e c i sely the eye (of the c a m e ra) as a n " a ut o n o m o u s o rg a n" whi c h w a n d e rs a r o u n d in the e a rly 1920s, giving us s n i p pets of th e NEP ("new e c o n o m i c p o l itic s") r e a l­ ity of th e Soviet Uni o n . R e c a l l the c o m m o n express i o n "to c a st an eye over s o m eth i n g ," with its l ite r a l i m p l i c ation of p i ck i n g the eye out of its s o c ket a n d throwi n g it a r o u n d . M a rtin, t h e l e g e n d a ry i d i ot f r o m Fre n c h f a i ry ta les, does exa ctly this when his m other, worried that he wi l l never f i n d a wife, tells h i m to go to c h u rc h a n d c a st an eye ove r the girls th e re. What h e does is g o to the b utc h e r fi rst, p u r c h ase a pig eye, and th e n , i n the c h u rc h, throw this eye a r o u n d ove r the g i rl s at p raye r-no w o n d e r he l ater r e p o rts to his moth e r that the g i r l s were n ot too i m p ressed by his b e h a v i o r. This, precise ly, is what revo l uti o n a ry c i n e m a s h o u l d be d o i n g: using the c a m era a s a p a rti a l obje ct, as a n "eye" torn from the s u bj e ct and freely thrown a r o u n d - o r, to q u ote V e rtov h i m s e lf: "The film camera drags the eyes of the audience from the h a n d s to the fe et, from the feet to the

iz

eyes and so o n i n the m ost profita b l e ord er, and it o r g a n es the d eta i l s i nto a re g u l a r m o nta g e exercise."s We a l l k n ow the u n c a n ny m o m e nts in o u r everyday lives when we catch s i g ht of o u r o w n i m a g e a n d this i m a g e is not l o oki n g b a ck a t us. I re m e m b e r o n c e trying t o i n s p e ct a str a n g e g rowth on the s i de of my h e a d u s i n g a d o u b l e m i rror, when, a ll of a s u d d e n , I c a u g ht a g l i m p se o f my f a c e i n p rofi l e . The i m a g e reR l i c ated a l l my g e stures, but i n a weird u n c o o rd i n ated way. I n s u c h a situ ati on, " o u r s p e c u l a r i m a g e is to rn away from us and, c r u c i ally, our l o o k is n o l o n g e r look i n g at o u rselves:�6 It is i n s u c h weird experi e n c e s t h a t o n e c atches w h a t L a c a n c a l l e d g a z e as objet petit a , th e p a rt o f o u r i m a g e w h i c h e l u d e s th e m i rro r- l i k e sym m etri c a l relati o n s h i p . When w e see o u rselves "f rom o uts i d e ," from this i m p os s i ble p o i nt, the tra u m atic feature is not that I am o bje ctiviz ed, red u c e d to an exte r n a l o bject for the gaze, b ut, rath e r, that it is my gaze itself which is objectivized, wh i c h o b s e rves me from the o uts i d e; w h i c h, p r e c i s e ly, m e a n s that my g a z e is no l o n g e r m i n e , that it is sto l e n from m e . D e l e u z e ofte n va ries th e th e m e o f how, i n b e c o m i n g posth u m a n , w e s h o u l d l e a rn to p r a ctice "a p e r c e ption as it was before m e n (or after) . . . rele a s e d from th e i r h u m a n c o o r d i n ates":' those w h o f u l ly e n d o rse t h e Nietzs c h ean " retu rn o f t h e s a m e" a re strong enough to susta i n the vision of th e "iri d e s c e nt c h a os of a world b efore m a n . '" A lth o u g h D e l e u z e reso rts h e re o p e n l y t o Ka nfs l a n g u a g e , ta l k i n g a b out d i rect a c cess t o "th i n g s (the w a y t h e y a re) i n th emse lves," his p o i nt is precisely t h a t o n e s h o u l d s u btra ct t h e o p p ositi o n between p h e n o m e n a a n d thi n g s - i n-th e m s e lves, b etwe e n the p h e n ome n a l a n d t h e n o u m e n a l level, from its K a ntian f u n ctio n i n g , where n o u m e n a a re tra n s c e n d e nt th i n g s that forever el u d e o u r g r a s p . What D e l e u z e ref e rs to as "th i n g s in themse lves" is i n a way even more phenomena / th a n our shared p h e n o m e n a l real ity: it is the i m p o s s i b l e p h e n o m e n o n , the p h e n o m e n o n t h a t is exc l u d e d from o u r sym b o l i c a l ly c o n stituted real­ ity. The gap that sepa rates us from noumena is thus p ri m a rily n ot e p i ste m o l o g i c a l , but pra cti c o-eth i c al a n d l i b i d i n al: there is no "true r e a l ity" b e h i n d o r b e n e ath p h e n o m e n a , n o u m e n a a re p h e n o m e n a l th i n g s w h i c h a re "to o stro n g ," t o o i ntens(iv)e, f o r o u r p e r c e p ­ t u a l a p p a ratus attu n e d t o c o n stitute d rea l ity-e p iste m o l o g i c a l fa i l u re is a s e c o n d a ry eff e ct of l i b i d i n a l terror, that is to say, th e u n d e rlyi n g l o g i c is a reve rs a l of Ka nfs "Yo u

xiv

FOREWORD

c a n, b e c a u s e you m ust!": "You c a n not Iknow nou m e n a), b e c a u s e you m u st not!" Ima g i n e someone b e i n g fo rced t o witn ess a te rrifyi n g tortu re: i n a way, the mon strosity o f w h a t h e s e e s wo u l d m a ke t h i s a n exp e ri e n c e o f th e nou m e n a l i mpossib l e-r e a l t h a t wo u l d sh atter t h e coord i n ates o f o u r common reality. ITh e s a m e holds for witn essing a n intense sexu a l a ctivity.) In th is s e n se, if we were to d iscover films s hot i n a co n c e ntratio n c a mp a mo n g th e MU5u/mannen, s howi n g s c e n e s from th e i r d a i ly life, how they a r e syste m­ ati c a lly f!Jistre ate d a n d d eprived of a l l d ignity, we wo u l d h a v e "se e n too m u c h," the pro hibited, we wou l d have entered a fo rb i d d e n territory of w h at should h a v e remai n e d u n s e e n . lOne c a n well u n d e rsta n d C l a u d e Lanzma n n w h o s a i d th at, if h e were to stu m b l e upon s u c h a film, h e wo u l d d e stroy i t i m m e d i ate ly.) T h i s is a l so what m a kes i t s o u n b e a r­ a b l e to witn ess the l a st mome nts of peop l e who know they a re shortly goi n g to die a n d a re i n this s e n s e a l ready living-de ad-a g a i n, i m a g i n e that we h a d d i scovered, a mo n g the r u i n s of the Twi n Towe rs, a video c a m e ra whi c h m a g i c a l ly s u rvived the "rash i ntact and is full of s hots of what went on a mong th e passe n g e rs on the p l a n e i n the m inutes before it c r a s h e d i nto one of th e Towe rs. I n all these c a s e s, it is that, effe ctively, we wou l d h ave seen thi n g s a s they are "in th emselves," outside h u m a n coord i n ates, outs i d e o u r h u m a n r e a l ity-we wou l d h ave s e e n the wo rld with i n h u m a n eyes. I M aybe t h e

U S a utho riti es do possess s u c h s hots a n d, fo r u n d e rsta nda b l e r e a sons, a re k e epi n g t h e m s e c ret.) This, then, is th e b a c kg round of what Bond d e s c ri b e s: a ltho u g h the shots of the c ri m e s c e n e do not d i r e ctly present t h e nou m e n a l s c e n e o f a c r i m e too i ntensive fo r o u r eyes, th ey evoke it-wh t m a ke s th e m so u nsettl i n g i s that they record tra c e s of somethi n g

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we c a n not rea l ly a c c ept as a n a ctu a l eve nt, or g ra sp how it could h a ve h appe n ed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks are d u e to the fol lowing for their contributions-guidance, advice, e nco u r­ agem e n t-toward t h e s uccessfu l compl etion of this m a n u script. I g la d l y and warmly acknow l e d g e: E m i l y Tsing o u , Sharon H a rp e r, Ros Je n n i n g s, Alison Scott- Bau m a n n , N i c k Sargeant, David Bate, Mandy M e rck, Darian Lead e r, Ju lian Stalla b rass, B r u c e Fink, Dylan Evans, Luc Sante, U rs Stahel, Be rnard B u rgoyne, Nicholas Royle, Dou g las Go rdon, Lindsay Watson, Dominic Palfreyman, Brian Voce, Russell Rob erts, Michael Pinfold. All images are reprod uced with pe rmission of The National A rch ive, Kew. Special thanks to Rog e r Canove r at MIT and, of co u rse, to Gospod Z izek: who could frame his fearful-Balzacian-symm etry?

xvii

INTRODUCTION

I begin wi th a novel and engaging premise: what if} acques Lacan-the bril liant and eccentric Parisian psychoanalyst-had left his home in the early 1950S in order to travel to England and work as a police detective ? How might he have applied his theories in order to solve crime ? A "what if. . . ? " that conjures up images of this most unusual personage: on the cross - Channel ferry swaying in the drizzling rain next to an ageing Citroe n DS; being met in Dover by a steaming J aguadl lled with gruff chain- smok ing cops. In my mentaln lm clip Lacan' s Frenchness is amplin ed, highlighting the incongruity of the effete intellectual as he greets his new colleagues.l But beyond this flippant or comedic starting point is a serious enough proposition: an attempt to put Lacan's tripartite model of human mental fu nctioning to use in the service of crime investigation-particularly through a consideration of visual evi dence present at scenes of murders . In order to follow up on this proposal-or question-I began to mak e regular visits to the National Archive , req uesting whatever material I couldn nd on murders that look place in England between 1955 and 1970. Each bulky, dusty boxn le dontained essential original documents pertaining to the crime-the Senior Investigating Ofn cer's (s IQ 's) report to the Director of Public Prosec�t ions (DPP) , numerous wi tness statements, press clippings, and, decisively, copies of the o riginal crime scene photographs : I had enough info rmation to research and propose a series of Lacanian readings . And set out below are the results of my three -year - long inquiry. P olice photographs of a murder scene do not ordinarily capture the aggressive actions that Lacan characterized as "moments, similar in strange ­ ness to the faces of actors when a nlm is suddenly stopped in mid - frame [a freeze- fram e]." 2 Al ways arriving too late. the forensic photographer must depict instead only what is residual. The presence of Scenes of Crime Ofncers (s a c a) or Crime Scene Investigators (CSI)3 is menacing-or ominous-and immediately obvious through their distinctive regulation attire : single- use Tyvek brill iant white polyethylene hooded forensic scene anticontamination one - piece coveralls, nitrile gloves , and a face mask, or even a respirator.4 The termforenSiC, as is well kn own, refers to a context: work that is being carried out for legal purposes. As part of the " apparatus of the prosecution, " any evidence collected by these men and women may ultimately be produced and admitted as exhibits by the crown/prosecuting counsel in any future trial. Perhaps the most desirable type of forensic evidence is recovered ma­ terial that includes a sample of a suspect's-more or less unique-DNA; a single hair or saliva residue preserved on a glass is suffi. cient, and will more or less incontestably connect that suspect to the scene . Samples of clothing n bers, or even p ollen, may be recovered. Possible n ngerprint evidence is

also photographed and documented, as well as the patterns and formations of any bloo d residue s . Such evidence will be photographed and enlarged by up to lOOOX magnincation.5 Yet , in additio n to these highly technical materials an records, the cs I s will also make an extensive series of nonnal photographs, images that usually include diverse general photographic views of the scene taken fro m various perspectives a n d angles, often made using the same kind of familiar camera equipment that a wedding photographer might use-and it is ex­ amples of these more prosaic or workaday records that I have relied upon in this study.6 The Federal Bureau of Investigation Handbook of Forensic Services provides a comprehensive picture of the meticulousness that is essential to success in this demanding neld. In the U SA, a copy of that handbook is given to all law e nforcement professionals including part - time staff, county sheriffs , and so forth, as decisions made by the nrst ofncer to arrive at a crime scene will be crucial-impo rtant forensic evidence is often destroyed or recovered inappropriately by no nspecialists long before the c s I s arrive . In the melee that often commences upon the discovery of violent death, appropriate pro­ cedure is not always followed, and the nrst priority of any law enfo rcement ofncer is to secure the sce n e : that is. to stop anyone but the cs I s from ap ­ proaching or entering.? In high contrast to the drama and excitement that such an event will provoke in the layman. the specialist cs I s seem to carry on their methodical. reflective work with an apparent nonchalance that often appears to be awkwardly respectful of the traumatizing events: for them it is just another day at the ofnce. Indeed. for these experts the crime scene is their typ ical-but always temporary-wo rkplace, and. in common with those attending many much less challenging working environments. they proceed with a conndent familiarity.

�

Considering this dichotomy of performance versus reflection in terms of the photographic. there is an immediate resonance with the critical assertion made by the French theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes, who noted that "the nlmic, very paradoxically, cannot be grasped in the nlm 'in situ ­ ation , ' ' in movement , ' 'in its natural stat e , ' but only in that maj or artefact, the still . "6 Deferring to the residual, Barthes argued, is probably essential in order to comprehend cinematic action.9 The author William Burroughs also recognized that the affect connected to an event or activity might be revealed-grasped-only through documentation, observing that "you may not exp erience shame during defecat i o n and intercourse , but you may well experience shame when recordings are played back to a disapproving audience. Shame is playback: exposure to disapproval. "10 There is an idea advanced that remote documents may hold the key to comprehending human actions, events , and so on: a belief (or fascination) that may be traced back

I NTRODUCTION

through the advances and discoveries made-in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century-in the domain of photography technol ogy . In 1 9�4, the Hungarian photographer and writer La sz l6 Moholy- Nagy noted how the photographic camera " makes visi ble existences which cannot be percei ved or taken in by our optical instrument, the eye : i . e . , th e photo ­ gr aphic camera can either complete or supplement our optical instrument , the eye . . . . This principle has already b e e n applied in a few scientin c exper­ iments, as in the study of movements-walking, jumping, galloping-and of zoological , b otanical and mineral forms-enlargements, mi croscopic photographs-and other investigations into natural history; but these exper­ iments have remai ned isolated phenomena, the inter-connections of which have not been established . "11 And Moholy - N agy ' s exhor tation to recogn ize the potential signin cance of the connections and links between data provided from diverse photo sources seems to precisely foreshadow the development of the modern forensic serv ices laboratory, which is a contemporary instance par excellence of this proposition: a place where every possible use is made of diverse technologically advanced lens- based equipment, and where a single unifying purpose remains primary-the possible interconnections that might effectively incriminate a suspect. The inventions and discoveries to which Moholy- N agy alludes inclu de the development of photomicrography (taking photographs through a micro ­ scope) , an invention attributed to Reginald Fessenden in 1 87 6 ; the high­ speed camera shutter (stop - motion photography) attributed to Eadweard Muybridge in 1 878, and Ro ntgen ray imaging (x - ray images) attributed to Wilhelm Ro ntgen in 1 8 9 5 . 1 2 A common purpose shared by each of these pioneers was the desire to use science in order to reveal hither to unseen worlds-to go deeper, fu rther, and so on. And this attitude was shared , of course, by the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, who formulated his initial theory of the unconscious during precisely the years that these photo discoveries were also announced-The Interpretation of Dreams was n nally published in 18 9 9 . I t was the philosopher WaIter Benjamin who-almost thirty years later-n rst proposed a direct parallel between inventions such as photomi ­ crography Ro ntgen ray imaging, or the high - speed camera shutter and ' the theory of psychoanalysis. Benjamin-now famously-commented that "photography, with its devices o f slow motion and enlargement , reveals the secret. It is through photography that we n rst discover the existence of this optical unconscious, jus t as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. " 13 Benj amin's assertion of a parallel with Freud's pr opo­ sition is instantly compelling, but if we take his proposal literally and relate it back to the analytic setting- "the session"-it can b e noted that traces-evidence-of the unconscious are not wholly imperceptible , only

disguised . The hidden metanarrative-of the dynamic unconscious-emerges from the analysand's discours e : the real story is not the one that t4e patient carefully relates, but is often located in seemingly incidental details such as denials, repetitions, hesitation, slips, and so on. The primacy of the analysand's discourse has been qualifIed by the psychoanalyst J acques-Alain Miller: " [ Lacan emphasizes] the internal coherence of the patient's discourse , that i s , o f what h e o r she says .. . you simply check whether his o r her discourse is consistent . . . you look for discrepancies within the discourse itself. "14 This theme also underpins the process that modern crime investigators follow: their basic procedure is to rule out or eliminate each suspect from the inquiry-a methodology that remains unaltered since Poe' s fIctional detective M. Dup in observed that "they [the detective and his team] had fallen into the gross but common error of confounding the unusual with the abstruse . But i t i s by these deviations from the plane o f the ordinary, that reason feels its way. if at all, in its search for the true . In investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked 'what has occurred , ' as 'what has occurred that has never occurred befo re . ' '' 15 And when this method of alighting up o n inco nsistency is applied to interpreting, fo r example, crime scene photogra p hs, Benj amin's parallel with the clinical s etting is sustaine d : j ust as the privileged space of the psychoanalytic session enables an ordinarily dismissible instance of speech to be highlighted, here too all that was once incidental or unremarkable cannot be (must not be) igno red or overlooked. The scene of a murder is a rarefIed space in which the banal is almost completely eradicated (or anni ­ hilated) . Commenting on the power that a dead body has to alter the status of obj ects surrounding it , the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot noted: " even though the cadaver is tranquilly lying in state on its bier, it is also everywhere in the room, in the hous e . " 16 And this factor is decisive-whether a violent death or otherwise-as it is the presence of a body that redefInes the space and reconfIgures the status of everything-or, everything else-in the room. 1 7 obj ect must now b e documented and scrutinized. IS In order to capture-p rivilege- such details in the primary material that I consulted-crime scene images from the D P P archive- I worked with a macro o r "close -up " lens at around three centimeters from the surface of the o riginal photographs, using a technique known as photomacrography. 1 9 Commenting on his use of a similar setup , the artist Richard Prince wrote: " I thought o f the camera [copy stand] a s a n electronic scissor, "20 and s o , too, my rostrum-like movements over the image surface (the lens moving slowly across the ageing black- and -white photos) were made in o rder to seek out and alight upon (in the familiar clutter of the everyday) elements which

I NTRODUCTION

were recognizable as symptomatic.21 Immersed in the angle of view off ered by my camera's viewfInder, I " reentered" each of these scenes, and of ten the eff ect was as if I were physically present-cautiously (guiltily) creeping around, capturing my own evidence: a single high - heeled shoe on a k itchen table; some caref ullyf olded clothes placed over the back of a chair; a plate of chocolate biscuits on a dinner table; a lewd graf fIti inscribed into a train carriage door; an arrangement of workman's tools in af orest clearing.22 In The Optical Unconscious, Rosalind Kr auss asks : "Wh at can we speak of in the visual fIeld that will be an analogue of the 'unconscious' itself , a structure that presupposes fIrst a sentient being within which it operates, and second a structure that only makes sense insof ar as it is conflict with that being' s consciousness? Can this optical fIeld -the world of visual phenomena: clouds, sea, sky , f orest-have an unconscious ? "23 And in answer to Kr auss 's vexed question, it may simply be asserted that the (supposed) unconscious of "cl ouds, sea, sky, f orest , " are-at l east in this study-irrelevant: the clues that I interrogate below are simply p roposed as indexical-visual evidence that isal ways rel ated back to (possible) human actions and behavior.24 Following Barthes's terminology , the studium of murder scene photographs -insof ar as I have worked with them-is always the depiction of a violent death (the corpse) . Barthes characterized thi s element as "the general, cultural . . . int er­ est one has in a photograph [that which] corresponds to the photographer' s work. "25 H owever, as the author J im Ballard has observed, "cruel and violent images which elicit pity one day have by the next af ternoon been stylised into media emblems. "26 T hus, the Barthesian studium may actually seem banal. repetitive, and empty, communicating only an emb lem which is re ­ stricted, closed.27 Eq ual ly, the Barthesian p u nctum , "the detail that captivated me, surprised and awakened me . . . a ki nd of point, a sting, that touches me sharply," seems toal so depend-as do Miller's and P oe's-upon the notion of a discrepancy. 28 For example, of the fIf teen p aintings by the German artist Gerhard Richter which depict-almost grandiosely-the much - disputed " suici des" of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and J an- Carl Raspe in the early hours of the morning of October 18, 1977 (while inmates of Stammheim P rison) , it is a " subsidiary" painting that is not derivedf ro m the sensational p ress images of the harrowing cadavers, but merely depicts a secondary detail of a record (a vinyl LP) on a cheap record player which "touches me sharply," that is, seems to be the most revealing-and pOignant-image .29 T he d e ­ pressing futility of the RAF'S eleven -year campaign of vi olence and murder that was designed to achieve f reedomf rom s o - called Imperialist Forces is not implicit in the "heroic" images of their cadavers-which do seem to present them as marty rs in a "just cause" of the complete destruction of Capitalism-but might be glimpsed somehow in the record pl ayer: the

' stirring revolutionary and anti establishment sentiment of late � 1960s rock and pop music must have been how it aU began. An example of the phenom ­ e n o n that Luc Sante alluded to when h e observed : "The fact that every life is a chaos of incidentals e nsures that sudden death will magnify disorder; any ridiculous moment might b e the last moment, any insignincant obj ect might be forever associated with you through some terminal j uxtaposition. "30 And it is precisely some instances of these "terminal juxtapositions " that I evaluate in this book-the detail that is usually glimpsed only at the edges of an otherwise lurid photo .

IN THE NEW HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY, EDITO R M I C H E L FRIZOT CLAI MS THAT H I S APPRAISAL O F PH OTO H I STORY I S O N E WHICH DEMOCRATICALLY I NCLUDES HITH ERTO I G N O R E D APPLICATIONS O F THE MEDI UM-A H I STORY N OT SOLELY BASED ON THE OEUVRES OF THE TRADITIONAL CANON OF GREAT MASTER PRACTITI ON ERS. THERE ARE ARTI CLES ON SCI ENTI FIC P H OTOGRAPHY AND ON THE H I STORY OF THE SNAPS HDT ( " U N IVERSAL P H OTOGRAPHY"), BUT NOTHI N G REALLY ON CRIME SCENE P H OTOGRAPHY (THE HARD-TO- I GN O R E H I STORY OF PORNDGRAPHY IS ALSO CONVENI ENTLY SIDESTEPPED).'

The photography historian Dr. Ian J eff rey has recently proposed a new and revised history of photography-Revisions: An Alternative History o f Photography-a study that recognizes the centrality of utility t o photography's development.2 Dr. J eff rey off ers chapters on military photography. celestial photography. and x- ray imaging. However. it is not surprising to note that even in a book on "overlooked" genres of photography. the crime scene photograph is not considered.3 This was the nrst compelling clue that I was conf ronted with when I began research ing crime scene photography: the shortage of any sustained critical wr iting (or other presentation) on the subj ect-it seemed thatf or some possibly signincant reason. an adeq uate discourse hadf ailed to evolve. Certain publications available on this topic deal q uite generally with the relationship between photography and law enf orcemen t-these are essentially picture books that normally f eature copious reproduction s of crime - related images presented as they stand. or accompanied by a series of terse commentaries. and include those edited by Buck land. Hannigan. and Aa ro nson.4 I think it isf air to assert that some of these additions to the literature are not intended to be academic studies . and-as with many such "coff ee table" books-they tend to be designed and presented in a manner that seems to pr omote only a brief perusal. The written contributions of ten include tossed- off generalized statements that are sometimes poorly consid ered; others echo a prevalent tendency-when conf ronted with the crime scene photograph-to descend into a prose sty le that is a parody of ha rd-boiled crime nction. such as this annotation of a photograph made by Art hur Fellig CWeegee") . a photographer whose pictures are de rigueur in these b o oks : "Roy Bennett. twenty - s even years old. had come f rom Texas by bus and im­ mediately tried his hand at big city crime . His nrst attempt at a stickup was his last: detectives shot him dead as he tried to escape on August11 .1 94 1 . "5 Another regularly encountered theme is a response that relies up on a heartf elt or personal reaction to the imagery; wr iting in Mandel and Sultan's Evidence. Sandra P hillips comments : " Recently. there has been an interest in seeing evidentiary photography. such as police pict ures made as evidence [f or use] in court. aesthetically. a phenomenon probably linked to reality TV and a certain aIix iety about reality itself . P hotographs of early twentieth­ century murders in New York City. published in a book called Evidence [Sante . 1 9 9 9 ] , are pictures of social phenomena compelling and beautif ul .

Because of their fascinated regard for violent death [that] . . . volume is re ­ ally about rapture , the mysterious sacredness of life , and provides . . . an acknowledgment of photography'S power. "6 Phillips's notes-on a collection of photographs selected from the archives of the NYP D -are extravagantly wide-ranging (reality T V , global anxiety, mysterious sacredness) but are clearly not based on any relevant academic argument, relying instead on bland casual opinion. 7 In the literature accompanying a recent exhibition of crime scene pho ­ tographs (at a well - known U S photography center) , it is asserted that " some of these images are downright shocking in their detailed depictions of grim homicides . Yet many also have a picturesque beauty verging on the cinematic. Some of the more evocative scenes even come perilously close to resembling stills from fIlm noir classics . " 8 Equally, Gail Buckland writes: "We are all wildly ambivalent about crime photographs . We want to look, and we want to look away. Our response to many images of violence is the same as it is to a terrifying scene in a movie: we cover our eyes but leave our fIngers just a little apart. "9 The crime scene photograph is often characterized as both picturesque/ cinematic and shocking/ grim (that paradox is noted) ; however, it is elementary that looking at crime scene photographs can often be vexatious and troubling to the viewer-such images do seem to often provoke mixed feelings . What is lacking is any psychological explanation (or explor�tion) of the reasons for such a paradox . \0 Furthermore , when I made a request to the leading English photography historian Mark Haworth-Booth (who for many years , until his recent retire ­ ment was curator of photography at the Victoria andAlbert Museum, London) ' to conduct an e-mail interview on the subj ect of crime scene photography, I received only the following terse reply: "Sorry, but I fInd the whole subj ect of crime scene photo so unsympathetic. " 1 1 As these examples perhaps b egin t o reveal, crime scene photography has not been particularly well served by academic inquiry from within the discipline of photo history. However, several authors working in other allied fIelds have made important contributions to the production of a basic critical context . Particularly cogent are several studies concerned with documents of trauma, disaster, or war, in which the emphasis is often on a broad s ocial context/ reception and includes such works as those by Taylor; Baer; Lesser; Azoulay; and (the diffIcult to fInd) Ruby. 12 The art historian Sue Taylor's study of the photographer Hans Bellmer is Freudian in its orientation, and there are also some other highly original studies that cut across the bound­ aries of literature , art, and art criticism, including thos e by Parry, Sante, Sternfeld, and Rugoff. 13 Peter Wollen's text in Rugoff's Scene of the Crime , in particular, encom ­ passes a consideration of the maj o r themes that s e e m relevant to this fIeld o f

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inq uiry, and my research in this volume might be reasonably characterized as a response to-or a sustained elaboration of -his all too brief essay. In attempting to extend the discourse in this fIeld, the emphasis of my attack has been to pursue a critical engagement with my primary material whereby I have sought, above all, to go beyond readings of murder scene photography that propose to invoke poetic rapture-the mysterious and un­ knowable. But also those in which the critical challenge posed is dif fused and sanitized by rendering the themes under consideration as distinctly separated f rom the pr esent (the everyday) , thus inoculating the viewer / reader against the potentially threatening, distressing, psychological dimension. In this respect I note an af fInity with the unf linching and insightful biographies of certain notorious murderers written by Ward Jouve, Masters , and Burn; these exemplary studies undoubtedly remain key texts in this fIeld. 14 T he discovered murder scene is a location that exists primarily as a myth, that which is "close to what Durkheimia n sociology cal ls a ' co llective representation, ' [and] can be read in the anonymous utterances of the press , advertising, mass consumer goods; it is something socially determined , a 'ref lection. "'15 Crime scenes are f req uently depicted across the f ormats of the mass media, but rarely-f or the maj ority-is such a place ever actually expenenced.1 6 A defIning aspect of the murder scene is that it is a privileg ed place that is inaccessible toal l but af ew prof essionals. Even the press photog­ rapher is denied access by the P olice Line-the ubiq uitous yellow- and - black or bl ue -and -white polythene tape, emblazoned with the injunction: CRI M E SCENE D O N O T cRo s s -and is conf ronted b y a situation where the scene itself cannot be depicted. T he tape defInes a specifIc area that is temporarily subj ect to extraordinary regulation. Due to the presence of this barrier the photo ­ j ournalist may turn instead to suggestion and implication, the lack of access ultimately prompting documents of the f amiliar coming and going at the perimeter boundary: they may point their lenses at a circling helicopter, or at the police and medical support vehicles which slow to a crawl at the threshold, then abruptly accelerate away. T he press photographer's pictures are of ten defIned by their distance f rom the site itself , and such images are precisely those that propagate myth or cliche : the inherent lack of specifIcity fInal ly supporting their function, that is, their vagueness and generic q uality, actually creates a useful space f rom where the news s to l)"--:in thef orm of speculation and j ournalistic mus ­ ings-can emerge . I? Conversely, the Scenes of Crime Of fIcer-whose photographic records are the subj ect of this inq uiry-works beyond myth. Such a photographer is not expected to produce a neat story. Instead their task is to photograph evel)"thing -anything present may be of signifIcance . In the current FBI fIeld manual it is stated that "Nothing is insignifIcant to record if it catches o ne' s

attention. "18 When the (artistic) photographer Garry Winogrand asserted: " I photograph to fmd ou t what something will look like photographed . " he also came near to elucidating a sensibility closely allied to the forensic brief. which presumes that we do notyet know what is important or significant: that is something which will be considered -oru nderstood -only later. 1 9 Practitioners involved in these two equally important disciplines are seemingly polarized: they are literally either side of a (polythene) line .20 For the fIrst there is a lack or gap : the photographer cannot actu ally gain access to their supposed subj ect at all . Whereas the latter is vexed by an excess: there is a seemingly unlimited qu antity of material which mu st be docu mented.2 1 And this is the basic challenge with which the Scenes of Crime OffIcer is pre ­ sented upon arriving at such a place . Indeed. the soco 's role is now so well known that dominant fIlm language . for instance . has produ ced no more effective-or simpler-means of introducing a location as a discovered crime scene than to portray the act of it being photographed and docu mented.22 Numerous practical handbooks exist to guide the practitioner throu gh the process of photographing a crime scene. including those au thored by Siljander. Saferstein. and Redsicker.23 Each of them reconfIrms the point made -somewhat extravagantly-by the technician Kraszna- Krausz. who notes that "photographic coverage [must be] made from severa l angles to meet all eventualities. "24 A recent FBI briefIng doc� ment asserts that "the aim should be to record a maximu m of useful information. " and inclu des the fol­ lowing examples of potentially relevant subj ect material : "cigarette bu tts. tool marks and impressions of shoe prints . . . [a] telephone receiver off the hook or wires cu t. playing cards orderly stacked or scattered. TV and lights tu rned on. food in cooking stages. coffee cu ps. drinking glasses or liqu or bottles. "25 The above directive confIrms that a basic paradigm of the CS!· S procedu re is to place no greater emphasis on what appears to be striking or spectacu lar (a bloody corpse. for instance) than on any of the other ordinary.u nspectac ular. or banal elements present (coffee cu ps or food in cooking stages) . an approach that may be described as one which democratizes the subject matter. Thi s essential requ irement or sine qua non of the crime scene docu ment has been redeployed by nu merous photographers in a fiI). e - art context . inclu ding William Eggleston. KeithArnatt. Boris Mikhail ov. and Georg Phil ipp Pezold . 26 D o cu menting the everyday has also been a concern in my own research/practice since 1 9 8 8 . 27 Su ch photographers have often depicted­ and published images of-familiar obj ects that are encou ntered daily: milk bottles. saucepans . shoes. folded newspap ers. or the contents of a fridge . This approach to su bj ec t matter is more or less opposed to the aims of many others who seek to pho tograph the exotic/the spectacu lar. and so on. Charac­ terizing his approach to his daily activity of photo- making with a straight ­ forward clarity. Wi lli am E ggleston commented: "the word [snapshot] has

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C H A PTER 1

never had any meaning [f or me] . I am at war with the obvious. "26 For Eggleston and some others . the everyday is of ten recorded without a preconceived notion of what might be (or has to be) coded as interesting or beautif ul . This approach also has parallels in literature-f or example. the painstak ing eval ­ uations and descriptions of the ordinary supplied by Georges P erec in La Vie mode d'emploi [Life: A User's Manual].29 Or Daniel Spoerri ' s An Annotated Topography of Chance. which is constructed using a device that the author describes as the "techniq ue of Sherlock H olmes . . . [who] starting out with a single obj ect could solve a crime. "30 Spoerri highlighted the mundane obj ects on his studio table-an egg cup . matches . a piece of baguette-and derived his enthral ling text exclusivelyf rom associations. memories. and anecdotes relating to them.3J For the Swiss photographer Olivier Rich on. depicting mundanity is al so proposed as a challenge to the traditional hierarchy of fme - arts ubj ect matter: " [The everyday is] an aesthetic category based upon the repudiation of the clas ­ sical regime of representation that assigns a hierarchy to diff erent genres and subj ects . T he banal and the ordinary raise things to the dignity of objects and the techniq ue of photography enables us to read signs on the photographed body of things and people . "32 This classical regimentation of representation is not only present in historical nne - art painting. but is also generally d e ­ termining. For instance . when the French sociologist P ierre Bourdieu ask ed a group of survey respondents to consider cert ain photographs and give each a percentage score based on a perception of how " interesting or beautifu l" it appeared to be. he drew thef ollowing overal l results: A s u n s et: 78%, a lan d scape: 76%, a l ittl e g i rl playi n g with a cat: 56%, a woman breast-feeding: 54%, a fol k dance: 46%, a weaver at work: 39%, a still life: 38%, a n old master: 37%, th e bark of a tree: 35%, a famous mon u m e nt: 27%, a first com m u n ion:

26%, a snake: 20%, a rope: 16%, a m etal frame: 15%, cab ba g e s: 12%, a butcher's sta l l: 9% . . a car accident: 1%.33 .

According to Bourdieu's research results. there emerges a broadly agreed sense that-f or many people-certain photographic subj ects are simpl y more worthwhile than others: there is a co nsciously asserted typical hierarchy of agreeable subj ect matter. And it is this of ten unspok en proposition (as ­ sertion) of a sliding scale that many of the pioneers of twentieth - century photography sought to challenge . Characterizing preCisely this inclusive democracy of vision. Walk er Evans invok ed a passage written by his contem­ porary. the Russian author Vl adimir Nabok ov: "V asili Ivanovich would look at the confIgurations of some entirely insignifIcant obj ects-a smear on the platf orm. a cherry stone. a cigarette butt-and would say to himself that never. never would he remember these three little things here in that

13

particular interrelation, this pattern, which he could now see with such death ­ less precision . . . . Nabokov might be describing a photograph in a current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. "34 And beyond Evans' s recognition of a parallel with nne - art photography there is also , again, a correlation with the fo rensic work that the saGO is tasked to carry out : recording spatial rela­ tionships between objects; documenting the exact angle at which an obj ect came to rest ; the precise distance of one object fro m another; and so on .35 An insight into this seemingly too inclusive mode of visual inquiry may be gained by co mparing it with another approach to representing the -world - around -us to which it is also antagonisti c : the stock or library photograph-such as those huge commercial collections held by Getty Images, Corbis Corp . , or Fotosearch, fo r example . Typ ical examples of this genre include many depictions that seem to be i ntent upon only reiterating a well - known visual motif-a worker at a desk in shirt sleeves, surrounded by several stacks of papers ; a smiling couple hand in hand at sunset ; dad greets his child, offering a new teddy bear; a smile on the telephone; weary shoppers step out of a N ew York taxicab . The primary purpose of this­ often tedious-photographic language is to close down ambiguity i n order that the denotative functi o n remains secure , thus enabling the image to communicate-telegraphically-a preferred c � mnotation, which also very often reconnrms-automaton- like-a well - known theme: happy- in- love ; healthy fre e time ; busy at the ofnce; and so on. In terms of technical pro ­ duction, though , the essential factor is the necessity to constantly marshal a correct i nterpretation, and i n o rder to achieve this aim all insignincant , unne cessary, or unusual detail is carefully avoided and removed from the frame by the photographer and art d irectors . In the stock photograph, daily life is depicted without the leaks , blemishes, stains , pauses, and stumbling that actually characterize it .36 Most importantly, elements that communicate

nothing really CNabokov' s cherry stone and cigarette end) are removed on the basis that inclusion would limit the efnciency of the i I? age to make its po int . In the Barthesian sense , the stock photo is designed and executed with all possibility of punctum wip ed out . 37 And it is precisely be cause such images are sanitized, highly intentional, and predictable that they exist only as banal generic cliches . 38 In order to develop an explanation for this ongoing dichotomy between the warts- and - all, humdrum depiction and an alternative more polished version, it seems plausib l e , or even essential , to introduce a psychoanalytic frame ­ work, and in particular the co ncept of repression.39 Just as the scientinc/forensic photographer gains nothing fro m i de­ alization, the psychoanalyst h a s no purpose in prioritizing "interesting and beautiful" utterances, and will usually be equally interested in nongeneric and less art - directed pheno mena . A slip of the tongue, mispronunciation,

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H A R D EV I D E N C E

repetition, or a hesitation-like the b its and pieces of detritus noticed o n a station platform-may b e of as much value as any carefully worked, c o n ­ sciously controlled speech. I n order to apprehend material that is marked , distorted, or altered b y t h e unconscious, th e analyst declines to insert o r im­ p o s e any thematic hierarchy o n t h e incoming data. Indeed, this strategy, nrst elucidated by Sigmund Freud, remains the basic analytic rule-the golden rule . Stating the analysand's (some use patient or even client these days, in order to avo id this semi - antiquated term) obligations in the session, Freud pronounced: " For the purpose of self- observatio n with concentrated atten­ tion it is advantageous that the patient should take up a restful p osition and close his eyes; he must b e explicitly instructed to renounce all criticism of the thought formations which he may perceive . H e must also b e told that the success of the psycho analysis depends upon his noting and communicating everything that passes through his mind, and that he must Iiot allow himself to suppress one idea b ecause it seems to him unimportant or irrelevant to the subj e ct , or another b ecause it seems nonsensical. "40 The stock photography picture-indeed, promotional imagery in general­ might be described as a corollary to the Freudian concept of justiflcation: a presentation that is idealized and artincial Y Richard Prince , for example, describes such pages as "too good to be true. Unbelievable. Overdetermined. "42 Equally, a photo strategy that tends to highlight what is "unremarkable, for­ gotten, cast adrift" does not simply offer up an alternative o r antidote to the familiar b anality of myth, but , in capturing the incidental, an e qualitarian directive is activated with the underlying proposition (or implication) that all subj ects, views , obj e ct s become part of a n onj udgmental co ntinuity­ just as in the session it will be for the p sycho analyst to differentiate and select what is to b e regarded as signincant, by attending to the logic of the unconscious. The overt hierarchy of photographic subj ect that Pierre B ourdieu's re ­ spondents proposed as "interesting or beautiful" may thus be contrasted­ or even replaced-with one that is more open - ended and less restricted by what Freud called the "psychical dams of disgust, shame , and morality. " 4 3 Just such an alternative taxonomy was proposed in a phantasmagoric sequence of images compiled by the French writer and philosopher Georges Bataille :44 An a b a n d o n e d s h o e , a rotte n tooth, a s n u b nose, the c ook s p itti n g in the s o u p of his m a sters . . . an u m b re l l a , a sex a g e n a ri a n , a s e m i n a r i a n . . . th e h o l l ow eyes of j u d g e s . . . a dog devouring the sto m a c h of a g o o s e , a d ru nk e n v o m iti n g wo m a n, a s o b b i n g a c c o u nta nt, a j a r of m u sta rd represent the c o nf u s i o n that s e rves as the ve h i c l e of l ove . . . . The J e suve [a B ata i l l i a n n e o l o g i s m ] is thus the i m a g e of an e roti c move m e nt that b u r g l a rizes the i d e a s c o nta i n e d i n the m i n d , giving them the

force of a scandalous eruption.'5

15

Bataille includes images that are tawdry or intentio nally distressing, but crucially, he also adds several that are entirely unclear or ambiguous in their connotation-a j ar of mustard, a snub nose , an umbrella-and it is this movement away from rele ntlessly identiftable hierarchies and logical groupings that is compelling. Bataille refuses to exclude elements that do not seem to fit; his images are provocative -and richly associative-precisely because some of their connotations are opaque . 46 The creative decision to explore the visual beyond myth is, in any case, a strategy that has been sustained since the invention of photography-as long ago as 1839 .41 Edgar Allan Poe, for example, described the initial announce ­ ment o f the daguerreotype Cthe forerunner of modern photographic processes) as "the most important and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science , "48 and in the tale The Mystery qfMarie Roget , written the fol ­ lowing year, h e pieces together the probable events o f a n unsolved murder case Ca thinly veiled commentary on the unsolved murder of the cigar vendo r M a ry Rogers in New York) . 4 9 Poe' s prose seems t o be, i f not directly dependent on photographs , then at least photographically informed; his literary reconstruc ­ tion foreshadows a slow low- angle camera pan across the murder scene . 50 Poe's device is to consider certain details as ifhe were referring back to a series ofphotographic images of the crime scene, and his �eticulous appraisal reveals the signiftcance of a hitherto overlooked detail-some torn strips of fabric which had been carefully removed from the deceased's skirtY Geoffrey Batchen has noted that "the photograph exercised a halluci­ natory presence well before i t s offtcial invention, being conceived by at least twenty different individuals b etween 1790 and 1 8 3 9 " ; for Poe, however, it seems, photography remained a "hallucinatory presence" even after its inven ­ tio n . 52 Reiterating his interest in the mundane-and now foreshadowing Freud - P o e ' s M . Dupin reminds his colleague s : " Experience has shown that a vast , perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant . "53 Many decades later, yet directly influenced by both Freud and Poe , the surrealists-a group of artists , writers , and provocateurs based mainly in Paris-reengaged with this larger portion of truth . John Roberts has com­ mented: . . [ F o r Bretonl Freud produced not just a new diagnostics , but a new hermeneutics of the everyday. The possible truth of things and events lay beyond the initial moment of empirical veriftcation in their unconscious signiftcance . As a consequence, everyday life became ftlled with motives and inte ntions whose meaning lay beyond the consciousness of their agents . "54 Breton himself asserted, for instance : "We have said nothing about [Giorgio del Chirico until we take into account his most pers o nal views about the artichoke , the glove , the biscuit, or the spool. "55 Recognizing this phenomenon in the work of the French photographer Eugene Atget, WaIter

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C H APTER 1

Benjamin observed that "Atget almost always passed by the ' great sights and so called landmarks . ' What he did not pass by was a long row of boot lasts; or the Paris courtyards, where from night to morning the hand carts stand in serried ranks ; or the tables after people have fInished eating and left, the dishes not yet cleared away-as they exist by the hundreds of thousands at the same hour; or the brothel at No. 5, Rue--, whose street number app ears, gigantic, at four different places on the building's far;:ade"S6-that is to say, Atget often avo ided the overdetermined and spe ctacular views that had already become the photo cliches of Paris , and instead chose to highlight elements from a seemingly mundane reality, such as grilles, banisters , grates, shop window displays , and so on. More recently, the curator and writer John Szarkowski-also a signifIcant contributor to the study of Atget­ has proposed that a central preoccupation for the photographic practitioner has been to record, or "point at [that which] was unseen before, or seen dumbly, without comprehension. "57 Thus, fInally, the interpretive work laid out below may be contextualized as a further contribution to a critical traj e c ­ tory which began with P o e , and has b e e n incrementally evolved through the contributions of Atget, Chirico , Evans, Spoerri, Perec, Nab okov, Eggleston, and so on.S8 A second theme that is worth reviewing in the context of this study is that of the photograph ofa photograph-the macro details that I created /worked from are pictures ofpictures-rephotographed fragments . 59 In a rephotograph the subj ect matter selected by the photographer is already a photograph, and the fundamental signifIcation implicit in the use of this technique ( "strategy") is that-in depicting and re -presenting a preexisting photograph-there is an emphasis placed upon the materiality and processes of photography as media/medium. 6o Michel de Certeau, writing in the 1 970s, considers appro ­ priation-in the activity of reading-as unintentional . unavoidable: " [The reader/viewer] insinuates into another person' s text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation: he poaches on it [steals from it] , is transp orted into it, pluralizes himself in it like the internal rumblings of one's own body. Ruse , metaphor. arrangement, this production i s also a n 'invention' o f the mem­ ory."61 In the 1 9 8 0 s the focus moved away from the whimsical-personaliz ­ ing-appropriation, and was concentrated instead on highly intentional theft and the explicit use of duplication ; this prompted some commentators­ particularly in relation to fIne - art practice in 1 9 80s New York-to suppose that photographers /artists involved with rephotography were signaling a failure of originality: the use of rephotography-particularly as it was offered by, say, Richard Prince or Sherrie Levine-was promoted as being redolent of a hastening endgame in which image - making was rap idly becoming limited and repetitive . Andy Grundberg's critical commentary, for example,

17

which is predicated on a thematic of fmality, now looks , in retrospect, overly dramatic : " [Richard Prince's] art is troubling because it implies the exhaus ­ tion of the image universe; it suggests that a photographer can fmd more than enough pictures already present in the world without the bother of making new ones . It is a strategy of wide appeal to a generation brought up in an environment saturated with images. "62 For Grundberg, photographic subj ect matter is proposed, quite preposterously, as a commodity; one which-much like oil or coal reserves-is presumed to be running out, or becoming used up . And this theme of a " connotation exhaustion" (as deple ­ tion) or a even a feared photo saturation was a pervasive attitude in the nne arts at that time : a recognition that it was "Game Over, " that artists were now operating only in the (bombed - out) ruins of art history-the death of art, and so on. More recently those "postmodernist" themes have been forgotten, and attention has been on the so - called "Greater New York" scene of artists, includingWade Guyton, KelleyWalker, and Nate Lowman-aloose quasi - group of rephotographers and appropriationists whose exuberance is not at all in question. Indeed, it seems not only elementary but essential that an inquiry into the nature of photographic representation is actually enriched through an a priori acceptance of the photographer's alienation,from their subj ectY And it is alienation (which begins with/in the lens itself) which is, for Lacan, implicit to the imposition of language-the fundamental consequence of the subj ect' s entry into the Symbolic Order. 64 This theme of the subj ect' s alienation­ which is the basic paradigm of Lacan' s conceptualization of Oedipus-has been eloquently described by the psychoanalyst Dr. Darian Leader, who recently noted that " we are all immersed in the register of signs . Language is pulverized . The phrase 'I love you' is already pulverized. Each [visual] artist creates their own pulverized signs . We struggle to convey intimacy in language : it is already pulverized . We can only get to the real feeling through the artincial . The realm of language inherently produces distance . "65 This factor, that we are doomed to " get to the real feeling [only] through the artincial, " is precisely what the rephotograph highlights : rephotography may be conceptualized/ recognized as a useful means with which to emphasize the fundamentally mediated quality of subj ectivity itself. And Richard Prince -writing in a per­ sonal artist's statement-communicates something of this sensibility; in an explanation of his decision to utilize that technique , he notes how "his own desires had very little to do with what came from himself because what he put out (at least in part) had already been out . His way to make it new was to make it again , and making it again was enough for him certainly, personally speaking, almost him . "66 As Douglas Crimp has reflected : " [these photogra­ phers are] showing photography to be always a representation, always ­ already- seen. "67

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This potentially debilitating pulverization of the sign prompted Roland Barthes (attempting to summarize his theory of photography) to stat e : " 1 think that w e are victimized by cultural stereotypes. " 6 6 Barthes i s not defeatist in delivering this observation, but this state of affairs does seem to demand a response from (create a challenge for) the author, the artist, the poet. Highlighting the work of Gustave Flaubert, he continues : " [Flaubert] also came to grips with cultural codes; he was truly bogged down in them, and he tried . . . to free himself from them through ambiguous attitudes, irony, plagiarism, simulation; as a result we have that vertiginous book, so amazingly modern, Bouvard et pecuchet. " 69 Thus- ¥ with the theme of the mundane detail that I have also outlined above-the traj ectory curve of the creative use of plagiarism, simulation, and so forth may be traced back at least a century to Flaubert's 1 8 8 1 novel, evolving through, for example , the work of Francis Picabia, the phenomenon of pop art, and the fllms Jean - Luc Godard (Wollen highlights, for instance, Godard's use of " multiple diegesis , open - endedness, overspill, intertextuality, allusion, quotation, and parody") , before arriving at the " [Metro] Pictures" scene of the 1 9 8 0s and beyond.70 One of the earliest examples of creative apprqpriation or quotation in so - called straight photography can be seen in Walker Evans' s notorious image , often referred to simply as Studio: a photograph that depicts the window of a commercial photo - po rtrait studio where rows of photo booth images have been placed . 7 1 In this image , and others such as Minstrel Handbill or Tom Cinema Poster, Evans simply re - p resents photographic images that were already on display, with no further intervention. 72 Once again Evans's experi ­ ments dispose of any argument that the use of appropriation in photography is an explicitly "postmodern" phenomenon. As the art historian D ouglas Fogle has recently noted, while also reconsidering some of the grandiose claims made in the 1 9 8 0 s : " One starts to think that the last p icture might not have come yet , let alone the last picture show, which today seems like a distant dream. "73 Equally, Jacqueline Rose, commenting from an overtly Freudian per­ spective , does not emphasize any end - of- epoch stagnation or desolation of image production, but the fact that " [a psychoanalytic approach] gives back to repetition its proper meaning and status: not lack of originality or some ­ thing merely derived, nor the more recent practice o f appropriating artistic and photographic images in order to undermine their p revious status ; but repetition as insistence, that is, as the constant pressure of something hidden but not forgotten . " 74 Ros e ' s conceptualization of repetition as pressure (being brought to bear on the image) seems cogent: in her reading, repetition actually becomes a valuable tool that can act to intensify and illuminate pre ­ cisely through re - presentation-pressure-which returns the reader lviewer to some element that has been repressed, removed, rej ected.

19

An alternative-and useful-approach to locating the rephotograph is to completely remove any connotation (context) of artistic practice altogether, and recognize it instead as a technique that has been an important utility since the earliest years of the medium's history: a technique that has always been used to simply enable the duplication of an important document-like the modern (recently antiquated) photocopy. In the 1 84os, during the era of the daguerreotype process, taking a photograph of a photograph was actually the only way a reproduction could be made of an existing image , since the daguerreotype produced only originals and no negative . And that procedure has been paradigmatic-embedded-during the analogue era, as the basic mechanism whereby an image . a text. a fIlm. a television program, or an audio recording has been copied. The process of making an analogue copy produces a next-generation copy where . crucially. the newer version is always marked by the process : a consequence of making the copy is that the new image is degraded . Analogue duplication processes (in photography the jargon is " making dupes") always also produce a loss of clarity when compared to the original . In transfers of audio recording (magnetic tape) this marking of the copy is manifest in increased " noise" or audible hiss. for example. and in the photocopy or dupe photograph evidence of the copying process is often recognizable in a narrowing of the original color gamut that is manifested in a loss of detail in shadow areas . and other often unwanted alterations such as color balance shifts that can render the image as unnatural or unrealistic. The inherent degradation of analogue reproduction may be contrasted with the typical contemporary means of copying that is achieved through the use of digital processing. Of course. the trace (clue , evidence) of the digital process is that it actually improves on the original-through techniques such as digital restoration. remastering. image enhancement . image cleaning, noise removal-the object is often returned as better than it ever was before. The process of digital restoration of antique fIlms . photographs , and audio recordings often reveals extra detail that was not previously visible / audible . Recently. new digital versions have been made from the negatives of several early classic fIlms-including. notably. Fritz Lang' s M. As a con­ sequence of these processes. much detail often literally comes to light that was present on the original camera negative. but was not actually visible in the early theatrical (analogue) positive prints: the fIlm negative stored these levels of detail which would be seen only decades later. 75 Another-regularly cited-instance of just such a phenomenon is portrayed in the classic sci - fI fIlm Blade Runner: the detective Deckard uses an Esper workstation t o magnify and enhance a photograph, revealing details that were previously hidden in areas of shadow. 76 And although that fIlm is set in the year � 0 1 9 , much of the functionality of the fIctional Esper machine actually became commercially available with the introduction of Adobe's Photoshop computer software

20

C H A PTER 1

application in 1 9 9 1 . 77 My activity actually paralleled quite precisely the pro ­ cess carried out by D eckard-with his barked voice recognition instructions replaced in my setup by a computer mouse and the digital tools of curves, saturation, skew, distort, perspective, warp, threshold, and so on.78 Yet equally, I have also allowed included/incorporated the visihle evidence of rephotographing as an process in the illustrations included here . I have , for example, made no to disguise any evidence of my inter­ vention-indexed through " errors" such as inconsistent color temperature , visible surface reflections , and even lens - based distortio ns . That is to say, the images reproduced do not escape also being instances of what WaIter Benjamin memorably describ ed-and appositely here-as being "like the bloody fIngerprint of a murderer on the page of a book [which] says more than the text . "79 An observation that parallels, for example, the approach taken by conservators and restorers of photography: these professionals, who are constantly in contact with the materiality of the image , do not tend to describe a photograph as "a picture " or " an image" (as I am so tediously obliged to) but as an object ( e . g. , "I am working on a very challenging object at the moment, " or " I am still working on that obj ect") . The simple p oint being that in their line of business a photograph is three - dimensional : it has a back, a front, and (usually) four (very thin) sides. For those carrying out such forensic - type activities , commonly held presu �ptions are often replaced by others that are more specifIc/specialized. A complete comprehension as to how a particular photograph has been constructed-the condition of each of the layers of substrate, the photosensitive layer, the protective laminate , etc.-may be vital in determining the appropriate method of restoration. Police photographers document and record scenes of crimes in a manner that is assumed to be scientifIc. The general approach is to work toward some kind of supposed neutrality; any photographiC effect produced by the lens-such as foreshortening or the typical stretching caused by wide angles of view-is recognized as a distortion, and dismissed as potentially confusing or even misleading. As the current FB I handbook of guidelines recommends: "Photograph from eye -level to represent the normal view . " 8 0 Summarizing the purpose of these expectations , Raymond Silj ander, a law enforcement professional involved with training such photographers-whose guide to this type of work is a classic desk reference on the subj ect- qualifIes this instruction: " Be sure to always use the camera to document things rather than attempt to create photographs that offer little more than a pleasing artistic quality . . . . The forensic photographer must seek evidence , not a creative work of art. " 8 1 For those who are on the other side of the yellow­ and - black- striped tap e , the dichotomy between their documentary work and art is surely explicit. 82 But the basis for Siljander's binary opposition is not a traditional antagonism between art (considered highly subj ective) and

21

science (considered highly obj ective) ; the true motivation for prioritizing obj ectivity is simply that such photographs must remain admissible as evi ­ dence in court . As they are produced , stored , and referred t o , the status of crime scene photographs is seemingly constant : a legal document and a vital visual resource which must neve r appear to include any element that might b e interpreted as exhib iting a bias, nor incorporate anything that a hostile defense lawyer might seize upon in an attempt to discredit the credibility of the forensic evidence-regularly during jury trial proceedings a judge will hear legal argument that a photograph provisionally admitted as evidence is, in fact, prejudicial, that is, not neutral enough. and will therefore rule that it cannot be presented to a jury. Within nne - art photography, the motif of this "image without a person­ ality, " that is blank. transparent, and reliable. has been extensively utilized. particularly by. fo r example. the so - called Dusseldorf School of photogra ­ phers such as Bernd and Hiller Becher or Thomas Struth. Elsewhere. other s o - called conceptual artists have emphasized the role of photography as a utility that can be used simply to record a preconceived action or an event (tossing colored balls in the air; photographing every garment of clothing owned ; documenting every building on a given street) . as in some works of art made by John Baldessari. Bruce Nauman. Edward Ruscha. or Christian BoltanskL B3 I n such instances. the idea that the resultant pictures provide documentary evidence is often assumed-or utilized-as a given . However. those who are engaged with a critical approach to photography (and do not actually need to complete the important work of documenting a crime) cannot so easily enter a supposedly b inary debate such as the one Silj ander proposes b etwe e n artists and CSI S . s4 For those involved with the philosophy of the

photographic . it is an established axiom that all images are coded, derived : as' Barthes states, a document that is intended to be "a purely mechanical and exact transcription of reality [ always] implies some consideration. some ideology behind the shot. "S5 And certain artists-and visual researchers­ have respo nded to this inherent ideological factor which (always) underpins " exact transcription" by reproblematizing any simplistic-and potentially complacent-reading of the forensic evidence photograph as merely (and exclUSively) a reliable document . I n order t o produce the series Evidence , Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan s e ­ lected and exhibited a selection o f photographs from various archival sources. including records of industrial trials and documentation of experiments/neld research at organizations such as the United States Department of Transpor­ tation or U.S. Food and Drug Administration. as well as images produced by the National Semiconductor Association.s6 The selected photographs were removed from any forensic co ntext and placed into the artistic/reflective context of an art gallery. The artist ' s Duchamp - like act of appropriation

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H A R D EVI D E N C E

allowed a series of initially bland scientinc documents to resonate in quite unexpected ways . 87 The intended purpose of each photograph is not revealed-it often remains which compositional element is even primary. The photographs are freed from their rigid raison d 'etre and may­ in the cultivated, reflective setting of the art space-resonate enigmatically in a similar way to the deliberately open- ended visual images in Morgan and M urray ' s TAT (Thematic Apperception Test) , sparking off diverse ass o ­ ciative ' interpretive possibilities.88 An d through this process a m o r e or less complete inversion of the original scientinc purpose is achieved.89 In the exhibited series of photographic works L 'Hotel -and a subsequent publication-the French artist Sophie Calle re - presented photographs taken in various occupied hotel rooms .90 Her images were made using the same "dispassionate" approach as the one that the cs I is also taught to adopt/ appropriate. Calle 's photographs record and do cument such incidental details as a winter coat laid on a bed, a cluttered desktop, a pair of shoes care ­ fully placed, or a to othbrush in a glass next to a few coins . In photographing the obj ects in each of the rooms as if it were a crime scene , the artist also challenges the too simple expectation that a supposedly neutral photograph is also a generally reliable image : her pictures do-in fact-accurately record the interiors of certain hotel rooms, but Call e ' s intervention is also an inversion-or short - c ircuiting-of the viewer's expectations that have been raised and deceived through the use of the code of objectivity, that is, the artist records copious evidence of incidental bric - a -brac that has been observed in some entirely arbitrary hotel rooms-these are evidence photos that lack a crime. Calle' s challenge is to propose evidence in the absence of a crime-in spite of no crime; her images function to reafnrm Benjamin's now mantra - like assertion: "It is no accident that Atget' s photographs have been likened to those of a crime scene . But isn't every square inch of our cities a crime scene? Every passer- by a culprit? Isn't it the task of the photographer to reveal guilt and point out the guilty in his pictures?"91 And these examples of artistic research or experimentation-along with many others-have tested the long- ago - abandoned notion that "the camera never lies . " But the specinc appropriation that is going on in L'Hotel and Evidence is not of any individual image in particular, but a more general ­ ized appropriation of context.92 Simplifying Barthes 's observation that there is an implicit ideology behind every photograph, it is pOSSible to assert an even more compact truism: in photography, ideology is context. Very often murder scene photographs are difncult to access. Those held by individual police forces such as those in London (M etropolitan Police Authority) or Manchester (Greater Manchester Police) are never made available to researchers or any other interested individual; even those that are eventually passed to the National Archive are often censored for various

Z3

given reasons . including any ruling a judge may have made during a trial­ such as a recognition that making the images public may cause distress to surviving relative s . Similarly. explic itly violent material recorded in the process of news - gathering remains unbroadcast or printed- newspapers and broadcasters in England adhere to a code that allows some limited depic ­ tions of death (as a consequence of war. bomb blasts. or natural disaster) but outlaws the depiction of severe injury. suffering. severed body parts . and so o n . 93 The material is essentially sanitized. and-in the case of broadcast news-often emerges with an entirely misleading narrative: if the truly har­ rowing elements are removed. a dangerously disj ointed continuity remains . one that is unrealistic because (as with. say. the Hollywood sex scene) it misses /excludes the supposed subj ect. showing only a rendition that highlights before and after-a narrative that incorporates repression . 94 Crime scene photographs are surround � d by taboo-my inquiries as to the possibilities of sustained access fo r research were often met with a distinctly discouraging tone by those tasked to curate such objects; there was a discernible resistance to making this type of material available . 95 It was as if it had been hidden away in the same manner that psychoanalytic theory proposes that hostile infantile (including murderous) thoughts be ­ come subj ect to the force of repression-they are hidden away because they are unbearable . The psychoanalyst Theodor R e ik noted how the decision to imprison a criminal may b e understood as a kind of quarantining.96 I n h i s argument . criminals a r e placed in prison for fear of contagion: their dangerous thoughts and actions are feared because they represent an ir­ resistible temptation to others .97 And . following Reik. it may be argued that photographs of the tabo o of murder are also repressed or censored for the same reason: to diminish any temptation that might emanate-ooze-from them . 98 As Reik note d : "The ho rror of the crime . the desire for expiation. the urgent need to find the culprit, all these bear witness to a defense against repressed impulses . . . . [It is] our own hidden impulses that account for the haste with which cases [of murder] are dealt with. "99 And to this list might also be added an apparent need-or wish-to also make the photographic evidence of such crimes highly inaccessible : to forget about them-that is. to repress them. 1 00 This dimension of the negative reaction to a tab o o -as temptation­ was often enforced while I was working at the N ational Archive . I was , for example. regularly asked by the patrolling guards to move to a cell - l ike private room designed fo r those wo rking with d o cuments that require co nstant invigilation. This request was apparently due to the distressing nature of my material , that is. I was asked to move in order to protect other readers (working in this open - plan setting) fro m the potentially harmful consequences of looking (glancing) at the images on my desk.

24

C H A PTER 1

On one occasion I requested to see again a case fIle that I had previously consulted- I had already photo copied the case notes and made my own pho ­ to graphs from the crime scene images that the folder contained . However, when I placed my follow-up request, the screen of the document - o rdering service computer terminal returned an error message : Y O U D O N O T H AV E lol P E R M I S S I O N TO R E Q U EST T H I S FI L E . I consulted the information desk, and was asked to return to my allocated study area. Mter fIfteen minutes a man came over to me and intro duced himself as a senior archivist. I was asked to follow him. We went through a set of doors that seem almost hidden in normal daily use . He led me down a long corridor, at the end of which I was asked to take a seat in a large meeting room. Three men were seated at one end of a large conference table , with the archive box that I had requested placed (tantalizingly) in front of them. As I entered, the archivist turned to me and said, H I think they are going to ask you to sign the OffIcial Secrets Act. " 1 02 Ultimately, the three men did not ask me to sign anything. They only indicated that this fIle had been inappropriately placed into the public domain, and had now been re- marked as " closed" : they had simply made a mistake , the fIle had been opened too early. Mter this-vaguely uncomfort ­ able-experience , I realized that much material is present at the National Archive which could easily be made available to researchers/ readers, but is not. For instance, there are many case fIles that are physically present at the archive site but are not due to be made accessible to the public for years­ or even decades-to come . Such fIles are ghostlike : they can be located on a specifIc shelf with precision; they have already been assigned a case num­ ber; but nobody may legally consult the contents until the date imposed has passed (often 80 years after the original trial) . Such material is not withheld for a logistical reason-that it has not yet been fully p repared or indexed, for example-but solely because a required period of quarantine has not expired; that is-following Reik's assertion-it is simply too contagious to release . Such a quality o f contagion also prevails when crime scene examples are introduced into the mainstream more directly. In order to counter the negative connotations of the taboo surrounding the murder scene , general publication of such photographs is often rendered acceptable by the addi­ tion of a clearly defInedjustiftcation . When Georges Bataille considered the reproduction of murder scene photographs for consumption by a mas s ­ market audience , such a s those that were regularly reproduced i n the 1 9 � os-and usually documented the crimes carried out during the era of Prohibition in the U S A , often highlighting the gang "hits" of the black mar­ keteers-he noted that they were usually pr �}; ented in the context of a high moral tone or a specifIc campaign against violence, and the format of X Marks the Spot (the book that Bataille reviewed) is retained in the well - known B B C television program Crimewatch , i n which violent armed robberies and even

murders are " re - created by actors . " but only fo r the admirable purpose of eliciting new evidence fro m members of the public. 1 03 Contemporary book publications that incorporate a convincing justifIcation include H annigan. Buckland. Phillips. Sante. and Parry. with the intellectual explanations rang­ ing across such themes as historical signifIcance . cautionary tales. p oetic value. and so on. 1 04 Law enforcement offIcers who are involved with such gruesome material on a daily basis also retain. fo r example. the justifIcation of the necessity to consult it . The studied indifference and apparently cynical hard - boiled at ­ titude to violent crime that is so often characteristic thus becomes an index to a phenomenon Lacan also highlighted when he commented: "We have noted that manifest indifference may mask intense latent interest . " l Os Equally. if the required-and essential-dimension of justifIcation is absent. then the use and display of such imagery is immediately recoded as merely gratuitous . and instantly becomes taboo -for example. the disgust that is reserved for Tej aratchi 's highly explicit book Death Scenes . a publication which will b e found o nly in a b ookstore's Cult!Alternative section, often next to b ooks o n other peculiar phenomena such as spontaneous combus ­ tion or mysterious crop circle s . 106 Or, equally. the internet site goregallery . com. which is typ ically derided as being a destination for puerile weirdos; in ' any case , admitting to browsing to that url will e ndear the internet user to few. In such contexts . curiosity- or a defIcit of shame-will often prevail. In that circumstance . as Bataille wrote , "the wish to see triumphs over disgust o r terror. " 1 07 and this dual ity between (appalled) loathing and a n ­ noyance a n d indulgence remains a basic theme that is regularly invoked and re qualifIed-there is a bleeding edge . But it is not a theme that any civilization can solve once and fo r all . As Freud qualifIed: "To negate something in a judgement is, at b ottom. to say: 'This is something which I should prefer to repress . ' A negative judgement is the intellectual substitute for repression; its 'no' is the hallmark of repression, a certifIcate of origin-like, let us say, ' Made in Germany. ' ' ' l O B The tab o o that surrounds this typ e of material may also account for the fact that as a researcher of murder case ftles at the N ational Archive (�oo 4 through � o o 7 ) I was apparently unique: there were no others studying-in any sustained manner-the D P P ftles during the time I was involved with them. I ndeed. each ftle that I requested still retained, upon my receipt of it. the unbroken seals of the Home Offtce (the last Government department that would have been responsible for them) , that is, they had never been opened-for each of the cases annotated below, I was undoubtedly the ftrst (and only) reader to interrogate the material since it was placed in front of a jury, more than ftfty years before . 1 09

26

H A R D EVI D E N C E

STRUCTURALIST L I N G U ISTIC T H E O RY

AS S C H EMATIZEO BY F E R O I N A N D DE SAU S S U R E- H AS

R E G U LARLY BEEN D EPLOYED IN O R D E R TO ASSERT THAT VISUAL ELEMENTS IN A P H OTOGRAPH ( O R F I L M F R A M E ) MAY B E B R D K E N DOWN A N D I N T E R P R ETED T H R O U G H T H E C D N C E PTUAL F R A M E ­ WORK O F SIGNIFI ERISI G N I FIED. CONSIDERING THE PHOTO G RAPH I C TAB LEAU. BARTH ES NOTES THAT "MEAN I N G COMES FROM THE OBJECTS PHDTOGRAPHED IWH E REBY] . . . THE I NTEREST LIES IN THE FACT THAT THE OBJECTS ARE ACCEPTED INDUCERS OF ASSOCIATIONS OF I D EAS

lE. G . •] BOOKCASE =

INTELLECTUAL . . . SUCH OBJ ECTS CONSTITUTE EXCELLENT ELEM ENTS OF S I G N I FICATION . . . STABLE TO A DEGREE WHICH ALLOWS THEM TO BE READI LY CONSTITUTED INTO SYNTAX."' AND. IF IT IS AGREED THAT T H I S IS A FAI RLY TYPICAL MODE OF INTERPRETI N G A PHOTOGRAPH I C IMAGE. T H E N IT M I G HT ALSO BE ASSERTED THAT A PSYCHOANALYT I C I NTERPR ETAT I D N SEEKS TO REVEAL A FU RTH ER EN CRYPTED D I M E N S I O N THAT IS ATTACHED TD THE CHOSEN S I G N I FIER: THE PATH O L O G I CAL MAY B E RECOGNIZABLE I N T H E VISUAL, B U T O N LY W H E N A LATENT M EAN I N G H A S B E E N I NTERPRETED CAN THIS OTHER SENSE OF SIGNI FICATION BE REVEALED.

The psychoanalyst Bruce Fink has commented that "nothing in [the clinical session of] analysis can be taken at face value . " 2 And' with specifIc reference to the crime scene, the Lacanian - o riented critical theorist Slavoj Zizek has noted that "the detective grasps the scene as a bricolage of hetero ­ geneous elements, in which the connection between the murderer's mise - e n ­ scene and the ' real events' corresponds exactly to that between the manifest dream content and the latent dream thought, or between the immediate fIguration of the rebus and its solution. It consists solely in the ' doubly inscribed' signifying material . "3 The obj ects that I have rephotographed and annotated below are-as in Zizek's characterization-precisely those that are doubly inscribed . However, the crucial paradigm of a Freudian reading of an image is the supposition that signifIcatio n is also personalized for each individual. It is this notion of the personal stake in signifIcation that de Certeau, f� example, was assessingwhen he considered how "writing becomes a movement of strata, a play of spaces. A different world (the reader's) slips into the author's place. This mutation [the reader's transformatio n of a text or image through personal association] makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment. It transforms another person's property into a space bor­ rowed for a moment by a transient. Renters make comparable changes in an apartment they furnish with their acts and memories; as do speakers , in the language into which they insert both the messages of their native tongue and, through their accent, through their own 'turns of phras e , ' etc . , their own history; as do pedestrians, in the streets that they fIll with the forests of their desires and goals. "4 And it is these-often unconscious-insertions, mu ­ tations or rentings that psychoanalytic research is fInally concerned with: ' associations that are regularly revealed to be paradoxical, contradictory, o r even a complete inversion of the most obvious reading.5 This seemingly paradoxical metasignifIcance is also what vexed Freud's early patients , their disconcertedness often prompting him to justify his

interventions : " as soon as I had corrected his mistake I asked-him to explain , .�"\( it, but , as is usually the cas e , he was surprised at my question . He wanted to know whether a person had no right to make mistakes in talking. I explained to him that there is a reason for every mistake . "6 In order to be understood, however, these hidden associations and beliefs that are attached to an obj ect/ situation must be worked through . And the methodology I propose depends upo n a wild working through of certain possible interpretations of various obj ects , lo cations, elements, and so forth . The unconscious of the visual­ specincally in terms of the documentation of human activity-may be recog­ nized as a residue that is always an index to a thought or thought pattem­ however, my annotations remain propositions only; overall they may best be read as indicative . I am not proposing to actually know the contents of another's unconscious. What I am asserting is that the technique-or method­ that I follow is robust and coherent. Wild psychoanalysis is the historically (technically) correct term used to describe any psychoanalytically oriented interpretation that is made outside of a clinical session. It is an activity that is often derided and discouraged by practicing psychoanalysts , who-motivated by elitist , xenophobia - like fears of erosion, pollution, o r " falling standards"-dismiss the work of no n - card ­ carrying researchers as charlatanism, and so fortp.. This recently prompted a colleague to characterize working on psychoanalytically oriented cultural theory/critical theory as " s omething like a noble shame . "7 The key p oint here is that any argument against wild analysis, or even the psychobiography genre-biography containing psychoanalytic propositions-inherent ly asks that we reserve psychoanalysis for the clinic, but this wish-exhortation­ is simply too much of a luxury: psychoanalytic theory must be deployed wherever it can illuminate a dark corner, as it is (in any case) the only tool availabl e . The specinc deciphering system I use below relies o n Lacan' s contri ­ bution to psychoanalytic, theory, but-it may be argued-his theory does no more than schematize Freud' s o riginal theories : that is, his the ories do not contradict Freud' s at any point . As the psychoanalyst Dr. M ark Bracher has observe d : "psychoanalytic discoveries provide the basis for a general model of subjectivity that can help us understand . . . the psychological roots of social and cultural phenomena-that is, the motives that cause humans to produce these phenomena. " 8 My research has evolved out of a belief in the validity of the above assessment, of the psychoanalytic proj ect, and is located within a resolutely Freudian discourse; thus I will connrm immediately that this text will not draw into question the historical validity of Freud 's claims , nor attempt to propose that they are dated, or-the dullest of all proposals­ that they are due for a "timely reappraisal . "

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LA C A N I A N D ET E C T I V E S

A fundamental factor which led me to concentrate on Lacan's frame ­ work is that central to his theory is the categorization of human mental func ­ tioning as neurotic, perverse, orpsychotic-a tripartite model. As Jacques-Alain Miller asserts : " Lacan forces us to ask ourselves how meaning is given to certain things by neurotics , psychotics, and perverts . " 9 In opposition to the generalized myth surrounding Dr. Lacan's oeuvre-that it is overly complex and too difficuLt-my decision to utilize his approach is , conversely, based on my belief in its clarity, even its simplicity. Elsewhere Miller explains that "the three fundamental mechanisms found in Freud's work-neurosis, psychosis, perversion-were logicized by Lacan: repression (Verdrangung) for neurosis, foreclosure (Verwerfung) fo r p sychosis, and Verleugnung [repudiation] for perversion. "10 The crucial point here , though, is that Lacan proposed these three categories-structures-as nonpermeable , distinct , and separate from one another: a neurotic subj ect cannot-suddenly­ become perverse; a psychotic subj ect cannot become neurotic: these are mutually exclusive modalities. Thus any instance of human functioning must be an example of onLy one of the three concepts . This is the sine qua non of Lacanian theory. In the clinical setting the overwhelming maj ority of cases are neurotic, and it may be useful to note here that there is no mean­ ingful distinction in psychoanalytic work between so - called "normal" sub ­ jects and neurotic subj ects . Normal is not a technical term: in psychoanalytic theory, neurosis is the basic familiar paradigm . Joseph Wortis , for example, attributes the following to Freud: "everybody has some slight neurotic nuance or other, and as a matter of fact, a certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive . " 1 l Clinical work with psychotics can be highly effective, but it is not psychoanalysis per se . On the other hand, clinical work with perverse subj ects is-.Fare and, in any case, most likely to be unsuccessful . This b asic Lacanian framework- "technique "-is, obviously, not limitciJ. to the appraisal of the crime scene or crime scene photographs; it can (and should) be deployed to consider any phenomenon that bears the trace of human intervention. At the heart of Lacan's work is his proposal that these different structures are the consequences of different outcomes of the Freudian Oedipus complex. As Fink has clarified in this crucial paragraph: The fath e r brings a b o ut a s o c i a l izati o n of the boy's [ o r g i rl's] sexu a l ity: h e req u i res the boy [ o r g i rl] to s u b o r d i n ate his [or h e r] sexu a l ity to c u ltu ra lly a c c e pted -that is to say, sym b o l i c - n o rms. This o c c u rs, F re u d te l l s us, even i n th e case of p e rv e rts: th e i r p o l y m o r p h o u s sexu a l ity g ives way to a h i e r a r c h ization of th e d rives, b ut u n d e r th e d o m i n a n c e o f a z o n e oth e r th a n t h e g e n ita l z o n e ( o ra l , a n a l . s c o p i c , a n d s o o n). S i m i l a rly, in a c c o r d a n c e with L a c a n i a n c rite ria, the p e rve rt's i m a g i n a ry h a s u n d e r g o n e sym b o l i c rewriti n g n e v e rth e l e ss. I n psyc hosis t h i s rewriti n g d o e s n ot

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o c c u r. We c a n-at the th e o reti c a l level-say that this is d u e to the u n s u c c essfu l esta b l i s h m e nt of the e g o - i d e a l , the n o n -fu n cti o n i n g of the patern a l meta p h o r, the n o n - i n itiati o n of the c a strati o n c o m p l ex."

Lacan restated the centrality of the Freudian Oedipus complex in instigating the subj ect ' s insertion i nto language : becoming literally subject to it. He summarizes : " O ne c a n o nly think of language as a network, a n et over the entirety of things , over the totality of the real . It inscribes on the plane of the real this other plane , which we call here the plane of the symbolic . " 13 Indeed, the essence of Lacan's theory is contained in his single bald- and boldly straightfo rward-assertio n that "the prohibition of incest is nothing other than the sine qua non of speech. " 1 4 For Lacan, the central concept that defmes development is paternal triangulation, a mechanism/process that will end with a child's e ntry into the Symbolic Order of language . Central to Lacan's theme of Symbolic Castration is the notion that, in order to enter the realm of the Symbolic, the child also has to give up something. It is this factor-of alienation from some longed - for element-that remains decisive; hence the centrality of nostalgial lack in his conceptualizatio n . 1 5 Equally, beyond my argument for Lacan's conceptual simplicity, it remains undeniable that he did also utilize numer