(Re)Producing the Optical Unconscious

Pearce, Anthony; Pearce, Anthony

This session will present work that directly engages the optical unconscious, a concept originally theorized by Walter Benjamin. At times nebulous, in general terms it connects the psychoanalytical concept of the unconscious with photography. As Benjamin explains, “[t]he camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.” Benjamin proposes this idea in his essays “Little History of Photography” (1931) and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). Few comprehensive explorations of the concept exist, but Rosalind Krauss’s The Optical Unconscious (1993) employs Benjamin’s theoretical sketches effectively in her approach to modernism. In Photography and the Optical Unconscious (2017), Shawn Michelle Smith and Sharon Sliwinski expand on this understanding and propose that we encounter the optical unconscious whenever the photographic touches “the unknown, the unseen, and the uncontrolled” (3). The panel accepts a broad definition of the optical unconscious and seeks to build upon this array of scholarship by contextualizing the inherent conflicts in this theoretical construct. The panel flags the inscriptive capacity of the photograph and considers the capture of the previously unseen as both lure and defense against a subject’s desire, fluctuating in collective, circular patterns.

The panel is designed to encourage discussion between panelists and audience members, and as such we have selected three panelists who will limit their presentations to seventeen to eighteen minutes each. We will begin the panel with "Historical Context and Coincidence in Benjamin and Bey" by Cole Morgan. Dawoud Bey’s 2012 The Birmingham Project comprises dozens of photographic diptychs, each of which juxtaposes portraits of Black individuals directly facing the camera. Each diptych features a younger and an older subject, who are—the exhibition explains—either the same age as the four victims of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing were when they were killed, or the age they might have reached by 2012, had they lived. Dr. Morgan considers Benjamin’s theorization of the optical unconscious by entertaining the doubled vision we see in his idea of looking back upon the wreckage of history on the one hand, and in the returned gaze of Bey’s photographic subjects on the other. Benjamin’s fascination with the autonomous quality of photographic reproduction is echoed, with a difference, by Bey’s faith in the restorative power of the photographic countenance. In its abstract interpretation of history’s presence in our everyday, The Birmingham Project illuminates the creative and political power of coincidence in historical narrative.

Continuing the discussion of Benjamin’s concept and the wreckage of history is Anthony Pearce with “Textual Apertures and the Optical Unconscious.” Within the photo-textual relationship, or what this essay refers to as the textual aperture, lies a fundamental contradiction. This relationship, oscillating between text and photograph, modulation of the aperture and transparency of the image, produces gaps. These gaps form an integral part of the photo-textual process: the optical unconscious. The camera simultaneously creates the unseen and exhibits the unseen, producing an unevenness that flows from the center of the textual aperture. This essay analyzes the role of the optical unconscious within the photo-textual discourse of the Peruvian internal conflict. Specifically, the paper examines the Social Photography Workshops (SPW) that took place in Peru between 1986 and 1996. The workshops provided cameras to non-professional photographers in rural communities. The SPW archive acts as a counter to the much more visible Yuyanapaq collection by exhibiting the unseen, the unknown and that which lies outside of state control.

The last paper of the panel reframes these questions of how and where the optical unconscious is produced by jettisoning the visual entirely. While Benjamin explains that the close-up can “capture images which escape natural vision,” Carole-Anne Tyler’s “Audiogenie: The Audiovisual Unconscious” argues that cinematic sounds and voices can be reframed for equally disorienting effects and thus offer entries into the “acoustic unconscious.” Jean Epstein, like Benjamin an early theorist of cinema, defined “photogenie” as cinema’s ability to enhance a thing through technological manipulation of images. However, in his description of a silent film’s close-up of a face breaking into a smile, Epstein incorporates numerous sonic metaphors, as if anticipating sound cinema’s audiovision and what Tyler terms “audiogenie,” the cinematic enhancement of a thing through technological manipulation of voice and sound. That enhancement opens onto the acoustic unconscious as the inner life of a sound image offered and apprehended as lure and defense against a subject’s desire. The paper closes with a discussion of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which centers on the deathly pleasure of a phone call from a dying father.

64 (Re)Producing the Optical Unconscious: Calls for Papers