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Geoffrey Batchen
| Content Provider | Scilit |
|---|---|
| Copyright Year | 2013 |
| Description | It is interesting how this conversation keeps coming back to the question of photography's ontology, and to indexicality and punctum as ways to articulate an answer. These seem very much to be concerns of the 1980s, and of the postmodern discourse it generated. I have to admit they are still my concerns too, but then I am a product of that moment myself. However, I wonder if a younger generation of scholars might be asking different questions (including whether photography is any one thing anyway, with a singular homogeneous ontology waiting patiently to be identified). At one point, Joel Snyder states that “we are all anti-essentialist,” but in fact much of the panel's discussion, unable to escape the rhetoric of art, assumes to already know what photography is. To use the word “photography” is, after all, to make an inherently essentialist claim; it is to divide this entity off from all others. And why not? As language users, we are, in fact, all essentialists (and by the way, there is nothing more essentialist than claiming to be anti-essentialist). As Derrida might put it, essentialism is an inescapable metaphysics. On the other hand, as he also points out, there are better and worse ways of not escaping. Book Name: Photography Theory |
| Related Links | https://api.taylorfrancis.com/content/chapters/edit/download?identifierName=doi&identifierValue=10.4324/9780203944141-35&type=chapterpdf |
| Ending Page | 295 |
| Page Count | 2 |
| Starting Page | 294 |
| DOI | 10.4324/9780203944141-35 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited |
| Publisher Date | 2013-10-18 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Book Name: Photography Theory Cultural Studies Ontology Photography Singular Conversation Postmodern Coming Younger Inherently Claiming |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Chapter |
