What was intimated in the radioactive culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries erupted at full force in Hiroshima and Nagasaki: if the atomic blasts and blackened skies can be thought of as massive cameras, then the victims of this dark atomic room can be seen as photographic effects. Seared organic and nonorganic matter left dark stains, opaque artefacts of once vital bodies, on the pavements and other surfaces of this grotesque theater. The “shadows”, as they were called, are actually photograms, images formed by the direct exposure of objects on photographic surfaces. Photographic sculptures. True photographs, more photographic than photographic images.
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But a secret archive is not the same as an archive of secrets.
Atomic Light (Shadow Optics)
ReplyDeleteby Akira Mizuta Lippit
(…) There can be no authentic photography of atomic war because the bombings were themselves a form of total photography that exceeded the economies of representation, testing the very visibility of the visual. Only a negative photography is possible in the atomic arena, a skiagraphy, a shadow photography. the shadow of photography. By positing the spectator within the frames of an annihilating image, an image of annihilation, but also the annihilation of images, no one survives, nothing remains: “it made angels out of everybody.”
ReplyDelete(…) The catastrophic flashes followed by a dense darkness transformed Hiroshima and Nagasaki into photographic laboratories, leaving countless traces of photographic and skiagraphic imprints on the landscape, on organic and nonorganic bodies alike. The world a camera, everything in it photographed. Total visibility for an instant and in an instant everything rendered photographic, ecstatic, to use Willem de Kooning’s expression, inside out.The grotesque shadows and stains – graphic effects of the lacerating heat and penetrating light – the only remnants of virtual annihilation.
(…) In the remainder, a dark writing was born. A secret writing, written in the dark, with darkness itself. In the atomic night and on the human surface, a dark, corporeal surface appeared.”
The Shadow Archive: From Light to Cinder
ReplyDeleteby Akira Mizuta Lippit
From the ashes of the archive, from its cinders, emerges the figure of another archive, a secret archive, an archive of secrets, “the very ash of the archive.” Other because, as Derrida says, there can be no archive of the secret itself, “by definition.” “In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate (secernere), or partition, in an absolute manner.” By definition, the archive is always open, undivided, visible, and accessible. One stands in the archive always before the law of the archive and defined by it. A law that calls forth the secret in order to banish it.
Undefined, then, reduced to ash, the shadow archive, an “archive of the virtual,” as Derrida calls it, erupts from the feverish imagination of a mal d’archive, an archive illness and desire that burns with a passion. (An archive sickness in the sense of lovesickness, the secret archive remains a phantasy enflamed by longing and fever. ) Against this fever, the secret archive seeks to protect the archive, its interiority, from detection and destruction. From infection, contagion, fire.
But a secret archive is not the same as an archive of secrets. The latter is achieved through a passage made possible by psychoanalysis. “As if one could not,” Derrida writes, “recall and archive the very thing one represses, archive it while repressing it (because repression is an archivization), that is to say, to archive otherwise, to repress the archive while archiving the repression.” To archive otherwise, anarchivize.