The project and Apollinaire
I have recently been preoccupied with the
formulation of a translational philosophy
and practice adapted to my needs as a
literary reader (Scott, 2012a, 2012b). In
brief, this philosophy involves the shifting
of the task of translation from that of
interpreting the source text (ST) to that of
capturing the phenomenology of reading.
For me, literary translation is about the
creation of a literature of reading literary
texts. By ‘capturing the phenomenology of
reading’ I mean both capturing reading as a
psycho-physiological experience of text, as
an adventure of consciousness and
perception in reading, and writing that
experience, that consciousness and
perception, back into the translation of the
ST. The pursuit of this end necessitates the
multiplication and extension of the
linguistic, graphic and pictorial resources
available to the translator, which in turn
entails an approach which is multilingual
and at the same time anti-semiological: that
is to say, the dialogues between different
languages, whether verbal or visual,
encourage each language constantly to re-adapt itself to new relationships and new
expressive demands, and thus undo any
sense of its codedness, of its systemic
stability, and this in turn draws all languages
(langues) towards the inclusive totality of
the medium (langage). Apollinaire himself
anticipates an enterprise like this when he
writes, in a letter to Jeanne-Yves Blanche of
October 30, 1915: ‘Le moment de revenir
aux principes du langage n’est pas encore
venu, mais il viendra, et à ce moment la
pureté de telle ou telle langue ne pèsera pas
lourd’ (1966a, p. 676) [The time to return to
the first principles of language [langage] has
yet to arrive, but it will, and when it does,
the purity of any language [langue] will
count for little].
Whatever one’s disagreements with
Saussure might be, the distinction he makes
between langage and langue is as
fundamental as my own, and extremely apt
to my argument: ‘Mais qu’est-ce que la
langue? Pour nous elle ne se confond pas
avec le langage; elle n’en est qu’une partie
déterminé, essentielle, il est vrai. C’est à la
fois un produit social de la faculté du
langage et un ensemble de conventions
nécessaires, adoptées par le corps social
pour permettre l’exercice de cette faculté
chez les individus. Pris dans son tout, le
langage est multiforme et hétéroclite; à
cheval sur plusieurs domaines, à la fois
physique, physiologique et psychique, il
appartient encore au domaine individuel et
au domaine social; il ne se laisse classer
dans aucune catégorie des faits humains,
parce qu’on ne sait comment dégager son
unité. La langue, au contraire, est un tout en
soi et un principe de classification. Dès que
nous lui donnons la première place parmi les
faits de langage, nous introduisons un ordre
naturel dans un ensemble qui ne se prête à
aucune autre classification’ (1972, p. 25)
[But what is a language [langue]? It is not to
be confused with language [langage], of
which it is only a defined part, essential
though it is. It is at once a social product of
the faculty of language and a collection of
necessary conventions adopted by the social
body to allow individuals to exercise this
faculty. Taken as a whole, language is
multiform and heterogeneous; straddling
several spheres, at one and the same time
physical, physiological and psychological, it
belongs both to the individual sphere and the
social sphere; it does not fit into any
category of human facts, because its unity is
indiscernible. A language, on the other hand,
is a self-sufficient whole and a principle of
classification. As soon as we give it pride of
place among the facts of language, we
introduce a natural order into an ensemble
which is susceptible of no other
classification].
The multiplication of resources is designed
radically to enlarge the translator’s ability to
put him/herself at his/her own disposal as a
reader/writer, and it includes the
incorporation into translation of those modes
of graphic self-representation – handwriting,
crossing-out, doodling in ink and paint –
which have access to the unconscious, to
reverie, to the impulses and spontaneities of
the reading body, and the development of
the languages of text (punctuation,
typefaces, margins, diacritical marks, layout)
to embody the paralinguistic features of
voice (tempo, tone, intonation, pausing,
loudness, emphasis, accent, voice-quality)
and the physical kinaesthetics brought to
bear on the ST by the reader. How much
these new languages might also incorporate
into translation the reading environment, the
ambient world, continues to exercise me; in
my view, it should certainly be a significant
element in translation.
The pursuit of the multilingual entails the
supercession of the bilingualism which
governs most translational transactions. The
translator feels able to draw on all
languages, including dialects, jargons,
pidgins, creoles and even science-fictional
languages, to register those associations of
sound, of orthography, of textual fragment
which are generated in the reader by the ST.
Translation elbows aside the ethnocentricity,
the atavisms, the territoriality of national
languages, in its desire to generate new
linguistic maps, new forms of linguistic
nomadism, new morphings of culture, new
versions of the cosmopolitan. Apollinaire’s
own multilingualism springs not so much
from the serious study of languages as from
a creative attraction towards the curious
kinships and modulations that languages
develop, and from a fearless cultivation of
linguistic variety (Décaudin, 1973, pp.10-11,
pp.14-15). He looks for the same variety of
linguistic background, and of social and
human condition, in his readers:
Moi je n’espère pas plus de 7 amateurs de mon
œuvre mais je les souhaite de sexe et de
nationalité différents et aussi bien d’état: je
voudrais qu’aimassent mes vers un boxeur
nègre et américain, une impératrice de Chine, un
journaliste boche, un peintre espagnol, une
jeune femme de bonne race française, une jeune
paysanne italienne et un officier anglais des
Indes (letter to Jeanne-Yves Blanche, November
19 1915 ; 1966a, pp. 680-1) [I don’t hope for
more than 7 fans of my work but I want them to
be of different sexes, different nationalities and
of different social conditions too: I would like
my poetry to be enjoyed by a black American
boxer, a Chinese empress, a German journalist, a
Spanish painter, a young French woman of good
breeding, a young Italian peasant woman and an
English officer from the Indies].
Implicit in these wishes is a rejection of
monoglottism and the monoglot reader.
My own wishes for translation are motivated, as
must already be apparent, by the desire to
break the monopoly of a translation geared
to the monoglot reader, in the belief that this
kind of translation, against its own will
perhaps, not only perpetuates monoglottism,
but is an implicit argument for the
dispensability of knowledge of foreign
languages, produces a disempowered reader,
endorses fossilized notions of national
cultures and prevents translation from
prosecuting its own distinctive
literariness/literature. Translation for the
polyglot reader, on the other hand, for the
reader who is acquainted with the source
language (SL), develops a deeply embedded
relationship with the text, a relationship
Anyone wishing to champion the
multilingual against the ‘monolingual
paradigm’ is strongly advised to read
Yasemin Yildiz’s excellent Beyond the
Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual
Condition (2012)
which involves listening to, and speaking,
the ST across languages and into languages,
that is, across and into the languages of the
reading experience itself, the languages
which give expression to readerly perception
and readerly consciousness. This in turn
facilitates the inhabitation of the
multicultural and the re-drawing of linguistic
and cultural geographies.
There are many senses in which Apollinaire
makes the ideal subject for a translational
enterprise driven by a restless and
proliferating phenomenology of reading and
writing. Not surprisingly, it took scholars
and editors a long time to catch up with
Apollinaire’s Nachlass of occasional
epistolary pieces, poems put aside, poems
published but uncollected. It is only
posthumously that the collections Il y a
(1925), Poèmes à Lou (1947; initially
Ombre de mon amour), Le Guetteur
mélancolique (1952) and Soldes (1985) were
rather arbitrarily ‘constructed’ for
publication. I want to foster this sense of
translation as a form of ongoing daily
intercourse with texts, as a form of dialogue
with others and with self, of the
experimental search for an adequate
language. A translation is formal project,
yes, but also a journal of reading, an album
of try-outs, an intimate letter to its own
readers, which multiplies drafts, sketches,
casual snapshots.
Apollinaire had little sense, it seems, of the
inviolability of texts or of their desire to be
finished: he might, at the last minute,
dismantle a decasyllabic line into a
tetrasyllable followed by a hexasyllable
(‘Sous le pont Mirabeau’), or radically
reduce a passage of verse (e.g. the East
European Jewish emigrants of ‘Zone’), or
plunder longer unpublished poems for
shorter publishable ones (both ‘L’Adieu’
and ‘La Dame’ are fragments of ‘La Clef’),
or turn a three-stanza poem into a five-stanza one (‘Spectacle’ > ‘Crépuscule’) or,
conversely, a five-stanza poem into a three-stanza one (‘Les Saltimbanques’ >
‘Saltimbanques’), not to mention the
plethora of other textual variants. In his
hands, the text is infinitely malleable, rarely
satisfied with being itself, always in
transition, always heading off somewhere,
or, abruptly, somewhere else. This
improvisatory habit may also have
connections with Apollinaire’s devotion to
the aesthetics of collage, his growing
resistance to syntactical continuity, his
cultivation of expanded fields of
consciousness at the expense of local
cohesion.
And there are other important respects in
which Apollinaire seems to be the fitting
objective and agent of the kind of translation
I wish to essay. In his work, the printed, the
calligraphic and the graphic live in easy
intercourse with one another. We learn from
his notebooks and proofs how existentially
important were the gestural self-embodiments of handwriting, doodling,
drawing, watercolour painting, trying out
alphabets and scripts and signatures; as Peter
Read tells us, these various ‘decorations’
‘constituent un prolongement de son œuvre
écrite et une facette essentielle de son
imaginaire’ (Debon & Read, 2008, p. 67)
[constitute an extension of his written work
and an essential facet of his imaginary].
Despite the fact, as Michel Décaudin reports
(2002, p. 90), that ‘Apollinaire a toujours
soutenu que les techniques de la peinture ne
s’appliquaient pas à l’écriture et qu’il n’y
avait pas de “cubisme littéraire”’
[Apollinaire always maintained that the
techniques of painting were not applicable to
writing and that there was no such thing as
‘literary cubism’], his verse contradicts this
view, and we should not overlook, of course,
his collaborations with other artists: with
Derain for L’Enchanteur pourrissant (1909),
with Dufy for Le Bestiaire ou Cortège
d’Orphée (1911) - after the failure of plans
with Picasso - and the unrealised project for
Odes with Picasso. An integral part of this
extension of writing into the gestural and
spatial, this projection of utterance into a
visual field, is, for me as translator, the
translation of the linear into the tabular.
Given my persuasion that translation should
translate from the textual towards the
performative, from the linguistic towards the
paralinguistic and kinaesthetic, it is fitting
that Apollinaire should make much of the
oral composition of his verse; as in
improvisatory jazz, or aleatory or
indeterminate music, performing is
composing. In a letter to Henri Martineau
(July 19 1913), Apollinaire tells us that
perambulation and composition are natural
partners and that rough draft usually turns
out to be final copy, a comment to be taken
more as a vindication of writing ‘d’un seul
jet’ than as the truth (see Burgos, 1973, p.
35):
Mes vers ont presque tous été publiés sur le
brouillon même. Je compose généralement en
marchant et en chantant sur deux ou trois airs
qui me sont venus naturellement et qu’un de
mes amis a notés. La ponctuation courante ne
s’appliquerait point à de telles chansons (1966a,
p. 768). [My poems have almost all been
published from the draft itself. I usually
compose as I walk, singing two or three tunes
which have come naturally to me and which one
of my friends has noted down. Current
punctuation would not be appropriate to such
songs].
The creation of verse for Apollinaire is, it
seems, less to do with writing-on-the-page
than with in-the-head-composition. On the
evidence of his manifest and tireless
tinkering with drafts, and of his calligrams,
and of all his doodling, we might want to
question this claim. But it is important as an
assertion of the primacy of the lyrical in his
poetic make-up. However much one might
wish to see in Apollinaire’s abandonment of
punctuation an acknowledgement of Futurist
sympathies – Marinetti had called for the
discarding of punctuation in his Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Literature of 1912
and, particularly, sympathies with the
Futurists’ assault on the constraining
machinery of syntax, Apollinaire jibbed at
their dismantling of the lyric partnership of
voice and verse-line, and remained in two
minds, to judge by his poetic practice, about
their banishment of the psychological ‘I’. In
‘Nos amis les futuristes’ (Les Soirées de
Paris, 15 February 1914), he welcomes
Marinetti’s ‘words-in-freedom’, but finds in
them a propensity for the descriptive and
didactic, which confirms the continuing
need for the rhythmic articulations of phrase
and line for the purposes of self-expression:
Certes, on s’en servira pour tout ce qui est
didactique et descriptif, afin de peindre
fortement et plus complètement qu’autrefois. Et
ainsi, s’ils apportent une liberté que le vers libre
n’a pas donnée, ils ne remplacent pas la phrase,
ni surtout le vers : rythmique ou cadencé, pair ou
impair, pour l’expression directe (1991, p. 971).
[Certainly, they [words-in-freedom] will be used
for everything which is didactic and descriptive,
so as to depict forcefully and more completely
than hitherto. And thus, even if they introduce a
freedom which free verse has not provided, they
will not replace the phrase, nor, above all, the
line: rhythmic or cadenced, even- or odd-syllabled, for direct expression].
Marinetti puts it thus: ‘6. Abolish all
punctuation. With adjectives, adverbs and
conjunctions having been suppressed,
naturally punctuation is also annihilated
within the variable continuity of a living
style that creates itself, without the absurd
pauses of commas and periods. To
accentuate certain movements and indicate
their directions, mathematical signs will be
used: + – x: = >, along with musical
notations’ (Rainey, 2005, p. 16).
Translation and projection
While translation may seek, as its primary
task, to translate the phenomenology of
reading, it also has the task of projecting the
source text into its future, into its renewed
engagement with the world. The struggle
towards the future is a constant
preoccupation of Apollinaire’s work after
1908 (Davies, 1973), a struggle because its
boundless promise is countervailed by
equally boundless uncertainties, and because
it seems to necessitate the sacrifice of that
past of memory and suffering which
constitute the poet, and constitute, too, his
particular lyric gift. It can never be
sufficiently insisted that translation is an act
of writing, of resuming that never-ending
investigation of language’s expressive
capacity, so that one can both write one’s
readerly responses into the ST and write the
ST into what lies ahead of it and which it
has no power to foresee. This approach is
very close to the heart of Yves Bonnefoy
and necessarily takes his translational
thinking in the direction of co-authorship,
the harnessing of someone else’s thought
processes to one’s own, and vice versa, to
produce collaborative work (2000, pp. 7-15).
This idea of reading a poem in order to write
with it, both as record of a linguistic
experience and to take it forward, coincides
with my own persuasions. Bonnefoy calls
this ‘une lecture écrivante’, a relative of
Roland Barthes’s notion of the scriptible
(1970, 9-12/1974, pp. 3-6).
Bonnefoy’s vision of the relationship
between co-authors is one in which a
process of intimate recognition, based on the
sharing of a certain essentialist, presence-filled vocabulary, is enhanced by the fact
that the foreign language of the ST sets this
vocabulary differently, in territories to
which the translator has not had access in his
own language. A foreign language is a new
consciousness applied to the world.
Additionally, the translator’s relative
ignorance of the SL sharpens his sense of
the compact density, the intensity, of the
ST’s words. Bonnefoy’s abiding
preoccupation remains the pursuit of the
immediacy that lies buried in words.
However much I may be of the translator-as-co-author persuasion, I do not share
Bonnefoy’s ideology of partnership; I am
more of the view that the translator’s task is
to help the ST to be different from itself, to
do justice to the time and space it has
traversed since it was first published. While
criticism practices a constant process of re-interpretation of works, assimilating new
reading conditions and intellectual contexts,
to ensure the continuing relevance of the
work in question, that is, practises an
updating at the level of consumption,
translation, as I imagine it, is an updating at
the level of production, and involves
imagining not how a work can best be
interpreted to suit prevailing conditions, but
what its own potential for change is, how
that potentiality might best be caught.
But here, again, Bonnefoy’s position is
really not so far from my own. He argues
that the reader is superior to the poet he
analyses in the sense that, with much greater
lucidity, he sees what the text is capable of
being and becoming:
En bref, l’auteur, ce serait celui qui croit, ou a
cru longtemps, qu’il se tourne vers le monde,
comme serait celui-ci en lui et autour de lui, et
cela pour en découvrir la vérité: alors que monde
et vérité ne sont que des constructions de ses
mots et pour une part des mirages. Et ainsi il
perdrait de vue ce foisonnement de virtualités de
son texte qu’il faudrait que l’on tienne pour la
puissance de la parole, tandis que son hardi
interprète percevrait, lui, ces ambiguïtés, ces
polysémies, et en saurait la valeur, comprenant
même qu’elles sont la seule réalité dans un
univers qui n’est constitué que de signes en
perpétuel mouvement (2000, pp. 22-23) [In
short, the author is one who believes, or has long
believed, that he addresses the world, as it exists
in him and around him, and that in order to
discover its truth: whereas world and truth are
only what his words construct and are to some
extent mirages. And thus he loses sight of that
proliferation of virtualities in his text which
must be attributed to the power of language,
while his bold interpreter, for his part, sees these
ambiguities, these polysemies, and knows their
value, even understanding that they are the only
reality in a universe which is made up only of
signs in perpetual movement].
In his preface to his translation of twenty-four of Shakespeare’s sonnets into French
sonnets of anything up to eighteen lines,
Bonnefoy returns to a topic which has
consistently exercised him in his
translations: the relationship between form
and content. To treat the one as a variable
and the other as a given, is to subject the
variable element to an undue and inertial
constraint. Instead, one needs to generate a
dialectical relationship between two
variables (within certain parameters of
recognisability), such that translation, like
poetry itself, becomes a search, a search for
what is most creatively immediate in us, a
search for a territory this side of ready-made
concepts, before the involuntary has ceded
too much ground to approved equivalences.
And metre is no more a safeguard of the
spirit of poetry than fixed forms are. The
adoption of a freer form enables the
translator not only to listen to the ST more
intensely, but also to draw out of the ST
potentialities which may have been stifled
by its own formal constraints. ‘Comprenons
bien’, Bonnefoy writes, ‘car c’est cela
l’essentiel: le matériau du traducteur, c’est
moins le “sens” qu’a le texte […] que son
expérience propre de celui-ci’ (1995, p. 59)
[Let us make no mistake, for this is at the
heart of the matter: the material of the
translator is less the “meaning” possessed by
the text […] than the translator’s own
experience of this meaning’ (trans. Antony
Rudolf in Bonnefoy, 2004, p. 254)].
In order to distinguish between a translation
that is retrospective and one that is
prospective, we need to make a distinction
between meaning and sense. Meaning is
something which is seen to inhere in
language by virtue of lexical and cultural
embeddedness. It is something which,
however ambiguous, however plural, must
be respected and cannot be denied,
something which has claims to make. But
we must be careful, or else meaning will
subdue the translator, demand its dues
overbearingly, and without right. Because
meaning is, in fact, in a permanent state of
obsolescence. Sense, on the other hand, has
constantly to be made. But it is elusive; it
multiplies, diversifies, escapes, or holds
itself at a distance, just beyond our grasp. It
is an integral part of the ST’s progress
through time and space, a guarantee of that
progress, and both sense and progress are
dependent on the efforts that the readers and
translators of the ST are prepared to make in
pursuit of them. Translation, then, is not the
extraction of meaning from a text, in order
to perpetuate it. Translation is an account of
a sense-making of the ST by the translator, a
sense-making which has written into it the
activity of the readerly consciousness and
the play of the readerly senses. And if the
ST has to be made sense of, repeatedly, it is
because STs cease to be comprehensible to
themselves shortly after their production,
and progressively lose their meaning. STs
are nomadic texts, in search of themselves,
in search of a ‘place’ in the world, in search
of an ever-renewed expressive energy. In a
word, then, translation does not recuperate
meaning, but generates sense, as it generates
the future of the ST.
Poetry and photography
On occasion, Apollinaire makes disparaging
reference to photography’s purely imitative,
uncreative relationship with nature: in the
first section of Méditations esthétiques
(1913), for example, ‘Sur la peinture’, he
declares: ‘Chaque divinité crée à son image;
ainsi des peintres. Et les photographes seuls
fabriquent la reproduction de la nature’
(1991, p. 8) [Each divinity creates in his/her
own image; so it is with painters. And
photographers alone manufacture the direct
reproduction of nature]; and, in similar vein,
in the preface to Les Mamelles de Tirésias
(1918), he speaks of the need to ‘revenir à la
nature même, mais sans l’imiter à la manière
des photographes’ (1965, p. 865) [return to
nature itself, but without imitating it in the
manner of photographers]. But the camera’s
ability to capture the light projected by the
subject and thus become the instrument and
mirror of nature is a boon to the soldier
away at war; Apollinaire sorely needed the
photograph’s unimaginative indexicality to
fire his own imagination, to make present to
himself the charms of Madeleine Pagès. And
beyond this, Apollinaire had much hope
invested in the creative possibilities of those
new technologies of moving photographic
images and recorded sounds, the cinema and
the phonograph:
Quant aux Calligrammes, ils sont une
idéalisation de la poésie vers-libriste et une
précision typographique à l’époque où la
typographie termine brillamment sa carrière, à
l’aurore des moyens nouveaux de reproduction
que sont le cinéma et le phonographe (letter to
André Billy, quoted by Butor in Apollinaire,
1966b, p. 7) [As for the Calligrams, they are an
idealization of free-verse poetry and a
typographic culmination at a time when
typography is bringing its career to a brilliant
close, at the dawn of new means of reproduction
represented by the cinema and the phonograph].
Inasmuch as our affair is with the absorption
by translation of collaged photographic
fragments (see below), the contribution of
cinematic thinking to our argument is not
inconsiderable.
I want, for a moment, to consider the part
that photography might play in a
translational enterprise. It is easy to suppose
that, since Apollinaire’s poetry is already in
existence, the incorporation of photographs
into a translation would entail a kind of
reverse ekphrasis: rather than a linguistic
commentary on, or description or narrative
of, a picture, we have a pictorial account of a
poem. But such a supposition would be
mistaken for two important reasons: the
relation between poetry and photography
may be a co-textual one (i.e. juxtapositional
or reciprocal or competitive) rather than a
metatextual one. And secondly, the assumed
order of events – Apollinaire’s poetry >
photographic commentary – is undermined
by the natures of the media involved. Even
though photographs, in their taking, in
chronological terms, may post-date the event
or text they bear witness to, in the relation
between photograph and text, the
photograph sensorily predates the text. A
photograph predates text because the
photograph is a primary material, a raw
sensory material, in a way that writing
cannot be, because, in Piercean terms, the
indexical of the image predates the symbolic
of language. Writing is always too late.
Photographs cannot be called upon to
authenticate or represent writing.
But the more distance (of subject, attitude,
etc.) there is between poem and photograph,
the more the fatality of precedence is lifted:
image and poem can enjoy a simultaneity of
origin, which is held in place by letting them
go their own ways, by letting them interact
as they wish, aleatorily, without forcing any
dependencies, or priorities, or meta-positions. As John Berger says of the text
and images in O’Grady and Pyke’s I Could
Read the Sky (1998, n.p.): ‘And so they
work together, the written lines and the
pictures, and they never say the same thing.
They don’t know the same things, and this is
the secret of living together’. This is not an
argument to polarize their specific
ontologies as media, but to maximize the
fruitfulness of their relationship, of the
tensional ground between them.
These arguments tacitly presuppose the use
of full photographs, constituted as wholes by
their rectangular frames, frames which
endow their images with autonomy,
guarantee them a significance (without,
however, indicating what it might be) and
bespeak an expressive control (without
necessarily meaning compositional
integrity). But we should recognize that
framed wholeness will tend to diminish the
photograph’s ability dynamically to interact
with the poem’s structural energies, its
processes of self-constitution. The full
photograph is, in many respects, already
beyond reach, an inert tableau which only
the spectator can re-activate, which only the
spectator can massage into a relationship
with the text. All photographic theory, one
might claim, is based on the full photograph,
because a photograph is only a photograph
by virtue of being a full photograph. It is
only through the full photograph that we can
construct a notion of authorship, of
intention, even of vision, of seeing and
framing. Is a hand, excised from a
photographic portrait still a photograph?
And if it is not, have we ways of thinking
about the photographic fragment which will
allow us to recompose our expectations, our
responses, our creative impulses, around that
hand? And in our argument about the
sensory precedence or temporal priority of
the photograph in relation to text, does a
photographic fragment have the power to
exercise any visual imperatives, and does it
have any stable relationship with temporal
orders?
There are some immediate remarks we
might make about the photographic
fragment. Its excision is an action on a
photograph that already exists, just as
translation itself is an action on a text that
already exists. But immediately a
qualification is necessary: a target text (TT)
may be produced which looks to question
whether the ST is already a foregone
conclusion, that looks to cast doubt on the
ST’s finishedness, on its stability. This is the
kind of TT that wishes itself a genetic event,
a re-geneticization of the ST. The TT is, as it
were, another play of variants that the ST
has spawned in the process of its own
composition. In similar, but by no means
identical fashion, the photographic fragment,
as a translational accompaniment or
complementary language, might have the
ability to suggest or project other pieces of
photograph which do not add up to the
photograph from which the fragment was
initially excised. Photographic fragments,
like word-choices, or typographic choices,
may generate a floating visual/textual field
which promises infinitely to ramify and
modulate rather than to return home to its
origins. This is certainly not to say,
however, that a photographic fragment, like
a textual fragment, may not operate as a
quotation from, or allusion to, an original
text, as a metonymy for an originating work,
but this citational function must not be
allowed to obscure the more compelling
motive of fragmentation, which is precisely
to expand the metonymic field, the
metonymic ‘influence’ of the image, far
beyond its original photographic
environment.
The photographic fragment requires the eye
to look more fleetingly, less possessively,
less insistently, with a more dynamic
responsiveness than it does with the full
photograph. The eye does not stare or gaze,
because such a perceptual mode is
unproductive; the eye, confronted by a set of
photographic fragments, traverses, flickers,
glimpses, intuits, guesses, constantly feeding
itself on new patterns of circulation. This is
the art of ‘looking among’. Photographic
fragments install the nervous, mobile
spectator, whose relationship with the image
is piecemeal, distracted, incomplete, ever-renewed. Through these photographic
clusters and interpolations the reader does
not submit to the meditative time of the text,
or rather does not allow it a meditative time;
he/she looks instead for the restless activity
of the text, its being-in-progress, the
progress of self-formation, of making sense.
The time of perceiving looks to oust the time
of reporting, or describing, or representing.
Writing itself, under the influence of
photographic fragments, might become a
performance of perception in writing, just as
translation is a performance of linguistic
glimpsing, intuiting, traversing, sense-making, as it constantly reinvents the
circulation of languages.
It might be thought that the ‘straight’
photographic image is hostile to
performance, in that it has no tactility, in
that it seems to arrest time rather than propel
it, in that there seems to be no presence of
the photographer’s body in the image. We
might argue that there is performance in the
blurred and the out-of-focus, or in the
radical camera angle, or in photographic
‘errors’ more generally, or indeed in the
very act of framing the shot. There is, after
all, a performative eye, a performative eye
which is also at work in the contact sheet,
and which photographic fragmentation
brings into full presence and activity; the
photographic fragment has the power to
translate the visual given, back into
something virtual or latent, something which
has yet to realize itself in all its possibilities;
which is perhaps to say that the
photographic fragment more effectively
performs the pulsions and movements of the
unconscious than the whole photograph. At
the very least, one might claim that the
cluster of photographic fragments is
peculiarly adept at capturing the intimate
workings of a sensory consciousness at
several levels.
But we must not forget that the photographic
fragment is produced by cutting, and it is the
processs of cutting that not only brings the
performative eye into existence, but also
redefines the photograph’s field of play,
releases it into a specialized activity on the
page, makes it available for collage. What
the cut first of all produces is a rupture in
and with the whole image, so that the initial
rupture established by the frame itself, and
which established the photograph’s
autonomy in relation to its environment, is
nullified. Thereafter, as we have already
intimated, the cut acts to produce both a
photographic quotation, an allusion to a
visual intertext, and, transcending that, the
photographic fragment’s peculiar capacity
for fictionalization, a capacity to bond
intimately with other images, a capacity to
open up an infinitely extendable and
diversifiable blind field, a capacity not
enjoyed by the whole photograph, which has
particular obligations to its blind field. We
speak of re-geneticizing the text, but we
need also to imagine what one might call
post-compositional editing and modification:
given that a TT has been arrived at, in what
ways might one wish to modify it (in terms
of disposition, additional materials, added
textual notations, etc.) in order to better
contextualize it, or to free its synaesthetic or
multisensory possibilities, or to increase its
own performative energy or to prepare it for
performance? Here again the photographic
fragment, in the form of collaging, might
become both a model and an indispensable
resource, the cut constituting a significant
stylistic and expressive decision, that act by
which the whole photograph sacrifices its
autonomy, its own language (langue),in
order to contribute to the formation of a
more inclusive, more experientially and
sensorily complex miscellany (langage).
Because, after all, our underlying ambition
remains just this: to translate a (monoglot)
langue into a (multilingual) langage, a
langage which includes, as we pointed out at
the outset, not just the national languages,
and dialects, creoles and so on, but the
languages of the page (typography,
orthography, punctuation) and, indeed, the
languages of the different media.
