On Visualisation as Power

Abstract

Meanings

Offering three texts-as-images (to illustrate photogrammar), a sketch is made of analogies between Foucault's pastoral powers and the grammar of the picturesque and the picturable as part of an investigation of the dialexis of Authority and Difference. Picturing, it is argued, works not only in the depicting but in the photogrammar of what and whom is shown how, they thus encourage ways of seeing and saying more general than any one re-presentation. Critique begins with the stress on these selecting and dividing practices but must then move to a study of orthogonality (who is projecting whom) as a particular form of Authority in relation to Difference. Comme toujours, distanciation that makes this feature of cartography clear begins with making strange what is obvious (hence innocence, naivété) and being a little gauche (hence stupidity).

Memories

We forget, or at least I do. In close analogy with W. B. Yeats' poem for ‘Unknown Instructors’, I acknowledge here the influence of Jean Luc Godard and, in part through him, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Reviewing Godard's work, in a retrospective in Toronto (February-March, 1988) I was struck by the meanings and questions and methods I had taken from his work, especially from Les Carabiniers (1962) in the closing scene where these Rifle-men return with their booty: their postcards acting as the real; equally from the Godard-Gorin Letter to Jane (1972), how the struggle for new questions instead of old answers has to be a difference done differently. But, sentimentally, nothing surpasses (and in this reviewing I wept again) Alphaville (1965) for its insight into Authority as grammar, and as Terror. Thank you.