“We are looking into stereoscopes as pretty toys, and wondering over the photograph as a charming novelty; but before another generation has passed away, it will be recognized that a new epoch in the history of human progress dates from the time when He who never but in uncreated light dwelt from eternity took a pencil of fire from the hand of the ‘angel standing in the sun,’ and placed it in the hands of a mortal.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, from his essay “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph, published in ‘The Atlantic’ in 1859.
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Context
An exploration of two axes:
Impression <> non-impression.
Conscious <> unconscious.
The Co-Evolution of Photography and Impressionism
Impressionism becomes thinkable through photography. Not because painters suddenly “imitated” cameras, but because photography helped to reorganise the field of seeing: cropping, instantaneous exposure, contre‑jour silhouettes, glare and blur, the cut of a frame that truncates figures mid‑gesture.
That grammar of the snapshot became imaginable in paint. Peter Galassi’s Before Photography made the classic argument that photography was “a legitimate child of the Western pictorial tradition” and that nineteenth‑century painting and the new medium were co‑constitutive rather than antagonists, i.e. the camera didn’t kill painting; it licensed painters to work with a different ontology of the visible.¹
Around the same problem of a new observer, Jonathan Crary reconstructed how nineteenth‑century optical devices, the stereoscope above all, reformatted attention and perception, preparing modern ways of looking to which Impressionism gave painterly form.²
The public debate was already heated in the 1850s. Oliver Wendell Holmes prophesied a “new epoch” in perception via the stereoscope;³ Charles Baudelaire, in the Salon of 1859, insisted that photography must be returned to the domain of science, not art.⁴ That polarity, ecstasy versus dread, frames the conditions of Impressionism’s emergence.
Recent museum work has made the affinities concrete: Impressionists and Photography (Museo Nacional Thyssen‑Bornemisza) pulls the strands together around cropping, off‑axis viewpoints, and the rhetoric of instantaneity, precisely the painterly “impressions” that a camera popularised.⁵
- Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1981).
- Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990).
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, The Atlantic Monthly 3 (June 1859), 738–748.
- Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le Salon de 1859’, in Art in Paris 1845–1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1965).
- Paloma Alarcó (ed.), Impressionists and Photography (Madrid: Museo Nacional Thyssen‑Bornemisza, 2019), exhibition catalogue
Jacques Derrida: Archive Fever – A Freudian Impression
“In an enigmatic sense, which will clarify itself perhaps (perhaps, because nothing should be sure here, for essential reasons), the question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in times to come, later on or perhaps never. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise. And we are never far from Freud in saying this. Messianicity does not mean messianism. Having explained myself on this elsewhere, in Specters of Marx, and even if this distinction remains fragile and enigmatic, allow me to treat it as established, in order to save time.”
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“The trouble de l’archive stems from a mal d’archive. We are en mal d’archive: in need of archives. Listening to the French idiom, and in it the attribute en mal de, to be en mal d’archive can mean something else than to suffer from a sickness, from a trouble or from what the noun mal might name. It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anarchivizes itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. No desire, no passion, no drive, no compulsion, indeed no repetition compulsion, no “mal-de” can arise for a person who is not already, in one way or another, en mal d’archive. Now the principle of the internal division of the Freudian gesture, and thus of the Freudian concept of the archive, is that at the moment when psychoanalysis formalizes the conditions of archive fever and of the archive itself, it repeats the very thing it resists or which it makes its object. It raises the stakes. Such is the case with the three plus one theses (or prostheses). Three of them have to do with the concept of the archive, one other with the concept of concept.”
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Also see: Degas’ Obsession / Tracing the Light
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“On the one hand, the archive is made possible by the death, aggression, and destruction drive, that is to say also by originary finitude and expropriation. But beyond finitude as limit, there is, as we said above, this properly in-finite movement of radical destruction without which no archive desire or fever would happen. All the texts in the family and of the period of Beyond the Pleasure Principle explain in the end why there is archivization and why anachiving destruction belongs to the process of archivization and produces the very thing it reduces, on occasion to ashes, and beyond.”
“But on the other hand, in the same moment, as classical metaphysician and as positivist Aufklärer, as critical scientist of a past epoch, as a “scholar” who does not want to speak with phantoms, Freud claims not to believe in death and above all in the virtual existence of the spectral space which he nonetheless takes into account. He takes it into account so as to account for it, and he intends to control it or prove it right only while reducing it to something other than himself, that is to say, to something other than the other. He wants to explain and reduce the belief in the phantom. He wants to think through the grain of truth of this belief, but he believes that one cannot not believe in them and that one ought not to believe in them. Belief, the radical phenomenon of believing, the only relationship possible to the other as other, does not in the end have any possible place, any irreducible status in Freudian psychoanalysis. Which it nonetheless makes possible. From which we have the archaeological outbidding of a return to the reality, back to the originary effectivity of a base of immediate perception. A more profound and safer base than that of Hanold the archaeologist. Even more archaeological. The paradox takes on a striking, properly hallucinatory, form at the moment Freud sees himself obliged to let the phantoms speak for the duration of the archaeological digs but finishes by exorcising them in the moment he at last says, the work having been terminated (or supposed to have been), “Stones talk.” He believes he has exorcised them in the instant he lets them talk, provided that these specters talk, he believes, in the figurative. Like stones, nothing but that. . . .
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
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“We distinguish three provinces, regions, or systems, each of which possesses its own characteristics and obeys different laws. The first of these is the system of the unconscious. Its contents are ideas and impulses which are repressed, that is to say, which are excluded from consciousness by the process of repression. The second is the system of the preconscious, which contains what we might call the ordinary latent ideas, those which are capable of becoming conscious. The third system is that of the conscious.”
“Stimuli move from there to the preconscious, and then on to the perception-consciousness system. Since this system is incapable of retaining anything, they quickly disappear, making room for new perceptions.””
“Every mental process, on the other hand, exists to begin with in an unconscious stage or phase, and it is only from there that the process passes over into the conscious phase — just as a photographic picture begins as a negative and only becomes a picture after being turned into a positive; nor is it necessary for every unconscious mental process to turn into a conscious one.”
Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans. James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVI (London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1963), pp. 297–298.