Culture, Theory & Critique, 2009, 50(2–3), 165–183

Magical Nominalism:
Photography and the
Re-enchantment of the World
Martin Jay
MartinJay
Culture,
10.1080/14735780903240117
1473-5784
Original
Taylor
2009
000000July-November
2-3
50
martjay@berkeley.edu
& Theory
Article
Francis
(print)/1473-5776
RCTC_A_424185.sgm
and & Critique
Francis 2009 (online)

Antony Gormley, WELL II, 2008, © the artist.

Abstract Even since William of Ockham’s critique of scholastic realism,

the nominalist impulse in philosophy has been understood to undercut the
inherent intelligibility of the world and abet its disenchantment. As a result,
it has often been tied to a voluntarist notion of God or of human subjects
who construct a world through self-assertion. Drawing on the writings of
Walter Benjamin, Rosalind Krauss and most notably W. J. T. Mitchell, this
paper explores an alternative version of non-conventionalist nominalism,
which it calls ‘magical’ based on the Adamic quest for ‘true’ names. It
argues that photography in certain respects exemplifies a visual expression
of the same quest, which can be understood as the assertion of the world
against the domination of the subject.

Among the many lessons taught us by W. J. T. Mitchell over his long and
distinguished career is the virtue of theoretical eclecticism. Rather than
imposing a single method – whether it be psychoanalysis, Marxism, structur-
alism, deconstruction or the like – on a problem, it is best to take insights from
whatever direction they may come and let them play off each other in the
search for new understandings of the matter at hand. Any inquiry that can
justly be called critical will be willing to sacrifice theoretical purity in the
service of interpretative fecundity. It is in this spirit that the following exercise
has been carried out. It seeks to contribute to the on-going discussion about
the meaning – or better put, meanings – of photography by examining it in
the light of a time-honored philosophical tradition, nominalism, and then
mobilizing ideas from a series of recent and contemporary artists and
thinkers: Marcel Duchamp, Walter Benjamin, Rosalind Krauss, and W. J. T.
Mitchell himself. The question it hopes to address, although not conclusively
answer, is whether photography can be understood as an example of a new

Culture, Theory & Critique

ISSN 1473-5784 Print/ISSN 1473-5776 online © 2009 Taylor & Francis
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DOI: 10.1080/14735780903240117
166 Martin Jay

version of nominalism, which can paradoxically be called magical, fostering

the re-enchantment of the world.1
***
The history of nominalism is normally written as a story of denial, contribut-
ing to the disenchantment of the world.2 Beginning with the medieval Fran-
ciscan friar William of Ockham (sometimes spelled Occam) (c.1288–c.1348),
whose celebrated razor was wielded to cut away imagined entities unneces-
sary to explain the world of experience, nominalism has been understood as
promoting a principle of parsimony or economy. It sought to purify philoso-
phy, in particular the reigning Scholastic orthodoxy of the medieval Church,
of unnecessary and excessive conceptual baggage, freeing it to confront the
world as it existed in all its motley particularity. The nominalists’ favorite
target was the alleged existence of supra-individual universals, universals
that were wrongly taken to be more real than the particulars that embodied
them. In this sense, nominalism has been understood as deeply anti-realist in
its hostility to the essentialist Aristotelian ontology of the Scholastic tradition.
For the supposed reality of inherent universals it substituted the convention-
alist linguistic name that we mere humans give for shorthand convenience to
groupings of individual entities that seem to share attributes in common, thus
earning the designation of ‘nominalism’. Or to put it in other terms, it rejected
the claim that general terms named anything different from the names we
give particular objects subsumed under them. ‘Fatherhood’, to give an
example, is not a reality beyond the individual ‘fathers’ in the world. There is
no substratum of ‘fatherhoodness’ underlying the particular instances of an
individual being a father, a subject having the predicate of paternity.
Additional dispensable entities included abstract objects, which allegedly
exist outside of time and space, leading some nominalists to employ
‘concreteness’ rather than ‘particularity’ as their positive counter-term.3 Here
the tradition of Platonic Idealism rather than Aristotelian Realism was the
intended object of critique. But in both cases, the goal is to rid thought of
collective conceptual entities, such as substance, essence or intelligible form,
understood as superfluous fictions which hamper the straightforward
cognition of the world in all its individual uniqueness.
The theological basis of the nominalist impulse has been widely acknowl-
edged, a theology which rejects philosophical speculation about the teleologi-
cal intelligibility of the world. In 1277, only three years after the death of the
leading Scholastic theorist, St Thomas of Aquinas, the Aristotelian proof for
the necessity of this world was condemned by the Bishop of Paris, Etienne
Tempier, as a restriction on the unfettered divine will. An omnipotent God, he
suggested, implies the impotence of reason understood as an innate quality of
reality itself. As Hans Blumenberg has noted, ‘this document marks the
exact point when the interest in the rationality and human intelligibility of
creation cedes priority to the speculative fascination exerted by the

1
For a selection of essays that address the issue of re-enchantment in modernity,
see Joshua Landay and Michael Saler (2009).
2
See, for example, Jane Bennett (2001: 66–70).
3
‘Nominalism in Metaphysics’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
 Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World 167

theological predicates of absolute power and freedom’ (1983: 160). That is,
any constraint on the sovereign will of God, such as the binding power of
even the universal forms or rational structures previously created by that
very God, is now understood as impossible. Or to put it in different terms,
there is always a state of exception to the rule of even divine law, miracles are
always potentially able to interrupt the apparently regular workings of the
natural order. Ours is merely one of an infinity of possible worlds, and God
may choose at any time to create another.
Ridding the mental universe of unnecessary real universals and abstract
objects, however, could open the door for something else. For when doubts
about knowledge claims or the sufficiency of human reason were advanced,
as they were by nominalists and many others in the broader tradition of skep-
ticism, the way was opened for faith alone to be the sole source of certainty.
We may lack the means to sense or know real universals or abstract objects,
but we can still believe that they exist. For Ockham, revelation was the only
access we have to such entities as the soul’s immortality or the inherent
attributes of God, such as his unfettered sovereign will. The way was
prepared for Kant’s later celebrated admission that he had to ‘limit reason to
make room for faith’. Like Ockham, he too denied various rational proofs for
the existence of God or the immortality of the soul, seeing them purely as
matters of belief or perhaps a function of practical reason.
When it came to more mundane matters, the nominalists opened the way
for a less exalted source than God’s will. Here the categories we bestow on the
world are understood to be the product of human invention, an assumption
which led to the self-assertion of the species in the face of a world that could
no longer be read as a legible text filled with meanings written by God and
available to human understanding. That is, to cite Blumenberg again,
‘deprived by God’s hiddenness of metaphysical guarantees of the world, man
constructs for himself a counterworld of elementary rationality and manipu-
lability’ (1983: 173). The sovereign will of God unconstrained by innate ratio-
nal rules or essential forms is mimicked by the assertion of humankind
producing an order that is less found than made. Modern science, however
much it may pretend passively to discover what is the case, is indebted to this
transformation, which has as its hidden corollary the domination of the pliant
nature that is thus posited. Modern art, it has been even easier to argue, is
fuelled by the nominalist denial of ‘real presence’ in the world.4
Nominalism is, in short, primarily a theologically driven critique of ratio-
nalist and essentialist metaphysics, a denial of ontological universals and
abstract objects, opening the door for faith in divine will, epistemological
conventionalism and ultimately human self-assertion. What, we might ask,
does this have to do with photography and visual experience?

4
See, for example Eduardo Sabrovsky (2001). On the modernist abandonment of
the idea of ‘real presence’, originally a term denoting Christ’s manifestation in the
Eucharist, see George Steiner (1989), where he claims that ‘a Logos-order entails … a
central supposition of “real presence”. Mallarmé’s repudiation of the covenant of
reference, and his insistence that non-reference constitutes the true genius and purity
of language, entail a supposition of “real absence”’ (96).
168 Martin Jay

To begin an answer, we have to understand that William of Ockham’s

razor was applied as well to those basic building blocks of medieval optics,
the so-called ‘visible species’ which allowed an object to appear as meaning-
ful to the eyes that beheld it (Tachau 1988).5 Sight, according to the dominant
medieval ocular theory, worked through the transmissions of these forms – or
in the synonyms listed by Roger Bacon, ‘similitudes’, ‘images’, ‘idols’, ‘simu-
lacra’, ‘phantasms’, or ‘impressions’ (in Biernoff 2002: 74) – from the object to
the eye and vice versa (what was called extramission involved the sending
out of species from the eye to meet those coming in through intromission).
They were somehow successively reproduced through a medium like air or
water and then ultimately had an impact on the sensitive membranes and
humours of the eyeball, which registered their pressure. They were under-
stood to have corporeal being, which can convey an object’s visual form and
meaning to the beholder, more along the lines of touch than what we would
now understand as visual experience via light waves or particles. Ontological
continuity is maintained through the material medium of transmission, which
assures the validity of the perception.
This is not the place to try to unravel the intricacies of the doctrine of
‘visible species’, which was not only the dominant medieval model for the
sense of sight but for all sensual perception. What is important to understand
is that Ockham rejected the entire idea as unnecessarily adding an extraneous
general concept, which could be jettisoned in favor of understanding sight as
an intuitive grasping of particular objects at a distance. The corporeal media-
tion by species like the other abstract universals derived from ancient Greek
metaphysics was a fiction that was wisely abandoned. Although there was
considerable resistance to Ockham’s critique of ‘visible species’ well into the
14th century (Tachau 1982), in the long run his demolition was effective.
However we understand sight now, it is not on the basis of the successive
reproduction of iconic forms through a corporeal medium.
Ockham’s razor was applied as well to the Scholastic concept of organic
aesthetic form, which, as posited by Aquinas, involved the integrity, clarity
and proportion of the object (Eco 2002). Although there was a modest place
for the judgment of the beholder in Thomist aesthetics, these qualities were
understood to adhere in the object itself as ontologically real. Moreover, each
individual case exemplified a type, which also had substantial form. The
doctrine of haecceitas introduced by Duns Scotus had stressed the individuat-
ing, singular ‘thisness’ of an object rather than its essential or generic ‘what-
ness’. Ockham went still further in weakening the importance of integrity and
proportion in the work, which did not have to conform to a prior notion of
aesthetic form. As Umberto Eco puts it,

5
It should also be noted that even earlier during the eighth-century Iconoclasm
controversy in the Byzantine Church, theologians quarreled over another relevant
issue, whether or not icons were representations of essential images of saints or
martyrs or merely depictions of particular differences in actual appearances. The
iconophiles were in the latter camp, which we might call proto-nominalist, whereas
the iconoclasts were still Platonists. See Verchinina (2008).
 Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World 169

all that remains is the intuition of particulars, a knowledge of existent

objects whose visible proportions are analyzed empirically; in fact,
Ockham held that an intuition of particulars is possible. As for artis-
tic inspiration, this consists in an idea of the individual object which
the artist wants to construct, and not of its universal form. (2002: 89)

Although there were subsequent efforts to rescue a generic metaphysics

of beauty – neo-Platonism returned during the Renaissance and had other
moments during the l8th century, while neo-Aristotelianism could still
inspire a number of aesthetic theorists well into the 20th century (e.g. the so-
called Chicago School of literary criticism) – the nominalist challenge was
enormously influential not only on aesthetic judgment, but also on artistic
practice as well. Perhaps the most notable illustration of its power came with
the rise of the novel, that anti-generic genre that defies virtually all of the
traditional rules of beauty and form.6 Nominalism has also been noted in
musical compositions as well, for example in the works of Gustav Mahler,
who denied an ontology of pre-given musical forms (Adorno 1982: 62).7 In the
realm of visual art, photography played a similar role, and as a result was
sometimes denied the status of genuine art by those nostalgic for more tradi-
tional representational genres, such as the painted portrait.8 In his Aesthetic
Theory, Theodor Adorno claimed that in fact all art:

has been caught up in the total process of nominalism’s advance ever

since the medieval ordo was broken up. The universal is no longer
granted art through types, and older types are being drawn into the
whirlpool. Croce’s art-critical reflection that every work be judged,
as the English say, on its own merits raised this historical tendency to
the level of theoretical aesthetics. (1997: 199)9

Indeed, from the beginning, Adorno claimed, genuine art has had a strong
nominalist impulse, each work attempting to transcend the limitations of its
given genre, providing its own unique form from below rather than accepting
it from above.
But no art, Adorno went on to argue, can ever entirely free itself of the
given forms it tries to transcend, forms that are its dialectical negation.

6
See Ian Watt’s classical account, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson
and Fielding (1957).
7
He explicitly compares Mahler’s music to the novel because of their shared
nominalist impulse. Perhaps an even more plausible candidate would be Arnold
Schoenberg during his atonal period.
8
See, for example, Roger Scruton (1983). He claims that because photographs
only capture ephemeral moments of contingency they are incapable of depicting the
cumulative passage of time and thus the genuine truth about the figures they depict.
9
Adorno’s own complex attitude towards nominalism is a subject we cannot
broach now. See Fredric Jameson (1990: 157–64) and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (1997:
207–11).
170 Martin Jay

Unchecked aesthetic nominalism liquidates – just as philosophical

critique does with regard to Aristotle – all forms as a remnant of a
spiritual being-in-itself. It terminates in a literal facticity, and this is
irreconcilable with art. By being something made, artworks acquire
that element of organization, of being something directed, in the
dramaturgical sense that is anathema to the nominalistic sensibility.
The historical aporia of aesthetic nominalism culminates in the insuf-
ficiency of open forms. (1997: 221)

But what, we have to ask, of those artworks in the 20th century that
explicitly resisted the idea of being made or formed by artistic intention? What
of those works that were designated instead ‘readymades’ by the enormously
influential figure whose legacy Adorno curiously never considered in his
theory of art, Marcel Duchamp? Duchamp, in fact, turns out to be very much
part of our narrative because of a lapidary and cryptic note from his White Box
in 1914, which reads: ‘A kind of pictorial Nominalism (check)’ (1973: 78). Thierry
de Duve (1991), one of the leading Duchamp scholars, significantly chose this
phrase for the title of his study of the artist’s ‘passage from painting to the
readymade’, noting that nominalism was a term that appeared throughout
Duchamp’s writings. How does Duchampian nominalism, we now have to
ask, fit with our story of denial and then with the re-enchantment of the world
via photography?
***
What first has to be acknowledged is the multiple function of nominal-
ism in Duchamp’s powerful provocation to traditional artistic practices.
Whereas mainstream modernist abstraction may have pursued the elusive
goal, as Clement Greenberg never tired of insisting, of the essential ‘purity’ of
the medium,10 Duchamp performatively rejected that quest by decisively
giving up painting itself. Abandoning not only the mimetic task of painting
what was on the other side of a framed, transparent window onto the world,
Duchamp also rejected the claim that the flat canvas was an opaque surface
on which experiments in color, form and a texture might be pursued. Instead,
he decried all ‘retinal art’ meant to provide pleasure to the eye in favor of an
art that was named as such by someone with the cultural capital to have his
act of enunciation taken seriously. That is, one meaning of pictorial nominal-
ism was the idea that the intrinsic qualities of the object were less important
than the act of naming it a work of art and getting the legitimating institutions
– museums, galleries, collectors, historians of art, etc. – to accept the act as
valid. Eschewing the older ideal of creative genius in which the gifted artist
somehow channeled the same innovative spirit that God has shown in willing
the world into being, miraculously making the invisible visible, Duchamp
effaced himself, or at least his talent as a traditional artist, and became the
more modest designator – the namer – of found objects as readymade works

10
See, for example, Clement Greenberg (1961: 139, 144, 171), where ‘purity’ is
always put in scare quotes. Beginning with Leo Steinberg’s celebrated 1968 lecture
(Steinberg 1972), Greenberg’s generalizations came increasingly under fire.
 Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World 171

worthy of display in museums. De Duve calls it his ‘ironic asceticism’ (1991:

126). In this sense, pictorial nominalism was a variation of the older impulse
we have already encountered in Ockham, which denied that inherent quali-
ties existed in the world which could serve as standards of beauty. It was a
radical conventionalism in which the decision of the enunciator – the one who
can get away with saying this bottle rack or this urinal was a work of art and
should be in a museum – trumped any intrinsic rules of formal beauty, such
as proportion, organic wholeness, or integrity. Although the larger institu-
tional frame of art was not repudiated by Duchamp – the museum, after all,
remained the privileged site of his provocation – the assumption of qualita-
tive artistic merit determining what belongs within that frame was.
There was, however, another sense in which pictorial nominalism moved
beyond this conventionalist usage, and gestured towards a kind of nominal-
ism that was no longer understandable solely in terms of denial and disen-
chantment. It is this second kind that I want to call ‘magical nominalism’,
with apologies to the masters of what has become known as ‘magical realism’
in the novel.11 Duchamp wanted to reduce words to their non-communicative
status, expressing nothing of the intention of the mind that might speak them
or describing nothing of an external world to which they might refer. Ideally
spoken by no one, they defy interpretation into something else, as well as
their subsumption under a generic concept. As de Duve notes, for Duchamp,
‘words ought to “forget” that they have referents, that they give birth to
concepts, that they are made up of a phonic substance, so that the dictionary,
linguistics, phonology, and aesthetics can all be abolished’ (1991: 127). If
words are to be understood as names, it is not in the sense of a linguistic sign
but rather that of the proper name, which does nothing to describe the charac-
teristics of the person to whom it refers or subsume him under a concept, but
rigidly designates him or her as a unique entity.12
This second sense of nominalism, which I have called magical for reasons
that will be clearer shortly, has to be differentiated from the first in its relative
de-emphasis of the enunciative function of the artist, on that voluntarist
moment of self-assertion ex nihilo, which we have seen Blumenberg argue was
a critical implication of the Ockhamist critique of real universals. As de Duve
notes, a number of other modernist painters

emerged out of the cubist dislocation [of traditional realist painting]

with the certainty that a new hieroglyphic language had just been
born and that painting had a brand new future ahead. The painter
would become the semiotician of a future culture. In contrast,
Duchamp sensed he could not be anything but the nominalist of a
past culture (1991: 142)

11
Although the term has recently been used to characterize the work of Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, Ben Okri and other novelists from Latin America and Africa who
mixed realistic with supernatural phenomena, it was already in play in Weimar
Germany as a synonym for the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in painting. See
Franz Roh (1925).
12
For more on the issue of Duchamp and proper names, see Thierry de Duve
(1996: chapter 1).
172 Martin Jay

That is, the readymade is something given by the past, not created by the
artist in the present, which is then re-named an ‘art object’, not even a paint-
ing or a sculpture, but simply ‘art object’. As such, it means nothing aside
from that name; no longer an object of use, it is also not to be understood as an
object of formal beauty within a generic tradition. Its value, we might say, lies
solely in what it is now designated. Once named a readymade, it is nothing
but the carrier of that name.
Whether or not the two variat ions of nominalism, conventionalist and
magical, can be entirely separated is, to be sure, not so clear. The transition
from the original generic name in the quotidian world out of which the ready-
made is wrested – the urinal or bottle rack or bicycle wheel is, of course, first a
functional artifact before it becomes an ‘art object’ – is enabled, after all, only
by the act of a legitimated designator. It may not be an act of creation ex nihilo,
but it is also not an entirely passive act of recognition. Nor is Adorno’s warn-
ing that the individualist telos of nominalism reaches its limit when it is inev-
itably pitted against a generic tradition really refuted by Duchamp’s
provocation. Indeed, not only did the concepts of ‘painting’ or ‘sculpture’
remain potent in the very act of negating them, as did the larger category of
‘art’ itself, but the very word ‘readymade’ also quickly became a generic
concept of its own under which all its specific instances could then be
subsumed. Duchamp, not surprisingly, could become known as a progenitor
of conceptual art.
Still, there is something worth pondering in Duchamp’s semi-coherent
quest to pursue a pictorial nominalism that considers found objects as if they
were singular proper names, with no inherent characteristics of importance in
the objects themselves, something that may allow us to understand photogra-
phy as a means of re-enchanting the world. To arrive at what I hope is this
pay-off will require a detour through the writings of three critics, who at one
time or another had illuminating things to say about art in general and
photography in particular: Walter Benjamin, Rosalind Krauss, and most
notably W. J. T. Mitchell. Let me take each of them in turn to build my larger
argument.
***
Benjamin’s relevance is not due, however, only to his ruminations on
photography, but also to his speculations about language, which are perhaps
most prominently developed in his famous essay of 1916, ‘On Language as
Such and on the Language of Man’ (1996).13 In this seminal work, he adopted
what has been called an ‘Adamic’ view of languages, in which the fall into a
Babel of different tongues was preceded by an Ursprache, an original pure
language. As the historian of language Hans Arsleff has put it:

Also an epistemological doctrine, it held that languages even now, in

spite of their multiplicity and seeming chaos, contain elements of the

13
There are many commentaries on Benjamin’s linguistic theory. For a helpful
comparison with that of his friend Gershom Scholem, see Eric Jacobson (2003). As far
as I can tell, his views on naming have never been compared with Duchamp’s
pictorial nominalism.
 Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World 173

original perfect language created by Adam when he named the

animals in his prelapsarian state. In the Adamic doctrine the relation
between signifier and signified is not arbitrary; the linguistic signis
not double but unitary. Still retaining the divine nature of their
common origin, languages were in fundamental accord with nature,
indeed they were themselves part of creation and nature. They were
divine and natural, not human and conventional. (1982: 25)

After John Locke’s demolition of innate ideas, the Adamic view of language
went into hibernation, preserved in esoteric teachings like the Cabbala, but
having little impact on modern linguistic theory. Benjamin had the audacity
to resurrect it in his 1916 essay, which was itself left unpublished until well
after his death in 1940.
Benjamin began the essay be expanding the word ‘language’ beyond a
tool of human communication or mental expression to include everything in
animate and inanimate nature. Whereas conventional notions of language –
Benjamin, the incipient Marxist, calls them ‘bourgeois’ – privilege communi-
cation between humans about a world of objects, the more expansive notion
‘knows no means, no object, and no addressee of communication. It means:
in the name, the mental being of man communicates itself to God’ (1996: 65).
Although only God possesses the perfect language in which name is equiva-
lent to thing, man approximates it through the giving of proper names: ‘The
theory of proper names is the theory of the frontier between finite and
infinite language. Of all beings, man is the only one who names his own
kind, as he is the only one whom God did not name’ (69). Language in this
expanded sense is therefore more than mere signs, more than arbitrary
conventions invented to communicate abstract ideas or enact intersubjective
performatives.
After the fall into Babel, however, the project of regaining the perfect
language was thwarted by what Benjamin calls ‘overnaming’, which
produces the melancholy of a disenchanted world of nature, no longer at one
with its original names. But that something more might be hoped for,
Benjamin argued, is evident in the inherent telos of translation, which is to get
beyond the inadequacies of individual languages and approach the Ursprache
beneath them. Significantly, ‘translation passes through continua of transfor-
mation, not abstract areas of identity and similarity … it is also the translation
of the nameless into the name’ (1996: 71).
Here we have a nominalism that fully earns the adjective ‘magical’14 in
the sense that it rejects both abstract universals in the Scholastic tradition and

14
In ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’, Benjamin in fact writes,
‘the Fall marks the birth of the human word, in which name no longer lives intact and
which has stepped out of name-language, the language of knowledge, from what we
may call its own immanent magic, in order to become, expressly, as it were externally,
magic’ (71). Benjamin continued to use this term in his unpublished 1933 fragment
‘Antithesis Concerning Word and Name’, where he writes ‘The foundation of the
name: communication of matter in its magic community’ (1999: 717).
174 Martin Jay

conventional names in its Ockhamist nominalist opponent.15 Instead, it posits

the possibility of regaining original names, ‘true’ names, as designating,
indeed being at one with, the specific, qualitatively unique things to which
they had been equivalent before the Fall into Babel and conventionalist
pluralism of different human languages. Although there is some ambiguity
about how absolutely particular Adam’s names in the Garden were – were
they the Ursprache version of ‘dog’ or ‘poodle’ or ‘fido?’ – like Duchamp’s
pictorial nominalism, Benjamin’s sought-after restoration of it also dislocates
objects from their functional contexts of use and resituates them in a new
realm in which they are without any communicative meaning beyond their
existence as qualitatively distinct things.
The passage from Benjamin’s linguistic version of magical nominalism to
Duchamp’s pictorial alternative, however, seems puzzling, and even more so
if we want so see the latter as a way-station to a consideration of photogra-
phy. That is, what can it mean to call a readymade a pictorial or visual version
of a proper name? Let me suggest two ways to approach this problem. The
first comes from Benjamin himself, who considered visual examples of anti-
conceptual experience before he settled on his theory of names. As Howard
Caygill has recently shown in Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (1998),
among his earliest writings, mostly left as unpublished fragments, were a
number of ruminations on the importance of color as a site of resistance to
generic conceptual subsumption of qualitative individuality.16 Here he articu-
lated many of the same ideas he would soon develop in his essay on language
in the idiom of color. Without spelling out all the details and attempting to
make his argument fully coherent – it was, after all, presented in fragmentary
form and never published by Benjamin in a final version – one major point
can be stressed. Colour, unlike form, is not sharply divisible; it is infinitely
nuanced in ways that defy its subsumption under categories (thus instantiat-
ing that ‘continua of transformation’ Benjamin would later attribute to trans-
lation). The words we use to distinguish colors are arbitrary impositions on a
manifold that cannot be reduced to innate distinctions. Children, in their state
of innocent wonder prior to reflective distantiation from the world with its
straitjacket categories, are in touch with the magic of color:

Because children see with pure eyes, without allowing themselves

to be emotionally disconcerted, it is something spiritual: the rain-
bow refers not to chaste abstraction but to a life in art. The order of
art is paradisiacal because there is no thought of the dissolution of

15
As Robert Hullot-Kentor has noted, ‘Benjamin’s work was also conceived in
opposition to nominalism, although the focus of his critique was distinct. It was
concerned with nominalism’s refutation of the expressive content of language …
Benjamin developed a doctrine of ideas that attempts to recover the expressive
content of language in a fashion that, with idealism, justifies thought as part of meta-
physical contents’ (2006: 127).
16
Among these are ‘The Rainbow: A Dialogue on Phantasy’, ‘Aphorisms on
Imagination and Color’, ‘A Child’s View of Color’, ‘Painting and the Graphic Arts’,
and ‘Painting, or Signs and Marks’. All but the first of these are translated in Selected
Writings, volume 1 (Benjamin 1996).
 Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World 175

boundaries – from excitement – in the object of experience. Instead

the world is full of color in a state of identity, innocence, and
harmony. (Benjamin 1996: 51)

The child’s experience of color is thus not filtered through generic categories
or abstract boundaries; it simply registers the qualitative intensity of the
colors it sees. Ironically, without the conventional linguistic name for a color,
it is able to experience something like the individual proper name of the hue it
sees along a spectrum of infinite gradations. In a way, this is a visual experi-
ence of the magical nominalism that Benjamin would later attribute to the
Adamic view of language before the Fall into Babel. Although the proper
name is identical to itself while the continual transformation of color suggests
no rigid identities, both resist the conceptual imposition of generic categories
on the world.
We are, to be sure, still a far cry from photography, which for a good part
of its existence was, after all, black and white rather than colored. Here Rosal-
ind Kraus’s influential essay of 1977, ‘Notes on the Index’, republished in The
Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), comes to our
aid. In the context of an explanation of Duchamp’s rejection of painting and
his overcoming of his early focus on self-depiction, she turned to the impor-
tance of the photograph’s indexical relationship to the world. Drawing on
André Bazin’s classic essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1967),
which had argued for its superiority over painting as a way to render a like-
ness of an object, and re-describing it in the terms of C. S. Peirce’s trichotomy
of icon, symbol and index, she argued that ‘the photograph heralds a disrup-
tion in the autonomy of the sign. A meaninglessness surrounds it which can
only be filled by the addition of a text’ (Krauss 1985: 203).
Krauss then took her argument one step further by audaciously linking
Duchamps’s readymades with the photograph: ‘It is also, then, not surprising
that Duchamp should have described the readymade in just these terms. It
was to be a “snapshot” to which there was attached a tremendous arbitrari-
ness with regard to meaning, a breakdown of the relatedness of the linguistic
sign’ (203). There was, she claimed, a parallel between the ways both ready-
mades and photographs were produced, both as uncoded events:

It is about the physical transposition of an object from the continuum

of reality into the fixed condition of the art-image by a moment of
isolation, or selection … It is a sign which is inherently ‘empty,’ its
signification a function of only this one instance, guaranteed by the
existential presence of just this object. It is the meaningless meaning
that is instituted through the terms of the index. (206)17

Krauss’s larger argument, which is that much of the abstract painting of the
recent past also sought to signify indexically, is less important for our

17
For a later consideration of the importance of photography in Duchamp’s
oeuvre, which takes it from the influence of chronophotography in ‘Nude Descending
a Staircase’ up through his last work, the installation ‘Given’, see Dalia Judovitz (1995:
219–26).
176 Martin Jay

purposes than her recognition that the readymade and the photograph both
resisted subsumption under traditional codes or categories, either inherent in
the world or imposed by the artist. In this sense, they transcended the realist/
(conventionalist) nominalist dichotomy and approached what we have been
calling magical nominalism.
Theoreticians of photography have, to be sure, debated the extent to
which it is entirely a message without a code, with voices like Umberto Eco’s
(1982) and Joel Snyder’s (1980) raised against the mainstream position
represented by Bazin and Roland Barthes (1977).18 However important the
indexical character of photographs, they argue, there is always an iconic and
symbolic element that cannot be ignored. The field of vision, focal point,
distance from the object, shutter speed, and exposure time all contribute, they
remind us, to the photographic image as a theatrical mise en scène. Different
cultures, other commentators have claimed, have from the beginning resisted
the belief in the automatism of the photographic image.19 And with the
advent of digital technologies, the indexical component in what is indistin-
guishable from traditionally produced photos is reduced still further, perhaps
even entirely effaced. In this sense, photography and painting lose their
inherent distinction, as has recently been argued with the work of artists like
Jeff Wall.20
Still, despite the attempts to efface the difference, the stubbornly indexi-
cal moment in virtually all photography is hard to deny. Even digital photos,
after all, need not be doctored. Pixels are not inherently less trustworthy than
the chemical recording of light rays. In fact, as one commentator has noted,

in spite of the rejection of the idea that photography has any special
characteristics or monopoly on reality, recent years have seen a revi-
talizing of photography in art as traces or ‘indexes’ in the Peircian
sense … What is incidental, banal and commonplace (it could be
called the trivial realism of photography) is an important hallmark of
most photographs – not only snapshots – compared with, say,
paintings or drawings. Another is the special relationship of the
photograph to time; the fact that it is a trace of something which has
been. (Sandbye 1999: 182)

Indexicality in general involves temporal delay, but photography seems to

mobilize its affective impact even more powerfully than other traces of past
material contact, like tracks in the snow or handprints on a wall. If, as we
have seen de Duve argue, Duchamp was a nominalist of a past culture and if
Benjamin’s nostalgia for an Adamic language of proper names prior to the fall
into ‘overnaming’ are transferred, as we have been suggesting they might, to

18
If the ferocity of the debate over its significance in the collection edited by James
Elkins based on the Cork Art Seminar of 2005 (Elkins 2007) is any indication, the index
remains a hot button issue for photographic theory.
19
See Olu Oguibe (2002) for a discussion of the African response to the camera,
which he argues prefers the idea that photographs are made rather than ‘taken’.
20
For recent considerations of this issue, see Lars Kiel Bertelsen (1999) and
Diarmuid Costello (2008).
 Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World 177

the photograph, then the power of this temporal displacement can be even
more strongly registered. From one perspective, of course, the pastness of the
photographic image has been understood as a source of deep melancholy, a
reminder of our mortality and the mortality of those we love. Barthes’
celebrated ruminations in Camera Lucida are perhaps the locus classicus of this
response, which understands delay in terms of the logic of trauma – in
Barthes’ vocabulary, punctum – and spies ghosts rather than living people in
the images they leave behind.
But if we approach it from a less morbid perspective, its magical poten-
tial can reassert itself. As Mette Sandbye has put it,

something has taken place, and photography connects us with this

distance in time. It is not the consolidation in an epistemologically
founded realism that fascinates us in photography; it is because – like
a fetish? – it is both a substitute for something absent and a simu-
lacrum, and at the same time presence and analogy. (1999: 184)

Like a fetish? Mentioning fetishism moves us finally to the third of our major
theorists, W. J. T. Mitchell, whose most recent collection is entitled provoca-
tively What do Pictures Want? (2005a), and which introduces a consideration of
fetishism in his response.
***
Before exploring its implications, we should note that Mitchell has been
concerned with the implications of nominalism throughout his career,
making him suspicious of any attempts to discern the universal essence of a
medium such as photography. He has, for example, clearly learned a great
deal about the limits of indexicality as the basis of all photography from his
on-going dialogue with his University of Chicago colleague Joel Snyder.
Iconology, Mitchell’s path-breaking collection of 1986, includes an admiring
essay on the nominalist philosopher Nelson Goodman, whose critique of neo-
Kantian essentialism in Languages of Art he enthusiastically endorses. He
extrapolates Goodman’s conventionalism to included skepticism towards
attempts, like those of Barthes, to privilege the indexical, realist function of
the photographic image. ‘Nelson Goodman’s nominalism (or conventional-
ism, or relativism, or “irrealism”) provides, in my opinion, just the sort of
Ockham’s razor we need for cutting through the jungle of signs so that we
may see just what kind of flora we are dealing with’ (63). What Mitchell finds
most suggestive in Goodman is the distinction the philosopher makes
between dense, replete and continuous sign systems and ones that work via
discontinuous gaps and differentiations, between for example a thermometer
without gradations and the alphabet with its discrete letters. Images are
generally of the former kind, texts of the latter.21 In a 2001 interview, Mitchell
reiterates the same argument, calling the ‘surplus’ of images ‘an intractable

21
This opposition is, to be sure, itself open to deconstruction. As Mitchell notes,
‘A text, whether a concrete poem, an illuminated manuscript, or a page from a novel,
may be constructed or scanned as a dense, analogical system, and the results may be
noted without worries over whether this violates a law of nature’ (1986: 70).
178 Martin Jay

feature of visual culture’ and warns against ‘formalizing it within the straight-
jacket of linguistics. Nelson Goodman’s argument that images are dense,
analog symbol systems, in contrast to the differentiated, articulated schemes
of language … is relevant here’ (2005b: 239–40).22
In so arguing, however, Mitchell subtly moves away from the radical
culturalism and voluntarism of the mainstream nominalist tradition. For no
matter how conventionalist Goodman with his stress on constructivist
‘world-making’ (1978) may aspire to be, this contrast between dense, replete,
nuanced symbolic systems and ones based on crisply defined digital opposi-
tions is precisely the ontological distinction we have seen Benjamin draw
between the colors of the rainbow with their infinite nuances, and the
abstract, generic names we give them. Mitchell himself tacitly acknowledges
this similarity when he concedes in a later essay in Iconology, ‘not that Good-
man utterly banishes the magic of images. One could argue that his catego-
ries of density and repleteness reinstate the basic values of modern
formalism by treating these emphases on the signifier as “symptoms of the
aesthetic”’, and then Mitchell adds, ‘Goodman’s list of “symptoms of the
aesthetic”, when coupled with his account of expression of the application of
metaphorical predicates to art objects, is surprisingly close to Walter
Benjamin’s notion of “aura”’ (1986: 153).23 Thus, although he contrasts Good-
man’s nominalism with the realism of art historians like Ernst Gombrich
who believe images can be understood naturally and scorns the belief that
images are natural signs as ‘the fetish or idol of Western culture’ (1986: 90),
Mitchell quietly opens the door to a nominalism that is more magical than
conventionalist.
In a later essay, ‘Realism, Irrealism, and Ideology: On Nelson Good-
man’, reprinted in his 1994 collection Picture Theory, Mitchell moves even
further through that door and away from what he calls the philosopher’s
‘hyperconventionalism’ (1994: 351), and distances himself from the assump-
tion that iconoclastic ‘irrealism’ can explain everything in visual experience.
Although still endorsing Goodman’s critique of naïve copy theories of
representation, Mitchell argues that ‘what we need at this point is a positive
account of realism that registers the force of Goodman’s critique without

22
If there is any doubt that Goodman’s argument is critical is to his thinking, it
should be noted that Mitchell cited the same argument at length in yet another inter-
view (2008: 40).
23
It might be better to think of the parallel less in terms of modernist formalism
than in that of the formlessness (or informe) that Surrealists such as Georges Bataille
found so compelling and whose importance contemporary critics like Rosalind E.
Krauss have emphasized. See in particular Krauss (1993) where she writes, ‘let us
think of informe as what form itself creates, as logic acting logically to act against
itself within itself, form producing a heterologic. Let us think it not as the opposite of
form but as a possibility working at the heart of form, to erode it from within’ (167).
The importance of the blur and the out-of-focus photographic image has also been
stressed by Raymond Bellour (1993–94). He distinguishes between photographs that
are all blurred or out of focus, which he compares to painting in their imposition of a
single code, and those in which there is only one element that is blurred or
unfocused, which is closer to cinema and serves like Barthes’ punctum to interrupt
the code.
 Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World 179

extending it beyond its proper domain’ (354). Although his main point in
this essay is political – the model of freedom implied by ‘irrealism’ is
ultimately a variant of soft liberalism – Mitchell’s unease with radical nomi-
nalist conventionalism opens the door for at least a tacit embrace of its
magical alternative, a pictorial nominalism that is not utterly resigned to
disenchantment.
It is in his most recent collection, What do Pictures Want?, that Mitchell
moves more decisively to the other side of that door to embrace a nominal-
ism that shifts the center of gravity away from the making or judging of
images by artists or spectators and back to the images in themselves. In so
doing, he helps us complete our argument that photography has served to
re-enchant the world. As the title of the collection suggests, Mitchell is will-
ing to take the audacious step of attributing to images their own desires,
their own vitality, instead of seeing them as the mere projection of human
wants and interests. Rather than relegating the magical power of images to
a pre-modern past, he argues that it remains potent in the present, indeed is
a characteristic of our relation to images in general. Modern technology has
failed to disenchant the world, he contends; instead, it revives ancient
fetishistic, totemistic and idolatrous attitudes and practices in new guises.
As ‘vital signs’, images cannot be reduced to their semiotic function in a
cultural system created entirely by humans. Significantly, Mitchell cites
Barthes on photography to support his claim: ‘the punctum, or wound, left
by a photograph always trumps its studium, the message or semiotic content
that it discloses’ (2005a: 9). And he notes with admiration Bazin’s blatant
contradiction of his own admonition not to maintain ‘archaic superstitions’
by ‘asserting a greater magic for photography than was ever possible for
painting’ (54).
Mitchell is, to be sure, sensitive enough to the obvious objections to the
anthropomorphization of images to try to cover his flank against critics
who wonder ‘do you really believe that images want things?’ He replies,
somewhat defensively: ‘My answer is, no, I don’t believe it. But we cannot
ignore that human beings (including myself) insist on talking and behaving
as if they did believe it, and that is what I mean by the “double conscious-
ness” surrounding images’ (11). Can we totally ‘cure’ ourselves of the
illness of fetishism through a debunking iconoclasm, which would entirely
eliminate the vitalism of images? Mitchell is skeptical: ‘My own position is
that the subjectivized, animated object in some form or other is an incurable
symptom … In short, we are stuck with our magical, premodern attitudes
towards objects, especially pictures, and our task is not to overcome these
attitudes but to understand them, to work through their symptomology’
(30).
To return to our point of departure, William of Ockham’s nominalism
may have denied the intrinsic intelligibility of the world in terms of real
universals, but, as we noted, it opened the door for faith. Magical nominal-
ism can perhaps be understood as one variant of that faith, which is
revived in visual terms most powerfully in the case of the photograph.
What precisely is the object of that faith, which even if we reduce it to a
symptom, as Mitchell suggests, can never be fully worked through? What
do photographs want of us, to remain with his unapologetically vitalist
180 Martin Jay

vocabulary?24 Why do they grab us and demand our attention, telling us to

stop the flow of time and pause in our rush into the future?
Here, of course, we can only conjecture. If we agree that they do not
affirm a world of inherent ontological universals, or even an aesthetic canon
of conventional forms, can we say that photographs somehow want to be
understood as the visual equivalents of the Adamic names – the ‘true’ names
– Benjamin hoped to rescue from the ‘over-naming’ of linguistic convention-
alism? Do they want to remain stubbornly meaningless in the sense that they
resist being paraphrased in terms that reduce their singularity to an exemplar
or case of a larger category or even as a metaphor of something else? Or more
precisely, despite all efforts to saturate them with meaning, do they insist that
they always contain a measure of excess, like Barthes’ punctum, that defies
paraphrastic reduction?25
What may suggest that they deserve to be understood in this way is their
complex relationship to temporality, which has occasioned so much specula-
tion in the reception of the medium. A great deal of it, as we have seen,
stresses the melancholy implication of the photographic image as memento
mori, as a mark of the inevitably passing of time implying our finitude. But if
we see it instead as a miraculous freezing of a single ephemeral moment, a
moment that is utterly irreducible to what came before or after, an uncanny
moment that somehow is present when the image is later viewed despite its
absence, then perhaps it can be understood to betoken something magical. As
Martin Seel has argued, for this reason photographs differ radically from film:
what moves the focus of rendition and perception from photography to film,
from a ‘“having been there” to the “being-there of a thing”, is the event of a
moving image, which abandons any realist bonds of photography precisely
because it is movement’ (2008: 175). Like a fetish, wrested out of the contextual
flow of linear time, the conventional time of historical narrative or the cinema,
the photograph resists being absorbed into a cultural whole. Like a proper
name, it refers only to one singular object at one instant of its existence.26 And
as such, it limits the sovereign power of the constitutive subject. As Régis
Durand has noted, ‘painting presupposes a gesture of construction or

24
Mitchell himself makes the link between vitalism, the analogical resistance to
digital coding and photography in a later essay in the collection entitled ‘In the Age of
Biocybernetic Reproduction’, where he writes: ‘The Cyber is the judge and differentia-
tor, the one who rules by writing the code. Bios, on the other hand, tends towards the
analogical register, or the “message without a code”, as Roland Barthes put it in
speaking of photography’ (2005a: 315).
25
Any essentialist generalization about photographs will inevitably come up
against the objection that not all instances of the phenomenon – whose precise bound-
aries remain historically variable and in constant flux – will be compelling examples.
For a selection of those that I would argue do support the argument in this paper, see
the collection of Allan Chasanoff (Chasanoff 1994; 2008).
26
For an account of this issue, see Martin Seel (1996). He shows that the photo-
graphic image is more like a denotative proper name than a full sentence, a momen-
tary configuration of things rather than a story, although of course, connotations and a
story can be added to its meaning. He also notes the limits of the parallel, because
proper names belong to enduring individuals, whereas photographs are of ephemeral
moments when the configuration congeals.
 Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World 181

extraction, while the photograph (in one view, at least) presupposes a simple
reception, a contemplation. It is an art of the déjà vu, showing the already-
seen, and as such it plunges into a state close to the dream or hallucination’
(1993–94: 124).
Although we know that photographs, even before the age of digitaliza-
tion, are amalgams of the instant of their being taken and the subsequent
work on them in the developing, printing and displaying processes, that
instant is never entirely absorbed into those posterior interventions. It is a
reminder that the world is more than human projection or construction, more
than the categories we impose on it, more than the meanings we impute to it.
Rather therefore than the self-assertion that Blumenberg understood to be a
consequence of conventionalist nominalism, it implies what we might call the
counter-assertion of the world, a world more readymade than the product of
human will, a world that somehow stubbornly thwarts all of our best – or is it
worst? – efforts to disenchant it. Ironically, the magical nominalism of the
camera begins to resemble a realism of particulars, which is, to be sure, very
different from the scholastic realism of universals it challenged during the era
of William of Ockham. But it is a realism of proper names that paradoxically
comes from the world and not the naming subject, a world that has not
entirely lost its capacity to inspire awe, wonder and humility.

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