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A Voiceless Song and The Ice Cream Man:
Photography as Political Metaphor
loan Davies
II
about this genre, this code, this medium?but only in relation to its
own alterity. Where semiology / takes the inherent properties of a
text or medium as self-enclosed?we read out from the text?
Semiology //concerns itself with the inter-text as a revelation of the
strengths and limitations of the text itself. Semiology ///goes even
further. Our questions now concern the text in motion; we interrogate
not the product but the process of textuality, More precisely,
semiology ///attempts to complete what Barthes failed to do in his
1972 Mythologies: to relate ideology and the reading of codes to 'the
actual practice of living people'13 Semiology ///thus brings the text
out of its own code, out of the discovery of its place in relation to other
codes, and resolves it into practice; that is, the imposition on and
appropriation of practices.
It seems obvious from the foregoing that semiology /// offers our
most crucial vantage-point for grappling with the existential
problems of a medium like photography. Duplicitous by design, it
provides a unique way of examining both the particular (Semiology
I) and the universal (Semiology II). Going far beyond the reading of
texts, in other words, semiology /// is a reading of ourselves, our
practices, our ideas, and our legitimations in order to understand
how we make sense of the images we choose or choose to ignore. It is
a reading, not merely of the things we contemplate, but of the
'thinking experience which produced the things' we contemplate, to
use Blum's phrase again.14 If Semiology /foregrounds the object in
and for itself, and Semiology //functions as a methodological trope
to facilitate the arbitration of competing languages, Semiology ///
combines in one project the polarities of theory and action. It is all
the more unfortunate, then, that photographic (and film and art and
literary) criticism has condemned?and even more critically, inured
us?to living in the worlds of Semiology I & II. And why? Because
they are comfortable. Because each in its own way tells us what is
important?the inside, the outside; the centre, the frame; the text, the
con-text. And in doing so each allows us to situate ourselves?again,
comfortably?in the kingdom of signs. Naming (as in Umberto Eco's
Name of the Rose) is what it's all about. Armed with a repertoire of
categories, we have only to fill in the blanks (mow the lawn, cultivate
the roses, play or watch hockey, attend the odd Bar Mitzvah, dash
off an article on the importance of photography in Finnegan9s
Wake). Semiotics /// is much more troublesome, both as academic
activity and as life style. Eschewing names, absolutes, certainties,
either/or, it compels us to move in life's marginalia. This, on the
other hands, is exactly what makes it worth doing.15
378 Politics, Culture, and Society
III
FIGURE 1
Photograph of a prisoner at Stoney Mountain in Manitoba.
Photography by John Paskievich.
own metaphors which vie with each other in order to define place. In
Paskievich's A Voiceless Song metaphor is imposed on place: the
Slavic lands, all of which are communist, are to be seen as echoes of
the Manitoba prisons, the expressionless faces of the Salvs twinning
with the faces of the prison inmates. There is an intertext against all
of this that read,
might of course,
be and it is displayed in
Skvoresky's preface with its evocation of a people yearning to be
free. The origin of the metaphor is not in Skvoresky, but it is clear as
we scan from book to book. The concepts totalitarian and total
institution were both developed in the 1940s. They appear in the
work of Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, Robert Jay Lifton and
Erving Goffman, and soon became central to most political science
and sociology in the United States. Just as prisoners lived in a
policed environment, so did communists. The two books are therefore
illustrations of this metaphorical linkage. There is, however, a world
of a difference between the two books. Ice-Cream Man creates within
itself the grounds for the prisons' deconstruction: it invites the play
of text to consider the fragmentation of existence and expression
(though itmust be admitted that it is Paskievich's photography that
provides the
totalising framework). A Voiceless song has none of
this in it: both in construction and in its images it is the more
totalistic of the two books, and it comes out like this because there is
no alternative to the images. The people do not speak, and perhaps if
one image stands out in the book (see Paskievitch 1983:91) it is of a
peasant woman carrying a heavy load under a triumphant horse, in
the Ukranian fields. It has all the appropriate elements: the concrete
slabs, the wings of progress, the antedeluvian worker, the flowers
sprouting all around, nothing on the horizon. Its message is one of
total hopelessness. The photograph confirms the message of all the
others and of Skvorecky's essay. Is this what Paskievitch intended?
The issue is whether this is a particularly useful means of doing a
photography which sees itself in discourse with writing.
The of the two books in which Paskievitch's
intention photographs
appear might ultimately to be to create a situation within which the
ideologies which maintain the two kinds of totality are exploded.
Paskievitch is presumably as opposed to prisons as he is to the
Communist regimes of East-Central Europe. And yet in Ice-Cream
Man the conditions for exploding the prison system are present in
the text while in A Voiceless Song they are not. In reality, however,
the prisons are less likely to be changed than Eastern Europe is
(which is, indeed, in a state of ferment as I write). Paskievich's
photography in both books celebrates the tyranny to which he is
opposed. Why is this so? The answer might be found by returning the
semiological issues with which I commenced this essay.
382 Politics, Culture, and Society
FIGURE 2
Photograph of a woman bearing a heavy load in the Ukranian
Fields. Photography by John Paskievich.
loan Davies 383
these images are put in place and coming to terms with our own
autobiography. In his exhibition of images and text (at the Winnipeg
Art Gallery, April 1988), 'Some Sons and their Fathers,' the English
sociologist Dick Hebdige portrayed a world in which the images of
father-son relationships as portrayed in newspapers, magazines,
family albums,
photo war posters are set against the real everyday
experiences of a young man (himself) growing up and confronting
the split identities that media and family relationships created.21
The account is by Hebdige as he negotiates into and out of these
public and private images, and tries to put a shattered dream-life
together again.
This subjective encounter with image may be the beginning of
learning how to write of the difference between living and imagining,
pulling the images into narrative, and providing for an auto?
biographical approach to photography. This, of course, is precisely
what is absent in A Voiceless song, where the subjects can never
speak back against the images, but are in every sense trapped in
them. Hebdige suggests the beginning of such a dialogue.
An even more radical approach is suggested by Geoff Miles in his
exhibition 'Foreign Relations. Re-Writing A Narrative in Parts' (at
Gallery 44, October/November 1987).22 The language of the
philosopher, of the mythologist and of the photographer suffer from
a tendency to provide 'comfort of unity over disunity, coherence over
fragmentation, sameness over difference, singularity over
plurality.'23 The task of the philosopher/photographer is to restore
variety and difference and to look without having the 'colonizing
gaze.' He can do this by a parodying photography, by a deliberate
use of imagery and text which forces the viewer to rethink his notion
of the 'quote' as well as of the techniques of the photographer.
Ultimately this requires an abandonment of the authoritarial,
phallocentric pre-eminence of the image and a quest for a form of
discourse that would break open the assumptions behind most
existing attempts at intertextuality.
Neither Hebdige nor Miles suggest a clear way into a photography
in-Semiotics III, but they do suggest ways that might be open if
photography is to escape both from its imitative art frame or from its
clearly authoritarian ideological one. The crucial aspect of all this is
that photography is a language which we have barely learned how
to use except by appropriating it into languages that are already
out-worn. To rethink photography we have to rethink it in the
context of languages with which is in contact, and that involves
rethinking our complete languages about sexuality, politics, myth
and even prisons.
loan Davies 385
References