Capitalism and the Camera: Essays on Photography and Extraction by Kevin Coleman & Daniel James

Author:Kevin Coleman & Daniel James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

Part II. Gloom

In a recent essay framed by the question “what is to be done?” Jean-Luc Nancy quotes the poet Paul Celan, who spoke of “doing without a shoreline.” 38 Nancy takes this as a way to envision a doing or praxis freed from a given order of ends and rightfully interprets this as “an adventurous and risk-taking boundless doing.” In doing so, he derives an image from the poem itself, the last line of which describes this nontelic doing as a “shimmer from the ground” ( Schimmer aud dem Grund ). 39 A shimmer that, Nancy goes on to say, “arises from a depth that remains endless.” 40

It is this shimmer that I want to think further about, in terms of photography and the night. 41 The shimmer is to be understood less as an image or even as the surface effects of a cast of light, than in the precise terms of the poem: as a “shimmer from the ground.” Meaning, I want to suggest, as humus (soil, earth, dirt). The depth of this ground from which the shimmer comes to shine, is neither the shine of solar nor lunar illumination, but what might be described as a nocturnal depth. Not the night that is opposite the day and its light, but the geological and therefore posthumous night of the humus or ground. 42 As much as the shimmer extends out in its shine and gleam, it also recedes, and this recession is what maintains the shimmer’s power and brilliance. As Deborah Bird Rose writes, “For shimmer to capture the eye, there must be absence of shimmer. To understand how absence brings forth, it must be understood not as lack but as potential.” 43

Here we are confronted with that which is neither human nor animal, existing outside of bios and hence perhaps also outside the biopolitical. It is what Eugene Thacker has recently come to refer to as “dark life,” as that which is not only beyond the two dichotomies of human/machine and human/animal, but that occupies a zone of indistinction between the living and the nonliving. 44 It is for example, Desulfotomaculum , the bacterium that, as Thacker explains, “thrives in the darkness of radioactive rocks” existing without the benefit or need of photosynthesis. Such extremophiles (organisms that can survive extreme conditions of heat, cold, acidity, pressure, radioactivity, and darkness—meaning: at the outer reaches of what is needed to sustain life) put into question the equation between light and life, and by “feeding off of the absence of light—are an anomaly for biological science.” In other words, they exist at the limits oftheopticalanthropological-biological-photographic-machine by which life is identified and known. Inhabiting the soil, water, geothermal run-off and insect intestines, desulfotomaculum use things like dead moths to anaerobically metabolize energy and thereby generate a posthumous shimmer from the humus.

Now, since our bodies are at least 50 percent bacterial matter, and since it is clear that the ability of such matter to subsist in the dark and thrive on

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.