The Found Photograph and the Limits of Meaning

Barry Mauer

continued . . .

As I mentioned earlier, voyeurism is fueled by stereotypes about others. Voyeurism and stereotyping form a powerful combination because the voyeurism allows safe distance and the stereotyping allows easy understanding. Together they can short circuit closer analysis. Stereotypes are linguistic formulations that categorize others according to identifiable traits. Balzac's famous example from Sarrasine, "The Count de Lanty was small, ugly, and pockmarked; dark as a Spaniard, dull as a banker" (224), was a subject for Roland Barthes in S/Z. Balzac expected his reader to accept these stereotypes without thinking. Are there no blond Spaniards? No exciting bankers? The text blocks these questions.

Stereotypes, despite their numerous disadvantages, may be necessary perceptual tools for people who live in complex societies. They provide legibility (or at least the illusion of it) in an increasingly illegible world. Stereotypes based on race, class, and ethnicity were broadly disseminated during the industrial revolution as people from diverse backgrounds moved from isolated villages to major cities where they encountered thousands of strange people in their daily lives. The physiognomies, popular picture books depicting a variety of social types, offered to make legible the strange people inhabiting these crowded urban centers. These books relied heavily on stereotypes: for example, if you see a man with rough hands you know he's a laborer. Physiognomy reduces polysemy (the multiplication of meaning) by classifying people according to legible "types" based on the perception of bodies, clothing, gestures, and expressions. Eleanor Antin's play El Desdichado (The Unlucky One), described in this passage by Henry Sayre, dramatizes the absurdity of relying on stereotypes for making judgments:

As the king and his horse subsequently witness a series of hangings, they construct narratives to explain the crimes each of the victims must have committed. They are based on nothing other than a cursory examination of the victims' physiognomies:

1.H: [That one's] a rapist.

2.K: How do you know?

3.H: Shifty eyes. And look at those thumbs.

However arbitrary, what is clear is that these narratives-or narratives like them, which no doubt were told at the trial-constitute the morality and ideology of the society in its most repressive mode. They justify the hanging. (Sayre 164)

Photography, invented soon after the appearance of the first physiognomies, promised to make the stranger in the crowd more legible than a caricature because photography rendered detail more precisely than any drawing. To some extent, photography lived up to its promise. But photography also reproduced seemingly irrelevant, idiosyncratic, and accidental details that refused legibility in terms of the familiar codes.

Studios enabled photographers to eliminate these accidental details from their image. The studio photographer controlled environmental factors such lighting, climate, and movement, all for the sake of the coded message. When cinema arrived, the dispassionate qualities of the photographic image (the equal clarity of the "irrelevant" and the "relevant" detail) again proved troubling. Studio production methods helped filmmakers reproduce more-or-less regular codes in their films. Whereas photographic portraiture had derived its codes primarily from painting, the cinema's codes were drawn mainly from the stage, the circus, and vaudeville; villains wore black, had mustaches, and squinted, while damsels in distress had ribbons, petticoats, and long eyelashes. Dramatic events with familiar visual codes-train robberies, chase scenes, seduction scenes-repeated from film to film. Visual codes were loosened somewhat with the arrival of sound, since information that had been purely visual could be carried acoustically; for example, Hollywood villains could have Italian accents and use gangster slang. But despite the loosening of some of the visual codes, cinema (and other mass media) serve as modern versions of the physiognomies, promising to make strangers legible.

This legibility via stereotypes, as we know, comes at a price. Many stereotypes are cruel caricatures based on willful misunderstandings. Stereotypes obscure individual differences; individuals who share one trait with a despised group are assumed to share all other traits with the group as well. Yet stereotypes survive because they are enormously practical. As perceptual tools, they enable the user to make inferences based on limited information. Because stereotypes are often shared by diverse groups, they bind the society together by providing a system of shared meaning based on shared codes. Diverse audiences can "fill in" the inferences about characters in Hollywood films because they share linguistic formulae for translating fragmentary details into narrative worlds full of legible characters. In the quotation below, Robert Ray comments on the importance (and cost) of these linguistic formulae in coping with modern life:

Narrative . . . subordinates its images to the linguistic formulations they serve. "The sequence exists . . ." Barthes writes, "when and because it can be given a name" (S/Z 19). Thus, encountering a picture offering itself as "a still," we will immediately begin to imagine the missing story. Doing so typically involves a summoning of the received categories stored in inner speech, the "already-done," the "already read" (S/Z 19). To the extent that any of these constructions would immediately limit the image's possibilities, we can make this proposition: in late-twentieth-century civilization, every image lies surrounded by invisible formulae whose inevitable activation reasserts our stubborn allegiance to language as the only means of making sense. (Ray 37)

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