Panagia, Davide. “The Photographs Tell It All” [Epilogue]

Panagia, Davide. The Political Life of Sensation. Durham And London, Duke University Press, 2009. The world is a mobile texture of these distinctions between seen and seeing objects. It is the stuff in which the inner folding, unfolding and refolding takes place which makes vision possible between things. --Michel de Certeau To remember: [Kant's] disinterested …

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. [Part I]

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York, Hill and Wang, 2010. Summary: In the first half of Camera Lucida, Barthes unpacks the experiential reading of photography. Uninterested in empirical, rhetorical or aesthetic perspectives, he not only offers language for the affective photography experience, but also asserts that the sensations produced and received [and intra-acting] …

Punctum: Reflections on Photography, edited by Séamus Kealy

Punctum: Reflections on Photography, edited by Séamus Kealy, Salzburg, Salzburger Kunstverein, 2014. Producing Punctum, Boris Groys Groys compares/contrasts Barthes's analysis of mother-referent photographs to Siegfried Kracauer's analysis of his grandmother's photos in Die Photographie (1927). For Kracauer, every photograph is merely, as he says, a general inventory of diverse fragments or details that lacks any inner unity …

Rogoff, Irit, “Studying Visual Culture”

Rogoff, Irit. "Studying Visual Culture." The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, London, Routledge, 1998, pp. 24-36. Summary: Rogoff sets up a 'what is' [and what is not] for visual culture studies. She casts the field as taking up Derrida's concept of différance and providing "the visual articulation of the continuous displacement of meaning in the …

Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects [part one]

full disclosure: this particular tome has rested on my bookshelf for more than a year since it was loaned to me by a mentor. i remember the moment it came to be in my hands, and the feeling that it may hold magic. i sensed that cracking it open could be a game-changer. and as i …

the mourning post as punctum

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York, Hill and Wang, 2010. thumbing through Camera Lucida (Barthes) in preparation for a project about mourning on social media. sensed possibilities: [Studium refers to experiencing an] average affect, almost from certain training ... studium ... which means a kind of general enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without …

Gregg, Melissa & Gregory Seigworth. “An Inventory of Shimmers”

Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth. "An Inventory of Shimmers." The Affect Theory Reader. London: Duke University Press, 2010. Print. Moments to remember/return to [so many moments]: Affect is born in in-between-ness and resides as accumulative beside-ness. Affect can be understood then as a gradient of bodily capacity - a supple incrementalism of ever-modulating  force-relations - …

interrupted

scratching surfaces. pen, paper. fingernails, skin.   [language is a skin: i rub my language against the other. it is as if i had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words barthes]   soul friction. raw chafing. unable to penetrate dermis to meat.   cord cut. leaving blood spilling from …

Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a …