Spectral Bodies: Derrida and

the Philosophy of the Photograph

as Historical Document
NICK PEIM
Marxs call for a materialism capable of engaging reality as
sensuous human activity opens a question about the role of
representation in relation to data. Images have increasingly
been seen as signicant forms of data in the history of
education. Derridas theory of the spectrea variation on the
positions established in his earlier works on the trace, the
supplement and differanceoffers a way of rethinking visual
images, their relations with existing discourses of knowledge
and with positioned subjects who makes sense. Two early
twentieth-century photographs are explored here in relation to
ideas derived from Derrida as an exercise in the philosophy of
representation.
SPECTRAL HISTORY?
The chief defect of all previous materialism . . . is that the thing, reality,
sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of an object of contemplation,
but not as sensuous human activity (Marx, 1969, p. 13).
What happens when we try to recover sensuous human activity from its
representation? In what sense are we engaging with the material reality
that we must assume engenders the representation? What are the relations
between the material representation and the material, but not present,
activity it represents? These questions present problems that the historian
confronts implicitly or explicitly in every aspect of addressing and making
sense of the past. The issue of representation and its relations with the
historical quest for the truth of complex social practices, as in the history
of education, cannot be said to have been settled or resolved. It remains
one of the most live theoretical questions now confronting the historian.
The photograph as a source of evidence or meaning provides an occasion
here for some consideration of the issue of representation in the eld of
history of education.
1
Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 39, No. 1, 2005
rThe Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Two photographs are brought together here for consideration. Both are
taken from a fairly well-known text on the history of childhood. In both
cases, their appearance in the book is supplemented by a contextualising
caption, although the caption makes little reference to the apparent content
or status of the photographs. It is as if the photographs and their status as
68 N. Peim
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documents speak for themselves. They punctuate the text as self-evident
illustrations of its account of the child and schooling, an account that
follows a familiar but not unimportant story of governmental intervention
via the social apparatus of the school into the domain of childhoodeven
while that domain is being constituted. Another way of looking at these
photographs is that they announce the arrival of the spectral into the
history they inhabit.
SCHOOL PHOTOGRAPHS
These two examples here serve as case studies for a consideration of the
photograph as trace within a logic of what Jacques Derrida has called
spectrality (Derrida, 2001a, pp. 4344; Negri, 1999). One of the selected
examples here represents Girls saluting in a drill class in the playground
of Ben Jonson School, Stepney, in 1911 (Horn, 1989, p. 39). The other
represents: Boys learning to knit at Walton Lane Council School,
Liverpool, c. 1914 (Horn, 1989, p. 45). As photographic evidence within
this text they stand alone. Questions of authorship or origin, for example,
such as might be addressed within the literary eld, are not posed. We
have to put into brackets the conditions of their production, and suspend
the questions they might give rise to. By whom, under what conditions and
with what purposes were these photographs created? Questions of
signicance are also averted. How exactly do they stand in relation to
the text, what specic information do they convey, how might we
understand them in relation to a larger history? The information is not
conveyed within the context of their appearance.
They have perhaps a series of connecting threads that will not take too
much time to establish. Both appear together in the same book (in a
chapter entitled Widening Horizons). The book makes some contextua-
lising information available. The dates are given, whichalong with the
quality of the photographs, their characteristic timbremean that we can
locate them within an era, within a certain knowledge about schooling and
within a sense of the historical movement of urbanisation (Donald, 1992;
Jones, 1977; Hunter, 1994; Wardle, 1974). At another level, these
photographs may prompt us to recall a series of laws relating to child
employment, the prehistory, the invention and inauguration of the
apparatuses of state schooling, the particular form of the elementary
school, its characteristic structure, its ambience and its specic practices.
They may call on us to consider the transition from sovereign to capillary
power and the attendant transformation of the state in relation to practices
governing the body and the soul (Foucault, 1997b; Rose, 1990). These
photographs seem to reverberate with this history. All this supplementary
knowledge will give us pointers to follow what we take to be signicant
factors in the history of education, prompt us to make sense of each textual
ensemble in particular ways. It might not be too fanciful to suggest that
these photographs call to us as historians of education (and no doubt in
other ways, too). They seem to make a demand upon us that we work
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towards their understanding, to give them a true and proper reading.
2
If
the photograph cannot guarantee its own delity to an originary reality, we
may have to seek to establish a kind of good faith in terms of rendering
it meaningful in relation to an always unnished series of modes of
understanding and forms of knowledge.
These photographs give rise to a number of speculative questions. We
may wonder, for instance, about the position from which each image
is seen/taken. From what positionwhat physical, social, space-time
perspectivesis the scene before us viewed? In what sense is the gazing
subject of the photograph both implied and excluded from its structure?
The image and the angle of the image project back to us a specic position
through imaginary lines of convergence. We always see from a point
outside the bounded space of the photograph. We occupy, by implication,
the viewing position of the photographer, but clearly not the same social,
temporal, professional point of view. Our position is itself, as it were,
haunted by this difference. We cannot reclaim this originary point of view
and can only speculate as to its character. The photograph to some extent
depends for its very existence on the gure and the position of the
photographer, as imaginary agent of its existence, but for us this must
remain forever an imaginary position that we cannot occupy in the same
way. Looking at the photograph effects a temporal dislocation. We are
required to take up the impossible position of seeing through someone
elses eyes.
At the same time, we are aware, at some level or other, of the
metonymic laments that lead out from the image. The gures and the
space they occupy imply a large school; the few houses viewed imply
many; the built-up environment implies a city. This image cannot be
complete in itself, nor can it completely capture the eld of vision of its
agent. It is always already cropped. It hovers in a space that implies its
larger physical context. We read the scene as being embedded in an urban
setting, just as we read its temporal and spatial context. As we begin to
gure out the relations between what is framed within and what is
connected outside the framing of the photograph, we become conscious
of absent presences. These may be, as with the position of the
photographer, unrepresentable, but they may also arise more intimately
within the very content of the photograph. Both scenes represent highly
ordered congurations of bodies enacting intricate and co-ordinated,
purposeful movements in collective activity. In both cases we witness a
highly disciplined activity and social milieu. But where or what is the source
of this order, where is the agency of this palpable discipline? The
photographs in both cases cannot represent what is a vital element of their
composition. Both photographs seem to be metonymic of signicant
practices enacted through mass schooling concerned with governing the
bodyand doing so in a collective, normative mode.
3
Within a logic of presence and absence, nonetheless, both photographs
present denite and readable content. The drill class photograph clearly
depicts an urban context. We can read this from the style of buildings, the
low rise tenement-type constructions that have an effect of compression
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about them. The brick-built buildings, their grimy exteriors closing off any
vistaall indicate an urban, proletarian environment. We see this echoed
in the gures of the children, in their clothes, their aprons; their very body
styles seem to speak of a particular socio-economic stratum. The schools
location, its dramatic proximity to the tenement dwellings and the washing
line are clues that in various ways conrm the sense of social context.
Historically speaking, we know that the school arises in that context as a
special, differentiated space within which particular kinds of regulated
events may occur, shaping and transforming the social environment. What
we witness in the photograph is precisely one of those well-regulated,
purposeful events that signal the realisation of a new era in the governance
of urban, proletarian populations. The girls appear to belong to that
portion of the urban population for whom elementary education was
designed as an array of practices in disciplined self-management, the
cultivation of a limited range of literacy skills and domestic competences,
and a regime of ordered management of the body (Donald, 1992, pp. 17
46; Seaborne and Lowe, 1977). We can see too that age stratication is
at work: the girls appear to be close enough in age for us to conclude that
their training is heavily norm-oriented. The choreography of the activity
indicates this clearly. The pose is held, with inevitable differences of
personal body style, but at the same time with an implied unity in the
arrangement. A perfectly disciplined practice is in place here. What is
enacted through a careful organisation of bodies in space is a collective
disciplinary training of the person.
4
A mere three years separates the alleged date of this photograph from
the other. Once again we are aware of the spatial arrangements of bodies
in trained activity within an institutional context. Boys learning to knit
takes us into the interior of an institution that, we may imagine, shares a
similar structure and location to the implied institution of the drill class.
(Qua institution, it is not, of course, there in that an institution in this
sense cannot be represented photographically as such.) The organisation
of arrangements of space and objects is interesting again. The walls are
decorated with images of nature that appear in two forms. The higher layer
includes fairly detailed, more or less naturalistic images of owers. Below,
both ora and fauna appear in ghostly silhouette form. It is as though
sensuous reality (or one version of it) and ideal forms were being
deliberately set off against one another, in a platonic relation of signs. In
the lower half of the picture we discern the familiar gallery of the board
school, the special arrangement that came with the still relatively recent,
though by then (1914) pretty well-established, inventionthe classroom.
The gallery is populated in this case by male subjects. Once again we may
speculate on where we are positioned, though in this instance it is easy, at
one level at least, to imagine ourselves positioned at the point where the
teacher gure would habitually stand, or perhaps at a point above that
precise position. Of course, our point of view cannot in any full sense be
the same as that imaginary gure. Spatially, it is possible to locate
ourselves more or less and in a purely abstracted sense. Socially, in terms
of an identity more fully eshed out in terms of culture, values,
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knowledge, language and the viewpoint that comes with a specic
Dasein, it is not quite so easy.
5
Perhaps it would also be presump-
tuous to pretend to know. We are historically removed and can at best
perhaps identify ourselves as different from the life-world of the
photograph.
We may also speculate on the activity enacted in the photograph, its
meaning and its place within a scheme of things that today we would refer
to as a curriculum and that might in that time also be called by the same
name but with a different set of resonances. There will be parallels, of
course, with our own contemporary experiences of classrooms and
curricula: we are likely to be familiar at least with the carefully ordered
arrangement of bodies indicated here. Eighteen boys, each with a ball of
wool and knitting needles, sit in three well-ordered rows. They all focus
with apparently total absorption on the knitting task in hand. This is not
exactly a drill exercise as in the previous example, but it is an extremely
regulated activity performed with an apparent competence and focus that
suggests long-term training. We note, too, that these boys, like the girls in
the previous picture, appear to be urban, working-class children from their
demeanour, though perhaps more well-groomed than the girls of Stepney.
Again, it is evident that their grouping is the product of age stratication.
The scene speaks of order, of the careful spacing and management of
bodies, of the specic technique of the particular productive technology
that is in the process of being mastered. The image conveys a sense of
engagement, of the body at work in the performance of a technical skill.
We might be tempted to say that it represents selves in the work of self-
production, for there is clearly another human technology at work in this
process. The absent authority gure may be imagined to be positioned at
the point from which we see the event. Again, we do not see but must
suppose the imaginary gure of authority on whom the scene is
predicated. Present elements depend on non-present elements for this
interpretation. The construction of the photograph thus corresponds to the
panopticon with its self-regulatory content and the absent presence of the
disciplinary mechanism that sustains this mode of being (Foucault, 1997b,
p. 185; 1980, p. 158).
CAPTIONS AND SUPPLEMENTS
Both photographs appear without any direct reference in the main body of
the chapter. They speak across the written text and punctuate it with
their presence. They cannot appear without framing, though, and their
separateness is bridged by, in each case, a fairly extensive caption. The
drill image refers to its taking place in a large school reminding us
perhaps of what the photograph itself clearly suggests by implication
that this is modern mass education. We are also given an indication about
the nature of the area, Stepney, which is described as a very deprived area
of London. So that we might get our proper historical bearings we are
also given a date, 1911, locating the photograph, and our potential reading
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of it, within a period. Learning to knit is also accompanied by some
supplementary information in the form of a caption. The school is a
council school, in Liverpool, informing us or reminding us that the
photograph depicts a scene from mass, urban education. There is a
comment also on the apparent level of engagement of the pupils in this
caption. Learning to knit is described as an absorbing occupation as
though it is simply the knitting as an activity itself that creates the
seemingly intense concentration of the boys in this photograph. As to the
purpose or function or rationale of the activity, it is expressed in terms of
the Edwardian vogue for manual and domestic instruction, as though no
other explanation were needed, nor further account required (Horn, 1989,
p. 45).
It is clear that making sense of the photographs in question depends on a
number of supplementary factors. In order to make sense, to read how they
might signify within both the immediate (this book on this topic) and the
more layered context they appear in (the book, the discourse of history, the
idea of childhood, the school, education and so on) we must already have
access to various discourses of knowledge before we can even see what
there is to see in the photograph. What is more, we also evidently need
to know how to account for certain structural features of the photograph.
We will need to understand at some automatic level the photographs
metonymic properties and the assumptions we can legitimately make in
relation to this. We will need to be automatically familiar with the logic of
position and with the issue of cropping. Managing these structural features
of the photograph requires a familiarity with the medium to free us from
the awkward problems they may give rise to. The whole process of
recognition involved in the reading of the photographs is rich and complex
and cannot be described simply in terms of seeing what is there.
Seeing, then, is not an act or process that can escape the logic of
representation: the visual eld is organised for us and by us according to
codes and conventions that give us an orientation and that allow for
recognition as well as for active intervention in terms of meaning.
6
A at
surface, for example, differentiated by the shaped arrangement of a
greyscale continuum must be seen as a place, within a time, enfolding an
event, revealing a social practice, a social milieu, a world.
7
Nevertheless, because of its iconic mode of representation, photography
can give the impression of making some more direct connection than
writing or speech with the activity it represents. It can appear as a natural
mode of representationlight-writing, as though light itself were
making a statement (Grosvenor, 1999). The operation of the aperture
enables the reception and inscription onto a light-sensitive surface of what
is in some way quite simply and unproblematically there.
8
This model
of photography can be sustained only up to a point: a point that must
suppress framing, selection, perspective, the translation of a three
dimensional reality to a two-dimensional surface (a number of mediating
factors) as well as the active process of sense-making. Representation
itself is necessarily an act or process of mediation. The domain of
symbolism is structured by this fact.
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For the historian, the question of representation and interpretation can
only be properly understood when the activity of the historian interpret-
ing the photographic image is itself understood as a sensuous human
activity. The activity of interpretation is necessarily caught up in a series
of positional relations to do with perspective, aspects, subjects and objects
that have been the business of phenomenology in philosophy (Moran,
2000, pp. 192221). But the productive activity of the historian is also
itself an historical sensuous human activity contingent upon specicities
of time and place and enfolded in academic social relations, prevailing
ideas and familiar positions. These determinations insist that addressing
the question of data, its documentary and archival status, relates closely
to the epistemological and ontological status of history and the historian.
The logic of the supplement provides one way of thinking about these
relations.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND SPECTRES: HAUNTOLOGY
The photograph offers a particularly dramatic case for the exploration of
the relations between sensuous human activity and its representation for
the historian, touching on questions of the nature of the document and the
archive. One interesting way of approaching the issue of the past and its
representation is through the concept of the spectre (Bennet and Royle,
1999, pp. 132140). In Spectres of Marx, taking a cue from the rst line of
The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Derrida (1994) plays with the idea
of the spectre in order to contest the proposition of the death of Marxism.
Derrida nds in this particular trope a double relevance. The domain of the
spectral belongs to what haunts and returns, something from the past as yet
unfullled or unnished. At the same time, the returning spectre or
revenant points towards a future. The resolution of the past disturbance
that the appearance of the spectre signies, is a mattera call, perhaps
towards the future, proposing a question and an orientation. In addition,
of course, the very business of representationwhere one, present, ele-
ment stands in for another, absent, elementis necessarily ghostly or
spectral: that is, its sense necessarily depends on something that is not
there (Derrida, 2001a, p. 44).
In addressing the issue of the spectral, Derrida coins the term
hauntology (Derrida, 1994). The point of the joke is twofold: to make a
comment on the classic language of ontology; and to conjure at the same
time an alternative set of principles that reminds us of Derridas earlier
work of deconstruction in relation to the metaphysics of being as presence
(Derrida, 1976, 1978, 1982, 1987). The spectral metaphor is apposite for
both purposes. The spectre occupies a particular and peculiar position in
relation to the business of ontology, the question of being. The spectre
makes its presence felt, but its presence does not occupy ontological space
in the way imagined in what by what Derrida calls the metaphysics
of presence (Buse and Scott, 1999, pp. 1011). The spectre conjures
a present absence. Its presence, as Elizabeth Rottenberg puts this, is
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predicated on the very fact of the absence of what it presents: To be
spectral is neither to be present nor absent; it is neither to be nor not to be.
Indeed, the spectral, says Derrida, is what exceeds all ontological
oppositions between absence and presence, visible and invisible, living
and dead (Rottenberg, 2002, p. 5). In an interview, Derrida himself puts it
thus:
the concept of the spectral has a deconstructive dimension because it has
much in common with the concepts of trace, of writing and differance,
and a number of other undecidable motifs. The spectral is neither alive
nor dead, neither present nor absent, so in a certain way every trace is
spectral. We always have to do with spectrality, not simply when we
experience ghosts coming back or when we have to deal with virtual
images. Even here, there is some spectrality, when I touch something
(Derrida, 2001a, p. 44).
The spectre is incomplete and to be distinguished from the living
present. The idea of spectrality is continuous with the position that
Derrida explores in relation to questions of meaning and being in an
earlier phase of his work. In this earlier phase, Derrida proposes a new
concept of writingwhere writing comes to signify the operation of sym-
bolisation. This concept of writing emphasises the play of differences that
disrupts any simple notion of presence:
The concept can be called gram or differance. The play of differences
supposes, in effect, syntheses and referrals which forbid at any moment,
or in any sense, that a simple elements be present in and of itself, referring
only to itself. Whether in the order of spoken or written discourse, no
element can function as a sign without referring to another element which
itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each element
phoneme or graphemebeing constituted on the bases of the trace within
it of the other elements of the chain or system. This interweaving, this
textile, is the text produced only in the transformation of another text.
Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere
ever simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences
and traces of traces (Derrida, 1987, p. 26).
Derrida reminds us here that the tendency in Western thought to make a
clear distinction between presence and absence, between being and
representation, between ideal and material can be interpreted according to
an alternative logic. In agreement with this work, the spectreas the
present absenceprovides a metaphor for the logic of signication; while
also providing in turn a dramatic image of the critique of the metaphysics
of presence. The spectre signies the problematisation of the living
present as singular, complete, self-present entity. In representation
something stands in for something it is not. The present signier marks
the absence whilst also conjuring the presencenever of course a real or
full presenceof what it points to. The sign is haunted by this interplay of
presence and absence. The sign can only stand in for what it signies
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depending for its own logic on the absence of the referent or object. There
can be no one-to-one relation between signier and signied. All signs are
subject to this logic of presence and absence.
The spectre signies a restless presence, both haunting and haunted, but
also an absence or gap. There is something unanswered, something
incomplete in the very nature of the spectre (Abraham, 1994, p. 171). In its
familiar guises, the spectre is the past returning, sometimes to inform,
sometimes to indicate unnished business: an incomplete life, an un-
resolved issue. The spectre is revenant, a past gure that keeps coming
back, disrupting the smooth logic of time. At one point, Derrida reminds
us of Caesars ghost in Shakespeares play. On its rst appearance, Brutus
senses the spectre will return and asks it: Well; then I shall see thee
again? The Ghost replies: Ay, at Philippi (4.3). Derrida emphasises the
importance of the signicances attached to the word again and associates
them with a view of temporality in which repetition plays a key role.
Repetition (the return of the spectre) disrupts the view of a linear
temporality that presupposes a smooth passage from the past to the present
and further on to the future. The past is repeated in the present to the point
of dislocating it. What is more, as Derrida argues, the repetition of the past
is projected onto the future, so that it appears to be coming at the same
time from the future. There is an expectation that the appearance of the
ghost will repeat, that only a future resolution can prevent the past from
returning to perturb the present. It is this threat of intrusion of the past into
the future that comes to haunt and to demand attention, and often action,
to reveal the untold or unconscionable truth. Hence the spectre is restless,
unquiet and demanding.
The spectre is both the product and the occasion of unease. The spectre
returns from the unnished past. As indicated, however, there is a double
logic to the spectre in relation to time: the thinking of the spectre, contrary
to what common sense would lead us to believe, signals towards the future
(Derrida, 1994). The future orientation of the thinking of the spectre is
paradoxical but relates vitallyone might say absolutely criticallyto the
work of the historian and to the very idea of history. The spectre returns
to remind us that the past is incomplete and therefore to come. In a num-
ber of ways, we are haunted by the past, but specically haunted by
its incompletion, its unresolved aura. Accordingly, the past and its
appearance in the present are subject to the logic of deferral. Deferral is
the suspension of completeness.
9
This is precisely what calls to the
historian and makes a demand, in the manner of the spectre. The past
exists in this restless, unsettled and incomplete modality. The spectral
presenceor return of the pastalso has a mission to inform. It is not
simply the marker of unnished business. The spectre may appear to
inform us of a truth that is also yet to come, yet to enter into the domain of
discourse. Derridas Spectres of Marx is interwoven with a reading of the
ghost scenes from Hamlet. The ghost in that play appears to tell the truth
of the past (the manner of its death) and the truth of the living present (the
concealment of murder). But, at the same time, the spectre belongs to the
order of the simulacrum: is not one with what it represents, and has to
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be tested for its truth. The authenticity of the spectre is always
questionablea function of the gap between its partial nature and the
full version it claims to represent.
The spectre, therefore, constitutes a disturbing presence that haunts our
epistemological assumptions and certitudes. There are perhaps several
ways in which the analogy with Hamlet can be expanded. One is to
consider the reverberations of the relations between past and present in the
phrase: the time is out of joint that Derrida considers at some length in
Spectres of Marx. Another, as Rottenburg explains, is that the spectre
makes a demand and calls us to action: it haunts every moment of
apparent presence. It not only makes the future possible . . . it also makes
possible the ghostly return of the past. This ghostly return or revenance
conveys what Derrida calls a legacy (Rottenberg, 2002, pp. 45). The
spectre forces us to rethink our assumptions about present realities.
Drawing on Kant, this logic of inheritance requires a decision and a
responsibility; no legacy can both express and deliver its own demands
it requires the responsible answer of a question that is not given (Kant,
1991, pp. 110111; Rottenberg, 2002, p. 6). According to this logic,
no legacy can be a simple, inert gift: truth is always an incomplete
project, always situated within a discourse, a particular kind of work that
cannot achieve nal completion. The legacy implies a burden of res-
ponsibility.
GRAMMATOLOGY OF THE PHOTOGRAPH
It has already been indicated how the photograph has been taken as a
special kind of evidence. There is also the emotive value of the
photograph to consider as an aspect of its signifying structure. The
emotive, often poignant, aspect of the photograph is related to its vivid
capture of the moment, but also to the difference between present and past
that it enacts. The particular allure of the photograph has been written
about extensively, at times with a powerful sense of its special place in the
textual domain and its affective potential (Barthes, 1993; Peim, 2005).
Hence also the special relation of the photograph with death. In the
photograph the living present is both represented and conrmed in its
absence at the same time. In this, the photograph followsindeed
accentuatesthe necessary logic of the sign. It is spectral and represents
what is not there: a present mark coincides with the absent presence.
This untimeliness is hauntological rather than ontological. Its genera-
tive quality is the productive effect of the gap or absence that generates
differences in meaning, that ensures an unnished, interminable ow into
the process of sense-makingand that according to Derridas critique
disrupts the logocentric idea of being-as-presence.
10
The present signi-
er signies the absent presence. The material mark or signier is
palpably there. What it signiesthe living momentis not there. There
is a gap between the signier and the living moment that interferes
with their congruity. In this gap of non-identicality the play of difference
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is activated. This play also has a temporal dynamic: time is always
already disjointed, itself subject to the logic of differance.
The photograph has an historical relation to the concept of truth in
representation:
The photographic image from the mid-1850s was held to be inherently
objective. Photography offered a way of observing the world without bias.
The photographic image had truth-value, it was self-evident and evidence
of the real; it was a witness and had documentary status (Grosvenor,
1999, p. 85).
Some people felt that the representational uses of painting, drawing and
other print based media had been made obsolete and expected
photography to take over these functions immediately (Warren, 2000,
p. 273).
From its inception, there has been an assumption that photography
produces images by autogenesis as a kind of natural writing (light-
writing) that by virtue of the technology of shutter and chemical reaction
guarantees objectivity (Grosvenor, 1999, pp. 8586). On this account, the
photograph allows for direct access to reality, and enables the historian
to become a retrospective eyewitness to past phenomena: it faithfully
records the phenomenon it represents as it captures a moment in the ux
of history without the intervention of an actively shaping subject
(Grosvenor, 1999, p. 88).
In spite of its apparent philosophical na vety, the idea of light-writing
indicates a positive direction for thinking about the nature of the
photograph as historical document. It is in the graph or writing sense that
the logic of the photograph and its uses can be reconsidered. Derridas
deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence through the concept of
writing enacts, by implication, a critique of the premises of this account
of the historical value of the photograph (Derrida, 1999). This critique
revisits fundamental metaphysical premises through radical ideas about
language.
Derridas grammatology or theory of language calls into question the
received idea that language can be a vehicle for conveying meanings that
come before it. Derrida is, as we saw, concerned to rethink metaphysics
through language. The very operation of language is dependent, according
to Derrida, on something other than present elements that may or may not
correspond to absent presences. A fundamental element of representation
is spacingthe condition of what Derrida comes to call arche-writing,
which is the condition of language. A present mark or sound is sup-
plemented by this spacing, this movement that consists of a gap, or a
nothing: no phoneme corresponds to the spacing between written words
(Derrida, 1976, pp. 6869). Present elementsphoneme or grapheme
are dependent for their operation on what cannot be present: that is, an
absence. Language is predicated on the interplay between signs and spaces
or signs and silence. Within language the blank space between the letters
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of a word is the condition of the possibility of difference, like the gap
between two utterances. This phenomenon of the internal spacing (the
articulation of space and time) of signs identies a rather strange aspect
of the material condition of the sign and the text.
The word spacing designates both a completed arrangement and an act
of distribution or arranging. The idea corresponds closely to difference,
designating for Derrida both a passive difference already in existence as
the condition of signication and an act of differing or deferring that
produces differences. Signifying events depend on differences, but these
differences are themselves the products of events. There is an irresolvable
dialectic in this alternation. One can shift back and forth between these
two perspectives, which never give rise to a synthesis. According to this
logic it is not possible to claim that writing can produce a correspondence;
it can only produce another kind of difference. This applies equally to the
concept of light-writing. What is received on the surface of a two-
dimensional photo-sensitive plane is inscribed as a mark: all spacing is a
disruption of presence in a mark, what I here call writing (Derrida, 1982,
pp. 307330).
The concept of spacing highlights the gap between representation and
what is represented. Spacing signies, among other things, the gap
between signifying elements that are brought together in more or less
formal relations of difference and framed, separated from an exterior that
it is at the same time called to represent. The recognition of this primary
difference reminds us of the structure of the text (any text) as conditioned
by spacing. This is the only foundation (a foundation that is not a
foundation) for the possibility of the text. At the same time, this spacing,
this absence, this fundamental and determining gap is what activates the
element of playthe play of difference.
The upshot of the critique of the sign that Derridas account of writing
involves is encapsulated in the concept of the trace. The sign leaves a trace
of what is signied. In the process of signication, there can be no pure
presence, no capture and no direct access to objective reality because
of the necessary temporal and spatial movement between the elements of a
signifying event. The trace is the present mark of an absent presence
textual representations being founded only in difference, incompletion and
mobility (play). Within a signifying event there can be no centre that will
necessarily organise that event into a complete and self-sufcient totality.
The framing of any text cannot hold to a strictly determinable limit. There
is no centre, no key to the text (Derrida, 1978, pp. 280293). The
possibility of the text is the play of differences. The sign points beyond
itself to something else, something other. The present trace, an element
in a chain, is supplemented by what is beyond itself. But even this present
presence is always subject to the movement of time and to the difference
between its constituent elements. The point of focus is always shifting.
Nor can the elements of the textwhat is within it, what makes it what it
isbe strictly delimited. The limits of the text cannot be nally contained
or framed. Since the text reaches constantly beyond itself there cannot be a
determinate boundary between what lies within and what is beyond. The
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text depends for its existence, for the possibility of its representation of
something, on this movement, this alternation between inside and outside.
The play of this movement similarly determines that the text cannot be
brought to a nal conclusion. The signier requires something else for the
realisation of the sign. The evidencetext, statement, document,
archivedoes not speak for itself. The text is not pointing, teleologically,
to the realisation of its internally driven goal.
NIETZSCHES EYES: DISCOURSE AND THE SUBJECT OF HISTORY
It is this logic of the trace, of the supplement, of difference and spacing
this series of linked concepts in Derridas return to the relations between
signier and signiedthat guarantees the generative possibilities of
language, meaning and interpretation. The trace in its movement means
the deferral of meaning. Meaning is not present in itselfembedded or
embodied in text: it is put off, deferred, subject to the logic of the
supplement. The text points beyond itself to what is not there, to what
cannot be fully present but is conjured by the present trace (or signier).
This means that the production of meaning is a supplementary activity.
One name for this supplementary element in relation to signs, to texts and
to the production of meaning is discourse: discourse in the sense of
regimes of truth that produce the objects of which they speak and which
regulate, in institutions and in practices, the borders of meaning (Foucault,
1977a, pp. 4849). It is an irreducible paradox, according to Derridas
grammatology, that the logic of the trace that is founded in an absence,
or more properly the interplay of a presence and absence, gives rise to an
excess of meaning whereby the generative working of any sign always
exceeds a one-to-one relation of correspondence. In this sense meaning
is both multiple and unstable. It is discourse, however, that gives a degree
of determination to signs and to texts. Discourse, as indicated, is meant
here in the generative Foucauldian sense, as being productive of the
objects it designates. But discourse in this sense does not refer to a closed
system where relations between inside and outside are strictly delimited.
Discourse, which gives life to meaning and text, is also necessarily subject
to the same play of difference.
In this sense, it is not possible to speak of a direct capture of sensuous
human activity through the mediation of the signier:
this trace is the opening of the rst exteriority in general, the enigmatic
relationship of the living to its other and of an inside to an outside:
spacing. The outside, spatial and objective exteriority which we be-
lieve we know as the most familiar thing in the world, as familiarity itself,
would not appear without the gramme, without difference as temporalisa-
tion, without the nonpresense of the other inscribed within the sense of the
present, without the relationship with death as the concrete structure of
the living present (Derrida, 1976, pp. 7071).
A photograph as an historic document, as a component in an archive
or a text among textscannot escape this logic of the trace and the
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supplement. This logic gives rise both to the incompletion of signication
and to the excess of signication. Hence it is appropriate to approach
the photograph within the compelling logic of Derridas hauntology
(Derrida, 1994, p. 10).
None of this of course is to say that the photograph is not informative,
but it is to remind us that the photograph cannot bring us into a direct
contact with a slice of social reality. The point is to understand in what
sense the photograph, the photographic archive, the discourse of
photography has meaning for the historian. To begin to comprehend
these photographs historically we must rst perhaps be haunted by their
strange resonance: as with all photographs they have a commemorative
effectnot simply in the fact that they represent a past that is gone, but
also in the fact that they represent the fracturing of the living moment by
the opening of a differencea spacing. But we must also necessarily
engage with various forms of knowledge that enable us to make sense of
the specicity of the moment that is commemoratedand perhaps with
the lives that are caught up in the act of representation. In the photograph,
the living present has already been transformed by this commemora-
tive dimension so that its value acquires a testamentary signicance.
Responding to the demand of this testament implies a legacy conferring
obligations. We also are required to have some understanding of the mode
of signication of the photographinvolving questions of position, of
editing, cropping, of all the nuances of composition that displace the
notion of seeing or being confronted with what is there, the notion that
the photograph is simply light-writing.
In addition, we bring with us specic historical knowledge. We
recognise that these photographs belong to an era of elementary education.
We might construct for them a general context in the following terms, for
example. They record the bringing of the urban working-class within the
regime of state education in England instituted by the 1870 Forster
Education Act and its subsequent amplications. The photographs
examined here give us an expression of that process, a representation of
its practices. In these specic cases we can bear witness to the disciplinary
practices that involve the training of the body and the active engagement
in a sophisticated technology of the self. We note features of systematic
organisation to provide a context for the disciplinary practices in question,
features that speak of social and age stratication and at the same time of a
social machinery of normativity. In these photographs, we can see the
school as the carefully crafted milieu for the production of an ultimately
self-managing populace. We bring this act of vision to the photograph
which may in turn enhance, qualify or even disturb our sense of the order
of things.
Informing the activities in these photographs there is a juridical history,
from the early nineteenth-century factory acts to the later education
acts. There are accounts of practices in schools and forms of curri-
culum that also contribute to providing a socio-juridical context for the
period 19111914. All of this will help to explain, to contextualise, to
enrich, but it cannot exhaust the possible meanings of these photographs.
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At the same time, we may struggle in a very specic way to interpret the
issue of gender as it is presented in these cases, for instance. Why are boys
knitting and girls doing drill? Within what conception of gender identity
do these activities exist here? Within what regime of gendered practices
do these activities make sense, and how does this resonate with or against
contemporary understandings of gender as performance?
If the logic of signication is dependent on relations of difference (or
differance, as Derrida would oddly have it), one thing standing in for
something else, the congruities that we experience in representation must
be conventional. Representation is always in need of the supplement. The
supplement is the product of relations of difference, but is also the con-
dition of reading, seeing, sense-making. The text, understood as a sig-
nifying event, is curiously structured by a double logic of incompletion
and excess. Discourse is the condition of the text, but it cannot exhaust its
generative potential. Discourses and their texts are also always structured
by incompletion and in need of the supplement. Historical discourses are
determined by this logic of supplementarity.
Derridas hauntology proposes a counter-logic to the metaphysics of
presence that inhabits the idea of the photograph as light-writing and asks
us to consider the precise way in which a documenta photograph for
examplearticulates something to us and to ponder its status as data.
Hauntology, we might say, invites us to consider the process and the
nature of the engagement that engenders historical knowledge. Different
technologies of data engender different modalities of production. While
this is not, of course, to say that data is reducible to the technology that
carries it, it is to remind ourselves that representation inevitably involves
a specic material technology for its being. The photograph provides
a signicant instance of the technology of incompletion that activates
prosthetics, tools, techniques and other supplements of meaning. Our his-
torical knowledge also exists in this incomplete state, requiring for its very
existence the constant work of the supplement.
While our collective sense of knowledge is haunted by tropes of sight
that imply a metaphysics of presence, the implicit ideal of the self-evident
or immediately present visible is an impossibility (Derrida, 2001, p. 17).
The always incomplete structure of the photographic text calls forth the
supplementary engagement of a subject that is itself haunted by an
ontological incompleteness, the same dislocation in and through time.
Hence the poignant dimension to our engagement with the photograph;
hence also the necessity of a productive reading of the photograph.
We already know about the myth of objective viewing:
Let us, from now on, be on our guard against the hallowed philosophers
myth of a pure, will-less, painless, timeless knower; let us beware of the
tentacles of such contradictory notions as pure reason, absolute
knowledge, absolute intelligence. All these concepts presuppose an
eye such as no living being can imagine, an eye required to have no
direction, to abrogate its active and interpretative powersprecisely those
powers that alone make of seeing, seeing something. All seeing is
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essentially perspective, and so is all knowing. The emotions we allow to
speak in a given matter, the more different eyes we can put on in order to
view a given spectacle, the more complete will be our conception of it, the
greater our objectivity (Nietzsche, 1956, p. 255).
Nietzsches provocative account of seeing serves as a counter to the
privileging of the autonomous subject, but the logic of the spectre may
also provide a trope for taking into account the positioned, engaged,
animated subject of discourse that actively and endlessly supplements the
photographic text.
Correspondence: Nick Peim, School of Education, University of
Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK.
Email: n.a.peim@bham.ac.uk
NOTES
1. Up to now, educational histories have only made marginal use of the visual in the reconstruction
(or rather construction) of the past (Depaepe and Henkins, 2000; see also Novoa, 2001).
2. Perhaps no small part of this injunction depends on a sense of mourning (in a special,
generalised sense) in relation to these photographs, and an unconscious responsibility to the
claims of the dead. Whatever else they may be, these photographs are commemorative and
activate a logic of mourning. See Derrida (2001b), pp. 9495 for a pithy account of this theme.
3. Metonymy is always, by denition, incomplete, pointing beyond itself to a potentially endless
series of contexts.
4. Discipline here is used in the expanded Foucauldian sense as famously established in Foucault
(1977b) Discipline and Punish (Harmondsworth, Allen Lane).
5. Dasein is here used in the Heidegerian sense of an irreducible specicity of being.
6. Kant famously problematises the idea of seeing things as they are. See, for example, Critique of
Pure Reason. Another famous version of this phenomenological view is in Gadamers reworking
of Heidegger in Truth and Method (1960).
7. Wittgensteins discussion of seeing as is also useful here: Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical
Investigations Part II, pp. 193e198e.
8. The photographic process from the mid 1850s was held to be inherently objective. Photography
offered a way of observing the world without bias. The photographic image had truth-value, it
was self-evident and evidence of the real; it was a witness and had documentary status
(Grosvenor, 1999, p. 85).
9. Deferral in Derrida applies to the rethinking of the sign via the concept of the trace (Derrida,
1976).
10. With Nietzsche the pretensions of the representational model of the sign are irrevocably undone.
The sign is conceived of no longer as a transparent or direct representation of a real object that
is subverted by the space of absence between the sign and object that makes of this relation one
of mediation, but mediation as the impossibility of immediacy in representation. The sign is
always already an interpretation. For Nietzsche, the interpreter is the authentic one as he reveals
the origin as an absence, and meaning thus to be bound to the primacy of interpretation
(Nietzsche, 1968; Foucault, 2000, p. 276).
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