THE EVIDENCE OF SIGHT

Abstract:
In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault focuses on excavating discursive
formations, but he acknowledges that a pre-discursive reality, “the enigmatic treasure of
‘things’ anterior to discourse,” also exists. This divide between the pre-discursive and the
discursive is straddled, I argue, by photographs as historians use them. The reason for
photography’s dual capacity lies with the complex nature of sight, which is both precognitive
(primarily so, as neuroscience demonstrates), and also culturally encoded. Historians
most commonly rely on mute sensuality; they place photographs in books with little comment,
implying that some form of unmediated recognition is possible. Used in this way,
photographs cannot serve as the basis for new analyses but may underscore the affective
stance of historians toward their topics. Less commonly, historians interrogate photographs
much like texts, locating them within the discourses through which they emerged. This
strategy treats the experience of sight, in Joan Scott’s words, as “an interpretation that
needs to be interpreted.” Photographs seen as discursive objects may provide understanding
of past political and social relations, but we lose any assurance that we can recognize
and intuitively understand their subjects. In short, we risk blindness. I explore these two
fundamentally different strategies for approaching photographs, using the concepts of recognition
and excavation to examine an image made in 1946 by Japanese photographer
Hayashi Tadahiko. Photographs, I argue, expose our dual relationship with the past, both
visceral and cultural.