photography

[Tore Rye Andersen]

John Bailey wrote:

>V. very literally turns herself into an object.
>
>Profane and SHROUD:
>
>"What do you mean, we'll be like you... some day? You mean dead?"
>Am I dead? If I am then that's what I mean.
>"If you aren't, then what are you?"
>Nearly what you are. None of you have very far to go.
>
>I see P's first novel playing with the idea that the project of modernity 
>(or maybe just the 20th C) doesn't just require humans to treat one another 
>as objects, it also needs humans to learn to see themselves as objects, to 
>sacrifice their subjectivity. His novels play with the pleasures to be 
>found in giving up agency, while also reminding us of the losses this 
>entails.
>
>I can see photography working with this angle - another aid in learning to 
>see yourself from the outside, as a thing, the self-as-other.

That's a great connection. Interestingly, the last of Stencil's eight 
impersonations in chapter 3 is as an immobile camera eye that neutrally (and 
without sound) registers the action (which incidentally has Porpentine 
turning from a living subject into a dead object: "Vision must be the last 
to go. There must also be a nearly imperceptible line between an eye that 
reflects and an eye that receives" (94)).
Stencil's impersonations, his "forcible dislocation of personality", are 
certainly also a way of "giving up agency", as you put it, and this 
sacrifice of subjectivity reaches its natural culmination (nadir?) as 
Stencil actually impersonates an object (as opposed to his seven previous 
impersonations of the "natives" of Baedeker Land who are only objects - 
"train's hardware" (78) - as far as the tourists are concerned, but whose 
rich subjectivity is shown to us through Stencil's impersonations).

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