the sophist an the photograph olivier richon

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35 Philosophy of Photography Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Symposium. English language. doi: 10.1386/pop.1.1.35/7 POP 1 (1) pp. 35–40 Intellect Limited 2010 OLIVIER RICHON Royal College of Art, London The Sophist  and the photograph The photograph is praised or denounced for playing with app earances. As a representation and as a form of resemblance, the photographic image is caught within the discourse of mimesis, or at least traces of such a discourse. In this respect, we can read Plato’s sophist having the photograph in mind as a particu- larly troublesome image. Philosophy is here a hunt to track down the sophist. The example of the image is used to get closer to what the sophist does. In the dialogue, he is never present as a speaking subject. He is the absent one made present by the words of Plato’s characters. He never speaks as such, but is spoken in the interchange between ‘the Master’, ‘the Stranger’ and the pupil, Theaetetus. The example of the image is a tool to identify the sophist as an imitator of some kind. The sophist is like the painter: he pretends to know everything and teach everything just as the painter can reproduce anything:  And so we recognize that he who professes to be able by virtue of a single art to make all things will be able by the painter’s art to make imitations which have the same names as the real things, and by showing the pictures at a distance will be able to deceive the duller ones among young children into the belief that he is perfectly able to accomplish in fact whatever he wishes to do. (Plato 1921: 234b) POP 1.1_symp_Richon_035 040.indd 35 POP 1.1_symp_Richon_035-040.indd 35 3/8/10 8:24:50 PM 3/8/10 8:24:50 PM

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Philosophy of Photography, 1 (1). pp. 29-34. ISSN 2040-3682

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    Philosophy of Photography

    Volume 1 Number 1

    2010 Intellect Ltd Symposium. English language. doi: 10.1386/pop.1.1.35/7

    POP 1 (1) pp. 3540 Intellect Limited 2010

    OLIVIER RICHON

    Royal College of Art, London

    The Sophistand the photograph

    The photograph is praised or denounced for playing with appearances. As a representation and as a formof resemblance, the photographic image is caught within the discourse of mimesis, or at least traces ofsuch a discourse. In this respect, we can read Platos sophist having the photograph in mind as a particu-larly troublesome image. Philosophy is here a hunt to track down the sophist. The example of the imageis used to get closer to what the sophist does. In the dialogue, he is never present as a speaking subject.He is the absent one made present by the words of Platos characters. He never speaks as such, but isspoken in the interchange between the Master, the Stranger and the pupil, Theaetetus. The exampleof the image is a tool to identify the sophist as an imitator of some kind. The sophist is like the painter:

    he pretends to know everything and teach everything just as the painter can reproduce anything:

    And so we recognize that he who professes to be able by virtue of a single art to make allthings will be able by the painters art to make imitations which have the same names as thereal things, and by showing the pictures at a distance will be able to deceive the duller onesamong young children into the belief that he is perfectly able to accomplish in fact whateverhe wishes to do.

    (Plato 1921: 234b)

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    Would the truth of the image, like in the story of Zeuxis birds pecking at painted grapes, lie in its abil-ity to deceive? But, we may ask, who is being cheated, who is this painter who wishes to substitute animage for the thing itself? These characters do not solely exist in the metaphysical imagination of theirauthor. They are ironic pictures made of words, examples that enable philosophy to drag painting on

    its own ground on the side of knowledge and truth and away from the art of appearances whichcharacterizes image making (for instance, Lichtenstein 1993). The sophist is hunted with the exampleof the mimetic image. In Platos dialogue, two sorts of imitations are distinguished: likeness making,governed by the principle of resemblance, and fantastic art, where the image is an appearance. Thedistinction between that which resembles and that which appears belongs to a method of division andseparation; it is a strategy which separates the pure from the impure, the model from the copy. InGilles Deleuzes words, it is a dialectic of rivalry (Deleuze 2001) where the division of a genre intoopposite species helps to select the good pretenders. The sophist (the bad pretender) is hunted downby means of this dialectic of conflict. Placed as it were between resemblance and appearance, thesophist is not merely compared with a false copy. By attempting to catch the sophist with the exampleof the image, the Stranger and Theaetetus venture into a dangerous terrain where the very distinctionbetween the model and the copy is undermined: In the cleverest manner he has withdrawn into abaffling classification where it is hard to track him down (Plato 1921: 236d).

    The image resembles its model when the art of likeness making follows the proportions of the orig-inal in length, breadth and depth (Plato 1921: 236d). The image appears without resembling when thelink with its model is absent, and when this absence is dissimulated. The fantastic art implies a perver-sion of the relation between model and copy, as in this instance the image appears but does not resem-ble. With resemblance, a thing resembles the idea of the thing. The idea is the genitor, the father of thething. The image shifts towards the fantastic when it does not pass through the hands of the father.Appearing but not resembling, the image produces an effect of resemblance. It is not an illusion, as illu-sion still relies on the distinction between truth and appearance, but the undermining of such a distinc-tion. Appearance produces an effect of likeness and brings confusion between what is and what is not:

    Stranger: Then what we call a likeness, though not really existing, really does exist?Theaetetus: Not-being does seem to have got into some such entanglement with being, andit is very absurd.

    Stranger: Of course it is absurd. You see, at any rate, how by this interchange of words the many-headed sophist has once more forced us against our will to admit that not-being exists in a way.

    (Plato 1921: 240c)

    ***

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    In Pierre Klossowskis novel, Roberte ce soir,Octave shows a photograph of his wife, Roberte, toAntoine, his nephew:

    Antoine: What an extraordinary scene this young lady

    Octave: whose skirt is starting to burn and who leaps away from the fireplace and into thearms of a gentleman who has rushed up to her rescue and is snatching her burning clothes.

    (Klossowski 1971: 19)

    Antoine recognizes his aunt Roberte and is shocked that his uncle, instead of rescuing her, couldonly think of taking a picture of the scene.

    Octave: I tell you I had my camera out to photograph her giving her speech, and just as I wasready to click the shutter the incident occurred

    Antoine: The accident Uncle Octave.

    Octave: The incident, I tell you.(Klossowski 1971: 20)

    After a long dialogue on the nature of pure spirits, they return to the photograph, at which point thenephew claims that he is less and less able to distinguish between incident and accident.

    Octave: A simple accident you may call it, but something very different is contained in thephotograph. I might add that in other prints from the same negative there is no sign of anyfire: all that remains, but in a much more striking manner, is this extraordinary tangle of armsand legs.

    (Klossowski 1971: 42)

    Is there a resonance between the image in The Sophist and the photograph in Roberte ce soir? Theopposition between what Antoine calls an accident and what Octave names an incident sets intomotion a dialectic between resemblance and appearance. As accident, the photograph is understoodas a good likeness: it is a record of what happened. There is a causal link between the image and itsmodel; fire is understood as naturally causing Robertes skirt to burn. As an incident, which Octaveinsists it is, the image appears but ceases to obey a principle of resemblance. The photograph ceasesto be a good pretender, which simply imitates a reality preceding it. Its truth is nothing other than aneffect of resemblance.

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    In other prints from the same negative, there is no sign of any fire, says Octave (Klossowski1971). Fire is no longer what has caused the clothes to burn. Fire is now a sign, which functions asa mask; it dissimulates this extraordinary tangle of arms and legs. Fire is a rhetorical sign ofambivalence. On one hand it provides a reason for the clothes to be removed and, on the other, it

    acts as a veil for Robertes body. The image as appearance does not simply replace a good resem-blance. It contaminates resemblance; and this is what always already threatens the good copy; thisis what the good mimesis attempts to repress in order to prevent the fantastic art from insinuatingitself everywhere.

    Roberte is in the midst of giving a lecture and Octave produces a dissembling photograph of her.This brings together the image of speech, Roberte lecturing in front of a small audience, and thephotograph as an image that appears but does not resemble, thus producing a rhetorical effect ofresemblance. It is no accident that the image of Roberte is linked to the dissembling image. The pho-tograph produces diverging points of view is it an accident or an incident? It manufactures what isbeing seen rather than faithfully reflecting it. And it is the image of the unfaithfulness of Roberte thatfires the imagination of her husband, Octave, and the confusion of their nephew, Antoine. The pho-tograph forms and deforms its subject. It also forms and deforms the spectator, who is part of this

    apparatus of appearances. As signs, woman, image and sophist belong to a rhetoric of ornament, arhetoric that the lovers of metaphysical truth and defenders of nature consider as fundamentallydeceitful. Pharmacea, the nymph of the cosmetic arts, is in charge of Kosmetike: drugs, powders andpigments; these are the materials for representation, which always already undercut the functioningof the good copy. In this respect, a photograph is always already made up, even if, or especially if, itappears to be just taken.

    The sophist is ultimately tracked down when he can be classified as belonging to the dissemblingimitator. He is a manufacturer of appearances, denounced for simulating truth and dissimulating hislack of knowledge. In other words, he is a mere imitator of the philosopher. And yet, he is also, per-haps, indistinguishable from the philosopher. After all, the Stranger, the philosopher, has to manu-facture the image of the sophist in order to track him down. He is not outside of the mimetic arts and

    immune to their effects. He may end up being deceived and made ridiculous, like the duller onesamong young children (Plato 1921: 236d). As Gilles Deleuze argues, the overturning of Platonismbegins with Plato himself. Parmenides was said to continuously repeat, never let this thought prevail[] that not-being is (Plato 1921: 240c ).

    Perhaps we could say that photographs enable us to think, beyond the Parmenidian prohibition,the possibility that not-being is.

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    Olivier Richon,He tries to take cover in the various sections of the imitative arts, C Type photograph, 1995.

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    References

    Deleuze, Gilles (2001), Plato and the Simulacrum, in The Logic of Sense, London: Athlone.Klossowski, Pierre (1971), Roberte Ce Soir, London: Calders and Boyars.Lichtenstein, Jacqueline (1993), The Eloquence of Colour: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical

    Age, California: University of California Press.Plato (1921), The Sophist, 234b, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard and Heinemann.

    Suggested citation

    Richon, O. (2010), The Sophist and the photograph, Philosophy of Photography1: 1, pp. 3540,doi:10.1386/pop.1.1.35/7

    Contributor details

    Olivier Richon is Professor of Photography at the Royal College of Art, London. His work has beenexhibited internationally since 1980 and is in many public collections, including the Victoria & AlbertMuseum, London; the Muse dart moderne de la ville de Paris; Museum Folkwang, Essen; theNational Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the National Galleryof New South Wales, Australia. Steidl published a monograph of his photographic work, entitledReal Allegories, in 2006. He is represented by Ibid Projects, London.

    Contact: Olivier Richon, Professor of Photography, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, LondonSW7 2EU, UK.

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    http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/pop.1.1.35/7http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/pop.1.1.35/7http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/pop.1.1.35/7http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/pop.1.1.35/7