Photography and Culture

ISSN: 1751-4517 (Print) 1751-4525 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfpc20

Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the

Contemporary Subject: Amelia Jones

Ignaz Cassar

To cite this article: Ignaz Cassar (2009) Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the
Contemporary Subject: Amelia Jones, Photography and Culture, 2:1, 103-106

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/175145209X419453

Published online: 27 Apr 2015.

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Download by: [Purdue University Libraries] Date: 16 March 2016, At: 23:51
 Photography
& Culture
Book Review
Volume 2Issue 1
March 2009 Self/Image:
pp. 103106
DOI Technology,
10.2752/175145209X419453
Reprints available directly
Representation, and
from the publishers
the Contemporary
Photocopying permitted by
licence only Subject
Downloaded by [Purdue University Libraries] at 23:51 16 March 2016

Berg 2009
Amelia Jones
London and New York: Routledge, 2006

Reviewed by Ignaz Cassar

Ignaz Cassar works as an artist and writer, and is a doctoral
candidate at the University of Leeds, England. He has
published on the curatorial politics of contemporary art
(How to Use Parasites, parallax 14:4) and has edited
a special issue of the journal parallax on the concept of
inversion (Inverted Visions, parallax 14:2). His photographic
work has been shown in the solo exhibition Declining
Images at South Square Gallery, Bradford.

The Self, the Slash, the Image

In the title of Amelia Joness recent book Self/Image, we nd
a slash sitting between the self and the image, separating
and binding the two words at the same timeit is the
and/or of the slash that entwines the image and the self.
Taking the title by its word, Jones sets out to explore the
dynamic between the changing nature of technologies of
representation and continually shifting conceptions of the
self as ltered through representation (p. xix) in the context
of largely contemporary art productions and their theories.
She interrogates thereby notions of our self and its body/
mind complex which she sees as inextricably linked with
technologies of representation. By doing so, Jones moves us
right into the productive space of the slash, its position of
and/or offering us always more than just one point. Yet
this is not to say that the slash is a character of vagueness.

Photography & Culture Volume 2Issue 1March 2009, pp. 103106

 104 Book Review
Rather, it is its acute force to insert itself
between our signs with such an exactitude
that it can thereby bind and separate them at
once. The sign of the slash echoes Derridas
diffrance and Jones embraces precisely this
oblique line to offer us an ethics of the
never enough of the image, that is to say,
an image that might not render complete the
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(postmodern) subject in representationan
image that is daring enough to painstakingly
expose a potentially incoherent self, or
indeed engage the spectator productively
through resisting closure in its aesthetic
dimensions.
As such, the slash might also come
to represent the paradox that inevitably
manifests itself in our ongoing attempts to
image our selves and to give our bodily,
desiring selves ultimate shape in the form of
images. Jones argues that while technologies
of visual representation enable us to conrm
the self, this also entails an objectication
of the self so as to prove its existence as a
subject (p. xvii). Jones opens up the space of
this paradox by making explicit the bodies
to which representations of the self so
intuitively resort. Instead of disavowing the
frailty and corporeal temporality of the body
through the very work of representation
so as to thereby ideologically surpass the
limitations of its esh, Jones argues the case
for the body and its gift of being never
enough, that is the tendency of the body
when rendered representationally through
technologies of visual imaging to exceed
oppositional models of signication (p.
18). What is at stake here is not to naively
make a claim for a unifying, stable concept
of the body in our ongoing theorizations
of our changing subjectivities to better
understand them, but to grasp the plurality
Photography & Culture Volume 2Issue 1March 2009, pp. 103106
Ignaz Cassar
of our bodies and thus their irreducible
differences (corporeal, racial, sexual, libidinal,
generational). In addition, it is important
to grasp the historical specicity of our
bodies so as to withstand the idealizing lure
of abstracting models such as Albertian
perspectivalism, which laid the foundations
to an ocular epistemology (p. 4) as it is
still evident in most of our technologies of
representation. Yet, as Jones develops her
argument further, with imaging technologies
reaching into our lives in ever more complex
ways, it is the same technologies that can
also allow us strategies of reaching out to
our bodies, not to thereby suspend in turn
their lived actualities but to immerse our
sense of self in its image. By immersing rather
than distancing ourselves in our self/image,
we begin to lose sight of our bodily selves.
And it is this paradoxical giving ground
of the body, as a signifying, corporeal unity
in representationand through which we
traditionally have hoped to nd our selves
afrmedthat might enable us to actually
see our bodies as well as our selves in a
differing light.
Self/Image tests the ground for this
ethico-political premise by moving us along
the unseating line of the slash to foster
possibilities for employing the image to lose
ones body and/or lose the body in ones
image. That this might, after all, also engender
the possibility of doubt is part of Joness
project to remind the postmodern subjects
(we who have become oh-so-aware of
the fact that everything, including our body,
is collapsible into a commodifying image
in late capitalism) that we can no longer
simply unidirectionally refer to the body as
a reifying guarantor for a concept of the self.
While the corporeal form of the body might
 Ignaz Cassar
provide the much-needed referent for a
self, new technologies render such a body-
as-referent more uncertain. Accordingly, we
cannot rely on this referent to be coincident
with a real or live body that secures a stable,
coherent or recognizable self (p. 21). Rather,
representation points to the impossibility
of the real ever being known except as the
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specic experience (resolutely embodied)
of spaces, languages, images, sounds, smells,
textures, etc.all of which are on a
continuum (p. 85).
Such undertaking cannot leave the
conception and, crucially, the body of the
critic untouched, as Jones demonstrates
in her opening chapter. Expanding on
deconstructive practices and the politically
engaged work of feminist and queer theory,
Jones asserts that a phenomenologically
embodied and thus also libidinally motivated
model of vision cannot only be a conduit
for criticality, but is indeed needed to move
us beyond oppositional stances that identify
swiftly subjects and objects, self and other,
us and them, etc. Instead of maintaining
unequivocal credence in such polar logics
through which the blas Kantian critic
might have found his (theoretical) position
reafrmed, Jones brings into relief the perils
of sustaining a conception of ourselves as
discrete and contained viewing subjects (p.
10) vis--vis the vast techno-cultural and
geopolitical shifts that have occurred over
the last few decades. Instead of remaining
caught in a disembodied mix of Kantian
disinterestedness and Baudrillardian fatigue,
Jones explores ways of allowing desiring
bodies to (re)emerge through new imaging
technologies and through their utilization
in artists self-imaging projects. This is also
reected in the books neat organization,
Photography & Culture Volume 2Issue 1March 2009, pp. 103106
Book Review 105
which invites us to consider Joness own
embodied self. Topical chapters alternate
with short, overtly over-invested meditations
on particular artworks, accommodating and
acknowledging Joness own psychosomatic
investments and projections so as to
remind the reader of the critics own
bodythe contours of its singularity
unavoidably performing a breaking through
universalizing ideals.
Exploring a wide range of bodies of/at
work by art practitioners and cultural
theorists in their attempts to claim and/or
disclaim the body in representation, the
author induces openings for the body as a
productive state of uidity and disorder
(p. 191) against the backdrop of rationalizing
Cartesian thought. Appealing for images
of the body that are immersive rather
than safely contained, bounded, and thus
potentially trapped by an external gaze (p.
11), Jones punctures the smooth surfaces
that are projected by such gazes and the
homogenizing identities that emerge out of
them. In so doing, the books chapters lay
out a conceptual itinerary that guides us
passionately into less chartered realms of
conceptions of the self/image. Loosening up
the grip of perspectival mastering and its
two-dimensional attening, Jones opens out
its ideational screens onto spaces where
living bodies and representing surfaces
(including its theories) become enmeshed.
Investigating the potentials as well as the
risks of such contact points, Jones invites
us onto a journey that is not limiting itself
to conventional forms of ne art but
moves us through a variety of theoretical
and material contexts; we venture into
the complex space that spans across
photographing and photographed subject
 106 Book Review
in the genre of self-portraiture, testing its
dimensions through artists strategic play
with performative excess; we encounter
a self-declared love letter by the author
to the city of Los Angeles that eshes out
an experiential screen of this emblem
of postmodern discourse to map out a
socially more ambiguous understanding of
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its space; nally, Jones puts us in contact with
bodies presented (live or in representation)
by artists such as Pipilotti Rist, Carolee
Schneemann, Bob Flanagan, Mona Hatoum,
and Ron Athey. Indeed, she does this so
much so that we can no longer keep
Photography & Culture Volume 2Issue 1March 2009, pp. 103106
Ignaz Cassar
ourselves fully at bay from their bodily
affects.
Bodies touchingtouching bodies.
Self/Image explores this intertwining but it
does so through imaging technology, not to
subject ourselves to it in blind faith but to
remind ourselves of the slash that continues
to sit between the self and the image so as
to hold open a space for us to see our selves
in a dissimilar light. Self/Image takes up this
challenge, generating an ethically responsible
space that continues opening gaps for the
emergence of differing subjectivities and
bodies as well as their recognition.