Photography reveals vision’s materiality, displacing the spiritual ideal of perception.

Evidence

But I believe that we can now identify Macrae-Gibson’s “intellectual picture” a little more precisely and concretely: it is, I think, simply the photograph itself and photographic representation, the perception by the machine — a formulation meant to be a little stronger than the more acceptable idea of perception mediated by the machine. For bodily perception is already a perception by the physical and organic machine, but we have continued to think of it, over a long tradition, as a matter of consciousness — the mind confronting visible reality or the spiritual body of phenomenology exploring Being itself. But supposing, as Derrida says somewhere, there is no such thing as perception in that sense: supposing that it is already an illusion to imagine ourselves before a building and in the process of grasping its perspectival unities in the form of some glorious image-thing: photography and the various machineries of recording and projecting now suddenly disclose or deconceal the fundamental materiality of that formerly spiritual act of vision. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 315

Categorization

• XREF: Connects Derrida’s denial of pure perception to the film apparatus debate and Lacanian subject construction, echoing post-structuralist critiques found in Bordwell’s film theory. — connects to: The image is constituted by a nihilating structure, not by revived perception — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 230; The fantasy of capturing reality live has driven image-making since Narcissus — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 349; Photography itself actively alters the world it records, not just passively captures it. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 1395