Bridge No. 1 ~ Winter 2009
A photograph is what it appears to be. Already far from ‘reality’ because of its silence, lack of movement, two-dimensionality and isolation from everything outside the rectangle, it can create another reality, an emotion that did not exist in the ‘true’ situation. It’s the tension between these two realities that lends it strength.
Richard Kalvar
Emmanuel Levinas taught that the existential life, the lived experience, the ontic life, is one sandwiched between two infinities, two timeless infinities in which one is unable to respond to, to take part in the world. The absolute separation between the existential life and the Absolute Otherness of these two infinities is decisive, unconditional, absolute, unknown and unknowable. Between the lived experience and the infinite is an Absolute Exteriority that may never be breached except by death, an exteriority from which there is both no return (upon birth) and a longing to return (anticipation of one’s death). Much ink has been spilled writing about what this Absolute Other must be like, defining the undefinable, assuming the Truth of the unknown and assigning an anthropomorphic ontological existence. Theologians, mystics and philosophers spend much time on the question of being, the ontic question, only to run headlong into brick walls or find themselves inside an inescapable circle. Levinas responds by releasing the ontic question, the question of being in the world, to the domain of the unknowable urging one to adopt the more important question of the ethical response, the ethics before philosophy, the ethics before belief, the ethics that define the existential life rescuing that life from the despair of the I, of the self as existent in a solipsistic nightmare of a horizonless relativistic landscape, the ethics of response-ability for the other; the imperative to act on behalf of the widow, the orphan and the stranger in our midst, to step outside of our ego and act in service for the other even at the peril of the self.
Levinas’ model for the other is the Absolute Other, the unconditional separation of interiority and exteriority that is mitigated by the gaze and the face. The gaze and the face are expressions of welcome, of hospitality initiated by the other and accepted by the self as one gazes back in what Levinas calls the face to face encounter. The argument turns on the understanding that the Absolute Other, the timeless infinities that sandwich the existential life represent an unconditional welcome witnessed by the Absolute Separation from and to the Absolute Other. This understanding leads to the notion that the existential life is lived as if one is a guest in the world and that the Absolute Other remains as a model for the interpersonal response-ability for the other thus allowing the exteriority of the other to be bridged through the social relationship of the face to face, of the gaze toward the other, as response-ability. As one ultimately accepts the Exteriority of the Infinite through the death of being response-able, so one accepts the exteriority of the other through one’s actions, or better, choice of actions, of being response-able for the other as an acceptance of the silent (or overt) hospitality offered by the other.
As a photographer, I think in terms of the briefest segments of time, I believe that the photographic image re-presents the closest trace of the Infinite we are likely to see while actively engaged in the existential life. The existential life is lived in the existential moment, an immeasurably brief instant, an infinitely brief moment that is always already replaced by another existential moment. Left behind is a trace of the moment providing the illusion of temporality, of linear time. While we also have the ability to project into the future, to plan, to set goals, to work toward the execution of our plans, that projection merely provides us with additional illusory evidence of existing in time. Yet all that exists for certain, all we can count on as real, is the existential moment, that instant of existence that is always already gone. The photographic image scratches the surface of exteriority, nearly penetrating the shell, but, in the end, failing to bridge the gap between the existential life and the Absolute Exteriority of the Other. The photograph essentially freezes a moment of temporality (on average I freeze 1/100th of a second), a measurable period of time which, in itself, contains an infinite number of existential moments bounded by a temporal exactness that stops at the gate of exteriority without penetrating, without crossing over into the unknown. The photograph remains a trace of a trace of an origin that long ago was replaced by another origin, a mere rap at the door of the infinitely brief existential moment frozen outside of linear time while existing in linear time. An image detained in two-dimensions begging to be interrogated, to be deconstructed, only to allow for the construction of meaning by an engaged viewer.
The Bridge No. 1 ~ Winter 2009 by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
