Emerson's Photographic Thinking

SEAN ROSS MEEHAN

Emerson's Photographic Thinking The fate of my books is like the impression of my face. My acquain

,I tances as long back as I can remember, have always said, "Seems to me you look a little thinner than when I saw you last."

-Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks (1850; II: 214)

MANY ACCOUNTS, INCLUDING HIS OWN, Emerson was By

I'

not a photogenic man. There is a curious and telling exchange found within the celebrated legacy of Emerson's correspondence with Thomas Carlyle that speaks to his apparent photographic misrepresentativeness. At Emerson's request, Carlyle had sent a photographic likeness-"Yes, you shall have that sun-shadow, a Daguerreotype likeness" Carlyle writes him in 1846-which Emerson would receive with great pleasure: "I have what I have wished," Emerson would write back of the photograph's arrival. "I confirm my recollections & make new observations: it is life to life. Thanks to the Sun." Emerson, however, would have trouble returning the favor. He would write to Carlyle, explaining the delay as a problem he was experiencing in having his own likeness taken, "I was in Boston the other day, and went to the best reputed Daguerreotypist, but though I brought home three transcripts of my face, the housemates voted them rueful, supremely ridiculous, I must sit again, or ... I must not sit again, not being of the right complexion which Daguerre & iodine delight in" (Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle 398). After trying and failing yet again, Emerson would send a photographic image whose persistent misrepresentativeness Carlyle would confirm in receiving it. "This Image is altogether unsatisfactory, illusive, and even in some measure tragical to me! First of all, it is a bad Photograph; no eyes discernible, at least one of the eyes not, except in rare favourable lights.... I could not at first, nor can I yet with perfect

Arizona Quarterly Volume 62, Number 2, Summer 2006

Copyright © 2006 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610

28 29 Sean Ross Meehan

Frontispiece portrait from the r903 Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Caption reads: "From daguerreotype in r847, now in the possession of the Carlyle family, England." Courtesy of Hickman-Johnson-Furrow Library, Morningside College.

Emerson's Photographic Thinking

decisiveness, bring out any feature completely recalling to me the old Emerson." Second of all, Carlyle goes on to write, the bad image leaves him with the uncanny feeling of Emerson's death: "seems smiling on me as if in mockery, 'Dost know me friend: I am dead, thou seest, and distant, and forever hidden from thee;-I belong already to the Eternities, and thou recognisest me not!' On the whole, it is the strangest feeling I have" (CEC 464).1

With an eye to this type of exchange, Oliver Wendell Holmes would go on to imagine such photographic reproduction and circulation of likenesses as a new form of friendship. Writing in 1863 in the third of his series of articles on photography, Holmes speculates, "A photographic intimacy between two persons who never saw each other's faces (that is, in Nature's original positive, the principal use of which, after all, is to furnish negatives from which portraits may be taken) is a new form of friendship" ("Doings" IS). The photographic friendship with Carlyle provides a rich example of Emerson's first-hand accounting of that new experience of intimacy through distance and absence that photographic communication would offer Emerson's "ocular" age (journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5: 328). But in the apparent failure of that intimacy-the "illusive" image that fails to represent Emerson to Carlyle familiarly or faithfully-there is the suggestion of a more significant experience of photography that Emerson reflects and meditates upon in his thought and work. Taking up those experiences and engagements of the nineteenth-century's newest representational medium, this essay argues that Emerson's reflections on photography constitute a significant example of early observations of the new medium and its cultural influence. But even more than these cultural reflections, photography in Emerson's writing marks a crucial figure-a medium, so to say-for the recognition of creative genius and its "negatively electric" mode of communication that Emerson will name in "Intellect," "the power of picture or expression" (Essays and Poems 417, 423). Emerson's "picture or expression" in this same essay identifies "the grand strokes of the painter," surely a familiar metaphor in Emerson's visual rhetoric and in Romanticism more broadly. But as we will see when we return to "Intellect" further on, Emerson precedes that passage with a definition of intellectual power and production that turns to the photographic language of image reproduction. Such language unsettles the familiar recognition of the artist metaphor and its tenor of originality-much

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as the new medium was challenged by the older medium of painting in these very terms of original versus mere reproduction. Thus, in his essay on Shakespeare in Representative Men, we will find Emerson tum to the photographic process, in contrast to painting, to celebrate Shakespeare's genius in terms of its reproducible (and thereby representative) originality. In these and other cases, Emerson's photographic thinking illuminates this paradox of unique replication that lies at the heart of his conception of intellect, art, genius, identity, thinking. In Emerson's hands, the emerging idea of photography and its imaging process sheds light on the fate that these convertible terms share with their author and the impression of his face.2

THINKING PHOTOGRAPHY

Emerson's engagement with the newly emerging medium and idea of photography appears foremost in a journal entry from October 1841. Writing within two years of the announcement of its discovery in Europe and subsequent introduction to America, Emerson reflects upon the peculiarity of the already popular experience of photographic portraiture located in its most prominent form throughout the 1840S and '50S, the daguerreotype process. This marvelous passage reads in full:

Were you ever Daguerreotyped, 0 immortal man? And did you look with all vigor at the lens of the camera or rather by the direction of the operator at the brass peg a little below it to give the picture the full benefit of your expanded and flashing eye? And in your zeal not to blur the image, did you keep every finger in its place with such energy that your hands became clenched as for fight or despair, and in your resolution to keep your face still, did you feel every muscle becoming every moment more rigid: the brows contracted into a Tartarean frown, and the eyes fixed as only they are fixed in a fit, in madness, or in death; and when at last you are relieved of your dismal duties, did you find the curtain drawn perfectly, and the coat perfectly, and the hands true, clenched for combat, and the shape of the face and the head? But unhappily the total expression had escaped from the face and you held the portrait of a mask instead of a man. Could you not by grasping it very tight hold the stream of

Emerson's Photographic Thinking 3 1

a river or of a small brook and prevent it from flowing? (JMN 8: 115-16)

Perhaps drawing upon personal experience sitting before the camera, Emerson focuses sharply on the physical discomfort that attends the procedure or "operation" (in the conventional phrase) of daguerreotype portraiture, the "dismal duties" of keeping still-most frequently, being literally fixed into position by a neck brace-that were required by the lengthy exposure time. What is even more exceptional about the passage, however, is the manner in which the physical discomfort of the portrait process collapses with Emerson's, as it were, metaphysical discomfort with the portrait product. The individual is fixed in position before the camera, just as his image is photochemically fixed on the plate; but Emerson seems most unsettled by the implications of the "fiXing" of identity that apparently results in the portrait, the represented pose: "the eyes fixed as only they are fixed in a fit, in madness, or in death." The daguerrean image, on Emerson's view, fails to represent the identity of the sitter accurately, and provides instead of the "total expression" of the man, "the portrait of a mask." This failure may well be the autobiographical point of departure of this passage. Emerson remarked repeatedly in letters of the difficulties he encountered in attempts to get an accurate portrait of himself taken, a problem reiterated, as we have seen, in his photographic correspondence with Carlyle; "on repeated trials of the daguerre process," he would write later in the 1840S, "my friends declared that I was a very bad subject for that style, and that every impression was a painful misrepresentation" (Letters 8:83).

The journal entry is one of several from 1841 in which Emerson, with varying degrees of ambivalence, meditates upon the character of the daguerrean image and the photographic medium's rapid circulation as a representative technology of his age) I would argue that this passage, like other "reflections" on photography in Emerson's writing, is as philosophically reflective as any other passage in Emerson's thought. What initial image of Emerson's philosophical engagement with photography, then, does this meditation give? With this passage in mind, Timothy Sweet concludes, "For Emerson the photographic process is outside nature, producing images that are only poor resemblances" (87). This judgment seems correct when we consider Emerson's understand


ing of the process and course of nature. The final rhetorical question that evokes Heraclitus alludes to that process; the understanding is perhaps most apparent in Emerson's lecture "The Method of Nature," also from 1841. Here, Emerson portrays the course of nature as a "rushing stream" whose only permanence is "a perpetual inchoation," resisting the observation and admiration it, nevertheless, endlessly invites.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it? That rushing stream will not stop to be observed. We can never surprise nature in a comer; never find the end of a thread. . . . The wholeness we admire in the order of the world, is the result of infinite distribution. Its smoothness is the smoothness of the pitch of the cataract. Its permanence is a perpetual inchoation. Every natural fact is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also, and from every emanation is a new emanation. (EP II9)

As in the daguerreotype passage, Emerson associates the attempt to fix the natural facts of such fluctuation and "infinite distribution," by analogy, with madness: "If anything could stand still, it would be crushed and dissipated by the torrent it resisted, and if it were a mind, would be crazed; as insane persons are those who hold fast to one thought, and do not flow with the course of nature" (EP 119). Toward the end of this same essay, Emerson renders explicit the Heraclitean thought that similarly courses through the journal entry on the daguerreotype. "You cannot bathe twice in the same river, said Heraclitus; and I add, a man never sees the same object twice: with his own enlargement the object acquires new aspects" (EP 127).

I tum to this passage from "The Method of Nature" not to imply that Emerson's word "enlargement" is figuratively latent with photography, but rather, to suggest a way that we might, as readers of Emerson's words, enlarge the received view of his engagement with photography. Like the daguerrean image that represents more them one aspect in its view-in fact, is unique as a form of photography precisely in the simultaneous doubleness of its image, its flickering juxtaposition of negative and positive representation-Emerson's journal entry ("Were you ever Daguerreotyped") "acquires new aspects" when read in (or more precisely, read back into) this context of nature's representative, inchoate identity, nature's own flickering juxtapositions. Emerson, in other


words, reflects upon what, from the medium's conception, is thought of as the unique nature of photography, conceptions already, thoroughly conventional. In April 1839, for example, N. P. Willis offered his observations of the new photographic discoveries (naming the inventors]. L. M. Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot) even before he had seen an example. "All nature shall paint herself," he declares, emphasizing the self-representative nature of the invention: "all nature, animate and inanimate, shall be henceforth its own painter, engraver, printer, and publisher" (The Corsair, April 13, 1839; cited in Rudisill 43). The metaphorical title of his article, "The Pencil of Nature," would be recirculated and more famously asserted by Talbot himself in 1844, publishing The Pencil of Nature, the first photographically illustrated book. Daguerre, the other inventor, would propose a similar version of the unique autobiographicity of the medium he gives his name to, declaring in 1839 that "the DAGUERREOTYPE is not merely an instrument which serves to draw Nature; on the contrary it is a chemical and physical process which gives her the power to reproduce herself" ("Daguerreotype" 13)·

The skeptical vision that constitutes Emerson's passage on being daguerreotyped, and sets it apart from the host of commentaries celebrating the perfection of photography's "total expression," indicates that Emerson's difference from such conventional conceptions and circulations of the medium's nature lies in his thinking more critically about the character and identity of the medium of nature. The passage is most frequently cited as evidence of the daguerrean process' rigidity and Emerson's negative reaction to this new mechanical form of self/portrayal, its aberrant location, as Sweet puts it, "outside nature." Bringing out the Heraclitean implications of the passage, however, we can see that Emerson represents the new medium-the passage, after all, is a rhetorical representation of photographic portrayal, not merely an historical reflection-as an analogy for nature's method and "perpetual inchoation." Emerson's passage represents an image of the failure to observe or fix identity in any permanent form, a failure that photography shares with nature. Emerson provides an image for the necessary and natural failure of any portrayal or observation that would claim to be located outside the changing course of nature. "Who could ever analyze it?" Emerson asks of the method of nature, echoing the argument from "Circles" that "around every circle another can be drawn": "There

34 Sean Ross Meehan Emerson's Photographic Thinking 35

are no fixtures in nature.... Permanence is a word of degrees. Every thing is medial" (EP 403-04).

This recognition of the "medial" nature of "every thing" in Nature remains implicit in his own analysis of the daguerreotype's failure to capture and render completely and immediately the subject's identity. The portrait fails to prevent the "total expression" of the face from escaping, stream-like, thus betraying the identity---or what photographic manuals of the age would define as the expressive "character"-of the subject. Here, the impression of Emerson's face (or at least the type of "face" Emerson imagines in this meditation) shares the fate of nature's elusive, physiognomic character. Who could ever recognize its dynamic, circulating emanations completely? 4

These betrayals of the "total expression" of character are thus, paradoxically, indicative of the very self-representative nature of the image that photography offers but also, so Emerson emphasizes, fails to fix. In this curious but crucial sense in which, as Michael Lopez shows in Emerson and Power, Emerson values the "uses of failure," the failed portrait becomes representative of that description of nature that Emerson gives the name "art." In the essay titled "Art," the concluding piece in Essays: First Series (1841), Emerson links the word and larger concept of "portrait" to a favored, suggestive word marking this use-value of failure, "betray." There, the portrayal of original identity is fated to betray the conditions and circumstances that make any representative of nature-by nature-necessarily unoriginal and any portrait "only an imperfect picture or likeness of the aspiring original within" (43 I):

No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share. Though he were never so original, never so willful and fantastic, he cannot wipe out of his work every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew. The very avoidance betrays the usage he avoids.... Shall I now add, that the whole extant product of the plastic arts has herein its highest value, as history; as a stroke drawn in the portrait of that fate ... ? (EP 432)

Emerson's "stroke" draws upon the shared etymology of portrait and betray (trahere: to draw out): such are the "traits" and "traces" of nature, the ongoing history of history itself, that the plastic arts represent

authentically by representing them partially and self-reflexively. That is to say, these fated portraits of every man's context ("age and country") reproduce and draw upon-index-the very partiality and contingency, the circumstantial character of the creation and cultural production ("every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew"), they also represent. In this locating of art's significance in the contingent traces of its production and in its faithfulness to how it represents, rather than in its mimetic faithfulness to what it represents, Emerson anticipates here the revisionist argument that twentieth-century art historian Norman Bryson will make regarding the fundamental "deixis" or material selfreference of painting-"the recognition that painting galvanizes is a production, rather than a perception, of meaning"-that Western art history has tended to de-historicize and efface (xii). In his Vision and Painting Bryson could well have cited Emerson's line, that this very "disavowal of deictic reference" (89) in the conventions of Western painting consistently betrays the usage it avoids.

Emerson's version of deictic reference proposes a similar metonymic working of art, a production that is "never fixed, but always flowing" because it must reproduce a similar character of nature that is "alive, moving, reproductive" (EP 438, 440). At the end of "Art," Emerson indicates that such plastiC arts, "the supplements and continuations of the material creation," would thus include, not exclude as one might think, newer forms of "mechanical" reproduction. Emerson names there, as one example of such a "mechanical" representation of the reproductive art of nature, the railroad. In other places, Emerson adds photography to the list of what he calls "our great mechanical works." 5 The invention that goes unnamed in "Art," and all but named in that essay's picturing of art as reproducing and supplementing "material creation," is the same representative art that Emerson evokes in the journal passage on being daguerreotyped. This mechanical art of supplement and continuation is representative for Emerson, however, in a more foundational and decidedly less conventional sense. Engaging an understanding of all art as contingently and partially representative, and a reproductive art like photography most vividly, Emerson writes less against the medium of daguerrean portraiture in its early days, as much as against its most popular, discursive views. As I have suggested, these portrayals of photography (daguerreotypy specifically) held that the image could provide an unmediated representation of its subject:


those positivist claims of photographic transparency which, particularly when translated into America, informed what Alan Trachtenberg calls the "popular republican ideology of the image" ("Seeing" 469). When applied specifically to the case of the portrait, it was asserted that the image could capture the identity of the man. In an 1840 article Edgar Allan Poe provides a characteristic example of this view of photography's natural vision, suggesting that the daguerreotype offers a "positively perfect mirror" and its image presents "a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented" (38).

From Emerson's point of view, however, such assumptions of natural and "positively perfect" vision, photographic or otherwise, mistake the emanational procession of nature. Nature's method, as Emerson reads it, is already a series of shifting resemblances, fluctuations that identify the very nature and "natural fact" of identity: "from every emanation is a new emanation" (EP 119). Nature for Emerson also (and already) reproduces herself, but consequently, a true picture of that nature---or a picture made by that nature, as Daguerre emphasizes-becomes, as an endless emanation, the portrait of a mask instead of a man. The mask betrays the tendency that constitutes the man's own (and photography's own) metamorphic nature. "We can point nowhere to anything final," Emerson writes of the "rapid metamorphosis" that characterizes the "genius or method of nature": "But tendency appears on all hands" (EP 121). And thus, Emerson adds with regard to any attempt to draw upon that tendency, and to communicate with those hands, "as the power or genius of nature is ecstatic, so must its science or the description of it be" (EP 126). Significantly, Norman Bryson locates in photography a crucial example of this same "tendency" repressed and effaced in the mimetic conventions and representations of art. Contrasting photography with the disavowal of deictic reference he reads in the history of Western painting, Bryson argues: "Here the position of the painting is asymmetrical with that of the photograph, for photography is the product of a chemical process occurring in the same spatial and temporal vicinity as the event it records: the silver crystals react continuously to the luminous field ....." (89). For Bryson, this fundamental metonymy and contingency of photography's "chemical process," the traces of its own "temporality of process," as he calls it, resists the mimetic conventions of Western painting and the effacement of its material, historical traces.6


Emerson's use of the already conventional daguerreotype in his writing, I would argue, foregrounds this asymmetrical character of photography and its potential resistance to such artistic conventions. Indeed, Emerson takes this recognition of photography's critical difference a step further, applying it back to the medium itself. All things are medial and the photographic process only more faithfully represents (and fails to hide) the tendencies of mediation it shares with painting. We need to think of Emerson's unconventional and contradictory usage of photographic representation, his emphasis (beginning in the 1841 journal passage) on the medium's representative failure, in this regard, in line with a larger unconventionality that is the foundation of his thinking and writing. I have in mind that provocational characteristic of Emersonian thought that Stanley Cavell calls "aversive thinking." For Cavell, Emerson's familiar (and much celebrated) contradictions are not philosophical problems or weaknesses of the thought and writing, but marks of the very philosophical character of the writing. Writes Cavell, "Emerson is I believe commonly felt to play fast and loose with something like contradiction in his writing; but I am speaking of a sense in which contradiction, the countering of diction, is the genesis of his writing of philosophy" ("Finding" 81). Thus Emersonian thinking, Cavell elsewhere argues (and in a sense never ceases to argue with regard to Emerson) enacts its aversion to conformity and performs its crucial "transfiguration" of convention at the reflexive level of its own writing. Such transfiguration returns us to the very conditions of our experience or, as Cavell reminds us, the recognition of our "condition," "stipulations or terms under which we can say anything at all to one another" ("Finding" 81). I refer to this transfiguration as crucially reflexive to the extent that the conditions to which Emerson returns us, of course, involve the very conditions (or "traces") of his own production of writing, the history and fate of his own strokes. For Cavell, then, "Emerson's 'Experience' announces and provides the conditions under which an Emerson essay can be experienced-the conditions of its own possibility. Thus to announce and proVide conditions for itself is what makes an essay Emersonian" ("Finding" 103). Or, to return to the conditions of Emerson's "Art," the essay betrays every trace of the thought from which the portrayal develops.

Emerson's 1841 passage on the experience of being daguerreotyped may be a briefer version of this Emersonian essay, but it is similar in


kind. It, too, is a reflection on, and provision of, the "conditions of its own possibility," those conditions of writing and thinking that Emerson provocatively locates in the newer and less familiar representational conditions of the photographic experience. Those photographic conditions are marked in Emerson's passage by his observation of the marks and traces of the temporal process and "operation" by which the daguerrean image is produced. Most vividly, as Emerson suggests, there are the clenched hands and fixed eyes, the rigid posture of the subject, circumstantial indications of what William Crawford calls "photographic syntax"; these are the technological conditions and limitations-most notably the lengthy exposure time required by the types of photochemistry used in these early processes-that inform the resulting image (7). Reading Emerson's reflections on the daguerreotype "mask," Karen Sanchez-Eppler similarly focuses in on the significance of the hands. By way of Cavell, she links this "image of hands vainly clutching at an ungraspable flow" to the confounding condition of experience that Emerson announces in the essay of that name, appealing to a similar image. "I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects," Emerson writes, "which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition." As Sanchez-Eppler correctly suggests, in this light "the daguerreotyped hands clenched in combat or despair gain a new poignancy" (75). Cavell first calls our attention to the philosophical poignancy of the clutching hands in "Experience," as Sancehz-Eppler duly notes, suggesting in his reading of Emerson's essay a "connection between the hand in unhandsome and the impotently clutching fingers" ("Finding" 86). But he might just as well have guided us to the photographic poignancy of Emerson's vainly clenched hands, though to my knowledge he nowhere refers to the 1841 journal passage on the daguerreotype. I am suggesting that Cavell's readings of such provocative images of skepticism and philosophy in Emerson's writing have their implicit counterpart in his readings of the provocative and philosophical "images of skepticism" that photography offers the world. In short, I would argue that "what photography calls thinking," as Cavell puts it in the title of one of these readings, is analogous to the thinking, as we have begun to see, that Emerson gives to-and receives from-photography. The photographic experience achieves its critical significance in revealing, and providing for, the conditions of its own experience as a medium. 7


THE STRANGENESS OF THE DISCOVERY

This revisionary potential of photography, as Emerson reads the medium, appears perhaps no more provocatively than in its first, published form. In his "Introductory Lecture on the Times" given toward the end of 1841, the year in which he first reflects upon the daguerreotype inhis journal, Emerson employs the newly introduced process of daguerreotypy to reflect further upon how his age, its "times," might best be represented within the medium of his words. "And so why not draw for these times a portrait gallery?" Emerson asks:

Let us paint the painters. Whilst the Daguerreotypist, with camera-obscura and silver plate, begins now to traverse the land, let us set up our Camera also, and let the sun paint the people .... Could we indicate the indicators, indicate those who most accurately represent every good and evil tendency of the general mind, in the just order which they take on this canvass of Time; so that all witnesses should recognize a spiritual law, as each well known form flitted for a moment across the wall, we should have a series of sketches which would report to the next ages the color and quality of ours. (EP 156)

The opening rhetorical question and the image of the Daguerreotypist traversing the land link this passage to the journal entry that asks the rhetorical and reflexive question of being daguerreotyped. Emerson once again reacts with concern to the medium that is, not yet two years old, already circulating as the invention of the age.

Emerson re-circulates the language of photography's (presumed) immediacy, its "perfectly positive aspect" as Poe would call it, with the difference he locates in the nature of the medium. This is not just another portrait of the times or "theory of the Age" (a discussion, as Emerson remarks in "Fate," that is itself characteristic of the times and his age of "reflection"); rather, Emerson proposes a portrait of the potential portrayal of the times, how the times, its history and its people, might be represented and reported in relation to how those times already assume and reiterate, as history, a form of representation. Emerson's "Camera" figures, in this regard, as another version of that lesson we find traced in "Art," the lesson that history's accurate portrayal lies in the traces and strokes of its failure to avoid its own fate as a portrait, its own means of


representation. Focusing on that contingent relation between what the times represent and how they are represented, Emerson's "portrait" doubles back on itself, a doubling evident in the phrases "paint the painters" and "indicate the indicators." Such reflexivity is marked as early as the opening rhetorical question: using the conventional metaphors of portraying the times-and already, we see, photography is one of them-Emerson proposes a "portrait gallery," not a portrait of the times per se, but a collection of its portrayals. Emerson's daguerrean "Camera" mediates this double focus on representing the representational (representative) aspects of the times. More than a mere extension of the metaphor of the verbal portrait, this photographic analogy problematizes the very notion that it seems to participate in: the presumption that there can be a representation of the times that stands wholly apart from the conditions of its representation, that can capture its character or "genius" completely.

That presumption of a representation emancipated from its circumstances is itself characteristic of the times, as Emerson suggests in different guises throughout this lecture. This characteristic presumption fails to recognize the mediated lenses through which we know the timesindeed, the mediation that constitutes the times. Emerson makes this clear in the passage that follows upon his taking up of the "Camera": "But we are not permitted to stand as spectators of the pageant which the times exhibit: we are parties also, and have a responsibility which is not to be declined" (EP 157). Since the "pageant which the times exhibit" flow like the method of nature, emanation upon emanation, a portrait of those times can capture its characteristics only as partially as the daguerrean portrait can capture the total expression of a face. To suggest that we always stand doubly as spectator and participant to the exhibition of history is to understand, as with the man and his daguerreotyped counterpart, that we can never hold before us a single, fixed, impartial identity, nor stand in the same river twice. In fact, as Emerson suggests earlier in the lecture, the true portrait of the times that we might report to the next ages would be the glimpsed portrait of a mask: "the Times are the masquerade of the eternities" (EP 153).

Emerson uses the figure of photography to portray this masquerade of the times and the character of its tendencies. This metonymic vision of representativeness, the quality of suggesting truth partially and contiguously, precisely by not representing it wholly, seems at odds with


the conventional, metaphorical view that we have tended to associate with Emerson's notion of the representative. But Emerson's vision runs against the grain of a metaphorical vision of wholeness and closure, of the "representative" as "a fixed and singular exemplar, to the extent that it is itself about, and informed by, the recognition of "vision" as thoroughly suggestive, partial, fundamentally metonymic. The essay, "Intellect" which precedes "Art" in the 1841 First Series, addresses this characteristic (but unconventional) vision of genius by declaring in the opening paragraph, "Its vision is not like the vision of the eye, but is union with the things known" (EP 417). I would argue that the best way to understand the difference that Emerson has in mind, the difference in this "vision" not of the eye but of union with things known that constitutes genius, is to recognize the implications of Emerson's photographic vision in the essay that follows. Emerson goes on to characterize the suggestive partiality of this vision of genius or intellect, what he will describe as its "mainly prospective" character (EP 42 I), by emphasizing the thoroughly receptive nature of all intellection. "Our thinking is a pious reception," Emerson writes: "We do not determine what we will think" (EP 419). Emerson's "reception" suggests that our thinking, and by extension "truth" itself, can never be original or wholly present to us; it must remain, as he will put it, always partially "latent," not to be presented so much as "reported": "All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud" (EP 419).

We can associate the process ofphotography with this reduplicative "unfolding" and development of intellect's "progress" and "method" for two reasons. The first is that Emerson links this secondary reporting or "revelation" or "publication" of thinking's primary reception with what he calls "the power of picture or expression." "To be communicable, it must become picture or sensible object," Emerson writes with regard to the unfolding of our receptive thought." "In common hours," Emerson continues his depiction of this "power of communication" in terms of a picture making process,

we have the same facts as in the uncommon or inspired, but they do not sit for their portraits; they are not detached, but lie in a web. The thought of genius is spontaneous; but the power of picture or expression, in the most enriched and flowing nature, implies a mixture of will, a certain control over the


spontaneous states, without which no production is possible. It is a conversion of all nature into the rhetoric of thought, under the eye of judgment, with a strenuous exercise of choice. (EP 422- 23)

We notice, then, that the pure receptivity that characterizes and even determines "our thinking" is itself further determined by its "conversion" and "production," by the process of its becoming a picture. Intellect's singular power of "expression," also named here "intellect constructive," is decidedly double: spontaneous reception and willful reproduction.

It is in this same light that Emerson figures this prospective "power of picture or expression" in the crucial terms of a photographic impression. The passage from "Intellect" I have in mind reads in full:

If you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay, or hoe com, and then retire within doors, and shut your eyes, and press them with your hand, you shall still see apples hanging in the bright light, with boughs and leaves thereto, or the tasselled grass, or the com-flags, and this for five or six hours afterwards. There lie the impressions on the retentive organ, though you knew it not. So lies the whole series of natural images with which your life has made you acquainted in your memory, though you know it not, and a thrill of passion flashes light on their dark chamber, and the active power seizes instantly the fit image, as the word of its momentary thought. (EP 42 1-22)

Here, the pious reception of thinking becomes an image reproduction. In this elaborate depiction of after-images and latent development, Emerson evokes that kind of defamiliarizing "subjective vision" that Jonathan Crary details in Techniques of the Observer. As Crary argues, this subjective and corporealized vision marks the early nineteenthcentury, discursive origins of modernity and its proliferating techniques of observation, origins he locates in "an uprooting of vision from the stable and fixed relations incarnated in the camera obscura" (14). While Crary understands that photographic techniques playa part in this "new valuation of visual experience," the technique of stereography being his privileged example, he insists that this "uprooting of vision" "occurs in the nineteenth century before the appearance of photography" (14).

Emerson's Photowaphic Thinking

Emerson's tum from the phenomenon of the after-image to a focus on the reproducibility of "natural images" and "impressions"-the power of photochemically developing them in the "dark chamber"-usefully elaborates Crary's thesis.8 Photography's role in this "uprooting of vision" lies not merely in the techniques of the optics and the camera, the instantaneity and immediacy we have long associated with photographic vision. In fact, Emerson understands that photography's "power of communication" lies in the tension between that sense of immediate and transparent vision and the recognition of the latency of that vision which Emerson locates specifically in the process of developing the impression, in the becoming of the picture.

In another journal reflection on photography from 1841, Emerson identifies this process and its latent imaging as the "strangeness of the discovery" repeated in each of its pictures: "The strangeness of the discovery is that Daguerre should have known that a picture was there when he could not see any. When the plate is taken from the camera it appears just as when it was put there-spotless silver; it is then laid over steaming mercury and the picture comes out" UMN 8:139-40). Whether or not Stanley Cavell has Emerson in mind in The World Viewed when he characterizes the "mysteriousness of the photograph" that is the basis of film, Cavell is thinking of the same strangeness located in the photograph's temporal process of exposure and development. Cavell understands "that the mysteriousness of the photograph lies not in the machinery which produces it, but in the unfathomable abyss between what it captures (its subject) and what is captured for us (this fixing of the subjecr), the metaphysical wait between exposure and exhibition ..." (185). This characteristic tension or doubleness of photography's "metaphysical wait" is evident in Emerson's language, particularly in the apparent contradiction asserted between "instantly" and "momentary," between the spontaneous recording of the natural image and its appearance "five or six hours afterwards." Emerson reinforces that the power of the "fit image" lies not in the image as such, but in the power and potential of its thinking or wording that yields each of its momentary appearances-or in the photographic terms evoked here, in the potential of the continuing development and reproduction of the impression.

44 Sean Ross Meehan Emerson's Photo[!laphic Thinking 45

IMPRESSIONABLE MAN

Emerson describes the poet, perhaps the most representative of his figures of genius, in terms of his ability to receive and to mirror in his thought the symbolic nature of the world about him. To cite the "we are symbols, and inhabit symbols" passage from "The Poet," Emerson writes: "He perceives the independence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the acddency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession ... he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis ... uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature" (EP 456). Here, the poet's very identification with nature, one step nearer to things, constitutes the uncanny character of his representative alterity. The poet stands one step nearer to the symbolic nature of things, and through his mirroring of that nature, his symbolic perception and reporting of it, stands as nature's representative cipher. "His own body is a fleeing apparition,-his personality as fugitive as the trope he employs," Emerson writes in the later essay "Poetry and Imagination": "In certain hours we can almost pass our hand through our own body. I think the use or value of poetry to be the suggestion it affords of the flux or fugaciousness of the poet" (Complete Works 8: 21). Thus, paradoxically, the autobiographical value of the poet lies in his ability to reproduce, through his own apparent erasure, not his but nature's autobiography.

Emerson displays this provocative insight remarkably in his portrait of Shakespeare in Representative Men. Midway through this portrayal Emerson addresses the art and expression that locates the nature and "natural history" of Shakespeare's writing: "This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of things into music or verse, makes him the type of the poet, and has added a new problem to metaphysics." Emerson continues: "Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur: he could paint the fine with precision ... without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair point; finished an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the scrutiny of the solar microscope" (EP 723). Shakespeare's ability to mirror nature makes him, as Emerson puts it, "the type of the poet." Emerson locates the

power of the writer's expression not in the ability to imitate or copy nature into writing accurately, but in the potential to represent what is already imagined as nature's writing. Shakespeare's uncanny and inimitable "power of expression" is "like nature's" to the extent that the "minute details" of his picture-poetry enable us to approach nature's own picture-making power. Emerson precedes the 1841 journal passage regarding the "strangeness" of Daguerre's photographic discovery with something of this understanding: "There is this advantage also about the new pictures that whereas in painted miniatures it will not do to hold them near the eye, for then I see the paint and the illusion is at an end, these are like all nature's works, incapable of being seen too near" UMN 8: 139). While this "advantage" seems to register the familiar conventions of photographic precision and realism (Morse, again, referred to the first pictures as "Rembrandt perfected"), Emerson's reflection, as I read it, also suggests that the useful vantage point the photographic picture provides lies in its approach to "nature's works" and in the detailed recognition, the foregrounding, of its "illusion."9

Shakespeare's expression or registration is, therefore, like all nature's works of likeness. Shakespeare draws a mountain with the same detail and analogical reporting that a mountain draws and writes itself. To recall the terms from "Art," Shakespeare reproduces in his beautiful expressions and pictures a nature that is "beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive" (EP 440). If Shakespeare is the "type of the poet," it is because he represents in his writing the impressions-the typing and style-that his poetry receives from, and shares with, the method of nature. To register this double meaning in Emerson's use of the word "type" is to recognize that the representative man is great precisely because he is, to use another of Emerson's pliable words, "impressionable." Emerson will write in "Fate," most famously, of the tendency of life's fundamental "double consciousness," linking it specifically to the character of an impression: "Certain ideas are in the air. We are all impressionable, for we are made of them; all impressionable, but some more than others, and these first express them .... So the great man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man" (EP 791). Shakespeare is one such impressionable man because the figurative type of his poetry registers the latent character and personality of the poet himself: as fugitive as the trope he employs. The other meaning of type operative here, as in generic example, reit


erates the paradox of the representative's original reproducibility. The impressionability that sets Shakespeare apart and that makes his expression unique as a poet also represents the very thing that makes his identity as typical and transferable as an impression, that relates him to all of us. Emerson gestures toward Shakespeare's representative "double consciousness," as with the other figures in Representative Men, as early as the title that announces the essay's dual focus: "Shakspeare; or, The Poet."

We should be careful then, reading Emerson's depiction of Shakespeare's "power of expression," to recognize that what the poet mirrors "without loss or blur" is precisely the loss and blur that constitute his representative identity as a poet. In other words, Shakespeare represents in and through his "pictures" the very nature of representation. His images are mediating images, reflecting back on the means of their picturing and the power of expression they communicate and exemplify. With regard to this crucial reflexivity that Shakespeare would seem to share with Emerson, we might say that Emerson reads Shakespeare's "power of expression" much as Cavell reads the experience of Emerson's essays: announcing and providing for its own conditions.

Emerson provokes this recognition of Shakespeare's exemplary impressionability by turning to the mediating image of photography. 10

"In short," Emerson continues his portrait,

He is the chief example to prove that more or less of production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the power to make one picture. Daguerre learned how to let one flower etch its image on his plate of iodine; and then proceeds at leisure to etch a million. There are always objects; but there was never representation. Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let the world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given for the making of a Shakspeare; but the possibility of the translation of things into song is demonstrated. (EP 72 3)

What possibility of translation, we might also ask, is demonstrated in this-in Emerson's-picture of Shakespeare's example? Emerson's troping of the conventional mirror of nature metaphor, offered in the previous passage, throws that potential into relief. That troping reminds us of the kind of shift from Classical to Romantic analogues of art and mind


that M. H. Abrams outlines in The Mirror and the Lamp: from imitation to expression, from reflection to projection (47-69). Perhaps in line with that analogical shift, Emerson's photographic analogy revises the very painting/mirror metaphor that he earlier offers: Shakespeare's writing perfects nature just as photography (in this case, daguerrean portraiture) perfects painting.

But Emerson's analogical "Daguerre" in this passage just as surely unsettles the conventional status of the Romantic figures of expression and projection that Abrams identifies with the lamp. Shakespeare's daguerrean perfection analogizes the poet's location, as Emerson views it, in natural history; but the emphasis on what Emerson calls "perfect representation" is no Wordsworthian "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," one of Abrams' models (47).11 Instead, the representative nature that Emerson's "Daguerre" imagines is thoroughly visual, of course, and natural, but no less mechanical. The key to Daguerre's photographic representation, as Emerson proposes here, is the power of its reproducibility, a potential suggested specifically by the implication of the image's photochemical recording and development that Daguerre (and photography) discovers: "to let one flower etch its image on his plate of iodine." This "plate of iodine" reminds us that Emerson's "Daguerre" is a figure not for the image formed by the camera, but for the "strangeness of the discovery" Daguerre locates in the process of (latent) image development and reproduction. It is not the picture but the process of picture-making that Emerson figures. In this analogy, Shakespeare is Daguerre to the extent that the inventor represents, and reproduces in his self-registered representations, the reproducibility that is (already) nature's work. Emerson's conflated example of Daguerre's natural/chemical etching-a conflation marked by the ambivalent syntax, let the flower reproduce itself-vividly situates his language in the context of early photographic discourse. To that extent, the language implies a circularity that, if it is basic to photography, is just as crucial to Emerson's conception of greatness. Daguerre discovers (and reproduces) a photography already latent in nature, and thus we might just as well call Daguerre "Shakespeare perfected" since the potential of pictorial representation that Daguerre reveals is-as with Shakespeare-like nature's. Emerson's "Daguerre" tropes upon the conventional mirror figure, a metaphor, as Abrams shows, most frequently applied to Shakespeare; but Emerson's "Shakespeare," whose expression


already reproduces that potential to become as fugitive as a trope, is already a "Daguerre."

Shakespeare is an equally important figure in Carlyle's On Heroes and Hero Worship. But Carlyle's use of the mirror metaphor to express Shakespeare's "power of vision"-"No twisted, poor convex-concave mirror, reflecting all objects with its own convexities and concavities; a perfectly level mirror ..."-further, suggests the difference at issue in Emerson's photographic revisioning of Shakespeare's mirror of nature (146, 148). Most recently, Pamela Schirrneister asserts a crucial difference between Carlyle's heroes and Emerson's representatives, arguing that "even as Emerson evades Carlyle and the entire tradition behind him, his use for the representative moves well beyond the usual notions of imitation or mimesis that attach to representation in an aesthetic or moral sense" (152). Significantly, Schirmeister offers as a suggestive example of Emerson's revision of Carlyle's mimetic conventions the "unlikely comparison" of Shakespeare to Daguerre, of originality to photography.

To read this unlikely and anachronistic reflexivity in Emerson's analogy-Shakespeare is like Daguerre-is to recognize Emerson's underlying conception of the impressionability that links the genius of a Shakespeare with a Daguerre and underwrites the similar "inventions" of a poet and a photographer. This returns us to Emerson's "Fate" and its crucial reading of any "expression" (of character, of the times, of genius) in terms of an impression:

Certain ideas are in the air. We are all impressionable, for we are made of them; all impressionable, but some more that others, and these first express them. This explains the curious contemporaneousness of inventions and discoveries. The truth is in the air, and the most impressionable brain will announce it first, but all will announce it a few minutes later. So women, as most susceptible, are the best index of the coming hour. So the great man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man,---of a fibre irritable and delicate, like iodine to light. (EP 79 I)

If inventions like photography are curiously contemporaneous-many histories list at least three different inventors, Daguerre, Talbot, Niepce-the contemporaneity replicates the fate that makes such


inventions, like women and great men, strangely iterable: "'Tis frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They have all been invented over and over fifty times" (776).12 In the Shakespeare passage, the "curious contemporaneousness" of Emerson's language further marks this impressionability. "Here is perfect representation": it remains suggestively unclear whether this "here" refers to Shakespeare or Daguerre. Once again, for whom is the analogy? Similarly, the referent of the phrase that follows, "now let the world of figures sit for their portraits," could apply to either representative man. And, of course, it could just as well be the "here" of Emerson's portrayal and the doubleimaged "figures" of his own representation: as though Emerson, reading Shakespeare by the (analogical) "mechanical means" of Daguerre, reproduces the "power of picture or expression" of both artists over again.

I use the verb reproduce decidedly, since the simile from "Fate," like iodine to light, returns us to the traits of photochemical development and reproducibility that characterize the true inventiveness of the photographic image. This is the character of photography as a medium of image communication more than conservation, interpretation more than representation. 13 Like great men and women most especially, photographic images are indexes: their representativeness lie in what they receive and reproduce. 14 Emerson's simile for any invention implies, in fact, that Daguerre and other inventors of the medium discover photography by way of a reproductive potential already latent in (its) nature. Shakespeare's greatness, like any other inventor's, and no less Emerson's tracing of it, proceeds along similar, curious lines. Thus the "strangeness" of Daguerre's discovery is also implicated in Emerson's daguerrean analogy. Daguerre attends to his discovery as Shakespeare (or Emerson) attends his writing: he lets photography, or poetry, or biography sit for its portrait and, as he puts it in "Intellect," converts or translates its nature into thought, "without which no production is possible."

Emphasizing the process of photography over the apparently fixed form of its product, Emerson's photographic thinking reiterates his interest in Shakespeare's demonstration of his medium. If the syntactical ambiguity of Emerson's "here" unsettles the clarity of his own analogy of "perfect representation" as a photographic/daguerrean image, so too does it reproduce the very nature of the representation at issue. Here, Emerson's analogy provokes a different, or at least a double reading of what "perfect representation" means. The daguerrean metaphor, suggest

so Sean Ross Meehan

ing the kind of detail and accuracy that made the image seem uncannily real, certainly figures the kind of precision that Emerson locates in the physiognomics ("finishes an eyelash") of Shakespeare's expression. But the daguerrean image's perfection of detail is uncanny in a further, more implicit manner. The very power of that accurate and complete picture lies in its potential, as an image, to be reproduced. The precision of the image is unfixed in the process that enables Daguerre "at leisure to etch a million." This reading goes against the grain of the auratic individuality that is generally associated with the daguerreotype-unlike the photograph, each daguerrean image is unique since there is no separate negative-but it is a conflation that Emerson himself offers and reads in the analogical potential of Daguerre's plate of iodine.l5

CONCLUSION: USE WITH CAUTION

Emerson asserts in "Poetry and Imagination" a remarkable proposition as to the character and use of all thought. "All thinking is analogizing, and it is the use of life to learn metonymy. The endless passing of one element into new forms, the incessant metamorphosis .... The imagination is the reader of these forms" (CW 8: IS). I am not sure that Emerson's readers have taken this lesson in metonymy to heart with regard to Emerson's own method of thinking and imaginative readings of nature's forms.l6 Emerson's photographic thinking offers us a crucial marker of this metonymy and method of his larger thought, particularly his readings of the uses of greatness and representativeness. Toward the end of his third lecture in Representative Men, "Swedenborg; or, The Mystic," Emerson warns his reader to recognize the nature of Swedenborg's mysticism. He cautions us to remember that in reading and quoting from the originality of this thinker, we are reading what is itself already quotation, that we are already reading originality's necessary reproduction. This caveat lector is an appropriate place to end this essay, if only because the (by now) familiar doubleness of the image-another image onto the problem and power of images-recalls us to the strangeness of reading the implications conveyed through photography's representative picture. "These books should be used with caution," he begins:

It is dangerous to sculpture these evanescing images of thought. True in transition, they become false if fixed. It requires, for his

Emerson's Photographic Thinking SI

just apprehension, almost a genius equal to his own. But when his visions become the stereotyped language of multitudes of persons, of all degrees of age and capacity, they are perverted. ... But these pictures are to be held as mystical, that is, as a quite arbitrary and accidental picture of the truth,-not as the truth. Any other symbol would be as good: then this is safely seen. (EP 682)

Swedenborg's symbolic "pictures" are as potentially dangerous as the portrait that would claim to fix the transitional truth of any representative "image" of thought. Emerson's warning, here, thus also doubles back on itself. "These pictures" are also Emerson's, not merely because the syntax of the passage is, once again, ambiguous and "impressionable," but more to the point, Emerson's very concept of the representative or genius and his/its symbolic nature is largely informed by Swedenborg's "doctrine of Representations and Correspondences" (as Emerson cites him in this same essay), his theory of "identity and iteration" readable in nature's "endless picture language" (EP 673, 674). Here, then, is another provocative image of what makes Emerson's conception of genius, and its portrayal in this book, a flickering paradox of its own dis/appearance: the representative language of Swedenborg, one of the origins for the very concept Emerson is in the process of displaying, must be read "as a quite arbitrary and accidental picture of the truth."

Though there is no "Daguerre" in this passage, no explicit analogical thinking of photography as we have found elsewhere, Emerson's visual rhetoric still implicates the method of photography. That such photography remains implicit in Emerson's picturing of Swedenborg's thought should come as no surprise, given the very implication of Swedenborgian thought in the origins ofphotography. As Roaslind Krauss argues in "Tracing Nadar," one of the speculative keystones of early photography, the view of the image's representativeness or the "inherent intelligibility of the photographic trace," develops out of the nineteenth-century "marriage of science and spiritualism" which she explicitly locates in the physiognomic theories of Lavater and the "representative" writings of Swedenborg. 17 Krauss emphasizes the indexical nature of the photographic or "luminous trace": an impression that "can double as both the subject and object of its own recording" (42). Photography thus offers a double image whose representational value as a trace is as much


metonymic as metaphorical. To use Emerson's definition of metonymy, photography works by "using one word or image for another" (Complete Works 12: 300); but that image or symbol, rather than replacing

its object entirely, represents it by indexing its own accidental and fugitive relation to it, its own "magnetic tenaciousness" ("Poetry and Imagination" 27). In other words, such a "fluent symbol" in image or word shares the double consciousness of Daguerre's strange discovery. Photography's metonymic character lies in its ability to reveal-which is to say its inability to conceal-the doings of the medium. For that

reason, photography shares in the fate of Emerson's books and figures so crucially in the thinking within them.

Morningside College

NOTES

For rheir thoughtful response to earlier versions of this essay, the author wishes to thank Eduardo Cadava, Ed Folsom, and Garrett Stewart.

1. This exchange of photographic images between Carlyle and Emerson is also recounted in Banta 97-101.

2. Critical focus on Emerson and photography has been surprisingly limited. Trachtenberg offers the best insight in placing Emerson among a group of "exceptional sitters" (including Whitman and Melville) who engaged with the medium both figuratively and skeptically in their writing ("Likeness as Identity" 191). Drawing upon Trachtenberg's important work in reading the cultural text of photography in mid-nineteenth-century America and the role that writers such as Emerson play in its circulation, I seek in this essay to give a more intensive focus to the role that photography plays in Emerson's text. Interestingly, this recognition of Emerson's philosophical engagement with photography is noted as early as Matthiessen's American Renaissance, in his opening "Note on the Illustrations": Concerned as he was with every possibility of seeing, Emerson was fascinated with the developing art of photography from the time of the invention of the daguerreotype... [conceiVing] of the camera as a powerful symbol for his age's scrutiny of character" (n.p.). Most curiously, Matthiessen does not go on to analyze the work of this "powerful symbol" of photography in Emerson's writing.

3· On the metaphysical implications of this process, I draw in part on Davidson who writes of the "ambivalent metaphysics of the early photograph" (686). One could also read the metaphysics of this reflection on photography by way of Roland Barthes, whom Emerson seems to anticipate uncannily, precisely on the question and implication of photography's uncanniness. Barthes too, most famously among late-twentieth-century readings of the medium and its ontology, associates photography with madness and representational death, writing in Camera Lucida, for example, that the photograph's transformation of subject into object is "the pro


found madness of Photography" and the "experience" of "a micro-version of death": "Death is the eidos ofthat Photograph" (13, 14).

4. Trachtenberg cites this journal passage in "Likeness and Identity," aligning Emerson with those writers who recognize the potential of the daguerrean likeness to "destabilize the idea of self and character" which the same portraits are held to reflect transparently and truthfully. But here, I would also slightly alter Trachtenberg's conclusion with regard to this passage: "For Emerson, in the stillness of the daguerreotype portrait lay deceit." Rather, I would argue that this passage suggests the deceit of stillness, but that for Emerson the daguerrean portrait's failure to capture that stillness also provokes the kind of truthful recognition of the dynamics of identity that Trachtenberg (in the previous passage in this same essay) associates with the "photographic act itself" and its contingencies of expression: "It designates a relation of image to sitter as that of a radically contingent identity, rather than as an emblematic likeness. The frame encloses and makes utterly still; the edge continues and implies motion, and more accurately expresses the photographic act itself" (190).

5. In an 1847 journal passage, for example, Emerson addresses "the new arts" and lists "daguerre, telegraph, and railroad" (jMN 10: 173-74). This inclusion of mechanical invention with the artistic may seem unfamiliar to our common associations of Emersonian aesthetics of transcendence, too long assumed to be antitechnological. However, as Emerson argues at the beginning of "The Method of Nature," "I look on every trace and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each of these works an act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken; that act or step is the spiritual act; all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousand times" (EP

IIS)·

6. In emphasizing what he calls the "sovereign Contingency" of the photograph, Barthes similarly speaks of its "pure deictic language" (Camera Lucida 4-5).

7. I recognize that Cavell's broader interest in cinema does not define his understanding of the "photographic basis" of photography/cinema as explicitly and strictly as I am doing, that is, in terms of the contingencies of the photochemical process of photography informing and unsettling the camera view of the photograph. However, I would argue that Cavell's "revelation of the medium" and his characterization of the strangeness and uncanniness of photographic representation/reproduction, implicitly returns us to the means of photography's difference located in the temporal processes of exposure and development of the image, more or less marked in the image. In The World Viewed, for example, Cavell defines the metaphysical "mysteriousness of the photograph" as a tension between contingency and absoluteness, between the automaticity of the camera (as he emphasizes earlier in the book) and the temporality of the development process: "the mysteriousness of the photograph lies not in the machinery which produces it, but in the unfathomable abyss between what it capture (its subject) and what is captured for us (this fixing of the subject), the metaphysical wait between exposure and exhibition, the


absolute authority or finality of the fixed image" (185). As to links between this "metaphysical wait" of photography and the metaphysical weight of Emersonian skepticism (Cavell's next sentence employs this wonderful pun: "The weight of this point ..."), to my knowledge Cavell makes no explicit reference to Emerson's readings of photography. Though it should be noted that Emerson, along with Thoreau appears in the same essay "What Photography Calls Thinking" as an example of the "nearness" or (Thoreau) "nextness" to the world that binds, for Cavell, the "question of photography" with "the question of skepticism" (2). I might also note that Cavell himself opens the door to linking his readings of Emerson and film, though the implication made in "An Emerson Mood" is left as just that. "I remark a feature of Emerson's writing that associates it in my mind with my involvement in the study of film," he offers there: "His list in 'The American Scholar' of the matters whose 'ultimate reason' he demands of students to know ... is a list epitomizing what we may call the physiognomy of the ordinary, a form of what Kierkegaard calls the perception of the sublime in the everyday. It is a list, made three or four years before Daguerre will exhibit his copper plates in Paris, epitomizing the obsessions of photography" (149-50).

8. While agreeing with Crary's overall thesis that the uprooting of vision is initiated before photographY/I 839, I would also complicate that understanding. I would argue that photography's discursive origins, as Batchen convincingly shows, are also evident before the conventional "appearance of photography" in 1839; those are the discursive origins similarly being worked out, for example, by the natural philosophers like Talbot and Herschel in the same period of Crary's focus (1810-1840 ); more to my point, such discursive formations of photography are located, almost exclusively, in the experiments in photochemistry, not in optics: in the problem not of forming an image with a camera, but in developing and reproducing and fixing the image's photochemical impression.

9· Trachtenberg's reading of Morse's description of the first daguerreotypes, in which he calls them "Rembrandt perfected," offers an understanding of what I mean by this foregrounding of photography's reality of illusion. That is, the images can be viewed as both uncannily real and precise, but also "strange and estranging" given their potential to record movement as "blur or absence." "It could decapitate as easily as depict a full head and body," Trachtenberg writes with regard to Morse's transcription of one of Daguerre's images in which a man's "boots and legs are well defined, but he is without body or head because these were in motion" ("Likeness" 188).

IO. I use the term "mediating image" in the sense Mitchell proposes for an image (verbal or visual) that reflects on its own representational conditions, a construct he variously names a "metapicture," a "hypericon," and borrowing from Plato, a "provocative." Mitchell defines the self-referential nature of the metapicture in terms, I would argue, that link it both to the nature of photography and the philosophical self-reflexivity of Emerson's writing: "They may be primitive in a rather different sense, however, in their function as reflections on the basic nature of pictures, places where pictorial representation displays itself for inspection rather


than effacing itself in the service of transparent representation of something else. Metapictures are pictures that show themselves in order to know themselves: they stage the 'self-knowledge' of pictures" (48).

I I. Though it is not my intention here to contrast Emerson with Abrams' model, one place to locate Emerson's complication of the "lamp" would be in the fact that for Abrams the figurative shift, generally speaking, is from exterior to interior analogues of art, specifically from visual (painting, mirror images) to music. In our case, Emerson tropes the mirror of nature with another visual figure. My emphasis would be on ways in which that photographic figure, understood by Emerson, complicates the painting/imitative analogue by adding an interiority to representation in the form of photography's reproducibility.

12. For a thoughtful reading of the complex history of photography's multiple inventions, see Batchen.

13. Peters elaborates insightfully Emerson's "vision of communication, in any setting, as essentially communication with the dead: never as the touching of consciousness, only as the interpretation of traces" (153). In proposing this view of Emersonian communication as "the anamnestic reading of the traces of the dead by the living," Peters argues that Emerson anticipates "photography and phonography" (154). I would agree with Peters in principle but also argue, of course, that Emerson's anticipation of later versions and developments of photography is also, from the beginning, an explication and understanding of photography.

14. Cavell wonders why Emerson curiously identifies women as, ironically, the "best index" of the greatness/impressionability that informs the "great man." He writes, citing this same passage: "I would like to follow on with Emerson's understanding of the origination of philosophy as a feminine capacity ... the idea that philosophical knowledge is receptive rather than assertive, that it is a matter of leaving a thing as it is rather than taking it as something else." He concludes: "I associate Emerson's invocation of the feminine with a striking remark of Helene Cixous's, in which she declares her belief that while men must rid themselves of pain by mourning their losses, women do not mourn, but bear their pain" ("Emerson's Constitutional" 30). Cavell's more indirect association of Emerson's invocation of the feminine with the mediumistic character of "impressionability" might even be more directly traced out by follOWing upon the photography invoked in the same passage, "like iodine to light." As Gunning shows, nineteenth-century spirit photography reiterates, both in name and in practice, the spiritualist principle of feminine receptivity and negative power: "The medium was passive, but passive in a particularly dynamic way. She was receptive, sensitive, a vehicle-a medium-by which manifestation appeared. All mediums, men or women, had to be, in Spiritualist parlance, feminine or negative (borrowing again from electricity and magnetism, a technical term which also has implications for photography), in order to let the spirit world manifest itself" (52).

15. There is a similar conflation in Holmes' 1859 article "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph." There, the uncanny "perfection" of the photographic image


(generally speaking, as he does) lies not only in its incredible detail and precision, but in the potential of the image to be reproduced. "Theoretically, a perfect photograph is absolutely inexhaustible," Holmes writes of the "optical unconscious" (to use Walter Benjamin's term) that photography reveals: "in a perfect photograph there will be as many beauties lurking, unobserved, as there are flowers that blush unseen in forests and meadows" (744). But that lurking potential, as I read Holmes, is linked further on to the great potential of photography to divorce form from matter: "There is only one coliseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed,-represeI1tatives of billions of pictures" (747-48). I would also suggest that Holmes conflates the daguerrean with the photographic (negative-positive process) precisely in terms of this shared, lurking potential of reproducibility. Thus even though Holmes attempts to distinguish the different forms of photographic representation (daguerreotype, photograph, stereograph) the emphasis ultimately is on photography's potential representativeness, whatever the form, as a reproducible and "cheap and transportable" form; that is, the focus is implicitly on the means of photographic circulation that is latent in every image.

16. In "Art and Criticism," Emerson further defines "metonymy" and identifies it as the "principal power of rhetoric" that all language and thinking seeks to translate and reproduce. Emphasizing metonymy as the figure of and for the flUidity and convertibility of all expression, Emerson writes: "All conversation, as all literature, appears to me the pleasure of rhetoric, or, I may say, of metonymy .... Whatever new object we see, we perceive to be onty a new version of our familiar experience, and we set about translating it at once into our parallel facts. We have hereby our vocabulary" (Collected Works 12: 300). I read this view of metonymy as a kind of self-reflexive figure for the process and experience of language and its translation to be in accord with Hollis's exposition, following Jakobson's theory, that metonymic contiguity is a figure of "dynamic action" while metaphoric similarity is a figure of "static posture" (158).

17. In fact, Krauss reads Swedenborg by way of Emerson, citing his own citations ofSwedenborg from Representative Men. Here, it might be said that such critical circulations of Emerson's representative concept, or his own quotations of it, are peculiarly photographic: or, as Krauss implies, photographic at their very origins.

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