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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
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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
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Berg 2009
Amelia Jones
London and New York: Routledge, 2006
Rather, it is its acute force to insert itself of our bodies and thus their irreducible
between our signs with such an exactitude differences (corporeal, racial, sexual, libidinal,
that it can thereby bind and separate them at generational). In addition, it is important
once. The sign of the slash echoes Derridas to grasp the historical specicity of our
diffrance and Jones embraces precisely this bodies so as to withstand the idealizing lure
oblique line to offer us an ethics of the of abstracting models such as Albertian
never enough of the image, that is to say, perspectivalism, which laid the foundations
an image that might not render complete the to an ocular epistemology (p. 4) as it is
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provide the much-needed referent for a which invites us to consider Joness own
self, new technologies render such a body- embodied self. Topical chapters alternate
as-referent more uncertain. Accordingly, we with short, overtly over-invested meditations
cannot rely on this referent to be coincident on particular artworks, accommodating and
with a real or live body that secures a stable, acknowledging Joness own psychosomatic
coherent or recognizable self (p. 21). Rather, investments and projections so as to
representation points to the impossibility remind the reader of the critics own
of the real ever being known except as the bodythe contours of its singularity
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in the genre of self-portraiture, testing its ourselves fully at bay from their bodily
dimensions through artists strategic play affects.
with performative excess; we encounter Bodies touchingtouching bodies.
a self-declared love letter by the author Self/Image explores this intertwining but it
to the city of Los Angeles that eshes out does so through imaging technology, not to
an experiential screen of this emblem subject ourselves to it in blind faith but to
of postmodern discourse to map out a remind ourselves of the slash that continues
socially more ambiguous understanding of to sit between the self and the image so as
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its space; nally, Jones puts us in contact with to hold open a space for us to see our selves
bodies presented (live or in representation) in a dissimilar light. Self/Image takes up this
by artists such as Pipilotti Rist, Carolee challenge, generating an ethically responsible
Schneemann, Bob Flanagan, Mona Hatoum, space that continues opening gaps for the
and Ron Athey. Indeed, she does this so emergence of differing subjectivities and
much so that we can no longer keep bodies as well as their recognition.