ABSTRACT
The photographic pathos or tragedy is determined by the hermeneutic incommensurability of signifier and signified, surface and depth, image and referent. Modernism searches for this coherence in the depths of hidden phantasms; postmodernism manifests this coherence on the very surface of the artwork, produced as the referential purity (emptiness) of the simulacrum. Veronica's shrouds thus present the tragic irony of modernism from which postmodernism arises: the creation of the artwork always entails the "death of the subject". For photography, that popular art, is the universalization of vanitas, where only the sophistry of criticism will discover Utopia. All work on the object depends upon the formal structure of the signifier, and all criticism is but an explicitation of that structure, and of its sociological contextualization. In the postmodern realm, criticism differs from art in its sociological—and not semiological—function, now that photography has assumed the role of criticism.
