City Things

IN WHAT MAY be considered his most probing examination of history, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes claims that “we have an invincible resistance to believing in the past, in History, except in the form of myth.” ¹ This claim turns out to rest on two unstated assumptions: (1) that seeing is believing, and (2) that certain images can make things perfectly visible as such, even when they are no longer there in the flesh. For, Barthes continues, “[t]he photograph, for the first time, puts an end to this resistance [to history]: henceforth the past is as certain as the present, what we see on paper is as certain as what we touch. It is the advent of the Photograph—and not, as has been said, of the cinema—which divides the history of the world” (CL, pp. 87–88). Where Barthes loves images for their capacity to resurrect the past, Georg Lukács seems to hate them for killing off history. His claim assumes that seeing is believing, but that things obscure the social relations necessary to produce them, especially when those objects appear to be there in the flesh. When images take over the task of representing historical reality, according to Lukács, “genuine historicism—the conception of history as the destiny of th people”—disintegrates: “The more this historicism breaks down, the more everything social appears simply as ‘milieu,’ as picturesque atmosphere or immobile background.” ² Although Lukács approaches the relationship between image and object from the side of literature, and concludes that history vanishes in the presence of too many images, he implies precisely what Barthes declares, namely, that photography divides the history of the world.