Narrative and Thought Thursday November 10, 2005
One of my long-term favourite photographers is Henri Cartier-Bresson, and it was a long time before I understood his intrigue. Understanding his pictures is not simply photographic perception – whatever that is or could be – it requires deeper and more subtle thinking. Cartier-Bresson was always dismissive of technology and technique, and dismissive of the appellation ‘artist’. He preferred to simply ‘take pictures’, relying on the visual power of his work to express what he wanted to say, rather than justify it with aesthetic words or intellectual pretension. In some respects photography for him was an incidental tool, because his real focus was elsewhere. His pictures and his attitude invite viewers to consider wider humanistic values.
Many of his famous pictures have unanswered questions and moods. You know something is happening, but don’t know what it is. They are snapshots in the highest sense according to his famous ‘decisive moment’ aesthetic, abstractions of a situation that precedes or follows that moment, that we never see. Like stills from a cinematic screen, they are moments of narrative and thus affirm the power and importance of narrative in human life. So called post-modern theorists like to suggest that narrative has been deconstructed and is now redundant, or at least reconfigured in terms of contemporary arbitrary relativism. Narrative is what you say is narrative, and you can say anything you like. There are no reference points, we are adrift in a landscape of our own choosing, of our own making. But this is not the meaningless wasteland of Sartrean angst, or the contingent world of Albert Camus; this is the one-layer world of Jean Baudrillard, where meaning is artifice, and reality is the artificial construct of Disney, of cyberspace, of mediated perception.
Interesting as these ideas are, I like to reframe them within a wider and more sensible context. They make sense in their own limited terms, but the philosophical parameters have to be enlarged if we are seeking a more universally coherent outlook on life. Perhaps it’s no accident that Cartier-Bresson visited India, went to Mexico, documenting the people in distant and more primitive places. His camera captured exotic decisive moments where we recognise our own self in the expression of a farmer in a barren land, a child playing in a dusty street, a woman expressing quiet maternal power in a young rural family. Ultimately, those kind of photographs reflect my own humanity. On the surface they are arguably the gaze of a cultural voyeur, but in a deeper sense they are an exploration of anthropological humanism. And what anthropology tells us is there are many different kinds of culture, beyond the technological, intellectual Western form, and all of them demonstrate the vacuity of post-modern idea-making. Try explaining simulation theory to that farmer, or the hierarchy of discourse to that Parisian prostitute. Thus, we see that much contemporary academic theory is little more than rarefied mind games, and a million anthropological photographs debunk it in an implicit instant. And they don’t have to be of distant or exotic places; they can depict any mainstream city street.
Narrative is as important as it has ever been, and its post-modern dismissal is merely – itself – a sophisticated narrative device. Bored with preceding theory, we now theorise the theory which theorises the theory. And all of this is more of the same intellectual narrative, undertaken for its own masturbatory sake, closed off from contradictory information. An academic denial of life, for the sake of intellectual elegance.
We are born, we live, and we die. Thinking makes no difference to that fact, and thinking either investigates that kind of phenomenological and human-condition situation, or it denies it and pretends that thought is a pre-eminent power which changes things by its own operation. Call this the ‘Western narrative’. Contrast it with Oriental thinking – i.e. use the method of comparative anthropology – and you discover that Chinese philosophy, for example, is phenomenologically based and frequently makes use of nature as the starting point for philosophical examination. What can we extrapolate from what we see around us; is not the passing of the seasons, the respective energies of rock, air, fire and water a matter of supreme philosophical interest?
Ultimately, we may find that all narrative is illusory because there is no pattern which orders our living, because living is itself arbitrary and contingent. But at that philosophical juncture, we can conclude it therefore makes no difference what we say and may as well invent ideas for rarefied amusement, or we can conclude that we have an intriguing situation based on the external universe, on the one hand, and our thinking about it, on the other, and there’s an interesting relationship there. And because it’s a universe where we are born, live and die – the ultimate philosophical ‘facts’ – then if you ignore this you are just creating castles in the air.
The older narratives are redundant and useless; no one is interested any more in the traditions of authority and cultural deference. It’s all been deconstructed, analysed in terms of power relations and ideological interest. Identity politics is the new politics, as grey (blue, green, whatever) is the new black. But always, always, at the heart and underneath all this to-ing and fro-ing and relativity and reconfiguration and intellectual gaming, is the fundamental fact of thought – that it is thought, nothing more, and has to be seen as such.
