Page 148 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

142 CULTURAL STUDIES

But now I know, at the very least, to hold my tongue when my son Oliver
turns his back on me and my camera, dodging the (maternal) frame.

Notes

I am grateful to Jane Blocker for inviting me to present an initial version of this
article at a conference, ‘Seeing through the body’, at Wayne State University,
Detroit, April 1995. I also want to thank Jerry Blow for his generous help with
photography.
1 Sigmund Freud, Minutes From the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 1909, published
as ‘Freud and fetishism: previously unpublished minutes of the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society’, ed. and trans. Louis Rose, Psychoanalytic Quarterly,
LVII, 1988,159. As cited by Emily Apter in ‘Splitting hairs: female fetishism and
postpartum sentimentality in Maupassant’s fiction’, in Feminizing the Fetish:
Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the Century France, Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1991, p. 102.
2 Lynn Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, Paris: Flammarion, 1994, p. 110.
3 Emily Apter’s book, Feminizing the Fetish, has been very influential in my
approach to writing this text.
4 Apter, ‘Splitting hairs’, p. 102.
5 Susan Stewart writes: ‘The term à-bric-à-brac, which we might translate as “by
hook or crook”, implies the process of acquisition and exchange, which is the
(false) labor of the collector.’ (On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the
Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1984, p. 159).
6 James Clifford, ‘On ethnographic allegory’, in Writing and Culture: The Poetics
and Politics of Ethnography, J.Clifford and G.Marcus, editors, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986, p. 106.
7 Clifford, ‘On ethnographic allegory’, p.121. Here, since Clifford is writing about
ethnographic allegories/stories, I am twisting his intended meaning a little.
Clifford’s exact words are, ‘If we are condemned to tell stories we cannot control,
may we not, at least tell stories we believe to be true.’
8 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 1981, p. 63.
9 Ibid., pp. 64–5.
10 Ibid., p. 65.
11 Ibid., p. 81. Barthes is quoting Susan Sontag.
12 Ibid., p. 92.
13 Ibid., p. 94.
14 André Breton, the ‘Pope of surrealism’, ends the most famous of the surrealist
novels, Nadja, with the line, ‘Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all’
(André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Grove Press, 1960, p.
160). Interestingly enough, the novel’s ‘convulsive beauty’ is substantially derived
from the book’s fragmented presentation of photographs that are provocatively, if
only tangentially, related to the text’s already incomprehensible narrative. But the