This presentation considers the intersecting but differing temporalities brought to bear in the space of the photograph upon its entry into an archive. It can be argued that any document, photographic or otherwise, that enters the topology of the archive is, paradoxically, rendered into obsolescence by that archive and its sedentary drives. Following thinkers of the archive such as Derrida, Foucault, Groys, among others, one of the ethical functions of the archive is to enable differentiation: to do ‘archival work’ is to unlock difference. Yet how is one to think the archival content outside of those moments in which we engage with it deliberately? More specifically, how is one to think the spectatorial relation to images that, assigned to the sequestered space of the archive, remain most of the time without spectators? In thinking the archival mode through the philosophical lens of sublation and its Hegelian precursor of Aufhebung that performs alteration through preservation-as-cancellation, the paper sets out to articulatea phenomenology of the archived photograph as ‘an image of, or in, sublation’. Exploring the fragile dynamics at stake between the archived and its outside, non-archived, the paper emphasizes the critical contradictions inherent in the logics of archivization: seeking to preserve, the archive cannot do so without also engendering another differentiation.

Ignaz Cassar works as a writer and artist. He gained his PhD at the University of Leeds, England. His dissertation, entitled ‘Declining Images’, advanced a critique of the photographic production of visibility by exploring the phenomenology of the photographic image in relation to the spaces and temporalities of photographic production. Wider research interests comprise modern art theory, the historiography of art and photography, lens-based media practice and theory, and psychoanalytic and poststructuralist thought. Currently he has teaching engagements in aesthetics at the University of Leeds and in photographic theory and practice at Nottingham Trent University. He has published in the journals parallax, Photography & Culture, Journal of Visual Arts Practice.

In 2002, the journal October marked its 100th issue with an edition themed explicitly around the outmoded and the obsolete. This brought together existing readings of these ideas, consolidated them and perpetuated them. The central proposition underlying the approach to obsolescence here is that it is a site of resistance. This suggested power to oppose, reveal and disrupt comes predominantly from engagements with Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno. There is also a very strong and overbearing correspondence with the fetishising of failure, and by implication, with a distorted version of utopia as pure failure. These ideas have, for at least the past decade, circulated as a broad and ongoing set of assumptions. I will revisit some of these arguments in order to rethink the terrain, and propose some alternative ways of thinking about art and obsolescence. In particular, I wish to present a speculative theme that I call total compatibility – a fantasy that is perpetually deferred, but which is increasingly becoming a framework in which technologies from different periods coexist. A tension here could be seen between market forces that deliberately defy compatibility and the fueling of desires sold back to us as illusions of complete usability. Negotiations around these gaps and obstructions offer some form of illumination here, as do opportunities to refuse compatibility in favour of other forms of experience. Instead of assuming that obsolescence is a site of resistance, obsolete forms, mediums, techniques and technologies might be seen to offer artists the means to make decisive gestures.

Dan Smith is a writer, editor of the online publication Altertopian, and currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Theory at Chelsea College of Art and Design. He is writing a book on the presence of nineteenth century forms of material culture as active forces in the fabric of the present, to be called Traces of Modernity. He is also working on a book exploring relationships between contemporary art and utopia.