I want to record sections that I cut at the moment, in case I feel they need to be re-inserted in favour of other sections. (Some may already have been re-inserted or moved to different sections)

Two of these cut bits seem particularly relevant and have an impact on my BOW. Points 10 and 11 were really difficult to edit out and as I read through them now, I wonder if there is a way of reintroducing them. Orange needs to go back in some way:

1. ‘Following the uptake of the term ‘intra-action’ by Haraway (2008: 17, with the concept underpinning her account of companion species) the term has obtained widespread currency in perspectives influenced by feminist STS (e.g. Latimer and Miele, 2013; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011). Yet, as Haraway herself suggests, use of Barad’s terminology does not necessarily mean an ethical engagement with the ‘radical change Barad’s analysis demands’ (Hollins, 2015: 162, n.1).
2. ‘Photographers’ practice is hostile to ideology. Ideology ….insist[s] on a single viewpoint thought to be perfect. Flusser 415
3. Faced with Bloomberg and Chanarin’s Shirley Images, appropriated Kodak cards which appear at the beginning of The Image of Whiteness, edited by Daniel C. Blight, demonstrating ‘perfect exposure’ for white skin we should be alarmed. When we witness the capitalised ‘NORMAL’, we should be nothing less than horrified by its ignorance of that global leftover, but evidently much-continued colonialized mind-set. Kember and Zylinska’s urge us to see the ontology of photography as predominantly that of ‘becoming’ – an intra-active process of existence. The Shirley Images, as such, were not merely representative of a racist world, but rather a re-enforcer of it, a definer of ‘normality’. The performative action, not only of taking the image, but of disseminating it as some form of (most likely unconscious) propaganda to potential clients makes Kodak a collaborator of the dominant white, male ideological machine.
   In her essays Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography Azoulay is asking us to make the connections between entangled actions elsewhere in time as well as place.
   While Modernism may have been the ‘relentless pursuit of a better future’ (Harvey, 1990), we should not only ask, better for who, but also look at the entangled production of ideas, goods and apparatus’ which have resulted in the current state of reality. A reality in which people with more melanin in their skin than Shirley get are being banished from their homes. Aside from its likely improbability, representationalism distances us from responsibility and a willingness or even an ability to conceive of alternative realities.
   
   
4. ‘Realness’ we are reminded, does not imply ‘thingness’. (2007: 56)
5. Summary of Chapter 1  Barad asks us to query long-assumed conceptual definitions, referencing quantum-based philosophy which potentially dissolves and continually re-configures past, current and future boundaries. Indeterminism exists at the heart of reality. We are asked to consider how, why and where we cut out the fabric of reality to create it? Gilles Deleuze’s writing similarly rejects traditional cuts that end in the separation of realms, and promotes the idea that everything in reality is in continual flux – the world is always ‘becoming’ – an intra-active dance of Virtual entities emerging and disappearing. And, as with Barad, there is a continual, lively, responsive relationship between discursive and material objects that form our reality. In Barad’s agential realism, meaning arises out of material and discursive practices[1], not as something imposed upon reality but rather from within and of it. It is emergent. For Deleuze too, there is no Utopian plane waiting to be represented. (We might trace this discussion back to Aristotle and the question of Forms – non-earthly perfect things that exist elsewhere, and reality – that which we actually live with).  However, before addressing representationalism, entanglement and diffraction will be introduced.
6. First intro The January 2020 edition of Vogue Italia contained no photography. We were told this temporary rejection of the photograph demonstrated Vogue Italia’s commitment to the environmental movement. Considering the industry’s track record, which includes ominous links to slavery, a difficult relationship with women’s bodies and a cutthroat career path satirically expressed in The Devil Wears Prada (Weisberger, 2003), suggests being suspicious of their motivation is forgivable. The fashion industry is viewed by many as an ecological outlaw: the manufacture of synthetic fabrics which don’t decompose but instead turn to plastic waste along with elaborate advertising shoots requiring sizeable teams of people and objects travelling by air across the planet make it easy to see why. Entanglement between dubious business practices, social injustice, impossibly cheap must-have dresses and glossy magazine pages cannot be denied. But as photographers, we may shudder with alarm to see our medium side-lined, even if for only one issue, but we may also understand Vogue Italia’s intentions and its desire to be, or simply be seen, as responsible and responsive. If nothing else, it makes perfect marketing sense.This essay, however, is not about the fashion industry. Rather, it is about photography’s position in an interconnected world, which no longer seems to contain unrelated, disconnected objects, and instead feels more interrelated and than ever. It’s about the photograph and photography’s position within a contemporary perception of reality.  And as such, we should investigate whether there is something other than ecological virtuousness or best marketing practice underpinning the illustration-only issue of Vogue Italia.
7. Barad and Deleuze each reject notions of dual reality planes, one represented and one waiting be represented (2007: 46); there is no Utopia or Hades, forms vs. reality is a distraction, mind and body are one. Barad condemns the ‘Cartesian habit of mind’ (ibid: 49) which reinforces such dualistic interpretations of reality. Deleuze critiques Plato and his cave. Subject-object distinction is fatally undermined by Bohr’s quantum philosophy, says Barad, as it ‘exposes a fundamental failure of representationalism’ which is explored in more detail in the next section. (2007: ??
   
8. Segmentarity becomes fluidity Chapter 4In The Condition of Post Modernity, David Harvey describes the period after WWI when Modernity often expressed its idealistic hope in ‘machine-living’ (1989: 32). Deleuze and Guattari relied on the collective image of the machine, of segmented parts with interconnected possibilities. Segmentarity is a foreshadowing of intra-activity. In A Thousand Plateaus, they describe two types of segmentarity, one flexible, more readily associated with what they refer to as primitive social groups, a word they are evidently uncomfortable with, indicated by the inclusion of ‘so-called’. The opposite, rigid segmentarity, refers to the structural nature of modern state-societies (2012: 246). They suggest both these and other structural configurations are ‘entangled’ and ‘inseparable’. (ibid: 247)  We people, our machines, our institutions and social structures are interconnected. The pair includes Fernand Léger’s Men in Cities (1919) at the beginning of the section about segmentarity. It has similar structural implications to other cubists, namely Georges Braque whose Violin and Candlestick seemed reminiscent of experiments I made using an old film purchased from eBay and which I have, after further development, made into a fragment of matter and meaning, called When Tom shot Penelope, his perfect wife and their kids in 1971 to include my body of work.Figure 1 Men in the City (1919) is included at the top of Chapter 9, 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity by Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus (2012)Figure 2 ‘When Tom shot Penelope, his perfect wife and their kids in 1971’: made by buying an old film from eBay, taking screenshots, then put through a Processing code to make a montaged moving image of overlaid entanglements which have also been stored as single frames, a selection of which I extracted for the book element of my body of work.

   We might compare the sense of their segmentarity so clearly defined in Cubist painting with the grotesque fluidity evident in Klingemann’s AI renderings, where there are no segmented lines between fragments With that in mind, we may ask, is photography the ultimate expression of a dualistic Western mind-set? Could photography with its ‘negative and positive’ only have emerged from a Cartesian habit of mind, which itself didn’t appear out of a vacuum, but was predicated on hundreds of years of dualistic culture, expressed in Plato’s forms vs. reality – illustrated in his cave, and which only allows for ‘true or false, winner and loser?’ (Baggini, 2018)

   Or is binary code, behind so many photographs today, its ultimate expression: if so, it is ironic that that dualistic code has come at the same time as unprecedented levels of fluidity., only a morass of weirdly formed data, of intra-active malleable elements. Furthermore, his work overrides the photograph’s denial of fluidity and connectivity, and its insistence of fixedness.
   
   Deleuze and Guattari’s response to the dominant ‘belief in ‘linear progress, absolute truths, and rational planning of ideal social orders, under standardised conditions of knowledge and productions’ (Harvey, 1989: 35) seems, understandably, not to fully envisage the utter fluidity of a post digital-explosion world. They are, however, adamant that one form of segmentarity is no better or worse than another (Adkin, 2015: loc 2594) which we would do well to take on board. And while they do of course begin to reference the digitised eye, and their term ‘flow’ appears to precede the fluidity of data: word segmentarity does not convey the sheer level of mutability allowed by coded data.

   Photography, segmentarity – and then the algorithm

   Although The Family of Man exhibition was meant to be a representation of holistic reconstruction and oneness – from a fragmented society to one more interconnected, the photographs maintain and reinforce evident top-down, boundaried, structural division – segmented. Today, in a different context, where some in the West have embarked on a long-overdue examination of the crimes and repercussions of Colonialism, The Family of Man is heavily critiqued for its, at best, unsophisticated, representation of non-western people, and at worst racist, colonial outlook. Although the fluidity we witness today can at times seem impossible, it is worth considering how it might be completely necessary in order to overhaul the categorisations intrinsic in our language, institutions and structural reality.

9. Daniel Palmer ends his essay Camera, Lights, Algorithm by explaining how photography continues to be relevant, however, ‘the traditional single-authored logic has been supplanted’. (2014: 160). For Azoulay (2018) and McGregor (2013), the hero-photographer and the decisive moment is no longer viable as it is based on misconception or been usurped by animated technologies. Intra-active entanglement of time, individuals, and concepts not only better reflect the reality in which we exist, these types of mutable assemblages are the reality in terms of how images are made today, not to mention a more responsible way of understanding events. Alain Jain’s title, ‘Everything Connects to Everything  (2018) sums up this paradigm. When we looked at Edgar Martins and Lisa Barnard, we were exploring artists who have taken this on board, using photography as their medium but refusing its fixity: expressing entanglement within structural design and by overturning traditional conventions (mixing archived and original images, for instance). The projects are dynamic, contextualised, and flexible. They manage to convey a sense of intra-activeness and becoming by utilising technological possibilities in Barnard’s case, such as the website – golddepositary.com – and a rejection of linear coherence in both, rather than giving in to the medium’s tyrannical sense of representationalism. 
   

[1] ‘Discourse is not a synonym for language.²⁴ Discourse does not refer to linguistic or signifying systems, grammars, speech acts, or conversations. To think of discourse as mere spoken or written words forming descriptive statements is to enact the mistake of representationalist thinking. Discourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables what can be said. Discursive practices define what counts as meaningful statements. Statements are not the mere utterances of the originating consciousness of a unified subject; rather, statements and subjects emerge from a field of possibilities.’ (Barad, 2003: 819)