This paper seeks to approach the philosophical questions around digital photography through the lens of ‘speculative realism’. Taking Graham Harman’s reading of Bruno Latour’s Irreductions as a starting point and developments characterised as the “speculative turn” in continental philosophy as a framework, I seek to account for the enfolded position of the digital image and what I will call digital imag(in)ing within and across the distributed “Live Web’.

Discussion of the philosophical position of photography in the digital age has tended to focus around questions of epistemology and ethics. The veracity and status of images when digital information can be reconfigured and repositioned as simulacra as well as the questions of the role of images and imaging in our understanding of suffering and subjectivity after Abu-Ghraib have positioned the digital image-object and imaging practice as the sites of philosophical enquiry.  While there has been discussion of the ontology of the photographic image from Barthes onwards, there has been little concern to widen out the range of photographic objects for ontological consideration. My paper takes a different approach not only in focusing on question of ontology but on ‘bracketing’ the image-object.

It would of course be possible to address the ontology of the photographic image-object from an OOP point of view but this paper looks to expand the range of objects within photography that need to be accounted for to include the software protocols that enable particular images and imaging practices to operate online.

I use Harman’s controversial reading of Latour and his development of what he calls ‘object-oriented philosophy’ to create an initial flat ontology within photography – an ontology that sees not only the image but also the software protocols, the hardware components as well as the network of other material and immaterial actant-objects enfolded with photography such as Apple, Google, IP law, surveillance databases and archives, as worthy of study. Where Harman departs from Latour is in arguing that those object-actants have an ontological status not only in their relations with each other within networks, but also in themselves. Here Harman moves from actor-network theory to ontology, a move that became known as part of the “speculative turn” and the “school” of speculative realism.

Speculative realism is of course not a unified school nor discourse. Harman’s debates with Ray Brassier’s eliminative nihilism, Iain Hamilton Grant’s cyber-vitalism and Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative materialism offer a way into debates about the status of not only the photographic object (the image or the file) but the photography object (the jpeg protocol that encodes light as data, the corporate object that structures the capitalist relations within the imaging industries). While there is much disagreement within this ‘movement’, there is a common rejection of Kant’s Copernican Revolution and an embracing of reality “in itself” – a move that I argue is particularly important when dealing with the (im)material digital. Similarly the movement’s speculative exploration of what Harman calls “weird realism” is important. Speculative realism does not merely expand what we can consider as an object or real (allowing us to look at protocol, software and App stores) but also allows us to deal with the ‘weird’ nature of those photographic objects as simultaneously material and immaterial, real and virtual.

In the 1970s James Burke hosted a TV series, Connections where the audience was taken on a journey from one technological object to another (Burke 1978). The programme started with Burke presenting an unlikely partnership: the manorial system and the carburettor for instance. What could be the connection, the audience was asked and then the story began.

Burke masterfully wove a story of coincidences, eureka moments, unlikely connections and choices. Great men (usually) were brought in alongside ‘ordinary people’ caught up in an object’s life story. By the end of each programme, like a detective in an Agatha Christie story, Burke would lay out the plot, the journey and the connections.

This of course was popular, Reithian television not academic history or Foucauldian/media archaeology. But there are parallels that are instructive for any consideration of ways to approach media objects.

Burke approached his objects in their specificity and locality as well as their network positions. Each ‘invention’ (although everything in Burke’s world is linked, things have their moments of birth) is addressed in relation to it’s cultural, political and economic position. Each is a specific thing but the network connections Burke draws are framed in terms of wider processes. Within Burke’s  “actor network” each object is distinct but also in alliances.

Burke also looks at the unexpected, the discontinuous and the disjunctions. Like a Paul Auster novel, coincidence is never far below the ‘surface’.  What the ‘inventor’ never thought of can be as important or influential as what he did. The unexpected turn of events, fortuitous accident or alliance is enfolded into the story. What may seem a clearcut linear story is actually  presented, and revelled in, as a series of multilayered alliances and translations.

Finally Burke could be seen as a popular forefather of media archaeology insofar as the stories in Connections and his later book The Knowledge Web (2001), are not only authorial tales that parallel those of Crary and Zielinski but also have a bigger project than a scrapbook of wonders. Burke may not reference Foucault, “governmentality” or “biopower”, but structures and relations of power are never far away. Burke’s concept of a technology extended beyond the gadget or even the material. The manorial system of social and economic organisation, the taxonomic relations of the  library, the Medician system of money were ‘technologies’ in a flat ontology of technological object-actants held together by alliance-connections. These technologies of organisation and power were, for Burke, part of the network.

Burke even honed in on the same examples as later new materialist/media archaeologists to develop his argument. Just as Jane Bennett uses a power blackout that affected 50 million people in North America in 2003 as a way of mapping an “agentic assemblage” (2010: 21), so Burke uses a similar event in 1965 as a way of discussing interdependence and network effects (1978: 1-3). Of course Bennett adds actants to the network that the 1970s BBC left out, notably the neo-liberal political and economic framework of the power industries. But while Bennett talks of “assemblages” rather than “connections”, the argument comes from the same basic understanding that we are enfolded in a network of object-actants (best treated through a flat ontology), in specific, local relations and alliances.

• Bennett, J., 2010, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology Of Things, Duke University Press, Durham.
• Burke, J., 2001, The Knowledge Web: From Electronic Agents To Stonehenge And Back, Simon & Schuster, London.
• Burke, J., 1978, Connections, Macmillan, London.

Siegfried Zielinski’s exploration of “hearing and seeing” through an archaeology of scopic and sonic apparatuses (2006) includes the sort of engravings and diagrams of gadgets and devices that pepper Crary and Jay’s work. Here too the apparatuses for investigating seeing and hearing open up questions of subjectivity and biopower that Zielinski argues resonate in contemporary media.

Zielinski (or at least his publisher) explicitly refers to “archaeology” in the subtitle to Deep Time of the Media. Quoting Rudi Visker’s exploration of “anarcahéologie”  as a method that evades the potential of identifying a “standardized object of an original experience” (Visker 1991: 309), Zielinski sees ‘media archaeology’ as a history that “privileges a sense of […] multifarious possibilities” (2006: 27). Here the “neglected constellations” as Timothy Druckery calls it in his Foreword (Zielinski 2006: x) (echoing Crary’s term (2001: 5)), are not illustrations for a ‘history of ideas’ or a ‘cataloguing’ even archiving or creation of the sort of  taxonomies Foucault highlights (1989). The scopic and sonic apparatuses are the material instantiations of media practices and events, effects and affects – in Zielinski’s case conceptions and lived experiences of time. They are the traces of explorations and expeditions undertaken by scientists and artists.

As with Crary and Jay, these devices and apparatuses are intimately tied to people. Even when they are addressed in their material as well as their metaphoric positions, the story of the apparatus is woven into the story of the artist/scientist. This is not to say that Zielinski, let alone Crary and Jay are engaged in some humanist, whig history of progress and the great and the good. Far from it. They are all at pains to locate their ‘inventors’ in cultural, political and economic ‘contexts’ and assemblages. The point is merely to suggest that the technology and the human are enfolded in a way that perhaps foregrounds the way the human object is located in the media assemblage at the expense of how other objects work.

This can be seen in Zielinski’s final chapter where he draws “cartographies”, maps of how seeing and hearing assemblages have connected across the globe and time. Through a series of figures he literally maps out his story. Here geographies are overlaid with biographies. The object-actants on the network map are names: Empedocles, Eisenstein, Lombroso and Bruce Sterling as labels on territories: Messina, Riga, Turin and Texas. The diagrams’ lines link the “people and places”. These lines are deliberately not arrows, not even double-headed arrows. They are more like synaptic connections. Trails and traces of influence, congruence and even coincidence. It is within and across these network connections that the scopic and sonic regimes, and their attendant governmental relations, emerge. But the technological object, the apparatus withdraws from view. For all three the technological object is a way into that wider assemblage rather than the object of investigation itself. There is a certain depth to their ontologies.

• Crary, J., 2001, Suspensions Of Perception : Attention, Spectacle, And Modern Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass..
• Foucault, M., 1989, The Order Of Things: An Archaeology Of The Human Sciences, Routledge, London; New York.
• Visker, R., 1991, Foucaults Anführungszeichen einer Gegenwissenschaft, in F Ewald & B Waldenfels (eds), Spiele der Warheit, Michel Foucaults Denken, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, p. 298f.
• Zielinski, S., 2006, Deep Time Of The Media: Toward An Archaeology Of Hearing And Seeing By Technical Means, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass..