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Mark Prince argues that in our social media saturated culture, to photograph or film something has come to seem as not only evidence of having seen it, but also as a substitute for that same experience, as if one could not have occurred without the other.
How literally should pictures be taken? If this is likely to be construed as a question about the evolving ability of images to deceive us - that is, to be taken more seriously than they warrant - it may also refer to a tendency not to give their figuration its due, which is to not take them seriously enough. In defining fiction as language "used not seriously", JL Austin - in his early -1950s lectures "How To Do Things With Words' - may appear to have been derogating art, but he could as Well have been providing a measure by which to protect it from being instrumentalised, in a spirit similar to WH Auden's line "For poetry makes nothing happen', which, I would argue, is a definition of artistic freedom, rather than a hobbling of it by resigning its powers. If, as Austin insisted, language used for artistic purposes is effectively 'hollow or void' - its instrumental potential neutralised by remaining within the bounds of artifice or figuration - how literally can artistic citation be taken? Bear in mind that misquotation may be among the forms that writerly authority takes when making over the world to how an author sees it. Would we be succumbing to contradiction if, despite concurring with Austin, we were to ask whether 'quoting' a photograph - as Sherrie Levine has done - could be analogous to what Austin calls a performative utterance 'given in bad faith', in that by exploiting the interchangeability of its form, the quotation so plausibly appears to be something it is not?
"Performative", here, defines forms of speech that 'do' as well as 'say' something; language that constitutes an action for which the speaker may be held responsible, rather than merely a description, which may be either true or false. Austin's work has been cited to argue that pornographic images should be considered performative, in that - according to Judith Butler - 'they do not state a point of...