Barbra Egervary

 Photography and Plasticity: Another Possibility

In both practice and thinking about photography, I have waited for another possibility for the
photograph. I have felt a latency in the photograph which moves through and beyond the frames of
representation and phenomenology. Can there be another possibility for the photograph? Has there
always been, at the heart of the photographic enterprise, the anticipation of its development in the
direction of Catherine Malabou's inductions into plasticity and epigenesis?

After reading Malabou, this thesis will return to a reading of Roland Barthes's punctum, Walter
Benjamin's 'dialectical image', and Jacques Derrida's 'cliches'. Reading them again in the light of the
notion of plasticity, we investigate the latency of temporal differentiations and synchronicities in
photography: the always before and after, in anticipation, as promise, of the photograph. Another
possibility emerges for the photograph, one that may begin to address the always pending questions
of presence and absence, the there-then and here-now of photography, as well as its latent power
of explosion into the yet-to-come. We will follow Malabou's instigation to take the leap into
neurology, taking recent works by Eric Kandel on memory and trauma, and Gerald Edelmann's
search for the location and functioning of consciousness in the brain into our investigations of the
photographic experience. Can the paradigm of a neuronal economy illuminate the reflective
experience of the photograph, as well as its organization within the archive? Is the photograph and
the photographic experience an expression of the plasticity of the brain itself, and what might that
reveal of how we are becoming?

The thesis will seek to show how both the photograph and photographic experience are constantly
engaged in the plastic processes of receiving, retaining, and exploding form; how the endless
possibilities and counter-possibilities of neuronal connection in photography remain indefinitely
metamorphic and mutable. Contrary to readings of the photographic project as purely archival, we
will encounter photography as plastic, and as such, paradigmatic of experience itself as motor
scheme, implicated in its own becoming, revealing the innumerable in us.