Image & Text : a Journal for Design

In the same year that the TRC hearings commenced, Jacques Derrida’s Archive fever: a Freudian impression (1996) was translated into English from French.1 The work offers a rich and inclusive analysis which proffers the notion that the relationship between the archive and its contents is fluid – the structure, formulation and functioning of the archive are informed by its contents as well as external bodies of knowledge. To this end, the archive’s objectivity, authorship and authenticity are in doubt. Nearly two decades on, the archive is still a primary source of investigation across various fields of inquiry including archaeology, anthropology, philosophy, literary studies and visual art.

In this article, I use a new materialist methodology to analyse two full-length nude portraits in Ralph Werther’s memoir, The Female–Impersonators (1922). I show how Werther either cooperates with the sexological diagnosis of his “pathological” condition of androgyny or, more provocatively, resists it to make a visual argument for the beauty of his variant body. My theoretical framework presents an alternative to social constructionist assumptions by asserting that agency, as Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, and others have suggested, is distributed across networks of human and nonhuman objects, exerting a mutually constitutive force to change and be changed by contiguous objects. Objects, from this viewpoint, have power beyond what humans assign them. In this light, I argue that Werther is made by the objects that his body engages within and beyond the photographical frame, but, more importantly, that he also exercises his agency on them, via a series of visual relays, in order to maximise their value for his own rhetorical purposes. I conclude that Werther, as an actant in a complex visual negotiation, ultimately persuades us that his body is not to be pitied, but rather is a form to be aspired to, both culturally and aesthetically

In this article, I examine numerous figurative manifestations of “the machine” in Modern times (1936), directed by Charles Chaplin. I focus in particular on the film’s varied expressions of the HUMAN IS A MACHINE conceptual metaphor, tracing its presence from the first quarter of the film, which I label “Life in the factory”, to what follows thereafter in “Life beyond the factory”. The role of this conceptual metaphor in Modern times is identified in r esponse t o Thomas Wartenberg’s (2007) influential analysis, in which he argues that the film provides a valuable illustration of Karl Marx’s theory of worker mechanisation. While not denying the philosophical value that he attributes to Modern times, I question Wartenberg’s assumption that the film illustrates a theory in itself. Instead, I propose that the film mobilises a more general and fundamental concept – the conceptual metaphor that the film and Marx’s philosophy happen to share – and that it is only by means of this underlying concept that Wartenberg can identify Modern times as a cinematic illustration of the philosophical theory. I conclude with a few implications that my analysis and assessment of Wartenberg hold for the broader film as philosophy debate.¹