In this paper I consider the possibility that photography might provide an education from, for and in death. This will involve a necessary dance with clichés – clichés immediately ghoulishly crowd round talk of death: “live every minute” etc. It is perhaps worth noting that to talk about photography is always, in some sense, to talk about clichés – etymologically speaking the word “cliché” dates back to the 19^th century and means: to produce or print in stereotype.

As a prelude to exploring the relationship between education, photography, and death, I consider a famous scene from a film which “appears” to take such connections seriously. The scene in question is from ‘Dead Poet’s Society’ and contains a number of “clichés” (in both senses of the word). ‘Dead Poet’s Society’, is set in 1959 in a fictional boarding school for boys. In the scene in question, a new English teacher, Mr Keating, takes the boys out of the classroom down to the school lobby and begins to teach Robert Herrick’s poem ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’. He notes that the Latin translation of poem’s main sentiment is “Carpe Diem” (or seize the day). Keating informs the boys that soon they will be “food for worms” and encourages them to lean in and look at photographs of long dead alumni in backlit trophy cabinets. Whilst they gaze he whispers carpe diem in a mock-ghostly voice.

I focus in on this scene because it provides one (clichéd?) perspective on the relationship between photography death and education, one I wish to resist. Keating’s ventriloquizing of the photographs, a cliché violently superimposed onto clichés of another sort, is the very thing that blocks the pedgagogical potential present in the experience of being addressed by photographs. For Keating the photographs become vehicles for illustrating the meaning of a poem and, indeed, a wider philosophy that he wishes to convey. In a sense he has seized, where seizing comes close to scrunching, the photographs and encourages the boys to the same.

During the course of the paper I draw upon Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida’s writings on photography to present an alternative view of the relationship between the photograph, death and education. In Camera Lucida (2000), Barthes presents a way of relating to photographs quite at odds with the grasping approach discussed above. He famously employs two terms - studium and punctum. [MI1] The former accounts for our active relationship to what we see and is associated with learning (). The “punctum”, on the other hand, pierces through the studium to wound: “the second element will break (or scan) the stadium. This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the stadium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me” (Barthes, p. 26). The punctum refers to a specific detail in the photograph. There is a subjective dimension to this experience – not everyone experiences the same punctum in the same way or, indeed, in the same photograph. For Derrida, the punctum is equivalent to the spectre, for: “Having to keep what it loses, namely the departed, does not every photograph act in effect through the bereaved experience of such a proper name, through the irresistible singularity of its referent” (Derrida, 2010, p.2-3). For Derrida and Barthes, showing hospitality to what is singular and pierces through, prompts an expressive form of writing. In the paper, I argue that this sort of expressiveness represents a form of subjectification (in Biesta’s sense) overseen by a spectral teacher.   

This is a piece of philosophical research.

Ultimately, I argue that photography provides a spectral form of education through the prompting experience of the punctum, Hospitality to the experience of wounding contributes to the emergence of a voice. In Athens Still Remains (2010), Derrida is haunted by a phrase "Nous nous devons a la mort" or “We owe ourselves to death”. Whilst Derrida refuses to take ownership of this phrase (p. 1) I take it to mean that we owe our "selves" to the dead - that what is singular is somehow in debt to the piercing of the spectre that emerges from the photograph's singularity. This is not to say that submission to the punctum is the only way this can happen, but it is “one” way. Towards the end of the piece I introduce a sceptical note to proceedings. Ranciere sees the discussion of the punctum as some sort of act of atonement where Barthes revisits the sins of the semiologist – one who had tried to “strip the visible world of its glories” and had “transformed its spectacles and pleasures into a great web of symptoms and a seedy exchange of signs” (Ranciere, 2007, p. 5). I defend Barthes against these charges on the grounds that Ranciere misses the enchanted aspects of phenomenological experience. Finally, the lesson/wound of photography is not seize the day every day. Perhaps it is something more like “as you look, and study, something may pierce you. It won’t pierce everyone in the same way. Be hospitable towards it when it seizes you. Rejecting it a la Ranciere may mean that a fright, or a fraid a knight, or a press of ghosts (for there are at least four collective nouns for ghosts) will cluster round you and be harder to stave off than clichés.

Barthes, J. (2000) Camera Lucida Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang Derrida, J. (2010) Athens, Still Remains. New York: Fordham University Press. Derrida, J. (2007) Psyche Inventions of the Other Volume 1. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ranciere, J. The Future of the Image (2007) London: Verso