The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The entities, which seem to serve as elements in thought, are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined’
Albert Einstein (Lyons, 2014:201)
On the surface a photograph is just a pattern of thoughts, defined by language and its creator, translated into and image by the creator and their camera, and then translated back into a spoken language for consumption by the viewers minds. Rather than being able to transcend spoken language it would appear communicating using photograph in a way that is tied to verbalised language and has become exponentially more complicated as extra layers of translation have been introduced. These extra layers invite additional confusion with regard to not just language but semiotics, as in order to be effective they are both reliant on the cultural synergy between the photographer and viewer.
However, I believe that a photograph, particularly portraiture, has the ability to go further and bypass spoken language entirely using a mechanism called limbic resonance.
Defined as:
‘a symphony of mutual exchange and internal adaptation whereby two mammals become attuned to each other’s inner states. It is limbic resonance that makes looking into the face of another emotionally responsive creature a multi-layered experience. Instead of seeing a pair of eyes as two bespeckled buttons, when we look into the ocular portals to a limbic brain our vision goes deep: the sensations multiply, just as two mirrors placed in opposition create a shimmering ricochet of reflections whose depth recede into infinity. Eye contact, although it occurs over a gap of yards, is not a metaphor. When we meet the gaze of another, two nervous systems achieve a palpable and intimate apposition’. (Lewis; Amini; Lannon, 2000:63)
Here the camera acts as one half of a cybernetic cryptograph, it buries the innermost intentions, thoughts and emotions of its human collaborator into a photograph. But there no means to accurately unencode it’s intended message, it can only be experienced and felt, there is no verbal explanation. The viewer is left to lean on innate ability to navigate a multitude of interconnected assumptions, perspectives and definitions of reality in order to get to the bottom of the image.
The work of Lewis, Amini and Lannon that defined limbic resonance, can be found in their book A General Theory of Love (2000). It follows on from Lorenz’s (1935) study of ‘imprinting’ in ducklings and Bowlby’s (1969) work on ‘attachment’, whereby they both developed the belief that the close relationship between mother and infant was related to the physical security of an infant. Limbic resonance was conceived as a theory that went beyond this simplistic view, taking the fundamentals of attachment towards the centre of what it means to be a human being and situating the relationship as essential to successful human interaction and communication later in life. The seat of limbic resonance is found in the brain, which can be divided into 3 major structures (Sinek, 2010). On the outside we have the Neo-Cortex – the Homo Saipan brain, the area where we analyse things in a rational way and where language is understood. The middle two sections predominantly make up the limbic system. Among other vital functions, this arrangement is the source of our feelings, it controls behaviour and decisions and has no capacity for using or understanding language, it is the source of that gut feeling you sometimes get. It is where limbic resonance receives and projects an emotional state. Although empathy is placed at the centre of ‘mammalian development, limbic regulation and social organisation’ (Farrow & Woodruff, 2007:51), it is happiness, fear, sadness, disgust, anger, surprise and all other feelings derived from these six basic sensations (which includes empathy) which stimulate activity in particular areas of the limbic brain.
‘Facial expressions are powerful nonverbal displays of emotion that signal valence information to others and contain information that is vital in the complex social world’ (Fusar-Poli, et al, 2009:419). This has been primarily demonstrated in mother-infant relationships, limbic resonance is so fundamental to life, that a child, nurtured in every other way, will die if it is denied this close relationship with its mother. Therefore, to call limbic resonance an asset of extrasensory perception function would be erroneous. This is not telepathy, but a documented 2nd line sense that unconsciously uses information from our basic senses, to give us the ability to detect and analyse the internal state of other mammals by utilising the potential of complex hormonal relationships. ‘Emotionality is [therefore] the social sense organ of limbic creatures’ (Lewis; Amini; Lannon, 2000:62). It is a communicative function that antedates language by allowing our nervous system to sync with those around us. In Human beings this relationship goes further; what goes on in the limbic mind perceived by the (Neo-Cortex) conscious mind – this is why we can verbalise our emotions to some degree. One the one hand it is physiological; limbic regulation explains (Brehony, 2003:26) why women, who spend a large amount of time in each other’s company, often see that their menstrual cycles synchronise. On the other, it is psychological, it is why we fall in love and feel heart break. Limbic resonance is responsible for ‘the wordless harmony we see everywhere but take for granted… Limbic states can leap between minds, feelings are contagious, while notions are not… That’s why a movie viewed in a theatre of thrilled fans is electrifying, when its living room version disappoints—it’s not the size of the screen or speakers—it’s the crowd that releases storytelling magic, the essential, communal, multiplied wonder ’ (Lewis; Amini; Lannon, 2000:64).
Could limbic resonance open up new thinking regarding the interpretation of a photograph by explaining or contributing to what Roland Barthes (2000:27) describes as the ‘punctum’? If the source of art and therefore photography can be attributed to emotions and the limbic system, is it possible for a photograph to be embedded with information that can communicate directly and unconsciously to another limbic brain? – This mechanism I propose would be akin to the limbic minds of the photographer and the viewer having unintentionally developed their own for of end-to-end encryption that prevents their own consciousness and logic from eavesdropping on what an image is communicating.
In his book Camera Lucida, the French philosopher charts his analysis of why he felt an attraction to certain photographs. He states that ‘this photograph which I pick out and which I love has nothing in common with the shiny point which sways before your eyes and makes your head swim; what it produces in me is the very opposite of hebetude; something more like an internal agitation, an excitement, a certain labor too, the pressure of the unspeakable which wants to be spoken’ (sic,18-19). Barthes sees many photographs as inert, describing them as unary photographs, which he derives only a passing interest. By describing these images as possessing Studium he infers that they act as a docile but culturally contingent, connection to the subject. It allows him to ‘participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings [and], the actions’ (sic, 26) depicted. He understands the photographer’s intentions but can only experience the photograph using language from his own perspective. However, there are occasions when something disturbs the studium; A photograph is afforded a punctum by the person who is serendipitously touched by it. It shoots out of the image ‘like an arrow’, poignantly pricking the viewer with punctuated wounds, stimulating emotions without warning. Experiencing a punctum is a highly personal, but intertextual (Werner, 2004:64) and non-transferable experience that is tied to the passing of time; the ‘that-has-been’ (sic, 96). No prior analysis of the photograph at its source can illicit it, but existing personal memories along with ‘shutting your eyes… to make the image speak in silence’ (sic, 55), can act as catalysts to discovering an equivalence. There is no code to decipher here as the provenance of the prick inflicted by the punctum cannot be named. The punctum can very often be traced to a particular object depicted or feature found in a photograph; it’s subtle power of expansion—beyond the representing of the literal—is provided not by a photographers intended juxtaposition, clever composition or camera trickery, but by the metonymic nature of the said object or feature found within the image.
Barthes recognised that it is possible for a photographer’s emotion to be projected onto the photographs they take, that they could be material incarnations of eidetic images found in the photographer’s mind, and that as well as looking at a photograph, a photograph could look back at him. He also acknowledges that ‘the photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me… a sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze’ (sic, 80-81). Bathes therefore recognises the potential of a relationship, that transcends language, between a subject found in a photograph, the photographer, the photograph and the viewer of the photograph but did not apply this thinking to his mediations on the origins of the punctum. W.J.T Mitchell (2005:127) goes further that Barthes while exploring the historically president of ‘offending images’; he applies independent activity to images that are ‘fetishes, idols and totems’, by describing how they can ‘magically’ communicate with a viewer and that images are ‘not merely a transparent medium for communicating a message but something like an animated, living thing, an object with feelings, intentions, desires, and agency’ and are to be seen as ‘pseudopersons’.
In response I would suggest that the resulting punctum that wounds Barthes, or the apparently unanalysable air of a face he is often faced with in an photograph, is not just the result of his own serendipitous projections onto an image as he proposes, but a consequence of limbic minds meeting and transmitting emotion to one another through a photograph? While accepting Michell’s premise that images appear to take on a life of their own, I reject his notion that images have their own agency as some kind of magical construct, as discussed before they are cybernetic constructions and are never fully independent of the human creator even when the creator has lost control, the genesis cannot be uncoupled. The photograph or image in my interpretation of the punctum is not mono-directional or autonomous but would act as a limbic intermediary. However, it is not to be interpreted as being animistic; it is insentient, merely a cybernetically constructed conduit.
Paul Virilio (1989:8) helps to explain this chemical process by highlighting that those emotions that have been stimulated in the act of perception ‘make themselves felt through chemical, neurological processes in the sense organs and the central nervous system, affecting human reactions and even the perceptual identification and differentiation of objects.’ – A photograph is therefore the site of transmission between bodies that is necessarily articulated by an unseen chemical interaction. A photograph here must be impregnated with a hormonal stimulus, that transcends ekphrasis, tropes, language, semiotics and culture; hidden, save for the primary senses of a receptive and acquiescent subconscious primitive mind that is disposed to feel beyond what can be described and consciously experienced. Creating and viewing photographs are acts of perception; they are biologically stimulating exercises that amend our organic constitution, animating mumchance emotions that could not have been triggered or communicated by any other means.