Developing cliches: Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes at the limits of photographic theory

Developing Cliches: Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes at the Limits of Photographic Theory is a comparative study of the critical writings on photography by Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. Through their respective critical engagements with the phenomenon of photography each author establishes the centrality of visuality for the category of the modern and underscores the centrality of photography for the very category of visuality. Their theorizations of photographic visuality form the basis for a general rethinking of history and historiography in the era of technical reproducibility.;The analytical field open by these authors has so dominated contemporary discussions of photography, that they can be seen as authorizing theoretical cliches within this field; a situation apparent in the current debates addressing the impact of digital technology on more traditional analogue representation. This blindness to the socio-political and historical specificity of the theories of photographic visuality and analogue representation enunciated by Benjamin and Barthes is symptomatic of a failure to take into account the history of the very field of photography. By delineating a history of these theories of photography and their analytical preeminence, this dissertation attempts to provoke a rethinking of the field that retrieves the negative from the commonplaces, that is, that tries to see what more can be said about photography by articulating the system that organizes what remains unspoken in both Barthes and Benjamin.;Chapter One examines current debates concerning the recontextualization of analogue photography. Chapter Two is an explication of Benjamin's critique of the socio-political and historical specificity of photography. Chapter 2 explication of Barthes's early writings on photography from 1951-1973. Chapter Five compares Barthes and Benjamin through an examination of their respective theories of photographic historiography.