The death of the referential series.

I’d like to follow on from the comment made below on Thierry De Duve’s essay, Time exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox and the inherent qualities of photography that render a photograph troubling. I found De Duve’s analogy of the Freudian theory of the work of mourning in relation to the reading of the photograph to be particularly interesting.

In order to survive the death of someone you love, Freudian theory suggests that you look to replace that which has been lost. This is a gradual process of substitution, a de-cathexis, during which “a certain quantity of libidinal affect must be withdrawn from the object to which it was attached, awaiting to be refastened to a new object.” The loosened affect shifts from the object of affection to “each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object." In so doing, the significance of any object or photograph to illicit a memory becomes hyper-cathected.

De Duve stipulates that this mourning process is true in the semiotic reading of any photograph because of the indexical nature of photography and the fundamental inability to separate the referent of an index from its signifier. Within the semiotic structure of the photograph, the “referential series” plays the part of the object that has been lost whereas the “superficial series” is the hyper-cathected object upon which the displaced affect is superimposed. In this light, – unless I have misunderstood the sentiment of the analogy – it is the de-cathexis, indeed the death, of the referential series that so troubles the viewer.