The Role of Indices (in Doane's "The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity"

When reading Mary Ann Doane’s “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” I was intrigued by her concepts of indices and the role that they play in the creation of meaning. The authors that we have read thus far, such as Andre Bazin and Roland Barthes, tend to focus mainly on how indices such as photography and film relate to memory and human beings’ conception of the past in relation to the present. While the medium of photography succeeds in capturing a moment or a place that existed at some point in history, this ability to capture, represent, and reproduce does not make photography inherently meaningful. Indices “are limited to the assurance of an existence; they provide no insight into the nature of their objects; they have no cognitive value, but simply indicate that something is ‘there’” (Doane, 135). It seems to me that by grouping all indices into this category of meaningless, lesser replications of the “real,” Doane suggests (perhaps inadvertently) that the medium of photography itself is not an art form. The artistic meaning derived from a photographic work of art would then depend on the viewer’s individual interpretation and attitude toward the piece; without anybody interpreting the image produced, the photograph remains an object that exists without a specific aim or purpose. This subjective way of looking for meaning in a photograph greatly challenges the intrinsic objectivity of photography described by Bazin in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image: “only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation” (14). Doane suggests that reproducing a replica of an actual object in a photograph is not enough to fully satisfy man’s deep need. Satisfaction is a result of the meaning found within the image, which occurs long after the image has been produced.

Doane, in speaking about Peirce, radicalizes this idea of photography-as-a-model for its object: “For Peirce, the iconicity of the photographic image is reduced by the sign’s overadherence to its object (elsewhere he claims that an icon, in order to resemble its object, must also be noticeably different)” (134). This last bit interests me the most – how is it that in order to resemble something, the icon must be different from this very same thing? Perhaps the reason this line confused me is because I am misunderstanding what Peirce means by “resemble.” Is he referring to the actual likeness of the photograph to the object, or is he looking for some produced meaning that comes as a consequence of the photograph’s difference?