is nowhere photographable in a photo’sstudium,
yet thepunctumsupplements and mobilizes every
element of thestudium. The border betweenpunc-
tumandstudiumdeconstructs even as thepunctum
remains heterogeneous to and breaches thestu-
dium’s representational closure. Camera Lucida
marvelously demonstrates how, in representa-
tion’s deconstruction, otherness becomes think-
able as otherness.
Jean Baudrillard: Hyperreality and the Trace
In the late 1960s, influenced by Marx, Baudrillard
published sociological analyses of post-1945 con-
sumer society. Baudrillard’s analyses define ob-
jects, rather than commodities’ producers, as
sociological inquiry’s locus. These objects form a
‘‘system of commodities’’ that is also a ‘‘system of
signs’’ (Gane, Jean Baudrillard, 12). This concern
with ‘‘the object’’ continues in Baudrillard’s later
writings but mutates dramatically in the 1970s as
Baudrillard investigates contemporary societies
characterized by global information technologies,
biological cloning, and ‘‘reality’’ TV shows.
Baudrillard describes pre-modern societies as
having engaged in symbolic exchanges character-
ized by semantic ambivalence and excessive, waste-
ful expenditure. The potlatch ceremony of the
native peoples of North America’s Pacific coast is
an example. In contrast, Baudrillard correlates
modern political economy with a subject-centered
definition of reality as the representable. What one
calls the real, Baudrillard argues, is largely Eur-
opean modernity’s invention. For example, the
gaze of Renaissance perspective ‘‘realized’’ the
object in cleansing it of any symbolic dimension.
Modernity relentlessly pursues the world’s realiza-
tion or objectification. The enchanting birds med-
ieval hunting manuals depict become real in John
James Audubon’s disenchanted ornithological il-
lustrations. While yielding exploitable knowledge,
the real, the objective, is what the subject’s gaze
masters as representable. The real is an object’s
modern representational simulation, but in post-
modern society the simulation of the real virtually
subsumes reality.
In effect, Baudrillard understands the uneasy
feeling that ‘‘if X is not on television X does not
exist’’ as implying the following paradoxical
answer to philosophy’s ‘‘what is being?’’ question:
what is the simulation of the real. Already an
aggressive ‘‘take’’ on the object, reality now col-
lapses into a hyperreality more real than reality.
Digital photographic simulations of Audubon’s
illustrations posted on the World Wide Web are
hyperreal. Digitalization can cleanse marks of dete-
rioration and enhance faded colors to produce a
virtual replica of each illustration more real than
any of them. If science takes the crow’s genome to
encode the crow’s biological reality, the digital
mapping of that genome renders it hyperreal. Mod-
ifying DNA to conform to digitally ‘‘perfected’’
model genomes, biologists may soon clone birds
whose defining antecedents are hyperreal simula-
tions. Even time itself becomes hyperreal. What
cable news shows and high-tech military command
centers call ‘‘real time’’ is a hyperreal co-presence
that simulates a reality one never encounters in
reality: One will never simultaneously be in
Washington D.C., London, and Baghdad.
In simulating objects as more than real ‘‘virtual’’
realities, the hyperreal constitutes an almost ‘‘per-
fect crime.’’ This crime attempts the world’s com-
plete and final realization as a hyperreality free of
(reference to) otherness. Fortunately, the crime is
never perfect: Singular traces of otherness remain.
In the photo, Baudrillard finds a trace of the
object’s singular alterity that marks the disconcert-
ingly smooth and claustrophobic hyperreal.
Photos register the object’s singularity in bypass-
ing the representational subject’s imposition of an
objective meaning. Objects do not pose themselves
to meet the composing eye’s expectations. Photo-
graphy may give one a glimpse of the object when
no one is looking at or objectifying it, suggesting
one’s disappearance as a subject and one’s release
from subjective identity’s boundaries. Rather than
simulating time or movement, the photo, unlike
film, video, or computer animation, allows for an
‘‘objectality’’ distinct from subject-centered ‘‘objec-
tivity.’’ ‘‘Objectality’’ deconstructs the subject/
object binary while seducing us into the vitally illu-
sionary play of a world disillusioned by reality’s
hyperreal simulation.
For Baudrillard, by insisting on an aesthetic
‘‘vision’’ or a moralistic documentary purpose,
photographers retreat from photography’s seduc-
tive potential and impose a signification onto the
photo. Baudrillard is himself a photographer, and
several galleries have exhibited his photos. These
photos tend to be of things or city scenes exhibiting
their ‘‘objectality.’’ For example, Baudrillard’s
Covered by Hoarfrostseries includes color close-
ups of a car coated with hoarfrost and backlit by
the early morning sunlight glowing through the
windshield and front window with tree trunks and
branches in the background. Each photo lingers
over the unique pattern of light and color that the
chaotic variations in the frost’s thickness and tex-
ture produce. With the windshield and windowsDECONSTRUCTION