Excising Chunks: Time Turned In

We say that photography freezes time or capture the moment, as though such a thing were possible. Time that is frozen is no time at all. Photography is actually based on a passage of time, a chunk excised from linear time according to the whim of photons. It has a beginning and an ending and therefore is an event, or a duration, be it twelve minutes or one one-thousandth of a second. At the same time, a photograph is the record not simply of duration but of a duration made to resemble a "moment," a time outside of time, time turned in on itself, because the beginning and end of its duration are collapsed into an object, the photogaph. The final image seems still and is made in that wy to resemble eternity.


Abou Farman -"Clerks of Passage" in The Believer: Issue 58, Nov/Dec 2008. pg. 14

Male Femininity?

If it is possible to speak of “man” with a masculine attribute and to understand that attribute as a happy but accidental feature of that man, then it is also possible to speak of a “man” with a feminine attribute, whatever it is, but to still maintain the integrity of the gender. But once we dispense with the priority of “man” and “woman” as abiding substances, then it is no longer possible to subordinate dissonant gendered features as so many secondary and accidental characteristics of a gender ontology that is fundamental intact. If the notion of an abiding substance is a fictive constructions produced through the compulsory ordering of attributes into coherent gender sequences, then it seems that gender as a substance, the viability of man and woman as nouns, is called into question by the dissonant play of attributes that fail to conform to causal models of intelligibility.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. pg. 33