사라지는 자본과 아파니시스: 재커리 폼왈트의 두 영상, <자본의 자리>와 <모래 위의 임금>

Abstract

This study reflects on the issues related to the movement of capital and the formal aspects of art and cinema that Zachary Formwalt has persistently explored, through his two works In Place of Capital, and Wages on the Sand. In his work, Formwalt overlays the disappearance of photography in early photographic practices with the disappearance of capital within the aesthetic dimension of art. These disappearances represented by Formwalt reveal processes such as “aphanisis”—the disappearance of the subject in the chain of signifiers—and issues of jouissance related to the capitalist discourse in Lacan’s theory of discourse. Formwalt implies mechanisms of subject performativity, hinting at the photographic agent and enunciative operations of a subject that slips beneath typically invisible enunciations. In particular, in Wages on the Sand, this operative image appears as an inverted image, similar to a photogram that does not manifest on the screen but exists only in a latent state—comparable to the “blind spot” of the visual field. However, as an operative image, the photographic agent—like the subject of enunciation who slips beneath signifiers and is never fully represented by any one of them, always leaving a remainder—cannot be structurally visualized. Nevertheless, the “photographic agency,” inherently invisible and existing only in a latent state, functions as a fundamental mechanism that renders something visible and dynamic. Therefore, the representational method presented in Formwalt’s films can be considered a classical response to the pessimistic reality brought about by the operational image of cinema, which acts at a distance.