regulation of primal instincts.17 Such theories prove themselves inadequate here. They deny agency to the subjects of these portraits as spectators affirming and celebrating such rituals as instances of social cohesion and communality. By contrast, I would like to suggest that by displaying these portraits in their many responses to the spectacle in a polyptych form Masi enacts the kind of shift of scopophilic engagement from the singularity of the event, as the focus for vision, to the plurality of the spectators and their multiple vantage points that parallels Kaja Silverman’s re-reading of Plato’s cave.18

World Spectators is an attempt to posit a form of spectatorship, a kind of looking that is enabling and productive, that can be affirmative and not annihilating. The complex nature of Silverman’s argument cannot be analysed at length nor is it entirely suited to a discussion of specific examples of the visual.19 It attempts to wrest poststructuralist accounts of subjectivity from a dominantly logocentric reading to insist on the visual nature of our engagement with others as beings-in-the-world. Silverman’s project is at base an ethical attempt to conceptualise love for the other, in its widest sense; not as a threatening presence but as a being that conditions and activates our sense of ourselves. This reciprocity is based on a libidinal look that circulates between beings as a multiplicity of visual exchanges in a manner that resembles Merleau-Ponty’s embodied subject. Silverman explicitly ties it to Freud’s writings on the pleasure principle to indicate its psychic as well as phenomenal nature. If one views the play of light in Masi’s photographs as a metaphor for a libidinal force that is energising and life affirming we can begin to find certain connections with Silverman’s project.

In this instance portraiture is of crucial importance because our innate fascination with the human face is only enhanced by photography. The attention to detail and the glow that emanates from a black and white silverprint offers a temporal gratification of scopo-philia, the love or pleasure of looking, by harnessing ‘affect’, a flow of emotional energy that circulates between our conscious and unconscious worlds. Affect typically manifests itself in the metaphorical associations we make between colours or musical tones with moods and states of mind and their resonance with past memories. It is therefore fundamental to the bonding of emotional ties between people in its circulation of collective associations between symbolic forms and states of mind and by extension the emergence of collective memories. The face becomes all the more a lure for the spectator when the warmth of skin, rendered almost iridescent in a silver print allows such an extent of visual mastery as to arouse in the spectator the

17 Cf. Christian Metz in “Photography and Fetish” (1984) in Liz Wells (ed.), The Photography Reader, Routledge, 2003, pp. 138-145. Barthes’s phenomenological study also places emphasis on the notion of the ‘that-has-been’ as a condition of death in which the motion of taking a photograph is described as ‘shock’: Camera Lucida, Hill & Wang, New York, 1981, pp. 76-78. Hal Foster develops Barthes’s latent Lacanian allusions to trauma in relation to this theory in his Return of the Real, MIT Press, 1993; the negative view of visual pleasure is wide spread but particularly influential in Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Visual and other pleasures, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1989, pp. 14-26.

18 Silverman emphasises that it is not totality or a fantasy of it that is at stake here but rather a affirmation of being: “What is crucial, rather, is that each of us comes to understand our look in its partialness”. World Spectators, op. cit., p. 26.

19 Silverman explained the absence of actual examples of art and film in World Spectators as a realisation that no one specific example could credibly bear the burden of a philosophical/psychoanalytic account of spectatorship in a recent talk entitled Cure by Love, delivered at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, 21st May 2004.