In thinking about my own work, I have been looking at my friend Jordan Card's extensive Internet interventions. One of her fairly recent projects, she has been compiling synopses of Frasier episodes in a blog called What's Goin' On With Frasier? In her most recent meditation on the series, she responds to Lifetime Television's airing of the first season in their 12 AM timeslot.
"It's amazing in that I have never realized how much Frasier changed over the
years. Some real doozies that were knocked in my direction were Frasier's long
'do despite his clearly visible receeding hairline (I thought he was supposed to
be sophisticated!), and the fact that in these early episodes Daphne's character
is psychic! The most interesting thing, however, is not the changes that the
series made over the years, but the things that were always the same."
The photograph exists as an intervention in time, giving the viewing subject the frail consolation of permanence. The photograph is a trace of the real, of a specific occurrence in time and space. However, in its status as mere trace, it creates only an illusory notion of permanence. It is this illusion which acts as a consolation, a defense against the decay and ultimate death of the subject, which forms a striking parallel to Freud's death drive. The image seeks to destroy the life of the subject portrayed. Thus, Frasier's personality, the sets, the form of the series are preserved, but we witness the decay of Frasier Crane's hairline. This parallels Card's own project, creating an archive out of what gets forgotten in the grand scheme of popular culture, though it is an archive in its own right. Card's archive exists, just as the Frasier archive does, in a medium that is subsumed in its own forgetting.
As Derrida reminds us, "Because the archive, if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of ordinary and structural breakdown of the said memory." The retelling of the Frasier plotlines is an act of memory, but by placing these memory works in an archive, both the experience and the recounting are effaced within Freud's death drive.
In the late episodes of Frasier one witnesses a telling display of the bourgeois obsession with permanence and ultimately a crack in the smoke-screen of the bourgeois image world, revealing the abject beneath the veil of the image. The set of Fraiser remains the same, over many years, accommodating the bourgeois desire for permanence, however as Card reminds us, the status of photographic representation as a trace of a verifiable reality is confirmed by Frasier's receding hairline. Card's subtle observation throws into question recent debates in which radical scepticism regarding 'truth' in photography has been displayed.
