Despite its etymology, this function is neither limited to nor best exemplified by writing and, indeed, assumes its purest form in the technical domain—in the phenomenology of photography. Roland Barthes pinpoints this elective affinity between photography and orthography when, in Camera Lucida, he champions the specificity of photography as that technical medium capable of bringing together reality and the past:
I call "photographic referent" not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often "chimeras." Contrary to these imitations, in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and the past.6
This conjunction of reality and the past is the principle of photographic certainty and the basis for its specific intentionality; photography's noema, Barthes tells us, is “that has been" [ça a été].
Whereas Barthes takes pains to distinguish photography from other media, philosopher Bernard Steigler deploys Barthes' analysis as the basis for an account of orthography in general.iv Orthography, or straight writing," has been adopted by Stiegler as a paradigm for technical recording, from writing to more recent, real-time, literal inscription technologies like phonography and cinema.' According to Stiegler, orthographic recording allows for the exact inscription of events and thus for their exact repetition, the possibility of experiencing the same exact thing more than once (the possibility upon which Stiegler's neo-Husserlian analysis of memory is based).vi
In his analysis of Barthes, however, Stiegler suggests that photography should be distinguished less for its technical singularity (which it shares with other mechanical inscription technologies) than for its exemplary resistance to phonocentrism: “The photo will in effect place us at a remove fromphonocentric' temptations. And it will also permit us to discover that alongside orthographic writing there exist other types of exact registrations," an ensemble of “orthothetic memory supports" (supports orthothétiques de la mémoire) (Stiegler 1996, 24). What Stiegler has in mind here (on this point, his analysis certainly converges with Kittler's) is the host of technical recording instruments from photography to the digital computer—"straight-positing" (orthothetic) memory supports-that today function to inscribe our experience or rather, on
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