world," not only can the photograph itself be possessed concretely, but the photograph's culturally defined semiotic status as a mechanical reproduction (rather than a linguistic representation) also allows an unprecedentedly literal and material, and perhaps uniquely complacent form--and ethics--of self-possession. Family albums serve as "memory banks" that authenticate self, other, and experience as empirically "real" by virtue of the photograph's material existence as an object and possession with special power.[19] In regard to the materiality of the photograph's authenticating power, it is instructive to recall one of a number of particularly relevant ironies in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), a science fiction film focusing on the ambiguous ontological status of a group of genetically manufactured "replicants." At a certain moment, Rachel, the film's putative heroine and the latest replicant prototype, disavows the revelation of her own manufactured status by pointing to a series of keepsake photographs that give "proof" to her mother's existence, to her own existence as a little girl, to her subjective memory. Upon being told that both her memory and their material extroversion "belong to someone else," she is both distraught and ontologically re-signed as someone with no "real" life, no "real" history--although she still remembers what she remembers and the photographs still sit on her piano. Indeed, the photographs are suddenly foregrounded (for the human spectator as well as the narrative's replicant) as utterly suspect. That is, when interrogated, the photographs simultaneously both reveal and lose that great material and circulatory value they commonly hold for all of us as the "money of the 'real.'" The structures of objectification and material possession that constitute the photographic as both a "real" trace of personal experience and a concrete extroversion of experience that can "belong to someone else" give specifi...
