Theories_of_the_Image_in_France_Between.pdf

THEORIES OF THE IMAGE IN FRANCE: BETWEEN ART HISTORY AND VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY Ralph Dekoninck Translated by Matthew Rampley A properly founded re��ection on art, a ‘science’ of art could only be both historical and theoretical. Henri Zerner �

Introduction

Let us start with the recognition of the importance that studies of the image and of the visual in general have had for philosophical research in France in the twentieth century. In order to be convinced of this it suff��ces to refer to the work of thinkers who have enjoyed an undeniable critical fate such as Jacques Aumont, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Alain Besançon, Pierre Bourdieu, Christine Buci-Glucksman, Dominique Chateau, Guy Debord, Régis Debray, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Jaqueline Lichtenstein, Jean-François Lyotard, Henri Maldiney, Jean-Luc. Marion, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Christian Metz, Marie-José Mondzain, Jacques Rancière, Rainer Rochlitz, Jean-Marie Schaefffer, Jean-Luc Schefer, Bernard Stiegler, Paul Virilio or Jean-Jacques Wunenburger.� Even if it is the custom in the

� Henri Zerner, ‘L’art’, ‘L’art’, in Jacques Le Gofff Gofff and Pierre Nora, eds., Faire de l’histoire, vol. 2, Nouvelles approches (Paris, 1974) 183–202. � See, for example, example, Jacques Jacques Aumont, The Image (London, 1997); Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Re�lections on Photography (London, 1993); Jean Baudrillard, Screened Out , trans. Chris Turner (London, 2002); Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago, IL, 2001); Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middlebrow Art (London, 1996); Christine Buci-Glucksman, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity (London, 1994); Dominique Chateau, Sémiotique et esthétique de (Paris, 2007); Guy Debord,Society of the Spectacle , trans. Fredy l’image: Théorie de l’iconicité (Paris, Perlman, Tony Verlaan, Paul Sieveking, Michel Prigent, Colin Carsten, and John Fullerton (Detroit, MI, 1968); Régis Debray, Vie et Mort de l’Image (Paris, 1995); Gilles Deleuze, Cinema (New York, 2001); Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, co-author and trans. Geofffrey

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Anglo-Saxon world to subsume the greater number of these authors, the majority of whom are trained philosophers, under the rubric of ‘French Theory’, it is nevertheless diff��cult to discern within this constellation of works a shared theory of the image or, at the very least, a communal way of thinking. At most one can emphasize the importance of phenomenology, psychoanalysis and semiotics, alongside the critique, amongst some authors, of Western occularcentrism, in other words, the dominance of vision over the other senses as a privileged mode of grasping the sensible world of cognition.� Yet if these works have in��uenced ‘visual studies’, essentially a transatlantic enterprise, then one has to note that they have had hardly any in��uence on French art history, with a few exceptions that will be addressed later in this chapter.� In fact, re��ection on the image takes place rather more on the margins of academic art history in France, including either institutions at the margins (Schools of Art, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, EHESS—‘School of Advanced Studies in Social Science’—or the Centre National de la Recherche Scienti��que, CNRS) or disciplines at the margins (Literature, History, Sociology, Psychoanalysis, Film Studies).� Thus, as Georges Didi-Huberman has commented, ‘thinking Bennington (Chicago, IL, 1987); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London, 1986); Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, Le Silence des tableaux (Paris, 2005); Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca, 1987); Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art , ed. Alice Jardine and Léon Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora (Oxford, 1982); Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York, 2007); Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Annexes—de l’œuvre d’art (Paris, 1999); Jaqueline Lichtenstein, La Couleur éloquente (Paris, 1993); Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis, MN, 2010); Henri Maldiney, Art et existence (Paris, 2003); Jean-Luc Marion, La croisée du visible (Paris, 2007); Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jefff Fort (New York, 2005); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL, 1969); Marie-José Mondzain, Image, icône, économie: Les sources byzantines de l’imaginaires contemporain (Paris, 1998); Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image , trans. Gregory Elliott (London, 2009); Rainer Rochlitz, Subversion and Subsidy: Contemporary Art and Aesthetics, trans. Dafydd Roberts (Chicago, IL, 2008); Jean-Marie Schaefffer, Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger , trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton, NJ, 2000); JeanLouis Schefer, Du monde et du mouvement des images (Paris, 1998); Paul Virilio, War and Cinema. The Logistics of Perception , trans. Patrick Camiller (London, 2009); or Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, L’imaginaire (Paris, 2003). � See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Los Angeles, 1994). � See Roland Recht, ‘Remarques liminaires’, in Roland Recht, Philippe Sénéchal, Claire Barbillon, and François-René Martin, eds., Histoire de l’histoire de l’art en France au XIX e siècle (Paris, 2008) 13–14. � See for example, the series of volumes published by Gallimard and edited by JeanClaude Schmitt and François Lissarrague entitled Le temps des images.


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about the image in France is dispersed’.� This is why it is not possible to speak of major theoretical watchwords. If, for some, the lack of dialogue between disciplines is a cause of regret, for Didi-Huberman this fragmentary state contains, in spite of everything, a positive and fecund dimension, for it opens up a ��eld of possibilities and freedom. According to Didi-Huberman this freedom continues a completely unabashedly literary tradition including writers such as Denis Diderot, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jean Genet, Francis Ponge, and Yves Bonnefoy. ‘In France the most striking theoretical texts on the image are nearly all marked by this profound anchoring in the poetic’, and he cites examples such as Georges Bataille’s writing on Lascaux, Foucault’s discussion of Las Meninas, or Barthes’s re��ections on the photograph.� Even if in France art history has sought to keep its distance from this dual philosophical and literary tradition, the latter continues to inspire work with clearly stated theoretical ambitions, but which characteristically apply such re��ection to the ��eld of history. This chapter will examine the contribution of critical, historical and anthropological re��ection on the visual by thinkers whose work has become part of the ��eld of art history or who sit at its boundaries. For practical reasons the discussion is limited to only a small number of the many authors who might have been included, and it therefore focuses on just the most important and representative ��gures. In general, however, I would like to suggest that one of the distinctive traits of this research perspective in France can be found in the shared re��ection on the problematic articulation of the relation between art theory and art history, on the one hand, and between art and the image on the other, with a particular emphasis on the conditions governing the agency and impact of representations. Art History and the Theory of Art: A Semiotic Turn

Amongst the pioneers one should mention the name of Pierre Francastel (1900–1970) who was associated right at the beginning with what would later become the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS),

� Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘En ordre dispersé’, Trivium 1 (2008), http://trivium.revues .org/index351.html (accessed 8 September 2009). � Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture , trans. Michelle and Stuart Kendall (New York, 2005); Foucault, The Order of Things; Barthes, Camera Lucida.


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thus bringing together a team of historians working within the Annales school. Partly breaking with academic art history, Francastel contributed to the opening up of the discipline to the social sciences. In particular, he opened up the path to what he called a ‘sociology of art’, in which he was careful to place artworks in the context of the visual culture of the era that produced them, while also remaining attentive to the speci��c ‘��gurative thinking’ that gave them their form and meaning.� Rejecting any kind of determinism (such as the idea of complete dependence on historical context) and any kind of formalism (the idea of the absolute autonomy of the history of forms) he aimed to articulate as best he could the relation between the plastic properties of artworks and the diverse social functions these artworks ful��lled, and to which their plastic values contributed. The originality of his approach lay in his assertion that the latter both depended on and participated in the nature of these functions and their eff��cacy. Inspired by this pioneering work, the art-historical research that developed at the EHESS, in particular within the Centre for the History and Theory of Art (CEHTA) set up in 1977 by Hubert Damisch, attempted to combine the analysis of the socio-historical conditions of the production and reception of artworks with the study of their formal and aesthetic properties. Adopting an approach that thought of itself as structuralist, this research was clearly oriented towards semiotics.� Thus for Damisch it was a matter of studying artworks in themselves, apart from any historical determinations, but without losing sight of their structural relation to other artworks or cultural phenomena. For the speci��c nature of an artwork could only be demonstrated in terms of its diffferential relation to the artworks it transformed (or indeed by which it was itself transformed), in the sense that it either displaced or recon��gured them.�� This was why it was necessary to take into account both the speci��c rhythm and history of artworks, while, equally, not neglecting their interactions with an enlarged historical context. For they only bring to completion

� See Pierre Francastel, La Réalité ��gurative: Éléments structurels de sociologie de l’art , 2nd edn., (Paris, 1978) and Études de sociologie de l’art: Création picturale et société, 2nd edn., (Paris, 1989). On Francastel’s notion of the sociology of art, see the comments by Nathalie Heinich, ‘Sociology of Art. With and against Art History’, (000–000 in this volume). � See Jean-Claude Bonne, ‘Art et image’, in Une école pour les sciences sociales, ed. Jacques Revel and Nathan Watchel (Paris, 1996) 353–65. �� Hubert Damisch, ‘Histoire et/ou théorie de l’art’, Scolies 1 (1971) 27–36 and Damisch, ed., Critique 315–16, Special Issue ‘Histoire/théorie de l’art’ (1973).


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their own particular aesthetic and semiotic potential in response to the most diverse, individual or collective, intended or unintended ��nalities. Weaving together diffferent temporalities prompts a rich re��ection on the historicity of the artwork. Thus, as we shall later see, it is important to draw on the array of diffferent theories and ideologies that presided over the formation of art history as a body of historical knowledge. Yet if art history cannot dispense with a theory of history, neither can it hide the theories of art that it consciously or unconsciously mobilizes. Rather than evading the question of beauty, or abandoning the concept of art in favour of a supposedly more neutral concept such as that of the image, we should acknowledge, argues Damisch, that art history and aesthetics operate hand in glove, and that art is, by its nature, a theoretical object. If one therefore wishes to write the history of art, one has to know what its status is and what its forms are at each moment in its history. In other words, one has to trace the constant process of delimitation and redistribution of artistic activity. It follows from this that the art historian’s object is nothing other than the array of phenomena which are, in the given period, held to be aesthetic artefacts. This comes back to the point that art history studies above all the history of art as an institution and the collective representations of art. The term ‘production of art’ should hence be understood not only in terms of the making of artworks, but also in terms of the production and reproduction of the material, ideological and theoretical conditions of such making and its eff��cacy. The work of authors such as Louis Marin or Daniel Arasse resonates perfectly with this interrogation of the relation between the theory and history of art. For Marin the main stakes of this relation stem from the recognition of artistic representation as a theoretical object. The latter is theoretical in a twofold manner, both as the construct of a science of art, and also an object that re��ects on itself.�� For every representation represents itself. It is especially this second aspect, which coincides with the idea of ��gurative thought that was so dear to Francastel, to which Marin’s re��ection, in its essence, pertains. For him ‘the re��exivity within the work of art de��nes its theoretical dimension’.�� Focusing mainly on the study of the theory and practice of the sign during the Classical Age, a founding moment in the history of modern representation (aiming towards the

�� Louis Marin, Des pouvoirs de l’image: gloses (Paris, 1993). �� Louis Marin, Opacité de la peinture: Essais sur la représentation en Quattrocento , 2nd edn., (Paris, 2006) 17.


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ideal of transparency), he thus traces all the zones of opacity (in essence, all of the non-mimetic indices and all thresholds, such as the frame) across which representation is the object of its own thought, thereby revealing the constitutive dialectic between transitivity and re��exivity that enables one to articulate as closely as possible its semantic and expressive poles. An inquiry of this kind into the semiotic and aesthetic modalities of the ��guration of such a thought naturally leads him to interrogate the latter’s powers which are closely linked to the unstable play of presence and representation. ‘All the efffects of pleasure and jouissance in the imagination and the senses, all its emotional afffects in the feelings and the heart, are induced by the sign’s opacity.’�� The interest directed towards the opaque ��esh of painting (which therefore goes against the occultation of this ‘accursed share’ by the classical theory of art) makes it possible to understand how matter, form and meaning become interwoven in the cognitive and emotional experience of the painting. This re��ection on the sensible powers of representation open up the way to a more political questioning of the representation of power, which resides, precisely, in representation conceived of as an operation that puts the force of signs, as it were, in reserve.�� This is the operation that underpins the belief both in the power being represented and also the power of the representation. Similar conclusions on ��gurative thinking and on the conditions of the possibility of representation and its agency have been reached in the work of Daniel Arasse, conducted in the wake of Damisch and Marin. Investigating, like the other two authors, the epistemological bases of modern representation and those of art history, his work has consisted of an inquiry into the unseen; not the invisible, as it were, but the optical unconscious hidden within the work. This includes, in short, everything that eludes the normative, on the level both of the construction of the representation (most notably, perspective) and also the conceptual and perceptual framework bequeathed by art history. Only a ‘close history’ of painting, conceived of as a closed, but dynamic or organic whole that secretes its own thinking, is equal to the task of laying bare what conceptual knowledge excludes or represses.�� One can discover such ‘intimacy’, understood both as an object and as an approach, in the details and singular features

�� Marin, Des pouvoirs de l’image, 955. �� Louis Marin, Portrait of the King (London, 1988). �� Daniel Arasse, Le détail: Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (Paris, 1996).


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that betray the thought of the work (the presence of the painting) or the presence of the subject in the work (the presence of the painter). In other words, the subjectivity invested in the painting by its author (the genetic approach to the work, concerned with the vestiges of embodied thinking), but also the implication of the subjectivity of the viewer, not to mention that of the art historian, all three of whom are moved by the pleasure and desire aroused by the work.�� Subject to the enduring efffect of the painting through time, the historian has to seek to produce an account of the plot at the heart of the iconic narrative that constitutes its power, by creating a narrative, even a ��ction, which aims to enable us to come into intimate contact with the painting and the painter, and thereby to recreate none other than the artist’s closeness to the work. This closeness, which must not be mistaken for empathy, can be achieved through the exercise of a reasoned sensibility or a theory open to the senses. A theory of history and of its writing thus emerges out of this theory of the subject and of the ��gurative thinking in the work of painting. For it is important to address the delicate issue of how to give a historical perspective to a singularity, how to turn the unique and original thing that is an artwork into an object of knowledge. Conceived of as an event that reiterates itself at each encounter, it is the bearer of its own unique history that the historian has to unravel once more, and which is a function not only of its ��gurative weft, but also of the diffferent layers of interpretation that weft creates, and which have become sedimented through time, enriching or impoverishing the work’s meaning. Turning from the history of painting to histories of paintings involves, for Arasse, a rethinking of historical knowledge by taking into account the depth of the historical and cultural distance separating the present of the observer and the past of the work. With the strong conviction that when one interrogates the past one is inevitably responding to the present, Arasse sees historical knowledge as put to the test by the anachronism constitutive of every work of art. Placed under the sign of the singular and the intimately private, which cannot escape its own historicity, his work is basically that of a historian who constantly examines the epistemological and aesthetic stakes of temporal and psychic distance (the question of living memory, the work’s memory and that of the spectator) as well as physical distance (the question of the intimate gaze) from the artwork. �� Daniel Arasse, Histoire de peintures (Paris, 2004) 199.


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�� Art and the Image: An Anthropological Turn

One can add the writings of Georges Didi-Huberman to this re��ection dedicated to the thought and power of images, which are in his case accompanied by a critical revisiting of the epistemological foundations of art history, what he terms ‘a critical archaeology of art history’. Inspired by his early research on the ��guration of hysteria and on the ��gurative processes within the painting of Fra Angelico, he has undertaken a deconstruction of the humanist thinking (of writers such as Vasari, Kant and Panofsky) that made possible the establishment of art history as a form of knowledge, which has, as a consequence, reduced the visible to the legible.�� The main object of his research has been everything that the art history emerging from this humanist tradition has repressed, has been unable to conceptualize or to see. The unthought or the unseen is none other than what has plunged representation into crisis, a critical point to which he gives the name of ‘symptom’, dialectically linked to the symbol. Derived from Freudian metapsychology, this concept refers to the event where the unconscious bursts in, the repressed returns. The other key concept is that of embodiment (taken as the symptom’s implementation) which permits him to conceive of a visibility beyond appearance. A counter-model or one that diverges from that of classical aesthetics and the theory of mimesis sustaining it, the Christian paradigm of embodiment or incarnation leads Didi-Huberman along the path towards an ‘anthropology of the visual’, in which the concept of the visual is understood as the unconscious of the visible. However it is not only in reference to Christian dogma that he thinks of embodiment as the major anthropological stake of images, even if it enables him to undertake such an anthropological turn. Instead, he envisages it as a phantasm in a wider cultural sense. This goes on to interrogate the limits of imitation, limits which are crossed over in the ��ction of a living image that desires, that offfers and opens up its body to the spectator. Whether this is in relation to fables (he cites examples from Ovid, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Balzac and Proust) or the concrete reality of images that reify this phantasm, embodi-

�� Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA, 2004); Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago, IL, 1995); DidiHuberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art , trans. John Goodman (Philadelphia, PA, 2009).


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ment is studied not only as a motif, but also as a motor, in other words, as the cause and efffect of the desire that literally sets the body in motion, the body of the image as well as that of the spectator. To think of the body of the image in relation to the body of the spectator is to give imitation and its anthropomorphic tropes their full anthropological depth. Thought of not as a state so much as a dynamic and relational process with very real pragmatic efffects, resemblance has to be viewed in its relation to dissemblance (a polarity that recalls Marin’s opposition of opacity and transparency), in a play of dialectics from which representation draws all its power. This accounts for Didi-Huberman’s interest in all ��gurative processes or, in other words, visual efffects and phenomena, more so than in visual objects, for they open up the bodies of images and tear down the veil of mimesis all the while addressing the spectator caught up in this play. For one cannot distinguish between the image as an object and the image as subject, or as operation of the subject, hence one should not separate the image in the imagination from the image in the psychic economy.�� This brings us back once more to examination of the belief in the powers of the image. Such anthropological re��ection on the eff��cacy of the visual, which goes against the tyranny of pure visibility, is necessarily accompanied by a second layer devoted to the temporal dimension of images.�� Having ��rst scrutinized ‘art’ as an object, it is then necessary to linger by the object ‘history’. For how can one articulate the relation between the timelessness of anthropology and its historical declensions? This is achieved, quite simply, by recognizing that when we stand before the image we stand before time; as Didi-Huberman argues, the present and the past are constantly recon��guring themselves in the image. If the concept of the ‘symptom’ made it possible to think through the unconscious of the visible, then the concept of ‘survival’, borrowed from Aby Warburg, makes it possible to access the unconscious of history.�� In other words, it enables access to everything that the classical models of temporality (mainly cyclical, linear, even teleological) used by art history do not manage to think.

�� Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image ouverte: Motifs de l’incarnation dans les arts visuels (Paris, 2007). �� See Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico and Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images (Paris, 2000). �� Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris, 2002).


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One can start with the idea of anachronism, the accursed share of the historian, which expresses both the longue durée of survivals and the discontinuity of historical time. How can the present recon��gure an image from the past, and how can the past survive in a current image? This is linked to the fact that every image is the result of a sedimentation of heterogeneous times. Its meaning can no longer be found exclusively in the era that produced it. Instead, one should sound out its memory in order to gain access to the multiple strati��ed times of which it is composed. In short, the image is more a matter of memory than of history, and art history should turn itself into a kind of art of memory (a chronological anamnesis consisting of a going back in time contrary to the order of events), where the historian’s own memory is implicated in every moment. Conclusion

‘Without theory one will not know what “history” means, nor “art”, nor what is meant when one speaks of a “history of art”. But without history, there will be no “theory” that has any validity, even if, in the ��nal analysis, art eludes any strictly historicizing treatment.’�� This could be the credo underpinning the thought of French art historians, who are united in their conviction that no history or theory of art can do without an interrogation of the nature of its objects and their historicity. One additional shared issue is the desire to bring back presence to representation, the presence of the painting and of the painter, but also the presence of the spectator, including the presence even of the art historian. The recognition that every historian makes theoretical choices involves a self-re��exive step that lies at the heart of the work of the thinkers presented here. Another distinctive trait that goes hand in hand with this is their desire as much to bring objects from the past together with contemporary theory, as to bring together theories from the past and objects of the present, in a constant to-and-fro. In a way it involves having objects from the past speak in their own language, all the while showing how what they say still concerns us in the present. It is in this respect that one can speak of a diffference from ‘mainstream’ visual studies, where one can witness a move towards the inverse taking place, where the point of departure is often rather more the society of the spectacle and issues relating to the

�� Bonne, ‘Art et image’.


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contemporary world, sometimes at the cost of a relegation of history to a secondary level. In contrast to this essentially contemporary orientation, the articulation of the relation of history to theory would appear to be one of the salient features of the oeuvre of these art historians, who are conscious of the depth of history working its way through images. One might thus say that history, just as much as the unconscious, lies at the heart of their theory of art and the image, and that their thinking is traversed by the question of time. Finally, one could summarize their contribution by saying that the image is to be found at the heart of all thinking about time, while time is to be found at the heart of all thinking about the image.


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Theories_of_the_Image_in_France_Between.pdf

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