Below the bar of the signifier

On meaning and meaninglessness in the visual arts

I have, as I’ve mentioned in another post, been diving deeply into the work of Erwin Panofsky, which means reading texts that most art historians are presumed to have read already—but if they have, probably did so long, long ago in a methods course. It isn’t important to read the classics for their own sake. Nobody is a conscious Panofskyan in art history these days, so what is the point? This is the problem of historiography, or the study of the way things used to be studied.

There are a few possible answers. One is to say that a discipline is marked by its origins in ways that are embedded not so much in conscious methodology as in the always-already operative distribution of the sayable and of the unsayable, of problems, ideas of what constitutes a “field” (strange agrarian metaphor, after all), presumptions about what it is we’re even talking about. In Panofsky’s case, this might be, for instance, the presumption that “meaning” is the thing we’re trying to extract from or read back into artifacts. These presumptions are often short-lived. George Kubler challenged the supremacy of meaning rather early on, and anyway iconography was from the start a turn against existing formalist method. (A few months ago, the translators of Panofsky’s very early anti-Wölfflinian essay “The Problem of Style in the Visual Arts” went so far as to claim that “ignorance of this background obscures the nature of iconology as a reaction—possibly political—to rigidly formalist approaches to art.” Well, sure, and that has something to do with the fact that the Germanophone iconologists were mostly Jewish and liberal whereas the formalists were mostly neither, but what does this politics amount to in the present moment?) Another case study, to which Éric Michaud has again drawn attention, is that of the appalling racialist framework that art historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries almost unanimously accepted without a second thought. It’s important to study these things in order to know what not to do. It may be, however, that art history simply can’t be decolonized, as Jennifer Nelson has observed.

A different response to the “why historiography?” question is to say that the history of a discipline reveals things that the discipline has lost and might regain. I think this applies to certain forms of social or Marxist art history; it would be fun to write a book about Marxist art historians before World War II, if I ever had the time for it. But a third and probably more sophisticated answer—I wouldn’t go so far as to call it an Aufhebung, though it does recover important things in both the “original sin” and the “paradise lost” versions of historiography—would be to say that specific inadequacies in prior ways of doing things, inadequacies the visibility of which may sometimes emerge in the parallax that we call history, suggest ways of changing that discipline’s future, or even of abolishing it.

This requires occupying an impossible position: that of the thinker of the absolute, as Gillian Rose puts it in her brilliant, intensely difficult book on Hegel. That is, without assuming that we know anything about the final stage of things, we can nevertheless see ways in which the limitedness of a given historical form of ethical life, such as the plowing of the field of things that iconographers thought were or weren’t matters of attention (matters of “meaning”), suggests in negative the contours of a non-contradiction between our supposed principles and the things we really do. The other nice aspect of this is that the parallax of absolute thought helps to indicate the real conditions that prevent any such reconciliation, although it has to be, again, practice rather than theory that both points the way and makes good on the promise. An acceptable horizon might be something like “decolonial art history,” for example. We can read old (or new) art history and see that it is, alas, still colonial. But there will not be a truly decolonial art history until many other things are decolonized, which hasn’t happened yet and, if it did happen, would make art history as we know it rather obsolete in any case.

I will eventually publish things about Panofsky that go into this in greater detail, so I’ll keep matters specific for now. Yesterday, I was floored by a passage in Panofsky’s well-known book on the disputed concept of the Renaissance. He’s considering the relation between the two poles of the renovation of Italian art in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries: “back to nature” versus “back to the classics.” The solution found was, Panofsky says, “an aesthetic theory—not seriously opposed until the very end of the Renaissance and strengthened by this opposition ever after [really? ever after?] which resolved the dichotomy between ‘return to nature’ and ‘return to the Antique’ by the thesis that classical art itself, in manifesting what natura naturans had intended but natura naturata had failed to perform, represented the highest and ‘truest’ form of naturalism.” That is, classicism is what nature ought to have been. Nothing shocking here.

The part that startles me actually comes a few pages earlier. Panofsky is rehearsing Alberti’s theory of convenienza or concinnitas, that is, harmony between a subject and its means of representation: artistic decorum. The essence of this is that the representation of some things is simple, mimetic, empirical, whereas other things require conceptuality and choice. The line between the two is anything but innocently drawn. Here’s the paragraph:

This doctrine, reiterated ad infinitum by Alberti’s followers (among them, to cite only the most famous, Leonardo and Dürer), opposed to the older postulate of verisimilitude that of aesthetic selection and—at least as far as the ‘harmony in quantity’, that is to say, proportion, is concerned—mathematical rationalization. That the skin of a negro is dark throughout is a matter of common, everyday experience; but who is to judge of the ‘harmonious’ relation between, say, the length of a foot, the width of the chest and the thickness of the wrist without combining empirical observation with archaeological research and exact mathematics?

Panofsky’s example of a “matter of common, everyday experience” will strike contemporary readers as unhinged, to put it bluntly. What is self-evident? That black skin is black. Of course it isn’t, any more than “white” skin is white. But the fact of blackness, l’expérience vécu du Noir (that is, “our” experience of it, not “theirs,” if we still identify with the author here), is that of an undifferentiated given, “dark throughout.” It’s pre-iconographic. In the famous diagram of the three levels of interpretation in Studies in Iconology—“pre-iconographic description,” “iconographic analysis,” and “iconographical synthesis”—blackness belongs to the first and lowest. There is no meaning here at all, strictly speaking. Where does meaning come from? In its highest form, to which the third and highest form of interpretation corresponds, it comes from the making of a “symbolic form” out of merely sensuous materials. The great achievement of figures such as that of Melancholy in Dürer’s engraving (who, incidentally, Panofsky describes as having a dark complexion in his study of the work with Fritz Saxl) is not so much, or at least not only, the reconquest of a phenomenology, a sense of how bodies occupy space (such as Panofsky describes in his dazzling essay on perspective), than that of a way of literally thinking in images. In which case, blackness is the position of the unthought.

I would like to bring this back to Aby Warburg, too, if only in cursory fashion. The world probably does not need more commentary on his snake-ritual lecture. But here it goes. Good readers of Warburg will recall that the lecture describes a loop from immediacy to symbolization and back again. The most “primitive” stage of the magical-practical manipulation of nature involves the barbarism of manipulating its very stuff prior to distancing symbolization. Primitives dance with the snake that is lightning and, by metonymy, rain, in order to make rain happen. In other words, this is the pre-iconographic stage—a kind of technology or at least practice (as opposed to theory). It is a slight but decisive jump from here to the somatic transmission of affect encoded in the engrams of the pathos formula. A pathos formula is a type, a symbol, a code, but of a kind that hits its recipient like a bullet (like Benjamin’s Dadaist shock), thereby generating, ever after through the centuries, a mimetic reproduction of the original impulse. A formula can be lost, and it can be inverted—a dying Niobid can turn into a triumphant David—but it remains ever after on this threshold of semiotics.

It is subsequent to this baseline moment of symbolization that the construction of what Ernst Cassirer and Panofsky after him will call “symbolic form” gets underway. And this is what cuts the clearing of Warburg’s Denkraum, the “thinking space” of distance, of abstraction that permits emancipation from mythic immediacy. The dialectic of Warburg’s thinking (which I have to say he most often seems to repress rather than work through—but perhaps we’d do the same if our sanity was on the line) plays out between the automatism of the Pathosformel and the encodings of iconology. Famously, however, the snake-ritual lecture ends on a different and more pessimistic note. A third term—technology—takes its revenge:

The American of today is no longer afraid of the rattlesnake. He kills it; in any case, he does not worship it. It now faces extermination. The lightning imprisoned in wire—captured electricity—has produced a culture with no use for paganism. What has replaced it? Natural forces are no longer seen in anthropomorphic or biomorphic guise, but rather as infinite waves obedient to the human touch. With these waves, the culture of the machine age destroys what the natural sciences, born of myth, so arduously achieved: the space for devotion, which evolved in turn into the space required for reflection.

The modern Prometheus and the modern Icarus, Franklin and the Wright brothers, who invented the dirigible airplane, are precisely those ominous destroyers of the sense of distance, who threaten to lead the planet back into chaos.

Telegram and telephone destroy the cosmos. Mythical and symbolic thinking strive to form spiritual bonds between humanity and the surrounding world, shaping distance into the space required for devotion and reflection: the distance undone by the instantaneous electric connection.

Modern technique, then, is barbaric de-symbolization, decoding, deterritorialization, one wants to say. After passing above the bar of the signifier as the pathos formula locks a meaning into place, if even a primordial and somatic one, the arc of history dips down below the bar once again with technological rationality’s abolition of distance. The technological world is post- rather than pre-iconographic. Since I like to visualize things, I’ve tried to represent this in a diagram that came out of a seminar a few months back:

So, what has happened here? We’ve returned to the position of the unthought. But what did Panofsky’s racial barbarism teach us if not that the threshold to “meaning” is itself a moment of unseeing? What does the presence of method as such repress? What still remains unthought? What might return?