Below the bar of the signifier: Part 2

Further considerations on iconology, concepts, and race

This is an overdue response to my friend and colleague Danny Marcus, who wrote an extraordinarily rich comment on a post of mine last year. I’d like to pick up the thread of that exchange, I hope as prelude to more a more adequate discourse on the stakes of the iconographic method. These are Danny’s words:

Many interesting directions of thought here, Daniel. This gets a bit lost in what you’ve written, although I think we’re on the same page, but there are also racial undertones in Panofsky’s account of the “higher” orders of iconographic analysis in this passage: "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?" As you’ve noted, Panofsky frames race as a matter of quantity/nature, hence beneath the exercise of conscious thought ("blackness is the position of the unthought"). As for judgments of quality, however, these require analysis according to historically and culturally specific canons or codes. Although Panofsky offers this point in the spirit of methodological clarification, his quantity/quality distinction also maps the production of race as a social category through the application of proportional norms to the human body—and, indeed, the restriction of social/symbolic meaning to the (male) subject’s muscular physicality, his capacity for labor. In that sense, we might consider the Middle Passage a horrific Pathosformel, in which enslaved Africans found themselves subjected to a battery of physical trials and tests, revaluing their worth in terms of “the length of the foot, the width of the chest and the thickness of the wrist”—and those terms alone. While skin pigmentation would eventually yield race as a pre-iconographic, “unthought” dimensions of everyday experience, this was only the proleptic residue of a conscious process of extreme human commodification. Only after the conscious pursuit of “barbaric de-symbolization, decoding, deterritorialization,” to use your terms, does race come to be positioned as an unthought (and, in a certain sense, unthinkable) social reality—an evacuation of meaning (de-culturation, dehumanization, etc.) that is, at the same time, fully self-conscious in the minds of the enslavers. Of course, Panofsky’s topic is the periodicity of the Renaissance, the end of which he dates to around 1600, the dawn of the transatlantic slave trade. We might say, then, that the self-evidence of race haunts the Panofskian Renaissance as a tragic outcome: by recovering the “physiognomy” of Classical sculpture without its symbolic meaning (paganism), the Renaissance prepared the ground for the technologization of physiognomy.

Incidentally, there’s another strange passage toward the end of this essay, wherein Panofsky likens the subjective transformation of the Renaissance to the experience of a young girl of the 1950s trying on clothes that her grandmother would have worn at the same age (presumably in the late 19th century). “[I]f this girl adopts her grandmother’s clothes for good and wears them all the time in the conviction that they are more becoming and appropriate than those she used to wear before, she will find it impossible not to adapt her movements, her manners, her speech, and her susceptibilities to her modeled appearance. She will undergo an inner metamorphosis which, while not transforming her into a duplicate of her grandmother (which no one has claimed to be true of the Renaissance in relation to classical antiquity), will make her ‘feel and act’ quite differently from the way she did as long as she believed in slacks and polo coats: her change of costume will indicate—and, later on, serve to perpetuate—a change of heart.” This is a remarkable passage: it is Panofsky’s most direct attempt at analogizing the subjective experience of the Renaissance, not just intellectually but also—crucially—in terms of physiognomy (movements, manners, speech, and even desire). Whereas the art-historical subjects and objects at issue for Panofsky are men and male-bodied, here, the subject of “re-nascence”—that is, the pivotal “change of heart”—is conspicuously female-gendered and -bodied. This is not a contingent aspect of the essay: the subjective transformation Panofsky identifies with the Renaissance must be total and experiential, not merely intellectual; external, conscious change must yield a reorganization of inner feeling. Indeed, the woman in Panofsky’s example must actually believe herself to be more beautiful (and thus desirable) as a result of her retro makeover; only on the basis of this internal reconfiguration—this real dis- and reorientation of the embodied self—can the corresponding social values (Victorian prudity) become reestablished more generally, “perpetuat[ing]” not only her change of heart, but affecting the hearts of men as well. Panofsky offers no account of this process of inner self-transformation, however, other than to insist—quite absurdly—that by forcing a teenage girl to dress differently, she will eventually (again, irresistibly) become a believer. Again, the process of change can only be described proleptically: “woman” is defined as a subject uniquely susceptible to external physiognomic norms. Were there no such subject, then one would have to describe the phenomenon as a matter of social violence—neither “self-discovery” nor “self-delusion,” but an experiment in domination and submission. The rebirth of the Self requires a brutal refashioning of the Other.

This is so convincing that I don’t think it needs direct comment, at least not to begin with. I’d rather attempt a textual montage. First, compare a famous passage in Michael Baxandall’s book on “painting and experience in fifteenth-century Italy”:

It is an important fact of art history that commodities have come regularly in standard-sized containers only since the nineteenth century: previously a container—the barrel, sack or bale—was unique, and calculating its volume quickly and accurately was a condition of business. How a society gauged its barrels and surveyed its quantities is important to know because it is an index of its analytical skills and habits. For instance, in the fifteenth century Germany seems to have gauged its barrels with complex prepared rules and measures from which the answers could be read off: the job was often done by a specialist. An Italian, by contrast, gauged his barrels with geometry and π:

There is a barrel, each of its ends being 2 bracci in diameter; the diameter at its bung is 2 1/4 bracci and halfway between bung and end it is 2 2/9 bracci. The barrel is 2 bracci long. What is its cubic measure?

This is like a pair of truncated cones. Square the diameter at the ends: 2 x 2 = 4. Then square the median diameter 2 2/9 x 2 2/9 = 4 76/81. Add them together: 8 76/81. Multiply 2 x 2 2/9 = 4 4/9. Add this to 8 76/81 – 13 31/81. Divide by 3 = 4 112/243…. Now square 2 1/4 = 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 = 5 1/16. Add it to the square of the median diameter: 5 5/16 + 4 76/81 = 10 1/129. Multiply 2 2/9 x 2 1/4 = 5. Add this to the previous sum: 15 1/129. Divide by 3: 5 1/3888. Add it to the first result: 4 112/243 + 5 1/3888 = 9 1792/3888. Multiply this by 11 and then divide it by 14 [i.e. multiply by π/4]: the final result is 7 23600/54432. This is the cubic measure of the barrel.

It is a special intellectual world.

These instructions for gauging a barrel are from a mathematical handbook for merchants by Piero della Francesca, De Abaco, and the conjunction of painter and mercantile geometry is very much to the point. The skills that Piero or any painter used to analyse the forms he painted were the same as Piero or any commercial person used for surveying quantities. And the connection between gauging and painting Piero himself embodies is very real. On the one side, many of the painters, themselves business people, had gone through the mathematical secondary education of the lay schools: this was the geometry they knew and used. On the other side, the literate public had these same geometrical skills to look at pictures with: it was a medium in which they were equipped to make discriminations, and the painters knew this.

The consequences that Baxandall draws from this are well known. The sensibility that made possible Renaissance volumetric painting, and more specifically linear perspective, emerged not so much from pure mathematics as from a “period eye” calibrated to mercantile ends. Hence the proliferation of cones, cylinders, and so on in early Renaissance painting. In using these forms, the painter “depended on his public’s general disposition to gauge.”

Now compare the following. In the seventeenth-century Caribbean slave trade, cargoes were measured in terms of an abstract human body known as a pieza de India (piece of the Indies, or peça da India in Portuguese). The pieza de India

was a measure of potential labor, not of individuals. For a slave to qualify as a pieza, he had to be a young adult male meeting certain specifications as to size, physical condition, and health. The very young, the old, and females were defined for commercial purposes as fractional parts of a pieza de India. The measure was convenient for Spanish imperial economic planning, where the need was a given amount of labor power, not a given number of individuals.

This is from Philip D. Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (University of Wisconsin Press, 1969, here page 22). Fractional calculation of piezas was not dissimilar from Piero’s barrel-gauging. Three individuals aged 8 to 15 might be reckoned as two piezas, for instance, meaning that ten such enslaved children would go on the ledger as 6 2/3 standardized bodies. And piezas, needless to say, were exchangeable for other goods in the triangular trade. Marx’s conversions between coats and yards of linen in Capital perhaps belong to the same “special intellectual world.” At the slave ports, inspectors used measuring tapes to evaluate concrete bodies against the ideal standard, also noting defects such as missing limbs.

Is this “the production of race as a social category through the application of proportional norms to the human body”? Let’s hold that question in suspension for a short while and instead ask another: Where is conceptuality in the three moments with which we are here concerned—that is, in Panofsky’s division between the “pre-iconographic” and higher levels of meaning, Baxandall’s barrel-gauging, and the measurement of standardized human commodities? To this set of case studies, we can add Warburg’s Pathosformel—the significance of which, I have suggested previously, turns on a conversion from the somatic transmission of intensities to symbolization (and back again in the spectator’s mimetic shudder). What then do we mean by calling the Middle Passage a “horrific Pathosformel”? Technical procedures result at once in formalization (a measurement and a set of measurements: that is, a canon of proportion) as well as the commodity form, which requires convertibility between unlike things. The “technologization of physiognomy” precedes both commodification and the epidermalization of racial difference, as Fanon called it, functioning thus as the technical a priori of racecraft. It would then seem that the conversion of body to number leaves in its wake not so much the repression of the somatic (pushing it below the bar of the signifier) as a purely aesthetic, “epidermal,” and thus “pre-iconographic” self-evidence: Panofsky’s “matter of common, everyday experience.”

So, Danny is talking about a chiasmus. There was no “self-evidence of race” before its production as perceptual (aesthetic) immediacy. This throws a new light on the tremendous amount of recent scholarship on “race before race.” There were, of course, concepts of race in Christendom before the “scientific” racism of the 18^th century. The production of modern race was accomplished, however, through a quantitative formalization of the body that is homologous with the recovery of laws of proportion in the Italian Renaissance, though it would be wildly irresponsible to say that the one formalization was the cause of or even a necessary condition of possibility for the other. It was not primarily the Italian merchants of the Quattrocento who were responsible for the commodification of African bodies, after all. The unthinking of race (its de-conceptualization) was all the same a complement of 1) the mathematical formalization of an ideal bodily schema together with its contrary, the degenerate African physiognomy, and 2) the universalization of the commodity form, which constitutes a representational matrix it might be fruitful to compare with the immanence of measure to universalized perspectival space. In his perspective essay, Panofsky argues that the prelude to the latter was the eradication of the subjective viewpoint in medieval art, which produces an asubjective spatial monism that is paradoxically more akin to Renaissance space than is embodied ancient perspective. Perspective, that is, constitutes another modality of the number/body dialectic that is characteristic of the production of blackness as simultaneously the “position of the unthought” as well as a marker or residue of increasingly universal quantification/commodification. An interesting corollary is that the production of modern race in its two modalities—as a formalized “science” of physiognomy and proportion, and as an “immediate” aesthetic fact—resulted as well in a split that is congruent with the contemporaneous distinction of “primary” from “secondary” qualities in European philosophy (e.g., between number and color). As the “horrific Pathosformel” of numerical formalization, race emerged as a measurable primary quality. But as epidermal marker it was relegated to nonconceptual contingency. We are fast reeling away into realms more speculative than it would be responsible to trespass upon, but is it too extravagant to say that whoever is unwilling to speak of slavery and the commodity form ought to keep quiet about the problem of thought and extension—the very signature of modern philosophy since Descartes?

This is arguably to start too far down the road, though, since we don’t yet know what a concept is to begin with. To put a finer point on it, we have not yet tried to decide whether number as such constitutes a “symbolic form” of the kind that Panofsky, after Cassirer, makes the rather mystified centerpiece of iconology. I can’t hope to answer the question satisfactorily here, though I do intend to deal with it further when time permits; I certainly have no intention of reviewing the philosophical literature on the nature of concepts. So, I will revert to textual montage.

What seems to distinguish a concept from any abstraction or formalization whatsoever is that it involves a structure of anticipation. Concepts lie in wait for the empiria to which they apply. Hans Blumenberg locates a striking etiology of the concept in techniques of preemption:

Concepts require a latitude for all the concrete that is to be subjected to its classification. They admittedly need to have enough distinctiveness to exclude what is altogether irrelevant, but their exclusivity must not be as narrow as the name needs to be, referring to the individual and its identity, its identifiability. In this respect, concepts are not so much the instruments of a creature that is capable of memory but one that is attuned to preemption [Prävention]: it seeks to cope with what is not yet immediately at hand…. If we imagine preemption not so much as an immediate necessity but as a conception, a project, or a planned order that has at one point been understood in its capacities, then the extension of preemptive behavior leads by necessity to the creation of societies. The flight animal that defends itself across spatial and temporal distances may have not yet become an organic system capable of close combat, but it has become one that itself applies and extends its learned abilities in the hunt for its prey. The trap, too, is an action in the absence of both the prey and, at a temporal remove, the hunter. The trap acts on behalf of the hunter in the moment in which he himself is absent but the prey is present, while constructing the trap displays the inverse relationship. It is expectation turned object. Since one has to return to traps to monitor and enjoy their success, they require a certain degree of sedentarism. The trap also represents the very tolerance between exactness and inexactness of its reference object that can only be created by way of concepts. One need only think of the still current significance of a fishing net’s mesh size, on which depend both the quality of the current prey as well as the protection of their numbers for future forays.

(This is from Blumenberg’s Theory of Nonconceptuality; the translation is in the marvelous History, Metaphors, Fables reader, pages 262-63.) So, a concept is a trap. This is not a metaphor. As “expectation turned object,” a trap is materialized preemptive cognition, just as the purely mental concept is internalized technē. There is no ontological wall between cognition and its media. But the model of the concept here is not only the Heideggerian “project” (Entwurf) or projectile (in the ellipsis in the passage I’ve quoted, Blumenberg remarks that “It is not by accident that human history is dominated by projectiles and throwing devices”). It is also the latency of the snare and the autonomized violence of capture. Here we return to the “horrific Pathosformel” as a threshold to conceptuality. Technologies of capture yield the concept of race, perhaps even the concept as such. Yet we have seen that the “conceptuality” of race is paradoxical in the extreme, since its two modalities at the same time mark a de-conceptualization: a reduction on the one hand to number or formalization (the pieza de India; the physiognomic profile) and on the other hand to “epidermal” aesthetic immediacy, both of which are ways of unthinking.

We have thus arrived, finally, at another uncomfortable proximity: Paul de Man’s pairing of “trope” with “trap.” In his essay on Kleist’s Marionettentheater, de Man shows that “the disarticulation produced by tropes is primarily a disarticulation of meaning.” Or, as he concludes after running through the many potential meanings of the word Fall (fall, case, grammatical declension): “But Fälle, of course, also means in German ‘trap,’¹ the trap which is the ultimate textual model of this and of all texts, the trap of an aesthetic education which inevitably confuses dismemberment of language by the power of the letter with the gracefulness of a dance.” At the end of an essay that mercilessly destroys all seeming immediacy, we ought to be suspicious of any “ultimate textual model,” even when the author proposes it. Yet here, I think, we do find a way to approach the mortifying formalization that is the signature of the Pathosformel and enslavement alike. Iconology, then, would be the logos not so much of “symbolic form” as of its contrary, the production of non-meaning in its twin guises of instrumental rationality and the autonomy of the aesthetic: hallmarks of the modern age.

I’m painfully aware that I have not yet said anything at all about Danny’s second paragraph, the one on gender. I may have to return to this.

1. De Man is in fact a bit wrong here, as the German word for trap is Falle, in the feminine singular without an umlaut, plural Fallen; Fälle is the plural of the noun he’s been talking about, der Fall. Nonetheless it’s close enough to work, more or less.