[Due to space constraints, the foregoing essay will be published in three instalments. Part I can be read here.—Ed.]
From Object to Image through Displacement
In art history there is an implicit belief that human intuition is limited by external physiological mechanisms. The encounter with an object may thus be seen as a traumatizing event. According to the critics to whom we proceed, in art discourse we are dealing with the effect of this trauma. But when speaking about images (considered as visual and partially as objects in the external world), we displace them and still, they erupt into our consciousness. Most of these authors believe that such so-called images are thus analyzable. However, as the most recurrent symptom of the trauma, we will see artists’ attempt to break beyond representation through the methods of representation as mimesis itself (understood in Helmholtzian terms) and thus to overcome the limitations of intuition, which are located where representation ends.
Historically, the results of this attempt have been either allegory, where the break with mimesis is partial, or the rejection of representation, abstraction. There is also a parallel mechanism of obscuring fundamentally possible representation, which historians and today’s art functionaries have resorted to when the denotation of images has proven ideologically unacceptable or too baroque for straightforward relations of buying, selling and promoting works. In this case, these ideologically engaged actors establish an artificial limitation of intuition, which researchers of later eras unmask with success. As the anthropological literature available on the subject shows, it is impossible to completely disentangle these two mechanisms: many artists deliberately obscured representational connections, making them elusive because they themselves were guided by the ideas of their time. This is, in the least, a postulate that permeates iconology—though we still cannot say with assurance whether any precise artist agreed with or even knew about their contemporary cultural beliefs. But, as we will see later, if some signs of these connections exist, researchers of future eras may decipher them one way or another.
In all cultures of humankind there is a known prohibition against the representation of the most sacred concepts. These are said to be transcendent, incomprehensible to the mind. This paper cannot provide a complete overview of books on cultures with non-Western conventions of representation, although their role in shaping contemporary art should be acknowledged: in the case of abstract painting they are Orthodox icons, and in the case of conceptualism they are certain readings of Zen Buddhism. Still, much of the contemporary ideological framing of art is inherited from the philosophy perceived by historians of European painting, where prohibitions on representation are often violated or exist implicitly. For this reason, the author of this text does not consider as a failure the attempt to expose contemporary art’s signification system without devaluing it completely.
Artists, as in former epochs of Western art, depict and put into their works meanings that their historian contemporaries are not prepared to articulate. As an example of soft and hybrid forms of restrictions on depiction, one might cite the text of Pope Gregory the Great’s letter to Serenius1 on the importance of painting in matters of faith. He writes that although painting can in no way reflect the greatness of the foundations of being, it can serve as a device of rhetorical persuasion, and therefore it is not expedient to abandon it for the sake of purity of faith. According to Gregory, ontological ideas are distinct from “rhetorical” ideas, and painting can accommodate the latter. We also see that so far the system legitimizing art has been willing to tolerate it only to the extent and as long as it expresses ideas close to its patrons. But, if we believe Alain Besançon, who cites Gregory in his book The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History Of Iconoclasm, the ideological accompaniment of art either censors, as in the case of “incorrect,” non-canonical icons, or simply ignores everything that does not fit the belief system of the patrons of art. Nonetheless, there are also descriptions of a more complex mechanism for dealing with “undesirable meanings,” where images are accompanied by texts that are completely inconsistent with the content.
Imagery—and here we turn to Georges Didi-Huberman—contains a problem that confounds any researcher: the semblance of the flow of images to what we might call “agency.”2 Images carry a system of meanings that seems unacceptable to viewers, but one cannot completely deny their understanding. It is also common to say that images “live their own life.” It is precisely to these instances that the hero of Didi-Huberman’s texts, Aby Warburg, devoted his entire research career.
In Warburg’s system, once-forgotten and recently widely popular, image and symbol coexist. While the notion of sign/symbol is slightly modified in relation to the Kantian symbol (a carrier of indirect transmission of concepts to intuition) and effectively replaces what Kant would call images, Warburg’s image is the direct opposite of Kant’s schema. Researchers on Warburg cautiously suggest that with his work, culminating in the Mnemosyne Atlas, the early twentieth-century art historian was trying to say that the human does not think in images, but displaces them—as all art historians who followed, albeit misunderstanding Kant, would have also said. In this misalignment of terms, he could mean that a subject retains the knowledge of symbols (hence thinking in general on Kantian terms) but does not transmit symbols to the sense organs. In the least, this occurs with irregularities which cause an information loss. If so, this would explain the previously discussed phenomenon of explanation recovery, which was Warburg’s pinnacle of research. The trauma in his writings was uniformly described as sexual, guiding his studies towards images which would likely contain signs of being displaced by this mechanism. But after seeing these, he concluded that the consequences of this trauma are so broad in spectrum that all analogies and allegories in general, taken to the visual organ, become unacceptable in culture. According to Warburg, a maenad in an erotic trance and Mary Magdalene in a moment of repentance expressed the same affect;3 the snake could be braided around Laocöon as well as Pueblo Indian entity. Such meanings bear the same set of ritualistic expectations4 but until analysis, remain unexpressed. Only analysis reveals them to the sense organs, and the subject begins to see what they know. We cannot, however, say that Warburg was consistent in this thought, because its logical conclusion would be that either the procedure of analysis does not yield these impressive results for the thought process, or some unmentioned displacement of symbols is taking place alongside with the schema. Most probably, though, Warburg himself confounded the notions of schema and image to some extent.
According to Didi-Huberman, Warburg’s system was an insurmountable obstacle for Cassirer. The latter visited the former’s library to complete, in his own words, the difficult second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms about mythology. Cassirer admitted in the introduction that while he could rely on Wilhelm von Humboldt to systematize linguistic aspects, studies of world mythologies were in such a disjointed state that he needed the help of the books collected by enthusiastic Warburg to find a scientific basis under these texts. It so happened that Warburg’s books eventually helped Cassirer to complete his volume, but the philosophers diverged so much on questions of the image that Cassirer did not reflect Warburg’s views in his works. In Warburg’s system as described by Didi-Huberman, images lay claim to an ontological being; they are not concerned with beauty; they also exist in relative independence from people as a kind of the undead. They “survive.” Cassirer, unlike Warburg, eliminated the troublesome distinction between a symbol and its sense organ transmission, and put the issues of the strange fate of the latter off the table. Many of the key concepts of his theory can be traced in this small summary of Aristotle:
But for him this mimetic character of the word is not opposed to its purely symbolic character; on the contrary, Aristotle stresses the symbolic character of the word by pointing out that the inarticulate sound expressing sensation, such as we find in the animal world, becomes linguistic sound only through its use as a symbol. The two terms merge, for Aristotle here uses “imitation” in a broader, deeper sense: for him it is not only the origin of language, but also of artistic activity. Thus understood ??????? itself belongs to the sphere of ???????, of creative and formative activity. It no longer implies the mere repetition of something outwardly given, but a free project of the spirit: the apparent ‘reproduction’ (Nachbilden) actually presupposes an inner ‘production’ (Vorbilden). And indeed, it becomes evident on closer scrutiny that this factor which is pure and independent in the form of artistic creation, extends down to the elementary beginnings of all apparently passive reproduction. For this reproduction never consists in retracing, line for line, a specific content of reality; but in selecting a pregnant motif in that content and so producing a characteristic ‘outline’ of its form. 5
The research of artistic production frees itself from the issues of givenness (and how trauma affects it) and becomes a purely intellectual task. Explaining his own view of art in his later An Essay on Man, Cassirer emphasizes that it is the individual who constructs the image (already understood non-visually), by choosing a “pregnant motif” for it. By this locution Cassirer meant that a draft symbolic system is already formed and ready to accommodate a new element. As envisioned, such a task was opposed to a scenario where the anti-schema pursued the individual and prompted them to reconnect it to its ritualistic ecumene.
Cassirer’s works may answer an important question which so far has been lingering in this essay: Why do we need so many texts of all kinds in order to understand works of art? The answer given by Cassirer can be partially attributed to his decision to avoid referring to schematism in his system. But even retaining this concept, we would not rely on data input from sense organs, as this would compromise the trustworthiness of our conclusions. Under the influence of von Humboldt’s philosophy of language, Cassirer abandoned the division into schema and sign in favor of a single category of symbolic form, but the primary component of this form is the linguistic one. In the chapter The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms devoted to aphasia, he claimed that without the ability to articulate concepts in speech, a person loses the ability to fully perceive reality. In particular, many of the aphasic patients he described were unable to locate their body parts with their eyes closed, to indicate where they were in the room, to solve examples of addition and subtraction—in other words, to localize themselves or the designation of a statement in space. Kantian judgment becomes, in his writings, a verbal explanation. This way, to a certain extent, the verbalization of artworks is their understanding.
A further inquiry into the issue of what is a language will demonstrate, however, that natural languages differ from other symbolic systems in their refinement, and hence are used to calibrate statements produced in all other symbolic systems. Still, their development was itself formed by limitations of the human organism and cultural knowledge, and natural languages may cease one day to be the standard communication system. As we saw from the passage on Aristotle, natural languages are not based on visual perception, and accommodate visual data on premises that are fully unknown. The two researchers, Cassirer and Warburg, would nevertheless agree on one thing: Visual perception is a fleeting and poorly explicable phenomenon primarily because of the limitations in symbolic systems—traumatic in Warburg and cultural in Cassirer. Both of them tried to solve the problem discursively.
Contrary to his plans, Cassirer never wrote a volume of the The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms devoted to art, having addressed this phenomenon directly only in passages in An Essay on Man. From his system we can already see the difficulties he would have encountered had he begun work on said volume. Since without verbalization we cannot say that we understand images, in Cassirer’s system mimetic art turns out to be a proto-language, the writing of a pre-hieroglyphic era. And because of this limitation, it is not at all clear how to chart the symbolic evolution of this phenomenon in a convincing way. Perhaps he, like Kant, believed that the ideal to which art aspired was aesthetic pleasure—but here the reader will rightly point out that pleasure is non-symbolic; the traces of art development to attain it will be lost. Artists themselves have considered that since symbolic systems of different cultural forms overlap with one another, there are no different ideals and truths for these forms; that the truth is one, and it lies in the realm of science. Here, in order to not be unsubstantiated, we will turn to Joseph Kosuth’s classic conceptualist legitimizing text, Art After Philosophy:
The twentieth century brought in a time which could be called ‘the end of philosophy and the beginning of art.’6
The realization that symbolic forms are omnipresent, not reducible to art, and probably even lie largely somewhere outside it, does not occur often in the discipline of art history due to the expectations traditionally put on researchers. Nonetheless, it was something that Warburg excelled at. Yet in doing so he focused not on the transition of the signification system itself to a different level of functioning, but only on the change in the form of signs: changes from forms attempting to be mimetic into forms known to be guided only by conventions. He borrowed the concept of the symbol from the works of Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Robert Vischer, and Tito Vignoli.7 In this narrow definition, “symbol” means a designator that dialectically links something in nature to the author’s idea. From a cultural historian stance, in his Serpent Ritual essay, Warburg claimed that the Pueblo Indians used live snakes as a symbol that magically conjured rain. The symbols were utilitarian in nature, chosen for the purpose of changing reality. Warburg associated goals of magical rituals not with a particular culture, but precisely with a symbol, insisting that the serpent on the statue of Asclepius from Kos also referred to a serpent deity and thus to a rite similar to the Indian one.8 He drew this conclusion from his study of the thirteenth-century Spanish Calendar, which depicted the rite itself and Scorpius, the sign of Asclepius. Warburg rejected mystical interpretations of magical rituals, adopting the progressive view at the time that magical thinking was a primitive, para-scientific way of interacting with the world.9 It is noteworthy that his attempts to systematize symbolic meanings in various cultures were somewhat successful, at least in his own opinion, but the same cannot be said in his theory about images available to visual observation rather than intellectual inquiry. Warburg made several attempts to infer the iconological data of the images he was interested in from physiological signs indicating displacement, but abandoned this project. He tried to keep an alphabetical list of personalities and a schemata, his so-called pathosformeln table of images of affect, sorted by repeated patterns of facial expressions and gestures. The term use might indicate that he indeed meant image as an opposition to Kantian schemata and planned to find relations between the two. Warburg could not complete this table, finding insufficient art-historical evidence of the systemic nature of such expressions; after this failure, he proceeded to his enigmatic visual essay, the Mnemosyne Atlas.
Virtually all of Warburg’s followers, while maintaining both the duality of image as at the same time schemata, anti-schemata and artifact, and the term “symbol” as a replacement for Kantian image, were and are wary of the lack of proper research, bulkiness, and the irrationalizing features of their concept of “image.” This did not foreclose their many attempts to solve the problem with the concept of image by secularizing it, stripping it of all that is mystical, although the work remained superficial. Panofsky gave the example of a wrecked car: In case of an accident you would gladly borrow your grandfather’s car, writes the art historian.10 In the same way, artists use images of bygone eras for lack of better visual means. Alois Riegl stated that authors resurrect works from former eras based on their own agendas and intellectual fashions, never the same as those in which the works were created.11 He acknowledged that image and symbol do not belong to their creators, but for perfectly understandable reasons. Opponents of this approach, such as Didi-Huberman, have emphasized the origins of the image (as schemata and anti-schemata) perception in psychoanalysis. Among other claims in their theories, this is to mean that an image does not lend itself to rational understanding.
[To be continued in Part III—Ed.]
NOTES