Originally published in Art Criticism, 1998
A.
From the “natural” to the “semiological”
The story of the struggle between
art as “perception,” what could be described as some sort of direct, unmediated
“visual experience” and art as “language,” a conventional system of signs
intended to convey “meaning” via a fundamentally conceptual process, goes back
a very long way. The conflict came to a
head in the late nineteenth century with the development and subsequent
dissolution of a major Realist movement affecting all the arts. In my view, the history of the birth of
Cubism from the intensification/ collapse of this movement is of decisive importance. This history, and its theory, has, of course,
already been written (apparently by Clement Greenberg[1]),
countersigned (by his critics as well as his followers), folded into a
reductive “definition” of what modernism “was” all about, closed and placed on
a dusty shelf. We must reopen this
“closed book,” re-examine and rewrite it.
To See A Sight
What can it mean to “see”
something? A huge literature exists on
this question, of course, and it is easy to become enmeshed in arcane issues.
In the present context I must drastically oversimplify. The “real” world seems to present itself to
us as a steady, seamlessly continuous
whole which exists, moreover, totally outside us, as a set of objects. “Realistic” paintings and photographs appear
to unproblematically document this experience.
The briefest consideration of the workings of our visual “apparatus,”
however, will demonstrate that this view is mistaken. The human eye is in constant, irregular
motion, of which we are never consciously aware, a “saccadic” twitching,
resembling the movements of a bird’s head.
(Birds must move their heads to produce such movements since their eyes
are fixed in their sockets.) Our
attention (conscious and unconscious) is also continually shifting from one
point to another, from right to left, up to down, wide view to detail. What falls on the retina is therefore
radically discontinuous in comparison to the stable, continuous world we
“see.” For this reason, and others which
will concern us below, our common sense notion of “natural” vision cannot be
natural, but must involve some unconscious, culturally determined, cognitive
process, which “constructs” such unitary “vision” for us. Clearly, under such circumstances, we can no
longer speak of a “subject” which exists “in here” as opposed to an “object”
“out there,” in the “real world.” Nor
can we speak of “vision” as though it were some sort of natural function,
something that could ultimately be reduced to the workings of an “innocent
eye.”
The painters of “realistic”
paintings are not passive recorders of whatever falls on their retina, but active observers, choosing to direct their attention toward details in
order to construct the illusion of an
overall view from fragments assembled according to some sort of conventionally
determined pictorial “language.” For
example, as we focus our attention on a particular thing, it will tend to
command our visual field as in a close-up and will seem to grow larger than it
seemed when seen as part of the total field.
Moreover, as we shift our attention to some other detail, our sense of
its spatial relation to the first will weaken considerably. One thing will always command our attention
while the things around it remain vague.
A fundamental difficulty, then, is to reconcile details with one another
and with the total space in order to reconstruct on canvas the illusion of what
we are “supposed” to see “naturally.”
The “language” of mid-nineteenth
century Realism employs some form of perspective (either as a deliberate
discipline or a set of loosely defined rules of thumb) to deal with this
problem by creating an abstract, ideal background space within which every
detail can be placed. But this
geometric grid forces each object to exist passively within it. Idiosyncrasies, special eye‑catching features
of unusual objects, must be smoothed over lest they threaten the uniformity of
the overall plan.
Cézanne and Early Cubism
In the words of Meyer Schapiro,
Cézanne "loosened the perspective system of traditional art and gave to
the space of the image the aspect of a world created free‑hand and put
together piecemeal from successive
perceptions, rather than offered complete to the eye in one coordinating glance
as in the ready-made geometrical perspective of Renaissance art."[2] In the absence of any clearly conventional
controlling system, Cézanne’s tortuous, "piecemeal" method produces
distortions which can no longer be held within reasonable bounds, which can no
longer remain, as in traditional paintings, discreetly subliminal.
Not only do the various objects
contend with one another, but larger objects call forth tensions within
themselves. One part of a large pitcher
may not jibe with another, so that, as a whole, it leans and swells
unpredictably over areas of its visible surface.[3] Table edges exhibit abrupt breaks in
continuity, crudely, obviously, masked by crumpled tablecloths. Each object strains to assert formal dominion
over its neighbors and, as a result, the entire structure seems ready to break
apart.
Braque and Picasso were inspired by
Cézanne to an even closer scrutiny of the contingencies of the objective
world. During Cubism's early phase,
familiar, ordinary things, bottles, glasses, newspapers, guitars, violins, and
the inevitable tabletops, are subject to the most intense study, examined and
reexamined in a variety of juxtapositions.
In the process of struggling to see the object in the depth of its own
space only, without the aid of any system or set of conventions, the young
Cubists discover the equivalence of analysis and dissection. Each thing, then each dissected part, begins
to have a life, to produce a space of its own.
So fearsome is the Cubist hold on the visual fragment, the small detail
on which a single act of attention can rest, and so strong is the pull of the
contradictory spaces, that the object seems ready to explode.[4] In the later phase of Cubism, the tensions
apparently resolve. The distorted, “four-dimensional”
space of analytic Cubism magically gives way and the “surface” of the canvas
(apparently) emerges into the foreground of our awareness.
The “Greenbergian Surface”
The most serious error of the
Greenbergian view is the notion that the above dialectic is essentially a question of “depth” vs.
“surface.” According to a widely held interpretation of this view, what begins
as an attempt to produce a “window on the world” by means of the accurate
representation of “natural” seeing-in-depth, ends with a reversal which makes
of the flat, “material” surface of the canvas itself that which is most
important, that which is “real.”[5] For many of Greenberg’s critics, who all too
easily accept his interpretation as an adequate and complete picture of modernism
as a whole, this “reversal” reveals modernist art to be an empty, detached
“aestheticism,” a throwback to the idealized, elitist aesthetic of Kant,
focused entirely on the artwork as object.[6]
According to these critics (and today they are legion), what was willfully
ignored both by Greenberg and the artists he championed, was the fundamental
and persistent problematic of art as language and, ultimately, “text.”
In this essay, at certain points, I
may sometimes seem to be following a more or less Greenbergian line. Indeed, I strongly feel that the visually
oriented “depth vs. surface” dialectic he promoted cannot be completely
ignored. Nor can the profound insight
behind Ruskin’s flawed notion of the “innocent eye.” Postmodern theory has been far too eager to
reject such views outright. Ultimately,
however, as I’ve stated above, Greenberg’s overemphasis on “depth vs. surface”
must be regarded as a serious error.
The
Pictorial Sign
While few today would want to claim
that pictorial art can present an unproblematic, unmediated encounter with
either the “real world” or Greenberg’s “actuality of the [painted] surface,”
the manner in which the “language” of visual art mediates remains very much an unresolved issue. Cubism was, almost from the very first,
informed by a kind of “semiotic” awareness far ahead of its time, a development
that grew inevitably from the radically realist "struggle to see"
initiated by Cézanne.[7]
Attempting to do justice in paint to contingent details as perceived in their
own equally contingent space, the Cubists are forced to delve critically into
the whole process by which objects are represented on canvas, until, in the
words of William Rubin, "[t]heir quest ended by making the very process of
image formation virtually the subject of their pictures . . ."[8] Analytic Cubism is, indeed, the analysis of
pictorial language itself and, in their analysis, the Cubists discover many of
the methods we now associate with structural linguistics and semiotics.
For example, concerned with the
representation of space in depth, early Cubism places great emphasis on shading
and modeling. But in the absence of
perspective, or any other overall guiding system, such methods can have only a
limited provenance. As the Cubists
fragment the overall space, the various locally defined areas of depth
contradict one another and, as they do, the purely conventional role of shading
and modeling begins to make itself felt.
As Cubism progresses, we become increasingly aware of such devices as
remnants of a process of encoding which is, in some sense, being revealed to
us.[9]
Equally interesting in this respect
is the Cubist use of line. Picasso's
remarkable Portrait of Ambroise Vollard
contains a maze of lines that can look totally arbitrary, meaningless:
Only after
careful study does it become apparent that, in fact, all the lines are remnants
of meaningful articulations: a pair of
parallel zigzag lines demarcate what could have been a sign for
"nose"; just below, a strong horizontal, seen in a certain way,
reveals a “mouth”; lower still, a hardly noticeable diagonal shows how easy it
might be to speak the word "collar" in the "language" of
the painter. With some persistence one can
even make out, in the lower portion, a cuff, a hand, the thumb of a second
hand, and, on one side of the figure, lines that suggest shelves surmounted by
a window. The very resistance these
lines offer, their refusal to easily coalesce into signs despite their
borderline identifiability as quasi-signifying traces, is what prompts the
process of analytic inquiry on the part of the viewer. Less problematic imagery, deployed with less
sophistication (as in the work of so many of the "lesser" Cubists)
would lead to a much simpler, more passive reading and/or the
"enjoyment" of the canvas as a decorative "stylized"
entity.
As Cubist analysis intensifies, webs
of lines cover the entire canvas, growing simpler, straighter in the process,
with greater emphasis on horizontals and verticals. While this development has often been
described as "geometrical," there is no evidence whatsoever that
either Picasso or Braque used compositional methods remotely connected with
this science (though some of their followers clearly did). Nor is there any
basis for the claim, associated with Clement Greenberg, that horizontals and
verticals are emphasized as "affirmations of the [rectangular] picture
plane." (Indeed, several such works
are painted on an oval canvas.) Nor is there, as far as I can see, any
evidence of an a priori “grid.”[10]
I suggest that the prevalence of
"geometric" elements such as straight lines and orthogonal
relationships in late analytic Cubism has a dual function. On the one hand, it must be regarded as a
simplification in the interest of precise spatial determination. I will return to this aspect later. On the other hand, not necessarily unrelated
to the first, it can be understood as stemming from the discovery of principles
we now associate with Fernand Saussure, who defined a language system as a
network of pure difference or opposition lacking any positive terms. In a sense, late analytic Cubism becomes just
such a network, in which "geometrically" straightened lines and
simplified, arclike curves, express mutual opposition: horizontal vs. vertical, diagonal vs.
opposite diagonal, curve vs. opposite curve.
In a similar spirit, almost all "positive terms," if we can so
characterize “motivated” signs, have vanished -- the iconic signifier no longer
resembles its signified in any straightforward way. A play of differences and oppositions is
essentially all that remains.[11] While the images are usually maddeningly
complex, the basic elements of which they are composed are both simple and few,
as though forcing upon our attention linguist Louis Hjelmslev's notion of
"a language . . . so ordered that with the help of a handful of figurae and through ever new
arrangements of them a legion of signs can be constructed."[12]
Hjelmslev’s figurae are semiotic elements of second articulation, a
generalization of the linguistic phoneme (morphemes, such as words, are
considered the elements of first articulation, those elements which can carry
“meaning” – they are built up from elements of second articulation, phonemes
and figurae, which do not have
“meaning”). The question of whether or
not pictorial images can be regarded as possessing second articulation has been
a continuing subject of debate.[13] Most semioticians have found it difficult to
accept that pictorial elements such as shading, cross-hatching, simple linear
configurations, etc., could be regarded as figurae,
for a variety of reasons, most notably: 1. such elements seem to lack
“segmentation,” that is, they often continuously flow into one another and
there appears to be no principle upon which their articulation into distinct figurae could be based; 2. while the
total number of phonemes or figurae
in any given language must be strictly limited, the total number of pictorial
elements, even in a single painting, can be enormous; 3. while in themselves
certain pictorial elements can lack “meaning” or “reference” (a lack deemed
necessary to second articulation) they do carry iconic reference in the context
of the overall depicted scene, something which does not happen to phonemes –
for example, some cross-hatching in itself might not represent anything at all,
but in the context of a landscape, it could represent, say, the shadowy side of
a tree trunk, an effect in which meaning could be said to spread from the whole
to the parts, which does not happen in verbal language.[14]
Given the above, it is not
particularly difficult to notice that, in Analytic Cubist paintings, everything proceeds as though their creators
were consciously intent on revealing a level of second articulation that was
implied but repressed in traditional pictures. Thus, in Cubist paintings we do in fact find
a kind of segmentation, based indeed on binary opposition (horizontal vs.
vertical, diagonal vs. opposite diagonal, etc.). As with phonemes, the number
of possible elements (straight horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines, simple
arcs, simple shadings, a restricted range of colors) is strictly limited, not
only within a single painting, but throughout whole series of works by both
artists. As Cubism becomes increasingly
“hermetic,” moreover, the “spread of meaning from the whole to the parts,”
alluded to above, reverses itself into a “spread of meaninglessness” from the
parts to the whole. Thus if we can say
that the smoothly continuous veneer of traditional paintings appears to lack
second articulation, we could go on to claim that the Cubists may have found a
way to strip that veneer, revealing the sort of figurae that may indeed lie
buried in the pictorial flux of the most traditional works.
As should be clear by now, Cubism
can be regarded, like semiotics itself, as a tool for the analysis of the workings
of pictorial language, not only for the painter, but the viewer as well. What, indeed, is it that one does standing
before a late analytic Cubist painting, struggling to puzzle it out? We can, if we like, try to appreciate such
works as "pure form," but as "form," they are decidedly,
aggressively, impure, presenting to the eye, as often as not, what can only be
described as a clutter. We must
remember, however, that these are always paintings of something, always, in
fact, paintings of certain very specific items and/or people. The only way "in" to the secrets of
these remarkably secretive works is to fix on one particular area at a time and
attempt to "read" it, that is to search for a way to link some
provisional signifier and signified into some sort of sign. In the attempt, trying now this, now that
configuration of lines and facets to see
whether or not, through position, opposition and difference, they can produce a
convincing signified, we are in fact ourselves undertaking an analysis, not
unlike the sort of thing linguists and semiologists do: e.g., identifying syntagms, attaching them
(provisionally) to paradigms, distinguishing hierarchical levels (e.g., phonemes
as opposed to morphemes), seeking out binary oppositions, performing
commutation tests, distinguishing denotation from connotation, continually
testing potential meaning against context.[15]
The resulting "analysis"
can tell us much: lines which may have
seemed arbitrary may gradually reveal themselves as something more, the side of
a table, say, or the crease on a sleeve; areas which seemed spatially vague
will coalesce into part of the foreground or background; configurations that
seemed flat will suddenly carry the eye backward to extreme depth. The "semiotic" efforts of artist
and viewer can combine in this way to provide a uniquely fascinating experience
of discovery, in which many of the codes (or, if one prefers,
"tricks") of traditional pictorial language may be revealed. Thus, whatever we may think “pictorial
semiotics” entails, Cubism does seem, in some sense, to reveal important
aspects of how it might operate.
B.
The Dismantling of Pictorial Semiosis
Despite
the many intriguing parallels discussed above, Cubism cannot really be regarded
as a form of semiotics, not simply because the latter is a “science” and the
former an “art,” but because the Cubist analysis of the image goes beyond that
of semiotics, beyond analysis itself, to thoroughly dismantle, not only the
most basic processes of pictorial signification and the meanings they produce,
but the detached, “scientific” subject which semiotics is designed to
serve. Thus, the “semiotic” action of
Cubism “amounts,” if I may take a phrase of Derrida out of context, “to ruining
the notion of the sign at the very moment when . . . its exigency is recognized
in the absoluteness of its right.”[16] For, in the very act of producing/ revealing
its segmentation of the pictorial “stream,” Cubism subverts the sign function
at its origin, the “syntactic” field which grounds it. In so doing, Cubism cannot also function as a
metalanguage,[17]
or indeed a language in any sense and becomes something quite new, difficult,
problematic. To understand what this might mean, we need to more closely
examine that relationship between pictorial space, semiosis and “syntax” which
I have already invoked. Please remember
that here and throughout the remainder of this essay the word “syntax” must be
understood in very general terms, as a kind of organizing (tax), unifying (syn),
rule-producing, “force-field,” controlling the structure of what Hjelmslev has
called the “expression plane,” the realm of the signifiers. We need also, for very different reasons, to
exercise caution in our understanding of
“visual,” “perceptual,” “surface” and similar words -- these terms,
which we think we know so well, will become increasingly problematic and
strange as our analysis proceeds.
Space, Syntax and Proto-Syntax
In the words
of art critic John Berger, “perspective makes the single eye the centre of the
visible world [which is] arranged for the spectator as the universe was once
thought to be arranged for God.”[18] This statement gives us a clue to the
ideological nature of perspective and the “transcendental subject” produced by
it. In such a work everything is
presented in terms of an apparently passive background into which things are
placed. In terms made familiar by
Gestalt psychology, we are seeing figures
displayed on a ground, what artists
call “negative space.” As gestalt
psychology has demonstrated, the figure is all we consciously see -- the ground
is subliminal.
What is this unobtrusive
background? In one sense it is simply
the surface of the canvas, rendered invisible by the illusion of depth. In another, more subtle, sense it is
perspective space itself, invisibly guiding and controlling almost every aspect
of what is painted and the way it will be perceived. Like ideology, this space, functioning as a
unifying, organizing “syntax,” secretly, invisibly arranges everything “behind
the scenes,” quietly manufacturing “nature.”
As Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz have demonstrated (in the
context of film theory) the “transcendental subject” produced by this sort of
construct can be understood in terms of the well-known Lacanian theory of the
“mirror-stage.”[19]
For Lacan the mirror of the
“mirror-stage” produces, in the awareness of the child, a “Gestalt . . .
[which] symbolizes the mental permanence of the I . . . ”
Only in and through such an integrated subject is the development of
language possible. Indeed, for Lacanian
semiology, this “imaginary” is a necessary precondition for any form of
symbolization.[20] Considerations of this sort led me to propose,
in an earlier publication, what I have called the first “semio-aesthetic”
principle, which must in some sense be regarded as axiomatic: “any object of
perception can signify (take on meaning) only in relation to a controlling
syntactic field.”[21]
The “field” in question can be regarded as simultaneously a vector field
(perspective), a field of differences/ oppositions (Saussure) and a gestalt
field (Lacan’s “imaginary”).
If
we can regard the perspective system as a fully developed syntactic field, then
it should also be possible to recognize the existence of no less fully
developed “syntactic systems” for similarly producing “transcendental subjects”
throughout all provenances, historical and ethnographic, of the visual arts. At certain points, however, we encounter a
treatment of space that seems to operate without any clearly defined
rules: cave art, certain examples of
tribal art, certain Medieval pictures, Fauve, Expressionist, Surrealist, etc.
paintings, even many so-called “postmodern” works, where images are juxtaposed
in a manner that seems to ignore or minimize pictorial syntax of any kind, yet
nevertheless hang together conceptually in a more or less meaningful way. The existence of such works is evidence of
what we might call a "proto-syntactic" awareness.
This
phenomenon can be related to what Freud, in Totem
and Taboo, has called “secondary elaboration,”
a mental function which causes us to "make sense" of even the most
fragmented and confused sensations or thoughts:
"An intellectual function in us demands the unification, coherence
and comprehensibility of everything perceived and thought of . . ." Freud relates secondary elaboration, which
finds its basic principle in what he calls "the omnipotence of
thought," to primitive animism and taboo in a manner that suggests (via
the principles of "similarity" and "contiguity") a further
connection with the rhetorical codes, metaphor
and metonymy.[22]
In
this regard, we must consider also the important work of linguist Roman Jakobson, who discovered a fundamental analogy between the
pairs metaphor/metonymy and paradigm/syntagm.
Since metonymy operates by creating a mental connection among physically
contiguous signifiers, it can be said to function, like Freud's secondary elaboration,
as a loosely defined, rhetorical, or "proto," syntax. This insight,
which became a vital part of Jakobson's theory of poetics, contributed as well
to his pioneering (if flawed) work on the semiotics of Cubism.[23]
An
appropriate example of this proto-syntax at work can be found in the famous
pre-Cubist Picasso painting of 1907, Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon. Here the women's faces
and bodies are broken down into a series of stereotyped “figurae.” Some are drawn
from Western high art, others from European and African "primitive"
art. As in many Fauve paintings of the
time, considerable liberties are taken with conventional pictorial syntax. Yet the picture still "scans," the
“codes” still function, the viewer still finds a way to put it all together
mentally.
If
we look casually, for example, at the leftmost figure, we see a woman who is
apparently pushing a curtain aside with her left hand. Covering all but the head and hand, however,
we may see things a bit differently: a
head in profile with a disembodied hand sitting on top of it like a hat. The simple conjunction of sign for head and
sign for hand is all we really see ‑‑ there is no visual evidence that an arm
is raised, or even exists; nor is there any modeling of the sort that would
syntactically "place" the hand in the space behind the head. What is it that causes viewers to think they
see an odd looking woman lifting a curtain when all they really see, in the
absence of any trace of traditional pictorial syntax, are juxtaposed signs?
To
answer this question, we must look to the notion of a presyntactic mental
function, as described above -- in Jakobson's terms, an instance of metonymy. Despite the fact that Picasso had gone a
considerable distance in liberating iconographic signs from syntax there
remained, nevertheless, this proto‑syntax
to perform the syntactic function in a cruder manner, linking all the signs,
forcing the viewer to "read" the painting conceptually, repressing
any tendency to see in purely visual terms.
With
"proto-syntax", metonymy, "secondary elaboration," what
have you, we have arrived at something absolutely fundamental, something which
might well have provided the original impetus for all the more highly
elaborated, strictly regulated, ideologically controlled and controlling
"language systems" of today.
For, as Freud has stated, the basic principles of animism remain in the
modern world "as the foundation of our language, our belief, our
philosophy."
As Cubism develops, one of its crucial
projects becomes the disruption, not only of traditional pictorial syntax, but
also this metonymic proto-syntax and the “omniscient” subject it produces. To
this end merely "breaking the rules," doing without perspective
and/or other similarly “syntactic” conventions is not enough. In the mere absence of syntax, meaning and
its subject are still implied and will arise (as in works such as Les Demoiselles) in the form of a kind of
ambiguous but nevertheless fundamentally conceptual, proto-syntactic,
rhetoric. This is an extremely important
point, as it performs the absolutely essential function of separating the modernist
sheep from the goats. So the formula
bears repeating: breaking the rules is
not enough; substituting strategies of pictorial “rhetoric” for pictorial
“logic” is not enough -- only an active negation
of syntax and rhetoric both, and at every level, can effectively oppose the all
pervasive integrative power marshalled by "omnipotence of thought."[24]
To understand Cubism’s ability to subvert "omnipotence of
thought" through such a negation, we will need to press farther. Of key importance at this point is the profoundly
disjunctive role of the spatial "technique" known as passage.
Passage
and Space
Passage may be regarded as an art of
transition, a way of “passing” smoothly from one form to another. For example, there might be a subtle but
continuous passage in the form of a color transition from one edge of a yellow‑green
leaf in the foreground to a portion of a blue‑green mountain on the horizon,
contiguous with the leaf on the picture‑plane.
Or a shadow on the upper part of one side of a face might imperceptibly
merge with a dark area in the background.
By discreetly using passage to leave certain boundaries vague, the
traditional artist could effectively mask the conflicts that pit the unique
space of a given object against the overall scheme required by perspective.
Clearly, passage is a powerful tool
for the alleviation of spatial disparities.
In the "old masters" and Realists alike, it softens
discrepancies between assertive forms and the overall space. Cézanne used it more intensively and
liberally, but for essentially the same purpose. During the development of analytic Cubism,
heavily influenced by Cézanne, passage produces a multidimensional
"warping," but also serves to pull the space of the surface together. With the advent of "synthetic"
Cubism, this space has been almost completely unified. To understand how passage nevertheless always
carried within itself the seeds of radical disjunction, we must turn our
attention from space per se to space
as it functions within pictorial representation ‑‑ in semiotic terms, taken
somewhat loosely, space operating syntagmatically.
The reconciliations
of passage are not perceived within the virtual, three dimensional space of
traditional Western representation. This
space, controlled by pictorial syntax, is much too rigidly circumscribed to
permit passage to be directly visible.
It operates, therefore, entirely on the subliminal “surface,” where its
transitions are not easily perceived as such and can even serve to enhance
effects of atmosphere and depth. By
“drawing the viewer in” unconsciously, to mentally supply subtle effects of
depth that are not actually painted but can seem to be, passage contributes strongly to the formation
of the “transcendental subject.”
The multiple disparities of
Cézanne's representational space are so extreme that he is forced into liberal
use of passage to mitigate them. As the
picture depends more and more on such surface adjustments, the negative space of the surface begins to
emerge in the awareness of the viewer.
Since there is no room for such a space in traditional pictorial syntax,
the viewer tends to interpret the emergence of the surface as a distortion of
the space surrounding the depicted objects.
Thus the disparities that passage originally covered over, disparities
between represented objects, re‑emerge as disparities within representational
space, i.e., visual syntax itself.
A Visual Aporia
While emergence of the “surface” was
a serious problem for Cézanne, who wanted to preserve “realistic”
representation, it was seized upon by the Cubists as a means of iconographic
analysis and disruption. In their hands
passage, more and more clearly perceived as the opening of form to negative
space, weakens representational syntax so it can be radically distorted and
dismantled. Easily grasped examples of
this strategy can be found in a relatively early analytic Cubist canvas,
Picasso's The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro,
of 1909.
The
roof of the central building (lowermost of the complex of buildings hovering
above the horizontal arc representing the far wall of the reservoir in the
lower half of the picture) is depicted by a single facet (facet A) whose
rightward tilt would normally cause one to see it as receding into depth. It is linked by passage, however, to a facet
(facet B) depicting the side of a building immediately to the left. This link tends to pull the upper part of
facet A forward, in conflict with the "grammatical" recession into depth. Facet B is pulled even more radically in two
directions. As a signifier for the right
side of a building, it must be "read" as receding from left
foreground to right background. But the
passage to the adjoining rooftop weakens this effect, while the facet's
alignment (which suggests "reverse perspective") tends to pull it in
the other direction.
The resulting
tension thrusts a piece of the "background," contiguous with facet B
on the upper right, forward. This dark,
triangular chunk of negative space commandeers both facets as though it were the
front of another building, with facet B as its left side. On this reading, facet A can have no meaning
at all and simply disappears. And facet
B must be read as receding downward from right to left. As a signifier with two equally possible but
contradictory signifieds (the side of either one building or the other),
oriented in two contradictory directions (rightward to the rear and up or
leftward to the rear and down) it has become a visual "aporia." The whole unsettling force of the aporia is
“felt” by the passage between facets A and B, which cannot absorb it. Since vague, border areas of this sort are
exactly where, in traditional works, the participation of the viewer is most
strongly solicited (so s/he may mentally fill in details that are only suggested)
it is in such areas that the subject is most strongly “invested,” and, in this
case, undone.[25]
From Discontinuity to Disintegration
Despite its many discontinuities and
paradoxes, the Reservoir at Horta is
still a more or less "readable" work. As analytic
Cubism develops, the entirety of
representational space becomes much more thoroughly saturated with passage and
contradictorily aligned facets. In the
resulting fragmentation, these facets, remnants of iconographic signs, become
totally detached from the objects they would ordinarily unite to signify. With such a complete dismantling of the
visual gestalt, the object all but vanishes as a readable signified, its sign
elements disassembled in such a way that no effort at conceptual resynthesis
can be successful.
A good example is Picasso's Ma Jolie, of 1911‑12.
Careful
study gives one a sense of a woman seen from the waist up, in profile,
strumming on a zither-like instrument.
This information is gained only in bits and pieces, however. One sees a curved line that could be a chin,
a diagonal above it that could be a nose in profile. Some distance below these, to the left, a
grouping of three curved lines within a small triangular shape can be read as a
hand. Two diagonals meeting at a point
to the upper right seem to form an elbow -- etc. These fragments are all located more or less
where they should be in terms of human anatomy.
But no amount of puzzling can bring them all together to give us the
familiar gestalt of a human side view.
The upper part of the “elbow,” for
example, stops abruptly short of any upper arm or shoulder. The facet which might signify this elbow, is
opened to the upper left by passage, thus simultaneously pushed “forward” to
the surface and “backward” to the background.
Any signifying power it might have had is thereby drained out of
it. In a similar manner, almost any area
which must be read spatially in a certain direction in order to
"scan" overall is pulled in another direction (or directions) locally
by disembodied, contradictory, spatial cues, linked, and drained of meaning, by
open networks of passage.
As should be evident, fragmentation
in itself would not be sufficient to thwart pictorial syntax so thoroughly that
no coherent form can emerge.
Fragmentation is, in fact, just as common in conventional syntax (both
pictorial and linguistic) as in Cubism.
It is the effect of negative space,
brought into our awareness and unified by passage, which works against any
tendency, syntactic or proto‑syntactic, to integrate the fragments, thoroughly
exploding that perceptual gestalt which is so essentially part and parcel of
the Lacanian imaginary, the transcendental subject and the signifying process
generally.
The Negative Field and its
Subject
We are now in a position to draw
some theoretical conclusions: 1. if the traditional organization of space
can be regarded as a kind of syntax,
its negation, “negative space,” is, in effect, the negation of that
syntax; 2. therefore, that type of
organization which promotes “negative space” can be regarded as equivalent to
what we may call negative syntax, or antax, a structural principle (tax) which can operate to pull apart (an), to disrupt signification, form, the subject, thought itself -- it is
this principle, at work already in those aspects of passage we have been
discussing, which provides the key to our understanding of the disruptive power
of Cubism; 3. if traditional, “positive” space can be said to function
generally, as we have indicated earlier, as a kind of “positive” or “syntactic”
field, we can posit an opposing
field, as produced by negative syntax, which we may call the “negative” or
“antactic” field.[26]
Since the syntactic field has been
thoroughly subverted, the subject once produced by it is put, in the words of
Julia Kristeva, “en procès,” which for
her implies both “in process” and “on trial/ in question.” The move from a Lacanian to a Kristevan
subject at this point, is, indeed, highly appropriate. The problematic, “unsettled” “sujet en procès” is produced by what
Kristeva has called le sémiotique
(not to be confused with la sémiotique,
the science of semiotics), a “heterogeneousness to signification [that]
operates through, despite, and in excess of it and produces in poetic language
‘musical’ but also nonsense effects that destroy not only accepted beliefs and
significations, but, in radical experiments, syntax itself, that guarantee of
thetic consciousness . . .”[27] As should be evident from this quotation
alone, Kristeva’s theories, developed in response to certain aspects of avant
garde poetry, have a strong bearing on my own, a relationship which I have
explored elsewhere[28]
and cannot pursue here. In the present
context, her formulation can facilitate our understanding of how the
self-assured subject of traditional pictorialism is thoroughly “unsettled” by
Cubist “negative syntax.”[29]
Resolution Outward
While negative syntax dissolves representation, its disembodied,
semiotically defused sign‑parts are retained in the multi‑dimensional
"depth" created by the now free-floating shadings and fragmented
recession lines linked throughout the surface by passage. Through a remarkable process of evolution,
representational disjunction leads to “perceptual” intensification, to the
point that each facet, no matter how confusing, how difficult to interpret, has
an especially vivid, distinctive "look." I will have occasion presently to say more
about this “look,” achieved through uniquely spatial simplifications and
precisions without precedent in the history of art.
As Cubism evolves, the facets begin
to expand, to take up more space on the “surface” and this (increasingly
problematic) “surface” begins to emerge more and more with a weight of its
own. In a "synthetic" Cubist
work such as Picasso's papier collé, Musical
Score and Guitar,
of autumn, 1912,[30]
for example, the entire surface is divided into only nine areas, each a
precisely shaped and placed piece of colored paper or, in two instances, sheet
music, each clearly differentiated from the others.
Each
area partakes in some way of some aspect of the shape (or negative space) of a
guitar and the group is assembled in a manner very roughly resembling the
overall shape of a guitar. Unlike
examples of late analytic Cubism, it is not terribly difficult to see that a
guitar is in some sense being depicted, but, when we try to put everything
together into some overall figure,
gestalt, morpheme, sign, what have you, we are unable to do so -- all paths
toward some potential syntagmatic integration lead antagmatically outward toward a visually determined proportioning
of colored shapes in stark juxtaposition.
For example, we can see that the
lower contour of the large upper-central, cream colored area resembles the
outline of the side of a guitar. As we
look upward to find the other side, however, it transforms itself into a
neutral rectangular shape extending all the way to the top -- the potential
sign function dissolves into a “flat surface.” Just to the left is a brown shape, flush with
the straight edge of the first, curved on its left side, like the side of a
guitar (but also resembling a violin).
Again, any potential signifying power this shape might have is canceled
by the context – the “side” of the instrument is placed where the top should be
and, instead of being a continuation of the body, is in stark, contrastive,
juxtaposition with it. There are thus
tantalizing resemblances, “traces” of iconic function, which have been
flattened out and juxtaposed in a manner that might suggest arbitrary
linguistic signifiers.[31] But no such function is any longer possible
either. Picasso has here, as in so many
works of this period, conflated icon
(the motivated sign) and symbol (the arbitrary sign), in a context which
effectively neutralizes both.
In works such as this, the use of
passage to mediate between “surface” and depth is no longer necessary -- all has become “surface.” Passage, which was always in any case, of the
surface, has not really disappeared but opened out into large planar areas --
in this sense, all has been transformed into passage. Negative syntax now manifests itself in the
decentered, disjunctive placement and precise proportional determination of
these areas.
What we are left with is a powerful
design containing remnants of
signifying material. While the “surface”
was originally present only as an all but subliminal trace, it is now the representational elements which survive
merely as traces. Thus the high handed
use of sheet music as though it were simply another piece of paper or, as in so
many other works of this period (though not this one), the almost decorative
use of lettering or bits of newspaper.
We may certainly still “read” the music or newsprint, if we like. We will still recognize in such works that a
“guitar,” “violin,” “wineglass,” etc. is in some sense “referred to.” What has been eliminated is not the codes of
signification, but their power to function as such, and, in so functioning, control the way we see. Thus, the negative field of Cubism is not so
much antireferential as multireferential.
Multireferentiality, in the sense that I am here employing the term,
must not be confused with either ambiguity
or polysemy, which imply two or more
perfectly conventional meanings, each of which is clearly grounded in
traditional "positive" syntax.
Multireferentiality involves the liberation of sign-elements from syntax
altogether, in such a way that a host of different and/or opposed unconventional readings become equally
possible, with no need for resolution on some higher, “paradigmatic” plane
which could provide them with meaning.
In the words of Derrida, regarding dissemination,
“the force and form of its disruption explode
the semantic horizon. . . [While] polysemia, as such, is organized
within the implicit horizon of a unitary resumption of meaning . . .,
[dissemination] marks an irreducible and generative
multiplicity.”[32] Cubism could thus be said to reveal the
hidden disseminative action of the traditional pictorial “text” in a manner
comparable, in some sense, to Derrida’s revelations regarding the literary
and/or philosophical “text.”[33] (I will
have more to say on the problematic relation between Cubism and Derridean
deconstruction in the final section of this essay.)
A Dissenting View
Before continuing, I must take note
of the fact that I am here in disagreement with many respected authorities,
among them Roman Jakobson, Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, Francis Frascina, Rosalind
Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, all of whom regard Cubism as, in some sense, a
language. Frascina,[34]
echoing Jakobson, has argued that Cubist signs operate via metonymy, as visual
rhetoric, a notion called into question earlier in this essay. This approach makes it impossible to
distinguish between paintings such as Les
Demoiselles de Avignon, which, in my opinion, does operate metonymically, and later, more characteristically
Cubist works, which, as I have argued at length, treat the sign function in a
radically different manner. Yve-Alain
Bois, following Kahnweiler, strongly influenced by Saussure, sees a break in
Cubism, due to an “epiphany” of Picasso’s regarding the fundamentally
“linguistic” nature of an African mask.
Thus, from 1912 on, in Bois’ view, Picasso turns, in a series of papiers collés and constructions, from
the “iconism” cum “indexicality” of analytic Cubism to a more “linguistic”
(thus, for Bois, more properly semiotic) approach based on the “arbitrary
nature” of the sign.[35] Rosalind Krauss, fundamentally in agreement
with Bois, also focusses on Saussurian linguistics as manifested in more or
less the same Picasso works.[36]
Both Bois and Krauss reveal an
awareness of the complexities of the Cubist encounter with semiosis that I can
neither adequately summarize nor challenge here. While much in the work of both is not
inconsistent with my own views, I will attempt, very briefly, to point out some
important differences: 1. I believe the
treatment of space cannot be separated from issues of pictorial semiosis (and its
subversion), whereas they posit, for Cubism, a very definite “break” from
fundamentally spatial to fundamentally semiotic concerns; 2. they write as
though Cubism were a kind of rediscovery of the ideogram or hieroglyph, as
though its most powerfully original aspects depend on an awareness of painting
as a “system of signs,” whereas, for me, Cubism is a subversion of the
signifying process;[37]
3. inhibited, perhaps, by fears of falling back into Greenbergism, they place
little emphasis on the role of spatial determination, especially in the later
works,[38]
while I find that the extraordinarily precise placement of lines, planes,
passages, so characteristic of all phases of Cubism, tells us that more is
going on than just a play of signs. Most
fundamentally, for me the movement from analytic to synthetic Cubism can be
understood as a development of the subversive action of passage-as-negative
space, starting as marginal “trace,” opening out more and more to the
“surface,” finally emerging, in its own right, as determination of the negative
field. I therefore see no need for
positing a “break.” Nor do I feel that
Cubism, in any of its phases, can be contained within the “space” of either
Peircean or Saussurian semiotics. As I
have attempted to demonstrate, it develops a semiotic/ antisemiotic “space” all
its own.
In Sum
To summarize (and again we must
recall that many of our terms, such as “surface,” “visual,” “perception,”
“sensory,” are problematic and provisional, as will presently be explained)
what begins with Cézanne as a vague warping of "positive," i.e.,
virtual, representational space, evolves, in the movement from analytic to
synthetic Cubism, into a flattening and consequent clarification of the
"negative field" associated with the space of the surface. What begins, in a painting such as Les Demoiselles de Avignon, as pictorial
metonymy, transforming juxtaposed elements into meaningful, if crude,
representations, becomes, as in Musical
Score and Guitar, simple juxtaposition in and for itself. What begins in analytic Cubism as a rhythmically
disjunct web of lines and passages suggesting (contradictory) spatial
recessions, reverse perspective, etc., resolves into a division of this surface
according to precisely determined, relatively simple, proportions. What “ought” to be a breakdown of solid
things (“signifieds”) into their weightless, conceptual parts (“signifiers”)
turns out to be a transfer of visual weight from conceptually depicted things
to the “surface” on which they have been depicted. Perception in terms of an overall coordinating
representational, signifying gestalt, a centered whole "greater than the
sum of its parts," has been subverted and transformed into the perception
of decentered, disjunctive parts and whole juxtaposed in a context of mutual
equivalence, what Mondrian was to call "dynamic equilibrium."[39] While remnants of pictorial language remain,
and cannot be ignored, the hegemony
of language has been broken -- univocal meaning has been replaced by a
multireferential field, the negative, antactic
field produced by negative syntax.
We must, at this point, cast a
glance backward at those terms I have been warning you about: “perception,” “sight,” the “surface,”
“sensory experience,” etc. They are problematic since, through the course of my
argument, they have themselves undergone a kind of “passage” from one realm of
meaning to another, radically different from the first. One might want to say the negative field, in
opposition to the fundamentally conceptual positive field, involves “direct unmediated experience”: of
“vision,” “space,” “perception,” “seeing,” “surface,” etc., and, indeed,
there are passages in earlier writings of my own which, taken out of context,
could be (mistakenly) understood in this sense.
But all these words are already implicated in what Cubism works to
undermine. So, by the time we arrive at
synthetic Cubism and already for some time before this, what it might mean to
“see” such works has been radically altered by the works themselves to the
point that the old terminology of “vision,” “sensory experience,” “surface,”
etc. has been transformed. To understand
what a rethinking of these terms might entail for this new situation, we must
delve more deeply into the strangeness that is the negative field.
C.
Deconstruction and the Image
Unlike the workings of a traditional
dialectic, the Cubist network of differences and oppositions does not exist to
efface itself within an ultimate unity, a "synthesis" which would
transcend difference and opposition either to establish a metalanguage on some
higher level or assert the absolute privilege of some sort of Greenbergian
“presence.” On the contrary, as we have
already learned, Cubism operates against such a dialectic, pushing all
oppositions to their limit in a manner that defies any form of conceptual (or
“perceptual”) reintegration. In this it
more closely resembles what it may well have indirectly inspired, the critical
method associated with Jacques Derrida, known as "deconstruction."[40]
Passage and Différance
Perhaps the closest Derrida ever
came to a definition
of this term appears in an early (1963) essay "Force and Signification," where he speaks of "a certain organization, a certain strategic arrangement which, within the field of metaphysical opposition, uses the strength of the
of this term appears in an early (1963) essay "Force and Signification," where he speaks of "a certain organization, a certain strategic arrangement which, within the field of metaphysical opposition, uses the strength of the
field
to turn its own stratagems against it, producing a force of dislocation that
spreads itself throughout the entire system, fissuring it in every direction
and thoroughly delimiting it.
[emphasis is the author's]."[41]
In a somewhat later (1966) essay, he actually names this force: "It is a question of explicitly and
systematically posing the problem of the status of a discourse which borrows
from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself [emphasis mine]."[42] Closely associated with
"deconstruction" are certain key terms, such as "différance,"
"the trace," "spacing," "erasure," the
"supplement," etc.
With reference to this by now well
known constellation, I would like to make and briefly discuss an
"outrageous" or perhaps even "naive" contention of my own,
one that, given the highly problematic nature of Derridean discourse, I would
not hope to adequately defend, even outside the limitations of the present
context, but that might, nevertheless, communicate on some level why I perceive
an intimate relation between the Cubism of Braque and Picasso and the
remarkable project of Derrida: in terms
of the evolution we have been tracing in these pages, what has both guided and
fueled the "force of dislocation" which "fissures" an
"entire system," "deconstructs" it by "turning its own
stratagems against it," can be seen as "différance" and the
"trace" as the double action of Cubist facetting
and passage.
Passage as "spacing," as "erasure," as the "trace," as "difference/ deferral," as "temporization," as that which causes "each element appearing on the scene of presence [to be] related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element,"[43] as "the displaced and equivocal passage of one different thing to another, from one term of an opposition to the other,"[44] passage in all these senses, to recover my own voice, can be related to that opening of forbidden channels between the otherwise discreetly articulated elements of a structure, that discreetly disguised opening out into vagueness of the forms of the structure, which, at the hands of traditional artists, engages the viewing subject in a conspiracy to disguise the fact that signification can be neither fully expressed nor contained by form, structure, syntax.
Passage as "spacing," as "erasure," as the "trace," as "difference/ deferral," as "temporization," as that which causes "each element appearing on the scene of presence [to be] related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element,"[43] as "the displaced and equivocal passage of one different thing to another, from one term of an opposition to the other,"[44] passage in all these senses, to recover my own voice, can be related to that opening of forbidden channels between the otherwise discreetly articulated elements of a structure, that discreetly disguised opening out into vagueness of the forms of the structure, which, at the hands of traditional artists, engages the viewing subject in a conspiracy to disguise the fact that signification can be neither fully expressed nor contained by form, structure, syntax.
This “innocent,” “supplementary”
device, when appropriated, commandeered and forced to its limit in Cubism,
prevents the pictorial elements ("marks," "traces,") from
coalescing on any level to produce semiotic effects, but forces them through
the force of a negative structure or antax to fall back on the negative field
of their own (and our own) contingency.
In this sense the work of Braque and Picasso must be regarded less as
“text” and more as deconstructor of
text, thus comparable not so much to other paintings as to the work on text of Derrida himself.[45]
The Truth in Painting?
The relation of passage to a whole
set of ideas important for Derrida’s later thought is brought out quite
forcefully in his The Truth in Painting.[46] The introductory chapter is entitled “Passe-Partout,” a French “idiom” meaning
either “pass-key” or else a certain type of frame-within-a-frame, but which
also means literally, “pass-through-all.”
Here, with respect to yet another “key” term, the trait, which can mean “mark,” “feature,” “stroke,” “connection,”
Derrida writes “A trait never appears, never itself, because it marks the
difference between the forms or the contents of the appearing.” He relates it to “the broaching of the origin:
that which opens, with a
trace, without initiating anything.”
[Emphasis mine.] A bit later he
continues:
Between
the inside and the outside, between the external and the internal edge-line,
the framer and the framed, the figure and the ground, form and content,
signifier and signified, and so on for any two-faced opposition. The trait thus divides in this place where it
takes place. The emblem for this topos seems undiscoverable; I shall
borrow it from the nomenclature of framing:
the passe-partout.[47]
In the essay which follows, the
“Parergon,” Derrida writes in similar fashion of the parergon as frame: “There is always a form on a ground, but the
Parergon is a form that has, as its traditional determination, not that it
stands out but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away .
. . ”[48] In Memoirs
of the Blind, he elaborates on the same theme: “all the colored thicknesses
that [a tracing, an outline] retains tends to wear [it] out so as to mark the
single edge of a contour. Once this
limit is reached there is nothing more to see . . . ”[49] It is this “withdrawal of the line” which
makes a place for language.[50]
I lack both the space and the
erudition to do more than speculate briefly on Derrida’s intentions, but it
seems we can, up to a point, think, as “passage-in-general” (passe-partout, “passage-through-all”)
all that which, like the trait, the contour, the passe-partout, the parergon, “melts away” at those borders which
mark the difference between figure and ground.
Would it be going too far to claim that the systematic wearing away of
these borders, a wearing away calculated to bring out the manner in which they
are always already wearing themselves
away, is already, long before Derrida, a principal task of the great Cubists, a
task he may have inherited from them?
Ground of the Trait
For
Derrida, this “melting away,” this “making space,” or “giving ground” which is
the trait, the parergon, the trace, etc., produces an abyss: that which perpetually divides figure and
ground has no ground of its own, no “home” of its own, must perpetually retrace
its steps, like Derrida himself, and indefinitely defer its action. The
negative field would seem not to be limited in this way and because of this, its deconstruction of “metaphysical presence” might not be, as for
Derrida, “impossible,” but complete and definitive. To better think this possibility,
let us more closely examine some of the essential characteristics of this
construct:
The negative field is a differential
field, that is to say it is determined, as is the positive field, by, in the
words of Saussure, “a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each
term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others.”[51]
Moreover, according to Saussure, “the linguistic signifier . . . is not phonic
but incorporeal – constituted not by its material substance but the differences
that separate its sound-image from all others.”[52] As a result of a similar, yet at the same
time radically opposite, process, very possibly equivalent to that which, for
Mondrian, “annihilates the plastic means,”[53]
the negative field is also incorporeal, constituted not by “material substance”
(e.g., the “surface,” as usually understood) but the “materiality” of radical
disjunction. Thus, not only is it
“unthinkable,” but also, in some sense quite different from before,
“unseeable.”
The negative field can be
characterized as irrational, even as the ground
of the irrational, but it is also “logical,” in a sense that can perhaps best
be conveyed by the remarkable phrase of Alexander Baumgarten: Ars
Analogi Rationis (“art of the analogy of reason”). This phrase constitutes the essence of what he
called, in a founding act for which he has rarely been given adequate credit, aesthetica. Baumgarten’s “sensory logic,”
both opposed to, yet structurally analogous with, logic “proper,” has for its
object, not the abstract categories of the conceptual, but, on the contrary,
the “individual in its immediacy as it is grasped in sensate experience” by
means of poetry or the visual arts.[54]
The negative field is therefore an aesthetic field, which makes it, once again, a matter of: “perception,” “sensory experience,” “seeing,” “materiality,” etc. This is reflected in the incredibly precise, precisely “logical,” placement of all elements which produce the field, a precision especially evident in the radically simplified, highly disjunctive spaces of synthetic Cubism. Such precision, which cannot be accounted for by either the Saussurian considerations invoked by Bois and Krauss, or any conceivable geometric principle, is, for me, founded in what I have called "‘the perceptual axiom,’ the anti-axiom which explodes the ‘axiomatic’ itself,”[55] that which lies at the heart of Baumgarten’s aesthetica, his ars analogi rationis. But just as aesthetica is, first of all, ars, i.e. an artifice, not a “given” of nature, so must we understand the negative field as opposed, not simply to the conceptual, but the entire opposition conceptual (formed by thought) vs. perceptual (unformed presence, given directly by nature), which, as Derrida has revealed, lies at the heart of both logocentric metaphysics and the idealist aesthetics of Kant. This opposition, produced by what I have called the “positive field,” is itself opposed by the negative field,[56] which, finally (for now) we can call, in Derridean terms (but hardly in accord with Derridean “doctrine”): ground of the trace (as trait, mark, contour, etc.) / the trace (or trait -- as passage -- that which “passes through all”) as ground.
The negative field is therefore an aesthetic field, which makes it, once again, a matter of: “perception,” “sensory experience,” “seeing,” “materiality,” etc. This is reflected in the incredibly precise, precisely “logical,” placement of all elements which produce the field, a precision especially evident in the radically simplified, highly disjunctive spaces of synthetic Cubism. Such precision, which cannot be accounted for by either the Saussurian considerations invoked by Bois and Krauss, or any conceivable geometric principle, is, for me, founded in what I have called "‘the perceptual axiom,’ the anti-axiom which explodes the ‘axiomatic’ itself,”[55] that which lies at the heart of Baumgarten’s aesthetica, his ars analogi rationis. But just as aesthetica is, first of all, ars, i.e. an artifice, not a “given” of nature, so must we understand the negative field as opposed, not simply to the conceptual, but the entire opposition conceptual (formed by thought) vs. perceptual (unformed presence, given directly by nature), which, as Derrida has revealed, lies at the heart of both logocentric metaphysics and the idealist aesthetics of Kant. This opposition, produced by what I have called the “positive field,” is itself opposed by the negative field,[56] which, finally (for now) we can call, in Derridean terms (but hardly in accord with Derridean “doctrine”): ground of the trace (as trait, mark, contour, etc.) / the trace (or trait -- as passage -- that which “passes through all”) as ground.
Opposing, as it does, both
“thinking” and “perception” in any usual sense, the negative field opens new
vistas on both. One could say that, in
Cubism, as in Derrida’s own texts, univocal thinking is challenged by an
awareness of multireferentiality, “dissemination.” “Seeing” or “perception,” as passive
“experience,” in terms of what Derrida has called “an irreducible receptivity,”[57]
or what for Greenberg would simply be an unmediated encounter with “the
material surface,” can have no meaning in the context produced by the negative
field. What we have been calling the
“surface” has in any case melted away into the negative field as ground -- “analogi
rationis.”
But seeing in quite another sense, perception in quite another sense, is of the essence. I prefer to describe it as the act of seeing, the struggle to see, the seeing of seeing itself, as struggle, in its contingency, its heterogeneity, its ephemerality, its materiality, its “passing.” Such seeing, radically other to the conceptually controlled perceptual processes, logical or rhetorical, that have traditionally repressed it, radically other also to the original dream of Realism, that "metaphysical presence" always questioned by Derrida, radically other to the whole dichotomy, “sensible” vs. “intelligible,” which, for Derrida, founds metaphysics itself -- this “other” seeing, does not, cannot, transcend, but simply (and successfully) opposes, from without, the same repressive logos which Derridean deconstruction hopelessly hopes to deconstruct from within. In the light of such seeing, where neither our words nor our “thinking” nor our “vision” can follow, in the ratio established by this anti-rational proportion, the untranscendable ratio of logic and reason can, without paradox, be held at bay, and a certain “truth,” finally, be “told.” In painting.
But seeing in quite another sense, perception in quite another sense, is of the essence. I prefer to describe it as the act of seeing, the struggle to see, the seeing of seeing itself, as struggle, in its contingency, its heterogeneity, its ephemerality, its materiality, its “passing.” Such seeing, radically other to the conceptually controlled perceptual processes, logical or rhetorical, that have traditionally repressed it, radically other also to the original dream of Realism, that "metaphysical presence" always questioned by Derrida, radically other to the whole dichotomy, “sensible” vs. “intelligible,” which, for Derrida, founds metaphysics itself -- this “other” seeing, does not, cannot, transcend, but simply (and successfully) opposes, from without, the same repressive logos which Derridean deconstruction hopelessly hopes to deconstruct from within. In the light of such seeing, where neither our words nor our “thinking” nor our “vision” can follow, in the ratio established by this anti-rational proportion, the untranscendable ratio of logic and reason can, without paradox, be held at bay, and a certain “truth,” finally, be “told.” In painting.
Notes
[1]
Almost all the many references to Greenberg in the literature of postmodernism
cite one volume, a miscellaneous collection of brief critical essays entitled Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press,
1961).
[3]. See, for example, the analysis by Merleau-Ponty in his
"Cezanne's Doubt," in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus
(Evanston:Northwestern University Press, 1964) pp. 13,14. One of the clearest analyses of the
contradictions discussed here can be found in Aaron Berkman's relatively little
known Art and Space (New York:Social
Sciences Publishers, 1949). See
especially pp. 115, 116. I am indebted
to Berkman for many insights regarding Cezanne.
[4]
It is commonly held that the Cubists fragmented objects according to “multiple
views” so their signs could then be “conceptually” reconstituted by the viewer
over the course of time, the "fourth dimension." Thus Werner Haftmann speaks of the
"representation of different aspects of an object in juxtaposition, so
that the partial views of an object can be turned into a total mental view . .
." [Painting in the Twentieth Century (New York:Praeger, 1965) pp. 99-100] While something resembling “multiple viewpoints” does seem to be at work in Cubism,
the notion that such “partial views” could somehow be turned into “a total
mental view,” over time or otherwise, is, in my opinion, totally
misguided. The role of the conceptual in
Cubism is far more problematic.
To
fully grasp the falsity of the multiple viewpoint theory one need only compare
a Cubist painting with certain examples of Northwest Coast Indian art, where,
indeed, objects are systematically splayed out and flattened so that all views,
front, sides and back, are simultaneously visible. These representations appear confusing and
unreadable until their very consistent language is explained. Once given the keys, we can reconstitute the
signified objects mentally with little trouble. Northwest Coast Indian art is a language of fragmented, multiple
views ‑‑ when we learn to “read” this language, its "partial views"
are turned into "a total mental view." Cubist paintings never resolve in this
manner. For an equally skeptical view of
“multiple views” see John
Adkins Richardson's "On
the Multiple Viewpoint Theory of
Early Modern Art," in The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 53 no. 2, spring 1995.
[5]
Thus, art historian Linda Nochlin writes of the transition from Realism to
modernism as “the transformation of the Realist concept of truth or honesty,
meaning truth or honesty to one's perception of the external physical or social
world, to mean truth or honesty either to the nature of the material -- i.e. to
the nature of the flat surface -- and/or to the demands of one's inner
‘subjective’ feelings or imagination rather than to some external
reality.” [Realism (New York:Penguin, 1971), p. 236.]
[6]
A classic example of a critique of both
“Greenbergism” and “modernist” art on the basis of a simplistic application of
Greenberg’s thought is Rosalind Krauss’ essay, “Grids” [in Krauss, The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other
Myths (Boston: MIT Press, 1985)], in which the author argues that pervasive
use of “the grid,” simultaneously “material” and “ideal,” reveals a fundamental
contradiction at the heart of a
modernism seeking to repress the essentially romantic roots of its deepest
impulses. There is certainly some
insight in this, but, in an apparent eagerness to atone for past Greenbergian
sins, Krauss concocts a “metanarrative” as reductive as anything ever produced
by Greenberg, finding “grids” and artistic dead-ends everywhere she casts her
eye. As she once seemed to understand,
things are not that simple. Indeed, in
her (pre-poststructural) Passages in
Modern Sculpture [(New York: Viking Press, 1977)], she goes to some length
to distinguish between two wings of Constructivist art, one basically neo-romantic,
neo-idealist, the other “concerned primarily with the surface of its materials
and the contingincies of the situation, spatial and otherwise, of its immediate
existence” [see pp. 43‑53]. In her later writings, such distinctions
vanish. (See my essay “Mondrian and the
Dialectic of Essence” [Op. Cit., pp. 17-22], for a response to the charge, so
often and unjustly – as in “Grids” -- brought against Mondrian, of a
self-deluding idealism.)
[7]
A somewhat similar view has been expressed in Yve-Alain Bois’ “The Semiology of
Cubism” [in Picasso and Braque: A
Symposium, Ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1992)],
where he writes of “a ‘semiological
attitude’ [which] had been at the core of what is usually called Cubism right
from the start . . . ” [p. 175.] For Bois, however, this attitude is more a
reaction against realism than a development from it.
[8]. See "Picasso and Braque: An Introduction," in
Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism
(Museum of Modern Art:New York, 1989), p. 16.
[9].
Much more is at work, however, than a
simple process of "flattening" the space. Even at its most thoroughly fragmented and
"decoded," the Cubist facet is capable of producing a very powerful
illusion of depth, a major source of the extraordinary fascination these
paintings can command. It is in
demonstrating the full power of the illusion, powerful even in the process of
being "decoded," that Cubism becomes a truly profound analysis of
representational syntax.
[10]
I’m not sure what to make of the strange claims of Rosalind Krauss and
Yve-Alain Bois regarding the importance of “the grid” to Cubist painting. [See Krauss, “The Grid,” Op. Cit., and Bois,
“The Semiology of Cubism,” Op. Cit., p. 180 et seq.] Both write as though Picasso and Braque were
in the habit of laying out a priori
geometric grids as guides in the organization of their work. In a “question-answer” session published in
the Symposium, after Bois’ essay,
Edward Fry takes strong exception to this idea and I agree. While certain other artists (Gris, for
example) may well have utilized such a device, there is no evidence whatsoever
for the existence of grids, a priori
or otherwise, or any other form of rational systemization, anywhere in the work
of either Braque or Picasso. There are
indeed many instances of linear simplification (straight lines, simple curves)
and opposition (horizontal vs. vertical, diagonal vs. opposite diagonal), but
no evidence that such simplifications are connected with some regularized
scheme, geometrical or otherwise.
[11]
As Yve-Alain Bois demonstrates in his "Kahnweiler's Lesson" (Representations 18, Spring, 1987), this
aspect of Cubism was already recognized by linguist Roman Jakobson and his
associates during the Twenties and became, moreover, an active influence on the
development of structural linguistics and semiotics at the time. Bois credits art dealer Daniel-Henry
Kahnweiler (who of course had many opportunities to discuss such matters with
Picasso, Braque and Gris) with developing a very similar insight
independently. Many links between Cubism
and Saussurian linguistics are revealed in this most interesting paper and its
highly significant sequel, “The Semiology of Cubism.” [Op. Cit.] See also Rosalind Krauss’ “In the Name of
Picasso” [in The Originality of
the Avant Garde and Other Myth, Op. Cit.], where Saussurian linguistics is
applied to Picasso’s collages in a most interesting manner. For my problems with the views of both Bois
and Krauss with respect to the Saussurian model, see below in the text.
[12]. As quoted in Sources
of Semiotic, ed. D. S. Clarke Jr. (Carbondale:Southern Illinois University
Press, 1990), p. 131.
[13]
See, for example, the treatment of figurae
in Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics
Op. Cit., pp. 213-216 and Goran Sonesson, Pictorial
Concepts, Op. Cit., pp. 159- 193.
[15]. It is a commonplace of poststructuralism that the
receivers of any message perform a work on the message, thereby
contributing to the "production" of its meaning. As should be obvious, however, such
"work," when applied to the problem of reading traditionally
organized imagery at the level of object recognition, is essentially
unconscious and immediate. Analytic
Cubist images, on the other hand, force their viewers into struggling with the
work from a consciously active
analytic standpoint in order to see anything in it at all. Such viewers, like semiologists, are aware of their own "work on the
image."
[16] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1974), p. 50. Derrida is
writing in reference to Peirce’s notion of “infinite semiosis.”
[17]. As an example of what a visual metalanguage might be,
we can turn to the remarkable work of M. C. Escher, whose prints can be understood as constituting a
language about the language of visual representation. Escher is involved in many of the same issues
as the great Cubists, but his treatment of space, solidly based in the grammar
of "positive" syntax, is far less problematic and challenging.
[19]
See Jean‑Louis Baudry, ``Ideological
Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus,'' in Cinethique 7/8 (1970); translated from the French in Film Quarterly (Winter, 1973/74) and
Chrisitan Metz, ``The Imaginary Signifier'' (1975), translated in Screen , vol. 16, no.
2 (Summer 1975).
[20]
See Jacques Lacan, ``The Mirror Stage As
Formative of the Function of the I As Revealed In Psychoanalytic Experience''
(1949) in Lacan, Ecrits, trans. A.
Sheridan (New York:Norton, 1977), pp.
1‑7.
[21]
For an explanation of this principle see Grauer,“Toward a Unified Theory of the
Arts,” in Semiotica, Op. Cit., pp.
237 - 238.
[22]. Sigmund Freud, Totem
and Taboo [1913], in The Basic
Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. by A. A. Brill (New York:Modern
Library, 1938) pp. 867, 872-873, 876, 880.
[23]. An excellent summary of Jakobson's theory appears in
Robert Scholes, Structuralism in
Literature (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 19-22.
[24]
I am for this reason highly skeptical of the recent adaptation of Bataille’s informe by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind
Krauss [ October 78, Fall 1996, is
devoted largely to this topic].
[25] The
power of this sort of visual aporia might best be understood by comparison with
what might seem an equivalent effect in so many of M. C. Escher’s designs,
where certain images can be read in more than one way. Escher’s “paradoxes” stem from long known and
well understood effects based on the presence of two or more conflicting
syntactic fields. One can clearly see
what is represented, but cannot decide whether to “place” it within one
framework or the other. The much more
complex paradoxes of Cubism work to undermine the very possibility of seeing in
terms of any syntactic field whatsoever.
The powerful form-dissolving action of Cubist passage undermines both
the very ground of pictorial semiosis and the subject produced by it, thus
undermining representation and ultimately “seeing” itself. If Escher’s rather mild ambiguities can be
called “paradoxes,” we are justified in calling the far stronger effects of
Cubism “aporias.”
[26]. For an extended discussion of negative syntax and the negative
field in a broader context, involving music as well as the visual arts, see
Grauer, "Toward A Unified Theory of the Arts," op. cit., pp. 243-250.
See also my essay, “Mondrian and the Dialectic of Essence,” Op. Cit.
[27]
Julia Kristeva, “From One Identity to Another,” in Kristeva, Desire in Language, trans. by Leon
Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977, p. 133. See also Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1984).
[29]
In a fascinating, probing, but also rather fanciful and partisan study of
Duchamp, Thierry de Duve presents a very different view of the role of the
subject in Cubism: “In demanding realism
and, in particular, a realism of conception, orthodox [i.e., non-Duchampian]
Cubism did not so much try to represent the object as it was . . . as to ensure
that the subject would stay as he was, a master of his perceptual field and
sure of his own identity. . . The Cubists [wanted] to safeguard or reconstitute
the self-presence and the unity of the classical subject at the price of an
active breaking up of the world of objects.”
Thus, for de Duve, it is not Braque and Picasso but the bitter Cubist
“outcast,” Duchamp, who achieves a “complete dismemberment of the self.” [Pictorial Nominalism: Duchamp’s Passage from
Painting to the Readymade (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1991),
pp. 78-80.] It is difficult to see how
one could argue that a breakup “of the world of objects” could preserve the
“classical subject” without first assuming that “object” and “subject” can be
clearly separated, a position which I doubt de Duve would want to
reinstate. He, like so many other
“postmodern” critics, is taking Greenbergian modernism (“mastery of the
perceptual field”) much too literally and, as a result, drawing completely
untenable conclusions. It is indeed
difficult, especially from the Lacanian viewpoint so central to de Duve’s
analysis, to see how the “object” could be totally reconstituted without this
having a profound effect on the “subject.”
Nor is it easy to see how a viewing of Cubist imagery, probably the most
complex and unsettling in the history of art, could lead one to imagine oneself
“master of the perceptual field.”
[30]. Reproduced in William Rubin, Picasso and Braque:Pioneering Cubism (New York:Museum of Modern
Art, 1989) p. 257.
[31]
Indeed, the relation between the effect of flattening and the invocation of
written or printed text in Picasso’s papiers
collés has led both Rosalind Krauss [“The Motivation of the Sign,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, Op.
Cit.] and Yve-Alain Bois [“The Semiology of Cubism,” Op. Cit.] to posit a move
on Picasso’s part from the iconic sign to the “unmotivated,” i.e. arbitrary,
sign of verbal language. For reasons
which immediately follow in the text, and others, to be presented shortly, I
cannot agree.
[32] Positions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 45.
[33]. Thus, statements such as Victor Burgin’s claim, that,
for modernism, “the art object was to signify nothing; that is to say, it must
not serve in the place of something which is absent as the signifier of that absence but rather it must serve, like the fetish,
to deny that absence” must be
understood as strictly applicable to certain aspects of Greenbergian modernism,
and certain artists he admired, but certainly not to all modernist works. [see Burgin, “Tea With Madeleine,” in The End of Art Theory, op. cit., p.
106.] Cubism, as Burgin himself has
implied, does not deny the referent but in fact multiplies it.
[34]
"Realism and Ideology: An Introduction
to Semiotics and Cubism," by Francis Frascina in Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction, by Harrison, Frascina and Perry
(Yale University Press:New Haven, 1993) pp. 87-183.
[35] See
Yve-Alain Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” Op. Cit. and “The Semiology of Cubism,”
Op. Cit.
[36]
See Rosalind Krauss, “In the Name of Picasso,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Myths, Op. Cit. and
“The Motivation of the Sign,” Op. Cit.
While Krauss and Bois each develop complex, impressive and insightful
arguments, many of their points are weakened by what appear to be flawed
premises: 1. both place a great deal of
importance on a simplistic reading of Peirce’s index, which cannot, as they seem to think, be regarded as an
unmediated “presence” which could somehow escape or even undermine semiosis
(for a thorough examination of this issue, see Sonesson, Op. Cit., 38-65); 2.
there is little in the work of either which reveals an awareness of certain
fundamental problems of pictorial semiotics, as raised in my earlier discussion
of Eco, Sonesson, Bryson, Elkins and Derrida – indeed, their framework for
treating Cubist semiotics proper (as
manifested, for them, only in Picasso’s constructions and collages) depends
upon the linguistics model, long ago dropped by most investigators as
unworkable; 3. I find the “motivated” (iconic) vs. “arbitrary” (signifying)
opposition they posit untenable for many reasons, notably the fact that
arbitrary signs cannot function in the absence of socially established
conventions, which Cubism clearly flaunts – they apparently have failed to
notice how the opposition motivated/
arbitrary is consistently put into question by both Picasso and Braque.
[37]
Both Bois and Krauss seem often on the verge of moving beyond semiosis, to a
recognition of the manner in which Cubism not only invokes the sign but, at the
same time, puts it in question. Thus,
Bois writes of how, in Picasso’s papiers
collés, “signs take on a life of their own, almost entirely disconnected
from the identity of the object as referent. . . As a result of this disconnection, the signs
‘migrate’ in all kinds of directions.” [“The Semiology of Cubism,” Op. Cit., p.
191.] But there is a holding back, a
reluctance to proceed beyond the merely polysemic, which seems curious. Elsewhere, invoking Shklovsky’s notion of
“defamiliarization,” the “making difficult” of the sign, Bois writes: “But an investigation of this
meta-linguistic, or rather meta-semiological, level of Cubist production would
constitute in itself a vast chapter which I cannot open here.” [Ibid.,
p.178.] As Bois hints in this section,
there may well be a fear of “falling back” into “modernist” constructs, a
process which might end by once again privileging the visual over the
“textual.”
[38]
Krauss and Bois find geometrically determined “grids” underlying the design of
pre-1912 Cubist paintings. I (and
others) have not been able to find any evidence that such grids exist [see note
28, above]. They have little or nothing
to say about the spatial determination of the later works, the ones they find
to be properly “semiotic,” which, for them, no longer depend on “the grid.”
[39]
Much in both Mondrian’s theory and practice casts considerable light on the
workings of Cubism, which influenced him profoundly. For a discussion of this
relationship, see my essay “Mondrian and the Dialectic of Essence,” Op. Cit.,
pp. 3-11.
[40]. To dismiss, simply as hindsight, the notion that
deconstruction may in some sense be derived from Cubism, would be to reveal
that one is staring down the wrong end of the historical telescope. Modern semiotics has clearly been profoundly
affected by Cubism, and the writings of Derrida show many signs of Cubist
influence, however indirect. While the
history I have in mind is complex and in some ways speculative, the following
time line should be taken seriously:
Cubism -> Futurism -> Constructivism -> Russian Formalist
Linguistics -> Structuralism -> Modern Semiotics -> Poststructuralism
-> Deconstruction -- or, more directly (and speculatively): Picasso -> Lacan (Picasso's physician and
member of his intimate circle) -> Derrida.
[41]. in Writing and Difference (University of Chicago Press:Chicago, 1978, p. 20.
[41]. in Writing and Difference (University of Chicago Press:Chicago, 1978, p. 20.
[42]. see "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of
the Human Sciences," in ibid., p. 282.
[43]. see "Différance," in A Derrida Reader:Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (Columbia
University Press:New York, 1991), pp. 65-66.
[44]. Ibid., p. 70.
[45]
As the above strongly suggests, the negative field not only opposes, but
appears also to interpenetrate the positive field [see also my “Toward a
Unified Theory of the Arts,” Op. Cit., pp. 247-250.], in such a manner as to
imply a mutually complementary
action. Since a veritable abyss
nevertheless yawns between the two opposed terms there would seem to be some
resemblance to the notion of complementarity developed by Niels Bohr to deal
with certain aporia of quantum theory, such as the wave/ particle
opposition. Certain formulations of
Derrida also seem to have a similar, radically complementary, aspect. [The role of complementarity in the thought
of both Bohr and Derrida is the subject of Arkady Plotnitsky’s Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after
Bohr and Derrida (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).]
[49] Memoirs of the Blind: The Self Portrait and Other
Ruins Trans. Pascal-Anne Brault and Michael
Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 53. Similar themes, the wearing away of borders,
the “giving” of “place,” “passage” as trespass of borderlines, are treated in
several of Derrida’s most recent works.
[50]
In the essay already cited (“Marks, Traces . . .,” Op. Cit.), James Elkins
produces an extended critique of Memoirs
of the Blind. What most disturbs him
is Derrida’s “general lack of interest in seeing and a concomitant fascination
with the invisible . . . Is it possible not to read an unthematized and even a
personal lack of engagement with images in this ‘logic’ that takes us so
swiftly from transcendental conditions to the possibility of writing? . . .
Derrida’s is a repressive reading, a way of silencing the drawn trace by
letting it melt away into writing.” [pp. 837-838.]
[51]. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique generale (Paris: Payot, 1922), p. 159.
[53]
“The equilibrium that neutralizes and annihilates the plastic means is achieved
through the proportions within which the plastic means are placed and which
create the living rhythm.” Piet
Mondrian, "General Principles of
Neo-Plasticism" (1926) in Michel Seuphor, Piet Mondrian:Life and Work (New York:Abrams, 1956).
[54]
Leonard P. Wessell, “Alexander Baumgarten's
Contribution to the Development of Aesthetics,” in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 30, no. 3
(Spring,1972) p339. Wessell is here
paraphrasing from Baumgarten's major work, Aesthetica
(1750-58).
[55]
“Mondrian and the Dialectic of Essence,” Op. Cit., p. 22.
[56]
Writing of the strange, almost mystical
notion of “khora” as presented in Plato’s Timaeus [in “Khora,”
translated by Ian Mc Leod, in Derrida, On
the Name (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995)], which for Plato is
neither “sensible” nor “intelligible,” but belongs “to a third genus,” Derrida
asks: “Beyond the . . . opposition of logos and mythos, how is one to think the necessity of that which, while giving place to that opposition as to so
many others, seems sometimes to be itself no longer subject to the law of the
very thing which it situates?” [p.
90] He goes on to write of a “structural law which seems to me never to have
been approached as such by the whole history of interpretations of the
Timaeus. It would be a matter of a
structure and not of some essence of the khora,
since the question of essence no longer has any meaning with regard to it.” [p.
94] The Chora (sic) is, for Julia Kristeva (to whom Derrida never refers),
a central aspect of her notion of le
semiotique. “[U]nnameable, improbable, hybrid, anterior to meaning, to the One, to
the father, and consequently, [that which is] maternally connoted . . .,” [she is here quoting Plato], Chora
indicates what Kristeva calls “the semiotic body” as an emptiness or mold
within which its opposite, signification, shapes itself as a child within the
mother. Reference to the maternal
function is an important aspect of this formulation; indeed, the chora first manifests itself in that
period of infancy, prior to the mirror phase, when there is no perceived
distinction between child and mother. [Kristeva, Op. Cit., pp. 133, 136.
See also Kristeva, “Place Names,” op.
cit. p. 284.] Despite their differences, both
formulations reveal the limitations which any purely language-based attempt to
get beyond the “sensible/ intelligible” dichotomy must encounter. Derrida must posit Khora “as a matter of
structure” which is at the same time indeterminate; Kristeva’s construct must
be centered in a “body” which perpetually retreats into the world of metaphor. Both notions bear too close a resemblance to
the Jungian archetype. While the
negative field shares certain qualities (or should I say “lack” of qualities)
with Khora (both are neither sensible
nor intelligible), it is a determinate, limited construct, not an
indeterminate, “infinite” possibility, which works to undermine the “archetype”
at its source. [see my essay “Mondrian and the Dialectic of Essence,” Op. Cit.,
pp. 12-17.]
[57]
“Khora,” Op. Cit., p. 111.
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