Ics | Poet TUF} V ete 22, Number 2, Summer 1988volume 22, phanben 2 Editor: Harold F, Mosher, Jr. Founding Editor: James R. Bennett Guest Editor: Mieke Bal Associate Editors Book Reviews: John V. Knapp Business Affairs: Tammy Hodges Production: Vicky T. Miller aan Summer 1988 HEMEROT- TA FACULTAD DE FILOSSFIA Y LETRAS U.N. A.M Editorial Staff Word Processors: Karen Blaser, Carolyn Critser, Cheryl Fuller, Helen Satterlee Secretaries: Patricia Francis, Jean Nellans, Janice Vander Meer Financial Controllers: Ted Bachman, Judith A. Hacker Librarian: Victor Schormann Special Assistants: Penny Snyder, Dale A. Stephens Special Typesetting: Linda Mitchell Design: Northern Illinois University, Publications and Printing Editorial Board Valerie Adams, University College, London Richard W. Bailey, University of Michigan Mieke Bal, University of Rochester James R. Bennett, University of Arkansas Barron Brainerd, University of Toronto ie Bremond, Ecole des Hautes Etudes, aris Dolores M. Burton, Boston University Seymour Chatman, University of California, Berkeley it Cohn, Harvard University Edvard P. J. Corbett, Ohio State University Lacien Dallenbach, University of Geneva Kenomit Dolezel, University of Toronto at R. Fairley, Northeastern University eet Fowler, University of East Anglia ee Hamon, Universite de Haute Paul Hee i, Uni Sa “madi, University of California, AA wi oe et . Hil i Ann Jerr’. wversity of Texas Jefferson, Oxford University Geoffrey Leech, University of Lancaster Felix Martinez-Bonati, Columbia University Louis Milic, Cleveland State University Thomas Pavel, University of California, Santa Cruz Gerald Prince, University of Pennsylvania Randolph Quirk, University of London John Paul Riquelme, Southern Methodist University Donald Ross, Jr., University of Minnesota Francoise van Russum-Guyon, University of Amsterdam Meir Sternberg, Tel-Aviv University Karlheinz Stierle, Ruhr University Bochum Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Stanford University | Paolo Valesio, Yale University Rainer Warning, University of Munich Martha Woodmansee, Case Western Reserve UniversityVolume 22, Number 2 summer 17 MIEKE BAL ntroduction: Visual Poetics RE J _ Contents Visual Poetics HEMEROTECA FACULTAD DE FILOSOFIA Y LETRAS U.N. ALM. THEORY OF VISUAL POETICS 183 NoRMAN BRYSON Intertextuality and Visual Poetics 194 A. KiBEDI VARGA Stories Told by Pictures In contradistinction to Lessing’s notion of the stability of images, the potential for conceiving of them as mobile rests on the theory of intertextuality. Unlike texts, however, images are “embodied” in their materiality, which constitutes their uniqueness and limits their intertextual movement. Can fixed images tell a story; do autonomous visual stories exist? In order to answer this question, two categories of nar- rative images are considered: series like tapestries, which con- stitute together one narration, and on the other hand single paintings. Historical paintings representing a collectivity can suggest temporal evolution (like Poussin’s Manna in the De- sert) while those which represent one central hero must choose the “pregnant moment” of peripeteia (like Rembrandt’s The Feast of Balthazar). The conclusion is that autonomous vis- ual stories cannot be developed alongside existing verbal (lit- erary) stories.| | | ae | | iv 275 TIMOTHY MATHEWS d Cubism? Apollinaire an 299 LINDA HUTCHEON Fringe Interference: Postmodern Border Tensions 324 L. A. CUMMINGS A Semiotic Account of Gothic Serialization inaire’s critical involvement with the arts, rath Apatingive oF misconceived, signals an aesthetic impe ' radically at odds with symbolist verse as exemplified pyr ue laine. In addition, there is a growing sense in APollinaite,, response to visual form that the experience of innovation $s as estranging as it is liberating. The progressive vation expression that Apollinaire offers is not based on the fun pursuit of power and transcontextual delusion, Apoltina; ris involvement with cubism forms the basis of his conti effort to develop expressive forms out of otherness ise’ ual poetics is understood here as a theory and pricis Vis. poetry developed in critical contact with paintin, and a of ited in Alcools, Apollinaire’s first major Collection of vere READING THE VISUAL “Fringe interference” is what happens wi forms meet: two stones thrown into a Pond ee ae which meet, and at the point of mesting some ™ happens. In postmodern Photographic art, this describe mi the encounter of the visual and the verbal in the work of Victor Burgin, Barbara Kruger, Martha Rosler, Hans Haacke, Marie Yates, and others, Their work plays on the border tensions of theory, politics, and art—both high art and mass media—while problematizing the borders between text and image. The works’ own theoretical self-reflexitivity compli- cates the task of the critic, who must tum to theories of both the literary and the visual in order to Study both the instal. lation and the subversion of the Conventions of both dis- courses, for this is the art of postmodernism, that is, ofcom- plicitous critique. Some semiotic techniques can be adopted to the study of nonverbal, nongestic expression. By using such methods on Poetry and on other disciplines, we are able to recognize at- rays of information from texts, objects, and events. Conse quently, we can define one widespread, unconscious patter! or signature in the medieval imagination (termed Gothic rialization) that manifests itself in writing of several an in painting, sculpture, architecture, in town “plans, aie itary science, in religious practice, and in other humane sions.341 ALICE BENSTON ‘ Being ming and d by a icality an’ Theeurism in Balthus Fra! Frame 361 v Balthus’s work elicits an exceptionally high degree of viewer self-awareness. Critics report their own subjective responses as well as those of others. This essay argues that the artist purposely manipulates these reactions and that they are sim- ilar to those created by modern theater, particularly the plays of modern realism. Further, it is argued that, since Balthus had direct experience with theatrical productions, he know- ingly transposed theatrical devices to the totally visual world of his canvasses. Analysis of the paintings in terms of the- atrical conventions shows how he employs them to involve us in his world of young girls, who, “behind the footlights,” are absorbed in their own dreams, fantasies, and sometimes nightmare of sexual desire and awareness. Notes on Contributors—— ; Introduction: Visual Poetics ears ago, strolling with me around the Italian town of Urbino, Ten y scholar Philippe Hamon wondered what would come after French ks he could not imagine disappearing. When I pointed out that niotics, vas not alone on the academic literary scene, reminding him of the jotics W sence of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, Hamon insistent Pe those are all variants of semiotics!” Indeed, the characteristic of replied theory near exhaustion is that it appears to subsume everything a it, The exhaustion of a theory or paradigm is not evident in its dis- an ce but, to the contrary, is evident in its overwhelming presence, which apPsompanied by an increasing lack of specificity. ; i a asiotics is still around, and its possibilities are far from being fully ped, let alone exploited. Yet literary studies has been in need, for some aan now, of a new impulse to make semiotics work. Such an impulse has eaurred in the formation of a field of study that takes semiotics at its inter- oriplinary word, Beyond the multidisciplinary gathering of fields of appli- cation, semiotics has inspired a variety of scholars in the cultural sciences to explore the truly interdisciplinary connections among their fields. These schol- ars explore the ways in which theory and criticism, and visual and verbal arts can inform each other to increase their insights into each field and at the same time into the arbitrariness of some of the limits between them. Although some general sense of a semiotic basis underlies these endeavors, their activities do not stand out as specifically semiotic; rather, they are characterized by what I have begun to call “visual poetics.” The field whose outlines are apparent in this volume is perhaps better known under the more restricted and slightly clumsy name of “word and image,” or under the more encompassing one of “comparative arts.” The former is the title of a journal, a newly founded international society, and a special issue of Poetics Today, guest-edited by Wendy Steiner, who was one ofthe forerunners of the discipline. The latter is the title of a new program at the University of Rochester, whose founding members—Michael Ann Holly, Norman Bryson, and myself—are all involved in the present special issue. I Consider both “word and image” and “visual poetics” as sections of the larger feld of comparative arts, and the relations between the three titles deserve Some clarification. i Comparative arts, at least as it is conceived at the University of Rochester, “ant to be an interdisciplinary endeavor intended to overcome the limi- ons imposed by academic traditions and to increase the fruitfulness of mes and methods developed in each of the cultural sciences for the others. Tecent flourishing of film studies has shown how profitable such an open- *eVolume 22, No, 2, Summer 1988 177 - ipuaememmamamaasararemmacciamai:Micke Ba 178 iplinary thinking can be. Drawing upon sen: inter ictpeory, Philosophy, besides the More Obview ne atines like psychology of perception, literary studiesand visual Analysis disciplines like PSY itself a convincing profile in no time. Comparative an’ film studies has 81% shis interdisciplinarity to the entire range of « is an attempt 10 epplines: art history, literary studies, film studies, by, or see ea logy and history. . oe aah film studies, “word and image” is another starting Point, be it less spectacularly successful because more limited in scope and more te ditional in methodology. Associated with this name are analyses of the inter. relations between literary texts and the images used to illustrate them. The classical case, almost a field in its own Tight, is Blake, and the subtle, yet far. reaching analysis of two poems-with-plates presented here by Harriet Gueg and John Barrell shows that the subject is far from being exhausted, The phrase “visual poetics” indicates an approach which is more Modest in scope than comparative arts and more profoundly interdisciplinary than word and image in its initial limited sense. As it is presented in this volume it is a poetics in the first place: an approach to literature, although also ap. plicable to other arts, it is comparable to rhetorical, Psychoanalytical, or so. ciological poetics. But unlike these, it is defined not by affiliation with a the. oretical paradigm but by a specific cognitive basis, or bias if you wish, upon which it draws for its heuristic tools and for its overall perspective, Acknowi- edging the profoundly spatial and visual input indispensable in all cognition and the subsequent impossibility of severing the visual domain from the verbal, a visual poetics tries to overcome the word-image Opposition implanted into our culture from antiquity on. Turning its back to commonplace notions of verbal art as temporal, it tries to make characteristics of visual analysis like Perspective and vantage point, but also less obvious elements like indiscrete- ness, composition, and even color, work for literary analysis. ; "Precisely because of its polemic denial of the word-image opposition, visual poetics is also an approach to visual art which is truly a “poetics.” Acknowledging the profoundly discursive nature of all semiosis and the sub- sequent impossibility of basing the analysis of visual art on a specific ontology or substance, a visual poetics tries to make recent developments in literary theory and philosophy work for visual analysis. Although none of the com tributors to this collection believes that differences between the arts can and need be easily ignored, they all believe that serious reflection on the possibiit® of mutual collaboration has much to offer for the study of literature and the visual arts. arts.” t also . each The essays collected here present themselves in sets of two oF No illuminating a different aspect of visual poetics. The first two earn encetit man Bryson and A. Kibédi Varga, raise initial theoretical questiction: Visual Poetics trod sissies 179 ibility of visual poetics. The: ‘ . se very 2 sative to say. If the wale ope vith viele ething Positive and “t is because Bryson’s three books of visual poetics, ow Skeptical con: ul a . , Word and Im tol ), Vision and Painting (1983), and Tradition and Desire (1984) off ithe 4 4 substantial presentation of the field. If even the scholar whe wan considered oe founder of visual poetics expresses some ske ticism toward assimilation o poetry and painting, his attitude is bound to reassure ose WhO, cautious if not sespiiorn about this kind of new wave in schol- shi, might be tempted to ismiss it right away. Bryson begins by challenging the well-known, often challengs | but still widely held view represented by Lessing's Laoko6n according to which images stand still while texts flow through time. Rather than questioning the latter, he undermines the former, more | appealing idea. Images do not stay still, and whoever believes they do should spend some time in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, where one gets easily seasick by the movement of Rothko’s most radical paintings. Drawing upon Barthes’s attempt to sever texts from both the referent and the author, Bryson develops a sense for intertextuality as the basis of visual mobility. Yet he does not want to take the radically deconstructionist position for images that he adopts for texts, because, in his view, images are bound by the ma- terality of their construction. Bryson, who is inspired by Bourdieu in this per, shrewedly uses the word “embodiment” to develop his ideas of the materiality of the image. This embodiment constitutes the limit of intertex- tuality and the token of uniqueness. One can challenge, in turn, the assumption that texts because of their sheer reproductability are not “embodied.” Further, Iwould suggest that the limits to the intertextual flow that he wishes to protect for painting might also apply to texts, where the semiotic freedom is equally limited by the power relations which determine the validity of interpretations. . Bryson certainly raises important questions which demonstrate how produc- tive semiotics can be, not only for literature and painting alike, but for the assessment of their interrelations. A. Kibédi Varga has been involved in word and image for a long time. Inhis paper he assesses the possibility of paintings to narrate. Visual stories canand do exist, not only as series of paintings or of scenes within one painting, butalso in other forms, which Varga discusses. The problem he tackles is this: wean Painting move from (the representation of) one action to an entire Pam ceiving three recent developments in narratology—the Proppian andthe ans, the psychological study of understanding and memory, teins w pepological study of the function of story-telling in a culture—he After th a visual narratology can contribute to each. East van A ne two Pieces of theoretical reflection, Michael Ann Holly and tents Hl explore visual poetics as an interpretive strategy for reading erature in the ly examines a genre of writing that has been assimilated into le wake of Hayden White’s Meta-History: early historiography,SS Ne a 180 . ineteenth-and early twenti, in Holly’s case, the famous got ie ae eatablicn rhetoric ' cultural history. Unie redorninate in the writing of historical perig ®t which are Prete exivity that makes the historiographic text pec Bt rather, posits a et a object it sets out to describe. In the structure ones reflect, or On the Renaissance she recognizes the principles of i ck. hard vation charameristic of the period with its richness of de ir torial marie principle of composition. Similarly, in Henry Adams's Weide ts rredieval art, she recognizes the heterogeneity that characterizes the a on The semiotic relation between text and visual object she brings to the fore be seen as a diagrammatic iconicity in Charles Sanders Peirce’s sense Van Alphen proposes to read literary texts visually, and he demonstra his poetics with a Dutch postmodern text. He shows how this Novel, whi can to a certain extent be read realistically, gains its depth from a ich visuality that originates in the main character's upbringing by a Silent fat “in the beginning was the image.” The novel seems to propose a Visual reg nl but by its own self-reflexivity it also Proposes to read other Works in this Van Alphen engages in a dialogue between literary/visual and theoreti scala course that draws its insights from the refusal of theoretical ™Mastery leanne from deconstruction. While Holly explores the Possibilities of visual et for historical intertextuality, van Alphen’s approach, which, as typically os, modern, is also period-bound, is more functional and Systematic, " Word and image in the initial Sense, as the study of Telations between text and illustration, is convincingly renewed by the two Papers that represent the approach. Arie-Jan Gelderblom begins by assessing the Approaches to Dutch art, conceived of, first, as Photographic realism, hence Purely visual; then as emblematic and, hence, purely “verbal” finally, Svetlana Alpers characterized it as descriptive, not in the realist sense but in the Barthian sense: asa thetorical effect. The allegorical art Gelderblom Studies does not fit any of these ap- Proaches because it is not unified. As a heterogeneous mixture of “discourses,” the illustrations as well as the texts themselves, in his case country-house poems, defy any hierarchy between realism and fantasy, descriptive and figural, fact and figure. Gelderblom ends with appealing suggestions about the impli- cations of his analysis, which lead to a view of the “politics of landscape” and the “semiotics of place.” The latter thread runs from Gelderblom’s paper to that by Harriet Guest and John Barrell. They also explore the political implications of the a between text and image and the Possibilities of the semiotic transaction 3 meaning that these relations offer. They analyze two different eur ane Poem and illustration: one in which the image proposes one possi aon plausible, interpretation of the song, and one where the proposed he : is actually problematic. The text, as they write, refuses to authorizjatroduction: Visual Poetics 181 _terpretation unambiguously. Thej 0 ut the political and critical potential of the word. a orical position of this particular mixed discourse. John Neubauer and Timothy Mathews explore the possibilities of vi ing with two classic examples: the case of Goethe, whose writing isos n characterized as “morphological,” hence, visual, ae ofte involvement with cubism is well known, Both and that of Apollinaire, T Profound analyse: the visual (Anschauung is the key word) has pushed i Pale Goethe’s investment in the visual. In fact, the anciyas chen ns demonstrates that visual poetics should Not be an easy transfer from one art to the other, and as Jong as the debate is phrased in terms of observational reliability, the opposition will 8row rather than diminish. Mathews studies a favorite period in visual poetics: the rise of cubism and concrete poetry. Although relations between the two arts are undeniable and consciously pursued, it is by no means obvious that we know how to approach these works. In an elaborate response to Marjorie Perloff’s recent study The Futurist Moment ( 1986), Mathews works through the problems of interpretation of art forms which “make forms of expression out of otherness ase” m After the papers exploring visual reading, the volume ends with three papers practicing the reverse: reading the visual. Three literary scholars analyze visual works: Linda Hutcheon studies postmodern photography; L. A. Cum- mings, gothic cathedrals and cityscapes; and Alice Benston, the paintings of Balthus. The analysis of photography as the visual art form which challenges assumptions of uniqueness may entice the reader to go back to Bryson’s ma- terialist claim for the image’s distinctness. Cummings and Benston develop a nading of visual images beyond the word-image opposition. Cummings’s con- pt of seriality is in itself a challenge to the atemporality of the image. As a Etuine “chronotopos” in the literal sense, seriality is an interpretive strategy that manages to overcome the opposition which blurs our insight into the style characteristic of the late Middle Ages. Benston uses the theater as interpretive Model, an art form equally mediating between the visual and the verbal. Her waits of Balthus’s sometimes disturbingly voyeuristic paintings of naked 08 girls explains why they are not necessarily only that: as theater, they voyeuristic object of vision status as a subject of acting. ) a says collected here do not give an overview of visual poetics. They te vit Various approaches connected to this new field. It is hoped that "Se questions and stimulate the development of further possibilities.182 nits The collection grew out of have something more to O! cui Micke pa the conviction that the relations" ffer than the study of each art can offer all the ang ‘One, Mieke R ‘ochester and Utrecht, January ise~ Norman Bryson Intertextuality and Visual Poetics* ‘The phrase “visual Poetics” contains a promise: that between poetry and cual there is a kinship or affiliation which allows us to cross from one ye vis the other with some kind of ease or sense of natural right of way. domain intention of making the passage from one to the other seem im- have nr unduly difficult, but there are conceptual difficulties in that passage possible ‘ think one should be aware. I am afraid I will be pointing to more of which than I can resolve, and my aim is rather to raise some questions dificult answers. I should add that I am restricting my discussion of the a presentational painting to stop matters from getting completely out of a might begin by invoking a classical account of the relation between m he visual, which, if it were correct, might completely block inter- flow between them: Lessing’s Laoko6n. Lessing argues that painting and poetry lo joy different and incompatible systems of signs, the signs of painting being onitaneous or synchronic, the signs of poetry being diachronic or distributed in time. ‘An image has “but one moment” to release its charge; a text, by contrast, is a progress from beginning to middle to end. Lessing argues that poetry, being a consecutive or serial form, is singularly unable to deal with the visual sphere. The more a poetic text tries to describe the visual or to generate an image, the more it displays its constitutional inability to achieve the simultaneity which is the image’s essence. If poetry's visual description is short it will lack the detail which characterizes visual experience. If poetry’s visual description tries to pack detail in, the more it adds, the more the pos- sibility of achieving simultaneity recedes. According to Lessing, poetry should therefore avoid the visual altogether and leave it to the painters to deal with. Conversely, painting, which employs static and unmoving forms, is singularly snable to deal with narrative: the more an image tries to tell a story with binning, middle, and end, or with episodes arranged in a series, the less Coherent it becomes. Painters should not try to do the job of poets. At best sane can select the central moment which sums up a story and implies wissen its end; yet the story must be implied, not stated, since it is i Or a static or unmoving entity to unfold in time, as all narratives poetry and t Ths essay opi ' original in Critic "ited by remiss heated in Critical Texts, volume 4, number 2 (1987), Pages-1-6, and is Syke Votu 2 * Volume 22, No. 2, Summer 1988 1184 “Norman Bryson Let us take from Lessing this notion of the image as atemporal, or all at-once. Obviously it corresponds to a certain truth of ordinary experience Paintings stay still; they don’t move around the walls; their figures don’t gi: out of the frame and gambol about when no one is looking. Sometimes A Slip of ideal form aspires to a shedding of time’s contingencies, so that the % Cult we see in painting are taken out of the temporal flux. Or Painting Thay ¢: o ideal form and instead set down an unidealized and transient moment. shew think of the image in terms of abstraction, and identify painting with the f We held on the picture plane as surface flatness, time seems notably abse orm reference to a temporal world or to narrative sequence complicates the No vailing stasis. Idealization, realism, and abstraction Concur in the times, Pre. of images. Such timelessness allows one to think of a Painting as a subse in Aristotle’s sense: as an entity having (i) stable location in a single pj, tance independent self-existence, requiring nothing but itself in order to z ‘ace; (ii) permanent or enduring form. A metaphysics of substance seems built ing ut format of Western painting, into the Picture frame. In a Sense we ca, ee the with frames and regard them as extrinsic to painting; yet even ese actual frame Western painting is a structure of framing, and within th Out its substance is held ina state purer than substances in nature. In nature g he hie may move, unfold, blend, dissolve, but in the frame substance is hee displayed in Aristotelian purity: as requiring nothing else—no other eld and in order to exist; as independently self-existent, in a single place, and a manent essence. > alia’ 10 per- The first question I want to raise is: what kind of entity i i if it is not in fact a substance, what is it? Thinking of the image ecaee and is obviously untrue to certain aspects of ordinary experience, Images do chan after five seconds some are completely dead; others get better after the ted ten minutes. Images can also change through an individual’s life, and are one thing in one decade, something else a decade later. The substance-view of the image starts to founder the moment we shift the Point of view of the discussion to the spectator. In actual experience, looking at an image is a Tadically tem- poral process, which changes from moment to moment, If we think of the saccadic movements of the eye, what vision experiences is an image distributed across discontinuous leaps. Each act of looking attends to a different area of the image and discloses a partial view, as vision transits through the image in endless stops and starts. Each view finds a different perch or purchase on the image, and the successive views are strung together serially, in a flow of time. One might want to say that gradually these partial views are assembled, like the pieces of a jigsaw, into a complete image, a total state, which at together and supersedes the work of assemblage. Yet we do not ie experience vision as ever achieving that totality or saturation. Tf bid at vison that way, then looking at an image would reach a distinct ee ‘ap seems interminable. It is such that until the moment we drop a oooality and Visual Poetics intertextuality 185 Fe cannot make vision stand still i ooking; we ¢ e n nd still or repeat itself Perfectly, ne of totality is never achieved, is always Postponed, is always. ahead Ne : ihe idea of accumulating vision Quite true to experience: when we look at 4 painting we aie revising Our previous apprehensions, erasing or ego ‘S freeze-frame an individual momen: al it a glance. The temporality of the glan ‘ve and protentive: it brings with it the jtoccurs is felt as leading on to the next vi ei oe being is its becoming, which perish wmpletion. The glance is an entity hard to map according to Aristotelian orpstance. Since its constitution retains the past and is oriented to the future i lacks the all-at-onceness of substance. Rather, it is a structure of interpe- it tration; past and future interpenetrate it without obstruction, nel The interpenetration runs, that is to say, both backwards and forwards, When we recognize a Pieta ora Nativity, recognition proceeds by relating the resent occasion back to past occasions when we have seen Pietas and Nativ- ities, back to their iconographic conventions. Tconography provides the clearest example of the retentive structure of the glance, yet it is not only iconographic forms but all forms that are recognized in this way. And this is true from the sart, even the first form we recognize is one which is related to a previous case, and in the logic of inauguration at work here even the first instance is already interpenetrated by the past. The glance is a Structure without origi- nation. The “forward” or protentive structure of the glance is a function of the endless mobility or insatiability of vision, When we look at an image, we cannot stop our looking: looking goes on, nothing can arrest it; it seeks always the next view and the next image, and this seeking is built into, is the foun- dation for, each individual glance in the very moment that it occurs, Now consider what kind of image stands before, or is Proposed and assumed by, the glance. It, too, is structured according to absence of origin, ntentive-protentive temporality, and interpenetration. In a classical concep- tion of the image such as Lessing’s, the image inhabits a stable location in a single place; it is a permanent or synchronic form. In the alternative view of ‘he image which I am briefly exploring here, each of those classical fixities is unsettled. The image is found to lack all-at-onceness, independent self-exist- tnce, permanent form. We can analyze this post-classical or at least other conception of the image either “macroscopically,” and consider the individual nage in relation to other images, or “microscopically,” and consider the in- ina image by itself (though what “by itself” might mean is exactly the t of looking and for convenience ce is, in actual viewing, both re- wake of previous views and even ew, It is an occasion of experience es immediately on attainment of tenti wee” the Macroscopic view, the image contains within itself, and is inter- nee without obstruction by, the whole suit of prior images, as well as ‘ther, as yet empty set of future images, all of which co-exist with orOOOO SEE EEE EEE EE OE OOOO 186 Norman Bryson inhabit the image in a continuous or frameless field. In terms of the traditio, of painting, interpenetration by the past corresponds to the Massive struct n of allusion or reference a painting makes, willed or unwilled, to the tra; ditine which houses it and which it also continues. Again in terms of the tra ain of painting, interpenetration by ‘the future corresponds to the Perceptig a painting as unfolding in a tradition which runs beyond itself and into fu of work: it corresponds, that is, to the perception of art as embodying a tra nae structured by forward direction rather than mere haphazard accumulati ion Microscopically, in the individual act of looking or glance, interpenetrati = by the past corresponds to the repertoire of images previously encountered.” the viewer and now brought to bear upon a particular image in the WO by recognition; while interpenetration by the future corresponds to the awarey ct in the present of viewing, that there is no terminus or saturation péint viewing. Each moment of the glance is inhabited by the suite of previous for of attention which the viewer has brought to bear upon the-particular ‘mae and is inhabited also by a proleptic awareness of the next glance which ve follow and supersede the present one in an endless track of deferral or des : What I am describing has both a visionary and a common or ane aspect. Nothing could be more flat than to observe that when we look at paintings, we typically think of their relation to tradition, or that no sooner have you enjoyed a particular image or view than you want another one. Yet the dissolution of the Aristotelian or substance-view of images brings with it some major transformations. Let me prolong this more visionary aspect by invoking some similes, which may—this is their intention, at any rate—convey a visceral sense of the changeover from the idea of image according to substance to the post-classical idea of the image according to unimpeded interpenetration. Think of the whole span of tradition, both past and future, as “rounded”: then each image, interpenetrated by the images of past and future, reflects all other images from its own standpoint, so that the splendor of tradition is multiplied ad infinitum in a panoramic spectacle of simultaneous mutual reflection not unlike Leibniz’s monads or perspectival mirrors. Within the boundary of the individual image, each glance of the viewer across its surface reflects the sum of previous glances upon the present image, as well as all the images to come, the image before each glance has the structure of a hologram. Once we she the substance-view, we find that the image is subject to wholly different pn ciples of being. Since it does not disclose itself all at once and does on in self-existence, it emerges together with the surrounding field of ee is dit mutual arising. Interpenetrated by past and future images, its al refi solved and crossed through principles of mutual entering, mulual mutual containment. se or imelss I mentioned earlier that if Lessing's idea of the a zit woud image and the diachronic or temporally unfolding . nd ne litera ® tke be hard to move between the domains of the visual @ aF . . extuality and Visual Poetics Intert 187 ise “visual Poetics” Promises we might do, The shedding of rubstance-VieW of the image moves the image into close proximity to of literature and language. The image regains the fluid temporality . the substance-view. The idea of the text as an interpenetrative structure is, ‘ course, important in literary theory in the work of Barthes and Derrida. I oul id say that Barthes established the intertextual text in two moves. The first volves the severance of the text from reference to a real world beyond itself. R ealism is only a rhetorical effect, the result of a text’s internal organization, nd what seems like realism is only the repetition within the text of the repeated discursive forms which in Barthes’s view construct reality. This first move, the separation of text from reference to a real world, is completed in the second move, which disconnects the text from authorial intention. In “The Death of Author,” Barthes wrote that a text is “not a line of words releasing a single ological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimen- sional space in which a variety of texts, none of them original, blend and ash.” Barthes’s idea of the text is such that, disconnected from authorial intention on the one hand and from reference to a world beyond the text on the other, it becomes an intertextual field where no discursive fragment is pound to any origin whatever. In the field of the text, fragments of other texts blend, clash, collide; each text is the reflection of other texts in a swirl of mobile intertextualities. To think of paintings as mutually interpenetrating is to dis- cover in the realm of the image the same phenomenon of mobile intertextuality made familiar to us by Barthes and Derrida in the field of literary criticism. The logistics are indeed similar in both domains. In the case of the image, intertextuality is established by dissolving the frame around the work, In the case of the text, interpenetration is established by annulling the point of origin of the work, whether this point is the world - the text refers to or an author in control of its meaning. The phrase “Visual Poetics” promises a kinship or affiliation between the literary and visual which allows one to cross from one domain to the other without a massive change of gear. In the parallel ideas of the interpenetrative image and the intertextual text, we seem to have a current mutual ground which criticism might profitably work with. It seems therefore worth raising at the present time the question: isthere such a thing as a general category of intertextuality or interpenetration which might be applied in the same way to texts as subject to similar structures of dissemination and flow? Or are there specificities which apply in the case ofthe text but not in the case of the image? x kK Lessing's the fields denied it ‘a ae like to keep these questions open; but I would also like to suggest 0Y of pelo or intertextuality functions rather differently from the image- toy oft age interpenetration. I can sketch the difference as follows. In the xtual dissemination described by Derrida, texts flow so fast becauseN 188 orman Bryson they are pure information, and information is weightless. To produce Meanin, 8 at all the verbal signifier has to travel to another signifier: its essence ig m ment. Moreover, the text 1s a multiple object; it exists simultaneously in Ove. places. The life of texts can be easily thought of as inherently mobile. di inating, travelling out in many directions and colliding, blending, clashi "sem. other texts similarly mobile, rapid, weightless. For Barthes, the text is M8 with clearing of a space in which we can contemplate aesthetically the gen JUSt the and interflow of signs as these ripple throughout the social organism, Hy flow holds these signs down. They cannot be fixed by authorial intention, - Nothin, multiple text at once flies from the pen of the singular author to a SINCE the places and a thousand clashes with other texts. They cannot be hel thousang against a world beyond signs, since much of the world—at the eld in place itself made of signs and so cannot provide anchorage. Accordi very least—ig in the most energetic literary texts one finds that the flow of. disces to Barthes, even more volatile: in Flaubert, Mallarmé, or Sollers, the Ourse is made discourse are scrambled, turned and overturned, and the text then forms of bliss bursts out “in the splendor of permanent revolution.” Ac Joussance or rida, the disseminating energy of language cannot be contaii Ccording to Der. repressive agencies of authority try to stabilize the flow b nea xcept when fixed interpretations and holding words to the false stabil holding texts to Dissemination is boundless. Though books pretend to frat co te prefaces and titles, and such things as covers, they are act ily themselves with flow of information travelling in all directions and a one The flow of the verbal signifier may thus be sheer every individual terpenetration; but do paintings flow like this? The veel ak unimpeded in the theory of dissemination, is weightless because language i Sen, according to and information flies. It has no body to tie it down; its scm sins ae and difference has no physical dimension, Is painting Tike 8 difference, eee —= _ discursive aspect. Its narrative dimension, vbeiiome , its iconography, its denotations and connotations are all discursive, and can also . . o otati € all discursive, and canna ae aed ret Everything in painting that is ike te one can “read” in a pat ures oO dissemination and interpenetration; everything and its disseminating flows, But paintoe a v4 in ie ee Cee to information. ig May also possess aspects irreducib _Take the always intractable case: color. Color can convey information; and if we alter the colors, we alter the information. If Guernica is painted pith its vision of the world may be rosy. But the experience of color involves an excess beyond the function of information, and as color exceeds the power 0 discourse to claim it for textuality, it touches on a realm of bodily expenea which diverges radically from the realm of information. Color can be organ ae information, as in color codes, but the experience of color stands oul! e code.ity and Visual Poetics tuality sil ro) ntertex ir think of Cézanne. In a Cézanne landscape, the trace is by no means 1 to information, since Cézanne’s method bathes each trace in the luster died consciousness. The traces do not only exist in the space of the ane, but in the ¢imme of their application to its surface. The separability ity of the trace correspond to the slowest and most ruminative of working hods: each implies time prolonged, time distended. It is important that they are landscapes of particular places and not the generalized landscapes of Poussin—We have to take it as a donnée that behind the landscape stands actual scene. Each trace is compared with its counterpart in the scene, though not in order to reduce the scene to simultaneous information: Cézanne’s ration is the record of an embodied consciousness moving between land- scape and representation as between distinct but related registers, whose re- lation is precisely the movement of reflexive consciousness between them. Even the word “image” may suggest something too simultaneous here: rather, the canvas collects, gathers into itself moments of duration in which con- sciousness moves among perceptions and among signs. Such an image is not at all like a text under dissemination, where texts race weightless and decontextualized, without gravity or density. Cézanne ex- actly anchors his signs in the actual experience of the body under time and in a single place. Each trace draws the image deeper into the anchorage of a consciousness dwelling reflexively between the distance of the landscape and the proximity of the canvas, and between orders of perception and represen- tation. Painting thought of in this way is intimately linked to “embodiment,” yet “embodiment” has to be one of the most problematic concepts which painting presents. For the rest of this essay I will be trying to suggest’ ways of thinking about embodiment which may free it from the reactionary and un- theorized context in which it remains embedded. My aim is to place this concept squarely within historical materialist thought and exactly to separate itfrom any connotations of the oceanic, of pure Being, of the ground of Being, ofsheer presence, of kingdom, of foundation. I can name three ways of thinking about embodiment as a particular case of “the body,” which link it inexorably with reaction and depoliticization: the body as (i) a pre-social and biological hah a substance lying undisturbed beneath the socialization of the subject women and outside historical and ‘social Processes; (ii) as unitary; (iii) as a ay nba value. Converging on painting, these notions would claim Wo the tex) ae th Painting may possess (particularly as this emerges in contrast sign i we ihe expression of pure Being and of the subject undivided by Value oe not be long before “embodiment” was claimed as a source bodiment presen as the art which stores that value, with the value of Ub idea of ember asa haven for troubled and divided subjectivity. When itive proun d hee arises, a siren song is at once heard: the body as the of being (in Merleau-Ponty), as the place of blissful, maternal oO identical of embor jcture pian pg visibili ing met!Norman 190 i mpire of signs (in Barthes), as an int; refuge from it Da re Gn Heldegeen’. These are the positions which fo, sically theologi sed. discussion to SE Se an wn weet of enculturation rather than a To Da ee ian is, I would say, easier since Foucault, and hana’ See eid, If our understanding of signs is thoroughly materialist, then the material aspect of painting is naturally thought of as continuous with its State as sign: since signs are material work, no contradiction arises, The Problem with differance is that, by identifying meaning as movement between, signi as their mobile inter-relation, the sign is in some sense dematerializeg, If the relation which one signifier has to the rest is Posited as synchronical| diachronically endless, then any local and limited operation of the si that it acts as x + y, rather than x + n) must seem a descent into Context. more or less repressive constriction of the infinitist expansion of signs, a Gi 7 a of the sign by matter. A dualism is instituted between the local and ahate ure capture of the sign by context and the sign’s inherent expansiveness ( Mal dualism can be criticized as the unexorcized classicism of Derrida’s mor terms of painting, this model Produces a two-tier account: Painting as ie mation, painting as mute matter. As information, Painting can then be thom to be an infinitely intertextual structure, which, Overturning the ght agency of the frame, flies out to meet all other Paintings under conditi mutual dependence and mutual arising. As matter, Painting can token be thought of as the absence of information and as sheer as the inert pigment on canvas. One interesting consequence of 'Y and I i > mi » Of pigment below a threshold of information, as Pre-semiotic or semantic, Such a position ace tually concurs with the depoliticized and reactionary Conception of “embod: iment” in painting as the realm below sign activity and cultural work. All that here by embodiment: work with material signs which takes place always (i) in an actual social and economic arena, and (ii) under conditions of “real time. Bourdieu’s insistence is that when we look at sign activity we resolutely avoid Teducing it to information, and that we take into particular account its structut of local and material Negotiation. Bourdieu’s book argues. by example and i dense: all I can indicate here are some schematic cases. In the case of ara uA Marriages (the context is anthropology), while the ceremony of marriageity and Visual Poetics gptertextuality 191 viewed as symbolic theater, negotiation ‘owards marriage involves a tem- be ‘ality of bargaining in which neither side yet knows the outcome of any of “tg Moves: The meaning of the moves in the negotiation is determined ret- ively by the interpretation put on the move by the other side—the Meaning not yet exist as the move is made. Practice here, as a concept, posits a does rality of “real social time” and a zone “to one side of meaning,” where ten ing is being made but also has not yet arrived. Other examples include a and combat, where each move both counters a previous action and feu iates 2 further action, whose outcome is unknown; process and performance int where the material dimension itself acts upon each move to influence arts, me; calendrical symbolism, where months are described, not according oda or a static order of the whole year, but in relation to the month welore and the month to come. ; . : The Cézanne example possesses embodiment in many of Bourdieu’s sen- ses, Cézanne’s hundredth stroke responds to the previous ninety-nine, and launches a further move, whose outcome is not yet known; the work acts recursively and reflexively upon itself in real time, through the agency of its embodied creator. This “real time” of process also occurs within a “real social time”; the image reacts to prevailing discursive formations of painting, which it mutually modifies; it is also placed into a circuit of dealer-merchant trans- actions, where its pricing modifies the field of commodities with unknown outcome. “Embodiment” in these cases is a descriptive, not a valorizing term. Yet our neutral description of embodiment, which does nothing to praise embodiment or go into raptures over it, should also include a recognition that, with actual practical systems, embodiment typically operates in relation to vaue. For example: if the potter lacks dexterity, the clay collapses; if the combatant lacks coordination, he loses; if the negotiator misjudges, the trans- xtion misfires, Embodiment here is exactly not given by biology or by pre- cultural Being; it is something to be acquired as cultural skill. It is not at all quality of the primitive body, as in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Lutof the body cultivated. It is acquired by training in cultural and semiotic Work, A mystical inclination of the argument tends to seize on those aspects ieodiment which are outside skill: color is such a potent case for those ie te embodiment to disclose pure Being exactly because color is one risneverthe does not make (God makes colors). But even in this case, Wattain puis e idea of color, even in color-field paintings where color seems lua, individual and essentiality: color exists only in instances of colors iat, ifanyt ua cases, and the example of color-field painting ought to “lors, the deli ing, the high degree of enculturation involved in working with acy and skill with which the painter manipulates the cultural ig 4 Cony, PX ‘sm of the nm of color and the precision of his task: not some mys-MAD Bryson 192 ‘ 5 ion is provided by calligraphy ; Perhaps a clearer point of one soal, not its starting point a, wie’ far East. Embodiment y serrated for embodiment, to be embodieg. » le body must be massively vd successful work as possessing extreme value and though calligraphers reas! imitive substrate of bodily experienc, osite end from a primitive su! HY experience, yaluciat toe ely been trained in material work of the sign to the Point © oO a aeons organism is fully absorbed, leaving little or Nothing of th imitive behind, Primi hy is a particularly good counter-example to the “mystica” of color, since calligraphy turns on the entry of the body into the gi ¢ language—the example shows beyond doubt that the subjectivity behing ligraphy has been fully inserted into the symbolic order. We need not, think of embodied subjectivity in any way other than as wholly rul decentering of the subject provoked by the entry into langua; to work out what the subject of embodiment is like. The subject of calligraphy, though embodied, does not—as 8 result of embodiment—possess any transcendent unity, which embodiment, in the ts course of reaction, tends to assume as an automatic guarantee, What has bee said here about calligraphy can be returned to Western painting: here al, the painter’s embodiment is the product and precondition of cultural skilig the manipulation of material signs. Such embodiment suggests limits to the concept of tuality. I will conclude by stating a formal case, though provisional and open to objections as a tweedy compromise, I Offer it, con. scious of its shortcomings, in the hope that when its shortcomings are seen, discussion might move several steps forward: hereto, led by the ge when en Painting’s intertey. My statement of it ig Texts form a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of other texts, none of them original, blend and clash. They are intrinsically intertextual; that is, they coexist with other texts according to a logic of mutual origination, mutual dependence, and mutual interpenetration. They absolutely disobey the description of Aristotelian “substance.” Texts are like this because they possess no embodiment. They are sheer information. Paintings are otherwise. Paintings possess embodiment, though this is a concept absolutely to be purged of mysticism. Embodiment counter intertextuality as the unique counters the order of the same, Since the signs of painting are never sheer information, but in their embodiment are partol material practice, they are information thoroughly inhabited and interpeat trated by non-information: “embodiment” is a concept which deconstrucs tt opposition between matter and information, upon which the concept of “the text” (as information outside material practice) rightly or wrongly na built. By virtue of their embodiment, paintings offer a resistance to _ tuality which texts do not. To this extent they do not behave like tes odsentextualitY and Visual Poetics mero 193 Io sii i appropriately analyzed through models based on texts; they disobey are not pictura poesis, and they frustrate the hopes of any easy Visual