Kaleidoscope

Author(s): Boris Wiseman

Source: Paragraph , July 2011, Vol. 34, No. 2, Claude Imbert in Perspective: Creation,
Cognition and Modern Experience (July 2011), pp. 199-216
Published by: Edinburgh University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43263783

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Kaleidoscope
Boris Wiseman

Abstract:

Imbert's philosophical writings return time and time again to the question of
the image. What follows will explore in what terms she does so. The means
I will adopt are a lateral exploration of a series of fragments, an assemblage of
sorts, which follows the thread provided by a number of images themselves.
Steering a path between logic, anthropology and an expanded aesthetics, I
will take up the thread of an ongoing concern in Imbert's philosophical project
with what she calls the 'metamorphoses of the visual'. Philosophically speaking,
what is at stake, in these metamorphoses, is the kind of realism for which we
opt. This question, as I will show, is also the key to Imbert's understanding of
modernism.

Keywords: image, syntax, adherent logic, modern art

Among the eclectic list of Claude Imbert's objects of philosophical

inquiry, Aby Warburg's atlas of images, Mnemosyne, is perhaps the
most puzzling.1 The great and troubled art historian, inventor of
iconography, had left the adas unfinished at his death in 1929.
The 79 plates it deploys, each made up of an assemblage of
heterogeneous images hung on black cloth - reproductions of works
of art, photographs found in newspapers, advertisements etc - , had
been endlessly re-arranged, somewhat like the books in his equally
bizarrely organised and famous library. The ultimate purpose of this
combinatorial activity was left to the speculations of posterity, although
Imbert suggests (2003a) that a lecture given by Warburg in April 1923
to the medical team of the sanatorium where he was being treated for
acute psychosis, may provide a clue to it.2 In this talk, Warburg had
already audaciously attempted to connect a series of images relating
to the figure of a snake. Warburg had travelled to New Mexico in
the late 1890s and spent some months among the Pueblo Indians.

Paragraph 34.2 (2011): 199-216

DOI: 10.3366/para.201 1.0017
© Edinburgh University Press
www.eupjournals.com/para

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200 Paragraph

He had become fascinated by the masked Kachina dances, one of

which he had witnessed, and a Moki variant of it, in which live
snakes were used as intercessors to the gods. The venomous animals
were supposed to bring rain to the drought parched plateaux where
the rituals were carried out. On Hopi pottery, lighting resembling
a snake confirmed a connection that was central to Hopi religious
belief, one that exploited a formal resemblance between the zigzagging
snake and its meteorological sister image. Connecting the Amerindian
iconography he had collected to a series of images from more familiar
sources, Warburg went on to argue that, in a European context too,
the snake has an ambivalent status - it is typically tied to the question
of the origin of destruction, death and pain, but is also a symbol of
salvation. A snake, for example, is coiled round the staff of the Greek
god of healing, Asclepius (live snakes were kept in a temple devoted to
him at Kos) and, in Deuteronomy, Moses commands the children of
Israel to make a brass snake in order to protect them against snake bites
(the image is reproduced on the rood screen of a Protestant church
that Warburg visited in northern Germany). The symbol, in short,
displays a marked tendency towards reversibility, which in part maps
onto the attributes of the snake itself: its venom is the source of its own
antidote and, although it may bring death, it is also reborn each time
that it sheds its skin. Beyond art history, the underlying problem with
which Warburg was grappling, here, in advance of his times, was an
anthropological one - in his own words, the way in which 'man (. . .)
interposes symbols between himself and the world' (Warburg 1939,
282).
No arguments accompany Warburg's Atlas. Yet, for Imbert, it
performs a crucial operation, one that provides a key to one of the
central concerns of her own philosophy. Or rather, the Adas holds
up a mirror to what Imbert is perhaps trying to do in a number of
her own texts, namely to open a space for a new way of conceiving
images and the interrelations between images. Imbert's readings of
Warburg's project (Imbert 2003a; Imbert 2011) show him to be an
even more radical innovator than we had perhaps realised. The lecture
given in 1923 prefigured what the Adas achieved by other means.
It revealed a new dimension to the image, one that Kantian judgements
missed, that traditional symbolic deciphering left in the dark (Imbert
2003a, 15) and that was perhaps best grasped by placing images next
to one another and letting them tell their own story. For Imbert, what
Warburg showed was that images, beyond their iconic content, are the
repository of something else - a schema of sorts, one integrally bound

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 Kaleidoscope 201

up with cultural memory and its transmission. What mattered was not
what each image showed but what was being passed on from one image
to the next, unawares. Warburg's originality is difficult to disentangle,
here, from Imbert's own. To what extent his project is given shape
by hers, or hers by his, is unclear. Such interpretative freedom does
not seem out of place for anyone exploring the 'space for thought'
( Denkraum)1 that is the Atlas. Warburg constructed a curious object,
part imaginary museum, part modern art installation, a kind of theatre
which, for Imbert, became a space for exploring something like the
implication of images. The phrase is Valéry 's, who, comments about
his poetic practise: 'By imagination I understand the exploiting of
images - working on the image, exploring its field or universe - as
logic explores what concepts imply. The image and its possibility -
and not its transitiveness.'4
What follows will remain on the terrain of the Atlas, that of an
assemblage of images, this time taken from Imbert's writings. Rather
than attempt to extract from her works a ready-made doctrine of the
image, which would anyway be hard to find, I will briefly explore a
series of short texts - fragments - and the ways in which they raise,
explicidy or implicidy, the question of the image, or simply put images
to work. This lateral exploration, which artificially cuts across what is
no doubt the main thrust of each of the fragments selected here, will
try to trace a series of conceptions of the image, which progress from
the familiar terrain of our Platonic heritage and a certain Classical way
of framing the image - and using the image to frame experience -
to the more unfamiliar territory of ethnographic art and finally to
modern painting and its wholesale re-invention of the image. My
argument is that Imbert's works contain at once a powerful analysis
of a certain Classical heritage that has informed our most common
conceptions of the image, a critique of these conceptions and an
attempt to articulate new ways of thinking the image. Her concerns,
in this respect, remain close to those which have preoccupied much
contemporary French theory, which has arguably also been centrally
concerned with redefinitions of the image.

The image as philosophical argument

The first image that I would like to consider is to be found in Plato's

Phaedo (99d), where it is embedded in a famous analogy. It is the image
of a solar eclipse reflected on the surface of a body of water. The image,

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202 Paragraph

and the analogy it supports, designates a key bifurcation in Platonic

thought and it is, as such, that Imbert returns to it in her programmatic
essay, 'Ce platonisme que l'on parle et dont on ne parle pas' (That
Platonism which we speak and of which we do not speak).5 But, as we
shall see, it also provides her with something else - a means of reading
Plato and our Platonic heritage through the image, and beyond that, of
opening the image to new significations.6
Imbert's essay is centrally concerned with the breaks in continuity
between Plato's earlier Socratic dialogues and the later scholastic ones,
in particular the Sophist, breaks that are made evident in the latter
text by the adoption of a new style of philosophical inquiry, one that
turns its back on the Socratic method of definitions to embrace the
new science of Dialectic called for by the Stranger from Elea. The
significance of the introduction of this new method of philosophical
inquiry for the subsequent history of philosophy is hard to overstate. As
the earlier and more familiar Platonic concern with the relationship of
Forms to things (universais to particulars) gives way to an exploration
of the relationships between the Forms themselves, it is the entire
panorama of logic that is opened up. The seismic shift that occurs in
the Sophist is concomitant with a crucial change of focus: the emphasis
is no longer on the world as an object of knowledge (the problem of
the eidolon) but on the kinds of statements that could be made about it
and how one may determine their truth or falsehood. Even if Plato did
not fully disentangle logical considerations from ontology7 the door
was now open to consider the forms of statements apart from their
meaning and to try to capture them in a system of symbols. The Stoics
picked up where Plato left off, extracting from a predicative analysis of
propositions the four categories under which reality is apprehended,
those which they took to be constitutive of the phenomenology of
any moving body.8 But the decisive shift had arguably already occurred
when the Stranger from Elea first turned to the young Theaetetus and
invited him to consider not Existence in itself, nor Motion nor Rest,
but what we can say about these things and how Existence, Motion
and Rest, and later Sameness and Difference, 'combine' or 'blend'
in the statements we make about them. As Imbert puts it: 'Plato had
opened a space for philosophy, perhaps philosophy itself'.9 It is not this
'opening', noted by others, that is of primary interest here, so much
as its preempting in the earlier Phaedo. It is as if the new path taken by
the Stranger from Elea had already been intuited by a kind of textual
unconscious and its image provided, in veiled form, by the analogy
mentioned above. How is this?

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 Kaleidoscope 203

In the Phaedo, Plato's Socrates, having accepted with equanimity the

judgment of his fellow Atheneans, awaits the moment of his death.
His attention shifts from the question of the immortality of souls to
that of the means by which we may come to know the causes of all
things, among them why he, Socrates, is sitting where he is, on his
bed, waiting for poison to be brought to him, rather than escaping
to Megara or Boetia. Having described and dismissed his youthful
infatuation with the 'natural sciences' and the false hope provided by
Anaxagoras, he finally arrives at the conclusion that it is necessary to
turn away from the direct testimony of the senses, so as not to be
blinded by it, and undertake, as he puts, a 'second navigation' (99 d),
one that seeks out the truth of things indirectly, as it is reflected in the
mirror of 'reason' ( logoi ), which is also to say in 'discourses' (this dual
sense of the term logoi, lost by most translations of Plato, is crucial to
Imbert's reading). It is here that Socrates compares himself to Thaïes,
who managed to observe a solar eclipse without being blinded by it by
turning to its reflection in water.
Imbert takes up Plato's analogy, looks beyond its rhetoric to consider
the image it contains in and for itself. What comes to light is a
whole theory of the relations of images to things that sidesteps its
traditional Platonic formulation. Imbert puts the image to work, turns
it into an instrument of philosophical inquiry. The light and dark discs
moving across the plane of water dispel the terror of the eclipse by
providing a mirror image that is also the means of an explanation of the
event. But the image does more than passively mirror the event. The
inscription of the eclipse on the reflective surface of water reduces its
dimensions from three to two, capturing the event in a simplified and
now intelligible diagram. The purely perceptible becomes intelligible
and allows a progress in understanding. Furthermore: 'This paradoxical
shadow, which exists thanks to the ring of light surrounding it, this
entirely reliable copy, suited to our limited human understanding,
reveals, on a plane of water, the geometry of the process that gave
rise to it.'10 The image of the eclipse, given to human beings by the
gods, is also a map of the world and its physical processes. As such,
it functions in much the same way as the statements examined in the
later scholastic work, the Sophist. They too, once analysed into their
logical articulations, are the means by which the hidden structure of
reality is finally revealed. For what shows through the hierarchy of
Forms established by the good dialectician, following the new method
of Division According to Kinds, is a structure of reality written into
the fabric of language. As was the case with the image of the eclipse, an

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204 Paragraph

order of the world is entrusted to an analagon, here the logoi: ' Physics
is inscribed on language in the form of a logic. Such is the ambiguity
of the term logos, its dual-status of human discourse and compressed
figure of the world'.11
In Imbert's reading of Plato, the image of the eclipse points ahead,
towards a foundational moment of western thought, to the scene of
the birth of logic. She reveals another meaning to the image - what
it knew. In the process, Imbert's reading transforms Plato's analogical
use of the image, indeed inverts its sense, somewhat in the way in
which Warburg's snake reverses its meanings depending on the context
in which it occurs, or that one Amerindian myths inverts another -
Lévi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked starts by showing that a Bororo
myth about the origin of rain water is an inversion of a Gê myth about
the origin of fire.12 In the Phaedo, Socrates' analogy, and the image of
the eclipse it contains, was meant to recall the allegory of the cave and
its invitation to look up, towards the higher truths concealed behind
the world of appearances. Imbert, by contrast, unfolds the literal sense
of the image, plunges us head first into its internal logic and discovers
a syntax contained in the texture of things, a syntax that is immanent
to those 'good' images given to us by the gods, images that allow us
to steer a course between the illusions of phenomenal appearances and
the blinding light of eternal truths. The image of the eclipse provides a
paradigm for these 'good' images, which vehicle a form of knowledge
fit for human use. Their essential quality is to usher forth concealed
dimensions of the world, to allow it to exist as appearance, in short
to create an 'epiphany' (the term is Imbert's), while at the same time
laying bare the syntax of the operations that allow them to do so. The
stage is set, here, for what one may think of as a Classical conception of
the image, whose canonical form would later be fixed as the Albertian
window.13 In the process, the dualistic theory of the image contained
in the Republic gives way, in the Sophist, to a four part typology of
images, or rather of image-making, which doesn't oppose appearance
to Reality but discovers in the world of appearances, originals and
copies of both divine and human origin. Divine images are divided, on
the one hand, into the 'originals' that are all living creatures and natural
things - including 'fire water and their kindred' (Cornford 1979, 326)
and, on the other, into the 'copies' that are dream images, shadows
and reflections. Human image-making is divided into the production
of artifacts (a house, a bed = originals) and copies such as the painting
of a house or of a bed (Cornford 1979, 327). And if there are good

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 Kaleidoscope 205

copies made by the gods, as the lesson of the eclipse suggests, one is
entided to seek out their human equivalent.
The image of the eclipse in Imbert's essay is part of what Claude
Lévi-Strauss might have called a transformational group. It takes on
its full significance once placed side by side with another image, to
which it is related, and which is central to Imbert's thought, that of
the sundial. Sundials adorned the peristyles of Platonic academies and
are alluded to in the homage to Thaïes and geometry contained in the
Phaedo. They represent a desire to live according to a cosmic order but
are also something like the human version of the image of the eclipse
reflected in water. The rod or straight edge that casts the shadow, also
known as a 'style' or gnomon, projects the sun's course onto the dial
plate, measuring out its revolutions in man-made units. It too is a
translation device of sorts, the means by which a physical process -
the sun's course - is captured in a diagram. The gnomon projects a
'pure syntax of time', as Imbert puts it (Imbert 1999c, 13), onto a two
dimensional surface, in the process converting time into space.
For Imbert, the image of the eclipse designates a foundational scene
of philosophy, an originary tying together of the perceptible and the
intelligible dimensions of experience (or at least it has been constructed
as such). Its ideological raison d'être is a certain naturalism, one that
Imbert places at the heart of our Greek heritage: the physical world
transfers its articulations to the parts of speech as instandy and as
transparendy as the style distributes the movement of the sun across the
hour lines of a sundial. In the apprenticeship scene of the Sophist, when
the Stranger from Elea first invites us to turn to propositions and their
articulation to reality, he uses an example ('Theaetetus with whom I
am presendy speaking sits') which refers us back to a similar example
already used in the Phaedo : 'Socrates sits'. However, a third element
is added to the later apprenticeship scene, namely a speaking subject.
While the Socrates of the Phaedo considers judgments ('Socrates sits')
and the causes they designate (facts and the propositions made about
them), the Stranger from Elea considers utterances ('Theaetetus with
whom I am presently speaking'), i.e. propositions made in a particular
place at a particular moment in time. He thereby ties a speaking
subject (and hence present time and existence) to the structure of a
proposition that is itself a map of the physical world or a universe in
miniature. It is in this scene of perfect correspondence between word,
world and subject, that Plato ties his phenomenal knot. Here, the
world is constituted as phenomenon in and through the transparency
of language. As such, the lesson of the Stranger from Elea provides the

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essential paradigm for the many phenomenologies that would come

in its wake. These may have tied Plato's knot in different ways but
they did not attempt to undo it, at least not until the modern epoch.
The Stranger form Elea marks out a territory that for over 2000 years
became our own and provided a ground for our many ways of seeing,
being, doing and speaking. In this long view of our history, what
perhaps matters most to Imbert is the present moment to which it
leads. Imbert conceives of the advent of modernity as the slow and still
only partially understood rupture with this Classical heritage. It is the
undoing of our Alexandrine heritage.
At the risk of oversimplifying, one might say that Imbert's
philosophical writings tell two stories: one about the history of logic,
which is inseparable from the history of philosophy in its Greek form,
the other about the advent of modernity. She shows that the two
are deeply intertwined. Much of the rest of her essay on Platonism
is devoted to tracing how Western philosophy developed after Plato.
It progressed, Imbert is saying in substance, along the same tracks up
to and including Kant. It pursued, as Souleymane Bachir Diagne has
shown very well in this volume, the fantasy of a single universal syntax
that would translate all syntaxes (Imbert 1999c, 52). Kant's Table of
Judgments is presented as an attempt to perfect and seal once and for
all this Platonic heritage. Kant's formal logic aims to grasp in a single
transcendental scheme, which binds the four functions of judgments to
Newton's treatment of space, time and physical forces, the conditions
of all possible experience. The key turning point in the history of
logic, Imbert argues, comes after Kant, with Frege. It is in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, with Frege, that the scheme
perfected from Plato to Kant, via the stoics, starts to come undone.
Frege 's work is now recognized by philosophers to be among the most
important of the modern epoch, although it may seem to some that
it belongs to a narrowly specialised field. But its implications are far
reaching, even outside the domain of logic. Frege's functional syntax
detaches logic from the substratum provided to it, since Antiquity, by
natural languages. Frege's logic roots its definitions and operations in
arithmetic notions that no longer have anything in common with a
prepositional syntax. He starts to develop - with great difficulty and
not without a series of false starts - an autonomous and entirely artificial
syntax, or indeed several. His mathematical syntaxes - his extensional
calculus for example - don't fit Kant's Table of Categories or the
model of experience it shored up. Indeed, they don't fit a single mould,
but rather present us with a multiplicity of canons of expression. One

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 Kaleidoscope 207

of Imberťs key insights is to see this seemingly confidential moment

in the history of logic as being symptomatic of a broader and deeper
cultural and historical shift. It is here that she places the 'caesura of
modernity' (Imbert 1999c, 49), whose terrain is so clearly designated
by Frege's work. The advent of modernity, is inseparable from the
diversification of the protocols that govern the languages with which
we express ourselves and grasp the world. In this connection, Frege's
innovation in the domain of logic may be seen as running parallel to
the dismantling of our mimetic stance in art and to the many social
changes that accompanied and provoked this metamorphosis in our
ways of seeing. With Frege, logic (and the logos) loses its unifying,
transcendental, a priori status, and enters history, becomes taken up
in the story of the development of a multiplicity of singular and
heterogeneous syntaxes. One of the lessons of Imberťs writings is that
the story of the re-invention of logic in the nineteenth century is tied
up with that other story, which we are no doubt still in the process
of trying to understand, that of the advent of modernity. Here too,
we are confronted with an unprecedented search for new forms of
intelligibility. With the dismantling of our perspectivai view of the
world and the dissolution of the unity of pictorial space (Manet's Bar
aux Folies-Bergère, 1882, is often cited as the turning point) another
space is opened up for new forms of visibility. Frege worked against
a certain closure of Western logic and questioned the hypothesis, as
Imbert puts it, of a 'perfect translation' of phenomenon into logos.
A similar closure underpinned, in pictorial terms, our deeply mimetic
and scenographic heritage, used to framing images with narratives.
How Manet starts to change this way of seeing and representing is
what Imberťs essay translated in this volume explores. I will turn to
the essay on Manet and modern art shortly, but would like first to
consider Imberťs recent homage to Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Passage
du Nord Ouest (Imbert 2008a), as it is arguably in the crucible of the
ethnographic experience that the relativity of our ways of seeing, and
the multiplicity of the visual worlds we live in, was first and most
dramatically revealed.

Circulating images

True to her iconoclastic way of reading texts, Imbert finds in

La Voie des masques (1975)14 much more than a transposition to
plastic forms of the structural method of mythical analysis. This work
does indeed demonstrate that seemingly different masks belonging to

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208 Paragraph
various neighboring populations of the Northwest coast of Canada
(Salish, Kwakiutl, Haida and Tlingit) entertain, like myths, relations
of transformation with one another. However, the transposition of the
method from the domain of myth to that of masks, carries with it,
as Imbert makes manifest, a series of crucial lessons. Imbert's reading
highlights all that La Voie des masques tells us about the conditions under
which images appear.
Lévi-Strauss's point of departure in La Voie des masques was the
bizarre style of a particular type of Salish mask, the Swaihwé, whose
unusual shape and appearance, compared to other Salish creations
and to the artistic styles developed by neighboring populations,
presented him with an enigma. What was the reason for the protruding
cylindrical eyes, the white, quaking, feathery crown or the bird head in
place of a nose? And what about the schematized gaping jaw with its
giant protruding tongue, sometimes painted in red, sometimes replaced
by a fish tail? The problem was one of readability. The ethnographer
needed first of all to free himself of his own visual habits, shaped in
museums that didn't yet have a place for objects such as these (Imbert
2008a, 155, 165) and the seemingly monstrous style of the elements
they assemble. A first set of clues to reading these masks is provided
by the myths that tell the story of their origin, myths that matter,
Lévi-Strauss argues decisively, not because of their narrative or
symbolic content, but because they are the means by which certain
qualities or visual features are marked out in the sensorium, given the
status of differential traits which can be then used to constitute each
style of mask. The myths of origin, in short, are the means by which
the signifying units of a symbolic language are created. Beyond their
narrative content, they determine the conditions of a mask's visibility
(Imbert 2008a, 169).
Lévi-Strauss's text is shown to be an exploration not so much
of the imagery of Northwest coast masks but of the grounds of a
particular visual language. Once the unusual stylistic features of the
mask have been identified as diacritical signs, the concealed relations
that link the Swaihwé to other masks, in particular its symmetrically
inverted double, the Kwakiutl Dzonokwa, come to light. Indeed, the
latter 's defining traits - its dark colours, its use of fur as opposed to
feathers, its concave or closed eyes, the grimacing mouth whose lips
are positioned in such a way as to make it impossible for any tongue
to protrude, answer, term by term, the Swaihwé. The point is not
merely that masks are, as it were, structured like a language (i.e. as
a system of differences). These differences are indeed the means by

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 Kaleidoscope 209

which a given society filters its beließ, giving them symbolic status.
But beyond that, they are also the means by which a certain visual
economy is brought into existence; one that Imbert suggests needs to
be conceptualized in radically different terms to those with which a
western audience is familiar. It is the exploration of this difference,
and all that it implies in terms of the dependency of our ways of
seeing on cultural and historical premises, that is perhaps the most
far reaching aspect of her essay on Lévi-Strauss. Here, qualia are no
longer some perceptible exterior of things, the livery of a phenomenal
world. They lose their status of pure attributes. They are peeled away
from the objects to which they once belonged and redistributed onto
a series of alternative symbolic supports (Imbert 2008a, 178-9). These
cultural 'signs' are neither displayed, nor offered as representations of
this or that, but are used as tokens, taken up and circulated in a system
of exchange that is also marital, and which includes, in the case of
the Swaihwé, vast and precious copper plates, some of whose features
echo those of the masks, as well as immaterial entities such as honours
and names. The problem posed by northwest coast masks is not that of
successfully decoding their symbolism. It requires a whole sensory and
cognitive re-education - i.e. the acquisition of a new way of seeing
and of constructing a symbol's operations. A number of features of this
visual regimen are worth highlighting:
a. One of its distinctive traits is no doubt the transferability of the
differential schémas it deploys to a multiplicity of different supports.
These 'clusters of qualities' (Imbert 2008a, 174), constituted in and
through mythical discourse, lend a style to each type of mask but are
also distributed more broadly across the visual field. Myths convert
qualities extracted from the sensorium into a syntagm, taking the
term in its original sense ('an ordering, disposing, or placing of things
together' OED, 1658), which can then be reused, adapted, transferred,
etc.

b. The symbolism particular to each mask makes full use of th

specific dimensions of the materials that are ready to hand. The diff
erential schémas are expressed through colour oppositions, the choi
of materials (the use of feathers as opposed to fur), the preference
for concave as opposed to convex shapes, etc. Each type of mater
support permits certain combinations, excludes others, each tim
setting parameters within which the syntactical rules of assemblag
underpinning a mask's symbolism are developed. The key princip
is that syntaxes are always dependent on their external supports
their systems of notation, as it were. This is what I take Imbert to

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be referring to when she speaks about 'adherent' symbolism, a concept

whose productiveness for an anthropologically informed philosophy or
a philosophically informed anthropology is yet to be explored. In the
case of language, that external support is phonetic and grammatical,
which is also to say rhythmic. In other cases, it is provided by the
contours of a series of masks (which includes dimensions other than
visual), in yet others (e.g. the famous decorative boxes made by the
Northwest coast Indians), it is the dismembered ('split') parts of various
animal species.
The principle of 'adherence' has a wider application. Photography,
for example, allowed the development of new syntaxes that 'adhered'
to their particular supports which diversified along with the
technologies used by photographers, each giving rise to different ways
of framing, to new treatments of colour, to different methods of
transposing scales, to new practices of capturing light and displaying
and sharing images. These syntaxes generated new kinds of images,
new visual practices and cognitive processes (Imbert 2008a, 159).
Muybridge, in the 1870 s, used multiple cameras to capture lateral,
front and rear views of human and animal locomotion. Each shot
isolated units of signification. Once developed, he mounted his contact
prints (cyanotypes), creating sequences, cropping and editing freely
in the process, opening new dimensions along his paradigmatic and
syntagmatic axes of creation. He was developing a syntax that would
allow a new understanding of movement, one that is sometimes
thought to be more objective, but which was equally dependent on
the supports used to capture movement as were earlier methods of
representation. His vision was dependent on his syntactical choices,
which were different, say, from those of Thomas Eakins who, at
roughly the same time, used a rotating disk that allowed sequences
of movements to be captured not in a succession of discrete frames but
in a single image. The tourist's snapshot is no less a form of symbolism
that adheres to its external supports - there is no naturalism here, or
in any other use of photography, only the production of meaning,
which is as much dependent on its material supports as on the cultural
habits of those consuming such images. The sundial, mentioned
above, may be seen too as a symbolic operator. If we divest it of its
metaphorical associations - if we no longer treat it as the symbol of
a cosmic order - we may see it quite literally as the material support
of a particular syntactical operation akin to that performed by various
cinematic devices, i.e. as the means of transferring movement to a
screen. It converts the perceptible into the intelligible by virtue of

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 Kaleidoscope 211

an operation that doesn't fit easily any of the traditional categories

of semiology: it is not a sign, not an icon and not stricdy speaking an
index, although it is perhaps closest to the latter. It is not a substitute for
anything. It is one among a myriad of syntactical mediators whereby
we filter our relations to the sensorium, the means by which the
elements of sensation are dismantled and reassembled, somewhat in
the manner of a kaleidoscope, according to a set syntactical choices,
and are given the shape of an intelligible experience.15
c. The principle of adherence implies syntactical diversity and
hence a multiplicity of irreducible, singular, symbolic languages (in
the same way that Frege showed that there are several logics and
that Wittgenstein identified a multiplicity of language games). As
Imbert remarks, the contrast between concave (Swaihwé) and convex
(Dzonokwa) features has no discursive equivalent (Imbert 2008a, 182).
The same applies to the colours used by the masks. The contrast
between the dark colours of the Dzonokwa and the light colours of
the Swaihwé, and the gender distinction it is used to encode, is not
quite reducible to opposition understood in purely logical terms. The
way in which black and white are interrelated depends on a logic of
colours, one in which, for example, the achromatic status of black and
white sets them apart, as a pair, from the rest of the colour spectrum.
They are opposed to one another and, together, stand in oppositions
to other colours. It is only by a kind of abusive logocentrism that black
and white are transformed into contrasting binaries. As the example of
Manet will show, unlike their logical equivalents, they are eminently
reversible values.
Imbert's reading of La Voie des masques takes as one of its points of
departure Lévi-Strauss 's own recognition that the linguistically inspired
approach to mythical analysis cannot easily be transposed to the plastic
realm of masks. She proceeds from the identification of a limit to the
structural paradigm (Lévi-Strauss was fully aware of it), and brings our
attention to the fact that the logic that underpins language is bound by
the structure of propositions - it is a logic of predication - and that
images work in a different way, although nonetheless in accordance
with their own set of rules, rules that are arguably freer, that make it
easier for meanings to flip from positive to negative, rules that exploit
symmetries and their disruption (colours have textures and moving
objects make sounds), and may also provide relays to other sensory
dimensions: sound and touch in particular (colours have textures).
Northwest coast masks obey their own syntactical rules, which are
medium specific.

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212 Paragraph

The more general relevance to contemporary theory of this

philosophical extension of Lévi-Strauss s analysis of Northwest coast
masks lies in what it tells us about the limits of phenomenology
The particular visual economy identified here, with its circulating
differential clusters, doesn't fit a visual world in which the central
structure of experience is its intentionality. Nor is the excavation of
the external supports of local symbolisms - a possible future route
for exploring modes of cognition and their connections with material
culture - compatible with phenomenological bracketing and its focus
on first person experience.

The scalar image

The above ethnographic example makes manifest the extent to which

geographically distant or unfamiliar societies create new forms of
visuality. The productive anthropological question to be asked of
images is not that of their symbolic content but that of the conditions
under which they appear and are seen or shared, circulated, invoked,
remembered, etc. The same question may be transposed to the domain
of art history and given a diachronic application. Different artistic
styles, when they are genuinely innovative, are no less engaged in
the production of new forms of visuality, as Imbert s essay on Manet
translated here makes amply clear.
In it, Imbert returns to a problem that intrigued Mallarmé and to
which Foucault briefly considered devoting a book, a project which he
ultimately abandoned; Manet's use of black. More precisely, what sets
it apart from other uses of black, to the point that it had become clear
to a handful of Manet's friends that it was in his troubling challenge
to colourist principles that much of Manet's modernity resided. If
other painters, Goya in particular, had already given to the colour
black a new prominence, the importance it has in Manet's work is
of an altogether different kind, Imbert suggests, for it is through his
uses of black that Manet started to disengage himself, and painting
more generally, from mimetic illusionism, thus opening his canvas to
new possibilities. Imbert draws on a number of works to illustrate
her argument, from early paintings in which thirsty black textures
absorb light sources in order to redistribute them in the form of a new
kind of luminosity, to later key works, such as Le Déjeuner sur Vherbe
(1863), Olympia (1863) and the aforementioned Bar aux Folies-Bergère
(1882). No doubt, one cannot capture Manet's use of black in a single

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 Kaleidoscope 213

formula. The early works seem to obey the very Baudelairian principle
of reversibility, darkness being often transformed into light. Pissarro,
whom Imbert cites, had already noted this distinctive pictorial alchemy.
One is reminded of Rilke 's comment in his Letters on Cézanne, that
the black of the gondolas in Francesco de Guardi's paintings is 'more
a dark mirror than (...) a colour'.16 In Imbert's hands, this chromatic
instability becomes the sign of something else, the harbinger of a new
kind of painting. In other works, such as Le Vieux musicien (1862),
the clothing worn by Manet's cast of characters serves to introduce
gradations of black that already start to count in and for themselves.
These gradations, fixed here to a horizontal axis (the characters are
conveniently lined up) are, in Olympia, made to circulate. The black
cat, the face of the servant entering the room, the choker perhaps
somewhat sadistically cutting across the model's neck, set in motion
a series of dynamically interacting blacks. With Le Déjeuner, it is yet
something else. Imbert treats this work as a montage of sorts, one that
sticks together an impressionist bathing scene (in the background), a
reworking of an engraving after Raphaël, The Judgment of Paris (in the
centre) and a still life that is a pretext for a pure display of colour (in
the foreground), a sort of laying bare of the artist's palette. It is the
central tableau, which converts a mythological scene into a scene of
daily life, that mainly retains Imbert's attention. It curiously resembles a
photograph - a black and white photograph. What matters in Imbert's
analysis of Manet's use of black, is not the audacious promotion to
centre stage of achromatic elements, of 'another' colour that does not
have a place in the Newtonian scale, as she puts it. It is the way
blacks are used to explore scales of intensity. The contrast of light
and dark is no longer the means of a dramatic effect, as it was with
chiaroscuro. It is no longer a narrative element. It is the means of
capturing something new, a range of experiences that were dawning on
the streets of Paris, whose own familiar layout was itself in the process
of being turned inside out by the Baron Haussmann. The motif, here,
almost ceases to have importance. Is the pretext for inserting within
the image a 'scale of intensities' (Imbert in this volume, pp. 187-8,
190, 192, 196 and 197) designed to capture not a figure, not a story,
not a scene, but a series of moods. And also some objects of desire,
an amalgamation of memory traces, all of which were constitutive
of a modern sensibility whose range Baudelaire had already located
somewhere between spleen and intoxication.
Modernity is synonymous, for Imbert, with the advent of new
dimensions of intelligibility, among them Manet's uses of blacks. The

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214 Paragraph

new 'parameter' (Imbert 2008c, 96 and in this volume, pp. 187, 192 and
195) he introduces into modern art, consists in a scale which underpins
colour as such, that quantifies its force, its energetic reserves and that is
presented here, as it were, unadorned, by way of an attempt to translate
experiences that no longer fitted a purely academically trained eye.
Imbert s analysis of the importance of Manet for modern painting
differs from Foucault's17 in the following crucial way: she does not
primarily locate Manet's inventiveness in his dislocation of traditional
pictorial space but in his use of black to create scales of intensity. This
inserts a new dimension into the image, one that requires neither depth
nor a fictional plane beyond the image. It is carried by the surface of
the image, which is thereby granted a new kind of prominence, one
that would be exploited by Manet's successors.
Imbert's essay on Manet takes up and pursues, in another context,
some of the concerns that are central to her explorations of logic. The
point of view onto the history of art afforded by Imbert's writings is
that it consists in the history of the invention of new syntaxes. The
term syntax needs to be understood, here, in its most literal sense,
in the way that the Greeks understood it (I have already evoked this
sense above) as an art of putting together, or putting in order (from
syn-, together + tassein, arrange). This combinatorial art is eminently
linguistic but also applies to other kinds of units - musical, pictorial,
etc. (the linguistic sense of the term syntax is in fact later). In a more
fundamental way, the term must also be understood in a sense close
to that given to it by Foucault in the opening sections of The Order of
Things where it designates that 'archaeological' network of connections
that is constitutive of the figures of knowledge of an epoch, providing
the grounds of an episteme. In Imbert, it is something preceding the
advent of a visual field and providing grounds for cognitive processes.
The term syntax, as used by Imbert, usefully strips the idea of a
'grammar' of art from its reductive metaphoricity and designates a
more elemental process. These syntaxes belong to the history of our
'indirect languages'. After the Platonic inscription of a cosmic order
on the reflected image of an eclipse, after the tracking of circulating
qualities affixed to the unusual features of a series of masks, Manet's
'black effects' appear as yet another way of filtering experience, of
ordering it and thereby granting it a new kind of intelligibility. They
illustrate a process that is neither particular to art nor to Western
societies, and which could usefully orient aspects of current research:
the invention of new syntaxes as a means of grasping a world of
experiences that is always in the making. Which is to say, in the first

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 Kaleidoscope 215

instance, the creation of the material supports to which these syntaxes

necessarily 'adhere'.

NOTES

1 See Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne , edited by Martin Wa

Claudia Brink (Berlin: Akademie, 2003).
2 The text of this lecture has been published as Aby Warburg, 4 A Lectu
Serpent Ritual* , Journal of the Warburg Institute 2:4 (1939), 277-92.
(Warburg 1939).
3 The expression is used by Warburg in Aby Warburg, The Renewa
Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Ren
translated by David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute
History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 597-698.
4 In Paul Valéry, Cahiers /Notebooks I, translated by Rachel Killic
Pickering, Norma Rinsler, Stephen Romer and Brian Stimpson (Fr
Peter Lang, 2000), 302.
5 See Imbert 1999c, Chapter 1.
6 The discussion that follows will use the term in a number of c
used senses that will become apparent from the context. These cover
human artifacts, 'naturally' occurring appearances, mental images of
kinds and images in the linguistic sense of word. In the Platonic sch
phenomenal world itself is, of course, assimilated to an image.
7 The case is made convincingly by Francis MacDonal Cornford in
Plato's Theory of Knowledge: The Theaetetus and the Sophist of Plato
with a running commentary (London: Routledge, 1979), 264-6. He
(Cornforth 1979).
8 For a more detailed presentation of the relations between Plato and t
see chapter 3 of Pour une histoire de la logique (Imbert 1999c). A
of stoic categories may be found in chapter 5 of Phénoménologies et
formulaires (Imbert 1992b, 200-1).
9 'Platon avait ouvert un lieu philosophique, peut-être la philosop
même' (Imbert 1999c, 51). My translation.
10 'Ombre paradoxale qui vaut par son ourlet de Lumière, intégralem
elle montre, en dimensions planaires, et pour le médiocre disce
accordé à l'homme, la géométrie du processus dont elle provient
1999c, 11). My translation.
1 1 'La physique s'inscrit sur la parole comme logique. La est l'ambi
du terme logos , sa double face de discours humain et de figure ram
monde' (Imbert 1999c, 14). My translation.
12 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le cuit (Paris: Pion, 1964), 41-81.

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216 Paragraph

13 'Le critère de la bonne image est d'être une épiphanie physique qui donne
en même temps que son contenu les dimensions de son raisonnement. (. . .)
La leçon est de thématiser ce logos , dont la géométrie est trace de monde et
paradigme d'inférence. L'extraire de cette image des dieux selon un processus
qui n'est pas l'abstraction, diffuser en grammaire ce paradigme, telle sera la
leçon du Sophiste (Imbert 1999c, 11).
14 Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Voie des masques (Genève: Albert Skira, 1975).
15 For a discussion of the kaleidoscope as a theoretical paradigm see Georges
Didi-Huberman, 'Connaissance par le kaléidoscope: Morale du joujou
et dialectique de l'image selon Walter Benjamin', Etudes photographiques 7,
http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/index204.html. Consulted 1 1
February 2011.
16 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne , translated by Joel Agee (London:
Cape, 1988), 30.
17 See the lecture on Manet that Foucault gave in Tunis in 1971, reproduced
in Michel Foucault, La Peinture de Manet. Suivi de Michel Foucault, un regard ,
edited by Maryvonne Saison (Paris: Seuil, 2004).

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