Visual poetics

7/25/2019 Visual poetics

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182 Micke lial

The collection grew oat of the conviction that the relations between the arts

have something more to offer than the study of each art can offer alone.Mieke Bal

Rochester and Utrecht, January 1988

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N o r ma n B r y s o n

Intertextualily and Visual Poetics*

The phrase Visual Poeticscontains a promi.sc: that between poetry and

he visual there is a kinship or affiliation which allows us to cross from one

omain to the other with some kind of ease or sense of natural right of way.have no intention of making the passage from one to the other seem im-

ossible or unduly difficult, but there are conceptual difficulties in that passage

f which I think one should be aware, I am afraid I will be pointing to more

ifficulties than I can resolve, and my aim is rather to raise some questions

han supply answers, I should add that I am restricting my discussion of themage to representational painting to stop matters from getting completely out

f hand.

One might begin by invoking a classical account of the relation betweenoetry and the visual, which, if it were correct, might completely block inter-

low between them: Lessings Laokoon.Lessing argues that painting and poetry

mploy different and incompatible systems of signs, the signs of painting being

imultaneous or synchronic, the signs of poetry being diachronic or distributedn time. An image has but one moment to release its charge; a text, by

ontrast, 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

he 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

he simultaneity which is the images essence. If poetrys visual description is

short, it will lack the detail which characterizes visual experience. If poetrysvisual description tries to pack detail in, the more it adds, the more the pos-sibility of achieving simultaneity recedes. According to Lessing, poetry7should

herefore avoid the visual altogether and leave it to the painters to deal with.Conversely, painting, which employs static and unmoving forms, is singularly

unable to deal with narrative! the more an image tries to tell a story withbeginning, 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

the painter can select the central moment which sums up a story' and implies

its beginning and its end; yet the story must be implied, not stated, since it is

not possible for a static or unmoving entity to unfold in time, as all narratives

must.

* This essay originally appeared in Critical TV.v/.v, vo lume nu m be r 2 ( HH7). page s16, and isreprinted by permission.

183Style:Volume 22, No. 2. Summer 1988


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184 Norman Bryson

Let us take from Lessing this notion of the image as atemporal, or all

aionce. Obviously it corresponds to a certain truth of ordinary experience.Paintings stay still; they dont move around the walls; their figures dont slipout of the frame and gambol about when no one is looking. Sometimes a cultof ideal form aspires to a shedding of times contingencies, so that the formswe see in painting are taken outof the temporal flux. Or painting may eschew

ideal form and instead set dolvn an unidealized and transient moment. If wethink of the image in terms o f abstraction, and identify painting with the formsheld on the picture plane as surface flatness, time seems notably absent: noreference to a temporal world or to narrative sequence complicates the pre-vailing stasis. Idealization, realism, and abstraction concur in the timelcssnessof images. Such timelessness allows one to think of a painting as a substancein Aristotles sense: as an entity having (i) stable location in a single place; (ii)independent selfexistence, requiring nothing but itself in order to exist; (iii)permanent or enduring form. A metaphysics of substance seems built into theformat of Western painting, into the picture frame. In a sense we can dispensewith frames and regard them as extrinsic to painting; yet even without itsactual frame Western painting is a structure o f framing, and within the framesubstance is held in a state purer than substances in nature. In nature substancesmay move, unfold, blend, dissolve, but in the frame substance is held and

displayed in Aristotelian purity: as requiring nothing elseno other paintingin order to exist; as independently selfexistent, in a single place, and in per-manent essence.

The first question I want to raise is: what kind of entity isthe image, andif it is not in fact a substance, what is it? Thinking of the image as substanceis obviously untrue to certain aspects of ordinary experience. Images dochange:after five seconds some are completely dead; others get better after the firstten minutes. Images can also change through an individuals life, and arc onething in one decade, something else a decade later. The substanceview of the

image starts to founder the m om ent we shift the point of view of the discussionto the spectator. In actual experience, looking at an image is a radically tem-poral process, which changes from moment to moment. If we think of thesaccadic movements of the eye, what vision experiences is an image distributedacross discontinuous leaps. Each act of looking attends to a different area ofthe image and discloses a partial view, as vision transits through the image inendless stops and starts. Each view finds a different perch or purchase on theimage, 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, likethe pieces of a jigsaw, into a complete image, a total state, which gathers

together and supersedes the work of assemblage. Yet we do not ordinarilyexperience vision as ever achieving that totality or saturation. I f we could seethat way, then looking at an image would reach a distinct terminus; but vision

seems interminable. It is such that until the moment we drop wc haveto go


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Imertextuality and Visual Poetics 185

oil looking; we cannot make vision stand still or repeat itself perfectly. Thestate of totality is never achieved, is always postponed, is always ahead. Nor

is the idea of accumulating vision quite true to experience: when we look ata painting we arc constantly revising our previous apprehensions, erasing orregrouping our findings.

Let us freczeframe an individual moment of looking and for conveniencecall it a glance. The temporality of the glance is, in actual viewing, both re-tentive and protentivc: it brings with it the wake of previous views and evenas it occurs is fell as leading on to the next view. It is an occasion of experiencewhose being is its becoming, which perishes immediately on attainment ofcompletion. The glance is an entity hard to map according to Aristoteliansubstance. Since its constitution retains the past and is oriented to the future

it tacks the allalonceness of substance. Rather, it is a structure of interpe-netration; past and future interpenetrate it without obstruction.

The interpenetration runs, that is to say, both backwards and forwards.When wc recognize a Pieta or a Nativity, recognition proceeds by relating thepresent occasion back to past occasions when we have seen Pietas and Nativ-ities, back to their monographic conventions. Iconography provides the clearestexample of the retentive structure o f the glance, yet it is not only iconographicforms but all forms that are recognized in this way. And this is true from the

start: even the first form we rectognize is one which is related to a previouscase, and in the logic of inauguiation at work here even the first instance isalready interpenetrated by the past. The glance is a structure without origi-nation. The forward" or protentivc structure of the glance is a function ofthe endless mobility or insatiability of vision. When we look at an image, wc

cannot stop our looking: looking goes on, nothing can arrest it; it seeks alwaysthe 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 andassumed by, the glance. It, too, is structured according to absence of origin,retentiveprotentive temporality, and interpenetration. In a classical concep-tion of the image such as Lessings, the image inhabits a stable location in asingle place; it is a permanent or synchronic form. In the alternative view of

the image which 1 am briefly exploring here, each o f those classical fixities isunsettled. The image is found to lack allatonceness, independent selfexist-ence, permanent form. We can analyze this postclassical or at least otherconception of the image either macrosco pi tally, and consider the individualimage in relation to other images, or microscopically and consider the in-dividual image by itself (though what by itself might mean is exactly the

issue).In the macroscopic view, the image contains within itself, and is inter-

penetrated without obstruction by, the whole suit of prior images, as well as

by the further, as vet empty set of future images, all of which coexist with or


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186 Norman Bryson

inhabit the image in a continuous or framelcss field. In terms of the tradition

of painting, interpenetration by the past corresponds to the massive structureof aitusion or reference a painting makes, willed or unwilled, to the traditionwhich houses it and which it also continues. Again in terms of the traditionof painting, interpenetration by the future corresponds to the perception ofpainting as unfolding in a tradition which runs beyond itself and into futurework: it corresponds, that is, jo the perception of art as embodying a traditionstructured by forward direction rather than mere haphazard accumulation.Microscopically, in the individual act of looking or glance, interpenetration

by the past corresponds to the repertoire of images previously encountered by

the viewer and now brought to bear upon a particular image in the work ofrecognition; while interpenetration by the future corresponds to the awareness,in the present of viewing, that there is no terminus or saturation point forviewing. Each moment of the glance is inhabited by the suite of previous actsof attention which the viewer has brought to bear upon the particular image,

and is inhabited also by a proleptic awareness of the nerd glance which is tofollow and supersede the present one in an endless track of deferral or desire.

What 1 am describing has both a visionary and a common or gardenaspect. Nothing could be more llat than to observe that when we look at

paintings, we typically think of their relation to tradition, or that no soonerhave you enjoyed a particular image or view tliftn you want another one. Yetthe dissolution of the Aristotelian or substance view of images brings with itsome major transformations. Let me prolong this more visionary aspect byinvoking some similes, which maythis is their intention, at any rateconvey

a visceral sense of the changeover from the idea of image according to substanceto the postclassical idea of the image according to unimpeded interpenetration.Think of the whole span of tradition, both past and future, as rounded : theneach image, interpenetrated by the images of past and future, reflects all other

images from its own standpoint, so that the splendor of tradition is multipliedad infinitum in a panoramic spectacle of simultaneous mutual reflection notunlike Leibnizs monads or perspectival mirrors. Within the boundary of theindividual image, each glance of the viewer across its surface reflects the sumof 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 shedthe substanceview, we find that the image is subject to wholly different prin-ciples of being. Since it does not disclose itself all at once and does, not stand

in selfexistence, it emerges together with the surrounding field of images throughmutual arising. Interpenetrated by past and future images, its frame is dis-

solved and crossed through principles of mutual entering, mutual reflection,mutual containment.

I mentioned earlier that if Lessings idea of the synchronic or timelessimage and the diachronic or temporally unfolding text were correct, it would


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Intertextuality and Visual Poetics 187

phrase Visual Poetics promises we might do. The shedding of Lessingssubstanceview of the image moves the image into close proximity to the fields

of literature and language. The image regains the fluid temporality denied itin the substanceview. The idea of the text as an interpenetrative structure is,of course, important in literary theory in the work of Barthes and Derrida. I

would say that Barthes established the intertextuaf text in two moves. The firstinvolves the severance of the text from reference to a real world beyond itself'.Realism is only a rhetorical effect, the result of a text's internal organization,

and what seems like realism is only the repetition within the text of the repeated

discursive forms which in Barthess 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

the Author, Barthes wrote that a text is not a line of words releasing a singletheological meaning (the message of the AuthorGod) but a multidimen-

sional space in which a variety of texts, none of them original, blend anddash. Barthess idea of the text is such that, disconnected from authorialintention 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 isbound to any origin whatever. In the field of the text, fragments of other textsblend, 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 establishedby annulling the point of origin of the work, whether this point is the worldthe text refers to or an author in control of its meaning. The phrase VisualPoetics promises a kinship or affiliation between the literary and visual whichallows one to cross from one domain to the other without a massive changeof gear. In the parallel ideas of the interpenetrative image and the intertextual

text, we seem to have a current mutual ground which criticism might profitablywork with. It seems therefore worth raising at the present time the question:is there 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 structuresof dissemination and flow? Or are there specificities which apply in the case

of the text but not in the case of the image?

* * *

I would like to keep these questions open; but I would also like to suggest

that the textflow or intertextuality functions rather differently from the imageflow or image interpenetration. 1 can sketch the difference as follows. In the

flow of textual dissemination described by Derrida, texts flow so fast because


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188 Norman Bryson

they are pure information, and information is weightless. To produce meaning

at all the verbal signifier has to travel to another signifier: its essence is move-ment. Moreover, the text is a multiple object; it exists simultaneously in many

places. The life of texts can be easily thought of as inherently mobile, dissem-inating, travelling out in man; directions and colliding, blending, clashing withother texts similarly mobile, rapid, weightless. For Barthes, the text is just theclearing of a space in which (we can contemplate aesthetically the general flowand interflow of signs as these ripple throughout the social organism. Nothingholds these signs down. They cannot be fixed by authorial intention, since the

multiple text at once flies from the pen of the singular author to a thousandplaces and a thousand clashes with other texts. They cannot be held in placeagainst a world beyond signs, since much of the worldat the very leastisitself made of signs and so cannot provide anchorage. According to Barthes,in the most energetic literary texts one finds that the flow of discourse is madeeven more volatile:.in Flaubert, Mallarme, or Sollers, the normal forms ofdiscourse are scrambled, turned and overturned, and the text of jouissance orbliss bursts out in the splendor of permanent revolution. According to Der-rida, the disseminating energy of language cannot be contained except when

repressive agencies of authority try to stabilize the flow by holding texts tofixed interpretations and holding words to the false stabilities of reference.

Dissemination is boundless. Though books pretend to frame themselves withprefaces and titles, and such things as covers, they are actually part of a seamlessflow of information travelling in all directions and across every individual.

The flow of the verbal signifier may thus be sheer and unimpeded in-

terpenetration; but do paintings flow like this? The verbal sign, according to

the theory of dissemination, is.weightless because language is pure information,and information flies. It has no body to tie it down; its structure is difference,and difference has no physical dimension. Is painting like this? Of coursepainting possesses a discursive aspect. Its narrative dimension, its legible struc-

tures, its iconography, its denotations and connotations arc all discursive, andcan also be considered as information. Everything in painting that is like textcan partake of the structures of dissemination and interpenetration; everythingone can read in a painting potentially belongs to the universe of informationand its disseminating flows. But painting may also possess aspects irreducibleto information.

Take the always intractable case: color. Color can convey information;

and if we alter the colors, we alter the information. If Guernicais painted pink,

its vision of the world may be rosy. But the experience of color involves an

excessbeyond the function o f information, and as color exceeds the power of

discourse to claim it for textuaiity, it touches on a realm of bodily experience

which diverges radically from the realm o f information. Color can be organized

intoinformation, as in color codes, but the experience of color stands outside

the code.


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Intertcxtuality and Visual Poetics 189

Or think of Cezanne. In a Cezanne landscape, the trace is by no meansidentical to information, since Cezannes method bathes each trace in Die luster

of embodied consciousness. The traces do not only exist in the spam'of thepicture plane, but in the timeof their application to its surface. The separabilityand visibility of the trace correspond to the slowest and most ruminative ofworking methods: each implies time prolonged, tune distended. It is importantthat they are landscapes of particular places and not the generalized landscapesof Poussinwe have to take iL as a dam ice that behind the landscape standsan actual scene. Each trace is compared with its counterpart in the scene,

though not in order to reduce the scene to simultaneous information: Cezanne'soperation 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 textsrace weightless and decontextuaiized, without gravity or density, Ce/anne ex-actly anchors his signs in the actual experience of the body under time and ina single place. Each trace draws the image deeper into the anchorage of a

consciousness dwelling reilexively between the distance of the landscape andthe 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 whichpainting 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 separateit from any connotations of the oceanic, o f pure Being, of the ground of Being,of sheer presence, o f kingdom, of foundation. I can name three ways of thinkingabout embodiment as a particular case of the body, which link it inexorablywith reaction and depoliticization: the body as (i) a presocial and biologicalgiven, a substance lying undisturbed beneath the socialization of the subjectin culture and outside historical and*social processes; (ii) as unitary; (iii) as asource of mystical value. Converging on painting, these notions would claimany embodiment painting may possess (particularly as this emerges in contrast

to the text) as..the expression of pure Being and of the subject undivided by

the sign; it would not be long before embodiment was claimed as a sourceof value and painting as the art which stores ihat value, with the value ofembodiment presented as a haven for troubled and divided subjectivity. Whenthe idea of embodiment arises, a siren song is at once heard; the body as theprimitive ground of being (in MerleauPonly), as the place of blissful, maternal


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190 Norman Bry son

refuge from the paternal, coercive empire of signs (in Barthes), as an intrin-

sically theological concept (in Heidegger). These are the positions which, fordiscussion to advance, must be refused.To think of the*body as an arena of encukuration rather than as the

substrate to onculuiration is, I would say, easier since Foucault, and hardersince Derrida. If our understanding of signs is thoroughlymaterialist, then the

material aspect of painting is itaturally thought o f as continuous with its statusas sign: since signs are material work, no contradiction arises. The problem

with differun.vis that, by identifying meaning as movement between significrs.as their mobile interrelation, the sign is in some sense ^materialized. If therelation which one signifier has to the rest is posited as synchronicaliy and

diachronically endless, then any local and limited operation of the sign (sothat it acts as x > y. rather than x n) must seem a descent into contest, amore or Jess repressive constrictionoflheinftrmist expansion ofsigns, a captureof the sign by matter. A dualism is insrituted between the local and material

capture of the sign by context and the signs inherent expansiveness (suchdualism can be criticized as the unexorcized classicismof Derridas workl. Interms of painting, this model produces a twotier account: painting as infor-mation, painting as mute matter. As information, painting can then be thoughtto be an infinitely intertcxtual structure, which, overturning the repressive

agency of the frame, Hies out to meet all other paintings under conditions of

mutual dependence and mutual arising. As matter, painting can by the sametoken be thought of as the absence of information and as sheer figurality:

as the inert pigment on canvas. One interesting consequence of the extremeclaim for the massive imertextuality of images is that an obverse picture also

presents itself: painting as an art of the material substrate, of pigment belowa threshold o f information, as presemiotic or semantic. Such a position ac-

tually concurs with the dcpoliticized and reactionary conception of embod-iment in painting as the realm below sign activity and cultural work. All that

is lacking is a rhetoric which then celebrates that substrate as a primitive

expression o f Beingall that is missing is the lyricism of the Siren Song.One of the most useful texts arguing against such dualism must be Pierre

Bourdieus Outline o fA Theory o fPractice(Cambridge University Press, 1976),

a work which has never, 1 think, been adequately recognized (and has beeneclipsed, like Lyotards Discours, Figure,by later work and later transforma-

tions of its author). Bourdieus concept ofpractice is dose to what is meant

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.Bourdieus insistence is that when we look at sign activity we resolutely avoid

reducing it to information, and that we take into particular account its structureof local and material negotiation, Bourdieus book argues, by example and is

dense: all I can indicate here are some schematic cases. In the case of arranged

marriages (the context is anthropology), while the ceremony of marriage can


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be viewed as symbolic theater, negotiation towards marriage involves a tem-porality of bargaining in which neither side yet knows the outcome of any of

its moves. The meaning of the moves in the negotiation is determined ret-roactively by the interpretation put on the move hv the other sidethe meaningdoes not yetiexist as the move is made. Practice here, as a concept, posits atemporality o f rea] social lime" and a zone "to one side of meaning,7' where

meaning is being made blit also has not yet arrived. Other examples include

feuding and combat, where each move both counters a previous action and

initiates a further action, whose outcome is unknown; process and performance

arts, where the material dimension itself acts upon each move to influenceoutcome; calendrical symbolism, where months are described, not according

to a zodiac or a static order of the whole year, but in relation to the monthbefore and the month to come.

The Cezanne example possesses embodiment in many of Bourdicu's sen-ses. Cezannes hundredth stroke responds to the previous ninetynine, andlaunches a further move, whose outcome is not yet known; the work actsrecursively and reflexively upon itself in real time, through the agency of its

embodied creator. This real time" of process also occurs within a real socialtime: the image reacts to prevailing discursive formations of painting, which

it mutually modifies: it is also placeu :nto a circuit of dealermerchant 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 docs 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

value. For example: if the potter lacks dexterity, the clay collapses; if the

combatant lacks coordination, he loses: if the negotiator misjudges, the trans-

action 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 alla quality of the primitive body, as in the phenomenology of MerleauPonty,

but of the body cultivated. It is acquired by training in cultural and semiotic

work. A mystical inclination of the argument tends to seize on those aspectsof embodiment which arc outside skill: color is such a potent case for thosewho want embodiment to disclose pure Being exactly because color is one

thing the painter does not make (God makes colors). But even in this case,

color is never the idea of color, even in colorfield paintings where color seems

to attain purification and essentiality: color exists only in instances of colors

(plural), individual cases, and the example of colorfield painting ought to

indicate, if anything, the high degree of cnculturation involved in working with

colors, the delicacy and skill with which the painter manipulates the cultural

codes and conventions of color and the precision of his task: not some mys-

ticism of the azure.


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Perhaps a clearer poini of discussion is provided by calligraphy in the

far Past, Embodiment is calligraphys goal, not its starting' point; the wholebody must be massively enculturated for embodiment to be embodied; andthough calligraphers regard successful work as possessing extreme value, it is

value at the opposite end from a primitive substrate of bodily experience. Thebody has, precisely; been trained in material work, o f the sign to the point at

which the gross organism ii fully absorbed, leaving little or nothing of theprimitive behind.

Calligraphy is a particularly good counterexample to the "mystical case

of color, since calligraphy turns on the entry of the body into the signs of

languagethe example shows beyond doubt that the subjectivity behind cal-ligraphy has been fully inserted into the symbolic order. We need not, therefore,

think of embodied subjectivity in any way other than as wholly ruled by thedecentering of the subject provoked by the entry into language when we tryto work out what the subject of embodiment is like.

The subject o f calligraphy, though embodied, docs notas a result ofembodimentpossess any transcendent unity, which embodiment, in the dis-

course of reaction, tends to assume as an automatic guarantee. What has beensaid here about calligraphy can be returned to Western painting: here, also,

the painter's embodiment is the product and precondition of cultural skillj :

(he manipulation of material signs.Such embodiment suggests limits to the concept of paintings intertex

tuality. I will conclude by stating a formal case, though my statement of it is

provisional and open to objections as a tweedy compromise. I offer it, con-scious of its shortcomings, in the hope that when its shortcomings arc seen,discussion might move several steps forward:

Texts form a multidimensional space in which a variety of other texts,none of them original, blend and clash. They arc intrinsically intencxtual; 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 arc like this because they possess no embodiment. They are sheer

information. Paintings are otherwise. Paintings possess embodiment, thoughthis is a concept absolutely to be purged of mysticism. Embodiment counters

intencxtualily as the unique counters the order of the same. Since the signsof painting are never sheer information, but in their embodiment are part of

material practice, they are information thoroughly inhabited and interpene-

trated by noninformation: embodiment is a concept which deconstructs the

opposition between matter and information, upon which the concept of thetext" (as information outside material practice) rightly or wrongly has been

built. By virtue of their embodiment, paintings offer a resistance to intertex

tuality which texts do not. To this extent they do not behave like texts: they


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are not appropriately analyzed through models based on texts; they disobeythe formula ut piciura poesis\and they frustrate the hopes of any easy Visual

Poetics.

.

-i-j:..;

Visual poetics

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