“Les mots et les images” [“Words and images”] by Michel Foucault in Le Nouvel Observateur, n.154, 25 October 1967, pp.49-50.
This brief piece, nowhere available in English, that Michel Foucault wrote in 1967 for Le Nouvel Observateur, is worth reading for a few reasons: first, for Foucault’s refreshingly enthusiastic approach to review; second, for its display of an early convergence between Foucault and Bourdieu (who translated Panofsky’s Gothic architecture and scholasticism and appended a postface to it in which he famously justified his “habitus” concept); third, and finally, for his nice recapitulation of the difficulties of treating the image as a text.
May I be pardoned for my lack of competence. I am not an art historian. Until last month, I had read nothing of Panofsky. Two translations have appeared simultaneously: the famous Essays on iconology, which appeared thirty years ago (five studies on the Renaissance, preceded and integrated by an important methodological reflection; Bernard Teyssèdre presents the French edition) and two studies on the Gothic Middle Ages, brought together with a commentary by Pierre Bourdieu.
After such long delays, this simultaneity is striking. I am poorly placed to proclaim what benefits specialists could draw from this publication that has been desired for so long. Being a neophyte Panofskian, however enthusiastic, I will explicate the master’s destiny by the master’s words, and I will proclaim that the benefit will be great: these translations will transform the distant and strange iconology into a habitus for us; for apprentice historians, these concepts and methods will cease to be what one is forced to learn and will become the basis from which to see, to read, to decipher, to know.
But I will not get ahead of myself. I would like to speak alone of what was for me a new discovery in this texts which, for others, are already classics: the trip they invite us to take which, I hope, disorients us [nous dépayser].
A first example: the analysis of relations between discourse and the visible.
We are convinced, we know, that everything in a culture speaks: linguistic structures give form to the order of things. This is another version (a very fertile version, as we know) of the postulate of the sovereignty of discourse that classical iconography already assumed. For Émile Mâle, plastic forms were texts invested in stone, in lines or colors; to analyze the capital of a column or the illumination of a manuscript was to bring to light what “it wanted to say”: to restore speech there where, to put it bluntly, it had been stripped of words. Panofsky takes away the privilege of discourse. Not to claim some kind of autonomy for the realm of the plastic, but to describe the complexity of their relations: intertwining, isomorphism, transformation, translation—briefly, the whole festoon of the visible and sayable that characterizes a culture in a moment of its history.
Here, elements of discourse pervade the text as themes, recopied manuscripts, works translated, imitated, commented upon; but they take bodily form in plastic motifs which are submitted to changes (from the same Ovid text, the abduction of Europa is bathing in a Quattrocento miniature, violent kidnapping in Dürer); here, the plastic form rests, but receives a succession of diverse themes (the female nude that is a vice in the Middle Ages becomes a despoiled and therefore pure, true, and sacred Love in the sixteenth century). Discourse and form arrange themselves in relation to each other. But they are not independent: what the Nativity is no longer represented by a women giving birth, but by a kneeling Virgin, it is the accent is put on the theme of the Mother the living God, but it is also the substitution of a triangular and vertical schema for a rectangular organization. There finally arrives the moment in which discourse and form are both submitted, as if by a unique movement, to a single arrangement. Scholastic discourse, in the twelfth century, broke with the long continuous flow of proofs and discussions: the “summae” give up their architectural logic, by spatializing writing as much as thought: divisions into paragraphs, visible subordination of parts, homogeneity of elements on the same level; visibility, therefore, of the entirety of the argument. At the same time, in architecture, the vault ceiling makes the ribs of the edifice perceptible; this substitutes for a hitherto great continuity; it gives the same structure to all elements that have an identical function. Here and there, a single and same principle of manifestation.
Discourse is not, therefore, the interpretative background common to all cultural phenomena. To make a form appear is not a distorted way (more subtle or more naive, whatever one lines) of saying something. Not everything contained in human activity is, ultimately, a decipherable whirring. Discourse and depictions each have their own mode of being; but they maintain complex and intricate relations. The task is to describe their reciprocal functioning.
Another example: the analysis, in the Essays on iconology, of the representative function of painting.
Until the turn of the twentieth century, Western painting “represented”: by its formal arrangement, a painting always related to a certain object. A problem that is tirelessly taken up is to know which, whether form or meaning, determines what is essential about a work. Panofsky himself substitutes for this simple opposition the analysis of a complex representative function that traverses, with different values, the whole formal density of the picture.
What a picture of the sixteenth century represents manifests in Panofsky in four modes. The lines and colors produce objects – people, animals, things, gods – but always according to the formal rules of a style. In the pictures of one time there are ritual sites that permit one to know if one is dealing with a man or angel, a specter or a reality. They also indicate expressive values – the anger of a face, the sadness of a forest – but according to the formal rules of a convention (the passions in Le Brun do not have the same features as in Dürer). In their turn, these characters, scenes, faces, and gestures incarnate themes, episodes, concepts (the fall of Vulcan, the origin of the Earth, the fickle nature of Love), but according to the rules of a typology (in the sixteenth century, Judith rather than Salome carried the sword). Finally, these themes give a place (in the strict sense of the term) to a sensibility, to a system of values, but according to rules of a sort of cultural symptomology.
Representation is neither external nor indifferent to form. It is linked to it by a functioning that we can describe, on the condition that we discern its levels and that we specify for each of them the mode of analysis that must be specific to it. Then, the work appears in its articulated unity.
The reflection on forms, whose importance we know today, is, after all, the art history that the nineteenth century begat. For a good forty years, it emigrated toward the regions of language and linguistic structures. Then multiple problems – very difficult to solve – present themselves as try to cross the limits of language, as soon as try to handle real discourses. It could be that Panofsky’s work is valuable as an indication, perhaps as a model: it teaches us to analyze not only the elements and the laws of their combination, but the reciprocal functioning of systems in the reality of a culture.
Social appearances: a philosophy of display and prestige
Barbara Carnevali
Columbia University Press
2020
I had not perceived how much I had changed but how did the people who laughed at me know? I had not a grey hair, my moustache was black. I should have liked to ask them how this awful fact revealed itself.
Marcel Proust, Time regained
We form appearances whether or not we like to – and quite often we don’t like to, as Proust’s aged protagonist discovers. Condemned to engage with the world through our senses, social interaction cannot take place without our appearing to one another. Proust, who declared that our “social personality” is created by others, assumed this in the early twentieth century. Making recourse to neglected philosophical anthropology of Proust’s time, Barbara Carnevali asserts in her Social appearances that such appearing through images is an inescapable human phenomenon. Not only can “no society…rid itself of images” (p.95), but they are increasingly characteristic of social interaction in our time, dominated as it is by various forms of media.
By appearances and images we should not understand phenomena subordinate to reality, “inessential and ephemeral” (p.xiv). Rather, since appearances are reality insofar as we can access it, they ought to be accorded the same ontological status. This entails the rejection of a cultural tendency to degrade images, surfaces, and appearances. In the book, Carnevali aims to provide the intellectual co-ordinates for an accurate interpretation and evaluation of “appearing in human life” (p.xii), something that such degradation of appearance precludes, committed as it is to derision. This latter approach adopts a “pathological” attitude, casting appearances as deviant phenomena demanding clinical attention in the form of moral castigation. Carnevali on the other hand takes a “physiological” approach, outlining and then detailing the role that appearances actually play, without assuming we know the role they should play.
This book aims to preserve the specific, autonomous, and irreducible character of appearance, treating it as an object worthy of respect in its right, not as the debased or reflected form of a more profound or meaningful reality. So the philosophical characters cast in the text are divided according to the respect they grant appearance itself. For the “pathological” approach, “meaning lies beyond the appearance: either as an essence concealed by the mask…or as the revelation of an interiority that precedes and is superior to the appearance” (p.71). This “pathological” approach fits within a hybrid Platonic-Christian tradition, traveling through Pascal and Rousseau to Guy Debord and Pierre Bourdieu by way of Saint Augustine and Emile Durkheim. The opposing approach, which makes use of “perspicuous description”, finds its origin in Aristotle, reaching Nietzsche, the later Wittgenstein, Simmel, Merleau-Ponty, Helmuth Plessner, and Hannah Arendt. For them, “there is no such thing as dualism: the face of things consumes their meaning in its entirety”. In the Italian version of the book (this is not just a translation but a reworking), Carnevali describes these thinkers as providing a “‘positive’ philosophy of vanity”.
The book does best in dissecting the “pathological” view, which for Carnevali is rooted in a moral conviction that appearance is tantamount to insincerity, that mediation – whether through rhetoric, advertising, public relations or makeup, clothes, and conversation – implies deception and mystification (p.29). While this conviction has its origin in Plato’s denunciation of rhetoric, the metaphysical assumptions on which it rests – that of “two worlds”: a transcendent, ideal sphere inaccessible to the senses and a temporal, fallen, “Vanity Fair” – have travelled through Western philosophy and everyday thought. Christian theology regenerated it and, through Augustine, intensified it, such that his seventeenth-century French moralist heirs could develop, out of the sheer horror of appearances, “a refined aesthetic sensibility” (p.70), attending closely to appearances and masks in order to better puncture them.
The romantic tradition, despite its secular premises, finds itself complicit here, replicating the narrative structure of the Christian tradition’s Fall story. But in place of the corruption of spirit we find the corruption of unmediated authenticity. If the victim is the authentic individual, the culprit is society, and particularly its tendency to give rise to a spectacle. As Rousseau tells it, early humans fell from their state of nature as they came to concern themselves with “public esteem”, hoping to secure others’ recognition through spectacle, by singing, dancing, or being the most attractive—in any case turning themselves into images for the pleasure of others. What Rousseau condemns above all in this is “the center of gravity of subjectivity shifted inevitably from inside to outside” (p.73). Not only was one dependent on others for one’s own esteem, but one’s experience of oneself was mediated by others. It is the intervention of society, insinuating itself within, that gives rise to this unhappy consciousness.
[The romantic’s] contempt focuses on a single target: society as a system of mediations, which are not only economic and political (the market, money, political representation) but also aesthetic. The romantic condemns all forms of exchange in which images intervene, as medial surfaces, in the contact between subjects of society (p.79)
For Carnevali, there are important correspondences between these eighteenth-century arguments and contemporary ones. Her main focus in this regard is Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle”. He remains trapped within the “two worlds” metaphysics, with images mediating or distorting presumably otherwise unmediated relations between people. For Debord, this occurs in a manner analogous to the commodity form. In fact, the commodity – understood as exchange value – is the first form the image takes, as the social worth of a use-value, “a surreptitious inversion between the authentic value of things and their apparent value” (p.87). For Carnevali, his particular mix of romanticism and Marxism, his drive to demystify and reduce, leads him to the same dead-end as his antecedents: “The pathos of demystification ends up dissolving the same aesthetic-social sphere that the eye of Debord, as observer, had observed so acutely” (p.83).
He refuses to see the spectacle as a spectacle, but only as a pretence or more-or-less reliable mediator of some otherwise inaccessible personal, individual truth. This is a common theme in Carnevali’s criticism, forming the basis that her positive intervention will set right. Similarly, Emile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu are prevented from tracing its specific logic by their apparent separation of the aesthetic, seen as gratuitous, from the social (in its economic and moral dimensions), seen as purposeful and necessary (p.99). While Durkheim is rebuked for his depiction of the aesthetic as a kind of individual libertine aestheticism, Bourdieu’s flaw, not unlike Debord’s, is his ostensible reductionof the aesthetic to social, “the subordination of aesthetic values to economic ones” (p.101), with aesthetic choices undertaken in an effort to accumulate social power. In both cases, what is missing, Carnevali argues, is an appreciation of the specificity of social aesthetics. What is of interest is not what the mask is potentially concealing, but the properties and character of the mask itself.
Even French moralists, like Pascal and La Rochefoucauld, hostile to the mundane world of appearance, have much to offer, owing to their close attention to this world, which they approached in an aesthetic manner, not unlike an art critic. Carnevali continues this work, which engages in the “delicate task of translating from the sensible to the conceptual: thought tries to transpose what is communicated in the mode of appearance into the mode of discursive mediation” (p.32). This transposition is the beginning of her “positive” approach to appearance, seeking not to condemn appearance or to reduce it to something else, but to identify its specific logic. So for Carnevali the most aesthetically pleasing image is not necessarily the most expensive or the one commanding the most social power. It has its own hierarchy – of “prestige” – irreducible to these.
Unjustly separated, the worldly sciences of economics and aesthetics share a concern with material valuation and distribution. For Carnevali’s “social aesthetics”, this manifests itself in the distribution of prestige, something not perfectly correlated with distribution of financial wealth. Prestige is status “represented through the senses—it is status in image, social value in sensible form” (p.178). The status or social value sensed here operates according to its own logic, making the appearance that is sensed something other than a mere signifier of underlying wealth. Rejecting semiotic approaches, Carnevali asserts that adornments and other objects that comprise an appearance have certain “sensible qualities and forms” inherent to them that attract public attention and form the basis of their value (p.179). Rather than social position imbuing an object with value, Carnevali asserts, the appropriation of pleasing objects enables the creation of social value. Likewise, the aesthetic style characteristic of a group is not a superfluous and interchangeable addition to a pre-existing group, but is a symbol that actually “creates the unity of the group, enabling it to be represented in the public space and therefore to exist in a social form” (p.185). Carnevali argues that in such instances, contrary to sociological assumptions, a universal aesthetic sensibility undergirds social life.
Carnevali’s positive argument is underwritten by a paradoxical claim: social life is inescapably aesthetic, but concern for appearance does not derive from social life—it does not spring up in surprise from the other’s alienating gaze (as the romantic and sociological traditions have it). Rather, drawing from philosophical anthropology, Carnevali suggests that it is an innate feature of human life. The split between an I and a Me, the self perceiving itself and the self being perceived, “is located already inside the self, in its depths” (p.15). Carnevali derives this position from Helmuth Plessner, whose main work was translated into English in 2019, almost 90 years after its original German publication. For Plessner, our self-concern derives from our realization that not only are we a body, but that we have a body. We are thus thrust outside ourselves as spectators, something he calls “eccentric positionality”.
By making self-presentation an innate property, Carnevali shares with the romantics an antipathy towards social institutions and the variations they introduce. While there is some discussion of the disproportionate burden that women bear as guardians and carers of appearance (p.12; p.65), Carnevali is mostly concerned with the invariants and universals. This is especially clear when discussing the social correlates of appearance. Against Bourdieu, who observed a positive correlation between class status and concern for appearance, Carnevali maintains that “everyone, no matter what his or her position in the social field, possesses an interest and an expertise in the field of appearing” (pp.126-7). On the surface this is banal. But guided by Carnevali, we can assume it to be true and use it as a basis to think about variation: do men and women equally care about their appearance? Do they possess an equal expertise? But also how would different empirical findings affect the philosophical propositions of the book? These are the questions of the sociologist, but they are addressed in the book as if it were a problem amenable to simple a priori adjudication.
Our lived appearances are fluid and inconstant, changing with the light that hits us or with the eyes (ears, nose, etc.) of the person perceiving us. We can give them some measure of stability, enabling their study and circulation beyond immediate physical co-presence, by considering snapshots of appearance, what Carnevali calls “social images” (p.34). These are not just photographs, but include among other images like social media profiles, sound recordings, and gossip. While we can cultivate these images, posing or editing photographs, we are – inasmuch as we are social beings – constantly vulnerable to their production and proliferation. These images are inescapably public and fears of intrusion into our private lives are better understood as fears of the circulation of our “image”, a static snapshot that appears to represent us, but from which we feel estranged: “the social image does not belong to whoever is represented in it and by it…which is why it appears alien or even threatening” (p.42). Yet despite its potentially alienating character, this image is the only way we can exist publicly: “in society, to exist is to be perceived and to perceive” (p.218). Proust’s narrator, quoted at the outset, was after all making an impression at a society party when this image of himself was thrust upon him.
Social being increases with the proliferation of images, something Carnevali sees as a development of the last decades of the twentieth century. Her guide in this is Andy Warhol, who articulates both the alienating and liberating tendencies of the image. He manages first to reconcile economics and aesthetics, by conflating art and advertising, not necessarily making advertising into an art, but art into publicity. Now, “the socialite, the adman, and the artist are melded into a single persona” (p.216). Since appearance is existence, he also manages to merge aesthetics “with ontology because the social reality grows proportionally with the number of images that represent it and that circulate in the public space” (p.218). Using mechanical means to reproduce images (“I want to be a machine”, he once said), Warhol sought this ontological increase for the objects of his depiction. His numerous silkscreen prints, far from diminishing the aura of the artwork, were able to “transfigure the most banal object into something magical and seductive” (p.224). As a practitioner of the “social arts”, a technician of “social-aesthetic labor”, Warhol held in his “hands the magic wand of prestige” (p.206), producing status and social being in the act of drawing attention to his objects. For Arthur Danto, this assists us in understanding
…his tendency to reproduce indefinitely the same image of the same personality—Marilyn, Liz, Jackie, Elvis—as if only the reiterated repetition of their image could increase the substance of people who are in actuality no more than the brand image of themselves. To be is to be famous, and to be famous means eliminating everything foreign to the familiar perception of one’s image and that consequently does not reach popular awareness, because it is foreign to one’s essence.
Arthur Danto, in Carnevali (pp.217-218)
In the present, where the means of image production are widely possessed, and the potential is there for each to be one’s own Warhol, we do well to follow Carnevali in taking the powers of appearance seriously and resisting the temptation to moralize.
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