articles: Georges Didi-Huberman’s Iconology of the Ninfa Moderna: A Critique

Georges Didi-Huberman’s Iconology of the Ninfa Moderna: A Critique
Johnnie Gratton
Since the turn of the century, Georges Didi-Huberman has rapidly gained prominence as one of France’s best known and most intellectually challenging specialists in the theory and history of art. The year 2002 saw the publication of two major new works by this proli c author, both re ecting his passionate interest in the work of the German art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929). The rst, L’Image survivante, offers an ambitious and comprehensive study of Warburg’s signi cance as an historian and theorist of art. It runs to almost 600 pages, far longer than the companion work, Ninfa Moderna, which, at less than 200 pages, may be considered a spin-off of L’Image survivante, taking the form of an extended essay on one particular aspect of Warburg’s broadly anthropological approach to iconology. I hasten to add that, on the few occasions Didi-Huberman applies the term ‘iconology’ to Warburg’s theories and working methods, he does so with reluctance, for fear of making any suggestion that Warburg’s achievement might be reduced to the parameters of ‘iconology’ as subsequently laid down in the more canonical writings of Erwin Panofsky. Rather, he af rms their radical difference:
L’iconologie magistralement constituée par Erwin Panofsky s’est débarrassée in petto de tous les grands dé s théoriques dont l’œuvre warburgienne avait été porteuse. Panofsky a voulu dé nir la ‘signi cation’ (meaning) des images là où Warburg cherchait à saisir leur ‘vie’ (Leben) même, leur paradoxale ‘survie’. Panofsky a voulu interpréter les contenus et les ‘thèmes’ guratifs au-delà de leur expression, là où Warburg cherchait à comprendre la ‘valeur expressive’ des images au-delà même de
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leur signi cation.1
It goes without saying that Didi-Huberman’s own ‘iconology’ of the Ninfa moderna seeks to build on his contemporary reconceptualization of the example set by Warburg.
In L’Image survivante, Didi-Huberman sets out to demonstrate the key importance, for contemporary thinking about art, of Warburg’s notion of survivance, or, more fully, the Nachleben der Antike, the survival of Antiquity. The German term Nachleben is Warburg’s translation of the English word survival, which he discovered as a concept in the work of the nineteenth-century British ethnologist, Edward B. Tylor, widely considered as one of the founding fathers of modern ethnology. As Didi-Huberman puts it, when Warburg set off on his journey to New Mexico in 1895, he was not so much embarking on a ‘voyage vers les archétypes’, to quote one of Warburg’s own disciples, as on a ‘voyage vers les survivances’ (IS 52), and his guiding light was not James Frazer but Edward Tylor, whose rst de nition of ethnographic ‘survivals’ was ‘the “standing over” (superstitio) of old habits into the midst of a new changed state of things’ (IS 53). Warburg’s keen interest in this notion of ethnographic survivals forti ed his conviction that, throughout the history of art, one can identify persistences of expressively charged morphological con gurations, most of which correspond to representations of gesture and movement that can be traced back to classical antiquity. Just as Tylor attributes the survival of fragments of ancient belief systems to folk memory, so Warburg considers his discovered con gurations to have been imprinted in or on collective visual memory, where they survive as either conscious memories or unconscious ‘engrams’. He casts them as ‘dynamograms’, or, to use his preferred term, Pathosformeln, ‘pathos formulae’. Eschewing any single, simple or shopworn de nition of these coinages (for example, as mergers of ‘form’ and ‘content’), Didi-Huberman characteristically offers us a series of pointers forming a complex, open-ended, implicitly
1. Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Minuit, 2002), p. 493, hereafter IS in the text.
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Pathosformel ou Dynamogramm nous disent, en effet, que l’image fut pensée par Warburg selon un double régime, voire selon l’énergie dialectique d’un montage de choses que la pensée, généralement, tient pour contradictoires: le pathos avec la formule, la puissance avec le graphique, bref, la force avec la forme, la temporalité d’un sujet avec la spatialité d’un objet...
(IS 198)
Warburg, montage, image, the Pathosformel with its array of double delineations: all are animated by ‘dialectical energy’ — but none more so than Didi-Huberman himself.
Both of Didi-Huberman’s books on Warburg lead eventually to analyses of the monumental and never completed project for which the German art historian remains best known, the so-called Mnemosyne Atlas, on which he worked from 1925 until his death, at the age of 63, in 1929. The ‘atlas’ is in fact a kind of huge scrapbook, consisting of over sixty large panels made of black cloth nailed to wooden frames, each a montage of pinned-on black-and-white photographic reproductions displaying an historically and generically disparate assembly of iconographic material ranging from high art to mass culture. And the point of these displays is to dramatize a series of particular yet never distinct ‘pathos formulae’, for, as Didi-Huberman himself underlines, the featured motifs of each separate montage constantly overlap.
It is in his analyses of the Mnemosyne Atlas that Didi-Huberman most tellingly advances what he calls his own theoretical ‘point of view’ (IS 277), a stance that leads him to offer a resounding critique of the understanding of Warburg delivered rst by centre- eld art-historical heavyweights such as Panofsky and Gombrich, and more recently by theorists whom he characterizes (i.e. slates) as ‘postmodernists’ or ‘avant-gardists’. He strongly disputes Ernst Gombrich’s view that Warburg’s ideas are more compatible with a Jungian than a Freudian frame of reference (IS 276–77). He contests Panofsky’s reductive
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reading of Warburg by arguing that ‘pour construire son savoir, Panofsky — comme tous ceux qui, après lui, se sont autorisés de la discipline iconographique — n’a pas cessé de séparer forme et contenu, là où Warburg n’avait cessé de les intriquer’ (IS 493–94). And, coming on to an allegedly postmodernist view, he nds fault with the distinction drawn by Benjamin Buchloh between the models of time implied in the Atlas and those promoted by avant-gardist thought. For Buchloh, the Atlas sets up ‘a model of historical memory and continuity of experience’ quite opposed to the models of modernity, understood as ‘providing instantaneous presence, shock, and perceptual rupture’ (IS 481). For Didi-Huberman, this opposition stems from a dubious postmodernist credo inspired by Jean Baudrillard. Not only does it over-schematize the very history of modern avant-garde movements, but it also fails to grasp the meaning given to the concept of memory by Warburg, as well as by certain of his contemporaries such as Freud and Walter Benjamin. Once we get beyond these misunderstandings, claims Didi-Huberman, we can begin to appreciate the Mnemosyne Atlas as constituting in its own way, and in its own right, an ‘avant-garde object’ (IS 482) — and this, not because it breaks with the past (which is clearly not the case), but because it breaks with a certain way of ‘thinking the past’: ‘La rupture warburgienne consiste précisément à avoir pensé le temps lui-même comme un montage d’éléments hétérogènes: telle est la leçon anthropologique des “formations de survivance”, à quoi répond si bien, sur le plan métapsychologique, celle des “formations de symptôme”’ (IS 482). Indeed, Didi-Huberman can be seen to argue tirelessly throughout his book that, as theorized by Warburg, the ‘pathos formulae’ surviving through collective memory do indeed resemble ‘symptoms’ in the Freudian sense by enacting a kind of ‘return of the repressed’ — whence the French critic’s assertion that ‘le Nachleben apparaît comme le temps d’un contretemps dans l’histoire’ (IS 281). Thus, according to his French advocate, Warburg’s living-on pathos formulae must be assessed as bearers of temporal disorientation, and not as elements explicable within an evolutionary model of time or an art-historical periodizing project. In short, these resurgent formulae
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‘anachronize’ and ‘complexify’ history itself. In Ninfa Moderna, Didi- Huberman will press on with his mission to have the active forces and forms of anachronism recognized in contemporary thinking about time — hence his repeated commendation of Walter Benjamin’s dictum that ‘Le Maintenant est l’image la plus intime de l’Autrefois’. This, Didi- Huberman will claim, is what the postmodernists and avant-gardists have conveniently forgotten or repressed.
Running to 592 pages, L’Image survivante is a massive tome, while its companion work published in the same year is a far shorter study, explicitly classi ed as an essay, in which Didi-Huberman extends into a modernity beyond Warburg’s time the ‘afterlife’ of one particular Warburgian ‘pathos formula’, that of the nymph, whose Latin name graces the essay’s title.2 Before homing in on the essay, I shall mark this moment of transition by underlining a few important features that the two works share.
Each of these works deploys an impressively scholarly apparatus re ecting the sheer amount of research and reading undertaken by their author in his efforts rstly to encompass the full range of Warburg’s writing, secondly to demonstrate his familiarity with a host of relevant works of traditional art history and connoisseurship, and thirdly to create a multi-disciplinary intellectual environment by constantly soliciting fruitful ideas and perspectives from a wide variety of other sources, whether literary, philosophical, scienti c, anthropological, psychoanalytic, or more generally theoretical. In this respect, his ambitions are not unlike those of Warburg himself. In Ninfa Moderna, as in L’Image survivante, Didi-Huberman includes a commentary on his own way of writing about art. In the nal chapter of his essay, he contends that it is not enough for the art historian to play the role of ‘philologist’ or erudite scholar. He or she must also be a ‘philosopher’. What the philologist considers to be ‘scienti c modesty’, the philosopher takes to be mere ‘heuristic cowardice’. Where the philologist seeks out
2. Georges Didi-Huberman, Ninfa Moderna. Essai sur le drapé tombé (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), hereafter NM in the text.
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chains of historical determination, the philosopher recognizes the play of ‘overdetermination’. Thus, for Didi-Huberman, the art historian as philosopher must be willing, as Warburg had been, to extend his/ her research into the domain of the ‘unveri able’. And how does one face up to the unveri able? The self-commentator offers the following suggestion:
Devant l’invéri able, le philologue doit se faire — en dépit, mais aussi en raison de son respect pour l’objet — philosophe: il doit entreprendre de poser des questions, de problématiser l’inconnu, d’avancer des hypothèses que guidera, fatalement, ce qu’on appelle un point de vue théorique. (NM 129)
Taking up once more his insistence on the notion of ‘point of view’, he insists that we can only approach the unveri able with hypotheses. Hypotheses are necessary, but, more than this, they are necessarily ‘guided’ by a preceding ‘theoretical point of view’. In turning now to a speci c aspect of Didi-Huberman’s practice as an art-historian cum philosopher in Ninfa Moderna, I want to suggest how writing from a ‘theoretical point of view’ can lead not only to powerful argument but also to prejudicial argument; how an intellectual strength of argument can be both conferred and compromised by the very recourse to theoretical positions that have solidi ed into something as intractable — and ultimately personal — as a ‘point of view’. And to be fair to Didi- Huberman, I should add that I think he is not just aware of this risk, but more than willing to take it. As he writes of his approach to Warburg in L’Image survivante: ‘cette lecture sera orientée, donc discutable [...] et tout aussi bien polémique’ (IS 274).
In Ninfa Moderna, Didi-Huberman takes up the gure of the nymph, the basis of, or memory behind, one of the ‘pathos formulae’ most consistently highlighted by Warburg from the time of his doctoral thesis right through to the much later Mnemosyne Atlas, one of whose panels offers a montage illustrating the many representational guises in which the nymph has appeared in the past and survived into the
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present, though not always in the form of a recognizable iconographic motif. Didi-Huberman’s own study is basically, as he himself puts it, a different take from that of Warburg on the ancient gure of the nymph as she re-appears in modern times, ‘une autre version, une autre extension possible’ (NM 133) — something different, something extra, but nonetheless something prompted by Warburg’s ndings and grounded in his principles. Thus Didi-Huberman is not signi cantly departing from a Warburgian line when he evokes a litany of literary, theatrical, and other gures who may be taken to stand as modern embodiments of nymphs in their more dangerous guise as secularized ‘divinités [...] irradiantes d’une véritable puissance à fasciner’ (NM 7). Examples here include Nerval’s Aurélia, Charcot’s hysterics, de Clérambault’s veiled Moroccan women, Jensen’s Gradiva (as mediated by both Freud and the surrealists), and Breton’s own Nadja. Some of these gures (de Clérambault’s models, Gradiva as encountered on the wall of Freud’s consulting room) are more evidently nymph-like in the iconographic sense because they are indelibly associated with drapery. This said, it is one of Warburg’s main contentions about ‘pathos formulae’ that they cut across iconographic boundaries by reappearing in displaced, transformed, and even inverted guises, such that, to quote Didi- Huberman, ‘une même morphologie peut être utilisée par les artistes dans des contextes et pour des enjeux symboliques très différents, si ce n’est antithétiques’ (NM 36).
As Warburg also makes clear, we do not have to wait for modern times, or the modern nymph, to nd examples of such dynamism. Thus one of the most signi cant changes undergone by the nymph motif during the Renaissance consists according to Warburg in a process of dissociation or lateral displacement. As Warburg argued in his early studies of ‘The Birth of Venus’ and ‘Primavera’, the element of pathos or emotive charge in Botticelli’s paintings has shifted away from the gures themselves, who look strangely impassive, to their edges: ‘vers leurs “bordures”’, as Didi-Huberman puts it in his commentary, ‘ces éléments “accessoires” mais “en mouvement” que sont les chevelures et les draperies dans le vent’
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(NM 16). The Warburgian concept rendered in French as ‘accessoires en mouvement’ tends to occur in English translations of Warburg as ‘moving accessories’, which can be read as an entirely appropriate pun. For Warburg, gurations of movement are emotively charged carriers and intensi ers of expressivity. But the movement that Didi- Huberman most wants to run with in his bid to project ‘une autre extension possible’ is based on another kind of displacement noted by Warburg, that of the physical slippage, or fall, of the nymph’s drapery. This is the ‘drapé tombé’ mentioned in Didi-Huberman’s sub-title. Here, the author himself is effectively punning in so far as, traditionally, this expression, like the English ‘fallen drapery’, refers to the fall or hang of worn drapery, itself a key aspect of what Gen Doy calls ‘the old usage of drapery as cloth transformed into art’.3 Thus, in the history of physical displacement that he envisages, a narrative of modernity involving both the fall of drapery from (and not just down) the female body and the progressive downfall of Ninfa herself, Didi- Huberman argues that ‘cette bifurcation prendra la forme d’une très lente dissociation de la nudité d’avec le tissu qui l’habillait d’abord’ (NM 16), and that ‘de ce mouvement choit un reste, un magni que reliquat: c’est le drapé lui-même prenant son autonomie gurale’ (NM 16–17). The destiny of the modern nymph is to survive in residual form as little more than the drapery she once wore, now a mere rag or remnant left strewn upon the ground, yet still imbued with hints of its former glory, or, as Didi-Huberman puts it, its ‘textural dignity’ (NM 80) and ‘rhythmic movement’ (NM 100). Hence not only the ‘ gural’ autonomy of what was once the accessory of a human or divine gure, but also its expressive autonomy, suggested by Didi-Huberman when he describes this leftover as a ‘magni que reliquat’. Here, still in his opening chapter, the essayist is cleverly preparing his reader for the story of downfall he wishes to tell, a story whose stages of descent are clearly outlined in the titles of his seven chapters, especially of chapters 3 to 6, which we encounter in sequence as follows: ‘De la
3. Gen Doy, Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2002), p. 8.
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mode, et de ses défroques’, ‘De la rue, et de ses entrailles’, ‘Du trottoir, et de ses expressions’, ‘De l’informe, et de ses draperies’.
Still relatively early in his essay, Didi-Huberman takes another step in setting up his story about the modern forms taken by the residual garments of the nymph of old when, turning to Poussin’s Triumph of Pan (1636), a painting of a bacchanal in full swing, he points out the contrapuntal presence in the foreground, and on the ground, of a crumpled cast-off sheet or garment, commenting:
L’orgie des dieux antiques laisse toujours des restes visibles aux humains arrivés plus tard: ce tas, ce reste central, ce beau chiffon en est un. Troublant pour le destin qu’il fait subir à l’anthropomorphisme: la forme humaine s’est absentée, en effet. Mais elle demeure en suspens — ou plutôt en repli, en rebut —, comme une dernière forme possible pour le désir humain. Quelque chose comme un haillon du temps. (NM 24)
I feel obliged to make a pedestrian intervention here. In a painting that features both male and female revelers, neither we nor Didi- Huberman can nd suf cient visual evidence to assume that this ‘disassociated’ piece of cloth is a garment, let alone one of the featured nymphs’ garments. Can Ninfa in her changes of guise become gender- indeterminate, androgynous, or even in this case a nymph turned satyr? The only feminine pronoun in Didi-Huberman’s analysis has perhaps been planted to make subliminal reference to Ninfa, though ‘she’ refers properly (grammatically) to an admitted generality, that of an absent (yet soon to be restored) ‘forme humaine’. Rather than confront the issue of gender, the commentator carefully sweeps it under the carpet.
The pedestrian literalist in me has worries over another sleight of hand in this passage. What the painting shows is a strongly anthropomorphic elongated mound of clean white fabric, worthy of being featured in a washing powder ad. But what the commentator wants us to see is determined by his introduction of the words chiffon and haillon. Here, he takes less a long look at the painting than a
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cunning short cut away from it, for these are no ordinary words. They are Baudelairian words, and, by adoption, Benjaminian words. Their function is to prophesy the future of Ninfa as Ninfa Moderna, and the future of the essay as the pursuit of Ninfa’s destiny.
The image of the ‘haillon du temps’ rounds off the essayist’s opening chapter on representations of the nymph, mainly from the late fteenth century (Botticelli) to the early seventeenth century (Poussin). Following a second chapter on sculptural representations of female saints, covering more or less the same period, he suddenly fast-forwards his ‘ lm’, as he occasionally describes his essay (NM 11, 25, 45), to the ‘visual ecstasies’ gleaned by writers and artists from the destitute end of modernity. In announcing the decline of Ninfa in the modern era as a fall into ‘la misère contemporaine’ (NM 46), he is also telling us that she will fall under a certain ‘theoretical point of view’. The remains of Ninfa are now to be found in the street, meaning instantly that this will be a very dialectical street: ‘nous sommes dans la rue comme dans un temps dialectique où chaque présent résonne d’harmoniques étranges faites de la rumeur des âges’ (NM 47). Such is the theoretical environment, as it were, that enables Didi-Huberman to pull off his most radical ‘extension’ to Warburg’s understanding of how the nymph motif, or rather the traces and remnants of that motif, survive in the visual culture of the modern city, waiting now to be photographed rather than sculpted or painted. Thus — a point not made in this heavily voice-overed ‘ lm’ — the fall of Ninfa coincides with the rise of photography as an artistic medium, and, from his ‘point of view’, as the modern-day medium most capable of nding here and now the dwindling, displaced, downtrodden traces of Ninfa’s cast-off drapery.
Any given theoretical environment requires its own hero, and in this case the Baudelaire/Benjamin axis inevitably elects the âneur, whereby, once more, a characteristically male gure will direct his gaze towards a female object of (theoretical) desire. Unlike the tourist, or even the plodding pedestrian, the âneur has the time and the inclination to turn his gaze downward, there to survey the realm of the fallen, the discarded and the outmoded. Among the objects most likely to catch
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his attention on the streets of Paris, the âneur will come across the serpillière, the ‘ oor-cloth’, glossed by Didi-Huberman, quite fairly except for the odd word, as ‘une défroque, une espèce d’infâme ou d’informe draperie — la récupération d’un tissu quelconque, drap, vêtement usagé, bout de moquette — que les employés de la voierie disposent dans les caniveaux, contre le trottoir, pour canaliser le ux du “ruisseau” (comme on disait autrefois) jusque dans la bouche d’égout’ (NM 49). Less blatantly an inappropriate ‘plant’ than the earlier haillon, the adjective informe has nevertheless been chosen as much in deference as in reference, for, in the next chapter, at the next street corner on our guided tour around Didi-Huberman’s theoretical environment, one bumps into Georges Bataille.
An ‘unveri able’ hypothesis can never been proven. At best, the case for it can only be argued persuasively by an act of writing that induces us to see the unseen, or something spectral, in the images adduced by their commentator. In this respect, if there is a crux point, a crunch point in Ninfa Moderna, it lies undoubtedly (‘for me’, as Roland Barthes would say) in Didi-Huberman’s promotion of the serpillière as an exemplary modern remnant of Ninfa. Accordingly, I shall henceforth focus largely on the portion of the essay devoted to the serpillière.
Most modern city streetscapes are busy with a plethora of minor details. Unique to Paris, the serpillière is one such detail, a peripheral object familiar to its residents, mysterious to its visitors, but potentially an object of fascination for any walker of the streets due to the countless materials it may be made of and the unpredictable shapes it may assume. It is an object forever destined to be a resolute mis t in the increasingly homogenized fabric of the urban everyday. Not surprisingly, as the author of Ninfa Moderna shows, it has attracted much photographic attention. The following considerations apply above all to the serpillière as photographed object. The very existence of a photo of a peripheral urban object bears witness to a moment of arrested attention on the part of the photographer. Recognition of this invites an at least equal generosity of attention on the part of the viewer, including an attention to the effects of decisions taken — whether by the photographer or the
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camera — on framing, lighting, distance, focus, angle of vision, and so on, for variations of these will not only result in different formal compositions but will also in uence the degree and kind of visual eloquence (if any) attributable to the depicted object.
My rst consideration acknowledges the capacity of the object itself to determine the core of its reception, whether viewed in an image or, under direct visual scrutiny, as an image. Once attended to in situ, as an object that has literally ended up in the gutter, the serpillière can hardly fail to activate a symbolic eld (or composite pathos) of demise, encompassing rejection, subjection, abjection and dejection. The ‘ oor- cloth’ of the street started out as an item of merchandise, a piece of material, perhaps an item of clothing, bedding, towelling, or carpeting. At some point, having outlived its usefulness or never proved useful enough to warrant keeping, it was discarded, and eventually recuperated and pressed into one nal, lowly service. Twisted or rolled, crudely bundled or neatly tied into a dam of cloth, it has been cast into the gutter to direct the water gushing out of the curb through the spouts of a Haussmann-era street-cleaning system. We encounter it in this sorry state, usually sodden with water and sullied by detritus, displaying in every fold and bre the causal history of its demise. Overlooked by Didi-Huberman, this intrinsic pathos of the serpillière is remarkably consonant, up to a point, with that he attributes to the decline of Ninfa.
My second consideration engages with photography in so far as it has more to do with the object as image than with the object as such. Monopolized by a photograph, and responding to a medium that can isolate everyday objects and visualize them as enigmatic or ‘suggestive’ images, attention can grow into the keener mode of curiosity. Imaged in this way, the serpillière may now speak of more than itself. Enlisted into the image world, it acquires a capacity to allude analogically, through its lie, shape, and surface textures, to images of other things. As a tied- up roll of carpet or a bound oblong bundle of cloth, for example, the serpillière offers a visual evocation of enveloped human corpses, an evocation dependent on our very contemporary exposure to an array of images referring to both past and present: the mummi ed remains of
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ancient Egyptians, wrapped and tied in cloth; but equally news pictures of corpses zipped into body-bags and fastened to stretchers by straps or tape. In the case of looser, unravelled arrangements of cloth, the serpillière, especially given its de ning location, might invite comparisons with the makeshift bedding of down-and-outs who sleep on the city streets. Once more, it is the prominence in contemporary visual culture of globally circulated images of the homeless and the innocent victims of war and famine, shrouded or blanketed in the drapery of the poor, that activates these comparisons.4 In a later chapter of Ninfa Moderna, Didi-Huberman will go on to feature two photos taken by Germaine Krull in 1928 of street tramps (NM 94–95), one a female, the other male, describing them as ‘images émouvantes de la misère parisienne’ (NM 96). The former is predictably envisaged as yet another modern avatar of the nymph, ‘nymphe fatiguée, peut-être malade’. Because the latter poses an obvious problem of gender assimilation to the gure of Ninfa, he, pictured asleep on the cobblestones, is seen rather arbitrarily as ‘presque collé au sol comme un papillon serait épinglé sur sa plaque de liège’ (NM 96). Both the predictable metaphor and the evasive simile attest to the continuing prioritization of the nymph, underlining in turn that, for the commentator of these photos, it is less the contemporaneity of visual culture than ‘le temps “inactuel” des survivances’ (NM 119) that links images of decommissioned drapery to images of tramps.
As we can deduce from the preceding examples, resort to comparison within the exercise of ekphrasis is, in Didi-Huberman’s writing, always strategic, always made to serve his guiding ‘hypothesis’ (besides which, his staple comparant, Ninfa, is always for him, not an import from without, but a vestige detected in the comparé). In other words, he has no time for the kind of spontaneous comparisons of something in a picture to something not in the picture that images often inspire. I suspect our art historian would reject these as reductions of the potency of images to the level of Rorschachian inkblots. Yet, in a phototextual work which sets Annie Ernaux and her lover Marc Marie
4. On drapery as featured in news photography, see Doy, pp. 212–31.
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the task of writing separately about photos of the aftermath of their love- making in the form of their clothes left strewn on different occasions around the oors of almost every room in her suburban home, Ernaux herself constantly responds to these photographically trans gured scenes by comparing certain items of apparel to other things. Just one, rather tting, example will suf ce here: ‘À gauche du jean, la doublure rouge d’une veste rouge étalée comme une serpillière.’5 It should come as no surprise, then, that she does indeed go on to describe her reaction to these photos of cast-off garments in terms of a Rorschach test: ‘Ma première réaction est de chercher à découvrir dans les formes des objets, des êtres, comme devant un test de Rorschach où les taches seraient remplacées par des pièces de vêtement et de lingerie.’6 Most readers of this co-authored work will recognize this mode of speculative visual inquiry (undertaken, as Ernaux herself insists, more by one’s imaginaire than one’s mémoire)7 as a common type of response to images that catch ‘the forms of objects’ in misshapen, crumpled, ‘suggestive’ states. Yet again, this appears to be a type of response shunned by the philosopher of the image, whose inquiry seeks out — and always nds — only Ninfa, or her last vestimentary traces.
To put it another way, Didi-Huberman’s guiding ‘hypothesis’ forbids curiosity as a mere distraction from his single-minded purpose. The title of his book recurs as the proxy (invisible, overwritten) title of virtually every photograph reproduced on its pages. Like certain words studding the titles and captions attached to so many published or exhibited photos, the words Ninfa and Moderna provide us as viewer- readers with ‘ready-made levers and points of purchase’,8 thereby
5.
6.
7. 8.
Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, L’Usage de la photo (Paris: Coll. Folio, 2006 [Gallimard, 2005]), p. 29. This is one of many overlaps between the texts written by both co-authors and Didi-Huberman’s Ninfa Moderna — too many, perhaps, for them to be purely coincidental. But further delving into this intertextual dimension will have to be another day’s work.
Ernaux and Marie, L’Usage de la photo, p. 31. In his companion text, the latter refers to the same photograph as ‘ce puzzle textile’ (p. 39).
Ernaux and Marie, L’Usage de la photo, p. 31.
See Clive Scott, The Spoken Image: Photography and Language (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), p. 90.
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restricting the image’s capacity to solicit our attention and our capacity to offer a response. Against such single-mindedness, we can usefully set the virtues of attention, consideration and curiosity as outlined by Jacques Rancière. For Rancière, attention and curiosity are affects: not just ways of looking, but aspects of our affective response to images. And the value of these affects, as expressions of ‘le désir de voir de plus près’, lies in their not being guided. Resisting any anticipation of the meaning or effect of an image, they neither visually foresee nor ekphrastically foretell:
Je parle ici de curiosité, j’ai parlé plus haut d’attention. Ce sont là en effet des affects qui brouillent les fausses évidences des schémas stratégiques; ce sont des dispositions du corps et de l’esprit où l’œil ne sait pas par avance ce qu’il voit ni la pensée ce qu’elle doit en faire.9
Geared towards af rming the persistence of a single Pathosformel, Didi-Huberman’s often polemically charged ‘hypothesis’ inevitably leads him to anticipate detections of Ninfa and so to overlook or dismiss what he isn’t looking for.
Richly metaphorized and allegorized, appropriated as ‘notre serpillière’ (NM 63), ‘notre haillon des rues’ (NM 80), the ‘humble et somptueuse draperie des trottoirs’ (NM 63) becomes the key point of departure and return holding together Didi-Huberman’s expansive discourse across the three central chapters of his essay (NM 45–82). In the rst of these chapters, having reiterated his commitment to a Benjaminian vision of the modern city as embodying a present laden with anachronistic value, he goes on to compare photographs of serpillières taken by two artists, one English (Steve McQueen), the other French (Alain Fleischer). Initially McQueen’s series of photos is described as ‘belle’ (NM 49), while the artist himself is described as being à la mode. Exhibited all over the world, the winner of the
9. Jacques Rancière, ‘L’Image intolérable’, in Le Spectateur émancipé (Paris: La Fabrique éditions, 2008), pp. 93–114 (p. 114).
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Turner Prize 1999, he is someone whose work is selling well on the art market. In all this, of course, McQueen is being set up only in order to be knocked down. The problem for Didi-Huberman is that McQueen and his photos are precisely à la mode, and that la mode points to a super cial modernity, a modernity with no dialectical connection to the past. ‘L’actualité des images de Steve McQueen ne fait pas de doute,’ he claims, adding: ‘Mais où se trouve leur élément d’inactualité?’ (NM 51). The counter-example to McQueen, Alain Fleischer, is not only French, his series of photos is said to be ‘magni que’ (NM 53). We are further told that he also took many more photos of serpillières than McQueen, and over a much longer period of time, thereby making the English artist’s series of photos appear opportunistic, the work of a blow-in, or in Didi-Huberman’s own words, ‘presque touristique’ (NM 53). Needless to say, there is no room for tourists in the theoretical environment surveyed by Didi-Huberman. To top it all, we learn that Alain Fleischer does not seem to have earned much money from his photographs:
Comme souvent, Fleischer n’a pas compté, s’est entièrement dépensé dans le caractère in ni, en droit, du travail. Il n’a pas cherché à clore, encore moins à donner une valeur de rareté à ses images: beaucoup ne sont pas tirées, aucun tirage n’est numéroté, aucune galerie n’a pris en charge de montrer extensivement cette série. (NM 53)
Almost incredibly, but perhaps symptomatically, a highly sophisticated visual anthropologist tries to seduce us with the most eminently stereotyped image in the Romantic repertoire: that of the admirably poor, unrecognized, self-sacri cing artist — and this, in order all the better to accomplish his demolition job on the work of Steve McQueen. Even if he is right in his evaluation of Fleischer’s work as being qualitatively better than McQueen’s, the way in which Didi-Huberman tries to prove his point remains the equivalent of a punch below the belt. This is at best a case of polemic, and at worst a case of raw prejudice. Either
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way, it’s a stitch-up, in which an art described as ‘à la mode, je veux dire à la mode “postmoderne”’ was always destined to lag far behind the kind of ‘authentique modernité’ (NM 55) represented by Fleischer. Remarkably, even though he provides us with reproductions of three photos from each of the artists’ series, at no point in this xed contest does the polemicist use his considerable ekphrastic and analytical skills to address them with a view to substantiating his claims. Given the basic comparability of these images as ltered through reduced-scale, poor-quality, black-and-white reproduction, the essayist could hardly have expected that his readers would simply endorse his strategically predictable claims.
Two recurrent features of the essay emerge here in unusually blatant form. The rst, a recurrent theme throughout his corpus, is his quarrel with postmodernism, and, more speci cally, with postmodernist art historians. There’s nothing wrong with engaging in such debates. Indeed, elsewhere in the essay, Didi-Huberman offers some valid and incisive critiques of postmodernist aesthetics. But the essay as a whole suffers from too much match- xing and not enough refereeing. The critique of McQueen, who has been frogmarched into the role of postmodern artist, is, as it stands, literally without foundation. The double caricature of Fleischer and McQueen neatly packages his claims but does nothing to further his cause — and nothing to further our understanding of his huge symbolic investment in the serpillière.
The other notable recurrent feature laid bare in the essay’s third chapter consists in the fact that, throughout the three chapters foregrounding the serpillière as a photographically revealed memory of Ninfa, very little of Didi-Huberman’s discourse is devoted to directly addressing photographic images as such. The main task he performs can be described blandly as one of contextualization. He builds an often complex mosaic of points of reference around images, inviting us to take them on board in our viewing of them and ultimately, given that he regularly identi es ‘wrong’ ways of reading images, to apprehend them as he does. The fourth chapter, entitled ‘De la rue, et de ses entrailles’, is largely written without any reference to particular images
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of the serpillière. Instead, Didi-Huberman sets about recreating, and enthusiastically espousing, a nineteenth-century imaginaire, in which the modern city coughs up the pre-Hausmannian entrails of its infernal underbelly, spilling them onto the streets through its sewers. These innards are the city’s dirty secrets (NM 58), its ‘mémoire refoulée’ (NM 61), ‘the truth itself’ (NM 62). Vomiting the before and the below onto the streets, the city anachronizes itself, ful lling the essayist’s fundamental theoretical desire. A constant presence in the vicinity of any ‘bouche d’égout’, the serpillière is recast as ‘l’avertissement qu’à cet endroit précis [...] la surface vivante de la ville communique avec le règne quasi infernal du sous-sol’ (NM 58). But the serpillière is soon eclipsed by the evocation of this phantasmagoric (but still theoretical) environment as Didi-Huberman proceeds to construct a montage of quotations, drawing upon works by Zola, Balzac, and Hugo, commenting on them as broader expressions and con rmations of this infernally exuberant urban imaginaire. Not that the essayist considers this recreation to be a mere imaginaire. For him, it furnishes the contextual sine qua non for any satisfactory understanding of a crumpled piece of sacking in a Parisian street gutter. Beyond that, it holds a truth later to be articulated by Baudelaire, Benjamin, Warburg, and, of course, himself: namely that, in the visual arts, not least in streetscape photography, the visual itself is merely the tip of an archaeological and anthropological iceberg. Not until the last few paragraphs of the chapter does Didi-Huberman return to the matter of the serpillière as photographed object. Surprisingly, he offers us a reproduction of an Atget close-up of a ragged serpillière in a city gutter, placed immediately to the left (from the viewer’s point of view) of two holes in the side of the pavement, from which water is gushing and being directed to the right by the dam of cloth. Sharply contrasted against the adjacent dark greys of the side of the pavement and the sodden cloth, the gushing water is caught by the photographer as a splash of pure, clean, brilliant white: the very antithesis of the preceding imagery of gunge ejected from a nether realm. Responding to the photo, the essayist himself admits as much by nally retrieving Ninfa from the only ever implicit role he has allocated to her over this chapter, that
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very dark role of gatekeeper of Hell: ‘devant une boulangerie de la rue Descartes, le caniveau crache son eau et, juste à côté des deux bouches d’égout, se trouve la “nymphe” avec son drapé, cette moderne gardienne des sources’ (NM 64). This is a more benign, almost bucolic rendering of Ninfa. Didi-Huberman is perhaps signalling here an instance of what Warburg called ‘dynamic inversion’, whereby embodiments of a particular Pathosformel can take on radically different pathetic hues. But he offers no explanation along such lines. In this chapter as an overall stage in his pursuit of the modern nymph, the relation between text and image proves once more to be distinctly problematic.
The only example of a photograph of Ninfa-stroke-serpillière being addressed in a sustained way occurs at the beginning of the fth chapter of Ninfa Moderna, entitled ‘Du trottoir, et de ses expressions’ (NM 67–126). Here, alongside a full-page reproduction of the image, Didi-Huberman engages in a seven-page discussion of and around László Moholy-Nagy’s photograph, variously entitled ‘Rinnstein’ and ‘Kloake in Paris’, taken in 1925. His ekphrastic presentation of the photo captures many of its exceptional qualities:
L’image est admirable: extrême pauvreté de la chose vue, extrême complexité de la vision elle-même. La plaque d’égout, le ux du caniveau, le drapé trempé forment, dans leur ‘misérable’ sujet, un saisissant feu d’arti ce de rythmes et de textures. Métal, pierre, bitume, tissu, eau, chaque matériau reçoit la lumière et la renvoie différemment. L’immobilité des choses dures, mobilité de l’eau, état intermédiaire du morceau de tissu. L’image est oue devant nous — en bas, là où nous sommes le plus proche, là où rien ne bouge —, elle devient nette sur l’eau en mouvement et sur le gris haillon qui fuit vers le haut. (NM 67–68)
The materiality of the referent, the texture of the image, and the dramatically transformative power of the photo are all well accounted for, with modest use of metaphor and with no resort as yet to allegorization. The serpillière, for instance, is held within literal bounds
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as merely a ‘drapé trempé’, a ‘morceau de tissu’, a ‘gris haillon’. Indeed, the question the essayist now wishes to ask of the image concerns its aesthetic credentials, not its meaning, though the former will, of course, shape the determination of the latter. Seeking to persuade us as to how the image should be read, he rst tells us how it should not be read. He considers how it might well be taken as an example of urban realism or of the Neue Sachlichkeit to which Moholy-Nagy himself subscribed: ‘[L’image] est réaliste en ce qu’elle regarde ce sur quoi, généralement, on ne fait que marcher’ (NM 70). This option, however, he declares to be inadequate. Engaging a transformative potential not broached in his ekphrastic presentation of the photo, he now proposes to understand the photo in terms of expressionism — not in the stylistic or art-historical sense of the word, he hastens to add, but in its philosophical and psychological sense (known as ‘expressivism’10). Rather than return directly to the photo, he turns to an article written in 1929 by Franz Roh, in which the German art critic explains his own expressivist leanings. By coincidence, he happens to use his friend Moholy-Nagy’s 1925 photo as an example of an image that can show how a banal snatch of urban reality can become ‘expressif et presque symbolique’, enabling us to see in it ‘les entrailles souterraines d’une ville énorme avec tous les produits de la digestion d’une métropole expulsés au dehors’, concluding that ‘la teneur infernale (der infernalische Gehalt) d’une grande ville se trouve ainsi saisie de façon signi cative dans un petit détail’ (NM 72). We are instantly transported back to chapter three of Didi-Huberman’s essay, and to that nineteenth-century imaginaire of infernal emissions from below. We have been here before, we’re back on Didi-Huberman’s home ground. With Roh, as the essayist jubilantly observes, ‘Nous voici tout à coup près de Georges Bataille et de Walter Benjamin [...] Nous voici donc près d’Aby Warburg’ (NM 73) — as if ‘we’ had never strayed from their sphere of in uence. Now Didi-
10. First coined by the philosopher Charles Taylor, ‘expressivism’ is a term apparently unknown to Didi-Huberman, but one that characterizes a key strand in his own aesthetics. For an analysis of the expressivist paradigm, see Johnnie Gratton, Expressivism: The Vicissitudes of a Theory in the Writing of Proust and Barthes (Oxford: Legenda, Research Monographs in French Studies 6, 2000).
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Huberman can say what he was always going to say:
Moholy-Nagy a produit une image intensi ée, extrayant — ‘exprimant’ — d’une banale serpillière trempée sa valeur ‘expressive et presque symbolique’, sa ‘teneur infernale’, son inquiétante étrangeté. Il a donc ‘exprimé’ — au sens très physique du chiffon que l’on comprime et que l’on tord pour en extraire ses saletés, ses humeurs — un pathos. (NM 73–74)
In this epiphany, an expressive process and value considered to inhere in the photograph are asserted by a writer, who superimposes onto the photograph the words of another writer, who also asserts that same photo’s same expressive process and value. Found between quotation marks, the epiphany is purely verbal. The agreed words of two authorities, themselves part of a wider pantheon of intellectual authorities, outweigh and overwrite the image.
Didi-Huberman’s analysis of the photograph is a kind of set-up, deferring the delivery of a meaning that has always been anticipated and already been rehearsed. In a similar vein, the privileged object that returns centre stage in the above passage is never anything more than his (rather than ‘our’) serpillière. His serpillière is a theoretical object, a reminder and remainder of Ninfa, whether in her benign or her cruel guise. In its allegorical function, it is never for long any particular serpillière. That Atget’s benign Ninfa is extracted from a compact mound of cloth, while Maholy-Nagy’s cruel Ninfa is extracted from an elongated band of cloth, sticking out into the wet road like a landspit surrounded by water, is of no consequence to the allegorist. All too often, in jumping to conclusions, Didi-Huberman jumps over the image and sees the invisible at the expense of the visible.
Among the range of issues that I have found problematic in the writing of Ninfa Moderna, a considerable number have revolved around the relationship forged in it between text and image. A master of contextualization, Didi-Huberman tends to construct such a dense montage of citations and theoretical reference points around any given
image that the visual can become swamped, almost overpowered, by the textual. In this respect, I am reminded of what Rancière says about the dominant media: ‘Ce que nous voyons surtout sur les écrans de l’information télévisée, c’est la face des gouvernants, experts et journalistes qui commentent les images, qui disent ce qu’elles montrent et ce que nous devons en penser.’11 Didi-Huberman, of course, is not among the ‘dominant’ in his chosen eld. We see rather a new kind of theorist struggling to argue his case, here his ‘hypothesis’, against the sedimented iconology and art historicism of the past but also against the tide of postmodernist art theory and de-aestheticized cultural studies. On the other hand, he has in his own way assembled a panel of talking heads, whose ideas in uence and support his own, and who are invoked as intellectual authorities with the power to accredit, if not ‘verify’, his hypothesis. These ‘experts’ in alternative thinking are enlisted as key gures in the essayist’s rhetoric of persuasion. They are there to help the writer ‘say what images show and what we must think about them’. Like the reader, the image is put under pressure. Above all, and at all costs, the image must be shown to support a thesis. Image illustrates text.
Trinity College Dublin
11. Rancière, Le Spectateur émancipé, p. 106.

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6/24/2020

Georges Didi-Huberman’s Iconology of the Ninfa Moderna: A Critique

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