Previously, librarii were called bibliopolas, because the Greeks call a book a biblion. The same people are called both librarii and antiquarians, but librarii are
those who copy out both old and new things, while antiquarians are
those who write out only the old, from which fact they derive their
name. The scribe has received this name from writing (scribendo), expressing their duty with the quality of the word.
The scribe’s tools are the reed and the
quill, because it is from these tools that words are fashioned on the
page. But the reed comes from a plant, while the quill comes from a
bird; its tip is divided into two, with its unity preserved throughout
its whole form. I think that this is on account of the mystery rite and
signifies the Old and New Testaments on its two points, by which the
sacramen of the word is expressed as it pours forth from the blood of
the Passion.
The reed (calamus) is so called because it lays down its liquid. For this reason, among sailors the word calare
means “to set down”. The quill (penna) however, gets its name from
hanging (pendendo), that is to say, from flying. It is, as I have said,
proper to birds.
The sheets (foliae) of books are so called either from their similarity to the leaves of trees, or because they are made from folles,
that is, from the hides which are typically taken from slain animals.
The parts of these are called pages (paginae) because they are joined
together (compingantur) in turn.
Verses are so called by the
common people because the ancients used to write in the same way that
they ploughed the land. At first, they drew the stylus from left to
right, and then they turned it around on the following line, and then
the succeeding line was again written from left to right. Rustic people
still call these things verses. A scheda is a page which is still being
corrected and not yet put back into the books. This is a Greek word,
just like tomus.
DE LIBRARIIS ET EORVM INSTRVMENTIS.
Librarios antea bibliopolas dictos. Librum enim Graeci BIBLON vocant.
Librarii autem iidem et antiquarii vocantur: sed librarii sunt qui et
nova scribunt et vetera; antiquarii, qui tantummodo vetera, unde et
nomen sumpserunt. Ab scribendo autem scriba nomen accepit, officium
exprimens vocabuli qualitate. Instrumenta scribae calamus et pinna. Ex
his enim verba paginis infiguntur; sed calamus arboris est, pinna avis;
cuius acumen in dyade dividitur, in toto corpore unitate servata, credo
propter mysterium, ut in duobus apicibus Vetus et Novum Testamentum
signaretur, quibus exprimitur verbi sacramentum sanguine Passionis
effusum. Dictus autem calamus quod liquorem ponat. Vnde et apud nautas
calare ponere dicitur. Pinna autem a pendendo vocata, id est volando.
Est enim, ut diximus, avium. Foliae autem librorum appellatae sive ex
similitudine foliorum arborum, seu quia ex follibus fiunt, id est ex
pellibus, qui de occisis pecudibus detrahi solent; cuius partes paginae
dicuntur, eo quod sibi invicem conpingantur. Versus autem vulgo vocati
quia sic scribebant antiqui sicut aratur terra. A sinistra enim ad
dexteram primum deducebant stilum, deinde convertebantur ab inferiore,
et rursus ad dexteram versus; quos et hodieque rustici versus vocant.
Scheda est quod adhuc emendatur, et necdum in libris redactum est; et
est nomen Graecum, sicut et tomus.
Paula Michelstaedter trascrisse i versi e
le riflessioni del fratello Carlo. Le carte sopravvissero alla razzia
dei tedeschi che nel 1943, durante la persecuzione degli ebrei goriziani
e la requisizione dei loro beni, svuotarono l'appartamento di Paula a
Gorizia, in via Pitteri. Una vicina di casa riuscì a mettere in salvo la
cassa in cui erano conservate e così salvò l'opera del giovane
filosofo, morto suicida nel 1910
Distici (!) (1901)
Pioggia che cadi scrosciante che bagni ed avvolgi Gorizia
Colgati il cancro affinché più non ti vegga tra i piè
Pioggia infame ed odiata che annaffi e rovini ogni festa
Trema! la mia cadrà certa vendetta su te.
Vedo venire quel giorno, mi mette la gioia nel cuore
Ché finalmente potrò, secco vedere il terren:
Sterminate pianure si estendono lussureggianti
Già nell’azzurro del ciel splende infocato il bel sol
Raggi cocenti egli manda alla candida strada maestra
Che dalla Mainizza va fino alla nostra città.
Sul mio leggero biciclo io volo, divoro la strada
Volo con rapidità senza alcun brutto pensier
Volo e la corsa sfrenata mi apre la mente ed il core
Librasi in alto il pensier, alti ideali egli vuol
Volo e la strada fuggente di sotto alla ruota anteriore
Bianchi bagliori mi dà, tutto è una gran voluttà.
In bicicletta Esametri (Dicembre 1902)
Sterminate pianure si estendono lussureggianti,
Guida nel ciel di Latona il figlio il suo cocchio dorato,
Dardi infocati mandando alla candida strada maestra.
Sul mio cavallo d’acciaio io volo; né brutti pensieri
Turban la mente entusiasta che spazia per campi infiniti.
Volo e la corsa veloce mi apre i polmoni ed il core,
Volo e la strada fuggente di sotto alla ruota anteriore
Bianchi bagliori mi getta, arcana mi dà sensazione
Ave biciclo pietoso che allievi le cure ai mortali!
III
Al Vivaldi per un pezzo di legno (Dicembre 1902)
IV
A Semig (Novembre 1903)
Nel giorno memorando in cui giungi ai sedici anni
Vengo a farti i miei auguri, mio carissimo Giovanni
Che tu possa avere al fianco sempre un uomo come me
Un amico così buono così bello, hè hè hè.
Che tu possa esser allegro come adesso d’ogni età
E gridar senza pensieri sempre: Franz tà tà tà tà!
V
Brumat (1903)
Lungo e sottile, i morbidi mustacchi orizzontali
Alta la fronte d’ispidi capelli incorniciata
Celesti gli occhi che dicono ai mortali
Ch’alti pensieri volgonsi nell’alma innamorata.
VI
A Mreule (Sabato 10.30-11) 1900-1901
Carissimo!
Non t'adontar di mie parole o Rico
amico vero parla ad un amico
col fare antico.
D'allungarmi in preludi non mi sento
senza proemio entro in argomento:
non so esser lento.
_
Se 'l tutto è nulla noi siam men che nulla,
Noi al dolor votati dalla culla
siam gente grulla.
E poi che liberarci a noi non lice
dalli legami delle convenienze
di render tentiamo almen felice
questo viaggio pien di sofferenze,
tentiam di sollevarci dalla schiera
degl'uomini volgari, e una bandiera
leviamo di giustizia e libertate,
le genti basse e vili e interessate
pieghino a noi le fronti umiliate.
Giacché se dura vuol necessitate
che in una tragi-comica tenzone
si dibatta una gente che possiede
problematico lume di ragione
senza mercede,
sentiamo almen di rendere più lieve
questo d'obblighi pondo tanto greve.
Infine procuriam di soddisfare
i bisogni innegabili morali
della nostra natura, ché lottare
con lei non giova. Come i materiali
di lei bisogni tutti soddisfiamo
quantunque sieno dalla nostra mente
chiamati vili. Così pur dobbiamo
al nostro cuor concedere equamente
soddisfazioni morali e aspirazioni,
quantunque lo θυμός ce lo dispregi.
Ma già di queste mie dissertazioni
sarai ristucco. Dissi senza fregi
della mia mente piccola il pensiero
profondo e intero.
Riassunsi quel che dissi in bicicletta
in maniera probabile, migliore,
rapidità fa aprire e mente e cuore,
si pensa in fretta. -
E se non abbiam forza di cangiare
queste del mondo condizioni amare
di ridere di loro almen tentiamo
così godiamo. -
Vedevo andare in schiera ora i soldati
Ritti marciando e duri, vincolati
dalla catena della disciplina -
Ecco l'armata fa da burattina!
Son giovani che prima avean decoro!
Ed or non son che macchine di carne!
L'assurditate invece che lagnarne
risi di loro!
- (Ott. 1904)
Il lavoro pei mortali
è un futuro spaventoso
un presente faticoso
ma un passato splendido
VII (1904)
O perché mai si uccide il delinquente,
perché il malvagio si disprezza ognora
e chi il principio dell'onesto ignora!
Se tal natura o il pernicioso ambiente,
lo fecero di che lo si condanna!
O si condannerà forse un vitello
perché bovino nacque e non uccello?
Un falso senso la ragione inganna,
una coscienza fatta d'egoismo.
VIII (1904-1905)
Ruppe i vetusti ceppi della fede
in sé solo fidente il mio pensiero.
Le oscure fonti a ricercar del vero
cieco diresse e malsicuro il piede,
per ciechi orrori incontro al fine ignoto
al fine ignoto che l'affascinava. -
Verso la luce brancolando andava
avido e forte nell'orrendo vuoto.
Lieve chiarore allora lui fu duce
e 'l giunse al fine con fatica immane
- o falsa luce vaga d'ombre vane!
vano riflesso dell'eterna luce!
L'eterno vero fermo ed immutabile
noi stupidi miriam oltre alla lente
bugiarda e miope della nostra mente
che ce lo mostra diminuito e labile.
Ei si credé del dubbio vittorioso,
sostò sui falsi allori trionfante,
e della fede le catene infrante
mirò superbo con l'occhio pensoso.
Ma ancor l'incalza la rabida sete,
a conseguire l'assoluto vero
e fissa gli occhi nell'abisso nero
e cade per la lubrica parete,
giù nell'imperscrutabile mistero
della vita. Io vidi allor che vano
e relativo è ogni pensiero umano,
vano l'affaticar del mio pensiero.
Volli tornare i passi alla realtà
della vita che avevo abbandonata.
Aimè quant'era agli occhi miei cangiata,
quanto diversa ormai la società!
Era stracciato il velo pietoso
che le miserie della vita asconde
ed io scendeva nelle più profonde
sue piaghe col ferro sanguinoso,
e le scrutava di veder dolente
e le scrutava col ferro fatale,
tutte le fibbre distruggeva il male,
trionfava la menzogna; e l'arti lente
dell'ipocrita erano stromento
all'egoismo che move ogni cosa,
e in questa terra di pietà pelosa
regna sovrano, autocrata, violento.
Manifeste mi furono le frodi
dei giusti, e le malvagità dei buoni,
e manifeste delle religioni
le infamie e le vigliaccherie dei prodi.
Nel vile fango troppo avea indagato
e allor che il vero l'animo m'offuse,
ogni energia di vita in me si spense,
in me lasciando il core assiderato.
Ai! quanto è triste quanto doloroso
l'arida vita trascinando andare,
del fuoco privi sacro e salutare
del fuoco della vita poderoso.
All'intelletto, al cuore ed alle braccia
manca l'impulso naturale e forte,
chiude la vita in seno già la morte
ed ombra e morte all'occhio mio s'affaccia.
È morto nel mio core l'ideale
morta è la vita, morta la poesia,
si dibatte il pensier nelle fredd'ale
del nulla sconfinato. Per tal via
solo nella battaglia universale
vivrò la triste vita e così sia!
-
Supremo insulto all' animo dolente
la vanità di tutto l'universo
vedere in me nel cuore e nella mente
specchiato, e nel suo fango esser immerso.
Ad una meta che fermo disprezza
il mio intelletto ammagliatrice eterna
sentirmi spinto da una forza interna
priva di gioia, priva di bellezza.
È freddo il cor. - La fulgida scintilla
del genio e pur dei sensi l'estasi infinita
non sa. Né un lampo di virtù più brilla
in lui né fiamma d'epico valore
a far la forza bruta della vita
impeto d'arte di poesia d'amore.
-
Io non mi so spiegar che sia avvenuto
nell'animo mio triste e sconsolato
nell'animo mio vinto e sfiduciato. -
Come un tenero suono di liuto,
una dolce armonia nel cor mi nacque,
levità salì al cervello voluttuosa
allo stanco cervel che mai non posa.
Vinse il pensiero e tutto allor si tacque. -
Cantava amore. - Un turbamento strano
e puro e dolce e vago d'oblivione
mi scosse. Ahimè! fu forse sogno vano?
Fu di spossati sensi un'illusione?
O forse è vero: nel mio cor lontano
cantava Amor la prima sua canzone?
IX
Ode saffica (aprile 1905)
Io vivo fuori del mondo reale
vivo in un sogno, vivo in un'idea
un'idea che m'innalza, mi ricrea
nella miseria
Il sangue nelle vene si ravviva
come i ruscelli al cader della pioggia.
Io schiavo del pensier ora divenni
un sognatore.
Gli strali del mio povero cervello
che il cuore a me uccidevano ed il mondo
s'arrestano, si smussano placati
interrogando.
Una forma gentile li ha domati
a lei l'ardita piegano carne
si prostrano all'imagine adorata
muti ammirando.
Tra i lampi del pensiero annientatore
fra le battaglie, fra le delusioni
te vidi pura e fulgida fanciulla
nell'innocenza.
Quanto t'amo mia dolce fanciulla gentil
che rifletti negli occhi lo sguardo d'amor
tu mi elevi, mi salvi da insano furor
che doveva condurmi alla morte.
Tu dal volgo m'innalzi, dall'animo vil
verso il limpido azzurro infinito del ciel
in un'estasi pura e profonda del bel
mentre un'onda d'amore m'incanta
mentre scuote ogni fibra del cuore il sospir
disperato dell'agonizzante Manon
mentre vibra per l'aria il poetico suon
io ti miro negli occhi rapito. -
XI (aprile 1905)
Ora mi sembra d'esser più cattivo
mi sembra muta l'armonia del mondo
mi sembra d'esser divenuto immondo
mi sembra di peccar se di lei scrivo.
E di peccare quando a lei rivolgo
ardente e supplicante il mio pensiero
mi sento tratto in un abisso nero
mi sento perso nell'umano volgo.
XII (Apr. 1905)
Ell'è partita! Ed io son ripiombato
nel deserto dell'alma sconsolata
ella che nella strada affaticata
l'animo mio salvava dalla morte
Non è più qui col suo viso adorato
i pensier a cacciar dalla mia mente,
ritornan ora all'animo dolente
le cupe riflessioni già risorte.
Per me non ebbe pur un'espressione
non uno sguardo, non una parola,
e nel rimpianto della compassione
di me, mi struggo. L'anima mia sola
nell'universo freme ribellione
ed il pensiero amaro a lei sen vola.
XIII (maggio 1905)
Trascorse sono già tre settimane
dacché m'abbandonasti o mia fanciulla
né più un saluto, una parola nulla
giunse le nostre anime lontane
Io non lo so perché, ma involontario
ed insistente, amaro e tormentoso
sorge un pensiero in me che dir non so.
E pur... o mia fanciulla deh m'ascolta
Tu m'obliasti già, né mai sincero
né forte mai fu verso a me il tuo affetto
mai tu corrispondesti nel tuo petto
la fiamma che annientava il mio pensiero.
Fu inganno quello ch'io credetti amore
e fu menzogna l'edera fedele,
tutto un inganno perfido crudele
che m'ha straziato ed invecchiato il cuore.
L'ardente sguardo tuo che m'accendeva
di folle amore e disperato e insano
menzogna, e fu menzogna la tua mano
allor che nella mia si confondeva.
Ed ora tutto tace nel mio cuore,
la fibbra è rotta della mia esistenza
io miro con stupor nell'incoscienza
la vita che ha perduto ogni calore.
E ancor respiro l'atmosfera greve
di vanità, d'infamia di bassezza
donde il suo sguardo con la sua carezza
mi trasse per un tempo ahime! sì breve.
E ancor gli stessi germi in me vegg'io
e nel futuro con l'orrenda gola
guatami là una canna di pistola
Madre natura, amore, vita addio!
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 IJFrS 11 (2011) 114 GRATTON
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.
DIDI-HUBERMAN’S
ICONOLOGY 115 expandable de nition: 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 116
GRATTON 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 DIDI-HUBERMAN’S
ICONOLOGY 117 ‘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. 118
GRATTON 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 DIDI-HUBERMAN’S
ICONOLOGY 119 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’ 120
GRATTON (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. DIDI-HUBERMAN’S
ICONOLOGY 121 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 122
GRATTON 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 DIDI-HUBERMAN’S
ICONOLOGY 123 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 124
GRATTON 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 DIDI-HUBERMAN’S
ICONOLOGY 125 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. 126
GRATTON 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. DIDI-HUBERMAN’S
ICONOLOGY 127 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). 128
GRATTON 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 DIDI-HUBERMAN’S
ICONOLOGY 129 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 130
GRATTON 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 DIDI-HUBERMAN’S
ICONOLOGY 131 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 132
GRATTON 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). DIDI-HUBERMAN’S
ICONOLOGY 133 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.