Game recognize game

"The petit bourgeois do not know how to play the game of culture as a game. They take culture too seriously to go in for bluff or imposture or even for the distance and casualness which show true familiarity; too seriously to escape permanent fear of ignorance or blunders, or to sidestep tests by responding with the indifference of those who are not competing or the serene detachment of those who feel entitled to confess or even flaunt their lacunae. Identifying culture with knowledge, they think that the cultivated man is one who possesses an immense fund of knowledge and refuse to believe him when he professes … that, brought down to its simplest and most sublime expression, it amounts to a relation to culture ('Culture is what remains when you've forgotten everything'). Making culture a matter of life and death, truth and falsehood, they cannot suspect the irresponsible self-assurance, the insolent off-handedness and even the hidden dishonesty presupposed by the merest page of an inspired essay on philosophy, art or literature. Self-made men, they cannot have the familiar relation to culture which authorizes the liberties and audacities of those who are linked to it by birth, that is, by nature and essence."

— Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice, 330-331

Disinterest

"Out on tour with the Smashing Pumpkins
Nature kids, I/they don't have no function
I don't understand what they mean
And I could really give a fuck"

— Stephen Malkmus on the Kantian aesthetic

Pierre and Bruno

I've now completed a little trilogy of posts at We Have Never Been Blogging on the complicated relationship between Bourdieu and Latour.

From Foucault to Bourdieu?

From Foucault to Bourdieu?
Institutions of Social Theory in America
(Paper delivered at the UCLA Southland Graduate Student Conference, June 5th, 2009)

The institution of American literary criticism — not only, but especially, that kind of criticism that attempts to take social institutions into account — owes an incalculable debt to Michel Foucault. Yet Foucault’s work has been so influential in the United States over the past forty years that it may fairly be regarded as a kind of academic institution unto itself — one potentially in need of radical questioning or reform. Such a desire, to reform the institution that is Foucault’s thought — or at least to view it from a slight distance, a new angle — may perhaps explain a recent turn in literary studies engaging with social theory, away from a Foucauldian framework and towards one more influenced by Foucault’s contemporary and friend, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

The two have much in common: both agregés in philosophy at École Normale Superieure in the mid-1950s, they are alike in combining careful scholarship with theoretical ambition, minute phenomenological reflection on the body with materialist historical explanations on a grand scale, and a resistance to the problematic of Marxism with eternal vigilance toward the effects of domination exercised by all forms of power and capital. Foucault, of course, has long been the more influential figure in America. For a few decades now — at least since the pioneering New Historicist work of the late 1970s and early 1980s — American literary scholars have been working through the implications of Foucault’s genealogical method, which seeks to trace the history of concepts central to our literature and our culture: sexuality, subjectivity, rationality, sovereignty, and many others. Literary scholars and critics influenced by Foucault are legion, but some of the most illustrious and illustrative names would include Stephen Greenblatt, D.A. Miller, Walter Benn Michaels, Frances Ferguson and Mary Poovey.

Bourdieu’s influence is more recent, and perhaps less familiar, so I’ll characterize it briefly here. Literary critics working under Bourdieu’s influence are interested not so much in an analysis of the labor that goes into constituting or constructing literature’s conceptual content, but in what happens to literature once it has been constructed: how it circulates, who is able to recognize and evaluate it, who profits by it, what social practices it makes possible or participates in. Rather than attempting to craft diachronic narratives of how particular, more or less philosophical concepts might have found their way into literature, Bourdieuvians tend to favor synchronic analyses of literary practice at particular stages of cultural and social development. The object of research, in other words, is not primarily the history of culture that brings about a particular work, but rather that work’s place within what Bourdieu calls “the field of cultural production” at any given historical moment: the economies (real and symbolic) in which particular literary works are embedded. Here, the concepts operating within literary works matter less than the concepts of literature (along with other social concepts) that allow works to circulate in society in a specific way (among individuals of a certain class, for instance, or within certain institutions, or between particular nations). Scholars and critics I would align with this roughly Bourdieuvian project include John Guillory, Franco Moretti, Janice Radway, James English, and Pascale Casanova.

We are talking, in other words, primarily about a difference of methodology: a difference of theoretical object. The Foucauldians wonder how literature and culture gets to us in the form it does; the Bourdieuvians wonder how it gets from one of us to another. These critical projects, though different, hardly seem irreconcilable. If work that explicitly combines Foucault and Bourdieu, genealogy and reflexive sociology, has been rare, perhaps it’s because the practical compatibility of their methodologies is obscured by the troubling tendency that each of these thinkers has to try to eradicate the other’s foundations. Think of the famously devastating last chapter of The Order of Things, for instance, on the emergence of the “human sciences”: “There can be no doubt, certainly, that the historical emergence of each one of the human sciences was occasioned by a problem, a requirement, an obstacle of a theoretical or practical order … the threats that, since the French Revolution, have weighed so heavily on the social balances, and even on the equilibrium established by the bourgeoisie, were no doubt also necessary before a reflection of the sociological type could appear” (345). Sociology, for Foucault, like all the “sciences of man,” comes into being with an anxious sense that the behavior of human beings need to be accounted for, that their discourses and activities need to be comprehended and classified — a development he associates with the historical rise of a “disciplinary society.”

Such passages provide some pretty powerful weapons of critique, or even of a priori dismissal, not only against Bourdieu, but any sociologist, whose very object, in Foucault’s view, is at best obsolete and at worst oppressive. But the game of criticism can go both ways; just as Foucault’s genealogical critique of the human sciences can be used to undermine Bourdieu and sociology, Bourdieu’s sociology of intellectuals offers a convincing deflationary account of many of Foucault’s most anomalous philosophical choices. In his introduction to the English translation of Homo Academicus, for instance, Bourdieu places Foucault among those “philosophers … [who] were caught in a dual relation with the worlds of philosophy and the social sciences … In their relation with the philosophical high priests of the Sorbonne … they appear like religious heretics, or, in other words, rather like freelance intellectuals installed within the university system itself … More or less totally deprived of, or liberated from, the powers and privileges but also the tasks and the responsibilities of the ordinary professor (examining the entrance examinations, supervising theses, etc.) they have strong connections with the intellectual world, and especially with the avant-garde reviews (Critique, Tel Quel, etc.) and with journalism (especially the Nouvel Observateur): Michel Foucault is no doubt the most representative of this position, since, until the end of his life, and even when he became professor at the Collège de France … he remained almost entirely bereft of specifically academic and even scientific powers, and therefore of the clientele which these powers afford, even if because of his fame he wielded considerable power over the press and, through it, over the whole field of cultural production. The marginal nature of this position … is obviously not unconnected with the fact that all these heretics with a vocation to become heresiarchs … share a sort of anti-institutional mood homologous in its form to that of a considerable fraction of students: they are inclined to react impatiently to the discrepancy between their already considerable fame in the outside world, that is, outside the university and also outside France, and the subaltern status which is accorded them inside the French university world, in collusion with their contempt and their rejection, by an institution which, when they were adolescents, had attracted and even consecrated them” (xix). Thus, from a sociological perspective — which is ultimately just as valid as a genealogical one —Foucault’s ferociously “anti-institutional” mood is largely an expression (albeit a brilliantly elaborated one) of his marginal position within academic institutional space.

Furthermore, for Bourdieu, Foucault’s method of genealogy, which he was able to present as a philosophical innovation, arises — genealogically, if you like — out of a latter-day contest of the faculties between philosophy and the social sciences. Bourdieu suggests that Foucault “finds in Nietzsche an acceptable philosophical sponsor for the socially improbable combination of artistic transgression and scientific invention that he achieves and for the screen-concepts which, like that of genealogy, help to provide a cover for an ambitious enterprise in social history or genetic sociology” (xxiii-xiv). So Foucault, far from making the social sciences — like all sciences of man — impossible, in fact comes out of the closet as a sociologist himself! In other words, Foucault’s turn to something like historical sociology, under the name of “genealogy,” is closely linked to his intellectual sublimation of the “anti-institutional mood” he’s put in by his marginal academic status. Ironically, in order to attack the institution, Foucault is pushed closer than he perhaps wishes to be to that science of institutions, sanctioned and made possible by institutions: sociology.

One may find this little critical circle satisfying or frustrating, depending on your investments, but it reflects a larger and more significant difference. Besides having different notions of the efficacy of their own critical methods, Foucault and Bourdieu also have a fundamentally different sense of how institutions influence history, and intellectual history in particular. At the risk of oversimplifying, I would like to formulate it like this: Foucault sees the institution as what gets in the way of history; while Bourdieu tends to see them as what makes history, or rather, as the site and original condition of possibility for the making of history.
Foucault defined his own scholarly interest, in a document prepared in order to advance his candidacy for the Collège de France, as “knowledge invested in complex systems of institutions” (Macey, 234). In a sense, Foucault came to the study of the institution reluctantly, as something he had to delineate in order to give full plausibility to his greater claims about the historical evolution of the categories of human thought. Attention to institutions was, as it were, a methodology imposed on him by the institution: it was not taken up as an end in itself, but as something Foucault had to do in order to legitimize his intellectual project in the eyes of his teachers.

A 1957 letter by Foucault to Stirn Lindroth, his Swedish thesis advisor at the University of Uppsala (quoted by Didier Éribon in his excellent biography of Foucault) makes this clear. Lindroth, a historian of science, had charged Foucault’s work-in-progress — an early draft of Madness and Civilization — with being too speculative and insufficiently rigorous. Foucault responded in his own defense: “my … great mistake was to prepare first the pages dealing with medical theories, whereas the realm of ‘institutions’ is unclear and would have helped me to be more clear in other areas. Since you are willing to allow me to do so, I shall show you what I did over the vacation on the subject of institutions … There we are in a realm that is far easier to define and one providing the social conditions of the beginnings of psychiatry” (84).

Leaving aside the irony that it was an institutional constraint that initially forced Foucault to refine his critical analysis of the institution (the very mode of analysis that would eventually make him so famous), we see here that Foucault’s view of institutions is articulated with reference to “theories”: the institution is what needs to be more fully described so that the theories developed within it can be better understood. Foucault admits that “the realm of ‘institutions’ is unclear” in his early theoretical work, but also “far easier to define” than theory: institutions, in other words, are the easy part. (Or so he thought in 1957!) Foucault’s early thinking on the institution is that of a frustrated post-Hegelian philosopher, who finds that he has to give his narrative of the development of scientific thought a complex and persuasive empirical background. Institutions, in other words, are interesting because they have produced this philosophical concept called man, which a recently effected epistemological break has led us to realize we no longer really need. Institutions thus function as a term in a larger argument, a source of error, but not as an object of inquiry in themselves.

Strangely enough, this changes at more or less exactly the same time that Foucault himself finally escapes from everyday institutional confinement: with his election to the Collège de France in 1970, he was essentially free to do whatever work he wanted, unmonitored by supervisors and unhampered by pedagogical or administrative duties (the only requirement was that he give a course of public lectures for five weeks out of every year). Given this freedom from exigent institutional demands, Foucault decided, somewhat perversely, to focus not on “knowledge invested in complex systems of institutions,” but more strictly on those institutions themselves, and the internalization of their demands that they are able to bring about in human subjects. Hence his mid-career masterpiece, Discipline and Punish, which brings the methods of institutional history that had been imposed on his earlier work to a new level of intensity and conceptual precision. Here the approach is further from intellectual history and is more thoroughgoingly materialist. Thought, knowledge, man, “the subject,” all the grand philosophical concerns of the earlier work, fall away in this book; what takes their place are new terms like “biopolitics” and “discipline,” the “technologies of the self,” the “microphysics of power.” It’s as if Foucault, by looking closer at the obstacles that prevented thought from moving dialectically forward, the traps that it got itself ensnared in, became so fascinated with the workings of the trap that he forgot what his original object had been. But while the focus is now on the obstacle rather than the object, he still regards it as an obstacle: the purpose of institutions, in Foucault’s work, is nothing other than to repress, to keep in check, to prevent.

(To indulge in a little sociological/biographical aside: it’s interesting to note that Foucault became so obsessed by the workings of institutions in the period when he himself had effectively left everyday institutional work behind, as his position at the Collège de France left him without administrative or pedagogical duties. Occasional wry remarks in his lectures of this period remind us of this: “You know that the institution where you are, and where I am, is not exactly a teaching institution … [T]he Collège de France now functions essentially as a sort of research institute: we are paid to do research … Given that we are paid to do research, what is there to monitor the research we are doing?” ("Society Must Be Defended," 1).)
Bourdieu, on the other hand, was interested from the beginning in the obstacles that the institution poses to intellectual autonomy. But, regarding the institution as a sociologist rather than a philosopher, he did not theorize them as obstacles: rather, for him, institutions are generative structures that produce thought as a phenomenon, by organizing intellectual activity as a social game. Where Foucault came to the material (or disciplinary) effects of the institution from the side of the ideal — of pure philosophical or theoretical inquiry — Bourdieu early on renounced the traditions of the philosophy of the concept in favor of a theory built up from empirical analysis of the social world. So Foucault starts out from the existence of pure philosophy — of thought, the ideal — and then looks closer at its actual history to see what material conditions distort and determine it. For him, philosophy always has to get through or around institutions, the constraints imposed by the apparatuses of disciplinary society.

Bourdieu, on the other hand, begins with the empirical fact of institutions, often focusing his attention on the seemingly ordinary and banal (the social factors determining students’ choice of majors, for instance) and develops from that a conceptual system of extraordinary sophistication and subtlety, which accounts for philosophy as merely one of the possible outcomes of this system. In other words, Bourdieu ultimately derives all of the traditional concerns of philosophical inquiry — concerns about politics, aesthetics, ethics, etc. — from the social effects of the institution: rather than seeing thought as something that must pass through or bypass the institution, and on its way either affirm or negate it, he sees thought as something always originally produced by some institution. For him, it simply can’t come from anywhere else. Foucault’s intention, in describing the institution, was always to eventually transcend it; Bourdieu, on the other hand, insists that any possibility of transcending the institution will be predicated on the effect and authority of the institution itself, on what the institution makes possible. We might say, to sum up: Bourdieu seeks to know what the institution makes possible; Foucault what it makes impossible.

The particular institution on which Bourdieu fixes his attention most closely is, of course, the French educational system: a system in which, unlike Foucault’s madhouse, clinic and prison, he was also a participant and in which he had an interested stake. This accounts for what some see as the excruciating self-consciousness of Bourdieu’s work, but it is also what makes him a particularly important role model for those who want to do academic work on institutions: that is, examinations of the role of institutions from within an institution. Even at his most radical and critical — for instance, his infamous 1970 study Reproduction, which argues that the school system largely serves to reproduce class distinctions from generation to generation — Bourdieu always remains, in his themes and style of argument, a homo academicus. Foucault, on the other hand, sometimes seems to imagine himself as some kind of fantastic mutation of the academic genus, one that is slowly evolving away from the institution and towards something new, whether this be anarchist politics or the literary avant-garde.

Foucault's desire to simultaneously transcend and transgress manifests itself most clearly in the literary dimension of his early work, greatly influenced by his association with the French avant-garde journal Critique, founded in the early 1950s by the dissident surrealist writer Georges Bataille. In an interview collected in the volume In Other Words, Bourdieu relates that he “was, doubtless for sociological reasons, less attracted than other people (for instance, Foucault) to the Bataille-Blanchot side of Critique. The desire for a clean break, rather than for some ‘transgression,’ was in my case directed against institutional power, and especially against the institution of the university and all the violence, imposture and sanctified stupidity that it concealed — and, behind the institution, against the social order. This may have been because I didn’t have any accounts to settle with the bourgeois family, as did others, and so I was less inclined to the symbolic breaks dealt with in The Inheritors. But I think that the concern to nicht mitmachen, as Adorno put it — the refusal to compromise with institutions, beginning with intellectual institutions — never left me” (4). From Bourdieu’s perspective, it seems as if Foucault breaks with those bourgeois social institutions, the school and the family — or, more precisely, transgresses against them — in part by attaching himself to another institution, that of the literary avant-garde.

So Foucault's desire to transcend, to transgress, or simply to develop beyond the academic institution is doubtless an enormous part of his charisma for academics — and also, it should be said, for good reasons: his intransigence remains a valuable example, and his resistance to disciplinary boundaries and constraints does offer a model of intellectual activity that produces truly interesting results. But I think there are as many lessons in Bourdieu’s embattled immanence as in Foucault’s frustrated transcendence: perhaps more, for those of us who want to both study and work within institutions. For even as Bourdieu stays with the institution, always within the institution, he consistently refuses to compromise with it or let it fully determine his critical discourse. The importance of Bourdieu’s work is that it allows one to objectivate and understand the effects that the academic institution has on those within it, and to counteract them where they need to be counteracted, without indulging in the wholesale negation, or ritual transgression, that Foucault arguably indulged in, and which is so easily incorporated into the oppositional, either-or logic of academic criticism.

So where does this leave us? A too-easy dichotomy would see Foucault as an anti-institutional revolutionary, and Bourdieu as an institutional reformer. Indeed, Bourdieu was a passionate advocate for reform of the French school system; his analyses of “cultural capital,” so often misappropriated by American academics in theoretical battles over the nature of aesthetic value, were designed to account for inequalities within the school system that allowed students from certain social backgrounds to succeed out of all proportion to supposedly “natural” differences in aptitude and ability. Whereas Foucault, after the events of May 1968 especially, inclined toward an anarchist politics that opposed (in theory, at least) the existence of any coercive social institutions whatsoever, Bourdieu remained, in a sense, in the camp of the old socialist Left, seeing May 1968, for instance, as an opportunity for extensive pragmatic social reform rather than revolution. The formulation is clearly inadequate, given that Foucault, in the 70s especially, was deeply committed to practical social reform: as he put it, “justice always must question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions” (269).

But there’s a certain utility to the formulation nonetheless. We might say that Foucault opposes the normalizing effects of the institution on principle; while Bourdieu takes an explicitly normative stance on that normalization, accepting that the institution normalizes but calling for that normalization to be radically democratized. In other words, while Foucault is inclined to see institutions as sites of total control, Bourdieu regards them as sites of perpetual conflict: for him, struggles over who is in and who is outside of the institution, what practices it institutes, what social fields and interests it intersects with, are part of the process that ultimately transforms institutions, and society as a whole. So, where Foucault is most concerned about subjection and domination, Bourdieu is most concerned about access and exclusion. What may at first seem to be due simply to a difference in their object of analysis (with the prison, what’s of greatest interest is what happens inside it; with the school, it’s who is kept outside) is also a deep-rooted philosophical difference, a contrast between Foucault’s basically Nietzschean foundation, which sees the individual will to power as blocked by the intermediary of the social institution, and Bourdieu’s basically Pascalian foundation, which sees the access to truth prevented by the social, but more through collective human blindness than any insidious effect of power. (As Bourdieu puts it in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, “The fantasy of the conspiracy, the idea that an evil will is responsible for everything that happens in the social world, haunts critical social thought.”)
Foucault’s evident frustration with the institution, as a philosopher, is exactly what Bourdieu, as a sociologist, considers its saving grace: for all the tyrannical effects of domination the institution can impose, it also offers the most socially efficacious way of establishing the force of ideas. Thus the institution, for Bourdieu, far from impeding the progress of philosophy, allows philosophy to have some degree of social force in the world: allows ideas to be more than ideas, and material conditions to be meaningfully effected by the course of human thought. For Bourdieu, the institution is less cruelly oppressive than it is mercilessly selective: the final social fact to be rued (and changed) is not that institutions discipline our bodies and minds, but that they consecrate only a few of those bodies and minds; not that they construct subjects out of certain individuals, but that they fail to make anything at all out of so many others.

There is a philosophical commitment implied here too; Bourdieu's position should not be mistaken as simply a refusal of the enchanted discourse of philosophy in the name of responsible and respectable social obligation (though it is that, in part). For Bourdieu (as for his protegé Luc Boltanski), the question of the institution is closely bound up with the larger philosophical question of justification, and justice. As he puts it in Pascalian Meditations, in a surprisingly affirmative reading of the bureaucratic state: “what truly is at stake in this game, if not the question of raison d’etre, the justification, not of human existence in its universality, but of a particular, singular existence … It is the question of the legitimacy of an existence, of an individual’s right to feel justified in existing as he or she exists … [T]he social world offers humans that which they most totally lack: a justification for existing” (237-239). And a few pages later: “Rites of institution give an enlarged and particularly visible image of the effect of the institution, an arbitrary being which has the power to rescue from arbitrariness, to confer the supreme raison d’etre, the one constituted by the affirmation that a contingent being, vulnerable to sickness, infirmity and death, is worthy of the dignity, transcendent and immortal, like the social order, that he is given” (245).

One final remark. Even if we decide that Bourdieu and Foucault, as pure theorists, are fundamentally incompatible — and I think that in the final analysis, in many ways, they probably are — even if we feel we must “take a side” between Foucault or Bourdieu, there is much to be gained by reading both of them, whichever side one chooses to be on. And it is probably best, it goes without saying, to avoid slavishly imitating either one. One thing that Bourdieu shared with Foucault was a desire for his work to be seen not as an imposing theoretical edifice but as a practical “tool-kit” for researchers and political activists alike. In one of his last texts, entitled “How to effectively establish the critical attitude” (2000), Bourdieu reflected on this aspect of Foucault’s practice: “Concepts, he said, came from struggles and should return to struggles” (385). In this spirit, then, I think we should keep struggling with both of these thinkers, and letting them struggle with one another, in our work. If, in other words, it is concepts constructed by Foucault and Bourdieu that we have to struggle against, it is also concepts constructed by them that we have with which to struggle. Literary criticism, like literature, is an institution at once ideal and material — and we need all the perspective on that institution we can get.

Institutions: History, Practice, Method

The Southland conference schedule is now online. If "you" are anywhere near UCLA on June 5th, you should come see "me" talk about Foucault and Bourdieu.

Panting After Panofsky - Pt. 9

The end of the essay is in sight! I was beginning to think I was going to be transcribing and paraphrasing Panofsky until well into 2009.

Everything in the study of art, then, is “directed towards understanding Kunstwollen,” the will or volition to make art — not simply will in the individual sense, but the collective will which is a historical product of all previous art history. “For this reason, not only should art theory have an interest in the continuing development of factual research (without which its concepts, to use Kantian terminology, would be empty), but empirical research on factual matters should have an interest in the prejudice-free development of art theory (without which its observations would be blind); and in the end both have to come together to work collaboratively, ideally within the same person.” (Here is confirmation of my two-hat theory.) In spite of the complicated conceptual torsions of Panofsky’s argument, the practical consequences of his contribution to this debate with Dorner are really quite simple: history needs theory, theory needs history, the ideal scholar of art will be adept in both.

He illustrates this thesis with reference to his predecessors Winckelmann and Rumohr, both of whom made use of a system of theoretical concepts as well as undertaking specific empirical research. They and others laid the groundwork for the discipline, and even those contemporary historians who eschew theory are working, whether they know it or not, with his forebears’ previously constructed concepts: “The art historian of today, who does not always need to develop his concepts himself, frequently avoids all such theoretical constructions; yet does this not mean that he can avoid their results consciously or unconsciously? [I feel as though the translation may have malfunctioned here; surely this is a rhetorical question, and should read “does this mean” for “does this not mean.”] And even today the approaches and conceptual constructions of the most empiricist art history are governed by art-theoretical thinking” (66).

This is why we need explicit methodology: to remind the empiricists that they’re already using somebody else’s concepts, constructed for a somewhat different use, that can always be reformulated and improved upon; and to remind the theorists that their proper role is to adjust their concepts to the needs of current empirical research. “It would be comfortable and certainly spare all methodological discussion from the start if art theory and art history really had nothing in common. Alas, in truth they rely on each other reciprocally,” Panofsky says, presenting the situation as a fait accompli that is only in need of being recognized and addressed. Furthermore, “this reciprocity is not a coincidence but the necessary result of the fact the work of art — like all productions of the creative mind — has the double characteristic of being determined by temporal and spatial circumstances on the one hand and on the other of forming a solution, conceptually timeless and absolute, of a priori constituted problems — of generating itself in the flow of historical making and yet reaching into the sphere of hyperhistorical validity” (67).

Once again, at the risk of deforming Panofsky’s thought a little, I’m going to use Bourdieu (as I understand him) to make better sense of this. Like the “field,” which PB claims has a twofold existence — subjectively in reality, and objectively in the minds of those who participate in it — for EP the work of art is both a historical object, determined in all sorts of ways by its position in time and space, and a trans- or hyperhistorical solution to a conceptual problem. This is a more logically rigorous version of the familiar expression that a work of art is “timeless”: in one sense it isn’t, and in another it certainly is; Panofsky’s claim is that the solution to the fundamental problems, qua solution, would still be satisfying even if it were possible to experience it completely de-worlded, outside of all historical space and time. But we never do see it this way, and even the most painstaking, philosophically impeccable art history or criticism won’t get us all the way to seeing a work as pure solution. We’ll always see it with the residue of history on it, the practical, historical, time- and space-determined marks of its creation.

Good art history can help, though, to convince us that a particular, specific, historically determined work is a solution to a fundamental artistic problem, even if we can’t completely see it that way. It has to make a claim that the work of art really has a dual existence. (In order to resist the transcendental, quasi-supernatural interpretation of these remarks, I’m going to read this as EP saying that art history can convince us that people — many people: the artist and the work’s original audience, but also its subsequent audiences and, potentially, us today — have given it this existence in their minds.) “Therefore an artistic phenomenon, if its to be fully understood in its uniqueness, makes a twofold claim,” Panofsky states: “on the one hand to be understood in its determination, that is, to be put within the historical context of cause and effect; and on the other hand to be understood in its absolutism, that is, to be lifted out of the historical context of cause and effect and, beyond all historical relativity, to be understood as a time- and spaceless solution of time- and spaceless problems.” Art history will then be about objectifying objects in such a way that they are not idealized (i.e., we realize that they are historical products; empirical research) while also convincing us of their subjective existence and value. A tricky business indeed, as Erwin himself admits. “In this lies the peculiar problem of all research in the humanities but also its peculiar appeal; ‘two weaknesses,’ Leonardo once said in relation to the architectural arch, ‘together form a strength’” (67).
I’m going to finish (except for that excursus on Dorner!) as Panofsky does, with three theses, which at this point are familiar enough not to need comment:

1. Art theory develops a system of fundamental concepts and, subordinately to these, a system of specialist concepts whose task is to formulate artistic problems, problems that let themselves fall into fundamental and individual problems and that can be deduced wholly from one unique ur-problem.

2. Art history as a pure science of things describes the sensible qualities of works of art by means of suggestive and demonstrative concepts and establishes the style in its external sense as an aggregate of stylistic criteria by means of interpretive/characterizing concepts. This purely morphological and stylistic operation has, consciously or subconsciously, to navigate according to those artistic problems that only art theory and not art history itself is capable of understanding and providing the concepts for.

3. Art history as a discipline of interpretation aiming to understand Kunstwollen is the result of a deep interconnection of art theory with purely empirical art history and must be constructed itself from the results of both. It demonstrates the relations between the sensible qualities of artworks and the artistic problems that are assumed by art history as a pure science of things, doing so explicitly and systematically and thus focusing no longer on a historical reality but on the relation between the formulation of a problem and its solution, which finds its expression in a historical reality.

In the relation of certain complexes of manifestation to certain fundamental and individual artistic problems, art history as a discipline of interpretation formulates certain principles of design. When it relates the entirety of complexes of manifestation to the artistic ur-problem, that is, to one underlying stylistic principle that bridges all the individual principles of design, then art history grasps Kunstwollen.

That pretty much covers it.

Panting After Panofsky - Pt. 7

(I’ve already run through all the pictures of Panofsky Sr. to be found on the internet apparently, so here’s one of his son Wolfgang, who is a renowned physicist in his own right.)

So Panofsky holds that empirical researchers use two orders of concepts — sensible and suggestive/demonstrative — in their practice, but that these exist on a different layer than the fundamental theoretical concepts he himself formulates:

To repeat, one has to differentiate between two layers within the standard art-historical concepts: a superficial layer of solely suggestive or demonstrative concepts, which only define and describe the sensible qualities of artworks, and a deeper layer of concepts that actually characterize style, which interpret those sensible qualities along the lines of stylistic criteria in that they interpret certain complexes of sensible qualities as the manifestation of principles of design and those principles of design as the differentiation of a uniform stylistic principle. (60)

Both of these kinds of concepts, remember ("sensible" and "suggestive/demonstrative/[first-order] stylistic") are still pragmatically generated art-historical concepts, and not properly theoretical concepts of the kind that Panofsky wants to propose and perfect.

But what gives this guy Panofsky, and art theorists more generally, the right to impose their more "fundamental" concepts on researchers? “Now, it is worth asking what grants art history the right to operate interpretatively in this way, as any interpretation, if it is not simply capricious, demands the existence of solid and legitimized standards of definition to which objects of interpretation can be related” (60-61). (Note Panofsky’s neo-Kantian concern with “right,” with justification, grounding and legitimation — the kind of questions Habermas revives in the 60s and 70s.) “The answer, which should perhaps now be obvious, is the imperative of those artistic problems formulated in the fundamental concepts of art theory. Those fundamental problems [i.e. haptic vs. optic etc.] represent the standards of legitimation to which the sensible qualities of artworks can be related. These problems help observation navigate while collating the sensible qualities within certain complexes of manifestation and interpret them according to stylistic criteria. Only by being oriented towards them do we have the ability to conduct successfully this enterprise of collating and interpreting” (61)

So the point of fundamental theoretical concepts is to “orient” empirical research: this is what differentiates Panofsky’s position from that of scientific positivism, which would be mere, pure data collection, without the necessary second step of “collating and interpreting.” This helps us arrive at a practical definition of what the critic/theorist actually does, in relation to what the historian/researcher does: she does “stylistic characterization,” as opposed to a “sensible classification.” (By the way, I don’t think Panofsky thinks these necessarily have to be different people, or that one can’t move from gathering and classifying data to interpreting and characterizing it; but he does think you can only wear one hat at a time.)

This act of “characterization” is pretty close to what Kant called “judgment” (?). It means not just description of the artwork, however exhaustive, but an assessment of whether it is satisfying, which Panofsky reformulates as a question about whether it solves fundamental problems:

The stylistic characterization “within this work of art lies one of the fundamental artistic problems — or even all the fundamental artistic problems — which have been solved in this or that sense.” We only get to this point after first recording a complex of manifestations (for example, the extremely “textural” mode of surface characterization or the extremely unifying mode of color design), with the help of demonstrative concepts (doughiness or the addition of grey in all local colors) and then by interpreting this “texturality” or unity through the prism of the fundamental problems. Only by this process can the observation of sensible qualities … reach the sphere of problems that actually characterizes style and whose specific task is to relate the sensible qualities of works of art to artistic problems. (61)

For Panofsky, understanding of art, when it’s done correctly, is a process: the theorist/critic looks at what the historian/researcher has gathered, and at what she has already observed about it (with those pragmatic “suggestive or demonstrative concepts” that emerge out of the research experience), and goes on to relate it to the fundamental problems, to what is agreed to already exist within the sphere of art history. And this entails saying how this particular work has “solved” one or all of the fundamental artistic problems. (There may be a direct line of descent from this neo-Kantian definition of the critic to the self-understanding of a Clement Greenberg, or after him a Michael Fried.)

This brings us back to the distinction suggested earlier between characterization and classification: “Only from this perspective is it clear why the double precondition of stylistic characterization — that in certain sensibly perceivable complexes of manifestation an artistic principle of design become apparent and that the principles of design themselves to be governed by a single underlying stylistic principle — actually exists in its own right. Only if we can take these complexes of manifestation as solutions to artistic problems can we understand them as the manifestations of principles of design, that is, as testimonies for a certain position on fundamental and individual artistic problems. Only if we can detect within these fundamental and individual problems the shaping of a single ur-problem can we grasp a single stylistic principle in operation within and above all principles of design, that is, a certain position on these ur-problems” (61-62) (I’ll leave it for now, but I’m uncomfortable with this talk of “ur-problems.” For one thing, EP makes a weird move, within a single sentence, from “a single ur-problem” to plural “ur-problems” — is this a translation glitch? Or an inconsistency within Panofsky’s system? Does he really think it’s productive to think of all artworks as solving a “single ur-problem”? If so, what is it? For modernism, maybe it’s autonomy; this seems to be what Bourdieu thinks.)

But, yet again stipulating Panofsky’s terms:

only from this perspective is it clear why we have the right to deduce stylistic differences from the differences of sensible qualities and a stylistic identity or relation from a correspondence or similarity of sensible qualities. We can do this because (and on the condition that) the difference of sensible qualities provides testimony for differing positions on one and the same artistic problem (to which a unified artistic subject could only respond in the form of one position); we are allowed to do this because (and on the condition that) the correspondence or similarity of the sensible qualities provides testimony for an identical or related position on one and the same artistic problem (to which differing or, rather, different artistic subjects could only respond with different positions). (62)

Gaaah. This is an insanely dense and defensive sentence (I mistyped it about four times just now, getting lost in the parallel clauses). So, it seems that what Panofsky thinks is that the role of art theory is to mark individual artworks (and maybe, on another level, artists?) as positions within a larger space of art as a whole. (I may be overreading this passage based on a false transfer from some of Bourdieu’s writings, but just run with me here.) A description of an artwork’s “position” will need to take into account historical facts about it (when it was made, why it was made, the biographical details of its maker if any are known), but also, more importantly, its position within the space of art history, that is of all other artworks. And this latter space can only be known if we orient ourselves according to fundamental theoretical concepts. If we want to have a hope of understanding artworks with reference to a universal, then something like Panofsky’s system will allow us to get from a thick empirical description (a classification, and even a preliminary characterization) of an individual object to the whole set of artworks ever produced in any culture. And though Panofsky opposes the hastier kinds of “short circuit” thinking about art, his scheme does allow us to get from specifics to the general (Art) without tracing everything with endless cultural-historical research.

But Panofsky doesn’t just make this as a suggestion for art historical research, he makes it as a claim about art and style: “every stylistic characterization (no matter whether it wants to or not, no matter whether it knows it or not) necessarily relates — both in choice and organization of its observations and above all in its creation of a conceptual system — to the contents of that sphere of problems that I tried to outline in the first part of this essay. A stylistic characterization that denies this relationship to the fundamental problems either denies it incorrectly or is incorrectly termed a stylistic characterization” (62). (Hmm. Here he makes the twentieth-century theoretical move par excellence — “no matter whether it wants to or not, no matter whether it knows it or not” — taken over from Marx, Freud and Nietzsche by basically everybody who wants to make a categorical statement without arguing for it. I am skeptical about this descriptive, as opposed to prescriptive, aspect of Panofsky’s argument, but this is neither the time nor the place (well, I guess it actually is the place) to talk about that.)

But then he goes back to the methodological level: “Yet the art historian qua art historian cannot understand these problems and their interdependencies. He who solely deals with empirical manifestations is in the opposite situation from the art theoretician, who aims to develop fundamental art-theoretical concepts and to differentiate art-theoretical specialist concepts. The art historian … can define the empirical manifestation but not the solution of the artistic problems, while the art theoretician only supplies the solutions of artistic problems without being himself able to understand their empirical manifestations in actuality” (62). So the historian and the theoretician need each other: that’s the take-away from Panofsky’s essay (this section of it anyway; no, he’s still not finished). With a rhetorical emphasis on the historian needing the theoretician, to be sure (this is against Dorner, presumably):

Empirical manifestations, with which art-historical study in its strict sense is concerned, do not show the fundamental problems at all; the problems are not apparent within the phenomena but are required behind the phenomena and therefore are only understandable by a form of investigation that is not art history but art theory. It is only the nonsensible conceptual speculation of art theory that can establish the goals by which the work of empirical researchers must navigate its every step. Only art theory can understand those artistic problems that are assumed in art-historical practice and can provide those artistic problems that are assumed in art-historical practice and can provide the fundamental and specialist concepts for this enterprise. (63)

So theory is the concept factory. Researchers mine the ore of art, give it to the theorists to make tools out of, and then the theorists give it back to the researchers to use to find more art with.

Panting After Panofsky - Pt. 6

Panofsky opens his essay's second section (B) with a few unnumbered paragraphs in which he sums up what he’s done so far and defines what he wants to go on to do: “I have clarified the possibility for the development of a conceptual system of a science of art … It remains to examine whether this development is necessary.” We move from the descriptive to the prescriptive, then, asking ourselves what we actually want from this system of concepts, and even whether we want it at all. “One might ask if the construction and design of those art-theoretical concepts were not a futile game of logic, a useless mental exercise completely without meaning for the historical study of real and existing artifacts.” One might! “My response is no” (56).

No! OK, then: Panofsky proposes that empirical research and theoretical system-making be put in, you guessed it, a dialectic: “The construction of an art-theoretical system of concepts and the empirical conduct of historical research are both essential because they study the [art] object from two completely different perspectives, but in each case from only one perspective. Together, they partake of a peculiar and unbreakable reciprocal relationship.” Art theory and art history each see the same objects, but from different angles: by putting them together we get a new, composite, more complete image, which brings us closer to understanding. (This theorization of the dialectic in visual terms seems to anticipate Slavoj Žižek's recent-ish stuff on parallax. Or quite possibly there’s a longer continuity within Hegelian thought that I’m not aware of.) “The ultimate task of a science of art, namely, the determination of Kunstwollen, can only be achieved in the interaction of the historical and theoretical modes of observation” (56). Here Panofsky reintroduces Kunstwollen, or artistic volition, as what we really want to understand, to get at, by looking at works of art; this is just assumed as given; his contention is that it’s by this double perspective that we can do it.

Here begins section B1 proper. So Panofsky has been arguing the necessity for a double perspective — a version of dialectic — in the methodology of the science of art, but he goes on to say that even the normal, supposedly strictly empirical half of this proposed dialectic is already doing something double. “Even the kind of art history that is not open to theory has found itself with a double task,” he says. “As art history, first it classifies the monuments historically, that is, temporally as well as spatially, and puts them in relation with each other; second, its role is to characterize the style of the monuments. The achievement of the second task (which has necessarily to take place before the accomplishment of the first because the historical place of a monument can only be assessed when its artistic character is known) takes place with the help of concepts that characterize in a more or less general way the stylistic qualities of the artworks studied.” Characterization precedes classification; we need to know what an object is like, what properties it has, in a broad sense before we can class it, put it into a category. [ Classification versus characterization: is this possibly somehow important for the ACLA paper? ] Panofsky’s intention, in pointing out this obvious fact, is that even the most anti-theoretical, purely historical text (his example is Georg Dehio’s History of German Art) uses some concepts, and often preconstructed, commonsensical ones drawn directly from “the contemporary culture” and ordinary language (e.g., pictorial and plastic, depth and surface, calm and moved). “Even historical empiricism does not deny that the use of such style-denoting concepts in art-historical work is not only common but necessary; it only avoids interrogating them about their origin and legitimacy” (57). This is a version of the argument often made in defense of literary theory, that whenever we read or interpret we’re doing so according to the lights of some kind of theory; Theory Per Se is just a way of making these operative concepts more explicit.

The next three so pages (and the rest of this blog post) will be devoted to “two sets of objections [that] may be made” to this defense of theory as something always already at work in historical criticism. The first (B1.1a) is that “concepts that can characterize the style of an artwork denote something completely different from its sensible qualities.” So what is the relevant difference here between “stylistic” and “sensible”? “The sensible qualities that we may be detect in a work of art may be nothing but pure qualities of visual perception — qualities that we habitually … divide into [e.g.] color and noncolor.” In other words, is it really using a philosophical concept if we say, simply, that painting is red; isn’t it just a perception? Panofsky’s answer to this is that, once you move from seeing red to using the word “red,” you’ve entered the realm of concepts; furthermore, you’ve had to make a choice about conceptual usage. “To capture these qualities conceptually, the art historian has two options to choose from, which are close to each other in that they are each only an indirect form of labelling” (57). (Parenthetically, we’re veering awfully close to Philosophical Investigations territory here; I’m beginning to wonder if Wittgenstein read Panofsky.)

“On the one hand, one can imply the sensible qualities of the work of art in question by pointing back to other sensible perceptions that are taken as known (for example, when describing skin as leathery or doughy, a fold as in the shape of an eye, drapery as rustling, a color as mouse-coloured or cadmium yellow).” Let’s call this the appeal to common sense. Rhetorically, it works like this/has this structure: we say we all know what color a mouse is; this object is that color. “On the other hand, one can label the sensible qualities of the work of art in question by attempting to describe the feelings stimulated by it (for example, when we talk of an emotionally rousing play of lines, or solemn or cheerful color design)” (57-58). Let’s call this the appeal to impressionism. Rhetorically, it works like this: we say imagine a cylinder that is open on one end, and a fan of dotted lines is extending out of it. The second requires a little more mental work, but both operate relationally, by attaching themselves to some kind of mental image we’ve already got in our heads, or are capable of producing.

“The limits of both practices” — of the appeal to common sense and the appeal to impressionism — “are clear,” Panofsky says. “Labelling the sensible qualities of a work of art can never be exact or sufficiently determined because a general statement — general because it is linguistic-conceptual — can never do justice to individual, purely qualitative content. The most lively and sweeping account of a set of lines or a complex colors is essentially only a hint towards a factual situation and never has the ability to cover it completely” (58). (This modest, pragmatic application of Zeno’s paradox to the sphere of the visual — we can describe more and more, and better and better, of the artwork but we will never quite get it all — can be taken too far too fast and we end up with a certain vulgar version of deconstruction: language is totally inadequate to express the reality of artworks, or indeed of anything else.)

To say this much is just to say that even a purely sensible description can never be a complete sensible description: any transfer to the sphere of concepts will entail some loss. But even if this weren’t the case, a complete description of an object’s sensible properties still wouldn’t give us an account of its stylistic properties. “Methodologically it is important to stress that classification of sensible qualities is by no means identical with classification of stylistic criteria. Taken on its own, a classification that only captures the sensible qualities of the artwork has no right whatever to draw any fundamental difference between those lines that were produced by the artist’s hand and those lines that appear because of cracks in the varnish; and even if this right were granted, that is, even if such classification could extract qualities of artistic importance from the wealth of purely sensible data, the observation of those qualities does not lead to the understanding of stylistic criteria” (58).

Style, for Panofsky, is thus linked to intentionality. An anti-theoretical, empiricist critic, by their own logic, cannot say anything about whether an artist meant to do something, because that requires concepts beyond the purely sensible and descriptive. Critical understanding of style/intention/Kunstwollen requires theory. (Taken in the right way, this is a pretty devastating reply to the Wimsatt/Beardsley arm of the New Criticism, and thus a more elaborate version of this.) What can theory help us to understand, exactly? It can establish intentionality, or perhaps something related to it, Kunstwollen: “we would need to establish that in specific, internally connected sequences of sensible qualities (let us call these sequences complexes of manifestation) specific artistic principles of design are fulfilled, and second we must be clear that within these principles of design we can find a unity without contradiction, without which we could not talk about style at all” (58-59). (This confident invocation of “unity without contradiction” again raises deconstructionist red flags, as well as [unhelpfully?] anticipating Althusser’s jargon — this is something else to bracket in the name of Playing Along With Panofsky.)

So we need to talk about style, and to do that we need constructed concepts: “In analyzing the style of an artistic manifestation, an art history that relied solely on concepts that only describe the sensible qualities of artworks (which we perhaps should be allowed to call suggestive or demonstrative concepts) would be futile from the start. Art history would then treat works of art no differently from natural objects; that is, by collating hundreds and thousands of individual observations indiscriminately and disjointedly, it would in the end only offer a more or less poetic paraphrase of sensible experience or some kind of personal description of the artwork, but never a characterization of artistic style” (59). From this, if from nothing else, it should be clear that Panofsky, despite all his talk of science and respect for the methods of empiricism, is not a positivist: he ABSOLUTELY INSISTS on interpretive theory in addition to descriptive criticism or history, and in fact goes so far as to say that we can have no concept of artistic style at all without it. (And, à propos of ACLA, note that Panofsky thinks we are able to recognize and describe something as a “manifestation” prior to our understanding of it as a specific expression of Kunstwollen; that is, we don’t just need to “read” the object, we also have to understand why it appeared when it did.)

So far this is all exclusively about “sensible” description, writing which doesn’t even attempt to give an account of style. But of course some anti-theoretical art history does try to talk about style. “Luckily [I guess this is Panofsky’s idea of a joke], besides such demonstrative concepts … art history commands other concepts, which are capable of describing stylistic criteria but in doing so reach beyond the sensible qualities of art: pictorial and plastic, depth and surface, bodily and spatial, style of being and style of becoming, coloristic and polychrome” (59). These terms, useful as they are, are still, from Panofsky’s point of view, common sense concepts, refined beyond the apparently nonconceptual state of concepts like “red” and “leathery” and “mouse-colored,” but still not rigorously worked out: they’ve emerged as they were needed in the course of empirical research, of everyday conversation, or from the culture. (Of course for a full-on pragmatist, like John Dewey or Richard Rorty, such concepts are all the concepts there really are. But staying with Panofsky.)

“I hardly need note that such concepts have a fundamentally different meaning than those that describe the sensible qualities of artworks. The sensible aspects of the artistic rendition of a lion or a mountain landscape have no more pictorial, dimensional, spatial, and coloristic qualities than the lion or the mountain landscape themselves” (Note the lion: another Wittgenstein image.) Sensing, for Panofsky, is naive seeing: we look at a picture of a lion and just see the lion, not a picture of a lion.
“When we use such concepts” as “pictorial” and “plastic,” on the other hand, “we no longer define or describe sensible qualities; we interpret them. Interpretation organizes individual, in itself purely qualitative and disjointed, perceptual content into an internally connected complex and underpins it with a function in the sense of its pictorialism, depth, and so forth. Only by looking at such complexes as expressions of artistic principles of design, which do not appear together by sheer chance* but are united in a uniform and dominating stylistic principle, can we talk about them as stylistic criteria” (59). (Once again this puts me in mind of Alexander Nehamas, and his ideas about interpretation, which he applies not only to art and literature but, following Nietzsche, to all of life.) (* “Sheer chance”: another place where a stray breeze from the past century or so of avant-garde art and theory could bring this whole magnificent structure down. Stay with Panofsky, stay with Panofsky.)

So style, or the manifestation of Kunstwollen in a particular object by a particular artist, can only be grasped through interpretation, or the discovery of a uniform and dominating stylistic principle. This is sounding awfully monolithic and transcendental, but Panofsky saves it with what I think is a pretty brilliant example:“How else, to take an example, could we find a set of concepts to define the collaboration of two different artists on one and the same work of art (which is not difficult to discern for the expert)? Without the assumption of unified stylistic principles, the art historian would have to take the differences resulting from the conflation of two sensible qualities … as something quite natural and harmless no less so than that the drapery of one figure is yellow but of another red. The difference between two sensible qualities can only be seen as a stylistic difference once we accept this double precondition that a given complex of visual expressions reveals a certain principle of design and that such principles of design are united in an unopposed unity” (60).

That is, if the style is just in the object itself, and can be read without reference to the artists who made it, then what do we do when we’re confronted with an object made by more than one artist, and that we can tell (if we’re trained art historians, at least) was made by more than two artists? Is this observation just inadmissible in a discussion of the object’s real properties? No, Panofsky says; if we’re really understanding the object, the way a good theoretically oriented art historian would, then we can take it apart and see how the two separate manifestations of Kunstwollen interact with each other. We can see more than just what’s in the object, and also more than either of the individual artists knew or intended: we can see how their two wills combined to produce a single artwork.

“What applies to the understanding of stylistic differences naturally applies to the understanding of stylistic correspondences; the art historian who singles out certain stylistically identical or related items from a given group of artworks and distributes them into stylistically connected subgroups” (this would be classification) can only do this “on the basis of a correspondence or similarity of principles of design.” (This is why, to hop briefly into Bourdieuland, “classification classifies the classifier.”) Without this conceptual mastery and self-reflexivity, based on a knowledge of the history of art and thus a grasp of Kunstwollen, we’ve basically just got a bricoleur putting like with like, sticking things together regardless of whether they really belong together or not. “The researcher who would underpin his groupings with the sensible qualities of works of art in themselves — rather than as indications of certain principles that are presumed to be behind them — could never be certain that he has put together works which are really stylistically identical or stylistically related, and it could easily happen that his groups … would include items that [only] correspond in size, material, color, or other sensible aspects” (60). Thus empiricism, left unchecked by theoretical understanding, opens the door to the totally arbitrary, which for Panofsky, no Saussurean avant la lettre, is emphatically not a state of affairs to be welcomed. (And, ironically, one might say, we see here how positivism gives birth to the postmodern.)

Panting After Panofsky - Pt. 3

In section A3 Panofsky stops making little tables and takes up his purported subject, the proper relationship between art history and art theory. “It should by now be clear,” he says, “how incorrect is the general opinion that a fundamental conceptual system for a science of art should aim to define the stylistic qualities of a work of art or of an artistic period by a single formula.” Without knowing precisely what he’s reacting to, I know the kind of theoretical-historical criticism he’s talking about: work that would deduce what’s going on in a work of art from what we think we know about the era (this work was made/written then, so clearly it must be dealing with that). Against this historical reductionism, Panofsky argues for a particular kind of formalism, guided by an absolute theory of form but sensitive to empirical differences on the ground. We can’t sum Kunstwollen up in one formula, he warns: the will to make good art is not the will to surmount one obstacle, but to solve a whole range of problems currently constituted as important. Theory can help us understand these problems, but not by specifying what they are a priori: “What a terminology that merits the label of a fundamental system of concepts aims to shape into a formula is not the issue of how an artistic problem is solved but rather in what form such problems arise” (49). That last part is a little obscure, but that orienting kind of knowledge — not knowing the problems but the form of the problems — is what Panofsky thinks art theory can contribute to the study of art.

Crucial here, then, is the distinction between the theoretical concepts Panofsky has given us so far and the details that actual close observation of artworks reveal. We can’t start with the first and apply them directly to the second. “Understood aright, the fundamental concepts are not labels to be stuck onto concrete objects” — i.e., this object is dealing with optic vs. haptic, this one with fusing vs. splitting — “their necessarily antithetical qualities denote not stylistic differences apparent within the world of appearance between two phenomena that can be observed but a polarity between two principles that exists beyond the world of appearance and that can be located by means of theory.”

When EP says that the concepts are “necessarily antithetical,” I believe he is saying that, in any object, we experience some property (color, say) empirically as just one thing: that canvas is that exact shade of red. But conceptually, it is possible to think of it as somewhere on a spectrum, between two poles of possible shades of red. (And “color” is already too specific an example, not as fundamental as haptic vs. optic, depth vs. surface, etc. But it’s easier to understand this way.) So in “the world of appearance,” of empirical observation, we are seeing just one point on a line (Bourdieu, following Leibniz, would say a “space of possibles”). In order to see it this way, though, we need to conceptually orient ourselves by using theory.

Why can’t we just apply the fundamental concepts directly to the objects? “Because they are necessarily formulated antithetically, these fundamental concepts cannot account for the wealth of artistic reality — which is not to be reduced to dualisms — and thus cannot be accused of a failure to do so. All the concepts discussed above — optical and haptic values, depth and surface values, the values of fusing and splitting — refer not to contrasts actually encountered within artistic reality but to contrasts out of which artistic reality generates a conciliation of some kind” (49)

So Panofsky is careful to separate our “encounter” of “artistic reality” from the conceptual system he’s outlined. We will not be able to look at an artwork and just “do the math” — calculate how far it’s haptic in contrast to optic, or fused as opposed to split — to get a sense of its quality or value. The only thing we know for sure about the actual artwork is that it will be “a conciliation of some kind” (???) and this will be “generated” out of the contrast between the fundamental concepts. The concepts themselves are purely ontological: “a purely haptic value would only come into being in an abstract geometric figure, a purely optical value only in an amorphous manifestation of light; an absolute surface is in concreto as impossible as an absolute depth; a pure fusing would be spaceless time; a pure splitting would be timeless space” (49). (“Pure” in Panofsky is a marker for “stay out, empiricists.”)

On the next page Panofsky reasserts the polarity thing: “it is certain that art-historical characterizations refer only to works of art themselves and thus operate not in contrast but on a flexible scale. The fundamental system of concepts for a science of art defines the poles of a polarity that is constituted a priori and that cannot be grasped in a manifest form” (50). [Here’s a possible opening for the ACLA paper. “Manifest” is here distinguished from “theoretical”: you can “manifest” your current position, where you are, on a flexible scale; but this mustn’t be confused with the purely conceptual theoretical polarity.] Thus, “normal art-historical characterizations describe a conciliation of these polarities, which is executed a posteriori and for which there are not two but an indefinite number of solutions” (50). I still don’t think I get the “conciliation” thing.

From here Panofsky goes on to introduce another order of concepts, closer to those in use in the art historical terminology of his day: these include “pictorial,” “plastic” and “stereometrical-crystalline.” “Now,” he says, “if [the] concepts of absolute contrast (such as haptic, optical, and so forth) only generate but do not solve fundamental artistic problems, then those concepts such as pictorial, plastic, and so forth, which are only concerned with the solution rather than the generation of fundamental problems, will produce a scheme of gradual difference rather than a set of absolute contrasts” (50). A couple of things to nail down here: the distinction between “generation” and “solution”; and the distinction between “absolute contrast” and “gradual difference.” I don’t quite know what to do with the former right now, but the latter really interests me. For Panofsky, the empirical (or the art-historical) is the realm of “gradual difference”: when we’re looking at a particular artwork from a particular time, we need to specify the contours of the phenomenon we’re talking about every time. “The concepts pictorial, plastic, and stereometrical-crystalline by no means describe absolute contrasts; rather they describe points on a scale, whose freezing point is every time defined by the concept plastic” (50) [freezing point?].

This “scale” metaphor is useful, and Panofsky runs with it: “That is, if the theoretical end points of the scale, which cannot be touched by any reality, are located as it were in the indefinite, but are also ultimately defined by the contrast of haptic and optical values, then its historical end points are located in the definite and therefore, depending on the specifications of the corpus of objects under scrutiny, must change their location” (50). The same formal scale has, as it were, a double existence: in theory — where the end points are stable, but invisible — and in history — where the end points (i.e. the extremes) are in principle visible, but always changing. “In art-historical practice, depending on the reference system applied, the same phenomena can be described with different terms and different phenomena with the same expressions” (50-51). Meaning: we can adjust the scale all we want in dealing with particular historical examples in order to account for difference, but the fundamental concepts will remain the same, and cannot be challenged. We can see why EP likes this so much, because it preserves his conceptual system against any possible argument: “the variability of the individual points on the scale is not proof against the constancy of the poles of the scale and only shows that concepts of characterization are not fundamental concepts and that fundamental concepts are not concepts for characterization” (51); i.e., the theory, qua theory, is unfalsifiable.

[There’s a little thing on color at the end here, which I may come back to. But I’ll stop for now, and tomorrow probably go on to A4.]

Panting After Panofsky - Part 1

The new issue of Critical Inquiry (or at least the newest one I’ve got: Vol. 35 No. 1 Autumn 2008) includes the first English translation of a 1925 article by the German art historian Erwin Panofsky with the following catchy title: “On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts for the Science of Art.” It is a doozy. Even the valiant translators, Katharina Lorenz and Jas’ Elsner (who endearingly admit to “brain ache” in their introduction), don’t really make the claim that it’s a “good” piece of writing, even by the low rhetorical standards of German philosophical discourse. But it is also totally fascinating, and not just as a historical document (though there is that: Panofsky was hugely influential in the field of art history, and more generally in American academic and intellectual circles in the 40s and 50s; I’m learning some interesting tidbits from my Rockefeller research about his role alongside Einstein and Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton). The best description of Panofsky might be given in a 1934 telegram of rec. from Bernard Berenson which Lorenz and Elsner use as their epigraph: “LEARNED INDUSTRIOUS AMBITIOUS USES TALMUDIC DIALECTIC TO PROVE THAT IN EVERY FIELD HE ALONE IS MASTER.” That about sums it up. If you think the 60s was the heyday of High Theory, you may want to turn your attention to Germany in the 20s.

I’m interested in Panofsky, in part, because he was very important to Bourdieu, who translated his 1951 book Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism into French and contributed a “postface” to it that I’ve yet to look at. Reading “On the Relationship…”, I can see the stylistic debt to Panofsky in early-mid-period Bourdieu works like Reproduction (1970), which has some of the same algebraic density of Panofsky’s text. (As the translators put it, EP “seems to be striving for a language and syntax that give his thoughts the shape of mathematical formulae … as if even his language were designed to stress the dependencies between form and content.”) (One interesting thing about Bourdieu is that he tried out a variety of prose styles in the first half of his career, writing in quite different Durkheimian, Sartrean, Lévi-Straussian, and Althusserian idioms by turns before finally discovering his own “voice,” rather late in the game, by translating and then imitating Panofsky. He then refined this super-dense, German Kantian style until it was transformed into something much more classically French, almost Proustian. (I became sensitized to this progression by Jeffrey Alexander’s lengthy critique of Bourdieu in Fin-de-Siècle Social Theory, which attempts to use it against him in order to accuse him of inconsistency; but it seems to me just an interesting case of intellectual development.) But this is all a subject for some other time.) It’s on the theoretical level, though, that Panofsky had the most influence on Bourdieu, or one might even say the metatheoretical level, since what both insist on is an explicitly theorized relation between theory and practice: for Panofsky, art history; for Bourdieu, empirical sociological research.

Enough preamble: what I want to do here is basically just work through Panofsky’s essay, quoting it, paraphrasing it, and ultimately trying to decide if it can help me with my ACLA talk. In particular I want to track his use of the term “manifestation,” and see if I can credibly get from there to Puchner’s claims about “manifestos.” What I’m not going to do is criticize any of the essay’s premises or moves (which, given Panofsky’s intense attachment to binarism, would be super-easy to do with vulgar deconstruction), just try to understand them on their own terms; nor am I hereafter going to note any similarities to Bourdieu, though they are legion. I may do this in a few parts, because it’s a really really dense essay and I have other stuff to do. But here goes.

Panofsky begins by invoking an earlier article of his, “Der Begriff des Kunstwollens” (“The Concept of Artistic Volition”), in which he defined the concept of “Kunstwollen” (artistic will or volition), taken up from art historian Alois Riegl. “Kunstwollen” is “the sum or unity of creative powers manifested in any given artistic phenomenon.” In that old article, Panofsky says, he claimed that Kunstwollen “can be interpreted neither psychologistically as the will of the artist (or the epoch and so on) nor as psychological ‘reality’ but as a metempirical [read: non-empirical] subject — an immanent sense within an artistic phenomenon” (43-44). The cash value of this is that Kunstwollen is not discoverable through empirical research alone, nor by connecting the empirical object to its immediate surroundings or historical context (what Panofsky later in the essay calls the “short circuit” approach). How it is discoverable isn’t yet clear, but this is what Panofsky wants to go on to show.

The impetus for this piece is a 1922 attack on Panofsky’s position by rival art historian Alexander Dorner. He really only engages Dorner at the end, though, in a three-page “Excursus on Dorner” after the main body of the essay; most of the article is just a fuller restatement of his theory, because Dorner’s objections are “partly … based on a fundamental misunderstanding of my views, partly … they depend on a mistaken grasp of the relationship between the a priori and a posteriori understanding.” So, according to Panofsky he’s only restating — though probably also refining — the ideas he’s already put forward in “The Concept of Artistic Volition.”

In Section A (there are a lot of divisions and subdivisions), Panofsky posits a few “pairs of concepts” which make up the “fundamental system of concepts for art theory” of the title. All of these pairs, or “problems” — which, he will go on to tell us, include optic/haptic, depth/surface, fusing/splitting, and time/space; more on these later — are “part of” (more elaborated versions of?) “a single major ur-problem”:

When we examine works of art, we talk of artistic problems for which the work of art itself offers solutions. Problems of this kind … always present themselves in the form of opposites, while works of art create a conciliation between such binary polarities … Now all these artistic problems are implicitly part of a single major ur-problem, which in itself has the shape of an antithesis … and — insofar as it is the necessary result of the conditions of artistic creation — is an a priori issue. The ur-problem is perhaps best described with the words volume and form. (45)

So, for Panofsky, volume vs. form is the fundamental problem of art. Let’s let him elaborate on that:

Art, however one chooses to define it and from whatever vantage point one takes, operates through an organization of sensibility. The products of art both preserve a genuine volume of sensible perception and yet also subject it to organization; in this respect they curtail that volume. To put it another way, in any work of art there must be a conciliation of some kind between volume and form as the two poles of a fundamental antithesis. (45-46)

Purely conceptually, this is all art is: you have some physical stuff (“a genuine volume of sensible perception”) which must be presented, yet somehow also limited, “curtailed”: Panofsky calls this, intending I’m pretty sure absolutely no psychological or moral connotations, “an organization of sensibility.” This much should be uncontroversial, and also by itself not very interesting.

But the next move kind of does my head in:

Volume and form … can and must form a synthesis because the purely ontological antithesis of form and volume has a correlation to (or, to be more precise, is at its core identical with) the methodological antithesis between time and space; the principle of volume corresponds to the nature of space and the principle of form to the nature of time. If the antithesis between form and volume is the a priori precondition for the existence of artistic problems, then the interaction between time and space is the a priori condition for their potential solution.

OK, so: the antithesis (which Panofsky calls “ontological,” meaning “relating to our understanding of being”) between volume and form — which is at the core of all Art — is correlated to, or analogous with, or actually really the same thing as* the “methodological antithesis between time and space.” (* I’m not going to pause to work out which of these options Panofsky really means, or is better off arguing about, or whether he can really mean all of them, though it seems to me that would be valuable and important to do.) “The methodological antithesis between time and space”: that would be, I take it, the fact that we can comprehend the entirety of the sensible volume of an artwork all at once (except where we can’t, as in something huge like the Spiral Jetty or, um, a work of literature), that is we can see everything about it on the level of “space”; but on the level of “time” we think about it, we process it, we understand it. (Also, it exists in time — in history — which is what I’m ultimately interested in, but Panofsky’s not, right here.) Thus “the principle of volume corresponds to the nature of space” — we can behold all the volume, all the being, all at once — and “the principle of form to the nature of time” — we need time to think about the form, why it is the way it is, how it could be different. It should be clear already that when Panofsky invokes “time” as being “methodological” he’s thinking about criticism, or art history, which is why he ultimately also associates it with the artwork’s “solution.” Right, so, Panofsky lines up volume — space — problem, form — time — solution. This is a distinction between being / ontology / ousia and understanding / methodology / methodos:

If a definition of a work of art can be attempted at all, it would have to go along these lines: the work of art examined from an ontological perspective is an argument between volume and form, while the work of art examined from a methodological perspective is an argument between space and time. Only within this pattern of correlations can the work of art be understood. On the one side volume and form engage in lively interaction; on the other time and space unite themselves within one individually perceptible object.

So, for Panofsky, “time” and “space” are the critic’s concerns; “volume” and “form” are the artist’s, or the artwork’s (let’s not get bogged down in any debates about intentionality). Both activities, artmaking and criticism, are “arguments” with the same basic phenomenological terms: there’s a volume there, let’s organize it into form. There’s a being there, let’s understand it in time. (To really get above my pay grade, I wonder to what extent Panofsky was aware of Heidegger; Being and Time was published two years after this essay.) Panofsky wants to make this the basic contrast that underlies any and every visual artwork:

This double problem (which in reality is only the twofold aspect of a single problem) dominates, I repeat, artistic creation in general — whether it takes its sensible material from visual or acoustic experience. In the specific conditions of visual experience, that is, in those conditions that are binding for the fine arts, the decorative arts, and architecture, the problem in question is naturally expressed through more specific contrasts.

This is the final move Panofky makes in the first section of Part A (after which I’ll stop for today); he wants to move from this most basic level to one a little closer to the actual manifestation the individual artwork takes. Though the fundamental problem is always the antithesis between volume and form, space and time, it is always “expressed through more specific contrasts” in any given work, which Panofsky will go on to specify. What’s important for now is that he has established a pair of basic ground concepts that will be valid for any visual artwork:

These specific visual contrasts or, to be more precise, these contrasts of specific visual values we may call the fundamental problems of artistic and architectural creation. Their conceptual description is thus what I mean by the fundamental conceptual system for a science of art.

So far so good. Next time, A2.