Coke Is It

William Empson to John Wain, 1953:

"The Wimsatt-Beardsley essay … seems to me good, especially from a reasonable breadth … [But] the hatred of 'biography' and the claim that a good poem should have all requirements for reading it 'within itself' seems to me mere petulance, like saying 'I won't visit any house that hasn't got a Coca-Cola machine and a sun-bathing apparatus.' Obviously a person of more serious interests would be willing to put up with inconvenience." (Selected Letters of WE, 213)

Panting After Panofsky - Pt. 4

At the beginning of this section (A4) Panofsky is still formulating, still more strictly, the difference between art theory and art history, now using the Kantian language of “duty”:

The duty of art theory is to define and develop the absolute antithesis of the fundamental concepts — the concepts that formulate artistic problems. Art theory does not incorporate an absolute antithesis of style-defining concepts equal to those with which art history operates. The fundamental concepts, far from separating the world of artistic manifestations into two hostile camps between which there would be no space for a considerable number of phenomena, simply describe the polarity of two regions of value that face each other beyond the world of manifestations and that are contrasted within the work of art in varied ways. (52)

Again, he insists on a strict separation between the concepts and terminology of history and that of theory. (Interesting that he uses the political/military metaphor of “hostile camps” — it would be interesting to know more about what he’s reacting against.) Thus far Panofsky has mostly talked in roughly spatial terms about history and theory — speaking of separation, distance, difference, etc. — but now he starts to talk more in terms of time (perhaps this attends a turn from the ontological to the methodological): “The contents of the world of historical reality must be grasped not with the fundamental concepts but starting from them. The fundamental concepts do not dare, as a form of grammaire générale et raisonnée, to classify the manifestations of art; their duty is rather … to offer an a priori legitimated catalyst from which a discussion of the manifestation may be constructed” (52-53) (I wonder if this would work as an anticipatory objection to structuralism? In some of its versions, anyway. Or it may just be the sudden French that makes me think this.) So what does EP mean exactly by “a priori legitimated catalyst”? I think this should be read along with “starting from them”: Panofsky is making a claim about methodological priority. The catalyst comes first, and sets us off on our adventure. “They [the fundamental concepts] shape only the formulation of artistic problems, not the potential solutions; they determine only those questions that we direct to objects, not the individual and unpredictable answers that these objects can offer us” (52-53).

It seems to me like Panofsky is trying to formalize aesthetic looking, without predetermining the final product of aesthetic encounter with an object too much. That is: we start with these very basic, fundamental problems (how does the artist solve the haptic/optic problem, and the surface/depth problem? etc.) which quickly become much more specific when we start actually examining an artwork, and trying to figure out what it’s doing. The fundamental problems will not be used, as terms, in our final analysis of the work, but if we don’t start with them, then what we’re doing is not really “aesthetic looking” at all. He wants to draw a line somewhere, and he decides to do it at the earliest possible moment, before the particular features of the work make matters more confusing.

(There’s a footnote on this page which baffles me a little but is definitely relevant to the question of what is or isn’t “really” aesthetics. Right after “they determine only those questions that we direct to objects, not the individual and unpredictable answers that these objects can offer us,” Panofsky adds: “This describes the principal difference between art theory, as I understand it, and so-called aesthetics and art psychology. By addressing fundamental problems, art theory does not ask the questions of philosophical aesthetics, which seeks to determine the prerequisites and conditions that have made the artwork possible a priori, and even less those of normative aesthetics, which claims to formulate the laws that works of art must follow; art psychology on the other hand enquires into the conditions in which the work of art, or the impression of the work of art, becomes real” (53). This position-taking is very helpful in understanding what he thinks his project is all about. For Panofsky, traditional philosophical aesthetics (everything in the line of Aristotle?) is too literal, effecting that short circuit from the concept to the artwork that he warns against everywhere in this essay: its implict presumption is, if we think hard enough, apply enough philosophy to this object, we will get clear about it. Panofsky says no way. “Art psychology,” on the other hand, would seem to be a more subject-centered (psychoanalytic? or phenomenological?) approach, making what the artwork does to the viewer the ground of philosophical discourse, rather than the problems the artist is trying to solve. This is also no good. We can’t discover what artworks really want to be doing — their Kunstwollen — by reasoning about them with traditional philosophical concepts, or by looking more intently about what they are already doing to us. If it helps, we could identify the first approach with Kant and Hegel, the second with Freud and Heidegger. NEITHER OF THESE WAYS OF THINKING GETS US ANYWHERE, WITH REGARD TO WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON IN THE ARTWORK.)

By this point Panofsky has pretty well made his claim for art theory’s autonomy: that it must formulate general questions, with which we begin, and which we cannot give up if we want to continue doing aesthetic looking. But now he turns to the specific tasks it takes on in relation to empirical research: “besides the fundamental artistic problems, with which all works of art have to deal, there are without doubt also individual artistic problems, which are solved only in a specific group of artworks, perhaps only in a single monument … [A]rt theory then must provide specialist concepts so as to support fundamental art-theoretical concepts and order them systematically; the individual artistic problems should be shaped to formulae and related to the fundamental problems” (53). This is where art theory has a role in a continuing discourse: after having laid down the inalienable system of concepts adumbrated earlier, it looks at what the art historian has actually come up with, the individual artistic problems, and comes up with new concepts to describe them which link up with the unassailable fundamental problems. It’s a little space for pragmatism, and thus for argument, within a larger scientific foundationalism. (Parenthetically, I think this is similar to how Adorno conceived social theory’s relation to sociology. Might be an interesting paper in here, about Master Theorists and their administrative genesis.)

Then Panofsky’s argument takes kind of a weird sociological turn, making a claim not just about how art history (the discipline) should operate but about how the history of art actually functions:

“The individual artistic problems emerge, almost as if following a Hegelian scheme, from the fact that all solutions of the fundamental artistic problems in the course of historical development become themselves the poles of a specific individual artistic problem. Further, the solutions of this individual problem again form the poles of another, even more specialist second-order problem, and so forth ad infinitum” (53)

The example he uses to illustrate this is a column: “if, under specific historical circumstances … the situation occurs in which wall and column join into an organic connection within one building, then a new artistic problem arises, which in relation to the fundamental problem has to be regarded as an individual problem. Such an individual problem can produce further specialized individual problems, in that its varied solutions … are themselves in dialogue with each other. In the same way, two different solutions of the fundamental artistic problems … can come to face each other as poles of a new contrast, which itself can be split into indefinite subproblems” (53-54)
What Panofsky wants to give us here, I guess, is an account of the genesis of styles. Everything kicked off, long ago, with the fundamental conceptual problems of haptic versus optic et al., and every time a satisfying solution is found that achievement forms the basis for a newer, more specific problem. So the problem becomes not simply to manifest some sort of art, but to make a column; then to make a Doric column; then to solve some specific problem within the Doric column, and so on, as he says, ad infinitum. What keeps this from being totally teleological or progressivist or whatever (Art just gets Better and Better!)* is that there can be multiple problem chains going on at the same time, and even interacting with each other: Doric columns don’t have to give way to Ionic, there can be both at any one time, and they can draw on each other’s solutions in order to help with their own specific problem, etc. (* Just how Hegelian is this? Not sure right now: the popular image of Hegel is of a pretty monolithic forward movement of history, but you never know.) And presumably chains can also come to an end, or get lost, through accidents of history as well.

This is all leading up to a very grand theory of art indeed. If we accept Panofsky’s scheme, then ultimately “ all individual artistic problems can be systematically linked with each other and finally — however particular and specialized (even singular) they may be — referred back to fundamental problems, and so from the table of art-theoretical fundamental concepts a coherently connected art-theoretical conceptual system emerges, which can branch out even into the finest specialist concepts” (54). We can keep our specialist, historicist, close reading/looking procedures, refine them however we need to in order to make use of them: as long as they can ultimately “refer back” to the fundamental problems, we can tie them in with every other artwork. But not, I think, by short circuit: by slow, careful relation of one style to another, back through the history of art, which can all in principle be made to form one coherent story.

How would this work, exactly? “How this conceptual system might be designed and used in practice is not possible to demonstrate here,” but all he’s concerned with here, he says, is refuting Dorner’s objection to “the possibility of finding fundamental art-historical concepts”; what Panofsky wants to insist is that, in theory, fundamental concepts are possible. There would still be a tremendous amount of work to do to show how, or that, they’re useful to art historians. So really his argument here doesn’t depend on the particular concepts he’s given (although he presumably does think they’re right), but on the very idea of a fundamental conceptual system. Therefore, he ends the section with three reasons that he thinks his concepts can “rightly be described as fundamental”:

(a) they are valid a priori and are therefore suitable and necessary for understanding all artistic phenomena;
(b) they do not refer to anything nonmanifest but to manifest objects;
c) they build a systematic connection with those specialist concepts that form their subordinates.

So, against a common sense objection that any fundamental conceptual system will be too abstract to apply to all artworks, Panofsky says: (a) as long as we get the concepts logically right before we move into the empirical arena, we'll have room to maneuver later; (b) my concepts are good because they refer to real visual experience; and (c) they are useful because they allow us to connect up seemingly disparate works and compare them.

(It seems like there might be a contradiction between “a priori” and “manifest” — doesn’t “a priori” mean “prior to experience,” and thus to manifestation? If not, I think Panofsky owes a fuller definition of manifestation.)

(There’s also an interesting footnote at the end here about form and content, but it has to do with Dorner, so maybe I’ll save it for the end and the excursus on Dorner.)

Today

Today I woke up feeling sick and exhausted, body crumbling to dust, the ants are back in my apt. and it was raining.  Drove to campus cause i missed the bus and paid for all-day parking in the garage, prepped for my last class of the semester, gorged on cough drops.  Then, somehow, class went fine.  It was brief, but we talked about Edith Wharton and Gossip Girls' debt to Wharton, and about how American corporatism disrupts the bildungsroman/everything.  As one student remarked:  the everyday excoriations of the stock market seem more brutal and intrinsically gothic than anything else we've read (in a semester that included Dorian Gray).  Then I got to see an esteemed colleague become Dr. Esteemed Colleague, with a brilliant final dissertation oral exam.  Then I went to the public library to get my parking validated, and found a used copy of Proletarian Literature in the United States (1935) for a couple of bucks in the library book sale.

Here's Langston Hughes's poem "Park Bench," from this anthology:

I live on a park bench.

You, Park Avenue.

Hell of a distance

Between us two.

I beg a dime for dinner --

You got a butler and maid.

But I'm wakin' up!

Say, ain't you afraid

That I might, just maybe,

In a year or two,

Move on over

To Park Avenue?

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 2

Picking up where we left off: in between sections A1 and A2 Panofsky includes a little table, which lays out the antitheses I described yesterday (“general antithesis within the ontological sphere: volume versus form,” “general antithesis within the methodological sphere: time versus space”) in two columns. Between those two, there’s a third column, itself divided into three, which lists the “specific contrasts within the phenomenal and, especially, within the visual sphere.” So we’re getting more specific, closer to actual artworks. The three specific contrasts Panofsky lists are:

1. contrast of elementary values: optical values (empty space) versus haptic values (body)
2. contrast of figural values: values of depth versus values of surface
3. contrast of compositional values: values of fusing versus values of splitting

The rest of section A2 (which has five parts — sigh) is basically a reading of this table, which Panofsky calls “the table of a fundamental conceptual system for a science of art” (47).
“The pair of concepts in the first column (optic and haptic values) refers to a region of the experiential that we may call the layer of elementary values; it describes those qualities that need to be reconciled to create a visual unit (figure).”

The pair of values in the second column (depth and surface) “refers to a further region of the visual, which we may call the layer of figural values; it describes those qualities through whose conciliation a visual unit (figure) actually comes into being” (47). For another way of talking about this basic contrast, think of Wittgenstein’s remarks in the Philosophical Investigations on Gestalt psychology, or “seeing something as something”: on the level of elementary values we just see some lines, or a totally abstract pattern, not yet understood or processed; on the level of figural values, we begin to see these same lines or pattern as a figure of some kind. (I don’t think this necessarily needs to apply only to representational art — any kind of artwork, or really anything sensible, presents some kind of Gestalt, right? — though I’m not 100% sure about this.)

Finally, the third pair of concepts “refers to the final region of the experiential, which we may call the layer of compositional values; it describes those qualities through whose conciliation a majority of visual units (whether the members of a specific organism, or the parts of a specific group, or the components of a specific artistic entity) are joined together in a unity of a higher order” (47). So there’s a progression from: just stuff; stuff that is something; stuff that is something for some reason. (I may have smuggled in intentionality here, so maybe it would be better to say for the last: something that is organized somehow.)

Panofsky moves on: “The fundamental problem expressed in the first [elementary] pair of concepts is the argument between optical and haptic values, which can be understood as the specifically visual manifestation of the contrast between volume and form. For the realization of a purely optical value would lead to an annihilation of form, that is, to the completely amorphous appearance of light, while conversely the realization of a purely haptic value would lead to a complete annihilation of all sensible volume, that is, to a wholly abstract geometric form” (47-48). This is interesting: thinking of it like an eye, “optic” means totally open, letting light in, putting up no resistance to it, and therefore what you get is just the volume, “an annihilation of form” — a pure ontology. (Of course this is possible only in theory.) “Haptic,” on the other hand, which literally means "relating to touch," is eyes closed, no light getting in at all: since we're talking about the visual, in this case we are just as it were imagining an artwork, rather than actually sensing any volume. (It’s a little confusing that Panofsky says this would be “a wholly abstract geometric form,” because it implies that it would have to look like a Mondrian or something; but if I’m understand him right, it could look like anything, the important thing is that it only exists as form, it hasn’t been manifested as a sensible object that has volume.)

Having done haptic vs. optic, Panofsky skips over to the third (compositional) pair of concepts, “fusing” versus “splitting,” which he calls “the specifically visual manifestation of the contrast between time and space. For a real complete amalgamation of single independent units can only be imagined within the medium of time, which cannot be split, while reciprocally a real and strict isolation of single units from each other is only imaginable in the medium of space, unpenetrated by any movement. The antithesis expressed in the third pair of concepts could thus be described as calmness and movement (being and becoming) if the concept of movement or becoming included not only a sense of the purely temporal but also the idea of a spatiotemporal event” (48).

Ow. Brain ache. So, we’re thinking about “composition” now — the “final region of the experiential” and “a unity of a higher order” — and in order to do this we have to think methodologically, which means thinking about the contrast between time and space. I think we’re trying to think of an artwork that has to be exactly as it is — “a real complete amalgamation of single independent units” — which means we apprehend it all at once as right (or successful, or unified, or whatever other term of praise you want to use). This happens in time, “which cannot be split”: that is, I think, you can’t divide a moment of your experience of a complex artwork and be looking at more than one thing at once: you have to look at each piece one at a time. In other words, you need to effect “a real and strict isolation of single units from each other” — which would presumably be necessary in order to critically examine the artwork, and really see how it all fits together? — can only happen in space, “unpenetrated by any movement” (and Panofsky is usually so symmetrical, I’m surprised he doesn’t say here that space “cannot be fused” — though again I’m not exactly sure what this would mean. What’s the contrast? Can time be fused?). The last sentence is more abstract, but it seems to make things a tiny bit easier: the compositional antithesis is between “calmness” and “movement,” “being” and “becoming,” and movement/becoming means a “spatiotemporal event” (scanning the canvas of a painting, in time). So, maybe all Panofsky is saying here is that the time element comes in at the compositional level? If so, that’s clear enough. Still, I’m not at all sure I’ve got the hang of this part; maybe I’m just not sure what “fusing” and “splitting” actually are. Perhaps I’ll come back to this.

He then doubles back to the middle figural pair of concepts — depth and surface — and says that this contrast “can be understood not only through the contrast between volume and form but also through the contrast between time and space, inasmuch as a specific relationship between depth and surface requires also a specific relation of optical and haptic values and a specific relation of fusing and splitting, movement and calmness” (48). Hmm… so it seems as if here Panofsky is saying that the figural is the synthesis of the elementary and the compositional, or (maybe better) the mediating level: it has to do with (“requires”) both space and time and openness and closedness.

To illustrate this, Panofsky brings in his first example: “The difference between ancient Egyptian and classical Greek reliefs is well known: in ancient Egyptian art an utterly flat or even sometimes a receding execution of the relief and an almost complete relinquishment of foreshortening eliminate any values of depth in favor of values of surface while in classical Greek art a measured depth of the relief and an equally measured foreshortening establish an equilibrium between values of depth and values of surface” (48). Egyptian relief: no depth, all surface:
Greek relief: equilibrium between depth and surface:
(Panofsky, I think it’s safe to infer, likes the Greek relief better; he’s bringing in this contrast because he wants an example of a more successful artwork to illustrate his theory. Again, we will just stipulate this value judgment for didactic purposes.) “In this example, it is clear that these solutions to the surface-depth problem, however they may be executed, are inevitably also linked to a corresponding solution of the problem of optical and haptic values as well as of the problem of the values of fusing (or movement) and splitting (isolation or calmness). In this example, the movement of one individual form and thus also the connection of various individual forms with each other is only possible on the condition that this one individual form is free to move from the second to the third dimension of space” (48). (Note that now Panofsky is suddenly back to talking about "problems" and "solutions." Where does he get this language from, I wonder? Is it Hegelian? Or is he using it in a logical sense?)

Again, just granting him that the Greek relief is better than the Egyptian, what Panofsky emphasizes as a criterion of excellence for art is the simultaneous solution of multiple fundamental problems in a single gesture or feature. “A solution of the surface-depth problem in favor of surface necessarily means also a solution of the contrast between calmness and movement, isolation and amalgamation, in favor of calmness and isolation, and vice versa. Likewise … a solution of the surface-depth problem in favor of surface means necessarily also a solution of the problem of the optical and haptic values in favor of the haptic, and vice versa. So, while the two other fundamental problems [viz., elementary and compositional] can be attributed either to the space-time antithesis or to the volume-form antithesis, the fundamental problem of … depth and … surface can actually be understood from both sides” (48-49).

I’m still not sure I’m getting what putting the figural in between the elementary and the compositional values does for Panofsky — but it’s clear enough what he’s positing as success in art: “It is this mediating role of the second fundamental problem that helps us to understand that within any one specific style all three fundamental problems can and have to be solved in one and the same sense” (49). That is, simultaneous solution is what he likes the best — and with this doctrine we may be within reach of Robert Graves, I.A. Richards, William Empson, and thus the New Criticism. But I’m going to stop there, on the verge of A3.3, and hope the foregoing gets clarified a little as I go along.

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.

I just found out

that Lawrence Rainey is not English. Who knew?