zanne 109
secure the phenomenality of the sign.
secure the phenomenality of the sign.
Paul-de-Man-Material-Events
" The aesthetic is that moment (this is the claim) at
Phenomenality and Materiality in Ce? zanne 101
which the materiality of the sign is grasped again, and grandly played with, but precisely as "phenomenal substance," as part of a world of stuffs and perceptions. It is this tourniquet of the world's substance and the sign's substance, or better still, of the texture and structure of sentences, say, or metaphors, or passages of paint, and the texture and structure of experience--it is this twisting together and analogizing of procedures and intuitions that the aesthetic brings up to the surface of signifying, and lets us do again.
What would it be like for art not to do this, or at least to try to? Not like Ce? zanne, by the looks of it; and maybe not like any artwork we would count as such. Nonetheless, in practice the very twisting and grasping can lead artworks, on occasion, to come to suspect--and to voice or envisage the suspicion--that maybe what they are doing is not analogizing or "realizing" at all. This suspicion is not antiaesthetic. But it is a kind of horror, and elation, at what the work of form might be about. I sense that horror and elation in Ce? zanne.
No doubt the only way I can make the sense seem less bald and ominous is by showing what I mean by it in relation to particular se- quences of brushmarks. But before I do that, let me state again what questions seem to me worth asking of pictures with the category "aes- thetic" in mind. From the cluster of problems touched on, I take two. First, the notion of the aesthetic as a moment of adequacy of form to content, in which form is revealed as the necessary clothing of an intui- tion. And second (another way of putting the same point, essentially), the notion of the aesthetic as a moment or dimension of representation in which the phenomenality of the sign is retrieved. The aesthetic--I quote de Man directly in his discussion of Kant's Critique of Judgment-- "is always based on an adequacy of the mind to its physical object, based on what is referred to . . . as the concrete representation of ideas-- Darstellung der Ideen. "10 The relation of form to content, in other words, is rooted in a relation of mind to world. The one relation analo- gizes the other. And the world, as I have been saying, is unthinkable save as a texture and structure of phenomena, of sensate "experiences. "
These givens, to repeat, are built deep into the category "aesthetic" as it comes down to us. And of course Ce? zanne's achievement has been taken as an object lesson of them. "In a picture like 'L'Estaque'"--this is Roger Fry in 1910, discussing a painting now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (figure 5)--"it is difficult to know whether one ad- mires more the imaginative grasp which has built so clearly for the an- swering mind the splendid structure of the bay, or the intellectualised
102 T. J. Clark
sensual power which has given to the shimmering atmosphere so defi- nite a value. "11 I retain from this sentence the phrases "built so clearly for the answering mind" and "intellectualised sensual power. " They seem to me the aesthetic in a nutshell; and no doubt Fry meant us to catch the echo of Hegel above all in the latter.
The assumption of adequacy and totality, then, and the assumption of sensuousness, of "imaginative grasp": I am saying the concept "aes- thetic" is built around these terms. Now, in the case of Ce? zanne the first assumption has always been challengeable. Obviously there is a side to Ce? zanne's art that lends itself to a discourse of unfinish, dispari- ty, and inadequacy of sorts. His pictures are "exactes parfois jusqu'au de? sarroi"--this is a critic writing as early as 1892. 12 The point is that excitement or bewilderment at Ce? zanne's disequilibrium (which is an- other word that crops up in the early responses) has coexisted entirely peacefully with the structure of assumptions about the aesthetic I have outlined so far, and with our taking Ce? zanne to exemplify them. Disarray and inadequation either function as a kind of brilliant des- cant to totality in the pictures--"the splendid structure of the bay" and so forth--or they are taken as the form totality assumes in this (mod- ern) instance. Modern experience just is this evenness and disequilibri- um in high tension. It looks as though the notion of the aesthetic in Ce? zanne is only going to be open to radical reworking if the second as- sumption is put in doubt. That is, if we start from the (obviously un- congenial) supposition that the individual brushmarks in Ce? zanne do not analogize or open onto "sensations" or "phenomena": that they posit a lack or failure of any such opening or analogy; and that they do so precisely in their material individuality as marks--their atomized facticity, their separateness.
I know these are counterintuitive suggestions. ("Counterintuitive" about sums it up. ) And I do not want to revel in their disagreeableness. They are disagreeable, and on the face of it preposterous, because they seem to go against the qualities that critics and philosophers have al- ways valued in Ce? zanne--what looks like vividness and openness to the least incident of seeing. Of course vividness and openness are the right terms. But I want to ask: Out of what circuit of intentions and assumptions, and intentions and assumptions defeated in practice, or altered beyond recognition (including the painter's)--out of what cir- cuit does the vividness come? I am not suggesting, again to state the obvious, that Ce? zanne's project did not exist under the auspices of nineteenth-century positivism. Of course it did. He was a phenomenal-
Phenomenality and Materiality in Ce? zanne 103
ist through and through--made for Merleau-Ponty to hero-worship. But the question is: What did "existing under the auspices" actually give rise to in his case? A doubting, anxious not-quite-confirmation of that phenomenalism, or its doing to death in particular passages of paint? (Maybe, in the Large Bathers, in pictures as a whole? )
I shall ask these questions mainly of Trees and Houses (figure 6), a painting in the Walter-Guillaume collection in the Orangerie, done probably in the late 1880s. But before I do, let me head off a possible answer to them. I do not think the one given by Clement Greenberg, interesting as it is, gets us very far. 13 In the painting Ce? zanne did over the last two decades or so of his life, it is simply not the case, in my ex- perience, that the logic of marks can be plausibly rehearsed in terms of a positivist phenomenalism somehow instinctively adjusted to the "facts" of the picture's, or picture making's, physical limitations. The materialism of Ce? zanne's markmaking, I want to argue, acknowledges no such phenomenal constraints: it is not surreptitiously or naively structured around another phenomenalism, of "flatness," "rectangu- larity," and so forth. Maybe there is a brief period in Ce? zanne's career, for three or four years around 1880, when Greenberg's descriptions work. For a while the paintings are put together largely out of nearly identical, same-size-and-direction mosaic dabs. But even here the invo- cation of "flatness" and "rectangularity" has a willed, self-consuming edge to it. It is hyperbolic and mechanical: more like a parody of simple- minded materialism than an attempt to pursue it. And once the mosaic stroke is abandoned (as it is), it reappears (as it constantly does here and there) always as false certainty--a hopeless, sporadic afterlife of positivism, lost in the imaginary world from which it struggles to get free.
There is some of this in Trees and Houses. Part of the lower front wall of the houses, as well as the space between them, is done in up- right bricks of light brown and mauve, as if to imply a dusting of undergrowth. The same stroke is tilted to left and right of vertical and repeated in the midground fields, or along the path that cuts through them, and at place after place in the trees--sometimes believably as moss or foliage, sometimes as free-floating notation. I would not deny that these kinds of marks (art historians call them "the constructive stroke") contribute to the painting's overall evenness and delicacy; nor that evenness of attention is the picture's most touching quality. But the regular brushmarks are always on the verge--and sometimes over
104 T. J. Clark
it--of not "applying" to anything in particular. And they coexist with other sorts of painterly activity, which make their placid atomism look not so much tentative as willfully flimsy.
Look at the tall central house, for example, the one with the red roof. Look in particular at the marks of the brush that are meant to put together, into a single sequence on the flat, the line of the house's red eaves, the faint shadow the eaves cast, and the gentle curve of a branch half-concealing them, seemingly in a plane parallel to the housefront but much nearer to us. Then, focusing on the right-hand side of this already small area, look at the triangle of sunlit wall be- tween the eaves and the branch, and a second branch, maybe sprouting from the other, which seems as though it must be twisting toward us and down, crossing in front of the branch it sprouts from. We have only just started. In the angle of the two branches there is an area of deep blue; it consists, when we look closer, of two broad smears of gray-blue and off-white paint, the first overlapping the thicker branch and the second apparently painted over a line of blue-violet just above it--the line we are invited to take as the twisting branch beginning. The off-white, as I say, seems to override the twisting branch; but the branch fights back. There is a final thin trace of paint--purplish, more cursive and transparent--painted in turn on top of the shadow line. And then on the underside of the thicker branch there is another kind of paintmark, pale orange-brown picked up from the top of the roof and applied more lightly and dryly, putting the thick branch in silhou- ette. And an oilier brown on the shuttered window just to the right, which half invades the blue-purple of the branch that hides its top edge. And all of this--trying now to move back from the local adjust- ments and see what they do to the wider pattern of branches and shut- ters and plaster and tile--all this ferocious involution of markmaking in and around the intersecting branches is constantly altering their re- lation to the open, more insubstantial, floating "flats" of the other two windows to the left, and the lighter, more discontinuous brown of the branch bisecting the house below. And so on.
I choose to focus on this area of Trees and Houses partly because it seized my attention in the Orangerie, and once seen was endlessly ab- sorbing. And also because it strikes me as typical of many other such organizing incidents in Ce? zanne's work--places where foreground and background come into active, difficult touch, or where a flat screen of forms, drawn across the picture surface almost like a veil, is punctuated by lines or planes that lead back or forward, sometimes violently, into
Phenomenality and Materiality in Ce? zanne 105
depth. These are the pictures' seams, as it were, and have to be tightly stitched; whereas a lot of the pictures' broader visual material--the ap- proximations of grass and undergrowth here, or the possible signs of foliage--can be left flapping comparatively loose (the looseness also being part of Ce? zanne's proposal). Edges are difficult. Foreground and background are potentially crutches for the mind, which painting should put in question. There are plenty of paintings--The Village of Gardanne in Brooklyn (figure 7) is one--in which the spatial seams of the subject have been left mostly empty, as if the painter had deferred them to a time of totalization that never arrived.
The question I promised to ask of the Trees and Houses sequence is what pattern of intention drove it on, and how the balance within it shifted between a wild analogizing of paint and vision (paint and world) and an intimation, in the brushmarks themselves, of their com- ing to obey a different logic--not a logic of analogy at all. I am not looking for an iconoclastic answer to the question, in which we discov- er that Fry and Greenberg and Merleau-Ponty got Ce? zanne all wrong. On the contrary, I want to go with them as far as possible. "Ce? zanne," said Roger Fry,
inheriting from the Impressionists the general notion of accepting the purely visual patchwork of appearance, concentrated his imagination so intensely upon certain oppositions of tone and color that he became able to build up and, as it were, re-create form from within; and at the same time that he re-created form he re-created it clothed with color, light, and atmosphere all at once. It is this astonishing synthetic power that amazes me in his work. 14
I think what we are looking at is a fair example of such concentration and synthesis. And partly--partly--it answers to Fry's line of thought. Take the violent forward movement of the smaller branch. I inter- pret the to-and-fro of paintmarks around this movement--the evi- dence of fine-tuning and improvisation going on right up to the last minute, and maybe in a sense never having been brought to a stop--as Ce? zanne's trying to see if a play of direction, and one the eye seems not to be able to lay hold of completely, could be made as much part of an uninterrupted paint surface as the plain face of the house next door. I guess Fry's "purely visual patchwork" is helpful here. Putting aspects of the world into the same surface is, for Ce? zanne, putting them into the eye. But that does not grasp the kind of effort going into the twisted branch. Its being in the eye is, as I understand Ce? zanne's metaphysic,
106 T. J. Clark
its being over there in space, being "outside" not "inside," taking place at a distance, staying separate and self-sufficient. This is the Ce? zanne effect. The world has to be pictured as possessed by the eye, indeed "totalized" by it; but always on the basis of exploding or garbled or ut- terly intractable data--data that speak to the impossibility of synthesis even as they seem to provide the sensuous material for it.
Now I shall make my iconoclastic move; because in the end I won- der whether these are the terms in which the sequence of marks we have been looking at makes sense. Do the marks follow, or go on fol- lowing, a logic of visual sensation? Are synthesis and re-creation the right words for the force that drives them? Or is the logic they come to pursue generated out of a different set of opportunities and con- straints, which sounds in the telling a bit less exalted? Let us call them "formal tactics" as opposed, say, to "imaginative grasp"; material ac- cidents as opposed to phenomenal complexity; ironic, automatic facili- ty, not "intellectualised sensual power. " Fanatic display and technical imperiousness, not Fry's "supreme spontaneity, as though he had al- most made himself the passive, half-conscious instrument of some di- recting power. "15 In the realm of the aesthetic, spontaneity is always presented as a ventriloquism of the world, a giving over of will to intui- tion. But why? Why should the will not be in unflinching charge--a will that is ultimately happy to settle for a world made up of separate and incommensurable realms, each one of sheer procedure? Are not the marks we have been concentrating on procedural with a vengeance? Are not they more like a Nietzsche aphorism than a paragraph of Proust? Fierce, declarative, and self-canceling, not edging toward the truth of consciousness step by qualified step.
These are rhetorical questions, I know. And as usual the answer to them is yes and no. Let me give the answer first in general terms, and then see how it applies to the sequence of brushmarks.
Ce? zanne's is the most radical project of nineteenth-century posi- tivism. It stakes everything on the possibility of re-creating the struc- ture of experience out of that experience's units. I am sure Fry was right in this basic hypothesis. But the very radicality of the project de- livers it: because this painting stakes everything on the notion of the unitary, the immediate, the bare minimum of sensation, the momentary- and-material "ping"; because it goes on and on searching for ways to insist that here, in this dab, is the elementary particle out of which see- ing is made; because it fetishizes the singular, it discovers the singular
Phenomenality and Materiality in Ce? zanne 107
as exactly not the form of "experience. " It shows us a way of world- making in which the very idea of a "world"--the very idea of totality, or synthesis, or Fry's three-times-repeated word power--is not drawn from some prior texture of unit-sensations "out there," and therefore (potentially) "in here. " It follows that notions as seemingly basic as foreground and background may no longer apply. (Look back at the sequence of brushmarks in Trees and Houses and see if they do. ) Maybe not even "inside" and "outside. " Nor "experience" and "representa- tion. " Nor "now" and "then. "
Of course, what we get of this other way of world-making in Ce? - zanne is no more than a glimpse. But "glimpse" in Ce? zanne exactly does not mean that the other possibility appears momentarily, or just round the edges of things. The glimpse is everywhere (in Ce? zanne's last two decades). The nonidentity of mark and marked is foundational. I call it a glimpse only because nonidentity of this sort cannot be thema- tized: it cannot once and for all replace the phenomenalism it shadows. It shadows that phenomenalism; it disperses and thins it out; it reveals the logic of the singular and re-creative to have nothing to do with the subject of sensation. If the reader then wants to know what phrase I would put in place of "subject of sensation"--and any one phrase is bound to be overstressed, or overneat--the one I would opt for is "ob- ject of the exercise. " The logic of the singular and constructive in Ce? zanne has nothing to do with the subject of sensation but everything to do with the object of the exercise. That formulation will do, as long as we do not allow "object" and "exercise" to collapse back into the familiar modernist version of phenomenalism--the sensuous reality being rediscovered "here," on the surface, where the picture is made. There is no "here" in painting. Picturing is not a physical matter--least of all in Ce? zanne, in the nine or ten (typical) marks we have been look- ing at. The exercise called picturing is a deep, notional, physically irre- trievable dimension--a dimension of social practice. And the object of the exercise in Ce? zanne is the object posited by that strange line of thought we call eighteenth- and nineteenth-century materialism--by that project pushed and stressed (as it very often was) to its utopian limits. The world of objects reached after in Ce? zanne, and laid before us in all its manifoldness, overtness, and pungency, could hardly signal its counterfactual status more clearly. It is a horizon of meaning, an al- ternative to experience, a contentment with nonidentity. Nobody is saying, least of all me, that such contentment could be lived in more than fitfully.
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The thing to recognize about the sequence of brushmarks, then, is that there is no one point within it at which the phenomenal is dis- placed by the material or "formal. " The displacement is there and not there from the start--in the very first mark of the sequence, supposing the terms first and sequence could ever be stabilized, which they cannot. There and not there all the way through: from (not-)first to (not-)last. This is the Ce? zanne effect. Always, at every point, there appears to be reference to the nth degree, fierce and immediate, punctual, acute: but always the reference is haunted by the fact of its precisely being (only) to the nth degree: that is, a touch or a point or a patch in a merely nu- merical, repetitive, indeed "formal" sequence, of degrees to the nth quantity, with this one only implying the nth--meaning the final, infi- nite place in the series, the nonnumerical, nonrepetitive, unpredictable moment at which reference is secured. This is the anxiety, and also the utopian horizon, that drives the fanatic process forward. The next mark might (somehow) not be a mere sign in a sequence but a true fig- ure of things seen--a figure that cancels the marks preceding, or raises them to a different power.
Interminability and hesitation in Ce? zanne are thus not rooted in an epistemology of addition--though of course some such naive positivism is operative, at the level of ideological framing and self- understanding--but in an (equally naive) Hegelian prevarication, a waiting and hoping for the moment when the addition of units turns quantity into quality. What goes on in practice is not so much addi- tion as erasure: that is what the logic of the nine or ten brushmarks suggests. Or maybe "erasure" is overstressed. Call it "interference," then: a radical (at times a positively melodramatic) interference of each unit with those it is put next to: the hope being, I think, that erasure and interference might save the mere sequence from itself, and make its unities into a world. Ce? zanne is looking for a mark that would not be a further "one" in a series but a kind of "zero," with the power to replace the dab after dab of addition by connectedness and unity--by a truly magical multiplier effect. There is no such mark, of course. Effects like this are beyond painting's grasp. But the fact that they are is precisely what generates vividness in the sequence of marks that concerns us. The sequence is required to show that no feat of painterly energy, no moment of "supreme spontaneity," no demonstration of "intellectualised sensual power," can ever perform the aesthetic conjuring trick. Vividness, then, is the vividness of de- feat. The vividness of procedure. Even this, says the painting, cannot
Phenomenality and Materiality in Ce?
zanne 109
secure the phenomenality of the sign. You see why the "even this" had to be so monstrously good.
Therefore, consistency of touch and color, the guarantor of phenome- nality in Ce? zanne, is always in his painting the other face of disequilib- rium or overload, or dispersal of energy. Evenness in his work has a forced, or counterfactual, quality. It is a device, not a condition. Put a Ce? zanne next to a Corot and that is immediately clear.
Writers about Ce? zanne have often felt called on to answer this ques- tion: What, do we think, was going on in the painter's mind during the famous endless minutes he sometimes spent between brushstrokes-- the minutes Vollard and others recall so ruefully? Any answer is going to be figurative. I imagine him looking around, as it were, for a rule to follow for the next mark, and hesitating because he wished not to rec- ognize that no such rule existed. He did not want to know that any next mark he might make would be accurate and inaccurate at once; and accurate above all by reason of what he would do to it--the force he would apply to it more than the sight of it in relation to whatever it was of. Marks respond to each other as rhymes, or beats. But it was ex- actly this being always inside a metric or a rhyme scheme that Ce? zanne would not accept.
Look at the way any sequence of marks, even one that strikes out for the detail of optical experience as unflinchingly as that in Trees and Houses, is overtaken by a logic of contrivance, not perception. Look at the way something so basic and constitutive of painting as "calling on the accidents of process"--which no one in their right mind (certainly not Ce? zanne) objects to--sets off an unstoppable automatism whereby accidents become what the process is directed to as well as by. And the words we need to describe the process are contingency, performance, and will, not necessity, imagination, and "half-conscious instrumentali- ty. " There is a sentence of Roger Fry's that seems to me to sum these things up. I admire it greatly, and find myself disagreeing with it more or less phrase by phrase. "[Ce? zanne's] composition," he says, "at first sight looks accidental, as though he had sat down before any odd cor- ner of nature and portrayed it; and yet the longer one looks the more satisfactory are the correspondences one discovers, the more certainly felt, beneath its subtlety, is the architectural plan; the more absolute, in spite of their astounding novelty, do we find the color harmonies. "16 Felt certainty, absoluteness, architecture, satisfactory correspondence: whatever the noise on the aesthetic message, says Fry, the message
110 T. J. Clark
comes over finally loud and clear. The Ce? zanne I am proposing is one where none of these terms of value applies, and the list of implied con- tingent negatives--I am precisely not going to name them, I want them to go on unappeasedly haunting Fry's positives--is what gives this painting its strength.
I said I did not want to end with an iconoclastic answer to the Ce? zanne problem, but inevitably my rhetoric has drifted that way. Forced and automatism are hard words. I should try to amend their tone. I realize that in putting "accident, performance, and will" in place of "neces- sity, imagination, and openness" I look to be preaching a heartless creed. But what if I settled for the words "practice, exercise, and ob- ject" rather than "spontaneity, experience, and subject"? At least then the ethical balance becomes less clear. We know what violence has been done in the name of the latter triad's brand of organicism. In any case, ultimately I refuse to go along with the notion that an aesthetic of performance and will is, by its nature, less humane and empathetic than one of totality and phenomenon. I do not think it need lead us in Nietzsche's direction. Part of Ce? zanne's importance to me is that in him it does not.
What other direction, then? Answering this question without falling into bathos involves me saying what I think Ce? zanne's art is "about"-- beyond the trying and failing to stay true to the facts of vision, which is certainly a main part of it. I flinch from doing this, or doing so more explicitly than in my description of the Ford Mont Sainte-Victoire, be- cause of course the proposals about the world and our knowledge of it--and I am sure Ce? zanne's art contains such proposals--are deeply embedded in technique. That is part of the pictures' argument. "Track- ing shots are a question of ethics. " Yet if I do not at least sketch an an- swer, I shall have colluded in what seems to me the dreariest remainder of the early-twentieth-century myth of Ce? zanne: the myth of his paint- ings' ineffability. Because a picture is not a proposition does not mean that it cannot be translated into one or more. Technical and ineffable are not cognates.
Let me put side by side the Baltimore Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bibe? mus Quarry (figure 3) and the painting, probably done around the same time, now called A Pyramid of Skulls (figure 8). I re- alize the pairing is tendentious, and that A Pyramid of Skulls is excep- tional in Ce? zanne work; equally, when I suggest that we read the one (more typical) painting in light of the other, I am not meaning to elicit
Phenomenality and Materiality in Ce? zanne 111
some daft detection of a hidden iconography. The two central rocks in the quarry are not disguised skulls, and Mont Sainte-Victoire is neither a skull nor a pyramid. Yet I do want to say that the view from Bibe? mus is at one level a view from the tomb; the skulls intend, by the simple act of pyramiding, to give form to death and therefore survive it. (The pyramid is the first and last form of the aesthetic illusion. )
You see my problem. Because the embedded propositions in Ce? - zanne are so simple and primordial, and so entirely dependent on the ironic feats of matter--of paint--which breathe life and death back into them, putting them into words is exactly betraying "what they have to say" about material existence; and about where the recognition of the human world as one of accident, device, persuasion, and will might ac- tually lead us. Not necessarily, it seems, into a realm of deep nihilism or contingent power. But certainly into some kind of graveyard or charnelhouse.
I died for Beauty--but was scarce Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain In an adjoining Room--
He questioned softly "Why I failed"? "For Beauty", I replied--
"And I--for Truth--Themself are One-- We Brethren, are", He said--
And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night-- We talked between the Rooms-- Until the Moss had reached our lips-- And covered up--our names--
We should not need Ce? zanne's picture Boy with a Skull (figure 9) to know that death is this painter's ultimate subject. Any of the later por- traits would convince us of that. In all of them costume and posture are rigid, and ineffectual, against the surrounding pressure of the void. Nature, in the landscapes, is Emily Dickinson's Moss. It goes on "deathless progressing to no death," "forever decaying and never to be decayed. " Its presence in the folds of Boy with a Skull's stiff tapestry, or on the tablecloth of Woman in Blue (figure 10), is no doubt quietly accurate about its normal place and function in Ce? zanne's bourgeois world. Most people are in no danger of dying for Beauty. Out there, on the other hand, is the mountain above the quarry. Nature reaching our
112 T. J. Clark
lips. Whether its deathly animation is consoling or enraging is some- thing, I believe, Ce? zanne's pictures never stop trying to decide.
NOTES
This essay owes much to conversations with Fred Orton and Kathryn Tuma. For Orton's de Manian reading of Ce? zanne and allegory, see Fred Orton, "(Painting) Out of Time," parallax, no. 3 (September 1996): 99-112. For Tuma's account of Ce? zanne and positivism (much more complex and historically responsible than the one gestured toward here), see Kathryn Tuma, "Ce? zanne, Lucretius and the Late Nineteenth-Century Crisis in Science," Ph. D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2000.
1. Paul de Man, "Hegel on the Sublime," in Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 111.
2. Paul de Man, "The Resistance to Theory," in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 10.
3. Paul de Man, "Kant's Materialism," in Aesthetic Ideology, 128.
4. Paul de Man, "Hypogram and Inscription," in Resistance to Theory, 37. 5. Paul Ce? zanne to E? mile Bernard, September 21, 1906, in Paul Ce? zanne,
Correspondance (Paris: Grasset, 1978), 326.
6. My thanks to Maureen Devine and Josephine Shea, head and assistant cura-
tors of the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House, for their patience and helpfulness during my visit there.
7. Richard Wollheim, "Ce? zanne and the Object," paper presented at a confer- ence, "Ce? zanne and the Aesthetic," National Gallery, London, 1996.
8. Paul Ce? zanne to his son, October 15, 1906, in Ce? zanne, Correspondance, 332.
9. Quoted in Kurt Badt, The Art of Ce? zanne, trans. Sheila Ogilvie (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), 181.
10. Paul de Man, "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," in Aesthetic Ideology, 88.
11. Roger Fry, "Art. The Post-Impressionists. --II," Nation, December 3, 1910, 402.
12. Georges Lecomte, "L'Impressionisme," Revue de l'E? volution Sociale (May 1892): 217. Compare the following sentence, on Ce? zanne's paintings: "Au temps he? roi? ques du naturalisme, on se plut a` exalter l'e? quilibre incertain de quelques-unes d'entre elles, leur bizarrerie fortuite, comme si l'art pouvait s'accommoder de dis- proportion et de de? se? quilibre. " Lecomte, at this point anarchist and Symbolist in his sympathies, is presumably relaying the terms of his friend Pissarro's enthusiasm for Ce? zanne in the 1870s.
13. See for instance, Clement Greenberg, "Ce? zanne and the Unity of Modern Art," in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986-93), 3:82-91. The fol- lowing sentences (88) sum up the argument: "No wonder he complained to the day of his death of his inability to 'realize. ' The aesthetic effect toward which his means urged was not that which his mind had conceived out of the desire for the organ- ized maximum of an illusion of solidity and depth. Every brushstroke that followed a fictive plane into fictive depth harked back by reason of its abiding, unequivocal
Phenomenality and Materiality in Ce? zanne 113
character as a mark made by a brush, to the physical fact of the medium; the shape and placing of that mark recalled the shape and position of the flat rectangle that was the original canvas, now covered with pigments that came from pots and tubes. Ce? zanne made no bones about the tangibility of the medium: there it was in all its grossness of matter. "
14. Fry, "The Post-Impressionists. --II," 402. 15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
114
Political Thrillers: Hitchcock, de Man, and Secret Agency in the "Aesthetic State"
Tom Cohen
The picture opens with a scene at St. Moritz, in Switzerland, because that's where I spent my honeymoon with my wife. From our window I could see the skating rink. And it occurred to me that we might start the picture by showing an ice-skater tracing numbers--eight--six--zero--two--on the rink. An espionage code, of course. But I dropped the idea.
--Hitchcock to Truffaut
(Teresa Wright) remembered, too, the endless series of word games and puns Hitchcock used to keep his cast and crew entertained.
--Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius
We must bear in mind that, fundamentally, there's no such thing as color; in fact, there's no such thing as face, because until the light hits it, it is nonexistent.
--Hitchcock to Truffaut
There is a road that goes from this notion of Schein to the notion of materiality.
--de Man, "Kant and Schiller"
Why the perpetual motif of writing beneath surfaces in Hitchcock--as a tracing visible, perhaps, by certain spy agencies alone, of letters, carved in the ice? In The 39 Steps, the secret formula is all letters and numbers; we are barely into Shadow of a Doubt when the motifs of telegrams and telepathy interface with a little girl's automaton-like, compulsive reading; Hitchcock, in his first overt cameo in a "talkie" (Blackmail) is interrupted reading on a train--that is, interrupted with- in a stasis within the accelerated semiosis of a cinemallographic shuttle. 1
If these examples among numerous others indicate, point to something else (and such pointing is the blackmailer Tracey's last, accusatory, yet cutoff gesture--as it will be that still of the Hitchcock opus, the last image of Family Plot), they point to an alternate scene of writing that has nothing to do with "pictures of people talking," and everything to do with an attempt to indict, displace, and politically subvert the consumerist logic of mimesis to which the history of film--and for that matter, "film theory"--has been linked. 2 Interestingly, this puts Hitchcock in contact at once with a Benjaminian practice, since the lat- ter's argument that film begins with a divestiture of "aura" is to say that it takes place as the abolition of much of what film theory has striven to restore--logics of identification, primarily, but also Oedipal maps, and the relapse of cultural studies into mimetic codes. This essay will attempt to ask where a rethinking of the trope of "materiality" through the late, and in many ways still unread, work of de Man strikes a strange accord not only with this other Hitchcock--a Hitchcock for whom the mnemonics of inscription has a political import that is irreducible--but with a transformation in the very terms of the cul- ture's hermeneutic program: what is called materiality, to be sure, but also the aesthetic, the political, "light," memory, and so on. Hitchcock's work is traversed with secret agents, yet the term itself, as in the film with John Gielgud and Peter Lorre so named, seems for him to ques- tion an irreducibly material question: that is, in a medium dependent on the projected repetition of old prints and mnemonic inscription-- like film or, perhaps, ideology--what kind of reflexive agency can in ef- fect reach into its own prerecordings to intervene in or alter history, which is at once to say the past and virtual futures?
Careful readers of Hitchcock's Secret Agent--pointedly evoked in the telescope shot of Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest--are not surprised that the turning point of the film is when Gielgud and Lorre end up at a Chocolate Factory in a multilingual Switzerland. The two ineffective and bumbling actants are tracking a "secret agent" tellingly named Marvin (Robert Young), tellingly since Hitchcock's ceaseless recurrence to the syllable Mar- in proper names draws atten- tion to an interrogation of marking that pervades this work. On the success of this disclosure of identity and reflexive chase, the film's nar- rative MacGuffin pretends, the outcome of the first world war will hang, which is to say, the fate of Britain, the "world," and so on. In fact, Marvin will have to be stopped on a train headed for Constantinople-- that is, a trope for Hitchcock of a certain cognitive realization echoed
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elsewhere in names such as Conway, or Constance, or Conrad, or Victor Constantine (Family Plot). What is interesting is not that it is the American "college boy"--irritating, mock-flirtatious, and overlooked-- who is the deadly agent, but that the Chocolate Factory is itself so misleading. Deafening and machinal, gigantic in its "expressionistic" troping of Lang's Metropolis, the conveyor belts that turn out the "chocolate" also purvey letters, notes in code and transliterated script sent out to all the other spies. The deafening machinal Chocolate Factory with its white-coated mutlilingual Swiss attendants and ridicu- lous gigantic churning wheels is termed the "Spies' Post Office. " The deafening roar is not new to the film: it suggests the reduction of all languages to sheer sound, a kind of Benjaminian reine Sprache, sug- gested in the first murder in Langenthal Kirche (Fritz Lang, language), where again a deafening single organ note and then a giant bell obliter- ate speech and leave us with the close-up shot of an almost deaf ear being shouted into by the linguistically incoherently and obscurely (non)ethnic and many-named General (Lorre).
The chocolate in which spy messages are transposed--like the net- works of puns and repetitions sent out across all of Hitchcock's films, binding them in transformative systems of revision and commentary-- is not just something sweet and tasty, like the bonbon of film entertain- ment itself. We know from related "political thrillers" like the first Man Who Knew Too Much, that this semiotic and migratory black hole is also allied to an eclipsed sun (the skeet-shoot, the fake Temple of Sun Worshipers which parodies a movie house and is the assassin Abbott's front [again, Lorre]), to excrement,3 to little black dogs, and again, in Secret Agent, to obliterating sound, feet, letters, and so on. The "secret agency" pointed at in the title, in short, is a kind of mne- monic trace, neither living nor dead, void of semantic content yet that on which all switchboard relays or translation or even visibility (read- ing) seems to rest. As political thrillers go, the job of Gielgud and Lorre seems inverted: Britain will thrive, the course of the world or world war will be maintained, official history of a sort will seem secure, if Marvin is kept from Constantinople, if the mnemonic network of marking on which cinema and "life" depend is not disclosed, does not alter the material premises of cognition. "Britain," again, names not the good guys for the early Hitchcock, but a certain hermeneutic state of relapse or effacement with elaborate policial networks, much as Marvin in this scenario might well count for the "knowledge" of a critic such as de Man (or, clearly, Hitchcock). What is momentarily disclosed
is the dependency of all programmatized perception on mnemonic pre- recordings, like the record player resting on a toilet in Gielgud's hotel room against the backdrop of which Lorre throws a famous tantrum. And this state has long arms. With Gielgud unable to "act" (in any sense) and Lorre unable to stop acting or acting up (in every sense), and with Marvin speeding on his train (that is, cinema) to Constantinople, it is left for the British spymaster back in London to order an air strike of the train altogether--to brutally intervene in any narrative devel- opment and simply command the latter's total derailment by extra- cinematic means. Not surprisingly within this system of specular doubles on which aesthetic politics here resides--yet on which, in turn, the "world" depends--this is done by a letter, by "old man R," as the master agent is alone named (that is, like the "R" of Rebecca, insignia of a reclaiming repetition that Marvin would break with). The victory of Britain is nothing more or less than the pretended victory of an aes- thetic state over a knowledge of technicity identifiable with Hitchcock's posthuman project.
Thus, when Hitchcock repeats certain names and syllabic or even letteral patterns across his films, they appear to link up in active net- works or mnemonic constellations--not "thematic" motifs so much as trace-chains confirming alternative modes of sense and perception (which is to say, other techniques of reading) at utter variance with the mimeticism of the film commodity. Such repetitions isolate specific signifiers--individual letters or letteral clusters, sounds (often drawn attention to with the phrase "sounds like" inserted into dialogue), vi- sual "puns," and citations--which may operate like monadic and no- madic switchboards whose proliferation continues to alter the afterlife not only of the film texts themselves (their cumulative interpretive lit- erature, their reception), but the literary or cultural mnemonics that they have become embedded in. 4 This operation, in ways a virtual sabo- tage for Hitchcock of interiorist and oculist ideology (which is to say mimeticism tout court), has the added effect of supplanting, exterioriz- ing, transposing the very memory reserve that this oeuvre would have been framed by or staged within. Memory, temporality, will have been or come to be altered. This may be the materialistic and technical crossing that many "political" plots in Hitchcock's "thrillers" covertly point to, circle, and defer. Such a focus finds an unexpected parallel with the "late" essays of de Man as well, where there is a heightened focus on the problems of memory, materiality, and intervention. Of course, in making this connection, an obvious link would be Benjamin,
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whose treatment of cinema parallels his own revision of allegory, on which de Man draws--and which, in fact, de Man may be seen as a penultimate technician or engineer of on the microtextual, micro- mnemonic level. I will suggest that the problem probed by the "late" de Man as a certain passage, shift, or direction which this project involves--an encounter with a formal aporia as the premise for such a "direction"--is at work in Hitchcock's cinematic project as well, and is purveyed as a political task (and task of translation), one represented by the "villain's" attempted crossing of political borders with a trans- formative and explosive secret that has the potential to alter the world (say, Mr. Memory--a transparent figure of a certain cinematic project-- in The 39 Steps, or the micro-film in North by Northwest). We will ask, in the process, what sort of politics is practiced here, why this en- tails an altered definition of the "aesthetic" itself, and why the statist enemy will be identified not with this or that political ideology (fascist, democratic, capitalist) but with an entire regime of cognition, interpre- tation, and experience governed by what de Man calls, more generally, the "aesthetic state. " Such questions frame, of course, the delayed pub- lication of Aesthetic Ideology,5 as well as the event or nonevent posed by its (impossible) reinsertion in today's alien critical registers.
Cinema, for Benjamin, is not a machine of mimetic reproduction so much as technical analogue of mnemonic orders that project and, im- plicitly, intervene in or alter the perceptual sensorium (which is al- ways already hermeneutically programmed and constituted): a virtual mnemotechnic. In "The Work of Art" essay, Benjamin links cinema to a technology associated with an alteration in the entire history and field of perception ("the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence" [222], "the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception" [235]): this "constitutes the shock effect of the film. . .
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which the materiality of the sign is grasped again, and grandly played with, but precisely as "phenomenal substance," as part of a world of stuffs and perceptions. It is this tourniquet of the world's substance and the sign's substance, or better still, of the texture and structure of sentences, say, or metaphors, or passages of paint, and the texture and structure of experience--it is this twisting together and analogizing of procedures and intuitions that the aesthetic brings up to the surface of signifying, and lets us do again.
What would it be like for art not to do this, or at least to try to? Not like Ce? zanne, by the looks of it; and maybe not like any artwork we would count as such. Nonetheless, in practice the very twisting and grasping can lead artworks, on occasion, to come to suspect--and to voice or envisage the suspicion--that maybe what they are doing is not analogizing or "realizing" at all. This suspicion is not antiaesthetic. But it is a kind of horror, and elation, at what the work of form might be about. I sense that horror and elation in Ce? zanne.
No doubt the only way I can make the sense seem less bald and ominous is by showing what I mean by it in relation to particular se- quences of brushmarks. But before I do that, let me state again what questions seem to me worth asking of pictures with the category "aes- thetic" in mind. From the cluster of problems touched on, I take two. First, the notion of the aesthetic as a moment of adequacy of form to content, in which form is revealed as the necessary clothing of an intui- tion. And second (another way of putting the same point, essentially), the notion of the aesthetic as a moment or dimension of representation in which the phenomenality of the sign is retrieved. The aesthetic--I quote de Man directly in his discussion of Kant's Critique of Judgment-- "is always based on an adequacy of the mind to its physical object, based on what is referred to . . . as the concrete representation of ideas-- Darstellung der Ideen. "10 The relation of form to content, in other words, is rooted in a relation of mind to world. The one relation analo- gizes the other. And the world, as I have been saying, is unthinkable save as a texture and structure of phenomena, of sensate "experiences. "
These givens, to repeat, are built deep into the category "aesthetic" as it comes down to us. And of course Ce? zanne's achievement has been taken as an object lesson of them. "In a picture like 'L'Estaque'"--this is Roger Fry in 1910, discussing a painting now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (figure 5)--"it is difficult to know whether one ad- mires more the imaginative grasp which has built so clearly for the an- swering mind the splendid structure of the bay, or the intellectualised
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sensual power which has given to the shimmering atmosphere so defi- nite a value. "11 I retain from this sentence the phrases "built so clearly for the answering mind" and "intellectualised sensual power. " They seem to me the aesthetic in a nutshell; and no doubt Fry meant us to catch the echo of Hegel above all in the latter.
The assumption of adequacy and totality, then, and the assumption of sensuousness, of "imaginative grasp": I am saying the concept "aes- thetic" is built around these terms. Now, in the case of Ce? zanne the first assumption has always been challengeable. Obviously there is a side to Ce? zanne's art that lends itself to a discourse of unfinish, dispari- ty, and inadequacy of sorts. His pictures are "exactes parfois jusqu'au de? sarroi"--this is a critic writing as early as 1892. 12 The point is that excitement or bewilderment at Ce? zanne's disequilibrium (which is an- other word that crops up in the early responses) has coexisted entirely peacefully with the structure of assumptions about the aesthetic I have outlined so far, and with our taking Ce? zanne to exemplify them. Disarray and inadequation either function as a kind of brilliant des- cant to totality in the pictures--"the splendid structure of the bay" and so forth--or they are taken as the form totality assumes in this (mod- ern) instance. Modern experience just is this evenness and disequilibri- um in high tension. It looks as though the notion of the aesthetic in Ce? zanne is only going to be open to radical reworking if the second as- sumption is put in doubt. That is, if we start from the (obviously un- congenial) supposition that the individual brushmarks in Ce? zanne do not analogize or open onto "sensations" or "phenomena": that they posit a lack or failure of any such opening or analogy; and that they do so precisely in their material individuality as marks--their atomized facticity, their separateness.
I know these are counterintuitive suggestions. ("Counterintuitive" about sums it up. ) And I do not want to revel in their disagreeableness. They are disagreeable, and on the face of it preposterous, because they seem to go against the qualities that critics and philosophers have al- ways valued in Ce? zanne--what looks like vividness and openness to the least incident of seeing. Of course vividness and openness are the right terms. But I want to ask: Out of what circuit of intentions and assumptions, and intentions and assumptions defeated in practice, or altered beyond recognition (including the painter's)--out of what cir- cuit does the vividness come? I am not suggesting, again to state the obvious, that Ce? zanne's project did not exist under the auspices of nineteenth-century positivism. Of course it did. He was a phenomenal-
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ist through and through--made for Merleau-Ponty to hero-worship. But the question is: What did "existing under the auspices" actually give rise to in his case? A doubting, anxious not-quite-confirmation of that phenomenalism, or its doing to death in particular passages of paint? (Maybe, in the Large Bathers, in pictures as a whole? )
I shall ask these questions mainly of Trees and Houses (figure 6), a painting in the Walter-Guillaume collection in the Orangerie, done probably in the late 1880s. But before I do, let me head off a possible answer to them. I do not think the one given by Clement Greenberg, interesting as it is, gets us very far. 13 In the painting Ce? zanne did over the last two decades or so of his life, it is simply not the case, in my ex- perience, that the logic of marks can be plausibly rehearsed in terms of a positivist phenomenalism somehow instinctively adjusted to the "facts" of the picture's, or picture making's, physical limitations. The materialism of Ce? zanne's markmaking, I want to argue, acknowledges no such phenomenal constraints: it is not surreptitiously or naively structured around another phenomenalism, of "flatness," "rectangu- larity," and so forth. Maybe there is a brief period in Ce? zanne's career, for three or four years around 1880, when Greenberg's descriptions work. For a while the paintings are put together largely out of nearly identical, same-size-and-direction mosaic dabs. But even here the invo- cation of "flatness" and "rectangularity" has a willed, self-consuming edge to it. It is hyperbolic and mechanical: more like a parody of simple- minded materialism than an attempt to pursue it. And once the mosaic stroke is abandoned (as it is), it reappears (as it constantly does here and there) always as false certainty--a hopeless, sporadic afterlife of positivism, lost in the imaginary world from which it struggles to get free.
There is some of this in Trees and Houses. Part of the lower front wall of the houses, as well as the space between them, is done in up- right bricks of light brown and mauve, as if to imply a dusting of undergrowth. The same stroke is tilted to left and right of vertical and repeated in the midground fields, or along the path that cuts through them, and at place after place in the trees--sometimes believably as moss or foliage, sometimes as free-floating notation. I would not deny that these kinds of marks (art historians call them "the constructive stroke") contribute to the painting's overall evenness and delicacy; nor that evenness of attention is the picture's most touching quality. But the regular brushmarks are always on the verge--and sometimes over
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it--of not "applying" to anything in particular. And they coexist with other sorts of painterly activity, which make their placid atomism look not so much tentative as willfully flimsy.
Look at the tall central house, for example, the one with the red roof. Look in particular at the marks of the brush that are meant to put together, into a single sequence on the flat, the line of the house's red eaves, the faint shadow the eaves cast, and the gentle curve of a branch half-concealing them, seemingly in a plane parallel to the housefront but much nearer to us. Then, focusing on the right-hand side of this already small area, look at the triangle of sunlit wall be- tween the eaves and the branch, and a second branch, maybe sprouting from the other, which seems as though it must be twisting toward us and down, crossing in front of the branch it sprouts from. We have only just started. In the angle of the two branches there is an area of deep blue; it consists, when we look closer, of two broad smears of gray-blue and off-white paint, the first overlapping the thicker branch and the second apparently painted over a line of blue-violet just above it--the line we are invited to take as the twisting branch beginning. The off-white, as I say, seems to override the twisting branch; but the branch fights back. There is a final thin trace of paint--purplish, more cursive and transparent--painted in turn on top of the shadow line. And then on the underside of the thicker branch there is another kind of paintmark, pale orange-brown picked up from the top of the roof and applied more lightly and dryly, putting the thick branch in silhou- ette. And an oilier brown on the shuttered window just to the right, which half invades the blue-purple of the branch that hides its top edge. And all of this--trying now to move back from the local adjust- ments and see what they do to the wider pattern of branches and shut- ters and plaster and tile--all this ferocious involution of markmaking in and around the intersecting branches is constantly altering their re- lation to the open, more insubstantial, floating "flats" of the other two windows to the left, and the lighter, more discontinuous brown of the branch bisecting the house below. And so on.
I choose to focus on this area of Trees and Houses partly because it seized my attention in the Orangerie, and once seen was endlessly ab- sorbing. And also because it strikes me as typical of many other such organizing incidents in Ce? zanne's work--places where foreground and background come into active, difficult touch, or where a flat screen of forms, drawn across the picture surface almost like a veil, is punctuated by lines or planes that lead back or forward, sometimes violently, into
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depth. These are the pictures' seams, as it were, and have to be tightly stitched; whereas a lot of the pictures' broader visual material--the ap- proximations of grass and undergrowth here, or the possible signs of foliage--can be left flapping comparatively loose (the looseness also being part of Ce? zanne's proposal). Edges are difficult. Foreground and background are potentially crutches for the mind, which painting should put in question. There are plenty of paintings--The Village of Gardanne in Brooklyn (figure 7) is one--in which the spatial seams of the subject have been left mostly empty, as if the painter had deferred them to a time of totalization that never arrived.
The question I promised to ask of the Trees and Houses sequence is what pattern of intention drove it on, and how the balance within it shifted between a wild analogizing of paint and vision (paint and world) and an intimation, in the brushmarks themselves, of their com- ing to obey a different logic--not a logic of analogy at all. I am not looking for an iconoclastic answer to the question, in which we discov- er that Fry and Greenberg and Merleau-Ponty got Ce? zanne all wrong. On the contrary, I want to go with them as far as possible. "Ce? zanne," said Roger Fry,
inheriting from the Impressionists the general notion of accepting the purely visual patchwork of appearance, concentrated his imagination so intensely upon certain oppositions of tone and color that he became able to build up and, as it were, re-create form from within; and at the same time that he re-created form he re-created it clothed with color, light, and atmosphere all at once. It is this astonishing synthetic power that amazes me in his work. 14
I think what we are looking at is a fair example of such concentration and synthesis. And partly--partly--it answers to Fry's line of thought. Take the violent forward movement of the smaller branch. I inter- pret the to-and-fro of paintmarks around this movement--the evi- dence of fine-tuning and improvisation going on right up to the last minute, and maybe in a sense never having been brought to a stop--as Ce? zanne's trying to see if a play of direction, and one the eye seems not to be able to lay hold of completely, could be made as much part of an uninterrupted paint surface as the plain face of the house next door. I guess Fry's "purely visual patchwork" is helpful here. Putting aspects of the world into the same surface is, for Ce? zanne, putting them into the eye. But that does not grasp the kind of effort going into the twisted branch. Its being in the eye is, as I understand Ce? zanne's metaphysic,
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its being over there in space, being "outside" not "inside," taking place at a distance, staying separate and self-sufficient. This is the Ce? zanne effect. The world has to be pictured as possessed by the eye, indeed "totalized" by it; but always on the basis of exploding or garbled or ut- terly intractable data--data that speak to the impossibility of synthesis even as they seem to provide the sensuous material for it.
Now I shall make my iconoclastic move; because in the end I won- der whether these are the terms in which the sequence of marks we have been looking at makes sense. Do the marks follow, or go on fol- lowing, a logic of visual sensation? Are synthesis and re-creation the right words for the force that drives them? Or is the logic they come to pursue generated out of a different set of opportunities and con- straints, which sounds in the telling a bit less exalted? Let us call them "formal tactics" as opposed, say, to "imaginative grasp"; material ac- cidents as opposed to phenomenal complexity; ironic, automatic facili- ty, not "intellectualised sensual power. " Fanatic display and technical imperiousness, not Fry's "supreme spontaneity, as though he had al- most made himself the passive, half-conscious instrument of some di- recting power. "15 In the realm of the aesthetic, spontaneity is always presented as a ventriloquism of the world, a giving over of will to intui- tion. But why? Why should the will not be in unflinching charge--a will that is ultimately happy to settle for a world made up of separate and incommensurable realms, each one of sheer procedure? Are not the marks we have been concentrating on procedural with a vengeance? Are not they more like a Nietzsche aphorism than a paragraph of Proust? Fierce, declarative, and self-canceling, not edging toward the truth of consciousness step by qualified step.
These are rhetorical questions, I know. And as usual the answer to them is yes and no. Let me give the answer first in general terms, and then see how it applies to the sequence of brushmarks.
Ce? zanne's is the most radical project of nineteenth-century posi- tivism. It stakes everything on the possibility of re-creating the struc- ture of experience out of that experience's units. I am sure Fry was right in this basic hypothesis. But the very radicality of the project de- livers it: because this painting stakes everything on the notion of the unitary, the immediate, the bare minimum of sensation, the momentary- and-material "ping"; because it goes on and on searching for ways to insist that here, in this dab, is the elementary particle out of which see- ing is made; because it fetishizes the singular, it discovers the singular
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as exactly not the form of "experience. " It shows us a way of world- making in which the very idea of a "world"--the very idea of totality, or synthesis, or Fry's three-times-repeated word power--is not drawn from some prior texture of unit-sensations "out there," and therefore (potentially) "in here. " It follows that notions as seemingly basic as foreground and background may no longer apply. (Look back at the sequence of brushmarks in Trees and Houses and see if they do. ) Maybe not even "inside" and "outside. " Nor "experience" and "representa- tion. " Nor "now" and "then. "
Of course, what we get of this other way of world-making in Ce? - zanne is no more than a glimpse. But "glimpse" in Ce? zanne exactly does not mean that the other possibility appears momentarily, or just round the edges of things. The glimpse is everywhere (in Ce? zanne's last two decades). The nonidentity of mark and marked is foundational. I call it a glimpse only because nonidentity of this sort cannot be thema- tized: it cannot once and for all replace the phenomenalism it shadows. It shadows that phenomenalism; it disperses and thins it out; it reveals the logic of the singular and re-creative to have nothing to do with the subject of sensation. If the reader then wants to know what phrase I would put in place of "subject of sensation"--and any one phrase is bound to be overstressed, or overneat--the one I would opt for is "ob- ject of the exercise. " The logic of the singular and constructive in Ce? zanne has nothing to do with the subject of sensation but everything to do with the object of the exercise. That formulation will do, as long as we do not allow "object" and "exercise" to collapse back into the familiar modernist version of phenomenalism--the sensuous reality being rediscovered "here," on the surface, where the picture is made. There is no "here" in painting. Picturing is not a physical matter--least of all in Ce? zanne, in the nine or ten (typical) marks we have been look- ing at. The exercise called picturing is a deep, notional, physically irre- trievable dimension--a dimension of social practice. And the object of the exercise in Ce? zanne is the object posited by that strange line of thought we call eighteenth- and nineteenth-century materialism--by that project pushed and stressed (as it very often was) to its utopian limits. The world of objects reached after in Ce? zanne, and laid before us in all its manifoldness, overtness, and pungency, could hardly signal its counterfactual status more clearly. It is a horizon of meaning, an al- ternative to experience, a contentment with nonidentity. Nobody is saying, least of all me, that such contentment could be lived in more than fitfully.
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The thing to recognize about the sequence of brushmarks, then, is that there is no one point within it at which the phenomenal is dis- placed by the material or "formal. " The displacement is there and not there from the start--in the very first mark of the sequence, supposing the terms first and sequence could ever be stabilized, which they cannot. There and not there all the way through: from (not-)first to (not-)last. This is the Ce? zanne effect. Always, at every point, there appears to be reference to the nth degree, fierce and immediate, punctual, acute: but always the reference is haunted by the fact of its precisely being (only) to the nth degree: that is, a touch or a point or a patch in a merely nu- merical, repetitive, indeed "formal" sequence, of degrees to the nth quantity, with this one only implying the nth--meaning the final, infi- nite place in the series, the nonnumerical, nonrepetitive, unpredictable moment at which reference is secured. This is the anxiety, and also the utopian horizon, that drives the fanatic process forward. The next mark might (somehow) not be a mere sign in a sequence but a true fig- ure of things seen--a figure that cancels the marks preceding, or raises them to a different power.
Interminability and hesitation in Ce? zanne are thus not rooted in an epistemology of addition--though of course some such naive positivism is operative, at the level of ideological framing and self- understanding--but in an (equally naive) Hegelian prevarication, a waiting and hoping for the moment when the addition of units turns quantity into quality. What goes on in practice is not so much addi- tion as erasure: that is what the logic of the nine or ten brushmarks suggests. Or maybe "erasure" is overstressed. Call it "interference," then: a radical (at times a positively melodramatic) interference of each unit with those it is put next to: the hope being, I think, that erasure and interference might save the mere sequence from itself, and make its unities into a world. Ce? zanne is looking for a mark that would not be a further "one" in a series but a kind of "zero," with the power to replace the dab after dab of addition by connectedness and unity--by a truly magical multiplier effect. There is no such mark, of course. Effects like this are beyond painting's grasp. But the fact that they are is precisely what generates vividness in the sequence of marks that concerns us. The sequence is required to show that no feat of painterly energy, no moment of "supreme spontaneity," no demonstration of "intellectualised sensual power," can ever perform the aesthetic conjuring trick. Vividness, then, is the vividness of de- feat. The vividness of procedure. Even this, says the painting, cannot
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zanne 109
secure the phenomenality of the sign. You see why the "even this" had to be so monstrously good.
Therefore, consistency of touch and color, the guarantor of phenome- nality in Ce? zanne, is always in his painting the other face of disequilib- rium or overload, or dispersal of energy. Evenness in his work has a forced, or counterfactual, quality. It is a device, not a condition. Put a Ce? zanne next to a Corot and that is immediately clear.
Writers about Ce? zanne have often felt called on to answer this ques- tion: What, do we think, was going on in the painter's mind during the famous endless minutes he sometimes spent between brushstrokes-- the minutes Vollard and others recall so ruefully? Any answer is going to be figurative. I imagine him looking around, as it were, for a rule to follow for the next mark, and hesitating because he wished not to rec- ognize that no such rule existed. He did not want to know that any next mark he might make would be accurate and inaccurate at once; and accurate above all by reason of what he would do to it--the force he would apply to it more than the sight of it in relation to whatever it was of. Marks respond to each other as rhymes, or beats. But it was ex- actly this being always inside a metric or a rhyme scheme that Ce? zanne would not accept.
Look at the way any sequence of marks, even one that strikes out for the detail of optical experience as unflinchingly as that in Trees and Houses, is overtaken by a logic of contrivance, not perception. Look at the way something so basic and constitutive of painting as "calling on the accidents of process"--which no one in their right mind (certainly not Ce? zanne) objects to--sets off an unstoppable automatism whereby accidents become what the process is directed to as well as by. And the words we need to describe the process are contingency, performance, and will, not necessity, imagination, and "half-conscious instrumentali- ty. " There is a sentence of Roger Fry's that seems to me to sum these things up. I admire it greatly, and find myself disagreeing with it more or less phrase by phrase. "[Ce? zanne's] composition," he says, "at first sight looks accidental, as though he had sat down before any odd cor- ner of nature and portrayed it; and yet the longer one looks the more satisfactory are the correspondences one discovers, the more certainly felt, beneath its subtlety, is the architectural plan; the more absolute, in spite of their astounding novelty, do we find the color harmonies. "16 Felt certainty, absoluteness, architecture, satisfactory correspondence: whatever the noise on the aesthetic message, says Fry, the message
110 T. J. Clark
comes over finally loud and clear. The Ce? zanne I am proposing is one where none of these terms of value applies, and the list of implied con- tingent negatives--I am precisely not going to name them, I want them to go on unappeasedly haunting Fry's positives--is what gives this painting its strength.
I said I did not want to end with an iconoclastic answer to the Ce? zanne problem, but inevitably my rhetoric has drifted that way. Forced and automatism are hard words. I should try to amend their tone. I realize that in putting "accident, performance, and will" in place of "neces- sity, imagination, and openness" I look to be preaching a heartless creed. But what if I settled for the words "practice, exercise, and ob- ject" rather than "spontaneity, experience, and subject"? At least then the ethical balance becomes less clear. We know what violence has been done in the name of the latter triad's brand of organicism. In any case, ultimately I refuse to go along with the notion that an aesthetic of performance and will is, by its nature, less humane and empathetic than one of totality and phenomenon. I do not think it need lead us in Nietzsche's direction. Part of Ce? zanne's importance to me is that in him it does not.
What other direction, then? Answering this question without falling into bathos involves me saying what I think Ce? zanne's art is "about"-- beyond the trying and failing to stay true to the facts of vision, which is certainly a main part of it. I flinch from doing this, or doing so more explicitly than in my description of the Ford Mont Sainte-Victoire, be- cause of course the proposals about the world and our knowledge of it--and I am sure Ce? zanne's art contains such proposals--are deeply embedded in technique. That is part of the pictures' argument. "Track- ing shots are a question of ethics. " Yet if I do not at least sketch an an- swer, I shall have colluded in what seems to me the dreariest remainder of the early-twentieth-century myth of Ce? zanne: the myth of his paint- ings' ineffability. Because a picture is not a proposition does not mean that it cannot be translated into one or more. Technical and ineffable are not cognates.
Let me put side by side the Baltimore Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bibe? mus Quarry (figure 3) and the painting, probably done around the same time, now called A Pyramid of Skulls (figure 8). I re- alize the pairing is tendentious, and that A Pyramid of Skulls is excep- tional in Ce? zanne work; equally, when I suggest that we read the one (more typical) painting in light of the other, I am not meaning to elicit
Phenomenality and Materiality in Ce? zanne 111
some daft detection of a hidden iconography. The two central rocks in the quarry are not disguised skulls, and Mont Sainte-Victoire is neither a skull nor a pyramid. Yet I do want to say that the view from Bibe? mus is at one level a view from the tomb; the skulls intend, by the simple act of pyramiding, to give form to death and therefore survive it. (The pyramid is the first and last form of the aesthetic illusion. )
You see my problem. Because the embedded propositions in Ce? - zanne are so simple and primordial, and so entirely dependent on the ironic feats of matter--of paint--which breathe life and death back into them, putting them into words is exactly betraying "what they have to say" about material existence; and about where the recognition of the human world as one of accident, device, persuasion, and will might ac- tually lead us. Not necessarily, it seems, into a realm of deep nihilism or contingent power. But certainly into some kind of graveyard or charnelhouse.
I died for Beauty--but was scarce Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain In an adjoining Room--
He questioned softly "Why I failed"? "For Beauty", I replied--
"And I--for Truth--Themself are One-- We Brethren, are", He said--
And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night-- We talked between the Rooms-- Until the Moss had reached our lips-- And covered up--our names--
We should not need Ce? zanne's picture Boy with a Skull (figure 9) to know that death is this painter's ultimate subject. Any of the later por- traits would convince us of that. In all of them costume and posture are rigid, and ineffectual, against the surrounding pressure of the void. Nature, in the landscapes, is Emily Dickinson's Moss. It goes on "deathless progressing to no death," "forever decaying and never to be decayed. " Its presence in the folds of Boy with a Skull's stiff tapestry, or on the tablecloth of Woman in Blue (figure 10), is no doubt quietly accurate about its normal place and function in Ce? zanne's bourgeois world. Most people are in no danger of dying for Beauty. Out there, on the other hand, is the mountain above the quarry. Nature reaching our
112 T. J. Clark
lips. Whether its deathly animation is consoling or enraging is some- thing, I believe, Ce? zanne's pictures never stop trying to decide.
NOTES
This essay owes much to conversations with Fred Orton and Kathryn Tuma. For Orton's de Manian reading of Ce? zanne and allegory, see Fred Orton, "(Painting) Out of Time," parallax, no. 3 (September 1996): 99-112. For Tuma's account of Ce? zanne and positivism (much more complex and historically responsible than the one gestured toward here), see Kathryn Tuma, "Ce? zanne, Lucretius and the Late Nineteenth-Century Crisis in Science," Ph. D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2000.
1. Paul de Man, "Hegel on the Sublime," in Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 111.
2. Paul de Man, "The Resistance to Theory," in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 10.
3. Paul de Man, "Kant's Materialism," in Aesthetic Ideology, 128.
4. Paul de Man, "Hypogram and Inscription," in Resistance to Theory, 37. 5. Paul Ce? zanne to E? mile Bernard, September 21, 1906, in Paul Ce? zanne,
Correspondance (Paris: Grasset, 1978), 326.
6. My thanks to Maureen Devine and Josephine Shea, head and assistant cura-
tors of the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House, for their patience and helpfulness during my visit there.
7. Richard Wollheim, "Ce? zanne and the Object," paper presented at a confer- ence, "Ce? zanne and the Aesthetic," National Gallery, London, 1996.
8. Paul Ce? zanne to his son, October 15, 1906, in Ce? zanne, Correspondance, 332.
9. Quoted in Kurt Badt, The Art of Ce? zanne, trans. Sheila Ogilvie (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), 181.
10. Paul de Man, "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," in Aesthetic Ideology, 88.
11. Roger Fry, "Art. The Post-Impressionists. --II," Nation, December 3, 1910, 402.
12. Georges Lecomte, "L'Impressionisme," Revue de l'E? volution Sociale (May 1892): 217. Compare the following sentence, on Ce? zanne's paintings: "Au temps he? roi? ques du naturalisme, on se plut a` exalter l'e? quilibre incertain de quelques-unes d'entre elles, leur bizarrerie fortuite, comme si l'art pouvait s'accommoder de dis- proportion et de de? se? quilibre. " Lecomte, at this point anarchist and Symbolist in his sympathies, is presumably relaying the terms of his friend Pissarro's enthusiasm for Ce? zanne in the 1870s.
13. See for instance, Clement Greenberg, "Ce? zanne and the Unity of Modern Art," in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986-93), 3:82-91. The fol- lowing sentences (88) sum up the argument: "No wonder he complained to the day of his death of his inability to 'realize. ' The aesthetic effect toward which his means urged was not that which his mind had conceived out of the desire for the organ- ized maximum of an illusion of solidity and depth. Every brushstroke that followed a fictive plane into fictive depth harked back by reason of its abiding, unequivocal
Phenomenality and Materiality in Ce? zanne 113
character as a mark made by a brush, to the physical fact of the medium; the shape and placing of that mark recalled the shape and position of the flat rectangle that was the original canvas, now covered with pigments that came from pots and tubes. Ce? zanne made no bones about the tangibility of the medium: there it was in all its grossness of matter. "
14. Fry, "The Post-Impressionists. --II," 402. 15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
114
Political Thrillers: Hitchcock, de Man, and Secret Agency in the "Aesthetic State"
Tom Cohen
The picture opens with a scene at St. Moritz, in Switzerland, because that's where I spent my honeymoon with my wife. From our window I could see the skating rink. And it occurred to me that we might start the picture by showing an ice-skater tracing numbers--eight--six--zero--two--on the rink. An espionage code, of course. But I dropped the idea.
--Hitchcock to Truffaut
(Teresa Wright) remembered, too, the endless series of word games and puns Hitchcock used to keep his cast and crew entertained.
--Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius
We must bear in mind that, fundamentally, there's no such thing as color; in fact, there's no such thing as face, because until the light hits it, it is nonexistent.
--Hitchcock to Truffaut
There is a road that goes from this notion of Schein to the notion of materiality.
--de Man, "Kant and Schiller"
Why the perpetual motif of writing beneath surfaces in Hitchcock--as a tracing visible, perhaps, by certain spy agencies alone, of letters, carved in the ice? In The 39 Steps, the secret formula is all letters and numbers; we are barely into Shadow of a Doubt when the motifs of telegrams and telepathy interface with a little girl's automaton-like, compulsive reading; Hitchcock, in his first overt cameo in a "talkie" (Blackmail) is interrupted reading on a train--that is, interrupted with- in a stasis within the accelerated semiosis of a cinemallographic shuttle. 1
If these examples among numerous others indicate, point to something else (and such pointing is the blackmailer Tracey's last, accusatory, yet cutoff gesture--as it will be that still of the Hitchcock opus, the last image of Family Plot), they point to an alternate scene of writing that has nothing to do with "pictures of people talking," and everything to do with an attempt to indict, displace, and politically subvert the consumerist logic of mimesis to which the history of film--and for that matter, "film theory"--has been linked. 2 Interestingly, this puts Hitchcock in contact at once with a Benjaminian practice, since the lat- ter's argument that film begins with a divestiture of "aura" is to say that it takes place as the abolition of much of what film theory has striven to restore--logics of identification, primarily, but also Oedipal maps, and the relapse of cultural studies into mimetic codes. This essay will attempt to ask where a rethinking of the trope of "materiality" through the late, and in many ways still unread, work of de Man strikes a strange accord not only with this other Hitchcock--a Hitchcock for whom the mnemonics of inscription has a political import that is irreducible--but with a transformation in the very terms of the cul- ture's hermeneutic program: what is called materiality, to be sure, but also the aesthetic, the political, "light," memory, and so on. Hitchcock's work is traversed with secret agents, yet the term itself, as in the film with John Gielgud and Peter Lorre so named, seems for him to ques- tion an irreducibly material question: that is, in a medium dependent on the projected repetition of old prints and mnemonic inscription-- like film or, perhaps, ideology--what kind of reflexive agency can in ef- fect reach into its own prerecordings to intervene in or alter history, which is at once to say the past and virtual futures?
Careful readers of Hitchcock's Secret Agent--pointedly evoked in the telescope shot of Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest--are not surprised that the turning point of the film is when Gielgud and Lorre end up at a Chocolate Factory in a multilingual Switzerland. The two ineffective and bumbling actants are tracking a "secret agent" tellingly named Marvin (Robert Young), tellingly since Hitchcock's ceaseless recurrence to the syllable Mar- in proper names draws atten- tion to an interrogation of marking that pervades this work. On the success of this disclosure of identity and reflexive chase, the film's nar- rative MacGuffin pretends, the outcome of the first world war will hang, which is to say, the fate of Britain, the "world," and so on. In fact, Marvin will have to be stopped on a train headed for Constantinople-- that is, a trope for Hitchcock of a certain cognitive realization echoed
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116 Tom Cohen
elsewhere in names such as Conway, or Constance, or Conrad, or Victor Constantine (Family Plot). What is interesting is not that it is the American "college boy"--irritating, mock-flirtatious, and overlooked-- who is the deadly agent, but that the Chocolate Factory is itself so misleading. Deafening and machinal, gigantic in its "expressionistic" troping of Lang's Metropolis, the conveyor belts that turn out the "chocolate" also purvey letters, notes in code and transliterated script sent out to all the other spies. The deafening machinal Chocolate Factory with its white-coated mutlilingual Swiss attendants and ridicu- lous gigantic churning wheels is termed the "Spies' Post Office. " The deafening roar is not new to the film: it suggests the reduction of all languages to sheer sound, a kind of Benjaminian reine Sprache, sug- gested in the first murder in Langenthal Kirche (Fritz Lang, language), where again a deafening single organ note and then a giant bell obliter- ate speech and leave us with the close-up shot of an almost deaf ear being shouted into by the linguistically incoherently and obscurely (non)ethnic and many-named General (Lorre).
The chocolate in which spy messages are transposed--like the net- works of puns and repetitions sent out across all of Hitchcock's films, binding them in transformative systems of revision and commentary-- is not just something sweet and tasty, like the bonbon of film entertain- ment itself. We know from related "political thrillers" like the first Man Who Knew Too Much, that this semiotic and migratory black hole is also allied to an eclipsed sun (the skeet-shoot, the fake Temple of Sun Worshipers which parodies a movie house and is the assassin Abbott's front [again, Lorre]), to excrement,3 to little black dogs, and again, in Secret Agent, to obliterating sound, feet, letters, and so on. The "secret agency" pointed at in the title, in short, is a kind of mne- monic trace, neither living nor dead, void of semantic content yet that on which all switchboard relays or translation or even visibility (read- ing) seems to rest. As political thrillers go, the job of Gielgud and Lorre seems inverted: Britain will thrive, the course of the world or world war will be maintained, official history of a sort will seem secure, if Marvin is kept from Constantinople, if the mnemonic network of marking on which cinema and "life" depend is not disclosed, does not alter the material premises of cognition. "Britain," again, names not the good guys for the early Hitchcock, but a certain hermeneutic state of relapse or effacement with elaborate policial networks, much as Marvin in this scenario might well count for the "knowledge" of a critic such as de Man (or, clearly, Hitchcock). What is momentarily disclosed
is the dependency of all programmatized perception on mnemonic pre- recordings, like the record player resting on a toilet in Gielgud's hotel room against the backdrop of which Lorre throws a famous tantrum. And this state has long arms. With Gielgud unable to "act" (in any sense) and Lorre unable to stop acting or acting up (in every sense), and with Marvin speeding on his train (that is, cinema) to Constantinople, it is left for the British spymaster back in London to order an air strike of the train altogether--to brutally intervene in any narrative devel- opment and simply command the latter's total derailment by extra- cinematic means. Not surprisingly within this system of specular doubles on which aesthetic politics here resides--yet on which, in turn, the "world" depends--this is done by a letter, by "old man R," as the master agent is alone named (that is, like the "R" of Rebecca, insignia of a reclaiming repetition that Marvin would break with). The victory of Britain is nothing more or less than the pretended victory of an aes- thetic state over a knowledge of technicity identifiable with Hitchcock's posthuman project.
Thus, when Hitchcock repeats certain names and syllabic or even letteral patterns across his films, they appear to link up in active net- works or mnemonic constellations--not "thematic" motifs so much as trace-chains confirming alternative modes of sense and perception (which is to say, other techniques of reading) at utter variance with the mimeticism of the film commodity. Such repetitions isolate specific signifiers--individual letters or letteral clusters, sounds (often drawn attention to with the phrase "sounds like" inserted into dialogue), vi- sual "puns," and citations--which may operate like monadic and no- madic switchboards whose proliferation continues to alter the afterlife not only of the film texts themselves (their cumulative interpretive lit- erature, their reception), but the literary or cultural mnemonics that they have become embedded in. 4 This operation, in ways a virtual sabo- tage for Hitchcock of interiorist and oculist ideology (which is to say mimeticism tout court), has the added effect of supplanting, exterioriz- ing, transposing the very memory reserve that this oeuvre would have been framed by or staged within. Memory, temporality, will have been or come to be altered. This may be the materialistic and technical crossing that many "political" plots in Hitchcock's "thrillers" covertly point to, circle, and defer. Such a focus finds an unexpected parallel with the "late" essays of de Man as well, where there is a heightened focus on the problems of memory, materiality, and intervention. Of course, in making this connection, an obvious link would be Benjamin,
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118 Tom Cohen
whose treatment of cinema parallels his own revision of allegory, on which de Man draws--and which, in fact, de Man may be seen as a penultimate technician or engineer of on the microtextual, micro- mnemonic level. I will suggest that the problem probed by the "late" de Man as a certain passage, shift, or direction which this project involves--an encounter with a formal aporia as the premise for such a "direction"--is at work in Hitchcock's cinematic project as well, and is purveyed as a political task (and task of translation), one represented by the "villain's" attempted crossing of political borders with a trans- formative and explosive secret that has the potential to alter the world (say, Mr. Memory--a transparent figure of a certain cinematic project-- in The 39 Steps, or the micro-film in North by Northwest). We will ask, in the process, what sort of politics is practiced here, why this en- tails an altered definition of the "aesthetic" itself, and why the statist enemy will be identified not with this or that political ideology (fascist, democratic, capitalist) but with an entire regime of cognition, interpre- tation, and experience governed by what de Man calls, more generally, the "aesthetic state. " Such questions frame, of course, the delayed pub- lication of Aesthetic Ideology,5 as well as the event or nonevent posed by its (impossible) reinsertion in today's alien critical registers.
Cinema, for Benjamin, is not a machine of mimetic reproduction so much as technical analogue of mnemonic orders that project and, im- plicitly, intervene in or alter the perceptual sensorium (which is al- ways already hermeneutically programmed and constituted): a virtual mnemotechnic. In "The Work of Art" essay, Benjamin links cinema to a technology associated with an alteration in the entire history and field of perception ("the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence" [222], "the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception" [235]): this "constitutes the shock effect of the film. . .
