No More Learning

Let me start with the picture Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Cha^teau Noir, now in the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House museum (figure 1). The painting was probably done not long before Ce? zanne died--maybe as late as 1904. Most of the things I shall say about it are true only if lighting conditions are good. In most reproductions the picture's blues are too glossy, or else too grayed and sullen. But given steady north day- light (here I am guessing), or under a reasonably sympathetic mixture of tungsten and neon (which is how the picture was shown to me),6 color and texture, and color and stroke size, work on each other to aereate--almost levitate--the whole thing. The blues are translucent, floating into and over the answering parallelograms of green. The mountain looks crystalline, made of a substance not quite opaque, not quite diaphanous; natural, obviously, but having many of the charac- teristics--the crumpled look, the piecemeal unevenness--of an object put together by hand.
Color is crucial to this effect, and deeply perplexing. There is a bal- ance of grayed (though often semitransparent) blues, strong greens, pinks, light opaque ochers. The stroke is a choppy, unlovely, inch-to- two-inch rhythm of wedges, hooks, and scrubbed squares. "D'une forme au travail rebelle. " It looks almost as if Ce? zanne was deliberate- ly avoiding the smaller-scale dabs and curlicues of his classic pictures of Mont Sainte-Victoire--the ones in the Courtauld and Phillips collec- tions, for example (figure 2), or the Baltimore Museum quarryface with the mountain looming above (figure 3)--and trying for a hard- edgedness and angularity of touch, carried over from certain aspects of his watercolors. Carried over but also broadened, flattened--I should say, brutalized.
Greens flood the foreground. The farther away from the picture one
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stands, the more the greens come into their own--because there the middle range of blues can be seen to rest and feed on them, drawing up patch after patch of the wind-blown, slightly unstable color into its steel mesh. A lot of the greens were put on late, over the blues and grays, as if recoiling from their implacability.
Over the left peak of the mountain sits a green "cloud," with even a half-hidden scratching of red in the middle of it. What the cloud does, visually, is pull the mountain back closer to the picture surface. If you screen it out, the green foreground and midground loom too large and close, and the final escarpment goes deep into distance. The cloud lightens the mountain, and does not allow the dark left slope to pre- dominate. Part of the reason most reproductions overdo the picture's sobriety is that they do not give the green cloud its due. In the flesh it is hard to keep your eyes off it.
Yet the color overall is inhuman: the reproductions do not get it completely wrong. It is not the color of rock or foliage, nor a blending of the two. It is crystalline, as I said--not resistant to light, not reflec- tive or refractive. Light seems to go part way through the blues and greens, or get inertly trapped underneath them. The resulting texture is inorganic. The color is at an infinite remove from appetite, foodstuff, or flesh.
This only goes to make the bodily suggestions built into the land- scape's midground all the more telling once they present themselves. And surely they do before long. The main edges and declivities of the landscape lend themselves irresistibly to physiognomic reading-in. There are limbs, buttocks, thighs, maybe breasts, a mons veneris with dark pubic hair. A languid body enjoying the sun, prone and glistening, under a plumped-up patterned coverlet. A body of cut glass or faceted flint. An aged face, eyes screwed up against the dazzle.
Richard Wollheim has pointed out that often in Ce? zanne access to a landscape is partly halted, or at least slowed down, by an empty strip in the foreground, echoing and strengthening the picture's bottom edge. 7 A good example would be the lower four inches or so of Sea at L'Estaque (figure 4), which look like the top of a wall, or the ground plane of a terrace on which we are supposed to be standing. Wollheim characteristically wants us to understand this stopping place as an invi- tation to moderate our eager appropriation of the world beyond: to build a measure of distance and inaccessibility into our dealings with it, and therefore psychological poise: in the end to know it more deeply. Maybe so. But of course the point in making the comparison here (and
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something of a Wollheim kind could be said of the Phillips and Baltimore versions of the mountain, with their incomplete foreground trees) is to have the lack of barrier or entry plane in the Ford picture register as the great fact--the loss of bearings or limits--I think it is. The segment of blue holding the picture's bottom left corner strikes me as the vestige or parody of a structure Ce? zanne has deliberately denied himself. No poise or slowness here. We go straight to the middle ground; that is, straight to the impossible object--the nonhuman, physiognomically teeming surface "over there where the mountain is," not remote but not nearby. Somewhere a viewer cannot quite place. The painting is naive (but also humane and understanding) about our wish to have that middle distance be our world, invested with "the uncontrollable power of the letter. " Everything is metaphor in it. Mountains are ex- cuses for bodies. But equally, the picture is certain that it can put a stop to fantasy (to the Unconscious's endless reading-in and gobbling up and multiplication of part-objects) by the singularity of its color and texture. They will make the mountain a mountain again--put it at a determinate distance. Make it an object that in its whole structure and materiality, as opposed to mere accidents of surface, has nothing to do with us and our script.
This is quintessential Ce? zanne, I think: no doubt harder and fiercer than usual, but with a ferocity and hardness that are always waiting in the wings of the graver, more elaborate structures, ready to transfigure them. (The trees in front of the Baltimore quarryface, for instance, do not ultimately put up much of a fight against the attractions of the wall beyond them: in terms of touch and substance, they are sucked into the general firestorm of yellows. ) We are treated in the Ford picture to the spectacle of two kinds of understanding of the material world con- fronting each other nakedly, with no other mediation than the painter's will. "Les sensations faisant le fond de mon affaire, je crois e^tre im- pe? ne? trable"8 (Since what I am doing is grounded in sensations, I be- lieve myself impenetrable). Nietzsche is supposed to have said that art in the late nineteenth century was "the last metaphysical activity with- in European nihilism. "9 Kurt Badt, who quotes the phrase, wants us to believe it was Ce? zanne's paintings, particularly ones like that in the Ford House, that Nietzsche had in mind.
What makes the Ford picture a touchstone for me is the way its vision of nature is both the most openly, naively physiognomic that Ce? zanne ever did, and at the same time the most remote and indifferent to human wishes. The least habitable, the most anthropomorphized. The most
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like a body, the least like an organism. Dreamlike and machinelike. The two contrary qualities depend on each other, I think: there could not have been such a free flow of desire and analogy if it had not taken place in such an artificial, unplaceable medium: if the landscape body had not also been folded cardboard or hammered foil.
Hence the wedges and right angles and jostling quadrilaterals. Even to call them "handling" is to miss Ce? zanne's point, I believe: they seem to issue from a pattern book, or a slightly clumsy program or mecha- nism. No doubt at a distance they are taken up into the rustling, as- cending turbulence of the mountainside, and are roughly translatable into rocks and trees; but even as they do this, they never stop marking that ascension as a contrivance, assembled from disparate parts. A landscape is not an organism, they say: the way our mind and eyesight put together the pieces of a mineral and vegetable world and make a scene of them, is not, or need not be, analogous to the way a particular organism's parts are arranged and counterpoised--even if (and this too the painting is full of) landscape painting usually thrives on the idea that it is.
I do not mean to suggest, finally, that the painting's nonhuman tex- ture and color are ominous, or even uncanny. Those qualities would be a comfort, interpretatively speaking: they would put the mountain back into a familiar dialectic of remoteness and sublimity. But that is not where Ce? zanne has placed it. The nonsublime (but also nonintimate) character of his landscapes is what makes them truly unsettling. Color in the Ford picture has too much lightness and definiteness for it to usher in the notion of infinity. The object-world is uninhabited as op- posed to infinite: no more nor less elusive to the mind than the great carpet in the studio, folded ready for its still-life fruit. The colors are not even cold, ultimately. They are warmed just enough by the pinks and ochers. Nonhuman is not the same as hostile and refusing. The moun- tain may be a machine, but not one of metal or synthetics. Crystalline does not mean dead.
The farther I go in describing the two vectors of Ce? zanne's dealing with the material world, the less sure I am about how they align with one side or the other of de Man's phenomenality/materiality distinc- tion. For a start, the mountain has a nonhuman, mechanical aspect; but that character seems to me the key to its being established by the picture as a separate fact--a phenomenon--existing at an infinite re- move from our wish to make metaphors of its features (our attempts to give the mountain a "face"). And where, in any case, are we supposed
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to place this basic, unstoppable anthropomorphism, in terms of de Man's scheme? To the extent that it converts what it touches into bod- ies and body parts--and what else does it do? what else do we mean by metaphor? --it is a force that insists on the world's being all one sub- stance, one space chock-full of "experience. " That is why the world out there is representable at all. But the Ford picture is a wonderful demonstration of what de Man had most urgently to say about this proceeding: that the moment at which a text or depiction reaches out most irresistibly to a thing seen or experienced is also the moment at which it mobilizes the accidents and duplicities of markmaking most flagrantly, most outlandishly--all in the service of pointing through them, and somehow with them, to another body that is their guaran- tor. No wonder we can never be sure where materiality ends and phe- nomenality begins. Each thrives interminably on the other's images and procedures. An account of matter will never be rigorous enough, or vivid enough, to seal itself against the other's metaphorical world.
Right-thinking people (readers of Bourdieu and Jenny Holzer) have lately been taught to hold the category "aesthetic" in suspicion. It has an elitist flavor. It is supposed to usher in a world of universals, at the opposite end of the spectrum from concepts we need if our aim is to grasp the work of art's particularity--concepts like "history," "ideolo- gy," and "production. " (De Man could be clever and funny about the confidence implied here that "aesthetics" and "history" are notions that have nothing much to do with each other. ) I understand what caused the right-thinking suspicions in the first place, and in terms of sheer class gut feelings I still largely share them. The word Bloomsbury is my least favorite in the language. But as an approach to the problem of the aesthetic dimension, or impulse, in human affairs, I do not think high-minded disapproval gets us very far. In particular, not very far with pictures.
I need, therefore, to say briefly what is meant by the word aesthetic when I use it, and why I think I have to. Let me distinguish between the aesthetic impulse and the aesthetic illusion. The former is simply the urge people feel to make the form of their statements and descriptions embody, fully and adequately, the truth claims, or content, or meaning, of the statements and descriptions in question. This impulse seems to me ineradicable, and ordinary. In every production of a sentence (including even the stodgy ones I am producing now) formal elements of various kinds--intonation, assonance and dissonance, syntactical
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symmetries or redundancies, rhythm, timbre, pacing--play against the constative or performative sense, enforcing it, staging it, ironizing it, and so on. This is a priori. It has to do with the inherence of thinking and communicating in actual, peculiar stuff, and with that stuff pro- viding irresistible opportunities for persuasion. Form is a great per- suader, we think.
In this sense, then, the aesthetic is part of the stuff of life. We should give up feeling it belongs to Andre? Malraux. All the same, I want to keep a place for some suspicion of the category, partly because I think Ce? zanne (like de Man) may have shared it. There is such a thing as aes- thetic illusion. By that I mean the belief, or working assumption, that the aim of the aesthetic impulse can be fulfilled, at least locally, once and for all: that there are moments when form embodies truth in a way unassailable to further challenges, and independent of the mere "posi- tionality" of speakers, describers, and receivers. Philosophy has had many names for this moment, and often staked a great deal (maybe everything) on its existence. "The sensuous [or sensory] appearance of the Idea," was Hegel's formulation. The moment of passage, in other words--of stable or stabilizable relation--between Idea and world, or thinking and sensory appearance. The moment of unity or totality, of a felt adequacy between a statement's form and content: an adequacy which in the end is not dependent on the mere mechanics or materials of the formal process, because the aesthetic moment is that at which "form" reveals itself to be the clothing of an intuition (a true ingather- ing) of the world's order--its manifoldness, its belonging together in difference.
This brings me back to phenomenality, and the key idea in de Man's discussion of it: the "phenomenality of the sign. " The phrase does no more than slightly dramatize a deeply held, and commonsensical, as- sumption about the nature of signs and their power: the belief that signs or statements are part of a world we know through the senses--a world that is always already "experienced," made up of perceptions, intuitions, acts of consciousness--onto which the sign opens, or to which it belongs, or from which it derives its ultimate substance, its ac- tuality as audible and visual stuff. This language--this vocabulary of matter and sense--was threaded through my summary of the aesthetic case. Of course it was. For built into our very idea of the aesthetic mo- ment is the notion of the aesthetic rescuing us from abstraction, or from mere material production of persuasions, and putting the sign back in mind of its "world. " The aesthetic is that moment (this is the claim) at
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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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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
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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
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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.