No More Learning

De Man, in a nonclassical ensemble of his own individual texts, reads these texts as such "allegories of reading," partly classical and partly (and most fundamentally) nonclassical, partly general and partly unique, and so forth. For de Man, nonclassical configurations can only emerge by way of reading, each such reading being, again, unique, rather than in terms of a (independent) conceptual architecture. These readings do contain and enable the latter as well and make it nonclassical. De Man opens his reading of Kleist with a quotation from Schiller:
I know of no better image of a beautiful society than a well executed English dance, composed of many complicated figures and turns. A
Algebra and Allegory 79
80 Arkady Plotnitsky
spectator located on the balcony observes an infinite variety of criss- crossing motions which keep decisively but arbitrarily changing direc- tions without ever colliding with each other. Everything has been arranged in such a manner that each dancer has already vacated his po- sition by the time the other arrives. Everything fits so skillfully, yet so spontaneously, that everyone seems to be following his own lead, with- out ever getting in anyone's way. Such a dance is the perfect symbol of one's own individually asserted freedom as well as of one's respect for freedom of the other. (Friedrich Schiller, Aesthetic Education 300; The Rhetoric of Romanticism 263; emphasis added)27
This is, in present terms, a classical and classically "geometrical" description, or at least a description that allows for a classical reading. As such it can be, and is by de Man, contrasted to Kleist's nonclassical "algebraic" allegories (which may also be juxtaposed to Schiller's "symbol" here), which disallow classical readings. Schiller's passage and his related elaborations are considered by de Man both in terms of the aesthetic formalization they offer and as Schiller's points apply to the formal structure of Schiller's text itself. The same strategy will be applied to Kleist's U? ber das Marionettentheater, with an exposure of the nonclassical character of the text and of its self-reading as an out- come. After a complex analysis, de Man arrives at a dance that is very different from the "strictly ballroom" dance of Schiller:
We have traveled some way from the original Schiller quotation to the mechanical dance, which is also a dance of death and mutilation. The violence which existed as a latent background in the story of the ephebe and of the bear now moves into full sight. One must already have felt some resistance to the unproblematic reintegration of the puppet's limbs and articulations, suspended in dead passivity, into the continuity of the dance: "all its members (are) what they should be, dead, mere pendula, and they follow the law of pure gravity. " (The Rhetoric of Romanticism 288)
The invocation of Newton's law of gravity, the paradigmatic classi- cal physical law, is of much interest and significance in the context of the present essay and in general. Both the question of the classical laws of physics and, hence, the formalization of nature, and how classical such formalization can in fact be are at stake. I cannot pursue these subjects here. I shall, however, return to the question of "falling," physically the defining phenomenon of gravity. In Einstein's general
relativity, his theory of gravitation, the fall is merely an aspect of the geometry of a space curved by gravitation. The analysis of this space, however, involves a very complex "algebra" (of the so-called tensor calculus) and the technology of rulers and clocks, which would open yet another chapter in the history of the book of nature, the role of al- legory in physics, and the reading of de Man. 28 De Man continues:
The passage is all the harder to assimilate since it has been preceded by the briskly told story of an English technician able to build such perfect mechanical legs that a mutilated man will be able to dance with them in Schiller-like perfection. "The circle of his motion may be restricted, but as for those available to them, he accomplishes them with an ease, ele- gance and gracefulness which fills any thinking mind with amazement. " One is reminded of the protests of the eyeless philosopher Saunderson in Diderot's Lettre sur les aveugles when, to the deistic optimism of the Reverend Holmes, disciple of Newton, Leibniz and Clark, he opposes the sheer monstrosity of his own being, made all the more intolerable by the mathematical perfection of his highly formalized intellect: "Look at me well, Mr. Holmes, I have no eyes. . . . The order (of the universe) is not so perfect that it does not allow, from time to time, for the produc- tion of monsters. " The dancing invalid of Kleist's story is one more vic- tim in a long series of mutilated bodies that attend on the progress of enlightened self-knowledge, a series that includes Wordsworth's mute country-dwellers and blind city-beggars. The point is not that the dance fails and that Schiller's idyllic description of a graceful but confined free- dom is aberrant. Aesthetic education by no means fails; it succeeds all too well, to the point of hiding the violence that makes it possible. (The Rhetoric of Romanticism 288-89)
At stake, then, is the possibility of formalization, aesthetic or other, under the condition of the radical, lawless, singularity and deformity-- monstrosity--that is quite manifest, materially and phenomenally. Both singularity and law--formalization--and their relationships and conflicts take a very radical form, parallel to the radical disfigurations of Shelley's The Triumph of Life. There is also a revealing textual par- allel. Here de Man invokes "a long series of mutilated bodies that at- tend on the progress of enlightened self-knowledge. " The essay on Shelley asks about our (according to the present analysis un-Romantic) aesthetic, historical, and other formalization of Romanticism: "For what we have done with the dead Shelley, and with all other dead bodies that appear in Romantic literature--one thinks, among many others,
Algebra and Allegory 81
82 Arkady Plotnitsky
of the 'dead man' that ' 'mid that beauteous scene / Of trees, and hills and waters, bold upright / Rose with his ghastly face . . . ' in Words- worth's Prelude (V. 470-72)--is simply to bury them, to bury them in their own texts made into epitaphs and monumental graves" (The Rhetoric of Romanticism 121). Thus, the Empedoclean algebra-allegory of the dismemberment of the body, (re)thought or (re)allegorized in "quantum-mechanical" terms, now applies within very broad limits. It can be further correlated with the quantum-mechanical allegories in- volved in the optics of Shelley's poem: the wave and particle imagery there; the manifest quantum-like discontinuity of events and textual atoms; the divestiture of marks and traces from all architectonics so as also to reveal their inaccessible (material efficacity); the radical materi- al aesthetics; the collapse of realism and causality; the "algebraic" and "allegorical" nature of whatever patterns or forms of order are left to us; and so forth. In other words, the nonclassical features of quan- tum physics and Shelley's poetic epistemology can be assembled and brought together in reciprocal allegories. 29 De Man's reading does not do this but is in part made possible by these reciprocities, as considered earlier in relation to quantum physics and its nonclassical formalization.
De Man explores the "algebra" of "the mutilated body" at some length in his late essays. The deepest and most significant instance may well be his analysis, considered earlier, of the Kantian architectonics in the third Critique. Accordingly, I shall only offer a few supplementary points. In a parallel gesture to his Kleist essay (cited by de Man), de Man invokes Diderot's Lettre sur les sourds and les muets in consider- ing the allegorization of the faculties of reason and imagination in terms of both the anthropomorphized dramatic conflict and the sacrifi- cially mutilated body. The invocation has Dionysian overtones and an invocation of the figures of Antigone and Iphigenia (AI 86-87). Then, he proceeds, via Kleist and Kant's first Critique, to a reading of Kant's architectonics and its self-de-architectonization in the Empedoclean terms of a mutilated body. The conclusion offers extraordinary elabo- rations on the allegorical algebra of Kant's text. De Man writes: "to the dismemberment of the body corresponds a dismemberment of lan- guage, as meaning-producing tropes are replaced by the fragmentation of sentences and propositions into discrete words, or the fragmenta- tion of words into syllables or finally letters" (AI 89; emphasis added).
One thus encounters the workings of radical materiality, or/as sin- gularity, both in the world and in the text. It would, however, be a mis- take to see both as merely (if at all) mirroring or mapping each other,
as de Man's usage of corresponds here might suggest, but should not. (It is difficult to be certain given the complexities of the concept and the very signifier of "correspondence" in de Man. )30 Instead, insofar as one wants to or can approach the world by way of a text (or a text by way of reading), the dismemberment or "decoherence" of language-- the divergence, ultimately irreducible and uncontrollable, of the mean- ing of figures, tropes, signifiers, and so forth, indeed of whatever carries meaning in a given text--manifests the irreducible inaccessibili- ty of the world or life through peculiar configurations of material and phenomenological effects. Accordingly, analogously to quantum- mechanical epistemology, the dismembered, decohered language or representation (i. e. , the configuration of the corresponding phenome- nal effects) does not map or otherwise represent them any more than "coherent" language and representations do, or reading represents a text. However, decoherent representations or allegories appear to be better suited to relate, via the algebra of allegory, to the world and life, or to read the kind of texts in question here. One might say that the radical (material) singularity of individual events of life and the radical inaccessibility of their efficacity find their proper expression or allegory in this circumstance of the dismemberment or decoherence of language and tropes.
Aesthetic formalization as radical formalization and the overall epistemological machinery in question also become, in an antithetical parallel with Schiller's classical text, enacted in Kleist's essay, at the level of figures or tropes. On the one hand, there is a certain "collec- tive" semantic field within which these figures and tropes function and which--that is, a more or less shared meaning or more or less coherent set of meanings--they obey. On the other hand, once rigorously con- sidered individually, or, again, in a certain ultimate decomposition, these figures and tropes can no longer be fully subsumed by such a meaning or a coherent configuration of meanings. Or, in the terms in- troduced earlier, they begin to decohere. Accordingly, one speaks of (an enactment of) a decoherence of figures and tropes, or of all lan- guage, in a nonclassical text, such as Kleist's, or Shelley's, or Kant's, if in the latter case, to some degree, against other forces, conceptual and tropological, of Kant's text. 31 This decoherence or dissemination (in Derrida's correlative sense) defines the functioning of virtually all fig- ures and tropes in these texts. They give the materiality of the signi- fiers, "linguistic atoms," a formal aesthetic structure or un-structure we encounter in the case of quantum mechanical marks, as considered
Algebra and Allegory 83
84 Arkady Plotnitsky
earlier. Or rather, the materiality of the signifier in de Man's sense is this un-structure, which then requires a very different "algebra" of for- malization. De Man writes:
[W]hen, by the end of the tale, the word Fall has been overdetermined in a manner that stretches it from the theological to the dead pendulum of the puppet's limbs to the grammatical declension of nouns and pro- nouns (what we call, in English, the grammatical case), then any com- posite word that includes Fall (Beifall, Su? ndenfall, Ru? ckfall (#46) or Einfall) acquires a disjunctive plurality of meaning.
C's story of the puppets, for instance, is said to be more than a ran- dom improvisation: "die A? usserung schien mir durch die Art, wie er sie vorbrachte, mehr als ein blosser Einfall. " As we know from another narrative text of Kleist ["U? ber die allma? hliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden"], the memorable tropes that have most success (Beifall) occur as mere random improvisation (Einfall) at the moment when the author has completely relinquished any control over his meaning and has relapsed (Zuru? ckfall) into the extreme formalization [emphasis added], the mechanical predictability of grammatical declension (Fa? lle).
But Fa? lle, of course, also means in German "trap," the trap which is the ultimate textual model of this and of all texts, the trap of an aesthetic education which inevitably confuses dismemberment of language by the power of the letter with the gracefulness of dance. This dance, re- gardless of whether it occurs as mirror, as imitation, as history, as the fencing match of interpretation, or in the anamorphic transformations of tropes, is the ultimate trap, as unavoidable as it is deadly. (The Rhetoric of Romanticism 289-90)
In introducing "the dismemberment of the body" toward the end of "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," de Man speaks of the word Glieder in Kant as "meaning members in all the senses of the word, as well as, in the compound Gliedermann, the puppet of Kleist's Marionettentheater" (AI 88). In the same paragraph de Man adds a playful reference to Montaigne's "cheerful" invocation of "Monsieur ma partie," further extending the multilingual decoherence--or again, coherence-decoherence--of tropes by dismembering all members in- volved in their constitution. "Fall" is a decisive figure and concept in Kleist, including in defining any stability, formal--linguistic or mathe- matical--or physical, for example, monumental. It is equally decisive for Shelley or Keats (whom de Man discusses in this context in "The Resistance to Theory"), or de Man, who brings all three together, al-
though, interestingly, he does not consider "fall" (or, again, dance), as he could, in Shelley, in the way he does in Kleist or Keats. It would not be possible to consider here the relevant physics, for example, the way gravity bends even light itself (which would bring all three figures and texts together in yet another way). These connections must be relevant to de Man's reading, even if only because from Newton to Einstein and beyond they changed our sense of fall or (they are perhaps ultimately the same) the world. Kleist once said of the arch, another great figural model or allegory: "the arch stands because all the stones want to plunge at the same time," and, I would add, with the preceding analy- sis in mind, each following its own trajectory. We know, of course, that a random, lawless event, such as an earthquake in Chile, can bring the arch down in any event. What Kleist tells us here, however, is that even the standing arch is a kind of dance in a gravitational field. We all know or assume, naively, that, in dancing, a fall is the least graceful event, or the least graceful--and the least formalizable--form of dance. It is more difficult to realize, as Kleist did looking at dancing mari- onettes, that dance is perhaps only a graceful form of falling (always commanded by many a gravitational field of our life, or death) and that grace itself is, in each case, a very singular, and very difficult, com- bination of fall and dance, just as is the grace of Kleist's or Shelley's writing--their dancing pens, without ever falling, except as a form of dance, albeit on thin ice. As Nietzsche tells us, however: "Thin ice is paradise for those who skate with expertise. "
NOTES
1. The use of the term concept requires caution here, especially in applying it to Paul de Man's work. In particular, it may not be possible to "abstract" these concepts from the thought and text of figures involved or indeed to make them "abstract"--free of particularities or even singularities, or, in de Man, (the practice of) reading. Although Jacques Derrida's "assemblages" ("neither terms nor con- cepts"), such as, most famously, diffe? rance, or "concepts" as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Fe? lix Guattari in What Is Philosophy? , trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), offer better mod- els, de Man's practice remains unique in this respect. Andrzej Warminski, "'As the Poets Do It': On the Material Sublime," and J. Hillis Miller, "De Man as Allergen" (both in this volume), and Rodolphe Gasche? 's The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), offer further guidance.
2. I will not be able to discuss in sufficient detail the secondary literature on de Man and other key authors to be considered here, for example (to give a very incomplete list), by such scholars as Jacques Derrida, Werner Hamacher, Rodolphe Gasche? , Carol Jacobs, Peggy Kamuf, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski. By
Algebra and Allegory 85
86 Arkady Plotnitsky
the time one comes to other figures the list of pertinent commentaries becomes practically interminable, although Jacques Derrida's, Jean-Franc? ois Lyotard's, and Jean-Luc Nancy's work on Kant is especially significant here, and especially diffi- cult to put aside. I also bypass two related topics--Derrida's analysis of "law," "event," and "singularity," including in his writings on de Man (and commentaries on these topics in Derrida by, among others, Richard Beardsworth, Rodolphe Gasche? , and Samuel Weber), and Gilles Deleuze's approach to these subjects (quite different from both that of de Man and that of Derrida). I am also grateful to Jacques Derrida, Rodolphe Gasche? , Samuel Weber, and the editors of this volume for helpful discussions.
3. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 119-20; hereafter AI.
4. The epistemology becomes classical once such exclusion takes place. This point is crucial to Derrida's reading of Kant in "Economimesis" (Diacritics 11:3 ([1981]: 3-25).
5. An analogous argument would apply to other pairs of that type, such as the general and the particular, which similarly figure in de Man's work.
6. For Gasche? 's view of de Man's epistemology, see, especially, The Wild Card Of Reading (108-13, 181-83), and of formalism in de Man, the chapter "Apathetic Formalism" (91-113).
7. This point indicates that the rhetoric of allegory in de Man is indeed the rhetoric of temporality. I cannot consider the question of temporality here, al- though it is crucial in de Man and significant in quantum theory.
8. I am not sure to what degree one can speak of "materiality without matter" in de Man, as Derrida suggests in his "The Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)" (in this volume). Some aspects of de Manian "materialism" may be conducive to such a view. However, the material visions of Aesthetic Ideology, including that of "the material sublime," as considered by Warminski's in "As the Poets Do It," appear to suggest that a certain economy (inscription) of matter, analogous to the general economy (also in Bataille's sense) of Derrida's diffe? rance (Positions, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], 64), is at stake in de Man's work, insofar as this economy relates to the ultimately inaccessible here in ques- tion, which makes "matter" yet another ultimately inadequate term and concept, perhaps having less strategic force than "materiality. "
9. Bohr appears to apply the term phenomena to the material configurations in question themselves rather than to their representation or phenomenalization. His thinking on the subject is, however, quite subtle and is closer to the present under- standing, certainly in terms of the epistemology at stake. I have considered this point and Bohr's quantum epistemology overall in a number of previous articles and books, to which I refer here and throughout this discussion, most pertinently, "Techno-Atoms: The Ultimate Constituents of Matter and the Technological Con- stitution of Phenomena in Quantum Physics," Tekhnema: Journal of Philosophy and Technology 5 (1999), and Complementarity: Anti-epistemology after Bohr and Derrida (Durham, N. C. : Duke University Press, 1994). For Bohr's own presenta- tion of these ideas, see his essays in The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, 3 vols. (Woodbridge, Conn. : Ox Bow Press, 1987), hereafter referred to as PWNB.
10. On this point I refer again to Complementarity and "Complementarity,
Idealization, and the Limits of Classical Conceptions of Reality," in Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory, ed. Barbara H. Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky (Durham, N. C. : Duke University Press, 1997). The connections with relativity emerge in view of the following key aspect of Einstein's theory (whose connections to quantum epistemology were especially significant for Bohr). Rather than being given independently of our instruments of observation, such as rulers and clocks, and, then, represented by means of these instruments, as Newtonian physics assumes, space and time become "products" or effects of instruments. In other words they are products of the technology of observation (and, in more complex ways, of our theories) and indeed represent or embody experimental and theoreti- cal practices.
11. I have considered this subject in "All Shapes of Light: The Quantum Mechanical Shelley," in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Stuart Curran and Betty Bennett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
12. Paul de Man, "Shelley Disfigured," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 94.
13. Most immediately, the latter express strict quantitative limits (defined by Planck's constant, h) upon any exact simultaneous measurement of both such com- plementary variables. In Bohr's interpretation, however, the uncertainty relations manifest the impossibility not only of simultaneous measurement but the simulta- neous determination or unambiguous definition of both such variables at any point. Once again, not even a single such variable can ever be unambiguously as- cribed to quantum objects themselves.
14. This statement cannot be seen as strictly defining allegory, which, as de Man says on the same occasion, is difficult to do (AI 51). If, however, there could be one (or any) such definition, the formulation just cited appears to come as close to it as possible. The feature itself indeed appears to characterize the practice of allegory, at least from Dante on. Galileo's project of the mathematical sciences of nature can be seen from this allegorical viewpoint, and connected to Dante, along these lines. (I refer the reader to an article by David Reed and the present author, "Discourse, Mathematics, Demonstration and Science in Galileo's Discourses concerning Two New Sciences," forthcoming in Configurations. )
15. The details of quantum-mechanical formalism and of the specific form of algebra (that of the so-called operators in infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces) are not essential here.
16. Cf. de Man's use of "linguistic terms" in "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minne- apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 203; hereafter BI.
17. The question of the particular architectonic involved in each case is com- plex, even though a certain geometrical architectonic is suggested by a kind of (pure) geometrical figure (rather than equation) defining Galileo's or Newton's sci- ence. Newton felt obliged to recast his mechanics in (Euclidean) terms of geometry rather than those of calculus in preparing Principia.
18. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), 24.
19. As will be seen, the nature of quantum probability is in turn nonclassical, and is not defined, as in classical physics, by, in practice, insufficient information
Algebra and Allegory 87
88 Arkady Plotnitsky
concerning the systems that, in principle, behave classically. As I have indicated, while quantum theory (at least in Bohr's interpretation) fully conforms to non- classical epistemology, it has its specificity. Accordingly, further qualifications con- cerning it may be necessary, which, however, would remain consistent with my overall argument here. In particular, in certain idealized cases, some among experi- mentally measurable quantities and, hence, some aspects of individual observable "events" involved can be predicted exactly, that is, with the probability equal to unity, by using the dynamical laws of quantum mechanics, such as Schro? dinger's equation. Hence, the prediction of such quantities may be seen as comprehended by these laws. Such predictions, however, would not allow us to define the outcome as an "event" (say, in the way we could in classical physics) even in idealized cases and hence to make overall individual events themselves subject to law. In this sense the conditions of radical formalization would still rigorously apply even in these cases. (I also leave aside for the moment that such predictions can only concern effects of the interaction between quantum objects and measuring instruments, and can never apply to "events" of the quantum world itself. ) In general, however, in quantum physics there are always "events" that cannot be comprehended by law even with respect to their partial aspects--in principle, rather than only in practice, which is possible in classical physics as well. Nor, in contrast to classical physics, can we ever be certain concerning the conditions under which an idealization of the type just described would apply, even though we, again, can estimate probabilities when it applies. This is part of the irreducibly statistical character of quantum theory, rather than (as classical statistical physics) its being statistical by virtue of the struc- tural complexity of the systems involved and, hence, our lack of sufficient informa- tion concerning them. Quantum theory predicts only correlations between events (and does so exceptionally well), but tells us at best only half a story concerning the correlata themselves. This is of course epistemologically extraordinary, but should not be surprising by this point. As I have indicated, in the field of quantum physics, anything can always happen and nothing is ever fully guaranteed, which, as will be seen, is also the principle of de Man's epistemology.
20.
Whether this representation in fact corresponds to any "physical reality" is yet another question, which I shall suspend, since the negative answer would only make the present argument stronger.
21. Werner Heisenberg, "U? ber quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen," Z. Phys. 33 (1925): 879-93.
22. Werner Heisenberg, "The Physical Content of Quantum Kinematics and Mechanics," Quantum Theory and Measurement, ed. John A. Wheeler and Wojciech H. Zurek (Princeton, N. J. : Princeton University Press, 1983), 62-84. Heisenberg's German title, significantly, says "anschaulichen" ("actually repre- sentable") rather than "physical. "
23. It is worth qualifying that my subject here is the relationships between this linguistic understanding and quantum-mechanical epistemology rather than the role of language in quantum mechanics--a related and important (especially in Bohr) but separate subject.
24. One can consider from this perspective Derrida's analysis of Ce? zanne in The Truth of Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
25. I am indebted to Carlo Rovelli's article "'Incerto Tempore, Incertisque Loci': Can We Compute the Exact Time at Which a Quantum Measurement Happens? " Foundations of Physics 28:7 (1998): 1031-43.
26. This is consistent with de Man's argument in "The Resistance to Theory," in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 27. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon,
1967), 300; translation modified by de Man.
28. I am also referring to de Man's reading of Keats's The Fall of Hyperion in
ibid. , 16-18. Cf. Cathy Caruth, "The Claim of Reference," in Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing, ed. Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch (New Brunswick, N. J. : Rutgers University Press, 1995).
29. I have addressed this subject in "All Shapes of Light. "
30. Cf. Warminski's analysis of de Man's reading of Baudelaire's "Correspon- dances" in "As the Poets Do It" in this volume. It would also be instructive to fol- low de Man's earlier approach to "correspondences" of that type in "The Rhetoric of Temporality. "
31. Cf. also de Man's analysis of Nietzsche and Rousseau in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 103-11, 135-60, and "The Epistemology of Metaphor" (in AI 34-50).
Algebra and Allegory 89
This page intentionally left blank
II. Deadly Apollo: "Phenomenality," Agency, the Sensorium
This page intentionally left blank
Phenomenality and Materiality in Ce? zanne
T. J. Clark
To the memory of Robert Boardingham
La nature, j'ai voulu la copier, je n'arrivais pas.
--Ce? zanne to Maurice Denis, 1906
The word materialist as applied to painting need not mean anything very deep. Painting has always prided itself on being, next to sculpture, the most object-oriented of the arts. A brushy surface is supposed to put the viewer directly in touch with things. Color comes out of a tube into the eye. Most pictures seem happy with their gold frames. Even those painters (like Ingres or Mondrian) who wished to defeat the medium's dumb objectivity took it for granted that the quality was basic and stubborn, and could only very gradually be turned against it- self. The gradualness--the slow cunning with surface and framing--is a large part of what makes Ingres's or Mondrian's idealism interesting.
Ce? zanne is a special case. The words materialism or even positivism come up in connection with him--they came up from the beginning-- but usually shadowed by a sense that his art exemplifies, perhaps even worsens, the slipperiness of both terms. In particular, the question im- plied by Paul de Man's pairing and contrasting of the concepts "phe- nomenality" and "materiality" is one writers on Ce? zanne have posed repeatedly, and never been able to answer to anybody's satisfaction. Is the word materialist called for in Ce? zanne's case because the wedges and commas of color that go to build his pictures are so patiently aligned, "by an infinite variety of devices or turns, . . . with the phe- nomenality, as knowledge (meaning) or sensory experience, of the sig- nified toward which [they are] directed"? 1 Or do the marks end up proposing another account of matter and sign altogether, in which the
93
94 T. J. Clark
grounding of painting practice in the stuff of the world--the world of sensations and experiences--gives way to something darker? Some- thing "suspect and volatile,"2 maybe fundamentally blind.
I think of a phrase de Man uses to describe what he sees as the key moment (the key impasse) in Kant's analytic of the sublime: "Kant's looking at the world just as one sees it ('wie man ihn sieht')" turns out to open onto a form of "absolute, radical formalism that entertains no notion of reference or semiosis. "3 Is there such a moment in Ce? zanne? Or compare de Man's verdict on Saussure--on the episode of Saussure's turning back, in something like horror, from his suspicion that Latin poetry was structured around a hidden and arbitrary play of proper names. Scattered anagrams and permutations seemed embedded in the texts he studied, and might turn out to be their main propellants. What was horrible about that suspicion, according to de Man, was the way it called into question Saussure's root assumption as a scientist: that poet- ic diction, like any other, possessed a "phonic, sensory and phenomenal ground. " If it did not, what threatened was a general "undoing of the phenomenality of language, which always entails (since the phenome- nal and the noumenal are binary poles within the same system) the un- doing of cognition and its replacement by the uncontrollable power of the letter as inscription. "4 Is this a power--for "letter" in the last sen- tence we would have to substitute something like "brushmark"-- Ce? zanne's painting acknowledges?
Probably yes. Many writers on Ce? zanne have thought so. The more difficult question is where such an acknowledgment then leaves the version of materialism we started with: that is, Ce? zanne's dogged at- tention to sensory fact. Surely the one version does not simply cancel the other. On the contrary, it seems to be a characteristic of Ce? zanne's best work that in it the two possible vectors of materialism coexist. They intermesh. They stand in peculiar relation to each other, doubt- ing and qualifying each other's truth, but in the end not ironizing or dispersing it. I would say they reinforce it. They exemplify the other's account of matter--by showing it at the point it encounters paradox, and begins to follow a contrary logic. This is what gives Ce? zanne's painting its depth.
I am not suggesting that Ce? zanne's treatment of these issues--issues of matter and reference, essentially--is much like de Man's in tone. Ce? - zanne can be grave and pungent, but not acerbic. Readers of de Man will have recognized the words suspect and uncontrollable in the phras- es I quoted from him, and known they are typical. Unreliable is another
Phenomenality and Materiality in Ce? zanne 95
favorite. It is true that the terms in de Man are tinged with schoolmaster- ly disappointment. Reference had promised well in the lower forms, but turned out to be a bit of a performer. Ce? zanne is not severe in this sort of way. He is not inconsolable. Even the admission of defeat in the epi- graph at the beginning of this essay should be read, I am sure, in a flat tone of voice. It is a scientist's verdict. "Il n'y a que la preuve a` faire de ce qu'on pense qui pre? sente de se? rieux obstacles. Je continue donc mes e? tudes" (It is only proving what one thinks that presents real difficulties. So I continue my studies. )5 This is much more indefatigable--much more late-nineteenth-century--than anything I can imagine de Man coming out with.
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
96 T. J. Clark
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
Phenomenality and Materiality in Ce? zanne 97
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
98 T. J. Clark
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.