Image and subversion. Introduction

I. From language to image: unexpected consequences of a radical cultural shift

Foucault's Meninas paradox

When Michel Foucault, in Les Mots et les choses, seeks to trace the birth of the human sciences through the evolution of epistemological divisions in the field of knowledge, it is through the analysis of a painting, Les Ménines by Velasquez, that he opens his reflection. The approach is paradoxical in a book whose guiding thread is the highlighting of an increasingly dominant and exclusive relationship between language and science, a relationship from which the image seems a priori excluded.

Michel Foucault indeed distinguishes, schematically, three periods: the Renaissance, first of all, still bases its thought on the model of the medieval gloss of the Divine Word; from this gloss, it develops a metonymic thought of universal analogy and weaves a network of correspondences between the microcosm and the macrocosm. The Classical Age was then marked by the autonomy of a space of representation outside reality. The plausible replaces the real¹. This space of representation is organized, regulated according to a veritable general grammar of the world². Applying the rules of this grammar defines propriety³. All that remains to be done is to establish the nomenclature of elements subject to these rules⁴ : a system of characters, a classification of species, a taxonomy⁵ is then established in all domains of knowledge. Finally, in the wake of the Enlightenment, nineteenth-century positivism saw taxonomies of nature change. They ceased to be ordered, from the outside, by a transcendent raison d'être, to obey an internal, organic logic.

Analogy, taxonomy, organization are thus the three strata revealed by the archaeology of the human sciences undertaken by M. Foucault. We thus slowly see the perfection, autonomy and secularization of a general hermeneutical principle based on language, endowed with its own grammar and autonomous systematics. All sciences, and beyond them all representations, then appear as languages endowed with their own grammar, and a rhetoric enabling them to be decoded. This generalization of the linguistic model leads, as it were, naturally to psychoanalysis: Freud's approach is to endow the unconscious and dreams with a primitive grammar, based on condensation and displacement⁶ ; the Lacanian approach identifies the subject's access to the symbolic with its access to language, and introduces signifier, signified, metaphor and metonymy into its "algebra" (the term is Lacan's and refers to the utopian model that haunts him of a mathematical language that is both pure and universal). Linguistic formalization and twentieth-century psychoanalytic discoveries appear inseparably intertwined.

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Decadence of language as a universal epistemological structure

Why, in such a perspective, open a book devoted to the history of the triumph and hegemony of language in our culture, with the analysis of an object by nature irreducible to language, a painting? Why account for the autonomization of a classical space of representation by a painting, a painting whose signified is barely represented, since the painter's studio that here offers itself to the viewer's gaze and entertains his attention reveals only through the accident of a misty reflection from the mirror in the background the royal couple that Velasquez is painting?

It's as if Michel Foucault, in this book that brings to a monumental close a multi-secular civilization of language and rhetoric, senses the overtaking of this civilization by an medium that has haunted it and remained ill-subdued to it. This medium is the image.

Michel Foucault's example is not unique, and the analysis of the Menines cannot be reduced to an accident, the insignificant, purely anecdotal hazard of bookmaking. This liminal painting is truly the symptom of a mediological revolution that the critic intuitively thematizes, without yet being able to problematize it. Les Mots et les choses dates back to 1966. In 1964, Jacques Lacan opened his eleventh seminar at the École normale supérieure on the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis: the unconscious, repetition, transference and drive. However, during the course of the year, overwhelmed by the publication of Merleau-Ponty's posthumous work, Le Visible et l'invisible, Jacques Lacan introduced at the heart of his talk a long digression on the gaze, based on the analysis of the anamorphosis of Holbein's Ambassadors. As he recapitulates the organon of psychoanalytic science, the master stumbles, slips, skids over what, outside language, makes image.

Let's also mention T. Todorov's work on Henry James: based on the analysis of a James short story with an evocative title, L'Image dans le tapis, T. Todorov shows that all James's fictions are organized as "quests for an absolute and absent cause"⁷. It's clear enough that the structure of the story lies outside the text. Yet, despite the title of James's short story, Todorov does not bring the image into play as a non-textual semiological principle. The image in the carpet has flourished, but as hypostasis and enigma, rather than as a principle of the concreteness of the world. Here again, what we might refer to, not without ulterior motives, as the dark continent of our culture loomed large, without yet managing to name itself.

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In 1980, before his death, Roland Barthes wrote La Chambre claire, his book on photography, which opens with a reference to Lacan's Séminaire XI. Something this time has shifted: R. Barthes' object is now exclusively the image, while the critical tools cling desperately, ultimately, to the rhetorical tradition. The two key notions on which R. Barthes analyzes the symbolic organization of the photographic image, the studium and the punctum⁸, lay claim to the Latin of the humanities, even if one searches in vain for them in the lexicons of the rhetorical vocabulary of Cicero or Quintilian.

After R. Barthes, it seems that this new epistemological field developed rather at the margins or outside of literature. Phenomenology explores, after Merleau-Ponty⁹, non-linguistic modes of communication, and uncovers in sensation the constitutive chiasmus of what we might be tempted to call a non-semiotic semiology¹⁰, substituting the cut inherent in language (the cut of the sign into a signifier and a signified, the cut between the sign and the referent, and finally the cut of symbolic castration that marks the child's advent to language) with a system of exchange, a network based on continuity (affective continuity from subject to object, the indicial continuity of trace and imprint, the social continuity of an emotion that spreads and communicates).

Art history also participates in this renewal. The starting point for D. Arasse's book Le Détail is Barthesian¹¹. Referring to what, in Le Plaisir du texte, R. Barthes designates as the reader's jouissance, D. Arasse turns the discomfiture of a meaning that slips away and unravels in detail into the jubilant dynamic of reconstructing meaning: it is no longer a question here, as in traditional iconology, of unearthing a beautiful or picturesque detail, for the sole pleasure of the connoisseur's erudite eye. Detail, this time envisaged not as particolare but as dettaglio, has to do with structure. It manifests itself "as a gap or resistance in relation to the picture as a whole", "as if the order of discourse were confronting one of its limits here" (pp. 6-7). The detail alerts the viewer's attention, it "makes an event" (p. 12): "by itself signalling to the viewer and calling him to come closer, it dislocates to its own advantage the device of representation" (p. 14). To its benefit: this dislocation is therefore productive, not simply a perversion of the structural dimension of representation, but a subversion, or in other words, a recomposition.

Actuality of old images

Today, as we come to culture bathed in images, it becomes possible to radically rethink the articulation of the image to our culture, not in a desperate attempt to absorb this heterogeneous medium into a cultural system that language has massively informed and modeled, but to draw out its profound irreducibility, often subversive, and sometimes structuring.

Thus, a whole literature reputed to be marginal, discontinuous, unclassifiable, finds itself reassessed for our modernity: what it has drawn from the image as ideologically deconstructive energy, what it has implemented against language appears in its coherence as a non-rhetorical logic of textual structuring. The literature of the margins, the perverse effects of meaning - in a word, all the underside of the literary text - reveal the mediological structures of a civilization of the image in gestation, destined to take off tomorrow. While the zone of turbulence where ideological issues converge inexorably shifts from text to image (we now consume our culture massively through television, cinema and exhibitions, and the book itself is approached differently, as an object or even as a media instrument), literature gains the foreign status of an anthropological object. Finally, we can approach it with that Persian gaze inaugurated by Montesquieu: foreign to ourselves in our relationship with our texts, off-center, we stumble, we stumble over their meaning. Paradoxically, then, it is what resists the rhetorical structuring of the work, and hence its ideological integration, that first reveals itself to us as an image. Because we are no longer familiar with the humanist tradition, we cease to be blind to its implications, to its ideological contradictions.

Or paradoxically, this new relationship to classical culture, this new way we look at literature, psychoanalysis was the instigator. If, as we showed at the outset, psychoanalysis in a sense completes the linguistic modeling of the sciences by analyzing the unconscious on the model of a language, a lost language whose grammar it would be a matter of reconstituting (and the unconscious appears a priori as what in man is the most foreign to language, the paradoxical grammar that emerges from this model appears articulated to an absolutely new material, that of mental images insofar as, in their sequence, according to a logic that is not that of articulated discourse, they make sense. Freud, armed with this tool, revisits our entire culture. Even the analysis of the witticism, where language seems to be the material, in fact reveals a device for condensing meaning, crystallizing through ellipsis and producing an ambivalent image that both designates and masks the aggression Freud always identifies at the root of the witz. The logic of the mot d'esprit lies outside language, in this contradictory movement of discovery and recovery on which the fleetingly incisive image plays that words here merely support and dramatize.

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Psychoanalytic analysis thus proposes to give discourse a meaning that is totally foreign to its letter. Discourse is taken into account as a symptom, and interpreted only as a clue to a hidden coherence, foreign to the manifest intention of the purpose, the text, the work. The psychoanalyst breaks down and disarticulates the discourse, abandoning the architecture to focus on the material and find in it the vestiges of a half-lost meaning. He searches for what haunts the work, like an archaeologist who, scrutinizing the materials of a harmoniously-proportioned medieval Greek church, would leave behind the amazed eye of the faithful or the aesthete and change his gaze to seek out in the composite materials of the construction the history of the temple of Hera, whose Byzantine walls bear the inlaid archaic fluting, the history of the proto-Christian basilica, whose reworked capitals use marble, and of the ancient agora, whose traces can be glimpsed on the pavement beneath our feet. The layout of the church thus takes on a new meaning: it is not a triumphant, autonomous structure in itself, but a detour of models and materials, an incorporation of successive cultures, the dialectical product of their muted resistance. To move from the logic of discourse to that of the image is to move from architecture to archaeology, to deconstruct obvie meaning, to bring out another meaning in the infrastructure. The aesthetic object then becomes part of a history of materials, a history of the subject for the psychoanalyst, a cultural history for the archaeologist. It is with this second perspective that we would like to take up the question of representation again, and propose a model that takes into account the visual dynamics of culture, through which structural and diachronic perspectives are reconciled.

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The image will serve us as both object and method. The method applied to texts and images will bring to light a new object, escaping the logic of discourse and constituting outside language the coherence of the work; in interpretation, this object will define the foundations of a new culture, the modern culture of the image.

II. What is an image?

Logic and support

Vision in a dream interpreted by the analyst, painting executed on canvas by the hand of an artist, photographic impression of a snapshot captured on the spot by the sensitive film, haunting metaphor, surreptitious or lexicalized in a text, what exactly is meant by image?

There are several systems of meaning production. From one system to another, it's not just the signifiers that change, but the very semiological logic at work. As a first approximation, we can consider discourse as one of these semiological systems, a differential system based on succession (Saussure), and visual representations as another semiological system, a synthetic system based on condensation and displacement (Freud). The focus here, then, is not on the image as a medium, but as a logic that produces meaning. This choice, which may seem paradoxical (we'll be talking about images in Petrarch or in Le Cabinet des fées, but about classical history painting as textual painting), is nonetheless dictated by the cultural habits of the Renaissance and classical era, which didn't distinguish between reading a text and reading a painting¹², and navigated with ease from emblem to motto, from motto to sonnet, from myth to allegory, from allegory to painting.

The essential semiological opposition is therefore not between two distinct artistic productions, like literature and painting, but between two systems of meaning production that are at once irreconcilable and consubstantial, a rhetorical order on the one hand, a logic of the image on the other. So, when we speak of the image in a text or the discourse of painting, we do not proceed by analogy, but distinguish the medium of representation from the semiological system(s) that organize representation.

The word image is used here on purpose, taking advantage of the vagueness and ambiguity it entails. Indeed, the word image can just as easily designate a concrete image (a painting, a drawing, a photograph) as an abstract image (a metaphor, a way of speaking, or even a certain aura, a fame). The image thus participates in both the iconic and the verbal. What we perceive today as immediately different, as a heterogeneous medium, was not so in a culture organized entirely around the ideological fiction of the ut pictura poesis, to which we'll have occasion to return: the poièsis, i.e. textual production, had to function as a painting, and above all, in reverse, painting, as a poièsis. There was no mediological boundary between literature and painting. The pre-eminence of a rhetorical model of meaning production was then indisputable, and even accentuated in the seventeenth century, as M. Fumaroli¹³ has shown.

This textual logic of meaning production, subject to the order of language and its modes of expression regardless of the medium of representation, exercised hegemony in all the arts both formally and ideologically: At the time, history painting was the painting par excellence, and could be deciphered and unfolded like a text; painters imposed unheard-of constraints on themselves to integrate their work into this semiological model, giving the illusion of movement and duration to representations whose medium excluded them a priori, making mute figures speak, identifying the immediate and overall visual effect of the painting with the articulations of a discourse. Such semiotic tyranny was bound to meet with resistance. The historical importance of this resistance is crucial: as we shall see, it was from this resistance that the semiotic overthrow of the Enlightenment was prepared.

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The image as phenomenon

It's always difficult to give an account of resistance. The historian cannot, as in an open war, a declared and settled conflict, analyze the forces involved, the stakes and the twists and turns of a struggle between protagonists identifiable at sight, in uniform. Resistance fighters operate in the shadows. He's part of the structure he's fighting. He can only distinguish himself in his innermost being, and in the lightning speed of his action.

What is at stake here with rhetorical hegemony belongs to this order of struggle. In classical culture, the image does not occupy an external, marginal and dissociated position. We won't be pitting images against texts, but rather, within the same object, a rhetorical logic against an image logic: sometimes the metaphorical network of a text works against its argumentative structure; sometimes the play of shapes and colors, the arrangement of objects or characters in a painting subverts its allegorical decoding. The point, then, is not to talk about images, to isolate somewhere an image, but to identify, analyze, model what, at a given moment, in the object, stands out, coagulates, makes an image and, from there, operates subversion.

For, precisely because it resists, often borrowing its resources from the medieval cultural background, the semiological logic of the image is necessarily subversive. Modernity is prepared and constituted by these archaisms that stand in the way. In literature, painting, music and art in general, at the very moment when a certain rhetorical framework is put forward, something of the order of the image parasitizes the intimate architecture of the object, deploying its subversive coalescences. Another logic is at work.

The image thus interests us here as a phenomenon of the tilting of meaning within representation, as an ontological moment of the denudation of structure, provoking ethical interrogation and subversion. In these crucial moments when the structure unravels, when the voyeuristic rhetorical armature stumbles, slips, the object of representation is not dissolved for all that, but on the contrary is recaptured in its essential dimension, which does not belong to the structure, but to that in which the structure is caught, to the device.

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III. The method: from structure to device

The crisis of criticism

How are we to interpret this dialectic of representation that inhabits all representations, literary and artistic, of our culture, and singularly of classical culture? On the one hand, the work deploys a structure, but it's the inessential structure of the Platonic shadow play, a structure offered to the front of the canvas, still life and brocade thrown in as eloquent bravura pieces, splendid but pure Vanities, illusions of meaning, of its mechanics without truth. On the other hand, the work manifests the light of truth, but a light that is shielded from, an inaccessible light, a covered trauma, an embroidered tear.

This dialectic of a mechanical structure covering up, obscuring the light from which it feeds has resulted, in the history of literary criticism, in the confrontation of structuralism and deconstructionism: by analyzing the work as a semiotic mechanism reducible to a simple structural formula that it would reduplicate, amplify and complexify ad infinitum, structuralism, with new methods and tools, preserved the traditional field of literary analysis conceived as the analysis of representation as repetition. This type of analysis always comes back to a rhetorical conception of texts or a typology. Thus, leaving behind the obligatory reference to realism in art, denounced by the new theoretical approaches of the sixties and seventies, structuralism and its heirs dispensed with the documentary heap, first substituting the "little true fact¹⁴", then the "blind spot" of the text, a pure structural spring, formal and disembodied, before its last epigones pronounced themselves in favor of a return to literary history, then to history tout court. This return is in fact an accomplishment, since it allows us to completely and definitively evict from critical discourse the literarity of the text, i.e. not its rhetoric, but, at the opposite extreme, its immediate relationship to reality, that which in the text manifests itself as shock, as pure brutality, and remains incomprehensible. Once the problem of reality has been evaded, text and even image can, with the illusion of objective exhaustiveness, be treated both as historical documents and as rhetorical constructs, provided that these two types of analysis are clearly dissociated and that for each is implemented not a thought, but an adequate technique.

Faced with this technicization of criticism, deconstructionism attempted to take into account that dimension of brilliance, of shock, which the real takes on when it manifests itself without mediations in representation. Deconstructionism sought to break out of structural logic, but from a purely negative perspective that was bound to doom it in the long run. Indeed, the interest ends up being slim in uncovering the flaws, the essential hollowness of a text or, more generally, a representation, only to demolish its logical architecture and ruin any attempt at interpretation, as if the productions of culture tended towards an essential, petrifying nullity¹⁵.

To avoid this ineluctable narrowing of the object of study and the theoretical stakes, it will be advisable, in the face of the flaws in representation, to maintain as an unshakeable principle the signifying function of shock. Faults have a hermeneutic value only in terms of the representational device they reveal, and the depth of the real to which they give access. If the text, if the canvas, are worked upon, undermined by a flaw that the effort of art seeks to make up for, this flaw could well be the shock that the work delivers to us, as an index, as a burst of the real ; as for the supplement¹⁶, it constitutes the dynamic of repetition.

The fragility of these theoretical models, and then their collapse, are each time due to a certain silence on the real, either that the latter is minorized (this is the origin of the crisis of structuralism), or that, on the contrary, the flaw, hypostasizing the shock, makes it an inaccessible quintessence, which it ultimately relegates beyond critical discourse.

Shifting from structure to device to analyze the object of representation engages the method of literary and artistic criticism in a veritable revolution. The literarity of a text, like the artistic value of a painting or a work of music, is constituted by the interference of several semiological systems on the same support. This interference, this scrambling, sets the rich artistic message against the communicative effectiveness of a simple message, reducible to its rhetorical structure alone. But as soon as that which, from a structural point of view, manifests itself in the object as outside the structure, as noise, engages in a subversion of the rhetorical message, it becomes necessary to recapture the object of representation within a framework in which structure appears as a precarious space, open to toppling. We'll call this framework a device. The device articulates the structure to what conditions it, materially and ideologically; it orders the rhetorical process, which is a matter for language, to a scenario of representation, thanks to which this process is possible. Language thus manifests itself in the device as a space protected by a scenario, like text caught up in the image, which it arrests and formalizes, but into which it can tip at any moment. The modalities of this insertion, of this articulation of text to image within a semiological device, can only be defined in a given historical and cultural context.

The focus here is on the interference between image and discourse in the semiological structure of texts and painting, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. These semiological systems are therefore not exactly competing, but articulated in a device that we'll define in this case as a screen device.

The screen device takes up (but hijacks) the Platonic cave. It can be described as follows: the realistic alibi of mimesis lies in the fact that reality is projected in the form of images onto the surface of representation. But this representation is not mechanical or technical. It is socially and ideologically coded. The projection device therefore presupposes the interposition between reality and representation of a screen that filters, distorts and stylizes this reality, materializing the symbolic dimension of representation. Either a semiological impossibility or an ideological prohibition, the screen conceals most of the images of reality and only diffuses a tiny part of them. In the vast shadow zone of what is obscured, a rhetorical mesh develops in its own way a discourse tending to make up for the absent images. Representation thus appears as a shadow zone protected by the screen, made up of a rhetorical mesh ensuring mimesis, but bordered and perforated by the blinding light of reality. This light organizes, concurrently with the rhetorical mesh, the logic of the image (this is Barthes's punctum).

In this book, we propose to analyze this device in all its implications, imaginary, historical, semiotic, symbolic.

Why today?

If this logic of the image is so important, we'll say, why wasn't it theorized in the seventeenth, or at least the eighteenth century, when the poetic arts flourished and reflection on art emphasized, essentially, its rhetorical framework? To answer this objection, we will show the fundamentally anti-mimetic nature of the image in classical culture, if by image we really mean what we have just defined here: a non-rhetorical, non-verbal semiological order. The image has played this fundamental role in subverting and exercising a certain symbolic marginality precisely because it fell outside the rhetorical mesh of art and, escaping all mimetic theorization, remained outside language, sheltered from all control, all ideological censorship. Discourse in its rhetorical logic can only account for the image as a void, a lack, a flaw. The image is a hole in discourse. Neither Quintilian nor Abbé Du Bos could devote a treatise to it. The causes of this silence of the image are essentially theological: forbidden by the second commandment of the Decalogue, castigated by the Reformation, the image is rehabilitated in classical culture, is even placed at the center of this culture only at the price of this silence.

A second objection immediately arises: if the image blocks critical discourse, if its anti-rhetorical nature necessarily makes it escape any form of poetic art or treatise on the rules of art production, how can we today legitimately devote a book to it? This is where the cultural and mediological revolution we're living through is bound to intervene in an essential way in our understanding of classical culture. Massively, the medium of culture today is iconic. Beyond technical invention, it is the changing relationship between image and discourse that is profoundly transforming both our modes of thought, our relationship to the symbolic, and our apprehension of culture. Modernity did not invent the image, but the primacy of the image over discourse. It is the image that now carries the weight of ideology in the media spotlight. The "below" where images used to work has become highly visible and exposed. Today, it's beginning to be the subject of discourse, because it now bursts onto the screen, because our culture, founded primarily on the gaze and no longer on the magisterium of language, can no longer be modeled by a theory of mimesis.

So, as we turn our television-, poster- and advertising-filled eyes back to the texts that have built and traversed humanism, we necessarily see in them something other than this discourse of the humanities, which is becoming more illegible by the day. A different dynamic of these texts is taking shape before our eyes, as their images not only blur the meaning, but also build step by step the symbolic feminine continuum that is the foundation of modernity. This subversive order of the humanist image can only be theorized today, because only today is the theological-rhetorical ban lifted and a properly iconic model of representation outlined.

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Notes

J. Lacan radicalized this model by asserting that "the unconscious is structured like a language". See on this subject, among others, in the Ecrits, "L'instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient" (1957; Point Seuil, 1970, p. 251 and p. 267) and in the Séminaire XI, chapter II, 2 (Seuil, 1973, p. 23).