The vague of representation

One might think it agreed that in classical aesthetics representation always represents something. There would be a detail of representation, which would identify each element with a sign, whose articulation, the whole of which would constitute the meaning, indifferently, of text or image. The ideal form of this signifying structure of representation is the stage : theatrical stage, where actors arrange themselves to exchange discourses  pictorial stage, where the spectator's eye transposes, finds again the dispositions of the theatrical stage  engraved stage, for which the book proposes face to face the textual deployment of a fiction and the iconic condensation of a novel scene.

Stage form

The scene can be defined on the basis of three constitutive features : firstly, it implements discourse¹ : there's an eloquence to the scene, of which the silent scene produces the borderline case, foreseen by rhetoric : Phryne before her judges, Agamemnon veiling his face, Macbeth wiping his hands. The scene's second characteristic is to condense time, to concentrate a story into a moment² : the rule of three units participates in this condensation  the painting's immobility accentuates the process  the virtualities of the suspense exploit its effectiveness. Finally, the scene traps the viewer's gaze, giving him or her to see what it has itself posited as forbidden to the gaze³ : Sodom in flames to which one must not turn back ; the nudity of Susanna grappling with the two old men ; the intimacy of two lovers overheard by a husband or a promisee, Acis and Galatea, Paolo and Francesca.

The scene is thus the expansion of a discourse, the condensation of a moment and the trap of a look : these three traits structurally define its form.

The vague and the form

This form of the stage does not, however, constitute a stable, anhistorical structure : if there is a grammar of scenic representation, like the grammar of languages it is inscribed in a history, contains the traces, the remanences⁴ of earlier semiologies, the premises of future upheavals. These traces, these premises, must not be treated simply as factors that blur the scenic structure: what cannot be said, or cannot be shown, a reticence of representation, a weakness of speech in discourse or image. We're not interested here in a vague form of representation that would consist in not exactly making a scene, in playing with its form, in marking one's distance from it, and more generally in not assuming the structural plenitude of representation. Undoubtedly, the individual genius of artistic creation rests largely on this vagueness which, by introducing play into the structure, personalizes its springs, adapting its effectiveness to this or that artistic project.

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But the vagueness that interests us here is of another order, intrinsic to the very form of the stage, grasped no longer as an ideal structure whose rules we could detail in the same way as we would detail its signs, but as a formation of compromises⁵, established for want of a better way between contradictory cultural, historical, ideological requirements of representation. These contradictions, compromises and compromises produce a certain vagueness, which we'd like to study here as the vagueness of representation: as that which does not, strictly speaking, enter into the form of the stage, /// and yet conditions this form and inscribes it in a historicity. It is not a question of the unspeakable of the vague, but of the vague as the remanence of what is no longer said, and yet remains, digging by its dead presence into the depth of representation.

I. The vague as offstage: Lotto's Suzanne

Stage layout

Let's take as an example a painting by Lorenzo Lotto dated 1517, depicting Susanna and the Elders. In the left foreground, an undressed Susanna, her clothes thrown to the ground around her, kneels on the edge of her bath, enclosed by a high brick wall at the back of her garden. With her left hand, she hides the nakedness of her breasts; with her right, raised and stretched upwards, she marks her refusal; her head is turned away: she thus evades the two men who have intruded on her intimacy. The man below is arguing with his hands, facing her  he's pointing to the sinister left-hand side, from the steps where he's positioned, leading down to the bath water, towards the obscure consumption he's proposing. The one at the top is turned to the right, towards two young men who have just arrived and are staring curiously into the Bath's doorway. With his left forefinger, he points to the woman he's accusing, and with his right, to Heaven as witness. On the pool steps, Lotto has imagined adding green stockings (the color of betrayal) and a pair of shoes below, perhaps false evidence of a lover laid out by the old men⁶.

Scene talk

Gestures and objects deliver the meaning of the scene, which is in some ways only redoubled by the characters' discourse. Of this discourse, the two phylacteries above Suzanne on the one hand, and the old men on the other, deliver the synthesis : three sentences represent three times in the scene : first, the bargaining proposed by the old man below, Ni[si] nobis assenties, testimonio nostro peribis, if you do not accede to our request, you will die by the testimony we will bear against you  then comes Susanna's refusal, Satius duco mori quam peccare, Heu me, rather die than sin, alas, poor me ; finally it's the false testimony of the old man above before the young men, Vidimus eam cum juvene commisceri, we saw her committing with a young man⁷.

Time condensation

So there's an unfolding of the facts, which implies a duration : bargaining, refusal, testimony. Suzanne has been spied on for days: " The two elders saw her every day come in and walk around [...]. As they watched for a favorable opportunity, it happened that Susanna entered the garden, as she had done the day before and the day before " ; and it's only the next day, in front of her husband Joakim and the people, that the naked Susanna is offered up for public viewing :

" The next day, when the people had gathered at Joakim's house, [...] she came with her parents, her children and all her relatives. Now Susanna had delicate features and was a great beauty. The ungodly ordered her veil to be removed, for she was veiled, in order to feast on her beauty. But all her relatives and all who saw her wept."

This narrative time has been condensed into a single place, the Bath, and into a single, artificial, improbable moment, where the young people, acting as extras, transposing the judgment audience, overhear the old men's haggling, Suzanne's refusal, the false testimony. Indeed, the /// yesterday, Suzanne's loud cry led the old men to open the garden gate⁸ ; here, the door is closed and Suzanne is in the desolate posture of the next day at her judgment ; the rich clothing of the two young men evokes the neighbors, the equals who attend the judgment, not the servants who the day before overheard the scene.

The gaze trap

One of them, standing, listens to the old man's testimony ; but the other, bent over, one hand on the ground, scans what's going on behind, the underside of the stage : the eye listens, the eye suspects and turns the discourse around, the eye grasps what's at stake⁹. The dramaturgical deployment of the discourse and the temporal condensation that produces the moment of the scene are conditioned, circumscribed by this gaze of the witnesses, which assumes a double trigger (what they are given to see and what they surprise, guess behind this fake picture) and formalizes the trap¹⁰ where the spectator's eye is caught : what the young people shouldn't see, we see ; what the old men couldn't get, we get satisfaction for the eye. The scene gives us satisfaction as a discourse of virtue and as a thing of sex, while indicating the impossibility of this satisfaction. Suzanne's refusal is assumed without witnesses ; her nudity, her intimacy - without a spectator.

Trap of the screen

The form of the trap is twofold : on the one hand it sets up the screen of representation¹¹, by positing what it shows as forbidden to the gaze and figuring this prohibition by a material, physical obstacle to sight : here, the obstacle itself becomes twofold: the young people must first cross the threshold of the Bath to enter the scene of the crime  they must then unravel the truth through the old man's discourse, see Suzanne in her truth of innocence beyond the screen set up for them by the old men's bodies. This screen is drawn like a bow, aiming at Suzanne's heart. The old man at the bottom and, behind him, the young man bent over are in the aiming position; the hands draw the bow and the taut string; the index finger points, like an arrow, towards Suzanne's nakedness. The screen is a bow  opposed to the gaze, interposed as an obstacle, it is at the same time the instrument that pierces through, that points towards the truth.

Quarter-turn trap

The second form of the trap is the scenic quarter-turn: it's from the right that the scene is seen in the painting by the painted spectators who are the two young men  it's frontally that we, real spectators, see it. To switch from their point of view to ours, the scene must be rotated a quarter turn¹². This pivoting ensures and dramatizes the interposition then lifting of the screen, giving view first to what the old men present, indicate as a factitious tableau, where Suzanne is confused, then to what Suzanne reveals, even exhibits as exemplum virtutis, where her work of seduction is paradoxically but indissolubly completed.

Off-stage space

As we can see, all the elements of this space in Le Bain are signposts, either as objects, or figures, or through their arrangement. But this space occupies just under two-thirds of the total painting : it is overhung by a non-scenic space, a vague space, a priori a set that signifies nothing. Behind and just above Le Bain stretches Suzanne's garden, itself surrounded by a surrounding wall. A woman walks down an alley in this garden. Up on the left are the walls of a fortress, towards which two women are heading. Finally, on the right, the eye is lost in the distance of a vast undulating landscape¹³ : a path winds through it, where we can make out two strollers. No discourse here: the painter has painted the mute persistence of things, the muted activity of ordinary days, a turn in the garden, a run, a stroll. No temporal constriction either: in the solitude of the paths, time dilates, no event occurs. Finally, there is no trap for the gaze  on the contrary, the painter offers the viewer's eye the gentle repose of a vague depth, the glide of a perspective, the insignificance of a dissemination.

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Traces de signes

However, this vagueness of representation is not purely recreational. The fortress refers to Babylon, in which the biblical narrative situates Susanna's home and garden. It is this daily, solitary stroll that is depicted in the left-hand alley of the garden, where Susanna is recognizable by the yellow petticoat, red dress, white shirt and blue veil that are scattered around her in the Bath below. Behind the walker, a small doorway can be seen in the enclosure, and on the left two women heading towards Babylon after leaving the garden : it's because Susanna sent her two maids to fetch oil that she found herself alone in the Bath¹⁴. A little further up the garden, behind the rose bushes that line the inner wall, Jacques Bonnet thinks he can make out the two old men in ambush¹⁵.

The old narrative structure

Confronting the painting with the biblical text it represents thus enables us to detect, in the vagueness of the representation, traces of signs, an ancient narrative organization of pictorial space, where the same character may appear several times and is inscribed in a frieze that unfolds a narrative. The model of narrative painting is not theatrical or optical, but novelistic, organized into sequences and cycles. Space is not centralized as a stage, but fragmented into compartments¹⁶. There is no abrupt transition from the narrative compartment to the theatrical stage  rather, the compartment is pushed to the margins of representation ; de-emiotized, it becomes vague¹⁷.

Between frieze and stage: the concentric

The compartmentalization of space, in Lotto's painting, is particularly worked : first there's the Bath, and inside the Bath the actual bathing place, accessed by the steps in the foreground, and the poolside, where the negotiation takes place. Then there's the garden, an in-between space, certainly secluded from the world and protected by walls, but more open and less intimate than the Bath. The garden, with its flower-bordered paths, is itself a system of compartments. Finally, beyond the garden, the world itself is divided between town and country, on either side of the garden's tallest tree. But instead of being organized in a frieze, the compartments are nested, presenting a concentric system. The Garden is the paradigm of this concentration, which tends to empty the marginal compartments of their meaningful narrative function.

Travel for meaning: anagogical reading

In the context of a biblical representation, it's the Garden itself, as the overall shape of the represented space, that takes on meaning. The hortus conclusus designates, at least since the Marian allegories of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Virgin's body impregnated without penetration by the divine Word. The Susanna of the Book of Daniel prefigures the Virgin of the Annunciation, whose angel often bears the greeting /// gospel on a phylactery¹⁸. It's a lily that traditionally represents Mary's virginity at the Annunciation  and Suzanne in Hebrew means lily. Lotto arranges, in enfilade, the open door and the closed door (as in the Annunciation Gardens by Domenico Veneziano and Fra Angelico¹⁹), the threat of rape and chastity preserved : mystical anagogy will convert these data from Old Testament history into figures of the mystery of the Incarnation²⁰.

Travel for the eye: from tabernacle to screen

But the passage to the stage operates a second conversion : from the syntactic play of figures (door closed and door open, Mary's virginity and Christ's conception) we move to an optical play of the screen ; the eye passes and does not pass, surprises what was not given to see and can only surprise it as forbidden²¹, as the very, biblical Forbidden of representation. Here, it's no longer just a matter of the two young men entering the Bath to find Susanna grappling with the two old men. A path for the eye is sketched out from the background of the landscape²², a convergence of roads, a string of doors. The architecture of the space in which this journey takes place is the architecture of the tabernacle: from the outside to the Holy of the Garden, then from the Holy to the Holy of Holies of the Bath. Now in the Greek Septuagint text, where we can read the story of Susanna absent from the Hebrew Bible, tabernacle is said σκὴνη, scene.

Susanna's scene emerges on the attenuated, effaced forms of the tabernacular hortus conclusus. The concentric space of the tabernacle had itself imposed itself as a recomposition of the compartments of the narrative frieze, which passed through the semantic erasure of marginal spaces. The vagueness of the performance, which dissolves Susanna in the garden, her maids on their way to Babylon, in the narrative indifferentiation of a stage set, a background landscape, makes a symptom, indicates below the scenic structure a formation of compromise and, through the play, the hermeneutic uncertainty introduced by this compromise (between trace and sign, between syntax and spectacle), implements a device.

II. The vague as symptom. Greuze, la Mère bien aimée

The principle of superposition

Fundamentally, every device coordinates, superimposes levels. Where hermeneutic criticism defines a plurality of readings and interpretations, device theory identifies and superimposes levels of organization, mutually supportive in terms of interpretation, but radically heterogeneous in terms of operation. The system of signs, the unfolding of a narrative, the interpretative reading constitute an essential level, but only one level of the representation device: this is the symbolic level, outside of which all other levels are referred, in the hermeneutic perspective, to the vague of representation. Now, to the system of signs that organizes meaning, every classical stage superimposes a spatial arrangement (a geometrical level²³) and a network or path of gazes (a scopic level²⁴). Non-scenic devices superimpose others /// levels; but superposition is the essential constitutive principle of the device, by which it always remains irreducible to a simple structure of representation. The vague is the artifact of this superposition. This is why vagueness must be grasped as a symptom: not only does it call up other levels, it also enables us to switch from one device to another. Defining representation as a formation of compromise allows us to grasp this toggle.

Disposition of La Mère bien aimée

Let's consider Greuze's La Mère bien aimée. On the left, the father of the family enters the room, followed by a servant whose shoulder conceals the scene. He returns from hunting, holding his rifle in his right hand, and is preceded by his two dogs. On the right, near the alcove, the mother sits on a chair, surrounded by her six children, who press her with their displays of tenderness. Between the couple, the grandmother, also seated, leaning forward and leaning on the wicker cradle, is moved by the touching tableau formed by mother and children. The scene was thus intimate, before the unexpected arrival of the father of the family, whose intrusion tips the intimate into the public.

The word from the stage

The first thing Diderot imagines, in the Salon of 1765²⁵, when he recalls the sketch of La Mère bien aimée, is the father's word. Because the idea of this painting is simple, we believe we could have had it in Greuze's place: " and you would have introduced into this moment this man so gay, so happy to be the husband of this woman and so vain to be the father of so many children ; you would have made him say: I did all this...²⁶ " The painting bears a phrase, and this word from the father structures the whole scene.

Narrative succession

This is a reunion scene, which in fact condenses several narrative moments  in the center foreground, a dress is thrown to the ground  this dress is missed by the little girl with the untied corset who, looking piteous, has thrown herself between her mother's knees. The moment before, presumably, her grandmother had been helping her to get dressed  overcome with impatience or jealousy, at the sight of her younger brother out of the cradle, she escaped, threw off her dress and sought refuge with her mother, causing the cat to flee, knocking over the work basket and jumping right onto a chair on the side. All the children took advantage of the opportunity to press themselves against her; the grandmother was so touched that she didn't dare reprimand the little girl, and the father of the family arrived in the meantime. The dressing of the little girl, the general tenderness and the arrival of the father constitute the three narrative moments that this scene condenses into the artifact of a single moment. To the father's phrase, " I'm the one who did all this " should be added the grandmother's preceding one, signified by the gesture of her raised right hand : something like, Well, well, I won't say any more, I'm not going to scold my granddaughter.

Concentric organization: permanence of stage layout

The scene is ordered around three apparently successive, but semantically concentric  groups: on the right, the mother surrounded by her children, treated in whites, yellows and light pinks, radiates the light she receives and constitutes the luminous center, the object of the composition. In the center, the grandmother forms the interface between the /// public and intimate  she has witnessed the children's spontaneous outpouring, and is still turned towards them  but solicited, interrupted by the dogs, she will take the father as her witness, swivel in her chair, perform the quarter-turn that allows us to move from frontal apprehension to lateral entry into the scene. Finally, the third group, composed of the father and the maid, closes the scene, which the young man's open arms, whose shape is repeated by the pot on the end table, envelop and circumscribe.

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We thus find the same arrangement as in Lotto 's Bath of the Suzanne: the focal object of the scene (Suzanne / the beloved mother) is privately contemplated by a first row of spectators (the old men / the grandmother), then surprised and made public by a second row (the young men / the father of the family). Our eye can consider the first row of spectators on the canvas in two ways :

Or it serves as an interface, separating and articulating center and periphery, the focal object of the scene on the one hand, the second row of spectators on the other. It acts as a screen. This screen, decisive in Lotto's depiction of Suzanne's story, becomes purely formal in Greuze's staging.

Either the eye associates the object and the first row as making tableau globally for the second row : this tableau effect is reinforced in Greuze, where the eldest daughter turned towards the viewer, and thus the painter, seems to smile at him for the pose.

Proscenium versus tabernacle

With Lotto, we saw how the space of the stage proper was surmounted by a vague space, which could be treated either as a landscape and stage set, or as the persistence of an archaic narrative organization of painting : the vague was the aftereffect of a pre-scenic device of representation. In Greuze, this off-stage space has disappeared : there is only the stage, as if, more than two centuries after Lotto, Greuze's painting had definitively broken with ancient semiologies.

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In fact, the tripartite organization of the scene, the play of symmetry between the door and the alcove refer to another pre-scenic model, that of the Roman scene as restored in the Renaissance²⁷ : a depthless stage, or proscenium, where actors glide along three or four curtained compartments, successors to the antique stage wall that can serve as a backstage or secondary stage²⁸.

Enigma versus screen: historial logic of the room

Contrary to the hidden God of classical tragedy, who always brings the backstage and the sober backdrop back to the Holy of Holies of the tabernacle, the gods of the ancient stage show themselves, through theatrical machinery leaning against the stage wall, which therefore doesn't screen, but on the contrary serves as a foundation, a support for theatrical exhibition. The classic scopic game of the screen, which hints at the truth beyond an obstacle interposed between the eye and the object, is superimposed on the much older game of the enigma, which does not manifest the truth visually, but makes it happen through the process of ἱστορία, i.e. both in the story and through investigation : Oedipus the King investigates the plague in Thebes ; Queen Atossa questions the messenger about the disaster at Salamis.

The enigma continues to order the scene based on its compartments, which, as they open, reveal this or that fragment of it. The compartments deliver meaning, spill onto the scene historicity, produce, accumulate clues : in fact, Greuze's scene spreads out, swarms, overflows. From the left, the door spills out the return of the hunt, with gun and hounds; from the right, it's the alcove that seems to spill out mother and children. Even the /// grandmother, in the center, seems to slide on her chair and footrest.

The enigma does not define the stage as theater, with its system of visibilities, but as chamber, that is, as a reservoir of clues. The vague is in the chamber, as a principle of indecision that the ἱστορία will strive to reduce, but also as a symptom of a prior of the stage, as a trace of an origin of history, as the afterglow of a shock, an encounter, an originary collapse.

Exiting rhetoric: the vagueness of expression

For La Mère bien aimée, Greuze exhibited a pastel head at the 1765 Salon, which Diderot was to comment on at length :

" Voici, mon ami, de quoi montrer combien il reste d'équivoque dans le meilleur tableau. You can see this beautiful fishwife, with her heavy stature, her head tilted back, her pale coloring, her headclothes spread out, in disarray, her mixed expression of pain and pleasure showing a paroxysm more gentle to experience than honest to paint  Well, it's the sketch, the study of the Beloved Mother. How is it that here, a character is decent, and there, it ceases to be so ? Are accessories and circumstances necessary for us to be able to pronounce just physiognomies ? Without this help, do they remain indecisive? They have to be. That half-open mouth, those swimming eyes, that upturned posture, that swollen neck, that voluptuous mixture of pain and pleasure make all the honest women in this place look down and blush. Next door, it's the same attitude, the same eyes, the same neck, the same mix of passions, and none of them notice. I mean those who know what they're doing, and those who, under the pretext of knowing what they're doing, come to enjoy a spectacle of strong voluptuousness, and those who, like me, combine the two motives. In the forehead, and from the forehead to the cheeks, and from the cheeks to the throat, there are incredible passages of tone; it teaches you to see nature and reminds you of it. You have to see the details of this swollen neck and not talk about them; it's utterly beautiful, true and learned. Never have you seen the presence of two contrary expressions so clearly characterized. " (Diderot, Salon de 1765, " Portrait de Mme Greuze ", DPV XIV 188 ; Bouquins, p. 385)

Classical representation is fundamentally based on the expression of passions²⁹ : the painting arranges figures that articulate with one another according to a rhetorical principle of variation and differentiation of these expressions, supposedly univocal. Yet it is precisely by blurring this univocity³⁰, i.e. by introducing vagueness, that the painter can claim to restore the depth of the soul, beyond the codes and taxonomic structure of characters.

The vague introduces the logic of superposition

So, here in this portrait of Mme Greuze, who at the same time figures the beloved mother, there is " equivocation ", a " mixed expression ", a " indecisive... physiognomy ", a " mixture of passions ", " the presence of two contrary expressions ". Faced with Suzanne, it was a matter of seeing innocence despite the screen of the old men and their allegations : the opposition of true and false rested on the antagonism of two semiotic regimes, of iconic evidence collapsing the logic of discourse. In La Mère bien aimée, truth and falsity are mingled  it's both Mme Greuze and the beloved mother, both a woman who, having just made love, still bears the traces of pleasure on her face and a peaceful mother surrounded by her children. The vagueness of the expression does not point to a flaw in the representation, but on the contrary to a /// Greuze's redoubtable fidelity, restoring reality beyond that which it was intended to represent.

The ebb and flow of the vague: the economy of jouissance

The expression on Mme Greuze's face, with " ces yeux nageants " incongruous, delivers an enigma, which Diderot investigates. To the equivocal expression on the painting, Diderot's text cleverly, and maliciously, superimposes his own reticence : " il faut voir les détails de ce cou gonflé, et ne en parler ". The vague is the sign of jouissance, the sign of a given to be seen irreducible to speech. Diderot moves from " la tête renversée ", which objectively characterizes Mme Greuze's posture, to " cette attitude renversée ", which upsets the codes of figuration, panics the reading and exhibits the past " paroxysm " of sex. Madame Greuze's natural stoutness becomes the conjunctural sign of this paroxysm, which reveals a " swollen neck " : the line dissolves into " passages of tones ", becomes a matter of color, and even a matter of gray.

If we now return to the complete composition of La Mère bien aimée, Diderot suggests that the equivocation then falls : " accessories, circumstances " dispel the uncertainty of interpretation. The vagueness doesn't disappear, however, fuelling the painting's magnetic attraction, and the back-and-forth of connoisseurs from portrait to scene, scene to portrait. It's clear, then, that it was never really a question of hesitating between several interpretations, but rather of grasping the jouissance at the heart of the virtuous painting, the trivial, saucy power of sex innervating and irradiating the most decent, innocent scene. The vague thus functions here not as an index of the beloved mother's secret, but as a symptom of pictoriality³¹, by which the eye, superimposing the chamber of jouissance and the scene of virtue, overturns the institution of discourse and finds scopic satisfaction.

Conclusion

Faced with a global bankruptcy of national rhetoric and a collapse of reading mechanisms, our faltering civilization turns to images to celebrate their planetary efficacy and power of speech. But like discourse, the image is plagued by a consubstantial weakness  the vague is its silence.

There's a marginal vague, bordering the stage, not as a mere backdrop, but as the graveyard of bygone semiologies : figures hesitate to make a sign or dissipate there as traces.

There's another, central wave, which works the chamber of representation : beneath the discourse of truth, underlying the tableau of virtue, is the wave of jouissance, which works the figure, decontextualizes it, sends it back to original rape.

Between these two waves, the image marries, with difficulty, a form of representation : it is never reduced to this form, just as discourse always lacks its rhetoric. The wave beckons to earlier forms : the tabernacle beneath the stage, the proscenium upstream from the chamber, and, superimposed on what the image says, the jouissance that its own discourse misrecognizes.

Perhaps deep down this contradiction, this fragility of images should reassure us ?

Notes

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