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Conceptual Odysseys: Passages to Cultural Analysis
The ""theoretical turn"" within the arts and humanities in the 1970's and 1980's has, for many, had its day, with work produced under its rubric all too often feeling tired or even downright lazy. In its place -- whilst hazarding against an outright rejection of theory -- this book, introduced by Mieke Bal, presents work by a new generation of scholars responding directly to Bal's idea of the ""travelling concept"". By taking a concept from one discipline and, with a genuine understanding of its origin, thoughtfully applying this in a new context, exciting new possibilities are opened up for analysis of artworks and other cultural objects. Here we find these ""travelling concepts"" employed in fresh explorations of subjects as diverse as the paintings of Poussin and of Adam Elsheimer; Chantal Akerman's film; The Museum of the French Revolution and the work of German Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon. This is a uniquely illuminating contribution to the edgy territorial conflicts between visual culture, art history and cultural studies.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
13 people want to read
About the author
Griselda Pollock
89 books76 followersGriselda Pollock is a visual theorist, cultural analyst and scholar of international, postcolonial feminist studies in the visual arts. Based in England, she is well known for her theoretical and methodological innovation, combined with readings of historical and contemporary art, film and cultural theory. She is professor of social and critical histories of art at the University of Leeds.
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May 3, 2023
• Cultural analysis as travel: Culler’s reference to the picaresque tradition inserts an element of fictionality into the academic ‘travels’. The travels proposed here do, indeed, appear like armchair trips. Perhaps they just happen on a stage: in a classroom, in a study. In this sense, then, the fictional theatricality of mise en scène subtends the metaphor of travel, as a reminder of the basis of humanist study in that large, unmanageable field called ‘cul- ture’.
• Using concepts and not methods: Concepts function not so much as firmly established univocal terms but as dynamic in themselves. While groping to define, provi- sionally and partly, what a particular concept may mean, we gain insight into what it can do. It is in the groping that the valuable work lies. This is why I have come to value concepts.
• ‘Meaning’ is a case of just such an ordinary word-concept that casually walks back and forth between semantics and intention.
• Concepts are not fixed. They travel—between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods, and between geograph- ically dispersed academic communities.
• [The resisting viewer in a medieval Jewish image of the circumcision ritual]
• Framing enables the interpretative work of the historian to emerge as an active intervention.
• Such work is a form of visual reading, and it draws attention to the many preceding acts of reading that have intervened between the artist’s own reading of the narrative through the design of the image, and our own reading of it in the present.
• Ways to overcome the absence of women in the archive: Reflection theory reads literary texts and artistic images as realistic reflections of real women’s lives. This is overly simple and a-historical. Sign theory, by contrast, conceives of ‘woman’ as a sign, a metaphorical currency of exchange between writing and painting men. This view can easily lead to the erasure of medieval women readers and viewers.
• My solution to this dilemma—being caught be- tween the reflection theory and the ‘woman as sign’ theory is to try and locate the inscribed female viewer in the visual image.
• Where medievalists like Roberta Krueger and Tova Rosen have identified an inscribed woman reader in the text, I locate an inscribed female viewer within the image, a viewer that becomes tangible because of the mate- rial framing performed within the image.4 It is my contention that these inscribed female viewers could have formed the bridgeheads or points of identification that allowed viewing as a woman, modelled on Krueger and Rosen’s resisting readers.
• What I want to show is that gender trouble is inscribed within the im- ages in illuminated medieval Hebrew manuscripts and that these gender tensions are articulated through the figure of the viewer within the image, the inscribed viewer. The inscribed viewer in turn implies a view- ership outside the image. INSCRIBED VIEWER….
• The figure of the viewer, i.e. the inscribed viewer, is a potentially problematic figure in feminist terms. It could be a figure of passive spectatorship as opposed to action, but it can equally well be a figure of subversion and resistance by virtue of non-action. It is even possible to see it as a figure of power: the power of the gaze.
• This whole chapter is just spotty and anachronistic feminism
• [Visual agency in Poussin’s Rinaldo and Armida Phillippa Plock]
• By figuring a viewer being moved by a passive object, which in turn still seeks to move an external viewer, the painting seems to challenge the demarcation between the worlds of things and people that has been established in recent criticisms of fetishism and reification.4 Rhyming my own potential interaction, the painting addresses me in such a way that suggests it has a powerful agency to affect my own state of being, forcing me to merge with the image and to become a dual entity myself.
• Concept here is AGENCY OF THINGS: objects of material culture have the power to influence their own- ers’ behaviours,
• Through attending to the means of this painting’s visual address in the first part of this essay, it becomes evident that the painting commu- nicates through a visual language composed of contradictory gendered gestures. We shall see that the simultaneity apparent in the first en- counter with the painting rests in Armida’s signification as both femi- nine and masculine.
• In communicating Armida’s masculinity and femininity simultaneously, Poussin stressed the specificities of his own craft to move audiences to the utmost degree. THESIS. GENDER SIMULTANEITY
• [4 Mirror: Mary Magdalene Through the looking glass]
• Pardo presents Savoldo’s Magdalene as a masterpiece of painterly ar- tifice, intended to showcase the talent of the artist for creating ironic invenzione, artistic sleight-of-hand. The figure of the Magdalene herself, for Pardo, is a cipher—a ‘code’— enabling the artist to endow his composition with meanings ranging from the theological to the iconographic.
• While recognizing the importance of Pardo’s work on this painting, in this paper I wish to take issue with the view of the Magdalene as an empty mediator, void of independent ‘truth’. In investigating the notion of ‘Magdalene as mirror’ via a case study of Savoldo’s Magdalene (4.1) but also a Magdalene originally painted by Caravaggio (4.2), I hope to show, on the contrary, that rather than being a ‘passive ... projection screen’,7 a certain kind of early seventeenth-century Magdalene actively appropriates the mirror. Somewhere in the play of body and light, paint and canvas, the painted body becomes the agent, the instigator of the interaction between self and other. THESIS
• It is therefore a knowing Magdalene assuming both erotic bodiliness and sacredness8 who engages and challenges the viewer’s gaze: the Magdalene of the Gnostic gospels, the knower of ‘truth’ who said to the disciples, ‘What is hidden from you, I will proclaim to you.’9 Hmmmm not convinced
• Is she ever threatening in a way which exceeds the artist?
• The threat posed by the Magdalene is that of excessive empathy with an emphatically corporeal body, experiencing an ecstasy which is am- biguous in its physical and spiritual pleasure or pain, of mysterious and ineffable origin and which may be too ‘real’ to be safely viewed.
• An au- tonomous pleasure, activated visually, inevitably introduces questions of the concept of the mirror. The sight of an ecstatic body, suspended both present and absent, both physical and spiritual, sets in motion a fantasized interplay of the gaze, where the viewer’s own body is itself the product of the gaze network. An infinity of mirrors, where the body is simultaneously both subject and object of the gaze; gazing at another body, it constructs itself as seen. In this way, the body’s status as a subjective site of the gaze is paradoxically enabled by the body’s fictive identification as an object of a fantasized gaze. OKAY DAMN becoming subject by engaging object
• Bal continues, however, that ‘the price to pay for wholeness is the ab- sence of consciousness ...’31 While the Rome Magdalene remains ‘a fig- ure of transgression and conversion’, she nevertheless remains unconscious, ‘she does not “know herself’’’.32 In remaining passive, ‘[the Magdalene] represents the passive receptivity of the mirror as a gender-specific projection screen for the production of an illusory, ex- terior wholeness.’
• Lacan: you only have to go and look at Bernini’s statue in Rome to under- stand immediately that she’s coming [qu’elle jouit], there is no doubt about it. And what is her jouissance, her coming from? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics is that they are experiencing it but know nothing about it.3
• Against Bal and Lacan: I argue that when Caravaggio’s Magdalenes become mirrors, it is not a passive, unknowing unconsciousness but rather an active one.
• To assume that apparent unconsciousness is passive is to overlook the body of imagery surrounding the figure of Mary Magdalene, and the extraordinary symbolic allusions which enfold her image, in terms of her transgression of body and spirit as the one who touches the risen Christ. It is her action of rejecting the physical mirror, enabling her to transgress all that it represents in terms of Narcissistic worldli- ness, which enables her to internalize and absorb its power to destabi- lize the play of focalizers in visuality.36 The Caravaggesque Magdalene gains wholeness at the price of the ‘real’. Instead the ‘real’ becomes an ‘air de vérité’,37 and the ‘Caravaggesque’ becomes a cipher at many levels, signifying a performance of fictive bodiliness in which the Magdalene is complicit. Hmmmmm
• Neverthe- less, the term Caravaggesque traverses the before and after of the Caravaggio ‘moment’ just as the visual discourse of ecstasy, in the Fou- cauldian sense, is a network of relations and connections. LOVE THIS
• This Magdalene is a mirror—but neither reflecting the viewer nor herself. Instead the viewer is implicated, via the commanding gaze of the saint, in a three-way interaction where the missing third party, the resurrected Christ, is depicted as light—incomprehensible to us, unless it is mirrored, reflected, and translated by the Magdalene.
• Here the subject of the painting has gained an effect of agency: she is complicit in the fiction of her own painted space and her paradoxical bodily existence.
• [5 Trauma A concept of ‘travelling light’ to a case-study of Early Modern Painting]
• Disciplines in the humanities often raise questions that cannot be an- swered within their own confines. Art history is particularly in need of external help when pictorial developments seem not to adhere to pre- vious aesthetic norms or assumptions.
• Trauma as a traveling concept to aid art history’s inability to reconcile these paintings
• The combination of a resistant object and a distant historical period seems, then, to promise little for the use of trauma in the analysis of Renaissance and Baroque painting, as, in our case, the work of Elsheimer. If trauma is to pack and carry the whole semantic and con- textual charge that accompanies it at home (in psychology, that is, where it was most widely used during the last century), this conceptual journey seems impossible to handle and unworthy of the effort.
• I am willing to ac- cept this, because what interests me as a cultural analyst is less the source of trauma than its consequences, or what I would call trauma-like representational elements.
• Borrowing a term used by Elaine Scarry in an entirely different context, we can call such a crisis the ‘derealization of a culture’; the question is how, in the substance of painting (rather than, as Scarry would have it, in war), can such a crisis be ‘substantiated’?11
• what the author calls in French pan, which can be translated into English as ‘patch’ or ‘blot’.15 For Didi-Huberman, the pan is a mysterious fragment which is the irruption of the materiality of painting, an accident in the painting which shows nothing more than the progress of figuration itself.
• I would like to claim that some elements in it can be shown to be epistemic disorders that, in a trauma-like reaction, manifest a broader cultural crisis.
• Nature itself, the object represented, seems to have become a series of pans, as the loss of heuristic value in its ele- ments seems to negate their potential status as details.
• Soemthing is wrong with this painting: something post-traumatic about it
• The second painting by Elsheimer, The Baptism of Christ (5.2), is even more interesting, in that we can see in it the concrete apparition, spatial and visible, of an incongruous, strange symptom. Here this is not to be found, or not mainly, in the general regime of representation, but in a detail that is, like Poe’s purloined letter, so visible and close to the viewer’s space that it can easily be ignored altogether, or considered as background to be passed through on the way to the representation ‘it- self’.22 I am talking, of course, about the figure in the foreground, al- most in the dark, that occupies about a third of the width of the work and literally blocks our view of the—narratively speaking—more im- portant events taking place behind it.
• Worse still, this intermediary figure is covered with thick shadow, and so in itself is barely visible, more a pan of colour than anything else; this figure prevents, rather than pro- motes, visibility.
• [6 Life-Mapping]
• Working with Benjamin’s concept that links space and life-writing, I want to shift the dominant modes of in- terpretation of the work of the German-Jewish artist Charlotte Sa- lomon (1917–43, 6.2) that focus on autobiography, visual narrativity and trauma.3
• I want to propose allo-thanatography—the writing of the deaths of [feminine] others.
• [6 Puncture/Punctum]
• The Latin word Barthes is referring to is ‘punctum’. In Camera Lucida Barthes differentiates between the studium—that which is of general interest in a photograph—and the punctum—which is a second ele- ment (not always present) that punctuates the studium. The punctum is like the needle of a syringe puncturing the spectator’s skin, filling the spectator with feeling ... we travel through images seeking the experi- ence that is the punctum.
• Barthes’s punctum should be under- stood as a site of resistance. He suggests that we do not seek out the punctum, we do not understand it, rather it seeks us out, it understands us.17 The punctum is not part of the meanings that we give to an image, rather it gives us meaning. Through the injury it causes, I feel something and I must ask why have I felt and what have I felt. As punctuation it has an asemantic element to it, an aspect ... a point that resists the for- mation of meaning that constitutes the process of reading.18 It eludes, evades, escapes our efforts to ensnare it and catch it in meaning. It gives sense without being sensible. The punctum is perhaps a comma, punc- tums are ellipses ‘...’.
• Face to face with the sightless solitude of this image, there are three sensitive points for me, three holes, the hand beneath the water, the water that ripples (7.3), and the point that was not supposed to be there. The point which this paper points towards. This point is difficult to see, it is not as sharp as its counterparts ... but the mark, the prick ... is there all the same. It is the punctum which should have been, which was, but which was removed. It is the punctum which is present as ab- sence, the hole where the hole should be. (her track marks photoshopped out) THE HOLE WHERE THE HOLE SHOULD BE
• The photograph of Gia Carangi, through its use of airbrushing pho- tograph, may provide an example of what John Paul Ricco has called a ‘disappeared aesthetics’, an aesthetics founded on imperceptibility.
• The materiality of represen- tation—its presence in the world—threatens to obscure the very loss it sometimes seeks to commemorate.
• SO GOOD
• [The Efficacity of Meta-Conceptual Performativity]
• Using Bal’s concepts of performance/ performativity as a springboard, this paper is not about how concepts change as they move through the disciplines, but how apparently totally different areas of sciences and arts share the same conceptual imagina- tion. Moreover, this shared epistemology comes to the same conclu- sion, namely, that in the case of some things, we just do not know what we are talking about.
• while performance is grounded in a ‘score’ anterior to the actuality of the performance, per- formativity lives by the present and knows no anteriority.’
• My paper is a chal- lenge to art history, and to art theory and art criticism. Indeed, rather than to believe that art can be explained by language, it is to regard the space between art and language as performativity generating new knowl- edge.
• There is something in the way that both French philosophy and quantum theory thinks the unthinkable, seeks the unknowable, and ac- cepts that there are things we just do not know that I wish to negotiate here. For me, performativity is the unknowable, though it can be ‘known’ by its effects.
• In classical theory, then, we look for the thing or person that caused the effect; in nonclassical theory, we can never, ever, find out the source, the thing that did it. What we can do is think about the action that was implicated in the effect we see. Now this action, this efficacity, is the re- sult of two things that cannot be separated. It is the result of something producing an effect, some-thing we will never ‘know’, combined with the means we have to measure that effect. An effect, then, is something brought about by a cause or an agent that can be known. An efficacity is the action of an unknowable that affects the knowable effect.
• Plotnitsky defines ‘efficacity’ as the ‘power or agency producing ef- fects but, in this case, without the possibility of ascribing this agency causality’. We can know effects but not EFFICACITY The ‘efficac- ity’ is ultimately unknowable also, but it is interesting to study, in the way it impacts on the knowable.
• Thus it is a metathesis; this work is not a matter of discovering some- thing new to add to art history, but describing, unfolding, perhaps dis- covering, the process of knowing, and doing so through the imaginative structure of atomic physics and cosmology.
• Using concepts and not methods: Concepts function not so much as firmly established univocal terms but as dynamic in themselves. While groping to define, provi- sionally and partly, what a particular concept may mean, we gain insight into what it can do. It is in the groping that the valuable work lies. This is why I have come to value concepts.
• ‘Meaning’ is a case of just such an ordinary word-concept that casually walks back and forth between semantics and intention.
• Concepts are not fixed. They travel—between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods, and between geograph- ically dispersed academic communities.
• [The resisting viewer in a medieval Jewish image of the circumcision ritual]
• Framing enables the interpretative work of the historian to emerge as an active intervention.
• Such work is a form of visual reading, and it draws attention to the many preceding acts of reading that have intervened between the artist’s own reading of the narrative through the design of the image, and our own reading of it in the present.
• Ways to overcome the absence of women in the archive: Reflection theory reads literary texts and artistic images as realistic reflections of real women’s lives. This is overly simple and a-historical. Sign theory, by contrast, conceives of ‘woman’ as a sign, a metaphorical currency of exchange between writing and painting men. This view can easily lead to the erasure of medieval women readers and viewers.
• My solution to this dilemma—being caught be- tween the reflection theory and the ‘woman as sign’ theory is to try and locate the inscribed female viewer in the visual image.
• Where medievalists like Roberta Krueger and Tova Rosen have identified an inscribed woman reader in the text, I locate an inscribed female viewer within the image, a viewer that becomes tangible because of the mate- rial framing performed within the image.4 It is my contention that these inscribed female viewers could have formed the bridgeheads or points of identification that allowed viewing as a woman, modelled on Krueger and Rosen’s resisting readers.
• What I want to show is that gender trouble is inscribed within the im- ages in illuminated medieval Hebrew manuscripts and that these gender tensions are articulated through the figure of the viewer within the image, the inscribed viewer. The inscribed viewer in turn implies a view- ership outside the image. INSCRIBED VIEWER….
• The figure of the viewer, i.e. the inscribed viewer, is a potentially problematic figure in feminist terms. It could be a figure of passive spectatorship as opposed to action, but it can equally well be a figure of subversion and resistance by virtue of non-action. It is even possible to see it as a figure of power: the power of the gaze.
• This whole chapter is just spotty and anachronistic feminism
• [Visual agency in Poussin’s Rinaldo and Armida Phillippa Plock]
• By figuring a viewer being moved by a passive object, which in turn still seeks to move an external viewer, the painting seems to challenge the demarcation between the worlds of things and people that has been established in recent criticisms of fetishism and reification.4 Rhyming my own potential interaction, the painting addresses me in such a way that suggests it has a powerful agency to affect my own state of being, forcing me to merge with the image and to become a dual entity myself.
• Concept here is AGENCY OF THINGS: objects of material culture have the power to influence their own- ers’ behaviours,
• Through attending to the means of this painting’s visual address in the first part of this essay, it becomes evident that the painting commu- nicates through a visual language composed of contradictory gendered gestures. We shall see that the simultaneity apparent in the first en- counter with the painting rests in Armida’s signification as both femi- nine and masculine.
• In communicating Armida’s masculinity and femininity simultaneously, Poussin stressed the specificities of his own craft to move audiences to the utmost degree. THESIS. GENDER SIMULTANEITY
• [4 Mirror: Mary Magdalene Through the looking glass]
• Pardo presents Savoldo’s Magdalene as a masterpiece of painterly ar- tifice, intended to showcase the talent of the artist for creating ironic invenzione, artistic sleight-of-hand. The figure of the Magdalene herself, for Pardo, is a cipher—a ‘code’— enabling the artist to endow his composition with meanings ranging from the theological to the iconographic.
• While recognizing the importance of Pardo’s work on this painting, in this paper I wish to take issue with the view of the Magdalene as an empty mediator, void of independent ‘truth’. In investigating the notion of ‘Magdalene as mirror’ via a case study of Savoldo’s Magdalene (4.1) but also a Magdalene originally painted by Caravaggio (4.2), I hope to show, on the contrary, that rather than being a ‘passive ... projection screen’,7 a certain kind of early seventeenth-century Magdalene actively appropriates the mirror. Somewhere in the play of body and light, paint and canvas, the painted body becomes the agent, the instigator of the interaction between self and other. THESIS
• It is therefore a knowing Magdalene assuming both erotic bodiliness and sacredness8 who engages and challenges the viewer’s gaze: the Magdalene of the Gnostic gospels, the knower of ‘truth’ who said to the disciples, ‘What is hidden from you, I will proclaim to you.’9 Hmmmm not convinced
• Is she ever threatening in a way which exceeds the artist?
• The threat posed by the Magdalene is that of excessive empathy with an emphatically corporeal body, experiencing an ecstasy which is am- biguous in its physical and spiritual pleasure or pain, of mysterious and ineffable origin and which may be too ‘real’ to be safely viewed.
• An au- tonomous pleasure, activated visually, inevitably introduces questions of the concept of the mirror. The sight of an ecstatic body, suspended both present and absent, both physical and spiritual, sets in motion a fantasized interplay of the gaze, where the viewer’s own body is itself the product of the gaze network. An infinity of mirrors, where the body is simultaneously both subject and object of the gaze; gazing at another body, it constructs itself as seen. In this way, the body’s status as a subjective site of the gaze is paradoxically enabled by the body’s fictive identification as an object of a fantasized gaze. OKAY DAMN becoming subject by engaging object
• Bal continues, however, that ‘the price to pay for wholeness is the ab- sence of consciousness ...’31 While the Rome Magdalene remains ‘a fig- ure of transgression and conversion’, she nevertheless remains unconscious, ‘she does not “know herself’’’.32 In remaining passive, ‘[the Magdalene] represents the passive receptivity of the mirror as a gender-specific projection screen for the production of an illusory, ex- terior wholeness.’
• Lacan: you only have to go and look at Bernini’s statue in Rome to under- stand immediately that she’s coming [qu’elle jouit], there is no doubt about it. And what is her jouissance, her coming from? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics is that they are experiencing it but know nothing about it.3
• Against Bal and Lacan: I argue that when Caravaggio’s Magdalenes become mirrors, it is not a passive, unknowing unconsciousness but rather an active one.
• To assume that apparent unconsciousness is passive is to overlook the body of imagery surrounding the figure of Mary Magdalene, and the extraordinary symbolic allusions which enfold her image, in terms of her transgression of body and spirit as the one who touches the risen Christ. It is her action of rejecting the physical mirror, enabling her to transgress all that it represents in terms of Narcissistic worldli- ness, which enables her to internalize and absorb its power to destabi- lize the play of focalizers in visuality.36 The Caravaggesque Magdalene gains wholeness at the price of the ‘real’. Instead the ‘real’ becomes an ‘air de vérité’,37 and the ‘Caravaggesque’ becomes a cipher at many levels, signifying a performance of fictive bodiliness in which the Magdalene is complicit. Hmmmmm
• Neverthe- less, the term Caravaggesque traverses the before and after of the Caravaggio ‘moment’ just as the visual discourse of ecstasy, in the Fou- cauldian sense, is a network of relations and connections. LOVE THIS
• This Magdalene is a mirror—but neither reflecting the viewer nor herself. Instead the viewer is implicated, via the commanding gaze of the saint, in a three-way interaction where the missing third party, the resurrected Christ, is depicted as light—incomprehensible to us, unless it is mirrored, reflected, and translated by the Magdalene.
• Here the subject of the painting has gained an effect of agency: she is complicit in the fiction of her own painted space and her paradoxical bodily existence.
• [5 Trauma A concept of ‘travelling light’ to a case-study of Early Modern Painting]
• Disciplines in the humanities often raise questions that cannot be an- swered within their own confines. Art history is particularly in need of external help when pictorial developments seem not to adhere to pre- vious aesthetic norms or assumptions.
• Trauma as a traveling concept to aid art history’s inability to reconcile these paintings
• The combination of a resistant object and a distant historical period seems, then, to promise little for the use of trauma in the analysis of Renaissance and Baroque painting, as, in our case, the work of Elsheimer. If trauma is to pack and carry the whole semantic and con- textual charge that accompanies it at home (in psychology, that is, where it was most widely used during the last century), this conceptual journey seems impossible to handle and unworthy of the effort.
• I am willing to ac- cept this, because what interests me as a cultural analyst is less the source of trauma than its consequences, or what I would call trauma-like representational elements.
• Borrowing a term used by Elaine Scarry in an entirely different context, we can call such a crisis the ‘derealization of a culture’; the question is how, in the substance of painting (rather than, as Scarry would have it, in war), can such a crisis be ‘substantiated’?11
• what the author calls in French pan, which can be translated into English as ‘patch’ or ‘blot’.15 For Didi-Huberman, the pan is a mysterious fragment which is the irruption of the materiality of painting, an accident in the painting which shows nothing more than the progress of figuration itself.
• I would like to claim that some elements in it can be shown to be epistemic disorders that, in a trauma-like reaction, manifest a broader cultural crisis.
• Nature itself, the object represented, seems to have become a series of pans, as the loss of heuristic value in its ele- ments seems to negate their potential status as details.
• Soemthing is wrong with this painting: something post-traumatic about it
• The second painting by Elsheimer, The Baptism of Christ (5.2), is even more interesting, in that we can see in it the concrete apparition, spatial and visible, of an incongruous, strange symptom. Here this is not to be found, or not mainly, in the general regime of representation, but in a detail that is, like Poe’s purloined letter, so visible and close to the viewer’s space that it can easily be ignored altogether, or considered as background to be passed through on the way to the representation ‘it- self’.22 I am talking, of course, about the figure in the foreground, al- most in the dark, that occupies about a third of the width of the work and literally blocks our view of the—narratively speaking—more im- portant events taking place behind it.
• Worse still, this intermediary figure is covered with thick shadow, and so in itself is barely visible, more a pan of colour than anything else; this figure prevents, rather than pro- motes, visibility.
• [6 Life-Mapping]
• Working with Benjamin’s concept that links space and life-writing, I want to shift the dominant modes of in- terpretation of the work of the German-Jewish artist Charlotte Sa- lomon (1917–43, 6.2) that focus on autobiography, visual narrativity and trauma.3
• I want to propose allo-thanatography—the writing of the deaths of [feminine] others.
• [6 Puncture/Punctum]
• The Latin word Barthes is referring to is ‘punctum’. In Camera Lucida Barthes differentiates between the studium—that which is of general interest in a photograph—and the punctum—which is a second ele- ment (not always present) that punctuates the studium. The punctum is like the needle of a syringe puncturing the spectator’s skin, filling the spectator with feeling ... we travel through images seeking the experi- ence that is the punctum.
• Barthes’s punctum should be under- stood as a site of resistance. He suggests that we do not seek out the punctum, we do not understand it, rather it seeks us out, it understands us.17 The punctum is not part of the meanings that we give to an image, rather it gives us meaning. Through the injury it causes, I feel something and I must ask why have I felt and what have I felt. As punctuation it has an asemantic element to it, an aspect ... a point that resists the for- mation of meaning that constitutes the process of reading.18 It eludes, evades, escapes our efforts to ensnare it and catch it in meaning. It gives sense without being sensible. The punctum is perhaps a comma, punc- tums are ellipses ‘...’.
• Face to face with the sightless solitude of this image, there are three sensitive points for me, three holes, the hand beneath the water, the water that ripples (7.3), and the point that was not supposed to be there. The point which this paper points towards. This point is difficult to see, it is not as sharp as its counterparts ... but the mark, the prick ... is there all the same. It is the punctum which should have been, which was, but which was removed. It is the punctum which is present as ab- sence, the hole where the hole should be. (her track marks photoshopped out) THE HOLE WHERE THE HOLE SHOULD BE
• The photograph of Gia Carangi, through its use of airbrushing pho- tograph, may provide an example of what John Paul Ricco has called a ‘disappeared aesthetics’, an aesthetics founded on imperceptibility.
• The materiality of represen- tation—its presence in the world—threatens to obscure the very loss it sometimes seeks to commemorate.
• SO GOOD
• [The Efficacity of Meta-Conceptual Performativity]
• Using Bal’s concepts of performance/ performativity as a springboard, this paper is not about how concepts change as they move through the disciplines, but how apparently totally different areas of sciences and arts share the same conceptual imagina- tion. Moreover, this shared epistemology comes to the same conclu- sion, namely, that in the case of some things, we just do not know what we are talking about.
• while performance is grounded in a ‘score’ anterior to the actuality of the performance, per- formativity lives by the present and knows no anteriority.’
• My paper is a chal- lenge to art history, and to art theory and art criticism. Indeed, rather than to believe that art can be explained by language, it is to regard the space between art and language as performativity generating new knowl- edge.
• There is something in the way that both French philosophy and quantum theory thinks the unthinkable, seeks the unknowable, and ac- cepts that there are things we just do not know that I wish to negotiate here. For me, performativity is the unknowable, though it can be ‘known’ by its effects.
• In classical theory, then, we look for the thing or person that caused the effect; in nonclassical theory, we can never, ever, find out the source, the thing that did it. What we can do is think about the action that was implicated in the effect we see. Now this action, this efficacity, is the re- sult of two things that cannot be separated. It is the result of something producing an effect, some-thing we will never ‘know’, combined with the means we have to measure that effect. An effect, then, is something brought about by a cause or an agent that can be known. An efficacity is the action of an unknowable that affects the knowable effect.
• Plotnitsky defines ‘efficacity’ as the ‘power or agency producing ef- fects but, in this case, without the possibility of ascribing this agency causality’. We can know effects but not EFFICACITY The ‘efficac- ity’ is ultimately unknowable also, but it is interesting to study, in the way it impacts on the knowable.
• Thus it is a metathesis; this work is not a matter of discovering some- thing new to add to art history, but describing, unfolding, perhaps dis- covering, the process of knowing, and doing so through the imaginative structure of atomic physics and cosmology.
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