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Fateful Images

ALPHONSO LINGIS

The Pennsylvania State University

Reality and its Appearances

Phenomenology, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, reduced the reality of things to the totality of their appearances. It is because something appears that we can assert that it exists. It belongs to the essence of a real

thing to generate appearances. And the appearances are appearances of things. Appearances do not flow by, a drifting fog of tones and

hues; they separate into identifiable units, gestalten. To be outside our minds belongs to the things, and their appearances are outside. We do not see patterns suspended in the inner space of the mind, but the colors, sizes, shapes of outside things. The real thing itself-the chair or the building caught sight of in its fragmentary appearances- is not something invisible, or conceptual, not an identity-term posited by the mind; it is the totality as sketched out in any of its appear- ances. Any of its appearances implicate further appearances: we see how the surface exposed in front of us implicates and is continued by a back side, an underside. The chair or a building exists in a wave of duration across which it evolves perspectival profiles of itself.

Yet not all the appearances a thing generates show it as it really is. Natural perception itself, Maurice Merleau-Ponty pointed out, distin-

guishes between the real properties of things and their perspectival deformations, appearances distorted by the intervening medium or obscured by the distance, colors seen in dim or colored light, shapes

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set askew. The real properties appear in the thing when the thing itself is within reach, set at the right distance and position, accessible to our multiple sensory and motor powers. Other appearances appear not as false or illusory (or mentally fabricated) but as transitional: they lead to the real thing and its real characteristics, and disappear when

they appear. The flattened oval shape of the dinner plate seen on the shelf leads to and merges into the circular form which spreads out all the patterns of the plate equally before our view, as monocular images fade out before the integral appearance of an object set at explorable distance from our eyes.

Formal and Substantial Appearances of Real Things

The apprehension of the real features and natures of things is an ac- tion. It is when we position ourselves before a thing, and position it before us, such that its surfaces are visible throughout and their colors and textures observable, and its overall structure is surveyable that the

thing appears to be a unit that holds together. This positioning, this

manipulation is a primary form of understanding. The construction of a scientific representation of the universe proceeds out of an action of

isolating substances and discovering their properties by putting them in reaction with other substances; and it is predictive; it issues in tech-

nological transformations. Since we uncover and discover things by manipulation, are the things

anything but manipulanda? Things are not only forms but also forces- their forms are dynamic forms. The hammer's form is the ways its force of resistance or drive fits in with other things-with the grip of the hand of the user and with the other things movable, breakable, or assemblable with its force. A thing thus reduces to the unity of its

"properties"-which are in fact modes of appropriateness; and

phenomenological ontology establishes a relational conception in place of the ancient substantive definition of things, taken, since Hume, to be metaphysical.

But, Emmanuel Levinas points out, things do not momentarily take form in the unarticulated elements, in the flow of light and shadow, heat and damp, along the ground, with the specific function the ma-

nipulating hand simultaneously outlines and makes use of. It is be- cause they are already there, detachable substances, in themselves and at our disposal, that we can envision uses for them. Use presupposes possession. The clearly delimited contours that constitute a piece of

reality as a thing mark out the way it is separate from or detachable from other things. Because a thing's form, its closed surfaces, makes

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of it something that is closed in upon itself, it is also graspable and detachable and transportable, at our disposal. What offers no surfaces to take hold of-air, heat, warmth, light, ground-are not things, but sensuous elements. What offers a form but is not detachable-a moun- tain range, the clouds, the moon-is, Henri Wallon said, an "ultra-

thing." Wallon discovered that children who draw houses, people, cars, and trees in relative proportion to one another do not know how big to draw the moon in relation to these things. The moon and the clouds follow us as we walk; they are movables, but not removables.

The identity a thing acquires by virtue of its form makes it suscepti- ble to being compared, exchanged, and quantified. But a form does not so much expose and make accessible and graspable the inner na- ture of things as clothe them. Under their forms which have made

things graspable and domesticated, their inner natures are clothed. Their natures remain decent and abstract. The functional forms of

things that make them implements or furnishings cover over their sub- stantial natures. The fiberglass, metal alloy, or plastic substance of the automobile remain abstract and unknown under the molded forms; the form of the stone axe, which detaches it for our eye, leaves the substance that is uncovered by the broken and decayed form in all the abstract generality of "stone" or "fossil substance." Roquentin in the public garden senses how ungraspable is the substance of the bench under the forms and functions that extend it as surfaces in the light.

The Space and Time of Real Things

Things are not just patterns projected in space before us or streaming by; they take form in the place we inhabit. They await us in our home and along the paths extended from our door. Before things become

implements (Zeuge), annexed to the body of the user, prostheses, they are furnishings, meubles-movable goods, detachable substances brought into the zone of the home, tranquillized, and kept in reserve. The

concept of means misses their reality. Things are terms, that rest in

themselves, termini. In their substantiality they are goods-good in

themselves, attractions, and not simply good-for, utilities.

Space does not open about us from the first in the homogeneity and infinity of geometrical extension nor as a layout of instrumental connections. The primary segregation separates a zone of the intimate from the outlying zone of the alien. The zone we inhabit, our home, is a supporting retreat, a point of departure and return. A zone of

tranquillity and repose, it is known in an involution of sensibility, in

enjoyment.

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In their substantiality things condense the tranquillity of the home. We rest within the solidity of the four walls and sink into the rest of the easy chair. Below our window the garden gate and the tree-lined road and the bridge over the river are composed and serene. They keep at a distance the threats and provocations, the sound and the

fury of the stock exchanges and the battlefields. At rest in themselves, these substances do not gear into the things about them or onto our

forces; they emanate a savor, a resonance, an aura. Our active forces are freed from them, but they softly invade our sensibility, which comes to rest in them.

A house is equipped with means-with kitchen equipment, with tools for cleaning and for repairing; it becomes a home by filling up with

goods, with easy chairs, books and recordings, a fish tank, rocks gath- ered on walks and pieces of driftwood. Once we have attended to the mechanisms of home equipment enough to have acquired the proper use of them, they revert to a substantial presence in contact with our

sensuality. The sensuous properties of things do not only provide data for identifying them practically and conceptually. Things support us, sustain us, exalt us. They buoy up our gaze, fill our hearing, nourish our energies, restore our movements. The living-room furniture, the

drapes, the lighting acquire the density of a sensuous harmony. The

invigorating smells and air and rigor of the gymnastics court or ski

slopes envelop the room of the student athlete. The jacket, full of smells and memories, that he has worn the last half of his life and the stained and worn knife that have made a shelter for him in the woods lie about the old man, who is nestling in cardboard boxes in the door-

way as a barrier against the traffic and rules of the street and the dense tone of respite.

By taking hold of their contours and detaching things from the elements,

by keeping them at one's disposition within the zone one inhabits, by finding uses for them, an agent enters into the time of things. Things harbor possibilities, possibilities for use and for enjoyment; a future extends from them. But as substances, withdrawn from the uncharted

expanses of the alien, at rest within the repose of the home, they exist in a present which is not simply the point of conversion of their re- sources into possibility, a present which extends of itself in endurance.

The paths leading from our door to the things that furnish our environment also lead on into the outlying regions of the alien. Levinas describes the outer regions beyond the limits of what we inhabit as uncharted depths of the elements-earth, forest, desert, oceans, sky, darkness. Yet in also designating it as the realm of pagan gods, he

opens the possibility of a description of things that are movables with-

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out being furnishings. Our departures from the home are not all preda- tory sallies to acquire possessions and implements. The things we come

upon in the outlying regions of the alien are themselves alien forms. The carved rock we come upon in the clearing in the forest in the Guatemalan mountains, the bleached twisted log we come upon on the sands are not correlates of our hands that impose their uses on

them; they are forms made by the growth of a long-dead tree and

polished by the sea, made by geological upheavals and carved by a

priest of a vanished people and softened by the rain and the moss. Such things crystalize as lures in which our look, our touch, our life

flowing outward is channelled and sent further into the alien. They are entries into the inhuman. We find ourselves drifting far from our home toward the time of ancient gods of lost peoples, toward the geo- logical epochs of the oceans and the continents.

Alien things are charms and omens; they function as matrices of

expropriation. The albatross is a form varying itself rhythmically and

drawing vanishing arabesques in the Antarctic sky. In the summer meadows the patches of grasses in seed and the thick spiny leaves coil-

ing around the stalk of a thistle form snares for our eyes, into which each time a wave of our life sinks and is lost. In a foreign city the

pagoda, the parks, and the colors and designs of the shantytown crys- talize into ensembles which present us with unknown shapes and sub- stances dense with imperatives for oblivion-seekers. When people first discover the coral seas, they often buy underwater cameras to take from the ocean depths its enchanted colors and forms, motivated by the desire to share them with the surface-bound. But one quickly learns that the forms and colors fixed on photographic paper stabilized what existed in shimmering movement. In the depths of the ocean one is

only a visitor.

Misleading Appearances and Errant Images

Action takes hold of things in their appearances, and takes the ap- pearances to exhibit the reality, carpentry, and properties of things. Appearances that are not the appearances of the real properties of

things in their coherent intersensorial unity are taken as transitional

relays toward the real appearances; by repositioning them, or reposi- tioning oneself before them, we pass to the real features and traits.

Appearances can also be deceptive; they can mislead action. Modern philosophy of mind was wrong to impute these illusive ap-

pearances to fabricating tendencies of the mind. The things themselves are devious, producing deceptive images of themselves. It is the things

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that cast monocular images of themselves upon our eyes set too close before them. If what looks to be a shimmering pool of water appears on the highway before us, this misleading appearance is in no sense

"subjective," a private image fabricated within the closed sphere of the

spectator's mind. Everyone in the car sees it, and cannot help but see it. It is the asphalt highway itself that engenders this image of itself in the medium of the sunlight-soaked layer of heated air.

Appearances can mislead the eye and hand that wishes to appropri- ate a thing. The appearances a thing generates can also lead us off that thing entirely and off things entirely. Levinas shows that to judge such images as illusions and to explain them as fantasies concocted by a mind that indulges in deluding itself is to neglect the phenomenological ontology that must describe how they show themselves to be.

Things do not only produce perspectivally deformed appearances of their shapes, appearances distorted by the intervening medium or obscured by the distance, colors dimmed, bleached, or stained by the

light. Things also cast colors and shapes off themselves onto other substances or onto empty spaces. The water of the garden pool casts streaks of zigzag light onto the screen of cypresses behind. Things cast shadows on other things. They cast reflections of themselves into the water and onto mirrors and into the crystal globes of eyes. They ema- nate halos about themselves and dense or brooding or shimmering atmospheres. The colors of a face do not only outline the surfaces and

pores of the carpentry of that face, but interact with one another in the brew of a sensual, swarthy, or translucid complexion. Kawabata

contemplates the strobe glow of fireflies on the cheeks and brow of a woman in the night. Things are not found separated in gestalten in a

transparent medium. They condense in the radiance of the light, along the road, in the continuum and flow of the surfaces of the ground and of the building; their tangible substance surfaces in the continuity of the night. And their colors bleed out of themselves to stain the

atmosphere; their shapes merge into one another to form contours and hollows of the continuous surfaces. In twilight the colors of the forest below disengage from the contours of the leaves and the trees and interact with one another, doubling up the trees with a layer of dense green harmonics.

Each thing presents not only itself, the abiding essence that main- tains it as a practicable form and a task; across a wave of duration it refracts off doubles of itself, facades, simulacra, shadows, reflections,

mirages. These are appearances without the real thing appearing, ap- pearances that mask or caricature the real thing, appearances in which the real thing is ungraspable, and appearances of those appearances.

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A face exposed to view doubles up with a caricature of itself. The

professor is occupied in reading the explanations he has prepared to communicate them to the students in the room. But the way he holds his lecture papers, his gestures, his complexion, the shape of his skull and the fall of his hair separate from this professorial work to form a

picturesque image. This image is caricatural. In attending to the im-

age, the foppish or the buffoonish or the loutish image, the students are not penetrating to the reality of the professor and his work there- nor exercising some penetrating insight into his real character. Both his character and his professor persona disappear, as though he had left the room, leaving there only his trappings and paraphernalia. The resemblance remains, resemblance to some other character, as though he had been replaced by someone imitating him, making the gestures but no longer doing the teaching.

A squirrel or rabbit nibbling its way across the garden doubles up in the image of a child or a dwarfish human by linking up with the images of people who seem to be only scurrying about in the landscape and not pursuing their tasks. The walls of a house double up into a facade, into the image of a face whose windows are eyes and whose door is a mouth linking up with the images of faces that are frozen and expres- sionless. The trees extending their bare branches against the wintry sky double up into an image of hands scratching and gesticulating meaninglessly by linking up with hands flaying about instead of oper- ating effectively with things. The hills rising out of the plain double

up into the image of breasts exposed to the voluptuous twilight by linking up with the image of a body prone in a swoon or in sleep.

Everything that is resounds. In their creaking in the wind we hear the rigidity and flexibility of the bamboos; in the rumble from the

ceiling we hear the heaviness and irregular contours of something rolling over the floor above. But the sounds also drift off things, and link up with one another, in rhythms. The sound of a drop of water falling into the bathtub reveals to us its nature as a drop of water and reveals the surface of the water still left in the bathtub after we have left it without draining it, called away by the sound of someone knocking at the door. But the sounds also link up with one another, and we hear a morse code of sounds: dum, dum-dumm, dum, dum-dumm, a rhythm obsessively repeating itself disconnected from the faucet and the sur- face of the water, pursuing its way in the free space.

It is through action that we comprehend how things hold together and fit in with other things. These images refracted off things are not

ways the thing is there together and graspable; they are ways things appear elsewhere than where they are and are ungraspable. The

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relationship between us and these images is one of captivation and

possession. Their relationship to us is magical, they act on us across a distance and without intermediaries. Images captivate by their rhythm. When we walk through the forest, the shadows link up in a rhythm which lifts our eyes from the substance of the trees and underbrush and induces in them a rhythmic movement. Seated in a train, we look out of the window, actively seeking to identify things, landmarks, towns, but soon the color and forms of the mountains disengage from the

map of the landscape and flow by the window and distract us; our

gaze gets caught up in the rhythmic flow of the trees and hills, follow-

ing the rhythm, moving rhythmically, as our hearing gets entangled in the rhythmic sound of the train wheels turning on the rails.

Our attention to the meaning of the words of a story being told is doubled up with an awareness of the sounds, the rhythm of the sounds, which tend to form closed wholes that link up with and call for one another. We do not actively link up the sounds and produce the rhythm that does not exist in any one of them but exists between them; in- stead we participate in the rhythm. It captivates us and invades us, so that the pace of our hearing becomes rhythmic.

Levinas disengages the specific traits of involvement in a rhythm which is the specific form of awareness of these images. Captivated by the

images in which the consistency and coherence of things dissipates, the consistency and coherence of the ego dissolves. We lie in bed try- ing to sleep or to read, but the tap-tap of the dripping faucet invades

us, and we end up caught in it. Unable to break free of it, unable to direct our attention to our own concerns, we are reduced to anonym- ity, hearing it as one hears it, as anyone hears it. Involvement in a

rhythm is not consciousness, if consciousness is identified with inten-

tionality, for the I is no longer there to exercise initiatives and objectify. Involvement in music produces the intense agitation of walking or

dancing, while the freedom of consciousness is paralyzed. Nor does involvement in a rhythm have the form of the unconscious, since all elements of the situation are present and nowise disguised or con- cealed. Being caught up in a rhythm is also different from the

prepredicative body intentionality Merleau-Ponty found in habits and skills. It produces an intense sense of presence, an obsessed lucidity quite different from the obscurity and indistinctness in which habits, reflexes, or instinct operates.

The images in which the consistency and coherence of things dissi-

pate are interesting, without being of interest, of utility to us. Our awareness is inter-ested (inter-esse), finding itself among them, an im-

age of itself. It becomes rhythmic itself, each pulse of awareness an

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image of the prior pulse, linked up with it and called up by it-and each pulse of awareness an image of the visual or sonorous images whose rhythm captivates it.

It is with dreaming that states of captivation by images is to be com-

pared. The dreaming is not conscious of the dream-images like a sub-

ject situated over against them and observing them or like a subject fabricating them, but it is not unconscious of them either, since they are intensely present as articulated apparitions. The dreaming subjec- tivity is subjected to them, caught up in them, entangled in them, unable to separate itself from them and from their own progression. Likewise, the rabbit or squirrel nibbling its way through the garden doubles up into an image of a child or dwarfish human not because our mind actively selects images and links them up, but because our mind is captivated by images disconnected from things that of them- selves link up in harmonics and rhythms.

Sounds are the qualities most detached from objects; sounds dematerialize the substance of the things they resounded, and exhibit their own reverberation. When we listen to the obsessive tap-tap of the

faucet, or the music, the relationship with the substance of the faucet, the water, or with the substance of the trumpets and drums is lost

sight of. Listening is not apprehending "something," is not grasping things with concepts. We arrive at the concert hall, and look at the musicians tuning up, emptying spittle from their trumpets, pounding on the taut surfaces of their drums, clanging the cymbals, picking at the strings of the harp. Then the music begins, the sounds detach themselves entirely from the substances whose metallic or wood or catgut nature they revealed, and are set free in another dimension, where

they link up in rhythms and melodies. And our hearing is caught up in those rhythms and melodies, its initiatives terminated; we follow the music anonymously, like and with anyone who listens to it.

The whole setting open to our perception, with its practical and

intellectually elaborated structures, can touch us musically, can become an image. The caricaturized shapes and drifting colors are set free from the layout of things uncovered, discovered, manipulated and grasped in action, to form a dense and distinct realm. This double materializes not as a Platonic realm beyond manipulation poised for intellectual

contemplation, but as something on this side of the practicable world. The images effect an obscuring of the practicable field, a density and

materiality that cakes up the carpentry and gearings of things. They clog up the onward course of action and discourse. They dilate with a different tempo and temporality than that of furnishings and imple- ments-of things.

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In Platonic terms, the order of real things engenders a succession of

images, which resemble them but without their reality, their truth, images that are semblances. These images are not true and are not false ap- pearances either; they form a distinct ontological stratum. Images are

appearances that do not function as signs relaying the gaze to the

things themselves, they have lost their transparency; they thicken, materialize for themselves. They are places where the real practicable and graspable world is engulfed in another, purely sensuous, realm.

Levinas shows how images exist in a time that is not the time of the course of the inhabitable and practicable world. When we see the real brown of the table, we see how the table was brown and will be brown. When we look at the real front side of this chair or this toaster, it leads us to the sides and the back side and the underside; it unfolds a time of its progressive development and exposure. But when we get caught up in the shadow or the reflection of the toaster in the win-

dow, the image does not evolve; it endures in a present without possi- bilities. When we look at the face speaking and see the professor teaching, we see the expression and form of that face evolving in the elabora- tion of sentences and paragraphs. But when we see instead the caricatural

double, the foppish or buffoon or loutish image, this image appears fixed in its endurance without change. Each image is an instant-not that it is instantaneous, but that it stands in itself, and cut off from

past and future. The fixity of images is not that of concepts. When we grasp things

and fix their natures in concepts, these concepts offer the succession of things to our powers and connect up with other concepts in a dia- lectic. The motor force of that dialectic is in them. When we see the shadow or the reflection that doubles up the table, these shadows and reflections link up with other shadows and other reflections. They do not evolve or continue of themselves; it is their rhythm or their tempo that commands them like a fate. They exist in a time without the de- terminism by which causes result in effects and without the freedom

by which things take initiatives on their own. Hiking down from the hills above, we survey the town below either to map out the best path down into it before darkness falls or to disengage its colonial layout of church square, bus terminus, and commercial and residential districts. Then each flank of a hill evolves toward the town center. But when we are walking, this practical and circumspective survey gets displaced by an awareness caught up in the rhythm of hills, trees, and luminous

splatterings of autumn leaves. Then each salvo of autumn leaves we

pass drifts by poised for itself and answers and calls up the prior and

succeeding ones like images of them-images of images-and not

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unfoldings of them. Images fall out of the course of the things of the world and of the action that deals with them; they are immobilized in their own fates.

The fixity of images is also not that of the endurance of things, of

substances, which furnish the zone we inhabit. Levinas relates the instantness of an image, immobilized, prolonged without issuing in a

future, to the time of dying. In the measure that one knows one is

dying, one knows that the powers to take hold of things, to advance in the world are being taken from one. In the end one can do nothing. One can effect no action, one cannot advance into a future made of

promises and chances and possibilities. One can do nothing but wait. Wait for death itself to come. One is in suspense, held in life, held in the present, without being able to continue to another present, an- other possibility. One waits, as in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Pit and the

Pendulum," as death in the blade of the pendulum imperceptibly de- scends. This is not the Heideggerian anxiety, which resolutely of its own forces confronts death and hurls oneself into the abyss. It is the

anxiety of having fallen out of the advance of the world, the time of

history, into a time that is dead but not extinguished, a time that en-

dures, a time in which one goes on without going any where. The images are in this dead time, held in suspense, enduring with-

out advancing or evolving in an impotent present. It is a realm that cannot end, where the present cannot open upon a becoming, where the images, moved by the tempo or the rhythm as by fate, cannot even

extinguish themselves.

Art and Fate

Artistry breaks with comprehensive activity, with grasping and manipu- lating things. Modern art events and objects that present themselves as absolute music, pure painting, pure poetry, have driven things out of the realm of colors detached from objects and of sounds detached from resounding pieces of metal and wood. But in those paintings and statues that did represent something or someone, the image itself closes in upon itself and breaks with the ongoing life of the young woman who posed for some hours in the artist's studio and whom he

paid and perhaps seduced or married. An artist occupies himself not with the essences of things, but with their appearances, their images, idealizations (more exactly idolizations) and caricatures. In the statue of the athlete, the properties of the image emanating from an athlete are disengaged from that athlete and fixed in the mineral substance of the marble, where they are not the properties of that marble. Although

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the words of a poet do have meaning, a meaning that may delineate the form and destiny of things for the first time, the poet is enchanted with the resonance of words instead of their references, with the play of harmonics and dissonances between the resonances of words, and with the rhythm of the succession of the resonance of words. Since

they are words, they still have meaning, but they depict things fanci-

fully or metaphorically, substituting an image for the concept that grasps and formulates the inner structure of things.

An art event or object is an image withdrawn from the onward course of things being articulated, displayed, elaborated, and discussed. In that onward course of things, it materializes a zone of nontruth, an event of obscuring, a descent of night, an invasion of shadow.

Artistry finds each time the moment when the event or object itself refuses to accept anything more, appears saturated. It is impossible to add or subtract anything from the Mona Lisa; we see that, Leonardo

stopped when he saw that. A poem by itself comes to its completion, when the poet sees that no word can be added to improve it, no word subtracted. Even happenings come to an end, and as they take place separate themselves from the trafficking of the city.

In language everything said calls for and requires a response; there is no last word on any subject. To say something is to begin a dialec- tic. In labor, everything found or fashioned as a tool opens upon an indefinite range of uses. Art historians artificially link up art events and objects into a dialectical history, explaining how the art "works" of classical antiquity were reborn in the renaissance, how the "works" of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci led to mannerism, and then to Dutch and Flemish romanticism, and then to the new classicism of the ancien regime, and then to impressionism, cubism, fauvism, futur-

ism, and so on. But all that is an artificial construction elaborated centuries after. When we stand before the Mona Lisa or the David of

Michelangelo, these "works" are sealed in their own completion, and no survey of the mannerist "works" that came after illuminate their artistic perfection.

Classical art which was representational corrects the caricatural im-

ages-the snub nose, the stiff gesture. It closes the image in on itself. Classical beauty is this closure and perfection of the image. A human

image carved in marble, with all the loose hair, the moles, the flabby buttocks corrected, an image of an athlete who is wholly, entirely, in-

tegrally an athlete, a figure of power and effectiveness. But the classi- cal artist only succeeds in producing an idol, that is, an image that is

perfect and closed in itself but mute and inactive and sunken into a

stupor. The athlete could not be an athlete unless he aspired in the

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present to act, to let fly the discus. In perfecting and closing the im-

age of this poised athlete, the artist has immobilized the image in an instant that endures without a future. "Eternally Laocoon will be caught up in the grip of serpents; the Mona Lisa will smile eternally. Eter-

nally the future announced in the strained muscles of Laocoon will be unable to become present. Eternally the smile of the Mona Lisa about to broaden will not broaden."

It is not that the artistry immobilized the real present of the athlete, the appearance showing the real athlete in his action. Instead the art- ist was captivated by the image that emanated there-which, as an image, did not direct the force of the past to unfold a future. The instant of this image that cannot pass of its own forces and cannot take on any- thing, cannot undertake anything, is a present fallen out of time and

history into the dead time of fate. A present that is impotent to force the course of the future, impotent to force the very movement of a

future, is a present that knows its existence only as fate. Art images are compared with dreams; their time is the time of nightmares.

The painter who paints the youthful blush on the cheeks of a young woman immobilizes this blush, turns it into an image and takes it out of the subsequent life and history of that woman. The novelist who narrates the lives of a number of characters imprisons them in his narrative. They seem to be people in the world, and at the end of the novel the course of the world about them makes no headway. The

trees, the animals, the weather, the other people in the city only make an appearance as the setting, the context of these characters; they have no other life. They are images disengaged from the real trees, ani-

mals, weather, and other people who go on their own. In music, literature, theater, and cinema, the time that the artist in-

troduces between the images does not cancel the immobility of the

images themselves. The characters in a novel can only repeat indefi-

nitely the same acts and the same thoughts. They will take no further initiative as a result of having gone through all these acts and thoughts, and nothing further will happen to them. Marcelo Taranto composed a film-a tale of an architect struggling to produce a civic building both beautiful and protective of the environment-in which at a cer- tain point the characters get an inkling, then the indubitable recogni- tion, that they are but characters in a film, and that the urban and architectural projects they are involved in and they themselves will come to an end within 45 minutes. But in fact the present in which artcrafted

images exist does not have this power to foresee their real futures. When we cut out a segment of life and make it into a narrative, we

represent people and events in the course of a plot that has a beginning,

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middle, and end. The narrative comes to its comic or tragic or ironic conclusion. But of course when Kerouac or we set out on this motor-

cycle trip across the country, we did not move along the lines of this

plot, and the other people, landscapes, and events that we encoun- tered did not present themselves as characters and events in a plot. The narrative deals not with real people and events, but with their

images. When we watch a movie, the reality of the actors themselves disap-

pear under their roles, but the characters they portray appear to sub- stitute for them, and we get interested in their actions as we would in

watching real people. But the cineast is not a historian or biographer; what interests him are the images that real people generate and the

relationship between those images. There are always moments in Alain Robbe-Grillet's films when time stops, when all the characters stop their hands or their legs in mid-air and compose an image, a scene, a tab- leau. These are moments when the spectator is stopped in his ten-

dency to go along with the action and views the personages as characters, the action as a spectacle.

Art extends the space and time-the dead time, time of fate or dy- ing, outside of life and history-in which the images of things are

immobilized, with their life and their power absent from them. Art-

istry, which takes flight when something of the urgency and pressure of need are lifted, and which thus is so often identified with freedom, in fact enters into the nontemporality and unfreedom of fate.

That in history, laborious and enterprising humans could also have been distracted by the sorcery of art reveals, in the midst of time and of history, an uncertainty about the continuation of time. Life falls into the time of dying, the dead time of fate. Artistry is the very pre- sentiment of fate.

Artistry thereby frees us from responsibility. To make or to contem-

plate a painting, to write or read a novel is to no longer have to con- ceive reality, is to abandon the effort of science, philosophy, and action. This irresponsibility charms us as lightness and grace. Artistry deals not with horrors and malice but with their images, their caricatures;

they are given over to contemplation, fixed in their contours and speech- less and impotent. The very powers of eternal malediction appear in-

nocent ; Satan is fascinating in all his pomps. The world to be built is

replaced by the completion and perfection of its shadows. Before its annexation back to China, Hong Kong television showed three or four costume dramas of Imperial China a day. Before Gorbachev, any week

night ten thousand Moscovites packed the Bolshoi, Congress Palace and Tchaikovsky theaters to watch grand opera. There is, Levinas writes,

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something wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment. There are times when one can be ashamed of it, as of feasting during a plague.

The harmonics of colors detached from the surfaces of things, the realm of resonance and music, the realm of the purely tangible, the realm of free-floating scents and savors in the night, the realm of dreams,

phantasms, and hallucinations, the realm of voluptuous contours and erotic obsessions are unpracticable spaces. They are spaces that beckon to us and summon us imperatively through images. They are spaces where, when we enter them, we cease to be competent bodies and become resonating boxes, become carnal, sensual, oneirotic, noctur-

nal, and phantasmal bodies. They are realms of action-at-a-distance,

sorcery, and enchantment. They are realms where one cannot touch, cannot manipulate, cannot use what is there. They are zones where the world of work and history enters into decomposition.

The shadowy world of art is a realm of evasion from one's responsi- bility. It is not that Levinas thinks that we are imperatively destined to the world of work and appropriation. It is rather because for Levinas we must answer to the imperative in the appeal and contestation of others. There is not something irresolute and cowardly in losing one- self in the realm of music instead of devoting oneself to furnishing one's home with possessions, in writing a poem instead of engineering a highway. It is rather that there is something wicked and egoist in

losing oneself in the realm of music when the burning city resounds with cries for help.

Art and Language

One speaks of the language of poets, of realist or romantic or postmodem novels, the "language" of painting, of cinema, of architecture. But an art event or object is not an expression, neither of the author nor of

any real individuals and situations, any more than a mirage-lake on a

highway is an expression of the inner nature of that highway. An art event or object does not speak, does not engage a dialogue. It closes in upon its own completion and perfection. Poems and novels stop language itself within their own closures. Like the "In the beginning" or "At that time" of myths and epics, the opening words of a poem or a novel do not respond to any utterances that may have preceded them, and nothing that can be said after them, by the reader or the critic,

belongs to them. But about art, language proliferates-the language of art criticism,

and also the language of philosophy. The critics are not themselves

artists; they are spectators. Either they seem to be saying in clear language

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what the poet or the cineast is taken to have said in obscure and con- fused language, in which case the poem or the movie are superfluous and vain. Hegel said that in modern times the medium in which the essential was set up and set forth was no longer art but rational phi- losophy and science. Or else criticism seems to be vainly trying to put in words what can only be exhibited in colors, in sounds, in the masses and spaces of architecture.

Criticism divests the artist not only of inspiration and genius but also of irresponsibility. By disengaging in an "artwork" its technique, a critic treats the artist as a man at work. In elaborating a discourse about the "influences" an artist is said to have undergone or taken up, criticism links this disengaged and proud artist to real history. Nietzsche admitted the validity of an aesthetics from the point of view of the artists and not from the point of view of critics, that is, spectators and audience.

But criticism also can do something else. The critic enters into the realm of art, that ether of shadows and images, and entertains it as his own mental environment, even though as a critic he seeks to speak frankly and through concepts. The most lucid writer in art criticism will finds his language captivated by images. His discourse is telling by virtue of what it contains of allusions, suggestion, double meanings and equivocations, those shadows of concepts. His language is not re-

ally that of truth, the setting up of the essential in a stable and public medium, but it is not simply a parasitical and impotent discourse that can be validated neither as science nor as art. For it is true that art has always called for language. The language of art appreciation intro- duces the empyrean of reflections, mirages, simulacra, and mute idols into the world of the mind.

What about philosophy? Philosophy has an essential relationship to art. For when philosophy sets out to determine ontologically the ap- pearances in which reality appears, it discovers about the concepts that

grasp the carpentry of real things, all the doubles, mirages, masks, shadows, images that reality engenders. Its discourse cannot simply turn

away from the path of images in order to remain resolutely on the

path of reality. Its discourse cannot simply elaborate a dialectic of his-

tory and dismiss the time of fate. Philosophy interprets the images, treats the succession of images completed, perfected, fixed by art as

myth. Philosophical discourse can be captivated by myth as by the image of truth-and deceived by what it takes that myth to say. It becomes conscious of the sources of images, not only of the production of the

appearances that are appearances of real things, but also of the im-

ages. What the idol will say when it is made to speak is that it is a

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mute and inexpressive image, fixed in a time of fate. Thus philosophy, set up to found rationally the city and the sciences, is contaminated by an uncertainty of time's continuation and a premonition of fate.

REFERENCES

Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers of Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987).

-. Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978).

-. Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979). Henri Wallon, Les origines de la pensée chez l'enfant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,

1945).