Damisch - Eight Theses for (or Against) a Semiology of Painting - 1979

hubemischEight Theses For (or Against?)A Semiology of Painting

Hubert Damisch

at University of C

anterbury on July 4, 2013http://oaj.oxfordjournals.org/

Dow

nloaded from

http://oaj.oxfordjournals.org/

at University of C


Dow

nloaded from


Eight Theses For (or Against?)A Semiology of Painting1

Hubert Damisch

1 Is there a truth of painting or, according to Cezanne’s words, hisdeliberately ambiguous statement (‘I owe you the truth in painting and Ishall tell it to you’2), is there a truth in painting? And this truth, a truth ofpainting, a truth in painting, is it the privilege of the semiologist, if not totell it (perhaps this truth can only be told in painting? ), at least toinscribe it in the theoretical register, to designate its locus of emergence,to define its conditions of enunciation by reference to the object ‘Painting’such as the semiologist works for his part and according to his means toconstitute this object as a domain, field, or specific mode of production ofa meaning, itself specific? Besides the fact that this question does not allowitself to be dissociated from a more fundamental interrogation bearing onthe ‘necessity’ of art (a necessity that Jurij Lotman has been able todemonstrate to be linked to the structure of the artistic text itself, to itsinternal organisation3), the question is not an improper one, since what isat issue is to introduce some remarks of a very general order on asemiology of painting considered as a possibility – since a good share ofthe work, reflection, analysis, and semiological criticism applied to thevisual arts appears, on the contrary, to lead to prohibit the question frombeing advanced: unless, in the best of cases, it is for the semiologist toconduct back to its deep ideological determinations the exigency of ‘truth’that reveals itself, intermittently, in the pictorial field, in various speciesand on various levels (and, for example, in the sort of adherence to theoptical model of vision among the initiators of the Renaissance; but also,on another level, that of coloured and colouring, signified and signifying‘sensation,’ through the assignation to painting, by Cezanne himself, of avalue of denotation in Frege’s sense). It is important to see (to see and notonly to understand [entendre ]) that this question of the truth of painting, ofthe truth in painting (which is altogether a question of the truth withinpainting and a question of the truth of the effigy, of the truth in effigy) isat the centre of the debate, which today is occasioned by the project, ifnot by the very rare developments of a semiology of the visual arts, andfirst of all – but this order of priority, in its double logical and ideologicaldetermination, itself poses a problem – of a semiology of painting, andhow this question confers on this debate a scope that largely exceeds thelimits of the specialized field under whose rubric it is announced.2 The project of studying painting as a system of signs will first havecorresponded to the concern of attaining, by the simultaneous definition ofthe object of a semiology of painting and of the procedures of analysis thatwould constitute it as such, a truth of a scientific order concerning thepictorial production. In a Saussurean perspective, and being modelled onthe linguistic ‘master pattern,’ in its initial formulation this project leadsone to introduce a first division (decoupe ) in the heterogeneous whole offacts about ‘painting’ (heterogeneous in that these facts belong to the most

1. This text is the General Report presented byDamisch to the First Congress of theInternational Association for Semiotic Studies atMilan, June 2–6, 1974. It originally appeared as‘Huit theses pour (ou contre?) une semiologiede la peinture’ in Macula, no. 2 (1977),pp. 17–23. We thank Hubert Damisch andYve-Alain Bois for permission to publish thisversion.

2. Paul Cezanne, letter to Emile Bernard(October 23, 1905), in Letters, ed. J. Rewald(Cassirer: London, 1941), p. 252.

3. Jurij Lotman, ‘Introduction’ in The Structureof the Artistic Text, trans. R. Vroon, MichiganSlavic Contributions, no. 7 (University ofMichigan: Ann Arbor, 1977).

# The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. OXFORD ART JOURNAL 28.2 2005 257–267doi:10.1093/oxartj/kci025

at University of C


Dow

nloaded from


diverse domains of inquiry: cosmetology, the chemistry of colour, geometricand/or physiological optics, the theory of proportion, psychology ofperception, but also comparative mythology, general symbolics, particulariconographies, etc.) by way of which this heteroclite whole would letitself be thought in its coherence: already like the language, once thepartition effected between the mass of facts of speech and the register oflanguage, of the system to which these facts should be related as to theirnorm. Whatever the form assumed by the opposition thus marked outbetween the two registers, and however sophisticated its statement maybe – ‘art’ being thought under the heading of a consequent deviation inrelation to the norm, taken as a semiotic category (Boris Uspenskij), the‘language’ of painting fragmented, disseminated into a multiplicity ofpartial systems, of codes of ‘invention’ and of reading (Pierre Francastel),the system of the tableau distinguished from the structures of figurationand the object ‘Painting’ aimed at across and by way of the text that takescharge of it and that articulates it (Jean-Louis Schefer) – it will always bea matter of sketching a surface of cleavage between the performance that awork represents (the ‘masterwork’), and the network, if not the system ofcompetences that are put into play by the deciphering of the work, itsinterpretation, and all that even though one posits that ‘art’ is never givenapart from individual works, that its signifiance4 does not refer to anyrecognised code or convention, and that the signifying relations of ‘artisticlanguage’ are to be discovered at the interior of a given composition(Benveniste, and in the same sense, Schefer: ‘There is only a system of thetableau’). The question remains entirely one of the nature, the status, andthe articulation of the ‘signs’ by which the reading is informed andoriented, which the reading attempts or not to constitute, in thedeclarative order, into a system.In the statement of this project – to study painting, the works of painting

(according to the formula, itself also deliberately ambiguous, of Francastel) asa system of signs – system and signs will successively be underlined, in order tobring out (a) that if painting lets itself be analysed in terms of system(s),system is not necessarily to be understood as system of signs, and (b) that ifthe problematic of the sign can be revealed as pertinent in the matter, atits level and within its proper limits, this is perhaps to the extent that thenotion of sign lets itself be disjoined from that of system (and reciprocally).Unless it is perhaps for us to work to impose another notion of sign,another notion of system than those that all the Western tradition willhave regularly associated with the possibility of cutting a whole, anarticulated structure, into discrete elements, into units identifiable as such.3 In a register that this time has nothing theoretical about it, but that all thesame corresponds in fact to the practice of the historian or of the‘connoisseur,’ it will be admitted that it is not from a reading, nor evenfrom a first apprehension of a tableau, of a fresco, of a decorativeensemble, and so on, which is not based on a certain number of traits,marks, or discrete elements, which would present themselves as so manyperceptual (or ‘imaginative’) units possibly combined in syntagmsimmediately given as such, and certain of which, by their recurrenceacross a given series of works, arrange themselves into a manner of a moreor less completed repertoire, which will be taken as characteristic of anartist, a school, an epoch, or even a culture. All traits or elements, evensyntagms, which certainly are not of the same order or from the samelevel, no more than they are finite in number: such as the figures,

4. Signifiance: a term proposed by Julia Kristevato designate the flux of meaning across a textualsurface, its freeplay of signifiers, which is to bedistinguished from communication- anddenotation-bound ‘signification.’ See the firstand final essays in Kristeva’s Semiotike: Recherchespour unc semanalyse (Seuil: Paris, 1969), and note25 below (Trans. note).

Hubert Damisch

260 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 28.2 2005

at University of C


Dow

nloaded from


representational or not, which let themselves be read in the pictorial field,the motifs, attributes, or marks (attitudes, gestures, expressions, even thecolours, treatment, and so on) that nourish iconographic discourse, butalso the indices that call to the attention of the connoisseur searching forauthenticated attributions (and one remembers here the analogy marked byFreud between the method of connoisseurship such as Giovanni Morelli haddefined it and the method of the analyst who, like the connoisseur, isreduced to working on apparently derisory, marginal data, something likethe rubbish of observation, Freud said,5 even as far as the tracings, touches,imprints that retain, in the capacity of an index, something of the work outof which the artwork is produced). Without counting the letters, ciphers,inscriptions, frontlets, captions, legends, titles, signatures, and so on, thatthe work exhibits, if that be the case, within its limits proper or on itsperiphery, and which produce, in the very context of an apprehension thatwould wish to be strictly sensible, ‘esthetic,’ a specific effect of reading,or to paraphrase Paul Klee a first ‘acquiescence to the sign’: thecoexistence in the frame of a single composition, or in its immediateproximity, of elements of an iconic or indexical nature, and of properlysymbolic givens (when the image does not present itself as explicitlylinked to the text, given or not in presentia, which it illustrates – on thissubject, see the recent work of Meyer Schapiro on the word-bound image6)makes sufficiently manifest that if it can be claimed along with Benvenistethat it is language – ‘natural’ language being understood – which confersthe quality of a signifying system on the ensemble ‘painting’ (or ‘tableau’)by informing it with the relationship of a sign,7 this relation all the sameis at play, prior to any reading, to any interpretation, within thisensemble, or at least inside its space of definition. It remains to be seen ifthe properly perceptual units, forms and/or figures can with all rigour bequalified as units, in the semiotic sense, outside or setting apartconsideration of the operation that declares them, or again, in Peirce’sterms, if the representamen has or not the quality of a sign independentlyfrom the verbal interpretant that it determines.4 Every signifying system must be defined by its own mode of signifying. Itremains that, in positing, as Benveniste does, that it is necessaryconsequently for this system ‘to define the units which it puts into play toproduce “meaning” and to specify the nature of the “meaning”produced,’8 one is anticipating the conclusion by which language must berecognised as the interpretant of all semiotic systems (and, consequently,of the ‘Painting’ system itself, which will from then on be characterised,in the terminology of the Soviet semioticians, as a ‘secondary modelingsystem’), if indeed it is true that ‘no other system disposes of a “language”in which it can categorise and interpret itself according to semioticdistinctions, whereas in principle language can categorise and interpreteverything, including itself.’9 Concerning the units put in play in order toproduce meaning, the ‘Painting’ system doubtless does not dispose of a‘language’ that would permit it to define these units to which it hasrecourse. Yet it can produce these units, designate them, display them,exhibit them by all the artifices and devices that characterise the systemsuch as spacing, positioning, framing, lighting, treatment, deformation,and so on. All artifices that do not borrow from the discursive order, noreven necessarily from the iconic order in a narrow sense, insofar as thelatter would be founded on mimesis. And this is not even in the form ofthe presentation, in the ‘imaginative’ form itself (without necessarily

5. Cf. Hubert Damisch, ‘La partie et le tout,’Revue d’esthetique, 1970, no. 2, pp. 168–88,and ‘Le gardien de l’interpretation,’ Tel Quel,no. 44, Winter, 1971, pp. 70–84, and no. 45,Spring, 1971, pp. 89–96.

6. Meyer Schapiro, Words and Pictures: On theLiteral and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text(Mouton; The Hague, 1973).

7. Emile Benveniste, ‘Semiologie de la langue,’in Problemes de linguistique generale, vol. II(Gallimard: Paris, 1974), p. 63.

8. Benveniste, ‘Semiologie de la langue’ (1974)p. 57.

9. Benveniste, ‘Semiologie de la langue’ (1974)61–2.

Eight Theses

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 28.2 2005 261

at University of C


Dow

nloaded from


taking the term ‘image’ in its strictly mimetic connotation), insofar as itwould be governed by, for example, the perspective model or insofar asit would amount, as with Mondrian or in minimal art, to a finite ensembleof principles or basic elements, of which it would not be unfounded toremember, with Wittgenstein, that it can be, if not reproduced, described,represented, at least produced, displayed, exhibited, by the means that arethose of the ‘image’ itself.10 In order to confine oneself to the question ofunits (the question of the Form der Abbildung [pictorial form] calling fordevelopments that cannot find their place here), one will again notice that,once a painting is given over to deciphering by way of a multiplicity ofcodes, once it includes several levels of reading, the very possibility that itoffers of slidings and also of references from one code or from one level toanother, the capacity arising from this for a given unit to assumeheterogeneous, if not contradictory functions according to these levels,introduce into the ‘system’ ( for the moment, in the vaguest sense) thepossibility of a freeplay of interpretance that is, if not declarative, at leastmonstrative (in the sense in which Lacan was able to say that, in the dream,‘id/it shows’ [ ca montre ]), from one level or from one code to another, asone sees by the variations to which a single formal or iconographic motiflends itself and which lead one to assign alternately, even simultaneously,to a single element (e.g., the ‘cloud’ in the figurative tradition of theWest,11 the column of so many Annunciations or Nativities, but alsoCezanne’s still lifes, Mondrian’s ‘squares’) functions (plastic, constructive,semantic, syntactic, symbolic, decorative, stylistic, and so on) from adifferent level (the problem then being of knowing if one is justified inclaiming to produce the system of these assignations, and for all that,without prejudging the coherence of the levels, their degree ofsystematicity). Still, it is appropriate to make a place for them, along withMeyer Schapiro, beside units immediately identifiable as such, in theelements of the iconic message that are non-mimetic, not directlydescriptive, and one could say, non-discrete, all elements – the form ofsupport, its frame, the properties of the ground as a field, the relationsof scale and of orientation, of positioning, of spacing, the components ofthe iconic substance as such, points, lines, surfaces, blots, and so on,12 andfirst of all, the colour that, to follow Benveniste – but this underhandedassertion, which bears the mark of a logocentrism, ceases to be admissibleas a thought that is working to impose an other than a strictly linguisticnotion of the sign – the colour that, considered in itself, would not inany case let itself be declared in the capacity of a sign, nor even of a unit.All elements that in representational painting play a decisive role, anintegrative role (in the linguistic sense of the term), but which modernpainting, since Cezanne and Seurat, strives on the contrary to dissociatefrom their imaginative function, in order to exhibit them, produce themin their value of expression, of proper, autonomous signifiance, to thepoint that the ‘non-figuration,’ far from appearing as a particular case, as alimited moment in the history of painting, and that would only let itselfbe thought by way of the representational structure such as the latter wasconstituted from the position assigned to the subject in the perspectiveapparatus, on the contrary leads, if one takes it seriously as it must be, tosubmit the ‘Painting’ system, by the ‘baring’ of the ‘device’ (as theFormalists said) and by the substitution for the aim of Nature thatof pictorial expression itself, to a radical displacement in the order ofsignifiance, even as far as removing it, at least in part, from the

10. Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. Pears and B. McGuinness(Humanities: New York, 1961), section 4.121ff.

11. The reader is referred to Damisch’s Theoriedu nuage (Seuil: Paris, 1972) (Trans. note).

12. Meyer Schapiro, ‘Some Problems in theSemiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle inImage-Signs,’ Semiotica, Vol. 1, no. 3, 1969,pp. 223–42.

Hubert Damisch


at University of C


Dow

nloaded from


relationship of interpretance in which semiological discourse – this beingperhaps one of its major ideological functions – claims on the contrary toenclose it.5 To the question of whether the ‘painting’ system lets itself be reduced tounits, one will thus reply in the negative. It remains to be determined ifthe units that this system nevertheless does, quite obviously, put into play,and that perhaps represent its springing, or its headroom (as one seeswhen a perspective organisation gives itself to be read by way of someindex or figurative ‘flexion’: an architectonic fragment presented inforeshortened form, the ‘diminution’ to which the figures are submitted,and so on), if these units are signs, if the very notion of the sign, in itstraditional acceptation, is pertinent in the context of a system that doesnot allow itself – except for always significant, if not polemical, tactical,indeed strategic exceptions, and of which modern art is not alone in settingforth examples – to be brought back to a digital code, all the more sinceit dictates that room be made, next to elements that can be immediatelymarked out on the perceptual plane, for figurative procedures themselvesirreducible to a corpus of rules that would supposedly preside over theassociation and combination of units in finite number and from the samelevel. If the notion of sign can prove to be acceptable in the domain‘Painting,’ this will be by way of another division than the one referred toup to now. For the strictly Saussurean ‘master pattern,’ which imposes adistinction between the order of the ‘system’ (competence) and that ofconcrete productions (performance), will be substituted an articulationthat will borrow its pertinence from a distinction between the levels ofanalysis (the question then perhaps becoming that of the relation betweentwo ‘performances,’ that of the work and that of interpretation, such asthis relation is inscribed in a common, but not identical space of‘competence’). Provisionally ignoring the problem of properly figurativeor plastic articulation, it will be posited that if the concept of sign cantake operative value in the domain ‘Painting,’ this is first of all (andperhaps exclusively) by reference to a level, to a mode of signifiance whichis not one – a semiotic one – in which perceptual units, forms and/orfigures, are recognised as such (and this even if this recognition passes bythe detour of a ‘declaration,’ of an explicit interpretant), but to one – asemantic one – in which the image, appealing to its own reading, from itcomes to assume properly discursive status, once, to speak as did theiconologists of the classic age, it is ‘made to signify a thing different fromthe one the eye sees.’ The theory of levels developed by Panofsky, at thesame time that it reiterates the break marked by Cesare Ripa in his timebetween the order of the visible and that of the readable, leads seeminglyto the opposition to the universe of motifs (of the objects or the eventsfigures by the lines, colours, and volumes) that of the universe of images,of the motifs recognised as bearers of a secondary or conventionalsignification as distant as one will want from their primary, ‘natural’signification, and that lend themselves to combination in the mode of‘history,’ fable, or allegory, at the same time as to all sorts of figurativeredoublings (the ‘image’ of Isaac being in its turn taken for the ‘figure’ ofChrist, which it pre-figures, and so on): take as an example the universe ofa discourse, of which the image, in the sense mentioned, constitutes theminimal unit, once it is declaratively articulated in the mode of astatement (‘a female character holding a peach in her right hand’ to beread, according to the example Panofsky notes, as a personification of

Eight Theses


at University of C


Dow

nloaded from


‘Veracity’). A unit, in the semantic register in which iconology operates,which seems to have to be accepted in the capacity of a sign once it isfound to be associating a ‘signifier’ (the motif given over to be ‘seen’) anda ‘signified’ (the concept or statement given over to be understood ), andonce it lets itself be identified, in the capacity of a component and possiblyof an intregrative element (in the sense in which Meyer Schapiro couldshow, in a celebrated study, that the image of Saint Joseph fashioning amousetrap ‘integrated’ the Annunciation of the Master of Flemalle, in itsdifference from traditional representations of this event13) in a unit of ahigher level, the one constituted by the tableau. A unit, a minimal sign ofa ‘discourse of images’ (ragionamenti d’imagini, again as the iconologistssaid) by which painting is put in the position of representing, of staging,of signifying by strictly representational means a quantity of notions, ofrelations, if not of abstract propositions. And if Panofsky’s works onsymbolism in Flemish painting do re-intersect in a striking way withFreud’s analyses of the dream-work (which themselves refer, in the mostexplicit way, to the work of painting), the encounter has nothingfortuitous about it: it suffices to agree that Van Eyck’s symbolics, as that ofthe dream according to Benveniste,14 depends on a true logic of discourse,and that its figures are first of all figures of style, figures of rhetoric, tropes.In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud himself had proposed a descriptionof Raphael’s The School of Athens that moves in this direction: the fact ofassembling philosophers belonging to different periods, and to different, ifnot as well antagonistic cultures within one scenic space set up as unitaryappears to be a means, for the painter, of imposing onto the strictlyfigurative mode of a monstration, a notion of philosophy as a transhistorickingdom and as a society of minds in which Plato, Saint Thomas Aquinas,and perhaps Averroes himself would find themselves in a dialogue beyondthe contingencies of space and time, of language and beliefs.15

Now the devices used by Van Eyck or by Roger van den Weyden are ofexactly the same nature, such as the device, to keep only one among allthose that Panofsky enumerates, by which, within the unity of a singledecor or architectural frame, for example that of a church, inside which orin front of which the scene is set, the painter associates two ‘styles’marked as such, the Romanesque style and the Gothic style, in order torepresent the sequence of periods of time, the opposition of before andafter, even the wholly conceptual opposition of the Old and New Law.16

6 If one must admit, still following Benveniste, that the ‘Painting’ system ischaracterised by the fact that, in distinction to language, it only presents aunidimensional signifiance (semantic signifiance, corresponding to theuniverse of ‘discourse,’ to the exclusion of any properly semioticsignifiance), it would then be necessary to recognise that a good part ofthe programme of a semiology of painting would already by now have beenrealised under the title of Iconology, even of Iconology understood,according to Panofsky’s expression, as a ‘Science of Interpretation.’17 Butif Iconology can claim to recuperate the so-called ‘stylistic’ traits of thework, even its quality, no longer as a species of signs, but of ‘symptoms’of a vision of the world or of a class consciousness, it nonetheless remainsincapable, and any strictly interpretative discipline along with it, ofrendering account of painting considered in its sensible substance, in itsproperly aesthetic articulation, in the Kantian sense of the term. Now herethere is a question that the semiologist cannot ignore, which he evensometimes asks, which is that of knowing if the work of art reduces itself

13. Schapiro, ‘Muscipula Diaboli: TheSymbolism of the Merode Altarpiece,’ ArtBulletin, Vol. 27, 1945, pp. 182–7.

14. Benveniste, ‘Remarks on the Function ofLanguage in Freudian Theory,’ in Problems inGeneral Linguistics, trans. M. Meek (Universityof Miami Press: Coral Gables, 1971),pp. 65–75.

15. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Interpretation ofDreams,’ in The Standard Edition, vol. IV(Hogarth: London, 1953), p. 314.

16. Cf. Erwin Panofsky, Early NetherlandishPainting (Harvard University Press: Cambridge).

17. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (Harper &Row: New York, 1962).

Hubert Damisch


at University of C


Dow

nloaded from


or not to a system of signification.18 A decisive question in comparison withthe interrogation from which these ‘Theses’ have taken their departure, andwhich bears on the ‘truth’ of painting, on the truth in painting, and on thestatus (ideological, critical, theoretical) of the semiological discourse in itsrelationship to this truth. As a question of the ‘meaning’ that paintingwould be producing, it is certain that specification of the meaning cannotbe the privilege of painting itself, but of language, which ‘alone is able tointerpret everything.’ But do not the work, the work of art, the work ofpainting have another destiny (in the sense that Freud speaks of a destinyof pulsions19) than interpretation, another forseeable avatar to take upagain a word of Lotman’s that opens up a very new perspective,20

than semantization? It does not seem that this was the opinion of Freudhimself, at least for what concerns the work in its relation to its producer:‘Meaning is but little to these men [artists]; all they care for is line, shape,agreement of contours. They are given up to the pleasure principle.’21

Is this to say that the universe of lines, that of forms, that of contour – tothe exclusion, how significant, of colour – does not directly depend on ananalysis in terms of signification, but on a formal, if not ‘stylistic’approach, the question remaining furthermore entirely of knowing how theform, thus distinguished from the content, will manage to be articulatedinto an economy, even the one of ‘pleasure’?7 The problem comes back to that of the existence or of the non-existence ofa semiotic level in painting. Now the question is generally badly posed, once itcomes to re-intersect the question of ‘style’ (a notion whose unfortunate rolein the study of art it would be necessary to demonstrate, and howthe advancing of this notion aims at forestalling the very positing of theproblem that concerns us, to interdict its statement), above all once thisquestion is found to be interfering with that of the image, once it is posedas a question of the nature, semiotic or non-semiotic, of the image.It has been seen that for Panofsky the image was dependent on the symbolic

level. But the fact is that, for the Iconologist, there is only an image startingfrom the moment when a conventional signification is superposed to the‘natural’ signification, given in the register of perception. If the image isretained no longer for what it signifies, but for what it offers to be seen(donne a voir) (and without prejudging about the nature of the articulationof the readable on the visible), it will be a question of determining ifthe image, ‘forming an image’ (the ‘imaginative synthesis’ of thephenomenologists) lets itself be thought and analysed in terms of signifyingarticulation. Hence, independently of the logical determination that willlead the construction of the image to be thought, by priority, under therubric of space – a notion, in the matter of painting, of the mostequivocal, of the least theoretical sort there is – the reference customaryfrom then on to the attempts made to study the imaginative process (andthe perceptual process itself) under the heading of a process ofcommunication, and in terms of Information Theory, all attempts thatcorrespond to a return to a pre-phenomenological position of the problem,since they return to establishing the image, taken as an analogon of thereal, in a relationship of denotation in relation to the perceived or, whatamounts to the same thing, in a relationship of reproduction and/or ofequivalence in relation to perception. How would the image not have thestatus of a message when perception is itself assimilated to an operation ordeciphering, of ‘recognition,’ when both are referred to their commonconventional roots?22 Furthermore, it would be appropriate, prior to any

18. Roland Barthes, ‘The PhotographicMessage,’ in Image-Music-Text, ed. S. Heath (Hilland Wang: New York, 1977), pp. 15–31.

19. Freud’s expression is Triebschicksale, whichhas been translated into French as les destins despulsions (the destinies of pulsions), and intoEnglish as ‘the vicissitudes or instincts’ (Trans.note).

20. Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text(1977), pp. 19, 21.

21. Freud, letter to Ernest Jones (February 8,1914), cited in Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life andWork, vol. 111 (Hogarth: London, 1957),p. 441.

22. For an example of this epistemologicaltactic, see Umberto Eco, La struttura assente(Bompiani: Milan, 1968).

Eight Theses


at University of C


Dow

nloaded from


discussion on this point, to question oneself from the first about thedetermination (theoretical, ideological, linguistic) that leads to paintingbeing thought under the title, under the rubric of the image (andreciprocally). Painting would be an image, but an image of a particular, ifnot specific type: an image that would be characterised by a surplusof substance, from which would come its weight, its charge, its title ofpainting, and which would produce, under that title, an effect of pleasurespecific to it. It will nonetheless have to be referred to, be posed as avariety of image among others, a privileged, if not dominant, variety, ina culture where the term ‘painting’ itself (one thinks of the difficultiesthat the translation of Wittgenstein poses in this regard) can be taken for asynonym of image, representation, portrait, even of reproduction or imitation(by which, through the theme of mimesis, the question of the truth of theeffigy, of the truth in effigy is introduced). As for the program of a generalsemiology, the semiology of painting would nonetheless be inscribed in itat its place, under the rubric of a semiology of the image, and as aparticular branch of the latter.8 Parodying Merleau-Ponty, it will be said that in treating painting alongwith the perceived one can only miss the semiotic level in it and,therefore, miss painting itself, to the extent that a truth is working toreveal itself there, which is not immediately dependant on the order ofdiscourse, but which has relation, in the highest degree, to perception.Since there is indeed something like a semiotic level of painting, but onethat does not let itself be led back to the agency of the sign, no more thanto that of the image, the notion of which is functioning here, by allappearance, as a veritable epistemological obstacle: the level, for example,on which Cezanne was working when, still with an intention ofdenotation, he said he wished to substitute for the problem of light that ofcolour and representation, of sensations coloured by colouring sensations.23

This work, closest to perception, on the signifier, this putting to work ofthe signifier in painting of which Cezanne’s art, as well as the art of Seuratcontemporary with it, offer the example, witnesses, with an eloquenceonly drawing its resources from painting, to the fact that the surface of thecleavage between the semantic and the semiotic is not to be soughtbetween the level of the figure (given to be seen) and that of thesignification (given to be understood), but somewhere on the joint of thereadable and the visible, between the domain of the symbolic and that ofthe semiotic, on the condition of thinking of the semiotic, along withJulia Kristeva, as a modality (which one could in fact call psycho-somatic,with a direct hold on the body) of the process of signifiance, and as amoment logically, genetically, productively anterior to the symbolic, butwhich in the latter is made the object of a raising24 by which it isintegrated there.25 A moment of an articulation – that of a continuum –prior to that of the linguistic sign and of the iconic sign itself (to theextent that the latter would only be constituted as such to determine aninterpretant ). A pre-thetic moment, anterior to the position of the subject,in his reference to the experience of the specular image, and the bestillustration for which is offered by the articulation of the chromatic field,strictly contemporaneous with the articulation of the phonematic field, asJakobson has shown26: since the history of painting today gives us to seehow the semiotic, precisely in the species of colour, can let itself berecuperated and function, in the capacity of a supplement, within thesymbolic, but also how it can make a return, under the symbolic and

23. Cezanne, letter to Emile Bernard(December 23, 1904), in Letters, p. 243.

24. Releve: a term elaborated by Jacques Derridaas a translation for Hegel’s philosophical termAufhebung (Trans. note).

25. Julia Kristeva, La revolution du langagepoetique (Seuil: Paris, 1974), section A.I.‘Semiotique et symbolique.’

26. Roman Jakobson, Child Language, Aphasia,and Phonological Universals (Mounton: TheHague, 1968), pp. 82–4.

Hubert Damisch


at University of C


Dow

nloaded from


outside of it, in a position of exteriority in relation to the sign and to anysignification constituted in the order of language as well as in the order ofthe image, of representation (except to finally take seriously what Peircewill have worked, towards the end of his life, to express under the title ofthe hypoicon, of the icon which no longer lets itself be thought under anytitle, and of a representativity prior to any relationship of interpretance,27

as well as the idea that, in fact to take the notion in the widest sense, asign could admit of other interpretants than a concept: an action, anexperience, indeed a sensible effect, a pure quality of ‘feeling’28). In thissense, one is justified to claim that semiology, in its order of linguisticdependence, is as belaboured (travaillee ) by the question of painting, as itis, moreover, by that of writing, as in the example of the two workers,the painter and the writer, which the Philebus already associated in a singletask in double-entry fashion. But as for the economy of the signifyingprocess of which painting is the theatre (and whose scene it defines andredefines ceaselessly), this economy is to be thought, up to its very limitsand perhaps to its ‘beyond,’ in the Freudian register and by way of theconcept which continues, in the reading of Freud, to form the object of averitable censorship, namely that of regression, in the way that TheInterpretation of Dreams introduces it. The formal regression which is theprinciple of the dream-work at the same time that it forms the scope ofjurisdiction of the dream-work, a work itself thought, in the Freudiantext, in explicit reference to that of painting, and which only produces itseffect, outside any relation of interpretation, in playing the divergence – andthe tension that it generates – between the register of the visible (of whatcan be shown, figured, represented, staged) and that of the readable (theregister of what can be said, stated, declared). A divergence which is thatof a productive work of a surplus-value: an iconic surplus-value, from themoment, as Peirce indicates, and this must be emphasised, that the iconhas as a distinctive fundamental property that through its directobservation other truths concerning the object can be discovered thanthose which suffice to determine its construction29; but also, in the case ofpainting, a specifically pictorial surplus-value, which defines painting in itsdifference from the image and confers on it the privilege which has beenspoken of. A divergence which will be marked either as the locus of anopposition (of a contradiction), or as that of an exchange, and doubtless asboth at once, as is required by the taking into account of ‘figurability’which forms the condition of all regression. A divergence, furthermore,constitutive of pictorial textuality insofar as it is as if woven of the visibleand the readable, and by way of which it is appropriate, in relation to thesystem ‘Painting,’ to pose the question of the signifier; the signifier aboutwhich Freud teaches us, to read him well, that one cannot produce it, noreven recognize it, by way of a position of exteriority, especially since itonly gives itself to be taken there.

Translated by Larry Crawford

27. Charles S. Peirce, Elements of Logic, II,Ch. 3, 276–7 (c. 1902), in Collected Papers ofC. S. Peirce, vol. I–II (Harvard UniversityPress: Cambridge, 1965), p. 157.

28. Peirce, Letters to Lady Welby (1904), inCollected Papers (1965), Vol. VIII, pp. 220–30.

29. Peirce, Elements of Logic (1902), in CollectedPapers (1965), Vol. I–II, p. 158.

Eight Theses


at University of C


Dow

nloaded from


Damisch - Eight Theses for (or Against) a Semiology of Painting - 1979

Documents

Transcript of Damisch - Eight Theses for (or Against) a Semiology of Painting - 1979