The useless image. Bataille, Magritte and Bergson..pdf

The Useless Image: Bataille, Bergson, MagritteAuthor(s): Suzanne GuerlacSource: Representations, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Winter 2007), pp. 28-56Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2007.97.1.28 .Accessed: 28/09/2014 03:44

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toRepresentations.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 200.16.5.202 on Sun, 28 Sep 2014 03:44:45 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

SUZANNE GUERLAC

The Useless Image:Bataille, Bergson, Magritte

The Lascaux cave, known as the Sistine Chapel of prehistoricart because of its stunning wall paintings, was discovered, quite fortuitously,in 1940. Opened to the public in 1948, it became the site of serious archae-ological study only in the early 1950s, with work carried out by lAbb Breuil,the most celebrated French paleontologist of the time. In 1952 Breuilpublished his monumental Quatre Cent Ans dart parital, in which he devel-oped his thesis concerning the magical power of prehistoric cave paintings,powers he explained in terms of primitive hunting rituals. Three years laterGeorges Bataille published Lascaux ou la naissance de lart, in which he shiftedBreuils interpretation toward a notion of religious transgression.

Bataille frequented the surrealist milieu of Andr Breton until 1929when he broke with Breton, violently, and became editor of Documents, acountersurrealist review devoted to questions of avant-garde art and ethno-graphy that he published from 1929 to 1931. In 1937 he helped found theCollge de Sociologie (along with Michel Leiris, Roger Caillois, and others),a project informed by Emile Durkheims sociology of religion and theethnographic work of Marcel Mauss. Bataille remained fascinated byrelations between art and the experience of the sacred, eventually theorizingwhat he called the transgression of eroticism as an intimate relation betweeninterdiction and transgression in a study influenced by Cailloiss LHomme etle sacr and, to a lesser degree, inspired by the work of Rudolf Otto.

By the 1960s, lAbb Breuils thematic treatment of cave art had beensuperceded by the structuralist approach of Andr Leroi-Gourhan, who readPaleolithic art in terms of binary structures of signification. With the rise ofpoststructuralism, however, in the course of the same decade, Batailles notion oftransgression became an important philosopheme in France in the context ofTel Quel s avant-garde theoretical program. Michel Foucault appealed to it as apost-Hegelian substitute for the dialectic; Jacques Derrida wrote an importantessay on the subject; and transgression played a crucial role in Julia Kristevas

28

A B S T R A C T This paper explores Batailles writings on primitive art, specifically his essay on the Lascauxcave, in order to elaborate a notion not of the informe (as contemporary art critics have done), but of the fictivefigural image. It reads this useless imagea term borrowed from Bataillein the work of Magritte throughBergsons notion of resemblance and the operation of attentive recognition. / RE P R E S E N TAT I O N S 97. Winter2007 2007 The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 07346018, electronic ISSN 1533855X,pages 2856. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article contentto the University of California Press at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.


The Useless Image: Bataille, Bergson, Magritte 29

analysis of avant-garde language practices in The Revolution of Poetic Language andin her elaboration of the concept of the abject.1 Together with Derridasgrammatological term diffrance, transgression provided one of the majortheoretical underpinnings for the notions of text and writing central topoststructuralist theory and its challenge to representation. This is why, even inour post-poststructuralist era, it remains a bit shocking to hear Bataille speak of asacred moment of figuration in Lascaux (fig. 1).2 He not only marvels at themiraculous seductive power of the caves animal paintings but also attributes aspecifically transgressive force to these figurative images, contrasting them withthe grotesque depictions of human beings that he labels informe (fig. 2).3

Since the 1980s, Rosalind Krauss has transposed the theoretical termswriting and text into art-critical discourse in the American context. In1996, together with Yve-Alain Bois, she curated an important exhibit at theCentre Pompidou, Linforme: mode demploi, that revived (and displaced)Batailles notion of the informe, elaborating it as an important art-critical term.4

Whereas in their exhibition catalogue (published in English as Formless: A

FIGURE 1. Black bull, Lascaux. Reprinted from Georges Bataille, Lascaux; or, TheBirth of Art (Lausanne, 1955).


R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S30

FIGURE 2. Venus of Tursac (Dordogne). Reprinted from Grand, Paule-Marie,Prehistoric Art: Paleolithic Painting and Sculpture (Greenwich, Conn., 1967).

Users Guide) Krauss and Bois refer the informe back to Bataille and to hisdiscussion of primitive art, they consistently steer clear of the Lascaux cave.5

In Lascaux ou la naissance de lart, Bataille puzzles over what he takes to be acertain lack of interest in the prehistoric cave on the part of specialists. Is it, heasks, pudeur that inhibits a return to this place of our birtha fear ofregression, perhaps?6 We might ask the same question in a different registerconcerning the reluctance of contemporary critics to address Batailles text onLascaux. Might there not be some anxiety about theoretical regression, given thatBataille insists here on the magic of figural images? To the extent that theexhibit Linforme: mode demploi, and the lively critical discussion that surroundedit, marked a strategic critical intervention in the field of modern art criticism, wecould say that crucial issues of contemporary aestheticsissues that concern thelimits of modernism, the status of surrealism within the modern canon and thestatus of fictive figural imagescan be meaningfully staged in relation toprehistoric sites, specifically the caves of Lascaux and, as we shall see, Gargas.



I

The theoretical unity of modernism, affirms Yve-Alain Bois, hasbeen constituted through an opposition of formalism and iconology.7 Itwas ostensibly to undercut pat oppositions of this kind that Rosalind Kraussand Yve-Alain Bois elaborated the term informe. The Pompidou exhibition,and the critical term that oriented it, were part of a strategy of redealingmodernisms cards (To Introduce, 29). Informe implied a delicate criticalintervention, one that brushes modernism against the grain, but withoutcountering modernisms formal certainties by means of more reassuringand naive ones of meaning (To Introduce, 25), that is, without fallingback into iconology or figuration. The task of the informe, then, was not onlyto undermine the excessive formalism of a certain modernism (themodernist fetishization of sight associated with Clement Greenberg) butalso to stave off a postmodern impulse that would, in Boiss words, burymodernism and conduct a manic mourning of it (To Introduce, 29).8

The task of reframing modernism has been ongoing for decades, andthe theorization of the informe was just the latest move in the service of thisproject. Tools borrowed from the French theoretical contextsemiologicaland grammatological toolshad been turned successfully against modernistformalism. But now, faced with a challenge from another quarterfrompostmodernismit became necessary to disarm the other term of theopposition, iconology, whose immanent return postmodernism threatened.To this end Krauss and Bois turned to Julia Kristevas theory of the abjectand displaced it in the discourse of the informe. Through a structuralinterpretation of the base materialism of the early Bataille, which Kristevaarticulated with the psychoanalytic concept of primary repression, theFrench theorist had invented a category of the abject that seemed to slippast ready-made oppositions (such as between the imaginary and thesymbolic) and even to suggest a way into the difficult Lacanian territory ofthe real. In the notion of the informe Krauss and Bois found a way to thinkthe concept of the abject operationallyindependently of a thematics oftrauma, of mourning, of melancholyi.e., independent of attachment to asubject, and to meaning (To Introduce, 25). The informe, in other words,would do the work of the abject in the visual field without falling intoiconology. This is what is at stake when Yve-Alain Bois insists that the informeis an operation, not a theme, and explicates this operation with reference toBatailles discussion of alteration in an essay on primitive art published in1930, a book review of G.-H. Luquets LArt primitif.9

Bataille turned to Luquet for an explanation of the puzzling contrastbetween the two kinds of primitive art already mentionedthe painted well-formed images that resemble animals, on the one hand; and the


deformed, abstract, sculptural renderings of human beings on the other.10

What is the difference in meaning between these two distinct kinds of art, heasked? If primitive artists could paint animals so convincingly (indeedNorbert Aujoulat admires the uncommon mastery of motion andperspective of Lascauxs cave paintings, as well as their precision of detail)why did they not produce comparable images of themselves?11

In order to account for certain aberrant features of primitive art, Luquethad introduced a distinction between visual realism and intellectualrealism.12 The former is mimetic, whereas the latter presents things as weknow them to be, not as they appear to us (a profile rendering of a personwith two ears would be an example of intellectual realism). Luquet associatesintellectual realism with childrens drawings and suggests that primitivehumans, like children, pass through this phase before advancing to visualrealism. Not only does Bataille object to the comparison of primitives tochildren, he finds Luquets theory inadequate to the question that concernshim, namely, why there would have been such a great difference in the cavesbetween the visual treatment of animals on the one hand and of humans onthe other.

Bataille proposes another approach, one he derives from observationsLuquet had made concerning the origin of figuration in the graffitilikedrawing activity of children who love to dip their fingers in mud or paint andrun them along a wall, taking a kind of instinctual pleasure in markingthings up and destroying the surfaces around them. Bataille suggests thatthe deformation of the human form in the abstract anthropoid figures (theones he calls informe) could be attributed to an operation of alteration,characterized as an innate instinctual desire to deface or deform materials,surfaces, or objects. This process involves the following steps: First, randomscribbling or tears attack a given surface or support in a kind of instinctualgesture. Second, a virtual object is discerned through imaginative projectioninto these random markings. Finally, in a third dialectical moment, thisvirtual figure is altered, or defaced, in turn. It is in reference to thissequence that Krauss will write: Informe denotes what alteration produces.13

And it is on this basis that Krauss and Bois will define the informe as anoperation that yields the disintegration rather than the creation of form.14

But they move too quickly when they reduce alteration to this operationand proceed to identify it with transgression. For, on Batailles account,alteration also includes a second moment. Speaking of alteration, Bataillecontinues,

Another outcome is possible for the figured representation from the moment that theimagination substitutes a new object for the support that has been destroyed . . . it ispossible, through repetition, to subject it to a progressive appropriation in relation tothe represented original. In this way one passes, quite rapidly, from an approximate



figure to the more and more well-formed image [limage de plus en plus conforme] of ananimal, for example.15

In other words, there is a second operation of alteration that runs parallelto the first and produces a dialectically opposite result: a figural image. Onthis version, a first moment performs the defacement or deformation of asurface as before and a second moment, as before, yields a virtual imagethat is projected into these markings. But an important shift occurs in thethird moment. When the virtual image is discerned it is not, in turn,prevented from coming to appearance, defaced or rendered informe. It isrendered de plus en plus conforme; it is brought into form and actualized as afigural image. Thus, according to Batailles theory, the operation thatrenders a virtual image informe is simply an alternative practice to the onethat actualizes it as a figure. Both are operations of alteration and both placeus, as we shall see, outside the realist framework of representation.

Indeed, in a less theoretical way, Luquet had proposed this secondversion of what Bataille will call alteration as an explanation of the figurativeimages of primitive art. He had explained that in the caves, artistic creationdid not initially consist in the execution of a complete figure on a blanksurface, but was limited at first to an operation . . . of intentionally complet-ing a resemblance that had been remarked and judged to be imperfect inimages that were already there, and that sometimes were merely suggestedby natural accidents such as the contours of a cave wall.16

Modern theorists of the informe do not mention this figural version ofalteration, or this feature of Batailles analysis of primitive art.17 As we shallsee, however, it is indispensable to the link Bataille makes between primitiveart and transgression in his essay on Lascaux, an association already signaledin LArt primitif when, in a note, Bataille links the operation of alterationto the sacred with reference to Rudolf Ottos theory of the tout autre [theabsolutely other].18

As we have seen, Bataille turns to the concept of alteration tounderstand the difference between the two types of prehistoric art, thepaintings of animals, on the one hand, and the grotesque anthropoidartifacts on the other. He wants to account for the difference between themin anthropological terms, to determine the difference in meaning thatmight have attached to the two types of production in order to arrive at ageneral theory of primitive art. He is able to do so thanks precisely to hisconception of alteration as a dual operation, recognizing that a change ofmeaning attaches to the alternative paths of alteration and to the two typesof art he associates with them.19 He is not yet able to say what this change ofmeaning is and he will not in fact do so until the essay on Lascaux (1955),which proposes psychological motives for it. Indeed, a careful reading ofthis essay reveals that the dual operation of alteration presented earlier



(informe/conforme) corresponds with the dual operation of the sacred thatrequires interplay between interdiction and transgression.

Bataille does not explicitly theorize the notion of transgression untilLErotisme (1957), published two years after Lascaux. However, an earlierversion of this study, LHistoire de lrotisme (whose composition coin-cides with that of the essay on Lascaux) presents an account of the dualoperation transgression/interdiction that parallels the story Bataille tellsabout the birth of art in Lascaux ou la naissance de lart.20 In LHistoirede lrotisme, we find interdiction/transgression written into a narrativethat concerns the origins and ends of history. In his famous public lectures(which Bataille attended) Alexandre Kojve had interpreted G. W. F. Hegel tosay that history is the dialectical development of the self-creation of man, adevelopment he presented as a negation of the givens of nature. LHistoirede lrotisme presents an eminently dialectical account of the relationshipbetween interdiction and transgression that follows the lines of Kojvesnarrative of history, which goes like this: (1) history is founded as thenegation of nature; this is the moment of interdiction that framesthe experience of culture. (2) This cultural world, which now coincides withthe horizon of the given, impinges on the autonomy of the subject. (3) Thesubject revolts against this limitation in a gesture of transgression thatnegates this new horizon of culture. Transgression, as a negation ofinterdiction, marks a dialectical return to the initial horizon of natureonlythis time in a mode of desire. This is the double movement of negation andreturn that Bataille also calls the reversal of alliances in his discussion ofthe sacred.21 It corresponds to the affective rhythm of the sacred presentedthrough the figure of the dance in LErotisme, a movement anticipated by thedrunken dance evoked for Bataille by the animal images on the walls ofLascaux.22

When Bataille presents the origin of art as a passage from beast to manin Lascaux ou la naissance de lart, the dialectical narrative of relationsbetween interdiction and transgression comes into play. The act of makingart implies a passage from nature to culture; it coincides with the moment ofinterdiction as theorized in LHistoire de lrotisme. Transgression occursthrough the evocation of the animal world that is left behind in this passageby means of painted figural images that seem to address us. It occurs for thespectator who experiences a return to the world of nature in a mode ofdesire (a transgression of interdiction), and who, upon viewing theseimages, is transported, making a correlative passage from the world of workto the world of play.23 The human being who views these cave imagesbecomes a religious animal when addressed by this primitive art.24 This is themoment of transgression, and it occurs thanks to the powerful way in which



the figurative images address the viewer across an immense expanse of time(fig. 3).

Figuration produces an experience of the sacred here because ourencounter with it is catastrophic. Catastrophe is above all a temporalstructure for Bataille, one that interrupts linear time.25 In the Lascaux cave,the figural image addresses us from the depths of time, performing itsendless survival until it reaches us. It is through this address that theprimitive beast becomes an artist, entering into history and culture. Thenegation of the order of nature (of prehistoric man as beast) occursthrough this address by the figural image. At the same time, figurationmarks a return: They returned to this world of the savagery [sauvagerie] ofthe night . . . they figured it with fervor, in anxiety, Bataille writes of thesefirst artists.26 The images that we recognize let us feel the transgressive joy ofthe primitive man/beast that Bataille associates with play and opposes to theutilitarian cultural economy established through interdiction.


FIGURE 3. Third Chinese horse, Lascaux. Reprinted from Georges Bataille,Lascaux; or, The Birth of Art (Lausanne, 1955).


For Bataille, the informe anthropoid objects found in the cave are part ofthis story. They signify a refusal by the artists of Lascaux to depict thehuman form that Bataille interprets as a negation of the passage fromnature to culture (or from beast to man); they signify the negation ofinterdiction associated with transgression. Considered in light of theprestige of the animal paintings, they communicate a desire for(dialectical) return to the savage night of nature. To this extent theyparticipate in the narrative of transgression that implies a return to naturein a mode of transgressive desire according to the (pseudo-) dialecticallogic presented in LHistoire de lrotisme.

If the Lascaux paintings are stupefying because of what they show usand the desire they evoke in us, they are equally important to Bataille forwhat they do not show. In this cave, Bataille writes, we are overwhelmed bythe useless figuration of these signs that seduce. These extraordinaryimages, then, are useless figures. First (departing from the theory ofBreuil), Bataille claims they are useless because they were created fromdesire, not for some instrumental (or ritual) purpose; this is what makesthem art. In the second place these images are useless because they do nottell us what we want to know. We want to see a portrait of the artist as aremote reflection of ourselves at the point of our own origin, to know whatthe primitive human looked like when, making art, s/he became like us.Instead, Bataille writes, we are given masks, masks that evoke the animalworld primitive man is on the point of leaving through the act of making art(fig. 4).

Last but not least, there is a theoretical sense in which it is meaningfulto speak of useless images here. For, according to Batailles theory ofalteration, the figures that emerge to be either deformed or brought intoformrendered informe or de plus en plus conformeare, as we have seen,virtual figuresimages of pure invention. They are images fortuites, asBataille put it in LArt primitif, images that arrive as if by accident.27

Alteration involves the projection of spontaneously generated mentalimages, which, when actualized or given form, offer no certainty, noknowledge, and no truth.

II

Batailles enthusiasm for the sacred moment of figuration inLascaux is scandalous for modernist critics committed to the disintegrationrather than the creation of form.28 But the notion of the useless image,which we borrow from Batailles essay on the cave, suggests a way to theorizefigural art outside the celebrated opposition between formalism and



iconography. In particular, it provides a way of thinking about surrealistimages, fictive figures that are not representational.

We might take as a point of departure a painter generally excluded fromthe modernist canon: Ren Magritte. Magritte was an abstract painter until1925, by which time he had discovered the early work of Giorgio De Chiricoand come to feel that abstract paintings reveal only abstract painting, andabsolutely nothing else.29 He had also come to believe that the fullpotential of abstraction had already been realized in the early work of PietMondrian. Abstraction, from his point of view, was over. Having abandonedit, however, Magritte became marginalized within the history of modern art.Labeled realist, his work was accused of being retrograde, banal, and, worseyet, unpainterly.

Rosalind Krauss, for example, contrasts the dry realism of Magritte withthe abstract liquefaction of Joan Mir, an artist she claims for the informe ina brilliant analysis in another context.30 This opposition is telling, in that it


FIGURE 4. Fourth bull, Lascaux. Reprinted from Georges Bataille, Lascaux; or, TheBirth of Art (Lausanne, 1955).


demonstrates how easily the informe itself can be recuperated by one term ofthe fundamental opposition that it was meant to displace, one we can nowrephrase as an opposition between formalist abstraction and realism.

In his celebrated early-1970s essay Ceci nest pas une Pipe Foucaultattempted to clear Magrittes name of the charge of realism. He succeeded,provisionally, but only at the price of significant misunderstanding and in an argu-ment that leaves the opposition formalism/iconography (or abstraction/figuration) intact. Indeed, he took a version of that oppositionreadingversus lookingas his point of departure.

Foucault argued that Magrittes paintings were fundamentally con-cerned with operations of signification, not visual representation. Magrittewas not interested in visual resemblance, but rather in similitude, a termFoucault defined according to a textual paradigm. Whereas resemblanceserves representation, Foucault wrote, similitude develops in series thathave no beginning and no end, that one can run through [parcourir] in onedirection or the other, that obey no hierarchy, but propagate themselves fromsmall differences to small differences.31 Foucault affirms that similitude(conceived on the grammatological model of diffrance or the Barthesianmodel of texte scriptible) is privileged over resemblance in Magrittes work.32

Similitude, he insists, introduces a reading function (a differential movement)that triumphs over resemblance, defined as a looking function and identifiedwith representationor, as Krauss put it more bluntly, dry realism. In effect,Foucaults analysis brings Magritte over to the side of writing, which, as weknow, contests representation. (Krauss will make a comparable gesture forsurrealist photography, as we shall see, a decade later.)33

The Fata Morgana edition of Ceci nest pas une Pipe includes two shortletters from Magritte to the already celebrated French philosopher in whichthe painter attempts to clarify his use of the terms resemblance andsimilitude. Not only do these letters call attention to erroneous assump-tions made by Foucault, they alert us to the importance of the termresemblance for Magritte, and to the fact that the painter used this term ina radically unconventional way. Six years after Foucaults essay, Flammarionpublished a hefty volume of the collected writings of Magritte that revealshow absolutely central the notion of resemblance was to his conception ofpainting, and how radically Magrittes understanding of the term differs fromthe one Foucault attributed to him. The art of painting, Magritte writes

that really should be called the art of resemblancemakes it possible todescribe, through painting, a thought capable of becoming visible. This thought in-cludes only figures that the world offers: people, curtains, weapons, stars, solids, in-scriptions, etc. Resemblance spontaneously reunites these figures in an order thatdirectly evokes mystery.34



For Magritte, then, painting is fundamentally an art of resemblance. Butresemblance does not imply a mimetic relation between an image and a model.It is an act of visual thought. The images I paint, he writes, show nothingexcept what I have thought (Ecrits, 689).35 Painting does not give us an imagethat resembles the world; it materializes, or embodies in paint, a visual mentalactan act of resemblance. It renders this act visible as if by photographicrecording [enregistrement photographique]. Here Magritte meets up with Bretonwho defined surrealist automatism as a photography of thought.36

Resemblance, for Magritte, involves the visual thought of an affinitybetween two images that do not look alike. The painter recounts, forexample, the night he slept in a room where someone had placed a bird in acage. A magnificent error, he writes, made me see the bird absent [disparu]from the cage and replaced by an egg. I had discovered an astonishing newpoetic secret (Ecrits, 110).37 What has happened? Magritte sees somethingthat is not there (the egg) in a particularly revealing relation to what is thereto be seen (the cage). The bird, really there, has disappeared from view,hidden by the image of the egg. The visual shock Magritte enjoyed, hewrites, was caused by the affinity of two objects (110), in this instance thecage and the egg (fig. 5).

Henceforth Magritte would seek out such visual experiences of affinity.He would set himself thought problems to be solved visually, either throughan automatic drawing practice, or, exceptionally, by direct visual inspiration(fig. 6).38 Each problem, he writes, involves three terms: the object, thething attached to it in the shadows of my mind, and the light in which thisthing should appear [devait parvenir] (Ecrits, 111). This elusive third termis crucial to the articulation of the other two. It is precisely this act ofsynthesis that Magritte calls resemblance and characterizes as an activityof inspired thought.

An unknown image from the shadows is called forth by an image knownin the light [une image connue de la lumire], Magritte writes (Ecrits, 335) (fig. 7).The phrase sounds like a nod to Marcel Proust, and it may well be, but it alsoevokes Henri Bergsons discussion of relations between memory andperception in Matire et mmoire. Here we come across a notion ofresemblance that informs Magrittes theory of painting, as well as the moregeneral notion of the useless image I am attempting to elaborate here.

Bergson argues that since perception occurs in time it requires thesupport, or relay, of memory in order to function at all.

Your perception, as instantaneous as it may be, consists therefore in an incalculablemultitude of memory fragments [lments remmors] and, in truth, all perception isalready memory. Actually, we perceive nothing but the past, the pure present beingthe elusive [insaissable] progress of the past gnawing away at the future.39




Perception, according to Bergson, involves a perceptual shock [branlementperceptif ] that functions to imprint on the body a certain attitude inwhich memories will insert themselves . . . the present percep-tion willalways seek, in the depths of memory, the image [souvenir] of the anteriorperception that it resembles (Matire, 112).40 This is the phrase thatreturns, only slightly altered, in Magrittes sentence: An unknown imagefrom the shadows is called forth by an image known in the light(Ecrits, 335).

Bergson calls the operation that articulates the incoming sense data ofperception with memory images attentive recognition (Matire, 107). Hesays that the incoming sense experience, imprinted on the body, calls tomemory, which then spontaneously generates memory images to match (oranswer) the rough contours of perceptual experience. On Bergsons theoryvarious mental planes are available to furnish memory images. There are,

FIGURE 5. Ren Magritte, Les Affinits Electives [Elective Affinities], 1930.Copyright 2006 C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York.


for example, the memories that follow immediately upon . . . perception, ofwhich they are but the echo (Matire, 112). These provide useful memoryimages that contribute directly to the act of perception and to the cognitiveconstruction of the object at hand.41 These shallow memory images appearsimilar to the incoming sense data of perception. They are as ifphotographed from the object itself (Matire, 112). But more disparatememory images come into play as well, images associated with various fea-tures of the specific context into which past experiences are embedded inour memory through relations of similarity and contiguity. Behind theseimages identical to the object, writes Bergson, there are others, stored inmemory, and that simply have resemblance to the object (Matire, 11213).There are still others, he adds, that only have a more or less distant kinship[parent ] (Matire, 112) with the incoming sense data. In other words, the


FIGURE 6. Ren Magritte, La Main Heureuse [The Happy Hand], 1953.Copyright 2006 C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York.



shallowest memories, and those that will directly participate in the percep-tion of the object at hand, yield images similar to the object of perception.But othersdeeper memories that carry more contextual detail, morespecific features of the concrete singularity of the past experiencemay linkto the sense data in a mode of resemblance that does not imply visualsimilarity at all, but merely some sort of generic affinity.42

Bergson defines perception in terms of action, not representation.43

This point is fundamental. Perception does not match, or represent,external objects; it filters from the complexity of the real only those featurespertinent to its pragmatic interests. Perception, for Bergson, is always lessthan the real. Poised for action, memory contracts; the mind tenses up andsharpens its focus, as if to cut through the real like a knife blade at the pointof incipient action.44 Bergson provides a schematic drawing of an invertedcone to show us what he calls the two extreme planes of mental life . . . the

FIGURE 7. Ren Magritte, Les Vacances de Hegel [Hegels Vacation], 1958.Copyright 2006 C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York.


plane of action and the plane of dream (Matire, 273). At the point of theinverted cone (the point marks the site of action) memory images interveneaccording to a tightly orchestrated set of rules where resemblance tendstoward similarity and direct contiguity. But if we pass, as Bergson puts it, tothe other extreme of mental life, to the broad plane of memory associatedwith dream, here all of the events of our past life appear [se dessinent] in alltheir most minute detail (Matire, 186). It is here, in what Bergson callspure memory, that the past lives on, virtually. This complete past isunconscious; it is mostly hidden from our awareness by the practicalrequirements of useful action, that is, by the tendency of every organism toextract from a given situation whatever is useful to it (Matire, 186). Here, inthe region Bergson identifies with dream, where, like Bretons Nadja, one isdetached from the imperatives of action, one would hold beneath [ones]gaze, at all times, the infinite multitude of details of [ones] past history(Matire, 172). Here between any two ideas [deux ides quelconques] . . .there is always resemblance (Matire, 182, my emphasis). Virtually,everything resembles everything [tout se ressemble] (Matire, 187).

To evoke the past in the form of images, Bergson writes, one must beable to cut oneself off from [sabstraire de] present action, one must knowhow to attach value to what is useless, one must want to dream. Only humanbeings are perhaps capable of such an effort (Matire, 87). Unlike SigmundFreud, for whom a bar of repression separates dream from reality, Bergsonpresents a continuous transition from consciousness, on the plane of action,to unconsciousness, characterized as detachment from action. The plane ofdream, or dilated memory, is just as real as the plane of action. Memorygives us the survival of lived experience (le vcu). The difference between thetwo extremes of mental lifeaction and dreamis a difference in degree ofmental tension. It is a question of the extent of contraction or expansion bymeans of which consciousness tightens or enlarges the development of itscontents (Matire, 185). A more relaxed state, where the memory is openedup, enables an enriched contact with the past and a concomitantbroadening of the play of resemblance. With the dilation or expansion ofmemory, Bergson writes, reflexion reaches deeper levels of reality (Matire,115). Here useless memories [souvenirs inutiles] (Matire, 170, emphasisadded) enrich our experience of the real. They are useless because they donot serve the interests of action. Vision is detached from perception; itoccurs for its own sake as a voir pour voir.45 This is what I take Magritte to mean whenhe speaks of second degree vision, a vision intermediate between the realobject, extra-mental, and the mind [esprit] . . . a vision considered for its ownsake [prise pour elle-mme] (Ecrits, 182) (fig. 8). And it is from this perspectivethat we can best grasp the importance of what Bataille referred to as theuseless figures that seduced him in the Lascaux cave.



It is in this sense, then, that Bergson could be said to provide thephilosophical ground for Magrittes conception of painting, and for what I amcalling, after Bataille, the useless image. This broader play of affinity betweenimages, which Bergson characterizes through the word resemblanceonethat moves beyond mere similarity of appearance and does not depend on theratio of any analogyis what I take Magritte to have in mind when he definespainting as an art of resemblance. Magrittes visual thought [la pense quivoit] (Ecrits, 377) can be glossed in relation to Bergsons vision of memory(Matire, 173). It is through a richer contact with memory that the uselessimage comes into play, and with it what Magritte calls the beauty of what isneither meaning [sens] nor nonsense [nonsens] (Ecrits, 549). This is thebeauty of art that escapes the grip of either formalism or iconologythebeauty, we could say, of the useless image (fig. 9).


FIGURE 8. Ren Magritte, Dieu nest pas un Saint [God Is Not a Saint], 1935.Copyright 2006 C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York.



III

If there is one position on which Rosalind Krauss and ClementGreenberg could be said to agree, it is the rejection of surrealist painting.When, in a move against Greenberg, Krauss champions surrealism, shedoes so in the domain of photography, in a reading that performs whatKrauss calls a relocation of photography from its eccentric position relativeto surrealism to one that is absolutely centraldefinitive one might say.46

We could say that Krauss has done the same for surrealism, shifting it froman eccentric position relative to modern art to a central one.47

The Optical Unconscious (1993), which contests Greenbergian mod-ernism, and traces an alternative path through modern art that is orientedby the informe, starts in the surrealist context with the photo collages ofMax Ernst and proceeds to engage with Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso,

FIGURE 9. Ren Magritte, Les Fanatiques [The Fanatics], 1945. Copyright 2006 C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.



and Jackson Pollock. This gesture cuts two ways. On the one hand itcounters Greenberg, for whom surrealism was anathema. On the other, itradically rereads surrealism, skirting the issue of surrealist painting almostentirely, and drawing surrealism back toward the practices of Dada.48

Through the perspective opened up by the informe, the analysis in theOptical Unconscious pursues the critics earlier reading of surrealist photogra-phy, where a semiological analysis enables her to circumvent issues of iconol-ogy almost entirely.

Photography, she has written,belongs to that group of signs set off semiologically by the name index. It is the char-acter of the index, indeed, to mark the spot, since it is the one type of sign that is theresult of a physical cause, unlike the icon, a sign that relates to its referent throughthe axis of resemblance . . . the index has an existential connection to meaning, withthe result that it can only take place on the spot.49

The photograph does not engage with representational meaning, since it isproduced by a trace of the object that imprints itself directly by chemicalmeans. It functions not as an icon but as an index (terms borrowed fromthe semiology of Charles Sanders Peirce).

In The Optical Unconscious, Krauss implicitly inscribes her analysis of theindex in an art-historical narrative through reference to the readymade. Notonly does she move from Max Ernst to Duchamp (in a displacement fromsurrealism to Dada) she reads Ernst through the Duchampian termreadymade, thereby capturing surrealism for the trajectory of the informethat, in the end (with Jackson Pollock), meets up with the conventional storyof modernism.

Max Ernst composed his photo collages from a stock of preexistingimages (photographic or print material), often taken from commercialcatalogues. Krauss not only associates this practice with the Duchampianreadymade but also attributes this association to Andr Breton. The termBreton had originally used for this element, she writes, is the far moresuggestive word readymade, as, in his text for the 1921 exhibition at AuSans Pareil, he notes that the collages are built on grounds constituted bythe readymade images of objects, adding parenthetically (as in cataloguefigures).50 Krauss then extends this analysis to affirm surrealismsengagement with a model based . . . on the conditions of the readymade,conditions that produce an altogether different kind of scene from that ofmodernisms, one that implies a structure of vision and its ceaseless returnto the already-known.51 This is the horizon of the optical unconscious thatKrauss will analyze with reference to Freud and Jacques Lacan, challengingthe sublimating opticality of Clement Greenberg, through an appeal to theLacanian notion of the real.



Two comments are in order. First, in the passage from Breton just cited,Breton is not describing Ernsts collages.52 He is critiquing art that tries tosignify in new ways (like cubism and the symbolist poetry of StphaneMallarm) instead of working with what is given and rearranging it, as Ernstdoes (and as Lautramont had done before him, in the literary field, inPosies).53 What is essential, from Bretons point of view, is not the readymade(in Duchamps sense) but the act of redistributing given terms (words orimages) in whatever order we please.54 For Breton, this is how thesurrealist practice of automatism yields the image. When Rosalind Krausstranslates Bretons images toutes faites (which I have translated elsewhere asgiven images) as readymade, what is evacuated is precisely the wordimage and, beyond that, the image itselfthe light of the image, as Bretonmight say.55 What is at stake in the substitution of the readymade for thesurrealist image is precisely the allusion to Duchamp, who not onlyabandoned abstract painting (like Magritte) but abandoned paintingaltogether, and for whom, in his own words, the choice of the readymade[was] always based on visual indifference.56

Surrealist photographers, Krauss has written, were masters of theinforme.57 Both photography and the readymade enjoy a privilegedconnection with the real associated with the structure of the index.58 Thanksto this structure, both are independent of any imaginative manipulation,which is to say, free of meaning or iconography; as paradoxical as it mightseem, Krauss writes, photography has been an operative model forabstraction.59 The gesture of brush[ing] modernism against the grain,oriented by the critical construct of the informe, ends with abstraction,having successfully evicted the image from surrealism and displacedsurrealism toward Dada. Krauss ends her story with Jackson Pollock (andEva Hesses sculptural allusions to his work), arriving, when all is said anddone, not so far from Greenbergs modernism after all.

IV

In many of the caves, but particularly those at Gargas, the paleolithic paintings in-clude palm prints that were made, twenty millennia ago, by placing an outstretchedhand against the wall and blowing pigment onto the exposed surface to create theimage in negative. The image is a residue of its maker. No matter how simply, Ileave my trace. . . .

Displaced from a Golden Age Greece to the dawn of humanity, the birth of artnever seemed, therefore, to require a break with the myth of Narcissus. If themimetic urge led to the depiction of mammoth and horse and bison, it even moresurely required the reflection of the artist himself.60


Given the theoretical authority of Bataille for the critical project ofthe informe, and the importance, in this context, of Batailles discussion ofprimitive art, Krauss had to return to the question of cave art in The OpticalUnconscious. She also had to avoid Lascaux, with its proliferation of powerfullyaffecting figurative images, at all costs. Her solution is to change caves.Instead of entering Lascaux, a site renowned for its proliferation of dazzlingfigural images, she brings us to Gargas, a cave celebrated (as the Gargas Website attests) for its hundreds of mysterious handprints (fig. 10).61 These areimages Krauss characterizes as having been quite literally stenciled off theworld itself, as she has written of the photograph.62 The palm prints ofGargas place the index at the very origin of art. The substitution of Gargasfor Lascaux parallels the displacement already noted from Breton toDuchamp. It is consistent with a story that takes us from the indexical markof the palm print, to the indexical structure of surrealist photography,through the readymade, to modernist abstraction. The move from Lascaux


FIGURE 10. Gargas, hand prints. Reprinted from Andr Leroi-Gourhan, The Dawnof European Art (New York, 1982).


to Gargas enables contemporary theorists of the informe to evacuate the issueof fictive figuration, which is central to the art practices of Breton, MaxErnst, and Magritte and to new media art today. The issue played out at theprehistoric scene therefore, is the fate of what I have called, after Bataille,the useless image.

Modernism, Krauss writes, imagines two orders of the figure:

The first is that of empirical vision, the object as it is seen, . . . the object modernismspurns. The second is that of the formal conditions of the possibility for vision itself,the level at which pure form operates as a principle of coordination, unity, structure:visible but unseen. That is the level modernism wants to chart, to capture, to master.But there is a third order of the figure . . . an order that works entirely underground,out of sight.63

On this account, the first order of the figure implies realism, the secondimplies Greenbergian formalism, and the third the order of the informe asdestruction of form and return to the real. I am proposing yet anotherorder of the figure: the useless image. It is neither iconic (the object seen)nor abstract; it is not even informe. Magritte elaborates it through a notionof resemblance that refers us not to Peirce, but to Bergson.

If the index marks the spot, as Krauss has so aptly put it, the questionremains: where is the spot in a photography of thought?64 Where, in otherwords, is thought? This is a question that prompted Bergson to write Matireet mmoire and to displace entirely the question of the relation between bodyand mind through memory that traverses them both.65 Photography was acentral preoccupation of surrealism, but it preoccupied the surrealists, moreoften than not, as a problem. When Max Ernst took already given photo-graphic or engraved images as the point of departure for his photo collages,gluing them together in improbable juxtapositions, he then photographedhis collages to hide the seams of his cuts and designated the photographiccopy as the original work. In so doing he was certainly not using photogra-phy in view of its indexical value, its status as imprint or footprint.66 He wasusing it, quite precisely, to cover his tracks, imagina-tively manipulatingphotography to yield the appearance of a seamless fiction, one with nosystem of reference, as Breton observed with delight, capable of estrangingus back into our memory.67 Magritte, who was fasci-nated with bothphotography and film, speaks of the need to overcome the objectivity ofphotography, something he undertakes to do precisely by extending thecitational practices of Ernsts photo collages into a field of pure invention:painting. He produces what Ernst referred to as collages painted entirely byhand.68 Surrealism problematizes the index, then, specifically at the pointwhere Magrittes art of resemblance meets Bretons definition of surrealistautomatism as a photography of thought.69 From Breton through Ernst and




Magritte this metaphor deepens and develops its specificity. Magritte extendsErnsts metaphotographical maneuvers, completely breaking the indexicalrelation of the photograph, while miming it.

Krauss and Bois ostensibly intended the informe to undercut [dclasser]oppositions between modernism and postmodernism, thereby disabling thepostmodern attempt to bury modernism. As soon as one takes intoaccount figures such as Magritte, however, we see that the informe serves toshore up modernism through a series of repositionings that shield whatemerges as the first principle of modernism: the refusal of iconology. Thedefense against the figural image, so vehemently waged by Greenberg,prevails.

If alternative modernisms are in order today, it is not so much because ofan aesthetic challenge posed by postmodernism as it is a result of thechallenge new technologies pose. Digital images have already displacedphotography from the ground of photochemical form[s] of causality.70

One could argue that what Breton saw in the photo collages of Ernst was astep in this direction. Magritte, who paints his collages entirely by hand,reveals that the index has no ground to stand on. This is what Magritteunderstood by the dpassement [overcoming] of the objectivity of photog-raphy by painting, which, as an art of resemblance, not only invokes memorybut also embodies virtual images in paint.

The notion of the useless image (and the constellation of figures itdesignatesBreton, Magritte, de Chirico, Ernst) strikes me as especiallypertinent today, when structures of representation are being called intoquestion technologically in ways that suggest a dpassement of the problem ofabstraction altogether. In the information age the image per se may be on itsway to becoming useless. As Mark Hansen has convincingly argued, todaythe image is not given, it is actualized. New media works emphasize theactualization, or embodiment, of images through interaction with thespectator in an information field.71 As Friedrich Kittler put it, digital dataexist unencumbered by a need to adapt to the constraints of humanperceptual ratios.72 Today, on a model much more similar to Bergsonsoperation of attentive recognition than to structures of either abstraction orrepresentation (either formalism or iconography), it is a question of therealization or embodiment of virtual images.

This is precisely the path we have opened up through Bataillesdiscussion of the sacred moment of figuration in Lascaux (fig. 11) and ofthe useless figuration of these seductive images, which we have consideredin light of the moment of alteration that has been repressed bycontemporary criticsthe gesture of bringing into form. We have followedit to Magritte, where painting, as an art of resemblance, is an embodiment ofvirtual images, images of visual thought. What links the two is Bergson,


whose theory of attentive recognition proposes that even perceptualinformation needs the supplement of a memory image in order to comeinto being, just as the memory image needs the solicitation of perceptualdata (its life or chaleur) to prompt the spontaneous actualization of thememory image from the virtual storehouse of pure memory.

We began, then, with the useless image in its proximity to the informe, infull support of the gesture of redealing the cards of modernism. But toredeal effectively, we must start with a full deck. We cannot limit the processof alteration only to the informe (in the limited sense invoked by Krauss andBois) or we will be locked within the modernist opposition formalism/iconography (or abstraction/figuration), unable to fully appreciate thecritical and aesthetic force of surrealism. We must also include the operationthat brings into form, that actualizes or embodies images, associated with whatI am calling, after Bataille, the useless image. This is the fictive figural imagethat occurs outside the framework of representation, yielding, as Magritteput it, the beauty of what is neither sense nor nonsense (Ecrits, 549).


FIGURE 11. Rotunda bull, Lascaux. Reprinted from Leroi-Gourhan, Dawn ofEuropean Art.


Notes

I would like to thank the editorial board of Representations for their carefulreading of my work and helpful editorial suggestions.

1. Michel Foucault, Prface la transgression, Critique 19596 (1963); JacquesDerrida, De lconomie restreinte lconomie gnrale, Un hegelianismesans reserve, in LEcriture et la diffrence (Paris, 1967), trans. as Writing and Dif-ference by Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978); Julia Kristeva, The Revolution of Poetic Lan-guage, trans. Margaret Waller (New York, 1984), and Powers of Horror: An Essayon Abjection, trans. Lon S. Roudiez (New York, 1982).

2. Georges Bataille, Lascaux ou la naissance de lart, in Oeuvres compltes, 12 vols.(Paris, 1970), 9:63. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

3. These consist of inhuman depictions of human figures or statues of mostlyfeminine figures that Bataille describes as hidden from human appearance[drobes lapparence humaine] (ibid., 72). He refers to them as informe (65).

4. That same year, in a pendulum swing away from Andr Leroi-Gourhans struc-turalist paleontology, a new version of lAbb Breuils shamanistic interpreta-tion of cave art was affirmed by two anthropologists working in collaboration,David Lewis-Williams, an expert in southern African shamanistic art, and JeanClottes, an expert in European Paleolithic cave art. See Jean Clottes and DavidLewis-Williams, The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves,trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York, 1996). One can only imagine how this workmight have fascinated Bataille.

5. Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A Users Guide (New York,1997).

6. Bataille, Lascaux, 43. 7. Yve-Alain Bois, To Introduce a Users Guide, October 78 (Fall 1996): 29. Subse-

quent references to this work will be given in the text in parenthesis. On thequestion of the informe see also Georges Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblanceinforme ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris, 1995).

8. Greenbergs modernist fetishization of sight is cited in Rosalind Krauss, An-tivision, October 36 (Spring 1986): 147.

9. This operation also implies a specific set of gestures such as horizontality,pulse, entropy, and base materialism. Georges Batailles LArt primitif, inOeuvres compltes (Paris, 1970), vol. 1, was first published in Documents 7, deux-ime anne (1930): 38997. In a preceding issue, Documents had published adictionary entry for the word informe, defining it as a term used to declassify(cited in ibid., 217).

10. Bataille, LArt primitif, 253.11. Norbert Aujoulat, Lascaux: Movement, Space, and Time (New York, 2005), 221. 12. This was a distinction introduced by Heinrich Schaeffer in 1919 in Principles of

Egyptian Art (recently reprinted; Oxford, 1986). 13. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths

(Cambridge, 1985), 64. 14. Rosalind Krauss, Corpus Delicti, October 33 (Summer 1985): 43. 15. Bataille, LArt primitif, 253. G.-H. Luquets account of figuration in primitive

art, and Batailles theorization of the figural moment of alteration, meet up in




the surrealist practice of automatism. See Bretons essay on Max Ernst (AndrBreton, Max Ernst, in Oeuvres compltes [Paris, 1988], and Max Ernsts BeyondPainting (New York, 1948). Ernst writes of reproducing only that which saw it-self in me in his photo collages, and of obtaining a faithful image of my hal-lucination; cited in Suzanne Guerlac, Literary Polemics (Palo Alto, 1997), 130.He also refers to the celebrated lesson of Leonardo, the pedagogical exerciseLeonardo reputedly required of his students, namely, that they stare at a blankwall until they began to discern figures there that they must then go on to ren-der (130 n. 15), and which resembles the figural operation of alteration.

16. Bataille, LArt primitif, 249. 17. In The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), Rosalind Krauss acknowl-

edges that it is because of its wonderful ambivalence that Bataille likes theword alteration and that it leads simultaneously downward and upward(152), but she says nothing about the fact that figuration belongs to the struc-ture of alteration in Bataille.

18. Bataille, LArt primitif, 251. A note refers to Rudolf Ottos Le Sacr, publishedin English as The Idea of the Holy (Oxford, 1923). Ottos study, which emphasizesambivalent subjective response in the experience of the sacred (attraction andrepulsion), anticipates important features of Batailles account of transgressionin LErotisme (Paris, 1957).

19. We will limit ourselves for the moment to affirming that such a change hastaken place from the time of the Aurignacian with respect to the representa-tion of animals and with respect to the representation of human beings(Bataille, LArt primitif, 253).

20. Cf. Georges Bataille, LHistoire de lrotisme, in Oeuvres compltes (Paris,1970), 8:9165. Some versions of these essays go back as early as 1939. Mostwere written during 195051. Likewise, two versions of the Lascaux study werepublished before 1955 in Critique (see Bataille, Oeuvres compltes, 9:420).

21. Bataille, Oeuvres compltes, 8:66. Bataille calls this study an erotic phenomenology(524) and situates it in relation to Alexandre Kojve. He also writes: Eroticismis essentially, from the first step, the scandal of the reversal of alliances(Oeuvres compltes, 7:81).

22. Bataille, Lascaux, 81, and LErotisme, 6869.23. Bataille, Lascaux, 28. 24. Bataille, LHistoire de lrotisme, 3941. 25. See Georges Bataille, Sacrifices, in Oeuvres compltes, 1:9496. Bataille speaks

here of the catastrophe of time and of the problem, of the being of time(95). In Lascaux he writes: Could we miss the fact, that, entering thegrotto . . . we are, deep in the ground, in some way lost [gars] la recherche dutemps perdu? (43).

26. Bataille, Lascaux, 63. 27. Bataille, LArt primitif, 249.28. Krauss, Corpus Delicti, 43. In another essay Krauss identifies informe with

deconstruction (No More Play, in Originality of the Avant-Garde, 99). See mydiscussion of relations between art criticism and French theory in La trans-gression et le rve de la thorie, in De Tel Quel lInfini, lavant-garde etaprs? ed. Philippe Forest (Paris, 1999), 7995.

29. Ren Magritte to Andr Bosmans, August 1959, published in Harry TorczynersMagritte, Ideas and Images, trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1977), 65.


30. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, 91; Michel, Bataille, et Moi, October 68(Spring 1994).

31. Michel Foucault, Ceci nest pas une Pipe (Paris, 1973), 61. The title refers to aseries of paintings by Magritte that includes La Trahison des Images, wherewe read the words ceci nest pas une pipe painted beneath the painted imageof a pipe (which justifies his opposition between reading and looking).

32. Foucault speaks of the privilege of similitude over resemblance (ibid., 65),and again of breaking down the fortress in which similitude was held prisonerto the affirmation of resemblance (71).

33. See Krauss, The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism, in Originality of theAvant-Garde. The chapter concludes with this statement: But it is my thesisthat . . . [with surrealist photography] reality was both extended and replacedor supplemented by that master supplement which is writing: the paradoxicalwriting of the photograph (118).

34. Ren Magritte, Ecrits complets (Paris, 1979), 518. 35. I would like to stress the distinction between what Magritte calls visual thought

and something like opticality. Vision is not just physical, writes Magritte, it isreasoned [raisonne]. Magritte calls this a vision to the second degree(ibid., 182).

36. Breton, Max Ernst, 245. 37. The anecdote pertains to the painting Elective Affinities.38. The problem of the glass, for example, finds its rponse exacte in an umbrella in

the painting Les Vacances de Hegel; the problem of the cloud yields LaCorde Sensible; the problem of the piano, La Main Heureuse; and the prob-lem of the train, the celebrated painting La Dure Poignarde. Concerningthe painting La Main Heureuse Magritte has written: The problem I havebeen dealing with is the problem of the piano. The answer apprized me thatthe secret object designed to be joined with the piano was an engagementring. . . . The size of the ring is like an emanation of some happiness, particu-larly that of a hand playing the piano. In addition the outline the ring makes,partly concealed by the piano that traverses it, evokes the form of a musicalsign (Torczyner, Magritte, Ideas and Images, 144). Of La Dure Poignarde hewrites: I decided to paint the image of a locomotive . . . I thought of joiningthe locomotive image with the image of a dining room fireplace in a momentof presence of mind. By that I mean the moment of lucidity that no methodcan bring forth. Only the power of thought manifests itself at this time . . . wedo not count for anything, but are limited to witnessing the manifestation ofthought (81).

39. Henri Bergson, Matire et mmoire (Paris, 1939). Bergson also writes: Every per-ception occupies a certain thickness of duration, prolongs the past in the pres-ent, and in this way participates in memory (274).

40. Bergson uses the words mmoire and souvenir. To distinguish the two, andbecause souvenir implies images, I have translated the latter as image.

41. On Bergsons account, sense data come into the body; this structures an appealto memory, which produces an image. This image then feeds back into the actof perception itself, helping to constitute the object perceived.

42. If one keeps in mind Bretons correction of Pierre Reverdys conception of theimage in the Manifeste du surralisme, which Reverdy had characterized in termsof metaphor, it is important not to identify Magrittes use of the term affinitywith metaphor or analogy. See Breton, Oeuvres compltes, 1:325. Magrittes term



affinity also echoes Bergsons use of the term parent (Matire et mmoire,112) in his analysis of attentive recognition where a notion of resemblancecomes into play.

43. Representation only occurs through memory, that is, in relation to the past, toabsence, to that which no longer acts [ce qui nagit plus] (Bergson, Matire etmmoire, 71). Lets restore the real character of perception, showing that inpure perception, an incipient system of actions plunges into the real . . . thisperception will distinguish itself radically from memory (71). On this pointsee Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time, An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca,2006), 10711.

44. What we call action involves precisely making this memory contract orsharpen itself more and more [obtenir que cette mmoire se contracte ou plutt saffilede plus en plus] until it presents only the cutting edge of its blade to experience,in which it will penetrate (Bergson, Matire et mmoire, 117).

45. Consciousness amuses itself by perceiving for the sake of perceiving, remem-bering for the sake of remembering, without any concern for life, cited inGuerlac, Literary Polemics, 150.

46. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, 101. 47. See Rosalind Krauss, Jane Livingston, and Dawn Ades, LAmour Fou: Photography

and Surrealism (New York, 1985), catalogue of the exhibition at the HaywardGallery in London and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. in 1986.

48. For another reading, which considers Bretons response to Ernsts photo col-lages in the context of a deliberate attempt to invent an alternative to Dada, seeGuerlac, Literary Polemics, 12736.

49. Krauss, Michel, Bataille, et Moi, 13.50. Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 46.51. Ibid., 53.52. See my discussion of Bretons essay Max Ernst in Literary Polemics, 13031. 53. What Breton has in mind is the work of Lautramont [Isidore Ducasse] in

Posies, where Lautramont affirms the necessity for plagiarism, by which hemeans something not unlike what Bataille has called alteration in the contextof primitive art. In Ernsts photo collages, Breton sees an analogy to this opera-tion in the visual field, a practice similar to the one he will go on to theorize interms of automatism and the surrealist image in the First Manifesto, where hewill define surrealism in terms of its image-producing capacity. Far from col-lapsing surrealism back into the Dada context, Breton is claiming Ernst for thenew movement of surrealism, which will define itself against Dada. AsMargurite Bonnet writes, in a note to Bretons essay on Max Ernst in thePleiade edition of that text, Breton sees this work of Ernst as distancing itselfresolutely from Dada, Breton, Oeuvres compltes, 1266. For a discussion ofPosies see Suzanne Guerlac, The Impersonal Sublime: Hugo, Baudelaire, Lautra-mont, and the Esthetics of the Sublime (Palo Alto, 1990).

54. Breton, Max Ernst, 245. 55. Guerlac, Literary Polemics, 131.56. In words that evoke the terms of Krausss critique of Greenberg, Marcel

Duchamp complained to Pierre Cabanne: When you see what the Abstraction-ists have done since 1940, its worse than ever optical. Theyre really up to theirnecks in the retina! Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (New York,1971), 43.



57. Krauss, Corpus Delicti, 34. 58. By real she means not the reality of realism but the Lacanian structure

of the real that cannot be situated in the terms of either the symbolic or theimaginary.

59. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, 210.60. Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 151.61. These are mysterious not only because they are so numerous in this cave but

also because of what has been described as mutilated fingers in these palmprints. Andr Leroi-Gourhan, however, reads these as coded signs for animals(not narcissistic marks). See his 1967 essay The Hands of Gargas: Toward aGeneral Study, trans. Annette Michelson, October 37 (Summer 1986): 1934.

62. Krauss, Michel, Bataille, et Moi, 13. 63. Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 217. 64. See Krauss, Michel, Bataille, et Moi, 13, and Optical Unconscious, 151, 192, and

25960. 65. Since the time of Bataille (and for the critics of Tel Quel in particular), the ques-

tion of surrealism has pitted materialists against idealists, Bergsons dis-placement of this opposition through the term memory becomes all themore pertinent in this context.

66. Krauss writes: Photography exploits the special connection to reality withwhich all photography is endowed. For photography is an imprint or a transferoff the real; it is a photochemically processed trace causally connected to thatthing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to that of fingerprintsor footprints (Originality of the Avant-Garde, 110).

67. Breton, Max Ernst, 246. 68. Ernst, Beyond Painting, 14. Max Ernst stated in 1936 that Magrittes pictures

were collages painted entirely by hand. Cited by David Sylvester in Magritte:The Silence of the World (New York, 1992), 110.

69. The definition is given in Max Ernst, written for the catalogue of the 1921exhibit at the Librairie Sans Pareil, republished in Les Pas perdus (Breton, MaxErnst, 245).

70. Krauss, Michel, Bataille, et Moi, 13. See William J. Mitchell, The ReconfiguredEye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, 1994).

71. See Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, 2004).72. Cited in ibid., 2.



The useless image. Bataille, Magritte and Bergson..pdf

Documents

Transcript of The useless image. Bataille, Magritte and Bergson..pdf