I have repeatedly stressed in my writing about visual art that the relation we have to it is a form of intersubjectivity. It is not a relation between person and thing, between me and a painted silver cup on a canvas. Chardin’s silver cup is humanized by the simple fact that he not only produced the work but the gestures of his body remain a part of it. His touch becomes mine in viewing. The artwork is, of course, not fully a “you” but rather a “quasi you,” and I engage with it as the other’s creation, a thing impregnated with his or her being. It does not matter if the work is figurative or abstract; my relation to it is a sensual, emotional, and intellectual connection between a me and something like a you rather than a utilitarian one—between me and an it. The real cup on my kitchen counter is not a quasi you. It becomes a temporary extension of my hand when I drink from it. The word coined by the psychologist J. J. Gibson is “affordance.” The sight of the cup acts as an affordance for my action.19 Seeing a real cup affords me the chance to drink, and the reach of my arm will secure the sip or gulp.
Chardin’s cup, however, is a radiant signifier of cup-ness that will never serve me as a real cup would, but it is also suffused with the emotion of human movement no actual cup in the world has. It beckons to me as an image of a graspable thing that is locked in the imaginary realm created by another person and delineated by its frame. Part of my relation to the unattainable cup is my recognition of cups, my memory of cups and drinks of various potable liquids, as well as the motor memory of the gestures involved in drinking. It is peculiar that a glass, a couple of nuts, three apples, a copper bowl, and a spoon can produce in me a feeling of tenderness for other human beings, persons who do not appear in the canvas at all, but this is the truth. The canvas from 1769 carries within it the ghostly touch of an artist long dead; my perception of it includes his motion and awakens in me my own history of felt touch.
Works of the imagination in all the arts are created from and perceived through unconscious corporeal processes—implicit memory and mirroring—that are never symbolically represented, and in the learned bodily rhythms and repetitions we call skill. Furthermore, a motor skill such as writing from left to right accompanied by the subject-precedes-object convention in English may be used metaphorically to reinforce a cultural stereotype about masculinity as active subject and femininity as passive object. These learned patterns are also made from rhythms of exchange between us that become predictive of feeling. The child who learns that his howling will earn him a slap eventually falls silent. Feelings are conscious, but feeling responses are embedded in an organism’s past. They are repetitions of earlier sensations and feelings that have good and bad values, which guide our judgments in life but are not conscious thoughts.
We are not reasoning machines. We reason and judge with emotion. We also know that we remember what we care about. Emotion consolidates and reconsolidates memories in animals and human beings.20 Emotional events stay alive in us, usually for better, sometimes for worse. They may be conscious or unconscious. We remember what moves us so we may act to protect ourselves or repeat a pleasure in the future. I remember Chardin’s pictures because in the past they moved me and, when I saw the new canvas, I recognized the repetition of a particular form of tender melancholy, a feeling I like. When a work of art leaves me cold, I forget it.
Before art became art, before aesthetics was a discipline, before museums and galleries and auction houses, people were making paintings, totems, and myriad other objects that radiated religious or mythical meaning, forms invested with divine or demonic power within a particular culture. It is generally agreed that cave paintings, such as the ones at Lascaux, were made for religious, not aesthetic, purposes. Transubstantiation in the Eucharist is an excellent example of the ordinary miraculously infused with divinity—wafer and wine as body and blood of God ingested by the believer. Images of various kinds continue to be animated by the sacred, the magical, or the merely enchanted in tribal, religious, but also in secular culture. There is surely an argument to be made that the gleaming images of movie stars, athletes, billionaires, and various other beloved (or hated) cultural figures have been invested with something more than human, that the collective imagination has imbued them with an almost supernatural quality not granted the rest of us plebeians. We do not treat blank canvases and tubes of oil paint with reverence, but we do regard certain works of art as sanctified by another kind of memory: collective memory. Some works of art have been invested with a kind of holiness. The names da Vinci, Rembrandt, van Gogh, and Picasso have become signs of artistic grandeur in the West. The artists’ names and their works are treated as quasi-deities and, when not priceless, are colossally expensive.
My response to Chardin’s silver cup has an animistic quality, one triggered by an embodied simulation of the strokes and touches in the canvas and a corresponding felt empathy, not for the cup, apples, copper bowl, or nuts, but for what I perceive as the delicate, almost unbearably delicate, movements expressed in the canvas itself. But Chardin’s cup is not a cup, to rephrase the sentence inscribed in Magritte’s famous pipe painting, and the pleasure I derive from the painted cup is at least in part about its distance from me, its presence in a parallel world of representation I cannot reach. The mental image of my special coffee mug in my memory is not the cup itself, nor is my fantasy of a cup I hope to receive for my birthday. Art always partakes of symbolic alienation. In her introduction to a book by Ernst Cassirer, whose work influenced her own, the American philosopher Susanne Langer articulates the difference: “In its symbolic image, the experience is conceived, instead of just physiologically remembered.”21 The distinction is crucial. There is a remembered preconceptual past in our moving, perceiving bodies and a remembered subjective conceptual reality that frames our experience symbolically. One might conceive of the preconceptual as vertical animal memory and the symbolic as horizontal, serial memory that is linked to our language and literacy, one that has produced an arrow of time.
In Feeling and Form, Langer writes, “Whatever brute fact may be, our experience of it bears the stamp of language.”22 It is hard indeed to return to a time before we could speak, to perceive the world prior to its dissection by words, to enter wild being and vertical time because boundaries, it must be remembered, are often inscribed by the concepts and words we use to erase the ambiguities of overlapping realities. Once we can speak and write, our kinetic music changes. Our spatial views are altered, but we mustn’t view concepts and words, spoken or written, as entities suspended over our bodies or lodged exclusively in our heads; they are in us and of us, part of our rhythmical, felt bodily existence and expressive reality. Again and again, I have set my alarm for six o’clock to make sure I will get up in time for the plane I have to take that morning. Again and again, I have slept solidly and woken an instant before the alarm rings. Even my sleeping body can count and somehow remember that artificial interval we call an hour. Culture becomes matter—acquired knowledge resides in soma.
In his mostly fragmentary writings in the early twentieth century Aby Warburg tried to make sense of the life and felt movement of static images through a form of cultural memory that made its appearance in what he called Pathosformel, recurring emotive images that covered, according to Warburg, everything from “helpless passive absorption to murderous frenzy and all the intervening moments.”23 He was particularly fascinated by how images of the pagan past were revived in Renaissance art that depicted Christian as well as mythological themes. Drawing on Nietzsche’s poles of the Dionysian and Apollonian, Jakob Burckhardt’s reading of ancient Greek life, Robert Vischer’s Einfühlung (empathy), Cassirer’s idea of myth and symbolic forms, Ewald Hering’s biology of ancestral memory, Darwin’s theory of the emotions, and the zoologist Richard Semon’s theory of the memory engram, Warburg understood the repetition of these forms as a kind of Nachleben or afterlife, the survival of primitive, ecstatic, often dangerous impulses into the artistic present.
Following Hering, Warburg believed in a biological tra
nsmission of memory, a hereditary unconscious material memory that linked all species and all matter. As Andrea Pinotti points out, Warburg’s engram “refer[s] to a moment of accumulation of an energetic charge deriving from a sufficiently intense and often repeated event capable to inscribe itself indelibly in the collective memory as a material track.”24 In other words, the idea of heredity in Warburg’s thought is subsumed by the idea of memory. From the point of view of Kierkegaard’s Constantin Constantius, Warburg’s returns are not recollections but repetitions, vivid renewals of forms of wild being that change over time. For Warburg, they were transmitted by the artist and apprehended by the viewer as an electrical emotional charge, and these shock variations are less personal than prepersonal, part of a larger human story rather than a single or particular human story. The notion of collective memory as biological is controversial, of course. Lamarck’s idea that parental experiences or any acquired characteristics can be passed on to offspring has long been regarded as an embarrassing wrong turn in science. Jung’s collective unconscious has suffered a similar fate as a “mystical” notion.
Darwin, who is nothing if not current, proposed another form of hereditary “memory” through natural selection: the ancestral past is alive in our present traits. Semantic issues become pivotal in this context. Some evolutionary psychologists explain just about every human propensity, including popular taste in art, as inherited from our Pleistocene ancestors. These proclivities are present in naturally selected mind modules that are supposed to determine everything from male and female behavior to the kind of landscape paintings most Americans prefer. In The Blank Slate, the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker argues, “The dominant theories of elite art and art criticism in the twentieth century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship.”25 There is plenty of bad art in every period and plenty of bad writing about art, too, but Pinker approaches aesthetics with a hammer, pounding away at the preening fops and snooty critics who have tromped on the aesthetic preferences of the average guy, which are decided by evolution, not mass marketing.
This is no doubt a popular position to take, but it tells us little about what is nature and what is culture in the experience of looking at art. From Pinker’s perspective, those of us who love Henri Matisse or Alberto Giacometti or Joan Mitchell are actively suppressing our true natures, natures that apparently crave soothing calendar landscapes with deer and heroic figures in them. Crude thinking is alive and well, and it is crude from a scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic position to argue that this fixed human “nature” tells us that Modernism is both bad and unnatural. It is not crude, however, to ask questions about the human urge to represent and symbolize the world, nor is it crude to ask how this urge is reconfigured over time, from culture to culture, or to ask how prereflective wild mammalian being and reflective symbolic forms are both involved in the experience of art.
There is no question in my mind that we share emotions with other animals, but how would one, for example, parse nature and culture in the pleasure I feel as I look at a painting by Chardin? As an evolved creature with a complex, creative visual system and a literate citizen of the United States, who therefore unconsciously reads time in paintings from left to right, but who also has myriad personal memories of paintings of many kinds, who has read and thought about visual art for years, I am obviously a physiological amalgam of all these factors. Can one actually isolate the natural from the cultural “components” of my pleasure?
Warburg’s memory science was of his time, and memory, like many words, has shifting meanings. In the nineteenth century it could encompass broad notions of inherited traits and ideas. It is fascinating to note that in the field of epigenetics there is mounting evidence that environmental stress on an animal creates molecular changes after DNA replication. The nucleotide sequence of the genes is not directly affected but gene expression or suppression is.26 Such changes, it appears, can be inherited, not forever, but for more than one generation. In science, old ideas have a way of sneaking back in new forms.
Warburg’s conception of time and memory was not linear. It might be described as vertical or funnel shaped. The extreme poles of archaic human experience represented in bodily gestures he identified as recurring in artworks and other images, including stamps, postcards, and advertisements, are formulaic expressions of extreme human states of orgiastic mania, traumatic fear, and severe melancholy or depression, states in which there is no room for reflective thought or distance, no distinction between ego and world.
For Warburg, wild being had a terrifying quality. The distance created by symbols was precisely what constituted civilization and culture. “When this interval becomes the basis of artistic production,” he wrote, “the conditions have been fulfilled for this consciousness of distance to achieve an enduring social function which, in its rhythmical change between absorption in its object and detached restraint, signifies the oscillation between a cosmology of images and one of signs; its adequacy or failure as an instrument of mental orientation signifies the fate of human culture.”27 In other words, the stakes are high.
In another revealing fragment, Warburg wrote, “The detachment of the subject from the object which establishes the zone for abstract thought originates in the experience of the cutting of the umbilical cord.”28 The dialectic here is between a wild fusion without differentiation between mother and infant during pregnancy and the distance that arrives with separation and eventually self-conscious reflection. Warburg’s umbilical cord is at once literal and metaphorical. For the fetus, the umbilical connection is a lifeline that is cut once the newborn is literally separated from its mother’s body. A redemptive, metaphorical “space” or “distance” arrives when the child is able to reflect on herself and the world around her. Warburg believed that Denkraum, or “thought room” (another spatial metaphor), acted as a vehicle of rescue from drowning in the other. This opening or distance between subject and object created by symbols rescues a person from ecstatic and/or traumatic bodily feeling, in which there is no distinction between me and you or between me and the world, an idea that has strong psychoanalytic resonance. Freud believed the primal sexual drive could be sublimated in cultural and artistic forms.
A pure example of preconceptual memory without Denkraum is the traumatic flashback, a particular kind of memory relevant to Warburg’s thought. The flashback feels like the eruption of a horrific past event in the present— a motor-sensory and sometimes visual “reenactment” of experience. While it is happening, it is as if the horror is happening again. It is not a repetition that is renewed or changed; rather, it is an identical experience, which means there is no felt sequential horizontal reality, no forward or backward, no linear quality at all. Unlike an autobiographical memory for which I have mental images and a story, there is no “back then” in the flashback. Time feels vertical: a volcanic upward surge, which is wholly unmediated by symbols. After a car accident, I had flashbacks four nights in a row in my sleep. Then, after many years of no recurrence, I had another, a deafening, terrifying explosion that shocked me awake from my sleep. I was certain the house had been bombed or was collapsing on top of me, that a massive attack or wholly unexpected earthquake had struck New York City. It wasn’t until I had reassured myself that both I and the house were intact that I realized it must have been another flashback of the now remote accident. The words “car accident” and “flashback” had to be applied to the nameless experience minutes later, however. They were not present during the experience, which did not signify car crash but what can only be described as bodily horror. Whether the flashback is a perfect repetition of an earlier event or not (I don’t know how this could be proved), it is a form of memory unlike others and, while it is happening, it has no context, no language, no before or after. It is literally a memory without distance or any time beyond the present. It occurs without reflective symbolic thou
ght room. It is not framed. The flashback is conscious, but it is inscribed in bodily systems outside of consciousness.
Every work of art has an aesthetic frame, which procures a form of Denkraum or conscious reflection for the viewer, reader, or listener, no matter how traumatic or frightening the subject. In religion, ritual and taboo provide for an orderly unfolding of events, as well as dissections of space that insulate the practitioner from the power of the sacred. The liturgy is a sequence of precise repetitions that organize the time of the church service according to a prescribed order. The Jewish mikvah, the monthly purification ritual for women, turns on a menstruation taboo and is subject to specific laws that define the time of immersion and the structure of the bath in space. For example, the mikvah must contain at least two hundred gallons of rainwater and it must not be portable. Representations and symbols alienate and protect us as much as they seduce and lure us into their alternative or parallel space.
A now famous canvas by Artemisia Gentileschi of Judith decapitating Holofernes that was painted sometime between 1614 and 1620, and that hangs in the Uffizi in Florence, presents the viewer with gruesome and arguably traumatic content. Warburg searched figures in art for recurring emotional gestures that leapt across centuries and periods, what Giorgio Agamben called “an indissoluble intertwining of an emotional charge and an iconographic formula” in which form and content are indistinguishable.29 I am not arguing that Gentileschi’s canvas of a beheading represents the return of a pathos formula. I am using it as a test case for memory and perception, a way to demonstrate that memory, expectation, the unconscious and conscious, the biological and the cultural, and vertical and horizontal axes of time collide in us as spectators. (The image can be readily seen online.)
Decapitation is not an archaic form of violence. Those of us who live far from war nevertheless have immediate access to the grisly beheadings of ISIS on the Internet, should we choose to view the documentary footage. As spectators to such horrors, we might be haunted forever, but the films cannot kill us. We see the violence occur in miniature; our vision of it is literally framed by a screen, and yet knowing that the victims are real people, not actors, increases our terror. The three people in this Baroque canvas are flat painted figures that do not move. They “live” inside a frame. Still, this image of a woman beheading a man is a terrible one, and embodied mirroring is at work in us, an “as if” kinetic participation in the scene that elicits, at least in me, both fear and fascination. The woman’s braced forearms, her strong grip on the sword with one hand, and the fist she makes with the other, which is pressed so hard into the man’s forehead that she has pushed the skin of his face into a fold of wrinkles over his eye, and the way she leans back from the blood that spurts from the severed neck of her victim, perhaps to protect her clothing, all create a startling feeling of a fixed, frozen, eternal now.
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