georges didi huberman, confronti... - lensbased.net

History of Art, Reason 95It implies first of all a sifting of the most common categories of thehistory of art. What, for example, is ‘‘historical time,’’ what are ‘‘themodes of time’’ (die Modi der Zeit) in the history of art? Somethingquite different, certainly, from natural, physical, and even chronologicaltime. 26 What is the exact worth, from the point of view of ‘‘methodological-philosophicalsignificance’’ (methodisch-philosophischenBedeutung), of the notions elaborated by those prestigious elder colleaguesHeinrich Wölfflin and Aloïs Riegl? Panofsky answers point bypoint, demands rigor, asks himself whether art historians ‘‘have theright,’’ interrogates the foundations. 27 Wölfflin’s famous binariesemerge from this much diminished, notably the basic opposition betweenthe ‘‘eye’’ and the ‘‘mind’’ (Auge; Gesinnung): Panofsky showsthat there is no ‘‘law of nature’’ in the history of art, and that theanthropology and psychology of vision are inevitably mediated bycultural schemas, by ‘‘elaborations of the soul’’—nothing, then, thatresembles a state of nature. By the same blow, the archetypal characterof Wölfflin’s oppositions (linear versus painterly, surface versusdepth, etc.) lost its value as foundation and a priori. It was nothing, inPanofsky’s view, but a mental construct:Only one answer is possible: the soul [Seele]. Consequently,this antithesis, initially so convincing in its discursive concision—stateof mind here, point of view [Optik] there; feelinghere, eye there—ceases to be one. Without any doubt, visualperceptions can acquire linear or painterly form only throughthe active intervention of the mind [Geist]. It follows that the‘‘optical attitude’’ [‘‘optische Einstellung’’] is, strictly speaking,a mental attitude toward the optical, and that the ‘‘relationof the eye to the world’’ is in truth a relation of the soul tothe world of the eye [so gewiss ist das ‘‘Verhältnis des Auges zurWelt’’ in Wahrheit ein Verhältnis des Seele zur Welt des Auges]. 28Let’s read this sentence again. ‘‘The ‘relation of the eye to theworld’ is in truth a relation of the soul to the world of the eye.’’ Anadmirable sentence—perhaps a dangerous sentence. Doesn’t it closeall doors? Doesn’t it enclose the history of art within the most alien-