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

96 Confronting Imagesated, the most ‘‘psychological’’ specularity there is? Not at all, answersPanofsky, whose distrust of psychologism, a visceral distrust, becomesmore emphatic and more precise on every page. Thus when he expandsupon his ‘‘methodological scrutiny’’ and ‘‘critical philosophicalspirit,’’ as he puts it, in an analysis of a celebrated concept advancedby Aloïs Riegl, the Kunstwollen—sometimes translated as ‘‘artistic volition,’’sometimes as ‘‘will-to-form’’—Panofsky affirms the fundamentalworth of this concept only by striking down, one by one, each of itspossible psychological meanings. Is the Kunstwollen a product of theartist’s psychological agency? No, thrice no, answers Panofsky, unlesswe renounce the very objective (objectiv) content at stake in the concept.Does it pertain to a ‘‘period psychology’’? No again, for we deceiveourselves when we find a ‘‘criterion for judging’’ artisticintentions ‘‘objectively’’ in the way ‘‘that contemporaries understoodthese intentions’’—an objection that anticipates the excesses and theoreticalinnocence of all reception theory. Can our own, present-dayapperception provide the criterion we seek? Less still, answers Panofskyin two pages castigating what he calls ‘‘the modern aesthetic,’’ inwhich he finds only ‘‘an amalgamation of a psychologising aestheticand a normative aesthetic,’’ in other words an academic one. 29In fact, the critical movement would deepen and become moreprecise until someone put a finger on the more elementary problemof our attitude as knowing subjects in the face of art objects, andmore generally in the face of events in the visible world. How does‘‘the relation of the soul to the world of the eye’’ express what becomesfor each of us ‘‘the relation of the eye to the world’’? This isthe basic question. It takes things in their nascent state, it alreadyinterrogates the phenomenology of perception from the followingangle: how does the perceived visible acquire meaning for us? It alsobroaches things on the level of an elementary semiology of the visible.Panofsky discusses this approach to the problem in two slightly differenttexts, the first written in German and published in 1932 in theperiodical Logos, 30 the second written in English as an introduction tohis famous Studies in Iconology, published in 1939, and subsequentlyrevised twice, in 1955 and 1962. 31 It is, of course, the second, ‘‘American’’version that art historians generally have in mind when they