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

100 Confronting Imagessentational elements into symbols of something that isrepresented; and by doing so, regardless of how it proceeds,it rises from the purely formal sphere to a realm of meaning[jede Deskription wird . . . die rein formalen Darstellungsfaktorenbereits zu Symbolen von etwas Dargestelltem umgedeutet habenmüssen; und damits wächst sie—gewissermassen noch ehe sie ünerhauptanfängt—aus einer rein formalen Sphäre schon in ein Sinnregionhinauf]. 40This inelegant passage contains critical observations of great significancewhose essentials are strangely elided in the revised ‘‘American’’text published in Studies in Iconology—perhaps because theseessentials were a bit too burdensome, a bit too effective at preventinghistorical knowledge from turning in circles, by which I mean fromdroning on about itself. Note first that the inferential model, operativeand even ‘‘engaging’’ in the American version, is here severely limited,even short-circuited in advance. No, there is no simple, ‘‘formal’’ origin—puresensible forms, results of the relation of the eye to theworld—from which issue little by little, or even automatically, aworld of meaning and representation organized in quite distinct levels.There is only representation. There is no origin save in the possibilityof an already-representation: thus, ‘‘even before it is begun,’’writes Panofsky, every description will already have overthrown perception—which,strictly speaking, does not exist ‘‘in a state of nature’’—willalready have flowed into a system of signification. Whichis to say, too, that we do not cross some supposed threshold or limitseparating reality from symbol. The symbolic precedes and inventsreality, much as the Nachträglichkeit precedes and invents its ‘‘origin.’’Remarking, on the other hand, the widespread, automatic tendencyto construe paintings in terms of the relation of ‘‘something that representsto something that is represented,’’ Panofsky put his finger onthe question of the pictorial signifier (but the expression is doubtlessill chosen, in need of clarification), of the ‘‘plurivocal given’’ that,paradoxically, occasions the formulation of an univocal ‘‘presentationcontent,’’otherwise known as a representational signified. In any case,what becomes clear—but is obscured in the American version—is that