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

134 Confronting Imagesdown to nothing other than the unity of all the manifold ofintuition in inner sense, and thus indirectly to the unity ofapperception, as the function that corresponds to inner sense(to a receptivity). Thus the schemata of the concepts of pureunderstanding are the true and sole conditions for providingthem with a relation to objects, and thus with significance,and hence the categories are in the end of none but a possibleempirical use, since they merely serve to subject appearancesto general rules of synthesis through grounds of an a priorinecessary unity . . . and thereby to make them fit for thoroughgoingconnection in one experience. 141One sees instantly what such a tool of thought might offer Panofsky’s‘‘science of art.’’ It is through the magic of the schematism thatthe hat could be lowered over artistic images and, upon being liftedagain, reveal a unitary and synthetic concept. The notion of ‘‘symbolicform’’ plays entirely on the theoretical possibility of this procedure.Perhaps in the beginning it was but a ‘‘poor substitute’’ for the Kantianschema itself. 142 Perhaps it deliberately ignored Kant’s oppositionof schema and symbol. 143 Perhaps it ended by ossifying, within thefield of the history of art, Kant’s ideas of relation and function. 144Perhaps it even forgot Kant’s postulate that the understanding legislatesonly the form of phenomena, nothing more—and the slippageeffected here should be clear, for in the history of art, observed phenomenaare themselves defined (and considered legitimate solely) asforms. Perhaps, finally, it wanted to make Kant’s truth into a truth ofdecision, certainty, and adequacy—something that it most definitely isnot, if read for itself. 145 But the important thing for us is not the accuracyor inaccuracy with which Kant was applied; it is, as has alreadybeen said, the elevation of the tone adopted since then by the historyof art, a tone sometimes rigorous but destined as well to promoteitself as a priori certainty. The important thing is the fact that one dayan art historian could invoke the authority of Kant’s schematism tojustify a whole argument about art and style understood as ‘‘stereotypes,’’phenomena of a ‘‘vocabulary’’ or of ‘‘formulas or schemata’’