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

168 Confronting Imageslifting his hat, Panofsky ultimately proposed, in his two great methodologicaltexts of 1939 and 1940, the synthetic idea of a symptom conceivedas ‘‘intrinsic meaning or content’’ situated, of course, ‘‘abovethe sphere of conscious volition,’’ but in a beyond that he called ‘‘thebasic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophicalpersuasion—all this unconsciously qualified by one personality, andcondensed into one work.’’ 67If we must at all costs look for an ‘‘unconscious’’ in Panofsky’sproblematic, then we will find something like a reality on a higherlevel, the result of a hierarchy expressed either in terms of ‘‘base’’ and‘‘foundation,’’ or in terms of ‘‘above’’ and ‘‘generality.’’ It is this thatPierre Bourdieu has called an ‘‘objective intention,’’ a ‘‘system ofschemes of thought,’’ a ‘‘shared unconscious’’—in short, somethingthat might be likened to the ‘‘primitive forms of classification’’ previouslydefined by Mauss and Durkheim ...and that would have theadvantage, he says, of making us ‘‘enter into the game of structuralinterpretation’’ of a given culture. 68 Is this a Freudian unconscious? Ofcourse not. It’s a question rather of a transcendental unconscious,something like a metamorphosis of the Kunstwollen expressed in termof the philosophy of knowledge. So Panofsky’s ‘‘unconscious,’’ too,expresses itself in neo-Kantian terms: it is invoked only to define theair of a ‘‘knowledge of the essential,’’ a meta-individual and metaphysicalknowledge. It is opposed to the obscure unconscious of the Romanticsonly by way of requiring the overconsciousness of theiconologist, his brand of the historian’s pure reason. Thus consciousnessis not incongruous in him; quite the contrary, since its absoluteexercise is what makes his knowledge possible. So there is no suchthing as a Panofskian unconscious. 69There is no unconscious in Panofsky—only a symbolic function thatgoes beyond the specific intentions of each fabricator of symbols: ameta-individual and ‘‘objective’’ function. A function that, to quotePierre Bourdieu again, certainly goes beyond intuitionism ‘‘in its hasteto reach a principle unifying different aspects of the social whole,’’and beyond positivism insofar as the latter limits itself to the ‘‘facevalue of phenomena.’’ 70 But it is a function that, as I have alreadysuggested, would have been conceived to function without remainder. It