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232 Appendix: Detail and Panits thickness—to be found: this will be the ‘‘solution’’ of the painting,its ‘‘motive’’ and its ‘‘confession.’’ It will most often be an emblem, aportrait, or something garnered from history; in short, it is a symbol,or perhaps a referent that prompts a historian to ‘‘make the paintingconfess.’’ 4 It is to act as if the work of painting had committed a crime,and one crime only (whereas a work of painting, good as gold, doesn’tcommit any, or cunning as all aspectual black magic, can commit ahundred).Furthermore, while Freud understood details to be observationaldiscards,* the ideal describer conceives of the detail as resulting froma simple acuity of observation. An acuity supposed to make possible,as if inductively, the very discovery of the treasure, the treasure ofmeaning. But what is meant, in the end, by ‘‘acuity of observation’’?If we turn to the conceptual field that provided the model for suchan acuity, we discover that the problem is much less simple than itseems.The conceptual field in question is the one known precisely as theobservational sciences. Bachelard discussed the status of the detail ina famous thesis published in 1927. 5 He showed that the epistemologicalstatus of the detail—even in the physical sciences, the sciences ofmeasurement—is that of a division, a disjunction of the subject ofscience, of an ‘‘intimate conflict that it can never wholly pacify.’’ 6 It isa conflict—let’s say as a first approximation—between the minutia ofthe descriptive detail and the clarity of the interpretive set-up.The first reason comes down to the phenomenological status ofthe object of knowledge itself: ‘‘Nothing is harder to analyze,’’ writesBachelard, ‘‘than a phenomenon that can be known in two differentorders of magnitude.’’ 7 When the object of knowledge suddenly getsclose, for example, a threshold is crossed, abruptly, and one must shiftto another order of thought that has to be implemented if one doesn’twant all thought to be rent or to collapse. Getting back to painting: itis in accordance with not two but multiple orders of magnitude thatit lets us apprehend it. A commonplace in the Kunstliteratur is based*rebuts.