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

242 Appendix: Detail and Panto function here as absolute model and origin: the primacy of thesignified gives way, henceforth, to primacy of the referent.That seventeenth-century Dutch painting had an epistemic aim,that it participated in structures of knowledge, is no longer debatable;and it is no longer debatable because of the existence of Alpers’s book,which reveals to us in this sense an important part of what might becalled the ‘‘final cause’’ of an artistic period. But the aim does not sayall there is to say about either ‘‘vision’’ or the view, much less aboutpainting. The methodological flaw consists in having folded, immediately,the idea of final cause into formal cause, on the one hand(the eidos of Dutch seventeenth-century painting is the episteme ofthe seventeenth-century; pictorial cutting-up is the scientific dismembermentof the visible world, its exhaustive description); and intomaterial cause on the other hand. As if paint, an opaque material,‘‘rendered’’ the visible with as much transparency as a well-polishedlens. As if painting were a technique of exactitude—which it has neverbeen, in the epistemological sense of the term: painting is rigorous oraccurate, it is never exact.Basically, Alpers’s argument comes down, even in the book’s title,to prejudging painting in these terms: painting equals depicting. Hencethe extremely high value ascribed to what Alpers calls ‘‘descriptivesurfaces.’’ 26 As if the visible world were a surface. As if paint had nothickness. As if a flow of a pigment had the legitimacy of a topographicalprojection—and such is the hidden ideal underlying the notion oftechnical skill: that the hand itself could be transformed into a ‘‘faithfuleye,’’ in other words, an organ without subject. As if the onlythinkable thickness was the absolutely diaphanous one of the lens ina pair of glasses, or of an ideal retina.But above all, Alpers’s argument foregrounds two instruments ofvisibility whose historical role—whose seventeenth-century usage—isreinforced by a paradigmatic value wherein is stated a meaning, aglobal interpretation of Dutch painting: one of these instruments isthe camera obscura, the other the geographical map. The one, theoreticallyinformed by the contemporary prestige of photography,seems to guarantee the exactitude, or better, the authenticity of thereferent projected onto the picture. 27 The other seems to guarantee