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

The Detail and the Pan 243us that every discrepancy between the ‘‘surface of the world’’ andthe ‘‘surface of representation’’ is the fruit of a transformation that iscontrolled, and thus epistemologically legitimate: hence exact, henceauthentic. 28In this sense, Alpers will say that Vermeer’s View of Delft is ‘‘like amap,’’ that the painting takes as its paradigm the non-pictorial genreof urban topographical views; and that in the last analysis, the thingsin the painting are exactly the same things that were in the minds ofseventeenth-century geographers. 29 The poet and art enthusiast willof course object to this epistemocentric view, arguing from ‘‘paintingper se’’ or from the famous ‘‘vibrant colors’’ specific to Vermeer’spainting. But from the outset Alpers counters this with two arguments,by their nature heterogeneous. As regards color, she offersanother epistemological argument: geographical maps of the seventeenthcentury are colored, and painters—métier oblige—were evenhired to color them; and moreover, the maps represented in Vermeer’spaintings—cartes oblige or peinture oblige?—are themselves ‘‘colored.’’30 The indubitably pictorial conception of seventeenth-centurymaps would thus suggest the exact opposite of a ‘‘geographic’’ concept—andthus, colored or not, a graphic concept—of painting. Asregards vibrancy in the present, which is to say the formidable supplementwhereby we conceive of Vermeer not as a cartographer pureand simple but as an incomparable genius of painting, Alpers oddlygoes on to adduce an argument that, this time, pertains to what wemight call an ordinary, even trivial, metaphysics: everything that is‘‘common’’ to both the View of Delft and the ‘‘the mapping enterprise,’’namely its sense of community and social banality, is endowedwith ‘‘an uncommonly seen and felt presence’’; for all of this ‘‘suggeststhe intimacy of human habitation’’ in general, to the extent that in theView of Delft, Alpers finally writes, ‘‘mapping itself becomes a mode ofpraise’’: a paean, a celebration of the World. 31So the supposed equivalence of painting and depicting has herebrought together two contrasting arguments: a epistemocentric argument,which postulates painting as a graphic description of the world,the View of Delft being understood here as a map, an observation, adetail of the town of Delft; and a metaphysical argument, which pos-