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

266 Appendix: Detail and Panstance’’—which is to say ‘‘inked or painted lines and spots’’ 66 —he issuggesting a change of gnosological perspective rather than an accidentor a material singularity exhibited by the work itself. 67 In short,he here takes up only the universality of parameters that vary withmodification of the perceptual point of view, with the degree ofviewer discrimination and sensitivity.Now the pan in painting does not designate the picture seen fromanother angle, from close up, for example; it really designates, assymptom, another state of painting within the representative system ofthe picture: a precarious, partial, accidental state, which is why I willagain speak of passage from one state to another. The pan is not aglobal parameter; it is a singularity that nonetheless has paradigmatic,even programmatic value. It is an accident; it surprises us through itsessential intrusive capacity; it insists in the picture; but it likewiseinsists about its being an accident that repeats itself, that passes frompainting to painting, that makes itself paradigmatic as trouble, assymptom: an insistence—a sovereignty—that itself bears meaning, orrather as if by chance makes surge forth surface radiances that are,here and there, like zones of outcropping—and thus faults—of a seam,of a deposit (a metaphor premised on the thickness, the material depthof paint).So the pan is to be defined as the part of painting that interruptsostensibly, from place to place, like a crisis or a symptom, the continuityof the picture’s representational system. It is the accidental andsovereign outcropping of a deposit, of a colored seam: it makes meaning,with violence and equivocation, as a wound on white skin givesmeaning—gives gushing-forth—to the blood that pulses below. It selfpresentsits material cause and its accidental cause, namely the verygesture, the touch, the intrusion of the paint. An event too singular topropose a stability of signification, the pictorial pan makes meaning asa symptom does, and symptoms never have a transparent infrastructure,which is why they extravagate on bodies, disappear here to resurfacethere, where one did not expect them, and constitute in thisrespect an enigma of place and of trajectory as much as an enigma ofmeaning. An accident or singularity in praesentia, the pan is, then, notonly the ‘‘appearance ‘of’ ’’ a dissimulated paradigm in absentia, but