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Eight Theses For (or Against?

) A Semiology of Painting

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Hubert Damisch

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1. This text is the General Report presented by Damisch to the First Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies at Milan, June 2 6, 1974. It originally appeared as ` ses pour (ou contre?) une se miologie Huit the de la peinture in Macula, no. 2 (1977), pp. 17 23. We thank Hubert Damisch and Yve-Alain Bois for permission to publish this version. 2. Paul Cezanne, letter to Emile Bernard (October 23, 1905), in Letters, ed. J. Rewald (Cassirer: London, 1941), p. 252. 3. Jurij Lotman, Introduction in The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. R. Vroon, Michigan Slavic Contributions, no. 7 (University of Michigan: Ann Arbor, 1977).

Eight Theses For (or Against?) A Semiology of Painting1


Hubert Damisch

1 Is there a truth of painting or, according to Cezannes words, his deliberately ambiguous statement (I owe you the truth in painting and I shall tell it to you2), is there a truth in painting? And this truth, a truth of painting, a truth in painting, is it the privilege of the semiologist, if not to tell it (perhaps this truth can only be told in painting? ), at least to inscribe it in the theoretical register, to designate its locus of emergence, to dene its conditions of enunciation by reference to the object Painting such as the semiologist works for his part and according to his means to constitute this object as a domain, eld, or specic mode of production of a meaning, itself specic? Besides the fact that this question does not allow itself to be dissociated from a more fundamental interrogation bearing on the necessity of art (a necessity that Jurij Lotman has been able to demonstrate to be linked to the structure of the artistic text itself, to its internal organisation3), the question is not an improper one, since what is at issue is to introduce some remarks of a very general order on a semiology of painting considered as a possibility since a good share of the work, reection, analysis, and semiological criticism applied to the visual arts appears, on the contrary, to lead to prohibit the question from being advanced: unless, in the best of cases, it is for the semiologist to conduct back to its deep ideological determinations the exigency of truth that reveals itself, intermittently, in the pictorial eld, in various species and on various levels (and, for example, in the sort of adherence to the optical model of vision among the initiators of the Renaissance; but also, on another level, that of coloured and colouring, signied and signifying sensation, through the assignation to painting, by Cezanne himself, of a value of denotation in Freges sense). It is important to see (to see and not only to understand [entendre ]) that this question of the truth of painting, of the truth in painting (which is altogether a question of the truth within painting and a question of the truth of the efgy, of the truth in efgy) is at the centre of the debate, which today is occasioned by the project, if not by the very rare developments of a semiology of the visual arts, and rst of all but this order of priority, in its double logical and ideological determination, itself poses a problem of a semiology of painting, and how this question confers on this debate a scope that largely exceeds the limits of the specialized eld under whose rubric it is announced. 2 The project of studying painting as a system of signs will rst have corresponded to the concern of attaining, by the simultaneous denition of the object of a semiology of painting and of the procedures of analysis that would constitute it as such, a truth of a scientic order concerning the pictorial production. In a Saussurean perspective, and being modelled on the linguistic master pattern, in its initial formulation this project leads one to introduce a rst division (decoupe ) in the heterogeneous whole of facts about painting (heterogeneous in that these facts belong to the most
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diverse domains of inquiry: cosmetology, the chemistry of colour, geometric and/or physiological optics, the theory of proportion, psychology of perception, but also comparative mythology, general symbolics, particular iconographies, etc.) by way of which this heteroclite whole would let itself be thought in its coherence: already like the language, once the partition effected between the mass of facts of speech and the register of language, of the system to which these facts should be related as to their norm. Whatever the form assumed by the opposition thus marked out between the two registers, and however sophisticated its statement may be art being thought under the heading of a consequent deviation in relation to the norm, taken as a semiotic category (Boris Uspenskij), the language of painting fragmented, disseminated into a multiplicity of partial systems, of codes of invention and of reading (Pierre Francastel), the system of the tableau distinguished from the structures of guration and the object Painting aimed at across and by way of the text that takes charge of it and that articulates it (Jean-Louis Schefer) it will always be a matter of sketching a surface of cleavage between the performance that a work represents (the masterwork), and the network, if not the system of competences that are put into play by the deciphering of the work, its interpretation, and all that even though one posits that art is never given apart from individual works, that its signiance4 does not refer to any recognised code or convention, and that the signifying relations of artistic language are to be discovered at the interior of a given composition (Benveniste, and in the same sense, Schefer: There is only a system of the tableau). The question remains entirely one of the nature, the status, and the articulation of the signs by which the reading is informed and oriented, which the reading attempts or not to constitute, in the declarative order, into a system. In the statement of this project to study painting, the works of painting (according to the formula, itself also deliberately ambiguous, of Francastel) as a system of signs system and signs will successively be underlined, in order to bring out (a) that if painting lets itself be analysed in terms of system(s), system is not necessarily to be understood as system of signs, and (b) that if the problematic of the sign can be revealed as pertinent in the matter, at its level and within its proper limits, this is perhaps to the extent that the notion of sign lets itself be disjoined from that of system (and reciprocally). Unless it is perhaps for us to work to impose another notion of sign, another notion of system than those that all the Western tradition will have regularly associated with the possibility of cutting a whole, an articulated structure, into discrete elements, into units identiable as such. 3 In a register that this time has nothing theoretical about it, but that all the same corresponds in fact to the practice of the historian or of the connoisseur, it will be admitted that it is not from a reading, nor even from a rst apprehension of a tableau, of a fresco, of a decorative ensemble, and so on, which is not based on a certain number of traits, marks, or discrete elements, which would present themselves as so many perceptual (or imaginative) units possibly combined in syntagms immediately given as such, and certain of which, by their recurrence across a given series of works, arrange themselves into a manner of a more or less completed repertoire, which will be taken as characteristic of an artist, a school, an epoch, or even a culture. All traits or elements, even syntagms, which certainly are not of the same order or from the same level, no more than they are nite in number: such as the gures,
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4. Signiance: a term proposed by Julia Kristeva to designate the ux of meaning across a textual surface, its freeplay of signiers, which is to be distinguished from communication- and denotation-bound signication. See the rst and nal essays in Kristevas Semiotike: Recherches pour unc semanalyse (Seuil: Paris, 1969), and note 25 below (Trans. note).

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Eight Theses

5. Cf. Hubert Damisch, La partie et le tout, tique, 1970, no. 2, pp. 16888, Revue desthe tation, Tel Quel, and Le gardien de linterpre no. 44, Winter, 1971, pp. 70 84, and no. 45, Spring, 1971, pp. 8996. 6. Meyer Schapiro, Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (Mouton; The Hague, 1973). miologie de la langue, 7. Emile Benveniste, Se in Proble`mes de linguistique generale, vol. II (Gallimard: Paris, 1974), p. 63. miologie de la langue (1974) 8. Benveniste, Se p. 57. miologie de la langue (1974) 9. Benveniste, Se 61 2.

representational or not, which let themselves be read in the pictorial eld, the motifs, attributes, or marks (attitudes, gestures, expressions, even the colours, treatment, and so on) that nourish iconographic discourse, but also the indices that call to the attention of the connoisseur searching for authenticated attributions (and one remembers here the analogy marked by Freud between the method of connoisseurship such as Giovanni Morelli had dened it and the method of the analyst who, like the connoisseur, is reduced to working on apparently derisory, marginal data, something like the rubbish of observation, Freud said,5 even as far as the tracings, touches, imprints that retain, in the capacity of an index, something of the work out of which the artwork is produced). Without counting the letters, ciphers, inscriptions, frontlets, captions, legends, titles, signatures, and so on, that the work exhibits, if that be the case, within its limits proper or on its periphery, and which produce, in the very context of an apprehension that would wish to be strictly sensible, esthetic, a specic effect of reading, or to paraphrase Paul Klee a rst acquiescence to the sign: the coexistence in the frame of a single composition, or in its immediate proximity, of elements of an iconic or indexical nature, and of properly symbolic givens (when the image does not present itself as explicitly linked to the text, given or not in presentia, which it illustrates on this subject, see the recent work of Meyer Schapiro on the word-bound image 6) makes sufciently manifest that if it can be claimed along with Benveniste that it is language natural language being understood which confers the quality of a signifying system on the ensemble painting (or tableau) by informing it with the relationship of a sign,7 this relation all the same is at play, prior to any reading, to any interpretation, within this ensemble, or at least inside its space of denition. It remains to be seen if the properly perceptual units, forms and/or gures can with all rigour be qualied as units, in the semiotic sense, outside or setting apart consideration of the operation that declares them, or again, in Peirces terms, if the representamen has or not the quality of a sign independently from the verbal interpretant that it determines. 4 Every signifying system must be dened by its own mode of signifying. It remains that, in positing, as Benveniste does, that it is necessary consequently for this system to dene the units which it puts into play to produce meaning and to specify the nature of the meaning produced,8 one is anticipating the conclusion by which language must be recognised as the interpretant of all semiotic systems (and, consequently, of the Painting system itself, which will from then on be characterised, in the terminology of the Soviet semioticians, as a secondary modeling system), if indeed it is true that no other system disposes of a language in which it can categorise and interpret itself according to semiotic distinctions, whereas in principle language can categorise and interpret everything, including itself.9 Concerning the units put in play in order to produce meaning, the Painting system doubtless does not dispose of a language that would permit it to dene these units to which it has recourse. Yet it can produce these units, designate them, display them, exhibit them by all the artices and devices that characterise the system such as spacing, positioning, framing, lighting, treatment, deformation, and so on. All artices that do not borrow from the discursive order, nor even necessarily from the iconic order in a narrow sense, insofar as the latter would be founded on mimesis. And this is not even in the form of the presentation, in the imaginative form itself (without necessarily
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taking the term image in its strictly mimetic connotation), insofar as it would be governed by, for example, the perspective model or insofar as it would amount, as with Mondrian or in minimal art, to a nite ensemble of principles or basic elements, of which it would not be unfounded to remember, with Wittgenstein, that it can be, if not reproduced, described, represented, at least produced, displayed, exhibited, by the means that are those of the image itself.10 In order to conne oneself to the question of units (the question of the Form der Abbildung [pictorial form] calling for developments that cannot nd their place here), one will again notice that, once a painting is given over to deciphering by way of a multiplicity of codes, once it includes several levels of reading, the very possibility that it offers of slidings and also of references from one code or from one level to another, the capacity arising from this for a given unit to assume heterogeneous, if not contradictory functions according to these levels, introduce into the system ( for the moment, in the vaguest sense) the possibility of a freeplay of interpretance that is, if not declarative, at least monstrative (in the sense in which Lacan was able to say that, in the dream, id/it shows [ c a montre ]), from one level or from one code to another, as one sees by the variations to which a single formal or iconographic motif lends itself and which lead one to assign alternately, even simultaneously, to a single element (e.g., the cloud in the gurative tradition of the West,11 the column of so many Annunciations or Nativities, but also Cezannes still lifes, Mondrians squares) functions (plastic, constructive, semantic, syntactic, symbolic, decorative, stylistic, and so on) from a different level (the problem then being of knowing if one is justied in claiming to produce the system of these assignations, and for all that, without prejudging the coherence of the levels, their degree of systematicity). Still, it is appropriate to make a place for them, along with Meyer Schapiro, beside units immediately identiable as such, in the elements of the iconic message that are non-mimetic, not directly descriptive, and one could say, non-discrete, all elements the form of support, its frame, the properties of the ground as a eld, the relations of scale and of orientation, of positioning, of spacing, the components of the iconic substance as such, points, lines, surfaces, blots, and so on,12 and rst of all, the colour that, to follow Benveniste but this underhanded assertion, which bears the mark of a logocentrism, ceases to be admissible as a thought that is working to impose an other than a strictly linguistic notion of the sign the colour that, considered in itself, would not in any case let itself be declared in the capacity of a sign, nor even of a unit. All elements that in representational painting play a decisive role, an integrative role (in the linguistic sense of the term), but which modern painting, since Cezanne and Seurat, strives on the contrary to dissociate from their imaginative function, in order to exhibit them, produce them in their value of expression, of proper, autonomous signiance, to the point that the non-guration, far from appearing as a particular case, as a limited moment in the history of painting, and that would only let itself be thought by way of the representational structure such as the latter was constituted from the position assigned to the subject in the perspective apparatus, on the contrary leads, if one takes it seriously as it must be, to submit the Painting system, by the baring of the device (as the Formalists said) and by the substitution for the aim of Nature that of pictorial expression itself, to a radical displacement in the order of signiance, even as far as removing it, at least in part, from the
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10. Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, trans. D. Pears and B. McGuinness (Humanities: New York, 1961), section 4.121 ff. 11. The reader is referred to Damischs Theorie du nuage (Seuil: Paris, 1972) (Trans. note). 12. Meyer Schapiro, Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs, Semiotica, Vol. 1, no. 3, 1969, pp. 22342.

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Eight Theses

relationship of interpretance in which semiological discourse this being perhaps one of its major ideological functions claims on the contrary to enclose it. 5 To the question of whether the painting system lets itself be reduced to units, one will thus reply in the negative. It remains to be determined if the units that this system nevertheless does, quite obviously, put into play, and that perhaps represent its springing, or its headroom (as one sees when a perspective organisation gives itself to be read by way of some index or gurative exion: an architectonic fragment presented in foreshortened form, the diminution to which the gures are submitted, and so on), if these units are signs, if the very notion of the sign, in its traditional acceptation, is pertinent in the context of a system that does not allow itself except for always signicant, if not polemical, tactical, indeed strategic exceptions, and of which modern art is not alone in setting forth examples to be brought back to a digital code, all the more since it dictates that room be made, next to elements that can be immediately marked out on the perceptual plane, for gurative procedures themselves irreducible to a corpus of rules that would supposedly preside over the association and combination of units in nite number and from the same level. If the notion of sign can prove to be acceptable in the domain Painting, this will be by way of another division than the one referred to up to now. For the strictly Saussurean master pattern, which imposes a distinction between the order of the system (competence) and that of concrete productions (performance), will be substituted an articulation that will borrow its pertinence from a distinction between the levels of analysis (the question then perhaps becoming that of the relation between two performances, that of the work and that of interpretation, such as this relation is inscribed in a common, but not identical space of competence). Provisionally ignoring the problem of properly gurative or plastic articulation, it will be posited that if the concept of sign can take operative value in the domain Painting, this is rst of all (and perhaps exclusively) by reference to a level, to a mode of signiance which is not one a semiotic one in which perceptual units, forms and/or gures, are recognised as such (and this even if this recognition passes by the detour of a declaration, of an explicit interpretant), but to one a semantic one in which the image, appealing to its own reading, from it comes to assume properly discursive status, once, to speak as did the iconologists of the classic age, it is made to signify a thing different from the one the eye sees. The theory of levels developed by Panofsky, at the same time that it reiterates the break marked by Cesare Ripa in his time between the order of the visible and that of the readable, leads seemingly to the opposition to the universe of motifs (of the objects or the events gures by the lines, colours, and volumes) that of the universe of images, of the motifs recognised as bearers of a secondary or conventional signication as distant as one will want from their primary, natural signication, and that lend themselves to combination in the mode of history, fable, or allegory, at the same time as to all sorts of gurative redoublings (the image of Isaac being in its turn taken for the gure of Christ, which it pre-gures, and so on): take as an example the universe of a discourse, of which the image, in the sense mentioned, constitutes the minimal unit, once it is declaratively articulated in the mode of a statement (a female character holding a peach in her right hand to be read, according to the example Panofsky notes, as a personication of
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Veracity). A unit, in the semantic register in which iconology operates, which seems to have to be accepted in the capacity of a sign once it is found to be associating a signier (the motif given over to be seen) and a signied (the concept or statement given over to be understood ), and once it lets itself be identied, in the capacity of a component and possibly of an intregrative element (in the sense in which Meyer Schapiro could show, in a celebrated study, that the image of Saint Joseph fashioning a mousetrap integrated the Annunciation of the Master of Flemalle, in its difference from traditional representations of this event13) in a unit of a higher level, the one constituted by the tableau. A unit, a minimal sign of a discourse of images (ragionamenti dimagini, again as the iconologists said) by which painting is put in the position of representing, of staging, of signifying by strictly representational means a quantity of notions, of relations, if not of abstract propositions. And if Panofskys works on symbolism in Flemish painting do re-intersect in a striking way with Freuds analyses of the dream-work (which themselves refer, in the most explicit way, to the work of painting), the encounter has nothing fortuitous about it: it sufces to agree that Van Eycks symbolics, as that of the dream according to Benveniste,14 depends on a true logic of discourse, and that its gures are rst of all gures of style, gures of rhetoric, tropes. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud himself had proposed a description of Raphaels The School of Athens that moves in this direction: the fact of assembling philosophers belonging to different periods, and to different, if not as well antagonistic cultures within one scenic space set up as unitary appears to be a means, for the painter, of imposing onto the strictly gurative mode of a monstration, a notion of philosophy as a transhistoric kingdom and as a society of minds in which Plato, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and perhaps Averroe s himself would nd themselves in a dialogue beyond the contingencies of space and time, of language and beliefs.15 Now the devices used by Van Eyck or by Roger van den Weyden are of exactly the same nature, such as the device, to keep only one among all those that Panofsky enumerates, by which, within the unity of a single decor or architectural frame, for example that of a church, inside which or in front of which the scene is set, the painter associates two styles marked as such, the Romanesque style and the Gothic style, in order to represent the sequence of periods of time, the opposition of before and after, even the wholly conceptual opposition of the Old and New Law.16 6 If one must admit, still following Benveniste, that the Painting system is characterised by the fact that, in distinction to language, it only presents a unidimensional signiance (semantic signiance, corresponding to the universe of discourse, to the exclusion of any properly semiotic signiance), it would then be necessary to recognise that a good part of the programme of a semiology of painting would already by now have been realised under the title of Iconology, even of Iconology understood, according to Panofskys expression, as a Science of Interpretation.17 But if Iconology can claim to recuperate the so-called stylistic traits of the work, even its quality, no longer as a species of signs, but of symptoms of a vision of the world or of a class consciousness, it nonetheless remains incapable, and any strictly interpretative discipline along with it, of rendering account of painting considered in its sensible substance, in its properly aesthetic articulation, in the Kantian sense of the term. Now here there is a question that the semiologist cannot ignore, which he even sometimes asks, which is that of knowing if the work of art reduces itself
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13. Schapiro, Muscipula Diaboli: The Symbolism of the Merode Altarpiece, Art Bulletin, Vol. 27, 1945, pp. 1827. 14. Benveniste, Remarks on the Function of Language in Freudian Theory, in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. M. Meek (University of Miami Press: Coral Gables, 1971), pp. 65 75. 15. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition, vol. IV (Hogarth: London, 1953), p. 314. 16. Cf. Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (Harvard University Press: Cambridge). 17. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (Harper & Row: New York, 1962).

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18. Roland Barthes, The Photographic Message, in Image-Music-Text, ed. S. Heath (Hill and Wang: New York, 1977), pp. 15 31. 19. Freuds expression is Triebschicksale, which has been translated into French as les destins des pulsions (the destinies of pulsions), and into English as the vicissitudes or instincts (Trans. note). 20. Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text (1977), pp. 19, 21. 21. Freud, letter to Ernest Jones (February 8, 1914), cited in Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, vol. 111 (Hogarth: London, 1957), p. 441. 22. For an example of this epistemological tactic, see Umberto Eco, La struttura assente (Bompiani: Milan, 1968).

or not to a system of signication.18 A decisive question in comparison with the interrogation from which these Theses have taken their departure, and which bears on the truth of painting, on the truth in painting, and on the status (ideological, critical, theoretical) of the semiological discourse in its relationship to this truth. As a question of the meaning that painting would be producing, it is certain that specication of the meaning cannot be the privilege of painting itself, but of language, which alone is able to interpret everything. But do not the work, the work of art, the work of painting have another destiny (in the sense that Freud speaks of a destiny of pulsions19) than interpretation, another forseeable avatar to take up again a word of Lotmans that opens up a very new perspective,20 than semantization? It does not seem that this was the opinion of Freud himself, at least for what concerns the work in its relation to its producer: Meaning is but little to these men [artists]; all they care for is line, shape, agreement of contours. They are given up to the pleasure principle.21 Is this to say that the universe of lines, that of forms, that of contour to the exclusion, how signicant, of colour does not directly depend on an analysis in terms of signication, but on a formal, if not stylistic approach, the question remaining furthermore entirely of knowing how the form, thus distinguished from the content, will manage to be articulated into an economy, even the one of pleasure? 7 The problem comes back to that of the existence or of the non-existence of a semiotic level in painting. Now the question is generally badly posed, once it comes to re-intersect the question of style (a notion whose unfortunate role in the study of art it would be necessary to demonstrate, and how the advancing of this notion aims at forestalling the very positing of the problem that concerns us, to interdict its statement), above all once this question is found to be interfering with that of the image, once it is posed as a question of the nature, semiotic or non-semiotic, of the image. It has been seen that for Panofsky the image was dependent on the symbolic level. But the fact is that, for the Iconologist, there is only an image starting from the moment when a conventional signication is superposed to the natural signication, given in the register of perception. If the image is retained no longer for what it signies, but for what it offers to be seen (donne a` voir) (and without prejudging about the nature of the articulation of the readable on the visible), it will be a question of determining if the image, forming an image (the imaginative synthesis of the phenomenologists) lets itself be thought and analysed in terms of signifying articulation. Hence, independently of the logical determination that will lead the construction of the image to be thought, by priority, under the rubric of space a notion, in the matter of painting, of the most equivocal, of the least theoretical sort there is the reference customary from then on to the attempts made to study the imaginative process (and the perceptual process itself) under the heading of a process of communication, and in terms of Information Theory, all attempts that correspond to a return to a pre-phenomenological position of the problem, since they return to establishing the image, taken as an analogon of the real, in a relationship of denotation in relation to the perceived or, what amounts to the same thing, in a relationship of reproduction and/or of equivalence in relation to perception. How would the image not have the status of a messa` ge when perception is itself assimilated to an operation or deciphering, of recognition, when both are referred to their common conventional roots?22 Furthermore, it would be appropriate, prior to any
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discussion on this point, to question oneself from the rst about the determination (theoretical, ideological, linguistic) that leads to painting being thought under the title, under the rubric of the image (and reciprocally). Painting would be an image, but an image of a particular, if not specic type: an image that would be characterised by a surplus of substance, from which would come its weight, its charge, its title of painting, and which would produce, under that title, an effect of pleasure specic to it. It will nonetheless have to be referred to, be posed as a variety of image among others, a privileged, if not dominant, variety, in a culture where the term painting itself (one thinks of the difculties that the translation of Wittgenstein poses in this regard) can be taken for a synonym of image, representation, portrait, even of reproduction or imitation (by which, through the theme of mimesis, the question of the truth of the efgy, of the truth in efgy is introduced). As for the program of a general semiology, the semiology of painting would nonetheless be inscribed in it at its place, under the rubric of a semiology of the image, and as a particular branch of the latter. 8 Parodying Merleau-Ponty, it will be said that in treating painting along with the perceived one can only miss the semiotic level in it and, therefore, miss painting itself, to the extent that a truth is working to reveal itself there, which is not immediately dependant on the order of discourse, but which has relation, in the highest degree, to perception. Since there is indeed something like a semiotic level of painting, but one that does not let itself be led back to the agency of the sign, no more than to that of the image, the notion of which is functioning here, by all appearance, as a veritable epistemological obstacle: the level, for example, on which Cezanne was working when, still with an intention of denotation, he said he wished to substitute for the problem of light that of colour and representation, of sensations coloured by colouring sensations.23 This work, closest to perception, on the signier, this putting to work of the signier in painting of which Cezannes art, as well as the art of Seurat contemporary with it, offer the example, witnesses, with an eloquence only drawing its resources from painting, to the fact that the surface of the cleavage between the semantic and the semiotic is not to be sought between the level of the gure (given to be seen) and that of the signication (given to be understood), but somewhere on the joint of the readable and the visible, between the domain of the symbolic and that of the semiotic, on the condition of thinking of the semiotic, along with Julia Kristeva, as a modality (which one could in fact call psycho-somatic, with a direct hold on the body) of the process of signiance, and as a moment logically, genetically, productively anterior to the symbolic, but which in the latter is made the object of a raising 24 by which it is integrated there.25 A moment of an articulation that of a continuum prior to that of the linguistic sign and of the iconic sign itself (to the extent that the latter would only be constituted as such to determine an interpretant ). A pre-thetic moment, anterior to the position of the subject, in his reference to the experience of the specular image, and the best illustration for which is offered by the articulation of the chromatic eld, strictly contemporaneous with the articulation of the phonematic eld, as Jakobson has shown26: since the history of painting today gives us to see how the semiotic, precisely in the species of colour, can let itself be recuperated and function, in the capacity of a supplement, within the symbolic, but also how it can make a return, under the symbolic and
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23. Cezanne, letter to Emile Bernard (December 23, 1904), in Letters, p. 243. 24. Rele`ve: a term elaborated by Jacques Derrida as a translation for Hegels philosophical term Aufhebung (Trans. note). 25. Julia Kristeva, La revolution du langage poetique (Seuil: Paris, 1974), section A.I. miotique et symbolique. Se 26. Roman Jakobson, Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals (Mounton: The Hague, 1968), pp. 82 4.

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Eight Theses

27. Charles S. Peirce, Elements of Logic, II, Ch. 3, 2767 (c. 1902), in Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce, vol. I II (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1965), p. 157. 28. Peirce, Letters to Lady Welby (1904), in Collected Papers (1965), Vol. VIII, pp. 22030. 29. Peirce, Elements of Logic (1902), in Collected Papers (1965), Vol. I II, p. 158.

outside of it, in a position of exteriority in relation to the sign and to any signication constituted in the order of language as well as in the order of the image, of representation (except to nally take seriously what Peirce will have worked, towards the end of his life, to express under the title of the hypoicon, of the icon which no longer lets itself be thought under any title, and of a representativity prior to any relationship of interpretance,27 as well as the idea that, in fact to take the notion in the widest sense, a sign could admit of other interpretants than a concept: an action, an experience, indeed a sensible effect, a pure quality of feeling28). In this sense, one is justied to claim that semiology, in its order of linguistic dependence, is as belaboured (travaillee ) by the question of painting, as it is, moreover, by that of writing, as in the example of the two workers, the painter and the writer, which the Philebus already associated in a single task in double-entry fashion. But as for the economy of the signifying process of which painting is the theatre (and whose scene it denes and redenes ceaselessly), this economy is to be thought, up to its very limits and perhaps to its beyond, in the Freudian register and by way of the concept which continues, in the reading of Freud, to form the object of a veritable censorship, namely that of regression, in the way that The Interpretation of Dreams introduces it. The formal regression which is the principle of the dream-work at the same time that it forms the scope of jurisdiction of the dream-work, a work itself thought, in the Freudian text, in explicit reference to that of painting, and which only produces its effect, outside any relation of interpretation, in playing the divergence and the tension that it generates between the register of the visible (of what can be shown, gured, represented, staged) and that of the readable (the register of what can be said, stated, declared). A divergence which is that of a productive work of a surplus-value: an iconic surplus-value, from the moment, as Peirce indicates, and this must be emphasised, that the icon has as a distinctive fundamental property that through its direct observation other truths concerning the object can be discovered than those which sufce to determine its construction29; but also, in the case of painting, a specically pictorial surplus-value, which denes painting in its difference from the image and confers on it the privilege which has been spoken of. A divergence which will be marked either as the locus of an opposition (of a contradiction), or as that of an exchange, and doubtless as both at once, as is required by the taking into account of gurability which forms the condition of all regression. A divergence, furthermore, constitutive of pictorial textuality insofar as it is as if woven of the visible and the readable, and by way of which it is appropriate, in relation to the system Painting, to pose the question of the signier; the signier about which Freud teaches us, to read him well, that one cannot produce it, nor even recognize it, by way of a position of exteriority, especially since it only gives itself to be taken there. Translated by Larry Crawford

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