1771503

University of Oregon
"Is That Helen?" Contemporary Pictorialism, Lessing, and Kant Author(s): Claudia Brodsky Lacour Reviewed work(s): Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. 230-257 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771503 . Accessed: 03/12/2012 23:32
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CLAUDIA BRODSKYLACOUR
That Helen?" Contemporary

"Is
Pictorialism, Lessing,
and
AS
Kant
MARSHALL with regard to BROWN has argued persuasively W61fflin's entangled "classic" and "baroque," it is difficult to maintain purely conceptual distinctions between different moments in the development of a single medium.' Such moments can be viewed externally as consecutive stages in the evolution of style, or, less abstractly, as instances in which the practitioners of a medium perceive their own practice as a critical problem. But whatever kind of historical action these moments appear to define and whatever character one gives to that action-the face of progress, decay, or sheer insistence-media, matter made into means, bear with them their own constraints and possibilities, the physical facts which make their temporal course of development appear part of their being. Im1Rather than simply conflating W61fflin's pivotal concepts, Brown's careful reading renders forceful tribute to the thoroughly diachronic and dynamic purport of his entire theoretical project, now too often dismissed as "mere" and outmoded formalism. Most strikingly, Brown's concluding comments on the temporal duality of all aesthetic forms find confirmation in the principles of literary history set forth in Stendhal's Racine et Shakespeare. Writing ostensibly in romanticism's defense, or from an historical viewpoint obverse to W61fflin's, Stendhal argues that the difference between romanticism and classicism is purely a matter of time, both at the general level of history ("Racine was romantic" in his day) and at the .level of the individual work (the fleeting moments of romantic "illusion" experienced during the act of aesthetic reception). Cf. Stendhal, especially 57-60, 71; and Brown 401: "History is always moving toward the baroque and away from the classic. This means that each age serves as the baroque to some earlier age and as the classic to some later one ... that history is recapitulated in each individual work of art . .. that every artwork is both classic and baroque, classic in its essence and baroque in its existence, classic in its formal perfection and baroque in its expressivity." On linguistic art as the representation of temporal difference, see my discussion of Lessing and Benjamin below. See also Payot.
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plicated in it at all times, the material identity of a medium makes its history different from either a causal sequence or predetermined entelechy, less like logic carrying itself out than a landslide carrying bodily its own force. Changes in empirical technique or formal conventions may seem to come suddenly, with or without reason, and in distinct, we may ask precisely when and surveying what has become with whom this movement began. Yet the more closely one attends to the medium that dynamically links its practitioners, the more likely it is that the answer to the age-old question, "How long has this been going on?"will be, in turn, "Whocan tell?" Something has been going on in our view of aesthetic media themselves-not in our view of the development of individual media but in our sense that anything individuates them at all. This equation of media may always have been going on (Hagstrum 3-70; Praz 3-27; Mitchell "Spatial"),' or it may have been the particular aim of the modernist avant-garde (Frank; Laude, especially 480). It may have been most important to the theory and practice of renaissance painting (Lee; Rosand),3 or limited in importance to mannerist aesthetics and baroque poetics (Fowlie, especially 503-06). It may have inspired the romantic reaction against neoclassical poetics (Babbitt), or the romantic revitalization of eighteenth-century sentimental painting (Greenberg, esp. 297-302).4 It may have reached a peak in high modernist concrete poetry (Steiner 192-218); it may be "a general principle of poetics" "implicitly proclaimed" by all poetry (Krieger,
2 Aimed at corroborating the poetic practices of English neoclassicism, Hagstrum's historical survey suggests that the identification of the literary with the
pictorial has been ongoing since Homer. His definition of literarypictorialismis "Inorder to be called 'pictorial'a descriptionor an image must be, straightforward: in its essentials,capable of translationinto painting or some other visual art";"the
art of the poet resembles the art of the painter" (xxi-xxii; 162; I will return later to Hagstrum, or Mitchell, who views "spatial form" as universal to the "experience and
Hagstrum's discussion [17-19] of Homer and remarks on Lessing). Unlike interpretationof literature"(541-42),Prazrestrictsthe validityof ut picturapoesisto the retrospectiverecognition of "likenesses among all the worksof art of a period" (54), suggesting that what unites mutuallycontemporaryarts is not their sensory (as Mitchell and Hagstrumargue respeccomplementarityor intertranslatability tively), but a kind of "aestheticmemory"in which their distinctivetemporalforms are registered(57-58). 3See especially Lee 200-205 on the Ars pictoriaconstrued from ancient theories of criticsof painting. poetryby sixteenth-century 4 Cf. IngeborgHosterey,"Laokoon und Modernitit"and "DieModerneam Ende?," for fine commentaries on Greenberg's seminal view that modern abstract art ment intensifies a "'self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant"' (170).
reinvigorates Lessing's call for the artist's critical engagement with the particularity of his medium. Hosterey cites Greenberg's observation that the modernist move-
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
cf. Scott); or it may be a "poetic prac"Ekphrastic"124, 128; Ekphrasis: tice" of "self-signification" underlying the history of painting (Damisch, Theorie42-47). Lastly, and most recently, it may be a postmodern reaction to the "anti-iconic" "imbalance"in structuralist and post-structuralist literary theory (Mitchell, "Spatial"565);5 or the postmodern adoption, in academic criticism, of the ideologically nullifying mode of argument by readily consumable picture (Christensen).6 What it is-and still dares not speak its name in the discourse of contemporary criticism-is a distinct resurgence of the doctrine of ut picturapoesis,7 the historically controversial notion that words and pictures are like one another, work to the same end, and so can (or should) be treated interchangeably.8 The sense that conceptual distinctions drawn between these media are either false or, at very least, counterproductive, has taken hold of the critical imagination with all the unselfconscious ubiquity of an interpretive norm. The purpose of the present essay is to question that norm, bringing to the fore some aspects of contemporary criticism that encourage the recurrent pictorialist doctrine and reinvestigating an historic movement in critical theory whose groundbreaking significance that doctrine neglects. Insofar as critical terminologies go, the force of the ut picturapoesis comparison has worked predominantly one way, with theory of the visual media, spearheaded by film studies, freely adopting the metalanguage of language. Terms like "grammar," "syntax,""rhetoric," "metaphor," and, of course, "metalanguage," seem to have folWriting slightly before the rapid proliferation of postmodern theories of the image, Mitchell predicts that this reaction will stem from physiological evidence for a "hemispheric theory of the brain" ("Spatial"565n). In a companion piece to "Spatial Form in Literature" that argues alternately for literary form in painting, Mitchell heralds "postmodernism" as "an explosive breaking down of the barrier between vision and language that had been rigorously maintained by modernism" ("Ut Pictura" 352). 6 Christensen's especially timely analysis focuses on "the notion of picturability on which, increasingly, both contemporary theory and the theory of the contemporary are based" (439). His critique extends importantly to the collaboration between the pictorial selling of consumerism by "corporate populism" and "the emergence of the new historicism with its propagation of picturability as a mode of critical argumentation that has a political feel answerable to all ideological agendas" (465). 7 It is relevant to the "doctrine" that it bears little relation to the lines in the Ars poetica from which its slogan is taken. For a meticulous analysis of the larger theoretical and immediate verbal context of Horace's extended analogy, see Trimpi, "Meaning"; and "Horace's." Discrepancies between the classical text and its later appropriations are also noted by Hagstrum 9, 59-60, and Lee 199-200. 8 Cf. Lee 197: "The sister arts . .. differed, it was acknowledged, in means and manner of expression, but were considered almost identical in fundamental nature, in content, and in purpose."
I
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lowed naturally from-though they are not necessarily implied bythe general semiotic paradigm of differential signification.9 Barthes's (1957) offers a handy reference point for plotting the rise Mythologies of contemporary interest in the "poetics" of visual images,1' although his ElMments de semiologie(1964) soon suggested that semiotics might turn out to be a branch of linguistics, thereby reversing Saussure's founding subordination of linguistic forms to a larger science of signs (80-81, 167; Saussure 33-34). The renewed influence of the Frankfurt School and recent canonization of Benjamin's writings on pictorial images and tactile objects (emphasizing, in the one case, modern reproducibility, and in the other, specific dialectical involvement in history, with the effect of suggesting a political dimension to Riegl's "optic" and "haptic" [Spdtromische 32-36, 248]) have served to complement this general thrust towards a critique of the visual via the poetic. While remaining eccentric to the methods and aims of traditional art history," this tendency has invigorated the concept of the visual image and virtually insured the institutionalization of popular and general cultural studies. The limitless range of objects of investigation implied by these last two alone makes the metaphoricity, or, at very least, the technical imprecision, of much of the critical discourse so generated seem a minor consideration. Even worse, it makes such considerations appear like anti-"professionalist" niggling, a sinister backpeddling whose only net result, to recall one of the more unforgettable phrases of Stanley Fish-Henry Ford (and sometimes Henny be "no jobs" Youngman) of the humanities profession-might Fish's one and that all theoOne need share not belief, only (204).12 retical reflection is circumstance and the very pretense of self9 The adoption in visual studies of the Saussurian conceptualization of language as a system, with its necessary bracketing of historical linguistics, should be distinguished from earlier attributions of linguistic models to art which, influenced precisely by the rise of nineteenth-century historical linguistics, also admitted the metaphoric nature of their schematization. See, for example, Riegl's explanation of his use of the term "historical grammar" (instead of the more literal "theory of elements") in developing a "scientific" approach to art history (Historische 210-11). In the art world, by contrast, the comparison between poetry and painting has been practically replaced by an identity in the works of such successful renovators of the doctrine as Barbara Kruger andJenny Holzer. 10Predating Barthes by nearly a decade is Spitzer's iconographic and poetic analysis of a Sunkist orange juice ad (see "American"). 11The reason for this may be referred to the material differences between the media. Svetlana and Paul Alpers have suggested that the "uniquely concrete presence [of imitation] in the visual arts" makes the practice of art history inhospitable to critical or analytic methods (see especially 443, 437-39, 444n). Cf. Holly, especially 373. 12 In "Anti-Professionalism" (215-46) Fish counter-argues that the disposition against professionalism is intrinsic to professional well-being. Cf. Youngman.
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criticism deluded,'3 to feel that the proliferation
of linguistic models
into pictorial fields is a gift horse one should not look in the mouth. Like most proposed similitudes, however, the doctrine of pictures as words does not offer symmetrical rewards. By a telling irony of conceptual history, the very properties of language that make its analysis appear infinitely and profitably transportable seem to vanish from
language once that transportation, or translation, is taken for granted, once the metaphoric exchange between media becomes the
methodological everyday. Translations of theory of language seem to
work very much the same way. Now that Nietzsche, Hegel, and Kant, among others, appear fully transposed from the confines of the history of speculative philosophy to a more general theoretical landscape, it is as if many of their most significant observations on the specific nature of linguistic art (whether rhetoric, ancient and romantic poetry, or poetry tout court) had never been written. Their definition and analysis of distinct modes or moments of the aesthetic"4-categorical attempts at understanding the dynamic power of art whose critical acumen had attracted translation in the first place-also seem to have gone the way of all conceptual limits. In part because it appears doubly futile to attempt to identify just when this second moment in the return of ut pictura poesis began-to ask how long the practical pictorialization of language, its interpretive designification, has been going on-it seems appropriate to examine instead a conscious attempt to undo the doctrine, Lessing's endeavor to identify the distinct modalities of word and picture in Laokoon. As Laokoon sought to defend Troy, so Lessing's Laokoonseeks to defend the identity of the arts by questioning the equation of verb and image which, seeming to bestow riches, threatens to usurp the very ground of reception. Maintaining that ground may well prove critical to our understanding of current interpretive tendencies; relinquishing it surely has direct effects on our larger conception of history. Contemporary adherence to the doctrine of ut pictura poesis has arisen, not coincidentally, at a time when our view of history, and of historiographical concepts and methods, is also undergoing substantial change (cf. Brodsky Lacour). More specifically, the nonmimetic understanding of language advanced in Laokooncontradicts a view of the conception of language in Lessing's entire century most
Naturally, this belief is most forcefully 13Expounded throughout Doing What Comes articulated in "Consequences" (315-41) and "Critical Self-Consciousness, Or Can We Know What We're Doing" (436-467). A particularly incisive, as well as appreciative and good-humored, riposte to Fish is offered by Brooks. 14Such as the Apollonian and Dionysian, the beautiful and the sublime, or the symbolic, classic, and romantic, to cite only the most central.
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widely promoted in our own time by the schematic historicism of Foucault.'5 Attending to Lessing's argument will not keep the attractions of Foucauldian revisionism or other versions of the gifts of Greeks at bay, but it can help explain the appeal as well as indicate the conceptual limits of much new historical theory. A theory of discourse that dovetails with a history of discourse so as to dovetail ultimately with both a theory and history of power is bound to appear attractive-whatever misrepresentation of earlier theory it entailsduring a critical period in which the relationships between theory and history, language and history, theory and power, and language and power are foregrounded, divided, and fraught. Foucault's historiography effectively cancels these conflictual relationships by equating their terms, providing a kind of comfort in the notion that discourse, theory, and history are one thing after all-a desire for power disguised as reason. Such a globalizing theory presents an additional reason for turning to Laokoononce again. For Foucault's theory of discourse as history proceeds, oddly enough, by way of pictures; power, the lowest common denominator of that theory, is represented by Foucault in spatial configurations. Indeed, it can be argued-and here one uses painterly metaphors advisedly-that the very persuasiveness of the picture of the power of "discursive""reason" Foucault draws has more to do with the immediate attraction of the visual over the verbal than with the accuracy of Foucault's own depictions.16 Describing discourse in markedly visual terms and casting cognitive themes as scenes, Foucault himself rightly lays no claim to any diachronic rendering of history. His self-contained historical epochs are explicitly modeled instead on painting, organized spaces of containment, and other physical forms (Las Meninas, the panopticon, ship of fools, asylum, h6pital gendral,penal institution, and, ultimately, the body itself), visual examples which exercise their own seductive power in prose.
15Foucault's conceptualization of "discourse" as a mode of taxonomic "order" rests on a profound identification of discursivity with graphic and pictorial disposition-"there where, since the foundation of time, language intersects with space" (Les mots 9). On "discursive" "order" as a "grid" superimposed on language; on "knowledge" as "space";and on "language" as the "spontaneous picture and original compartmentalizing of things," see Les mots12-15. On Foucault's influence on interpretation of eighteenth-century linguistic theory, see note 25 below. 16 Cf. Snyder and Cohen's thoroughly enlightening technical refutation of Foucault's nonanalytical assertions regarding Las Meninas. Snyder and Cohen correct Foucault's inaccurate description of the point of view from which the painting is projected, and, by identifying the actual point of view and corresponding vanishing point of Las Meninas, they go far in indicating an appreciable irony of Foucault's own discursive method: that his descriptions of techniques for organizing reason are purely symbolic gestures, drawn, as it were, in very broad strokes (433, 437; see Les mots 19-31 for Foucault's discussion of Las Meninas).
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LITERATURE COMPARATIVE
Still, whether or not one feels drawn by the use of graphic imagesto represent a supposed semiotic"transparency" of reason, Foucault's central portrait of the "ClassicalAge," or Age of Reason, which he defines as extending to the onset of "modernity" in the early nineteenth century (Les mots13-14),'" is best kept at a distance from actual texts. Inspired by the French seventeenth century, and in that century more by Port-Royal"8than by Pascal, Racine, or Madame de Lafayette, Foucault's age of semiotic transparency extends to the literature and theory of the French eighteenth century only at the cost of their erasure, and its further extension to the German Enlightenment, which Kant more aptly called the "Age of Criticism" (KrVA 11. 3:13; LogikA 40. 6:457), enforces a concept of historical and cultural homogeneity where there is none. Few texts make this critical point more effectively than Laokoon,which distinguished truth in poetry from beauty in painting,'9 the illusion of vision produced by language from the illusions of optical representation, precisely on the basis of the absence in verbal art of a self-identical, or, in Foucault's terms, transparent visual medium. As no less a skeptic in matters of theoretical and literary-historical change than Goethe would later attest,2"it was Lessing who spelled the beginning of the end of neoclassical literary norms in his time. The contemporary resurgence of those norms, in historical and interpretive theories explicitly opposed to the idealization of history
7 For Foucault's description of this "archaeological" section of time as a "space" of "pure representation" (31) or linguistic "transparency" (71, 75, 80), see 59-80. 18 In addition to Les mots 78-79, 90, see Foucault's "Preface" to Arnauld and Lancelot, Grammaireg&neraleet raisonnie iii-xxvii. On Foucault and Port-Royal, see also Damisch, Thdorie84-90. That Foucault's characterization of the discursive sign as a self-imaging similitude, in which "semiology and hermeneutics are superimposed and confused as one" (85-86; cf. Foucault, Les mots 80) might be too uniform even for an aesthetic theory of self-signifying painterly signs, is briefly suggested by Damisch (89-90). 19Cf. Gombrich 141: "the point is, I believe, that Beauty is not Truth. Lessing was not a Platonist." 20 Goethe's comments on Laokoon arise in the context of his own distinction between the modalities of "vision" [Anschauung] and "concept" [Begrifj]: "[Vision] demands a worthy object, which is not always available, and a formation [Bildung] in proportion with it, which one has not just attained. Concepts, on the other hand, only require receptivity, they bring their content with them, and are themselves the tools of formation." Lessing, Goethe next indicates, provided just such tools. But the highly visual imagery and dramatic temporal structure of his account of Lessing's formative effect, the barely disguised irony with which he describes this youthful experience of apparently irreversible change, all suggest that Goethe thinks the work of Laokoon is actually never done. See Dichtung und Wahrheit9:316 (all translations in this essay, unless otherwise indicated, are my own).
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and art that characterized neoclassicism,21 makes Lessing, who suspected all doctrinal norms,22 a theorist whose time may have, in a sense, returned.23 If the modernist aesthetic now appears increasingly irrelevant, a naive formalism or latter-day classicism, it may be no less the case that the new didacticism championed in an academy and art world shaped by postmodern theory and aesthetic practices also recalls the shift to moral illustration by which neoclassicism assimilated the pictorial excesses of the baroque. Obviously, the desire to overcome distinctions between media can cut both ways; since the view that the media reflect each other may be used to reflect any point of view or moral cause, it may be useful to reconsider, by contrast, Lessing's criticism of such assimilations on analytic grounds: he redefines those differences (which the temporal course of interpretation seems bound to obviate) between the media he equates conceptually again and again. Finally, before turning directly to Lessing as if to an uncontestable authority,24we should note that Laokoon,too, has been the object of historical and interpretive revision. Indeed, one index of the seriousness and scope of contemporary pictorialism is that it has, on occasion, gone back to question Lessing's influential text. Recent interpretations have argued that Laokoonsubscribes to the very doctrine it seems to refute, that its view of poetry is modeled on painting
21The idealization of the purposes and influence of art goes hand in hand with an idealization of classical models and of mimesis. Cf. Trimpi's fine definition of this recurring pattern: "By'neoclassic' attitudes in art and literature I have meant simply that attempt to verify principles of artistic representation by referring them to history and tojustify aesthetic responses to the work of art by reference to its verisimilar truth. Defined so generally, neoclassicism refers not to an intention characteristic of a period or movement but an ever-present effort of the mind to seek empirical consolation in the face of uncertainty about the objects which it experiences" ("Meaning" 27n30). was "a 22 A psycho-biographical account of Lessing's tendentiousness-he Pyrrhonist at heart"-is offered by Gombrich 145-52. 23 Whether or not the "time" that prompted Lessing's critical observations is indeed repeating itself, by a kind of "eternal return" making Goethe's salad days our own, can only remain a matter of speculation. But, as Damisch has argued, even Nietzsche's conception of a step beyond Laokoon was, in analytic terms, "a turn backward"; and, while "Heideggerian criticism" has remained mute on the subject of Lessing's writing, any contemporary encounter with Laokoon cannot be too late (this in the context of the first French edition of Laokoon to be published in this century ["Avant-propos" 7-10]). Cf. Hosterey, "Die Laokoon-Faktor," for an astute appraisal of the continuing relevance of Lessing to any "art form" engaged in "critical reflection upon its specificity as a medium" (169); Hosterey's examples include the modern novel (Faulkner, Joyce, and Broch) and the contemporary essay form of "deconstructivist criticism" (176-77). 24See Jacobs's argument that Laokoon is Lessing's own polemical attempt to wrest the power of authority from Winckelmann, Caylus, and Spence.
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(Wellbery) ;5 and that its differentiation of media rests on no cognitive distinction but rather on an historically conditioned hierarchy of the arts that reinforces certain hierarchical relations of power and, implicitly, of gender (Mitchell, "Politics").2 The nonsystematic approach to aesthetics announced in Laokoonmay account in part for this revisionary reception. At once a theoretical forerunner and the methodological antithesis of Kant, whose Critiquegave new philo25 More precisely, Wellbery argues that it is not "painting per se," but what he calls "the idea" or "paradigm of painting" that Lessing equates with poetry (236, 227). This idea he defines in phenomenological terms as "the intuitive presence of an ideal content," "the experience of presence [which] communicates its contents immediately to intuition"-in other words, the sense of unmediated presence suggested by transparent or self-effacing signs (235-38). The description is not an unfamiliar one, but its application to Lessing is. To argue that Lessing views "poetry as a transparent discourse" (241; cf. 42, 72, 84, 91, 95, 137) is to conform to Foucault's notion of the "myth of the sign" in the Classical Age, and Wellbery clearly states his adherence to Foucault's thesis: "The entire philosophy of the sign-and 'classical thought,' according to Foucault ... rests on the primacy of intuition, the direct apprehension of our mental representations" (241, 228; see also 2-3, 9). "Intuition" and immediate "presence" are, however, not Lessing's terms, and the model of poetry as nonsemiotic, iconic art which Wellbery attributes to Laokoonobviously runs contrary to Lessing's explicit definition of narrative poetry as composed of sequential "arbitrary signs." Wellbery scrupulously attempts to overcome this difficulty by arguing that, for Lessing, as for all "aesthetic theory in the Enlightenment," "the poem as a whole attains to the status of a natural sign" (233, 237; see also 7, 30, 7, 191-203). Once again owing most directly to Foucault, Wellbery's idea of narrative, analogous to his "idea of painting," is a provocatively questionable notion to which I will return. 26 Mitchell prints a table of political and gendered oppositions which he claims are implied, while not actually stated, in Laokoon. Such argument at the level of implication can lead to surprising if not contradictory results. Mitchell aligns Lessing's assumedly pejorative view of women with the (lowly) sense of vision, but vision is also the sense traditionally associated (at least since Plato) with cognition, and so one may suppose, with the superior hierarchical position of men. In support of his main thesis-that the "whole distinction [between poetry and painting] hangs ... on the slender thread of the difference between primary and secondary representation, direct and indirect expression" (102)-Mitchell cites Lessing's observation (sec. 16) that "painting can also imitate actions" and "poetry also depicts bodies," "but,"in the former case, "only by suggestion [nur andeutungsweise] through bodies," and in the latter, "only by suggestion through actions" (Lessing 9:95). Arguing further that painting represents bodies "bymeans of shapes and colors-that is, by certain kinds of signs," Mitchell concludes: "[ft]he distinction between 'direct' and 'indirect' is therefore not a difference of kind, but one of degree" (102). In joining the issue of "indirect" signification or "suggestion" to the decisive difference between pictorial and verbal signs (which he denies), Mitchell helpfully clarifies the broader thrust of the ut pictura poesis doctrine, for in both cases the question is whether the difference between direct and indirect, presentational and abstract signification, is a difference in kind. To argue that it is not, however, is to argue also that such "kinds of signs" as brushstrokes or even mimicking gestures are categorically indistinguishable from the noniconic "kind," the visually and acoustically transmissible signs of words. If that difference seems "a slender thread," it is also the same thread on which has hung, at least since Augustine, all theory of specifically linguistic signification.
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sophical meaning to the term "architectonic,"27 Lessing describes his observations in Laokoon as following no particular order, stating in its "Preface" that the individual "essays" (Aufsdtze) composing the work "arose in an accidental manner" and so constituted "more a disorderly collection of notes for a book than a book" (9:5). What Lessing, following Diderot, called an "accidental" approach,28 we might instead call empirical, an engagement with texts taking the form of philological criticism in an active, interpretive sense. The same can be said for the conceptual vocabulary in which Lessing's so-called "accidental" observations are expressed. The occasionally striking disorder of that critical language, even as it may invite revisionist readings, displays neither simple inadvertence, nor bad faith, nor an historically determined semiotic consciousness on Lessing's part, but rather an enduring theoretical problem related to the accidents of language Lessing recognized and addressed. "We Germans are not lacking in systematic books" (9:5). With considerable understatement, Lessing distinguishes the act of criticism from its mannered imitation, the gratuitous elaboration of conceptual systems, a distinction Kant will repeat some fifteen years later when criticizing the insubstantial systems of dogmatic metaphysics (111:36). Still, some systematic principles regarding different aesthetic media inform the analyses of texts and pictorial objects that are
It should also be noted that Lessing's comments on "indirect" imitation directly follow the commonsensical remark, which Mitchell might welcome, that in painting, as much as in poetry, the categories of time and space cannot exclude each other: "[o]f course bodies don't only exist in space, but also in time"; "actions cannot exist in themselves, but must be attached to bodies" (9:95). Far from implying the representational incompatibility of space and time, Lessing's distinction between the objects represented by verbal and nonverbal signs remains tied to a differentiation of their cognitive forms, the "arbitrary"or abstract references of discourse and "natural" or imaged references of painting. Still, as has become familiar from the spatialform-and-literature debate, any basis for differentiation may appear too slender and any recognition of difference too great when a neoplatonic or apostolic unity of image and word is fundamentally desired. (Cf. Mitchell, "Spatial"560: "the spatial form of literature becomes the logos or incarnate word, and the criticism which reveals this form becomes itself a literary, metaphoric creation, like the voice of Blake's Bard, whose poetry depends upon his having hearda word and sensed the presence of its living, incarnate form.") 27 On the specifically architectural, aesthetic dimension of Kant's Critique, see my "Architecture." 28 Cf. Lessing's gloss of the title (Hermda) he gave to a collection of "critical and antiquarian essays" whose projected composition (1762-63) was subsequently interrupted and absorbed by his work on Laokoon: "Everything that the Greeks accidentally found on their path, they named Hermia ... for Hermes was the God of the path, and they thanked him for everything that happy circumstance carried into their hands" (14: 290nl).
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dispersed throughout Laokoon.Linking these analyses, they define "the limits of painting and poetry"--like Kant's negative limitation of to knowledge to the form of mental representations-according which an understanding of the mediation of cognition, and so of the larger relation between aesthetics and epistemology, can be approached. Unlike the doctrine whose aesthetic products he criticizes, Lessing locates the cognitive potential of the arts not in what unites them but in what makes them materially non-identical, and, following the fact of material difference, practically and conceptually nonidentical as well.29His focus on the material differences of the arts does not aim merely to maintain their integrity (a mute integrity being as useless as a garrulous and indistinct union), but rather-and with greater theoretical significance-to bring the critical dimension of aesthetic forms into relief. Lessing's real philosophical insight into the aesthetic, one that Hegel would make into a method for narrating the history of the spirit, is that the empirical limitations within which art forms operate are also the only means through which they gain a critical edge. Integrally related to these material conditions, the feature that most defines the media as critically different from one another is the presence or absence of mimetic representation. Departing from Aristotle, to whom he claimed allegiance in his writings on drama, Lessing uses the term Nachahmung ("imitation") in Laokoonto describe the works of both painters and poets. Yet the conception of imitation as objective visual illusion or verisimilitude, whose formal observance in French classical drama Lessing criticized in his
Hamburgische Dramaturgie as non-Aristotelian, 30is confined in Laokoon
to the plastic arts alone.31 The visually life-like imitations of plastic art
29In this emphasis Lessing differed even from his closest theoretical correspondent. Mendelssohn, whose definition of "natural"and "arbitrary" signs as the respective "limits" of pictorial and discursive art doubled back to reaffirm a mimetic overlap between the arts. See Mendelssohn's "Betrachtungen fiber die Quellen und Verbindungen der sch6nen Wissenschaften und Kfinste" ["Considerations on the sources and relations of the beautiful sciences and arts"] 1:165-90 (especially 17480); see also Mendelssohn's annotations of Lessing's early drafts of Laokoon, in Lessing, 14:344-48. 30 On Lessing's view that even dramatic imitation involved neither sensory "illusion" nor the "realistic representation of nature," see Rudowski 59, 87; cf. my "Lessing." On Lessing's theory of literary "imitation" as preromantic, see Todorov, "Imitation" 40-42. 31 Cf. Gombrich 142, 144, for a similar argument regarding Lessing's alignment of visual art with French drama. See also Todorov, "Poetic" 107-09; "Esth6tique," especially 38; and Wimsatt 69 on Lessing's opposition to the notion of mimetic resemblance in poetry. Steiner argues, by contrast, that for Lessing "both [poetry and painting] are iconic of reality," a view she bases on Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp (13-14).
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are contrasted throughout Laokoon to the imitations of linguistic art, whose purpose is not to represent objectivelybut to render diachronically; for Lessing, object-representation and diachronic narration are opposed terms. The confusion of the visual with the verbal, a primary characteristic of postmodern aesthetics and a major factor in Foucauldian theory of history, is not, however, easily avoided. While Lessing's rethinking of aesthetics and aesthetic theory with regard to the properties of language represents precisely a rejection of this noncritical leveling, he also encounters difficulties in keeping the arts separated, difficulties articulated in descriptive language itself. At the close of section 14 of Laokoon Lessing admits these difficulties openly, in a footnote that, perhaps because it indicates a conflict Lessing also admits he cannot resolve, has gone virtually unnoted in both traditional and revisionist readings of his text. Following a discussion of the absence of pictorial imagery in Milton and the New Testament, Lessing states: There are paintable and unpaintablefacts, and the writerof historycan narrate unpainterlyin a painterlyfashion. To viewthis matterotherwiseis to let oneself simplybe misledby the ambiguityof the word. A poetic painting is not necessarilysomething that can be transformed into a materialpainting. (9:91-92) between poetic and material Having pointed to a discontinuity "painting," Lessing nonetheless proceeds to describe the "ambiguity" ("Zweideutigkeit") of their designation as rationally continuous, asserting that "every trait, every combination of traits" through which the poet makes his subject perceptible "is called painterly, is called a because it painting" ("heisst mahlerisch, heisst ein Gemihlde") brings us closer to that degree of illusion which "material pictures" induce most easily (9:92). It is at this moment, just as his critique of identifications of the arts seems to falter in the very corner where it lays blame-describing painting as a model for poetic languagethat Lessing notes that the question he has been addressing, i.e., on what basis poetic imaging can be called "a painting," is a question he has been misled to by the "ambiguity of the word." He analyzes that "Zweideutigkeit" philologically, locating the cause of its misleading effect not in any natural similarity between the different arts referred to, but in their shared reference, an "arbitrary name":
[n] 96. What we call poetic paintings, the ancients named phantasiae, as one recalls from Longinus. And what we call illusion, the deceiving aspect of these paintings, they called enargeia [. . .] I strongly wish that modern manuals of poetry had used this designation [poetischephantasiae] and refrained entirely from using the word painting [Gemdihlde]. They would have spared us a multitude of half-true rules, whose
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the most painterly in as unpainterly a fashion as the poet can represent the most
were namedpoetic paintings,the basisfor being misledwasestablished(9:92b).32
main justification is the agreement of an arbitrary name. No one would have subordinated poetic phantasiae to the limits of a material painting; but as soon as phantasiae
Granted that Lessing's wish to ban Gemdhlde ("painting") from "manuals of poetry" is wishful thinking-poetisches Bild ("poetic imand age"), Hegel's poetische Vorstellung ("poetic representation"), other qualified but still ambiguous expressions having arisen to take its place-his note on the arbitrary verbal origin of theoretical error sheds light on the crux and dilemma of aesthetic theory generally, the structural exchange of vision and words."33 Far from being hypothetical, this dilemma is written into the language of aesthetic theory; and far from being limited to the past history of that language, the first such exchanges Lessing's note illuminates arise directly in Laokoon. In section 13, for example, Lessing had described narrative poets as leading us "through a whole gallery of paintings" (9:89); but in section 14, cited above, he uses the same turn of phrase to praise Milton by default: "Admittedly, Milton can fill no picture galleries" (9:91). If it is Milton's inability to fill a gallery that makes him for Lessing a second Homer, then Lessing's metaphor of the poem as rather, of the narrative poet as one who leads us, picture gallery-or, and dynamically diachronically, through such a gallery-can only be read coherently as a conceptual play on words taking place in the context of already misleading usage, Lessing's ambiguous response to the ongoing circulation of an "ambiguous," "arbitrary name." Such metaphoric crossings occur frequently in Laokoon; indeed, the verb Lessing uses most often to describe the act of poetic articulation is mahlen, "to paint." But in section 16, the central section of basis of so-called verbal Laokoon, Lessing makes the nonmimetic clear. After briefly setting out the differences be"painting" critically tween the arts systematically, starting "from first principles," Lessing returns immediately to his own first principle, that of the act of textual study, stating: "I would put little trust in this dry chain of reasoning, if I didn't find it fully confirmed by Homer's praxis, or, rather, if it were not Homer's praxis itself that had brought me to it" (9:95). It is as a consequence of Homer's narrative praxis that Lessing expli32 In the only discussion I have found of this passage, Hagstrum (156) literally reverses its terms, claiming that enargeiawas the word Lessing wanted to substitute for Gemiihlde (picture) and leaving aside any consideration of phantasia. 33 Cf. Holly 372. Lessing's note also indicates the involvement of sensory or aesthetic images in linguistic theory. Lexical difficulties along the same lines were noted with historic consequences by Saussure, who substituted the formal terms "signified" and "signifier" for "concept" and "acoustic image" on grounds of a semantic "ambiguity" arising in the customary use of the word "sign" directly comparable to those Lessing gives for replacing Gemdhlde(see Saussure 26, 99-100).
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cates the critical thrust of Laokoon:that poetry, because it "paints" "progressive actions," does not represent bodily objects. Instead, poetry uses objects, or rather a single trait of an object, to delineate its "real" or "actual object" ("eigentliche[r] Gegenstand," 9:95), "action," much as an arbitrary name provides the subject and complement of a verb: "Ifind that Homer paints nothing other than progressive actions, and that he paints all bodies, all individual things, only by way of their contribution to these actions, usually only by means of
a single trait" (9:95-96). Nowhere is this specifically verbal nature of
narrative poetic art better demonstrated than in Lessing's discussion of the scepters of Agamemnon and Achilles, symbols of power which are, objectively, nothing in themselves, but whose movement from subject to subject makes action conceivable as a series of discrete predicates, just as do words. The passage of the scepters is what Lessing calls "history,"and representation plays no part in the accidents of power it designates, nor in our knowledge of those bare
traits that link names like verbs:
What does it matter to Homer, how far behind him he leaves the painter? Instead of an illustration he gives us the history of the scepter: first it is worked on by Vulcan; next it glitters in the hands ofJupiter; now it marks the dignity of Mercury; now it is the commander's staff of the warlike Pelops; now it is the shepherd's staff of the peaceful Atreus, etc. . . . So finally I know this scepter better than if a painter were to
layit before my eyes,or a secondVulcanto deliverit into myhands. (9:98) In "knowing" the scepter better than if he had it in his hands, in knowing what Lessing calls in section 10 "the thing itself' ("die Sache selbst") (9:74),34 what he says in section 5 the verbal "imagina-
tion sees through" to (9:43),35 Lessing knows no "thing," and "sees"

34 Here Lessing is distinguishing the "allegorical images" necessarily used to identify "personified abstractions" in plastic art from the nonallegorical "attributes" by which they are identified in poetry. The latter, he argues by inversion, are not images strung together like "letters," codified iconic substitutes for linguistic signs, but "tools" which take material part in ongoing narrative action: "instruments without which these beings could not produce the effects we ascribe to them." "The thing itself' which these predicative attributes "signify" (9:74) is thus not their own objectivity but the object of poetic imitation, action. 31 Parting company with both sides of a debate over the appearance of the Laokoon statue-whether its indecorous nudity may be excused on a technicality, the inability to sculpt folds of cloth-Lessing argues that the representation of the figure rests instead on intellectual grounds (the human body is worthier of imitation than clothing) and that to deny the artist this motive "debases" plastic art. That such a debate might even arise signifies for Lessing the reductioad absurdumof the neoclassical illusionist aesthetic, the substitution of a general principle of illusion for meaning: "Do our eyes only want to be deceived, and does it make no difference to them with what they are deceived?" Poetic imitation, by contrast, remains unaffected by questions of literal proper dress, for already in poetry clothing "covers nothing; our imagination sees through everywhere." Once again, however, Lessing specifies that
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no object but its "history,"or, more precisely, the history of hands through which it has passed. Each of the clauses narrating this history is limited to a constative minimum: pronoun, verb, abstract noun or adjective ("dignity,""peaceful," "warlike")and proper noun. Homer's epic narrative is not a drama; and rather than emphasize the formal unity of its plot, or suggest that it somehow be viewed synchronically,36 Homer's poem, according to Lessing (and Homerists tend to agree ), represents historical action as the unqualified act of forward motion, motion verbalized in what Lessing called, with appropriate awkwardness, "progressive imitations" ("fortschreitende Nachahmungen," 9:95 et passim). Instead of serving as a synchronic device of representation (a painting), the scepter in this passage works as a narrative token, passed along from sentence to sentence, from one accident of history to the next. This is what Lessing indicates in the astonishing observation, a kind of Baudrillardism avant la lettre,that even when Homer does not use an image to a specific narrative "end" ("Absicht")-when "he is concerned merely with the image" ("auch da, wo es ihm um das blosse Bild zu thun ist")-he "disperses this image over a kind of history" ("wird er dieses Bild in eine Art von Geschichte verstreuen"), subordinating it to the tempo, the "flow of discourse" ("Fluss der Rede," 9:100).37 If the discursive flow of postmodernism has made the idea of imaging as dispersal now seem familiar, this notion is remarkable in Laokoonnot only because of its own timing, at the sources of modernity, but also because it refers not to a visual image, the preferred vehicle of postmodern theory, but to a word. Moreover, this word is more like an unvisualizable sign, a purely syntactic element, and less like a representational painting than any concrete noun one might think of-exwhat the discursive imagination "sees"is not the body as a whole but its part in representing action: "Whether or not Virgil's Laokoon is clothed, his suffering is as visible in one part of his body as in another" (9:42-43). 36There is no mention in Laokoon of a "single moment" in which the diachronic narrative appears "a contentual (sic) whole," and no basis on which to entertain "ideal" rather than "material" suppositions regarding narrative signs, such as is suggested by Wellbery's phenomenalist notion of the "whole" poem functioning as a "formally natural sign," "the form of intuitive presence" (237). Treating "idea" and "representation" interchangeably, when, it can be argued, it is upon the differentiation of these terms that the very possibility of aesthetic theory depends, Wellbery's historical interpretation of Lessing tends to accede to "a higher level of generality" regarding the arts than did Lessing (7, 9; see also 110). 37 To my knowledge, Jacobs is alone in citing this observation even in part (516). She incorporates it, however, into her reading of the scepter passage as allegorical for any continuous allegory of the transmission of power: "The allegorical reading is therefore allegorical in turn for the power (or failure) of language to 'express' its 'object,' to strengthen its power by means of 'eine Art von geschichte'" (518).
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Like a baton, a pure cept, of course, for that false sign, Gemdhlde. marker of movement, Homer's verbal image points to what is next, without representing why, and without ever representing itself.38This is the form of "poetic description" (9:50 etpassim) Lessing chooses to describe. It is a differential lexical token easily endowed with allegorical meaning, as he subsequently remarks (9:98-99; cf. Jacobs 516-21); a sign that does not represent a thing, but gives the occurrence of action-otherwise as invisible as the gods-verbal form: a thing, in other words, which is a sign.39 Lessing's understanding of poetic description offers a theoretical context for interpreting an observation he made in correspondence
with Nicolai (letter of May 26, 1769) whose significance in recent
critical literature has sometimes overshadowed that of Laokoon itself.40 Reacting to a review of Laokoon by Garve, Lessing apparently
retreats from his appreciation of Homeric narrative and commends drama as that form of poetry most capable of making "arbitrary signs" into "natural signs of arbitrary things" (17:291). To say that the scep-
ter is not the sign of a thing but a thing which is a sign is to come close to the chiasmus Lessing sets up here, by which signs attain natural status and the things they signify are denaturalized. I know of no discussion of this passage which focuses on the literal wording of the latter and stranger portion of its inversion, the assertion, extraordinary for Lessing or for any secular theorist, that "things" signified
38 In the drafts of Laokoon that Lessing circulated to Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai for their comments, "motion" (or "movement," Bewegung)is the name given, instead of "action," Handlung, to the object of poetic imitation (including imitation that is "indirect," andeutungsweise). See Muncker's edition of the Laokoonpapiere, 14:334-440 (especially 372, 380, 414-15). 39Cf. Burke's seminal "Whatare the Signs of What?"in which the inversion of sign and thing signified is offered as a means of conceiving the linguistic mediation of cognition generally. 4o Wellek first called attention to it, interpreting Lessing's statement to mean that in drama "language is natural because it is spoken by characters and in character, with gestures and expression of the face as in real life, and thus it loses the fatal quality of conventionality which inheres in all other uses of language" (164-65). Rudowski's study is primarily devoted to the letter in its bearing on the problem of dramatic mimesis; interested in a larger theory of illusion in drama, Rudowski takes exception to Wellek's implication that "the preeminence of the dramatic genre" for Lessing was "a function of theatrical performance" (49-50). Todorov cites the remark as Lessing's indication of an instance of semiosis in which linguistic "motivation is complete," i.e., when "words designate words" rather than things ("Esthetique" 37). Wellbery, by contrast, introduces the letter as a kind of dramatic proof that Lessing viewed all signs as natural (226). Cf. Jacobs 513n, on the way in which the remark may be used to identify Lessing with just such a theory of "natural" (or unambiguous) linguistic signification.
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could be "arbitrary."4'Rather than indicating the overcoming of semiotic relations, this phrase reverses the order of semiosis, as conventionally conceived. In this respect it recalls another highly unconventional notion with which Lessing is not commonly associated: Benjamin's view that, as represented by baroque drama, "nature" itself was "allegorical," and, as conjoined with history, subject to temporality (see esp. 145, 160). Lessing's description of verbal images as necessarily dispersed over history, similarly rendering arbitrary the thing imaged, also recalls Benjamin's treatment of the ends of history as the artifactual givens of each successive "allegorical perspective," images that become objects of knowledge once their original (we might say "natural") temporal context has been eradicated (159-63, 105). Their then explicitly arbitrary relation to the dramatic allegorical context not only "fixes" these "images" but makes them into "fixing signs," "objects of knowledge in their own right," "emblems" or indices of the passage of time (161-62). The image-signs of Benjamin's allegory become "natural"in Lessing's terms, insofar as they signify not a natural history but the fact that nature is historical, calling attention, by their own displacement, to the arbitrariness of semiotic relations at any given moment of time. What is not and cannot be arbitrary, however, according to Laokoon,is painting. Lessing's definition of the "signs"of painting as "natural," carried over from DuBos, Mendelssohn, and others, implies no naturalization of their artifactual status. Indeed, Lessing's analytic observation that pictorial images of events are carefully constructed so as to represent the context of "a fruitful moment" directed new critical attention to the conscious selection and composition of signs involved in making plastic art. The signs of painting are natural in semiotic aesthetic theory not because they are not artifactual but because they are not arbitrary with respect to their object:
"1As cited in the preceding note, Todorov equates the designation "arbitrary things" with "words,"reading the second half of the inversion as follows: "words thus designate words ... the motivation [of the sign] is complete" ("Esth6tique" 37; "Imitation" 41). Wellbery follows Todorov's interpretation of "'arbitrary things"' as meaning "words,"but views this instead as the "point where [the naturalness of signification] loses all meaning. The only referent which discourse can perfectly imitate turns out to be not a real or imaginary object or action, but discourse itself" (227). The referential tautology Wellbery indicates, however, results only from the already circular logic of reading language naturally. A noniconic reading which distinguished between arbitrary signs and natural things would similarly distinguish between "natural signs" and "arbitrary things." Cf. Lessing's comments earlier in the same letter that the painting of "costume" and "even of a large part of bodily expression" are also "natural signs of arbitrary things," i.e., visual images of conventions [17:290].
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through ongoing technical and conceptual permutations of its medium, painting shows what it gives the viewer to know. This can lead to the difficulty of showing the invisible, memorably analyzed in Lessing's discussion of the painterly combination of two visible objects-clouds and gods-to connote the invisibility of the latter (sec. 12, 9:85-88).42 But when it comes to visibility, the fundamental condition of pictorial as of all plastic art,43 painting gives up its claim to cognitive power when, like pictorial poetry, it shirks its own means, does not show what it gives to be seen, and so avoids the act of making visible that is its own historical action. It has been objected that the limits of Lessing's own understanding of painting are most evident in his criticism of Caylus's proposed painting of Helen as veiled (sec. 22, 9:132-34; cf. Lee 215n84). Lessing remarked that, rather than describing Helen, Homer narrates her active effect on those who saw her, the experiences of "pleasure, dedication, love, and rapture, which beauty causes"; furthermore, the poet "transforms beauty" itself into the dynamic quality of "charm,"freshly defined by Lessing as "beauty in motion" (9:130). Like a scepter of power, then, Helen's beauty is a token of action in Homer; an image dispersed over history, passing from Greek to Trojan, it is the thing which, operating as a sign, ostensibly links the series of ambiguous and often discontinuous effects and actions known as the Trojan War.44 But a painting of Helen that showed her effect on others while hiding its cause would negate even the action it "suggested" (andeutungsweise)45 by withdrawing the body, the aesthetic object itself. Any "Helen" a painter images will be a token of beauty, part of an ongoing series of acts constituting not Homer's narrative but that of another "progressive action": the history of bringing images into being, the history of art. To take Helen out of the picture, by contrast, is to commit no action as far as imaging is concerned, except that of denying the possibility of a relation between the pictorial arts and
42Lessing's insight here is recalled in Damisch's "theory of the/cloud/," in which the ambivalent pictorial sign of the cloud serves as a kind of metaphor for painting (see especially 215, 255). 43Cf. Lessing in the Laokoon drafts: "Caylusdid not consider that the poet works in a double genre of beings and actions; visible and invisible. Painting cannot declare this difference; in it everything is visible and visible in the same way" (14:363). 44Lessing's observation that Homer never "portrays"the beauty "upon which the whole poem, nonetheless, is built," led to Nicolai's semiotically insightful comment: "The poem was built on Helen's beauty; that is why one should not see the ground" (14:348). 45 Cf. note 26.
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knowledge.46 Thus with respect to Caylus's hypothetical and hidden figure, Lessing may ask with genuine urgency a question which is also the most concise complete sentence in Laokoon: "Is that Helen?" (9:133).47A pictorial representation of Helen that showed no figure would be comparable, in Lessing's terms, to an action left unstated, or narrated only by the words, "youknow how these things go." Like a poem that negates itself as verba,leaving its very lexical identity to the reader's or listener's imagination, a painting that contrives to make us imagine Helen rather than see her image must make us question whether our imaginings bear any relationship to that particular hidden figure, or, indeed, whether the unimaged figure meant to prompt our imagining "is"Helen at all. Imagination left on its own (whatever that would be), without visible "natural signs" to work on, does not so much rise to the heights of ineffable vision as fall back on cliched images whose already-known quality enforces a lack of imagination and maintains the limits of ignorance. Finally, this withdrawal of the means to knowledge in its nonaesthetic assumption would hold for nonfigural painting as well. A painting of Helen in which Helen was not visible would be like a display of nonfigural painting in which the paintings were not visible: no part of them, not even "empty"canvases, not even "empty"frames. To inquire of a pictorial representation of Helen that does not show her, but shows the visible reaction of others who also do not see her-"Is that Helen?"-is no less critical than to ask of spectators gaping at galleries shorn of paintings, a site vacant of sculpture or of building, indeed, at invisibility itself, "Isthat art?" The things of plastic art must be visible if they are to make the conception of something known, and that something need be no more concrete than "Helen," a proper noun conventionally connoting a particularly significant instance of beauty, the beauty otherwise known to us in its function as a verbal token in a poem. It may be, selfreflexively, the practical conception of the thing called "painting," or
46Cf. Damisch on the epistemologically related problem of representing "Beauty" by a "beautiful image": "It would only be tautological to attempt to represent an unknown thing by another which would be just as unknown." The fact that "Helen" is not the abstract persona, "Beauty," but its poetic token in a narrated history, both reverses and maintains the terms of Damisch's analysis, for while "Helen" would have to be seen in order for her ("Helen's") effect on others to have meaning, "Beauty"is best painted (following Damisch's comments on Cesare Ripa) with "her head in the clouds" (81-83). 47"Dasist Helena? "-itself a succinct representation of the question of the relation between cognition and art-is later rephrased by Lessing in the bluntly deaestheticized terms denoting an abandonment of that relation: "Washat dieses Ding von der Helena?" ("What does this thing have of Helen?" 9:133).
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"art"-indeed, given the revolutions in the history of the medium, it probably always must be, at least in part48-but without the particular visible object, Lessing's "natural sign," there is no conception, no historical movement of conceptions, nothing to be known. The absence of such visible objects in discourse makes discourse the medium of action; Helen will always be Helen in language, an arbitrary name, but the passage of Helen, the history of what the name stands for, will be poetry, Homer's or another poet's, and its medium of representational knowledge is the linguistic sign. Returning for a final moment to Laokoon,and to Lessing's description of the things of poetry as the arbitrarysigns of history, there is a specific way in which Lessing's endeavor can now be read as part of another passage, the movement of criticalhistory. The sign of this movement is the verbal image of Laokoon, and Lessing, the critic who attempts to read the difference between this verbal image and a statue, may be read, in turn, as Laokoon himself, or rather, as performing the critical function Laokoon performs in Virgil's narrative. What the Trojans see when they see the splendid horse is its material grandeur; they take Sinon's story at face value.49But Laokoon, or Lessing, will have no truck with such false transparency. Beautiful the horse may well be, but where, he asks, does it come from: what is its history? Or rather, of what progressive action is it a mere token; and, if we take this token into our hands, what happens next? We all know what happened to Laokoon. He and his offspring were materially immobilized by serpents moving toward the citadel (Aeneid 2:201-227). The Trojans took those deaths, again transparently, as caused by their own gods, and we, with the transparency of hindsight, take them as caused by gods friendly to the Greeks. (Virgil, incidentally, never says anyone sent the serpents, and one can always entertain the suspicion that, much like Lessing's scepters, these serpents may have merely been moving on, making history of whomever happened to stand in their way.) What Lessing says happened to his Laokoonwas the publication, before the completion of Laokoon, of
Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (9:156). Asserting
dramatically, "I don't dare take another step without having read this work," Lessing ends Laokoon in (one-sided) debate with Winckelmann over the dating of the Laokoon statue. It is now gener48Cf. Damisch 46-47, on "innovation" and the "image of painting." 49Cf. Hexter's argument that Virgil's contradictory references to the precise mate-
rial the horse is made of implies that one is apt to make of this image what one will; and that, like the verbally variegated horse, the desire to assimilate it is not to be trusted (especially 117-22).
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ally agreed that Lessing's late dating of the statue was wrong, but the main interest of that debate was never empirical chronology. On the contrary, what makes Lessing's effort in these final sections remarkable is that the only evidence he musters and manipulates remains textual, on the order of philology rather than iconic history: rhetorical evidence in section 26 (the precise import of the comparative similiter);grammatical evidence in section 27 (the use of the perfect tense in an inscription); syntactical evidence in section 28 (the function of a single comma in a description of a statue's pose); and bibliographical evidence in section 29 (the misquotations of Longinus and Pliny which demonstrate Winckelmann's failure to go back to original textual sources). Lessing misdated the Laokoon statue just as he fudged the actual timing of his reading of Winckelmann,50 and neither of these facts impinges on Lessing's aesthetic theory in the slightest. Nor have they, despite repeated remonstrances, impeded the progress of his Laokoon.For what happened in critical history to Lessing's limitation of visual representation to the plastic arts was Kant's limitation of knowledge to representation, the transformation of a critique of aesthetic forms into a critical epistemology. In the context of the present discussion only some summary obserare possible, but even a brief recapitulation of vations on the Critique of the three Critiques may serve to undermade in each key points score the relation between Lessing and Kant. Starting again from "first principles," the first of these for Kant was the philosophically revolutionary notion of a "transcendental aesthetic," the hypothesis that all empirical, sensory perception already takes place in representational form. At the opening of the First Critique Kant states, "A science of all a prioriprinciples of sensory perception I name the 'transcendental aesthetic"' (KrV B 36. 3:70), and in describing his new,
epistemological use of the word "aesthetic"Kant refers specifically to its earlier adoption by Baumgarten. Like Lessing before him, Kant criticizes Baumgarten's attempt to make aesthetic judgment a reasoned science-"to bring the judgment of the beautiful under principles of reason and to raise the rules of these principles to a science"-arguing by contrast that any formulation of rules of taste is "futile" ("vergeblich") (KrVB 36. 3:70n) since such rules must come
50 Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums(1763) was known to Lessing earlier than the opening sentence of section 26-"Herr Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art has appeared" ["Des Herrn Winckelmanns 'Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums' ist erschienen"]--leads one to believe (9:156; see also Muncker's commentary, 14:378n2). Still, the verbal perfect, "ist erschienen," while implying relative immediacy, remains grammatically untied to any specific date.
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into conflict with the empiricalcriteria on which they are based. In order to understand the ability to judge what is beautiful as something other than prescribed taste, one must instead treatjudgment as a specific kind of mental activity, and this is Kant's purpose in the Third Critique. Yet in so considering judgment Kant also confronts what he calls the "ambiguity" of the term "aesthetic." While the word had been used historically to denote pleasing or beautiful forms, in Kant's critical project "aesthetic" signifies the a priori form of all phenomenal cognition. Here a reconception of epistemology which names the fact of formal sense perception "aesthetic" must proceed to redefine the referent of "aesthetic"when, instead of the logical apprehension of objects, the experience of pleasure is meant:
when whatis understood therebyis the relatingof a representationto an object-as appearance-toward the cognition of that object ... But for a long time it has been also customaryto call a mode of representationaesthetic,i.e., sensory,when whatis
meant thereby is the relationship of a representation not to the cognitive faculty, but The expression-an aesthetic mode of representation-is entirely unambiguous,
to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure. . . Thus there remains an unavoidable
one unambiguity in the expression-an aesthetic mode of representation-when derstands thereby that mode which excites the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and alternatively that which only has to do with the cognitive faculty ... (KU 10:3435)51
Just as Lessing's theory of poetry as the representation of action rather than objects may be viewed as his critical resolution of the historical "ambiguity"of the word "painting," so Kant's epistemological use of the term "aesthetic" both makes the "ambiguity"of this "expression"-in view of its long-standing use-"unavoidable," and proceeds to resolve that ambiguity by critically reconceptualizing the activity to which its customary usage pertains. That activity, the judgment of the beautiful, is now defined neither on the basis of objective criteria, nor in terms of the cognition of objects, but, instead, as action: "This ambiguity can, however, nonetheless be cancelled if one uses the expression aesthetic neither of the intuitions nor even less of the representations of understanding, but solely of the actions of judgment" (KU 10:35). What is "aesthetic,"then, is no longer a representation but an action, the activity of judging which, in the Third Critique, determines no object but rather a subject moved by "feeling": "Thus it will immediately be shown that, although through the naming of an aesthetic judgment of an object, a given representation
5' Both this discussion of the "ambiguous" referential status of "aesthetic" and Kant's explicit redefinition of the use of the word occur in the "First Draft of the Introduction to the CritiqueofJudgment."
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is related to an object, it is not the determination of the object but of the subject and his feeling that is understood in the judgment" (KU 10:36). Within the Third Critique Kant remains on guard against the ambiguity brought forward by his cognitive use of the aesthetic in the First Critique. Absent from its title, the term "aesthetic" appears in the Critique ofJudgmentprincipally as a contrastive term to "teleological," effecting a distinction between judgments of beautiful and of purposeful forms echoing Kant's larger division between pure and practical reason. Returning, as he states, to its "ancient" meaning (KrVB 36. 3:70n), Kant turns the concept of the aesthetic from a notion of the objectivity of the senses to that of their activity, with the critical difference that his new epistemological definition of an "aesthetic" that is "transcendental" refers to senses operating according to a priori"representations," the pure forms of sensibility: space and time. Kant's "transcendental aesthetic" of all possible knowledge thus seems to unite the forms Lessing divides: in making representation a cognitive category, Kant brings space and time together as the twin intuitions of the mind. Yet, as is well known, the representation of time gave Kant the most difficulty. He introduced an additional notion, that of "intermediary representations," or "schemata,"in order to join the invisible "internal sense" of time to our apprehension of matter. But while declaring the "schemata"to be "nothing but a priori determinations of time according to rules," Kant also admitted that their "hidden art" ("verborgene Kunst") was and would remain "in the depths of the human soul" ("in den Tiefen der menschlichen Seele"), and that no investigation would reveal that art to the eye ("unverdeckt vor Augen legen," KrVB 177-85. 3:187-92). If "time"is the dynamic form of knowledge the First Critique must posit, but cannot represent to the mind's eye, the Third Critique focuses, with less conceptual difficulty, on the notion of noncognitive, but similarly dynamic, "purposive form." Repeating Lessing's definition of the first criterion of all art (9:19), the "free play of imagination," now seen in conjunction with "understanding" (KU B 29. 10:132), defines the judgment of the beautiful in the Third Critique. Such judgment is not a ruling arrived at either rationally or capriciously. Experienced whether we will or no, and without regard to verisimilar, cognitive qualities, judgment of the beautiful acts in response to the sense of purposiveness conveyed by delimited forms of which we have no conceptual knowledge. In contrast to the pleasurable dynamism of the beautiful, its "purposiveness without a purpose" (KUB 61. 10:155), the adverse dynamic experience of the sub252
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lime seems to destroy all formal limitations and to point to the "purpose of practical reason" (KUB 115. 10:193) which neither the Third nor First Critique can demonstrate: not the systematic goal of limited, representational knowledge but the purpose against which the limits of such knowledge are aimed, the possibility of action undertaken without cognitive, representational limits. Even as Lessing took action to be the only "real object" of verbal art, Kant's "freedom" of action, subsequently named "the moral law," and prepared for in the Third Critique by the intermediary notion of "the actions ofjudgment," is the single verbal "form"-one could say "the thing itself' (die Sacheselbst)-his whole critical endeavor must render "real"(KpVA 97-99. 7:171-73). Action that is entirely "free"in its movement must also be free even of the passage of lexical tokens, and it is this objectively unlimited, or nonnarrative "freedom" of action that Kant's Second Critique attempts to define (KprVA 53-54. 7:139-40).52 Like Lessing's attempt to define or disambiguate the material limits of poetry and painting, once and for all to clarify theoretically the misleading descriptive language he, too, must use to talk about language, Kant's attempt to define "freedom" as the single mental form delimited by no phenomenal object and unrelated even to the experience of pleasure-that is, as absolutely noncontingent action always critically available to the mind-results within the Second Critique in his admission that this form "imposes" itself on his critical endeavor (KpVA 54. 7:140).5"Still, Kant's effort to conceive of the reality of "freedom" discursively has tended to be confused historically with an instrumental imposition of the "categorical imperative," that a priorisynthetic proposition named and described as
necessarily "inconceivable"in his earlier Foundation of the Metaphysics of
Morals (BA 88, 128. 7:75, 102; emphasis in text). Although the purely speculative notion of a "categorical" or "moral imperative" in no way
52In "Whatis Enlightenment?" Foucault distinguishes Kant as the first philosopher to have explicitly situated his own understanding of knowledge historically, proposing, in turn, that the cognitive limits Kant's project defined are those which we must now overcome practically, in "the undefined work of freedom" (38, 46). While Foucault's turn to Kant is admirable, his argument for the specifically contemporary need to transgress cognitive limits tells only half the story, for the practical transgression of theoretical knowledge is the very action Kant ascribes to "freedom" in the Second Critique. Only because it makes such acts of transgression "thinkable," precisely by limiting systematic knowledge to representational forms and so maintaining his the possibility of nonrepresentational "freedom"-of unknown action-can "negative" Critique,in Kant's words, "in deed" be of practical "positive use" (KrVB 2426; 3:293-31). 53 For further discussion of this dilemma in Kant's critical project, see my Imposition 68-87, 307-08.
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freed Kant from seeking to define "freedom" in the Second Critique, that speculative notion and not the practical reality of "freedom" is often all that is retained of Kant's moral philosophy as a whole.54 Yet in the critical context of an unrepresentable "freedom" of action, the "idea"he considered the "keystone"of his Critique (KprVA4. Kant redefines both and aesthetics, as well as 7:107), epistemology the relation between them. Thus it is in action, the dynamic "real object" necessarily described negatively by their critical theories, that the historically sequential but structurally inverted critiques of Lessing and Kant meet. Lessing's criticism of the notion of representation in discursive art and Kant's limitation of discursive knowledge to representation both point theoretically to the possibility of action freed from aesthetic and cognitive-that is, from representationallimitations. Grounded in a critical purpose rather than elevated to an ideal, that possibility is practically indispensable: as necessary to the making and understanding of art as it is to claims of knowledge, as crucial to the making and understanding of poetry as it is to the cause of moral action. With Kant, Lessing's analysis of the narrative sign and critique of representational aesthetics pass from the "aesthetic" limitations of representational knowledge to the dynamic, nonrepresentational experiences of the beautiful and the sublime, to action conceived as free from all representational objects, even the traits of objects with which action is spelled out. If historians and critics of art have frequently dismissed Lessing as simply not understanding one medium, the visual, and historians and critics of literature have even more frequently dismissed Kant as simply not understanding another, the verbal,55this may be because of the complicated history of what passed betweenthem-no verbal token of
14An exception to the rule in this respect was Adorno's Negative Dialektik, whose consideration of the concept of "freedom" in the Second Critique criticizes instead its nonhistorical foundation. See "Freiheit. Zur Metakritik der praktischen Vernunft," 211-94, especially 217: "In no way did it occur to [Kant] that freedom itself, his eternal idea, could be of historical existence, a concept not merely as such but according to the content of experience. Whole epochs, whole societies lacked the concept of freedom as much as the thing." While Kant's critical turn in philosophy makes any reproach of its method on grounds of historical context at once irrelevant and irrefutable, it is no less the case that the "critical theory" practiced by Adorno relies fundamentally on what remains a Kantian possibility of freedom. This freedom may take the "negative" form of a dialectic whose "limits"are viewed instead as historical and ideological. But all that prevents such limits from fully determining action and so obliterating even the notion of critical thought is the same opposition to the exhaustive logic of causality appealed to in systematic terms by Kant. 55On Kant's cognitive understanding of discursivity, see my Imposition 21-52. For a detailed historical and textual analysis of Kant's own transformation of the literary form of philosophical writing, see Goetschel.
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power but its theoretical equivalent, a critical conception of representation posed at different moments against the historical "limits"of aesthetic and epistemological theory. And this, with Lessing, we may call historical "action."
Princeton University
Works Cited
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COMPARATIVE
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Abstract Painting and the Repression of Language." Criti. "UtPictura Theoria: calInquiry 15 (1989): 348-71. Payot, Daniel. Anachroniesde l'oeuvred'art.Paris: Galilke, 1990. Praz, Mario. Mnemosyne:The Parallel BetweenLiteratureand the Visual Arts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. derbildendenKiinste.Vienna: B6hlaus, 1966. Riegl, Alois. HistorischeGrammatik Kunstindustrie.Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Spdtramische 1973. Rosand, David. "Ut Pictura Poesis: Meaning in Titian's Poesie."New LiteraryHistory 3 (1972): 527-46. Rudowski, Victor. Lessing'sAestheticsin Nuce. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971. Paris: Payot, 1978. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Coursde linguistiqueg&ndrale. Scott, Grant F. "ReviewEssay:Ekphrasis." EuropeanRomanticReview3 (1992): 215-23. Snyder, Joel and Ted Cohen. "Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost." CriticalInquiry7 (1980): 429-47. Spitzer, Leo. "American Advertising Explained as Popular Art." Essays in English and American Literature. Ed. Anna Hatcher. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962. 248-77. Rpt. A Method of InterpretingLiterature.Northhampton: Smith College, 1949. 102-49. in theRelation BetweenModernLiterature Problems Steiner, Wendy. The Colorsof Rhetoric: and Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Stendhal (Henri Beyle). Racine et Shakespeare. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1970. Todorov, Tzvetan. "Esth6tique et semiotique au XVIIUme siacle." Critique 308 (1973): 26-39. Studies3 (1977): 28-43. . "Imitation et motivation." Michigan Germanic -"Poetic Truth: Three Interpretations." Essaysin Criticism38 (1988):96-113. ---. Trimpi, Wesley. "The Meaning of Horace's Ut Pictura Poesis."Journal of the Warburg and CourtauldInstitutes 36 (1973): 1-34. . "Horace's 'Ut Pictura Poesis': The Argument for Stylistic Decorum." Traditio 34 (1978): 29-73. Wellbery, David. Lessing's Laocoon: Semioticsand Aestheticsin the Age of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Wellek, Rend. A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. Wimsatt, W. K. "In Search of Verbal Mimesis [Supplement to 'Laokoon: An Oracle Reconsidered']." Day of theLeopards.New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Youngman, Henny. "'Nem di Gelt' (Take the Money)." New YorkTimes.July31, 1990: A:19.
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