1771503

8/22/2019 1771503

1/29

University of Oregon

"Is That Helen?" Contemporary Pictorialism, Lessing, and KantAuthor(s): Claudia Brodsky LacourReviewed work(s):Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. 230-257Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771503 .

Accessed: 03/12/2012 23:32

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of Oregon andDuke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend

access to Comparative Literature.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:32:34 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=dukehttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uoregonhttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1771503?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1771503?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uoregonhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=duke

8/22/2019 1771503

2/29

CLAUDIA BRODSKY LACOUR

" I s T h a t Helen?"ContemporaryPictorialism,ess ing,a n d K a n t

AS MARSHALLROWN has argued persuasivelywithregardtoW61fflin's entangled "classic"and "baroque," it is difficult tomaintain purely conceptual distinctions between different momentsin the development of a single medium.' Such moments can beviewed externally as consecutive stages in the evolution of style, or,less abstractly, as instances in which the practitioners of a mediumperceive their own practice as a critical problem. But whatever kindof historical action these moments appear to define and whatevercharacter one gives to that action-the face of progress, decay, orsheer insistence-media, matter made into means, bear with themtheir own constraints and possibilities, the physical facts which maketheir temporal course of development appear part of their being. Im-

1Rather than simply conflating W61fflin's pivotal concepts, Brown's careful read-ing renders forceful tribute to the thoroughly diachronic and dynamic purport of hisentire theoretical project, now too often dismissed as "mere" and outmoded formal-ism. Most strikingly, Brown's concluding comments on the temporal duality of allaesthetic forms find confirmation in the principles of literary history set forth inStendhal's Racine et Shakespeare.Writing ostensibly in romanticism's defense, orfrom an historical viewpoint obverse to W61fflin's, Stendhal argues that the differ-ence between romanticism and classicism is purely a matter of time, both at the gen-eral level of history ("Racine was romantic" in his day) and at the .level of the indi-vidual work (the fleeting moments of romantic "illusion"experienced during the actof aesthetic reception). Cf. Stendhal, especially 57-60, 71; and Brown 401: "Historyisalways moving toward the baroque and away from the classic. This means that eachage 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 isboth classic and baroque, classic in its essence and baroque in its existence, classic inits formal perfection and baroque in its expressivity."On linguistic art as the representation of temporal difference, see my discussion ofLessing and Benjamin below. See also Payot.230

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

8/22/2019 1771503

3/29

LESSING& KANT

plicated in it at all times, the material identity of a medium makes itshistory different from either a causal sequence or predetermined en-telechy, less like logic carrying itself out than a landslide carryingbodily its own force. Changes in empirical technique or formal con-ventions may seem to come suddenly, with or without reason, and insurveying what has becomedistinct, we may ask precisely when andwith whom this movement began. Yet the more closely one attends tothe medium that dynamically links its practitioners, the more likely itis that the answer to the age-old question, "Howlong has this beengoing on?"will be, in turn, "Whocan tell?"Something has been going on in our view of aesthetic media them-selves-not in our view of the development of individual media but inour sense that anything individuates them at all. This equation ofmedia may always have been going on (Hagstrum 3-70; Praz 3-27;Mitchell "Spatial"),'or it may have been the particular aim of themodernist avant-garde (Frank; Laude, especially 480). It may havebeen most important to the theory and practice of renaissance paint-ing (Lee; Rosand),3 or limited in importance to mannerist aestheticsand baroque poetics (Fowlie, especially 503-06). It may have inspiredthe romantic reaction against neoclassical poetics (Babbitt), or theromantic revitalization of eighteenth-century sentimental painting(Greenberg, esp. 297-302).4 It may have reached a peak in high mod-ernist concrete poetry (Steiner 192-218); it may be "ageneral prin-ciple 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 thepictorialhas been ongoing since Homer. His definition of literarypictorialism sstraightforward:Inorder to be called 'pictorial'a descriptionor an imagemustbe,in its essentials,capableof translation nto paintingor some other visualart";"theart of the poet resembles the art of the painter" (xxi-xxii; 162; I will return later toHagstrum's discussion [17-19] of Homer and remarks on Lessing). UnlikeHagstrum, or Mitchell, who views "spatialform" as universal to the "experience andinterpretationof literature" 541-42),Prazrestricts hevalidityof utpicturapoesis othe retrospectiverecognitionof "likenesses mongall the worksof art of a period"(54), suggestingthat what unites mutuallycontemporaryarts is not their sensorycomplementarityor intertranslatabilityas Mitchelland Hagstrumargue respec-tively),but a kind of "aestheticmemory"n which their distinctivetemporalformsareregistered(57-58).3See especially Lee 200-205 on the Arspictoriaconstrued from ancient theories ofpoetrybysixteenth-centuryriticsof painting.4Cf.IngeborgHosterey,"Laokoonnd Modernitit"and "DieModerneamEnde?,"for fine commentaries on Greenberg's seminal view that modern abstract artreinvigorates Lessing's call for the artist's critical engagement with the particularityof his medium. Hosterey cites Greenberg's observation that the modernist move-ment intensifies a "'self-criticalendency that began with the philosopherKant"'(170).

231


8/22/2019 1771503

4/29

COMPARATIVEITERATURE

"Ekphrastic"124, 128;Ekphrasis:f. Scott); or it maybe a "poetic prac-tice" of "self-signification" underlying the history of painting(Damisch, Theorie42-47). Lastly, and most recently, it may be apostmodern reaction to the "anti-iconic" "imbalance"in structuralistand post-structuralist literary theory (Mitchell, "Spatial"565);5 or thepostmodern adoption, in academic criticism, of the ideologically nul-lifying mode of argument by readily consumable picture(Christensen).6 What it is-and still dares not speak its name in thediscourse of contemporary criticism-is a distinct resurgence of thedoctrine of utpicturapoesis,7 the historically controversial notion thatwords and pictures are like one another, work to the same end, andso can (or should) be treated interchangeably.8 The sense that con-ceptual distinctions drawn between these media are either false or, atvery least, counterproductive, has taken hold of the critical imagina-tion with all the unselfconscious ubiquity of an interpretive norm.The purpose of the present essay is to question that norm, bringingto the fore some aspects of contemporary criticism that encouragethe recurrent pictorialist doctrine and reinvestigating an historicmovement in critical theory whose groundbreaking significance thatdoctrine neglects.Insofar as critical terminologies go, the force of the ut picturapoesiscomparison has worked predominantly one way, with theory of thevisual media, spearheaded by film studies, freely adopting themetalanguage of language. Terms like "grammar,""syntax,""rheto-ric," "metaphor,"and, of course, "metalanguage," seem to have fol-

I Writing slightly before the rapid proliferation of postmodern theories of the im-age, Mitchell predicts that this reaction will stem from physiological evidence for a"hemispheric theory of the brain" ("Spatial"565n). In a companion piece to "SpatialForm in Literature" that argues alternately for literary form in painting, Mitchellheralds "postmodernism" as "an explosive breaking down of the barrier between vi-sion and language that had been rigorously maintained by modernism" ("UtPictura"352).

6 Christensen's especially timely analysis focuses on "the notion of picturability onwhich, increasingly, both contemporary theory and the theory of the contemporaryare based" (439). His critique extends importantly to the collaboration between thepictorial selling of consumerism by "corporate populism" and "the emergence of thenew historicism with its propagation of picturability as a mode of critical argumenta-tion 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 Arspoeticafrom which its slogan is taken. For a meticulous analysis of the larger theoreti-cal and immediate verbal context of Horace's extended analogy, see Trimpi, "Mean-ing";and "Horace's."Discrepancies between the classical text and its later appropria-tions 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 andmanner of expression, but were considered almost identical in fundamental nature,in content, and in purpose."232


8/22/2019 1771503

5/29

LESSING& KANT

lowed naturally from-though they are not necessarily implied by-the general semiotic paradigm of differential signification.9 Barthes'sMythologies1957) offers a handy reference point for plotting the riseof contemporary interest in the "poetics"of visual images,1' althoughhis ElMmentse semiologie 1964) soon suggested that semiotics mightturn out to be a branch of linguistics, thereby reversing Saussure'sfounding subordination of linguistic forms to a larger science of signs(80-81, 167; Saussure 33-34). The renewed influence of the FrankfurtSchool and recent canonization of Benjamin's writings on pictorialimages and tactile objects (emphasizing, in the one case, modern re-producibility, and in the other, specific dialectical involvement in his-tory,with the effect of suggesting a political dimension to Riegl's "op-tic" and "haptic" [Spdtromische2-36, 248]) have served to comple-ment this general thrust towards a critique of the visual via the poetic.While remaining eccentric to the methods and aims of traditionalart history," this tendency has invigorated the concept of the visualimage and virtually insured the institutionalization of popular andgeneral cultural studies. The limitless range of objects of investiga-tion implied by these last two alone makes the metaphoricity, or, atvery least, the technical imprecision, of much of the critical discourseso generated seem a minor consideration. Even worse, it makes suchconsiderations appear like anti-"professionalist" niggling, a sinisterbackpeddling whose only net result, to recall one of the more unfor-gettable phrases of Stanley Fish-Henry Ford (and sometimes HennyYoungman) of the humanities profession-might be "no jobs"(204).12One need not share Fish's one and only belief, that all theo-retical reflection is circumstance and the very pretense of self-

9The adoption in visual studies of the Saussurian conceptualization of language asa system, with its necessary bracketing of historical linguistics, should be distin-guished from earlier attributions of linguistic models to art which, influenced pre-cisely by the rise of nineteenth-century historical linguistics, also admitted the meta-phoric nature of their schematization. See, for example, Riegl's explanation of hisuse of the term "historical grammar" (instead of the more literal "theory of ele-ments") in developing a "scientific"approach to art history (Historische 210-11).In the art world, by contrast, the comparison between poetry and painting hasbeen practically replaced by an identity in the works of such successful renovators ofthe doctrine as Barbara Kruger andJenny Holzer.10Predating Barthes by nearly a decade is Spitzer's iconographic and poetic analy-sis of a Sunkist orange juice ad (see "American").11The reason for this may be referred to the material differences between themedia. 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 criti-cal or analytic methods (see especially 443, 437-39, 444n). Cf. Holly, especially 373.12 In "Anti-Professionalism" (215-46) Fish counter-argues that the dispositionagainst professionalism is intrinsic to professional well-being. Cf. Youngman.

233


8/22/2019 1771503

6/29

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

criticism deluded,'3 to feel that the proliferation of linguistic modelsinto pictorial fields is a gift horse one should not look in the mouth.Like most proposed similitudes, however, the doctrine of picturesas words does not offer symmetrical rewards.By a telling irony of con-ceptual history, the very properties of language that make its analysisappear infinitely and profitably transportable seem to vanish fromlanguage once that transportation, or translation, is taken forgranted, once the metaphoric exchange between media becomes themethodological everyday. Translations of theory of language seem towork very much the same way. Now that Nietzsche, Hegel, and Kant,among others, appear fully transposed from the confines of the his-tory of speculative philosophy to a more general theoretical land-scape, it is as if many of their most significant observations on thespecific nature of linguistic art (whether rhetoric, ancient and ro-mantic poetry, or poetry tout court) had never been written. Theirdefinition and analysis of distinct modes or moments of the aes-thetic"4-categorical attempts at understanding the dynamic powerof art whose critical acumen had attracted translation in the firstplace-also seem to have gone the way of all conceptual limits. Inpart because it appears doubly futile to attempt to identify just whenthis second moment in the return of ut pictura poesisbegan-to askhow long the practical pictorialization of language, its interpretivedesignification, has been going on-it seems appropriate to examineinstead a conscious attempt to undo the doctrine, Lessing's endeavorto identify the distinct modalities of word and picture in Laokoon.As Laokoon sought to defend Troy, so Lessing's Laokoonseeks todefend the identity of the arts by questioning the equation of verband image which, seeming to bestow riches, threatens to usurp thevery ground of reception. Maintaining that ground may well provecritical to our understanding of current interpretive tendencies; re-linquishing it surely has direct effects on our larger conception ofhistory. Contemporary adherence to the doctrine of ut pictura poesishas arisen, not coincidentally, at a time when our view of history, andof historiographical concepts and methods, is also undergoing sub-stantial change (cf. Brodsky Lacour). More specifically, the non-mimetic understanding of language advanced in Laokooncontradictsa view of the conception of language in Lessing's entire century most

13Expounded throughout Doing What ComesNaturally, this belief is most forcefullyarticulated in "Consequences" (315-41) and "CriticalSelf-Consciousness, Or Can WeKnow What We're Doing" (436-467). A particularly incisive, as well as appreciativeand good-humored, riposte to Fish is offered by Brooks.14Such as the Apollonian and Dionysian, the beautiful and the sublime, or thesymbolic, classic, and romantic, to cite only the most central.

234


8/22/2019 1771503

7/29

LESSING& KANT

widely promoted in our own time by the schematic historicism ofFoucault.'5Attending to Lessing's argument will not keep the attrac-tions of Foucauldian revisionism or other versions of the gifts ofGreeks at bay, but it can help explain the appeal as well as indicatethe conceptual limits of much new historical theory. A theory of dis-course that dovetails with a history of discourse so as to dovetail ulti-mately with both a theory and history of power is bound to appearattractive-whatever misrepresentation of earlier theory it entails-during a critical period in which the relationships between theoryand history, language and history, theory and power, and languageand power are foregrounded, divided, and fraught. Foucault's histo-riography effectively cancels these conflictual relationships by equat-ing their terms, providing a kind of comfort in the notion that dis-course, theory, and history are one thing after all-a desire for powerdisguised as reason. Such a globalizing theory presents an additionalreason for turning to Laokoononce again. For Foucault's theory ofdiscourse as history proceeds, oddly enough, by way of pictures;power, the lowest common denominator of that theory, is repre-sented by Foucault in spatial configurations. Indeed, it can be ar-gued-and here one uses painterly metaphors advisedly-that thevery persuasiveness of the picture of the power of "discursive""rea-son" Foucault draws has more to do with the immediate attraction ofthe visual over the verbal than with the accuracy of Foucault's owndepictions.16 Describing discourse in markedly visual terms and cast-ing cognitive themes as scenes, Foucault himself rightly lays no claimto any diachronic rendering of history. His self-contained historicalepochs are explicitly modeled instead on painting, organized spacesof containment, and other physical forms (Las Meninas, thepanopticon, ship of fools, asylum, h6pitalgendral,penal institution,and, ultimately, the body itself), visual examples which exercise theirown 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 disposi-tion-"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 originalcompartmentalizing of things," see Les mots12-15. On Foucault's influence on inter-pretation of eighteenth-century linguistic theory, see note 25 below.16Cf. Snyder and Cohen's thoroughly enlightening technical refutation ofFoucault's nonanalytical assertions regarding Las Meninas. Snyder and Cohen cor-rect Foucault's inaccurate description of the point of view from which the painting isprojected, and, by identifying the actual point of view and corresponding vanishingpoint of Las Meninas, they go far in indicating an appreciable irony of Foucault'sown discursive method: that his descriptions of techniques for organizing reason arepurely symbolic gestures, drawn, as it were, in very broad strokes (433, 437; see Lesmots 19-31 for Foucault's discussion of Las Meninas).

235


8/22/2019 1771503

8/29


Still, whether or not one feels drawn by the use of graphic images orepresent a supposed semiotic"transparency"of reason, Foucault'scentral portrait of the "ClassicalAge," or Age of Reason, which hedefines as extending to the onset of "modernity"in the early nine-teenth century (Lesmots13-14),'" is best kept at a distance from actualtexts. Inspired by the French seventeenth century, and in that cen-tury more by Port-Royal"8 han by Pascal, Racine, or Madame deLafayette, Foucault's age of semiotic transparency extends to the lit-erature and theory of the French eighteenth century only at the costof their erasure, and its further extension to the German Enlighten-ment, which Kant more aptly called the "Ageof Criticism"(KrVA11.3:13; LogikA 40. 6:457), enforces a concept of historical and culturalhomogeneity where there is none. Few texts make this critical pointmore effectively than Laokoon,which distinguished truth in poetryfrom beauty in painting,'9 the illusion of vision produced by languagefrom the illusions of optical representation, precisely on the basis ofthe 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-historicalchange than Goethe would later attest,2" t was Lessing who spelledthe beginning of the end of neoclassical literary norms in his time.The contemporary resurgence of those norms, in historical and in-terpretive theories explicitly opposed to the idealization of history

7For Foucault's description of this "archaeological" section of time as a "space"of"purerepresentation" (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 andLancelot, Grammaireg&nerale t raisonnie iii-xxvii. On Foucault and Port-Royal, seealso Damisch, Thdorie84-90. That Foucault's characterization of the discursive signas a self-imaging similitude, in which "semiology and hermeneutics are superimposedand confused as one" (85-86; cf. Foucault, Les mots 80) might be too uniform evenfor an aesthetic theory of self-signifying painterly signs, is briefly suggested byDamisch (89-90).19Cf. Gombrich 141: "the point is, I believe, that Beauty is not Truth. Lessing wasnot a Platonist."20 Goethe's comments on Laokoon arise in the context of his own distinction be-tween the modalities of "vision"[Anschauung] and "concept" [Begrifj]: "[Vision] de-

mands a worthy object, which is not always available, and a formation [Bildung] inproportion 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 thetools of formation." Lessing, Goethe next indicates, provided just such tools. But thehighly visual imagery and dramatic temporal structure of his account of Lessing'sformative effect, the barely disguised irony with which he describes this youthful ex-perience of apparently irreversible change, all suggest that Goethe thinks the workof Laokoon is actually never done. See Dichtung und Wahrheit9:316 (all translationsin this essay, unless otherwise indicated, are my own).236


8/22/2019 1771503

9/29

LESSING& KANT

and art that characterized neoclassicism,21makes Lessing, who sus-pected all doctrinal norms,22a theorist whose time may have, in asense, returned.23 If the modernist aesthetic now appears increas-ingly irrelevant, a naive formalism or latter-day classicism, it may beno less the case that the new didacticism championed in an academyand art world shaped by postmodern theory and aesthetic practicesalso recalls the shift to moral illustration by which neoclassicism as-similated the pictorial excesses of the baroque. Obviously, the desireto overcome distinctions between media can cut both ways;since theview that the media reflect each other may be used to reflect anypoint of view or moral cause, it may be useful to reconsider, by con-trast, Lessing's criticism of such assimilations on analytic grounds: heredefines those differences (which the temporal course of interpreta-tion seems bound to obviate) between the media he equates con-ceptually again and again.Finally, before turning directly to Lessing as if to an uncontestableauthority,24we should note that Laokoon, oo, has been the object ofhistorical and interpretive revision. Indeed, one index of the serious-ness and scope of contemporary pictorialism is that it has, on occa-sion, gone back to question Lessing's influential text. Recent inter-pretations have argued that Laokoon ubscribes to the very doctrine itseems 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 anidealization of classical models and of mimesis. Cf. Trimpi's fine definition of thisrecurring pattern: "By neoclassic' attitudes in art and literature I have meant simplythat attempt to verify principles of artistic representation by referring them to his-tory and tojustify aesthetic responses to the work of art by reference to its verisimilartruth. Defined so generally, neoclassicism refers not to an intention characteristic ofa period or movement but an ever-present effort of the mind to seek empirical con-solation in the face of uncertainty about the objects which it experiences" ("Mean-ing"27n30).

22 A psycho-biographical account of Lessing's tendentiousness-he was "aPyrrhonist at heart"-is offered by Gombrich 145-52.23 Whether or not the "time" that prompted Lessing's critical observations is in-deed repeating itself, by a kind of "eternal return" making Goethe's salad days ourown, can only remain a matter of speculation. But, as Damisch has argued, evenNietzsche's conception of a step beyond Laokoonwas, in analytic terms, "a turn back-ward"; and, while "Heideggerian criticism" has remained mute on the subject of

Lessing's writing, any contemporary encounter with Laokoon cannot be too late (thisin 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 appraisalof the continuing relevance of Lessing to any "art form" engaged in "critical reflec-tion upon its specificity as a medium" (169); Hosterey's examples include the mod-ern 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 wrestthe power of authority from Winckelmann, Caylus, and Spence.237


8/22/2019 1771503

10/29


(Wellbery);5 and that its differentiation of media rests on no cogni-tive distinction but rather on an historically conditioned hierarchy ofthe arts that reinforces certain hierarchical relations of power and,implicitly, of gender (Mitchell, "Politics").2 The nonsystematic ap-proach to aesthetics announced in Laokoonmay account in part forthis revisionary reception. At once a theoretical forerunner and themethodological antithesis of Kant, whose Critiquegave new philo-25 More precisely, Wellbery argues that it is not "painting perse,"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 anideal content," "the experience of presence [which] communicates its contents im-mediately to intuition"-in other words, the sense of unmediated presence sug-gested by transparent or self-effacing signs (235-38). The description is not an unfa-miliar one, but its application to Lessing is. To argue that Lessing views "poetry as atransparent discourse" (241; cf. 42, 72, 84, 91, 95, 137) is to conform to Foucault'snotion of the "myth of the sign" in the Classical Age, and Wellbery clearly states hisadherence to Foucault's thesis: "The entire philosophy of the sign-and 'classicalthought,' according to Foucault ... rests on the primacy of intuition, the directapprehension 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 po-etry as nonsemiotic, iconic art which Wellbery attributes to Laokoonobviously runscontrary to Lessing's explicit definition of narrative poetry as composed of sequen-tial "arbitrarysigns." Wellbery scrupulously attempts to overcome this difficulty byarguing that, for Lessing, as for all "aesthetic theory in the Enlightenment," "thepoem 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 Iwill return.26 Mitchell prints a table of political and gendered oppositions which he claims areimplied, while not actually stated, in Laokoon. Such argument at the level of implica-tion 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 alsothe sense traditionally associated (at least since Plato) with cognition, and so onemay suppose, with the superior hierarchical position of men. In support of his mainthesis-that the "whole distinction [between poetry and painting] hangs ... on theslender thread of the difference between primary and secondary representation, di-rect and indirect expression" (102)-Mitchell cites Lessing's observation (sec. 16)that "painting can also imitate actions" and "poetryalso depicts bodies," "but," n theformer case, "only by suggestion [nur andeutungsweise] through bodies," and in thelatter, "only by suggestion through actions" (Lessing 9:95). Arguing further thatpainting represents bodies "bymeans of shapes and colors-that is, by certain kindsof signs," Mitchell concludes: "[ft]he distinction between 'direct' and 'indirect' istherefore not a difference of kind, but one of degree" (102). In joining the issue of"indirect" signification or "suggestion" to the decisive difference between pictorialand verbal signs (which he denies), Mitchell helpfully clarifies the broader thrust ofthe ut pictura poesis doctrine, for in both cases the question is whether the differencebetween direct and indirect, presentational and abstract signification, is a differencein kind. To argue that it is not, however, is to argue also that such "kinds of signs" asbrushstrokes or even mimicking gestures are categorically indistinguishable fromthe noniconic "kind," the visually and acoustically transmissible signs of words. Ifthat difference seems "a slender thread," it is also the same thread on which hashung, at least since Augustine, all theory of specifically linguistic signification.238


8/22/2019 1771503

11/29

LESSING & KANT

sophical meaning to the term "architectonic,"27 Lessing describes hisobservations 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 disor-derly collection of notes for a book than a book" (9:5). What Lessing,following Diderot, called an "accidental" approach,28 we might in-stead call empirical, an engagement with texts taking the form ofphilological criticism in an active, interpretive sense. The same canbe said for the conceptual vocabulary in which Lessing's so-called "ac-cidental" observations are expressed. The occasionally striking disor-der of that critical language, even as it may invite revisionist readings,displays neither simple inadvertence, nor bad faith, nor an histori-cally determined semiotic consciousness on Lessing's part, but ratheran enduring theoretical problem related to the accidents of languageLessing recognized and addressed.

"We Germans are not lacking in systematic books" (9:5). With con-siderable understatement, Lessing distinguishes the act of criticismfrom its mannered imitation, the gratuitous elaboration of concep-tual systems, a distinction Kant will repeat some fifteen years laterwhen criticizing the insubstantial systems of dogmatic metaphysics(111:36). Still, some systematic principles regarding different aes-thetic media inform the analyses of texts and pictorial objects that are

It should also be noted that Lessing's comments on "indirect" imitation directlyfollow 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 existin themselves, but must be attached to bodies" (9:95). Far from implying the repre-sentational incompatibility of space and time, Lessing's distinction between the ob-jects represented by verbal and nonverbal signs remains tied to a differentiation oftheir cognitive forms, the "arbitrary"or abstract references of discourse and "natu-ral" or imaged references of painting. Still, as has become familiar from the spatial-form-and-literature debate, any basis for differentiation may appear too slender andany recognition of difference too great when a neoplatonic or apostolic unity of im-age and word is fundamentally desired. (Cf. Mitchell, "Spatial"560: "the spatial formof literature becomes the logos or incarnate word, and the criticism which revealsthis form becomes itself a literary, metaphoric creation, like the voice of Blake'sBard, whose poetry depends upon his having hearda word and sensed the presenceof its living, incarnate form.")27 On the specifically architectural, aesthetic dimension of Kant's Critique,see my"Architecture."28Cf. Lessing's gloss of the title (Hermda) he gave to a collection of "critical andantiquarian essays"whose projected composition (1762-63) was subsequently inter-rupted and absorbed by his work on Laokoon: "Everythingthat the Greeks acciden-tally found on their path, they named Hermia ... for Hermes was the God of thepath, and they thanked him for everything that happy circumstance carried intotheir hands" (14: 290nl).

239


8/22/2019 1771503

12/29


dispersed throughout Laokoon.Linking these analyses, they define"thelimits of painting and poetry"--like Kant'snegative limitation ofknowledge to the form of mental representations-according towhich an understanding of the mediation of cognition, and so of thelarger relation between aesthetics and epistemology, can be ap-proached. Unlike the doctrine whose aesthetic products he criticizes,Lessing locates the cognitive potential of the arts not in what unitesthem but in what makes them materially non-identical, and, follow-ing the fact of material difference, practically and conceptually non-identical as well.29His focus on the material differences of the artsdoes not aim merely to maintain their integrity (a mute integrity be-ing as useless as a garrulous and indistinct union), but rather-andwith greater theoretical significance-to bring the critical dimensionof aesthetic forms into relief. Lessing's real philosophical insight intothe aesthetic, one that Hegel would make into a method for narrat-ing the history of the spirit, is that the empirical limitations withinwhich art forms operate are also the only means through which theygain a critical edge.Integrally related to these material conditions, the feature thatmost defines the media as critically different from one another is thepresence or absence of mimetic representation. Departing fromAristotle, to whom he claimed allegiance in his writings on drama,Lessing uses the term Nachahmung ("imitation") in Laokoon to de-scribe the works of both painters and poets. Yet the conception ofimitation as objective visual illusion or verisimilitude, whose formalobservance in French classical drama Lessing criticized in hisHamburgische Dramaturgie as non-Aristotelian, 30is confined in Laokoonto the plastic arts alone.31 The visually life-like imitations of plastic art29In this emphasis Lessing differed even from his closest theoretical correspon-dent. Mendelssohn, whose definition of "natural"and "arbitrary"igns as the respec-tive "limits" of pictorial and discursive art doubled back to reaffirm a mimetic over-lap between the arts. See Mendelssohn's "Betrachtungen fiber die Quellen undVerbindungen der sch6nen Wissenschaften und Kfinste" ["Considerations on thesources and relations of the beautiful sciences and arts"] 1:165-90 (especially 174-80); see also Mendelssohn's annotations of Lessing's early drafts of Laokoon, inLessing, 14:344-48.

30 On Lessing's view that even dramatic imitation involved neither sensory "illu-sion" 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 ofvisual art with French drama. See also Todorov, "Poetic" 107-09; "Esth6tique,"espe-cially 38; and Wimsatt 69 on Lessing's opposition to the notion of mimeticresemblance in poetry. Steiner argues, by contrast, that for Lessing "both [poetryand painting] are iconic of reality," a view she bases on Abrams's The Mirror and theLamp (13-14).240


8/22/2019 1771503

13/29

LESSING & KANT

are contrasted throughout Laokoon to the imitations of linguistic art,whose purpose is not to representobjectivelybut to render diachronically;for Lessing, object-representation and diachronic narration are op-posed terms.The confusion of the visual with the verbal, a primary characteristicof postmodern aesthetics and a major factor in Foucauldian theory ofhistory, is not, however, easily avoided. While Lessing's rethinking ofaesthetics and aesthetic theory with regard to the properties of lan-guage represents precisely a rejection of this noncritical leveling, healso encounters difficulties in keeping the arts separated, difficultiesarticulated in descriptive language itself. At the close of section 14 ofLaokoon Lessing admits these difficulties openly, in a footnote that,perhaps because it indicates a conflict Lessing also admits he cannotresolve, has gone virtually unnoted in both traditional and revisionistreadings of his text. Following a discussion of the absence of pictorialimagery in Milton and the New Testament, Lessing states:

There are paintableand unpaintablefacts,and the writerof historycan narratethe most painterly in as unpainterly a fashion as the poet can represent the mostunpainterlyn apainterly ashion.To viewthis matterotherwise s to let oneself simplybe misledbythe ambiguityofthe word.A poetic painting is not necessarilysomething that can be transformedinto amaterialpainting.(9:91-92)Having pointed to a discontinuity between poetic and material"painting," Lessing nonetheless proceeds to describe the "ambiguity"("Zweideutigkeit") of their designation as rationally continuous, as-serting that "every trait, every combination of traits" through whichthe poet makes his subject perceptible "is called painterly, is called apainting" ("heisst mahlerisch, heisst ein Gemihlde") because itbrings us closer to that degree of illusion which "material pictures"induce most easily (9:92). It is at this moment, just as his critique ofidentifications of the arts seems to falter in the very corner where itlays blame-describing painting as a model for poetic language-that Lessing notes that the question he has been addressing, i.e., onwhat basis poetic imaging can be called "a painting," is a question hehas been misled to by the "ambiguity of the word." He analyzes that"Zweideutigkeit" philologically, locating the cause of its misleadingeffect not in any natural similarity between the different arts referredto, but in their shared reference, an "arbitrary name":

[n] 96. What we call poetic paintings, the ancients named phantasiae, as one recallsfrom 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 thisdesignation [poetischephantasiae] and refrained entirely from using the word paint-ing [Gemdihlde].They would have spared us a multitude of half-true rules, whose

241


8/22/2019 1771503

14/29


main justification is the agreement of an arbitraryname. No one would have subordi-nated poetic phantasiae to the limits of a material painting; but as soon as phantasiaewere namedpoetic paintings, hebasis orbeingmisledwasestablished(9:92b).32Granted that Lessing's wish to ban Gemdhlde ("painting") from"manuals of poetry" is wishful thinking-poetisches Bild ("poetic im-

age"), Hegel's poetische Vorstellung ("poetic representation"), andother qualified but still ambiguous expressions having arisen to takeits place-his note on the arbitrary verbal origin of theoretical errorsheds light on the crux and dilemma of aesthetic theory generally,the structural exchange of vision and words."33Far from being hypo-thetical, this dilemma is written into the language of aesthetic theory;and far from being limited to the past history of that language, thefirst such exchanges Lessing's note illuminates arise directly inLaokoon. In section 13, for example, Lessing had described narrativepoets as leading us "through a whole gallery of paintings" (9:89); butin section 14, cited above, he uses the same turn of phrase to praiseMilton by default: "Admittedly, Milton can fill no picture galleries"(9:91). If it is Milton's inability to fill a gallery that makes him forLessing a second Homer, then Lessing's metaphor of the poem aspicture gallery-or, rather, of the narrative poet as one who leads us,dynamically and diachronically, through such a gallery-can only beread coherently as a conceptual play on words taking place in thecontext of already misleading usage, Lessing's ambiguous responseto 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 articula-tion is mahlen, "to paint." But in section 16, the central section ofLaokoon, Lessing makes the nonmimetic basis of so-called verbal"painting" critically clear. After briefly setting out the differences be-tween the arts systematically, starting "from first principles," Lessingreturns immediately to his own first principle, that of the act of tex-tual study, stating: "Iwould put little trust in this dry chain of reason-ing, if I didn't find it fully confirmed by Homer's praxis, or, rather, ifit were not Homer's praxis itself that had brought me to it" (9:95). Itis as a consequence of Homer's narrative praxis that Lessing expli-

32 In the only discussion I have found of this passage, Hagstrum (156) literallyreverses its terms, claiming that enargeiawas the word Lessing wanted to substitutefor Gemiihldepicture) and leaving aside any consideration of phantasia.33 Cf. Holly 372. Lessing's note also indicates the involvement of sensory or aes-thetic images in linguistic theory. Lexical difficulties along the same lines were notedwith historic consequences by Saussure, who substituted the formal terms "signified"and "signifier"for "concept" and "acoustic image" on grounds of a semantic "ambi-guity" arising in the customary use of the word "sign" directly comparable to thoseLessing gives for replacing Gemdhlde see Saussure 26, 99-100).

242


8/22/2019 1771503

15/29

LESSING & KANT

cates the critical thrust of Laokoon: hat poetry, because it "paints""progressiveactions," does not represent bodily objects. Instead, po-etry uses objects, or rather a single trait of an object, to delineate its"real"or "actual object" ("eigentliche[r] Gegenstand," 9:95), "ac-tion," much as an arbitraryname provides the subject and comple-ment of a verb: "I ind that Homer paints nothing other than progres-sive actions, and that he paints all bodies, all individual things, onlyby wayof their contribution to these actions, usually only by means ofa single trait" (9:95-96). Nowhere is this specifically verbal nature ofnarrative poetic art better demonstrated than in Lessing's discussionof the scepters of Agamemnon and Achilles, symbols of power whichare, objectively, nothing in themselves, but whose movement fromsubject to subject makes action conceivable as a series of discretepredicates, just as do words. The passage of the scepters is whatLessing calls "history,"and representation plays no part in the acci-dents of power it designates, nor in our knowledge of those baretraits that link names like verbs:

What does it matter to Homer, how far behind him he leaves the painter? Insteadof an illustration he gives us the history of the scepter: first it is worked on byVulcan;next it glitters in the hands ofJupiter; now it marks the dignity of Mercury; now it isthe commander's staff of the warlike Pelops; now it is the shepherd's staff of thepeaceful Atreus, etc. . . . So finally I know this scepter better than if a painter were tolay tbeforemy eyes,or a secondVulcanto deliver t into myhands. (9:98)

In "knowing" the scepter better than if he had it in his hands, inknowing what Lessing calls in section 10 "the thing itself' ("die Sacheselbst") (9:74),34 what he says in section 5 the verbal "imagina-tion sees through" to (9:43),35Lessing

knows no "thing,"and "sees"34 Here Lessing is distinguishing the "allegorical images" necessarily used to iden-tify "personified abstractions" in plastic art from the nonallegorical "attributes"bywhich they are identified in poetry. The latter, he argues by inversion, are not imagesstrung together like "letters," codified iconic substitutes for linguistic signs, but"tools"which take material part in ongoing narrative action: "instruments withoutwhich these beings could not produce the effects we ascribe to them." "The thingitself' which these predicative attributes "signify"(9:74) is thus not their own objec-tivitybut the object of poetic imitation, action.31 Parting company with both sides of a debate over the appearance of theLaokoon 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 figurerests instead on intellectual grounds (the human body is worthier of imitation thanclothing) and that to deny the artist this motive "debases" plastic art. That such adebate might even arise signifies for Lessing the reductioad absurdumof the neoclassi-cal 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 withwhat they are deceived?" Poetic imitation, by contrast, remains unaffected by ques-tions of literal proper dress, for already in poetry clothing "coversnothing; our imagi-nation sees through everywhere." Once again, however, Lessing specifies that243


8/22/2019 1771503

16/29


no object but its "history,"or, more precisely, the history of handsthrough which it has passed. Each of the clauses narrating thishistory is limited to a constative minimum: pronoun, verb, abstractnoun or adjective ("dignity," "peaceful,""warlike")and proper noun.Homer's epic narrative is not a drama; and rather than emphasizethe formal unity of its plot, or suggest that it somehow be viewedsynchronically,36 Homer's poem, according to Lessing (and Homeriststend to agree ), represents historical action as the unqualified act offorward motion, motion verbalized in what Lessing called, with ap-propriate awkwardness, "progressive imitations" ("fortschreitendeNachahmungen," 9:95 etpassim). Instead of serving as a synchronicdevice of representation (a painting), the scepter in this passageworks as a narrative token, passed along from sentence to sentence,from one accident of history to the next. This is what Lessing indi-cates in the astonishing observation, a kind of Baudrillardism avant lalettre, hat even when Homer does not use an image to a specific narra-tive "end" ("Absicht")-when "he is concerned merely with the im-age" ("auch da, wo es ihm um das blosse Bild zu thun ist")-he "dis-perses this image over a kind of history" ("wirder dieses Bild in eineArt von Geschichte verstreuen"), subordinating it to the tempo, the"flow of discourse" ("Flussder Rede," 9:100).37If the discursive flowof postmodernism has made the idea of imaging as dispersal nowseem familiar, this notion is remarkable in Laokoonnot only becauseof its own timing, at the sources of modernity, but also because itrefers not to a visual image, the preferred vehicle of postmoderntheory, but to a word. Moreover, this word is more like an un-visualizable sign, a purely syntactic element, and less like a represen-tational painting than any concrete noun one might think of-ex-what the discursive imagination "sees" s not the body as a whole but its part in repre-senting action: "Whether or not Virgil's Laokoon is clothed, his suffering is as visiblein one part of his body as in another" (9:42-43).36There is no mention in Laokoon of a "single moment" in which the diachronicnarrative appears "a contentual (sic) whole," and no basis on which to entertain"ideal" rather than "material"suppositions regarding narrative signs, such as is sug-gested by Wellbery's phenomenalist notion of the "whole"poem functioning as a"formallynatural sign," "the form of intuitive presence" (237). Treating "idea" and"representation" interchangeably, when, it can be argued, it is upon the differentia-tion of these terms that the very possibility of aesthetic theory depends, Wellbery'shistorical interpretation of Lessing tends to accede to "ahigher 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 allegoricalfor any continuous allegory of the transmission of power: "The allegorical reading istherefore 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).244


8/22/2019 1771503

17/29

LESSING & KANT

cept, of course, for that false sign, Gemdhlde.Like a baton, a puremarker of movement, Homer's verbal image points to what is next,without representing why, and without ever representing itself.38Thisis the form of "poetic description" (9:50 etpassim) Lessing chooses todescribe. It is a differential lexical token easily endowed with allegori-cal meaning, as he subsequently remarks (9:98-99; cf.Jacobs 516-21);a sign that does not represent a thing, but gives the occurrence ofaction-otherwise as invisible as the gods-verbal form: a thing, inother words, which is a sign.39Lessing's understanding of poetic description offers a theoreticalcontext for interpreting an observation he made in correspondencewith Nicolai (letter of May 26, 1769) whose significance in recentcritical literature has sometimes overshadowed that of Laokoonit-self.40 Reacting to a review of Laokoon by Garve, Lessing apparentlyretreats from his appreciation of Homeric narrative and commendsdrama 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 closeto the chiasmus Lessing sets up here, by which signs attain naturalstatus and the things they signify are denaturalized. I know of no dis-cussion of this passage which focuses on the literal wording of thelatter and stranger portion of its inversion, the assertion, extraordi-nary for Lessing or for any secular theorist, that "things" signified

38 In the drafts of Laokoon that Lessing circulated to Mendelssohn and FriedrichNicolai for their comments, "motion" (or "movement," Bewegung) s the name given,instead of "action,"Handlung, to the object of poetic imitation (including imitationthat 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?" n which the inversion of signand thing signified is offered as a means of conceiving the linguistic mediation ofcognition generally.4o Wellek first called attention to it, interpreting Lessing's statement to mean thatin drama "language is natural because it is spoken bycharacters and in character,with gestures and expression of the face as in real life, and thus it loses the fatalquality 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 takesexception to Wellek's implication that "the preeminence of the dramatic genre" forLessing was "a function of theatrical performance" (49-50). Todorov cites the re-mark as Lessing's indication of an instance of semiosis in which linguistic "motiva-tion is complete," i.e., when "words designate words" rather than things("Esthetique" 37). Wellbery, by contrast, introduces the letter as a kind of dramaticproof that Lessing viewed all signs as natural (226). Cf. Jacobs 513n, on the way inwhich the remark may be used to identify Lessing withjust such a theory of "natural"(or unambiguous) linguistic signification.245


8/22/2019 1771503

18/29


could be "arbitrary."4'Rather than indicating the overcoming ofsemiotic relations, this phrase reverses the order of semiosis, as con-ventionally conceived. In this respect it recalls another highly uncon-ventional notion with which Lessing is not commonly associated:Benjamin's view that, as represented by baroque drama, "nature" it-self was "allegorical," and, as conjoined with history, subject totemporality (see esp. 145, 160). Lessing's description of verbal im-ages as necessarily dispersed over history, similarly renderingarbitrarythe thing imaged, also recalls Benjamin's treatment of theends of history as the artifactual givens of each successive "allegoricalperspective," images that become objects of knowledge once theiroriginal (we might say "natural") temporal context has been eradi-cated (159-63, 105). Their then explicitly arbitrary relation to thedramatic allegorical context not only "fixes" these "images" butmakes them into "fixing signs," "objects of knowledge in their ownright," "emblems" or indices of the passage of time (161-62). The im-age-signs of Benjamin's allegory become "natural" n Lessing's terms,insofar as they signify not a natural history but the fact that nature ishistorical, calling attention, by their own displacement, to the arbi-trariness of semiotic relations at any given moment of time.

What is not and cannot be arbitrary, however, according toLaokoon, s painting. Lessing's definition of the "signs"of painting as"natural,"carried over from DuBos, Mendelssohn, and others, im-plies no naturalization of their artifactual status. Indeed, Lessing'sanalytic observation that pictorial images of events are carefully con-structed so as to represent the context of "a fruitful moment" di-rected new critical attention to the conscious selection and composi-tion of signs involved in making plastic art. The signs of painting arenatural in semiotic aesthetic theory not because they are not artifac-tual but because they are not arbitrarywith respect to their object:

"1As cited in the preceding note, Todorov equates the designation "arbitrarythings" with "words,"reading the second half of the inversion as follows: "words thusdesignate words ... the motivation [of the sign] is complete" ("Esth6tique" 37; "Imi-tation" 41). Wellbery follows Todorov's interpretation of "'arbitrary things"' asmeaning "words,"but views this instead as the "point where [the naturalness of signi-fication] loses all meaning. The only referent which discourse can perfectly imitateturns 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 alreadycircular logic of reading language naturally. A noniconic reading which distin-guished between arbitrary signs and natural things would similarly distinguish be-tween "natural signs" and "arbitrary things." Cf. Lessing's comments earlier in thesame letter that the painting of "costume" and "even of a large part of bodily expres-sion" are also "natural signs of arbitrary things," i.e., visual images of conventions[17:290].246


8/22/2019 1771503

19/29

LESSING& KANT

through ongoing technical and conceptual permutations of its me-dium, painting shows what it gives the viewer to know. This can leadto the difficulty of showing the invisible, memorably analyzed inLessing's discussion of the painterly combination of two visible ob-jects-clouds and gods-to connote the invisibility of the latter (sec.12, 9:85-88).42 But when it comes to visibility, the fundamental condi-tion of pictorial as of all plastic art,43 painting gives up its claim tocognitive 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 makingvisible that is its own historical action. It has been objected that thelimits of Lessing's own understanding of painting are most evident inhis criticism of Caylus'sproposed painting of Helen asveiled (sec. 22,9:132-34; cf. Lee 215n84). Lessing remarked that, rather than de-scribing Helen, Homer narrates her active effect on those who sawher, the experiences of "pleasure, dedication, love, and rapture,which beauty causes"; furthermore, the poet "transformsbeauty" it-self into the dynamic quality of "charm," reshly defined by Lessing as"beauty in motion" (9:130). Like a scepter of power, then, Helen'sbeauty is a token of action in Homer; an image dispersed over his-tory, passing from Greek to Trojan, it is the thing which, operating asa sign, ostensibly links the series of ambiguous and often discontinu-ous effects and actions known as the Trojan War.44But a painting of Helen that showed her effect on others while hid-ing its cause would negate even the action it "suggested"(andeutungsweise)45 by withdrawing the body, the aesthetic object it-self. Any "Helen" a painter images will be a token of beauty, part of anongoing series of acts constituting not Homer's narrative but that ofanother "progressiveaction": the history of bringing images into be-ing, the history of art. To take Helen out of the picture, by contrast, isto commit no action as far as imaging is concerned, except that ofdenying the possibility of a relation between the pictorial arts and

42Lessing's insight here is recalled in Damisch's "theory of the/cloud/," in whichthe ambivalent pictorial sign of the cloud serves as a kind of metaphor for painting(see especially 215, 255).43Cf. Lessing in the Laokoondrafts: "Caylusdid not consider that the poet works ina double genre of beings and actions; visible and invisible. Painting cannot declarethis difference; in it everything is visible and visible in the same way"(14:363).44Lessing's observation that Homer never "portrays" he beauty "upon which thewhole 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).45Cf. note 26.

247


8/22/2019 1771503

20/29


knowledge.46Thus with respect to Caylus's hypothetical and hiddenfigure, Lessing may askwith genuine urgency a question which is alsothe most concise complete sentence in Laokoon:"Is that Helen?"(9:133).47A pictorial representation of Helen that showed no figurewould be comparable, in Lessing's terms, to an action left unstated,or narrated only by the words, "youknow how these things go." Like apoem that negates itself as verba, eaving its very lexical identity to thereader's or listener's imagination, a painting that contrives to makeus imagine Helen rather than see her image must make us questionwhether our imaginings bear any relationship to that particular hid-den figure, or, indeed, whether the unimaged figure meant toprompt our imagining "is"Helen at all. Imagination left on its own(whatever that would be), without visible "naturalsigns" to work on,does not so much rise to the heights of ineffable vision as fall back oncliched images whose already-known quality enforces a lack of imagi-nation and maintains the limits of ignorance. Finally, this withdrawalof the means to knowledge in its nonaesthetic assumption wouldhold for nonfigural painting as well. A painting of Helen in whichHelen wasnot visible would be like a display of nonfigural painting inwhich the paintings were not visible: no part of them, not even"empty"canvases, not even "empty" rames. To inquire of a pictorialrepresentation of Helen that does not show her, but shows the visiblereaction of others who also do not see her-"Is that Helen?"-is noless critical than to ask of spectators gaping at galleries shorn of paint-ings, a site vacant of sculpture or of building, indeed, at invisibilityitself, "Is hat art?"

The things of plastic art must be visible if they are to make theconception of something known, and that something need be nomore concrete than "Helen," a proper noun conventionally connot-ing a particularly significant instance of beauty, the beauty otherwiseknown to us in its function as a verbal token in a poem. It maybe, self-reflexively, 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 anunknown thing by another which would be just as unknown." The fact that "Helen" isnot the abstract persona, "Beauty,"but its poetic token in a narrated history, bothreverses and maintains the terms of Damisch's analysis, for while "Helen" would haveto be seen in order for her ("Helen's") effect on others to have meaning, "Beauty" sbest painted (following Damisch's comments on Cesare Ripa) with "her head in theclouds" (81-83).

47"Das st Helena? "-itself a succinct representation of the question of the relationbetween cognition and art-is later rephrased by Lessing in the bluntly de-aestheticized terms denoting an abandonment of that relation: "Washat dieses Dingvon der Helena?" ("Whatdoes this thing have of Helen?" 9:133).248


8/22/2019 1771503

21/29

LESSING & KANT

"art"-indeed, given the revolutions in the history of the medium, itprobably alwaysmust be, at least in part48-but without the particularvisible object, Lessing's "naturalsign," there is no conception, no his-torical movement of conceptions, nothing to be known.The absence of such visible objects in discourse makes discoursethe medium of action; Helen will always be Helen in language, anarbitrary name, but the passage of Helen, the history of what thename stands for, will be poetry, Homer's or another poet's, and itsmedium of representational knowledge is the linguistic sign. Return-ing for a final moment to Laokoon,and to Lessing's description of thethings of poetry as the arbitrary signs of history, there is a specific wayin which Lessing's endeavor can now be read as part of another pas-sage, the movement of criticalhistory. The sign of this movement isthe verbal image of Laokoon, and Lessing, the critic who attempts toread the difference between this verbal image and a statue, may beread, in turn, as Laokoon himself, or rather, as performing the criti-cal function Laokoon performs in Virgil's narrative.What the Trojanssee when they see the splendid horse is its material grandeur; theytake Sinon's story at face value.49But Laokoon, or Lessing, will haveno truck with such false transparency. Beautiful the horse may wellbe, but where, he asks, does it come from: what is its history? Orrather, of what progressive action is it a mere token; and, if we takethis token into our hands, what happens next?We all know what happened to Laokoon. He and his offspring werematerially immobilized by serpents moving toward the citadel (Aeneid2:201-227). The Trojans took those deaths, again transparently, ascaused by their own gods, and we, with the transparency of hindsight,take them as caused by gods friendly to the Greeks. (Virgil, inciden-tally, never says anyone sent the serpents, and one can alwaysenter-tain the suspicion that, much like Lessing's scepters, these serpentsmay have merely been moving on, making history of whomever hap-pened to stand in their way.) What Lessing says happened to hisLaokoonwas the publication, before the completion of Laokoon,ofWinckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (9:156). Assertingdramatically, "I don't dare take another step without having readthis work," Lessing ends Laokoon in (one-sided) debate withWinckelmann over the dating of the Laokoon statue. It is now gener-

48Cf. 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 betrusted (especially 117-22).

249


8/22/2019 1771503

22/29


ally agreed that Lessing's late dating of the statue was wrong, but themain interest of that debate was never empirical chronology. On thecontrary, what makes Lessing's effort in these final sections remark-able is that the only evidence he musters and manipulates remainstextual, on the order of philology rather than iconic history: rhetori-cal evidence in section 26 (the precise import of the comparativesimiliter);grammatical evidence in section 27 (the use of the perfecttense in an inscription); syntactical evidence in section 28 (the func-tion of a single comma in a description of a statue's pose); and biblio-graphical evidence in section 29 (the misquotations of Longinus andPliny which demonstrate Winckelmann's failure to go back to origi-nal textual sources). Lessing misdated the Laokoon statue just as hefudged the actual timing of his reading of Winckelmann,50and nei-ther of these facts impinges on Lessing's aesthetic theory in theslightest. Nor have they, despite repeated remonstrances, impededthe progress of his Laokoon.For what happened in critical history toLessing's limitation of visual representation to the plastic arts wasKant's limitation of knowledge to representation, the transformationof a critique of aesthetic forms into a critical epistemology.

In the context of the present discussion only some summary obser-vations on the Critique re possible, but even a brief recapitulation ofkey points made in each of the three Critiques may serve to under-score the relation between Lessing and Kant. Starting again from"firstprinciples," the first of these for Kant was the philosophicallyrevolutionary notion of a "transcendental aesthetic," the hypothesisthat all empirical, sensory perception already takes place in represen-tational form. At the opening of the First Critique Kant states, "Ascience of all aprioriprinciples of sensory perception I name the 'tran-scendental aesthetic"' (KrV B 36. 3:70), and in describing his new,epistemological use of the word "aesthetic"Kant refers specifically toits earlier adoption by Baumgarten. Like Lessing before him, Kantcriticizes Baumgarten's attempt to make aesthetic judgment a rea-soned science-"to bring the judgment of the beautiful under prin-ciples of reason and to raise the rules of these principles to a sci-ence"-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 erKunst des Alterthums 1763) was known to Lessingearlier than the opening sentence of section 26-"Herr Winckelmann's History ofAncient Art has appeared" ["Des Herrn Winckelmanns 'Geschichte der Kunst desAlterthums' ist erschienen"]--leads one to believe (9:156; see also Muncker's com-mentary, 14:378n2). Still, the verbal perfect, "ist erschienen," while implying rela-tive immediacy, remains grammatically untied to any specific date.250


8/22/2019 1771503

23/29

LESSING & KANT

into conflict with the empiricalcriteria on which they are based. Inorder to understand the ability to judge what is beautiful as some-thing other than prescribed taste, one must instead treatjudgment asa specific kind of mental activity, and this is Kant's purpose in theThird Critique.Yet in so considering judgment Kant also confronts what he callsthe "ambiguity"of the term "aesthetic." While the word had beenused historically to denote pleasing or beautiful forms, in Kant's criti-cal project "aesthetic" signifies the a prioriform of all phenomenalcognition. Here a reconception of epistemology which names thefact of formal sense perception "aesthetic" must proceed to redefinethe referent of "aesthetic"when, instead of the logical apprehensionof objects, the experience of pleasure is meant:

The expression-an aesthetic mode of representation-is entirely unambiguous,when what s understoodthereby s the relatingof arepresentation o an object-asappearance-toward the cognitionof thatobject ... Butfor a long time it has beenalsocustomary o call a mode of representationaesthetic, .e., sensory,when what smeant thereby is the relationship of a representation not to the cognitive faculty, butto the feeling of pleasureand displeasure . . Thus there remains an unavoidableambiguity in the expression-an aesthetic mode of representation-when one un-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 10:34-35)51

Just as Lessing's theory of poetry as the representation of actionrather than objects may be viewed as his critical resolution of the his-torical "ambiguity"of the word "painting,"so Kant's epistemologicaluse of the term "aesthetic" both makes the "ambiguity"of this "ex-pression"-in view of its long-standing use-"unavoidable," and pro-ceeds to resolve that ambiguity by critically reconceptualizing the ac-tivity to which its customary usage pertains. That activity, the judg-ment of the beautiful, is now defined neither on the basis of objectivecriteria, nor in terms of the cognition of objects, but, instead, as ac-tion: "This ambiguity can, however, nonetheless be cancelled if oneuses the expression aesthetic neither of the intuitions nor even less ofthe representations of understanding, but solely of the actions ofjudgment" (KU 10:35). What is "aesthetic,"then, is no longer a repre-sentation but an action, the activity of judging which, in the ThirdCritique, determines no object but rather a subject moved by "feel-ing": "Thus it will immediately be shown that, although through thenaming of an aesthetic judgment of an object, a given representation

5' Both this discussion of the "ambiguous" referential status of "aesthetic" andKant's explicit redefinition of the use of the word occur in the "First Draft of theIntroduction to the Critique fJudgment."251


8/22/2019 1771503

24/29

COMPARATIVELITERATURE

is related to an object, it is not the determination of the object but ofthe subject and his feeling that is understood in the judgment" (KU10:36).Within the Third Critique Kant remains on guard against the ambi-guity brought forward by his cognitive use of the aesthetic in the FirstCritique. Absent from its title, the term "aesthetic" appears in theCritique fJudgmentprincipally as a contrastive term to "teleological,"effecting a distinction between judgments of beautiful and of pur-poseful forms echoing Kant's larger division between pure and prac-tical reason. Returning, as he states, to its "ancient"meaning (KrVB36. 3:70n), Kant turns the concept of the aesthetic from a notion ofthe objectivity of the senses to that of their activity, with the criticaldifference that his new epistemological definition of an "aesthetic"that is "transcendental" refers to senses operating according to apriori"representations,"the pure forms of sensibility: space and time.Kant's "transcendental aesthetic" of all possible knowledge thusseems to unite the forms Lessing divides: in making representation acognitive category, Kant brings space and time together as the twinintuitions of the mind. Yet, as is well known, the representation oftime gave Kant the most difficulty. He introduced an additional no-tion, that of "intermediary representations," or "schemata,"in orderto join the invisible "internal sense" of time to our apprehension ofmatter. But while declaring the "schemata"to be "nothing but apriorideterminations of time according to rules," Kant also admitted thattheir "hidden art" ("verborgene Kunst") was and would remain "inthe depths of the human soul" ("in den Tiefen der menschlichenSeele"), and that no investigation would reveal that art to the eye("unverdecktvor Augen legen," KrVB177-85. 3:187-92).If "time" s the dynamic form of knowledge the First Critique mustposit, but cannot represent to the mind's eye, the Third Critique fo-cuses, with less conceptual difficulty, on the notion of noncognitive,but similarly dynamic, "purposive form." Repeating Lessing's defini-tion of the first criterion of all art (9:19), the "free play of imagina-tion," 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 capri-ciously. Experienced whether we will or no, and without regard toverisimilar, cognitive qualities, judgment of the beautiful acts in re-sponse to the sense of purposiveness conveyed by delimited forms ofwhich we have no conceptual knowledge. In contrast to the pleasur-able dynamism of the beautiful, its "purposiveness without a pur-pose" (KUB 61. 10:155), the adverse dynamic experience of the sub-252


8/22/2019 1771503

25/29

LESSING& KANT

lime seems to destroy all formal limitations and to point to the "pur-pose of practical reason" (KUB 115. 10:193) which neither the Thirdnor First Critique can demonstrate: not the systematic goal of lim-ited, representational knowledge but the purpose against which thelimits of such knowledge are aimed, the possibility of action under-taken without cognitive, representational limits.Even as Lessing took action to be the only "real object" of verbalart, Kant's "freedom" of action, subsequently named "themoral 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 mustrender "real"(KpVA97-99. 7:171-73). Action that is entirely "free" nits movement must also be free even of the passage of lexical tokens,and it is this objectively unlimited, or nonnarrative "freedom" of ac-tion that Kant's Second Critique attempts to define (KprVA 53-54.7:139-40).52 Like Lessing's attempt to define or disambiguate the ma-terial limits of poetry and painting, once and for all to clarify theo-retically the misleading descriptive language he, too, must use to talkabout language, Kant's attempt to define "freedom" as the singlemental form delimited by no phenomenal object and unrelated evento the experience of pleasure-that is, as absolutely noncontingentaction alwayscritically available to the mind-results within the Sec-ond Critique in his admission that this form "imposes"itself on hiscritical endeavor (KpVA54. 7:140).5"Still, Kant's effort to conceive ofthe reality of "freedom" discursively has tended to be confused his-torically with an instrumental imposition of the "categorical im-perative," that a priorisynthetic proposition named and described asnecessarily "inconceivable" n his earlier Foundation of the Metaphysics ofMorals(BA 88, 128. 7:75, 102; emphasis in text). Although the purelyspeculative notion of a "categorical"or "moralimperative" in no way

52In "What s Enlightenment?" Foucault distinguishes Kant as the first philosopherto have explicitly situated his own understanding of knowledge historically, propos-ing, in turn, that the cognitive limits Kant's project defined are those which we mustnow overcome practically, in "the undefined work of freedom" (38, 46). WhileFoucault's turn to Kant is admirable, his argument for the specifically contemporaryneed to transgress cognitive limits tells only half the story, for the practical transgres-sion of theoretical knowledge is the very action Kant ascribes to "freedom" in theSecond Critique. Only because it makes such acts of transgression "thinkable," pre-cisely by limiting systematic knowledge to representational forms and so maintainingthe possibility of nonrepresentational "freedom"-of unknown action-can his"negative"Critique,n Kant's words, "indeed" be of practical "positive use" (KrVB24-26; 3:293-31).53For further discussion of this dilemma in Kant's critical project, see my Imposi-tion 68-87, 307-08.

253


8/22/2019 1771503

26/29


freed Kant from seeking to define "freedom" in the Second Critique,that speculative notion and not the practical reality of "freedom" isoften all that is retained of Kant'smoral philosophy as a whole.54Yet in the critical context of an unrepresentable "freedom" of ac-tion, the "idea"he considered the "keystone"of his Critique KprVA4.7:107), Kant redefines both epistemology and aesthetics, as well asthe relation between them. Thus it is in action, the dynamic "realobject" necessarily described negatively by their critical theories, thatthe historically sequential but structurally inverted critiques ofLessing and Kant meet. Lessing's criticism of the notion of represen-tation in discursive art and Kant's limitation of discursive knowledgetorepresentation both point theoretically to the possibility of actionfreed from aesthetic and cognitive-that is, from representational-limitations. Grounded in a critical purpose rather than elevated to anideal, that possibility is practically indispensable: as necessary to themaking and understanding of art as it is to claims of knowledge, ascrucial to the making and understanding of poetry as it is to the causeof moral action. With Kant, Lessing's analysis of the narrative signand critique of representational aesthetics pass from the "aesthetic"limitations of representational knowledge to the dynamic,nonrepresentational experiences of the beautiful and the sublime, toaction conceived as free from all representational objects, even thetraits of objects with which action is spelled out. If historians and crit-ics of art have frequently dismissed Lessing as simply notunderstanding one medium, the visual, and historians and critics ofliterature have even more frequently dismissed Kant as simply notunderstanding another, the verbal,55 his may be because of the com-plicated history of what passed betweenthem-no verbal token of

14An exception to the rule in this respect was Adorno's NegativeDialektik,whoseconsideration of the concept of "freedom" in the Second Critique criticizes insteadits nonhistorical foundation. See "Freiheit. Zur Metakritik der praktischenVernunft," 211-94, especially 217: "In no way did it occur to [Kant] that freedomitself, his eternal idea, could be of historical existence, a concept not merely as suchbut according to the content of experience. Whole epochs, whole societies lackedthe concept of freedom as much as the thing." While Kant's critical turn in philoso-phy makes any reproach of its method on grounds of historical context at once irrel-evant and irrefutable, it is no less the case that the "critical theory" practiced byAdorno relies fundamentally on what remains a Kantian possibility of freedom. Thisfreedom may take the "negative"form of a dialectic whose "limits"are viewed insteadas historical and ideological. But all that prevents such limits from fully determiningaction and so obliterating even the notion of critical thought is the same oppositionto the exhaustive logic of causality appealed to in systematic terms by Kant.55On Kant's cognitive understanding of discursivity, see my Imposition21-52. For adetailed historical and textual analysis of Kant's own transformation of the literaryform of philosophical writing, see Goetschel.

254


8/22/2019 1771503

27/29

LESSING & KANT

power but its theoretical equivalent, a critical conception of repre-sentation posed at different moments against the historical "limits"ofaesthetic and epistemological theory. And this, with Lessing, we maycall historical "action."Princeton University

Date post:	08-Aug-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	mau-oviedo
View:	212 times
Download:	0 times

1771503

Documents