Didi-Huberman and the image

Chari Larsson

• Editorial: Manchester University Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526149251
• Categoría: Art
• Categoría: Art Theory & Criticism

Philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman is one of the most innovative and influential critical thinkers writing today. This book is the first English-language study of his writing on images. An image is a form of representation, but what are the philosophical frameworks supporting it? The book considers how Didi-Huberman takes up this question repeatedly over the course of his career. Placing his project in relation to major historical and intellectual contexts, it shows not only how he modifies dominant disciplinary traditions, but also how the study of images is central to a new way of thinking about poststructuralist-inspired art history.

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The archaeological art historian

Across the breadth of his project Didi-Huberman has repeatedly declared his debt to Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge. In his first text, Invention of Hysteria, Didi-Huberman observed, ‘Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules.’¹ In the preface to the English edition of Confronting Images, he broadens his gaze from the birth of modern psychology at the Salpêtrière to consider the field of art history. Here, Didi-Huberman delineates the goals of his project: ‘To effect a true critique, to propose an alternative future, isn’t it necessary to engage in an archaeology, of the kind that Lacan undertook with Freud, Foucault with Binswanger, Deleuze with Bergson, and Derrida with Husserl?’² This statement clearly signals his revisionist intent. It also simultaneously aligns his work with some of the great revisionist projects of the twentieth century. Fast forward to an interview of 2010, in which he declared his ongoing proximity to Foucault: ‘De toute façon, Michel Foucault est très présent dans mon travail. De plus en plus. Parce que Foucault le dit très bien, que savoir c’est trancher. Savoir c’est savoir trancher.’³ (‘In every way, Michel Foucault is very much present in my work. More and More. Because Foucault said very well: to know is to cut. To know something is to know how to cut it.’) Finally, ‘Foucault created relationships between practices and discourses, and I just added another element, images.’⁴

Didi-Huberman’s statements point to an ongoing engagement with Foucault’s legacy, particularly in relation to Foucault’s Archaeology. This presents an immediate challenge as Foucault’s text curiously remains one of the most resistant to interpretation, particularly amongst art historians and theorists of visual culture. Instead, Foucauldian themes such as power, representation and sexuality have long occupied the discipline’s attention. In his discussion of Foucault’s influence on visual art, Roy Boyne concisely summarised this:

Foucault’s writing on art is both interesting and symptomatic of some of his wider concerns. It is, however, his innovative and controversial histories of the body, of sexuality, of the self and, overarching all of this, his approach to the understanding of power, that probably hold most significance for the field of art.⁵

In this chapter, I will argue that Didi-Huberman’s proximity to Foucault’s Archaeology shines a light on an under-investigated period of Foucault’s intellectual development.

Theorists and art historians such as Geoffrey Batchen, Jonathan Crary and John Tagg have interrogated the question of photography’s relationship to power.⁶ In Didi-Huberman’s own work, the relationship between photography and institutional power forms the basis of his argument in Invention of Hysteria. Drawing on themes central to Foucault’s texts of the 1960s, The Invention of Madness and The Birth of the Clinic, Didi-Huberman examined the intersection between photography and psychiatry deployed by celebrated French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot famously leveraged photography, with its documentary claims to truth, to document the symptoms of hysteria in the closing decades of the nineteenth century at the Salpêtrière hospital. Directly evoking the clinical gaze described by Foucault, Didi-Huberman described the camera as possessing a ‘mute gaze, without gesture. It feigns to be pure.’⁷ Didi-Huberman is describing the intersection between epistemology, power and the medical gaze described by Foucault, with ‘deep structures of visibility in which field and gaze are bound together by codes of knowledge’.⁸ These codes of knowledge become ‘naturalised’ as cultural conventions, anticipating Foucault’s analysis of the formations of knowledge six years later in Archaeology.

Foucault is perhaps best remembered by art historians and theorists of visual culture for his analysis of Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) in the opening chapter of The Order of Things. Foucault’s essay signalled the possibility of an alternative to the existing historiographical approaches still dominated by Erwin Panofsky’s iconological methodology. Foucault did not rely on familiar art-historical tropes such as the search for hidden meanings. There was no emphasis given to conventional disciplinary concerns such as biography, influence or genius. He conducted no archival research to give weight to his analysis, nor did he attempt to recreate the broader social and economic context. In the wake of the chapter’s translation and dissemination amongst English-language art historians, Svetlana Alpers lambasted the discipline, asking: ‘Why should it be that the major study, the most serious and sustained piece of writing on this work in our time, is by Michel Foucault?’⁹ For Alpers, Foucault’s reading of Las Meninas was a historiographic wake-up call: the disciplinary reliance on Panofsky-inspired iconography as the incumbent methodological tool had blinded art historians to the self-reflexive representational strategies deployed by Velázquez.¹⁰

One of the most important disciplinary critiques explicitly pursued along archaeological lines was conducted by feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, who, in her seminal text Vision and Difference, argued that art history was a discourse invented by men who had inaugurated and continued to support it. In respect to the influential role Foucault played in the feminist critique of art history, Pollock noted:

Foucault’s analyses of historical writing, of discursive formations and their practical institutionalization, provided a necessary instrument for feminist probing of the archive, of evidence, of the selective resources of historical research which secure masculine hegemony in the recirculation by one generation of a previous generation’s ideological structurings of knowledge.¹¹

Despite this early momentum, Foucault’s archaeology continues to remain one of the most underexamined aspects of his thought, especially amongst art historians who never recognised what historian Paul Veyne described as the ‘practical usefulness’ of Foucault’s archaeological method.¹² Didi-Huberman’s focus on this phase of Foucault’s intellectual development reinvigorates this period of French intellectual history and draws attention to the potential of archaeology as a method for disciplinary critique.

Archaeology itself has suffered from a bad reputation. In their influential book Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow described archaeology as a methodological impasse and structurally condemned to failure. They write, ‘After Archaeology, Foucault spent some time rethinking and recasting his intellectual tools.’¹³ This dismissal by Dreyfus and Rabinow is problematic, as it negated the most productive aspects of an archaeological approach. It also served to cement the general perception that Archaeology was the most theoretically impenetrable of Foucault’s texts from the 1960s, compared to the rich visual language deployed in The Birth of the Clinic and Discipline and Punish. As Gary Gutting has argued in archaeology’s defence, ‘Properly understood, archaeology is a technique for revealing how a discipline has developed norms of validity and objectivity.’¹⁴

With regard to developing an archaeological history, Foucault instructs, what one is trying to uncover are disciplinary practices in so far as they give rise to a corpus of knowledge, as they assume the status and role of a science. In turn, it is this internalised formation of knowledge that a discipline normalises as ‘natural’ and ‘true’. Foucault carefully defines the concerns of an archaeological analysis:

Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules.¹⁵

Foucault seeks to identify the conditions that make knowledge possible. Instead of asking ‘what do these works mean?’, we should examine how historical frameworks have emerged, and what they reveal about the deep underlying ideological and philosophical structures of art history. Archaeology is a technique for revealing how a discipline has developed and maintained conventions which structure knowledge.

Towards the end of Archaeology, Foucault argued that the scope for archaeologies be expanded beyond the life sciences, and ‘might develop in different directions’, and he nominates painting as a possible orientation for future archaeology.¹⁶ Foucault’s gesture is a broad invitation for scholars working in the humanities to consider archaeology as a mode for revision. Didi-Huberman has taken Foucault’s invitation seriously and sought to undertake an archaeological critique, seeking to understand how these cultural codes of knowledge have emerged and developed over time. The questions that dominate the first phase of Didi-Huberman’s research are direct responses to the historiographic questions an archaeological approach raises: how is the discipline possible? If the foundations of its knowledge stretch back to Giorgio Vasari, how do these assumptions continue to covertly inform disciplinary practice?

Archaeological critique: mimesis as ‘totem-notion’

Didi-Huberman commences Confronting Images with a case study to introduce the reader to his chief concerns. He takes us to a fresco in the San Marco convent in Florence, painted by Fra Angelico in the 1440s (Figure 2). The fresco is bathed in natural light, which streams in through the easterly facing window and tends to obscure the fresco. Slowly, the details begin to emerge, signs that can be ‘read’ as it slowly becomes legible and therefore readable. The fresco reveals itself as an Annunciation. Didi-Huberman, howeve...