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Didi-Huberman and the image
Chari Larsson
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eBook - ePub
Didi-Huberman and the image
Chari Larsson
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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 Foucaultâs The Archaeology of Knowledge. In his first text, Invention of Hysteria, Didi-Huberman observed, âArchaeology 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.â1 In the preface to the English edition of Confronting Images, he broadens his gaze from the birth of modern psychology at the SalpĂȘtriĂšre to consider the field of art history. Here, Didi-Huberman delineates the goals of his project: âTo effect a true critique, to propose an alternative future, isnât 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?â2 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: âDe toute façon, Michel Foucault est trĂšs prĂ©sent dans mon travail. De plus en plus. Parce que Foucault le dit trĂšs bien, que savoir câest trancher. Savoir câest savoir trancher.â3 (âIn 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.â) Finally, âFoucault created relationships between practices and discourses, and I just added another element, images.â4
Didi-Hubermanâs statements point to an ongoing engagement with Foucaultâs legacy, particularly in relation to Foucaultâs Archaeology. This presents an immediate challenge as Foucaultâs 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 disciplineâs attention. In his discussion of Foucaultâs influence on visual art, Roy Boyne concisely summarised this:
Foucaultâs 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-Hubermanâs proximity to Foucaultâs Archaeology shines a light on an under-investigated period of Foucaultâs intellectual development.
Theorists and art historians such as Geoffrey Batchen, Jonathan Crary and John Tagg have interrogated the question of photographyâs relationship to power.6 In Didi-Hubermanâs own work, the relationship between photography and institutional power forms the basis of his argument in Invention of Hysteria. Drawing on themes central to Foucaultâs 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 SalpĂȘtriĂšre hospital. Directly evoking the clinical gaze described by Foucault, Didi-Huberman described the camera as possessing a âmute gaze, without gesture. It feigns to be pure.â7 Didi-Huberman is describing the intersection between epistemology, power and the medical gaze described by Foucault, with âdeep structures of visibility in which field and gaze are bound together by codes of knowledgeâ.8 These codes of knowledge become ânaturalisedâ as cultural conventions, anticipating Foucaultâs 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 VelĂĄzquezâs Las Meninas (1656) in the opening chapter of The Order of Things. Foucaultâs essay signalled the possibility of an alternative to the existing historiographical approaches still dominated by Erwin Panofskyâs 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 chapterâs translation and dissemination amongst English-language art historians, Svetlana Alpers lambasted the discipline, asking: âWhy 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?â9 For Alpers, Foucaultâs 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 VelĂĄzquez.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:
Foucaultâs 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 generationâs ideological structurings of knowledge.11
Despite this early momentum, Foucaultâs 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 âpractical usefulnessâ of Foucaultâs archaeological method.12 Didi-Hubermanâs focus on this phase of Foucaultâs 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, âAfter Archaeology, Foucault spent some time rethinking and recasting his intellectual tools.â13 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 Foucaultâs 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 archaeologyâs defence, âProperly understood, archaeology is a technique for revealing how a discipline has developed norms of validity and objectivity.â14
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 ânaturalâ and âtrueâ. 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 âwhat do these works mean?â, 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 âmight develop in different directionsâ, and he nominates painting as a possible orientation for future archaeology.16 Foucaultâs gesture is a broad invitation for scholars working in the humanities to consider archaeology as a mode for revision. Didi-Huberman has taken Foucaultâs 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-Hubermanâs 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 âtotem-notionâ
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 âreadâ as it slowly becomes legible and therefore readable. The fresco reveals itself as an Annunciation. Didi-Huberman, howeve...