IN[]VISIBLE CULTURE AN ELECTRONIC JOURNAL FOR VISUAL STUDIES
Focillon's
Bergsonian Rhetoric and the Possibility of Deconstruction[1]
by Andrei Molotiu ©2000
In
The Life of Forms in Art, the 1935 volume in which he summed up his theory
of art, Henri Focillon argued against any art-historical explanation that
tries to account for the evolution of artistic form through exclusively
contextual, extrinsic factors. The art historian phrased his view in memorably
epigrammatic form: "The most attentive study of the most homogenous milieu,
of the most closely woven concatenation of circumstances, will not serve
to give us the design of the towers of Laon."[2]
From one who has entered our disciplinary shorthand under the rubric of
"formalist," such a statement can come as no surprise: Focillon, in this
passage, could easily be interpreted as trying to eschew engagement with
the concerns of what later came to be called "the social history of art,"
as attempting to safeguard an idealized realm of pure form untainted by
messy social realities.
Interestingly
enough, more recently, Focillon's views have found a close echo in the
work of a thinker who can not be so quickly relegated to the backwaters
of our discipline. In an important interview from 1990, Jacques Derrida
outlined his notion of "the structure of expectation"--the totality of
the "historical, ideological, and technical conditions that make possible"
a work of art. He pointed out the shortcomings of any historical analysis
that limits itself to the interpretation of these conditions, and that
believes that it has thereby solved the riddle of the artwork. "If we
could do this in an exhaustive fashion," Derrida writes, "it would mean
that nothing had happened." He continues: "If there is a work, it is because,
even when all the conditions that could become the object of analysis
have been met, something still happens... If there is a work, it means
that the analysis of all the conditions only served to, how shall I say,
make room, in an absolutely undetermined place, for something that is
at once useless, supplementary, and finally irreducible to those conditions."[3]
We can easily translate Focillon's insight into Derrida's
terms: the design of the towers of Laon exceeds, is supplementary to,
its structure of expectation. The deconstructive philosopher and the formalist
art historian are in complete agreement on this point. They both urge
engagement with the specific phenomenon of the artwork itself, and not
only with the various conditions--social or other--that helped bring it
into being. This is the only way, they both suggest, that the importance
of the work as a singular event, bringing absolute newness into the world,
can be respected.
I think that the counterintuitiveness of the parallel
I am drawing, at least when seen from the perspective of the received
wisdom of our discipline, is clear. The works of Derrida have only tentatively
entered, over the last decade and a half, the field of art history, long
after their influence had peaked in other fields of the humanities. They
were taken up in the context of what was called the New Art History, which,
whatever other attribute may have characterized it--post-Marxist? poststructuralist?--definitely
saw itself as anti-formalist.
Today, I would like to tease out the implications of
this surprising similarity; specifically, I would like to sound out the
common philosophical grounding shared by Derrida and Focillon. In doing
so, I want to stress that Derridean deconstruction is a philosophical
practice, and that a true integration of its methods into our discipline
requires a close examination of art history's philosophical foundations;
I will briefly do so today by looking at the roots of Focillon's theory
of art in the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Secondly, I hope that establishing
such a point of nearly indistinguishable closeness between a seemingly
old-fashioned art historian and a state-of-the-art theorist will help
challenge the common notion that formalism and deconstructive theory are
incompatible.[4]
Not only can a space be opened where the two meet; but, as I will argue,
the close attention to the object that formalism affords us is indispensable
for a full understanding of the promise of deconstruction.
Focillon's and Derrida's positions, in the statements
I quoted, can be summed up in one word: anti-determinist. Philosophically,
determinism is defined as the belief in the inevitability of causality:
on this view, the thorough analysis of conditions in any system, at any
moment, can not fail to predict their further effects, and as such all
the future states of that system. Belief in a wholly determinist universe
denies any possibility of free will, of human freedom. In a more restricted
sense, historical determinism in the social sciences is best exemplified
by much of Marxist theory: from the traditional base/superstructure model
to theories of ideology in which most individual acts are seen as resulting
not from free choice but from, say, class interests, no matter how obscured
to the individual consciousness.
The dispute between the proponents of freedom and those
of determinism has been one of the most venerable debates in the philosophical
tradition. One of the principal arguments of determinism's opponents has
been to demonstrate that unforeseeable novelty does indeed exist in the
world; and it is in the realm of the arts that many philosophers have
found the best examples of such novelty. This is both Derrida's and Focillon's
position when they argue that, given a specific structure of expectation,
no single outcome--no single shape of the work of art, design of the towers
of Laon--is necessary, is inevitable.
Let me return later to the anti-determinism of Derridean
deconstruction, and to the implications of such a position for our discipline.
I want to look first at the intellectual sources of Focillon's anti-determinism.
They lie, I would argue, in the influence exerted upon the art historian
by the work of Henri Bergson, the foremost philosopher of pre-WW I France.
Henri Focillon (1881-1943) belonged to the right generation
to absorb fully the insights of Bergson (1859-1941). He pursued his higher
education in Paris between the late 1890's and into the first decade of
the twentieth century, at the very moment of Bergson's highest popularity.
A true Bergsonian craze swept the Paris intelligentsia during the Belle
Epoque, a craze similar to the earlier onslaught of Wagnerism, which to
some extent it continued. A list of auditors to Bergson's lectures at
the Collége de France beween the years 1901 and 1914 would include Focillon's
name along with those of writers T.S. Eliot and Nikos Kazantzakis, and
of philosophers Jean Wahl and Gabriel Marcel, as well as of many society
ladies.[5]
Bergson's popularity is perhaps best explained by the
anti-rationalist, anti-academic bent of his thinking.[6]
At a time of general dissatisfaction with academic philosophy, he was
a leading figure among the so-called "life philosophers" (a category which
at times was seen to include not only thinkers who willingly accepted
this label, such as Wilhelm Dilthey, but also precursors such as Nietzsche,
or allied thinkers like the pragmatist William James). The life philosophers
were suspicious of the grand, all-explanatory systems that defined traditional
metaphysics; they wished to bring philosophical inquiry closer to, as
Bergson put it, "the immediate givens" of day-to-day existence. In doing
this, they paved the way for the next generation's even stronger critiques
of metaphysics, such as in Husserl's and Heidegger's phenomenology, or
in existentialism.
Even a superficial acquaintance with the oeuvres of
Focillon and Bergson suggests the connections between the two. A principal
example would be the vitalism the two thinkers share: as suggested in
the very title of The Life of Forms in Art, Focillon saw artistic forms
as living entities, evolving and metamorphosing over time. This sense
of unstoppable, continuous, living transformation over time is equally
typical of the work of Henri Bergson, as outlined in the philosopher's
first and most important book, Time and Free Will of 1889, and as elaborated
in essays written over the next forty-odd years. Already Focillon's first
important monograph, his 1915 book on Hokusai, can be shown to have used
Bergsonian, vitalist arguments as evaluative criteria to underline Hokusai's
artistic achievement, and to support Focillon's anti-academic stance.[7]
By 1935, the time of The Life of Forms in Art, Bergsonian arguments will
come, as we shall see, to ground the entirety of Focillon's philosophy
of history.
Bergson criticized all-encompassing metaphysical systems
that claimed for themselves an unshakable basis in reason--for example
the cartesian system which had defined French philosophy for the previous
two centuries--for their lack of "precision"; this was the quality Bergson
felt "philosophy had lacked most."[8]
A good, though simple, example of rational system, as provided by Bergson,
is the system of standardized measurements. Based upon a few simple units,
any object in the physical world can be reduced to a few numbers which
quantify all of its perceivable physical qualities. Such an operation
seems more or less correct when dealing with spatial quantities; yet the
system completely breaks down when dealing with the much less objectivizable
quantity which is time.
Indeed, for Bergson, the perfect example of rational
reduction and falsification is the measurement of time through standardized,
equal units--a method of measurement which, according to him, is wholly
based on the measurement of space. Time, he argued, is felt by the individual
not as a homogenous continuum that is easily decomposable in discrete
units, but as the much more flexible concept of durŠe, duration. While
humans can to some extent distance themselves from physical expanse, and
consider it "objectively", their existence is inseparable from their own
feeling of time's flow, and of their lasting as living beings. It is only
from one's intimate knowledge of one's own living body and existence in
time that one can begin reasoning about the world, rather than from the
inorganicity of the physical world of objects, to which corresponds the
impersonality of philosophical systems that do not take into account the
reasoner's own subjectivity and life. This method, according to Bergson,
had never before had its place in philosophy, since concentrating attention
upon minute actions and perceptions goes against the common functioning
of our consciousness, which attempts to simplify and generalize its perceptions
for the sake of the economy of energy.
Yet, if no philosopher before Bergson had been aware
of the true position of the living being in its environment and time,
were Bergson's insights completely original? Not at all, he assured us.
What had been neglected for centuries by philosophers--limited as they
were by their rational, systematized language--had, for as long a period
of time, constituted the primary intuition of artists: "For hundreds of
years, in fact, there have been men whose function has been precisely
to see and to make us see what we do not naturally perceive. They are
the artists."[9]
Artists, as opposed to abstract thinkers, construct representations of
the world that both take into account the inexhaustible complexity of
phenomena, and give a meaning to the brute facts of reality; they are,
if you wish, the original phenomenologists.
In, Time and Free Will , Bergson
enrolled his philosophy of durée in what he saw as the most important
philosophical debate of the time, specifically that of freedom versus
determinism. As Bergson argued, thinking in terms of lived time leads
to the affirmation of the radical novelty of each event: it is only within
the false framework of homogenized time--where, inasmuch as duration is
recast as space, and thus the past, present and future appear somehow
to be equivalent and coexisting--that determinism can be conceived at
all.[10]
As Bergson argued in his most popular book, Creative
Evolution of 1907, in which he continued the same vein of thought, the
greatest proof of the possibility of novelty--and, as such, the best counterproof
to determinism--came, once again, from the artistic realm. The wealth
of works available to us as we survey the histories of the various arts
is a living testimony to the existence of absolute creativity in the universe.
Though works of art come into being at a specific historical moment, within
specific historical conditions, their specific form, their phenomenal
uniqueness, is utterly unpredictable prior to the time of their creation.
The example that Bergson gives--the painting of a portrait--sounds like
a direct source for Focillon's statement about the towers of Laon (remember
that it was around the time of the publication of Creative Evolution that
Focillon audited Bergson's lectures). The philosopher writes: "The finished
portrait is explained by the features of the model, by the nature of the
artist, by the colors spread out on the palette; but, even with the knowledge
of what explains it, no one, not even the artist, could have foreseen
exactly what the portrait would be... the portrait will surely resemble
the model and will surely resemble also the artist; but the concrete solution
brings with it that unforeseeable nothing which is everything in a work
of art."[11]
For Bergson (as for Derrida and Focillon), the work
of art can not be simply deduced from its structure of expectation. It
has to be created, and it is in the process of creation that the clearest
instance of human freedom available to philosophy can be found. Indeed,
for all the other differences between their philosophical systems,[12]
Derrida's notion of that "something that is at once useless, supplementary,
and finally irreducible to" its historical, ideological and technical
conditions virtually rephrases Bergson's "unforeseeable nothing which
is everything".
Focillon clearly felt a particular affinity with a
manner of thinking such as Bergson's whose principal pieces of evidence
came from the realm of the arts. He found in it a philosophical defence
of the close attention he paid to the form of the artwork. For Focillon,
formalism is the method that allows us to outline the work's singularity;
as such, formal description and analysis are, for him, the most theoretically
complex of interpretative acts. I do not have time for examples here,
but I would refer you to almost any page of, say, The Art of the Romanesque
Sculptors: analysis of form there records nothing less than a powerful
phenomenological encounter with the work of art.[13]
Focillon's kind of formalism is also not a matter of pure, immaterial
forms. A true student of Bergson, the art historian grounds his thinking
in the living body's--whether it is the viewer's or the artist's--confrontation
with the artwork in all its physicality.
Starting from such a notion of form as singularity,
Focillon embraced Bergson's anti-determinism; in the process he reduced
it from its original, universal scope to a critique of contextual determinism
as an explanatory structure in art history. This philosophical position
was explicitly stated already in Focillon's earliest publications. In
his 1915 monograph on Hokusai, for example, the art historian criticized
those writers who, in judging an artist's achievement, refuse "to rise
above the contingent appreciation of a master by his contemporaries;"
Focillon saw such points of view as "the extremes of Tainian determinism
in the history of art."[14]
(The reference is of course to the doctrines of Hyppolite Taine, the nineteenth-century
literary historian considered the founder of the modern French sociology
of art.)
Twenty years on, the last chapter of The Life of Forms
in Art, entitled "Forms in the Realm of Time"--the chapter in which can
be found the sentence I quoted about the towers of Laon--reads like a
faithful translation of Bergson's line of argument in Time and Free Will
into the language of art history. Like Bergson, Focillon begins with a
critique of a homogenized, spatialized notion of time. He criticizes the
"grave confusions often made between chronology and life," using as an
example art history's infatuation with the concept--the unit of measurement--of
"century." "We are exceedingly reluctant to give up an isochronal conception
of time, for we confer on these equal measures not only a metrical value
that is beyond dispute, but also a kind of organic authority. These measures
presently become frames, and the frames then become bodies. We personify
them."[15]
And so an arbitrary unit of measurement--one hundred years, becomes an
organism that is born, lives and dies; and so museums regiment their collections;
and so we all see ourselves as seventeenth, or eighteenth, or maybe twentieth-century
specialists.
From this critique of the spatialization of historical
time, Focillon moves on to a critique of the notion of context meant to
combat the belief in a one-sided causal action by surrounding conditions
onto the process of artistic creation. At this point, Focillon chooses
to focus particularly on the field of architecture. Architecture, he tells
us, "gives birth to new conditions for historical, social, and moral life.
It creates unforeseeable environments. It satisfies old needs and begets
new ones. It invents a world."[16]
Not only, then, is artistic creation an example of novelty, as it was
for Bergson, but it acts directly upon other realms of society, breaking
the determinist logic of their own development. It is this line of argument
that includes the statement about the towers of Laon.
The chapter ends with an affirmation of freedom over
determinism that could have come directly from Bergson. Discussing the
infinite number of conditions that can influence the creation of a work
of art, Focillon writes: "It is this multiplicity of factors that is opposed
to the rigors of determinism... In those imaginary worlds [of art] in
which the artist plays the role of geometer and mechanic, of physicist
and chemist, of psychologist and historian at once, form, through the
play of its metamorphoses, perpetually goes forward, by its own necessity,
toward its freedom."[17]
In a nice conceit, Focillon sees art as only condemned, deterministically,
to the necessity of its utterly unpredictable freedom.
Now, what about Derrida's own anti-determinism? Deconstruction
from the beginning has seen as its primary task to reveal the ultimate
openness of any conceptual system that claims closure. To do so is already
to open that system to the indeterminacy of the outside. A more explicitly
anti-determinist stance informs many of Derrida's recent writings: not
only his discussions of the arts but also his discussions of ethics and
politics. As this theme has grown in importance over the last decade,
echoes of Bergson's work--and especially, in this case, of Bergson's late
writings on ethics--have grown more insistant in Derrida's writings, perhaps
transmitted through the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Let me offer you
just two examples.
In Specters of Marx, of 1993, Derrida defined deconstruction
as "an experience open to the absolute future of what is coming, that
is to say, a necessarily indeterminate, abstract, desert-like experience
that is confided, exposed, given up to its waiting for the other and the
event."[18]
(By the way, this particularly French, etymologically correct usage of
the term "event" to denote that which is coming, in all of its unforeseeable
novelty, is not only applied by Derrida, in the interview with which we
started, to the work of art, but was also used in the same sense by Focillon
in The Life of Forms in Art.) In another text of the same year, Aporias,
Derrida referred to the figure of the immigrant, of the outsider, as the
"absolute arrivant;" this word, arrivant, for him implies "the singularity
of who arrives, he or she who comes, coming to be where s/he was not expected,
where one was awaiting him or her without waiting for him or her, without
expecting it, without knowing what or whom to expect, what or whom I am
waiting for--and such is hospitality itself, hospitality toward the event."[19]
These meditations on ethics and politics are of a piece
with Derrida's meditation on art and the structure of expectation, with
which we started. Allow me to quote again part of that statement: "If
there is a work, it means the analysis of all the conditions only served
to, how shall I say, make room, in an absolutely undetermined place, for
something that is at once useless, supplementary, and finally irreducible
to those conditions." I hope that word, "undetermined," has a different
ring now.
What, then, of the question of how to adopt Derridean
insights into our own discipline? As deconstruction has been appropriated
into the New Art History, it has been its first, critical moment that
has largely been foregrounded. The negativity of such a position has allowed
deconstruction to be understood as a form of demystification or ideology
critique--notions derived from the determinist milieu of a late Marxist
paradigm.[20]
It is only within such a paradigm, with its specific institutional and
political allegiances, that the view of an incompatibility between deconstructive
theory and formalism can be maintained.
If, on the other hand, we are to appropriate deconstruction's
further, affirmative and, in my opinion, more profound insights, it may
be that the kind of attention devoted to works of art by formalists such
as Focillon--attention that is able to emancipate the work from its structure
of expectation, to respect its singularity--may offer the more fertile
ground for the adoption of Derrida's work.[21]
As it did for Bergson and, indeed, as it does for Derrida himself, such
a revelation of singularity may--and should--translate itself into other
realms, of ethics, for example, and ground an entire philosophy. In such
a philosophy, however, "formalism" would be not a superceded, politically
dubious methodology, but the first step that would necessarily precede
any further intuition, any further event. Notes
1. This article
reproduces the text of my talk of the same title delivered in New York
City on February 25, 2000, at the annual meeting of the College Art Association,
as part of the panel "Reading and Writing Art History." I am grateful
to the panel's chair, Michael Ann Holly, for selecting my paper as well
as for her comments on earlier versions. The arguments expounded here
are drawn from a larger project on Derrida, aesthetics, and art history,
where I will treat them in greater detail. I have expanded several of
my points in footnotes. 2. Henri Focillon,
Vie des formes (Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 1988),
94. Translated by C.B. Hogan and George Kubler as The Life of Forms in
Art (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 149. 3. Peter Brunette
and David Wills, "The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,"
in Brunette and Wills, eds., Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art Media,
Architecture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
28. 4. In the accepted
usage of the word in contemporary art history, "formalism" does not distinguish
between Focillon's way of paying attention to form, to the object, and
that of the post-Wöllflinian Germanic tradition. For strategic purposes,
perhaps--specifically, to reverse the hint of opprobrium that has often
tinted our discipline's use of the term--I provisionally accept here the
more general definition; however, it should become clear that I advocate
the Focillonian variety. Indeed, I hope that my conclusions can contribute
to clarifying the distinction between the two; it corresponds, roughly,
to the distinction between a phenomenology and a dialectics. I will address
this point at much greater length in the final version of this project.
5. R.C. Grogin,
The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900-1914 (Calgary: The University
of Calgary Press, 1988), 123 and n.94. Grogin provides a good interpretation
of the phenomenon of Bergsonism in its social context. His reference for
the sighting of Focillon at Bergson's lectures is Jérome and Jean Tharaud,
Notre cher Péguy (Paris: Plon, 1926), vol.1, 263-264. 6. The best introduction
to Bergson's thought can probably be found in Bergson's books themselves,
particularly Creative Evolution, authorized trans. Arthur Mitchell, 1911
(reprinted New York: Random House/Modern Library, 1944) and The Creative
Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. N.L. Andison, 1947 (reprinted
Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1975), my main sources for the folowing
discussion. For more on Bergson and art see also Mark Antliff, "Bergson
and Cubism: a Reassessment," Art Journal 47:4 (Winter 1988), 341-49, as
well as his Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 7. See Henri
Focillon, Hokousai (Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1914), especially 113-116;
I will analyze in detail these passages, together with their relationship
to Bergson (particularly to passages from Creative Evolution), in a future
article on Focillon's style. 10. Henri Bergson,
Time and Free Will, authorized trans. F.L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan,
1919), especially chapter III. 11. Creative
Evolution, 9, 370. The importance of the example of the portrait painting
is underlined by the fact that Bergson uses it both in the introduction
and the conclusion of his argument. 12. For an example
of such a difference, see below, note 18. 13. Henri Focillon,
L'Art des sculpteurs romans (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1931, reprinted Quadrige/P.U.F.,
1964). 14. Hokousai,
42. My translation. 15. Vie des
Formes, 84 (English translation p. 138; translation modified). 16. Vie des
Formes, 94 (English translation p. 149; translation modified). 17. Vie des
Formes, 100 (English translation p. 156; translation modified; my italics).
18. Jacques
Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York & London: Routledge,
1994), 90. The attributes "abstract, desert-like" mark the difference
between Derrida's view of the indeterminate experience and Bergson's,
for whom such experience rather denotes an overabundant fullness. However,
a more critical reading of Bergson's text (which cannot be undertaken
in this space) will take us a long way toward reconciling the two views.
19. Jacques
Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1993), 33. 20. This situation
was quite accurately diagnosed by Stephen Melville, in his review of Craig
Owens's collected writings. "Owens never quite got Derrida and company
right," Melville writes. He supports his point by drawing a distinction
between deconstruction's critique of presence, and the critique of representation
that was elaborated by Owens among others and that has proved so influential
in the New Art History and in the visual applications of Cultural Studies:
"the two critiques pull, finally, in very different directions: where
the critique of presence forces an acknowledgment of the inevitable concomitance
of presentation and representation, the critique of representation aims
precisely at their separation, at the freeing of forms of presence and
identity not subjugated to representation and recognition. It is symptomatic
that Derrida's sentences regularly run to 'both...and' constructions,
and Owens's, particularly in his later work, to 'not...but.' Melville,
review of Owens, "Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture",
in Art in America, July 1993, 30-32, at 31. The determinism of the New
Art History was also pointed out by Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and
Keith Moxey in the introduction to the influential volume they edited,
Visual Theory (New York: Harper Collins, 1991). Identifying two different
approaches among the essays in the book, they oppose an "Aristotelian,"
essentialist position to one that "argues that representation is always
a matter of convention, not of essence... According to such a view, the
work of art is wholly defined by its historical conditions of origin and
reception." (p.1; my italics.) 21. Indeed,
Focillon's formalism is similar to what Stephen Melville, in an essay
also concerned with the issue of bringing art history and deconstruction
together, has advocated as "objectivity" in art history: an "aim at objects
and [a] willingness to assume the demand to think or write them as such."
As Melville writes: "deconstruction is objective. It is committed to things
and does not take place apart from their taking place." Melville, "Color
Has Not Yet Been Named: Objectivity in Deconstruction," in Brunette and
Wills, Deconstruction and the Visual Arts, 33-48, at 43. |