De Duve - Critical Response II. Intuition, Logic, Intuition (1998)

7/28/2019 De Duve - Critical Response II. Intuition, Logic, Intuition (1998)

1/10

Intuition, Logic, IntuitionAuthor(s): Thierry de DuveReviewed work(s):Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 181-189Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344139 .

Accessed: 22/07/2012 11:36

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].

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical

Inquiry.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpresshttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1344139?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1344139?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress


2/10

Critical ResponseIIIntuition, Logic, Intuition

Thierry de Duve

The sense I get from James Elkins'sresponse (for which many thanks) isthat he is not having a critical debate with me so much as with his formerself. "I spent several years doing the kind of work de Duve has pulled offwith such dispatch," he says (p. 175), and in a footnote he speaks of his"own misplaced labor,"to be found in his dissertation, "full of diagramsso intricate [he] ran out of letters of the alphabet and started over withaa, bb,and so forth" (p. 175 n. 9). While I find such candid self-criticisman admirable proof of honesty, and while I wouldn't dare criticize Elkins'sthorough and competent work on Jan van Eyck or Paolo Uccello or Pierodella Francesca even if he does, I beg him to consider that I don't sharehis personal trajectory. I have never slept with la dolceprospettiva; hat'ssimply not where I'm coming from. Nor have I ever built 3-D models ofDuchamp's TheLarge Glass or dreamt of drawing an equation betweenManet'sA Bar at theFolies-Bergerend Holbein's TheAmbassadors.Which iswhy I don't recognize myself in those passages in Elkins'sresponse wherehe slips into the first person plural ("We'reall recovering addicts here";p. 177) and speaks of "our favorite interpretive mode-sleuthing-and our favorite subject for analysis-the interrogation of subjectivity"(p. 176).The piece I wrote is not about subjectivity at all, and it interprets aslittle as possible. True, a few paragraphs into the piece a hint or two isgiven as to my long-term interest in it, and I make some rather ellipticalremarks toward the end that indicate where my interpretation might gowhen the time comes. I am working on a book that will have Manet's BarCritical nquiry25 (Autumn 1998)? 1998 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/98/2501-0003$02.00. All rights reserved.

181


3/10

182 CriticalResponse Thierryde Duveat its center, but it is too soon to tell where the book is going to take me-I don't fully know it myself yet. The story of this piece is actually quitesimple. Three years ago, I was working on something else when, for thesake of some comparison but mostly for the fun of it, I attempted to drawa bird's-eye view of Manet'sBar. After a bit of fumbling, the idea occurredto me that the optical "errors" in the painting might be accounted forwith the hypothesis of a rotating mirror. What immediately struck me wasthe fact that the combination of barmaid and reflected duo is far moreconsistent with an oblique mirror than with an eccentric viewpoint. Thenext thing that struck me was that the man'sreflection in the mirror couldbe read--geometrically, optically-as corresponding simultaneously to aman standing on the side and outside the visual pyramid, if the mirror isparallel to the picture plane, and to a man facing the barmaid, if themirror is oblique. I immediately assumed that the mirror was both paral-lel and oblique. Whatever Manet's intentions, the fact that one image inthe mirror locks together the man's two possible positions in "real"spaceconfirmed my (and everyone else's) initial intuition that he "is" in bothpositions. There I had an explanation for the riddle of the painting'sconstruction that could be derived from the painting and nothing but thepainting. I was pretty sure at the time that someone else had stumbledon the same explanation as I, and left it at that. When I began seriouslyworking on Manet a year later, I realized that no one had, and whenTwelveViewsofManet's"Bar"appeared, that realization became a certainty.I then decided that I should write a technical piece dealing with the ge-ometry of the painting, so as to make my demonstration available to otherscholars. The result is the essay "How Manet's A Bar at theFolies-BergeresConstructed," which made funny detours before being accepted by Criti-cal Inquiry,but that's another story. Let me now try to attend to Elkins'smain objections.

WhatIs Intuitiveand WhatIs Counterintuitive?Intuition and aesthetic appreciation are always my starting points,whether the work of art under scrutiny is something as highly theoreticalas Marcel Duchamp's Fountain or whether it is Manet'sBar.To make thatclear, I quoted Kermit Champa: "'Like all of Manet's best works the Barlooks right before it looks wrong, and the latter sensation never com-

Thierry de Duve has written extensively on modern and contempo-rary art. He is the author of Pictorial Nominalism(1991), Kant after Du-champ(1996), and ClementGreenberg etween he Lines (1996) and editor ofTheDefinitivelyUnfinishedMarcelDuchamp(1991).


4/10

CriticalInquiry Autumn 1998 183pletely subverts the former"' (p. 143). What looks right in the Bar? Essen-tially, the intuitive facts that we are facing the barmaid and that ouremotional response is prompted by her movingfacingness (Michael Fried'sterm). Then, what looks wrong? Essentially, the equally intuitive facts thather reflection is not where it should be and that a man is facing her inthe mirror who remains unaccounted for in "real"space. Now, you mayor you may not want to reconcile the wrong with the right. Not seekingreconciliation may or may not have far-reaching consequences (such asclaiming, as does T J. Clark, that "'inconsistencies so carefully contrivedmust have been felt to be somehow appropriate to the social forms thepainter had chosen to show"' [p. 141 n. 11]). Seeking reconciliation, on theother hand, may or may not have other far-reaching consequences. I per-sonally didn't seekreconciliation; Ifound it in the painting in the shape of ademonstrable construction accounting for both the right and the wrong.Before I found anything, however, my curiosity had been aroused. Cer-tainly I considered the viewer's puzzlement (something subjective) as anaesthetic response to the painting, and the painting's perspectival puzzle(something objective, there for all to see) as the trigger to the viewer'sreflection. That's because I have a Kantian, that is, reflexive,understand-ing of aesthetic intuition. Should you be puzzled by Manet's Bar, andshould you be reflexively interested by your own puzzlement, then, assoon as you have noticed the presence of a mirror in the image, youwould inevitably be drawn to the laws of optics in order to see if the puzzlecan be solved. Two things make me call the puzzle perspectival ather thansimply optical.First, both mirrors and images in strict monocular perspec-tive obey the laws of optics, which exist independently of us. Second, thepainting offers one obvious perspectival clue, the left-hand edge of thebar in the mirror. I didn't pick it from Conger's diagram (I was unawareof its existence at the time), as Elkins seems to believe, but rather fromthe painting itself. When I later discovered, thanks to the X-ray,that Ma-net had moved the left-hand edge of the bar from where its extensioncrosses the median line of the painting between Suzon'seyes to a crossingpoint at her mouth, then I knew that it had significance for the painter.Of course I don't really know that. Call it aesthetic conviction insteadof knowledge, but then, don't accuse me of overconfidence in scientificdemonstrations. Neither do I know for sure that the vanishing point is atSuzon's mouth. This is the one and only premise one has to accept inorder to see the demonstration as a true demonstration. Elkins is right insaying that "de Duve reaches his conclusion twice: definitively at the endof the paper, but also beforehis optical analysis" (p. 174 n. 8). The reasonthis is so is that in aesthetic matters intuition-that is, reflexive aestheticjudgment-comes first. Whoever wants to challenge this either needs tonegate aesthetic intuition in general (in which case all that remains inManet's Bar is indeed a mere intellectual puzzle) or else convince me thathis or her intuition is less counterintuitive than mine. Thus, I admit that


5/10

184 CriticalResponse ThierrydeDuvethe premise upon which my demonstration is based-namely, the intu-ition that the beholder is facing the barmaid-is not itself demonstrable.It is in the nature of aesthetic intuition to claim universal assent withoutproof-in this case, to assume that all of us experience the painting as aface-to-face encounter. In footnote 16 of my text, I explored the counter-intuitive hypothesis that the beholder is not facing the barmaid but isstanding, instead, far enough to the right so as to see the reflections ofthe barmaid and of the man in the top hat where they are. But that inturn would have to be compatible with the direction of the left-hand edgeof the bar in the mirror, leading the viewer to climb high above the de-picted scene. If we accept that we are facing the barmaid-an impressionthat is not only intuitive in the most immediate manner but that is alsounderscored by the emphasized median line (the ridge of the nose, themedallion, the row of buttons, the pleat, and so on)-then the vanishingpoint can only be where the median line crosses the orthogonal that ex-tends the left edge of the marble countertop in the mirror-that is, atSuzon's mouth. Elkins doesn't challenge this, though he calls it a guessfounded on a thought experiment. (What thought experiment?)

WhatIs Economicaland WhatIs LessSo?Once the vanishing point is established or accepted, the line of sighton which the viewpoint is situated is fixed, too. But with a fixed line ofsight, an immobile parallel mirror, and characters on the stage who stayput, you will explain neither the puzzle nor your puzzlement. Somethingor someone must be moving. I made it a binary choice, as Elkins aptlynoted: either the viewer or the mirror moves. In fact, once I begin tounfold the demonstration, it becomes clear that both the mirror and the

man in the top hat have moved between the first and the second phaseof the demonstration. Is this more or less economical than having theviewer move to where he or she sees exactly what we see in the mirror?Let's try to plan it out. To do this rigorously, we need to move the painter/spectator's viewpoint along the arc of a circle whose center is, as in mydemonstration, the projection of the painting's median line into the mir-ror, by an angle twice as wide as the one it took to rotate the mirror inmy demonstration. Diagram 5 shows the result. I'm not arguing that afew degrees less is what makes one hypothesis more economical than theother. What I'm arguing is that if you adopt the solution of moving theviewer, the number of other inexplicable things in the painting multiplies.For one thing, you still need to postulate two viewpoints and thus theconflation of two moments, since the lateral view onto the scene is sooblique that it makes a frontal depiction of the barmaid all but impossible(not counting the fact that she is intersected by the visual pyramid). And,


6/10

CriticalInquiry Autumn 1998 185

\ \ ItI\ I I

\ I I\ I \

\ \ I\ \ INI

I N\ I \ 1

\ I \ I

N\S I I I

' I

I\I

'I

I t \ \l I\S I \I I \,I \1 1\II\II

\II11I11I

DIAGRAM 5.-Plan of the scenography of Manet'sA Bar at theFolies-Bergere.Hypothesiswith viewer moving to the right so that the reflections of the man and the barmaid corre-spond to the painting.as I already stated, a single lateral viewpoint would send the viewer farup in the air, as a perspective view drawn from a center of projectioncompatible with both diagram 5 and the only orthogonal in the paintingwould easily demonstrate. Next, why would Manet move his viewpoint sofar to the right? We know that the finished painting evolved out of thesketch, and a mere glimpse at the distance between the barmaid and herreflection in the sketch tells you that the painter's viewpoint is not as far


7/10

186 CriticalResponse Thierryde Duveto the right as in the Courtauld Institute's picture. Third, Manet paintedthe barmaid's reflection four times, moving it gradually to the right,something more easily done with a pivoting mirror (even a huge one)than by transporting the easel, especially for someone who was paintingseated because of a terrible leg condition. (The mirror, by the way, neednot be as big as the one in the painting to capture the image of the duo.Furthermore, as I said in my essay, we don't have to imagine Manet work-ing with the accuracy of my demonstration to understand that he graspedthat the two mirror images of the man would lock together-which iswhat really matters.)But perhaps I am mistaken in defending my solution as more eco-nomical than alternative ones. "The search for economy is itself suspect,"Elkins writes, on the grounds that "perspective is by nature uneconomi-cal" (p. 172). This is a surprising assertion. As a means of depicting theworld, strictone-point perspective is extremely economical; not only doesit simplify the work of the draughtsman enormously by rendering a hostof decisions, such as the diminution of objects, automatic, but it also de-liberately neglects a number of aspects of the visual world (aspects thatthree-point perspective and chiaroscuromight restore) in favor of a simpli-fied view. What Elkins means, I suppose, is that works of art (of the kindthat fascinated him-works such as van Eyck's TheArnolfini MarriageorUccello's The Flood) almost never obey strict one-point perspective.Granted. But that shifts the ground of the discussion. Elkins accuses me,in fact, of reducing the complexity of Manet'sart to the one phenomenonin the Bar prone to a positivistic account. It's an unwarranted accusationas long as I have not offered my interpretation of Manet's art. Meanwhile,I claim that my demonstration is economical in exactly the sense thatelegant, concise mathematical formulas are economical, or that scientificreductionism in general is. Indeed, seeking economy is the hallmark ofscientific endeavor, and the demonstration I undertook is a scientific en-deavor-undertaken, not because I am generally interested in speakingthe forensic language of problems, clues, codes, ciphers, and so forth, butbecause in this particular, indeed unique case we are dealing with a prob-lem of construction that, for once, is susceptible to proof. This is rareenough in the history of art. If Elkins, using his incomparably betterknowledge of geometry, optics, and perspective, had successfully provedthat my demonstration was incompatible with the visual evidence in thepainting, I would have yielded. But he hasn't. Instead, he urges us (again,the lapse into the first person plural) to resist the temptation to be scien-tific: "we have to resist because, if we don't, we risk missing the real plea-sure of the works" (p. 175). Do I have to speakof my pleasure in Manet'sBar to prove that I didn't miss it? Words prove nothing in matters of feel-ing, and besides, my pleasure in Manet was not the subject of the essay.


8/10

CriticalInquiry Autumn1998 187WhatIs ConclusiveProofand WhatIs Not?

This question hinges on two others: What is it exactly that I tried toprove? and, Are geometry and optics adequate vehicles of proof by virtueof their mathematical nature? The latter question finds a simple prag-matic answer in this: Whenever we encounter vertical mirrors (whetherin images or in real life), we can treat them in plan as axes of symmetry.The position and distance of mirror images relative to their real counter-parts, as well as the equality of the gaze's angle of incidence and angle ofreflection no matter where the viewer is, simply follow. Real, pictured,and virtual spaces get equal treatment, and their scenography in a bird's-eye view is independent of the placement of the picture plane, of theviewpoint of the perspective, and of the "focal length" of the visual pyra-mid. The latter three parameters, together with the left and right bordersof the picture, then become a regulative device with which to adjust thescenographic parameters (width and depth of the bar counter, distancebetween counter and mirror, placement of the characters), so as to arriveat a plan as close as possible to the perspectival view. Since the paintingoffers no hint of distance points, none of these elements are fixed, asElkins rightly notes. To conclude from this that any of them (Elkinsspeaks of the man in the top hat) "could be adjusted practically at will,producing a wide range of positions all in accord with the painting" is,however, a gross mistake (p. 173). You'd be surprised how little leewaythere is when you try to keep all the parameters in check at once. Thediagrams I have offered are the result of a long trial-and-error process,and they are not yet in perfect accord with the painting (they will neverbe, though they might perhaps still be improved). I, too, would put themirror a little closer to the barmaid, if this wouldn't make it impossible todetach her from her mirror image; I would prefer to see the man standthis side of the picture plane, at the front angle of the bar, if this wouldn'tpull him too far away from the barmaid in the mirror; and I would optfor a shorter distance between viewpoint and picture plane, if the left sideof the "real"bar didn't need to be placed about an inch beyond the frameof the picture in order to correspond to its mirror image. The diagramsare as plausible as they can be, but they are theoretical. t is theoreticallynecessary that the man be moved along the arc of a circle whose centeris also the pivot of the mirror for his two images to coincide perfectly. Inpractice, I didn't think for a minute that Manet proceeded this way.Whenall is said and done, the really troubling thing is not that the diagramsremain too theoretical to be demonstrative; it is, quite to the contrary,how closely all the parameters fall into place according to theory giventhe certainty that Manet's procedure must have been far more empiricaland far less precise. This is in itself, if not proof, at least a very strongreinforcement of the thesis that the painting is conceived as the theorywould have it constructed.


9/10

188 CriticalResponse Thierryde DuveIs that what I wanted to prove? Elkins says it is an "unexpected coin-cidence" that (and here he quotes me) "'one and the same reflection of

the man in the top hat, in a mirror which in the meantime has pivoted,should serve for his two successive locations "in reality.""'No doubt itcould be a coincidence. The logical conclusion to be drawn from this,however, is not that "it would still not be true that it proves the thesis" (p.173) but, rather, that Manet didn't know what he was doing, an uncom-fortable thought that I nevertheless took into account when I said that Ididn't intend to explain how Manet conceived and constructed his paint-ing, but only how thepaintingis conceived and constructed. But the rose'sreflection on the right is enough to prove that Manet knew what he wasdoing. So, what is, in fact, the thesis? The thesis is that what Elkins callsan "unexpected coincidence" is "what clinches the demonstration, andindeed, makes it a true demonstration" (pp. 173, 152). The logic of thepainting's construction is locked into place by the co-incidence, ndeed, oftwo mirror images indistinguishable from one another. Perhaps I shouldhave added (because this is what really clinches it) that whereas the man'sreflection is compatible with both mirrors, the woman'sis compatible withthe oblique mirror only. The co-incidence is not coincidental. Whichbrings me to a few concluding remarks weaving together Manet's use ofperspective, the issue of uncertainties, and my avowed long-term interestin crossing Michael Fried with T J. Clark.In my essay, I qualified that interest thus: "to play the question ofthe viewer's place when he or she faces a painting thatfaces him or heragainst the question of the uncertainty of representation when it is repre-sentativeof an uncertainty that constitutes the social identity of the pub-lic-all at the precise moment in the history of painting when anemergent modernism could still lay claims on 'the painting of modernlife"' (p. 139). I was pleased to see that Elkins shares that interest: "themost important question is the degreeof uncertaintywe want to ascribe tothe relationships among the figures (including ourselves, and includingalso the painter, as he is implied)." Then he adds, "De Duve's thesis hasthe least room to maneuver" (p. 179). I would hope so. Isn't the task ofart history, as a scientific endeavor, to strive for a lesser degree of uncer-tainty when it comes to interpretive relevance? Perhaps even all the moreso since the "uncertainty we want to ascribe to the relationships betweenthe figures" is what needs to be understood as such. The uncertainty Iwould indeed hope to have offered less room to maneuver is the interpre-tive fuzziness of some historians who do not deem it necessary to attendprecisely o the visual evidence in front of them the better to use the art astheir own inkblot test. It was my impression that, though fascinating andsometimes very enlightening, most essays in TwelveViewsof Manet's"Bar"went slightly overboard in the direction of exuberant projective fantasies,and, if this is a trend, then I wonder whether it is in the interest of theNew Art History. Manet's uncertainty is an altogether different matter,


10/10

CriticalInquiry Autumn 1998 189especially in the Bar. It is so obviously willed, and so manifestly the prod-uct of a clear mind that knew very well what it was doing and of a handthat could rely blindly, so to speak, on the painter's intuition, that the ideawas irresistible-at least to me-that uncertainty was itself a clue. Per-haps I haven't emphasized enough the incredibly playful game of hide-and-seek, of revelation and conceit, of clues carefully planted andlackadaisically contradicted, that goes on in A Bar at theFolies-Bergere.t ishere that perspective sets in. A summation (such as Conger's) of the vari-ous perspectival clues in the painting leads nowhere, since they canceleach other out. Something more like subtraction is required in order tofocus on the main uncertainty, which is the all-too-blatant contradictionbetween the couple in the mirror and the mirror itself.The Bar is a composite image, I claimed in my essay. It is as if thecouple's image has been excised from the oblique mirror and pasted intothe parallel mirror. The idea of transferring figures seen from one angle(here, thanks to an oblique mirror) into surroundings seen from anotherangle didn't seem to me at odds with the notions that the painting as awhole was "in perspective" and that the picture plane was perpendicularto the gaze. I agree with Elkins that such Photoshop procedures (if he willallow me the anachronism) were current practice all along in perspectivalpainting, even in "careful, analytically minded paintings" (p. 171). Actu-ally, I had in mind the example of the two figures in Raphael's The Schoolof Athenswho stand at the extreme right of the painting holding globesthat appear as circles instead of ellipses, as they would if they had beendrawn in the same central projection as the architecture.' What is true ofthe globes is, of course, true of the figures themselves; I was, therefore,utterly familiarized with a picture plane containing a multitude of tinypicture planes oblique to it-very much my understanding of Alberti'sintarsia,by the way. What is certainly not common practice, and actuallyextremely peculiar, is the possibility of a double reading attached to such"pasted-in" figures. There is to my knowledge no precedent in the wholehistory of art to a mirror image lending itself to such a reading, not evenLasMeninas. AsJoel Snyder has demonstrated, the king and queen in themirror cannotbe the "real"king and queen who are posing for the paintedVelkzquez but mustbethe king and queen portrayed on the canvas whoseback we are beholding in Las Meninas.Velkzquez relies on our inadequatedecoding of the perspective in his painting to generate the fascinatingambiguity that has led so many viewers astray, Michel Foucault included.But with Manet's Bar things are different. The fascination is similar; thesense of ambiguity is there, too; but, in fact, the image offers two unam-biguous, yet incompatible, readings. The intimation is that Manet reliedon our adequate decoding of both readings in this case, and that he didit to further our puzzlement, not to assuage it.

1. See M. H. Pirenne, Optics,Painting,and PhotographyCambridge, 1970), pp. 121-22.

Documents

De Duve - Critical Response II. Intuition, Logic, Intuition (1998)