The Future of the Image by Jacques Ranciere

Author:Jacques Ranciere
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Verso Books

The whole of this text is governed by one aim: to transform figurative particulars into events of pictorial matter, which themselves convey metamorphic states of matter. The operation might be conveniently summarized starting from the last lines: the curling up of the walnut, the appearance of the figure in the mud-coloured texture and the marks of a dry brush. The ‘matterism’ of the Goncourts’ description prefigures a major form of visibility of pictorial ‘autonomy’: the working of the material, of the coloured paste asserting its sway over the space of the painting. It configures in Chardin’s painting a whole future of Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism or action-painting. It also prefigures in it a whole future of descriptions and theorizations: conceptualization of the formless à la Bataille, of original mimesis à la Merleau-Ponty, or of the Deleuzian diagram – the operation of a hand that cancels one visibility in order to produce another: a ‘tactile’ visibility, the visibility of the gesture of the painter substituted for that of its result. The domestic still life does not possess any privilege in this regard. The description of Rubens’s great religious paintings observes the same principle: ‘Never has a paintbrush so furiously rolled and unrolled lumps of flesh, tied and untied clusters of bodies …’.

This transformation of the visible into the tactile and of the figurative into the figural is only possible through the highly specific labour of the writer’s words. It first of all consists in the deictic mode of the utterance, a mode of presence indicated through the operation of a literalization which shows us Chardin ‘pouring out’ the plates – that is, transforming the representation of the table into a gesture of projection which renders the acts of spreading colour and laying the table equivalent. Next it consists in the whirlwind of adjectives and metaphors that succeed in articulating two contradictory operations. They transform the qualities of the fruits represented into substantial states of matter. The amber, the rime, the mist, the wood, or the moss of some living matter take the place of the grape, the plums, the hazel nuts, and the table of the represented still life. At the same time, however, they systematically blur the identities of objects and the boundaries between realms. Thus, the guipure of the melon, the wrinkles of the orange, or the copperas of the apple endow the plants with the features of human faces or works, whereas moss, coolness, and film transform solid elements into liquid ones. Both operations conduce to the same result. Linguistic tropes change the status of the pictorial elements. They transform representations of fruits into tropes of matter.

This transformation is much more than an aesthete’s re-reading. The Goncourts simultaneously register and configure a new visibility of the pictorial phenomenon, an aesthetic-type visibility where a relationship of coalescence between the density of the pictorial matter and the materiality of the painter’s gesture is imposed in place of the representative privilege of the form that organized and cancelled matter. They elaborate the new regime of visibility that makes a new pictorial practice possible.

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