Signatures of the Visible by Frederic; Jameson

Author:Frederic; Jameson [Jameson, Frederic;]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

II

But it is necessary to suspend the question of history temporarily in order to turn to the peculiar and constitutive function of color in these films, particularly since our previous remarks on this subject have not adequately made clear in what way “color” in this new and heightened technical sense is radically incompatible with the logic of the image or the visual simulacrum we have associated with postmodernism—a logic to which the experience of chromatic images would hardly seem alien. Let me try to approach this fundamental distinction by differentiating color from glossiness, which indeed strikes me as the more relevant category for nostalgia film.

As we will understand it there, color separates objects from one another, in some mesmerizing stasis of distinct solids whose unmixed individual hues speak to distinct zones of vibration within the eye, thereby setting each object off as the locus of some unique and incomparable visual gratification. Glossiness, on the other hand, characterizes the print as a whole, smearing its varied contents together in a unified display and transferring, as it were, the elegant gleam of clean glass to the ensemble of jumbled objects—bright flowers, sumptuous interiors, expensively groomed features, period fashions—which are arranged together as a single object of consumption by the camera lens.14A remarkable comment of Lacan is apt here (from the very different context of his meditation on the “scopic drive” in the Eleventh Seminar): the example is meant to illustrate what is for him a crucial distinction between the eye and the gaze (le regard):

In the classical tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, Zeuxis has the advantage of having made grapes that attracted the birds. The stress is placed not on the fact that these grapes were in any way perfect grapes, but on the fact that even the eye of the birds was taken in by them. This is proved by the fact that his friend Parrhasios triumphs over him for having painted on the wall a veil, a veil so lifelike that Zeuxis, turning towards him said, Well, and now show us what you have painted behind it. By this he showed that what was at issue was certainly deceiving the eye (trompe–l’oeil). A triumph of the gaze over the eye…

There would have to be something more reduced, something closer to the sign, in something representing grapes for the birds. But the opposite example of Parrhasius makes it clear that if one wants to deceive a man, what one presents to him is the painting of a veil, that is to say, something that incites him to ask what is behind it.

It is here that this little story becomes useful in showing us why Plato protests against the illusion of painting. The point is not that painting gives an illusory equivalence to the object, even if Plato seems to be saying this. The point is that the trompe–l’oeil of painting pretends to be something other than what it is…

It appears at that moment as something other than it seemed, or rather it now seems to be that something else.

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