French poet Yves Bonnefoy writes, “Now night has fallen (Maintenant, c’est la nuit): if by these words I claim to express my sense-experience they promptly become merely a frame from which presence has disappeared. The portraits that have seemed to us the most lifelike turn out to be mere paradigms. Our most private words become myths once we have let them go” (107). This is both a critique of language and an affirmation of its only possibility of communication. What is most intimate, coterminous with the thoughts and emotions it expresses, is simultaneously exterior and utterly other: my language is both mine and not mine at all. Similarly, physical sensations can only be articulated and vicariously shared by being turned into abstractions, virtual feelings.
Language exists in and as a liminal state between the material and the immaterial, thing and idea: it is neither sheer marks on the page, sounds in the air, nor sheer ideality, but rather it is their contingent and temporary union. (This would be Saussure’s union of signifier and signified that together produce the sign, which Saussure brackets off from the unattainable, and unsayable, real.) It cannot veer too far in either direction without losing its character as language. (The poetic avant-garde seeks to discover how closely language can approach either pole without losing its language character.) Language is neither object nor concept but their articulation. Words hover and hesitate over the abyss between being and non-being, presence and absence. They embody a non-Aristotelian logic of both/and, in which A need not equal A and simultaneously equals B, as well as some third term that’s both their combination (A/B) and some other item altogether (a not A/not B not quite reducible to C).
The notion of direct, unmediated presentation of the “as is,” Pound’s demand for “direct presentation of the thing itself,” is itself a metaphor, a speaking of one thing—the things of the phenomenal, event-full world—in terms of another—words, which are at once tangible and intangible, which are both things and non-things. The world is, for us, always a tropological world.
Language converts the intangible into the tangible (thoughts or feelings that are events into words that are objects) and the tangible into the intangible (trees or dogs or the skin of a lover into words that cannot as such be touched, heard, or even seen, yet only function as words by being heard or seen, by their materialization): poetry foregrounds this travel between realms of being, this transfer of contents. (The word “metaphor” means “transfer” in Greek.) As Mexican poet and critic Octavio Paz writes, “Language is symbolic because it tries to relate two heterogeneous realities: man and the things he names. The relation is doubly imperfect because language is a system of symbols that reduces, on the one hand, the heterogeneity of each concrete thing to equivalences and, on the other, constrains the individual man to use general symbols. Poetry, precisely, proposes to find an equivalence (that is the metaphor) in which neither things in their concrete particularity nor the individual man will disappear” (227). Language is by its very nature metaphorical, calling a near infinity of unique, individual entities all by the same name, “chair” or “fig tree” or even “person,” calling an unlimited range of movements all the same action, “walking” or “laughing” or even “writing.” The name asserts that all the phenomena it points toward are if not identical then equivalent: this is like this is like this is like this, or even, this is this is this is this.
The poem always aspires to be an object in itself (as all art aspires to the condition of music), but is always also a thing about things. The thingness of language is an asymptote (neither marks on a page nor sound in the ear is language per se): language is by definition both object and meta-object. Thus there cannot be an abstract poem in the way that there is abstract music or abstract visual art, with no content but its formal procedures, for language is not a discrete entity the way sound and color and shape are: like Gertrude Stein’s Oakland, when examined closely, there is no there there.
“Abstraction” in art is the foregrounding of the materiality (as against the referentiality) of the medium (in this sense, “abstract art” is the opposite of abstract). Given language’s tenuous materiality, its capacity to foreground that materiality and still remain language (as shapes and colors are palpable and perceptible as such even when not “representing” anything) is limited. Compared to music or painting or sculpture, language has no “as such,” which puts stricter limits on the degree to which one can successfully experiment with it as a medium. Art critic Clement Greenberg characterized the history of modern art as the process of each form stripping itself of all that is not unique to its medium, an Hegelian coming to awareness of its own essential nature. In this sense, literature has no unique medium. What poetry captures isn’t things or events, but mind’s relation to objects and events. Perhaps this is what literature has/is that is unique: all relation itself, it is perfectly suited to enact and embody relation.
The poem performs a double transformation: translating feelings (in the sense of physical sensations) into feelings (in the sense of interior phenomena), and also vice versa (thought-feelings become sense-feelings, including the words themselves as sensory experiences). It turns conceptions and emotions into analogues of sensuous experience (by turning thoughts into images) and simultaneously turns both thoughts and images into, if not the intangible, then the not-quite-tangible: that is, into words, which can function as a shared medium precisely because they are not specific to individual sensations, while at the same time they are sources of sensation.
While for Plato the actual is that which is graspable by the senses but fleeting and ultimately insubstantial, whereas imperishable but not immediately apprehensible Ideas comprise the real, for Kant the never to be attained Ding an sich is exactly the naked, unmediated physical existence—it is not the material world but mental phenomena to which we have immediate access. Following in Kant’s very regular footsteps, in his Speaker’s Meaning Owen Barfield maintains that it is not our thoughts but our physical sensations that are unique to us as individuals: anyone can have the same thought that I have had (and I can share any thought I have with another), but no one can experience the same sensation on biting, for example, into a ripe Bosc pear on a May morning at nine: I can attempt (hopelessly) to describe it, but I cannot share it with anyone. (From this perspective Williams’s poem “This Is Just to Say” assumes a wider significance than its unassuming surface pretends to: the taste and feel of the cold, delicious plums the speaker’s wife cannot experience at breakfast because he has already consumed the fruit are a figure for all physical sensation, private and unshareable.) I would assert that thoughts are more events, and thus unrepeatable in identical form, and sensations are more things, and thus reproducible, than Barfield acknowledges. The distinction he draws between thoughts and sensations, events and things, is too sharp; it is exactly the double sense of the word “feelings” (which double-faced word can here stand in for language as such) that exemplifies their interpenetration.
Works Cited
Barfield, Owen. Speaker’s Meaning. Reprint. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1984.
Bonnefoy, Yves. The Act and the Place of Poetry: Selected Essays. Ed. John T. Naughton. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.
Paz, Octavio. The Bow and the Lyre. Trans. Ruth L. C. Simms. Austin: U of Texas P, 1973.
This piece is excerpted from the essay “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Coat: Nuances of a Theme by Stevens,” which will appear in my forthcoming collection Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, to be published in the University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry series in 2008.
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Friday, May 18, 2007
Monday, February 19, 2007
Picture This: On the Concept of Poetic Imagery
1
A teacher I had in high school said once, “Images are a dime a dozen. I’m tired of them.” A professor in college warned, “Don’t let metaphors become pets.” Some years ago, a student told me, “I don’t want to look at pictures when I’m reading a poem.” The still predominant scenic mode, to use Charles Altieri’s term, is so heavily dependent on imagery and visual description that it’s become completely rote. If I’ve painted a verbal picture, I’ve written a poem. It sometimes seems that anyone can come up with a string of images. It’s the structure that’s hard to produce, some reason that these particular images appear together in this particular order or constellation. Of course, it’s sadly impressive how many writers can’t even come up with disconnected images of any precision or impact. But while I’m critical of the scenic mode, I’m quite wedded to images, and to the specificity and groundedness images can provide. I don’t like poems to float off into the ether, and imagery can provide ballast, a route from here to there, wherever “there” may be for any given poem. Vivid, striking images make a strong impression on me, and I strive for them in my own work as part of the sensuous experience of the poem. All good poems, of whatever mode or style, have in common specificity and particularity. In contemporary American poetry, that specificity is primarily imagistic.
What we mean when we talk about images in poetry are mental images. A mental image can be defined as “the connecting link between experience (object) and knowledge (subject). An image [is] the reproduction in the mind of a sensation produced in perception….But of course the mind may also produce images when not receiving direct perceptions,” as in remembering past events or objects no longer present, in dreams, or in reading, where words “may refer either to experiences which could produce physical perceptions were the reader actually to have those experiences, or to the sense-impressions themselves” (“Imagery,” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 559, 560). While the words “image” and “imagery” have been used in many and various senses in literary criticism, it is in this basic sense that I use them here.
In his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound writes of three ways that language can be charged with meaning, which he calls phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia. He defines phanopoeia as “throwing the object (fixed or moving) on to the visual imagination,” much like projecting an image onto a screen (63). The reader’s imagination is presumably the screen which passively accepts this image. (This is a problematic view of the reading process, discounting the reader’s active role in producing the text, but I will leave that discussion for a later time.) Pound emphasizes that phanopoeia includes not just the fixed, still image but the moving image, that is, “praxis or action” (52). Most imagery in contemporary American poetry, as in Imagism, is of the fixed, still variety. (For Pound, at least for a time, vorticism was the solution to this problem of stasis.) Melopoeia induces “emotional correlations by the sound and rhythm of the speech” (63). Pound describes, in turn, three kinds of melopoeia, “verse made to sing; to chant or intone; and to speak” (61), and recommends the first. Louis Zukofsky followed this line of thinking with his diagram of poetry as “Upper limit music, lower limit speech.” Pound’s definition of logopoeia is the most problematic of the three. Logopoeia induces “both of the effects by stimulating the associations (intellectual or emotional) that have remained in the reader’s consciousness in relation to the actual words or word groups employed” (63). It’s unclear to me what the two effects are meant to be. It seems that they are visual imagery and emotional associations, but since the effects are induced by the stimulation of intellectual or emotional effects, that doesn’t seem possible, unless Pound is saying that emotional associations are induced by the stimulation of emotional associations, which is completely circular.
In the interest of clarity and at the risk of distortion, I define phanopoeia as the deployment of imagery to produce an effect upon the reader; melopoeia as the use of the range of verbal music toward this aim; and logopoeia as a second-order technique, using ideas, connotations, and intellectual and emotional associations to produce an effect in the reader. In Stevens’s terms, logopoeia may be referred to as the poetry of the ideas, as distinct from the poetry of the words (melopoeia) or, to add a category Stevens does not write of, the poetry of the images (phanopoeia).
Not all imagery is visual. Norman Friedman’s New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics entry on “Imagery” lists a whole panoply of kinds of mental imagery: “visual (sight, then brightness, clarity, color, and motion), auditory (hearing), olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), tactile (touch, then temperature, texture), organic (awareness of heartbeat, pulse, breathing, digestion), and kinesthetic (awareness of muscle tension and movement)” (560). It also points out that different poets may use different kinds of imagery, arguing that Keats’s poetry is dominated by tactile and organic imagery and Shelley’s by kinesthetic imagery. At the risk of simplifying a complex topic, I concentrate here on visual imagery, as most imagery in contemporary American poetry is of the visual kind.
Much contemporary American poetry neglects melopoeia, the music of syllables and words and phrases, in favor of phanopoeia, the play of imagery, or in the case of avant-garde poetry, some of which reads like a Cliff’s Notes version of theory, logopoeia, the play of ideas. Too often, however, the images neither play nor work, and the ideas are out on strike. (Horace wrote that poetry should instruct and delight, but too much contemporary poetry skimps on the delight and teaches nothing one didn’t already know.)
2
I’ve become interested in what I call the image-phrase, which isn’t strictly descriptive or visual but evocative or connotative (something along the lines of the absent presence of a flower that has never existed conjured up by the word fleur for Mallarmé). The image-phrase strikes me as a more flexible concept than the image per se. The image-phrase mingles perception and conception; it captures the inseparability of image and language, and also the way that a phrase can produce an image that is not a picture of something. The aim is a perhaps paradoxical sharp-edged, precise evocation.
Words are not pictorial, except in their visual presence as marks on a surface, a presence which is in itself not linguistic. There are no images in poems. There are conjunctions of words by means of which the poet hopes to induce the reader to produce a mental image in his or her mind (and such an “image” is as much verbal as visual), an image that will be analogous to the image the poet wants to appear at that point in the poem. “As far as poetry is concerned, there are no sensuous visions that correspond to what a poem tries to say. Instead,…the concrete actualization of poetry lies in its linguistic shape, not in the highly problematic visual representations poems are supposed to stimulate. Poems do not need sensual representation to actualize themselves. They are concrete enough in the medium of language” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 143-144). In Saussurean terms, one presents the signifier rather than the referent, which is always unattainable in any case: the concept rather than the thing in the world.
Jack Spicer writes in one of his letters “to” Lorca that he has tried to be “independent of images…to make things visible rather than to make pictures of them” (After Lorca, in The Collected Books of Jack Spicer 34). This is close to what the image-phrase attempts to do, knowing that it is an impossible aim. Spicer, though, claims to seek “to make poems out of real objects,” though he also claims, contradictorily, that he wants “to point to the real” (op. cit. 33), which would indicate that those objects have stubbornly stayed outside the poem. An object in a poem, unlike the strips of newspaper and wallpaper pasted into Picasso’s collage painting Glass and Bottle of Suze, is not a real object, but a virtual object, a verbal simulacrum of objecthood. A poem cannot be constructed out of things, or even ideas and emotions. As Mallarmé reportedly told Degas, poems are not made out of ideas, but out of words. The only objects in poems are words, and words are not objects in the same way that globs of paint, that shapes and colors are.
Words can elicit visual responses in the reader’s mind (though the relationship between a reader’s visual response and the visual impression aimed at by the poem is contingent at best), but the paradox of how a visual impression or experience is conveyed or recreated in a nonvisual medium is irresolvable. Much as we might wish them to, words do not embody things. How often I’ve been frustrated by language’s incapacity to capture a visual impression, the nearly-full moon at eight haloed by a pink-tinged mist and wreathed by a half-circle of bare and partly-bare branches black against the blue-fading-into-deeper-blue night. So many words and that moon’s still not there. As W.J.T. Mitchell points out, “Since literary representation does not represent by likeness the way pictorial images do, literary representation is itself only and always metaphorical” (“Image,” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 557). The idea of representation is itself a metaphor when applied to literature. Visual images bear a perceptual resemblance to the things that they represent, but words do not resemble that which they attempt to represent, except insofar as they represent other words (as in literary presentations of speech, writing, or verbal thought). Verbal descriptions are never depictions. “The concept of ‘poetic imagery’ is thus a kind of oxymoron, installing an alien medium (painting, sculpture, visual art) at the heart of verbal expression” (ibid.).
3
Painting and writing work very differently in this regard, because a painting is always itself an image, even if it’s not an image of anything. There are actual colors and actual shapes that, whether or not they refer to something else, exist as material entities in themselves. A painting, or a sculpture, can be thought of as an image of itself. I often prefer nonrepresentational art exactly for this reason. Representational paintings seem on the one hand redundant (an image that’s also imaging something else) and on the other hand distracting (the image being represented takes one’s attention away from the image the painting is: and I’m very easily distracted by subject matter). I’ve seen the world, and I don’t particularly need copies of it. My interest is in the painting as a painting, not as a painting of something. As Adorno writes of traditionally representational paintings, “To the extent to which we detect in them images rather than replicas of something, they are ‘abstract’” (Aesthetic Theory 46).
Clyfford Still’s wholly abstract paintings are landscapes of color and shape. There’s a large all black painting of his at the Art Institute of Chicago (I can’t recall the title, though I’ve tried to look it up) that’s like a sea of black with black islands of textured paint rising out the surface. How often I’ve been tempted to touch that painting, to feel the textures that the eye only intuits. But words, as words, don’t have that palpable solidity, that visceral immediacy. We hear or we read and we must then translate.
Language is an in-betweenness, the interrelation of elements. Language doesn’t just relate things: language is relation. If it’s purely material, its no longer language, just scrawlings or noise (though it might then become visual art, like Arakawa’s work, or music, like some of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s language experiments). If it’s purely conceptual, without manifestation, then it’s no longer language either. Some experimental poetry (concrete poetry, for example; I don’t know what the poetic equivalent of conceptual art would be) tries to approach one or the other of those extremes as closely as possible while still remaining language.
The sound of a word can fill the mouth or ear with pleasure, but that sound isn’t the word. A beautifully scripted or typeset word can give visual pleasure, but those marks on the page aren’t the word either. Nor is the verbal concept in the mind, unspoken. Words are defined by their liminal state between the immaterial and two states of concretion, thoughts on the one hand and marks or sounds on the other. It’s the conjunction and co-presence of these two modes that makes language language.
A teacher I had in high school said once, “Images are a dime a dozen. I’m tired of them.” A professor in college warned, “Don’t let metaphors become pets.” Some years ago, a student told me, “I don’t want to look at pictures when I’m reading a poem.” The still predominant scenic mode, to use Charles Altieri’s term, is so heavily dependent on imagery and visual description that it’s become completely rote. If I’ve painted a verbal picture, I’ve written a poem. It sometimes seems that anyone can come up with a string of images. It’s the structure that’s hard to produce, some reason that these particular images appear together in this particular order or constellation. Of course, it’s sadly impressive how many writers can’t even come up with disconnected images of any precision or impact. But while I’m critical of the scenic mode, I’m quite wedded to images, and to the specificity and groundedness images can provide. I don’t like poems to float off into the ether, and imagery can provide ballast, a route from here to there, wherever “there” may be for any given poem. Vivid, striking images make a strong impression on me, and I strive for them in my own work as part of the sensuous experience of the poem. All good poems, of whatever mode or style, have in common specificity and particularity. In contemporary American poetry, that specificity is primarily imagistic.
What we mean when we talk about images in poetry are mental images. A mental image can be defined as “the connecting link between experience (object) and knowledge (subject). An image [is] the reproduction in the mind of a sensation produced in perception….But of course the mind may also produce images when not receiving direct perceptions,” as in remembering past events or objects no longer present, in dreams, or in reading, where words “may refer either to experiences which could produce physical perceptions were the reader actually to have those experiences, or to the sense-impressions themselves” (“Imagery,” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 559, 560). While the words “image” and “imagery” have been used in many and various senses in literary criticism, it is in this basic sense that I use them here.
In his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound writes of three ways that language can be charged with meaning, which he calls phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia. He defines phanopoeia as “throwing the object (fixed or moving) on to the visual imagination,” much like projecting an image onto a screen (63). The reader’s imagination is presumably the screen which passively accepts this image. (This is a problematic view of the reading process, discounting the reader’s active role in producing the text, but I will leave that discussion for a later time.) Pound emphasizes that phanopoeia includes not just the fixed, still image but the moving image, that is, “praxis or action” (52). Most imagery in contemporary American poetry, as in Imagism, is of the fixed, still variety. (For Pound, at least for a time, vorticism was the solution to this problem of stasis.) Melopoeia induces “emotional correlations by the sound and rhythm of the speech” (63). Pound describes, in turn, three kinds of melopoeia, “verse made to sing; to chant or intone; and to speak” (61), and recommends the first. Louis Zukofsky followed this line of thinking with his diagram of poetry as “Upper limit music, lower limit speech.” Pound’s definition of logopoeia is the most problematic of the three. Logopoeia induces “both of the effects by stimulating the associations (intellectual or emotional) that have remained in the reader’s consciousness in relation to the actual words or word groups employed” (63). It’s unclear to me what the two effects are meant to be. It seems that they are visual imagery and emotional associations, but since the effects are induced by the stimulation of intellectual or emotional effects, that doesn’t seem possible, unless Pound is saying that emotional associations are induced by the stimulation of emotional associations, which is completely circular.
In the interest of clarity and at the risk of distortion, I define phanopoeia as the deployment of imagery to produce an effect upon the reader; melopoeia as the use of the range of verbal music toward this aim; and logopoeia as a second-order technique, using ideas, connotations, and intellectual and emotional associations to produce an effect in the reader. In Stevens’s terms, logopoeia may be referred to as the poetry of the ideas, as distinct from the poetry of the words (melopoeia) or, to add a category Stevens does not write of, the poetry of the images (phanopoeia).
Not all imagery is visual. Norman Friedman’s New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics entry on “Imagery” lists a whole panoply of kinds of mental imagery: “visual (sight, then brightness, clarity, color, and motion), auditory (hearing), olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), tactile (touch, then temperature, texture), organic (awareness of heartbeat, pulse, breathing, digestion), and kinesthetic (awareness of muscle tension and movement)” (560). It also points out that different poets may use different kinds of imagery, arguing that Keats’s poetry is dominated by tactile and organic imagery and Shelley’s by kinesthetic imagery. At the risk of simplifying a complex topic, I concentrate here on visual imagery, as most imagery in contemporary American poetry is of the visual kind.
Much contemporary American poetry neglects melopoeia, the music of syllables and words and phrases, in favor of phanopoeia, the play of imagery, or in the case of avant-garde poetry, some of which reads like a Cliff’s Notes version of theory, logopoeia, the play of ideas. Too often, however, the images neither play nor work, and the ideas are out on strike. (Horace wrote that poetry should instruct and delight, but too much contemporary poetry skimps on the delight and teaches nothing one didn’t already know.)
2
I’ve become interested in what I call the image-phrase, which isn’t strictly descriptive or visual but evocative or connotative (something along the lines of the absent presence of a flower that has never existed conjured up by the word fleur for Mallarmé). The image-phrase strikes me as a more flexible concept than the image per se. The image-phrase mingles perception and conception; it captures the inseparability of image and language, and also the way that a phrase can produce an image that is not a picture of something. The aim is a perhaps paradoxical sharp-edged, precise evocation.
Words are not pictorial, except in their visual presence as marks on a surface, a presence which is in itself not linguistic. There are no images in poems. There are conjunctions of words by means of which the poet hopes to induce the reader to produce a mental image in his or her mind (and such an “image” is as much verbal as visual), an image that will be analogous to the image the poet wants to appear at that point in the poem. “As far as poetry is concerned, there are no sensuous visions that correspond to what a poem tries to say. Instead,…the concrete actualization of poetry lies in its linguistic shape, not in the highly problematic visual representations poems are supposed to stimulate. Poems do not need sensual representation to actualize themselves. They are concrete enough in the medium of language” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 143-144). In Saussurean terms, one presents the signifier rather than the referent, which is always unattainable in any case: the concept rather than the thing in the world.
Jack Spicer writes in one of his letters “to” Lorca that he has tried to be “independent of images…to make things visible rather than to make pictures of them” (After Lorca, in The Collected Books of Jack Spicer 34). This is close to what the image-phrase attempts to do, knowing that it is an impossible aim. Spicer, though, claims to seek “to make poems out of real objects,” though he also claims, contradictorily, that he wants “to point to the real” (op. cit. 33), which would indicate that those objects have stubbornly stayed outside the poem. An object in a poem, unlike the strips of newspaper and wallpaper pasted into Picasso’s collage painting Glass and Bottle of Suze, is not a real object, but a virtual object, a verbal simulacrum of objecthood. A poem cannot be constructed out of things, or even ideas and emotions. As Mallarmé reportedly told Degas, poems are not made out of ideas, but out of words. The only objects in poems are words, and words are not objects in the same way that globs of paint, that shapes and colors are.
Words can elicit visual responses in the reader’s mind (though the relationship between a reader’s visual response and the visual impression aimed at by the poem is contingent at best), but the paradox of how a visual impression or experience is conveyed or recreated in a nonvisual medium is irresolvable. Much as we might wish them to, words do not embody things. How often I’ve been frustrated by language’s incapacity to capture a visual impression, the nearly-full moon at eight haloed by a pink-tinged mist and wreathed by a half-circle of bare and partly-bare branches black against the blue-fading-into-deeper-blue night. So many words and that moon’s still not there. As W.J.T. Mitchell points out, “Since literary representation does not represent by likeness the way pictorial images do, literary representation is itself only and always metaphorical” (“Image,” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 557). The idea of representation is itself a metaphor when applied to literature. Visual images bear a perceptual resemblance to the things that they represent, but words do not resemble that which they attempt to represent, except insofar as they represent other words (as in literary presentations of speech, writing, or verbal thought). Verbal descriptions are never depictions. “The concept of ‘poetic imagery’ is thus a kind of oxymoron, installing an alien medium (painting, sculpture, visual art) at the heart of verbal expression” (ibid.).
3
Painting and writing work very differently in this regard, because a painting is always itself an image, even if it’s not an image of anything. There are actual colors and actual shapes that, whether or not they refer to something else, exist as material entities in themselves. A painting, or a sculpture, can be thought of as an image of itself. I often prefer nonrepresentational art exactly for this reason. Representational paintings seem on the one hand redundant (an image that’s also imaging something else) and on the other hand distracting (the image being represented takes one’s attention away from the image the painting is: and I’m very easily distracted by subject matter). I’ve seen the world, and I don’t particularly need copies of it. My interest is in the painting as a painting, not as a painting of something. As Adorno writes of traditionally representational paintings, “To the extent to which we detect in them images rather than replicas of something, they are ‘abstract’” (Aesthetic Theory 46).
Clyfford Still’s wholly abstract paintings are landscapes of color and shape. There’s a large all black painting of his at the Art Institute of Chicago (I can’t recall the title, though I’ve tried to look it up) that’s like a sea of black with black islands of textured paint rising out the surface. How often I’ve been tempted to touch that painting, to feel the textures that the eye only intuits. But words, as words, don’t have that palpable solidity, that visceral immediacy. We hear or we read and we must then translate.
Language is an in-betweenness, the interrelation of elements. Language doesn’t just relate things: language is relation. If it’s purely material, its no longer language, just scrawlings or noise (though it might then become visual art, like Arakawa’s work, or music, like some of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s language experiments). If it’s purely conceptual, without manifestation, then it’s no longer language either. Some experimental poetry (concrete poetry, for example; I don’t know what the poetic equivalent of conceptual art would be) tries to approach one or the other of those extremes as closely as possible while still remaining language.
The sound of a word can fill the mouth or ear with pleasure, but that sound isn’t the word. A beautifully scripted or typeset word can give visual pleasure, but those marks on the page aren’t the word either. Nor is the verbal concept in the mind, unspoken. Words are defined by their liminal state between the immaterial and two states of concretion, thoughts on the one hand and marks or sounds on the other. It’s the conjunction and co-presence of these two modes that makes language language.
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