被消失的我们

长期以来，

图像一直被认为与理性和思想无关。

柏拉图称图像为“非逻辑的”也并非偶然。

但近些年，

人文学科在各自的领域里，

在诸如视觉文化或视觉社会学等学科中，

已经越来越意识到视觉机制问题的显现。

人们提出了如下意见：

图像不是对世界的模仿性再生产，

而是一种主动的世界生成的方式，

并因此从它们“述行的”而非“描写的”功能来加以思考。

研究图像如何思考，

它们如何传达意义，

如何在观者身上激发反应的时机已经成熟。

而这样一种研究不可避免将是一项集体的事业，

会诉诸东西方的美学资源。

本次 “观想：图像及其受众” 国际学术研讨会

邀集了中国与欧美著名专家共同参与。

会议时间

2018年6月21-22日

会议地点

复旦大学哲学学院

（邯郸路220号光华西楼2401室）

  

与会学者及发言纲要

       从魏晋到唐，中国画的写实能力不断提高，写实的绘画技巧不断精细化和准确化，虽然也延续了用笔墨勾线界定轮廓与衣纹的概略表象（白描）呈现方式，但在平面上用勾线渲染的办法描绘客体对象的技巧已经达到了很高的水平。正是这种越画越象的趋势，反而造成了知识精英阶层的不满足，文士们开始提出“绘画以形似，见与儿童邻”的反叛性主张，引发了宋元之际从“拟像”重返“图形”的转变。而欧洲绘画演进中“像” “图”的转变，则是开始于19世纪末的后印象之变。塞尚是最早的探索者，有开创之功，马蒂斯、毕加索等人全力推进，迅速实现了从“拟像”重返“图形”的转变。宋元之变在时间上虽然大大早于后印象之变，但后印象之变表现得更为快速与激烈。前者用了几百年，后者只用了几十年。 

       In the last hundred years there have been a wide range of theories about how pictures (paintings, drawings, film, photography, video) embody, possess, contain, or suggest meaning. It would not be inaccurate to say that every major art historian, philosopher, or critic who has articulated a theory of interpretation has in effect contributed to this question. Normally these theories are treated as separate endeavors, so that accounts of the meaning of images are found, separately, in phenomenology, semiotics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, and other fields. 

       My proposal here is that all such theories participate in a general interest in distinguishing linguistic meaning from what sometimes ends up being called pictorial meaning.  This is a speculative lecture: it’s an attempt to suggest that all such interpretations may be understood as versions of a hope, or desire, about pictures.

       At one limit there are claims (endemic in modernism) about pictures’ nonlinguistic nature. At another limit there are claims (common in anthropology) that pictures not only have language, but are living, acting agents in the world. In between is the gray area that continues to snare theorists. And in the gray area, the most interesting region, one often inhabited by academic writers, is where there is a hope that pictures somehow produce thought -- that they somehow think. 

       I discuss a number of versions of this kind of claim by Hubert Damisch, Tom Mitchell, and Louis Marin, and I claim that the notion that pictures embody thought is a crucial confusion that enables current conceptualization of the image. It is a confusion because it elides several mutually incompatible or otherwise unacceptable claims, such as the notion that a picture has volition and agency. But it is crucial for current writing because enables claims about the way that meaning resides in pictures, without requiring that those claims are individually argued. We work, in effect, in an intentionally ill-defined zone that permits our desires about pictures to live alongside our desires about our writing.

       近年来，图像（images）的方法介入中国传统山水画研究，拓展了绘画作品解读的多样化视野，然而从本质上看，中国山水画无论从观念到方法，都并非对应于视觉的客观，而是服务于艺术家内心诸多内涵的外显。

       公元四、五世纪之间，宗炳以“圣人含道映物，贤者澄怀味象”的比附，明确提出了山水画的功能与意义，同时期的王微，也提出“以一管之笔，拟太虚之体”的山水画技术方向，并与“案城域，辨方州，标镇阜，划浸流”的现实功能图像划清了界限。而综观此时期思想背景，如宗氏的“精于言理”且长于释、老之学，佛教传播中制像与“观像”的修行方法，进而如“观想”的通感体验，当在此早期山水画生成过程中达成一定的推进作用，同时也在山水画的品读中形成一定的冥思意味。

       尽管山水画的前期历史保留了比较清晰的自然视觉景观，但“坐穷丘壑”（北宋郭熙）的思维想象，却依然是绘画美学的主要动因，乃至《宣和画谱》（十二世纪初）得出了“以画山水得名者，类非画家者流，而多出于缙绅士大夫”的论断。后期山水画的历史，正如元明以来山水画家们所不断“仿作”的“米家山水”那样，山水画的观念与技术，更加激发出个体领悟的抒情性创作，并被晚明董其昌总结为“丘壑内营”的集大成法则，并被清初王原祁等继承为“画中龙脉，开合起伏”的山水画主观营造之法。

       回味宗炳的“目所绸缪”之意，它正是一种观念在先的作画意图。因此在山水画艺术的追求过程中，诉诸视觉的画面形式，根本是在于精神境界的内在升华，而非图像记录的叙事满足。而至于此中技法风格的丰富与多样，只是“理一而分殊”的具体体现。

       金版《文姬归汉图》是一幅传世之作，在对此画的研究与探讨中，常常有些观点将画面中胡人躬背缩首的姿势视为惧冷胆怯，并与文姬的昂首挺胸形成鲜明对比，无形中得出了一种贬低金人抬高汉人的观点，本文对一观点提出商榷，并尝试着从形式分析角度论证画中骑马胡人姿势的躬背缩首应为一种习惯姿势，而汉人的挺直身躯多少与汉人的不擅骑射有关，整体上都是一种写实手法的结果，主题或有寓意，而形式本身当无褒贬的含义。

Alloa Emmanuel

       “Pictures can’t say ain’t”. Sol Worth has summarized what is a commonly held opinion: most theorists believe that pictures lack the capacity of negating. Such an opinion has been voiced time and again, and has prominent proponents, such as Freud or Wittgenstein and can be illustrated by René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe. The talk shall outline a counter-proposal, which tries to argue that there is indeed an entire range of modes of pictorial negation which must be analyzed in their specifics. The result of this analysis is that the concept of negation itself turns out to be too narrow, inasmuch as it is conceptualized on the benchmark of propositional language. Beyond the definite negation, whose purpose pictures arguably don’t serve very well, there is however a whole range of other forms of (indefinite) negations, which pictures might illustrate with even more clarity than the traditional grammar of propositional negative statements. As the paper argues, a picture is a differential matrix, where forces and forms generate figures that are not subjected to the principle of contradiction. While pictures might thus indeed be ill-suited for replacing the determinate negations of verbal language, they might be particularly appropriate for exemplifying the play of contrasting forces.

 

       The notion of "figurative thought" has a long histry and a pivotal position between the history of art and aesthetics. The French tradition of the “theoretical object”, in which my own work fits, has indeed developed this notion on the level of theory but also on the heuristic plan. The perspective of the theoretical object is characterized by the choice to attribute to the work of art a whole series of operations that the interpreter can make explicit, but that belong to the internal structuring of the work itself. This thought being a thought of the work of art and not a thought on the work of art, it follows that to make this thought explicit it is necessary to start from a close and very careful description of this singular work rather than elaborate general principles. The consequence is that the only way to answer the question posed by the title of our symposium from the point of view of the theoretical object is to choose one and my choice fell on the Last Judgment, painted by Michelangelo between 1535 and 1541.

       图像首先不是被凝视的东西，而是被制作出来的东西。人们制作图像是为了让事物在图像中呈现出它的是其所是。事物的呈现是公然的，图像的制作是隐蔽的。艺术提醒人们以事物的图像本性。图像是整体性的。人们以辨认和看见这两种方式来对待图像。辨认意味着将图像中的事物辨认为该物以便迅速从它转向下一个事物或行动。这种迅速转向使得对于事物的看见成为不可能。对于事物的辨认是以转向的秩序性为根据的，对于事物的看见是以图像的整体性为根据的。艺术意味着辨认的停顿和看见的发生。辨认的停顿有两种方式，一种是转向的中止，另一种是辨认的困难。就传统艺术中看见的发生而言，辨认的停顿主要缘于转向的中止，即以鉴赏的方式看见作品而不是藉着固定的秩序迅速从它转向下一步。就当代艺术中看见的发生而言，辨认的停顿主要缘于辨认的困难，即人们难以根据固定的秩序把事物辨认出来从而陷入无法摆脱的困惑。辨认的困难有两种，第一种是难以辨认作品所呈现的东西，比如抽象艺术等，然而，就作品可以被辨认为艺术作品而言，这一困难被规避了；于是有了第二种困难，即难以把作品辨认为艺术作品，比如现成品艺术等。传统艺术之所以成为当代艺术，其中一个重要原因是，前者所遭遇到的挑战使得转向的中止获得了解除，因而不得不以另一种方式亦即使辨认产生困难的方式来造成辨认的停顿，这就是后者。总而言之，艺术，无论是传统的还是当代的，其宗旨都是辨认的停顿和看见的发生，尽管它们的方式以及所遭遇到的挑战不尽相同。而辨认的停顿和看见的发生意味着一切都在图像之中，都是在图像中获得自身的是其所是的。

 

       My paper entitled “Making Things Visible: Uncertain Images” contributes to the theoretical discussion on images and their presence or a potential quality of agency whilst looking at three iconic examples of uncertain images. Their uncertainty derives not only from their blurriness yet mostly out of their context of the NS concentration camps and a complex of absence, loss and memory politics. Whilst Georges Didi-Huberman analyzes four black and white images which are rather concealing than revealing scenes of the Lager – images, which were smuggled out by inmates under the risk of their lives – the German painter Gerhard Richter uses these photographs as a starting point for his own transformation into four large scale abstract paintings entitled Birkenau. Another form of dealing with the act of disappearance and making things visible is the use of grain in the fictional photography-textnarrative of W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. Questions of the entanglement of materiality and meaning will be addressed through analyzing the images as well as the reception process. Do these examples become meaningful through the act of prescribing signs and interpretation or do they resist making things visible and remain somewhat uncertain, uncanny and unreadable? My argument will strengthen the dynamic act of making things visible and invisible at the same time through the use of grainy black and white or abstract lines as a way of experiencing the presence of images: their agential capacity which include notions as such, that images “think”.

       The simple question “how do images think?” is doubly tricky, because it requires two levels of methodological awareness. It implies that images have transhistorical agency—images think—and suggests that this agency is culturally determined—they think in a way that we can investigate from time to time. By now, of course, this is all but provocative or paradoxical, as we have known at least since Aby Warburg’s understanding of Pathosformeln and various discussions of the subject. The twinning of the dynamis proper to the images and their material expressions has certainly been pivotal for visual studies, which have exploited its heuristic power to such an extent that I believe it has been exhausted.

       However this twinning is still thought-provoking if we insist on it by applying Mitchell’s concept of “media nesting” and investigate it in relation to our primary medium: the human body. Phenomenology and philosophical anthropology have thoroughly explained how human bodily experience participates in conscious human self-appreciation. We each know ourselves thanks to the double experience of having a body and being a body, as Helmuth Plessner put it. The body we have is the human one, but the one I experience is mine. Does the image-making have an effect on, or even express, the relationship between the bodily substratum and the individual bodily experience? I think so.

 

       My claim is that, in Western culture, the very conception of the painted image coevolved with the idea of human beings as embodied psychological individuals. The picture helped to reinvent the body as expression of our personal identity and to think of it as at the forefront of its environment. Using Narcissus as a case study, I will discuss how both visual media external to our bodies and our body as medium itself are deeply nested in each other, to the extent that pictures and individuals enact an “autopoietic feedback loop”.

       In Art and Illusion, E. H. Gombrich accounts, based on Kenneth Clark’s experiment, that we can see “the brush strokes and dabs of pigment on the canvas,” and we can see “a vision of transfigured reality,” but we cannot see “both visions at the same time.” Gombrich likens our experience of paintings to our experience of the duck-rabbit illusion: “We can see the picture as either a rabbit or a duck.” But “we cannot experience alternative readings at the same time.”    

 

       But Richard Wollheim’s account is different. He observes that “the seeing appropriate to representations permits simultaneous attention to what is represented and to the representation, to the object and to the medium, and therefore instantiates seeing-in rather than seeing-as….” The experience of seeing-in is twofold, since it involves simultaneous awareness of seeing the medium and seeing the object. While seeing-as does not have this twofoldness. The central thesis of Gombrich’s Art and Illusion is that, according to Wollheim’s understanding, “in looking at representational pictures, I am incapable of this kind of twofold perception.”

 

       Wollheim’s account seems plausible, but he does not give a clear and detailed explanation for the twofoldness phenomenon. Based on his body-mind relation hypothesis, Michael Polanyi tries to clarify the twofoldness. Polanyi finds that we have two kinds of awareness, that is, focal awareness and subsidiary awareness. On the one hand, Polanyi agrees with Gombrich that we cannot have simultaneous focal awareness of seeing the medium and seeing the object or subject, on the other hand, he agrees with Wollheim that we can have focal awareness of seeing the object and subsidiary awareness of the medium at the same time. 

 

       Both Wollheim and Polanyi agree that the relation between medium and subject is asymmetrical. We can see subject in medium but we cannot see medium in subject. But Michael Podro’s account is different. He supports a symmetrical relation: “we see the figures in the pen or brush marks, but that we see the pen or brush marks, or the intervals shadow and light, in the figures. There is, we want to say a symmetrical relation between medium and subject.” Both seeing manifest different aspects of the depicted object. 

 

       In Chinese painting, especially literati painting, we find another asymmetrical relation between medium and subject. Chinese artists and art theorists prevent us from seeing subject in medium, instead they prefer seeing medium. As Su Shi’s poem indicates, “To judge a painting by its verisimilitude / Shows the mental level of a child. / If a poem is written as such a poem should be written, / You can be sure he is not a poet.” The medium, the ink and brush, abstracted from the painted object does not aim at representing the shape of the object but expressing its nature and the painter’s spirit.

       汉斯·贝尔廷教授在他《图像人类学》中提出了一种解释图像学任务的新方法：在图像、媒介和身体之间建立三角关系的人类学方法。贝尔廷教授试图阐明，为了深刻地理解图像，我们必须将这个三角关系引入图像学。我试图在本文中阐明，伯格森在《物质与记忆》中提出的方案能够帮助我们更好地理解图像与身体之间的连续性。这个伯格森式的方案比贝尔廷教授提出的人类学方法更为彻底。伯格森指出，身体并不是非图像性的要素，身体就是图像，并且，较之于其他图像，身体是最主要的图像。基于这一理解，图像中的身体维度以及身体－图像的连续性就变成了明显的事实。不过，无论是从意图还是从结论来看，这个伯格森式的方案并没有在任何意义上驳斥贝尔廷教授的人类学方法，而是从形而上学的视角出发强化了后者的一些关键洞见。

       If surveillance is the figure of the panopticon (the visibility of the many to the few) and celebrity that of the synopticon (the visibility of the few to the many), internet combines the two into a ‘schizoptic’ mode. The mass observer and the mass observed are fused into the same person, but the lived experience of the two states is disassociated. What I am calling the Schizopticon consists in the ‘consensual’ unification of the seer and the seen. I would like to explore this hypothesis by first describing some ancient devices and cultural conceptions from the Middle Ages to the 19th Century in the West.

 

       本文作者通过仔细观察敦煌北朝至曹氏归义军时期壁画的一些细节，试图复原敦煌中古壁画的创作过程及其背后的图画思维。张彦远所记载的中古壁画创作时“描”与“成色”的分工及竞争，实际上可以在敦煌壁画中找到最好的证明。壁画作为中古时期最为人所重的一种艺术媒介，为这一艺术分工与竞争创造了必要条件。中古晚期，随着壁画大范围的衰落及卷轴画作为艺术媒介的统治地位的形成，这一现象也随之消亡。如果从全球美术史的角度来理解敦煌艺术创作中的这个现象，那么我们或许可以说，它就是发生在“线条”与“色彩”，“基底”与“形象”之间的一场“斗艺”。

       约翰·杜威和纳尔逊·古德曼是二十世纪美国两位极具代表性的美学家，他们都深入地参与到了回应西方美学从古典时期的再现艺术转向现代多元化的符号形式这一全球话语中。对非再现的艺术表现的共同拥护，正是本文在杜威与古德曼之间展开对话的出发点。对于实用主义美学家杜威来说，艺术是一种蕴涵重要的人性力量的经验的典范，深化了人们在世界中生活的意义。所有艺术形式（并不局限于视觉艺术）的共同之处是，通过利用自然和改造自然，自我也在过程中得以形成和成长。既揭示了自然的潜在特性，也发现了自我的潜力。正是这种“双重的改变”，一个活动转化成了一个表现行动。古德曼继恩斯特·卡西尔和苏珊·朗格之后，将他的美学理论建立在艺术符号的基础之上。他批评图像再现的相似性观点，他将艺术表现定义为“隐喻性例证”。有学者评价古德曼“比起科林伍德或丹托，更加明确地宣称艺术的价值在于成为构造世界的一种方式”。

       尽管有这些相似之处，但杜威和古德曼在诠释何为艺术之首要价值（究竟是提升生命，还是获取知识）方面有着重要的区别。杜威认为艺术交流所蕴含的意义最为根本，艺术之优越性在于联合而不是割裂自然与文化世界的连续性。对于古德曼来说，艺术作为符号形式是为了认知探究，相比而言，艺术符号在交流以及满足其他实际的或愉悦目的中的作用仅仅是次要的。杜威和古德曼在这一立场上的差异不容忽视。正如美国美学家比尔兹利指出的：“审美经验与认知探究的经验之间存在根本差异，前者通过将意义和性质糅合在一起来恢复整体，后者则将性质和它们的意义区分开来研究”。基于这些比较，本文呼吁恢复一种意义生成的审美经验的必要性，这也是美学的教育启示。

       In his book Suspension of Perception, Jonathan Crary involved in huge amount of knowledge such as Husserl’s Phenomenology, Wundt’s experimental psychology, Freud’s psychology, Sherrington’s neuroscience, William James’ psychology and Bergson’s philosophy to explore the “visual archeology” of Cezanne’s painting Pines and Rocks which was produced around 1900- the same era when these knowledge systems were produced. When he explains painstakingly the brushstrokes of which the signified are unknown with astonishing erudition, it is not difficult to see that scholars tend to situate paintings in the structure of visual perception. For Chinese painters, however, whether these strokes are flowers, weeds, mosses or rocks is not such a bigdeal. It is actually not that Chinese painters can’t tell their formal andvisual differences, but that these differences are not the point of their “poetic dwelling” which is really about co-existing with things. In this relation between human and things, the problem of which kind of the things are (a question belongs to the Kantian cognitive judgment) is not so much as important as a poetic relation (with reference to Kantian judgment of taste) in which he/she really gets on well with things.