It is indeed hardly too much to say that
Civilization, being a process of long and complex
growth, can only be thoroughly understood when
studied through its entire range; that the past is
continually needed to explain the present, and the
whole to explain the part.
EDWARD BURNETT TYLOR
Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the
Development of Civilization (1865)1
Interlude
Theoretical Setting
Introduction
That I find it necessary to introduce my metahistorical credo at this early stage
rather than at the conclusion is due to two reasons. Firstly, the present text is in
very many ways an interdisciplinary experiment which brings together empirical
material and methodological instruments from quite different subject areas: besides
art history, also the history of religion, history of science, philosophy, psychology,
sociology and anthropology. In order to make a functional unity of these often
heterogeneous traditions, I think it necessary to equip the reader with consumer
guidelines. This Interlude is an attempt to formulate such guidelines, by defining
terminology, outlining premises and (possibly the weakest link) declaring reservations. Secondly, the text has been written at a time – the 1990s and first decade of
the 21st century – in which the academic climate, at least in the various branches of
the humanities, is still characterised by diverse forms of fervent cultural relativism:
post-structuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, politicising feminism. Even
though the current text is actually inconceivable without a dimension of cultural
relativism – a notion that cognition, interpretation and description cannot be
absolutely objective, but are always inscribed in given cultural circumstances – it
departs radically from the widespread dogma of ‘the death of the grand narratives’:
the impossibility in devising transverse, long-term effective patterns in history. As
I thus acknowledge that, especially from this angle, the underlying concept of the
text cannot be said to be ‘generally’ approved, the Interlude can also be read as the
defence on the attack.
Were I to attach a methodological label to this book, it would be, in a more
general sense, syncretism, in a narrower sense, evolutionism. Syncretism is here
understood as methodological pluralism, acknowledgement that, in principle, not
enough methodologies can be employed to describe the diversity of the world, in
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casu cultural history. But, unlike fervent cultural relativism, this does not mean
that there are just as many atomistic separate ‘worlds’ as there are points of view,
but rather – by a displacement of the fulcrum from the perceiving subject and its
social context to the communal space between subject, sociality and world – that
the world reveals itself in a multifaceted basic structure, which accordingly exacts
different angles of approach in order to be decoded. By this means it is undoubtedly
possible to develop unlimited quantities of points of view, each with its particular
and so in its way unique cognition, but nevertheless between these points of view,
or at least a certain number of them, there will be enough connectors, what I will
call structural similarities, justifying talk of the same world. The world constitutes a
terrain we can collide with, a mosaic with myriads of tesserae which are components
of a multipart pattern – multipart associating to both ‘split’ and ‘shared’.
Syncretism thus means neither confusion of style nor struggle between incompatible standpoints, but rather that the world, precisely because it cannot be contained in a single beam of light revealing a complete pattern, must be approached
via the interaction of many searchlights. My endeavour here will be to select a little
set of these searchlights – the landscape image and the comparative areas of analysis:
self-consciousness, socially-determined perception of nature and world picture – and
investigate the profiles of cultural history which thereby become visible.
Evolutionism now enters the picture because the body of cultural history not
only adds new layers to itself in the course of time, but also – through couplings with
the appropriate methodological instruments – reveals new aspects of its genesis. In
my opinion, the philosophy, psychology, social and human sciences of the last two
centuries in particular have seen the advance of instruments to record a broader
developmental sequence in cultural history: an evolution that covers the period from
the origin of culture to a maturation phase, modernity, which, the more forcefully
it is acknowledged as this pattern’s concluding phase, the more it becomes the connecting link to a new evolutionary phase, postmodernity after the year 1900. This
evolution thus covers the development of sets of cultural domains which at the same
time as interacting horizontally – on a synchronic level – can also be said to have
a correlated process of genesis on a vertical – diachronic – plane. Precisely which
methodological instruments can be devised to throw light on this two-pronged
correlation will be discussed below. In musical terms this strategy might seem like
introducing an orchestral work by playing the individual instrumental parts one
by one. The risk is, of course, that the work will fall apart by concentrating on its
components, but I hope to provide so many samples of ensemble playing along the
way that the reader will not wander off the track.
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1.
Diachronic aspects
The concept of evolution
and its function in a model of culture
What are we meant to understand by cultural evolution at all? Before I tune in to
the specialist disciplines from which I have assembled the parts for my orchestration of the term, I will outline some of the essential qualities of the soundscape in
order to provide a general overview. For a system to be claimed as behaving in an
evolutionary manner, I would first argue that it has to be characterised by a certain
combination of stasis and change. It must, on the one hand, not be at a complete
standstill – stasis alone is not evolutionary – and on the other hand it must not
change character so abruptly that we question whether it is the same system. In
other words, it has to contain phenomena that are in transformation – and this
might very well be to a major degree, possibly in discontinuous leaps – but which
after this transformation can still be recognised as ‘itself’ in an altered guise.
Secondly, it is crucial that the changes to the system, within one or more interpretative frameworks, can be said to be directional. By direction I will not only
understand irreversibility – that something once occurred cannot be repeated – but
moreover that one or more parameters of the system are in expansion. It is therefore not enough for something to occur that has not been seen before if it does
not also continue a tendency that was earlier in the process of genesis. The limit of
an evolutionary process is thus reached when it, or the parameters that have been
followed, reach their maximum and thereafter phase out and disintegrate. This
breaking up can give the final phase of the process a cyclic character that is not a
case of actual reversibility – a symmetric return to the starting point – rather, the
whole sequence could be likened to a spiral movement which, on one level, is a case
of return and, on the other level, of continuous progression.
My contention is that human culture, from its origin in pre-historic times and
up to the present, is characterised by just such an overarching evolutionary sequence,
and that the development of the landscape image and, on the whole, pictorial
space – the growing, deepening, culminating and, from the 1900s, eventually decreasing depth of field – can be used as an amazingly stable and objective instrument
for a reading of this process. Thus, certain other parameters in cultural evolution
must also be assumed to be growing from pre-historic times to the end of the 19th
century, whereas the 20th and 21st centuries represent the spiral-like conclusion to
the sequence, during which they phase out and disintegrate. Among the potential
manifold parameters in the overall cultural evolution, of which the expansion of
depth of field can be regarded as expressing a structural equivalent, I then focus
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on three evolutionary sequences: self-consciousness, socially-determined perception
of nature and world picture. As regards the first and last of these, they enter into
a type of contrapuntal relationship, in which the expansion of self-consciousness
occurs in tandem with the opening of the cosmos and is based on a distinction
between spirit and matter: a process which corresponds structurally to the escalating contrast between viewpoint and distance in the pictorial space.
To give an introductory impression of scholarly traditions which can be used
to substantiate these circumstances, I will begin by turning to the Hegelian, for,
besides evidently considering the genesis of self-consciousness to be the result of
a historical process, the growing emancipation of spirit from matter, it demonstrates, through its chronological arrangement of art forms – a hierarchy towards
increasing subjectivity – an incipient disposition to see this genesis reflected in the
development of pictorial space. A reformulation of this type of thinking, which
connects the genesis of self-consciousness more specifically with the increasing
perspectivism of pictorial space, is found in the Swiss child psychologist and
evolutionary theorist Jean Piaget’s study of the child’s ontogenetic development.
For as is demonstrated, with increasing success, by Suzi Gablik, Sidney J. Blatt
and Lars Marcussen, Piaget’s observations can be applied advantageously to the
phylogenetic system, the overall development of culture. The Piagetian framework
provides, moreover, an opportunity to place considerations of the evolution of
spirit and image in a more materialistic context, as Piaget’s observation of the
individual’s development is a cornerstone in Habermas’ sociological model of
cultural phylogenesis – a model which re-connects to Hegel via Marx and the
idealistically-oriented evolutionary sociologist Talcott Parsons.
The cosmological points of contact in the landscape image are elaborated upon if
we go to what can be seen as the supplementary counterpole to the Hegel tradition:
Jungian history of religion, in which the initial development of self-consciousness
is linked to the heavens’ masculinisation and command of a chaotic, feminine matter from which it is itself detached. In this framework, the first background that
the depth of field of the image encounters in the course of its expansion – postEgyptian rocks and mountains – is accounted for as a visualisation of the feminine
matter, just as the second depth of field distance – the symbolic celestial ground
of antiquity and the Middle Ages – appears as metaphor for the supra-sensuous
masculine beyond. In order to throw light on the third depth of field distance – the
non-dualistic infinity of modernity – it is, however, necessary to supplement the
framework of history of religion with a framework of history of science: the narrative of how the Copernican cosmos exploded the geocentric world picture.
If, in conclusion, we turn to the third comparative strand in cultural evolution – the socially-conditioned perception of nature – we will be able to connect
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it, in particular, with the landscape image sequence of terrains: the pattern by
means of which post-Egyptian pre-modern rocky grounds are emblematic of noncultivation, whereas landscape images in the flanking eras – Neolithic-Egypt and
modernity – represent potential space for cultural cultivation of the earth: fields,
paths, canals, mines, etc. Inasmuch as the basic sequence of the Golden Age and the
paradise myths – the sequence from, inter alia, work-free and ideal to work-marked
and mortal – appears structurally equivalent to the development of the landscape
image from antique-medieval to modern, it is possible to connect with various
models of the work ethic during the epochs in question, among these, not least,
Hegelian theories relating to the motive power of spiritual evolution, humankind’s
struggle for recognition. As clarified by Alexandre Kojève, ancient civilisations could
here be seen as characterised by a master-slave division, in which the slave shows
the master his recognition by recreating a paradisiacal condition for that master (a
parallel to the non-work terrains of the image), whereas post-antique, particularly
modern recognition, is based on the universal prevalence of work (a parallel to the
cultivated terrains of the image). Through this lens, cultural evolution would seem
to show its concluding cyclical tendencies earlier than in the other parameters, as
here modernity’s work ethic – through a ‘mirroring axis’ in antiquity – is seen as
symmetrical with the work ethic in the Neolithic period and Egypt.
Sociological and anthropological theories
on the evolution of societies
Even though the various forms of cultural evolutionary thinking – Hegelian philosophy of consciousness, Jungian history of religion, Piagetian history of mind and
space representation, diverse forms of sociological and anthropological development
models – function as independent domains and are each endowed with an internal
perception framework, one of them – the set of models applied by sociology and
anthropology – could be said to aspire to a more general representation, which,
to a greater or lesser degree, might allocate the others as sub-domains. In terms
of origin, these models all have roots in the Age of Enlightenment and its belief
in the advance of civilisation. In the work of philosophers such as Vico, Turgot
and Condorcet we encounter the beginnings of a united, secularised theory of
evolution, which combines antiquity’s cyclical ideas of a cultural movement going
from hunter-gatherers and herdsmen through agricultural civilisation and on to
decadence and potential revitalisation, with the Christian concept of an irreversible movement going from paganism through Christianity and on to the Day of
Judgement. Based on the idea of Western modernity as culture’s provisional telos
and non-Western cultures as representatives of earlier stages in cultural evolution,
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the outlines of this theory are consolidated in the 19th century by philosophers
such as Hegel, Marx and Spencer and anthropologists such as Lewis Henry Morgan
and Edward Burnett Tylor.2
The furtherance of the theory in the 20th century has, however, met with a lot
of resistance. At the end of the 1800s it had thrived in a fertile give-and-take with its
parallel and forerunner in biology, Darwin’s theory of the origin of species (1859),
but after the turn of the century a form of iron curtain was set up between physical
and cultural anthropology. The idea of evolution could still be sanctioned until
man became farmer, but subsequently homo sapiens presumably resigned – in the
name of humanism – from the evolutionary project. To describe cultures on the
basis of ideas of common stages of development was now to do violence to their
diversity and distinctive characteristics. While the biological species were related
and could be arranged in the branches of a family tree, cultures were merely different.
Even though the iron curtain was re-buttressed by Robert Nisbet’s 1969 attack on
the sociological theory of evolution and is maintained in the social constructivist
climate of the humanities to this very day, evolutionary social science is, however,
far from dismantled. For the scholars who have continued to work with it since the
1930s – especially, at first, Americans such as V. Gordon Childe, Leslie White, Talcott
Parsons and Gerhard Lenski – the 19th-century schema has proven to be amazingly
durable, and after Jürgen Harbermas elaborated its systems- and action-theoretical
aspects, we have since the 1970s been in possession of a very nuanced theory for the
evolution of societies.3
For a detailed consideration it is perhaps still a little too simple to talk of one
single theory of evolution, as in a reading of many aspects there are considerable
disagreements. Is the evolution of society played out on one or a number of strings?
Is its progress determined by local circumstances, or is there a more overarching
control? Does it proceed mostly through self-development or via the spread of
cultural concepts? Is it mainly controlled by environmental pressure, new forms of
energy, technological innovations, class struggle, cognitive understanding or ideology, or is it actually all these and many other factors in an emerging interplay, which
creates the instrumental incentive for an otherwise more profound drive towards
increased complexity?
I will lean towards the latter possibility and thereby an assumption of a fundamentally one-stemmed social evolution, which, to be sure, in its actual progress is
split into many diversified branches, but which nonetheless is governed by the same
overarching tendencies: tendencies which are only strengthened by the fact that the
interaction of the branches intensifies with time. By investigating different frameworks of clarification for cultural evolution, it will also be seen that whether the
fulcrum has been placed in exterior, material factors (the Marxist tradition: White,
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Lenski) or in interior, conceptual factors (the Hegelian tradition: Parsons), there has
usually been consensus on a certain correspondence between domains within each
individual culture.4 A particular social structure must thus be expected according
to a certain level of technology (e.g. stone tools/tribal society), just as a particular
form of government belongs to a corresponding world picture (e.g. democracy/Copernican system). Such stages do not mean that all cultures must necessarily tread
the same narrow path; rather, they signify tendencies, spaces of possibility, to which
there are limits as to how far they can be stretched.5 An ontogenetic parallel that,
as we will see, has more than metaphorical validity, is to be found in the development experienced by the individual human being. Even though personality can be
developed in many directions, all are subject to a physiological framework – namely
the body and its biologically-determined progress from childhood through youth
and on to old age.
This comparison, however, only holds good on a macro-evolutionary scale because, unlike the individual person, the individual cultures do not have to pass
through precisely the same phases, just as they do not all develop to the same extent.6 Many cultures have thus, at least until the 19th century, retained a way of life
which in outline stretches back to the Late Stone Age (e.g. sub-Saharan Africa) and,
conversely, the diffusion enables some cultures to jump directly to more complex
stages of development without having to go through the preceding links to the
same extent (e.g. the Northern peoples in encountering the culture of antiquity).
It is nevertheless the case that somewhere or other there is always a culture on the
way to a stage of hitherto unseen complexity, and that this stage cannot be very far
from this culture’s current situation.
Once the provisos have been taken on board, the evolution model is therefore
a highly fruitful tool. Albeit with somewhat culturally chauvinist terms, the first
three stages have been specifically denoted by Morgan and Tylor: savagery (huntergatherers; Parsons’ primitive), barbarism (slash-and-burn method; Parsons’ advanced
primitive) and civilisation (use of plough and writing). Within the third, rather broad
category, Marx made a distinction between a further four stages: the Asiatic (clanbased despotism; Parsons’ archaic intermediate), the antique (citizenry and slaves,
subset of Parsons’ advanced intermediate), the feudal (landowners and serfs) and,
eventually, the last stage – a Western speciality – capitalism (democratic market
economy; Parsons’ modern).7
If every theory of cultural evolution, even the most materialistic, proposes that
a given social structure brings about a certain individual perception of the surrounding environment, the question still remains as to how, more explicitly, this
perception is formed. Is the individual at liberty to ‘choose’ a perception of the
environment that fits the social situation, or is the perception of the environment
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actually something one is irreversibly brought up with during socialisation in the
community? That many evolutionary-oriented scholars still, to this very day, refuse
to tighten the net is not simply due to insufficient research tools, but also to a
reluctance to end up in the Marxist-Hegelian dilemma: either humankind is made
a puppet of history (reductionist materialism) or else history becomes a question
of the development of human spirit (reductionist idealism).
A convincing synthesis is, however, underway from Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929),
a late representative of the Marxist-influenced Frankfurt School. Habermas works
his way forward towards his sought-after middle ground, the so-called communicative action, from two flanks: partly from outside – and phylogenetically – from the
evolutionary social theory in its most versatile aspects, partly from inside – and
ontogenetically – from Jean Piaget’s theory of the child’s cognitive stages of development.8 According to Piaget, the child builds up its perception of the surrounding
environment and self in a quite specific sequence of stages, a sequence that involves
a development towards increasing cognitive insight and autonomous sense of self. As
Habermas now assumes that there are universal laws for the process through which
a system absorbs new experience, he believes in a correspondence of developmental
logic between the child’s ontogenetic sequence and the phylogenetic sequence, which
the culture itself has undergone in its evolution from the Palaeolithic period to the
present day. It is indeed in the individual encounter with the material, social and
practical circumstances that the child’s cognitive identity takes shape, but conversely
this process of formation has also been undertaken earlier by the culture as a whole.
Habermas sums it up thus:
The history of technology is probably connected with the great evolutionary advances
of society through the evolution of world views; and this development might, in return,
be explicable through formal structures of thought for which cognitive psychology
has provided a well-examined ontogenetic model, a model that enables us to place
these structures in a developmental-logical order.9 [Habermas’ italics]
Even though I cannot here discuss the very complex sociological theory that accompanies Habermas’ observations regarding correspondence between cultural
phylogenesis and ontogenesis, these same observations constitute an essential legitimatisation of the current project. Corresponding to the child’s first speechcharacterised phase, Piaget’s preoperational period with its barely developed selfconsciousness, Habermas assumes that the world pictures of the first societies are
characterised by absent boundaries between the conceptual world and nature, and
between sociality and world. These boundaries are first stabilised with the formation of the later states in ancient cultures where, in a parallel to the child’s so-called
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concrete operational stage, the populace was subject to laws that were set outside
and above nature: a form of monotheistic principle. If, however, a society of actual
autonomous individuals is to come into being, these laws have to be internalised
in the social sphere where they can be used as the object of reflection and discussion. This universalistic stage, which corresponds to the formal operational stage
of puberty, is only realised in the democracies of Western modernity.10 As we will
see, Piaget’s ontogenetic developmental sequence can also be observed in a cultural
domain that Habermas passes over – the phylogenetic development of pictorial
space – so Habermas’ theory provides a good recipe for how this aspect of cultural
evolution can be seen in a sociological context.
To take provisional stock of the way in which my project might involve sociological evolutionary thinking at all – especially Parsons’ and Habermas’ variants – we can
single out the following key features: partly a division into periods which correspond
to the stages in the development of pictorial space, and partly a clear indication of
how social structure can be aligned with the three evolutionary sequences of pictorial
space, self-consciousness and world picture (see fig. 0.1). In the roaming huntergatherer cultures of the Palaeolithic period (Parsons’ primitive stage), society is
clan-ruled, has flexible social roles and no concept of the distinction culture/nature,
which corresponds structurally to a barely developed self-consciousness and thereby
a pictorial space without depth, frame and vantage point. In the Neolithic period
(Parsons’ advanced primitive culture), when communities become settled and start
to provide food by the slash-and-burn method (horticulture), self-consciousness is
heightened through an incipient social stratification and separation from nature: an
equivalent to a pictorial space that is still additive and without frame, but in which
narration and stationary natural elements are incorporated. At the same time, this
stage is matched cosmologically by a world picture where the heavens are separated
from the feminine-conceived ground, which in the Palaeolithic period constituted
the cosmic totality. But population growth and intensified cultivation of the soil –
use of the plough – sharpened social stratification to a hierarchy in which a working
rural population is governed by an urban upper class invoking privileged access to
the divine (Marx’s Asiatic stage; the later phases of Parsons’ archaic intermediate).
From the socially inflexible viewpoint of this upper class, figures are placed against
a background of the wilderness land formations in images (later Mesopotamia;
the Minoan culture); and it is also here – likewise in correspondence to the social
chasm – that a divine heaven has cleaved off from a material earth, which it controls
and fertilises.
As Parsons has pointed out, in the middle of the last millennium BC there are
a number of philosophical breakthroughs which are felt all the way from Europe
across India to China.11 These breakthroughs can be seen as a symptom of the upper
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LANDSCAPE SPACE
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Primitive:
hunter-gatherers;
no social stratiication
Advanced primitive:
horticultural village community;
clan-ruled, incipient social hierarchy
Archaic intermediate:
use of plough, urban society;
pyramidal, still clan-ruled social
structure with monarch surrounded
by literary priesthood
Advanced intermediate:
philosophical and literary upper
class; lower class of slaves
(supernatural god)
Feudal:
monarch, aristocracy, serfs
(ininite god)
Modern:
civic, secularised society with
capitalist economy and industrial
manufacturing
© JACOB WAMBERG
GRAPHICS: TULLA CHRISTINA WAMBERG
Fig. 0.1. Evolutions of pictorial landscape space, world picture and society.
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classes no longer limiting themselves to a religious caste of priesthood, warriors
and rulers, but taking on an autonomous character that provides the dynamism
necessary for innovations such as literature and religious-philosophical reflections
(Parsons’ advanced intermediate stage). In the Greco-Roman culture this occurs in
the new elitist democracy, which asserts itself at the expense of a slave class (Marx’s
antique stage). To this quasi-autonomous culture we can add the observations that
in terms of consciousness it is characterised by a semi-developed subjectivity, in
pictorial terms by a dawning view-oriented perspective and cosmologically by the
more three-dimensional geocentric system (with a spherical, rather than flat, earth
at the centre).
In order to get from this point to evolution’s provisionally latest social configuration – capitalism and, at least in principle, universal democracy – requires
a further levelling of the former upper class’s position, by means of which the
evolution of society assumes a cyclical character. The seeds are found in the feudal
system of the Middle Ages, which tempers the slave status of land workers and
makes everyone equal before God. The route to modernity can thus be regarded
as a secularisation of this relationship to the deity: equality before God becomes
equality before fellow human beings. If one accepts that equality deals with relative
circumstances, and that relative circumstances imply an infinite, homogenous
space, then this development can also be connected to parallel phases in selfconsciousness, world picture and pictorial space: from an individual posted before
the infinite God (cosmology’s infinite deity sphere; the gold ground), we move
to an individual able to contemplate the infinite environment (the Copernican
universe; perspective space).
Evolution of the landscape
image in a tripartite context
Among the many strands which develop in parallel and constitute cultural evolution,
I have, as stated, singled out three in particular to serve as comparative domains for
the fourth and central strand in my study: evolution of the landscape image and,
in extension, of the pictorial space. As mentioned in the Introduction, these three
strands, like the representative terrain of the landscape image, are spread across a
space stretching from the very near to the far distance: a) the pole of vantage point:
self-consciousness; b) the middle distance: the socially-determined perception of nature;
and c) the pole of remoteness: the world picture of cosmology.
In order to assess the connection between a) and c), the poles of nearness and distance, I will first turn to one of the methodological mainstays of this study, Oswald
Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1923). Although this comparative study of
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“the morphology of world history” chiefly focuses on the modus operandi and progression of individual cultures, rather than an overall evolutionary whole, Spengler
nonetheless had an eye for a common denominator which, in terms of cultural development, dealt with the dialectical relationship between near and far:
Here, then, we shall not be concerned with what a world “is”, but with what it signifies to the being that it envelops. When we wake up, at once something extends itself
between a ‘‘here” and a “there”. We live the ‘‘here” as something proper, we experience the “there” as something alien. There is a dualizing of soul and world as poles
of actuality […]. Actuality – the world in relation to a soul – is for every individual the
projection of the Directed upon the domain of the Extended – the Proper mirroring
itself on the Alien; one’s actuality then signifies oneself.12 [Spengler’s italics]
In this quote the self and the world, the near here and the distant there, are perceived
as two complementary quantities, which reciprocally – and inextricably linked by
the mediating concept of reality – illuminate and constitute one another.
As regards the more detailed triadic classification – here-sociality-there – distinct
interfaces can be found with one of Habermas’ general strategies: with ultimate derivation from Kant’s triad of aesthetic judgement, practical reason and pure reason,
Habermas structures the communicative perpetrator’s world picture according to
three basic concepts – [1] the subjective (expressive, aesthetic), [2] the social (normative,
moral-practical) and [3] the objective (cognitive, empirical-theoretical).13 In relation to
this, my triad could be seen as a subset with emphasis on the nature-oriented: the pole
of vantage point – self-consciousness – corresponds approximately to the expressive
and aesthetic domain of subjectivity; the middle distance – the socially-determined
perception of nature – is part of sociality’s normative and moral-practical territory;
and the pole of remoteness – the world picture of cosmology – belongs to objectivity
with its cognitive and empirical-theoretical issues. It should be noted, however, that,
influenced by Piaget, I have put some of the latter domain under the pole of vantage
point, self-consciousness, as cognitive development – objective dealings with the surrounding environment – can also be seen as a component in the formation of the self.
At the same time, my concept of world picture should not be read as Habermas’ more
general perception of the world, the triad’s assembled concept, but as being more specifically focused on cosmology, which in turn is somewhat absent in Habermas.
Even though the three comparative areas and their implications for the interpretation of the landscape image are closely interweaved, often even indistinguishable
from one another, I will in the following endeavour to pinpoint each individually
and outline some of their theoretical specifications. To facilitate the logic of exposition, I will present them in a slightly changed order:
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[1] The pole of vantage point
– Pictorial space and self-consciousness: aesthetic and psychological perspectives
That the Western pictorial space goes through an evolution from none to full depth
of field and that this evolution can be coupled with a cognitive development from an
unspoken to an autonomous self-consciousness, has seemingly not been described in
these particular terms before. Nevertheless, various traditions of scholarship – philosophy of aesthetics, art history, child psychology – demonstrate analyses which
with relatively straightforward modification could be expanded to cover this thesis.14
The oldest is without doubt the ambitious model of cultural history which Hegel
presents in his Aesthetics (1820-29, edited posthumously by H.G. Hotho 1835). As Hegel
sees the course of history as being determined by an evolution towards the emancipation of the human spirit, he can make a distinction between three key stages in
art: [1] the symbolic, [2] the classical and [3] the romantic. The spirit is already being
sought after in the Egyptians’ symbolic art, architecture, but is, so to speak, trapped
in the mass, such as happens in the closed pyramid. In the redemption of Greek
art, sculpture, on the other hand, the spirit has found its first freedom, inasmuch as
in the ideal human body we encounter an unsurpassed synthesis between the form
of the mass and the content of the spirit.15 The synthesis is, however, broken up
again in romantic art – a term applied to Christian art in general, but particularly
appropriate to modernity. Inasmuch as the spirit has now reached its definitive
emancipation, it can no longer be expressed in the bodily, the perennially beautiful
sculpture, but has to settle for mirroring itself in the outer world – which in the case
of the visual media means in painting with its subjective viewpoints, particularities
and traces of time. In paintings, including landscapes, the subject finds expression
for its innermost moods and feelings.16
Even though Hegel does not pursue the same medium, painting, through history,
but changes focus according to the most characteristic mode of expression of each
period, the basic features of my thesis – the proportionality of depth of image with
degree of development of self-consciousness – are already to be found embodied in
his schema. The liberation of the spirit as expressed in the sequence architecturesculpture-painting, thus constitutes a movement from matter to openness: having
been inside the encircling totality, the movement is directed over to the single-form
sculpture which is closed within itself, finally to end out in painting’s fragmented
view from a distance. Within the image itself this transformation thus corresponds
with that increase in depth of field – the expansion of view from the body to its
surroundings – which follows when the vantage-point position, the expression of
self-consciousness, withdraws towards a single point and thereby converts the image
from an inscription in nature’s own material (cave painting) to an artificial space
surgically cut off from the environment (autonomous, perspective image).
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Unfortunately, 20th-century art history has broken with Hegel’s ideas and has
instead profited from their optically more fine-grained, but philosophically more
limited descendants in Riegl, Wölfflin and Panofsky. Riegl, of these scholars the
one most inclined to create an overarching view, also regards art history, now more
view-specific, as determined by a movement from matter to openness, from Egypt’s
predominantly haptic vision (near sight) via antiquity’s mixed haptic-optic vision
(normal sight) to late antiquity’s – and in intensification thereof: modernity’s –
purely optical vision (distant sight).17 Riegl’s only explication for these shifts of
perspective in art is, however, the consciously context-less term Kunstwollen; so
seemingly one has to go right up to Suzi Gablik’s Progress in Art (1976) and its more
detailed successor Sidney J. Blatt’s Change and Continuity in Art: The Development of
Modes of Representation (1984) before an evolutionary art history is again presented in
a perspective pertaining specifically to the philosophy of mind – albeit still without
specific reference to Hegel.18
Like Habermas, but independently, both Gablik and Blatt illuminate the phylogenetic evolution from the basis of Piaget’s theory of the child’s cognitive stages
of development. Piaget’s multi-faceted concept of cognition also covers the child’s
perception of space, including its representation in children’s drawings. In the
initial preoperational stage, in which the child has yet to distinguish imagination
from outside world, the child’s spatial representation is controlled by the so-called
topological space characterised by tactile values, relations of proximity and absence
of an overall system of reference – a space indicated in the child’s drawing by lack
of depth relationships. As cognitive insight deepens, and consciousness assumes
subjective form in the concrete and formal operational stages, a more abstract
and projective sense of space emerges, which in terms of the image is matched
by perspective with its specification of vantage points, the mark of autonomous
consciousness.19 From the phylogenetic parallel development of pictorial space,
Gablik and Blatt thus read a corresponding cognitive progress. Whereas Gablik
is rather coarse-grained in relation to the pre-modern periods – everything from
Egypt to Byzantium is put in the same box – Blatt offers a nuanced exposition,
even an elaboration of Piagetian terminology, depicting the entire spectrum from
Palaeolithic and Neolithic additive pictorial space via Egypt’s baselines and on to
antiquity and modernity with perspectives ever more controlled by vantage point.
Independent of this, a similar elaboration has recently been presented in the work
of Danish architect and historian of architecture, Lars Marcussen, in which he also
demonstrates the phylo- and ontogenetical correspondence via a detailed study of
the development of children’s drawings.20 Habermas, as mentioned, does not involve
the pictorial space in his evolutionary theory, and therefore the observations made
by Gablik, Blatt, Marcussen and myself could be taken together and used as a kind
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of litmus test for his ideas – just as Habermas’ theory could conversely contribute
to give a sociological substantiation of our observations.
[2] The pole of remoteness
– Pictorial space and world picture: perspectives pertaining to the histories of religion and
science
If we now want to shed light on the evolution of pictorial space in relation to the
otherness of the ‘I’ – the cosmological world picture – proportionality can, as mentioned, be made out between the pictorial depth of field and the effective radius
of the world picture. In step with the expansion of depth of field, we move from
a closed, feminine cosmos, via a cosmos split between celestial spirit and earthly
material, finally arriving at, in modernity, an infinite and orientation-less universe.
In practice, it can however be difficult to see this continuity, as scholarship pertaining to the history of cosmology is divided into two factions, each with its own
invested interest: one, coming from the history of religion, has its central point in
the pre-modern, especially pre-classical world pictures; the other, pertaining to the
history of science and philosophy, has its focus on the Greek and modern systems.
For the early period, in which earth cults are central, I have found particular backup
in the Jungian, structuralist history of religion: Mircea Eliade, Erich Neumann and
their feminist successors Anne Baring and Jules Cashford.21 Neumann not only clarifies how an increasingly spiritual, energising and masculine heaven detaches itself
from the feminine earth, of which it was originally born, but also demonstrates the
link between this detachment and the formation of self-consciousness – a synthesis
with the abovementioned Hegelian-Piagetian track thus being an obvious inference.
Hence the interior formation of self-consciousness can be seen as a reflection of the
heavens’ exterior breakaway from the earth. Moreover, with reference to the earth
cults, observations made by these and other scholars allow for a movement from
the how of the pictorial space to its what, as the rocky ground of pre-modern images
now – apparently for the first time – can be seen to have more significance than
mere ‘background scenery’. More precisely, they represent the bodily depth from
which the spirit must liberate itself in order to be able to see spatially in images
at all, i.e. let depth of field stretch out to the land formations (see chapter 2). The
cosmologically oriented religious history, besides pinpointing the rocks’ relationship
to matter and the subterranean, also proposes an interpretation of the next zone
to be incorporated into the depth of field of the image: the heavens. As a counterpole to the rocks, the medieval gold ground and colour surfaces can be linked to
the very heavens in whose outermost sphere the divine spirit is concentrated.
As far as the cosmological dimension of the more rationally-based Greek and
modern developments of pictorial space is concerned, its philosophical consequences
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in particular are put into relief by historians of science and philosophy such as
Duhem, Cassirer, Koyré, Kuhn and Spengler.22 Promoted by the interdisciplinary
milieu around the Warburg-Institute in Hamburg where, among others, Cassirer
worked, this development is linked specifically to pictorial space in the short treatise Panofsky wrote as a young man, “Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form’”
(1924-25).23 This work describes modern perspective as an expression of the individual’s comprehension of the world, as it connects with the Copernican, infinite
universe and also with the subjective or objective relationship – the autonomous
subject’s complementary engagements with the environment – which the mind can
enter into with this universe.
If the frameworks conditioned by cosmology and the philosophy of nature still
appear to be somewhat implied in Panofsky’s work, they are profiled far more keenly
by Spengler who, by involving mathematics, physics and astronomy, is able to clarify
the profound difference between the Apollinian (classical) and the Faustian (modern)
perception of the world.24 Observations made by Hegel and Riegl as regards the plastic qualities of antique art find resonance here, partly in a cosmos limited by an outer
heavenly sphere (the geocentric), and partly in a mathematics, the Euclidian, which
is only concerned with closed bodies. In striking contrast to this, Faustian culture is
founded in infinity, a primeval symbol in which it is steeped from infinitesimal calculation through the unlimited Newtonian void to polyphonic music, Gothic church
space reaching up to the heavens, and perspectival pictorial space.
Finally, it should be mentioned that the relationship between world picture
and pictorial space has been discussed by Franzsepp Würtenberger in a short and
strangely neglected monograph, Weltbild und Bilderwelt von der Spätantike bis zur
Moderne (1958), which might actually have been a first draft for the present study.
He writes, for example: “Art works are small ‘world picture machineries’ made by
humans whose function depend on quite certain hypotheses of word picture positions.”25 Before modernity, claims Würtenberger, images are put into a vertical field
of suspense in which polarisation between divine and earthly powers prevents a view
towards distant expanses and the pathway to an actual temporal setting (fig. 0.2).
The emergence of modernity does away with this field of suspense in favour of a
horizontality determined by spatial and temporal coordinators: “Such earthly fields
with their own value, with earthly concepts for time and place, we term landscape.”
The process takes place, however, in interaction with the simultaneously developing
natural sciences and can therefore first be wholly realised in the early 19th century,
at the same time as the map of the world has been fully explored and world time
has been coordinated.26
If we acknowledge that the cosmological world picture must also be included
in the stages of cultural evolutionary thinking, we are suddenly faced with a greatly
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Fig. 0.2. Juxtaposition of 1) Master of Hohenfurth, Nativity (c. 1400),
Hohenfurth, Stiftsgalerie, and 2) diagrammatic outline of the impact of
divine and earthly powers on this event. From Franzsepp Würtenberger,
Weltbild und Bilderwelt von der Spätantike bis zur Moderne (1958).
expanded effective radius for sociological models of society. The world picture
appears not as an isolated ‘image’, but as a combined physical-metaphysical terrain, the contours of which are amalgamated both with accessible nature and the
anatomy of culture generally. The universe is here incorporated into culture in the
same way as a nest of Chinese boxes opened from within and outwards. Each new
box that is opened up by a culture signifies not only a new world picture, but also
a set of new conditions for how that culture should be organised (what I will call
an epistemic field, see below).
[3] The middle distance
– Pictorial space and perception of nature: sociological perspectives
If, finally, we turn back towards the middle domain – the socially-determined perception of nature – we can begin by placing the evolution of self-consciousness,
and thereby also of depth of field, in a sociological framework: retraction to the
subjective ‘I’ shell and the image’s concomitant larger range of vision are inextricably
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connected with alienation from nature, the urbanised individual’s accelerating distance from the land. A variant of this argument – the concept of landscape and the
sentimental feeling for nature being conditional on an alienation from nature – is
given a nuanced reading by the German philosopher Joachim Ritter (1962), which
at the same time demonstrates its romantic origin (Schiller).27 That Ritter limits
the argument to its mature manifestation in modernity will, however, not prevent
me from deploying it in the model of evolution and, mutatis mutandis, extrapolate
it back to prehistoric time.
But the sociological angle also involves a focus on dealings between human
being and nature: the extensive but largely unexamined issue of the extent to which
terrains in landscape images bear traces of cultivation. ‘Cultivation’ in this sense
should not be understood as every trace of the human hand on nature, particularly
not interventions that could be said to involve religious or leisure-time activities –
shrines, holy groves or gardens, for example. I am rather thinking of the specifically
utilitarian and functional interventions in nature that make no secret of the fact
that a proportion of humankind has to perform physical effort – work – in order
to make nature fertile and inhabitable; in other words, interventions such as cornfields, fences, hedges, canals, bridges, roads and mines, which I here, in contrast
to the untouched terra of the rocks, will call territory.28 As regards these kinds of
work-marked phenomena, the history of the image seems, as indicated, to offer a
tripartite structure: [1] the Neolithic period and Egypt with utility-marked landscape
images; [2] the period of the Golden Age field without; [3] modernity after 1420 again
with. On the understanding that images handed down through history are primarily
testimony to lives of the well-to-do, a sociological explanatory model will have to
focus on the status of physical work among the elites.29
During phase [1], when society is still clan-based, and when heavens and earth
form part of an evenly balanced sexual cycle (Neolithic period and Egypt), the anthropologist Marvin Harris, for example, has substantiated, via studies of contemporary tribal societies, that work enjoys tolerable respect, 30 and accordingly traces
of work are permissible in images. But gradually, as the heavens become detached
to their own sovereign sphere, and society is correspondingly polarised into an
urban-based upper class and a rural-based lower class (phase [2]: Mesopotamia,
Greece-Rome, Middle Ages), work becomes an inferior phenomenon, whereby traces
of work are accordingly ousted from landscape images. At the focal point of this
study is, as already stated, my thesis that here cultural evolution takes a primitivistic turn for the first time and that the overall anatomy of culture – the epistemic
field – plus sub-domains such as that of image culture, are therefore structured
according to the forces of the paradise myth: a yearning out towards and back to
conditions before the institution of grain culture, felling, mine-work and trade.
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Even though, not least, grain culture’s displacement from power is in need of a
systematic investigation, I have been able to find significant evidence for this thesis
especially among scholars specialising in the Greco-Roman culture: A.O. Lovejoy
and G. Boas, E.W. Heitland, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Barbette Stanley Spaeth.31
A more specifically macrohistorical backup for the observations made under
phase [2] – which also re-establishes the link to the track of self-consciousness –
could be found in the work of Hegel and his successor Alexandre Kojève.32 Seeing
that Hegel and Kojève also define the spirit, self-consciousness, as the desire for a
desire – the desire for recognition by a second party – they take as their point of
departure an initial cultural stage in which recognition is won by risking one’s life
in battle, a test that is stabilised in the master’s forcible subjugation of the slave.
Even though it would seem unlikely that the early, still collectively-based agricultural
cultures (my phase [1]) would be founded in such dynamics, Hegel’s and Kojève’s
idea dovetails with the advanced city-states of ancient history (phase [2]), in which a
primitivistic yearning for paradise and a corresponding warrior ethos are explicitly
based on an elite’s subjugation of a rural-based slave class.
The applicability of Hegel’s and Kojève’s thinking becomes further visible when
we turn towards phase [3] in the evolutionary sequence of the landscape image: the
post-1420 general marking of the terrain by work and, in continuation of this, its
specific iconographic forerunners in the Middle Ages. In their explanation of the
sequence from the medieval feudal system to modernity’s democracy, Hegel and
Kojève suppose that it is now no longer the master’s violence but, on the contrary,
the slave’s own ability – work – that takes over the route to recognition. As this
involves the slave class gradually assuming power, and thereby the formation of a
work ethic, we can understand why traces of work can also assume a position in
the landscape image. In a more detailed and more specifically sociological fashion
this logic is apparent from Max Weber’s model and its elaboration by Habermas.
Here the work ethic of the Late Middle Ages appears as a secularisation of work’s
incipient penitential value in medieval monasteries, a process that is backed up by
a combined growth of capitalism, Protestantism, promotion of rationality and desacralisation of nature.33
Based on Weber’s observations, we also find a well-substantiated interpretative framework for an idea from the Italian Risorgimento, which, in other respects,
with spatial-aesthetic arguments finds most support in the work of Spengler:34
namely, that the Renaissance is a conservative countercurrent in modernity which,
for its part, chiefly has roots in the Christian culture of the Middle Ages. Since
modernity’s Protestant-capitalist culture develops north of the Alps, it would seem
logical that it is also here that the most progressive experiments in pictorial art
are to be found – including a pictorial space dominated by landscapes which are
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panoramic, temporally-determined and work-marked, or radically devoid of humankind – whereas Italy, the home of Catholicism and an autocratic culture, rekindles
a style of the past, the Renaissance, with its focus on the idealised human body
against the background of a pastoral and work-free landscape.
II.
Synchronic aspects
In the above I have chiefly focused on evolutionary sequences and their mutual correspondences. But how is it at all possible to compare across the evolutionary current in this way? The comparisons not only presuppose that the cultural domains
interact, but also that their flow can be frozen in definable stages. This strategy
presupposes a synchronic rather than a diachronic approach, and among the fundamental assumptions I am working with, two in particular should be highlighted: [1]
that interactions between different cultural domains can be read as morphological
correspondences, in other words that cultural domains at every stage are controlled
by a common structural principle; [2] that the stages, despite constant change,
are effective for such a length of time that they do not merely appear as arbitrary
sections of a continuous current, but rather as links in a chain, where one stage
succeeds another with a certain sense of continuity. These assumptions alone make
it possible to avoid the quarrel that so often divides historically- and structurallyoriented thinkers – think of, for example, Lévi-Strauss and French post-war thinking
in general with its scepticism as regards the concept of evolution – for whereas the
instruments of structuralism work irreproachably within each stage, it is necessary
to zoom out to a historic – i.e. evolutionary – vantage point if the dynamics of succession of the stages and their internal development from genesis through maturation to
dissolution are to be comprehended.35
The landscape image and Panofsky’s model
If this two-sided assumption is here formulated from the outside, through a consideration of evolution’s modus operandi, it can also be illustrated from inside,
by focusing on my object of analysis, the landscape image, and the interpretative
frameworks which this subject seems to offer. What, in essence, does interpretation
of the landscape of an image mean? Which form, or forms, of meaning – conventiondetermined symbolism, connotations, iconology, indexicality, etc. – can one expect
to ascribe a landscape image?
If by ‘meaning’ we only understand convention-determined symbolism, i.e.
iconography in a Panofskyian sense, we could undoubtedly identify certain clusters
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of sense, areas of particularly dense meaning, but in other respects we are left to
hand over the greater part of the landscape image to areas empty of meaning. Thus
it will often be possible to make out isolated landscape elements – for example, the
Nativity cave or the Tree of Life – that can be submitted to a simple iconographical
analysis just like any other symbol-laden object. But as soon as we move to areas
that lie beyond the stories or allegories of tradition – to skies, clouds, mountains,
fields, forests – the effective radius of the iconography thins out, so the meaning
must be conceived in a different way.
Actually, Panofsky was well aware of this not insignificant blind spot in his master
schema: the three-step ladder from pre-iconography (sense-determined identification
of motifs) through iconography (interpretation of these in the form of images, stories
and allegories) to iconology (synthesis pertaining to history of culture and geist):
[…] as the correct identification of motifs is the prerequisite of their correct iconographical analysis, so is the correct analysis of images, stories and allegories the
prerequisite of their correct iconographical interpretation – unless we deal with
works of art in which the whole sphere of secondary or conventional subject matter is eliminated and a direct transition from motifs to content is effected, as is the
case with European landscape painting, still life and genre, not to mention “nonobjective” art.36
With Panofsky we must ideally move across the iconography – the coupling: motif/
conventional content – in order to reach harbour safely in the final synthesis, the
iconological interpretation; and yet there is a series of genres which avoid this
connecting link, so we are catapulted out into the more indefinable space between
sense-determined description and reflective interpretation. These genres are all
characterised by the absence of motifs which, like some kind of bodily containers, can record those images, stories and allegories of the iconography that are
determined by tradition. Rather, these genres are determined, in terms of content
as well as spatially, by a centrifugal movement away from such motifs and out towards their spatial environment, whether these surroundings are made up of the
anthropomorphic everyday space of genre, the reified micro-space of still life or the
panoramic macro-space of landscape. To maintain that the landscape belongs to
the domain of depth of field – that which we do not actually look at – is thus not
merely a spatial but also an interpretative statement.
Panofsky’s blindness to the interpretation of such genres would not seem to
be accidental as, however universally he aimed with his concept of iconography, it
seems to be based in one of art history’s more incriminating prejudices: the notion
of the Renaissance as being protypical for modernity’s image culture. Not only is the
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iconography concept presented in an introduction to a study of the Renaissance, but
it fits hand in glove with this movement’s ideal of history painting: beautiful human
bodies as containers for narrative meaning. Conversely, the blind spot in Panofsky’s
schema is made up of exactly the types of motif that the art academies, the institutionalised heirs of the Renaissance, allowed to be relegated to inferior positions
in their genre hierarchy and which first gained ground in the mature modernity of
the 17-1800s – a period which Panofsky himself typically passed by in silence. But
what can still, from the Renaissance’s Neoplatonic point of view, be reduced to a
kind of inferior exception – the fall from intelligible narration to sensuous pluralism of meaning – is transformed in modernity’s open pictorial space to, in effect,
the rule. Surrounded by infinity’s anti-hierarchy, the closed body explodes as if it
were a carcass that is placed, with no protection, in a vacuum.
That the body-bound narration must almost inevitably be brought into crisis in
the pictorial space of modernity had actually already been recognised by Spengler,
who also inscribes the crisis in the tension between the restrictedly body-bound
and the infinite; in his terminology: between the Apollinian and the Faustian:
Outlines define the material, while colour-tones interpret space. But the picture of the
first order belongs to directly sensible nature – it narrates. Space, on the contrary, is
by its very essence transcendent and addresses itself to our imaginative powers, and
in an art that is under its suzerainty, the narrative element enfeebles and obscures
the more profound tendency. Hence it is that the theorist, able to feel the secret
disharmony but misunderstanding it, clings to the superficial opposition of content
and form.37 [Spengler’s italics]
For Spengler then, the narration finds protection in the fixed-contoured husk of
the body, whereas it remains a stranger in modernity’s open pictorial space – a
space which rather, through the projection of colour tones, appeals to the subjective-bound imagination. However, should the form expressed through colour and
space hereby break away from narrative content, there will be no loss of content as
such, but rather the content will shift in the direction of the means by which it is
expressed: accordingly, considering the style’s modern conception as the imprint
of genius, a move towards the subjective.
If we turn specifically towards that part of the spatial expanses that is made up
of the landscape, the following brief case study will illustrate its seemingly meagre
dealings with the iconography and its corresponding fuller affiliation to the iconology. In Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection, painted in the 1450s for Palazzo Comunale
in Sansepolcro (plate 10), a few of the landscape ingredients can be interpreted in
the usual iconographic way based on the narrative theme and its requirements. If
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we ask, for example, why the two trees in the left background are dead and bare
in contrast to the leafy trees on the right, an obvious answer would be that they
symbolise death vanquished by the resurrected Christ. In similar fashion we can
explain the delicate gathering of grey clouds: they allude to the rising sun on Easter
Sunday. But what about a detail such as the hedgerow running along the hillside
in the right-hand background? If we assume that it is not part of a topographical
portrait of the rural environs of Sansepolcro, then we already find ourselves in an
area beyond the demands of narrative and allegory.
That there might be, however, another level of meaning in this landscape – a level
which, moreover, also includes the aforementioned elements – becomes apparent if
we turn to an earlier image of the same motif: Niccolò di Pietro Gerini’s fresco from
circa 1371 in the Florentine Santa Croce’s sacristy (plate 11). What is worthy of note
here is not so much the absence of withered trees, daybreak clouds and hedgerow,
but rather that these elements would be inconceivable – even if Gerini had wanted
to use them. Withered trees and daybreak clouds belong to the domain of time and
change, a domain that was still largely absent in the art of Gerini’s day. Similarly,
the hedgerow indicates a context of cultivated land, and this phenomenon had not
been introduced in the Western depiction of landscape either, except for themes
dealing specifically with agriculture such as Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s The Effects of
Good Government in the Countryside (1337-40; plate 13).
So, that Piero was in a position to deploy these landscape elements in his painting not only presupposed a certain set of iconographic requirements, occasioned by
the commission; it was equally determined by a historical process that had made
landscape elements part of a normal and widespread pictorial language. And, as suggested in the Introduction, atmospheric skies and cultivation had actually become
common ingredients in landscape images post-1420, just as perspectival infinity had.
What Piero did was simply to articulate a far-reaching tradition. To the interpretative question as to why his trees are withered, it is therefore, by way of introduction,
just as meaningful to answer: because the contemporaneous landscape images afforded the opportunity to depict temporal traces, as it is to give the narrower – and
iconographically-determined – answer: because they symbolise death.
Iconology, structuralism – and iconography
The context, the common tradition, which thus determines what it is possible to
depict in images (or other media) at a given point in time, I will here – despite the
word’s recent overuse – call the paradigm (from the Greek paradeigma = pattern). In
1962, however, the initiator of the term, science historian Thomas Kuhn, defined
the paradigm meticulously as the tradition of theory, laws and practice that at a
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given time prescribe how a particular science should be conducted (e.g. Ptolemaic
astronomy or Newtonian optics).38 Kuhn observed – and I can concur from my
experiences of the visual arts – that a paradigm is an extremely conservative phenomenon that will be influenced only after considerable pressure, but which, on
the other hand, can also be replaced with a new and just as conservative paradigm.
If we now translate this paradigmatic – and moreover supra-iconographical –
level to Panofskyian terminology, it could quite appropriately be called iconological,
or better still: the necessary prerequisite for the iconology, which the iconography
cannot fulfil. Even though an iconographical level can very well exist (e.g. the connection of Piero’s withered trees with the Resurrection theme), this level is not a
necessary prerequisite for the supra-iconographical level: the iconological (Piero’s
hedgerow is only evoked by a paradigm that favours traces of work in images). What
I identify is, in complete agreement with Panofsky’s aforementioned ‘exception’, an
iconology without requisite underpinning in iconography.
More specifically, the paradigmatic level could be called structural. For if we turn
to the domain of origin of humanist structuralism – Saussurian linguistics – we could
say that, rather than dealing with the vocabulary of the landscape image and its use
of specific ingredients (exactly these clouds in preference to another type of cloud),
the level refers to its syntax (what kind of elements are included at all, and the way in
which these elements relate to one another). And, unlike the iconography, this level is
not distinguished by first treating the images in isolation (pre-iconographical motif
identification) and then relating them to a context (coupling with iconography’s images, stories and allegories); rather the context – by way of introduction, a quantity
of other images with which the image is compared – is included from the outset and
only transpires in the relationship between several components. Even though evidence of the existence of the paradigm is naturally more compelling the greater the
number of images involved, its outline will more often than not emerge very quickly
anyway, for as Lévi-Strauss remarks in The Raw and the Cooked (1964) with reference
to structure in South American myths: “Syntax does not become evident only after
a (theoretically limitless) series of events has been recorded and examined, because
it is itself the body of rules governing their production.”39
The further and seriously interesting part of the image’s context first appears,
however, if we can make a link from the interior paradigms of the landscape image
to homologous, structurally kindred paradigms in other cultural domains; in other
words, establish common structural principles among cultural domains. This is
exactly the kind of isomorphism I had in mind earlier when discussing connections
within the evolutionary stages. The paradigm which in the modern perspectival
pictorial space contrasts vantage point with the infinitely distant line of the horizon
must, for example, be considered as isomorphic with the paradigms which, on the
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one hand, separate the individual soul from the infinite Copernican universe and,
on the other hand, position the modern urban individual in an alienated relationship to nature.
This procedure continues, in a slightly revised version, the track that Panofsky
himself plotted in so exemplary a fashion in Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951):
the demonstration of the structural similarity between Gothic architecture and scholastic summae.40 Panofsky considered the similarity to be the result of a common way
of thinking in the period, what he called a mental habit, and even though he did not
explicitly take the final iconological step to couple it with the symbolic forms – the
central concept from Cassirer’s neo-Kantian philosophy, which Panofsky had himself introduced into art history in his perspective dissertation of 1924-25 – it comes
extremely close. For the symbolic forms can be perceived as interpretative contexts
which, albeit bound to sensuous signs, disclose something deeper about the spiritual disposition of a culture. By so doing they point towards the final objective of
iconology: “those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation,
a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion […].”41 In keeping with my
observation that Piero’s hedgerow was determined by a paradigm that favours traces of work in landscape images, rather than a conscious iconography, Panofsky was
aware that the symbolic forms are often “unknown to the artist himself and may
even emphatically differ from what he consciously intended to express”.
But does this mean, then, that the iconography in the case of the landscape
image is actually superfluous to the identification and understanding of the iconology – that iconography and iconology each thrive on their individual and always
non-comparable levels? This is without doubt taking the point a step too far, because
best of all would be to regard the space of meaning as a blend of continuous and
discontinuous, a heterogeneous field in which meaning is found in various degrees
of saturation and category. Thus the interpretative level of paradigm and iconology
can be said to be aimed at areas where the meaning is thin and dispersed, whereas
iconography aims at nodes of significance – places where the meaning is so substantial that it is crystallised into recurrent stories and allegories that have also made a
literary impression. Sometimes these iconographical nodes appear as a concentration
of tendencies that already thrive in the paradigm albeit in a flimsier form, at other
times they appear more as independent pockets in the paradigm. If, for example,
we look at the iconographic landscape motif Hell, a rocky terrain with caves and
labyrinthine passages, it will appear in the medieval image as a condensation of a
paradigm which dictates, in advance, that every occurrence, regardless of its more
specified character, should take place on rocky ground; a terrain whose iconological
significance, diffusely but persistently, embraces everything from the wilderness to
the element of terra to the superstructure of the underworld. Conversely, Ambrogio
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Lorenzetti’s cultivated terrain with its network of cornfields, roads and bridges will
appear as an iconographically-determined pocket in a paradigm which otherwise,
without this kind of local thematic pressure, consistently prescribes the landscape
as being wild and free from evidence of civilisation dividing up and cultivating the
terrain.
A metaphor for these two conditions – condensation and pocket – could be the
climate of the day compared to that of the season. A hot August day thus reinforces
a tendency that is already latent in late summer’s overarching potential for how
days at this time of year behave (cf. iconography as condensation of the paradigm),
whereas a cold and rainy August day is on the periphery of this potential (cf. iconography as pocket in the paradigm). On the other hand, the cold August day can
give notice of the propensities of autumn and winter within which, provided it had
occurred here, it would have functioned as condensation – just as the thematically
motivated cultural terrain shifts status from pocket in the 14th-century landscape
paradigm to condensation in its 15th-century successor.
More generally the relationship between paradigm and iconography could be
elucidated on a linguistic plane – by a comparison with language and the utterances
language can express. Language – the apparatus of words and the rules that decide
how the words can be connected – is here equivalent to the paradigm, the unwritten
set of rules that in given periods dictates which ingredients make up the images. Accordingly, the utterance can be compared with the iconography, as both deal with a
thematic node in the medium – the language or the paradigm – in which they float
around. If we look at everyday language utterances, they will often be aimed solely at
the theme they are attempting to express, by which the language seems transparent
and non-interfering – in the same way as when an iconographical occurrence in an
image simply has the landscape as non-interfering background. But now and then the
utterances might interact with the very language through which they are expressed –
for example, in play on words or poetry – and here we are approaching the aforementioned situations where the iconography appears as condensation or pocket in
the paradigm. An illustrative example of this could be the cartoon in fig. 0.3, where
the utterance “Oh no, it’s the cruel hair-splitter!” (in Danish literally ‘word-splitter’)
has had its own words split, so it is actually referring to the very language of which
it is made. Transferred to the context of images, this corresponds to a condensation
in which the iconography lays bare properties of the overarching paradigm through
which it is expressed (for example, Hell in the medieval paradigm, which in itself
requires wild rocks). Had the cartoon’s sentence instead expressed itself across the
chopped-up words of which it was made – for example, “Ho w n i ce connect e d w o
rds ar e!” – we would have a parallel to the paradigm’s pocket (for example, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s cultural landscape in the medieval rock paradigm).
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Fig. 0.3. Cartoon from the TÅGEKAMMERET
students’ association (2002). University of
Aarhus, Faculty of Science.
In the actual interpretative situation, we can therefore approach the iconological
level not only by means of the paradigm’s bird’s-eye perspective – via the homologies to paradigms in other cultural domains – but in fact also, with the necessary
provisos, by means of the iconography’s worm’s-eye view. Here, then, we analyse
as many iconographical situations relating to the characteristics of the paradigm –
and which can be regarded as condensations of this – as possible, and induce from
these situations back to the paradigm, which thereby, through mixture and dilution
of the individual iconographies, becomes encircled by a cloud of meaning from
which, conversely, each iconographical situation can be condensed as raindrops.
An endeavour, for example, to identify the Golden Age paradigm’s iconological
properties – that is, those properties whose visible result is, among other things,
that all landscape grounds in post-Egyptian pre-modern time are rocks bearing no
trace of divisions or scoring made by the plough, mining and roadwork – can be
conducted through an iconographical study of those rural activities that do not
cause scoring and division of the earth surface, such as pastoralism, fruit-picking,
hunting, fishing (see chapters 4-6). The graceful, leisurely and/or heroic properties
attached to every single one of these iconographical situations, and which through
the case of a specific theme make visible something which otherwise, in the average
landscape background – the paradigm’s level – is invisible, are then all projected
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out on this paradigmatic plane where they all in all, in more dispersed and discreet
form together with other properties which reflect other iconographies, can be said
to comprise an iconology.
It must, however, be emphasised again that the distance between the iconography’s condensation and the diffusion of the paradigm is not always as absolute
and quantum-leap-like as described here; on the contrary, it can be filled with a
continuum of various degrees of saturation of meaning in which the type of meaning
we are dealing with can be quite indefinable. Examples of this kind of indefinableness, which moreover seems to be teasingly brought into play by many artists, will
be discussed in relation to 15th-century rock images in chapter 12.
Whether the iconography is separate from or flows more continuously over
into the paradigm, the very fact that the two parts are coordinated confirms, in
its own way, Panofsky’s dogma of the iconography as indispensable basis for the
iconology, the paradigm in its cultural context. But when, as here, we are dealing
with landscape images and related genres, it is still with the essential difference that
[1] not every iconologically meaningful image possesses an iconography that is significant for
the iconology and [2] when that kind of iconography is actually present, the step from iconography to iconology is still not taken within the individual image, but within large groups of
images of which smaller sets, those with significant iconography for the group’s paradigm, are
selected to then shed light on the paradigm’s iconology. Within the individual landscape
image it is thus still only in special cases that the iconography can be said to be
the basis for the iconology – and this in the roundabout way that the iconography
does not directly determine the iconology of the image, but rather concentrates a
general iconology, of which this image merely constitutes one of many examples.
Taking this differentiation into consideration, Panofsky’s ‘exception’ still applies
to the landscape image and other modern categories such as still life and genre:
their iconology is not underpinned in iconography.
But because for Panofsky iconology was never founded beyond precisely the
conscious intentionality – the iconography – it was, when it lost this basis in these
genres, played into the hands of something so diffuse as the beholder’s “synthetic
intuition”, qualified by his “psychology” and “Weltanschauung”. It comes therefore as no surprise that Panofsky himself feared its degeneration into a kind of
art-historical answer to astrology.42 However, it would seem to be equally obvious
that my sought-after objective – a reformed iconology – will not be satisfied by the
pitfalls of such intuitionism. It will more appropriately profit by the movement that
comes to maturation at much the same time as Panofsky’s Gothic/scholasticism
comparison, but to which he himself never built a bridge: structuralism. From the
more orthodox structuralist experience between the 1940s and 1960s, the current
study can deduce, firstly, that certain cultural domains – for example, myths or
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clan relationships of tribal cultures, as cited by Lévi-Strauss – can be regulated by
relatively stable structures, which shine through across all singularities.43 Secondly,
as demonstrated by Foucault, cutting across the cultural domains it is possible to
make out a structure, a so-called episteme, that influences a culture in its entirety
until, in a discontinuous leap, it is replaced by another.44 For my purposes, however, the structuralist experience cannot stand alone, partly because the structures
of structuralism appeared as strangely static and partly because they were never
brought satisfactorily into play with the hermeneutic tradition, which structuralism now and then actually renounced, leading the structures to drift in a degree of
independence from the historical context.45 In contrast to this, I call for a dynamised
structuralism that can describe both how the structures manifest themselves in
different contexts – in terms of consciousness, world picture, social sphere – and
how they transpire, mature and dismantle.
The paradigm in a sociological context:
Bourdieu’s concept of field
As regards the socially-determined aspect of the structures, I have found a useful
conceptual guideline in the idea of field introduced by the French sociologist and
anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002).46 Partly in defiance of his structuralist
training – and in dialogue with Panofsky’s theses on perspective and Gothic –
Bourdieu wished to place the concept of structure within a social dynamics – i.e.
describe it in a way that takes into consideration the agents through which it operates and also the social system by which it is surrounded. The field thus signifies
the system of forces – rules, practices, traditions – which influence every culturallydetermined action. Even though the field could at first perhaps seem indistinguishable from the paradigm, there is a difference in the depth of meaning and thus the
iconology. The field includes all the transactions, the living whole in its turbulence
of contexts; the paradigm is more concerned with indicating its surface, the set of
decipherable rules.47
In addition to manifesting an exterior space of forces in which the individual
agents act, the field also leaves its traces on the interior of the agents, an enfolding
of forces described by Bourdieu as habitus. Habitus can be understood as
systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to
function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize
practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations
necessary in order to attain them.48
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While Bourdieu, like structuralism, recognises the existence of certain governing
principles beyond the subject’s control and consciousness, he nonetheless insists that
these principles are rooted in the social practice and as such are in constant motion.
Without approximation to an actual Piagetian systematism, Bourdieu can, on the
one hand, maintain that habitus is absorbed since earliest infancy and therefore
becomes an “embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten
as history”.49 On the other hand, habitus is also “an infinite capacity for generating
products – thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions – whose limits are set by
the historically and socially situated conditions […].”50
The space which frames these limits is thus made up of the field, a space of
possibles that determines what can be realised at a specific time in a specific social
context. In Wittgensteinian terminology, the field constitutes a kind of game, the
rules of which one is born into rather than having to learn.51 Where art works are
concerned, a form of expression to which Bourdieu devotes much of his later production, it is therefore not enough to observe isolated relationships such as the
art-historical tradition and the patron; the whole institutional apparatus has to be
involved: critics, dealers, museums, education, viewers. In Bourdieu’s words it is a
matter of “understanding works of art as a manifestation of the field as a whole, in
which all the powers of the field, and all the determinisms inherent in its structure
and functioning, are concentrated.”52 This way of thinking can also prevent shortcircuiting of the Marxist variety in which works of art are, for example, deciphered
as the direct result of economic conditions, as it is only once the interior modus
operandi of the individual fields has been understood that it becomes possible to
begin to set out hypotheses as regards their interaction.53
Taking these provisos into consideration, Bourdieu does not however sidestep
what must be regarded as the key reason his thinking is relevant to the current
project: to trace homologies between cultural domains. In fact, Panofsky’s transverse mental habits from his Gothic study was a main source of inspiration in the
formulation of the habitus concept, and in very general terms Bourdieu finds that
comparative analyses of habitus or field reveal structural affinities between different
cultural domains.54
Even though Bourdieu does not pursue actual macrohistorical considerations,
and in particular dissociates himself from evolutionary concepts,55 I shall venture
the following – possibly brutal – fusion of his ideas and this very evolutionism. As
it is possible to decipher homologies between different fields in a given epoch, I will
envisage that the fields submit to a transverse evolutionary process which, despite
conflicts, co-ordinates them in diachronic as well as synchronic respects. At each
synchronic stage, then, there thrives a series of fields that might indeed function
according to local sets of rules, but which have such major structural similarities
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that through a kind of constructive interference they create a coherent morphology. They thereby form part of an overarching condition, a hyper-field, which, with
a nod to Foucault, I will call the epistemic field. So historical epochs – antiquity, the
Middle Ages, modernity – can be read as such epistemic fields which span larger sets
of sub-fields, and in so doing prevent cultures from disintegrating in chaos.
If it is thus possible, all in all, to describe cultural evolution as a development
in which older fields are overlaid by new, it does not mean that the older fields are
completely supplanted. In the perimeter areas of the culture – countryside, forest,
mountains – the old field can carry on undiminished, and in its urban centre it will
at least exist as memory. Once a field has been constructed, it can thus be handed
down unchanged through generations, indeed through millennia – a cultural longterm effect that could be described according to the French Annales school historian
Fernand Braudel’s notion of la longue durée.
The dynamic field: Spengler’s concept of culture
Apart from the overarching evolutionary perspective, this diachronic-synchronic
method could actually be said already to have been displayed in abundant variety
by Spengler. Even though Spengler in the main reserves his philosophical “method
of comparative morphology in world-history”56 for the diachronic courses of the
cultures, his chief practical concern, the comparison between broad sets of a culture’s synchronic domains – visual art, music, literature, natural science, philosophy, economics – could resemble a multi-faceted structuralist investigation. For,
consistent with one of structuralism’s fundamental assumptions, he demonstrates
how each of the “great cultures” is controlled by a so-called prime symbol, a basic
interpretation of the extent of space which, like Panofsky’s mental habit or Foucault’s
episteme, regulates its most diverse products: “it is operative through the form-sense
of every man, every community, age and epoch and dictates the style of every lifeexpression.”57 In this way, for example, the perspective of oil painting, the art of
printing, the credit system, long-distance missiles and contrapuntal music appear as
an expression of “one and the same spiritual principle”, as they form part of world
history’s “great groups of morphological relations”.58 [Spengler’s italics] Considering that
Spengler does not limit his prime symbols to an immaculate abstract sphere, but
sees them displayed in a turbulent historical reality, it would not seem unreasonable to perceive his individual cultural domains as a type of Bourdieuian fields and
thereby his overall culture as an epistemic field.
However, where Spengler breaks definitively with a Bourdieuian and a structuralist horizon in general is on the issue of the development of cultures. Rather than appraising their progress as the result of unpredictable social power struggles, Spengler
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compares them to organisms which can each be ascribed a destiny, a cyclical course,
that – to switch to a season imagery – takes them from the summery unconscious
culture to the wintry and experienced civilisation.59 Even though Spengler’s imagery
is rather pathos-laden, and even though he goes rather far in his effort to pinpoint
this fundamental progress in a succession of essentially different cultures – besides
the antique and the Western, also the Arab (medieval), Indian and Egyptian – my
own experience of the empirical material leads me to endorse the following basic
model: that each culture, i.e. each epistemic field, actually bears a resemblance to an
organism, by means of which its development can be equated with an evolutionary
progress from creation through maturity and on to dissolution. This model has
the advantage that at the same time as recognising the synchronic dimension of
structuralism, i.e. that each culture is characterised by a certain episteme, this episteme
is by no means seen as stationary but, on the contrary, in cyclical or, more precisely,
spiral development. Every culture thus possesses a certain potential for change, and
when that is fulfilled, i.e. when the culture has reached the maturity of civilisation,
Elman Service’s so-called “law of evolutionary potential” (1960) takes effect: “the
more specialized and adapted a form in a given evolutionary stage, the smaller is
its potential for passing to the next stage.”60 Decadence and dissolution, the final
and cycle-like stage of an evolutionary sequence, therefore appears as a prerequisite
for a restructuring and incipient regeneration.
In combination with the overarching evolutionary model, this is where we detect
a chain-like structure – the sequence of continuously new cyclical, epistemic fields –
at the same time as other and recurrent parameters (and here we, by and large, leave
Spengler) can be seen to increasing effect along the length of the chain. These parameters, then, survive the individual cycle (spiral twisting) and carry on, reinforced, in
a bigger, incessantly evolutionary progress with new cycles (spiral movements).
Summing up
Considered synchronically, my analysis model employs two basic kinds of tool: an
analytic-descriptive (structuralist) and an iconological (hermeneutic). The analyticdescriptive tool is, firstly, that which identifies the paradigms of the landscape
image: those sets of rules that over a given epoch determine the appearance of the
landscape in images. Secondly, this tool is extended by means of connecting the
paradigms of pictorial art with structurally related paradigms in other areas of
the culture, paradigms which – as proffered by the evolutionary simultaneity in
combination with Spengler’s organismic ideas – emerge, culminate and die out at
the same time as their companions in the image.
However, the interpretation first becomes iconological when the paradigms
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are supplied with a dimension of significance, which can occur in two ways:
via a worm’s-eye view and via a bird’s-eye view. The worm’s-eye view identifies
the iconographies that can be regarded as concentrations of the paradigms of
pictorial art, and which through a comparative ‘mixing’ can generate a cloud of
meaning around the paradigms. From the bird’s-eye view the paradigms are seen
as Cassirerian symbolic forms – that is, as imprints of fields. The fields are those
structures of forces with which the various domains of the culture are arranged,
and a description of them depends on an understanding of their dynamics, i.e.
of the institutions, traditions, attitudes, socio-political tensions, etc. which contribute to their maintenance. Even though every evolutionary stage is composed
of a large number of fields – spanned by the overarching epistemic field – I permit
myself to single out a small selection as comparative material for the iconological
interpretation of the landscape image: the fields of cosmology, socially-determined
perception of nature and self-consciousness.
III.
Towards a fusion of diachronic and synchronic
General systems theory
The above attempt at mediation between the diachronic and the synchronic lines
of approach – which, particularly since the 1960s, have been kept apart – could
perhaps seem rather postulated. Fortunately, albeit here only in brief outline, better arguments are to be found in a framework that the Austro-American biologist
Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-72) has labelled general systems theory.61 This concept,
which also goes under names such as complex systems theory or simply systems theory,
aims at an interdisciplinary science investigating and identifying laws for complex
systems of every kind: cosmological, chemical, meteorological, biological, economic,
technological, cognitive – and then also sociological and historical.
The prerequisite for such a science is the phenomenon of emergence: in large
accumulations of elements, properties emerge that cannot be analysed on the basis
of isolated sub-elements, but develop exclusively in interaction between them. The
organism-like forms encircling a flock of birds are, for example, emergent in relation to the individual bird. Not unlike the way in which structuralism finds the
same syntax in diverse vocabularies, it is thereby possible to observe patterns and
developmental mechanisms which are common to otherwise widely different contexts – be it whirling patterns in the galaxy and shellfish or feedback mechanisms
in organisms and thermostats. In the context of this study, I can specifically point
out that the evolutionary concept becomes an ordinary developmental parameter
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with just as much significance for socio-cultural systems as for the biological species’ system.62
Even though the general systems theory’s objectives were clarified as early as
the 1930s, and in the post-war period acquired effective tools for formalisation in
areas such as information theory, chaos mathematics and computer simulations, in
practice it has to be accepted that there is still a long way to go to its general implementation – particularly in the humanities. This is not only because the science of
systems is still incomplete, eclectic and in a number of respects directly speculative,
but also, as we will soon see, more routinely because of the general divide between
the experiences of the natural sciences and those of the humanities. Even though
most of the problems around the landscape image could probably be presented at
a ‘sober’ distance from this issue, it would still be a kind of hypocrisy to conceal
the extent to which it has influenced my thinking in practice. As I see it, this is
where we really begin to understand the nature of the mechanisms we are dealing
with – on certain points an intuitive insight, which I think deserves presentation,
even though the price is a probing draft that mainly indicates future areas of study.
My reason for regarding the general systems theory as a fusion between the
diachronic and the synchronic is that it deals with systems in their dynamic activity.
In the terminology of thermodynamics, it is a matter of open systems, i.e. systems in
which energy and matter interact with their surroundings. Through this turbulent
flow, the systems can counteract the universe’s general tendency to entropy, chaoscharacterised equilibrium, and instead develop towards dynamic non-equilibrium
states of more complex order: forms of order which the chemist Ilya Prigogine
describes as dissipative structures.63 Unlike closed systems, the open systems’ displacement away from equilibrium is, moreover, irreversible, which thus means that time
and its direction play a crucial role in the understanding.
It is here quite tempting to see an incipient formalisation of Spengler’s cultural
philosophy, given that what Spengler called for was precisely an approach describing
the phenomena in a more overall temporal sequence, a destiny, as opposed to the
classic modern natural science which, based on the idea of reversible cause and effect,
lets genesis fossilise in isolated phenomena: “Day is not the cause of night, nor youth
of age, nor blossom of fruit.”64 If a statement such as this seems ‘metaphorical’, i.e.
poetic rather than scientific, it gains credence in systems theory where one of the
points is exactly that genuine morphological kinships can be encountered among
widely differing systems, and thereby organism-like structures and developmental
sequences are also found in systems other than the ‘actual’ organisms of biology.
In terms of cultural history it is also significant that Der Untergang des Abendlandes
was one of Bertalanffy’s sources of inspiration in the formulation of the general
systems theory.65
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Fig. 0.4. The Epigenetic Landscape,
diagram based on Conrad Hall
Waddington’s ideas (after Ward,
The Strategy of the Genes (1957)).
Another forerunner of systems theory is embryology, where one of the mysteries
has been how a fertilised egg follows the route to a full-grown organism, and often
from widely different starting points at that (an egg, a half egg). At the turn of the
19th-20th century, the biologist Hans Driesch tried to introduce the term entelechy
(from Greek en=in + telos=end), a vitalistic force that influenced the development
of the embryo. Even though today we are still far from an understanding of this
dynamics, it does not seem to require the intervention of special exterior forces,
but can presumably be explained by the internal interaction of cell components;
in other words, within the framework of the general systems theory. However, the
phenomenon that complex systems may reach the same state of completion via
different routes and from divergent points of departure has certainly become one
of the prime features of systems theory and is now designated equifinality.66
In physics, theoretical biology and more recent mathematical disciplines such as
chaos and catastrophe theory, the force that thus compels quantities of a system’s
single elements to move towards the same state of completion goes by the name
of attractor (alternatively: strange attractor).67 In order to be treated exactly, attractors
require a multi-dimensional phase space, but to make them more decipherable several scholars have compared them with undulations in a terrain. For example, the
embryologist Conrad Hall Waddington (1905-75) lets his system, the embryo, develop
in a terrain which supplements and influences the internal genetic information: the
epigenetic landscape (from Greek epi=next to).68 The terrain is sloping and traversed
by a network of channels, so-called chreodes, of various breadths and depths, and
the embryo’s development of new cells is thus compared with balls rolling through
continuously new chreodes (fig. 0.4). Even though nothing definite can be said
about the more precise route of the balls, the anatomy of the terrain keeps them
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within certain spaces of probability – attractors alias chreodes – and only high speed
or low sides to a channel can take them out of a chreode.
It now seems quite reasonable that these insights from general systems theory
should be put together with our earlier observations concerning cultural evolution
and fields. On the ontogenetic level it is worth noting that Piaget, in later life, was
influenced by Waddington’s concept of chreodes and presumed that the child’s
sequence of cognitive stages must be structured by similar evolutionary forces.69
If we then widen the focus to phylogenesis, and compare human societies with
complex systems in the course of development towards states of higher order, the
fields become comparable with attractors, terrains of structuring forces that determine within which places of probability individual elements are to be found. The
comparison has the advantage that it comprehensively pulls the concept of field
away from the timelessness of structuralism and into the dynamic genesis, where
it exists solely by virtue of history’s turbulence and drive towards new states. Qua
attractor, the field is carried by the currents of cultural evolution, at the same time
as it ‘attracts’ and transforms the individual elements of culture. In this framework
of understanding, the concept of field itself also comes into its own as it – not unlike the general theory of relativity – can be connected with space. As Alastair M.
Taylor has written in his evolutionist analysis of socio-cultural systems, space hereby
becomes a plenum: “an ordering constituent of a macrocosmic system in which field
forces are omnipresent and omnioperative, acting upon all material phenomena
and maintaining a dynamic, energizing, as well as balancing, field.”70
The concept of attractor can also be useful when we want to shed light on history’s dynamics of succession, the change of fields. In my analysis we observed that
the change often had a certain discontinuous character, and in comparison with
Waddington’s epigenetic landscape we could then equate this with a change of
chreode: the ball’s abrupt movement from one channel into another. This form of
‘catastrophic’ change of state is actually so widespread in systems theory that it has
in itself been the subject of exhaustive research, be it in the form of biology’s and
sociology’s punctuated equilibrium or René Thom’s catastrophe theory with its cusp
(the catastrophic pinnacle between two attractors).71 In my evolutionary cultural
context I cannot, however, count on pure catastrophic changes, but rather on new
fields which gradually overlay older fields, so that the changes take shape as a mixture
of abruptness and continuous transformation.
The problem with cultural history’s fields in relation to simpler complex systems
is, of course, that they are exceedingly difficult to pin down in a more formalistic
manner. What kind of space are we actually dealing with? Since attractors can
be visualised through a terrain imagery, the landscape image could, however,
constitute a potential – perhaps even privileged – medium, by means of which
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history’s space can be made visible in a more concrete manner. The landscape
image thus becomes a kind of attractor imprint, an imaginary terrain that freezes
the structuring forces of cultural evolution. Just as diverse cultural homologies
become the key to the landscape image, so the landscape image itself acts as the
recorder of the anatomy of culture.
Evolution as universal phenomenon
Because open systems can move away from equilibrium and thereby achieve a higher
degree of complexity, the concept of evolution appears as a common parameter
in general systems theory. In particular, this offers the possibility to rehabilitate
the 19th-century united theory of evolution: the theory that considers cultural development to be a furtherance of biological evolution. Even though I cannot give
a detailed account here, the biologist Richard Dawkins and his successor Susan
Blackmore have recently set out a theory formalising this kind of bridge-building
between biology and culture, whilst also demarcating the differences between the
two: the so-called meme theory.72 This theory notes that in both biology and culture
we encounter hordes of individuals brought together, through a certain uniformity,
in systems – biology’s species and culture’s societies – and, at the same time, that these
individuals develop via evolution, changes which influence systems in their totality.73 The two sides are decisively separated, however, by the ways in which their
distinctive characteristics are stored, passed on and developed. Whereas the species’
distinctive characteristics are stored in genes, which are passed on by reproduction
and developed by mutation and selection, societies’ ditto are rather stored in what
Dawkins calls memes, symbol systems which are passed on by imitation and developed
through innovation (whose direct motive power can be everything from religion to
social and practical-inquisitive considerations).
Even though the similarities should not be exaggerated, both the gene and the
meme are replicators that spread through host organisms: the one through the
bodies of the species, the other through the brains of the people of a society and
their outer manifestations in diverse forms of practice. That meme replication is
capable of overlaying its genetic forerunner is due, as Blackmore emphasises, to a
property that separates people from animals: the ability to imitate behaviour and
procedures that are not transmitted in the genes, but which have to be learnt from
scratch in every new individual.74
That I have found it fruitful to bring in the meme theory as an explanatory tool
at this juncture is because, through their replication by gemmation, memes assume
their own life, which functions independently of their individual hosts’ intentions,
and thereby makes them compatible with my structuralist line of thought. The
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more recently coined term memeplex – a complex of memes reproduced simultaneously75 – would seem particularly comparable with Kuhn’s concept of paradigm. By
this means it is also possible to build bridges from biology to culture, for just as
the experience of a specific phenotype has no direct bearing on the genotype, nor
are the paradigms, the memeplexes, directly influenced by the myriads of individual
occurrences experienced by a culture and the meme exchanges thus generated. For
example, it had no effect on the epistemic field and its paradigms when, in the first
century BC, Hellenistic Heron from Alexandria invented the aeolipile, a forerunner
of the steam engine. As numerous field forces supported the general work paradigm,
slave-power, the new meme merely meant that the machine was used to open and
close heavy temple doors.76
Conversely, the memes’ agent of reproduction – imitation and learning rather
than procreation – means that under sufficient pressure for renewal their paradigmatic superstructure can change faster and more flexibly than the genes can (at least
until the age of genetic manipulation). Where genetic development is an internal
matter for a species, the mere encounter between different cultures can thus lead
to exchange and transmission of memes and memeplexes. As Blackmore points
out, the escalation of mass communications has meant that cultural evolution
actually makes increasing use of this flexibility, and it thus shifts from a vertical
branched structure, which extends the biological lines of heredity, to a horizontal
network structure, which is transmitted independently of family and immediate
social environment.77 The 20th-century break with the branch-like cultural evolution of the preceding millennia can presumably be accounted for on the basis of a
critical satiety for this new type of horizontal meme-dispersal.
This increased speed of cultural evolution also takes on significance if we turn to
a comparison with its biological forerunner. Thus, it is well known that the evolution of species has not progressed at a steady tempo, but has if anything accelerated:
the first cells with DNA-nucleus, the eukaryotes, appeared in the primordial ocean
1.2 billion years ago, more than half-way into the evolutionary sequence; marine
animals crawled ashore 300 million years ago, 90 per cent into the sequence; and
homo sapiens emerged just 250,000 years ago, a tenth per mille before the present day.
On the understanding that culture’s superstructure, the memes, continue this acceleration – and that, in accordance with the assumptions of general systems theory,
we are thus dealing with a further development of the same complex system – it
would seem but logical that around twenty thousand years could pass before the
Upper Palaeolithic period was succeeded by the Neolithic period, but only a tenth
of that time span before the antique form of culture was succeeded by the modern.
If we acknowledge the existence of the acceleration, it constitutes a significant argument against the objection that human culture unfolds on a completely different
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time scale from biological evolution, and that an alignment of the two is therefore
‘scientistic’.
The notion that cultural and biological evolution are two sides of basically the
same historical development project could also explain the seemingly slightly odd assumption we saw expounded by Habermas, Gablik, Blatt and Marcussen above: that
cultural ontogenesis has structural similarities with phylogenesis. For precisely this is
a property of biological evolution: in its ontogenetic genesis, the embryo re-runs the
entire gamut of phylogenetic evolution, from one-celled organism through fish and
saurian to mammal. Thus the child’s acquisition of its culture’s memeplexes is a superstructure to this genesis, as the culture’s previous evolution – from, for example,
topological to Faustian conception of space – is connected up and lived through.
Finally, we could also elaborate the strict sense of the concept of evolution I
am working with here: that evolution is not merely a case of irreversibility but of
directional irreversibility, and that this determined direction may be demonstrated
through the pursuit of one or more parameters that are increased over the course of
history. If we look at that part of evolution which is occupied by cultural history up
to the 20th century, the primary observation of my thesis – that pictorial space, over
the course of history, is transformed from no depth of field to full depth of field –
must be interpreted as an empirically tangible indication that something changes –
increases – over the course of cultural history. Elaborated by means of some of the
aforementioned cultural tracks, we venture all in all to follow the progress – and
the conclusion – of a quite specific process: the development of a self-dependent
individual, whose growing freedom, cognitive awareness and experience involves a
corresponding isolation from the surrounding natural world.
In so doing we have identified if not as precise a teleology as the embryo’s development from one-celled organism to fully-developed individual then at least a
sequence of chreodes, the potential alternatives to which are to be found in nearby
river valleys. Mapping these is obviously complicated by the fact that in practice
we are dealing with a single sequence (extraterrestrial civilisations remain, as of
yet, unknown!), albeit comparative analyses between various cultural sequences –
Western, American, Asian – will already take us far in distinguishing between the
chance-individual and necessary, the heuristic and nomothetic. Even though spot
views of non-Western cultures would in fact seem to confirm the overarching pattern – the direction of the pictorial evolution towards increasing depth of field and
accompanying socio-cultural properties – I must here, however, limit myself to mere
indications (see chapter 1).
The discussion becomes more inflamed when it gets to the question of the extent
to which this direction also involves progression, a transformation from less to more
developed. Among scholars of biology and sociology alike, a massive taboo has built
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up around this previously so recognised idea, whether it concerns the biological
or cultural domain. In its biological version, progress, for example, is given the
following emotionally-charged words along the way by the contingently-oriented
evolutionary scientist Stephen Jay Gould: “[It] is a noxious, culturally embedded,
untestable, nonoperational, intractable idea that must be replaced.”78
Unfortunately, in the present context I cannot go into the counterarguments
that this scepticism deserves. I will merely repeat that a number of branches of
general systems theory are specifically rooted in the observation that open systems
can move towards decreasing entropy: that is, towards higher degrees of complexity.
This is especially the case in the most recent theoretical biology, where scholars such
as Stuart Kauffman develop formalisable models for evolution’s fitness landscapes,
attractor terrains, where the highest peaks (in a reversal of the chreode imagery)
represent the most complex stages of development. The consequences for cultural
evolution go without saying.79
Acceptance that cultural evolution actually involves a development towards higher complexity, and that this development reached an interim extremum in the West,
should not, however, prompt Western self-righteousness because, like nature’s ecosystems, the process would be inconceivable were it not for interaction with the rest
of the cultures in the world. More importantly yet, as already mentioned, we should
not regard the coupling of an independent individual and an infinite universe to be
evolution’s ultimate telos, as the 20th and 21st centuries seem to entail a memetic melting pot where all cultures’ memeplexes are blended and re-combined, in conjunction
with the deconstruction of the idea of the self-dependent human individual; where
the barriers between technology and nature are erased; and where the universe becomes evolutionary and limited. This development, again, seems to be reflected in
the Western pictorial space, as perspectival space and landscape image have been in
permanent crisis since Picasso and Duchamp. A discussion as to how this most recent, partly neo-primitive and cyclically recurrent cultural phase can be interpreted
in an evolutionistic light, I must, however, postpone until a later occasion.80
IV. Theory of science reflections and
critical dialogue with anti-evolutionism
A project like this one, dealing with such temporally and geographically wide-reaching areas and building bridges between apparently separate specialist disciplines, is
obviously going to have dealings with the theory of science. On what exactly does
its scientific legitimacy rest, and which criteria of validity can be advanced to take
its theses from postulate to plausibility?
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Notwithstanding the many differences that characterise methodological groupings in the humanities today, two dogmas usually recur: [1] the subject area of the
humanities is made up of singular phenomena, i.e. phenomena which might well
be described as reflecting local laws, but yet to no greater degree than that their
potential representation of broader historical periods and patterns of development
is seen as, at most, hypothetical and beyond the actually scientific dimension; [2]
as a result of this very singularity, there is no limit to how exhaustively and closely
the historical phenomena should be analysed and their differences highlighted. As
we will soon see, the routes that lead to these dogmas are extremely different in
themselves, and yet they all seem to be based on variants of nominalism – the epistemological line of thought that presupposes an uncrossable boundary between the
phenomena of the world and the concepts, theories and methods we use to deal
with these phenomena. One methodological pole, the traditional, which carries
forward variants of 19th-century positivism, strives toward coming as close to the
diffuse documentable facts as is possible: the higher the level of analytical resolution, the more precise and thereby scientific the exposition of historical phenomena,
whereas the broader and synthesising focus is written off to, at best, the domain
of essayism. Another methodological pole, that of radical relativism, which covers
new theoretical departures since the 1970s, from post-structuralism to feminism to
postcolonialism, stresses the always ideology-determined discourse which frames
the world’s infinitely varied and, in terms of meaning, open cultural phenomena:
the greater the degree to which the ideology can be fragmented and repressed differences exposed, the more politically supportable and thereby ethically correct the
exposition, whereas the broader and synthesising focus is written off to the domain
of patriarchal control and totalitarian ideologies.
Even though I, in many ways, share views with both positivism and relativism –
respectively: in the request that a thesis should not be contradicted by documentable fact; and in the awareness that a view is never without a context – this project
nevertheless breaks crucially with the two ultra-nominalistic dogmas of these methodological groupings: that history is fundamentally singular and that it therefore
always requires meticulously detailed analyses. Firstly, the project’s empirical observations have led to the assumption that a quantity of historical phenomena are
actually not fundamentally singular but, on the contrary and as already adduced
by Spengler, on a certain organisational level are subject to broader analysable laws
in both a synchronic and diachronic direction. Secondly, this assumption has occasioned a necessary shift of focus, which does not confine the scientific legitimacy
of historical analysis to the minor temporal and geographic scale, but finds patterns
of regularity displayed in macrohistorical dimensions.
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Three criteria for scientific legitimacy:
analytical level, morphological
correspondence, predictive power
That this break with dogma involves neither an essayist nor totalitarian slant,
but in certain respects can rather be seen as a claim for an intensified and antitotalitarian scientific legitimacy – one that aims at more universal and basically
natural laws – can be demonstrated if we draw in some of the fundamental assumptions of natural science. Unlike the humanities, the objects of natural science do
not comprise singular phenomena, but classes of objects whose behaviour can be
described and predicted by means of models: universally applicable law structures.
Thereby, the aim and criteria of science are not to carry out a detailed investigation
of every imaginable object within a class – for example, all the iron atoms in the
universe – but to isolate an appropriate selection of these based on a well-defined
framework, a level for analysis, and then from this draw up a model which in part
displays morphological correspondence with the little group of observed iron atoms,
in part predicts that all iron atoms in this framework will behave in accordance
with the model. The criterion for whether a scientific model can be recognised
as ‘true’ is thus tripartite: it must [1] be able to account for its level of analysis; [2]
demonstrate a morphological correspondence between an analysed selection of objects on
this level and a model; [3] predict that this pattern also applies to all other objects in
the given class. If there are objects that behave differently than predicted, i.e. do
not correspond with the structure of the model, the model does not work. This
possibility of contradiction – essential for testing scientific theses – was that which
Karl Popper named falsification.81
Even though historical phenomena belong by definition to the past, and therefore cannot be subject to proper repeatable control tests, there is still a quantity of
phenomena in history with the potential to be included in classes and thereby to
assume properties beyond the purely singular. This book’s subjects, the landscape
images and their evolution, are just such phenomena, and the structuralist approach
proposed to analyse them seems to be as close to the aforementioned scientific
method and its tripartite criterion of truth as is possible using the contemporary
humanist methodological repertoire. The proposed structural patterns – the paradigms and fields – and their evolutionary sequence should thus be seen as models of
a scientific disposition, and their viability rests accordingly on how accurately they
cover their empirical matter on the level at which they are presumed to be effective.
If we focus more closely on the issue of level [1], the conditioned humanist
reflex is that the models are too ‘rough’ and therefore at best overlook a quantity
of cultural differences (essayism), at worst damage the singular character of the
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historical phenomena (totalitarian control). But to this it has to be countered that
the identification of larger structures in history is not seen as being comprehensive
downwards in the historical material; rather it is a question of emergent patterns
that surface on an analytical level above the myriad of incidents that create them. A
parallel scientific example might be a model for the behaviour of gasses which deals
with macroscopic parameters such as temperature, volume and pressure without
mentioning the molecules’ microscopic, singular movements. Conversely, the macrohistorical level is not merely possible, but essential if the iconology of the landscape
images is to be analysed in a qualified fashion, as without it the looked-for patterns
drown in details irrelevant for this iconology – more or less as in Lewis Carroll’s
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), in which there is an attempt to bring the art of
cartography to total perfection. Having by turns found maps on a scale of 1:100 and
1:10 too rough, one finds the optimally nuanced solution: a map to the scale 1:1. The
farmers are, however, worried that this kind of map would keep the sunlight off
the fields, so a more financially viable and, in its way, even more accurate solution
is found: to use the country itself as its own map.82 This story exposes the absurdity
arising in certain situations when the humanities follow the widespread dogma of
aiming, at any price, for a description that is detailed and reveals differences. In
Carroll’s story, respect for detail results in the loss of the idea of a map: precisely to
shed so many details that it is possible to orient oneself. The jigsaw correspondence
between South America and Africa, and the consequent thesis of continental drift,
was unlikely to have been devised if cartography was subject to a dogma of maps
on a maximum scale of 1:100. The more specified scale of a scientific model must
therefore be independent of predetermined ‘acceptable’ scales – such as in casu the
‘human’ scale of the humanities – and be solely determined by the problem to be
resolved.
On the macrohistorical level I think I can thus comply with criterion [2], the
fundamental scientific principle of a morphological correspondence between a selected
empirical corpus and a model. In the first place this applies to the basic evolutionary pattern, the extension of depth of field from the Palaeolithic period to the
19th century, which constitutes a relatively simple regularity, by means of which
significant aspects of Western culture’s presentation of space and landscape can be
understood. The veracity of the model is immediately corroborated by its internal
regular principle of development, which so patently matches images from reality
that, having first acknowledged the principle, it is possible retrospectively to predict the course of image development right up until its saturation in 19th-century
viewpoint-directed infinity – comparable to the way in which it is possible to predict
that the number sequence 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 must inevitably be followed by 34 and
not 35 or 52. As this regularity in image development already contains an imperative
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element of non-randomness, it seems seriously beyond the realm of fluke when it
also proves to correspond structurally with a whole series of evolutionary models,
which have often developed independently of one another within other specialist
disciplines, and which as far as several are concerned even prove capable of direct
collaboration with this regularity in terms of content. Besides being temporally
equivalent to the development of depth of image, the assumptions in Hegel’s and
Habermas’s models of the gradual autonomisation of consciousness can, as shown
earlier, be correlated with the image’s intensified vantage position – a collaboration
already carried out by Piaget on the ontogenetic plane and coupled with phylogenesis by Gablik, Blatt and Marcussen. Similarly, the Jungian Neumann has combined
the evolution of consciousness with the evolution of cosmology, a bridge-building
I can further consolidate through my own analyses of the figurative visualisation
of rocky ground, heavens and infinity. Furthermore, my structuralist comparison
of the sequence of the Golden Age myth and the movement from post-Egyptian
pre-modern to modern pictorial space, and this comparison’s iconological interpretation vis-à-vis the development of the concept of work, demonstrates that the
sociological evolutionary theories of Habermas, Parsons, Kojève and Weber can also
be linked to the theoretical framework in terms of content.
Although I cannot investigate the empirical basis for the evolutionary models of
consciousness, cosmology and concept of work as thoroughly as my own empirical
material – the images – the mere morphological kinship between the models indicates that they must constitute different theoretical frameworks of basically the same
phenomenon: the evolution of culture. It is these correspondences which mean that,
for each evolutionary section of time, I have to assume the existence of a common
organisational principle that influences culture’s individual domains despite all differences, and which I term the epistemic field. The evolution of the image can hereby
be seen as a particularly testable indication of the existence of cultural evolution,
just as the other branches of this evolution can be used as iconological contexts
for the interpretation of image evolution – the point is not to give the one part
the monopoly as thesis and the other as proof; the thesis is rather to demonstrate
how the various sequences of cultural evolution mutually confirm one another’s
morphology. In the eyes of humanistic sceptics, this attempt at interdisciplinary
co-thought will perhaps be seen as a rampaging aspiration to make analogies between hardly compatible, i.e. again primarily dissimilar, subject areas – the word
‘analogy’ has a suitably harmless ring of merely a subjectively devised kinship of
form, somewhat à la ‘metaphor’ – but as I hope to have indicated above, and will
also account for throughout the entire book, the morphological equivalences are
so striking that randomness is far less probable than valid connection. Again I will
resort to parallels of natural science, for nor do we here ever achieve greater certainty
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for connection than the ‘mere’ analogy between model and empirical material or
groups of empirical material, and so the criterion therefore again – and alone – must
be: are the structures of model and empirical material of sufficient complexity that
the probability of their arbitrary similarity can be ruled out? Is it, for example, a
coincidence that the pollen count changed 11,500 years ago simultaneously with the
oxygen isotope level – such as precipitation samples excavated from the Greenland
inland ice now demonstrate – and is it possible to set up other models explaining
this synchrony, which coordinates otherwise essentially different domains than the
general organising principle: the end of the Ice Age?
Another conditioned humanist reflex, which is closely related to the scepticism of
the macrohistorical level, is the objection that I draw too broad conclusions on the
basis of too slight a corpus and that a project such as this is impossible to carry out
in a scientifically valid way in practice because more life sequences should be used to
scour history’s various image cultures and their contexts. This objection, however,
again relies on the concept of all historical phenomena’s fundamental singularity,
whereas I presuppose the existence of classes of objects which are regulated by
shared laws – what I call paradigms and fields. Therefore, in theory it is not necessary to compare more than ten-twenty temporally and geographically sufficiently
scattered images from a given epoch before the contours of the paradigm will have
emerged – the involvement of further material is more likely to add nuances than to
shift the earlier tendency. In order to emphasise how central this point is, I repeat
the previously quoted words of Lévi-Strauss: “Syntax does not become evident only
after a (theoretically limitless) series of events has been recorded and examined,
because it is itself the body of rules governing their production.” Syntax is again
that regularity, that structure, which is assumed as controlling a given class of
objects and, as in natural science, its contours emerge following study of a smaller
selection from this class. That I then in practice have actually studied and discuss
a very large number of images can but enhance the plausibility of my thesis. The
temporal and geographical range of paradigms and fields means, moreover, that
their registration is robust vis-à-vis gaps in the surviving material. Even though I am
indeed dependent on what the ravages of time have, more or less randomly, handed
down – sometimes just archaeological fragments – the organising structures are
outlined completely by the fragments. The possibility that certain types of image
might nevertheless have evaded investigation – for functional reasons or because
of my subconscious selection – will be discussed below.
Even though the events of history cannot evoke an impression of repetition to
the extent that the objects of natural science can, a structuralist thesis ultimately
fulfils the aforementioned criterion [3] of truth pertaining to natural science, the
requirement for predictive power, in the sense that, based on a small selection of a
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class’s objects, the thesis makes claims on behalf of all the objects in the class. It is
therefore particularly open to Popper’s claim for the potential falsification of scientific theories, given that it is possible to carry out numerous other spot tests within
the classes to which the thesis refers. Should an image diverging fundamentally
from the alleged horizon of a paradigm one day make an appearance (a Palaeolithic
cave painting with a perspectival landscape or merely a baseline; a medieval representation of sky with floating clouds; a Pompeian sacral-idyllic landscape image
traversed by cornfields without demonstrable iconographic cause), the evolutionary
thesis will thus collapse like a house of cards. It is on this factual-empirical, in a
way positivistic, basis – not from predetermined, ideologically-conditioned opinions
as to which methodologies humanistic science ought to employ – that my thesis
should be tested and judged.
Protectors of the singular:
social constructivism and positivism
The above reflections apropos the theory of science should really be enough to
preclude criticism of my evolutionistic and structuralistic thesis, but my previous
discussions – not exactly few in number – with sceptics, especially of a deconstructive bent, tell me that a more than usual legitimisation of methodology is required
in order to gain a hearing. In an academic climate, now in its third decade, characterised by a relativistic and social constructivist atmosphere – in the art history
discipline known as New Art History – I cannot sidestep a more specific dialogue
with the prevailing trends. The dilemma is now this: should this dialogue be conducted humbly, half apologising for the seemingly untimely opinions I broach, or
should it be outgoing, possibly even directly critical of my interlocutors? I have
chosen the latter solution.
It should first be noted that scepticism of macrohistory is by no means exclusively the province of social constructivism. For large tracts of 20th-century art
historiography, particularly its Anglo-American offshoots after the Second World
War, a methodology directed at empirical material prospers which might indeed
be open to various socio-historical contexts, but which is sceptical of geistesgeschichtliche constructions of every kind, especially the Hegelian version. A scholar such as
Erwin Panofsky, who came from a Germanic geistesgeschichtliche tradition and who
followed an evolutionistic line of thought in his earlier treatise on perspective,83 was
thus subject to a sharp theoretical leaning curve when, as a refugee from Nazism,
he sought shelter in the US, where he had to tone down his overarching insight
in favour of more microhistorical analyses or empirical accounts of tradition (the
Gothic treatise being a hesitant exception). And although Ernst Gombrich, a pupil
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of the culture-historical minded Viennese art historian Julius von Schlosser and
also a refugee in the Anglo-American world (Britain), actually operates in a quite
evolutionistic manner with a notion that mimesis increases over the course of art
history, he refutes that this tendency is determined by the likes of culture-historical
currents beyond the individual artist’s control. By combining Schlosser’s ideas of
cultural stereotypes with Karl Popper’s aforementioned concepts of the potential
falsification of scientific theses, Gombrich assumes that approximation to optical
perception takes place when the individual painter tests learnt schemata in relation
to new visual impressions. Beyond the schemata, however, the artist moves in a
cultural vacuum, and Riegl’s Kunstwollen can therefore be dismissed as “a ghost in
the machine”, just like it is self-confidently concluded that “Evolutionism is dead”.84
Perhaps the weightiest argument against a stance dealing with deeper drifts
in history is the one identified by Gombrich in the totalitarian geistesgeschichtliche
inclinations with which Popper had already settled accounts in The Poverty of Historicism (1957): “By inculcating the habit of talking in terms of collectives, of ‘mankind’,
‘races’, or ‘ages’, [this reliance of art history on mythological explanations] weakens
resistance to totalitarian habits of mind” – of which the later Nazi sympathising Viennese art historian Hans Sedlmayr’s reading of Riegl is highlighted as a particularly
ominous example.85 In this showdown with totalitarianism, Gombrich proves to be
allied with New Art History and its social constructivist hinterland which, based
on experiences with totalitarian genealogies, has expanded the attack to include
all the grand narratives that various power categories – the bourgeoisie, capitalism,
communism, patriarchy, rationality, Western culture – have used to legitimatise
their subjugation of various forms of otherness.86 It has therefore been necessary
to free these narratives from any demand of connection to immanent tendencies in
history and instead to reveal them as mere constructions stemming from culture’s
always active power games.
What, however, crucially separates social constructivism from Gombrich and
much of post-war ‘old art history’ is the weighting of the social space. Where art
history directed at empirical material purges itself of geistige inclinations by thinking
in individualistic cause-effects – in artists who are influenced by specific exemplars,
stereotypes, patrons’ demands, books in an otherwise purged social vacuum, etc. –
social constructivism carries out the same purge in reverse by saturating the social
space with cool semiotic codes in which the artist is inextricably inscribed. In the
first version of this space – 1950s and 1960s structuralism – these codes were, as we
have seen, reasonably stable and could be analysed in an almost natural scientific
manner, but from fear of once again ending up in essentialism’s – and the accompanying totalitarianism’s – iron grip, post-structuralism has since made the space
fluid and indefinite. This indefiniteness spreads right out to the interpreter who,
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to no lesser a degree than the object she or he puts into words, is inscribed in an
unstable semiotic space where the interpretation becomes more a question of construction than of reconstruction.87And in any case – as is generally prescribed by
French post-war thinking, which social constructivism draws on – the space of the
past can only be analysed from a synchronic, i.e. contemporaneous, point of view,
and is inaccessible from a diachronic, i.e. historical, reading. In Donald Preziosi’s
words: “Indeed, one would think that for a discipline so perennially obsessed with
the ultimate apt phrase and the poignant and penetrating bon mot, there might
be some Olympian perspective revealing an orderly, rational, and progressive evolution. There is no such perspective, despite what might be inferred from numerous
primers.”88 This diachronic outlook is suspicious because it ostensibly frees itself
of all codes and sees through the system from the stance of value-free notions of
origin and directionality. The only option for the historiographer, in a diachronic
respect, is therefore to select a genealogy and then, moreover, to bear in mind that
this is a product of her or his own arbitrary standpoint and therefore remains one
of an infinite number of possible, small narratives.
As far as I can see, this standpoint, which today is so widespread that it has
almost become more ‘naturalised’ than the evolutionism it originally challenged,
gets out of control in its otherwise legitimate critique of the older humanistic
intellectual history and its ostensibly value-free judgements, belief in the West as
culture’s telos and lack of an eye for the dynamics and conflicts of history. Firstly,
it would be tempting to turn the relativistic line of thought back on itself and ask
if its standpoint is not just as dependent on a limited perspective as all other possible forms of thought, for example the evolutionistic variant? For what would an
Olympian perspective actually mean other than a perspective that is directed towards
an analytical level or two above the microhistorical with its obligatory cultivation of
differences between man-made cultures? Bearing in mind the aforesaid reflections
vis-à-vis the theory of science, the selection of level is not a predetermined fact, but
something that is solely dependent on the extent to which morphological similarities
between model and empirical corpus can be revealed. For a theoretical standpoint
that calls itself anti-humanistic, it is actually strangely old-humanistic to cling to the
microhistorical level as being the only permissible option, because it forces the lens
into an ‘everyday’, ‘immediately’ comprehensible scale, and forgets the elementary
relativistic fact that scale is in fact relative. What is, on conventional humanistic
grounds, called microhistorical could thus from another point of view – for example,
of microbiology or nuclear physics – just as well be called macrohistorical.
Old-humanism is also re-packaged in the post-structuralistic fondness for the
singular event. Post-structuralism’s point of attack here is otherwise the common
human value base and free metaphysical aspiration, which should exist in every kind
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of art work irrespective of its historical or geographical origin, and which is at the
same time individually irreducible and therefore appropriated with corresponding
individual emotional fullness, the herostratically notorious ‘impressionistic’ – i.e.
ruleless – art criticism. In contrast to this, social constructivism attempts to desubjectify the work of art and record its value in variable discourses qualified by
political power, beyond which there is nothing that can feasibly be analysed. Taking into consideration that politics and power continue to be thought of as having originated from an exclusively man-made domain, and that here formation of
meaning even shifts like quicksilver, we are left in the ironical situation that the
social constructivist interpreter is just as human-referential and rulelessly imaginative as his impressionistic predecessor – merely with the small difference that now
it is not a case of free metaphysical aspiration, but of free political aspiration: the
exposure of man-made power structures, which can liberate diverse minorities from
patriarchy, aristocracy, Western culture, etc. The endeavour might be to shift the
subject to the collective, the aesthetics to the politics, but the ideals of liberty are
still those of the French Revolution and, in their aesthetically-coloured rulelessness,
unmistakeably humanistic.
Something similar can be noted in New Art History’s scepticism of larger historical patterns – par excellence: evolutionism. Again, it is the human scale that steps in
as explanatory framework: as there are no other patterns in history than the manmade, larger patterns inevitably become expressions of smaller groups’ endeavours
to cope with the heterogeneous majority. And, again, this microhistorically-based
scepticism is also long since an attendant of positivism, which finds no truth beyond
that which can be demonstrated in single documents. Compared with this, social
constructivism can thus simply be said to seal the documents outwardly – to cut
short their indexicality on ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ – and chiefly to read them as
suitably fragmented signifiants for continually changing signifiés within the belljar of
discourses. Considering how deeply rooted the empirico-centric micro-art history
is in the Anglo-American world, it would therefore seem less dramatic that the
French deconstruction has become such a success here as is the case. In addition
to both traditions celebrating the small narratives, deconstruction can supply some
intellectual ammunition to the civil rights battles that have been fought since the
1970s, as compensation for fading political activism, on academic paper.
Expressed polemically, the most extreme aspects of the social constructivistic
humanities, including their offshoots in New Art History, could thus be seen as a
(last?) attempt to maintain an autonomous aesthetic domain in culture – a domain
in which the impressionistic experience of the singular work shifts to the semioticpolitical concept of the open signifiant, and the aestheticistic historylessness is recirculated as the right to construct the context.
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The body of history
In particular, social constructivist scepticism can be seen as a late offshoot of
nominalism, the epistemology which sets up an impassable boundary between
the things out in the world and the names (Latin: nomina) we attach to them.
This high- rather than actually post-modern thinking has its roots in Late Middle
Age scholasticism and comes to maturation in Kant’s formulation of the isolation of the consciousness from das Ding an sich. As it finds it futile to ask the
extent to which our representations fundamentally have anything to do with the
organisation of reality, its concept of truth is basically pragmatic and limited to
the issue of the extent to which these representations can be used. The constant
issue is, then, the criteria for usefulness. The matter is at its most straightforward
within the natural sciences, the representations of which, as mentioned, relate to
repeatable experiments and can thereby be legitimised through their predictive
power. However, the more history that goes into the undertaking, i.e. the more
non-repeatable it becomes, the more complicated the matter. Biology is already
at the soft end, and the picture becomes further tangled from sociology through
history to – perhaps furthest out – aesthetics with its unique, ruleless sense impressions. In the humanistic domains it is therefore open to negotiation as to which
representations are actually most useful and thereby closest to the truth (if this
concept is allowed at all).
Even though this issue has long been tackled by operating with a strict gap
between natural and human sciences – C.P. Snow’s “two cultures”89 – the late 1900s
would seem, however, to be characterised by growing interdisciplinary bridge-buildings. These bridge-buildings have opened up for the export of paradigms across the
disciplines as well as ensuing reactions preventing specialist loss of identity. Thus
structuralism could be seen as a scientific formalism’s entry in the humanities,
whereas post-structuralism conversely, by disseminating the rulelessness of aesthetics to history, sociology and the history of science, defends the specific experience
of the humanities via an export drive. The dissemination, which en route atomises
the structuralistic semiotics and accumulates a universalised Marxist politics (all
minorities and othernesses ‘unite’!), creates the social constructivistic sphere, a
hyper-nominalistic domain, that shifts the usefulness criterion of natural science
from external prediction to internal ideology: inasmuch as aesthetics has dissolved
every friction vis-à-vis a given empirical material, the friction is shifted inwards to
an issue of power struggles between political fractions. The useful theory is exclusively that which wins, and as it is the minorities which, by definition, must win,
this is the hegemony of the small narratives. Expressed polemically: if fascism is
aesthetics transformed into politics, i.e. the dream of classical unity transformed
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into totalitarian oppression, this could then resemble fascism in reverse: difference
fetishism converted into the tyranny of minorities.
If one accuses social constructivism of spiriting away a real world beyond the
primacy of signs, the reaction is, however, usually of a negative bent: reality, the
factual, does indeed exist, it is just inaccessible without an ideologically-determined
sign mediation, which therefore becomes the only thing science can relate to. But
how can one both make it a virtue to problematise all borders, dichotomies and
hierarchies that are brought about by logos, and then at the same time safeguard
the politico-semiotic sphere as if it were a sacred threshold behind which one must
politely stay for now and evermore? Why should something so relatively arbitrary as
politics and semiosis be the black hole in which all cognition must implode, never
again to escape? Here I cherish no ambitions of entering an epistemological refutation of the more extreme aspects of social constructivism; I would actually prefer to
turn the critique into a constructive dialogue, partly endeavouring to re-introduce
a dimension of reality into the historiography of art and partly synthesising it with
what I perceive as fertile aspects of New Art History and the new humanities.
My desire is, in the first instance, to re-inject the historical material with resistance, weight or, if you like, body, which displaces it from a chimera in the grand
cranium constituted by the discourses of the historians into a reality which existed
in the past and survives perceptibly in the present, including, but by no means
exclusively, our representations of it. Against this, the singularity of the historical
material is often invoked, which, it is true, might allow for agreement on certain
‘factual’ circumstances (date and place of the first landing on the moon, Grauballe
Man’s cause of death, etc.), but which nevertheless involves an impenetrable indefiniteness as regards otherwise scientifically pertinent model areas such as cultural
causes and effects, discursive fields, motives of historical persons, etc. Within this
domain, which thus has to be separated from the indisputable facts by means of
some kind of magic boundary, there is scope for free rein of discourse and power,
which could reasonably be confirmed through the history profession’s notorious
feuds and jumble of changing explanatory models.
The bone of contention is now whether or not these fields are ontologically impenetrable – so social constructivism constitutes a kind of humanistic counterpart
to quantum mechanics’ indefiniteness models – or if they appear impenetrable
partly as a consequence of hitherto inadequate analytical tools. I will here sign up
to the latter possibility, in that I call for a both more rigorous and more ‘woolly’
historiographical thinking. The rigorousness aims at more thoroughly thought-out,
elaborated and morphologically clear models, the ‘woolliness’ at a softening of and
mediation between the usually far too polemic, polarised and fragmented positions
which characterise the humanistic discussions. Put another way, opinions are usually
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too rigid in relation to the limited standpoints and areas of interest they represent –
such as social constructivism, if none other, has taught us is the case – rather than
through a responsiveness to these standpoints being able to make comparative
analyses between many standpoints. This would lead to the understanding that
many – presumably most – disagreements are due to phenomena being looked at
from differing standpoints, rather than to fundamentally different phenomena and
to standpoints belonging each to their own hermetically sealed world. At the same
time, it could actually be beneficial to transfer some of the indefiniteness thinking of quantum mechanics to history – not that historical phenomena should be
open to delirious or politically tendentious constructs, but rather that formalisable
spaces of possibilities should be established, within which given phenomena can
be sought.
These means would both open to a more flexible awareness of standpoint and
give the historical material the chance to offer resistance. A peculiarity pertaining to
historical material, time-bound phenomena, is thus its combination of the irrecoverable and the unfinished – that it both has definitively taken place and yet continues
to stretch its tentacles into the present, which thereby is formed by this very past, yet
also forms this past as a consequence of subsequent layers of experience, which like
a prism elicit new aspects of the past. Therefore, as the hermeneuticist Hans-Georg
Gadamer has pointed out, there are always two parties, each with its experience, in
historical analysis, the past and the present, and the ideal hermeneutic interpretation occurs when the two horizons of experience meet at an Archimedean point: the
fusion of horizons.90 Precisely this cognition is forfeited in social constructivism,
which only recognises one horizon – that of the present – and thereby deprives past
events their possibility of offering resistance, i.e. to supply the one, empirical part
in the two-part structure characteristic of every analysis that leads to an advance
in cognition.
What I am calling for in the humanities is thus a synthesis between, on the one
hand, the specifically historical-aesthetic experience of these disciplines and, on
the other, that formalism influenced by the natural sciences last heard of in structuralism, but since supplanted by post-structuralism’s labile, ideology-infiltrated
scepticism of patterns. If the thesis-antithesis-synthesis movement has any voice
in history, we have to imagine a thinking that mediates between singularity and
pattern, a dynamically infused structuralism, which revokes the ban under which
diachronic thinking has so long laboured, and which ventures to re-test the issue
of bigger patterns in history. This kind of thinking will involve a change of tone in
the humanities: no longer the routine singing out of differences mixed with ironic
distress over the aggravations of power, but a more soberly descriptive, perhaps even
optimistic vision. For, as suggested, the idea of the small narratives lives almost
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parasitically on the necessary counter-narrative of the totalitarian system, oppressive of individuals, and accordingly a critique of it will be fruitful and productive
as long as this system can be ascribed some currency of reality, but will be tilting
at windmills should the world have moved on. It could thus be the case that there
were patterns in history which evaded this control by ‘the constructed’, and which
it would therefore not be possible to criticise, politicise or deconstruct one’s way
out of – no more than a swimmer can break up an underwater current by means
of ‘critique’.
In an aforementioned alternative imagery, it could be a case of re-supplying history with body – a body that is not only, as today, a mirage projected from history’s
politico-semiotic consciousness, but which has weight and reality and has just as
great an effect on this consciousness as vice versa. The necessary shift in thinking
would thus be reminiscent of the anti-Cartesian movement away from the psyche
as all-explanatory, autonomous cause found in current psychiatric sciences – which
can, for example, regard a depressive predisposition not as a cause but as a consequent effect of gastric pains. The phenomenological and psychoanalytical sections
of the humanities have, actually, already paid a lot of attention to the body, but still
only in curiously schizophrenic isolation from its superstructure in the socialised
psyche, whether this be regarded as individual or scattered in the collective societal
cranium. Either the body speaks unproblematically through an unhistorical psyche
(phenomenology) or else it acts as the historicised psyche’s subversive otherness
(psychoanalysis). If history is not obscured, it is removed to contending discourses,
which again operate in nominalistic separation from the material.
What I am calling for, however, is that the by now hackneyed constellation of
body-anarchy-emancipation and consciousness-pattern-oppression be refracted
towards a third figure in which body and consciousness, anarchy and pattern,
emancipation and oppression are considered together through the temporal, i.e.
historical, collective figure of dynamics, so that our world is perceived in a process of
genesis in which patterns appear just as much as the result of matter’s non-conscious
processes and their impregnation of consciousness, as the result of consciousness’s
subsequent influence on matter.91 The body of history is thus here no longer to be
perceived as an ontologically unattainable chaos of coincidences, above which the
discourses’ constructions hover in their Cartesian secluded balloon; if anything, it is
a largely self-organisational process, which might indeed be influenced, even formed
by voluntary impacts of consciousness, but which itself simultaneously forms and
determines what this consciousness is at all capable of constructing. If we venture
to take our bearings from historiographical formalisms that displace the focus
from micro-events in chaos to larger patterns – which the individual might indeed
interact with politically and semiotically, but does not create, let alone ‘construct’ – it
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is worthwhile examining the structuralistic tradition in a wider sense, including
its offshoots in the interdisciplinary field between the humanities and the natural
sciences.
Even though recent humanities have hitherto left no room for a historiography
bearing this kind of pattern impress, and especially not one that has a specific direction, it would seem a good starting point for debate that my historical building,
conversely, actually gives recent humanities plenty of room in its most recent territory: the 20th and 21st centuries. Because, again: maturation of the autonomous
consciousness and its associated autonomous perspectival art certainly does not
constitute history’s telos; on the contrary, cultural evolution would now seem to have
turned into the final phase of a macrohistorical cycle, which occasions rejection,
deconstruction and dismantling of all the values of high modernity – a showdown I
completely acknowledge as an essential aspect of the art practice and historiography
of the 1900s and 2000s. However, my narrative is still separated from postmodernism’s mainstream-meltdown of the legacy of the past by my assumption that the
current crisis in art historiography is due to actual forces in history rather than a
contemporary coincidental-ideological need for the undermining of all historical
constructions. Our thinking has become inadequate precisely because it has got
out of step with the most recent, in a way post-evolutionary, phase – which will
not, however, lead to a denial of the highly evolutionary process that led up to this
phase, in other words: to a mix up of post-evolutionary (we are actually in evolution’s slipstream) with post-evolutionistic (we can no longer think with the concept
of evolution, neither in relation to the present nor to the past). This misreading
would correspond to a menopausal woman experiencing the cessation of menstruation and suddenly, for that reason, declaring menstruation to be a biographical
‘construction’ and denying that it corresponds to an earlier reality.
If this mediation, which transforms post-evolutionistic to post-evolutionary, can
be accepted, it will be seen that my project builds to the utmost extent upon experiences from recent humanistic theory of science: structuralism, field theory, sociology,
feminism, psychoanalysis, theories of vision and representation. In keeping with
them, I reject the concept of a transhistorical human subject and instead regard
the subject as the product of various contexts, of which many can be rendered via
these very theories. Where I and the prevailing variants of the theories part ways,
however, is on the issue of the structure of time (universally chaotic or, at best,
discontinuous vs. evolutionary until the 20th century); and if theory variants that
are also influenced by post-structuralism are taken on board, we also diverge on
the issue of the status of meaning (labile and solely constructed by interpreter vs.
dynamic-stable and in part immanent in the historical material).
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V. Cracks in the generalisations:
reservations regarding function and iconicity
Function
Even though I have claimed that the paradigms of pictorial art are, as a result of
their permeation of all the images of an epoch, vigorous in relation to the gaps in
the extant material, the critic can still with a degree of justice ask: without specification of context, is there any sense in speaking about evolution of the pictorial
space when images have served a myriad of different purposes over the course of
history, and their manifestation is perhaps primarily dependent on these varying
functions? To this the answer must be: certainly, the manifestation of an image is
dependent on its function, but at the same time a given evolutionary stage implies
a horizon of image functions which cannot be overstepped. An image could not,
therefore, be assumed to look much different ‘merely’ because its function had been
changed, because the image function itself interacts with the epistemic field just as
much as the pictorial space does. How image functions have changed in the course
of time, and how these changes have interacted with the manifestation of the pictorial space, and thereby of the landscape image, will thus be an extremely interesting
subject to investigate – it is even possible to imagine a model that describes image
and landscape space as a function of the function the image is intended to fulfil.
The framework of this study, however, means that here I must limit myself to an
incomplete and experimental draft.
Although the majority of the images to which I refer are today part of art history’s domain of investigation and can accordingly be categorised as ‘art’ – that is,
as relatively self-dependent objects with an aesthetic-metaphysic appeal – it is patent
that most of them were assigned contemporaneous functions reaching beyond or
outside the category of art (this would apply to all images before modernity, apart
from certain forerunners in antiquity). If the autonomous art category is inscribed
in [1] the private domain of a bourgeois culture, three further principal domains of
image function can perhaps be singled out: [2] religious, in which the image is part
of a cultic context (e.g. altarpieces, icons or votive offerings); [3] political, in which
the image serves as propaganda for a human-based power or ideology (e.g. battle
scenes, portraits of leaders or panoramas of possessions); and [4] practical, in which
the images acts as an aid in applied contexts (as topographical maps, architectural
sectional views or botanical illustrations).
A straightforward assessment of this outline will reveal that the development
of the landscape image, at least in its most recent phase, occurs within the development of domain [1], a private bourgeois space, and thereby that the landscape image
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reaches its ultimate autonomy in a type of image that would have to be called art
for art’s sake (figs. 8.1 and 8.13). As a consequence of the late crystallisation of the
art category in cultural evolution, it is however just as patent that the landscape
image must chiefly have antecedents in domains [2]-[4], which raises the question
as to how these domains more specifically interact with its development. The answer becomes more obscure the further we travel back towards pre-historic time: in
addition to the lack of elementary evidence as regards the function of the images,
the function seems to become less and less differentiated. To make a distinction
between a religious, a practical or a political function in a cave painting seems, for
example, absurd.
If one was to venture a generalisation with reference to the more differentiated,
pre-modern functions, it could be as follows: landscapes, and pictorial space with
a wide depth of field in general, occur mainly in images with a certain religious
and/or political monumentality, i.e. images commissioned by religious or political
rulers to serve a purpose other than purely practical. Of image functions that will
thus not have landscapes or will have landscapes with scant relevant depth of field
for the time, we could mention: topographical maps (practical function; plate 12
and figs. 4.50-4.55), poor people’s cult images (religious function beyond the ruling class), graffiti (political function beyond the ruling class), emblems (politically
elitist, but non-monumental function).
In addition, it might be noted that my aforementioned observations concerning
landscapes marked by cultivation could be coupled with the relationship between
political and religious function. That the Golden Age field enjoys the freedom for
landscape images marked by cultivation could thus also be said to be the result of
a mainly religious, possibly semi-private function without intervention of an explicitly political dimension. In this phase, the landscape image’s Golden Age vision is
invoked precisely as a bulwark against a painful political reality in which an elite
class’s administrative, philosophical-religious or warlike conduct depends on the
subjugation of the majority of the working population. This applies to Pompeian
sacred idylls (a semi-private, secularised transformation of an originally religious
function; fig. 6.10), and it applies to the greater part of medieval images (where
politics rarely transcends the religious aspect). In Egypt, on the other hand, the clan
society is as of yet no more challenged by growing social polarisation than that the
religious function of the images continues to be inseparable from their political
function, leading to multitudes of agricultural depictions, images of a blessed collective life (figs. 1.11 and 4.4-4.8). And when, in Assyria and Roman late antiquity, we
again meet these iconographical pockets in which the landscape image – now as an
exception – is marked by cultivation (figs. 1.16, 4.18-4.19, 7.7, 7.21 and 7.26-7.27), the
explanation here would also seem to be that the political power wishes to manifest
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itself more tangibly in images (for further detail see chapters 4 and 6-7). In brief,
before modernity the representation of terra belongs to the politically inexplicit
and religious, the representation of the territory to the politically explicit and, in
post-Egyptian times, downplayed religious.
If, finally, we consider the genesis of the modern landscape image – which involves, inter alia, the spread of the aforementioned iconographical pockets to the
landscape image in its entirety – it involves the jettisoning of any kind of religious
function, in other words the complete secularisation of the image. As is pre-eminently
demonstrated by Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s panorama of the Sienese hinterland
(1337-40; plate 13), a political image function here plays a crucial role (everything
from nationalism and military propaganda through party politics and on to ideology of work and trade can provide incentive), but also all sorts of practical image
functions – e.g. topographical views (fig. 8.10), maps (figs. 8.8-8.9), scientific illustrations (figs. 10.14-10.15) – contribute on the periphery of the monumentality to
the final evolutionary maturation of the landscape image. That this development,
conversely, is promoted by the withdrawal of religion from the image is borne out
in the 16th-century Reformation, when scepticism of religious images was counterbalanced by new specialised and more private image types such as genre, still
life and landscape. It is from this bourgeois private function, albeit always in close
interaction with politics and practice (and even also: religion), that the utmost fruit
of the landscape image, the 19th-century autonomous landscape image, grows.
The iconic
Despite my attempt to cover the various epochs’ landscape images as extensively
as possible, it is true that I have had an eye on a specific set of image features and
therefore might well have been able to overlook certain other features and their
crystallisation in separate image genres. My attention has been focused on the evolution of mimesis – reconstruction on a surface of the visual impression – while more
abstract or ornamental image types are displaced to the periphery. If we involve
Charles S. Peirce’s useful category of sign, the icon, and two of its subdivisions,
the image and the diagram,92 it could also be said that I make more of the image
than the diagrammatic aspect of the pictorial space. Unlike the linguistic sign, the
symbol, which according to Peirce is characterised by an arbitrary, i.e. conventiondetermined, relationship between the sign (representamen) and the object to which
this sign refers – the word ‘table’ has nothing in common with the physical object:
a table – a fundamental feature of the image sign, the icon, is that something of the
object actually gets through into its depiction. This ‘something’ is a structural relationship and it is most visually expressed in the subdivision of the image (a mimetic
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representation of the table), whereas the diagram filters out certain aspects in favour
of a more abstract manifestation (e.g. a table composed of thin lines).
My claim that a given epoch is characterised by a certain pictorial space should
thus not necessarily be understood as all of the epoch’s images being completely
controlled by this, for a number of them will often be more diagrammatic – not
just ornamental zones, but also genres such as the coat of arms, vignette, signpost,
topographical map, diverse illustrations, graffiti, etc. The claim should rather be
understood as asserting that in certain areas of a culture one finds a pictorial space
with a, for its time, maximum width of depth of field and a maximum Peircean
image aspect, and that this pictorial space indicates a horizon of potential.
Is it then the case that the image genres which are more diagrammatic in relation to the ‘front pictorial space’ are leftover forms from earlier evolutionary
stages, a kind of continuous cultural digestion? Seen in relation to the depth of
field yardstick, the diagrammatic images actually often seem to rehabilitate traits
from past stages: think of the surface-bound line drawings of Pompeian graffiti,
which do not display the depth-creating illusionism of contemporaneous frescoes;
or take early modernity’s coat of arms which makes use of simplified pictograms
rather than the newly-developed perspective. On the other hand, it is also a fact
that it is actually not so very rare for depth of field to reach a new evolutionary
stage in precisely a diagrammatic imagery. For example, it is in images from late
antiquity, which otherwise in many ways ‘return to’ the tribal culture imagery of
the northern countries, that the heavens become a valid ingredient of the depth
of field, at the same time as the surroundings, as Riegl demonstrated, are directed
towards an abstract spatiality to a greater extent than was the case in the bodybound pictorial art of antiquity. And even if Mesolithic rock paintings look more
diagrammatic than their strikingly optical forerunners in the Palaeolithic period,
it is nonetheless here that we first meet rudimentary indications of landscape and
space.
These observations imply the need for a more nuanced elaboration of the concept
of mimesis – and a further augmentation of Peirce’s concepts: image and diagram –
than I can supply here. I must content myself with the following comments: that
an image has an optical-mimetic appearance does not necessarily mean that it is
directed towards all phenomena within a given viewpoint, or, in other words, that the
depth of field is here displayed in full. Conversely, an image that is expressed mainly
diagrammatically can contain more information about the spatial relationships of
the environment than a mimetic image directed towards the same environment,
merely with a more selective vision. This is precisely the case with the Mesolithic
rock paintings, which although less optical-mimetic than their Palaeolithic forerunners, on the other hand diagrammatically allow the image gaze to widen from
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individual animals to landscape surroundings. It is therefore possible to note that
historically the diagram has often acted as a type of outpost for the more mimetic
image, an introductory digestion where new types of image ingredients are taken
in and processed before they are ready to be converted into a more mimetic form.
Beyond the spectrum of variously sign-mediated spatialities which a given epoch
represents – from diagrams to optical-mimetic images – I will also distinguish between degrees of spatiality within the optical-mimetic spectrum itself: although all
optical-mimetic images from the same epoch may well entail potentially the same
depth of field, this does not have to be manifested in actu. For example, modern
perspectival images can be set in dark interiors or have a wall or shrubbery as background (fig. 11.19), by means of which the perspective’s infinite depth of field can
be sensed as potential, but is not so fully perceptible as when effectively manifested
in a landscape image with a distant horizon (fig. 11.18). This distinction between
potential and actual depth of field is of significance for the question of whether or
not landscape images call for the legitimisation of the figures, as figures can often
be waived in images with potential, but not actual depth of field (see chapters 1
and 6; plates 5 and 14). The distinction is equally useful for the theme rock- contra
vegetation-dominated landscape images in antiquity and the Middle Ages, as the
latter only thrive in a potential depth of field (see chapters 2 and 5; plate 5 and
fig. 2.5).
Moreover, a separate argumentation is also called for to demonstrate that the
more developed optical-mimetic painting at all events actually involves a spatiality
giving the illusion of depth. Strictly speaking, two-dimensional representation of
depth presupposes the presence of phenomena with a recognisable spatial scope,
in the most graphic form geometrical shapes, which can be arranged according to
laws of linear perspective relating to foreshortening. So, how does the perception
of depth behave if the image zone is filled with amorphous, non-geometric phenomena such as clouds, mist, darkness, shrubbery, mud and rocks – phenomena
which are actually recurrent ingredients in the image category of ‘landscape’? Does
the dominance of such phenomena mean that the sense of depth is suspended and
we are consigned to a fundamentally indeterminate spatiality? In the work of some
French post-war thinkers and art historians – Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Hubert Damisch, Didi-Huberman93 – a sharp polarisation has arisen between, on the one hand,
a rationalist perception of space controlled solely by lineary principles: geometry
and linear perspective; on the other hand, a body-based and instinctive perception
of space directed at the non-geometric accumulations of light and colour in the
surrounding environment. In their perception, linear perspective spatiality entails
the surroundings being subordinated to the subject that is placed in the centre of
the field of vision, whereas the amorphous traces left by colours and light entail
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a more receptive relationship to the world and accordingly one less controlled by
consciousness.
For my thesis it is, of course, crucial that the two visual regimes, linear perspective and the light-colour interplay, are not as totally incompatible as the Frenchmen
would have it. A case in support of this, aimed specifically at modern painting,
will follow in chapters 8-9, whereas here I will turn to the macrohistorical angle.
An account of the expansion of depth of field over the course of time entails, as
mentioned, not merely the observation that the pictorial space in a more abstract
sense can be structured by perspectival foreshortenings, but also – and inextricably
linked to this – that it gradually absorbs more and more distant surroundings:
earth formations, expanse of sky and, finally, the infinite environment with linear
perspectival vanishing points and amorphous atmospheric phenomena. These
atmospheric phenomena, as well as the first two distances of depth of field – earth
formations and expanse of sky – could in a way be categorised as ‘amorphous’ domains beyond linear-perspectival definition, and yet we see that they are absorbed
into the pictorial space under influence from experience of them as, respectively,
‘distant’, ‘more distant’ and ‘most distant’, i.e. in relation to a certain overarching
recognition of their spatial depths. Even though many of modernity’s landscape
phenomena defy a precise metric spatial assessment, I would therefore claim that
they still assume an advanced evolutionary conception of infinity and depth and
can thereby be perceived in complementarity to the linear perspective: where the
light-colour interplay represents the geometrically immeasurable infinity, the linear
perspective approaches the measurable. I say “approaches” because we should actually also be sceptical of the Frenchmen’s implicit assumption that simply because
images contain objects of a geometric appearance, such as fields, buildings and
interiors, this necessarily means that the space is controlled by well-defined spatial
relationships. It is only on condition that we actually know the geometric features
of the objects – and, for example, know that a corner of a house that appears to be
right-angled is not an optical illusion for an obtuse angle – that they can be assessed
in three dimensions. In other words, the range of depth of field is only in special
cases a question of exact geometric reconstruction of the individual pictorial space.
It is, above all, more accurately a matter of the image paradigm having absorbed
certain phenomena, which via experience are perceived as distant or connected with
the concept of infinity, be they of a geometric or non-geometric nature; and in my
use of the word, the term perspective therefore covers both extremities (with linear
perspective as specification of the perspective’s geometrically constructed part,
intuitive perspective specifying its colour- and light-mediated part).
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VI.
Image and sight
The observation that in time the image extends its gaze towards wider and wider expanses provokes another and particularly pressing question: how does this process
relate to the anatomical sight, our actual use of the eye? Is it symptomatic of culture
also intervening in the perception itself and causing the brain’s structuring of the
sense impressions to change with time? Or is it a matter that is utterly independent
of sight and has exclusively to do with the culture-made norms for visual representation in different eras? We are here dealing with an enormously complex issue in the
no-man’s land between, on the one side, diverse disciplines pertaining mainly to the
natural sciences, such as biology, medicine and cognition research, and, on the other
side, various human and social sciences such as cultural anthropology, sociology, psychology and history. However interesting it might be to find an answer to this question, it is not a matter for my research and I will therefore again limit myself to some
relatively straightforward comments based on the fragments of knowledge, above
all from the human and social sciences, that I have at my disposal at this juncture.
On the one hand, it would probably be reasonably uncontroversial to state that
the evolution of the image cannot – at least not in any simple one-to-one relationship – turn on a registration of changes in the actual everyday use of the eye. That
rivers, trees and clouds are conspicuous by their absence in cave paintings can
surely not mean that the Palaeolithic hunter could only catch sight of game and
was blind to the surrounding forest or the rain clouds that were drawing together
above him. Similarly, it seems unlikely that we in the age of spectacles perceive the
environment more acutely and completely than our Stone Age ancestors.
On the other hand, it ought to be evident without too much accounting that
the evolution of the image cannot be completely devoid of connection to sight
perception. What the image can be said to approach over the course of time is a
quite specific aspect of perception: the field of vision as experienced in an isolated
moment. The eye’s momentary field of focus is indeed extremely limited, but if this
is compensated for by intermittent movements, the so-called saccadic movements,
which piece together sight, the gaze from a specific position of the head can be said
to cover a reasonably well-defined field, what the perceptual psychologist James J.
Gibson has termed “the visual field”.94 Thus, the 19th-century fully-developed realistic images could be said to cover the visual field, as if it appeared sharply-delineated
for the consciousness at a specific moment.
However, if the image in the course of time can be said to approach a freezing
of this field, this is far from an approximation of the ‘natural’ way of seeing, as in
its full function sight is stereometric rather than monocular, spherical rather than
plane projected and, in addition, it occurs over time and in interaction with the
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body, memory and the other senses. The amount of information to which sight
potentially has access in its full function is termed by Gibson “the visual world”,
covering all phenomena in the spatial environment which interplay with light.
Exactly how consciousness becomes conversant with its sense impressions of
this visual world is, however, a vexed question. Some scholars (e.g. Piaget) champion
an interior arsenal of models, which consciousness builds up gradually based on
its physical and social background knowledge, and which are tested experimentally
in the specific situation. Adherents of the Gestalt theory (including Rudolf Arnheim
and Gibson) picture, on the other hand, a more direct impact from the world to
consciousness as the visual world stimulates notional images (gestalts), which are
embedded in the brain from birth.
If we assume, as above, that sight, regardless of cultural background, occasions
a spatial orientation with the same pragmatic essential qualities – distinction between near and far, assessment of the form and extent of bodies, impression of
surface textural properties – it would seem to be reasonable, along with the Gestalt
psychologists, to conceive of the existence of certain mainly biologically-determined
gestalts, which translate quite directly from sense stimuli to images in consciousness. In this way all people – like the more complex mammals – are capable of
sorting out a degree of invariance in mobile phenomena such as trees blown by
the wind, animals in motion, water flowing in waves, by means of which the flow
of the world is articulated in certain object units. At the same time it is, however,
clear that humankind, unlike animals, also gestalt the environment in other and
more ways than this pragmatic registration of surroundings, as this registration
interacts with and is extended by more comprehensive and culturally-determined
hypotheses as to how the world is organised.
It is the uncertain placing of the border between these two domains – the pragmatic registration of the surroundings and the culturally-determined hypotheses
which overlie this registration – that makes it so difficult to give an opinion as to
the extent to which the image refers to the procedure of sight itself, or if it rather
tells us something about the culturally-determined interpretation of this procedure.
Is cultural formation such an inextricable aspect of our consciousness that it influences perception right down at its very first encounter with the visual world? Or
does it live a more discreet, secluded existence, which would make it meaningful
to talk about a basic, phenomenological sight experience independent of culture?
The current study does not, as mentioned, cherish the ambition of clarifying this
issue in depth, but simply assumes – while hopefully supplying empirical-theoretical
evidence – that the evolution of pictorial space mirrors the evolution of consciousness,
i.e. the culturally-determined interpretation of the sight process, however closely connected or separated these two domains might be. I will, however, cautiously present
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the thought that the early phases of pictorial space – phases with low depth of field
corresponding to an equivalent undeveloped self-consciousness – actually come close
to certain aspects of sight’s shaping of the environment, i.e. the more pragmatic and
consciousness-independent spatial image. As the culturally formed self-consciousness
and its expression, the depth of field of the image, develops, the image’s attention is
displaced if anything from the gestalt towards the visual field, i.e. towards consciousness’s momentary visual impression of the environment. Paradoxically, it is in this fragmented approximation to the naked, non-shaped sensuality that the most alienated,
abstracted and consciousness-reflective spatial image appears.
To be sure, the idea of pictorial realism has met with fierce opposition since the
1980s. Semiologist and post-structuralist art historians such as Norman Bryson and
Mieke Bal have challenged the idea that the realistic style should in any objective
sense get closer to the visual reality than any other style; for as realism, to the same
extent as other styles, makes use of culturally-determined conventions, this closeness
is allegedly illusionary.95 Even though the attack on the idea of a natural realism,
which without intermediary agency and symbolic significance merely ‘stands for’
reality, is, in itself, needed, I am of the opinion that in practice it misses its mark
and in some cases ends in a dogmatic image scepticism, an iconophobia which is
just as misleading as the contrasting ‘naïve’ realism.
In my opinion, it is completely correct that in the 19th century one finds images
that are more realistic than any that had been seen previously, if by realism one
understands a pictorial language which involves the fixing of momentary visual
impressions seen from specific viewpoints. A consideration of the anatomy of the
eye clearly shows that the momentary visual image appears as a projection on the
retina of the rays of light that are refracted through the lens, and that this, in the
Peircean sense, iconical transformation bears a striking similarity to the projection
that underlies both the perspectival construction and its successor in the camera’s
photographic imprint (discussed in detail in chapter 9).
That Bryson and those who share his views have chosen to close their eyes to this
fact is not least due to the derivation of their semiological terminology from French
structuralism – i.e. Saussure’s sign model – which, because it is based on studies of
language and not images, is exclusively interested in the connection, determined
by convention, between the carrier of meaning (signifiant) and the conceptual idea
(signifié). Thereby, not only the potential structural similarity between these elements
is excluded, but also – and disastrously when dealing with the mode of operation of
sight and image – the correspondence between these elements and phenomena in
the environment. This very lack is remedied, as mentioned, by Peirce, for in addition
to his concept of sign having Saussure’s as a subset (with representamen=signifiant;
interpretant=signifié; and the symbol category as guarantor for meaning determined by
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convention), his concept of sign also takes in the third part: the object, the imaginary
or actual object to which the representamen refers. Furthermore, even though it is
perfectly possible, the connection between these elements is not necessarily, as in
Saussure, limited to a symbolic – convention-determined – connection; throughout
the whole sign triad there may also run an iconic, including an imagistic, preservation
of structure. It therefore approaches a worrying distortion of history when Bal and
Bryson, in their eagerness to force through a cultural relativistic and solely socially
constructed, i.e. convention-determined, art history, can claim: “First of all, any
identification of icon and the entire domain of the visual is wrong.”96
Instead of attacking the iconicity of realism, the opponents of ‘naïve’ realism ought
rather to query the fundamental assumption that is etymologically mirrored by the
term ‘realism’ itself: namely that reality, that which is real, can be universally said to
consist of the environment to which we have access via the senses, and that an artistic fixing of this is ‘objective’, i.e. exempt from a semiotic or social dimension. As far
as the reality concept, the real, is concerned, to a Plato, for example, it would be made
up of precisely that which is found beyond the senses, and correspondingly the 20th
century seems to take bearings from a reality concept that detaches the empirical concept from the modern nominalistic duality between the objective and the subjective
in order to bring it into a common space with, on the one side, the body (phenomenology), on the other, the social and sign-controlled world (sociology, semiotics, etc.).
To the best of my belief, this reality concept is not implemented by simply, as in the
Saussurian tradition, sealing up the empirical material and turning it into a question
purely of social construction – a move that is actually only the same as emphasising
nominalism’s subjective pole and expanding its subject to the entire social sphere.
An alternative solution will, hopefully, be tendered in the current study, in which the
symbolic dimension of an image is not limited to that determined by convention –
as in derivatives from Saussurian semiotics or simply iconography – but, in addition,
is manifested in the very character of iconicity, the time-bound and therefore historically-determined representation of the way in which the world is perceived.
VII.
Image and word
The way in which the image binds meaning to itself, and how this process changes
over the course of cultural evolution, could also be illustrated by a more searching comparison between image and word; between, in a Peircean sense, iconic and
symbolic signs.
Regardless of how simple an image might be, it is qua icon given specificity, a
stamp of identifiable circumstances, which the shortest sentence, the word, can
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never possess. Take, for example, the concept ‘bird’. As regards the word ‘bird’, its
convention-determined link to the object prevents it possessing any information
about the more explicit details of the bird. An image of a bird, on the other hand,
will immediately make the creature more distinctive. We will know the shape of
the bird’s beak, to which side the beak is directed, the type of wings, etc. Nevertheless, the specificity of this image will never exist as an immaculate what, as it will
always be dependent on semantic and stylistic conventions. If we look at the most
extreme instance of the former dependence, the hieroglyph, we do not need, for
example, to pay attention to the direction of the bird’s beak or the type of wings,
but can simply read the image as ‘bird’, in the same way as we ignore the shape of
the letters in the word ‘bird’. An increased problem of specificity arises, however,
in connection with the style – the how by means of which the bird is shown. If the
bird is covered with a stylised pattern of blue feathers, for example, does this mean
that it should be perceived as a bird covered with feathers of a certain colour and
shape; or, again, that the feathers merely allude to the generalised concept ‘bird’?
When is what replaced by how?
In my view, questions such as these cannot be answered without a well-developed
image-evolutionistic model. Fortunately for the analysis, the degree of specificity
of the images would appear to be closely connected with their depth of field: the
intensification of depth of field from the Palaeolithic period to modernity quite
simply involves a movement towards increased specificity. If we focus on the landscape image, its repertoire will therefore be restricted to fewer types in the premodern period. Does this restriction mean that a correspondingly lesser degree of
meaning should be read from the specific characteristics, which despite everything
are still found – that, for example, a background of rocks and trees should not be
read as a concrete specification of place, but rather as a general hieroglyph meaning
‘nature’ or ‘wilderness’? I would assume that we are indeed dealing with this kind
of hieroglyphs, but that it nevertheless makes sense to interpret their specificity.
Thus, interpretation does not relate to the individual landscape image, but to the
paradigm of which it is a part, by which means it can be called iconological.
The development becomes more complicated in modernity, as the specificity
must increasingly be taken literally, while it is more than ever before conditioned
by style. On the one hand, the development denotes acceleration towards an almost
unique specificity – Monet’s haystacks in that particular morning light, enveloped
in this particular mist. On the other hand, it is also revealed – through point of
view, cropping, brushstrokes, etc. – how this very specific what has been captured; yes,
how has quite simply become indistinguishable from what. In light of this unconditional accommodation of idiom to a never previously described empirical material,
it is hardly surprising that image interpreters schooled in semiology have become
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confused, but the dimension of meaning is still not salvaged by denying the extent
to which the iconic sign formation has taken over in relation to the symbolic.
Considerations of the nature of the image medium in relation to the written
word are therefore crucial to the question: how far, in a given period, do pictorial
art and literature allow themselves to be contained by the same paradigm? Can we
assume an ut pictura poesis or are the two media, if anything, conditioned by each
their sub-paradigm? In the current context I will concentrate on the paradigms of
pictorial art and can therefore only put forward vague ideas about the conduct of
literature. From my scattered and unsystematic comparisons between images and
literature of various periods, I have received the impression that the rules I observed
in images were also to be found in broad outline in literature. There are no ardent,
evocative descriptions of landscapes in the literature of antiquity, just as vertiginous impressions of the distance are absent. Nonetheless, one can come across a
few specifications of place, which would be inconceivable in a contemporaneous
landscape in pictorial art: for example, traces of time such as snow-clad mountains,
or traces of cultivation such as ploughed fields.97
In order to explain these kinds of deviations in relation to the rules that I posit,
one could indeed turn to the inbuilt specificity of the image. Because a painted
ploughed field denotes a specific ploughed field placed in a specific location in the
pictorial space, in antiquity it will claim an attention that will make it symbolicallyloaded in a different way to when it is mentioned en passant in a literary description.
As Lessing observed in Laocoön (1766), his still surprisingly valid paragone of poetry
and painting, the claim for decorous beauty and exclusion of ugly and painful details
is in fact much bigger in visual art than in its literary equivalents, precisely because
the visual rendering makes the object graphically present, whereas the literary mention merely hints at it.98 This is, of course, especially true in classical art, but even if
we look at a juxtaposition of contemporary representations of still taboo subjects
such as death, violence and sex, for example on film and in novels, we will see that
our arts are still very much governed by this tendency.
The landscape variety of visual specificity has thus to be part of a well-developed
paradigm in order to be relieved of its iconographical burden: a paradigm that does
not emerge until modernity when the status of the ploughed field, as we have seen,
is shifted from iconography to iconology. Since the modern landscape paradigm
as such is concerned with the specific (specific places seen from specific viewpoints
at specific times), the ploughed field slips to the periphery of attention, to the
depth of field. But it should be stressed, however, that a satisfactory clarification
of this issue will require a very different systematism than I can provide here – a
systematism which, besides comprehensive historical literary material, will require
a well-developed semiological and semiotic apparatus.
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VIII. Concluding remarks:
the landscape image in literature
As a consequence of the interdisciplinary character of this study, my landscape
analyses will mainly be syntheses of observations from disciplines other than art
history: especially history of religion, history of science, psychology, sociology, anthropology and philosophy. Despite a not insignificant body of literature dealing
with landscape depiction from the various epochs, it is only in recent decades that
art historians have started to reflect more systematically on the significance of the
concept of landscape as such. The reason for this is not difficult to make out: as we
have seen, interpretation of landscape requires the involvement of forms of meaning
other than iconography, as well as reflections on culture’s mode of operation; but
this way of thinking has been disputed since scientifically valid iconology in the
post-war period has been identified with microhistorical iconology. The development, of course, breaks up the foundation of the iconology concept – the idea of a
broader history of thought – and, as Jan Białostocki noted in 1963, most iconologists
were actually more occupied with iconography than with iconology.99
There is much to suggest that intellectuals at the culmination of modernity in
the 18th and 19th centuries actually had a better understanding of the concept of
landscape – an arch-modern symptom – than the majority of art historians in the
20th century. In the wake of Alexander Baumgarten’s pinpointing of the aesthetic
domain, Friedrich Schiller in “Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung” was
surprised that “one finds so little trace among them [the Greek people] of the sentimental interest with which we moderns are attached to the scenes and characters
of nature.”100 With the Greeks, unlike we “moderns”, there is no sensitiveness, no
sweet wistfulness, no fervour, and their descriptions of nature do not differ from
other kinds of description, including mechanical. The reason for this, as stated by
Schiller, is in principle the same as the thesis of the current study: modern humans
have become distanced from nature, whereas the Greeks were still a part of it. Sentimentality presupposes such a reflective distance that “[o]ur feeling for nature is
like the feeling of an invalid for health.”101 And yet Schiller has to value this distance
as it is also the premise for our freedom.
While the insights gleaned from Schiller and his successor Hegel survive to a
greater or lesser extent in the work of cultural analysts such as Carl Gustav Carus,
Alexander von Humboldt and Ruskin in the 19th century, understanding among art
historians dwindled in the 20th century. Riegl is already so late a representative that
his Kunstwollen, as implied, would seem to be a somewhat autonomous specimen, an
easy target for condescending characterisations such as Gombrich’s “a ghost in the
machine”. As far as the subject of landscape interpretation was concerned, stimulus
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from other disciplines was necessary before this reluctance to address an evolutionistic history of thought was challenged. One stimulus was Joachim Ritter’s previously
mentioned essay of 1962, in which the 18th-19th-century experience is taken up again
and placed in a sociological framework. The first synthesis of Ritter’s observations
with art history as such occurs in Renate Fechner’s Natur als Landschaft (1986); despite
a somewhat paraphrasing presentation, Fechner can be said to provide probably the
best analysis to date of the landscape’s status in Western pictorial art from antiquity to the early modern era. Independently of the Schiller-Ritter line of evolutionistic
thought, and instead informed by Marxist ideas of cultural development, Denis Cosgrove (1984) similarly considers landscape to be a way of viewing specifically linked
to the emergence of capitalism between the 15th and 19th centuries.102 Though omitting a more precise demonstration of how this linkage operates, Cosgrove’s ideas are
thoroughly compatible with the thesis pursued here.
Apart from these well-reflected studies, however, a shortage of serviceable theories has been a problem for otherwise impressive books such as the classic work
on the subject, Kenneth Clark’s charming Landscape into Art (1949). The book is,
as always with Clark, bristling with sensitive observations, but the categories in
which they are organised – “Landscape of Fact” versus “Landscape of Fantasy”, for
example – unfortunately seem a little home-made. To an even greater extent, Götz
Pochat’s monumental stocktaking of 1973 lacks theoretical awareness, indeed any
kind of organisational thinking, and accordingly remains a mountain of detached –
albeit often useful – information.103 Although structuring his likewise sumptuously
learned Landscape and Memory (1995) according to potentially apposite divisions –
the exclusive wilderness categories of wood, water and rock – Simon Schama also
seemingly fails, and strangely so, to crack the iconological code of landscape.104
More incisive on a reflective level, albeit still without an actual methodology,
is an earlier work by Max J. Friedländer, Essays über die Landschaftsmalerei und andere
Bildgattungen (1947). Friedländer points out that landscape is concerned with spatial context, and that both – landscape and space – are only realised at a relatively
advanced degree of civilisation. Primitive peoples, like children, represent mountains, trees and rivers as isolated things, whereas the same phenomena in an actual
landscape appear as elements of an indissoluble wickerwork.105 In his more systematically reflected book (1993) on Albrecht Altdorfer’s landscape images, the earliest
autonomous examples in the West, Christopher Wood extends this line of thought,
seeing in modern landscape painting a total collapse of a previously fundamental
distinction: the distinction between ergon and parergon, work and by-work, figure
and landscape.106 With this tool in hand, it seems difficult to continue believing that
the corpo-centric Renaissance could be identical with landscape-fixated modernity.
It is my intention here to synthesise and build upon all the aforementioned
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sources. The possibly most groundbreaking areas I contribute in relation to the art
literature to date are: [1] the systematic description of the space-representational
evolution of the landscape image; [2] the interpretation of landscape paradigms
pertaining to the evolution of cosmology and consciousness, particularly the reading
of pre-historical images and of the rocky grounds and skies of pre-modern images;
and finally [3] the sociological interpretation of landscape paradigms, based on the
distinction between agriculturally cultivated and uncultivated landscapes and their
relation to the Golden Age myth and social structure.
Innovative analyses are perhaps especially needed in the case of pre-modern landscape images. As regards both the ‘impressionistic’ and the theory-based art historians, there has long been a danger of making such analyses a blind spot in the zone
of interpretation. The impressionist naïvely compares realism with feeling for nature,
and as these landscapes are unrealistic they must consequently be scenery without
content. Paradoxically, the theoretician reaches the same conclusion, as he or she assumes, conversely, that the pre-modern human had such an existential relationship
to nature that this relationship came to expression everywhere else than in the landscape of the image. As I hope to show, however, the pre-modern landscape images –
despite their often simple appearances – are packed with iconological meaning.
I would be the first to acknowledge the hazards of this study. Anyone who turns to
‘foreign’ disciplines for the answer to questions within his or her own discipline –
what we call being interdisciplinary – will often end up in a no-man’s land where the
‘foreigners’ will look upon you as an amateur, colleagues as a defector. In addition,
the extensive chronological and geographical scale has meant that I have often had
to take a lenient view of customary requirements of familiarity with the literature.
As long as one moves in a familiar subject area, i.e. a subject area with boundaries
sanctioned by tradition, it is possible to maintain the illusion of having an overall
grasp of the relevant literature and being able to weigh up the tradition pertaining
to the history of the discipline. As a consequence of the macrohistorical character
of the project, however, my reading has of necessity been selective, and I have often
had to pass by internal discussions within the specialist subjects.
That I nevertheless trust in the project’s good purpose is due to the morphological consistency of the thesis: the evolutionary and paradigmatic patterns of the
areas brought into the discussion, and their transverse structural agreement. It will
without doubt be possible to nuance and elaborate most of my claims, and yet I
am of the conviction that they will prove to be fundamentally viable.
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Notes
Introduction
1
Riegl (1929), p. 8: “Die Spezialforschung hat durch Jahrzehnte Material in Fülle aufgehäuft und
nun erwacht wiederum der unwiderstehliche Drang, aus der Enge der Einzelerscheinungen herauszustreben nach der befreienden Höhe umfassender Überblicke.”
2
Confessiones, 12, xiii (16).
3
Laws, 713c-e.
4
That the mosaic is spurious is corroborated by other apparent forgeries in the Vatican Museum: a
mosaic with garlands on a golden background and with the same type of border, ostensibly found
in Hadrian’s Villa 1738; a mosaic with a basket of flowers, ostensibly from the second century and
found 1789-92 in Sala a Croce Greca in Villa dei Quintili on Via Appia Antica. The genesis of the
latter in modernity is evident from the far too numerous and various flowers (infinite diversity)
and from the complex angles from which the flowers are viewed (a well-developed perspective).
The relentless serialism of the border ornamentation is also strikingly non-antique.
Interlude
1
Tylor (1870), p. 2.
2
For an excellent survey of the history of the sociological theory of evolution, see Sanderson (1990).
3
Sanderson (1990), pp. 4-5, 75-130 and 144-53; White (1959); Parsons (1977); Lenski (1970); Habermas
4
See also Cosgrove (1998), pp. 40, 46 and 58.
For the earlier period see also Bowler (1984), pp. 85-102.
(1976); idem (1987).
5
On this context see Habermas’ assistant Rainer Döbert (1981), pp. 77-79.
6
Habermas (1976), p. 155.
7
Sanderson (1990), pp. 10-35 and 50-74; Parsons (1977), pp. 39-97; Tylor (1870), pp. 152-93 and 370-80.
See also Lenski’s model, which includes specialised offshoots in fishing, herding and maritime
societies, in Lenski (1970), p. 124.
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8
T O
P A G E S
4 0 - 5 0
See Habermas (1976), especially pp. 9-48 and 129-259, and Habermas (1987), especially vol. I, pp. 76-83
and 104-113. For an excellent introduction to this aspect of Habermas’ thinking, see Outhwaite
(1994), pp. 58-67.
9
Habermas (1976), p. 164: “Wahrscheinlich ist die Technikgeschichte mit den grossen evolutionären
Schüben der Gesellschaft über die Evolution der Weltbilder verknüpft; und diese Verbindung dürfte
wiederum über formale Strukturen des Denkens zu erklären sein, für deren Entwicklungslogische
Anordnung die kognitivistische Psychologie ein hinreichend untersuchtes ontogenetisches Modell
anbietet.” English translation from Habermas (1991), p. 149.
10
For a critique of Habermas’ compound thinking re the cultural onto- and phylogenesis and his
concept of directional phylogenesis, see Schmid (1982), pp. 162-80.
11
Parsons (1977), pp. 72-114; Sanderson (1990), p. 110.
12
Spengler (1972), p. 211: “Es wird hier also nicht davon die Rede sein, was eine Welt ‘ist’, sondern
was sie dem lebendigen Wesen bedeutet, das von ihr umgeben ist. Mit dem Erwachen zerdehnt
sich für uns etwas zwischen einem Hier und einem Dort. Das Hier leben, das Dort erleben wir,
jenes als eigen, dieses als fremd. Es ist die Entzweiung zwischen Seele und Welt als den Polen der
Wirklichkeit […]. Die Wirklichkeit – die Welt in bezug auf eine Seele – ist […] das Eigne, das sich
am Fremden spiegelt, sie bedeutet ihn selbst.” English translation from Spengler (1971), p. 164.
13
See, for example, Habermas (1987), vol. I, pp. 106-09 and 250.
14
A condensate of the consciousness-evolutionary and cosmological approaches is to be found in
Wamberg (2000).
15
Hegel (1970), vol. I, pp. 390-91, 458f.; vol. II, pp. 131, 141, 388-92.
16
Hegel (1970), vol. II, pp. 137-46, 364-73; vol. III, pp. 14-40, 112-29.
17
Riegl (1901), especially pp. 19-22.
18
In Blatt (1994), pp. 195-226, his thesis is presented in summary.
19
Piaget and Inhelder (1956).
20
Marcussen (2002); summary version hereof in Marcussen (2000), pp. 139-72.
21
Eliade (1960) and (1962); Neumann (1949) and (1963); Baring and Cashford (1991).
22
Duhem (1913-59); Cassirer (1927); Koyré (1957); Kuhn (1985); Spengler (1972).
23
Panofsky (1927), pp. 258-330.
24
Spengler (1972), especially pp. 71-124, 181 and 424-28.
25
Würtenberger (1958), p. 6: “[…] Kunstwerke sind kleine, vom Menschen geschaffene ‘WeltbildMaschinerien’, deren Funktionieren auf jeweils ganz bestimmte Hypothesen von Weltbildstandpunkten
beruht.”
26
“Solche irdische Gefilde mit Eigenwert, mit irdischen Zeit- und Ortsbegriff, nennen wir Landschaft.”
27
Ritter (1989).
Ibid., pp. 17-21, 28-30 and 65-67.
28
The distinction between virginal terra and ploughed-up territorium is found in Durand (1986),
p. 179.
29
The results of this angle of approach are assembled in Wamberg (1999).
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30
Harris (1977) (more detail about this in chapter 4).
31
Lovejoy and Boas (1935); Heitland (1921); Vernant (1973); Spaeth (1996).
32
Hegel (1988), IV, A, pp. 127-36; and Kojève (1980).
33
Weber (1987), vol. 1, pp. 225-366; vol. 2, pp. 444-88. Even though his approach is more empirical and
microhistorical, Martin Warnke toys with something similar in his term “the political landscape”
in early modern Western painting, a terrain marked by traces of the powerful (see Warnke (1994),
especially pp. 9-20 (“The Occupation of the Plain”)).
34
Spengler (1972), especially pp. 300-08.
35
For a reconciliation between these two points of view, see Döbert (1977), especially pp. 537-38; also,
Döbert (1981), pp. 71-74.
36
Panofsky (1955), p. 32. The text is a slightly revised version of Panofsky’s introduction to Panofsky
(1939), pp. 3-31. The deliberations as to the placing of the interpretation of landscape in relation to
Panofsky’s schema were first presented at the seminar “Har ikonografien en fremtid?” (“Is there a
future for iconography?”), held by Dansk Kunsthistoriker Forening in Copenhagen, 22 April 1995.
See Wamberg (1995).
37
Spengler (1972), p. 313: “Umrisse begrenzen Stoffliches, Farbentöne interpretieren Raum. Aber das
eine ist von unmittelbar sinnlicher Natur. Es erzählt. Der Raum ist seine Wesen nach transzendent.
Er spricht zur Einbildningskraft. Für eine Kunst, die unter seiner Symbolik steht, ist die erzählende
Seite eine Herabsetzung und Verdunkelung der tieferen Tendenz, und ein Theoretiker, der hier
ein geheimes Missverständnis fühlt, aber nicht begreift, klammert sich an den oberflächlichen
Gegensatz von Inhalt und Form.” English translation from Spengler (1971), p. 242.
38
Kuhn (1962), pp. 10ff.
39
Lévi-Strauss (1969), p. 7.
40
Panofsky (1951), p. 21.
41
Panofsky (1955), p. 30.
42
Ibid., pp. 31, 38 and 32 respectively.
43
For example, Lévi-Strauss (1968), pp. 31-54; Eagleton (1983), pp. 103-17.
44
The episteme concept is presented in Foucault (1966), passim, for example pp. 13, 45, 68 and 76-77.
45
As early as Piaget’s 1970 book on structuralism, Foucault’s episteme discussion was criticised for
bypassing the developmental dimension (Blatt (1984), pp. 45-46).
46
Bourdieu (1970), pp. 7-41 and 75-158; Bourdieu (1977), pp. 72-95 and 143-58; Bourdieu (1990), especially pp. 52-79; Bourdieu (1993), especially pp. 29-73.
47
In the chapter “Art, Evolution, and the Consciousness of History” in Danto (1986), pp. 200ff., Arthur
C. Danto links Panofsky’s iconology with both Cassirer’s symbolic forms and Kuhn’s paradigms.
Here, with a related argument, it is asserted that the symbolic forms mark out the surface of the
culture rather than its deep structures.
48
Bourdieu (1990), p. 53.
49
Ibid., p. 56 (citation); Bordieu (1977), pp. 81 and 87.
50
Bourdieu (1990), p. 55.
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T O
51
Bourdieu (1993), pp. 176-79; id. (1990), p. 67.
52
Bourdieu (1993), p. 37.
53
Bourdieu (1970), pp. 35-36.
54
Ibid., p. 32; id. (1977), pp. 83 and 86.
P A G E S
6 2 - 7 0
55
Bourdieu (1990), pp. 2-3.
56
Spengler (1972), p. 70: “Methode der vergleichenden Morphologie der Weltgeschichte”. English
57
Spengler (1972), p. 226: “Es ist im Formgefühl jedes Menschen, jedes Gemeinschaft, Zeitstufe und
translation from Spengler (1971), p. 50.
Epoche wirksam und diktiert ihnen den Stil sämtlicher Lebensäußerungen.” Translation from
Spengler (1971), p. 175.
58
Spengler (1972), p. 66: “eines und desselben seelischen Prinzips” and “mächtigen Gruppen morphologischen Verwandtschaften”. Translations in Spengler (1971), p. 47.
59
Ibid., pp. 3-70.
60
Cited in Sanderson (1990), p. 138.
61
Bertalanffy (1968).
62
See, for example, Jantsch and Waddington (1976).
63
Prigogine and Stengers (1984), especially pp. 12-14 and 142-43, and Prigogine “Order through
Fluctuation: Self-Organization and Social System”, in Jantsch and Waddington (1976), pp. 93-126.
64
Spengler (1972), especially pp. 140ff., 198 (citation): “Aber der Tag ist nicht Ursache der Nacht,
die Jugend nicht die des Alters, die Blüte nicht die des Frucht.” Translation from Spengler (1971),
p. 152.
65
Johnston (1973), pp. 25-26. Bertalanffy even published an analysis of Der Untergang des Abendlandes
66
On equifinality and Driesch, see Bertalanffy (1955), pp. 117-20.
67
On attractors, see Prigogine and Stengers (1984), p. 152; Ralph Abraham, “Vibrations and the
in 1924.
Realization of Form” in Jantsch and Waddington (1976), pp. 134-49; Peat (1992), pp. 182-90 and
Emmeche (1991), pp. 94-96.
68
See Waddington’s “Concluding Remarks” in Jantsch and Waddington (1976), pp. 243-49; and
69
See Piaget: “Piaget’s Theory” and id., “Need and Significance of Cross-Cultural Studies in Genetic
70
“Process and Structure in Sociocultural Systems” in Jantsch (1976) (pp. 169-84), p. 182.
71
On punctuated equilibrium see, for example, Somit and Peterson (1989) and Sanderson (1990),
Waddington (1975), especially pp. 220-23; in addition, Reid (1985), pp. 260-63.
Psychology” in Inhelder and Chipman (1976), pp. 22 and 260.
pp. 207-08. On Thom, see Abraham in Jantsch and Waddington (1976).
72
See Blackmore (1999). The meme term was introduced in 1976 in Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene.
73
Lenski (1970), pp. 48-70, already writes about this.
74
Blackmore (1999), pp. 47-52.
75
Ibid., p. 19: shortened form (Speel 1995) of Dawkins’ phrase “coadapted meme complexes”.
76
On Heron’s aeolipile, see Braudel (1992), vol. III, p. 543.
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77
Blackmore (1999), pp. 132-37.
78
Stated in 1988, cited in Sanderson (1990), p. 200. Sanderson is himself sceptical of the idea of evolutionary target-orientation and recommends keeping biology and sociology distinctly separated
altogether (especially p. 205).
79
See the detailed account in Kauffman (1995). Even though I cannot go into it in more detail here,
conversely the biologist Julian Huxley (1887-1975) has cited a growing independence from the
surroundings as one of the two parameters that can define progress not just in cultural but also
biological evolution; the other is increased control over the surroundings (in Evolution: The Modern
Synthesis (1963), pp. 564-65, here cited from Lenski (1970), p. 58; see also Barlow (1994), pp. 4-20). In
Hoffmeyer (1993) the Danish biochemist reaches a similar conclusion from a semiotic approach;
the parameter that in this way expands during the evolutionary sequence is designated “semiotic
freedom” by Hoffmeyer.
80
For a provisional interpretation of this evolutionary phase, see Wamberg (1999). Marcussen (2002),
pp. 267-72, confirms via spatial-geometric arguments that the abstractions of modernism lead
‘backwards’ in the sense that they involve resumption of elementary geometric concepts that
preceded perspective, and which were first made the object of systematic mathematical study in
the 18th-19th centuries.
81
Popper (1995), pp. 78-92.
82
Carroll (1939), ch. XI, pp. 556-57.
83
Panofsky (1927).
84
Gombrich (1960), pp. 16-18.
85
Ibid., pp. 16-17; Hans Sedlmayr: “Die Quintessenz der Lehren Riegls” [1927], in Riegl (1929),
86
The term “the grand narrative” was introduced in Jean-François Lyotard’s La condition postmoderne
87
For a presentation of this line of thought in art history, see Bal and Bryson (1991).
pp. xii-xxxiv.
(1979), see Lyotard (1984), especially pp. 31-41.
88
Preziosi (1989), p. xi.
89
Snow (1960).
90
Gadamer (1990), pp. 307-12.
91
In this perception of patterns as dynamic phenomena transferred continuously from world to
consciousness, I am in great agreement with Mikkel Bogh in his instructive article “Formalitet og
figurativitet. Fænomenlogiske perspektiver i nyere kunstteori”, in Dam Christensen, Michelsen and
Wamberg (1999), pp. 215-50. Whereas Bogh, however, shares the phenomenological lack of focus
on history’s fundamental mark on our world perception, this is where my interest is primarily
focussed.
92
See Peirce, II (1965); a fine comment to this is found in May and Stjernfelt (1996).
93
Merleau-Ponty (1964), pp. 37, 57 and 72-74; Lacan (1994), pp. 93-97; Damisch (1972); Didi-Huberman
(1995); see also Jay (1993), pp. 315-28 and 357-70.
94
Gibson (1950), pp. 26-43.
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95
Bryson (1983), especially pp. 14-15 and 53; Bal and Bryson (1991), especially pp. 188-95.
96
Ibid., p. 189. For a critique of post-structuralism’s scepticism of icons, see also May and Stjernfelt
(1996), p. 200.
97
Mount Olympus is often called snow-clad; in the Aeneid 4, 245f. Atlas’ cape is described as falling
98
Lessing (1984).
99
Holly (1984), p. 163.
snow; ploughed fields, see e.g. the Aeneid 10, 140f. (wheat fields).
100
Schiller, vol. 8 (1959), p. 562: “daß man so wenige Spuren von dem sentimentalischen Interesse, mit
welchem wir Neuere an Naturszenen und an Naturcharakteren hangen können, bei demselben
[dem Griechischen Volk] antrifft.” English translation from Schiller (1985), p. 189.
101
Schiller, vol. 8 (1959), p. 564: “[u]nser Gefühl für Natur gleicht der Empfindung des Kranken für
die Gesundheit.” English translation from Schiller (1985), p. 190;
102
Fechner (1986); Cosgrove (1998).
103
Clark (1949); Pochat (1973).
104
Schama (1995).
105
Friedländer (1947), pp. 18-19.
106
Wood (1993), pp. 54-65.
Chapter 1
For Good Is a Form of the Limited
1
See also the bison with plants and cones, engraving on mammoth ivory knife (c. 10,000 BC), La
2
Confirmed in Clottes and Lewis-Williams (1998), p. 48: “The natural landscape is lacking. Other
Vache cave, Ariège, reproduced in Baring and Cashford (1991), fig. 24.
cultures represented clouds, rain, the sun and the stars, trees and other plants, rivers, and mountains. Not they.”
3
Ibid., pp. 86-91; Nougier (1993), pp. 50-56.
4
Merleau-Ponty (1964a), pp. 22-23: “Les animaux peints sur la paroi de Lascaux n’y sont pas comme
y est la fente ou la boursouflure du calcaire. Ils ne sont pas davantage ailleurs. Un peu en avant, un
peu en arrière, soutenus par sa masse dont ils se servent adroitement, ils rayonnent autour d’elle
sans jamais rompre leur insaissable amarre.” English translation from Merleau-Ponty (1964b),
p. 164.
5
Clottes and Lewis-Williams (1998), p. 49. See also p. 92.
6
In engravings of bodies in the immediate vicinity of one another – for example, the fish among
the reindeer legs in the engraving on a reindeer antler (from Lortet in the Pyrenees; reproduced
in Hawkes (1976), p. 34) – there are also very occasional incidences of spatial covering effects in
Palaeolithic images.
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