barthes and the lesson of saenredam, by howard caygill

Barthes and the Lesson of SaenredamAuthor(s): Howard CaygillReviewed work(s):Source: Diacritics, Vol. 32, No. 1, Rethinking Beauty (Spring, 2002), pp. 38-39+41-48Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566360 .

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BARTHES AND THE

LESSON OF SAENREDAM

HOWARD CAYGILL

Obverse Platonism

In his late dialogue Parmenides, Plato seems to be on the point of overturning the main achievement of his philosophy, the doctrine of ideas. The aged Parmenides disquiets the young Socrates by asking if ideas apply not only to abstractions such as the just, the beautiful, and the good, but also to "hair, mud, dirt, or anything else particularly vile and worthless" [131A]. Socrates thinks not, but admits being troubled by a doubt that forces him to retreat "for fear of falling into some abyss of nonsense and perishing." This hint of an obverse Platonism that haunts the doctrine of ideas shares much with the later work of Barthes, which, qualifying a life's work in semiotics, seems to turn away from signs and the inquiry into their conditions of meaning to seek meaning in the smudge and the blemish. In his late essay on Cy Twombly, "The Wisdom of Art" (1979), he explicitly adopts the obverse Platonism that so troubled Socrates as a principle of method: "Ideas (in the Platonic sense) are not shiny, metallic Figures in conceptual corsets, but somewhat shaky maculations, tenuous blemishes on a vague background" [180]. The clear allusion to the parable of the cave in Plato's Republic-with its contrast between the shadows on the wall and the bright light of the ideas-allows Barthes's work to be situated within an obverse, dirty Platonism. He does not abandon the Pla- tonic search for ideas but reorients its direction of inquiry from the realm of light to that of shadow, from the heavens to the cave.

The position adopted by Barthes before his death should not be understood as a turn away from a preoccupation with light and the conditions of intelligibility to a sensitivity to the shadows in the nuances of voice, tone, timbre, and texture. Such a devel-

opment might seem to be confirmed by the shift in Barthes's interests from the immaculate, harshly lit geometrical architectural interiors of the Dutch seventeenth-century artist Saenredam in one of his first essays, "The World as Object" (1953), to the informal works of Cy Twombly during the final years of his life. The church interiors of the former would seem to exemplify the idea as "shiny, metallic figure," while the paintings of the latter are closer to maculation and blemish. Yet the sensitivity to the vague and the indefinable that eludes meaning while remaining one of its conditions of possibility was always present, even and especially in Barthes's response to the mysterious works of Saenredam, which for all their immaculate surface are themselves profoundly marked and blemished.

The essay of 1953, contemporary with Writing Degree Zero, inaugurates a number of trajectories that range between a concern with the visual to the conditions of artistic practice under capitalism, even to a reorientation of Platonism. Itself an astonishingly wide-ranging yet focused response to seventeenth-century Dutch painting, the essay begins with a discussion of Saenredam as an exceptional moment in Dutch painting. Yet this moment is itself quickly identified as an inaugural moment of a certain obverse

38 diacritics 32.1: 38-48



artistic practice-the evocation of the idea of truth through reduction and negation- that continued through the contemporary avant-garde. Saenredam's art is inaugural in its refusal to participate in the mythology of what would later be identified as a capitalist society and culture. The essay, ostensibly concerned with Dutch painting, is also a reflection on the possibilities of an aesthetics of resistance in a capitalist society and the limits within which avant-garde practice is confined. Barthes's reading of Saenredam and through him Dutch painting is thus programmatic of his readings of the contemporary avant-garde, and beyond this to the Platonic structures which still silently inhabit its aesthetic theory and practice.

An Aesthetic of Silence

In the opening paragraph of "The World as Object," Barthes introduces the work of Saenredam as anticipating "a 'modem' aesthetic of silence," an anticipation that is said to exceed even "the dislocations of our contemporaries" [62]. This chronological dislocation of Saenredam's work-placing it in advance of the contemporary avant-garde- is but one of the many strange movements that govern the place of Saenredam in this essay. Saenredam is identified as the negative theologian of Dutch painting, articulating "by antithesis the nature of classical Dutch painting" [62]. However, this inversion is complex, for it situates Saenredam's work as the antithesis of an antithesis. In Barthes's reading, the "classical Dutch painting" inverted by Saenredam was itself already an antithesis, one that "washed away religion only to replace it with man and his empire of things. Where once the Virgin presided over ranks of angels, man stands now with his feet upon the thousand objects of everyday life, triumphantly surrounded by his functions" [63]. Yet what is significant in Saenredam's negation of the negation is not the return to an original position' but the new space that is opened up by the double negation. The nature of this space will be evoked at the end of the essay, but at the outset it serves as a undefined source of contrast through which to analyze Dutch painting by means of the via negationis, or as the painting of that which Saenredam did not paint.

The antithetical articulation of the "nature of classical Dutch painting" discovered by Barthes in Saenredam's painting is not just a methodological device for the cultural historian. This antithetical practice is prized as an artistic practice, one which anticipates, even exceeds, that of the modem avant-garde. In many ways Barthes finds the formal "dislocations" of the contemporary avant-garde wanting when compared with the rigor of a Saenredam. This lends particular significance to Barthes's characterization of what and how he did and did not paint. Since Saenredam painted "neither faces nor objects," these become the core of Barthes's analysis of classical Dutch painting, which he claims was obsessed with precisely these themes. Yet if neither faces nor objects what, then, was the subject of Saenredam's painting? Barthes gives a short and long answer, but neither is by any means unambiguous.

Given that the opening proposition of the essay is that Saenredam is as deserving of literary renown as Vermeer, Barthes's description of his theme-"vacant church interiors, reduced to the beige and innocuous unction of butterscotch ice cream" [62]-seems, with its blunt simile, parodically "literary." Yet entirely so, since Barthes will insist on the sweetness of Saenredam's "sugary, stubborn surfaces" in order to emphasize the

1. Schwartz and Bok, in Pieter Saenredam: The Painter and His Time, convincingly locate Saenredam's early work in a context of Catholic nostalgia-representing purged churches as if they had not suffered the iconoclasm of the Reformation. However even these paintings betray a rigorous act of aesthetic selection, since not all the purged details, but new ones added, locate the imaginary of the paintings after a Counter-Reformation restoration.

diacritics / spring 2002 39



insidious character of Saenredam's negation. The Church interiors he represents are, after all, the reduction to sweetness, to aesthetics, of a memory and a site of religious violence. The churches Saenredam painted, Barthes continues, are bare surfaces, "ex- panses of wood and whitewashed plaster." that are "irremediably unpeopled." The lack of occupants and ornaments entails for Barthes more than "the mere destruction of an idol." Indeed, for him, "Never has nothingness been so confident" [62]. Saenredam's painting exceeds iconoclasm-whether as object of representation in the stripped Ref- ormation churches or as an iconoclastic artistic practice-since it is not a negation but a double negation. The destruction of the idols and the depopulation of the churches are themselves destroyed and silenced in his painting.

The sweet serenity of Saenredam's "images" is determined by a further negation, this time framed in terms of a resistance to an "Italian overpopulation of statues" and the horror vacui of other Dutch painters. His painting "of the absurd" and achievement of a "privative state of the subject" in the rendering of "these meaningless surfaces" is startlingly contemporary, and for Barthes inaugurates a modem aesthetic of silence. Saenredam's painting is dedicated to the absurd, that is, is not invested in meaning, and is reductive in its pursuit of the privation of the subject, reducing violent histories to carefully crafted aesthetic surfaces. All this makes it an art that stands in a double antithesis-not only to Italian religious painting but also to the antithesis of that painting in the practice of his Dutch contemporaries. It is a resolutely obverse practice that dislo- cates the traces of both divine and human sovereignty, an aesthetic negation of historical negation that yields no Hegelian results.

The painting of Saenredam continues to haunt the essay and the essays that fol- lowed it as a type of practice that could not easily be situated in terms of tradition or avant-garde. It announces another avant-garde distinct from the oppositional version that dominated modernism. Saenredam's practice directed against Dutch painting and its world becomes exemplary of a much wider aesthetic resistance to the modem epoch. What this refusal implies becomes apparent in the discussion of Dutch painting that follows, one that is strictly organized in terms of what Saenredam did not paint-faces and objects. To anticipate, Saenredam's painting for Barthes does no less than evacuate an entire order of meaning founded in technology, humanism, and property.

The world of classical Dutch painting, founded in protest against the claims of the transcendent heavenly realm, is a "universe of fabrication" [64]. In place of a world governed by vertical movements between the earthly and the transcendent-the entire sacramental economy of medieval Catholicism-the "universe of fabrication" is governed by the horizontal movements of exchange and commerce. This inverted world is in turn founded upon a technological appropriation of nature. Barthes's argument from a characterization of the epoch of the "universe of fabrication" to its consequences for the object and its mode of representation is guided by the exception of Saenredam. The focus in the first part is correspondingly the "object" as the theme of Dutch painting- situated within the ontology of the "universe of fabrication," which then shifts in the second part to the "face" as theme or the ethic of this universe. In the course of this movement between object and face, representation and the gaze assume an ever more prominent role, pointing to a complicity between Dutch painting and its epoch that, once again, is refused by Saenredam.

The inversion of the transcendent realm is described by Barthes in terms of "hu- manization" or the "gradual appropriation of matter." This appropriation has two aspects-technology and accounting. The technological appropriation consists in shaping spatio-temporal matter: "All this is man's space; in it he measures himself and determines his humanity, starting from the memory of his gestures: his chronos is covered by functions, there is no other authority in his life but the one he imprints upon the inert by




shaping and manipulating it" [64]. The notion of the gesture, which will assume great importance in Barthes's subsequent work, here already possesses the characteristic of a corporeal technology, an appropriative, repeatable movement of the body in space and time. This movement is authoritative-it "imprints"2 itself upon matter, shaping it in terms of its definition of utility. The authoritative character of the appropriative gesture consists in its claim to universality-it creates a universe in which the value of each member is determined by its contribution to that universe. The vertical orientation of the production, the body stooping to shape matter, is mythologically dissolved in the horizontal movements of the apparently universal system of exchange, which sets the object into motion.

The universal character of the technological shaping and manipulation of matter enables and is enabled by a comprehensive survey and cataloguing of the world. Na- ture, or the "Dutch landscape," is "transformed from an elemental infinity to the pleni- tude of the registry office" [63]. The containment of infinity in the register or catalogue-an important aspect of the epochal inversion of transcendence at issue here- achieves the paradoxical feat of combining the absence of horizon characteristic of the technological appropriation of nature with the circumscribed character of the register. This feat is achieved in two ways, first by the dissolution of the void between objects, which puts an end to the potentially infinite division of an interval, and second by the dissolution of the object into a function, which permits the performance of a contained infinity of permutations. In both the object is only significant as an instance of value or exchange-any other characteristics are irrelevant, a surd to be factored out of their equation.

The ontological implications of the technological and surveyed character of the universe of fabrication are considerable. The object is now defined by its location with respect to use and other objects rather than its essence: "everywhere the object offers man its utilized aspect, not its principial form" there is no longer "a generic state of the object, but only circumstantial states" [65]. The object is transformed from an essence to an attribute, and these attributes in turn are in perpetual motion. The object exists only insofar as it can be consumed or exchanged for other objects. The context of exchange and use determines the movement of objects with respect to each other-they enter into a system of equivalences determined by human value. This system, and the object that embodies it, is at once infinite-"always open, exposed, accompanied" and closed insofar as it is directed toward consumption or the destruction of the object "as closed substance." Barthes concludes with the ontological claim that "The object is by and large constituted by this mobility"--one that is equivocally oriented with respect to human use and other objects, but no longer partaking of the vertical orientation toward the divine or "idea" which governed the essence of objects in premodern ontologies.

The transformation of the object is accompanied by a transformation of art. Barthes touches upon the main subgenres of Dutch painting, situating them with respect to the

"universe of fabrication." Landscape and marine painting are described in terms of the mobility of the object. Their motifs-ships, sea, rivers, canals, roads, and paths-all concern the location and transport of the object. Still life represents the object as "never alone, and never privileged; it is merely there, among many others, painted between one function and another, participating in the disorder of the movements which have picked it up, put it down-in a word, utilized" [64]. In all of these cases, the representation

2. Earlier in the essay the term "inscribe" serves the function of "imprint," thus marking an intensification of the movement from the set of manual gestures that comprise writing to the incorporeal technological gesture of printing.

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serves to "lubricate man's gaze amid his domain" [64] or, in other words, to enable the smooth transport of the gaze, which is itself now an object among objects.

The second half of the essay makes the transition from the ontology to the ethics of the "universe of fabrication" by means of reflection upon the representation of the face. It begins with a comparison of the catalogue of objects in a Dutch still life with the "itemising power" of the Civil Code, anticipating Barthes's extension of the "universe of fabrication" into the Enlightenment in his 1964 essay "The Plates of the Encyclope- dia." Barthes maintains that reading a Dutch still life is akin to auditing "the painting like an accountant" [67]. The trope of reading as inventory is carried over into the representation of human figures, beginning with the transitional possibility of representing human figures as objects. Barthes selects Avercamp and Adriaan Ostade as examples- their works are an "anecdotal catalogue dividing and combining the various elements of a prehumanity" [67]. As objects, their human figures do not effect gestures, do not shape the world, but are beings intermediate between matter and human shape.

Yet even in this mode of representation it is possible to locate an aesthetic practice that exceeds it. Barthes sees Adriaan Ostade's representations of peasants-largely pro- duced for the pleasure of a patrician audience-as presenting an intermediate between object and face-"From the neck up, these peasants have only a blob which has not yet become a face" [68]. This "shifting prehumanity" that Avercamp's paintings surveyed from above is here viewed obliquely and with difficulty. Ostade's human objects pursue a motion whose drunken trajectory is unpredictable and difficult to trace or fix. In place of the well-regulated transport of carefully fabricated and inventoried objects found in the marine, landscape, and still life genres, these human objects are undefined and er- rant: their faces are obverse, neither gazing nor open to the gaze of the other, "invariably slashed or blurred or somehow twisted askew," and their motion "reels across space like so many objects endowed with an additional power of drunkenness or hilarity" [68]. Such blurring, distortion, and twisting of the figure is the mark of a radical aesthetic practice, one that anticipates certain moments of modernism. But it is remote from that of Saenredam, who, it may be remembered, was prized at the outset of the essay for exceeding the modernist "dislocation" now revealed to have been anticipated by Ostade.

The blurred object-faces of Ostade's peasants do not rise to the status of "the person" [67]. The link between "person" and "face" is classically achieved by the figure of the mask, a form of object-humanity that Barthes goes on to explore in terms of the patrician "ultra-person"-the terms of the series moving from "sub-" to "ultra-human," ostensibly skipping over the "human." The genre of guild portrait features the representation of the face as mask of personality, each face "treated as units of one and the same horticultural species, combining generic resemblance and individual identity" [69]. Explaining these features by means of a contrast with socialist realism-these masks do not represent an abstraction and its qualities (the virility and tension of the militant proletariat)-Barthes sees the patrician mask in terms of the sedimentation of authority vested in the motion of the "universe of fabrication." As masks these objects-"ultra- humans"-become numen, mere gestures of authority and command-but their com- mands do not so much set the universe into motion as oversee it.

At this point in the discussion the missing "human" term of the series pre/sub-/ ultra-human returns. The character of the ultra-human mask-the master's pure gesture of command-is distinguished in terms of the gesture of command that oversees and ensures regular motion (the patrician) and the one that inaugurates motion (the imperial), the two exemplified by Barthes in the Dutch guild portrait and the representations of Napoleon. The patrician gesture of command consists in the appraising gaze-ready to situate its object within the existing mobile universe of fabrication-while the imperial gesture of command consists in the raised hand that sets in motion the forces of




history. Both patrician and imperial gestures are distinguished from the human gesture of the worker, "the gesture of the workman, homo faber, whose functional movement encompasses him in search of its own effect .. ." [71]. The gaze of the patrician mask neither rises to command nor stoops to labor but is suspended between the two, a pos- ture exemplified for Barthes in the cloth merchant rising from the table in Rembrandt's guild portrait. The patrician gaze abstracts both productive and political action-in a word it abstracts itself from history-and for Barthes achieves an icon of arrest: "In this perfectly content patrician world, absolute master of matter and evidently rid of God, the gaze produces a strictly human interrogation and proposes an infinite postponement of history" [72]. Since motion is intrinsic to the "universe of fabrication," there is no need for the command to set objects in motion-instead there is the steady contempla- tion, inventory, and charting of a given, regular motion. This suspension of history is the antithesis of religious art-the eternally arrested gaze of the human replacing that of God-and is also the antithesis that is inverted by Saenredam.

In addition to Ostade's practice within the margins of the universe of fabrication, Barthes also discusses another great antimythological exception represented by Rembrandt. Barthes cites Rembrandt's David as an "aberrant scene" [70], inasmuch as its subject obscures his gaze. In place of the replete gaze of the patrician surveyor, the

gaze of Rembrandt's subject is dislocated. The covering of the face shields it from the

gaze of the other and narrows its own field of vision. In this painting "for once man is endowed with an adjectival quality; he slips from being to having, rejoins a humanity at

grips with something else" [70]. The movement is thus from the "ultra-humanity" of the

patrician to the human gestures of the worker, one in search of its own effect. The idea of an incomplete humanity in history-denied by the patrician portrait-is given a sur-

prising retrospective and projective genealogy by Barthes. Rembrandt's David is lo- cated in a tradition that stretches between "a tearful fifteenth-century Pieta and some combative Lenin of contemporary Soviet imagery" [70]; in both, "an attribute is pro- vided, not an identity." The attribute calls to be worked upon or worked through, providing a task rather than a closed and completed identity.

The tradition evoked through the Rembrandt should not be confused with that of the avant-garde inaugurated by Saenredam at the outset of the essay-the aesthetics of silence. The reorientation of the gaze with respect to historical task achieved by painters of the Pieta, Rembrandt, and later socialist realism-namely, the redemption of historical suffering-is an antithesis of the patrician gaze, but one which restores command to a historical subject, be it church, chosen people, or proletariat. The antithesis achieved

by Saenredam pursues an entirely different trajectory. It is resumed at the end of the

essay in the constellation Barthes implies between Saenredam and Courbet. There Barthes turns from the representation of faces and objects to the representation of a space-the space of Courbet's Atelier-space that for Barthes is "emptied of any gaze" bar that of the painter. The aesthetic gesture of "emptying" space is precisely that performed by Saenredam, whose reduction consists in a gesture of aesthetically emptying a space that has been emptied by history. The task of this art is not to refill the space, but to lend depth to its emptiness, to vest the gaze neither in objects nor faces, but in what made them possible, their scene or history. In Barthes's words, for both Saenredam and Courbet: "Depth is born only at the moment the spectacle itself slowly turns its shadow toward man and begins to look at him" [73]. The modality of emptying a space and then turning the emptiness out as a gaze exemplifies the practice of Saenredam, and leaves his art as a question rather than a command to the viewer. Such a philosophical art, one that questions without providing answers, is approached by Saenredam and Courbet, but also in Barthes's eyes by Brecht and Eisenstein and finally Twombly, and is named at the end of the essay as allegory.

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An Aesthetic of Bareness

At the beginning of "World as Object," Barthes observed obscurely that Saenredam's

"negation" or emptying of the canvas "goes much further than the destruction of idols" [62]. The iconoclastic emptying of churches was in some sense exceeded by Saenredam's aesthetic negation. Saenredam's churches constitute special objects in the object world of Dutch painting. Arrested in time, their role as sites of vertical communication between the human and the divine is abolished and the liturgical apparatus dismantled or left incongruously obsolete. Their striking anticipation of later photographic representations of obsolete factory spaces-scattered with discarded machines-is developed by Barthes in his essay on the encyclopaedia. Yet the emptying of the space is even more uncanny than the simple representation of cleared spaces and surviving fragments of liturgical machinery. In Saenredam's negation the space itself becomes questionable, empty of both divine and human presence, a moment of arrest in the mobile world of objects or a hole in its seamless fabric.

Saenredam images the erasure by which iconoclasm "washed away religion" [63]; his object is the haunted space that survives erasure. In this, his practice corresponds closely to that of Twombly, which is so often the presentation of an act of erasure. In both cases the presentation of an erasure troubles the space and invests it with a ques- tioning gaze. Yet there would seem at first glance to be little correspondence between the method of the two works, between Saenredam's architectural precision and Twombly's "vague." Saenredam's method consisted in first surveying the sites and then producing accurate architectural drawings.3 This apparent homage to the Platonic tradition of the drawing as the truth of the image, later reproduced in the painting,4 is not quite what it seems. For Saenredam would use his drawings as material to be manipulated and juxta- posed in the final image, which would present-to viewers familiar with the build- ings--often impossible permutations. The space in the paintings does not directly participate in that of the drawings but is scrambled to produce an enigma. The work of Twombly-who, as Barthes was fond of observing (perhaps with some degree of iden- tification), was a military cryptographer in an earlier life-also scrambles a given spa- tial meaning, rendering its presence questionable.

The distinction that Barthes elaborates in "Cy Twombly: Works on Paper" between the painting as product and a producing is complicated with respect to Saenredam. Barthes introduces his notion of Twombly's "producing" by means of a contrast with a diagram: "Take an architect's or an engineer's drawing, the diagram of a machine or of some building element; here it is not the drawing's materiality that we see, but its meaning, entirely independent of the technician's performance; in short we see nothing if not a kind of intelligibility" [169]. The drawing aspires to the condition of Platonic idea, full and unparticipated intelligibility, and the making of its image is a separate act of participation. Twombly's work is first of all a making, a drawing whose materiality has prior- ity over its intelligibility; it is itself an act of production, not a blueprint for one to follow. Yet Saenredam's drawings do not work in this way, not as blueprints, but as matter for arrangement, for providing a space that calls for acts of drawing.

Before further exploring the spaces of Saenredam and Twombly, a digression into Barthes's "aesthetic of blankness" is in order. The phrase itself appears in the 1964 essay "The Plates of the Encyclopaedia," which is in many ways a continuation of "The World as Object." Its continuity with the earlier essay consists in its premise of a com- mercial-productive capitalist economy with implications for both the ontology of the

3. For a full discussion of Saenredam's method, see Schwartz and Bok, ch. 6. 4. See Panofsky's Ideafor a detailed discussion of this tradition.




object and its representation. In the essay, Barthes inclines toward celebrating the obso- lescence of the images of the Encyclopaedia, their correspondence with the machine phase of capitalism. Like the Dutch world of objects, the world of the Encyclopaedia is both a census and a spectacle-the catalogue of the "objects" or "entire sphere of sub- stances shaped by man" [219] and the spectacle of its making. In a phrase that also summarizes the argument of the earlier essay, "the object is the world's human signature." In the later essay, however, the process of the production of objects-excluded in Dutch painting-is now the main theme.

From this premise Barthes follows a line of argument that eventually complicates the reading of the Enlightenment image. The simplicity of Enlightenment technology consists in its "relay" from substance via machines and instruments to object. The "two- term space: the causal trajectory that proceeds from substance to object" calls for an emptying of the space of representation or an "aesthetic of bareness." In a description of the Enlightenment scene of production that lends itself immediately to Saenredam's church spaces, Barthes writes, "huge, empty, well-lighted rooms, in which man cohab- its alone with his work: a space without parasites, walls bare, tables cleared; the simple, here, is nothing but the vital .. ." [221]. While Saenredam's spaces-stripped of such "parasites" as God, priests, and liturgical machinery of image and sculpture-pose the question of what is now to fill them, the Enlightenment space seems to answer the question with productive activity. Its emphasis on the productive work of the hands is "in a close relationship" with, indeed supplements, "another 'progressive' or bourgeois iconography: seventeenth-century Dutch painting" [223]. Yet even the manufacturing answer to the bareness of space itself generates further questions.

Barthes frames his discussion of the interrogatory effect of the space of the Ency- clopaedia in terms of the distinction between paradigmatic and syntagmatic signifying units. He divides the image of the plates between the two. The representation of the object in its many types and aspects occupies the lower part of the plate and is organized in terms of paradigmatic variation-these representations approximate to the architectural drawing or technical diagram-while the representation of the scene of use, the vignette, of the upper part of the plate shows the instruments in use in a productive space. The paradigmatic diagram of the lower part "involves by definition no secrecy" [225]-it occupies the space of ideas-while the "lively scene" of the vignette "charged with a disseminated meaning, always presents itself like a little riddle; we must deci- pher it, locate in it the informative units" [226]. The vignette both "condenses" and "resists" meaning-the passage from the "radical language consisting of pure con- cepts" of the technical diagram of the lower part of the plate to the "langue" of the upper is accomplished by means of "fiction" or "fictive truth" which "deliberately loses in intelligibility what it gains in experience" [227]. The participation between diagram and scene is thus both scrambled-the transmission from the idea to the scene is not smooth-and reencoded. The loss of intelligibility in scrambling and the recoding in fiction constitutes the "cryptographic vocation of the image" [226]: an obverse Platonism that distorts and enriches the idea in its transmission, a Platonism oriented toward futural rather than eternally past ideas.

The distinction between the diagram/product and the performance of a work pro- posed in "Cy Twombly: Works on Paper" is already complicated in the practice of Saenredam as well as in the theoretical reflections of the Encyclopaedia essay. The distinction between idea and product is a diversion from the question of what is to fill the emptied spaces of representation. At this point it is possible to take up the thread of graffiti that runs throughout "Cy Twombly: Works on Paper." Saenredam's paintings of the "Nave of the Buurkerk, Utrecht, from North to South" of 1644 and 1645 exemplify both the stripped interiors of the Reformation church and the introduction of the liturgi-

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cal machine of the word-the list of the Ten Commandments. Yet they also introduce other elements. In the 1644 image, the foreground features the scene of a child drawing graffiti on the wall-the four sons of Aymon riding the horse Bayard-underneath which, also written on the wall, is the artist's signature.5 The child's graffiti drawn from a medieval fiction responds to the walls stripped of their medieval imagery, as does the mark of witness constituted by the artist's signature. The Fort Worth version leaves the walls stripped, but with a space incised in the pillar on which Saenredam has marked his signature and date, and identified the scene. The artist in both cases signals a reclama- tion of the stripped space, for art, through graffiti.

Barthes clarifies both Saenredam's and Twombly's acts of graffiti with the expla- nation that "what constitutes graffiti is in fact neither the inscription nor its message but the wall, the background, the surface (the desktop); it is because the background exists fully, as an object that has already lived, that such writing always comes to it as an enigmatic surplus: what is in excess, supernumerary, out of place" [167]. The inscription of graffiti witnesses the lived life or the history of the backdrop, bringing it into visibility by an act of disfigurement; the stripped reformations are shown to have been stripped by the gratuitous inscriptions on the now bare walls. Barthes goes further by examining the temporality of the act of graffiti through an analogy with the character of Twombly's inscription. He notes that "the past tense of the stroke can also be defined as its future" since the stroke is an open performance. Similarly, while the iconoclasts who stripped the walls of the churches willed their act of erasure to be eternal-the walls to remain forever bare-the act of graffiti deflates the violent erasure and reintroduces it into history. It scrambles the meaning of the original act and opens a future of other acts of inscription, whether in the hands of the child or the aesthetic realm of painting. The meaning that would fix itself forever in the silent bareness of the violated churches finds itself providing the perfect backdrop for new acts of inscription.

The obverse Platonism of this position, evident in the scrambling of the transmitted meaning that pretends to hold eternally, in the dirtying of the backdrop for the manifes- tation by history is confirmed in Barthes's praise of chance in "The Wisdom of Art." The necessity for the participation of meaning is undercut by the event of chance, possible even if "the work is the result of precise calculation" [181]. For the throw of the dice never takes place in eternal circumstances; the page is never white. The throw or inscription embodies "an initial decision and a terminal indetermination: by throwing, I know what I am doing, but I do not know what I am producing" [182]. The act reduces intelligibility-it is not simple transmission or participation-but also enriches experience with its unpredictable outcomes. The space that been emptied of its history not only gazes back, posing a question of what is to fill it, but also invites those acts of desire and fiction that would fill it again, invites the resumption of its history. Saenredam's churches are the paradigm of an allegorical avant-garde that recognizes the violent imposition of meaning, but does not contest it with another imposition. The idea or meaning is not made present by being imposed or reimposed, but is solicited. The via negationis of emptying and reduction turns into the via eminentiae of surplus and excess. Saenredam's images of violated churches work in the same way as Twombly's can- vases, those "big Mediterranean rooms, warm and luminous, with their elements lost in them, rooms the mind seeks to populate" [183].

5. Children's graffiti in the proximity of his signature is a repeated feature in Saenredam's painting [see list and discussion in Schwartz and Bok 200].




WORKS CITED Barthes, Roland. "Cy Twombly: Works on Paper." 1979. Trans. Richard Howard. The

Responsibility of Forms. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. - . "The Plates of the Encyclopaedia." 1964. Trans. Richard Howard. A Roland

Barthes Reader. Ed. Susan Sontag. London: Vintage, 2000. -. "The Wisdom of Art." 1979. Trans. Richard Howard. The Responsibility of Forms.

Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. -. "The World as Object." 1953. Trans. Richard Howard. A Roland Barthes Reader.

Ed. Susan Sontag. London: Vintage, 2000. Panofsky, Erwin. Idea: A Concept in Art Theory. Trans. Joseph J. S. Peake. Columbia:

U of South Carolina P, 1968. Plato. Parmenides. Trans. H. N. Fowler. London: Loeb Library, 1926. Schwartz, Gary, and Marten Jan Bok. Pieter Saenredam: The Painter and His Time.

London: Thames and Hudson, 1990.

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barthes and the lesson of saenredam, by howard caygill

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