Grey on Grey: At the Threshold of Philosophy and Art 9781474478533

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: Grey Time
1. Hegel’s Grey Aesthetics: Painting in the Intellectual Realm
2. Grey Time: Anachromism and Waiting for Beckett
3. ‘A Warm Gray Fabric’: Walter Benjamin on Boredom
Part II: Grey Imaging
4. Spectres of Seurat
5. Grey and the Silence of Surfaces
6. ‘Whatever Looks Luminous Does Not Look Grey’: Wittgenstein on the Impossibility of Luminous Grey
Part III: Grey Intensities
7. Barthes’ Grisaille and an Aesthetics of Indifference
8. Grey is (not) Grey: Considerations on an Ethics of Attentiveness
9. Klee’s ‘Grey Point’
Part IV: Grey Thought
10. Fade to Grey: Colour, Greyness and Utopia in the Work of Art (Adorno)
11. Grey Illuminations: Foucault and Warburg in the Kingdom of Shadows
12. Icy Phantasms, Contemporary Inuit Art and the Grey of Ethno-Aesthetics
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Grey on Grey

Refractions Series editor: Kamini Vellodi, University of Edinburgh At the borders of art history and philosophy Editorial Board Andrew Benjamin, Kingston University Adi Efal, University of Lille 3 Jae Emerling, University of North Carolina Vlad Ionescu, University of Hasselt Sjoerd Van Tuinen, Erasmus University Sugata Ray, UC Berkeley Aron Vinegar, University of Oslo Hanneke Grootenboer, Radboud University Poised at the threshold of art history and philosophy, Refractions offers a space for intellectually adventurous work that engages the theorisation of art and image as a persistent provocation for our times. The series captures the character of inquiry as refractive, forging resonances and oblique inter­sections between diverse zones of thought, while fostering breakaway strands of thinking.

Books available Mieke Bal, Image-Thinking: Artmaking as Cultural Analysis Bart Verschaffel, What Artistry Can Do: Essays on Art and Beauty Ian Verstegen, The New Vienna School of Art History: Fulfilling the Promise of Analytic Holism Kamini Vellodi and Aron Vinegar (eds), Grey on Grey: At the Threshold of Philosophy and Art Books forthcoming Joaquin Lorda, Gombrich: A Theory of Art, translated by Tim Nicholson Charlotte de Mille, Bergson in Britain: Philosophy and Modernist Painting, c. 1890–1914 Adi Efal-Lautenschläger, Ravaisson’s Method: Edification as Therapy Maryse Ouellet and Amanda Boetzkes (eds), Art’s Realism in the Post-Truth Era Visit the series website at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-refractions

Grey on Grey At the Threshold of Philosophy and Art Edited by Kamini Vellodi and Aron Vinegar

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com We are committed to making research available to a wide audience and are pleased to be publishing a platinum Open Access version of Chapter 2, ‘Grey Time: Anachromism and Waiting for Beckett’. © editorial matter and organisation Kamini Vellodi and Aron Vinegar, 2023 © the chapters their several authors, 2023 Chapter 2, ‘Grey Time: Anachromism and Waiting for Beckett’ by Laura Salisbury is published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the sources listed in the List of Figures for permission to reproduce material previously published elsewhere. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Constantia by Biblichor Ltd, Scotland, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 4744 7851 9 (hardback) ISBN  978 1 4744 7853 3 (webready PDF) ISBN  978 1 4744 7854 0 (epub) The Right of Kamini Vellodi and Aron Vinegar to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Published with the support of the University of Edinburgh Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

Contents ist of Figures L Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements

vii xii xvii

Introduction: Kamini Vellodi and Aron Vinegar1 Part I: Grey Time 23 1. Hegel’s Grey Aesthetics: Painting in the Intellectual Realm,   Ingvild Torsen25 2. Grey Time: Anachromism and Waiting for Beckett, Laura Salisbury53

3. ‘A Warm Gray Fabric’: Walter Benjamin on Boredom, Thijs Lijster87 Part II: Grey Imaging 119 4. Spectres of Seurat, Éric Alliez121 5. Grey and the Silence of Surfaces, Bente Larsen153 6. ‘Whatever Looks Luminous Does Not Look Grey’: Wittgenstein   On the Impossibility of Luminous Grey, Marcos Silva175 Part III: Grey Intensities 201 7. Barthes’ Grisaille and an Aesthetics of Indifference, Aron Vinegar203 8. Grey is (not) Grey: Considerations on an Ethics of Attentiveness,   Hana Gründler249 9. Klee’s ‘Grey Point’: Kamini Vellodi291 Part IV: Grey Thought 329 10. Fade to Grey: Colour, Greyness and Utopia in the Work of Art  (Adorno), Gerhard Richter331 11. Grey Illuminations: Foucault and Warburg in the Kingdom   of Shadows, Henrik Gustafsson357 12. Icy Phantasms, Contemporary Inuit Art and the Grey of  Ethno-Aesthetics, Amanda Boetzkes387 ibliography B Index

420 453

Figures 1.1 Gerhard Richter, Grey (1967). Copyright: Gerhard Richter, 2021 3.1 Constantin Guys, Meeting in the Park, ca. 1860. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 3.2 J. J. Grandville, ‘La mode’ from Un autre monde, 1844. Source: Guernsey Center Moore 1904 Memorial Fund 3.3 J. J. Grandville, ‘Rose’, from Les fleurs animées, 1867. Source: Guernsey Center Moore 1904 Memorial Fund 5.1 Vilhelm Hammershøi, Open Doors, 1905, oil on canvas. Photographer: Pernille Klemp. Source: The David Collection, Copenhagen 5.2 Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor,

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1901, oil on canvas, 46.5 × 52 cm (KMS3696). Source: National Gallery of Denmark 5.3 Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with the Artist’s Easel, 1910, oil on canvas, 84 × 69 cm. Source: National Gallery of Denmark 5.4 Vilhelm Hammershøi, Landscape on the Island of Falster, 1890–1891, oil on canvas, 31.2 × 44.3 cm. Source: National Gallery of Denmark 7.1 Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, open state, 1500–1505, oil, grisaille on oak panel, h. 185.8 cm × 325.5 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Copyright: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid/Art Resource, New York 7.2 Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, closed state, 1500–1505, oil, grisaille on oak panel, h. 185.8 cm × 76.5 cm (each panel). Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Copyright: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, New York 7.3 Sophie Bassouls’ photograph of Roland Barthes in his apartment surrounded by painting materials and Sennelier Colorines, Paris, France, 9 June 1978. Copyright: Sophie Bassouls 7.4 Bottle of Sennelier Teinte Neutre/Neutral Tint. Source: photograph taken by Aron Vinegar 7.5 Hieronymus Bosch, Triptych of The Temptation of St. Anthony, closed state, detail of ‘internal kindling’ from the grisaille outer panel, ca. 1501. Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, Portugal. Source: photograph taken by Aron Vinegar 7.6 Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, closed state, detail of God the Father, 1500–1505, oil, grisaille on oak panel, h. 185.8 cm × 76.5 cm (each panel). Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Copyright: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, New York 7.7 Roland Barthes, structural diagram of the winged triptych (Couleur/ Grisaille) in the margin of Le Neutre: Cours au Collège de France (1977–78), viii

81. Texte établi, annoté et présenté par Thomas Clerc. Paris: Éditions du Seuil/Imec, traces écrites, 2002. Source: photograph taken by Aron Vinegar 7.8 Cy Twombly, Untitled (Rome), 1966, oil, wall paint and crayon on canvas, 190 × 200 cm. The Lambrecht-Schadeberg Collection. Copyright: Cy Twombly Foundation, New York 7.9 Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, closed state, right panel, detail of clouds, 1500–1505, oil, grisaille on oak panel, h. 185.8 cm × 76.5 cm (each panel). Inv. POO2823. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Copyright: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, New York 8.1 Grisaille stained-glass window, 12th century. Aubazine Abbey, France. Copyright: Hervé Champollion/akg-images 8.2  Paul Engelmann and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Palais Stonborough-­ Wittgenstein, 1926–1928, Vienna, Kundmanngasse. Detail, floor surface and glass doors to the patio. Copyright: Ludwig Wittgenstein Trust Cambridge 8.3  Paul Engelmann and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Palais Stonborough-­ Wittgenstein, 1926–1928, Vienna, Kundmanngasse. Detail, glass doors, from the library to the hall. Copyright: Ludwig Wittgenstein Trust Cambridge 9.1 Paul Klee, The Grey Man and the Coast, 1938. Coloured paste on burlap; reconstructed frame, 105 × 71 cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Livia Klee Donation 9.2 Paul Klee, Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre: 1.2 Principielle Ordnung (Theory of Pictorial Configuration: 1.2 Principal Order), pen, watercolour and pencil on paper, 21.8 × 27.5 cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern 9.3 Paul Klee, Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre: 1.2 Principielle Ordnung (Theory of Pictorial Configuration: 1.2 Principal Order), pen, pencil and pen on paper, 27.5 × 20.7 cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern ix

9.4 Paul Klee, Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre: Anhang (Theory of Pictorial Configuration: Appendix), pen and pencil on paper, 21.8 × 27.4 cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern 9.5 Paul Klee, Beiträge sur bildnerischen Formlehre (Contributions to the Theory of Pictorial Form), pen, pencil and coloured pencil on paper, 20.2 × 16.3 cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern 9.6 Paul Klee, Beiträge sur bildnerischen Formlehre (Contributions to the Theory of Pictorial Form), pen, pencil and coloured pencil on paper, 20.2 × 16.3 cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern 9.7 Paul Klee, Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre: I.3 Specielle Ordnung (Theory of Pictorial Configuration: I.3 Special Order), pen on paper, 43 × 33cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern 9.8 Paul Klee, Beiträge sur bildnerischen Formlehre (Contributions to the Theory of Pictorial Form), pen on paper, 20.2 × 16.3 cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern 9.9 Paul Klee, Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre: I.1 Festaltungslehre als Begriff (Theory of Pictorial Configuration: I.1 Pictorial Creation as Concept), pen and coloured pencil on paper, 21 × 33.2 cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern 9.10 Paul Klee, Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre: I.1 Festaltungslehre als Begriff (Theory of Pictorial Configuration: I.1 Pictorial Creation as Concept), pen and coloured pencil on paper, 21 × 33.2 cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern 12.1 Pia Arke, Self-Portrait, 1992. B/w double exposure photograph, nude self-portrait over pinhole camera photograph of Nuugaarsuk Point, Narsaq, 30.5 × 25.5 cm. Copyright: Søren Arke Petersen 12.2 Pia Arke, Untitled (Toying with National Costume), ca. 1993. Photo: Kuratorisk Aktion, 120 × 130cm. Copyright: Søren Arke Petersen x

12.3 Pia Arke, Arctic Hysteria IV, 1997. Yellow-toned b/w photo montage. Copyright: Søren Arke Petersen. Courtesy of the Department of Theory and Communication, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen 12.4 Pia Arke, stills from Arctic Hysteria, 1996. Video 4:3 (S-VHS to DVD), 5:55 min. Copyright: Søren Arke Petersen 12.5 Tim Pitsiulak, Underwater Research Team, 2014. Coloured pencil. Copyright: Dorset Fine Arts 12.6 Shuvinai Ashoona, Compositions (Titanic Plus Nascopie & Noah’s Ark), 2008. Coloured pencil with black porous point pen, graphite on paper, 122.5 × 243 cm. Copyright: Dorset Fine Arts

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Contributors Éric Alliez is Professor of Philosophy at University of Paris 8 and at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University (London). Recent publications include Duchamp Looked At (From the Other Side), with Jean-Claude Bonne (Urbanomic, 2022), Wars and Capital, with Maurizio Lazzarato (Semiotexte, 2018) and a co-edited book with Peter Osborne and Eric-John Russell, Capitalism: Concept, Idea, Image: Aspects of Marx’s Capital Today (CRMEP Books, 2019). Amanda Boetzkes is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on the relationship between xii

perception and representation, theories of consciousness, and ecology. She is the author of Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (MIT Press, 2019), The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and a forthcoming book titled Ecologicity: Vision and the Planetarity of Art. Co-edited books include Artworks for Jellyfish and Other Others (Noxious Sector, 2022), Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Routledge, 2014) and Art’s Realism in the Post-Truth Era (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Her current project, At The Moraine, considers modes of visualising environments with a special focus on Indigenous territories of the circumpolar North. Hana Gründler is Permanent Senior Research Scholar at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institute, where she leads the Research Group ‘Ethico-Aesthetics of the Visual’. She is an image historian and philosopher working at the intersection of philosophy and art, with a critical focus on the ethical and political implications of works of art and the built environment. Among her most recent publications is the first German edition of and critical commentary on Leon Battista Alberti’s moral dialogue ‘Über die Seelenruhe’ (Berlin, 2022). Henrik Gustafsson is Professor of film, media, and visual culture in the Department of Media and Documentation Science at the Arctic University of Norway. He is the author or editor of five books, including Crime Scenery in Postwar Film and Photography (Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2019) and Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image (co-edited with Asbjørn Grønstad) (Bloomsbury, 2014), and he is currently working on a book-length project titled The Sedimented Screen. Bente Larsen is Professor in Art History at the University of Oslo. Her primary interests are in continental aesthetics, art theory and modern and xiii

contemporary art with a focus on concepts of sensuality and silence. Her publications include ‘An Apologetic Praising of Derridean Deconstruction’, The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics (2022), Perspectives on the Nordic, Jakob Lothe and Bente Larsen (eds) (Novus Forlag, 2016), ‘Fragment and Laughter: The Art of Thomas Schütte’, in Mathilda Olof-Ors (ed.) Thomas Schütte, United Enemies (Koenig Books, 2016), ‘The Infinity of Water Lilies: On Monet’s Late Paintings’, in Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles (eds) Late Style and its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature and Music (Oxford ­University Press, 2016). Thijs Lijster teaches philosophy of art and culture at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He published Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno on Art and Art Criticism (De Gruyter, 2017) and co-­edited the books Spaces for Criticism (Valiz, 2018), The Future of the New (Valiz, 2018) and The Rise of the Common City (ASP, 2022). Gerhard Richter writes and teaches at the intersection of literature, philosophy and critical theory at Brown University, where he is the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature. He is the author of ten books, most recently This Great Allegory: On World-­ Decay and World-Opening in the Work of Art (MIT Press, 2022) and Thinking with Adorno: The Uncoercive Gaze (Fordham University Press, 2019). Laura Salisbury is Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on modern literature and culture, including Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), and is current President of the Samuel Beckett Society. With Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck), she is the co-principal xiv

investigator of the Wellcome Trust-funded project, ‘Waiting Times’, on the relationship between time and care. She is currently writing a book on post-war British cultures of waiting. Marcos Silva is Associate Professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil. He is also Productivity Researcher of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq/Brazil). Marcos has held research positions in Rio de Janeiro, Fortaleza, Maceió, Leipzig and Pittsburgh and has presented his research throughout Europe. His research interests include the philosophy of logic, philosophy of language and Wittgenstein’s philosophy. He is the editor of Colours in the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy (Palgrave, 2017) and How Colours Matter to Philosophy (Springer, 2017). In 2017, he received the Fulbright Junior Faculty Member Award. Ingvild Torsen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo. She has published articles on the aesthetics of Heidegger, Hegel and Kant, and is the co-editor of Philosophy of Sculpture. Historical Problems, Contemporary Approaches (Routledge, 2020). Kamini Vellodi is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Theory and History of Art, at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Tintoretto’s Difference. Deleuze, Diagrammatics and Art History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and Series Editor of Refractions. At the borders of Art History and Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press). Her research interests lie at the interstices of continental philosophy, art historiography and theories of art history, and her writing has appeared in journals including Art History, Word and Image, Parrhesia, Zeitschift für Kunstgeschichte, The Journal of Art Historiography and Deleuze Studies. xv

Aron Vinegar is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo. He works at the inter­section of art history, visual studies, philosophy and aesthetics. His most recent book is Subject Matter: The Anaesthetics of Habit and the Logic of Breakdown (MIT Press, Short Circuits series, 2023) and his co-edited books include Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Routledge, 2014).

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Acknowledgements Thank you to the authors for their patience and support during the publication process and, most importantly, for their inspiring essays. It was a pleasure to work with all of you. This project began as a conference held at the University of Oslo. A special thank you to all the speakers, to Associate Professor Per Sigurd Styve who co-organised the conference with Aron Vinegar, and to the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, which provided financial support for this event. We would also like to thank Edinburgh University Press, and in particular, Carol Macdonald, Sarah Foyle, Judith Mackenzie and Geraldine Lyons. xvii

Introduction Kamini Vellodi and Aron Vinegar

Between black and white, the chromatic and the achromatic, a zone of excess and transition, a threshold with no opposite, the singular character of grey has given rise to some remarkable reflections and conceptualisations in art, philosophy and literature. The guiding spirit and title of this book stem from perhaps the most well-known of these reflections, the passage at the end of Hegel’s Preface to his Elements of the Philosophy of Right: ‘When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of 1

philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.’1 This passage complicates and challenges the assumptions we may have regarding the character and notion of grey, and opens towards many of the compelling philosophical issues it raises, both as a concept and as a sensible and visible phenomenon: the relationships between abstraction and the concrete, belatedness and beginning, particularity and universality, mediation and immediacy, colour and colourlessness, determination and the indeterminate, repetition and difference, thought and experience, enlivening and deadening. Indeed, ‘grey on grey’ invites us to ‘grayen’ (Samuel Beckett’s word), that is, to further abstract and nuance the values traditionally assigned to grey. Contributions to this volume invite us to reflect on grey in its myriad registers as it crosses epistemological, ontological, ethical, aesthetic, historical and political domains. Bringing together perspectives traversing art, art history, visual studies, philosophy, ecology, media studies and literature, chapters explore grey’s enigmatic character as both a non-colour and the fons et origo of colour as such; a fungibility and erasure of difference, but also a nuancing that challenges given determinations; a dulling and levelling down, yet latent with an impersonal intensity; a colour of belatedness and aging, but also indicating new forms of life and vitality. While not every chapter engages with or refers to Hegel’s passage explicitly, all of them project its implications in new ways and directions. This volume is not intended as a comprehensive overview of the meanings and interpretations of grey, nor of the many philosophers, theorists and artists who have drawn inspiration from Hegel’s passage, but rather as an interrogation of how grey – and particularly the notion of ‘grey on grey’ – refracts crucial issues concerning the relationship between art and philosophy.2 In this spirit, rather than surveying some of the more well-known 2

inter­pretations of grey and its intellectual history – such as the early modern association of grey with the return of antiquity through grisaille, or its association with the aesthetic conditions and techniques of modernity, modernism, industry and capitalism – we instead focus here on some conceptual resonances that traverse the essays, as oriented through the four section titles: Grey Time, Grey Imaging, Grey Intensities and Grey Thought. Invoking a remark by Goethe’s Mephistopheles, ‘Gray is, young friend, all theory, and green of life the golden tree’, Hegel’s passage has often been interpreted as a comment on philosophy’s constitutive belatedness with respect to the colour and intensity of the world, and the draining of life’s immediacy through abstraction, interpretation and theorisation.3 From this perspective, ‘grey on grey’ marks the tenor and tonality of conceptual thinking, as opposed to the colour, vitality and experience of life. This volume sets out to problematise and question such interpretations and explore alternative conceptualisations. It considers how grey might, in fact, offer another way of thinking about what is generative and vital beyond given oppositions. Indeed, the repetitions of and within ‘grey on grey’ might be said to manifest a tenaciousness and insistence more akin to a compulsion to repeat. Perhaps grey is the ‘death drive of color’, as Jean-François Lyotard wrote in his account of the erosion of chromatic difference and didactic chromatism in monochrome painting; a repetition compulsion that courses through the life of colour, not as its external opposite but rather as its immanent other and relentless self-differencing. This unruly form of vitality is excessive, disruptive and unsettling, just as much as its tautologous repetition is an emptying-out, a silencing and simplification that may foster meditative contemplation and attention. As the unconscious of colour, grey erodes and exhausts didactic chromatism and determinate forms rendered through the chiaroscuro of black 3

and white, fostering other thresholds and intensities. Approached as such, grey is not merely the colour of capitalist fungibility, general equi­ valence, abstraction, boredom, indifference or indecisive neutrality. It is also the colour of ‘generic vacillation’, to use Badiou’s term, that puts differences and singularities to the test. 4 Grey shifts the indifference, indeterminancy and indecision with which it is customarily associated away from their privative implications towards a strange multiplication and subtraction of differences and determinations. We might even characterise this movement of greying as the ‘cunning of color’ – echoing Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’ – that allows the contradictions of a given logic to work immanently against themselves in order to release its phantasms and deadlocks.5 Hegel’s passage dramatizes the sense of the universal as not the neutral medium of its particular content, but rather the site of an excessively minimal difference of grey on grey which never coincides with itself. Grey on grey, then, is the ‘other night’ and the ‘excess of darkness’, suspended in and between twilight and dawn, that counters the dialectic of night and day, light and dark, and opposes the Schellingian night of ‘monochrome formalism’ – a night in which, Hegel writes, ‘all cows are black’.6 Indeed, monochromes and images in grisaille are rarely ever homogen­ eously monochromatic. Cistercian windows – often considered the first examples of grisaille in art – are imbued with subtle hues of white, black and even green. The grisaille outer panels of Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights are awash with different values of black and rust browns, and the grey tones of Pia Arke’s pinhole-camera landscapes of Nuugaarsuk render a spectrum of variations that register the inconsistency of her own self-imaging. Whilst, as Badiou has claimed, the ‘rainbow’ of colour may be missing from snow and from night, this is not the case for 4

grey, which enfolds and refracts colour.7 This condition of self-differing, signalled by the repetition within ‘grey on grey’, echoes Hegel’s remark that instead of the ‘shapeless repetition of one and the same thing which is only externally applied to diverse material’, what is demanded is ‘for the shapes to originate their richness and determine their differences from out of themselves’.8 Thus, grey on grey exposes nuance within the movement of Hegel’s dialectic, as well as its internally generated resistance to dialectical mediation. The question of self-differencing and immanence within the notion of grey on grey forges links between Hegel and bodies of thought that are ‘coloured’ by a generalised anti-Hegelianism – such as those associated with Deleuze, Foucault, and Barthes – or with figures such as Wittgenstein who, like Hegel, engaged with Goethe’s writings on colour and with thinking about grey as an impasse within the concept of colour in its relationship to life – an impasse thinkable through an aesthetics that can ‘figure’ it whilst resisting the burden of representation. This returns us to the Hegelian notion that philosophy and the movement of the concept does not offer illumination on life. The gaze of the owl of Minerva does not only emanate from yellow orbs that pierce the crepuscular grey of twilight. Rather, like philosophy itself, this gaze is ‘glaucus’ (in Greek, glaukus can mean ‘owleyed’), registering an opacity that moves through thought itself, disrupting claims to any ‘science’ that would refuse to account for its own blind spots. Instead, as instances of a ‘grey science’, in the words of one of our contributors, we might think of Deleuze’s ‘Sahara grey’ that can spread like a sandstorm and overwhelm the conditions of optical grey, or Foucault’s practice of a ‘patient, tenacious, impersonal’ genealogy that summons forth anonymous utterances from the dusty and cracked terrain of hitherto overlooked archival material. We might also think of Seurat’s refractions of colour 5

theory through the medium of grey, or Aby Warburg’s greyscale photo­ mechanical reproductions mounted on his black Bilderatlas Mnemosyne panels – or his ‘Grisaille Notebooks (1929)’ – that invoke the phantasmatic images persisting through all the mediums of the ‘in-between’. One of the most compelling legacies of such a grey science – consolidated in the nineteenth century, but with a long and rich pre-history and subsequent legacy – is its capacity to invoke the strange spectres and conflicts that are persistently not-there, unthought and unsaid. Perhaps this invocation is also a grey imperative, a repetitious insistence addressed to us to further ‘grayen’ grey, to quest for an exponentially greater degree of coldness and deadening expressionlessness beyond capitalism’s ‘grey-on-grey commodity world’.9 That might be an infinite and persevering task that we need to take up in order to account for and counter Badiou’s lament about our time: ‘How will those who begin with the darkish gray on the palish gray of computer screens manage? Without the slightest inkblot? Won’t they think that thought is just another variation of formlessness, that the intellect is just a thin additional coat of gray over the gray of drive, and drive a mere stripping of the gray of the intellect?’10 New mediums, technologies, techniques, and new forms of political struggle, require us not to abandon but rather to restage the unthought potential inherent to the techniques of greying central to speculative phil­ osophy, philosophies of immanence, and practices of indifference in the arts, art history, and anthropologies of the image and imagination. A greying of grey on grey is also an immanent tarrying with the ever-increasing grey zones spanning the realm of bioethics, technology, ontology, ecology, politics and medias. We might think here of what Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey have called ‘gray media’ – corporate work systems, algorithms and data structures, twenty-first-century self-improvement manuals, 6

phar­maceutical techniques – all those supposedly ‘neutral’ technicities and structures that permeate what appear as conventional media.11 If there is a greying of truth in our supposed post-truth times we might need to further ‘grayen’ these zones to expose the spectres of violence they conceal, thus painting over the false vitality of greenwashing with a greying of ecology, or plumbing the shades of our grey waiting times. Grey is where language, concept, experience and color touch in their mutual indetermination, doubling and diffraction. Through its self-­d ifferencing, grey disrupts the assumed unity of identity; it is where the very limits, thresholds and divisions that prevent any identity to be identical with itself inhere. It is the question of the peculiar logic, manifestations and experience of grey that is at stake in the following chapters. Grey Time Hegel’s ‘grey on grey’ passage has been taken to suggest that philosophy comes onto the scene when a form of life is complete, that philosophy theor­ ises and conceptualises what has always already happened. This interpretation of belatedness can be read alongside Hegel’s injunction against any attempt by philosophy to make prognoses and predictions about the future. The strange tempo and temporality of lateness, retrospection and mediation that runs through Hegel’s philosophy is complex, for it implies an incessant arriving at the beginning, such that any ending is always delayed and stillto-be-born. What results is a temporal arrhythmia conditioned by precipitous anticipation and preposterous delay, circular closure and incessant opening, a ‘not-yet’ that is always already. The owl of Minerva is repeatedly beginning to take flight, forging a dawning awareness that grey endings can ‘mark(s) the chromatic opening to a new beginning’.12 7

What are we to make of the reconciliation of beginning and ending in Hegel’s thought that is more like a brutal and unmediated juxtaposition indicative of an infinite judgement than a dialectical progression from beginning to end, past to present? What might this mean for any claims about ‘endings’ with regards to Hegel’s infamous ‘end of art’ thesis in his Lectures on Aesthetics, and its legacy in the preoccupations of art history and modernist aesthetics with lateness and melancholy? If Hegel’s definition of philosophy ‘is its own time apprehended in thought’, what is the actuality of his grisaille thinking in and for our time? If our time is dis-continuous with the time of modernity, what might be the sense of ‘our epoch of grayening. (Still not closed.)’?13 In ‘Hegel’s Grey Aesthetics: Painting in the Intellectual Realm’, Ingvild Torsen reflects on the nuances within Hegel’s claim that philosophy can aspire to understand life and give it intellectual shape. Approaching Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics – and certain key passages within it such as ‘(t)hought and reflection have spread their wings above fine art’ – through the lens of The Philosophy of Right, she invites us to consider how Hegel’s ‘twilight discourse’ is not merely retrospective but prompts new conceptions of painting as a way of understanding philosophy’s relation to art and its purported end. In so doing, Torsen accounts for Hegel’s aesthetics as a grey philosophical painting of the fate of painting’s vivid ideal of colour, the carnation of Spirit’s appearance in an age of ‘reflection’. She invites us to consider how Hegel’s so-called ‘end of art’ thesis is not merely retrospective but prospective. In the wake of Hegel’s grey aesthetics, painting can be understood to be both metaphorically grey – a belated and intellectual reflection upon itself – and literally grey – the increasing turn to grey and monochromes in twentieth-century modernist painting. Torsen turns to the works of Gerard Richter to explore how grey paintings, in their nuance and continuity with colour, are 8

anything but an empty and intellectual formalism.14 If ‘painting after Hegel now means painting in the shadow of this grey painting’, ‘after’ is always there from the beginning, and any ‘fullest potential’ is always already overripe even before it is ‘after’. Grey may then be the very colour of a rejuvenation that permeates philosophy and art. In ‘Grey Time: Anachromism and Waiting for Beckett’, Laura Salisbury reflects on the condition of waiting in Samuel Beckett’s work through his grey vision, greyscale imaging and grey time. Attending to Beckett’s interest in monotony and grey, she argues that the ash grey (noir-gris) that pro­ lif­erates in his formally constrained short story, Lessness (Sans) of 1969, permeates all of Beckett’s writings, theatrical performances and their analogue mediations. Beckett’s commitment to ‘grayening’ materialises a temporal aesthetic that she calls ‘anachromism’ which is structured by waiting without fulfilment and progress. Suggestive of a certain Hegelian tone, but not strictly reducible to it, Beckett’s works express a postwar experience of temporality in which waiting and delay is denuded of purpose and colour. For Salisbury, anach­romism fosters an exploration of how Beckett’s grey time might proleptically and anachromistically illuminate the waiting times of our contemporary moment. The question of the modern and contemporary experience of time is also at stake in Thijs Lijster’s chapter, ‘“A Warm Gray Fabric”: Walter Benjamin on Boredom’, a close reading of Benjamin’s theorisation of boredom and its relation to grey, including this key passage in The Arcades Project: ‘Boredom is a warm grey fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful silks.’15 Benjamin associated boredom with nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, an orientation towards the future that is not just continuous with the present and which interrupts historical time with the dialectical instant.16 He saw the loss of boredom in the early twentieth 9

century as part of an atrophy of experience resulting from the modern fragmentation of time into empty and discrete, commodifiable moments. Grey, and its boring quality, both conceals and has a capacity to reveal the ‘liveliness’ of colour, invoking a dialectic between capitalism’s ‘dream sleep’ and its revolutionary awakening. Lijster explores the character of boredom in relation to a notion of capitalism that both creates conditions for the sus­ pension of time and for forging new techniques and practices that suspend those suspensions, opening up new strategies for deviation. If boredom is a suspension of time whereby any dialectics of unfaltering progress comes to a standstill, how might it relate to the ‘hedo-ascetic’ dimensions of our present world with its economies of attraction and distraction? Are the standstills brought to the fore by the pandemic a genuine disruption of the given flows and circulations of money, resources and affects, or just another catastrophe that fuels the locomotive of the chronic time that is the real crisis? Grey Imaging From the grisaille painting that played a significant role in the formation of an early modern concept of the image (pittura) to the impact of photography, early film and the mass reproduction of media and its greyscale, grey functions as a compelling medium through which to attend to the concept of image. Grey imaging might pay particular attention to the techniques, technologies and phantasmatic movements that assert the image as a threshold through which to address what grey offers to the thought of issues such as spectrality and reduction. In ‘Spectres of Seurat’, Éric Alliez invests the dual figures of Seurat and Duchamp to project an articulation of the grey, ‘anaesthetic’ coordinates of 10

art after the photographic image. Seurat’s spectral conversion of painting through a scientific reduction that strips the image to grey – something we see in his conte-crayon drawings – exposes a new photographic condition of painting, a condition whereby painting becomes a spectre, an ‘eye-machine’ that inaugurates a machinic logic that will be affirmed by Duchamp and which presents critically against the supposed aesthetic autonomy of painting. In this affirmation of the image beyond the art form, grey functions as a critical interrogation of modern art in terms of a thinking of forces, rather than forms, providing material for a grey archaeology of contemporaneity beyond art history. In ‘Grey and the Silence of Surfaces’, Bente Larsen considers the quality of withdrawal embodied by grey, through a close study of selected paintings by Vilhelm Hammershøi and Gerhard Richter. Despite the historical and aesthetic differences between these two practices, Larsen explores how both artists invest painterly strategies of withdrawl and reduction through the use of grey. Larsen approaches this condition through Jean-Luc Nancy’s post-­phenomenological conception of art in terms of what he calls ‘the distinct’ (le distinct), that which sets apart at a distance, silent, withdrawn, and thus where touch remains out of reach, detached and impalpable, allowing invisibility to present itself without representing itself as such. She puts Nancy’s notion of ‘the distinct’ in dialogue with Adorno’s notion of Verstummen, as articulated in his Negative Dialectics, which translates into English as ‘silence’ or ‘muteness,’ and is elsewhere characterised by Adorno as a ‘flickering out’ of expressive means, or as an ‘expressionless expression’. Through its aesthetics of withdrawal, art reveals that there is nothing behind the image to find or interpret, and it is as a materialisation of this loss, and an affirmation of its untranslatable muteness, that art preserves and ‘speaks’. 11

Marcos Silva considers the question of grey imaging from a more analytic angle. In ‘“Whatever Looks Luminous Does Not Look Grey”: Wittgenstein On the Impossibility of Luminous Grey’, he attends to Wittgenstein’s treatment of ‘impossible colours’, elaborating on his statement in his 1950 text Remarks on Color, that ‘Whatever looks luminous does not look grey. Everything grey looks as though it is being illumined.’ Luminous grey lies neither within the province of physics nor the psychology of colour, and it is a proposition that is neither empirical nor a priori – but, rather, calls for a new study, a logic of colour concepts. Taking off from Wittgenstein’s character­ isation of colour as a ‘spur to philosophising’, Silva shows how Wittgenstein’s investigations of the nature of colours cannot be properly addressed independently from other important themes in his work such as grammatical investigation and the fundamental relation between ‘use’ and ‘sense’, and that this logic of colour, reciprocally, sheds light on his views of language, phenomenology and logic. Grey Intensities The repetition of Hegel’s ‘grey on grey’ critically positions itself against the ‘monochrome formalism’ that Hegel relentlessly critiques in The Phenomenology of Spirit, and which he associated with Schelling’s abstract concept of the Absolute. Rather than the ‘monotonous’ and ‘abstract universality’ of an Absolute bereft of the immanent determinations and labour of the particular, the repetition of grey on grey suggests that it is the colour of ‘concrete universality’, in which its manifestation of universality is not an empty container of its content. Seen through this lens, grey on grey generates a Real granularity which may be registered in the fine internal variations of tone, value, hue and intensity that are simultaneously voiding and multiplying, and which 12

permeates and unsettles colour’s consistent identity. Thinkers such as Barthes, Deleuze and Foucault might thus be approached anew, whilst aspects of pure difference and resistances to the dialectic that are generated from within Hegel’s speculative movement of thought are reciprocally exposed. Aron Vinegar’s chapter, ‘Barthes’ Grisaille and an Aesthetics of Indifference’, explores the key role that Bosch’s winged-triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1490–1500), plays in Roland Barthes’ late lecture course on The Neutral (1978) at the Collège de France. Unlike most art historians before and after him, Barthes focuses almost all of his attention on the grisaille outer panels from the triptych rather than the interior panels all ablaze in the full splendour and glory of their riotous and intense colours. He does so alongside a recounting of a personal incident involving the spilling of a bottle of Neutral Tint (Teinte Neutre) that turns out to be a type of ‘dull greyblack’ (noir-gris mat), that not only sets the ‘tone on tone’ for that week’s session on colour and its relationship to grey/grisaille, but for the entire course as such. Barthes variably characterises Bosch’s grisaille panels as a ‘subtle dialectic’, a ‘dialectic of intensities’, or in terms of their quest for a ‘slight difference’ that resonates with the subtle, immanent and intransigent logic of Hegel’s ‘grey on grey’ passage. Barthes’ notion of the Neutral is defined as a ‘diaphoralogy’, a neologism for what he calls a science of nuance, shimmers or scintillation, which he contrasts with adiaphoria, or indifference (indifférence), the latter defined as an absence of both passion and difference. But it is precisely his account of the subtle dialectic generated by grey on grey and its aesthetics of in­difference that expresses not only his ‘desire’ for the neutral, but also its very drive and jouissance. In ‘Grey is (not) Grey: Considerations on an Ethics of Attentiveness’, Hana Gründler also considers grey as a field of nuancing and intensities, but one that invites an ethics of attention. Reflecting on the relationship between 13

attentiveness and monochromy from the Middle Ages (Bernard de Clairvaux, St Augustine, Marsilio Ficino, Cistercian art and architecture) to Ludwig Wittgenstein and the works of the filmmaker Derek Jarman, Gründler sets out a transhistorical and transdisciplinary genealogy of grey. Beginning with Jarman’s evocation of the ‘immense phenomenological richness of gray’ in his book Chroma. A Book of Color, Gründler explores the association of the monochrome, and grey in particular, with an ‘ethical transformation of the self ’ that takes place through the forms of attentiveness that it invites. Looking both at his philosophical writings and his practice as an architect, she explores Wittgenstein’s late thinking about colour and grey in the context of his view of philosophy’s task ‘to overcome the limits of idealized cold [and grey] abstraction, and look more attentively at the infinite variety of forms of life’. This connecting of philosophy with the ethics of the self was, she argues, expressed through his deepening interest in the philosophical problem of colour in texts such as The Remarks on Colour and, more particularly, in his design and construction of the house (Palais Stoneborough) for his sister Margaret Stoneborough-Wittgenstein that he worked on between 1926–1928 with the architect Paul Engelmann. The ‘acute attentiveness’ to ‘complex ­spatial boundaries, passages, material, nuanced monochromes and structural detail’ give expression to a new logico-phenomenological understanding of dwelling. In ‘Klee’s “Grey Point”’, Kamini Vellodi considers the affirmative, non-­ dialectical and differential expression of grey that emerges in the paintings and writings of the twentieth-century artist Paul Klee. During his time at the Bauhaus, Klee developed a complex colour theory, drawing on the work of Goethe, Delacroix, Van Gogh and Itten, within which grey assumes a singular role. What Klee calls the ‘grey point’ is not just the deadening mixture of black and white, but rather the meeting point of all colours 14

(which included black and white), as well as the hinge between chaos and order, point and line. Grey was not just a product, but a reservoir of potential, of forces, playing a vital role in pictorial genesis, a ‘non-conceptual concept’ that is neither a non-concept nor a sensible quality. Insofar as the grey point hinges on the borders of sensations and concepts, it functions as the genetic agent of pictorial thinking. In texts such as A Thousand ­Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia and Francis Bacon. Logic of Sensation, Deleuze (and Guattari) elaborates on Klee’s grey point, describing it as a ‘chaos-germ’ that unlocks dimensions of sensation and inaugurates new registers of experience. The conjunction of Klee and Deleuze, provoked by the notion of the grey point, projects one way of how painting can function as a model for thinking. Grey Thought Hegel’s association of grey with thought – both philosophical, and non-philosophical-and in its interpenetration with colour returns in the work of other figures, including Adorno, Foucault, Bataille, Barthes and Deleuze. In ‘Fade to Grey: Colour, Greyness and Utopia in the Work of Art (Adorno)’, Gerhard Richter argues for grey as a key to accessing ‘core aspects of Adorno’s philosophical preoccupations’ such as his conceptualisation of negative dialectics and aesthetic theory. In Adorno’s work, grey is associated both with threat (the homogeneous uniform grey of capitalism – the ‘gray on gray of the commodity world’17) and potential (the modern, grey work of art that in its difference from quotidian life, offers a mode of critique). With reference to his late ‘Marginalia on Theory and Praxis’, Richter shows how Adorno, following in Hegel’s footsteps, challenges the dismissal of theory made by Goethe’s Mephistopheles, in contrast to the glorification of green 15

life. The ‘life’ that Mephistopheles defends to Faust is, Adorno states, ‘hardly green’. Indeed, life – with its logic of domination and exploitation – requires critique by theory. Mephistopheles’ aversion to grey and theoretical reflection is an ideologically motivated attempt to negate the genuine thinking that could change the conditions of life. Richter goes on to show how such conditions of theory and its greyness need to be thought of in relation to artistic production. In Aesthetic Theory, the question of greyness re-emerges, in relation to a ‘certain unconventional utopian potentiality’. For Adorno, the black and gray of contemporary art operates critically against the given colours of life, but in dialectical relation to ‘new’ colour. Art, in its singularity, resists the monotony of life under capitalism – the homogeneous greyness of general equivalence, retaining the potential to return life to a more liberationary colour. Henrik Gustafsson’s chapter, ‘Grey Illuminations: Foucault and Warburg in the Kingdom of Shadows’, shows how Foucault’s emphasis on grey as the tonality of genealogy – which Foucault describes as ‘. . . gray, meticulous and patiently documentary’ – and archaeology, described as ‘. . . this gray, anonymous, language . . .’ grounded in the ruptures and discontinuities of discourse ‘in the dust of books’ – might work in a media archaeology attentive to the ruptures of media-technological shifts that push beyond the limits of Foucault’s own epistemological framework. Gustafsson argues for grey as a medium in itself and approaches this idea through early responses to the projections of animated photograms at the turn of the twentieth century, and the photographic montage that Warburg mounted on the panels of his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas projects the grey genealogy later affirmed by Nietzsche and Foucault. In Amanda Boetzkes’ ‘Icy Phantasms, Contemporary Inuit Art and the Grey of Ethno-Aesthetics’, grey becomes the vector by which to consider how 16

contemporary Inuit art deploys an aesthetics that can expose and critique the traumas of colonial encounter that have been obscured by the operations of climate science. She sets out a contrast between ‘phantasmology’ and ‘glacialogy’ (the scientific study of ice). Attending to Rodophe Gasché’s reading of George Bataille, she elaborates Gasché’s notion of phantasmology, as his term for Bataille’s deployment of mythic figures, narratives of transgression and sensorial excess that exert a violence on the structural terms of Enlightenment philosophy and science. In a close reading of Inuit and Greenlandic artworks by Pia Arke, Tim Pitsiulak and Shuvinai Ashoona, Boetzkes associates grey with the substance of ice and the way circumpolar Indigenous artists mobilise a phantasmology of excess in order to further grey the discourse of glaciology, which is never ‘cold’ enough to perturb the study of Arctic environments and summon forth the primal scenes of colonial violence that subtend any possible encounter between Inuit culture and climate science. Boetzkes further argues that the upheaval of such phantasmatic topography can only be made possible when this greying operation is considered as a geoaesthetic that would seismically shift the scientific discourse and practice of climate change towards a political ecology that can think science and the politics of decolonisation together in all its unsettling complexity. Notes 1. Hegel, ‘Preface’, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23. The complete passage in German reads as follows: ‘Wenn die Philosophie ihr Grau in Grau malt, dann ist eine Gestalt des Lebens alt geworden, und mit Grau in Grau läßt sie sich nicht verjüngen, sondern nur erkennen; die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der 17

einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.’ See G. W. F Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Werke 7, Hrsg. von Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurter am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), s. 28. There is variation in the wording of this sentence across the standard English translations by S. W. Dyde, T. M. Knox, H. B. Nisbet and Alan White, not to mention the many scholars who have chosen to alter or provide their own translations of and elaborations on this passage. We have chosen to render it as ‘grey on grey’. The French translation makes the connection to painting even more striking, as the ‘Grau in Grau’ is often translated as ‘grisaille’. See Aron Vinegar’s chapter, note 28. For three insightful readings of the passage see: Rebecca Comay, ‘Gray on Gray (Hegel, Beckett, Richter)’, in Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 142–145; Mladen Dolar, ‘The Owl of Minerva from Dusk till Dawn, or, Two Shades of Gray’, Filozofija i društvo, xxvi, 4 (2015): 875–890; and Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 322–323. 2. In addition to those studied in this volume, notable figures might include Theodore Lipps, Theodor Vischer, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, György Lukacs, Vilhelm Flusser, Primo Levi, Slavoj Zizek, Milan Kundera and Hito Steyerl. Recent books dedicated to the colour grey include: Peter Sloterdijk, Wer noch kein Grau gedacht hat: Eine Farbenlehre (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2022), Gray Book (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), David Batchelor’s writings on grey, particularly in The Luminous and the Grey (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), Frances Guerin’s The Truth is Always Grey (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and Magdalena Bushart and Gregor Wedekind’s edited volume, Die Farbe Grau (Berlin: de Gruyter Verlag, 2016). See also David Kastan and Stephen Farthing’s, ‘Gray Areas’ in On Color (Yale University Press, 2018), Derek Jarman’s ‘Gray Matter’ in Chroma (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s edited book Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 18

Press, 2013). References to grey in books that are primarily about the colour black include Alain Badiou’s Black: The Brilliance of a non-color, trans. Susan Spitzer (London: Polity Press, 2017) and ‘The Writing of the Generic: Samuel Beckett’, in Con­ ditions (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2008), 251–284. An exhibition entitled Monochrome: Painting in Black and White, at the National Gallery in London in 2017–2018, and the accompanying catalogue, offers a historical survey of ‘painting in black and white’ from the Renaissance to the present. 3. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), 207. Faust. Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. 3, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: DTV, 1988), 66. 4. Alain Badiou, In Praise of Theatre (London: Polity Press, 2015), 84. 5. Although discussions of the ‘Ruse’ or ‘Cunning of Reason’ (List der Vernunft) usually refer to its manifestation in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, where the supposed universal reason of history is achieved ‘behind the backs’ of world-­ historical figures who think they are guiding it, its logic is apparent throughout Hegel’s philosophy. This cunning of colour outwits itself and thus is often not in control of its own deviating and self-differentiating logic. 6. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirt, ed. and trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), §16. This critique of monochrome formalism is carried through and elaborated on in other significant passages in The Phenomen­ ology of Spirit. 7. Badiou, Black: The Brilliance of a non-color, 35. 8. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, §15. 9. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 253. 10. Badiou, Black: The Brilliance of a non-color, 17–18. 11. Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, Evil Media (Boston, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), 11–12: ‘Grayness is a quality that is easily overlooked, and that is what 19

gives it its great attraction, an unremarkableness that can be of inestimable value in background operations.’ ‘The unobstructive grayness of so many types of media practice, from system administration to data gathering . . . Calls for a kind of suspicious attentiveness, the cultivation of a sensibility able to detect minor shifts of nuance, hints of a contrast where flatness would otherwise be the rule.’ The notion of the ‘grey zone’ as a zone of extreme moral ambiguity (in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps) was coined by Primo Levi, in his final book, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017): ‘a zone of ambiguity which radiates out from regimes based on terror and obsequious­ness’, 46. 12. Comay, ‘Gray on Gray (Hegel, Beckett, Richter)’, 144. 13. Fioretos, Gray Book, 41. 14. One of the best-known analyses of Richter’s grey paintings (Richter painted over 100 grey monochromes in total) is by Benjamin Buchloh, who associated Richter’s Eight Gray with ‘the internalized melancholia of a closed system of cultural administration’, where the monochrome becomes ‘an affectless record of loss’. Buchloh, Gerard Richter. Eight Gray (Berlin, 2002). Richter’s own remarks on grey as ‘the epitome of non-statement’, the colour of ‘the misery of life’ and ‘the only welcome and possible equivalent to indifference’ seem to support Buchloh’s reading, but Richter, in fact, has a more nuanced conception and sees affirmative qualities in grey, as explored in different ways by Gründler, Larsen, Richter, and Torsen in this volume. Gerard Richter – Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961–2007 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009). 15. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), D2a, 1. For a more art historical reading of Benjamin’s dialectic of grey and color see Annie Bourneuf ‘Radically Uncolourful Painting: Walter Benjamin and the Problem of Cubism’, Grey Room, 39 (2010): 74–93. 20

16. Walter Benjamin, ‘Berlin Chronicle’ in Selected Writings: 1931–1934, vol. 2, part 2, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 596. 17. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 253.

21

Part I Grey Time

1. H  egel’s Grey Aesthetics: Painting in the Intellectual Realm Ingvild Torsen

Hegel’s Aesthetics is a remarkable work in philosophical aesthetics, partly because of its sheer size – it is more than 1,200 pages long – but mostly because of its richness in the use of example and the elaborate treatment of the general features, history and genres of art. It is a multi-layered text which, with all its examples and inventiveness, seems more alive and colourful than many of its counterparts in philosophical aesthetics. Yet I will claim, for 25

reasons that will become clear below, that the Aesthetics is grey. I will explain how the difference between art and philosophy can be understood both literally and metaphorically as a difference between colour and greyness. I will show how this reveals something important about Hegel’s understanding of philosophy in general and aesthetics in particular. I will expand upon Hegel’s thought in order to characterise the situation of painting in modernism, after Hegel, as a situation of painting within a grey realm.1 My starting point is a passage from the preface to The Philosophy of Right. For anyone interested in the relationship between philosophy and art, it is an exciting passage, although it is neither a statement primarily about art, nor about the colour grey, but about philosophy: When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.2 The context of this suggestive passage is that Hegel, in introducing his political philosophy, is arguing against ‘issuing instruction on how the world ought to be’, and to make his point he uses metaphors of painting and greyness. In light of this metaphor, we can infer that the painting that philosophy paints (in this case, when it is reflecting on the political) should hence be neither a colourful utopia nor an imaginative, possible future world. What philosophy instead can and should do is aspire to understand the world, and then ‘reconstruct’ it ‘in the shape of an intellectual realm’. There are many different grey paintings in the history of art, and their compositions and meanings vary greatly. What I want to focus on here is how 26

we can understand grey paintings in Hegelian terms, and specifically two kinds of grey painting: the metaphorical, philosophical painting that we are introduced to in Hegel’s Preface, and the grey paintings made in the wake of Hegel’s aesthetics, that is, the greys of modernism.3 The Greyness of Hegel’s Philosophy In this section, I will provide an analysis of the metaphor from the Philosophy of Right, isolating four features that can help illuminate what Hegel thinks he is doing when he is doing philosophy and reflecting on different areas of human life. The first important feature of Hegel’s description of philosophy as painting is its timing: it is late. What philosophy is trying to know is ‘a shape of life’ (Gestalt des Lebens), that is, one of the forms life can take. For Hegel, what is to be understood is not individual lives, but rather historical life forms, like the city-state, the nuclear family or art. These emerge, change and end at different points in history, and the reasons that structure them and their development are likewise historical. Such shapes of life, ways of being, are expressions of what Hegel calls Spirit. When they are ripe for thought, that is, when phil­ osophy can know them, the particular historical life form is already old. It is clear from the impossibility of rejuvenation noted in the passage, that being old here means in some sense past and without a future. It follows that philosophy is not only late to the game, but too late, in the sense that whatever it gives us to understand is something that strictly speaking is in its concluding stage. Philosophy is, then, an afterthought, a kind of postscript, always backward-looking. Philosophy is a historical discipline, and this has significant consequences for how to understand art, Hegel’s so-called ‘end of art’ thesis, and the paintings made in the centuries that follow his philosophy of art. 27

A second important feature of Hegel’s description of philosophy as painting has to do with the normative status of Hegel’s philosophy.4 It sounds like Hegel is ruling out that philosophy should take on a prescriptive role vis-à-vis its subject matter. Instead, what philosophy can and ought to do is to articulate a theoretical expression of an actual shape of life, so that it is not merely lived, but also understood. Philosophical understanding creates an atmosphere of theory, we could say, but it does not strictly speaking create anything new – it is only ‘its own time comprehended in thoughts’.5 What philosophy does, Hegel is at pains to stress here, before offering his work on politics, is to give a rational form to what already exists and is already ‘reasonable’.6 What philosophy does is to give form to what is – being; a form that allows what is to be thought. ‘Genuine thought is not the opinion of something, but the concept of the thing itself.’7 Nothing, certainly no content, is added by philosophy and no ideals should be asserted. In the context of Philosophy of Right this is often seen as a conservative feature, but the motivation is methodological. Philosophy is to comprehend and articulate the norms that structure ‘a shape of life’, but is not to prescribe norms for that, or any other, way of being. In the next section we will see how Hegel himself aims to articulate such norms of painting, and in the subsequent sections we will see how such an articulation does, eventually, have some normative consequences for the continuation of painting. A third notable feature of Hegel’s description of philosophy as painting is the greyness itself. The metaphor of grey is presumably functioning in several ways for Hegel. It is suggesting old age and weakness, that is, the belatedness of philosophy. It is also suggesting monotony: there is just one scale, one colour, for philosophy. However, philosophy’s painting cannot result in a work that is muddled, uniform or without contrast – that would be the painting of bad philosophy. To develop this latter point, it will be useful to put this 28

metaphor into dialogue with another famous metaphor of the monochrome in Hegel’s philosophy, which reveals that for him not all philosophical paintings are the same. In the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel criticises what he calls the ‘monochrome formalism’ of other idealists. In the context of the critique of a philosophy (presumed to be Schelling’s) that explains all phenomena through the single idea of the Absolute, Hegel writes that the consequence of such a philosophy is ‘the night in which, as we say, all cows are black’.8 In other words, certain monochrome attempts at arti­ culating being in thought are bad philosophical paintings because they erase the complexity of the phenomena they are meant to portray. We will return to this ‘dark night’ below, but it is important to note that the grey painting Hegel attributes to his own philosophy in The Philosophy of Right must differ from this ‘monochrome formalism’ that he attributes to his adversaries in The Phenomenology of Spirit. In opposition to the monochrome that renders everything the same, philosophy’s grey painting is not one that lacks differentiation or that leaves the object inarticulate. Finally, I want to suggest that Hegel’s use of this metaphor harbours a somewhat conceited self-presentation, a kind of false humility, since the very same discipline that Hegel characterises as grey (and presumably slightly dull in contrast to the lively shapes of life that it captures) is the one that simultaneously demotes these forms of life, like art and religion, as something bygone and necessarily obscure to themselves without philosophy’s rational articulation. To sum up, all these are dimensions of Hegel’s metaphor of the grey painting: philosophy (1) as historically posterior; (2) as articulating norms and reasons rather than prescribing them; (3) as monochrome; and (4) as superior. The description of philosophy’s painting as ‘grey on grey’ is interesting with respect to Hegel’s aesthetics, since Hegel devotes much time and thought 29

to the shape of life that is art. If what Hegel is doing in the Philosophy of Right is painting in grey, my suggestion is that we also try to read Hegel’s lectures on fine art as such a belated painting in grey of, among other things, painting itself. It might seem prima facie strange to describe Hegel’s rich, lively and engaging Aesthetics as a ‘grey on grey’ painting. Still, the metaphor’s ideas of belatedness, the insistence on philosophy as rational articulation, together with the notion of false humility, will prove to be helpful for making sense of Hegel’s understanding of what philosophy can do with respect to art and what art can do after its philosophical articulation. The Aesthetics of Painting and Colour In order to understand the metaphor of grey painting, and to understand it as a metaphor for his theory of art, it is useful to turn to Hegel’s own account of painting. This has both a historical and a more systematic and meta­ physical dimension. Both need to be understood to comprehend what he calls ‘the principle of painting’.9 For Hegel, to determine the principle of a parti­ cular art form, you need to know the form’s ‘means of portrayal’ – that is, what you can do with the materials and form at hand – and what subject-­ matter can be expressed through that form. This is not something found via empirical study of extant paintings; rather, theoretical work is needed. Hegel writes that the ‘deeper question’ concerning the principle of painting is to figure out and determine what subject-matter ‘by its very nature so precisely harmonizes with the form and mode of portrayal employed by painting that this form corresponds exactly with that content’.10 Hegel then articulates the principle of painting by drawing both on his historical theory of available and important subject-matter and on an analysis of the defining characteristics of the formal and material possibilities of painting as a genre. This spells out 30

the rationality of painting as a phenomenon, we could say. What Hegel’s Aesthetics offers us, in line with the metaphor from the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, is a theory that does not dictate how painting should proceed, but allows us to comprehend its essence and history. To articulate the principle of painting, we need first to establish painting’s subject-matter. Painting is about ‘subjectivity aware of itself ’, about Spirit’s inner life, ‘feeling, heart, mind, and meditation’, and Hegel thus classifies painting as a Romantic art form.11 Such subjectivity becomes a topic for art at a historical moment, when Spirit no longer coincides with its body. Hegel thinks that this is particularly apparent in the development of painting in the Renaissance and that it continues into the modern period. Of course, the paintings Hegel knew were representational and depicted the external surfaces of things – bodies, landscapes, increasingly mundane scenes and artefacts – but painting does so ‘in such a way that that shape itself reveals that it is only the external shape of a subject with an independent inner life of his own’.12 In other words, Hegel thinks painting is a form that allows for an expression of interiority and subjectivity in the representation of the things and events of the world that surrounds us, so that even a landscape, when it becomes the subject-matter of painting, must be of Spirit.13 The characteristic formal and material features of painting are the representation of three dimensions on a level or two-dimensional surface and the rendering visible through the use of light and dark and colour. These are made physically possible through linear perspective (representing distance), draughtsmanship (representing shape) and, most of all, colour. Perspective and draughtsmanship are what constitute the sculptural element in painting. They are what makes it possible to express external, three-dimensional reality. But colour is the most important feature of painting for Hegel: ‘it is colour, colouring, which makes a painter a painter’.14 This is because painting’s 31

subject matter is subjectivity, inner life; not just the looks of things or people or places, but what moves and animates them. And what makes it possible to express interiority in external shapes, to express bodies coming alive with feeling, to express, in short, ‘liveliness’, is colour. Hegel defends these claims about colour through an analysis that contrasts painting with other genres. Drawing and etching also render visible through light and dark, but here the mode of expression is the line. With line, the relation between light and dark is abstract and light and dark are juxtaposed. By contrast, when colour is used, the relation between light and dark is modelled, rich and anchored in the material. Hegel invites us to consider the way a human face in a portrait by Rembrandt is modelled from the dark colours and comes into the light, or the way ordinary objects in the painting of Van Eyck come to glow and demand our attention. Hegel uses the example of a flash of gold in a piece of jewellery: ‘looked at closely there is nothing in them but pure yellow, which, considered by itself has little brightness’.15 If you move close to a Rembrandt or Van Eyck, what you see is the material: fields of colour. Yet, from a distance it is as if the physical world comes alive in painting. Colour has the ability to make visibility shine and the objects represented appear as if ‘spirited’. This analysis enables Hegel to declare certain painterly achievements as the best use of colour. Hegel describes ‘carnation’, the ability to paint human flesh using many colours, as ‘the idea, or as it were, the summit of colouring’.16 Here, he is thinking of the way blues and pinks colour ‘the transparent yellow of the skin’, where veins can be seen through the surface or a flush can reveal warmth though the cheeks.17 The interiority that is painting’s subject-matter is of course not the physical interiority of embodied subjects, that is, the flesh and blood underneath our skin. Rather, when carnation is at its best, the appearance of a subject is animated and ensouled from within. 32

Colour is also what makes it possible for painting’s content to be most subjective, as in least beholden to external appearance. In Hegel’s description of sfumato, what he calls ‘the magical effect of colouring’, the use of colour appears to be approaching music: ‘the magic consists in so handling all the colours that what is produced is inherently objectless play of pure appearance’, he writes, and the results are ‘so fine, so fleeting, so expressive of the soul that they begin to pass over into the sphere of music’.18 To sum up, given its subject matter, that is, what painting is supposed to accomplish for us – namely, the representation of human subjectivity and inwardness – Hegel can argue that certain features of painting’s material are most fit for achieving such content. He can thereby make a claim as to what kind of painting and what kind of usages of colour approach the Ideal of painting. The description of the art form and its artistic possibilities, how it can succeed or fail, is related to the goal of painting, which in turn follows from its place in the historical development of Spirit and its material conditions. The particular feature of painting as a medium – representing through colour – is what makes subjectivity concretely manifest in an external appearance. Liveliness, soulfulness and free agency might also be expressed through music, literature and even philosophical prose, but in these forms liveliness is not visible as it is in painting. Hegel’s insistence on the centrality of colour in his Aesthetics can help us deepen the interpretation of his metaphor of philosophy’s grey painting in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right. The most important characteristic of art’s painting – colour – is precisely what is missing in philosophy’s painting. If Hegel’s Ideal of painting is depicting subjectivity through the material of colour, could we not say that as painting a grey painting is inferior, if not a failure? The absence of colour suggests a different relationship between the material and the subject matter in the case of philosophy: if we follow the 33

logic of the metaphor, whatever philosophy ‘paints’ is not something inner that comes to life in its exteriority, but rather the rationality and logic of something that is dying. We might say that philosophy does not look lively, which further suggests that vividness is not important for comprehension in thought. This is what Hegel’s theory of painting can help us understand about philosophy, given the metaphor of grey painting. The metaphor of grey painting can also help us understand what is going on when Hegel presents what is often referred to as the ‘end of art thesis’. There are two features of the notion of philosophy as grey painting that are relevant here: the belatedness and the recommendation against prescribing norms. When considering Hegel’s thesis about art’s exhaustion or completion, we see that these two related features appear to be in conflict. Let us first consider the recommendation against prescribing norms. An insight from Hegel’s metaphor is that philosophy should not be prescriptive (‘on the subject of issuing instructions on how the world ought to be: philosophy, at any rate, always come too late to perform this function’).19 Readers of the Aesthetics will no doubt find this a strange contention since Hegel’s text is full of claims about the inferiority of Egyptian art, the right shape of noses, the most fitting subject matter for painting, and, indeed, the assertion that the time in which art can be most important is over. That is, the text appears to be full of normative, evaluative and prescriptive claims. How can Hegel claim that philosophy should not construct ideals, when he calls Greek marble sculpture the Ideal of art? Hegel’s aesthetics focuses on a conception of art as necessary and important to life, and as self-sufficient – not in the sense of autonomous or characterised by a peculiar aesthetic value, but in the sense of being an adequate manifestation of Spirit in the world, a manifestation that bears ‘genuine truth and life’.20 For Hegel, the truth of a phenomenon like art is comprehended when 34

thought by philosophy, ‘so that the content which is already rational in itself may also gain a rational form and thereby appear justified to free thinking’.21 What is achieved on art’s behalf in the formulation of an aesthetic theory is an articulation of its rationality. What appears normative then, in Hegel’s theory of Attic drama, Romantic poetry and dimples (there shouldn’t be any) should in fact be recognised as the norms and reasons that already structure the phenomenon of art as a meaningful practice in a certain historical period. Now let us turn to the temporal characterisation. Philosophy’s painting is described as late, painting a shape of life that has grown old and cannot be made young again. Hence it follows that the presence of aesthetics, as a philosophical discipline about fine art, should already be a symptom of art being a shape of life that is coming to an end: ‘As the thought of the world, it [philosophy] appears only at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state.’22 What is comprehended in thought in Hegel’s aesthetics is the development of a phenomenon, art, that develops historically, achieving its fullest potential along the way, and which is eventually complete, and then exhausted, since its form cannot adequately fit its increasingly complex content. In the contemporary moment of Hegel’s Aesthetics, art is instead ‘transferred into our ideas’, inviting us ‘to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is’.23 This development is presented by Hegel as a historical fact, that is, a description of the contemporary situ­ ation, and it is neither strictly speaking art’s fault nor is it a negative evaluative judgement that philosophy makes about art. Thus, the metaphor from the Philosophy of Right can also be used to describe Hegel’s aesthetics: it is a grey painting, that is, an expression of something that we can know and think, but not rejuvenate. 35

It is here timely to remind ourselves of what I called the aspect of ‘false humility’ in Hegel’s metaphor of grey painting: the dull belatedness of philosophy also entails a power to declare something to be over. The proclamation of the end of art, even understood as a descriptive claim, entails that Hegel’s expansive aesthetics undercuts the importance of its very topic. If philosophy’s articulation has such consequences, it is hard not to understand it as nor­ mative or evaluative. We appear to be faced with an extreme example of what Arthur Danto referred to as philosophy’s disenfranchisement of art: through a systematic analysis of art’s definition (given to art by philosophy), philosophy supplies art with a certain historical meaning and role which leads to art’s end, when its purpose – expressing Spirit – is better achieved by philosophy.24 To continue using the metaphor: philosophy’s grey painting might be inferior as painting, but in addition to letting us understand the paintings that preceded it, philosophy’s grey painting also has the power to define all painting that follows. Philosophy’s grey painting is what we could call a ‘meta-painting’ – a painting of painting (and the other fine arts). This painting does not merely hover above the other paintings which it comprehends in thought; it is, from its conception in late modernity, also a painting amongst other paintings which casts its shadow over all the others. Painting after Hegel now means painting in the shadow of this grey painting. Painting happens in the intellectual realm created by aesthetic theory. Painting in the Intellectual Realm The challenge for us, two centuries after Hegel lectured in Berlin, is to describe and comprehend, philosophically, what art is after Hegel’s Aesthetics. In light of Hegel’s metaphor of the grey painting and his proclamation of the end of art, it is striking how many monochrome and grey paintings are 36

made in its wake. In the ‘grey-on-grey commodity world’, as Adorno describes the postwar era, many artists also turned to grey.25 Is the prevalence and importance of grey painting in the twentieth century a symptom that art is approaching philosophy, and that the difference at the heart of Hegel’s metaphor is collapsing? There are different ways of thinking about how we can relate Hegel’s philosophy to modernist painting. The most ‘literal’ Hegelian response could be to claim that modernist painting, independently of questions of abstraction, is ‘inferior’ art in the sense that it does not live up to the characteristics of the Ideal of painting – there is by necessity a mismatch between the subject matter that is important for the age and the artistic means available to the art of painting. Alternatively, we could take the presence and development of modernism to reveal that Hegel’s theory was plainly wrong. Art did not reach its end (in terms of exhaustion), because art does not have an end (in the sense of a goal or ideal), or at least Hegel did not get that goal right. The proliferation and continued importance of painting is testament to this. A third way to think about Hegel’s theory, and the painting that followed it, is to use Hegel’s theory to develop a Hegelian inspired philosophical account of what modernism is. In the following I take myself to be contributing to the latter.26 Here, I want to look at some of what Hegel says about painting and art more generally after philosophy, and to consider what resources he offers us for understanding the monochromes and greys of modernist painting in particular. The remainder of this chapter will reflect on what it is to paint in the shadow of Hegel, so to speak, that is, in the intellectual realm that is now opened up. The suggestion is that philosophy is after all ‘prescriptive’ in a way that Hegel does not explicitly recognise – it informs the future not merely by articulating, but also by changing, the conditions of art-making. 37

In the Introduction to the Aesthetics, Hegel describes what the contemporary situation is for art in in the early 1800s. He describes both what it means to live in a ‘world of reflection’ and how reflection makes itself felt in art: The development of reflection in our life today has made it a need of ours, in relation to both our will and judgment, to cling to general considerations and to regulate the particular by them, with the result that universal forms, laws, duties, rights, maxims, prevail as determining reasons and are the chief regulator.27 The description seems to fit with the self-understanding of political life in late modern Western societies. Whether this is really the best understanding of our late modern way of being is of course highly questionable – much philosophy since Hegel has challenged the validity of such a rational selfunderstanding, both as accurate description and as an ideal. But the description could explain the relationship between art and theory and the changing role of art in modernism. We live in an era of reflection – that is what modernism amounts to – and that means that the shape our lives have taken cannot be understood apart from that ‘intellectual realm’ which philosophical reflection opens up. Hegel continues: But for artistic interests and production we demand in general rather a quality of life in which the universal is not present in the form of law or maxim, but which gives the impression 38

of being one with the sense and the feeling, just as the universal and the rational is contained in the imagination by being brought into unity with a concrete sensuous appearance. Consequently, the conditions of our present time are not favourable to art.28 In other words, a form of life marked by reflection appears to be in tension with a life that is aesthetically expressible. Aesthetic expression of life, in which the universal takes on a concrete, sensuous appearance, has lost its credibility, we could say.29 The colour of painting was precisely what made a quality of life visible in artistic expression. What are the consequences for painting, when such an artistic expression does not fit our reality, needs or expectations? The impression artworks make on us now ‘is of a more reflective kind, and what they arouse in us needs a higher touchstone and a different test’ – we need philosophy.30 This is due to the development of Spirit, a historical fact about human expression and human concerns, and again something Hegel wants us to understand as a descriptive characterisation. It is, however, a situation in which philosophy clearly has normative implications for art, since philosophy of art becomes a need in such a world of reflection: ‘Thought and reflection have spread their wings above fine art’, Hegel writes, and, furthermore, ‘art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is’.31 One can read this last famous statement as describing a situation where an audience turns to philosophical interpretation or analysis in order to complement and complete the experience of an artwork, such that the artwork needs further philosophical reflection on its meaning. But the new intellectual situation for art is one that we all need to respond to, artists 39

and audience alike. The world of reflection and the philosophy of art more specifically have consequences for not only the interpretation, but also the practice of art. Art invites further philosophical reflection also about its very being and practice, it needs a kind of reflexivity that it earlier was able to do without, and it is to this topic I now turn. The Greyness of Modernist Painting Let us return to our metaphor: philosophy’s grey painting, including Hegel’s own aesthetics, has repercussions for all painting in its wake. This brings out an important nuancing of Hegel’s claim about philosophy’s status: philosophy ought not prescribe norms for art, but through articulating norms for art, that is by making art the kind of practice whose principles are known, philos­ophy also contributes to art’s development. The grey painting – theory – casts a shadow on all subsequent painting. This is what modernist art is: art-­making in the intellectual realm. Hegel describes this as a great challenge, posing several dilemmas to the artist: It is not, as might be supposed, merely that the practicing artist himself is infected by the loud voice of reflection all around him and by the opinions and judgments on art that have become customary everywhere, so that he is misled into introducing more thought into his work; the point is that our whole spiritual culture is of such a kind that he himself stands within the world of reflection and its relations, and could not by any act of will and decision 40

abstract himself from it, nor could he by special education or removal from the relations of life contrive and organize a special solitude to replace what he has lost.32 If we take Hegel seriously, there are indeed several normative implications of such a situation. The above offers several clear prescriptions about how not to respond – escapism or nostalgia are not live options, and neither is introducing more thought (the artist is ‘misled’ if he does, Hegel writes). However, ‘introducing more thought’ is precisely the tendency that Hegel himself gets to witness and which only intensifies over the following centuries in the wake of philosophical aesthetics: criticism, self-commentary and theory become companions of art, and the boundaries between them and art become increasingly hard to decipher. The presence of aesthetic theory is a fact the modernist artist has to relate to and, as a consequence, self-knowledge and self-criticism become intrinsic elements of the artist’s world. From a Hegelian point of view, the development of modernism is not surprising: the many -isms of modernism and its reverberations are what you get when attempting to practise art in the intellectual realm. The future situation that Hegel’s aesthetics predicts, described as blurring the lines between art and theory, might seem to fit with a familiar modernist narrative: What happens in art in modernism is an internal exploration and refinement of art’s conditions and limitations. Another dimension of this narrative is that of art’s increased autonomy. Unburdened by the heavy task of expressing Spirit, art can turn its attention towards itself and become clear about what is most essential to it when freed from any external purpose. That is, it can concentrate on its form and is free when it comes to content, since it is no longer tasked with representing anything substantial. In this sense, 41

art’s end implies its freedom. The coupling of a more reflexive, theorical art with a freedom from expressing particular content(s) can be thought of as two central features of formalism. However, such a way of thinking about art’s situation, as basically beholden only to itself and its own self-understanding, is anticipated and problem­ atised in Hegel. Throughout his career Hegel is critical of formalism, arguing against formalism both in philosophy and in the realm of art. The freedom of formalism comes with loss of relevance. In the section of Phenomenology of Spirit which includes that other monochrome image of the night in which all cows are black, Hegel describes the formalism of fellow German idealists as ‘. . . the shapeless repetition of one and the same thing which is only externally applied to diverse material and which contains only the tedious semblance of diversity . . .’. Imagine that Hegel is describing the formalism of an Ellsworth Kelly, or perhaps, rather, a critic like Roger Fry: Having the knowing subject apply the one unmoved form to whatever just happens to be present and then externally dipping the material into this motionless element contributes as much to fulfilling what is demanded as does a collection of purely arbitrary impressions about the content. Rather, when what is demanded is for the shapes to originate their richness and determine their differences from out of themselves, this other view instead consists only of a monochrome formalism which only arrives at the differences in its material because the material itself has 42

already been prepared for it and is something well known.33 The target of empty formalism could be several post-Kantian philosophers (including Kant himself), although the passage leading up to the ‘black cows’ is most likely meant to describe a specific kind of Idealism, as we find it in Schelling. Without developing the original context of the quotation further, we can apply the critique of philosophical formalism to art’s situation. The parallel to the idealist thinker would be this: a highly self-reflexive sort of artist, who produces something overly formal, but ultimately empty, and is thereby not able to express nor add anything to its subject matter. Such an artist creates something equivalent to the impoverished and insufficiently differentiated monochrome. What becomes clear when we put the two metaphors together is that Hegel must be able to differentiate between grey painting and monochromes. The difference between the two might then be, to follow Hegel’s analysis of painting, that a grey painting is still able to make visible – light and dark can still be modelled out of the material. On the other hand, perfect monochromes, understood here as uniform colour-field paintings, could offer variation in shape and colour from work to work, but little differentiation internal to the work.34 Monochromes lose the distinction between flatness and depth, the twofold-ness that is characteristic of painting, and as such they fail to be representational, even in a more inclusive sense than that used by Hegel. In The Truth is Always Grey: A History of Modernist Painting, Frances Guerin argues that the monochrome plays a central role in the project of modernist painting.35 The monochrome canvas of Malevich, an early and influential exemplar, is a performative rejection of representation, and such 43

monochrome ‘gestures’ recur through the twentieth century. Grey paintings are, however, not necessarily monochromes, and the task Guerin gives herself is to show how grey has a history and meaning that is more complex than the mere rejection of colour and that this is also at work in the use of grey in modernism. For example, the line in abstract works of Agnes Martin, Cy Twombly and Sol LeWitt (the juxtaposition of light and dark, as Hegel describes the line) is often grey; grey lends a sense of realism to representational painting by invoking the images of black and white photographs (which immediately challenged the meaning of painting at the onset of modernism); and grey is associated with memory and remembrance, especially as themes of the postwar period; with form, but also with social life. The complexity of grey is expressed in the quotation from Anselm Kiefer, from which Guerin borrows her title, talking about lead: ‘You cannot say that it is light or dark. It is a color or non-color that I identify with. I don’t believe in absolutes. The truth is always gray.’36 Could it be that the grey atmosphere initiated by Hegel’s philosophy of art likewise leaves more possibilities for art than varieties of formalism? The result of being unburdened of significant content (and defining or testing the boundaries of painting does not qualify as sufficiently significant) is described in Hegel’s Aesthetics as the decline of Romantic art, the last stage of art. At this stage, which is that of Hegel’s historical present, art can then either occupy itself with all kinds of content (think of various realistic novels) or be merely free-floating, random subjectivity. And art devoted to its form, be it overly self-important or playful, errs on the side of subjectivity. Such an art is not sustainable in the long run; even free subjectivity will eventually yearn for content, Hegel claims. The ego may, contrariwise, fail to find satisfaction in this self-enjoyment and instead 44

become inadequate to itself, so that it now feels a craving for the solid and substantial, for specific and essential interest.37 But what kind of content is fitting for art, now that the most pressing questions cannot be adequately addressed through sensuous form? How can the artist be both sincere in his address to the world and sufficiently self-­conscious of his own practice? The quandary that the ironist finds himself in illustrates what it is like, for example, to try to paint after philosophy’s grey painting: On the one hand, the subject does want to penetrate into truth and longs for objectivity,

Figure 1.1  Gerhard Richter, Grey (1967). Copyright: Gerhard Richter, 2021 45

but, on the other hand, cannot renounce his isolation and withdrawal into himself or tear himself free from this unsatisfied abstract inwardness.38 It is as if we hear the echo of Hegel’s description in the situation described by the painter Gerhard Richter 150 years later. At the end of the 1960s Richter starts to paint what is to become a series of grey paintings. Richter will increasingly turn to abstraction and also has several representational paintings in grey, but these works are grey monochromes.39 Describing the reasons for painting the grey monochromes, Richter in 1975 writes to Edy de Wilde (then director of Stedelijk Museum): ‘I did so because I did not know what to paint, or what there might be to paint: so wretched a start might lead to nothing meaningful.’40 One might be tempted to interpret this as Richter himself seeing his paintings as a series of intentional ‘black cows’. However, as Richter pursues these paintings, something changes: As time went on, however, I observed differences of quality among the grey surfaces – and also that these betrayed nothing of the destructive motivation that lay behind them. The pictures began to teach me. By generalizing a personal dilemma, they resolved it. 41 This resolution from within must have been a most exciting experience for the artist Richter, and it is also exciting from the point of view of Hegel’s account of painting. The unfavourable conditions described by Hegel leave the modern practice of art a grey atmosphere to paint within, in which an art 46

that is simultaneously sincere, important and self-conscious of its purpose and its own historicity is very likely not achievable. Richter seems to face a situation in the late 1960s that confirms some of Hegel’s predictions for art’s future and he turns to grey in order to face up to the seeming impossibility of painting. Still, contrary to his ‘destructive motivation’, Richter finds that the art of painting itself offers resources. Even grey has a nuance and, he suggests, even grey paintings are results of colour: To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour. 42 This latter statement could be read as implying that colour really is the core principle of painting, and that grey is a concept that philosophy can grasp (something like this seems to be what Richter means by ‘idea’), but not painting. Hence philosophy might paint in grey, like Hegel claims, but when painting paints in grey, something else happens: painting cannot but help to be something other than indifference and absence, Richter realises, so that when grey is painted, it joins the colours, and the colours are ultimately what gives painting its liveli­ ness. Read this way, the grey painting that is painted in philosophy’s shadow, culminating here in Richter’s 1970s series Grau, might confirm that Hegel was right about the importance of colour for painting. However, the manner in which it does so has a reflexivity and vitality that Hegel never could have imagined. 47

Notes 1. I will use ‘modernism’ in a fairly inclusive sense, referring to works from the second half of the nineteenth century and onwards that are characterised by increasing formal inventiveness. 2. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23. 3. The richness both of examples, and interpretations of grey paintings is testified to by the contributions in this volume. For a book-length treatment of the history and interpretation of grey painting in modernism, see Frances Guerin, The Truth is Always Grey: A History of Modernist Painting (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Guerin uses precisely the prevalence of grey painting as a way of interpreting and problematising the development of modernist painting. As will become clear below, for Hegel the meaning of a grey painting is dependent on its historical situatedness. 4. Another way to think about what is at stake with respect to the issue of normativity, is whether the norms that structure a practice like art are realised by us or prescribed or given to the practice by us (or philosophy). The way I read Hegel here is that philosophy merely articulates the logic that is already in the world. However, as we will see, such articulation also happens in the world and further affects it, so that the distinction between ‘merely’ describing and ‘issuing instruction’, if only implicitly, is harder to maintain. 5. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 21. 6. ‘To comprehend what is is the task of philosophy, for what is is reason’, Hegel writes in the same context. This entails that a phenomenon like art already has its own logic which grounds its practice and moves its historical development, which philosophy understands and articulates. 7. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 14, Addition H. 48

8. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. and trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), §15, p. 17. The main target here is thought to be Schelling, see further discussion below. 9. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 799. 10. Hegel, Aesthetics, 799. 11. Hegel, Aesthetics, 802, 794. 12. Hegel, Aesthetics, 794. 13. ‘. . . natural objects as such in their purely external form and juxtaposition should not be the real subject-matter of painting, because, if they were, painting would become mere imitation; on the contrary, the life of nature, which extends through everything, and the characteristic sympathy between objects thus animated and specific moods of the soul is what painting has to emphasize and portray in a lively way in its landscapes.’ Hegel, Aesthetics, 832. 14. Hegel, Aesthetics, 838. 15. Hegel, Aesthetics, 843. 16. Hegel, Aesthetics, 846. 17. This description of carnation also reveals a limitation of the kinds of paintings Hegel is imagining – presumably, the subjects represented therein would all be light-­ skinned. 18. Hegel, Aesthetics, 848. 19. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 23. 20. Hegel, Aesthetics, 11. 21. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 11. 22. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 23. 23. Hegel, Aesthetics, 11. 24. Arthur Danto, ‘The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art’, in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 1–22. 49

25. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 253. 26. The most important contributors to this third way are Pippin and Rutter, cf. Robert B. Pippin, ‘What Was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel)’, Critical Inquiry, 1 (Autumn 2002): 1–24; Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Benjamin Rutter, Hegel on the Modern Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). I have tried to contribute to this in the case of sculpture in Ingvild Torsen, ‘The Future of Hegelian Art History: On the Body in Late Modern Sculpture’, in Paul A. Kottman and Michael Squire (eds), The Art of Hegel’s Aesthetics: Hegelian Philosophy and the Perspectives of Art History (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2018), 303–330. See also Hanneke Grootenboer, ‘The Self-conscious Image: Painting and Hegel’s Idea of Reflection’, in Kottman and Squire, The Art of Hegel’s Aesthetics, 189–210. Other recent studies are Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Einführung in Hegels Äesthetik (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005) and Lydia L. Moland, Hegel’s Aesthetics. The Art of Idealism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), which both stay closer to Hegel’s text on the question of modernism. 27. Hegel, Aesthetics, 10. 28. Hegel, Aesthetics, 10. 29. Robert Pippin in After the Beautiful describes modernism as characterised by a scepticism towards the very possibility of a shared aesthetic intelligibility, that is, that it is possible for us to have a similar understanding of what the pressing subject matters ‘look like’ at all. The sceptical question is whether, in the age of reflection, our subjectivity could successfully be expressed in visual art. 30. Hegel, Aesthetics, 10. 31. Hegel, Aesthetics, 10–11. 32. Hegel, Aesthetics, 10. 33. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 17. 50

34. Danto’s gallery of monochrome reds in the opening of Transfiguration of the Commonplace could be said to challenge this claim. Arthur Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1–3. 35. Frances Guerin, The Truth is Always Grey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2018). 36. Quoted in Guerin, The Truth is Always Grey, 17–18. 37. Hegel, Aesthetics, 66. 38. Hegel, Aesthetics, 66. 39. See the series of fifteen (!) paintings (oil on canvas) entitled Grau from 1970 (numbers 247-1 to 247-15 in Richter’s Catalogue Raisonné. Dietmar Elger (ed.), Gerhard Richter. Catalogue Raisonné. Volume 2: 1968–1976, nos 198–388 (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2017)). 40. Richter, ‘Letter to Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975’, in Gerhard Richter – Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters, 1961–2007 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), 91. 41. Richter, ‘Letter to Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975’, 91. 42. Richter, Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters, 1961–2007, 91.

51

2. Grey Time: Anachromism and Waiting for Beckett Laura Salisbury

When the actor Billie Whitelaw was rehearsing the play Footfalls in 1976, Samuel Beckett gave her some advice. As she was getting to grips with this play in which a woman paces back and forth, over and over, revolving in her mind a relationship of traumatic attachment to a mother who is now only an insistent voice, Beckett instructed her, over again: ‘Too much colour, Billie, too much colour.’1 He directed her towards a voice and embodied attitude that 53

matched the tattered grey dress and ashen oval of stage space upon which he had insisted. When Whitelaw was rehearsing Rockaby (1981), Beckett similarly told her that the voice used should be ‘very monotonous’: ‘There’s no colour, or hardly any.’2 The colourlessness of grey is everywhere in Beckett’s finished work and firmly associated with his austere and carefully curated personal image.3 But as the example above makes clear, an orientation towards grey was also part of his process, his craft. Beckett’s attempts to dampen down and flatten the ‘drama’ in Whitelaw’s performance, in and through rehearsal time, can clearly be linked to writing strategies designed to strip out or ‘vaguen’ those obviously ‘colourful’ elements visible in his manuscript drafts;4 they also match his famous turn from English to French described as a movement from ‘ex[c]ess to lack of colour’.5 Whether in the rehearsal studio, through the drafting process, or by reworking texts through translation, the act of taking time into the texts and insisting they absorb it seems to have been key to the work of realising Beckett’s grey vision. Alongside marking Beckett’s obvious fascination with what we would now call greyscale images, this chapter will argue that Beckett’s modernist, often minimalist works also materialise an analogous temporal aesthetic: a grey time structured, in particular, by an attention to waiting without the possibility of fulfilment or progression. In a greyscale image, the value of each pixel is a single sample representing only an amount of light; in other words, it carries information only about intensity rather than chromatic difference. I want to argue that grey time might similarly be described as a temporality structured not by a movement through states that are clearly different in kind, but through the modulation of experiences of intensity that emerge while waiting. As contrasting differences that would enable forms of dialectical temporal progression become difficult to detect, Beckett’s commitment to what I will term anachromism brings into focus the time of post-World 54

War II European and US modernity – a time in which a sense of a future into which one could step had sheared away. I will also argue that the concept of anachromism enables an exploration of how Beckett’s grey time also seems to reach forwards, proleptically, in ways that illuminate the contours of the contemporary moment – our own waiting times. Colour: None The scene begins with three women sat on a bench in dulled shades, with the red, yellow and violet of their coats fading out to grey. The figures Flo, Vi and Ru are ‘as alike as possible’ and as abbreviated as their names.6 As one gets up and leaves, the other two discuss her fate (an impending catastrophe, perhaps her death) in faint, muted tones and in a cycle that repeats: FLO: Ru. RU: Yes. FLO:  What do you think of Vi? RU:  I see little change. [Flo moves to the centre seat, whispers in Ru’s ear. [Appalled.]] Oh! [They look at each other. Flo puts her finger to her lips.] Does she not realize? FLO:  God grant not.7 In this play – Come and Go – which was written in 1965 and first performed in German in 1966, action and dialogue are muted, with the scene voided of expressive sound, light or colour. Beckett himself stated that the dialogue should be ‘[c]olourless except for three “ohs” and two lines following’.8 ‘One sees little in this light’, Flo notes.9 There is, however, evidence to suggest that 55

Beckett started out with more obviously vivid elements for Come and Go. At first, he considered calling the play ‘Good Heavens’ – a sardonic, rather overdone pun for a play that ostensibly concerns the terminal illness of its three protagonists. The draft of ‘Good Heavens’ has episodes of dialogue that are strikingly colloquial, while a later version of the play includes a character performing a comically inappropriate reading from what seems to be a bad romantic novel. But all of this is stripped away in favour of the suspension of meaning: VI:  May we not speak of the old days? (Silence.) Of what came after? (Silence.)10 Here, there is little possibility of speaking either of the past or an imagined future, for the whispered prognosis around which the play constellates is never heard. Instead, it is as if washes of identifiable colour are being removed, leaving a structural grisaille of shaded, though uncertain, affective intensity underneath. The scene simply repeats and plays itself out while waiting for a denouement that never arrives. In the television play Ghost Trio (1977), we see a similar attempt to place meaning in suspension and to denude the text of easily determinable affect. The working title of the play was moderated from ‘Tryst’ to the more obviously untimely Ghost Trio and, right from the start, we are in a shaded, greyscale environment: ‘Mine is a faint voice. Kindly tune accordingly. [Pause.] It will not be raised, nor lowered, whatever happens.’ There will be ‘[n]o shadow. Colour: none. All grey. Shades of grey. [Pause.] The colour grey if you wish, shades of the colour grey’, while the strongest injunction in the play is 56

to ‘[k]eep that sound down’.11 The stage space of Ghost Trio (chamber, wall, door, window) and props (pallet, pillow, cassette) are similarly stripped of depth and volume but are instead described as ‘smooth grey rectangle[s]’.12 The doors must have no knobs and the window is only an ‘[o]paque sheet of glass’: these blank surfaces must repel a looking that searches for interest or depth within the austerely restricted environment. In one shot, without equivalent in Beckett’s oeuvre, we are shown, simply, a square of dust. The arrangement of rectangles, in various shades of grey within the surrounding rectangle of the room, eschews depth, refusing the figurative and its ocular illusions of perspective and volume. The grey lighting, described as ‘faint, omnipresent. No visible source’, also declines the possibility of contrasts or the hollowing out concave and convex spaces.13 Instead, the restricted depth of field of the television image was emphasised. Beckett indeed had high hopes that Jim Lewis, the cameraman, could match his vision, writing that ‘His lighting will be good & perhaps eliminate all shadows.’14 But as Beckett insisted in a 1977 letter to Antoni Libera, the demands of grey were not easily met; they could only be achieved with a care and technical precision that would guard against rendering what was present through more obvious modes of contrast: the ‘tone is colourless and unvarying from start to finish, “the colour grey if you wish”, very hard to keep up’.15 Beckett’s Ghost Trio was broadcast on the BBC in 1977 within a longer programme called Shades, appearing alongside . . . but the clouds . . . and a striking revisioning for television of the play Not I. The word ‘shades’ suggests that we might be in a ghostly, haunted environment, but it also brings into focus the plays’ use of monochrome. As Jonathan Bignell has noted, by 1977 audiences were used to watching colour footage, and because Shades used colour for its discussion elements the broadcast drew attention to the anachronistic atmosphere of these black and white plays that seemed belated and 57

ongoing, even as they also clearly positioned themselves as part of a theatrical and televisual avant garde.16 David Cunningham has argued that Beckett’s late television plays like Ghost Trio and Quad also use minimalism to present a contrast to, and laborious negation of, the expectations of the medium, ‘the image-bombardment that is the televisual stream’. Within this lurid context, he suggests, Beckett’s TV plays materialise an abstraction and ‘blankness achieved against the odds’.17 Indeed, it is as if the lighting of Ghost Trio, which is ‘faint, omnipresent. No visible source’, and its representation of an ‘[o]paque sheet of glass’,18 reproduces, through precise technical work, the blank-grey screen of the television set on which the play would have been received, but before it had warmed up enough to transmit expected levels of contrast. Rosalind Krauss has suggested that Beckett can be understood as part of an artistic tradition of 1960s and 1970s minimalism precisely because of his commitment to abstraction and the monochrome. She describes Sol LeWitt’s double page spread in Harper’s Bazaar (April 1969) that marked the occasion of Beckett’s publication of Come and Go as a ‘linear hive’19 – a matrix or grid of squares, some shaded grey with geometric lines, others encasing Beckett’s text – that expressed both artists’ shared interest in an ‘intellecto-conceptual approach’ rather than ‘colore – the representation of atmosphere and rich texture’.20 But I would argue that Beckett’s commitment to the labour of the monochrome marks his attention to a belated but ongoing temporality that is not without atmosphere. Affect is not simply drained off; instead, in the mid-to-late work Beckett uses an attention to the shading of intensity of atmosphere to measure and articulate grey on grey differences that cannot quite be called differences in kind, but that persist and are shaded within an ongoing duration that may merely have the appearance of indifference. In 1961, Beckett described his work as inhabiting what we might think of as a grey zone shaded in both darkness and light: 58

If life and death did not both present themselves to us, there would be no inscrutability. If there were only darkness, all would be clear. It is because there is not only darkness but also light that our situation becomes inexplicable [. . .] The question would also be removed if we believed in the contrary – total salvation. But where we have both light and dark we have also the inexplicable. The key word in my plays is ‘perhaps’.21 By Beckett’s own account, this is a greyscale environment denuded of its poles: black, or the total absence of transmitted or reflected light, and white, the total transmission or reflection of light at all visible wavelengths. But there is also a temporality to be teased out of this greyscale. For there is little sense of a progressive movement towards enlightenment or what we might think of as the promise of modernity evoked in Beckett’s account; although neither is there a possibility of the black negation of absolute obliteration or extinction that modernity can produce through its technologies of industry and war. We are, instead, in a ‘perhaps’ that is more like a meantime – a stretched duration of decrepitude that endures in the wake of a former life or disaster in the past, but that also waits in the shadow of a dissolution to come. The grey time of this life limps on chronically, waiting and persisting in stable but slowly worsening conditions, without the hope of either cure or death.22 It is worth noting that grey is not, strictly speaking, a colour at all: it is, rather, a shade. It is achromatic: composed of black and white in various shades of intensity rather than hues. Grey time, which would also be neither simply black nor white, nor coloured with stable or easily determinable affect, 59

might then usefully be described as anachromistic. In reaching for this neologism, I recognise that there is some crossover between the idea of a temporal ‘colour’, or temporal ‘shade’, produced by an aesthetic object and materialised within a perceiving subject and Ben Anderson’s work on atmosphere. Anderson describes atmospheres as emerging in the interstices and relations between object and subject: Atmospheres require completion by the subjects that ‘apprehend’ them. They belong to the perceiving subject. On the other hand, atmospheres ‘emanate’ from the ensemble of elements that make up the aesthetic object. They belong to the aesthetic object. Atmospheres are, on this account, always in the process of emerging and transforming.23 But whereas Anderson pays attention to ‘the intensive spatialities of atmosspheres’,24 my wager is that a particular form of intensive temporality – one that both belongs to and transverses the perceiving subject and aesthetic object – might be focalised through an attention to colour or, in this case, shade. I want to argue that in Beckett’s grey we find emerging into perception an intensive temporality that has a kinship with anachronism – a chronological inconsistency that is, at least etymologically, ‘against time’ as it is usually arranged. To speak of grey time as anachromistic, then, is to evoke an aesthetic experience that is against clear colour or hue, but, as with anachronism, also produces a slub in the fabric of time as it is usually thought. The double gesture of the term anachromism is the attempt to speak to time’s intensity rather than, as is more usual, concentrating on its flow, 60

movement or progression, while trying to capture an atmosphere where there is an explicit weaving or binding in of blank, uncertain, colourless ‘colour’ and affect into what is felt of time. From the Blue Hour to an Ashen Sun How might we describe the intensive qualities of time? It is common to make a distinction between measuring time’s quantity and anatomising its qualities, to note the difference between clock time and the human experience of duration and to use metaphor as a way of feeling towards the felt qualities of time. Clock time is most frequently described in a lightly metaphorised fashion; time is spoken of as being short and long, as if always already measured. Duration tends to be described according to a more heavily metaphorised texture, however: it can be smooth, flowing, jagged, bumpy, frayed, stretched, sticky, stuck, solid, or perhaps even friable. Less commonly, temporality can be described in terms of its intensity: full, empty, saturated, diluted, dispersed. Even more unusually, there are occasions when temporal intensity can seem to take on a colour, a hue. Various empirical studies of the effect of colour on time perception have shown that long-wavelength colours such as red seem to precipitate feelings of excitement that quicken the sense of time’s passage, while short-­wavelength colours such as blue are perceived as more relaxing, seeming to stretch the perception of the length of a stimulus.25 And in terms of Western cultural figurations of time and colour, it is the blues that have come to be associated with extended and extensive experiences of temporality – with longing. Joan Didion has written of the blue hour, the gloaming, ‘when the twilights turn long and blue’,26 as a kind of waiting time that contains a promise of what is to come, but that is always already in the penumbra of future losses and 61

dissolution. In 1912, Jacques Guerlain was inspired by the same suspended moment, composing the perfume L’heure Bleue to capture the time in which the sun has set but night has not yet fallen. But L’heure Bleue is now viewed as a deeply melancholic scent, evocative of the dying years of what later came to be imagined as the Belle Epoque – that lost time after the end of the Franco-­Prussian War in 1871 but before the Great War came to shade so many twentieth-century optimisms. Grey seems much closer to blue than to red hues, and in its suspension, in its waiting, grey time might have something of the double articulation of optimism and a proleptic sense of loss of the blue hour. But it has little of blue’s romanticism or seductive, nostalgic melan­ choly. Instead, the atmosphere of grey time, while not without shades of intensity, is never certain of its qualities. It becomes hard to say that grey time has any essential hue. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, written in French in 1948 and linked to Beckett’s experiences of living in Occupied France in World War II, describes a grey zone: ‘Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!’27 Every possibility on the horizon of the play is blanked out by the refrain: ‘we’re waiting for Godot’. Neither weak enough to give up, nor strong enough to leave, Vladimir and Estragon stand, or sit, and wait. Pozzo enters and imagines that night will burst as a relief through a sky that is gradually being stripped of colour and vividness, that is ‘losing its effulgence’. All begins to ‘grow pale [. . .] pale, ever a little paler, a little paler until [. . .] pppfff! finished! It comes to rest.’28 For Vladimir and Estragon, waiting under these conditions, where night or Godot might be imagined to come ‘just when we least expect it’, is tolerable, at least for a time: ESTRAGON:  So long as one knows. VLADIMIR:  One can bide one’s time. 62

ESTRAGON:  One knows what to expect. VLADIMIR:  No further need to worry. ESTRAGON:  Simply wait.29 But later this idea fades out as knowing what to expect dissipates. Waiting starts to shift into something less orchestrated around rhythmic diurnal poles of light and dark. As Vladimir puts it, when he thinks Godot has arrived (though it is actually Pozzo), ‘[t]ime flows already again. The sun will set, the moon will rise, and we away . . . from here.’30 But this comes as a relief from that waiting into which they have inexorably been shading – a waiting that is no longer endurable because the for has dropped out into an ellipsis: ‘We are no longer waiting alone, waiting for night, waiting for Godot, waiting for . . . waiting.’31 The arrival of Pozzo is, of course, a false dawn (or dusk). Pozzo is not Godot; the waiting is not finished. There is a suggestion that there was once a twilight where one could confidently wait for night to fall, where a decadent ‘losing heart’ could have been an achievement. But Vladimir states that crepuscular decadence is no longer possible in this century: ‘We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties.’ For the postwar is no longer the Belle Epoque in which Vladimir and Estragon remember themselves ‘[h]and in hand from the top of the Eiffel tower [opened 1889], among the first. We were presentable in those days.’32 Instead they are suspended, in a stuttered repetition that cannot progress; they are ‘waiting for . . . waiting’. And in this cryptic utterance we see the condition from which night, Godot and the diversions of others have merely been distracting them. The for drops away, leaving, simply, waiting ‘in the midst of nothingness’.33 The French title En attendant Godot indeed captures rather better than the English the fact that Godot’s arrival will never be the main act of this play; instead, attention will be funnelled towards 63

what might go on while waiting for Godot.34 Attendre, and the more obvious presence in French of the link to the Latin tendere, to stretch, also evokes a sense of an attenuated present pulled thin between the ever-­widening poles of an unrecoverable past and ungraspable future, even though the scene is never quite vivid enough to achieve the bluesy certainty of longing. The waiting time of Godot, which might also be marked as a grey time, has often been read in terms of its metaphysics of temporality; but, as more recent criticism and many productions have emphasised, it was also an attempt to explore what it meant to live in a socio-historical moment following World War II that seemed like an abandoned present, denuded of a future that might be seized. Although written following the Allies’ victory and in a time of rebuilding, Godot was a postwar settlement that anatomised what it meant to live on in the wake of an unnamed, unnameable, unchanging disaster. As Alain Badiou implies, following a reference to Godot, this may have been a sensation born of historical circumstances, but it comes to feel total: ‘Yes, the century is an ashen sun.’35 Endgame (1957) similarly plays out in the grey wake of an unfolding disaster in which, looking both forwards and backwards in time, all the characters become like Hamm’s imagined and ‘appalled’ madman who can only drop his gaze: ‘All he had seen was ashes.’36 Clov peers into the outside world with his telescope. To Hamm’s surprise it is no longer night or day, it is ‘GRREY!’: ‘[l]ight black. From pole to pole.’37 It is clear that ‘[o]utside of here it’s death’,38 and the play has variously been read as a displaced account of World War II, an invocation of the Irish Potato Famine of just over a hundred years previously (a hole in historical time into which the lives of a million were swallowed),39 and an anxious anticipation of a global nuclear holocaust that would reach beyond the ruined cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the historical specificity of such scenes is declined in the play, as is progress or regress; instead, time gathers as a mix of unclearly 64

differentiated particles: ‘Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. [Pause.] Grain upon gain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.’40 These opening lines of Endgame show that, from the start, there is a movement from order to disorder, towards shades of undifferentiation. This movement mimes the second law of thermodynamics discovered and articulated in the mid-nineteenth century: the idea that the total entropy of an isolated system always increases over time, with the movement towards a disorganised state and eventually to the stillness of heat death marking the arrow of time and the future as inevitable dissolution. We know from his notebooks that Beckett was influenced by technical discussions of entropy, 41 and the movement from colour to grey explicitly acts as both a marker of the increase in entropy and an arrow of time in one of Beckett’s late explorations of a square of dust. Quad was written in 1980 but Beckett directed, altered and extended it by adding a second part for the German TV company Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart in 1981. Quadrat I seems unusually fast, noisy and colourful for a Beckett play; but when Beckett saw the playback on a black and white monitor he perhaps saw an echo of more familiar ground. ‘Yes, marvellous’, he said: ‘it’s 100,000 years later’. 42 The actors were called back for another shoot; this time, though, the footage was printed in black and white. Quadrat II thus has ‘no colour, all four in identical white gowns, footsteps only sound, slow tempo, series 1 only’.43 There is an implied entropic decline within the repeating series, as if the intrinsic motor energy, or perhaps the atomic energy within these figures, is winding down towards heat death. As a ‘quadrat’ is a small area of habitat typically of one square metre acting as a sample to ascertain the distribution of plants or animals, the plays suggest mere snapshots from a sequence in which time is not looped but extenuates itself out into geological tracts. One hundred thousand years 65

is a waiting time beyond historical imagining; nevertheless, the second half of the twentieth century explicitly forced this deep time into consciousness. As John Beck has argued: While nuclear war promises to end time, radiation lasts a long time, and the dilemma of how to imagine the persistence of contaminated matter surviving intact for thousands of years is barely more manageable than conceiving the devastation of nuclear war itself. The intervention of nuclear energy not only introduces the reality of there being no future, it also delivers an irreversible future of waste.44 Stilling, but not stilled, the grey dust of Quadrat II is that of a ‘half-life’: a future that is both cancelled and yet endures, even if only minimally, under the grey light of an ashen sun.45 Beckett only experimented with one text where ongoing entropic time is replaced with the theoretical possibility of timeless, endless serialism. This is paradoxically achieved through the idea of the possibly endless repetition of finite elements. In 1969 Beckett wrote Sans, translated as Lessness in 1970: Ruins true refuge long last towards which so many false time out of mind. All sides endlessness earth sky as one no sound no stir. Grey face two pale blue little body heart beating only upright. Blacked out fallen open four walls over backwards true refuge issueless. 66

Scattered ruins same grey as the sand ash grey true refuge. Four square all light sheer white blank planes gone all from mind. Never was but grey air timeless no sound figment the passing light. No sound no stir ash grey sky mirrored earth mirrored sky. Never this changelessness dream the passing hour.46 The word grey appears more times in this text than any other in Beckett’s oeuvre (forty-four times in less than five pages), though that is at least partially because of its particular compositional structure. As Ruby Cohn describes it, the text consists of an arrangement of the sixty sentences and was inspired by John Cage’s ‘indeterminacy of composition’. Beckett wrote his sixty different sentences in six ‘families’, each family arising from an image. He then wrote each sentence on a separate piece of paper and twice drew them from a container in random sequence. This became the order of the 120 sentences in Sans. Beckett then wrote the number 3 on four separate pieces of paper, the number 4 on six pieces of paper, the number 5 on four pieces, the number 6 on six pieces and the number 7 on four pieces of paper. Again, drawing randomly, he ordered the sentences into paragraphs according to the number drawn.47 Although greyness indicates a time left after the white walls that dominated the earlier cylinder pieces like All Strange Away (1963–1964) have fallen, the suggestion of fading in Lessness is overwritten by the idea of a repeatable series – an endlessness. The published version of Lessness is, after all, only one of the approximately 1.9 x 10176 possible versions, which can repeat endlessly. This indeterminacy of performance and the possibility of endlessness is dependent, however, on a repetition of the operations of random generation 67

external to the textual system. And it is this action that puts back in work and organising energy that acts against the thermodynamic movement towards disorder and heat death. In 2016, the theatre director Jonathan Heron released an online piece called End/Lessness; it uses recordings of the actor and Beckett scholar Rosemary Pountney reading out the sections from Lessness that are then played out according to computer pseudo-random generation.48 The possibility of ghostly endurance is particularly emphasised by the fact that the pieces of text were recorded when Pountney knew her death was imminent.49 But the piece is also not quite endless. Computer systems are not energyless or workless, despite an imaginary dominated by matter seemingly becoming immaterial – clouds and the ether. The material server power that underpins End/Lessness and our access to it puts back in work and organising energy into the online world and the online text; at least temporarily, it therefore opposes the thermodynamic movement towards disorder and heat death. The losses over time are also real and can be measured through intensity and affect. Rosemary is gone, which pains those who knew her, even as traces of her live on. Despite the repeated term ‘endlessness’, then, both Heron’s and Pountney’s End/Lessness and Beckett’s Lessness are only theoretically negentropic. The material text as given, as produced, published and read by material bodies, indeed suggests a time that inches forwards rather than repeats endlessly, backwards as forwards, through randomly generated equivalence. Instead, it is the intensity of lessness in the shadow of endlessness that is evoked: an anachromistic grey of modulating intensities. A grey on grey instance of difference is momentarily subtracted from endless grey, endless indifference, and gathered in a textual word heap.50 This accumulation and overlaying that has neither the ‘colour’ of progress nor its absolute negation is suggestively illuminated by Rebecca Comay’s reading of Hegel’s famous assertion at the end of the Preface to the 68

Philosophy of Right that philosophy paints ‘grey on grey’. One of the significant things Comay notes about grey is that it has no dialectical opposite; as a consequence, it inhabits an anomalous position in terms of frameworks of historical time. Although she admits that a mixture of black and white may look like ‘the triumph of the ideal: the convergence of the dusk of sensation with the dawn of inner illumination, physical blindness with spiritual insight’, a far less affirmative reading is both possible and necessary.51 Comay describes Hegel refusing the fantasies of regeneration that philosophy might inaugurate as it looks back and forwards, flickering: ‘it paints, overpaints, and silently defaces as it mourns its lost futures and future losses’.52 Positioning itself in a crepuscular time that lingers, that is already anachronistic, philosophy instead paints ‘gray on gray . . . to mark the exhaustion of the present – a faded landscape in which there is nothing to take over and nothing to pass on’.53 Hegel’s philosophy thus positions itself, Comay argues, like the modernity from which it emerges, as something that can neither end nor begin again. But just as modernity has its own specific temporal logic and historical consciousness, the invocation of painting ‘grey on grey’ also suggests a specific temporal aesthetic – an aesthetic Beckett might be said to inherit. Beckett renders this anachromistic temporality of grey time palpable across his texts and their embodied reception by exploring stilling, though never still or completely indifferent, shades of difference in intensity. Rather than chromatic difference or the difference in kind that could enable a sense of contrast, dialectical progress or the passage of time, grey time just accumulates; it gathers in an ‘impossible heap’. It is worth noting that two twentieth-century philosophers have taken up Beckett’s resistance to dialectical logical operations and a progressive temporality precisely by aligning it with his commitment to grey. Alain Badiou describes Beckett’s work as an articulation of the truth of Being which is 69

constructed not according to the operations of difference, but through sameness – a Being that is ‘in-separate’, ‘in-distinct’, ‘void’, and figured through ‘grey black’:54 It is a black such that no light can be inferred to contrast with it, an ‘uncontrasted’ black. This black is sufficiently grey for there to be no light opposed to it as its other. In an abstract sense, the place of being is fictionalised as a black that is grey enough to be anti-dialectical [. . .] The grey black is a black that must be grasped in its own arrangement and which does not form a pair with anything else.55 Grey-black, which has no opposite, has no place in the dialectical progression of historical time; instead, for Badiou, Beckett’s grey-black marks out what inheres as singular and universal. In ‘The Exhausted’, Gilles Deleuze has also described Beckett’s resistance to dialectical operations dependent on differences in kind through his attention to a grey. But instead of Badiou’s sense that grey signals the universal, Deleuze uses grey to represent Beckett’s commitment to the exhaustion of all possibilities. The idea of ‘exclusive disjunctions’, where it could be daytime or night-time, one could choose to go out or stay in, shades into something different in Beckett’s work. Here, just as there can be no opposing dark with light, there can be no ‘orders of preference’.56 And yet, as Deleuze notes, ‘one does not fall into the undifferentiated, or into the famous unity of contradictories, nor is one passive; one remains active, but for nothing’.57 The possible is exhausted and yet distinctions persist, although they seem to create only further permutations rather than any kind of progress. Indeed, Deleuze describes the close ups of objects in 70

Ghost Trio as ‘homogenous, gray, rectangular parts homologous with a single space distinguished solely by nuances of gray . . . These objects in space are strictly identical to the parts of space. It is therefore any-space-whatever.’58 Any-space-whatever, and yet I would argue that Beckett’s is a space, a world, in which particular, sometimes barely differentiated, bodies do still persist. They perceive and are perceived as and through shades of intensity. In the exhaustion of possibilities there are still bodies, there is still activity, one might say that there is affect and atmosphere, but it is ‘for nothing’. Although Badiou and Deleuze are writing about Beckett in an ontological register, we have already seen that there is a way of thinking through the articulation of bodies as sites of intensity that ‘remain active, but for nothing’ in more psychosocial and historical terms. The final part of this chapter will examine grey time and Beckett’s anachromism in relation to bodies that subsist with their intensities and affects beyond the immediately postwar moment. In the following section I will explore how experiences and sensations of exhaustion and the uncontrasted come to characterise the contemporary moment of late liberalism in which historical progress appears to have stalled. Stripped of the oppositions from which a feeling of dialectical movement could emerge, but marked but differing gradations of intensity, I want to argue that late liberalism can also be characterised as a grey time that accumulates rather than passes – a grey time to which Beckett’s work still seems to speak. The Meantime In her book Enduring Time, Lisa Baraitser describes and contributes to a body of work in social theory that pays attention to the temporal contradictions of late capitalism in which clear acceleration plays out alongside a sense of a future that can no longer unfold:59 the ‘slow violence’ of climate change and 71

the irreversible loss of biodiversity in the Anthropocene;60 the ‘slow death’ of bodies worn out under the conditions of capital in which agency must be rethought as maintenance rather than making;61 the ‘new chronic’ in which individual bodies and whole societies are managed in continual states of crisis that perpetuate injustice and exclusion;62 and the ongoing effects of vio­l­ence in the wake of slavery and settler colonialism.63 While the chronic injustices of wage slavery and new forms of transgenerational debt bondage play out at a social level,64 ‘deep time’ violence is produced by the ongoing effects of nuclear waste that will endure beyond human timescales.65 As social theory articulates it, the sensation of the ‘slow cancellation of the future’ that Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi describes emerged in the 1970s and 1980s to overwrite Marxist commitments to dialectical progress and bourgeois beliefs in a progressive future of welfare and democracy.66 But this sensation has only accelerated since the financial crash, with a paradoxical accumulation of ever-new ways in which the future comes to feel stalled and replaced by heaps of lost futures and future losses, to borrow Comay’s phrase. But the result is not an experience of indifference. Instead, this sense of accumulation might be captured through an idea of the intensification of the affective experiences of ‘cruel optimism’ and ‘slow death’ – the promise of ‘the good life’ upon which late capitalism rests and the reality of brutal of forms of exclusion from any future that could come to change the conditions of the present or into which one could step.67 The continuing resonance of Beckett’s work in this present, as it echoes beyond its postwar moment, in some ways seems obvious. Alongside the glimpse of the deep time violence of a future of nuclear waste, ‘slow death’ and forms of lateral agency seem fair descriptions of the chronic decline endured by the characters while waiting in Endgame. Theirs is, indeed, ‘a meantime with no end’.68 ‘Outside of here it’s death’, states Hamm, while Clov, seemingly 72

indentured to serve Hamm as a child, concurs that this is a ‘corpsed’ world that lives on in the wake – becoming gradually denuded of life in a future of unceasing environmental degradation and extinction. Hamm’s fantasy that ‘[y]ou can make a raft and the currents will carry us away, far away, to other . . . mammals’ is clearly only that.69 In Happy Days (1961), Winnie persists with her daily routines in the face of the slow violence of being buried up to her waist and then neck in scorched earth. She endures amidst the detritus of a bourgeois life and a heap of grey time that will not pass, and on an earth inching towards extinction. Footfalls (1976) also centres on a middle-aged woman, May, but unlike Winnie she is dressed in grey tatters and pacing back on forth on stage. She endures an ongoing demand of care for an aged mother who is now only a voice, but whose chronic condition will never be released in death – there will only be more of the same. Voice (the mother) indeed insists on the endlessness of the demand of care that is both produced by and oddly seems to create the grey time of waiting and reciprocal violence and maintenance in which both women are suspended: ‘Will you never have done? [. . .] Will you never have done . . . revolving it all? [. . .] In your poor mind.’70 It is certainly true that the temporal measures that mark the timescapes of the natural world and those of industrialised modernity have fallen away in the ‘[g]rey light’ of these plays.71 But what are the loci of intensity that remain? In a time in which the distinctions between night and day, but also work and leisure or play, are subject to collapse, keeping occupied or passing the time together, as bodies in proximity to one another, marks the quality of this time seemingly without definable qualities. In Endgame, Clov tells Hamm there is no more painkiller; indeed, all the things they may have once been waiting for have been exhausted. And yet these figures are not indif­ ferent to one another; they remain, they insist, ‘obliged to each other’, in both pleasure and pain.72 Intensity, alongside modulations of shades of difference, 73

are gathered up in and as social practices of dialogue, care and, frequently, violence. As John Cash has argued, one might read the waiting time of Godot (and indeed Endgame) as a specific dramatisation of how significance and relatedness are forged in the social world: Beckett’s characters await, enter, dissolve, await again, and yet again, and enter, again, and yet again, a momentarily achieved sociality that, for that moment, displaces boredom, uncertainty, meaninglessness and the suspended time of waiting with the intensity of sociality, an intensity of caring and cruelling that achieves significance and establishes meanings, before itself dissolving again.73 Continually slipping in and out of social bonds that are understood to be intermittent and incomplete, Godot shuttles between the interwoven social intensities that forge such bonds, alternating between violent master/slave relations and relationships of care. These embodied social relations in Beckett’s work insistently dramatise the difficulties of interdependence, as they repetitively emerge into presence and fall back into forms of more muted relationality, of uncertainty and indifference, only to intensify again. Indeed, it seems to be Beckett’s particular work to draw attention to what Baraitser’s describes as ‘the shared management of vulnerable states’,74 where violence and tenderness play out as part of the impossible demand and work of relationality and reciprocal maintenance in a context where a future of finally reparative or fully destructive change is unavailable. Instead, in Beckett’s grey time of modulating intensities we come to see what takes place while waiting, 74

and the peculiar homologies between the time of torture and of care time that both bracket off, at least temporarily, any different future. Torture telescopes time into a present of pain from which it must be imagined, at least in the moment, that there can never be an escape. But as Maria Puig de la Bellacasa has recently articulated it, care time also ‘suspends the future and distends the present’, although it does so by ‘thickening it with myriad multilateral demands’.75 Although in care time this suspension can be pleasurable, Puig de la Bellacasa acknowledges that it is also very tiring, sometimes even tiresome, to be ‘hovering and adjusting to the temporal exigencies of the care for’.76 As all carers know, it can also feel like torture, in the moment, to wonder, as May does, if one will ‘never have done . . . revolving it all’.77 In Footfalls, both torture and care bind daughter May and mother Voice in the ashen oval, with the tatters of May’s colourless dress signalling entropic decline and an arrow of time that cuts across the cycling of her pacing back and forth. For V, care is required/desired but somehow always ‘too soon’ – the same phrase Clov uses to deny Hamm his painkiller after Hamm has insisted on it, that it is ‘[t]ime enough’.78 Voice may be in the process of becoming immaterial, but this changes little the demands of care – an injection, a change of position – of hovering and adjusting: M:  Straighten your pillows? [Pause] Change your drawsheet? [Pause] Pass you the bedpan? [Pause] The warming pan? [Pause] Dress your sores? [Pause] Sponge you down? [Pause] Moisten your poor lips? [Pause] Pray with you? [Pause] For you? [Pause] Again. V:  Yes, but it is too soon.79 As Puig de la Bellacasa suggests, such care ‘makes time’ of a particular kind that requires bracketing off, even if only as a temporary measure, other 75

orientations dominated by productivity and futurity, or, as Footfalls demonstrates all too clearly, the idea that the need for care could ever fully be met. Whether care is withheld or simply untimely, in the face of a lost future of change it is always ‘too soon’. Beckett’s work insists on what it means to live and live on in an enduring time that does not unfold towards a future. But, as we have seen, the time that remains is also not free or unfettered; rather, time seems occupied. One remains active, but for nothing, to repeat Deleuze. One way to make sense of the ongoing relevance of the grey time of Godot to the contemporary moment is to explore the homologies between how time is occupied in a play that clearly invokes the trials of Occupation in France in World War II, and the new world of occupations that has come to dominate late liberalism. In Our Aesthetic Categories, Sianne Ngai describes how the category of the zany represents and critiques contemporary post-Fordist conditions of work and their impact on and use of affective life, by anatomising, through a simulated excess of effort and skilful representation of an almost mechanical movement, ‘a politically ambiguous erosion of the distinction between playing and working’.80 Where automation has taken many of the jobs reliant on explicitly mechanical skill, post-Fordist labour conditions demand incessant and persistent adaptability – a flexibility with which the matter and rigidities of human bodies and minds fall very frequently out of sync.81 Ngai notes that labour conditions that respond to demand rather than scientifically managed temporal efficiency are concerned with the ‘“putting to work” of affect and subjectivity for the generation of surplus value’;82 they thus reframe much work under traditionally feminised modes of service and care. As responsivity, availability and forms of affectively intense labour replace clocking on and off, work often begins to mime social and domestic practices, though this also leads to the sensation of capital occupying all areas of human 76

life – of endless busyness in spaces and times that become uncontrasted, undifferentiated. Now, perhaps a play like Waiting for Godot is not obviously zany, even as Ngai marks Beckett’s general obsession with ‘laborious and compulsive doing’ that is at the heart of zany performance.83 But Godot does speak to a place where the distinction between activity and idleness, between work and play, collapses in the face of a future that cannot simply be mobilised. And, when attended to closely, its slowed down vaudeville routines – the physical comedy of hat gags, kicks and falls – are a little zany, although it is zaniness scanned to a slower, profoundly extenuated tempo. They play with their food – their radishes and carrots – and try to put boots on as a way of passing the time, while also somehow being occupied by that time that remains: VLADIMIR:  It’d pass the time [. . .] I assure you, it’d be an occupation. ESTRAGON:  A relaxation. VLADIMIR:  A recreation. ESTRAGON:  A relaxation. [. . .] ESTRAGON:  We don’t manage too badly, eh Didi, between the two of us? VLADIMIR:  Yes, yes. Come on, we’ll try the left first. ESTRAGON:  We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?84 They wait, bizarrely, in a world of ‘exercises’ and ‘appointments’ – in the grey shade of the language of another world – with those modulated affective intensities of care and carping, play and torture. That which goes on while waiting becomes the work these characters do. 77

As Sarah Sharma argues in relation to the time of labour, it is vital to remember that ‘time is worked on and experienced at the intersections of inequity’, as ‘bodies are differently valued temporally and made productive for capital’.85 As Sharma outlines, the sped-up lives of twenty-first-century business people who move, greyly jet-lagged, through airport hotels at every hour, inhabit a partic­ ular temporality serviced by others who wakefully wait and adjust their time and rhythms to attend to them. Taxi drivers in North American cities, who are almost invariably recently immigrated, waiting for citizenship or status, similarly serve travellers and the expectation that ‘certain bodies recalibrate to the time of others as a significant condition of their labor’.86 The experience of waiting necessarily plays out differently (and differentially) across raced, sexed, aged and classed bodies. From a social point of view, there is no universal waiting time – no undifferentiated grey. Waiting and living while Black, alongside dying while black, remain significantly different to living and dying while white.87 Beckett’s bodies on stage are frequently marked in the play texts by gender, age and even the propos of social class, but race is never articulated. But as Wendell Pierce’s and J. Kyle Manzay’s portrayals of Vladimir and Estragon in Paul Chan’s 2007 post-­Hurricane Katrina New Orleans production of Godot have demonstrated, specific bodies and sites gather up particular affective intensities.88 Everyone waits; maybe it is even possible to say, as Baraitser and Brook have recently done, that this moment of the early twenty-­ first century can be described as one in which individuals and whole populations are left permanently waiting;89 but bodies are also marked differentially, gathering together specific historical and individual experiences. Raced bodies come to experience the reverberations of waiting differently, bringing to the threshold of perception very particular shades of grey. Everyone waits, then, but there are multiple meantimes. For example, Amy Elias describes the ‘techno-duration’ produced by the universal medium of 78

digital connectivity and the presentness of information in the blue-grey light of the screen. Past and future are no longer contrasting vectors in relation to historical time; instead, they ‘signal a doubled movement of simultaneous futurity and historicity that provokes an image of “moving stasis” compatible with techno-durational “presentism”’.90 ‘Moving stasis’ has a certain kinship with what Ivor Southwood describes as the ‘non-stop inertia’ of neoliberal life and labour under conditions of austerity – being ceaselessly occupied by modes and practices designed to maintain enduring states of poverty that are neither simply working nor its other; instead, they are uncontrasted.91 And, as Baraitser has shown, in this timescape that feels ‘relentlessly driven and yet refuses to flow’,92 there is something significant about the persistence of experiences of enduring and sustaining, in which temporality inheres within relations between self and other that maintain a psychosocial world always on the cusp of dissolution and beginning again, rather than a sense of dwelling securely or progressing through time. This is a time without graspable qualities or hues: it is not a time of contrasts that might produce sensations of dialectical progress. Nevertheless, as Beckett’s work demonstrates, it is a time marked by shifting psychosocial greyscale intensities – intensities felt by bodies across acts and relations of care and of violence seemingly without end – an ‘impossible heap’ that produces an anachromistic interruption, a stutter in the purposive passage of time as it is usually accounted for. It may seem anachronistic to read Beckett’s plays alongside a world of labour and occupations he hardly could have imagined; but it is clear enough that his works have not left us. The ‘Staging Beckett’ Project has mapped 3,715 productions of Beckett’s work in the UK and Ireland alone, with little sign of these performances dwindling in the contemporary moment.93 Instead of reaching for universalist explanations of Beckett’s peculiar endurance, I have wanted to suggest here that the temporality calibrated under greyscale 79

intensities that characterise our current times has odd but revealing precursors in the interruptions of the historical time of the modern that were filled by Beckett’s texts of waiting. In the face of a future only imaginable in terms of the chronic, Beckett’s plays force time to gather through a commitment to anachromism – an aesthetic that brings together and accumulates the intensities experienced as social and intersubjective bonds are made, broken and remade in the time that remains while waiting. And perhaps if we are looking to make sense of what is to be done in our current times, it is vital to understand something of Beckett’s grey insistence and his aesthetic that never gives up on the nothing to be done. Acknowledgements This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [‘Waiting Times’, 205400/A/16/Z]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. Notes 1. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 624. 2. Samuel Beckett, The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: The Shorter Plays, ed. James Knowlson (London: Faber, 1999), 105, 101. 3. See, for example, Enoch Brater, ‘Beckett’s Shades of the Color Gray’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 19, (2009): 103–116. 4. Rosemary Pountney notes Beckett’s marginal self-instruction to come back and ‘vaguen’ some of the more obvious elements of Happy Days. Rosemary Pountney 80

and Matthew Feldman, ‘An Interview with Dr Rosemary Pountney’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 22, (2010): 397–405 (399). 5. Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. IV: 1966–1989, edited by George Craig et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 593. 6. Samuel Beckett, Footfalls, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1990), 356. 7. Beckett, Come and Go, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 354. 8. Beckett, Come and Go, 357. 9. Beckett, Come and Go, 355. 10. Beckett, Come and Go, 355. 11. Beckett, Ghost Trio, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 408. 12. Beckett, Ghost Trio, 408–409. 13. Beckett, Ghost Trio, 408. 14. Beckett, Letters, 461. 15. Beckett, Letters, 464. 16. Jonathan Bignell, Beckett on Screen: The Television Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 42. 17. David Cunningham, ‘Asceticism Against Colour, or Modernism, Abstraction and the Lateness of Beckett’, New Formations, 55, (2009): 104–119 (117). 18. Beckett, Ghost Trio, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 408. 19. Rosalind Krauss, ‘LeWitt’s Ark’, October, 121, (Summer 2007): 111–113 (113). 20. Krauss, ‘LeWitt’s Ark’, 111–112. 21. Tom F. Driver, ‘Beckett by the Madeleine’, Columbia University Forum, 4, 3 (1961): 21–25 (23). 22. On ‘the chronic’, see Eric Cazdyn, The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 23. Ben Anderson, ‘Affective Atmospheres’, Emotion, Space and Society, 2, (2009): 77–81 (79) 24. Anderson, ‘Affective Atmospheres’, 80. 81

25. Sven Thones et al., ‘Color and Time Perception: Evidence for Temporal Over­ estimation of Blue Stimuli’, Scientific Reports, 8 (2018), footnote. 26. Joan Didion, Blue Nights (London: Fourth Estate, 2012), 3. 27. Beckett, Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 41. 28. Beckett, Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 37. 29. Beckett, Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 37 30. Beckett, Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 72. 31. Beckett, Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 72. 32. Beckett, Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 12. 33. Beckett, Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 73. 34. Beckett translates Vladimir and Estragon’s repeated lines, ‘[e]n attendant’, as ‘[w]hile waiting’. Samuel Beckett, En Attendant Godot (Paris: Minuit, 1952), 128. Beckett, Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 71. 35. Alain Badiou, The Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 161. 36. Beckett, Endgame, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 113. 37. Beckett, Endgame, 107. 38. Beckett, Endgame, 96. 39. Sean Kennedy, ‘Edmund Spenser, Famine Memory and the Discontents of Humanism in Endgame’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 24, (2012): 105–120. 40. Beckett, Endgame, 93. In 1967, the land works artist Robert Smithson described a game in which a child runs first clockwise, in such a way that originally separated black and white sand begins to get mixed up, and then anti-clockwise: ‘the result will not be a restoration of the original vision but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy’. ‘The Monuments of the Passaic, New Jersey’, Artforum, (December 1967): 52–57 (56). 41. See Laura Salisbury, ‘Art of Noise: Beckett’s Language in A Culture of Information’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 22, (2010): 355–371.

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42. Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 109. 43. Beckett, Quad, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 454. 44. John Beck, Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 179. See also Peter C. Van Wyck, Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 45. Adam Piette has suggested that Beckett’s cylinder pieces can be read as an explor­ ation of ‘deep time’ in which bodies endure alongside nuclear radiation. ‘Deep Geological Disposal and Radioactive Time: Beckett, Bowen, Nirex and Onkalo’, in Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics, ed. by John Beck and Ryan Bishop (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 102–115. 46. Samuel Beckett, Lessness, in The Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989, ed. by S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove, 1995), 197–201 (197). 47. Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 265. 48. http://www.end-lessness.co.uk. The use of pseudo-random generation emphasises the importance of running through all permutations without the repetitions that would be the result of pure random generation. 49. The website went live ‘on the occasion of Pountney’s death’. 50. This image of words gathering in a grey heap that seems implicit in so much of Beckett’s postwar writing is given explicit form in Robert Smithson’s 1966 drawing, A Heap of Language. Daniel Katz notes Smithson’s clear engagement with Beckett’s work and thinking in ‘WHERE NOW? A Few Reflections on Beckett, Robert Smithson, and the Local’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 22, (2010): 329–340. 51. Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 143. 52. Comay, Mourning Sickness, 142.

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53. Comay, Mourning Sickness, 143. 54. Alain Badiou, On Beckett, ed. by Nina Power and Alberto Toscano (Manchester: Clinamen, 2003), 7. 55. Badiou, On Beckett, 6. 56. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, trans. Anthony Uhlmann, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), 152–174 (153). 57. Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, 153. 58. Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, 165. 59. Lisa Baraitser, Enduring Time (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 5–11. 60. See Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 61. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 95–120. 62. See Cazdyn, The Already Dead. 63. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Craig Jeffrey, Time-Pass: Youth, Class and the Politics of Waiting in India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 64. See Baraitser, Enduring Time, 7. 65. Vincent Ialenti, Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help the Earth Now (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020). 66. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, After the Future (London: AK Books, 2011), 18–19. 67. See Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 95–120. 68. Cazdyn, The Already Dead, 13. 69. Beckett, Endgame, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 109. 70. Beckett, Footfalls, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 400. 71. Beckett, Endgame, 92.

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72. Beckett, Endgame, 132. 73. John Cash, ‘Waiting for Sociality: The (Re)birth, astride a Grave, of the Social’, in Waiting, ed. by Ghassen Hage (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009), 27–38 (32). 74. Baraitser, Enduring Time, 15. 75. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 207. 76. Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care, 206. 77. Beckett, Footfalls, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 400. 78. Beckett, Footfalls, 400; Endgame, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 104. 79. Beckett, Footfalls, 400. 80. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 188. 81. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2007). 82. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 188. 83. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 14. 84. Beckett, Godot, 64. 85. Sarah Sharma, In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 14. 86. Sharma, In the Meantime, 20. 87. Junia Howell, Marie Skoczylas and Shatae’ De Vaughan, ‘Living While Black’, American Sociological Association, 18, 2 (June 2019): 68–69, begins with an incident where two black men were arrested in a Starbucks in Philadelphia while waiting for a business associate: ‘Caught on camera, their interactions with police and nearby customers highlighted how their only crime was being Black in a predominately White space’ (68). See, also, Vernellia R. Randall, Dying While Black (Dayton, OH: Seven Principles Press, 2006).

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88. https://creativetime.org/projects/waiting-for-godot-in-new-orleans/ 89. Lisa Baraitser and Will Brook, ‘Watchful Waiting: Crisis, Vulnerability, Care’, in Vulnerability and the Politics of Care, ed. by Victoria Browne, Jason Danely, Tina Managhan and Doerthe Rosenow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 90. Amy J. Elias, ‘Past/Future’, in Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, ed. by Joel Burgess and Amy J. Elias (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 35–50 (36). 91. Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia (London: Zero Books, 2011). 92. Baraitser, Enduring Time, 9. 93. https://research.reading.ac.uk/staging-beckett/

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3. ‘A Warm Gray Fabric’: Walter Benjamin on Boredom Thijs Lijster

Introduction Rain makes everything more hidden, makes days not only gray but uniform. From morning until evening, one can do the same thing – play chess, read, engage in argument – whereas 87

sunshine, by contrast, shades the hours and discountenances the dreamer.1 Grey is often used as a sign for the inability to recognise differences; hence the well-known proverb that in the dark all cats are grey. Thus understood, grey is not so much considered a colour in itself, but rather as the fading of colour, or the blurring of all colours into each other. Based on what Walter Benjamin says in the quote above, one might say that what the colour grey is for our vision, boredom is for our experience of time. The experience of boredom as described here, in this case caused by a grey and rainy day, is characterised by the inability to distinguish between different moments in time. Each second, minute or hour of the day blends into the next, and appears to us exactly like the previous one, while we feel as if we are stuck in an endless loop. Boredom takes in a central place in Walter Benjamin’s work, especially in his unfinished Arcades Project, an analysis of modernity that was to contain a section on boredom. His attitude towards it, however, is deeply ambiguous. On the one hand, he considers boredom as part of what he calls the ‘hellish time’ of modernity.2 On the other hand, he also describes boredom as the ‘dream bird that hatches the egg of experience’,3 and ‘the threshold to great deeds’.4 How to explain this ambiguity? As I will argue in this chapter, Benjamin understands boredom not as part of the human condition per se (as is the case with for instance Schopenhauer), instead he believes that nineteenth-century industrial capitalism generates a specific kind of boredom, differing from earlier forms. I will start out by investigating what causes this boredom. A particular place where this becomes clear is Benjamin’s analysis of fashion, which will be discussed in the second section. Fashion, he argues, is exemplary for the modern 88

experience of time: the eternal recurrence of the same disguised as constant progress. Next, I will discuss how this experience of temporality induces a ‘dream-sleep’ from which Benjamin wanted the collective to awake. The key to this awakening, though, was hidden inside boredom itself. For Benjamin, then, boredom is a thoroughly dialectical category, which can be both the result of consumer culture and can lay the groundwork for a revolutionary awakening. Or as Benjamin puts it: ‘Boredom is a warm gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks’ (an enigmatic formulation that will be unpacked below).5 For these colours to come to the light, however, we need to unearth the critical political kernel hidden inside the experience of boredom, which contains elements both from the alienated worker in the factory and from the flâneur walking his tortoise through the Paris arcades. Hiding From the Weather: The Paris Arcades ‘France is bored’.6 This line, written by Alphonse de Lamartine in 1839, and quoted by Benjamin, sums up the spirit of mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Lamartine, as well as other prominent authors such as Balzac, Hugo and Baudelaire, bore witness to the ennui that seemed not only to be the illness of the time, but also a sign of sophistication. In his Salon of 1946 Baudelaire pointed at the greyness of men’s fashion – as if the whole of Paris was visiting a funeral, as ‘an immense cortege of undertakers’7 – which in his view was an apt expression of the drudgery and dullness of life itself. As Benjamin cites, from a treatise on fashion: ‘To show one’s colors is considered ridiculous; to be strict is looked on as childish. In such a situation, how could dress not become equally colorless, flabby, and, and the same time, narrow?’8 89

Figure 3.1  Constantin Guys, Meeting in the Park, ca. 1860. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

What could be the cause of this boredom? ‘Nothing bores the ordinary man more than the cosmos’, Benjamin writes. ‘Hence, for him, the deepest connection between weather and boredom’.9 Weather conditions are a notorious cause of boredom, illustrated by the story of the Englishman who one morning shot himself because it was raining. Modernity, however, consists in mankind’s attempt to emancipate itself from such a deep-felt connection between the cosmos and the inner life. If we follow Max Weber in understanding modernisation as a process of the ‘disenchantment’ of nature, as 90

well as our increased control over it, one would expect this relation to become unstable. And indeed, modern man succeeds in shielding himself in all kinds of ways from the cosmos, as well as from other natural forces. Benjamin points to the fact that Baudelaire was the first to describe a starless night, in his poem ‘Obsession’ – an allusion both to the streetlights in the city streets that block out the light of the stars, and to the godforsaken world of modernity.10 And the arcades – the glass-roofed alleyways constructed in Paris in the 1840s that gave Benjamin’s project its title – allowed people to stroll and shop even when it rained, or when the sun had set. One science-fiction writer even dreamt of ‘a crystal canopy that would slide over the city in case of rain’.11 By thus controlling the elements, and hiding from the grey skies and rainy weather, mankind had hoped that it would have control over boredom too, that it would be a thing of the past. Indeed, the Paris arcades, as proto-malls housing stores with luxury fashion, gadgets and novelties, and entertainment from panoramas and casinos, promised instant gratification of any possible desire. The arcades, one might say, were the colourful silk interior to the grey fabric of the Parisian streets. But of course, it turned out not to be so. Although the arcades provided a shield against the elements, this brought other problems and unintended side effects, such as the dust coming in from the unpaved streets, which would accumulate under the arcades’ roofs because of the absence of rain, and which would cover everything under a thick grey layer: ‘As dust, rain takes its revenge on the arcades’.12 And, just like the dust, boredom returns with a vengeance. Benjamin writes: ‘Boredom began to be experienced in epidemic proportions during the 1840s’.13 The emergence of boredom at this place and time – mid-nineteenth-century Paris – may at first glance come as a surprise, as this is precisely the era of massive urban growth, industrialisation and the emergence of a consumer culture and entertainment. Constantin Guys, 91

quoted by Baudelaire, said that ‘any man . . . who can yet be bored in the heart of the multitude is a blockhead!’.14 However, as Georg Simmel already indicated in his seminal essay The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) it is precisely the over-abundance of stimuli – traffic, crowds, loud noises, bright lights – which forces the urbanite to protect herself with what Simmel called a ‘blasé-attitude’; a state of indifference and ‘underwhelmedness’ towards one’s surroundings, that functions as a survival tactic. It is this attitude Benjamin traced back to mid-nineteenth-century boredom, though he extends and enriches Simmel’s psychological and phenomenological analysis to a philosophical-historical one. Benjamin argues that in the nineteenth century there occurs a shift in the ‘structure’ of experience: traditional continuous experience (Erfahrung) is replaced by a series of isolated, discrete experiences (Erlebnis). Drawing on Freud, Benjamin argues that the most important function of human consciousness is not the reception of, but rather protection against, stimuli, especially those that are likely to shock and cause trauma.15 Consciousness, in other words, parries and cushions shock experiences, preventing them from entering one’s memory by bracketing them and turning them into reified, isolated Erlebnisse. In the nineteenth century, shock experiences become the norm. Technological innovations such as the match, the telephone and telegraph, and photography have in common the reduction of continuous actions to one single ‘click’. These ‘haptic’ shocks are complemented by ‘optic’ ones – the overcrowded, entertainment-filled and nerve-stimulating streets of the metropolis that were mentioned by Simmel. As a result, Benjamin argues, these shock-experiences no longer have the opportunity of being absorbed in lasting experience (in the sense of Erfahrung).16 Obviously, the boredom that comes along with this change in the structure of experience is marked by class differences. Referring to Friedrich 92

Engels’ descriptions of the drudgery of industrial labour, Benjamin argues that ‘factory work [is the] economic infrastructure of the ideological boredom of the upper class’.17 Karl Marx, in line with German idealism, distinguished between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. Only once we have taken care of the things that are needed to reproduce our individual and social life – nutrition, housing, care work, etc. – are we free to spend our time the way we choose to. In his text on ‘Estranged labour’ Marx wrote that ‘The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.’18 However, the theorists of the Frankfurt School – not only Benjamin but later also Adorno and Marcuse – were among the first to point out that not only in the factory but also during leisure time is the worker increasingly under the control of the machine. In his essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ Benjamin writes: ‘What the amusement park achieves with its dodgem cars and other similar amusements is nothing but a taste of the training that the unskilled laborer undergoes in the factory.’19 Capitalism increasingly creates our very needs and desires, through advertisement and the invention of new lifestyles, thus determining the way we spend our time and, by consequence, further prolonging the ‘realm of necessity’. Not only labour, but also leisure thus becomes alienated. Free time, Adorno was later to argue, has become a mere extension of our work time, in which we are still serving our capitalist masters, though this time not as an army of labourers but as an army of consumers.20 In the Arcades Project, Benjamin was studying nineteenth-century Paris as the cradle of this newly emerging form of consumer capitalism, which first affected the bourgeoisie but was soon to spread throughout society. The centre of this work was to be the Marxist theorem of commodity fetishism. Like Karl Marx, Benjamin was very interested in the commodity form, and like Marx he understood the commodity form not merely as an economic 93

phenomenon but also as a psychological category: commodification tended to permeate each aspect of our social life, our culture and even our consciousness (what Georg Lukács called ‘reification’). Unlike Marx and Lukács, however, Benjamin was not primarily interested in the commodity as it is produced in the factory or as it appears in the market, but rather in the commodity-on-display.21 Benjamin in fact took Marx’s metaphor of the commodity as fetish quite literally: in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, the commodity for the first time is actually worshipped as an idol or totem, and the Paris arcades were the cathedrals or temples in which this worshipping took place. Here the commodity was literally put on a pedestal, behind the first shopping windows, to be revered by the crowds of consumers passing by as in a religious procession. This is also why he focuses on particular kinds of commodities: whereas Marx, in Capital, used linen and coats to exemplify any commodity, Benjamin is particularly interested in nouveautés, in other words the commodities that were desired and purchased for the sake of their newness. Benjamin writes: ‘Newness is a quality independent of the use value of the commodity [. . .] It is the quintessence of that false consciousness whose indefatigable agent is fashion.’22 By here mentioning newness as independent from use value, Benjamin highlights that nouveautés are pure exchange value, and therefore commodities through and through. They do not fulfil a particular need, but only the desire for a new commodity. The commodity is indeed a fetish, in that we project onto it all kinds of dreams and wish-images, that will be fulfilled once we have it. However, the ‘new’, for Benjamin, is the mere semblance of the new, for of course it never quite delivers what it promises. This is also what ties the ‘new’ to the ‘ever recurrent’, and what, in turn, ties them to boredom: the endless flow of new commodities is presented as the promise of an antidote to our boredom, while in fact, as the eternal 94

recurrence of the same, it is its very source. Since Benjamin, in the quote above, mentions fashion as the ‘indefatigable agent’ of this process, I will now turn to his analysis of this particular nouveauté to further elaborate on how the commodity relates to boredom. Fashion and the Revolutionary Energies of the ‘Outmoded’ There is a drawing by the nineteenth-century French caricaturist J. J. Grandville, titled ‘La mode’ (‘Fashion’), in which we see a lady sitting at a spinning wheel. Attached to the wheel, both on the inside and the outside, are hats in different styles, each one correFigure 3.2  J. J. Grandville, ‘La mode’ from Un sponding to the year in which it was autre monde, 1844. Source: Guernsey Center Moore 1904 Memorial Fund fashionable. While the wheel itself is grey, as are the men’s hats, the women’s hats attached to the axis are brightly coloured, in pink, purple, yellow and green. The lady at the wheel, though her body is white and her hair dark, has pinkish lips and cheeks, and her dress is made of the most beautifully coloured and patterned garments, as a reservoir of any imaginable fashion of past, present and future. There is a crowd of people standing by and looking as if they are anxiously waiting to see how the wheel will turn and where it will stop, so that they will know what to wear the next season. (Most of the onlookers, except for the two men at the front, are grey, which seems primarily meant to suggest 95

depth in the picture.) The years on the wheel, however, are not ordered chronologically, and the hats from different ages bear an uncanny similarity. It is remarkable that Benjamin, though he was familiar with Grandville’s work, and even devoted a section of the Arcades Project to it, never mentions this particular picture, since it beautifully captures his reflections on fashion and the way it epitomises the cyclical, or what he calls the ‘hellish time’ of modernity. It is not difficult to see in this fashion-wheel a variant of the wheel of Ixion, the mythological figure who, as punishment by Zeus for seducing his wife, was condemned to eternal suffering in the underworld, tied to an ever-spinning burning wheel. For Arthur Schopenhauer, the myth of Ixion told the story of the human condition per se, which forever turns from suffering some lack, to the subsequent boredom once a desire is gratified, to yet the next desire. It is only in seldom moments of philosophical contemplation or disinterested aesthetic experience that our will is momentarily put on hold, and the ‘wheel of Ixion stands still’.23 Benjamin, by contrast, considers this turning of the wheel not as a natural state, but as one created by consumerism and the ceaseless production of new commodities. Indeed, fashion makes the wheel of Ixion, turning from desire to instant gratification to boredom, run wild. Grandville’s picture, in which fashions succeed each other randomly and greyness exists cheek by jowl with intense colour, thus beautifully shows what Benjamin called ‘the eternal recurrence of the new’.24 Through fashion, we ourselves dress in, and one might say, as commodities. ‘Clothing’, says Susan Buck-Morss, ‘is quite literally at the borderline between subject and object, the individual and the cosmos’.25 In our fashionable and colourful clothes, we ourselves tend to become commodities on display, as libidinal energy is rerouted and transferred from people to objects. Benjamin writes: ‘In fetishism, sex does away with the boundaries separating the organic world from the inorganic. Clothing and jewelery are its allies.’26 96

Fashion, in other words, is where Eros and Thanatos meet: the attempt to make oneself sexually desirable, but by transferring the orientation of desire to inorganic matter, in this case commodity items. One might say fashion is ‘fetishist’ in the dual, Marxian and Freudian sense, as the transference of social relations onto material ones, and as the transference of sexual desires from persons onto objects. Furthermore, what sets fashion apart from other commodities, or rather what makes it the commodity fetish par excellence, is its already mentioned novelty. Benjamin writes: ‘Novelty is the indispensable condition for all fashion . . . The duration of a fashion is inversely proportional to the swiftness of its diffusion.’27 Novelty, in other words, is what distinguishes fashion from the already existing commodities, and, in its wake, from the people who own (and wear) them. That a particular colour, for instance, is fashionable, has nothing to do with its innate qualities, but only with the fact that it differs from the colours of last year’s fashion. This is what makes the ‘dedicated follower of fashion’ so desirable: through fashion, one is able to set oneself apart from the grey mass of the big-city crowd. In this regard, there is both a class and a generational aspect to fashion: as soon as a certain style becomes customary for the lower classes, or is considered to be the style of an earlier generation, it ‘falls out of fashion’, in other words, it loses its allure, becomes boring and therefore is shunned like the plague: ‘Each generation experiences the fashions of the one immediately preceding it as the most radical anti­ aphrodisiac imaginable.’28 To a certain extent, this following up of fashions had occurred throughout written history. But especially in the course of the nineteenth century, the spinning wheel of grey and colourful attires depicted by Grandville started to turn faster and faster, and fashions followed up each other at ever higher velocity. Fashion becomes cheaper and more generally available, because of 97

the industrialisation of production processes and the standardisation of products (most notably the introduction of off-the-peg clothes and the discovery of synthetic dyes), but this only increases the need for new fashion precisely because the next season it will be available to all. This will then again speed up the production process, and so it goes on and on. For Benjamin, however, this was not all bad; the ‘false consciousness’ contained a utopian moment. Through its acceleration and general availability, he argued, modern fashion unhinged class distinctions. Traditionally, the nobility could signify their class, and thus their place in a cosmic hierarchy, by wearing certain clothing, and clothing of certain colours, only available to them. Modern fashion leaves this hierarchy behind, in the same way as capitalist society according to Marx breaks with the feudal principle that one’s place in the cosmos is fixed. Fashion under capitalism constantly strives to renew itself.29 Thus understood, it is charged with utopian dreams of a classless society. And indeed, the grey tones of mid-nineteenth-century fashion alluded to earlier – which in part was the result of industrially produced, ready-to-wear and standardised clothes – might have been more boring than the colourful garlands with which the nobility of yore adorned themselves, but they also allowed one to disappear in the crowd, to become anonymous. Similarly, the general availability of fashion destabilised class relations, as was also expressed by artists such as Manet, Degas and Seurat who portrayed the bourgeoisie as a melting pot of social strata that only decades ago were strictly segregated. The figure of the prostitute – omnipresent in the work of the impressionists as well as that of Baudelaire – was an illustration of that. As T. J. Clark writes, in his classic study of Manet, she could take on any role: ‘Bored chatelaine, misunderstood bourgeoise, failed actress, corrupted peasant girl, she is all of these . . . She is the perpetually undeciphered enigma, intriguing and terrifying man.’30 98

And yet, despite this revolutionary force present in fashion, it is at the same time reactionary. The thirst for the new, of which fashion gives evidence, is also quenched by fashion – be it only momentarily – instead of brought into action in order to bring about social change. The dream, in other words, is mistaken for its actualisation. This only becomes apparent when fashion becomes old-fashioned: one can still recognise the utopian promise within it, but its ruinous state bears witness to the fact that the promise is far from fulfilled. That is why the old-fashioned is something so boring for the ordinary person – indeed ‘the most radical antiaphrodisiac’ as was quoted above – for it reminds us of what we once aspired to be or become. The old-fashioned is the return of the repressed. To this extent, the eternal recurrence of the new in fashion stands, in Benjamin’s philosophy, for something much more far-reaching: it exemplifies the erasure of time and the forgetfulness of history. ‘Under Louis Philippe, dust settled even on the revolutions’, Benjamin writes.31 History, like the arcades, has closed itself off from the world and is therefore gathering thick layers of grey dust. In other words, he blames the mid-nineteenth-century bourgeoisie for having forgotten their own revolutionary promises of liberty, equality and fraternity, and for having turned their backs on politics, instead retreating into their interiors stuffed with souvenirs and plush: ‘To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry.’32 All the while, the bourgeoisie clings on to the ideology of the ‘eternal progress’ in history and technology – the belief that as history continues, we will eventually reach a state of universal emancipation and prosperity. As Graeme Gilloch writes: ‘Fashion is, in the realm of commodities, what the notion of progress is in the domain of technology.’33 Writing from the 99

perspective of the early twentieth century, with a destructive world war fresh in his memory and another one on the threshold, Benjamin knew better. ‘The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are “status quo” is the catastrophe’, he wrote in 1940, shortly before his death.34 In Benjamin’s most elaborate reflections on the philosophy of history, the theses ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940), he criticises the concept of a universal history, that is, history understood as a ‘continuum’, a unified whole and a naturally evolving process. This was a belief that began to take root with the bourgeoisie of the mid-nineteenth century and stretched all the way up to the social-democratic thinkers of his own time.35 For Ben­ jamin, an optimistic faith in the naturally progressive course of history implies a danger­ous form of political resignation, fostering ‘the illusion that the factory work ostensibly furthering technological progress constituted a political achievement’.36 But there is an even greater problem, in that historical and present suffering is regarded as the mere stepping stone to a utopian goal (classless society) that is endlessly postponed. It is then at best a necessary evil and at worst irrelevant – faule Existenz in Hegel’s terms. Benjamin argues that a critique of the concept of progress should address the notion of time that lies at its basis: ‘The concept of mankind’s historical progress cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must underlie any criticism of the concept of progress itself.’37 Underlying the concept of progress, in his view, is a mythical notion of time that is reproduced in modernity. Myth, in Benjamin’s view, is antithetical to history. There is no history in myth, for myth turns history into nature – or as he sometimes calls it, into ‘natural history’ (Naturgeschichte). The concept of progress, as 100

the natural development of history, belongs to myth no less than does the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same.38 This is why he was so fascinated with fashion, since it turns something that is thoroughly historical into something so seemingly natural. Again, Grandville had shown this like no other, by transforming fashion objects into flowers, forests, coral reefs and other objects from the world of animals and plants, and, conversely, flowers into women wearing beautifully coloured dresses.

Figure 3.3  J. J. Grandville, ‘Rose’, from Les fleurs animées, 1867; Source: Guernsey Center Moore 1904 Memorial Fund 101

A critique of the concept of progress, according to Benjamin, involves a critique of mythical time, that is, of any understanding of history in terms of an organic whole. Interestingly, boredom plays a key role in the interruption of myth, and the ‘blasting open’ of the historical continuum. Waking From the Dream ‘Every epoch dreams the following’ – this quote by the historian Michelet was one of the epigraphs of Benjamin’s project: by analysing the wish-images of the nineteenth century we would gain insight in the twentieth century. Indeed, boredom, for Benjamin, was ‘the index of participation in the collective sleep’.39 A dream-sleep, or as he sometimes calls it a ‘phantasmagoria’, had come over the mid-nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. This epoch, he argues, witnessed the dawn of a new mythology. 40 Myth, according to Benjamin, consists of the transformation of history into nature: in mythology, contingent historical phenomena are experienced as necessary and inevitable, in other words as natural. Still, Benjamin refuses to consider this dream-sleep as mere ideology, as ‘false consciousness’. Rather, he attempts to mobilise elements from the dream itself – the manifest content to speak with Freud – in order to get to the repressed wishes and desires. In the Arcades Project he writes: ‘The realization of dream elements in the course of waking up is the canon of dialectics.’41 In other words, only through the dream of mythic history can we awake from the latter. This was a lesson Benjamin learned from the surrealists. About André Breton he had written the following: He can boast an extraordinary discovery: he was the first to perceive the revolutionary 102

energies that appear in the ‘outmoded’ – in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them.42 The Arcades Project was an attempt to distil, as the surrealists did, the revolutionary energies in the ‘outmoded’. By showing the ‘the rags, the refuse’43 Ben­ jamin wanted to lay bare the utopian dreams and desires of the past generation. This was how boredom could play a role in revolutionary awakening: within itself it contained the key to overcome the boredom induced by consumerism. In the Arcades Project Benjamin writes the following: Boredom is a warm gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks. In this fabric we wrap ourselves when we dream. We are at home then in the arabesques of its lining. But the sleeper looks bored and gray within his sheath. And when he later wakes and wants to tell of what he dreamed, he communicates by and large only this boredom. For who would be able at one stroke to turn the lining of time to the outside? Yet to narrate dreams signifies nothing else.44 This long passage deserves some further unpacking, since it tells us, in an extremely dense version, what Benjamin’s intention were in the Arcades Project. 103

First of all, it is interesting that in the quote above Benjamin attaches a profound utopian significance to colour. This seems to be a legacy of his early texts on colour, such as ‘A Child’s View of Color’, written in 1914–1915 during a period when he was under the sway of the works and writings of Kandinsky, especially the latter’s On the Spiritual in Art. Unlike Kant, who in the Critique of Judgment was notoriously contemptuous about colour and considered it to be secondary to design in art, Benjamin considers the experience of colour as prior to, and in a way even forming a counter-force to, the schematising mind. As Martin Jay puts it: ‘Color [. . .] resisted the reduction of the world to isolated, discrete things, favoring instead a response to it as infinite nuance, alive with shimmering energy.’45 Although Jay (in line with earlier work by Howard Caygill46) rightly points out that Benjamin never fully developed this early philosophy of colour, it is clear that in his philosophy of history these thoughts work through, most notably in the resistance against the reification and petrification of history into discrete events. In the section on fashion in the Arcades Project, Benjamin approvingly quotes from a treatise on fashion by Theodor Lipps from the late nineteenth century, who argued that our general aversion to bright colors, especially in clothing for men, evinces very clearly an oft-noted peculiarity of our character. Gray is all theory; green – and not only green but also red, yellow, blue – is the golden tree of life. In our predilection for the various shades of gray . . . running to black, we find an unmistakable social reflection of our tendency to privilege the theory of the formation of intellect above all else. 47 104

Although Benjamin follows Lipps in associating colour with creativity and life, and greyness with rigidity and the ‘coldness’ of theory, his take on boredom is more dialectical in the passage quoted earlier, in that the colour is hidden inside the greyness. Second, and consequently, if the ‘warm gray fabric’ is the outside of boredom (or of the dream-sleep) and the inside is ‘the most lustrous and colorful of silks’, it is precisely Benjamin’s intention in the Arcades Project to ‘turn the lining of time to the outside’ by narrating the dream of the collective, that is in this case the dream of the nineteenth century itself. Earlier, in his essay on ‘The Storyteller’ Benjamin had already written about the creative potential of boredom: If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places – the activities that are intimately associated with boredom – are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. 48 As we already saw above, however, and as Benjamin here again emphasises, this ‘traditional’ form of boredom seems to disappear in modernity. While the patient work of ‘hatching’ reminds one of traditional Erfahrung mentioned in the first part of this chapter, Benjamin is now looking for new ways in which to turn – ‘in one stroke’ as he writes in the quote above – the Erlebnis of modern boredom into something more fruitful. There thus appear to be two different forms of boredom, which relate dialectically. There is the fruitful boredom that ‘hatches the egg of experience’ 105

and which is aroused by waiting – such as during the grey and rainy days discussed earlier. Benjamin is quite appreciative of this form, as a source of reflection (the waiting causes one to overthink one’s life) and creativity (such as in this case, the telling of stories). He writes: ‘We are bored when we don’t know what we are waiting for. That we do know, or think we know, is nearly always the expression of our superficiality or inattention. Boredom is the threshold to great deeds.’49 The modern type of boredom, however, the one earlier discussed in relation to fashion and the ever-recurring stream of commodities, seems rather to exist in the disappearance of waiting and the instant gratification of desires by the commodity, which is however always temporary and never fully delivers what it promises. This is also why Benjamin emphasises that the traditional form of boredom is ‘extinct in the cities’: in a city like Paris it is, after all, almost impossible to be bored in this way – considering the abundance of entertainment and novelties – but this over-stimulation is hardly an improvement, and brings with it a new poverty: the superficiality in thinking that you know what you are waiting for. The dialectic of boredom is then as follows: consumer capitalism constantly promises us excitement and entertainment – the escape from boredom – but eventually is unable to deliver and only offers the boredom of the eternal recurrence: the ever-the-same that is constantly gold-plated as the brand new. The flip side of this is that, according to Benjamin, only boredom offers the breeding ground for the truly new (the ‘egg of experience’, the ‘great deed’).50 But how is the latter form of boredom still possible? And if the conditions of ‘true’ boredom are lost, is there still a possibility to cross the threshold towards ‘great deeds’? Benjamin refuses to be nostalgic about the boredom of yore. Rather, in his Arcades Project he identifies different strategies to cope with the over-­ stimulation of modern urban life, and deal with boredom in a ‘heroic’ way. 106

There was the rag picker, who collects the obsolete fashion items of yesteryear and turns them into something valuable; there is the collector, who is exploring the curiosity shops, not looking for the newest commodities or souvenirs, but by contrast, for the outmoded ‘trash’ with which to complete his collection, thereby ‘detaching the object from its functional relations’;51 and there is the gambler, who refuses to wait or work for money but hopes to make his fortune with a single stroke of luck. And of course, there is the flâneur, who strolls around town directionless, not looking for anything in particular (unlike the tourist, who follows the beaten track of the ‘cultural goods’), but who simply opens his view and his mind for anything unexpected that might cross his path. What these figures have in common is their boredom with modern life, but at the same time, and because of it, a heightened sense of awareness, or what Benjamin calls ‘presence of mind’ (Geistesgegenwart).52 The flâneur, the collector, the rag picker; each of them is open to chance encounters and thus can be struck by truly new experiences. They seem to escape the lure of commodity fetishism (as the mere prefabricated semblance of novelty) and are in that sense the foreshadowing of the surrealists. What they have in common, furthermore, is an alternative experience of time, although here Benjamin distinguishes between different ways of dealing with the passing of time: ‘Rather than pass the time, one must invite it in. To pass the time (to kill time, expel it): the gambler. Time spills from his every pore. – To store time as a battery stores energy: the flâneur. Finally, the third type: he who waits. He takes in the time and renders it up in altered form – that of expectation.’53 There’s a particular temporality involved in the ‘one stroke’ that Benjamin talks about: though the ‘crossing’ of the threshold, or the ‘turning inside out’ of the grey fabric, is described by him as a sudden and abrupt event, it has to be prepared carefully by waiting, and ‘training’ 107

oneself in presence of mind (without having the guarantee that it will ever happen). The true hero of the modern age, then, Benjamin argued with reference to Baudelaire, was not the one fleeing from boredom into the phantasmagorical world of commodities, but rather the one who faces boredom head on. Or, to use Benjamin’s metaphor one last time: to experience the colourful silks, one has to wrap oneself in the grey fabric. Like Nietzsche, who considered the acceptance of the thought of the ‘eternal recurrence of the same’ as the true life-affirming gesture, Baudelaire saw true heroism in those who plunge themselves without reservation into the experience of modernity’s ‘eternal recurrence of the new’. According to Benjamin, however, Baudelaire’s mistake (and Nietzsche’s) was to ontologise this eternal recurrence, thus making it as mythic as its counterpart, the idea of historical progress.54 He does not realise that ‘eternal recurrence’ is exactly what is ‘new’ in modernity, that this hellish time is the result of industrial capitalism and consumer culture. The myth­ ical ontologisation of time can only result in political resignation, which is the reason why Benjamin says that Baudelaire, too, eventually ‘missed out on reality – though just by a hair’.55 Benjamin, by contrast, wants neither to deny nor to ontologise boredom, but to make us mindful of the temporal and historical character of it.56 When we experience boredom in this way, we become aware of our historical moment and its particular temporality (instead of being forgetful of it, and filling the void with some commodity, such as in the boredom caused by fashion). At that moment, the ‘wheel of Ixion’ – or the wheel of fashion, for that matter – truly stands still.57 This would signal the ‘interruption of myth’ which for Benjamin is the true characteristic of the political.58 Indeed, if things ‘going on like this’ is catastrophic, true progress can only consist in a catastrophe (from katastrephein, to overturn), that interrupts the blind ‘natural’ 108

progression of history: ‘Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train-namely, the human race-to activate the emergency brake.’59 This is what it would mean, then, to turn the ‘warm gray fabric’ inside out so that the ‘the most lustrous and colorful of silks’ could come to the light. Epilogue: Fifty Shades of Grey As Benjamin recounts in Berlin Childhood around 1900, consumer society, the origin of which he had traced to the mid-nineteenth-century Paris arcades, had been experienced by him first-hand as a child, shopping with his mother, or lured towards the panoramas or the zoo. And yet, ‘the city would promise [excitement] to me with the advent of each new day, and each evening it would still be in my debt’.60 More than a century later, things have only further ‘progressed’, so that instant gratification of our every wish and desire is only a mouse click away, or even waiting in our very pockets via our smartphones. In what Guy Debord calls the ‘society of the spectacle’, consumer culture revolves less and less around the circulation of actual ‘physical’ commodities, and increasingly around the commodification of spectacle, of experience itself.61 David Harvey recently coined the term ‘Netflix economy’ to refer to a production model in which there is a huge investment of capital in an ephemeral entertainment product (such as an episode of a Netflix series), which is then consumed within an hour by millions of people.62 At the same time, there has been a huge increase of what anthropologist David Graeber named ‘bullshit jobs’, namely jobs which not only seem pointless and unnecessary in the objective sense but which even the people performing these tasks consider to be 109

meaningless, and which seem to be designed only to keep people employed and able to buy more commodities, lest the entire system collapses.63 The Protestant work ethic that Max Weber described has perhaps not so much been replaced – as was argued by conservative critics like Daniel Bell – but rather has been complemented by a hedonistic consumer ethic: it is our duty, in the service of the economy, to buy, to consume and to enjoy. While hedonistic transgression, for someone like Georges Bataille, could still be considered as an act of defiance against the bourgeois societal order, today transgression seems to be fully absorbed in that order. Slavoj Žižek once nicely stated this, when someone asked him about his view on the popularity of Fifty Shades of Gray, the erotic novel by E. L. James from 2011 that sold over sixty million copies worldwide. What makes these books so obscene, he argued, is not the sadomasochist pornographic scenes they contain, but rather the fact that everyone reads and discusses them in public and without any embarrassment (unlike, for instance, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover or James Joyce’s Ulysses, which were immediately banned after publication): ‘It is the Other without Otherness, utterly obscene. In the liberal society, everything is permitted, every kind of sexuality; not only permitted, it is mandatory. The command everywhere is this: you must Enjoy!’64 Hence, one might say that contemporary consumer capitalism is characterised by what I have elsewhere called a ‘hedo-ascetic’:65 the amalgam of limitless pleasure-seeking and submissively doing your duty within a strictly planned and administered system. This also means that, in the strict sense, we do not get bored anymore, since our access to entertainment is instant and endless, and our attention is constantly drawn towards screens – if not in our pockets then on the streets. Nevertheless, as our days are filled and our time is thus ‘stolen’, this can still sometimes strike us as meaningless and empty – the experience of 110

the ‘homogenous, empty time’ Benjamin was writing about – as is witnessed by the critiques of consumer society and spectacle that have gotten louder and louder and are now even part of mainstream movies like Wall-E and the Lego Movie. As Mark Fisher sharply remarked, however, this irony, of movies or pop songs critiquing consumerism, ‘feeds rather than challenges’ the contemporary capitalist system: ‘the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity’.66 And then, at the beginning of 2020, there was a sudden interruption by a seemingly meaningless event called ‘COVID-19’. All over the planet, people were quarantined, and despite some initial hoarding there was an enormous drop of household consumption worldwide. Flights were cancelled, tourism came to a halt, and shops and cultural venues such as cinemas, theatres and museums were closed, so that city centres in many parts of the world came to look like ghost towns. Idyllic pictures were shared on the internet of dolphins in the canals of Venice (which turned out to be a hoax) and Himalayan mountain tops which for the first time in thirty years were visible from the city due to the absence of smog. With it, we witnessed a surge of articles in newspapers and magazines (the culture and lifestyle sections of which now had little to write about) on boredom; how to combat it, or cope with it. Of course, and as Benjamin had already said about nineteenth-century boredom, what was obscured was that this boredom was very much class bound. Although movie stars sent us their video messages telling us how we are ‘all in this together’ from the comfortable confines of their mansions, a lot of people were stuck in small apartments, suddenly having to combine their jobs with home-schooling their kids or care work. Or they were simply too anxious to be bored, as they were suddenly without an income and hence without any long-term perspective. 111

What the lockdown situation mostly demonstrated was our utter inability to be bored, to fully experience such a sudden interruption of our lives and of the very fabric of our society. People had either too little or too much time on their hands – which either way led to suffering67 – and in the latter case tended to quickly fill the void. The coronavirus pandemic led to an increase in media consumption of up to 40 per cent in some countries, video-streaming services and web shops exploded (reportedly earning Amazon boss Jeff Bezos about US$40 billion in the first months of the crisis); via Instagram and TikTok we drowned ourselves in our self-produced dances, memes or freshly baked breads, and magazines instructed us on how to get the most out of our quarantine by learning how to play the piano, or speak a foreign language. Still, this might be a too pessimistic way to look at it. After all, it was probably no coincidence that after months of inactivity the Black Lives Matter demonstrations hit the streets in the way they did, not only in the places where they immediately responded to police brutality, but also in many other countries all over the world. Perhaps the ‘emergency brake’ had led to a reflection on how to live our lives, and how to organise our societies, after all, but at the moment of writing it is too soon to tell. One might argue, following Benjamin, that such an interruption provides at least the condition, and therewith the opportunity, for changing our lives. How to stop it? Žižek, in his reflection on Fifty Shades of Grey, concluded that ‘The truly radical act, this I claim, is to not enjoy.’ The question is, of course, whether we can still imagine a place beyond enjoyment, a realm beyond both economic production and hedonistic consumption.68 Leisure time, with its lists of things you have to see, read or experience, has become as restrained as labour time described by Marx. Perhaps it is indeed only when we are truly bored, wrapped in the ‘warm gray fabric’ as described by Walter Benjamin, that we are able to properly reflect on our own lives and imagine a different world. 112

Notes 1. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 104. 2. See for instance Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 119. 3. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 3, 1935–1938, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland and others, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 149. 4. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 105. 5. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 105. 6. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 110. 7. Quoted in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 46. 8. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 68. 9. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 102. 10. Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 4, 1938–1940, 97. 11. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 109. 12. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 102. 13. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 108. 14. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 111. 15. As he writes in ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’: ‘The more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the less likely they are to have a traumatic effect.’ Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 4, 1938–1940, 317. 16. See ibidem: ‘The greater the shock factor in particular impressions, the more vigilant consciousness has to be in screening stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less these impressions enter experience [Erfahrung] and the more they 113

correspond to the concept of isolated experiences [Erlebnisse].’ Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 4, 1938–1940, 319. 17. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 106. 18. Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1978), 74. 19. Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 4, 1938–1940, 329. 20. Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein (New York: Routledge, 1991), 187–197. 21. Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 81. 22. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 11. 23. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1, trans. and ed. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 220. 24. Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 4, 1938–1940, 179. 25. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 97. 26. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 69. 27. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 75. 28. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 79. 29. As Susan Buck-Morss remarks: ‘Interpreted affirmatively, modern fashion is irreverent toward tradition, celebratory of youth rather than social class, and thus emblematic of social change.’ Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 97. 30. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 76. 31. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 102. 32. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 216. 33. Graeme Gilloch, Myth & Metropolis. Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 120. 114

34. Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 4, 1938–1940, 184. 35. For instance, Benjamin disapprovingly quotes Joseph Dietzgen: ‘Every day, our cause becomes clearer and people get smarter.’ Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 4, 394. 36. Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 4, 1938–1940, 393. 37. Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 4, 1938–1940, 394–395. 38. Cf. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 119. 39. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 108. 40. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 391. 41. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 464. 42. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 2, Part 1, 1927–1930, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999a), 210. 43. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 460. 44. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 105–106. 45. Martin Jay, Splinters in Your Eye. Frankfurt School Provocations (London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2020), 107–108. 46. Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin. The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998). 47. Lipps quoted in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 80. That ‘gray is all theory’ is a reference to Mephistopheles’ speech in Goethe’s Faust. 48. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 3, 1935–1938, 149. 49. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 105. 50. Interestingly, these two forms of boredom seem to mirror the two forms of hap­piness that Benjamin distinguishes in his essay on Proust: ‘There is a dual will to happiness, a dialectics of happiness: a hymnic form as well as an elegiac form. The one is the unheard-of, the unprecedented, the height of bliss; the other, the 115

eternal repetition, the eternal restoration of the original, first happiness.’ Ben­ jamin, Selected Writings. Volume 2, Part 1, 1927–1930, 239. 51. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 207. 52. Cf. Thijs Lijster, Benjamin and Adorno on Art and Art Criticism. Critique of Art (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 164–165. 53. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 107. 54. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 119. 55. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 347. This resignation is indeed expressed in his poetry, such as in the poem ‘St Peter’s Denial’: ‘Believe it, as for me, I’ll go out satisfied / From this world where the deed and dream do not accord.’ 56. As Joe Moran writes: ‘For Benjamin, the value of boredom is that it can form the beginnings of an awareness that the dull monotony of the present will only end with a resolution of the deeper contradictions of society, and the creation of an alternative society based on true creativity and pleasure.’ Joe Moran, ‘Benjamin and Boredom’, Critical Quarterly, 45, 1–2 (2003): 168–181 (180). 57. Benjamin speaks of a ‘dialectics at standstill’, and in ‘On the Concept of History’ writes the following: ‘The historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time takes a stand and has come to a standstill.’ Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 4, 396. I do not have the space here to elaborate on this important concept, but see Lijster, Benjamin and Adorno on Art and Art Criticism, 158–169. 58. See also Thijs Lijster, ‘The Interruption of Myth: Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Critique’, in Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, ed. by Karin de Boer and Ruth Sonderegger (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 156–174. 59. Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 4, 1938–1940, 402. 60. Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 3, 1935–1938, 378.

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61. For a comparison between the analyses of commodity festishism in Lukács, the Frankfurt School, and Guy Debord, see Samir Gandesha and Johan F. Hartle (eds), The Spell of Capital. Reification and Spectacle (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017). 62. David Harvey, ‘Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19’, in Jacobin. https:// jacobinmag.com/2020/03/david-harvey-coronavirus-political-economy-disruptions (accessed September 2020). 63. David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It (London: Penguin Books, 2018). 64. Retrieved from https://samkriss.com/2012/09/05/slavoj-zizek-answers-a-questionon-fifty-shades-of-grey/ (accessed September 2020). 65. Thijs Lijster, De grote vlucht inwaarts. Essays over cultuur in een onoverzichtelijke wereld (Amsterdam: Boom, 2016). 66. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative? Winchester and Washington: Zero, 2009), 12. 67. This was nicely expressed by Zadie Smith in her essay ‘Suffering Like Mel Gibson’: ‘All the artists with children – who treasured isolation as the most precious thing they owned – find out what it is to live without privacy and without time [. . .] The artists without children are delighted by all the free time, for a time, until time itself begins to take on an accusatory look, a judgmental cast, because the fact is it is hard to fill all this time sufficiently, given the sufferings of others.’ Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays (London: Penguin Books, 2020), 29. 68. This in turn raises the question of what kind of ‘beyond’ we are talking about. For Žižek this ‘beyond’ would probably entail the Lacanian jouissance, an ambiguous form of enjoyment which also entails pain and displeasure, but which is still a form of enjoyment. For Benjamin, on the other hand, this ‘beyond’ would necessarily have a messianic dimension.

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Part II Grey Imaging

4. Spectres of Seurat

1

Éric Alliez, translated by Robin Mackay

You find colour in the Andelys, but I see the Seine. Almost indefinable, grey sea, even in the strongest sunlight, with a blue sky. Georges Seurat, to Paul Signac They see poetry in what I do. No – I apply my method, and that is all. Seurat, to Charles Angrand 121

The possible is an infra-thin. The possibility of many tubes of colours becoming a Seurat is the concrete ‘explanation’ of the possible as infra-thin. Duchamp, Notes, note 1 To interrogate that (accursed) share of modern art that is not the province of pictorial modernism but which, on the contrary, might, by way of a thinking of forces rather than of forms, provides material for an archaeology of contemporaneity – a contemporaneity for which, in our view, Matisse and Duchamp would constitute the two untimely ‘entries’ in a history that exceeds mere ‘art history’. This was one of the tensors of my research project which ultimately took the form of a trilogy placed under the sign of a critique of the aesthetic. At first articulated in two parts – La Pensée-Matisse (2005);2 and The Brain-Eye, subtitled New Histories of Modern Painting (2007, English translation 2015)3 – the project was extended into a third and final part in Undoing the Image: Of Contemporary Art (2013)4 via a more direct confrontation with Duchamp’s work, and with the ways in which he deployed and radicalised an ‘extreme modernity’ aimed at undoing what Jean-Claude Bonne and I have called ‘the image-form and the aesthetic-form of art’. A modernity, then, not so much ‘iconoclastic’ (as they say) as pushed to its critical extremities. I should like to explore the return-effect of Duchamp on Seurat, and its presence at the heart of the process of my rediscovery of Seurat in a spectral play between himself and Duchamp, which combines with the solar shadow of Matisse who comes to trouble the whole assemblage by exposing its genealogy to the risk of a new de-figuration. We could begin with a prominent example, by placing the famous Nude Descending a Staircase no.2 not in a direct descendance from, but in the shadow cast by that other scandalous nude, Olympia. But it is more 122

interesting and, in our view, more decisive to look at Seurat’s Poseuses, shown – or rather hung, and hung high, in the central hall of the Barnes Foundation, where Matisse’s Dance also found its place.5 For with Seurat, but in a way that is profoundly different from Manet, art is no doubt exposed for the first time to mechanical and aided reproduction (with photography as the privileged example) – a phenomenon whose full significance Duchamp will take the measure of. Whereas in Manet’s painting the photographic indexes an overexposure effect (the cold overexposure proper to the vacuity of an image which no longer ‘images’ anything except for the most obscene exposure of the commercial exchange revealed by painting), in Seurat the photographic pertains more radically still to the image’s mode of production, of which he produces a new and even more profound pictorial destitution – one that will not leave the ‘place of the spectator’ untouched. For commercial exchange affects the becoming-image of the nude de-posed under the title of Poseuses – a title that announces a reality principle excluding all ‘disinterested’ aesthetic pleasure. Is it any surprise, then, that Duchamp recognised the great importance of Seurat? Recall how Duchamp says that Seurat ‘interests me more than Cézanne’;6 that he was ‘the only man in the past whom I really respected’.7 And, furthermore, that ‘[t]he greatest scientific spirit of the nineteenth century, greater in this sense than Cézanne, is Seurat’.8 Thierry de Duve has dedicated some remarkable pages to the relation between Seurat and Duchamp in his Pictorial Nominalism (subtitled Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to Ready-Made),9 as well as in his Résonances du readymade.10 But de Duve’s analysis relies chiefly upon Duchamp’s explicit comments about Seurat. Our approach here differs from his in two ways. Firstly, our point of departure will not be Duchamp’s remarks about Seurat, but rather Seurat’s painting as such, and Poseuses in particular. Above all we will compare what we take to be the most singular elements of these 123

paintings with Duchamp’s notes, which are not primarily or chiefly about Seurat but seem to strangely echo him. A few words are necessary to justify this comparison. According to Seurat’s contemporaries, his paintings may be considered a ‘theoretical’ body of work precisely insofar as he applied his method and painted his theory – a theory he described as a ‘chromoluminarism’. The scientific basis for Seurat’s reflections on colour theory was provided by Charles Blanc’s 1867 Grammaire des arts du dessin [Grammar of the Arts of Drawing], whose chapter on ‘Painting’ focused on ‘the law of colour contrasts’ advanced by Michel-Eugène Chevreul and by Ogden Rood in his Modern Chromatics: Students’ Text-Book of Color (translated into French in 1881 as Théorie scientifique des couleurs et de leurs applications à l’art et à l’industrie). Seurat also sought confirmation for his idea of the expressiveness of colours and lines in Charles Henry’s essays on scientific aesthetics. It is at the time of these ‘scientific’ speculations on colour that Seurat’s work comes to be regarded as belonging more to a scientific laboratory than to the artist’s studio. This was taken as all the more reason to condemn his ‘positivism’. As for Duchamp’s notes, they are meticulous marks of and remarks on both the intellectual and the technical development of a vast project entitled The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, also known as the Large Glass. These notes, full of his ‘calculations’ (the word is Duchamp’s) and assembled ‘as precise[ly] as those of a patent engineer’ (Richard Hamilton) become less frequent once the construction of the Large Glass begins, and they stop completely by 1921 or 1922. (The Large Glass will be left ‘definitively unfinished’ in 1923.) So there is a complete break between conception and execution, as confirmed by Duchamp in 1953 when he declares that ‘[i]t was not an original work, it was the copy of an idea, an execution, a technical execution, like a pianist executing a piece of music of which he is not the composer. It is the same thing with this glass: it was merely the execution of an idea.’11 This in 124

turn meant that it would be necessary to ‘consult the book and [to] view the two together’.12 In view of this ideation marrying the Bride to those Notes which set out the conditions of possibility for an image only ever to be seen by ‘imaginary eyes’,13 and which is to be approached via the mediation of language as vehicle for the work’s fourth dimension, it is impossible to imagine a more complete rupture with Matisse’s thought. For the latter espouses the inseparability of conception and execution in an ‘in-the-making (se faisant) ‘whose orientation is energetic and involves ‘automatic cerebral progression’14 (a whole ‘cinema of sensation’15 in which the spectator’s mind is engulfed).16 In Duchamp’s Notes we find a full realisation of the scriptural and anti-­aesthetic dimension of The Large Glass, conceived as cosa mentale, a work that was supposed to be accompanied by inscriptions and by a text that was never completed (but whose ‘extra-sensory’ tenor is plainly legible in the Notes). Let us go further and propose that what binds Seurat and Duchamp is that Seurat’s work bears the same relation to the ‘pictorial mentalism’ immanent to his practice as Duchamp’s ‘notes’ do to the deliberate ‘pictorial nominalism’ of the Large Glass. It is precisely this ‘mental’ affinity with Seurat to which Duchamp was particularly sensitive. Or, in other words: if ‘la pintura é cosa mentale’, Duchamp’s reprise of da Vinci’s formula, can be extended to Seurat, it is by rectifying the enigmatic declaration that appears in an interview he gave in October 1963: ‘My landscapes begin where Seurat’s end.’17 My second aim is to show that there is, however, a tension or ambivalence in Seurat’s painting, one that allows it to be inscribed within the horizon of Fauvism. This is something that Matisse picked up on: ‘I have [. . .] been able to supplement Gauguin’s theory with Seurat’s theory of contrasts, of the simultaneous reactions of colours and the relation of their luminosity.’18 If Gauguin must be ‘supplemented’ and corrected by Seurat, it is because Gauguin ‘lacks a construction of space by means of colour, which latter he employs as 125

an expression of feelings’ – which is why Gauguin cannot be ‘counted among the Fauves’; whereas Seurat – and this statement finds a strange echo in Duchamp – ‘uses [. . .] a scientifically organized matter, reproducing and presenting before our eyes objects constructed through scientific means rather than through signs based upon feelings’. Matisse concludes from this that ‘Seurat is the complete opposite of a Romantic’.19 Yet Matisse also finds it necessary to ‘correct’ Seurat by way of the dynamism of Gauguin’s flat colour planes, for Seurat’s scientific divisionism of points imparts ‘to his works a positivist aspect, a stability that is a little inert because of his composition’. But in an interview with Tériade in 1929, Matisse paradoxically makes an exception for what he calls Seurat’s ‘grey canvases’. It is as though Matisse foresaw how, despite (or because of) the grisaille effect for which they were constantly denigrated, Seurat’s works resulted from what we will call a quantitative science of colour-light (‘chromoluminarism’), which marked Matisse’s distinction from what might be called the explicitly qualitative interpretation of light in the neo-Impressionism of Signac and Cross. It was precisely such artists with whom Matisse had to break, after La Joie de vivre, in order to extend/present his most technical definition of Fauvism: ‘At the time of the Fauves, what created the strict organization of our works was that the quantity of colour was its quality.’20 Thus, Matisse and Duchamp are both advocates of a certain Seuratian science. It is from this science that we must set out in order to examine the point where Matisse and Duchamp diverge from and in Seurat. Seurat’s Poseuses, oil on canvas, 1886–1888, 200.5 cm – 250.5 cm, is a very large painting, and one of the neo-Impressionists’ objections to this work will be on this very . . . point. In his journal of 1897, Paul Signac commented that Poseuses ‘is too divided, the brushstrokes are too small [. . .] It makes this fine paintwork look mechanical and too small [. . .] The technique [. . .] lends to the whole a greyish tone.’21 It was in order to confront this issue that, from 126

1895 onwards, Signac – self-appointed spokesman for the neo-Impressionist movement – would, together with Henry Edmond Cross, present himself as an advocate of a second wave of neo-Impressionism. To him, this meant an extended pointillism, using colours ‘as sold in tubes, by shopkeepers’22 (a statement whose ultimate consequences Duchamp would later extract by turning the commercially sold tube of colour into the paradigm of the ready-made). This contradicted de facto Félix Fénéon’s claim that ‘at the right distance, the facture disappears in the optical mixing’.23 The consequence of Signac’s assertion was that ‘the divided brushstroke must be proportionate to the dimensions of the work’, with pointillism therefore absolutely ruled out for large formats24 – and hence for those ‘large machines’ that characterise what Seurat called his ‘great canvases of struggle’, including Poseuses. In a singular paradox, then, pointillism comes to be affirmed in modern art only at the price of undercutting its inventor, when the latter, in any case, claimed to be merely applying a ‘method’. But how could it have been otherwise, given the extent to which the theory painted by Seurat seemed fated to envelop painting in ‘a vast memento mori’ that translated the structural evidence of a Visual isolated both from nature and from the brilliance of pure colour? Signac’s parricide of Seurat reveals neo-Impressionism to us as a moment that is essentially ‘preparatory’ to modernism, understood as the liberation of expression by means of ‘pure colour’. This was a liberation not only from the theory of optical mixture, but also from what Thierry de Duve, speaking of Seurat, calls ‘the constitution of a digitalized code of the visible’ that connects ‘the atomic [or rather molecular] components of the light-­ image’ to ‘its reconstitution in the eye of the spectator’.25 The exception was that for Seurat, the first condition of the effect of a ‘radioactive’ ‘generalized discontinuity’ is that hues must not fuse with each other on the surface. On the contrary, and in opposition to the dissolvent schema of ‘optical mixture’, 127

in Seurat’s work the visibility of the facture is emphasised to the point where it becomes as one with the most visually elementary possible form of sen­ sation, acting so as to render noticeable and visible the mental production of vision through the summation of sensations. As a result of this artificial discontinuity, vision now demands motor activity, an incessant attempt at an impossible definitive pinpointing on the part of a ‘viewer’ tasked with putting together the painting themselves – a kind of photopathy extended to the point of self-hypnosis. On this point there is an unmistakable rapprochement with Duchamp’s formula according to which, if ‘the artist acts like a medium­ istic being’, it is nevertheless ‘the VIEWERS who make the pictures’.26 Let us pause a moment to consider Seurat’s conté crayon works. The graphite blackens the white of the paper, which remains visible in between the dark marks irregularly retained by its uneven grain. From contrasts arising not from the line but from frottage alone, there emerge ‘evanescent forms’, static but spectrally blurred, combining geometric simplification with progressive flattening, frequently evoking figures that seem isolated or arrested in an ‘instantaneous state of Rest’ (in Duchamp’s famous expression),27 suspended in an atomic existence devoid of narrative contours, obeying ‘the mechanics of effects alone’ (Georges Duthuit). In such drawing, conducted by what Françoise Cachin describes as ‘an impersonal hand modulating every possible image of incommunicability and absence’, the eye initially perceives only a contradictory optical architecture combining the illuminating function of white with the colouring function of black. ‘An automat transcribes its incomparable scenes’, scenes viewed by the Machine-Eye of an ‘extra-terrestrial’ ‘half-lost in the acetylene fog’ (Duthuit again);28 an eye that would then have invested the mechanical eye or ‘artificial retina’29 of the photographic apparatus with its speculative projection so as to make its images return, revenant like the spectres they are, as every image has been, ever since the first 128

photograph: a real that can no longer be touched (just an image). In other words, Seurat’s extra-terrestrial gaze, upon which more than one critic has remarked, presents itself as the spectre of the invention of photography, that automatic art with which Seurat is the only painter of his generation to be absolutely contemporary in his very paintings. It is no wonder then that Duchamp was sensitive to Seurat’s Machine-Eye, to the automated anonymity of its recordings, to this practice of art as technological experimentation, to the radioactivity that suffuses the corpuscular nature of light in Seurat’s crayon works. It might be fitting to recall here that The Milky Way – the upper part of the Large Glass – was originally meant to have been a giant photograph, a photosensitive glass plate. It is as though the spectrality of those Seurat drawings that seize upon the nondescript aspects of modern life in order to expose their drabness, their grisaille, resulted from the painter’s experiments in relation to the effects of the daguerrotype as defined by Arago: ‘In M. Daguerre’s paintings and copies, just as in a drawing in black crayon, or, better still (the simile will be more exact), as in mezzotints [gravure à la manière noire], there is nothing but white, black, and grey; light, darkness, and intermediate tones.’30 It is this experience of photography that Seurat will develop graphically in his visual cut-outs by investing both the most material aspect of ‘art’ photographs – their fibrous texture and granular structure – and the most ‘mediumistic’ or spectral conception of a universal photographic ‘influence’, one in which (according to Nadar’s summary of Balzac’s ‘Theory of Spectres’) ‘every body in nature is made up of series of spectral images, in infinite superimposed layers, foliated in infinitesimal films in every direction where optics perceives this body’.31 Seurat as seer, physicist and optician, in a strange and inevitable alliance between ‘materialism’ and ‘spiritism’ (the ‘subtle matter’ that was to make such a powerful impression on Duchamp) that is rendered 129

immediately perceptible by even the most minor of Seurat’s conté crayon works – by their consistent affinity with the printed photographic negative, and by their refusal of Impressionist solutions designed to make up for the ‘shortcomings’ of photography. How novel are these ‘pictograms of the actual’, these ‘icons of the concrete’ resolutely informed through his artistic plate32 (the ‘extra-photographic plate’ evoked by Max Weller) by this paradigmatic usage of the photographic apparatus which became necessary after 1870, when, rather than being connected to a type of image and the question of its nature, the notion of photography would come to refer above all to a productive process, to an economy of production at once optical and chemical, in which the experimental method figures as a grey ontology at work within the positivist current, and where images are constituted as composite assemblages reconciling the psychic and the physiological in a ‘Brain-Eye’. Henceforth there can be production of the image only on condition that the image renders visible the new relation of production that it mediates. This new relation of production consists in the montage of painting as screen for a world that is always-already image, and which thereby reduces painting to no more than the reproduction of a worldless image (in accordance with the principle of the general expansion of the image insofar as it incorporates the entire sphere of the visible by precipitating the disappearance of the things themselves). Accordingly, if there is optical mixing, it is optical mixing as collage: a collage of spots of colours on the canvas which, as they overlap, repel the penetration of a gaze confronted with the least atmospheric images imaginable. Atmospherism, like every form of ‘retinal’ naturalism, is also one of the things that Duchamp’s art, in its ‘beauty of indifference’, categorically refuses and, in this refusal, shares with Seurat. With what Duchamp perceives as Seurat’s counter-Impressionism, as manifested in those paintings which recreate the grey irradiation of the conté works; that power of greyness 130

which, black-on-white, provides the basis for their ‘optical formula’, deline­ ating point by point the image-idea of a subject without subjectivity, monumental in its disenchanted banality. This is indeed the best definition of a spectre, as well as the most rigorous way of registering the spectral condition that menaces painting in the age of photography, an invention that transforms the general character of the art-object in its very ‘making’. Does nothing remain for painting, then, other than to express the dis­ enchantment of the world and the dystopia of modernity’s promises by using and abusing its own codes? In Seurat’s mind, in any case, there is no option left to painting than to plunge into this age whose supreme modernity signifies the absenting of things qua beings (industrial suburbs, Sundays at the Grand Jatte, café concerts, circus parades . . .). In other words, there is no option but to reach that point where, as Yshaghpour writes, ‘between imagery and the mental thing, the visible can no longer exist’. The task will be to envision and synthesize this in-visible as the artifice of a visual which brings with it the most artificial image of painting: painting as that which can no longer be anything but cosa mentale, and which will consequently be so absolutely, in conformity with Rimbaud’s imperative to be ‘absolutely modern’, indissociable here from Duchamp’s admiration for Seurat. To that end, it will be necessary to evacuate the visible world of all natural and terrestrial colour; to convert it completely into the black and white grain of an image obtained by photo-graphic reduction; and then, on the basis of the image’s complete dependence on light, to develop colour according to a photo-chemistry whose effects are strictly determined by those primary or ‘discrete’ elements, points, with the regulation of the gradation of tones (that is, of reciprocal values of black and white) overdetermining the relationships between hues according to a ‘composition of forces’ (Charles Henry, in a phrase copied out by Seurat). 131

It is necessary here to transpose, without conflation, the question of the tonal overdetermination of hue in Seurat into what Matisse sees as the intimate relation between the black and white, sketch and colour. As Matisse stated in 1945: ‘What is most important in colour are relations. Thanks to them and to them alone a drawing can be intensely coloured without there being any need to add colour to it.’33 We should understand from this that for Matisse, the quantitative relations between black and white produce the equivalent of the intensive relations between colours, following the Fauvist principle whereby what constitutes the strict ordering of a painting is the fact that the quantity of colour is its quality. If Matisse is able to declare that after having ‘reflected at length on all the other painters, Seurat remains great’, even in his grey canvases, this is because he recognises Seurat’s ability to construct his objects scientifically, by means of quantitatively calculated dosages of light and shadow devoid of all ‘picturesque’ sentimentalism. Thus, Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte (1884–1886) uses the landscape as a stage set (far removed from any naturalist conception, with its multiple perspectives and their oblique and horizontal shadows) in order to set up, rigid, with the resolution of photographic grain, ‘some forty characters [. . .] with a hieratic and summary line’.34 This is enough to invite us to conceive of la Grand Jatte as a post- and anti-Impressionist radicalisation of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe – a mental construction and a phantasmatic projection mobilised against the ‘picturesque’ illusion of Impressionism. In his description of la Grand Jatte, the philosopher Ernst Bloch speaks of ‘the pallid river’, ‘the lustreless brilliance of the atmosphere in the lifeless waters of the Seine on Sunday, the object of an equally lifeless contemplation’, when ‘everything seems to blur into a damp drabness, not only the world of work but every other world, and even every other object’. Bloch concludes that ‘this type of bourgeois Sunday afternoon is the landscape of suicide in painting’.35 But it 132

also opens onto the orchestrated suicide of impressionist and/or expressionist painting, with its manhandling of the Romantic ideal in a ‘humanitarian’ hermeneutic that harbours its delay beneath the pictorial cult of incompletion. On the plane of the matter of expression, the pointillist technique is a way of executing the technical suicide of painting, with the uniform function of the point turning scientifically against ‘pure’ painting (soon to become a synonym for ‘modernism’) means and methods which, from Manet onwards, are those of a Brain-Eye. Thus, Fénéon writes of the Grande Jatte that, in whatever part of it one examines there unfolds a monotonous and patient tapestry. Here, in effect, the painter’s hand is of no consequence, trickery is impossible; there is no place for bravura. Let the hand be numb, but let the eye be agile, perspicacious, and knowing. Whether ostrich plume or bale of straw, wave or rock, the handling of the brush is the same.36 Whether or not this last assertion is accurate (with respect to a facture that was actually far more varied than his contemporaries realised) matters less than the mechanical effect that is produced by means of a ‘pointillism’ that submits the brush to photography’s Machine-Eye. (One is reminded here of Duchamp’s rejection of the painterly hand which he claimed ‘might hamper his mind’; a hand that is no longer there except as underlabourer for the cold works of the brain . . . .) Obviously, this technical suicide of painting is still a pictorial response to a crisis that is itself no less pictorial. In accordance with the reduction of sensation to what Taine had described as ‘a group of molecular movements’,37 133

painting is now able to promote the molecular as ultimate bastion of the pictorial, thereby giving rise to an animism of pictorial matter as excitation and production of the cerebralised eye. Carried away by a landscape of rays, of diaphanous waves into which it seems one could plunge one’s hand, the canvas offers merely a superficial resistance to the inspection of the viewer who imperceptibly, through gradual displacement, takes up the same distance at which Seurat painted. Yet this abolition of any ‘distance’ of the gaze characteristic of self-hypnosis, this coloured screen transmuted into a retina, both tend actually to ‘provoke in us a living contemplation’, transfiguring the point (what Signac called ‘uniform, dead, matter’) by modulating it in accordance with ‘the brushstroke as divided, changing, living, light’.38 But what holds back the ‘immense canvas’ from yielding to Impressionist plein-air frenzy, if only to impart order to it, is a certain rarefied atmosphere that imposes a lack, an airless void characteristic of ‘pointillism’. And, indeed, the modern age is far closer to the Outside than to the Open; what is at stake in modernity is an Outside and its declension into the presence of the absent/ the absence of presence. For this Outside is ‘phenomenologically’ inseparable from the way in which its vertiginous vacuity excludes all communication between the different figures implicated. One may explore the Open, but one does not thereby rid oneself of the vertigo of an Outside that absorbs every character in an isolation that Manet was the first to experiment with, by melding the autonomy of his perception with the vacuity of the painting. In Seurat, the proliferation of absent figurines will also accentuate the distance that holds them apart, hollowing out a space that light alone can irradiate, saturate with its molecularised matter . . . . As absent to the Open as it is to the fullness of the Flesh and its incarnations of the distant, Seurat’s art attests to the disincarnation of the world and to the spectral condition of the figures that haunt its theatre, suspended in the void. 134

This is particularly true of the preparatory sketch of Child in White (1884), adumbrated in crayon in anticipation of a later addition of colour that in fact never took place, as though lost in the humid whiteness of an absent face (the only one in the final painting to directly address the spectator). All the crayon studies for the Grand Jatte seem likewise to have just been pulled out of a sort of ‘photographic bath’ wherein characters melt like spectres, partially developed indexical traces to which colour will confer a rhythm that is at once ‘material’ and ‘cerebral’. Seurat adopts this void air, detached from all plen­ itude of being, outrageously diaphanous, the pure light of a matter which is no more than gaseous energy imprisoning its characters in a vast suspended mist. ‘Gas has replaced the sun’, warned the journalist Jules Janin in his article championing the daguerrotype.39 In this regard, we cannot ignore the fact that Duchamp will use gaslight when painting some of his works, 40 or that he will seek to explore the signifying possibilities of gas-spirit, albeit more mentally than visually, in order to animate the Large Glass with an oxy­ moronic ‘signification of the Image’. In Duchamp, gas is textually ‘on every floor’. If ‘it can no longer be a question of a formal beauty’,41 in Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte the immobility and closure of sign-forms that might evoke the anomie of colour poster prints42 is only counteracted – from very close up – by those variations in the multicoloured brushstrokes that furnish the immanence of a mixture more haptic than optical – the promise of the new, of a final Song of the Earth for the eye in perdition. But Seurat’s last work, Le Cirque, will open up another line of flight for colour. Before examining this work, we should pause for a moment to consider Poseuses. In this post-Olympia work we see the flat world of the deconstruction of the female nude through painting’s exposure to photographic decoding. If the cliché effect of the nudes is reinforced by the neologism that serves as a title, providing the painting’s ‘invisible colour’, as well as by the 135

contractual-commercial transaction of posing that is now on full display, the photographic effect itself is sustained by the ‘mechanical’ facture and the ‘grey’ tonality in which these spectral nudities are bathed, executed in a fine grain of dense points, here used with a systematicity and on a scale never previously attempted. Under the generically plural title Poseuses (with no definite article), Seurat puts his name to a work that is absolutely alien in its staging of a stand-off between the pictorial and the photographic – something that will have further repercussions for the status of the ‘painting-within-a-painting’ that appears in the background. Already tarnished by its association with popular imagery, here the motif of the Grand Jatte loses what remains of its aura, entering into the cycle of reproduction of the ‘subject’ and of the proliferation of those ‘objects’ so characteristic of the age of their spectacular commodification (the age of department stores43 and prêt-à-porter, almost synonymous with ready-made . . .). Take for instance the two pairs of shoes, three umbrellas, three hats and other trinkets – fashionable articles if ever there were – which have no value other than that of exhibiting the artifices of art (now over­ determined by Charles Henry’s psychomathematical aesthetics) in a world where ‘the provocation of objects has replaced the proposition of things’.44 For it is indeed the ‘poseuse’ dressed in the artistic fashion of the Grand Jatte, as immediately recognisable as an advertising logo, that I see undress in three stages in Poseuses; Poseuses whose time is spread out on the canvas like the successive Polaroid images of a ‘stripping bare’ of the modern. Time is no longer the site of the ‘unique appearance of the distant, however close it might be’ (Walter Benjamin); rather, it bifurcates space into four virtual figures distributed between the represented space in the background of the painting and the supposedly ‘real’ space of the studio which is ordered by a ‘chronophotographic’ montage that lends the site an even more problematic 136

character than that of the still temporally unified re-presentation of La Grande Jatte. In the complex positing of a surface-to-surface, there is a superposition of temporal layers, a device through which the same model seen in bifurcating universes stellates space, undoing and inverting the convention proper to the ‘depth’ of the painting, to that ‘window’ which here gives only onto a wall where the relation of presence to its representation is no longer what it was once thought to be. The outside is no longer situated on the side of the spectator facing the work, nor in the painter’s studio, here transferred onto the canvas, but within the vaporous garden of the Grande Jatte itself, which crosses over its white frame to impose its fine grain of dense points onto the whole composition – no longer even stopping at the frame. The frame of Poseuses, now lost, was originally painted pointillistically with neighbouring colours reacting against one another, so as to break, from within, the window opened onto the spectacle of the exterior45 – that is, the device still maintained by the classical frame of Impressionism, the white frame. And so, the spectres of La Grand Jatte traverse the walls of the studio, deposing and annulling the traditional partitioning of the painting by expressing and exposing the porosity of surfaces that seem to sustain it. An abyssalised surface, collapsing towards an outside more distant than any external world because it no longer adheres to any support, except for a fine mist of light in the ‘grey perspective of the studio’; pellicular image of an outside that is cerebral, atomic, microbiological and molecular, referring every work to something essentially free-floating, in the same sense in which photography detaches the image from its referent by submitting it to the grey regime of reproducibility. Yet it is still in the grey perspective of the studio, on the wall of which are hung four grisailles with indiscernible motifs, that the loss of the subject (of the picture? of the painting?) is best perceived. For if the model at the centre 137

is indeed the true actress of her image (at ‘life’ size), observing us looking at her, doubled, putting on the pose of art like a true poseuse and strolling, deposed in La Grande Jatte, on account of a certain thinness in the treatment of her figure the ‘living’ model is notoriously veiled or underexposed in the sombre light of the studio, in comparison with the typological portrait of the strangely overexposed elegant lady in the painting. Like the entire section of the painting re-presented in Poseuses, the strutting ‘courtesan’ is re- or over-pictorialised by the most material effect of her reproduction, which presents the aspect of the kind of flecked surface characteristic of certain new printing techniques, particularly those of chromotypography (as used in the illustrated magazines of the 1880s). By making his pictorial signs emerge from the bedazzlement of all representation, Seurat displaces the work of the painter towards the apprehension of an outside immanent to that which seeing captures and folds in upon itself in the hallucinatory reception reserved by the retina for the most artificial light. It is probably in Parade de cirque (1887–1888), that ‘dark masterpiece’ exhibited along with Poseuses, and which exhibits the most mysterious (or ‘extra-terrestrial’)46 qualities of Seurat’s painting, that every pose is deposed in the strangest fashion. The site of the Parade finds itself delocalised in favour of an erratic image that traverses the canvas like an imprint captured by its fine mesh. This is a plane unfastened from every mooring, from every ‘foundation’, and projected into the artificial fluttering of an outside unequally partitioned between the orange light of the gas nozzles that dominate the podium haunted by three musicians and a trombone player with almost featureless faces, and the bluish night into which the spectators in the foreground are plunged in contrejour, ‘shadows’ among which we ourselves figure as we line up before the painting. Whence the impression that everything is apposed, affixed upon the same indifferent plane where images that have 138

been peeled off, traced from very different universes jostle alongside one another, assembled in a tabular or diagrammatic fashion within a scenic image ‘where everything is highlighted with the same intensity’ (Alexand­ rian) in a tonal declination of luminous greyness (as one might colourise a black and white photograph). The painting enthusiast finds himself lost in a space that encloses him in its impenetrability and dissolves his all-too-physical presence, as though he himself was afflicted, extinguished, in this deterritorialised plane. As though he in turn were being sucked in by each of those phantoms whose hallucinatory stations have been fixed upon the canvas with a counter-light effect that forbids all visual entry into the scenographic field theatrically de-staged by the painter. So the painting, not without a certain evocation of public execution, will be sustained by a light that is alien to all perceptual faith and ‘devoid of any resonance with the physical world’, according to a key expression of Duchamp’s. In Chahut (1889–1890) and Cirque (1891), the two final large paintings with linear accents and mysteriously abstract movements arrested by schematism, Seurat’s interest in the colour posters of Jules Chéret, which he collected, 47 meets Eadweard Muybridge’s ‘electrophotographs’ and Étienne-Jules Marey’s ‘chronophotographs’ (studied extensively in Charles Henry’s Chromatic circle) with their pointillated graphs, and the ‘bands’ and ‘freeze-frames’ used by Emile Reynaud in his Projective Praxinoscope. Mechanisation of the human, synthetic vision and decorative flatness, ‘design’ avant la lettre – these are the wellsprings of this ‘poster-art’, an art that is industrial and photogenic, an art of advertising, a caricatural art which is for Seurat ‘above all [of] experimental interest’48 when he uses it to exhibit the ‘demonic rhythm’ (Lecomte, on Cirque) of ‘contemporary ignominy’ (G. Khan, on Chahut). This is an experimentation proper to an art of synthesis the machinic essence of which relates the visibility of the image to its projection calculated as a function of the 139

stimulus of spectacle alone, disregarding all ‘idealism’ of reception and all ‘realism’ of perception. Whence the absolute control of the expressions of the spectators in Cirque and their ‘absolute passivity’ with which we engaged as witnesses by the painting’s entire apparatus. To conjoin two of Duchamp’s key expressions, we could say that here the ‘beauty of indifference’ comes in the form of a ‘painting of precision’.49 From this grey vision, hardly compatible with the manipulative effects sought by the ‘dynamogenics’ of the advertising aesthetic proper to the society of the spectacle, a greyness in which colour finds itself enmeshed, and which mobilises an extra-terrestrial distance, the all-too-scientific painter accused of dispelling the Dream will nevertheless extract a wholly compelling effect of ‘contrast’. This is the contrast between the caricatural depictorialisation of the composition of the image (reduced to the schemata of the engineers of entertainment) and the pictorial pulsation of the ‘mechanical’ support’s invasion of the ‘empty’ spaces of the image. Such is the ‘delirious surject of life’50 that animates the ‘background’ of Chahut and the ‘ring’ of Cirque. The animation of these zones remind us of what critics denounced as ‘colour-analyses that are too close to laboratory work’. They make the line flee independently of any topographical function, between points, in the milieu of points-colours, recreating in the most striated space imaginable (in Cirque, everything is ruled by the whip) a nomad space of pure connections, inhabited by a machinic vital force that can only be called ‘abstract’. In this way the eye assumes a digital function and, as Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘the ground constantly changes direction, as in an aerial acrobatics’.51 We might see this as a Matissean rebuke of Duchamp in the form of a spin. Seurat’s illumination, Seurat’s hallucination: a sandy-coloured clown-­acrobat somersaults before the top-hatted painter-spectator.52 He forms a mobile 140

visual bloc with the broken line, abstract and mutant, of the same tone, sharply cut off at the bottom – in the doorway of the artist’s entrance from which the extra-terrestrial will abruptly exit, after a few days of delirium, at the age of thirty-one, as the Hermes Trismegistus of modern art. De Duve translates for us: ‘It was perhaps his status as dead father – I mean as someone who died young without having had the time to produce an oeuvre that would constitute an obstacle to subsequent artists – that allowed him to serve in such a displacement’53 (by Duchamp). It is in À l’infinitif, which brings together notes that are contemporary with the conception of the Large Glass, that we find Duchamp’s thinking entering a particular resonance with Seurat’s theory-painting. À l’infinitif begins with a section titled ‘Speculations’, dated 1913, which announces in its title the speculative colour of the Large Glass, the colour of grey matter, we might say. It opens with a well-known note in the form of an interrogation: ‘Can one make works which are not works of “art”?’54 The possibility evoked by this interrogation of an exit of art from art had been revealed to Duchamp by Seurat when he opened the mode of production of painting to the photographic mode of production, which ‘artists’ of the time took to be external to ‘art’. Whilst it is still possible to make works, art’s commercial externalisation means that it is no longer possible to make works as before. ‘The figuration of a possible’, in Duchamp’s expression, is henceforth inseparably coupled with what he calls ‘the impossibility of making’. Duchamp writes ‘ fer [iron]’ where we are meant to understand ‘ faire [to make]’, so as to make it easier to hear the significant regime of its making. The mordant irony of this undecidable coupling fits perfectly in the context of Duchamp’s choice of an iron comb for a ready-made in 1916. If the iron ‘comb’ [peigne] speaks of the injunction to paint [peindre], then by saying it (ready-)made in iron [en fer] it simultaneously refers to the impossibility of 141

making [faire] on the part of a painter who has selected a ready-made object to take the place of his making, since a comb ‘combs’ without the painter needing to paint it [un peigne, ça ‘peigne’ sans que le peintre ne l’ait peint]. Subsequently, and still under the rubric of the interrogative introductory ‘Speculations’, Duchamp develops several brief statements concerning ‘the question of shop windows’, which he concludes with this assertion: ‘The shop window proof of existence of the external world.’55 Although this formula may seem alien to the initial question, it does provide a certain response to the question of art’s opening onto the Outside. I cannot track here all the Duchampian associations suggested by this notion of the ‘shop window’ – a kind of optical box sealed by a ‘large glass’ . . . But these associations lead directly to the ready-made, as is indicated by another formula a few lines further on: ‘From the demands of shop windows, from the inevitable response to shop windows, there follows the making of a choice.’ To make a readymade is first and foremost to select an object, and ultimately one seen in a shop window, with the proviso that this choice not be made on the basis of any sort of taste or ‘aesthetic’ (dis)interest and that in this sense it will be situated outside art. It will be noted that the shop window also pertains to a way of exhibiting objects – or people-merchandise, in Seurat’s painting: the shop windows of his time were the parades of the fair or the circus, but also the windows of the department stores where one could see displayed in artificial light all sorts of miscellaneous reproducible objects that had been posed there, made to pose for ‘poseuses’ of all sorts. To the question of knowing whether it is possible to make a work that would not be of ‘art’, the shop window answers with the proof of the existence of an outside world internalised by the commercialisation of capital. Capital enjoins art, its aura and unicity challenged by industrialised objects, to find in these very objects some field [du champ] for works that will no longer give anything more than 142

sign [faire signe] towards possibilities left to viewers and to whatever counter-effectuations of which they may be capable [à même]. Or not, even [même]. Duchamp du signe . . . the very title under which Duchamp’s writings are collected. If all of this also directly concerns the relation between Duchamp and Seurat, it is because among the new ready-mades to be found in shop windows we find tubes of industrially produced colours for painters, ready-made colours that the painter no longer has to crush and mix himself, but which can be used pure, straight from the tube. Thus, Duchamp can take the tube of colour as the paradigm of a pictorial ready-made. De Duve rightly deduces from this that ‘the ready-made is of pictorial extraction’, and that ‘the readymade tube of paint is a possible painting’ for a viewer who selects it as such.56 It is precisely in relation to this point that the name Seurat appears explicitly in the undated posthumous note (from the thirties or forties?) that provides the epigraph for the present text: ‘The possible is an infra-thin – the possibility of many tubes of colour becoming a Seurat is the concrete “explanation” of the possible as infra-thin.’ Why Seurat? Duchamp explains: ‘[Seurat] didn’t let his hand interfere with his mind. Anyway, in 1912 I decided to stop being a painter in the professional sense.’57 In the passage from one phrase to the other, Duchamp carries out an accelerated archaeology of his own work – with the appropriate ‘delay’. The tone of certain notes on colour in À l’infinitif resonates strongly enough with Seurat’s fundamentally tonal conception of colour for it to seem worthwhile digging a little deeper into the archaeological relation that links Duchamp to Seurat. These texts date from a period when Duchamp was still thinking of The Bride Stripped Bare By her Bachelors, Even as a future painting, or rather, a sort of anti-painting whose paradoxical mode of existence he was trying to define. He would only find a way out of the aporia into which 143

these notes led him through what he would come to call a ‘pictorial nominalism’ – so it would ultimately be language, or rather the performative games of the signifier, that would end up being the real motor of a work that would no longer be ‘of art’ even though it did not call itself anti-art, with the complicity of the spectator who sets it in motion by interpreting it ‘without any poesis [or poiesis, EA addition] here that could call itself pictura’.58 Nevertheless, in a section of À l’infinitif called ‘Colour’, Duchamp spec­ ulates on how one might make a painting similar to Seurat’s. He suggests starting by adding luminance values, gradations of black and white, to a pre-existing design, then covering them over with corresponding colour values.59 Here we are very close to Seurat’s own idea, discussed above, since for Seurat too, the contrasts of hues are overdetermined by tonal contrasts. But Duchamp will go even further, concluding as follows: ‘Over this second coat, shade again in black and white (spit).’60 This return in fine to the tonal values so dear to Seurat is indeed a way of spitting on colour, in particular on the colours of Fauvism. Generally speaking, it is a question of degrading colour so as to evacuate it as much as possible of all aesthetic quality by proscribing any sort of naturalism or ‘vitalism’. So it comes as no surprise that, at the close of this section, Duchamp ends up declaring: ‘There is a certain inopticity, a certain cold consideration, these colorings affecting only imaginary eyes in this exposure.’61 Something that cannot fail to evoke Seurat’s machinic eye, coldly operating with colouring-points which no longer evoke objects in a natural light, thereby depriving the painting of the retinal opticality proper to real eyes and addressing itself only to the artificial retina ‘of imaginary eyes’. Except that Duchamp can only envisage a nominalism of colours, since he adds in parentheses: ‘The colours about which one speaks’, followed by the explanatory note: ‘I mean the difference between speaking about red and looking at red.’62 Here we can gauge the full 144

magnitude of the linguistic turn that separates the painter Seurat from the pictorial nominalist Duchamp. Duchamp discusses colours in another important section of À l’infinitif titled ‘Appearance and Apparition’. Since we do not have the space to analyse it in detail here, we will limit ourselves to noting its general sense. For Duchamp, ‘appearances’ constitute ‘the usual sensory evidence enabling one to have an ordinary perception of [an] object’.63 It is with this image-form as with all aesthetic-form that Duchamp intends to break [couper] by situating art/anti-art in an outside that is irreducible to them. What must ‘surface’ in the painting is not appearance but ‘apparition’, which he defines ‘as a kind of mirror image looking as if it were used for the making of this object, like a mold, but this mold of the form is not itself an object’; and again: ‘By mold is meant: from the point of view of form and colour, the negative (photographic).’64 This notion of the mould is fundamental for Duchamp: the mould is not a real object, but that which will allow us to think of the work as the production of an art/anti-art ‘object’ not on the basis of its appearance but on the basis of something like its negative (on the photographic model). The mould as ‘negative’ is thereby defined as a ‘generator’65 not of (sensible) givens (or data) but of a ‘being givens [étant donnés]’. It allows Duchamp to place the ‘making’ of the work no longer in appearances, but in their retreat, beyond the retinal, into the grey matter of a hypothesis whose only material reality is negative. Or, once again: the machine of the Large Glass produces the negation of the work in the modern sense of the term. Ultimately, then, Seurat and Duchamp do not situate themselves on the same plane of photographic apparition. They make different uses of the photo­ ­graphic paradigm. Seurat’s Machine-Eye collects up the energy of luminous molecules in the form of colour-points, like a camera. The painter goes so far as to attribute to the texture of these colour-points a quantum of vital energy, 145

something Matisse will perceive as closely related to the energy that endows his colour-forces with their expansive power. Faced with this colour-­machine that Seurat had begun to set in motion in the form of an entirely new sensation that is no longer that of ‘experienced colour’ but of its photo-­graphic re/ production on the surface of the canvas, Duchamp sets up the grey machinery of a constructivism of the signifier as the only alternative to the aesthetic power that he cuts off his viewers. He thus projects the generator-­paradigm of the photographic negative onto a mental plane, the infra-thin plane of ‘the colours about which one speaks’ – and of which, once they have passed into the shop window, one can no longer speak other than ‘A little like the passage of a present participle to a past one.’66 As the truth of this passage, then, a ‘pictorial nominalism’67 that signifies the proliferating voiding of the image-­ object of/outside art as the ab-aesthetic foundation of a kind of grey postmodernism that is at once de-monstrated and dismantled [dé-montre et démonte], dé-coupé et découplé for the first time as such in the specular self-­ reflexivity of art-anti-art. Here language finds itself shifted towards the resumption, in extremis, of a possible ‘non-speakable’ fiction, with no other plastic relay than the ironic promise of a ‘Colour Breeding’ impressing the Dust Breeding on a section of the Large Glass as photographed by Man Ray. We’ll conclude that Seurat will have been for Duchamp (a Seurat signed ‘Duchamp’?) that future anterior who completes modernity as performative by no longer promising a becoming-colour except in dust, even. A certain grey, then, that will make mention of the quality of colour on the backside, all the better to take from behind the modernism of colour’s supposed autonomy. Dust, that time-powder with a delay effect which Duchamp will cultivate, ultimately desiccating all the liquidities of painting on a Large Glass which he treats as a giant photographic plate where it can no longer picture itself except in a ‘box’. A grey box. 146

Notes 1. This text returns – inevitably rewriting it in the present participle – to a lecture given within the context of the FORART Lectures at Oslo in 2007, at the invitation of Professor Ina Blom (Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo), who also recently re-initiated this work on the occasion of a seminar that she gave at the University of Chicago. I thus offer her my twofold thanks. 2. Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne, La Pensée-Matisse: Portrait de l’artiste en hyperfauve (Paris: Le Passage, 2005). 3. Éric Alliez, with the collaboration of Jean-Clet Martin, L’Oeil-Cerveau: Nouvelle histoires de la peinture moderne (Paris: Vrin, 2007); English translation The BrainEye: New Histories of Modern Painting, translated by Robin Mackay (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). 4. Éric Alliez, with the collaboration of Jean-Claude Bonne, Défaire l’image. De l’art contemporain (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2013); English translation Undoing the Image: Of Contemporary Art, 5 vols, translated by Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017–ongoing). Vol. 3, Duchamp Looked At (From the Other Side), has just been published with the supplement Duchamp With (and Against) Lacan. An Essay in Queer Mutology (2022). 5. In 2012 the Barnes Foundation moved from the suburb of Merion (in the state of Philadelphia) to the city centre but preserved the original architecture and hangings of the American collector (at the time the move was described as ‘a two-hundred-million-dollar cloning’). 6. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), 93. 7. Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (New York: Badlands Unlimited, 1964), 16. 147

8. Marcel Duchamp, ‘A Complete Reversal of Art Opinions by Marcel Duchamp, Iconoclast’, in Art and Decoration, September 1915, reprinted in Studio International, 189, 973 (January–February 1975): 29. 9. Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to Readymade, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991). 10. Published in English as chapters 2, 3, 4 and 7 of Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 11. Interview with Harriet and Sidney Janis in 1953; quoted in de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 173. 12. Cabanne, Dialogues, 43. The Green Box (1934) containing facsimile reproductions of the notes and ‘technical drawings’ in a limited edition (of 300) in a green cardboard box bearing the title ‘La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même’ is therefore an integral part of the Large Glass. If they are complementary, it is only in the (negative) sense that one prohibits the other from forming an aesthetic unity of a visual order (as explained by Duchamp in a 1949 letter). 13. Marcel Duchamp, Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk, À l’infinitif / In the infinitive, trans. Jackie Matisse, Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk (Typosophic Society, 1999), 53. Thus André Breton was able to write ‘Phare de la mariée’ following the ‘Ariadne’s thread’ of the Notes, without having seen the Large Glass (which was in New York). André Breton, ‘Phare de la mariée’, Minotaure, 6, (1934): 45–49; English translation in View 1 (1945), reprinted in Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Paragraphic Books, 1959), 88–94. 14. Louis Aragon, Henri Matisse, roman, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), vol. 1, 302. ‘I am led, I do not lead’, as Matisse would explain in relation to his drawings Variations (Matisse to Aragon, 1942, cited in Henri Matisse, roman, vol. 2, 234). 15. Matisse’s expression, as reported by Aragon, Henri Matisse, roman, vol. 1, 75. 16. Letter from Henri Matisse to Pierre Matisse, April 1942.

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17. The original reads: ‘My landscapes begin where da Vinci’s end’. See Francis Roberts, ‘I Propose to Strain the Laws of Physics’, Artnews, 67, 8 (December 1968): 63. 18. Henri Matisse, Écrits et propos sur l’art, ed. Dominique Fourcade (Paris: Hermann, 1972), 94; underline in the original. [Fourcade’s selection overlaps only partially with that presented in Henri Matisse, Matisse on Art, trans. and ed. J. D. Flam (Oxford: Phaidon, 1973) – trans.] 19. Matisse, Écrits et propos sur l’art, 94. 20. Henri Matisse, ‘Statements to Tériade: On Fauvism and Color, 1929’, in Flam (ed.), Matisse on Art, 83–87, 85 [Écrits et Propos sur l’Art, 98] (italic ours). On the quantitative foundation of the qualitative and the relations between the intensive and extensive in Matisse, see Alliez and Bonne, La Pensée-Matisse, 75–84; ‘Matisse-­ Thought and the Strict Quantitative Ordering of Fauvism’, trans. R. Mackay, in Collapse 3, ed. R. Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012), 206–229; and for a more recent critical discussion of Yve-Alain Bois’s thesis on this subject, see ‘Unframing Painting, “Pushing Back the Walls”’, Journal of Contemporary Painting, 5, 1 (April 2019): 117–134. 21. Paul Signac’s Journal, 28 December 1897 (emphasis ours) (P. Signac [1899], D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionisme [republished by Hermann, Paris, 1978], 21). Influenced by the recent publication of Delacroix’s Journal, Signac begin to keep his own in 1894. 22. Maurice Denis, ‘Préface à l’exposition Henri-Edmond Cross (22 Avril–8 May 1907)’, reprinted in Maurice Denis, Théories (Paris, 1912); republished in Maurice Denis, Le Ciel at l’Arcadie, ed. Jean-Pierre Bouillon (Paris: Hermann, 1993), 125. 23. Félix Fénéon, ‘Le néo-impressionisme’, L’Art Moderne, 1 May 1887: republished in Félix Fénéon, Au-delà de l’impressionisme (Paris: Hermann, 1966), 93: ‘Two steps back – and all these variegated colours merge themselves into undulating luminous masses; the facture, one might say, vanishes.’

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24. Signac, Journal, 119, 121, 122. In his Journal, on the date of the passage cited above, he will write: ‘I attach more and more importance to the purity of the brushstroke, and I try to give it its maximum purity and intensity; it is this love of the fine hue which makes us paint like this, not a taste for the “point.”’ 25. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 172. 26. Marcel Duchamp, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 138; Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp du signe (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 247. Capitalisation in the original. 27. Duchamp, Salt Seller, 27. 28. Georges Duthuit, ‘Georges Seurat, voyant et physicien’ [1946], in Représentation et présence. Premiers écrits et travaux (1923–1952) (Paris: Flammarion, 1974), 324. 29. Thus wrote the theorist of optics Jean-Baptiste Biot in a scientific note added to the account of the meeting of 7 January 1839 where François Arago presented Daguerre’s discovery to the Academie des sciences. 30. Account of the public meeting of the Académie des sciences, 19 August 1839. Italic in the original. 31. Félix Nadar, My Life as a Photographer, trans. Thomas Repensek, October, 5 (Summer 1978): 6–28, 9; translation modified. See Honoré de Balzac, Le Cousin Pons (Paris: G. Roux et Cassanet, 1847), chapter 32. 32. The expression ‘artistic plate’ was coined by Max Weller in his account of the hanging of neo-Impressionist canvases at the Salon des XX in Brussels (Max Weller, ‘Le Salon des XX’, L’artiste, May 1888). He goes on to speak of an ‘extra-photographic plate’. 33. Matisse, Écrits et propos sur l’art, 200. 34. Félix Fénéon, Les Impressionnistes en 1886 (Paris: Publications de La Vogue, 1886), 23. 150

35. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (London: Blackwell, 1986), vol. 2, 814; translation modified. Italic in the original. 36. Fénéon, Les Impressionnistes en 1886, 22. 37. Cf. Hyppolite Taine, De l’intelligence, 2 vols (Paris: Hachette, 1870–1923), vol. 1, 7. 38. Signac, Journal, 122. 39. Jules Janin, ‘Le Daguerotype’ [sic], L’Artiste, November 1838–April 1839; cited by André Rouillé, La Photographie. Entre document et art contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 36. 40. Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp du signe, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 221. 41. Marcel Duchamp, Notes, ed. Paul Matisse (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), 42 (note 69). 42. The ‘chromos’ collected by Seurat, found in the painter’s studio after his death. 43. Au bonheur des dames, a novel in which Émile Zola presents the world of the grands magasins, had been published in 1883. 44. The phrase is Henri Maldiney’s: Regard, Parole, Espace (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1973), 121. 45. In Deleuze’s phrase: the outside is more distant than any external world . . . . In this sense (with all due respect to Deleuze), the outside is the negation of the exterior (in its ‘classical’ or impressionist sense). 46. It is with particular reference to Parade that Roger Fry introduces the idea of a vision which might be that of a ‘visitant from another planet’. Roger Fry, ‘Seurat’s La Parade’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 55, 321 (December 1929): 291–293. 47. John Russell, Seurat (London: Thames & Hudson, 1965), 234. 48. Arsène Alexandre, ‘Le Salon des Indépendants’, Paris, 20 March 1891. Something which, from the pen of this author, is far from high praise. 49. Duchamp, Notes, note 77. 151

50. According to Huysman’s remarkable phrase in an article on Chéret (J.-K. Huysmans, Paris, Tresse et Stock [Paris: UGE 10/18, 1976], 317). 51. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1987), 494; (and the entire section ‘Aesthetic Model: Nomad Art’, 492–500). 52. The bearded spectator in the first row of the Cirque is the painter Charles Angrand, to whom Seurat had confided: ‘They see poetry in what I do. No, I apply my method, and that is all.’ 53. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 171. 54. Duchamp, Salt Seller, 74. 55. Duchamp, Salt Seller, 74; translation modified. 56. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 171. 57. Tomkins, The Afternoon Interviews, 16. 58. Catherine Perret, Les porteurs d’ombre. Mimésis et modernité (Paris: Belin, 2001), 187. 59. Duchamp, Salt Seller, 79. 60. Duchamp, Salt Seller, 79; translation modified. Underline in the original. 61. Duchamp, Salt Seller, 83. My italic. 62. Duchamp, Salt Seller, 83. 63. Duchamp, Salt Seller, 84. 64. Duchamp, Salt Seller, 85. 65. Duchamp, Salt Seller, 85. 66. Duchamp, Salt Seller, 83. 67. Duchamp, Salt Seller, 78.

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5. Grey and the Silence of Surfaces Bente Larsen

Sense opens up in silence. Jean-Luc Nancy How are we to approach artworks which turn away from us, which close themselves off in relation to the gaze, create distance and withdraw into pure pictorial matter? These are the crucial issues that I will address through the strategies of withdrawal, muteness and silence epitomised through the use of grey in the work of two painterly practices: the early modernist, Vilhelm Hammershøi 153

(1864–1916) and the late modernist, Gerhard Richter (1932). The primary and most striking feature of Hammershøi’s paintings is a reductive colour scheme that manifests as a dominant grey tonality that permeates the work in and through a play of opaque surfaces. In Richter’s oeuvre, grey is a recurring feature and way of thinking in painting that often manifests as either an all-over monochrome-like approach, or like pigment floating on blank screens. Although there are clear historical and aesthetic differences between the two practices, I want to explore how their respective approaches connect them through a passion for the distinct image that is expressed through the colour grey. Central to my analysis will be Jean-Luc Nancy’s post-phenomenological definition of art in terms of what he calls ‘the distinct’ (le distinct), which is defined as that which sets apart at a distance, silent, withdrawn, and thus where touch remains out of reach, detached and impalpable and which allows in-visibility to present itself without representing itself as such. Furthermore, I want to put Nancy’s notion of ‘the distinct’ in conversation with Adorno’s notion of ‘Verstummen’ as articulated in his Negative Dialectics, which translates into English as ‘silence’ or ‘muteness’. For Adorno, this ‘muteness’ is the sign of a world that can no longer be experienced because the world itself has lost its meaning and art is the exigent manifestation and preservation of this loss. Thus, this Adornian term echoes in strange and compelling ways with Nancy’s claim that art is not a simulacrum that protects us from absence and loss, but a simulacrum in which the very revelation of loss is art’s revelation as such. In fact, in a piece entitled ‘Interviews’ in Multiple Arts: The Muses II, Nancy specifically uses the words ‘silence’ and ‘muteness’ when he notes that ‘(l)anguage is radically improper when faced with painting . . . Painting doesn’t speak. There’s a silence where painting’s concerned, an absolute muteness.’1 But, as he also emphasises, in spite of language remaining essentially improper to painting we still have to speak about it, leaving open the question of how 154

to approach art in order to maintain its untranslatable muteness. In this chapter, muteness will be the point of departure for my approach to Hammershøi’s and Richter’s use of the colour grey. Rather than trying to hermeneutically interpret their works into the medium of language, my aim is to explore their respective uses of grey as gestures of withrawal in which art is a way of making sense that preserves, exposes and ‘speaks’ this untranslatable muteness. In 1917, the Danish Romantic poet Sophus Claussen wrote a poem entitled Vilhelm Hammershøi, Inspired by an Exhibiton of Hammershøi’s Paintings. Three of the most compelling lines from the poem read as follows: How sweet to know that blacks and greys Give shelter to the light and let it stay Grey is not grey nor is black ever black.2 As a neo-Romantic symbolist, Sophus Claussen reads the colourless, the grey and the black in Hammershøi’s paintings, as a transcendental shelter for the light, ‘dewed’ by the ‘depth of darkness and the tenderness of white’, that carries, ‘the dream and silence of creation morning’. For Claussen, this silence opens a melancholic yet generative consolation enfolded within the colour grey. Eighty-six years after Claussen’s poem on Hammershøi, Gerhard Richter’s 2002–2003 exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim – Gerhard Richter: Eight Grey – featured the colour grey. In his critical/scholarly essay for the exhibition catalogue, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh introduces the text with a cit­ ation from T. W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: One cannot say in general whether somebody who excises all expression is a mouthpiece of reification. He may also be a spokesman for a 155

genuine, non-linguistic, expressionless expression, a kind of crying without tears.3 The two exhibitions refer to two different epochs within the recent history of art, just as the two citations, connected to the exhibition of the two artists, reflect two different approaches: the neo-Romantic poet reading grey as a metaphysical tonality that bears melancholic consolation and the critical-­ theoretical philosopher seemingly denying it. By including the citation by Adorno, Buchloh opens up an approach to Richter’s Grey Mirrors as a formulation of a silencing of expressive means that manifests itself as a ‘Verstummen’, that is characterised as ‘crying without tears’. In a modernity in which, according to Adorno, ‘all expression is a mouthpiece of reification’, authenticity can only genuinely appear as an ‘expressionless expression’. This muteness materialises as a withdrawal of the artwork into its own materiality and tonality in order to draw itself out: Perhaps all expression, which is most akin to transcendence, is as close to falling mute as in great new music nothing is so full of expression as what flickers out – that tone that disengages itself starkly from the dense musical texture – when art by virtue of its own movement converges with its natural element.4 This ‘falling mute’ and ‘flickering out’ as the ‘expressionless expression’ of muteness through a tonality that sets itself apart from the artistic material itself is what is at stake in the grey tonality that so strikingly marks the works of Hammershøi and Richter. 156

In the early modernist works by Hammershøi, his grey paintings are characterised by a withdrawal into a world of painterly immanence through a poetic resonance and play between immobile, calm and flat surfaces/planes of walls, floors, doors, buildings and the sky. Richter’s grey paintings are formed by a performative and self-reflective act of greying: painting grey pictures of pictures of grey; a self-reflexive strategy that he has adopted through his entire production. In their own unique way, Hammershoi and Richter enact a poetics of immanence that involves a ‘flickering out’ of express­ ive means via the colour grey. In order to draw Adorno and Nancy together in ways that are compelling for thinking about the colour grey as a way of manifesting withdrawal, it is important to note that Nancy makes direct reference to Adorno’s conception of the monad, and includes a long quote from Aesthetic Theory in The Muses: ‘Aesthetics must needs demand immersion in the individual . . . It is the artwork itself that points beyond its nomadic constitution . . . The only way to relate an aesthetic particular to the moment of universality is through its closure as a monad.’5 Although Nancy and Adorno share a conception of art’s potential openness that is only accomplished through its closure and sepa­ration from the available world, their approach to the monadological character of the artwork differs in important ways. In Adorno’s materialistic-dialectical aesthetics of art, the artwork is ‘defined by its relation to what it is not’,6 which determines a dialectics of negation both in relation to the outer world and within the immanence of the artwork that is antithetical to that world. In the post-phenomenological aesthetics of Nancy the artwork is defined as ‘the distinct’: ‘It is what one cannot touch (or only a touch without contact).’7 The distinct implies a transimmanence that Nancy describes as an ‘. . . ex-position. The transimmanence, or patency, of the world takes place as art, as works of art.’8 Nancy determines this transimmanence to be the result 157

of a process in which the artwork has transformed from being to appearing, to art as a simulacrum. It is a result of a historically determined shift from ‘form to formation, /. . ./ from the image as lie to truth as image. Nothing less.’9 To sum up, the differences between Adorno and Nancy circle around the work of art as an immanent unfolding of a dialectics of negation on the one hand, and a transimmanent exposition on the other. From the point of departure of Adorno’s negative dialectics, Hammeshøi’s early modern paintings transcend representation, thus forming a ‘Verstummen’, a ‘flickering out’ of expression via the abstraction of the represented space through grey planar surfaces. At the same time as these surfaces withdraw into a silent non-representative existence, they visually protrude towards the viewer in a monadological negation manifesting as silent, grey muteness. In contrast, Richter’s late modern works do not manifest as a painterly dialectics of negation. Instead, Richter’s works unfold through and as surfaces without an inside. What touches is described by Nancy as ‘something that is borne to the surface from out of an intimacy’.10 As an intimate object, but without an inside, what meets this object is the eye. In its being seen, it opens up for an artistic practice of distance, radicalising the relation between eye and work into an impalpable touch. Despite the differing of their painterly practices, Hammershøi and Richter share a monadological silencing of expression epitomised through grey. It is a silencing unfolding in and as the surface without a notion of rising to the sur­ face from a ground. Rather it is a mute ground literally facing itself right at the surface. This radical expression of a silencing and recession of represen­ tationality through surface is formulated in Richter’s early ‘photo-­painting’, Tisch (1962). Here the painter has added an extra layer of grey paint on top of the black and white tonality of the table; an abstract gesture that simul­ taneously undermines the representative quality of the table and emphasises 158

its painterly surface that suggests a painting of a painting of pictorial surface that distances its palpability and proximity without reducing its exposure to our gaze. As is well known, Richter thematised grey in a number of his paintings and installation works throughout his career. During the 1970s, he produced several series of grey paintings, which delicately vibrate in nuanced, albeit restricted, tonalities, hues, textures and techniques of application. In numerous interviews, Richter has offered insightful reflections on his works that are of theoretical and epistemological pertinence. One example is his description of grey as ‘the epitome of non-statement . . . it does not trigger off feelings or associations, it is actually neither visible nor invisible . . . Like no other colour it is suitable for illustrating nothing.’11 In pointing out the colour grey as ‘suitable for illustrating nothing’, it can be seen as the materialisation of an eclipse between the visible and non-visible, thus suggesting a link to Nancy’s aesthetic of the artwork’s immanent distance. Displacing attention from the work as a representation ‘of ’ to its presentation and patency, the work has become what is ‘given to be seen’; a ‘coming out of the non-visible and the non-seeing formed by the work in and as ex-position’.12 In Nancy’s definition, the artwork is ‘completely different from an ordinary understanding of representation, figuration or fiction’.13 Nancy determines the figurative form of the artwork as a figuration of itself, of the very act of figu­ ration. It exposes the world as imaging the imagination itself in ‘its being as sensible/intelligible thereness’.14 It is this ‘thereness’ of the image that separates the artwork as distinct, as ‘a thing which is not a thing’.15 The ‘thereness’ is a ‘given to be seen’, such that ‘(pa)ainting is there in order to bring out, broadly, at length, endlessly, that thing, that type of pure material essence: seeing’.16 Opening for ‘seeing’ as in itself forming a ‘pure material essence’, through what Richter describes as an eclipse, also opens up the radicality of Gerhard 159

Richter’s series of Grey Mirrors, all made by grey paint applied to the reverse side of the glass panels. Through the reflection formed by the grey-toned glass, Richter creates a dialogue with the outer world through their mirroring effect, at the same time as the reflection of the outer world is displaced into an image. Not only do these mirrors distinguish themselves by dissolving pictorial surface into pure reflection, they can be seen as a materialisation of an image that differs from what Nancy describes as an ordinary version of representation, figuration or fiction.17 Grey Mirrors is a work in which object and subject are given together and give themselves ‘to one another, or even in one another (ein ins andere hinein sich bildend)’.18 In Grey Mirrors, the image does not exist, but rather is dissolved into pure reflection, at the same time as the grey pigment emphasises the displacement of the reflection into an image. The mirror effect performs a nihilation of surface together with the image giving itself to be seen, but as an image. Hammershøi’s painterly practice also involves a displacement into ‘a given to be seen’, in ways that resonate with Richter’s Grey Mirrors. In addition, and from another epistemological point of departure, it radicalises the immanent process of the works as a radical ‘Verstummen’. In Hammershøi’s paintings, grey is not thematised explicitly, as it is in Richter’s work. Rather, it forms a tonality of subdued expressiveness that permeates his oeuvre through and through.19 For example, in his paintings of streets or buildings, the sky takes on the same dense, grey-toned materiality as the buildings themselves, just as trees are frozen into grey silhouettes in From the Old Christiansborg (1907) and St. Petri Church (1909). The lifelessness of the cityscapes is underlined by the absence of people. Most of his works appear uninhabited even as they persistently refer to habitation in their subject matter. Another predominant motif in Hammershøi’s production is interiors. These paintings are almost exclusively of the different apartments he 160

occupied in Copenhagen. When his family – himself and his wife Ida – were forced to move, Hammershøi only accepted apartments that he found to be suitable subject matter for his paintings.20 Instead of depicting interiors inviting the viewer into comfortable, well-furnished, bourgeois living rooms, as was the norm in the work of Hammershøi’s contemporaries, he turns Danish Golden Age interiors into enigmatic scenes of estrangement, draining them of any decorative value or symbolic function. The interiors depicted are simple rooms, almost chaste, with only a few pieces of furniture and the focus resolutely placed on walls, windows and doors. Many of the windows depicted in his paintings are characterised by numerous sash bars and small window panes, and doors with classical panels, which were all distinctive features of the style predominating in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses in Christianshavn.21 Working predominantly in series, Hammershøi chose doors as the predominant motif in some paintings, windows in others, or they are combined, with a door placed beside the window. The openings offered by the doors are not openings to different rooms or outside views but, rather, to other doors, walls or windows (Figure 5.1). In paintings that include windowpanes, instead of opening to the outside world, the panes most often take on the shape of new surfaces, formed by the sunlight streaming into the room, at the same time as it is caught by the panes, blocking the view to the outside (Figure 5.2). In the same way, dust catches the sunbeams, thus forming small, grey dust-squares. In other paintings, the windows opens up to the darkness of the night, with window bars framing small black squares drawing night into the room, as another painterly surface. When the windows do offer a view outside the apartment, it is to other windows, either gallery windows, as in Interior with a View on an Exterior Gallery (1903), or fragments of windows from a building close by on the opposite side of the street. 161

This play of openings and closures – or, rather, of opening to closure, or, of openings closing in on themselves – forms a painterly form of introversion; a self-referential play of surfaces opening to other surfaces across the paintings. It is a play that in some paintings includes Hammershøi’s wife, Ida. Most often she is depicted with her back turned towards the viewer standing or seated, dressed in a plain black dress, her black hair in a bun, and her neck forming a white triangle between hair and dress. Instead of leading the viewer’s gaze to some place narratively beyond the restrictions of the painted world, Ida blocks the view, just as her view is blocked by a door or a window. If she is not depicted facing a door or a wall, she is presented absorbed in some kind of activity that is hidden from the viewer, as in Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor (1901), where Ida is depicted sitting and involved in an inscrutable task that we are never privy to (Figure 5.2). She turns her back to the viewer and is pushed to the left side of the painting, such that the window and door, as well as the squares formed by the sun on the floor, dominate the picture. Above Ida, and in continuation with her head, a vertical panel rises towards the ceiling. On each side of the panel are placed two small quadratic pictures enclosed in dark-brown frames. The panel and the pictures are framed by another rectangle of panels adjacent to them. This new panel forms a rectangle that repeats the vertical shape of the window and the door. This play of surfaces and squares, modulated in nuances of grey, encloses Ida’s small dark figure, at the same time as she is locked in between the brown chair and table, and squeezed towards the panels of the wall. Despite being displaced to the side, and structurally dominated by the window and door, Ida forms an inscrutable centre of silence and absorption. In the formal play of surfaces unfolding across the picture, she embodies the suspension of the possibility of visually entering the work. She narratively and formally intensifies the closing-off of the picture from the outer 162

world – both from the beholder of the painting and from any ‘outside’ that is referred to in the painting – into a world of silent immanence; a pictorial room frozen in a moment of eternity. This play with surfaces is further explored in Interior with the Artist’s Easel from 1910 (Figure 5.3). It is a depiction of a canvas on an easel, showing the reverse side of the canvas, with its front facing the painter’s chair, abandoned and empty. Here Hammershøi breaks with the genre of ‘painter painting in front of his easel’, which focuses on the act of painting, with the painter

Figure 5.1  Vilhelm Hammershøi, Open Doors, 1905, oil on canvas. Photographer: Pernille Klemp. Permission to use. Source: The David Collection, Copenhagen 163

and the artwork forming the centre of the painting, narratively as well as compositionally. Instead, absence forms the centre. What is present as a painting in the painting is a slightly romanticised landscape painting with a golden frame placed above the easel. One half of a bipartite door remains closed, and the other is open, with its light-grey

Figure 5.2  Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor, 1901, oil on canvas, 46.5 × 52 cm (KMS3696). Source: National Gallery of Denmark

edge protruding towards the viewer, opening onto an adjacent room, where we can see a small table with a bowl on top, placed against a grey wall. This is a painting in which the painter is present in his absence, the same way as his painting is present through its being hidden from the gaze of the viewer yet intractably there. The part of the door 164

Figure 5.3 Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with the Artist’s Easel, 1910, oil on canvas, 84 × 69 cm. Source: National Gallery of Denmark

Figure 5.4 Vilhelm Hammershoi, Landscape on the Island of Falster, 1890–1891, oil on canvas, 31.2 × 44.3 cm. Source: National Gallery of Denmark

which is open offers a fragment of a view into the room into which it opens, presenting to us a still life with table and bowl. It is a still life which is depicted as real in the same way as the landscape painting hanging on the wall above the easel is real as a painting within the immanence of the painting we are beholding. Compositionally, the almost luminous grey edge of the open door divides the painting into two, consisting of a grey wall to the left visually blocking the gaze, and the right side opening onto a new room. The easel to the left generates an immanent process of presence and absence. Through this easel, the absent painter is given presence, whereas the still life of the 165

bowl to which the door opens appears unreal, as belonging to another world. This immanent process of presence becoming absence, and absence turning into presence, is repeated and emphasised formally in the play with the door dividing the picture in two. Furthermore, within the pictorial matter, the grey surface of the wall and the back of the easel have achieved a stronger sensuous and thematic presence than the still life. The same still-life quality we see in Hammershøi’s interiors also permeates his city- and landscape paintings. In his cityscapes of frozen trees and grey sky, numerous official buildings are depicted as if densely weighted objects, anchored down by their own materiality in the misty, grey atmosphere of Copenhagen in November. In these paintings, the sky takes on the same materiality as the walls, window panes and doors in Hammershøi’s interiors, all forming pictorial surfaces of dense grey substance, devoid of the light transparency of air. This effect is radicalised in some landscapes in which the sky is allowed to take up almost all of the space of the canvas. In an early work, Landscape on the Island of Falster from 1890–1891 (Figure 5.4), Hammer­ shøi has lowered the horizon, allowing the sky to dominate a thin strip of land and water, at the bottom of the canvas. It is a painting in which Hammer­shøi embeds grey as a monochromatic material substance detached from any object, visually self-contained and closing itself off from the viewer, at the same time as it aesthetically opens for sensuous intimacy. A similar play between intimacy and material substance is at work in Richter’s Grey Mirror, 765, from 1992. Grey Mirror consists of a reflective surface of tinted glass split in two, each separate part half-hinged so that they can be rotated. Exceeding the size and scale of a human being it allows for a bodily-­ oriented relation to the viewer that is emphasised by the fact that the work has a mirror effect. As described by Richard Storr, the rotation also allows for a double image of the spectator when the paired panels are turned towards 166

each other, and when they face away from each other the spectator dis­appears into the crack between the two panels and only the surrounding room is visible. Storr interprets Richter’s intention behind this version of Grey Mirror as not to ‘. . . eliminate distortions but to draw attention to them and to the discrepancy between what one sees first hand and what happens to that image when it is re-created pictorially’.22 Storr’s interpretation opens up an approach to the mirrors as performing a dialogue between reality and image. It is a dialogue that is deepened by another dialogue taking place within the surface as absence. Through the uncensored inclusion of the outer world, the literal surface is displaced in its appearance as an image in the mirror. Such a process is also epitomised in Hammershøi’s use of mirrors in some of his paintings, for example the mirror rendered in grey in Interior from 1898, or in Interior with Mirror, from 1907, where the mirror reflects the surface of a panel or maybe a door. Whereas Gerhard Richter’s mirror is at once opaque and absent in its reflectivity, presenting us with a monochromatic field as well as a reflected likeness of the viewer, Hammershøi’s mirrors reflect nothing but surface, such that the mirrors themselves are emphasised as opaque surfaces. Through his grey mirrors, Richter performs a late modern play of the extinction of painterly surface through surface, whereas Hammershøi performs an essentialisation of surface as matter, as a negation of surface as pure exteriority. In the painterly practice of the two artists, grey performs an eclipse and articulation between the visible and non-visible. Through the negative dialectics of not only performing an extinction of colour, but an extinction of painterly surface, be it through the mirror effect of in Richter’s Grey Mirror(s), or an essentialisation of surface into its negation as pure exteriority in Hammershøi, the two artists articulate a pictorial presence that denies sensuous fusion. Epistemologically and ontologically they replace phenomenological intertwining with the impenetrability of the ‘the distinct’. 167

This again opens up a visuality of the works being formed in being seen, a visuality of the eye having become a gesture of the touching eye as an instant of ‘proximity-in-distance’. In line with these thoughts, Nancy differentiates between seeing and perceiving: ‘“Perception” is always overloaded with significations or manipulations.’23 As a pure material essence, painting becomes seeing that instantiates a post-phenomenological conception of seeing: Painting doesn’t make itself seen in the same way as everything else that we can see. It makes itself seen as a reversal of seeing, as the ability to deceive all sight, in order to make us see precisely the opposite: not what we see, but the fact that it is seen.24 A definition of the artwork as forming the act of seeing instead of the gaze opening the artwork preconditions an ontological definition of the artwork as distance, as an outside. In doing so, Nancy formulates an analogy between painting and human skin: ‘After all, what the nude reveals is that there is nothing to be revealed, or that there is nothing other than revelation itself, the revealing and what can be revealed, both at once.’25 In encountering the artwork, our eyes initiate and become part of a revelation of an ‘appearing that makes nothing appear other than appearing itself ’.26 If the nude is not a relentless process of stripping bare, the nude becomes ‘nudity’, a spectacle for the science: ‘What renders itself naked makes itself an image, pure exposition.’27 Being nude is our being, just as the image is appearance in and as the fragility and intensity of skin: ‘(t)he truth right at the skin is only true in being exposed, in being offered without reserve but 168

also without revelation’.28 Nancy insists on the oxymoron of painting being both truth and skin, truth as skin, and skin as truth. Surface is both formed and forming a relation to the viewer. Like the Icon, art represents a refusal to represent what it presents: ‘The icon exposes the invisible, not by rendering it properly visible but by exposing the presence of the invisible, calling thereby for a vision other than sight.’29 Calling this presence forth, the work does not ‘recall a distant present; rather it brings absence closer, so close that its call is silent’.30 It is silent as spirit: ‘We shall be asking no longer how painting comes to represent Spirit but how it presents it, how it presents what will never have been present elsewhere.’31 In Adorno’s aesthetics, spirit as truth is formed through a work of immanent negation: Truth is antithetical to the phantasmagorical element of artworks; thoroughly formed artworks that are criticized as formalistic are the most realistic works insofar as they are realized in themselves and solely by means of this realization achieve their truth content, what is spiritual in them rather than merely signifying this content.32 Adorno and Nancy share a diagnosis of modernity as involving loss; a loss that was first diagnosed by early Romantics such as Baudelaire and Nietzsche: ‘L’art est d’abord la conscience du malheur, non pas sa compensation.’33 In spite of their differences, Adorno and Nancy share an insistence that art re-presents the possibilities of truth and authenticity in a society totalised through reification and a world of loss that can be experienced no longer. In 169

a world in which truth has become a simulacrum that both protects us from loss as a bearer of truth at the same time as it reveals the loss of authenticity, its primary revelation is that there is nothing behind the image, ‘not even the abyss, not even the gulf or the conflagration, but simply the image itself, in its own immanence’.34 It is as a materialisation of this loss as a truth in which art itself has become a way of thinking. Art has also turned into ‘absolute theory’, with art producing itself as it produces its own theory, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy note well.35 In the aesthetics of Adorno, authenticity is preconditioned by art mimetically becoming the ‘other’ of society. From the point of departure of a definition of society as totally reified – a society in which the only authentic expression is the expression of the expressionless – the silencing of the radical modern artwork into a ‘Verstummen’ is a materialisation of truth. It is as a negation of matter through matter itself into a ‘Verstummen’ that Hammershøi’s paintings materialise truth. And it is truth as defined by Nancy as a simulacra, as skin opening to be touched by the eye, that the non-colour of grey in Richter’s Grey Mirrors and the grey surface quality of Hammershøi’s paintings perform an aesthetic gesture of withdrawal into art becoming thought, as they open themselves to a sense that is also the silencing of sense. Notes 1. Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts. The Muses II (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 159. 2. The three lines were included in a catalogue of the exhibition, Painted Tranquility: Masterworks by Vilhelm Hammershøi from SMK, Scandinavia House, New York, 2015. 3. Gerhard Richter: Eight Grey (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2002), 14. In German the citation reads: ‘Nicht is generell darüber zu urteilen, ob einer, 170

der mit allem Ausdruck tabula rasa macht, Lautsprecher verdinglichten Bewusstsein ist oder der sprachlose, ausdruckslose Ausdruck, der jenes denunziert. Authentische Kunst kennt den Ausdruck des Ausdruckslosen, Weinen, dem die Tränen fehlen.’ Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 7 (Franfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 179. 4. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 79. 5. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 258; cited from Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 35. 6. ‘Otherness’ refers conceptually to Adorno’s definition of art as formed by ‘ihrem Anderen’: ‘Deutbar ist Kunst nur an ihrem Bewegungsgesetz, nicht durch invarianten. Sie bestimmt sich im Verhältnis zu dem, was sie nicht ist. Das spezifisch Kunsthafte an ihr ist aus ihrem Anderen: inhaltlich abzuleiten; das allein genügt irgend der Forderung einer materialistisch-dialektischen Ästhetik. Sie spezifiziert sich an dem, wodurch sie von dem sich scheidet, woraus sie wurde; ihr Bewegungsgesetz ist ihr eigenes Formgesetz. Sie ist nur im Verhältnis zu ihrem Anderen, ist der Prozess damit’ (Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 7, 12). The English translation goes like this: ‘Art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants. It is defined by its relation to what it is not. The specifically artistic in art must be derived concretely from its other; that alone would fulfill the demands of a materialistic-dialectical aesthetics. Art acquires its specificity by separating itself from what it developed out of; it is the process that transpires with its other’ (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 3). 7. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 1. 8. Nancy, The Muses, 34–35. 9. Nancy, The Muses, 80. 10. Nancy, The Muses, 4. 171

11. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/richter-grey-l01682 (4 November 2020). 12. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 84. 13. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 84. 14. Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 219. 15. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 225. 16. Nancy, Multiple Arts. The Muses II, 160. 17. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 84. 18. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 84. 19. As the biographer of Hammershøi, Paul Vad, points out, Hammershøi found his own style at the age of twenty and he did not change it during his lifetime. Poul Vad, Hammershøi. Værk og liv (København: Gyldendal, 1988), 21. 20. In a monograph on Hammerhøi from 1918, Sophus Michaëlis and Alfred Bramsen underline that Hammershøi only chose motives for his paintings that he knew very well. Sophus Michaëlis and Alfred Bramsen, Vilhelm Hammershøi. Kunstneren og hans værk (København: Nordisk forlag, 1918), 42. 21. For further discussion on the role of the window panes see Bente Larsen, ‘Wilhelm Hammershøi: A Danish Avent-Garde Painter’, in Perspectives of the Nordic, ed. Jacob Lothe and Bente Larsen (Oslo: Novus Press, 2016). 22. Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter. Forty Years of Painting (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 49. 23. Nancy, Multiple Arts. The Muses II, 160. 24. Nancy, Multiple Arts. The Muses II, 161. 25. Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari, Being Nude: The Skin of Images (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 2. 26. Nancy and Ferrari, Being Nude, 2. 27. In French it reads like this: ‘C’est pourquoi l’image est son élément, et sa peau toujours la peau d’une image. Qui se denude se fait image: exposition pure’; Nancy 172

and Ferrari, Being Nude, 2. Through the emphasis of the relation between ‘nu’ and ‘se denude’ Nancy emphasises the process from image as ‘nu’ to its becoming a spectacle in the process in which the ‘nu’ ‘se denue’, as a process taking place within the image as well as within the essence of being: ‘nu somme’ in the French title. 28. Nancy and Ferrari, Being Nude, 2. 29. Jean-Luc Nancy, Portrait (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 35. 30. Nancy, Portrait, 34. 31. Nancy, Portrait, 18. 32. Nancy, Portrait, 129/195. 33. Maurice Blanchot, L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 85. 34. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 56. 35. ‘As presentation, as constitutive or productive of its object art becomes a purveyor of knowledge.’ It is a knowledge described by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy as absolute ‘. . . theory is itself as literature. The literary absolute is also, and perhaps above all, this absolute literary operation.’ Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute. The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), 12. This process of art as turned into theory, its being theory through its very formation, is at the core of the post-phenomenological thinking of Nancy preconditioning his definition of the artwork as the distinct.

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6. ‘Whatever Looks Luminous Does Not Look Grey’: Wittgenstein on the Impossibility of Luminous Grey Marcos Silva

Colours are a stimulus to philosophizing [regen Philosophieren an]. Wittgenstein, 1948 175

Introduction Colours spur us to philosophise. Colours are so familiar that we cannot help wondering why they can be troublesome and enigmatic for philosophers. They have been subject to much discussion in the history of philosophy: from Aristotle’s remarks on exclusions by contrariety and problems for the Principle of Excluded Middle1 to the collapse of Wittgenstein’s early Philosophy;2 from Locke’s discussion of secondary qualities to puzzles about perception relevant to the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness; from the debate about synthetic a priori truths to challenges for the possibility of sharp distinction between shape and content in aesthetics; from issues with the distinction between the subjective and the objective to technical efforts to pin down the irreducible element of vagueness in our language; from ontological discussions and thought experiments to experimentation in neuroscience concerning perception and cognition. In all these examples, colours occupy the centre of the discussion by illustrating difficulties or the very path for solutions. Accordingly, colours pose problems and challenges to theories of per­ ception, of rule-following and classical principles of logic. They serve as illustrations of harmonic and holistic systems. Colours encourage intricate models in linguistics and mathematics. They also represent common ground for the Gestalt tradition as well as puzzles for some central accounts in the philosophy of mind. Indeed, colours are a favoured example in many central philosophical arguments where they are used systematically in support of some theses and as counter-examples to refute others. Discussions about the nature of colours reside at the core of many classic disputes in metaphysics and epistemology, such as those between Locke and Leibniz, Newton and Goethe, as well as Wittgenstein and himself.3 176

A good example of the importance of colours for philosophy can be seen in Wittgenstein’s philosophical development.4 It seems there is no end to the examination and discussion of the various and seminal ways in which colours matter in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Throughout his philosophical career, the theme of colour was one to which he returned constantly. His active reflections on colour appear already in crucial passages in his first work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Further, one of the unfinished manuscripts discovered in Cambridge at the time of Wittgenstein’s death (1951) was triggered by Goethe’s seminal but controversial work on colour,5 and was published posthumously as Remarks on Colours (1977). The great diversity of problems concerning colours that Wittgenstein deals with, some belonging to the philosophy of language, some to the philosophy of logic and phenomenology, suggests that what he was investigating is not a consolidated subject but rather a set of philosophical problems that cannot be properly addressed independently of other common Wittgensteinian themes and with careful attention to the complexities of his philosophical development. In Remarks on Colour, a compilation of remarks from approximately the last fifteen months of his life, Wittgenstein subjects colour to an ‘analysis of concepts’, one that clarifies, for instance, the meaning constituted by the use of words such ‘grey’, ‘luminous’, ‘reddish’, ‘green’, ‘white’ and ‘transparent’.6 Wittgenstein thus develops further philosophical consequences of his mature idea that use determines the meaning and sense of our linguistic expressions. Believing that philosophical puzzles about colour can only be resolved through attention to the language games involved, Wittgenstein considers Goethe’s propositions in the Theory of Colours and the observations of Philipp Otto Runge in an attempt to clarify the use of language about colour. Wittgenstein was interested in the fact that some propositions about colour, such as “There is no luminous grey” or “Black is the darkest colour”, are apparently 177

neither empirical nor, exactly, a priori, but something in between, creating the impression of a sort of phenomenology, such as Goethe’s. Interestingly, Remarks on Colours may also be characterised as a book of logic, concerned with the possible and impossible, the necessary and contingent, the thinkable and unthinkable, at ever deeper levels.7 Following Wittgenstein’s instigating remarks, we may wonder, for example, why something can be transparent green but cannot be transparent white.8 Is the impossibility causal or conceptual (or grammatical, as he often puts it)? But how is that distinction between the empirical and the logical to be understood?9 According to Wittgenstein’s view, grammar (or logic) is what defines the implicit rules that determine and constrain how we use concepts, i.e., the normativity implicit in the prohibitions and authorisations in our ruled practices. Understanding the intricate relation, for instance, between ‘grey’ and ‘luminous’, we have the full importance of grammatical investigation to Wittgenstein’s later work and the fundamental relation between ‘use’ and ‘sense’. Further questions can be raised. What is the relation between the colour concepts of people with normal vision and those of the colour-blind, including in comparison to the colour concepts of totally blind people? And why only human beings? If we can conceive of other conceptual schemes than our actual ones, aren’t we led to recognise a still deeper logic, in comparison with which ours is contingent? The talk about limits of thought and language reappears with insistence. For instance: Can’t we imagine people having a geometry of colours different from our normal one? And that, of course, means: can we describe it, can we immediately respond to the request to describe it, that is, do we know unambiguously 178

what is being demanded of us? The difficulty is obviously this: isn’t it precisely the geometry of colours that shows us what we’re talking about, i.e. that we are talking about colours?10 Why Impossible Colours Matter? Wittgenstein remained concerned with the nature of colour in his early, middle and late philosophies. However, these writings have received comparably little attention from scholars.11 It is not only important to investigate why Wittgenstein wrote so intensively about colour during the last years of his life, but also why he was engaged with problems concerning the nature and logic of colour from his early philosophy onwards. However, in this contribution, my aim is more modest. I will investigate one particular case in which Wittgenstein addresses a problem involving colour, in his Remarks on Colours (1977). In this work, Wittgenstein defends the a priori impossibility of some particular colours, such as luminous grey, reddish green and transparent white. The discussion on the impossibility of luminous grey, in particular, is important for philosophy because it connects questions on the nature of language and logic and their relation to the normativity of our concepts. One of the first references to grey in Remarks on Colours is in Book III (§80). Wittgenstein asks what makes grey a neutral colour. He continues to pose pressing questions: ‘Is it something physiological or something logical? What makes bright colours bright? Is it a conceptual matter or a matter of cause and effect? Why don’t we include black and white in the colour circle? Only because we have a feeling that it’s wrong?’ Wittgenstein then concentrates on the nature of grey and examines the following proposition: ‘There 179

is no such thing as luminous grey’. He asks himself: ‘Is that part of the concept grey, or part of the psychology, i.e. the natural history, of grey?’12 As it stands, III.80 comprises three short paragraphs, two of which focus on the question of whether a claim about grey is conceptual (logical, grammatical) or empirical. In the first paragraph, Wittgenstein asks why grey counts as a neutral colour and whether its neutrality should be thought of as ‘something physiological or something logical’. Wittgenstein would probably say that the claim ‘Grey is neutral’ is ‘physiological’ (or psychological) when grey surfaces are perceived as ‘uncoloured’, and ‘logical’ (or grammatical) when understood as stating that the colour is achromatic – achromatic colours being essentially neutral. Both alternatives make sense. There is not a single answer to the question as it stands. To provide a definitive answer, further specification is required. Likewise for the question posed in the second paragraph. There is no saying what the brightness of bright colours amounts to in the absence of more information. The brightness of a bright red may be an empirical fact calling for causal explanation. But it also may be a grammatical observation calling for non-causal explanation. There can be little doubt that Wittgenstein thinks there is a sense in which the question, like the question about the neutrality of grey, can be understood as requiring a logical, non-empirical, answer. Further on in Book III13 Wittgenstein analysed the proposition ‘Black dirties’. He asks: That means it takes the brightness out of colour, but what does that mean? Black takes away the luminosity of colour. But is that something logical or something psychological? That is such a thing as a luminous red, a 180

luminous blue, etc., but no luminous black. Black is the darkest of the colours. We say ‘deep black’ but not ‘deep white’. But a ‘luminous red’ does not mean a light red. A dark red can be luminous too. But a colour is luminous as a result of its context, in its context. Grey, however, is not luminous. There is another similar remark in Book III that also negates the possibility of ascribing the predicate ‘being luminous’ to grey. ‘Why is there no brown nor grey light? (. . .) A luminous body can appear white but neither brown nor grey’.14 Wittgenstein explains further: ‘That something which seems luminous cannot also appear grey can be an indication that something luminous and colourless is always “white”; this teaches us something about our concept of white.’ Soon he comes back to the same issue affirming: ‘What we see as luminous we don’t see as grey. But we can certainly see it as white’.15 But what does that all mean? The impossibility of conceiving of ‘grey-hot’ objects, he is emphasising, has to do with the meaning or logic of the concept of grey. In other words, it is traceable to how we think and speak about colour, not to the fact that our powers of imagination fall short. And at III.223, he declares that he cannot rule out the idea of a grey flame for the simple reason that he is not familiar with ‘the colours of the flames of all substances’. For him the idea ‘mean[s] nothing’. A ‘grey-hot flame’ applies, if at all, to flames that are ‘weakly luminous’. My own approach to the problem of impossible colours differs significantly from works such as Readings on Color, edited by Byrne and Hilbert,16 and Colors for Philosophers, authored by Hardin,17 which focus primarily on the naturalist tradition of analytic philosophy. 181

As Andrew Lugg puts it: In recent years the suggestion that philosophical problems are at root conceptual has been roundly criticised, and problems once assumed to fall in the province of logic are now commonly held to fall in the province of empirical science. In particular many questions concerning colour that used to be regarded as perfect fodder for conceptual analysis – for instance, the explanation of the resemblances among colours, the nature of impossible colours, the special status of primary colours and the difference between light and dark colours – have been subjected to naturalistic investigation. Knowledge of how things happen to be is reckoned necessary for answering such questions, and knowledge of how we happen to think and speak is deemed to be largely, if not entirely, beside the point. Nowadays the prevailing view in many quarters is that science trumps logic and the difficulties besetting the analysis of colour concepts are resolvable by the simple expedient of taking stock of scientific fact, especially the theory of colour and sundry observations about colour phenomena. The old view that analysis of concepts is central to philosophy, even its be-all and end-all, is 182

reckoned passé and the peculiarities of grammar and linguistic usage are held to be the exclusive affair of grammarians and linguists.18 Also in this naturalist tradition, Dejan Todorovic19 and Osvaldo da Pos et al.20 defend the claim that Wittgenstein’s conceptual account of impossible colours relies on incorrect assumptions about their properties and effects due to lack of empirical and scientific support. As concrete examples of Witt­ genstein’s impossible colours, they show computer-generated graphical displays, including one that depicts an image conveying the impression of a transparent white sheet, and another conveying an impression of luminous grey. Todorov and Da Pos et al. connect philosophical issues regarding the nature of colours with empirical enquiry. They conceptualise philosophical problems as problems of empirical evidence and natural science. This is a legitimate approach. However, it does not fully address the breadth and depth of philosophical problems concerning colours, as Wittgenstein’s critical remarks show. In contrast I set out to defend a normative reading of the impossibility of some colours. We should note that, for Wittgenstein, luminous grey is just one example of an impossible colour. The analysis of grey that he proposes must therefore be seen in the context of his broader account, of impossible colours, which includes, for instance, transparent white, that in turn are based on a more general account of the nature of our ruled practices. Wittgenstein’s treatment of impossible colours such as luminous grey, reddish green and transparent white should not be dismissed by empirical evidence. Conceptual analysis is philosophically relevant for the discussion of normativity; that is, the way our practices work and are constituted by rules. There is still a necessity for the conceptual analysis of the sort that Wittgenstein advocates, and for attention to its philosophical consequences 183

concerning the normativity in our ruled practices. It is still philosophically significant to see colour concepts as logically interrelated in conceptual systems that are constituted by our ruled practices, especially for the discussion on normativity in the relation between our language and reality. These practices set the normativity which constitutes the concepts we use in our daily life. In what follows, I shall critically assess, using the case of the so-called impossible colours, Wittgenstein’s defence of the conceptual impossibility of luminous grey. I will defend the claim that philosophical problems that are at root conceptual is not wrongheaded, as some naturalist philosophers argue. It is misleading to hold that some problems once assumed to fall within the province of logic should be designated to the domain of empirical science. Some of Wittgenstein’s critics misread the normativity in the application of evaluative criteria required to understand the difference between empirically impossible and logically impossible. A correct understanding of Wittgenstein’s remarks on impossible colour may shed some light on the important debate about the nature and normativity of logic. Are Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Impossible Colours Wrong? Wittgenstein’s claims are regularly dismissed on the grounds that he focuses on words and language at the expense of facts of science and nature, on what ordinary people mean and not on what scientists explain to us. For the naturalist, the problems of colour that Goethe hopes to resolve by reflecting on our use of words are held to be scientific problems solvable by attending to the behaviour of coloured surfaces and mediums. The impossibility of the combination of two colours, say red and green, is to be explained by appealing to the psychology or physiology of human perception and to the physics 184

of incident light (or other well-developed scientific theories), and not by an analysis of concepts. The impossibility of some colours should be tracked down to physical events in the world. As a result, an alleged logical impossibility should in a specific sense be reduced to a physical impossibility. To explore the plausibility of this line of thought it helps to consider a problem that both Wittgenstein and his naturalist opponents struggle with, such as the problem of how impossible colours like reddish green, trans­ parent white and luminous grey should be understood. Wittgenstein’s view is that the impossibility of some colours is understandable by examining our grammar of colour language. This means that we should investigate the conceptual framework of prohibitions, authorisations and criteria that we use to evaluate our descriptions of our experience of the world. In contrast, the naturalist argues that examination of the facts of colour science are required in order to see how phenomena causally connect to each other over a time span of complicated empirical interactions. The argument against Wittgenstein’s grammatical observations may also be very simple. Da Pos et al., for instance, challenge Wittgenstein’s view in the following way: If, as Wittgenstein thought, philosophising means rejecting erroneous arguments, then his claims about white and transparency are paradigmatic cases of fallacious arguments. Even worse, despite what he says, his arguments are based on physics, not on the phenomenology of colour. The concept of ‘white’ and the concept of ‘transparent’ would not in fact be associated, according to Wittgenstein, because there is a 185

logical incompatibility between them, or by thought they cannot be together: a transparent white, therefore, cannot exist even though one can see it.21 In conclusion, according to Da Pos et al., Wittgenstein’s claim that white cannot be transparent is contradicted by the plain empirical fact that white veils are transparent. Wittgenstein’s point is taken to be fallacious simply because we can present an alleged counter-example based on empirical evidence – here some sort of plain empirical fact. Since we can see a veil that is white and transparent, Wittgenstein must be wrong. No scientific model of perceptual transparency and a priori arguments concerned with conceptual analysis exclude the possibility that white might be transparent since the empirical evidence shows us that the experience of transparent white is possible. In response to the possibility that the surface is rightly described as ‘white and transparent’, Wittgenstein states that what is seen is not ‘something coloured and transparent’. Reflections in white surfaces are, he implies, different from reflections in mirrors. He does not, however, explain why this is, and we are left where we started. To be told that ‘transparent white’ is similar to ‘reddish green’, ‘pure brown’, ‘luminous grey’ and other impossible colours only reminds us that it is equally impossible. Another example of naturalist refusal is given by Jonathan Westphal.22 He hopes to show that Wittgenstein was wrong in assuming either that there is any special logic of colour concepts or that propositions concerning impossible colours cannot be explained by empirical discovery. In fact, Wittgenstein does clearly think that an empirical theory of colour is unable to preserve the a priori and necessary status of puzzle propositions, such as ‘grey cannot be luminous’. 186

Westphal, however, understands Wittgenstein’s remark that ‘opaqueness is not a property of the white colour’ as claiming that transparency and opacity are properties of objects, substances and media rather than of colours, displaying how we use concepts in the ascription of colour to our visual field. However, Wittgenstein’s point is rather that opacity is not a property of white but part of its grammar, that ‘white’ has a logical or internal connection with opacity. Likewise, ‘grey’ is such conceptually that it is rendered incompatible with ‘being luminous’. In other words, ‘grey is ‘grammatically’ incompatible with ‘being luminous’. Westphal reduces this to a question of empirical impossibility: ‘as one philosopher who has grappled with the problem has observed, the assertion that a surface is transparent white is “a straight double contradiction” since it cannot both transmit and not transmit, respectively both reflect and not reflect, nearly all incident light’.23 Another detractor who wants to reduce a grammatical problem concerning impossible colours to a problem concerning physical regularities is Todorovic, who writes: This oddness [impossible colours] may teach us ‘something about our concept of white’, but only in the sense that our perceptual concepts are likely to reflect the statistical regularities in our environment, and how they are processed in the visual system. In other words, the ‘grammar’ of color is based on its physics, physiology, and psychology.24 This contention is highly non-Wittgensteinian. Grammar is not reducible to mere empirical facts, neither by induction over regularities nor by the simple 187

composition of empirical evidence. Todorovic argues that nothing has been achieved in showing that Wittgenstein is wrong in taking the ‘forbidden’ colours to be logically excluded. These arguments resemble attacks against Zenon’s and Berkeley’s arguments for counter-intuitive statements such as ‘there is no movement’ or ‘there are no material things’. To show to an opponent some movement, as a rock being thrown, or to observably display a material thing as the rock itself, would be enough to prove that Zenon’s arguments against the existence of movement and Berkeley’s arguments against the view that there are material things are incorrect. Similarly, Todorovic seems to presuppose that no more than cursory considerations of empirical matters can reveal that reddish green, luminous grey and transparent white occur (and are perceived), i.e., that ‘reddish green’, ‘luminous grey’ and ‘transparent white’ are as logically legitimate as ‘reddish blue’ and ‘transparent red’. Wittgenstein would argue that wheel rims, watches and skies are no more luminous grey than leaves in autumn are reddish green and fog is transparent white. Indeed, he would insist that grey wheel rims and watches merely reflect light, and the supposedly luminous grey sky is properly regarded as having openings where sunlight streams through. In his view, grey is non-­ luminous, and it only remains to explain the nature of the impossibility. In the language of III.80, as we have seen, Wittgenstein is concerned with whether the impossibility is ‘something physiological or something logical’ and whether the concept is excluded ‘[o]nly because we have a feeling that it is wrong’. One might expect him, therefore, to say straight out that luminous grey is logically excluded.

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Why is Wittgenstein Not Wrong? We have seen how Wittgenstein’s critics often misrepresent his analytical approach based on his so-called grammatical observations by favouring a naturalistic view requiring the examination of empirical data and also facts of colour science. However, neither Wittgenstein’s view nor his conception can be dismissed by insisting that the colours are in fact perceived in, say, computational experiments or ruled out solely based on allegedly empirical facts in ordinary life. Neither Wittgenstein’s view on colours nor his conception of philosophy can be criticised by insisting that impossible colours can in fact be perceived as matters of empirical fact or psychological evidence. It is crucial to note that Wittgenstein, in his Remarks on Colour, takes the view that Goethe’s Theory of Colours is not really a scientific theory which can explain colour phenomena but rather a description (incomplete and flawed) of the use of our colour concepts and language. Wittgenstein is making the claim that Goethe was not doing science, or proposing a real theory of colours, but rather describing our language, that is, the way we use colour concepts and render some colours as grammatically impossible. For example, Wittgenstein writes in the first chapter of Remarks on Colour: 70. Goethe’s theory of the constitution of the colours of the spectrum has not proved to be an unsatisfactory theory, rather it really isn’t a theory at all. Nothing can be predicted with it. It is, rather, a vague schematic outline of the sort we find in James’s psychology. Nor is there any experimentum crucis which could decide for or against the theory. 189

71. Someone who agrees with Goethe believes that Goethe correctly recognized the nature of colour. And nature here is not what results from experiments, but it lies in the concept of colour.25 According to Wittgenstein, Goethe’s theory should be understood as an analysis of concepts through grammatical observations, that is, as a set of remarks on how we use concepts in our ruled practices of ascribing colours to visual things. Wittgenstein remarks that ‘we do not want to establish a theory of colour (neither a physiological one nor a psychological one), but rather the logic of colour concepts. And this accomplishes what people have often unjustly expected of a theory’.26 This view enables the case for philosophy as conceptual analysis, in contrast to the reliance on empirical evidence or the rise of naturalistic philosophy, which in turn has enabled the highly influential approximation between philosophy and empirical sciences we encounter today. For the naturalist, we are to look to scientists for clarification regarding the nature of spectral colours, phenomena of light reflection and the nature of transparency or luminosity, for instance, in order to understand why white cannot be transparent and grey cannot be luminous. However, as we have seen, Wittgenstein’s account of ‘luminous grey’, ‘reddish green’ and ‘transparent white’ should be seen as grammatically excluded and not empirically excluded. For Wittgenstein, the impossibility of the colours is ‘not a result of investigation [but] a requirement [of it]’.27 It is not a matter of explicating causal relations among colour phenomena but of describing what is necessary for any investigation concerning colours to take place. The impossibility of colour is a presupposition and not a generalisation over pieces of evidence and empirical regularity. What Wittgenstein makes 190

us notice is that the concepts of red, blue, green, etc., are systematically interrelated, and the relationships among them explain why the concepts of luminous grey, reddish green and transparent white are incoherent or logically impossible, and not just empirically impossible. Wittgenstein does not attempt to reduce or eliminate colour concepts but attempts rather to remove incomprehension, perplexity and confusion through a correct investigation of how our understanding is seduced into philosophical deep problems by the plasticity of our language.28 To borrow words from the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein seems to seek ‘a clear view of the aim and functioning of words’, his aim being to ‘dispers[e] the fog’, the ‘haze that makes clear vision impossible’.29 This does not require analysis that reduces greatly complex empirical phenomena in terms of some core physical items, but only an understanding of how our concepts are interconnected in our actual usage of them. A Normative Reading of Impossible Colours We may ask then: do the impossibility of some colours reveal something important about the essential nature of our empirical world? Or do we learn something about the intimate essence of reality by understanding some combinations of colours as impossible or possible, or allowed or prohibited? The Wittgensteinian answer has a more modest aim, I think. It concerns the normativity implicit in our ruled practices. The impossibility of some colours reveals something about the way we represent things and use language, and not something about the ultimate nature of the world. As Andrew Lugg puts it: [Wittgenstein] takes ‘the logic of colour concepts’ to forbid some concepts and allow 191

others in much the same way that the logic of spatial concepts – below/above, right/left, top/ bottom, front/back, etc. – forbids the concept of being both above and below and permits the concept of being to the right and in front.30 As Lugg sees it, it is important to note that the language of colour is, for Wittgenstein, like mathematics and mathematical physics – a means of representation. It sets the horizon of possible connections within a particular domain – what is prohibited and what is authorised, what counts as a successful application and what can be dismissed as misapplication. The representation of colour (and other qualities and quantities) constitutes a ‘grammar’, and the grammatical relations among colour concepts, the intricate implicit rules of usage of colour concepts, track the logical relations among the colours themselves. In other words, grammar pertains to how we use concepts and the rules implicit in this use, and not any special fact about the nature of reality itself. Westphal, for instance, seems to have misunderstood the crucial point that grammar is to be taken as prior to science, that the distinction between logic and science cannot be undermined, and that grammar establishes the possibilities of scientific investigation. In order to make an empirical discovery we have to establish what should count as an empirical development of a theory. For that, we need to use agreed criteria and rules that set the standards for any investigations. According to Elaine Horner,31 Westphal seems to have mistaken grammatical remarks such as ‘white is a minimal darkening’ and ‘white is the representative of light’ for plain empirical observations. But empirical observations presuppose grammatical rules in order to take science off the ground. 192

Wittgenstein takes an analysis of concepts – the concepts of luminous grey, reddish green and transparent white included – to require careful philosophical investigation, since the logical grammar of colour concepts is far from self-evident – it can be hidden by our prejudices and theories. In Wittgenstein’s view, conceptual analysis, as championed by some analytic philosophers, involves no more and no less than an analysis of concepts – in the present instance, the concepts of luminous grey, reddish green and transparent white. For Wittgenstein the terms in question – ‘grey’ and ‘luminous’, ‘green’ and ‘red’, ‘transparent’ and ‘white’ – are logically opposed and it only remains to show that there is no conceptual space for ‘luminous grey’, ‘reddish green’ and ‘transparent white’ to occupy. To know a concept is to know how to use it properly in significant and legitimate contexts. If you understand some colour concepts and know how to use them in daily com­municative exchanges then you will reckon that some conceptual articulations, such as luminous grey, are conceptually impossible because they are forbidden by the colour system fixed by the way we use colour concepts. It is noteworthy, for instance, that being the lightest colour isn’t a property of the colour white itself but is, rather, part of its grammar, just as is the relation between ‘non-luminous’ and ‘grey’. Wittgenstein here is noting a particular use of white and grey. ‘White is the lightest colour’ and ‘there is no luminous grey’ are rules belonging to a ‘sort of mathematics of colour’; it is a non-temporal proposition, which has full normative power over our practices, expressing an internal relationship between the lightness of colours. In this vein, Dejan Todorovic does not talk about the connections of rules of grammar and how we use concepts of grammar. He misreads Wittgenstein grammatical observation and implies that Wittgenstein’s lack of imagination or computational means are to blame for his alleged mistakes concerning impossible colours. Todorovic neglects in his criticism that the investigation 193

of our colour language reveals why something cannot count as being simultaneously both grey and luminous; this revelation comes neither by way of an explanation nor by induction over empirical data but by examining the grammar of our concepts. Another faulty point in Todorovic’s line of argument is to be seen as we draw an analogy to Escher’s drawings. Escher shows pictures that are intended to display real contradictions. However, we may well ask ourselves: does having the impression of a real contradiction mean that a real contradiction is possible? Likewise, does a picture that evokes the impression of luminous grey prove that luminous grey is really possible? We have to make the distinction between the impression of having a real contradiction and the existence of a real contradiction. Analogically, we have to make the distinction between having the impression of luminous grey and the existence of luminous grey. In fact, Wittgenstein at no point tells us how a transparent white or luminous grey surface would have to look should it exist. Neither does he tell us how to identify a reddish green patch drawn on a piece of paper. One of Wittgenstein’s most important ideas is that to say that we cannot imagine white transparency is really to say that one doesn’t know what one should imagine here. We lack criteria or rules for identification here. For instance, if red is not a colour, what should red be? We do not know what answer to expect here and how to assert it as the right answer, because the very formulation of the problem violates our grammar and we have no criteria for correcting a misrepresentation of ‘red not being a colour’ or ‘grey being luminous’. The impossibility of luminous grey has nothing to do with the way grey looks, its phenomenal character, or whether this character is of a subjective or an objective nature since there is nothing here which points to any 194

peculiarity in its relationship with ‘being luminous’. Rather, the impossibility is constituted by the grammar of ‘grey’, the particular logic of this colour which means that it holds for us a special place amongst our colour concepts in relation to ‘being luminous’. The peculiar grammar of ‘white’ means that ‘transparent white’ has no use; it does not represent a possible move in our colour language game. This is why, for example, we would never mistake a reflection in a white object for something behind it. Science should be seen as posterior to grammar. An impression of luminous grey is just that: an impression of luminous grey, as Escher’s drawing elicit the impression of a contradictory object, but it is just an impression of real contradiction. This assessment provides the rationale for the conception of philosophy already propounded since Wittgenstein’s first masterpiece, Tractatus, in particular for the view that there are no philosophical propositions and philosophy does not aim at achieving new knowledge. Since the Tractatus, Wittgenstein defended the claim that philosophy should not be taken as a kind of science, that philosophy is an activity. The distinction is held to be indicated by a variety of strands interwoven in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. ‘All philosophy’, he writes in his Tractatus32 – in a remark that highlighted the ‘linguistic turn’ characteristic of twentieth-century analytic philosophy – ‘is a “critique of language”’. Its task is not to discover the most general truths about the universe – that is the province of physics. It is not concerned with studying the workings of the human mind – that is the province of psychology. It does not investigate the metaphysical nature of things and report its findings in special philosophical, synthetic a priori propositions, for there are no such propositions. Philosophy does not aim at new know­ ledge, but at a correct logical point of view upon existing non-philosophical knowledge. 195

However, one might ask: what is the relation between our concepts and the reality? In order to understand a sentence or a description about colours, or in order to determine if they are true or false or under which conditions they are true or false, first we have to understand several different criteria and rules. Criteria and rules are always presupposed by scientific investi­ gation and constitute our concepts. We need some paradigm or pattern for comparison in order to evaluate the quality and legitimacy of both scientific and ordinary descriptions. As a result, the criteria that make up our colour concepts, for instance, should be taken as setting the prohibitions and authorisations of possible connections among colours. It is important to see that nature, facts and phenomena do not have a criteria, a pattern, a norm, an attached measuring system by themselves. Scales and coordinates, rules and criteria presupposed by science and which con­ stitute our concepts have to be introduced, determined, postulated, stipulated, so that we can determine the phenomena and we can rule out imprecision and vagueness. Nobody should search for a real ruler or a real system of coordinates in nature. Once our concepts are introduced and understood, they work as measures or objects of comparison or like criteria to evaluate the quality of our activities and descriptions. Our concepts determine the ground from which we judge truth and validity. Our colour concepts determine the ground from which we judge the truth and validity of our colour ascriptions. Before being used to describe something, our conceptual, organised colour system constitutes a framework wherein any description of colourful objects and patches has to take place. Furthermore, our conceptually organised colour system plays a normative role. To make some sentences about colours capable of truth or falsity we have to introduce stipulations for determining some highly vague phenomena. 196

The phenomenon itself is not fully determined and the stipulation of criteria does not belong to the phenomena. It is something that has to be introduced. The stipulation is not itself true or false. It constitutes the possibility of judging descriptions as true or false. In this way a more general classificatory question as ‘what is x?’ which can be instantiated by the pattern ‘what is red?’ cannot be answered as far as a pattern, criterion, norm or in one word a concept can be introduced and learnt. This learning entails a possibility of controlling and revising mis­ applications. Accordingly, the concept of luminous grey, for instance, does not introduce criteria to control and revise misapplications of ‘luminous grey’ to any visual patch. This is evident in the case of De Pos’ criticism. If a transparent white is excluded by means of grammar, we lose foothold to identify with objective criteria when something is transparent white and when it is not, just as we do not know to identify what red would be if not a colour. The concepts themselves do not substitute anything in reality. Rules which make up the concepts that we have cannot be false or falsifiable. They are constitutive because they determine how we describe things. Something has to be postulated so we can make descriptions and judgements which can be true or false. In the particular case of impossible colours, we are looking for connections between normativity and our use of concepts and not confirmation or fals­ ification based on empirical data. Concepts should be thought of as rules or instructions for our practices and agency in the world. This represents an anthropological turn in the discussion of impossible colours as an alternative to the naturalist approach. Concepts setting rules and criteria for the identification of colours are not in the world as material things and empirical data are. Concepts are stipulations for the instrumentalisation of regularities. 197

They can be neither true nor false. The point is not that nature has no regularity. We use rules to express them and to predict things. In order to understand how to follow a procedure in a social activity, ‘normative’ is a more adequate concept than ‘constitutive’ or ‘internal’, because these latter notions can be misleading. They hide the human dimension; the anthropological dimension of human beings or individuals in a community in dynamical and permanent interactions with their environment. As human beings we are engaged in rule-governed practices that presuppose pro­ cedures, history and cooperation. All of these set the criteria to use our colour concepts which prohibit some combinations and guide our scientific investigations. I hope that this short essay brings some philosophical problems concerning impossible colours, especially luminous grey, to a broader audience, and demonstrates how Wittgenstein’s investigations of the nature of colours shed light on his views of language and logic. Notes 1. Laurence R. Horn and Heinrich Wansing, ‘Negation’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, spring 2020 edition, ed. by Edward N. Zalta (Stanford, CA: Stanford University). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/negation/ 2. See Marcos Silva, ‘Negation, Material Incompatibilities and Inferential Thickness: A Brandomian Take on Middle Wittgenstein’, Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin, 8, 9 (2019). 3. P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Mauro L. Engelmann, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Development: Phenomenology, Grammar, Method, and the Anthropological View (London: Palgrave, 2013). Marcos Silva, ‘Two Forms of Exclusion Mean Two Different Negations’, Philosophical 198

Investigations (UK), 39, 3 (July 2016): 0190-0536. Marcos Silva, ‘On a Philosophical Motivation for Mutilating Truth Tables’, ed. Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen, Martin Gustafsson and Yrsa Neuman, Nordic Wittgenstein Review, 5, 1 (June 2016): 105–126. 4. Marcos Silva, ‘Wittgenstein on Contradiction and Contrariety: Four Turning Points in the Development of his Philosophy of Logic’, in Colours in the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy (Cham: Palgrave, 2017). 5. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970). 6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), II.16. 7. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, I.15. 8. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, I.16. 9. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, III.109–114. 10. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, I.66. 11. Engelmann, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Development. Silva, ‘Wittgenstein on Contradiction and Contrariety’. 12. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colours, III.81. 13. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colours, III §156. 14. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colours, III.215. 15. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colours, III.226. 16. Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, Readings on Color, Vol. 1: The Philosophy of Color (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, Readings on Color, Vol. 2: The Science of Color (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 17. Clyde L. Hardin, Color for Philosophers (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1988). 18. Andrew Lugg, ‘Impossible Colours: Wittgenstein and the Naturalist’s Challenge’, in How Colours Matter to Philosophy, ed. by Marcos Silva (Cham: Springer, 2017), 110–111. 19. Dejan Todorovic, ‘Wittgenstein’s “Impossible” Colors: Transparent Whites and Luminous Grays’, Belgrade Philosophical Annual, 30, (2017). DOI 10.5937/BPA1730213T. 20. Osvaldo da Pos, Liliana Albertazzi and Valerio Villani, ‘White Can be Transparent: 199

Why Wittgenstein is Wrong’, Journal of the International Colour Association, 13, (2014): 84–90. 21. Da Pos et al., ‘White Can be Transparent’, 86. 22. Jonathan Westphal, Colour (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). 23. Westphal, Colour, 20. 24. Todorovic, ‘Wittgenstein’s “Impossible” Colors’, 221. 25. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour. 26. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, I.22. 27. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), §107. 28. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §71. 29. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §71. 30. Lugg, ‘Impossible Colours’, 108–109. 31. Elaine Horner, ‘“There Cannot be a Transparent White”: A Defence of Witt­ genstein’s Account of the Puzzle Propositions’, Philosophical Investigations, 23, 3 (July 2000). 32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico–philosophicus [TLP]. Tagebücher 1914–16. Philosophische Untersuchungen. Werkausgabe Band 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 4.0031.

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Part III Grey Intensities

7. B  arthes’ Grisaille and an Aesthetics of Indifference Aron Vinegar

Hieronymus Bosch’s winged triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1490–1500), plays a key role in Roland Barthes’ late lecture course on The Neutral that took place at the Collège de France over thirteen weeks in 1978 (Figure 7.1).1 More specifically, the two grisaille outer panels from the triptych, painted grey on grey, are the focus of week four’s session on the ‘figureword’ Color and its relationship to grey/grisaille as the colour of the 203

Figure 7.1  Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, open state, 1500–1505, oil, grisaille on oak panel, h. 185.8 cm × 325.5 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Copyright: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, New York

Figure 7.2  Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, closed state, 1500–1505, oil, grisaille on oak panel, h. 185.8 cm × 76.5 cm (each panel). Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Copyright: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, New York

colourless Neutral and, along with a personal incident involving the spilling of a bottle of Neutral Tint (Teinte Neutre), sets the ‘tone on tone’ (ton sur ton) for the entire course (Figure 7.2). I want to bear down on Barthes’ engagement with grisaille as the fantasy of an aesthetic, ethics and politics of indifference that colours his late work. This might seem like a difficult claim to make, as Barthes’ very notion of the Neutral is what he calls a ‘diaphoralogy’ (diaphoralogie), based on the Greek word diaphora, which means difference (or that which distinguishes one thing from the other), and which Barthes simply translates as ‘nuance’.2 Diaphoralogy is Barthes’ neologism for what he calls a science of nuance, shimmers or scintillation, which he contrasts with adiaphoria, or indifference (indifférence), the latter defined as an absence of both passion and difference – a condition seemingly at odds with his ‘desire for the neutral’.3 But it is precisely in his discussion of grisaille – and the relationship of colour to the colourless – where a ‘slight difference’, and ‘dialectic of intensities’, is generated by a grey on grey that is not only an expression of his ‘desire’ for the Neutral, but rather its very drive and jouissance.4 Spilled Ink and the Stained Soul of The Neutral Before launching directly into a discussion of Bosch’s triptych, Barthes introduces the relationship of colour to the Neutral with a ‘personal incident’, thus carrying out a promise he made in his inaugural lecture at the Collège that each course he taught there would derive from a personal fantasy.5 As such, this personal incident not only sets the tone for this session on Colour, and its relationship to the colourless, but for the entire course as such.6 Barthes recounts heading out on a beautiful afternoon (du soleil is vocalised in the audio recording but not written in the published text version) to purchase ‘some paints’ (des couleurs), ‘Sennelier inks’ (encres Sennelier), ‘bottles of 206

Figure 7.3  Sophie Bassouls’ photograph of Roland Barthes in his apartment surrounded by painting materials and Sennelier Colorines, Paris, France, 9 June 1978. Copyright: Sophie Bassouls

pigment’ (flacons de colorine), two days before the lecture.7 Following his ‘taste’ (appétit) for the names, he buys sixteen bottles at the famous Maison Sennelier close to the École des beaux-arts in a vivid range of hues, carefully naming a selection of them: golden yellow (jaune d’or), sky blue (bleu lumière), brilliant green (vert brilliant), purple (pourpre), sun yellow (jaune soleil), cartham pink (rose carthame), a rather intense pink (rose assez soutenu), with a few other colour names, including vermilion and turquoise, added a couple of lines later.8 While arranging the bottles in his apartment, he knocks one over; a situation we are helped to imagine via Sophie Bassouls’ striking black 207

and white photograph taken only six days after The Neutral lecture course ended, showing Barthes seated in a comfortable armchair with his ever-present cigar, and a small portable table in front of him replete with numerous bottles of Sennelier colorine (Figure 7.3). In sponging it up he makes a ‘new mess’ – ‘little domestic complications’ (petite complications ménagères). ~ ‘And now’ (Et maintenant) – a ‘now’ that has been dramatically delayed, but is now allowed to drop and stain the scene – he will give us the ‘official name’ (nom officiel) of this ‘spilled color’ (couleur renversée), ‘imprinted on the small bottle like all the others: it was the “color called Neutre” (couleur nommée Neutre)’. At this point Barthes pauses, and says ‘obviously (évidemment)’ – a carefully chosen adverb that resonates, at least to my mind, with its paronym, évidement, a noun that means ‘emptying out’ – ‘I had opened this bottle first to see what kind of colour was this Neutral about which I am going to be speaking for thirteen weeks’.9 The exact name printed on the bilingual label is Teinte Neutre/Neutral Tint, and an image of a Sennelier bottle of Teinte Neutre features prominently on the front cover of both the English hardcover and softcover translations of the lecture course published by Columbia University Press, bookended by the personal incident in quotations on the back of the hardcover (Figure 7.4).10 This little caper is received with peals of laughter in the audio version of the course available online, as Barthes relates that he was both punished and disappointed: punished because the Neutral ‘spatters and stains’ (éclabousse et tache), and turns out to be a type of ‘dull gray-black’ (noir-gris mat), and disappointed because the Neutral is a colour like all the others, and for sale, thus the ‘unclassifiable is classified’. ‘(A)ll the more reason’, he says, ‘for us to go back to discourse, which, at least, cannot say what the Neutral is’. 208

Figure 7.4  Bottle of Sennelier Teinte Neutre/Neutral Tint. Source: photograph taken by Aron Vinegar

But we have never left discourse! Like his final seminar at the Collège, The Preparation of the Novel, this has all been a ‘preparation of painting’ that is not simply about the inadequacy of the labels of predication, classification and value in defining the Neutral and its disappointing actualisation as a distinct, marked, visible and rather dull stain, but rather an elaborate set-up presupposed by the writerly excesses of this incident.11 Indeed, there is nowhere else to go, even if we follow Barthes’ apparent injunction to go back by moving forward to the next section, that consists of two references that raise ‘the (mythical) correspondence of the colorless and the 209

Neutral (“neutral colors”)’ – a short passage from Lao-Tzu’s Portrait of LaoTzu by Himself, where he describes himself as if colourless and neutral, immediately followed by the introduction of The Garden of Earthly Delights, which he will elaborate on over the next few pages. So, let us hold back and linger a little while longer with this incident and what it has dramatically overturned.12 Within the space of just a few sentences, Barthes has spilled ink, like the cuttlefish he mentions in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, producing an inky cloud in an attempt to baffle, outplay and retreat from the ‘arrogance’ that is asserted by the ‘marked’ and ‘official’ value of the Neutral Tint, while simultaneously allowing himself to be stained by the doxa of its meaning.13 In what amounts to a strange writerly alchemy – if the latter’s origins can be located in Egyptians dying their grey cottons blue – Barthes has both transformed this dull grey-black stain into the blue ink that the drafts were originally written in, but also let the very name of that stain permeate his text, not to mention the published version of the lecture (in French), with its greyish typeface on rough cream-coloured paper that is supposed to suggest the script of handwritten notes.14 A neutral tone is usually produced by mixing two primary colours together to create a greyish colour.15 As a pre-mixed colour, Neutral Tint has been available for purchase since the eighteenth century, and each paint brand has its own proprietary blend.16 Needless to say, Neutral Tint is not primarily meant to be used by itself, but rather applied and mixed with other colours to cool them down and lighten their value. And Barthes indeed uses this Neutral Tint by spilling, staining, and sponging, such that it gains texture, tone and inflection as it permeates and colours this little domestic scene. Although its official name is bottled up and stamped with the authority of the Sennelier label, that by no means definitively qualifies its ‘non-predicable 210

qualities’, as the ‘lure’ of the adjective persists, and the Neutral Tint is precipitously uncapped, overturned and begins to decant its unforeseen effects.17 Barthes knocks one over on us, as he had ‘opened this bottle first’, as he already wanted to know what kind of colour this Neutral would be that he would be speaking about for the next thirteen weeks. Like a ‘vapour bath’, it is a diffuser that, although initially omitted from Barthes’ list of purchased colours brimming with intense life, was already suffusing it through and through.18 Thus, the Neutral is not colourless – it is not the ‘beautiful soul’ of colour, to use Hegel’s terminology; a ‘transparent purity’ that ‘lives with the anxiety that it will stain the splendor of its innerness through action and existence’ – as it is always producing stains and marks even when trying to sponge them up.19 Neutral Tint not only spills and stains its own purity, it also permeates the sunshine, vibrant growth and vital life captured in the life of colour – all jaune soleil, bleu lumière and vert brilliant – not to mention the ‘bel après-midi (du soleil)’ of the Parisian afternoon when Barthes went out to purchase them. But it is important to note that this ‘noir-gris mat’ is not just flat, muffled and faded. It is what Barthes would call, drawing on the vocabulary of the German mystic Jacob Boehme, a qualitas; that is to say, not merely a (colour) value, quality, or a qualified, predicated substance, like a label stuck on a bottle, but rather as if the imprint of its name surged up from within itself ‘like a potent ink becoming visible’, as an intensity and force of distinctiveness emerging from indistinction, that ‘throws itself ’ and ‘overflows’.20 For Barthes, it would seem, these vibrant colours are already streaked with the force of a ‘dull gray-black’ that might well be the very epiphany of his claim that colour is a ‘jouissance’.21 But if jouissance is an excess, a drive, then by definition it is driven by repetition, as it is repetition that engenders excess.22 So, we must ask: is this grey qualitas repeated en grisaille even before we encounter Bosch’s outer panels? 211

Indeed, it is. Barthes recounts another personal incident that is bathed in the colour of grey in a ‘Supplement’ that inaugurates this weekly lecture, and precedes his recounting of the incident of purchasing the Sennelier inks and spilling the Neutral Tint that turns out to be ‘noir-gris mat’.23 Here we have a doubling down on the ‘personal incident’ – an incident on incident – that is indicative of a tautological strategy that is crucial to Barthes’ particular sense of the Neutral as a passion for difference. Barthes notes that the magisterial ‘flow’ of the course – a literal cursus that implies lack of interruption, and thus a sign of its paradigmatic/authoritarian status – must be neutralised by incidents ‘shimmering of an individuation’ (moire d’individuation) that are precisely about ‘Tact’ (Délicatesse), ‘Twinklings’ (scintillation) and ‘Minutia’.24 His example: ‘Going out, evenings at dusk, (En sortant, le soir, au crépuscule), sharply receiving tiny, perfect futile details of street life: the menu written in chalk on the windowpane of a café (chicken mashed potato, 16 francs 50 – kidneys crème fraîche, 16 francs 10)’, or, in other stretches of his writing, the scintillations and jouissance of his cruising (drague).25 Barthes specifically writes that it is ‘dusk’ (crépuscule) that activates this intoxicating ‘vividness’ (vivant).26 Given all the talk of grey and dusk so far – even though we are still at a preparatory stage (we may never leave it) before even arriving at Barthes’ discussion of the grisaille outer panels – I want to invoke the owl of Minerva passage from the ‘Preface’ to Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right: ‘When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of phil­ osophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.’27 In the standard French translation of the Elements of the Philosophy of Right available in France at the time, as well as in Alexandre Kojève’s influential Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, the colour terminology is rendered in even 212

more striking painterly terms such that, ‘When philosophy paints its grey in grey’ becomes ‘si la philosophie peint sa grisaille dans la grisaille’ and ‘the onset of dusk’ is translated as ‘l’heure de crépuscule’; a crépuscule that Barthes evokes twice in the Supplement, and a grisaille that he has already painted before even arriving at Bosch’s triptych.28 Although Barthes often pits the Neutral against the ‘arrogance’ of the Hegelian concept throughout the lecture course, suggesting, via Kojève, and some selective passages from Hegel, that the bad connotations of the Neutral are predicated on the perceived ‘failure’ of Greek skepticism to think the concept, i.e., to think the Neutral philosophically, that is not the whole story.29 Despite at times engaging in a stark contrast between the subtle and nuanced approach to the Neutral by figures such as Pyrrho, Lao-Tzu (Laozi) and Blanchot contra Hegel’s supposedly totalising tendencies that subsume singularity, reduce diversity and imprison contradiction within identity thinking, there are also numerous references to the mystic Jacob Boehme (via Alexandre Koyré), whom Hegel much admired, and to what Barthes variably calls a ‘subtle dialectic’ (a term first raised in an essay on the painter Cy Twombly), a ‘dialectic of intensities’ (referring to the notion of qualitas in Boehme) or the quest for a ‘slight difference (différence légère), of the onset, of the effort toward difference . . .’ that he locates in Bosch’s grisaille panels, that resonates with the subtle, immanent and intrans­igent logic of Hegel’s grey on grey passage.30 But what exactly is that logic? How should we read Barthes’ personal incident in regard to grey as the ‘colour of the colourless’ that is often interpreted as a painting over of the vitality of life in all its colourful intensity with the hue of ineradicable loss, melancholy and abstraction? Should we now see Barthes’ ‘sun yellow’ as an ‘ashen sun’, a term that Badiou uses to describe the twentieth century, clearly drawing on Beckett’s grey-black palette, or see his ‘brilliant green’ now painted over in ‘dull grey-black’, thus echoing the 213

apparent source and sense of Hegel’s grey on grey passage derived from an utterance by Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust – ‘Gray, my dear friend, is all theory, and green is the golden tree of life’ – such that grey is the colour of abstract thought, belatedness and a turning away from life in all its sensory richness?31 I think we should refrain from reading Barthes’ grisaille in this way. Let’s not assume that this ‘sun yellow’ has been layered over with a film of sooty grey ash, such that the reference to grey suggests that we are talking about a remainder that comes after or outside; merely the residue left over from an ardent fire, such that grey/​noir-gris mat/grisaille is the mere trace of an antecedent life, light and vitality that has burnt out, leaving us with its cold, undifferentiated grey ashes. No. These vivid colours both emerge from and are generated by the indeterminacy and subtle dialectic of grey on grey; a repetitive and incessant re-marking that is the virtual and imminent spark of the colour, quality and logic of the neutral as a ‘desperate Figure 7.5 Hieronymus Bosch, Triptych of The vitality’.32 If colour is related to calor as Temptation of St. Anthony, closed state, detail of Michael Taussig has suggested, per‘internal kindling’ from the grisaille outer panel, ca. 1501. Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, Portugal. haps grey is not simply the colour of indifference as a ‘general equivalence’, Source: photograph taken by Aron Vinegar 214

but rather its ‘ardent burning activity’, its ‘scintillation’, to use Barthes’ vocabulary.33 At times it might be just a scintilla (spark) of that scintillation that is ‘internally kindled’ (to use a phrase from Hegel) within the minimal difference of grey on grey, like the barely detectable fleck of fire in one of the grisaille outer panels from another Bosch triptych, The Temptation of St. Anthony in Lisbon (Figure 7.5).34 If jouissance ‘. . . begins with a tickle and ends with a blaze . . .’, perhaps the slight tickling of grey on grey is the colour of its instauration.35 The Neutral, Exemption of Meaning, and the Grisaille Outer Panels Whoever suggested, or designed, the cover of the philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia’s critical account of our modern obsession with The Life Intense astutely reproduces a snippet of the interior left wing from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, thus invoking the incantatory spell by which everyone from casual visitors to art historians to psychoanalysts are drawn, like moths to a flame, to these interior panels all ablaze in the full splendour and glory of their riotous and intense colours (Figure 7.1).36 As most readers know, the interior panels are some of the most enigmatic, elusive and hotly debated stretches of painting in Western art, calling forth endless cascades of interpretation, drawing on all matter of pictorial and textual sources. In contrast, Barthes withdraws from this flame, and devotes most of his attention to the laconic intensity of the two grisaille outer panels of the winged triptych rendered in different shades and tonalities of black, white and rust-based brown (Figure 7.2). While most art historians would rather focus attention on the curious delights in the three interior panels, Barthes will spill his ink over the Neutral Tint of the two grisaille panels that confront us with the cool indifference of a world coming into existence. It would be no exaggeration to 215

say that the entire corpus of writings on these outer panels adds up to a very small sum in the vast literature on this most famous of winged triptychs.37 Perhaps this is due to the fact that there is, as Hans Belting points out, a ‘remarkable consensus’ on the textual sources and iconography of the outer panels: the depiction of the third day of Creation according to the Book of Genesis.38 The grisaille panels would seem to offer an idyllic space of a more confident interpretation, if not settled meaning; a welcome respite, albeit slightly wet and grey, from the interpretive conflict to come on the interior panels. Although Barthes begins from this basic premise, he resolutely remains ‘before’ these grisaille panels, as a way of standing vigil to the very genesis of delight’s neutral, sovereign and indifferent realm. After the creation of night and day on the first day, and the creation of the firmament on day two, day three is the creation of earth and seas, and the earth’s bringing forth of grasses, the herb yielding seed and the fruit tree yielding its abundance; a time of budding life but before the appearance of animals and humans. And, indeed, this rather bleak but germinal landscape is full of odd Boschian-like plants and trees brimming with seed pods and fruit. Barthes writes that this ‘monochrome gray’ ‘is used’ (sert) to describe a landscape laden with heavy clouds above a flat disc of earth surrounded by water and ‘circumscribed by a transparent sphere (the crystal ball of the seers)’.39 This sphere, in turn, is suspended in a void of nothingness, that is rendered in shades of greyblack (Figure 7.2). These areas outside the sphere are not borne by a monochrome tonality rendered by smooth and evenly applied strokes of grey and black. Due to Bosch’s way of applying paint as if he were ‘sketching’ with a brush, the pigments are thinly spread and insubstantial yet insistently there. This insubstantiality is reinforced by the fact that the lighter ground of the canvas remains visible as an indeterminate substance, 216

thus suggesting that ‘ungrounding’ and ‘voiding’ is immanent to the appearance of this nothingness in its emerging and precipitous inflection. 40 In contrast to the repetitive use of the term ‘monochrome’ in the English translation of The Neutral, Barthes never uses that word in the original French version of the lecture course, but rather ‘camaïeu’, ‘gris­aille’ and ‘ton sur ton’ in order to emphasise that this ‘monochrome gray’ (camaïeu gris) is not undifferentiated and uniform, but precisely consists of values and tones of grey and other muted colours, which these terms better indicate. 41 Although ‘monochrome’ is technically an appropriate translation of camaïeu, we should be alerted to the fact that there are rarely any pure monochromes, particularly when we take into consideration the interplay of phenomenological bodies, disembodied drives, materiality and light. 42 This is a very serious issue for Barthes, as he essentially approaches the notion of God and Creation from a mystical perspective, which emphasises an ‘originary indistinction’ from which the distinct emerges from the indistinct, deter­ mination from indetermination, the qualified from the unqualified.43 Simply put, according to Barthes, God is ‘ungrund’. He specifically uses the mystic Jacob Boehme’s term here in order to emphasise the temptation of an originary indistinction and ur- or pre-paradigmatic state.44 In drawing out the extreme logic of this mystical literature to its full and radical conclusion, Barthes seems to suggest that this God would be a colorless monochrome that can’t be known or seen even to itself; a non-painting of originary indistinction ‘before’ any division of marked and unmarked.45 Because grey is unmarked – that is to say, marked as the unmarked, in contrast to black and white which are both on the side of the marked – it is the closest one can come, in colour, to the colour­lessness of the indistinct.46 Grey on grey is the minimal and incessant re-marking of that unmarked state, such that the ‘transparent sphere’ that Barthes calls attention to in Bosch’s panel, is rendered as an opaque transparency painted in grisaille.47 217

But this mythic birth of the ‘not yet’ and ‘before’ meaning in Bosh’s panels seems to be countermanded by God as the very ‘wellspring of meaning’. A carefully rendered text stretches across the upper parts of both outer panels and appears to be a gloss on this Genesis scene from the Psalms of David (33:9): ‘for he spake and it was done: he commanded and it stood fast’. The figure of God the Father is located on the upper left, wearing a crown (it looks like a papal tiara), seated on a bench and enfolded within a cloud, who appears to look on his creation from afar, thus evoking another passage from the Psalms (33:13-14): ‘The lord looketh from heaven . . . From the place of his habitation he looketh’48 (Figure 7.6). Given these figural and textual conditions, we might be inclined to consider this to be a rather classic, and dull, example of ‘ontotheology’. But note that God the Father is a diminutive figure – indeed, barely noticeable – and, as Belting perspicuously notes, ‘his gesture seems hesitant, almost shy, as though the world he had created was already slipping beyond his control’. 49 In fact, the cloud in which he is curled up in – or which curls around and consumes him – resonates with the texture and tonalities of the stormy greyish-black clouds within the sphere he is outside of and looking in at as well as the ‘ungrund’ of the painting’s lighter ground that permeates the mist-like grey washes of pigment. God the Father’s manifestation is constituted by a ‘God-matter’ (matière-Dieu) that is neutral, indistinct and colourless yet necessarily appears ‘clouded by originary indistinction’. ~ At this point in the text, Barthes specifically refers to three sources in order to emphasise that this colour­lessness is mattered, stained and clouded through and through by a relentless painting in grisaille that constitutes God the Father’s dis-appearing: the neutral ‘Salitter’ of the German mystic Boehme 218

Figure 7.6  Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, closed state, detail of God the Father, 1500–1505, oil, grisaille on oak panel, h. 185.8 cm × 76.5 cm (each panel). Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Copyright: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, New York

via Koyré, who repeats Hegel’s use of the word ‘neutral’ to describe the ‘unrevealed existence’ of God that precipitously manifests an infinite something out of the negation and nothingness of his own being (ex se) in and as ‘ungrund’; to Lao Tzu’s declaration, ‘I am as though colorless and undefined’; and to the imperative of Angelus Silesus: ‘Lose all form ^ all color ^50 and you will be like god.’51 As Barthes writes, it is ‘logical’ that Bosch would entrust to grisaille the ‘representation’ of the early steps, ‘when Creation was still very 219

close, still clouded by originary indistinction, that is with God-matter’.52 To put it another way, the figure of God the Father is consumed with and by creation; the creator withdraws in the midst of its act. Thus, the logic of what we encounter here is much closer to what Jean-Luc Nancy has called an ‘absentheism’ at the very heart of ‘ontotheology’ than the figure of God as the wellspring of a paradigmatic sovereignty.53 Or, to put it in Barthes’ terms, if the ‘silere’ of Boehme’s God is an unknowable and ur-or pre-­ paradigmatic condition, then he must dis-appear in and as differentiation emerging from indifferentiation, the distinct from the indistinct, the marked from the unmarked.54 For Barthes, it would seem that God is the absolute anxiety of an unmarked monochrome painted with a colourless ‘god matter’, that generates an unhinged drive to mark this remarkable dis-appearance and unknowability as the very threshold of meaning. Barthes notes the appropriateness of grisaille for these outer panels that have as their ‘subject’ the creation of the world, because grey is the colour of the drivenness of the drive as it circles around that threshold of meaning through repetitive and excessive acts of generating re-marks of grey on grey. The subtle gradations of grey, black and camaïeu in the grisaille panels are rendered in such a way that they manifest as a palimpsest of plenitude and lack, excess and void, appearance and disappearance. I take it that this is what Barthes is trying to get at when he talks about grisaille’s ‘principle of all over organization’, which covers the totality of the outer panels and results in, to use his exact words, an ‘almost exhaustively nuanced space’.55 The exhaustion manifested by grisaille is of a piece with a repetition compulsion of grey on grey, which is imbued with a desperate and infinite fatigue that is simultaneously an excess­ively vital and generative force in its own right, and that frustrates any given notions of before and after, early and late, beginning and ending, genesis and ruination, virtual and actual. Like the undefined 220

nature of Lao Tzu as a perpetual newborn, the Neutral is the ‘time of the not yet, moment when within the original non-­differentiation something begins to be sketched, tone on tone, the first differences (l’indifférenciation originelle): early morning . . . silere: the bud, the egg not yet hatched: before meaning’.56 That this moment is ‘sketched’, draws on Barthes’ particular sense of this term that is prescient for Bosch’s logic and practice of applying paint that appears insubstantial and ungrounded even in its finished state: ‘to link in a single state what appears and what dis­appears . . . Life-Death, in a single thought, a single gesture’.57 For Barthes, these grisaille panels capture the doubling of this ‘early morning’ (petit matin) – the grey dawn of Jacob Boehme’s L’Aurore naissante – and its grey dusk (crépuscule), as if Creation was the ‘slight difference’ between the repetition of these two greys of dawn and dusk, both of which Taussig nicely refers to as the ‘unconscious of light’.58 Barthes remains with the ‘not yet’ of this minimal difference that excessively repeats itself and in doing so evacuates meaning even while holding forth at its very threshold.59 Thus, ‘before meaning’ should not be taken in a strictly temporal, spatial or referential sense, but rather to invoke what Barthes calls an ‘exemption from meaning’, with all the implications this phrase suggests in terms of freeing or relieving from an imposed obligation or duty to mean and signify.60 If we take Barthes’ phrase to mean literally ‘before’ meaning it would reinforce the bin­arism of the paradigm as the great principle of organization that Barthes is trying to outplay and baffle (déjouer) by the neutral, as well as suggesting that meaning or sense is either empty or full, when it is precisely a matter of how grisaille is the persistent and repetitive task that generates the ‘slight difference’ that ‘skips’ this either/or condition. If the neutral is what outplays or baffles the paradigm (opposition), which is the ‘wellspring of meaning’ through its oscillation between the marked and the unmarked, then grisaille is a repetitive re-marking that delays the birth of meaning. 221

The exuberance and emptiness of grisaille’s repetition is Barthes’ way of sustaining the force and ‘dialectic of intensity’ that is generated by the ‘slight difference, the opening onto difference’, of grey on grey. Joseph Leo Koerner describes the grisaille panels, in which a ‘frugal likeness of the newly created world floats amidst the nothing preceding, a decidedly grayish, sober image . . .’.61 But this ‘nothing preceding’ – perhaps represented by the area ‘outside’ the ‘transparent sphere’ – is also immanent and inside, such that this greyish, sober image from the Old Testament is ‘sketched’ in grisaille from edge to edge. These grisaille panels open up a chromatic intensity that is generated from within its field of grey on grey, and that is not simply located ‘behind’, ‘outside’, or in dramatic contrast with it. If creation is a matter of separation – or perhaps more to the point, a ‘separtition’, given that we are talking about the subtle internal divisions and shifts of grey on grey – then we should refrain from seeing the opening that bisects the orb, and divides the two external panels, as a hermeneutic ‘hinge’; a door to be opened onto a meaning, colour, or space behind it.62 The logic here is not one of revealing and concealing, before and after, interior and exterior. Although Barthes rehearses the values invested in these binaries, he finds that such ideologies are far from satisfactory: ‘problem for us: is the Neutral really a breachable, peelable surface, behind which richness, color, strong meaning hide (Cf, the unconscious is it really what hides behind the conscious?).’63 Margin on Margin, or, Aerating the Schema In resonance with his claim early in the lecture course that his definition of the Neutral remains structural and does not refer to ‘impressions of grayness, of neutrality, of indifference’, Barthes begins with an account of the altarpiece’s ‘form’ rather than its history per se.64 In classical structuralist fashion, 222

he briefly elaborates on the cultural values invested in the binary oppositions between colourful and colourless in terms of recto/verso, inside/outside, richness/poverty in regards to the triptych. Throughout his writings, Barthes insists that a ‘tertium’, or third term, is required in order to elude and suspend the intractable binarism of the paradigm. It would appear that the very form of Bosch’s Flemish altarpiece that when open is composed of three panels, and when closed two, would seem to be the ideal figure for such an endeavour. Barthes’ main account of the grisaille panels occurs under the heading, ‘Interpretations’, which is subdivided into five sections lettered (a) to (e). These sections explore the ‘values’ invested in the opposition between colourful and colourless in terms of (a) Richness/Poverty, (b) Back/Front, (c) Origin, (d) Shimmer, and (e) Indistinction. In the paragraphs above, I skipped to aspects of sections (c), (d) and (e), but right at the threshold of point (a) the paradigmatic nature of this set-up begins to be subtly inflected. Barthes draws two seemingly simplified and schematic diagrams of the triptych in its open and closed states on a blackboard during the lecture, and you can hear the sounds of the chalk dragging across the blackboard in the audio recording. Both drawings are reproduced in the wide margins of the French and English versions of the Le Neutre/The Neutral where all the other supplementary materials are located, such as truncated bibliographic references, keywords and proper names (Figure 7.7).65 The diagram of the triptych in its open state consists of three adjoining squares numbered one to three, and the word ‘Color’ (Couleur) above the central panel, with an arrow pointing down and connecting the word to its mid-point. The diagram of it in its closed state consists of two adjoining squares with the heading below it titled ‘Values of Gray’ (Grisaille), with an arrow pointing up and connecting the word to the line that bisects the two panels. ~ 223

Figure 7.7  Roland Barthes, structural diagram of the winged triptych (Couleur/Grisaille) in the margin of Le Neutre: Cours au Collège de France (1977–78), 81. Texte, établi, annoté et présenté par Thomas Clerc. Paris: Éditions du Seuil/Imec, traces écrites, 2002. Source: photograph taken by Aron Vinegar

As the translator of the lecture course rightly notes, these wide margins are an ‘aesthetic use of the layout of the page’.66 But these two diagrams are particularly intriguing as they are the only ones to appear in the margins of any of his three lecture courses at the Collège.67 So, just as this weekly topic on the relationship of colour to colourlessness is prefaced by the ‘personal incident’ of buying the Sennelier inks, that is in turn prefaced by another personal incident in the ‘Supplement’, the altarpiece schemas occupy the incidental space of the marginal domain. Thus, these diagrams turn out to 224

be what Barthes calls ‘margins within the margin’.68 And within these rather chaste diagrams subtle nuances and inflections emerge. To begin with we can hear the ‘grain’ of Barthes’ voice as he is drawing on the board in the audio version, and thus its timbre, tone and mood infuse what we might imagine to be the bold, but chalky white lines drawn across a stark blackboard. But I think we need to imagine this scene of graphic inscription a bit differently than I worded it here. If the extant images of Barthes teaching are any indication, that blackboard is not stark, but rather more akin to one of Cy Twombly’s ‘blackboard’ paintings from the late 1960s and early 1970s (Figure 7.8). As is well known, Barthes admired Twombly’s work, and writes eloquently about how his pencil or brush ‘drifts’ and ‘smears’ across the surface, subtly working over its previous iterations, which, ‘gives the canvas [read blackboard] the depth of a sky in which thin clouds pass in front of each other without cancelling each other out’.69Although the marginal schemas in The Neutral may look like stark structural diagrams or models of the triptych in its open and closed states with all the ‘grain’ of his voice and gesture of drawing on the blackboard drained out, this is a lure we should surely resist. What we are offered is the very limits of formalisation, as if Barthes wanted to repeat a logic articulated in a much earlier essay on the mythology of Einstein, that compares the cartoon images of him with chalk in hand, and the stark equation E=mc2 already written ‘on an empty blackboard, as if without preparation’, as opposed to photographs of him in front of a messy chalkboard with palimpsestic and cloudy traces of all the labour and effort that went into working out the equations that drift across its surface.70 The drawings in the margins have the sureness and independence of a ‘gesture’, but one that does not refer back to an affirmation of self, but rather to a sovereign, yet subtle, graphic mode of existence. ~ 225

I am not sure who was responsible for the typographic layout of the English version of the published lectures, but here the triptych diagrams are rendered in a very fine black line, such that the contrast between their subtle and extenuated existence and the surrounding white page of the generous margin is de-dramatised in contrast with the heavier typeface of the other written references located there. These Figure 7.8  Cy Twombly, Untitled (Rome), 1966, oil, wall paint and crayon on canvas, 190 × 200 lines are insistently outlined but cm. The Lambrecht-Schadeberg Collection. also withdrawn, and thus what Copyright: Cy Twombly Foundation, New York might immediately look like a schema or diagram heavy with mean­­ing is almost overwhelmed by the surrounding white space. In doing so, they body forth aspects of what Barthes would characterise as the discretion of the ‘incident’: ‘a tiny fold, an insignificant crease on a great empty surface’.71 One might say that the winged triptych diagrams are ‘aerated’, a term that Barthes increasingly uses in his late works, and which suggests how a practice or stance is suffused and/or diffused with a degree of lightness such that more of the surface is available for delicacy, contact and in-distinction.72 Despite their crisp and cool graphic lines, the two drawings emanate an extremely subtle and barely detectable atmosphere and mood. In many ways, they are rendered like a haiku, with just a few judicious inflections that are aerated by the white page, thus lightening hard value and arrogance without negating ideality and concentration.73 The drawings are able to stand and 226

breathe on their own without needing to rely on any further punctuation as they are already punctuated through and through.74 For Barthes, aeration suggests how a bearing, gesture or typographic layout infuses itself with the void. The void in this sense is not merely a gap or an abyss underneath, or ‘over there’, that one might fall into, but rather a slight displacement, a minimal difference, or a repetition. By incorporating the void into the very heart of the schema it is transformed from a stable form to the outline of a force or a tenuous event that enacts an exemption of meaning and not its definitive framing. It is as if we are given the purity of the rectangle/​ square, which for Barthes is the primal, and formal, precondition of fantasy as an act of ‘framing’, but only in order to dramatise how even this minimal repertoire generates a graphic form of existence that is not devoid of incident, nuance and inflection. In doing so, it echoes the cloudy grey on grey drifts and streaks generated on the blackboard. Nuer, Nuance and the Colour of ‘Thoughts are (Grey) Clouds’ Although the entire scene in Bosch’s grisaille outer panels is rendered in a rich variety of grey tonalities, this is particularly striking in the stormy clouds painted on the upper part of the globular cosmos, where they extend across the vertical opening of the outer panels that bisects the earthly sphere (Figures 7.2, 7.6 and 7.9). The clouds carry the night and heavy rains and also emanate an emerging light that modulates the different tonalities and illumination within the bleak landscape. In The Preparation of the Novel, Barthes makes a direct connection between nuance, weather and his quest for a diaphoralogy, a science of nuances, through the archaic French verb ‘nuer’, which means ‘to compare shades of color to the play of light in the clouds’.75 As Barthes notes, nuance tends to iridate, diffuse and streak, 227

like a cloud streaks the sky.76 Throughout his work, including The Neutral, Barthes consistently draws on the nuances of clouds and their different shades of grey to describe subtle worlds of sense and atmosphere that are not merely phenomenological, subjective or impressions of the neutral. It would be worthwhile to enumerate all the different qualities of grey that Barthes writes about, but here are just a few: the ‘light gray’ skies of South West France; the ‘heavy gray’ that often envelopes Paris, which he calls ‘Parisian Gray’; the ‘lofty sky’ with ‘gray clouds floating across it’ from Tolstoy’s The Night of Austerlitz that features as one of the ‘epigraphs’ for The Neutral course; the cottony puffs of white-grey clouds that drift across the surface of a Cy Twombly painting; the particular incidents that scintillate the grey crepuscular hours of his cruising; or, the slightly bluish-grey of dawn he is attracted to in Daniel Boudinet’s ‘Polaroid’, which serves as the frontispiece to Camera Lucida, and is taken from a series that the photo­ grapher took of his apartment from dawn to dusk. ~ Again, it must be stressed that the nuance of these grey clouds is not a Figure 7.9 Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly matter of ‘impression’, but rather is, Delights, closed state, right panel, detail of clouds, 1500–1505, like Barthes’ characterisation of the oil, grisaille on oak panel, h. 185.8 cm × 76.5 cm (each panel). Inv. POO2823. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Copyright: Neutral itself, ‘a borderline thought, on the edge of language, on the edge Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, New York 228

of color, since it’s about thinking the nonlanguage, the noncolor’.77 For Barthes, the nuance and ‘nuer’ of grisaille drifts away from the arrogance of both the predicable and the ineffable. Grisaille not only catches the light, but rather it catches alight in a striking subtlety that is set adrift (dérive) and forces us to think an opening that is immanently generated by a slight difference and repetition of grey on grey that does not abandon indifference to what Adorno calls the ‘gray-on-gray’ of general equivalence.78 To paint ‘grey on grey’, or ‘tone on tone’, is a subtle dialectic of intensities that is internal to and emerges out of an intransitive drive that exhaustively repeats and does not form a pair with any opposite. It is from out of this doubling down of grey on grey that the prefix ‘in’ marking the negative and privative dimensions of indifference as a lack of difference, or, to put it in terms of capitalist exchange value, a general equivalence, is outplayed, enabling an intensification of difference and the particular to alight, that is ‘internally kindled’ by grisaille’s insistent thought of indifference. Notes 1. Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005; in French, 2002). I frequently refer to the original French publication of The Neutral lecture course in what follows: Roland Barthes, Le Neutre, Cours au Collège de France (1977–78), Texte établi, annoté et présenté par Thomas Clerc (Éditions du Seuil, novembre 2002). The course ran every Saturday for two hours from 18 February to 3 June 1978. The Neutral was preceded by How to Live Together: Novelistic Stimulations of Some Everyday Spaces, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013; in French, 2002) that took place in 1977; and was followed by his last lecture course/seminar, The Preparation of the Novel, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 229

2011; in French, 2003), which took place in 1978–1979. One should also read Barthes’ inaugural lecture marking his appointment to the Chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France (7 January 1977), as it lucidly sets the tone for these late lecture courses and seminars. See Roland Barthes, ‘Lecture’, trans. Richard Howard, in October, 8 (Spring 1979): 3–16. All the Collège lecture courses and seminars were originally published in the Traces Écrites series at Éditions de Seuil under the overall direction of Éric Marty. 2. The word ‘nuance’ is also one that is frequently raised by Lyotard in relation to colour and music. 3. On diaphora, diaphoralogy and adiaphoria see Barthes, The Neutral, 11, and fn 32 p. 215, and fn 9 p. 233, as well as The Preparation of the Novel, 45–46. On ‘indifference’ in The Neutral, see pp. 7, 71 and 195. The colour of the Teinte Neutre, noir-gris mat, echoes with ‘matteness’ (matité) that Barthes uses to describe the figure of indifference right at the end of the course (p. 195). In regards to the terms diaphora and adiaphoria, Barthes is drawing on the Skeptic Pyrrho, who is a major figure in Barthes’ concept of the Neutral; Nietzsche’s use of these terms in works such as The Will to Power; Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy; Lyotard who wrote his MA thesis on Indifference as an Ethical Notion; and Blanchot’s writings on the neutral and indifference. Barthes’ most succinct definition of indifference is articulated in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994; in French, 1975), but is fully operative and explicitly referred to in The Neutral and The Preparation of the Novel as a condition bereft of nuance and difference, and thus one of the ‘bad adjectives’ that contributes to the ‘bad image’ of the neutral. See Barthes, The Neutral, 69–71. 4. See Barthes, The Neutral, 51, for ‘slight difference’ and, 54, for ‘dialectic of intensities’; for ‘subtle dialectics’ see Barthes, ‘The Wisdom of Art’, The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 179. On ‘the desire for the Neutral’, see, Barthes, The Neutral, 1, and the section entitled ‘The Desire for Neutral’, 12–14. 230

5. Roland Barthes, ‘Lecture’, 5 and 15. 6. Roland Barthes, The Neutral, 12. A list of the twenty-three traits, figures or figurewords of The Neutral (he also refers to them as shimmers or scintillations) are provided during the first weekly lecture. Barthes generally covered two figurewords per week over the thirteen-week course. Colour and The Adjective are covered in week four, which took place on 11 March 1978. Three additional figurewords are discussed in the ‘Annex’ to the published version of the course, and he made notes for many more that he did not include. The reason Barthes emphasises the relationship of colour to the colourless is because it is the ur-paradigm of the structural opposition of marked and unmarked, the distinct and indistinct, and thus the difference between the colourless and colour surpasses everything that separates two distinct colours. Here, Barthes specifically draws on Meister Eckhart’s negative theology. See Barthes, The Neutral, 51, and fns 11–12 p. 224. 7. Barthes, The Neutral, 48-49; Le Neutre, 80-81. All English and French quotations/ translations that are not separately noted are derived from these sections of the lecture course. An audio version for the entire lecture course is available on UbuWeb Sound, and this weekly session on Colour and The Adjective can be accessed at: https:​/​​/​ubu.com​/​media​/​sound​/​barthes​_​roland​/​Barthes​-​Roland​_​Le​-​­Neutre​_ ​04​_ ​1 1​-​ mars​-​1978.mp3. The rhythm of the live lecture is inscribed in the published version of the lecture courses, which is divided and dated according to the weekly sessions, and which indicates where he left off each Saturday and where he would take it up again the following Saturday. It should be noted that the published texts of all the lecture courses are primarily derived from Barthes’ handwritten manuscripts, and thus they include the numerous ellipses, arrows, brackets and abbreviations he used, which makes it challenging to transcribe and to quote in standard sentences. No doubt Barthes would have been pleased with this effect. 8. In the audiotape version, he notes that he initially intended to buy a ‘douzaine’ but got carried away, which elicits peals of laughter from those in attendance. The 231

subtle intensity of Barthes’ deadpan delivery is of a piece with the clear joy and levity of these weekly sessions. 9. The rhythm between immanent repetition, excess and emptying out is indicative of a kenotic aesthetics that is crucial to Barthes’ concept of the neutral in general and, more specifically, to his account of the ‘tone on tone’ of grisaille. I further explore this kenotic aesthetics in relationship to repetition and habit in my book, Subject Matter: The Anaesthetics of Habit and the Logic of Breakdown (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023). Also see footnote 19. 10. The French version of the manuscript published by Éditions de Seuil does not have an image of the bottle of Teinte Neutre on the front cover, nor does it quote the personal incident on the back cover, but rather uses a graphic design that is more suggestive of a page ripped out from a spiral-bound cahier, and the typeface of the text is meant to suggest written script, which is fitting for the Traces Écrites series as it is devoted to publishing lectures and seminars. See Lucy O’Meara, Roland Barthes at the Collège de France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 5. The quotation from the personal incident is omitted on the back cover of the English paperback edition of the lecture course. The cover design of the English translation for Columbia University Press is inadvertently misleading as it shows a more recent bottle of Neutral Tint no. 931 from the Encre Sennelier line, whereas I believe Barthes was using ‘Colorine’, a word that he specifically uses when talking about purchasing these colours in the lecture, and which is a different line of Sennelier ink that was discontinued a decade or so after Barthes’ death in 1980. As is clearly evident from the image on the cover of the English translation, the Neutral Tint in the current Encre Sennelier line is violet in colour and the small 30 ml bottle is topped by a screw-top cap with a protruding pipette (stopper), whereas the Neutral Tint from the Colorine line was ‘noir-gris mat’, as Barthes clearly indicates in the personal incident, and these bottles had a flat, screw-top cap without a pipette. You can clearly see the Colorine labels on 232

the Sennelier bottles, with their screw-top caps, in Sophie Bassouls’ photograph of Barthes in his apartment surrounded by bottles of Sennelier paint and brushes, which was taken six days after The Neutral lecture course had ended. The photograph is clearly ‘set up’ to invoke the personal incident of buying bottles of Colorine, and Barthes’ status as an ‘amateur painter’, with all the connotations those latter two words evoke for him with regard to ‘preparation for painting’. In the current Encre Sennelier line you can also purchase Gris/Grey no. 701 and Diluant Incolore/Colourless Medium 020 among many other colours. 11. In his inaugural lecture, Barthes claims that his new form of semiology will be coloured differently, such that he will proceed more like an artist who paints than a hermeneuticist who digs up and interprets. See Barthes, ‘Lecture’, 55. This approach is clearly articulated in his first lecture course, How to Live Together, where he likens his teaching, which juxtaposes figures in the class, to a pointillist painter who dabs unmixed touches of colour on canvas. See Barthes, How to Live Together, 134. The ‘personal incident’ also resonates with a line from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, ‘If I were a painter, I should paint only colors.’ Here we are immersed in the preparation for that ‘If I were a painter.’ In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes he also talks about a projected book that he would like to write titled The Amateur (‘record what happens to me when I paint’). See Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 129, 143 and 149. Barthes was also an ‘amateur’ painter himself, and increasingly speaks more and more about this in his later writings. See for example, ‘Colouring, Degree Zero’, in Roland Barthes: Signs and Images, vol. 4, trans. Chris Turner (London: Seagull Books, 2016), 123–124. Sophie Bassouls’ photograph shows one of his sketches to the left of his bottles of Colorine. But it is important to emphasise that although, according to Barthes, painting is a ‘non-­ signifying practice’ and thus the ‘utopia of the Text’, that exemption holds forth here in writing. See ‘Masson’s Semiography’, The Responsibility of Forms, 156. Here, I think Barthes differs somewhat from Julia Kristeva’s understanding of colour, 233

which is not uncommon, in terms of its rhetorical function as that which escapes power, control and discursive regimes. 12. The theatricality and drama of the course is captured in the final two words of the course: ‘Exit the Neutral’/‘Exit le Neutre’. See Barthes, The Neutral, 195 and Le Neutre, 244. 13. Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 162. As Barthes emphasises elsewhere, the control of value is always a form of ideological censorship. Throughout his writings, Barthes will often refer to doxa as a kind of staining that can’t be simply bleached away, i.e., struggled against as it ‘sticks’ or ‘enstickens’. One of the prime movers of doxa and value is the role of the adjective and predication, which Barthes also describes in similar terms. 14. I am assuming that the manuscript for Le Neutre was written in blue ink. See Neil Badminton’s essay, ‘The Inkredible Roland Barthes’, Paragraphe, 31, 1 (March 2008): 93. The Preparation of the Novel was also partly drafted in blue ink. See Nathalie Léger, ‘Editor’s Preface’, The Preparation of the Novel, xx. For the origins of alchemy and colour see Michael Taussig, What Color is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 26. 15. This technique would be pursued in other ways and for other means by modernist painters, such as Seurat and Paul Klee. 16. As far as I can tell, Neutral Tint was originally derived from a mixture of light red (red iron oxide) and indigo (iron blue). 17. Roland Barthes, The Neutral, 52–61 (The Adjective). It is precisely in Barthes’ desire to ‘deconstruct the subject/predicate paradigm’ that he is closest to Hegel, Boehme, mysticism and negative theology: ‘The Neutral would be like a language with no predication.’ He actually goes on to explore the lures and resistances of predication and alternative grammatical structures and linguistic forms that would outplay fixed and given modes of predication, as Hegel does with his account of the speculative sentence in the ‘Preface’ to The Phenomenology of Spirit. We should recall 234

that in his inaugural lecture, Barthes characterises his work as a ‘negative semiology’. See the entry ‘Mot-couleur/Color-word’ in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 129, where he notes that ‘When I buy colors, it is by the mere sight of their name.’ Interestingly, in that text these names are more explicitly exotic/colonial in nature, but most of the colour names in The Neutral seem to be about life and vividness as such. Barthes is quick to note that a colour’s name only marks out its generic region but not its specific effects, thus it is the promise of pleasure, the thrill of a future praxis, which he characterises as an appetite. Taussig has some interesting things to say about these ‘colonial color-names’ (Indian Yellow, Persian Red, celadon green) in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. See Taussig, What Color is the Sacred?, 44. The issues Taussig raises are also relevant to the frequent references to colour in Barthes’ texts recounting his sojourns in Morocco. The colour names that Barthes writes about are quite standard and restrained when compared, for example, to the inventive colour names in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. See David Batchelor (ed.), Colour: Documents of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA: The MIT Press and Whitechapel Gallery, 2008), 150–151; or, more recently, the twenty-three kinds and qualities of green that Anne Carson names in her new version of Euripedes’ Bakkhai. See Euripedes, Bakkhai: A New Version by Anne Carson (London: Oberon Books, 2015), 16–17. 18. For ‘vapor bath’ see Barthes, The Neutral, 103. Perhaps we might also recall the following passage from Proust’s Swan’s Way, which Barthes was certainly aware of given his love of À la recherche du temps perdu, 46: ‘I can just barely perceive the neutral glimmer in which the elusive eddying of stirred-up colors is blended.’ See Taussig, What Color is the Sacred?, 197. 19. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), §658. Also see footnote 9. 20. Barthes, The Neutral, 53–54. In The Neutral, Barthes is mostly referring to Alexandre Koyré’s impressive book on Boehme, La philosophie de Jacob Boehme (Paris: 235

Librarie J. Vrin, 1929), 88. The references to Boehme via Koyré are numerous, important and neglected in most of the scholarship I have read on The Neutral and the late lecture courses at the Collège. A longer version of this chapter would need to engage with them more fully. See note 25. 21. Roland Barthes, ‘Cy Twombly: Works on Paper’, The Responsibility of Forms, 166. The English translation of the entire sentence is: ‘But what is color? A kind of Bliss.’ The original French is ‘Mais qu’est-ce que la couleur? Une jouissance.’ See Barthes, ‘Cy Twombly ou “Non multa sed multum”’, Roland Barthes, Oeuvres complètes, Tome V, Nouvelle edition revue, corrigée et présentée par Éric Marty (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), 710. Although Barthes also talks about painting in terms of a cozy sense of craftwork, ‘laying out one’s pastels, inks, brushes and sheets of paper on a work bench’, and as ‘the relief of being able to create something that isn’t directly caught in the trap of language . . .’, in the passages I am concerned with in The Neutral he is writing about painting, as he is in the very text I just quoted. See Barthes, ‘Colouring, Degree Zero’, in Roland Barthes: Signs and Images, 123–124. 22. There are some important passages in Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text on repetition, excess and jouissance that are relevant here. See Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 41. 23. There are eight ‘Supplements’ in The Neutral that appear at the beginning of many of the weekly sessions. They elaborate on details, incidents, make connections, and generally lighten and nuance the mastery of the pedagogical condition of lecturing, thus ‘priming’ each new class – setting its tone so to speak. For a succinct account of them see Thomas Clerc, ‘Preface’, The Neutral, xxiv–xxv and fn 1 p. 219. 24. Barthes, The Neutral, 47 and fn 1 p. 222. Barthes is concerned that his teaching is not just a pedagogy of nuance but a nuanced pedagogy, which involves facilitating an art of opening, decanting and diffusing. 25. Barthes, The Neutral, 47 and 131. The recounting of this ‘menu’ in all its useless detail conveyed by the grain of Barthes’ rather deadpan delivery again stimulates 236

the exuberance and laughter from the bodies crammed into the no-doubt drab auditorium at the Collège. 26. Although Barthes notes that ‘urban dusk’ is particularly intoxicating for him, as it is related to his cruising, he is also enamoured of it in his holiday home in Urt as well: ‘The dusk, already far advanced, of extraordinary beauty, almost strange in its perfection: a soft light gray, not at all sad.’ See Roland Barthes, Incidents, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (London: Seagull Books, 2010), 153. 27. Hegel, ‘Preface’, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23. The Owl of Minerva passage in German reads as follows: ‘Wenn die Philosophie ihr Grau in Grau malt, dann ist eine Gestalt des Lebens alt geworden, und mit Grau in Grau läßt sie sich nicht verjüngen, sondern nur erkennen; die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.’ See G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Werke 7, Hrsg. von Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 28. There are three reflections on this passage that I find particularly compelling: Rebecca Comay, ‘Gray on Gray (Hegel, Beckett, Richter)’, in Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 142–145; Mladen Dolar, ‘The Owl of Minerva from Dusk till Dawn, or, Two Shades of Gray’, Filozofija i Društvo, xxvi, 4 (2015): 875–890; and Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 322–323. 28. See G. W. F Hegel, Principes de la philosophie du droit, trad. André Kaan, préface de Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Gallimard, 1963 [1940]), 45; and Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1947), 514. 29. In the scholarship on Barthes, it has become a commonplace to point out his ‘generalized anti-Hegelianism’ that was also prevalent among many of his intellectual cohort and interlocutors. This has, at times, prevented a closer scrutiny of their respective and specific modes of anti-Hegelianism, as well as their more subtle and 237

nuanced engagements with Hegel’s speculative philosophy. It also ignores the way these interlocutors engaged with Hegel in recursive and nachträglichkeit-like ways, i.e., Barthes’ admiration for Lacan, and Lacan’s indebtedness to Kojève’s readings of Hegel and Koyré’s account of science and ‘philosophical mysticism’ (apparently Lacan read Koyré’s La philosophie de Jacob Boehme). This ‘generalized anti-Hegelianism’ is a well-known and oft-quoted phrase from Deleuze’s ‘Preface’ to Difference & Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xix. 30. Roland Barthes, The Neutral, 51 and 54. The references to Hegel in The Neutral are numerous, either directly to Hegel’s account of Skepticism in ‘Plato and the Platonists’, vol. 2 of Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simon (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1995), 328–373, or to Kojève’s account of skepticism in ‘Le scepticisme antiphilosophique et les dogmatismes pseudo-­ philosophiques’, in Essai d’un histoire raisonnée de la philosophie païenne, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). But, perhaps most importantly, Koyré’s book on the German mystic Jacob Boehme, La philosophie de Jacob Boehme, is a constant reference throughout the lecture course, and is particularly germaine to week four’s discussion of Colour, The Adjective, and his account of Bosch’s grisaille panels. For the references to Hegel, Kojève and Koyré, see The Neutral, 25, 72, 156, 170–171, 200 and fn 18 p. 218; fns 19–21 p. 245; and fn 16 p. 257. We might recall that Hegel called Boehme ‘the first German philosopher’, and noted ‘the profound craving for speculation which existed within this man’. Koyré was already linking the two together within the larger rubric of his teaching on German Speculative Mysticism and Hegel’s Religious Philosophy at the École pratique des hautes Études from 1926/1927 to 1932/1933. No doubt Barthes felt an affinity not only to the content of Boehme’s mysticism but also its form – the poetic quality of his writing, his many neologisms/‘word-figures’, and his devotion to what Hegel calls ‘picture-thinking’, which led the philosopher to write that despite the ‘profound craving for speculation which existed in this man’, his ‘great mind’ was confined to the ‘hard knotty oak of the 238

senses’. See G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, vol. 3, 216 and 195. An issue that I would like to explore further is Barthes’ critique of the ‘subject/ predicate paradigm’ and his preference for the ‘world of qualities, not of qualified predicated substances’ that is put forth in The Adjective section that immediately follows the one on Colour in week four (pp. 52–61), and its resonance with Boehme’s writings, as well as Hegel’s critique of predication in terms of what he calls the speculative sentence in the ‘Preface’ to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Another day. 31. Alain Badiou, The Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 161: ‘Yes, the century is an ashen sun.’ There are many more references to grey and grey-black in Badiou’s writings on Beckett and in his book, Black: The brilliance of a non-color, trans. Susan Spitzer (London: Polity Press, 2017), including a rather grim rearticulation of Hegel’s grey on grey passage in regards to the twenty-first century: ‘How will those who begin with the darkish gray on the palish gray of computer screens manage? Without the slightest inkblot? Won’t they think that thought is just another vari­ation of formlessness, that the intellect is just a thin additional coat of gray over the gray of drive, and drive a mere stripping of the gray of the intellect?’ (17–18). 32. ‘Desperate vitality’ is a beautiful phrase that Barthes uses in The Neutral (14, 73), and that is inspired by Pasolini’s poem ‘Una disperata vitalità’. My sense is that Barthes is reading this poem with Boehme’s notion of quaal in mind, which is likened to the demonic character of life (Nachtseite der Natur), described by Koyré, and quoted by Barthes, as a ‘. . . perpetual movement with neither break nor goal . . .’ See Barthes, The Neutral, 93. This unhinged, disturbing and unruly force captures the jouissance and death drive at the heart of Barthes’ grisaille. It is also a feature of Lyotard’s account of ‘this profound erosion of chromatic differences’ that moves away from didactic chromatics, and is ‘the death drive operating in the field of colours’. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Assassination of Experience by Painting – Monory/L’Assissinat de l’expérience par la peinture – Monory, trans. Rachel Bowlby (London: Black Dog Publishing Limited, 1998), 99. 239

33. Lyotard is also wont to talk about a ‘burning coldness’, ‘extremely cold intensities’ and ‘an indifference, which has nothing to do with being cold’. See Lyotard, Monory, 108; and Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Ian Hamilton Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 15 and 74. 34. Taussig, What Color is the Sacred?, 14. Barthes, The Neutral, 7. Barthes’ notion of scintillation is derived from the Latin scintallatus, past participle of scintillare, meaning to sparkle, glitter, gleam or flash. Scintilla is ‘a spark’. Also relevant here is the alchemy of saltpetre or potassium nitrate (a gunpowder ingredient), which Boehme calls ‘Salitter’ or ‘Salniter’, and which is the neutral, unrevealed existence that ignites and gives rise to flashes of light and life. Hegel specifically uses the term ‘neutral’ to describe Boehme’s ‘Salitter’. For the term ‘internally kindled’ see, G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 540. 35. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII (The Other Side of Psychoanalysis), trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 83. The complete sentence ends with ‘of petrol’. Needless to say, Lacan emphasises the intimate relationship of repetition to the ‘eruption of jouissance’. 36. Tristan Garcia, The Life Intense: A Modern Obsession, Letting Be, Volume I, trans. Abigail Ray Alexander, Christopher Ray Alexander and Jon Cogburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). As anyone who has gone to see Bosch’s triptych in person can attest, the crowds in front of the open panels at the Prado are overwhelming and relentless. However, if you want a moment of silence and solitude, all you need to do is walk around to look at the grisaille panels facing away from these crowds, and you will be accompanied by an intimate yet subtly proximate group of three or four at most. For the ‘idiorythmy’ of these small groups, see Barthes, How to Live Together. 37. Mind you they are some great pages! See Hans Belting, Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2020 [2002]), 21–23; and Joseph Leo 240

Koerner, Bosch & Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 186–191. Of course, it is more complicated than the quantification implied by a ‘few pages’. All good writing is not merely progress­ ive but recursive, so these pages are elaborated on and read differently from the perspective of latter sequences just as these earlier pages suffuse later ones. But still . . . there is much less curiosity about this ‘remarkably laconic exterior’ (Belting, Hieronymus Bosch, 20). Needless to say, my chapter is not primarily an art historical or art historiographical engagement with this painting but rather focused on Barthes’ account of it. A fleshed out version of this chapter would engage a bit more with that art historical material when called for. 38. Belting, Hieronymus Bosch, 21. One alternate interpretation of these outer panels that is not part of this general pattern of consistency is E. H. Gombrich’s claim that they depict a scene after the biblical flood. See E. H. Gombrich, ‘Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights: A Progress Report’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 32, (1969): 162–170. What I find compelling in this essay is a fragment from a sentence on the first page: ‘. . . it seems somewhat perverse to think about a rainbow in grisaille’. Needless to say, I am not concerned with the broader culturological and hermeneutic claims he pursues in the essay, and whether or not they are convincing, or have been proven wrong in the academic sense. Speaking of rainbows, the following passage from Heidegger is also relevant here: ‘The smallest gap, the rainbow bridge of the phrase it is all alike, conceals two things that are quite distinct: “everything is indifferent” and “nothing is indifferent.”’ See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volumes 1 and 2, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 82. 39. It is Barthes himself who puts the parenthesis around ‘use’ (sert) here. Perhaps this is a reference to Lacan and his early use of the word ‘usufruct’ to characterise jouissance? 40. You can get a sense of Bosch’s painting technique and its effects through high-­ resolution reproductions, but the magical quality and intricacy of its application is 241

really enhanced by first-hand encounters with the paintings. I was able to get quite close up to the St. Anthony and Garden of Earthly Delights triptychs, so that level of scrutiny is available to any visitor to the museums in Lisbon and Madrid. Koerner offers some good descriptions of Bosch’s painting technique in Bosch & Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life, 80, 89–90, 166–167, 173, 190 and 207–208. 41. The term ‘ton sur ton’ is the more unusual phraseology for grisaille that Barthes uses in The Neutral. It comes from the language of painting and textiles, and it also plays on the fact that ‘ton’ is another word for colour, but also suggests value, in this case restrained value, and not just hue. Also, its musical resonances would not be lost on Barthes. Needless to say, I hear its resonance with Hegel’s ‘gray on gray’ passage. 42. This point is well made in Frank Fehrenbach’s essay, ‘Coming Alive: Some Remarks on the Rise of “Monochrome” Sculpture in the Renaissance’, Notes in the History of Art, 30, 3 (2011): 51. 43. Lyotard also shared Barthes interest in ‘. . . the color of the god’. See J. F. Lyotard, ‘God and the Puppet’, in The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 161. 44. Barthes, The Neutral, 42. 45. Peter Sloterdijk has highlighted the sheer madness and pathos of reasoning in the procedures of a mysticism that is concerned with taking matters to their logical conclusion. On can call this a ‘logical mysticism’. See ‘World Estrangement and Diagnosis of our Times: Interview with Andreas Geyer’, in Peter Sloterdijk: Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and Interviews, 1993–2012 (London: Polity Press, 2016), 20. 46. Barthes also states this aporia for the Neutral in Taoist terms that resonates with the Behmian language of mysticism and its drive to manifestation in and through the ‘ungrund’: ‘to make known, to state the not to speak, however lightly, there needs to be speech at a certain moment. Neutral = impossible: to speak it is to defeat it, but not to speak it is to miss its “setting up.”’ See Barthes, The Neutral, 28–29. 242

47. Blanchot’s writings on the Neutral is a key reference for Barthes and is frequently cited throughout the course. No doubt, Blanchot’s account of the relationship of the Neutral to the marked, and thus to an ‘opacity of transparency’, is relevant here. See Maurice Blanchot, ‘René Char and the Thought of the Neutral’, in The Infinite Conversation, trans. and foreword by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 303. 48. Belting, Hieronymus Bosch, 22. 49. Belting, Hieronymus Bosch, 21–22. 50. On Barthes’ use of grammatical marks and abbreviations in the published texts of his lecture courses, see note 7 above. 51. Barthes, The Neutral, 49–54. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, vol. 3, 198 and 214. Koyré, La philosophie de Jacob Boehme, 129. I recall Barthes writing somewhere that God was better understood by mystics than theologians. Indeed, the references to mysticism and negative theology via Jacob Boehme (via Koyré), Master Eckhart and Angelus Silesius are numerous in this weekly session on Colour and The Adjective. In this regard, Barthes’ consistent engagement with Blanchot throughout The Neutral is relevant here, particularly when we note that there is a direct reference to St. John of the Cross in The Neutral and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, which is clearly influenced by Blanchot. If Blanchot talks about a ‘first night’ and a ‘second night’, specifically referring to St. John of the Cross, this is strikingly recast by Barthes as the ‘first Neutral’ and the ‘second Neutral’, with the former separating the will-to-live from the will-to-possess, and the latter ‘separating this already decanted will-to-live from vitality’. See Barthes, The Neutral, 13–14. This ‘second Neutral’ is indicative of grisaille’s grey on grey. Needless to say, Blanchot’s ‘black on black’ (first night and second night) is full of grisaille nuance, thus it is precisely not the ‘monochrome formalism’ that Hegel relentlessly attacks in his ‘Preface’ to The Phenomenology of Spirit, that passes off its absolute ‘as the night in which, as one says, all cows are black’. See Hegel, ‘Preface’, The 243

Phenomenology of Sprit, §15–§16. One might see the ‘grey on grey’ of grisaille as a counter to this ‘monochrome formalism’. 52. Barthes, The Neutral, 51. The ‘still clouded’ is the English translation of ‘toute mêlée’ in the French version. See, Le Neutre, 84. 53. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 18, 69, 88; and The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007). Strikingly, Nancy directly relates the issue of absentheism to colour and painting in an essay entitled ‘Chromatic Atheology’, which is a commentary on Martin Buber’s brief but compelling ‘The Altar’, which is an essay on Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. Both essays were translated by Vivian Rehberg and Boris Belay, and published together in the Journal of Visual Culture, 4, 1 (2005): 116–128. Interestingly, part of Buber’s PhD dissertation was devoted to Jacob Boehme. 54. Barthes, The Neutral, 22 and 50–56. 55. Barthes, The Neutral, 51. In this context, the reference to ‘all over’ is probably recalling Deleuze’s writings on Jackson Pollock’s ‘all-over technique’. If the death drive is not a separate drive, but a drive that is woven through all drives, then we need to take into consideration Alenka Zupančič’s comment that, ‘the death drive names a kind of fundamental or ontological fatigue of life as such. It is the steady undercurrent of life in all its colorful and exuberant forms.’ See Zupančič, What is Sex? (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017), 96. Barthes devotes part of the second and third weeks of The Neutral to exploring the figure-word ‘Wearinesss’. See Barthes, The Neutral, 16–21. 56. Barthes, The Neutral, 50. I have left out the following passage after early morning: ‘Daltonian space (the Daltonian can’t oppose red and green, but he perceives different surfaces of light and intensity.’ This is further pursued in the appendix with 244

regard to shades of grey (196). I shy away from this passage as I think it can be read as if grisaille is the simple translation of paradigmatic colour oppositions into nuanced shades of grey, but that still risks being seen as merely a ‘monotonous formalism’, (Hegel), but now rendered in a grisaille palette. 57. Barthes, ‘Cy Twombly: Works on Paper’, The Responsibility of Forms, 165. 58. L’Aurore naissante is the French translation of Boehme’s first book, Aurora (Morgen röte Im Auffgang) (1612). For a bilingual version of this text see, Aurora (Morgen röte Im Auffgang) (1612), and Fundamental Report (Gründlicher Bericht, Myserium Pansophicum, 1620), trans. and introduction by Andrew Weeks (Leiden: Brill, 2013). On the repetition of these two greys of dawn and dusk in Hegel’s grey on grey passage see Comay and Dolar note 27. On the ‘unconscious of light’ see Michael Taussig, Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 24. 59. My hunch is that Barthes read a very striking book review of Roger Laporte’s novel La Veille written by Foucault in 1963 that explicitly engages with the ‘before’, the time of the ‘not yet’, the colour grey, and mourning/dawn in ways that would have been compelling for Barthes with regard to Bosch’s grisaille panels. See Foucault, ‘Standing Vigil for the Day to Come’, trans. Elise Woodard and Robert Harvey, Foucault Studies, 19 (June 2015): 217–223. But the strange logic of this beginning is already fully articulated in Hegel’s Science of Logic, 51: ‘that which begins already is, but is also just as much not yet’. Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the Dogon Egg in chapter 6 of A Thousand Plateaus is probably in play here as well, as well as the passages on the egg in Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation. For Deleuze the egg is an example of virtuality, indetermination, and the proliferation of signs. 60. Much has been written about Barthes and the ‘exemption from meaning’ (exemption du sens), a phrase that recurs in multiple stretches of his writings, including The Neutral, 7 and 93. See Nancy’s essay on this exact phrase in Barthes’ work, ‘An 245

Exempting from Sense’, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, 121–128. In an early mention of the word exemption in Dis-Enclosure, Nancy characterises it as a an ‘extreme delicacy’ (23) – a sentiment that clearly echoes with Barthes’ understanding of tact and nuance. Nancy is attracted to Barthes’ emphasis on exemption as a kenotic notion; an emptying out, which is captured by Nancy’s term ‘exscription’, the emptying or spilling out of sense. See for example note 9. 61. Koerner, Bosch & Bruegel, 187. 62. The word ‘separtition’ is Lacan’s neologism. See Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. A. R. Price (London: Polity Press, 2016), 237: ‘separtition – not separation but partition on the inside . . .’. 63. Barthes, The Neutral, 50. 64. Barthes, The Neutral, 7. Barthes’ account is prescient in that most commentators concentrate on the surfeit of curiosities, delights and striking colours in the triptych, and tend to downplay the strong drive towards structure in Bosch’s oeuvre. Koerner is one scholar who does emphasise the diagrammatic forms, hierarchical structures and fearful symmetries in Bosch’s work. Of course, the metaphysical sense of structure that Koerner sees in Bosch’s work is directly related to one of the overarching claims of his book, i.e., ‘enmity . . . is the very matrix of structure’. See Koerner, Bosch & Bruegel, 60 and 144–145. I am interested in other dimensions of structure and structuralism as they relate to nuance, indifference and the cloudy borders of free thought and thinking. 65. Éric Marty, who supervised the French publication of Barthes’ late lecture and seminar courses at the Collège de France for the ‘Traces Écrites’ series, reproduces the wide margins in Barthes’ written drafts for the course. The English translations of these texts published by Columbia University Press follow his lead in this regard. There are also precedents in some of Barthes’ other publications, for example the fairly wide margins with truncated references in A Lover’s Discourse. Needless to say, they invite the reader, including Barthes, to remark, annotate and inflect them 246

although they are always already what Barthes calls an ‘excessive marginality’. See, The Neutral, 35. 66. Thomas Clerc, ‘Preface’, The Neutral, xxii. 67. Barthes, The Neutral, 173. These two diagrams of the open and closed triptych form a contrast with another diagram that was also drawn on the blackboard later in the course – a fact that we are informed of in a footnote – but that is reproduced in the body of the text, and not in the margin. See, The Neutral, fn 33 p. 249. 68. Barthes, The Neutral, 35. 69. Roland Barthes, ‘The Wisdom of Art’, The Responsibility of Forms, 149–150. 70. Roland Barthes, ‘Einstein’s Brain’, in Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 69. Also see Peter Fenves’ intriguing article, ‘“Einstein’s Brain” in the Three Parts’, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, 62, (2016): 174–188. 71. Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, 69. 72. Aeration is a crucial modality of Barthes’ aesthetic that is inseparable from his ethics and politics. It is inflected through discussions of the Haiku form, Mallarmé’s typographic mise-en-page, the quality of Cy Twombly’s paintings and, implicitly, the open, joyful and light ‘bathos’ of Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait in Camera Lucida. 73. The Haiku is a form which he addresses in depth in The Empire of Signs and in The Preparation of the Novel. Perhaps it is worth noting that the Haiku, like the triptych, is a tercet consisting of three verses of 5-7-5 syllables. At one point in The Preparation of the Novel, Barthes notes that the haiku is a ‘coloration of the neutral’ (66). 74. In The Preparation of the Novel, Barthes removes the punctuation from the English and French translations of the Haikus he uses in the text. See, The Preparation of the Novel, fn 23 pp. 414–415. 75. Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, 45. 247

76. Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, 45. 77. Barthes, The Neutral, 51. I am struck by how this passage written in The Neutral resonates with a sentence from Alain Badiou’s Pocket Pantheon, which refers to a quote from Lyotard: ‘Thoughts are Clouds. The periphery of thoughts . . . is immeasurable.’ See Badiou, Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy, trans. David Macy (London: Verso, 2016), 14. Badiou is referring to Lyotard’s Peregrinations, 5: ‘Thoughts are not the fruits of the earth. They are not registered by areas, except out of human commodity. Thoughts are clouds. The periphery of thoughts is immeasurable.’ Two other important texts that address the structural dimensions of clouds, among many other worthy insights, are Hubert Damisch’s A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), and Aris Fioretos’ The Gray Book (Stanford, CA: Stan­ ford University Press, 1998), in which the final section/chapter is devoted to clouds (105–155). 78. The ‘dérive’ (drift) is repeatedly cited and referred to in The Neutral as one of the ways of outplaying the arrogance of the paradigm. Barthes is usually referring to Lyotard’s use of this term, but no doubt also invoking Lacan’s suggestion that this word be used to translate and characterise the Freudian ‘drive’. See Barthes, The Neutral, 39, 183–184 and 202–203. These drifting clouds also bring out a ‘pathos of distance’ and ‘tact’ (délicatesse) which is so important to Barthes, and which suggests that the grey periphery of thoughts can’t be simply grasped by a subject, although their drift has everything to do with a notion of the subject as a bearer of the unconscious.

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8. Grey is (not) Grey: Considerations on an Ethics of Attentiveness Hana Gründler

The Alchemy of Colour In Chroma. A Book of Color British filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman medi­ tates on the colour grey.1 The title of the chapter ‘Grey Matter’ clearly points to one of the most common connotations of the colour grey: that is, its relation to thought and abstraction. However, Jarman departs from this classical 249

reading and poetically evokes the immense phenomenological richness – one could almost say colourfulness – of grey. He sensitises the reader and lets them become aware of the intrinsic complexity of grey that according to Jarman can be luminous, shimmering, reflecting, transparent and opaque. It is significant that in his concise praise of grey, Jarman deliberately inverts St Augustine’s Neoplatonic, metaphysical notion that light is the ‘Queen of Colours’ and even misquotes the Church father: ‘Shadow, writes Augustine, is the Queen of Colour. Colours sing in the grey.’2 Grey, it seems, creates the resonant habitat for colours, and for Jarman its apparent absence of light – the Augustinian ‘absit’ that saddens the mind – does not necessarily possess only negative implications. During the course of the chapter Jarman beautifully elaborates on the remarkable presence of grey, and the numerous quotes and personal reflections show not only how many different emotions are ‘embodied’ in this colour, but how strongly grey is connected to memory, (in-) visibility and emptiness. ‘Despise not the ash, for it’s the diadem of my heart, and the ash of things that endure. (Morienus, Rosarium).’3 Chroma was written during the same period in which Jarman was working on his last, completely monochrome film Blue. Blue is Jarman’s intense artistic confrontation with his diminishing eyesight due to AIDS – his vision was often altered by blue light – and consequentially his gradual entry into concrete, symbolic and ontological-existential darkness.4 The film thus represents a deep, philosophical cogitation on the subtle and sometimes unperceivable line between being and not-being, life and death – an aspect that is also touched upon in one of the last passages of the Grey-chapter in Chroma, when Jarman writes: ‘And we end in deadly grey.’5 It was by the end of 1992 that Jarman returned to Blue as he had originally conceived it in the late 1980s.6 By combining a monochrome screen of Kleinian blue with a richly layered soundtrack and a voiceover with his own poetic and diaristic texts, 250

he invites the beholder to journey into the materiality of both colour and sound, while also making them perceive ‘the admirable austerity of the void’.7 Significantly, in a late proposal for the film, Jarman underlined the connection between monochromy and the experience of limitlessness with an almost idealistic impetus: ‘The monochrome is an alchemy, effective liberation from personality. It articulates silence. It is a fragment of an immense work without limit. The blue of the landscape of liberty.’8 What is important in the context of this paper is that Jarman explicitly addresses this alchemistic dimension of the monochrome in his reflection on the colour grey. He writes: Grey is tenacious, it allowed the high-key colour to rush over it into the future but retained a presence; in the paintings of Giacometti, who pared away the figure until it looked like the stroke of a pen; [. . .] and Anselm Kiefer, who worked in the grey lead of alchemy. They were the inheritors of Renaissance grisaille, figurative paintings executed entirely in monochrome by the master of grey, Mantegna.9 However, as this and the above-mentioned quote from Blue show, for Jarman (monochrome) alchemy is by no means only a process of material trans­ formation, but rather is connected to an ethical transformation of the self, which requires specific forms of both spiritual and physical exercises. In this light, Jarman’s insistence on the concept of emptiness and void is no coincidence: significantly, during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, minimally decorated monastic spaces adorned exclusively with monochrome works 251

marked a shift from the sensuous amenities of a stimulating outside, and were meant to sharpen the beholders attentiveness and to inspire her or him to contemplation.10 These complex and sometimes contradictory links between sensually subdued monochromes that require specific forms of aesthetic attentiveness and might, consequently, lead to the possibility of an ethical transformation of the self are the leitmotif of the present discussion, and shall be investigated in a transhistorical and interdisciplinary perspective. In the case of Jarman it is therefore only fitting that following the chapter on grey, and before the chapter on green, he dedicates some of the most innovative pages of Chroma to the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino, who is most famous for his medical-philosophical treatise De vita libri tres (Three Books on Life) that was first published in 1489.11 What is particularly striking is that when talking about grey and, subsequently green, Jarman does not only reflect on the different degrees of darkness connected to the melancholic spirit – evoking the grey owl that flies only at night – but also refers to its therapeutic effects.12 Indeed, Jarman insists that Ficino was a therapist, one who knew how to mitigate the darkness of depression through the healing and calming power of the monochrome green, one who was well aware that certain forms of aesthetic perception might serve to sensitise, and even transform, the spectator ethically. ‘Ficino, the first “therapist”: I summon all of you to nourishing Venus – and while strolling to all this greenery, we might ask why the colour green is a sight that helps us more than any other, and why it delights us. Green is the middle step in colouring and the most temperate . . . (The Book of Life) These are the rules for prolonging life.’13 Despite or maybe exactly because of its reduction, the monochrome possesses a specific, one could say existential, presence and intensity that invites the beholder to reflect on life in a more holistic and profound way. As we will see shortly, this ethico-­aesthetic connotation of the monochrome in general and 252

grey in particular was already intensely discussed in the early Middle Ages and the early modern period, and might be defined as one (though obviously not the only) characteristic feature that persists into our contemporary period. Night Owls and Green Gardens First, let us take a short look at the De vita libri tres. Here Ficino analyses the ancient Hippocratic-Pseudo-Aristotelian idea of the melancholic individual who neglects the activities of the body because of their far too agile mental life; a mental life that can increase to an almost unbearable and unproductive hyperactivity.14 In his dietetic, the Neoplatonic philosopher warns of the danger of this melancholic disposition. What is of concern for us is that in De vita Ficino uses a deeply figurative and visual language, in which colours play not only an important literary-aesthetic role but also an epistemological and ethical one. Indeed, Ficino deliberately refers to the sombre, turbid dark of night that is of great menace to the erudite, and instead praises the calming effect of green monochromes, while also insisting on the absolute transparency and sharpness of light. Here the sadness of inner darkness (interiores tenebrae) is the dialectical counterpart to the bright light of truth.15 The search for and ascent to truth is thus ‘displayed’ in a both real and imaginative aesthetic landscape ‘painted’ in different tonalities – dark grey, green, white – that affect the reader. In De vita Ficino concisely describes how a wrong form of life accentuates the negative aspects of melancholy – that is, of the black bile – and hence destroys the capacity for contemplation of the melancholic thinker.16 Following an ancient Christian topos, Ficino notes that contemplation requires a movement from the periphery – the outer world – to the centre – the inner world. And this movement always involves a reduction and contraction 253

endangering the delicate physical balance of the philosopher, because it destabilises the krasis – that is, the ideal balance of the four humours – creating a state of ‘half death’ (semianimum), thus predisposing the individual to a negative form of mania.17 According to Ficino, this condition ‘harms the wisdom and the judgment, because when that ideal balance of the four humors is kindled and burns, it characteristically makes people excited and frenzied, which melancholy the Greeks call mania and we madness’.18 Ficino thus invites the contemporary literati to take precautions, in order to prevent an excess of black bile and to fight against the darkening of the mind. Among other things, the philosopher should absolutely avoid nocturnal work, since night is a dangerous moment, in which the mind is rendered anxious because this is when rational capacities are disturbed, and when overexcited phantasy can provoke erroneous judgements. ‘Who therefore, as the night owl, makes night into day against nature, unintentionally imitates the owl also from this point of view: exactly as the owl’s eyes become turbid and unclear with daylight, his mental sharpness darkens in front of the light of truth.’19 These cursory reflections show that even though Ficino ennobles melancholy and associates it with ingeniousness and furor, he clearly warns of its destabilising dangers. In the end, as Ficino writes in the twenty-sixth chapter of the first book, only the disciplining cura sui (care of the self), which involves both the body and the mind, can save the philosopher from the dangers of melancholy and sustain them in their never-ending search for truth.20 Significantly, this care for and work on the self is inextricably linked to the philosophical concept and practice of the advertere animum: that is, an attentive inclination of the soul, an exercise in which perturbations are removed through a careful act of looking at things and the self, rendering the latter alert and stable.21 What is important when thinking about the possibility of an ethics of attentiveness and its relation to monochromy is that for Ficino 254

the aesthetic contemplation of harmonious and calming monochromes is a significant element in this ethical work on the self. The insistence on the calming and perhaps even healing potential of the aesthetic is also a main feature of the work of Leon Battista Alberti, with which Ficino was well acquainted.22 For instance, Alberti discusses this topic in his Della tranquillità dell’animo, a dialogue between the stoic Agnolo Pandolfini and the antistoic Niccola de’ Medici, that begins in the well-tempered, harmonious interior of Florence’s Duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore, and after a beautiful walk through the city landscape – and imaginatively up to the green hills of San Miniato al Monte – returns to the Piazza del Duomo.23 What is important for our purposes is that for Alberti the aesthetic perception of art and architecture serves to sensitise the spectator ethically. For a long time, Alberti’s emphasis on aisthesis has been interpreted as a strong anti-stoic gesture, because instead of aspiring to complete apatheia – that is, the stoic detachment from outer influences, the inner autarchy of the person – he pleads for a harmonic balance, in which the peace of mind is achieved through a sensuous and aesthetic relationship to the outer world.24 However, and perfectly consistent with his preference of rational ethos over emotional pathos, Alberti insists on the need to control excessive sensuous experiences and thematises the importance of vacuity.25 For him the aesthetic contemplation of harmonious, well-tempered and robust architecture as well as of well-balanced historiae that do not overexcite the spectator’s mind either from an iconographical point of view or in terms of colour is a fundamental element in this ethical work on the self. The fact that Alberti is also one of the few early modern art theorists who explicitly addresses and acknowledges the significance of the grey colour of ashes might also be interpreted within this context of a reduction of overwhelming – and thus incontrollable – sensuous stimuli, and insistence on the importance of well-tempered and 255

harmonious compositions.26 Indeed, for Alberti – and this is important – grey is the colour of the earth that encompasses all other colours, and thus it manifests an almost infinite variety of nuances, without sacrificing coherence.27 Although there is no conclusive evidence that Ficino was familiar with Alberti’s Della tranquillità dell’animo, in which the humanist insists that through continuous aesthetic and ethical work on oneself the human being can reach a well-tempered and peaceful state, it is clear that in his De vita Ficino emphasises the idea that excessive sensuality and phantasy have a destabilising effect and trouble rational capacities.28 In contrast, according to Ficino, the green monochrome has a deeply calming effect on the soul. And the uncoloured yet shining abstraction of thought to which a philosopher aspires must be balanced by the calming green, whether it be of the landscape or of decorated walls in Florentine palaces.29 Unlike most scholars, Jarman has perfectly understood these aspects of Ficino’s thinking, and so he ends his little chapter on Ficino with a serene and hopeful image, in which the dark, turbid soul of the melancholic is enlightened: ‘Ficino wrote his Book of Life one sunny summer in a meadow, al fresco, not shut in a cell. He was melancholic, but his conversation was full of good-humour and laughter.’30 The Ethical Beauty of the Colourless It is very likely that Ficino’s theoretical reflections about the ambivalent power of colour were based not only on theological and philosophical treatises, but also on concrete observations of monochrome paintings in terra verde or terra di Siena that were present in many monasteries in Tuscany.31 As previous scholarship has convincingly argued especially with regard to Cistercian art and architecture, monastic spaces adorned exclusively with monochrome works must be interpreted within the broader context of ‘image 256

theology’ and ethico-aesthetic practices.32 From the perspective of medieval colour symbolism, black, white and grey – but also green and terra di Siena – were associated with the virtues of order, purity, simplicity and spirituality.33 Although very little early Cistercian decoration has survived, twelfth-century fragments suggest that it was common to ornament religious buildings only in shades of black and white. Importantly, unlike the stained-glass windows in many Romanesque and Gothic churches, early Cistercian windows were composed exclusively of pieces of greyish-white grisaille-glass assembled in complex ornamental geometric or vegetal patterns (Figure 8.1).34 This so-called Cistercian stained glass is considered the oldest surviving form of grisaille in Western art.35 It represents the aesthetic, symbolic and even ethical counterpart to the richly coloured ‘marvellous windows’ of ‘sapphire glass’ so highly praised by Abbot Suger in his De administratione.36 What is particularly striking when reading De administratione is Suger’s conscious poetic evocation of polychromy and pleochroism that goes hand in hand with the deeply visual and bodily sensuality of the text. Indeed, he glorifies the beauty of manycoloured gems, and stresses that through material beauty and colour, and in a kind of raptus, he will reach the immaterial: ‘Thus, when – out of my delight of the beauty of the house of God – the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect that which is material to the immaterial [. . .] .’ 37 It is well known that the colour aesthetics and (Neoplatonic) light meta­ physics of the Cistercians and Abbot Suger could hardly be more antithetical. Indeed, Suger’s De administratione is an indirect response to Bernard of Clairvaux’s critique of Cluniac superfluitas.38 It is also a classical topos in scholarship to strongly insist on the Cistercian hostility towards the senses that – so the reasoning goes – manifested itself in the strict prohibition of 257

colours and luxurious materials, and, consequently, implied an aversion to art as such.39 According to these readings, the complete subduing of the senses is a necessary step in order to let the beholder focus the mind in meditation. Cistercian art and architecture would thus represent the crystalline material­ isation of this idea (and ideal). There is certainly some truth in this interpretation. However, since it operates within a strictly binary model of colour versus non-colour, senses versus intelligibility, external vision versus inner contemplation, it does not take into account the possibility of a complexity within simplicity, of a ‘sensuousness’ of the spiritual that manifests itself in fine gradations, and not in extreme polarities. In the context of this paper, which investigates the longue durée of an aesthetics and ethics of attentiveness, it might be fruitful to analyse more carefully whether the attainment of simplicity is actually the result of a more complex and subtle aesthetic, epistemological and ethical process. Such a process leads to a highly differentiated and refined sensitis­ ation of perception and thought, that is an intrinsic part of a holistic work on and transformation of the self. 40 Cistercians seem to have been well aware that there is a difference between overwhelming the senses and refining the senses, between gazing at the material and visible, and seeing what might seem invisible, at the edge of immateriality and, in this regard, the trans­ lucent aesthetics of grey should not be underestimated. Last but not least, the Cistercians clearly insisted on the necessity to distinguish between different groups of beholders, with different levels of spiritual consciousness. Against this background, Bernard’s critique of art must not necessarily be interpreted as a banal invocation or prescription of austere art. 41 This, in turn raises Figure 8.1  Grisaille stained-glass window, 12th century. Aubazine Abbey, France. Copyright: Hervé Champollion/akg-images 259

questions: is Bernard really condemning the use of images tout court? Or is he not rather insisting on the necessity and also legitimacy of images, while instead attacking the daily practice of misusing images in specific ecclesiastic contexts?42 And what about the aesthetic quality both of his own writing as well as of Cistercian artistic decorations and architectural settings? Is it satisfactory to emphasise solely the austere, ascetic and colourless character of Cistercian art? In order to answer these questions, it is first necessary to take a closer look at some Cistercians’ textual sources. In the 1120s Bernard of Clairvaux wrote the most brilliant, severe and certainly also controversial passages on the necessity to avoid the superfluous and to critically observe and condemn inappropriate uses of artistic works in churches and monasteries.43 Famously, he based his reflections on two very early written and mandatory Cistercian statutes from around 1119 (statutes 10 and 20). 44 In the spirit of the Regula Benedicti these statutes already addressed the necessity of strictly reducing the use of multiple colours and luxurious materials – what Conrad Rudolph concisely calls the ‘ideal of restrictive art legislation’.45 Also in the important statute 80 it is determined that all colour needs to be eliminated from the monastic space altogether, and also that ‘windows are to be made white, and without crosses and pictures’. 46 The minimal thus explicitly becomes the dominating principle of aesthetic and artistic practice in Cistercian churches and monasteries. Undeniably, the Cistercian ethico-aesthetic ascetism must be understood as part of a larger set of ascetic practices and spiritual exercises – a cura sui that included dietary restrictions as well as manual labour and intense meditations over theological texts – while also being a political instrument of power.47 This insistence on paupertas (poverty) and simplicitas (simplicity), as well as the will to overcome superbia (pride) and superfluitas (superfluity) in the 260

monastic space, also lies at the heart of Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia ad Guillelmum Abbatem that was most likely written between 1121 and 1126, and which can be defined as the summa of this ethico-aesthetic ascetism.48 As the historian Georges Duby convincingly argued, even though Bernhard had never been a patron in the strict sense, the persuasive power of his words was so enormous that the artistic and architectural expression within the Cistercian context was strongly shaped and guided by his ideas, and, as Duby stresses, ‘this art is inextricably linked with ethics’. 49 As is well known, in the chapter De picturis et sculpturis, auro et argento in monasteriis of his Apologia, Bernard harshly attacks the sumptuous and overwhelming architectural setting and interior decoration of the Cluniac order, and also criticises Abbot Suger.50 On one hand, according to Bernard, gold and multicoloured gems – in short, what he believes to be artistic superfluousness – seduce the faithful. However, if we look at the rhetoric strategy he deploys, it is clear that in the case of illiterate laypersons it might actually be necessary, and thus also righteous, to resort to images in order to invigorate their devotion. What is truly deplorable is the Churches’ excessive use of gold and other luxurious materials in order to stimulate first the laypersons’ eyes and then their wallet: ‘Eyes are fixed on relics covered with gold and purses are opened.’51 That is, rather than criticising art as such, Bernard is accusing the existing practice of inciting donations. He shows how and why in the case of the simple man, the admiratio provoked by luxurious materials – the heartless visual admiration of colours and outer form, the belief that a saint is more holy the more coloured she is – leads to idolatry rather than devotion, compunction or meditation.52 Significantly – and with the classical readings of Bernard’s Apologia in mind somewhat surprisingly – in the Apolo­ gia we find explicit mention of how in this process of negative excitement of eyesight and of curiosity not only are the images of saints abused, but also 261

the material itself. ‘Why does one not at any rate spare the beautiful colours’, Bernard asks.53 In the pompous and empty display of luxury, the holiness intrinsic to every creation of God – and therefore also of colours – is disdained. But of course, the admiration and curiosity of the layperson is only one side of Bernard’s argument: if we return and delve deeper in his Apologia, then superfluitas – for instance the monstrous creatures of capitals – incites the curiositas, the vice of curiosity, in the monks as well. This corruptive ebriety of the senses compromises even their capacity for contemplation and meditation.54 Bernard writes: ‘In short, everywhere so plentiful and astonishing a variety of contradictory forms is seen that one would rather read in the marble than in books, and spend the whole day wondering at every single one of them than in meditating on the Law of God.’55 Elaborating on the above-­ mentioned statutes 10 and 20 in the Apologia, Bernhard thus not only thematises the spiritual distraction certain forms of art elicit, but also praises the inner necessity of reduction that according to him – and this is crucial – is often misinterpreted as austerity. ‘For moderation is thought to be miserliness, sobriety is believed to be austerity, silence is considered gloom.’56 Bernard’s distinction between sobriety and austerity, silence and gloom – or tristitia, a sinful state that came into being only through the fall of men – is a subtle reference to the necessity of balance, order and harmony. From an aesthetic, epistemological and ethical point of view every form of excess – whether it be enormous luxury or absolute miserliness – is problematic. This voluntary accentuation of moderation and order seems to question the traditional argument of complete hostility towards the senses that is so strongly associated with Bernard’s thinking. And there is even more evidence for such a critical questioning: the Apologia’s sophisticated rhetoric structure, its linguistically and aesthetically highly refined description of the artistic excess displayed in Cluniac monasteries, as well as its precise yet evocative 262

use of concepts belonging to the realm of the visual highlight the complexity of Bernard’s reasoning. The subtle play with the ‘material’ of language, the insistence on small details and elaborated metaphors can be found in all of Bernard’s writings.57 His ability for nuanced perception is beautifully epitomised in his phenomenologically acute reflections on the non-colour black: ‘Not everything black is necessarily deformed. Black, for instance, does not displease us in the pupil of the eye; small black gems are pretty in ornaments, and black hair adds beauty and grace to very pale faces.’58 Bernard’s writings thus require a rethinking of the concept of simplicity itself, and so does Cistercian art. This point has already been partially discussed with regard to Cistercian architecture. Indeed, despite their linear ground plans, Cistercian buildings were often complex in detail, and their high-quality materials were processed with the greatest precision.59 In addition, the intricate and elaborated ornaments of the ‘monochrome’ grisaille-windows invite us to take seriously the semantic and phenomenological difference between austerity and sobriety. The nuanced simplicity of Cistercian stained glass becomes particularly evident when observing the many different shades of clear grey, white and sometimes even slight greenish tones within them. The tonalities of the glass, that softly absorbs, modifies and at the same time accentuates the intrinsic qualities of natural light, constantly change over the course of the day. Thus, the sensual reduction that strikes the beholder at first transforms during the temporal act of attentive observation and lived multisensorial experience of the monastic space, and slowly reveals its inner complexity.60 Instead of a complete subduing of the senses, the grisaille-windows require a high degree of ‘aisthetic’ sensitivity, a capacity to perceive the subtle, almost invisible differences in the nuances of grey, and to identify symmetry and order in the intricate ornamental patterns. Importantly, clear white or grey glass was highly appreciated not only 263

because it was so extremely difficult to produce – Isidore of Seville calls it the most exquisite kind61 – but because of its deep spiritual significance. The transparent, crystalline light was regarded as an evocation of divine Light over the course of the entire Middle Ages.62 Now, the critical reader might ask: do such nuances and ornaments not also stimulate a form of curiosity and sensuous pleasure so explicitly criticised by Bernard in the Apologia?63 And haven’t many scholars convincingly argued against the idea of art as a spiritual aid?64 There is no unequivocal answer to these questions. As we have seen, in his Apologia Bernard certainly denounces luxurious materials, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic creatures, and ‘contradictory forms’ that incite the monk to stare at them, because they represent a deviation from the natural order of things.65 Bernard also insists on the tight connection between negative curiosity, phantasy and the senses. Excessive interest in the sensuous plurality of the world, so the abbot claims, is dangerous for human rationality.66 However, at no point do we ever find an explicit critique of a moderate, harmonious and ordered aesthetic décor that might eventually educate the outer eye of the monk, thus refining his raw senses, in order to ultimately refine his inner eye that might better lead to a vision of the divine in an act of revelation. Not only the Apologia but also many of Bernard’s other writings show that the edification of the soul, and the contemplative movement from the visible to the invisible, is not an abrupt passage from one realm to the other. It is rather a process of purification through reduction and refinement. Only the right ascetic practice will cure the individual from sensuous and spiritual obtuseness and will lead to the acuteness of the mind that is necessary for the ascent towards God. What is particularly important at this point is to analyse the place of aisthesis and creation in this ethical and mystical process. As Duby and other scholars have convincingly argued, the entire Cistercian project can be defined as an 264

attempt of domestication and clarification: from the rawness of the outer world to the lightness of the transcendent world, from the overexcited senses of the animal to the harmonious and ordered ratio of human beings, from unclear and blurred vision to clarity.67 This edificatory act is also an act of creation of the self. In the process of withdrawal from the world, so typical for the monastic life, the monk will tame the negative side of the sensuous, and will move from the external to the internal, from the senses to ratio and contemplatio. Still, in his De consideratione, Bernard was well aware that this spiritual ascent from the material to the immaterial was difficult and thorny. He understood that a moderate and transitory use of the senses was helpful for the spiritual novice.68 According to Bernard, simple men are not able to differentiate between colour and form, or to understand that form always refers to structure that has its own beauty.69 This argument has often been interpreted as a harsh condemnation of colour and the sensuous in general.70 But on a closer look, Bernard seems to emphasise that there are different levels of perceptive capacity and consciousness: the more advanced the individual is in his ascent towards the divine the more acute and refined his senses will be, and the more he will leave behind the animal, seducible part of his soul. Bernard writes: ‘And as is said in the psalm, “Begin the song, and play the drum”, which is to say, begin spiritual things, but first give attention to physical things. Indeed, the best man is he who performs discreetly and harmoniously both the one and the other.’71 The spiritually advanced instead should leave behind the raw and material world with its images of animals and human action, and gradually come to eliminate mental images. It is within this ethico-aesthetic and theological context that the un-excessive, harmonious and all-embracing grey that creates an atmosphere of acuteness and silence needs to be analysed. 265

In the Apologia Bernard emphasises that ‘the empty heart forces on the body the mark of its own emptiness, and exterior excess is an indication of interior emptiness’.72 Accordingly, for Bernard excessive colours, luxurious materials or deviated amorphic images, and thus ‘illogical’ figures, are always expressions of an empty heart and excessively curious mind. If we follow Bernard’s dialectical thinking, then we can infer that grey is the material manifestation of spiritual richness because of its sobriety and intellectual clarity. In this light, the complex, yet harmoniously structured ornamentations of the Cistercian grisaille-windows are not in contradiction with Bernard’s pursuit of simplicity. Rather, they are a highly elaborated and yet simple and clear manifestation of a rational order that requires a form of ‘ethical seeing’.73 Thus, the monochrome environment is by no means simply a sensually subdued ambiance for the contemplation of truth. The well-measured, ordered and reduced aesthetics is rather the result of a long process of refinement and clarification of the senses. It is a visualisation of inner harmony and of the logical structure of divine creation that in its factitiousness also possesses an apotropaic function. Significantly, in one of his Sermones, Bernard writes that in the mystic raptus of the soul, visual representations of ‘inferior things’ from the material world, function like an obscuring veil before the blinding light of ecstasy. For Bernard the material shadowy images (and therefore maybe also those cast by monochrome windows) render the shining light of truth ‘tolerable’ and comprehensible to the soul, and thus possess an important role in the edification of the soul.74

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‘Simplex sigillum veri’ Many centuries later – and certainly under very different life-world conditions – the Austrian Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein also reflected on the importance of the care of and work on the self that according to him is inextricably linked to attentive observation (or even contemplation) and intellectual clarification. For Wittgenstein, philosophy should not be understood so much as a science or a theory but rather as a therapy, a clarifying process that changes our way of seeing, and therefore our way of living. In a note from 1947 he refers to the topos of Wisdom’s greyness and in an almost Nietzschean move insists on the colourfulness of life: ‘Wisdom is cold and to that extent stupid. (Faith on the other hand is a passion.) It might also be said: Wisdom merely conceals life from you. (Wisdom is like cold grey ash, covering up the glowing embers.)’75 According to the late Wittgenstein it is philosophy’s task to overcome the limits of idealised cold abstraction, and look more attentively at the infinite variety of forms of life. Jacques Bouveresse and Judith Genova argue that seeing has to be considered as the paradigm of Wittgenstein’s thinking, in both his early and his late philosophy.76 Wittgenstein remained faithful to the idea that the process of philosophical investigation must change our way of looking at things, allowing us to take different perspectives. This, according to Bouveresse and Genova, is clear from his repeated assertion that philosophers may not be able to see adequately: ‘Disquiet in philosophy might be said to arise from looking at philosophy wrongly, seeing it wrong.’77 However, despite the importance that the concepts of vision and perspective assumed in Wittgenstein’s entire oeuvre, it is possible to observe an important shift between his earlier and later positions on the matter. In the Tractatus, influenced by Spinoza and especially Schopenhauer, he assumes that there is one, correct 267

perspective – a perspective sub specie aeternitatis – that is achieved not only through aesthetic and ethical contemplation but also through philosophical thinking.78 From the early 1930s on, and after the construction of the house for his sister Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, he abandons the idea of a correct perspective in favour of polyperspectivity. Unlike in the period of the Tractatus and his Diaries, Wittgenstein’s aesthetic approach no longer consists in the decontextualisation and contemplation of objects in isolation but rather in looking at objects from many different points of view, in ‘moving’ around them and thus perceiving them in a multisensorial way: ‘We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!’79 From now on it is the attentive act of seeing that keeps the philosopher from getting lost in theoretical and abstract constructions, from generalising differences under one concept – instead of seeing their ‘family resemblances’ – and from forgetting an interesting detail that may throw a whole theory into question.80 Seeing is thus an active practice that requires lifelong exercise similar to philosophy. A quote from 1931 beautifully elucidates this idea: ‘Working in philosophy – like work in architecture in many respects – is really more a working on oneself. On one’s interpretation. On one’s way of seeing things.’81 The critical reader might now ask if the late Wittgenstein’s understanding of seeing is not in clear opposition to what has been elucidated until now: that is, the close relation between different forms of ‘contemplative’ seeing and monochromy. A closer analysis of Wittgenstein’s reflections on the work on one’s way of seeing and the work on oneself as well as an analysis of his architectural practice that has played an important role for the transfor­ mation of his philosophical thinking could support a different reading. As we shall see, for Wittgenstein this new, almost phenomenological understanding of being in the world goes hand in hand with an acute attentiveness to the complex spatial boundaries, passages, materiality, nuanced monochromes 268

Figure 8.2  Paul Engelmann and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Palais Stonborough-Wittgenstein, 1926–1928, Vienna, Kundmanngasse. Detail, floor surface and glass doors to the patio. Copyright: Ludwig Wittgenstein Trust Cambridge

and structural details of the Wittgenstein House. We could say that the philo­ sopher’s understanding of work on the self involves less a contemplation of the transcendent than a sensitive meditation on the immanent. So, let us take a closer look at the Wittgenstein House. From 1926 to 1928, Wittgenstein worked with the architect Paul Engelmann, a student of Adolf Loos, on the design and construction of the house for his sister in Vienna (also known as Palais Stonborough).82 The house’s reduced formal language has led many to interpret it as a literal ‘translation’ of Wittgenstein’s Trac­ tatarian philosophy – as ‘hausgewordene Logik’ (logic become house).83 In recent years scholars have rightly criticised this reductionist reading of the Wittgenstein House and have demonstrated how strongly architectural practice shaped Wittgenstein’s late philosophy.84 But perhaps his striving for formal reduction and clarification ought to be read not only in relation to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus but more broadly as an ethical attitude that was a constant throughout his life.85 Ilse Somavilla convincingly argues that the desire for precision and truthfulness that is so characteristic of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work can also be observed in his work as an architect, which he pursued no less ardently.86 Unsurprisingly, Somavilla refers to the before-mentioned statement that the work on oneself is always linked to the way we see things. And perhaps we should not forget Wittgenstein’s quotation of the Spinozian ‘Simplex sigillum veri’ (simplicity is the sign of truth), that echoes the sobriety so highly praised by Bernard and practised in the monochrome, yet highly refined, décor of Cistercian monastic spaces.87 Figure 8.3  Paul Engelmann and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Palais Stonborough-Wittgenstein, 1926–1928, Vienna, Kundmanngasse. Detail, glass doors, from the library to the hall. Copyright: Ludwig Wittgenstein Trust Cambridge 271

Wittgenstein’s insistence that we reflect on how we see things goes hand in hand with a desire to create and describe almost invisible nuances and subtle boundaries and passages that can be read as bearing not only architectural and aesthetic dimensions but also ethical relevance. This sensitivity towards every single, apparently irrelevant detail and the extremely nuanced use of monochrome tones becomes particularly evident in the interiors of the Wittgenstein House that were originally simple, yet refined compositions that disclosed their harmonious and nuanced complexity only through an attentive act of vision (Figures 8.2 and 8.3). For instance, the grating of the paving tiles in each room is modulated in accordance with the room’s specific proportions. The visitor will at first hardly perceive this difference. But through the interplay of the highly differentiated doors, windows, fixtures and radiators – each detail unique, designed not only for a particular function but also for the minute specificities of each room – she will finally be sensitised to the ‘incomparability of things’ as a matter of principle. For example, the double-wing glass doors – that could be transparent, opaque, semiopaque, with a metal door, open, half-open, closed – reflect the inhabitants’ varying needs for privacy and light. These doors thus create a subtle variety of thresholds and passages, similar to the way the high vertical windows make visible and tangible the encounter of the inside with the outside, marrying the different possibilities of moving through the spaces of the building. At the same time, the corridors are also subtle monochrome compositions since the grey floor, the metal doors and the glass have an immense variety of white and grey tones. The at first seemingly identical windows and doors reveal their subtle differences only to a slow, attentive act of seeing, thereby educating our perceptive capacities. To truly see the Wittgenstein House in all its subtle shades, one must not merely look but linger and dwell at length on and at its borders. 272

Wittgenstein’s subtle phenomenology of materials manifests itself especially in the nuanced play with different qualities of light as well as the different tones and temperatures of black, grey and white. The music room, located on the right side of the main hall, originally had walls that were executed in a slight ochre stucco lustro that shimmered in the daylight. As Bernhard Leitner rightly states, the walls, pavements, doors and small details, such as the radiators, were subtly harmonised colour compositions, in which Wittgenstein paid particular attention to different degrees of transparency and lustre.88 The dark grey polished artificial stone pavement reflected the shimmering stucco lustro of the walls, while the monochrome surfaces of the greenish-grey metal curtains rhythmically divided the space. The milkyopaque or transparent glass doors and radiators that were painted in an opaque black were clearly distinct from the pavement and reacted to light in very different ways. As a result of later restorations, the walls of stucco lustro were completely covered with a simple and opaque layer of white paint, and the metal doors were covered in a simple, light absorbing grey. Of course, these changes have had a devastating effect on the appearance of the house.89 Originally, the surfaces of the Wittgenstein House thus possessed a subtly haptic and sensuous character because of their opaque, shimmering and reflecting features. This is why, despite their reduction, they appeared highly differentiated rather than identical. ‘Look at your room in the late evening, when colours can hardly be differentiated anymore’, or ‘how do I see a surface in light’ asked Wittgenstein almost twenty years after his experience as an architect in one of his last and unfinished works, The Remarks on Colour.90 Here we find several passages in which the philosopher discusses the almost invisible differences between grey and white, while also addressing how minimal changes of light might transform our way of perceiving colours, objects and spaces. 273

Wittgenstein’s interest in the philosophical problem of colour became more intense from the early 1930s on, after the construction of the house for his sister.91 In his view, colours are a stimulus to philosophy, since they ‘seem to present us with a riddle, a riddle that stimulates [anregt] us, not disturbs [aufregt] us’.92 The Remarks on Colour are, in the first place, an attempt to clarify the use of language about colour. As Wittgenstein writes at the beginning of this text, it is not his intention to find a theory of colour, but the logic of colour concepts.93 The grammar of colours is always embedded in specific shared language games and these are played out in specific forms of life and cultural contexts by humans who see. This is why it is fundamental to pay particular attention to the complexity of involved language games, thus revealing the often-idealised concepts of colours. If I say a piece of paper is pure white, and if snow were placed next to it and it then appeared grey, in its normal surroundings I would still be right in calling it white and not light grey. It could be that I use a more refined concept of white in, say, a laboratory (where, for example, I also use a more refined concept of precise determination of time).94 As has been rightly claimed, in his Remarks Wittgenstein does not only try to clarify the linguistic use of colour concepts, he also reflects on the boundaries between the logical and the empirical, concept and experience.95 And it is fascinating to see how at the end of his life, these boundaries become more and more porous. According to Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, Wittgenstein realises that we understand the riddles of colours only when we continuously cross 274

the borders between our reflections on colour concepts and our perception and deeply physical experience of colours.96 It is the very act of attentive seeing that saves us from a reductionist understanding of colours, since it sensitises us to their embeddedness in the living environment. If we read the Remarks attentively we soon come to realise that they demonstrate a remarkable aesthetic and artistic sensitivity for the smallest nuances and details; for the most subtle changes of light and darkness, white and grey, that are also so characteristic of the Wittgenstein House, in which different shades of grey abound, while all other colours are extremely rare.97 When Wittgenstein writes, in the Philosophical Investigations, that ‘in order to see more clearly [. . .] we must look at what really happens in detail, as it were from close up’, it is above all a matter of grasping and appreciating each single object in its uniqueness.98 Only an attentive and slow observation of all details enables us to become aware of subtle nuances and deviations from static rules. A real appreciation and acknowledgement of the individual case is, for him, only possible if ‘one has seen, how different the differences are’ – that is, if one has ‘looked’ to see if the objects summed up under one name do not each possess their own distinct nuances and tonalities.99 Significantly, according to Wittgenstein, it is art and aesthetics that lead us to see adequately, to perceive singularities and to take them seriously. To perceive subtle shades, and also to express them is what Wittgenstein practised in the detailing of his sister’s house. This form of aesthetic sensitivity towards the material is, for him, inseparable from an ethical one. Thus, his incessant and unrelenting struggle for absolute precision, which he also demanded of the house’s builders, was always an expression of his ethos.100 The work in architecture, as work on the self – on one’s own way of seeing – in turn produces a transformation of one’s attitude. By cultivating a more acute awareness, one not only experiences an expansion of knowledge but is 275

also ethically sensitised. In Wittgenstein’s demand to ‘look at things like this!’ there is a call to change one’s way of seeing and thinking, and thus one’s way of living. Wittgenstein returned to the question of how the individual ought to live throughout his entire existence. For him, this is the fundamental question for every individual – a question that cannot be answered theoretically but only experienced singularly.101 Following Wittgenstein, there has been an attempt within philosophy to establish what is called an ethics of attentiveness or care.102 This ethics of attentiveness is also an ethics of perception and vision, and one could talk about it in terms of an education in perceptive capacity, for which aesthetic sensitivity is paramount. In seeing differences and singular­ ities and in observing the detail, it is necessary to respect those things that seem insignificant only because they are everyday commonplaces – like the everyday grey things Jarman lists in his Grey Matter: coats and walls and hairs.103 A dullness of perception – what Bernard called obtuseness – is connected to a dearth of empathy, but also to the inability to deal with things each time anew, to truly see things anew, and to realise that grey is not always grey. Acknowledgement I want to thank Kamini Vellodi and Aron Vinegar as well as Franziska Lampe, Matteo Trabattoni and Katharine Stahlbuhk for the critical reading of my article and the many precious comments that improved the text immensely. Notes 1. Derek Jarman, Chroma. A Book of Color (New York: The Overlook Press, 1994). 2. Jarman, Chroma, 51. In a clearly Neoplatonic gesture, St. Augustine wrote: ‘For this queen of colours, the light, shedding itself in all whatsoever we behold, so oft as I 276

enjoy the daylight, gliding by mine eye in its varied forms, doth most sweetly inveigle me, wholly busy about another matter, and taking no notice of it. For it so forcibly insinuates itself, that if at any time it suddenly be withdrawn, it is with much longing looked after again; and if missing too long, it besaddeth the mind.’ Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, vol. 2: books 9–13, trans. William Watts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912), X, XXXIV, 171. 3. Jarman, Chroma, 53. 4. For Blue see Derek Jarman, Blue. Text of a Film by Derek Jarman (New York: The Overlook Press, 1994); Kate Higginson, ‘Derek Jarman’s “Ghostly Eye”. Prophetic Bliss and Sacrificial Blindness in Blue’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 41, 1 (March 2008): 77–94; Jacques Khalip, ‘“The Archaeology of Sound”: Derek Jarman’s Blue and Queer Audiovisuality in the Time of AIDS’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 21, 2 (2010): 73–108; Tim Lawrence, ‘AIDS, the Problem of Representation, and Plurality in Derek Jarman’s Blue’, Social Text, 52/3 (Autumn–Winter 1997): 241–264; Peter Schwenger, ‘Derek Jarman and the Colour of the Mind’s Eye’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 65, 2 (Spring 1996): 419–426. 5. Jarman, Chroma, 54. Jarman ends the chapter on grey as following. ‘Grey is the sad world / Into which the colours fall / Like inspiration / Sparkle and are overwhelmed / Grey is the tomb, a fortress / From which none return.’ Chroma, 56. 6. On the complex and contradictory history of the creation of Blue see Tony Peake, Derek Jarman. A Biography (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company, 1999). 7. Jarman and Sutherland quoted in Peake, Derek Jarman, 477. 8. Peake, Derek Jarman, 515. This is not the place to define more precisely whether the romantic-idealistic conception of art as a fragment of the infinite plays a deeper role in Jarman’s aesthetics. For the relation between silence, fragment and the infinite see for instance Schlegel, Novalis, and later also the Early Wittgenstein. 9. Jarman, Chroma, 52. 277

10. See the work by Katharine Stahlbuhk, Oltre il colore. Die farbreduzierte Wandmalerei zwischen Humilitas und Observanzreformen (Berlin and München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2021). 11. For the De vita see Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Tempe, AZ: The Renaissance Society of America, 1998); Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London: Nelson, 1964). See also the excellent introduction by Michaela Boenke to Marsilio Ficino, De vita libri tres/Drei Bücher über das Leben, ed. and trans. Michaela Boenke (München: Fink, 2012), 6–32. For Marsilio Ficino’s Three Books on Life see the seminal considerations of Martin Büchsel, Albrecht Dürers Stich Melencolia, I: Zeichen und Emotion – Logik einer kunsthistorischen Debatte (München: Fink, 2010), especially chapter 2: ‘Melancholie – Der Schatten der göttlichen Inspiration?’, 89–134, and there: ‘Ficino: Melancholie und Furor’, 109–122. 12. ‘As the old grey owl hoots all vanity turns to dust.’ Jarman, Chroma, 55. 13. Jarman, Chroma, 59. 14. Ficino, Three Books on Life, I, III–IV. 15. Ficino, Three Books on Life, I, IV. It is important to note that in the Middle Ages, for instance in Hildegard von Bingen’s mystical writings, grey, turbid and sallow had a strong family resemblance. Turbidus was often used for meteorological descriptions, but had also a strong affinity with unrest, while pallor could be associated with humility. See Christel Meier-Staubach, ‘Die Bedeutung der Farben im Werk Hildegards von Bingen’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien: Jahrbuch des Instituts für Frühmittelalterforschung der Universität Münster, 6 (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1972), 245–355, here 262–264. 16. See especially Ficino, Three Books on Life, I. 17. Ficino, Three Books on Life, I, IV, 113–115: ‘The natural cause seems to be that for the pursuit of the sciences, especially the difficult ones, the soul must draw in upon 278

itself from external things to internal as from the circumference to the center, and while it speculates, it must stay immovably at the very center (as I might say) of man [. . .] But of all learned people, those especially are oppressed by black bile, who, being sedulously devoted to the study of philosophy, recall their mind from the body and corporeal things and apply it to incorporeal things. The cause is, first, that the more difficult the work, the greater concentration of mind it requires; and second, that the more they apply their mind to incorporeal truth, the more they are compelled to disjoin it from the body. Hence their body is often rendered as if it were half-alive and often melancholic.’ 18. Ficino, Three Books on Life, I, V, 117. Or a similar passage from I, III, 113: ‘Phlegm dulls and suffocates the intelligence, while melancholy, if it is too abundant or vehement, vexes the mind with continual care and frequent absurdities and unsettles the judgment.’ 19. Ficino, Three Books on Life, I, VII, 127–129. 20. Ficino, Three Books on Life, I, XXVI, 160–163. 21. For the concept of the advertere animum, so the attentiveness of the soul, see for instance Augustine, On the Trinity. Books 8–15, ed. Stephen McKenna, trans. Gareth B. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), XI, II. As Bernhard Waldenfels has shown, in Augustine the attentio cannot be separated from the intentio, which in turn means that the attention that intervenes in the process of sensory perception is to be understood as an orientation of the will itself. Bernhard Waldenfels, Phänomenologie der Aufmerksamkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 18–19. 22. On the relationship between Alberti and Ficino, see for instance John S. Hendrix, ‘Alberti and Ficino’, Architecture, Art, and Historic Preservation Faculty Publications, 25. https://docs.rwu.edu/saahp_fp/25 (accessed 13 November 2020). 23. This is not the place to discuss the highly complex textual references – the most obvious being to Seneca’s famous De tranquillitate animi – as well as the many 279

philosophical reflections on the ‘perturbazioni’, that is the perturbations of the soul all human beings are exposed to in the course of their existence. For an analysis of the many antique sources of Alberti’s Dialogue see Matthias Schöndube, Leon Battista Alberti, ‘Della tranquillità dell’animo’. Eine Interpretation auf dem Hintergrund der antiken Quellen (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2011). For the Tranquillità dell’animo in general see for instance Hana Gründler, ‘Vom Gleichgewicht der Seele in widrigen Zeiten’, in Leon Battista Alberti, Über die Seelenruhe oder vom Vermeiden des Leidens in drei Büchern, ed. and with a critical commentary by Hana Gründler et al. (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2022), 7–28; and Klaus Mönig, ‘Kritische Reflexionen über die Stoa: Leon Battista Albertis’ “Profugiorum ab aerumna libri III”’, in Stoizismus in der europäischen Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Politik. Eine Kulturgeschichte von der Antike bis zur Moderne, Vol. 1, ed. by Barbara Neymeyr, Jochen Schmidt and Bernhard Zimmermann (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2008), 453–486. Luca Boschetto, ‘Tra politica e letteratura. Appunti sui “profugiorum libri” e la cultura di Firenze negli anni ’40’, Albertiana, 3, (2000): 119–140. 24. See Gründler, ‘Vom Gleichgewicht’, and Mönig, ‘Kritische Reflexionen’. 25. For the concept of vacuity see Leon Battista Alberti, ‘Profugiorum ab aerumna libri III’, in Opere volgari, Vol. 2: Rime e trattati morali, ed. by Cecil Grayson (Bari: Laterza, 1966), 105–183, here 122, 129 and particularly 139–140. 26. For a short analysis of Leon Battista Alberti and grey see Frances Guerin, The Truth is Always Grey. A History of Modernist Painting (Minneapolis: University of Min­nesota Press, 2018), 31–32. However, Guerin does not mention the complexity of Alberti’s argumentation and doesn’t seem to recognise that Alberti’s discussion of grey must be analysed within his entire theoretical and moral system that focuses on ethos and harmony. 27. See Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting. A New Translation and Critical Edition, ed. and trans. Rocco Sinisgalli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 31–32. 280

In mentioning the four elements, Alberti shows that he is well-acquainted with Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of colour that associate red, blue, green and grey respectively with the four elements fire, air, water and earth: ‘Of course, as a painter, I have, however, this opinion about colors: that through their mixing one generates an almost infinite number of other colors; but that among painters there are authentic kinds of colors conforming to the number of the four elements, from which numerous species are obtained. And in fact, so to speak, there is the color of fire that they call red; then the color of air as well, which is called sky blue or azure; the color of water is green. The earth, instead, has the color of ashes.’ 28. Ficino, Three Books on Life, I, VII, 123–125: ‘The first monster is sexual intercourse, especially if it proceeds even a little beyond one’s strength; for indeed it suddenly drains the spirits, especially the more subtle ones, it weakens the brain, and it ruins the stomach and the heart – no evil can be worse for one’s intelligence.’ 29. Ficino, Three Books on Life, II, XIV, 205–207: ‘After the oracle, she gives us this to meditate on: that the nature of green things, for so long as they stay green, is not only alive but even youthful and abounding with very salubrious humor and a lively spirit; and because of this a certain youthful spirit flows to us through the odor, sight, use, and frequent habitation of and in them. While we are walking among the green things, let us figure out why the color green more than others foments the sight and healthfully delights it [. . .] On which account the color green tempering most of all black with white, furnishes the one effect and the other, equally delighting and conserving the sight.’ 30. Jarman, Chroma, 60–61. 31. For terra verde-decorations see Stahlbuhk, Oltre il colore. 32. The concept often used with regard to Cistercian art is ‘artistic ascetism’. The problem of such a denomination is that it loses the fundamental embeddedness of artistic practices in the broader liturgical context and set of monastic ascetic practices. For Cistercian art and architecture see for instance Conrad Rudolph, 281

‘The “Principal Founders” and the Early Artistic Legislation of Cîteaux’, in Studies in Cistercian Art and Architecture, 3, Cistercian Studies Series 89 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications Inc., 1987), 1–45; Conrad Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance. Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude Toward Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Janet Burton and Julie Kerr, The Cistercians in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011). 33. For the colour symbolism of the Middle Ages see Wolfgang Schöne, Über das Licht in der Malerei (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1954). Also, John Gage, ‘Colour-Language, Colour-Symbols’, in Colour and Culture. Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993), 79–92. 34. Among the still classical texts on Cistercian Grisaille glass see Helen Jackson Zakin, French Cistercian Grisaille Glass (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1979). On the general history of Cistercian glass see Helen Jackson Zakin, ‘French Cistercian Grisaille Glass’, Gesta, 13, (1974): 17–28; Meredith Parsons Lillich, ‘Monastic Stained Glass: Patronage and Style’, in Monasticism and the Arts, ed. by Timothy Verdon (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 207–254. On the importance of light and colour in the sacred spaces of the Middle Ages see the classical text by Wolfgang Schöne, ‘Über den Beitrag von Licht und Farbe zur Raumgestaltung im Kirchenbau des Alten Abendlandes’, Evangelische Kirchbautagung, 10, (1959): 89–154. 35. On the use and misuse of the concept ‘grisaille’, and its historiographic impli­ cations see for instance the text of Michael Burger, ‘Grisaille in der Glasmalerei. Ein Mehrdeutiger Begriff’, in Die Farbe Grau. Zur Geschichte einer Künstlerischen Praxis, ed. by Magdalena Bushart and Gregor Wedekind (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 1–14. 36. Abbot Suger, ‘De administratione’, in Abbot Suger. On the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its Art Treasures, ed., trans. and annot. by Erwin Panofsky (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946), XXIX, 50–53. Also, on the aesthetics of Saint Denis and Abbot Suger see this still seminal work of Erwin Panofsky. 282

37. Suger, De administratione, XXXIII. Trans. Panofsky, Abbot Suger, 62–65. 38. On the aesthetic difference within the Cistercian and Cluniac order see for instance Romana Cortese Esposito, ‘Analogie e contrasti fra Cîteaux e Cluny’, Cîteaux, 19, (1968): 5–39. On the controversy between Suger’s De administratione and Bernard’s Apologia see for instance Martin Büchsel, ‘Materialpracht und die Kunst für Litterati. Suger gegen Bernhard von Claivaux’, in Intellektualisierung und Mysti­ fizierung mittelalterlicher Kunst. ‘Kultbild’: Revision eines Begriffs, ed. by Martin Büchsel and Rebecca Müller (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 2010), 155–182. I want to thank Martin Büchsel for the critical reading of my text and his valuable insights into Bernard of Clairvaux’s poetics and theological thinking. 39. A classical, and also rather reductionistic, interpretation of the Order’s strict pro­ hibition of colour and luxurious materials is indeed that the intention ‘was to create a sacred realm that subdued the senses and focused the mind as an aid to contemplation’. Lelia Packer and Jennifer Sliwka, Monochrome. Painting in Black and White (London: National Gallery Company, 2017), 28. 40. On this specific point see Georges Duby, Saint Bernard, l’art cistercien (Paris: Flammarion, 1979). Here Georges Duby, Der heilige Bernhard und die Kunst der Zisterzienser, trans. Maria Heurtaux (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 101. Of course, this does not imply to negate the Cistercians’ sharp criticism of (aesthetic) excessiveness that is so evident in the sources. 41. An excellent critique of art historical readings of the Apologia can be found in Tobias Frese, Die Bildkritik des Bernhard von Clairvaux. Die Apologia im monastischen Diskurs (Bamberg: Arthis, 2006). 42. For this see the especially fine work by Büchsel, ‘Materialpracht und die Kunst für Litterati’ and Frese, Die Bildkritik des Bernhard von Clairvaux. 43. The translation of superfluitates with ‘excess’ is not fully convincing. Etymologically speaking excess implies ‘to go beyond’, also in a metaphysical sense. Bernard instead talks about things that are not necessary, that is superfluous. 283

44. On the very complex history of the different statutes see the still seminal work of Ferenc Polykárp Zakar, Die Anfänge des Zisterzienserordens. Kurze Bemerkungen zu den Studien der letzten Zehn Jahre (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1964). For an excellent overview of the various scholarly positions see the Appendix in Rudolph, ‘The “Principal Founders”’, 32. 45. Rudolph, ‘The “Principal Founders”’, 18. 46. Statute 80, quoted after Rudolph, ‘The “Principal Founders”’, 21. Statute 80 is generally accepted to date from around 1134. 47. Bernard explicitly uses the concept of the cura sui in the Apologia. For the embeddedness of Cistercian art in a larger set of ascetic practices see Burton and Kerr, The Cistercians in the Middle Ages. 48. For an interpretation of the Apologia see for instance Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance. 49. Duby, Der heilige Bernhard, 9. 50. Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Apologia ad Guillelmum Abbatem’, Opere di San Bernardo, Vol. 1: Trattati, ed. by Ferruccio Gastaldelli (Milano: Città Nuova Editrice, 1984), 121–217, here XII, 28. ‘But these are small things; I am coming to things of greater importance, but which seem smaller, because they are more common. I will overlook the immense heights of the places of prayer, their immoderate lengths, their superfluous widths, the costly refinements, and painstaking representations which deflect the attention while they are in them of those who pray and thus hinder their devotion. To me they somehow represent the ancient rite of the Jews. But so be it, let these things be made for the honor of God.’ Trans. Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, 279. 51. Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, 281. 52. It is no surprise that Bernard uses both the verb mirare as well as the term admiratio, here both to be understood as a quite negative form of purely sensuous visual experience that is by no means connected to a form of inner, more spiritual seeing. 284

‘[. . .], and that saint is believed to be the more holy the more highly colored the image is’; Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, 281. 53. Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, 283. 54. ‘Cum autem curiositas et superfluitas directe obvient paupertati’, citation after Michael Bihl, ‘Statuta generalia ordinis edita in capitulis generalisbus celebratis Narbonae an. 1260, Assisii an. 1270 atque Parisiis an. 1292’, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 2, (1941): 13–94, here 48. 55. Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, 283. 56. The Latin sobrietas also possesses the ethical component of prudence. Bernard, ‘Apologia’, VIII, 16. Trans. Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, 261. 57. For this see also Duby, Der heilige Bernhard, 87. 58. Translation mine. ‘Non omne denique quod nigrum est, continuo et deforme est. Nigredo, verbi causa, in pupilla non dedecet; et nigri quidam lapilli in ornamentis placent, et nigri capilli candidis vultibus etiam decorem augent et gratiam.’ Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Sermones in Cantica canticorum’ (SC), in Opere di San Bernardo, Vol. 5.1 and 5.2, ed. by Ferruccio Gastaldelli (Milan: Città Nuova Editrice, 2006 and 2008), XXV, II.3, 350. 59. Terryl Kinder, Cistercian Europe: Architecture of Contemplation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerd­ mans Publishing Company, 2002), and Matthias Untermann, Forma Ordinis. Die mittel­ alterliche Baukunst der Zisterzienser (Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2001). 60. I do not agree with Rudolph that Bernard was against a holistic experience of the monastic space, since holistic does not necessarily mean excessive. Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, 65. 61. Isidore of Seville, ‘Etymologiae’, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed., trans. and annot. Stephen A. Barney et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), XVI, XVI.4, 328. 62. For the significance of the crystalline see especially the work of Stefania Gerevini, ‘Rock Crystal in the Medieval West. An Essay on Techniques and Workshops’, in 285

Seeking Transparency. Rock Crystals Across the Medieval Mediterranean, ed. by Cynthia Hahn and Avinoam Shalem (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 2020), 89–100. 63. Bernard clearly follows Augustine’s critique. On Augustine’s concept of curiosity see the still seminal work of Hans Blumenberg, ‘Augustins Anteil an der Geschichte des Begriffs der theoretischen Neugierde’, Revue d’ Etudes Augustiniennes Et Patristiques, 7, (1961): 35–70. 64. See for instance Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, 107. 65. Bernard, Apologia, XII, 29. Trans. Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, 283. 66. ‘Curiosity belongs to the animals’, Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, 111, note 342. 67. See Duby, Der Heilige Bernhard, as well as note 63. 68. Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘De consideratione ad Eugenium Papam’, in Opere di San Bernardo, Vol. 1: Trattati, ed. by Ferruccio Gastaldelli (Milan: Città Nuova Editrice, 1984), 725–939, V, II.3–4, 894–896. 69. ‘Propter simplices dico, qui inter colorem et formam discernere non noverunt, cum forma ad compositionem pertineat, nigredo color sit. Non omne denique quod nigrum est, continuo et deforme est.’ Bernard of Clairvaux, SC, XXV, II.3, 350. 70. See for instance Mareike Klein, Die Farben der Herrschaft Imagination, Semantik und Poetologie in heldenepischen Texten des deutschen Mittelalters (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 275. 71. Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, 259. 72. Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, 275. 73. As assumes Burger for instance. Burger, ‘Grisaille in der Glasmalerei’. 74. ‘Cum autem divini aliquid raptim et veluti in velocitate corusci luminis interluxerit menti, spiritu excedenti, sive ad temperamentum nimii splendoris, sive ad doctrinae usum, continuo, nescio unde, adsunt imaginatoriae quaedam rerum inferiorum similitudines, infusis divinitus sensis convenienter accommodatae, quibus quodam modo adumbratus purissimus ille ac splendidissirnus veritatis radius, et ipsi animae 286

tolerabilior fiat, et quibus communicare illum voluerit capabilior.’ Bernard of Clairvaux, SC, XLI, III.3, 86–88. 75. There is another, yet very similar, quote: ‘“Wisdom is grey.” Life on the other hand & religion are full of colour.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. Georg Henrik von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), MS 134 9: 1947, p. 56e and p. 62e. Significantly, in On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense from 1873 Nietzsche writes: ‘he [man] first universalizes these impressions into less colorful, cooler concept’s, in order to hitch the wagon of his life and actions to them. [. . .] the great structure of concepts displays the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium and has an aura of that severity and coldness typical of mathematics.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense’, in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetorics and Language, ed. and trans. by Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair and David J. Parent (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 250–251. It is very likely that Wittgenstein alludes to this passage and to Nietzsche’s general critique of Hegel’s famous passage about the Owl of Minerva from the ‘Preface’ to the Philosophy of Right, as well as to its original source in Goethe’s Faust, where the relationship between grey theory and life is problematised – a motive that, as we have seen with Ficino, has much older sources. On Nietzsche, Hegel and the colourfulness of philosophy see Christian Benne, ‘“ihr meine geschriebenen und gemalten Gedanken!”: Synästhetische Lektüre von Jenseits von Gut und Böse 296’, in Texturen des Denkens: Nietzsches Inszenierung der Philosophie in “Jenseits von Gut und Böse”, ed. by Marcus Born and Axel Pichler (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 305–322, esp. 318. 76. Jacques Bouveresse has convincingly argued that the visual metaphors are of fundamental concern already in the Tractatus. See Jacques Bouveresse, Wittgenstein. La rime et la raison. Science, éthique et esthétique (Paris: Minuit, 1973) and Essais, Vol. 3: Wittgenstein et les sortilèges du langage, ed. Jean-Jacques Rosat 287

(Marseille: Agone, 2003). See also Judith Genova, Wittgenstein: A Way of Seeing (New York: Routledge, 1995). 77. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. and trans. Gertrude Elizabeth M. Anscombe and ed. Georg Henrik von Wright (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 80, §447. 78. See Rudolf Haller, ‘Das Kunstwerk als Gegenstand sub specie aeternitatis’, in Ästhetik. Akten des 8. Internationalen Wittgenstein-Symposiums, ed. by Rudolf Haller (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1984), 30–35, here 31. 79. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Gertrude Elizabeth M. Ascombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), 51, §107. 80. See Daniel Eckert, ‘Wittgenstein, die Ästhetisierung der Philosophie und der Relativismus’, in Ästhetik, ed. Haller, 36–38. On the concept of family resemblance, see Richard W. Beardsmore, ‘Art and Family Resemblances’, Philosophical Investigations, 18, 3 (1995): 199–215; as well as the especially fine study by Hans Sluga, ‘Family Resemblance’, Grazer Philosophische Studien, 71, 1 (2006): 1–21. 81. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 16. 82. On the Wittgenstein House, see exemplarily Paul Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Architekt (Basel: Wiese, 1994); Bernhard Leitner, Das Wittgenstein-Haus (Ostfildern-­ Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000); Fabian Goppelsröder, ‘Das Palais Stonborough in Wien. Wittgenstein als Architekt seiner Spätphilosophie’, in WittgensteinKunst. Annäherungen an eine Philosophie und ihr Unsagbares, ed. by Fabian Goppelsröder (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2006), 27–46; and Nana Last, Wittgenstein’s House. Language, Space, and Architecture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 83. Peter Galison, ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism’, Critical Inquiry, 16, 4 (Summer 1990): 709–572; Hans Sluga, ‘Zwischen Moder­ nismus und Postmoderne. Wittgenstein und die Architektur’, in Die Wiener Jahrhundertwende, ed. by Jürgen Nautz and Richard Vahrenkamp (Vienna: Böhlau, 1996), 241–256. 288

84. Goppelsröder, Das Palais Stonborough; Last, Wittgenstein’s House; and Gunter Gebauer, ‘Taktilität und Raumerfahrung bei Wittgenstein’, Arch+, 157, (September 2001): 91–98. 85. Hana Gründler, Die Dunkelheit der Episteme. Zur Kunst des aufmerksamen Sehens (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 2019), esp. the chapter ‘“Die Arbeit an einem selbst. [. . .] Daran, wie man die Dinge sieht.” Wittgenstein, Architektur und Aufmerksamkeit’, 110–134. Here the reader can find a more elaborate version of the arguments discussed in this article. 86. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Paul Engelmann, Wittgenstein – Engelmann. Briefe, Begegnungen, Erinnerungen, ed. Ilse Somavilla (Innsbruck: Haymon, 2006). 87. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, ed. and trans. Gertrude Elizabeth M. Anscombe and ed. Georg Henrik von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), 83. 88. Leitner, Das Wittgenstein-Haus, 64. 89. Leitner, Das Wittgenstein-Haus, 70. 90. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, ed. Gertrude Elizabeth M. Anscombe, trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schättle (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), 11, 67. 91. For Wittgenstein and colour see exemplarily Josef G. F. Rothhaupt, Farbthemen in Wittgensteins Gesamtnachlass (Weinheim: Beltz Athenäum, 1996). Recently, and with a more strictly analytical approach, Marcos Silva, Colours in the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017). 92. Wittgenstein on 11.1.1948. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 67e. 93. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, 5, 22. 94. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, 38, 160. 95. Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, ‘Wittgenstein über Farben und die Grenzen des Denkbaren’, in Von Wittgenstein lernen, ed. by Wilhelm Vossenkuhl (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1992), 79–98; Josef G. F. Rothhaupt, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Farben scheinen uns ein Rätsel aufzugeben”’, in Farben, ed. by Jakob Steinbrenner et al. (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2011). 289

96. Vossenkuhl, ‘Wittgenstein über Farben’. 97. Leitner, Das Wittgenstein-Haus. 98. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 30, §51. 99. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 84–85. 100. Gebauer, ‘Taktilität und Raumerfahrung’. 101. Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, The Philosophical Review, 74, 1 (January 1965): 3–12. 102. Philosophers including Cora Diamond, Martha Nussbaum and Sandra Laugier reflect on such an ethics of perception or attentiveness, which is closely linked to questions of an ethics of care. See Cora Diamond, ‘Ethics, Imagination and the Method of the Tractatus’, in The New Wittgenstein, ed. by Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge 2000), 149–173; and The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991); as well as Sandra Laugier, ‘Ethik als das Achten auf das Besondere’, in Wittgenstein – Philosophie als ‘Arbeit an Einem selbst’, ed. by Gunter Gebauer et al. (Munich: Fink, 2009), 83–102. See also, Gründler, Die Dunkelheit der Episteme. 103. As Stanley Cavell demonstrates, to be aware of the perspective of the other one must see and understand differences and singularities. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

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9. Klee’s ‘Grey Point’ Kamini Vellodi

Taking off from Klee’s 1938 painting, The Grey Man and the Coast, this chapter explores Klee’s notion of the ‘grey point’ (graupunkt) and the way it figures in the thought of Gilles Deleuze. In his Bauhaus lectures of the early 1920s, Klee develops the idea of the grey point as the cosmogenetic moment of painting. The hinge between chaos and order, the mid-point of all colour, including black and white, and the transition between point and line, grey plays a pivotal role in pictorial genesis. The figure of Klee recurs through Deleuze’s late writings on art. Deleuze affirms Klee’s conception of grey as 291

the ‘chaos-germ’ that unlocks dimensions of sensation and inaugurates new registers of experience. Grey Man and the Coast. A line zigzags back and forth in Paul Klee’s Grey Man and the Coast (der Graue und die Küste) (1938) (Figure 9.1). Perhaps a series of tongues, or ribs, that juts into a sombre blue expanse where nameless ciphers float and dance. Perhaps a bird’s-eye view of a coastline, or a series of little boats in a sea of teardrops, dots and crescent moons. The scene is watched over by a grey man in the upper-right corner. Disproportionately outsized, this figure is curiously fractured. Both surveyor of the scene and engulfed by its pictorial world, its face is eaten into by a boat or bit of land and only one of its eyes fully visible. One might say that the figure is a point around which the composition revolves, whilst at the same time being absorbed by the composition that it surveys. Both inside and outside, it is at once a point of view and implicated by the centre of view. With no place of its own, it occupies a place common to all others. This grey man might be seen as an emblem of the role of grey in Klee’s work, alerting us to the peculiar nature of this colourless colour as an unlocalisable, interstitial element, between hues, between tones, forever on the threshold of things, qualities and states, evading manifestation.

Figure 9.1 Paul Klee, The Grey Man and the Coast, 1938. Coloured paste on burlap; reconstructed frame, 105 × 71 cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Livia Klee Donation 293

Grey and pictorial genesis More than a decade before painting The Grey Man and the Coast, Klee had theorised what he felt to be grey’s singular function in pictorial genesis. The painter’s writings on art – in particular, the Bauhaus lectures and essays written and collected in the early 1920s – testify to his preoccupation with formation understood as the ways that lead to form (gestaltung), and genesis, the dimension where ‘the secret key to all things is kept’.1 Klee understands genesis not as the reproduction of visible appearances but as the picture’s construction of order from chaos, where chaos is the ‘mythical, primordial state of the world’.2 He describes genesis as a ‘way to form’3 constituted by formative forces (anden formenden kraften): momentum and gravitational forces, hydraulic and centrifugal forces, indeed, the entire field of forces that complexify, through diversifying, the expression of the human element as well as the forms of nature itself. The way to form is superior to its goal, becoming is superior to being, and genesis assumes ontological priority over its products. In further describing pictorial genesis as ‘cosmic’ (kosmisch) Klee distinguished it from any mimetic operation. Whilst formerly artists depicted things that were to be seen on earth, painting as cosmogenesis traverses the realm of given, visible appearances to give access to a reality normally hidden from perception – a Zwischenwelt, or interworld. Hence the oft-quoted dictum of Klee’s Creative Credo: ‘Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible.’4 Such articulations were part of a response to the times, to a climate of terrestrial violence. For Klee, pictorial abstraction could surpass and supplant reality using the ‘broken fragments’ of the world.5 This requires the ‘distil­ lation’ of pure relations and forces from things in the world and the construction of a ‘higher point of view’, beyond ‘mere earthliness’.6 Thus, abstraction constructs visible universes of man, animals, mineral, machinic 294

and plant elements from the synthesis of cosmogenetic forces. So, in The Grey Man and the Coast, we encounter a collection of elements designating our earth – sun, moon, water, man, a jutting promontory, a boat – jostling alongside a number of other nameless and anonymous signs in an ungrounded, non-terrestrial space. Whilst Klee continuously made analogies between pictorial genesis and organic processes of growth – remarking, for instance, that pictorial genesis corresponds to ‘the idea of every sort of beginning (i.e., procreation), or better still, the concept of the egg’ – he projected the concept of nature beyond naturalism. Painting is construction: the cosmic is not given; it must be made. ‘Things on earth are obstructed in their movement; they require an impetus.’ In painting, this impetus is supplied by the primordial self-mobilising point. Klee will call this the grey point. The Grey Point and the Line Klee develops the notion of the grey point (graupunkt) in his Bauhaus lectures, ‘Contributions to a Theory of Pictorial Form’. These were written over a four-year period from 1921–1925 and received to acclaim on the 1924 publication of a section of the lectures under the title, Pedagogical Sketchbook, subtitled ‘The Original Foundation of Part of the Theoretical Programme of the Bauhaus at Weimar’. In the lectures, Klee refers to the grey point in two ways: firstly, as a point, or ‘mathematical’ point;7 secondly, in the later lectures on colour theory, as the centre of the colour circle. These two definitions are ultimately brought together as a theorisation of genesis in terms of motion. Klee describes the mathematical point as an infinitely tiny planar element, a non-dimensional element between dimensions and at their intersections. 295

It is a primal, or primordial element, an ur element, with an Ur-charakter. It does not yet have any material or sensible quality. A ‘mere point’, it is not ‘real’; it is only an idea. What matters is the potential of the point. Hence Klee’s somewhat cryptic remark that the point ‘is not really a point’8 but a ‘nullified something’ (nichtiges Etwas) or ‘possible nothing’ (etwaiges Nichts).9 ‘As an agent carrying out zero motion [the point] is at rest’10 but when it begins to move, it unleashes the potential for pictorial genesis. In his 1918 Creative Credo, Klee introduced the idea of the active line proceeding freely, talking a walk for its own sake without a goal. But pictorial genesis does not in fact begin with lines; it begins with the unreal mathe­ matical point setting itself in motion.11 How does a point set itself in motion? This is not a response to any external imperative (the demands of pictorial representation, or artistic ‘intention’), but a response to the formative forces that constitute and impel the point to move, the forces of gravity and momentum concentrated within the point that makes it do something against its ‘will’.12 Responding to these internal forces, the point ‘jumps over itself ’ and becomes sensibly perceptible and ‘established’ (Feststelling), acquires reality and turns grey. Pictorial genesis – which is at once the genesis of pictorial thought and of pictorial form – entails the passage from idea to sensible and material manifestation. When Klee describes the grey point as a ‘nonconcept’ (unbegriff ), he is indicating this role of the sensible in the dynamics of pictorial thought, that something beyond the limits of the concept is at work. Poised at the threshold of perceptible, between coming-into-being and passing-away, this sensibility has nothing to do with the actuality of the given world. It opens up a new realm of being. In the onto-genetic dynamics of painting, grey is at once interstice and reservoir, contradicting nothing and containing everything: 296

The point is grey because it is neither white nor black or because it is white and black at the same time. It is grey because it is neither up nor down or because it is both up and down. It is grey because it is neither hot nor cold; it is grey because it is a non-dimensional point, a point between the dimensions.13

Figure 9.2 Paul Klee, Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre: 1.2 Principielle Ordnung (Theory of Pictorial Configuration: 1.2 Principal Order), pen, watercolour and pencil on paper, 21.8 × 27.5 cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern 297

At the dynamic crossroads between planes, colours and tones, facing all directions at once, the grey point assumes a unique character. The hinge, the balancing-point and intermediate zone between opposites that con­ tains the binaries within it,14 its leap into the realm of order is not unidirect­ional, but multidimensional; it bears a ‘concentric primal character’ (Ur-charakter), and ‘[t]he circle thus awakened radiates from it in all dimensions’15 (Figure 9.2). The Grey Point and Colour Klee was experimenting with the concept of grey and its function in colour composition in his paintings long before he began teaching at the Bauhaus. One example is his painting, Once Emerged From the Grey of Night (1918), a composition cut into two halves by an imposing wide band of grey – a cut-out piece of silver paper. Here, grey functions as a centre from which all colours radiate and to which they return, a counterpoint to the spectrum of colour squares, and which holds this scintillating mosaic in tension. Indeed, an intriguing genealogy of grey can be traced through Klee’s entire oeuvre – where we can note its function as a pivot, a balancing point, and a zone of transition. This is particularly apparent in his works of chromatic gradation, such as Sepa­ration in the Evening (1922), where greyish tones are the fulcrum of the stepped gradations, and in the ‘Square paintings’ such as Pictorial Architecture Red, Yellow, Blue (1923), where modulated grey squares function as stilling points in the restless grid of colour – a work that Klee also placed in a grey frame. Later works such as Harmony of the Northern Flora (1927) and Glass Façade (1940) similarly express modulated grey squares as both stilling points and mobilisers of other coloured blocks. In other late works including Gray Man and the Coast (1938) and many of the ‘Angel’ paintings, grey is not 298

only a compositional agent but inhabits a figurative domain, bordering on the symbolic. In his Bauhaus lectures on colour beginning in 1922, Klee theoretically elaborates the role of grey, developing an idiosyncratic theorisation of colour that departed from his Bauhaus contemporaries. Influenced by Philip Otto Runge’s conception of the colour sphere, which Johannes Itten had introduced into the Bauhaus colour courses, Klee placed grey at the centre of his six-part colour circle.16 He based his colour circle on the natural phenomenon of the rainbow. Klee was drawn to the rainbow as an expression of the pure colour scale and as the intermediary between the earth and the cosmos, but felt that it was ultimately limited as a linear representation of colour that shows us nothing about the relations between colours.17 In contrast to this linear manifestation of pure colours, Klee presents the colour circle, with grey in its centre (Figure 9.2), as a way of understanding the ‘cosmic concept of pure colours’ and their dynamic relations: The cosmic concept of pure colours has found its appropriate representation in the circle. The rainbow, the terrestrial manifestation of pure colours, was a mere reflection of a hitherto unknown totality, the transcendent whole that we have now produced by synthesis. The colour circle is now before us.18 The colour circle is a disc that passes through ‘the equator of the colour sphere’ and presents colours in an ideal order; the grey circle at the centre, surrounded by a black circle, the spectral circle and a white circle. The spectral circle consists of six colours (the three primaries and the three secondaries) – red, 299

orange, yellow, green, blue and violet – organised such that complementary colours are located diametrically opposite each other. Three pairs – red/green; blue/orange; yellow/purple – are all fixed by the central grey point. The black and white are poised on either side of the spectrum (Figure 9.3). Grey, the mid-point of them all, is not given – that is, there is no grey in the pure spectrum of the natural phenomenon of the rainbow – but is produced by synthesis – when two complementary colours are mixed in equal amounts. Opposites cancel each other out in grey.19 For instance, when red and green mix, and gradually diminish in hue, a median grey (green-red) is produced: ‘No direct use of grey has been made and yet (pure) grey has been created in the fourth field where the colour quantities are equal.’20 This observation about grey as a product of mixing complementaries was, of course, a familiar precept in colour theory. Notable figures including Goethe, Charles Blanc, Kandinsky, Itten and Van Gogh had all written about it, and Klee was familiar was this body of work.21 What distinguishes Klee is that he was less interested in grey as the product of mixing than in its function as an inter­ mediary in the relations between colours, and the role of this relationality in pictorial genesis. ~ The grey intersection functions as a transitional zone from one colour to another. We can see this at work in the ‘Fugue’ series, a series of watercolours made during Klee’s time at the Bauhaus, in which chromatic gradations always pass through grey zones. Here, grey works both as the genetic point of transition for colour constructivism through tonal modulation and the product of modulated sequences. Grey is always in the middle of things, an all-encompassing interstice that absorbs and emits. In conceptualising grey as a dynamic intermediary or transitional zone, Klee was departing from the 300

view of his Bauhaus colleague and friend, Kandinsky, who had crit­ iqued grey as the static product of black and white, which he had described as two colours with ‘no active force’.22 Klee was closer to Itten’s view that ‘neutral grey, itself a characterless, indifferent, achromatic colour, is readily influenced by contrasting shades and hues, and whilst itself mute, is easily excited to thrilling resonances’.23 But for Klee, grey is neither neutral nor achromatic. It is neither coloured nor non-coloured, but a mobile equilibrium. Klee goes on to say that in addition to movements of complementary colours, one can produce colour chords – pairings that do not pass through the median grey centre, and which Figure 9.3 Paul Klee, Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre: 1.2 Principielle Ordnung. (Theory of pictorial configuration: thus meet in a warmer or cooler 1.2 Principal Order), pen, pencil and pen on paper, 27.5 × grey.24 Through such chords, in20.7 cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern finite variations of grey may be produced, showing that grey is not simply a singular, static monochrome, but already differing from itself,25 a differential reservoir that keeps things in motion and keeps attained harmonies in dynamic tension, not an identitarian ground that roots, resolves and fixes (Figures 9.4–9.10). 301

Figure 9.4 Paul Klee, Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre: Anhang (Theory of Pictorial Configuration: Appendix), pen and pencil on paper, 21.8 × 27.4 cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Figure 9.5 Paul Klee, Beiträge sur bildnerischen Formlehre (Contributions to the Theory of Pictorial Form), pen, pencil and coloured pencil on paper, 20.2 × 16.3 cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Figure 9.6 Paul Klee, Beiträge sur bildnerischen Formlehre (Contributions to the Theory of Pictorial Form), pen, pencil and coloured pencil on paper, 20.2 × 16.3 cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Figure 9.7 Paul Klee, Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre: I.3 Specielle Ordnung (Theory of Pictorial Configuration: I.3 Special Order), pen on paper, 43 × 33cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Figure 9.9 Paul Klee, Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre: I.1 Festaltungslehre als Begriff (Theory of Pictorial Configuration: I.1 Pictorial Creation as Concept), pen and coloured pencil on paper, 21 × 33.2 cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Figure 9.8  Paul Klee, Beiträge sur bildnerischen Formlehre (Contributions to the Theory of Pictorial Form), pen on paper, 20.2 × 16.3 cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Figure 9.10 Paul Klee, Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre: I.1 Festaltungslehre als Begriff (Theory of Pictorial Configuration: I.1 Pictorial Creation as Concept), pen and coloured pencil on paper, 21 × 33.2cm. Copyright: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Deleuze on Klee’s Grey Point Given the preoccupation with Paul Klee in twentieth-century postwar continental philosophy, it is intriguing that few theorists comment on his notion of the grey point. Gilles Deleuze is an exception, making mention of the grey point in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) and Francis Bacon. Logic of Sensation (1981). Klee in fact is a constant figure in Deleuze’s late works, also appearing in What Is Philosophy? (1991) and The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988). In their appeal to Klee to help shape and illuminate philosophical claims, Deleuze (and Guattari) join a long list of thinkers including Heidegger, ­Benjamin, Adorno, Sartre, Blanchot, Derrida, Gadamer, Lyotard, Foucault and Merleau-Ponty.26 Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Klee in his 1964 text Eye and Mind – itself often seen as a response to Heidegger’s analysis of Klee’s painting as ‘world-forming’ – seems to be a particularly important reference for Deleuze. Indeed, Deleuze’s reading of Klee illuminates aspects of Deleuze’s critique of phenomenology – and the notion of the grey point plays an interesting role in this. Like Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze makes few references to specific paintings by Klee. Instead, he refers mainly to Klee’s writings, and selected literature on Klee, such as Will Grohman’s seminal 1954 monograph.27 He draws upon a constellation of the artist’s ideas about pictorial genesis and the theory of formation, such as Klee’s notion of genesis as a cosmogenetic action of forces, the ‘free line’ as expression of this action, and the conception of abstraction as constructivism. Deleuze’s understanding of Klee’s grey point as a ‘chaos-­ germ’ (chaos-germe) – a point of chaos that is at once a germ of order – which unlocks dimensions of sensation and inaugurates new registers of experience and thought, is an intriguing vector from which to examine his conception of the relation between art and philosophy. Indeed, Deleuze’s integration of 305

Klee’s thought and practice is a compelling example of his understanding of how art can act as the impetus, material and model for philosophical thought. The Abstract Line and the Grey Point For Deleuze and Guattari, Klee’s line is an ‘abstract line’. In contrast to the representational outline of objects, an abstract line is a ‘line of becoming’ that does not delimit form and is not defined by the points it connects, but instead passes between points. With ‘neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination’, it has only a non-localisable middle (milieu).28 In this sense, abstract does not mean ‘abstracted from’, but designates an intermedial zone of ‘pure’ difference. Within what Deleuze and Guattari call, in A Thousand Plateaus, a ‘punctual’ system, a point refers to linear coordinates and lines connect points. Here, lines remain subordinate to points, serving as localisable connections for them. This is a system of representation, the elements of which act as referents. By contrast, in a ‘multilinear’ or ‘rhizomatic’ system, the line is independent from the point as origin, from vertical and horizontal as coordinates, and from diagonals that localise connections between two points. Instead, we have only ‘transversal’ abstract lines propelling themselves through a milieu. In this dynamic system, there is a reciprocal deterritorialisation of the line and the point: as the line becomes a ‘line of flight’, the point becomes a vanishing point (point de fuite), dislodged from referential coordinates.29 In effect, the point does not make the line; the line sweeps away the deterritorialized point, carries it off under its outside influence; the line 306

does not go from one point to another, but runs between points in a different direction that renders them indiscernible. The line has become the diagonal, which has broken free from the vertical and the horizontal. But the diagonal has already become the transversal, the semi-diagonal or free straight line, the broken or angular line, or the curve – always in the midst of themselves. Between the white vertical and the black horizontal lie Klee’s gray, Kandinsky’s red, Monet’s purple; each forms a block of color. This line is without origin, since it always begins off the painting, which only holds it by the middle; it is without coordinates, because it melds with a plane of consistency upon which it floats and that it creates; it is without localizable connection, because it has lost not only its representative function but any function of outlining a form of any kind – by this token, the line has become abstract, truly abstract and mutant, a visual block; and under these conditions the point assumes creative functions again, as a color-point or line-point.30 This distinction between two types of line recalls a distinction that Merleau-­ Ponty had made in Eye and Mind – a text in which Klee features promin­ ently – between the ‘prosaic line’ as a contour that registers what exists in the real world (Merleau-Ponty’s example is the classical, ‘mechanical’ line of 307

Renaissance perspective), and the ‘flexuous’ or ‘sinuous’ line as a ‘constituting power’ and ’generating axis’.31 In his earlier 1945 essay Cezanne’s Doubt, Merleau-Ponty had argued for the role of colour in painting’s capacity to access and make visible the invisible, preflective world of primordial being.32 But in Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty claims that ‘colour alone is no closer to being such a key [to the visible]’; colour gets us nearer ‘to the heart of things but this heart is beyond the color envelope’. The ‘nonconceptual presentation of universal Being’ is a ‘system of equivalences, a Logos of lines, of lighting, of colors, of reliefs, of masses’. That is, all elements of painting – ‘depth, colour, form, line, movement, contour, physiognomy’ are ‘branches of Being’;33 each entwines the tufts of all the rest, such that there are no separated, distinct problems in painting. As such, both line and colour have an equal part to play in painting’s disclosure of Being. It is in this regard that Merleau-Ponty refers to Henri Bergson’s remarks in The Creative Mind (1934) on the ‘sinuous outline’ [serpentement] outside living beings, a line that is distinct from the ‘visible lines of the figure’, a line that is ‘no more here than there’ but yet gives the ‘key to the whole’. Merleau-Ponty goes on to remark that painters have always known that ‘there are no lines visible in themselves’, and that lines are ‘always on the near or the far side of the point we look at’. Hence the vital function of lines in gesturing towards the invisible depth of the visible world. Lines do not simply demarcate the borders of visible forms; they indicate the far side of the visible, the pre-spatial domain where things become. As such, the task – for painting as for metaphysics – is to ‘free the line’ and ‘revivify its constituting power’, its function in the genesis of things. To emphasise his point, Merleau-Ponty refers to Klee’s line as ‘generating axis’, that acts as ‘the blueprint of a genesis of things’ and enables us to grasp the ‘inner radiance of the visible’. Indeed, he adds, ‘perhaps no one before Klee had “let a line muse”’.34 ‘Art is not construction’, but rather 308

it is depth, the founding difference intertwined with the visible of the world and recuperated in the originary koinos kosmos (shared world). Deleuze and Guattari wrest the elements of pictorial genesis from the transcendental unity of being. Line and colour do not disclose; they construct. Klee’s dictum ‘Art makes visible’ is to be grasped not as the revelation of primordial invisible Being, but rather as an intensive construction of forces that differentiates rather than unifies. What Deleuze and Guattari call constructivism, whereby every creation is a ‘construction on a plane that gives it an autonomous existence’, concerns the eruption of difference into this phenomenological matrix of intelligibility by which the alterity of the sensible is retrieved within the Same.35 Reality is neither given nor revealed but constructed in such a way as to retain and affirm alterity. Genesis is rethought as a disorganising and disjunctive process that displaces transcendental unity with the dislocating and violent heterogeneity of forces – and the relations between pictorial elements express this. Constructivism is a non-linear process, a passage or ‘leap’ from chaos to composition that takes effect in an intermediate, interstitial zone. It is in this regard that Deleuze and Guattari refer to the genetic function of Klee’s grey point, which they describe as both a ‘colour-point’ and a ‘line-point’. They acknowledge its fragility as a centre that permits ‘escapes’, a dynamic locus of forces that impels leaps, a construction of a territory and then a cosmic plane.36 They remark on how Klee’s preference for the cosmic over ‘terrestrial cordiality’ was connected with his revelation of ‘intermundia’, interstitial zones of becoming, and with his ‘microscopic’ gaze.37 They follow Klee’s understanding of the grey point as a ‘cosmic egg’, an intensive reality where things are distinguished only by ‘gradients, migrations, zones of proximity’– not before the organism (or the emergent forms), but ‘adjacent to it and . . . continually in the process of constructing itself ’.38 309

Sometimes chaos is an immense black hole in which one endeavours to fix a fragile point as a center. Sometimes one organizes around that point a calm and stable ‘pace’ (rather than a form): the black hole has become a home. Sometimes one grafts onto that space a breakaway from the black hole. Paul Klee presented these three aspects, and their interlinkage, in a most profound way. He calls the black hole a “gray point” for pictorial reasons. The gray point starts out as nonlocalizable, nondimensional chaos, the force of chaos, a tangled bundle of aberrant lines. Then the point “jumps over itself ” and radiates a dimensional space with horizonal layers, vertical cross sections, unwritten customary lines, a whole terrestrial interior force (this force also appears, at a more relaxed pace, in the atmosphere and in water). The gray point (black hole) has thus jumped from one state to another, and no longer represents chaos but the abode or home. Finally, the point launces out of itself, impelled by wandering centrifugal forces that fan out to the sphere of the cosmos: one “tries convulsively to fly from the earth, but at the following level on actually rises above it . . . owered by centrifugal forces that triumph over gravity.”39 310

For Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of an abstract line is, of course, not simply a question for painting. In A Thousand Plateaus it is articulated as a question concerning the nature of Being as becoming, addressed in terms of processes of subjectivation. Through embarking on an abstract line, they write, one becomes imperceptible, ‘one becomes like everybody else/the whole world’. This becoming concerns only those who have abdicated subjectivity, those who know ‘how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.’40 What is the implication of this direct reference to Hegel’s famous passage, in the Preface to The Philosophy of Right: ‘When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy’s grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only with the falling of dusk.’?41 By ‘grey on grey’, Hegel invokes the belatedness of philosophy. Wisdom always comes ‘too late’ for action, and grey is the colour of philosophy’s reflective and abstracted non-congruence with the present and life’s colourism, the monochromatic colour of rational thought in its abstraction that gives comprehension to what is. In contrast, after Klee, Deleuze and Guattari designate grey as the colour of thought’s becoming, immanently enfolded in the coloured world of experience. Thought is not a rationalised reflection upon life but its vitalist affirmation; it is not an operation of dialectical mediation or an abstraction, but immanent to the real and constructive. In contrast to Hegel, for Deleuze, philosophy ‘cannot claim the least superiority’ to art, and it is not needed to reflect upon it.42 Art thinks, as much as philosophy, even though the way in which it thinks, its modes and materials, are different – art thinks through sensations, rather than philosophical concepts. The work of art captures the infinite in thought by ‘molecularising’ matter and monumentalising it as a pure being of sensation. Just as the work of art, in making visible invisible forces, extends the horizon of the visible, philosophical thought extends the capacity of what thought can 311

think, becoming ‘a synthesizer functioning to make thought travel, make it mobile, make it a force of the Cosmos’.43 The cosmic is not approached through a dialectical mediation that submits difference to the labour of the negative, but a reality constructed through an affirmation of difference on the material and technical plane. Through its techniques of constructivism, art bears an apodictic function for philosophy. That is, it is not only that art thinks as much as philosophy, but that art embodies and materialises the internal, non-philosophical conditions at the heart of philosophical thought.44 Here, Klee’s notion of the grey point as a non-concept, as the sensible manifestation of the idea that exceeds conceptual demarcation, is apt. And we see that Deleuze and Guattari do not only discuss the grey point and grey in the context of Klee’s paintings, but to elaborate philosophically the question of thought with respect to the relations between the concept and the sensible. Diagrammatic Colourism and the Grey Point Deleuze returns to grey and Klee’s grey point a year after A Thousand Plateaus, in Francis Bacon. Logic of Sensation (1981). Here he develops the notion of a ‘logic of sensation’ – the sense of which must be grasped within his broader analysis in other texts, namely Difference and Repetition and What Is Philosophy?, of the role of sensation within his philosophy of difference, the relation between sensation and thought, and the ontology of art. In Francis Bacon, Deleuze offers an analysis of how within a ‘logic of sensation’, line and colour are not simply formal components of painting in the service of representation, but material traits that express intensive forces and convey pure sensations, and which the act of painting brings into new relation to construct a new reality. 312

Whilst Deleuze takes from Merleau-Ponty the notion of art as a ‘being of sensation’, he argues that sensation on its own is insufficient for the construction of new reality. A ‘material framework’ (also called a ‘house’ in What Is Philosophy?) is needed to prevent sensation remaining in a chaotic state of flux, and to impart to it the power to stand up on its own.45 Neither the framework nor sensation suffices on its own for this genetic operation. The former is abstract and lacks reality, the latter lacks duration and clarity. Thus, painting is not a being of sensation simply through its embodiment of sensation, but through the way it synthesises the constructive with the sensory in what Deleuze calls a ‘diagram’. This synthesis introduces alterity into the unity of the sensing and the sense – painting is not just disclosure of Being-in-the-World as an original unity, but construction of reality not already given. Sensation has a ‘synthetic’ character, composed of intensive variations and is in contact with a ‘vital power’ (puissance), more profound than any of the senses, and ‘almost unliveable’.46 An ‘operative set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones, line-strokes and color-patches’, the diagram is the ‘agitated locus of all forces’ that operates as a germ of order.47 A zone of indistinction, with no form or substance of its own, the diagram is a ‘stopping or resting point that is always linked to an immense agitation of matter’. 48 As such, it is the ‘height of abstraction, but also the moment at which abstraction becomes real’. Through this construction, painting traverses the reconstruction of the terrestrial/­ the lived, beyond organic representation – it opens to the nonorganic reality on a cosmic plane. Every painter, Deleuze claims, has their diagram, the moment of the ‘chaos-germ’, and the grey point is Klee’s diagram: Klee’s chaos – the vanishing grey point and the chance that this grey point will leap over itself and unblock dimensions of sensation.49 313

By ‘leaping over itself ’ the grey point reveals the action of invisible forces, reveals itself to be a concentrated locus of forces, the zone where the pressure of forces produce a movement in place, generating a zone of indiscernibility common to several possible forms. Deleuze also describes the point as a block, ‘a diagrammatical patch of gray-colour’.50 Whilst in A Thousand Plateaus Klee’s grey point has been discussed with reference to the point and the line, in Francis Bacon it is elaborated with respect to colour. This invokes Klee’s own conception of the grey point as a differentiator of both line and colour, at once the self-displacing origin of lines and the dynamic transition point between hues, the genetic ‘source’ of the work of art. Deleuze characterises the grey point as a ‘haptic’ grey, as distinct from an optical grey. Whereas the latter is produced through combining black and white, the former is a ‘coloured’ grey. Whereas the latter is a monotonous, undifferentiated, static, non-generative grey, the former is a differentiating source, consisting of infinite variations of tonal intensity. For Deleuze, it was Goethe (whose colour theory had been key for Klee) who had first laid down the first principles of a haptic vision’ in conceiving of a grey as a combination of green and red. And it was Goethe who had criticised Newton’s conception of an optical grey for not allowing an ‘active’ darkness.51 Deleuze thus distinguishes between two systems of colour: an optical (representational) system based on relations of value, namely, the contrast of black and white, and a haptic (constructive) system based on relations of tonality from the spectrum. Relations of value produce an optical modelling whereby light and dark create an interiorised, ‘homely atmosphere’, an optical organisation of space that in turn permits the distinction of forms and the possibility of representation. In contrast is the unhomely, disturbing space of the haptic forged by relations of tonality. A colour is warm or cool depending on which colour it is next to, and this relativity effects movements 314

of expansion and contraction. The juxtaposition of pure tones arranged on the flat surface forms a progression and regression and generates broken tones – unequal mixtures that conserve the sensible heterogeneity or tension of colours.52 Within this system, the haptic grey acts as a differentiating source, a power (puissance) of broken colour, diffusing throughout all the ranges of colour. This coloured, or rather colouring, grey ‘diffuses itself, giving rise to a non-localisable space, a space without coordinates but only molecular texture, a “Sahara”’.53 An intensive deformation, a catastrophe overcomes the figurative units of representational space, replacing it with micrometric and cosmic units. Deleuze’s distinction of the haptic and the optic in Francis Bacon parallels the distinction he and Guattari had made in A Thousand Plateaus between the multilinear and the punctual. The optical and the punctual systems are both systems of representation based on values. The haptic and the multilinear systems are constructivist systems based on relations (relations of tonality from the spectrum in the case of the former; line-blocks in the case of the latter). Just as the multilinear system had resulted in a colour-block, colourism accommodates the line – a new line ‘no longer in a relationship of form to ground, but in a relation of coexistence or proximity modulated by colour’.54 Both line and colour are reciprocally constructed anew by the free action of the other. And it is the grey point, as a diagram synthesising lineblocks and colour-traits, which is common to both processes of dismantling, the common locus of disjunctive synthesis and reciprocal genesis – ‘[t]]here is a diagrammatical line of desert-distance, just as there is a diagrammatical line patch of gray-colour, and the two come together in the same action of painting, painting the world in Sahara gray’.55 Thus there is modulation beneath colourism, internal variations of intensity or saturation without name or quality. 315

Diagrammatic construction constitutes a new pictorial reality that at once occasions a register of experience that makes us think and feel anew. The experience of this differential field – a field of difference ‘in-itself ’ not sub­ ordinated to identities of lines and colours, since it ontologically precedes (and exceeds) them – culminates in a close vision and a haptic space within sight itself. Thus, vision is argued to have at least two senses, the optical and the haptic, and it is colourism within painting that imparts the haptic sense to sight. In this way, painting provides the genetic conditions for the production of new sensibility, a transcendental domain of sensibility. As a being of sensation, the work of art acts as the condition for the expansion of the sensibility. In the encounter with it, habitual modes of perception are disrupted, and we are made to feel and think anew.56 Within this logic of sensation, grey plays a singular role. Grey embodies and gives expression to the differential condition of the sensible, the imperceptible continuum of intermediate sensations beneath and beyond the realm of sensible qualities. Grey is the pure and abiding element of this continuum, the infinitesimal point/patch between nameable qualities of colour. Whenever gradation crosses a threshold from one nameable quality to another, it is grey that we have reached and from which we pass. Grey embodies the state of pure difference in-itself and Klee’s works show us how this state is generative. What then is the function of discourse? And what might the grey point have to offer discourse? The Grey Point, Constructivism and Art History Klee did not understand the grey point simply in relation to the actual greyness of artworks. For him, grey concerned the being of art and the way artworks can express something elemental about being as such. To experience grey is 316

to experience Being as becoming, a movement of forces that proceeds through modulation and ‘leaps’, and enables pictorial composition. The grey point functions as a genetic ‘source’, the puissance or ‘will’ by which the work of art as a new reality is brought into being. Described by Klee as a ‘nonconceptual concept’ that is ‘sensibly perceptible’, it hinges on the borders of sensations and concepts, marking art’s work as a practice of thought. Klee’s thinking returns in and brings new intelligibility to the parameters and implications of Deleuze’s thought, and in turn the grey point becomes a singular fulcrum for reflecting on the relations between art and philosophy. In its unique role in pictorial genesis, it sheds light on Deleuze’s ‘logic of sensation’. Klee’s articulation of pictorial genesis as a constructivism of forces offers Deleuze a means of differentiating constructivism from phenomenology. The grey point subtends the language of line and colour that, for Deleuze, remains too close to a phenomenology of painting and to a metaphysics of identity. In showing how the engendering of thought occurs through a point of ungrounding and the pure zone of the interstitial, Klee’s works materialise a fundamental precept of Deleuze’s philosophy – that thought thinks only be means of difference. In this sense, the grey point becomes an impetus for a philosophical elaboration. Art here is not simply the model for philosophy, far less a ‘case study’ to be commented upon and interpreted. Rather, it is an impetus and inspiration for philosophical thought. It is in this sense that Deleuze writes that thought must become like painting, that it ‘needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction’57 – namely the divesting of the problem of forces from the overdetermination of effects that enables movement to the infinite. The task of modern thought is to renounce the domain of representation and take the conditions of representation as its object. Hence the apodictic value of Klee’s work, fundamentally concerned as 317

it is with interrogating and exposing the conditions of pictorial representation and its material elaboration of the dynamics of pictorial genesis as a movement of forces that captures the infinite. Deleuze does not attempt to explain what Klee’s works mean, or to uncover the historical conditions of their emergence. Instead, his reading replays, and thus affirms, the becoming of Klee’s work as an act of thought. As such, philosophy and art are brought into an immanent and non-hierarchical relation, and art as a being of sensation is kept a mobile and vital source of thinking, rather than an object to be thought about. In this sense, the borders between art and philosophy may appear to be porous. Although Deleuze distinguishes the regime of philosophy as that of the concept from the regime of art as that of sensations, philosophical thinking does not immediately take effect with concepts. Rather, it involves a ‘groping experimentation’ in a pre-philosophical, non-conceptual field. All concepts refer to a non-conceptual, intuitive understanding, which supplies their internal conditions. As such, the realm of the pre-philosophical and non-conceptual, which includes the ‘artistic’, is ‘perhaps closer to the heart of philosophy than philosophy itself ’.58 If philosophy has any function when it comes to thinking about art, it is to produce concepts that enable us to address how the work of art works (how it works as an experimental ‘machine’ producing effects) rather than what it means. And this is the approach that Deleuze takes in all his writings on artists, Klee included: to conceptualise the thinking that their work has materialised. ‘Diagram’ is one concept Deleuze invents to address the working of Klee’s grey point. But we don’t need this concept to reflect upon Klee’s works or make them intelligible. The philosophy of art is not a supplement or a substitution to art’s own work, but instead runs in parallel to the intelligibility the work of art generates, offering an alternative mode of registration of query. 318

Can we address the relation between art historical thought and the work of art in a similar way? What invitation might the grey point offer the thought of art history? If the question is art as a mode of thought rather than, say, an empirical object that reflects its historical circumstances, the task facing a philosophical art history is neither to recontextualise the grey point within its historical circumstances nor to interpret it – both operations which would cement the flux of sensation into significations that block the movement of thought.59 We are thus invited to consider the distinctions between the philosophical and the art historical, and whether art history is or can be philosophical and what this entails. Is art history a discourse involving concept creation? Is it a discourse that remains in the realm of description, fact-telling, interpretation and the application of concepts already invented? In the outlines of Klee-Deleuzian thought erected in this chapter, we might say that a philosophical art history is one which is attuned to the work of art as genetic method, rather than a historical feature, and that some facts of this attunement include an intimacy with the object in its alterity, the registration of alterity as shock and the creation of concepts immanent to this experience. In fact, the disciplinary question – what is at stake for the discipline of philosophy, or art history – is secondary to the more fundamental question of how we think and write immanently with respect to the work of art. Whether we call this operation ‘philosophy’ or ‘art history’ is incidental; from the perspective of thought’s genesis, they are indiscernible. Indeed, the practice of discipline, with its panoply of concerns about identity and borders, and its instituted habits and images of itself, threatens to over-code this immanence of thought to what makes it think. How might thought sustain this immanence, and not over-code it with new signs – including the embedded significations of disciplinary approaches and language? What ‘method’ might we need to propel thought, every time 319

it has arrived onshore and secured the coordinates through which it imparts intelligibility and attained epistemological anchorage, once more into differential zones of the non-thought? How can difference be kept in flux, without signifier or locus, affirming the perspective of genesis over products and findings? What are some of the ways this might take? The boundaries between ‘object’ and ‘approach’ might be called into question such that there is an investment of the asignifying hinges and thresholds between them. This might involve the retention of a reciprocal interplay between the conceptual and the non-conceptual, where the leakages between them are exposed and affirmed as part of the construction, the sustaining of a mobile equilibrium between lines of articulation and the sensations of its material. This might involve an investment of writing as affirmation of the logic of sensation it captures, which keeps its problematic in tension as a throbbing centre to which every idea is pulled and from which it expands, moving us away from the linear treatment of problems as things to be resolved, perhaps a practice of writing that radiates rather than projects itself in unidirectional lines. Stylistic possibilities, such as repetition, might be harnessed as ways of affirming the sensory impact of language and calling attention to the transitional zones, the grey zones, where meaning is interrupted, or when the relations between words assumes their own puissance. Far from keeping things indeterminate and vague, keeping things in a grey zone means retaining a concentrated charge, a state of tension that impels all writing and thought. It means investing points of intensity, the energetic concentrations of forces from which ideas leap in all directions and dimensions. Like the chromatic gradations in the intermediate zones of the rainbow, thought’s own graduations, its infinitesimal becomings, are refracted through grey.

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Notes 1. Paul Klee, quoted in Wilhelm Grohman, Klee (London, Thames and Hudson, 1957), 7. 2. Paul Klee, ‘Towards a theory of form production’ in Jürg Spiller (ed.), Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye. The notebooks of Paul Klee (London: Lund Humphries; New York: George Wittenborn, 1969), 9. 3. Paul Klee, ‘Towards a theory of form production’, in Spiller (ed.) The Thinking Eye, 17. 4. Paul Klee, ‘Creative Credo’ in Spiller (ed.) The Thinking Eye, 76. The ‘Creative Credo’ was first printed in 1920 but Klee made use of the unpublished text, which he began in 1918, in his early teaching at the Bauhaus. 5. ‘The more horrible this world (as today for instance) the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now’; ‘in the great pit of forms live broken fragments to some of which we still cling. They provide abstraction with its material. A junkyard of inauthentic elements for the creation of impure crystals. That is how it is today.’ Klee, quoted in Jurgen Glaesmer (ed.), Paul Klee: Life and Work (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2001), 108, 120. ‘The great crucible of forms contains ruins to which one is still somewhat attached. They provide material for abstraction.’ Klee, quoted by Jürg Spiller, ‘Introduction: How the Pedagogic Writings Came into Being’, The Thinking Eye, 23. 6. ‘To be an abstract painter does not mean to abstract from naturally occurring opportunities for comparison, but, quite apart from such opportunities, to distil pure pictorial relations.’ Klee, in Spiller (ed.) The Thinking Eye, 72. 7. This conception of the mathematical might be seen in the broader context of Bauhaus’s programme in its second period at Dessau. Following the example of the De Stijl group, pictorial quality was sought in formal abstract concepts, in a mathematical rationalisation of form. 8. Spiller, The Thinking Eye, 3. 321

9. Klee quoted in Gottfried Boehm, ‘Genesis: Paul Klee’s Temporalization of Form’, Research in Phenomenology, 43, 3 (2013): 322. 10. Klee, quoted in John Sallis, Klee’s Mirror (New York: SUNY: 2015), 55. Klee writes that mathematics and physics compel us ‘to concern ourselves first with the function and not with the finished form. Algebraic geometrical, and mechanical problems are steps in our education towards the essential, towards the functional as opposed to the impressionial. We learn to see what flows beneath, we learn the prehistory of the visible.’ Klee quoted in Spiller, The Thinking Eye, 69. 11. Klee, ‘Towards a theory of form production’, in Spiller (ed) The Thinking Eye, 21. We can detect here the influence of Kandinsky, for whom the point, whilst ‘in its tiny dimensions approaches “nothing”, has a powerful living force’. Kandinsky discusses this in the context of what he feels to be the dispassionate nature of modern experience, constrained to surfaces and insensitised to ‘the resonance of phenomena or their radiant emanations’. ‘The outer expediency and practical significance of the entire world around us have concealed the essence of what we see and hear behind a thick veil.’ He demonstrates the power of the point by placing it in the wrong place within a sentence – this slight act disturbs our customary indifference: we are ‘puzzled and insulted’ and ‘the veil has been raised’ from which ‘the secret meaning of the point can be discerned’ – its function in the genesis of art. Kandinsky’s emphasis on the spontaneous ‘arabesque’ of the line in the face of which ‘words have lost their power’ also anticipates Klee’s thoughts on the free line. Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Little Articles on Big Questions’, in Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, vol. 1 (1910–1921), ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 421–427. 12. Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, trans. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (Zurich: Lars Muller Publishers, 2019), 6. 13. Klee, ‘Towards a theory of form produciton, in Spiller (ed.) The Thinking Eye, 3. 14. Klee describes the grey point as point of ‘antithetical chaos’, which in contrast to 322

real or proper (eigentlich) chaos, is ‘locally determined’. ‘Towards a theory of form production’, in Spiller (ed.) The Thinking Eye, 3. 15. Klee,’Towards a theory of form production; in Spiller (ed) The Thinking Eye, 4. 16. With his colour sphere, Runge had aimed to establish the complete range of colour from the three primaries and white and black. Otto Runge, On Vision and Colours, ed. George Stahl (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Klee taught his first colour course at the Bauhaus in winter semester 1922/1923 with a shorter follow-up course in winter semester 1923/1924. These courses, highly shaped by Itten’s theory, as well as the theories of Goethe, Delacroix and Kandinsky, were based on Runge’s colour sphere and Itten’s colour star. Sallis, Klee’s Mirror, 21. Johannes Itten quoted the physiologist Ewald Henry, ‘To medium or neutral gray corresponds that condition of the optic substance in which dissimilation – its consumption by vision – and assimilation – its regeneration – are equal, so that the quantity of optic substance remains the same. In other words, medium gray generates a state of complete equilibrium in the eye.’ The Elements of Colour, trans. Ernst Van Hagen (John Wiley & Sons, 2003), 20. 17. Klee, ‘Contributions to a theory of pictorial form’, in Spiller (ed.) The Thinking Eye, 468. 18. Klee, ‘Contributions to a theory of pictorial form’, in Spiller (ed.) The Thinking Eye, 471. 19. Klee, ‘Towards a theory of form production, in Spiller (ed.) The Thinking Eye, 88. 20. Klee, ‘Contributions to a theory of pictorial form’, in Spiller (ed.) The Thinking Eye, 475. 21. Klee, ‘Contributions to a theory of pictorial form’, in Spiller (ed.) The Thinking Eye, 467. In his Farbenlehre, Goethe remarks on the value of grey surfaces and objects for chromatic experiments, in particular for showing how the eye spontaneously tends to an opposite state. Goethe was of course an important influence on Klee in other ways – for instance, his research on plant metamorphosis. Charles Blanc wrote that ‘if you place red and green in equal quantities and of equal intensities upon each other, there will remain only a colorless grey . . . this annihilation of colours is called achromatism’. ‘The Grammar of Painting and Engraving’, in Art in 323

Theory 1900–2000, ed. by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003 [1992]), 621. 22. Wassily Kandinsky, Kandinsky (New York: Parkstone, 2018), 110. 23. Johannes Itten, quoted in David Batchelor, The Luminous and the Grey (London: Reaktion, 2014), 75: ‘it is dependent on its neighbouring colors for life and accentuates their force and mellows them, reconciling violent oppositions by absorbing their strength – thereby vampire like’. See also Johannes Itten, The Art of Colour: The Subject Experience and Objective Rationale of Color, trans. Ernst van Haagen (New York: John Wiley, 1973), 37. 24. Klee, ‘On Modern Art’, in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 366. 25. In this, Klee may have been influenced by Van Gogh’s view that absolute black does not occur in nature and is present in all colours and forms as an endless grey distinguished in tones and intensities and produced through the unequal proportions of tones (broken tones produced through uneven mixture of complementary colours). Van Gogh remarks that ‘he is a colorist who, seeing a color in nature, knows very well how to analyse it and say for instance that green grey is yellow with black and almost no blue. In short he knows how to make the greys of nature on the palette.’ Vincent Van Gogh, ‘On the Shades of Grey’, 1882, in Batchelor, The Luminous and the Grey, 35. 26. See Stephen Watson’s excellent analysis in the Crescent Moon over the Rational. Philosophical Interpretations of Paul Klee (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 27. An exception is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s reference to Klee’s Twittering Machine (1922) at the opening of their chapter on the ‘refrain’ in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (ATP), trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2003), and to Klee’s Perspective on a Room with Occupants, 1921, in What Is Philosophy? (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991), 185. 28. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 293–294. 29. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 298, 173. 324

30. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 298. 31. Merleau-Ponty is here citing Leonardo da Vinci’s remarks in his Treatise on Painting. ‘Eye and Mind’, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Philosophy and Painting, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 142. Note also Lyotard’s discussion, which would also have shaped Deleuze’s analysis, of two types of line – Klee’s ‘figural’ line and the line of Andre Lhote, pp. 213–232. Lyotard develops this difference through an elaboration on pictorial energetics and desire. See Watson’s analysis in Crescent Moon, 15. 32. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 59–76. 33. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 141–142. 34. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 143. 35. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 7. Like Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari associate colour with figural difference against Merleau-Ponty’s investment of colour as the ‘flesh’ through which the invisible is made visible. Note Lyotard’s association of the figural with the ‘scarcely perceptible’ indeterminate differences between sounds or colours, giving Cezanne’s colourism as an example of this ‘nuancing’. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 172. 36. Citing Klee’s remark, ‘As for animals and all the other creatures, I do not like them with a terrestrial cordiality; earthly things interest me less than cosmic things.’ Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 342. See my paper, ‘Tintoretto. Cosmic Artisan’ for an analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the cosmic, in Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 13, 2 (2019). 37. Klee’s ‘microscope’ gaze, at crystals, molecules, atoms and particles, for their movement, that attends to the imperceptible relations between things . . . that is, with cosmogenetic creation populated by becomings-animal, becoming-molecular and becomings-imperceptible an interworld or ‘intermundia’ only visible to children, 325

madmen and primitives; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 337; and Anti-Oedipus, 243. On microscopic and cosmic units of the diagram see Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1981), 100. Note Klee’s remarks: ‘If we reduce our perspective to microscopic dimensions, we come once more to the realm of the dynamic, to the egg and to the cell. Accordingly, there is a macroscopic dynamic and a microscopic dynamic.’ Klee, in Spiller (ed.) The Thinking Eye, 5. 38. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 164. 39. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 312. 40. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 197. 41. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), xxi. 42. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), xvi. 43. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 342–343. 44. Deleuze’s complex reading of Hegel is beyond the scope of this chapter but for further reference, I can direct the reader to Henry Somers-Hall, Hegel, Deleuze and the Critique of Representation: Dialectics of Negation and Difference (New York: State University of New York Press, 2012). 45. See Klee’s remarks, on the study of nature: ‘First give space and form to the smaller living functions, and only then build houses round them, as in the apple, the snailshell and the human house.’ in Spiller (ed.) The Thinking Eye, 35. 46. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (London: Continuum, 2003) 42 – calls this vital power, ‘rhythm’: ‘We can seek the unity of rhythm only at the point where rhythm itself plunges into chaos, into the night, at the point where the differences of level are perpetually and violently mixed’. Francis Bacon, 44. 47. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 101, 151. 48. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 137. 49. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 102. 326

50. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 159. 51. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 133. In his theory of colours Goethe remarks that grey is something ‘longed for’ in the nineteenth century. Goethe’s Theory of Colours, applied by Maria Schindler (Sussex: New Knowledge Books, 1970). 79. Goethe introduced the notion of augmentation (steigerung) to account for the role of an ‘active’ darkness in colour mixing. Goethe critiqued Newton’s doctrine that all colours inhere in white light without the intervention of darkness. John Gage, Colour and Meaning. Art, Science and Symbolism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 52. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 133–134, 138–140, 196 n. 7, 158. 53. Deleuze develops the concept of the Sahara in his reading of Francis Bacon, citing Bacon’s own remarks in his interviews with David Sylvester. Bacon speaks of how surveying the involuntary marks of a graph (what Deleuze will rename le diagramme) suggests ‘the possibilities of all types of fact’ such that one might start with a thought of a portrait and place the mouth in one place ‘but you suddenly see through this graph that the mouth could go right across the face. And in a way you would love to be able in a portrait to make a Sahara of the appearance – to make it so like, yet seeming to have the distances of the Sahara.’ David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 56, 176 n. 1. Painting becomes ‘an immense space-time’ where things are united through the distances of a Sahara and the centuries of an aeon: ‘Time is no longer in the chromatism of bodies; it has become a monochromatic eternity’; Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 85. These remarks on the Sahara relate also to Deleuze and Guattari’s statements on nomad space – the desert, the steppe – in A Thousand Plateaus, cf. 382–383. 54. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 120. 55. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 159. 56. Deleuze’s most elaborate account of this is in Chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition, ‘The Image of thought’. 327

57. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 56. 58. Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?, 41. 59. Running through Deleuze’s work is a conception of how thought exceeds historical determination and the ‘territorialisation’ of signification: ‘creative disorder or inspired chaos which can only ever coincide with a historical moment but never be confused with it.’ Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 54. ‘There is no act of creation that is not transhistorical’; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 295–296.

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Part IV Grey Thought

10. Fade to Grey: Colour, Greyness and Utopia in the Work of Art (Adorno) Gerhard Richter

At first glance, there is nothing self-evident or obvious about the connection between the colour grey and any particular kind of intellectual activity. And yet, upon closer inspection, our engagement with grey – which is often considered a non-colour that figures as a gradation between black and white, a shade on the achromatic scale – is intimately intertwined with philosophical 331

thought itself. Unlike colours whose distinctness and intensity may distinguish them rather clearly from other pigmentations, grey lives predominantly in a world of shades. Located somewhere on the spectrum between the poles of black and white, what is called grey draws attention, each time it is perceived, to its own differential gradation, a gradation that sets each grey apart from other instances of greyness by merely a hue, more accessible perhaps to the eye than to the word. Like the experience of philosophical thinking itself, our encounter with grey thus pulls us into a world of nuances, subtlety and the exacting experience of fine differentiations. We may speak, for instance, of a warm grey or a cool grey, a light grey or a dark grey, an ashen grey or an anthracite grey. As the German art historians Magdalena Bushart and Gregor Wedekind point out, it behooves us to regard grey ‘not as a negation and a non-color’ but rather ‘dialectically, as a quality that consists in being nothing and yet something, an absence and a fullness, dead petrification and living bravura, a mode and a form of being’.1 This intricate form of being manifests itself in a plurality of perspectives. In the context of older art, we may be drawn to modes of philosophical reflection that are opened up by the complex grisaille technique in medieval panel painting and in Baroque oil painting, or by the subtly grey-suffused portraiture that we associate with masters such as Rembrandt. From among the most well-known paintings of the modern Western canon, we may be especially hospitable to the modes of conceptual enquiry instigated by the grey tonalities of Picasso’s Guernica. Even though Picasso experienced a so-called Blue Period and a Rose Period, but no Grey Period, it can be said with confidence that, without his seminal engagements with grey, our concept of modern painting would be radically different – and impoverished. In more recent artistic production, we may find the impetus for theoretical meditation in the modernist experimentations with grey by American painters such as Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly or the 332

sustained explorations of greyness and its overdetermined historicophilosophical valences in contemporary German artists such as Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter. In the realm of early photography, we may be particularly attentive, as were pioneering philosophical interpreters of photography such as Walter Benjamin, to the shades of grey that intermingle with conceptual reflection in Eugène Atget’s masterful images of ghostly Parisian street scenes. In the sonic realm, some of us who lived in Europe in the early 1980s may have listened to the dreamy rhythms of ‘Fade to Grey’ by the British new wave band Visage – with its hauntingly interjected French refrain ‘devenir gris’ – as the soundtrack to our conceptual buckling up for a protracted journey through a world that was beginning to be dominated by the Thatcher-Reagan-Kohl paradigm. One might also say that the experience of grey is linked to theoretical reflection through its tendency always to open onto something other than itself, an alterity that will not remain within the realm of any form of self-­ identity. Indeed, as the literary scholar David Scott Kastan and the painter Stephen Farthing suggest in their recent collaborative work On Color, ‘it is rare that gray is not something other than itself ’, as when it becomes, for instance in older photography, precisely the ‘color of colorlessness’.2 As happens under the philosophical gaze with its operations of increasing differentiation, the objects of one’s reflection, when they are regarded as shades or gradations within a grey-toned framework, may begin to change subtly but dramatically, and we may end up viewing and understanding these shades in rather differently modulated terms. Grey, when seen from this perspective, is one of the names for what refuses to remain simply itself yet continually demands to be thought and interpreted. Its very status as a non-colour, or as an other to colour itself, casts grey as the embodiment of larger, unresolved conceptual issues and theoretical 333

speculation pertaining to colour and its interpretation. To be sure, the canonical view of grey holds that it, like black and white, is not a colour at all because it does not have its own place on the colour wheel, and, again like black and white, it should strictly speaking not be referred to as a colour, but merely as a so-called neutral. But art historians such as Frances Guerin are beginning to complicate this traditional conceptualisation of grey. As she suggests in The Truth Is Always Grey: A History of Modernist Painting – a study that works to establish grey as a legitimate colour and even as a privileged key to seminal issues in the relationship between painting and modernity – one may well wonder if ‘the “noncolor” of grey’ signifies ‘merely a convenient way to deal with the uncomfortable space between the visual and the linguistic designation of colors’. In other words, ‘to call grey a “noncolor” is perhaps an unimaginative way of describing the constant ineffability of grey’, and, in fact, the ‘designation of grey as a noncolor might be a convenient repository for a much larger unknown’, so that ‘the indeterminacy of all colors’ may appear ‘projected onto the nebulousness of grey’.3 Considered from this angle, the indeterminacy of grey, its very resistance to being assigned any particular stable significance, figures as a prime instantiation of some of the most fundamental problems concerning our perception and interpretation of colour as such. Grey, in its withdrawal, opens onto the question of meaning itself. Yet philosophical reflection on the very greyness of grey is always also called upon to consider the manifold associations that are tied to grey as well as its traditional experiential valences and culturally mediated connotations, such as tristesse, neutrality, non-specificity, boredom, indistinguishability, barrenness, sobriety, a lack of stimulation or excitement, nebulosity, belatedness, old age and death, even spectrality. It is no accident that, in what could be considered one of modernity’s primal scenes of grey and greyness, Goethe’s 334

Mephistopheles warns his pupil: ‘Gray, dear friend, is all theory, and green alone life’s golden tree [Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie und grün des Lebens goldner Baum].’4 Whenever Goethe throughout his oeuvre takes recourse to the rhetoric of colour, it behooves his readers to pay especially close attention, in light of his extensive engagement with fashioning a comprehensive non-Newtonian Farbenlehre, or theory of colour. (In the Farbenlehre, Goethe largely denigrates the supposedly neutral grey in favour of the other, more vibrant colours, to whose full apperception, however, grey may contri­ bute by way of contrast.) In its dominant interpretations, Goethe’s line from Faust has been taken to favour a certain empirical pragmatism, an intense and experience-based engagement with the supposed fullness and richness of life itself, over mere detached speculation, abstraction and exclusively conceptual modes of relating to one’s life-world. Whereas, according to this model, ‘theoretical’ modes of being in the world appear to be connected to a drab, dry and anaemic greyness – that is, to the lifelessness one might associate with a non-colour or an achromatism – life itself is to be experienced as something vital, vivid and organic, as expressed in the colour green. This vital greenness is regarded as harbouring the true value – as it were, the gold standard (expressed in Goethe’s locution goldner Baum) – of life. When Hegel, in the programmatic Preface to his Philosophy of Right, implicitly takes up Goethe’s rhetoric without mentioning him by name, he retains Goethe’s sense that grey and greyness are to be considered modes of decline, decay and immobility, even as Hegel vectorises this thinking towards a slightly shifted purpose. He writes: ‘When philosophy paints its gray in gray [Wenn die Philosophie ihr Grau in Grau malt], one form of life has grown old, and by means of gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated [nicht verjüngen], but only cognized [nur erkennen]; the owl of Minerva begins to take its flight only with the falling of dusk [erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung].’5 Even though Hegel’s 335

well-known formulation elaborates upon the ambivalent conjunction between greyness and the philosophical reflections to which it may be linked in ways that are perhaps more subtle and complex than has typically been appreciated, dominant interpretations of Hegel’s passage emphasise the ways in which philosophy is struck by a certain belatedness, a sense in which, when it finally does appear, it is unable to capture the full richness of lived experience in a world that is about to move on, shucking the forms of previous experience to which it had given rise. Viewed in this light, the speculative activity of painting grey in grey would suggest an inability in the face of a particular form of being alive, an impotence with regard to providing a new impetus and vision to sustain an ever-more exhausted world. When seen from this perspective, the grey in grey that philosophical thought paints becomes the very figure of lateness itself. Its theoretical apparatus is reduced to mere knowing (even while the status of that ‘knowing’ is itself rather shaky), as it cannot ‘rejuvenate’ a world and a form of living that are about to vanish for good. The theoretical interpretation offered by philosophical speculation, like the owl of Minerva itself, only first takes off amidst the darkness that descends upon it and the forms of life in relation to which it wishes to think, that is, amidst the achromatic shades of grey that dusk visits upon thought just as it begins to come into its own.6 There are few thinkers for whom this constellation of problems has played a more significant role than Theodor W. Adorno. As the following pages show, crucial elements in his conceptualisation of a negative dialectics in general and of his theory of the aesthetic in particular cannot be fully appreciated outside the framework of a thinking that incorporates both the threat and the hidden potentiality of its greyness. In fact, grey emerges as one of the keys to accessing core aspects of Adorno’s philosophical preoccupations. In his often overlooked ‘Marginalia on Theory and Praxis’, which first appeared in his late 336

collection of philosophical essays, Stichworte (Catchwords) – in turn figuring as the second volume of his Kritische Modelle, or Critical Models in 1969, the year of Adorno’s death – we encounter the following observations: ‘All theory is gray,’ Goethe has Mephistopheles preach to the student he is leading around by the nose; the sentence was already ideology from the very beginning, a fraud about the fact that the tree of life the practitioners planted and that the devil in the same breath compares to gold is hardly green at all; the grayness of the theory is for its part a function of the life that has been de-qualified. Nothing should exist that cannot be fastened upon by both hands; not thought. The subject, thrown back upon itself, divided from its Other by an abyss, is supposedly incapable of action.7 [Daß alle Theorie grau sei, läßt Goethe Mephistopheles dem Schüler predigen, den er an der Nase herumführt; der Satz war Ideologie schon am ersten Tag, Betrug darüber, wie wenig grün des Lebens Baum ist, den die Praktiker gepflanzt haben, und den der Teufel im gleichen Atemzug mit dem Metall Gold vergleicht; das Grau der Theorie seinerseits ist Funktion des entqualifizierten Lebens. Nichts soll sein, was nicht sich anpacken läßt; nicht der Gedanke. 337

Das auf sich selbst zurückgeworfene, durch einen Abgrund von seinem Anderen getrennte Subjekt sei unfähig zur Tat.]8 If Adorno espies in Goethe’s Mephistophelean pronouncement a decidedly ideological component, it is because the greyness that is said to saturate all theory and, therefore, is to be abhorred is, in actuality, something else entirely. It is the very instrument by means of which the greyness that permeates quotidian life and its various contexts of domination and oppression can be submitted to critique in the first place. Adorno reminds us that Mephistopheles, rather than enlightening his hapless pupil, actually leads him only ‘by the nose’, which is to say, he indoctrinates him with an ideology that prevents his pupil from availing himself of genuine theoretical reflection – which is simply dismissed as ‘grey’. Just as fatally, Mephistopheles creates the false impression that the tree of life is in fact colourful – green and vital – as the pragmatists who apparently placed it there for undisclosed reasons wish us to believe. The supposed greyness of theoretical reflection, in Adorno’s reading, is in reality the expression of an ‘entqualifiziertes Leben’, literally a kind of ‘de-qualified’ life that has lost its essential characteristics in deference to a mere functioning or seamless submission to the logic of domination and exploitation in which it is immersed. The aversion to grey, along with the greyness of theoretical reflection, therefore emerges as an ideologically motivated attempt to negate all true thinking by means of a pragmatist pre-censorship that only considers as real that which can be grasped in the most concrete terms while excluding any consideration of the idea that things could be entirely different. The pragmatist disqualification (or de-qualification) of theoretical reflection as merely ‘grey’ thus not only paints a deceptive picture of a supposedly ‘green’ and vivid tree of life, it also evinces a fear of 338

genuine thinking, whatever the content of that thinking may be in a particular context. Adorno’s critique of the de-qualification of theoretical thought as grey is evocative of Hannah Arendt’s incisive dictum from The Life of the Mind: ‘There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.’9 One might say that those who would wish to denigrate theoretical thought by associating it with the supposedly undesirable quality of greyness in reality wish to erase thinking itself by making it disappear under thick and impenetrable layers of grey. Yet, when seen from another vantage point, layers of grey can at times also aid the mobilisation of sustained philosophical and aesthetic practice. For instance, in a 2012 filmic installation entitled ‘Adorno’s Grey’, the German artist Hito Steyerl takes as her point of departure the persistent (but likely apocryphal) legend that Adorno had his seminar and lecture halls at the University of Frankfurt painted grey in order to minimise distraction and thus to enhance his students’ ability to concentrate on the task of thinking. In the course of the video projection, which lasts 14 minutes and 20 seconds, the black and white images of the film show two lab coat-clad conservators at work in Adorno’s former classrooms at the University of Frankfurt as they meticulously attempt to remove the top layers of wall paint in order to ascertain whether there is in fact a layer of grey paint to be found underneath.10 This quasi-palimpsestic approach to Adorno’s grey and its institutional history functions as a prismatic lens through which various aspects of his life, politics and thought come into view. Although the conservators’ investigative efforts yield only inconclusive results, their scraping and chiselling frames the film’s own investigation of grey, even the very greyness that insinuates itself into what we rather imprecisely call a black and white film. Here, it is the abiding mysteriousness of greyness itself that propels both conceptual thought and artistic practice forward. 339

Especially for the late Adorno, who devotes himself ever more relentlessly to a philosophical exploration of the work of art and, through it, to his unfinished Aesthetic Theory (the completion of which was interrupted by Adorno’s untimely death), such considerations of theory and its alleged imbrication with greyness deserve to be thought first and foremost in relation to artistic production. For instance, in a remarkable and, at first glance, rather enigmatic passage from Aesthetic Theory, Adorno takes up the question of greyness once again, this time in relation to a certain unconventional utopian potentiality that he hopes to develop conceptually through recourse to the work of art: Each artwork is utopia insofar as through its form it anticipates what would finally be itself, and this converges with the demand for the abrogation of the spell of self-identity cast by the subject. No artwork is to be ceded to another. This justifies the indispensable sensual element of artworks: It bears their hic et nunc in which, in spite of all mediation, a certain independence is maintained; naïve consciousness, which always clings to this element, is not altogether false consciousness. The nonfungibility, of course, takes over the function of strengthening the belief that mediation is not universal. But the artwork must absorb even its most fundamental enemy – fungibility; rather than fleeing into concretion, the artwork must present through its own concretion the total nexus of abstraction 340

and thereby resist it. Repetition in authentic new artworks is not always an accommodation to the archaic compulsion toward repetition. Many artworks indict this compulsion and thereby take the part of what Haag has called the unrepeatable; Beckett’s Play, with the spurious infinity of its reprise, presents the most accomplished model. The black and gray of recent art, its asceticism against color, is the negative apotheosis of color.11 [Utopie ist jedes Kunstwerk, soweit es durch seine Form antezipiert, was endlich es selber wäre, und das begegnet sich mit der Forderung, den vom Subjekt verbreiteten Bann des Selbstseins zu tilgen. Kein Kunstwerk ist an ein anderes zu zedieren. Das rechtfertigt das unabdingbare sinnliche Moment an den Kunstwerken: es trägt ihr Jetzt und Hier, darin bewahrt trotz aller Vermittlung sich auch einige Selbständigkeit; das naive Bewußtsein, das stets wieder an jenes Moment sich klammert, ist nicht durchaus das falsche. Allerdings übernimmt die Unvertauschbarkeit die Funktion, den Glauben zu bestärken, jene wäre nicht universal. Noch seinen tödlichsten Feind, Vertauschbarkeit, muß das Kunstwerk absorbieren; anstatt in Konkretion auszuweichen, durch die eigene Konkretion den 341

totalen Abstraktionszusammenhang darstellen und dadurch ihm widerstehen. Wiederholungen in authentischen neuen Kunstwerken bequemen nicht stets dem archaischen Wiederholungszwang sich an. In manchen verklagen sie ihn und ergreifen damit Partei für das von Haag so genannte Unwiederholbare; Becketts Play mit der schlechten Unendlichkeit seiner Reprise bietet dafür das vollkommenste Modell. Das Schwarz und Grau neuer Kunst, ihre Askese gegen die Farbe ist negativ deren Apotheose.]12 What is utopian in the work of art, or what points to a utopian elsewhere that is non-coextensive with what is merely the case in the worldly and intel­ lectual setting in which a work is situated, cannot be found on the level of its content, that is, on the level of what it appears to be about, its ‘theme’ or apparent subject matter. If no artwork is to be ‘ceded’, as Adorno puts it, to another, that is, if the artwork persists in the irreducible and unsublatable singularity that makes it absolutely other from all other works – even as it also necessarily remains connected to these other works qua its work-character – this is because the utopian element anticipated by the work comes to pass precisely in its form, that is, in the formal features which alone relate it to its situatedness in the here and now. To actualise its utopian pull, the artwork absorbs within itself even that which it resists, its own Vertauschbarkeit, the fungibility or exchangeability in a system of exchange and exchange relations. To fulfil its own movement of concretisation, the work of art incorporates, and then serves as host for, the negatively charged system of mere abstraction and bad infinity in which, under the conditions of modernity, it 342

comes to pass. As so often is the case in Adorno’s aesthetic theory, Beckett’s work represents a prime instantiation of that refractory knowledge and its artistic consequences. For instance, repetition here must not be mere repetition because the genuine work of art – such as Beckett’s – may well mobilise the movement of repetition precisely to call into question art’s repetition compulsion, whether in its relation to mimesis or with an eye towards its position vis-à-vis mass cultural production. It is striking to note that Adorno’s thought concludes by referring to the ‘black and gray [Schwarz und Grau]’ of contemporary art. After all, as we have seen, the discourse of colour and non-colour – and especially of grey or greyness – plays such a pivotal role in his reading of Goethe and Hegel, as well as in his own thinking. At this point in Adorno’s meditations, the emphasis on grey and greyness in what was then ‘new’ art, its guardedness and quasi-ascetic stance in relation to colour, does not merely represent a turn away from specific colours or the very idea of colour and its potentialities. On the contrary, the utopian-liberatory streak that may mutely traverse the grey work of art is precisely to be located in its indirect or silent preser­vation of colour as a negativity, an other that is kept alive, even made the object of an apotheosis, when it is seemingly eschewed or repressed. The trace of otherness that is inscribed through the absence of colour in the grey work of art perpetuates the potential thinkability and return of colour itself. The precise logic of this movement is further concretised when we recall a particular passage from Negative Dialectics, where, at a point in the argument that might be read as an indirect response to Hegel’s (and, by extension, Goethe’s) statements on the greyness of theoretical thought, Adorno emphasises: Total determinism is no less mythical than is the totality of Hegel’s logic. Schopenhauer was 343

an idealist malgré lui-même, a spokesman of the spell. The totum is the totem. Consciousness could not even despair over grayness if it did not harbor the concept of a different color, a scattered trace of which is not absent from the negative whole. The trace always comes from the past, and hope comes from its counterpart, from that which was forced to go under or is doomed. Such an interpretation [Deutung] may very well be in accord with Benjamin’s text on Elective Affinities: ‘Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.’13 [Totaler Determinismus ist nicht weniger mythisch als die Totale der Hegelschen Logik. Schopenhauer war Idealist malgré lui-même, Sprecher des Bannes. Das totum ist das Totem. Bewußtsein könnte gar nicht über das Grau verzweifeln, hegte es nicht den Begriff von einer verschiedenen Farbe, deren versprengte Spur im negativen Ganzen nicht fehlt. Stets stammt sie aus dem Vergangenen, Hoffnung aus ihrem Widerspiel, dem, was hinab mußte oder verurteilt ist; solche Deutung wäre dem letzten Satz von Benjamins Text über die Wahlverwandtschaften, ‘Nur um der Hoffnungslosen willen ist uns die Hoffnung gegeben’, wohl angemessen.]14 344

Just as in Aesthetic Theory the greyness in modern works of genuine art preserves what it simultaneously occludes or neglects (that is, colour itself) by keeping alive within itself an awareness of this repressed otherness, so Negative Dialectics argues that there can be no consciousness that is capable of feeling despair in the face of a particular experience of greyness without also having a strong intimation of colour, a different colour, even of the concept of colour itself. And the place where this implicit or hidden knowledge is preserved is in the negative whole, in other words, in the very fibres where the despair associated with the supposed bleakness of grey is said to originate. If Adorno here prefers to speak not of archives, supplies or storage facilities but merely of elusive traces (‘Spuren’), this is because the dispersed traces, aleatory remnants and spectral remainders of our knowledge of colour permeate even and especially the grey works of art that may appear to have turned their backs on the ideas of hope and utopian longing altogether. In this sense, Adorno evokes his friend Benjamin, who in the memorable last sentence of his 1924/1925 essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities gives voice to the idea of receiving hope only in the name of, and for the sake of, the hopeless, that is, those who in principle are not able to receive any hope at all. No despair over this Goethean-Hegelian grey would even be possible if the knowledge – mediated by history, unsaturated experience and a hope for radical alterity – of another colourful way of being in the world did not inscribe itself as an invisible, unruly, spectral otherness in the discourse of non-knowledge and even of despair. The ‘versprengte Spur’, or dispersed trace, of colour that, according to Adorno, necessarily suffuses the experience of any greyness that is capable of evoking despair over its own abject condition, deserves to be further explored. One may turn, with this purpose in mind, to a text first published in 1960 and later entitled ‘Blochs Spuren’ (‘Bloch’s Traces’), in which Adorno engages 345

not only with Ernst Bloch’s 1930 collection of thought-images, the literary-­ philosophical miniatures entitled Spuren, but also with the relation among trace, colour and the principle of hope broadly conceived. While Adorno, especially in the early phases of his thinking, is not unreceptive to many of Bloch’s philosophical lessons, thinking highly enough of Bloch’s reflections on utopian principles to engage with Bloch in public settings such as a radio discussion on ‘Contradictions in Utopian Longing’, Adorno is careful to demarcate where his thinking deviates from Bloch’s utopian project. Adorno draws this line when he once again takes recourse to the language of greyness and colour. He writes: ‘For the trace itself is the involuntary, inconspicuous, intentionless. [Denn die Spur selbst ist das Unwillkürliche, Unscheinbare, Intentionslose.] To reduce it to an intention is to violate it, just as examples violate the dialectic [Beispiele an der Dialektik freveln], as Hegel recognizes in the Phenomenology. The color that Bloch is after becomes gray when it becomes total [or: totality, als Totale].’ And he continues: ‘Hope is not a principle. But philosophy cannot fall silent in the face of color [Philosophie kann aber nicht vor der Farbe verstummen]. Philosophy cannot move within the medium of thought, of abstraction, and then practice asceticism when it comes to the interpretation [Askese gegen die Deutung] in which such movement terminates. If it does, its ideas become enigmas.’15 In specifying how his own thinking of the trace differs from that of Bloch, Adorno stresses that the trace traverses an aleatory space of fleetingness, non-determination and non-intentionality. In contrast to Bloch’s idea of the trace, Adorno’s conception of the trace cannot simply be mobilised by a sovereign, knowing consciousness in the service of any particular programme or agenda. Closer to Jacques Derrida’s later conception of the radical trace than to Bloch’s intention-bound utopianism of the trace, Adorno fastens upon the non-containability of the trace, 346

its internal fissures and deviances, its unruly aberrations and disruptions. It is no coincidence that Adorno once again refers back to Hegel, who argues that examples of the dialectic can never catch up with it – that is, examples never merely illustrate a dialectical process which is always already operative beyond the very logic of exemplarity. Like the example that cannot match the requirements of the dialectic whose workings it is meant to illustrate, intentionality and its consciousness-bound modes of conceptualisation cannot account for the aberrant potentiality of the trace, whose inherent utopian potential and liberatory force are inextricably intertwined with its resistance to any intention-bound, knowing subject’s instrumentalisation. In his qualification of Bloch’s conception of the trace of utopian hope, Adorno notably employs the language of greyness to describe how Bloch’s hopefulness or ‘colour’ (‘Farbe’) tacitly turns grey (‘wird grau’) when it enters the realm of totality. This movement of unwitting exchange, in which colour transforms into greyness, is the price – according to Adorno’s reading – that Bloch’s model must pay for seeking to harness the utopian potentiality of the trace in the service of a prescribed political programme with a predetermined image of the world, including the particular colour combinations it is meant to possess in the future. For Bloch, the utopian force of an artwork is realised by means of a ‘principle’, more specifically, a ‘principle of hope’, as his magnum opus, the three-volume Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1954–1959), names it. For Adorno, however, hope ‘is not a principle’, but a concept that demands to be thought in different terms and according to different models. While Adorno does not say just what hope precisely is if it is no principle, he does intimate that hope must still assume the responsibility of engaging with the world of colour and colourfulness that the grey of non-freedom – along with the grey of totalisation that paradoxically works against its own intention precisely by remaining attached to the category of intentionality – threatens to paint over. 347

One might suggest that Adorno also hears in the threat of grey (Grau) a certain Grauen (horror), a Grausen (a shudder in the face of something uncanny), something grauenvoll (gruesome) or gräulich (horrible), perhaps even a Grausamkeit (cruelty). In Adorno’s world of thought, to face this threat rigorously also means to affirm that ‘philosophy cannot fall silent in the face of color’. In other words, philosophy cannot abandon its responsibility, perhaps even its infinite responsibility, to a life-world demanding to be liberated, a world wishing for emergent colour to undo its saturation in greyness.16 It is perhaps no coin­ cidence that Adorno’s formulation takes recourse to the rhetorical figure of synesthesia, in which the experience of one sensory impression is expressed in terms of another. Philosophy must not ‘fall silent’, he argues, before colour, even though colour is perceived visually, as an object of one’s sight, not one’s voice. Why, then, is the sound of philosophy’s voice and not the faculty of sight addressed in Adorno’s formulation? It is as though philosophical thought must not content itself with merely taking in the colour images of the world as it presents itself – or as it might be imagined once its greyness is replaced by colour. On the contrary, any perceived or imagined colour, or even a perceived or imagined distinction between colour and greyness, would require philosophical thought not only to look at it but always also to address it, to speak to it. The demand for philosophical thought to ‘Speak the speech, I pray you’, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet has it, is inextricably intertwined with the demand that philosophy not fall silent (‘verstummen’ is Adorno’s word) visà-vis the colour, real or as-yet only imagined, without which the world in which philosophical thought is immersed could hardly be conceived. The demand that philosophy not fall silent in the face of colour (‘nicht vor der Farbe verstummen’) also entails exposing itself to the exacting and exhausting requirements of explication and interpretation (‘Deutung’). The 348

object of this explication and interpretation may be the appearance of a specific colour, the general idea of colour, or even colour as it comes to suffuse, for instance in the form of a trace, a specific area or even a world of greyness. Yet the object of this ‘Deutung’ is also the very thought that philos­ ophy produces. In other words, the thinking to which philosophy gives rise in the face of colour first must be understood as such; it cannot simply be assumed to be a transparent, self-identical form of communication, offered in the form of straightforward propositional argumentation. Thinking and (its) understanding are themselves in need of thinking and understanding. Philosophical thought therefore cannot eschew the task of interpretation while embracing a certain ‘ascesis’ of meaning. It is not necessary to revisit Nietzsche’s trenchant critique of ascetic ideals in the third section of his Genealogy of Morals (‘What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?’) in order to appreciate Adorno’s guardedness with regard to the ideal of ascetic abstention here. Not engaging with the difficult demands of an ongoing and treacherous ‘Deutung’ would be akin to a kind of ‘Verstummen’, a falling into silence before the world of colour. By advancing his argumentation in this way, Adorno does not mean to suggest that the task of philosophical thought is to impose a closed and unalterable meaning upon a phenomenon or to interrupt the movement of a signifier in virtue of this or that achieved stable meaning. Rather, what comes to pass in the medium of thought cannot simply be held in abeyance as if it had no meaning at all, that is, as if it did not explain anything, as if it did not make a significant argument or expound an intelligible position. Whatever comes to pass, therefore, in and as philosophical thought in the world of colour – and, by extension, what refuses to fall silent in the face of colour – is intimately bound up with the Sisyphean task of reading and interpretation, of obsessive analysis, even when this analysis cannot come to rest in the safe harbour of achieved hermeneutical stability 349

once and for all, because its encounter with the object to be understood keeps running awry. The relentless and obsessional nature of this analysis might itself be best conceptualised as grey: as a form of immanent repetition compulsion that enables fine-grained difference and nuance to emerge. Genuine artworks, in Adorno’s sense, are capacious, heterogeneous and non-self-identical enough to open up the possibility of both soliciting interpretation and complicating any achieved understanding at the same time, and grey figures as a provisional name or tonality for this resistance, reticence and perpetual unthoughtness. In this demanding gesture of invitation and withdrawal, they provide a space in which the intentionless trace of colour almost imperceptibly – yet therefore all the more powerfully – traverses any saturated space of greyness. If the artwork does indeed harbour any liberatory, even utopian trace, such a trace also signals a certain complication, even rejection, of the commodified forms of consciousness into which the world of modernity has so dramatically fallen. In this world of exchange and exchangeability, everything and everyone is assigned a certain value in a system of equivalences, leaving no singularity, no idiomaticity, no disruption exempt from the powerful imposition of forms of equivalency onto every object, person and aspect of experience. But this ‘equivalent form [Äquivalentform]’, Adorno emphasises in his thought-image ‘Kaufmannsladen’ from Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, ‘disfigures all perception. What is no longer irradiated by the light of its own self-determination as “joy-in-doing,” pales to the eye.’ With respect to grey, one might say that this Adornean ‘irridation’ effected by ‘the light of its own self-determination’ – which can always also be a form of indetermination – suggests a grey that is not concerned with general equivalences or fungibility but rather with acts of immanent, nuanced colouring. He proceeds, implicitly taking up the Hegelian distinction between a ‘for-oneself ’ and a ‘for-another’, to observe how 350

‘organs grasp nothing sensuous in isolation, but notice whether a color, a sound, a movement is there for its own sake or for something else; wearied by a false variety, they steep all in gray [tauchen alles in Grau], disappointed by the deceptive claim of qualities still to be there at all, while they conform to the purposes of appropriation, indeed largely owe their existence to it alone’.17 One might say that the slender trace of colour within a vast sea of grey commodity equivalences consists in the insight that ‘only when purified of appropriation would things be colorful and useful at the same time [bunt und nützlich zugleich]: under universal compulsion the two cannot be reconciled’.18 The greyness of one’s experience of the commodity-world is sustained by a compulsory emphasis on exchange relations and the thinking of equivalences that are in principle deaf and blind to the singularity of any particular object, person or experience (except in those particular instances when singularity itself is seen as commodifiable, as in the case of a rare painting by a canonical artist, for example, or the unique misprint on a collectible record label). It is the utopian trace in a genuine work of art that interrupts the system of equivalence in such a way as to render the objects within it no longer grey (‘grau’) but ‘colourful’ (‘bunt’) and useful (‘nützlich’) at the same time (even though, as the present discussion has shown, it would ultimately be necessary to have at least some minimal traces of greyness that persist in any authentic work of art). To employ a more familiar Marxian terminology, the use value of an object is no longer eclipsed by its exchange value within the larger system of forced equivalences. In his 1969 reflections on ‘Free Time’, Adorno emphasises that, for the human subject situated within an economy of mere exchange relations, ‘boredom is the reflex reaction to objective grayness [das objektive Grau]’, while art behaves rather differently in relation to this objective greyness, presenting a provocation and potential subversion of the dominant grey, regardless of 351

whether or not a particular work of art is commonly characterised as utopian or reactionary, progressive or conservative.19 ‘Art’, he had underlined three years earlier in his musicological meditations concerning ‘Abused Baroque’, ‘separates itself through its mere existence from the gray of normal bourgeois self-preservation; the non-normal is its apriori, its own norm’.20 The artwork thus breaks with the greyness of quotidian experience in an administered world merely by existing, that is, prior to this or that content or intention. Its utopian otherness does not lie in the propositional statements or political agenda it may seem to offer but rather in its multiple aberrations from the self-sustaining norms of a conventionally bourgeoisie mode of being in the world, that is, the familiar models of mere self-preservation. If its norm is precisely to deviate from any norm, and if it affirms only the undoing of any affirmation, the genuine work of art opens itself to the rays of colour that penetrate even the most saturated greyness. Perhaps the utterly unconventional utopian streak traversing the work of art even allows – for all its celebration of colour and its associated possibilities and liberatory promise – a renewed appreciation of the utopian potentiality of grey itself, its often-hidden beauty and dignity. After all, it is hardly an accident that, in a 1928 review of Manuel de Falla’s ballet ‘Le Tricorne’ as performed in Frankfurt at the time, Adorno remarks that what was ‘most beautiful’ (‘das Schönste’) about it was the ‘Spanish stage set by Picasso; with dreamy arches of the bridge, little windows that hang like flags in the wind, and a gray in which there is more sun and more Southern essence that in any radiant yellow (‘einem Grau, in dem mehr Sonne und südliche Essenz steckt als in allem strahlenden Gelb’)?’21 Dreamy painterly strokes of grey such as Picasso’s here work to raise into consciousness the aesthetically mediated greyness that opens rather than forecloses, even in a world in which it is so difficult to tell apart the movements of opening and foreclosing at any given moment. 352

Notes A different version of this essay first appeared as a chapter in Gerhard Richter, This Great Allegory: On World-Decay and World-Opening in the Work of Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2022). Reprinted by permission. 1. Magdalena Bushart and Gregor Wedekind, ‘Die Farbe Grau. Zur Geschichte einer künstlerischen Praxis’, in Die Farbe Grau, ed. by Bushart and Wedekind (Berlin: de Gruyter Verlag, 2016), ix–xx, here xix. A note on translations: On occasion, translations of quotations have been slightly adjusted to enhance their fidelity to the original. Where no English translation is indicated, as in the present case, the translation is my own. 2. David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing, On Color (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 209. 3. Frances Guerin, The Truth is Always Grey: A History of Modernist Painting (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 27. In a similar vein, the art historians gathered around greyness in the above-cited volume Die Farbe Grau collectively work to trouble conventional apperceptions of grey by casting unexpected per­ spectives onto its diverse art-historical trajectories, which extend from antiquity to the present day. 4. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), 207; Faust. Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. 3, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: DTV, 1988), 66. 5. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox, rev. and ed. Stephen Houlgate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 16; Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, vol. 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 28.

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6. It would be instructive to attempt a comparative analysis of Hegel’s evocation of grey in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right and his evocation of black in a similarly pronounced place, the Preface to his early Phenomenology of Spirit, where he speaks of a ‘night [Nacht]’ in which ‘as the saying goes, all cows are back [alle Kühe schwarz sind]’. While Hegel’s comment is typically understood as a polemical critique of Schelling’s conception of the Absolute, the specific chromatic valences of Hegel’s rhetoric here are not normally considered. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 22; Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 9. 7. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Marginalia to Theory and Praxis’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 259–278, here 260. 8. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10:2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 759–782, here 759f. 9. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind. Volume I: Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 176. 10. A constellation of images from Hito Steyerl’s ‘Adorno’s Grey’ – both the film and the surrounding installation as whole, which itself is also designed entirely in grey – can be found at https://kow-berlin.com/artists/hito-steyerl/adornos-grey; and a 2013 artist’s talk by Steyerl about this work is located at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=PhmNXnKfZko. For a historical contextualisation of Steyerl’s installation in relation to the political landscape of postwar Germany, see Samir Gandesha, ‘The Color of Adorno’s Thought: On Hito Steyerl’s Adorno’s Grey’, in Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis: Beyond Reification, ed. Stefano Giacchetti Ludovisi (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), 189–204. 11. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 135. 354

12. Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 203f. 13. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Continuum, 2005), 377f. 14. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 371. 15. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Ernst Bloch’s Spuren’, in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 200–215, here 213; ‘Blochs Spuren’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 233–250, here 247f. 16. Although such an undertaking exceeds the boundaries of the present study, it would be illuminating to trace the complex relays between this aspect of Adorno’s thinking of colour and the early Benjamin’s fascination with the emancipatory dimension of colour as it is articulated in a number of shorter texts and fragments such as ‘A Child’s View of Color’, ‘Painting, or Signs and Marks’ and ‘The Rainbow’ (all from the period 1914–1915). There and elsewhere, Benjamin’s interest in the liberatory dimension of colour is worked out not only in relation to movements such as Der Blaue Reiter but also in relation to individual painters and their use of colour, including Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke and Paul Klee. For sustained analyses of the early Benjamin’s investment in the potentialities of colour, see Howard Caygill, The Colour of Expe­ rience (London: Routledge, 1998); Heinz Brüggemann, Walter Benjamin. Über Spiel, Farbe und Phantasie (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2007); and, most recently, the incisive reflections by Martin Jay, ‘Chromophilia: Der Blaue Reiter, Walter Benjamin, and the Emancipation of Color’, Positions: Asia Critique, 26, 1 (2018): 13–33. 17. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1999), 227; Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 259f. 355

18. Adorno, Minima Moralia (1999), 227f.; Adorno, Minima Moralia (1997), 260. 19. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Free Time’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 167–175, here 171; ‘Freizeit’, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10.2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 645–655, here 650. 20. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Der mißbrauchte Barock’, in Ohne Leitbild: Parva Aesthetica, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10.1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 401–422, here 403. 21. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Frankfurter Opern- und Konzertkritiken’, in Musikalische Schriften VI, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 19, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 124.

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11. Grey Illuminations: Foucault and Warburg in the Kingdom of Shadows Henrik Gustafsson

‘Genealogy is gray, meticulous and patiently documentary.’1 The opening statement of Michel Foucault’s 1971 essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ reiter­ates Friedrich Nietzsche’s polemics against ‘the genuinely English type’ of genealogy, ‘gazing around haphazardly in the blue’, launched in the preface 357

to On the Genealogy of Morals.2 As the antidote to the ethereal realms of the soul and sky hypothesised in earlier genealogies of humankind’s development, the German philosopher advances his own grey tactics, determined to mine ‘the entire long hieroglyphic record, so hard to decipher’.3 Turning away from human interiority and the perceived grand teleologies of Spirit and Reason, grey genealogy traverses the exterior margins of a vast and often discouraging terrain overlain with opacities, densities and minutiae, not in order to retrieve some transcendental signifier hidden beneath or beyond the ‘field of entangled and confused parchments’, 4 but to demonstrate how the very idea of origins, essences and first principles has been retroactively constructed and subsequently covered over. As a general strategy, Foucault delineates his concepts negatively by cropping out what they are not. Discourse, he asserts, is not, ‘a manifest, visible, coloured chain of words’.5 Consequently the genealogist should ‘not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity’.6 In the two programmatic declarations made a century apart by Nietzsche and Foucault, greyness denotes the dense and disjunct strata uncovered in the genealogical analysis of descent, or what the opening sentence of The Archaeology of Knowledge describes as, ‘the movements of accumulation and slow saturation, the great silent, motionless bases that traditional history has covered with a thick layer of events’.7 The thesis that knowledge and reason are historically contingent, obeying the provisional and unconscious roots of a period’s dominant episteme, was first formulated in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Working at the fringes of discursive formations, the archaeological method crafted by Foucault is not concerned with language as an instrument to express emotions or communicate ideas, nor with the content or message of individual texts, but as a framework that regulates the conditions of possi­bility of what 358

can be said or thought at a given time. In the renowned analysis of Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas (1656) undertaken in the opening pages of the book, the author reflects on the limits of his own ekphrasis by appealing to a tenacious greyness. Rather than seeking to abridge the chasm between language and looking, the sayable and the see­able, verbal description and pictorial surface, Foucault insists that the lacuna that separates them must remain open and undecided: if one wishes to treat their incompatibility as a starting-point for speech instead of as an obstacle to be avoided, so as to stay as close as possible to both, then one must erase those proper names and preserve the infinity of the task. It is perhaps through the medium of this grey, anonymous language, always over-meticulous and repetitive because too broad, that the painting may, little by little, release its illuminations.8 The greyness of archaeology, congruently, results from an act of erasure, as digging inevitably disturbs the topsoil, breaking up the crust of proper names and events and blurring out the higher stratum of meanings and ideas. When meditating on the fictions and literary theory of Maurice Blanchot in ‘The Thought from the Outside’, published the same year as The Order of Things, Foucault similarly maintains that it is by relentlessly clinging to ‘the gray neutrality’ of language that Blanchot in his writings is able to deactivate the communicative and representational function of language and to unveil, in place of its demand to mean and signify, an experience of language as such.9 Instead of exerting ‘a power that tirelessly produces images and makes them 359

shine’, then, the figures outlined by Blanchot appear ‘in the gray tones of everyday life and the anonymous’ – figures, which by merit of their self-­ effacing tonalities, possess the power to illuminate ‘the gray monotony’ in which they are enveloped.10 In his book-length essay on René Magritte a few years later, Foucault once more describes the indeterminate space between words and images, texts and figures, as a grey interstice. ‘The slender, colorless, neutral strip’, he maintains, ‘must be seen as a crevasse – an uncertain, foggy region’.11 Taken together, Foucault’s methodological musings confer a double valance to greyness. On the one hand, it denotes the empirical materials submitted to archeological and genealogical investigation; on the other, the medium through which the analyses themselves are conducted. These two distinct meanings of greyness converge in the general critique not only of historical hermeneutics but also of language itself immanent to Foucault’s project. The causal and progressive timelines of history, forged from random events and isolated accidents, are in part an effect of the linearity of written language. As an alternative to such a carefully wrought and intelligible order, designed to overcome discontinuities and replenish gaps, ‘so that the chain of knowledge may be made visible in all its clarity, without any shadows or lacunae’,12 archaeology and genealogy conceives of time as dispersed and scattered. Instead of summoning clear voices and colourful characters from archival records, it isolates these traces as monuments, as stony slabs abandoned by the past, inert, mute and grey, in order to stake out the distances of the unsaid that separates them.13 The cartographic and topographic inflection so prevalent in Foucault’s writings thus conjectures that language, rather than a transparent and representational medium, constitutes a territory in its own right, shattered by seismic shifts in the course of time and deposited into distinct and disjunct strata. 360

The plea to a ‘grey science’, to paraphrase Nietzsche, immersed in the muffled background noise of the archive, may in hindsight prompt a consideration of the epistemological ground that Foucault’s grey illuminations of the history of systems of thought obscured. As Friedrich Kittler has noted, Foucault’s methodology grinds to a halt at the moment when the era of the book is over. While the sources traditionally analysed by the historian may be heterogeneous and contradictory, ‘extremely diverse in terms of addressee, distribution technique, degree of secrecy, and writing technique’,14 they were nonetheless inscribed and preserved within the monopolistic medium of written language, the same medium through which the archaeologist conducted his critique of positivist historicity. However, as Kittler reprimands Foucault: Even writing itself, before it ends up in libraries, is a communication medium, the technology of which the archeologist simply forgot. It is for this reason that all his analyses end immediately before that point in time at which other media penetrated the library’s stacks. Discourse analysis cannot be applied to sound archives or towers of film rolls.15 In media archaeology, the analysis of different genres of discourse is supplanted by the analysis of discourse networks, Aufschreibesysteme, the media-technological a prioris that subtend the discursive field and that function independently and indifferently of whatever enunciations are channelled through them. From the perspective of media archaeology, discourse is not formed and dispersed ‘in the dust of books’,16 but in the substrate of communication technologies; not deposited in ‘the wavelike succession of words’,17 361

but in analogue waves, electric currents and digital pulses. A different spectrum of grey therefore confronts the media archaeologist. While the twenty-six letters of the alphabet effectively filtered out noise, the automated tools for inscription, storage and transmission introduced in the nineteenth century – photography, phonography and cinematography, all ending with the suffix graphē, ‘writing’ – drastically altered signal-to-noise and foreground-to-background ratios. With the indiscriminate recording of electromagnetic waves as grains, specks and sparks, Kittler says, ‘media were engulfed by the noise of the real’.18 But these grains also contained the kernel for a different articulation of the past, ‘freed from the anthropological theme’,19 as Foucault implored, and its causality-driven vectors. Post-Kittlerian media archaeologies have subsequently uncovered the grey strata of techno-mathematical operations: the code layer of numerical algorithms; the physical layer of circuits, cables, sensors and servers; and the geological substrate of rare earth minerals out of which electronic media devices are wrought. The archaeology of knowledge and the archaeology of media are nonetheless programmatically allied not merely in their stance against anthropocentric and teleologic narratives, but also in the granular and unassuming nature of the material with which they engage, or what media theorists Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey simply denominates as ‘gray media’.20 In the first case, medical journals, bureaucratic files, administrative notes and memos; in the second, lines of code, protocols, data sets, technical patents and standards. Grey media are thus for all intents and purposes operative in the background, and therefore constitutively overlooked. The following pages likewise proposes to understand greyness as a medium in its own right. They will proceed, however, by assuming the opposite approach; not by attending to the obscured and unnoticed background, but by clinging to the phenomenological surface of photographic greyness. 362

The greyness with which the present enquiry is concerned constitutes a medium in three respects: in the etymological sense as a space in-between; in the spiritualist sense as a realm for communicating with ghosts and spirits; and in the heuristic sense as a tool for conducting archaeological and genealogical investigations. The discussion below is structured around two focal points. First, with regard to some early responses to the projections of animated photograms at the turn of the last century, which on the one hand were reproached as a phantomisation of the world, transforming living beings into anemic sleepwalkers, and on the other hailed as a reawakening of the dead, a resurrection of the past, and the source for a new form of history. From here, the discussion moves on to consider the significance of greyness in the photographic montage that was mounted by the German cultural historian Aby Warburg in the late 1920s on the black panels of his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Tracing the afterlife (Nachleben) of pagan antiquity through recursive Pathosformeln, Warburg’s coinage for psychic states of passion or suffering frozen in the movement and fossilised as gestures, the Mnemosyne project will be addressed as a particularly potent, if bewildering, exponent of a grey genealogy, historically situated between Nietzsche and Foucault. This discussion finally beckons towards a more elusive a priori, one that calls for an archaeology of the phantasmatic media of the imaginative faculty. Grey Magic In the summer of 1896, Maxim Gorky attended the demonstration of the Cinématographe Lumière at the annual All-Russian Exhibition in his hometown of Nizhny Novgorod. This is what Gorky had to report after his descent from the fairgrounds into ‘The Kingdom of Shadows’: 363

Everything there – the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air – is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey [. . .] All this is in grey, and the sky above is also grey [. . .] Noiselessly, the ashen-grey foliage of the trees sways in the wind, and the grey silhouettes of the people, as though condemned to eternal silence and cruelly punished by being deprived of all the colours of life, glide noiselessly along the grey ground [. . .] Before you a life is surging, a life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colours – the grey, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life.21 Invoked no less than seventeen times in Gorky’s review, a prodigious greyness defines the simulated half-life conjured by the cinematograph. It is worth recalling that this is the account of an aspiring author, subsequently to become the founder of the socialist realist movement, who bears witness to the shattering of the symbolic order of written language by the intrusion of analogue media of technical reproducibility. Whereas the initial journalistic reception of the Lumière screenings that had taken place six months earlier in Paris extolled the medium’s miraculous capacity to capture and reproduce life itself, even ‘in color’ as one exalted reviewer erroneously exclaimed,22 Gorky scorns cinema as a gloomy travesty of the afterlife, caught in a loop of endless reruns. ‘Curses and ghosts, evil spirits that have cast entire cities into eternal sleep comes to mind’, he writes, ‘scraping together 364

all the pigment of earth and sky into a monotonous grey colour’.23 While quick to divulge the bleak and juddering chimera as a simple illusionist trick, Gorky nonetheless admits to succumbing to the mechanically induced sorcery. Internalising the life-draining greyness, his ‘consciousness begins to wane and grow dim’. Along similar lines, the Russian symbolist Zinaida Gippius speaks of ‘the grey dead of the cinematograph’ in her 1911 novel The Devil’s Doll, and in a short story published three years later, a character who has entered a pact with the devil is transported to a medially updated version of the infernal region, ‘surrounded by a cinematograph: everything was black and grey, fast-moving. Agitated and voiceless, and I too was part of the cinematograph. I wasn’t afraid, just bored.’24 This fate befalls mankind in its entirety in Salomo Friedlaender’s fantastic novel Gray Magic from 1922, which envisages a technology through which to take complete mastery over the mediating substance of ether.25 Through this device, monitored by a telepathically controlled typewriter, the ethereal emanations of the human brain can be directly transmitted onto external reality, and the whole planet transformed into an achromatic and three-dimensional cinematic projection. The Lumière brothers cunningly staged the passage from the old medium of photography to the new medium of cinematography as a magician’s trick, opening their shows with the projection of a still photograph that, after a few moments of inertia, unexpectedly rippled into motion. As Gorky tells us, ‘suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and the picture stirs to life’.26 Stirring anima, a current of air or breath, into the frozen image, this gimmick inferred that life henceforth could be reanimated and reversed at will by the cranking of the projector. Where Gorky saw mere shadows, anaemic undead inhabiting a permanent twilight, others eulogised the grey magic of sequentially projected photograms as a resurrection. In his 1898 appeal for the establishment of a national archive of animated photography, 365

Boleslas Matuszewski, an early practitioner of the Lumière Cinématographe, compared the life conserved in the granular deposit on the celluloid ribbon to ‘those elementary organisms that, living in a latent state, revive after years given a bit of heat and moisture’.27 This emulsified life, Matuszewski says, is ‘scarcely sleeping’, and ‘it only requires, to reawaken it and relieve those hours of the past, a little light passing through a lens in the darkness!’28 This notion prevails in André Bazin’s canonical treatise on photographic autonomism half a century later, comparing the ‘grey or sepia shadows, phantomlike and almost undecipherable’, embalmed in the silver-­ gelatin to insects ‘preserved intact, out of the distant past, in amber’.29 In antiquity, it is worth recalling, amber was believed to be the product of sun rays moistening the topsoil, leaving behind an oily layer of film.30 The classic Latin and Greek names for amber, electrum or ēlektron, we can further note, mean ‘beaming sun’. In the light beam from the projector’s lamp, Bazin continues, the life fossilised in each photogram is released from its ‘convulsive catalepsy’.31 The magic moment at which ‘the picture stirs to life’ performed at the Lumiére shows may therefore be taken quite literally, as a stirring up of the sediments embedded in the mineral solution, miraculously transformed into a life-giving fluid. Despite Gorky’s emphasis on the insubstantial and phan­tasmatic nature of the oneiric images, his insistence on their all-­pervasive greyness ultimately points to their material condition on the molecular level in the oxidised grains of silver halide. Rushing before the projector’s lamp, the illuminated grains of salt open up an ontological grey zone between life and death, presence and absence. In the procession of shadows that Gorky rebuked as a distressing daydream, Matuszewski instead recognised ‘a new source of history’. The novelty was not only afforded by the camera’s servitude as a neutral witness at the scene of significant events, but by its 366

indiscriminate record of everyday life and its material surrounds. What Gorky describes as a levelling of figure and ground, ground down into a uniform greyness, generates an archive of ‘gray noise’: the random noise that results when all frequencies are equally loud. Put differently, the automatic recording of history facilitated an infinite repository of accidents, contingencies and minutia, precisely the kind of source material mined by the new historian identified by Foucault.32 As our final interlocutor on photographic greyness before considering its role in the Bilderatlas constructed by Aby Warburg, we turn to Vilém Flusser’s proposal for a philosophy of photography. With the advent of the first fully automated image, the photographic camera, the pictorial surface disintegrated into a field of grains. Thereby, Flusser asserts, history, the historical consciousness perpetuated by the linearity of written language, is formally over. The swarm of particles or ‘pixels’ (picture elements) brings about a post-historic spatialisation of time, fragmented and dispersed. First and foremost, ‘the photographic universe is grainy’, Flusser says, made up of agglomerations of quanta, dots and granules.33 The general greyness that results from the mixture of black and white, from the absolute absence or presence of light, which are reversed on the negative, does not correspond to any real situation in the external world but attests instead to the picture’s origin in the theory of optics. With the progression towards lower grain, higher resolution and colour sensitivity, this origin is gradually concealed. Uncoloured photography is therefore truer, since it discloses the automated operations of optical mechanisms, darkroom chemicals and silver nitrate processing. Theoretical fidelity comes at the expanse of chromatic high fidelity, it seems, or as Mephistopheles says in Faust, ‘Gray, my dear friend, is all theory.’34 Echoing this assessment, Flusser writes: ‘Grey is the colour of theory: which shows that one cannot reconstruct the world anymore from a 367

theoretical analysis. Black-and-white photographs illustrate this fact: They are grey, they are theoretical images.’35 From the discussion above we can infer three distinct affordances associated with the medium of photochemical greyness, all of which are pertinent to Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas project. First, it causes a dimming and dulling of vitality. Second, it enables a controlled form of reawakening of these diminished energies. And, third, it constitutes a medium for theoretical speculation. For Warburg, greyness prepares the ground for a new form of historical knowledge that straddles the permeable boundaries between science and magic. In his own words, the image scholar assumes the role of a ‘necromancer’, whereas the Mnemosyne Atlas consequently comprises ‘a ghost story for adults’.36 This terminology suggests that Warburg was working in the tradition of the phantasmagoria as practised by necromancers and ghost conjurers of the late eighteenth century.37 Whereas the magic lantern horror shows abided to a simple didactic logic whereby terrifying images were first projected and then exorcised by flaunting their artificial nature, however, the Mnemosyne Atlas cautioned the researcher not to fall prey to the fallacy that we are in control of images. On the contrary, the history of Western civilisation offers ample evidence that the opposite is the case. The energies transmitted by the image must therefore be confronted with restraint, mediated and modified by a sobering greyness, and considered in what Foucault calls “the gray light of neutralization”.38 Anaemic Awakening In the Grisaille Notebook (1928–1929), the working journal that Warburg kept during the final year of his life, an analogy is established between the quattrocento technique of greyscale painting and the tactical deployment of photographical reproductions in the Mnemosyne Atlas: 368

The strength of the artist in keeping these forces at bay without forfeiting their vitalizing influence is symbolized in the artistic means of the grisaille. Here the artist makes use of the symbols of pagan frenzy without allowing them to encroach on his peace of mind. He keeps them at a safe distance by not allowing these figures fully to come to life.39 Grisaille painting models its subjects in shades of grey of various brightness to emulate the three-dimensional plasticity of reliefs chiselled in mineral friezes. A certain minerality is thereby conferred to living bodies, rendering them as stony sculptures. What Renaissance artists achieved through a delicate layering of tones, shades and tints, Warburg sought to recreate by means of black and white gelatin silver photographs. In both cases, his journal entry suggests, grisaille proffered a means of protection against the affective and animistic charge of the imagery. Before considering the tempering function of grisaille further, however, let us pause to reflect on the spatial and territorial tropes that inform Warburg’s research in a dialogue with those subsequently advanced by Foucault. In the first case, the cartographic metaphor of a Bilderatlas and its concomitant terminology of image vehicles (Bilderfahrzeuge), image migration (Bilderwanderung), cultural pathways (Wanderstrassen der Kultur) and border guards (Grenzwächter). In the second, what Foucault glossed as his ‘spatial obsessions’, seeking to describe and demarcate the formations, transformations and delimitations of discursive spaces through the inquisitive lens of regional phenomena, administrative practices and territorial struggles.40 My contention in what follows is twofold: first, that the spatial inflection evident across both sets of writing is 369

indicatory of a methodological common ground; and, second, that this spatialising approach is intrinsic to greyness as a medium. In the concluding paragraphs of the introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault describes his mode of writing as the construction of ‘a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself’.41 The Mnemosyne was designed precisely for this purpose. Rather than a rigorously tabulated and taxonomised pictorial encyclopaedia, it was intended to serve as a heuristic tool for navigation, pathfinding and tunnelling. The Atlas was thus conceived of as a form of spatial intelligence, or what Warburg, in a metaphor originally referring to Nietzsche, likened to a seismographic sensor. 42 This instrument was not merely primed to register seismic disturbances in the earth, however, but to actively provoke them; unshackling figures and motifs sedimented in the soil of Western culture so as to stir up and tap into their energetic currents. In common with the archaeologist described by Foucault, the iconographer ‘is forced to advance beyond familiar territory, far from the certainties to which one is accustomed, towards an as yet uncharted land’, where he is to confront the ‘dim mechanisms, faceless determinations, a whole landscape of shadow that has been termed, directly or indirectly, the unconscious’.43 For Warburg, this unthought or unconscious dimension was the world of pagan antiquity, a domain that had been buried deep beneath the humanist discourse of art history and the hermeneutic tradition through which it operated. Inspired by the Apolline and Dionysiac polarity described by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, Warburg’s view of antiquity stands in stark opposition to the becalmed grace and perfection eulogised by Winckelmann and institutionalised by art historians of the nineteenth century. Rather than a rebirth of the virtues and virtuosity of the classical age, retroactively dubbed a renaissance, the ‘reawakening of antiquity’44 disclosed by 370

the Bilderatlas is commensurate to a return of the repressed, erupting in agitated or manic gestures of terror and turmoil. The recursive phenomena of Pathosformeln are thus to be understood as performances of an invisible power, channelling the savage and superstitious undercurrents of European culture, or what Warburg simply referred to as the psychic pulsations transmitted by ‘unchained, elemental man’.45 The propensity to translate temporal relations into spatial terms shared by Warburg and Foucault can in the first instance be understood as a reaction against, and a renouncement of, an orthodox dramaturgy of history, plotted and propelled by individual agents, authors and artists, elicited through line­ ages of influence and intentionality from predecessors to successors, and kept in check through the ‘proper names’ of biographies, oeuvres, epochs and canons, or what Foucault refers to as the ‘pre-existing forms of continuity’ that undergird the historian’s effort ‘to master time’.46 These forms will shatter, however, if one instead pays sustained attention to the ‘dispersions themselves’.47 The formal principle that impels Warburg’s final project is also succinctly paraphrased by Foucault in his brief but influential proposal for a heterotopic approach to history, instigated as a shift from a linear succession of causally driven events to a spatial collocation and juxtaposition ‘of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed’.48 Genealogical research is thus in both cases conceived of as a spatial, or space enabling, enterprise, devoted to open up new terrains of knowledge. These general comparative remarks now call for a closer consideration of the spatial dispositif of the Bilderatlas, and the role it conferred to the medium of greyscale reproduction. The photographic collection that Warburg began to assemble in the 1880s drastically expanded as the Mnemosyne project gathered apace. At the time of his death, the image archive comprised some 400,000 items, out of which approximately 1,000 were mounted onto seventy-nine wooden 371

boards stretched with black canvas that make up the Atlas in its provisional, unfinished form. 49 This form was shaped by the dynamic principles of dispersal and distillation and, more pragmatically, in the photographic laboratory that was part of the library facilities. Artefacts of highly diverse provenance were first cropped, cut and magnified, then arranged and rearranged into ever-malleable constellations, not in order to arrive at a conclusive inter­ pretation but, on the contrary, to defer closure and the teleology that it implies. The inclusion of non-art imagery in the late iterations of the atlas, spanning antique coins and playing cards to contemporary propaganda flyers, news­paper clippings and commercial ads, reflects Warburg’s resentment of ‘aestheticizing art history’,50 which reduces images to formal objects and thereby deprives them of life. Cut loose from the conventional criteria of art history and disseminated on the black fabric without regard to medium or artistic merit, ‘surrounded on all sides by an immense region of shadow’, to borrow a phrase from The Order of Things,51 subterranean morphological echoes emerged in a startling montage of anachronistic jump-cuts. Technical reproducibility further underscored the key genealogical intuition ‘that none of the images is the original’, as Giorgio Agamben points out, and that the emotive formulas therefore are not retraceable to ‘an origin presupposed in time’.52 Conversely, the psychic energies tracked on the panels are only observable in their singular and recursive effects, as events rather than origins, given as variations of a theme, not as archetypes. From another perspective, however, the Atlas is patently un-photographic in the sense that it inverts the relation between photographic automatism and moving subjects. Instead of capturing bodies in the act of an expressive gesture, the camera was directed at already immobilised bodies: chiselled, carved, engraved, or otherwise. In order to confer motion back into these inert figures, we may therefore say that Warburg reversed the gimmick of 372

the Lumiére brothers’ projector, where life suddenly rippled through a still photo­g raph. The Mnemosyne Atlas did not engender movement through temporal synthetisation but through spatial dispersion and paratactic connectivity within and across the panels. While liquidating the authorial aura of the reproduced artworks, levelling them with more mundane imagery, a different kind of ‘aura’ beckoned from the panels, an anonymous and unruly presence that Warburg sought to control through the medium of photographic greyness. The result is intrinsically paradoxical. While the Atlas was devoted to the visceral expressions of the human body and its accessories, what Warburg termed bewegts Leben, the world it charts is without hue, bloodless and disenchanted. In David Freedberg’s disparaging appraisal, ‘the images have little of their original force, and in their servitude to a curious kind of genealogical encyclopedism, all are strangely and improbably drained’.53 While Freedberg deems the Atlas as a failure because the images ‘are drained and ineffective’,54 reminiscent of Georg Lukács’ categorical rebuke of the ‘profound monotony’ elicited by the compulsive juxtapositions of photomontage, in which ‘the whole will never be more than an unrelieved grey on grey’,55 this anaemia should more accurately be considered as a calculated effect following from Warburg’s acute apprehension that he was working with dangerous and active material. Desaturation was a means for neutralising the energetically charged imagery by conferring to it the same overall temperature. Neutralising thereby also occasions a nuancing, moving the material into a different register or shading that facilitates a common milieu for diverse forms to traverse and communicate across vast stretches of time and territory, instantiating, as Didi-Huberman puts it, ‘the ground on which our very history of art in its long duration is played out’.56 Hence, if the end result is paradoxical, it is because Warburg conceived of greyness as an inherently paradoxical 373

medium; at once anaemic and animistic, life-draining and life-giving, plastic and placating. This grey field of immanence finally also approximates a chthonic region, reminding us that Mnemosyne not only was the name of the Greek goddess of memory but also of a mythical river flowing through the kingdom of shadows in Hades. In this context it is worthy of note that grisailles often served as underpaintings on which successive layers of paint were applied. The grey substrate thereby produced a background shading that occasionally remained visible through the glazed, chromatic surface. In an essay from 1907, Warburg alternatively refers to the grisaille figures seen in the background of a fresco by Ghirlandaio as relegated to a ‘shadowy midrealm’, or ‘a shadowy existence’,57 and in the Grisaille notebook some twenty years later he maintains that the monochrome style ‘keeps the shadowy realm of the pre-stamped revenants at a metaphoric distance’.58 Transformed from a medium of ‘artistic practice to theoretical speculation’, as Christopher D. Johnson observes, greyness was thus tactically employed by Warburg both to summon these shadows to life and to neutralise the destructive energetic currents that radiated from undead antiquity.59 In its oscillating capacity to at once restrain and reanimate, freeze and fluidify, photographic greyness instigated a buffer zone and a relay switch between the dead and the living; a Zwischenraum in Warburg’s term. Yielding a conjectural field of transcultural, transhistorical and transgeographical migrations, the Bilderatlas mobilises greyness, in Charlotte Schoell-Glass’ succinct formulation, ‘as a space-creating medium’.60 While the desperate gestures of defiance and defeat gathered on the panels are all visibly aroused, the dampening of vitality aims for a different kind of awakening. Greying yields a low-level intensity that detracts attention away from stark figure-ground oppositions towards a shared ground that persists and extends across the ever shifting and ever deferred, and hence ‘space-creating’, assemblages. 374

A Curative Science Let us now take note of a biographical connection. At the time of the defeat of the German Army and the November Revolution in 1918, Warburg suffered a mental breakdown. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, manic depression and paranoid psychosis, he was committed to various mental asylums until 1923, concluding with a three-year confinement at the Kreuzlingen sanatorium under the psychiatric treatment of Doctor Ludwig Binswanger. In order to demonstrate that he had recovered from mental illness and was ready to resume his scholarly work, Warburg delivered a lecture to the staff and fellow patients at the clinic on 21 April 1923.61 Ironically, the main thesis of the lecture given by Warburg to verify his return to sanity postulated that human culture is irredeemably schizophrenic. In 1954, at the age of twenty-eight, Michel Foucault published his first work in the form of an extensive introduction to the French translation of Ludwig Binswanger’s 1930 essay Dream and Existence. Foucault’s preamble was, in fact, more than twice as long as the original work it introduced, and thus a strong indication of the influence that Binswanger exhorted on the young philosopher, who not only assisted the translation from German to French but also corresponded with the psychiatrist and visited him at the Bellevue clinic in Kreuzlingen. While Foucault never wrote a word of commentary on the work of Warburg, his early reflection on existential psychology, which simply added the word ‘imagination’ to the title of Binswanger’s essay, offers yet another point of entry into the grey, interstitial spaces respectively navigated by Warburg and Foucault. ‘Dream, Imagination, and Existence’ ventures into the kingdom of shadows that we all inhabit while dreaming. Anticipating his argument against hermeneutics, Foucault here takes issue with the psycho­ analytical practice of dream interpretation. While acknowledging Freud’s 375

insights into the opaque and overdetermined nature of oneiric images, Foucault criticises psychoanalysis for seeking to abridge the distance between the image, gleaned by consciousness upon awakening, and the imagination from which it originated. With recourse to a symbolic relation, the dream content is by default referred back to some libidinal instinct or repressed desire that, Foucault objects, merely constitutes one of its possible meanings. In order not to foreclose the gap between the image and its secreted meaning, he proposes a shift of attention from the stilled image to the ‘imaginative plasticity’ of the space of imagination in its perpetual movements and currents of becoming.62 This furthermore entails a shift from the analysis of dreams as a set of inductive elements leading to the past to its anticipatory or prophetic function and ability to prefigure the future. This arcane space, which according to the Greco-­ Roman tradition of dream interpretation most vividly presents itself to the dreamer in the grey ‘half-light’ of early morning dreams, cannot be reified and resolved into ‘a rhapsody of images’.63 Repudiating the Freudian scheme, according to which latent dream-thoughts are distorted into picture puzzles to be deciphered by the psychoanalyst as the remnants of unconscious desires, wish fulfilments and repressed traumas, the problem of the dream image as identified by Foucault lies instead in its tendency to arrest and restrain the free flow of imagination. The fixation on the ‘crystalized image’ therefore distracts us from a genuine engagement with the malleable and mercurial expressivity of the imagination, blocking our access to the emancipatory space of the dream and the challenge that it implores upon us to question the preconceived necessities of our waking consciousness of the world.64 For this reason, he concludes, ‘the aim of psychotherapy should be to free the imaginary that is trapped in the image’.65 According to Giorgio Agamben, this was the task that Warburg assigned to the Mnemosyne Atlas. ‘The Atlas is a sort of depolarization and repolarization 376

station’, he explains, ‘in which the images from the past that lost their meaning and now survive as nightmares or spectres are kept suspended in the shadows’.66 In common with a dream, the atlas exerted an iconoclastic agency through which the crystallised fears and phobias that paralyse our imagination are conjured back to life in order to break their spell so as to open up ‘the space for an imagination with no more images’.67 In fact, Agamben is here closely paraphrasing a formulation that first appears in the concluding paragraphs of Foucault’s introduction to Binswanger. ‘Poetic expression’, Foucault says, ‘teaches us to break with the fascination of images and to reopen, for imagination, its path of freedom toward the dream that offers it.’68 This text is also discussed at length by Agamben in his reflections on the methodology of the human sciences in The Signature of All Things, which concludes with a probing enquiry into philosophical archaeology. It is in his exegesis on Binswanger, Agamben proposes, that ‘Foucault perhaps most precisely ­ described – or foresaw – the strategies and gestures of archaeology’, and this is precisely because ‘“the movement of freedom” that Foucault attributes to the dream and imagination shares the meanings and aims of archaeology’.69 To recap, in brief, the gist of the strategies and aims shared between Warburg and Foucault. In congruence with Warburg’s critique of art history, Foucault reproaches psychoanalysis for failing to acknowledge the vital energies immanent in the image because it only considers the image in its crystallised and immobilised form. Conversely, anticipating Foucault’s assessment of gene­ alogy as a ‘curative science’,70 offering an antidote to positivist historicism by unmasking its claims to truth, morality and reason, Warburg, the self-­ declared ‘psycho-historian’,71 conceived of the Bilderatlas as a diagnostic instrument for unravelling the pathological forms that holds the imaginat­ ion captive. The atlas does not prescribe a talking cure, but a photo­graphic ekphrasis of expressive forms, muted in the double sense of the word, silenced 377

and greyed out, laid out so as to clear a path out of the stiffening grasp of the image. Once more, then, a constitutive ambivalence, or greyness, lurks at the heart of Warburg’s project. While the Atlas on the one hand can be understood as an apotropaic and therapeutic project, designed to ward of the demons to which its maker had previously succumbed, the cause and the cure enter into a precarious relationship as the act of unmasking inevitably unleashes an unruliness that ultimately evades capture, containment and control, eluding the firm grasp of metaphors and comparisons. ‘The problem in between’,72 as Warburg laconically put it, the oscillatory phantasmagoria of polarised and unappeased Pathosformeln, must by definition remain unresolved, to which the unfinished, and unfinishable, Atlas finally attests. The Colour of Dreams In light of the topic of Foucault’s first publication, let me conclude with a brief speculative remark that returns us to the paramount, but problematic, notion of the a priori raised in the introduction. During the first half of twentieth century, the realm of dreams was purportedly dyed in an all-­ pervasive grey. Numerous studies have reported that the vast majority of dreams during this period were black and white productions, and that dreams in colour were a rare and dubious occurrence. As psychoanalyst Ángel Garma asserted in a 1961 article: ‘Dreams are like the old silent films, without sound or technicolour.’73 By that time, however, dreams had already begun to flow in polychrome. Subsequent comparative studies of different age groups unanimously predict that the grey dreamworld will disappear together with the generation that was exposed to black and white media during a formative period of their childhood. The assault on the imaginative faculty endured by Gorky in 1896, subjugated to the eye-straining greyness 378

and dream-like nausea of the Lumière projector, in turn serves as an indi­ cation that the imaginary worlds previously conjured from printed pages, painted canvasses, stained-glass windows and Magic Lanterns had transpired in a more vibrant spectrum, utterly foreign to the monochrome visions introduced by early cinema. Hence, we may be induced to envision the faculty of imagination itself in geoarchaeological terms, deposited and furrowed into distinct chromatic and achromatic bands, somewhat like the multi-hued striations of the Painted Desert. Research on the colour of dreams hinges on an obvious uncertainty factor, however, since it draws its empirical data from the eminently malle­ able and unreliable medium of memory. In other words, it is not unreasonable to conjecture that it is the recollections, rather than the dreams themselves, that are coloured by dominant media standards. Maybe recent advances in brains scans and algorithmic reconstructions of the neural activities of dreaming subjects, which so far only has generated blurry results, will resolve this issue? Meanwhile, the nexus of dreams, colours and media raises a familiar conundrum. Whereas media archaeologists from Friedrich Kittler to Wolfgang Ernst emphatically insist on the technological a priori as constitutive of the epistemic a priori that preoccupied Foucault, the aspiration to isolate one layer from the other so as to establish a hierarchy of successive strata may ultimately be a misguided task. If media posit the material substrate of knowledge, our assumptions about media are always already engrained and embedded with activities of the imagination. Hence, the technical stratum can never be entirely disentangled from phantasmatic matter so as to assert the primacy of one layer over, or rather under, the other. This beckons our attention towards a path barely treaded, along which the archaeologies of knowledge and media fold together with what Foucault in his earliest publication names ‘an anthropology of the imagination’.74 379

Notes 1. Michel Foucault ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ [1971], in The Foucault Reader, trans. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 76–100, 76. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Preface to On the Genealogy of Morals [1887], in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 453 and 457. 3. Nietzsche, Preface to On the Genealogy of Morals, 457. 4. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, 76. 5. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge [1969], trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 48. 6. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, 81. 7. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 3. 8. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [1966], trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 10. 9. Michel Foucault, ‘Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from the Outside’, [1966] trans. Brian Massumi, in Foucault/Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi and Jeffrey Mahlman (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 57. 10. Foucault, ‘Maurice Blanchot’, 23 and 34. 11. Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe [1973], trans. and ed. James Harkness (Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983), 28. 12. Foucault, The Order of Things, 96. 13. ‘Archaeology’, Foucault explains, ‘does not treat discourse as document, as a sign of something else, as an element that ought to be transparent, but whose unfortunate opacity must often be pierced if one is to reach at last the depth of the essential in the place in which it is held in reserve; it is concerned with discourse in its own volume, as a monument.’ Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 138–139. 380

14. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [1986], trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 5. 15. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 5. 16. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 25. 17. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 6. 18. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 14. 19. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 16. 20. Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, Evil Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), 1, 11–14. 21. Maxim Gorky, ‘A Review of the Lumière Programme at the Nizhni-Novgorod Fair, as Printed in the Nizhegorodski listok, Newspaper, July 4, 1896, and signed “I.M. Pacatus”. Translated by Leda Swan’, in Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, ed. by Jay Leyda (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 407–409, 407–408. 22. Review in Le Radical, 30 December 1895, cited by Noël Burch in Life to Those Shadows, ed. and trans. Ben Brewster (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 20. 23. Gorky, ‘A Review of the Lumière Programme’, 408. 24. As quoted in Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 7 and 8. 25. See Friedrich Kittler’s discussion of Friedlaender’s novel Graue Magie: Ein Berliner Nachschlüsselroman in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 59, 77, 134–136, 140 and 248–249. 26. Gorky, ‘A Review of the Lumière Programme’, 407. 27. Boleslas Matuszewski, ‘Une nouvelle source de l’histoire’ [1898], ‘A New Source of History’, trans. Laura U. Marks and Diane Koszarski, Film History, 7, 3 (Autumn 1995): 322–324, 323. 28. Matuszewski, ‘A New Source of History’, 322–324, 323. 29. André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ [1945], trans. Hugh Gray, Film Quarterly, 13, 4 (Summer 1960): 4–9, 8. 381

30. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, Volume VI, trans. John Bostock and Henry T. Riley (London: H. G. Bohn, 1857), 399. 31. Bazin, The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, 8. 32. For a discussion on cinema and contingency, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002). 33. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography [1983], trans. Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 66. 34. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: A Dramatic Poem, trans. A. Hayward (Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1868), 93. I am indebted to Aron Vinegar for pointing out the connection between Mephistopheles’ utterance and the ‘grey on grey’ passage from Hegel to me. 35. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 42. 36. Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion [1998], trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 236 and 242. 37. For a discussion of how optical ghost shows, gothic novels and spiritualist séances came to inform the arguments of Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer, see Stefan Andriopoulos, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (New York: Zone Books, 2013). 38. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’ [1969], in Michel Foucault Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984. Volume Two, ed. by James D. Faubion, trans. by Josué V. Harari (New York: The New Press, 1998) 205–222, 209. 39. Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography [1970] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 296. 40. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972– 1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 69. 41. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 17. 382

42. For an in-depth discussion on the implication of the seismographic metaphor, see Georges Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms [2002], trans. Harvey L. Mendelsohn (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 67–83. 43. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 39, and The Order of Things, 355. 44. Aby Warburg, ‘Dürer and Italian Antiquity’, in Aby Warburg: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, ed. by Steven Lindberg, trans. by David Britt (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 1999), 553–558, 553. 45. Letter from Warburg dated 26 December 1923 as quoted by Kurt W. Forster, ‘Introduction’, in Aby Warburg: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 1–75, 25. 46. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 25 and 22. 47. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 37. 48. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’ [1967/1984], trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16, 1 (Spring 1986): 22–27, 22. 49. I am here referencing merely one of several documented versions of the Mnemosyne Atlas, none of which is to be considered definitive. While two volumes of text and a bibliography were originally planned for the completed project, the Mnemosyne remains today primarily as a visual genealogy. For a discussion, see Katia Mazzucco ‘(Photographic) Subject-matter: Fritz Saxl Indexing Mnemosyne – A Stratigraphy of the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection’s System’, Visual Resources: An International Journal on Images and their Uses, 30, 3 (2014): 201–221. 50. Quoted from Aby Warburg’s preparatory notes for his lecture on the serpent ritual at the Kreuzlingen clinic and dated 14 March 1923, published in the appendix ‘Memories of a Journey Through the Pueblo Region’, in Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, 301. 51. Foucault, The Order of Things, 360. 52. Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Attell (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2009), 29 and 32. 383

53. David Freedberg, ‘Warburg’s Mask: A Study in Idolatry’, in Anthropologies of Art, ed. by Mariet Westerman (Williamstown, MA: Clark Institute, 2005), 3–25, 17. 54. Freedberg, ‘Warburg’s Mask’, 17. 55. Georg Lukács, ‘Realism in the Balance’ [1938], trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate within German Marxism, ed. by Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 2002), 28–59, 43. 56. Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science [2011], trans. Shane Lillis (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2018), 16. 57. Aby Warburg, ‘Francesco Sassetti’s Last Injunctions to His Sons’, in Aby Warburg: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 223–262, 247. 58. As quoted by Christopher D. Johnson in Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 96. 59. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images, 107. 60. Charlotte Schoell-Glass as quoted by Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images, 95. 61. Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, trans. Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1995). 62. Michel Foucault, ‘Dream, Imagination, and Existence’ [1954], trans. Forrest Williams, in Michel Foucault and Ludwig Binswanger, Dream and Existence, ed. Keith Hoeller (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993), 31–78, 34. 63. Foucault, ‘Dream, Imagination, and Existence’, 45 and 43. 64. Foucault, ‘Dream, Imagination, and Existence’, 72. 65. Foucault, ‘Dream, Imagination, and Existence’, 72. 66. Giorgio Agamben, Nymphs [2007], trans. Amanda Minervini (London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2013), 37. While Foucault’s introduction to Binswanger remains curiously overlooked, Julian Reid’s pensive contextualisation of this work calls attention to its close affinity with Agamben’s discussion of the Mnemosyne Atlas in Nymphs. As Reid observes, ‘Agamben is effectively confronting the same 384

problem as Foucault in his very first essay; the problem of how to rescue the imagination from its condition of present oppression; how to recover time where this is no time.’ Julian Reid, ‘Foucault and the Imagination: The Roles of Images in Regimes of Power and Subjectivity’, Subjectivity, 11, (2018): 183–202, 199–200. 67. Agamben, Nymphs, 61. 68. Foucault, ‘Dream, Imagination, and Existence’, 73–74. 69. Agamben, The Signature of All Things, 103. 70. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, 90. 71. Warburg as quoted by Giorgio Agamben in ‘Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science’ [1975], in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. by Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 97. 72. Aby Warburg, ‘The Problem in Between’ [1918], in Aby Warburg: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 727–728. 73. Eva Murzyn, ‘Do we Only Dream in Colour? A Comparison of Reported Dream Colour in Younger and Older Adults with Different Experiences of Black and White Media’, Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 4 (December 2008): 1228–1237, 1230. 74. Foucault, ‘Dream, Imagination, and Existence’, 56.

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12. I cy Phantasms, Contemporary Inuit Art and the Grey of Ethno-Aesthetics Amanda Boetzkes

This chapter will consider grey as an aesthetic operation that drives towards a critical positioning of contemporary Inuit art in relation to climate change. I consider how Inuit artists recuperate and deploy an aesthetic of grey with a view to uncovering the traumas of colonial encounter that are 387

readily obscured by the assemblage of climate science. Such obscurity is exacerbated by the ‘post-truth’ context with which climate science contends. Thus, the grey of contemporary Inuit art appears against the grey of a critical exhaustion, as Bruno Latour diagnoses. In this respect, I consider the aesthetics of casting Inuit art against climate science – to cast grey on grey – as a means to challenge the discursive scaffolding that upholds the tradition of Enlightenment thinking. Furthermore, I will argue that by greying the grey of the post-truth moment with the aesthetic operations of Inuit art, one can witness the appearance of the latter’s decolonising force as it redistributes itself as a philosophical negative. I position artworks by Pia Arke, Tim Pitsiulak and Shuvinai Ashoona as a disavowed negative of Western science and philosophy. Yet I argue that precisely from such a positioning, their work returns to adhere to the scientific assemblage, generating a phantasmatic topography charged with vital elements and mythological actants that perturb the study of Arctic environments. I consider these to be decolonising forces that emerge from fundamental splits at the heart of a colonial episteme. Thus, I situate the greying effects of contemporary Inuit art as a means of resuscitating a common root between Inuit culture and climate science in the traumatic primal scenes of colonial encounter in the Arctic. I suggest that the grey operation that animates the work of many contemporary Inuit artists may be read by way of George Bataille’s phantasmology, in part because his work was explicitly addressed and critiqued by a generation of Greenlandic artists such as Pia Arke, but also because its decolonial trajectory may be developed further by reading it alongside the work of subsequent generations of Inuit artists in the circumpolar North. Through the anarchical vectors of shattered ice, sticky phantasms of colonial displacement and residual soma, these artists grey the predicament of climate change. Further, I will suggest that it is precisely by 388

considering this greying operation as specifically geoaesthetic that a repositioning of climate change from the perspective of political ecology – in which science and the politics of decolonisation are considered in a common consciousness – becomes possible. The Grey of Pia Arke’s Ethno-Aesthetics Pia Arke’s Self-Portrait (1992) is a black and white double-exposure of the artist posing nude, superimposed over a pinhole camera photograph of a foggy Arctic landscape (Figure 12.1). The artist’s spectral body coincides with the rocky topography of Nuugarsuk Point, in Narsaq, southwest Greenland. The flats of melting snow on the embankment show through her dissolving form at her knees and hips, while the smooth skin and gentle undulations of her lower belly blend with the still water and melting ice of the inlet. At the face and shoulders, Arke’s portrait divides into two oscillating perspectives: one in which her head and eyes are downcast, permissively showing her profile, the other direct, solemn and outwardly directed at the viewer. In this doubled representation, Arke captures herself as a divided subject: a visual object of colonial epistemology and as the observer of her own operation of self-representation in that mode.1 Through her modulation of greys, Arke situates herself in the Greenlandic landscape, emerging from its thick fog yet receding into its textured foreground. Part of a series of pinhole photographs of southwest Greenland, Arke’s self-portrait renders the estrangement of land and Inuit identity that accom­ panied her generation of Greenlanders who faced colonial displacement. Born in northeastern Greenland to a Danish father and Greenlandic mother, Arke moved to Denmark at the age of thirteen. Her returns to Greenland left her with a sense of being permanently unsettled; though she had lived her 389

Figure 12.2  Pia Arke, Untitled (Toying with National Costume), cc. 1993. Photo: Kuratorisk Aktion, 120 × 130 cm. Copyright: Søren Arke Petersen

childhood in Greenland she never learned Greenlandic language and was ridiculed for speaking Danish. Her artistic oeuvre sought to access the liminal post­colonial subject position that emerged from her quest to recuperate an understanding of her land and people of origin, the colonial forces that intervened upon them and the grey zone of consciousness that erupted in their confrontation. ~ Figure 12.1  Pia Arke, Self-Portrait, 1992. B/w double exposure photograph, nude self-portrait over pinhole camera photograph of Nuugaarsuk Point, Narsaq, 30.5 × 25.5 cm. Copyright: Søren Arke Petersen 391

Along with her doubled self-portrait, Arke photographed herself with parts of the Greenlandic national costume on her head, overlaying the image of her distorted form in the foreground of the pinhole landscape. In Untitled (Toying with National Costume), she is seated naked with her back to the camera, a set of seal-skin shorts on her shoulders, rendering her form split and seemingly headless while a knitted wool sweater has been stood up beside her, its interior seemingly filled out by a torso, yet without protruding arms or head (Figure 12.2). In another, Untitled (Put your Kamik on your Head, so Everyone Can See Where you Come From), she sits on a stool, clothed in a sweater and pants but with bare feet planted on the ground. Her back is turned to the viewer, while an embroidered, white leather full-length boot extends several feet from her shoulders. With her head obscured, her body has been seemingly upended or turned inside out. Arke invokes the Greenlandic costume to emplace herself in the landscape only to misuse the clothing and enact the mutual alienation of land and identity. This performative manoeuvre derives in part from a surrealist aesthetic that played a formative role in her training and in part from an elaboration of a postcolonial self-concept in which Arke surfaced the symptomology of colonial violence, trauma and repression. Furthermore, her work probes the uncanny juncture between living history and the sedimented geological matter that comprises the Greenlandic landscape, summoning the spectres of a troubled history of contact between settler explorers and Arctic Inuit. Thus, the grey tones of her pinhole camera landscapes of Nuugaarsuk Point evoke a range of consistencies, from the gritty slush in the foreground to the mirror-like surface of the fjord to the velvety quality of her naked skin and the soft cottony clouds in the background. Yet, for all its visual acuity, the materialities at play in the image disturb the cohesion of Arke’s figure, subtly changing the grain and density of her body with delineations that bind and weave it into the topography. 392

In this vein, Arke’s oeuvre links image, materials, body and objects into destabilising combinations under the rubric of what she called ‘ethno-­ aesthetics’. In her 1995 essay Ethnoæstetik, Arke tracks her critical practice to an investigation and critique of surrealist aesthetics and anthropological humanism.2 Drawing from James Clifford’s account of ethnographic surrealism in his 1988 book The Predicament of Culture, she suggests that these two roots – surrealist aesthetics and anthropological humanism – were entirely opposed (at least from the perspective of the surrealists) but that the former was subsumed into the latter by the mid-twentieth century. The surrealists had embraced the mutual pollution of opposites and sought the transgressive violation of European culture by the exotic, putting exoticism to use in such a way as to pervert civilisation by its disavowed domains of nature and the Indigenous other. They aimed to defeat the ordered world of humanism that kept cultures and nature in their respective categories and hierarchies. However, Arke suggests that the surrealist modus operandi of violation had its roots in the anthropological humanism of Marcel Mauss, whose lectures many of the surrealists had attended at the École Practique des Hautes Études. She remarks particularly on those who had defected from André Breton’s group and originated the periodical Documents, including Georges Bataille, Michael Leiris and Antonin Artaud. Significantly, Paul Rivet, who later founded the Musée de L’Homme was among them, and it is this historical link that gave Arke pause. For, as Clifford points out, while the ethno-surrealists had attempted to think their own practice of recombining and transgressing ideological identities, historical continuities, the functionality of objects and organic unities, thus embedding their art in a pan-cultural phantasmagoria, at the same time when the Musée de L’Homme opened it forcibly separated surrealism and ethnography. All the world cultures were categorised and on display except for the art, institutions and culture of the 393

modern West, which instead assumed a position as the pinnacle and invisible master of the order of humanity.3 At this crucial juncture, ethno-surrealism’s transgressions became indistinguishable from colonial violations, and its critical operation of violating the self-concept of the colonialist bourgeoisie was disarmed and subsumed into that very aesthetic régime. Surrealist aesthetics were recuperated in Denmark and Scandinavia in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, as Arke notes, this recuperation remained bound to an insipid humanism that preserved Greenlanders in a paternalistic embrace of protectionism and suppression. Thus, she argues for the imperative to excavate the desiring structure that fetishises Greenlandic material culture while effacing its articulations of self-determination. By contrast, Arke’s titular concept, ‘ethno-aesthetics’ attended to what she describes as the ‘cultural flea market of modern-day Greenland’, precisely through tactics of estrangement that she deployed as an operation of self-reflection on the postcolonial predicament.4 In other words, her work instigates a process of auto-decolonisation in and through a deployment of the heterogeneity of materials, elements and objects in her images. Arke mobilises ethno-aesthetics as a ‘third place’ of criticism: a practice born out of the space in which ethno-surrealism and anthropological humanism had fused. Yet she was nevertheless conscious that precisely because it originated from this third place – where surrealist self-violation had been appropriated by anthropology’s violation of the colonised other – her practice risked a descent into a grey zone of indistinguishability between critique and appropriation. Ethno-aesthetics perpetually had to differentiate itself from a confusion between criticism and the object of critique, between the criticism of colonial fetishisation and the fetish itself. Thus, Arke writes, ‘. . . my ethno-­ aesthetic issue with ethno-aesthetics constantly runs into the impalpable circumstance that the repressed remains repressed no matter how conscious 394

I am of its repression’.5 Nevertheless, she concludes by insisting on this third place as a domain of intervention for Greenlanders to take hold of for themselves: ‘Creating a third place for us, who belong neither within the ethnographic object, nor the ethnographic subject, thus becomes more than just an intellectual opportunity. There is a sense of urgent necessity about our play with the pieces of different worlds.’6 Arke therefore situated her practice at this juncture between the ethnographic object and the ethnographic subject, exerting her bifurcated identity as both Greenlandic Inuit and Danish settler in order to produce a new critical terrain. As cultural theorist Stefan Jonsson argues, Arke’s photographic images should be conceived less as representations and more as performances of her agonistic situation at the limit between viewer and viewed, medium and message, subject and representation.7 Arke engaged and thematised the nervosity of this limit in her video and photo-montage Arctic Hysteria (1997). She pursued a line of archival research with a focus on the expeditions of the American polar explorer Robert E. Peary, and the relationship between his expedition team and the Inuit communities who guided and cared for them as they endeavoured to reach the North Pole. Over the course of her study, Arke came across a photograph of a screaming and topless Inuk woman restrained by two fur-clad white explorers. The photograph was titled ‘Arctic Hysteria’, a phenomenon pronounced by Peary and his team to account for a wide range of symptoms afflicting both men and women (but most often women) and which included convulsive fits, wailing, gesticulating, pacing, imitating animals, removing clothing, and running about on the ice, sometimes even freezing to death. Arctic hysteria is a loose translation of the Greenlandic word pibloktoq, which the Inuit used to explain this behaviour. When Peary’s men were confronted by these outbursts, however, they deemed them to be a form of 395

hysteria that may have been caused by vitamin deficiency. But the explorers’ discourse of Arctic hysteria diverges significantly from pibloktoq, which anthropologist Lyle Dick argues was an anxiety response that erupted precisely in the context of contact with the explorers, and included everything from symptoms (perhaps feigned) of physical illness, expressions of resistance to patriarchy and/or sexual coercion, and shamanistic practice.8 The fissure between the two concepts – feminine hysteria, or what one of Peary’s navigators called ‘pure cussedness’, and resistant nervosity from the perspective of the Inuit – exposes precisely the limit-experience that Arke sought to probe in her research and practice. What was so striking about the photograph that Arke found in the archive was the relative calm of the explorers as they restrained the perturbed woman. Arke saw, with cold acuity, the colonial fetishisation of the Inuit rather than a representation of genuine madness, bestiality or hypersexuality. Further research yielded that Peary’s expeditions were indeed dubious social organisations rife with violation and exploitation. In their camps, Inuit women were expected to sew, carry wood and sexually service Peary and his men. Peary himself even fathered two children by his ‘laundress’ who at the beginning of their relationship was only fourteen years old. Arke was not granted permission to use that specific photograph of the Inuit woman in her work. However, she found others through which to build a broader visual context for the phenomenon of Arctic hysteria. Drawing from a set of photographs in Robert Peary’s 1898 book Northward over the ‘Great Ice’, Arke composed a montage of black and white photographs of three naked Inuit women next to four fur-clad male explorers (Figure 12.3). This juxtaposition lays bare the desiring male colonial gaze at the heart of the purportedly ‘scientific’ rationale of the expedition. The Inuit women pose for the camera, peeking out of a tent, standing or sitting coyly in front of a rock 396

that signals the Arctic habitat. Taken together the three female figures provide a full typological study, offering different angles by which to view their exposed bodies. Each image was titled in explicitly eroticised terms ‘The Mistress of the Tupik’, ‘Arctic Bronze’ and ‘Flash-Light Study’. By contrast, the four male explorers – marked by their last names: Peary, Baldwin, Entrikin, Clark – are entirely covered with heavy coats, mitts and boots, their hoods closed over their faces. Yet, by interleaving the figures, Arke visualises the structure of desire that was so manifest it had to be hidden behind science and skins and furs, as Iben Mondrup so aptly argues.9 The machinations of fetishisation and repression are aired in the interplay between the paired portraits. Though they are asymmetrical – the women naked, solicitous, expressive and exposed to the elements, while the men are concealed and

Figure 12.3  Pia Arke, Arctic Hysteria IV, 1997. Yellow-toned b/w photo montage. Copyright: Søren Arke Petersen. Courtesy of the Department of Theory and Communication, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen 397

protected – the photographs belong together and oddly mirror one another, one type a chilling projection of the other’s concealed and disavowed sexual desire. ~ It is the paroxysm of Arctic hysteria that provides Arke with the material for a critical operation by which to reclaim the latent exoticism of ethnographic humanism and transform it into a critical ethno-aesthetic. The culmination of the multimedia work is a six-minute video performance (Figure 12.4). For this, Arke printed a large-scale photostat of the landscape at Nuugaarsuk Point, upon which she undertakes a performative re-enactment of Arctic hysteria. In the video, she has laid the landscape image on the floor. She appears on it, naked and crouched down, her arms outstretched and touching its surface. She proceeds to roll across it, sniffing it like an animal. Finally, she begins to rip it to shreds, picking up the curled pieces and then letting them fall over her body. Arke thereby calls forth the behaviours associated with Arctic hysteria, but frees them from their association with barbarism and animality. Loosening her own bodily movements from the shackles of an ethnographic lens, she deploys her own agitation to tear at the history and geography of her original home. The performance positions her as a disjoined, free-floating spectre that haunts and affronts the landscape, unable to blend into its topography yet nevertheless probing and cutting into its lines, parameters and limits. ~

Figure 12.4  Pia Arke, stills from Arctic Hysteria, 1996. Video 4:3 (S-VHS to DVD), 5:55 min. Copyright: Søren Arke Petersen 398

I read Arctic Hysteria as the means by which Arke could recast in grey on grey the archival images of Peary’s expedition. Where the violence of ethno­graphic humanism is grey in the archival photographs (obscured in a state of repression), Arke overlays her ethno-aesthetic lens onto this history by re-enacting it. She greys Arctic hysteria, inverting the symptoms so that rather than keeping them as testimony to the state of repression she exerts them in order to summon their unspoken history. Grey is therefore not merely a chromatic orientation, but a critical operation by which she surfaces the indigestibility of colonial trauma that her very subject-position occupies. She exerts her bodily behaviours as conscious resistance to the narratives of heroic polar exploration, problematising the symptomology by which those same behaviours are pathologised. Arke thereby propels her divided subject-position from the context of settler violence onto a terrain of critical reflection by which she can (re)discover her homeland as hers precisely through the recuperation of its historic colonial trauma. The traumatic fissure between invasive colonial explorer and violated Inuit host provides a generative tissue by which to bind a critical position, identity and performance that runs the practice of self-representation against itself. From the third place of the ethno-­ aesthetic, Arke greys both sides of the polarity, while showing that the grey zone itself proffers its own topography of specters. Two years after Arctic Hysteria was exhibited, Arke was invited to contri­ bute to the Danish journal PASSAGE: Tidsskrift for litteratur og kritik for an issue on Snyderum (Illusive Spaces). She compiled a montage entitled Blubber and Science, which assembled archival photographs of nineteenth-century Danish explorers alongside portraits of Greenlanders from the Danish Polar Center’s book storage in Copenhagen. Arke interspersed the archival images with her own photographs of the archival stacks, which, as she recounts in her text, smelled like blubber. When she enquired, the caretaker told her 400

that the book storage had once been used to store seal and whale blubber shipped from Greenland to Denmark. The pungent odour clung to the walls of the facility and permeated the holdings, especially the back issues of the scientific journal Medelelser Om Grønland (Monographs on Greenland). Thus, her text declares, ‘Blubber and science are connected.’10 As with Arctic Hysteria, Arke positions two seemingly apposite terms but recovers a third term by which to bind them, and through this binding reset their meaning in an aesthetic agonism. The smell of blubber recalls the history of scientific exploration that was fully integrated into the expanding trade of whale and sea-mammal commodities. The scientific archive is thus saturated in the sensorial experience of Greenland. But this aesthetic dimension discloses the ambivalent relationship between science and Inuit culture. As cultural theorist Kristen Thisted points out, the Inuit’s use of blubber in hunting and cooking was disdained by Danes and Europeans who initially found the smell repulsive and associated it with primitive cultural practices.11 Contemporary Inuit have inherited this sense of shame. Yet as much as blubber was a disavowed substance, Europeans imported it with enthusiasm for decades to use as lamp fuel before it was replaced by kerosene. As Arke shows, science and blubber share a material history; scientific know­ledge and resource commodity were produced co-extensively and travelled along common channels of exploration and exchange, though the latter was dis­ avowed. But the smell recurs and thus calls the reader to consider science from the perspective of the aesthetic film that clings to its history. Science and Blubber encapsulates Arke’s ethno-aesthetic modus operandi, which pairs mutually exclusive terms by conjuring spectral matter – blubber, erotic photographs, her own nude body and performative nervosity – and adjoining it to the history of polar exploration. As she explains in her essay, this approach inherits surrealism’s critique of anthropological humanism. 401

Phantasmology and Spectral Aesthetics In order to explore the connection between Arke’s ethno-aesthetics and an aesthetic reflection of Hegel’s provocation in which consciousness arises as grey on grey, it is worthwhile to consider George Bataille’s operation of phantasmology. Phantasmology is the term Rodolphe Gasché advances for Bataille’s use of mythic figures, narratives of transgression and sensorial excess to exert a violence on the structural terms of Enlightenment philosophy and science. Following from Gasché, I focus on phantasmology in relation to Bataille’s rhetorical destructuration of concepts through the retrieval of their sticky material excesses, a procedure which leads to their collapse into topographies of meaninglessness. For it is by way of Bataille’s phantasmology that Hegel’s original scene of the emergence of the concept in consciousness – indeed the concept as consciousness emerging and grasping itself in a movement of exteriorisation – that one can understand how philosophy effects an aesthetic doubling. Phantasms are the echoes of the movement of consciousness that stick to the concept (whether scientific or philosophical) and shadow its meaning as a diaphanous but palpable presence. Bataille’s (an)aesthetic operation therefore provides a new appreciation of Arke’s recasting of science through the recuperation of its Greenlandic spectres, as well as the pertinence of her work to contemporary practices of Inuit art concerning climate change. Rodolphe Gasché gives a challenging reading of the status of the image in Hegel’s philosophy of consciousness alongside Bataille’s destructuration of it.12 Bataille’s Hegel, he shows, is forever caught in a dilemma stemming from the idealism of the Enlightenment, whereby philosophical and scientific concepts attempt to sever themselves from their archaic origins in mythology. Yet these concepts find themselves forever bound to the phantasms they attempt to disavow. Bataille’s phantasmology is a kind of counter-analytic 402

that exposes consciousness as bound to a rhythm of emergence and regression that is borne out aesthetically, steeped in elements and substances that invest the scene of origin of consciousness with embodied sensations, but which nevertheless bring the concept to a state of collapse. But, as Gasché argues, Bataille’s challenge lies not in a brute application of the phantasm as a destructive force. To the contrary, his phantasmology is deeply methodical – as methodical as science itself. Disciplinary, even. He writes, A discourse merely turned into its opposite would condemn the mythological representation into inconsequence, and it would deprive it of any possibility to change anything in the domain of practical life or in the domain of science. There, mythological representation will – after the reversal of the hierarchy is accomplished and the methodical thinking of science brought under its rule – assign within itself a new function to science.13 To chart Bataille’s phantasmology, Gasché develops his reading of the originary scene of the image in and through the emergence of consciousness in Hegel’s Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805–1806). Hegel situates the emergence of consciousness in the ‘nocturnal pit’ (nächtliche Schacht), a ‘treasury of unconscious slumbering images . . . [that are held in] an undifferentiated, undivided mass’.14 Here Spirit is asleep, existing in an interior night. In Hegel’s dramatic recounting, intuition spontaneously awakens in the nocturnal pit and exerts itself in the midst of this night, initiating a process of image recollection from this storehouse. The dawn of the concept takes place in and 403

as the claiming of an image that will hold it. Intuition seizes the image as a ‘becoming mine of being’ that entrenches being ever more deeply into the nocturnal pit from which images issue.15 In other words, in the random awakening of slumbering images, Spirit begins to divide itself into consciousness and unconsciousness, rationality and an anarchical state of free-floating visualisations. A struggle ensues at the site of the image, however. Consciousness takes place in and through the movement of ever-deepening regression into recollection (Erinnerung), the process of internalising the image as the concept appropriates it. Importantly, intuition’s drive to recollection paradoxically obscures the image it seeks to claim as its own. Thus, the drive of intuition and the image are threaded together on the path of meaning, but the movement of regression at the origin of the concept remains integral to the concept itself – a backward path towards its anarchical origin that always remains encoded within the image that the concept upholds. Within this very process of the claiming of the image as concept, the image retracts from the operation that summons it forward. It withholds itself in and as an internality, apart from the external place and context within which the intuition stood.16 In phantasmagorical representations such as dreams, as Gasché explains, images can, ‘shoot forth randomly and in arbitrary places and sink back again without coming to a halt’.17 In this regard, Hegel’s nocturnal pit behaves as an automated but also random geyser of images. Intuition must therefore be honed by the operation of abstraction by which a distinction between the internality of recollection and the externality of imagination is defined. As intelligence beholds the image and makes it into its object, it gives it an exteriority, a structure. Imagination doubles intuition. It is a process by which images, as Hegel writes ‘present themselves to our intelligence in the luminous, plastic shape of an existent intuition of similar content, and that with 404

the help of this present intuition we recognize them as intuitions we have already had’.18 Thus, Hegel charts the image from a formal reproduction activity, to a process of association, and ultimately to a symbolising function: a sign-making fantasy. From this initial formulation of the Hegelian consciousness, Gasché proceeds to define the phantasm and Bataille’s critique of Hegel by way of phantasmology. The phantasm is a hybrid offspring between the image and the operation of imagining or thinking. It thus exists in tandem with a phantasmology, a philosophical genealogy within which Gasché includes his own tracking of that very operation from Hegel to Freud and Bataille. He situates the critical procedure of phantasmology at the crux between the imagistic memory and its ‘playing out’ as a scene which so compelled Freud about concept of the primal scene – the zone of indistinction between a phylogenetic programme and an ontogenetic phenomenon. But while Freud sought the origin of the primal scene in a real event first and foremost, as Laplanche and Pontalis argue, he had to concede that this reality had an autonomous and structural basis with regard to the individual subject who depends on it.19 For Gasché, the hybrid ontology of the primal scene for both Hegel and Freud gives rise to a phantasmatic space in which signifiers rise up, attaching randomly to signifieds, a symbolic constituted by the residues of the primal scene that stick to the experience of the material world and bind it together. This reading leads to his definition of the phantasmic image as a material entity of the mind that delivers itself to the plasticity of abstraction but also remains a primordial recalcitrance. Bataille had mobilised the material excess of the phantasmic image, probing its potential to destructure the space of the symbolic by inciting regression back into the anarchical space of the nocturnal pit. His phantasm is at once an actant and an operation – a phantasm and 405

a phantasmology. In this respect, as Gasché explains, Bataille drew from Schelling’s notion of the katabole in the latter’s Philosophy of Mythology.20 The katabole is a tripartite concept that means: (1) to cast down, to throw down, to push down; (2) to originate, to ground, to begin; (3) to throw away, to cast away from oneself (60). Taken together, the katabole encompasses both the act of expulsion and the excess that is expelled. Bataille had a special interest in the katabole, seeing in it the potential for a reversal of scientific transparency; to turn science towards its mythological residues. We might recall Arke’s manoeuvre of reading science with blubber. From the perspective of surrealist critique, science had evacuated the mythological, as well as the true anarchical origin of philosophy. It had divided consciousness in order to pursue a pure transparency. Thus, Bataille’s critique of science and philosophy took the form of an aesthetics of ‘mythological represen­tation’, an operation that deploys the katabole (its heterogenous object), to return to ­science what it had violently expelled. The mythological representation would cast science down by presenting it to itself in its undivided fullness with the phantasm, as a limit-experience. Herein lies the aesthetic dimension of Bataille’s phantasmology: the mythological image returns to scientific discourse as an alienated stranger. But its aesthetic appearance expresses precisely its capacity to cast grey on grey. As Gasché describes, the phantasm is a spectre that goes unrecognised by the consciousness that produced it by expelling it in the first place. Upon its return, however, it katabolises the scene of origin, provoking productions and reactions within the symbolic scaffolding that subtends the scientific or philosophical concept. It therefore raises an anti-structure of phantasms that stick to the subject and bring about its destructuration. The katabolic effect of the phantasm is to grey the trans­ parency of science. Again, this is to say more than that the phantasm is grey – a hybrid ontic entity – but rather that the grey appearance of the 406

phantasm greys the primal scene of the concept itself. Grey greys, to be ­Heideggerian about it. Greying Glaciology: The Phantasms of Climate Change Insofar as Pia Arke recovered and redeployed a phantasmology of colonial exploration and science, greying it with an Inuit lens, it becomes possible to consider how the decolonial trajectory of her practice is parlayed through an elemental sensibility. For it is precisely by recuperating the grey of the Greenlandic landscape – a place from which she was estranged and which she rediscovered through the strangeness of the environment, including its fog, melting snow, uncanny icebergs, the residues of its animal life – that she gives expression to the grey of her own subject position. How then to consider this same environment in the contemporary context of climate change, when the world turns its eyes to the unprecedented melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet as well as the melting glaciers and permafrost of the circumpolar North? Ultimately, I would suggest that Hegel’s primal scene of consciousness, which Bataille katabolises, and which Arke decolonises, is not merely an internal operation of the imagination but is rather a scene that is being re-­ enacted now, and externalised in the Arctic at the site of its colonial ‘discovery’ and now ‘recovery’ by the life sciences. For the Arctic is currently positioned as an originary site of global warming: a site of dawning ecological consciousness. For many southerners, this dawn appears to be a new consciousness, as though global warming is rising from out of a nocturnal pit (or perhaps in this context, from out of a polar night). Yet, for the Arctic Inuit, it is not new at all but rather one perturbation on a historical continuum that has been underway for hundreds of years. The night is merely the darkness of a disavowed history. I therefore turn to contemporary Inuit art and 407

its phantasmatic operation of conjuring affective, symbolic and material operations by which it greys the discourse of climate change. Though images of melting Arctic ice are ubiquitous signifiers of climate change, I would suggest that it is Inuit art specifically that captures and recollects the scientific image of ice, sticking to it and encumbering its appearance as an autonomous pursuit of knowledge by raising cold mythologies alongside it. One of Gasché’s crucial reflections on Bataille’s writings is that their critical force grows out of the latter’s capacity to counter analytical coldness with the even colder properties of the phantasm (his capacity to deconstruct cold with cold). The phantasm appears like an icy ghost, born from the shadow cast by the absolutism of science. By discerning the elemental quality of the environment of consciousness – the coldness of the analytic concept as an illumination within the nocturnal pit – and then doubling it with the phantasm, Bataille forges a mode of criticism by saturating the aesthetic dimension of consciousness. As much as the phantasm greys science, it also freezes it. Thus, Gasché foregrounds the icy (glaçant) quality of Bataille’s mythological images and their capacity to effect a frozen topography of consciousness. In an especially vivid passage in his early essay ‘The Pineal Eye’, Bataille writes, For if the affective violence of human intelligence is projected like a specter across the deserted night of the absolute or of science, it does not follow that this specter has nothing in common with the night in which its brilliance becomes glacial. On the contrary, a spectral content only truly exists as such from the moment when the milieu that contains it 408

defines itself through its intolerance toward that which appears in it as a crime.21 Here, where the spectre casts the light of human intelligence in its grey – where the dawn of consciousness meets the night of the nocturnal pit – intelligence fulfils itself in its own deconstruction and multiplication, shattered by the glacial cold of this grey. The phantasm transforms the space of consciousness into a frozen topography by mirroring it (like a glace [n.]).22 Consciousness is propelled into a discontinuous dispersion of images, an infinite manifold of regression that transforms the Absolute into an icy desert. Bataille’s geoaesthetic flourish should not be lost on us. Gasché explains (and it is worth quoting at length), Bataille does not oppose the warmth of affect and violence to the coldness of the abstract and the Absolute. On the contrary, what irrupts within it is a frost even icier than the coldness of understanding and reason. The frost of this affective violence congeals the coldness of reason . . . As the tool of the deconstruction of the Absolute, in no way does it replace the analytic rigor of understanding with the intuition of imagination and its images. To the contrary, for Bataille the image is characterized by an analytic coldness and sharpness that far transcends those of reason . . . The world of images as such, provided we can still speak of totality here, is groundless, split, ambiguous, 409

elusive, fragmented, and endlessly mirrored in itself. In other words, it is a perverted speculation.23 To grey the faculties of reason and understanding with grey is to pervert speculation. But it is also to operationalise this perversion. Insofar as Bataille develops his destructuring analytic in and through ice, recasting thought to a groundless proliferation of cold images, we might think about the relationship between ethno-aesthetics as Arke develops them and contemporary Inuit art more broadly, in terms of their spectral and elemental sensibility. That is to say, what is emerging in more contemporary imagery is less concerned with the critique of Enlightenment science and philosophy per se, and more with practices of sticking to, splitting, mirroring and otherwise haunting scenes of knowledge production and colonial encounter. I would suggest therefore that we can see an epistemological drama playing out between climate science and Inuit knowledge that is constitutive of a political grey zone in which the global discourse of climate change resides. This grey zone is symptomatic of a post-truth moment, which Bruno Latour characterises in terms of an exhaustion of criticism and a polarisation of knowledge into discrete forms of research production.24 The imperative for a political ecology that would overcome this polarisation makes its appearance through planetary intrusions; eruptions of planetary force that expose the blind spots of the specialised sciences but nevertheless present themselves as philosophical concerns. But these intrusions do not merely emerge as planetary phenomena. They are new ontological entities, phantasms in their own right. I would suggest that the epistemological blind spots Latour identifies, and within which planetary phenomena emerge, are also the pretence by which the phantasms of the colonial history of the Arctic appear at the very 410

site of its scientific study. Such phantasms are a distinct force that haunts the global discourse of climate change and raise the imperative to account for this traumatic history in the ambiguity of the post-truth era. I read Inuit art as phantasmological insofar as it greys the grey context of climate change. I do so in terms that demand an appreciation of Gasché’s understanding of phantasmology as that aesthetic operation that recasts the environment of thinking by exacerbating its aesthetic excess – to grey grey, to freeze cold, to reflect reflections, to multiply divisions and to shatter rifts. But it is also worthwhile to raise the Inuit concept of sulijuk, a word in Inuktitut meaning ‘it is true’. Sulijuk denotes at once a demand to represent from true experience and to represent that experience authentically. But as I will suggest, the concept of sulijuk does not preclude phantasmological practice; to the contrary it seems to invite it. It was a concept that the southern Canadian artist James Houston encountered when he travelled in Nunavik and Nunavut, and which became a key ethic of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-Op founded in the late 1960s in Kinngait (formerly Cape Dorset). Inuit print­ makers and carvers sold their work through the Co-Op, and a flourishing market ensued as southerners became increasingly curious about Inuit life. The Kinngait Co-Op was both an important source of income for Inuit and a way to mediate Inuit perspective within the settler culture. In recent decades, the concept of sulijuk, and the premise of showing Inuit realities to settlers, have become the fulcrum for ever more complex representations of Inuit perspective in and alongside settler science, especially glaciology. The late Tim Pitsiulak, a third generation Kinngait artist, offers an acute example of an image of glaciology as a settler assemblage that encroaches on the Arctic landscape. In Underwater Research Team (2014), Pitsiulak draws a scene of researchers studying glacier ice (Figure 12.5). In the background a red icebreaker ship showcases a prominent Canadian maple 411

Figure 12.5 Tim Pitsiulak, Underwater Research Team, 2014. Coloured pencil. Copyright: Dorset Fine Arts

leaf, signalling the governmental claim on the landscape. In the middle ground two researchers, one in a red parka and another in a dry suit, have cut a hole in the ice and are preparing for a dive. In the foreground, another diver is intently shining a light on a section of glacier below sea level. The glacier wall slides into a pool of dark blue water. Overhead, a chopper flies a crate back to the ship, to add to its load of ice samples. ~ 412

There is a sense of humorous irony to the image insofar as the scientists appear to both bring insight to the signs of global warming, and yet in their myopia they do not see that their presence interrupts the land itself: they cut, crack and penetrate the ice they are observing. By contrast, Pitsiulak observes the scene in its entirety as an assemblage of scientific enquiry, the flexing of national territory and technological prowess. It is precisely by reading these vignettes evenly – from a state of remove from it – that his landscape renders ambiguous the causes and effects of glacial melt. Pitsiulak does not internalise or represent what the scientists see nor how they experience it. Nor does he mediate his own situatedness in the scene. The phases of scientific research that lead the eye from one group to the other and from background to foreground cut off sharply in the foreground. The thick line of water above the diver in the foreground yields a perspective that would be quite impossible to embody; seeing both below and above the water line. As much as the figures are absorbed and removed from the viewer, then, so also is Pitsiulak’s study of the scientists absorbed and removed from them. He offers a vision that examines their activity, reading them impartially (coldly, one might say) from a site that is wholly to the scene of climate know­ ledge production, yet is nevertheless immanent to the perspective of the image itself. The figures have occupied the place, their faces are entirely covered, they give no sign that the artist is even present or an integral part of the place. Even the helicopters seem noticeably pointed away from the viewer. The scene’s realism is fabulated and animated but nevertheless persuasive as Pitsiulak’s ordinary experience of life in Cape Dorset, in accordance with the principles of sulijuk. The drawing captures the epistemological rift between the scientific study of ice (which is insistently closed to the Inuit viewer) and the Inuit study of scientists as objects of realistic representation. This rift proffers a phantasmological effect: in the tradition of Inuit realism and with 413

an unrelenting acuity, Pitsiulak depicts the closure of the scientific perspective. It is precisely at the fissure between the respective epistemes (scientific vision and an Inuit envisioning of science) that the ice shatters into fragments. Doubling the water line, appearing both above and below it, the ice erupts across the foreground as an inexplicably excessive horizon line. This geoaesthetic flourish illuminates the epistemological rupture while at the same time greying the scientific apparatus. None of the figures seems to be aware of these jutting shards, yet the ice binds and separates Pitsiulak’s visuality from the visuality of the glaciologists. Whereas the latter have cut a perfectly symmetrical area of ice in the middle ground and produce measured samples to send back to the ship, it is the artist/viewer alone who sees the mesh of cerulean blue that tears across the spaces above and below the water in the foreground, and echoed at the base of the ship in the background. Where the researchers do not see the glacier for the samples, Pitsiulak deploys a veritable bacchanale of ice to grey the scene of glaciological research. Phantasmology as Reorigination of the Grey in Grey The deployment of phantasmology as a subject matter proper is exemplified by Shuvinai Ashoona whose drawings intersperse fictional creatures, affectively charged actants and local history in Cape Dorset. By way of conclusion, I read one of her drawings as a site of the re-origination of the grey concept in a greyed environment. That is to say, I read Ashoona’s work as scenes of the re-origination of consciousness in and through the decolonising effects of phantasmology. While her work and that of the Kinngait artists is not directly connected to surrealist anthropology as Pia Arke’s ethno-aesthetics, it nevertheless arrives at a place in common with Arke’s tactics of setting a 414

phantasmology in motion. Ultimately, I would suggest that Ashoona’s work reflects on the techniques of colonial signification in ways that re-found the process of signification itself in a phantasmatic space, a space where phantasms float up from the deep, and animate the recounting of stories and experiences while troubling the representation of colonial assemblages. As in the case of Pia Arke’s and Tim Pitsiulak’s work, Ashoona does not merely grey sites of colonial encounter, she greys the operation of greying itself. That is to say, she generates a specifically Inuit perspective of phantasmology.

Figure 12.6  Shuvinai Ashoona, Compositions (Titanic Plus Nascopie & Noah’s Ark), 2008. Coloured pencil with black porous point pen, graphite on paper, 122.5 × 243 cm. Copyright: Dorset Fine Arts 415

In her drawing Titanic, Nascopie, and Noah’s Ark Ashoona visually recounts the historical sinking of the RMS Nascopie, a Hudson’s Bay Company supply ship that struck uncharted reef in the icy waters near the Cape Dorset harbour in July of 1947 (Figure 12.6). The story of the sinking of the Nascopie is still remembered by the elders in the area and is a favourite story that has been depicted in the work of several of the Kinngait artists of Ashoona’s generation. Here, though, Ashoona transforms the oral history by summoning images, entities and associations from the colonial to the Biblical to the monstrous into a common space where the history is recounted alongside its alterities. The ship is identified not only as the Nascopie, but also the Titanic, another ship that garnered notoriety as a Victorian dream turned catastrophe and whose associations collide with those of the Nascopie. Beneath these names is ‘Noah’s Ark’. The reference not only evokes the epic and global scale disaster of The Flood, it conjures a mythological global climate disaster more broadly. But Ashoona perverts the story of Noah’s Ark in her representation and positioning of animals. Instead of the ship salvaging two of each species, the Nascopie seems to have drawn forth monstrous animals: a giant tentacled squid-like creature that lurks in the depths of the water. The squid aims at the Inuit villagers who attempt to save the food and goods from the sinking ship. On the shoreline, a winged polar bear growls at the squid as her three young cubs scamper from the nearby cave. The squid seems to be a spectral grey emissary from the icy deep, neither belonging to the angelic animal kingdom of the Arctic nor of the colonial assemblage, but rather something in between: an anarchical hinge between the two that aggressively binds the scene by dispelling its causal logic. Dominating the centre of the picture, it is a (literally) grey heterogenous core, a katabole that transforms the entire unfolding of the history of the Cape Dorset harbour without 416

explanation or cause. Its presence is ambiguous even as it recounts the story with ambiguity. If the phantasms of Inuit art perturb the scientific discourse of climate change, they do so by congealing science with phantasms. Where scientific claims are showing their political limits, this is perhaps a symptom of a failure to take consciousness of the origin of climate change in the colonial imaginary and its exteriorisation as global imperialism. Contemporary Inuit art intervenes by exposing an imaginary in which science is visualised in and through cultural knowledge and forms of expression that are enmeshed with the very planetary phenomenon science seeks to observe: the melting glacier ice. Through Pia Arke, Tim Pitsiulak and Shuvinai Ashoona it becomes pos­sible to see the possibilities of a global political ecology through the re-origination of climate science with phantasmology, in the grey zone after truth. In their work, the ice appears in a phantasmic space that is perturbed by grey spectres that chill, perturb and shatter the spaces and sites of the scientific assemblage. In the greyed and greying spaces of ethno-aesthetic intervention, it appears that science is not an exhausted discourse at all. Rather, it is not cold enough to acknowledge its own forms of disavowal. Notes 1. Stefan Jonsson, ‘Performing Postcoloniality: Pia Arke’s Disclosure of the Global Order’, in Tupilakosaurus: An Incomplete(able) Survey of Pia Arke’s Artistic Work and Research (Copenhagen: Kuratorisk Aktion, 2012), 321. 2. Pia Arke, Ethno-Aesthetics/Ethnoæstetik, 2nd edn, trans. Erik Grant (Copenhagen: Kunsttidsskriftet ARK, Pia Arke Selskabet and Kuratorisk Aktion, 1995). 3. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 145. 417

4. Arke, Ethno-Aesthetics/Ethnoæstetik, 23. 5. Arke, Ethno-Aesthetics/Ethnoæstetik, 27. 6. Arke, Ethno-Aesthetics/Ethnoæstetik, 28. 7. Jonsson, ‘Performing Postcoloniality’, 321. 8. Lyle Dick, ‘“Pibloktoq” (Arctic Hysteria): A Construction of European-Inuit ­Relations’, Arctic Anthropology, 32, 2 (1995): 1–42. 9. Iben Mondrup, ‘The Photo Montage Arctic Hysteria alias Arctic Hysteria IV (1997)’, in Tupilakosaurus, 267. 10. Arke, in Tupilakosaurus, 209. 11. Kirsten Thisted, ‘The Hate in the Body: Language, Gender, and National Affiliation in New Greenlandic Literature’, The History of Nordic Women’s Literature, 12 October 2016. https:​/​​/​nordicwomensliterature.net​/​2016​/​10​/​12​/​the​-​hate​-​in​-​the​-​body​-​­language​ -​­­gender​-​and​-​national​-​affiliation​-​in​-​new​-​greenlandic​-​literature​/​ 12. Rodolphe Gasché, Georges Bataille: Phenomenology and Phantasmology, trans. Roland Végsö (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 13. Gasché, Georges Bataille, 97. 14. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805–1806) (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 86. 15. Gasché, Georges Bataille, 113. 16. Gasché, Georges Bataille, 115. 17. Gasché, Georges Bataille, 115. 18. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. A. V. Miller, W. Wallace and Michael Inwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 205. 19. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, ‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality’, in Formations of Fantasy, ed. by James Burgin and Cora Kaplan (New York: Routledge, 1987), 15. 20. Gasché, Georges Bataille, 60. 418

21. Georges Bataille, ‘The Pineal Eye’, in Visions of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. by Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 81. 22. Gasché, Georges Bataille, 157. 23. Gasché, Georges Bataille, 157. 24. Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30, 2 (2004): 225–248.

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Index Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. End-of-chapter notes are indicated by the page number followed by the letter n and the note number, e.g. 171n6 refers to note 6 on page 171.

À l’infinitif (Duchamp), 141–5 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari), 306–7, 310, 311, 314, 315 Absolute, 12, 29, 353–4n6, 409 abstract line, 306–12 abstraction, 2, 3 in Gerhard Richter’s work, 46 and intuition, 404 in Paul Klee’s work, 294–5, 305, 311, 313

in Samuel Beckett’s work, 58 thought and, 249 in Vilhelm Hammershøi’s work, 158 achromatic colours, 180 adiaphoria, 13, 206, 230; see also indifference Adorno, Theodor, 336 Aesthetic Theory, 16, 155–6, 157, 340–2 on art and the utopian, 169, 171n6, 340–3, 346–7, 350–2

453

on free time, 93, 351 on general equivalence, 16, 229 on Goethe’s Mephistopheles, 337–8 on hope, 346, 347 ‘Marginalia on Theory and Praxis’, 336–8 Negative Dialectics, 343–5 philosophical thought and colour, 248–50 Verstummen (silence, muteness), 11, 154, 170 Adorno’s Grey (Steyerl), 339 aeration, 226–7 Aesthetic Theory (Adorno), 16, 155–6, 157, 340–2 aesthetics ethno-aesthetics, 393–5, 401, 410 geo-aesthetic, 17, 389, 409, 414 healing potential of, 255–6 of painting and colour, 30–6 scientific, 124 surrealist, 393–4 of withdrawal, 11 Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art (Hegel), 8–9, 25–6, 31, 33, 35, 38–9, 44–6 Agamben, Giorgio, 372, 376–7 aisthesis, 255, 263, 264–5 Alberti, Leon Battista, 255–6 anachromism, 9, 54–5, 60, 69, 80 anaesthetic, 10–11 animated photography, 363–7 anthropological humanism, 393, 394 antiquity, 370–1 apatheia, 255 apparitions, 145 Arago, François, 129 Arcades Project, The (Benjamin), 9, 87–8, 102, 103–8 archaeological method, 358–61; see also media archaeology Archaeology of Knowledge, The (Foucault), 358, 370 Arctic, 407 Arendt, Hannah, 339 Arke, Pia, 407 Arctic Hysteria, 395–400, 397, 399 Blubber and Science, 400–1 ethno-aesthetics, 393–5, 410 Self-Portrait, 389–91, 390 Untitled (Put your Kamik on your Head), 392Untitled (Toying with National Costume), 391, 392 art, 34–5 as the distinct, 154, 157 ‘end of art’ thesis, 8, 27, 34, 36–7 and modernist painting, 40–7 and philosophy, 311–12, 317–19 as sensation, 313

truth and authenticity in, 169–70 utopian, 340–3, 346–7, 350–2 see also blackboard paintings; grey paintings; Inuit art; painting Ashoona, Shuvinai, 414–17 atmospheres, 58, 60, 130, 166 attentiveness, ethics of, 13–14, 254–6, 276 Augustine of Hippo, 250 authenticity, 156, 169–70 Badiou, Alain, 4, 6, 64, 69–70, 72, 213, 248n77 Baraitser, Lisa, 74, 79 Barthes, Roland The Neutral, 13, 212–15: colour’s relationship to the Neutral, 203, 206–11; on The Garden of Earthly Delights (Bosch), 215–29 Bassouls’ photograph of, 207 The Preparation of the Novel, 227–8 Bassouls, Sophie, 207-8, 233n11 Bataille, Georges, 17 phantasmology (Gasché), 388, 402–3, 405–6, 408–10 Baudelaire, Charles, 89, 91, 108 Bauhaus 291, 294, 295, 298, 299, 300, 301, 321n4, 323n16 Bazin, André, 366 Beckett, Samuel, 2, 9 colourlessness, 53–4, 55–61 Come and Go, 55–6, 58 Endgame, 64–5, 72–3 Footfalls, 53–4, 73, 75 Ghost Trio, 56–7, 58, 70 grey time, 54–5, 59–61, 62–71: and late liberalism, 72–80 Happy Days, 73 Lessness, 66–8 Quad, 58, 65 Quadrat I, 65 Quadrat II , 65–6 repetition, 343 Rockaby, 54 Sans (Lessness), 66–8 Shades, 57–8 Waiting for Godot, 62–4, 73–4, 76, 77 Belting, Hans, 216, 218 Benjamin, Walter, 9–10, 136 on André Breton, 102–3 The Arcades Project, 9, 87–8, 102, 103–8 Berlin Childhood around 1900, 109 on boredom, 9–10, 88–9: as dream-sleep, 102–5; effect of modernity on, 88, 90–5, 105–9; effect of weather on, 90; relation to fashion, 88–9, 95–9, 101

‘Child’s View of Colour, A’ (Benjamin), 104 happiness, 115–16n50 on history and progress, 99–102 on hope, 345 ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, 93, 113n15–14n16 ‘On the Concept of History’, 99–100 philosophy of colour, 104–5 ‘Storyteller, The’, 105 Berardi, Franco, 72 Bergson, Henri, 308 Berkeley, George, 188 Berlin Childhood around 1900 (Benjamin), 109 Bernard of Clairvaux, 257, 259–60, 261–3, 264–6, 276 Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (Mnemosyne Atlas), 368–9, 370–4, 376–8 Binswanger, Ludwig, 375, 377 Black Lives Matter, 112 Blanc, Charles, 124 Blanchot, Maurice, 243, 359–60 Bloch, Ernst, 132 ‘Bloch’s Spuren’ [Bloch’s Traces] (Adorno), 345–7 Blubber and Science (Arke), 400–1 Blue (Jarman), 250–1 Boehme, Jacob, 211, 213, 217, 221 Bonne, Jean-Claude, 122 boredom, 4, 9–10, 351 as dream-sleep, 102–5 effect of modernity on, 88, 90–5, 105–9 effect of weather on, 90 impact of COVID-19 lockdown on, 111–12 relation to fashion, 88–9, 95–9, 101 Bosch, Hieronymus Barthes’ schematic diagrams, 223–7 The Garden of Earthly Delights, 4, 13, 203, 204–5, 215–22, 219 The Temptation of St. Anthony, 214–215 Bouveresse, Jacques, 267 Breton, André, 102–3 Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, The (Duchamp), 124–5 Buchloh, Benjamin, 155–6 Buck-Morss, Susan, 96, 114n29 Bushart, Magdalena, 332 Cachin, Françoise, 128 capitalism, 4, 9–10, 93, 106, 110 as cause of boredom, 88–9 effect on fashion, 98 effect on needs and desires, 93 late capitalism, 71–80 care time, 75

Cash, John, 73–4 ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’ (Merleau-Ponty), 308 Chahut (Seurat), 139–40 chaos, 15, 291, 294, 305, 309–10, 313 Child in White (Seurat), 135 ‘Child’s View of Colour, A’ (Benjamin), 104 Chroma. A Book of Color (Jarman), 249–52 chromoluminarism, 124, 126 Cinématographe Lumière, 363–7 Cirque (Seurat), 139–41 Cistercian art and architecture, 256–66, 258 Clark, T.J., 98 class, 92–3, 97, 98, 111 Claussen, Sophus, 155 Clifford, James, 393 climate change, 407–14 climate science, 17, 388–9, 410, 417 clock time, 61 collage, 130 colonial colour names, 235 colonial displacement, 389–90 colonial violation, 393–400 colonisation, 410–11 colour, 31–3, 39, 132 achromatic, 180 Benjamin’s philosophy of, 104–5 in De vita libri tres (Ficino), 253 of dreams, 378–9 Duchamp on, 144–5 effect on time perception, 61–2 and grey point (Klee), 298–301 Merleau-Ponty on, 308 names (Barthes), 207, 234–5n17 and philosophy, 176, 348–50; see also Wittgenstein, Ludwig ready-made, 127, 143 relationship to Barthes and the Neutral, 203, 206–11 in Shades (Beckett), 57–8 see also impossible colours colour circle, 299–300 colour symbolism, medieval, 257, 258 colour systems, 314–15 colour theory, 124, 295, 300; see also chromoluminarism colourlessness, 53–4, 55–61, 217, 218, 256–66 Comay, Rebecca, 68–9, 72, 237 Come and Go (Beckett), 55–6, 58 commodity, 106 commodity fetishism, 93–4, 107 fashion as, 96–8

455

commodity-world, 6, 15, 37, 351 Compositions (Titanic Plus Nascopie & Noah’s Ark), 415–17, 415 consciousness, 92, 402–5, 408–9 constructivism, 309, 312 consumerism, 96, 109, 111 conté crayon, 128–30 continuous experience (Erfahrung), 92, 105 Contributions to the Theory of Pictorial Form (Klee), 302, 303, 304 cosmogenesis, 294 COVID-19, 111–12 Creative Credo (Klee), 296 Creative Mind, The (Bergson), 308 Cunningham, David, 58 Da Pos, Osvaldo, 183, 185–6, 197 daguerreotype,129, 135 Dance, The (Matisse), 123 De administratione (Suger), 257 De Duve, Thierry, 123, 141, 143 De vita libri tres (Ficino), 252, 253–5, 256 Debord, Guy, 109 Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 70, 140, 291–2, 305–6, 306–7, 309–15 Della tranquilità dell’animo (Alberti), 255–6 Devil’s Doll, The (Gippius), 365 diagram 139, 223–6, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 318, 326n39, 327n55 desire 13, 91, 94, 96, 97, 109, 206, 230, 325n31, 376, 397, 398 dialectic, 13, 54, 69, 71, 89, 105, 158, 206, 213–14, 312, 346–7 dialectic of intensities, 13, 213, 229 diaphoralogy, 13, 206, 227–9, 230; see also science of nuance Didi-Huberman, Georges, 373 Didion, Joan, 61 difference 2,3,4,5, 13, 16, 42, 54, 58, 68, 69,70, 73, 88, 92, 144, 206, 212–13, 215, 219,221, 229, 230n4, 272–3, 306, 309. 312, 316, 317, 320, 325n37, 350 digital connectivity, 78–9 Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity (Nancy), 220–2, 244–6 discourse networks (Kittler), 361 discrete experience (Erlebnis), 92, 105 distinct, the (Nancy), 11, 154, 157 dream interpretation, 375–6 dream-sleep (phantasmagoria), 102–5, 368 dreams, 378–9, 404 drive/death drive, 3, 206, 211, 239, 244, 248

456

Duby, Georges, 261, 264 Duchamp, Marcel, 128, 133 À l’infinitif, 141–5 Large Glass, 124–5 and Seurat, 123, 125, 130–1 The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, 124–5 Notes, 122, 125 use of photography, 146 duration, 589, 61 Duthuit, Georges, 128 dusk, 2, 62–3, 69, 212–13, 221, 228, 311, 335, 336 ecology 2, 6,7, 17, 389, 410, 417 Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Hegel), 1–2, 26, 27–30, 212–13, 311, 335–6 Elias, Amy, 78 Engels, Friedrich, 92–3 End/Lessness (Heron), 68 ‘end of art’ thesis, 8, 27, 34, 36–7 Endgame (Beckett), 64–5, 72–3 endlessness, 66–8 Enduring Time (Baraitser), 71–2 Engelmann, Paul, 271 Engels, Friedrich, 92–3 Enlightenment, 17, 388, 402, 410 Erfahrung v. Erlebnis, 92, 105 Escher, Maurits Cornelis, 194 ‘Estranged labour’ (Marx), 93 ethics of attentiveness, 13–14, 254–6, 276 ethno-aesthetics, 393–5, 401, 410 ethno-surrealism, 393–4 ‘Exhausted, The’ (Deleuze), 70 exhaustion, 70–1, 220–1, 348 experience, continuous (Erfahrung) v. discrete (Erlebnis), 92, 105 expressionless expression, 156 ‘Eye and Mind’ (Merleau-Ponty), 305, 307–9 Farthing, Stephen, 333 fashion, 88–9, 95–9, 101, 104 Faust (Goethe) see Mephistopheles Fauvism, 125–6, 132 Fénéon, Félix, 127, 133 Ficino, Marsilio, 252, 253–5, 256 Fifty Shades of Gray (James), 110, 112 Fisher, Mark, 110–11 Flusser, Vilém, 267–8 Footfalls (Beckett), 53–4, 73, 75 formalism, monochrome, 12, 29, 42–3, 243 Foucault, Michel, 16, 367

archaeological method, 358–61 The Archaeology of Knowledge, 358, 370 ‘Dream, Imagination, and Existence’, 375 genealogy, 357–8, 360, 371, 377 ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, 357–8 The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 358 on poetic expression, 377 on psychoanalysis, 375–6, 377 Francis Bacon. Logic of Sensation (Deleuze), 312–13, 315 Frankfurt School, 93 free time, 93; see also leisure time ‘Free Time’ (Adorno), 351–2 Freedberg, David, 373 freedom, realm of, 93 Freud, Sigmund, 375–6, 405 Friedlaender, Salomo, 365 Fuller, Matthew, 6, 362 Garcia, Tristan, 215, 240 Garden of Earthly Delights, The (Bosch), 4, 13, 203, 204–5, 215–22, 219 Barthes’ schematic diagrams, 223–7, 224 Garma, Ángel, 378 Gasché, Rodolphe, 17, 402–6, 408, 409–10 Gauguin, Paul, 125–6 genealogy, 5, 14, 16, 260, 357–8, 371, 377 Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 349 genesis, 216, 294, 305 pictorial, 294–5, 296, 305, 309, 317 Gerhard Richter (exhibition), 155–6 Ghost Trio (Beckett), 56–7, 58, 70 Gilloch, Graeme, 99 Gippius, Zinaida, 365 glaciology, 17, 411–14 Glass Façade (Klee), 298 God, 217–20, 219 Goethe, J.W. von Faust, 16, 214, 367 haptic vision, 314 Mephistopheles, 3, 16, 214, 334–5, 337–8, 367 Theory of Colours, 177, 184, 189–90, 323n21 Goffey, Andrew, 6, 362 Gorky, Maxim, 363–7 Graeber, David, 109 Grandville, J.J., 95–7, 101 ‘La Mode’ (Fashion), 95 ‘Rose’, 101 Grammaire des arts du dessin (Blanc), 124 grammar, 178, 187–8, 192, 194–5, 274

grammatical observations, 190 Gray Magic (Friedlaender), 365 gray media, 6–7, 362 green, 3, 4, 104, 177, 186, 194, 207, 213–4, 235, 252–3, 255–6, 300, 335, 337–8 grey in Chroma. A Book of Color (Jarman), 249–50, 251–2 in Faust (Goethe), 335 in The Neutral (Barthes), 203, 208, 210–14, 223, 228 function in pictorial genesis, 294–5 haptic v. optical, 314–15 luminous, 12, 179–81, 183, 187, 188, 194–5, 197 as tonality of genealogy, 16 as unconscious of colour, 3–4, 244n55 grey genealogy, 357–8 grey imaging, 10–12 grey intensities, 12–15 Grey Man and the Coast (Klee), 291, 292, 293, 299 Grey Mirrors (Richter), 160, 166–7 grey paintings, 8–9, 10–11, 36–7 philosophy as, 26–30, 33–4, 35–6: and modernist painting, 40–7 and photographical reproductions, 368–9 see also grisaille; Barthes, Roland; Hammershøi, Vilhelm; Richter, Gerhard; Seurat, Georges ‘grey on grey’ of philosophy, 1–2, 4, 5, 26, 68–9, 212–13, 311, 335–6 grey point (graupunkt), 14–15, 291, 295–8, 316–17 and abstract line, 306–12 and colour, 298–301 Deleuze on, 305–7, 309–10, 313–14 and diagrammatic colourism, 213–316 and philosophy, 317–19 Grey (Richter), 45 grey science, 5–6, 361 grey thought, 15–17 grey time, 7–10 in Beckett’s work, 54–5, 59–61, 62–71: and late liberalism, 72–80 greyscale, 5, 54, 56 grisaille, 3, 4, 5–6, 8, 10, 56, 203, 206, 211–18, 220–29, 241n38, 242n41, 243n51, 244n51, 245n56 and n59, 251, 257, 263, 266, 282n34-35, 332, 369, 374 Grisaille Notebook (Warburg), 368–9, 374 Grisaille panels see Garden of Earthly Delights, The (Bosch); Temptation of St. Anthony, The (Bosch) grisaille-windows see Cistercian art and architecture Guattari, Félix, 140, 306–7, 309–12 Guerin, Frances, 43–4, 334

457

Guerlain, Jacques, 62 Guys, Constantin, 91–2 Meeting in the Park, 90 Hammershøi, Ida, 162–3 Hammershøi, Vilhelm, 11, 153–4, 157, 158, 160–7 Interior in Strandgade, 162–3, 164 Interior with Mirror, 167 Interior with the Artist’s Easel, 163–6, 164 Landscape on the Island of Falster, 165, 166 Open Doors, 163 happiness, 115–16n50 Happy Days (Beckett), 73 haptic grey, 314, 315 Harmony of the Northern Flora (Klee), 298 Harvey, David, 109 hedo-ascetic, 110 Hegel, G.W.F., 4 aesthetic of painting and colour, 30–6 Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art, 8–9, 25–6, 31, 33, 35, 38–9, 44–6 Art, 34–5, 38–9; ‘end of art’ thesis, 8, 27, 34, 36–7; and modernist painting, 40–7 carnation, 8, 32 Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 1–2, 26, 27–30, 212–13, 311, 335–6 Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805-1806), 403, 418n14 monochrome formalism, 12, 29, 42–3, 243 owl of Minerva, 1–2, 7, 212, 237, 311, 335–6 Phenomenology of Spirit, The, 29, 42–3, 235, 239, 243, 403 philosophy, 1–2, 5, 7, 68–9, 212–13, 335–6: as grey painting, 26–30, 33–4, 35–6; and modernist painting, 37–47; of consciousness, 402, 403–5 Science of Logic, 215, 240n34 speculative sentence, 234–235, 239 Spirit, 8, 27, 31–3, 36, 39, 358, 403–4 Henry, Charles, 124, 131 Heron, Jonathan, 67–8 historical knowledge, 368 history, 99–102, 367, 371 hope, 345, 346, 347 Horner, Elaine, 192 Houston, James, 411 ice, 407–8, 411–14, 417 image, the, 404 phantasmic, 405 imagination, 376, 377, 404

458

imaging see grey imaging immanence, 5, 6, 135, 157, 163, 165, 170, 214, 232, 319, 350, 374 impossible colours, 12, 179–84 critique, 184–8 defense, 189–91 normative reading, 191–8 indifference, 4, 13, 47, 58, 92, 130, 206, 222, 229, 230n3 intensities see grey intensities Interior in Strandgade (Hammershøi), 162–3, 164 Interior with Mirror (Hammershøi), 167 Interior with the Artist’s Easel (Hammershøi), 163–6, 164 intuition, 372, 403–5 Inuit art, 16–17, 387–9 and climate change, 407–14: Underwater Research Team (Pitsiulak), 411–14, 412 Compositions (Titanic Plus Nascopie & Noah’s Ark) (Ashoona), 415–17, 415 Pia Arke, 407: Arctic Hysteria, 395–400, 397, 399; Blubber and Science, 400–1; ethno-aesthetics, 393–5, 410; Self-Portrait, 389–91, 390; Untitled (Put your Kamik on your Head), 392; Untitled (Toying with National Costume), 391, 392 Itten, Johannes, 299, 301 Janin, Jules, 135 Jarman, Derek, 14 Chroma. A Book of Color, 249–52 on Marsilio Ficino, 256 Jay, Martin, 104 Johnson, Christopher D., 374 Jonsson, Stefan, 395 Jouissance (Lacan), 206, 211, 215, 236 Kandinsky, Wassily, 301, 322n11 Kant, Immanuel, 104 Kastan, David Scott, 333 katabole, 406 Kiefer, Anselm, 44 Kinngait Co-op, 411 Kittler, Friedrich, 361–2 Klee, Paul Contributions to the Theory of Pictorial Form, 302, 303, 304 Glass Façade, 298 Grey Man and the Coast, 291, 292, 293, 299 grey point (graupunkt), 14–15, 291, 295–8, 316–17: and abstract line, 306–12; and colour, 298–301; Deleuze on, 305–7, 309–10, 313–14; and diagrammatic colourism, 213–316; and philosophy, 317–19

Lacan, Jacques, 206, 211, 215, 222, 229, 236, 238–41, 246, 248 ‘La Mode’ (Grandville), 95 ‘La Tricorne’ (de Falla), 352 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 170 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 89 Landscape on the Island of Falster (Hammershøi), 165, 166 language, 177–8, 185, 189–90, 191–2, 274, 358–60 Lao-Tzu (Laozi), 209–10, 219 Large Glass (Duchamp), 124–5 Las Meninas (Velázquez), 359 Latour, Bruno, 388, 410 leisure time, 93, 112 Leitner, Bernhard, 273 Lessness (Beckett), 66–8 LeWitt, Sol, 58 Life of the Mind, The (Arendt), 339 Lipps, Theodor, 104–5 logic, 178, 192 of sensation, 312–13, 316, 317 see also grammar Lugg, Andrew, 182–3, 191–2 luminous grey, 12, 179–81, 183, 187, 188, 194–5, 197 Lyotard, Jean-François, 3, 239–40, 242–3

Meeting in the Park (Guys), 90 melancholy, 253–4, 256 Mephistopheles (Goethe’s Faust), 3, 16, 214, 334–5, 337–8, 367 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 305, 307–9, 313 ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’, 308 ‘Eye and Mind’, 305, 307–9 Metropolis and Mental Life, The (Simmel), 92 Michelet, Jules, 102 Middle Ages, 251–2 minimalism, 58 mirrors see Grey Mirrors (Richter); Interior with Mirror (Hammershøi) modernisation, 90–1 modernism, 38, 41 modernist painting, 37–40 greyness of, 40–7 modernity, 59, 69, 134 authenticity in, 156 effect on boredom, 88, 90–5, 105–9 as involving loss, 169 time in, 100–2 see also late capitalism monochrome film, 250–1 monochrome formalism, 12, 29, 42–3, 243; see also Hegel, G.W.F monochrome gray, 216–17; see also grey monochromy, 43–4 in Beckett’s work, 57–8 Derek Jarman on, 251–2 and ethics of attentiveness, 254–6 Wittgenstein House, 272 Multiple Arts: The Muses II (Nancy), 154 Musée de L’Homme, 393–4 Muses, The (Nancy), 157–8 muteness, 154–5, 156; see also silence; silencing; Verstummen (silence, muteness) myth, 100–2

Manet, Édouard, 123, 134 mathematical point 295; see also grey point Marx, Karl, 93, 94, 109 Matisse, Henri, 122, 125–6, 132, 146 Dance, The, 123 Matuszewski, Boleslas, 366 Mauss, Marcel, 393 media see gray media media archaeology, 361–2 medical philosophy see De vita libri tres (Ficino); Della tranquilità dell’animo (Alberti) medieval colour symbolism, 257

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 153 absentheism, 220 on artwork, 157–8, 159 Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, 220–2, 244–6 the distinct, 11, 154, 157 meaning, exemption of, 220–2 Multiple Arts: The Muses II, 154 Muses, The, 157–8 on painting, 168–9 seeing v. perceiving, 168 truth, 170

Harmony of the Northern Flora, 298 Pictorial Architecture Red, Yellow, Blue, 298 pictorial genesis, 294–5, 296, 305 Once Emerged From the Grey of Night, 298 Separation in the Evening, 298 Theory of Pictorial Configuration: 1.2 Principal Order, 297, 301; 1.3 Special Order, 303; Appendix, 302; I.1 Theory of Pictorial Configuration 304 Koerner, Joseph Leo, 222 Kojève, Alexandre, 212–3, 238 Koyré, Alexandre, 213, 218, 235–6, 238, 243 Krauss, Rosalind, 58

459

Negative Dialectics (Adorno), 343–5 neo-Impressionism, 127 Neutral, The (Barthes), 13, 212–15 adiaphoria, 13, 206, 230; see also indifference clouds, 216, 218–9, 225, 227–8, 248 Collège de France, 203, 206, 209 colour’s relationship to the Neutral, 203, 206–11 grisaille panels, The Garden of Earthly Delights (Bosch), 215–22: Barthes’ schematic diagrams, 223–7, 224; nuance, 228–9 margin, 222–6 Neutral Tint / Teinte Neutre, 206–11, 209 nuance, science of (diaphoralogy), 13–14, 206, 227–30 Sennelier inks, 206–8, 224, 232–3 newness, 94 Ngai, Sianne, 76 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 349 On the Genealogy of Morals, 358 ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ (Foucault), 357–8 Notes (Duchamp), 122, 125 nouveautés (novelties), 94, 96; see also fashion nuance, science of (diaphoralogy), 13–14, 206, 227–30 nudity, 168–9; see also Poseuses (Seurat) On Colour (Kastan and Farthing), 333 ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (Benjamin), 93, 113–14n16, 113n15 ‘On the Concept of History’ (Benjamin), 99–100 On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 358 Once Emerged From the Grey of Night (Klee), 298 Open Doors (Hammershøi), 163 optical grey, 314 optical mixing, 130 Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, The (Foucault), 358 Our Aesthetic Categories (Ngai), 76 owl of Minerva, 2, 5, 7, 212, 237n27, 311, 335 pagan antiquity, 370–1 painting, 313, 332–3 Hegel’s account of, 30–6 influence of photography on, 123, 128–31 modernist, 37–40: greyness of, 40–7 as seeing, 168 as truth and skin, 169 see also blackboard paintings; grey paintings Palais Stonborough-Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein House), 268, 269–70, 271–3 Parade de cirque (Seurat), 138–9 Paris arcades, 91, 94

460

PASSAGE: Tidsskrift for litteratur og kritik, 400 Peary, Robert E., 395–7 perception, 168 phantasmagoria (dream-sleep), 102–5, 368 phantasmic image, 405 phantasmology, 17, 388, 402–3, 405–6, 408–11, 413–17 phantasms, 402–3, 405, 406–7, 408–9, 410–11 Phenomenology of Spirit, The (Hegel), 29, 42–3, 234, 239, 243–4, 403 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 191, 275 philosophical thought, 331–4; see also theoretical reflection / thought philosophy as activity, 195 and art, 311–12, 317–19 belatedness of, 7, 27 and colour, 348–50 colours in, 176; see also Wittgenstein, Ludwig and ethics of the self, 14 grey on grey of, 1–2, 4, 5, 26, 68–9, 212–13, 311, 335–6 as grey painting, 26–30, 33–4, 35–6: and modernist painting, 40–7 of photography, 267–8 and science, 182–4, 189–90 Wittgenstein on, 267 see also De vita libri tres (Ficino); Della tranquilità dell’animo (Alberti) Philosophy of Mythology (Schelling), 406 Philosophy of Right, The (Hegel), 26, 27–30, 311 photographic montage see Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (Warburg) photography, 145–6, 333 animated, 363–7 influence on painting, 123, 128–31 philosophy of, 267–8 see also Arke, Pia Picasso, Pablo, 332 Pictorial Architecture Red, Yellow, Blue (Klee), 298 Pitsiulak, Tim, 411–14 poetic expression, 377 pointillism, 127–8, 133–4, 137, 145–6, 233 polyperspectivity, 268 Portrait of Lao-Tzu by Himself (Laozi), 209–10 Poseuses (Seurat), 123, 126–7, 135–8 post-truth, 410 poster-art, 139 Predicament of Culture, The (Clifford), 393 Preparation of the Novel, The (Barthes), 227–8 progress, 99–102, 108–9 prostitutes, 98

psychoanalysis, 375–6, 377 Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria, 75 Quad (Beckett), 58, 65 Quadrat I (Beckett), 65 Quadrat II (Beckett), 65–6 qualitas, 211 race, 78 rainbow, 4, 241, 300 realism 44, 140, 413 reflection, 38–40; see also theoretical reflection/ thought Remarks on Colour (Wittgenstein), 177–81, 189–90, 273, 274, 275 Renaissance, 251–2 repetition/repetition compulsion, 3, 4, 7, 211, 214, 222, 227, 343, 350 representation 5, 31, 33, 43, 46, 76, 58, 137, 158, 159, 160, 192, 219, 296, 299, 306, 312, 313, 314, 315, 317, 318, 359, 360, 389, 395, 396, 400, 403, 403, 406, 413, 415, 416 Richter, Gerard, 9, 11, 46–7, 154, 157, 158–60 Gerhard Richter (exhibition), 155–6 Grey, 45 Grey Mirrors, 160, 166–7 Tisch, 158–9 Rivet, Paul, 393 RMS Nascopie, 416 Rockaby (Beckett), 54 Romantic art, 31, 44 ‘Rose’ (Grandville), 101 Rudolph, Conrad, 260 Runge, Philip Otto, 299 Salon of 1946 (Baudelaire), 89 Sans (Lessness), 66–8 Schelling, F.W.J. von, 12, 406 Schoell-Glass, Charlotte, 374 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 96 science, 406, 408 and grammar, 192, 195 of nuance, 13–14, 206, 227–30; see also diaphoralogy and philosophy, 182–4, 189–90 Seurat and, 126 see also Blubber and Science (Arke); climate science; glaciology; grey science self-differencing, 3, 4–5 7 Self-Portrait (Arke), 389–91, 390 sensation, logic of, 312–13, 316, 317 Separation in the Evening (Klee), 298

Seurat, Georges, 10–11, 121 Chahut, 139–40 Child in White, 135 chromoluminarism, 124, 126 Cirque, 139–41 conté crayon works, 128–30 counter-Impressionism, 130–1 Duchamp’s affinity with, 123, 125, 130–1 and Fauvism, 125–6 Parade de cirque, 138–9 pointillism, 127–8, 133–4, 137, 145–6, 233 Poseuses, 123, 126–7, 135–8 Un Dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte, 132–3, 135, 137 sfumato, 33 Shades (Beckett), 57–8 Sharma, Sarah, 77–8 Simmel, Georges, 92 shock experiences, 92 shop windows, 142–3 Signac, Paul, 126–7 Signature of All Things, The (Agamben), 377 silence / silencing, 154, 155, 156, 158, 170; see also Verstummen (silence, muteness) Simmel, Georg, 92 Sloterdijk, Peter, 18, 242 social class see class social world, 74 society of the spectacle, 109 Somavilla, Ilse, 271 Southwood, Ivor, 79 stained glass see Cistercian art and architecture Steyerl, Hito, 339 Storr, Richard, 166–7 ‘Storyteller, The’ (Benjamin), 105 subjectivity, 31–2, 33, 44, 765, 311 subtle dialectic, 213 surrealist aesthetics, 393–4 synesthesia, 348 Taussig, Michael, 214, 235, 240 technology, 6, 59, 92, 99, 361, 365 Teinte Neutre / Neutral Tint, 206–11, 209 television plays, 56–8, 65–6 temporality see grey time; time perception Temptation of St. Anthony, The (Bosch), 214, 215 theoretical reflection / thought, 338–9, 343–5 Theory of Colours (Goethe), 177, 184, 189–90, 323n21 Theory of Pictorial Configuration (Klee) 1.2 Principal Order, 297, 301 1.3 Special Order, 303

461

Appendix, 302 I.1 Theory of Pictorial Configuration 304 thermodynamics, 65 thought, 317; see also grey thought; philosophical thought; theoretical reflection / thought time as belated, 7 as empty, 110–11 and fashion, 88–9 in late capitalism, 71–2 in Poseuses (Seurat), 136 and progress, 100–2 see also care time; free time; grey time; leisure time time perception, 61–2 Tisch (Richter), 158–9 Todorovic, Dejan, 183, 187–8, 193–4 torture, 74–5 traces, 345–7, 350 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), 195, 267–8 triptych see Garden of Earthly Delights, The (Bosch) truth, 169–70; see also post-truth Truth is Always Grey, The (Guerin), 43–4, 334 Twombly, Cy, 44, 213, 228 blackboard paintings, 225, 226 universal/universality, 12, 38–9, 70 Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte (Seurat), 132–3, 135, 137 Underwater Research Team (Pitsiulak), 411–14, 412 Untitled (Put your Kamik on your Head) (Arke), 392 Untitled (Toying with National Costume) (Arke), 391, 392 utopian art, 340–3, 346–7, 350–2

462

Verstummen (silence, muteness), 11, 154, 158, 160, 170; see also muteness; silence; silencing Vilhelm Hammershøi (poem by Claussen), 155 Vossenkuhl, Wilhelm, 274 Waiting, 9, 54, 56, 78, 80, 106, 107 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 62–4, 73–4, 76, 77 waiting time, 55, 61–2, 66, 72–3; see also grey time Warburg, Aby Grisaille Notebooks 368, 374 Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (Mnemosyne Atlas), 368–9, 370–4, 376–8 Weber, Max, 90, 110 weather, 89–91, 227–8 Wedekind, Gregor, 332 West Baffin Eskimo Co-op, 411 Westphal, Jonathan, 186–7, 192 wheel of Ixion, 96 Whitelaw, Billie, 53–4 wisdom, 267 withdrawal, 11, 155, 156, 157 Wittgenstein House, 268, 269–70, 271–3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 5, 14 on colours, 175, 177–9, 274–5 on impossible colours, 12, 179–84: critique, 184–8; defense, 189–91; normative reading, 191–8 on philosophy, 267 on seeing, 267–8 Philosophical Investigations, 191, 275 Remarks on Colour, 177–81, 189–90, 273, 274, 275 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 195, 267–8 Zenon, 188 Žižek, Slavoj, 110, 112, 237 Zupančič, Alenka, 244n55