It's Not What's in the Picture, It's Where the Picture Puts You: Cubism in Focus

Cubist painting puts a lot of people off, and, in a way, that's the point—but not in some sophomoric "let's shock our parents" way.  One of the main accomplishments of cubism is the way it dislocates the viewer, but to understand just how this works it's probably best to take a look at the highly developed mode of painting that cubism rejects—the kind of representational painting that relies on single point perspective.

It's not really a coincidence that this sort of painting comes into being in the Renaissance, reaches a zenith in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and only really begins to be challenged in the nineteenth century.  Consider how the dates co-ordinate so well with what  Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, calls "the classical episteme."  This episteme, or way of organizing knowledge —incipient in the Renaissance, dominant around the mid-seventeenth century, and continuing on through late eighteenth century—reflects the ideology of absolutist monarchies.  The stress is on order, centralization, and sovereignty in all things: in politics, in theology, in economics.

Aesthetics is no exception: the Palace of Versailles and its gardens give architectural and spatial expression to the notion of a grand and centralized scheme, and order based on the location and prestige of the sovereign.  The king's inner chamber, and, in the final analysis, the king's body are the center of a world that points toward, and radiates out from, his presence.  The single point perspective that dominates representational painting during the classical era also reflects the values of centralization and sovereignty.  We see this not only in grand portraits that assert the power of absolute monarchs, such as Hyacinthe Rigaud's famous portraits of Louis XIV, but in the formal underpinnings common to so many paintings of the classical episteme.

As Christopher Kul-Want puts it, "In painting during this period (especially in southern Europe), the subject stands literally and metaphorically before the pictured world like an omnipotent God.  In Raphael's School of Athens, for example, a central space is reserved for the subject, who is both viewer and addressee of the painting." As a viewer, you know where you stand in relation to the image, and it's a place of command and access: everything opens up, available to you and directed at you.  In a sense, you complete the scene, and stand at the point that gives it order.  In the case ofThe School of Athens, you stand directly before the greatest and most central of philosophers, as if to command their conversation and interrogate them about whatever subject you wish.

In The Order of Things Foucault discusses Velázquez's Las Meninas as a culmination of the classical episteme in painting.  Here, we take the position of the sovereign: the mirror in the back reflects the images of King Philip IV and Queen Maria Anna — and we, as viewers, soon realize that we stand, quite literally, in the place of the sovereign.  We command the creation of pictorial space, since Velázquez paints himself here as someone who is in the process of painting a commissioned portrait of us (the little girl is visiting us while we sit for this portrait).  We are also, by virtue of the mirror with our reflections in it, at the center of pictorial space.  And, most importantly, we are in the privileged place of the spectator for whom all of the visual elements are ordered and displayed.  There's a lot going on in Velázquez's painting but, among other things, Las Meninas is a comment on the nature of pictorial space, and on the privilege granted to the viewer of single-point perspective representational paintings.  In this kind of painting, we, the viewers, are kings, and gaze with mastery over all we survey.

There's a long, slow breakdown of the classical episteme, and many of our cultural landmarks are both symptoms and causes, of that breakdown.  Consider Isaac Newton's Principia: Newtonian space is a far more potent challenge to the classical episteme than Galileo's decentering of the earth in favor of the sun ever was.  If space is the neutral, ever-extending field Newton theorized, it lacks a center, and therefore is impossible to hierarchize: every point is as significant as every other point.  Or consider Voltaire's "Micromégas," a story in which a centuries-old, 20,000 foot tall creature from an enormous planet orbiting Sirius visits the earth, along with his 6,000 foot companion from Saturn.  Their contempt for the tiny inhabitants of our planet, and the philosophical reflections that stem from differences of scale in space and time serve to displace our sense of our own centrality and sovereignty.  A more familiar example of the relativizing of our perspectives and values comes in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which helps spell the death knell for the theology and political thought of the classical episteme—even though Swift himself was none too happy about the decline of the old values.

But I digress.  This is about Cubism.  And one thing that Cubism does is to displace the viewer from the privileged space he occupied during the classical episteme.  Whether it's a matter of presenting a profile view with both eyes visible as if in a frontal view, or a matter of representing the many different planes that might form the entry point into a painting, Cubist paintings find ways of not letting you assume a steady place from which the represented objects can be seen clearly.  In the Cubist world, we're no longer able to see from a position of sovereignty and command: we're no longer that important.  What is more, we're forced to confront the fact that it is not possible to survey the world from a vantage point that makes everything available to us.  Every imaginable perspective is partial, every perspective leaves something out.  Things in themselves are visible to us only in bits and pieces, in stolen glances.  Cubism denies Matthew Arnold's old ideal "to see life steadily and see it whole," and asserts something more like what E.M. Forster asserts when, in Howards End, he tells us "it is impossible to see modern life steadily and see it whole."  We can, like Forster's Mr. Wilcox, see it steadily but in a very limited fashion, or we can, like Forster's Margaret, see it whole.  Cubism is a kind of Margaret, offering the whole only by shaking it up into bits, and placing us in an unsteady position.

To understand painting of the classical episteme, we could stand in a position of sovereignty and command a view of the objects before us.  To understand Cubism, we have to stop asking what's been put into the picture, and start asking where the picture puts us.  ​

The Michael Jordans of Philosophy

"John Stuart Mill," Karl Marx is said to have opined, "owes his prominence in English philosophy entirely to the flatness of the surrounding terrain." I've been reading Mill's essays on Coleridge and Bentham, and am inclined to think that Marx was being a little unfair. But only a little, and it's understandable: to someone who rose from the churning depths of nineteenth-century German thought, the little pool of English philosophy must certainly have seemed like a backwater.

I mean, German philosophers, from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, were the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls of philosophy: dominant, confident, and effortlessly superior to the competition. I imagine a sense of this proud tradition informed Heidegger's infamous fulminations about how Frenchmen could only think seriously if they switched languages, true philosophy only being possible in Ancient Greek and in German (there is, said Heidegger in a 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, a "special inner relationship between the German language and the language and thinking of the Greeks. This has been confirmed to me again and again today by the French. When they begin to think they speak German. They insist that they could not get through with their own language." He says more about the alleged special philosophical nature of Greek and German in Introduction to Metaphysics, and in his Rector's address — sorry to belabor the bibliography, but a gentleman in a little newsgroup discussion of this post has alleged that this claim about Heidegger's views is "crap," and I wish to prove otherwise). Anyway, it's an odd, and kind of bigoted way of explaining the very real phenomenon of the comparative German excellence in philosophy. It's kind of like explaining the dominance of the Jordan-era Bulls as product of Chicago's superior hot dogs and deep dish pizza. But if we discard this kind of chauvinism, in which a rich tradition is explained with reference to some kind of bullshitty essential local superiority, how can we explain the tremendous power and depth of the German philosophical tradition? Why did the German-speaking parts of Europe give us Kant, Hegel, Schlegel, Schiller, Schelling, Schleirmacher, Schopenhauer, Herder, Fichte, Lessing, Feuerbach, Frege, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Dilthey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Adorno, Jaspers, Popper, Benjamin, Arendt, Habermas, etc., while England gave us Bentham, Mill, Bertrand Russell, and, uh... Alfred North Whitehead? I mean, you have to go to the B-list pretty quickly when naming English philosophers. And it goes for the whole continent: while there are individual stars (Kierkegaard, say), no national tradition racks up the points like the Germans. Why?

I think I've got this.

I mean, when we consider the different historical origins and institutional contexts of the French, English, and German Enlightenments, the differences in the character of the different national philosophical traditions becomes clear.

The French Enlightenment was famously anti-clerical. "Écrasez l'infâme!" shouted Voltaire, and the infamy he wished to see crushed was that of the Catholic church. Voltaire's slogan is not, I think, unconnected with another remark of his, about how he found himself spending his time traveling from one chateau to another. That is: I don't think it's coincidental that Voltaire, who spoke against the church, was sponsored by aristocratic patrons (most notably the Marquis Florent-Claude du Chatelet). Sure, Voltaire had his run-ins with aristos (especially that odious knucklehead, the Chevalier de Rohan), but by and large it was they who buttered his toast, and one understands why: the French aristocratic and clerical powers were constantly at one another's throats. And this held true for the French Enlightenment in general: it was a culture sponsored by aristocrats, and it took place in their salons. It owed little or nothing to the church, and directed much of its energy into anti-clericism. (I'm sure the style of French philosophy, so prone to the cutting remark and startling observation, owes much to its origin in the witty salons — I mean, a guy like Roland Barthes is all glitter and quick-jab, whereas a guy like Habermas is all earnest thoroughness — this has got to be connected to the aristocratic salon origins of French philosophy and the earnest, bourgeois scholarly origins of the German tradition).

Then there's the Enlightenment in England. Which is really as Scottish as it is English, since so many of the big-league players hailed from Scotland (David Hume being the real marquee name). The Enlightenment here was notably less anti-clerical than the movement in France, and one understands why: church and state, like bourgeois and aristocrat, had found ways to get along in England, largely by not talking about the things they disagreed on (it's true! Addison's imaginary Spectator Club, for example, served as a model for how members of different kinds of elites could work together by leaving one another alone much of the time, and sticking to topics of common interest, or to what were seen as disinterested matters like taste. Don't get me started on this, or I'll cut-and-paste fifteen pages from the manuscript of the book I'm working on into this blog post and we'll never get to the Germans...). The English system had, and maybe still has, a tremendous capacity for getting along and letting-things-be. A big part of it seems to involve not talking about anything more interesting or controversial than terriers and the weather.

And then there's Germany, or, more accurately (since we're talking for the most part about the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries), the German-speaking lands. There were plenty of courts, but they were small compared to the French court, and historically the church had provided a high proportion of the administrative brain-power (and, along the way, accumulated much wealth, autonomy, and political power). The university system had developed in no small measure as a system for generating all this ecclesiastical administrative human capital, and it was here, rather than in the little courts, that the German Enlightenment's most important developments took place (eventually the university in Jena alone ended up contributing more to philosophy in the nineteenth century than, say, Spain) (please don't send me hate mail from Spain — I mean, I like Miguel de Unamuno, too, but that guy was totally channelling the Germans). So while philosophy in England during the period we're discussing often developed without too much of an orientation toward the church (positive or negative), and the French were generally anti-clerical, the Germans found themselves in an interesting position. They took up enlightenment philosophy in an overtly religious institutional context, and had a strong incentive to find some way of reconciling the old traditions of religious thought with the emerging forms of knowledge.

The challenge proved fruitful. For one thing, it led the Germans to develop historicism and hermeneutics and all the other things you need when you want to take a set of texts and understand them as true, but not literally true, or at any rate as having had a kind of truth in their time but not the kind of truth we have today. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is probably the most obvious case in point. But it's not just that the Germans had a particularly difficult task, and built up their muscles to handle it: they had the university-bred culture of thoroughness and systematic thought behind them (and this makes all the difference: Hume is much, much more readable than Kant, but Kant's systematic method gives his work a power that Hume, every bit Kant's mental equal, can't match). Also, the Germans were able to draw on two traditions: secular Enlightenment thought and the long tradition of Judeo-Christian thinking. This is probably why a guy like Bertrand Russell is constantly dismissing the German philosophers as "mystics." I suppose many people will think Russell's got a point, but I always feel this lack of sympathy for half of what the Germans are up to is one of Russell's main limitations.

Anyway. If you want to get pseudo-Hegelian here, you could say that it was in Germany that the synthesis of Judeo-Christian traditions and Enlightenment secular thought came about. And this had everything to do with the institutional context in which the modern German philosophical tradition emerged.

As to how the Jordan-era Chicago Bulls came to be such a dominant force — well, that much simpler: Jordan was a basketball-optimized android, Scotty Pippin was a robot, and Dennis Rodman was clearly from another planet.