Translator’s Preface
A major work of—and beyond—philosophical aesthetics, a dense and perplexing multiplicity of a text, but one infused by an irrepressible and compelling élan, at once a set of discontinuous ‘plateaus’ which the reader must
learn to assemble and a series of lyrical sallies of cumulative intensity and
momentum, The Brain-Eye conducts its rediscovery of the plural powers of
painting through an experiment in writing and an audacious (de)construction
of the book-form. In a manner that recalls Gilles Deleuze’s refusal of ‘the’
history of philosophy as a teleological progression with a common finality,
and his insistence instead on a ‘history of problems’ (in the entirely positive
sense he gives to the term), the chapters that make up The Brain-Eye set out
to overcome a set of obstacles erected by art history and the philosophy of
art so as to arrive at an understanding of the singular problems that trouble
and motivate protagonists whom we once imagined we knew, as, between the
practice of painting and the discursive conceptualisation of the new modes
of seeing it engenders, they bring to the surface of painting the materiality of
the visual. Patiently reconstructing the itineraries of these singular voyages,
negotiating the byways of received opinion, critical commentary, and the
never straightforward relation between painters’ writings and sayings and
their practice, Éric Alliez gives us a series of ‘case studies’, each of which can
be read as a self-contained history but which are raised to their highest power
when one perceives, braided together across them, a set of transversal threads
that make of the book a whole that greatly exceeds its parts.
This textual dispositif harbours a writing machine that is as meticulous
in its employment of a formidable corpus of secondary materials as it is
intransigent in its exuberant refusal to submit writing to the demands of
‘communication’ by collapsing its perplexities, resonances, and reiterations
into a ‘clear’ propositional form (as if the thickness of writing was merely the
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result of an obdurate refusal to make things explicit, rather than the necessary
prerequisite of a real engagement with matters that overflow a strictly discursive frame). This is, therefore, a book that leaves the reader no choice but to
participate actively in a construction that is laid out precisely and delicately,
touch by touch, in order to realise a whole whose ‘finish’ is that of an all-over
effect rather than a transparent encapsulation: a definitively incomplete whole
which, by means of its conceptual warp and weft, continually maintains in
tension a set of forces that it falls to the reader to negotiate.
In staging these histories which operate a mutual complication of philosophical aesthetics and art history, Alliez brings before us a cast of characters
whose aspect is equally unfamiliar to both disciplines—Delacroix, the Turk;
Seurat, the extraterrestrial automaton; a serialist Manet, a logician Cézanne
glaring at us with the enucleated eyes of a skull. . . . In the process, he punctures biographical legend and shatters critical commonplaces (Delacroix’s
Orient is absolutely determinative, yet the ‘outside’ it brings to light is hardly
that of the orientalist imaginary; Cézanne’s dedication to ‘nature’ and his
‘provençal blood’ only serve to obscure the rigour of his endless labour ‘on
the motif’; Gauguin is a potter even when he’s a painter, and his ‘exoticism’
pertains to a land more foreign yet than the luxuriant tropics, a new earth . . .).
As evidenced by the precise analyses of selected paintings that serve as focal
points for each of the chapters (and which will serve the reader as the most
potent proof of the penetrating force of their arguments when consulted
with—at least—a reproduction to hand), these audacious figures are the direct
result of the author’s decision to attend exclusively to what is realised in the
practice of painting itself—or rather, practices plural.
For, upon entering into this open-air theatre, we must also abandon a linear
narrative of the history of art—that of a chain of successors who break with
the past and advance in the direction of some ulterior finality—in favour of
an untimely and imageless history of researcher-painters who, between them
but never in unison, project, construct, and hallucinate, from the middle (par
le milieu), the virtual field of forces that is modern painting. To extract these
kernels of painter-thought, Alliez patiently peels off the petrified carapace of
historical cliché, hagiographic doggerel, and indurate myth, allowing us to
see the paintings once more, attending to the movement of thought deposited
in them, and registering the tension implied by the continual struggle of painters to say what they do, or at least to distance themselves from what is said
of them and on their behalf. As these overcodings fall away, what is revealed
is the style of each subject: style as a habitus, a culture unto itself, at once
overdetermined by a multiplicity of influences and intuitions and resolute in
the obsessive pursuit of its singular problem. These disparate microcultures,
in their turn, are over the course of the book patiently worked into a broader
vision of the modernity of painting, with the ‘plateaus’ coming together and
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ix
interlocking at unexpected moments and unanticipated angles. Thus, The
Brain-Eye confronts us with a punctual set of historical events, observations,
causes and effects, surface formations rebarbative to any kind of dialectical
or narrative reconciliation, while at the same time indicating the continuity of
a subterranean plane of consistency whose unearthing will require an unprecedented effort of thought.
Furthermore, beyond analysis and description alone, the writing of each
chapter seeks to inhabit the style of its subject. The turbulence of Goethe’s
nature-philosophical morphology; the churning cascade of Delacroix’s
animal melee; the crisp, stark delivery of Manet’s frontally lit flatness; the
spectral greyness of Seurat—all imbue these ‘portraits of the artist as philosophical persona’ with a stylistic energy that makes for an experience of reading we might well qualify as hallucinatory—which is appropriate enough,
given that hallucination constitutes the major leitmotif running through the
work.
It is the work of Hippolyte Taine (largely neglected in the Anglophone
world) that provides the most explicit theoretical basis for the book’s central
claim: that throughout the nineteenth century, painting became the testbed
for experiments in hallucination that ran parallel to the development of
psychophysics, which sited sensation in a nervous system and a brain that
could offer no guarantee of an organic pre-established harmony of the subject with the external world it perceives. This is not, however, a story of
how art was ‘informed’ by science. The brain of The Brain-Eye is not one
conducive to a ‘neuroaesthetics’ that would enable us to explain (away)
visual effects by reducing them to a causal order independent of the event
of seeing; no more than its eye is one that would—in line with the strategy
of Merleau-Ponty, the philosophical enemy of choice here—allow the philosopher to avert such an ‘objectivizing’ catastrophe by rooting the visual
firmly in a lived body and its antepredicative enmeshment with the ‘flesh of
the world’. The Brain-Eye is an inhuman eye, and in its wake the phenomenology of the worldly subject and of its ‘flesh’ and the devitalised physics
of an unseen light must both yield to the divagations of an alien subjectile,
the bizarre developments of a phaneroscopic eye that belongs to no one,
and which is deployed by the researcher–painter–seer in order to map out a
vision yet to come.
The primary element of these researches is colour: as detailed in the
opening chapter on Goethe, colour has long provoked a ‘philosophical rage’
because it has proved impossible to collapse onto the side of either the subject
or the object of modern philosophy. The differential, intensive dimension of
colour—the raw material of painting—perishes when colour is reduced to
being an epiphenomenon of the physical realm, and yet, as the enterprises
of psychophysics showed very clearly, colour phenomena obey a logic that
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Translator’s Preface
is not purely ‘subjective’. The logic proper to colour perishes also when it
is corralled into a model drawn from another art, whether literary, poetic,
or musical, or subjected to the identificatory regime of the traditions of
beauty (line and form) or to imaginary conventions (sentiment and symbol).
The Brain-Eye details how the breakout of colour from its subservience to all
of these extraneous models served as a catalyst for the exploration of a logic
proper to the visual as such.
Colour becomes a component in a war machine that enables painting to
liberate the matrix of the visual from its local instantiation in the visible and
its models, both the artistic academicism that had allotted it a secondary role
within an ideal beauty and the everyday modes of representation founded
on common apprehensions that buttress the myths of ‘natural’ perception
and representation. The autonomisation of colour announces a visual whose
relation to the visible world will be attenuated and placed in tension by a
series of hallucinatory research programmes, at the same time provoking a
‘delocalisation’ that disrupts representation by favouring the consideration of
the picture as a dynamic whole perpetually ‘unfinished’ by the colour-forces
deployed within it. Seeing is now conditioned by the hallucinatory powers of
the brain-eye in its complicity with colour and in its ceaseless constructive
strivings, which the painter unseats from their organic function by manipulating and heightening the exhortations of colour.
In engaging this abstract machine, the painter enters into a becomingunnatural that corresponds to the movement of naturalisation/denaturalisation
precipitated by the emergence of psychophysics, which, with its postulation
of preconscious sensation and its discovery of the continuity between normal
and pathological perception, at once placed sensation into the class of natural,
law-governed phenomena (a logic of sensation), and revoked the ‘natural’
status of representational perception (an inorganic eye). This enables painting to aspire to a supernaturality that exceeds the actual (‘natured nature’),
with the painter equipping himself with the prosthesis of an inhuman eye
subtracted, at any cost, from the ‘visual atlas’ of common perception. The
perceiving subject is stripped of its flesh to reveal a hallucinating automaton,
which promptly takes leave of the space of representation and its (perspectival, subjective, mimetic) ‘point of view’—meaning that the conditions of
the pictorial as such must be rethought in the light of the visual. (Here the
encounter with photography, in its revelation of a generalised, impersonal
visuality, plays a crucial role in several respects, which are explored here in
a way that goes well beyond common generalisations regarding its impact on
modern painting.)
Now, if this virtual field of colour, the province of the brain-eye, constitutes the highest truth of seeing, but one with no trace of actuality (Goethe),
then how could the truth in painting be other than a truth of hallucination,
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xi
with painting consequently becoming the laboratory of true hallucination
(Taine)? The hallucination of a truth in painting that is glimpsed in between
the lines of the visible, that is announced by the insubordination of colour,
but is yet to be realised . . . .
To paint is to conceive, as Cézanne insists; and as they paint, painters
formulate their own conceptions of what they see. And yet the virtuality of
The Brain-Eye is attained not through the peremptory imposition of a theory
but through encounters. At this point, the Deleuzian principle that concepts
must be referred back to their sensible conditions and to the ‘involuntary
adventure’ of culture comes into play in a series of narrative sequences, the
conceptual tenor of which raises them well above the level of biographical
anecdote: Goethe is transformed from poet to painter by his Italian voyage;
Delacroix’s oriental reveries enable him to anticipate Chevreul’s analysis of
colour complementarity, leading him to apply a decorative model to painting
(the carpet, not the window); silently demurring from a miscognised application of Chevreul’s principles, Seurat evades the neatly drawn line from
Impressionism to neo-impressionism by disappearing into the grey particles
of the photographic emulsion . . . . In each case, these actual encounters with
an outside of painting are only the harbingers of a virtual outside, which
each painter must then strive to keep ‘in focus’ and, each in their own way,
each struggling with their own problem, realise in (a) practice. The aesthetics
(and the critique of aesthetics) proposed here is therefore one that involves
experience and experiment, passive synthesis and constructive artifice, with
the painter being both the receptive patient of accidental passions and an
experimental agent striving to construct the new on the basis of an always
precarious hold on the evanescent traces of these contingent encounters,
percepts that must be registered, retained, and developed in the face of the
constant threat of discursive formations that summon them to fall back onto
a cartography of the visible world laid out in advance.
Such a radical (transcendental) empiricism effectively disrupts a whole
series of structural oppositions and developmental sequences which art history and the ‘philosophy of art’ have tended to assume: evading the double
binds of objectivism and subjectivism, realism and naturalism, classicism
and romanticism, The Brain-Eye demonstrates how, fuelled by such encounters, the forces of painting ceaselessly insinuate themselves between these
lines—and indeed reveal the lines themselves to be the epiphenomenon of
a differential play. With a consummate mastery of historical and contemporary secondary materials, Alliez shows how, in the controversies over these
generic terms, what is at stake is rarely the real work of the painter-researcher,
but rather the shifting sands of political, professional, and sometimes petty
motives. Even the allegiances professed in the writings and reported remarks
of painters themselves are not primary evidence to be taken at face value,
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but attest to a constant back- and-forth between the experience/experiment of
practice and its discursive translation, whose infelicities only serve to motivate a further return ‘to the colours themselves’.
Intent on animating a modernity of painting beholden to no inevitable
progression, no formalist evacuation, all of this is of a piece with the author’s
determination—in the footsteps of these painters and in an advocacy of the
singularity of each one of them—to strip away all the modes of intentionality to which the visual has been subordinated, and to return to the (virtual)
materiality of painting, all the while resisting another narrative that constantly threatens to take up the baton in the guise of a formalist purification
that would dissolve this pluralism by implanting a new finality: that of the
abstraction of colour, or of a ‘pure Painting’. The combination of the episodes
recounted in The Brain-Eye yields instead a series of acute points of decision
that emerge from the problematic field of modern painting, and which are
neither consummations nor impasses, but jumping-off points for the reproblematisation of the ‘truth in painting’, a truth whose effects will also be felt
in the philosophical field.
All of this demands a tactical finesse, a great deal of circumspection,
and textual manoeuvres whose subtlety and non-linearity are manifest
throughout the book, as writing invests the plasticity of painting, relaying and
extending the furious patience of the artist as he activates the futural charge
compacted within the materiality of colour. Alliez’s flexuous sentences continually coil back upon themselves, amplifying and inflecting, cumulatively
adding further touches that transform the aspect of a preceding phrase before
its sense has set fast. In multiple recommencements, hesitations, and refrains,
the same question or observation will return repeatedly with a new inflection,
resetting the course of the argument as it is menaced by the inertial attractors of the readymade images of painting and painters peddled by critics
and advocates alike. Thus, one must come back to Cézanne, to Gauguin, to
Seurat once again—and not even to them ‘in person’ but to the pre-individual
singularities that they track and which are the real of their style (a singularity
‘signed’ Gauguin, a Seurat-effect, a Cézanning . . .)—in a spiralling movement that cumulatively amasses an instrumentarium of concepts coaxed out
of the material with an acute and penetrating gaze, utilising semantic shifters,
rhythmic devices, and hallucinatory effects that seek to rival the plastic creations they invest. Thus, terms that initially seem merely descriptive gradually take on the status of concepts (concepts that therefore will have already
been at work, nondiscursively, within paintings): a process that also testifies
to the outside that philosophy needs in order to truly become an art of the
‘creation of concepts’.
This is how the event of The Brain-Eye emerges, as if in a hallucinatory stereoscopy, from the ‘overlabour’ of the text: not as a chronological
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xiii
development entered into the ledger of art history, but as a virtual event or
problematic field whose chronically uneven distribution demands a crooked
path, a zigzag line, a series of retouchings that each time change the whole
picture; a virtual event that solicits the participation of the viewer-reader in
the construction of a tableau which must be seen ‘from too far away and up
too close’ in order to appreciate both the ambitious sweep of its argument and
the fine details of its ‘broken touch’.
Needless to say, all of this not only makes demands upon the reader, but
also exacerbates further the celebrated impossibility of translation. Alliez
convokes into his patchwork theatre a multitude of actors, sometimes with
a corroborative function but often ventriloquised in a more subtle and ironic
fashion. The precision with which he approaches his materials has in many
cases demanded a revisiting of existing translations of these sources, since his
local deployment of every phrase is calibrated in view of a global construction whose consistency is rigorously maintained throughout. And then, to
this orderly cacophony, the translator inevitably adds his own voice. Despite
my intent to prioritise the accessibility and lucid rendering of argument over
fidelity to the author’s style, the sensation of the two pulling against each
other was impossible to brush aside; in a work such as this, the argument
and its mode of delivery are ultimately inextricable. I take full responsibility
for the triage I was forced to operate in each instance, and do not trouble the
reader with details of the inevitable compromises it entailed. Indeed, I have
attempted to avoid as far as possible any emphatic intrusion on the part of
the translator, and have only intervened explicitly in the text where it seemed
absolutely necessary. I have tried to preserve certain key terms that operate
like passwords or instructions for assembly, granting access to the intersections within and between chapters: these recurring formulations which span
each of the ‘cases’, and indicate the points where they are to be coupled, are
marked in the original French where necessary. And then we have the Proustian scope of certain sentences, which, decanted directly in English, would
sometimes be a recipe for sub-Scott-Moncreiffian disaster; this occasionally
made reformulation unavoidable, although where possible I have tried to
maintain the author’s unremittingly additive, amplificative cascade of prose,
its constant kaleidoscopic requalification and transmutation of its own sense.
In attempting to confront discursive thought with the nondiscursive forces
that are at work within it, in describing how painting has been broken open
by its outside, and in bringing the outside that is the practice of painting to
bear upon the philosophical concept, The Brain-Eye makes significant contributions to our understanding of modern art history and of modernity itself,
and has seismic consequences for a thinking of the relation of philosophical
conceptuality to the logic(s) of sensation at work in visual art—something
that should be of immediate interest not just to philosophers and students of
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painting, but also to those working in the expanded field of contemporary
art, which, too often, esteems itself ‘conceptual’ while supposing that the
conceptual can be cleanly extricated from its sensate precursors; or generates
impoverished encounters with ‘sensations’ (or the ‘sensational’) that remain
burdened by the actuality of the contemporary rather than being pregnant
with its virtualities. The Brain-Eye plunges into the prehistory of the contemporary only to extract that part of the past which remains for the future
to develop.1 The fruit of many years of fastidious historical research into the
art of modernity, the book also poses ineluctable questions about the post- or
trans-modern prospects of the art and philosophy of tomorrow. Above all,
it is an exhortation to think and to see, in which content, expression, form,
and matter enter into a new alliance that I am sure will be hugely rewarding for readers prepared to surrender themselves to its shimmering, spectral,
hallucinatory effects.
I owe thanks to Éric Alliez, whose contribution to the translation during
a long and sometimes fraught process was substantial and indispensable: his
patience in answering my numerous and sometimes facile questions and in
attending to multiple revisions of the manuscript was much appreciated; and
equally, his impatience with any dereliction of duty on my part was a continual spur in my endeavours to master his work and to do justice to it. Thanks
also to Sarah Campbell, my editor at Rowman & Littlefield, who valued the
work enough to graciously accept many unanticipated delays in its completion. I would like to dedicate this translation to my beloved wife Louise, who
mustered superhuman forbearance and kindness as she involuntarily shared
in the struggle and unflaggingly supported me through the vicissitudes of
linguistic hallucination.
Robin Mackay
Truro, June 2015.
note
1. Alliez’s recent Défaire l’image: De l’art contemporain (Paris: Les presses
du réel, 2013) extends The Brain-Eye in the direction of a critique of aesthetics by
emphasising the necessary discontinuity between a diagrammatics capable of critically addressing contemporary art, and the aesthetics of modern painting, itself an
hallucination belonging to the historical ontology of the nineteenth century.