Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma is governed by two seemingly contradictory principles. The first counter-poses the autonomous existence of the image, conceived as visual presence, to the commercial convention of history and the dead letter of the text. Cézanne’s apples, Renoir’s bouquets, or the lighter in Strangers on a Train attest to the singular power of silent form. This renders the construction of plots inherited from the novelistic tradition, and organized to satisfy the desires of the public and the interests of industry, non-essential. Conversely, the second principle makes these visible presences elements which, like the signs of language, possess a value only by dint of the combinations they authorize: combinations with different visual and sonorous elements, but also sentences and words, spoken by a voice or written on the screen. Extracts from novels or poems, or the titles of films and books, frequently create connections that confer meaning on the images, or rather make the assembled visual fragments ‘images’ – that is, relations between a visibility and a signification. Siegfried et le Limousin – the title of Giraudoux’s novel – superimposed on the tanks of the invading German army and on a shot from Fritz Lang’s Nibelungen, is enough to make this sequence a combined image of the defeat of the French forces in 1940 and of German artists in the face of Nazism, of the ability of literature and cinema to foresee the disasters of their times and their inability to prevent them. On the one hand, then, the image is valuable as a liberating power, pure form and pure pathos dismantling the classical order of organization of fictional action, of stories. On the other, it is valuable as the factor in a connection that constructs the figure of a common history. On the one hand, it is an incommensurable singularity; while on the other it is an operation of communalization.
The context of an exhibition devoted to the relations between images and words naturally invites us to reflect on this double power placed under the same name of image. This exhibition is called Sans commune mesure.1 Such a title does more than describe the collection of verbal and visual elements presented here. It appears a prescriptive statement, defining the criterion of the ‘modernity’ of the works. Indeed, it assumes that incommensurability is a distinguishing feature of the art of our time; that the peculiarity of the latter is the gap between material presences and meanings. This declaration itself has a rather long genealogy: the Surrealist valorization of the impossible encounter between umbrella and sewing machine; Benjamin’s theorization of the dialectical clash of images and times; Adorno’s aesthetic of the contradiction inherent in modern works of art; Lyotard’s philosophy of the sublime gap between the Idea and any empirical presentation. The very continuity of this valorization of the incommensurable risks making us indifferent to the relevance of the judgement that includes some particular work in it, but also to the very significance of the terms. Thus, for my part I shall take this title as an invitation to reformulate the questions, to ask ourselves: What precisely does ‘without a common term of measurement’ mean? With respect to what idea of measurement and what idea of community? Perhaps there are several kinds of incommensurability. Perhaps each of them is itself the bringing into play of a certain form of community.
The apparent contradiction of Histoire(s) du cinéma might well enlighten us then on this conflict of measures and communities. I would like to show this starting from a small episode taken from the last part. It is called Les signes parmi nous. This title, borrowed from Ramuz, in itself involves a double ‘community’. First of all, there is the community between ‘signs’ and ‘us’: signs are endowed with a presence and a familiarity that makes them more than tools at our disposal or a text subject to our decoding; they are inhabitants of our world, characters that make up a world for us. Next, there is the community contained in the concept of sign, such as it functions here. Visual and textual elements are in effect conceived together, interlaced with one another, in this concept. There are signs ‘among us’. This means that the visible forms speak and that words possess the weight of visible realities; that signs and forms mutually revive their powers of material presentation and signification.
Yet Godard gives this ‘common measure’ of signs a concrete form that seems to contradict its idea. He illustrates it by heterogeneous visual elements whose connection on the screen is enigmatic, and with words whose relationship to what we see we cannot grasp. Following an extract from Alexander Nevsky, an episode begins in which repeated superimposed images, answering one another in twos, impart a unity that is confirmed by the continuity of two texts, which have seemingly been taken from a speech in one instance, from a poem in the other. This small episode seems to be tightly structured by four visual elements. Two of them are readily identifiable. They belong in fact to the store of significant images of twentieth-century history and cinema. They are, at the beginning of the sequence, the photograph of the little Jewish boy who raises his arms during the surrender of the Warsaw ghetto; and, at the end, a black shadow that sums up all the ghosts and vampires from the Expressionist age of cinema: Murnau’s Nosferatu. The same is not true of the two elements with which they are coupled. Superimposed on the image of the child from the ghetto is a mysterious cinematic figure: a young woman who is descending a staircase carrying a candle that outlines her shadow on the wall in spectacular fashion. As for Nosferatu, he bizarrely faces a cinema theatre where an ordinary couple in the foreground is laughing heartily, in the anonymity of a beaming audience revealed by the camera as it moves back.
How should we conceive the relationship between this cinematic chiaroscuro and the extermination of the Polish Jews? Between the good-natured crowd in a Hollywood film and the Carpathian vampire who seems to be orchestrating its pleasure from the stage? The fleeting views of faces and riders that fill out the space scarcely tell us. We then look to the spoken or written words that connect them for some indications. At the end of the episode, these consist in letters that are assembled and disassembled on the screen: l’ennemi public, le public. In the middle, they are a poetic text which speaks to us of a sob that rises and subsides. Above all, at the beginning, giving its tonality to the whole episode, we have a text whose oratorical solemnity is accentuated by the muffled, slightly emphatic voice of Godard. This text tells us of a voice by which the orator would like to have been preceded, in which his voice could have been merged. The speaker tells us that he now understands his difficulty in beginning a moment ago. And for our part we thus understand that the text which introduces the episode is in fact a peroration. It tells us which is the voice that would have enabled him to begin. It is a manner of speaking, obviously: by way of telling us this, he leaves it to another audience to hear – one which precisely does not need to be told it, since the context of the speech suffices to make the fact known to it.
This speech is in fact an acceptance speech – a genre where it is obligatory to eulogize one’s deceased predecessor. This can be done more or less elegantly. The orator in question has proved capable of choosing the most elegant way, one that identifies the circumstantial eulogy of the deceased elder with the essential invocation of the anonymous voice which makes speech possible. Such felicities of conception and expression are rare and indicate their author. It is Michel Foucault who is the author of these lines. And the ‘voice’ thus amplified is that of Jean Hyppolite to whom he succeeded on that day to the chair in the history of systems of thought at the Collège de France.2
So it is the peroration of Foucault’s inaugural lecture that supplies the link between the images. Godard has positioned it here just as, twenty years earlier in La Chinoise, he had introduced another, equally brilliant peroration: the one with which Louis Althusser concluded his most inspired text – the Esprit article on the Piccolo Teatro, Bertolazzi et Brecht (‘I look back, and I am suddenly and irresistibly assailed by the question …’).3 Then it was Guillaume Meister, the activist/actor played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, who gave literal effect to the words by actually looking back to hammer out the text, looking straight into the eyes of an imaginary interviewer. This pantomime served to represent the verbal power of Maoist discourse over young bodies of Parisian students. Responding now to this literalization, which is Surrealist in spirit, is an enigmatic relationship between the text and the voice and between the voice and the bodies we see. Instead of Michel Foucault’s clear, dry and rather cheerful voice, we hear the serious voice of Godard, filled with a Malraux-style pomposity. This indication therefore leaves us in a state of indecision. How does the lugubrious accent put on this purple passage, which is bound up with an institutional investiture, connect the young woman with the candle and the child from the ghetto, the shades of cinema and the extermination of the Jews? What are the text’s words doing in relation to the visual elements? What is the fit between the power of conjunction assumed by montage and the power of disjunction involved in the radical heterogeneity between an unidentified shot of a nocturnal staircase, testimony about the end of the Warsaw ghetto, and the inaugural lecture of a professor at the Collège de France who dealt neither with cinema nor with the Nazi extermination? We can already glimpse here that the common, measurement, and the relationship between them can be stated and conjoined in several ways.
Let us begin at the beginning. Godard’s montage assumes the establishment of what some call modernity, but which, in order to avoid the teleologies inherent in temporal markers, I prefer to call the aesthetic regime in art. This presupposed result is the distance taken from a certain form of common measurement – that expressed by the concept of history. History was the ‘assemblage of actions’ which, since Aristotle, had defined the rationality of the poem. This ancient measurement of the poem according to a schema of ideal causality – connection by necessity or verisimilitude – involved also a certain form of intelligibility of human actions. It is what established a community of signs and a community between ‘signs’ and ‘us’: a combination of elements in accordance with general rules and a community between the intelligence that produced these combinations and sensibilities called upon to experience the pleasure of them. This measurement involved a relationship of subordination between a ruling function – the textual function of intelligibility – and an image-forming function in its service. To form images was to take the thoughts and feelings through which the causal connection was displayed to their highest expression. It was also to create specific affects that strengthened the perception of this connection. This subordination of the ‘image’ to the ‘text’ in thinking about poems also founded the correspondence of the arts, under its legislation.
If we take it as given that this hierarchical order has been abolished, that the power of words and the power of the visible have been freed from this common measurement system for two centuries, the question arises: how should we conceive the effect of this uncoupling?
We know the standard reply to this question. This effect is quite simply the autonomy of verbal art, of the art of visible forms, and of all the other arts. Such autonomy was supposedly demonstrated once and for all in the 1760s, by the impossibility of translating into stone the ‘visibility’ given by Virgil’s poem to Laocoon’s suffering without rendering the statue repulsive. This absence of common measurement, this registration of the disjunction between registers of expression and therefore between the arts, formulated by Lessing’s Laocoon, is the common core of the ‘modernist’ theorization of the aesthetic regime in the arts – a theorization that conceives the break with the representative regime in terms of the autonomy of art and separation between the arts.
This common core can be translated into three versions that I shall summarize in their essentials. There is first of all the rationalist, optimistic version. What succeeds histories, and the images that were subordinate to them, are forms. It is the power of each specific materiality – verbal, plastic, sonorous or whatever – revealed by specific procedures. This separation between the arts is guaranteed not by the simple fact of the absence of any common term of measurement between words and stone, but by the very rationality of modern societies. Such rationality is characterized by a separation between spheres of existence and of the forms of rationality specific to each of them – a separation that the bond of communicative reason must simply complement. Here we recognize the teleology of modernity that a famous talk by Habermas counter-poses to the perversions of ‘post-structuralist’ aestheticism, ally of neo-conservatism.
Next there is the dramatic and dialectical version of Adorno. Therein artistic modernity represents the conflict of two separations or, if one likes, two forms of incommensurability. For the rational separation between spheres of existence is in fact the work of a certain reason – the calculative reason of Ulysses which is opposed to the Sirens’ song, the reason that separates work and pleasure. The autonomy of artistic forms and the separation between words and forms, music and plastic forms, high art and forms of entertainment then take on a different meaning. They remove the pure forms of art from the forms of aestheticized everyday, market existence that conceal the fracture. They thus make it possible for the solitary tension of these autonomous forms to express the original separation that founds them, to disclose the ‘image’ of the repressed, and remind us of the need for a non-separated existence.
Finally, we have the pathetic version evinced by Lyotard’s last books. The absence of any common measurement is here called catastrophe. And it is then a question of contrasting not two separations, but two catastrophes. The separation of art is in effect assimilated to the original break of the sublime, to the undoing of any stable relationship between idea and empirical presentation. This incommensurability is itself thought as the mark of the power of the Other, whose denegation in Western reason has generated the dementia of extermination. If modern art must preserve the purity of its separations, it is so as to inscribe the mark of this sublime catastrophe whose inscription also bears witness against the totalitarian catastrophe – that of the genocides, but also that of aestheticized (i.e., in fact, anaesthetized) existence.
How should the disjunctive conjunction of Godard’s images be situated vis-à-vis these three representations of the incommensurable? Certainly, Godard sympathizes with the modernist teleology of purity – especially, obviously, in its catastrophist form. Throughout Histoire(s) du cinéma, he opposes the redemptive virtue of the image/icon to the original sin that has ruined cinema and its power of witness: submission of the ‘image’ to the ‘text’, of the material to ‘history’. Yet the ‘signs’ that he presents to us here are visual elements organized in the form of discourse. The cinema that he recounts to us appears as a series of appropriations of other arts. And he presents it to us in an interlacing of words, sentences and texts, of metamorphosed paintings, of cinematic shots mixed up with news photographs or strips, sometimes connected by musical citations. In short, Histoire(s) du cinéma is wholly woven out of those ‘pseudo-metamorphoses’, those imitations of one art by another that are rejected by avant-gardist purity. And in this tangle the very notion of image, notwithstanding Godard’s iconodulis-tic declarations, emerges as that of a metamorphic operativeness, crossing the boundaries between the arts and denying the specificity of materials.
Thus, the loss of any common term of measurement between the means of art does not signify that henceforth each remains in its own sphere, supplying its own measurement. Instead, it means that any common measurement is now a singular production and that this production is only possible on condition of confronting, in its radicalism, the measurelessness of the melange. The fact that the suffering of Virgil’s Laocoon cannot be translated exactly into sculptor’s stone does not entail that words and forms part company; that some artists devote themselves to the art of words, while others work on the intervals of time, coloured surfaces, or volumes of recalcitrant matter. Quite the opposite deduction can possibly be made. When the thread of history – that is, the common measurement that governs the distance between the art of some and that of others – is undone, it is not simply the forms that become analogous; the materialities are immediately mixed.
The mixing of materialities is conceptual before it is real. Doubtless we had to wait until the Cubist and Dadaist age for the appearance of words from newspapers, poems or bus tickets on the canvases of painters; the age of Nam Jun Paik for the transformation into sculptures of loudspeakers given over to broadcasting sounds and screens intended for the reproduction of images; the age of Wodiczko or Pipilloti Rist for the projection of moving images on to statues of the Founding Fathers or the arms of chairs; and that of Godard for the invention of reverse angle shots in a painting by Goya. But as early as 1830 Balzac could populate his novels with Dutch paintings and Hugo could transform a book into a cathedral or a cathedral into a book. Twenty years later, Wagner could celebrate the carnal union of male poetry and female music in the same physical materiality; and the prose of the Goncourts could transform the contemporary painter (Decamps) into a stonemason, before Zola transformed his fictional painter Claude Lantier into a window-dresser/installer, pronouncing his most beautiful work to be the ephemeral rearrangement of turkeys, sausages and black puddings in the Quenu charcuterie.4
As early as the 1820s, a philosopher – Hegel – attracted the well-founded execration of all future modernisms in advance by showing that the separation between spheres of rationality entailed not the glorious autonomy of art and the arts, but the loss of their power of thinking in common, of thinking, producing or expressing something common; and that from the sublime gap invoked there possibly resulted nothing but the ‘entertainer’s’ indefinitely repeated abrupt switch of subject, capable of combining everything with anything. Whether the artists of the subsequent generation read him, did not read him, or read him badly is of little importance. This was the argument to which they replied by seeking the principle of their art not in some term of measurement that would be peculiar to each of them, but on the contrary where any such ‘peculiarity’ collapses; where all the common terms of measurement that opinions and histories lived on have been abolished in favour of a great chaotic juxtaposition, a great indifferent melange of significations and materialities.
Let us call this the great parataxis. In Flaubert’s time, it could take the form of the collapse of all the systems of rationales for emotions and actions in favour of the vagaries of the indifferent intermixture of atoms. A little dust shining in the sun, a drop of melted snow falling on the moiré silk of a parasol, a blade of foliage on the muzzle of a donkey – these are the tropes of matter that invent love by ranking its rationale with the great absence of any rationale for things. In Zola’s time, it is piles of vegetables, charcuterie, fish and cheeses in Le Ventre de Paris, or the cascades of white cloth set ablaze by the fire of the consummation in Au Bonheur des dames. In the time of Apollinaire or Blaise Cendrars, of Boccioni, Schwitters or Varese, it is a world where all the histories have dissolved into sentences, which have themselves dissolved into words, exchangeable with the lines, strokes or ‘dynamisms’ that any pictorial subject has dissolved into; or with the sound intensities in which the notes of the melody merge with ship horns, car noise, and the rattle of machine-guns. Such, for example, is the ‘profound today’ celebrated in 1917 by Blaise Cendrars in phrases that tend to reduce to juxtapositions between words, boiled down to elementary sensory tempos: ‘Phenomenal today. Sonde. Antenna. … Whirlwind. You are living. Eccentric. In complete solitude. In anonymous communion … Rhythm speaks. Chemism. You are.’ Or again: ‘We learn. We drink. Intoxication. Reality has no meaning any more. No significance. Everything is rhythm, speech life … Revolution. The dawn of the world. Today.’5 This ‘today’ of histories abolished in favour of the micro-movements of a matter that is ‘rhythm, speech and life’ is one which, four years later, will be consecrated by the young art of cinema, in the equally paratactic sentences by which Blaise Cendrars’s young friend, the chemist and filmmaker Jean Epstein, will devote himself to expressing the new sensory power of the shots of the seventh art.6
The new common term of measurement, thus contrasted with the old one, is rhythm, the vital element of each material unbound atom which causes the image to pass into the word, the word into the brush-stroke, the brush-stroke into the vibration of light or motion. The point can be put differently: the law of ‘profound today’, the law of the great parataxis, is that there is no longer any measurement, anything in common. It is the common factor of dis-measure or chaos that now gives art its power.
But this measureless common factor of chaos or the great parataxis is only separated by an almost indiscernible boundary from two territories where it risks getting lost. On the one side, there is the great schizophrenic explosion, where the sentence sinks into the scream and meaning into the rhythm of bodily states. On the other, there is the great community identified with the juxtaposition of commodities and their doubles, or with the hackneyed character of empty words, or with the intoxication of manipulated intensities, of bodies marching in time. Schizophrenia or consensus. On the one hand, the great explosion, the ‘frightful laugh of the idiot’ named by Rimbaud, but practised or feared by the whole era that runs from Baudelaire, via Nietzsche, Maupassant, Van Gogh, Andrei Biely or Virginia Woolf, to Artaud. On the other, consent to the great equality of market and language or the great manipulation of bodies drunk on community. The measurement of aesthetic art then had to construct itself as a contradictory one, nourished by the great chaotic power of unbound elements, but able, by virtue of that very fact, to separate this chaos – or ‘idiocy’ – from the art of the furies of the great explosion or the torpor of the great consent.
I propose to call this term of measurement the sentence-image. By this I understand something different from the combination of a verbal sequence and a visual form. The power of the sentence-image can be expressed in sentences from a novel, but also in forms of theatrical representation or cinematic montage or the relationship between the said and unsaid in a photograph. The sentence is not the sayable and the image is not the visible. By sentence-image I intend the combination of two functions that are to be defined aesthetically – that is, by the way in which they undo the representative relationship between text and image. The text’s part in the representative schema was the conceptual linking of actions, while the image’s was the supplement of presence that imparted flesh and substance to it. The sentence-image overturns this logic. The sentence-function is still that of linking. But the sentence now links in as much as it is what gives flesh. And this flesh or substance is, paradoxically, that of the great passivity of things without any rationale. For its part, the image has become the active, disruptive power of the leap – that of the change of regime between two sensory orders. The sentence-image is the union of these two functions. It is the unit that divides the chaotic force of the great parataxis into phrasal power of continuity and imaging power of rupture. As sentence, it accommodates paratactic power by repelling the schizophrenic explosion. As image, with its disruptive force it repels the big sleep of indifferent triteness or the great communal intoxication of bodies. The sentence-image reins in the power of the great parataxis and stands in the way of its vanishing into schizophrenia or consensus.
This could put us in mind of those nets stretched over chaos by which Deleuze and Guattari define the power of philosophy or of art. But since we are talking about cinematic histories here, I shall instead illustrate the power of the sentence-image by a famous sequence from a comic film. At the beginning of A Night in Casablanca, a policeman looks with a suspicious air at the strange behaviour of Harpo, who is motionless with his hand against a wall. He asks him to move on. With a shake of the head, Harpo indicates that he cannot. The policeman then observes ironically that perhaps Harpo wants him to think that he is holding up the wall. With a nod, Harpo indicates that that is indeed the case. Furious that the mute should make fun of him in this way, the policeman drags Harpo away from his post. And sure enough, the wall collapses with a great crash. This gag of the dumb man propping up the wall is an utterly apt parable for making us feel the power of the sentence-image, which separates the everything hangs together of art from the everything merges of explosive madness or consensual idiocy. And I would happily compare it with Godard’s oxy-moronic formula, ‘O sweet miracle of our blind eyes’. I shall do so with only one mediation – that of the writer who was most assiduous about separating the idiocy of art from that of the world, the writer who had to speak his sentences out loud to himself, because otherwise he saw ‘only fire’ in them. If Flaubert ‘does not see’ in his sentences, it is because he writes in the age of clairvoyance and the age of clairvoyance is precisely one in which a certain ‘sight’ has vanished, where saying and seeing have entered into a communal space without distance and without connection. As a result, one sees nothing: one does not see what is said by what one sees, or what is offered up to be seen by what one says. It is therefore necessary to listen, to trust the ear. It is the ear which, by identifying a repetition or an assonance, will make it known that the sentence is false – that is, that it does not possess the sound of the true, the breath of chaos undergone and mastered.7 A correct sentence is the one that causes the power of chaos to subside by separating it from schizophrenic explosion and consensual stupor.
The power of the correct sentence-image is therefore that of a paratactic syntax. Expanding the notion beyond its narrow cinematic meaning, such syntax might also be called montage. The nineteenth-century writers who discovered behind stories the naked power of swirling dust, oppressive mugginess, streams of commodities, or forms of intensity in madness also invented montage as a measure of that which is measureless or as the disciplining of chaos. The canonical example is the agricultural show scene in Madame Bovary, where the power of the sentence-image rises up between the empty talk of the professional seducer and the official orator, at once extracted from the surrounding torpor where both are equal and subtracted from this torpor. But for the issue that concerns me, I consider the montage presented in Le Ventre de Paris by the episode of the preparation of the black pudding even more significant. Let me recall the context. Florent, an 1848 republican who was deported during the coup d’état of 1851 but has escaped from his Guyanese penal colony, is living under a false identity in the charcuterie of his half-brother Quenu. Here he attracts the curiosity of his niece, little Pauline, who by chance has heard him refer to some memories of a companion eaten by animals, and the disapproval of his sister-in-law Lisa, whose business is basking in imperial prosperity. Lisa would like him to accept a vacant position as an inspector at Les Halles under his assumed identity – a compromise refused by the upright republican. At this point there occurs one of the major events in the life of the charcuterie – the preparation of the black pudding, constructed by Zola in an alternating montage. Mingling with the lyrical narrative of the cooking of the blood, and the enthusiasm that grips actors and spectators at the promise of a good black pudding, is the narrative of ‘the man eaten by animals’ demanded by Pauline from her uncle. In the third person Florent tells the terrible story of deportation, the penal colony, the sufferings experienced during the escape, and the debt of blood thus sealed between the Republic and its assassins. But as this story of poverty, famine and injustice swells up, the joyous sputtering of the black pudding, the smell of fat, and the heady warmth of the atmosphere contradict it, transforming it into an incredible story told by a ghost from another age. This story of blood spilt, and of a man dying of hunger who demands justice, is refuted by the place and the circumstances. It is immoral to die of hunger, immoral to be poor and love justice – that is the lesson Lisa draws from the story. But it is the lesson that was already dictated by the joyous sound of the black pudding. At the end of the episode, Florent, deprived of his reality and his justice, is powerless before the surrounding warmth and yields to his sister-in-law, accepting the position of inspector.
Thus, the conspiracy between ‘the Fat’ and fat seems to triumph completely and the very logic of the alternating montage appears to consecrate the common loss of the differences of art and the oppositions of politics in some great consent to the warm intimacy of the commodity-king. But montage is not a simple opposition between two terms, where the term that gives its tone to the whole necessarily triumphs. The consensual character of the sentence in which the tension of the alternating montage is resolved does not occur without the pathetic clash of the image that restores distance. I do not evoke the conflictual complementarity of the organic and the pathetic, conceptualized by Eisenstein, by way of simple analogy. Not for nothing did he make the twenty volumes of the Rougon-Macquart the ‘twenty supporting pillars’ of montage.8 The stroke of genius of the montage created by Zola here is that it contradicts the absolute victory of the Fat, the assimilation of the great parataxis to the great consent, with a single image. He has in fact assigned Florent’s speech a privileged listener, a contradictor who visually refutes him with her well-padded prosperity and her disapproving expression. This silently eloquent contradictor is the cat Mouton. As is well-known, the cat is the fetish animal of dialecticians of the cinema, from Sergei Eisenstein to Chris Marker – the animal that converts one idiocy into another, consigning triumphant reasons to stupid superstitions or the enigma of a smile. Here the cat that underscores the consensus simultaneously undoes it. Converting Lisa’s rationale into its sheer laziness, through condensation and contiguity it also transforms Lisa herself into a sacred cow – a mocking representation of Juno without volition or care in which Schiller encapsulated the free appearance, the aesthetic appearance that suspends the order of the world based on an ordered relationship between ends and means and active and passive. The cat, with Lisa, condemned Florent to consent to the lyricism of the triumphant commodity. But the same cat transforms itself and transforms Lisa into mythological divinities of derision who consign this triumphant order to its idiotic contingency.
Despite the conventional oppositions between the dead text and the living image, this power of the sentence-image also animates Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, particularly our episode. Indeed, it could be that this seemingly displaced acceptance speech plays a comparable role to Zola’s cat, but also to the mute propping up of the wall that separates artistic parataxis from the headlong collapse of materials, everything hangs together from everything merges. Doubtless Godard is not confronted with the complacent reign of the Fat. For, since Zola, that reign has gone on a diet of aestheticized commodities and sophisticated advertising. Godard’s problem is precisely this: his practice of montage was formed in the Pop era, at a time when the blurring of boundaries between high and low, the serious and the mocking, and the practice of jumping from one subject to the other seemed to counter-pose their critical power to the reign of commodities. Since then, however, commodities have teamed up with the age of mockery and subject-hopping. Linking anything with anything whatsoever, which yesterday passed for subversive, is today increasingly homogeneous with the reign of journalistic anything contains everything and the subject-hopping of advertising. We therefore need an enigmatic cat or burlesque mute to come and put some disorder back into montage. Perhaps this is what our episode does, in a tone far removed, however, from comedy. In any event, one thing is certain – something that is obviously imperceptible to the viewer of Histoire(s), who knows nothing of the young girl with a candle apart from her nocturnal silhouette. This young woman has at least two things in common with Harpo. Firstly, she too, metaphorically at least, is propping up a house that is collapsing. Secondly, she too is mute.
It is time to say a little more about the film from which this shot comes. The Spiral Staircase tells the story of a murderer who attacks women suffering from various handicaps. The heroine, who has become dumb following a head injury, is a clearly appointed victim for the killer, all the more so (we soon understand) in that he inhabits the same house where she has the job of governess, responsible for the care of a sick old lady and caught up in an atmosphere of hatred created by the rivalry between two half-brothers. Having spent a night without any other means of protection than the telephone number of the doctor who loves her – not the most effective recourse for someone who cannot speak, obviously – she would have suffered her fate of destined victim had the murderer not, at the decisive moment, been killed by his mother-in-law – a new trauma as a result of which she regains her powers of speech.
How does this relate to the small child from the ghetto and the professor’s inaugural lecture? Apparently as follows: the murderer is not the mere victim of irresistible drives. He is a methodical man of science whose design is to do away, for their own good and everyone else’s, with beings whom nature or chance has rendered infirm, and thus incapable of a completely normal life. No doubt the plot is derived from a 1933 English novel whose author would seem not to have had any particular political motive. But the film came out in 1946, which makes it reasonable to suppose that it was made in 1945. And the director was Robert Siodmak, one of the collaborators on the legendary Menschen am Sonntag – a 1928 film/diagnosis of a Germany ready to give itself to Hitler – and one of the filmmakers and cameramen who fled Nazism and transposed the plastic and sometimes political shades of German Expressionism into American film noir.
Everything therefore seems to be explained: the extract is there, superimposed on the image of the ghetto’s surrender, because in it a filmmaker who fled Nazi Germany speaks to us, through a transparent fictional analogy, of the Nazi programme for exterminating ‘sub-humans’. This American film of 1946 echoes the Germany, Year Zero which an Italian director, Rossellini, shortly thereafter devoted to a different transposition of the same programme – little Edmund’s murder of his bedridden father. In its fashion it attests to the way in which cinema spoke of the extermination through exemplary fables – Murnau’s Faust, Renoir’s La Règle du jeu, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. From here it is easy to complete the puzzle, to confer meaning on each of the elements that are fitted together in the episode. The merry public that is seated in front of Nosferatu is taken from the closing shots of King Vidor’s The Crowd. Of little importance here is the fictional situation in this film from the last days of silent movies: the final reconciliation in a music-hall of a couple on the verge of breaking up. Godard’s montage is clearly symbolic. It shows us the captivation of the crowd in darkened movie theatres by the Hollywood industry, which feeds it with a warm imaginary by burning a reality that will soon demand payment in real blood and real tears. The letters that appear on the screen (l’ennemi public, le public) say this in their own way. Public Enemy is the title of a film by Wellman, a story about a gangster played by James Cagney and slightly postdating The Crowd. But in Histoire(s) it is also the title given by Godard to The Crowd’s producer, Irvin Thalberg – the embodiment of the power of Hollywood that vampirized cinema crowds, but also liquidated the artists/prophets of cinema à la Murnau.
The episode therefore creates a strict parallel between two captivations: the captivation of German crowds by Nazi ideology and of film crowds by Hollywood. Falling within this parallel are the intermediate elements: a man/bird shot taken from Franju’s Judex; a close-up on the eyes of Antonioni, the paralyzed, aphasic filmmaker, all of whose power has withdrawn into his gaze; the profile of Fassbinder, the exemplary filmmaker of Germany after the catastrophe, haunted by ghosts that are represented here by the quasi-subliminal apparitions of riders taken from Fritz Lang’s Siegfried’s Death.9 The text that accompanies these fleeting apparitions is taken from Jules Laforgue’s Simple agonie – that is, not only from a poet who died at the age of 26, but also from a French writer nurtured in exemplary fashion by German culture in general and by Schopenhauerian nihilism in particular.
Everything is therefore explained, except that the logic thus reconstructed is strictly indecipherable exclusively from the silhouette of Dorothy McGuire, an actress as little known to viewers of Histoire(s) as the film itself. Accordingly, it is not the allegorical quality of the plot that must connect the shot of the young woman and the photograph of the ghetto child for viewers. It is the power of the sentence-image in itself – that is, the mysterious bond between two enigmatic relations. The first is the material relationship between the candle held by the fictional mute and the all too real Jewish child that it seems to illuminate. Such is in fact the paradox. It is not the extermination that is to clarify the story presented by Siodmak, but quite the reverse: it is the black and white of cinema that is to project on to the image of the ghetto the power of history that it derives from great German cameramen like Karl Freund, who (Godard tells us) invented in advance the lighting effects of Nuremberg, and which they themselves derived from Goya, Callot or Rembrandt and his ‘terrible black and white’. And the same is true of the second mysterious relationship contained in the sentence-image: the relationship between Foucault’s words and the shot and photograph that they are supposed to link. In accordance with the same paradox, it is not the obvious link provided by the film’s plot that is to unite the heterogeneous elements, but the non-link of these words. The interesting thing, in fact, is not that a German director in 1945 should stress the analogies between the screenplay entrusted to him and the contemporary reality of war and extermination, but the power of the sentence-image as such – the ability of the staircase shot to come directly into contact with the photograph of the ghetto and the words of the professor. A power of contact, not of translation or explanation; an ability to exhibit a community constructed by the ‘fraternity of metaphors’. It is not a question of showing that cinema speaks of its time, but of establishing that cinema makes a world, that it should have made a world. The history of cinema is the history of a power of making history. Its time, Godard tells us, is one when sentence-images had the power, dismissing stories, to write history, by connecting directly up with their ‘outside. This power of connecting is not that of the homogeneous – not that of using a horror story to speak to us of Nazism and the extermination. It is that of the heterogeneous, of the immediate clash between three solitudes: the solitude of the shot, that of the photograph, and that of the words which speak of something else entirely in a quite different context. It is the clash of heterogeneous elements that provides a common measure.
How should we conceive this clash and its effect? To understand it, it is not enough to invoke the virtues of fragmentation and interval that unravel the logic of the action. Fragmentation, interval, cutting, collage, montage – all these notions readily taken as criteria of artistic modernity can assume highly diverse (even opposed) meanings. I leave to one side instances where fragmentation, whether cinematic or novelistic, is simply a way of tying the representative knot even more tightly. But even omitting this, there remain two major ways of understanding how the heterogeneous creates a common measure: the dialectical way and the symbolic way.
I take these two terms in a conceptual sense that goes beyond the boundaries of some particular school or doctrine. The dialectical way invests chaotic power in the creation of little machineries of the heterogeneous. By fragmenting continuums and distancing terms that call for each other, or, conversely, by assimilating heterogeneous elements and combining incompatible things, it creates clashes. And it makes the clashes thus developed small measuring tools, conducive to revealing a disruptive power of community, which itself establishes another term of measurement. This machinery can be the encounter of the sewing machine and the umbrella on a dissecting table, some canes and Rhine mermaids in an antiquated shop window of the Passage de l’Opéra,10 or quite different equivalents of these accessories in Surrealist poetry, painting or cinema. The encounter therein of incompatible elements highlights the power of a different community imposing a different measure; it establishes the absolute reality of desires and dreams. But it can also be activist photomontage à la John Heartfield, which exposes capitalist gold in Adolf Hitler’s gullet – i.e. the reality of economic domination behind the lyricism of national revolution – or, forty years later, that of Martha Rosler, who ‘brings back home’ the Vietnam War by mixing her images with those of adverts for American domestic bliss. Even closer to us, it can be the images of the homeless projected by Krzystof Wodiczko on official American monuments, or the paintings that Hans Haacke accompanies with little notices indicating how much they have cost each of their successive buyers. In all these cases, what is involved is revealing one world behind another: the far-off conflict behind home comforts; the homeless expelled by urban renovation behind the new buildings and old emblems of the polity; the gold of exploitation behind the rhetoric of community or the sublimity of art; the community of capital behind all the separations of spheres and the class war behind all communities. It involves organizing a clash, presenting the strangeness of the familiar, in order to reveal a different order of measurement that is only uncovered by the violence of a conflict. The power of the sentence-image that couples heterogeneous elements is then that of the distance and the collision which reveals the secret of a world – that is, the other world whose writ runs behind its anodyne or glorious appearances.
The symbolist way also relates heterogeneous elements and constructs little machines through a montage of unrelated elements. But it assembles them in accordance with the opposite logic. Between elements that are foreign to one another it works to establish a familiarity, an occasional analogy, attesting to a more fundamental relationship of co-belonging, a shared world where heterogeneous elements are caught up in the same essential fabric, and are therefore always open to being assembled in accordance with the fraternity of a new metaphor. If the dialectical way aims, through the clash of different elements, at the secret of a heterogeneous order, the symbolist way assembles elements in the form of mystery. Mystery does not mean enigma or mysticism. Mystery is an aesthetic category, developed by Mallarmé and explicitly adopted by Godard. The mystery is a little theatrical machine that manufactures analogy, which makes it possible to recognize the poet’s thought in the feet of a dancer, the fold of a stole, the opening of a fan, the sparkle of a chandelier, or the unexpected movement of a standing bear. It is also what enables the stage designer Adolphe Appia to translate the thought of the musician/poet Wagner not into painted scenery that resembles what the opera is about, but into the abstract plastic forms of pieces of working scenery or the beam of light that sculpts space; or the static dancer Loïe Fuller to transform herself, solely by the artifice of her veils and spotlights, into the luminous figure of a flower or butterfly. The machine of mystery is a machine for making something common, not to contrast worlds, but to present, in the most unexpected ways, a co-belonging. And it is this common element that provides the term of measurement of the incommensurables.
The power of the sentence-image is thus extended between these two poles, dialectical and symbolic; between the clash that effects a division of systems of measurement and the analogy which gives shape to the great community; between the image that separates and the sentence which strives for continuous phrasing. Continuous phrasing is the ‘dark fold that restrains the infinite’, the supple line that can proceed from any heterogeneous element to any heterogeneous element; the power of the uncoupled, of what has never been begun, never been coupled, and which can conquer everything in its ageless rhythm. It is the sentence of the novelist who, even if we cannot ‘see’ anything in it, vouches by his ear that we are in the true, that the sentence-image is right. The ‘right’ image, Godard recalls citing Reverdy, is one that establishes the correct relationship between two remote things grasped in their maximum distance. But the rightness of the image is definitely not seen. The sentence must make its music heard. What can be grasped as right is the sentence – that is, what is given as always preceded by another sentence, preceded by its own power: the power of phrased chaos, of Flaubert’s mixing of atoms, of Mallarmé’s arabesque, of the original ‘whispering’ the idea for which Godard borrowed from Hermann Broch. And it is indeed this power of the non-begun, this power of the uncoupled redeeming and consecrating the artifice of any link, which Foucault’s sentences express here.
What is the relationship between the homage to the absent one in the inaugural lecture, the shadows of a shot from a film noir, and the image of the condemned ones in the ghetto? One might answer: the relationship between the pure contrast of black and white and the pure continuity of the uncoupled sentence. Here Foucault’s sentences say what Godard’s sentences – the ones he borrows from Broch or Baudelaire, Elie Faure, Heidegger or Denis de Rougemont – do, throughout Histoire(s) du cinéma: they bring into play the coupling power of the uncoupled, the power of what always precedes oneself. The paragraph from Foucault says nothing else here. It says the same thing as the sentence from Althusser twenty years earlier. It invokes the same power of continuous phrasing, the power of what is given as the continuation of a sentence that is always-already begun. Even more than the peroration cited by Godard, this power is expressed by the exordium to which it refers:
I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne away beyond all possible beginnings. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon me.11
This power of linking seemingly cannot be generated by the simple relationship between two visible elements. The visible does not succeed in phrasing itself continuously, in providing the measure of the ‘without common measurement’, the measure of mystery. Cinema, says Godard, is not an art, not a technique. It is a mystery. For my part, I would say that it is not such in essence, but that it is such as phrased here by Godard. There is no art that spontaneously pertains to one or the other form of combining heterogeneous elements. It must be added that these two forms themselves never stop intermingling their logics. They work on the same elements, in accordance with procedures that verge on the indiscernible. Godard’s montage doubtless offers the best example of the extreme proximity of contrasting logics. It shows how the same forms of junction of heterogeneous elements can abruptly switch from the dialectical pole to the symbolist pole. Interminably to connect, as he does, a shot from one film with the title or dialogue of another, a sentence from a novel, a detail from a painting, the chorus of a song, a news photograph, or an advertising message, is always to do two things at once: to organize a clash and construct a continuum. The space of these clashes and that of the continuum can even bear the same name: History. History can indeed be two contradictory things: the discontinuous line of revealing clashes or the continuum of co-presence. The linkage of heterogeneous elements constructs and, at the same time, reflects a meaning of history that is displaced between these two poles.
Godard’s career illustrates this displacement in exemplary fashion. He has in fact never stopped practising the collage of heterogeneous elements. But for a very long time it was spontaneously perceived as dialectical. This is because the clash of heterogeneous elements possessed a sort of dialectical automaticity in itself. It referred to a vision of history as a locus of conflict. This is what is summarized in a phrase from Made in the USA: ‘I have the impression’, says the hero, ‘of living in a Walt Disney film played by Humphrey Bogart – so in a political film.’ An exemplary deduction: the absence of any relationship between the associated elements sufficed to vouch for the political character of the association. Any linkage of incompatible elements could pass for a critical ‘appropriation’ of the dominant logic and any abrupt switch of subject for a Situationist dérive. Pierrot le fou provides the best example of this. The tone is set from the outset by the sight of Belmondo in his bath with a cigarette, reading Elie Faure’s Histoire de l’art to a little girl. We then see Ferdinand-Pierrot’s wife recite the advertising jingle about the benefits she would derive from the Scandale girdle and hear him waxing ironic about the ‘civilization of the backside’. This mockery is continued by the evening at the parents-in-law where the guests, against a monochrome background, repeat expressions from advertising. Thereafter the hero’s flight with the baby-sitter – the rediscovered sweetheart – can begin. The political message conveyed by this opening is far from obvious. But the ‘advertising’ sequence, because it refers to an established grammar of the ‘political’ reading of signs, sufficed to ensure a dialectical view of the film and to classify the elopement under the heading of critical dérive. To tell a cock-and-bull detective story, to show two young people on the run having their breakfast with a fox or a parrot, entered unproblematically into a critical tradition of denunciation of alienated everyday life.
This also meant that the strange linkage between a text of ‘high culture’ and the laid-back lifestyle of a young man from the New Wave era was enough to make us indifferent to the content of the Elie Faure text read by Ferdinand. Now, in connection with painting, this text on Velasquez was already saying the same thing that Godard would have Foucault’s text say about language twenty years later. Velasquez, Elie Faure essentially argues, has placed on canvas ‘representing’ the sovereigns and princesses of a decadent dynasty something quite different: the power of space, imponderable dust, the impalpable caress of the breeze, the gradual expansion of shadow and light, the colourful palpitations of the atmosphere.12 In Velasquez, painting is the phrasing of space; and the historiography of art practised by Elie Faure echoes it as the phrasing of history.
In the era of Pop and Situationist provocations, Godard at once invoked and obscured this phrasing of history imaginarily extracted from the pictorial phrasing of space. By contrast, it triumphs in the dream of the original great whisper that haunts Histoire(s) du cinéma. The methods of ‘appropriation’ which, twenty years earlier, produced, even blankly, dialectical conflict, now assume the opposite function. They ensure the logic of mystery, the reign of continuous phrasing. Thus, in the first part of Histoire(s) Elie Faure’s chapter on Rembrandt becomes a eulogy of cinema. Thus, Foucault, the philosopher who explained to us how words and things had separated off, is summoned to vouch positively for the illusion that his text evoked and dispelled, to make us hear the original murmur where the sayable and the visible are still joined. The procedures for linking heterogeneous elements that ensured dialectical conflict now produce the exact opposite: the homogeneous great layer of mystery, where all of yesterday’s conflicts become expressions of intense co-presence.
With yesterday’s provocations we can now contrast today’s counter-provocations. I have commented elsewhere on the episode where Godard shows us – with the help of Giotto’s Mary Magadalen, transformed by him into an angel of the Resurrection – that Elizabeth Taylor’s ‘place in the sun’ in the film of that name was made possible because the film’s director, George Stevens, had a few years earlier filmed the survivors and the dead of Ravensbrück, thereby redeeming cinema from its absence from the scenes of the extermination.13 Now, if it had been made at the time of Pierrot le fou, the link between the images of Ravensbrück and the idyll of A Place in the Sun could only have been read in one way: a dialectical reading denouncing American happiness in the name of the camp victims. This dialectical logic is what still inspired Martha Rosler’s photomontages, linking American happiness to Vietnamese horror, in the 1970s. Yet however anti-American the Godard of Histoire(s), his reading is the exact opposite: Elizabeth Taylor is not guilty of selfish happiness, indifferent to the horrors of the world. She has positively merited this happiness because George Stevens has positively filmed the camps and thus performed the task of the cinematic sentence-image: constructing not the ‘designerless dress of reality’, but the seamless fabric of co-presence – the fabric that at once authorizes and erases all the seams; constructing the world of ‘images’ as a world of general co-belonging and inter-expression.
Dérive and appropriation are thus reversed, absorbed by the continuity of the phrasing. The symbolist sentence-image has swallowed the dialectical sentence-image. The ‘without common measurement’ now leads to the great fraternity or community of metaphors. This move is not peculiar to a filmmaker known for his especially melancholic temperament. In its way it translates a shift in the sentence-image, to which today’s works attest even when they present themselves in the form of legitimations taken from the dialectical lexicon. This is the case, for example, with the exhibition Moving Pictures that was recently staged at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The rhetoric of the exhibition sought to enrol today’s artworks in a critical tradition from the 1960s and ’70s, where the methods of the filmmaker and the visual artist, the photographer and the video director, would be united in an identical radicalism challenging the stereotypes of the dominant discourse and view. Yet the exhibited works did something different. Thus, Vanessa Beecroft’s video, in which the camera revolves around upright naked female bodies in the space of the same museum, is, despite formal similarities, no longer concerned to denounce the link between artistic stereotypes and female stereotypes. Indeed, the strangeness of these displaced bodies seems instead to suspend any such interpretation, to allow these presences their mystery, which fades to join that of photographs themselves intent on recreating the pictorial formulas of magical realism: Rineke Dijkstra’s portraits of adolescents whose sex, age and social identity are ambiguous; Gregory Crewdson’s photographs of ordinary suburbs caught in uncertainty between the drab colour of the everyday and the murky colour of the drama with which cinema has so often played; and so on. Between videos, photos and video installations, we see the indicated querying of perceptual stereotypes shift towards a quite different interest in the uncertain boundaries between the familiar and the strange, the real and the symbolic. At the Guggenheim, this shift was spectacularly underscored by the simultaneous presence, between the same walls, of Bill Viola’s video installation called Going Forth by Day: five simultaneous video projections covering the walls of a dark rectangular room, where visitors stand on a central carpet. Around the entry way there is a great primeval fire from which a human hand and face vaguely emerge; while on the facing wall, there is a deluge of water that is about to submerge a multitude of picturesque urban characters, whose movements have been related and features detailed by the camera at length. The left wall is completely taken up by the décor of an airy forest where characters whose feet hardly touch the ground slowly, and interminably, walk backwards and forwards. Life is a transition, we have understood, and we can now turn towards the fourth wall, which is divided between two projection spaces. The one on the left is divided in two: in a small closet à la Giotto an old man is dying watched over by his children; whereas on a terrace à la Hopper a character peers into the Nordic sea where, while the old man dies and the light is extinguished in the room, a boat is slowly loaded and sets out. On the right, a group of exhausted rescue workers of a flooded village rest, while on the sea’s edge a woman awaits morning and rebirth.
Bill Viola does not attempt to hide a certain nostalgia for the great painting and the fresco series of yesteryear and says that what he wanted to create here was an equivalent of Giotto’s frescos in the chapel of Arena in Padua. But this series instead puts us in mind of the great frescos of the ages and seasons of human existence that people were fond of in the Symbolist and Expressionist era, at the time of Puvis de Chavannes, Klimt, Edvard Munch, or Erich Heckel. It will doubtless be said that the temptation to Symbolism is inherent in video art. And, in fact, the immateriality of the electronic image has quite naturally rekindled the enthusiasm of the Symbolist era for immaterial states of matter – an enthusiasm prompted at the time by the progress of electricity and the success of theories about the dissipation of matter in energy. In the period of Jean Epstein and Riccioto Canudo, this enthusiasm had sustained enthusiasm for the young art of cinematography. And it is also quite natural that video should offer Godard its new capacities for making images appear, vanish, and intermingle; and for forming the pure kingdom of their co-belonging and the potentiality of their inter-expression ad infinitum.
But the technique that makes this poetics possible does not create it. And the same shift from dialectical conflict to symbolist community is characteristic of works and installations that employ traditional materials and means of expression. The exhibition Sans commune mesure presents, for example, the work of Ken Lum in three rooms. This artist still identifies with the North American critical tradition of the Pop age. Into various advertising signs and billboards he has inserted subversive statements advocating the power of the people or the liberation of an imprisoned Indian activist. But the hyper-realist materiality of the sign devours the difference of the texts; without distinction, it puts the plaques and their inscriptions in the imaginary museum of objects witnessing to the everyday life of middle America. As for the mirrors that line the following room, they no longer have anything in common with those which, twenty years earlier, Pistoletto, sometimes engraving a familiar silhouette on them, substituted for the expected paintings, thereby demanding of visitors obliged to see their reflections in them what they had come to look for. With the small family photos that embellish them, Lum’s mirrors, by contrast, seem to expect us, to summon us to recognize ourselves in the image of the great human family.
I previously commented on the contemporary contrast between the icons of voici and the displays of voilà, stressing that the same objects or assemblages could indifferently pass from one exhibitory logic to the other. In the light of Godard’s complementarity of icon and montage, these two poetics of the image seem to be two forms of the same basic trend. Today, the photographic sequences, the video monitors or projections, the installations of familiar or strange objects that fill the spaces of our museums and galleries seek less to create the sense of a gap between two orders – between everyday appearances and the laws of domination – than to increase a new sensitivity to the signs and traces that testify to a common history and a common world. It is sometimes the case that forms of art explicitly declare themselves to this effect, that they invoke a ‘loss of community’ or undoing of the ‘social bond’, assigning the assemblages and performances of art the task of recreating social bonds or a sense of community. The reduction of the great parataxis to the ordinary state of things then takes the sentence-image towards its degree zero: the little sentence that creates a bond or beckons towards some bond. But outside of these professed forms, and under the cover of legitimations still taken from the critical doxa, contemporary forms of art are increasingly devoted to the unanimist inventory of traces of community or a new symbolist representation of the powers of the verbal and the visible or of the archetypal gestures and great cycles of human existence.
The paradox of Histoire(s) du cinéma thus does not reside where it first of all seems to be situated: in the conjunction of an anti-textual poetics of the icon and a poetics of montage that makes these icons the endlessly combinable and exchangeable elements of a discourse. The poetics of Histoire(s) simply radicalizes the aesthetic power of the sentence-image as a combination of opposites. The paradox lies elsewhere: this monument was in the nature of a farewell, a funeral chant to the glory of an art and a world of art that have vanished, on the verge of the latest catastrophe. Yet Histoire(s) may well have signalled something quite different: not the onset of some twilight of the human, but the neo-symbolist and neo-humanist tendency of contemporary art.