7/29/2019 BJ19_Jay

1/7

44 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

imAgeCourtesyoftheArtist

ouTcasT eyesThe medieval philosophy of nominalism has rippled through the centuries and into

our ways of making meaning out of what we see.

By Martin Jay

dan GluiBizzi, jr.,i-lines[B], 2009, waterColor on paper, 20 x 16 inChes

7/29/2019 BJ19_Jay

2/7

Fall 2010 | Number Nineteen | The Berlin Journal|45

Ever since its inv ention, in

the 1830s, photography has posed a

daunting challenge to the legion of

theorists who have sought to make sense

of its revolutionary implications. Variously

a tool of scientic inquiry, artistic cre-

ation, and social memory, it has exploded

conventional wisdom about visual experi-

ence, testing our sense of what an image

is, how mimetic representation duplicates

the world, and even how time itself can be

frozen in a perpetual instant or captured in

the ow of its movement. With the recent

development of digital technologies, which

seem to undermine the photographs func-

tion as a reliable recorder of an actual event

or object in the world, many of these issues

have been raised anew with no consensus

yet arriv ing about their possible resolution.

Sometimes it is useful to return to past

moments in the history of thought to helpus deal with present questions. In the case

of photography, one possible yet rareed

resource is a tradition that emerged in

medieval philosophy and that has had a lin-

gering impact ever since: Nominalism.

Beginning with the fourteenth-century

Franciscan friar William of Ockham,

whose celebrated razor was wielded to cut

away imagined entities unnecessary to

explain the world of exper ience, nominal-

ism has been understood as promoting

a principle of parsimony or economy. It

sought to purify philosophy, in particular

the reigning Scholastic orthodoxy of the

medieval Church, of its excessive conceptu-

al baggage, freeing it to confront the world

as it existed in all its motley particularity.

The nominalists favorite target was

the alleged existence of supra-individual

universals abstractions wrongly taken

to be more real than the particulars that

embodied them. Because it did so, nomi-

nalism has been understood as deeply

anti-realist in its hostility to the essentialist

Aristotelian ontology of the Scholastic tra-dition. For abstract universals it substituted

the conventionalist linguistic name that we

mere humans give to groupings of individ-

ual entities in the world that seem to share

attributes chairs, birds, oceans thus

earning the designation of nominalism,

from the Latin word for name, nomen.

Ridding the mental universe of unnec-

essary real universals and abstract objects,

however, could open the door for some-

thing else. For when doubts about knowl-

edge or the sufciency of human reason

were put forward, the way was opened for

faith alone to be the sole source of certainty.

We may lack the means to sense or know

real universals or abstract objects, but we

can still believe that they exist. For Ockham,

revelation was the only access we have to

such entities as the souls immortality or

the inherent attributes of God, such as His

unfettered sovereign will.

When it came to mundane matters,

nominalism cleared the way for a less exalt-

ed source than Gods will. Nominalism

says the categories we bestow upon the

world are the product of human invention,

an assumption which led to the self-asser-

tion of the species in the face of a world

that no longer could be read as a legible text

lled with meanings written by God and

available to human understanding the so-

called Great Chain of Being. The sovereign

will of God unconstrained by innate ratio-

nal rules or essential forms is mimicked by

the assertion of humankind producing an

order that is lessfoundthan made. Modern

science, for one, is indebted to this radical

transformation: However much it pretends

to passive discovery, its hidden corollary is

the domination of pliant nature.

As Ockhams razor sliced through the

building blocks of dominant medieval

optics, it hit the idea of the visible species,

which allowed an object to appear mean-

ingful to the eyes that beheld it. Sight, in

medieval optics, worked through the trans-

missions of these forms, from the object to

the eye and vice versa. Extramission, as

it was called, involved the sending out of

species from the eye to meet those comingin through intromission. But Ockham

rejected this idea as unnecessary, for it

added an extraneous general concept,

which he thought could be jettisoned in

favor of understanding sight as simply an

intuitive grasping of particular objects at a

distance.

Ockhams razor also severed the

Scholastic concept of organic aesthetic

form, which, as Aquinas held, was com-

prised of an object s integrity, clarity, and

proportion, qualities believed to be univer-

sal norms. While subsequent efforts were

made to rescue a generic metaphysics of

beauty (neo-Platonism returned during the

Renaissance and the eighteenth century;

neo-Aristotelianism enjoyed a twentieth-

century theoretical revival), the nominal-

ist challenge remained. It contributed,

for example, to the rise of the novel, that

entirely anti-generic genre that dees vir-

tually al l of the traditional rules of beauty

and form; and in musical compositions, in

the works of, for example, Gustav Mahler,

who denied an ontology of pre-given musi-

cal forms. In visual culture, nominalisms

dominant exemplar has been photography,

a medium that insists on capturing images

of only specic things in the world. But

photography has done so by instantiating a

version of the nominalist impulse I want to

call magical, with a nod to the novelists

who have developed a similar doctrine of

magical realism. To make my case, let me

take a detour through the work of a gurein the visual arts who carried the nominal-

ist impulse to its extreme, the French (anti-)

artist Marcel Duchamp. In inventing the

brilliant provocation that came to be called

the readymade, an object from everyday

life that was selected as art rather than

made by the skill of the artist, he denied

the very idea of organic formal beauty.

Duchamp himself understood his work,

to cite a lapidary and cryptic note from

his White Boxin 1914, as a kind of picto-

rial Nominalism, a term that appeared

throughout Duchamps writings.

How does Duchampian nomi-

nalism t with our understanding

of photography in nominalist

terms? For one, whereas mainstream mod-

ernist abstraction pursued the elusive goal

of the essential purity of the medium as

Clement Greenberg never tired of remind-

ing us Duchamp performatively rejected

that quest by giving up painting itself.

Abandoning not only the mimetic task of

painting copying what was on the otherside of a framed, t ransparent window onto

the world Duchamp also rejected the

claim that the at canvas was an opaque

surface on which experiments in color,

form, and a texture might be pursued.

Instead, he decried all retinal art meant

to provide pleasure to the eye, in favor of

an art that was named as such by someone

with the cultural capital to have his act of

enunciation taken seriously. In other words,

one meaning of pictorial nominalism was

the idea that the intrinsic qualities of the

object were less important than the act of

naming it a work of art and gett ing fi

in visual culTure,nominalisms dominanT

exemplar has been

phoTography, a medium ThaT

insisTs on capTuring images

of only specific Things

in The world.

7/29/2019 BJ19_Jay

3/7

46 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

the legitimating institutions museums,

galleries, collectors, historians of art to

accept the act as valid. Eschewing the

older ideal of creative genius in which the

gifted art ist somehow channeled the same

innovative spirit that God has shown inwilling the world into being, miraculously

making the invisible visible, Duchamp

effaced himself, or at least his talent as a

traditional art ist, and became the more

modest designator the namer of found

objects as readymade works worthy of dis-

play in museums. In this sense, pictorial

nominalism was a variation of the older

impulse found in Ockham, which denied

that inherent qualities existed in the world

that could serve as standards of beauty. It

was a radical conventionalism in which the

decision of the enunciator the one who

can get away with saying this bottle rack or

this urinal is a work of art and should be in

a museum trumped any intrinsic rules of

formal beauty, such as proportion, organic

wholeness, or integrity.

There was, however, another sense in

which pictorial nominalism moved beyondthis conventionalist usage and gestured

towards a kind of nominalism that was

no longer understandable solely in terms

of denial and disenchantment. It is this

second kind that I want to call magical

nominalism.

Duchamp wanted to reduce words to

their non-communicative status, express-

ing nothing of the intention of the mind

that might speak them or descr iptive of

an external world to which they might

refer. Ideally spoken by no one, they defy

both interpretation into something else

and their subsumption under a generic

concept. If words are to be understood as

names, it is not in the sense of a linguistic

sign but rather that of the proper name,

which does nothing to describe the char-

acteristics of the person to whom it refers

or to subsume him under a concept, but

rather rigidly designates him or her as a

unique entity.

Magical nominalism has to be differ-

entiated from its conventionalist cousin in

its relative de-emphasis of the enunciative

function of the art ist, that moment of self-

assertion ex nihilo, a critical implication of

the Ockhamist critique of real universals.

Duchamp sensed that it was only by diving

into the nostalgic past that he could carry

out his nominalist function. The ready-

made is something given by history, not

created by the artist in the present, and is

then re-named an art object not a paint-

ing or a sculpture, but simply art object.As such, it means nothing aside from that

name, no longer an object of use, not an

object of formal beauty within a generic

tradition. Its value, we might say, lies solely

in what it is now designated.

To understand the implications of

all this for photography wil l require

a quick glance at the writings of two

critics, who at one time or another had

illuminating things to say about art in gen-

eral and photography in particular: Walter

Benjamin and Rosalind Krauss.

In Benjamins seminal 1916 essay On

Language as Such and On the Language

of Man, he adopted what has been called

an Adamic view of languages: the Fall

into a Babel of dif ferent tongues was pre-

ceded by an Ursprache, an original pure

language. He began by expanding the word

language beyond a tool of human com-

munication or mental expression to include

everything in animate and inanimate

nature.

Whereas conventional notions of lan-guage privilege communication between

humans about a world of objects, the more

expansive notion knows no means, no

object, and no addressee of communication.

It means: in the name, the mental being of

man communicates itself to God. Although

only God possesses the perfect language

in which name is equivalent to thing, man

approximates it through the giving of prop-

er names: The theory of proper names is

the theory of the frontier between nite

and innite language.

Language in this expanded sense is

therefore more than mere signs, more

dan GluiBizzi, jr., mWi-lines , 2009. aCryliC on Canvas, 20 x 16 inChes

imAgeCourtesyoftheArtist

7/29/2019 BJ19_Jay

4/7

Fall 2010 | Number Nineteen | The Berlin Journal|47

than arbitrary conventions invented to

communicate abstract ideas or enact inter-

subjective performatives. After the Fall

into Babel, however, the project of regain-

ing the perfect language was thwarted

by what Benjamin calls overnaming,

which produces the melancholy of a dis-

enchanted natural world no longer at one

with its original names. For Benjamin it

is the act of translation that offers hope of

reunication: it aims at getting beyond the

inadequacies of individual languages and

approaching the Ursprache beneath them.

Here, in Benjamin, we have a nominal-

ism that fully earns the adjective magicalin the sense that it rejects both abstract

universals in the Scholastic tradition and

conventional names in its Ockhamist

nominalist opponent. Instead it posits the

possibility of regaining original names,

true names, as designating, indeed being

at one with, the specic, qualitatively

unique things to which they had been

equivalent before the Fall into Babel and

conventionalist pluralism of dif ferent

human languages. But like Duchamps

pictorial nominal ism, Benjamins sought-

after restoration also dislocates objects

from their functional contexts of use and

resituates them in a new realm in which

they are without any communicative

meaning beyond their existence as qualita-

tively distinct things.

We are, to be sure, still a far cry from

photography. And here Rosalind Krausss

inuential essay of 1977, Notes on the

Index, comes briey to our aid. In thecontext of an explanation of Duchamps

rejection of painting and his overcom-

ing of self-depiction, she turned to the

importance of the photographs indexical

relationship or factual trace, like tracks

in the snow or handprints on a wall to the

world. Drawing on C.S. Peirces distinction

of icon, symbol, and index, Krauss argued

that the photograph heralds a disruption

in the autonomy of the sign. A meaning-

lessness surrounds it which can only be

lled by the addition of a text. She then

audaciously linked Duchampss ready-

mades with the photograph, writing that it

was not surprising that Duchamp should

have described the readymade in just these

terms. It was to be a snapshot to which

there was attached a tremendous arbitrari-

ness with regard to meaning, a breakdown

of the relatedness of the linguistic sign.

There was a parallel between the way ready-

mades and photographs were produced:

both were uncoded events that extracted

signs from their contexts.

W

ith these points in mind,

let us return to our point of

departure: William of Ockhamsnominalism may have denied the intrinsic

intelligibility of the world in terms of real

universals, but, as noted, it opened the door

for faith. Magical nominalism can perhaps

be understood as one variant of that faith,

which is revived in visual terms most pow-

erfully in the case of the photograph. fi

Autumn sales 25 27 November 2010 in Berlin

Villa Grisebach Auktionen Fasanenstrae 25 D-10719 Berlin Phone +49-30-885 915-0 www.villa-grisebach.de

Every time I come here,it lifts my spirit.

Eric Kandel, New York

There was a parallel beTween The way readymades and

phoTographs were produced: boTh were uncoded evenTs

ThaT exTracTed signs from Their conTexTs.

7/29/2019 BJ19_Jay

5/7

48 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

What precisely is the object of that faith?

Why do photographs grab us and demand

our attention, telling us to stop the ow of

time and pause in our rush into the future?

Here, of course, we can only conjecture. But

if we agree that they do not afrm a world

of inherent ontological universals, or even

an aesthetic canon of conventional forms,

we can say that photographs somehow

want to be understood as the visual equiva-

lents of the Adamic names the true

names Benjamin hoped to rescue from

the overnaming of linguist ic conven-

tionalism. They want to remain stubbornly

meaningless in the sense that they resist

being paraphrased in terms that reduce

their singularity to an exemplar or case of

a larger category or even as a metaphor of

something else. More precisely, despite

all efforts to saturate them with meaning,

photographs insist that they always containa measure of excess that dees paraphrastic

reduction.

As Roland Barthes classic Camera

Lucida observes, photography stresses

the melancholy implication of its image

as memento mori, a mark of the inevitably

passing of time, implying our nitude.

But if we see the photograph instead as a

miraculous freezing of a single ephemeral

moment, a moment that is utterly irre-

ducible to what came before or after, an

uncanny moment that somehow is present

when the image is later viewed despite its

absence, then perhaps it can be understood

to betoken something magical. Like a

fetish, wrested out of the contextual ow of

linear time, the conventional time of his-

torical narrative, it resists being absorbedinto a cultural whole. Like a proper name,

it refers only to one singular object at one

instant of its existence. And as such, it lim-

its the sovereign power of the constitutive

subject.

Although we know that photographs,

even before the age of digitalization, are

amalgams of the instant of their being

taken and the subsequent work on them

in the developing, printing, and dis-

playing processes, that instant is never

entirely absorbed into those posterior

interventions.

The photograph, in short, is a reminder

that the world is more than human pro-

jection or construction, more than the

categories we impose on it, more than the

meanings we impute to it. Rather than the

humanist self-assertion that some have

seen as a consequence of conventionalist

nominalism, it implies what we might

call the counter-assertion of the world, a

world more readymade than the product

of human will, a world that somehow

stubbornly thwarts all of our most valiant

efforts to disenchant it.

Martin Jay is the Sidney HellmanEhrman Professor of History at the

University of California, Berkeley, and

the fall 2010 Ellen Maria Gorrissen

Fellow at the American Academy.

PfizerDeutschlandGmbH

Pfizer researches to develop the medicinesof today and tomorrow

Life is full of exciting discoveries. And what we do is all

about seeking new insights. For more than 160 years,

Pfizer has researched and developed innovative pre-

parations and treatments in all medical disciplines,

with 13,000 researchers around the world. We do this

with great perseverance because developing a new

drug may take as long as 15 years. Whats more, we

constantly strive to refine proven medication, for

example, to achieve a more specific effect or better

dosing. Every day, this is what we do to realize our

vision of Working Together for a Healthier World.

www.pfizer.de

Because lifeasks the biggestquestions

The phoTograph, in shorT, is

a reminder ThaT The world is

more Than human projecTion

or consTrucTion, more Than

The caTegories we impose

on iT, more Than The meanings

we impuTe To iT.

7/29/2019 BJ19_Jay

6/7

7/29/2019 BJ19_Jay

7/7

New Yorks newest attractions

are built by us.Its not just the tourists who are pleased about the new sights in the Big Apple. So are

the passengers. Thats because the urban buses from our Orion brand are equipped with

low-consumption hybrid drive, meaning that they make an important contribution towards

climate protection. There are more than 3,000 of these innovative buses on the road in

major US cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles. Another milestone on our

Road to Emission-free Mobility.

www.daimler.com

www.daimler.mobi