Abstract
This interview with Philippe Descola, conducted on two occasions separated by the Covid pandemic, delves into his evolving theoretical framework concerning the anthropology of images. Descola reflects on his transition from written discourse in Beyond Nature and Culture to visual representation in Les Formes du visible. The discussion explores the intersection of structuralism, phenomenology, and iconology, highlighting Descola’s engagement with Aby Warburg’s theories and the works of Hans Belting and Horst Bredekamp. Reference is made to Descola’s four ontologies – animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism – and their corresponding modes of identification and figuration. Through these lenses, Descola elucidates how different cultures conceptualize and depict their worlds, emphasizing the intentional autonomy of images and their role as efficacious agents.
Introduction
The following exchange with Philippe Descola took place on two occasions (separated by the Covid pandemic). The first dialogue was held at the Collège de France, September 2018, and the second in Cambridge, at the end of November 2021. The exchange does not cover the breadth of Descola’s work. Nor is there a particular focus on Beyond Nature and Culture (Descola, 2013) and its four ontologies. The journal HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory (Vol. 4, No. 3, 2014) has devoted a special section to this. 1 Instead, the dialogue is situated in the bridge between Beyond Nature and Culture and Les Formes du visible: une anthropologie de la figuration (Descola, 2021), and after Descola curated a major exhibition, La Fabrique des images (February 2010–July 2011) at Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. The ‘image’ forms the prime focus, including reference to the impact of Aby Warburg in Descola’s theory of the image and the ontologies more generally. The focus on the image invokes the question of representation. Here we see Descola is unashamedly close to Durkheim’s collective representations. Here the image is a figural representation standing in a sometimes complex relation with discourse. Discursive representation gestures to the importance of classifications. This puts Descola’s work into conflict with ecological and phenomenological frameworks that are so influential today (c.f. Ingold’s (2000) ‘ecological phenomenology’ and its anti-representational focus on affordances). There have been intense, indeed acrimonious exchanges between Descola (2016) and Ingold. The latter’s eco-phenomenology stands in contrast to Descola’s more less unreconstructed structuralism. Hence, representations, classifications and structure frame Descola’s curiosity about cultures and about cultural difference, whichphenomenology can miss.
Descola’s structuralism draws on his teacher Claude Lévi-Strauss’s morphogenesis and structural transformations. This opens up (re)considerations of animism and totemism in which animism foregrounds metamorphoses, and totems are a question of traces. As such, plants and animal species are to be understood not literally but as what cognitive psychologist Rosch (1983) understands as ‘prototypes’. This is from Rosch’s early fieldwork in New Guinea, where she saw that people categorized less through definitions or even words than on a comparison between an object and another that was regularly associated with similar experiences. Hence for Rosch, categories are more perceptual than semantic. Prototype classification stands in contrast to the logical classification of an object. It is question more of figural than discursive classification. This seems central to both Descola’s theory of the image in Les Formes du visible and to identification and the ontologies in Beyond Nature and Culture.
With respect to the second dialogue, Descola recommends consulting his European University Institute lecture on structuralism and ontology. 2 This is especially relevant for its focus on form, hence Les Formes du visible. And in the defense of structuralism it gives us a (social) science of not causality but instead of structural transformation. It is not about system, either the linear system of structural functionalism or the nonlinear systems of, say, autopoiesis. The original structure for Lévi-Strauss, marking the birth of culture and of social facts, is not (as in Durkheim) forms of religious life, but instead, as in early Australian tribes, the exchange of wives, or the exchange of women between two moities. On the basis of the incest taboo, this basic form of reciprocity is the structure that through its transformations yields kinship formations everywhere, as in, for example, India and China. The same can be said for the mythemes in Mythologiques (Lévi-Strauss, 1964–71). This has a basis of course in Saussure’s semiotics, whose syntax informs these structural transformations. For questions specifically of form, both Lévi-Strauss and Descola point to Goethe’s Urpflanze (Petitot, 2009), whose transformations yield a variety of forms, and Thompson’s (1917) morphogenesis, where in On Growth and Form a variety of skulls are variations on a common bone structure. Descola moves then to Beyond Nature and Culture’s four ontologies, which are structural transformations of a basic relation between physicality and interiority, in which, say in animism, animal and plant-based prototypes transform into the interiority of ceremonial masks. This is a question of identity in the ontologies, informed by Rosch’s psychology.
Introducing Les Formes du visible
What is the differentia specifica of the genus homo, or more particularly, homo sapiens? Are we to follow Aristotle’s definition of the reasoning animal, the political animal? In Les Formes du visible, Descola’s implicit philosophical anthropology sees this differentia specifica less like Cassirer’s focus on language and symbol and more as figure – less a collective symbolic than a collective imaginary. Homo sapiens is for Descola the species that figures, that traces lines in the sands, that paints bodies, that makes and decorates masks, that paints figures on tree bark, and on ivory tusks and bones. At more than 750 pages, Les Formes du visible is an ambitious book, whose ambition is as great as his Beyond Nature and Culture, and reflects the 16 years between the publication of these two books, giving us a paradigm-transforming anthropology of art. But this is more than an anthropology of art. It is an anthropology of the image. It suggests that we humans are more fundamentally imaging animals than we are discursive animals. It suggests that figure is at the basis of discourse. Its predecessors are Art and Agency (1998) by Alfred Gell, from the anthropological side, and Belting’s (2014) art-anthropology from the art-historical side. But Gell does not address modern art or even what Descola calls the art of ‘analogist’ modes of identification. Though Descola sees himself as an amateur, this book is sophisticated in its art-theoretical and art-historical sources.
The keyword for Descola is not the art object but instead figuration. Homo sapiens ‘figures’: s/he knows and operates in the world on the basis of ‘forms of the visible’. But there is a second keyword that appears in all four of the ontologies. Descola’s Paris show ‘La Fabrique des images’ at Musée du Quai Branly featured these four ontologies: animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism. What plays a key role in all of these ontologies, which are also for him ‘modes of identification’, is this second keyword: iconology. Hence, in Les Formes du visible, each ontology has an associated iconology, with a lineage featuring Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, Hans Belting and Horst Bredekamp, but especially Warburg. As Bredekamp showed in Aby Warburg, Der Indianer (2019), Warburg was also an engaged anthropologist. He was close to the ‘father’ of not social but cultural anthropology, Franz Boas. Descola’s lineage instead is Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss. He has recently retired from Lévi-Strauss’s chair at the Collège de France. Cultural anthropology has its roots in the German Historical School while social anthropology is rooted in Anglo-French positivism. Descola, like Lévi-Strauss and Durkheim/Mauss, is a social anthropologist. Similarly to Max Weber’s Methodenstreit crossing the boundaries between neo-Kantian ideal types and German-Historical verstehen, Descola’s method also gestures to cultural anthropology, with his iconological and image-based Kultur on the one hand and his Anglo-French classificationism (of ontologies) on the other.
Descola makes the distinction between how images, how visible forms, are constituted, considering their structure, their content, their form, and their effects. This iconology is focused on effects; as in Gell’s Art and Agency and Bredekamp’s Image-Acts, on the agency of the art itself. Descola (2021: 640–2) refers many times to the intentionality not of the artist but of the art. A book on the intentionality of images of course is more than a neo-positivist social anthropology. So, agency and intentionality are very much the same. This is not Husserl’s transcendental intentionality but the empirical, an posteriori intentionality of the figure, of the figural. The figural has as much to do with Kant’s imagination. Warburg gives us a theory of the imagination that is unlike the Kantian ‘schema’ that connect perception and the understanding.
It is not even mobilized against the categories of the understanding, but has more to do with the ideas of Warburg’s own psychotherapist, Ludwig Binswanger. Binswanger’s and Warburg’s focus is not on the latent content, but instead the manifest content of dreams. Indeed, in the second part of Les Formes du visible, under the telling title ‘Indices’, Descola addresses totemism in terms of dreams So, at the heart of what amounts to Descola’s notion of the imaginatiuon are dreams, the figural, and finally ‘schema’. Descola takes schema not from Kant but from Rosch. Kant’s schema and imagination (not to mention his Zweckmäßigkeit, usually translated as purposiveness) are transcendental. Rosch as psychologist works instead from the empirical. Descola developed this as a schema of experience in Beyond Nature and Culture.
Rosch worked with Francisco Varela, who, with Humberto Maturana, was the founder of ‘autopoiesis’. For them the schema, as perception and cognition, were biological and extended to the animal world. Descola’s ontologies, which are ‘modes of identification’, work through experience based on these schema. In Les Formes du visible the schema select the indices in the ‘folds of the world’ that count in each of the ontologies, now understood as ways of figuring. To imagine is to figure. Here Descola is working from an implicit Peircean perspective of index-icon-symbol in which icon is an immediate connection, image is more mediated and already representation, while symbol is in the realm of classification.
That said, what really counts here for Warburg, as for Bredekamp and Descola, is neither the constitution nor the structure of images but instead what images do. Thus, Descola gives us a semiotics which is not Saussurean, even in the sense that Durkheim and Saussure connect in some kind of symbolic. This semiotics is again Peircean – literally to do with Peirce’s icon in his index-icon-symbol. For Descola, there are four types of schema each for an ontology, for each mode of identification. This is not just the way we identify in a way of life or culture, but is also more literally identification. To figure, then, is to render visible. And we render visible what we perceive into images in our social imaginaries. In this we literally identify which indices in the folds of the world count for us, for our ontology. We identify and select literally from the chaos, the multiplicity of indices, which are also Peircean indices, and then we render visible as icons.
And then these icons do something, as in Bredekamp’s (2019) ‘Bildakten’, image-acts. What we identify and select relates to Eleanor Rosch’s schema, in whose Maturana-influenced cognitive psychology we see, for example, ‘when the dog bites you, it is not about you, it’s about the dog’. What then would be the dog ontologies? Here, Descola refers to ‘mondiations’ or worldings, in which we mondiate indices into icons.
What did Warburg’s iconology not include? It embraced the Hopi Indians and their famous snake dance. It dealt with Renaissance Classicism while rejecting Neoplatonism. It embraced ornament, background, the decorative – all which render visible. Descola reads Warburg’s Hopi not as animist but instead as an analogist ontology (see interview below). In the other three of his ontologies, which are modes of identifying what counts in the world, in animism, totemism, analogism, the indices that are worlded have agency, have intentionality (2021: 181–2). Only in Galileo’s naturalism does the image not have agency, is the image pure object. The other ontologies give us an intentionality of the image. In analogism there is the agency of mountains and rivers in, for example, Chinese landscape. In animism there is the intentionality of masks, in totemism of course in the totems. To return to Peirce and his semiotics of index, image and symbol, at stake in each case is a Peircean index. In each case the images are a semantic figuration of the indices of worlds. So, modes of identification have to do with what you identify and what you do and do not select. It has to do with the mode of seeing yourself, and identifying humans and nonhumans, interiority and exteriority, of what has ‘souls’. Totemism brings us back to the originary ancestor; animism to the interiority, the souls of trees, the souls of rocks and wolves. In each case there is purposiveness in the image, there is intentionality.
If the paradigmatic figures of animism are masks and of totemism are totems, then in analogism they are chimera: combinations of functional parts from different species in the same animal. Descola, with Bredekamp and Warburg, gives us an art theory that can be counterposed to Johann Winckelmann’s classicism, and neoclassicism. It runs counter to the Neoplatonism of the ‘Apollonian’; it affirms instead Nietzsche’s chimeric Dionysian satyrs. So, if both animism and totemism are in some way about unity, unity of soul and nature, of both in the originary ancestor, analogism is a mondiation of not unity but instead multiplicity: it affirms this multiplicity in the figure of the chimera, of the bestiary in Foucault’s Borgesian Chinese encyclopaedia. These of course work through correspondences; also, astrological correspondences and the mediaeval analogism of the humours evoked by Walter Benjamin. Similarly, analogism dovetails with Water Benjamin’s mimetic faculty.
Descola begins Les Forms du visible (2021: 9) with a quote from Merleau-Ponty: ‘the peculiarity of the visible is to be a double of the invisible; that it makes present as a certain absence’. This indicates already that despite his structuralism, there was a phenomenological dimension, a phenomenological intentionality. Thus, the book’s iconology is an ever-present gesture towards Aby Warburg. Warburg was art historian, art theorist, art-anthropologist and cultural historian for whom iconology was also a method: a method countering the ‘vulgarized ideal of the individual’ in Burckhardt and Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s antiquity and Renaissance. Warburg experienced the culture of the Hopi Indians as a very young man, witnessed the famous antelope dance, the cosmological drawings with the antelope at its centre: he saw the Hopi’s snake dance and its abstract painting on pottery. The images in this do not so much represen but instead ‘render’ the real. This is an anthropology of the image, of Bildakten, image-acts, in which images ‘don’t get meaning from context, they give meaning to context’ (2021: 23–4).
In the context of the four ontologies, animism in the first instance is giving to nonhumans a human like interiority, as opposed to the Cartesian ‘I think’ of naturalism. Totemism for its part is about lineage and identification with a prototype ancestor’s totemic properties. In animism not totemism, the ‘olds of the world’, the indices that are salient to humans, are experienced as a multiplicity. There is also such a multiplicity in analogism, and its ‘network of correspondences’.
Thus the importance for Descola of spell casting, where the image is an ‘efficacious agent’. The puppets and shrunken heads of spell casting are a figuration, to do ‘with the objects and relations that images depict’ (Descola, 2021: 26). At stake is an ‘excess energy’ whose efficacy is mediated through the regimens of mondiation. The most important thing about the figuration, to repeat, is not so much the constitution or structure, but instead the ‘intentional autonomy of the image’. At stake in figuration is a ‘chain’, a bit like the Peircean chain of object, sign and interpretant or inference, which is also a consequence. Images have an intentional autonomy, but they also ‘must be recognized’. The chain of figuration is also ‘along the chain of operations’ (2021: 27), and that to ‘mise en images’ is a chain of operations. The figures are ‘translators’, and work through translation schema, in part translating indices into icons, though not fully because the image-acts themselves in these iconologies are also indices.
In Descola and Warburg we find ‘myriads of images’, which make world-folds come to life less in a semiotics than a ‘praxeology’. Thus Warburg’s iconology is Pathosformel, a visual trope saturated with affect which has a ‘Nachleben’, an afterlife (2021: 635); and the Hopi images (dances, costumes, body paint, etc.) are a ‘corps vivant’, whose images, whose icons (and indices) sometimes contain violence, working through an iconoclasm. More generally, Bredekamp’s image-acts are ‘morts-vivants’ – living dead with their own ‘force and right to life’. And Gell’s image acts, in which the Congolese stick pins in figurines, are not a signifier but a substantive part of the enemy. Warburg’s Pathosformel is also very much the afterlife of the images of antiquity. In all of this figuration has agency and is an inventory of the world. Figuration works through a ‘visual path we trace spontaneously in the folds of the world’ (2021: 26–34), in each case via a particular figuration scheme.
Alfred Gell then is a major influence for Descola, again whose objects of art are animated with their own life, where they ‘as indices authorise operation, an abduction of agency which remounts again a chain of causalities’ (2021: 640). This is also Peircean abduction, a chain of conjectural inferences. There is a ‘logical aporia’ in which the premises are affirmed in light of the consequences and the consequences are the object of art as index (2021: 60). With indices at the beginning and end of the semiotic chain of operations, there is an inference, an abduction, which is at the same time a consequence of the sign and is also an index, a trace in the folds of the world.
Each ontology is also a question of point of view, whether multiple or unique. Yet, for Descola (2021: 59), this chain of operations in all the ontologies is threefold, as the four modes of identification work through three registers of figuration: the first is ‘ontological’, in which the types of object and relations and the ‘mobilier’ (maybe best though imprecisely translated as furniture) of the world are constituted; the second is ‘formal’, in which the properties of this ‘mobilier’ are made ostensible; and finally the third is pragmatic, the image-act dimension.
In animism there are ‘images of bodies specifically representing spirit and images of spirits rendered physically visible by means of the attributes of species’ (2021: 59), and in which ‘the reign of the soul goes beyond the human and the distinction between bodies and spirits traverse most existents’ (2021: 59). The hardest thing to grasp is the distinction between animism and totemism. We know that in neither is there a mondiation as a multiplicity as in analogism, or a multiplicity (of objects) connected to a unified subject by law as in naturalism. For Descola, naturalism brings Renaissance perspective and Alberti together with the Cartesian ‘I’, as well as the ‘law’ of mechanical objects of Newtonian physics. For Kant, the a priori of the First Critique was law, of the Third Critique Zweckmäßigkeit. In the First Critique nature is mechanism and its cogniser is the Cartesian subject. In the First Critique more importantly nature is law. The Third Critique gives us nature as Zweckmäßigkeit, rendered by Jean-François Lyotard as finalité, as its a priori, its condition of existence. And we are no longer the cognising subject but instead a judging consciousness. No longer is there cognition of nature as causal law, but now judgment of nature as purposiveness, that is as intention, with the move from objective cognition to subjective judgment. The same with art in the Third Critique which is again intentional. In the Third Critique, judgers are intentional, that is, oriented to our own purposiveness rather than the causal law of natural science. Kant does reach back before the moderns to the Greeks in his consideration of geometry as also a question of First Critique law, and this time logic’s and geometry’s progression from axioms to the apodictic knowledge of theorems. So, in part, naturalism is already present in the ancients. The point here, for an iconological anthropology, which is also a philosophic anthropology, is that art as Zweckmäßigkeit, is already iconic in Kant. We may see it as beautiful or sublime, in our own subjective judgments, coming from us as intentional, that is neither objective nor instrumental beings. In naturalism, science is about more or less structure or law, or syntax, while (Kantian) art is not about structure but intention, less about syntax than semantics. Art is instead both semantic and praxeological.
We keep returning to the ontologies. Totemism is paradigmatically Australian and also relates to Durkheim’s (1912) tribes in the Elementary Forms, while signature animism is the rainforest, where Descola and many others have carried out their ethnography. Animism is perhaps best seen through the ‘masques veloutée’ as icons, and here the ‘animal species of the mask and its traits as the external of an interiority that is human’. Hence body-soul miniatures and body painting. So, in animism ‘animals are taken as humans while humans get their plenitude in borrowing dispositions from animal bodies’ (Descola, 2021: 597), often the shaman acting as a mediator, with the shaman figuring much more in animism than in totemism, mediating exterior and interior, mediating ecstatically the soul. The word shaman and the phenomenon, in the Tungusic language, are remimiscent of the horseback nomads in Manchuria and Mongolia, pitched for millennia against the Han Holocene of analogists.
Totemism, on the other hand, is about the prototype, the ancestor of the clan; totems are much more about the clan and the ancestor than animism. Totemism gives us the ‘representation of animal silhouettes, of prototypes under their animal aspect’. And the totems of a totem pole are icons – the pole is iconic. Totemism gives us ‘pictographies’, a mode of identification also of the ‘beings of dream’ (2021: 196). Lévi-Strauss spoke of totems, identification and dreams. For him the patrilineal clan’s totems were based on dreaming, while totems of both patrilineal and matrilineal clans connected the material and spiritual worlds: nature on the one hand and society on the other in the ‘antithetical thinking’ of totemism. Identification in cultural groups is with particular species of animals and plants, which can be of the group or the individual.
In the animism of the Amazonian forest, the spirits are invisible and appear in plants and animals, giving them the ‘intentionality of the human soul’ (2021: 91–2). By contrast, Australia’s Arnhem cave figures, which were ‘not a figuration of nature’, in that there were animals but without a background, presents an iconography (totemist) which is closer to animals with few humans, and in which animals do not interact nor are classified versus one another. Yet Descola (and Lévi-Strauss) refer to a discontinuity between animal species to show the distances between social groups. Thus, in totemism, we have classes of humans and nonhumans, whose qualities proceed from the same originary prototype. This is not primarily about interiority of the soul, pace animism, but more a quasi-fusion of human and nonhuman descending from the same prototypes that ‘differentiates them from other ensmbles’ (clans) who come from a different prototype, where the ‘animals are depicted species by species’. Totemism, where humans and animals descend from the same totemic animal, possess the same nature; properties are inherited from this prototype, which is literally a mode of identification with the totem (2021: 198). The clan is the holder of the totemic heritage and the totem is also a dream figure. The totemic patrimony is a right to the usage of a site, and consists of songs and dances, ritual objects and images. Totemism is importantly also Palaeolithic.
Now fast forward to Neolithic analogism, which is much more literally representational. The world comes to comprise disparate multiplicities which are ‘simplified in the chimera, where disparate qualities of functional anatomic organs like in the dragon co-exist, whose functional parts permit it to fly’ (2021: 610). Arguably, for Descola, the dragon represents Chinese Daoist csmology’s Ten Thousand Things, disparate and intentional and simplifed through this ‘network of correspondence’, of the chimera, of astrology, of the humours. Where the rapport between humans and the universe is in a constellation of signs, of cosmograms, in analogism. Here again we see Benjamin’s correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm: in analogism, unlike totemism, chimera, humans and nonhumans are fused in a class because they share the same substance.
For Descola, Daoism’s Ten Thousand Things resemble Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being wherever the folds of the world radiate out a huge multiplicity of singular things, and develop analogies as a net of correspondences. Here correlations of microcosm and macrocosm are found also in Chinese geomancy, in the Yijing (Book of Changes), in which each of the Ten Thousand Things is singular and intentional. As Descola (2021: 58) writes, the ‘figural objective of analogy is to render present a network of correspondences between the continuous elements of this multiplicity’. Each of these individuals in this network of correspondence are ‘forms of mondiation’. In each case, in Descola’s anthropology of figuration, you only figure what you can perceive or imagine, what ‘habit teaches us to discern’; in a ‘visual path we traverse spontaneously in the folds of the world. Yet the path depends on the four different schemas’ (2021: 52). That is you figure yourself in an ontology as you make appear in a recognisable manner objects, attributes and relations (2021: 60). You make visible a singular mode of existence in the ‘plis du monde’ through detaching as it were these plis and their objects or images from the flow. These are ’routes’ through which you ‘furrow’ (dig out) indexes from the flow in a mode of identification.
Lévi-Strauss, as Descola is very aware, has a strong connection to notions of morphogenesis. Morphogenesis by definition is a question of transformations: that is neither classifications nor causation but transformations. And what undergoes transformations for Lévi-Strauss and doubly for Descola are structures themselves. But what then are the structures at stake? For Lévi-Strauss they are importantly structures of kinship, harking back to Marcel Mauss’s gift exchanges. Though Descola is quite loyal to the École sociologique, his structures are not primarily those of kinship. They are instead the four ontologies. Descola’s morphogenesis is apparent in his fascination with Holbein’s anamorphosis and even his focus on the apotropaic sign. Lévi-Strauss himself would admit to there being only a very few structuralists. One of these was mathematician René Thom, theorist of morphogenesis and structuralism, who stood in the French mathematical tradition shaped by Henri Poincaré, a pivotal figure in the creation of modern topology
For its part, topological equivalence is also a mode of structural transformation in the sense that the famous coffee cup and donut are equivalents. Thus also Lévi-Strauss’s and Descola’s attraction to Goethe’s metamorphosis in which all plants were structural equivalents of an Urpflanze. So, for Descola, structuralism involves the structural transformation of the ontologies. This stuctural transformation is in René Thom’s (1975) sense topological and morphogenetic.
Which takes us back to the image. In Beyond Nature and Culture Descola already brought in the work of Eleanor Rosch as at the heart of his ontologies. Rosch, a cognitive psychologist, gave us, as we saw, a theory of ‘schema’. Rosch’s schema are central to both Descola’s figuration and his ontologies. They are the structures, structures of the imagination that are fundamental to consciousness, to the conscience collective. For Descola sees Rosch’s schema as prototypes, forming a basis for Warburg’s Pathosformel, through which we encounter the life and the death driven power of images – to the image in general on the level of pathos. Thus the Pathosformel and Rosch’s schema are image driven structures of feeling at the heart of our consciousness and being.
Dialogue I (Paris, Collège de France, 21 September 2018)
In thinking about the four ontologies – animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism – outlined in Beyond Nature and Culture and more recently in your work on art, let me turn first to your notion of analogism. I have been doing work on China for the past 20 years and recently completed a special issue of Theory, Culture & Society, ‘Against Ontology: Chinese Thought and François Jullien’ (Lash and Li, 2023). Your idea of analogism seems to work for Chinese landscape and the Ten Thousand Things in, for example, the Dao de Jing.
One inspiration for analogism is Foucault’s (1970) The Order of Things. I was re-reading the chapter ‘The Prose of the World’ at the same time as I was reading le grand livre on Chinese thought by Granet (2022). I do appreciate some of Jullien’s analyses, despite our major differences. But I was looking at Foucault’s description of some of the mechanisms that Renaissance thought was using to connect things and I was seeing the same in what Marcel Granet was describing for China. Thus, the analogism in Foucault’s ‘Prose of the World’ made sense with China in a closer connection than what we used to think since Leibniz.
Foucault’s ‘world prose’ was a bit of a watershed. 3
Yes. Borgesian! Because it is the famous reference to the Borges short story which Foucault used in the beginning of The Order of Things, yes.
[Let’s turn to a question of practice]. I think you differ from Tim Ingold, from his anthropology as practice; an anti-classificatory anthropology of practice.
Practices are not a direct outcome of praxis. In Beyond Nature and Culture I quote a famous remark by Lévi-Strauss, noting, against a simplistic reading of Marx, that ‘between praxis and practices there is always a mediator, the conceptual scheme by which matter and form, both devoid of independent existence, are realized as structure, i.e. as beings both empirical and intelligible’. So, practices are not random. They are organized, they connect one with another and you can obviously, if not make a classification, at least put some order in them and see how they connect or do not connect. In fact, my general interest, perhaps one of the most basic in anthropology, is the one we inherited as anthropologists from comparative law. That is, how things are rendered compatible or are compatible or incompatible in a social setting. There are things that can happen and others that cannot. The idea that we might be able to understand why some things are compatible and others are not seems to be – should be – one of the main objectives of anthropology. That is, to put some order into the classifications. I don’t know if I managed to do it, but I think it is a worthwhile attempt.
Also, a contrast with Bourdieu’s theory of practice.
Early Bourdieu is not classificatory in that sense but is historicized. If I were to compare the relationship with Bourdieu, I would say that I am interested in a less historicized and a more fundamental origin or source of practice, Lévi-Strauss’s ‘conceptual scheme’.
That’s right. Bourdieu’s early work is anti-Durkheimian and then it becomes a little bit more Durkheimian, while you have always kept some Lévi-Strauss. . .
We had some interesting discussions with Bourdieu on Durkheim. Lévi-Strauss was still active . . . I was not only reading, but I followed some of his courses at the Collège de France when I was younger, but when I was admitted to this venerable institution, we often had discussions. 4
I am interested to understand what you mean by ‘institutional’. I am thinking of li (礼) in China, Confucian li, which is between protocol, ritual and convention, and which at first sight does not seem to have the formality of the institutional. But now when you say that it is institutional in the sense that even though it is not formal language, it is not the ‘said’, but much more a pointing in Wittgenstein’s sense, and as a pointing it seems not necessary to be more formally discursive to be institutional. I am so used to the discursive – in the sense of a propositional, predicational notion of institution – that I think Confucian as it were pointing would not be institutional, though in your expanded sense of institution it is.
Institutional needs may not be an equivalent of propositional. Any stabilized and transmissible collective set of norms to conduct one’s practice is an institution: a language, a ritual, a code of behaviour, an iconological style. This is why I became interested in images: they are not directly propositional although they point to a collectively admitted set of practices and a way of worlding that may be quite normative. My interest in images started about ten years ago, but I’ve never published anything on it. I am presently writing a large book on that theme, which is an experiment in detecting how ways of worlding are expressed in images. As a sort of preliminary exercise, I’ve curated an exhibition at the Musée du quai Branly, La Fabrique des images. 5
The factory of images?
Yes. Well, ‘la fabrique’ in French has many different meanings. I like the multi-dimensional meaning of this word which here can be understood as ‘the process of production’. I was interested in experimenting with the general public, people who were not necessarily versed in either my own approach or in uncommon images proceeding from very different parts of the world. I wanted to check whether people would recognize the kind of underlying structure of images I presented, the kind of distinctions between them I was making. And, of course, making an exhibition is remarkable for that because about 300,000 people visited this exhibition at the Musée du quai Branly. It is a new museum, but it was done in cooperation with the Louvre, so the Louvre accepted to lend some of their precious heirlooms, which was immensely statisfying.
Images and propositions.
I was interested in trying to see how signs can have meaning while being non-propositional. What are the visual devices that are used to grant an iconic dimension to the kind of ontological distinctions I have been proposing? The project has been fascinating me for a number of years. And I think it works, but of course there is something more, because you were referring to practice. I see images not only as iconic signs, but also as iconic agents, so they become agents in certain circumstances. I am interested in the circumstances that make them agents for some people. But there has been a problem with this approach: there has been a tendency to treat the images as agents, to emphasize the agency of images, particularly in anthropology with the work of Gell (1998), and neglect their meaning. It is an old tendency also among art historians, but what I surmise is you can’t separate the agency of images from their particular regime of iconicity. So, the two should be treated simultaneously. If you emphasize the agency, you lose iconicity; if you emphasize iconicity, you lose agency.
And when you read the notion of agency, it sounds so much like a human actor. Rather than as the Chinese word ‘yòng’, which means ‘use’. We are always starting from the particular, and so you can call something yòng, which is affordance, I guess. Or the other way, as an icon.
So that’s why I am trying to juggle with the two dimensions of images.
So, even as a representation (as distinct from an affordance), even as an icon, the image doesn’t work like a proposition.
Of course not! That’s an interesting aspect; not only does it not work as a proposition, but my guess, and it’s more than a guess, is that it predates what I see as the transition from analogism to naturalism in the 17th century, but in images this transition starts much earlier, in the 15th century. 6
When you shift from analogism to naturalism, then you get a superproposition.
You get a superproposition, but before you get the proposition, you get the images that make the switch. And this is, I suppose, quite common: images precede the propositional discourse and prefigure the propositional discourse. This is what Panofsky suggested when he said that the projective geometry of the 17th century is a product of the artist’s studio, but I think this is true in a much wider way than Panofsky had any inkling of.
So, we are to start with non-predicating animals? It is like when you teach a child, and you are not speaking in propositions. Yet, of course, they can be representations.
Yes, I have absolutely no problem with this.
They can be representations and without being propositional. And without necessarily being metaphoric?
Yes! I think they use the visual. I give you a very simple example to point to what I am interested in: animism. A very important dimension of animism is metamorphosis. And metamorphosis is the shift of perspective from the interiority of a being to the physicality of this being. So, you see an animal, it is an animal, it has a physicality of an animal, it belongs to a species. And then, in some circumstances, you have an access to the interiority of this animal and this interiority is human-like in many aspects, it is a subject like we are, it lives in a community of subjects like we do as humans. Metamorphosis is the shift from the perspective of the body to the perspective of the mind or the soul. There are a number of devices and images that operate this shift, its commutation, in a very spectacular way. The most obvious are the transformation masks from the Northwest Coast in Canada – from the northern United States to Alaska. So, you are a raven or whatever, an eagle, and then it opens up and suddenly you have a face. This face is not a human face, it is a face like a human, but it is a spirit or the soul of this animal. And so, this commutation operates the metamorphosis. When we tend to think of metamorphosis in terms of morphing, we are going in the wrong direction – metamorphosis is just like a sort of anamorphosis. Continuously, you go along the line and then suddenly it happens. And this visual cue of the commutation can be operated in many ways – it can be obtained in many ways. So, I am interested to follow a different method than the formal method, that has been invented for rendering visible and pregnant.
Aby Warburg’s icon was not just a representation.
Aby Warburg discovered among the Hopi that images could be agents, precisely. His famous formula, ‘you’re alive and cannot do anything to me’, is something of an apotropaic invocation, a conjuration addressed to images in which we discern signs of life so that they remain at bay and do us no harm. I think he was extremely clear in that, and in fact people like Horst Bredekamp, whom I greatly admire, have been influenced by Warburg in the way of treating images as agents. It is a very clear influence in his book Theorie des Bildakts (Bredekamp, 2010). Yes. Precisely the act of imaging. As an action.
I think that I am getting a feeling for the way it works and, in some way, the analogism for me is the most exciting, because of my work on China. Is there a connection between your analogism and images in your ontologies?
Oh yes, of course! One of them is very obvious. I mean the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm, which for me is completely analogist. The Indians in Amazonia don’t give a damn about this. And so, you have all forms of figuring this. What I am interested in, in fact, is the anthropology of figuration – what is it to figure? And there are different ways of establishing the connection between the macro and the micro. And analogism is also about networks, no? There are many different ways of figuring networks and chains and connections. So, I am interested in showing how it works. It is less about elements than it is about connections. It is not about, say, this book and that book, which would be an image. It is instead a question of not the elements but again the connections – whether in a book, an image, in a setting or an installation. In this context we should never use the word ‘art’, because it is too tricky. That’s why I use images. Images extend even to include scientific images. If we talk about art, there is a description of a certain category of images which puts you in trouble in terms of definition. I am interested in scientific images, for instance, which are not art, and interested, of course, in non-modern images. I am interested in body painting in traditional societies, which may or may not be considered as art.
If we look at Durkheim and Mauss’s (1967) Primitive Classifications, there is a more or less evolutionary paradigm, from the less to the more representational. Are you suggesting that with analogism, e.g. Mayan, Aztec and Chinese images become more representational somehow?
They become representational in a very specific sense. I am not interested in what the images represent. I am interested in (in Gell’s sense of representing) what a diplomat represents. This is not a question of iconicity. So, they represent, but for me they represent more than a topic or subject, or prototype. They represent a certain way of establishing connections between beings: this is also rendering visible an ontology.
So, with analogy an image becomes more institutional?
Yes. Because if it is an image, then it is going to be reproduced. As reproduced it will be more analogist rather than analogical. Fractals are more analogist than analogical. You have to be very careful. Some of my colleagues cringe when I say fractals, but it means simply a continuous replication on different scales of the same pattern. And this is something which doesn’t exist properly in totemism or in animism but is common in analogist images because it emphasizes a very simple thing, which is the general structure of the connections between the elements. There are many examples. One example is Marquesan sculpted war clubs, which are very common; I was yesterday in the Leiden Museum of Ethnography and they have a very nice one that is exactly like the piece in the Musée du quai Branly and another one in the British Museum. So, these images have been made and made and made. They all follow the same pattern that was described in the beginning of the 20th century by Karl von den Steinen, and the prototype is there, so they are represented in the same way. It is institutional, of course. People will make the same image, it’s a casse-tête, a club! A fighting club! A wooden club with which you crush the head of your enemy. But it is very ornamented. And it is always made with the same pattern. And so, it is institutional. Of course, it is an institution, stabilized in a certain way which changes, well, like everything changes – in this sense, some images are also an institution.
What I find quite fascinating is your theory of perception. The theory of experience, which is influenced by Eleanor Rosch, in Chapter VII of Beyond Nature and Culture. Later you look at cognition as if it developed out of perception; not as having a big difference between cognition and perception.
Yes, one of the problems that anthropology has found in the past decades is, on the one hand, the increasing divorce between classical anthropology, which is very reluctant to consider the fact that most of what humans do is cognitively processed and perceptively processed through physical and anatomical mechanisms, and on the other hand, the kind of current cognitive anthropology which, in some cases, is reductionist and is not interested in the diversity of human experience. So, there is a growing divorce between these two branches, which is a pity because you can only say relevant things about human life if you are aware of what some of the cognitive sciences are doing and know what memory is about, what language is about, what classification is about, etc. So, I try to find a common ground between the two. Because institutions are transmitted also conceptually, because they are stabilized in the mind as schemes [Rosch], as patterns of action.
Schemes? In the sense of Immanuel Kant’s idea? The schema of the imagination?
Yes, you can even take it in a very classical way as a sort of extension of the Kantian notion of schema taken by Piaget and others. I think it is an important aspect now for certain branches of cognitive sciences: how we are able to day-after-day do some operations without being entirely aware of them, because they follow non-conscious ‘scripts’, which we use also to connect different things that form patterns in daily life.
My first instinct about Ingold’s and Gibson’s affordances was the idea of ‘scripts’ – in architecture, in which Rem Koolhaas sees scripts in the sense of affordances in that they afford certain practices.
Yes! I was about to say that it is not obvious, but it is very clear, of course, that some spaces afford some form of practice.
Dialogue II (Cambridge, 30 November 2021)
Can you talk a bit about Les Formes du visible, the new book, in the context of Beyond Nature and Culture’s four ontologies?
It is a different enterprise. One exercise is in experimenting with the ideas of Beyond Nature and Culture as applied to images. Beyond Nature and Culture was in a sense a question of the written word while now the ontologies thesis is translated into images.
Sort of discourse/figure?
Yes, exactly.
The second book involves a theory of imagination?
Yes.
Is it also an idea of the human?
Yes, a theory of l’homme imaginant.
As the ‘figuring animal’? Are you influenced here by Eleanor Rosch?
The schema are an old European affair – Kant, Piaget. But in Rosch, what I find most interesting is ‘proto-typicality’. The schema at bottom is a terribly complex object that integrates diversity, whereas the prototype, with Rosch in particular, is something that fixes the image. It’s more image than it is schema. In this sense Rosch is very close to the initial idea of Aby Warburg in the ‘pathos formula’.
Is there a relation with Saussure or Peirce for you in Les Formes du visible?
For sure Peirce, because Saussure is not at all interested in signs as indexes and especially not as icons. This is also paradoxical in that there is an important tradition in landscape painting that is Saussure-influenced in the broadest sense. Peirce permits us to envisage forms of communication, exchange and interaction between humans not allowed for in Saussurean semiology.
And, of course, Peircean bio-semiotics. Even before Eduardo Kohn. A school of ‘biology’ that brings together Peirce, on the one hand, and autopoiesis and cognition on the other. Here there is an indistinction between perception, imagination and cognition. For Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, perception is cognition. And for Varela’s co-author Rosch, we have the schema. It seems Rosch goes beyond autopoiesis and Peirce and can give us an at least implicit theory of the imagination. There is an anthropology of the imagination in your book, Les Formes du visible.
I think the notion of affordance is very important also. It’s for me a basic way to select and compose worlds. It is very animistic in many respects: based on the diversity of capacities that different types of beings or different forms of life have. These diverse capacities that vary from culture to culture, from nature, decide whether they can or cannot interiorize certain features of the world they live in. And just through this actualization or non-actualization they can build a specific world precisely for themselves.
Build? Or select?
Or selecting. Yes, it is certainly a selection. But it is not necessarily a selection. Selection comes when there is a language and cultural features that induce one to select things precisely or ignore others.
We can think back to ‘The Prose of the World’ in Foucault’s The Order of Things. The chapter with the Chinese Encyclopedia. This chapter is before the imagination is, as it were, conquered by discourse. Shortly before, Foucault had translated Ludwig Binswanger, Warburg’s psychologist. There seems to be an affinity between Foucault’s Chinese Encyclopedia and Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. What about your notion of imagination in Les Formes du visible. Is it posed against discourse?
No. It’s a parallel regime. In fact, many images are linked to discourse. Those images with the most in common with discourse are ‘pictographies’. You can’t understand a pictography without the discourse that it is meant to punctuate. There is a straight connection. But what interests me in Les Formes du visible, I propose a certain innocence in the encounter with images. We need to take the risk of simplicity. And it’s possible without eliminating erudition, but in trying to put erudition to the side and looking at the images at their ‘face-value’: in comparing images with the greatest licence possible with one another, which itself makes certain characteristics stand out that otherwise would not have.
You do a bit less psychology in Les Formes du visible than in Beyond Nature and Culture. For me, Bredekamp’s (2021) Michelangelo book has considerable psychology in it. For him, in effect, Michelangelo did what Aby Warburg could not do. For Bredekamp’s Warburg it is by ‘empathy’ that schematic images are activated. Warburg was completely overwhelmed by this schema-empathy while Michelangelo was not.
What you say is interesting because I was always struck by the absence of a psychology in Bredekamp’s work. Though I haven’t read his Michelangelo yet. Bredekamp (2017) of course addresses agency in his Image Acts. Yet, other authors who address this question of agency, especially Freedberg (1989), have a strong psychological dimension.
Two questions. First, what is the structuralism in your work? In comparison to, say, Peircean iconology. Second, what is the connection between ‘naturalism’ in Galileo and Descartes and Newton, on the one hand, and Renaissance perspective, on the other?
My work is perhaps not primarily about classification. But it is structuralism in the sense that I am not convinced that there is a phenomenon in itself. That a phenomenon, whatever the nature of the phenomenon, only makes sense if it is compared, contrasted with other phenomena, in particular with other phenomena within a group of transformation. This, for me, is the basic credo of a structuralism.
Tim Ingold has a very strong anti-representational position.
Yes. That’s true.
But, one of his best chapters in The Perception of the Environment (Ingold, 2000) is the one on semantics.
This book, Ingold’s most important, evidences a virtuosity. It moves from music to textiles to writing (écriture). It reads wonderfully. You see a nimble spirit that jumps from form of practice to form of practice. But one of the numerous things that separate us is making comparisons. That is to work comparatively to understand different forms of human creativity and to understand how these forms are different from one another. For me, I start from difference. It is in this that I’m a structuralist. Whereas for Tim it’s not a question of resemblances but instead of connections.
Tim’s is a certain kind of phenomenology. An eco-phenomenology.
Philosophy is the starting point of my formation. And it is the basis of my discussion with Tim. Tim’s background is naturalism (in the sense that Darwin was a naturalist). His father was a mycologist. He was raised in the British naturalist tradition. Little by little he moved away from naturalism, all the while giving considerable attention to the materiality of phenomena. But he then discovered a philosophical tradition that was close enough to the ideas that he on his own formed spontaneously. That was Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception.
You too?
Yes, The Eye and the Mind is a great piece. But I needed to free myself from philosophy. I was more interested in the great diversity of people.
And in the patterns that they live? The structure, cultures, human behaviour – they become your forming classifications?
They are just models. Some people don’t get that. They are models in the sense that they are not substantive descriptions of ways of life. Models that allow us to play with the variety of forms of expression, of human inventivity. And in order to put some order precisely in these variations, I wrote a piece which you may have read, perhaps, where I contrast two forms of structuralism: On the one hand, the idea that Goethe developed, an ur-form (Urpflanze), from which variations could emerge out of a single entity. And this is how Lévi-Strauss works, for instance, in his The Elementary Structures of Kinship: the ur-form is reciprocity, exchange between two groups. And then it develops into an incredibly complex ramification of forms of marriage, which is not evolutionist in the traditional sense, but it is a logical way of devising complications out of this initial ur-form. This is the first structural approach. The second one is based on the transformation of a form in a space of coordinates. That’s how Lévi-Strauss proceeds in Mythologiques, for instance, where he jumps from one form to another, to another, to another. I see my own form of structuralism as belonging rather to the first type.7 For me, the Goethe Urpflanze is not like a plant. It’s rather a kind of evolutionary perspective without evolution, that is of an initial entity which transforms itself into many forms that are already potentially contained in it.
A bit like Darwin’s evolutionary starting point, the last universal common ancestor?
Darwin? Yes, yes, but not in the sense of Goethe, whose idea may explain some features of my work. Goethe thought that this Urpflanze existed, in fact! That there had been this initial plant, from which everything comes.
The original organic entity?
Yes, and this is why these models are, in a way, also active or cognitively sentient. I do play on both sides.
For you is it partly a question of nonhumans that cognize and then we cognize them? Because it seems to me that in three of your four ontologies, and in Les formes du visible, the object is intentional. And not as caused in the sense of naturalism.
I think all images have some kind of agency. The difference between me on agency, in comparison with Gell (1998), Freedberg (1989) or Bredekamp (2017), is that I think that there are different types of agency. Or, at least, agency is activated by different mechanisms, according to the ontological regime or the figurative regime of the images. That’s the basic point. Even in naturalism.
But you also say that objects themselves have a certain kind of ‘intentionality’. That’s the word you used. And I think it is right. Except, perhaps, the ontology of naturalism, which is more, it seems, a Cartesian thing.
In some cases, in animism, the basis of agency in animism precisely lies in intentionality. The image of the body, acting as an image . . .
And to the icons themselves!
Yes, of course! But I am very wary with the use of ‘intentionality’, which has become more and more widespread. Because I tend to see intentionality in the Humean sense, that is, the property of an agent. I tend to admire more and more David Hume as I grow older.
Possibly the best thing that Deleuze (2001) ever wrote is the first half of his book on Hume.
Empirisme et subjectivité? Yes, I am surprised, very few people know this book. Intentionality. I see it not as a transposition of human intentionality as it is traditionally defined: the capacity for the mind to point, to saisir [grab hold of] un objet as it is in the classical definition. Which many people, who have no training in philosophy, tend to use. And so, this is something that is active, that is efficient in animism, but not necessarily in other forms of agency. And so, this is why I tend to use agency very simply in the sense of the capacity to act as an agent. And this capacity is distributed and activated by different circumstances and in different contexts according to the figurative regimes. So, intentionality is the basic device for agency in animism, but it is not the case so much for the other figurative regimes.
And it leads again to semiotics, to language, to John Searle, which is not just about speech acts, but – in contrast to logic – a philosophy of mind and intentionality. Mind makes me think of identification, to your ‘modes of identification’, central to Beyond Nature and Culture. These modes seem to be world-building, through selection, but not just selection.
In regard to semiotics, I think that, for instance, indexes are very important in Australian totemism. In the sense that the idea is to render active the images not by mimesis, as it would be in the majority of cases in naturalism, but by imbuing these images with an intentionality. These images, because they are traces, they are indexes of something. This something is still present, active in the traces, in the index. And this is a form of agency, which is absolutely very specific not only to Australian totemism but to all the forms of totemism. The importance of the agency of the index itself we see, for instance, in the weathercock. It dances to the agency of the wind. It is the classical index. This is an example of the specificity of kinds of signs and kinds of agency in the ontologies and their figurative regimes.
Can we return to the mode of identification? Is it literally a mode of identification? Is this saying ‘I am identifying it and it is identifying me’?
That’s why one of the chapters in Beyond Nature and Culture is called L’autre est un ‘Je’. It is exactly that. I initially put that notion of identification under the authority of Mauss, in a way. There is a very simple sentence by Mauss, where he said that people identify themselves and identify the world by comparing what they think of themselves and what they see of the world. I think this is a profound idea, and motivated my thought on the modes of identification.
Which is indeed world-building. What connections do you see between Renaissance art and Galileo, Newton, Descartes, this type of naturalism?
The basic emphasis in Les Formes du visible is that, in fact, some image-makers pre-figure conceptual shifts. And it is obviously very clear that from the 15th century onwards naturalism was established in images long before it was theoretically formulated by philosophers, epistemologists.
And the perspective is already there.
Yes, of course, Renaissance perspective, but also the Flemish painters. I find people like van Eyck really tried without using expertly monofocal perspectives to show something of the continuity of the world. Because once you have linear perspective, it is easier, in a way. Panofsky’s proposition works. You have the subject objectifying the world. But the Flemish masters are interesting because they don’t use the same perspective, so you have to look at what they are doing. So, I think there are two ways in which this naturalism emerges.
There is a lot more background, isn’t there for Flemish painters?
There is no background! And, in fact, they were the ones, specializing in doing the background for the Italians! Yes, many Italian paintings, well, the first scene is the Annunciation, the classical scene from the sacred story, but in the back, there are pieces of landscape, and these were done by Flemish painters.
They were natural designers. They just designed?
So, yes, I am thinking that it is important to emphasize this aspect of the premonition of naturalism in images. And it was because perspectival images emphasized the capacity to be subject to many interpretations. I mean, they are less conducive than language. Icons are less conductive than the symbolic signs.
They don’t do propositions!
They don’t do propositions, exactly! So, they can pre-figure propositional discourse, and the propositional discourse of the 17th century. And exactly in the same fashion I see in the post-Cubist tradition something, which points to new things, which are just now possibly starting to emerge. I mean, we, intellectuals, philosophers, are trying to think the new world, that is emerging now, while some image-makers have started to depict it. And this is not, anymore, the world of naturalism.
Do you see this world very much different from the world of naturalism? What’s happening now?
I think that we are in the process of going towards something else. I have no idea of what it is, I would say that it is probably a different form of analogism, perhaps. But I have no idea.
Can we finally talk about form? Form, in general. Form of the object, forms of images, not necessarily form in matter.
Les Formes du visible has three dimensions. One is ontological: what do the images show of the framework of the world? The second is pragmatic: how all these images activate and acquire agency in certain contexts. The third one is formal: how images display these features of the world that they want to put in evidence. There are all these aspects of formalities, especially the ways you transform three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional objects. But I also use form in a much wider sense, because it is the title of the book – The Forms of the Visible. That is how distinctions between things are rendered visible, through the form they acquire in images. So, ‘form’ can also be taken in a very general sense, as in the title of the book.
You render visible some kind of form . . .
Yes, and more technically, in the formal processes that image-makers use in order to render this visible – the split-representation, poly-perspectivism, etc.
It makes me think again of Bredekamp’s Michelangelo, a critique of Neoplatonism. And of Neoplatonist form, which is often a Christianization of Platonism. Instead, he takes us to the quarry, to Michelangelo’s father’s marble quarry. Where the form was already there, or suggesting itself.
Yes, there are several quotations from Michelangelo, where this idea was very present, that the form emerges from the matter, it is not Platonic pre-defined forms. It is interesting in the sense that it is the case also with animism. One contemporary Inuit sculptor, who carves limestone, asks: ‘What are you there?’ As he is trying to see what can emerge from the matter. There is a little difference nevertheless, because it’s after Michelangelo became a theme in European art. The idea that the matter, in fact, is producing, both in sculpture and in painting. Because I think that even if you want to try to escape from Neoplatonic forms, there is still the idea that there are forms there. It is very difficult to evade Neoplatonic form, as we are bathed in European civilization. Even if we make a strict opposition, like François Jullien does in The Great Object Has No Form.
Let’s move towards an end. What is most difficult for me and perhaps other readers, is the totemism/animism distinction. Should we look to Australian tribes? To Durkheim? To Lévi-Strauss?
Lévi-Strauss (1963) in Totemism made a great move by positing that totemism is not a question of descent from an ancestor animal. It is a question of equating the series of differences, of gaps, between, on the one hand, the natural scale, and on the other hand, the social scale. So, the differences in the natural scale between species are used to conceptualize differences in the social scale. But I think it’s better to see nature and society as less separate. You can very well show that some distinctions you observe between species can be used in order to qualify the differences between social groups. So, this is alright, this eliminates the idea that people may be descended from the bear or from an eagle. My position, based on reading Australian ethnography, is that the connection between the animals and the humans is instead a connection between the prototype and social groups (Rosch, 1983). This prototype, as von Brandenstein (1982) has shown, is the name for the totem. But, the name for the totem is not the name of an animal. It is the name of a quality, which you use to name an animal. This completely disconnects the question of classification from the problem of natural categories.
Is it a predicate?
It is a predicate.
It is hard to think that animists can do that!
No, they don’t. This is why, I think, totemism is very important, because qualities are transmissible from the prototype, and that can infuse the life of humans and non-humans alike within a group. And when you move to another group, there is another set of qualities. So, it’s neither the Durkheimian classificatory analysis, nor the Lévi-Straussian analysis. It’s ontological. This is why it is not classificatory; it is ontological. Of course, it is used to classify, but it is ontological. Because there is an ontological connection between the quality, which comes from the prototype, and humans and non-humans within the class.
Is the totem a prototype?
The totem is a prototype. And it is never described as an animal. I mean, it is a name, it is very often a name with the name of an animal. But it is an animal who plays music, dances, cooks, does all the things that animals don’t usually do.
But what of animism in your South American work?
In Les Formes du visible, there is a chapter on the northwest coast. It is a bit hard to swallow, because it is a very ethnographic and a very complex system in very complex societies. But I try to show that in the domain of images how totemic and animistic images can be combined. Provided, of course, they are used in different settings with different intentions. They are made by different people also, within the society.
But is there an ideal-typical or paradigmatic image of totem as object?
It is a totem, usually under the guise of animal, or it is the traces it left.
And the animist discussion in Les Formes du visible. It is often a mask?
It is a mask, but it can be a body also. The human body, which it transformed. It’s the transformation, metamorphosis. The basic aspect of animism is metamorphosis. So, anything which induces the transformational shift of perspective is animistic in that respect. Thus a mask. In fact, one of the masks I present in the book is a shift from a tiger. One half of the head is a tiger, and the other half is a human. It is the duck-rabbit thing. Once you are locked into one of the halves, you are locked into either the human interiority of the spirit, or in the bodily expression of the spirit, which is the face of the tiger. And the idea is to be able to shift from one to another. The metamorphosis is shifting. It’s not shapeshifting, it is the shifting of the point of view, point of observation. If you move only a few inches on one side or another, you are caught either in one or in the other. So, it is the easiest form of metamorphosis, of figuring metamorphosis, that you can find. Well, of course, there are the transformation masks that are more elaborate.
Which are Hopi . . . that Aby Warburg described?
Completely and totally analogist!
Really? I was expecting animism or totemism.
No, they are analogist. I write on Hopi by treating, in fact, their obsession with detailing the world with these small essences that are in puppets as representations of spirits, that are usually represented in dances and public performances. The problem is that the reception of Warburg on the Hopi is difficult. I tried to address the idea that the history of anthropology (in a general statement) since the end of the 19th century towards now is one of trying to dissociate things that earlier anthropologists saw as associated, in their observations of non-modern, non-European people. If you look at Taylor’s animism, at Max Müller’s naturalism, all these bizarre things that Europeans don’t do are brought together in a general category. What I am trying to do – and what people like Lévi-Strauss and other have been trying to do ever since – is trying to dissociate by careful reading of ethnography things that were brought together, because they are so distinct from the way we ourselves separate things. So, this is why I insist on the distinction between animism and totemism, because I think that they are completely different.
