Diacritics

In his late dialogue Parmenides, Plato seems to be on the point of overturning the main achievement of his philosophy, the doctrine of ideas. The aged Parmenides disquiets the young Socrates by asking if ideas apply not only to abstractions such as the just, the beautiful, and the good, but also to "hair, mud, dirt, or anything else particularly vile and worthless" [131A]. Socrates thinks not, but admits being troubled by a doubt that forces him to retreat "for fear of falling into some abyss of nonsense and perishing." This hint of an obverse Platonism that haunts the doctrine of ideas shares much with the later work of Barthes, which, qualifying a life's work in semiotics, seems to turn away from signs and the inquiry into their conditions of meaning to seek meaning in the smudge and the blemish. In his late essay on Cy Twombly, "The Wisdom of Art" (1979), he explicitly adopts the obverse Platonism that so troubled Socrates as a principle of method: "Ideas (in the Platonic sense) are not shiny, metallic Figures in conceptual corsets, but somewhat shaky maculations, tenuous blemishes on a vague background" [180]. The clear allusion to the parable of the cave in Plato's Republic—with its contrast between the shadows on the wall and the bright light of the ideas—allows Barthes's work to be situated within an obverse, dirty Platonism. He does not abandon the Platonic search for ideas but reorients its direction of inquiry from the realm of light to that of shadow, from the heavens to the cave.

The position adopted by Barthes before his death should not be understood as a turn away from a preoccupation with light and the conditions of intelligibility to a sensitivity to the shadows in the nuances of voice, tone, timbre, and texture. Such a development might seem to be confirmed by the shift in Barthes's interests from the immaculate, harshly lit geometrical architectural interiors of the Dutch seventeenth-century artist Saenredam in one of his first essays, "The World as Object" (1953), to the informal works of Cy Twombly during the final years of his life. The church interiors of the former would seem to exemplify the idea as "shiny, metallic figure," while the paintings of the latter are closer to maculation and blemish. Yet the sensitivity to the vague and the indefinable that eludes meaning while remaining one of its conditions of possibility was always present, even and especially in Barthes's response to the mysterious works of Saenredam, which for all their immaculate surface are themselves profoundly marked and blemished.

The essay of 1953, contemporary with Writing Degree Zero, inaugurates a number of trajectories that range between a concern with the visual to the conditions of artistic practice under capitalism, even to a reorientation of Platonism. Itself an astonishingly wide-ranging yet focused response to seventeenth-century Dutch painting, the essay begins with a discussion of Saenredam as an exceptional moment in Dutch painting. Yet this moment is itself quickly identified as an inaugural moment of a certain obverse [End Page 38] artistic practice—the evocation of the idea of truth through reduction and negation—that continued through the contemporary avant-garde. Saenredam's art is inaugural in its refusal to participate in the mythology of what would later be identified as a capitalist society and culture. The essay, ostensibly concerned with Dutch painting, is also a reflection on the possibilities of an aesthetics of resistance in a capitalist society and the limits within which avant-garde practice is confined. Barthes's reading of Saenredam and through him Dutch painting is thus programmatic of his readings of the contemporary avant-garde, and beyond this to the Platonic structures which still silently inhabit its aesthetic theory and practice.