Emily C. Smith
Thought Paper
Mitchell, W.J.T. “Space and Time: LessingÂ’s Laocoon and the Politics of Genre.” Iconology:
Image, Text, Ideology.
Mitchell presents Lessing’s Laocoon thus: a border (not a “limit,” as “grenzen” is often poorly translated (105)) divides the
artistic domain where space trumps time (painting) and that where time trumps
space (poetry), and this border exists due to the rules of semiotics (qtd. on 95). In
order to maintain their social relationship and minimize destruction from
predatory outside influences/objectives like, for example, religion is for
painting (106), painters and poets should avoid willful encroachment upon one
anotherÂ’s terrain (such terrains described on 110).
However, LessingÂ’s
explanation of these domains “hangs ... on a slender thread of the difference
between primary and secondary representations, direct and indirect expression”
(101). Instead of insisting that either space or
time dominate in artistic genres, Mitchell proposes that art is always
“structures in space-time, and ... the interesting problem is to comprehend a
particular spatial-temporal construction, not to label it as temporal or
spatial” (103). Mitchell tours the
undercurrent of desire for a “proper sphere” for genres (104), the “political
economy” and “picture of stable international relations” that the
painting/poetry border can model, and the gender relations represented in the
space/time divide (painting should be seen and not heard – ostensibly like
woman – while poetry resembles man in its complexity and sublimity (109)).
Mitchell claims that Lessing never
intended for his “irregular, associative argument” to become a system of
requirements and limits. Rather, Lessing’s readers have seized his “collectanea”
and set forth a system supposedly derived from it (111). So his are not hard, rigid rules. Rather, as Mitchell explains, Lessing represents the interaction of painting and poetry
as a “social relationship” much like “those of countries, of clans, of
neighbors, of members of the same family” (112) who are expected – but not
obligated – to follow social codes and avoid “taboos” (112). To cross the borders or err from the code is
to jeopardize these relationships.
The signifier and signified in art need not only an artist
but also a receiver/viewer/reader to complete the signifier/signified
exchange. Mitchell mentions the “labor”
of sign interpretation (102), but he does not delve much further into the role
of the audience (except, perhaps, when he gets to icons). What power does the viewer have in the
spatial-temporal construction of art? My
reception/consumption of art is, I believe, worked out partially through
operation of my memory, which I use whenever possible to ground myself in
something – anything – in the work offering familiarity. Bergson claims that
perception “is impregnated with memory-images which complete it as they
interpret it” and that memory-images rely on “pure memory” (Bergson
133); it follows that perception requires access to space and time (albeit past
in both cases). So the work of memory
seems to me to allow all genres of art to lay claim to temporality and
spatiality. What do you think? Is this somehow part of the “spatial-temporal
construction” Mitchell suggests?
Also, can we think of
chronophotography as the inverse of ekphrastic
poetry? Does film destroy Lessing’s border between spatial and temporal?