Pantope’s Aesthetics of the Canon: Somatophilic Rationality, Images in Act

Abstract

When Wittgenstein made a case for the canon as dissolving into “forms of life”, the problem he thought to solve thereby was as follows: “Our paradox is this: a rule (canon) could not possibly determine a way of action (Handlungsweise), as any way of acting would have to be brought in correspondence with that rule (canon).” Today, we need to come to terms with how “science takes residence within us” (Serres), and this implies a coming to terms with relations of self-referentiality. It is in this light that a novel interest in “the rule” as “the canon” currently gains strength, urging us to consider embodiment approaches of how to think of mind and its capacities of reasoning and judgements, through an aesthetics that were not one of “the Enlightenment blinded by its own light”. An individual-centric embodiment of the mind constitutes a key interest in much of contemporary discourse, especially those characterised by an affirmative stance towards technology. But there have also been certain “minor key” voices whose interplay can open up, perhaps, the optics (as the transcendental means for an outlook) for what I will call an “aesthetics of the canon”: Le Corbusier’s Poem on the Right Angle, of which he thought as an iconostasis (a screen for walled icons that separates the nave from the sanctuary in orthodox churches); then Maurice Merlau-Ponty’s figures of the “chiasm” and “the flesh of experience”; George Lakoff’s and Mark Johnson’s cognitive linguistic approach to “a philosophy in the flesh”; Horst Bredekamp’s proposal for how to theorise the agency of images as Image Acts, whereby he distinguishes the three categories of schematic, substitutive, and intrinsic “acts” that are in play together when “animating images”; and also Michel Serres’s approach to geometry in relation to Anaximader’s Apeiron, and such a geometry’s capacity to measure “white cognitive objects”, in his book The Incandescent. In Western philosophy after Kant, the question of the “schematism” has mainly been related to the possibility of a theory, and the status, of judgements. What arguably relates these minor key voices is to attend to the schematism in a more “somatophilic” way. This promises to be of great interest today, as both lines converge often in unfortunate ways in recent positions that seek to think the body in relation to technology: postmodern and poststructuralist thought has been accused so often of being apolitical, that we see today its instrumentariums (its organons) increasingly militarised and stripped of their “flesh”. As a result, we can see drastic short cuts proposed between art and politics, where – I will try to make a case for this – a certain schemato-somatics, a somatophilic rationality, would be needed to “disgregate” motifs and agendas, such that they can sound together the relations between body, imaginations, and schematism. My aim by seeking to contract these minor voices on the role of the schematism is to explore what a musical approach to the image might bear for a notion of “an objective transcendental” where aesthetics relates not to an individual’s experiences directly but to impersonal bodies of thinking that act in the generic name of Pantope (from pan, all, and topos, place). Can such an approach help us to ideate of an embodied self that were no-one’s own in particular and everyone’s in principle?