The Pleasure in Drawing

The Drawing/Design of the Arts

The Drawing/Design of the Arts Allow me to add here a brief remark that will expand on several scattered notes in the previous pages concerning the plurality of the arts. What Freud has allowed us to designate as a counterpoint played out, according to a sexual score [partition], between different registers—‘‘stages,’’ ‘‘senses,’’ and ‘‘zones’’—ends up as playing a type of fugue or canon between artistic fields. In their relations of simultaneity and succession, of correspondence and distinction, in their mutual references and metaphors, or in the metonymy which makes them all express ‘‘art’’ (this singularity that is so difficult to decipher), the arts act simultaneously like stages, senses, and zones. Moreover, they also act as if attached to an infancy that never leaves them and that makes their story the history of an interminable repetition of their own birth (of the formation of their forms). And this birth is man’s birth. When he notes the impossibility, since this art still touches us, of reducing the art of the Greeks to their 54 T H E D R AW I N G / D E S I G N O F T H E A R T S mythology, Marx writes: ‘‘A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naı̈vité, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage?’’30 What makes truth and gives delight [réjouissance] out of naı̈veté is not ignorance but the emerging, innate (naive) character; it is the impetus of a form that that seeks itself and only finds itself in search of itself. Art shares the goal of playing out again an infancy of the senses and of sense (yet another singularity that is difficult to decipher), in other words, an infancy of our entire relation to the world. This playing out can be happy or painful. It can replay either the discovery of the world or the loss of the unreal outside of the world. It can either open or hollow out, or do both at once. This is always the effect of the way the mark, the tracing out, or the incision is drawn, dividing up areas, penetrating as well into the thickness that supports it. The difference that Freud’s sexual schema makes flagrant is in the way that the arts function as so many ‘‘perversions ,’’ which remain fixated at a stage, sense, or zone, and which are diverted from a final ‘‘relaxation.’’ But this way of ‘‘remaining fixated’’—whether to the visible, sonorous , or beating, or again, whether to the line, shading, and so on—is nowhere fixed in place. It is the choice of a momentary period during which stopping works to cultivate the intensity specific to a sensible difference, to differentiate it further, to bring out the specific drawing/design, and each time to extend and modulate a distinctive mark [trait], which will then be called, for better or worse, ‘‘painting’’ or ‘‘sculpture,’’ ‘‘music’’ or ‘‘cinema.’’ 55 T H E D R AW I N G / D E S I G N O F T H E A R T S In effect, art cannot be thought of as accomplishment— whether as the work’s plenitude without remainder, as a common assumption in a ‘‘total art,’’ or as the discharge of its energy for the benefit of some kind of engendering (of knowledge, belief, morality, civic-mindedness, etc.). But a second difference concerning art is that each of these ‘‘perversions ’’—which remain in a certain way closed in on themselves (painting does not become music, music does not become dance, etc., even if a common drawing/design traverses them)—aims at the same time to communicate itself and has a tendency to communicate its emotion to all others. However, once the ambiguities tied to the motif of perversion have been raised (and thanks to the precautions that Freud himself takes in using the term, recalled earlier ), one should not forget that art can be caught in a real perversion of its destination. We have learned at our expense—at the expense of our thought, our culture, and in certain respects, of art itself—what an absolutization of art, or worse, a ‘‘religion’’ or ‘‘metaphysics’’ of art can represent. Perhaps art is only itself when it appears as less of...