Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 7.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Tue, 09 May 2000 07:45:27 +0100
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: Downstream from Panofsky
After contrasting the disciplines of archeology and art
history, before contrasting art history with art theory,
Erwin Panofsky in "The History of Art as a Humanistic
Discipline" (1940) states:
<quotation>
The objects of art history, then, can only be characterized
in a terminology which is as re-constructive as the
experience of the art historian is re-creative: it must
describe the stylistic peculiarities, neither as measurable
or otherwise determinable data, nor as stimuli of
subjective reactions, but as that which bears witness to
"intentions". Now "intentions" can only be formulated in
terms of alternatives: a situation has to be supposed in
which the maker of the work had more than one possibility
of procedure, that is to say, in which he found himself
confronted with a problem of choice between various modes
of emphasis.
</quotation>
I find striking in this passage the vocabulary of
terminology, formulations, alternatives: a hint of a
language game. I find it striking because the notion of
alternatives for me hearkens to a practice of
experimentation. Alternatives awaken the historical
imagination to the it-could-have-been-otherwise. The
scientific imagination dreams of a it-must-be-so. Panofsky
earlier in his lecture does not contrast the scientific and
the humanistic so much in terms of the different modalities
they may adopt towards questions of chance and necessity.
He does however supply a figure that captures certain
attitudes towards both necessity and chance. He positions
both humanist and scientist in relation to the "stream of
time." He states:
<quotation>
The scientist, too, deals with human records, namely with
the works of his predecessors. But he deals with them not
as something to be investigated, but as something which
helps him to investigate. In other words, he is interested
in records not as they emerge from the stream of time, but
in so far as they are absorbed in it. [...] From the
humanistic point of view, human records do not age.
</quotation>
The claim to the existence of ageless human records looks
odd without the context of the example provided by Panofsky
of a scientist reading Newton or da Vinci as a humanist
would, that is as a person who looks on such records as
having "an autonomous meaning and a lasting value."
In the spirit of alternatives, we ask: Can a humanist, who
may not be an art historian, look upon documents as having
other than "lasting value"? Can humanists trained in other
disciplines look upon records as bearing other than
"autonomous meaning"?
Are the years of digital work with documents enabling humanists
to play at the boundaries of two metaphors: document as container,
document as pointer? Capsules that float in the stream of time and by
their bobbing indicate the force of the current?
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