too): something, not nothing, is missing in the way we see.
Asked where endlessness is located, what the realm or home of endlessness might be—the visible or the invisible—most of us would locate endlessness in the unseen; we'd do, that is, what we did as children, populate eternity with ghosts and say the sensible has the natural limits. But it is exactly that presumption, that prejudice, that blinds us. We cannot see all of the visible, ever; that is where the ache of the endless is greatest. We can't say all we do see, and, worst of all (because it needn't be) we're always missing much of what's in front of us, under our noses, before our eyes.
Our mythographies have always placed the past behind us, and reserved the space ahead for the future. I always loved the reminder that in some mythographies the past is construed to be ahead, where it's visible, and the future behind us, since it can't be seen. Such variances in the visualization of temporal space serve to remind us, with a shock of recognition, of the underlying power of our own fictions of construction. When Picasso says his object isn't what he's looking for, we have to rethrow our thinking about the jectified (jacere meant to throw, from the first). When Rilke studies a ball in air, he observes how it throws its handlers; when Robert Capa watches the watchers at an event, he sees subject and object not bordering but abounding-in each other. In studying a few pieces by these two, the poet Rilke2 and the photographer Capa, 3 I mean to consider what we hold in mind as mind moves over the landscape of an artwork; whether there is a stillness or idée fixe in the store of concepts we bring to moving experience; how the work of art refocuses our attention on our stillings (instillings, distillings) while moving us; and how the turns of the artistic moment replace the elements in a presumptive critical arrangement—unpacking what is stored in the way we look and locate, recovering for the reserved space or premises of time a certain illocability, and re-storing to the present (to the seeable present, that is) its real topos and subject, the unseen.
Robert Capa's photographic diptych “Tour de France” is also a tour d'adresse or sleight of hand, for it shows not the athletes we'd ordinarily consider to be the event, but rather two views of one row of bystanders or onlookers, occupying two moments one might call before and after the “event” (the bicyclists’ passing). We see the onlookers framing the event, looking forward and then looking afterward, in space and time, transitive and intransitive, turning (in a nice turn on the French tour) from anticipators to aftergazers.
The racers, the eponymous topic of the diptych, are present only as sketched in the figures that, craning, foresee and then, crouching, recall them. The onlookers become the language in which the event is transcribed for us, the second rank of onlookers, because superficially missing is something most conventionally central in our store of ideas about art: its subject.
What is still photography's relation to events in time? Whenever it addresses its object directly, it seizes it out of relation-in-time, it holds what was not holdable, it gives us time to study what in the usual stream of changes we could miss, but also it robs the studied object of change, in which it lived. (Even the high-jumper's foot was not so long in air as on the page, and the quality of the beloved's smile was in its waver, not its photo-fixity.) By displacing the camera's attention to the onlookers, Capa reminds us that the looking itself is his subject, and reminds us of the mind's takes (and mistakes) on things. Art takes for holdable what in experience will not stay put; and only to the extent that the artist confesses this violation (this fundamental failure of the represented to be the present, exactly because it adds a re-and an -ed to the present), only by keeping the infidelity to some degree his subject, does the artist suggest the depth of his understanding and of our quandary. Ambrose Bierce sorrowfully observed, the trouble with mind is it's all we have to know the mind with. The perennial problem of our being sunk in our limiting perspectives is engaged (not escaped) when the limitation itself is taken for object.
Tour de France, Pley ben, Brittany, July 1939. Photo by Robert Capa. Permission granted by Magnum Photos, Inc.
Tour de France, Pley ben, Brittany, July 1939. Photo by Robert Capa. Permission granted by Magnum Photos, Inc.
The problem of the subject is also, structurally, the problem of language. The subject of experience is the experiencer, but the subject of an essay is its object. The semantic difficulty goes deep, because subject and object are so hard to disentangle, even once one stabilizes one's philosophical terms. Capa's perspective branches into dilemma: in making the watchers his object, he directs our attention not only toward the missing object (the bicyclists toward whom THEIR attention is turned) but toward the missing subject: the viewers of the viewers, the audience we are, who gaze toward and back on our stand-ins, the French crowd. We, with the photographer, establish other presents from which the act of audience can be regarded. Thinking spatially of the spectacle at issue, we are located, vis à vis the crowd, where the race must have been when it was present in front of them. Looked at as seers, we take on the position of the (vanished) seen. At the moments these two photographs were taken, the race was not directly in front of the crowd, but the photographer was. By virtue of his intervention, we (the second audience) establish another before-and aftermath. These perplexities of subject and object, presence and disappearance, call our attention to the question of what it means to be vis à vis the artistic event or object.
In the unmarked field existing between us and the artist, other paradoxes crop up. In this nest of con-and de-centricities, this riddle of seers and scenes, is the photographer to be imagined as before or behind us? In this case the opposite of before isn't behind, most accurately, but after, since if he were before us in space, we'd see him, and if he were behind us in space, he'd more literally see us; the very thought of the photographer requires us to construct in our minds the probable scene on the near side of the street—another line of lookers, foremost among whom is the man with the camera. But the fiction of photography is the fiction of identity: we enter into a contract of faith through which we are an other; we see things through his eye and stand in his place. Time, rather than space, separates us most from the artist, and the circle this “tour” de France portrays is temporal as much as spatial. (In a sense, it is a portrait of the France that watches the races, invests so much of itself in them, and turns itself to them; it is, in other words, a picture of the “turning of France” to the Tour de France.)
The artist “in” his work always raises the paradoxical figure of a past that is in front of us. The artist's operation projected us in relation to its object; it foresees our act of seeing. We are the audience which is this diptych's object and yet we are outside it; we bear the relation to audience that we bear to language: we stand as if outside it to describe or define it, even to speak of it at all; and yet we can't escape the fact we're always speaking in it, when we speak. Watching the watchers, we watch what we are. Over the otherwise unbridgeable time-chasm, the photographer is out to get us (he is not only before us, but after us). And how we look is, after all, part of the spectacle's auspices, in the artist's eye: the future foreseen, the past looked after. Seeing is always going on, but by virtue of the still photograph, looking can stay awhile.
In the swirl of meanings of “subject” at issue in this Capa diptych, the conventionally primary one (the topic, the nominal performers of the “event,” the content of the piece as tided) is left out of the visual field. The bicyclists themselves, unmarked, are not however unremarked. Indeed, their having-been-there has left its traces not only in the slight wind of their after math (look at the newspaper held by a spectator! — events do leave their ring signatures, their eddies and wakes) but also in the excited postures of the lookers bent to what they've seen. Look at the boy whose sympathy turns his whole body, after his heroes have passed, toward the posture of a bicyclist. For it is their future that children are always practicing, and what has just passed in the form of a bicyclist is this child's image of