Fair enough, but how does the God in whose hand our breath is manifest himself? He is present first in the "golden and silver vessels" taken from the temple. After that he expresses himself in money: a mina, a mina, a shekel, and half minas. A price tag - not so different from the gods of silver and gold. That contradiction seems be at to work on every level. While the story is a play on the "embarrassment of riches", at the same time as an oil painting it is what John Berger calls "a celebration of private property". And Rembrandt goes even further by turning the feast into a painting that, like you said, attempts to make its value, the magic of gold, concrete...
Alphonse van Worden: Do you think this could be the divine here straining to expand to accommodate itself to the greater abstraction of the prime relation of the social order, property? It - god, property, the divine principle - can't be stuck in this specific statue or estate, although it has a kind of preference for these sensual things, a gravitation toward them. But it has to be mobile as light, and yet tangible, detectable and incontestable all the same.
The contradiction here is provoking the radical style, this new art in this newly important medium. And so the relation of content to surface works out a complex relation to 'the ineluctable modality of the visual' which Calvinism and related protestant Christianities also put into action. Samson's blindness is the route to the divine; and the visual obsession of the (catholic) Paul - where the divine is seen directly, without metaphor, in its true form, and the eyes are the perfectly adequate organs of revelation - is critiqued as both inescapably fetishist and sort of artistically (as it is commercially) stagnant. More scuro, less chiaro! The relation of service between light and shadow is reversed from the great commercial Italian culture to the greater commercial and at least quasi-capitalist Dutch empire.
Property's presence - the idea of wealth as well as its form - strains to retreat from the golden goblet, the gorgeous object of art/craft, and becomes instead a vaporized and gaseous version, a golden glow in the atmosphere. And the value which adheres in this golden-ness only grows more powerful and intense when the edges of the objects it inhabits are in the shadows, mutable, permeable, and the spirit of property (or the divine) which was trapped or locked into figures is revealed as not reducible to them; not latched to these unique material condition nor limited by the dimensions of objects. This is commercial wealth in the very act of transforming into capital proper.
RM: That last remark - the idea of wealth escaping form, or the divine unlimited by objects seems absolutely right for understanding Rembrandt. Maybe it's also what distinguishes the painting from the fable. In the bible the divine can be located in specific places, it's only in the writing and the vessels. On the canvas everything is illuminated, owned by the golden glow. I'll say more about this in a minute.
Meanwhile, a little aside on the act of capitalist transformation: yesterday, while writing the e-mail suggesting we discuss Belshazzar, I did a few internet searches for "oil painting" "capital" etc., because I needed a fresh-up on the old theory about oil painting resembling money in the way it adapts different things for the same medium (of exchange) - not unlike the glow in the atmosphere. I used google - the search function in gmail opens a new window automatically - and when I continued the mail, I noticed the commercial links in the sidebar, which offered quite reasonable prices for oil paint, courses in oil painting, and similar suggestions. In short, my thoughts had been commercialized before I had even formulated them - which is noy unlike what I see at work in the painting. Google-ads express my ideas better than I can myself.
Now, I wrote: "A price tag - not so different from the gods of silver and gold" But your comments made me realize that this is almost exactly what is at stake here, the difference between the golden goblet, the silver trinket and the price tags attached to them. And the relation between the object and the price tag is changing: More scuro, less chiaro! the relation of service between light and shadow is reversed from the great commercial Italian culture to the greater commercial and at least quasi-capitalist Dutch empire… Property's presence - the idea of wealth as well as its form - strains to retreat from the golden goblet, the gorgeous object of art/craft, and becomes instead a vaporized and gaseous version, a golden glow in the atmosphere" I agree, but I'm convinced that we should add a third term: concrete, real money. First come the objects of craft, then there are coins, shekels, and only after that there is the abstracted, insubstantial, vaporized capital. A kind of capital that clearly finds its origin in Rembrandt's time. The VOC, founded in 1602, was the first multinational and the first company to issue stocks and bonds.
In the painting the crowns and pearls and ornamented robes suggest the first type of property, the Hebrew writing the second, the atmospheric glow the third. The three categories also coincide with three cultures: the Babylonians can only deal with the gods of silver, gold, or bronze, iron, wood, and stone, the Jews understand real money, and the Dutch introduce a new, immaterial commerce.
AvW: I see what you're saying and agree completely - indeed, there are three. And I agree it is the middle term that dominates, that is the primary concern.
Its interesting this striving after the figuration of value has all the tension of an interior religious search, and its sort of saying, well, property/wealth, don't be deceived by the luxury - the embarrassing riches - they're important, and cherished, and indicating and concretising wealth, but that's not the whole story - its really a sacred thing, and you have to kind of squint to see it. Similar then to the protestant revision of the Eucharist Not really the god's body but we can't just get rid of it altogether or treat it with disrespect.
Also in Rembrandt there are all these exotic sort of souvenir luxury items - the javanese spear in Samson. Pearls. The foreign fabrics. They're not only negotiable things but global, imperial stuff. However they appear utterly domesticated and naturalized - as Rembrandt treats biblical myths as very local, thus mobile - exchangeable. The javanese blade doesn't suggest we're in java - it's a commodity and its home is where its owner is.
I think that's just right about the writing too - it's a ledger on the wall, a financial instrument in letters of gold - a joint stock certificate as one would wish it to be (the guarantor of its value and force is God Almighty himself) - figuring a spiritual judgement and vice versa. I think there is something to his posture also, that it is at his back and he has to turn around to see it. That's a very intense suggestion of debt to me. He's standing like a guy being called back by the proprietor of an inn before he escapes without paying. The extravagant feast was provided on credit. Its a price tag, but also payment is overdue - a debt is being called in. And a certain kind of debt is incredibly new and scary - the leverage architecture is a kind of leap into the abyss. The money can be loaned, the pearls and the oysters bought and consumed, without the gold on deposit having to actually be handed over. It's there and not there at the same time - spiritually absent, physically present and vice versa. You could have this feast and still be bankrupt! (that overturned goblet!)
But money wealth's physical self - its precious metal, its coin shape - is intensely necessary and intensely sensually anchoring to earth this terrifying leap of faith. Money's very tangible nature, its everyday physicality and beauty, it beautiful forms - pearls, goblets and gems as well as coins - the constant reminder of its palpable physical solidity, is that which provides the confidence - the Lutheran sort of faith, confidence without reason - in the absence of the coins in hand, that permits the abstraction to break away, with all its risk. Faith without proof is incredibly important to creditor-debtor relations! And now I see really the importance of what you were saying about Daniel's role as interpreter - it's a new sort of social function, the figure of a new moral ethical norm, requiring revisions of national law, international law, religious-moral-ethical law to back up and enforce the relations between increasingly remote things, to enforce the validity of representations and the significance and force of mere written words.
You really had to believe the bank's cellar was full of trunks of treasure, lush solid gems and gold, to accept those little marks in the ledger as reliable and to feel rich - discreetly, unembarrassingly rich - looking at them. But it didn't work in reverse - with this growing flexibility of leverage, you could have the feast but the ledger could still say 'broke.'
Reminders of the corporeality of wealth in these conditions would not be superfluous or unwelcome. Thus perhaps the love of these oil paintings - just their ability to be such sensually persuasive representation of wealth, might have been a comfort considering how unconvincing a contract or promissory note was as a substitute for a rope of pearls. Rembrandt's two-dimensional mere representations/replacements you can almost smell.
That last version of the trinity here -Babylonians, Jews, Dutch - is gorgeous. I love it. And that middle term is not only Jews (goldsmithing based bankers, being supplanted) but, in terms of the art historical context and Rembrandt's self positioning in his profession, Italians (Caravaggio and his patrons), the just-surpassed competitor bankers and maritime merchants, Catholics with their idolatry and sacred knick knacks, their emphasis on the spectacularly visual and unambiguous, and their financial extravagance as if display and consumption alone could make them really feel and believe in riches.
RM: I'm glad you mentioned "the figuration of value" that "has all the tension of an interior religious search" because this returns us to the biblical tale we started with. We began with a religious painting and decided it's all about property, money, value - in that order - and now we find this spiralling back towards the religion behind those concepts.
What interests me is how these religious notions might correspond with the different modes of representation employed by Rembrandt. In its original form, wealth, the pearls and the beautiful robes, is simply there. The secondary form, money, is written - aliquid stat pro aliquo, as the linguists say. The third, the glow, the atmosphere, is in the style, the colours, the technique of painting, in the brushwork, transforming everything, moving towards abstraction.
And the shock of this transformation, is in the face and gestures, the falling goblet, Belshazzar's right hand grasping for support. Yes, his posture suggests a debt and I love the idea that he was bankrupt when having the feast, but still I cannot completely agree when you say he's "a guy being called back by the proprietor of an inn before he escapes without paying."
He wasn't trying to escape. He never realized there was a bill to be payed. He's the dupe who suddenly discovers the rules of the game have completely changed, and he only knows this after Daniel explains it to him. And that's the terrifying thing about the volatility of newborn capitalism: not only could you "have this feast and still be bankrupt" you could also be bankrupt without even knowing it
AvW: Yes - you're right. I agree the pressure of the conditions inspiring elaboration of the spiritual/mystical is the thing most present; Rembrandt is offering both aesthetic and spiritual response And I agree also it's a gasping enlightenment for the monarch of Babylon - to discover the bankruptcy beneath the surface of things. Is this perhaps the terrible suspicion in this period, the primary anxiety of Rembrandt's patrons and Rembrandt himself? (the value of his own works is leaping all over the place in the newfangled art trade. If it can go up, surely one worries it can go down too.)
Imagine those ships coming in late, those foreign loans for French or English wars, not knowing what kind of margin these unregulated lenders were running and Oy! maybe a royal house here or there will be ousted and how does the incoming ruler treat the outstanding debts whose collateral is the royal revenues? This anxiety here is displaced onto an other, an obsolete and debauched but truly magnificent and impressive other - Catholic Church, Italian Prince, HREmperor, Sultan - easterly and southerly (the direction of certainty and the literal in Hamlet) they're spending like there is no tomorrow! But this is also the concentrated direction of Dutch imperialism. It's a military defeat being foretold by writing, and the partition of the kingdom. The VOC issued that stock for territorial expansion - the two are intertwined. Perhaps he's a Javanese Prince too, about to be presented with a bill on Amsterdam he never dreamt existed.
Also operating here: Babylon=The Eastern Paradise= Spices =Nutmeg: Jan Pieterszoon Coen figured out also, curiously, how to get rich, to create riches, to create value, by destroying rather than expanding material production -availing himself systematically of the magic of true commodities, which wheat-hoarding middlemen had only practised in Europe in a sort of opportunistic way, waiting for bad harvests and scarcity, etc, restricted by government regulations. He raised the price of nutmeg exponentially by laying nutmeg islands under VOC control to waste. This must have appeared a strange paradox - to be in the nutmeg business, raise money to invest in it, and mainly destroy rather than grow and transport nutmeg. And is was a paradoxical feature purely of capitalism and the market, puzzling and fascinating. Less meant more. The whole idea of prosperity, the notion than wealth=material abundance, was turned on its head by this VOC policy in Indonesia. Wealth=material scarcity. Abundance (of nutmeg or clove)=bankruptcy.
Also there is the terrible shock of inflation, which might have appeared the vengeful hand of yahweh.
RM: You said -"... to discover the bankruptcy beneath the surface of things. Is this perhaps the terrible suspicion in this period, the primary anxiety of Rembrandt's patrons and Rembrandt himself?"
Yes, and like you said before, this fear must have been the foundation of oil painting as a luxurious, exuberant proof of wealth; the reason for the depictions of expensive, exotic swords and golden helmets. But how does this relate to the original interpretation offered by Daniel? Isn't he saying that behind the gods of gold and silver there is the god of breath ( i.e. the void, nothing)? Is his moralist explanation used as a displacement of the "terrible suspicion"?
AvW: Maybe the voids are both a) the scarcity and destruction of the periphery which creates the wealth of the imperial centre, the absence of nutmeg which generates the value of nutmeg and b) the tenuous, ephemeral, contingent claim laid to the wealth and its being subject to sudden and at this point fairly inexplicable vanishing. Or is it c) the void of capital at the heart of abundance of commodities, the insolvency attending material abundance of colonies in conditions of competition with rivals - Italians, now English - the bankruptcy lurking within abundance of supply? What about this:
Sacred SCARCITY - The writing on the wall is from a new deity, the VOC. The feast is held by magnificently lush and fertile spice islands of Indonesia. The VOC is informing this gloriously wealthy society that the party is over. This takes the form of a new interpretation - Daniel's reading - of reality itself. The apparent abundance of this societyand its evidently desirable surplus is an illusion - when put in terms of money - mene, shekel - it really signifies a spiritual (capital) bankruptcy. This calculation/interpretation having been made, the Power has decided its lands are about to be seized (and divided among great empires, Persians and who was it? Now Dutch and English). It will be forthwith transformed to a (splendid, guinea-spinning) desert, a material wasteland which is really and secretly and spiritually a condition and engine of immense - invisible, intangible - wealth. (In religious terms, high, stable nutmeg prices involves the imposition of spiritually healthful Calvinist 'moderation' on the spice islanders and their society.).
RM: Yes, beautiful! But we also need a complement, based on points made earlier:
Sacred VOLATILITY: The writing on the wall is from a new deity, the VOC. The feast suggests the magnificent wealth and exuberance in which Dutch society found itself, everything touched by the glow of new capital. But this deity is like the God of calvinism, in that it demands belief in future revenues without any evidence, and guarantees no rewards for good deeds or hard work. It incomprehensibly turns abundance into a loss, creates riches out of scarcity and can make prizes shoot up and down for no apparent reason: this wealth, says Daniel is a deception, - built on nothing firm - worth no more than a breath. It can disappear in a moment without a trace, before anyone even realized a bankruptcy was imminent; a disaster the painting translates back into the illusion of precious property.
As it happens, just this morning I was reading Ernst Bloch on Rembrandt (The Principle of Hope, Vol 2, pp 800-802). Bloch calls Rembrandt's golden glow (though he is discussing different paintings) "a mysterious reflection of inner light in the world and behind the world... a paradox of final light... It stems neither from the sun nor from an artificial source of light, nor is the existing world, together with any supernatural world which is at all believed to exist, capable of dispensing this not earthly, not unearthly light... Rembrandt's paradoxical light is not to be found anywhere in the world, but nor has it emanated, despite its continuous reflection, from any ancient metaphysics of heavenly light: it is perspective light of hope, deeply led down into nearness and desolation, answered."
So Bloch wants to see this dispersed light as utopian, rather than as merely a new metamorphosis of capital, or of the coming-into-being of capital. Still, I think his description of the light as neither-immanent-nor-transcendent, neither-from-here-nor-from-elsewhere, fits well with the present discussion: it is precisely the right way to describe the being of "abstracted, insubstantial, vaporized capital."
Posted by: Steven Shaviro | August 02, 2005 at 01:28 PM
Thank you, SS.
"it is perspective light of hope, deeply led down into nearness and desolation, answered"
I'm not sure what to make of that, but in several paintings, especially of female nudes, I think the light suggests a kind of security and protection of the forms, a little hazy, faintly fragile cocoon. It is frequently pretty humid looking; the figures often seem to kind of be sweating the light.
Posted by: alphonsevanworden | August 02, 2005 at 02:00 PM
'as an oil painting it is what John Berger calls "a celebration of private property"
'he embarrassing riches - they're important, and cherished, and indicating and concretising wealth, but that's not the whole story - its really a sacred thing, and you have to kind of squint to see it'
Alphonse’s point is an interesting inversion of (part of) Berger’s argument. Berger talks about how oil painting succeeds as never before in depicting and offering to the viewer the tangibility of the physical world, which is increasingly a world of commodities. That which resides outside the world of such exchangeable objects (in short: the spirit, vestiges of Empyrean) is also eccentric to the very medium of oil paint – if you try to render it in oil paint there’s a curious bathos: the Empyrean becomes an emporium. (Tempera has an altogether different quality). So you get, as an attempt to get round this, for example the anamorphosis of the Ambassadors – the skull emanates from a different plane, cuts across the worldly tagged-with-exchange-value objects, exists on a different level of representation etc. & so you have to ‘squint to see it’.
But Berger’s argument perhaps ignores, or needs supplementing with the reminder that wealthly objects themselves are only representations of wealth etc and that the problem is to somehow include this wealth that shines through its ‘representations.’ The tangibility that Berger mentions is present, yes, but simultaneously confiscated and frustrated.
Posted by: Mark kaplan | August 02, 2005 at 03:17 PM
Is there, from the more overt level of content of the picture; a transitional kind of nationalist thing that needs to be imported to our interpretation?
Is there a transitional sort of nationalist content here too?
He’s the Pope; he’s surrounded by three ladies - Spain in the middle with the HRE, gaily dressed Venice to the East just spilled her blood/wine.
(Where is England? Either England to the West is composed - she was expecting it - and is shaped and positioned like Portugal on a map - these traditional allies, the major competitors, superimposed to form one figure.. Or she was not invited to the catholic feast. Or that black space on the upper left is where she was before the Dutch Navy obliterated her.)
The writing on the wall in this scenario is in an emphatic way media - the printing press, making possible expanded commerce and Protestantism, (and also the fame and fortune of oil painters whose works achieved mass distribution as engravings. )
And in this context the writing is also a distinctive national image - the writing is the Netherlands.
It is a nation which seems to be off the map - floating - a commercial empire whose nationhood has broken free of its geography and indeed all geography. It is national culture. And at the same time cosmopolitan.
In this way the painting enacts the toppling of the established European order by a new philosophy, a new dynamism, a new social order, the escape from yet another restraining form - territoriality - and a new class with new habits - that hand there with its drab grey sleeve of cloud - and no jewels - is the hand of the Dutch bourgeoisie, its ideologues, and its global market.
Posted by: alphonsevanworden | August 02, 2005 at 04:08 PM
Hey, Mark: slight detour here - there is a passage, it took me a little time to find it, in Derrida's Truth In Painting, which seems to wend from this toward other C-S preoccupations:
[Assuming that this question of the fullness of embodiment is also a question of ‘the right distance’ and the manufacture of a capturing perspective allowing the completion of comprehension of what is offered for the apprehension of the viewer by the painter, whose comprehension precedes.]
Chapter "Parergon"
The illustration is the Goya 'Colossus' or 'Panic'
"First, once again, the Pyramids. Kant returns to the Letters From Egypt. Savary explains: one must be neither too close nor too far away from the Pyramids to experience the proper emotion regarding them. From very far off, apprehension of the stones gives rise to nothing but an obscure representation which makes no impression on the aesthetic judgement in the subject. Too close, the accomplishment of visual apprehension from the base to the summit takes time, so that the first impressions fade away before the imagination takes in the last impressions and thus 'the comprehension is never complete' - never accomplished. One has to find somewhere in the middle, an appropriate distance to ally the maximum comprehension to maximum apprehension, to take in one's view the maximum one can see and imagine the maximum of what cannot be seen. And when imagination achieves its maximum and feels the intimation of its powerlessness, of its inadequacy to produce the idea of the whole, it collapses, it falls apart, it sinks into itself and wallows. And this abyssal collapse does not leave the imagination without a certain positive emotion: a certain transfer gives it a pleasure in this collapse which returns it to itself. There is a 'taking pleasure in' in the movement of the impotent imagination. It is this very thing that happens, at another place of stones [pierres] called Peter [Pierre], and it is the Church, when the spectator enters St. Peter's in Rome for the first time. He is carried away or struck with "stupor." One would almost say he is 'médusé': all at once outside, and at the same time within the stone crypt.
"It is at least the account we're told: Kant never went to see for himself, neither to Rome nor to Egypt. And so one must also calculate the distance of an account (récit), of an account written in this case in the Letters of Savary. But the distance necessary for the experience of the sublime - doesn't it open the perception of the space of the tale (récit)? Doesn't the rift between the apprehension and the comprehension call to, already, a narrative voice? Doesn't it already name a specific narrative voice - the Colossal?
[...]
"[Kant writes]...'An object is 'prodigious' when it, by its size, it reduces to nothing the completion which constitutes the concept of it. 'Colossal' on the other hand is the name of the simple presentation of a concept which is almost too big for any presentation (at the limit of that which is relatively prodigious); as the completion of the presentation of a concept is rendered difficult by the fact that the intuition of the object is almost too big for our faculty of apprehension.' Of apprehension and not of comprehension, even though apprehension is defined by the power to progress toward the infinite; it wearies less quickly than comprehension. We emphasized this earlier but to refine the distinction and the proximity between 'kolossalisch' and 'ungeheuer', we must recall the qualitative connotation which marks that last value: the _monstrous_. Philonenko privileges this connotation by the systematic replacement of 'prodigeux' (in the Gibelin translation) with 'monstrueux.'
« The colossal appears to belong to the presentation of brute, rude, raw nature. But the sublime doesn't lend itself to nature. The colossal sublime, arising neither from art nor from culture, is still not a bit natural. The size of the colossus is neither culture nor nature, and at the same time both. It is perhaps, between the presentable and the not presentable, the passage between them as much as the irreducibility of the one to the other."
Posted by: alphonsevanworden | August 03, 2005 at 03:25 AM
Thank you for bringing into unexpected proximity a number of C_S themes. Actually, I had been planning to write a little something on a variant of the monstrous having to do with over-proximity – Gulliver in Brobdingnag etc - ‘I must confess no object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast’
Posted by: Mark Kaplan | August 03, 2005 at 02:16 PM
Oh and the glow: it is not alone and self-sufficient. It is created by its antagonist and opposite. The threat to that pervasive glow - the scuro, which creates the glow by threatening it - the darkness and emptiness at the depth of the painting, is the pictorial presence of the void of "debt" and "scarcity" and "instability-imateriality" which stand in new "creative destructive" relations to light and presence and value.
Posted by: alphonsevanworden | August 04, 2005 at 07:33 AM
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