2.3 The Mutability of Form
In both theoretical writings and in poetry, music functions within a shifting
lexicon of similitudes–the cosmos, bodily humors, emotions, calligraphy,
a bird’s wing, a compass, architecture, painting, sexuality, wine–that
suggest a non-finite, non-semiotic symbolic realm. The meaning that
thereby emergesfits poorly with pervasive art-historical methods based
in analytical categories of medium, genre, region, religion, and time ana-
lyzed through stable semiotic systems.
Despite its regional analytical framework of European painting,
methods informed by Erwin Panofsky’s 1939 Studies in Iconology:
Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance remains central to
globalized methods in art history. His revolutionary work integrated
cultural interpretation into formalist art history by allowing the visual
to be interpreted as semiotic text. Such interpretation of form as coded
text presumes stable semiosis based on a one-to-one correspondence
between sign and meaning. In contrast, a system of similitudes likening
one form to another indicates meaning laterally, training the mind to
understand seemingly disparate forms as expressions of the same essen-
tial matter. The Brethren of Purity elucidate this by explaining form
(sura)as“every substance that admits form,”and matter (hayula)as
“every shape and motif a substance is able to admit.”^70 Echoing Plato,
expressive forms function as interchangeable reminders of a distant
quiddity, the divine. Far from mere metaphors, the similitudes govern-
ing the interpretation of music underscore the ephemerality of all form
in its transient relationship with matter. The associated analytic practice
does not traverse time to a teleological origin, as in the Hegelian art-
historical episteme, but crosses levels of creation originating in the
divine.
In contrast to the stable, definite meaning sought in iconographic analysis,
the lateral referentiality of similitudes frames the unknown, unknowable, and
unseen. The Andalusian Sufimaster ibn al-Arif (d. 1141) describes a symbol
as“a call from a distance and a disclosure of an essential deficiency.”^71
Meaning emerges in the slippage between forms, in a mutability that makes
wine be as theHadithbe as poetry be as music be as sex be as architecture be as
nature be as geometry be as calligraphy be as a bird.
The ontology of the object essential to this mobility of form contrasts
that imposed by a modern episteme rooted in stable and distinct categories
(^70) Akkach,2005a: 36. (^71) Akkach,2005a: 32.
The Mutability of Form 77