transformationaL Pra Cti CeDe- figuration versus disfiguration /pre- figurationas noted above Rancière emphasizes the creativity of de- figuration: both the goncourts
and aurier can be understood as constructing a new visibility and populating that
visibility with figures, that in aurier’s case await reification. Both cases also admit
the possibility that it is in the process of de- figuration itself that the new visibility
is constructed or seen in a painting, i.e. the new visibility is not necessarily given a
priori. Furthermore, no causal connection is assumed between the innovation of
painters and the de- figuration of the critic, or between de- figuration and subsequent
painterly innovation. hence, the critic’s de- figured conceptual spaces and the artist’s
innovated material spaces can be understood as unconnected. This being the case,
what is it that stimulates the cognition of a new aesthetic regime, a new bond between
image and text? For the creative writer, Rancière provides an answer; it is the power of
metaphor. The critic, according to Rancière, is privileged in comparison to the painter,
because de- figuration demands linguistic tropes that make it possible for images to be
transferred into text and text back into images, and it is this that enables us to see not
only that we are confronted by the new, but also that which constitutes the new. This
is not within the image makers’ power because, ‘When innovators [the impressionists]
want to make the physical play of light and the hachure of colour directly equivalent,
they short- circuit the labour of metaphor’ (Rancière 2007: 82). Thus, the painter does
not have the means for connecting the old and the new by tools, such as metaphor.
nevertheless, re- interpretation of Constable’s importance suggests one answer to
the question posed at the end of the section above entitled Painting in the Text, namely
it reveals one way by which painting, in its original presence, can mediate between
past and future ways of thinking about art. in contrast to de- figuration, works such
as Constable’s six- foot landscapes might be described as constituting, in the context
governing their immediate reception, a mode of figuration not fully commensurate
with expectation, and as a consequence unstable, ambiguous and capable of being
read as either disfiguration, the marring of what should be present, or pre- figuration,
the suggestion of a mode of figuration yet to be, depending upon the outlook of the
viewer. Consequently, unlike de- figuration, the instantiation of a new visibility cannot
be completed through material innovation and requires a further stage in which a
new visibility is resolved in a manner such as that suggested in Rilke’s confrontation
with Cézanne’s paintings or aurier’s engagement with those of gauguin. in short, the
cognitive disruption of expectation in the material present has to be re- described in
terms of a new visibility; a connection needs to be made between, ‘ways of making,
modes of speech, forms of visibility, and protocols of intelligibility’ (Rancière 2007: 3).
With this point in mind, let us return to Constable’s art in order to show how he
actually made this connection for us. The grounds of this demonstration will not need
to be sought in his art’s effects, as we understand them in retrospect. instead, it will
be argued, it is the material and intellectual achievement of Constable’s project that
provides the grounds we need; the grounds, that is, that account for its contemporaneous
failure, rather than his posthumous success. as demonstrated earlier, Constable was
very clear about his aim to elevate landscape painting to the same heights as history
painting and he proposed that this could be achieved through the apposite conjunction
of poetry and natural science. Furthermore, Constable’s belief in this proposition was