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Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry

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Drawing out a new image of thought: Anne Carson's

radical ekphrasis
Monique Tschofen
Published online: 11 Jul 2013.

To cite this article: Monique Tschofen (2013) Drawing out a new image of thought: Anne Carson's radical ekphrasis, Word &
Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, 29:2, 233-243, DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2013.794916
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2013.794916

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Drawing out a new image of thought: Anne Carsons

radical ekphrasis
MONIQUE TSCHOFEN

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To think is to create there is no other creation but to

create is first of all to engender thinking in thought.1
[A] poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a
page, and a reader, when he engages it repeats that action
but it is a movement through a thought, through an
activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end youre
different than you were at the beginning and you feel that
difference.2

In 1988, the artist Betty Goodwin was reading books about the
Stalinist purges alongside the poems of Carolyn Forch about
Latin American dictatorships when she began a series of
drawings she titled the Seated Figures that addressed the
history of forced disappearances, torture, and other stateperpetuated atrocities.3 Her images of interrogation hauntingly
conjure human degradation and suffering. What makes her
work important is that her treatment of interrogation is not
merely thematic. She develops a language of formal elements
such as lines, folds, and angles that, together, draw attention to a
visual technique perspective that pictures the world as an
objective structure to be represented with certainty through
rational methods. Perspective, it has been argued, creates
distance between the viewing subject and the object. In its
static frame, it crystallizes fluid processes. Goodwin thus links
her works thematic depiction of the dehumanizing practice of
political interrogation to the larger epistemology it relies upon
by drawing attention to a style of arts mediating role in the
subjectobject split, and then subverting its aesthetic regime.
In a poem titled Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988) by Betty
Goodwin, Anne Carson responds to one of the drawings from
Goodwins Seated Figure series.4 Torture is not an overt theme in
Carsons poem but it remains central to the poems broader
exploration of interrogation as a mode by which Western culture has sought information through epistemological paradigms founded on conceptions of knowledge, truth, and
certainty and expressed through representation based on resemblance.5 Like Goodwin, Carson evokes and then refuses the
grid-like structures of containment of syntax and sense. She
also refuses to subject her words visual other to an interrogation
by refusing to picture the picture; she will not frame, name, or
make the image speak by representing it. Referring to the writings of Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze praises the capacity of art
to offer a new image of thought.6 This article shows how, in
WORD & IMAGE, VOL.

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refusing representation as its central operational mode, the

poem reaches to the edge of the thinkable to demonstrate
arts capacity to offer its own uncertain form of thinking that, in
its dynamism, provisionality, and conditionality, brings into
being that which does not yet exist.7 In so doing, her poem
draws on and draws out interrelationships that heal the subject
object split which Goodwins art evokes.
It is important first to consider Goodwins image separately
from Carsons thoughts about it. Produced after her well-known
Carbon and Swimmer series, the drawing Seated Figure with
Red Angle (1988) comes from a series of haunting seated figures
such as Figure with Chair, No. 1 (1988), Hooded Figure with Chair
(19881989), and Seated Figure with Chair and Pipe (1988). Together
with works such as How Long Does it Take for One Voice to Reach
Another (1988) and Bent Figure With Megaphone (1988), these drawings reduce the scene of torture to basic elements: a darkened
figure, a chair, a light, and a room.8 If, as Elaine Scarry notes, a
room typically represents the most benign potential of human
life a miniaturization of civilization and its comforts the
interrogation rooms in this series represent its annihilation in the
form of a smudged white space emptied of the anchoring coordinates of dimension and depth.9 Rather than being represented
in relation to their torturer, the figures are solitary and isolated.
Goodwins figures faces are either covered with hoods or are
smudged beyond recognition to reflect the extent of their degradation and dehumanization. Many of the figures bodies are
hunched or bent over on themselves, and their limbs appear to
be twisted or disconnected from the bodies. The seated figures
are haunting images, pregnant with silence.
The particular image from the Seated Figure series Carson takes
up, Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988), is a drawing. Its medium is
important because unlike painting, which in its dominant tradition in the West from the Renaissance through to the modernist
era has tended to appear bounded and finished, drawing is, to
put it in the vernacular, sketchy. The kinds of surfaces one draws
on are much less forgiving than canvas and retain traces of every
gesture. On canvas, the brush traces obliteratively, while on
paper, everything that is marked on the surface remains visible.10 A drawing is often also a study and offers a means of entry
into a problem. The knowledge that drawing seeks is thus
exploratory rather than final; as Susan Stoops writes, by its
own intrinsic nature, the process of drawing is one that acknowledges the conditional.11

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Figure 1. Betty Goodwin, Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988). Oil pastel, oil and
graphite. 37 23 cm. Photo credit: Louis Lussier. Reproduced with
permission from Gatan Charbonneau.

Goodwins drawing is a study of the abject. It is also a study of

the connections between certain conventions of picturing the
world and certain types of relationships fostered between subject
and other. The figure is crowded in the middle of the page,
surrounded by an overwhelming sea of white contaminated by
traces, lines, gashes, erasures, and folds. A long straight black
vertical line on the right side of the figure, extending from the
shoulders to below the feet, anchors the grid of the drawing and
gives the impression of a wall that presses in on the subject.
Another group of lighter horizontal lines, or perhaps folds,
intersect at roughly ninety degrees with the vertical and are
disturbingly inscribed right through the figures head at the
level where the eyes should be, obliterating the figures ability
to see and to be seen as a person. These rectilinear lines a
motif Goodwin uses throughout her work evoke the frame of
a perspectival grid that artists sketch out to orient the space their
image will inhabit.
234

MONIQUE TSCHOFEN

Perspective is a device through which the world is projected

outward from the position of a spectator who is removed from
the action. Often associated with Decartess rationalism and his
search for ontological and epistemological certainty,12 the perspectival grid has been argued by writers like Martin Jay to
represent a technology of control, or, as Hubert Damisch puts
it, a regulatory structure.13 The perspectival grid offers a way of
mathematizing space so as to render objects realistically.
While the grid functions as an invisible mechanism to represent
the world objectively, it also objectifies that world. As Erwin
Panofsky puts it, perspective creates distance between human
beings and things.14 In the drawing, the presence of the grid
connects perspectives mathematizing modes of abstraction,
rationalist epistemologys purportedly objective knowledge,
and the subjectobject ontology we have inherited from
Descartes. The abstract grid thus links directly to the drawings
stated theme, since interrogation (as torture) is a practice that
materializes this epistemology.15
However, the strength of this image has to do with the ways in
which the grid is undermined and rendered impotent through a
more complex and fluid spatial operation. The figure appears to
occupy two separate planes at once, torqued around an invisible
central turning point in a way that produces a disconnect
between the upper and lower body. The figures legs do not
belong to the same geometric plane as the torso and seem to be
made of different matter; lighter and more translucent than the
upper body, the legs give the impression that they are floating
away. Via a delicate rupture of the fields of containment begotten by the principles of perspectivalism, Goodwins drawing
transforms an abstracted static field into a dynamic unfolding.
The logic of this alternate way of depicting spatial relationships
is neither objective nor does it objectify.
The red angle of the title of Betty Goodwins drawing hangs as
an enigma. It is drawn forcefully and left unsmudged on the left
side of the drawing, hovering away from the figure. Its angles
teeter off the right angles of the grid, echoing instead the more
organic angles of the shoulder, arm, and legs of the figures bent
form. And yet, unlike the blood-like splotches of red on the hip
and between the legs of the figure, the red angle firmly belongs
to a different order than the human figure. It evokes, but is not, a
gash in the skin of the paper. Resembling the other distresses on
the surface of the work, the red angle transforms the flat and
static fields of drawing into something that inscribes the work of
arts dimensionality and unfolding in time. An abstract inscription of the materiality of drawing, of the trace of the hand, of the
hidden depths art can make visible, the red angle is at once the
lure of the image, and the detail which, as Barthes puts it in
Camera Lucida, wounds and pierces.16
Anne Carsons Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988) by Betty
Goodwin was written in 1999, when she was invited by Art
Forum to respond to a work that had special significance to her.
Carson, whose work has frequently addressed the relationships
between verbal and visual arts,17 described the way she chose to
represent her encounter [b]y using the most hesitant of

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syntaxes.18 Like Goodwins dynamic distortions of rectilinear

visual geometry, Carsons disturbances of the syntax of the
phrase, of genre, of person, of order, and of representation itself
are designed to expose techniques of control and to subvert
them by offering models of how new dynamic interrelationships
might be configured.
Towards the beginning of the poem, Carson notes that the
seated figure started out with an idea of interrogation and later
continues if you had the idea of interrogation.19 This careful
slippage, from an idea of interrogation to the idea of interrogation
delineates the way the poem moves from a consideration of
Goodwins art and her depiction of torture to an exploration
of a broad set of abstracted philosophical concerns, for at the
heart of Carsons response to Goodwins art rests the double
meaning of interrogation. The term refers to a technique
torture and, seemingly more benignly, to a method or a mode
of inquiry that forms an essential part of rationalist epistemologys quest for certainty and structure behind the flux of experience. The connection between these two meanings of the word
interrogation seems to hang on the fact that both involve processes of questioning, but their imbrication runs deeper. As
Idelber Avelar writes, torture is a key chapter in the history of
truth.20 Anne Carsons scholarly and creative writing has systematically worked to retrieve concepts from classical antiquity
to show their strangeness and aliveness. There is little question
that her translation (L. translatus, to carry across) of Goodwins
treatment of torture, moving from an idea of interrogation to the
idea of interrogation itself, aims to draw out a history of its
meanings.21
In Athenian culture, the term basanos (o) referred to a
touchstone used by bankers to distinguish gold from alloys. Over
time, the term came to be associated with judicial technique
whereby a slave or servant, as a proxy for an accused free
man, was physically tested by torture in order to extract the
truth. What is significant for this analysis of Carsons poem
based on Goodwins image is that, because of this association,
the term came to signify processes by which we come to test the
truth of a matter. Edward Peters notes how, in the work of
Thucydides, the term basanos evidently connoted a kind of
critical inquiry22 interrogation as critical method and
later, basanos comes to signify not just the process of distilling
truth from falsehood, but truth itself. 23 It is this last connection
that Page duBois considers in her work Torture and Truth. She
looks at the works of writers ranging from Theognis to Pindar to
Plato to show how the Athenian practice of basanos is what has
endowed philosophy with the core metaphor that organizes its
central concept of truth as alethia (). DuBois argues that
this concept has been conceived of as a kind of aggressive
dragging, and bringing into light something hidden24 in a
way that leads almost inevitably to conceiving of the body of
the other as the site from which truth can be produced, and to
using violence if necessary to extract that truth.25
In the poem, Carsons retrieval of classical ideas about truth
(alethia) and interrogation (basanos) materializes when Carson

slyly raises the question of servant (or slave) and master. Art is
the servant of allure, she writes, but importantly in this poem,
there is no master of allure; no authenticating power submits
arts truths to its authority.26 With these words, she suggests that
the purpose of the art talk throughout the poem, with its references to colors (red), printing methods (wiping in), writing and
videotaping, and the poems references to artists like Pascal,
Artaud, and Nabokov, is to show how art can intervene in the
legacy of this darker aspect of our epistemology, either in service
of it as the technique of perspective can be seen to be doing, or
independent from it.27
With this context, it is possible to examine how Carson uses
verbal form to engage the history of interrogation and truth.
Carsons Seated Figure is difficult to categorize as essay or poem,
as it resembles both and neither. It evokes the syllogism and
propositional logic, and then wounds and pierces the argumentative with conditionality and non-sense. In broken lines where
the sequence doesnt matter and where nothing sticks, its
study of truth begins as a trickle, this thin slow falling of the
mind, and from there, leaks.28 And yet, very little here feels
poetic. There is no meter, no rhyme, no beautiful language. In
order to appreciate its radical work, what I am calling Carsons
poem needs to be understood as an ekphrasis, that is, as the
verbal representation of a graphic representation.29
Ekphrasis, from the Greek words ek (out) and phrasein (to
speak forth or tell) is a genre of poetry and, more broadly, a
mode of vivid writing that has been understood in relational
terms as it involves a meeting between two modes of representation one speaking and one silent; one temporal and one
spatial; one cognitive and one possessing embodiment.30
This act of meeting has traditionally been conceived of either
in confrontational terms as in DaVincis notion of the paragone,
or in sisterly or empathetic terms.31 Either way, as W. J. T.
Mitchell has argued, in the tradition of ekphrasis the textual
self projected as active, speaking, seeing speaks not
only about the visual other but also presumes to speak for it
insofar as the visual is projected as being passive, seen, and
(usually) silent.32 Precisely because ekphrasis enacts a relational
encounter, and precisely because this relational encounter has
been informed by a social structure that mimics the set of power
relationships enacted in the scene of interrogation, it is able to
offer Carson an appropriate platform from which to launch her
short-circuiting of the rational modes of thinking that can turn a
method of questioning back into a practice of interrogation.33
In her poem, the interrelations between the self of the written
word and the other of the art image are hard to discern. The
poems language offers no clear way of picturing the picture in
question.34 It does not apostrophize or engage in dialogue with
the picture. And it does not seek to put into words the pictures
virtual discourses.35 Moreover, the speaker does not seem to
be seeing (in the strict sense, with her eyes) or scanning for some
clear vision of an epiphany. The poems subject matter is scattered, covering topics as diverse as aging, house pets, colors, the
weather, art, literature, objects, propositions, and thoughts
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themselves in no easily discernible logical sequence. The poem

thus mimics the movements of thinking as it paces rather than
journeys, moving tangentially rather than linearly. Achieving
the very opposite of what Krieger calls the still moment of
ekphrasis, that is stasis, shape, closure, and silent presence, the
poem is too unpatterned to be still or stilled.36 But for the title,
one would have great difficulty recognizing the connections to
Goodwins work or her theme. Yet Carsons refusal to picture
the picture represents a refusal to render the silent image knowable and so extract its meanings literally to make it talk. If
one of the questions of the poem is how to put thoughts about a
complex work of visual art such as Betty Goodwins into words,
Carson wants to ensure that her aesthetic response to the image
of a human subject made into an object through the infliction of
torture does not subordinate or contain this visual image. Just as
Goodwin finds a way to have her work evoke the fields of
containment of the perspectival grid and the epistemology that
is associated with it, and yet transcend these through a fluid
spatial operation, so too does Carson find a way to evoke the
grid-like apparatus of genre and then, through the introduction
of dynamism, proliferate alternative ways of figuring interrelationships between words and images and subjects and objects
more broadly.37
As Carsons ekphrasis about the picture hesitates to picture the
picture, it faces another challenge, because the ekphrasis still is
obliged to phrase that which is mute and apparently beyond
language.38 Through a series of challenges to phrasing, the
poem implies that structures of grammar and syntax are gridlike mechanisms of containment akin to the perspective paradigm in the visual arts.39 A sentence is a logical unit that works
towards resolution and closure. In Carsons poem, each line has
the outward appearance of a sentence because it is punctuated
with a period, but, because each consists only of a conditional
clause without the main clause or consequent, these incomplete
sentences make visible the frame of the very structure they
violate.40 The broken sentences in Seated Figure create a
space for thought that cannot be fixed or pinned down. But
they do so in a way that is specifically relevant to the fact that this
is a poem that relates to a picture. As the unfinished preludes to
an idea that cannot be uttered, the sentence fragments show a
way for language to point to or reach towards rather than
objectively represent. The poem seeks to verbalize something
about the visual arts ineffability, and so its approach is to remain
silent in matters that reside in the realm of the inarticulable.
Conditionals are of great interest to philosophers because,
J. L. Mackie explains, we do not know precisely how to construe them or precisely what their truth conditions are.41
Carson declares in the second line of the poem that there are
two kinds of conditionals, factual and contrafactual, and it is
the contrafactual conditionals that have aroused the most
anxiety and dispute.42 Rather than offer a statement of what
is true if the antecedent is true as does the indicative conditional,
the counterfactual statement offers what would be the case if the
antecedent were true. Counterfactual reasoning is thus the
236

MONIQUE TSCHOFEN

process of evaluating conditional claims about possibilities

rather than consequences, and so when Carson alludes to the
form she raises the prospect that language can work to evade the
burdensome literalness of facts. In the poem, however, the bulk
of the protases are in the present indicative tense and so likely
represent factual conditionals. With this sleight of hand, the
poem draws attention to a delimitation between two grammatical and logical categories and thus to a way of using language to
generate statements of possibility, and then hides this boundary
from view so that we are left thinking about the poems own state
of possibility, that is, about what the poem might have been if it
had actually completed its thoughts. Her phrasing thus creates
the structural conditions under which it is impossible for our
thoughts to reach their consequences and there achieve a full
stop. By excising consequence, its fragmented sentences offer a
way to articulate potentiality.
Carson uses the poems incomplete conditionals to comment
self-reflexively on the conditional modes function as a connector of two parts. Scattered through the poem is a kind of
catalogue through a series of lines all beginning with the phrase
If conditionals are of two kinds, which seek to parse the notion
of the conditional, starting with the statement If conditionals
are of two kinds factual and contrafactual.43 This statement is
grounded in a recognizable process of logical reasoning that
seeks to categorize and establish the boundary edge between
different things. But the binary oppositions used to qualify the
noun conditional that follow keep shifting the terrains within
which their meaning resides. If the first statement is launched
from the idea of a binary related to fact and its opposite, the next
two iterations in the series move into dimensions that are probabilistic (possible and impossible) and then ontological (real
and unreal).44 Then, the categories of conditionals the poem
names begin to break down. In the line If conditionals are of
two kinds now it is night and all cats are black, the binary terms
no longer relate to the mode of the conditional proper.45
Instead, they relate to each other impressionistically, dark
thing opposed to other dark thing. The next two iterations in
the series, If conditionals are of two kinds allure and awake,
and (with a variation in the syntax) If conditional comes
between condiment and condolence, offer up even more
abstract interrelations between the terms of the binary by
using assonance and the alphabetic order of the dictionary as
the point of connection.46 The final lines of the poem, If
conditionals are of two kinds graven and where is a place I can
write this conclude the poem metatextually, setting into a faulty
parallel syntax two notions about writing. One is passive,
abstract and depersonalized ([conditionals are] graven). The
other is localized (where is a place), and embodied and active
(I can write this).47 Staged through this series of protases is
thus an array of ways to configure interrelationships ranging
from binary oppositional to proximal, and its overall movement
in the poem from relationships of distance to relationships of
closeness is one way the poem tries to think through the problem
of interrogation as a relationship founded on a distancing of

subject and object. In its place it offers a relationship based on

contiguity and sharing.48
If the idea of connectors is introduced with the poems conditional syntax, it is developed in the poems core imagery
around the idea of the edge. The central lines of the poem
warrant repeating here because they demonstrate the complex
work of the poems staging of thoughts and thinking within the
encounter of visual and verbal arts:

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If you want to know why you cannot reach your own beautiful
ideas.
If you reach instead to the edge of the thinkable, which leaks.
If you stop the leaks with conditionals.49

Here are three linked protases within which the categories keep
shifting so that, together, their instabilities work to create a
succinct verbal picture of different conceptions of thought.
Lying palimpsestically beneath these lines and the poem as a
whole is Aristotle, who pictured knowing as a form of reaching
in Metaphysics A: All men by their very nature reach out to
know.50 In the first line cited above, desire wanting to
know is separated from attainment reaching ones own
beautiful ideas, and while wanting is posited as possible, attaining is not. So why could one not reach the end of ones beautiful
ideas? To answer this, it is first necessary to look at the circumstances under which one could reach the end of ones ideas. What
is being conjured here is an epistemological framework in which
ideas are conceived as objective entities that reside beyond some
kind of finish line, but which can be reached through a rational line
of questioning the interrogatory method at the heart of a
notion of alethia we can trace back to the practice of basanos.
Now importantly, one small preposition offers the key to understanding the difference between the epistemological paradigm
alluded to in the first cited line, and the picture of thinking
offered in the second cited line, where knowing is understood
more in keeping with Aristotle as a reaching to rather than as
attaining. Reaching to can be infinite; as a model of knowledge,
it engages a dynamic movement that cannot be stilled or
contained.51
There are two hinges or turning points in the second quoted
line that relate to the edge of the thinkable that you are
reaching to. One concerns the figure of the edge, and the second
concerns the category of the thinkable. To begin with the figure
of the edge, it must be noted that edges are a recurring motif in
Carsons work.52 They are interesting because they are intrinsically paradoxical. Edges are figures of distance. They divide and
separate. They delineate boundaries between such categories as
self and other or subject and object which, once conceptualized,
create rigidities that affect all aspects of being. But at the same
time edges are figures of contiguity and contact. The categories
of self and other for example must touch at the place where they
each find their identity through difference. Edges mark the place
beyond which resides that which is not yet contained in the
categories of the known. Ontologically, edges also delimit
between what is and what is not but perhaps could be. And at

this edge is the thinkable, which itself is a categorical distinction that is unique in philosophy because one can only have
knowledge of what is thinkable. The line separating it from the
unthinkable is a line one can reach to, but never actually reach.
The edges of the thinkable here are edges that leak; the poem
thus uses a metaphor to make a picture of the limits of categorical thinking as well as thinking about categories. In the next
line, you stop the leaks with conditionals. The humor in this
line relates to the radical paradox of the image of conditionals as
stopgaps because the poems experimentational form clearly
uses the conditional to set thought in motion rather than contain
it. If anything, it might be said that the poem stops the conditionals with leaks.
Framed within hesitations around the constraints of ekphrastic form, and conveyed through hesitations in sentence form
and logic, the poem about Goodwins Seated Figure with Red Angle
offers hesitations around grammatical person. It is impossible
to reconstruct from the poem a unitary speaker because the
speakers voice in the poem constantly shifts identity
and address. For much of the poem the voice speaks in the
third-person impersonal in the voice of the scholar who stands
back from or above the text and names. Parsing the conditional
form, philosophizing about color, art, and experience, the scholars voice moves towards precision. However, the speaker in
the poem also uses a second-person form of address to counter
this impersonal authoritative voice. The second person creates
an intricate dialogic structure that breaks open the fourth wall
of the poem and allows subjectivity to enter into the discourse.53
The epistemological implications are great; one cannot calculate or be certain about another when one is engaged in
a dialogue with them. Dialogue is a dynamic process that
depends on a degree of intimate engagement between the speakers. It requires curiosity, and often accommodation and compromise. Dialogue bridges distances and offers new points
of view.
Carson uses the second person to draw attention to the complex work of pronouns in articulating relationships. From the
outset of the poem, the second person you becomes a moving
field rather than a stable ground. In other words, the pronoun
you delineates the edges of a category that leaks. At the
beginning of the poem, the second- person addressee appears
to be Goodwin herself and the poem an intimate letter to the one
who inspired it. However, on closer inspection, many of the lines
in which Carsons speaker seems to be addressing Betty
Goodwin as you are citations of Betty Goodwin herself speaking in interviews where she frequently used the second-person
pronoun as a synonym for the third or first person subject one
or I. For example, in an interview with Robert Enright,
Goodwin said that her work is based in something you dont
even realize yourself until it gives you back information. Its like
youre pulling and pulling and trying to get something. And then
theres that magic time when it begins to pull you. If that doesnt
happen, you cant push it any more and it dies.54 In the poem,
Carson retains Goodwins idiosyncratic use of the second person
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in the phrase If youre pushing, pushing and then it begins to

pull you.55 This habit of speech is fascinating because it results
from a schism in self-identity, that is, from a projection of the
mental contents of a speaking I onto the pronoun you. This
schism paradoxically makes possible a unique kind of intimacy
between speaker and interlocutor. The speaking I who is
speaking as a you is in fact addressing an interlocutor,
you, who by virtue of being addressed in the second person
feels interpellated by and drawn into the world of the speaker.56
Two figures inhabit the same pronominal unit. What takes the
appearance of a dialogue (Carson the poet addressing Goodwin
the artist) turns out to be a kind of intertextual sampling (Carson
quoting Goodwin) within which what is presented as a dialogue
(Goodwin addressing her interviewer) is in part actually a monologue (Goodwin is talking about herself). Even the metaphor of
Chinese boxes cannot capture the complexity of the multiple
frames in operation here.
For much of the poem, you cogitate. You have ideas, want
to know, remember, cannot remember, do not want to
remember, and are bewildered.57 Whether this you refers
to the reader of the poem, another viewer of Goodwins drawing,
Goodwin herself, or the seated figure in the picture is not at all
clear. What is clear is that when understood strictly in relation to
the seated figure, these activities of thinking serve to engage
cleverly with the thematic premise of interrogation in Goodwins
Seated Figure with Red Angle. Carson constructs a thought-full you
in order to juxtapose her to Goodwins image of a tortured you
being interrogated for what she knows. Carsons thinking you is
granted subjecthood and interiority. Goodwins interrogated
you would seem to be merely othered.
However, in an important twist, the poems catalogue of
thinking acts associated with the thought-full you avoids
merely reproducing rationalist epistemologys tendency to
objectify. Rather, it presents a sliding between two modes of
knowing from one that conceives of truth as certitude, correctness, or correspondence, to one that conceives of truth as what is
unexperienced or unthought.58 Early in the poem, the thinking
you is involved in activities grounded in the quest for certainty. Later, the thinking you fore goes the prospect of a
knowledge with certainty and enters into a realm in which
nothing sticks.59 Taking up the poems central metaphor of
leaking through the image of rain, the final lines of the poem
place I, you, and we in a contradictory series of statements about the weather:
If (for example) had you not destroyed the barometer it would
have forewarned us implies that we are now standing in a
storm of rain.
If as a matter of fact it is a clear night I would say almost
relentlessly clear.
If the rain lashes your face like the manes of all the horses of this
century.60

The transformation of the you who thinks into the you who
experiences rain leads away from thought towards perceptual
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MONIQUE TSCHOFEN

and affective experience. And so, in the final line of the poem,
where is a place I can write this, the speaker I has learned to
anchor language, specifically written language, in the phenomenal world, in the here and now of experience, correcting
perhaps the mind/body split proposed by the cogito.
The subject/object you in the poem is related closely to the
third-person pronoun she. She appears to be the seated
figure (who in Goodwins drawing is not gendered). She is
represented in the poem as vulnerable, just as Goodwins seated
figure is in the picture. In the poem, however, her abjectness
appears to be related to senility, a process by which information
slips away. While the result of the annihilation of thought is the
same, Carson proposes senilitys emptying of the mind as the
antithesis of interrogations extraction of information.61 In the
poem, she sits the way a very old person sits, with no pants
on, confused.62 What is important about Carsons treatment of
she in the poem is that, unlike the seated figure in Goodwins
image, she is cared for by you: you lead her to water
and bring her a gift such as a thought from Pascal,
Nabokov, or Artaud.63 In other words, in lieu of picturing a
relationship that objectifies the other, Carson posits a relationship between first and third person that is nourishing. These
pronominal games are highly significant for Carsons project of
reconfiguring Western epistemologys faulty logic of instrumentalizing ways of picturing and hence being in the world. The
poem thus traces what Martin Buber describes in Ich and Du as
the transformation from a relationship of IIt which reduces
the other to an object and subjects it to the blind will of the I,
towards mutual, reciprocal relationships Buber terms IYou
(IchDu) that are grounded in dialogue and based on the recognition of the other. As Buber posits: I require a You to become;
becoming I, I say You.64
The poems hesitations around pronominal structures establish a space of interpersonal exchange. This space of exchange
extends to the text as a whole, since the poem does not delineate
sharp edges between itself and other texts.
Roland Barthes argues that intertextual dialogism brings a
text into a kind of social utopia, that is, a space where no one
language holds sway over any other, in which all languages
circulate freely.65 Yet Carsons poem might better be described
as what Michel Foucault calls a heterotopia. In the preface to The
Order of Things, Foucault uses the term to describe the marvel of a
passage from one of Borgess fictions in which the categories
listed in a certain Chinese encyclopedia entry reveal the stark
impossibility of a system of thought.66 Foucault wishes to understand how a system, an order of things, which must by definition
have a grid or hidden network that determines how its elements
relate to one another, might at the same time offer no common
ground upon which its elements meeting is possible.
Heterotopias, he explains, like Carsons poem, secretly undermine language because they destroy syntax in advance, and
not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also
that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to
and also opposite one another) to hold together.67 Utopias

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(from ou-topos, meaning no-place or nowhere) project an

image of idealized places that do not and cannot exist.
Heterotopias in contrast violate all grids of coherence.68
Carsons disorderly poem can be understood as a heterotopia
because, like Goodwins drawing, it offers up the skeleton of
order a logical grid or system that appears to function serially
and then brings that order to the edge past which it becomes
unthinkable.
The problem that was raised at the beginning of this
article about the way Carson refuses to picture the picture,
refuses to make it speak, must be addressed now, because
amidst the many destabilizing registers of the poems language, the poem seems blind to the drawing. How is this
elision not ultimately to be understood as an exercise of the
words power to silence or dominate? I argue here that it
should not. In refusing to re-present something about
Goodwins drawing, Carson is offering a critique of representation itself and its relationship to both literary language
and visual arts. Many philosophers have argued that representation has for long been the fundamental category of
knowledge both the form and the content of what we
know.69 An order of things and a way of seeing, representation posits relationships between thoughts and things
based on resemblance or similitude. Its logic is that of the
copy, and its mode of engagement is recognition.
Recent philosophy has identified the problems inherent in
this conception of representation. In a consideration of the work
of Gilles Deleuze, Amy Hertzog argues that representation
contains and constrains the object it represents: representation
operates through immobilization, spatialization. It asserts
correspondences, analogies, and associations between elements
at the expense of their differences, their dynamisms, their movements and changes.70 To put this in the poems words, representation is a tactic that seeks to stop the leaks in an otherwise
dynamic and shifting field of knowledge.71 Ils Huygens elaborates on what the implications of representations immobilization and containments are for knowledge itself. The model of
representational thinking is deficient, Huygens writes,
because it can only re-present us what we already know. It
does not allow us to think the unthinkable, what has not been
thought, what falls outside what we already know. Simply put,
the representational image of thought cannot think qualitative
change or real difference.72

This is a serious deficiency, because it means that under a model

of representation it is not possible fully to pursue and realize
change, even when a disciplinary power is brought into view.
And it has implications for art and philosophy both, since under
a model of representation they are robbed of their powers to
break with doxa and create the new.
In order to describe the fundamental category of knowledge that underlies any epistemology, Gilles Deleuze coins
the phrase image of thought. For Deleuze, an image of
thought does not refer to an actual image that could be seen

with our eyes or imagined as though seen with our eyes. Neither
does it to refer to the notion that we perceive our thoughts as
images. Nor does it refer to what the surrealists produced as they
strove for material images of our unconscious thoughts. Rather,
the phrase refers to the implicit invisible presuppositions about
thinking that make thought possible: It is in terms of this image,
he writes, that everybody knows and is presumed to know what
it means to think.73
The dominant or dogmatic image of thought that characterizes our philosophical tradition is representational. It is based
on certitude: here, thought has an affinity with the true; it
formally possesses the true and materially wants the true.74
Certitude has limitations. By feigning objectivity, the representational image of thought objectifies. It also censors the improvisory and exploratory, and it ultimately limits what is knowable.
According to Deleuze, creative arts such as philosophy, literature, cinema, and even painting and drawing can liberate us
from the Image and its postulates by offering a new space of
possibility, movement, and becoming.75 Deleuze proclaims that
the new image of thought works by writers such as Nietzsche and
Proust make possible calls forth forces in thought which are not
the forces of recognition but the powers of a completely other
model, from an unrecognised and unrecognizable terra
incognita.76
What makes any new image of thought so powerful is that,
much like Foucaults idea of the heterotopia, it exists in a state of
pure potentiality, for once it has coalesced into an order, once it
ceases to be a disorder, it produces a new homogeneity. The
perspectival grid in Goodwins drawing, and genre, syntax, and
grammar in Carsons poem represent orders. To set up a new
image of thought, Deleuze offers, one seeks:
a thinking that no longer opposes itself as from the outside
to the unthinkable or the unthought, but which would lodge
the unthinkable, the unthought within itself as thought, and
which would be in an essential relationship to it (desire is what
remains always unthought at the heart of thought); a thinking
that would of itself be in relation to the obscure, and which by
rights would be traversed by a sort of fissure, without which
thought could no longer operate. The fissure cannot be filled
in, because it is the highest object of thought.77

As an image of torture, Betty Goodwins drawing lodges unthinkable human violence. But rather than merely oppose the atrocity
of a human subject made into an object, Goodwin draws these
issues in through the motif of the grid that surrounds and penetrates the seated figure, and then disrupts them through the
delicate torsion that disrupts the coordinates of the picture
space and the restrictions of representations certitude. This, I
argue, powerfully exposes and erodes both the foundations of an
entrenched system of thinking and the representational practices
that accompany this epistemology. Even more powerfully, on the
surface of Goodwins drawing erupts a fissure the enigmatic
red angle in which lodges the unthinkable, and this is the very
element that, because of its obscurity, permits a new mode of
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thought that reaches to but does not ever attain and contain, that
draws out, but does not ever fill in. The instability of the order of
image thus offers an opening into the central problems of philosophy and their relationship to human subjects.
If Carsons ekphrasis were to undertake as its task the
re-presentation of some aspects of the visual image that is its
subject matter, and strive to make these aspects recognizable
in some way, it would objectify the image, assert its distance
from it, and make it speak. It would treat the image as
though it were something that could be reached, and
known rather than reached to and drawn out. Instead, Carson
responded to Goodwins drawing by refusing to treat it as a
representational image, and by refusing actually to represent
or contain it. Her poetic approach to the drawing is in the
spirit of drawing: exploratory, experimental, and, like her
grammatical form, conditional. Yet her poetic approach to
the drawing provides an image that is not an image as one
would see with ones eyes or even imagine. Through its
many formal strategies of hesitation, the poem protects the
drawing from merely replicating the dominant epistemology,
and from Carsons own practices of interrogation. Instead, it
enters into a relationship of reciprocity with the drawing to
offer a new image of thought, an image of that which cannot
be pictured, which it presents as gifts. In so doing, Carsons
poem generates a state of disorder that is vital, offers infinite
possibilities for the generation of nourishing relationships
based on reciprocity rather than domination. Deleuze
writes: We live with a particular image of thought, that is
to say, before we begin to think, we have a vague idea of
what it means to think, its means and ends. And then
someone comes along and proposes another idea, a whole
other image.78 And we feel, as Foucault did upon reading
Borgess encyclopedia, the marvel of the stark impossibility
of thinking that and the restoration of a sense of what the
powers of the arts can be.79
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Jonathan Rollins, Sarah Henstra, and

Victor Cirone for their engagement with the project along its
way.

NOTES

1 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1995), 147.
2 Will Aitken, The Art of Poetry No. 88: Anne Carson, The Paris Review
46 (Fall 2004): 190226, here p. 203.
3 Carolyn Forch, The Country Between Us (New York: Harper and Row,
1981); Betty Goodwin, Betty Goodwin in Conversation with France
Morin, in Betty Goodwin: Steel Notes, ed. France Morin (Ottawa: National
Gallery of Canada, 1989), 108116, here 115.
4 Anne Carson, Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988) by Betty Goodwin, in
Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 96101.
This work was published in an earlier version under the title Betty Goodwin
Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988), Art Forum 38, no.1 (September 1999):
15657.

240

MONIQUE TSCHOFEN

5 Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 97. For a discussion of the notions of

representation as likeness or resemblance, see Michel Foucault, The Order of
Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970);
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition; Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror
of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
6 See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition; Essays in Critical and Clinical
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and Desert Islands and
Other Texts, 19531974 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004).
7 Gilles Deleuze, Difference, 147.
8 These images are all reproduced in Betty Goodwin, Steel Notes, Betty
Goodwin, ed. France Morin.
9 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 38.
10 Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1983), 92.
11 Susan L. Stoops, The Contemporary Drawing: Existence, Passage and the Dream,
exhibition catalog (Waltham, MA, Rose Art Gallery, Brandeis University, 17
March28 April 1991), 4.
12 Lyle Massey, Anamorphosis through Descartes or Perspective Gone
Awry, Renaissance Quarterly 50, no. 4 (1997): 114889, here p. 1148. See also
Hubert Damisch, who suggests that the use of fixed perspective in lge
classique could be taken as an indicator of certain scientific and philosophical
positions: In this sense (and in this sense only), the cogito can be regarded as
the translation, itself in accordance with the Cartesian ideal of world mastery, of a theme or methodical structure that recurs in all realms of knowledge and that lends itself to all manner of translations (Hubert Damisch,
The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 48). In this article,
I am guilty of a gesture, echoed in the works of Heidegger and Deleuze,
Martin Jay, and Erwin Panofsky, among many other writers, of drawing a
relatively uncomplicated line between Greek thought, Cartesianism, and
modern scientific rationality. I believe this thread is drawn in Goodwins
work and Carsons as well, so to complicate the history of Western philosophy would not advance an understanding of the poem or drawing I am
treating here.
13 See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 323, and
Scopic Regimes of Modernity, in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (San
Francisco: Bay Press, 1988), 323. Hubert Damisch refers here to Erwin
Panofskys and Ernst Cassirers work when he describes perspective as a
regulating structure. He then in fact proceeds to debunk this conception. See
Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000),
25. Also see my previous note.
14 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books,
1997), 67. Panofsky writes, thus the history of perspective may be understood with equal justice as a triumph of the distancing and objectifying sense
of the real and as a triumph of the distance-denying human struggle for
control. Perspective is as much a consolidation and systematization of the
external world, as an extension of the domain of the self. [T]he claim of
the object (to use a modern term) confronts the ambition of the subject. The
object intends to remain distanced from the spectator (precisely as something
objective). Ibid., 6768.
15 I do not have the space to elaborate on the connections between
Cartesianism and the animalhuman split used to justify another sort of
violence but this is another topic woven through the poem. In 19841985,
Betty Goodwin developed a series of images titled So Certain I Was, I Was
a Horse which feature a bent over figure including one with a leash-like
cord around his neck. The title of the series is an allusion to epistemologies
based on certainty and links these with degradation. In Betty Goodwin,
Carson refers to Goodwins series tangentially when she substitutes the
poems her for horse: If you lead her to water. Continuing the
reference to the construction of animality as an extension of the subject
object split, the poem refers to the scientist Miroslav (Holub)s position that
experimental animals should not be too smart, and then offers other
rationalizations: If the horses were exhausted / If they dont feel pain the

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way we do; Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 99100. For a very concise
discussion of the relationship between vivisection and Cartesian thought, see
John Rodman, The Dolphin Papers, North American Review 259, no. 1
(Spring, 1974): 1226.
16 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 17.
17 Carson has persistently used her creative and scholarly works to
investigate the relation between verbal and visual media. In Autobiography of
Red (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), for example, she constructs verbal
photographs that attempt to distill into words photographys ability to play
with perceptual relationships (65) in order to find a way of telling about
photographys ways of seeing. See E. L. McCallum, Toward a Photography
of Love: The Tain of the Photograph in Anne Carsons Autobiography of
Red, Postmodern Culture (PMC) 17, no. 3 (2007): 8, available online at http://
pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.507/17.3mccallum.txt. In Men in the
Off Hours (New York: Vintage, 2001), Carson offers ekphrases of both real
and imagined paintings, operas, and films. Jeff Hamilton argues that in
poems such as Life of Towns in Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (Toronto:
Vintage Canada, 1995), Carson constructs a verse equivalent to the vanishing point in painting as she probes the relationships between three interrelated conceptions of the line: the verse line, the painterly or writerly trace,
and the perspectival grid. Jeff Hamilton, This Cold Hectic Dawn and I,
Denver Quarterly 32, no. 12 (SummerFall 1997): 116.
18 Phoebe Pettingell, Shards of Meaning, review of Decreation: Poetry,
Essays, Opera by Anne Carson, The New Leader 88, no. 5 (SeptemberOctober
2005): 3638, here p. 37, emphasis added
19 Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 97 (emphasis added).
20 Idelber Avelar, The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics and Politics
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 29.
21 For example, in Eros the Bittersweet, Carson retrieves the ancient notion of
eros (). Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive
Press, 1998). In Economy of the Unlost (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999) she draws from xenia (), logos (), and eikon ().
22 Edward Peters, Torture: Expanded Edition (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
23 It is possible to trace the effects of the practice and metaphor of basanos
across time. In ancient Greece, writers ranging from Pindar (Pythian) to
Aristotle (Rhetoric) to Plato (Laches) refer to basanos by means such as whipping,
the rack, being buried under rocks, and even, in Aristophaness The Frogs,
putting vinegar under the nose. For connections between torture and truth
more broadly see Edward Peters, Torture, which examines tortures emergence in Roman law through to today. Stephen Eisenman also gives a
thorough summary of the early articulations of basanos in Greek and Roman
culture in The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion Books, 2007). The
endurance of the connection between torture, truth, and interrogation can
be traced forward from the Greeks to the Romans to early modern Europe.
See Jennifer A. Glancy, who offers an analysis of Pilates scourge of Jesus in
the Fourth Gospel in relation to Roman judicial interrogation (Torture:
Flesh, Truth, and the Fourth Gospel, Biblical Interpretation 13, no. 2 (2005):
10736). Lucy Grieg examines torture in hagiographic texts in relation to the
Roman quaestio per tormenta (interrogation by torture). Lucy Grieg, Torture
and Truth in Late Antique Martyrology, Early Medieval Europe 11, no. 4
(2002): 32136. For a discussion of early modern French concepts of truth as
being lodged in the body, requiring extraction just as tears and teeth are
drawn out, see also Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body
in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 118. Jody
Enders brilliantly analyzes the relationship between torture, rhetoric, and
spectacle. Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory and
Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). Elizabeth Hanson
argues that in the English discursive economy about torture the body gave
truth a basis in material reality susceptible to discovery, while through pain
made it inaccessible to all but the sufferer. Elizabeth Hanson, Torture and
Truth in Renaissance England, Representations 34 (1991): 5384, here, p. 56.

24 Page duBois, Torture and Truth: The New Ancient World (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 29. DuBois discusses Martin Heidegger, whose formulation of aletheia has to a large extent defined current usage of the term. While
she searches for rhetorical traces of basanos in his language, noting for
example his description of truth as the constant wresting extortion of the
unhidden, it is more effective to note that there are two competing notions
of alethia in Greek thought (duBois, Torture, 132). Marcel Detienne describes
the earlier notion of alethia as mythical while the later conception of truth
is positivist and abstract. The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece (New York:
Zone Books, 1999). Heidegger observes this evolution within which an earlier notion of alethia as an opening, or unconcealedness, becomes supplanted
by a notion of correctness and certainty that hails from Plato and runs
through Descartes and dominates our epistemology today. Linking this to
both the subjectobject split and to representation, Heidegger writes:
Homoisis [likeness] has since become adaequatio [correctness] and then
agreement, and since Descartes, the relation between soul and beings has
become the subjectobject relation, mediated by a representation, the
degenerate descendant of Platos idea. Truth becomes correctness, and its
elbow-room [Spielraum], the open, is neglected. See Michael Inwood, A
Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 14.
25 Page duBois, Torture, 6.
26 Anne Carson Seated Figure, 101 (emphases added). The reference to
allure is to Husserl, who in the Analyses defines affection as the allure given
to consciousness, the particular pull that an object given to consciousness
exercises on the ego; it is a pull that is relaxed when the ego turns toward it
attentively, and progresses from here, striving toward self-giving intuition.
Allure is thus that which draws the subject to the object, holding sway until
the ego is attentive. See Edmund Husserl, Analyses concerning Passive and Active
Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 196.
27 These three writers are known not only for the thoughts expressed in
their writings but also for their drawings. Antonin Artaud filled notebooks with
disturbing distorted figures surrounded and traversed by poems, rants, and
treatises. Nabokov illustrated books for his family with intricate drawings of
butterflies. Finally, one of the apocryphal stories about Blaise Pascal pictures
him as a child, drawing geometric figures on the floor of his home with
charcoal. These writers thus provide a model of a writing space that is open to
the traces of drawing, and of a drawing space open to the traces of writing.
28 Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 99 101.
29 Ruth Webb offers a penetrating history of the changes in the use of the
term from ancient to contemporary times. One important contribution of
this article is that Webb reminds us that earlier understandings of ekphrasis
had little to do with the definition of ekphrasis that has the most currency
today, namely as the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art
or as a verbal representation of a visual representation. See Ruth Webb,
Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre, Word & Image
15, no. 1 (JanuaryMarch 1999): 718. For works that consolidated this
current meaning of ekphrasis see also Leo Spitzer, The Ode on a Grecian
Urn, or content vs. metagrammar, in Essays on English and American Literature
(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1962), 6797; and James A.
Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.)
30 John Hollander, The Gazers Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Gottfried Ephraim Lessing,
Laocoon: An Essay Upon The Limits of Painting and Poetry (Mineola, NY: Dover
Publications, 2005); Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press 1991); Norman Bryson, Intertextuality and
Visual Poetics, Style 22, no. 2 (June 1988): 18393. It is pertinent to the
poems thematic treatment of torture via a reworking of the terms of
wordimage relationships that Lessings Laocoon possibly the most
important articulation of the differences between the verbal and visual arts
refers to a sculpture that represents a scene of excruciating torment and
agony. Lessing asks why the sculptor did not depict his figure screaming, and

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responds that transitory actions have no place in static and permanent

modes of representation.
31 For a summary of paragonal models, see Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays
on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
and James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words. For a summary of the tradition of
sister-arts see Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism
and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1958); and Richard Wendorf, Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to
Tennyson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). For works that
extend beyond the sister-arts see Anne Keefe, The Ecstatic Embrace of
Verbal and Visual: Twenty-first Century Lyric Beyond the Ekphrastic
Paragone, Word & Image 27, no. 2 (June 2011): 13547; and Ayala Amir,
Sunt Lacrimae Rerum: Ekphrasis and Empathy in Three Encounters
between a Text and a Picture, Word & Image 25, no. 3 (JulySeptember
2009): 23242.
32 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 157. Mitchell draws attention to how the
social structure of ekphrasis is grounded in our ambivalence about other
people, regarded as subjects and objects in a field of verbal and visual
representation (Mitchell, Picture Theory, 163). Page duBois echoes this view:
If ekphrastic texts are about learning to see, to read visual texts, they also
concern domination and power, the privileging of some readers over others,
and our own tendencies to identify with elite and privileged readers in the
past, those educated and cultured few whom we see as like ourselves (Page
duBois, Reading the Writing on the Wall, Classical Philology 102, no. 1,
Special Issue on Ekphrasis (January 2007): 4556, here p. 46).
33 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du rel, 2002), 18.
34 Not only does the poem not resemble ekphrasis defined in terms of its
subject matter the representation of an art object it does not resemble
ekphrasis in its early use of the term, as what Ruth Webb describes as a form
of vivid evocation that may have as its subject-matter anything. What
distinguishes ekphrasis is its quality of vividness, enargeia, its impact on the
minds eye of the listener who must, in Theons words, be almost made to see
the subject (Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, 13).
35 Jacques Derrida, The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques
Derrida by Peter Brunette and David Wills, in Deconstruction and the Visual
Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, ed. Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993): 1232, here p. 13.
36 See Murray Krieger, The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Moment of
Poetry, or Laokoon Revisited, in The Play and Place of Criticism (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967) and Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural
Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
37 In Seated Figure, Carson is working in the spirit of philosophers such as
Maurice Merleau-Ponty or Hubert Damisch, who challenge the connection
philosophy has made between the perspectival apparatus and perception.
Damisch writes that the problem with these ideas is how to distinguish that
which is perceived from that which is represented. Must description
necessarily resort to mean that are those of representation, borrowing its
forms, its metaphors? (Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, 34).
38 Gary Shapiro, The Absent Image: Ekphrasis and the Infinite Relation
of Translation, Journal of Visual Culture 6, n. 1 (2007): 1324, here p. 21.
39 A connection can be made between Goodwins interest in perspective
and Carsons interest in the sentence: The formal apparatus put in place by
the perspective paradigm is equivalent to that of a sentence, in that it assigns
the subject a place within a previously established network that gives it
meaning, while at the same time opening up the possibility of something like
a statement in painting (Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective 446).
40 In interview, Carson speaks about the way a poem break leads into a
thought that cant ever be apprehended, leaving the space where a
thought would be, but which you cant get hold of (Will Aitken, The Art of
Poetry No. 88: Anne Carson p. 214).
41 J. L. Mackie, Truth, Probability and Paradox: Studies in Philosophical Logic
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 64.
42 Ibid., 64.
43 Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 7.

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MONIQUE TSCHOFEN

44 Ibid., 98, 99.

45 Ibid., 100.
46 Ibid., 101.
47 Ibid., 101.
48 It is possible that Carson is also thinking about Aristotles view about
knowledge in which the mind (nous) becomes one with the object of thought
rather than depicting it. See Charles Taylor, Overcoming Epistemology,
in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
49 Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 96101, here 99.
50 Cited in Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive
Press, 1998), 70. Betty Goodwin also uses the metaphor of reaching when she
speaks about subsequent works in her series reaching more into the essence
of her earlier drawings. See Betty Goodwin, Betty Goodwin: Steel Notes, 113.
51 See Dennis Schmidt, Between Word and Image: Heidegger, Klee, and Gadamer
on Gesture and Genesis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), chapter
3, for a discussion of Gadamers contribution to an understanding of art as a
continuation of movement and play as opposed to as an object of cognition.
52 See Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet. Here, Carson links the edge to
desire (3031), figures of speech like puns and paradox (35), the self (35), and
most importantly language itself. She argues that edges are what distinguish
oral from written words, as writing gives each word its own visible boundary
while heard words have varying edges. See also Anne Carson, Chez
LOxymoron, Grand Street 7, no. 4 Summer 1988): 6874. Here Carson writes:
Once I went to South America to look at the edges of shadows. It became
my endeavour to stand on the very edge of shadow. I failed. There is
shadow and there is no shadow and you can see the difference between them
you can stare at it, measure it, describe it, you can show it in a mirror, but
to stand on that edge no you cant do it. The edge where shadow and
no shadow come together and lie side by side is a point without space. A
contradiction without terms. Anne Carson, Chez lOxymoron, 168. Another
place where the idea of an edge occurs is in pre-Socratic thinking. Detienne
juxtaposes the rationalist instrumentalizing notion of altheia that duBois
describes with an earlier conception of truth in which altheia borders on lthe
(oblivion or forgetting): Thus, Aletheia (+) does not stand on one side and
Lethe () on the other. Rather, an intermediate zone develops between the
poles, in which Aletheia approaches Lethe and vice versa. Negativity is not
isolated from Being. It borders the truth and forms its inseparable shadow.
The two antithetical powers are thus not contradictory but tend toward each
other. The positive tends toward the negative, which, in a way, denies it but
cannot maintain itself in its absence (Detienne, Masters, 82).
53 Hubert Damisch suggests that perspective involves a passing from the
point of view of the subject to that of the eye via the technique of the vanishing
point, and states that this passing is analogous to linguistic usages that allow us
to change person in a sentence, permitting us to pass from I to you or he,
and from the subject of a statement to that of the speaker (Hubert Damisch,
The Origin of Perspective, 51).
54 Betty Goodwin, A Bloodstream of Images: An Interview with Betty
Goodwin, interview by Robert Enright, Border Crossings 14, no. 4 (Fall 1995):
4253, here p. 48.
55 Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 97. The term pull also likely connects to
the notion of allure she presents later in the poem via Husserl. See my note
27 above.
56 In an essay on Aristotles Poetics, Anne Carson refers to the use of the
second person in Sappho: we are her. The second person singular verbs of
the poem locate us within some woman by calling her you Anne Carson,
Just for the Thrill: Sycophantizing Aristotles Poetics, Arion: A Journal of
Humanities and the Classics 1, no. 1 (Dec 2001): 14254, here 147.
57 Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 97101.
58 Martin Heidegger, The Origin, 52.
59 Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 99.
60 Ibid., 101.
61 Carson seems to be making the connection between the abjectness of the
tortured and the senile via Elaine Scarry, in The Body in Pain, after comparing
torture to pain inflicted in religious contexts, who explicitly distinguishes

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torture from the pain of aging, where the absence of the world from oneself
can be understood as an inversion of the eventual but unexperiencable
absence of oneself from the world, 34.
62 Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 97.
63 Ibid., 98, 99. Elsewhere, Carson offers an extensive theorization of the
gift. In Economy of the Unlost, Carson compares two modes of exchange:
commodification and gift-giving. Commodity form, she says, fragments
and dehumanizes human being, 19. A gift, in contrast, is an act of communication that offers an extension of the interior of the giver, both in space
and in time, into the interior of the receiver, 18. A gift has both economic
and spiritual content, is personal and reciprocal, and depends on a relationship that endures over time, 12. To give thoughts, and specifically to
give thoughts as they are articulated in the works of writers, is to activate an
understanding of language as an intimate force.
64 Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York:
Charles Scribners Sons, 1958), 43.
65 Roland Barthes, From Work to Text, in Image Music Text, trans.
Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 15564, here p. 164.
Jacqueline Plante has written an essay linking the idea of Utopia to Gilles
Deleuzes notion of becoming, arguing that Carsons Autobiography of Red is
utopian in order to extend the subversive activity of literature. See
Jacqueline Plante, In the Spirit of Process: A Braiding Together of New
Utopianism, Gilles Deleuze, and Anne Carson, in The Influence of Imagination:
Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy as Agents of Social Change, ed. Lee Easton and
Randy Schroeder ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2008), 17482. Below, I
too connect Carson to Deleuzes thought in relation to arts subversive
activity, but focus on what Deleuze says about the image as he describes how
literature can move us away from representationalism and correspondence
models of truth.
66 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(New York: Vintage Books, 1970), xv. The Borges passage with which

Foucault opens his book is well known, but worth citing again: This passage
quotes a certain Chinese encyclopedia in which it is written that animals
are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d)
sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present
classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a
long way off look like flies.
67 Ibid., xviii.
68 Ibid., xvii.
69 Ibid., 54.
70 Amy Hertzog, Images of Thought and Acts of Creation: Deleuze,
Bergson, and the Question of Cinema, In[ ] Visible Culture: An Electronic
Journal of Visual Studies 3 (2000), http://www.rochester.edu/
in_visible_culture/issue3/herzog.htm (accessed July 25, 2011).
71 Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 99.
72 Ils Hugens, Deleuze and Cinema: Moving Images and Movements
of Thought, Image and Narrative 18 (2007), http://www.
imageandnarrative.be/thinking_pictures/huygens.htm (accessed
December 15, 2012). Hugens is echoing Michel Foucault, who in the The
Order of Things writes, by positing resemblance as the link between signs
and what they indicate sixteenth-century knowledge condemned
itself to never knowing anything but the same thing. Michel Foucault,
The Order of Things, 30.
73 Gilles Deleuze, Difference, 131.
74 Ibid., 131.
75 Ibid., 132.
76 Ibid., 136.
77 Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 19531974 (Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e): 2004), 92.
78 Ibid., 139.
79 Michel Foucault, Order, xv.

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