Operacionalización de Variables y Matriz de Consistencia

The final chapter of the Studio, titled “The Education of a Photographer,” attempts to resolve pictorialism’s moral and social antagonism with painting. Robinson returns to the theme of the sublime. He moves from pedagogy (formal and moral) back to aesthetic philosophy. Robinson re-affirms the central tenant of the text – photography can be learned. But then Robinson argues that beyond technical facility lies the un-teachable realm of art. Here things become pedagogically contradictory. Robinson writes:

The study of art in its most comprehensive sense is, doubtless, the work of a lifetime; but there are one or two initial truths that should be clearly understood, and thoroughly impressed on the mind of the student. First, that very little art can be taught. Second, that

the chief portions of art which can be taught consist in tolerably definite and simple rules and principles easily understood and remembered, and not difficult to apply. These rules are to art what grammar is to literature. They will no more enable the painter to paint a Transfiguration than grammar taught Shakespeare how to write Hamlet; but neither the great picture nor the great poem could have been produced without, on the one hand, a knowledge of composition, and on the other an acquaintance with the construction of the English language. And third, that after the mastering of certain rules, art studies chiefly consist in constant observation and appreciation of the beauties of nature and art, and in attempts to realize in practice these beauties, aided by the principles and rules before acquired.152

There is a tension at play between what can be taught, under the sign of “principles,” “rules,” and “grammar,” and a comprehensive talent to make art. For Robinson, art in the last instance cannot be taught. Rules of composition – grammar – can be taught. But the study of art comes under the tutelage of nature. Rules are useful for the conversion of observations gleaned from the “beauties of nature” into representations. But knowledge of rules alone, cautions Robinson, is not enough to make art. There is an obvious contradiction: the student must first set about “mastering” rules and principles of composition in order to see the beauties of nature compositionally. The demarcation that Robinson makes between observation and practice is in this way a false one: to observe the beauties of nature as Robinson expects necessitates mastering the aesthetics or grammar of art. Robinson seeks a resolution to the contradiction via an elaboration of the aesthetic philosophy of William Thompson (1819-1890).

In An Outline of the Necessary Laws of Thought of 1879, Thompson discusses the rules of logic as a means to examine the nature of human reasoning. Robinson quotes the following: “The whole of every science may be made the subject of teaching. Not so with art; much of it is not teachable.”153

Robinson in fact misquotes Thompson or more exactly puts words in his mouth. Thompson does say: “The whole of science may be made the subject of teaching.” But he does not follow by concluding: “Not so with art; much of it is not teachable.”154 Those words are

Robinson’s. What Thompson does say is that logic is like art, but logic differs in one key respect. Whereas logic is a conscious operation, art is bound up with “the notion of unconsciousness.”155 Thompson continues: “The man of science possesses principles, but the artist, not the less nobly gifted on that account, is possessed and carried away by them.”156

Further clarifying his point, he writes: “Shakespeare is admitted to be a consummate artist, but no one means by this that his plays were composed only to develop a certain express theory of Dramatic Poetry.”157

Thompson then goes on to quote philosopher William Whewell (1719-1866), who notes: “The truths on which the success of Art depends, lurk in the artist’s mind in an underdevelopedstate – guiding his hand, stimulating his invention, balancing his judgment, but not appearing in the form of enunciated propositions.”158

Thompson serves as a philosophical buttress for Robinson’s claim that art is on the whole un-teachable. Since the special knowledge that the artist possesses is unconscious, it cannot be consciously transmitted in the form of clear pedagogical principles and rules of mastery. So even though Robinson misquotes Thompson, who bases his argument on Whewell, he appears to hold

153

Quote attributed to Thompson, in Robinson, The Studio and What to Do in It, 139.

154 _{William Thompson, An Outline of the Necessary Forms of Thought: A Treatise on Pure and Applied Logic (New}

York: Sheldon and Company, 1879), 29.

155

Thompson, An Outline of the Necessary Forms of Thought, 29.

156 _{Thompson, An Outline of the Necessary Forms of Thought, 29.} 157 _{Thompson, An Outline of the Necessary Forms of Thought, 29.} 158 _{Thompson, An Outline of the Necessary Forms of Thought, 29.}

to the spirit of Thompson and Whewell’s point: the knowledge of art is instinctual or unconscious and hence cannot be taught. In a conventional sense, education demands that things be clearly teachable and as such that pedagogy – its contents and its transmission – be fully amenable to conscious learning. But if art is a matter of the unconscious, then it cannot be taught consciously and conscientiously.

Art, as a teachable subject, might then be said to constitute the center and the aporia of Robinson’s pedagogic project. It is at once the heart of Robinson’s pedagogy of pictorialism and its recalcitrant and resistant kernel. This tension between the unconscious and education is explored in depth by Shoshana Felman. In “Psychoanalysis and Education,” Felman notes that the unconscious names the “discovery that human discourse can by definition never be entirely in agreement with itself, entirely identical to its knowledge of itself, since as the vehicle of unconscious knowledge, it is constitutively the material locus of a signifying difference from itself.”159

For Felman, psychoanalysis remains at bottom “a critique of pedagogy.”160 The resistance of the unconscious marks every pedagogical endeavor. Read in terms of Robinson’s pedagogic project, “art” is the term that auto-critiques or deconstructs the possibility of a pedagogy of pictorialism. This deconstructive fissure marks finally the “I” that carries Robinson’s authorial authority – the sign of Robinson qua explicator. This “I” fits the profile of what Jacques Lacan terms “the subject supposed to know.”161

Lacan develops the idea of “the subject supposed to know” through a discussion of Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave. Lacan transposes Hegel’s terms: the psychoanalyst is

159 _{Shoshana Felman, “Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable” Yale French Studies,}

No. 63(1982): 21-44, 28.

160 _{Felman, “Psychoanalysis and Education,” 28. Italics are in the original.}

161 _{Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII, trans. Russell}

positioned as a master in that the analyst is “supposed to know,” but, Lacan argues, it is the analysand, the object of the master’s gaze, who makes this supposition unconsciously. In seeking out a psychoanalyst, the analysand has already answered to an interpellative solicitation which auto-positions the psychoanalyst as the master, or the subject who is “supposed to know,” what is wrong with the analysand. Even before the analysand sits down with the psychoanalyst, the scene of interpellation has already occurred and the position of mastery has been assigned to the psychoanalyst. Mastery in Lacan’s sense is not an attribute the psychoanalyst has innately; it is a position (of power and knowledge) that the psychoanalyst occupies as a function of an institutional discourse (the psychoanalytic discourse) and the interpellation that this discourse accomplishes.

It is insignificant whether or not the one who assumes the master’s position is actually a master. The master does not need to have knowledge to be a master. The master merely occupies the position of the master. Lacan puts the matter humorously by noting that student teachers know first-hand that one can play the role of a master while knowing very little about a given subject. Lacan writes: “It was students at the Ecole normale [supérieure]…these little princes of the university who know quite well that you don’t have to know something in order to teach it.”162

As Lacan scholar Bruce Fink notes, “the master is unconcerned with knowledge: as long as his or her power is maintained or grows, all is well.”163

Lacan uses the example of citation to help illustrate the paradoxical nature of the master’s discourse.

When one cites Marx or Freud – I haven’t chosen these names by chance – one does so as a function of the part the supposed reader takes in a discourse. The citation is in its own

162 _{Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 26.}

163 _{Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press,}

way also a half-said. It is a statement about which someone is indicating to you that it is admissible only insofar as you already participate in a certain structured discourse.164

Here Lacan is doing a bit of autobiography. When Lacan cites Marx or Freud he invokes their authority on the presumption that his readers (and auditors) are already participating in the discourse of his version of psychoanalysis in which these names have already assumed the status of masters.165

Citation in Robinson’s text functions similarly. In quoting Thompson, Robinson’s text invests his name and discourse with mastery, which recursively lends authority to Robinson’s “I.” The citation of Thompson is a philosophical alibi that supports the supposition of mastery that the reader invests in the Studio, which itself is a function of the reader having already presumed that Robinson’s name signifies a master who is supposed to know what photography is and how one is to become a photographer. Robinson’s text sets his “I” up as a master, but Robinson the person in fact has no mastery over this position. The position of mastery is discursively produced by virtue of the fact that the Studio is a bona fide instructional manual. The genre of the text qua instructional manual positions Robinson’s “I” as an instructor supposed to know—a master of pictorialist photography. This position is ascribed by an automatic discursive function. In this sense, Robinson, like every supposed master, is in effect mastered by the discourse of mastery itself.