T. J. Clark and the Fiction of Individuality

Paul Cézanne, House and Tree, L'Hermitage (1874-75)

T. J. Clark is one of my favorite writers. I want to stress that at the outset. But there’s an aspect of his thinking that bugs me. He contends that the individual subjectivity of the artist is a fiction. In his otherwise brilliant “Strange Apprentice” (London Review of Books, October 8, 2020), a comparative analysis of Cézanne and Pissarro, he writes,

I said that these painters believed the world had somehow to happen to a picture – impinge on it, touch it. This ultimately is the point of the ‘tache’. It puts us back in the moment when the world occurs to the sensorium; and at that point it isn’t clear to the painting subject whether the occurrence is something made by the mind – by the mind’s eye – or entirely a material event, an actual unstoppable touch of light on the receptor evolved to receive it. Is the ‘tache’ transitive or intransitive, in other words? It is certainly a made thing, but made by what ... by whom?

He further states:

This brings us back to Schapiro and the question of individualism. Both Cézanne and Pissarro put their trust in the idea that their painting was founded on truth to their own irreducible ‘petite sensation’. But what the ‘petite sensation’ was remained for them a mystery. This was the great thing that painting was meant to find out. Yes, it was ‘mine’; but as I made the actual marks that were my seeing (‘Je vois, par taches’), I came to understand that in some sense it did not belong to me at all – or at least to the ‘me’ of the mind, of subjectivity. It, the ‘sensation’, was the contact – the deep structure of the contact – between sensorium and surrounding. Unique to each individual, doubtless, but full of a materiality, an exposure to the exterior, that put individuality at risk.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find that a weird bit of magical thinking, especially the part in the second passage when Clark suddenly starts talking as if he’s Cézanne. “I came to understand that in some sense it did not belong to me at all – or at least to the ‘me’ of the mind, of subjectivity” – those are Clark’s words, not Cézanne’s. Clark is doing more here that just putting words in Cézanne’s mouth.  He’s questioning the existence of Cézanne’s individual subjectivity. This isn’t the first time he’s done this. In a previous piece, also on Cézanne, he wrote, “The sadness and tension and confinement in Cézanne, I’ve been proposing, are all bound up with the ultimate fiction, ‘individuality’ ” (“Relentless Intimacy,” London Review of Books, January 25, 2018).

I find this view puzzling. For one thing, it offends common sense. It’s Cézanne’s sensorium that is making contact with his surroundings. And it’s Cézanne who is making the marks. The idea that Pool at Jas de Bouffin, say, or House and Tree, L’Hermitage somehow occurred without any operation of Cézanne’s mind is crazy. Cézanne as a brainless Tin Man on automatic pilot, standing at his easel without a thought of what he’s doing or how he’s doing it? Come on! It contradicts Clark’s own thesis – that Cézanne apprenticed himself to Pissarro “to unlearn his first style.” That “unlearn” suggests a mind intent on stylistic change. Style is an unmistakable, idiosyncratic, formally coherent personal way of doing something. It implies individuality. Clark’s denial of it is perplexing.