There is an essay by Berger, although I forget where, in which he suggests that a painting, a significant painting, is not so much a record of an appearance but of an act of seeing. A photo has trapped an appearance, rent it from time and context, and flattened it into something like a fact or factum brutum. The painted image is not a copy, not even a copy of the act of seeing. The painting, its rhythms, its inner constitution, the decisions that have knit it together – all these are the act or process of seeing. “Every painted image announces: ‘I have seen this’.” The photo copies ‘reality’, where reality is the world firmly and securely accommodated in and by language. To really see something involves breaking through this ‘reality’, searching beyond it, and this process is indissociable from what is before us on the canvas.
Rilke once said that everything that has truly been seen must become a poem. It must, we might put it, break through into poetry. But what is really being said here, surely, is that its ‘being seen’ is incomplete until it reaches or achieves poetry. The poem is its final and condign lodging.
Perhaps what both Berger and Rilke are talking about is the presence of a thing. The presence of a thing cannot be captured by photographic facsimile. The photo skims of precisely what is reproducible about the thing. Recognisable. That which is answerable to the Other. The painting or poem accommodates the ‘aura’ of the thing.
This seems to be the subject matter of one of Berger’s finest pieces of work, "Will it Be a Likeness", initially a radio programme performed by Berger and Simon McBurney. It is a programme about the presence and silence that adheres to things and the denial or emptying out of this presence by commerce and by the perpetual migration of reality into a series of representations; the fate of presence in an age when “everything everywhere on the planet is for sale.” The latter mentality, of universal buyability, or commodification, is given insistent voice in Berger’s essay:
‘Pure mystification! What you can’t, in principle, buy or sell, doesn’t exist! This is what we know for certain. What you’re talking about is your personal phantasm – to which of course you have every right. Without phantasms there would be no consumers, and we’d be back with the apes.”
What exists outside this kind of language is, increasingly, pushed, under duress, into what sounds like mysticism or madness. It is bullied into silence by the absolutism of profit, or its own proper and integral silence is inundated by impatient noise.
One of the signal and enduring qualities of Berger’s prose is the protective silence it builds around itself, the cordon of silence with which it insulates itself from the insistent noise of the world, the precious Nothing which is its stony rejoinder to the fanaticism of ‘how much?’.