The authors reply

The analysis of the Christ statue was part of our effort to outline a structure of temporal instability at work in the painting as a whole, a structure that, we argued, was in part modeled on exegetical procedures going back to Augustine himself. Our reading thus offers a conceptual framework for the many erudite exegeses of the picture that have been presented. It arose from an effort to go beyond an analysis of the picture's meaning or program and instead to understand the picture itself as a metacommentary on the temporal operations of images, artifacts, books, music--the whole array of human arts whose limits are exposed in the story of Augustine's vision. Hence, our emphasis on the picture's elaborate citational structure, the recursive pattern that runs through the painting and whose logic inexorably absorbs the painting itself.

We concur with virtually everything Claire Farago says about disciplinary responsibility and self-awareness and about the ideological force of the discourse of chronological reason, obviously one of the foundational self-legitimating discourses of the West. We do not actually feel addressed by her critique. She speaks of "the context of the discussion in which Wood and Nagel wish to participate" as disengaged from politics and society at large. Which "context of discussion" is that? Our text explicitly signaled its connection to Benjamin's reception of Surrealism, and in general to a body of highly creative prewar thinking about the temporality of the figure. Surrealism is negatively inscribed within the neo-enlightened, liberal (in the European sense) scholarship of the postwar period. The wearisome debates about the periodization of the Renaissance that dominated American scholarship from the 1940s to the 1970s and, in general, the orthodoxies and pieties of postwar scholarship emerged out of the context of world war and emigration. One might hesitate before describing the scholarship of the emigres, even the Renaissance scholars among them, as politically "disengaged."

To take up Farago's excellent challenge: Saint Augustine's study is indeed our study. the modern scholar who recognizes him- or herself in the Carpaccio painting must be prepared to see the world through its temporal kaleidoscope. The Renaissance studiolo proves to be an inhospitable setting for the lucid differentiations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship. The continuity between Carpaccio's painting and the model we have proposed is already implicit in the art system of our own time. The art system today theorizes itself as postautonomous, in the sense that art is located no longer in a discrete object but rather in a network of display, commentary, mediation, and theorization. This is the place where our paper is written from, and from such a vantage point it starts to look as if historical art was always already dispersed in networks. It seems obvious today that the work of art was a fragile historical construction; that the campaign to secure a concept of "pure visibility" that might underlie the institution of the artwork was never really won; and that the forces and conflicts that shaped the idea of the artwork are still legible in the artworks. A chronologically rationalist approach, as Farago suggests, will not help very much in understanding the historical processes of cancellation, condensation, and misremembering that created the institution of the artwork. Our effort to excavate the anachronic underhistory of the work of art is therefore by its nature a challenge to enlightened historical models.