La peur de la couleur

CHROMOPHOBIA

This book is surprising from the title onward, both forward and backward. No matter how you take it you are going to be both excited like hell and disappointed like standing in front of the gate of the Messianic Jerusalem. There is so little to see there. But I read it from cover to cover and I guess I am going to make a few remarks. For me “color” and “colors” are not to be debated. I have known Daltonian people who were entirely colorblind and for them, the world was nothing but a palette of grey or greys all huddled around between white light and black night. I could not even imagine it. And color is for me everywhere. In my latest dream, last night, bright green leaves were falling from I don't know where and those who picked them up could enter some kind of a means of transportation to go home, but where is home? A long way away, like Tipperary.

No, color is not a philosophical concept despite the color revolutions that lead nowhere. Color is a physical phenomenon. “Color may be a continuum, but the continuum is continuously broken, the indivisible endlessly divided.” (page 86) Yes of course, and this continuum can be exploded by simple refraction. To negate color/colors and reject it/them is as absurd as to reject light. Colorblindness is a handicap, just like plain blindness. To reveal color and colors, you just need to refract a beam of light in a refracting prism of glass, and you can then see the continuum and the various stripes, which have no clear limits, of what we consider different colors. And I will start from there. Light is a vast band of wavelengths that vary by so little a difference from one wavelength to the next that you cannot really say you have shifted from one color to the next, at best, from one hue to another. Is one nanometer the possible change? Why should it be since this nanometer is a measurement invented by man and not naturally available in nature?

Note the limit between ultraviolet and violet is fuzzy, the same way as it is between infrared and red. This is due to the human eye. Officially ultraviolet and infrared are invisible, but they vary with various individuals. This is typical of the vision of colors. What is blue for some is green for others and in many languages and cultures blue and green are one color, like for the Mayas who have only one word for “blue,” “green,” “blue-green,” and “first,” and the word is “YAX.”

YAX (yax) (T16) 1> adjective "green" 2> adjective "blue" 3> adjective "blue-green" 4> adjective "first."

It corresponds to the color of jade, a sacred color because it is the rock from which sacrificial knives are made. The same color can be found with other Indians in America, and it is turquoise for us. Strangely enough, these stones, or these minerals are sacred and as such cannot be fooled around with. We can clearly see that this non-distinction between blue and green is then connected with cultural elements, some being religious. To shed blood, including one's own blood, was seen, by these Indians as a religious act, feeding the Gods with the blood they gave us to create our species. Such examples are neglected or minored by the author, like the two basic colors in Vietnamese, wet and dry. Colors are a natural phenomenon vastly studied in the physics of light but the distinction or separation between two colors is vastly cultural and thus variable. But, once again, to reject color and colors is nothing but a psychiatric or psychological handicap because our eyes are naturally able to capture the wave variations in light. How big a variation is the real question, and we probably are not all equal?

In the various professions that deal with color and colors, the wavelength of the standard hue of each color is clearly defined. If we consider what I have just said, it is clear that white is not really a color since the wavelengths of all the colors, of the entire spectrum are necessary to produce white. In other words, and in a way, white is a play on words and wavelengths. In the same way, black is not a color since it is the absence of light, hence it does not have a wavelength. But it is not that simple. In nature, any object or item, alive or mineral, absorbs the wavelength corresponding to its or their color/colors and reflects these radiations and we catch them and that's how an object, or an animal, or anything is that particular color. Black absorbs no radiation at all, and white absorbs them all. Black does not reverberate a wavelength that does not exist and white reverberates them all.

There are some variations in basic colors. In painting three colors are basic: red, blue, and yellow, but black and white are seen as colors. In Video and cinema or TV art, the three basic colors are red, blue, and green. And in these industries, they may have surprises. In the film Batman Returns (1992) Batman and the Penguin could not be on the set together. So, they filmed Batman first and the Penguin second. The lights had been set for Batman who is dressed in Black. When the Penguin finally arrived on the set underground, instead of appearing in white, his costume appeared to be orange. All the lights had to be reset for the camera to capture the white costume of the Penguin as being white. The chief light engineer explained in a professional magazine what he had to do. What we are speaking of here is pure physics. But before, we were speaking culture, and to speak of the basic colors in various arts and artistic practices is first of all cultural. We can even wonder why we only state three colors. For the Mayas, there were three, four, and five basic colors, all connected together as the five cardinal points.
[...]
What is surprising is the “objective” tone of David Batchelor who is telling an enormous crime against humanity that went on with genocide and systematic exploitation of more than 80% of the world as if it were a simple story about how the West was chosen by the highest authorities in the cosmos to conquer and dominate the whole humanity. And he does not hesitate to push his fishing corks and hooks up to the year 2000. And it is the same story with Mikhail Bakhtin, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Salman Rushdie, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. And he dares conclude on this very segregational theme of his with a quotation from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

“… it is also worthy of remark, that savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid [My emphasis] colors; that animals are excited to rage by certain colors; that people of refinement avoid vivid [My emphasis] colors in their dress and the objects that are about them and seem inclined to banish them altogether from their presence.” [Note 13: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of colors, trans. C.L. Eastlake (Cambridge, MA and London, 1970), p.55] (page 112)

Charles Lock Eastlake committed this translation in 1840, and that makes it slightly questionable 180 years later since we do not speak the same language any more. The original by Goethe himself in Zur Farbenlehre, 1810, is the concluding section 135 of the first part of the book, “Erste Abteilung - Physiologische Farben.”

135. Endlich ist noch bemerkenswert, dass wilde Nationen, ungebildete Menschen, Kinder eine große Vorliebe für lebhafte [Meine Betonung] Farben empfinden, dass Tiere bei gewissen Farben in Zorn geraten, dass gebildete Menschen in Kleidung und sonstiger Umgebung die lebhaften [Meine Betonung] Farben vermeiden und sie durchgängig von sich zu entfernen suchen.

I will not question the equivalence between “wild” and “savage” though “savage” carries a derogatory meaning in its Latin root. I will question the couple “uneducated – of refinement” for the German couple “ungebildete Menschen – gebildete Menschen.” The concept of “refinement” carries a positive meaning that rejects “uneducated” into some derogatory meaning. The German couple is more objective about one single concept, the first word negative and the second word positive. I insist it is the same concept, “unconstructed – constructed” or “uneducated – educated” or “unelaborate – elaborate,” the idea that on one side some process of complexification did not take place and on the other side it did take place. Maybe education leads to refinement, but refinement is a positive behavioral term whereas educated is the positive side of the negative side of the same concept, that of education. But the main objection to this translation comes from “lebhaft.” Though “vivid” is connected to the Latin root for “life,” it is not directly connected to the standard English concept of “life,” and the German version uses the word twice and its root is “Leben,” the verb or the noun. The translation uses a word that refers to the flashy brightness of the colors, not the fact that they are directly connected with life as is implied in German where the adjectival suffix “-haft” means “endowed with,” in this case “endowed with life.” Goethe was often using his words with great care. When in the concluding verses of the Second Faust he says the future of man is woman, he uses for “woman” the old neuter root “das Weib” instead of the more modern feminine root “die Frau” and in this case again in the form of the adjective “weiblich,” amplified as the fourth rhyming “-liche” line ending. These four rhymes are the echo of the final stage of Faust's soul's salvation by four women, Mater Gloriosa presiding over three “Büsserinnen” (penitent women): Magna Peccatrix, Mulier Samaritana, and Maria Aegyptiaca.

CHORUS MYSTICUS:
Alles Vergängliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnis;
Das Unzulängliche,
Hier wird's Ereignis;
Das Unbeschreibliche,
Hier ist's getan;
Das Ewig-Weibliche [Meine Betonung]
Zieht uns hinan.

I was surprised by the fact that the note attached to section 135 of Zur Farbenlehre is not given by David Batchelor, though this note from the 19th-century translator clearly implies Goethe did not like this conclusion and at the time, developments, in science particularly, were more circumspect.

Goethe's book contains various illustrations on colors and how to obtain them from light by refraction with a circular approach to the set of basic colors like in the two following images at least inspired by Goethe. We can note how the three basic colors in painting and video art build a David's star and that cannot be a coincidence (though the way it works is not pre-determined, from David to color or from color to David?).

But read the note and you'll see that even then it was not that clear white was the supreme dominant color, though, of course, the fact Batchelor demonstrates is true: in the colonial and imperialistic vision Europe developed in the 19th century after the Independence of the USA and when European countries decided to colonize Africa, and Asia, more or less abandoning Latin America to the USA, provided they did not touch Canada, is absolutely true and dominated by the supremacy of the white race, hence of everything white.

“NOTE I.— Par. 135. The author more than once admits that this chapter on "Pathological Colors" is very incomplete and expresses a wish (Par. 734) that some medical physiologists would investigate the subject further. This was afterward to a great degree accomplished by Dr. Johannes Müller, in his memoir "Über die Phantastischen Gesichtserscheinungen." Coblentz, 1826. Similar phenomena have been also investigated with great labor and success by Purkinje. For a collection of extraordinary facts of the kind recorded by these writers, the reader may consult Scott's Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft.[ 1] The instances adduced by Müller and others are, however, intended to prove the inherent capacity of the organ of vision to produce light and colors. In some maladies of the eye, the patient, it seems, suffers the constant presence of light without external light. The exciting principle, in this case, is thus proved to be within, and the conclusion of the physiologists is that external light is only one of the causes which produce luminous and colored impressions. That this view was anticipated by Newton may be gathered from the concluding "query" in the third book of his Optics. [1] See also a curious passage on the beatific vision of the monks of Mount Athos, in Gibbon, chap. 63.” (Quoted from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe's Theory of Colors (Kindle Locations 4952-4965). Kindle Edition.)

This note opens up questions that should have been considered by David Batchelor but that would have forced him to consider the imperialistic and colonialistic approach for what it was, and still is, a crime against humanity after being a crime against science. The West in its 21st century twilight needs more courage to morally evaluate and historically assess its responsibility in the present political, economic, and environmental crisis.

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Lien : https://jacquescoulardeau.me..