Conclusion

One word is enough to light up an image; one image can refashion language. The work of Joaquín Torres-García proved the occasion to come to grips with the “immanence of thought in sensible matter” (Rancière 2004, 43). It makes us feel the contradictory demands of words and images – ‘sensible matter’ – in a manner that keeps the logic of the example at bay. Put differently, the reading tactic of emblematics – a precarious quasi-method – that grew out of this confrontation attempts to counter the disciplining function of Torres-García’s discursive architecture and its attempt to confront the enigmatic ‘muteness’ of visuality. Torres-García’s theories are the means to legitimate a praxis that in the end proved so disobedient or, rather, indifferent to the rhetorical function of illustration or exemplification. ¹ “Linguistic tropes change the status of the pictorial elements” (Rancière 2007, 81): as I have argued, Torres-García’s system is the index of the inverse as it registers the anxiety of ‘pictorial elements’ muddling ‘linguistic tropes.’ In fact, what makes Torres-García’s oeuvre so fascinating is precisely the gulf between the claim to mastery and the indifference of the work’s materiality, a gap that opens up new visibilities and legibilities. Both stand in a relation of contestation and come together in temporary, unstable constellations.