[Please allow me to post this incomplete version of the probe (I still don’t know what Hay is talking about), the final version of which will be up by Monday. As can be seen, my main concern is that Hay’s thought process needs explaining; not how he got to his conclusions, but how he got to how he got to his conclusions.]

Two things stand out from Jonathan Hay’s masterpiece, The Value of Forgery. First, that a forgery is still a forgery once it is recognized as such. Second, that a forgery can be visually detected. I shall start with the second point.

The detection of forgery is complex and infraempirical. “The visual effect of a forgery is by definition always at least slightly off” (14). Moreover, the connoisseur’s detection of this itself can be misrecognized. But the bottom line is that the connoisseur first senses that something is amiss – i.e. “The connoisseur registers visual effect as affect, sensing a gap between the claim of affect that a work makes and its actual effect” – and then recognizes the empirical proofs of forgery. However, we must not omit that visible clues also come before this sensing, “because the connoisseur’s instinct is based on the internalization of a long experience of visible clues of forgery” (14).

In other words, Hay’s theoretical masterpiece affirms that there are empirical characteristics in the work itself which make it a forgery, and that these aspects are there before there is even a doubt as to whether the work is genuine or not. Interestingly, the connoisseur at first only communicates with the superempirical of an artwork (15).

A forgery, therefore, is always a forgery. Connoisseurs merely misrecognize their experience of the forgery; though they may sense that something is “slightly off” (14) because of their precognitive recognition of the visual markers of forgery, they may not cognitively be capable of ascertaining that this sensation is caused by the work’s being a forgery, or even so, they might be unable to cognitively identify the visual characteristics of forgery which are always there.

The conditions of success of a forgery are therefore either of the following:
a) a connoisseur will not feel disjunctive affect when he should; not a single connoisseur will ever feel disjunctive affect (a statistical anomaly);
b )all connoisseurs will feel disjunctive affect, but won’t identify the forgery;
c) some connoisseurs will feel disjunctive affect, but won’t identify the forgery;
d) some connoisseurs will identify the forgery, but won’t be believed by others (the work for some, a forgery, for others, genuine).

Let us be reminded that in response to the communication of a genuine work, a connoisseur may still feel a disjunctive affect, which the genuine work would ”declare” (14) as theatricality or irony. This is in contrast to the “undeclared affective disjunction” resultant from a forgery. We are put in the situation where what is termed a forgery might in fact be an as-of-yet unidentified genuine work (as the declaration of the disjunctive affect remains unheard).

In the case of an affective disjunction, then, when does the search for a declaration end? If the disjunctive affect is identified as undeclared, does that leave the work in a limbo between genuine and forgery? It would not simply be “under review”; the review would have been done: thus the work would have no possibility of being identified as genuine, yet would not yet have been identified as a forgery. For this not to be the case, it would have to be accepted that the undeclared disjunctive affect felt as a result of the communication of a forgery can also be felt as a result of the communication of a genuine work, which itself would imply one of the following two: either that this sensation is a legitimate component of the experiencing of a genuine work, a situation which would dismiss Hay’s argument altogether as delusional; or, that the disjunctive affect is simply not a particular characteristic of the connoisseur’s experiencing either of a forgery or for doubt as to the genuineness of a work, a situation which simply dismantles Hay’s argument and leaves us without any means of identifying a forgery.

My argument hinges here on Hay’s claim that the undeclared disjunctive affect can never be identified positively as undeclared, and that the final giving up and acceptance of a disjunctive affect as undeclared Hay has not positively stated as in itself (the acceptance) a positive characteristic of the forgery, Hay saying rather that the only way a forgery can be positively identified is by the empirical features in the artwork itself.

How here should we think about Hay’s thought? Should I describe it in positive characteristics?

Hay does not take into account this situation of acceptance of the undeclared nature of a disjunctive affect by connoisseurs. (What do I imply here? That there is a group of connoisseurs who decide for the human language which object “is” a “forgery”, which is “genuine”, and that a same object’s term of reference may be changed at their will. I also imply that there is a universally accepted notion, first, of universal acceptance, second, of object and sign.). Second, for Hay the way to identify a forgery is not to start out looking for signs of forgery in an artwork. Hay also does not specify whether, after experiencing a non-disjunctive affect – a junctive affect? – one should then look for the empirical features of a genuine work in order to identify the work as genuine. Furthermore, if the empical features of a genuine work were different from those of a forgery, one would be hard-pressed to figure out the rationale for Hay’s insistence on its being essential to the identification of forgeries for the precognitive registering of disjunctive affect to preceed any investigation into a work’s empirical features.

How, then, is Hay thinking? The empirical features of a forgery do not then seem to be positive ones. (It seems that the undeclared disjunctive affect proves the existence of the forgery, but, that only the empirical features of the forgery, once recognized (if not identified, which would be a whole new set of problems, because what are the empirical features specific to the empirical features specific to forgeries) do finally make true the identity of the work as forgery: and also it was a forgery all along.

Hay is operating one two levels: the level of the connoisseur’s experience, and the level of the object (the forgery); and the identification of the forgery must proceed first through the experience of the connoisseur (is this itself an empirical feature), though this experience was already caused by the empirical features which can only have any significance (should I use that word?) in Hay’s thought after the experience which they directly cause (“the connoisseur’s instinct is based on the internalization of a long experience of visible clues of authenticity and forgery” (14). Notice how, though Hay says that visible clues come before the registering of affect, he does not explicitly say that in this specific instance of looking at the work the visible clues cause the connoisseur’s sensation. There is therefore a fundamental disconnect between the artwork as empirical object and the connoisseur. Hay puts it this way:

the connoisseur’s first impression can be said to establish a direct relation between the superempirical (the indeterminacy and potential that is channeled into form by the artifact) and the infra-empirical (bodily perception, nonconscious sensation). It brackets out empirical observation and conscious perception as such, even as it makes use of them. What the connoisseur registers affectively [in a forgery] is a mismatch betwen the superempirical that she senses infra-empirically and its channeling into form that she sees empirically. (15, emphases mine)

These notions look all too much like get-out-of-jail-free cards.

Cited:

Hay, Jonathan. “Editorial: The Value of Forgery.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53/54 (2008): 5-19