art since 1900

modernism antimodernism postmodernism with 637 illustrations, 413 in color

hal foster rosalind krauss yve-alain bois benjamin h.d.buchloh

Thames & Hudson

ntroductions
In these four introductions, tlie authors of Art Since 1900 set out sonne of the theoretical methods of franning the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Each describes the historical developnnent of a particular methodology and explains its relevance to the production and reception of the art qf the period.

he last hundred years or so have witnessed several rriajor shifts in both private and public debates about art, its nature, and its functions. These shifts need to be considered in terms of other histories, too: with the emergence of new academic disciplines, new ways of thinking and speaking about cultural production coexist with new modes of expression. We have written the following methodological introductions in order to identify and analyze the different conventions, approaches, and intellectual projects that underpin our project as a whole. Our intention has been to present the diverse theoretical frameworks that can be found in the book and to explain their relationship to the works and practices discussed in the individual entries. Forthat reason, each introduction begins with an overview of the mode of criticism, setting it firmly in its historical and intellectual context, before proceeding to a brief discussion of its relevance to the production and interpretation of art. Whether these introductions are read as stand-alone essays or in conjunction with other texts dealing with the individual modes of criticism, they will inform and enhance understanding in ways that allow each reader to develop an individual approach to the book and to the art of the period.

14

D.

sychoanalysis in modernism and as method

Z)

sychoanalysis was developed by Sigmund Freud (18561939) and his followers as a "science of the unconscious" in the early years of the twentieth centur)^ at the same time that

modernist art came into its own. As with the other interpretative methods presented in these introductions, psychoanalysis thus shares its historical ground with modernist art and intersects with it in various ways throughout the twentieth century. First, artists have dra^Mi directly on psychoanalysissometimes to explore its ideas visually, as often in Surrealism in the twenties and thirties, and sometimes to critique them theoretically and politically, as often in A feminism in the seventies and eighties. Second, psychoanalysis and modernist art share several interestsa fascination with origins, with dreams and fantasies, with "the primitive," the child, and the insane, and, more recently, with the workings of subjectivitv' and sexuality^ to name only a few f 1 ]. Third, many psychoanalytic terms have entered the basic vocabular)' of twentieth-century- art and criticism (e.g., repression, sublimation, fetishism, the gaze). Here I will focus on historical connections and methodological applications, and, when appropriate, I will key them, along with critical terms, to entries in which they are discussed.

Historical c o n n e c t i o n s w i t h art Psychoanalysis emerged in the Vienna of artists such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka, during the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. With the secession of such artists from the Art Academy, this was a time of Oedipal revolt in advanced art, with subjective experiments in pictorial expression that drew on regressive dreams and erotic fantasies. Bourgeois
1 H a n n a h H o c h , The Sweet Ethnographic Museum, One, From an x 3:

Vienna did not usually tolerate these experiments, for they suggested a crisis in the stability of the ego and its social institutionsa crisis that Freud was p r o m p t e d to analyze as well. This crisis vs^as hardly specific to Vienna; in terms of its relevance to psychoanalysis, it was perhaps most evident in the attraction to things "primitive" on the part of modernists in France and Germany. For some artists this "primitivism" involved a "going-native" of the sort play-acted by Paul Gauguin in the South Seas. For others it w^as focused on formal revisions of Western conventions of representation, as undertaken, with the
'30:^ 1922. 19S7. l&34a

c. 1926

- r-.-.onon-.age w i t r wate'CO'O', 30 x 1 5.5 i1

' 5 c c l i a g e o n e of a series t h a : c o T C m e s 'oancl ::" ' : c g'"chs of tribal sculpture and m c d e r n .vomen '"^ -l" p:i3y3 o n associations at w o r k in psyctioana:ytic and moaermst a ' l : ideas of "tf':e c r i n i t i v e " and the ' . . 2 . of racial o : r e r s a n s u n c o n s c i o u s desires. Sne o fs fnese associations to suggest t i e p o w e r O'f "tne 's. ' . ' . o T a r . " but sf"e aisc s e e n s t o m o c k ;fiem " exposing if-iem as c o n s t r u c t i o n s . lits'-aliy ..c tne m a g e s , d e c o r s t ' u c t i n g a n d reconstrLCfing

P s y c h o a n a l y s i s in m o d e r n i s m a n d as r n e t f i o d |

Introduction 1

15

2 Meret Oppenheim, O/ecf (also called Teacup and Dejeuner en fourrure), 1936

Fur-Lined

To n a h e s '.vorK, Vere: Cc'pennein sh-^d

sed = 3

saucer, arz: spocn Dough: " ^a'ls w l h t'-e 'ur ct a Ch nsse ga^ei s, VI xing &ttrac:ic:n a-'d reculs on, 2 S' agreeable c1 is jirtesserit ally S^"ealis:. ' c i1

adapts the device of the touna f i i n g to s x c l c e t'-e icea tet.sh," '.vhicri osj'chcana ysis understands as an a powe-tjl desire oive-tec urnli'^eiv Ol: e c -^vssIbs

IrC'T: Its prcpe- a m . ^-ere art aopreciat on 3 rio longer a na:ter o ' d sm-.e'ested :ea'. TS orop'iely: i: s cc dly ."terrupiec: thr^ug"" a s n u l t y allusio'" to ' e n a l e c8-itali8 fnat lorces us to ttiink about "he -ei^tio" cet'.veen aesthetics and e'otics 3 Andre Masson, Figure, 1927 Oil B-:d sand, 46 x 33 r 6 ' - x 13; ;n : r e Surrea practice of "autonat c wrr.ng." :-e author, ^

'eleasea TCT 'a: cnal cont-o , "ICCA dictation" 'ROTI h s or ne' unconscious. Andre Vasson s use of strange rnatenals and gestura rrarks. sometin^es airiest Cisso v ng tne distincdon betiveen :he t g j r e and ttis grounc, suggestec one me-.hod :o pu's^e "psychic a^^torratisn-i/^ opening up painting to new exclora"ions not only o ' t n e unconscious but also of t o r n a'^d its opoos te.

A aid of African objects, by Pablo Picasso a n d H e n r i Matisse in Paris. Yet almost all m o d e r n i s t s projected o n t o tribal peoples a purity of artistic vision that was associated with the simplicity of instinctual life. This projection is the primitivist fantasy par excellence and psychoanalysis participated in it t h e n even as it provides ways to question it now. {For example, Freud saw tribal peoples as s o m e h o w fixed in p r e - O e d i p a l o r infantile stages.) Strange t h o u g h it m a y seem today, for s o m e modernists an interest in tribal objects shaded into involvement with the art of children and of the insane. In this regard. Artistry of the Mentally III (Bildnerei der Geisteskranken), a collection of works by psychotics presented in 1922 by H a n s P r i n z h o r n (1886^1933), a G e r m a n psychiatrist trained in psychoanalysis a n d art h i s t o n ' alike, was of special i m p o r t a n c e to such artists as Paul Kiee, M a x Ernst, a n d lean D u b u f f e t . Most of these m o d e r n i s t s (mis)read the art of the insane as t h o u g h it were a secret part of the primitivist avant-garde, directly expressive of the u n c o n s c i o u s a n d boldly defiant of all convention. H e r e psychoanalysts developed a m o r e complicated u n d e r s t a n d i n g of paranoid representations as projections of desperate order, a n d of schizophrenic images as in m o d e r n i s t art. An i m p o r t a n t line of connection r u n s f r o m the art of the insane, t h r o u g h the early collages of Ernst, to the definition of SurreaUsm as a disruptive "juxtaposition of two m o r e or less disparate realities," as presented by its leader A n d r e Breton [2], Psychoanalysis influenced Surrealism in its conceptions of the image as a kind of dream, understood by Freud as a distorted writing-in-pictures of a displaced wish, and of the object as a sort of s\Tnptom, understood by Freud as a bodih' expression of a conflicted desire; but there are several other affinities as well. A m o n g the first to study Freud, the Surrealists attempted to simulate the effects of madness in automatic v^riting and art alike [3]. In his first "Manifesto of Surrealism" (1924), Breton described Surrealism as a "psychic a u t o m a t i s m , " a liberatory inscription of unconscious impulses "in the absence of any control
l&as 190r '922 1924 IS^Ob '9420

symptoms

of radical self-dislocation. And yet such readings also have parallels

16

I n t r o d u c t i o n 1 | Psychoanalysis in m o d e r n i s m and as m e t h o d

< Karel Appe\, A Figure, 1953 Oil and CD Dred c a v c n s c " oaper. 6 - , 5 x After W o r e vVs' I s" "'.srest

exercised by reason." Yet right here emerges a problem that has

25

dogged the relation between psychoanalysis and art ever since: either the connection between psyche and art \\ ork is posited as too direct or immediate, with the result that the specihcity of the work is lost, or as too conscious or calculated, as t h o u g h the psyche could simply be illustrated by the work. (The other m e t h o d s in this introduction face related problems of mediation a n d questions of causation-, indeed, they vex all art criticism and histon^) Although Freud knew little of modernist art (his taste was conser\^ative, a n d his collection ran to ancient and Asian figurines), he knew enough to be suspicious of both tendencies. In his view, the unconscious was not liberat o n ' o n the contrary-and to propose an art free of repression, or at least convention, was to risk psychopathology, or to pretend to d o so in the n a m e of a psychoanalytic art (this is why he once called the Surrealists "absolute cranks"). Nevertheless, by the early thirties the association of s o m e m o d ernist art with "primitives," children, a n d the insane was set, as was its affinity \snth psychoanalysis. At this time, however, these connections played into the hands of the enemies of this art, most catastrophicaUy the Nazis, w h o in 1937 moved to rid the world A of such "degenerate" abominations, which they also c o n d e m n e d as "lewish" a n d "Bolshevik." Of course, Nazism was a horrific regression of its
OWTI,

:",s unccnscio.-s oe'S

among arfi&ts such 35 the D..tch painTe-- Ka'el Appel, a member of Cob'-a :an c C o - v t for the r o n e oases groupCooennsgs'". B'usssls. Amsterdani, a* Thg s a r e time fne quest or of the osyche v,as refra-red cy :"-e horrors of the death c a r c s a ' d :r-e atomi-; bcmos. Like other groups. Coors c&ne to reject t'^e Freudian unconscious exp orsd cv t'^e Su-rsa' s:s as too individualistic; as cart cf a gere^ai tu-n :o tns ncTicn a "collective u " c o " s c o - s " cevelcoed by Ca-I J ^ - g . r s y explored fcie-r c -'c^res. T y t n c subjects, anc collaborative orajects 1 ar often a-guished searc". ^^ot onlv for a "ns'.v n a r " b^t ' c a rev.- society.

and it cast a pall over explorations of the

unconscious well after W o r l d War II. Varieties of Surrealism lingered on in the postwar period, however, a n d an interest in the u n c o n s c i o u s persisted a m o n g artists associated with art informeU Abstract Expressionism, and Cobra [4]. Yet, rather than the difficult m e c h a n i s m s of the individual psyche explored by Freud, the focus fell on the redemptive archetypes of a "collective u n c o n scious" imagined by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961), a n old apostate of psychoanalysis. (For example, lackson Pollock was involved in Jungian analysis in ways that affected his painting.) Partly in reaction against the subjective rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism, m u c h art of the sixties was staunchly antipsychological, c o n c e r n e d instead with r e a d y - m a d e cultural images, as in P o p art, or given geometric forms, as in Minimalism. At the same time, in the involvement of Minimalist, Process a n d P e r f o r m a n c e art with p h e n o m e n o l o g y there was a reopening to the bodily subject that p r e p a r e d a reopening to the psychological subject in feminist art. This engagement was ambivalent, however, for even as feminists used psychoanalysis, they did so m o s d y in the register of critique, "as a w e a p o n " (in the battle cry of filmmaker Laura MulveyO directed at the patriarchal ideology that also riddled psychoanalysis. For Freud h a d associated femininity with passivity, a n d in his f a m o u s account of the O e d i p u s complex, a tangle of relations in which the little b o y is said to desire the m o t h e r until threatened by the father, there is n o parallel d e n o u e m e n t for the little girl, as if in his scheme of things w o m e n c a n n o t attain full subjecthood. A n d lacques Lacan (1901-81), the French psychoanalyst w h o p r o p o s e d a n influential reading of Freud, identified w^oman as such with the lack represented by castration. Nonetheless, for m a n y feminists Freud a n d Lacan provided the m o s t telling a c c o u n t
1 1946. -.9471:. -949, 960:. 'S^'-cv "965 '963, "974. 1975 17

Psychoanalysis in m o d e r n i s m and as m e t h o d | I n t r o d u c t i o n 1

5 Barbara Kruger, Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face, 1961 Fhotcc-api-c s l k s c e s ' " or v v , 1 39.7 v ^ C4 1 i55 x 4" Fsychoaralys s "siosd s o T e 'eninisi in the s'gl"i:;es

of" the formation of the subject in the social order. If there is no natural femininity, these feminists argued, then there is also no natural patriarchyonly a historical culture fitted to the psychic structure, the desires and the fears, of the heterosexual male, and so vulnerable to feminist critique [5, 61. Indeed, some feminists have insisted that the very marginality- of women to the social order, as mapped by psychoanalysis, positions them as its most radical critics. By the nineties this critique was extended by gay and lesbian artists and critics concerned to expose the psychic workings of homophobia, as well by postcolonial practitioners concerned to A mark the racialist projection of cultural others.

:o c tique ooi'.'er st-jctures "ot cn y in h gh grt b'-t in rriass culture too: par: c j l a r attertior was o'a-.vn tc how irracss " octn sp'^eres a^e structured -'c a ma e hetercsex^^a' 3pec:atc'sn 0for a "nale gaze" empoi'/ersd w fh T e p easures c' looking, .vitn womsn ncstly figu'lng as passive objects of this ook. In he-" oiecss cf tns oe-'^oc.'thc Atie-ican a'fisf Barbara Kruge'juxtaposed aop'opna:sd Tiages and cnticai phrases :sonetirres suovertec cliches) - o'der to ques+ on this oc;ectif cation. :o w e l c c r e vvomen irto the place of specta:orship, and to open j p space for o f i S ' kinds of .mage-mak - g anc v ewing.

Approaches alternative to Freud

O n e can critique Freud and Lacan, of course, and still remain within the orbit of psychoanalysis. Artists and critics have had affinities with other schools, especially the "object-relations" psychoanalysis associated with Melanie Klein (1882-1960) and D. W. Winnicott (1896-1971) in England, which influenced such aestheticians as Adrian Stokes (1902-72) and Anton Ehrenzweig (1909-66) and, indirectly, the reception of such artists as Henrys M o o r e and Barbara Hepworth. Where Freud saw pre-Oedipal stages (oral, anal, phallic, genital) that the child passes through, Klein saw positions that remain open into adult life. In her account these positions are dominated by the original fantasies of the child, involving violent aggression toward the parents as well as depressive anxiety about this aggression, with an oscillation between visions of destruction and reparation. For some critics this psychoanalysis spoke to a partial turn in nineties artaway from questions of sexual desire in relation to the social order, tow-ard concerns with bodily drives in relation to life and death. After the moratorium on images of women in some feminist art of the seventies and eighties, Kleinian notions suggested a way to understand this reappearance of the body often in damaged form. A fascination with trauma, both personal and collecti^'e, reinforced this interest in the "abject" body, w^hich also led artists and critics to the later writings of the French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (born 1941). Of course, social factorsthe AIDS epidemic above allalso drove this per\'asive aesthetic of m o u r n ing and melancholy. In the present, psychoanalysis remains a resource in art criticism and histor>', but its role in artmaking is far from clear.

Levels of Freudian criticism

Psychoanalysis emerged out of clinical work, out of the analysis of symptoms of actual patients (there is much controversy about how Freud manipulated this material, which included his
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dreams),

and its use in the interpretation of art carries the strengths as well as the weaknesses of this source. There is first the basic question of who or what is to occupy the position of the patientthe work, the artist, the viewer, the critic, or some combination or relay of all these. Then
A 13S9 1393c 18 I n t r o d u c t i o n 1 | Psychoanalysis in m o d e r n i s m and as m e t h o d

there arises the complicated issue of the different levels of a Freudian interpretation of art, which I will here reduce to three: SNinbolic readings, accounts of process, and analogies in rhetoric. Early a t t e m p t s in Freudian criticism were governed by symbolic readings of the art work, as if it were a d r e a m to be decoded in t e r m s of a latent message hidden b e h i n d a manifest content: "This is not a pipe; it is really a penis." This sort of criticism c o m p l e m e n t s the kind of art that translates a dream or a fantasy in pictorial terms: art then becomes the encoding of a riddle a n d criticism its decoding, a n d the whole exercise is illustrational a n d circular. Although Freud was quick to stress that cigars are often just cigars, he too practiced this kind of deciphering, which fits in all too well with the traditional m e t h o d of art histor)' known as "iconograp h y " a reading back of symbols in a picture to sources in other kinds of textsa m e t h o d that most m o d e r n i s t art worked to foil (through abstraction, techniques of chance, a n d so o n ) . In this regard, the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg has d e m o n s t r a t e d an epistemological affinit)- between psychoanalysis and art histor)' based in connoisseurship. For both discourses (which developed, in m o d e r n f o r m , at roughly the same time) are concerned with the s y m p t o m a t i c trait or the telling detail (an idiosyncratic gesture of the hands, say) that might reveal, in psychoanalysis, a h i d d e n conflict in the patient and, in connoisseurship, the p r o p e r attribution of the w o r k to an artist. In such readings the artist is the ultimate source to which the symbols point: the work is taken as his s y m p t o m a t i c expression, and it is used as such in the analysis. T h u s in his 1910 study Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childlwod, Freud leads us f r o m the enigmatic smiles of his Mona Lisa a n d Virgin Mark's to posit in the artist a m e m o r \ ' regarding his long-lost m o t h e r . In this way Freud and his followers looked for signs of psychic disturbances in art (his predecessor l e a n - M a r t i n Charcot did the same). This is not to say that Freud sees the artist as psychopathological; in fact he implies that art is o n e way to avoid this condition. "Art frees the artist f r o m his fantasies," the French philosopher Sarah K o f m a n c o m m e n t s , "just as 'artistic creation' circumvents n e u r o sis and takes the place of psychoanalytic treatment." But it is true that such Freudian criticism tends to "psychobiography," that is, to a profiling of the artist in which art history is remodeled as psycho6 Lynda Benglis, Untitled, 1974 (detail) x

anaKtic case study. If sTOibohc readings a n d psychobiographical accounts can be reductive, this danger m a y be mitigated if we attend to other aspects of Freud. For m o s t of the time Freud u n d e r s t a n d s the sign less as symbolic, in the sense of directly expressive of a self, a meaning, or a realit)', than as s y m p t o m a t i c , a kind of allegorical e m b l e m in which desire and repression are intertwined. Moreover, he does not see art as a simple revision of preexisting m e m o r i e s or fantasies; apart f r o m other things, it can also be, as K o f m a n suggests, an " o r i g i n a r y ' s u b s t i t u t e ' " for such scenes, t h r o u g h which we c o m e to k n o w t h e m / o r the first tirne{\.h\s is what Freud a t t e m p t s in his L e o n a r d o study). Finally, psychobiography is put into p r o d u c tive d o u b t by the very fact that the p s y c h o a n a h t i c account of the

[-ictogr-apr-, 25 >: 26.5

" " 0 ' i e of femir s n m the sixt es and seventies, some ; .-.'tscKed pa:r a'chal h erarc^nes "ot cniy ir socsty " I -'al b j t in the a'f warld in par: oula-: psychcanaiysis " ' as both wsapcnbecause i: offered p'otound in:n the re aticn bet'.veen sexuali-y ana ~ " - - "Of cn.y v'jith passivity cut aiSO v/ th lack, n this 'I - jrapl", usee in a - -. P''f ous advertisement for a trie Anencan artist Lynda Benglis mocked : C"o ccsfuring of some M n ma 'St ana -"in-alist a-tists. as well as the /^creased marketing TT^mporsry an; at tne same fin^e. sr^e seizec "t^e ir a /vay that b o T litera zed ts assooaticn wit-" I joe and pc.ver and paroc ed it.

-Jl: = :t V :ya'-d targetbecause t tendea to associate

Psychoanalysis in m o d e r n i s m and as rnetfiod | I n t r o d u c t i o n 1

unconscious, of its disruptive effects, puts all intentionalityall authorship, all b i o g r a p h y i n t o productive d o u b t too. Freudian criticism is not only concerned with a symbolic decoding of hidden meanings, with the semantics of the psvche. Less obviously, it is also involved with the dynamics of these processes, \vith an understanding of the sexual energies and unconscious forces that operate in the making as well as the ^iewing of art. O n this second level of psychoanalytic interpretation, Freud revises the old philosophical concept of "aesthetic play" in terms of his.owTi notion of "the pleasure principle," which he defined, in "Two Principles of Mental Functioning" (1911 ),in opposition t o " t h e r e a l i t t p r i n c i p l e " : The artist is originally ciation of instinctual then in phantasy-life a man [sicj who turns from as it is first made, and reality who

cerned as m u c h of it is not to "sublimate" instinctual energies, to divert t h e m f r o m sexual aims into cultural forms, but to go in the opposite direction, to "desublimate" cultural forms, to open them up to these disruptive forces.

Dreams and fantasies

While the semantics of symbolic interpretation can be too particular, this concern with the dynamics of aesthetic process can be too general. A third level of Freudian criticism m a y avoid b o t h extremes: the analy^sis of the rhetoric of the a r t w o r k in analogy with such %isual productions of the psyche as dreams and fantasies. Again, Freud u n d e r s t o o d the dream as a c o m p r o m i s e between a wish a n d its repression. This c o m p r o m i s e is negotiated by the " d r e a m - w o r k , " w^hich disguises the wish, in order to fool further repression, t h r o u g h "condensation" of some of its aspects a n d "displacement" of others. T h e d r e a m - w o r k then turns the distorted fragments into visual images with an eye to "considerations of representability" in a dream, a n d finally revises the images to insure that they h a n g together as a narrative (this is called "secondary revision"). This rhetoric of operations might be b r o u g h t to bear on the p r o d u c t i o n of some picturesagain, the Surrealists t h o u g h t so but there are o b \ t o u s dangers with such analogies as well. Even w h e n Freud a n d his followers wrote only about art (or literature), they were concerned to d e m o n s t r a t e points of psychoanalytic theory first a n d to u n d e r s t a n d objects of arfistic practice second, so that forced applications are built into the discourse, as it were. Yet there is a m o r e p r o f o u n d p r o b l e m with analogies dra\STi between psycho an aly^s is a n d visual art. W i t h his early associate Josef Breuer (1842-1925) Freud f o u n d e d psychoanalysis as a "talking cure"^that is, as a t u r n away f r o m the visual theater of his teacher, the French pathologist a n d neurologist Jean-Martin

because he cannot come to terms with the demand for the renunsatisfaction allows full play to his erotic and ambitious ofphantasy phantasies justification

wishes. But he finds a way of return from this world back to reality; with his special gifts he moulds his into a new kind of reality, and men concede them a

as valuable reflections of actual life. Thus by a certain path he actually becomes the hero, king, creator, favorite he desired to be, without pursuing feel the same demanded the circuitous path of creating real dissatisfaction as he with the alterations renunciation resultijig by the realityin the outer world. But this he can only attain because other men by reality, and because this dissatisfaction, of the pleasure-principle

from the displacement

principle, is itself a part of reality. T h r e e years before, in "Creative Writers and D a y - D r e a m i n g " (1908), Freud h a d speculated on h o w the artist overcomes o u r resistance to this p e r f o r m a n c e , which we might otherwise deem solipsistic, if not simply inappropriate: [HJe bribes us by the purely formalthat is, aestheticyield of his of

pleasure which he offers us in the presentation

phantasies. to a yield of psychical work pro-

Charcot (1825-93), w h o staged the s y m p t o m a t i c bodies of female hysterics in a public display at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris. T h e technical innovation of psychoanalysis was to attend to symptomatic languagenot only of the d r e a m as a f o r m of writing b u t also of slips of the tongue, the "free association" of w o r d s by the patient, a n d so on. Moreover, for Freud culture was essentially a w o r k i n g out of the conflicted desires rooted in the Oedipus complex, a working out that is primarily narrative, a n d it is not clear how^ such narrative might play out in static f o r m s like painting, sculpture, and the rest. These emphases alone render psychoanalysis ill-suited to questions of visual art. F u r t h e r m o r e , the Lacanian reading of Freud is militantly linguistic; its celebrated a x i o m " t h e unconscious is structured like a l a n g u a g e " m e a n s that the psychic processes of condensation a n d displacement are structurally o n e with the Hnguistic tropes of " m e t a p h o r " a n d

We give the name incentive bonus or fore-pleasure

pleasure such as this, which is offered to us so as to make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper sources.... [Ojur actual enjoyment of an imaginative minds. ceeds from a liberation of tensions in our

Let us review s o m e of the (pre)conceptions in these statements. First, the artist avoids some of the " r e n u n c i a t i o n s " that the rest of us must accept, a n d indulges in s o m e of the fantasies that we m u s t forgo. But we d o not resent him for this e x e m p t i o n for three reasons: his fictions reflect realitN' nonetheless^ they are b o r n of the same dissatisfactions that we feel; and we are bribed by the pleasure that we take in the resolution of the f o r m a l tensions of the work, a pleasure that o p e n s us to a deeper sort of pleasurein the resolu-

tion of the psychic tensions within us. N o t e that for Freud art A " m e t o n y t n y . " N o analogy in rhetoric, therefore, would seem to bridge the categorical divide between psychoanalysis a n d art. originates in a t u r n f r o m reality, which is to say that it is f u n d a m e n tally conservative in relation to the social order, a small aesthetic c o m p e n s a t i o n for o u r mighty instinctual r e n u n c i a t i o n . Perhaps this is a n o t h e r reason why he was suspicious of m o d e r n i s t art, conAnd yet, according to both Freud a n d Lacan, the crucial events in subject f o r m a t i o n are visual scenes. For Freud the ego is first a bodily image, which, for Lacan in his f a m o u s paper o n "The M i r r o r
A !-i-'ocuclion 20 I n t r o d u c t i o n 1 | Psychoanalysis in m o d e r n i s m and as m e t h o d

Stage" (1936/49), the infant initially encounters in a reflection that allows for a fragile coherence-a \'isual coherence as an image. The p s y c h o a n a l n i c critic lacqueline Rose also alerts us to the "staging" of such events as " m o m e n t s in which perception /bufif/er5 ... or in which pleasure in looking tips over into the register of excess.'^ Her examples are two traumatic scenes that psychoanalysis posits for the little boy. In the first scene he discovers sexual differencethat girls d o not have penises and hence that he m a y lose hisa perception that " f o u n d e r s " because it implies this grave threat. In the second scene he ^^'itnesses sexual intercourse between his parents, which fascinates h i m as a key to the riddle of his own origin. Freud called these scenes "primal fantasies"primal both because they are fiindamental and because they concern origins. As Rose suggests, such scenes " d e m o n s t r a t e the complexity of an essentially visual space" in ways that can be "used as theoretical prototy-pes to unsettle o u r certainties once again"as indeed they were used, to different ends, in s o m e Surrealist art of the twenties and thirties (71 a n d in L some feminist art of the seventies and eighties. The i m p o r t a n t p o i n t to emphasize, though, is this: "Each time the stress falls on a p r o b l e m of seeing. The sexualit)' lies less in the content of what is seen than in the subjectivit)- of the viewer." This is where psychoanalysis has the most to offer the interpretation of art, modernist or other. Its account of the effects of the work on the subject a n d the artist as well as on the viewer (including the critic) places the work, finally, in the position of the analyst as m u c h as the anaK-zed. In the end we do well to hold to a double focus: to view psychoanalysis historically, as an object in an ideological field often shared with modernist art, a n d to apply it theoretically, as a m e t h o d to understand relevant aspects of this art, to m a p pertinent parts of the field. This double focus allows us to critique ps)'choanalysis even as we apply it. First a n d last, however, this project will be complic a t e d n o t only by the difficulties in psychoanalylic speculation, but also by the controversies that always s^virl a r o u n d it. Some of the clinical work of Freud a n d others was manipulated, to be sure, and some of the concepts are b o u n d u p \vith science that is n o longer validbut do these facts invalidate psychoanalysis as a m o d e of interpretation of art today? As with the other methods introduced here, the test m U be in the fit a n d the yield of the arguments that we make. A n d here, as the psychoanalytic critic Leo Bersani r e m i n d s us, o u r " m o m e n t s of theoretical collapse" may be insepa7 Lee Miller, Nude Bent Forward, Paris, c. 1931

rable f r o m o u r m o m e n t s of "psychoanalytic truth."

-BTHER -EADING Leo Bersani. =ress. 1336.1 Sigmund Freud, A.-t a.^^d Lite-atu^e. t-ans. James Strachey iLordcn: Pengun, 1 985; s Sarah Kofman,

: 'oanalys s is corcerned v.'th ra^.-Tatic scenes, I" " " actus o ' r a g i r e d , ' h a t marK ".he ch-ilc: ^ 'ice fcr exTC e, scenes that are oh.en visual c r ": jnc yscenes /.'^ere -^e or stie d'scovsrs sexual sis 1 -f.pri ^-cer:a n i natu'e. At c: tfe'ent limes m : "''^i 'leTh century, art sts, such as :h9 S_r'ealists in "les a - d fh -lies a-'d fer.inists ir the seve'-ties a r a fric-- 3 crawn en such images a " d sce^a'ios as - "c trouble assumot ens about seeing, expectatic-s I" gencer, anc so on. ^^ this p-^otograph by the VI j a - artist ^ee Ivliller. a someti-rie assoc ate of the - n s's. i: s -^o: irrmediately c ear ivnaf '.ve see: " - " - ; A male or a female^ Or some other catsgcry c' ' j maging. a r d feeling?

The Freudian Booy: ^syc^^oara^ysrs ar Art (Ne/; Yorc

Coljmb a

versity

The Cr'::d.'^DocGfAr: Ar: irrerc'ratatior, o'Fre'^d's Aesthetes, '''ne Language of P^yci'icar'ai'/sis. "a'^s. Conalc

trgrs Wrifrec Kicnc'son-

V.'oochj I i N e w C c U m b a Lnversity P-ess, 1988.1 Jean Laplancheand J.-B. Pontalis, Smitl- 'Msw yc'-s-: \'J. W. Nodc.r- '9:^3; Jacqueline Rose. Sexi.a'.'fy .'>; thsF'SHd ofV'S^or iLc-dor: Verse, 1 985)

'524. lyjb ' 9 :

Psychoanalysis in m o d e r n i s m and as rnetfiod | Introduction 1

21

2 The social history of art: models and concepts

ecent histories of art comprise a n u m b e r of distinct critical models (for example, formalism, structuralist semiotics, psychoanalysis, social art history', and feminism) that have been merged and integrated in various ways, in particular in the work of American and British art historians since the seventies. This situation sometimes makes it difficult, if not altogether pointless, to insist on methodological consistency, let alone on a singular methodological position. The complexity of these various individual strands and of their integrated forms points firstly to the problematic nature of any claim that one particular model should be accepted as exclusively vaUd or as dominant within the interpretative processes of art histor\\ Our attempts to integrate a broad variety of methodological positions also efface the earlier theoretical rigor that had previously generated a degree of precision in the process of historical analysis and interpretation. That precision now seems to have been lost in an increasingly complex weave of methodological eclecticism.

meaning operated in a manner analogous to other linguistic conventions and narrative structures (e.g., the folktale), or, in terms of the unconscious, as in Freud's and Carl Jung's theories, analogous to the joke and the dream, the symptom and the trauma. The social history of art, fi-om its very^ beginning in the first decades of the twentieth century, had a similar ambition to make the analysis and interpretation of works of art more rigorous and verifiable. Most importantly, the early social historians of art (Marxist scholars like the Anglo-German Francis Klingender [1907-55] and the Anglo-Hungarian Frederick Antal [1887-1954]) tried to situate cultural representation within the existing communication structures of society, primarily within the field of ideological production under the rise of industrial capitalism. After all, social art history's philosophical inspiration was the scientificity^ of Marxism itself, a philosophy that had aimed from the very beginning not only to analyze and interpret economic, political, and ideological relations, but also to make the writing of history itselfits historicity^contribute to the larger project of social and pohtical change.

The origins of the methodologies

All these models were initially formulated as attempts to displace earlier humanist (subiective) approaches to criticism and interpretation. They had been motivated by the desire to position the study of all types of cultural production (such as literature or the fine arts) on a more solidly scientific basis of method and insight, rather than have criticism remain dependent on the various more-or-less subjective approaches of the late nineteenth century, such as the biographistic, psychologistic, and historicist survey methods. Just as the early Russian Formalists m a d e Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic structure the matrix of their own efforts to understand the formation and functions of cultural representation, subsequent historians who attempted to interpret works of art in psychoanalytic terms tried to find a map of artistic subject formation in the writings of Sigmund Freud. Proponents of both models argued that they could generate a verifiable understanding of the processes of aesthetic production and reception, and promised to anchor the "meaning" of the work of art solidly in the operations of either the conventions of language and/or the system of the unconscious, arguing that aesthetic or poetic
-trcjc-i:;'3. 19-5 22 I n t r o d u c t i o n 2 | The social history of art: models a n d c o n c e p t s

This critical and analytical project of social art history formulated a n u m b e r of key concepts that I will discuss further: I shall also try to give their original definitions, as well as subsequent modifications to these concepts, in order to acknowledge the increasing complexity of the terminology^ of social art history% which results partially from the growing differentiation of the philosophical concepts of Marxist thought itself At the same time, it may become apparent that some of these key concepts are presented not because they are important in the early years of the twenty^-first century, but, rather, because of their obsolescence, withering away in the present and in the recent past. 1"his is because the methodological conviction of certain models of analysis has been just as overdetermined as that of all the other methodological models that have temporarily governed the interpretation and the writing of art history at different points in the twentieth century.

Autonomy
>German philosopher and sociologist liirgen Habermas (born

1929) has defined the formation of the bourgeois public sphere in general and the development of cultural practices within that

sphere as social processes of subjective differentiation that lead to the historical construction of bourgeois individuality. These processes guarantee the individual's identity and historical status as a self-determining a n d self-governing subject. O n e of the necessary- conditions of bourgeois identit)- was the subject's capacity to experience the a u t o n o m y of the aesthetic, to experience pleasure w i t h o u t interest. This concept of aesthetic a u t o n o m y was as integral to the differentiation of bourgeois subjectivity^ as it was to the differentiation of cultural p r o d u c t i o n according to its p r o p e r technical a n d procedural characteristics, eventually leading to the modernist orthodoxy of medium-specificity. Inevitably then, autonomy ser\'ed as a foundational concept d u r i n g the first five decades of European m o d e r n i s m . From Theophile Gautier's p r o g r a m of Fart pour Fart a n d Edouard Manet's conception of painting as a project of perceptual self-reMexivity, the aesthetics of a u t o n o m y culminate in the poetics of Stephane Mallarme in the 1880s. Aestheticism c o n ceiving the work of art as a purely self-sufficient and self-reflexive ' experienceidentified by Walter Benjamin as a nineteenthcentury theology of artgenerated, in early-twentieth-century formalist t h o u g h t , similar conceptions that would later b e c o m e the doxa of painterly self-reflexivity for formalist critics a n d historians. These ranged fi"om Roger Fry's responses to Postimpressionism in particular the work of Paul Cezanneto Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's neo-Kantian theories of Analytical Cubism, to the work of Clement Greenberg (1909-94) in the postwar period. Any a t t e m p t to transform a u t o n o m y into a transhistorical, if not o n t o logical precondition of aesthetic experience, however, is p r o f o u n d l y problematic. It becomes evident u p o n closer historical inspection that the formation of the concept of aesthetic a u t o n o m y itself was far f r o m a u t o n o m o u s . This is first of all because the aesthetics of a u t o n o m y had been determined by the overarching philosophical f r a m e w o r k of Enlightenment philosophy (Immanuel Kant's [17241804] concept of disinterestedness) while it simultaneously operated in opposition to the rigorous instrumentalization of experience that emerged with the rise of the mercantile capitalist class. W i t h i n the field of cultural representation, the cult of a u t o n o m y
1 John Heartfietd, "Hurray, the Butter is cover for AlZ, December 19,1935 Firjished!",

liberated linguistic and artistic practices f r o m mylhical and religious t h o u g h t just as m u c h as it emancipated t h e m f r o m the politically adulatory ser^'ice a n d e c o n o m i c d e p e n d e n c y u n d e r the auspices of a rigorously controlling feudal patronage. While the cult of a u t o n o m y might have originated with the e m a n c i p a t i o n of bourgeois subjectivity- f r o m aristocratic a n d religious hegemony, a u t o n o m y also saw the theocratic a n d hierarchical structures of that patronage as having their o w n reality. The m o d e r n i s t aesthetic of a u t o n o m y thus constituted the social and subjective sphere f r o m within which an opposition against the totality of interested activities a n d i n s t r u m e n t a h z e d f o r m s of experience could be articulated in artistic acts of open negation a n d refusal. Paradoxically^, however, these acts ser\-ed as opposition a n d i n their ineluctable condition as extreme exceptions f r o m the universal r u l e t h e y c o n f i r m e d the regime of total instrumentalization. O n e might have
mr^ 19" 1942= I96t The social history of art; models and c o n c e p t s | Introduction 2 23

r - :-:;[routage. 36 x 27 i'd'-l x 1
' C-" Johr Hea-tfieio. alcng w^th r a t of Marcel epistenc ogy C

t . . " a T o acd El Lissitz^y. deTarcates cne c' d'a t o s * ! . - ' t a n : oaradigir sniffs in n; 9th-century ToderniST. Pengc-ng ohctcmontage r;cns:rjcting ne^v tex:^a nafatives, i: estab 'Sfied " inly n c d e l for ar:is:ic p'acrice as s o n r i u m c a f vs "n in f i e age of TiBSS-c jitura orcpaga-'da. Denounced ^ ^..cn by ttie intrinsically conservative ideologies o* '-alis'.s a'"d n o d e " " sts defending cosc ete m^odels -."-cony it adaressec - fact fns fi:StO'cal ne&d for "" snge audiences anc of ttie forms of c s'.- oution. 0' oounte'p'opaganca i -' fhenegemcnic media I - . soly, i: Eecamis the s-^c^ia'. m^os: mportan: 0* tne t " " l i e s . the o-^ y vo ce in the visual ipenalist capiralism:

V : f-ga-de to copose the rse of fascism as s late form

to formulate the paradox that an aesthetics of a u t o n o m y is thus the highly instrumentalized form of noninstrumentahzed experience under liberal bourgeois capitalism.
2 El Lissitzky and Sergei Senkin, The Task of the Press is the Education Coogne Like Heartf eld. El Liss 1zky transforned t'-s legscies O'" co'lage and Dhctorron:age a3CC''ding to the needs s nev.'ly indus:r anzed co'lGCtive Especially n The le;'; genre of exiibition design, which he developed in : r e :>.venties in wo'ks SL.ch as the Sov et Pavilion 'or T S in:e'na:ional exh billon Pressa. 1 became evicent tha: L'ssitzky ivas one of the first land few) artists of the twe'^ties and thirties to understand tha: ihe spaces of public arc''.itectj''e itnat s, of simul'areo^s co ective 'ecepfionj and the space of pLfcl c in'o'n'^aliDn fiac cc apsed in fne r e w scaces of the mass-culfural spfnere. Tfnerefors Liss-tzky, an e x e n p a^y "a'tisf-as-proG^cer." as Walter Benjanin /.'culd iden: fy the a-fisf's " e w social role, wou d si:^ate h s oractice within t i e very osranneters s-^d modes of croducfio" of a newly developing p'oletariar oub'ic sohe^'e. of the Masses, 1928 t licn Pressa, Photograohic 1r eze - c :he nter-aticnal

Actual study of the critical phase of the aesthetic of a u t o n o m y in the nineteenth century (from Manet to Mallarme) would recognize that this very paradox is the actual formative structure of their pictorial and poetic genius. Both define modernist representation as an advanced f o r m of critical self-reflexivity and define their hermetic artifice in assimilation and in opposition to the emerging mass-cultural forms of instrumentalized representation, Typically, the concept of a u t o n o m y was b o t h f o r m e d by a n d oppositional to the instrumental logic of bourgeois rationality, rigorously enforcing the requirements of that rationality within the sphere of cultural production through its c o m m i t m e n t to empirical criticality. Thereby an aesthetics of a u t o n o m y contributed to one of the most fundamental transformations of the experience of the work of art, initiating the shift that Walter Benjamin in his essays of the thirties called the historical transition

24

I n t r o d u c t i o n 2 | The social history of art: m o d e l s and c o n c e p t s

f r o m cult-value to exhibition-value. These essays have c o m e to Aas the work of John Heartfield [11) defines its artistic practices as t e m p o r a r y and geopolitically specific (rather than as transhistoribe universally considered as the f o u n d i n g texts of a philosophical theon- of the social history' of art. The concept of a u t o n o m y also ser\'ed to idealize the new distribution f o r m of the work of art, n o w that it had become a cal), as participator}' (rather than as a unique emanation of an exceptional f o r m of knowledge). The antiaesthetic also operates as a

free-floating utilitarian aesthetic (e.g., in the work of the Soviet Productivists [2]), situating the work of art in a social context where it assumes a commodit}- on the bourgeois market of objects and luxur}' goods. variet)' of productive functions such as i n f o r m a t i o n a n d education Thus a u t o n o m y aesthetics was engendered by the capitalist logic of commodit)' production as m u c h as it opposed that logic. In fact, the Marxist aesthetician T h e o d o r W. A d o r n o (1903-69) still maintained in the late sixties that artistic independence and aesthetic a u t o n o m y could, paradoxically, be guaranteed only in the c o m m o d itv structure of the work of art. or political enlightenment, serv ing the needs of a cultural self-constitution for the newly emerging audiences of the industrial proletariat w h o were previously excluded f r o m cultural representation on the levels of both p r o d u c t i o n a n d reception.

Class, agency, and activism

Antiaesthetic Peter Brger ( b o r n 1936), in his i m p o r t a n t a l t h o u g h problematicessay. Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), argued that the new .spectrum of antiaesthetic practices in 1913 arose as a contestation of a u t o n o m y aesthetics. T h u s a c c o r d i n g to Brgerthe historical avant-gardes after Cubism universally attempted to "integrate art with life" a n d to challenge the a u t o n o m o u s "institution of art." Brger perceives this pro ject of the antiaesthetic to be at the center ^of the revolts of Dadaism, Russian Constructivism, a n d French Surrealism. Yet, rather than focusing on a nebulously conceived integration ot art a n d life (an integration never satisfactorily defined at any point in histon^) or on a rather abstract debate o n the nature of the institution of art, it seems m o r e productive to il)cus here on the ver\^ strategies that these avant-garde practitioners themselves had propagated: in particular, strategies to initiate ftmdamental changes in the conception of audience a n d spectatorial agency, to reverse the bourgeois hierarchy of aesthetic exchange\ alue and use-value, a n d most importantly perhaps, to conceive of cultural practices for a newly emerging internationalist proletarian public sphere \ d t h i n the advanced industrial nation states. Such an approach would not only allow us to differentiate these jvant-garde projects m o r e adequately, but would also help us understand that the rise of a n aesthetic of technical reproduction I in diametrical opposition to an aesthetic of a u t o n o m y ) emerges at that ven^ m o m e n t of the t^venties when the bourgeois public sphere begins to wither away. It is at first displaced by the progressive forces of an emerging proletarian public sphere (as was the case in the ' early phases of the Soviet U n i o n and the W e i m a r Republic), only to be followed, of course, by the rise of the mass-cultural public sphere, either in its totalitarian fascist or state-socialist versions in I the thirties or by its postwar regimes of the culture industry a n d of ^T'Pectacle, emerging with the h e g e m o n y of the United States a n d a largely d e p e n d e n t culture of European reconstruction. The antiaesthetic dismantles the aesthetics of a u t o n o m y o n all levels: it replaces originalit\' with technical reproduction, it destroys work's aura a n d the contemplative m o d e s of aesthetic experience and replaces these with c o m m u n i c a t i v e action and aspirations tinvard simultaneous collective perception. T h e antiaesthetic (such
. 1324. 19330 -S' 1923 -925b -ffiCe 1934a 1937a. -i95Ta." 9e3c The social history of art; models and c o n c e p t s | I n t r o d u c t i o n 2 25

The central premises of Marxist political theor)'^ had been the concepts of class and class-consciousnessthe most important factors to drive fonvard the historical process. Classes sen-ed in different m o m e n t s of histor\^as the agents of historical, social, and political change (e.g., the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the most powerful class in the twentieth centurv', the petite bourgeoisie, paradoxically the most neglected by classical Marxist accounts). It had been Marx's argument that class itself was defined by one crucial condition: a subject's situation in relation to the means of production. Thus, privileged access to (or, m o r e decisively, controlling o w n ership o f ) the means of p r o d u c t i o n was the constitutive condition of bourgeois class identit)- in the later eighteenth a n d the entire nineteenth centuries. In contrast, d u r i n g the same period, the c o n ditions of proletarianization identify those subjects w h o will remain forever economically, legally, a n d socially barred f r o m access to the m e a n s of p r o d u c t i o n (which would, of course, also include the m e a n s of education a n d the acquisition of i m p r o v e d professional skills). Questions concerning the concept of class are central to the social history of art, ranging f r o m the class identity of the artist to w h e t h e r cultural solidarit)^ or mimetic artistic identification with the struggles of the oppressed a n d exploited classes of modernitycan actually a m o u n t to acts of political s u p p o r t for revolutionaiy or oppositional m o v e m e n t s . Marxist political theorists have o f t e n regarded that kind of cultural class alliance with considerable skepticism. Yet this m o d e of class alliance d e t e r m i n e d practically all politically motivated artistic p r o d u c t i o n of modernit}', since very few, if any, artists a n d intellectuals had actually emerged f r o m the conditions of proletarian existence at that time. Class identity becomes all the m o r e complicated when considering h o w the c o n sciousness of individual artists m i g h t well have b e c o m e radicalized at certain points (e.g., the revolution of 1848, the revolutions of 1917, o r the anti-imperialist struggles of 1968) a n d artists might then have assumed positions of solidarity with the oppressed classes of those historical m o m e n t s [3]. Slightly later, however, in the wake of their cultural assimilation, the same artists m i g h t have assumed positions of complicit or active affirmation of the ruling order a n d simply served as the providers of cultural legitimation.

This also points to the necessary insight that the registers of artistic production and their latent or manifest relationships to political activism are infinitely more differentiated than arguments for the politicization of art might generally have assumed. We are not simpiv confronted with an alternative between a politically conscious or activist practice on the one hand, and a merely affirmative, hegemonic culture (as the Italian Marxist philosopher and aesthetician Antonio Gramsci [1891-1937] called it) on the other. Yet, the function of hegemonic culture is clearly to sustain power and legitimize the perceptual and behavioral forms of the ruling class through cultural representation, while oppositional cultural practices articulate resistance to hierarchical thought, subvert privileged forms of experience, and destabilize the ruling regimes of vision and perception just as they can also massively and manifestly destabilize governing notions of hegemonic power. If we accept that some forms of cultural production can assume the role of agency (i.e., that of information and enlightenment, that of criticality and counterinformation), then the social history of art faces one of its most precarious insights, if not a condition of crisis: if it were to align its aesthetic judgment with the condition of political solidarity and class alliance, it would inevitably be left with only a few heroic figures in w h o m such a correlation between classconsciousness, agency, and revolutionary alliance could actually be ascertained. These examples would include Gustave Courbet and H o n o r e Daumier in the nineteenth centur}', Kthe Kolhvitz and A John Heartfield in the first half of the twentieth centur\% and artists such as Martha Rosier [4], HansHaacke[6], and Allan Sekulain the
3 Tina Modotti, Workers' May t , 1929 P:a1inurT p'int. 2C,5 x 1 8 (8 x 7 :) Demonstration, Mexico,

second half of the twentieth century. Thus, in recognizing that compliance with class interests and political revolutionr)' consciousness can at best be considered an exceptional rather than a necessary condition within the aesthetic practices of modernity, it leaves the social art historian with a difficult choice. That is, either to exclude from consideration most actual artistic practices of any particular moment of modernism, disregarding both the artists and their production because of their lack of commitment, class-consciousness, and political correctness, or to recognize the necessity for numerous other criteria (beyond political and social history) to enter the process of historical and critical analysis. Since the proletarian's only means of survival is the sale of his or her own labor like any other commoditv^ producing a phenomenal accretion of surplus value to the entrepreneurial bourgeois or to the corporate enterprise by supplying the subject's labor power, it is, therefore, the very condition of labor and the laborer that radical artists from the nineteenth centur\' onward, from Gustave Courbet to the Productivists of the twenties, confront. For the most part, ho\vever, they confront it not on the ]e^'el of iconography (in fact, the almost total absence of the representation of alienated labor is the rule of modernism ) but rather with the perpetual question of whether the labor of industrial production and the labor of cultural production can and should be related, and, if so, howas analogous? as dialectical opposites? as complementary? as mutually exclusive? Marxist attempts to theorize this relationship (and the
1'371 19721; a84a

T".e w c ' k of -^e 'lalian-Arnencan ariist Modot:i n Mex co g v'es evidence c1 the ^r v'e-sa' ty of t^e pDlrical ans soc al cornT:itn-,ent a n c n g -adica' art sts ot 1he twent es anc thir:iss. Aba-'dO'^ '^g he*" training as a "st'aiont" mocsrn st pfiotograpns'm :hs T o l d o" Edward Weston. M c d c t t ' s vvo'k Vexico would sco-" -ecnen: 'tsel' :o ma<e ptictography a weapo'' " the pc ticai st'uggle of the Mexican peasant a^d w c k ng class aga nst .-e e".srnal defe'-'als and deceotions of the c o j r t r y ' s oligarc" c rulers Exoa-'dinc the t-adi: on cf :he TaHer Graf'CO Pod'3'' ' o address that class now v.- th t - e nea'^s o' photcgraohic -epresentat on. she nevertheless unoe-stcod t-^e necessr.y of making tfie regionally soecf c ana uneve'^ developrrent of f e r n s cf knowledge a"d artistic c j ture the basis of -^er worn. Aoco'ding^V'' Mcdct:i "-ever adopted :hs seeninc y nore acva"ced forms of co'tical phctcmo^tage, out 'eta "led t:"e bonds c" realist dec c* cn necessary " c ac: \'is: oc tical messages ^r- ttie geopC' ficai c c t s x t 'n v m c h she had stua:ed herself. At the s a n s t i n e , as the mage Workers' Demc.iSira.'jcc s graiS. she was far from fa " g T.o the concilia:ory a^d compensatory realisTS o' "straigfi:" ancl "New Objective" ohotography. What would 'ave been merely a modernist grid of serially receatec ob ec'S o' indLSt'ia rra'^.-faoture n the w c - ; of ''le' - storical oee-s [ s ^ c as Alfred Re^ge'-Patzsc"; becomes one of the most conv "c " g photographic atternots o* the twenties a^d thirt es to decic: the soc a arese^ce and polit cal activ^STi of :he wor-<inc and peasant c ass Tasses as t^e ac'ca producers o' a ccj-^try's economic resources.

26

I n t r o d u c t i o n 2 | The social history of art: models and c o n c e p t s

4 Martha Rosler, Red Stripe from the series Bringing House Beautiful, 1967-72

Kitchen,

social art historian's attempts to come to terms with these theorizations) span an extreme range: from a productivist-utihtarian aesthetic that affirms the constitution of the subject as necessar)- in the production of use-value (as in the Soviet Productivists, the k German Bauhaus, and the De Stijl movements) to an aesthetic of ludic counterproductivit)' (as in the simultaneous practices of Sur> realism) which negates labor-as-value and denies it any purchase whatsoever on the territor)^of art. Such an aesthetic regards artistic practice as the one experience where the possibility of historically available forms of unalienated and uninstrumentalized existence shine forth, whether for the first time or as celebratory reminiscences of the bliss of rituals, games, and child's play. It is no accident, then, that modernism has mostly avoided the actual representation of alienated labor, except for the work of great activist photographers such as I.ewis Hine, where the abolition of child labor was the driving agenda of the project. In contrast, whenever painting or photography in the twentieth centun* celebrated the labor force or the forceful laborer, one couldand canbe sure of being in the company of totalitarian ideologies, whether fascist, Stalinist, or corporate. The heroicization of the body subjected to alienated physical labor serv'es to instill collective respect for intolerable conditions of subjectivation, and in a false celebration of that labor it also sers'es to naturalize that which should be critically analyzed in terms of its potential transformation, if not its final abolition. Conversely, the all-too-easy acceptance of artistic practices as mere plaviijl opposition fails to recognize not only the per\'asiveness of alienated labor as a governing form of collective experience, but also prematurely accepts the relegation of artistic practice to merely a pointless exemption from the realit)' principle altogether.

the War Home: ogrsp'

i^,;; e- IS cnc

t"o very

s'tists m

pos:v.a''

z 'j T - ave -.ake- up the ecacies c" 1ne odica O - r j - . ' j m a c e .vd'< of the v -lies Her sens Sr.r,g:r:g :rc -'sco-'r^s'o r;cth a n sto'" cal a - d a r s : : s tua: on

- -s; of alt the '.vDrk partic pax-o " the gro/ving c j l : ' a l a ' a po tical cpaos tio-- againsT the mpe-alist A r e n c a ^ ,, a- r V' c-tnan Rather rhan r-ea: - g the '.vorks as - :: . dua ::h:::rc:n-o"tages, Res s- conce ved therr as a 95 ^o' - e p ' o d u c i a n a r d aisserr -atica in a - ^ T c e r a' a-f '.va- an.-: ccu'Me'c^ tural ,ou"-a s ^ order tc increase - e .'isib -v arc; Iir-Lisct -e inages, S-ie fiac d e a r y aers-.oac -sar:fic d's ecacy a^d the a alecvcs of :; striL..lian -'o'T ana mass-cul:..'-al iccnography. Seccno, - rsle' exp c t^y caunts'-ec the C a n c e a t j a c a^T tha' anctag-'ap-y s-io^ d n e r e y s-srve as a ns^t-al docuTS-it analy* ".al s e l f - c t i c a ty, c as sn -dexical tracs of the :-,i:a'o-ierco^a. stagings of the suciect. Rathe', she ae^tr'ec ph:::og'apiy as one of seve-ai c 3"..'s ve too s - :'-e p'oauc: on a' laec ogy the nass-c,. turai a-ssnal, E^.- -HS'ting S'jd:;en doa'^nenta^y Tages of the Vva--in e t n a n in:o th sse-riirgiy biissti/ and op., ent v.'oria ot r e n c a " ccrresac ty, Hos 9' net oniy reveais the :rtricate re-tvi-i'-errert of comesiic and n i i i t s ' s : c 'D'a-s of cap taiist c o n s u n p t i o r , cut a so r^a'-ifest y a enges d's crsdibiiity of oho:ography as a tru:'-:fjl .:L:'nc' of authe-tic m - c n a : on.

Ideology: reflection and mediation

The concept of ideolog)-played an important role in the aesthetics of Gyrg}' Lukacs (1885-1971), who wrote one of the most cohesive Marxist literan.^ aesthetic theories of the twentieth century. Although rarely addressing artistic visual production, Lukacs's theories had a tremendous impact on the formation of social art histor\' in its second phase of the forties and fifties, in particular on the w^ork of his fellow Hungarian Arnold Hauser (1892-1978) and the Austrian Marxist Ernst Fischer (1889-1972). Lukacs's key concept was that of reflection, establishing a rather mechanistic relationship between the forces of the economic and political base and the ideological and institutional superstructure. Ideology was defined as an inverted form of consciousness o r worseas mere false consciousness. Furthermore, the concept of reflection argued that the p h e n o m e n a of cultural representation were ultimately mere secondary' p h e n o m e n a of the class politics and ideological interests of a particular historical m o m e n t . Subsequently, though, the understanding of reflection would depart from these mechanistic assumptions. Lukacs's analysis had in fact argued for an understanding of cultural production as dialectical historical operations, and he saw certain cultural practices (e.g., the

The social history of art; models and c o n c e p t s | I n t r o d u c t i o n 2

27

bourgeois novel a n d its project of realism) as the quintessential cultural achievement of the progressi\'e forces of the bourgeoisie. W h e n It came to the development of a proletarian aesthetic, however, Lukacs b e c a m e a stalwart of reactionary- t h o u g h t , arguing that the p r e s e n ation of the legacies of bourgeois culture would have to be an integral force within an emerging proletarian realism. f ^ M m ^ h ^ p i fc. M J i m T h e task of Socialist realism in Lukacs's a c c o u n t eventually came simultaneously to preserv e the revolutionary^ potential of the p r o gressive bourgeois m o m e n t that had been betrayed and to lay the f o u n d a t i o n s of a new proletarian culture that h a d truly taken possession of the bourgeois m e a n s of cultural p r o d u c t i o n . Since the theorizations of ideolog)- in the sixties, aestheticians a n d art historians have not only differentiated general theories of ideology, b u t have also elaborated the questions of h o w cultural p r o d u c t i o n relates to the apparatus of ideology at large. The question of whether artistic practice operates inside or outside ideological representations has especially preoccupied social art historians since the seventies, all of t h e m arriving at very different answers, d e p e n d i n g on the theory of ideology to which they subscribe. Thus, for example, those social art historians ^vho follow-ed the m o d e l of the early Marxist phase of American art historian Meyer Schapiro (1904-96) continued to operate u n d e r the a s s u m p t i o n that cultural representation is the m i r r o r reflection of the ideological interests of a ruling class (e.g., Schapiro's a r g u m e n t about Impressionism being the cultural expression of the leisured share-holding bourgeoisie). According to Schapiro, these cultural
5 Dan Graham, Homes for America, Arts Magazine, 1967 Prirt. 74 x 93 (29 ; x 3eV;i Graham's oub'icaticn cf cne cf his ear es1 works n Ihe 'ayot ans preserlat onai format c' an artic.e in :he pages of a 'a'r^e' prominent An-ie^xan a^t nagaz .^-e cerr.arcates one of the key mcments cf Coriceptual art. First o' all, mode'nism's (and ConcsptL^alism's) supc;osedly radica quest for empirical and c^^tica sel-re'lexivity is turned in on itsef and onto the frames of presentation and dis1ribjr;on Graham's nagaz'ne a r c.e anticipates tne fact that c'ucial information cn artistic practices is always a reacy mediated oy mgss-c^ tural and corrime'-cial ' c m s of 3 sseminafon Acccrc ngly. Gra'^am integrates t^at dimersion o' dis'/ out on into the c o r c e p t i c cf the work i:se f The artist's model c1 self-reflexivity o^aiec^ oally sh tts '"rom t a j t o o g y to discursive and institutional cntique V.'hat distinguis'^es his approach to the problems of audience and distribi^tior f ' o m the earlier models of the historica avant-garde s the skepticism and the orecis on wit^^ which he cosit ons nis operations exc j s j v e y within tr-e discursive and ^nstituticral sp'-ere of the g ven conditions o' artistic product on ;rat"er ^nan the oroject cf utop'an socia and oolitica transforma: ons). Yet the choice of prefabricated subu-oac tract-nousing in New Je-sey 'irst of all expanas the subect matter of Pop art Torn a mere citation of mass-cc lural and r e d i a iconography to a new focus on social and architectural spaces. At the saT.s time, Grsham- revea s that the soat ai organization of the lowest level of everyday suboroar expe^-ence a r d architectural c o r sump lion had already prefigured the p'inc oles c' a serai or modular iterative s t r u c t c e t"at had de*ired the scriptural work of '^.iS oredecessors, the Minimalists. from

representations d o n o t merely articulate the mental universe of the bourgeoisie: they also invest it with the cultural authority to claim and m a i n t a i n its political legitimacy as a ruling class. Others have taken Meyer Schapiro's Marxist social history^ of art as a p o i n t of departure, but have also adopted the complex ideas that he developed in his later work. H e took the infinitely m o r e complicated questions of mediation between art a n d ideolog)^ into account by recognizing that aesthetic formations are relatively a u t o n o m o u s , rather t h a n fully dependent u p o n or congruent with ideological interests (a development that is e\ddent, for example, in Schapiro's subsequent t u r n to an early semiology of abstraction). O n e result of a m o r e complex theorization of ideology was the attempt to situate artistic representations as dialectical forces within their historically specific m o m e n t . That is, in certain cases a particular practice might very well articulate the rise of progressive consciousness not only within an indi\ddual artist, but also the progressi\aty of a patron class and its self-definition in terms of a project of bourgeois enlightenm e n t and ever-expanding social a n d economic justice (see, for example, T h o m a s Crow's [born 1948] classic essay " M o d e r n i s m a n d Mass Culture," concerning the dialectical conception of the idiom of neo-Impressionist divisionism in its drastic changes fi-om affiliation with the politics of radical anarchism to an indulgent st\ie). Social art historians of the seventies, like C r o w a n d T. J. Clark ( b o r n 1945), conceived of the p r o d u c t i o n of cultural representation as b o t h d e p e n d e n t u p o n class ideolog)' a n d generative of counterideological models. Thus, the most comprehensive account of

28

I n t r o d u c t i o n 2 | The social history of art: models and c o n c e p t s

6 Hans Haacke, MOMA-Poll,

1970 x 7 .x3 .

JO e-ice o'tic patc'y "STa a a r r : r.va : ' a r s a a ' 0 - * a:-;, j c: ocrxes eac-' JG x 2C x ' 0 ' 5

nineteenth-centun- modernist painting and its shifting fortunes within the larger apparatus of ideological p r o d u c t i o n can still be f o u n d in the complex and increasingh' differentiated approach to the question of ideology- in the work of Clark, the leading social art historian of the late twentieth century-. In Clark's accounts of the work of D a u m i e r a n d Courbet, for example, ideology^ and painting are still conceived in the dialectical relations that Lukacs had suggested in his accounts of the work of eighteenth and nineteenthcentury- literature: as an articulation of the progressive forces of the bourgeois class in a process of c o m i n g into its own m a t u r e identity to accomplish the promises of the French Revolution and of the culture of the Enlightenment at large. Clark's later work The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (1984), by contrast, does not discuss merely the extreme difficulty of situating the work of Manet a n d Seurat within such a clear a n d dy-namic relationship to the progressive forces of a particular segment of society. Rather, Clark nowfaces the task of c o n f r o n t i n g the n e w f o u n d complexity- of the relationship between ideology and artistic p r o d u c t i o n , a n d of integrating it with the methodology of social art history that he h a d developed up to this point. This theoretical crisis u n d o u b t e d l y resulted in large part f r o m Clark's discovery of the work of the Marxist Lacanian Louis Althusser (1918-90). Althusser's conception of ideolog)' still remains the most productive one, in particular with regard to its capacity to situate aesthetic a n d art-historical p h e n o m e n a in a position of relative a u t o n o m y with regard to the totality of ideology. This is not just because Althusser theorizes ideology as a totality of linguistic representations in which the subject is constituted in a politicized version of Lacan's a c c o u n t of the symbolic order. Perhaps even m o r e i m p o r t a n t is Althusser's distinction betvveen the totality of the ideological state a p p a r a t u s (and its subspheres in all d o m a i n s of representation) a n d the explicit e x e m p t i o n of artistic representations (as well as scientific knowledge) f r o m that totality of ideological representations.

-he axn.ai: an " nfcrr-^a:ion" a: Kew Yc-^/s ' v ' . o e . T a" aaerr A r a i 9 ^ " . haacke ias:a sd Dne of the "irst i le,-, .vor-<s to deal vv rh 'aocia' sy3:eTs." callea eiT^e' .-.v's c as V's:^crs' P''c:'.'63 in x e s e mstaiiatio'-a. -ana iy oassive sp-ctatcrs b e c a n e ac: ve eemen:s'y torn-a of statistiaa a ciea' response aia'ti;; ;;an:s l-laaa^e s S'^aiecticr C' the aracesses c oraducaon a r d reception c:: a anc acs tivist a f a r n s : or

actus onncip es governing expenence " wnat tts atren' an

- jarn;: had ca ed :he ''sacietv a"" adn- n stra: on," A: the ^ a n e tia-e, Haacke's wo-k, iiKe G r a - a r ^ s , --C-" -"e en: cai analysis a' tne '.vark's n n a n e - t structures i_ t "-ea" " 3 to the externa t ' a n e s a" insti:^t o'^s, Th j s -aa;-^e 'eposi' ons Conceptual a^t in a new cntica 'ela: on -a the 30cioeaonc,T c conditicns dsternining access a - d avaiiab 'y of aeschetic exaer ence. a crsctice ater iiaon: tied as "institut;ora crivque," Haacke's MOMA-Po:: IS a strik - g exan-ole a ' tais s*" ft s,nce t ccn'ronfs :ae ,, avver >,v th s sadoen insight inta ; r e cegree to wh^ch r i u s e - T ' as a supccsedly "B'^.tra space gjarG,ag aesthe: c a,.tcnon-y anc disintsrestesness is i.n-aricated a i : " accnorr c, declcgica , and cclitica interests. The v>'or< i so -eccnstit^tes a condition of respons.c ty and ;; a't'cipa:icn fcr the vie'.ve^ that surpasses Todels of -cecta:o' a invoiverent previously p-opcssd t y a r sts of tae "eo-svant-gsrde, while t recognizes the i i n i t a t i c s -.he scectators' paiidaal asp -aaans and :he ' psychic -arge of excerience a r d sel'-de:eTninadon.

WotAltfwtact that GownKx RcxlcsfeAar t danowced ProKknt Unn's

Popular culture versus mass culture

One of the most important debates a m o n g social art historians concerns the question of h o w so-called high art or avant-garde practices relate to the emerging mass-cultural formations of modernity. .And vs^hile it is of course understood that these formations change continuously (as the interactions between the tvvo halves of the systems of representation are continuously reconfigured), it has remained a difficult debate whose o u t c o m e is often indicative of the particular type of Marxism embraced by the critics of mass culture. It ranges f r o m the most violent rejection of mass-cultural formations in the w-ork of Adorno, whose i n f a m o u s c o n d e m n a t i o n of jazz is n o w universally discredited as a form of eurocentric Alexandrianism that wasworst of alllargely d e p e n d e n t o n the author's total lack of actual information about the musical p h e n o m e n a he so disdained. The opposite approach to mass-cultural p h e n o m e n a w-as first developed in England, in the work of R a y m o n d Williams (1921-88),

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whose crucial distinction between popular culture and mass culture became a productive one for subsecjuent attempts b)' cultural historians such as Stuart Hall (born 1932) to argue for an intinitelv more dift'erentiated approach when anah'zing mass-cultural phenomena. Hall argued that the same dialectical movement that aestheticians and art historians had detected in the gradual shift of stvhstic phenomena from revolutionr}' and emancipatory to regressive and politically reactionar) could be detected in the production ot mass culture as well: here a perpetual oscillation from initial contestation and transgression to eventual affirmation in the process of industrialized acculturation would take place. Hall also made it seem plausible that a fundamental first step in overcoming the eurocentric tixation on hegemonic culture (whether high bourgeois or avant-garde) was acceptance that different audiences communicate within different structures of tradition, linguistic convention, and behavioral forms of interaction. Therefore, according to the new cultural-studies approach, the specificity' of audience address and experiences should be posited above all claimsas authoritarian as they are numinousfor universally valid criteria of aesthetic evaluation, that is, that hierarchical canonicity whose ultimate and latent goal would always remain the confirmation of the supremacy of white, male, bourgeois culture.

Subtimation and desublimation

The model ot cultural studies that Williams and Hall elaborated, and that became known later as the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, laid the foundations for most of the work in cultural studies being done today. Even though he is
7 Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg/Fischer, Life with PopDemonstration for Capitalist Realism, at Mbelhaus Berges, Dsseldorf, October 11,1963 Ti 1963. Gerhard Renter and Kcrnrad Lueg rivrci later as Konraa Fischer became cne o1 Eurooe s n e s t impor.arit cealers the Minir-i&i and Conceptual general o^; staged a cerforrrance ^^ a Dsse dor' Department store It ini'lgteo a GerTan vana: on ori tho neo-avaot-garoe's in:e'na:icnal reorientation to>.varc: mass culture thatsince f e late tittieshad gradually n splaced pcst'.var forms of aDstraction m Eng anc, France, and tne United States. ~he reolog sm "capitalist -"ealism,' coined by RiChter for tfi'S occason. reveroerates v th realism's horrible "ether," the Socialist var ety f~at had denned Richter's ecjcaticnal caoKgrounci in f^e Communist p a r of Germany cnti 1961. The spectacle of boredom, aff'^maticn, and passivity aga nst the 03C'<:U'"Op cf a totalizing system o* ob ects of ccsumptio-^ too^ the Aork of Pie-o Manzci^ as cne cf ns cues, namely tne insight that arjstic practice w o j i d have to be situated more than ever in the interstitai soaces oetween objects of consumptior\ sites of spectacle, a r d ostentatious acts c' artistic a'^-' -"ilation. But its orocding rrelanchclic pass vity was a so a spec f cally Ge'ma"oonuituticn to t'^e recogniticn t^af from new on advanced e r r s of consumer c^'ture v;ould net only dete''m - e behavio' in a way that had been previously deterTiined by re igious or pclitica belief systems, but that this particular historical context c' Ge'm:any t-ey wculd a^so sen.'e as the col ect-,'e permit to reoress and to forget the populat.cn's ^ecent mass ve conversion to fascism

not known ever to have engaged with the work of any of the British Marxists, Adorno's counterargument would undoubtedly have been to accuse their project of being one of extending desublimation into the very center of aesthetic experience, its conception and critical evaluation. Desublimation for Adorno internalizes the very destruction of subjectivity further; its agenda is to dismantle the processes of complex consciousness formation, the desire for political self-determination and resistance, and ultimately to annihilate experience itself in order to become totally controlled by the demands of late capitalism. Another and rather different Marxist aesthetician, Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), conceived of the concept of desublimation in almost the opposite vvay, arguing that the structure of aesthetic experience consisted of the desire to undermine the apparatus of libidinal repression and to generate an anticipator)' m o m e n t of an existence liberated from needs and instrumentalizing demands. Marcuse's Freudo-Marxist aesthetic of libidinal liberation was situated at the absolute opposite pole of Adorno's ascetic aesthetics of a negative dialectics, and Adorno did not fail to chastize Marcuse publicly for what he perceived to be the horrifying effects of hedonistic American consumer culture on Marcuse's thoughts. Whatever the ramifications of Marcuse's reconception of desublimation, it is certainly a term for which ample evidence could be

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f o u n d in avant-garde practices before and after W o r l d W a r II. T h r o u g h o u t modernit\% artistic strategies resist and deny the established claims for technical virtuosity, for exceptional skills, and for c o n f o r m i t y with the accepted standards of historical models. They deny the aesthetic any privileged status whatsoever A and debase it with all the m e a n s of deskilling, by taking recourse to an abject or a low-cultural iconography, or by the emphatic foreg r o u n d i n g ot procedures a n d materials that reinsert the disavowed dimensions of repressed somatic experience back into the space of artistic experience.

It appears that the strengths and successes of the social history of art are m o s t evident in those historical situations where actual mediations between classes, political interests, and cultural forms of representation are solidly enacted a n d therefore relatively verifiable. Their unique capacity^ to reconstruct the narratives a r o u n d those revolutionary or f o u n d a t i o n a l situations of modernity makes the accounts of social art historians the most compelling interpretations of the first h u n d r e d years of m o d e r n i s m , f r o m David in the work of T h o m a s Crow- to the beginnings of C u b i s m in T. 1. Clark's w-ork. However, when it comes to the historical emergence of avant-

The neo-avant-garde
O n e of the m a j o r conflicts of writing social art history after W o r l d War II derives f r o m an overarching condition of asynchronicit)'. On the o n e h a n d , American critics in particular were eager to establish the first hegemonic avant-garde culture of the tsventieth century; however, in the course of that project they failed to recogni/.e that the very fact of a reconstruction of a m o d e l of avant-garde culture w^ould inevitably not only affect the status of the work being produced u n d e r these circumstances, b u t w^ould also affect the critical a n d historical writing associated with it even m o r e profoundly. In A d o r n o ' s late-modernist Aesthetic Theory (1970), the concept of a u t o n o m y retains a central role. Unlike Clement Greenberg's remobilization of the concept in favor of an American version of late-modernist aesthetics, A d o r n o ' s aesthetics operates within a principle of double negativity'. O n the one h a n d , Adorno's late m o d e r n i s m denies the possibility of a renewed access to an aesthetics of a u t o n o m y , a possibility annihilated by the final destruction of the bourgeois subject in the a f t e r m a t h of fascism and the Holocaust. On the other hand, Adorno's aesthetics also deny the possibility of a politicization of artistic practices in the revolutionary-perspective of Marxist aesthetics. According to A d o r n o , politicized art would only sen^e as an alibi and prohibit actual political change, since the political circumstances for a revolutionary politics are de facto not accessible in the m o m e n t of postwar reconstruction of culture. By contrast, American n e o m o d e r n i s m and the practices of what Peter Brger called the neo-avant-gardemost palpably advocated by Greenberg and his disciple Michael Fried (born 1939)could uphold their claims only at the price of a systematic tenmg., a manifest attempt at
wTiting

garde practices such as abstraction, collage, Dada, or the work of D u c h a m p , whose i n n e r m o s t telos it had been actively to destroy traditional subjectobject relationships and to register the destruction of traditional f o r m s of experience, both on the level of narrative and o n that of pictorial representation, social art history's a t t e m p t s to maintain cohesive narrative accounts often emerge at best as either i n c o n g r u e n t or incompatible vWth the structures a n d m o r p h o l o g i e s at h a n d , or at worst, as falsely recuperative. O n c e the extreme f o r m s of particularization a n d f r a g m e n t a t i o n have b e c o m e the central formal concerns in which postbourgeois subjectivity finds its correlative r e m n a n t s of figuration, the interpretative desire to reimpose totalizing visions o n t o historical p h e n o m e n a sometimes appears reactionary a n d at other times p a r a n o i d in its e n f o r c e m e n t of structures of m e a n i n g and experience. After all, the radicality of these artistic practices h a d involved not only their refusal to allow for such visions but also their f o r m u lation of syntax a n d structures where neither narrative figuration nor could still obtain. If m e a n i n g could still obtain at all, it

would require accounts that would inevitably lead beyond the f r a m e w o r k s of those of deterministic causation.
FARTHER S E A L I N G Frederick Antal, c/assc's'r a n c / i L c r d c r : Frederick Antal. Hog.g.c^ sr'': Rcutlodge & Kogsa Paut I966i

hiS Placetr Ei.ropear Art ;Loidon: "ou:ledge S Kegar PaL.t '962: T. J. Clark. Fsrewe.\' is an idea iNe.'.' Haven and Lcncoa: "^aie Lliivers :y ^'ess. 1999i T. J. Clark, irr.age of the Peo^'/e, Gasrai's Coarcsr a.ia' the Sezcr.j Frencf^ nepboi.'c. J S-^a- !55;
Xcrdo-.- Tt-ames & Huoson, ; 9"3;

T. J. Clark. Tre Asso'a.'e Bourgeo'S Arsts and Poiit'CS ,'n

Taaaies S Hudson, 1973; T. J. Clark.

'o^S- '6ii 7 lonclof

i _cndon:

The Panrirg ot '/oderr. U's: Pacts tn the,4,'t ot i'-'ar^et arc hs Foi'cners Psthters ana Pij(c Ufe :c t^^;^',-Cer.tJr, Pans

Tna'Ties S Hudson, 19841 Thomas Crow. iNe'A' Haver ard Loi'dor: "^ae Lnivarsity Press. 1985:. Thomas Crow. The (nfaV/ge'ice of Art 'iChaDel Hilt N,C.. Urrve^sitv o1 Mont Care na Press, 1999: Serge Guilbaut. Hoiv i\'ew YorK Stole tre icea ot '/oderr. Art: Ah'strsct ExpresS'Crcs.'T-', Freedcr,. anc the Caid A'ar iCn cago and London: Uriversi'.y cf Cnicagc Press, 1 98:3; Nicos Hadjinicotaou, Art History and Ctass Smuggle iLonuori: P Ldo ^ress, 1975) Arnold Hauser. The Social Histony ot Ah. (1 957;, fou' volumes,i_cndon: Rcjt edge, 1'999i Fredric Jameson (ed.), Meyer Sc hap iro. Brazle-, 'd^Si Meyer Sc hap iro, Meyer Schapiro, Pohhcs iLondon: New Led Bcoks " 9T7:' iNevv Yor'c George Francis Klingender. Ar. and tne iriajstriai Rei'Ci'ution :'i947i :l onaon: Paladin Press, 1975i

geschichtsklit-

history f r o m the perspective of

\ictorious interests, sy^stematically disavowing the major transformations that had occurred within the conception of high art and avant-garde culture discussed above (e.g., the legacies of Dada a n d the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes). But worse stl, these critics failed to see that cultural production after the Holocaust could not simply attempt to establish a continuity of modernist painting and sculpture. Adorno's model of a negative dialectics (most notoriously formulated in his verdict on the impossibility of lyrical poetryafter Auschv\itz) a n d his aesthetic theory^Ln open opposition to Greenberg's neomodernismsuggested the ineluctable necessity of rethinking the very precarious condition of culture at large.

Modem An: tQth and 2Ctn Centbry. Selected Papers. .'C'. 2

Pomsricspjc-Ah. S^sicotod Papers. vot. t (Nev.' York: Geo'-ge B'fizl er, 19771 Theor/ and Phiiosopl^y c'Ah: Styi'e. A,hist, and Society, Selected Papers, wi. 4

:Ng,v York: George B'azI er, 1994.:i

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3 Formalism and structuralism

n 1971-2, the French literar)' theorist Roland Barthes (1915-80) held a year-long seminar devoted to the histor\' of semiolog)', the "general science of signs" that had been conceived as an extension of linguistics by the Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) in his Course in General Linguistics ( p o s t h u m o u s l y published in 1916) and simultaneously, u n d e r the n a m e of semiotics, by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) in his Collected (also p o s t h u m o u s l y published, f r o m 1931 to 1958). Barthes had been one of the leading voices of structuralism f r o m the mid-fifties to the late sixties, together with the anthropologist Claude Le\i-Strauss (born 1908), the philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-84 ), and the psychoanalyst lacques Lacan, and as such had greatly contributed to the resurrection of the semiological project, which he had clearly laid out in Elements of Semiology (1964) and "Structural Analysis of Narratives" (1966). But he had seriously u n d e r m i n e d that very project in his most recent books, 5/Z, The Empire of Signs (both 1970), a n d Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971). T h e curiosity of Barthes's auditors (myself a m o n g them} was i m m e n s e : in this period of intellectual t u r m o i l m a r k e d by a general Oedipal desire to kill the structuralist m o d e l , they expected him t o ease their u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the shift u n d e r w a y f r o m A A (structuralism) to B (poststructuralism)a term that neatly describes Barthes's work at the time, but which was never cond o n e d by any of its participants. They anticipated a chronological s u m m a r y . Logicalh', such a narrative, after a presentation of Saussure's a n d Peirce's concepts, would have discussed the work of the Russian Formalist school of literary criticism, active f r o m a r o u n d 1915 to the Stalinist blackout of 1932; then, after o n e of its m e m b e r s , R o m a n lakobson (1896-1982), had left Russia, of the Prague Linguistic Circle g r o u p e d a r o u n d him; then of French s t r u c t u r a h s m ; and finally, in conclusion, it would have dealt with lacques Derrida's deconstruction. Barthes's audience got the package they had h o p e d for, but not without a m a j o r surprise. Instead of beginning with Saussure, he initiated his sur\^ey with an examination of the ideological critique proposed, f r o m the tw-enties on, by the German Marxist plavvvright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). A h h o u g h Barthes, n o less than his peers, had s u c c u m b e d to the d r e a m of scientific objectivity'when the structuralist m o v e m e n t was at its peak, he n o w implicitly advocated
9^5 rr.'-ClL.:' or 4

a subjective approach. N o longer interested in m a p p i n g a discipline, he endeavored instead to tell the story^ of his own semiological adventure, which had started with his discover)- of Brecht's writings. C o m i n g f r o m s o m e o n e whose assault on biographism (the reading of a literar)^ piece t h r o u g h the life of its a u t h o r ) h a d always been scathing, the gesture was deliberately provocative. (The e n o r m o u s polemic engendered by the antibiographism of Barthes's On Racine (1963), which had ended in Criticism and Truth (1966), Barthes's brilliant answer to his detractors, a n d which h a d d o n e m o r e than a m l h i n g else to radically transform traditional literary studies in France, was still very m u c h o n everyone's mind.) But there was a strategic motive as well in this Brechtian beginning, a motive that becomes apparent w h e n one turns to the essay in which Barthes had discussed Saussure for the first time. "M)1:h Today" was a postscript to the collection of sociological Wgnettes Barthes h a d wTitten between 1954 a n d 1956 a n d published u n d e r the title Mythologies been
vvTitten

(1957). The m a i n body of the b o o k h a d petit-bourgeois

in the Brechtian mode: its stated purpose was to reveal,

underneath the pretended "naturalness" of the

ideolog)'' conveyed by the media, what was historically determined. But in " M ) t h Today" Barthes presented Saussure's w^ork, which he had just discovered, as offering new tools for the kind of Brechtian ideological analysis he had so far been conducting. W h a t is perhaps most striking, in retrospect, is that Barthes's exposition of Saussurean semiology' begins with a plea in favor of formalism. Shortly ^ after alluding to Andrei Z h d a n o v a n d his Stalinist c o n d e m n a t i o n of formalism a n d m o d e r n i s m as bourgeois decadence, Barthes writes: "Less terrorized by the specter of 'formalism,' historical criticism might have been less sterile; it would have understood that ... the m o r e a system is specifically defined in its forms, the m o r e amenable it is to historical criticism. To parody a well-known saying, 1 shall say that a little formalism turns one a w w f r o m History, but that a lot brings one back to it." In other words, right f r o m the start Barthes conceived of what was soon to be n a m e d "structuralism" as part of a broader formaUst current in twentieth-century thought. Furthermore, Barthes was denying the claims of the antiformalist c h a m p i o n s that formalist critics, in bypassing "content" to scrutinize forms, were retreating firom the worid and its historical realities to the ivory tower of a humanistic "eternal present."

32

I n t r o d u c t i o n 3 | Formalism and structuralism

"Semiolog)' is a science of forms, since it studies significations apart f r o m their content." Such is the definition that immediately precedes Barthes's passage cjuoted above. Its terminology is somewhat flawed, for Barthes was still a novice in structural linguistics, and he would soon k n o w that the word "content" has to be replaced by "referent" in such a sentence. But the basic axioms are already there: signs are organized into sets of oppositions that shape their signification, independently of what the signs in question refer to; ever)' h u m a n activity partakes of at least one system of signs (generally several at once), whose rules can be tracked do^NTi; and, as a producer of signs, m a n is forever c o n d e m n e d to signification, unable A to flee the "prison-house of language," to use Fredric Jameson's formulation. Nothing that m a n utters is insignificanteven saying "nothing" carries a meaning (or rather multiple meanings, changing according to the context, which is itself structured). Choosing in 1971 to present these axioms as derived f r o m Brecht polemical intention: he was pointing to the historical link between m o d e r n i s m and the awareness that language is a structure of signs. Indeed, although Brecht's star has somewhat faded in recent years, he was regarded in postwar E u r o p e as one of the most powerful modernist writers. In his n u m e r o u s theoretical statements. Brecht had always attacked the m ) t h of the transparency of language that had governed the practice of theater since Aristotle; the self-reflective, anti-illusionistic montagelike devices that interrupted the flow of his plays aimed at aborting the identification of the spectator with any character and, as he phrased it, at p r o d u c i n g an effect of "distanciation" or "estrangement." The first example Barthes c o m m e n t e d on in his 1971-2 seminar \vas a text in w^hich the G e r m a n writer patiently analyzed the 1934 Christmas speeches of two Nazi leaders ( H e r m a n n Goering a n d Rudolf Hess). W h a t struck Barthes was Brecht's extreme attention to the f o r m of the Nazi texts, which he had followed w o r d for w o r d in order to elaborate his counterdiscourse. Brecht pinpointed the efficacy of these speeches in the seamless flow of their rhetoric: the smokescreen with which Goering a n d Hess masked their faulty logic a n d heap of lies was the mellifluous continuity of their language, which f u n c t i o n e d like a robust, gooey adhesive. Brecht, in short, was a formalist, eager to d e m o n s t r a t e that language w^as not a neutral vehicle m a d e to transparently convey concepts directly f r o m m i n d to m i n d , but had a materialit)' of its own a n d that this materiality was always charged with significations. But he immensely resented the label of formalism when it was t h r o w n at m o d e r n literature as a whole by the Marxist philosop h e r Gyorg)^ Lukacs, wTiting in the USSR at a time when calling a n y o n e a formalist was equivalent to signing his or her death warrant. Bv then virulently opposed to m o d e r n i s m in general but in particular to the technique of m o n t a g e that Sergei Eisenstein invented in film a n d Brecht a d a p t e d to the theater, a n d to the kind of interior m o n o l o g u e that concludes James Joyce's Ulysses Lukacs h a d p r o p o s e d n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y realist novels (those of Balzac in particular) as the m o d e l to be emulated, especially if o n e

was to write f r o m a "proletarian" point of view. Yet it was Lukacs w h o was the "formalist," wrote Brecht in his rebuttal. In calling for a twentieth-centur)' novel wiih a "revolutionary" content but p e n n e d in a f o r m that dated f r o m a c e n t u n ' earlier, a f o r m that belonged to the era before the self-reflexivity a n d anti-illusionism of m o d e r n i s m , Lukacs was fetishizing f o r m . T h u s the t e r m "formalist" was an insult that Lukacs a n d Brecht tossed at each other, but the word did not have the same sense for each. For Brecht, a formalist was a n y o n e w h o could not see that f o r m was inseparable f r o m content, w h o believed that f o r m was a mere carrier; for Lukacs, it was anyone w h o believed that f o r m even affected content. Brecht's uneasiness with the term, however, should give us pause, especially since the same uneasiness has m u s h r o o m e d in art history a n d criticism since the early seventies. (It is particularly noteworthy in this context that the art critic whose n a m e is most associated in America with formalism, Clement Russian, the t e r m has acquired ineradicably vulgar ones in English," he wrote in 1967.) In order to u n d e r s t a n d the ambivalence, it is useful to recall Barthes's dictum: "a little formalism t u r n s one away f r o m History, but that a lot brings one back to it." For what Brecht resented in Lukacs's "formalism" was its denial both of history and of what the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev would call the " f o r m of c o n t e n t " o f the fact that the very structure of Balzac's novels was g r o u n d e d u p o n the world view of a particular social class at a particular juncture in the history of Western Europe. In short, Lukacs had practiced only a "restricted" formalism, whose analysis remains at the superficial level of form-as-shape, or morphology. T h e antiformalism that was prevalent in the discourse of art criticism in the seventies can thus be explained in great part by a confusion bet^veen two kinds of formalism, o n e that concerns itself essentially m t h m o r p h o l o g y (which I call "restricted" formalism), a n d one that envisions f o r m as s t r u c t u r a l t h e kind embraced by Brecht w h e n he sorted out the "continuit)^" of Goering's a n d Hess's speeches as an essential part of their ideological machine. T h e c o n fusion was c o m p o u n d e d by Greenberg's gradual t u r n a b o u t . While his analyses of the dialectical role of trompe-Voeil de\ices in

(rather than f r o m Saussure, as he had d o n e in 1957), Barthes h a d a A Greenberg, also had such misgiWngs: "Whatever its connotations in

Georges Braque's Cubist still lifes 111 or that of the allovemess of lackson Pollock's drippings) are to be c o u n t e d on the structural ledger, by the late 1950s his discourse was m o r e reminiscent of the morphological m o d e p r o m u l g a t e d at the beginning of the twenti eth centur)'^ by the British writers Clive Bell a n d Roger Fry, whose concern was merely good design. T h e distinction between these two formalisms is essential to a retrieval of formalism (as structuralism) f r o m the wastebasket of discarded ideas.

Structuralism and art history

.Although the linguistic/semiological m o d e l provided by Saussure b e c a m e the inspiration for the structuralist m o v e m e n t in the fifties and sixties, art histor)' had already developed structural m e t h o d s by the time this m o d e l became known in the t\venties. Furthermore,

Formalism and structuraiism | introduction 3

33

1 Georges Braque, Violin and Pitcher,

1910

C- c" cs-ivas. 1 1 7 * 73 i4c X 2 . >

-netorical devices, :o the sign f ca: o^ a' tne nc-a^a a'' sign 1 ca:icn : " e T s e ves, EXBT - - g tnis ca "tmg by B'aque Giemen: Greercerg sing ecJ OL-I : r e cev ce 3'" v e real'Stic naii and ts shadcA'- pa nted on fco c^ tne facetec vcluTes decic:ed on t-^e p cture^s suraae, 3cth flattening

the first literary critics w h o can be called structuraliststhe Russian A f o r m a l i s t s w e r e particularly aware of their art-historical antecedents ( m u c h m o r e than of Saussure, w h o m the\' discovered only after writing m a n y of their groundbreaking works). Finalb', it was Cubism that first helped the Russian Formalists to develop their theories: in deliberately attacking the epistemology of representation, Cubism (and abstract art in its wake) underscored the gap separating reference a n d meaning and called for a m o r e sophisticated u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the nature of signs. T h e role played by art history and avant-garde art practice in the f o r m a t i o n of a structuralist m o d e of t h i n k i n g is little known today, but it is i m p o r t a n t for o u r purpose, especially with regard to the accusations of ahistoricism often t h r o w n at structuralism. In fact, o n e could even say that the birth of art history as a discipline dates f r o m the m o m e n t it was able to structure the vast a m o u n t of material it had neglected for purely ideological a n d aesthetic reasons. It might seem o d d today that seventeenth-centur\' Baroque art, for example, had fallen into oblivion d u r i n g the eighteenth a n d early nineteenth centuries, until Heinrich Wlfflin (1864-1945) rehabilitated it in Retiaissance and Baroque (1888). Resolutely opposed to the d o m i n a n t normative aesthetic of l o h a n n Joachim Winckelm a n n ( 1 7 1 7 - 6 8 ) , for w h o m Greek art w^as an unsurpassable yardstick for all subsequent artistic p r o d u c t i o n , Wlfflin endeavored to show that Baroque art h a d to be judged by criteria that were not only different f r o m btit resolutely opposed to those of Classical art. This idea, that the historical signification of a stylistic language was manifested t h r o u g h its rejection of a n o t h e r one (in this case, a preceding one) would lead Wlfflin to posit "an art history-without n a m e s " and to establish the set of binary^ oppositions that constitutes the core of his most f a m o u s book, Principles of Art open form; multiplicity/unity; clearness/unclearness). Wlfiflin's formalist t a x o n o m y , however, was still part of a teleological a n d idealistic discourse, m o d e l e d on Hegel's view of history, according to which the unfolding of events is prescribed by a set of p r e d e t e r m i n e d laws. (Within every^ "artistic epoch," Wlfflin always read the same s m o o t h evolution f r o m linear to painterly, f r o m plane to recession, etc., which left h i m with little r o o m to explain how^ one switched f r o m o n e " e p o c h " to the next, particularly since he denied nonartistic historical factors m u c h of a causative role in his scheme.) But if Wlfflin's idealism prevented h i m f r o m developing his formalism into a structuralism, it is to Alois Riegl (1858-1905) that ones owes the first full elaboration of a meticulous analysis of f o r m s as the best access to a social history of artistic p r o d u c t i o n , signification, a n d reception. Just as Wlfflin had d o n e with the Baroque era, Riegl u n d e r t o o k the rehabilitation of artistic eras that had been marginalized as decadent, most notably the production of late antiquity {Late Rowan Art Industry, 1901). But he did m o r e than Wlfflin to advance the cause of an a n o n y m o u s history of art, one that w^ould trace the evolution of formal/structural systems rather than merely study the o u t p u t of individual artists: if the well-known works of R e m b r a n d t a n d Frans History, which appeared in 1915 (linear/painterly, plane/recession, closed/

-re rest

o" t i e inage a - d p js-i,ng it back atc ceptn. the

r,'-o,^pe-,'"ce(,' -^ai; was fcr t - e ar: st a Tieans cf cas: - g some d c c o : with rega-d to tne traditional, illusior s: a mode a' represen: - g space.

34

I n t r o d u c t i o n 3 | Formalism and structuralism

Hals figure in his last book. The Group Portraiture of Holland

(1902),

retical landmark of Russian Formalism (the'family resemblance of this notion with Brecht's "estrangement effect" is not fortuitous). According to Shklovsk)-, the m a i n function of art is to defamiliarize our perception, which has b e c o m e automatized, and although Jakobson would later dismiss this first theory of defamilarization, it is the way he interpreted Cubism at the time. And for good reason,

the\' are as the e n d - p r o d u c t s of a series whose features the\' inherit and transform. RiegFs historical relativism was radical and had farreaching consecjuences, not only because it allowed him to disregard the distinction between high a n d low, m a j o r and minor, p u r e and applied art, but because it led him to understand every artistic
document AS

be analyzed a n d posited in relationship as one could say that the first, so-called "African," phase of Cubism was rooted in a deliberate practice of estrangement. Witness this with others belonging to the same series. In other \vords, Riegl declaration of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973): "In those days people demonstrated that it was only after the set of codes enacted (or a
nionufiientXo

altered) bv an art object had been m a p p e d in their u t m o s t details that one could attempt to discuss that object's signification and the way it related to other series (for example to the history-of social formations, of science, and so f o r t h ) a n idea that would be of importance for both the Russian Formalists a n d Michel Foucault. And it is because Riegl understood m e a n i n g as structured by a set of oppositions (and not as transparently conveyed) that he was able to challenge the ovenvhelming role usually given to the referent in the discourse about art since the Renaissance.

said that 1 m a d e the noses crooked, even in the Demoiselles

d'Avig-

non, but I had to m a k e the nose crooked so they would see that it was a nose. I was sure later they would see that it wasn't crooked." For Shklovsky, what characterized any work of art was the set of "devices" t h r o u g h which it was reorganizing the "material" (the referent), m a k i n g it strange. (The n o t i o n of "device," never rigorously defined, was a blanket term by which he designated any stylistic feature or rhetoric construction, encompassing all levels of languagephonetic, syntactic, or semantic.) Later on, w h e n he devoted particular attention to works such as the eighteenthcentury "novel" Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, where the

A c r i s i s of r e f e r e n c e A similar crisis of reference provided the initial spark of Russian Formalism a r o u n d 1915. T h e polemical target of the Russian Formalist critics was the Symbolist conception that poetry resided in the images it elicited, i n d e p e n d e n t of its linguistic f o r m . But it was through their c o n f r o n t a t i o n with Cubism, then with the first A abstract paintings of Kazimir Malevich and the poetic experiments of his friends Velemir Khlebnikov a n d Aleksei K r u c h e n i k h poems whose sounds referred to n o t h i n g but the phonetic n a t u r e t)f language itselfthat the Russian Formalists discovered, before they ever heard of Saussure, w^hat the Swiss scholar had called the '\u-bitrar\^ nature of the sign." Allusions to C u b i s m a b o u n d in R o m a n Jakobson's wTitings, particularly w h e n he tries to define poetic language as opposed to the language of c o m m u n i c a t i o n used in everyday life. In " W h a t is Poeir\ ?", a lecture delivered in 1933, he writes: Poet 'icityl can be separated out and made independent, various devices in say, a Gubist painting. not a mere representation burst of emotion, when like the

writer pays m o r e attention to m o c k i n g the codes of storytelling t h a n to the plot itself, Shklovsky began to conceive n o t only o u r perception of the world but also the daily language of c o m m u n i c a tion as the "material" that literary art r e a r r a n g e s b u t the work of art remained for h i m a s u m of devices t h r o u g h which the " m a t e r ial" was de-automatized. For Jakobson, though, the "devices" were not simply pUed up in a work but were interdependent, constituting a system, a n d they had a constructive function, each c o n t r i b u t i n g to the specificity a n d unity of the work, just as each b o n e has a role to play in o u r skeleton. F u r t h e r m o r e , each new artistic device, or each new system of devices, had to be u n d e r s t o o d either as breaking a previous o n e that h a d b e c o m e deadened a n d automatized, or as revealing it (laying it bare), as if it had been there all along b u t unperceived: in short, any artistic device (and not just the world at large or the language of daily c o m m u n i c a t i o n ) could b e c o m e the "material" m a d e strange by a subsequent one. As a result, any device was always semantically charged for Jakobson, a complex sign bearing several layers of connotations. It is this second n o t i o n of osrra/icNie that Jakobson had in m i n d w-hen he spoke of the isolation of the various devices in a Cubist work as a "special case": in laying bare the traditional m e c h a n i s m s of pictorial representation. C u b i s m p e r f o r m e d for Jakobson a n d his colleagues the same f u n c t i o n that neurosis had played for Freud's discovery of the unconscious. M u c h as the special (pathological) case of neurosis had led Freud to his general theory of the psychological development of m a n , the special (defamiliarizing) case of C u b i s m was seized by the Russian Formalists as s u p p o r t for their antimimetic, structural conception of poetic language. In hindsight, however, we can see that bestowing a status of "noror "making

But this is a special

case.... Poeticity is present when the word is felt as a word and of the object being named or an outwords and their composition, to their

! 1 ea}]ing, their external and inner form, acquire a weight and value of their own instead of referring indifferently \\ ithout contradiction [between 'tiobility of concepts, no mobility of signs, and the hctween concept and sign becomes automatized. a) a hah, and the awareness of reality dies out. reality.... relationship comes sign and object] there is no Activity

These last lines refer to the device of ostranenie,

m a l s ' " to the traditional means of pictorial representation that Cubism fought and whose devices it laid bare is not sustainable: it would posit such traditional means of representahon as constituting a

>n ange," as a rhetorical figure, whose conceptuaUzation by Viktor ShklovskT (1893-1984) in "Art as Device" (1917) is the first theo-

Formalism and structuraiism | i n t r o d u c t i o n 3

35

kind of ahistorical n o r m against ^vhich all pictorial enterprises would ha\'e to be measured ( bringing us back, in effect, to W'inckelmann ), Percei\ing the essentializing danger ot this simple dualism (norm/exception), lakobson grew m o r e suspicious of the normative postulates upon which his early work had been based (the opposition between the language of daih' use as n o r m , and of literature as exception). But he would always take advantage of the model offered by psychoanalysis, according to which dysfunction helps us understand function. In fiict, one of his ma jor contributions to the field of literar)^ criticismthe dichotom\' that he established between the metaphoric and metonyxnic poles of languagewas the direct fesult of his im estigation of aphasia, a disorder of the central jierv'ous system characterized by the partial or total loss of the ability to communicate. He noted that for the most part aphasic disturbances concerned either "the selection of linguistic entities" (the choice of that sound rather than this one, of that word rather than this one) or "their combination into linguistic units of a higher degree of complexity." Patients suffering f r o m the first kind of aphasia (which lakobson terms "the similariU^ disorder" 1 cannot substitute a linguistic unit for another one, and metaphor is inaccessible to them; patients suffering from the second kind of aphasia ("the contiguity disorder") caimot put any linguistic unit into its context, and metonymy (or symecdoche) is senseless for them. The poles of similarity and contiguity were directly borrowed f r o m Saussure (they correspond in his Course to the terms paradigm and sj'ntagni), but they were expressly linked by lakobson to the Freudian concepts of displacement and condensation: just as the limit between these two activities of the unconscious remained porous for Freud, Jakobson's polar extremes do not preclude the existence of h)i5rid or intermediary forms. But once again it is the opposition of these t\vo terms that structured for him the immense domain of world literature. And not only literature: he saw Surrealist art as essentially metaphoric, and Cubism as essentially metonymic.

This angle of attack led Saussure to separate the problem of referentiality f r o m the p r o b l e m of signification, u n d e r s t o o d as the e n a c t m e n t in the utterance 'which he called parole, as opposed to langue, designating the language in which the sign is uttered) of an arbitrary- but necessary- link betvveen a signifier and a "conceptual" signified. In the most celebrated passage of his Saussure wTote: In language there are only differences. Even more important, ference is set up; but in language there are only a Course,

difference generally implies positive terms between which the difdifferences subthan w i t h o u t positive t e r m s . . . The idea [signifiedj the other signs that surround it. or phonic

stance [signifier] that a sign contains is o f less importance

This not only m e a n s that a linguistic sign does n o t signify^ by itself, but that language is a system of which all units are i n t e r d e p e n d e n t . "I eat" a n d "I ate" have different m e a n i n g s ( t h o u g h only one letter has shifted its position), but the signified of a t e m p o r a l present in "1 eat" can exist only if it is opposed to the signified of a t e m p o r a l past in "I ate": o n e would simply not be able to identify^ (and thus u n d e r s t a n d ) a linguistic sign if o u r m i n d did not c o m p u t e its c o m petitors within the system to which it belongs, quickly eliminating the ill-suitors while gauging the context of the utterance (for "I eat" is opposed not only to "I ate," but to "I gorge," "I bite," or e v e n leaving the semantic realm of f o o d " I sing," "I walk," a n d so forth). In short, the essential characteristic of any sign is to be what o t h e r signs are not. But, Saussure adds,

the statement

that everything in language is negative is true only when

if the sig7iified and the signifier are considered separately; itive in own class.

we consider the sigti in its totality, we have something that is pos-

The arbitrary nature of the sign

Before we examine a Cubist work f r o m a structural p o i n t of view, let us at last t u r n to Saussure's f a m o u s Course and its g r o u n d b r e a k ing exposition of what he called the arbitrariness of the sign. Saussure went tar beyond the conventional n o t i o n of arbitrariness as the absence of any "natural" link between the sign (say, the w o r d "tree") and its referent (any actual tree), even t h o u g h he would have been the last t o deny this absence, t o which the simple existence of multiple languages attests. For Saussure, the arbitrariness involved not only the relation between the sign a n d its referent, b u t also that between the signifier (the s o u n d w^e utter w h e n w'e pron o u n c e the w o r d "tree" or the letters we trace when we write it d o w n ) and the signified (the concept of tree). His principal target was the Adamic conception of language ( f r o m A d a m ' s perform a n c e in the Book of Genesis: language as an ensemble of n a m e s for things), which he caUed "chimeric" because it presupposes the existence of an invariable n u m b e r of signifieds that receive in each particular language a different f o r m a l vestment.

In other words, the acoustic signifier a n d the "conceptual" signified are negatively differential (they define themselves by w^hat they are not), but a positive fact results f r o m their c o m b i n a t i o n , "the sole type of facts that language has," namely, the sign. Such a caveat might seem strange, given that everyvs'here else Saussure insisted on the oppositional nature of the sign: is he n o t suddenly reintroducing a substantive quality here, when all his linguistics rests on the discovery^ that "language is f o r m a n d not substance"? Fverything revolves a r o u n d the concept of value, one of the m o s t complex and controversial concepts in Saussure. The sign is positive because it has a value d e t e r m i n e d by what it can be c o m pared with a n d exchanged with within its own system. This value is absolutely differential, like the value of a h u n d r e d - d o l l a r bill in relation to a t h o u s a n d - d o l l a r bill, but it confers on the sign " s o m e t h i n g positive." Value is an e c o n o m i c concept for Saussure; it permits the exchange of signs within a system, b u t it is also what prevents their perfect exchangeability with signs belonging to a n o t h e r system (the French w^ord mouton, for example, has a

36

Introduction 3 | Formalism and structuralism

different value than the English sheep or niuttoii, because it m e a n s both the animal a n d its meat). To e.xplain his concept of value, Saussure invoked the m e t a p h o r of chess. If, d u r i n g a game, a piece is lost, it does not matter what other piece replaces it provisionally; the players can arbitrarily choose any substitute they want, any object will do, a n d even, d e p e n d i n g on their capacity- to r e m e m b e r , the absence of an object. For it is the piece's f u n c t i o n within a system that confers its value (just as it is the piece's position at each m o m e n t of the game that gives it its changing signification). "If you a u g m e n t language b\' one sign," Saussure said, "you diminish in the same p r o p o r t i o n the [value] of the others. Reciprocally, if only two signs had been chosen ... all the [possible] significations would have had to be divided between these two signs. O n e would have designated one half of the objects, the other, the other h a l f " T h e value of each ot these two inconceivable signs would have been e n o r m o u s . Reading such lines, it comes as no surprise that Jakobson and the .Russian Formalists had arrived at similar conclusions through a examination of C u b i s m t h a t of Picasso, in particular, who almost maniacally demonstrated the interchangeability of signs within his pictorial system, and whose play on the minimal act required to transform a head into a guitar or a bottle, in a series of collages he realized in 1913, seem a direct illustration of Saussure's pronouncement. This metaphoric transformation indicates that, contra Jakobson, Picasso is not b o u n d to the m e t o n y m i c pole. Instead, he seems to particularly relish composite structures that are both metaphoric a n d metonymic. A case in point is the 1944 sculpture of the Bull's Head [2], where the conjunction (metonymy) of a bicycle handlebar and seat p r o d u c e d a m e t a p h o r (the s u m of these rvvo bicycle parts are like a bull's head), but such swift transformations based on the tvvo structuralist operations of substitution and combination are legion in his oeuvre. Which is to say that Picasso's C u b i s m was a "structuralist activit)'," to use Barthes's phrase: it not only p e r f o r m e d a structural analysis of the figurative tradition of Western art, but it also structurally engineered new objects. An example is Picasso's invention of what one could call space as a n e w sculptural material. T h e fact that the Cubist constructions Picasso created in 1912-13 represent a key m o m e n t in the history of sculpture has long been recognized, but the m e a n s t h r o u g h which Picasso articulated space anew are not always u n d e r s t o o d .
2 Pablo Picasso, Bull's Head, 1942 - . - ^ e n b age ibicycle seat and "andlecarsi, : ^ ^ > - 3 5 X 19 ;13 . X 1 : ' X 7/;)

To m a k e a story short: until Picasso's 1912 Guitar [3], Western sculpture, either canned or cast, had either consisted in a mass, a v o l u m e that detached itself f r o m a s u r r o u n d i n g space conceived as neutral, or retreated to the condition of bas-relief. Helped by his discovery of African art, Picasso realized that Western sculpture w^as paralyzed by a fear of being swallowed by the real space ot objects (in the post-Renaissance system of representation, it was essential that art remained securely roped off f r o m the world in an ethereal realm of illusions). Rather than a t t e m p t i n g to discard the rope altogether, as Marcel D u c h a m p would soon do in his readyI mades, Picasso answered the challenge by m a k i n g space o n e of sculpture's materials. Part of the b o d y of his Guitar is a virtual

- e neve' read Saussure. Picasso discovered ~ ; c ,vn visual t e r n s what the 'aths' of st.'uc"L.'al

" ni- s: IS hac labe^ec the 'arb tra^ ness o' t " e s g^'."' -- er tnat signs a'e ef ^ed by their oppcsit on tc ether -ic- 5 '.v thin a given system, anytoirg car stand ' c - f- ^g e se if it c o " f o r n s to the r^ ss of the s y s t e r :-^65ticn. ^sing f^e handlebar and seat of a b cycle, - ". "-SSO -enains witt^ the 'ealm a' representation, oirg the minimum required ' c a comb "ation of -carate e^en^ents "o be -"ead as toe ho-ned heac of t c.. . while 3t f e same t n~e o e m c s f a t i n g tne n"etaohcrio ocwer o* assemblage.

Formalism and structuraiism |i n t r o d u c t i o n3

37

v o l u m e whose external surfacc we d o not see (it is immaterial) b u t that we intuit t h r o u g h the position of"other planes. Just as Saussure had d i s c o \ c r e d with regard to linguistic signs, Picasso found that sculptural signs did not ha\'e to be substantial. Empty space could easily be t r a n s f o r m e d into a differential mark, and as such c o m bined with all kinds of other signs: n o longer fear space, Picasso told his fellow^ sculptors, shape it. As Jakobson has n o t e d , however. C u b i s m is a "special case" in which devices can be separated out ( in a Cubist painting shading is emphatically i n d e p e n d e n t f r o m c o n t o u r , for example), and few artists in this c e n t u n ' were as good structuralists as Picasso was d u r i n g his Cubist years. A n o t h e r candidate proposed by k.structuralist critics was Piet M o n d r i a n (1872-1944). Indeed, in deliberately reducing his pictorial v o c a b u l a n ' to ven' few elements, f r o m 1920 o n b l a c k horizontal a n d vertical lines, planes of primary^ colors a n d of "noncolors" (white, black, or g r a y ) a n d in p r o d u c i n g an extremely various oeuvre within such limited parameters {4, 5], M o n d r i a n d e m o n s t r a t e d the c o m b i n a t o r y infinitude of any system. In Saussurean terminolog)', one could say that because the new pictorial hngue that he created consisted in a h a n d f u l of elements a n d rules ("no s y m m e t r y " was one of t h e m ) , the range of possibilities proceeding f r o m such a Spartan language (his parole) became all the m o r e apparent. He h a d limited the c o r p u s of possible pictorial m a r k s within his system, but this \ery limitation immensely accrued their "value." Despite the fact that M o n d r i a n seems to be a structuralist avant la lettre it is not the structural t ) ^ e of formal analysis, b u t rather the morphological one, that w^as first p r o p o s e d in the study of his art. This morphological formalism, mainly concerned with M o n d r i a n ' s compositional schemes, r e m a i n e d impressionistic in n a t u r e , t h o u g h it gave us excellent descriptions of the balance or imbalance of planes in his w^orks, the vividness of the colors, the r h y t h m i c staccato. In the end this approach r e m a i n e d tautological, especially in its b l u n t refusal to discuss " m e a n i n g , " a n d it is not by chance that an iconographic, Symbolist interpretation was long t h o u g h t preferable, even t h o u g h it ran c o u n t e r to what the artist himself h a d to say. A structural reading of M o n d r i a n ' s work began to emerge only in the seventies. It examines the semantic f u n c t i o n played by various c o m b i n a t i o n s of pictorial elements as M o n d r i a n ' s work
3 ' Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Fall1912 Const'-jclio- d1 sneet metal, string, ans: vM'e. 77,5 X 35 X 1 9.5 l30'': X ' Sv^ x 7^ :1 For slructjralisrr, signs are oppositional 3 " d r a : suDstartial, vvhich is :o ssy Itisr tne shape and sigr ticaticn are solely dednec by their d r e r e ^ c e trenail o-.-^er s:gns 'n the same system, anc tha: they wo..Id n e a r --oTn " g m salat on. By the shea- contrasting juxtapcsit on of voic and surface m this sculpture, L'.'hich n a r k s ttie oir:-: of vj-at woula be called "Syntnetic Gub s n . " i;hcss n a j c 'c-n^ai inven: on -.vo.. d be collage, Picassc transforrrs a veld into a sign - c the s<in a* a guita" anc a p'otruding cylinaer into a sign -o- its hcle. In do " g sc. ^e n a k e s a nonsubs:a.~cesoacein:o a -naterial for sculpture.

evolved and seeks to u n d e r s t a n d h o w a seemingly rigid f o r m a l system engendered diverse significations. Rather t h a n assigning a fixed m e a n i n g to these elements, as the Symbolist interpretation h a d vs^anted to do, it is able to show, for example, that f r o m the early thirties, the "Xeoplastic" pictorial vocabulary that he had coined in 1920 and used ever since w^as t r a n s f o r m e d into a selfdestructive m a c h i n e destined to abolish not only the figure, as he h a d d o n e before, b u t color planes, lines, surfaces, a n d by extension every possible identityin other words, that M o n d r i a n ' s art elicited an epistemological nihilism of ever-growing intensity. In short, if art critics a n d historians h a d been m o r e acutely attenti\'e to the formal development of his oeuvre, they might have earlier

38

I n t r o d u c t i o n 3 | Formalism and structuralism

on grasped the connection he felt more inclined to make in his writings, from 1930, between what he tried to achieve pictorially and the political views of anarchism. By the same token, however, they would have understood that if his classic Neoplastic work had been governed by a structural ethos, during the last decade of his life this ethos was geared toward the deconstruction of the set of binary oppositions upon which his art had been based: they would have perceived that, like Barthes, Mondrian had began as a practitioner of structuralism only to become one of its most formidable assailants. But they would have had to be versed in structuralism itself to diagnose his attack. Two aspects of Mondrian's art after 1920 explain why his art became an ideal object for a structuralist approach: first, it was a closed corpus (not only was the total o u t p u t small, but as noted above, the n u m b e r of pictorial elements he used were in a finite number); second, his oeuvre was easily distributed into series. The two first methodological steps taken in any structural analysis are the definition of a closed corpus of objects from which a set of recurrent rules can be deduced, and, within this corpus, the taxonomic constitution of seriesand it is indeed only after the multiple series scanning Mondrian's oeuvre had been properly mapped that a more elaborate study of the signification of his works became possible. But what a structural analysis can do with the production of a single artist, it can also do at the microlevel of the single work, as the Russian Formalists or Barthes have amply shown, or at the macrolevel of a whole field, as Claude L m - S t r a u s s has demonstrated in his studies of vast ensembles of myths. The method remains the same, only the scale of the object of inquirychanges: in each case, discrete "units" have to be distinguished so that their interrelationship can be understood, and their oppositional signification emerge. The method has indeed its limits, for it presupposes the internal coherence of the corpus of analysis, its unitywhich is why it yields its best results when dealing with a single object or with a series that remains limited in range. Through a forceful critique of the very^ notions of internal coherence, closed corpus, and authorAship, what is now called "poststructuralism," hand in hand w t h the literary and artistic practices labeled "postmodernist," would efficiently blunt the preeminence that structuralism and formalism had enjoy^ed in the sixties. But, as n u m e r o u s entries in this volume make clear, the heuristic power of structural and formalist analysis,
4 Piet M o n d r i a n , Composition Black, C Yellow, and Gray, 1921 with Red, Blue,

especially with regard to the canonical m o m e n t s of modernism, need not be discarded.

: n canvas. 39.4 x 35 ' 1 5 ' x 13: with Blue, Black, =L R ' - E R RHACING

5 Piet M o n d r i a n , Composition Yellow, and R e d , 1922

Roland Barthes. .Vv>'T,'^3i'cc'es ("95^1, t'"ans. Annexe -avers 'Nev-, York: Nocrday Press, 1972 Roman Jakobson '/'.'f-at s Poet'". "" " 533; ana 'Tv-.'C Aspects o" .angjage s r d '^.vo "yoes of Aphasie D'StLrbances"956:. n K'-vstyra For^orso ana Stephier R j c y ;eds iCa'Tiorioce. Iv'ass,- ha-'.'ara U" '-'e''sity ^'ess. ' SS^j Fredric Jameson, T'^s ^nscn-rc'jse c'ia;-'j's'je: A For'mJiSfri i;P"-cetcn: Prnce'or U'^veraity ^-eas. i972i Thomas Levin, "'vValte' Ber;amir ano tne " n e c y c f An hstory." Ocfcoec no ^7. '.Vnter t95S Ferdinand de Saussure Ca^rss .'n Gene'-ai i^'fqu^st'Ci. trar's \''v'aGe Bask r |[\iev,' Y c k : McG'SvV-hi; 9^6 Larguage arc

""I canvas 39.5 x 3 - . 7 i15 . x ' 3 ' ; -"-|"u.-ati:;n a - d c o m b - a t i c n a-e rns T e a n s by vvb c h C'scourse 3 g e n s - a t s d a'^d as s u e :hey constitute 1 0 - r a 1 aspects c" '.vnat B a t n e s callec the activity." n tbese tv.'C canvases. M c n d n a n "lecks, iust as a seiest s( .voulc c c . i? anc ho>v o c T'cec" o n o' a cent-al s c j a ' e c n a n c e s a c c o r d ' n c tc tne "" c J ^!catio."s of Its s j ' r o c " d i n g s .

rt'CCi . r

Formalism and structuraiism

| introduction3

39

D,

oststructura ism and deconstruction

' h r o u g h o u t the sixties, y o u t h f u l ideals m e a s u r e d against official cymicism created a collision course that climaxed in the uprisings of 1968, when, in reaction to the Vietnam W a r , student m o v e m e n t s t h r o u g h o u t the w o r l d i n Berkeley, Berlin, Milan, Paris, Toky^oerupted into action. A s t u d e n t leaflet circulating in Paris in May 1968 declared the nature of the conflict: We refuse to become teachers serving a mechanism selection in an educational working-class children, slogans for governmental of social up

would m o u n t a dozen sectionssuch as the "Section XlXeme siecle ( " N i n e t e e n t h - C e n t u r y Section") a n d the " D e p a r t e m e n t des Aigles" ( D e p a r t m e n t of Eagles) [ 1 ]and in the service of which he addressed the public t h r o u g h a series of " O p e n Letters." T h e f o r m e r separations within the art w o r l d b e t w e e n producers (artists) and distributors ( m u s e u m s or galleries), between critics a n d makers, between the ones who speak a n d the ones w h o are spoken f o r w e r e radically challenged by Broodthaers's m u s e u m , an o p e r a t i o n that constantly^ p e r f o r m e d a p a r o d i c but p r o f o u n d m e d i t a t i o n on the vectors of "interest" that r u n t h r o u g h cultural institutions, as f a r - f r o m - d i s i n t e r e s t e d accessories of power. This attitude of refusing the s u b o r d i n a t e p o s t u r e as the one w h o is spoken for by seizing the right to speak, a n d consequently of challenging the institutional a n d social divisions that s u p p o r t these separations of power, h a d other sources of entitlement besides student politics. T h e r e was also the reevaluation of the premises, the suppositions, of the various academic disciplines collectively called the h u m a n sciences that cry-stallized a r o u n d the time of 1968 into w^hat has been t e r m e d poststructuralism.

system operating at the expense of psychol''fimction" scientists

to become sociologists drumming election campaigns, to become ''teams of workers" to

ogists charged with getting

according to the best interests of the bosses, to become the profit economy.

whose research will be used according to the exclusive interests of

Behind this refusal was the accusation that the university, long t h o u g h t to be the precinct of an a u t o n o m o u s , disinterested, "free" search for knowledge, had itself b e c o m e an interested party- to the kind of social engineering the leaflet i m p u t e d to both g o v e r n m e n t and industry^ T h e t e r m s of this indictment and its denial that discrete social could be either a u t o n o m o u s or disinterested could not fail to have repercussions beyond the b o u n d a r i e s of the university. They immediately affected the art world as well. In Brussels, for > example. Marcel B r o o d t h a e r s (1924-76) a n d o t h e r Belgian artists joined their student confreres by occupying the Salle de M a r b r e of the Palais des Beaux-Arts and t e m p o r a r i l y "liberating" it f r o m its f o r m e r administration into their own control. F u r t h e r m o r e , in a gesture that was also patterned o n the action of the s t u d e n t m o v e m e n t s , Broodthaers c o a u t h o r e d statements that were released to the public in leaflet f o r m . O n e of t h e m a n n o u n c e d , for example, that the Free Association (as the occupiers identified themselves) " c o n d e m n s the commercialization of all f o r m s of art considered as objects of c o n s u m p t i o n . " This f o r m of public address, which he had used since 1963, was then to b e c o m e increasingly the basis of his w^ork, which he was to carry out in the n a m e of a fictitious m u s e u m , the "Musee d'Art M o d e r n e , " u n d e r the aegis o f w h i c h he

There is no "disinterest"
position

f u n c t i o n s w h e t h e r intellectual research or artistic practice A. S t r u c t u r a l i s m t h e d o m i n a n t French methodological

against which poststructuralism rebelledhad viewed any given h u m a n activitylanguage, for example, or kinship systems within a socieU^as a rule-governed system that is a m o r e or less a u t o n o m o u s , self-maintaining structure, a n d whose laws operate according to certain formal principles of m u t u a l opposition. This idea of a self-regulating structure, one whose ordering operations are formal and reflexivethat is, they derive f r o m , even while they organize, the material givens of the system itselfcan clearly be m a p p e d o n t o the m o d e r n i s t conception of the different a n d separate artistic disciplines or m e d i u m s . And insofar as this parallel obtains, the intellectual a n d theoretical battles of 1968 are highly relevant to the developments in the world of art in the seventies a n d eighties. Poststructuralism grew o u t of a refusal to grant structuralism its premise that each system is a u t o n o m o u s , with rules a n d operations that begin a n d e n d within the b o u n d a r i e s of that system.

40

Introduction 4 | Poststructuraiisnn and deconstruction

In linguistics, this attitude e x p a n d e d the limited study of linguistic structures to those m o d e s t h r o u g h which language issues into action, the f o r m s called shifters a n d performatives. Shifters are words like "I" a n d "you," where the referent of "I" (namely, the person w h o utters it} shifts back a n d torth in a conversation. Performatives are those verbal utterances that, by being uttered, literally enact their meaning, such as when a speaker a n n o u n c e s "I d o " at the m o m e n t of marriage. Language, it was argued, is n o t simply a m a t t e r of the transmission of messages or the c o m m u n i cation of i n f o r m a t i o n ; it also places the interlocutor u n d e r the obligation to reply. It therefore imposes a role, an attitude, a whole discursive system (rules of behavior a n d of power, as well as of coding a n d decoding) on the receiver of the linguistic act. Quite apart f r o m the content of any given verbal exchange, then, its very' e n a c t m e n t implies the acceptance (or rejection) of the whole institutional f r a m e of that exchangeits "presuppositions," as linguistics s t u d e n t Oswald Ducrot, early in 1968, called them:

The rejection of presuppositions

constitutes a polemical

attitude the

very different from a critique of what is set forth: specifically, it always implies a large dose of aggressiveness that transforms dialogue into a confrontation positions of my interlocutor, itself, but also the enunciative I disqualify not only the of persons. In rejecting the presuputterance act from which it proceeds.

O n e f o r m of post-1968 rejection of presuppositions was that French university students n o w insisted on addressing their p r o fessors with the intimate f o r m of the second p e r s o n " f i / " a n d by their first names. They based this o n the university^'s o w n abrogation of presuppositions when it called in the police (which historically had no jurisdiction within the walls of the S o r b o n n e ) to forcibly evict the student occupiers. Unlike the idea of the a u t o n o m o u s academic discipline (or work of art) whose f r a m e is t h o u g h t to be necessarily external to ita kind of nonessential a p p e n d a g e t h e p e r f o r m a t i v e n o t i o n of language places the f r a m e at the very^ heart of the speech act. For the verbal exchange, it was being argued, is f r o m the very beginning the act of imposing (or failing to impose) a set of pre1 Marcel Broodthaers, " M u s ^ e d'Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles, Section des Figures (The Eagle f r o m the Oligocene to the Present)," 1972 -"llavD'- view d 'ecTor of -".IS r r u s s u n . Broadtfiaers organized its Section Public te^' for DoccTenta. as well as exnibiticns of c.a-" c u l a r ' chness tor ether m^seiims. this cne for tne 5'cd: sehe Kjnsthalle. Dsselcorf. in 1 972 A cc ection ot c -erse ociects. the eagles ncluded v/ere ci'-awn f r o n ' :-.;is-cul1ura^ Tate':a (for example, the stamps on : arnpag-e corks) as well as p r e c i c j s objects (s^ch as - a ^ fi0i,','ae], al' cf them capticnec This .s not a '.vork c" ad " As Broodthaers explained in the catalogue, the tecticn marries the cieas of Ducnarro Ithe readymacte) to " c" Magrife (his deconstructive "Tt- s is rot a pipe." n : " e inscriptior on Tr^e Treachery of irnages of 1329;. '"3 museum oeoartmen: responsible ^or tfiis exhib t i c -:S tne "Section des ^igL-'es" illlustrations Section;.

suppositions on the receiver of that exchange. Speech is t h u s m o r e than the simple (and neutral) transmission of a message. It is also the e n a c t m e n t of a relation of force, a m o v e to m o d i f y the addressee's right to speak. T h e examples D u c r o t used to illustrate the presuppositional imposition of power were a university exam a n d a police interrogation.

Challenging the frame

T h e French structural linguist Emile Benveniste (1902-76) had already d o n e m o r e t h a n a n y o n e else to bring a b o u t this transform a t i o n in the way language c a m e to be viewed in the sixties. Dividing ty^^es of verbal exchange into narrative o n the o n e h a n d a n d discourse o n the other, he pointed o u t that each type has its

Poststructuralism and d e c o n s t r u c t i o n | I n t r o d u c t i o n 4

41

own characteristic features: narrative (or the writing of historyi typically engages the third person and confines itself to a f o r m of the past tense; in contrast, discourse, Ben\'eniste's term for live c o m m u n i c a t i o n , t\'picalh- engages the present tense and the first a n d second persons (the shifters "1" and "you"). Discourse is marked, then, by the e.xistential facts of its active transmission, of the necessary presence within it of b o t h sender and receiver. T h e French historian a n d philosopher Michel Foucault, teaching at the College de France in 1969, developed this idea further. Applying Benveniste's term "discourse" to what had always been u n d e r s t o o d as the neutral c o m m u n i c a t i o n of scholarly i n f o r m a tion contained within a gi\'en d e p a r t m e n t a l discipline andlike narrativeconfined to the transmission of "objective" i n f o r m a tion, Foucault took u p the contrary position that "discourses" are always charged f r o m within by power relations, and even by the exercise of force. Knowledge, according to this a r g u m e n t , ceases to be the a u t o n o m o u s contents of a discipline and n o w becomes disciplinarythat is, marked by the operations of power. Foucault's "discourse," then, like D u c r o t ' s "presuppositions," is an a c k n o w l e d g m e n t of the discursive f r a m e that shapes the speech event, institutionally, like the relations of power that operate in a classroom or a pohce station. A Broodthaers's seizing of the right to speak, in his guise as " m u s e u m director," performed the kind of challenge to institutional frames that poststructuralists such as Foucault were then theorizing. Indeed, Broodthaers m a d e his work out of those veryframes, by enacting the rituals of administrative compartmentalization and by parodying the way those c o m p a r t m e n t s in t u r n create collections of "knowledge." .And as the frames were m a d e to b e c o m e apparent, not outside the work but at its very center, what indeed took place was the putting of "the very legitimacy of the given speech act at stake." U n d e r each of the M u s e u m ' s exhibits, the D e p a r t m e n t of Eagles affixed the Magrittcan label; "This is not a work of art." Broodthaers was not alone in this decision to m a k e artistic practice out of the f r a m i n g , as it were, of the institutional frames. Indeed, the whole practice of what came to be called "institutional critique" derived f r o m such a practicecalling attention to the supposedly neutral containers of culture a n d questioning this putative neutrality. The French artist Daniel Buren, for instance, a d o p t e d a strategy- to challenge the pow-er of the frames by refusing to leave their
2 Daniel Buren, Photo-souvenir: "Within beyond the frame," 1973 (detail) Work ir sifu. ..ahn Webe'- Ga ery, Nevv Y c k Ey the early seve-ties Bure" hac -eajceci his pa - t ng oract-ce to a :yoe o' readynade: canvases cu: t-om c o m n e r c a y orodbaec gray-and-'.vtire st^ peo awning naterial :>sed 'O' the awnings o - - r e n c " sta:e cttiae bu dings! vvh ch hev-'OLlc "perso-^aiize" by -ar-d-aainarg ever one of the stripes at the edge of the sivatch, Fd' :ne u.ohn Weoer "3:ai atian, he ran ."s canvases t t ' o u g h d-e ga' ery and out ' o ' the ex-ibiticn. window aa-oss :ne width cf the sreetas a kind of ba^^eriika acveaisenent and

presuppositions

alone, impUcit,

unremarked.

Instead, his art, emerging in the seventies, was one of m a r k i n g all those divisions t h r o u g h which power operates. In 1973 he exhibited Within and beyond the frame [2]. A work in nineteen sections, each a suspended gray-and-white-striped canvas (unstretched a n d u n f r a m e d ) , Buren's "painting" extended almost two h u n d r e d feet, beginning at o n e end of the John W e b e r Gallery in New York a n d gaily c o n t i n u i n g out the window to w e n d its way across the street, like so m a n y flags h u n g out for a parade, finally attaching itself to the building opposite. The f r a m e referred to in the title of the work was, obviously, the institutional f r a m e of the gallery, a f r a m e that f u n c t i o n s to guarantee certain things about the objects it encloses.
r927a 1 42 I n t r o d u c t i o n 4 | Poststructuraiisnn and d e c o n s t r u c t i o n

3 - Robert Sm'ithson, A Non-site (Franklin, New Jersey), 1968 , -:: ;1 e ^ .v:;: o ". Tt;s"C:ne. silier - golstir p' ocaro. S - s i - s ' a i i e o ' e n 2Z-i : : 1 C3 : r - a r e s ' > x 73 ' x 30 ar ;; Ic' ; z or oacs' .v o'ap" 'e a^d t-arsfe- c t e r s

These thingslike rarity, authenticity, originalir)% and u n i q u e nessare part of the value of the work implicitly asserted by the space of the gallery. These values, which are part of what separates art from other objects in our culture, objects that are neither rare, n o r original, n o r unique, operate then to declare art as an a u t o n o m o u s system within that culture. Yet rarity, uniqueness, a n d so forth are also the values to which the gallen' attaches a price, in an act that erases any f u n d a m e n t a l difference between what it has to sell a n d the merchandise of any o t h e r commercial space. As the identically striped paintings (themselves barely distinguishable f r o m commercially p r o d u c e d awnings ) breached the f r a m e of the gallery^ to pass beyond its confines a n d out the window, Buren seemed to be asking the ^iewer to d e t e r m i n e at what point they ceased being "paintings" (objects of rarity, originality, etc.) and started being part of a n o t h e r system of objects: tlags, sheets h u n g out to drys advertisements for the artist's show, carnival bunting. He was probing, that is, the legitimacy of the system's power to bestow value on work. ' T h e question of frames was also at the heart of Robert Smithson's thinking a b o u t the relation between the landscape, or natural site, to its aesthetic container, which the artist labeled "non-site." In a series of works called Non-sites, Smithson i m p o r t e d mineral materialrocks, slag, slatefrom specific locations into the space of the gallery by placing this material into geometrically shaped bins, each one visually connected, by m e a n s of its f o r m , to a segment of a wall m a p indicating the area of the specimens' origin [3|. The obvious act of aestheticizing nature, a n d of t u r n i n g the real into a representation of itself t h r o u g h the operations of the geometrical bin to construct the raw matter of the rocks into a s i g n t r a p e z o i d t h a t comes to "stand for" the rocks' point of extraction, a n d thus for the rocks themselves, is what Smithson consigns to the system of the art world's spaces: its galleries, its m u s e u m s , its magazines. T h e ziggurat-like structures of Smithson's bins a n d m a p s might imply that it was only an ironic formal g a m e that was at issue in this aspect of his art. But the graduated bins were also addressing a kind of natural histor)' that could be read in the landscape, the successive stages of e.xtracting the ore f r o m the initial bount)-, to the progressive barrenness, to a final exhaustion of supply. It was this natural history that could not be represented within the f r a m e s of the art world's discourse, concerted as it is to tell quite a n o t h e r s t o r y o n e of f o r m , of beauty, of 5e/f-reference. Therefore, part of S m i t h s o n ' s strategy was to smuggle a n o t h e r , foreign m o d e of representation into the f r a m e of the gallery, a m o d e he took, in fact, f r o m the natural history m u s e u m , where rocks and bins a n d m a p s are not freakish, aestheticized abstractions b u t the basis of an altogether different system of knowledge: a way of m a p p i n g and c o n t a i n i n g ideas a b o u t the "real." T h e effort to escape f r o m the aesthetic container, to break the chains of the institutional frame, to challenge the a s s u m p t i o n s (and indeed the implicit pow^r relations) established by the art world's presuppositions was thus carried out in the seventies in

5 - - tnso^'s 'Vc.-"-3mss have been pre d u e vel', relsteo to .-e " tne M^se^-r of Katurai History in NG'.v '-'O'--,. .nK:' s a T d e s z""e na:,-.'al are m p c t e o m'o " - e as 9x-iib'ts that necessarily contan- -ate the ;:jr:t, cf the aesthetic space ~he cms c contaire's of - s conr-ien: '0":ca y cn Mm TaliST accus t c" y-i ac-sthc-ticisT that Mm/ra. st 5'tists like I ^ c a d J j d o a'lo Hicoe't fv'cns vvcu^o "ave emerge: cai y aen ec.

Poststructuralism and d e c o n s t r u c t i o n |

Introduction 4

43

4 Richard Long, A Circle in Ireland,

1975

relation to specific sites^gallery, m u s e u m , rock quarn*, Scottish Highkmds, California coastwhich the w o r k of art f u n c t i o n e d to refriwie. This act of re framing was m e a n t to p e r f o r m a peculiar kind of reversal. The old aesthetic ideas that the sites used to f r a m e (although invisibly, implicitly ) n o w hovered over these real places like so m a n y exorcised ghosts, w^hile the site itself^its white walls, its neoclassical porticos, its picturesque m o o r s , its rolling hills a n d rock)^ o u t c r o p p i n g s [ 4 ] b e c a m e the material s u p p o r t (the w^ay paint a n d canvas or marble a n d clay used to be ) for a new kind of representation. This representation was the image of the institutional f r a m e s themselves, n o w forced into visibility as t h o u g h s o m e kind of powerful new developing fluid h a d unlocked previously secret i n f o r m a t i o n f r o m an inert photographic negative.

3y gc - g ou: "tc the andscace far the Tiater 3 s a* s Vo'? s'les Sn-thso- - " o d L a e c tne :)ea'ha" the lanascace tself rr^gtr. be a sculptura T s a i u n , Ear:".vor-;s '.vere a resu t ot this sucgesticn, vvn'Ch anists such as ^ o r g . Waiter Ce Mara, Chrsto, er M'c^-ael Heizer operated directiy on t^e earth, cden TS'^ing pro-.ograpnic r e c c d s et tns ^ act vities, T - s depencer^ce an t^e proTograchic docuiren: was the con^irr^at on of Walser Be-^ a T " ' s c^eo cticns in the 1 935 essay 'The V.'ck of A r 'c the Age of Mechanics Rep-'ocuctian "

Derrida's double session

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), a philosopher teaching at the Ecole N o r m a l e Superieure in Paris, seized u p o n Benveniste's a n d Foucault's radicalization of structural linguistics to fashion his own b r a n d of poststructuralism. He started o u t f r o m the very terms of structuralism itself, in which language is m a r k e d by a f u n d a m e n t a l .bivalency at the heart of the linguistic sign. According to structuralist logic, while the sign is m a d e u p of the pairing of signifier

44

I n t r o d u c t i o n 4 | Poststructuraiisnn and d e c o n s t r u c t i o n

and signified, it is the signified ( the referent or concept, such as a cat or the idea of "cat") that has privilege over the mere material f o r m of the signifier (the spoken or written letters c, a, t). This is because the relationship between signifier a n d signified is arbitrary': there is n o reason why c, a, f should signifv' "catness"; any other c o m b i n a t i o n of letters could do the job just as well, as the existence of different words for "cat" in different languages demonstrates Cchat,'' "gcjffo," "Katze," etc.). But this inequality' between signifier a n d signified is not the only one at the heart of language. A n o t h e r feature to emerge f r o m the structuralist m o d e l is the unevenness of t e r m s that m a k e u p o p p o s ing binary pairs such as " y o u n g / o l d " or " m a n / w o m a n . " This inequality is between a markedandan unmarked term. The m a r k e d half of the pair brings m o r e i n f o r m a t i o n into the utterance than the u n m a r k e d half, as in the binary " y o u n g / o l d " a n d the statement " l o h n is as y o u n g as Mary." "As y o u n g as" here implies youth, whereas " l o h n is as old as Mary" implies neither youth n o r advanced age. It is the u n m a r k e d t e r m which opens itself to the higher order of sy^nthesis m o s t easily, a condition that becomes clear if we look at the binary^ " m a n / w o m a n , " in which it is " m a n " that is the u n m a r k e d half of the pair (as in " m a n k i n d , " " c h a i r m a n , " "spokesman," etc.). That the u n m a r k e d t e r m slips past its p a r t n e r into the position of greater generality gives that t e r m implicit pow^r, thus instituting a hierarchy within the seemingly neutral structure of the binary pairing. It was Derrida's d e t e r m i n a t i o n not to continue to let this inequality go w i t h o u t saying, but rather to say it, to " m a r k " the u n m a r k e d t e r m , by^ using "she" as the general p r o n o u n indicating a person, a n d i n the theorization of " g r a m m a t o l o g y " (see b e l o w ) t o p u t the signifier in the position of superiority over the signified. This marking of the u n m a r k e d Derrida called ''deconstruction,'" an overturning that makes sense only within the verystructuralist f r a m e that it wants to place at the center of its activity by f r a m i n g that frame. Derrida's extremely influential b o o k Of Grammatology (1967)

aurally indistinguishable f r o m difference, the French w^ord for that ditference on which language is based. Differance, which can only^ be perceived in its written f o r m , refers, precisely, to writing's operation of the trace a n d of the break or spacing that o p e n s u p the page to the articulation of one sign f r o m another. This spacing allows not only for the play of difference between signifiers that is the basis of language ("cat," for example, can f u n c t i o n as a sign a n d assume its value in the language system only because it differs f r o m "bat" a n d f r o m "car"), but also for the temporal unfolding of signifieds ( m e a n i n g being elaborated in time t h r o u g h the gradual iteration of a sentence): differance not only differs, then, it also defers, o r temporalizes. If deconstruction is the m a r k i n g of the u n m a r k e d , which Derrida sometimes called the re-mark, its striving to f r a m e the frames t o o k the analytical f o r m of the essay "The Parergon," which attends to I m m a n u e l Kant's m a j o r treatise "The Critique of ludgm e n t " (1790), a treatise that not only f o u n d s the discipline of aesthetics but also powerfully supplies m o d e r n i s m with its conviction in the possibility of the a u t o n o m y of the a r t s t h e art work's self-grounding and thus its i n d e p e n d e n c e f r o m the conditions of its f r a m e . For Kant argues that " J u d g m e n t , " the o u t c o m e of aesthetic experience, must be separate f r o m "Reason"; it is not d e p e n d e n t on cognitive j u d g m e n t b u t must reveal, Kant argues, the paradoxical c o n d i t i o n of "purposiveness without purpose." This is the source of art's a u t o n o m y , its disinterestedness, its escape f r o m use or instrumentalization. Reason makes use of concepts in its purposive pursuit of knowledge; art, as self-grounding, m u s t abjure concepts, reflecting instead on the sheer purposiveness of nature as a transcendental concept (and thus containing n o t h i n g empirical). Kant argues that the logic of the work (the ergon) is internal (or p r o p e r ) to it, such that what is outside it (the parergon) is only extraneous o r n a m e n t and, like the f r a m e on a painting or the c o l u m n s on a building, m e r e superfluity or decoration. Derrida's a r g u m e n t , however, is that Kant's analysis of aesthetic j u d g m e n t as self-grounding is not itself self-grounding but i m p o r t s a f r a m e f r o m the writer's earlier essay "The Critique of P u r e Reason" (1781), a cognitive f r a m e on which to build its transcendental logic. T h u s the f r a m e is not extrinsic to the work b u t comes f r o m outside to constitute the inside as an inside. This is the parergonal f u n c t i o n of the frame. Derrida's own r e f r a m i n g of the f r a m e was perhaps most

proceeded f r o m such a deconstructive operation to m a r k the u n m a r k e d , and thus to expose the invisible f r a m e to view\ If we c o m p a r e the status of "he says" to that of "he writes," we see that "says" is u n m a r k e d , while "vs^ites," as the specific t e r m , is t h u s marked. Derrida's " g r a m m a t o l o g y " intends to m a r k speech (logos) and thus to overturn this hierarchy, as well as to analyze the sources of speech's p r e e m i n e n c e over wTiting. This analy'sis had begun with Derrida's doctoral thesis, Speech and Phenomenon, in which he analyzed the p h e n o m e n o l o g i s t E d m u n d Husserl's (1859-1938) dismissal of wTiting as an infection of the transparency a n d i m m e diacy of t h o u g h t ' s appearance to itself. And as he analyzed the privilege of logos over the dismissed sign of the m e m o r y trace vvriting, gramme), t-he supplement, Derrida developed the logic of what he called an aid b r o u g h t in to help or extend or s u p p l e m e n t

eloquently carried out in his 1969 text "The D o u b l e Session," referring to a double lecture he gave o n the work of the French poet Stephane Mallarme (1842-98). T h e first page of the essay shows Derrida's almost m o d e r n i s t sensitivity to the status of the signifier, a sensitivity that parallels the poststructuralist's c a n n y assessment of the " t r u t h s " of structuralism 15]. Like a m o d e r n i s t m o n o c h r o m e , the page presents itself as a buzz of gray letters as it reproduces a page f r o m the Platonic dialogue "Philebus," a dialogue devoted to the theory of mimesis (representation, imitation). Into the lowerright corner of this field of gray, however, Derrida inserts a n o t h e r text, also directed at the idea of mimesis: Mallarme's " M i m i q u e , "

h u m a n capacityas writing extends m e m o r y or the reach of the h u m a n v o i c e b u t which, ironically, ends by supplanting it. Such a hierarchy is also b e h i n d the Derridean t e r m differance, itself

Poststructuralism and deconstruction | Introduction 4

45

the poet's account ot a p e r f o r m a n c e he saw carried out by a f a m o u s m i m e and based on the text "Pierrot, M u r d e r e r of His Wife."
S O C R A T E S : And if Ht hid iomcont wich him. ht ould put whit he said lo himself into acnial speech ddressed to his cu.-npanion. audibly uttering chose sime thoughts, so that what before we called opinion ( S i a v ) has now become assertion (X-roi;).PROTARCHUS: Of course S O C R A T E S : Whereas if he 15 aJone he continues thinking the samr thing by himself, going on his way maybe for a considenbie time with the thought in his m i n d P R O T A R C H U S : Undoubtedly,SOCRATES now, / wonder whether share rhese miners.PROTARCHUS What is I t ' S O C R A T E S : It seems 1 me that at such times oui soul is like a book (ioxE L 0 tte ti

Behind Derrida, on the blackboard of the classroom, had appeared a three-fold i n t r o d u c t i o n to the lecture, hanging above his words, he said, like a crystal chandelier: r ant re de r"entrc'^ de Ventre-deux Mallarme Mallarme "Mallarm

Wril

you

my rirw an

iioi

MiuVh Pi^) u v l i r p w t o i x ^ v a i ) P R O T A R C H U S : How s o : S O C R A T E S : It appeal^ to me that the conjtjnctiofl of memory with sensations, together with the feelings constituent upon memory and sensation, may be said as it were to write words in our souls f7pci<fELV TOets M'UXt^ Xb^;) And when this eiperience nies what is true, the resuJt is that true opinion and true assertions spring up in us, while when the internal scribe thai I have suggested writes what isfeise (JiEV&f) 8<yroiv

i\\L63v

J&^t

the opp>si're sort opinions Mid assertions. PROT A R C H U S : That certainly seems to me right, and I appfte of the way you put i t S O C R A T E S : Then please give your appfos-aJ to the pttsence of a secood artist (5Tl|uoup-YK> in our souls at such a t i m e . P R O T A R C H U S Who is that.'SOCRATES A painter ( Z i u f p t i c o v ) who comes after the writer and paints in the soui pictures of these lisettions that we make P R O T A R C H U S : How do we make out that he in his rum acts, and w h e n ' S O C R A T E S : When we have got those opmtons and assertions clear of the act of sight ('0<|Etix;) or other sense, and as it were see in ourselves picrures ot images (ECxdvas) of what we previously opined or stsserted. That does happen with us, doesn't i t ^ P R O T A R C H U S : Indeed it doe.SOCRATESThen ate the pictures of tr^ie opimons and assertions true. Mid the pictures of false ones & l s e ? P R O T A R C H U S Unquestionably.SOCRATES Well, if we are right so far, here is or^ more point in this connection for us to consider.PROTARCHUS: What is that?SOCRATES: Does all this necessarily beil us in respect of the present (Tdn/ bv^djv) and the past (t(v 7J70V<St<v), but IWX in respect of the future (T<>v l i s X X V T W v ) ? - P R O T A R C H U S ; On the cootiary. it applies equally to chem all S O C R A T E S : We said previously, did we not, that pjeasuies atvi pains felt in the soul aloie might precede those that come thnnigh the body? "Hvit must mean that we have anticipatory pleasures and anticipatory pains in regard to the fut u r e P R O T A R C H U S : Very true.SOCRATES Now do tlit>$e writings and paJnrings (-yptiiJijixifTd Te x a i {(iiTfpaipf)juxTQ), which a while ago we assumed to occur within ourselves, apply 10 past and present only, and not to the futurr.>PROTARCHUS: Indeed they d o . S O C R A T E S : 'When you say "indeed they do', do you n>ean that the last sort are all npectations concerned with wiial IS to come, and that we are full of opectations all our life l o n g ? P R O T A R C H U S : UndcHjbcedly.SOCRATES; Well now. as a supplement to al] we have said, heie is a furxher qiKStioo for you to

6 Toiofrroi; iTQ^ "fjliJ^ 7pa>t(iaTEiK; Tpdijrg), we get

of

*
UIMIQUE ^

Silence, sole luxury after rhymes, an orchestra only markiifg with its gold, its bcustos with thought and dusk, the detail of Its significalion on a par with a stilled ode and which it is up to the poei, roused by 1 durr, to translate? rhe silence of an afternoon of music; I find it, with contentment, also, before the ever original reappearance of Pierrot or of the poignant and elegant mime Paul Margueritre. Such is this P I E R R O T PrfURDERER OF HIS W I F E composed and set down by himself, a mute soliloquy thar the phantom, white as a yet unwritten page, holds in boch face and gesture at fvll length to his soui. A whirlwind nates, which It would be pleasing to seize upoo with security: the esthetics of the genre situated closerTOprinciples than any! (noHhing in this region of caprice foiling the direct simplifying instinct... This "The scene illustrates but the idea, not any actual acrio4i, in a hymen (out of which flows Dream}, tainted with vice yet sacied, between desire and fulfillment, perpetiarioo and remembrance: here anticipating, there recalling, in the future, in the past,

Because in French there is no aural distinction between autre a n d entre, this textual o r n a m e n t d e p e n d s on its wTitten f o r m in order to m a k e any sense, in the same way that differance m u s t be written in order to register its signified. This h o m o p h o n i c condition is itself "between-two," as in Mallarme's ''entre-denx,'' a between-ness that Derrida will liken to the fold in a page, a fold which t u r n s the singleness of the material support into an a m b i g u o u s doubleness
etna-

of niive or new msom

(a fold materialized in t u r n by the insertion of " M i m i q u e " into the "Philebus" at its corner). In the text of " T h e Double Session" itself, I3errida plays, like any good m o d e r n i s t , with the material c o n d i t i o n of the n u m b e r s that emerge f r o m Plato's a n d Mallarme's definitions of mimesis. Plato's definition t u r n s on the n u m b e r four, while the poet's t u r n s on the

mdir tin fahe afptarinta of a frant.

how the Mime operates, whose act is confined to a perpetual allusion without breaking the ice or the mirror: he thus sets up a medium, a pure medium, of fiction." Less than a thousand lines, the role, the one thar reads, will instantly compiehetKl the n J e s as if placed before the stageboards, their hiiizible depository. Surprise, accompanymg the artifice of a notation of sentiments by unproered sentences that, in the sole case, perhaps, with authenticity, between the sheets and the eye there reigr a silence still, the condition and delight of reading.

Thai is

double, or the n u m b e r two. And like any good m o d e r n i s t , Derrida materializes the classical f o u r s o m e , u n d e r s t a n d i n g it as a frame: Plato says that (1) the b o o k imitates the soul's silent dialogue with the self; (2) the value of the b o o k is not intrinsic but d e p e n d s on the value of what it imitates; (3) the t r u t h of the book can be decided, based on the t r u t h f u l n e s s of its imitation; a n d (4) the b o o k ' s imitation is constituted by the f o r m of the double. T h u s Platonic mimesis doubles what is single (or simple) and, being thus decidable, institutes itself within the operations of t r u t h . Mallarme's imitation, on the other hand, doubles w'hat is already double or multiple a n d is, therefore, undecidable: between-two. The text of the m i m e - d r a m a that Mallarme r e c o u n t s in " M i m i q u e " tells of Pierrot's discover)- of his wife C o l u m b i n e ' s adulter)', which he decides to avenge by killing her. N o t wanting to be caught, however, he refuses the obvious possibilities of poison, strangling, or shooting, since all of t h e m leave traces. After kicking a rock in

175

5 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination,

trans. Barbara

Johnson, page 175 ("The Double Session") Derriaa, i\hose decors"'jc\'rje theory ccsiSTed o' ar

frustration, he massages his foot to assuage the pain a n d inadvertently tickles himself. In his helpless laughter, the idea d a w n s on him that he will tickle C o l u m b i n e to death and she will t h u s die laughing. In the p e r f o r m a n c e , the actual m u r d e r is m i m e d with the actor pla)ing b o t h parts: the diabolical tickler a n d the convulsively struggling victim, writhing with pleasure. Since such a death is impossible, the imitation imitates n o t what is simple b u t rather a multiple, itself a pure f u n c t i o n of the signifier, a t u r n of speech ("to die laughing"; "to be tickled to death"), rather t h a n of actuality. As Mallarme writes: "The scene illustrates only the idea, not a positive action, in a marriage that is lewd but sacred, a marriage between desire a n d its achievement, e n a c t m e n t a n d its memor)': here, anticipating, recollecting, in the f u t u r e , in the past, u n d e r a

assault on the visualas a " o - t c1 preserice tha: " s dea ot spacirig as a^ aspect a' ceterra :c' di'.^&'ance) 'vvas Tean: tc cisnandeotien '^vented surp-is ngly efteatr^e .'isja n^eiachors tor ais concepts, here, the insertio" of V a t a ^ T e ' s "M'Tique" ntc a come' ct p atc's "Pniiecus"' suggests, visja ly. t i e idea cf the foi^, o- redoacNnc, that Derrida p r c o j c e s as a re'// concept ct n-;mesis, n iv^icn the doi.)ble secord-or3er copyi dcaoles no sing e icr orig nail. Arod-e' e x a n p e occurs :n the essay "The Pa-ergor." w^"ere a s'^^ccessio" cf graph,c t'-ames IS inte'spersec ihrougaout a text focused on :ne function ci tne f-ame c' tne 'vo'< o' art, a frame that attempts to essent alize :he as a u t o n c r o u s cut v/n ch aaes nothina rrore than cc^nect it to rs context c norwor-<

46

I n t r o d u c t i o n 4 | Poststructuraiisnn and d e c o n s t r u c t i o n

. Louise Lawler, Pollock and Soup Tureen, 1984 6 ; 5 j a : 1 6 x 20: < ic t c c ' d p " '^Q c'SJf?cf ar: as ey e r : e ' in:c t i e scac^ cc'llectcrs Lav/ier prcriucas t'ie ^sraticns of -itcrors ir. S:'essirg

false appearance of the present. In this way the m i m e acts. His game ends in a perpetual allusion w i t h o u t breaking the m i r r o r . In this wa>' it sets up a pure condition of fiction." Imitation that folds over what is already double, or ambiguous, does not, then, enter the realm of t r u t h . It is a copy w i t h o u t a model and its condition is marked by the t e r m simulacrum: a copy w i t h o u t an original"a false appearance of the present." The fold t h r o u g h which the Platonic f r a m e is t r a n s m u t e d into the Mallarm r n double (or between-two) is likened by both poet a n d philosopher to the fold or gutter of a book, which in its crevice was always sexualized for Mallarme, hence his term "lewd but sacred." This is the fold"false appearance of the p r e s e n t " t h a t Derrida will call hymeu, or will refer to at times as "invagination," by which the condition of the f r a m e will be carried into the inside of an argum e n t , which will, in t u r n , f r a m e it.

a ; tn^iuc- thsv v/ere

or anv cthe^ luxury desigii cencaica

a c o m n c d r i c a t o " of the vvorK o' art. Lawler's T a g e s so ''cci. cn : - s cchector's incorpo^atico cf 1ne wo'-; -0 s c l e r comes: c space, trereby 'r-a<ir g i: an s subject vity. T"e ceta: o ' Po oc-^'s '.ens o " of

c-c c pain: s fh^s relstec tc t^e in:r cate design cf ttif Mp tu-ee". as a 'cr-r cf (nrsro.^etat/o.c p e r s c a to C COllGCtC.

Art in the age of the simulacrum

T e r m s like parergon, supplement, differance, and re-mark grounded

new artistic practice in the wake of m o d e r n i s m . All of these ideas f r o m the s i m u l a c r u m to the f r a m i n g of the f r a m e b e c a m e the staple not just of poststructuralism but of p o s t m o d e r n i s t painting, David Salle, w h o is perhaps most representative o f t h a t painting, developed in a context of young artists w h o were highly critical of art's traditional claims to transcend mass-cultural conditions. This groupinitially including figures like Robert Longo, Cindy A S h e r m a n , Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, a n d Louise Lawler 16| was fascinated by the reversal between reality a n d its representation that was being effected by a late-twentieth-century culture of i n f o r m a t i o n . Representations, it was argued, instead of c o m i n g after reality, in an imitation of it, n o w precede and construct reaUty. O u r "real" e m o t i o n s imitate those we see on film and read about in pulp romances; o u r "real" desires are structured for us by advertising images; the "real" of o u r politics is prefabricated by television news a n d Hollywood scenarios of leadership; o u r "real" selves are congeries a n d repetition of all these images, strung together by narratives n o t of o u r own making. To analyze this structure of the representation that precedes its referent (the thing in the real world it is supposed to copy ) would cause this g r o u p of artists to ask themselves p r o b i n g questions about the mechanics of the imageculture: its basis in mechanical r e p r o d u c t i o n , its f u n c t i o n as serial repetition, its status as multiple w i t h o u t an original. "Pictures" was the n a m e given to this work in an early reception of it by the critic Douglas Crimp. There, for example, he examined the way Cindy Sherman, posing for a series of photographic "selfportraits" in a variety of different costumes and settings, each with the look of a fifties movie still a n d each projecting the image of a stereotypical film heroinecareer girl, highly strung hysteric, Sotithern belle, o u t d o o r girlhad projected her very self a.s always mediated by, always constructed t h r o u g h , a "picture" that preceded it, thus a copy without an original. The ideas that C r i m p and other
1975 -36;:. 1977 Poststructuralism and d e c o n s t r u c t i o n | Introduction 4

47

critics versed in tiieories of poststructuralism came to identifv-with such work involved a serious questioning of n o t i o n s of authorship, originality, and uniqueness, the f o u n d a t i o n stones of institutionalized aesthetic culture. Reflected in the facing mirrors of Sherman's photographs, creating as they did an endlessly retreating horizon of quotation f r o m which the "real" a u t h o r disappears, these critics saw what Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes h a d analyzed in the fifties and sixties as "the death of the author." T h e work of Sherrie Levine was set in this same context, as she r e p h o t o g r a p h e d p h o t o g r a p h s by EUiot Porter, E d w a r d Weston, and Walker Evans and presented these as her " o w n " work, questioning by her act of piracy the status of these figures as authorial sources of the image. Folded into this challenge is an implicit of the n u d e torso of his young son Neil, or Porter's wild technicolor landscapesas itself always already a piracy% involved in an u n c o n scious but inevitable borrowing from the great library of imagesthe Greek classical torso, the windswept picturesque c o u n t r y s i d e t h a t have already educated o u r eyes. T o this kind of radical refusal of traditional conceptions of a u t h o r s h i p a n d originality, a critical stance m a d e unmistakable by its position at the margins of legalitys the n a m e "appropriation art" has c o m e to be affixed. A n d this type of work, building a c r h i q u e of f o r m s of ownership a n d fictions of privacy and control came to be identified as p o s t m o d e r n i s m in its radical f o r m . The question of where to place this widely practiced, eighties tactic of " a p p r o p r i a t i o n " of the i m a g e w h e t h e r in a radical camp, as a critique of the power network that threads t h r o u g h reality, always already structuring it, or in a conser\^ative one, as an e n t h u siastic return to figuration and the artist as image-givertakes o n feminist artists. W o r k i n g with b o t h p h o t o g r a p h i c material a p p r o priated f r o m the mass-cultural image b a n k and the f o r m of direct address to which advertising often has recourseas it cajoles, or hectors, or preaches to its viewers and readers, addressing t h e m as " y o u " B a r b a r a Kruger elaborates yet a n o t h e r of the presuppositions of the aesthetic discourse, another of its institutional frames. This is the f r a m e of gender, of the u n s p o k e n a s s u m p t i o n set u p between artist and viewer that both of t h e m are male. Articulating this a s s u m p t i o n in a work like Your gaze hits the side o f my face (1981), where the typeface of the message appears in staccato against the image of a classicized female statue, Kruger fills in a n o t h e r part of the presuppositional tirame: the message transmitted between the two poles classical linguistics m a r k s as "sender" a n d "receiver," and assumes is neutral but presupposes as male, is a message put in play by something we could call an always-silent partner, namely, the symbolic f o r m of W o m a n . Following a poststructuralist linguistic analysis of language a n d gender, Kruger's work is therefore interested in w o m a n as one of those subjects w h o d o not speak but is, instead, always spoken for. She is, as critic Laura Mulvey writes, structurally "tied to her place as bearer of m e a n i n g , not m a k e r of meaning."
A 48 I n t r o d u c t i o n 4 | Poststructuraiisnn and d e c o n s t r u c t i o n

This is why Kruger, in this work, does not seize the right to speech the way that Broodthaers had in his open letters but turns instead to " a p p r o p r i a t i o n . " VN'oman, as the "bearer of m e a n i n g " is the locus of an endless series of abstractionsshe is "nature," "beauty," " m o t h e r l a n d , " "liberty," "justice"all of which f o r m the cultural a n d patriarchal linguistic field; she is the reser\'oir of meanings f r o m which statements are m a d e . As a w o m a n artist, Kruger acknowledges this position as the silent term t h r o u g h her act of "stealing" her speech, of never laying claim to having b e c o m e the "maker of m e a n i n g , " This question of the w^oman's relation to the symbolic field of speech a n d the m e a n i n g of her structural dispossession within that field has b e c o m e the m e d i u m of other m a j o r works by feminists. Document (1973-9), tracks the artist's own connection to her infant son t h r o u g h five years of his development a n d the 135 exhibits that record the m o t h e r - c h i l d relationship. This recording, however, is carried on explicitly along the fault line of the w o m a n ' s experience of the developing a u t o n o m y of the male-child as he comes into possession of language. It wants to examine the way the child himself is fetishized by the m o t h e r t h r o u g h her
OWTI

reading of the "original" p i c t u r e w h e t h e r W e s t o n ' s p h o t o g r a p h s A O n e of these, Mar)^ KelK^'s Post-Partum

sense of lack.

T w o kinds of absences structure the field of aesthetic experience at the end of the twentieth century and into the twent)'-first. O n e of them we could describe as the absence of reality^ itself as it retreats behind the miragelike screen of the media, sucked up into the vacuum tube of a television monitor, read off like so m a n y printouts firom a multinational c o m p u t e r hook-up. The other is the imisibilit}^ of the presuppositions of language a n d of insfitutions, a seeming absence behind which power is at work, an absence which artists f r o m Mar)^ Kelly, Barbara Kruger, and Cindy Sherman to Hans

a n o t h e r d i m e n s i o n when we view the strategy t h r o u g h the eyes of Haacke, Daniel Buren, and Richard Serra attempt to bring to light.
FRTHEN. READiKG Roland Barthes. Cr/rica''Assays, trsns. R chgr:; Ho'.varct lEvaistor: k c h w e s t s T Un ve'sity Press. 15721 Roland Barthes. I'l^sge. Music. Text. f a r s . Stepnen Hea:h ;Ne'.vYcrk. Hi anc vVarg. 977; Douglas Crimp, 'Dclu'es, " Ocfotsn nc. 3. S;;r rg 1979 Jacques Derrida.

Gramrna'.c^'ogy.

trans. 3aya"n 3p vak iBatiTore: Tt-e Johns Hopkns

University Press, 1 9~5:i Jacques Derrida. "Parergc^." The Trurr^ in Pairt'ng. trsns. Gsd" 5enn;ng:cn iCmcago eno Lonaon; Lniversity of Cnicago P-ess. '9S7i Jacques Derrida. "Tne CoubIs Session." D'sseminanon, fans. Ba-ba'a Jctinson ;Cnic5gc and bonder: Lniversity ot Chicago P-ess. '9611 Michel Foucault. 7fie A'-cf^aeo.teg/ofAfr'ctvvecise ;Par s: Galinard, iS'Sy: translation Lender Tai.'istock Publications: ana New York: Pantnec". i972; Michel Foucault. "What is an Autnor^"', Lang'jsge, CDU.-^ter-K'^err'C-/. P ' s c x e rans. C. Boucna'd ard S. Sirron i :heca. M.Y.: Cornell U-^iversity Press "'9771 Mary Kelly, DocLimeni ::Lcndcr: Rout edge S Kegan Pau . 1933: Laura Mulvey, 'y'lsua: Pieasjre and Ka'rativs Cinema." '/'sja' a.'ir Otner P/eas^.'es (Blocmington: Indiana Univers:, Press, 19S9: Craig Owens. 'The Ai egcrica -nouise: To'.varcts a Theoy cf ^ostrrocei.n.sm." Ocroner ros '2 and '3. Spring and Sun-mer i 933 Ann Reynolds, -Rep-ocLCirg Nature: The Mcsejm d* Katu-al Hisxry as Kors :e " Cdcsr. no. 45. Sjrrrrer 1 985

i-yE^c.'969 19.0 ' a " ' 1972b "SSj.a