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DOI: 10.1177/0952695107077109
2007 20: 141 History of the Human Sciences
Griselda Pollock
difference with some historical reflections on sociology and art history
Thinking sociologically : thinking aesthetically. Between convergence and
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Thinking sociologically:
thinking aesthetically.
Between convergence and
difference with some historical
reections on sociology and
art history
GRISELDA POLLOCK
ABSTRACT
This article takes as its provocation Marxs intriguing statement about
the disjunction between the owering of Greek art and the under-
developed stage of social and economic development made as an
epilogue to the Introduction to the Grundrisse in order to ask what are
the relations between that which has been considered art and what Marx
calls production as such. In the elaborated conditions of contemporary
capitalist societies, we can ask: Is art still being made? To examine this
question I juxtapose what Bauman has called thinking sociologically
with a proposition that art thinks aesthetically. So how can art historians
deal with that challenge of thinking aesthetic practices both socially and
historically? I track a genealogy of art historians (Clark, Antal, Shapiro)
who have attempted to think socially about artistic practices. This leads
into a section about the necessity for both sociological and aesthetic
education if we are to avoid totalitarianism or free-market individual-
ism (Bahro). Finally, thinking sociologically, by taking as a case study
HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol . 20 No. 2
2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) pp. 141175
[20:2; 141175; DOI: 10.1177/0952695107077109]
the work of Aby Warburg, I explore the technological conditions of art
historical production itself particularly in relation to photography and
the way this shapes our access to the image. Warburg represents the
possibility of another model for art historical thinking about the image
as Kulturwissenschaft, a parallel to Sozialwissenschaft in its ambition
and relation to the great intellectual revolutions c.1905 (Freud, Bergson,
Einstein, Hussserl). Like Marx, Warburg questioned the continuity of
the imaginary space of art thinking in the age of technological indus-
trialism. Where art is now, where art history is, are not just sociological
questions to which Marx might offer a dismal answer. I conclude that
what is necessary is a constructive conversation between thinking socio-
logically and thinking aesthetically, knowing synthetically and knowing
for oneself curricular issues made more intense by the shared conditions
in which all intellectual production is being transformed in contempor-
ary sites of intellectual practice, the university, by production as such
leading thought to risk the same fate as art in contemporary society, as
Marx hypothesized. As a nal thought, I suggest that in contemporary
art work that confronts trauma and catastrophe, often using new tech-
nologies as aesthetic processes, we may nd a counter-argument.
Key words aesthetic practices, aesthetic thought, art history,
commodication, image cultures, Marx, social histories of art,
sociological thought, sociology
Readers might well imagine that a conversation between Sociology and Art
History should begin with the division of disciplines in the university system
that might create an immediate dissonance between the harder end of the
social sciences with their dispassionately quantitative methods and the softer
end of the interpretative, qualitative humanities with Art History bridging
both the humanities (history/philosophy/literature/classics/theology) and the
creative arts. What I intend to do, however, is to explore relations and differ-
ences between what Zygmunt Bauman called thinking sociologically: Sozial-
wissenschaft that grand intellectual project of deeply humanistic social
analysis and a later 19th-century concept: Kulturwissenschaft which I trans-
late as cultural analysis, theory and history (Bauman, 1990). In both cases we
might be considering the analysis of the interrelations between the conditions
of social experience and the cultural forms through which they are articulated
and subjectively (not individualistically) interpreted or registered. By means
of its attention to systems, patterns, networks and conditions, sociological
analysis produces a range of concepts through which this double project can
be pursued theoretically, distilling lived and changing relations of inter-
dependency into formations such as class, gender, ethnicity, and relations
into terms such as intimacy, proximity, sexuality, identity, agency. Sociology
HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 20( 2) 142
operates in relation to its own cognates in psychology and anthropology as
well as across to philosophy, while embracing all of us within its potential
for sociological analysis of every social activity and experience.
To my mind no adequate analysis of the socially historically but notably
imaginative practices we call art can be undertaken without familiarity with
the conceptual aids offered by Sozialwissenschaft whose secondary effect
is to demand an ethical self-reexivity and positioning of the investigating
interpretant. Thinking sociologically provides a kind of Archimedean
point, furthermore, in which to situate ones practice from an external and
perhaps more synthetic point of view. Yet what Art History has historically
undertaken to analyse as its specic project is neither reducible to, nor
entirely to be discerned through, only sociological lenses. I shall argue that
there is a specicity to the aesthetic: not in the Kantian sense of a dis-
interested judgement of beauty which Bourdieu has shown is but the idealist
reex of a middle classs distance from actual production (Bourdieu, 1984). I
draw instead on Julia Kristevas sense of aesthetic practices in music, poetry,
dance, drama or the visual arts, as both imaginative thinking and affect-laden
signication, which explore through what she calls signifying practices the
difcult space between subjectivity and forms of social collectivity, and which
can be approached through semiotics and psychoanalysis (Kristeva, 1986).
What Kristeva poses as aesthetic practices emerged in opposition to the
concurrent end of religion (the emergence of secularism) and the assimilation
of institutionalized religion to the modern covenant between state, family
and church typical of modern bourgeois society (Kristeva, 1975). Identied
initially with transgression around signifying practices of the literary avant-
garde 18901920, aesthetic practices, now, historically, take on a new signi-
cance precisely in the disjuncture their anachronistic attention to singularity
and signication in a massied information society. She thus concludes:
It seems to me that the role of what is usually called aesthetic practices
must increase not only to counter-balance the storage and uniformity
of information in present-day mass media, data-bank systems and, in
particular, modern communications technology, but also to demystify
the identity of the symbolic bond itself, to demystify, therefore, the
community of language as a universal and unifying tool, one which
totalizes and equalizes. In order to bring out along with the singu-
larity of each person and, even more, along with the multiplicity of every
persons possible identications the relativity of his/her symbolic as
well as biological existence, according to the variation of his/her symbolic
capacities. And in order to emphasize the responsibility which all will
immediately face of putting this uidity into play against the threats of
death which are unavoidable whenever an inside and an outside, a self
and an other, one group and another, are constituted. At this level of
interiorization with its social as well as individual stakes, what I have
THINKING SOCIOLOGICALLY 143
called aesthetic practices are undoubtedly nothing other than the
modern reply to the eternal question of morality. (Kristeva, 1986: 210)
In specic social and historical conditions, a specic set of human activities
acquires a new diagnostic value as well as one capable of holding before us
what might be most easily lost in contemporary societies subject to increasing
massication, fake individualism fostered by ever more intensied commod-
ication of every area of life. Far from having a permanent and transcendent
social value, aesthetic practices, dened as enacting both the singularity of each
subject and their relation through language to the common, their multiple
identications and their relativity suspended between the corpo-material and
the symbolic, have historically contingent social effects and even necessity.
The argument I shall propose in the following article will follow what, to
some, might seem a strange itinerary. There are many routes through which
I could have considered the relations between sociology and art history, the
latter being presented as not an obvious cognate of the former. Yet, placing
art and sociology together, many readers will anticipate an engagement with
one of giants of the crossing between the two elds, Pierre Bourdieu. The
sociology of culture is a well-resourced subdiscipline of sociology and its
literature a point of reference for sociologically minded art historians. To
retravel the ground so richly plotted out by Bourdieu and his school would
thus be predictable and possibly boring. I have chosen a more quirky
procedure, characterized less by logical unrolling of a single line of argument
than by the purposive use of intellectual montage which mirrors ultimately
the intellectual position of Aby Warburg who dedicated his working life to
thinking through what he called Kulturwissenschaft in opposition to the
dominant trends in later 19th-century art history: aestheticizing art history
or formalism.
Each section of the following article addresses the central confrontation I
want to pose between thinking sociologically a term borrowed with respect
from one of the greatest living sociological thinkers, Zygmunt Bauman
and thinking aesthetically a difcult neologism that intends to perplex by
linking aesthesis with thought, and thought with the formal and the affec-
tive. The text weaves several strands drawn from my own long-term engage-
ment with the legacies of Marxist social and cultural theory as a resource for
thinking through some of the challenges faced by an art historian whose
project has paradoxically been consistently anti-art historical while seeking
to engage with what art history has taken to be its prime objects. Because
this is a journal of the history of the human or social sciences, I shall need to
explain certain things that will be self-evident to art historians of various
traditions, but without a common understanding of which, my own argu-
ments will not be grounded as I attempt to traverse sociology and art history
to argue rst against convergence and nally for renewed reciprocity. Starting
with a reading of a perplexing passage in Marxs Grundrisse, I shall weave
together statements by Antal, Clark, Schapiro, Simmel and Warburg to estab-
lish a complex picture of the relations between artistic practices and the
totality of practices in history we call the social ensemble. If we are not to
think of merely reduction or determination, which would explain art by refer-
ence to something other than itself, society, how will we specify in a way that
acknowledges sociality in the specicity of the work that artistic practices
do? How shall we arrive at a critical attitude, able to discern art that is doing
something to or even for and art that is complicit with its own conditions of
production at any historical juncture, and specially our own? Finally, in a
swerve that might seem unexpected but is deeply linked to the theme of seeing
artistic practice as one practice among the many that compose the social,
including technologies and institutions associated with image-making and
the circulation of cultural meaning, I shall discuss the impact on art history
of technologies that have fostered modern image cultures from the photo-
graphic to the digital in order to excavate from one of my hinge gures, Aby
Warburg, a possibility for art history in a moment in which critical practice
has become extremely difcult to imagine.
Since the 1970s, art history has undergone considerable transformations,
being challenged notably by the very constituencies its dominant narratives
excluded from its canon: women, people of colour, and gay and lesbian people.
In order to accommodate gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity as well as to work
against racism, sexism, homophobia and patriarchal Christian Eurocentrism,
we, dissidents within art history, faced the constant accusation that we were
betraying art with sociology. It was as if encounters with the social processes
and their terminology for the analysis of the major formations and deforma-
tions of social relations were alien intrusions into a virginal space of aesthetic
autonomy and transcendent meaning populated only by universal beings,
artists. It was not possible to begin to speak of difference (in which we can
collect all the formations and deformations listed above) without apparently
breaching the closed boundaries of certain types of institutionalized 20th-
century art history, dominated by formalist, iconographic and antiquarian
modes in which art historians effectively worked on behalf of dealers, galleries
and national heritage to consolidate knowledge of who did what when, who
inuenced whom how, and how each work has come to its current location or
ownership. This rather grim caricature obscures deeper intellectual struggles,
relations to fascism and cold war politics, the effects of the Holocaust on
shifting whole communities of scholars from Europe to the States and creating
the conditions for apolitical formalism or apolitical humanism as genuinely
and deeply committed perspectives. Art histories vary with national traditions
and the nature of the treasures they conserve and curate; with intellectual
histories of various academies and language traditions. From the feminist
social historical perspective through which I work, however, many of these
variations interesting and important for micro-histories of the discipline
are less signicant than the bold shapes of an increasing ight from afnity
with sociological thinking that actively obscured the complex of social
relations and imaginative intensities with which it is obvious that artistic prac-
tices and their visual cultures contended both in the production of dominant
ideologies and in critical renegotiation. I do not intend to go deeply into the
feminist critique of art history here, because that would serve to replay
precisely the way in which dominant Euro-American Art History dismissed
the feminist questions as belonging to another discipline: sociology (Parker
and Pollock, 1981; Pollock, 1999). I want to mount what is in fact a feminist
reading through an oblique approach: a question posed about art in the
middle of the 19th century by one of the founders of sociology, Karl Marx,
a man of his times thinking about art as contemporary Hegelian German art
history and middle-class taste formed him.
MARX 1857
In the case of the arts, it is well-known that certain periods of their ow-
ering are out of all proportion to the general development of society,
hence also to the material foundation, the skeletal structure, as it were,
of its organization. (Marx, 1973: 110)
In the brief nal section of the introduction to the Grundrisse of 1857, Karl
Marx turned to an unanticipated discussion of the uneven development
between artistic forms and social-economic relations. His example was that
of Greek art and Greek society. What does this curious afterthought about
art offer us now?
In the course of the preceding discussions of how to begin his analysis of
political economy, pressuring the Hegelian dialectic in order to conceive of a
dynamic and rich totality of many determinations and relations (Marx, 1973:
100) in which production could be logically demonstrated as the foundation,
Marx showed also that production and consumption were both determinants,
and instances, of each other. Not only did production produce objects for
consumption but consumption also produced more production by consuming.
Production furthermore produced a subject for consumption of the object,
and produced the need for the object it then supplied. Marx gives the example
of art. Here, production creates a desire for, and a capacity to respond to, art.
The need which consumption feels for the object is created by the per-
ception of it. The object of art like every other product creates a
public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus not
only creates an object for a subject, also a subject for an object. (Marx,
1973: 92)
Production is thus creative of a potential within subjectivity, forming the
desiring and consuming subject within the determining circuits of production.
Such an argument would rmly place any discussion of art within the larger
explanatory field of political economy or, in our case, sociology. There is
no doubt that a sociology of art addresses precisely the social institutions
and processes by which art is produced, circulated and consumed. Pierre
Bourdieus towering work stands as monument to and resource for complex
and thorough sociological study of art in modern culture.
My purpose here is to consider the estranged space between two disciplines,
sociology and art history, the latter being designated as a strange other. Art
history puzzles over a relation between two concepts, only one of which it
might share with a sociology of art. The rst is the concept of art and the
second the concept of historical process. The term art has been subject to
many conceptualizations in the eld of philosophical aesthetics from the 18th
century through to 20th-century sociology in which the former speculations
as to a fundamental essence give way to a more contingent interpretation of
art being whatever practices, texts, images, institutions, experiences to which
the term is generally applied. It might then seem anachronistic at worst or
purely philosophical at best to reclaim any kind of steady meaning for the
concept art. Yet art history cannot be simply sociological and accept that
what we study will be whatever any particular period so designates. It must
at least begin from the assumption, bequeathed by its origins in 18th-century
aesthetics, that there is some quality or process, called art, which needs its
own discipline, and which will then be subject to historical analysis, the
term art forming the commonality across which the differences of histori-
cal cultures can be mapped to allow us to perceive some kind of evolution,
development, or change, at the very least. Art History unhappily lives with
this tension between the apparent conceptual consistency of a category, art,
and the historical inconsistency of the forms of its appearance, institutional-
ization and practice. This can lead, in the case of the work of Hans Belting,
to remind us that in studying the medieval West, we may in fact be studying
images in an age before art (Belting, 2004). Even though concepts of art
and artist are specic to times, periods and nations, we can still agree that
aesthetic-symbolic practices that occur worldwide can be studied by a dedi-
cated discipline under the late-arriving categorization of such practices as
art and their makers as artists.
Marx, however, proposes something rather different. He is arguing that the
modern world, far from marking the emergence of art as such, heralds the
end of what historically was produced and later understood by the term art.
We need to plot a path to this paradox. The opening passages of the Intro-
duction to the Grundrisse deal with Marxs critique of Robinsonades, the
various ctions that traverse social/political and imaginative literature such
as Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe (1719), a novelistic treatment of the
documented case of Alexander Selkirk who was marooned alone on an
island 400 miles off the coast of Chile. Defoes Crusoe, however, re-created
his social world on the island including racial hierarchies and master/slave
relations. For Marx, Robinsades ideologically propose the notion of a primary,
complete, autonomous individual independent of society. They are thus anti-
sociological allegories that Marx exposed as ideological registers of 17th- and
18th-century political philosophy which posits an individual over against
society as extraneous to him. Rather than reecting a pre-social, autonomous
reality created by the free individual, Marx suggested that these fictions
indirectly registered the real conditions on which they arose as the inverted
representation, or the ideological (he is thinking of the camera obscura) reex
in the imagination, of living in such an advanced state of socio-economic
development that the complexity of the social ensemble confronts the indi-
vidual as alien and opaque, creating the conditions for the experience of
estrangement and thus individuation, unleashed from the powerful bonds
that hitherto surrounded the social subject in less developed ensembles of
social and economic relations.
The Robinsades inscribe not the ideas of the epoch but the epochs imag-
inative structuring of its own misrecognition of the conditions of social exist-
ence. The illusion of autonomy is, for Marx, the paradoxical effect of the very
complexity of social development, and not of an imaginary simplicity of one
English gentleman on his (colonized) island naturalizing conditions of servi-
tude upon which his freedom is built. The effect of autonomy is the result of
the historical development of a social complexity that veils from its subjects
the very advanced nature of their interdependencies. Complex forms of social
totality turn opaque, as it were, confronting the social individual as a dense,
indecipherable, alien other. Thus, for Marx, a form of individuated social
experience is the product of an elaborated division of labour and of the
economic conditions for the emergence of civil society and its institutions:
the very things that become the objects of sociological analysis, of course,
but which disconnect the individual experientially from the totality of which
she or he is an effect.
In relatively underdeveloped socio-economic conditions, however, imagi-
native activity such as the epic itself premised on a mode of thought called
mythic thinking ourished. Furthermore, the epic arises from social forms
already reworked in an unconsciously artistic way by the popular socially
dispersed and orally maintained imagination. With developments in precisely
those areas of signication and collective consciousness such as newspapers,
the mass media, as well as changes in the technologies of warfare gun-
powder and lead and of sustenance such as agriculture and provision of
energy, certain relations between unconscious artistic reworking and a
popular imagination as a means of interpreting unmastered material realities
become weakened. Thus Marx asks rhetorically:
What becomes of Fama beside Printing House Square? What chance
Vulcan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning rod and
Hermes against Crdit Mobilier? From another side is Achilles possible
with powder and lead? (Marx, 1973: 110)
In this nal section of the Introduction, therefore, moving beyond logic
to historical speculation, Marx identies a disproportion between certain
periods of owering of art its production and its produced consumers
and the general development of the society in which that took place. Thus
the Greeks produced a high level of aesthetic practices in relatively under-
developed economic conditions. Incidentally swiping at progressivist delu-
sions of the 19th century that are noticeable specically in Hegelian art
historical discourse that plots historical change as development, Marx argued:
Certain forms of art, e.g. the epic, can no longer be produced in their
world epoch-making, classical stature as soon as the production of art
as such begins. (Marx, 1973: 110; emphasis added)
Marx proposes, therefore, that certain conditions for artistic production
are in contradiction with the general socio-economic development of society.
The difculty of this situation disappears the minute it is formulated as a
general principle. It has, moreover, rather shattering repercussions for the
present. One reading of Marxs proposition, in the light of what has preceded
this discussion of art in the Grundrisse, is that art may not be a permanent
feature of social life; indeed, there are forms of social life in which art not
only would not ourish but would lose its foundations altogether. The
conditions for this might be the production of art as such.
By that phrase, Marx hinted at the danger to this imaginative sphere of
human interaction with the conditions of existence resulting from the total
incorporation of artistic production/imaginative thinking into the general
system of production when it has become production as such, that is, in indus-
trial capitalism, the rst society to be primarily determined by its economic
system. Marxist critics of specically postmodern culture as the cultural
logic of the latest stage of globalizing capitalism like Frederic Jameson, for
instance, identify a profound loss of what was once marked by modern art,
as a site of critical negotiation of its own conditions, modernity, by its more
or less total incorporation into commodication in advanced capitalist
relations of production (Jameson, 1991). Under penetrating conditions of
commodication in which even the gap or resistance marked by the notion
of the avant-garde has been eroded, imaginative and creative activity to which
we still attribute world, epoch-making signicance might cease altogether
despite the fact that commodities and production practices called art might
still appear to be being produced, circulated and consumed, in fact, in ever
greater volume. We are currently witnessing an increased visibility of art, the
increased notoriety of artists, and a wider cultural use of museums such as the
Tate Modern, for instance. But what is being experienced under that label?
Is it the consumption of a packaged, mediated and symbolic-capital-accumu-
lating administered culture? Or are we being offered an encounter with, or
a critical reading of, artistic practices as themselves a complex set of negoti-
ations as well as uneven and often revealing ideological reexes of the current
conditions of existence? Does art today explore the relations of cultural to
social practices, in which nexus, for instance, critical Modernism or the art
of the Greeks, were forged?
Why did Marx intimate that art as he understood it for the Greeks, meaning
a relation between a popular imagination conditioned by its own level of
socio-economic development and a set of specic aesthetic forms such as the
epic, might not survive full integration into commodity capitalism? Clearly
production makes its own subjects, manufacturing the nature of subjective
needs, desires and capacities. The answer may also lie either in the nature of
the contradiction between socio-economic conditions and their reex in
imaginative or aesthetic forms or in its complete supersession by production
of art as such. Surveying the emergence of the very term art as part of an
array of linguistically trackable changes around the end of the 18th century
that aligned class, democracy, industry, art and culture, Raymond Williams
intimated this potential historical redundancy of art as a consequence of
capitalism. In the elevated ideas newly attributed to Art as a sphere of moral
judgements and non-utilitarian action, Williams argues that, in bourgeois
society, art found a secondary function, which Bourdieu outlines as the
accumulating of symbolic capital, which must inevitably change the nature of
the relation people have to what is no longer art but art as symbolic capital.
This new form of social usage and cultural investment was appropriated and
used in the legitimation struggles of emerging and contesting class formations
of capitalist and later totalitarian societies (Williams, 1958; Bourdieu, 1984).
Before going any further, I need to distinguish this discussion of Marxs
precocious speculations about the questionable survival of art at all in the age
of production of art as such from what might appear similar to modernist
Jeremiahs in the art world who currently bemoan the end of art in the
current postmodern era of anti-aestheticism, or post-art, a term coined by
happening artist Allan Kaprow. Marxs idea that art may not survive the
production of art as such is not a sentimental but a structural proposition.
It holds within it the larger question posed by Marx about the dissonant
relation between imaginative solutions in the face of material conditions over
which the imagining communities have little real mastery, and the effect of
increasing mastery over the forces conditioning material existence on the
necessity for imaginative solutions. The analysis of contemporary artistic
forms must, if we follow Marx, identify the specicity of the conditions
under which we live and work: commodication being for Marx the decisive
characteristic of capitalist economies. The commodity itself is a complex
form, disguising in that form the chain of equivalences and substitutions that
constitute it as a form in which social relations of production become opaque
and substitute relations between fetishized things, objects of human social
labour, for the real and sensory knowledge of the human social labour that
produced them, in asymetrical relations of exploitation. As art or cultural
historians, we can chart different moments or key points in the struggle with
and against commodication in and through artistic practices, some of which
show critical understanding of the historical nature of the struggle, others
merely idealistic resistance or romanticized nostalgia. I think a great deal of
what is currently being produced and circulated in the art world does not
meet my denition of art as a critical negotiation, conscious or unconscious
of its own worlds (Clark, 2002). What is bought and sold, exhibited and evalu-
ated by art history, offered to public consumption through the media, as art,
does not at all or necessarily constitute art (aesthetic practices as dened by
Kristeva). Indeed in new media art, the boundaries between what is known as
ideological production and what held itself aloof (conservatively or critically)
are now being willingly eroded. It is the task of a critical art history/art writing
to help us understand the current conguration of relations and ideologies,
and ponder if a critical space called art can still operate when the terms of
being seen as artist and making art are so entirely framed by the relations
between art economics and the managers of symbolic capital (the dealers and
the museums). The very public nature of success often instant and early,
and rewarded by fabulous wealth resulting from ludicrous pricing militates
against the distance, the space of critical reection and struggle, that might
make certain practices merit the term art as a term precisely for alterity or
resistance to willing or, worse, self-serving ideological incorporation.
Such reections are not the same as those of critics, like Allan Kaprow and
Donald Kuspit, who categorize postmodern art production as post-art, a term
which in itself harks nostalgically back to the last moment of art: modernism.
Such Jeremiahs seek to recover an aesthetic of universal human experience in
the artists they select as new Old Masters (note the resurgence of the old
masculinist and probably racist canon) who retain the authenticity of an
older notion of the artist and his or her practice (Kuspit, 2004). Although the
triumph of cleverness (the postmodern habit) over creativity (the modernist
epitome), the banal over the enigmatic, the sociological over the sacred all
quotations from the blurb for Kuspits book may indeed dene the shift
from modernist to postmodernist culture, I shall place the crisis deeper and
in the conditions in which even modernism itself evolved. Starting, therefore,
with Marxs still perplexing but ultimately astute reections in the middle of
the 19th century, stretches the historical frame within which the encounter
of art history and sociology might be thought to encompass the very emer-
gence of urban-industrial modernity as a different set of conditions from
those which, to a greater or lesser degree, may be said to have persisted since
the Greeks.
It might then become possible to propose a correspondence between Marxs
mid-19th-century musings and the more formalized sociological thinking of
Georg Simmel (18581918) at the turn of the 20th century. Simmel also
considered the relations between the city as a site of the new money economy
and the increasing predominance of relations of exchange, and the forms of
intensied individuality which are its subjective imprint. Just as Marx argued
in reading the Robinsades of the 17th century, Simmel suggested that socio-
economic processes refashion conditions of subjectivity. I would also like to
introduce an art historian of Simmels generation, Aby Warburg (18661929)
who, by a different route through anthropology, philology and psychology,
came to a conclusion not dissimilar from Marxs about the potentially fatal
consequences of capitalist technological modernity for the conditions of
artistic creation rooted in mythic thinking where thought projects itself
imaginatively across a cognitive gap in relation to a sense of human depen-
dency on the surrounding material world for survival.
Having travelled in 1896 through the desert areas of New Mexico and
Arizona, settled by the Hopi and other indigenous Pueblo peoples still prac-
tising modied forms of extremely long-standing rituals within a living
mythological and cosmological thought system (though not unaffected by
four centuries of contact with Spanish Catholicism and Protestant evange-
lism), Warburg concluded his interpretation of their rituals using serpents as
signiers of energy and water, of earth and sky and their necessary inter-
action, by adding a photograph taken on the streets of San Francisco on his
return to the modern Euro-American city (Fig. 1).
Walking down the streets this Uncle Sam (Warburgs term) passes beneath
the electricity and telegraph wires that effortlessly and regularly carry power,
light, energy and communications to users at the thoughtless and emotionally
neutral ick of a switch. Warburg pondered
whether the idea of the sacred that sense
of powerless awe and needy yearning in the
face of uncertainty which sustained mythic
thinking could survive the impact of
technological mastery, hence of emotional
distanciation from nature and from the
precariousness of life which was the con-
dition for a certain kind of reection a
Denkraum that is distinct from the act of
logical or utilitarian mastery.
The American today, argued Warburg, is
no longer afraid of the rattlesnake. He kills
it; in any case he does not worship it. It
now faces extermination. The lightning
imprisoned in a wire captured electricity
Figure 1 Uncle Sam, photograph
(1896) from collection of Aby
Warburg (reproduced by courtesy
of the Warburg Institute)
has produced a culture with no use for paganism. What has replaced it?
Natural forces are no longer seen in anthropomorphic or biomorphic
disguise, but rather as innite waves obedient to human touch. With these
waves, the culture of the machine age destroys what the natural sciences, born
of myth, so arduously achieved: the space for devotion which evolved in turn
into the space required for reection.
The modern Prometheus and the modern Icarus, Franklin and the
Wright Brothers . . . are the ominous destroyers of the sense of distance,
who threaten to lead the planet back into chaos. Telegram and tele-
phone destroy the cosmos. Mythical and symbolical thinking strive to
form spiritual bonds between humanity and the surrounding world,
shaping distance into the space required for devotion and reection; the
space undone by the instantaneous electrical connection. (Warburg,
1995: 54)
Both Marx and Warburg might themselves be accused of anti-capitalist
Romantic nostalgia projected onto idealized pasts, the Greeks in the case of
Marx, and the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico in the case of Warburg. In
different ways, I would argue, however, they were both hard-headed analysts
of their presents. They were, in fact, thinking sociologically about the
material conditions for creative and imaginative activity that runs from arts
origins in ritual through the historical development of a specic sphere of
aesthetic-symbolic production separated from the sacred, ritual and ulti-
mately religion. They both allow me to pose a heretical question that lies at
the heart of this consideration of the relations of Sociology and Art History.
In the very text in which Marx poses the possibility of an end of art in
modernity with the production of art as such, Marxs analysis of the
Robinsades effectively poses the conditions for the emergence of sociologi-
cal thinking as such. Its conditions lie in the critical analysis, or rediscovery
as critical knowledge, of the increasingly invisible relations of interdepen-
dence, networks and patterns of social life and experience precisely as they
become, as a result of that very development of capitalist modernity, spon-
taneously unknowable by existing forms of imaginative or formal knowl-
edge. Thus I could pose a historically produced dissonance between thinking
sociologically and thinking aesthetically. Where is art history in this?
Foucault identied the historic moment at the end of the 18th century as
the moment of emergence of the sciences of man ranging from the biologi-
cal to the social sciences (Foucault, 1974). This moment is also that of the
undoing of the conditions of art through production of art as such. It also,
signicantly, marks the beginnings of the discipline of Art History as such,
taking its place long before literary or even musicological studies within the
Humboldtian German university system. In what I have written so far, I have
wandered outside art history proper, entering into an extended conversation
with various key sociologically inspired cultural theorists struggling with
major issues of sociality, collectivity, singularity, signication, subjectivity
and the historical emplacement and changing of their relations. Where in all
this is art history itself and why am I obliged to be so unfaithful to it in
order to think historically and aesthetically?
ANTAL, 1966; SCHAPIRO, 1937; CLARK, 197388
Writing as an unwelcome Marxist exile/Jewish refugee in Britain from the
lively intellectual ferment of Georgy Lukcs Sonntagskreis in Budapest in
1916, whose members included intellectuals such as the philosopher Georgy
Lukcs (18851971), the sociologist Karl Mannheim (18931947) and art
historians Arnold Hauser and Johannes Wilde, Czech-born Frederick Antal
(d. 1954) surveyed the state of British Art History as he, a student of the great
gures of Heinrich Wlfin in Berlin and Max Dvrk in Vienna, found it.
The whole point of view of art historians who have not yet even
absorbed the achievements of Riegl, Dvrk and Warburg (let alone
tried to go beyond them) is conditioned by their historical place; they
cling to older conceptions, thereby lagging behind at least a quarter of
a century. And in the same way, they are conditioned by the concessions
they are willing to make not too many and not too soon to the new
spirit. (Antal, 1966: 187)
Writing in a still politically charged moment of post-fascist anti-communism
which saw in art history the triumph of Wlfinian formalism on the one
hand, or Panofskys humanistic iconography on the other, Antal noted above
all a radical unwillingness amongst art historians at mid-century to allow
anything of a social or materialist explanation of artistic practice to impinge
on the idealizing story of great individuals creating universally signicant
beautiful things. Patronage studies were allowed for the minor artists but not
for the major gures. Reference to popular culture similarly was to be kept
at a distance from the major players. Discussion of subject matter was
conned to an esoteric kind of iconography remote from what Antal called
living history, while any relation between art and history or art and society
must be left allusively vague with no real engagement with any of the major
sociological theories. He then stated:
. . . The last redoubt which will be held as long as possible is, of course,
the most deep rooted nineteenth century belief, inherited from Roman-
ticism, of the incalculable nature of genius in art. (Antal, 1966: 189)
For those privileged to watch TV series such as Simon Schamas The Power
of Art (2006) or even the BBCs The Impressionists (2006), Antals anatomy
of art history as the cult of individual genius with almost no registration of
the impact of 30 years of critical, theoretically enriched scholarship, will be
all too horribly familiar. Served up regularly through the media and even the
Turner Prize extravaganza, what passes as Art History in the media is exactly
what Antal ironically decried as being out of date by the late 1940s: idealist
and romanticizing hero-worship. Antals conclusion is relevant here:
Methods of Art History, just as pictures can be dated. The methods
of Art History naturally constitute part of a prevailing intellectual
outlook, the problems and interests of successive periods. Alterations
in art historical methods do not cancel out the achievements of previous
generations, but only effect a shift of accent which brings into relief
ideas in art, as in history, which a particular generation considers
important. (Antal, 1966: 189)
Composed at the end of the 1940s but only published in 1966, Antals diag-
nosis of the dominance of formalism combined with and actually antithetical
to Romanticist cults of expressive genius in ofcial mid-20th-century Art
History marks a historical point of maximum alienation between Art History
and the sociological imagination.
1
Antals call for a recovery of a social history of art was heeded, however,
during the 1970s. A counter-movement to cold war formalism that domi-
nated museal and academic Art History in Europe and America reconnected
with the legacies of the men whose names Antal had mentioned, Riegl,
Dvrk and Warburg, probably hardly known outside arcane art historical
courses except to students of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin studied with the
founder of formalism, Wlfin at Munich, disliking him greatly and later
opposing his formalist teaching to that of Alois Riegl who profoundly inu-
enced Benjamins project of reading the crisis of capitalist modernity across
its entire interrelating cultural production including many sites and ephemeral
objects unacknowledged by formal Art History and unrecognized prior to
the development of Cultural Studies. It is, however, perhaps to the impact of
Georg Simmel that we should attribute Benjamins engagement with Riegl
whose notions of a cultural conguration of space, the haptic versus the
optical visual experience, and of the permeation of all cultural practices by a
shared formal structure, clearly play out in Benjamins Arcades project in
which everything from bus tickets to songs becomes equally indexical of the
new social and hence subjectivity-shaping processes of capitalist modernity.
Through Simmels teaching, Benjamin built on the reections on the novel
subjectivizing effects of metropolitanizing Berlin around 1900 to recognize
retrospectively their anticipation in the writings of the poet Charles Baude-
laire in Paris during the 1850s.
Within the eld of Art History, in which the poet Baudelaire, friend and
mentor to Edouard Manet, is acknowledged as a fundamental inuence in the
articulation of the need for a radical formal shift in art to catch the experi-
ence of Modernity as it unfolded in Paris in the middle of the 19th century,
Benjamin became the conduit for art historians back to Simmel to an event
within Sociology and its early formations. This circle is then completed when,
during the 1970s, one of those who listened to Antals advocacy of a social
history of art, excavated from Benjamins intellectual biography the signi-
cance of Georg Simmel and placed his essay The Metropolis and Mental Life
(Simmel, 1969) on the reading list for researchers into early cultural forma-
tions of painterly Modernism in Paris c.186090. In doing this, Marxist art
historian T. J. Clark was forced to articulate the problems with which we
continue to struggle today.
What I want to explain are the connecting links between artistic form,
available systems of representation, current theories of art, other
ideologies, social classes, and more general historical structures and
processes. . . . How does experience become a form, an event an image,
boredom become its representation, despair become spleen: these are
the problems. (Clark, 1973: 1213)
If we think sociologically, artistic practices must become thinkable within
the elds of social practices and related subjectivities. Yet if we think about
art, our object is to specify the particularity of aesthetic-symbolic articulation
as a cultural practice and as a meaning-producing effect that is not reducible
to a prior determination: the social, but is one of the many sites and threads
of what constitutes the social at the level of both experience and creative
reection upon its subjective meanings. Art is not an object but a practice,
and a practice that uses specic resources, sound, images, words, genres,
conventions, techniques to give form to aspects of social and subjective experi-
ence that would otherwise remain insignicant, culturally inoperative in
shaping the ways in which people lived their lives. As Raymond Williams
articulated it in his superb analysis of the Marxist metaphor of base and super-
structure, we should not ask what is the relation between literature and
society, since they have no relation in such an abstracted way. Instead we must
grant that literature or art is one of the practices of which society is complexly
composed. Indeed until it and all practices are present, the society cannot be
seen as fully formed (Williams, 1980: 44). Thus Modernism as an aesthetic
practice is not merely the register through social iconography of Modernity;
but a critical struggle with and reection upon the conditions of Modernity
by means of a mode of formal thinking that is pictorial art-making.
In 1984 T. J. Clark presented his most Simmelian book: The Painting of
Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers. Clark would there
declare:
The argument I wish to make in this book is somewhat less watertight,
I hope; I wish to show that the circumstances of modernism were not
modern and only became so by being given the forms called spectacle.
(Clark, 1984: 15; emphasis added)
Clarks point of departure for this proposition was a passage from a Marxist
art historian of the previous generation, Meyer Schapiro, who had, like Antal,
taken the struggle over the social versus the formalist vision of art and its
historical narration to the formalist horses mouth. In 1937, Meyer Schapiro
launched a critique of the concept of art historical evolution of modernism
articulated by the very Wlfinian art historian Alfred Barr, the rst director
of the rst ever Museum of Modern Art (founded in New York in 1929).
In presenting a major survey exhibition of the emergence of modern art
from the 1880s to the 1930s, Barr had ordered the apparently chaotic jumble
of competing styles and artistic cliques into a coherently trackable formal
evolution represented by a famous chart placed on the cover of the Cubism
and Abstract Art exhibition in 1936. This chart plotted an evolutionary logic
for modernist art by setting movements impressionism through post-
impressionism, fauvism, cubism, constructivism to abstract art in the 1930s
against a simple chronological grid. Visually, therefore, art seemed to emerge
from preceding art movements in a process of inuence and reaction, un-
affected by world catastropes such as the First World War or events such as
the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism, the Great Depression. This vision
of artistic autonomy and self-sufciency was challenged by Schapiro who
wanted to locate the motor for the evidently accelerating rate of artistic
change and diversity not in purely formal reactions but in the social experi-
ence of capitalist modernity which altered the position and subjectivity of
the artist/producer and was registered in the proliferating variety of individ-
ualized strategies that, nonetheless, could still be read socially as indices of
life as a private producer in capitalist relations of modernity. Even the self-
deluding myth of anonymous and estranged genius suffering poverty for the
sake of authenticity could be patched onto this social analysis.
A short digression is needed here: formalism functions as one of these
discourses of specication of Art History. What makes it possible to dedicate
a discipline to the study of art that is distinct from philosophical aesthetics,
archaeological antiquarianism and cultural history? Two moves had been
necessary: one was the legacy of 18th-century philosophical aesthetics that
separated out from cognition, and thus identied, aesthesis as a mode of
perception and/or knowing. This distinguished a human capacity for response
to beautiful things and a capacity for discrimination between them: judge-
ment. But for Art History to emerge, the aesthetic sphere had to be histori-
cizable, epochal and changing. This involved two further moves: one was to
bind specic forms or modes of art to place, geography, politics and social
forms the Greeks to Greek landscapes, democracy and mythology so that
each era or epoch could have its own distinctive character rooted in its social
forms and historico-geographical conditions. This produced the inherently
racist nationalism that structured 19th-century Art Historical practice and is
inscribed in our museum classications of art by national schools. What was
needed, furthermore, was to show that art was variable according to such
factors; thus it was historical, changing within the term art that was, nonethe-
less, structurally consistent across times and places. This then required an
internal denition not that of the aesthetic response to these historicizable
objects but a denition of what was constant within such variability: and
that unity was form which, in its changing modes, produces what the art
historian sets out to distinguish as style.
Art History is not so much dened by its modes of thinking as by its priv-
ileged object: art, which had to have simultaneously a historicizable and
structural unity. Of course, following Foucaults theory of discourse as a
productivity, objects of discourse are, in fact, produced by the discursive
practice itself which also creates its own experts relative to their objects. Art
is thus created in the emergent discourse of Art History, seeking to found
itself beyond both philosophical aesthetics and general cultural history in
which every feature of an age or civilization contributes evenly to its overall
character. Formalism the identication of an internal logic that makes
something art and relates different forms to each other through oppositions
and narratives of stylistic change is, however, potentially anti-humanistic,
being an attribute of the objects paintings, sculptures, drawings, buildings,
etc. that operates by its own formal logic. Romantic counter-forces, equally
invested in this emergent eld of the study of art historically, emerged to
compensate the objective logic of epochal form by recovering a subjective
dimension which proposes, as the source of value and intention beyond
formal and stylistic activity, a biographically constructed authorship: the
artist, which as Antal suggests and Freud ironically revealed, marks narcis-
sistic and theological investment in a kind of heroic gure who cannot and
should not be ordinary, like us, hence socially nameable. Genius marks a
singularity that surpasses human conditions.
Although the dominant forms of art historical writing are monographic
and artist-centred (just look along the shelves in any library and bookshop
and you will see that Art History is still the story of artists), within Art
History the deeper battle takes place between the foundational necessity to
identify an internal specicity for art in form and its stylistic changes and the
acknowledgement of artistic activity as a symbolic practice, a system of
meaning production, which is indifferent to the aesthetic attitude so closely
related to formalism. The symbolic approach developed into what we now
know as iconography: the study of recurring motifs and themes in images
and their pretexts in stories, myths and allegories. In the later 20th century,
iconography was transformed a little by the encounter with semiotics an
anti-romantic and non-esoteric conviction that visual representations could
be read as signifying systems whose signs visual and related could be read
ahistorically, a consequence of which that the meaning happens in the present
of reading, although we might acknowledge different moments of viewing and
reading are historically conditioned. Thus we can link across from semioti-
cized art history to emergent Cultural Studies replacing the aesthetic for the
cultural in Stuart Halls formulation of the impact of semiotic structuralism:
If the weakness of the positions outlined earlier was their tendency to
dissolve the cultural back into society and history, structuralisms main
emphasis was the specicity, the irreducibility, of the cultural. Culture
no longer simply reected other practices in the realm of ideas. It was
itself a practice a signifying practice and had its own determinate
product: meaning. To think of the specicity of the cultural was to come
to terms with what dened it, in structuralisms view, as a practice: its
internal forms and relations, its internal structuration. (Hall, 1980: 30)
With this sense of the battles internal to historical art histories, we can
return to Clark and Simmel and the manner in which the latters work can
illuminate the reexive relations between Sociology and Art History. Simmel
identies the way in which the transformed societal conditions of metro-
politan Modernity fashioned urban subjectivities across relations of space and
encounter, proximities, distance, familiarity, the unpredictable, heightened
individuation as well as the threat of a loss of self in the crowd or mass.
Probably also inuenced by Simmel, Schapiro refuted Alfred Barrs linear
model of an internal formal development within modern art by suggesting
that the very impetus for change, the search for new forms that accelerated to
create the chaos of competing individualistic or small group styles in early
20th-century modernist art, which it was Barrs project to organize into a
logical system of stylistic and formal development, were fostered by the social
conditions of urban capitalist life. This is how Schapiro articulated a radically
different reading of Impressionism as having meaning, a moral aspect, a
relation to social subjectivity and social relations that underpinned them.
Early Impressionism had a moral aspect. In its discovery of a constantly
changing phenomenal outdoor world of which the shapes depended on
the momentary position of the casual or mobile spectator, there was an
implicit criticism of symbolic social and domestic formalities . . . In
enjoying realistic pictures of his surroundings as a spectacle of trafc
and changing atmospheres, the cultivated rentier was experiencing in
its phenomenal aspect that mobility of environment, the market and
industry to which he owes his income and his freedom. (Schapiro, 1979:
1923)
Admired for the liberating breadth of this insight into potential relations
between economically conditioned social being and the emergence of a new
set of artistic forms, this passage, nonetheless, suggests a homology between
an idealized type the cultivated rentier and the world-picture offered to
him through the paintings made by his paid dependants (from a different
class), the painters, themselves clearly not experiencing the world supported
by rents and investments as they found themselves producing art in the novel
conditions of an uncertain marketing strategy known as the dealer-critic
system which emerged with the liberalization of the French economy after
the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the foundation of the Third Republic
in 1875 (White and White, 1965). Clark works precisely against reductive
homology in order to argue, in a more rigorously Marxist fashion, that the
contradictions, the dismal disjuncture of appearances, fantasies and social
relations that underpin the spectacularization of commodity capitalism,
inform the textures and provocations of paintings of the Impressionists, that
we can consider to be modern insofar as they show that Modernism and
Modernity are not reexive. Even though Impressionist and later modernist
art chooses to show obvious and special sites of modernity such as the street,
the caf, the brothel, entertainments and commodities, what merits the term
of modern lies in the formal strategies used to create a distanciation and ambi-
guity about appearances and meanings. Clark treats paintings above all as a
kind of work, struggling to forge from inherited materials and anachronistic
practices of visual representation (that still presumed stability between signi-
er and signied) a register of the as-yet-unrecognized social at the level of
both representation and solicited subjectivity that can be incited to recognize
its own confusions through the encounter with paintings that can be
considered modern, precisely because they refuse the promise of imaginary
unity and do not deliver comfortable illusion. The modernist mode of
painterly representation is not about a meaning known in advance and
shown through legible representation. It is the work done on, and indeed
against, painting and its inheritances of such visible presentation, in order to
nd/create a form, a form of representation for the capitalist modernity that
dees representation, namely the conditions of capitalist modernity that Marx
specied as producing its particular tissue of illusions in which phenomenal
appearances occlude real relations. It is that very difculty which generates
the perplexing ruptures within western representational practice that we call
Modernism. From then on, artistic practice can only bear witness to an ever-
deepening crisis about the representability of the world that is, nonetheless,
the condition for an ever-more intense but doomed impulse to make sense
of it. This crisis is still playing out in contemporary art whose most abjectly
uncritical practices simply fall into thoughtless mimesis of capitalisms delusive
structure, mistaking Andy Warhols fragile holding of the two apart in order
to demonstrate the risks and the trends for easy-going collapse of critical
perspective into wholesale participation in commodication. Compare, for
instance, Warhols ironic use of the term factory to suspend the romantic
illusions of the studio with Damien Hirsts overt use of a factory system for
making his paintings.
Instead of retrospectively tracking the progressive evolution of formal
experiments that mark a rupture with dominant academic regimes of repre-
sentation, as Barr and the formalists do, in ways that inhibit any recognition
of their fundamental failure or their self-deluding dishonesty, or their
moments of terrible revelation in relation to a social reality marked by its
own opacity, Clark forces us to recognize the strangeness of Impressionist
and later modernist art, and to ask what is specic to the manner in which
making an artwork, a painting, is seeking to articulate visually the problem-
atic of spectacular Modernity. What did these practices reveal, indexically,
through their own modality of failure about that capitalist social reality and
its unavailability to cognitive understanding or even affective engagement?
Thus it is not a question of translation from social experience to its visual
representation, but of representation as a moment of cognizance of the
opacity of social experience which from then on will be known through its
negative representational forms and troubled artistic strategies which will
involve obscurantism, avoidance, misrepresentation or a complete failure to
nd an adequacy in formulation and construction of signs: a symptomatic
signifying failure as Clark sees many of the key paintings of the 1870s1880s
precipitating a crisis that plays out until the entire project of Modernism is
abandoned abruptly in the 1960s and a radically different, non-formalist
paradigm takes its place. The new paradigm draws enviously on arts modern
others, on industrial technologies producing and refashioning social subjec-
tivity in the 20th century: the photographic and the cinematic and now the
digital. I could certainly perform a kind of Schapirian reading of the moral
aspect of contemporary art. I would prefer to do the Clarkian job of iden-
tifying, in a reading of particular practices and works, the cracks and dif-
culties of any cultural articulation of the opaque and diss(ass)embling social
realities we currently live in, the era that Zygmunt Bauman names Liquid
rather than Post Modernity (Bauman, 2000; Bryant, 2007).
In terms of the relation between Sociology and Art History, I am, there-
fore, arguing against homology, reductionism, base/superstructure-type hier-
archies in which the social is reied prior to representation. Sociological
analysis is itself a conditioned practice of representation of the social. Instead,
by talking of representation and signication on the one hand, allying myself
thus with the larger discourse of a sociologically inected cultural studies,
and, on the other, insisting that there is a specicity to the way in which artistic
practices engage with, register, think about, index the unconscious of the
social mediated through the lens of a situated singular subject, the maker and
her practices, we have to acknowledge a specicity that has its own effects and
may even play into the sociological understanding of human interventions
into the object world and their subjective registration as meaning.
My argument has been against convergence. Let me take this further to
suggest that thinking sociologically and thinking aesthetically (in terms of
practices inducing meaning and affect) form a polarity that, nonetheless, can
come back into reciprocity.
BAHRO, 1977
In 1977 an East German Marxist wrote a book for which he was promptly
expelled from East Germany for excessive radicalism. Rudolf Bahros Alterna-
tive in Eastern Europe offered an analysis of the creation of a subjective
condition of generationally transmitted and depressive subalternity in the so-
called socialist states of the East. He identied a blueprint for transformation
within the continuing frameworks of democratic and humanist socialism.
Central to his plan for creating a redivision of labour was education. Within
the discussion of an education programme, Bahro proposed a dual necessity.
All children must be taught that which enables them to understand the larger
synthesis, the structures, processes and practices that shape the worlds of
which each is a part. This would link with Baumans notion that Sociology is
dened by understanding human action in both a world of interdependency
and one of supra-individual patterns and relations.
Bahro calls this a political-philosophical education; I am tempted to call it
a sociological one. Bahro then writes:
Knowledge of human affairs that is taught and accepted without
aesthetic emotion must be basically untrue, and particularly more so
for the individuals involved. Aesthetics, as a method of education,
means simply the attempt to present all knowledge that man requires
in such a way that it appeals to its own self and receives subjective
meaning. (Bahro, 1978: 285)
In counter-force, therefore, to insistence that the individual lives relationally
in an overdetermined or patterned world, Bahro proposes a complementary
kind of knowing: knowing for oneself. Thus, balancing the sociological-
political-philosophical knowledge of the wide world, known externally
through formalized methods and studies of accumulated and interpreted data
unavailable to common sense and individual life experience alone, there must
be, as the summit of education, a combination of art and philosophy:
The solution to this problem is in theory extremely simple: young
people must have both an artistic and a political-philosophical practice.
To put it another way, they must be able to appropriate directly, as tools
for some use, the means of patterning and the concepts that allow them
to differentiate and synthesise both the small world and the wide world.
(1978: 286)
For Bahro, this model approximates to Marxs utopia:
The entire educational process must be organised in such a way that the
youthful development of all people leads to the summit of art and
philosophy, the emotional and rational bridges from the subjective
microcosm to the totality. If this is utopia, it is Marxs too. (1978: 286)
This dream is set against the cruel and actively depressing effects of totali-
tarian and inegalitarian societies.
The emancipating and humanizing power of all art as a human inter-
vention in the object-world, as a means of civilised displacement of
emotions outward instead of their repression within, as a medium of
self-purication by awe and compassion all this remains the privi-
lege of the very few. The cultural revolution and its educational policy
must draw its lesson from the uncontestable experience that those who
grow up without the possibility of political-philosophical and artistic
practice are condemned to subalternity, even if they become specialized
scientists. (1978: 287)
Thus Bahro proposes in idealistic fashion both the difference between socio-
logical and aesthetic knowledge, the wide world and the small world, the
systematic and the singularly situated, and their necessary complementarity
if we are not to produce, through our institutions of subjectication, sub-
altern subjects deprived of the means of both participation and self-afrming
judgement. Socialist societies of the East performed this by an apostasization
of social knowledge a xed vision of the ideal hence authoritarian model
of normative socialist society and by depriving its subjects of access to
the means of singularizing (not individualistic) self-knowledge. Access to the
means of making and appreciating aesthetic practice as a mode of knowing
not a form of elite entertainment and cultural capital becomes an emanci-
patory goal and a means of securing genuine democraticization of society.
Western capitalist democracies perform this subalternization with less
depressing effects by the seductive illusions of an individuality permitted its
free play in a phantasmagoria of commodities, themselves, as Marx argued,
a form of fetishistic misrepresentation obscuring real relations between
producers by the seduction of desirable objects. Bahros almost Schillerian
know for yourself is not at all part of the massication of consumers typical
of the West.
2
Reconsidering this blueprint from the other side, we can now come back
to a more sociological consideration of what Art History as a practice and
discipline actually performs in managing the distancing of the aesthetic as self
and socially situated self-knowing from a sociological or, rather, an ideo-
logical function. I speak here of Art History as the ofcial form of the
practice that I have above suggested could hold open a more extended and
interesting dialogue with sociological thinkers.
PANOFSKY, 1937 OR MARX IN THE AGE OF
MECHANICAL REPRODUCIBILITY
Figure 2 shows a photograph taken in the 1930s of art historian Erwin
Panofsky, a colleague of Aby Warburg in Hamburg, giving a lecture in the
Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. The room has been adapted for
this pedagogical purpose for which it was not custom-built. Indeed the wall-
paper, replace and general proportions betray its origin as the reception
room of the grand-scale Fifth Avenue New York home of tobacco magnate
and Methodist millionaire James B. Duke immortalized by his endowment
of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Founded in 1831, New
York University appointed as its rst Professor of Fine Arts, Samuel F. B.
Morse, who invented the telegraph. Only in 1922, however, did Art History
become a dedicated eld of study, lagging far behind Princeton and other
American universities that instituted chairs in the subject in the 1850s.
In 1931 a graduate programme in Art History at New York University was
installed in the Duke House on the Upper East Side to be near the Metro-
politan Museum of Arts collections; it was renamed the Institute of Fine Arts
in 1937, when it was enriched by a ood of refugee continental Jewish art
historians such as Erwin Panofsky, Walter Friedlaender, Karl Lehmann,
Julius Held and Richard Krautheimer. Erwin Panofsky was a Professor of
History of Art in Hamburg until the moment of the National Socialist elec-
toral victory in 1933 when he was forced to ee. At that moment over 25 per
cent of the art historical profession in areas about to be directly affected by
Nazisms racial legislation were Jewish itself a fascinating statistic worthy
of further cultural examination (Michels, 1999).
In this photograph, Panofsky is lecturing using a single projected glass
slide itself signicant in that the practice of using dual projection was then
a feature of the Munich School of
Art History initiated by Heinrich
Wlfin, thereby installing the
visual structure of compare and
contrast that indexed the philo-
sophical principles and methodo-
logical grounds of formalist
analysis. Only with the possibili-
ties of such widespread photo-
graphic capture and migration
of artworks as travelling images
could this whole edice of
comparative study of what then
appeared across this imaginary
museum as a coherent unity called
art be undertaken.
3
Panofsky is
Figure 2 Erwin Panofsky lecturing on
Gothic Art at the Institute of Fine Arts,
New York, 1946 (reproduced courtesy of
New York University).
lecturing on Gothic architecture using a projected photographic image to
bring into the room in New York a distant European building remote also
in time from the late 19th-century mansion in which the students are
gathered for this induction into Art History. What these students are being
inducted into involves both the visible performance of an audio-visual lecture
that certainly distinguishes Art History from other disciplines and also an
invisible socio-technological, photo-mechanical underpinning that made the
very subjects expansion possible. Art History, as we know it, as a university
discipline and general subject, was not possible before the photographic age.
Panofsky at work can be contrasted to a photograph of Andr Malraux,
author of the Voices of Silence (1955), in which he proposed what he called
le muse imaginaire (Malraux, 1963).
The museum of the imagination was created precisely by the relation
between musealization and photographic reproduction. Both extracted build-
ings, altars, monuments and other embedded uses of aesthetic-symbolic prac-
tices to create the levelled playing eld of modern consumption of art in which
an altar-piece becomes a Caravaggio, a cathedral an instance of the Gothic and
so forth (Pollock, 2007b). Reecting on the previous generation, or even the
19th centurys impact on concepts of art and emergent Art History, Malraux
rightly asked: What had those generations actually seen of art unless they
had been able to travel extensively and have access to a huge range of private
collections? What constituted knowledge of art on which 19th-century Art
History and criticism were practised was slight in comparison to what became
accessible through cheaper photographic reproduction. This enabled forms of
analysis and hence interpretative
structures freed from the relatively
static and canonized forms of
original patronage, commission and
antiquarian or social elite collection.
Aby Warburg was a university-
trained art historian who estab-
lished his own institute around a
library that he founded in Hamburg
having given up his claim to the
family banking business to his
younger brother in return for a
book allowance. Warburg, however,
actively used both architecture
(the shape of his library) and tech-
nology to create an intellectual
intervention against what was
becoming the dominant trend in
art historical studies in Germany:
aestheticizing formalist Art History.
Figure 3 Andre Malraux with illustrations
for le muse imaginaire, 1950 Jarnoux/
Paris Match Scoop
Not the single slide, nor Wlfins comparisons, nor Malrauxs promiscuous
assemblage, Warburgs method was a critical reading of the persistence of
meaning across cultural time by means of the image as a kind of mnemonic
signier.
Warburgs library was housed in a specially designed circular building by
Gerhard Langmaack which symbolically enacted Warburgs conviction that,
according to Kurt Forster:
The library, which demanded a building of its own, and the scholars
desk, which as the mensa of mental labour signies a ritual site of
mental sacrice, present positive analogies with the world of primitive
religious ritual. . . .
In the same way Warburg sought to create by way of experiment a
precise ordering of reied ideas that would set up a ow of thinking,
like a galvanic current. The library becomes a battery, an accumulation
of thinking in which, through books connected in parallel by Warburgs
[discovered] ordering principles, the current of ideas is induced to ow.
(Forster, 1996: 1112)
Thus in a movement against the limiting disciplinary specialization, Warburg
thought that the private spaces of intellectual labour and academic institutes
and resources must structurally reect the complex interplay of forces and
factors transdisciplinarity that constitute the domain of humanistic
study: a Denkraum or thinking space that he saw being created by the gap
lled by imaginative construal in cultures not yet affected by modernity like
those of ancient Greece or the Pueblo peoples between mastery and human
Figure 4 The oval library in the Warburg Haus, Hamburg; plate 79 from Mnemosyne
Bilderatlas compiled by Aby Warburg in the later 1920s (reproduced by courtesy of
the Warburg Institute)
vulnerability to which I referred in earlier sections of this article. Warburgs
practice was an argument against the departmentalization of knowledge
production and scholarly training which resulted in the disciplinary divisions
of the modern university. The function of a research institute/centre as an
enriched environment allowed individual research projects informed by
interrelations with expanded but specic research questions that demanded
that the investigation of art take place in an intellectual environment without
borders. But scholarship, for Warburg, was also not modern in the sense that
he opposed the displacement by a scientically deadening attitude of the
urgencies and anxieties associated with thinking and feeling human
conditions. If sociology becomes a matter of reducing complex social and
individual experience to statistical abstractions, it would not be part of
Warburgs Kulturwissenschaft. It would need the aesthetic the knowing for
oneself and in oneself as a living, sentient, suffering and often perplexed
human being to be able to produce genuinely humanistic knowledge.
The scholars desk is the site of ritual invocation of those forces that
compel, and those that assail, human beings within their culture. Not
only the scholars desk, but also the painters paper and canvas can serve
to invoke forces far older than the practice of Western culture. (Forster,
1996: 12)
Hence my insistence that Warburg is not nostalgic for an era of greater
simplicity, such as the childlike Greeks or Pueblo Indians. Instead, in a move
related to Freudian thought never acknowledged Warburg reminds us that
what lies closer to our cultural and human beginnings is, in fact, emotionally
complex, scary and overpowering both in its anxieties and in its potential
violence. Culture is understood not as development, but rather as a negoti-
ating process of sublimation and transformation based on creating the space
for devotion and reection in the confrontation between human social life
and its material conditions grounded in the world a version of which would
found the political theory of Hannah Arendt articulated in The Human
Condition (Arendt, 1998).
Let me nally link Warburg back to the passage in the Grundrisse where
I began. For Warburg the big question was neither a developmental nor a
stylistic history of art, nor the regular oscillation identied by Wlfin
between classical and baroque styles. It concerned the afterlife Nachleben
of pagan antiquity persisting into Christian and post-Christian western
culture. Marx wrote:
The difculty lies not in understanding that Greek art and epic are
bound up with certain forms of social development. The difculty is
that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they
count as a norm and as an unattainable model. (Marx, 1973: 111)
The conditions that generated one kind or moment of art in ritual or myth
are overtaken by socio-economic changes. Yet the images produced then have
a still vivid afterlife; they persist over time and across cultures as Warburgs
photographic assemblages revealed. Marx remained stumped: why did
ancient Greek art still afford pleasure? Journeying through anthropology and
philosophy, Warburg recognized what Lvi-Strauss would later call wild
thinking la Pense Sauvage (Lvi-Strauss, 1962). Warburg accepted that art
originated in ritual, itself a semi-formalized enactment of defences against
powerful emotions and anxieties attendant on the pre-industrialized struggles
for human survival in precarious and unmastered material conditions. For
Warburg, pagan visual cultures and related practices produced a repertoire of
signifying forms that registered in the language of the emotionally charged
representations of the body, life-grounded, material emotions pathos
formulae which become a memory bank. The historicity of art becomes in
addition their mode of persistence and transmission beyond their own moment
of inception. In a later historical cultures renewed need for a means of such
expression, they might at any moment be reanimated, as Warburg argued was
the case with the revival of pagan antiquity in 15th-century Europe.
Far from proposing the musealized art collections of antiquities as objects
of eternal value and transcendent aesthetic signicance for art-loving
connoisseurs or as dictionaries of sources and inuences for esoteric art
historians, Warburg saw the intensity of these unripe conditions of forms
and signs, bearers of wild thinking, as transmissible and rechargeable
ironically using metaphors of electricity to convey his meanings. Their
currency bears witness to the persistence of animating passions even while
social, economic and cultural conditions might, as in modernity, mute and
even obscure such relations to life and death anxieties. It is the job of the
cultural historian to read the signs, indexing as they do the often violent
forces at work in culture. Living at the turn of the 20th century with its rising
tide of racism, Warburg tracked images of violence towards the other from
Greek culture to German anti-Semitism in contemporary newspapers. The
nal plate of his Bilderatlas, illustrated above, forges links between past
images and contemporary newspaper reports of the pact between the papacy
and Mussolinis newly installed fascist regime. It is in this sense that
Warburgs historical work becomes a diagnosis of Western man in his
battle to overcome his own contradictions and to nd his dwelling place
between the old and the new (Agamben, 1999: 93).
These three nal images establish a problem: one shows the institutional-
ization of a distinct specialized and technologically conditioned discipline:
Art History, which is visualizable through the gure of Panofsky lecturing
with his projected slide or Malraux with his assembled photographs that will
soon become the art history book. Both indicate that whatever knowledge is
being produced is passed on through mere showing. What is it, however, that
you can see that can be called a knowledge produced by seeing? Style?
Form? Possibly some sense of use? What can be seen, in the sense of a deeper
understanding of visual images as articulations and memories, will depend,
however, upon the framing narrative of similarity and difference posited at
the level of visibility. This will operate without any further theorization of
what we might call a sociology of the visible, of spectacle, of the monumen-
tal, the ceremonial.
Warburg, on the other hand, is represented by a circular library itself
already allegorizing in modern terms a kind of mental work, a sacrice, a
ritual. Intellectual activity is imagined as a still unmanaged electrical current
that passes galvanizingly through relations between cognate forms of knowl-
edge stored in books but also in practices, rituals and objects that themselves
signify both human thought and the underlying emotions and anxieties that
thought or any kind of formalization in ritual or other representational
activity is struggling to manage and transform. In a nal image from
Warburgs last unnished project a vast montage of images he titled
Mnemosyne, A Picture Series Examining the Function of Preconditioned
Antiquity-Related Expressive Values for the Presentation of Eventful Life in
the Art of the European Renaissance we can see another conguration of
the image enabled by modern technologies.
On over 60 black hessian-covered boards Warburg hooked assemblages of
apparently unrelated images defying all the categories (nation, period, style,
movement, artist, oeuvre) that dened Art History as a formal discipline.
Instead these image collections functioned as what Warburg named pathos-
formel intertwining of an emotional charge with an iconographic formula
in which it is impossible to distinguish between form and content (Agamben,
1999: 90). The work was premised on the transmission of an emotional-
intellectual charge by means of the survival of image-forms and hence on the
problem of symbols and their life in cultural memory (Agamben, 1999: 93).
Thus the project of a radically expanded nameless science akin to Kultur-
wissenschaft became for Warburg the historical psychology of human
expression encoded in the image. This is signicant because it is dynamic,
historical and hence involves transmission, survival, polarization, and insofar
as it is historical, it is not individual, transcendent, universal as so much
modern Robinsade Art History suggests (remember Antal on genius); it is
not merely cultural or collective in a Burckhardtian or Tainean way there
lies the road to nationalist and ultimately racist underpinnings of the art
historical enterprise. Let me quote you a longish passage from a lecture of
1912 which, as Giorgio Agamben argues in his analysis of Warburg, offers a
methodological amplication of the thematic and geographical borders of
Art History:
Overly limiting developmental categories have until now hindered art
history from making its material available to the historical psychology
of human expression that has yet to be written. Because of its excess-
ively materialistic or excessively mystical tenor, our young discipline
denies itself the panoramic view of world history. Groping, it seeks to
nd its own theory of evolution between the schematisms of political
history and the doctrines of genius. By my method of interpretation
. . . I have shown that iconological analysis, which in refusing to submit
to the petty territorial restrictions, shies away neither from recognizing
that antiquity, the Middle Ages and the modern age are in fact one inter-
related epoch, nor from examining the works of the freest as well as the
most applied art as equally valid documents of expression. (Warburg,
1999: 585)
Warburgs legacy was muted as it entered Art History of the 20th century
through Panofsky where it was reduced to esoteric iconography (source-
hunting). Warburgs library (KBW) and research institute was moved to
London University in the 1930s where it is now the home of the most erudite
research that lacks the social and indeed emotional bite that animated
Warburgs own work across the image track of human history a symbolic
site that articulated thought and emotion in a singularly signicant modality
requiring both specialist and the most interdisciplinary expansion and
comprehensiveness in scholarship.
Thus what Warburg named Kulturwissenschaft would have taken into itself
all major attempts at understanding human activity while its work would
stand beside and also nd its research results in other institutes dedicated,
with different emphases, to analysing human interventions in the object
world. A contemporary of Georg Simmel, a product of a similar cultural
environment of disabused Jewish minority status in a racist culture, intellec-
tually alienated from the religious bonds that constituted the minoritys
communal identity, Warburg enables me to pose the relations between Soci-
ology and Art History critically here not in terms of obvious disciplinary
differences, but in terms of what intellectual communities thought it was
important to think about at a certain moment that was a hinge between the
two modernist centuries in which we nd still so much unharvested.
Thus the work of Simmel and Warburg will also open onto that of Freud,
Bergson, Durkheim, Saussure and Einstein and others of that extraordinary
moment that created the intellectual revolutions c.1905. The year 1905 marked
major intellectual ruptures: Einstein on Relativity, Freud on the unconscious
and sexuality, Husserl on Being, and can be linked with Saussure on
language, Bergson on memory and more. Elsewhere I have argued that Art
History as a discipline seems to have, in its ofcial forms, defaulted on the
implications of those c.1905 revolutions. In a sense, its practices, therefore,
remain pre-modern, pre-20th century. The later 20th century witnessed a
belated attempt to drag Art History into the sphere of the 1905 theoretical
revolutions whose implications began to recongure the intellectual land-
scape with the structuralist and poststructuralist intellectual interventions
c.195666. The culture wars were fought because of the entrenched resistance
to their radicalizing thought (Pollock, 2007a).
Art Historys resistance to change balks at exactly what Antal identied as
an earlier blockage against intercourse with social thought: the need to give
up the ideological investment in the triad artistworkoeuvre. Thus to under-
stand aesthetic-symbolic practices culturally is to recognize that with the
production of art as such in capitalist modernity we encounter another
moment of radically uneven interaction. This time the conditions for art
beyond commodication or ideological programming in capitalist and social-
ist modernities are progressively eroded side by side with the concomitant
evolution of a discourse that, as Bourdieu writes, romanticizes genius and
sacralizes art which, nonetheless, is now big business and gilt-edged securi-
ties. The less there is art, it seems, the more there is Art History, and now
the art market, perhaps.
The relations between Sociology and its strange other, Art History, take
place in the context of a larger question, which concerns the problem for all
of us, in universities today as elsewhere. That is: What are the conditions for
critical thinking at all when knowledge production as such appears to have
succumbed itself to commodication and business calculus called planning
a career? We are confronted with major changes to the post-Kantian 1960s
university. Old disciplines are challenged by new studies now conceived as
means of luring in new customers in ways that betray the social and politi-
cal imperatives that formed them. We negotiate the increasing penetration of
all spheres of intellectual and creative activity by capitalization, commodi-
cation and exclusively business models of production as such Art History
falls prey via its relations of market and museum to servicing this cultural
industry. Criticism in art, for instance, disappears to be replaced by a trained
cohort of those who make use of the new studies areas to create the claims
through which competing, branded art identities are marketed and rendered
secure investments through the alliance of dealers and museums.
What are, then, the remaining conditions of existence of aesthetic practices
and critical reection occasioned by them these singularities, meanings
both known for the self, and both communally efcacious as well as
emotionally educative, yet shaped in dislocated struggles with representa-
tional politics of our present shifting social experience? The one space in
which I nd such possibilities circles around the post-Auschwitz legacy of
trauma and the issue of representation of extreme human suffering that was
itself the product of Modernitys terrifying logics (Bauman, 1989). Art is both
a mode of thought and a searching for a form for the as-yet-unthought, a
way of facing up to the horrors of social reality of post-fascist and now liquid
modernitys untrammelled generation of its own impulse for constant
modernization and transformation for no purpose other than its own, a
register of the loss of social and political institutions to police the unleashed
force of the machine of production-consumption for itself, a way of enabling
us to use imaginative encounters to learn the real beyond the lure of the image
culture that is the delusionary face of production as such.
Thinking sociologically is, as I inherit it from Marx, Simmel and Bauman,
a kind of reection from within and without, a simultaneous address to how
we live and what structures the relations and networks that frame that living
which can only be grasped through analysis. Where the study of arts
histories in an expanded cultural approach that still denes a specicity to
aesthetic-symbolic practices and its knowledges of the world produced by,
and gained through, acquaintance with a making process and with a meaning
process encounters the sociological imagination lies in the way in which it
articulates through formal and signifying processes a means of our under-
standing a singular, situated yet social relation to that changing texture of
collective life.
I would prefer to pose for discussion the domains and objects of our respec-
tive activities rather than the internal structures of the disciplines. I cannot
think about artistic practice without acquaintance with the thinkers who
forged Sozialwissenschaft that philosophical, sociological enterprise, quali-
tative rather than quantitative which stands in productive and necessary
relationship to Warburgs Kulturwissenschaft; thus at the level of scholarship
there is a necessary transdisciplinary travel, while at the level of responsibility
there is an equal demand for attention to the differences but mutually inect-
ing relations between domains of human activity within that rich totality of
many determinations and relations which was the object of Marxs histori-
cal sociological thinking.
NOTES
1 I do not have the space or the competence to deal fully with the subset within
Sociology itself of a sociology of art or culture. There can be no doubt that any
and all social/cultural practices fall within the potentiality for sociological
analysis. There are sociological dimensions to the love of art, the formation of
its institutions, its marketing, its consumers and even its subjects. But the
relations between what we can, following Bauman, call thinking sociologically
and therefore, thinking aesthetically are not based on whether, as Janet Wolff
once claimed, a Sociology of art could better explain that which it might appear
Antal was seeking to foster a social history of art (Wolff, 1981). I am arguing
that key sites of a radical heterogeneity are identied by two not necessarily
intimate terms: history and art whose relations pose quite different questions
than those thought sociologically about cultural institutions and practices.
2 In discussion when an earlier version of this article was presented, I was asked
if Bahro was referring to Friedrich Schillers letters On the Aesthetic Education
of Man of 1793. As far as I can ascertain, Schiller is not referenced, but the legacy
seems relevant to Bahros vision.
3 I am well aware that prior to the invention of photography images circulated
through various forms of prints and even painted copies. There has always been
reproduction. If we study the early volumes of art historical surveys which were
produced with the formation of art history as a university subject, the limitations
of line drawings or black-and-white engravings, which translate works into
different media, as well as the costs, are clearly visible. Without suggesting that
reproduction of art begins with photography, I am arguing that emergent art
history was deeply shaped by the increasing possibilities provided by cheap
photographic reproduction which made possible the illustrated art history book
and the illustrated lecture. The idea of an image bank, a database or library of
images, is fundamental to the comparative studies, the genealogies and the
syntheses that characterize 20th-century art history even before colour illus-
tration (the coffee-table art book) or digital downloads.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Lvi-Strauss, C. (1962) La pense sauvage. Paris: Plon.
Malraux, A. (1963) Le Muse Imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard.
Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus. Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin.
Michels, K. (1999) Art History, German-Jewish Identity, and the Emigration of
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Parker, R. and Pollock, G. (1981) Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. London:
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
GRISELDA POLLOCK is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and
director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CATH)
at the University of Leeds. Predominantly known for her theoretical and
methodological work in social, critical and feminist interventions in art
history, she is currently researching issues of shame, trauma and cultural
memory and the relations between feminist psychoanalysis and aesthetics.
She is leading an AHRC research project on Concentrationary Memories
and the Politics of Representation. Major publications include Old Mistresses
(1981), Vision and Difference (1988) and Differencing the Canon: Feminist
Desire and the Writing of Arts Histories (Routledge, 1999). Recent publi-
cations include edited collections Psychoanalysis and the Image (2006),
Encountering Eva Hesse (2006), Museums after Modernism (2007) and the
forthcoming Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum. She is writing a
monograph on Charlotte Salomons Leben? oder Theater? 194142.
Address: School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies; Old Mining
Building, University of Leeds, Leeds, West Yorkshire LS2 9JT, UK. Tel: +44
(0)113 343 5267. [email: g.f.s.pollock@leeds.ac.uk]

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