Art Since 1900 Intro PDF

art since 1900
hal foster
rosalind krauss
yve-alain bois
benjamin h.d.buchloh
modernism
antimodernism
postmodernism
with 637 illustrations, 413 in color
Thames & Hudson
ntroductions
In these four introductions, tlie authors of Art Since 1900 set out sonne of the theoretical
methods of franning the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Each describes the
historical developnnent of a particular methodology and explains its relevance to the
production and reception of the art qf the period.
he last hundred years or so have witnessed several
rriajor shifts in both private and public debates about
art, its nature, and its functions. These shifts need
to be considered in terms of other histories, too: with the
emergence of new academic disciplines, new ways of thinking
and speaking about cultural production coexist with new
modes of expression.
We have written the following methodological introductions
in order to identify and analyze the different conventions,
approaches, and intellectual projects that underpin our
project as a whole. Our intention has been to present the
diverse theoretical frameworks that can be found in the book
and to explain their relationship to the works and practices
discussed in the individual entries. Forthat reason, each
introduction begins with an overview of the mode of criticism,
setting it firmly in its historical and intellectual context,
before proceeding to a brief discussion of its relevance to
the production and interpretation of art. Whether these
introductions are read as stand-alone essays or in conjunction
with other texts dealing with the individual modes of criticism,
they will inform and enhance understanding in ways that allow
each reader to develop an individual approach to the book
and to the art of the period.
14
D .
sychoanalysis in modernism and as method
Z)
1 Hannah Hoch, The Sweet One, From an
Ethnographic Museum, c. 1926
- r-.-.onon-.age witr wate'CO'O', 30 x 1 5.5 i1 x 3 :
' 5 ccliageone of a series tha: coTCmes 'oancl
::" ':c g'"chs of tribal sculpture and mcdern .vomen
'"^-l" p:i3y3 on associations at work in psyctioana:ytic
and moaermst a'l: ideas of "tf':e crinitive" and the
'. . 2. of racial o:rers ans unconscious desires. Sne
o fs fnese associations to suggest ti e power O'f "tne
's. '.'.oTar." but sf"e aisc seens to mock ;fiem lits'-aliy
" ..c tne mages, decorst'ucti ng and reconstrLCfing
exposing if-iem as constructions.
sychoanalysis was developed by Sigmund Freud (1856-
1939) and his followers as a"science of the unconsci ous" in
theearly years of thetwentieth centur)ât thesametime that
moderni st art came into its own. As with the other interpretative
methods presented in these introductions, psychoanalysis thus
shares its historical ground with moderni st art and intersects with it
in various ways throughout the twentieth century. First, artists have
dra^Mi directly on psychoanalysissometimes to explore its ideas
visually, as often in Surrealism in the twenties and thirties, and
sometimes to critique them theoretically and politically, as often in
A feminismin the seventies and eighties. Second, psychoanalysis and
moderni st art share several interestsa fascination with origins,
with dreams and fantasies, with "the primitive," the child, and the
insane, and, more recently, with the workings of subjectivitv' and
sexuality^to name only afew f 1 ]. Third, many psychoanalytic terms
haveentered thebasic vocabular)' of twentieth-century- art and crit-
icism(e.g., repression, sublimation, fetishism, thegaze). Here I will
focus on historical connections and methodological applications,
and, when appropriate, I will key them, along with critical terms, to
entries in which they are discussed.
Historical connections with art
Psychoanalysis emerged in the Vienna of artists such as Gustav
Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka, duri ng the decline of
the Austro-Hungari an Empire. Wi th the secession of such artists
from the Art Academy, this was a ti me of Oedipal revolt in
advanced art, with subjective experiments in pictorial expression
that drew on regressive dreams and erotic fantasies. Bourgeois
Vi enna did not usually tolerate these experiments, for they
suggested a crisis in the stability of the ego and its social institu-
tionsa crisis that Freud was prompted to analyze as well.
This crisis vsâs hardly specific to Vienna; in terms of its rele-
vance to psychoanalysis, it was perhaps most evident in the
attracti on to things "primitive" on the part of moderni sts in
France and Germany. For someartists this "pri mi ti vi sm" involved
a "going-native" of the sort play-acted by Paul Gaugui n in the
South Seas. For others it wâs focused on formal revisions of
Western conventi ons of representati on, as undertaken, with the
'30:^ 1922. 19S7. l&34a
P sychoanal ysi s in moderni sm and as rnetfiod | I ntroducti on 1 15
2 Meret Oppenheim, O/ecf (also called Fur-Lined
Teacup andDejeuner en fourrure), 1936
To n a h e s '.vorK, Vere: Cc'pennein sh-^d sed =
saucer, arz: spocn Dough: " â'ls wl h t'-e 'ur ct
a Ch nsse gaêi s, VI xing &ttrac:ic:n a-'d reculs on, 3
2 S' agreeable is jirtesserit ally S^"ealis:. ' c i1
adapts the device of the touna fiing to sxclce t'-e icea
c1 tet.sh," '.vhicri osj'chcana ysis understands as an
urnli'êiv Ol: ec -^vssIbs a powe-tjl desire oive-tec
IrC'T: Its prcpe- am. ^-ere art aopreciat on 3 rio longer
a na:ter o' d sm-.e'ested :ea'. TS orop'iely: i: s cc dly
."terrupiec: thrûg"" a snulty allusio'" to 'enale c8-itali8
fnat lorces us to ttiink about "he -ei^tio" cet'.veen ^
aesthetics and e'otics
3 Andre Masson, Figure, 1927
Oil B-:d sand, 46 x 33 r 6' - x 13;
;n :re Surrea practice of "autonat c wrr.ng." :-e author,
'eleasea TCT 'a: cnal cont-o , "ICCA dictation" 'ROTI h s or
ne' unconscious. Andre Vasson s use of strange rnatenals
and gestura rrarks. sometinês airiest Cisso v ng tne
distincdon betiveen :he t gjre and ttis grounc, suggestec
one me-.hod :o pu'sê "psychic a^^torratisn-i/ôpening up
painting to new exclora"ions not only o'tne unconscious
but also of torn a'^d its opoos te.
A aid of Afri can obj ects, by Pabl o Picasso and Henri Mati sse in Paris.
Yet al most all moderni sts proj ected onto tri bal peopl es apuri ty of
artistic vision that was associated wi th the simplicity of i nsti nctual
life. Thi s proj ecti on is the pri mi ti vi st fantasy par excellence and
psychoanal ysi s parti ci pated in it then even as it provi des ways to
questi on it now. {For exampl e, Freud saw tri bal peopl es as
somehow fixed in pre-Oedi pal or i nfanti l e stages.)
Strange though it may seem today, for some moderni sts an
interest in tribal objects shaded i nto i nvol vement wi th the art of
chi l dren and of the i nsane. I n this regard. Artistry of the Mentally III
(Bildnerei der Geisteskranken), a collection of works by psychotics
presented in 1922 by Hans Pri nzhorn (1886^1933), a German
psychiatrist trai ned in psychoanalysis and art hi ston' alike, was
of special i mportance to such artists as Paul Kiee, Max Ernst, and
l ean Dubuffet. Most of these moderni sts (mi s)read the art of the
i nsane as though it wereasecret part of the pri mi ti vi st avant-garde,
directly expressive of the unconsci ous and bol dl y defi ant of all
conventi on. Here psychoanal ysts devel oped a more compl i cated
understandi ng of paranoi d representati ons as proj ecti ons of
desperate order, and of schi zophreni c i mages as symptoms
of radical self-dislocation. And yet such readi ngs also have parallels
in moderni st art.
An i mportant line of connecti on runs f romthe art of the insane,
through the early collages of Ernst, to the defi ni ti on of SurreaUsmas
a disruptive "juxtaposition of two more or less disparate realities," as
presented by its leader Andre Breton [2], Psychoanalysis i nfl uenced
Surrealismin its concepti ons of theimageas aki nd of dream, under-
stood by Freud as adistorted wri ti ng-i n-pi ctures of adisplaced wish,
and of the object as a sort of s\Tnptom, understood by Freud as a
bodi h' expression of a conflicted desire; but there are several other
affinities as well. Among the first to study Freud, the Surrealists
attempted to simulate the effects of madness in automati c v^riting
and art alike[3]. I n his first "Mani festo of Surreal i sm" (1924), Breton
described Surrealism as a "psychic automati sm," a liberatory
inscription of unconsci ous impulses "in the absence of any control
l&as 190r '922 1924 ISÔb '9420
16 I ntroduction 1 | Psychoanalysis in modernism and as method
< Karel Appe\, A Figure, 1953
Oil and CD Dred cavcns c" oaper. 6-,5 x 25
After Wore vVs' I s" "'.srest :",s unccnscio.-s oe'S
among arfi&ts such 35 the D..tch painTe-- Ka'el Appel, a
member of Cob'-a :an cC o- vt for the rone oases
groupCooennsgs'". B'usssls. Amsterdani, a* Thg s are
time fne quest or of the osyche v,as refra-red cy :"-e
horrors of the death carcs a'd :r-e atomi-; bcmos.
Like other groups. Coors c&ne to reject t'ê Freudian
unconscious exp orsd cv t'ê Su-rsa' s:s as too
individualistic; as cart cf a gereâi tu-n :o tns ncTicn
a "collective u"co"sc o-s" cevelcoed by Ca-I J ^-g. r s y
explored fcie-r c -'c^res. Tytnc subjects, anc
collaborative orajects 1 ar often a-guished searc". ^ôt
onlv for a "ns'.v nar" b^t ' c a rev.- society.
exercised by reason." Yet right here emerges a probl em that has
dogged therelation between psychoanalysis and art ever since: either
the connecti on between psyche and art \\ ork is posited as too direct
or i mmedi ate, with the result that the specihcity of the work is lost,
or as too conscious or calculated, as though the psyche coul d simply
be illustrated by the work. (The other methods in this i ntroducti on
face related probl ems of medi ati on and questions of causation-,
indeed, they vex all art criticismand hi ston^) Al though Freud knew
little of moderni st art (his taste was conser\âtive, and his collection
ran to ancient and Asian figurines), heknew enough to be suspicious
of both tendencies. I n his view, the unconsci ous was not libera-
ton'on the contrary-and to propose an art free of repression, or
at least conventi on, was to risk psychopathology, or to pretend to do
so in the name of apsychoanalytic art (this is why he once called the
Surrealists "absol ute cranks").
Nevertheless, by the early thirties the association of some mod-
ernist art wi th "pri mi ti ves," chi l dren, and the i nsane was set, as was
its affinity \snth psychoanalysis. At this ti me, however, these con-
necti ons played i nto the hands of the enemi es of this art, most
catastrophicaUy the Nazis, who in 1937 moved to rid the worl d
A of such "degenerate" abomi nati ons, whi ch they also condemned
as "l ewi sh" and "Bolshevik." Of course, Nazi sm was a horri fi c
regression of its OWTI, and it cast a pall over expl orati ons of the
unconsci ous well after Worl d War II. Varieties of Surrealism
lingered on in the postwar peri od, however, and an interest in the
unconsci ous persisted among artists associated with art informeU
Abstract Expressi oni sm, and Cobra [4]. Yet, rather than the diffi-
cult mechani sms of the individual psyche expl ored by Freud, the
focus fell on the redempti ve archetypes of a "collective uncon-
sci ous" i magi ned by Swiss psychiatrist Carl J ung (1875-1961), an
old apostate of psychoanalysis. (For exampl e, l ackson Pollock was
involved in J ungi an analysis in ways that affected his pai nti ng.)
Partly in reaction against the subjective rhetori c of Abstract
Expressi oni sm, much art of the sixties was staunchl y anti psycho-
logical, concerned instead with ready-made cultural images, as in
Pop art, or given geometri c forms, as in Mi ni mal i sm. At the same
ti me, in the i nvol vement of Mi ni mal i st, Process and Performance
art wi th phenomenol ogy there was a reopeni ng to the bodi l y
subject that prepared a reopeni ng to the psychological subject in
femi ni st art. Thi s engagement was ambi val ent, however, for even
as femi ni sts used psychoanalysis, they did so mosdy in the register
of critique, "as a weapon" (in the battle cry of filmmaker Laura
MulveyO di rected at the patri archal ideology that also ri ddl ed psy-
choanalysis. For Freud had associated femi ni ni ty wi th passivity,
and in his famous account of the Oedi pus compl ex, atangle of rela-
tions in whi ch the little boy is said to desire the mother unti l
threatened by the father, there is no parallel denouement for the
littlegirl, as if in his scheme of thi ngs women cannot attai n full sub-
j ecthood. And l acques Lacan (1901-81), the French psychoanal yst
who proposed an i nfl uenti al readi ng of Freud, i denti fi ed wôman as
such with the lack represented by castrati on. Nonethel ess, for
many femi ni sts Freud and Lacan provi ded the most telling account
1 1946. -.9471:. -949, 960:. 'S^'-cv "965 '963, "974. 1975
Psychoanalysis in modernism and as method | I ntroduction 1 17
5 Barbara Kruger, Your Gaze Hits the Side of
My Face, 1961
Fhotcc-api-c slksces'" or v v , 1 39.7 v ^C4 1 i55 x 4"
Fsychoaralys s "siosd soTe 'eninisi in the s'gl"i:;es
:o c tique ooi'.'er st-jctures "ot cn y in h gh grt b'-t in rriass
culture too: par: cjlar attertior was o'a-.vn tc how irracss
" octn sp'êres aê structured -'c a ma e hetercsex^â'
3pec:atc'sn 0for a "nale gaze" empoi'/ersd w fh Te
p easures c' looking, .vitn womsn ncstly figu'lng as
passive objects of this ook. In he-" oiecss cf tns oe-'ôc.'thc
Atie-ican a'fisf Barbara Kruge'juxtaposed aop'opna:sd
Tiages and cnticai phrases :sonetirres suovertec cliches)
- o'der to ques+on this oc;ectif cation. :o wel ccre
vvomen irto the place of specta:orship, and to open j p
space for ofiS' kinds of .mage-mak - g anc v ewing.
of" the formati on of the subject in the social order. If there is no
natural femininity, these feminists argued, then there is also no
natural patriarchyonly a historical culture fitted to the psychic
structure, the desires and thefears, of the heterosexual male, and so
vulnerable to feminist critique [5, 61. I ndeed, some feminists have
insisted that the very marginality- of women to the social order, as
mapped by psychoanalysis, positions them as its most radical
critics. By the nineties this critiquewas extended by gay and lesbian
artists and critics concerned to expose the psychic workings of
homophobi a, as well by postcolonial practitioners concerned to
A mark theracialist projection of cultural others.
Approaches alternative to Freud
One can critique Freud and Lacan, of course, and still remai n
within the orbit of psychoanalysis. Artists and critics have had
affinities with other schools, especially the "object-relations"
psychoanalysis associated with Melanie Klein (1882-1960) and
D. W. Wi nni cott (1896-1971) in England, which influenced such
aestheticians as Adrian Stokes (1902-72) and Anton Ehrenzweig
(1909-66) and, indirectly, the reception of such artists as Henrys
Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Where Freud saw pre-Oedi pal
stages (oral, anal, phallic, genital) that the child passes through,
Klein saw positions that remai n open into adult life. I n her account
these positions aredomi nated by theoriginal fantasies of the child,
involving violent aggression toward the parents as well as depres-
sive anxiety about this aggression, with an oscillation between
visions of destruction and reparation.
For some critics this psychoanalysis spoke to a partial turn in
nineties artaway fromquestions of sexual desire in relation to
the social order, tow-ard concerns with bodily drives in relation to
lifeand death. After the moratori um on images of women in some
feminist art of the seventies and eighties, Kleinian noti ons sug-
gested a way to understand this reappearance of the body often in
damaged form. A fascination with trauma, both personal and col-
lecti^'e, reinforced this interest in the "abject" body, w^hich also led
artists and critics to the later writings of the French psychoanalyst
J ulia Kristeva (born 1941). Of course, social factorsthe AI DS
epidemic above allalso drove this per\'asive aesthetic of mourn-
ing and melancholy. In the present, psychoanalysis remains a
resource in art criticismand histor>', but its rolein artmaki ng is far
fromclear.
Levels of Freudian criticism
Psychoanalysis emerged out of clinical work, out of the analysis of
symptoms of actual patients (there is much controversy about how
Freud manipulated this material, which included his OWTI dreams),
and its usein the interpretation of art carries thestrengths as well as
theweaknesses of this source. Thereis first thebasic question of who
or what is to occupy theposition of thepati entthe work, the artist,
theviewer, thecritic, or somecombi nati on or relay of all these. Then
A 13S9 1393c
6 Lynda Benglis, Untitled, 1974 (detail)
[-ictogr-apr-, 25 >: 26.5 x
" " 0 ' ie of femir s n mthe sixt es and seventies, some
; .-.'tscKed pa:r a'chal h erarc^nes "ot cniy ir socsty
" I -'al bjt in the a'f warld in par: oula-: psychcanaiysis
" as both wsapcnbecause i: offered p'otound
' in:n the re aticn bet'.veen sexuali-y ana
-J l: =:t V :ya'-d targetbecause t tendea to associate
~" - - "Of cn.y v'jith passivity cut aiSO v/ th lack, n this
'I - jrapl", usee in a ous advertisement for a
- -. trie Anencan artist Lynda Benglis mocked
: C"o ccsfuring of some M n ma 'St ana
P'- -"in-alist a-tists. as well as the /^creased marketing
'f TT^mporsry an; at tne same finê. srê seizec "tê
- ir a /vay that boT litera zed ts assooaticn wit-"
I joe and pc.ver and paroc ed it.
therearises thecompl i cated issueof thedi fferent levels of a Freudi an
i nterpretati on of art, which I will here reduce to three: SNinbolic
readings, accounts of process, and analogies in rhetoric.
Early attempts in Freudi an criticismwere governed by symbol i c
readi ngs of the art work, as if it were a dream to be decoded in
terms of alatent message hi dden behi nd a mani fest content: "Thi s
is not apipe; it is really apeni s." This sort of criticism compl ements
the ki nd of art that translates a dream or a fantasy in pictorial
terms: art then becomes the encodi ng of a riddle and criticism its
decodi ng, and the whol e exercise is illustrational and circular.
Al though Freud was qui ck to stress that cigars are often just cigars,
he too practi ced this ki nd of deci pheri ng, which fits in all too well
wi th the tradi ti onal method of art histor)' known as "i conogra-
phy"a readi ng back of symbol s in a pi cture to sources in other
ki nds of textsa method that most moderni st art worked to foil
(through abstracti on, techni ques of chance, and so on). I n this
regard, the I talian hi stori an Carl o Gi nzburg has demonstrated an
epistemological affinit)- between psychoanalysis and art histor)'
based in connoi sseurshi p. For both di scourses (which devel oped,
in modern form, at roughl y the same ti me) are concerned with the
symptomati c trait or the telling detail (an idiosyncratic gesture of
the hands, say) that mi ght reveal, in psychoanalysis, ahi dden con-
flict in the pati ent and, in connoi sseurshi p, the proper attri buti on
of the work to an artist.
In such readi ngs the artist is the ul ti mate source to whi ch the
symbol s poi nt: the work is taken as his symptomati c expression,
and it is used as such in the analysis. Thus in his 1910 study
Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childlwod, Freud leads us
from the eni gmati c smiles of his Mona Lisa and Virgin Mark's to
posit in the artist amemor\' regardi ng his long-lost mother. I n this
way Freud and his followers l ooked for signs of psychic di stur-
bances in art (his predecessor l ean-Marti n Charcot did the same).
Thi s is not to say that Freud sees the artist as psychopathol ogi cal ;
in fact he implies that art is one way to avoid this condi ti on. "Art
frees the artist f rom his fantasies," the French phi l osopher Sarah
Kofman comments, "just as 'artistic creati on' ci rcumvents neuro-
sis and takes the place of psychoanal yti c treatment." But it is true
that such Freudi an criticismtends to "psychobi ography," that is, to
a profi l i ng of the artist in which art hi story is remodel ed as psycho-
anaKti c case study.
If sTOibohc readi ngs and psychobi ographi cal accounts can be
reductive, this danger may be mi ti gated if we attend to other
aspects of Freud. For most of the ti me Freud understands the sign
less as symbolic, in the sense of directly expressive of a self, a
meani ng, or a realit)', than as symptomati c, a kind of allegorical
embl em in whi ch desire and repressi on are i ntertwi ned. Moreover,
he does not see art as a si mpl e revision of preexi sti ng memori es or
fantasies; apart f rom other things, it can also be, as Kofman sug-
gests, an "ori gi nary'substi tute'" for such scenes, through which we
come to know them/or the first tirne{\.h\s is what Freud attempts in
his Leonardo study). Finally, psychobi ography is put i nto produc-
tive doubt by the very fact that the psychoanahti c account of the
Psychoanalysis in modernism and as rnetfiod | I ntroduction 1 7
unconsci ous, of its di srupti ve effects, puts all i ntenti onal i tyal l
authorshi p, all bi ographyi nto producti ve doubt too.
Freudi an criticism is not only concerned with a symbolic decod-
ing of hi dden meani ngs, with the semantics of the psvche. Less
obviously, it is also involved with the dynami cs of these processes,
\vith an understandi ng of thesexual energies and unconsci ous forces
that operate in the maki ng as well as the îewing of art. On this
second level of psychoanalytic i nterpretati on, Freud revises the old
philosophical concept of "aesthetic play" in terms of his.owTi noti on
of "the pleasure principle," which he defined, in "Two Principles of
Mental Functi oni ng" (1911 ),in opposi ti on to"thereal i ttpri nci pl e":
The artist is originally a man [sicj who turns from reality
because he cannot come to terms with the demand for the renun-
ciation of instinctual satisfaction as it is first made, and who
then in phantasy-life allows full play to his erotic and ambitious
wishes. But he finds a way of return from this world ofphantasy
back to reality; with his special gifts he moulds his phantasies
into a new kind of reality, and men concede them a justification
as valuable reflections of actual life. Thus by a certain path he
actually becomes the hero, king, creator, favorite he desired to be,
without pursuing the circuitous path of creating real alterations
in the outer world. But this he can only attain because other men
feel the same dissatisfaction as he with the renunciation
demanded by reality, and because this dissatisfaction, resultijig
from the displacement of the pleasure-principle by the reality-
principle, is itself a part of reality.
Three years before, in "Creative Wri ters and Day-Dreami ng"
(1908), Freud had speculated on how the artist overcomes our
resistance to this performance, whi ch we mi ght otherwi se deem
solipsistic, if not simply i nappropri ate:
[HJe bribes us by the purely formalthat is, aestheticyield of
pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies.
We give the name incentive bonus or fore-pleasure to a yield of
pleasure such as this, which is offered to us so as to make possible
the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical
sources.... [Ojur actual enjoyment of an imaginative work pro-
ceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds.
Let us review some of the (pre)concepti ons in these statements.
First, the artist avoids some of the "renunci ati ons" that the rest of
us must accept, and i ndul ges in some of the fantasies that we must
forgo. But we do not resent hi m for this exempti on for three
reasons: his fictions reflect realitN' nonetheless^they are born of the
same dissatisfactions that we feel; and wearebri bed by the pl easure
that we take in the resol uti on of the formal tensi ons of the work, a
pl easure that opens us to a deeper sort of pl easurei n the resolu-
ti on of the psychic tensi ons wi thi n us. Note that for Freud art
ori gi nates in aturn f romreality, whi ch is to say that it is f undamen-
tally conservative in relation to the social order, a small aesthetic
compensati on for our mi ghty i nsti nctual renunci ati on. Perhaps
this is another reason why hewas suspi ci ous of moderni st art, con-
cerned as much of it is not to "subl i mate" i nsti nctual energies, to
divert them f romsexual ai ms i nto cul tural forms, but to go in the
opposi te di recti on, to "desubl i mate" cul tural forms, to open them
up to these di srupti ve forces.
Dreams and fantasies
Whi l e the semantics of symbolic i nterpretati on can be too parti cu-
lar, this concern with the dynami cs of aesthetic process can be too
general. A third level of Freudian criticism may avoid both
extremes: the analy^sis of the rhetoric of the artwork in analogy with
such %isual producti ons of the psyche as dreams and fantasies.
Again, Freud understood the dream as a compromi se between a
wish and its repression. Thi s compromi se is negotiated by the
"dream-work," w^hich disguises the wish, in order to fool further
repression, through "condensati on" of some of its aspects and "dis-
pl acement" of others. The dream-work then turns the di storted
fragments i nto visual images with an eye to "consi derati ons of rep-
resentability" in a dream, and finally revises the images to i nsure
that they hang together as anarrative (this is called "secondary revi-
si on"). Thi s rhetori c of operati ons mi ght be brought to bear on the
producti on of some pi cturesagai n, the Surrealists thought so
but there are ob\tous dangers wi th such analogies as well. Even
when Freud and his followers wrote onl y about art (or literature),
they were concerned to demonstrate poi nts of psychoanalytic
theory first and to understand objects of arfistic practice second, so
that forced appl i cati ons are built i nto the discourse, as it were.
Yet there is a more prof ound probl em wi th analogies dra\STi
between psycho an aly^s is and visual art. Wi th his early associate
J osef Breuer (1842-1925) Freud founded psychoanalysis as a
"tal ki ng cure"^that is, as aturn away f romthevisual theater of his
teacher, the French pathol ogi st and neurol ogi st J ean-Marti n
Charcot (1825-93), who staged the symptomati c bodi es of femal e
hysterics in apubl i c display at the Salpetriere Hospi tal in Paris. The
technical i nnovati on of psychoanalysis was to attend to sympto-
mati c languagenot only of the dream as a form of wri ti ng but
also of slips of the tongue, the "free associ ati on" of words by the
pati ent, and so on. Moreover, for Freud cul ture was essentially a
worki ng out of the confl i cted desires rooted in the Oedi pus
compl ex, a worki ng out that is pri mari l y narrati ve, and it is not
clear how^such narrati ve mi ght play out in static forms like pai nt-
ing, scul pture, and the rest. These emphases al one render
psychoanalysis ill-suited to questi ons of visual art. Furthermore,
the Lacani an readi ng of Freud is mi l i tantl y linguistic; its celebrated
axi om"the unconsci ous is structured like a l anguage"means
that the psychic processes of condensati on and di spl acement are
structural l y one with the Hnguistic tropes of "metaphor" and
A "metonytny." No anal ogy in rhetori c, therefore, woul d seem to
bri dge the categorical dividebetween psychoanalysis and art.
And yet, accordi ng to both Freud and Lacan, the crucial events in
subject formati on are visual scenes. For Freud the ego is first a
bodily image, which, for Lacan in his famous paper on "The Mi rror
A !-i-'ocuclion
7 Lee Miller, Nude Bent Forward, Paris, c. 1931
Stage" (1936/49), the i nfant initially encounters in a reflection that
allows for a fragilecoherence-a \'isual coherence as an image. The
psychoanal ni c critic lacqueline Rose also alerts us to the "staging"
of such events as "moments in which percepti on /bufif/er5 ... or in
whi ch pleasure in looking tips over i nto the register of excess.'^Her
exampl es aretwo traumati c scenes that psychoanalysis posits for the
littleboy. I n the first scene he discovers sexual di fferencethat girls
do not have penises and hence that he may lose hi sa percepti on
that "founders" because it implies this grave threat. I n the second
scene he ^^'itnesses sexual i ntercourse between his parents, whi ch
fascinates hi m as a key to the riddle of his own origin. Freud called
these scenes "pri mal fantasi es"pri mal both because they are fiin-
damental and because they concern origins. As Rose suggests, such
scenes "demonstrate the complexity of an essentially visual space"
in ways that can be "used as theoretical prototy-pes to unsettle our
certainties once agai n"as i ndeed they were used, to di fferent
ends, in some Surrealist art of the twenties and thirties (71 and in
L some femi ni st art of the seventies and eighties. The i mportant poi nt
to emphasi ze, though, is this: "Each ti me the stress falls on a
probl em of seeing. The sexualit)' lies less in the content of what is
seen than in the subjectivit)- of the viewer." Thi s is where psycho-
analysis has the most to offer the i nterpretati on of art, moderni st or
other. Its account of the effects of the work on the subject and the
artist as well as on the viewer (i ncl udi ng the critic) places the work,
finally, in the posi ti on of the analyst as much as the anaK-zed.
I n the end we do well to hold to a doubl e focus: to view psycho-
analysis historically, as an object in an ideological field often shared
with moderni st art, and to apply it theoretically, as a method to
understand relevant aspects of this art, to map perti nent parts of the
field. Thi s doubl e focus allows us to cri ti que ps)'choanalysis even as
we apply it. First and last, however, this project will be compl i -
catednot only by the difficulties in psychoanalylic speculation,
but also by the controversies that always s^virl around it. Some of
the clinical work of Freud and others was mani pul ated, to be sure,
and some of the concepts are bound up \vith science that is no
longer val i dbut do these facts invalidatepsychoanalysis as a mode
of i nterpretati on of art today? As with the other methods i ntro-
duced here, the test mU be in the fit and the yield of the arguments
that we make. And here, as the psychoanalytic critic Leo Bersani
remi nds us, our "moments of theoretical collapse" may be insepa-
rable fromour moments of "psychoanalytic truth."
: 'oanalys s is corcerned v.'th ra^.-Tatic scenes,
I" " actus o' ragi red, 'hat marK ".he ch-ilc:
c r ": jnc yscenes /.'êre -ê or stie d'scovsrs sexual
" ^'ice fcr exTC e, scenes that are oh.en visual
sis 1: -f.pri ^-cer:a n i natu'e. At c: tfe'ent limes m s
"''î 'leTh century, art sts, such as :h9 S_r'ealists in
"les a- d fh -lies a-'d fer.inists ir the seve'-ties ara
fric-- 3 crawn en such images a"d sceâ'ios as
- "c trouble assumot ens about seeing, expectatic-s
I" gencer, anc so on. ^^this p-ôtograph by the
VI j a- artist êe Ivliller. a someti-rie assoc ate of the
- n s's. i: s -ô: irrmediately c ear ivnaf '.ve see:
" -" - ;A male or a femaleÔr some other catsgcry c'
' j maging. ard feeling?
- BTHE R - EADI NG
Leo Bersani. The Freudian Booy: ^syc^ôara^ysrs ar Art (Ne/; Yorc Coljmb a versity
=ress. 1336.1
Sigmund Freud, A.-t a.^^d Lite-atuê. t-ans. J ames Strachey iLordcn: Pengun, 1 985;
SarahKofman, The Cr'::d.'^DocGfAr: Ar: irrerc'ratatior, o'Fre'^d's Aesthetes, trgrs Wrifrec
V.'oochj I i N e wC c U mb a Lnversity P-ess, 1988.1
J eanLaplancheand J .-B. Pontalis, '''ne Language of P^yci'icar'ai'/sis. "a'^s. Conalc Kicnc'son-
Smitl- 'Mswyc'-s-: \'J. W. Nodc.r- '9:^3;
J acqueline Rose. Sexi.a'.'fy .'>;thsF'SHd ofV'Sôr iLc-dor: Verse, 1 985)
'524. lyjb '9:
Psychoanalysis in modernism and as rnetfiod | Introduction 1 21
2 The social history of art: models and concepts
ecent histories of art compri se anumber of distinct critical
models (for example, formal i sm, structuralist semiotics,
psychoanalysis, social art history', and femi ni sm) that have
been merged and integrated in various ways, in particular in the
work of American and British art historians since the seventies.
This situation someti mes makes it difficult, if not altogether poi nt-
less, to insist on methodological consistency, let aloneon a singular
methodological position. The complexity of these various individ-
ual strands and of their integrated forms points firstly to the
probl emati c nature of any claimthat one particular model should
beaccepted as exclusively vaUd or as domi nant within the interpre-
tative processes of art histor\\ Our attempts to integrate a broad
variety of methodological positions also effacethe earlier theoreti-
cal rigor that had previously generated adegree of precision in the
process of historical analysis and i nterpretati on. That precision
now seems to have been lost in an increasingly complex weave of
methodological eclecticism.
The origins of the methodologies
All these models were initially formul ated as attempts to displace
earlier humani st (subiective) approaches to criticismand interpre-
tation. They had been motivated by thedesireto position the study
of all types of cultural producti on (such as literature or the fine
arts) on amore solidly scientific basis of method and insight, rather
than have criticism remain dependent on thevarious more-or-less
subjective approaches of the late nineteenth century, such as the
biographistic, psychologistic, and historicist survey methods.
J ust as the early Russian Formalists made Ferdi nand de Saus-
sure's linguistic structure the matrix of their own efforts to
understand the formati on and functi ons of cultural representa-
tion, subsequent historians who attempted to interpret works of
art in psychoanalytic terms tried to find a map of artistic subject
formati on in the writings of Sigmund Freud. Proponents of both
models argued that they could generate averifiable understandi ng
of the processes of aesthetic producti on and reception, and
promi sed to anchor the "meani ng" of the work of art solidly
in the operati ons of either the conventi ons of language and/or
the system of the unconscious, arguing that aesthetic or poetic
meani ng operated in a manner analogous to other linguistic
conventi ons and narrative structures (e.g., the folktale), or, in
terms of the unconscious, as in Freud's and Carl J ung's theories,
analogous to thejoke and the dream, the symptomand the trauma.
The social history of art, fi-om its very^beginning in the first
decades of thetwentieth century, had asimilar ambition to make the
analysis and interpretation of works of art more rigorous and verifi-
able. Most importantly, the early social historians of art (Marxist
scholars liketheAnglo-German Francis Klingender [1907-55] and
the Anglo-Hungarian Frederick Antal [1887-1954]) tried to situate
cultural representation within the existing communi cati on struc-
tures of society, primarily within the field of ideological producti on
under the rise of industrial capitalism. After all, social art history's
philosophical inspiration was the scientificityôf Marxism itself,
a philosophy that had aimed from the very beginning not only to
analyzeand interpret economic, political, and ideological relations,
but also to make the writing of history itselfits historicity^con-
tribute to the larger project of social and pohtical change.
This critical and analytical project of social art history formu-
lated a number of key concepts that I will discuss further: I shall
also try to give their original definitions, as well as subsequent
modifications to these concepts, in order to acknowledge the
increasing complexity of the terminology^ of social art history%
which results partially from the growing differentiation of the
philosophical concepts of Marxist thought itself At the same time,
it may become apparent that some of these key concepts are pre-
sented not because they are i mportant in the early years of the
twenty^-first century, but, rather, because of their obsolescence,
wi theri ng away in thepresent and in the recent past. 1"his is because
the methodological conviction of certain models of analysis has
been just as overdetermi ned as that of all the other methodological
models that have temporarily governed the interpretation and the
writing of art history at different points in thetwentieth century.
Autonomy
>German philosopher and sociologist liirgen Habermas (born
1929) has defined the formati on of the bourgeois public sphere in
general and the development of cultural practices within that
-trcjc-i:;'3. 19-5
22 I ntroduction 2 | The social history of art: models and concepts
1 J ohn Heartfietd, "Hurray, the Butter is Firjished!",
cover for AlZ, December 19,1935
r- :-:;[routage. 36 x 27 i'd'-l x 1
' - C-" J ohr Hea-tfieio. alcng w^th r a t of Marcel
t . . "aTo acd El Lissitz^y. deTarcates cne c' d'a tos*
! . -'tan: oaradigir sniffs in epistenc ogy C
n; 9th-century ToderniST. Pengc-ng ohctcmontage
r;cns:rjcting ne^v tex:â nafatives, i: estab 'Sfied
" inly ncdel for ar:is:ic p'acrice as sonriumcaf vs
"n in fi e age of TiBSS-c jitura orcpaga-'da. Denounced
^ ^..cn by ttie intrinsically conservative ideologies o*
'-alis'.s a'"d node"" sts defending cosc ete môdels
-."-cony it adaressec - fact fns fi:StO'cal ne&d for
"" snge audiences anc of ttie forms of c s'.- oution.
I - . soly, i: Eecamis the s-^cîa'. môs: mportan:
0' oounte'p'opaganca fhenegemcnic media
i 0* tne t""lies. the o-^y vo ce in the visual
V : f-ga-de to copose the rse of fascism as s late form
- ' ipenalist capiralism:
sphere as social processes of subjective di fferenti ati on that lead to
the historical constructi on of bourgeoi s individuality. These
processes guarantee the i ndi vi dual 's i denti ty and historical status
as asel f-determi ni ng and sel f-governi ng subject. One of the neces-
sary- condi ti ons of bourgeoi s identit)- was the subj ect's capacity to
experience the autonomy of the aesthetic, to experi ence pl easure
wi thout interest.
Thi s concept of aesthetic autonomy was as integral to the
di fferenti ati on of bourgeoi s subjectivityâs it was to the differentia-
tion of cul tural producti on accordi ng to its proper technical and
procedural characteristics, eventually leading to the moderni st
orthodoxy of medi um-speci fi ci ty. I nevitably then, autonomy
ser\'ed as a foundati onal concept duri ng the first five decades of
European moderni sm. From Theophi l e Gauti er's program of Fart
pour Fart and Edouard Manet's concepti on of pai nti ng as a proj ect
of perceptual self-reMexivity, the aesthetics of autonomy cul mi nate
in thepoetics of Stephane Mal l arme in the 1880s. Aestheticism con-
ceiving the work of art as a purel y self-sufficient and self-reflexive
' experi encei denti fi ed by Walter Benj ami n as a ni neteenth-
century theology of artgenerated, in earl y-twenti eth-century
formal i st thought, similar concepti ons that woul d later become the
doxa of pai nterl y self-reflexivity for formal i st critics and historians.
These ranged fi"om Roger Fry's responses to Posti mpressi oni sm
in particular the work of Paul Cezanneto Dani el -Henry
Kahnweiler's neo-Kanti an theories of Analytical Cubi sm, to the
work of Cl ement Greenberg (1909-94) in the postwar peri od. Any
attempt to transformautonomy i nto a transhistorical, if not onto-
logical precondi ti on of aesthetic experience, however, is profoundl y
probl emati c. It becomes evident upon closer historical inspection
that the formati on of the concept of aesthetic autonomy itself was
far from autonomous. This is first of all because the aesthetics of
autonomy had been determi ned by the overarchi ng philosophical
framework of Enl i ghtenment phi l osophy (I mmanuel Kant's
[17241804] concept of disinterestedness) while it si mul taneousl y
operated in opposi ti on to the ri gorous i nstrumental i zati on of expe-
rience that emerged with the riseof the mercanti l e capitalist class.
Wi thi n the field of cultural representati on, the cult of autonomy
liberated linguistic and artistic practices f rom mylhical and reli-
gious thought just as much as it emanci pated them from the
politically adul atory ser^'ice and economi c dependency under the
auspices of a rigorously control l i ng feudal patronage. Whi l e the
cult of autonomy mi ght have ori gi nated with the emanci pati on of
bourgeoi s subjectivity- f rom aristocratic and religious hegemony,
autonomy also saw the theocrati c and hierarchical structures of
that patronage as havi ng thei r own reality. The moderni st aesthetic
of autonomy thus consti tuted the social and subjective sphere
f romwi thi n whi ch an opposi ti on against the totality of interested
activities and i nstrumentahzed forms of experi ence coul d be artic-
ulated in artistic acts of open negati on and refusal. Paradoxically^,
however, these acts ser\-ed as opposi ti on andi n thei r ineluctable
condi ti on as extreme excepti ons from the universal rul ethey
confi rmed the regi me of total i nstrumental i zati on. One mi ght have
mr^ 19" 1942= I96t
The social history of art; models and concepts | Introduction 2 23
2 El Lissitzky and Sergei Senkin, The Task of the Press
is the Education of the Masses, 1928
Photograohic 1r eze - c :he nter-aticnal t licn Pressa,
Coogne
Like Heartf eld. El Liss 1zky transforned t'-s legscies O'"
co'lage and Dhctorron:age a3CC''ding to the needs s
nev.'ly indus:r anzed co'lGCtive Especially n The le;'; genre
of exiibition design, which he developed in :re :>.venties in
wo'ks SL.ch as the Sov et Pavilion 'or TS in:e'na:ional
exh billon Pressa. 1 became evicent tha: L'ssitzky ivas one
of the first land few) artists of the twe'^ties and thirties to
understand tha: ihe spaces of public arc''.itectj''e itnat s,
of simul'areo^s co ective 'ecepfionj and the space of
pLfcl c in'o'n'âliDn fiac cc apsed in fne rew scaces of the
mass-culfural spfnere. Tfnerefors Liss-tzky, an exenp a^y
"a'tisf-as-proG^cer." as Walter Benjanin /.'culd iden: fy the
a-fisf's "ew social role, wou d si:âte h s oractice within
ti e very osranneters s-^d modes of croducfio" of a newly
developing p'oletariar oub'ic sohe^'e.
to formul atetheparadox that an aesthetics of autonomy is thus the
highly instrumentalized formof noni nstrumentahzed experience
under liberal bourgeois capitalism.
Actual study of the critical phase of the aesthetic of autonomy
in the ni neteenth century (from Manet to Mal l arme) would rec-
ognize that this very paradox is the actual formati ve structure of
their pictorial and poetic genius. Both definemoderni st represen-
tati on as an advanced form of critical self-reflexivity and define
their hermeti c artifice in assimilation and in opposi ti on to the
emergi ng mass-cultural forms of i nstrumental i zed representa-
tion, Typically, the concept of autonomy was both formed by and
opposi ti onal to the i nstrumental logic of bourgeois rationality,
rigorously enforci ng the requi rements of that rationality within
the sphere of cultural producti on through its commi tment to
empirical criticality. Thereby an aesthetics of autonomy con-
tri buted to one of the most fundamental transformati ons of the
experience of the work of art, initiating the shift that Walter Ben-
j ami n in his essays of the thirties called the historical transition
f rom cul t-val ue to exhi bi ti on-val ue. These essays have come to
be universally consi dered as the foundi ng texts of a phi l osophi cal
theon- of the social history' of art.
The concept of autonomy also ser\'ed to idealize the new distribu-
tion formof the work of art, now that it had become a free-floating
commodit}- on the bourgeoi s market of objects and luxur}' goods.
Thus autonomy aesthetics was engendered by the capitalist logic
of commodi t)' producti on as much as it opposed that logic. I n
fact, the Marxist aesthetician Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) still
mai ntai ned in thelatesixties that artistic i ndependence and aesthetic
autonomy could, paradoxically, beguaranteed onl y in the commod-
itv structure of thework of art.
Anti aestheti c
Peter Brger (born 1936), in his i mportantal though probl em-
aticessay. Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), argued that the new
.spectrum of antiaesthetic practices in 1913 arose as a contestati on
of autonomy aesthetics. Thusaccordi ng to Brgerthe historical
avant-gardes after Cubi sm universally attempted to "i ntegrate art
with life" and to challenge the autonomous "i nsti tuti on of art."
Brger perceives this pro ject of the antiaesthetic to be at the center
ôf the revolts of Dadai sm, Russian Constructi vi sm, and French
Surrealism. Yet, rather than focusi ng on a nebul ousl y conceived
integration ot art and life (an i ntegrati on never satisfactorily
defined at any poi nt in histon^) or on a rather abstract debate on
the nature of the i nsti tuti on of art, it seems more producti ve to
il)cus hereon thever\^strategies that theseavant-garde practi ti oners
themselves had propagated: in particular, strategies to initiate ftm-
damental changes in the concepti on of audi ence and spectatorial
agency, to reverse the bourgeoi s hi erarchy of aesthetic exchange-
\ alue and use-value, and most i mportantl y perhaps, to conceive of
cultural practices for a newly emergi ng i nternati onal i st prol etari an
public sphere \dthi n the advanced i ndustri al nati on states.
Such an approach woul d not onl y allow us to differentiate these
j vant-garde proj ects more adequately, but woul d also help us
understand that the rise of an aesthetic of technical reproducti on
I in di ametri cal opposi ti on to an aesthetic of autonomy) emerges at
that ven^moment of the t^venties when the bourgeoi s publ i c sphere
begins to wi ther away. It is at first displaced by theprogressive forces
of an emergi ng prol etari an public sphere (as was the case in the
' early phases of the Soviet Uni on and theWei mar Republic), only to
be followed, of course, by the rise of the mass-cul tural publ i c
sphere, ei ther in its totalitarian fascist or state-socialist versions in
I the thirties or by its postwar regimes of the cul ture i ndustry and of
^T'Pectacle, emergi ng wi th the hegemony of the Uni ted States and a
largely dependent cul ture of European reconstructi on.
The antiaesthetic di smantl es the aesthetics of autonomy on all
levels: it replaces originalit\' with technical reproducti on, it destroys
work's aura and the contempl ati ve modes of aesthetic experience
and replaces these with communi cati ve action and aspi rati ons
tinvard si mul taneous collective percepti on. The antiaesthetic (such
Aas the work of J ohn Heartfi el d [11) defines its artistic practices as
temporary and geopolitically specific (rather than as transhi stori -
cal), as participator}' (rather than as a uni que emanati on of an
exceptional formof knowl edge). Theantiaesthetic also operates as a
utilitarian aesthetic (e.g., in thework of the Soviet Productivists [2]),
situating the work of art in a social context where it assumes a
variet)' of producti ve functi ons such as i nformati on and educati on
or political enl i ghtenment, serv ing the needs of a cul tural self-con-
sti tuti on for the newly emergi ng audi ences of the industrial
prol etari at who were previously excluded f romcultural representa-
ti on on the levels of both producti on and reception.
Class, agency, and activism
Thecentral premises of Marxist political theor)'^had been the concepts
of class and class-consciousnessthe most i mportant factors to drive
fonvard the historical process. Classes sen-ed in different moments of
histor\âs theagents of historical, social, and political change (e.g., the
aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the most powerful
class in the twentieth centurv', the petite bourgeoisie, paradoxically the
most neglected by classical Marxist accounts). It had been Marx's
argument that class itself was defined by one crucial condi ti on: a
subject's situation in relation to the means of producti on.
Thus, privileged access to (or, more decisively, control l i ng own-
ershi p of) the means of producti on was the consti tuti ve condi ti on
of bourgeoi s class identit)- in the later ei ghteenth and the enti re
ni neteenth centuri es. I n contrast, duri ng the same peri od, the con-
di ti ons of prol etari ani zati on i denti fy those subjects who will
remai n forever economi cal l y, legally, and socially barred from
access to the means of producti on (whi ch woul d, of course, also
i ncl ude the means of educati on and the acqui si ti on of i mproved
professi onal skills).
Questi ons concerni ng the concept of class are central to the
social hi story of art, rangi ng f romthe class identity of the artist to
whether cul tural solidarit)ôr mi meti c artistic i denti fi cati on with
the struggles of the oppressed and exploited classes of modernity-
can actually amount to acts of political support for revol uti onai y
or opposi ti onal movements. Marxi st political theori sts have often
regarded that ki nd of cul tural class alliancewi th consi derabl e skep-
ticism. Yet this mode of class alliance determi ned practically all
politically moti vated artistic producti on of modernit}', since very
few, if any, artists and intellectuals had actually emerged f rom the
condi ti ons of prol etari an existence at that ti me. Class i denti ty
becomes all the more compl i cated when consi deri ng how the con-
sciousness of i ndi vi dual artists mi ght well have become radicalized
at certain poi nts (e.g., the revol uti on of 1848, the revol uti ons of
1917, or the anti -i mperi al i st struggles of 1968) and artists mi ght
then have assumed posi ti ons of solidarity wi th the oppressed
classes of those historical moments [3]. Slightly later, however, in
the wake of thei r cul tural assi mi l ati on, the same artists mi ght have
assumed posi ti ons of compl i ci t or active affi rmati on of the rul i ng
order and simply served as the provi ders of cul tural l egi ti mati on.
. 1324. 19330 -S' 1923 -925b -ffiCe 1934a 1937a. -i95Ta." 9e3c
The social history of art; models and concepts | I ntroduction 2 25
3 Tina Modotti, Workers' Demonstration, Mexico,
May t, 1929
P:a1inurT p'int. 2C,5 x 1 8 (8 x 7 :)
T".e wc'k of -ê 'lalian-Arnencan ariist Modot:i n Mex co
g v'es evidence c1 the ^r v'e-sa' ty of tê pDlrical ans soc al
cornT:itn-,ent ancng -adica' art sts ot 1he twent es anc
thir:iss. Aba-'dO'^'^g he*" training as a "st'aiont" mocsrn st
pfiotograpns'm :hs Told o" Edward Weston. Mcdctt's
vvo'k Vexico would sco-" -ecnen: 'tsel' :o ma<e
ptictography a weapo'' " the pc ticai st'uggle of the
Mexican peasant a^d wck ng class aga nst .-e e".srnal
defe'-'als and deceotions of the cojrtry's oligarc" c rulers
Exoa-'dinc the t-adi: on cf :he TaHer Graf'CO Pod'3'' 'o
address that class now v.- th t- e nea'^s o' photcgraohic
-epresentat on. she nevertheless unoe-stcod t-ê necessr.y
of making tfie regionally soecf c ana uneve'^ developrrent
of ferns cf knowledge a"d artistic cj ture the basis of -êr
worn. Aoco'ding^V'' Mcdct:i "-ever adopted :hs seeninc y
nore acva"ced forms of co'tical phctcmo^tage, out
'eta "led t:"e bonds c" realist dec c* cn necessary "c
ac: \'is: oc tical messages ^r- ttie geopC' ficai ccts xt 'n
vmch she had stua:ed herself. At the sans tine, as the
mage Workers' Demc.iSira.'jcc s graiS. she was far from
fa "g T.o the concilia:ory a^d compensatory realisTS o'
"straigfi:" ancl "New Objective" ohotography. What would
'ave been merely a modernist grid of serially receatec
ob ec'S o' indLSt'ia rra'^.-faoture n the wc- ; of ''le'
- storical oee-s [s ^c as Alfred Re^ge'-Patzsc"; becomes
one of the most conv "c "g photographic atternots o*
the twenties a^d thirt es to decic: the soc a arese^ce
and polit cal activ^STi of :he wor-<inc and peasant
c ass Tasses as tê ac'ca producers o' a ccj-^try's
economic resources.
This also points to the necessary insight that the registers of
artistic producti on and their latent or manifest relationships to
political activismareinfinitely more differentiated than arguments
for the politicization of art might generally have assumed. We are
not simpiv confronted with an alternative between a politically
conscious or activist practice on the one hand, and a merely affir-
mative, hegemoni c culture (as the I talian Marxist philosopher and
aesthetician Antoni o Gramsci [1891-1937] called it) on the other.
Yet, the functi on of hegemonic culture is clearly to sustain power
and legitimize the perceptual and behavioral forms of the ruling
class through cultural representation, while oppositional cultural
practices articulate resistanceto hierarchical thought, subvert priv-
ileged forms of experience, and destabilize the ruling regimes of
vision and perception just as they can also massively and mani -
festly destabilize governing noti ons of hegemoni c power.
If we accept that some forms of cultural producti on can assume
theroleof agency (i.e., that of i nformati on and enl i ghtenment, that
of criticality and counteri nformati on), then thesocial history of art
faces oneof its most precarious insights, if not acondi ti on of crisis:
if it wereto align its aesthetic j udgment with the condi ti on of polit-
ical solidarity and class alliance, it would inevitably be left with
only afew heroic figures in whomsuch acorrelation between class-
consciousness, agency, and revolutionary alliancecould actually be
ascertained. These examples would include Gustave Courbet and
Honore Daumi er in the nineteenth centur}', Kthe Kolhvitz and
A J ohn Heartfield in the first half of the twentieth centur\% and artists
such as Martha Rosier [4], HansHaacke[6], and Allan Sekulain the
second half of thetwentieth century.
Thus, in recognizing that compliance with class interests and
political revolutionr)' consciousness can at best be considered an
exceptional rather than a necessary condition within the aesthetic
practices of modernity, it leaves thesocial art historian with adifficult
choice. That is, either to excludefromconsideration most actual artis-
tic practices of any particular moment of modernism, disregarding
both the artists and their production becauseof their lack of commit-
ment, class-consciousness, and political correctness, or to recognize
thenecessity for numerous other criteria (beyond political and social
history) to enter theprocess of historical and critical analysis.
Sincethe proletarian's only means of survival is the sale of his or
her own labor likeany other commoditv^produci ng a phenomenal
accretion of surplus value to the entrepreneurial bourgeois or to
the corporate enterprise by supplying the subject's labor power, it
is, therefore, thevery condition of labor and the laborer that radical
artists fromthe nineteenth centur\' onward, fromGustave Courbet
to the Productivists of the twenties, confront. For the most part,
ho\vever, they confront it not on the ]e^'el of iconography (in fact,
the almost total absence of the representation of alienated labor is
the rule of moderni sm) but rather with the perpetual question of
whether the labor of industrial producti on and thelabor of cultural
producti on can and should be related, and, if so, howas analo-
gous? as dialectical opposites? as complementary? as mutually
exclusive? Marxist attempts to theorize this relationship (and the
1'371 19721; a84a
4 Martha Rosler, Red Stripe Kitchen,
fromthe series Bringing the War Home:
House Beautiful, 1967-72
ogrsp'
i^,;; e- IS cnc t"o very s'tists m pos:v.a''
z 'j TO - ave -.ake- up the ecacies c" 1ne odica
- rj - . 'j mace .vd'<of the v -lies Her sens Sr.r,g:r:g :rc
-'sco-'r^s'o r;cth a n sto'" cal a-d ar s : : s tua: on
- -s; of alt the '.vDrk partic pax-o " the gro/ving cjl:'al
a'a po tical cpaos tio-- againsT the mpe-alist Arenca^
,, a- r V' c-tnan Rather rhan r-ea: - g the '.vorks as
- :: . dua ::h:::rc:n-o"tages, Res s- conce ved therr as a
95 ô' -ep'oducian ard aisserr -atica in a - ^Tcer a'
a-f '.va- an.-: ccu'Me'c^tural ,ou"-a s ôrder tc increase
- e .'isib -v arc; Iir-Lisct -e inages, S-ie fiac deary
aers-.oac -sar:fic d's ecacy a^d the a alecvcs of
:; striL..lian -'o'T ana mass-cul:..'-al iccnography. Seccno,
- rsle' exp c t^y caunts'-ec the Canceatja c a^T tha'
anctag-'ap-y s-io^d nerey s-srve as a ns^t-al docuTS-it
analy* ".al self-ctica ty, c as sn -dexical tracs of the
:-,i:a'o-iercoâ. stagings of the suciect. Rathe', she
ae^tr'ec ph:::og'apiy as one of seve-ai c 3"..'s ve too s
- :'-e p'oauc: on a' laec ogy the nass-c,. turai a-ssnal,
E^.- -HS'ting S'jd:;en doa'^nenta^y Tages of the Vva--in
etnan in:o th sse-riirgiy biissti/ and op., ent v.'oria ot
renca" ccrresac ty, Hos 9' net oniy reveais the :rtricate
re-tvi-i'-errert of comesiic and niiits's: c 'D'a-s of
cap taiist consunptior, cut a so râ'-ifest y
a enges d's crsdibiiity of oho:ography as a tru:'-:fjl
.:L:'nc' of authe-tic m- cna: on.
social art historian's attempts to come to terms with these theo-
rizations) span an extreme range: from a productivist-utihtarian
aesthetic that affirms the constitution of the subject as necessar)- in
the producti on of use-value (as in the Soviet Productivists, the
k German Bauhaus, and the De Stijl movements) to an aesthetic of
ludic counterproductivit)' (as in the simultaneous practices of Sur-
>realism) which negates labor-as-value and denies it any purchase
whatsoever on the territor)ôf art. Such an aesthetic regards artistic
practice as the one experience where the possibility of historically
available forms of unalienated and uninstrumentalized existence
shine forth, whether for the first ti me or as celebratory reminis-
cences of the bliss of rituals, games, and child's play.
It is no accident, then, that moderni sm has mostly avoided the
actual representation of alienated labor, except for the work of great
activist photographers such as I.ewis Hine, where the abolition of
child labor was the driving agenda of the project. In contrast, when-
ever painting or photography in the twentieth centun* celebrated the
labor forceor the forceful laborer, one coul dand canbe sure of
being in the company of totalitarian ideologies, whether fascist,
Stalinist, or corporate. The heroicization of the body subjected to
alienated physical labor serv'es to instill collectiverespect for intolera-
ble conditions of subjectivation, and in a false celebration of that
labor it also sers'es to naturalize that which should be critically ana-
lyzed in terms of its potential transformation, if not its final abolition.
Conversely, the all-too-easy acceptance of artistic practices as mere
plaviijl opposition fails to recognize not only the per\'asiveness of
alienated labor as agoverning formof collectiveexperience, but also
prematurely accepts the relegation of artistic practice to merely a
pointless exemption fromthe realit)' principle altogether.
Ideology: reflection and mediation
The concept of ideolog)-played an i mportant role in the aesthetics
of Gyrg}' Lukacs (1885-1971), who wrote one of the most cohe-
sive Marxist literan.âesthetic theories of the twentieth century.
Although rarely addressing artistic visual producti on, Lukacs's
theories had a tremendous impact on the formati on of social art
histor\' in its second phase of the forties and fifties, in particular on
the wôrk of his fellow Hungari an Arnold Hauser (1892-1978) and
the Austrian Marxist Ernst Fischer (1889-1972).
Lukacs's key concept was that of reflection, establishing a rather
mechanistic relationship between the forces of the economi c and
political base and the ideological and institutional superstructure.
I deology was defined as an inverted form of consciousness or
worseas mere falseconsciousness. Furthermore, the concept of
reflection argued that the phenomena of cultural representation
were ultimately mere secondary' phenomena of the class politics
and ideological interests of a particular historical moment. Subse-
quently, though, the understandi ng of reflection would depart
fromthese mechanistic assumptions. Lukacs's analysis had in fact
argued for an understandi ng of cultural producti on as dialectical
historical operations, and hesaw certain cultural practices (e.g., the
f ^ M m ^ h M i m
^ p i fc. J
5 Dan Graham, Homes for America, from
Arts Magazine, 1967
Prirt. 74 x 93 (29 ; x 3eV;i
Graham's oub'icaticn cf cne cf his ear es1 works n Ihe
'ayot ans preserlat onai format c' an artic.e in :he pages
of a 'a'rê' prominent An-ie^xan a^t nagaz .^-e cerr.arcates
one of the key mcments cf Coriceptual art. First o' all,
mode'nism's (and ConcsptLâlism's) supc;osedly radica
quest for empirical and c^^tica sel-re'lexivity is turned in
on itsef and onto the frames of presentation and
dis1ribjr;on Graham's nagaz'ne ar c.e anticipates tne fact
that c'ucial information cn artistic practices is always
a reacy mediated oy mgss-c^tural and corrime'-cial ' cms
of 3 sseminafon Acccrc ngly. Gra'âm integrates tât
dimersion o' dis'/ out on into the corcepti c cf the work
i:se f The artist's model c1 self-reflexivity oâiecôally sh tts
'"romtajtoogy to discursive and institutional cntique
V.'hat distinguis'ês his approach to the problems of
audience and distribi^tior f'om the earlier models of the
historica avant-garde s the skepticism and the orecis on
wit^^which he cosit ons nis operations exc jsjvey within
tr-e discursive and ^nstituticral sp'-ere of the g ven
conditions o' artistic product on ;rat"er ^nan the oroject
cf utop'an socia and oolitica transforma: ons). Yet the
choice of prefabricated subu-oac tract-nousing in New
J e-sey 'irst of all expanas the subect matter of Pop art
Torn a mere citation of mass-cc lural and redi a
iconography to a new focus on social and architectural
spaces. At the saT.s time, Grsham- revea s that the soat ai
organization of the lowest level of everyday suboroar
expe^-ence ard architectural cor sump lion had already
prefigured the p'inc oles c' a serai or modular iterative
structce t"at had de*ired the scriptural work of '^.iS
oredecessors, the Minimalists.
bourgeoi s novel and its proj ect of realism) as the qui ntessenti al
cul tural achi evement of the progressi\'e forces of the bourgeoi si e.
When It came to the devel opment of a prol etari an aesthetic,
however, Lukacs became astalwart of reactionary- thought, argui ng
that the presen ati on of the legacies of bourgeoi s cul ture woul d
haveto be an integral forcewi thi n an emergi ng prol etari an realism.
The task of Socialist realism in Lukacs's account eventually came
si mul taneousl y to preserv e the revolutionary^potenti al of the pro-
gressive bourgeoi s moment that had been betrayed and to lay the
foundati ons of a new prol etari an cul ture that had trul y taken pos-
session of the bourgeoi s means of cul tural producti on.
Since the theori zati ons of ideolog)- in the sixties, aestheticians
and art hi stori ans have not onl y di fferenti ated general theori es of
ideology, but have also el aborated the questi ons of how cultural
producti on relates to the apparatus of ideology at large. The
questi on of whether artistic practi ce operates i nsi de or outsi de
ideological representati ons has especially preoccupi ed social art
hi stori ans since the seventies, all of them arri vi ng at very di fferent
answers, dependi ng on the theory of ideology to whi ch they sub-
scribe. Thus, for exampl e, those social art hi stori ans ^vho follow-ed
the model of the early Marxi st phase of Ameri can art hi stori an
Meyer Schapi ro (1904-96) conti nued to operate under the
assumpti on that cul tural representati on is the mi rror reflection of
the ideological interests of arul i ng class (e.g., Schapi ro's argument
about I mpressi oni sm being the cul tural expression of the leisured
share-hol di ng bourgeoi si e). Accordi ng to Schapi ro, these cul tural
representati ons do not merel y articulate the mental uni verse of the
bourgeoi si e: they also invest it with the cul tural authori ty to claim
and mai ntai n its political legitimacy as arul i ng class.
Others have taken Meyer Schapiro's Marxist social historyôf art
as apoi nt of departure, but have also adopted thecompl ex ideas that
he devel oped in his later work. He took the infinitely more compl i -
cated questi ons of medi ati on between art and ideolog)î nto account
by recognizing that aesthetic formati ons are relatively autonomous,
rather than fully dependent upon or congruent with ideological
interests (a devel opment that is e\ddent, for example, in Schapiro's
subsequent turn to an early semiology of abstracti on). One result of
a more compl ex theori zati on of ideology was the attempt to situate
artistic representati ons as dialectical forces wi thi n thei r historically
specific moment. That is, in certain cases aparticular practice mi ght
very well articulate the rise of progressive consciousness not only
wi thi n an indi\ddual artist, but also theprogressi\aty of apatron class
and its self-definition in terms of a proj ect of bourgeoi s enlighten-
ment and ever-expandi ng social and economi c justice (see, for
example, Thomas Crow's [born 1948] classic essay "Moderni sm and
Mass Cul ture," concerni ng thedialectical concepti on of thei di omof
neo-I mpressi oni st divisionismin its drastic changes fi-omaffiliation
wi th thepolitics of radical anarchi smto an i ndul gent st\ie).
Social art hi stori ans of the seventies, like Crow and T. J . Clark
(born 1945), conceived of theproducti on of cul tural representati on
as both dependent upon class ideolog)' and generative of counter-
ideological model s. Thus, the most comprehensi ve account of
6 Hans Haacke, MOMA-Poll, 1970
JO e-ice o'tic patc'y "STa aarr: r.va :'arsaa'0-* a:-;, j
c: ocrxes eac-' J G x 2C x ' 0 ' 5 x 7 . x 3 .
-he axn.ai: an " nfcrr-â:ion" a: Kew Yc-^/s 'v'.oe.T a"
aaerr Ar a i 9^". haacke ias:a sd Dne of the "irst
i le,-, .vor-<s to deal vv rh 'aocia' sy3:eTs." callea eiTê'
.-.v's c as V's:^crs' P''c:'.'63 in xese mstaiiatio'-a.
-- ana iy oassive sp-ctatcrs becane ac: ve
aia'ti;; ;;an:s l-laaaê s S'âiecticr C' the aracesses c
oraducaon ard reception eemen:s'y torn-a of statistiaa
c:: anc acs tivist afarns: or a ciea' response
a actus onncip es governing expenence " wnat
- jarn;: had ca ed :he ''sacietv a"" adn- n stra: on," A: the
âne tia-e, Haacke's wo-k, iiKe Gra-ar^s, tts atren' an
--C-" -"e en: cai analysis a' tne '.vark's nnane- t structures
i_ t "-ea" "3 to the externa t'anes a" insti:^t o'^s, Th js
-aa;-ê 'eposi' ons Conceptual a^t in a new cntica 'ela: on
-a the 30cioeaonc,T c conditicns dsternining access
a-d avaiiab 'y of aeschetic exaer ence. a crsctice ater
iiaon: tied as "institut;ora crivque," Haacke's MOMA-Po::
IS a strik - g exan-ole a' tais s*" ft s,nce t ccn'ronfs :ae
,, avver >,v th s sadoen insight inta ;re cegree to wh^ch
riuse-T' as a supccsedly "B'^.tra space gjarG,ag aesthe: c
a,.tcnon-y anc disintsrestesness is i.n-aricated ai:"
accnorr c, declcgica , and cclitica interests. The v>'or<
i so -eccnstit^tes a condition of respons.c ty and
;; a't'cipa:icn fcr the vie'.ve^that surpasses Todels of
-cecta:o' a invoiverent previously p-opcssd ty ar sts of
tae "eo-svant-gsrde, while t recognizes the i i ni tati cs
-.he scectators' paiidaal asp -aaans and :he ' psychic
-arge of excerience ard sel'-de:eTninadon.
WotAl tfwtact that GownKx RcxlcsfeAar
tdanowced ProKknt Unn's
ni neteenth-centun- moderni st pai nti ng and its shi fti ng fortunes
within the larger apparatus of ideological producti on can still be
found in the compl ex and i ncreasi ngh' di fferenti ated approach to
the questi on of ideology- in the work of Clark, the leading social art
hi stori an of the late twenti eth century-. I n Clark's accounts of the
work of Daumi er and Courbet, for exampl e, ideologyând pai nti ng
are still conceived in the dialectical relations that Lukacs had
suggested in his accounts of thework of ei ghteenth and ni neteenth-
century- literature: as an articulation of the progressive forces of the
bourgeoi s class in a process of comi ng i nto its own mature identity
to accompl i sh the promi ses of the French Revol uti on and of the
cul ture of the Enl i ghtenment at large.
Clark's later work The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of
Manet and his Followers (1984), by contrast, does not discuss
merel y the extreme difficulty of si tuati ng the work of Manet and
Seurat wi thi n such aclear and dy-namic rel ati onshi p to the progres-
sive forces of a parti cul ar segment of society. Rather, Clark now-
faces the task of confronti ng the newfound complexity- of the
rel ati onshi p between ideology and artistic producti on, and of inte-
grati ng it wi th the methodol ogy of social art hi story that he had
devel oped up to this poi nt. Thi s theoretical crisis undoubtedl y
resulted in large part from Cl ark's discovery of the work of the
Marxist Lacanian Louis Althusser (1918-90). Al thusser's concep-
tion of ideolog)' still remai ns the most producti ve one, in parti cul ar
with regard to its capacity to situate aesthetic and art-hi stori cal
phenomena in a posi ti on of relative autonomy with regard to the
totality of ideology. Thi s is not just because Althusser theori zes ide-
ology as a totality of linguistic representati ons in whi ch the subject
is consti tuted in a politicized version of Lacan's account of the
symbol i c order. Perhaps even more i mportant is Al thusser's dis-
ti ncti on betvveen the totality of the ideological stateapparatus (and
its subspheres in all domai ns of representati on) and the explicit
exempti on of artistic representati ons (as well as scientific knowl -
edge) fromthat totality of ideological representati ons.
Popular culture versus mass culture
One of the most i mportant debates among social art historians con-
cerns the questi on of how so-called high art or avant-garde practices
relate to the emergi ng mass-cultural formati ons of moderni ty. .And
vs^hileit is of courseunderstood that theseformati ons change conti n-
uously (as the interactions between the tvvo halves of the systems of
representati on are conti nuousl y reconfi gured), it has remai ned a
difficult debate whose outcome is often indicative of the particular
type of Marxi sm embraced by the critics of mass culture. It ranges
fromthe most violent rejection of mass-cul tural formati ons in the
w-ork of Adorno, whose i nfamous condemnati on of jazz is now uni -
versally discredited as a form of eurocentri c Al exandri ani sm that
wasworst of alllargely dependent on the author's total lack of
actual i nformati on about the musical phenomena heso disdained.
The opposi te approach to mass-cul tural phenomena w-as first
developed in Engl and, in thework of Raymond Williams (1921-88),
whose crucial distinction between popular culture and mass culture
became aproductive one for subsecjuent attempts b)' cultural histo-
rians such as Stuart Hall (born 1932) to argue for an intinitelv more
dift'erentiated approach when anah'zing mass-cultural phenomena.
Hall argued that the same dialectical movement that aestheticians
and art historians had detected in the gradual shift of stvhstic phe-
nomena from revolutionr}' and emancipatory to regressive and
politically reactionar) could be detected in the producti on ot mass
culture as well: here aperpetual oscillation frominitial contestation
and transgression to eventual affirmation in theprocess of industri-
alized acculturation would take place. Hall also made it seem
plausible that a fundamental first step in overcoming the eurocen-
tric tixation on hegemonic culture (whether high bourgeois or
avant-garde) was acceptance that different audiences communi cate
within different structures of tradition, linguistic convention, and
behavioral forms of interaction. Therefore, according to the new
cultural-studies approach, the specificity' of audience address and
experiences should beposited above all claimsas authoritarian as
they are numi nousfor universally valid criteria of aesthetic evalu-
ation, that is, that hierarchical canonicity whose ultimate and latent
goal would always remain the confirmation of the supremacy of
white, male, bourgeois culture.
7 Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg/Fischer, Life with
PopDemonstration for Capitalist Realism, at
Mbelhaus Berges, Dsseldorf, October 11,1963
Ti 1963. Gerhard Renter and Kcrnrad Lueg rivrci later as
Konraa Fischer became cne o1 Eurooe s nest impor.arit
cealers the Minir-i&i and Conceptual general o^; staged
a cerforrrance ^â Dsse dor' Department store It
ini'lgteo a GerTan vana: on ori tho neo-avaot-garoe's
in:e'na:icnal reorientation to>.varc: mass culture thatsince
f e late tittieshad gradually n splaced pcst'.var forms of
aDstraction mEng anc, France, and tne United States.
~he reolog sm "capitalist -"ealism,' coined by RiChter for
tfi'S occason. reveroerates v th realism's horrible "ether,"
the Socialist var ety f~at had denned Richter's ecjcaticnal
caoKgrounci in fê Communist par of Germany cnti 1961.
The spectacle of boredom, aff'^maticn, and passivity
aga nst the 03C'<:U'"Op cf a totalizing system o* ob ects of
ccsumptio-^ too^the Aork of Pie-o Manzciâs cne cf ns
cues, namely tne insight that arjstic practice wojid have
to be situated more than ever in the interstitai soaces
oetween objects of consumptior\ sites of spectacle, ard
ostentatious acts c' artistic a'^-' -"ilation. But its orocding
rrelanchclic pass vity was a so a spec f cally Ge'ma"-
oonuituticn to t'ê recogniticn tâf from new on advanced
errs of consumer c^'ture v;ould net only dete''m - e
behavio' in a way that had been previously deterTiined by
re igious or pclitica belief systems, but that this
particular historical context c' Ge'm:any t-ey wculd a^so
sen.'e as the col ect-,'e permit to reoress and to forget the
populat.cn's êcent mass ve conversion to fascism
Subtimation and desublimation
The model ot cultural studies that Williams and Hall elaborated,
and that became known later as the Bi rmi ngham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies, laid the foundati ons for most of
the work in cultural studies being done today. Even though he is
not known ever to haveengaged with the work of any of the British
Marxists, Adorno's counterargument would undoubtedl y have
been to accuse their project of being one of extending desublima-
tion into the very center of aesthetic experience, its conception and
critical evaluation. Desublimation for Adorno internalizes the very
destruction of subjectivity further; its agenda is to dismantle the
processes of complex consciousness formati on, the desirefor polit-
ical self-determination and resistance, and ultimately to annihilate
experience itself in order to become totally controlled by the
demands of late capitalism.
Another and rather different Marxist aesthetician, Herbert
Marcuse (1898-1979), conceived of the concept of desublimation
in almost the opposite vvay, arguing that the structure of aesthetic
experience consisted of the desire to undermi ne the apparatus of
libidinal repression and to generate an anticipator)' moment of an
existence liberated from needs and instrumentalizing demands.
Marcuse's Freudo-Marxist aesthetic of libidinal liberation was sit-
uated at theabsoluteopposite poleof Adorno's ascetic aesthetics of
a negative dialectics, and Adorno did not fail to chastize Marcuse
publicly for what he perceived to bethe horri fyi ng effects of hedo-
nistic American consumer cultureon Marcuse's thoughts.
Whatever the ramifications of Marcuse's reconception of desub-
limation, it is certainly a term for which ample evidence could be
found in avant-garde practices before and after Worl d War II.
Throughout modernit\% artistic strategies resist and deny the
established claims for technical virtuosity, for exceptional skills,
and for conformi ty wi th the accepted standards of historical
models. They deny the aesthetic any privileged status whatsoever
A and debase it wi th all the means of deskilling, by taki ng recourse to
an abject or a l ow-cul tural i conography, or by the emphati c fore-
groundi ng ot procedures and materi al s that reinsert the disavowed
di mensi ons of repressed somati c experi ence back i nto the space of
artistic experience.
The neo-avant-garde
One of the maj or conflicts of writing social art hi story after Worl d
War II derives from an overarchi ng condi ti on of asynchronicit)'.
On theone hand, Ameri can critics in parti cul ar wereeager to estab-
lish the first hegemoni c avant-garde cul ture of the tsventieth
century; however, in the course of that proj ect they failed to recog-
ni/.ethat the very fact of areconstructi on of amodel of avant-garde
culturewôuld inevitably not onl y affect the status of the work being
produced under these ci rcumstances, but wôuld also affect the crit-
ical and historical wri ti ng associated with it even more profoundl y.
I n Adorno's l ate-moderni st Aesthetic Theory (1970), the concept
of autonomy retains a central role. Unl i ke Cl ement Greenberg's
remobilization of the concept in favor of an Ameri can version of
l ate-moderni st aesthetics, Adorno's aesthetics operates within a
principle of doubl e negativity'. On the one hand, Adorno's late
moderni smdenies the possibility of a renewed access to an aesthet-
ics of autonomy, apossibility anni hi l ated by the final destructi on of
thebourgeoi s subject in theaftermath of fascismand the Hol ocaust.
On the other hand, Adorno's aesthetics also deny the possibility of a
politicization of artistic practices in the revolutionary-perspective of
Marxist aesthetics. Accordi ng to Adorno, politicized art woul d only
senêas an alibi and prohi bi t actual political change, since the polit-
ical ci rcumstances for a revol uti onary politics are de facto not
accessible in the moment of postwar reconstructi on of culture.
By contrast, Ameri can neomoderni sm and the practices of what
Peter Brger called the neo-avant-gardemost palpably advocated
by Greenberg and his disciple Michael Fried (born 1939)could
uphol d their claims only at the price of a systematic geschichtsklit-
tenmg., a manifest attempt at wT i ti ng history f romthe perspective of
\i ctori ous interests, sy^stematically disavowing the maj or transfor-
mati ons that had occurred within the concepti on of high art and
avant-garde culture discussed above (e.g., the legacies of Dada and
the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes). But worse stl, these critics
failed to see that cultural producti on after the Hol ocaust could not
simply attempt to establish a conti nui ty of moderni st pai nti ng and
sculpture. Adorno's model of anegative dialectics (most notoriously
formul ated in his verdict on the impossibility of lyrical poetry-
after Auschv\itz) and his aesthetic theory^Ln open opposi ti on to
Greenberg's neomoderni smsuggested the ineluctable necessity of
rethinking thevery precarious condi ti on of cul tureat large.
It appears that the strengths and successes of the social hi story of
art are most evi dent in those historical si tuati ons where actual
medi ati ons between classes, political interests, and cultural forms
of representati on are solidly enacted and therefore relatively verifi-
able. Thei r uni que capacity^to reconstruct the narrati ves around
those revol uti onary or foundati onal si tuati ons of moderni ty
makes the accounts of social art hi stori ans the most compel l i ng
i nterpretati ons of the first hundred years of moderni sm, from
Davi d in the work of Thomas Crow- to the begi nni ngs of Cubi sm in
T. 1. Cl ark's w-ork.
However, when it comes to the historical emergence of avant-
garde practices such as abstracti on, collage, Dada, or the work of
Duchamp, whose i nnermost telos it had been actively to destroy
tradi ti onal subjectobject rel ati onshi ps and to register the destruc-
ti on of tradi ti onal forms of experience, both on the level of
narrati ve and on that of pi ctori al representati on, social art hi story's
attempts to mai ntai n cohesive narrati ve accounts often emerge at
best as ei ther i ncongruent or i ncompati bl e vWth the structures and
morphol ogi es at hand, or at worst, as falsely recuperati ve. Once
the extreme forms of parti cul ari zati on and fragmentati on have
become the central formal concerns in which postbourgeoi s
subjectivity fi nds its correlative remnants of figuration, the inter-
pretative desire to rei mpose totalizing visions onto historical
phenomena someti mes appears reacti onary and at other times
paranoi d in its enforcement of structures of meani ng and experi-
ence. After all, the radicality of these artistic practices had involved
not onl y their refusal to allow for such visions but also their f ormu-
lation of syntax and structures where nei ther narrative nor
figuration coul d still obtai n. If meani ng coul d still obtai n at all, it
woul d requi re accounts that woul d inevitably lead beyond the
frameworks of those of determi ni sti c causati on.
FARTHER SEALI NG
Frederick Antal, c/assc's'r a n c / i L c r d c r : Rcutlodge &Kogsa Paut I966i
Frederick Antal. Hog.g.c^sr'': hiS Placetr Ei.ropear Art ;Loidon: "ou:ledge S Kegar PaL.t '962:
T. J . Clark. Fsrewe.\' is an idea iNe.'.' Haven and Lcncoa: "âie Lliivers :y ^'ess. 1999i
T. J . Clark, irr.age of the Peo^'/e, Gasrai's Coarcsr a.ia' the Sezcr.j Frencf^ nepboi.'c. J S-â- !55;
Xcrdo-.- Tt-ames &Huoson, ; 9"3;
T. J . Clark. Tre Asso'a.'e Bourgeo'S Arsts and Poiit'CS ,'n 'o^S- '6ii 7 lonclof
Taaaies S Hudson, 1973;
T. J . Clark. The Panrirg ot '/oderr. U's: Pacts tn the,4,'t ot i'-'arêt arc hs Foi'cners i _cndon:
Tna'Ties S Hudson, 19841
Thomas Crow. Psthters ana Pij(c Ufe :c t^^;^',-Cer.tJr, Pans iNe'A' Haver ard Loi'dor: "âe
Lnivarsity Press. 1985:.
Thomas Crow. The (nfaV/ge'ice of Art 'iChaDel Hilt N,C.. Urrve^sitv o1 Mont Care na Press, 1999:
Serge Guilbaut. Hoiv i\'ew YorK Stole tre icea ot '/oderr. Art: Ah'strsct ExpresS'Crcs.'T-', Freedcr,.
anc the Caid A'ar iCn cago and London: Uriversi'.y cf Cnicagc Press, 1 98:3;
Nicos Hadjinicotaou, Art History and Ctass Smuggle iLonuori: P Ldo ^ress, 1975)
Arnold Hauser. The Social Histony ot Ah. (1 957;, fou' volumes,i_cndon: Rcjt edge, 1'999i
Fredric J ameson (ed.), Pohhcs iLondon: New Led Bcoks " 9T7:'
Francis Klingender. Ar. and tne iriajstriai Rei'Ci'ution :'i947i :l onaon: Paladin Press, 1975i
Meyer Sc hap iro. Modem An: tQth and 2Ctn Centbry. Selected Papers. .'C'. 2 iNevv Yor'c George
Brazle-, 'd^Si
Meyer Sc hap iro, Pomsricspjc-Ah. S^sicotod Papers. vot. t (Nev.' York: Geo'-ge B'fizl er, 19771
Meyer Schapiro, Theor/ and Phiiosopl^y c'Ah: Styi'e. A,hist, and Society, Selected Papers, wi. 4
:Ng,v York: George B'azI er, 1994.:i
3 Formalism and structuralism
n 1971-2, the French literar)' theori st Rol and Barthes (1915-80)
held ayear-l ong semi nar devoted to the hi stor\' of semiolog)', the
"general scienceof signs" that had been concei ved as an extensi on
of linguistics by the Swiss Ferdi nand deSaussure (1857-1913) in his
Course in General Linguistics (posthumousl y publ i shed in 1916)
and si mul taneousl y, under the name of semiotics, by the Ameri can
phi l osopher Charl es Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) in his Collected
(also posthumousl y publ i shed, f rom 1931 to 1958). Barthes
had been one of the leading voices of structural i sm from the
mi d-fi fti es to the late sixties, together with the anthropol ogi st
Cl aude Le\i -Strauss (born 1908), the phi l osopher Michel Foucaul t
(1926-84 ), and the psychoanalyst l acques Lacan, and as such had
greatly contri buted to the resurrecti on of the semiological project,
which he had clearly laid out in Elements of Semiology (1964) and
"Structural Analysis of Narrati ves" (1966). But he had seriously
undermi ned that very proj ect in his most recent books, 5/Z,
The Empire of Signs (both 1970), and Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971).
The curiosity of Barthes's audi tors (myself among them} was
i mmense: in this peri od of intellectual turmoi l marked by a
general Oedi pal desire to kill the structural i st model , they expected
hi m to ease thei r understandi ng of the shift underway f rom
A A (structural i sm) to B (poststructural i sm)a term that neatly
describes Barthes's work at the ti me, but whi ch was never con-
doned by any of its parti ci pants. They anti ci pated a chronol ogi cal
summary. Logicalh', such a narrati ve, after apresentati on of Saus-
sure's and Peirce's concepts, woul d have discussed the work of the
Russian Formal i st school of literary criticism, active f rom around
1915 to the Stalinist bl ackout of 1932; then, after one of its
members, Roman l akobson (1896-1982), had left Russia, of the
Prague Linguistic Circle grouped around hi m; then of French
structurahsm; and finally, in concl usi on, it woul d have dealt wi th
l acques Derri da's deconstructi on.
Barthes's audi ence got the package they had hoped for, but not
wi thout amaj or surprise. I nstead of begi nni ng wi th Saussure, he ini-
tiated his sur\êy wi th an exami nati on of the ideological critique
proposed, fromthe tw-enties on, by the German Marxist plavvvright
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). Ahhough Barthes, no less than his
peers, had succumbed to thedreamof scientific objectivity'when the
structuralist movement was at its peak, he now implicitly advocated
a subjective approach. No longer interested in mappi ng a discipline,
he endeavored instead to tell the storyôf his own semiological
adventure, whi ch had started with his discover)- of Brecht's writings.
Comi ng f romsomeone whose assault on bi ographi sm (the reading
of a literar)^piece through the life of its author) had always been
scathing, the gesture was deliberately provocative. (The enormous
pol emi c engendered by the anti bi ographi smof Barthes's On Racine
(1963), which had ended in Criticism and Truth (1966), Barthes's
brilliant answer to his detractors, and whi ch had done more than
aml hi ng else to radically transform tradi ti onal literary studies in
France, was still very much on everyone's mi nd.) But there was a
strategic moti ve as well in this Brechtian begi nni ng, a moti ve that
becomes apparent when one turns to theessay in whi ch Barthes had
discussed Saussure for the first time.
"M)1:h Today" was a postscript to the collection of sociological
Wgnettes Barthes had wTitten between 1954 and 1956 and publ i shed
under the title Mythologies (1957). The mai n body of the book had
been vvTitten in the Brechtian mode: its stated purpose was to reveal,
underneath the pretended "natural ness" of the petit-bourgeois
ideolog)'' conveyed by the medi a, what was historically determi ned.
But in "M)th Today" Barthes presented Saussure's wôrk, whi ch he
had just discovered, as offering new tools for the ki nd of Brechtian
ideological analysis he had so far been conducti ng. What is perhaps
most striking, in retrospect, is that Barthes's exposition of Saus-
surean semiology' begins with a plea in favor of formal i sm. Shortly
âfter alluding to Andrei Zhdanov and his Stalinist condemnati on of
formal i smand moderni sm as bourgeoi s decadence, Barthes writes:
"Less terrorized by the specter of 'formal i sm,' historical criticism
mi ght have been less sterile; it woul d have understood that ... the
more asystemis specifically defi ned in its forms, the more amenabl e
it is to historical criticism. To parody awel l -known saying, 1 shall say
that a little formal i sm turns one aww from History, but that a lot
brings one back to it." I n other words, right fromthe start Barthes
conceived of what was soon to be named "structural i sm" as part of a
broader formaUst current in twenti eth-century thought. Further-
more, Barthes was denying the claims of the antiformalist
champi ons that formalist critics, in bypassing "content" to scruti-
nize forms, were retreati ng firomthewori d and its historical realities
to theivory tower of ahumani sti c "eternal present."
9^5 rr.'-ClL.:' or 4
32 I ntroduction 3 | Formalism and structuralism
"Semiolog)' is a science of forms, since it studies significations
apart from their content." Such is the definition that immediately
precedes Barthes's passage cjuoted above. Its termi nol ogy is some-
what flawed, for Barthes was still a novice in structural linguistics,
and hewoul d soon know that the word "content" has to be replaced
by "referent" in such a sentence. But the basic axioms are already
there: signs are organized i nto sets of opposi ti ons that shape their
signification, i ndependentl y of what the signs in question refer to;
ever)' human activity partakes of at least one systemof signs (gener-
ally several at once), whose rules can be tracked do^NTi; and, as a
producer of signs, man is forever condemned to signification, unabl e
A to flee the "pri son-house of language," to use Fredric J ameson's
formul ati on. Nothi ng that man utters is insignificanteven saying
"nothi ng" carries ameani ng (or rather mul ti pl e meanings, changing
according to the context, which is itself structured).
Choosi ng in 1971 to present theseaxi oms as derived from Brecht
(rather than f romSaussure, as he had done in 1957), Barthes had a
polemical i ntenti on: he was poi nti ng to the historical link between
moderni sm and the awareness that language is a structure of signs.
I ndeed, al though Brecht's star has somewhat faded in recent years,
he was regarded in postwar Europe as one of the most powerful
moderni st writers. I n his numerous theoretical statements. Brecht
had always attacked the m)th of the transparency of language that
had governed the practice of theater since Aristotle; the self-reflec-
tive, anti-illusionistic montagel i ke devices that i nterrupted the flow
of his plays ai med at aborti ng theidentification of thespectator with
any character and, as he phrased it, at produci ng an effect of "dis-
tanci ati on" or "estrangement."
The first exampl e Barthes commented on in his 1971-2 semi nar
\vas a text in w^hich the German wri ter pati entl y analyzed the 1934
Chri stmas speeches of two Nazi leaders (Hermann Goeri ng and
Rudolf Hess). What struck Barthes was Brecht's extreme attenti on
to the f ormof theNazi texts, whi ch he had followed word for word
in order to el aborate his counterdi scourse. Brecht pi npoi nted the
efficacy of these speeches in the seamless flow of thei r rhetoric: the
smokescreen with which Goeri ng and Hess masked thei r faulty
logic and heap of lies was the mel l i fl uous conti nui ty of their l an-
guage, whi ch functi oned likea robust, gooey adhesive.
Brecht, in short, was a formal i st, eager to demonstrate that l an-
guage wâs not a neutral vehicle made to transparentl y convey
concepts directly f rom mi nd to mi nd, but had a materialit)' of its
own and that this materi al i ty was always charged with significa-
tions. But he i mmensel y resented the label of formal i sm when it
was thrown at modern l i terature as awhole by theMarxi st phi l oso-
pher Gyorg)^Lukacs, wTiting in the USSR at a ti me when calling
anyone a formal i st was equivalent to signing his or her death
warrant. Bv then virulently opposed to moderni sm in general
but in parti cul ar to the techni que of montage that Sergei Eisenstein
i nvented in film and Brecht adapted to the theater, and to the ki nd
of i nteri or monol ogue that concl udes J ames J oyce's Ulysses
Lukacs had proposed ni neteenth-century realist novels (those of
Balzac in parti cul ar) as the model to be emul ated, especially if one
was to write froma "prol etari an" poi nt of view. Yet it was Lukacs
who was the "formal i st," wrote Brecht in his rebuttal . I n calling for
a twenti eth-centur)' novel wiih a "revol uti onary" content but
penned in a form that dated f rom a centun' earlier, a form that
bel onged to the era before the self-reflexivity and anti -i l l usi oni sm
of moderni sm, Lukacs was fetishizing form.
Thus the term "formal i st" was an insult that Lukacs and Brecht
tossed at each other, but the word did not have the same sense for
each. For Brecht, a formalist was anyone who coul d not see that
formwas inseparable fromcontent, who believed that form was a
mere carrier; for Lukacs, it was anyone who believed that formeven
affected content. Brecht's uneasiness with the term, however,
shoul d give us pause, especially since the same uneasiness has
mushroomed in art hi story and criticism since the early seventies.
(I t is particularly noteworthy in this context that the art critic whose
name is most associated in Ameri ca with formal i sm, Cl ement
A Greenberg, also had such misgiWngs: "Whatever its connotati ons in
Russian, thetermhas acqui red ineradicably vulgar ones in English,"
he wrote in 1967.) I n order to understand the ambivalence, it is
useful to recall Barthes's di ctum: "a little formal i smturns one away
f romHistory, but that a lot brings one back to it." For what Brecht
resented in Lukacs's "formal i sm" was its denial both of history and
of what the Dani sh linguist Louis Hj el msl ev woul d call the "formof
content"of the fact that the very structure of Balzac's novels was
grounded upon theworl d view of aparti cul ar social class at a partic-
ular j uncture in thehistory of Western Europe. I n short, Lukacs had
practiced onl y a "restri cted" formal i sm, whose analysis remai ns at
the superficial level of form-as-shape, or morphol ogy.
The anti formal i smthat was preval ent in thedi scourse of art crit-
icism in the seventies can thus be expl ai ned in great part by a
confusi on bet^veen two kinds of formal i sm, one that concerns itself
essentially mth morphol ogy (whi ch I call "restri cted" formal i sm),
and one that envisions formas structural the ki nd embraced by
Brecht when he sorted out the "continuit)^" of Goeri ng's and Hess's
speeches as an essential part of their ideological machi ne. The con-
fusi on was compounded by Greenberg's gradual turnabout. Whi l e
his analyses of the dialectical role of trompe-Voeil de\i ces in
Georges Braque's Cubi st still lifes 111 or that of the al l ovemess of
lackson Pollock's dri ppi ngs) are to be counted on the structural
ledger, by the late 1950s his di scourse was more remi ni scent of the
morphol ogi cal mode promul gated at the begi nni ng of the twenti -
eth centur)'^by the British writers Clive Bell and Roger Fry, whose
concern was merel y good design. The di sti ncti on between these
two formal i sms is essential to a retrieval of formal i sm (as struc-
tural i sm) f romthewastebasket of di scarded ideas.
Structuralism and art history
.Although the linguistic/semiological model provi ded by Saussure
became the i nspi rati on for the structuralist movement in the fifties
and sixties, art histor)' had already devel oped structural methods by
the ti me this model became known in the t\venties. Furthermore,
Formalism and structuraiism | introduction 3 33
1 Georges Braque, Violin and Pitcher, 1910
C- c" cs-ivas. 1 1 7 * 73 i4c X 2 .>
-netorical devices, :o the sign f ca: oâ' tne nc-aâ a''
sign 1 ca:icn :"eTse ves, EXBT - - g tnis ca "tmg by
B'aque Giemen: Greercerg sing ecJ OL-I :re cev ce 3'" ve
real'Stic naii and ts shadcA'- pa nted on fco c^tne facetec
vcluTes decic:ed on t-ê p cture^s suraae, 3cth flattening
-re rest o" ti e inage a-d p js-i,ng it back atc ceptn. the
r,'-o,^pe-,'"ce(,' -âi; was fcr t- e ar: st a Tieans cf cas: - g
some dcco: with rega-d to tne traditional, illusior s: a
mode a' represen: - g space.
the first literary critics who can becalled structural i ststhe Russian
A formal i stswere particularly aware of their art-historical ante-
cedents ( much more than of Saussure, whom the\' discovered only
after writing many of their groundbreaki ng works). Finalb', it was
Cubi sm that first hel ped the Russian Formalists to develop thei r
theories: in deliberately attacking the epistemology of representa-
tion, Cubi sm (and abstract art in its wake) underscored the gap
separating reference and meani ng and called for a more sophisti-
cated understandi ng of thenature of signs.
The role played by art hi story and avant-garde art practi ce in the
formati on of a structuralist mode of thi nki ng is little known today,
but it is i mportant for our purpose, especially with regard to the
accusati ons of ahi stori ci sm often thrown at structural i sm. I n fact,
one coul d even say that the bi rth of art hi story as adiscipline dates
fromthe moment it was able to structure thevast amount of mate-
rial it had neglected for purel y ideological and aesthetic reasons.
It mi ght seemodd today that seventeenth-centur\' Baroque art, for
exampl e, had fallen i nto oblivion duri ng the ei ghteenth and early
ni neteenth centuri es, unti l Hei nri ch Wl ffl i n (1864-1945) reha-
bilitated it in Retiaissance and Baroque (1888). Resolutely opposed
to the domi nant normati ve aesthetic of l ohann J oachi m Wi nckel -
mann (1717-68), for whom Greek art wâs an unsurpassabl e
yardstick for all subsequent artistic producti on, Wl ffl i n endeav-
ored to show that Baroque art had to bej udged by criteria that were
not onl y di fferent frombtit resolutely opposed to those of Classical
art. Thi s idea, that the historical signification of astylistic language
was mani fested through its rejection of another one (in this case, a
precedi ng one) woul d lead Wlfflin to posit "an art history-without
names" and to establish the set of binaryôpposi ti ons that consti -
tutes the core of his most famous book, Principles of Art History,
whi ch appeared in 1915 (l i near/pai nterl y, pl ane/recessi on, closed/
open form; mul ti pl i ci ty/uni ty; cl earness/uncl earness).
Wlfiflin's formal i st taxonomy, however, was still part of a teleo-
logical and idealistic di scourse, model ed on Hegel's view of history,
accordi ng to whi ch the unfol di ng of events is prescri bed by a set
of predetermi ned laws. (Wi thi n every^"artistic epoch," Wl ffl i n
always read the same smooth evol uti on f rom linear to painterly,
f rom pl ane to recession, etc., which left hi m with little room to
explain howône swi tched fromone "epoch" to the next, parti cu-
larly since he deni ed nonarti sti c historical factors much of a
causative role in his scheme.) But if Wl ffl i n's idealism prevented
hi m f rom devel opi ng his formal i sm i nto a structural i sm, it is to
Alois Riegl (1858-1905) that ones owes the first full el aborati on of
a meti cul ous analysis of forms as the best access to a social hi story
of artistic producti on, signification, and recepti on.
J ust as Wlfflin had done with the Baroque era, Riegl undertook
the rehabilitation of artistic eras that had been marginalized as deca-
dent, most notabl y theproducti on of lateanti qui ty {Late Rowan Art
Industry, 1901). But he did more than Wl ffl i n to advance the cause
of an anonymous history of art, one that wôuld trace the evolution
of formal /structural systems rather than merely study the output of
individual artists: if the wel l -known works of Rembrandt and Frans
Hals figurein his last book. The Group Portraiture of Holland (1902),
the\' are as the end-products of a series whose features the\' inherit
and transform. RiegFs historical relativism was radical and had far-
reaching consecjuences, not onl y becauseit allowed hi mto disregard
the distinction between high and low, maj or and mi nor, pure
and applied art, but because it led hi m to understand every artistic
document AS a nionufiientXo be analyzed and posited in relationship
with others bel ongi ng to the same series. I n other \vords, Riegl
demonstrated that it was only after the set of codes enacted (or
altered) bv an art object had been mapped in their utmost details
that one could attempt to discuss that object's signification and the
way it related to other series (for exampl e to the history-of social for-
mations, of science, and so forth)an idea that woul d be of
i mportance for both the Russian Formalists and Mi chel Foucault.
And it is because Riegl understood meani ng as structured by aset of
opposi ti ons (and not as transparentl y conveyed) that he was able to
challenge the ovenvhel mi ng role usually given to the referent in the
discourse about art sincethe Renaissance.
A crisis of reference
A similar crisis of reference provi ded the initial spark of Russian
Formal i sm around 1915. The pol emi cal target of the Russian For-
malist critics was the Symbolist concepti on that poetry resided in
the images it elicited, i ndependent of its linguistic form. But it was
through thei r confrontati on wi th Cubi sm, then wi th the first
A abstract pai nti ngs of Kazimir Malevich and the poeti c experi ments
of his fri ends Vel emi r Khl ebni kov and Aleksei Krucheni kh
poems whose sounds referred to nothi ng but the phoneti c nature
t)f language i tsel fthat the Russian Formal i sts discovered, before
they ever heard of Saussure, w^hat the Swiss scholar had called the
'\u-bitrar\^nature of the sign."
Allusions to Cubi sm abound in Roman J akobson's wTitings,
particularly when he tries to defi ne poeti c l anguage as opposed to
the language of communi cati on used in everyday life. I n "What is
Poeir\ ?", al ecture delivered in 1933, he writes:
Poet 'icityl can be separated out and made independent, like the
various devices in say, a Gubist painting. But this is a special
case.... Poeticity is present when the word is felt as a word and
not a mere representation of the object being named or an out-
burst of emotion, when words and their composition, their
! 1 ea}]ing, their external and inner form, acquire a weight and
value of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality....
\\ ithout contradiction [between sign and object] there is no
'tiobility of concepts, no mobility of signs, and the relationship
hctween concept and sign becomes automatized. Activity comes
a) a hah, and the awareness of reality dies out.
These last lines refer to the device of ostranenie, or "maki ng
>n ange," as a rhetorical figure, whose conceptuaUzation by Vi ktor
ShklovskT (1893-1984) in "Art as Device" (1917) is the first theo-
retical l andmark of Russian Formal i sm (the'fami l y resembl ance of
this noti on wi th Brecht's "estrangement effect" is not fortui tous).
Accordi ng to Shklovsk)-, the mai n functi on of art is to defamiliarize
our percepti on, whi ch has become automati zed, and al though
J akobson woul d later dismiss this first theory of defami l ari zati on, it
is the way he i nterpreted Cubi sm at the ti me. And for good reason,
as one coul d say that the first, so-called "Afri can," phase of Cubi sm
was rooted in a deliberate practice of estrangement. Witness this
declaration of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973): "I n those days peopl e
said that 1 made the noses crooked, even in the Demoiselles d'Avig-
non, but I had to make the nose crooked so they woul d see that it
was a nose. I was surelater they woul d seethat it wasn't crooked."
For Shklovsky, what characterized any work of art was the set of
"devices" through whi ch it was reorgani zi ng the "materi al " (the
referent), maki ng it strange. (The noti on of "device," never rigor-
ously defi ned, was a bl anket term by whi ch he designated any
stylistic featureor rhetori c constructi on, encompassi ng all levels of
l anguagephoneti c, syntactic, or semanti c.) Later on, when he
devoted parti cul ar attenti on to works such as the ei ghteenth-
century "novel " Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, where the
wri ter pays more attenti on to mocki ng the codes of storytelling
than to the plot itself, Shklovsky began to concei ve not onl y our
percepti on of the worl d but also the daily language of communi ca-
tion as the "materi al " that literary art rearrangesbut the work of
art remai ned for hi m a sum of devices through which the "mater-
ial" was de-automati zed. For J akobson, though, the "devices" were
not si mpl y pUed up in a work but were i nterdependent, consti tut-
ing a system, and they had a constructi ve functi on, each
contri buti ng to the specificity and uni ty of the work, just as each
bone has a role to play in our skeleton. Furthermore, each new
artistic device, or each new systemof devices, had to be understood
either as breaki ng a previ ous one that had become deadened and
automati zed, or as revealing it (laying it bare), as if it had been
there all along but unpercei ved: in short, any artistic device (and
not just the worl d at large or the language of daily communi cati on)
coul d become the "materi al " made strange by asubsequent one. As
a result, any device was always semantically charged for J akobson,
a compl ex sign beari ng several layers of connotati ons.
It is this second noti on of osrra/icNiethat J akobson had in mi nd
w-hen he spoke of the isolation of the vari ous devices in a Cubi st
work as a "special case": in laying bare the tradi ti onal mechani sms
of pictorial representati on. Cubi sm performed for J akobson and
his colleagues the same functi on that neurosi s had played for
Freud's discovery of the unconsci ous. Much as the special (patho-
logical) case of neurosi s had led Freud to his general theory of the
psychological devel opment of man, the special (defami l i ari zi ng)
caseof Cubi sm was seized by the Russian Formal i sts as support for
thei r anti mi meti c, structural concepti on of poeti c language.
I n hindsight, however, wecan seethat bestowing a status of "nor-
mal s'" to the traditional means of pictorial representation that
Cubi sm fought and whose devices it laid bare is not sustainable: it
would posit such traditional means of representahon as constituting a
kind of ahistorical norm against ^vhich all pictorial enterprises would
ha\'e to be measured ( bringing us back, in effect, to W'inckelmann ),
Percei\ing the essentializing danger ot this simple dualism
(norm/excepti on), lakobson grew more suspicious of the normative
postulates upon which his early work had been based (the opposition
between the language of daih' useas norm, and of literature as excep-
tion). But he woul d always take advantage of the model offered by
psychoanalysis, according to which dysfunction helps us understand
function. In fiict, one of his major contri buti ons to the field of literar)^
criticismthe di chotom\' that he established between the meta-
phoric and metonyxnic poles of languagewas thedirect fesult of his
i mestigation of aphasia, a disorder of the central jierv'ous system
characterized by thepartial or total loss of theability to communi cate.
Henoted that for themost part aphasic disturbances concerned either
"the selection of linguistic entities" (the choice of that sound rather
than this one, of that word rather than this one) or "their combi na-
tion into linguistic units of a higher degree of complexity." Patients
suffering fromthe first kind of aphasia (which l akobson terms "the
similariU^disorder" 1 cannot substitute a linguistic uni t for another
one, and metaphor is inaccessibleto them; patients suffering fromthe
second kind of aphasia ("the contiguity disorder") caimot put any
linguistic unit into its context, and metonymy (or symecdoche) is
senseless for them. Thepoles of similarity and contiguity were directly
borrowed fromSaussure (they correspond in his Course to the terms
paradigm and sj'ntagni), but they wereexpressly linked by lakobson to
the Freudian concepts of displacement and condensation: just as the
limit between these two activities of the unconsci ous remai ned
porous for Freud, J akobson's polar extremes do not precludetheexis-
tence of h)i5rid or intermediary forms. But once again it is the
opposition of these t\vo terms that structured for him the i mmense
domai n of world literature. And not only literature: he saw Surrealist
art as essentially metaphori c, and Cubi smas essentially metonymi c.
The arbitrary nature of the sign
Before we exami ne a Cubi st work f rom a structural poi nt of view,
let us at last turn to Saussure's famous Course and its groundbreak-
ing exposi ti on of what he called the arbi trari ness of the sign.
Saussure went tar beyond the conventi onal noti on of arbi trari ness
as the absence of any "natural " link between the sign (say, the word
"tree") and its referent (any actual tree), even though he woul d
have been the last to deny this absence, to whi ch the si mpl e exis-
tence of mul ti pl e languages attests. For Saussure, the arbi trari ness
involved not only the rel ati on between the sign and its referent, but
also that between the signifier (the sound wêutter when w'e pro-
nounce the word "tree" or the letters we trace when we write it
down) and the signified (the concept of tree). His pri nci pal target
was the Adami c concepti on of language (from Adam's perfor-
mance in the Book of Genesis: language as an ensembl e of names
for thi ngs), whi ch he caUed "chi meri c" because it presupposes the
existence of an invariable number of signifieds that receive in each
parti cul ar language adi fferent formal vestment.
This angle of attack led Saussure to separate the probl em of
referentiality fromthe probl em of signification, understood as the
enactment in the utterance 'whi ch he called parole, as opposed
to langue, desi gnati ng the language in whi ch the sign is uttered)
of an arbitrary- but necessary- link betvveen a signifier and a "con-
ceptual " signified. In the most cel ebrated passage of his Course,
Saussure wTote:
In language there are only differences. Even more important, a
difference generally implies positive terms between which the dif-
ference is set up; but in language there are only differences
wi thout positive terms... The idea [signifiedj or phonic sub-
stance [signifier] that a sign contains is o f less importance than
the other signs that surround it.
Thi s not only means that a linguistic sign does not signify^by itself,
but that l anguage is a systemof whi ch all uni ts are i nterdependent.
"I eat" and "I ate" have di fferent meani ngs (though only one letter
has shifted its posi ti on), but the signified of a temporal present in
"1 eat" can exist onl y if it is opposed to the signified of a temporal
past in "I ate": one woul d si mpl y not be able to identify^(and thus
understand) a linguistic sign if our mi nd did not compute its com-
peti tors wi thi n the system to which it belongs, quickly el i mi nati ng
theill-suitors whilegaugi ng thecontext of the utterance (for "I eat"
is opposed not onl y to "I ate," but to "I gorge," "I bite," or even
leaving the semanti c real m of f ood"I sing," "I walk," and so
forth). I n short, the essential characteristic of any sign is to be what
other signs are not. But, Saussure adds,
the statement that everything in language is negative is true only
if the sig7iified and the signifier are considered separately; when
we consider the sigti in its totality, we have something that is pos-
itive in own class.
I n other words, the acoustic signifier and the "conceptual " signi-
fied are negatively differential (they defi nethemsel ves by w^hat they
are not), but a positive fact results f rom thei r combi nati on, "the
sole type of facts that l anguage has," namel y, the sign. Such a caveat
mi ght seem strange, given that everyvs'here else Saussure insisted
on the oppositional nature of the sign: is he not suddenl y rei ntro-
duci ng a substanti ve qual i ty here, when all his linguistics rests on
the discovery^that "l anguage is formand not substance"?
Fverythi ng revolves around the concept of value, one of the
most compl ex and controversial concepts in Saussure. The sign is
positive because it has a value determi ned by what it can be com-
pared with and exchanged wi th wi thi n its own system. Thi s value
is absol utel y differential, like the value of a hundred-dol l ar bill
in relation to a thousand-dol l ar bill, but it confers on the sign
"somethi ng positive." Val ue is an economi c concept for Saussure;
it permi ts the exchange of signs wi thi n a system, but it is also what
prevents thei r perfect exchangeability wi th signs bel ongi ng to
another system (the French wôrd mouton, for exampl e, has a
36 Introduction 3 | Formalism and structuralism
2 Pablo Picasso, Bull's Head, 1942
-.-ênb age ibicycle seat and "andlecarsi,
: ^^>: - 3 5 X 19 ;13 . X 1 X 7/;)
' - e neve' read Saussure. Picasso discovered
~; c ,vn visual terns what the 'aths' of st.'uc"L.'al
" ni- s: IS hac labeêc the 'arb tra^ness o' t"e s g^'."'
-- er tnat signs a'e ef êd by their oppcsit on tc ether
-ic- 5 '.v thin a given system, anytoirg car stand ' c
- f- ^g e se if it co"forns to the r^ss of the syster
:-^65ticn. ^sing fê handlebar and seat of a b cycle,
- ". "-SSO -enains witt^ the 'ealm a' representation,
oirg the minimum required ' c a comb "ation of
-carate eênênts "o be -"ead as toe ho-ned heac of
t c.. . while 3t f e same t n~e oemcsfati ng tne
n"etaohcrio ocwer o* assemblage.
di fferent value than the English sheep or niuttoii, because it means
both the ani mal and its meat).
To e.xplain his concept of value, Saussure i nvoked the metaphor
of chess. I f, duri ng a game, a piece is lost, it does not matter what
other piece replaces it provisionally; the players can arbitrarily
choose any substi tute they want, any object will do, and even,
dependi ng on thei r capacity- to remember, the absence of an object.
For it is the piece's functi on wi thi n a system that confers its value
(just as it is the piece's posi ti on at each moment of the game that
gives it its changi ng signification). "I f you augment language b\'
one sign," Saussure said, "you di mi ni sh in the same proporti on the
[value] of the others. Reciprocally, if only two signs had been
chosen ... all the [possible] significations woul d have had to be
divided between these two signs. One woul d have desi gnated one
half of the objects, the other, the other hal f " The value of each ot
these two i nconcei vabl e signs woul d have been enormous.
Readi ng such lines, it comes as no surpri se that J akobson and the
.Russian Formalists had arrived at similar concl usi ons through a
exami nati on of Cubi smthat of Picasso, in particular, who al most
maniacally demonstrated the interchangeability of signs wi thi n his
pictorial system, and whose play on the mi ni mal act requi red to
transform a head into a guitar or a bottle, in a series of collages
he realized in 1913, seem a direct illustration of Saussure's pro-
nouncement. This metaphori c transformati on indicates that,
contra J akobson, Picasso is not bound to the metonymi c pole.
I nstead, heseems to particularly relish composi te structures that are
both metaphori c and metonymi c. A case in poi nt is the 1944 sculp-
ture of the Bull's Head [2], where the conj uncti on (metonymy) of
a bicycle handl ebar and seat produced ametaphor (the sumof these
rvvo bicycle parts are like a bull's head), but such swift transforma-
tions based on the tvvo structuralist operati ons of substi tuti on and
combi nati on are legion in his oeuvre. Whi ch is to say that Picasso's
Cubi smwas a "structuralist activit)'," to use Barthes's phrase: it not
only performed a structural analysis of the figurative tradi ti on of
Western art, but it also structurally engineered new objects.
An exampl e is Picasso's i nventi on of what one coul d call space as
a new scul ptural material. The fact that the Cubi st constructi ons
Picasso created in 1912-13 represent a key moment in the history
of scul pture has l ong been recognized, but the means through
whi ch Picasso arti cul ated space anew are not always understood.
To make a story short: until Picasso's 1912 Guitar [3], Western
scul pture, ei ther canned or cast, had ei ther consisted in a mass, a
vol ume that detached itself f roma surroundi ng space concei ved as
neutral , or retreated to the condi ti on of bas-relief. Hel ped by his
discovery of Afri can art, Picasso realized that Western scul pture
wâs paralyzed by a fear of bei ng swallowed by the real space ot
objects (in the post-Renai ssance system of representati on, it was
essential that art remai ned securely roped off f romthe worl d in an
ethereal real m of illusions). Rather than attempti ng to di scard the
rope al together, as Marcel Duchamp woul d soon do in his ready-
I mades, Picasso answered the challenge by maki ng space one of
scul pture's materials. Part of the body of his Guitar is a virtual
3' Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Fall1912
Const'-jclio- d1 sneet metal, string, ans: vM'e.
77,5 X 35 X 1 9.5 l30'': X ' Sv^x 7^:1
For slructjralisrr, signs are oppositional 3"d ra:
suDstartial, vvhich is :o ssy Itisr tne shape and
sigr ticaticn are solely dednec by their drere^ce tren-
ail o-.-êr s:gns 'n the same system, anc tha: they wo..Id
near --oTn "g m salat on. By the shea- contrasting
juxtapcsit on of voic and surface mthis sculpture, L'.'hich
narks ttie oir:-: of vj-at woula be called "Syntnetic
Gub sn." i;hcss naj c 'c-nâi inven: on -.vo.. d be collage,
Picassc transforrrs a veld into a sign - c the s<in a* a
guita" anc a p'otruding cylinaer into a sign -o- its hcle. In
do "g sc. ê nakes a nonsubs:a.~cesoacein:o a
-naterial for sculpture.
vol ume whose external surfacc we do not see (it is i mmateri al ) but
that we intuit through the posi ti on of"other planes. J ust as Saussure
had di sco\cred with regard to linguistic signs, Picasso found that
scul ptural signs di d not ha\'e to be substantial. Empty space coul d
easily be transformed i nto a differential mark, and as such com-
bi ned wi th all ki nds of other signs: no longer fear space, Picasso
told his fellow^scul ptors, shape it.
As J akobson has noted, however. Cubi sm is a "special case" in
which devices can be separated out ( in a Cubi st pai nti ng shadi ng
is emphati cal l y i ndependent from contour, for exampl e), and
few artists in this centun' were as good structural i sts as Picasso
was duri ng his Cubi st years. Another candi date proposed by
k.structuralist critics was Piet Mondri an (1872-1944). I ndeed, in
deliberately reduci ng his pictorial vocabul an' to ven' few el ements,
from 1920 onbl ack hori zontal and vertical lines, planes of
primary^colors and of "noncol ors" (white, black, or gray)and in
produci ng an extremely vari ous oeuvre wi thi n such limited para-
meters {4, 5], Mondri an demonstrated the combi natory i nfi ni tude
of any system. I n Saussurean termi nol og)', one coul d say that
because the new pictorial hngue that he created consisted in a
handf ul of el ements and rules ("no symmetry" was one of them),
the range of possibilities proceedi ng fromsuch a Spartan l anguage
(his parole) became all the more apparent. He had l i mi ted the
corpus of possible pictorial marks wi thi n his system, but this \ery
l i mi tati on i mmensel y accrued their "value."
Despi te the fact that Mondri an seems to be a structural i st avant
la lettre it is not the structural t)ê of formal analysis, but rather
the morphol ogi cal one, that wâs first proposed in the study of
his art. Thi s morphol ogi cal formal i sm, mai nl y concerned with
Mondri an's composi ti onal schemes, remai ned i mpressi oni sti c in
nature, though it gave us excellent descri pti ons of the bal ance or
i mbal ance of planes in his wôrks, the vividness of the colors, the
rhythmi c staccato. In the end this approach remai ned tautological,
especially in its bl unt refusal to discuss "meani ng," and it is not by
chance that an i conographi c, Symbolist i nterpretati on was long
thought preferabl e, even though it ran counter to what the artist
himself had to say.
A structural readi ng of Mondri an's work began to emerge only
in the seventies. It exami nes the semanti c functi on played by
vari ous combi nati ons of pictorial el ements as Mondri an's work
evolved and seeks to understand how a seemi ngl y rigid formal
system engendered diverse significations. Rather than assigning a
fixed meani ng to these el ements, as the Symbolist i nterpretati on
had vsânted to do, it is able to show, for exampl e, that f rom the
early thirties, the "Xeopl asti c" pictorial vocabul ary that he had
coi ned in 1920 and used ever since wâs transformed i nto a self-
destructi ve machi ne desti ned to abolish not only the figure, as he
had done before, but color planes, lines, surfaces, and by extensi on
every possible i denti tyi n other words, that Mondri an's art
elicited an epi stemol ogi cal nihilism of ever-growi ng intensity. I n
short, if art critics and hi stori ans had been more acutely attenti\'e
to the formal devel opment of his oeuvre, they mi ght have earlier
4 Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue,
Black, Yellow, and Gray, 1921
C :n canvas. 39.4 x 35 '15 ' x 13:
5 Piet Mondrian, Composition with Blue, Black,
Yellow, and Red, 1922
""I canvas 39.5 x 3- . 7 i15 . x ' 3 ' ;
-"-|"u.-ati:;n a- d comb - aticn a-e rns Teans by vvb ch
C'scourse 3 gens-atsd a'^d as s u e :hey constitute
1 0 -ra 1 aspects c" '.vnat Batnes callec the
activity." n tbese tv.'C canvases. Mcndnan
"lecks, iust as a seiest s( .voulc cc. i? anc ho>v o c
T'cec" on o' a cent-al s cj a' e cnances accord'nc tc tne
"" c J ^!catio."s of Its sj 'roc"di ngs.
on grasped the connecti on he felt more inclined to make in his
writings, from 1930, between what he tried to achieve pictorially
and the political views of anarchism. By the same token, however,
they would have understood that if his classic Neoplastic work had
been governed by a structural ethos, duri ng the last decade of his
lifethis ethos was geared toward the deconstruction of the set of
binary opposi ti ons upon which his art had been based: they would
haveperceived that, like Barthes, Mondri an had began as a practi-
tioner of structuralism only to become one of its most formi dabl e
assailants. But they would have had to be versed in structuralism
itself to diagnose his attack.
Two aspects of Mondri an's art after 1920 explain why his art
became an ideal object for a structuralist approach: first, it was a
closed corpus (not only was the total output small, but as noted
above, the number of pictorial elements he used were in a finite
number); second, his oeuvre was easily distributed into series. The
two first methodological steps taken in any structural analysis are
the definition of a closed corpus of objects from which a set of
recurrent rules can be deduced, and, within this corpus, the taxo-
nomi c consti tuti on of seriesand it is indeed only after the
multiple series scanning Mondri an's oeuvre had been properly
mapped that a more elaborate study of the signification of his
works became possible. But what a structural analysis can do with
the producti on of a single artist, it can also do at the microlevel of
the single work, as the Russian Formalists or Barthes have amply
shown, or at the macrolevel of awhole field, as Claude Lm-Strauss
has demonstrated in his studies of vast ensembles of myths. The
method remains the same, only the scale of the object of inquiry-
changes: in each case, discrete "uni ts" have to be distinguished so
that their interrelationship can be understood, and their opposi-
tional signification emerge.
The method has indeed its limits, for it presupposes the internal
coherence of the corpus of analysis, its unitywhich is why it
yields its best results when dealing with a single object or with a
series that remai ns limited in range. Through a forceful critique of
thevery^noti ons of internal coherence, closed corpus, and author-
Aship, what is now called "poststructuralism," hand in hand wth
the literary and artistic practices labeled "postmoderni st," would
efficiently bl unt the preemi nence that structuralismand formal i sm
had enjoyêd in the sixties. But, as numerous entries in this vol ume
makeclear, the heuristic power of structural and formalist analysis,
especially with regard to the canonical moments of moderni sm,
need not be discarded.
=L R ' - E R RHACI NG
Roland Barthes. .Vv>'T,'^3i'cc'es ("95^1, t'"ans. Annexe -avers 'Nev-, York: Nocrday Press, 1972
RomanJ akobson '/'.'f-at s Poet'". "" " 533; ana 'Tv-.'C Aspects o" .angjage srd '^.vo "yoes
of Aphasie D'StLrbances"956:. n K'-vstyra Forôrso ana Stephier Rjcy ;eds Larguage arc
iCa'Tiorioce. Iv'ass,- ha-'.'ara U" '-'e''sity ^'ess. ' SS^j
Fredric J ameson, T'^s ^nscn-rc'jse c'ia;-'j's'je: A
For'mJ iSfri i;P"-cetcn: Prnce'or U'^veraity ^-eas. i972i
Thomas Levin, "'vValte' Ber;amir ano tne "necycf An hstory." Ocfcoec no ^7. '.Vnter t95S
Ferdinand de Saussure Ca^rss .'n Gene'-ai i^'fqu^st'Ci. trar's \''v'aGe Bask r |[\iev,' Y ck:
McG'SvV-hi; 9^6
rt'CCi . r 4
F ormal i sm and structurai i sm | i ntroducti on 3 39
D,
oststructura ism and deconstruction
' hroughout the sixties, youthful ideals measured against
official cymicism created a collision course that climaxed in
the upri si ngs of 1968, when, in reacti on to the Vi etnam
War, student movements throughout the worl di n Berkeley,
Berlin, Mi l an, Paris, Tokyôerupted i nto acti on. A student leaflet
ci rcul ati ng in Paris in May 1968 declared the nature of the conflict:
We refuse to become teachers serving a mechanism of social
selection in an educational system operating at the expense of
working-class children, to become sociologists drumming up
slogans for governmental election campaigns, to become psychol-
ogists charged with getting ''teams of workers" to ''fimction"
according to the best interests of the bosses, to become scientists
whose research will be used according to the exclusive interests of
the profit economy.
Behi nd this refusal was the accusati on that the university, long
thought to be the preci nct of an autonomous, di si nterested, "free"
search for knowl edge, had itself become an interested party- to the
ki nd of social engi neeri ng the leaflet i mputed to both government
and industry^
The terms of this i ndi ctment and its denial that discrete social
functi onswhether intellectual research or artistic practi ce
coul d be either autonomous or di si nterested coul d not fail to have
repercussi ons beyond the boundari es of the university. They
i mmedi atel y affected the art worl d as well. I n Brussels, for
>exampl e. Marcel Broodthaers (1924-76) and other Belgian artists
j oi ned thei r student confreres by occupyi ng the Sallede Marbre of
the Palais des Beaux-Arts and temporari l y "l i berati ng" it f rom its
former admi ni strati on i nto thei r own control . Furthermore, in a
gesture that was also patterned on the acti on of the student move-
ments, Broodthaers coauthored statements that were released to
the publ i c in leaflet form. One of them announced, for exampl e,
that the Free Associ ati on (as the occupi ers i denti fi ed themselves)
"condemns the commerci al i zati on of all forms of art consi dered as
obj ects of consumpti on." Thi s f orm of publ i c address, whi ch he
had used since 1963, was then to become increasingly the basis of
his wôrk, whi ch he was to carry out in the name of a fictitious
museum, the "Musee d'Art Moderne," under the aegis of whi ch he
woul d mount a dozen sectionssuch as the "Section Xl Xeme
siecle ("Ni neteenth-Century Section") and the "Departement des
Aigles" (Department of Eagles) [ 1 ]and in the service of whi ch he
addressed the publ i c through a series of "Open Letters." The
former separati ons wi thi n the art worl dbetween producers
(artists) and di stri butors (museums or galleries), between critics
and makers, between the ones who speak and the ones who are
spoken forwere radically challenged by Broodthaers's museum,
an operati on that constantly^performed a parodi c but prof ound
medi tati on on the vectors of "i nterest" that run through cul tural
i nsti tuti ons, as far-from-di si nterested accessories of power.
Thi s atti tude of refusi ng the subordi nate posture as the one who
is spoken for by seizing the right to speak, and consequentl y of
chal l engi ng the i nsti tuti onal and social divisions that support these
separati ons of power, had other sources of enti tl ement besides
student politics. There was also the reeval uati on of the premi ses,
the supposi ti ons, of the vari ous academi c disciplines collectively
called the human sciences that cry-stallized around the ti me of 1968
i nto w^hat has been termed poststructural i sm.
There is no "disinterest"
A. Structural i smthe domi nant French methodol ogi cal posi ti on
against whi ch poststructural i sm rebel l edhad viewed any given
human activitylanguage, for exampl e, or ki nshi p systems wi thi n
a socieUâs a rul e-governed system that is a more or less
autonomous, sel f-mai ntai ni ng structure, and whose laws operate
accordi ng to certai n formal principles of mutual opposi ti on. Thi s
idea of a self-regulating structure, one whose orderi ng operati ons
are formal and refl exi vethat is, they derive from, even while they
organi ze, the materi al givens of the system i tsel fcan clearly be
mapped onto the moderni st concepti on of the di fferent and sepa-
rate artistic disciplines or medi ums. And i nsofar as this parallel
obtai ns, the intellectual and theoreti cal battles of 1968 are highly
relevant to the devel opments in the worl d of art in the seventies
and eighties.
Poststructural i sm grew out of arefusal to grant structural i sm its
premi se that each system is autonomous, wi th rules and opera-
ti ons that begin and end within the boundari es of that system.
40 Introduction 4 | Poststructuraiisnn and deconstruction
I n linguistics, this atti tude expanded the limited study of linguistic
structures to those modes through whi ch l anguage issues i nto
acti on, the forms called shifters and performatives. Shifters are
words like "I " and "you," where the referent of "I " (namel y, the
person who utters it} shifts back and torth in a conversati on.
Performati ves are those verbal utterances that, by bei ng uttered,
literally enact thei r meani ng, such as when a speaker announces
"I do" at the moment of marri age. Language, it was argued, is not
si mpl y a matter of the transmi ssi on of messages or the communi -
cati on of i nformati on; it also places the i nterl ocutor under the
obl i gati on to reply. It therefore i mposes arole, an atti tude, a whol e
discursive system (rules of behavi or and of power, as well as of
codi ng and decodi ng) on the receiver of the linguistic act. Qui te
apart f romthe content of any given verbal exchange, then, its very'
enactment i mpl i es the acceptance (or rej ecti on) of the whol e
i nsti tuti onal frame of that exchangei ts "presupposi ti ons," as
linguistics student Oswal d Ducrot, early in 1968, called them:
The rejection of presuppositions constitutes a polemical attitude
very different from a critique of what is set forth: specifically, it
always implies a large dose of aggressiveness that transforms the
dialogue into a confrontation of persons. In rejecting the presup-
positions of my interlocutor, I disqualify not only the utterance
itself, but also the enunciative act from which it proceeds.
1 Marcel Broodthaers, "Musê d'Art Moderne,
Departement des Aigles, Section des Figures
(The Eagle fromthe Oligocene to the Present)," 1972
-"llavD'- view
d 'ecTor of -".IS rrussun. Broadtfiaers organized its
Section Public te^' for DoccTenta. as well as exnibiticns of
c.a-" cular' chness tor ether m^seiims. this cne for tne
5'cd: sehe Kjnsthalle. Dsselcorf. in 1 972 A cc ection ot
c -erse ociects. the eagles ncluded v/ere ci'-awn fron
' :-.;is-cul1ura^Tate':a (for example, the stamps on
: arnpag-e corks) as well as precicjs objects (s^ch as
- a ^ fi0i,','ae], al' cf them capticnec This .s not a '.vork
c" ad " As Broodthaers explained in the catalogue, the
tecticn marries the cieas of Ducnarro Ithe readymacte) to
" c" Magrife (his deconstructive "Tt- s is rot a pipe."
n :"e inscriptior on Trê Treachery of irnages of 1329;.
'"3 museum oeoartmen: responsible ôr tfiis exhib t i c
-:S tne "Section des îgL-'es" illlustrations Section;.
One form of post-1968 rejection of presupposi ti ons was that
French university students now insisted on addressi ng thei r pro-
fessors with the i nti mate form of the second person"fi /"and
by their first names. They based this on the university^'s own abro-
gati on of presupposi ti ons when it called in the police (whi ch
historically had no j uri sdi cti on wi thi n thewalls of the Sorbonne) to
forcibly evict the student occupi ers.
Unl i ke the idea of the autonomous academi c discipline (or
work of art) whose frame is thought to be necessarily external to
i ta ki nd of nonessenti al appendagethe performati ve noti on
of language places the frame at the very^heart of the speech act.
For the verbal exchange, it was bei ng argued, is from the very
begi nni ng the act of i mposi ng (or failing to i mpose) a set of pre-
supposi ti ons on the receiver of that exchange. Speech is thus more
than the si mpl e (and neutral ) transmi ssi on of a message. It is also
the enactment of a rel ati on of force, a move to modi fy the
addressee's right to speak. The exampl es Ducrot used to illustrate
the presupposi ti onal i mposi ti on of power were a uni versi ty exam
and a police i nterrogati on.
Challenging the frame
The French structural linguist Emi l e Benveniste (1902-76) had
al ready done more than anyone else to bri ng about this transfor-
mati on in the way language came to be viewed in the sixties.
Dividing ty^ês of verbal exchange i nto narrative on the one hand
and discourse on the other, he poi nted out that each type has its
Poststructuralism and deconstruction | I ntroduction 4 41
2 Daniel Buren, Photo-souvenir: "Within and
beyond the frame," 1973 (detail)
Work ir sifu. ..ahn Webe'- Ga ery, Nevv Y ck
Ey the early seve-ties Bure" hac -eajceci his pa -t ng
oract-ce to a :yoe o' readynade: canvases cu: t-om
comnerc a y orodbaec gray-and-'.vtire st^peo awning
naterial :>sed 'O' the awnings o- -renc" sta:e cttiae
bu dings! vvh ch hev-'OLlc "perso-âiize" by -ar-d-aainarg
ever one of the stripes at the edge of the sivatch,
Fd' :ne u.ohn Weoer "3:ai atian, he ran ."s canvases
tt'ough d-e ga' ery and out window aa-oss :ne
width cf the sreetas a kind of ba^êriika acveaisenent
'o' the ex-ibiticn.
own characteristic features: narrati ve (or the wri ti ng of historyi
typically engages the third person and confi nes itself to a form of
the past tense; in contrast, discourse, Ben\'eniste's term for live
communi cati on, t\'picalh- engages the present tense and the first
and second persons (the shifters "1" and "you"). Di scourse is
marked, then, by the e.xistential facts of its active transmi ssi on, of
the necessary presence wi thi n it of both sender and receiver.
The French hi stori an and phi l osopher Michel Foucaul t, teach-
ing at the College de France in 1969, devel oped this idea further.
Appl yi ng Benveniste's term "di scourse" to what had always been
understood as the neutral communi cati on of scholarly i nforma-
tion contai ned wi thi n a gi\'en departmental discipline andl i ke
narrati veconfi ned to the transmi ssi on of "obj ecti ve" i nforma-
tion, Foucault took up the contrary posi ti on that "di scourses" are
always charged f rom wi thi n by power relations, and even by the
exercise of force. Knowledge, accordi ng to this argument, ceases
to be the autonomous contents of a discipline and now becomes
disciplinarythat is, marked by the operati ons of power. Fou-
cault's "di scourse," then, like Ducrot's "presupposi ti ons," is an
acknowl edgment of the discursive frame that shapes the speech
event, institutionally, like the rel ati ons of power that operate in a
cl assroomor apohce station.
A Broodthaers's seizing of the right to speak, in his guise as
"museum director," performed the ki nd of challenge to institu-
tional frames that poststructuralists such as Foucault were then
theorizing. I ndeed, Broodthaers made his work out of those very-
frames, by enacti ng the rituals of admi ni strati ve compartmental i za-
ti on and by parodyi ng the way those compartments in turn create
collections of "knowledge." .And as the frames weremade to become
apparent, not outsi de the work but at its very center, what indeed
took placewas theputti ng of "thevery legitimacy of thegiven speech
act at stake." Under each of the Museum's exhibits, the Department
of Eagles affixed theMagri ttcan label; "This is not awork of art."
Broodthaers was not al one in this decision to make artistic prac-
tice out of the frami ng, as it were, of the i nsti tuti onal frames.
I ndeed, the whol e practice of what came to be called "i nsti tuti onal
cri ti que" derived f rom such a practi cecal l i ng attenti on to the
supposedl y neutral contai ners of cul ture and questi oni ng this
putati ve neutrality. The French artist Daniel Buren, for instance,
adopted astrategy- to challenge the pow-er of the frames by refusi ng
to leave thei r presupposi ti ons al one, impUcit, unremarked.
I nstead, his art, emergi ng in the seventies, was one of marki ng all
those divisions through whi ch power operates. I n 1973 he exhib-
ited Within and beyond the frame [2]. A work in ni neteen sections,
each asuspended gray-and-whi te-stri ped canvas (unstretched and
unframed), Buren's "pai nti ng" extended al most two hundred feet,
begi nni ng at one end of the J ohn Weber Gallery in New Y ork and
gaily conti nui ng out the wi ndow to wend its way across the street,
like so many flags hung out for a parade, finally attachi ng itself to
the bui l di ng opposi te. The frame referred to in the title of the work
was, obviously, the i nsti tuti onal frame of the gallery, a frame that
functi ons to guarantee certain thi ngs about the objects it encloses.
r927a 1
42 I ntroduction 4 | Poststructuraiisnn and deconstruction
3- Robert Sm'ithson, A Non-site (Franklin, New J ersey), 1968
- .v:;: o ". Tt;s"C:ne. silier - golstir p' ar ;;
, or oacs' .v o'ap" 'e a^d t-arsfe- cters
-:: ocaro. S- si- s'aiieo ' e n 2Z-i Ic' z
;1 e ^ :>: 1 C3 : r- ares ' x 73 ' x 30 ;
5-- tnso^'s 'Vc.-"-3mss have been pre due vel', relsteo to .-e
" tne M^se^-r of Katurai History in NG'.v '-'O'--,. -
.nK:' saTdes z""e na:,-.'al are mpcteo m'o "-e
as 9x-iib'ts that necessarily contan- -ate the
;:jr:t, cf the aesthetic space ~he cms c contaire's of - s
conr-ien: '0":ca y cn MmTaliST accus t c"
y-i ac-sthc-ticisT that Mm/ra. st 5'tists like I ^ca d J jdo a'lo
Hicoe't fv'cns vvcuô "ave emerge: cai y aen ec.
These thi ngsl i ke rarity, authenti ci ty, originalir)% and uni que-
nessare part of the value of the work implicitly asserted by the
space of the gallery. These values, which are part of what separates
art fromother objects in our cul ture, objects that are nei ther rare,
nor original, nor uni que, operate then to declare art as an
autonomous systemwithin that cul ture.
Yet rarity, uni queness, and so forth are also the values to which
the gal l en' attaches a price, in an act that erases any fundamental
di fference between what it has to sell and the merchandi se of
any other commerci al space. As the identically striped pai nti ngs
(themsel ves barely di sti ngui shabl e f rom commerci al l y produced
awni ngs ) breached the frame of the gallery^to pass beyond its con-
fines and out the wi ndow, Buren seemed to be asking the îewer to
determi ne at what poi nt they ceased bei ng "pai nti ngs" (objects of
rarity, originality, etc.) and started bei ng part of another system of
objects: tlags, sheets hung out to drys adverti sements for the artist's
show, carnival bunti ng. He was probi ng, that is, the legitimacy of
the system's power to bestow value on work.
' The questi on of frames was also at the heart of Robert Smi th-
son's thi nki ng about the relation between the l andscape, or natural
site, to its aesthetic contai ner, which the artist labeled "non-si te."
I n a series of works called Non-sites, Smi thson i mported mi neral
materi al rocks, slag, sl atefromspecific l ocati ons i nto the space
of the gallery by placing this materi al i nto geometrically shaped
bins, each one visually connected, by means of its form, to a
segment of a wall map i ndi cati ng the area of the speci mens'
origin [3| . The obvi ous act of aestheticizing nature, and of turni ng
the real into a representati on of itself through the operati ons of the
geometri cal bi n to construct the raw matter of the rocks i nto a
si gntrapezoi dthat comes to "stand for" the rocks' poi nt of
extracti on, and thus for the rocks themselves, is what Smi thson
consi gns to the system of the art worl d's spaces: its galleries, its
museums, its magazines.
The ziggurat-like structures of Smi thson's bi ns and maps mi ght
i mpl y that it was onl y an i roni c formal game that was at issue in
this aspect of his art. But the graduated bi ns were also addressi ng
a ki nd of natural histor)' that coul d be read in the l andscape, the
successive stages of e.xtracting the ore from the initial bount)-, to
the progressive barrenness, to a final exhausti on of suppl y. It was
this natural hi story that coul d not be represented wi thi n the
frames of the art worl d's di scourse, concerted as it is to tell qui te
another storyone of form, of beauty, of 5e/f-reference. There-
fore, part of Smi thson's strategy was to smuggle another, foreign
mode of representati on i nto the f rame of the gallery, a mode he
took, in fact, f rom the natural hi story museum, where rocks and
bins and maps are not freakish, aestheticized abstracti ons but the
basis of an al together di fferent system of knowl edge: a way of
mappi ng and contai ni ng ideas about the "real."
The effort to escape f rom the aesthetic contai ner, to break the
chains of the i nsti tuti onal frame, to challenge the assumpti ons
(and i ndeed the implicit pow^r relations) established by the art
worl d's presupposi ti ons was thus carried out in the seventies in
Poststructuralism and deconstruction | Introduction 4 43
4 Richard Long, A Circle in Ireland, 1975
3y gc - g ou: "tc the andscace far the Tiater 3 s a*
s Vo'? s'les Sn-thso- -"odLaec tne :)ea'ha" the
lanascace tself rr^gtr. be a sculptura Tsaiun,
Ear:".vor-;s '.vere a resu t ot this sucgesticn, vvn'Ch
anists such as ôrg. Waiter Ce Mara, Chrsto, er
M'c^-ael Heizer operated directiy on tê earth, cden
TS'îng pro-.ograpnic reccds et tns âct vities, T- s
depencer^ce an tê proTograchic docuiren: was
the conîrrât on of Walser Be-âT "'s cêo cticns in
the 1 935 essay 'The V.'ck of Ar 'c the Age of
Mechanics Rep-'ocuctian "
rel ati on to specific sites^gallery, museum, rock quarn*, Scottish
Hi ghkmds, Cal i forni a coastwhi ch the work of art functi oned to
refriwie. This act of reframi ng was meant to perform a peculiar
ki nd of reversal. The old aesthetic ideas that the sites used to frame
(al though invisibly, implicitly ) now hovered over these real places
like so many exorcised ghosts, w^hilethe site itselfîts white walls,
its neoclassical porti cos, its pi cturesque moors, its rolling hills and
rock)ôutcroppi ngs [ 4] became the materi al support (the wây
pai nt and canvas or marbl e and clay used to be) for a new ki nd of
representati on. This representati on was the i mage of the i nsti tu-
ti onal frames themselves, now forced i nto visibility as though some
ki nd of powerful new devel opi ng fluid had unl ocked previously
secret i nformati on froman i nert photographi c negative.
Derrida's double session
J acques Derri da (1930-2004), a phi l osopher teachi ng at the Ecole
Normal e Superi eure in Paris, seized upon Benveniste's and Fou-
cault's radicalization of structural linguistics to fashi on his own
brand of poststructural i sm. He started out fromthe very terms of
structural i sm itself, in which language is marked by a fundamental
.bi val ency at the heart of the linguistic sign. Accordi ng to struc-
turalist logic, while the sign is made up of the pai ri ng of signifier
and signified, it is the signified ( the referent or concept, such as a
cat or the idea of "cat") that has privilege over the mere materi al
form of the signifier (the spoken or wri tten letters c, a, t). Thi s is
because the rel ati onshi p between signifier and signified is arbi -
trary': there is no reason why c, a, f shoul d signifv' "catness"; any
other combi nati on of letters coul d do the job just as well, as the
existence of di fferent words for "cat" in di fferent languages
demonstrates Cchat,'' "gcjffo," "Katze," etc.).
But this inequality' between signifier and signified is not the onl y
one at the heart of language. Another feature to emerge from the
structuralist model is the unevenness of terms that make up oppos-
ing bi nary pairs such as "young/ol d" or "man/woman." This
inequality is between a markedandan unmarked term. The marked
half of the pai r brings more i nformati on i nto the utterance than
the unmarked half, as in the bi nary "young/ol d" and the statement
"l ohn is as young as Mary." "As young as" here i mpl i es youth,
whereas "l ohn is as old as Mary" i mpl i es nei ther youth nor
advanced age. It is the unmarked term whi ch opens itself to the
higher order of sy^nthesis most easily, a condi ti on that becomes
clear if we l ook at the binary^"man/woman," in whi ch it is "man"
that is the unmarked half of the pai r (as in "manki nd," "chai rman,"
"spokesman," etc.).
That the unmarked term slips past its partner i nto the posi ti on
of greater generality gives that termimplicit pow^r, thus i nsti tuti ng
a hi erarchy wi thi n the seemingly neutral structure of the bi nary
pairing. It was Derri da's determi nati on not to conti nue to let
this i nequal i ty go wi thout saying, but rather to say it, to "mark"
theunmarked term, byûsi ng "she" as the general pronoun indicat-
ing a person, andi n the theori zati on of "grammatol ogy" (see
bel ow)to put the signifier in the posi ti on of superi ori ty over the
signified. Thi s marki ng of the unmarked Derri da called ''decon-
struction,'" an overturni ng that makes sense onl y wi thi n the very-
structuralist frame that it wants to place at the center of its activity
by frami ng that frame.
Derri da's extremel y i nfl uenti al book Of Grammatology (1967)
proceeded f rom such a deconstructi ve operati on to mark the
unmarked, and thus to expose the invisible frame to view\ If we
compare the status of "he says" to that of "he writes," we see that
"says" is unmarked, while "vsîtes," as the specific term, is thus
marked. Derri da's "grammatol ogy" i ntends to mark speech (logos)
and thus to overturn this hierarchy, as well as to analyze the sources
of speech's preemi nence over wTiting. Thi s analy'sis had begun wi th
Derrida's doctoral thesis, Speech and Phenomenon, in which he
analyzed the phenomenol ogi st Edmund Husserl 's (1859-1938)
dismissal of wTiting as an i nfecti on of the transparency and i mme-
diacy of thought's appearance to itself. And as he analyzed the
privilege of logos over the dismissed sign of the memory trace
vvriting, gramme), Derri da devel oped the logic of what he called
t-hesupplement, an aid brought in to hel p or extend or suppl ement
human capaci tyas wri ti ng extends memory or the reach of the
human voi cebut whi ch, ironically, ends by suppl anti ng it. Such
a hi erarchy is also behi nd the Derri dean term differance, itself
aurally i ndi sti ngui shabl e f romdifference, the French wôrd for that
di tference on whi ch language is based. Differance, whi ch can only^
be perceived in its wri tten form, refers, precisely, to wri ti ng's oper-
ati on of thetrace and of thebreak or spaci ng that opens up the page
to the arti cul ati on of one sign f rom another. Thi s spacing allows
not onl y for the play of di fference between signifiers that is the
basis of language ("cat," for exampl e, can functi on as a sign and
assume its val ue in the l anguage system onl y because it differs
f rom"bat" and f rom"car"), but also for the temporal unfol di ng of
signifieds (meani ng bei ng el aborated in ti me through the gradual
i terati on of a sentence): differance not onl y differs, then, it also
defers, or temporal i zes.
If deconstructi on is the marki ng of the unmarked, whi ch
Derri da someti mes called the re-mark, its striving to frame the
frames took the analytical formof theessay "The Parergon," whi ch
attends to I mmanuel Kant's maj or treatise "The Cri ti que of l udg-
ment" (1790), a treatise that not only founds the discipline of
aesthetics but also powerful l y supplies moderni sm with its convic-
ti on in the possibility of the autonomy of the artsthe art work's
sel f-groundi ng and thus its i ndependence f romthe condi ti ons of
its frame. For Kant argues that "J udgment," the outcome of aes-
theti c experience, must be separate f rom "Reason"; it is not
dependent on cognitive j udgment but must reveal, Kant argues,
the paradoxi cal condi ti on of "purposi veness wi thout purpose."
Thi s is thesource of art's autonomy, its di si nterestedness, its escape
fromuse or i nstrumental i zati on. Reason makes use of concepts in
its purposi ve pursui t of knowl edge; art, as sel f-groundi ng, must
abj ure concepts, reflecting instead on the sheer purposi veness of
nature as a transcendental concept (and thus contai ni ng nothi ng
empi ri cal ). Kant argues that the logic of the work (the ergon) is
i nternal (or proper) to it, such that what is outsi de it (the parergon)
is onl y extraneous ornament and, like the frame on a pai nti ng or
the col umns on a bui l di ng, mere superfl ui ty or decorati on.
Derri da's argument, however, is that Kant's analysis of aesthetic
j udgment as sel f-groundi ng is not itself sel f-groundi ng but i mports
a frame f rom the wri ter's earlier essay "The Cri ti que of Pure
Reason" (1781), a cognitive frame on whi ch to build its tran-
scendental logic. Thus the frame is not extrinsic to the work but
comes f romoutside to consti tute the inside as an inside. Thi s is the
parergonal functi on of the frame.
Derri da's own reframi ng of the frame was perhaps most
el oquentl y carri ed out in his 1969 text "The Doubl e Session," refer-
ri ng to a doubl e lecture he gave on the work of the French poet
Stephane Mal l arme (1842-98). The first page of the essay shows
Derri da's al most moderni st sensitivity to the status of the signifier,
a sensitivity that parallels the poststructural i st's canny assessment
of the "truths" of structural i sm15]. Likeamoderni st monochrome,
the page presents itself as a buzz of gray letters as it reproduces a
page f romthe Pl atoni c dialogue "Phi l ebus," a di al ogue devoted to
the theory of mi mesi s (representati on, i mi tati on). I nto the lower-
right corner of this field of gray, however, Derri da inserts another
text, also di rected at the idea of mi mesi s: Mal l arme's "Mi mi que,"
SOCRATES: And if Ht hi d iomcont wich him. ht oul d put whit he said lo himself into acnial speech
ddressed to his cu.-npanion. audibly uttering chose sime thoughts, so that what before we called
opinion (Si av) has now become assertion (X-roi ;).PROTARCHUS: Of course SOCRATES:
Whereas if he 15 aJonehecontinues thinking the samr thing by himself, going on his way maybe for a
considenbie time with the thought in his mi ndPROTARCHUS: Undoubtedl y,SOCRATES
Wril now, / wonder whether you share my rirw an rhese miners.PROTARCHUS What is
I t'SOCRATES: It seems 10 me that at such times oui soul is like a book (ioxE L iioi tte ti
MiuVh Pi^) uvl i r pwt oi x^vai ) PROTARCHUS: How so:SOCRATES: It appeal^to me that
the conjtjnctiofl of memory with sensations, together with the feelings constituent upon memory and
sensation, may be said as it were to write words in our souls f7pci<fELV i\\L63v TOets M'UXt^J&^t
Xb^;) And when this eiperiencenies what is true, theresuJt is that trueopinion and trueassertions
spring up in us, while when the internal scribe thai I have suggested writes what isfeise(J iEV&f) 8<yroiv
6 Toiofrroi; iTQ^"fjliJ^7pa>t(iaTEiK; Tpdijrg), weget
the opp>si're sort of opinions Mid assertions. PRO- *
TARCHUS: That certainly seems to me right, and I
appfte of the way you put i tSOCRATES: Then
please give your appfos-aJ to the pttsence of a secood
artist (5Tl|uoup-YK> in our souls at such a ti me.
PROTARCHUS Who is that.'SOCRATES A pain-
ter (Zi ufpti cov) who comes after the writer and paints
in the soui pictures of these lisettions that we make
PROTARCHUS: How do we make out that he in his
rumacts, and when'SOCRATES: When we havegot
those opmtons and assertions clear of the act of sight
('0<|Etix;) or other sense, and as it were see in ourselves
picrures ot images (ECxdvas) of what we previously
opined or stsserted. That does happen with us, doesn't
i t^PROTARCHUS: Indeed it doe.SOCRATES-
Then ate the pictures of trîe opimons and assertions
true. Mid the pictures of false ones &l se?PROTAR-
CHUS Unquesti onabl y.SOCRATES Wel l , if we
areright so far, here is or^more point in this connection
for us to consi der.PROTARCHUS: What is
that?SOCRATES: Does all this necessarily beil us
in respect of the present (Tdn/ bv^djv) and thepast (t(v
7J 70V<St<v), but IWX in respect of the future (T<>v
l i sXXVTWv)?- PROTARCHUS; On the cootiary. it
applies equally to chem all SOCRATES: We said
previously, did we not, that pjeasuies atvi pains felt in
the soul aloie might precede those that come thnnigh
the body? "Hvit must mean that we have anticipatory
pleasures and anticipatory pains in regard to the fu-
turePROTARCHUS: Very true.SOCRATES
Now do tlit>$e writings and paJnrings (-yptiiJijixifTd Te
xai {(iiTfpaipf)juxTQ), which awhileago weassumed to
occur within ourselves, apply 10 past and present only,
and not to the futurr.>PROTARCHUS: Indeed they
do.SOCRATES: 'When you say "indeed they do', do
you n>ean that the last sort are all npectations con-
cerned with wiial IS to come, and that we are full of
opectati ons all our life l ong?PROTARCHUS: Un-
dcHjbcedly.SOCRATES; Wel l now. as a supplement
to al] we have said, heie is a furxher qiKStioo for you to
UI MI QUE ^
Silence, sole luxury after rhymes, an
orchestra only markiifg with its gold, its
bcustos with thought and dusk, the detail
of Its significalion on apar with astilled ode
and which it is up to the poei, roused by 1
durr, to translate? rhesilenceof an afternoon
of music; I find it, with contentment, also,
before the ever original reappearance of
Pierrot or of the poignant and elegant mime
Paul Margueritre.
Such isthis PI ERROT PrfURDERER OF
HI S WI FE composed and set down by him-
self, a mute soliloquy thar the phantom,
white as ayet unwritten page, holds in boch
faceand gesture at fvl l length to his soui. A
whirlwind of niive or new msom etna-
nates, which It would be pleasing to seize
upoo with security: the esthetics of the
genre situated closer TO principles than any!
(noHhing in this region of caprice foiling
the direct simplifying instinct... This
"The scene illustrates but the idea, not any
actual acrio4i, in a hymen (out of which
flows Dream}, tainted with vice yet sacied,
between desire and fulfillment, perpetia-
rioo and remembrance: here anticipating,
there recalling, in the future, in the past,
mdir tin fahe afptarinta of a frant. Thai is
how the Mime operates, whose act is con-
fined to aperpetual allusion without break-
ing the ice or the mirror: he thus sets up a
medium, a pure medium, of fiction." Less
than athousand lines, the role, theone thar
reads, will instantly compiehetKl the nJ es
as if placed before the stageboards, their
hiiizible depository. Surprise, accompany-
mg the artifice of a notation of sentiments
by unproered sentences that, in thesole
case, perhaps, with authenticity, between
the sheets and the eye there reigr a silence
still, the condition and delight of reading.
175
5 J acques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara
J ohnson, page 175 ("The Double Session")
Derriaa, i\hose decors"'jc\'rje theory ccsiSTed o' ar
assault on the visualas a "o- t c1 preserice tha: " s dea
ot spacirig as aâspect a' ceterra :c' di'.^&'ance) 'vvas
Tean: tc cisnandeotien '^vented surp-is ngly efteatrê
.'isja nêiachors tor ais concepts, here, the insertio" of
Vata^Te's "M'Tique" ntc a come' ct p atc's "Pniiecus"'
suggests, visja ly. ti e idea cf the foi^, o- redoacNnc,
that Derrida prcojces as a re'// concept ct n-;mesis, n
ivîcn the doi.)ble secord-or3er copyi dcaoles no
sing e icr orig nail. Arod-e' exanpe occurs :n the essay
"The Pa-ergor." w^"ere a s'^^ccessio" cf graph,c t'-ames
IS inte'spersec ihrougaout a text focused on :ne function
ci tne f-ame c' tne 'vo'<o' art, a frame that attempts
to essent alize :he as autoncrous cut v/n ch aaes
nothina rrore than cc^nect it to rs context c norwor-<
the poet's account ot aperformance he saw carried out by a famous
mi me and based on the text "Pi errot, Murderer of His Wi fe."
Behi nd Derri da, on the bl ackboard of the cl assroom, had appeared
a three-fol d i ntroducti on to the lecture, hangi ng above his words,
he said, likeacrystal chandel i er:
r ant re de Mallarme
r"entrc'^ de Mallarme
Ventre-deux "Mallarm
Because in French there is no aural di sti ncti on between autre and
entre, this textual ornament depends on its wTitten formin order to
make any sense, in the same way that differance must be wri tten in
order to register its signified. This homophoni c condi ti on is itself
"between-two," as in Mal l arme's ''entre-denx,'' abetween-ness that
Derri da will liken to the fold in a page, a fol d whi ch turns the sin-
gleness of the materi al support i nto an ambi guous doubl eness
(a fol d materi al i zed in turn by the i nserti on of "Mi mi que" i nto the
"Phi l ebus" at its corner).
I n the text of "The Doubl e Session" itself, I 3errida plays, like any
good moderni st, with the material condi ti on of the numbers that
emerge fromPl ato's and Mal l arme's defi ni ti ons of mi mesi s. Plato's
defi ni ti on turns on the number four, while the poet's turns on the
doubl e, or the number two. And like any good moderni st, Derri da
materializes the classical foursome, understandi ng it as a frame:
Plato says that (1) the book i mi tates the soul's silent di al ogue wi th
the self; (2) thevalue of thebook is not i ntri nsi c but depends on the
value of what it imitates; (3) the truth of the book can be deci ded,
based on thetruthful ness of its i mi tati on; and (4) the book's i mi ta-
tion is consti tuted by the form of the doubl e. Thus Pl atoni c
mi mesi s doubl es what is single (or simple) and, bei ng thus deci d-
able, i nsti tutes itself wi thi n the operati ons of truth. Mal l arme's
i mi tati on, on the other hand, doubl es w'hat is already doubl e or
mul ti pl e and is, therefore, undeci dabl e: between-two. The text
of the mi me-drama that Mal l arme recounts in "Mi mi que" tells of
Pi errot's discover)- of his wife Col umbi ne's adulter)', whi ch he
decides to avenge by killing her. Not wanti ng to be caught,
however, he refuses the obvi ous possibilities of poi son, strangling,
or shooti ng, since all of them leave traces. After kicking a rock in
frustrati on, he massages his foot to assuage the pai n and i nadver-
tentl y tickles himself. I n his helpless l aughter, the idea dawns on
hi m that he will tickle Col umbi ne to death and she will thus die
l aughi ng. In the performance, theactual murder is mi med with the
actor pl a)i ng both parts: the diabolical tickler and the convulsively
struggl i ng victim, wri thi ng with pleasure. Since such a death is
impossible, the i mi tati on i mi tates not what is si mpl e but rather a
mul ti pl e, itself a pure functi on of the signifier, a turn of speech
("to die l aughi ng"; "to be tickled to death"), rather than of actual-
ity. As Mal l arme writes: "The scene illustrates only the idea, not a
positive acti on, in a marri age that is lewd but sacred, a marri age
between desire and its achi evement, enactment and its memor)':
here, anti ci pati ng, recollecting, in the future, in the past, under a
. Louise Lawler, Pollock and Soup Tureen, 1984
6 ;< 5 j a : 1 6 x 20:
ic tcc'dp" '^Q cf ar: as ey er:e' in:c ti e scac^
c'SJ f?- cc'llectcrs Lav/ier prcriucas t'ie
a; tnîuc- thsv v/ere ^sraticns of -itcrors ir.
or anv cthe^luxury desigii cencaica S:'essirg
a comncdricat o" of the vvorK o' art. Lawler's Tages
so ''cci. cn : - s cchector's incorpoâtico cf 1ne wo'-;
-0 s c ler comes: c space, trereby 'r-a<ir g i: an
'.ens o" of s subject vity. T"e ceta: o' Po oc-^'s
c-c c pain: s fh^s relstec tc tê in:r cate design cf ttif
Mp tu-ee". as a 'cr-r cf (nrsro.êtat/o.c persca to
C COllGCtC.
false appearance of the present. In this way the mi me acts. Hi s
game ends in a perpetual allusion wi thout breaki ng the mi rror. I n
this wa>' it sets up a pure condi ti on of fi cti on."
I mi tati on that folds over what is already doubl e, or ambi guous,
does not, then, enter the real mof truth. It is acopy wi thout a model
and its condi ti on is marked by the term simulacrum: a copy
wi thout an ori gi nal "a falseappearance of the present." The fold
through whi ch the Pl atoni c frame is transmuted i nto the Mallar-
mrn doubl e (or between-two) is likened by both poet and
phi l osopher to the fold or gutter of abook, whi ch in its crevice was
always sexualized for Mal l arme, hence his term "lewd but sacred."
Thi s is the fol d"fal se appearance of the present"that Derri da
will call hymeu, or will refer to at ti mes as "i nvagi nati on," by which
the condi ti on of the framewill be carried i nto the insideof an argu-
ment, whi ch will, in turn, frame it.
Art in the age of the simulacrum
Terms likeparergon, supplement, differance, and re-mark grounded
new artistic practi ce in the wake of moderni sm. All of these i deas
f rom the si mul acrum to the frami ng of the framebecame the
staple not just of poststructural i sm but of postmoderni st pai nti ng,
David Salle, who is perhaps most representati ve of that pai nti ng,
devel oped in a context of young artists who were highly critical of
art's tradi ti onal claims to transcend mass-cul tural condi ti ons.
This groupi ni ti al l y i ncl udi ng figures like Robert Longo, Ci ndy
A Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, and Louise Lawler 16|
was fascinated by the reversal between reality and its rep-
resentati on that was bei ng effected by a l ate-twenti eth-century
cul ture of i nformati on.
Representati ons, it was argued, i nstead of comi ng after reality,
in an i mi tati on of it, now precede and construct reaUty. Our "real"
emoti ons i mi tate those we see on film and read about in pul p
romances; our "real" desires are structured for us by adverti si ng
images; the "real" of our politics is prefabri cated by television
news and Hol l ywood scenarios of l eadershi p; our "real" selves are
congeries and repeti ti on of all these images, strung together by nar-
ratives not of our own maki ng. To analyze this structure of the
representati on that precedes its referent (the thi ng in the real worl d
it is supposed to copy ) woul d cause this group of artists to ask
themselves probi ng questi ons about the mechani cs of the image-
cul ture: its basis in mechani cal reproducti on, its functi on as serial
repeti ti on, its status as mul ti pl e wi thout an original.
"Pi ctures" was the name given to this work in an early reception
of it by the critic Dougl as Cri mp. There, for example, he exami ned
the way Ci ndy Sherman, posi ng for a series of photographi c "self-
portrai ts" in a variety of di fferent costumes and settings, each with
the l ook of a fifties movi e still and each proj ecti ng the image of a
stereotypical film heroi necareer girl, highly strung hysteric,
Sotithern belle, outdoor gi rl had proj ected her very self a.s always
medi ated by, always constructed through, a"pi cture" that preceded
it, thus a copy wi thout an original. The ideas that Cri mp and other
1975 -36;:. 1977
critics versed in tiieories of poststructural i sm came to identifv-with
such work involved a serious questi oni ng of noti ons of authorshi p,
originality, and uni queness, the foundati on stones of i nsti tuti onal -
ized aesthetic cul ture. Reflected in the facing mi rrors of Sherman's
photographs, creating as they did an endlessly retreati ng hori zon of
quotati on f romwhi ch the "real" author disappears, thesecritics saw
what Michel Foucault and Rol and Barthes had analyzed in the fifties
and sixties as "the death of the author."
The work of Sherrie Levine was set in this same context, as she
rephotographed photographs by EUiot Porter, Edward Weston,
and Wal ker Evans and presented these as her "own" work, ques-
ti oni ng by her act of piracy the status of these figures as authori al
sources of the i mage. Folded i nto this challenge is an implicit
readi ng of the "ori gi nal " pi cturewhether Weston's photographs
of the nude torso of his young son Neil, or Porter's wild techni col or
l andscapesas itself always already apiracy% involved in an uncon-
scious but inevitable borrowi ng f rom the great library of
i magesthe Greek classical torso, the wi ndswept pi cturesque
countrysi dethat have already educated our eyes. To this ki nd of
radical refusal of tradi ti onal concepti ons of authorshi p and origi-
nality, a critical stance made unmi stakabl e by its posi ti on at the
margi ns of legalitys the name "appropri ati on art" has come to be
affixed. And this type of work, bui l di ng acrhi que of forms of own-
ershi p and fictions of privacy and control came to be identified as
postmoderni sm in its radical form.
The questi on of where to place this widely practi ced, eighties
tactic of "appropri ati on" of the i magewhether in aradical camp,
as a cri ti que of the power network that threads through reality,
always already structuri ng it, or in aconser\âtive one, as an enthu-
siastic return to figuration and the artist as i mage-gi vertakes on
another di mensi on when we view the strategy through the eyes of
femi ni st artists. Worki ng with both photographi c materi al appro-
pri ated f rom the mass-cul tural image bank and the form of direct
address to whi ch adverti si ng often has recourseas it cajoles, or
hectors, or preaches to its viewers and readers, addressi ng them as
"you"Barbara Kruger elaborates yet another of the presupposi -
ti ons of the aesthetic discourse, another of its i nsti tuti onal frames.
Thi s is the frame of gender, of the unspoken assumpti on set up
between artist and viewer that both of them are male. Arti cul ati ng
this assumpti on in a work like Your gaze hits the side o f my face
(1981), where the typeface of the message appears in staccato
against the i mage of a classicized femal e statue, Kruger fills in
another part of the presupposi ti onal tirame: the message transmi t-
ted between the two poles classical linguistics marks as "sender"
and "receiver," and assumes is neutral but presupposes as male, is a
message put in play by somethi ng we coul d call an always-silent
partner, namel y, the symbolic formof Woman. Fol l owi ng a post-
structuralist linguistic analysis of l anguage and gender, Kruger's
work is therefore i nterested in woman as one of those subjects who
do not speak but is, instead, always spoken for. She is, as critic
Laura Mulvey writes, structural l y "ti ed to her place as bearer of
meani ng, not maker of meani ng."
Thi s is why Kruger, in this work, does not seize the right to
speech the way that Broodthaers had in his open letters but turns
instead to "appropri ati on." VN'oman, as the "bearer of meani ng" is
the locus of an endless series of abstracti onsshe is "nature,"
"beauty," "motherl and," "liberty," "j usti ce"al l of whi ch f orm
the cul tural and patri archal linguistic field; she is the reser\'oir of
meani ngs f rom whi ch statements are made. As a woman artist,
Kruger acknowl edges this posi ti on as the silent term through her
act of "stealing" her speech, of never laying claimto havi ng become
the "maker of meani ng,"
Thi s questi on of the wôman's relation to the symbolic field of
speech and the meani ng of her structural dispossession wi thi n that
field has become the medi um of other maj or works by feminists.
A One of these, Mar)^KelK^'s Post-Partum Document (1973-9), tracks
the artist's own connecti on to her i nfant son through five years of
his devel opment and the 135 exhibits that record the mother-chi l d
rel ati onshi p. Thi s recordi ng, however, is carried on explicitly along
the fault line of the woman's experi ence of the devel opi ng auton-
omy of the mal e-chi l d as he comes i nto possession of language. It
wants to exami ne the way the child himself is fetishized by the
mother through her OWTI sense of lack.
Two ki nds of absences structure the field of aesthetic experience at
the end of the twenti eth century and i nto the twent)'-first. One of
them we could describe as the absence of realityîtself as it retreats
behi nd the miragelike screen of the media, sucked up i nto the
vacuumtube of atelevision moni tor, read off likeso many pri ntouts
firomamul ti nati onal computer hook-up. Theother is the imisibilit}^
of the presupposi ti ons of language and of insfitutions, a seeming
absence behi nd which power is at work, an absence whi ch artists
from Mar)^Kelly, Barbara Kruger, and Ci ndy Sherman to Hans
Haacke, Daniel Buren, and Richard Serra attempt to bri ng to light.
FRTHEN. READiKG
Roland Barthes. Cr/rica''Assays, trsns. R chgr:; Ho'.varct lEvaistor: kchwestsT Un ve'sity
Press. 15721
Roland Barthes. I'l^sge. Music. Text. fars. Stepnen Hea:h ;Ne'.vYcrk. Hi anc vVarg. 977;
Douglas Crimp, 'Dclu'es, " Ocfotsn nc. 3. S;;r rg 1979
J acques Derrida. Gramrna'.c^'ogy. trans. 3aya"n 3p vak iBatiTore: Tt-e J ohns Hopkns
University Press, 1 9~5:i
J acques Derrida. "Parergc^." The Trurrîn Pairt'ng. trsns. Gsd" 5enn;ng:cn iCmcago eno
Lonaon; Lniversity of Cnicago P-ess. '9S7i
J acques Derrida. "Tne CoubIs Session." D'sseminanon, fans. Ba-ba'a J ctinson ;Cnic5gc and
bonder: Lniversity ot Chicago P-ess. '9611
Michel Foucault. 7fie A'-cfâeo.teg/ofAfr'ctvvecise ;Par s: Galinard, iS'Sy: translation Lender
Tai.'istock Publications: ana New York: Pantnec". i972;
Michel Foucault. "What is an Autnor^"', Lang'jsge, CDU.-^ter-K'êrr'C-/. P 'scxe
rans. C. Boucna'd ard S. Sirron i :heca. M.Y.: Cornell U-îversity Press "'9771
Mary Kelly, DocLimeni ::Lcndcr: Rout edge S Kegan Pau . 1933:
Laura Mulvey, 'y'lsua: Pieasjre and Ka'rativs Cinema." '/'sja' a.'ir Otner P/eas^.'es
(Blocmington: Indiana Univers:, Press, 19S9:
CraigOwens. 'The Ai egcrica -nouise: To'.varcts a Theoy cf ôstrrocei.n.sm." Ocroner ros
'2 and '3. Spring and Sun-mer i 933
Ann Reynolds, -Rep-ocLCirgNature: The Mcsejm d*Katu-al Hisxry as Kors :e " Cdcsr.
no. 45. Sjrrrrer 1 985
A i-yE^c.'969 19.0 'a"' 1972b "SSj.a

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