Beruflich Dokumente
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The "Primitive"Unconscious of
Modern Art
HAL FOSTER
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Unconscious
The "Primitive"
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PabloPicasso.Les Demoisellesd'Avignon.1907.
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Unconscious
The "Primitive"
ofModernArt
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coincidentalaffinitiesseemed to be derived in equal part fromthe formalistreception of the primitiveread back into the tribalworkand fromthe radical abstractionperformedon both sets of objects. This productionof affinity
through
projectionand abstractionwas exposed most dramaticallyin thejuxtaposition
of a painted Oceanic wood figureand a Kenneth Noland targetpainting(Tondo,
1961), a workwhich,in its criticalcontextat least, is preciselynot about the anthropomorphicand asks not to be read iconographically.What does this pairis
ing tell us about "universals"?- that the circle is such a form,or thataffinity
the effectof an erasure of difference.Here, universalityis indeed circular,the
specular image of the modern seen in the mask of the tribal.
the show dismissedthe primitivist
misreadingpar excellence:
Significantly,
thattribalart is intrinsicallyexpressionisticor even psychologicallyexpressive,
when it is in factritualistic,apotropaic, decorative, therapeutic,and so forth.
But it failed to question other extrapolationsfromone set of objects, one cultural context,to the other: to question what is at stake ideologicallywhen the
"magical" characterof tribal work is read (especially by Picasso) into modern
art, or when modern values of intentionality,originality,and aestheticfeeling
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No less than the formalabstractionof the tribal, this specular code of the
For what do we behold here: a universality
primitiveproduces affinity-effects.'9
of formor an otherrenderedin our own image, an affinity
withour own imagiof
the
terms
nary primitive?Though properly wary
primitiveand tribal,the
firstbecause of its Darwinist associations, the second because of itshypothetical
nature, the curatorsused both as "conventionalcounters"20- but it is precisely
this conventionalitythat is in question. Rubin distinguishedprimitivestyle
fromarchaic (e.g., Iberian, Egyptian, Mesoamerican) diacritically
in relationto
the West. The primitiveis said to pertain to a "tribal"socius with communal
formsand the archaic to a "court"civilizationwithstatic,hieratic,monumental
art. This definition,which excludes as much as it includes, seems to specifythe
but in factsuspends it. Neither"dead" like the archaic nor "hisprimitive/tribal
torical,"the primitiveis cast into a nebulous past and/orinto an idealist realm
of"primitive"essences. (Thus the tribalobjects, not dated in the show, are still
not entirelyfreeof the old evolutionistassociation with primal or ancient artifacts,a confusionentertainedby the moderns.) In thisway, the primitive/tribal
is set adriftfromspecificreferentsand coordinates- which thus allows it to be
definedin whollyWestern terms.And one begins to see thatone of the preconditions, if not of primitivism,then certainlyof the "Primitivism"show, is the
mummificationof the tribal and the museumificationof its objects (which vital
cultures like the Zuni have specificallyprotestedagainst).
The foundingact of thisrecodingis the repositioningofthe tribalobject as
art. Posed against its use firstas evolutionisttrophyand then as ethnographic
evidence, this aestheticizationallows the work to be both decontextualizedand
of the primitiveamong the moderns- its curcommodified. It is this currency
circulation
as
as
its
commodity- that allows forthe modern/tribal
rency sign,
in
The
the
first
"Primitivism"show exhibitedthiscurrency
place.
affinity-effect
but did not theorize it. Moreover, it no more "corrected"this primitivistcode
than it did the officialformalistmodel of modernism. This code was already
partlyin place by the time of the MOMA "AfricanNegro Art" show in 1935,
when James Johnson Sweeney wrote against its undue "historicaland ethnographic" reception: "It is as sculpture we should approach it."21 Apart from
anti-Darwinistmotives,the imperativehere was to confirmthe formalistreading
and newfoundvalue of the Africanobjects. With the Africancast as a specifibestowed
cally plastic art, the counterterm- a pictorialart- was institutionally
1946
of
the
South
the
MOMA
exhibition
"Arts
work
Oceanic
Seas,"
by
upon
19. "Affinity"
seems at once a cultural concept and a natural (or at least transcultural)property
- a logical scandal, as LUvi-Strausssaid of the incest prohibition.But just as Derrida argued that
Levi-Strauss's "scandal" was an effect
of his own structuralistsystem, so mightthe modern/tribal
be an effectof its formalistpresentationat MOMA.
"affinity"
20.
See Rubin, "Introduction,"p. 74.
21. James Johnson Sweeney, AfricanNegroArt, New York, MOMA, 1935, p. 21.
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The "Primitive"
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Western concept.)27 In this recognitiondifferenceis discovered only to be fetishisticallydisavowed, and in the celebrationof"human creativity"the dissolution of specificculturesis carried out: the Museum of Modern Art played host
to the Musee de l'Homme indeed.
MOMAism
MOMA has long served as an American metonymof modern art, with
the historyof the one oftenchartedin termsof the space of the other. This mapreading ofmodernism
ping has in turnsupporteda "historical-transcendental"28
as a "dialectic" or deductive line of formal innovations within the tradition.
Now in the decay of thismodel the museum has become open to charges that it
repressespolitical and/ortransgressiveart (e.g., productivism,dada), that it is
indifferent
to contemporarywork(or able to engage it only when, as in the "InternationalSurvey of Recent Painting and Sculpture,"it conformsto its traditional categories), that it is a period piece, and so on. In this situation, the
"Primitivism"show could not but be overdetermined,especially when billed as
a "significantcorrectionof the received historyof modern art."29What history
was correctedhere, and in the name of what present?What would be the stake,
forexample, if MOMA had presented a show of the modern encounter with
mass-culturalproductsratherthan tribalobjects? Could it map such a toposand
not violate its formal-historicist
premises? Could the museum absorb art that
modernist
official
paradigms as well as institutionalmedia apparachallenges
tuses as it incorporatedprimitivistart? More important,did MOMA in fact
pose a new model of modernismhere, one based not on transformationwithin
but on transgressionwithout- an engagementwithan outside (tribaltraditions,
popular cultures) that mightdisrupt the order of Western art and thought?
The conflictedrelationof"Primitivism"to the modern and the presentwas
evident in its contradictorypoint of view. At once immanentand transcendent,
the show both rehearsed the modern recepand demystificatory,
mystificatory
between the two "from
tion of the tribal"fromthe inside"and posited an affinity
above." It reproduced some modern (mis)readings (e.g., the formal,oneiric,
"magical"), exposed others(e.g., the expressionist),only to impose ones of its
See Levi-Strauss, "Race and History," in Structural
27.
Anthropology
(Vol. 2), trans. Monique
Layton, Chicago, Universityof Chicago Press, 1976, p. 329.
"The historical-transcendentalrecourse: an attemptto find,beyond all historicalmanifes28.
tation and historical origin, a primary foundation, the opening of an inexhaustible horizon, a
plan which would move backward in time in relation to every event, and which would maintain
throughouthistorythe constantlyunwinding plan of an unending unity"(Michel Foucault, "History, Discourse, and Discontinuity,"Salmagundi20 [Summer/Fall 1972], p. 227).
29.
Rubin, "Introduction,"p. 71. The exclusion of neo-expressionismfromthe contemporary
section of the show appears almost as a disavowal of one of its subtexts. The work in this section,
though not traditionalin medium, is so in the way it fashions"theprimitive"as an ahistoricalprocess or as a primitivisticlook.
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37.
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The "Primitive"
ofModernArt
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Unconscious
The "Primitive"
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"itis because
produced anthropologists,"Levi-Strauss writesin TristesTropiques,
it was tormentedby remorse."45Certainly primitivismis touched by this remorse, too; as the "elevation"of the artifactto art, of the tribalto humanity,it
is a compensatoryform.It is not simplythatthiscompensation is false,thatthe
artifactis evacuated even as it is elevated (the ritualworkbecome an exhibition
form,the ambivalent object reduced to commodityequivalence), thatfinallyno
white skin fond of black masks can ever recompense the colonialist subjection
detailed in Fanon's BlackSkin WhiteMasks. To value as art what is now a ruin;
to locate what one lacks in what one has destroyed:more is at work here than
compensation. Like fetishism,primitivismis a systemof multiple beliefs; an
imaginary resolution of a real contradiction:46 a repression of the fact that a
breakthroughin our art, indeed a regenerationof our culture, is based in part
on the breakup and decay of othersocieties,thatthe modernistdiscoveryof the
primitiveis not only in part itsoblivionbut itsdeath. And the finalcontradiction
or aporia is this: no anthropologicalremorse,aestheticelevation, or redemptive
exhibitioncan corrector compensate this loss becausetheyareall implicated
in it.
Primitivism,then, not only absorbs the potential disruptionof the tribal
objects into Western forms,ideas, and commodities, it also symptomatically
manages the ideological nightmareof a great art inspired by spoils. More, as
an artisticcoup founded on militaryconquest, primitivismcamouflages this
historicalevent, disguises the problem of imperialismin termsof art, affinity,
dialogue, to the point (the point of the MOMA show) where the problem appears "resolved."
A counterdiscourseto primitivismis posed differently
at different
moments:
the destructionof racial or evolutionist myths, the critique of functionalist
models of the primitivesocius, the questioning of constructsof the tribal, and
so forth.Levi-Strauss has argued most publiclyagainst these models and myths
in a culturalistreading that the "savage mind" is equally complex as the Western, that primitivesociety is indeed based on a nature/cultureoppositionjust
as our own is. Other ethnologistslike Marshall Sahlins and Pierre Clastres
have also countered the negative conception of the primitiveas a people without god, law, or language. Where Levi-Strauss argues thatthe primitivesocius
is not withouthistorybut thinksit as form,Sahlins writesthatpaleolithichunters and gatherers,far froma subsistence society,constitutethe "firstaffluent"
one, and Clastres (a studentof Levi-Strauss) contended that the lack of a state
in the primitivesocius is a sign not of a prehistoricalstatus,as it may be thought
45.
Livi-Strauss, TristesTropiques,trans.J. and D. Weightman, New York, Atheneum, 1978,
p. 389.
46.
This definitionof art (see note 7) was developed by Levi-Strauss in relation to a tribal
form,Caduveo face painting; see TristesTropiques,pp. 196-197.
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in a Western teleology,but of an active exorcismof externalforceor hierarchical power: a societynot withoutbut againstthe state.47
Such a theoreticaldisplacement is not simplyan event internalto ethnolit
ogy: is partlyincitedby anticolonial movementsofthe postwarperiod and by
thirdworld resistance in our own; and it is partlyaffirmedby a politicization
of otherdisciplines. For ifprimitivismis denial of difference,then the countermeasure is precisely its insistence,"opening the culture to experiences of the
Other," as Edward Said writes,"therecoveryof a historyhithertoeithermisrepresentedor renderedinvisible."48Finally,no doubt, a counterdiscoursecan only
come througha countermemory,an account ofthemodern/primitive
encounter
fromthe "other"side.49But lest thisrecoveryof the otherbe a recuperationinto
a Western narrative,a political genealogy of primitivismis also necessary,one
which would trace the affiliationsbetween primitivistart and colonial practice.
It is preciselythisgenealogythatthe MOMA show does not (cannot?) attempt;
indeed, the issue of colonialism, when raised at all, was raised in colonialist
terms, as a question of the accessibilityof certain tribal objects in the West.
As fora culturalcounterpractice,one is suggestedby the "primitive"operand by the surrealistreception of the primitiveas a rupture.
ation of bricolage
the
dissident
surrealists(Bataille chief among them) present, if not a
Indeed,
as
"counterprimitivism" such, then at least a model of how the othernessof the
primitivemightbe thoughtdisruptively,not recuperated abstractly.It is well
known that several ofthese surrealists,some ofwhom were amateur anthropologists,were not as oblivious as mostfauvesand cubiststo the contextsand codes
of the primitive,that some politicized ratherthan aestheticizedthe primitivistimperialistconnection (in 1931, Aragon and others organized an anticolonial
exhibitionto counterthe officialExpositioncolonialein the new Musee des Colonies). And when these "ethnographicsurrealists"did aestheticize, it tended to
be in the interestsof"culturalimpuritiesand disturbingsyncretisms."Which is
formbut its bricoli
to say that theyprized in the tribal object not its raisonnable
but
its
not
its
mediatory possibilities
transgressivevalue. In
heterogeneity,
short,the primitiveappeared less as a solution to Western aestheticproblems
47.
See, in general, Marshall Sahlins, Cultureand PracticalReason,Chicago, Universityof ChiAgainsttheState,trans. Robert Hurley, New York,
cago Press, 1976; and Pierre Clastres, Society
Urizen Books, 1974.
48.
Edward W. Said, "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community," in TheAntied. Hal Foster, Port Townsend (WA), Bay Press, 1983, p. 158.
Aesthetic,
49.
As for a Western text that involves this "other"account, an example is provided by the
Jean Rouch filmLes MaitresFous, a documentary of the trauma of imperialistsubjection ritually
worked throughby an Africantribe. In a trance the tribesmenare one by one "possessed" by the
white colonial figures,the Crazy Masters--an exorcism that inverts the one in the Demoiselles.
Here, though, the image of the other is used to purge the other, and the objectificationis reversed: it is the white man who appears as the other, the savage, the grotesque. At the end the
tribesmen returnto the colonial city and once again assume subject-positions- in the army, in
road crews, in the "native population."
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Unconscious
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than as a disruptionof Western solutions. Rather than seek to masterthe primitive-or, alternatively,to fetishizeits differenceinto opposition or identitythese primitivistswelcomed "the unclassified,unsought Other."o50
It is most likelyexcessive (and worse, dualistic!) to oppose these two readings of the primitive- the one concernedto incorporatethe primitive,the other
eager to transgresswith it- and to extrapolatethe latterinto a counterpractice
to the former.(Again, such a counterpracticeis not forthe West to supply.)
However, bricolage-which Levi-Strauss, influencedby the surrealists,did after
all defineas a "primitive"mode - is today posed in the Third World (and in its
name) as such a resistantoperation, by which the othermightappropriatethe
formsof the modern capitalist West and fragmentthem with indigenous ones
in a reflexive,critical montage of syntheticcontradictions.51Such bricolage
might in turn reveal that Western culture is hardly the integral"engineered"
whole that it seems to be but that it too is bricold
(indeed, Derrida has deconstructedthe Levi-Strauss opposition bricoleur/engineer
to the effectthat the latter is the product, the mythof the former).52
One tactical problem is that bricolage,
as the inversionof the appropriative
abstractionof primitivism,might seem retroactivelyto excuse it. Indeed, the
famous Levi-Strauss formulaforbricolage
is uncannilyclose to the Barthes definition of appropriation(or "myth"). In his definition(1962) Levi-Strauss cites
Franz Boas on mythical systems: "'It would seem that mythologicalworlds
have been built up, only to be shatteredagain, and that new worlds were built
fromthe fragments'"; and adds: "In the continual reconstructionfromthe same
materials, it is always earlier ends which are called upon to play the part of
means: the signifiedchanges into the signifyingand vice versa."53 Compare
Barthes on myth(1957): "It is constructedfroma semiological chain which existed beforeit: it is a second-order
semiological
system.That which is a sign . . . in
the firstsystembecomes a mere signifierin the second."54The differenceis that
is a process of texmythis a one-way appropriation, an act of power; bricolage
50.
Clifford,"On Ethnographic Surrealism," p. 564.
This strategywas posed by Abdellah Hammoudi at the symposium (Nov. 3-4,
51.
1984) held
at MOMA in conjunction with the show.
52. Jacques Derrida, "Structure,Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in
trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978, p. 285. In
Writingand Difference,
Of Grammatology
(trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1976, p. 105), Derrida writesof Levi-Strauss: "At once conservingand annulling inherited
conceptual oppositions, this thought, like Saussure's, stands on a borderline: sometimes within
an uncriticizedconceptuality,sometimes puttinga strainon the boundaries, and
workingtoward
deconstruction."
53.
Livi-Strauss, The SavageMind, p. 21.
54.
Roland Barthes, "Myth Today," in Mythologies,
trans. Annette Lavers, New York, Hill and
Wang, 1972, p. 114. In For a CritiqueofthePoliticalEconomyoftheSign (trans. Charles Levin, St.
Louis, Telos Press, 1981, p. 96), Jean Baudrillard writes: "This semiological reduction of the
symbolic propertyconstitutesthe ideological process."
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tual play, of loss and gain: whereas mythabstractsand pretendsto the natural,
cuts up, makes concrete,delightsin the artificial- it knows no identity,
bricolage
stands forno pretenseof presence or universal guise forrelativetruths.Thus, if
it is by a "mythical"reduction of content to formthat the primitivebecomes
primitivist,
by a mythicalabstractionof signifiedintosignifierthatAfricanritual
objects, customs,peoplebecome "Africanity"-ifit is by myththatone arrivesat
and universality- then bricolage
may well constitutea counterpractice.
affinity
For in bricolage
not only may the primitivesignifiedbe reclaimed but the Western signifiedmay be mythifiedin turn, which is to say that primitivism(the
mythsof the African,the Oceanic, that stillcirculate among us) may possibly
be deconstructedand other models of interculturalexchange posed. However
compromisedby itsappropriationas an artisticdevice in the West (superficially
understood, bricolagehas become the "inspiration"of much primitivistart),
remains a strategicpractice, forjust as the concept of mythdemystifies
bricolage
"natural"modes of expressionand "neutral"uses of other-culturalforms,so too
or
deconstructssuch notions as a modern/tribal"affinity"
the device of bricolage
modernist"universality"and such constructsas a fixedprimitive"essence" or a
stable Western "identity."
The OtherIs BecomingtheSame,
theSame Is Becoming
Different
Below, I want brieflyto pose, to collide, two readings of the primitiveencounterwiththe West: thatof its progressiveeclipse in modernhistoryand that
of its disruptivereturn(in displaced form) in contemporarytheory. The first
history,as we have seen, positionsthe primitiveas a moment in the "luminous
spread" of Western reason; the second, a genealogy, traces how the primitive,
is to thinkthese contaken into this order, returnsto disruptit. The difficulty
traryreadings simultaneously,the firstaggressivelyhistoricist,the second historicallyenigmatic.
If the identityof the West is defineddialecticallyby its other, what happens to this identitywhen its limitis crossed, its outside eclipsed? (This eclipse
may not be entirelyhypotheticalgiven a multinationalcapitalism that seems to
know no limits,to destructureall oppositions,to occupy its fieldall but totally.)
One effectis that the logic thatthinksthe primitivein termsof opposition or as
an outside is threatened(as Derrida noted in the work of LUvi-Straussor as
Foucault came to see within his own thought, such structuralterms can no
longerbe supportedeven as methodologicaldevices).55In the second narrative,
55. See Derrida,"Structure,
Sign,and Play,"and Foucault,"History,Discourse,and DisconofFrenchdeconstrucFredericJamesonhas suggestedin thisregardthatone "referent"
tinuity."
ed. Victor
tionmaywellbe Americancapital.See his"Pleasure:A PoliticalIssue,"in Formations,
Burgin,et al., London, Routledge& Kegan Paul, 1983.
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63.
Foucault, "A Preface to Transgression," in Language,Counter-Memory,
Practice,ed. Donald F.
Bouchard, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 50.
64.
Ibid., p. 31.
65.
The phrase is Robert Smithson's; see The Writings
ed. Nancy Holt, New
ofRobertSmithson,
York, New York University Press, 1979, p. 216.
66.
Derrida, "Structure,Sign, and Play," p. 280.
67.
Foucault, The Orderof Things,New York, Vintage Books, 1970. p. 238.
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truth,when the unconscious and the otherare penetrated- integratedintoreason, colonized by capital, commodifiedby mass culture?
Tellingly, it was in the '30s and '40s, afterthe high stage of imperialism
and before the anticolonial wars of liberation, that the discourse of the other
was most thoroughlytheorized-by Lacan, of course, and Livi-Strauss (who,
in TristesTropiques,
pondered "theethnologicalequivalentof themirrorstage")68
but also by Sartre, who argued that the otherwas necessaryto the "fusion"of
any group, and Adorno and Horkheimer,who elaborated the role of otherness
in Nazism. I mentionthese latterhere to suggestthat, howeverdecenteredby
the other,the (Western) subject continuesto encroach mercilesslyupon it. Indeed by 1962 (when Levi-Strauss wrote that "there are still zones in which
savage thought,like savage species, is relativelyprotected"),69Paul Ricoeur
could foreseea "universalworldcivilization."To Ricoeur, thismomentwas less
one of the imperialist"shockof conquest and domination"than one ofthe shock
of disorientation:forthe othera momentwhen, withthe wars of liberation,the
68. CatherineClement,TheLivesandLegends
ofJacquesLacan,trans.ArthurGoldhammer,
New York,ColumbiaUniversity
Press,1983,p. 76.
69. L vi-Strauss,TheSavageMind,p. 219.
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Unconscious
The "Primitive"
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69
70.
Paul Ricoeur, "Universal Civilization and National Cultures," in Historyand Truth,trans.
Charles A. Kelbley, Evanston, NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1965, p. 278. Also see Frederic
Jameson, "Periodizing the Sixties," in The SixtiesWithout
Apology,ed. Sayres, Stephanson, et al.,
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp. 186-188.
71.
See JilrgenHabermas, "Modernity--An Incomplete Project,"in TheAnti-Aesthetic,
pp. 3-15.
72.
Baudrillard, "The Beaubourg Effect,"trans. Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson,
October,no. 20 (Spring 1982), p. 10.
73.
Ricoeur, p. 278. What clearer sign of this implosion-when mankind is treated as a museum of the West - can therebe than the "Primitivism"show? If the "universality"of the Enlightenment positioned the West in a transcendental relation to the primitive,then the "globality"of
multinationalcapital (as representedby Philip Morris) may put us in a transcendentalrelation to
our own modernity.
74.
See Baudrillard, For a CritiqueofthePoliticalEconomyoftheSign, passim; Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus,trans. Hurley, Seem, and Lane, New York, Viking Press, 1977,
pp. 139-271; Barthes, The EmpireofSigns,trans. Richard Howard, New York, Hill and Wang,
1982, pp. 3-4; and Derrida, Of Grammatology,
pp. 77-93.
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