art since 1900 modernism

antimodernism
postmodernism

with 637 illustrations, 413 in color

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

Thames & Hudson

 ntroductions

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

he last hundred years or so have witnessed several

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

14
 D.
sychoanalysis in modernism and as method
1 H a n n a h H o c h , The Sweet One, From an
Ethnographic Museum, c. 1926
- r-.-.onon-.age w i t r wate'CO'O', 30 x 1 5.5 i1
' 5 c c l i a g e o n e of a series t h a : c o T C m e s 'oancl
::" ' : c g'"chs of tribal sculpture and m c d e r n .vomen
'"^ -l" p:i3y3 o n associations at w o r k in psyctioana:ytic
and moaermst a ' l : ideas of "tf':e c r i n i t i v e " and the
' . . 2 . of racial o : r e r s a n s u n c o n s c i o u s desires. Sne
o fs fnese associations to suggest t i e p o w e r O'f "tne
's. ' . ' . o T a r . " but sf"e aisc s e e n s t o m o c k ;fiem
" ..c tne m a g e s , d e c o r s t ' u c t i n g a n d reconstrLCfing
exposing if-iem as c o n s t r u c t i o n s .
sychoanalysis was developed by Sigmund Freud (1856-
Z) 1939) and his followers as a "science of the unconscious" in
the early years of the twentieth centur)^ at the same time that
modernist art came into its own. As with the other interpretative
methods presented in these introductions, psychoanalysis thus
shares its historical ground with modernist art and intersects with it
in various ways throughout the twentieth century. First, artists have
dra^Mi directly on psychoanalysissometimes to explore its ideas
visually, as often in Surrealism in the twenties and thirties, and
sometimes to critique them theoretically and politically, as often in
A feminism in the seventies and eighties. Second, psychoanalysis and
modernist art share several interestsa fascination with origins,
with dreams and fantasies, with "the primitive," the child, and the
insane, and, more recently, with the workings of subjectivitv' and
sexuality^ to name only a few f 1 ]. Third, many psychoanalytic terms
have entered the basic vocabular)' of twentieth-century- art and crit-
icism (e.g., repression, sublimation, fetishism, the gaze). Here I will
focus on historical connections and methodological applications,
and, when appropriate, I will key them, along with critical terms, to
entries in which they are discussed.
Historical c o n n e c t i o n s w i t h art
Psychoanalysis emerged in the Vienna of artists such as Gustav
Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka, during the decline of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire. With the secession of such artists
from the Art Academy, this was a time of Oedipal revolt in
advanced art, with subjective experiments in pictorial expression
that drew on regressive dreams and erotic fantasies. Bourgeois
Vienna did not usually tolerate these experiments, for they
suggested a crisis in the stability of the ego and its social institu-
x 3:
tionsa crisis that Freud was p r o m p t e d to analyze as well.
This crisis vs^as hardly specific to Vienna; in terms of its rele-
vance to psychoanalysis, it was perhaps most evident in the
attraction to things "primitive" on the part of modernists in
France and Germany. For some artists this "primitivism" involved
a "going-native" of the sort play-acted by Paul Gauguin in the
lits'-aliy
South Seas. For others it w^as focused on formal revisions of
Western conventions of representation, as undertaken, with the
'30:^ 1922. 19S7. l&34a
P s y c h o a n a l y s i s in m o d e r n i s m a n d as r n e t f i o d | Introduction 1 15
 2 Meret Oppenheim, O/ecf (also called Fur-Lined
Teacup and Dejeuner en fourrure), 1936
To n a h e s '.vorK, Vere: Cc'pennein sh-^d sed =
saucer, arz: spocn Dough: " ^a'ls w l h t'-e 'ur ct
a Ch nsse ga^ei s, VI xing &ttrac:ic:n a-'d reculs on,
2 S' agreeable is jirtesserit ally S^"ealis:. ' c i1
adapts the device of the touna f i i n g to s x c l c e t'-e icea
c1 tet.sh," '.vhicri osj'chcana ysis understands as an
urnli'^eiv Ol: e c -^vssIbs a powe-tjl desire oive-tec
IrC'T: Its prcpe- a m . ^-ere art aopreciat on 3 rio longer
a na:ter o ' d sm-.e'ested :ea'. TS orop'iely: i: s cc dly
."terrupiec: thr^ug"" a s n u l t y allusio'" to ' e n a l e c8-itali8
fnat lorces us to ttiink about "he -ei^tio" cet'.veen
aesthetics and e'otics
3 Andre Masson, Figure, 1927
Oil B-:d sand, 46 x 33 r 6 ' - x 13;
;n : r e Surrea practice of "autonat c wrr.ng." :-e author,
'eleasea TCT 'a: cnal cont-o , "ICCA dictation" 'ROTI h s or
ne' unconscious. Andre Vasson s use of strange rnatenals
and gestura rrarks. sometin^es airiest Cisso v ng tne
distincdon betiveen :he t g j r e and ttis grounc, suggestec
one me-.hod :o pu's^e "psychic a^^torratisn-i/^ opening up
painting to new exclora"ions not only o ' t n e unconscious
but also of t o r n a'^d its opoos te.
16 I n t r o d u c t i o n 1 | Psychoanalysis in m o d e r n i s m and as m e t h o d
3
^
A aid of African objects, by Pablo Picasso a n d H e n r i Matisse in Paris.
Yet almost all m o d e r n i s t s projected o n t o tribal peoples a purity of
artistic vision that was associated with the simplicity of instinctual
life. This projection is the primitivist fantasy par excellence and
psychoanalysis participated in it t h e n even as it provides ways to
question it now. {For example, Freud saw tribal peoples as
s o m e h o w fixed in p r e - O e d i p a l o r infantile stages.)
Strange t h o u g h it m a y seem today, for s o m e modernists an
interest in tribal objects shaded into involvement with the art of
children and of the insane. In this regard. Artistry of the Mentally III
(Bildnerei der Geisteskranken), a collection of works by psychotics
presented in 1922 by H a n s P r i n z h o r n (1886^1933), a G e r m a n
psychiatrist trained in psychoanalysis a n d art h i s t o n ' alike, was
of special i m p o r t a n c e to such artists as Paul Kiee, M a x Ernst, a n d
lean D u b u f f e t . Most of these m o d e r n i s t s (mis)read the art of the
insane as t h o u g h it were a secret part of the primitivist avant-garde,
directly expressive of the u n c o n s c i o u s a n d boldly defiant of all
convention. H e r e psychoanalysts developed a m o r e complicated
u n d e r s t a n d i n g of paranoid representations as projections of
desperate order, a n d of schizophrenic images as symptoms
of radical self-dislocation. And yet such readings also have parallels
in m o d e r n i s t art.
An i m p o r t a n t line of connection r u n s f r o m the art of the insane,
t h r o u g h the early collages of Ernst, to the definition of SurreaUsm as
a disruptive "juxtaposition of two m o r e or less disparate realities," as
presented by its leader A n d r e Breton [2], Psychoanalysis influenced
Surrealism in its conceptions of the image as a kind of dream, under-
stood by Freud as a distorted writing-in-pictures of a displaced wish,
and of the object as a sort of s\Tnptom, understood by Freud as a
bodih' expression of a conflicted desire; but there are several other
affinities as well. A m o n g the first to study Freud, the Surrealists
attempted to simulate the effects of madness in automatic v^riting
and art alike [3]. In his first "Manifesto of Surrealism" (1924), Breton
described Surrealism as a "psychic a u t o m a t i s m , " a liberatory
inscription of unconscious impulses "in the absence of any control
l&as 190r '922 1924 IS^Ob '9420
< Karel Appe\, A Figure, 1953 exercised by reason." Yet right here emerges a problem that has
Oil and CD Dred c a v c n s c " oaper. 6 - , 5 x 25
dogged the relation between psychoanalysis and art ever since: either

After W o r e vVs' I s" "'.srest :",s unccnscio.-s oe'S

the connection between psyche and art \\ ork is posited as too direct
among arfi&ts such 35 the D..tch painTe-- Ka'el Appel, a or immediate, with the result that the specihcity of the work is lost,
member of Cob'-a :an c C o - v t for the r o n e oases
or as too conscious or calculated, as t h o u g h the psyche could simply
groupCooennsgs'". B'usssls. Amsterdani, a* Thg s a r e
time fne quest or of the osyche v,as refra-red cy :"-e
be illustrated by the work. (The other m e t h o d s in this introduction
horrors of the death c a r c s a ' d :r-e atomi-; bcmos. face related problems of mediation a n d questions of causation-,
Like other groups. Coors c&ne to reject t'^e Freudian
indeed, they vex all art criticism and histon^) Although Freud knew
unconscious exp orsd cv t'^e Su-rsa' s:s as too
individualistic; as cart cf a gere^ai tu-n :o tns ncTicn little of modernist art (his taste was conser\^ative, a n d his collection
a "collective u " c o " s c o - s " cevelcoed by Ca-I J ^ - g . r s y ran to ancient and Asian figurines), he knew enough to be suspicious
explored fcie-r c -'c^res. T y t n c subjects, anc
of both tendencies. In his view, the unconscious was not libera-
collaborative orajects 1 ar often a-guished searc". ^^ot
onlv for a "ns'.v n a r " b^t ' c a rev.- society. t o n ' o n the contrary-and to propose an art free of repression, or
at least convention, was to risk psychopathology, or to pretend to d o
so in the n a m e of a psychoanalytic art (this is why he once called the
Surrealists "absolute cranks").
Nevertheless, by the early thirties the association of s o m e m o d -
ernist art with "primitives," children, a n d the insane was set, as was
its affinity \snth psychoanalysis. At this time, however, these con-
nections played into the hands of the enemies of this art, most
catastrophicaUy the Nazis, w h o in 1937 moved to rid the world
A of such "degenerate" abominations, which they also c o n d e m n e d
as "lewish" a n d "Bolshevik." Of course, Nazism was a horrific
regression of its OWTI, and it cast a pall over explorations of the
unconscious well after W o r l d War II. Varieties of Surrealism
lingered on in the postwar period, however, a n d an interest in the
u n c o n s c i o u s persisted a m o n g artists associated with art informeU
Abstract Expressionism, and Cobra [4]. Yet, rather than the diffi-
cult m e c h a n i s m s of the individual psyche explored by Freud, the
focus fell on the redemptive archetypes of a "collective u n c o n -
scious" imagined by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961), a n
old apostate of psychoanalysis. (For example, lackson Pollock was
involved in Jungian analysis in ways that affected his painting.)
Partly in reaction against the subjective rhetoric of Abstract
Expressionism, m u c h art of the sixties was staunchly antipsycho-
logical, c o n c e r n e d instead with r e a d y - m a d e cultural images, as in
P o p art, or given geometric forms, as in Minimalism. At the same
time, in the involvement of Minimalist, Process a n d P e r f o r m a n c e
art with p h e n o m e n o l o g y there was a reopening to the bodily
subject that p r e p a r e d a reopening to the psychological subject in
feminist art. This engagement was ambivalent, however, for even
as feminists used psychoanalysis, they did so m o s d y in the register
of critique, "as a w e a p o n " (in the battle cry of filmmaker Laura
MulveyO directed at the patriarchal ideology that also riddled psy-
choanalysis. For Freud h a d associated femininity with passivity,
a n d in his f a m o u s account of the O e d i p u s complex, a tangle of rela-
tions in which the little b o y is said to desire the m o t h e r until
threatened by the father, there is n o parallel d e n o u e m e n t for the
little girl, as if in his scheme of things w o m e n c a n n o t attain full sub-
jecthood. A n d lacques Lacan (1901-81), the French psychoanalyst
w h o p r o p o s e d a n influential reading of Freud, identified w^oman as
such with the lack represented by castration. Nonetheless, for
m a n y feminists Freud a n d Lacan provided the m o s t telling a c c o u n t
1 1946. -.9471:. -949, 960:. 'S^'-cv "965 '963, "974. 1975

Psychoanalysis in m o d e r n i s m and as m e t h o d | I n t r o d u c t i o n 1 17
 5 Barbara Kruger, Your Gaze Hits the Side of of" the formation of the subject in the social order. If there is no
My Face, 1961
natural femininity, these feminists argued, then there is also no
Fhotcc-api-c s l k s c e s ' " or v v , 1 39.7 v ^ C4 1 i55 x 4"
natural patriarchyonly a historical culture fitted to the psychic
Fsychoaralys s "siosd s o T e 'eninisi in the s'gl"i:;es structure, the desires and the fears, of the heterosexual male, and so
:o c tique ooi'.'er st-jctures "ot cn y in h gh grt b'-t in rriass
culture too: par: c j l a r attertior was o'a-.vn tc how irracss
vulnerable to feminist critique [5, 61. Indeed, some feminists have
" octn sp'^eres a^e structured -'c a ma e hetercsex^^a' insisted that the very marginality- of women to the social order, as
3pec:atc'sn 0for a "nale gaze" empoi'/ersd w fh T e mapped by psychoanalysis, positions them as its most radical
p easures c' looking, .vitn womsn ncstly figu'lng as
passive objects of this ook. In he-" oiecss cf tns oe-'^oc.'thc
critics. By the nineties this critique was extended by gay and lesbian
Atie-ican a'fisf Barbara Kruge'juxtaposed aop'opna:sd artists and critics concerned to expose the psychic workings of
Tiages and cnticai phrases :sonetirres suovertec cliches)
homophobia, as well by postcolonial practitioners concerned to
- o'der to ques+ on this oc;ectif cation. :o w e l c c r e
vvomen irto the place of specta:orship, and to open j p A mark the racialist projection of cultural others.
space for o f i S ' kinds of .mage-mak - g anc v ewing.

Approaches alternative to Freud

O n e can critique Freud and Lacan, of course, and still remain

within the orbit of psychoanalysis. Artists and critics have had
affinities with other schools, especially the "object-relations"
psychoanalysis associated with Melanie Klein (1882-1960) and
D. W. Winnicott (1896-1971) in England, which influenced such
aestheticians as Adrian Stokes (1902-72) and Anton Ehrenzweig
(1909-66) and, indirectly, the reception of such artists as Henrys
M o o r e and Barbara Hepworth. Where Freud saw pre-Oedipal
stages (oral, anal, phallic, genital) that the child passes through,
Klein saw positions that remain open into adult life. In her account
these positions are dominated by the original fantasies of the child,
involving violent aggression toward the parents as well as 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 from questions of sexual desire in relation to
the social order, tow-ard concerns with bodily drives in relation to
life and death. After the moratorium on images of women in some
feminist art of the seventies and eighties, Kleinian notions 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
Julia Kristeva (born 1941). Of course, social factorsthe AIDS
epidemic above allalso drove this per\'asive aesthetic of m o u r n -
ing and melancholy. In the present, psychoanalysis remains a
resource in art criticism and histor>', but its role in artmaking is far
from clear.

Levels of Freudian criticism

Psychoanalysis emerged out of clinical work, out of the analysis of

symptoms of actual patients (there is much controversy about how
Freud manipulated this material, which included his OWTI dreams),
and its use in the interpretation of art carries the strengths as well as
the weaknesses of this source. There is first the basic question of who
or what is to occupy the position of the patientthe work, the artist,
the viewer, the critic, or some combination or relay of all these. Then
A 13S9 1393c

18 I n t r o d u c t i o n 1 | Psychoanalysis in m o d e r n i s m and as m e t h o d

6 Lynda Benglis, Untitled, 1974 (detail)
[-ictogr-apr-, 25 >: 26.5 x If sTOibohc readings a n d psychobiographical accounts can be
" " 0 ' i e of femir s n m the sixt es and seventies, some
; .-.'tscKed pa:r a'chal h erarc^nes "ot cniy ir socsty
" I -'al b j t in the a'f warld in par: oula-: psychcanaiysis
" as both wsapcnbecause i: offered p'otound
' in:n the re aticn bet'.veen sexuali-y ana
-Jl: = :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 fin^e. sr^e seizec "t^e
- ir a /vay that b o T litera zed ts assooaticn wit-"
I joe and pc.ver and paroc ed it.
there arises the complicated issue of the different levels of a Freudian
interpretation of art, which I will here reduce to three: SNinbolic
readings, accounts of process, and analogies in rhetoric.
Early a t t e m p t s in Freudian criticism were governed by symbolic
readings of the art work, as if it were a d r e a m to be decoded in
t e r m s of a latent message hidden b e h i n d a manifest content: "This
is not a pipe; it is really a penis." This sort of criticism c o m p l e m e n t s
the kind of art that translates a dream or a fantasy in pictorial
terms: art then becomes the encoding of a riddle a n d criticism its
decoding, a n d the whole exercise is illustrational a n d circular.
Although Freud was quick to stress that cigars are often just cigars,
he too practiced this kind of deciphering, which fits in all too well
with the traditional m e t h o d of art histor)' known as "iconogra-
p h y " a reading back of symbols in a picture to sources in other
kinds of textsa m e t h o d that most m o d e r n i s t art worked to foil
(through abstraction, techniques of chance, a n d so o n ) . In this
regard, the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg has d e m o n s t r a t e d an
epistemological affinit)- between psychoanalysis and art histor)'
based in connoisseurship. For both discourses (which developed,
in m o d e r n f o r m , at roughly the same time) are concerned with the
s y m p t o m a t i c trait or the telling detail (an idiosyncratic gesture of
the hands, say) that might reveal, in psychoanalysis, a h i d d e n con-
flict in the patient and, in connoisseurship, the p r o p e r attribution
of the w o r k to an artist.
In such readings the artist is the ultimate source to which the
symbols point: the work is taken as his s y m p t o m a t i c expression,
and it is used as such in the analysis. T h u s in his 1910 study
Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childlwod, Freud leads us
f r o m the enigmatic smiles of his Mona Lisa a n d Virgin Mark's to
posit in the artist a m e m o r \ ' regarding his long-lost m o t h e r . In this
way Freud and his followers looked for signs of psychic distur-
bances in art (his predecessor l e a n - M a r t i n Charcot did the same).
This is not to say that Freud sees the artist as psychopathological;
in fact he implies that art is o n e way to avoid this condition. "Art
frees the artist f r o m his fantasies," the French philosopher Sarah
K o f m a n c o m m e n t s , "just as 'artistic creation' circumvents n e u r o -
sis and takes the place of psychoanalytic treatment." But it is true
that such Freudian criticism tends to "psychobiography," that is, to
a profiling of the artist in which art history is remodeled as psycho-
anaKtic case study.
reductive, this danger m a y be mitigated if we attend to other
aspects of Freud. For m o s t of the time Freud u n d e r s t a n d s the sign
less as symbolic, in the sense of directly expressive of a self, a
meaning, or a realit)', than as s y m p t o m a t i c , a kind of allegorical
e m b l e m in which desire and repression are intertwined. Moreover,
he does not see art as a simple revision of preexisting m e m o r i e s or
fantasies; apart f r o m other things, it can also be, as K o f m a n sug-
gests, an " o r i g i n a r y ' s u b s t i t u t e ' " for such scenes, t h r o u g h which we
c o m e to k n o w t h e m / o r the first tirne{\.h\s is what Freud a t t e m p t s in
his L e o n a r d o study). Finally, psychobiography is put into p r o d u c -
tive d o u b t by the very fact that the p s y c h o a n a h t i c account of the
Psychoanalysis in m o d e r n i s m and as rnetfiod | I n t r o d u c t i o n 1 7
 unconscious, of its disruptive effects, puts all intentionalityall
authorship, all b i o g r a p h y i n t o productive d o u b t too.
Freudian criticism is not only concerned with a symbolic decod-
ing of hidden meanings, with the semantics of the psvche. Less
obviously, it is also involved with the dynamics of these processes,
\vith an understanding of the sexual energies and unconscious forces
that operate in the making as well as the ^iewing of art. O n this
second level of psychoanalytic interpretation, Freud revises the old
philosophical concept of "aesthetic play" in terms of his.owTi notion
of "the pleasure principle," which he defined, in "Two Principles of
Mental Functioning" (1911 ),in opposition t o " t h e r e a l i t t p r i n c i p l e " :
The artist is originally a man [sicj who turns from
because he cannot come to terms with the demand for the renun-
ciation of instinctual satisfaction as it is first made, and
then in phantasy-life allows full play to his erotic and
wishes. But he finds a way of return from this world
back to reality; with his special gifts he moulds his
into a new kind of reality, and men concede them a
as valuable reflections of actual life. Thus by a certain path he
actually becomes the hero, king, creator, favorite he desired to be,
without pursuing the circuitous path of creating real
in the outer world. But this he can only attain because other men
feel the same dissatisfaction as he with the
demanded by reality, and because this dissatisfaction,
from the displacement of the pleasure-principle by the reality-
principle, is itself a part of reality.
T h r e e years before, in "Creative Writers and D a y - D r e a m i n g "
(1908), Freud h a d speculated on h o w the artist overcomes o u r
resistance to this p e r f o r m a n c e , which we might otherwise deem
solipsistic, if not simply inappropriate:
[HJe bribes us by the purely formalthat is, aestheticyield
pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his
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
sources.... [Ojur actual enjoyment of an imaginative
ceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds.
Let us review s o m e of the (pre)conceptions in these statements.
First, the artist avoids some of the " r e n u n c i a t i o n s " that the rest of
us must accept, a n d indulges in s o m e of the fantasies that we m u s t
forgo. But we d o not resent him for this e x e m p t i o n for three
reasons: his fictions reflect realitN' nonetheless^ they are b o r n of the
same dissatisfactions that we feel; and we are bribed by the pleasure
that we take in the resolution of the f o r m a l tensions of the work, a
pleasure that o p e n s us to a deeper sort of pleasurein the resolu-
tion of the psychic tensions within us. N o t e that for Freud art A " m e t o n y t n y . " N o analogy in rhetoric, therefore, would seem to
originates in a t u r n f r o m reality, which is to say that it is f u n d a m e n - bridge the categorical divide between psychoanalysis a n d art.
tally conservative in relation to the social order, a small aesthetic
c o m p e n s a t i o n for o u r mighty instinctual r e n u n c i a t i o n . Perhaps
this is a n o t h e r reason why he was suspicious of m o d e r n i s t art, con-
20 I n t r o d u c t i o n 1 | Psychoanalysis in m o d e r n i s m and as m e t h o d
cerned as m u c h of it is not to "sublimate" instinctual energies, to
divert t h e m f r o m sexual aims into cultural forms, but to go in the
opposite direction, to "desublimate" cultural forms, to open them
up to these disruptive forces.
Dreams and fantasies
While the semantics of symbolic interpretation can be too particu-
lar, this concern with the dynamics of aesthetic process can be too
general. A third level of Freudian criticism m a y avoid b o t h
extremes: the analy^sis of the rhetoric of the a r t w o r k in analogy with
such %isual productions of the psyche as dreams and fantasies.
reality
Again, Freud u n d e r s t o o d the dream as a c o m p r o m i s e between a
wish a n d its repression. This c o m p r o m i s e is negotiated by the
who
" d r e a m - w o r k , " w^hich disguises the wish, in order to fool further
ambitious
repression, t h r o u g h "condensation" of some of its aspects a n d "dis-
ofphantasy
placement" of others. T h e d r e a m - w o r k then turns the distorted
phantasies
fragments into visual images with an eye to "considerations of rep-
justification
resentability" in a dream, a n d finally revises the images to insure
that they h a n g together as a narrative (this is called "secondary revi-
sion"). This rhetoric of operations might be b r o u g h t to bear on the
alterations
p r o d u c t i o n of some picturesagain, the Surrealists t h o u g h t so
but there are o b \ t o u s dangers with such analogies as well. Even
renunciation
w h e n Freud a n d his followers wrote only about art (or literature),
resultijig
they were concerned to d e m o n s t r a t e points of psychoanalytic
theory first a n d to u n d e r s t a n d objects of arfistic practice second, so
that forced applications are built into the discourse, as it were.
Yet there is a m o r e p r o f o u n d p r o b l e m with analogies dra\STi
between psycho an aly^s is a n d visual art. W i t h his early associate
Josef Breuer (1842-1925) Freud f o u n d e d psychoanalysis as a
"talking cure"^that is, as a t u r n away f r o m the visual theater of his
teacher, the French pathologist a n d neurologist Jean-Martin
of
Charcot (1825-93), w h o staged the s y m p t o m a t i c bodies of female
phantasies.
hysterics in a public display at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris. T h e
technical innovation of psychoanalysis was to attend to sympto-
matic languagenot only of the d r e a m as a f o r m of writing b u t
psychical
also of slips of the tongue, the "free association" of w o r d s by the
work pro-
patient, a n d so on. Moreover, for Freud culture was essentially a
w o r k i n g out of the conflicted desires rooted in the Oedipus
complex, a working out that is primarily narrative, a n d it is not
clear how^ such narrative might play out in static f o r m s like paint-
ing, sculpture, and the rest. These emphases alone render
psychoanalysis ill-suited to questions of visual art. F u r t h e r m o r e ,
the Lacanian reading of Freud is militantly linguistic; its celebrated
a x i o m " t h e unconscious is structured like a l a n g u a g e " m e a n s
that the psychic processes of condensation a n d displacement are
structurally o n e with the Hnguistic tropes of " m e t a p h o r " a n d
And yet, according to both Freud a n d Lacan, the crucial events in
subject f o r m a t i o n are visual scenes. For Freud the ego is first a
bodily image, which, for Lacan in his f a m o u s paper o n "The M i r r o r
A !-i-'ocuclion

7 Lee Miller, Nude Bent Forward, Paris, c. 1931
: 'oanalys s is corcerned v.'th ra^.-Tatic scenes,
I" " actus o ' r a g i r e d , ' h a t marK ".he ch-ilc:
c r ": jnc yscenes /.'^ere -^e 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
"''^i 'leTh century, art sts, such as :h9 S_r'ealists in
"les a - d fh -lies a-'d fer.inists ir the seve'-ties a r a
fric-- 3 crawn en such images a " d sce^a'ios as
- "c trouble assumot ens about seeing, expectatic-s
I" gencer, anc so on. ^^ this p-^otograph by the
VI j a - artist ^ee Ivliller. a someti-rie assoc ate of the
- n s's. i: s -^o: irrmediately c ear ivnaf '.ve see:
" - " - ; A male or a female^ Or some other catsgcry c'
' j maging. a r d feeling?
Stage" (1936/49), the infant initially encounters in a reflection that
allows for a fragile coherence-a \'isual coherence as an image. The
p s y c h o a n a l n i c critic lacqueline Rose also alerts us to the "staging"
of such events as " m o m e n t s in which perception /bufif/er5 ... or in
which pleasure in looking tips over into the register of excess.'^ Her
examples are two traumatic scenes that psychoanalysis posits for the
little boy. In the first scene he discovers sexual differencethat girls
d o not have penises and hence that he m a y lose hisa perception
that " f o u n d e r s " because it implies this grave threat. In the second
scene he ^^'itnesses sexual intercourse between his parents, which
fascinates h i m as a key to the riddle of his own origin. Freud called
these scenes "primal fantasies"primal both because they are fiin-
damental and because they concern origins. As Rose suggests, such
scenes " d e m o n s t r a t e the complexity of an essentially visual space"
in ways that can be "used as theoretical prototy-pes to unsettle o u r
certainties once again"as indeed they were used, to different
ends, in s o m e Surrealist art of the twenties and thirties (71 a n d in
L some feminist art of the seventies and eighties. The i m p o r t a n t p o i n t
to emphasize, though, is this: "Each time the stress falls on a
p r o b l e m of seeing. The sexualit)' lies less in the content of what is
seen than in the subjectivit)- of the viewer." This is where psycho-
analysis has the most to offer the interpretation of art, modernist or
other. Its account of the effects of the work on the subject a n d the
artist as well as on the viewer (including the critic) places the work,
finally, in the position of the analyst as m u c h as the anaK-zed.
In the end we do well to hold to a double focus: to view psycho-
analysis historically, as an object in an ideological field often shared
with modernist art, a n d to apply it theoretically, as a m e t h o d to
understand relevant aspects of this art, to m a p pertinent parts of the
field. This double focus allows us to critique ps)'choanalysis even as
we apply it. First a n d last, however, this project will be compli-
c a t e d n o t only by the difficulties in psychoanalylic speculation,
but also by the controversies that always s^virl a r o u n d it. Some of
the clinical work of Freud a n d others was manipulated, to be sure,
and some of the concepts are b o u n d u p \vith science that is n o
longer validbut do these facts invalidate psychoanalysis as a m o d e
of interpretation of art today? As with the other methods intro-
duced here, the test m U be in the fit a n d the yield of the arguments
that we make. A n d here, as the psychoanalytic critic Leo Bersani
r e m i n d s us, o u r " m o m e n t s of theoretical collapse" may be insepa-
rable f r o m o u r m o m e n t s of "psychoanalytic truth."
-BTHER -EADING
Leo Bersani. The Freudian Booy: ^syc^^oara^ysrs ar Art (Ne/; Yorc Coljmb a versity
=ress. 1336.1
Sigmund Freud, A.-t a.^^d Lite-atu^e. t-ans. James Strachey iLordcn: Pengun, 1 985;
s Sarah Kofman, The Cr'::d.'^DocGfAr: Ar: irrerc'ratatior, o'Fre'^d's Aesthetes, trgrs Wrifrec
V.'oochj I i N e w C c U m b a Lnversity P-ess, 1988.1
Jean Laplancheand J.-B. Pontalis, '''ne Language of P^yci'icar'ai'/sis. "a'^s. Conalc Kicnc'son-
Smitl- 'Msw yc'-s-: \'J. W. Nodc.r- '9:^3;
Jacqueline Rose. Sexi.a'.'fy .'>; thsF'SHd ofV'S^or iLc-dor: Verse, 1 985)
'524. lyjb ' 9 :
Psychoanalysis in m o d e r n i s m and as rnetfiod | Introduction 1 21
 2 The social history of art: models and concepts
ecent histories of art comprise a n u m b e r of distinct critical
models (for example, formalism, structuralist semiotics,
psychoanalysis, social art history', and feminism) that have
been merged and integrated in various ways, in particular in the
work of American and British art historians since the seventies.
This situation sometimes makes it difficult, if not altogether point-
less, to insist on methodological consistency, let alone on a singular
methodological position. The complexity of these various individ-
ual strands and of their integrated forms points firstly to the
problematic nature of any claim that one particular model should
be accepted as exclusively vaUd or as dominant within the interpre-
tative processes of art histor\\ Our attempts to integrate a broad
variety of methodological positions also efface the earlier theoreti-
cal rigor that had previously generated a degree of precision in the
process of historical analysis and interpretation. That precision
now seems to have been lost in an increasingly complex weave of
methodological eclecticism.
The origins of the methodologies
All these models were initially formulated as attempts to displace
earlier humanist (subiective) approaches to criticism and interpre-
tation. They had been motivated by the desire to position the study
of all types of cultural production (such as literature or the fine
arts) on a more solidly scientific basis of method and insight, rather
than have criticism remain dependent on the various more-or-less
subjective approaches of the late nineteenth century, such as the
biographistic, psychologistic, and historicist survey methods.
Just as the early Russian Formalists m a d e Ferdinand de Saus-
sure's linguistic structure the matrix of their own efforts to
understand the formation and functions of cultural representa-
tion, subsequent historians who attempted to interpret works of
art in psychoanalytic terms tried to find a map of artistic subject
formation in the writings of Sigmund Freud. Proponents of both
models argued that they could generate a verifiable understanding
of the processes of aesthetic production and reception, and
promised to anchor the "meaning" of the work of art solidly
in the operations of either the conventions of language and/or
the system of the unconscious, arguing that aesthetic or poetic
-trcjc-i:;'3. 19-5
22 I n t r o d u c t i o n 2 | The social history of art: models a n d c o n c e p t s
meaning operated in a manner analogous to other linguistic
conventions and narrative structures (e.g., the folktale), or, in
terms of the unconscious, as in Freud's and Carl Jung's theories,
analogous to the joke and the dream, the symptom and the trauma.
The social history of art, fi-om its very^ beginning in the first
decades of the twentieth century, had a similar ambition to make the
analysis and interpretation of works of art more rigorous and verifi-
able. Most importantly, the early social historians of art (Marxist
scholars like the Anglo-German Francis Klingender [1907-55] and
the Anglo-Hungarian Frederick Antal [1887-1954]) tried to situate
cultural representation within the existing communication struc-
tures of society, primarily within the field of ideological production
under the rise of industrial capitalism. After all, social art history's
philosophical inspiration was the scientificity^ of Marxism itself,
a philosophy that had aimed from the very beginning not only to
analyze and interpret economic, political, and ideological relations,
but also to make the writing of history itselfits historicity^con-
tribute to the larger project of social and pohtical change.
This critical and analytical project of social art history formu-
lated a n u m b e r of key concepts that I will discuss further: I shall
also try to give their original definitions, as well as subsequent
modifications to these concepts, in order to acknowledge the
increasing complexity of the terminology^ of social art history%
which results partially from the growing differentiation of the
philosophical concepts of Marxist thought itself At the same time,
it may become apparent that some of these key concepts are pre-
sented not because they are important in the early years of the
twenty^-first century, but, rather, because of their obsolescence,
withering away in the present and in the recent past. 1"his is because
the methodological conviction of certain models of analysis has
been just as overdetermined as that of all the other methodological
models that have temporarily governed the interpretation and the
writing of art history at different points in the twentieth century.
Autonomy
>German philosopher and sociologist liirgen Habermas (born
1929) has defined the formation of the bourgeois public sphere in
general and the development of cultural practices within that

1 John Heartfietd, "Hurray, the Butter is Firjished!",
cover for AlZ, December 19,1935
r - :-:;[routage. 36 x 27 i'd'-l x 1
' - C-" Johr Hea-tfieio. alcng w^th r a t of Marcel
t . . " a T o acd El Lissitz^y. deTarcates cne c' d'a t o s *
! . - ' t a n : oaradigir sniffs in epistenc ogy C
n; 9th-century ToderniST. Pengc-ng ohctcmontage
r;cns:rjcting ne^v tex:^a nafatives, i: estab 'Sfied
" inly n c d e l for ar:is:ic p'acrice as s o n r i u m c a f vs
"n in f i e age of TiBSS-c jitura orcpaga-'da. Denounced
^ ^..cn by ttie intrinsically conservative ideologies o*
'-alis'.s a'"d n o d e " " sts defending cosc ete m^odels
-."-cony it adaressec - fact fns fi:StO'cal ne&d for
"" snge audiences anc of ttie forms of c s'.- oution.
I - . soly, i: Eecamis the s-^c^ia'. m^os: mportan:
0' oounte'p'opaganca fhenegemcnic media
i 0* tne t " " l i e s . 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 differentiation that lead to
the historical construction of bourgeois individuality. These
processes guarantee the individual's identity and historical status
as a self-determining a n d self-governing subject. O n e of the neces-
sary- conditions of bourgeois identit)- was the subject's capacity to
experience the a u t o n o m y of the aesthetic, to experience pleasure
w i t h o u t interest.
This concept of aesthetic a u t o n o m y was as integral to the
differentiation of bourgeois subjectivity^ as it was to the differentia-
tion of cultural p r o d u c t i o n according to its p r o p e r technical a n d
procedural characteristics, eventually leading to the modernist
orthodoxy of medium-specificity. Inevitably then, autonomy
ser\'ed as a foundational concept d u r i n g the first five decades of
European m o d e r n i s m . From Theophile Gautier's p r o g r a m of Fart
pour Fart a n d Edouard Manet's conception of painting as a project
of perceptual self-reMexivity, the aesthetics of a u t o n o m y culminate
in the poetics of Stephane Mallarme in the 1880s. Aestheticism c o n -
ceiving the work of art as a purely self-sufficient and self-reflexive
' experienceidentified by Walter Benjamin as a nineteenth-
century theology of artgenerated, in early-twentieth-century
formalist t h o u g h t , similar conceptions that would later b e c o m e the
doxa of painterly self-reflexivity for formalist critics a n d historians.
These ranged fi"om Roger Fry's responses to Postimpressionism
in particular the work of Paul Cezanneto Daniel-Henry
Kahnweiler's neo-Kantian theories of Analytical Cubism, to the
work of Clement Greenberg (1909-94) in the postwar period. Any
a t t e m p t to transform a u t o n o m y into a transhistorical, if not o n t o -
logical precondition of aesthetic experience, however, is p r o f o u n d l y
problematic. It becomes evident u p o n closer historical inspection
that the formation of the concept of aesthetic a u t o n o m y itself was
far f r o m a u t o n o m o u s . This is first of all because the aesthetics of
a u t o n o m y had been determined by the overarching philosophical
f r a m e w o r k of Enlightenment philosophy (Immanuel Kant's
[17241804] concept of disinterestedness) while it simultaneously
operated in opposition to the rigorous instrumentalization of expe-
rience that emerged with the rise of the mercantile capitalist class.
W i t h i n the field of cultural representation, the cult of a u t o n o m y
liberated linguistic and artistic practices f r o m mylhical and reli-
gious t h o u g h t just as m u c h as it emancipated t h e m f r o m the
politically adulatory ser^'ice a n d e c o n o m i c d e p e n d e n c y u n d e r the
auspices of a rigorously controlling feudal patronage. While the
cult of a u t o n o m y might have originated with the e m a n c i p a t i o n of
bourgeois subjectivity- f r o m aristocratic a n d religious hegemony,
a u t o n o m y also saw the theocratic a n d hierarchical structures of
that patronage as having their o w n reality. The m o d e r n i s t aesthetic
of a u t o n o m y thus constituted the social and subjective sphere
f r o m within which an opposition against the totality of interested
activities a n d i n s t r u m e n t a h z e d f o r m s of experience could be artic-
ulated in artistic acts of open negation a n d refusal. Paradoxically^,
however, these acts ser\-ed as opposition a n d i n their ineluctable
condition as extreme exceptions f r o m the universal r u l e t h e y
c o n f i r m e d the regime of total instrumentalization. O n e might have
mr^ 19" 1942= I96t
The social history of art; models and c o n c e p t s | Introduction 2 23

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
nev.'ly indus:r anzed co'lGCtive Especially n The le;'; genre
of exiibition design, which he developed in : r e :>.venties in
wo'ks SL.ch as the Sov et Pavilion 'or T S in:e'na:ional
exh billon Pressa. 1 became evicent tha: L'ssitzky ivas one
of the first land few) artists of the twe'^ties and thirties to
understand tha: ihe spaces of public arc''.itectj''e itnat s,
of simul'areo^s co ective 'ecepfionj and the space of
pLfcl c in'o'n'^aliDn fiac cc apsed in fne r e w scaces of the
mass-culfural spfnere. Tfnerefors Liss-tzky, an e x e n p a^y
"a'tisf-as-proG^cer." as Walter Benjanin /.'culd iden: fy the
a-fisf's " e w social role, wou d si:^ate h s oractice within
t i e very osranneters s-^d modes of croducfio" of a newly
developing p'oletariar oub'ic sohe^'e.
24 I n t r o d u c t i o n 2 | The social history of art: m o d e l s and c o n c e p t s
to formulate the paradox that an aesthetics of a u t o n o m y is thus the
highly instrumentalized form of noninstrumentahzed experience
under liberal bourgeois capitalism.
Actual study of the critical phase of the aesthetic of a u t o n o m y
in the nineteenth century (from Manet to Mallarme) would rec-
ognize that this very paradox is the actual formative structure of
their pictorial and poetic genius. Both define modernist represen-
tation as an advanced f o r m of critical self-reflexivity and define
s
their hermetic artifice in assimilation and in opposition to the
emerging mass-cultural forms of instrumentalized representa-
tion, Typically, the concept of a u t o n o m y was b o t h f o r m e d by a n d
oppositional to the instrumental logic of bourgeois rationality,
rigorously enforcing the requirements of that rationality within
the sphere of cultural production through its c o m m i t m e n t to
empirical criticality. Thereby an aesthetics of a u t o n o m y con-
tributed to one of the most fundamental transformations of the
experience of the work of art, initiating the shift that Walter Ben-
jamin in his essays of the thirties called the historical transition
 f r o m cult-value to exhibition-value. These essays have c o m e to Aas the work of John Heartfield [11) defines its artistic practices as
be universally considered as the f o u n d i n g texts of a philosophical t e m p o r a r y and geopolitically specific (rather than as transhistori-
theon- of the social history' of art.
The concept of a u t o n o m y also ser\'ed to idealize the new distribu-
free-floating utilitarian aesthetic (e.g., in the work of the Soviet Productivists [2]),
tion f o r m of the work of art, n o w that it had become a
commodit}- on the bourgeois market of objects and luxur}' goods. situating the work of art in a social context where it assumes a
Thus a u t o n o m y aesthetics was engendered by the capitalist logic variet)' of productive functions such as i n f o r m a t i o n a n d education
of commodit)' production as m u c h as it opposed that logic. In
fact, the Marxist aesthetician T h e o d o r W. A d o r n o (1903-69) still
maintained in the late sixties that artistic independence and aesthetic
a u t o n o m y could, paradoxically, be guaranteed only in the c o m m o d -
itv structure of the work of art.
Antiaesthetic
Peter Brger ( b o r n 1936), in his i m p o r t a n t a l t h o u g h problem-
aticessay. Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), argued that the new
.spectrum of antiaesthetic practices in 1913 arose as a contestation
of a u t o n o m y aesthetics. T h u s a c c o r d i n g to Brgerthe historical
avant-gardes after Cubism universally attempted to "integrate art
with life" a n d to challenge the a u t o n o m o u s "institution of art."
Brger perceives this pro ject of the antiaesthetic to be at the center
^of the revolts of Dadaism, Russian Constructivism, a n d French
Surrealism. Yet, rather than focusing on a nebulously conceived
integration ot art a n d life (an integration never satisfactorily
defined at any point in histon^) or on a rather abstract debate o n
the nature of the institution of art, it seems m o r e productive to
il)cus here on the ver\^ strategies that these avant-garde practitioners
themselves had propagated: in particular, strategies to initiate ftm-
damental changes in the conception of audience a n d spectatorial
agency, to reverse the bourgeois hierarchy of aesthetic exchange-
\ alue and use-value, a n d most importantly perhaps, to conceive of
cultural practices for a newly emerging internationalist proletarian
public sphere \ d t h i n the advanced industrial nation states.
Such an approach would not only allow us to differentiate these
jvant-garde projects m o r e adequately, but would also help us
understand that the rise of a n aesthetic of technical reproduction
I in diametrical opposition to an aesthetic of a u t o n o m y ) emerges at
that ven^ m o m e n t of the t^venties when the bourgeois public sphere
begins to wither away. It is at first displaced by the progressive forces
of an emerging proletarian public sphere (as was the case in the
' early phases of the Soviet U n i o n and the W e i m a r Republic), only to
be followed, of course, by the rise of the mass-cultural public
sphere, either in its totalitarian fascist or state-socialist versions in
I the thirties or by its postwar regimes of the culture industry a n d of
^T'Pectacle, emerging with the h e g e m o n y of the United States a n d a
largely d e p e n d e n t culture of European reconstruction.
The antiaesthetic dismantles the aesthetics of a u t o n o m y o n all
levels: it replaces originalit\' with technical reproduction, it destroys
work's aura a n d the contemplative m o d e s of aesthetic experience
and replaces these with c o m m u n i c a t i v e action and aspirations
tinvard simultaneous collective perception. T h e antiaesthetic (such
. 1324. 19330 -S' 1923 -925b -ffiCe 1934a 1937a. -i95Ta." 9e3c
cal), as participator}' (rather than as a unique emanation of an
exceptional f o r m of knowledge). The antiaesthetic also operates as a
or political enlightenment, serv ing the needs of a cultural self-con-
stitution for the newly emerging audiences of the industrial
proletariat w h o were previously excluded f r o m cultural representa-
tion on the levels of both p r o d u c t i o n a n d reception.
Class, agency, and activism
The central premises of Marxist political theor)'^ had been the concepts
of class and class-consciousnessthe most important factors to drive
fonvard the historical process. Classes sen-ed in different m o m e n t s of
histor\^as the agents of historical, social, and political change (e.g., the
aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the most powerful
class in the twentieth centurv', the petite bourgeoisie, paradoxically the
most neglected by classical Marxist accounts). It had been Marx's
argument that class itself was defined by one crucial condition: a
subject's situation in relation to the means of production.
Thus, privileged access to (or, m o r e decisively, controlling o w n -
ership o f ) the means of p r o d u c t i o n was the constitutive condition
of bourgeois class identit)- in the later eighteenth a n d the entire
nineteenth centuries. In contrast, d u r i n g the same period, the c o n -
ditions of proletarianization identify those subjects w h o will
remain forever economically, legally, a n d socially barred f r o m
access to the m e a n s of p r o d u c t i o n (which would, of course, also
include the m e a n s of education a n d the acquisition of i m p r o v e d
professional skills).
Questions concerning the concept of class are central to the
social history of art, ranging f r o m the class identity of the artist to
w h e t h e r cultural solidarit)^ or mimetic artistic identification with
the struggles of the oppressed a n d exploited classes of modernity-
can actually a m o u n t to acts of political s u p p o r t for revolutionaiy
or oppositional m o v e m e n t s . Marxist political theorists have o f t e n
regarded that kind of cultural class alliance with considerable skep-
ticism. Yet this m o d e of class alliance d e t e r m i n e d practically all
politically motivated artistic p r o d u c t i o n of modernit}', since very
few, if any, artists a n d intellectuals had actually emerged f r o m the
conditions of proletarian existence at that time. Class identity
becomes all the m o r e complicated when considering h o w the c o n -
sciousness of individual artists m i g h t well have b e c o m e radicalized
at certain points (e.g., the revolution of 1848, the revolutions of
1917, o r the anti-imperialist struggles of 1968) a n d artists might
then have assumed positions of solidarity with the oppressed
classes of those historical m o m e n t s [3]. Slightly later, however, in
the wake of their cultural assimilation, the same artists m i g h t have
assumed positions of complicit or active affirmation of the ruling
order a n d simply served as the providers of cultural legitimation.
The social history of art; models and c o n c e p t s | I n t r o d u c t i o n 2 25

3 Tina Modotti, Workers' Demonstration, Mexico,
May t , 1929
P:a1inurT p'int. 2C,5 x 1 8 (8 x 7 :)
T".e w c ' k of -^e 'lalian-Arnencan ariist Modot:i n Mex co
g v'es evidence c1 the ^r v'e-sa' ty of t^e pDlrical ans soc al
cornT:itn-,ent a n c n g -adica' art sts ot 1he twent es anc
thir:iss. Aba-'dO'^ '^g he*" training as a "st'aiont" mocsrn st
pfiotograpns'm :hs T o l d o" Edward Weston. M c d c t t ' s
vvo'k Vexico would sco-" -ecnen: 'tsel' :o ma<e
ptictography a weapo'' " the pc ticai st'uggle of the
Mexican peasant a^d w c k ng class aga nst .-e e".srnal
defe'-'als and deceotions of the c o j r t r y ' s oligarc" c rulers
Exoa-'dinc the t-adi: on cf :he TaHer Graf'CO Pod'3'' ' o
address that class now v.- th t - e nea'^s o' photcgraohic
-epresentat on. she nevertheless unoe-stcod t-^e necessr.y
of making tfie regionally soecf c ana uneve'^ developrrent
of f e r n s cf knowledge a"d artistic c j ture the basis of -^er
worn. Aoco'ding^V'' Mcdct:i "-ever adopted :hs seeninc y
nore acva"ced forms of co'tical phctcmo^tage, out
'eta "led t:"e bonds c" realist dec c* cn necessary " c
ac: \'is: oc tical messages ^r- ttie geopC' ficai c c t s x t 'n
v m c h she had stua:ed herself. At the s a n s t i n e , as the
mage Workers' Demc.iSira.'jcc s graiS. she was far from
fa " g T.o the concilia:ory a^d compensatory realisTS o'
"straigfi:" ancl "New Objective" ohotography. What would
'ave been merely a modernist grid of serially receatec
ob ec'S o' indLSt'ia rra'^.-faoture n the w c - ; of ''le'
- storical oee-s [ s ^ c as Alfred Re^ge'-Patzsc"; becomes
one of the most conv "c " g photographic atternots o*
the twenties a^d thirt es to decic: the soc a arese^ce
and polit cal activ^STi of :he wor-<inc and peasant
c ass Tasses as t^e ac'ca producers o' a ccj-^try's
economic resources.
26 I n t r o d u c t i o n 2 | The social history of art: models and c o n c e p t s
This also points to the necessary insight that the registers of
artistic production and their latent or manifest relationships to
political activism are infinitely more differentiated than arguments
for the politicization of art might generally have assumed. We are
not simpiv confronted with an alternative between a politically
conscious or activist practice on the one hand, and a merely affir-
mative, hegemonic culture (as the Italian Marxist philosopher and
aesthetician Antonio Gramsci [1891-1937] called it) on the other.
Yet, the function of hegemonic culture is clearly to sustain power
and legitimize the perceptual and behavioral forms of the ruling
class through cultural representation, while oppositional cultural
practices articulate resistance to hierarchical thought, subvert 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 notions of hegemonic power.
If we accept that some forms of cultural production can assume
the role of agency (i.e., that of information and enlightenment, that
of criticality and counterinformation), then the social history of art
faces one of its most precarious insights, if not a condition of crisis:
if it were to align its aesthetic judgment with the condition of polit-
ical solidarity and class alliance, it would inevitably be left with
only a few heroic figures in w h o m such a correlation between class-
consciousness, agency, and revolutionary alliance could actually be
ascertained. These examples would include Gustave Courbet and
H o n o r e Daumier in the nineteenth centur}', Kthe Kolhvitz and
A John Heartfield in the first half of the twentieth centur\% and artists
such as Martha Rosier [4], HansHaacke[6], and Allan Sekulain the
second half of the twentieth century.
Thus, in recognizing that compliance with class interests and
political revolutionr)' consciousness can at best be considered an
exceptional rather than a necessary condition within the aesthetic
practices of modernity, it leaves the social art historian with a difficult
choice. That is, either to exclude from consideration most actual artis-
tic practices of any particular moment of modernism, disregarding
both the artists and their production because of their lack of commit-
ment, class-consciousness, and political correctness, or to recognize
the necessity for numerous other criteria (beyond political and social
history) to enter the process of historical and critical analysis.
Since the proletarian's only means of survival is the sale of his or
her own labor like any other commoditv^ producing a phenomenal
accretion of surplus value to the entrepreneurial bourgeois or to
the corporate enterprise by supplying the subject's labor power, it
is, therefore, the very condition of labor and the laborer that radical
artists from the nineteenth centur\' onward, from Gustave Courbet
to the Productivists of the twenties, confront. For the most part,
ho\vever, they confront it not on the ]e^'el of iconography (in fact,
the almost total absence of the representation of alienated labor is
the rule of modernism ) but rather with the perpetual question of
whether the labor of industrial production and the labor of cultural
production can and should be related, and, if so, howas 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,
from the 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
- r j - . ' j m a c e .vd'< of the v -lies Her sens Sr.r,g:r:g :rc
-'sco-'r^s'o r;cth a n sto'" cal a - d a r s : : s tua: on
- -s; of alt the '.vDrk partic pax-o " the gro/ving c j l : ' a l
a ' a po tical cpaos tio-- againsT the mpe-alist A r e n c a ^
,, a- r V' c-tnan Rather rhan r-ea: - g the '.vorks as
- :: . dua ::h:::rc:n-o"tages, Res s- conce ved therr as a
95 ^o' - e p ' o d u c i a n a r d aisserr -atica in a - ^ T c e r a'
a-f '.va- an.-: ccu'Me'c^ tural ,ou"-a s ^ order tc increase
- e .'isib -v arc; Iir-Lisct -e inages, S-ie fiac d e a r y
aers-.oac -sar:fic d's ecacy a^d the a alecvcs of
:; striL..lian -'o'T ana mass-cul:..'-al iccnography. Seccno,
- rsle' exp c t^y caunts'-ec the C a n c e a t j a c a^T tha'
anctag-'ap-y s-io^ d n e r e y s-srve as a ns^t-al docuTS-it
analy* ".al s e l f - c t i c a ty, c as sn -dexical tracs of the
:-,i:a'o-ierco^a. stagings of the suciect. Rathe', she
ae^tr'ec ph:::og'apiy as one of seve-ai c 3"..'s ve too s
- :'-e p'oauc: on a' laec ogy the nass-c,. turai a-ssnal,
E^.- -HS'ting S'jd:;en doa'^nenta^y Tages of the Vva--in
e t n a n in:o th sse-riirgiy biissti/ and op., ent v.'oria ot
r e n c a " ccrresac ty, Hos 9' net oniy reveais the :rtricate
re-tvi-i'-errert of comesiic and n i i i t s ' s : c 'D'a-s of
cap taiist c o n s u n p t i o r , cut a so r^a'-ifest y
a enges d's crsdibiiity of oho:ography as a tru:'-:fjl
.:L:'nc' of authe-tic m - c n a : on.
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 production of use-value (as in the Soviet Productivists, the
k German Bauhaus, and the De Stijl movements) to an aesthetic of
ludic counterproductivit)' (as in the simultaneous practices of Sur-
> realism) which negates labor-as-value and denies it any purchase
whatsoever on the territor)^of art. Such an aesthetic regards artistic
practice as the one experience where the possibility of historically
available forms of unalienated and uninstrumentalized existence
shine forth, whether for the first time or as celebratory reminis-
cences of the bliss of rituals, games, and child's play.
It is no accident, then, that modernism has mostly avoided the
actual representation of alienated labor, except for the work of great
activist photographers such as I.ewis Hine, where the abolition of
child labor was the driving agenda of the project. In contrast, when-
ever painting or photography in the twentieth centun* celebrated the
labor force or the forceful laborer, one couldand canbe sure of
being in the company of totalitarian ideologies, whether fascist,
Stalinist, or corporate. The heroicization of the body subjected to
alienated physical labor serv'es to instill collective respect for 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 a governing form of collective experience, but also
prematurely accepts the relegation of artistic practice to merely a
pointless exemption from the realit)' principle altogether.
Ideology: reflection and mediation
The concept of ideolog)-played an important role in the aesthetics
of Gyrg}' Lukacs (1885-1971), who wrote one of the most cohe-
sive Marxist literan.^ aesthetic theories of the twentieth century.
Although rarely addressing artistic visual production, Lukacs's
theories had a tremendous impact on the formation of social art
histor\' in its second phase of the forties and fifties, in particular on
the w^ork of his fellow Hungarian Arnold Hauser (1892-1978) and
the Austrian Marxist Ernst Fischer (1889-1972).
Lukacs's key concept was that of reflection, establishing a rather
mechanistic relationship between the forces of the economic and
political base and the ideological and institutional superstructure.
Ideology was defined as an inverted form of consciousness o r
worseas mere false consciousness. Furthermore, the concept of
reflection argued that the p h e n o m e n a of cultural representation
were ultimately mere secondary' p h e n o m e n a of the class politics
and ideological interests of a particular historical m o m e n t . Subse-
quently, though, the understanding of reflection would depart
from these mechanistic assumptions. Lukacs's analysis had in fact
argued for an understanding of cultural production as dialectical
historical operations, and he saw certain cultural practices (e.g., the
The social history of art; models and c o n c e p t s | I n t r o d u c t i o n 2 27

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'r^e' prominent An-ie^xan a^t nagaz .^-e cerr.arcates
one of the key mcments cf Coriceptual art. First o' all,
mode'nism's (and ConcsptL^alism's) supc;osedly radica
quest for empirical and c^^tica sel-re'lexivity is turned in
on itsef and onto the frames of presentation and
dis1ribjr;on Graham's nagaz'ne a r c.e anticipates tne fact
that c'ucial information cn artistic practices is always
a reacy mediated oy mgss-c^ tural and corrime'-cial ' c m s
of 3 sseminafon Acccrc ngly. Gra'^am integrates t^at
dimersion o' dis'/ out on into the c o r c e p t i c cf the work
i:se f The artist's model c1 self-reflexivity o^aiec^ oally sh tts
'"rom t a j t o o g y to discursive and institutional cntique
V.'hat distinguis'^es his approach to the problems of
audience and distribi^tior f ' o m the earlier models of the
historica avant-garde s the skepticism and the orecis on
wit^^ which he cosit ons nis operations exc j s j v e y within
tr-e discursive and ^nstituticral sp'-ere of the g ven
conditions o' artistic product on ;rat"er ^nan the oroject
cf utop'an socia and oolitica transforma: ons). Yet the
choice of prefabricated subu-oac tract-nousing in New
Je-sey 'irst of all expanas the subect matter of Pop art
Torn a mere citation of mass-cc lural and r e d i a
iconography to a new focus on social and architectural
spaces. At the saT.s time, Grsham- revea s that the soat ai
organization of the lowest level of everyday suboroar
expe^-ence a r d architectural c o r sump lion had already
prefigured the p'inc oles c' a serai or modular iterative
s t r u c t c e t"at had de*ired the scriptural work of '^.iS
oredecessors, the Minimalists.
28 I n t r o d u c t i o n 2 | The social history of art: models and c o n c e p t s
bourgeois novel a n d its project of realism) as the quintessential
cultural achievement of the progressi\'e forces of the bourgeoisie.
W h e n It came to the development of a proletarian aesthetic,
however, Lukacs b e c a m e a stalwart of reactionary- t h o u g h t , arguing
that the p r e s e n ation of the legacies of bourgeois culture would
have to be an integral force within an emerging proletarian realism.
T h e task of Socialist realism in Lukacs's a c c o u n t eventually came
simultaneously to preserv e the revolutionary^ potential of the p r o -
gressive bourgeois m o m e n t that had been betrayed and to lay the
f o u n d a t i o n s of a new proletarian culture that h a d truly taken pos-
session of the bourgeois m e a n s of cultural p r o d u c t i o n .
Since the theorizations of ideolog)- in the sixties, aestheticians
a n d art historians have not only differentiated general theories of
ideology, b u t have also elaborated the questions of h o w cultural
p r o d u c t i o n relates to the apparatus of ideology at large. The
question of whether artistic practice operates inside or outside
ideological representations has especially preoccupied social art
historians since the seventies, all of t h e m arriving at very different
answers, d e p e n d i n g on the theory of ideology to which they sub-
scribe. Thus, for example, those social art historians ^vho follow-ed
the m o d e l of the early Marxist phase of American art historian
Meyer Schapiro (1904-96) continued to operate u n d e r the
a s s u m p t i o n that cultural representation is the m i r r o r reflection of
the ideological interests of a ruling class (e.g., Schapiro's a r g u m e n t
about Impressionism being the cultural expression of the leisured
share-holding bourgeoisie). According to Schapiro, these cultural
representations d o n o t merely articulate the mental universe of the
bourgeoisie: they also invest it with the cultural authority to claim
and m a i n t a i n its political legitimacy as a ruling class.
Others have taken Meyer Schapiro's Marxist social history^ of art
as a p o i n t of departure, but have also adopted the complex ideas that
he developed in his later work. H e took the infinitely m o r e compli-
cated questions of mediation between art a n d ideolog)^ into account
by recognizing that aesthetic formations are relatively a u t o n o m o u s ,
rather t h a n fully dependent u p o n or congruent with ideological
interests (a development that is e\ddent, for example, in Schapiro's
subsequent t u r n to an early semiology of abstraction). O n e result of
a m o r e complex theorization of ideology was the attempt to situate
artistic representations as dialectical forces within their historically
specific m o m e n t . That is, in certain cases a particular practice might
very well articulate the rise of progressive consciousness not only
within an indi\ddual artist, but also the progressi\aty of a patron class
and its self-definition in terms of a project of bourgeois enlighten-
m e n t and ever-expanding social a n d economic justice (see, for
example, T h o m a s Crow's [born 1948] classic essay " M o d e r n i s m a n d
Mass Culture," concerning the dialectical conception of the idiom of
neo-Impressionist divisionism in its drastic changes fi-om affiliation
with the politics of radical anarchism to an indulgent st\ie).
Social art historians of the seventies, like C r o w a n d T. J. Clark
( b o r n 1945), conceived of the p r o d u c t i o n of cultural representation
as b o t h d e p e n d e n t u p o n class ideolog)' a n d generative of counter-
ideological models. Thus, the most comprehensive account of
6 Hans Haacke, MOMA-Poll, 1970
JO e-ice o'tic patc'y "STa a a r r : r.va : ' a r s a a ' 0 - * a:-;, j
c: ocrxes eac-' JG x 2C x ' 0 ' 5 x 7 .x3 .
-he axn.ai: an " nfcrr-^a:ion" a: Kew Yc-^/s ' v ' . o e . T a"
aaerr A r a i 9 ^ " . haacke ias:a sd Dne of the "irst
i le,-, .vor-<s to deal vv rh 'aocia' sy3:eTs." callea eiT^e'
.-.v's c as V's:^crs' P''c:'.'63 in x e s e mstaiiatio'-a.
-- ana iy oassive sp-ctatcrs b e c a n e ac: ve
aia'ti;; ;;an:s l-laaa^e s S'^aiecticr C' the aracesses c
oraducaon a r d reception eemen:s'y torn-a of statistiaa
c:: anc acs tivist a f a r n s : or a ciea' response
a actus onncip es governing expenence " wnat
- jarn;: had ca ed :he ''sacietv a"" adn- n stra: on," A: the
^ a n e tia-e, Haacke's wo-k, iiKe G r a - a r ^ s , tts atren' an
--C-" -"e en: cai analysis a' tne '.vark's n n a n e - t structures
i_ t "-ea" " 3 to the externa t ' a n e s a" insti:^t o'^s, Th j s
-aa;-^e 'eposi' ons Conceptual a^t in a new cntica 'ela: on
-a the 30cioeaonc,T c conditicns dsternining access
a - d avaiiab 'y of aeschetic exaer ence. a crsctice ater
iiaon: tied as "institut;ora crivque," Haacke's MOMA-Po::
IS a strik - g exan-ole a ' tais s*" ft s,nce t ccn'ronfs :ae
,, avver >,v th s sadoen insight inta ; r e cegree to wh^ch
r i u s e - T ' as a supccsedly "B'^.tra space gjarG,ag aesthe: c
a,.tcnon-y anc disintsrestesness is i.n-aricated a i : "
accnorr c, declcgica , and cclitica interests. The v>'or<
i so -eccnstit^tes a condition of respons.c ty and
;; a't'cipa:icn fcr the vie'.ve^ that surpasses Todels of
-cecta:o' a invoiverent previously p-opcssd t y a r sts of
tae "eo-svant-gsrde, while t recognizes the i i n i t a t i c s
-.he scectators' paiidaal asp -aaans and :he ' psychic
-arge of excerience a r d sel'-de:eTninadon.
WotAltfwtact that GownKx RcxlcsfeAar
t danowced ProKknt Unn's
nineteenth-centun- modernist painting and its shifting fortunes
within the larger apparatus of ideological p r o d u c t i o n can still be
f o u n d in the complex and increasingh' differentiated approach to
the question of ideology- in the work of Clark, the leading social art
historian of the late twentieth century-. In Clark's accounts of the
work of D a u m i e r a n d Courbet, for example, ideology^ and painting
are still conceived in the dialectical relations that Lukacs had
suggested in his accounts of the work of eighteenth and nineteenth-
century- literature: as an articulation of the progressive forces of the
bourgeois class in a process of c o m i n g into its own m a t u r e identity
to accomplish the promises of the French Revolution and of the
culture of the Enlightenment at large.
Clark's later work The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of
Manet and his Followers (1984), by contrast, does not discuss
merely the extreme difficulty of situating the work of Manet a n d
Seurat within such a clear a n d dy-namic relationship to the progres-
sive forces of a particular segment of society. Rather, Clark now-
faces the task of c o n f r o n t i n g the n e w f o u n d complexity- of the
relationship between ideology and artistic p r o d u c t i o n , a n d of inte-
grating it with the methodology of social art history that he h a d
developed up to this point. This theoretical crisis u n d o u b t e d l y
resulted in large part f r o m Clark's discovery of the work of the
Marxist Lacanian Louis Althusser (1918-90). Althusser's concep-
tion of ideolog)' still remains the most productive one, in particular
with regard to its capacity to situate aesthetic a n d art-historical
p h e n o m e n a in a position of relative a u t o n o m y with regard to the
totality of ideology. This is not just because Althusser theorizes ide-
ology as a totality of linguistic representations in which the subject
is constituted in a politicized version of Lacan's a c c o u n t of the
symbolic order. Perhaps even m o r e i m p o r t a n t is Althusser's dis-
tinction betvveen the totality of the ideological state a p p a r a t u s (and
its subspheres in all d o m a i n s of representation) a n d the explicit
e x e m p t i o n of artistic representations (as well as scientific knowl-
edge) f r o m that totality of ideological representations.
Popular culture versus mass culture
One of the most important debates a m o n g social art historians con-
cerns the question of h o w so-called high art or avant-garde practices
relate to the emerging mass-cultural formations of modernity. .And
vs^hile it is of course understood that these formations change contin-
uously (as the interactions between the tvvo halves of the systems of
representation are continuously reconfigured), it has remained a
difficult debate whose o u t c o m e is often indicative of the particular
type of Marxism embraced by the critics of mass culture. It ranges
f r o m the most violent rejection of mass-cultural formations in the
w-ork of Adorno, whose i n f a m o u s c o n d e m n a t i o n of jazz is n o w uni-
versally discredited as a form of eurocentric Alexandrianism that
wasworst of alllargely d e p e n d e n t o n the author's total lack of
actual information about the musical p h e n o m e n a he so disdained.
The opposite approach to mass-cultural p h e n o m e n a w-as first
developed in England, in the work of R a y m o n d Williams (1921-88),
The social history of art; models and c o n c e p t s | I n t r o d u c t i o n 2 29

7 Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg/Fischer, Life with
PopDemonstration for Capitalist Realism, at
Mbelhaus Berges, Dsseldorf, October 11,1963
Ti 1963. Gerhard Renter and Kcrnrad Lueg rivrci later as
Konraa Fischer became cne o1 Eurooe s n e s t impor.arit
cealers the Minir-i&i and Conceptual general o^; staged
a cerforrrance ^^ a Dsse dor' Department store It
ini'lgteo a GerTan vana: on ori tho neo-avaot-garoe's
in:e'na:icnal reorientation to>.varc: mass culture thatsince
f e late tittieshad gradually n splaced pcst'.var forms of
aDstraction m Eng anc, France, and tne United States.
~he reolog sm "capitalist -"ealism,' coined by RiChter for
tfi'S occason. reveroerates v th realism's horrible "ether,"
the Socialist var ety f~at had denned Richter's ecjcaticnal
caoKgrounci in f^e Communist p a r of Germany cnti 1961.
The spectacle of boredom, aff'^maticn, and passivity
aga nst the 03C'<:U'"Op cf a totalizing system o* ob ects of
ccsumptio-^ too^ the Aork of Pie-o Manzci^ as cne cf ns
cues, namely tne insight that arjstic practice w o j i d have
to be situated more than ever in the interstitai soaces
oetween objects of consumptior\ sites of spectacle, a r d
ostentatious acts c' artistic a'^-' -"ilation. But its orocding
rrelanchclic pass vity was a so a spec f cally Ge'ma"-
oonuituticn to t'^e recogniticn t^af from new on advanced
e r r s of consumer c^'ture v;ould net only dete''m - e
behavio' in a way that had been previously deterTiined by
re igious or pclitica belief systems, but that this
particular historical context c' Ge'm:any t-ey wculd a^so
sen.'e as the col ect-,'e permit to reoress and to forget the
populat.cn's ^ecent mass ve conversion to fascism
30 I n t r o d u c t i o n 2 | The social history of art: models and c o n c e p t s
whose crucial distinction between popular culture and mass culture
became a productive 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 production ot mass
culture as well: here a perpetual oscillation from initial contestation
and transgression to eventual affirmation in the process 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 communicate
within different structures of tradition, linguistic convention, and
behavioral forms of interaction. Therefore, according to the new
cultural-studies approach, the specificity' of audience address and
experiences should be posited above all claimsas authoritarian as
they are numinousfor universally valid criteria of aesthetic 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.
Subtimation and desublimation
The model ot cultural studies that Williams and Hall elaborated,
and that became known later as the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies, laid the foundations for most of
the work in cultural studies being done today. Even though he is
not known ever to have engaged with the work of any of the British
Marxists, Adorno's counterargument would undoubtedly have
been to accuse their project of being one of extending 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 formation, the desire for 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 undermine the apparatus of
libidinal repression and to generate an anticipator)' m o m e n t of an
existence liberated from needs and instrumentalizing demands.
Marcuse's Freudo-Marxist aesthetic of libidinal liberation was sit-
uated at the absolute opposite pole of Adorno's ascetic aesthetics of
a negative dialectics, and Adorno did not fail to chastize Marcuse
publicly for what he perceived to be the horrifying effects of hedo-
nistic American consumer culture on Marcuse's thoughts.
Whatever the ramifications of Marcuse's reconception of desub-
limation, it is certainly a term for which ample evidence could be
 f o u n d in avant-garde practices before and after W o r l d W a r II.
T h r o u g h o u t modernit\% artistic strategies resist and deny the
established claims for technical virtuosity, for exceptional skills,
and for c o n f o r m i t y with the accepted standards of historical
models. They deny the aesthetic any privileged status whatsoever
A and debase it with all the m e a n s of deskilling, by taking recourse to
an abject or a low-cultural iconography, or by the emphatic fore-
g r o u n d i n g ot procedures a n d materials that reinsert the disavowed
dimensions of repressed somatic experience back into the space of
artistic experience.
The neo-avant-garde
O n e of the m a j o r conflicts of writing social art history after W o r l d
War II derives f r o m an overarching condition of asynchronicit)'.
On the o n e h a n d , American critics in particular were eager to estab-
lish the first hegemonic avant-garde culture of the tsventieth
century; however, in the course of that project they failed to recog-
ni/.e that the very fact of a reconstruction of a m o d e l of avant-garde
culture w^ould inevitably not only affect the status of the work being
produced u n d e r these circumstances, b u t w^ould also affect the crit-
ical a n d historical writing associated with it even m o r e profoundly.
In A d o r n o ' s late-modernist Aesthetic Theory (1970), the concept
of a u t o n o m y retains a central role. Unlike Clement Greenberg's
remobilization of the concept in favor of an American version of
late-modernist aesthetics, A d o r n o ' s aesthetics operates within a
principle of double negativity'. O n the one h a n d , Adorno's late
m o d e r n i s m denies the possibility of a renewed access to an aesthet-
ics of a u t o n o m y , a possibility annihilated by the final destruction of
the bourgeois subject in the a f t e r m a t h of fascism and the Holocaust.
On the other hand, Adorno's aesthetics also deny the possibility of a
politicization of artistic practices in the revolutionary-perspective of
Marxist aesthetics. According to A d o r n o , politicized art would only
sen^e as an alibi and prohibit actual political change, since the polit-
ical circumstances for a revolutionary politics are de facto not
accessible in the m o m e n t of postwar reconstruction of culture.
By contrast, American n e o m o d e r n i s m and the practices of what
Peter Brger called the neo-avant-gardemost palpably advocated Taaaies S Hudson, 1973;
by Greenberg and his disciple Michael Fried (born 1939)could
uphold their claims only at the price of a systematic geschichtsklit-
tenmg., a manifest attempt at wTiting history f r o m the perspective of
\ictorious interests, sy^stematically disavowing the major transfor-
mations that had occurred within the conception of high art and
avant-garde culture discussed above (e.g., the legacies of Dada a n d
the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes). But worse stl, these critics
failed to see that cultural production after the Holocaust could not
simply attempt to establish a continuity of modernist painting and
sculpture. Adorno's model of a negative dialectics (most notoriously
formulated in his verdict on the impossibility of lyrical poetry-
after Auschv\itz) a n d his aesthetic theory^Ln open opposition to
Greenberg's neomodernismsuggested the ineluctable necessity of
rethinking the very precarious condition of culture at large.
It appears that the strengths and successes of the social history of
art are m o s t evident in those historical situations where actual
mediations between classes, political interests, and cultural forms
of representation are solidly enacted a n d therefore relatively verifi-
able. Their unique capacity^ to reconstruct the narratives a r o u n d
those revolutionary or f o u n d a t i o n a l situations of modernity
makes the accounts of social art historians the most compelling
interpretations of the first h u n d r e d years of m o d e r n i s m , f r o m
David in the work of T h o m a s Crow- to the beginnings of C u b i s m in
T. 1. Clark's w-ork.
However, when it comes to the historical emergence of avant-
garde practices such as abstraction, collage, Dada, or the work of
D u c h a m p , whose i n n e r m o s t telos it had been actively to destroy
traditional subjectobject relationships and to register the destruc-
tion of traditional f o r m s of experience, both on the level of
narrative and o n that of pictorial representation, social art history's
a t t e m p t s to maintain cohesive narrative accounts often emerge at
best as either i n c o n g r u e n t or incompatible vWth the structures a n d
m o r p h o l o g i e s at h a n d , or at worst, as falsely recuperative. O n c e
the extreme f o r m s of particularization a n d f r a g m e n t a t i o n have
b e c o m e the central formal concerns in which postbourgeois
subjectivity finds its correlative r e m n a n t s of figuration, the inter-
pretative desire to reimpose totalizing visions o n t o historical
p h e n o m e n a sometimes appears reactionary a n d at other times
p a r a n o i d in its e n f o r c e m e n t of structures of m e a n i n g and experi-
ence. After all, the radicality of these artistic practices h a d involved
not only their refusal to allow for such visions but also their f o r m u -
lation of syntax a n d structures where neither narrative nor
figuration could still obtain. If m e a n i n g could still obtain at all, it
would require accounts that would inevitably lead beyond the
f r a m e w o r k s of those of deterministic causation.
FARTHER S E A L I N G
Frederick Antal, c/assc's'r a n c / i L c r d c r : 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: "^aie Lliivers :y ^'ess. 1999i
T. J. Clark, irr.age of the Peo^'/e, Gasrai's Coarcsr a.ia' the Sezcr.j Frencf^ nepboi.'c. J S-^a- !55;
Xcrdo-.- Tt-ames & Huoson, ; 9"3;
T. J. Clark. Tre Asso'a.'e Bourgeo'S Arsts and Poiit'CS ,'n 'o^S- '6ii 7 lonclof
T. J. Clark. The Panrirg ot '/oderr. U's: Pacts tn the,4,'t ot i'-'ar^et 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: "^ae
Lnivarsity Press. 1985:.
Thomas Crow. The (nfaV/ge'ice of Art 'iChaDel Hilt N,C.. Urrve^sitv o1 Mont Care na Press, 1999:
Serge Guilbaut. Hoiv i\'ew YorK Stole tre icea ot '/oderr. Art: Ah'strsct ExpresS'Crcs.'T-', Freedcr,.
anc the Caid A'ar iCn cago and London: Uriversi'.y cf Cnicagc Press, 1 98:3;
Nicos Hadjinicotaou, Art History and Ctass Smuggle iLonuori: P Ldo ^ress, 1975)
Arnold Hauser. The Social Histony ot Ah. (1 957;, fou' volumes,i_cndon: Rcjt edge, 1'999i
Fredric Jameson (ed.), 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
The social history of art; models and c o n c e p t s | I n t r o d u c t i o n 2 31
 3 Formalism and structuralism
n 1971-2, the French literar)' theorist Roland Barthes (1915-80)
held a year-long seminar devoted to the histor\' of semiolog)', the
"general science of signs" that had been conceived as an extension
of linguistics by the Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) in his
Course in General Linguistics ( p o s t h u m o u s l y published in 1916)
and simultaneously, u n d e r the n a m e of semiotics, by the American
philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) in his Collected
(also p o s t h u m o u s l y published, f r o m 1931 to 1958). Barthes
had been one of the leading voices of structuralism f r o m the
mid-fifties to the late sixties, together with the anthropologist
Claude Le\i-Strauss (born 1908), the philosopher Michel Foucault
(1926-84 ), and the psychoanalyst lacques Lacan, and as such had
greatly contributed to the resurrection of the semiological project,
which he had clearly laid out in Elements of Semiology (1964) and
"Structural Analysis of Narratives" (1966). But he had seriously
u n d e r m i n e d that very project in his most recent books, 5/Z,
The Empire of Signs (both 1970), a n d Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971).
T h e curiosity of Barthes's auditors (myself a m o n g them} was
i m m e n s e : in this period of intellectual t u r m o i l m a r k e d by a
general Oedipal desire to kill the structuralist m o d e l , they expected
him t o ease their u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the shift u n d e r w a y f r o m
A A (structuralism) to B (poststructuralism)a term that neatly
describes Barthes's work at the time, but which was never con-
d o n e d by any of its participants. They anticipated a chronological
s u m m a r y . Logicalh', such a narrative, after a presentation of Saus-
sure's a n d Peirce's concepts, would have discussed the work of the
Russian Formalist school of literary criticism, active f r o m a r o u n d
1915 to the Stalinist blackout of 1932; then, after o n e of its
m e m b e r s , R o m a n lakobson (1896-1982), had left Russia, of the
Prague Linguistic Circle g r o u p e d a r o u n d him; then of French
s t r u c t u r a h s m ; and finally, in conclusion, it would have dealt with
lacques Derrida's deconstruction.
Barthes's audience got the package they had h o p e d for, but not
without a m a j o r surprise. Instead of beginning with Saussure, he ini-
tiated his sur\^ey with an examination of the ideological critique
proposed, f r o m the tw-enties on, by the German Marxist plavvvright
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). A h h o u g h Barthes, n o less than his
peers, had s u c c u m b e d to the d r e a m of scientific objectivity'when the
structuralist m o v e m e n t was at its peak, he n o w implicitly advocated
9^5 rr.'-ClL.:' or 4
32 I n t r o d u c t i o n 3 | Formalism and structuralism
a subjective approach. N o longer interested in m a p p i n g a discipline,
he endeavored instead to tell the story^ of his own semiological
adventure, which had started with his discover)- of Brecht's writings.
C o m i n g f r o m s o m e o n e whose assault on biographism (the reading
of a literar)^ piece t h r o u g h the life of its a u t h o r ) h a d always been
scathing, the gesture was deliberately provocative. (The e n o r m o u s
polemic engendered by the antibiographism of Barthes's On Racine
(1963), which had ended in Criticism and Truth (1966), Barthes's
brilliant answer to his detractors, a n d which h a d d o n e m o r e than
a m l h i n g else to radically transform traditional literary studies in
France, was still very m u c h o n everyone's mind.) But there was a
strategic motive as well in this Brechtian beginning, a motive that
becomes apparent w h e n one turns to the essay in which Barthes had
discussed Saussure for the first time.
"M)1:h Today" was a postscript to the collection of sociological
Wgnettes Barthes h a d wTitten between 1954 a n d 1956 a n d published
u n d e r the title Mythologies (1957). The m a i n body of the b o o k h a d
been vvTitten in the Brechtian mode: its stated purpose was to reveal,
underneath the pretended "naturalness" of the petit-bourgeois
ideolog)'' conveyed by the media, what was historically determined.
But in " M ) t h Today" Barthes presented Saussure's w^ork, which he
had just discovered, as offering new tools for the kind of Brechtian
ideological analysis he had so far been conducting. W h a t is perhaps
most striking, in retrospect, is that Barthes's exposition of Saus-
surean semiology' begins with a plea in favor of formalism. Shortly
^ after alluding to Andrei Z h d a n o v a n d his Stalinist c o n d e m n a t i o n of
formalism a n d m o d e r n i s m as bourgeois decadence, Barthes writes:
"Less terrorized by the specter of 'formalism,' historical criticism
might have been less sterile; it would have understood that ... the
m o r e a system is specifically defined in its forms, the m o r e amenable
it is to historical criticism. To parody a well-known saying, 1 shall say
that a little formalism turns one a w w f r o m History, but that a lot
brings one back to it." In other words, right f r o m the start Barthes
conceived of what was soon to be n a m e d "structuralism" as part of a
broader formaUst current in twentieth-century thought. Further-
more, Barthes was denying the claims of the antiformalist
c h a m p i o n s that formalist critics, in bypassing "content" to scruti-
nize forms, were retreating firom the worid and its historical realities
to the ivory tower of a humanistic "eternal present."
 "Semiolog)' is a science of forms, since it studies significations
apart f r o m their content." Such is the definition that immediately
precedes Barthes's passage cjuoted above. Its terminology is some-
what flawed, for Barthes was still a novice in structural linguistics,
and he would soon k n o w that the word "content" has to be replaced
by "referent" in such a sentence. But the basic axioms are already
there: signs are organized into sets of oppositions that shape their
signification, independently of what the signs in question refer to;
ever)' h u m a n activity partakes of at least one system of signs (gener-
ally several at once), whose rules can be tracked do^NTi; and, as a
producer of signs, m a n is forever c o n d e m n e d to signification, unable
A to flee the "prison-house of language," to use Fredric Jameson's
formulation. Nothing that m a n utters is insignificanteven saying
"nothing" carries a meaning (or rather multiple meanings, changing
according to the context, which is itself structured).
Choosing in 1971 to present these axioms as derived f r o m Brecht
(rather than f r o m Saussure, as he had d o n e in 1957), Barthes h a d a A Greenberg, also had such misgiWngs: "Whatever its connotations in
polemical intention: he was pointing to the historical link between
m o d e r n i s m and the awareness that language is a structure of signs.
Indeed, although Brecht's star has somewhat faded in recent years,
he was regarded in postwar E u r o p e as one of the most powerful
modernist writers. In his n u m e r o u s theoretical statements. Brecht
had always attacked the m ) t h of the transparency of language that
had governed the practice of theater since Aristotle; the self-reflec-
tive, anti-illusionistic montagelike devices that interrupted the flow
of his plays aimed at aborting the identification of the spectator with
any character and, as he phrased it, at p r o d u c i n g an effect of "dis-
tanciation" or "estrangement."
The first example Barthes c o m m e n t e d on in his 1971-2 seminar
\vas a text in w^hich the G e r m a n writer patiently analyzed the 1934
Christmas speeches of two Nazi leaders ( H e r m a n n Goering a n d
Rudolf Hess). W h a t struck Barthes was Brecht's extreme attention
to the f o r m of the Nazi texts, which he had followed w o r d for w o r d
in order to elaborate his counterdiscourse. Brecht pinpointed the
efficacy of these speeches in the seamless flow of their rhetoric: the
smokescreen with which Goering a n d Hess masked their faulty
logic a n d heap of lies was the mellifluous continuity of their lan-
guage, which f u n c t i o n e d like a robust, gooey adhesive.
Brecht, in short, was a formalist, eager to d e m o n s t r a t e that lan-
guage w^as not a neutral vehicle m a d e to transparently convey
concepts directly f r o m m i n d to m i n d , but had a materialit)' of its
own a n d that this materiality was always charged with significa-
tions. But he immensely resented the label of formalism when it
was t h r o w n at m o d e r n literature as a whole by the Marxist philoso-
p h e r Gyorg)^ Lukacs, wTiting in the USSR at a time when calling
a n y o n e a formalist was equivalent to signing his or her death
warrant. Bv then virulently opposed to m o d e r n i s m in general
but in particular to the technique of m o n t a g e that Sergei Eisenstein
invented in film a n d Brecht a d a p t e d to the theater, a n d to the kind
of interior m o n o l o g u e that concludes James Joyce's Ulysses
Lukacs h a d p r o p o s e d n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y realist novels (those of
Balzac in particular) as the m o d e l to be emulated, especially if o n e
was to write f r o m a "proletarian" point of view. Yet it was Lukacs
w h o was the "formalist," wrote Brecht in his rebuttal. In calling for
a twentieth-centur)' novel wiih a "revolutionary" content but
p e n n e d in a f o r m that dated f r o m a c e n t u n ' earlier, a f o r m that
belonged to the era before the self-reflexivity a n d anti-illusionism
of m o d e r n i s m , Lukacs was fetishizing f o r m .
T h u s the t e r m "formalist" was an insult that Lukacs a n d Brecht
tossed at each other, but the word did not have the same sense for
each. For Brecht, a formalist was a n y o n e w h o could not see that
f o r m was inseparable f r o m content, w h o believed that f o r m was a
mere carrier; for Lukacs, it was anyone w h o believed that f o r m even
affected content. Brecht's uneasiness with the term, however,
should give us pause, especially since the same uneasiness has
m u s h r o o m e d in art history a n d criticism since the early seventies.
(It is particularly noteworthy in this context that the art critic whose
n a m e is most associated in America with formalism, Clement
Russian, the t e r m has acquired ineradicably vulgar ones in English,"
he wrote in 1967.) In order to u n d e r s t a n d the ambivalence, it is
useful to recall Barthes's dictum: "a little formalism t u r n s one away
f r o m History, but that a lot brings one back to it." For what Brecht
resented in Lukacs's "formalism" was its denial both of history and
of what the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev would call the " f o r m of
c o n t e n t " o f the fact that the very structure of Balzac's novels was
g r o u n d e d u p o n the world view of a particular social class at a partic-
ular juncture in the history of Western Europe. In short, Lukacs had
practiced only a "restricted" formalism, whose analysis remains at
the superficial level of form-as-shape, or morphology.
T h e antiformalism that was prevalent in the discourse of art crit-
icism in the seventies can thus be explained in great part by a
confusion bet^veen two kinds of formalism, o n e that concerns itself
essentially m t h m o r p h o l o g y (which I call "restricted" formalism),
a n d one that envisions f o r m as s t r u c t u r a l t h e kind embraced by
Brecht w h e n he sorted out the "continuit)^" of Goering's a n d Hess's
speeches as an essential part of their ideological machine. T h e c o n -
fusion was c o m p o u n d e d by Greenberg's gradual t u r n a b o u t . While
his analyses of the dialectical role of trompe-Voeil de\ices in
Georges Braque's Cubist still lifes 111 or that of the allovemess of
lackson Pollock's drippings) are to be c o u n t e d on the structural
ledger, by the late 1950s his discourse was m o r e reminiscent of the
morphological m o d e p r o m u l g a t e d at the beginning of the twenti-
eth centur)'^ by the British writers Clive Bell a n d Roger Fry, whose
concern was merely good design. T h e distinction between these
two formalisms is essential to a retrieval of formalism (as struc-
turalism) f r o m the wastebasket of discarded ideas.
Structuralism and art history
.Although the linguistic/semiological m o d e l provided by Saussure
b e c a m e the inspiration for the structuralist m o v e m e n t in the fifties
and sixties, art histor)' had already developed structural m e t h o d s by
the time this m o d e l became known in the t\venties. Furthermore,
Formalism and structuraiism | introduction 3 33
 1 Georges Braque, Violin and Pitcher, 1910
C- c" cs-ivas. 1 1 7 * 73 i4c X 2 .>
A f o r m a l i s t s w e r e particularly aware of their art-historical ante-
-netorical devices, :o the sign f ca: o^ a' tne nc-a^a a''
sign 1 ca:icn : " e T s e ves, EXBT - - g tnis ca "tmg by
B'aque Giemen: Greercerg sing ecJ OL-I : r e cev ce 3'" v e
real'Stic naii and ts shadcA'- pa nted on fco c^ tne facetec
vcluTes decic:ed on t-^e p cture^s suraae, 3cth flattening
-re rest o" t i e inage a - d p js-i,ng it back atc ceptn. the
r,'-o,^pe-,'"ce(,' -^ai; was fcr t - e ar: st a Tieans cf cas: - g
some d c c o : with rega-d to tne traditional, illusior s: a
mode a' represen: - g space.
34 I n t r o d u c t i o n 3 | Formalism and structuralism
the first literary critics w h o can be called structuraliststhe Russian
cedents ( m u c h m o r e than of Saussure, w h o m the\' discovered only
after writing m a n y of their groundbreaking works). Finalb', it was
Cubism that first helped the Russian Formalists to develop their
theories: in deliberately attacking the epistemology of representa-
tion, Cubism (and abstract art in its wake) underscored the gap
separating reference a n d meaning and called for a m o r e sophisti-
cated u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the nature of signs.
T h e role played by art history and avant-garde art practice in the
f o r m a t i o n of a structuralist m o d e of t h i n k i n g is little known today,
but it is i m p o r t a n t for o u r purpose, especially with regard to the
accusations of ahistoricism often t h r o w n at structuralism. In fact,
o n e could even say that the birth of art history as a discipline dates
f r o m the m o m e n t it was able to structure the vast a m o u n t of mate-
rial it had neglected for purely ideological a n d aesthetic reasons.
It might seem o d d today that seventeenth-centur\' Baroque art, for
example, had fallen into oblivion d u r i n g the eighteenth a n d early
nineteenth centuries, until Heinrich Wlfflin (1864-1945) reha-
bilitated it in Retiaissance and Baroque (1888). Resolutely opposed
to the d o m i n a n t normative aesthetic of l o h a n n Joachim Winckel-
m a n n ( 1 7 1 7 - 6 8 ) , for w h o m Greek art w^as an unsurpassable
yardstick for all subsequent artistic p r o d u c t i o n , Wlfflin endeav-
ored to show that Baroque art h a d to be judged by criteria that were
not only different f r o m btit resolutely opposed to those of Classical
art. This idea, that the historical signification of a stylistic language
was manifested t h r o u g h its rejection of a n o t h e r one (in this case, a
preceding one) would lead Wlfflin to posit "an art history-without
n a m e s " and to establish the set of binary^ oppositions that consti-
tutes the core of his most f a m o u s book, Principles of Art History,
which appeared in 1915 (linear/painterly, plane/recession, closed/
open form; multiplicity/unity; clearness/unclearness).
Wlfiflin's formalist t a x o n o m y , however, was still part of a teleo-
logical a n d idealistic discourse, m o d e l e d on Hegel's view of history,
according to which the unfolding of events is prescribed by a set
of p r e d e t e r m i n e d laws. (Within every^ "artistic epoch," Wlfflin
always read the same s m o o t h evolution f r o m linear to painterly,
f r o m plane to recession, etc., which left h i m with little r o o m to
explain how^ one switched f r o m o n e " e p o c h " to the next, particu-
larly since he denied nonartistic historical factors m u c h of a
causative role in his scheme.) But if Wlfflin's idealism prevented
h i m f r o m developing his formalism into a structuralism, it is to
Alois Riegl (1858-1905) that ones owes the first full elaboration of
a meticulous analysis of f o r m s as the best access to a social history
of artistic p r o d u c t i o n , signification, a n d reception.
Just as Wlfflin had d o n e with the Baroque era, Riegl u n d e r t o o k
the rehabilitation of artistic eras that had been marginalized as deca-
dent, most notably the production of late antiquity {Late Rowan Art
Industry, 1901). But he did m o r e than Wlfflin to advance the cause
of an a n o n y m o u s history of art, one that w^ould trace the evolution
of formal/structural systems rather than merely study the o u t p u t of
individual artists: if the well-known works of R e m b r a n d t a n d Frans
 Hals figure in his last book. The Group Portraiture of Holland (1902),
the\' are as the e n d - p r o d u c t s of a series whose features the\' inherit
and transform. RiegFs historical relativism was radical and had far-
reaching consecjuences, not only because it allowed him to disregard
the distinction between high a n d low, m a j o r and minor, p u r e
and applied art, but because it led him to understand every artistic
document AS a be analyzed a n d posited in relationship as one could say that the first, so-called "African," phase of Cubism
nionufiientXo
with others belonging to the same series. In other \vords, Riegl was rooted in a deliberate practice of estrangement. Witness this
demonstrated that it was only after the set of codes enacted (or declaration of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973): "In those days people
altered) bv an art object had been m a p p e d in their u t m o s t details
that one could attempt to discuss that object's signification and the
way it related to other series (for example to the history-of social for-
mations, of science, and so f o r t h ) a n idea that would be of
importance for both the Russian Formalists a n d Michel Foucault.
And it is because Riegl understood m e a n i n g as structured by a set of
oppositions (and not as transparently conveyed) that he was able to
challenge the ovenvhelming role usually given to the referent in the
discourse about art since the Renaissance.
A c r i s i s of r e f e r e n c e
A similar crisis of reference provided the initial spark of Russian
Formalism a r o u n d 1915. T h e polemical target of the Russian For-
malist critics was the Symbolist conception that poetry resided in
the images it elicited, i n d e p e n d e n t of its linguistic f o r m . But it was
through their c o n f r o n t a t i o n with Cubism, then with the first
A abstract paintings of Kazimir Malevich and the poetic experiments
of his friends Velemir Khlebnikov a n d Aleksei K r u c h e n i k h
poems whose sounds referred to n o t h i n g but the phonetic n a t u r e
t)f language itselfthat the Russian Formalists discovered, before
they ever heard of Saussure, w^hat the Swiss scholar had called the
'\u-bitrar\^ nature of the sign."
Allusions to C u b i s m a b o u n d in R o m a n Jakobson's wTitings,
particularly w h e n he tries to define poetic language as opposed to
the language of c o m m u n i c a t i o n used in everyday life. In " W h a t is
Poeir\ ?", a lecture delivered in 1933, he writes:
Poet 'icityl can be separated out and made independent, 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 "making
>n ange," as a rhetorical figure, whose conceptuaUzation by Viktor
ShklovskT (1893-1984) in "Art as Device" (1917) is the first theo-
retical landmark of Russian Formalism (the'family resemblance of
this notion with Brecht's "estrangement effect" is not fortuitous).
According to Shklovsk)-, the m a i n function of art is to defamiliarize
our perception, which has b e c o m e automatized, and although
Jakobson would later dismiss this first theory of defamilarization, it
is the way he interpreted Cubism at the time. And for good reason,
said that 1 m a d e the noses crooked, even in the Demoiselles d'Avig-
non, but I had to m a k e the nose crooked so they would see that it
was a nose. I was sure later they would see that it wasn't crooked."
For Shklovsky, what characterized any work of art was the set of
"devices" t h r o u g h which it was reorganizing the "material" (the
referent), m a k i n g it strange. (The n o t i o n of "device," never rigor-
ously defined, was a blanket term by which he designated any
stylistic feature or rhetoric construction, encompassing all levels of
languagephonetic, syntactic, or semantic.) Later on, w h e n he
devoted particular attention to works such as the eighteenth-
century "novel" Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, where the
writer pays m o r e attention to m o c k i n g the codes of storytelling
t h a n to the plot itself, Shklovsky began to conceive n o t only o u r
perception of the world but also the daily language of c o m m u n i c a -
tion as the "material" that literary art r e a r r a n g e s b u t the work of
art remained for h i m a s u m of devices t h r o u g h which the " m a t e r -
ial" was de-automatized. For Jakobson, though, the "devices" were
not simply pUed up in a work but were interdependent, constitut-
ing a system, a n d they had a constructive function, each
c o n t r i b u t i n g to the specificity a n d unity of the work, just as each
b o n e has a role to play in o u r skeleton. F u r t h e r m o r e , each new
artistic device, or each new system of devices, had to be u n d e r s t o o d
either as breaking a previous o n e that h a d b e c o m e deadened a n d
automatized, or as revealing it (laying it bare), as if it had been
there all along b u t unperceived: in short, any artistic device (and
not just the world at large or the language of daily c o m m u n i c a t i o n )
could b e c o m e the "material" m a d e strange by a subsequent one. As
a result, any device was always semantically charged for Jakobson,
a complex sign bearing several layers of connotations.
It is this second n o t i o n of osrra/icNie that Jakobson had in m i n d
w-hen he spoke of the isolation of the various devices in a Cubist
work as a "special case": in laying bare the traditional m e c h a n i s m s
of pictorial representation. C u b i s m p e r f o r m e d for Jakobson a n d
his colleagues the same f u n c t i o n that neurosis had played for
Freud's discovery of the unconscious. M u c h as the special (patho-
logical) case of neurosis had led Freud to his general theory of the
psychological development of m a n , the special (defamiliarizing)
case of C u b i s m was seized by the Russian Formalists as s u p p o r t for
their antimimetic, structural conception of poetic language.
In hindsight, however, we can see that bestowing a status of "nor-
m a l s ' " to the traditional means of pictorial representation that
Cubism fought and whose devices it laid bare is not sustainable: it
would posit such traditional means of representahon as constituting a
Formalism and structuraiism | i n t r o d u c t i o n 3 35
 kind of ahistorical n o r m against ^vhich all pictorial enterprises would
ha\'e to be measured ( bringing us back, in effect, to W'inckelmann ),
Percei\ing the essentializing danger ot this simple
(norm/exception), lakobson grew m o r e suspicious of the normative
postulates upon which his early work had been based (the opposition
between the language of daih' use as n o r m , and of literature as excep-
tion). But he would always take advantage of the model offered by
psychoanalysis, according to which dysfunction helps us understand
function. In fiict, one of his ma jor contributions to the field of literar)^
criticismthe dichotom\' that he established between the meta-
phoric and metonyxnic poles of languagewas the direct fesult of his
im estigation of aphasia, a disorder of the central jierv'ous system
characterized by the partial or total loss of the ability to communicate.
He noted that for the most part aphasic disturbances concerned either
"the selection of linguistic entities" (the choice of that sound
than this one, of that word rather than this one) or "their combina-
tion into linguistic units of a higher degree of complexity." Patients
suffering f r o m the first kind of aphasia (which lakobson terms "the
similariU^ disorder" 1 cannot substitute a linguistic unit for another
one, and metaphor is inaccessible to them; patients suffering from the
second kind of aphasia ("the contiguity disorder") caimot put any
linguistic unit into its context, and metonymy (or symecdoche) is
senseless for them. The poles of similarity and contiguity were directly
borrowed f r o m Saussure (they correspond in his Course to the terms
paradigm and sj'ntagni), but they were expressly linked by lakobson to
the Freudian concepts of displacement and condensation: just as the
limit between these two activities of the unconscious remained
porous for Freud, Jakobson's polar extremes do not preclude the exis-
tence of h)i5rid or intermediary forms. But once again it is the
opposition of these t\vo terms that structured for him the immense
domain of world literature. And not only literature: he saw Surrealist
art as essentially metaphoric, and Cubism as essentially metonymic.
This angle of attack led Saussure to separate the problem of
referentiality f r o m the p r o b l e m of signification, u n d e r s t o o d as the
dualism e n a c t m e n t in the utterance 'which he called parole, as opposed
to langue, designating the language in which the sign is uttered)
of an arbitrary- but necessary- link betvveen a signifier and a "con-
ceptual" signified. In the most celebrated 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
w i t h o u t positive t e r m s . . . The idea [signifiedj or phonic sub-
stance [signifier] that a sign contains is o f less importance than
the other signs that surround it.
rather
This not only m e a n s that a linguistic sign does n o t signify^ by itself,
but that language is a system of which all units are i n t e r d e p e n d e n t .
"I eat" a n d "I ate" have different m e a n i n g s ( t h o u g h only one letter
has shifted its position), but the signified of a t e m p o r a l present in
"1 eat" can exist only if it is opposed to the signified of a t e m p o r a l
past in "I ate": o n e would simply not be able to identify^ (and thus
u n d e r s t a n d ) a linguistic sign if o u r m i n d did not c o m p u t e its c o m -
petitors within the system to which it belongs, quickly eliminating
the ill-suitors while gauging the context of the utterance (for "I eat"
is opposed not only to "I ate," but to "I gorge," "I bite," or e v e n
leaving the semantic realm of f o o d " I sing," "I walk," a n d so
forth). In short, the essential characteristic of any sign is to be what
o t h e r signs are not. But, Saussure adds,
the statement that everything in language is negative is true only
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.

The arbitrary nature of the sign

Before we examine a Cubist work f r o m a structural p o i n t of view,
let us at last t u r n to Saussure's f a m o u s Course and its g r o u n d b r e a k -
ing exposition of what he called the arbitrariness of the sign.
Saussure went tar beyond the conventional n o t i o n of arbitrariness
as the absence of any "natural" link between the sign (say, the w o r d
"tree") and its referent (any actual tree), even t h o u g h he would
have been the last t o deny this absence, t o which the simple exis-
tence of multiple languages attests. For Saussure, the arbitrariness
involved not only the relation between the sign a n d its referent, b u t
also that between the signifier (the s o u n d w^e utter w h e n w'e pro-
n o u n c e the w o r d "tree" or the letters we trace when we write it
d o w n ) and the signified (the concept of tree). His principal target
was the Adamic conception of language ( f r o m A d a m ' s perfor-
m a n c e in the Book of Genesis: language as an ensemble of n a m e s
for things), which he caUed "chimeric" because it presupposes the
existence of an invariable n u m b e r of signifieds that receive in each
particular language a different f o r m a l vestment.
In other words, the acoustic signifier a n d the "conceptual" signi-
fied are negatively differential (they define themselves by w^hat they
are not), but a positive fact results f r o m their c o m b i n a t i o n , "the
sole type of facts that language has," namely, the sign. Such a caveat
might seem strange, given that everyvs'here else Saussure insisted
on the oppositional nature of the sign: is he n o t suddenly reintro-
ducing a substantive quality here, when all his linguistics rests on
the discovery^ that "language is f o r m a n d not substance"?
Fverything revolves a r o u n d the concept of value, one of the
m o s t complex and controversial concepts in Saussure. The sign is
positive because it has a value d e t e r m i n e d by what it can be c o m -
pared with a n d exchanged with within its own system. This value
is absolutely differential, like the value of a h u n d r e d - d o l l a r bill
in relation to a t h o u s a n d - d o l l a r bill, but it confers on the sign
" s o m e t h i n g positive." Value is an e c o n o m i c concept for Saussure;
it permits the exchange of signs within a system, b u t it is also what
prevents their perfect exchangeability with signs belonging to
a n o t h e r system (the French w^ord mouton, for example, has a

36 Introduction 3 | Formalism and structuralism


2 Pablo Picasso, Bull's Head, 1942
- . - ^ e n b age ibicycle seat and "andlecarsi,
: ^ ^ >: - 3 5 X 19 ;13 . X 1 X 7/;)
' - e neve' read Saussure. Picasso discovered
~ ; c ,vn visual t e r n s what the 'aths' of st.'uc"L.'al
" ni- s: IS hac labe^ec the 'arb tra^ ness o' t " e s g^'."'
-- er tnat signs a'e ef ^ed by their oppcsit on tc ether
-ic- 5 '.v thin a given system, anytoirg car stand ' c
- f- ^g e se if it c o " f o r n s to the r^ ss of the s y s t e r
:-^65ticn. ^sing f^e handlebar and seat of a b cycle,
- ". "-SSO -enains witt^ the 'ealm a' representation,
oirg the minimum required ' c a comb "ation of
-carate e^en^ents "o be -"ead as toe ho-ned heac of
t c.. . while 3t f e same t n~e o e m c s f a t i n g tne
n"etaohcrio ocwer o* assemblage.
different value than the English sheep or niuttoii, because it m e a n s
both the animal a n d its meat).
To e.xplain his concept of value, Saussure invoked the m e t a p h o r
of chess. If, d u r i n g a game, a piece is lost, it does not matter what
other piece replaces it provisionally; the players can arbitrarily
choose any substitute they want, any object will do, a n d even,
d e p e n d i n g on their capacity- to r e m e m b e r , the absence of an object.
For it is the piece's f u n c t i o n within a system that confers its value
(just as it is the piece's position at each m o m e n t of the game that
gives it its changing signification). "If you a u g m e n t language b\'
one sign," Saussure said, "you diminish in the same p r o p o r t i o n the
[value] of the others. Reciprocally, if only two signs had been
chosen ... all the [possible] significations would have had to be
divided between these two signs. O n e would have designated one
half of the objects, the other, the other h a l f " T h e value of each ot
these two inconceivable signs would have been e n o r m o u s .
Reading such lines, it comes as no surprise that Jakobson and the
.Russian Formalists had arrived at similar conclusions through a
examination of C u b i s m t h a t of Picasso, in particular, who almost
maniacally demonstrated the interchangeability of signs within his
pictorial system, and whose play on the minimal act required to
transform a head into a guitar or a bottle, in a series of collages
he realized in 1913, seem a direct illustration of Saussure's pro-
nouncement. This metaphoric transformation indicates that,
contra Jakobson, Picasso is not b o u n d to the m e t o n y m i c pole.
Instead, he seems to particularly relish composite structures that are
both metaphoric a n d metonymic. A case in point is the 1944 sculp-
ture of the Bull's Head [2], where the conjunction (metonymy) of
a bicycle handlebar and seat p r o d u c e d a m e t a p h o r (the s u m of these
rvvo bicycle parts are like a bull's head), but such swift transforma-
tions based on the tvvo structuralist operations of substitution and
combination are legion in his oeuvre. Which is to say that Picasso's
C u b i s m was a "structuralist activit)'," to use Barthes's phrase: it not
only p e r f o r m e d a structural analysis of the figurative tradition of
Western art, but it also structurally engineered new objects.
An example is Picasso's invention of what one could call space as
a n e w sculptural material. T h e fact that the Cubist constructions
Picasso created in 1912-13 represent a key m o m e n t in the history
of sculpture has long been recognized, but the m e a n s t h r o u g h
which Picasso articulated space anew are not always u n d e r s t o o d .
To m a k e a story short: until Picasso's 1912 Guitar [3], Western
sculpture, either canned or cast, had either consisted in a mass, a
v o l u m e that detached itself f r o m a s u r r o u n d i n g space conceived as
neutral, or retreated to the condition of bas-relief. Helped by his
discovery of African art, Picasso realized that Western sculpture
w^as paralyzed by a fear of being swallowed by the real space ot
objects (in the post-Renaissance system of representation, it was
essential that art remained securely roped off f r o m the world in an
ethereal realm of illusions). Rather than a t t e m p t i n g to discard the
rope altogether, as Marcel D u c h a m p would soon do in his ready-
I mades, Picasso answered the challenge by m a k i n g space o n e of
sculpture's materials. Part of the b o d y of his Guitar is a virtual
Formalism and structuraiism |i n t r o d u c t i o n3 37

3 ' Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Fall1912
Const'-jclio- d1 sneet metal, string, ans: vM'e.
77,5 X 35 X 1 9.5 l30'': X ' Sv^ x 7^ :1
For slructjralisrr, signs are oppositional 3 " d r a :
suDstartial, vvhich is :o ssy Itisr tne shape and
sigr ticaticn are solely dednec by their d r e r e ^ c e tren-
ail o-.-^er s:gns 'n the same system, anc tha: they wo..Id
n e a r --oTn " g m salat on. By the shea- contrasting
juxtapcsit on of voic and surface m this sculpture, L'.'hich
n a r k s ttie oir:-: of vj-at woula be called "Syntnetic
Gub s n . " i;hcss n a j c 'c-n^ai inven: on -.vo.. d be collage,
Picassc transforrrs a veld into a sign - c the s<in a* a
guita" anc a p'otruding cylinaer into a sign -o- its hcle. In
do " g sc. ^e n a k e s a nonsubs:a.~cesoacein:o a
-naterial for sculpture.
38 I n t r o d u c t i o n 3 | Formalism and structuralism
v o l u m e whose external surfacc we d o not see (it is immaterial) b u t
that we intuit t h r o u g h the position of"other planes. Just as Saussure
had d i s c o \ c r e d with regard to linguistic signs, Picasso found that
sculptural signs did not ha\'e to be substantial. Empty space could
easily be t r a n s f o r m e d into a differential mark, and as such c o m -
bined with all kinds of other signs: n o longer fear space, Picasso
told his fellow^ sculptors, shape it.
As Jakobson has n o t e d , however. C u b i s m is a "special case" in
which devices can be separated out ( in a Cubist painting shading
is emphatically i n d e p e n d e n t f r o m c o n t o u r , for example), and
few artists in this c e n t u n ' were as good structuralists as Picasso
was d u r i n g his Cubist years. A n o t h e r candidate proposed by
k.structuralist critics was Piet M o n d r i a n (1872-1944). Indeed, in
deliberately reducing his pictorial v o c a b u l a n ' to ven' few elements,
f r o m 1920 o n b l a c k horizontal a n d vertical lines, planes of
primary^ colors a n d of "noncolors" (white, black, or g r a y ) a n d in
p r o d u c i n g an extremely various oeuvre within such limited para-
meters {4, 5], M o n d r i a n d e m o n s t r a t e d the c o m b i n a t o r y infinitude
of any system. In Saussurean terminolog)', one could say that
because the new pictorial hngue that he created consisted in a
h a n d f u l of elements a n d rules ("no s y m m e t r y " was one of t h e m ) ,
the range of possibilities proceeding f r o m such a Spartan language
(his parole) became all the m o r e apparent. He h a d limited the
c o r p u s of possible pictorial m a r k s within his system, but this \ery
limitation immensely accrued their "value."
Despite the fact that M o n d r i a n seems to be a structuralist avant
la lettre it is not the structural t ) ^ e of formal analysis, b u t rather
the morphological one, that w^as first p r o p o s e d in the study of
his art. This morphological formalism, mainly concerned with
M o n d r i a n ' s compositional schemes, r e m a i n e d impressionistic in
n a t u r e , t h o u g h it gave us excellent descriptions of the balance or
imbalance of planes in his w^orks, the vividness of the colors, the
r h y t h m i c staccato. In the end this approach r e m a i n e d tautological,
especially in its b l u n t refusal to discuss " m e a n i n g , " a n d it is not by
chance that an iconographic, Symbolist interpretation was long
t h o u g h t preferable, even t h o u g h it ran c o u n t e r to what the artist
himself h a d to say.
A structural reading of M o n d r i a n ' s work began to emerge only
in the seventies. It examines the semantic f u n c t i o n played by
various c o m b i n a t i o n s of pictorial elements as M o n d r i a n ' s work
evolved and seeks to u n d e r s t a n d h o w a seemingly rigid f o r m a l
system engendered diverse significations. Rather t h a n assigning a
fixed m e a n i n g to these elements, as the Symbolist interpretation
h a d vs^anted to do, it is able to show, for example, that f r o m the
early thirties, the "Xeoplastic" pictorial vocabulary that he had
coined in 1920 and used ever since w^as t r a n s f o r m e d into a self-
destructive m a c h i n e destined to abolish not only the figure, as he
h a d d o n e before, b u t color planes, lines, surfaces, a n d by extension
every possible identityin other words, that M o n d r i a n ' s art
elicited an epistemological nihilism of ever-growing intensity. In
short, if art critics a n d historians h a d been m o r e acutely attenti\'e
to the formal development of his oeuvre, they might have earlier

4 Piet M o n d r i a n , Composition with Red,
Black, Yellow, and Gray, 1921
C : n canvas. 39.4 x 35 ' 1 5 ' x 13:
5 Piet M o n d r i a n , Composition with Blue,
Yellow, and R e d , 1922
""I canvas 39.5 x 3 - . 7 i15 . x ' 3 ' ;
-"-|"u.-ati:;n a - d c o m b - a t i c n a-e rns T e a n s by vvb c h
C'scourse 3 g e n s - a t s d a'^d as s u e :hey constitute
1 0 - r a 1 aspects c" '.vnat B a t n e s callec the
activity." n tbese tv.'C canvases. M c n d n a n
"lecks, iust as a seiest s( .voulc c c . i? anc ho>v o c
T'cec" o n o' a cent-al s c j a ' e c n a n c e s a c c o r d ' n c tc tne
"" c J ^!catio."s of Its s j ' r o c " d i n g s .
on grasped the connection he felt more inclined to make in his
writings, from 1930, between what he tried to achieve pictorially
and the political views of anarchism. By the same token, however,
they would have understood that if his classic Neoplastic work had
been governed by a structural ethos, during the last decade of his
life this ethos was geared toward the deconstruction of the set of
binary oppositions upon which his art had been based: they would
have perceived that, like Barthes, Mondrian had began as a practi-
tioner of structuralism only to become one of its most formidable
assailants. But they would have had to be versed in structuralism
itself to diagnose his attack.
Two aspects of Mondrian's art after 1920 explain why his art
became an ideal object for a structuralist approach: first, it was a
closed corpus (not only was the total o u t p u t small, but as noted
above, the n u m b e r of pictorial elements he used were in a finite
number); second, his oeuvre was easily distributed into series. The
two first methodological steps taken in any structural analysis are
the definition of a closed corpus of objects from which a set of
recurrent rules can be deduced, and, within this corpus, the taxo-
nomic constitution of seriesand it is indeed only after the
multiple series scanning Mondrian's oeuvre had been properly
mapped that a more elaborate study of the signification of his
works became possible. But what a structural analysis can do with
the production of a single artist, it can also do at the microlevel of
the single work, as the Russian Formalists or Barthes have amply
shown, or at the macrolevel of a whole field, as Claude L m - S t r a u s s
has demonstrated in his studies of vast ensembles of myths. The
method remains the same, only the scale of the object of inquiry-
changes: in each case, discrete "units" 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 remains limited in range. Through a forceful critique of
the very^ notions of internal coherence, closed corpus, and author-
Aship, what is now called "poststructuralism," hand in hand w t h
the literary and artistic practices labeled "postmodernist," would
efficiently blunt the preeminence that structuralism and formalism
had enjoy^ed in the sixties. But, as n u m e r o u s entries in this volume
make clear, the heuristic power of structural and formalist analysis,
especially with regard to the canonical m o m e n t s of modernism,
Blue,
need not be discarded.
Black, =L R ' - E R RHACING
Roland Barthes. .Vv>'T,'^3i'cc'es ("95^1, t'"ans. Annexe -avers 'Nev-, York: Nocrday Press, 1972
Roman Jakobson '/'.'f-at s Poet'". "" " 533; ana 'Tv-.'C Aspects o" .angjage s r d '^.vo "yoes
of Aphasie D'StLrbances"956:. n K'-vstyra For^orso ana Stephier R j c y ;eds Larguage arc
iCa'Tiorioce. Iv'ass,- ha-'.'ara U" '-'e''sity ^'ess. ' SS^j
Fredric Jameson, T'^s ^nscn-rc'jse c'ia;-'j's'je: A
For'mJiSfri i;P"-cetcn: Prnce'or U'^veraity ^-eas. i972i
Thomas Levin, "'vValte' Ber;amir ano tne " n e c y c f An hstory." Ocfcoec no ^7. '.Vnter t95S
Ferdinand de Saussure Ca^rss .'n Gene'-ai i^'fqu^st'Ci. trar's \''v'aGe Bask r |[\iev,' Y c k :
McG'SvV-hi; 9^6
rt'CCi . r 4
Formalism and structuraiism | introduction3 39
 D,
oststructura ism and deconstruction
' h r o u g h o u t the sixties, y o u t h f u l ideals m e a s u r e d against
official cymicism created a collision course that climaxed in
the uprisings of 1968, when, in reaction to the Vietnam
W a r , student m o v e m e n t s t h r o u g h o u t the w o r l d i n Berkeley,
Berlin, Milan, Paris, Toky^oerupted into action. A s t u d e n t leaflet
circulating in Paris in May 1968 declared the nature of the conflict:
We refuse to become teachers serving a mechanism 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.
Behind this refusal was the accusation that the university, long
t h o u g h t to be the precinct of an a u t o n o m o u s , disinterested, "free"
search for knowledge, had itself b e c o m e an interested party- to the
kind of social engineering the leaflet i m p u t e d to both g o v e r n m e n t
and industry^
T h e t e r m s of this indictment and its denial that discrete social
f u n c t i o n s w h e t h e r intellectual research or artistic practice A. S t r u c t u r a l i s m t h e d o m i n a n t French methodological
could be either a u t o n o m o u s or disinterested could not fail to have
repercussions beyond the b o u n d a r i e s of the university. They
immediately affected the art world as well. In Brussels, for
> example. Marcel B r o o d t h a e r s (1924-76) a n d o t h e r Belgian artists
joined their student confreres by occupying the Salle de M a r b r e of
the Palais des Beaux-Arts and t e m p o r a r i l y "liberating" it f r o m its
f o r m e r administration into their own control. F u r t h e r m o r e , in a
gesture that was also patterned o n the action of the s t u d e n t m o v e -
m e n t s , Broodthaers c o a u t h o r e d statements that were released to
the public in leaflet f o r m . O n e of t h e m a n n o u n c e d , for example,
that the Free Association (as the occupiers identified themselves)
" c o n d e m n s the commercialization of all f o r m s of art considered as
objects of c o n s u m p t i o n . " This f o r m of public address, which he
had used since 1963, was then to b e c o m e increasingly the basis of
his w^ork, which he was to carry out in the n a m e of a fictitious
m u s e u m , the "Musee d'Art M o d e r n e , " u n d e r the aegis o f w h i c h he
40 Introduction 4 | Poststructuraiisnn and deconstruction
would m o u n t a dozen sectionssuch as the "Section XlXeme
siecle ( " N i n e t e e n t h - C e n t u r y Section") a n d the " D e p a r t e m e n t des
Aigles" ( D e p a r t m e n t of Eagles) [ 1 ]and in the service of which he
addressed the public t h r o u g h a series of " O p e n Letters." T h e
f o r m e r separations within the art w o r l d b e t w e e n producers
(artists) and distributors ( m u s e u m s or galleries), between critics
a n d makers, between the ones who speak a n d the ones w h o are
spoken f o r w e r e radically challenged by Broodthaers's m u s e u m ,
an o p e r a t i o n that constantly^ p e r f o r m e d a p a r o d i c but p r o f o u n d
m e d i t a t i o n on the vectors of "interest" that r u n t h r o u g h cultural
institutions, as f a r - f r o m - d i s i n t e r e s t e d accessories of power.
This attitude of refusing the s u b o r d i n a t e p o s t u r e as the one w h o
is spoken for by seizing the right to speak, a n d consequently of
challenging the institutional a n d social divisions that s u p p o r t these
separations of power, h a d other sources of entitlement besides
student politics. T h e r e was also the reevaluation of the premises,
the suppositions, of the various academic disciplines collectively
called the h u m a n sciences that cry-stallized a r o u n d the time of 1968
into w^hat has been t e r m e d poststructuralism.
There is no "disinterest"
position
against which poststructuralism rebelledhad viewed any given
h u m a n activitylanguage, for example, or kinship systems within
a socieU^as a rule-governed system that is a m o r e or less
a u t o n o m o u s , self-maintaining structure, a n d whose laws operate
according to certain formal principles of m u t u a l opposition. This
idea of a self-regulating structure, one whose ordering operations
are formal and reflexivethat is, they derive f r o m , even while they
organize, the material givens of the system itselfcan clearly be
m a p p e d o n t o the m o d e r n i s t conception of the different a n d sepa-
rate artistic disciplines or m e d i u m s . And insofar as this parallel
obtains, the intellectual a n d theoretical battles of 1968 are highly
relevant to the developments in the world of art in the seventies
a n d eighties.
Poststructuralism grew o u t of a refusal to grant structuralism its
premise that each system is a u t o n o m o u s , with rules a n d opera-
tions that begin a n d e n d within the b o u n d a r i e s of that system.

1 Marcel Broodthaers, " M u s ^ e d'Art Moderne,
Departement des Aigles, Section des Figures
(The Eagle f r o m the Oligocene to the Present)," 1972
-"llavD'- view
d 'ecTor of -".IS r r u s s u n . Broadtfiaers organized its
Section Public te^' for DoccTenta. as well as exnibiticns of
c.a-" c u l a r ' chness tor ether m^seiims. this cne for tne
5'cd: sehe Kjnsthalle. Dsselcorf. in 1 972 A cc ection ot
c -erse ociects. the eagles ncluded v/ere ci'-awn f r o n
' :-.;is-cul1ura^ Tate':a (for example, the stamps on
: arnpag-e corks) as well as p r e c i c j s objects (s^ch as
- a ^ fi0i,','ae], al' cf them capticnec This .s not a '.vork
c" ad " As Broodthaers explained in the catalogue, the
tecticn marries the cieas of Ducnarro Ithe readymacte) to
" c" Magrife (his deconstructive "Tt- s is rot a pipe."
n : " e inscriptior on Tr^e Treachery of irnages of 1329;.
'"3 museum oeoartmen: responsible ^or tfiis exhib t i c
-:S tne "Section des ^igL-'es" illlustrations Section;.
In linguistics, this attitude e x p a n d e d the limited study of linguistic
structures to those m o d e s t h r o u g h which language issues into
action, the f o r m s called shifters a n d performatives. Shifters are
words like "I" a n d "you," where the referent of "I" (namely, the
person w h o utters it} shifts back a n d torth in a conversation.
Performatives are those verbal utterances that, by being uttered,
literally enact their meaning, such as when a speaker a n n o u n c e s
"I d o " at the m o m e n t of marriage. Language, it was argued, is n o t
simply a m a t t e r of the transmission of messages or the c o m m u n i -
cation of i n f o r m a t i o n ; it also places the interlocutor u n d e r the
obligation to reply. It therefore imposes a role, an attitude, a whole
discursive system (rules of behavior a n d of power, as well as of
coding a n d decoding) on the receiver of the linguistic act. Quite
apart f r o m the content of any given verbal exchange, then, its very'
e n a c t m e n t implies the acceptance (or rejection) of the whole
institutional f r a m e of that exchangeits "presuppositions," as
linguistics s t u d e n t Oswald Ducrot, early in 1968, called them:
The rejection of presuppositions constitutes a polemical attitude
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.
O n e f o r m of post-1968 rejection of presuppositions was that
French university students n o w insisted on addressing their p r o -
fessors with the intimate f o r m of the second p e r s o n " f i / " a n d
by their first names. They based this o n the university^'s o w n abro-
gation of presuppositions when it called in the police (which
historically had no jurisdiction within the walls of the S o r b o n n e ) to
forcibly evict the student occupiers.
Unlike the idea of the a u t o n o m o u s academic discipline (or
work of art) whose f r a m e is t h o u g h t to be necessarily external to
ita kind of nonessential a p p e n d a g e t h e p e r f o r m a t i v e n o t i o n
of language places the f r a m e at the very^ heart of the speech act.
For the verbal exchange, it was being argued, is f r o m the very
beginning the act of imposing (or failing to impose) a set of pre-
suppositions on the receiver of that exchange. Speech is t h u s m o r e
than the simple (and neutral) transmission of a message. It is also
the e n a c t m e n t of a relation of force, a m o v e to m o d i f y the
addressee's right to speak. T h e examples D u c r o t used to illustrate
the presuppositional imposition of power were a university exam
a n d a police interrogation.
Challenging the frame
T h e French structural linguist Emile Benveniste (1902-76) had
already d o n e m o r e t h a n a n y o n e else to bring a b o u t this transfor-
m a t i o n in the way language c a m e to be viewed in the sixties.
Dividing ty^^es of verbal exchange into narrative o n the o n e h a n d
a n d discourse o n the other, he pointed o u t that each type has its
Poststructuralism and d e c o n s t r u c t i o n | I n t r o d u c t i o n 4 41

2 Daniel Buren, Photo-souvenir: "Within
beyond the frame," 1973 (detail)
Work ir sifu. ..ahn Webe'- Ga ery, Nevv Y c k
Ey the early seve-ties Bure" hac -eajceci his pa - t ng
oract-ce to a :yoe o' readynade: canvases cu: t-om
c o m n e r c a y orodbaec gray-and-'.vtire st^ peo awning
naterial :>sed 'O' the awnings o - - r e n c " sta:e cttiae
bu dings! vvh ch hev-'OLlc "perso-^aiize" by -ar-d-aainarg
ever one of the stripes at the edge of the sivatch,
Fd' :ne u.ohn Weoer "3:ai atian, he ran ."s canvases
t t ' o u g h d-e ga' ery and out window aa-oss :ne
width cf the sreetas a kind of ba^^eriika acveaisenent
' o ' the ex-ibiticn.
42 I n t r o d u c t i o n 4 | Poststructuraiisnn and d e c o n s t r u c t i o n
own characteristic features: narrative (or the writing of historyi
typically engages the third person and confines itself to a f o r m of
the past tense; in contrast, discourse, Ben\'eniste's term for live
c o m m u n i c a t i o n , t\'picalh- engages the present tense and the first
a n d second persons (the shifters "1" and "you"). Discourse is
marked, then, by the e.xistential facts of its active transmission, of
the necessary presence within it of b o t h sender and receiver.
T h e French historian a n d philosopher Michel Foucault, teach-
ing at the College de France in 1969, developed this idea further.
Applying Benveniste's term "discourse" to what had always been
u n d e r s t o o d as the neutral c o m m u n i c a t i o n of scholarly i n f o r m a -
tion contained within a gi\'en d e p a r t m e n t a l discipline andlike
narrativeconfined to the transmission of "objective" i n f o r m a -
tion, Foucault took u p the contrary position that "discourses" are
always charged f r o m within by power relations, and even by the
exercise of force. Knowledge, according to this a r g u m e n t , ceases
to be the a u t o n o m o u s contents of a discipline and n o w becomes
disciplinarythat is, marked by the operations of power. Fou-
cault's "discourse," then, like D u c r o t ' s "presuppositions," is an
a c k n o w l e d g m e n t of the discursive f r a m e that shapes the speech
event, institutionally, like the relations of power that operate in a
classroom or a pohce station.
A Broodthaers's seizing of the right to speak, in his guise as
" m u s e u m director," performed the kind of challenge to institu-
tional frames that poststructuralists such as Foucault were then
theorizing. Indeed, Broodthaers m a d e his work out of those very-
frames, by enacting the rituals of administrative compartmentaliza-
tion and by parodying the way those c o m p a r t m e n t s in t u r n create
collections of "knowledge." .And as the frames were m a d e to b e c o m e
apparent, not outside the work but at its very center, what indeed
took place was the putting of "the very legitimacy of the given speech
act at stake." U n d e r each of the M u s e u m ' s exhibits, the D e p a r t m e n t
of Eagles affixed the Magrittcan label; "This is not a work of art."
Broodthaers was not alone in this decision to m a k e artistic prac-
tice out of the f r a m i n g , as it were, of the institutional frames.
Indeed, the whole practice of what came to be called "institutional
critique" derived f r o m such a practicecalling attention to the
supposedly neutral containers of culture a n d questioning this
putative neutrality. The French artist Daniel Buren, for instance,
a d o p t e d a strategy- to challenge the pow-er of the frames by refusing
to leave their presuppositions alone, impUcit, unremarked.
Instead, his art, emerging in the seventies, was one of m a r k i n g all
and those divisions t h r o u g h which power operates. In 1973 he exhib-
ited Within and beyond the frame [2]. A work in nineteen sections,
each a suspended gray-and-white-striped canvas (unstretched a n d
u n f r a m e d ) , Buren's "painting" extended almost two h u n d r e d feet,
beginning at o n e end of the John W e b e r Gallery in New York a n d
gaily c o n t i n u i n g out the window to w e n d its way across the street,
like so m a n y flags h u n g out for a parade, finally attaching itself to
the building opposite. The f r a m e referred to in the title of the work
was, obviously, the institutional f r a m e of the gallery, a f r a m e that
f u n c t i o n s to guarantee certain things about the objects it encloses.
r927a 1
3 - Robert Sm'ithson, A Non-site (Franklin, New Jersey), 1968
- .v:;: o ". Tt;s"C:ne. silier - golstir p'
, or oacs' .v o'ap" 'e a^d t-arsfe- c t e r s
-:: ocaro. S - s i - s ' a i i e o ' e n 2Z-i
;1 e ^ :>: 1 C3 : r - a r e s ' x 73 '
5 - - tnso^'s 'Vc.-"-3mss have been pre d u e vel', relsteo to .-e
" tne M^se^-r of Katurai History in NG'.v '-'O'--,. -
.nK:' s a T d e s z""e na:,-.'al are m p c t e o m'o " - e
as 9x-iib'ts that necessarily contan- -ate the
;:jr:t, cf the aesthetic space ~he cms c contaire's of - s
conr-ien: '0":ca y cn Mm TaliST accus
y-i ac-sthc-ticisT that Mm/ra. st 5'tists like I ^ c a d J j d o a'lo
Hicoe't fv'cns vvcu^o "ave emerge: cai y aen ec.
These thingslike rarity, authenticity, originalir)% and u n i q u e -
ar ;;
nessare part of the value of the work implicitly asserted by the
Ic' z space of the gallery. These values, which are part of what separates
x 30 ; art from other objects in our culture, objects that are neither rare,
n o r original, n o r unique, operate then to declare art as an
a u t o n o m o u s system within that culture.
Yet rarity, uniqueness, a n d so forth are also the values to which
the gallen' attaches a price, in an act that erases any f u n d a m e n t a l
t c"
difference between what it has to sell a n d the merchandise of
any o t h e r commercial space. As the identically striped paintings
(themselves barely distinguishable f r o m commercially p r o d u c e d
awnings ) breached the f r a m e of the gallery^ to pass beyond its con-
fines a n d out the window, Buren seemed to be asking the ^iewer to
d e t e r m i n e at what point they ceased being "paintings" (objects of
rarity, originality, etc.) and started being part of a n o t h e r system of
objects: tlags, sheets h u n g out to drys advertisements for the artist's
show, carnival bunting. He was probing, that is, the legitimacy of
the system's power to bestow value on work.
' T h e question of frames was also at the heart of Robert Smith-
son's thinking a b o u t the relation between the landscape, or natural
site, to its aesthetic container, which the artist labeled "non-site."
In a series of works called Non-sites, Smithson i m p o r t e d mineral
materialrocks, slag, slatefrom specific locations into the space
of the gallery by placing this material into geometrically shaped
bins, each one visually connected, by m e a n s of its f o r m , to a
segment of a wall m a p indicating the area of the specimens'
origin [3|. The obvious act of aestheticizing nature, a n d of t u r n i n g
the real into a representation of itself t h r o u g h the operations of the
geometrical bin to construct the raw matter of the rocks into a
s i g n t r a p e z o i d t h a t comes to "stand for" the rocks' point of
extraction, a n d thus for the rocks themselves, is what Smithson
consigns to the system of the art world's spaces: its galleries, its
m u s e u m s , its magazines.
T h e ziggurat-like structures of Smithson's bins a n d m a p s might
imply that it was only an ironic formal g a m e that was at issue in
this aspect of his art. But the graduated bins were also addressing
a kind of natural histor)' that could be read in the landscape, the
successive stages of e.xtracting the ore f r o m the initial bount)-, to
the progressive barrenness, to a final exhaustion of supply. It was
this natural history that could not be represented within the
f r a m e s of the art world's discourse, concerted as it is to tell quite
a n o t h e r s t o r y o n e of f o r m , of beauty, of 5e/f-reference. There-
fore, part of S m i t h s o n ' s strategy was to smuggle a n o t h e r , foreign
m o d e of representation into the f r a m e of the gallery, a m o d e he
took, in fact, f r o m the natural history m u s e u m , where rocks and
bins a n d m a p s are not freakish, aestheticized abstractions b u t the
basis of an altogether different system of knowledge: a way of
m a p p i n g and c o n t a i n i n g ideas a b o u t the "real."
T h e effort to escape f r o m the aesthetic container, to break the
chains of the institutional frame, to challenge the a s s u m p t i o n s
(and indeed the implicit pow^r relations) established by the art
world's presuppositions was thus carried out in the seventies in
Poststructuralism and d e c o n s t r u c t i o n | Introduction 4 43
 4 Richard Long, A Circle in Ireland, 1975
3y gc - g ou: "tc the andscace far the Tiater 3 s a*
s Vo'? s'les Sn-thso- - " o d L a e c tne :)ea'ha" the
lanascace tself rr^gtr. be a sculptura T s a i u n ,
Ear:".vor-;s '.vere a resu t ot this sucgesticn,
anists such as ^ o r g . Waiter Ce Mara, Chrsto, er
M'c^-ael Heizer operated directiy on t^e earth, cden
TS'^ing pro-.ograpnic r e c c d s et tns ^ act vities, T - s
depencer^ce an t^e proTograchic docuiren: was
the con^irr^at on of Walser Be-^ a T " ' s c^eo cticns in
the 1 935 essay 'The V.'ck of A r 'c the Age of
Mechanics Rep-'ocuctian "
44 I n t r o d u c t i o n 4 | Poststructuraiisnn and d e c o n s t r u c t i o n
relation to specific sites^gallery, m u s e u m , rock quarn*, Scottish
Highkmds, California coastwhich the w o r k of art f u n c t i o n e d to
refriwie. This act of re framing was m e a n t to p e r f o r m a peculiar
vvn'Ch kind of reversal. The old aesthetic ideas that the sites used to f r a m e
(although invisibly, implicitly ) n o w hovered over these real places
like so m a n y exorcised ghosts, w^hile the site itself^its white walls,
its neoclassical porticos, its picturesque m o o r s , its rolling hills a n d
rock)^ o u t c r o p p i n g s [ 4 ] b e c a m e the material s u p p o r t (the w^ay
paint a n d canvas or marble a n d clay used to be ) for a new kind of
representation. This representation was the image of the institu-
tional f r a m e s themselves, n o w forced into visibility as t h o u g h s o m e
kind of powerful new developing fluid h a d unlocked previously
secret i n f o r m a t i o n f r o m an inert photographic negative.
Derrida's double session
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), a philosopher teaching at the Ecole
N o r m a l e Superieure in Paris, seized u p o n Benveniste's a n d Fou-
cault's radicalization of structural linguistics to fashion his own
b r a n d of poststructuralism. He started o u t f r o m the very terms of
structuralism itself, in which language is m a r k e d by a f u n d a m e n t a l
.bivalency at the heart of the linguistic sign. According to struc-
turalist logic, while the sign is m a d e u p of the pairing 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 material
f o r m of the signifier (the spoken or written letters c, a, t). This is
because the relationship between signifier a n d signified is arbi-
trary': there is n o reason why c, a, f should signifv' "catness"; any
other c o m b i n a t i o n of letters could do the job just as well, as the
existence of different words for "cat" in different languages
demonstrates Cchat,'' "gcjffo," "Katze," etc.).
But this inequality' between signifier a n d signified is not the only
one at the heart of language. A n o t h e r feature to emerge f r o m the
structuralist m o d e l is the unevenness of t e r m s that m a k e u p o p p o s -
ing binary pairs such as " y o u n g / o l d " or " m a n / w o m a n . " This
inequality is between a markedandan unmarked term. The m a r k e d
half of the pair brings m o r e i n f o r m a t i o n into the utterance than
the u n m a r k e d half, as in the binary " y o u n g / o l d " a n d the statement
" l o h n is as y o u n g as Mary." "As y o u n g as" here implies youth,
whereas " l o h n is as old as Mary" implies neither youth n o r
advanced age. It is the u n m a r k e d t e r m which opens itself to the
higher order of sy^nthesis m o s t easily, a condition that becomes
clear if we look at the binary^ " m a n / w o m a n , " in which it is " m a n "
that is the u n m a r k e d half of the pair (as in " m a n k i n d , " " c h a i r m a n , "
"spokesman," etc.).
That the u n m a r k e d t e r m slips past its p a r t n e r into the position
of greater generality gives that t e r m implicit pow^r, thus instituting
a hierarchy within the seemingly neutral structure of the binary
pairing. It was Derrida's d e t e r m i n a t i o n not to continue to let
this inequality go w i t h o u t saying, but rather to say it, to " m a r k "
the u n m a r k e d t e r m , by^ using "she" as the general p r o n o u n indicat-
ing a person, a n d i n the theorization of " g r a m m a t o l o g y " (see
b e l o w ) t o p u t the signifier in the position of superiority over the
signified. This marking of the u n m a r k e d Derrida called ''decon-
struction,'" an overturning that makes sense only within the very-
structuralist f r a m e that it wants to place at the center of its activity
by f r a m i n g that frame.
Derrida's extremely influential b o o k Of Grammatology (1967)
proceeded f r o m such a deconstructive operation to m a r k the
u n m a r k e d , and thus to expose the invisible f r a m e to view\ If we
c o m p a r e the status of "he says" to that of "he writes," we see that
"says" is u n m a r k e d , while "vs^ites," as the specific t e r m , is t h u s
marked. Derrida's " g r a m m a t o l o g y " intends to m a r k speech (logos)
and thus to overturn this hierarchy, as well as to analyze the sources
of speech's p r e e m i n e n c e over wTiting. This analy'sis had begun with
Derrida's doctoral thesis, Speech and Phenomenon, in which he
analyzed the p h e n o m e n o l o g i s t E d m u n d Husserl's (1859-1938)
dismissal of wTiting as an infection of the transparency a n d i m m e -
diacy of t h o u g h t ' s appearance to itself. And as he analyzed the
privilege of logos over the dismissed sign of the m e m o r y trace
vvriting, gramme), Derrida developed the logic of what he called
t-he supplement, an aid b r o u g h t in to help or extend or s u p p l e m e n t
h u m a n capacityas writing extends m e m o r y or the reach of the
h u m a n v o i c e b u t which, ironically, ends by supplanting it. Such
a hierarchy is also b e h i n d the Derridean t e r m differance, itself
aurally indistinguishable f r o m difference, the French w^ord for that
ditference on which language is based. Differance, which can only^
be perceived in its written f o r m , refers, precisely, to writing's oper-
ation of the trace a n d of the break or spacing that o p e n s u p the page
to the articulation of one sign f r o m another. This spacing allows
not only for the play of difference between signifiers that is the
basis of language ("cat," for example, can f u n c t i o n as a sign a n d
assume its value in the language system only because it differs
f r o m "bat" a n d f r o m "car"), but also for the temporal unfolding of
signifieds ( m e a n i n g being elaborated in time t h r o u g h the gradual
iteration of a sentence): differance not only differs, then, it also
defers, o r temporalizes.
If deconstruction is the m a r k i n g of the u n m a r k e d , which
Derrida sometimes called the re-mark, its striving to f r a m e the
frames t o o k the analytical f o r m of the essay "The Parergon," which
attends to I m m a n u e l Kant's m a j o r treatise "The Critique of ludg-
m e n t " (1790), a treatise that not only f o u n d s the discipline of
aesthetics but also powerfully supplies m o d e r n i s m with its convic-
tion in the possibility of the a u t o n o m y of the a r t s t h e art work's
self-grounding and thus its i n d e p e n d e n c e f r o m the conditions of
its f r a m e . For Kant argues that " J u d g m e n t , " the o u t c o m e of aes-
thetic experience, must be separate f r o m "Reason"; it is not
d e p e n d e n t on cognitive j u d g m e n t b u t must reveal, Kant argues,
the paradoxical c o n d i t i o n of "purposiveness without purpose."
This is the source of art's a u t o n o m y , its disinterestedness, its escape
f r o m use or instrumentalization. Reason makes use of concepts in
its purposive pursuit of knowledge; art, as self-grounding, m u s t
abjure concepts, reflecting instead on the sheer purposiveness of
nature as a transcendental concept (and thus containing n o t h i n g
empirical). Kant argues that the logic of the work (the ergon) is
internal (or p r o p e r ) to it, such that what is outside it (the parergon)
is only extraneous o r n a m e n t and, like the f r a m e on a painting or
the c o l u m n s on a building, m e r e superfluity or decoration.
Derrida's a r g u m e n t , however, is that Kant's analysis of aesthetic
j u d g m e n t as self-grounding is not itself self-grounding but i m p o r t s
a f r a m e f r o m the writer's earlier essay "The Critique of P u r e
Reason" (1781), a cognitive f r a m e on which to build its tran-
scendental logic. T h u s the f r a m e is not extrinsic to the work b u t
comes f r o m outside to constitute the inside as an inside. This is the
parergonal f u n c t i o n of the frame.
Derrida's own r e f r a m i n g of the f r a m e was perhaps most
eloquently carried out in his 1969 text "The D o u b l e Session," refer-
ring to a double lecture he gave o n the work of the French poet
Stephane Mallarme (1842-98). T h e first page of the essay shows
Derrida's almost m o d e r n i s t sensitivity to the status of the signifier,
a sensitivity that parallels the poststructuralist's c a n n y assessment
of the " t r u t h s " of structuralism 15]. Like a m o d e r n i s t m o n o c h r o m e ,
the page presents itself as a buzz of gray letters as it reproduces a
page f r o m the Platonic dialogue "Philebus," a dialogue devoted to
the theory of mimesis (representation, imitation). Into the lower-
right corner of this field of gray, however, Derrida inserts a n o t h e r
text, also directed at the idea of mimesis: Mallarme's " M i m i q u e , "
Poststructuralism and deconstruction | Introduction 4 45
 the poet's account ot a p e r f o r m a n c e he saw carried out by a f a m o u s
m i m e and based on the text "Pierrot, M u r d e r e r of His Wife."
S O C R A T E S : And if Ht hid iomcont wich him. ht ould put whit he said lo himself into acnial speech
ddressed to his cu.-npanion. audibly uttering chose sime thoughts, so that what before we called Behind Derrida, on the blackboard of the classroom, had appeared
opinion ( S i a v ) has now become assertion (X-roi;).PROTARCHUS: Of course S O C R A T E S :
Whereas if he 15 aJone he continues thinking the samr thing by himself, going on his way maybe for a a three-fold i n t r o d u c t i o n to the lecture, hanging above his words,
considenbie time with the thought in his m i n d P R O T A R C H U S : Undoubtedly,SOCRATES
Wril now, / wonder whether you share my rirw an rhese miners.PROTARCHUS What is he said, like a crystal chandelier:
I t ' S O C R A T E S : It seems 10 me that at such times oui soul is like a book (ioxE L tte iioi ti
MiuVh Pi^) u v l i r p w t o i x ^ v a i ) P R O T A R C H U S : How s o : S O C R A T E S : It appeal^ to me that
the conjtjnctiofl of memory with sensations, together with the feelings constituent upon memory and
sensation, may be said as it were to write words in our souls f7pci<fELV i\\L63v TOets M'UXt^ J&^t r ant re de Mallarme
Xb^;) And when this eiperience nies what is true, the resuJt is that true opinion and true assertions
spring up in us, while when the internal scribe thai I have suggested writes what isfeise (JiEV&f) 8<yroiv
r"entrc'^ de Mallarme
6 Toiofrroi; iTQ^ "fjliJ^ 7pa>t(iaTEiK; Tpdijrg), we get Ventre-deux "Mallarm
the opp>si're sort of opinions Mid assertions. PRO- *
T A R C H U S : That certainly seems to me right, and I
appfte of the way you put i t S O C R A T E S : Then
please give your appfos-aJ to the pttsence of a secood UIMIQUE ^
Because in French there is no aural distinction between autre a n d
artist (5Tl|uoup-YK> in our souls at such a t i m e . Silence, sole luxury after rhymes, an
P R O T A R C H U S Who is that.'SOCRATES A pain- orchestra only markiifg with its gold, its entre, this textual o r n a m e n t d e p e n d s on its wTitten f o r m in order to
ter ( Z i u f p t i c o v ) who comes after the writer and paints bcustos with thought and dusk, the detail
in the soui pictures of these lisettions that we make of Its significalion on a par with a stilled ode m a k e any sense, in the same way that differance m u s t be written in
P R O T A R C H U S : How do we make out that he in his and which it is up to the poei, roused by 1
rum acts, and w h e n ' S O C R A T E S : When we have got durr, to translate? rhe silence of an afternoon
of music; I find it, with contentment, also,
order to register its signified. This h o m o p h o n i c condition is itself
those opmtons and assertions clear of the act of sight
before the ever original reappearance of
('0<|Etix;) or other sense, and as it were see in ourselves "between-two," as in Mallarme's ''entre-denx,'' a between-ness that
Pierrot or of the poignant and elegant mime
picrures ot images (ECxdvas) of what we previously Paul Margueritre.
opined or stsserted. That does happen with us, doesn't Such is this P I E R R O T PrfURDERER OF Derrida will liken to the fold in a page, a fold which t u r n s the sin-
i t ^ P R O T A R C H U S : Indeed it doe.SOCRATES- HIS W I F E composed and set down by him-
Then ate the pictures of tr^ie opimons and assertions self, a mute soliloquy thar the phantom, gleness of the material support into an a m b i g u o u s doubleness
true. Mid the pictures of false ones & l s e ? P R O T A R - white as a yet unwritten page, holds in boch
C H U S Unquestionably.SOCRATES Well, if we face and gesture at fvll length to his soui. A (a fold materialized in t u r n by the insertion of " M i m i q u e " into the
are right so far, here is or^ more point in this connection whirlwind of niive or new msom etna-
for us to consider.PROTARCHUS: What is nates, which It would be pleasing to seize "Philebus" at its corner).
upoo with security: the esthetics of the
that?SOCRATES: Does all this necessarily beil us
genre situated closerTOprinciples than any!
in respect of the present (Tdn/ bv^djv) and the past (t(v
(noHhing in this region of caprice foiling In the text of " T h e Double Session" itself, I3errida plays, like any
7J70V<St<v), but IWX in respect of the future (T<>v the direct simplifying instinct... This
l i s X X V T W v ) ? - P R O T A R C H U S ; On the cootiary. it "The scene illustrates but the idea, not any good m o d e r n i s t , with the material c o n d i t i o n of the n u m b e r s that
applies equally to chem all S O C R A T E S : We said actual acrio4i, in a hymen (out of which
previously, did we not, that pjeasuies atvi pains felt in flows Dream}, tainted with vice yet sacied, emerge f r o m Plato's a n d Mallarme's definitions of mimesis. Plato's
the soul aloie might precede those that come thnnigh between desire and fulfillment, perpetia-
the body? "Hvit must mean that we have anticipatory rioo and remembrance: here anticipating, definition t u r n s on the n u m b e r four, while the poet's t u r n s on the
there recalling, in the future, in the past,
pleasures and anticipatory pains in regard to the fu-
t u r e P R O T A R C H U S : Very true.SOCRATES
mdir tin fahe afptarinta of a frant. Thai is double, or the n u m b e r two. And like any good m o d e r n i s t , Derrida
how the Mime operates, whose act is con-
Now do tlit>$e writings and paJnrings (-yptiiJijixifTd Te fined to a perpetual allusion without break-
x a i {(iiTfpaipf)juxTQ), which a while ago we assumed to ing the ice or the mirror: he thus sets up a
materializes the classical f o u r s o m e , u n d e r s t a n d i n g it as a frame:
occur within ourselves, apply 10 past and present only, medium, a pure medium, of fiction." Less
and not to the futurr.>PROTARCHUS: Indeed they than a thousand lines, the role, the one thar Plato says that (1) the b o o k imitates the soul's silent dialogue with
d o . S O C R A T E S : 'When you say "indeed they do', do reads, will instantly compiehetKl the n J e s
you n>ean that the last sort are all npectations con- as if placed before the stageboards, their the self; (2) the value of the b o o k is not intrinsic but d e p e n d s on the
cerned with wiial IS to come, and that we are full of hiiizible depository. Surprise, accompany-
opectations all our life l o n g ? P R O T A R C H U S : Un-
mg the artifice of a notation of sentiments value of what it imitates; (3) the t r u t h of the book can be decided,
by unproered sentences that, in the sole
dcHjbcedly.SOCRATES; Well now. as a supplement
case, perhaps, with authenticity, between based on the t r u t h f u l n e s s of its imitation; a n d (4) the b o o k ' s imita-
to al] we have said, heie is a furxher qiKStioo for you to the sheets and the eye there reigr a silence
still, the condition and delight of reading.
tion is constituted by the f o r m of the double. T h u s Platonic

175
mimesis doubles what is single (or simple) and, being thus decid-
able, institutes itself within the operations of t r u t h . Mallarme's
imitation, on the other hand, doubles w'hat is already double or
multiple a n d is, therefore, undecidable: between-two. The text
of the m i m e - d r a m a that Mallarme r e c o u n t s in " M i m i q u e " tells of
Pierrot's discover)- of his wife C o l u m b i n e ' s adulter)', which he
decides to avenge by killing her. N o t wanting to be caught,
however, he refuses the obvious possibilities of poison, strangling,
or shooting, since all of t h e m leave traces. After kicking a rock in
5 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara
frustration, he massages his foot to assuage the pain a n d inadver-
Johnson, page 175 ("The Double Session")
tently tickles himself. In his helpless laughter, the idea d a w n s on
Derriaa, i\hose decors"'jc\'rje theory ccsiSTed o' ar him that he will tickle C o l u m b i n e to death and she will t h u s die
assault on the visualas a " o - t c1 preserice tha: " s dea
laughing. In the p e r f o r m a n c e , the actual m u r d e r is m i m e d with the
ot spacirig as a^ aspect a' ceterra :c' di'.^&'ance) 'vvas
Tean: tc cisnandeotien '^vented surp-is ngly efteatr^e actor pla)ing b o t h parts: the diabolical tickler a n d the convulsively
.'isja n^eiachors tor ais concepts, here, the insertio" of struggling victim, writhing with pleasure. Since such a death is
V a t a ^ T e ' s "M'Tique" ntc a come' ct p atc's "Pniiecus"'
impossible, the imitation imitates n o t what is simple b u t rather a
suggests, visja ly. t i e idea cf the foi^, o- redoacNnc,
that Derrida p r c o j c e s as a re'// concept ct n-;mesis, n multiple, itself a pure f u n c t i o n of the signifier, a t u r n of speech
iv^icn the doi.)ble secord-or3er copyi dcaoles no ("to die laughing"; "to be tickled to death"), rather t h a n of actual-
sing e icr orig nail. Arod-e' e x a n p e occurs :n the essay
ity. As Mallarme writes: "The scene illustrates only the idea, not a
"The Pa-ergor." w^"ere a s'^^ccessio" cf graph,c t'-ames
IS inte'spersec ihrougaout a text focused on :ne function positive action, in a marriage that is lewd but sacred, a marriage
ci tne f-ame c' tne 'vo'< o' art, a frame that attempts between desire a n d its achievement, e n a c t m e n t a n d its memor)':
to essent alize :he as a u t o n c r o u s cut v/n ch aaes
nothina rrore than cc^nect it to rs context c norwor-<
here, anticipating, recollecting, in the f u t u r e , in the past, u n d e r a

46 I n t r o d u c t i o n 4 | Poststructuraiisnn and d e c o n s t r u c t i o n
. Louise Lawler, Pollock and Soup Tureen, 1984 false appearance of the present. In this way the m i m e acts. His
6 ;< 5 j a : 1 6 x 20:
game ends in a perpetual allusion w i t h o u t breaking the m i r r o r . In
ic t c c ' d p " '^Q cf ar: as ey e r : e ' in:c t i e scac^
this wa>' it sets up a pure condition of fiction."
c'SJf?- cc'llectcrs Lav/ier prcriucas t'ie
a ; tn^iuc- thsv v/ere ^sraticns of -itcrors ir.
Imitation that folds over what is already double, or ambiguous,
or anv cthe^ luxury desigii cencaica S:'essirg does not, then, enter the realm of t r u t h . It is a copy w i t h o u t a model
a c o m n c d r i c a t o " of the vvorK o' art. Lawler's T a g e s
and its condition is marked by the t e r m simulacrum: a copy
so ''cci. cn : - s cchector's incorpo^atico cf 1ne wo'-;
-0 s c l e r comes: c space, trereby 'r-a<ir g i: an
w i t h o u t an original"a false appearance of the present." The fold
'.ens o " of s subject vity. T"e ceta: o ' Po oc-^'s t h r o u g h which the Platonic f r a m e is t r a n s m u t e d into the Mallar-
c-c c pain: s fh^s relstec tc t^e in:r cate design cf ttif
m r n double (or between-two) is likened by both poet a n d
Mp tu-ee". as a 'cr-r cf (nrsro.^etat/o.c p e r s c a to
C COllGCtC. philosopher to the fold or gutter of a book, which in its crevice was
always sexualized for Mallarme, hence his term "lewd but sacred."
This is the fold"false appearance of the p r e s e n t " t h a t Derrida
will call hymeu, or will refer to at times as "invagination," by which
the condition of the f r a m e will be carried into the inside of an argu-
m e n t , which will, in t u r n , f r a m e it.

Art in the age of the simulacrum

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

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

Poststructuralism and d e c o n s t r u c t i o n | Introduction 4 47

 critics versed in tiieories of poststructuralism came to identifv-with
such work involved a serious questioning of n o t i o n s of authorship,
originality, and uniqueness, the f o u n d a t i o n stones of institutional-
ized aesthetic culture. Reflected in the facing mirrors of Sherman's
photographs, creating as they did an endlessly retreating horizon of
quotation f r o m which the "real" a u t h o r disappears, these critics saw
what Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes h a d analyzed in the fifties
and sixties as "the death of the author."
T h e work of Sherrie Levine was set in this same context, as she
r e p h o t o g r a p h e d p h o t o g r a p h s by EUiot Porter, E d w a r d Weston,
and Walker Evans and presented these as her " o w n " work, ques-
tioning by her act of piracy the status of these figures as authorial
sources of the image. Folded into this challenge is an implicit
reading of the "original" p i c t u r e w h e t h e r W e s t o n ' s p h o t o g r a p h s A O n e of these, Mar)^ KelK^'s Post-Partum
of the n u d e torso of his young son Neil, or Porter's wild technicolor
landscapesas itself always already a piracy% involved in an u n c o n -
scious but inevitable borrowing from the great library
imagesthe Greek classical torso, the windswept picturesque
c o u n t r y s i d e t h a t have already educated o u r eyes. T o this kind of
radical refusal of traditional conceptions of a u t h o r s h i p a n d origi-
nality, a critical stance m a d e unmistakable by its position at the
margins of legalitys the n a m e "appropriation art" has c o m e to be
affixed. A n d this type of work, building a c r h i q u e of f o r m s of own-
ership a n d fictions of privacy and control came to be identified as
p o s t m o d e r n i s m in its radical f o r m .
The question of where to place this widely practiced, eighties
tactic of " a p p r o p r i a t i o n " of the i m a g e w h e t h e r in a radical camp,
as a critique of the power network that threads t h r o u g h reality,
always already structuring it, or in a conser\^ative one, as an e n t h u -
siastic return to figuration and the artist as image-givertakes o n
a n o t h e r d i m e n s i o n when we view the strategy t h r o u g h the eyes of Haacke, Daniel Buren, and Richard Serra attempt to bring to light.
feminist artists. W o r k i n g with b o t h p h o t o g r a p h i c material a p p r o -
priated f r o m the mass-cultural image b a n k and the f o r m of direct
address to which advertising often has recourseas it cajoles, or
hectors, or preaches to its viewers and readers, addressing t h e m as
" y o u " B a r b a r a Kruger elaborates yet a n o t h e r of the presupposi-
tions of the aesthetic discourse, another of its institutional frames.
This is the f r a m e of gender, of the u n s p o k e n a s s u m p t i o n set u p
between artist and viewer that both of t h e m are male. Articulating
this a s s u m p t i o n in a work like Your gaze hits the side o f my face
(1981), where the typeface of the message appears in staccato
against the image of a classicized female statue, Kruger fills in
a n o t h e r part of the presuppositional tirame: the message transmit-
ted between the two poles classical linguistics m a r k s as "sender"
a n d "receiver," and assumes is neutral but presupposes as male, is a
message put in play by something we could call an always-silent
partner, namely, the symbolic f o r m of W o m a n . Following a post-
structuralist linguistic analysis of language a n d gender, Kruger's
work is therefore interested in w o m a n as one of those subjects w h o
d o not speak but is, instead, always spoken for. She is, as critic
Laura Mulvey writes, structurally "tied to her place as bearer of
m e a n i n g , not m a k e r of meaning."
48 I n t r o d u c t i o n 4 | Poststructuraiisnn and d e c o n s t r u c t i o n
This is why Kruger, in this work, does not seize the right to
speech the way that Broodthaers had in his open letters but turns
instead to " a p p r o p r i a t i o n . " VN'oman, as the "bearer of m e a n i n g " is
the locus of an endless series of abstractionsshe is "nature,"
"beauty," " m o t h e r l a n d , " "liberty," "justice"all of which f o r m
the cultural a n d patriarchal linguistic field; she is the reser\'oir of
meanings f r o m which statements are m a d e . As a w o m a n artist,
Kruger acknowledges this position as the silent term t h r o u g h her
act of "stealing" her speech, of never laying claim to having b e c o m e
the "maker of m e a n i n g , "
This question of the w^oman's relation to the symbolic field of
speech a n d the m e a n i n g of her structural dispossession within that
field has b e c o m e the m e d i u m of other m a j o r works by feminists.
Document (1973-9), tracks
the artist's own connection to her infant son t h r o u g h five years of
his development a n d the 135 exhibits that record the m o t h e r - c h i l d
of relationship. This recording, however, is carried on explicitly along
the fault line of the w o m a n ' s experience of the developing a u t o n -
o m y of the male-child as he comes into possession of language. It
wants to examine the way the child himself is fetishized by the
m o t h e r t h r o u g h her OWTI sense of lack.
T w o kinds of absences structure the field of aesthetic experience at
the end of the twentieth century and into the twent)'-first. O n e of
them we could describe as the absence of reality^ itself as it retreats
behind the miragelike screen of the media, sucked up into the
vacuum tube of a television monitor, read off like so m a n y printouts
firom a multinational c o m p u t e r hook-up. The other is the imisibilit}^
of the presuppositions of language a n d of insfitutions, a seeming
absence behind which power is at work, an absence which artists
f r o m Mar)^ Kelly, Barbara Kruger, and Cindy Sherman to Hans
FRTHEN. READiKG
Roland Barthes. Cr/rica''Assays, trsns. R chgr:; Ho'.varct lEvaistor: k c h w e s t s T Un ve'sity
Press. 15721
Roland Barthes. I'l^sge. Music. Text. f a r s . Stepnen Hea:h ;Ne'.vYcrk. Hi anc vVarg. 977;
Douglas Crimp, 'Dclu'es, " Ocfotsn nc. 3. S;;r rg 1979
Jacques Derrida. Gramrna'.c^'ogy. trans. 3aya"n 3p vak iBatiTore: Tt-e Johns Hopkns
University Press, 1 9~5:i
Jacques Derrida. "Parergc^." The Trurr^ in Pairt'ng. trsns. Gsd" 5enn;ng:cn iCmcago eno
Lonaon; Lniversity of Cnicago P-ess. '9S7i
Jacques Derrida. "Tne CoubIs Session." D'sseminanon, fans. Ba-ba'a Jctinson ;Cnic5gc and
bonder: Lniversity ot Chicago P-ess. '9611
Michel Foucault. 7fie A'-cf^aeo.teg/ofAfr'ctvvecise ;Par s: Galinard, iS'Sy: translation Lender
Tai.'istock Publications: ana New York: Pantnec". i972;
Michel Foucault. "What is an Autnor^"', Lang'jsge, CDU.-^ter-K'^err'C-/. P ' s c x e
rans. C. Boucna'd ard S. Sirron i :heca. M.Y.: Cornell U-^iversity Press "'9771
Mary Kelly, DocLimeni ::Lcndcr: Rout edge S Kegan Pau . 1933:
Laura Mulvey, 'y'lsua: Pieasjre and Ka'rativs Cinema." '/'sja' a.'ir Otner P/eas^.'es
(Blocmington: Indiana Univers:, Press, 19S9:
Craig Owens. 'The Ai egcrica -nouise: To'.varcts a Theoy cf ^ostrrocei.n.sm." Ocroner ros
'2 and '3. Spring and Sun-mer i 933
Ann Reynolds, -Rep-ocLCirg Nature: The Mcsejm d* Katu-al Hisxry as Kors :e " Cdcsr.
no. 45. Sjrrrrer 1 985
A i-yE^c.'969 19.0 ' a " ' 1972b "SSj.a