The ongoing debates among partisans of a purist separation
of areas of critical discourse, those who make special claims for an
expanded function for a single kind of discourse, and what I may
call pluri-vocality, mask the fear, nostalgia, and reaction which
condition a shift in the ratios of cultural power. In one formulation,
which moves to expand criticism's traditionally understood
explicatory/integrative function, we are told that "The difference
between literature and criticism consists perhaps only in the fact
that criticism is more likely to be blind to the way in which its
own critical difference from itself makes it, in the final analysis,
literary."[1] It doesn't matter whether this shift is metaphorically
expressed as the death of God, the implosion of representation, the
demise of phallocentric discourse, a crisis in the status of master
narratives of the West, or an epistemological revolution. A main
focus is criticism broadly conceived questioning its own foothold
in the world. According to Cixous, "I think one has a hard time
escaping the discourse of mastery when using, for example, as a
teacher, discourse I'll call 'objective'; by that I mean a discourse
that does not involve an easily located subject of enunciation, that
speaks at that particular moment not just in the name of but as
universal knowledge itself."[2] However one formulates a position
on the changes which have occurred and continue to occur, any
methodological reorganization of the bases of discourse which
refuses to acknowledge those qualities noted above will founder,
since it will be forced to account for itself in strictly tautological
terms.
As a case in point, let's consider the post-structuralist or
postmodern claim for a broader function for criticism (Johnson's
position above), one which equates it with artistic creation. On the
face of it, such a claim may have an appeal for some in that it
permits a seemingly creative reorganization of criticism's purported
roles, ushered in under the aegis of "theory," a meta-criticism with
laws and dynamics all its own. Furthermore, who would doubt that
the contemporary, accelerated breakdown and reconstitution of
genres might not have some impact on critical theory, however one
might understand the term? Having achieved a degree of genetic
autonomy, theory is then free to take exciting new forms according
to the requirements imposed by any portion of the expanded field
of operations, which its own new hegemony has at least in part
generated.
In spite of this rejuvenation, however, theory curiously returns to
a preoccupation with the avant-garde, as if a ghost had to be
appeased for a genuine aesthetics of postmodernism ever
meaningfully to solidify. According to the implications of this
view, the avant-garde helps us to think modernism and is
inextricably bound up with it, such that a position on the former
becomes one on the latter. Theory on its own terms must grasp
modernism before it can deal with subsequent developments,
whether these be formulations of art-historical periodization,
literary movements, or trans-genre aesthetic categories. Thus, for
modernism to be rationalized, its most extreme manifestations must
be theorizable. In order for contemporary theory to proceed with
business, in other words, it must first kill off the avant-garde.
II
This is the goal Rosalind Krauss sets herself in "The
Originality of the Avant-Garde."[3] Krauss's attack on the avant-garde
takes the classic form of a move to reveal its false,
misunderstood, or inflated motives. In the case of the phenomena
in question, the deception hinges on an allegedly false notion of
originality. The avant-garde claims "a literal origin, a beginning
from ground-zero, a birth," (p. 157), so that in this way "The self
as origin is safe from contamination by tradition because it
possesses a kind of originary naiveté. " (p. 157) Thus, these
"origins" are mythopoeic, meta-origins. Furthermore, in these terms
the avant-garde's valorization of innovativeness in art is explicable.
Krauss cites as evidence for her claims comments by Marinetti,
Pound, Brancusi, and Malevich. She then proceeds with a
deconstruction of this understanding of the avant-garde's function,
using as her chief instrument the grid. As her analysis of the grid
in modern art carries so much of the stress of her argument, it calls
for close examination.
Basing her comments on an earlier essay entitled "Grids" (1979),
which goes into greater detail on the subject, Krauss sees revealing
connections between the uses to which modern artists have put this
design element and a general critique of the avant-garde.
Accordingly, she says the grid "organizes a metaphor for the plane
geometry of the field; through its repetition it configures the spread
of lateral continuity. The grid does not reveal the surface, laying it
bare at last; rather it veils it through a repetition." (p. 161)
However, a dialectical (instead of a formal) reading indicates that
this intentionality inheres in the structure of the very visual
discourse which Krauss is trying to interrogate. The grid, that is,
establishes a mock surface through the ironizing of representation
which it engages through its repetitions. As Krauss herself says,
"the very ground that the grid is thought to reveal is already riven
from within by a process of repetition and representation, it is
always divided and multiple." (p. 161) In what respect, however,
is the grid "thought to reveal a ground" not divided, deferred? This
seems a gratuitous reading, in the service of ends much removed
from what the parameters of such discourse will encompass (these
ends will emerge as her argument proceeds). I would submit that
the resemblance through identity which the grid's basic units
capture is not offered as a "laying bare" of surface; rather,
representation is rejected in favor of an abstracted reconstitution of
the classical matrices of geographically metaphorized space, which
places the grid's function very much within the category of
postmodernism which Krauss will introduce at the end of her essay.
(However, its presence there will redefine the category as such,
showing it to be more an extension of modernism than its
supersession). To put this another way, the categories "modernism"
and "postmodernism" have been insufficiently distinguished.
It is not surprising, therefore, that once Krauss sets out the
functions of the grid as she does, what she then sees should look
strange. "That so many generations of twentieth-century artists
should have maneuvered themselves into this particular position of
paradox where they are condemned to repeat, as if by
compulsion, the logically fraudulent original is truly compelling."
(p. 160) The repeating of the very foundations of non-repeatability
would indeed seem compelling; as usual, what strikes someone as
compelling is super-charged with the "presence" of meaning; in this
case, it is the very obfuscation which Krauss herself is creating in
order to further her arguments with the avant-garde, teleologically
conditioned by conclusions she has already reached.
As if to complement the above, Krauss points out what she
maintains is another peculiarity of the grid, namely, its "anti-
referential" quality;" she notes that it is "a refusal of speech" and
manifests a "hostility to narrative." (p. 158) In this view, speech,
narrative, and referentiality can be interrelated through their
participation in constructing a dimension of "time," whereas
"space" organizes conventional visuality; the anti-illusionistic
characteristic of grids then becomes an attack on enlightenment or
premodernist discourse and so must be discredited. "Flattened,
geometricized, ordered, it [the grid] is antinatural, antimimetic,
antireal." ("Grids," p. 9) I would submit recourse to some such
gestures (albeit less dyadic than Krauss's paradigm permits) is
helpful in order to understand the proliferation of this design
element, but not in the sense that Krauss indicates. The
unproblematized, implicit use of the categories of "time" and
"space" thus get reinforced through their accomodation to qualities
in art which their use has helped to extract.
Krauss goes on to say that "the bottom line of the grid is a naked
and determined materialism" (p. 10), and "The grid's mythic power
is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism
(or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides
us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction)." (p. 12)
Actually, unless one falls into the trap of "paradox" and
"compulsion" which Krauss herself set, the grid possesses no
mythic power at all but rather refuses that constellation; this is its
contribution to modernist discourse in the visual arts. There is no
"illusion" or "fiction," and to think so is to miss the grid's point
completely, applying standards appropriate for viewing nineteenth-century
realist/mimetic art to twentieth-century
antirealist/antimimetic art, then to seek an "explanation" for the
resulting confusion. Krauss would have done better to try to
understand what she rhetorically and revealingly refers to as
"naked and determined materialism."
By relating the grid's purported functions to what Krauss calls a
"discourse of originality" (dialectically related to the "discourse of
the copy"), she can then proceed with demolition work on the
avant-garde. That is, if the grid's pretensions to originality are laid
bare ("it is always already divided and multiple"), and if the avant-garde
can be seen as having founded itself on mythic origins ("a
beginning from ground-zero"), then it is not difficult for her to
demonstrate that modernism's main claim to a status distinct from
its actual historical origins is sheer illusion. She says, "modernism
and the avant-garde are functions of what we could call the
discourse of originality" (p. 162), and "the discourse of originality
in which impressionism participates represses and discredits the
complementary discourse of the copy. Both the avant-garde and
modernism depend on this repression." (p. 168) As I have shown
above, however, since her analysis of the grid is logically
fallacious, the conclusions she draws are untenable.
It is at this point in Krauss's analysis, needless to say, that other
motives for the whole business emerge. She speaks up for what she
takes her own work to be an example of, namely, a
"demythologizing criticism and a truly postmodernist art, both of
them acting now to void the basic propositions of modernism, to
liquidate them by exposing their fictitious condition. It is thus from
a strange new perspective that we look back on the modernist
origin and watch it splintering into endless replication." (p. 170)
The process of liquidation, however, belongs preeminently to those
very positions which she claims to be superseding (Freud,
Nietszche, Marx - masters of suspicion). It is no wonder that her
analysis produces effects of strangeness; the "new perspective" she
mentions ironically participates in the very discourse of originality
she had set out to discredit. Krauss then repositions her notion of
a postmodern criticism and art in the vacuum she believes her
moves have created. Through her example we get a blunt and
disturbing bid for the kind of power of which she had accused
modernism (specifically the avant-garde).
III
The strategic, direct placement of a complex, fully mediated
subjectivity in the center of the discourse is the elegant gesture
which immediately elevates Victor Burgin's work above the old-fashioned,
false transparency of Krauss's project, which pretends
simply to be reorganizing given data and re-presenting these as
somehow meaningful. This is not a casual advantage, I might add,
since artist-theoreticians (those who posit a complex subjectivity
using theoretical formulations as well as a traditional "creative"
genre or medium) are relatively rare. As well, it serves to ground
an understanding of modernism, a serious failing in Krauss's essay.
On Burgin's view, then, what distinguishes modernism from its
historical antecedent is first and foremost (but not exclusively)
what I might call a structural acknowledgement of point of view.
Saussure's theoretical contribution in this regard should be recalled:
in Culler's words, ". . . alongside Saussure's affirmations [on the
relativity of linguistic concepts] we may place the unequivocal
statement of the painter Georges Braques: 'I do not believe in
things; I believe in relationships.' This is, perhaps, the true
Modernist credo."[4] Related to this is the notion of the arbitrary
connection between signified and signifier, which for our purposes
conveniently carries over directly into photography. According to
Eco, "We know that sensory phenomena are transcribed, in the
photographic emulsion, in such a way that even if there is a causal
link with the real phenomena, the graphic images can be considered
as wholly arbitrary with respect to these phenomena."[5] Burgin's
idea of the end of art theory as seen from within a context of the
functioning of photography, especially as we get it in
Between [6] and in related essays, provides a persuasive
alternative to Krauss's understanding of the avant-garde. His work
seems especially appropriate in this connection as well since
Krauss herself has written on photography.
Burgin's work, then, is offered as that of a photographer/theoretician
deeply enmeshed in a specific socio-historic formation.
In Between, reproductions of photographic series are
interspersed with reprints of interviews, talks, and photo-
documentation (caption-like notes). This all forms a fabric; "I feel
I'm working across the fringe areas for example, as I've said
already, where 'art', 'advertising', 'documentary', theory' etc.
overlap." (p. 56) These elements can be clearly discerned and exist
in juxtaposition. What "unifies" them, as it were, is the forthright
inclusion of the speaking subject; the importance of relationship
and emphasis on an arbitrary basis to meaning construction provide
a theoretically consistent foundation from which one may safely
derive an understanding of modernism.
The photographic image is perhaps the best locus for any
discussion of "the discourse of the copy." However, not to base
one's statements on a strategy of subjectivity leads to error. As
Barthes puts it, "the photographer bears witness to his own
subjectivity, the way in which he establishes himself as a subject
faced with an object. What I say is banal and well known. But I
would greatly emphasize this aspect of the photographer's situation,
because it is generally repressed."[7] Although he acknowledges his
"outsider" status with regard to a truly contemporary (i.e.,
subjective) discourse on photography, Barthes is honest enough to
admit to having trouble theorizing the interconnections between
word and photographic image. "I have no experience as a
photographer, I am a pure consumer of photographed products. It's
obvious that photography and writing don't use the same material
. . . photography is not language." (p. 355)
For Burgin, however, who is a photographer, language is
very much a part of the photograph even though he does not make
claims of great syntactic or semantic sophistication for the
photographic image. "Simply because a message is, in substance,
visual, it does not follow that all of its codes are visual. Visual and
non-visual codes interpenetrate each other in very extensive and
complex ways. Metz has put it well: 'In truth, the notion of 'visual',
in the totalitarian and monolithic sense that it has taken on in
certain recent discussions, is a fantasy or an ideology, and the image
(at least in this sense) is something which does not exist.'"[8] This
will become the bridge to a theory of representation in visual art,
a necessary step if one wants to understand distinctions between
modernism and what it superseded. Put another way, photography
unpacks visual art's basis in representation, thereby highlighting the
false distinction between figurative and abstract art which came to
control thinking on modernism. Inclusion of a theory of language
broad enough to permit thinking the interconnections between
visual and verbal imageries, by contrast, will allow modernism to
be more productively theorized.
In spite of the social engagement which Burgin's position entails,
he points up the obvious partial autonomy artists justifiably retain:
"Artists are not independent socially, economically, ideologically,
politically for all it suits some of them to pretend that they are.
But neither are they 'a cog and a screw' in the party machine."
(Between, p. 55) Only by granting this imbrication of the
strategic subjectivity (which the artist posits) in the very stuff of
history, specifically through the medium of a socially conditioned,
fully "genderized" art practice, by structurally valorizing the artist's
point of view, not at all removed from the "contamination" of the
past but rather acknowledging it, can we place an understanding of
the avant-garde on a workable footing; this and this alone permits
a rethinking of modernism.
As one might expect, given the previous remarks, for Krauss there
is a barrier maintained in the surrealist photograph between those
verbal and visual codes which Burgin sees as interpenetrating. She
accords a special presence to the surrealist photograph: "Is that
[i.e., writing] not entirely foreign to the purely visual experience of
photography a visuality itself symbolized as heightened and
intensified by the presence of the microscope? Faced with this
image and its caption, are we not confronted with yet another
instance of the constant juxtaposition of writing and vision, a
juxtaposition that leads nowhere but to theoretical confusion?"
(Originality, p. 103) as well it might. Her attempt at a
"dialectical synthesis of opposites" (p. 103) through montage falters
since it is based one way or the other on the (for her) theoretically
puzzling still image. It would seem, then, that the surrealist
photograph forms a polar opposite from the grid, although both are
founded in a "refusal of speech," an "imperviousness to language,"
a "hostility to narrative." But for Burgin, the photograph best yields
to a structuralist or relational analysis, which due to its arbitrary
(what he calls "ideological") dimension permits, even necessitates,
a psychoanalytic reading: "An ideology is the sum of taken-for-granted
realities of everyday life; the pre-given determinations of
individual consciousness; the common frame of reference for the
projection of individual consciousness . . . it is contingent and. . .
within it the fact of its contingency is suppressed" (Thinking
Photography, p. 46), and "the technical means of production
of photography readily offers a plurality of images. The image
therefore represents a contingent repression of latent practices: it is
in this that it is ideological." (p. 67) By applying the metaphorical
discourse of psychoanalysis to the photographic image, Burgin will
make a structuralist move comparable to Saussure's notion that a
distinctive feature (a phoneme, say) can only be defined through
analyzing what it is not, that is, through focusing on the relations
to the suppressions by means of which "it" is constituted. The "it,"
then, is made up of a system of relations some of which tie directly
into the current social formation.
If photography (in its "specific work") deals in resemblance and if
this then opens out onto an ontology of content, of a world-space
populated by "objects," then a structuralist critique must detonate
resemblance (simultaneously detonating the molar "subjectivity"
upon which it is based). This Burgin does through problematizing
so-called photographic seeing, revealing it as a bogus category
designed to smuggle mystification into photographic art in order to
place it on a financially competitive footing with easel painting. If
we tend to forget this mystification with regard to easel painting
because of its longer history, we can see the process more readily
in photography; as Sekula puts it, "The invention of the photograph
as high art was only possible through its transformation into an
abstract fetish, into 'significant form.'"[9] If verbal and visual codes
indeed interpenetrate in the photographic image, and if an
understanding of this image must be based in a complex
hermeneutics of seeing, then Burgin's theory directly engages the
social formation, and in fact his early interrogation is carried forth
specifically in the domain of sexist advertising conventions.
Through the specific interconnections which advertising maintains
between text and visual image, a capitalism concealing its inherent
sexism retains its grasp. Burgin's series "VI" (1973), "Lei-Feng"
(1974), "U.K. 76," and "U.S. 77," through parody turn these visual
conventions against those societal uses for which they are created.
Fetishism's role in this inverted process is crucial: ". . .
photographic representation accomplishes that separation of
knowledge from belief which is characteristic of fetishism. It is this
pervasive structure of disavowal which links fetishism to the image
and to phantasy. The motive of the disavowal is to maintain the
imaginary unity of the subject at the cost of (fetishism)/in the face
of (phantasy) the subject's actual splitting."[10] Yet this splitting is
repressed from Krauss's understanding of surrealist photographic
reality, as well as the grid, which may account for her feeling that
they place their creators in a "truly compelling" situation of
"paradox." Burgin, in the meantime, has taken the next step,
increasingly incorporating feminist positions.
This returns us to Krauss's failure to reposition the speaking ego at
the center of critical/artistic discourse. In what amounts to a
challenge to critics issuing from some such understanding of
modernism's unique contribution, Burgin says, "Today, any critic
making this complaint ['we do not have the art we need'] should
'put up or shut up'." (Between, p. 201) That is, at a period
in history when art-making no longer requires lengthy immersion
in a workshop or guild-craft tradition of training through imitation,
the production of art has been liberated from the traditional
matrices of social control (these are maintained in the distribution
networks). For critics like Krauss to claim that true postmodern
criticism is "criticism without the Argument"[11] without offering
a necessarily altered notion of the function of a theory of
representations, amounts to the failure of postmodernism's murder
attempt on the avant-garde. And as I indicated above, according to
the logic of the dominant forms of critical discourse, no meaningful
affirmative statements can be made about postmodernism until the
avant-garde is defined/denied. Consequently, one can only conclude
that special claims for a postmodern criticism or art are simply
disguises for a bid for traditional cultural power, in other words,
the working out of ideological processes in the realm of culture.
Burgin confirms this: "In our present so-called 'postmodern' era the
end of art theory now is identical with the objectives of theories of
representation in general: a critical understanding of the modes and
means of symbolic articulation of our critical forms of sociality and
subjectivity." (Between, p. 204.)
IV
As I hope the above comparison has made clear, one needs
to radically revise critical practices in order to understand avant-garde
practices in a broader context of modernism; this revision
must adopt as a strategy a theory of language which acknowledges
a complex, gendered, historically conditioned subjectivity at its
center. That is, the avant-garde (and therefore modernism itself)
cannot be "understood" unless the discourse of understanding
(power) itself is simultaneously interrogated: this scrutiny opens up
onto the language matrix detailed above. In Paul de Man's
formulation, "One is interested in the subject-matter primarily
because it confirms that the unseen can be represented:
representation is the condition that confirms the possibility of
imitation as universal proof of presence. The need for the
reassurance of such a proof stands behind many characteristic
statements of the period and confirms its orthodoxy in terms of a
metaphysics of presence."[12] De Man goes on to give a
characterization of modernity which is not based on the flat
rejection or acceptance of an unproblematized notion of history: ".
. . modernity, which is fundamentally a falling away from literature
and a rejection of history, also acts as the principle that gives
literature duration and historical existence." (p. 162) This permits
further efforts in the direction of theorizing the avant-garde, as does
Buchloh's notion that "It seems more viable to define avant-garde
practices as a continually renewed struggle over the definition of
cultural meaning."[13] This emphasis on a fully mediated struggle
of a strategically constructed subjectivity in a particular historical
context necessarily implies a feminist hermeneutics. As Showalter
says, ". . . the fullest expression of the problematic of a feminist
criticism [is] how to combine the theoretical and the personal."[14]
"According to Foucault, the threshold from classicism to
modernity was crossed when 'words ceased to intersect with
representations and to provide a spontaneous grid for the
knowledge of things'. The nineteenth century brought with it,
according to him, the two most significant forces of modernity: the
return of language as no longer naturally linked to the world; and
the appearance of Man along with his unthought."[15] It is
important to place this notion of subjectivity in a theoretically
expanded perspective, as does Bürger: "The avant-garde not only
negates the category of individual production but also that of
individual reception."[16] Efforts such as those of Burgin establish
viable alternatives to the comfortable classicizing of Krauss's
postmodernism.