anti aesthetic essays on postmodern culture

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The Anti-Aesthetic ESSAYS ON POSTMODERN CULTURE Edited by Hal Foster BAY PRESS

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Ruben Verkoelen

Paul Crowther

This is a renamed version of Chapter 1 of my book Geneses of Postmodern Art: Technology As Iconology, published by Routledge in their Advances in Art and Visual Studies series, 2019. In the book, the chapter is entitled ‘Contingent Objects, Permanent Eclecticism’. If you wish to cite this discussion please refer to the version as presented in the book . This discussion describes how Postmodernism takes art to its logical limits. The origins of this are found in the delayed influence of Duchamp's legacy of the 'found object'. In Part 1, we discuss the emergence of minimalism, conceptual, and performance art. In Part 2, it is shown how the legacy of the found object is made into the positive basis for artistic creation in the form of Pop Art and other tendencies that affirm the worth of mass culture. It is argued further, that effect of all the tendencies described is to exhaust the possibility of further radical innovations in art. Part 3 explores some key aspects of the permanent Postmodern eclecticism that is consequent upon this.

Martina Sauer , Iris Laner , Arianna Fantuzzi

We live in the age of postmodernism. What does that mean? With this call for essays, we asked for proposals for a better understanding. At the same time, we were looking for posts that show how the arts have processed and are still processing the change from the modern to the postmodern selfconception of man, which has been described by philosophy since the 1950s to today. This special issue thus demonstrates how architects, designers and artists have reacted to the new socio-politically relevant concepts of postmodernism with a new kind of flatness, diversity and ambiguity in contrast to the identitarian concepts of modernism. What is striking is that the new designs were hardly understood and the reactions to them were characterized by a certain blurriness and uncertainty, which ultimately culminated in the winged term “anything goes.” Yet even today, adherence to this negatively evaluated dictum actually hides the critical aspects of postmodern philosophy and the arts’ reactions to it, which recognized the limitation of individuality through socio-political paternalism and found an answer first in the rejection, then in the diversification of the individual. It was not until the 1990s that the critical and ethically relevant aspects that challenged active engagement with social constraints began to gain importance in the arts. Against the background of the ambivalent history of postmodernism in the visual arts, the uncertainty in dealing with their designs was already evident in the very prominent exhibition on contemporary architecture at the MoMA in New York in 1988, which was organized by Philip Johnson. It could not really explain what was actually meant by “Deconstructivist Architecture,” as Simone Kraft makes clear. It is Arianna Fantuzzi who shows the neuralgic point of the transition from modernism to postmodernism by comparing self-portraits of artists from the 1990s. With the variety of possible roles that each person can adopt, the designs of postmodernism are thus characterized by the withdrawal of a unique identity. This phenomenon can also be described as Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen does in his historical overview, stating that after an affirmative opportunistic attitude toward sign systems in the 1980s, the arts only took on critical traits in the 1990s. In other words, as soon as the challenge was taken up to find its own, more critical path against paternalistic social standards, the situation changed. In line with this critical approach, Anna Kristensson argues that designers have a duty to choose an open and fair course toward the users, not to manipulate them in the interest of sales, and customers must face the reality of aesthetics and not be misled by supposedly clear advertising. It is Iris Laner, in her examination of postmodern theory and the work of Jeff Wall, who shows how alternative perspectives on our world are tested – permeable to the viewer, not only through the aesthetic, but also through epistemological and ethical gravity. Finally, I expressed myself in a similar way. The possibility of deconstructing our conventional understanding of reality, as postmodern theory made clear and as the artist Karin Kneffel shows, opens the possibility of freeing us from social pre-determinations. The magazine’s editor-in-chief also wrote an essay on the changing world of the arts and Jeff Koons. To conclude, this special issue on postmodernism clearly shows that in the long run, postmodernism Illustrates a completely new view of the world and our being in it. We can no longer hide behind predetermined standardizations. Thus, with the term “anything goes,” postmodernism opens a path of liberation from supposedly individual, but socially normed standards. In a new way, we are all called upon to consider not only our own share in shaping reality, but also that of the stakeholders, and to assume responsibility. Martina Sauer Senior Editor

Karel Císař

hugues henri

Historically, the Modern Movement and the International Style are part of the definition of European modernity. However, it was European modernity that took root in the mid-twentieth century in the United States through an unpredictable but successful grafting of some of its masters onto the American scene: Richard Neutra, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, at the expense of American modernists such as Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, even though it was indebted to them for a number of its fundamental spatial concepts such as the load-bearing structure, the curtain wall and the free plane. Then, towards the end of the 1960s, a radical contestation of this grafting of European modernity into the United States was undertaken by American theorists and architects, who engaged in a different refocusing than the painters of the New York School, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Franck Kline, and Mark Rothko in the publication, prior to postmodernity, of the Manifesto of the Irascibles, also an anti-European American refocusing, but expressly claiming to be modern. On the contrary, postmodernity in architecture wants to make a clean sweep of modernity. The current paradox, in the postmodern context, is the American rejection of modernity, as a whole, without an inventory having been made to restore to modernity as the "stage of the future" its archaic American part, which has little to do with European modernity.

Richard Shusterman

Kerem Güman

The Postmodernism and the bygone era of " concept within context " let us live a " temporal adhocracy " in a virtual loop. Designed to emphasize the transformation, discourses had been on the rise up until the obituary of art. Parallel to the developments in the socioeconomic system under recurringly permanent transformations, the medium and the institutions of art have had its own share. My study is aimed to show the problems of contemporary art world, through various practices, and practically what has been changed in art and how it has been transformed is being questioned after a reckoning with modernism and the debate on context.

Jesper Olsson

modernism/modernity, Vol. 22, No. 2

Luke Smythe

Outlines a new, two-stage history of modernism, linked to a transition between 'heavy' and 'light' phases of modernity.

integralworld.net

Marcel Cobussen

The Anti-aesthetic: essays on postmodern culture

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The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture

A handsome new edition of the seminal collection of late-twentieth-century cultural criticism. Named a Best Book of the Year by the Village Voice and considered a bible of contemporary cultural criticism, The Anti-Aesthetic is reissued now in a handsome new paperback edition. For the past twenty years, Hal Foster has pushed the boundaries of cultural criticism, establishing a vantage point from which the seemingly disparate agendas of artists, patrons, and critics have a telling coherence. In The Anti-Aesthetic, preeminent critics such as Jean Baudrillard, Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said consider the full range of postmodern cultural production, from the writing of John Cage, to Cindy Sherman's film stills, to Barbara Kruger's collages. With a redesigned cover and a new afterword that situates the book in relation to contemporary criticism, The Anti-Aesthetic provides a strong introduction for newcomers and a point of reference for those already engaged in discussions of postmodern art, culture, and criticism. New afterword by Hal Foster; 12 b/w photographs.

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THE ANTI-AESTHETIC AT FORTY

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THE NOTION OF POSTMODERNISM was once a great stimulant to art and thought; today, it feels like another anti-aphrodisiac of the just past. In some ways, postmodernism seems more historical than modernism, reanimated as modernism is by questions of colonialism, diaspora, and globality. On the other hand, this untimeliness makes the present a good moment to look back at postmodernism, if only to measure our distance from it.

Although not as nihilistic as our libertarian present, the early 1980s was a time of deep reaction. With Thatcher, Reagan, and Kohl, neoliberalism had captured the levers of political power, and neoconservatives like Daniel Bell were ascendant ideologically. What motivated the neocons above all was revenge against “the ’60s.” The problems of contemporary society, they claimed, were due to militant students, Black activists, and strident feminists, not, say, the ravages of advanced capitalism, and the necessary cure was a return to tradition, family, and moral values. Yet even as the Left was in political retreat, it had advanced on cultural fronts. There was real vitality in these multifarious debates, not least in matters of critical theory, which was heterogeneous, especially in the anglophone context. To come to terms with these ideas new and old, a bevy of reviews appeared, including Camera Obscura , Critical Inquiry , Diacritics , differences , New German Critique , October, Representations , Screen, Semiotext(e) , Social Text , Telos , Third Text , Wedge , and Zone . In retrospect, though, the drift from politics to criticism was a bad trade, however limited the options then were. When a Social Text editor said to me that critical journals were the political parties of our time, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

In part because of the vagaries of translation, young intellectuals in the United States encountered the Frankfurt School about the same time as structuralism and poststructuralism. Gramsci came via British cultural studies along with Althusser and Debord, who represented very different lines of Marxist thought. French feminism and film theory, which drew on Saussure, Freud, and Lacan, arrived with Foucault, who was skeptical of all three. A main motive of The Anti-Aesthetic was to parse how these various models might bear on contemporary art and architecture. Yet this also set up the ambiguous posture of the book, which was vanguard in its commitment to theory but defensive in its opposition to the neoconservative-neoliberal order. The Anti-Aesthetic was unambiguous, however, in its rejection of any postmodernism associated with neo-figurative art and neo-ornamental architecture. Stylistic in orientation, that postmodernism was more anti-modernist than anything else, and it appeared to support the cultural politics of the reactionary alliance.

The Anti-Aesthetic also appeared in the wake of The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), in which Jean-François Lyotard argued that “the grand narratives” of modernity—the dialectic of spirit, the emancipation of the worker, the accumulation of wealth, the classless society––had run into the sand. I wanted to begin, then, with a contrary voice, that of Jürgen Habermas, the central figure of the late Frankfurt School. As luck would have it, he had delivered his Theodor W. Adorno Prize lecture, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” at New York University in 1981; New German Critique published it later that year. The title of the essay carried its thrust, which insisted, against both Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition and Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), that the modern commitment to “communicative rationality” be recovered. Habermas acknowledged that the Enlightenment mission––to separate knowledge into the three spheres of science, morality, and art and to develop their “inner logic” professionally––had had mixed results at best, one of which was to distance such activities from the public. He also understood that “the 20th century . . . shattered this optimism” about the “rational organization of everyday social life.” On the other hand, Habermas averred that “efforts to ‘negate’ the culture of expertise,” à la Dada and Surrealism, were mostly “nonsense experiments”: “Nothing remains from a desublimated meaning or a destructured form; an emancipatory effect does not follow.” Hence his ultimatum, cast in the form of a question: “Should we try to hold on to the intentions of the Enlightenment, feeble as they may be, or should we declare the entire project of modernity a lost cause?” 1

When a Social Text editor said to me that critical journals were the political parties of our time, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Again, The Anti-Aesthetic advocated practices that were not merely antimodernist. At the same time, in essays first published in October , Rosalind Krauss and Douglas Crimp demonstrated how modernist conceptions of both medium and museum had fallen into crisis. Concerned that the category of sculpture had become almost meaningless after Minimalism, Krauss, in “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” reasserted its old definition as a commemorative monument in order to trace the breakdown of that logic in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, first in the work of Rodin, where sculpture entered “its negative condition—a kind of sitelessness,” and then in that of Brancusi, where it became a “pure marker” that, through a reflection on its materials and processes, “depicts its own autonomy.” For several decades, Krauss argued, modernists explored this “idealist space” productively, but in time it was “experienced more and more as pure negativity,” with sculpture understood mostly as that which was not-architecture or not-landscape. However, in a deft structuralist move, Krauss argued that this negative binary could be expanded “into a quaternary field” in which sculpture was revealed to be “only one term on the periphery” along with “site-construction,” “marked sites,” and “axiomatic structures.” “Within the situation of postmodernism,” she concluded, “practice is not defined in relation to a given medium––sculpture––but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium––photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself––might be used.”

This renowned text remains a brilliant demonstration of method, one that openly privileges structure over history as a mode of explanation, yet that very emphasis also renders it silent on socioeconomic factors, such as the dominance of the commodity form and the rise of spectacular society, that have impacted sculpture far more than any logical operation. 3 So, too, other critics have used the quaternary field deployed by Krauss to map not artistic expansion but ideological closure, and though Earthworks and other such constructions did extend sculpture spatially, for the most part they have proved to be a dead end aesthetically. 4

Another ruse of history has operated on the art institution as analyzed by Crimp in “On the Museum’s Ruins.” According to Foucault, it was Manet who underscored the reflexivity of modernist art, whereby “every painting now belongs within the squared and massive surface of painting.” 5 So what happens, Crimp asked, when photography is let loose on that surface not as a discrete medium of art but as an anti-auratic operation of image reproduction and proliferation as performed by Rauschenberg? Can the disciplinary boundaries of the institution hold up, or does such postmodernist art demonstrate once and for all that, as the theorist Eugenio Donato put it, “the set of objects the Museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representational universe”? Important at the time, this epistemological crisis of the museum seems a minor problem today compared with its complicities in colonialism and imperialism, not to mention its histories of expropriation and exclusion.

In “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” one of the most influential texts in The Anti-Aesthetic , Craig Owens redescribed the postmodern crack-up of the “grand narratives” of modernity as a “loss of mastery.” Although “the representational systems of the West admit only one vision—that of the constitutive male subject,” feminist artists had come to challenge that dominance. Long “excluded from representation by its very structure,” the female subject was its most incisive critic, one dedicated to its “ruin.” The prime move of feminist postmodernism was thus to “expropriate the appropriators,” an operation that Owens described, in terms that are now canonical, in the work of Dara Birnbaum, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Martha Rosler, and Cindy Sherman. “Here,” he concluded, “we arrive at an apparent crossing of the feminist critique of patriarchy and the postmodernist critique of representation.” After Rosler, Owens warned that women should not be “a token for all markers of difference”; at the same time, he insisted, “sexual inequality cannot be reduced to an instance of economic exploitation.” This tension between difference and totality has returned with force in contemporary debates about race and class. 6

For the Marxist Fredric Jameson, however, it was only through such totalizing that any difference could be understood. A year after the publication of The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson lectured at the Whitney Museum on “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” his first text on the subject. For Jameson, the passage from modernism to postmodernism was a matter less of a rupture than of “a restructuration of a certain number of elements already given,” of which he offered several telling instances. Whereas intellectual inquiry was once undertaken in discrete discourses like philosophy, history, political theory, and literary criticism, the new species of critical theory roamed across these disciplines, poaching from them freely. Jameson next pointed to a shift in the typical relations between high and low art. Whereas modernists tended to oppose the two, postmodernists liked to intermingle them. More precisely, whereas modernists alluded to classic texts for parodic effect (as with Joyce), postmodernists tended to incorporate them in a pastiche that undercut their normativity (as with Kathy Acker). 7 Most important, Jameson refused any stylistic understanding of the notion of postmodernism. Its purpose, rather, was “to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order”—those of advanced capitalism. If modernists stressed the originality of their oeuvres, postmodernists enacted “the death of the author,” and their practice of pastiche took the modernist fragmentation of language to a new level, one that Jameson likened to the effects of schizophrenia, in which “meaning is lost,” “the materiality of words becomes obsessive,” and the world is “transformed into an image.” Through this staging of an “unreality” that feels like “intensity,” Jameson concluded, postmodernism expresses “the inner truth” of advanced capitalism, which is to erode any “sense of history.” “Our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve.” Jameson ended with a proposition of his own: “Postmodernism replicates or reproduces––reinforces––the logic of consumer capitalism; the more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resists that logic.”

In “The Ecstasy of Communication,” Jean Baudrillard also associated the postmodern subject with a schizophrenic who, no longer able to “produce the limits of his own being,” “is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.” Of course, as with Jameson, such pathological diagnoses of an entire society are problematic, and Baudrillard was indeed prone to extreme statements, which were sometimes parroted in ’80s art talk. Yet he produced important insights, some of which anticipate “the hyperrealism of simulation” all around us. Here are several examples: “Advertising in its new dimension invades everything, as public space (the street, monument, market, scene) disappears.” “Bodily movements” are displaced into “electronic commands.” “The instantaneity of communication has miniaturized our exchanges into a succession of instants.” “In place of the reflexive transcendence of mirror and scene, there is a nonreflecting surface, an immanent surface where operations unfold––the smooth operational surface of communication.” The opposition between private and public is “effaced in a sort of obscenity where the most intimate processes of our life become the virtual feeding ground of the media.”

Finally, in “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community,” Edward Said concluded The Anti-Aesthetic with a critical reflection on “the politics of interpretation.” This phrase performs a discursive twist typical of the time: Rather than to represent or interpret politics, the charge was to politicize representation, to politicize interpretation. Yet Said was already alert to the problem that such criticism, however interdisciplinary, hardly translated into more direct communication with a wider audience. On the contrary, “critics read each other and cared about little else.” If “technical language” remained the criterion and “self-policing” remained the protocol, “the particular mission of the humanities” would be only “to represent noninterference in the affairs of the everyday world,” and its primary function would be merely “to represent humane marginality, which is also to preserve and if possible to conceal the hierarchy of powers that occupy the center, define the social terrain, and fix the limits of use, functions, fields, marginality, and so on.” Guided by figures like Said, the humanities have improved dramatically on these fronts, but representing “humane marginality” remains their primary purpose.

MOST ANTHOLOGIES worth a damn are products of urgency and contingency, and The Anti-Aesthetic was no different. A twenty-eight-year-old editor and critic at Art in America at the time of its publication, I was almost too eager to trace the connections among art, theory, and politics that the contributors pointed toward. 8 Urgency and contingency bring oversights, then, some of which remain especially galling to me. Although the premier artists of postmodernism were women, only one woman appears as an author in the book, and there is only one text on feminist art, and that was written by a man. 9 And though I participated in a seminar on Orientalism given by Said, the book includes no text on postcolonial discourse. There are excuses––Said was focused on literature and music, not art, and critics like Geeta Kapur were not widely known and journals like Third Text not yet founded—but these are excuses. It took the auto-critique of anthropology, along with the provocation of the notorious “Primitivism” show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984, to foreground the many implications of postcolonial critique for art. Difference, as understood by both poststructuralism and feminism, was still difference within more than alterity without.

I have already noted some shifts in the subjects taken up in The Anti-Aesthetic since its publication; here, to conclude, are several more. First, the valence of appropriation has obviously undergone a sea change. Once central to postmodernist practice, which was often called “appropriation art,” this operation was taken to challenge unexamined assumptions about authorship as authority and art as property. Now the notion is fraught with ethical peril, and the term often functions as an accusation. Second, though it was always trivial to treat postmodernism as a stylistic term, its use value as a period marker has become uncertain. Simply put, we overstated the break with modernism, if not with modernity (whose grand narratives appear more defunct than ever). Certainly, the modernism that provided a foil for postmodernism was a reductive one, often too focused on a straw man or an easy target (such as Greenberg or Color Field painting). Perhaps what Lyotard, Habermas, and others counted as modernity is also due for revision––and postmodernity along with it. Third, in my introduction to the book, I opposed “a postmodernism of resistance” to “a postmodernism of reaction” and associated the former with poststructuralist critique and the latter with neoconservative politics. Already a year later, I had questioned this binary, for both appropriation art and postmodern architecture can be taken to promote a fragmentation of cultural signs that speaks to the corrosive action of capital more than anything else. 10

Baudrillard was prone to extreme statements, which were sometimes parroted in ’80s art talk. Yet he also produced important insights.

Fourth, rejection of the aesthetic has eased. Suspicious of the lazy aestheticism all around us (late Greenbergianism, art photography, neo-expressionist painting, bronze sculpture), my cohort of artists and critics was skeptical of the aesthetic as a category, and in an early moment of the digital revolution, we were more dismissive of artistic aura than even Walter Benjamin (who influenced us enormously). As a site of reconciliation between different faculties (as Kant had defined it), the aesthetic seemed to be aligned with the ideological. This led me to draw, within the postmodernism of resistance, a distinction between two positions, one affined with Gramsci, the other with Adorno, and to offer an ultimatum of my own:

The adventures of the aesthetic make up one of the great narratives of modernity: from the time of its autonomy through art-for-art’s sake to its status as necessary negative category, a critique of the world as it is. It is this last moment (figured brilliantly in the writings of Theodor Adorno) that is hard to relinquish: the notion of the aesthetic as subversive, a critical interstice in an otherwise instrumental world. Now, however, we have to consider that this aesthetic space too is eclipsed—or rather, that its criticality is now largely illusory (and so instrumental). In such an event, the strategy of an Adorno, of negative commitment, might have to be revised or rejected, and a new strategy of interference (associated with Gramsci) devised.

In his account of the politics of interpretation Said had also advocated for Gramsci; there was a counterhegemonic thrust in the texts by Frampton, Owens, and Jameson; and a Gramscian position appeared to be the one to take up in the face of the neoconservative-neoliberal order. Yet I have come to doubt the necessity of this Gramsci-Adorno opposition. They are not as mutually exclusive as I made them out to be in the exigencies of the moment. And today there is a new insistence on the aesthetic, even a return to the beautiful, especially among Black artists and critics, in large part because it offers some respite from an otherwise necessary focus on traumatic histories, some promise of “a transfiguration of the given.” 11

Fifth and finally, there is a shift in the valence of the critical, which is no longer the undisputed good or inviolate criterion that my cohort often took it to be. That said, I remain committed to the kind of critical intervention that The Anti-Aesthetic attempted to make; the postcritical is not for me. Nor is the insistence that criticism be reparative; in my view, that notion edges toward a redemptive idea of culture that much of the most important art, modernist and postmodernist alike, rejects. 12 Criticism and culture are not therapy, not then, not now.

Hal Foster’s Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg was published in 2020 by Princeton University Press.

1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture , ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983). I dedicate the present text to its publisher, my great friend Thatcher Bailey, who was crucial to the making of the book from first to last.

2. There was pushback on the Frampton essay from architect friends who didn’t see critical regionalism as properly postmodernist, but what appealed to me was precisely its critical posture; it pointed to a “postmodernism of resistance.”

3. “The logic of sculpture, it would seem, is inseparable from the logic of the monument,” Krauss wrote in “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” “By virtue of this logic a sculpture is a commemorative representation. It sits in a particular place and speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place.” Two decades later, Benjamin Buchloh offered this diabolical revision: “The logic of sculpture, it would seem, is inseparable from the logic of the commodity fetish. By virtue of this logic, a sculpture is always already a fetishized object whose function is disavowal. It lacks any particular location and it is universally accessible. It speaks in a symbolic tongue about the meaning or use of the fetish.” See his “Sculpture: Publicity and the Poverty of Experience,” in Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 510.

4. See Algirdas Julien Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory , trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); see, too, the foreword by Fredric Jameson. Recently, of course, “the logic of the monument” has been contested in very different ways.

5. Michel Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice , trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 92.

6. It could be argued that Owens totalized in his own way, hypostatizing all authority as domination.

7. I was stumped by how to treat postmodernist literature, in large part because the writers associated with the term (such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and even Amiri Baraka and William Burroughs) were more hypermodernist than anything else. (There is a lesson here about the nonsynchronicity of the various arts.) In a text on “post-criticism” for The Anti-Aesthetic , Gregory Ulmer argued, after Rosalind Krauss, that critical theory had achieved a “paraliterary” status of its own, in large part through carrying over the modernist critique of representation, especially through the devices of collage and montage, into the domain of philosophy. See Krauss, “Poststructuralism and the ‘Paraliterary,’” October , no. 13 (Summer 1980), 36–40.

8. Also contingent was my acquaintance with the authors. I knew Frampton from the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and Krauss and Crimp from October . I worked alongside Owens at Art in America and Jameson at Social Text . I studied with Said at Columbia and met Baudrillard on one of his many trips to New York.

9. This problem is not mitigated by the fact that Owens was gay. However, in the short time remaining to him—he died, far too young, in 1990––he did become an important voice in queer theory, which had only begun to emerge at the time of The Anti-Aesthetic .

10. See my “(Post)Modern Polemics,” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1985), 121–138.

11. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: Norton, 2019), 33. Also see Christina Sharpe, “Beauty Is a Method,” e-flux , no. 105 (December 2019).

12. I allude here to my “Post-Critical?,” in Bad New Days (London: Verso, 2015); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–151; and Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

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The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture ed. by Hal Foster (review)

The MIT Press
Volume 9, Number 1, 1985 (PAJ 25)
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The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism

CRAIG OWENS

Postmodern knowledge [ le savoir postmoderne] is not simply an instrument ofpower. It refines our sensitivity to differences and increases our tolerance of incommensurability. -J.F. Lyotard, La condition postmoderne

Decentered, allegorical, schizophrenic ...-however we choose to diag nose its symptoms, postmodernism is usually treated, by its protagonists and antagonists alike, as a crisis of cultural authority, specifically of the authority vested in Western European culture and its institutions. That the hegemony of European civilization is drawing to a close is hardly a new perception; since the mid-1950s, at least, we have recognized the necessity of encountering different cultures by means other than the shock of domination and conquest. Among the relevant texts are Arnold Toynbee's discussion, in the eighth volume of his monumental Study in History, of the end of the modern age (an age that began, Toynbee contends, in the late 15th century when Europe began to exert its influence over vast land areas and populations not its own) and the beginning of a new, properly postmodern age characterized by the coexistence of different cultures. Claude Levi Strauss's critique of Western ethnocentrism could also be cited in this context, as well as Jacques Derrida's critique of this critique in Of Grammatology. But perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the end of Western sovereignty has been that of Paul Ricoeur, who wrote in 1962 that "the discovery of the plurality of cultures is never a harmless experience." When we discover that there are several cultures instead of just one and consequently at the time when we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, be it illusory or real, we are threatened with the destruction of our own discovery. Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves are an "other" among others. All meaning and every goal

57 58 The Anti-Aesthetic

having disappeared, it becomes possible to wander through civilizations as if through vestiges and ruins. The whole of mankind becomes an imaginary museum: where shall we go this weekend-visit the Angkor ruins or take a stroll in the Tivoli of Copenhagen? We can very easily imagine a time close at hand when any fairly well-to-d_o person will be able to leave his country indefinitely in order to taste his own national death in an interminable, aimless voyage.1 Lately, we have come to regard this condition as postmodern. Indeed, Ricoeur 's account of the more dispiriting effects of our culture's recent loss of mastery anticipates both the melancholia and the eclecticism that pervade current cultural production-not to mention its much-touted pluralism. Pluralism, however, reduces us to being an other among others; it is not a recognition, but a reduction to difference to absolute indifference, equiv alence, interchangeability (what Jean Baudrillard calls "implosion"). What is at stake, then, is not only the hegemony of Western culture, but also (our sense of) our identity as a culture. These two stakes, however, are so inextricably intertwined (as Foucault has taught us, the positing of an Other is a necessary moment in the consolidation, the incorporation of any cultural body) that it is possible to speculate that what has toppled our claims to sovereignty is actually the realization that our culture is neither as homogeneous nor as monolithic as we once believed it to be. In other words, the causes of modernity's .. demise-at least as Ricoeur describes its effects-lie as much within as without. Ricoeur, however, deals only with the difference without. What about the difference within? In the modern period the authority of the work of art, its claim to represent some authentic vision of the world, did not reside in its uniqueness or singularity, as is often said; rather, that authority was based on the universality modern aesthetics attributed to the forms utilized for the representation of vision, over and above differences in content due to the production of works in concrete historical circumstances.2 (For example, Kant's demand that the judgment of taste be universal-i.e., universally communicable-that it derive from "grounds deep-seated and shared alike by all men, underlying their agreement in estimating the forms under which objects are given to them.") Not only does the postmodernist work claim no such authority, it also actively seeks to undermine all such claims; hence, its generally deconstructive thrust. As recent analyses of the "enunciative apparatus" of visual representation-its poles of emission and reception confirm, the representational systems of the West admit only one vision that of the constitutive male subject-or, rather, they posit the subject of representation as absolutely centered, unitary, masculine.3 The postmodernist work attempts to upset the reassuring stability of that mastering position. This same project has, of course, been attributed by writers like Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes to the modernist avant-garde, Feminists and Postmodernism 59 which through the introduction of heterogeneity, discontinuity, glossolalia, etc., supposedly put the subject of representation in crisis. But the avant garde sought to transcend representation in favor of presence and imme diacy; it proclaimed the autonomy of the signifier, its liberation from the "tyranny of the signified"; postmodemists instead expose the tyranny of the signifier, the violence of its law.4 (Lacan spoke of the necessity of submitting to the "defiles" of the signifier; should we not ask rather who in our culture is defiled by the signifier?) Recently, Derrida has cautioned against a wholesale condemnation of representation, not only because such a condemnation may appear to advocate a rehabilitation of presence and immediacy and thereby serve the interests of the most reactionary political tendencies, but more importantly, perhaps, because that which exceeds, "transgresses the figure of all possible representation," may ultimately be none other than . .. the law. Which obliges us, Derrida concludes, "to thinking altogether differently." 5 It is precisely at the legislative frontier between what can be represented and what cannot that the postmodernist operation is being staged-not in order to transcend representation, but in order to expose that system of power that authorizes certain representations while blocking, prohibiting or invalidating others. Among those prohibited from Western representation, whose representations are denied all legitimacy, are women. Excluded from representation by its very structure, they return within it as a figure for-a representation of-the unrepresentable (Nature, Truth, the Sublime, etc.). This prohibition bears primarily on woman as the subject, and rarely as the. object of representation, for there is certainly no shortage of images of women. Yet in being represented by, women have been rendered an absence within the dominant culture as Michele Montrelay proposes when she asks "whether psychoanalysis was not articulated precisely in order to repress femininity (in the sense of producing its symbolic representation)." 6 In order to speak, to represent herself, a woman assumes a masculine position; perhaps this is why femininity is frequently associated with masquerade, with false representation, with simulation and seduction. Montrelay, in fact, identifies women as the "ruin of representation": not only have they nothing to lose; their exteriority to Western representation exposes its limits. Here, we arrive at an apparent crossing of the feminist critique of patri archy and the postmodernist critique of representation; this essay is a provisional attempt to explore the implications of that intersection. My intention is not to posit identity between these two critiques; nor is it to place them in a relation of antagonism or opposition. Rather, if I have chosen to negotiate the treacherous course between postmodernism and feminism, it is in order to introduce the issue of sexual difference into the modernism/ postmodernism debate-a debate which has until now been scandalously in-different? "A Remarkable Oversight" 8

Several years ago I began the second of two essays devoted to an allegorical impulse in contemporary art-an impulse that I identified as postmodernist -with a discussion of Laurie Anderson's multi-media performance Americans on the Move. 9 Addressed to transportation as a metaphor for communication-the transfer of meaning from one place to another Americans on the Move proceeded primarily as verbal commentary on visual images projected on a screen behind the performers. Near the beginning Anderson introduced the schematic image of a nude man and woman, the former's right arm raised in greeting, that had been emblazoned on the Pioneer spacecraft. Here is what she had to say about this picture; significantly, it was spoken by a distinctly male voice (Anderson's own processed through a harmonizer, which dropped it an octave-a kind of electronic vocal transvestism): In our country, we send pictures of our sign language into outer space. They are speaking our sign language in these pictures. Do you think they will think his hand is permanently attached that way? Or do you think they will read our signs? In our country, good-bye looks just like hello. Here is my commentary on this passage: Two alternatives: either the extraterrestrial recipient of this message will assume that it is simply a picture, that is, an analogical likeness of the human figure, in which case he might logically conclude that male inhabitants of Earth walk around with their right arms permanently raised. Or he will somehow divine that this gesture is addressed to him and attempt to read it, in which case he will be stymied, since a single gesture signifies both greeting and farewell, anp any reading of it must oscillate between these two extremes. The same gesture could also mean "Halt!" or represent the taking of an oath, but if Anderson's text does not consider these two alternatives that is because it is not concerned with ambiguity, with multiple meanings engendered by a single sign; rather, two clearly defined but mutually incompatible readings are engaged in blind confrontation in such a way that it is impossible to choose between them. This analysis strikes me as a case of gross critical negligence. for in my eagerness to rewrite Anderson's text in terms of the debate over determinate versus indeterminate meaning, I had overlooked something-something that is so obvious, so "natural" that it may at the time have seemed unworthy of comment. It does not seem that way to me today. For this is, of course, an image of sexual difference or, rather, of sexual differentiation according to the distribution of the phallus- as it is marked and then re-marked by the man's right arm, which appears less to have been raised than erected in greeting. I was, however, close to the "truth" of the image Feminists and Postmodernism 61 when I suggested that men on Earth might walk around with something permanently raised-close, perhaps, but no cigar. (Would my reading have been different-or less in-different-had I known then that, earlier in her career, Anderson had executed a work which consisted of photographs of men who had accosted her in the street?) 10 Like all representations of sexual difference that our culture produces, this is an image not simply of anatomical difference, but of the values assigned to it. Here, the phallus is a signifier (that is, it represents the subject for another signifier); it is, in fact, the privileged signifier, the signifier of privilege, of the power and prestige that accrue to the male in our society. As such, it designates the effects of signification in general. For in this (Lacanian) image, chosen to represent the inhabitants of Earth for the extraterrestrial Other, it is the man who speaks, who represents mankind. The woman is only represented; she is (as always) already spoken for. If I return to this passage here, it is not simply to correct my own remarkable oversight, but more importantly to indicate a blind spot in our discussions of postmodernism in general: our failure to address the issue of sexual difference-not only in the objects we discuss, but in our own enunciation as well.11 However restricted its field of inquiry may be, every discourse on postmodernism-at least insofar as it seeks to account for certain recent mutations within that field-aspires to the status of a general theory of contemporary culture. Among the most significant developments of the past decade-it may well turn out to have beeri the most significant-has been the emergence, in nearly every area of cultural activity, of a specifically feminist practice. A great deal of effort has been devoted to the recovery and revaluation of previously marginalized or underestimated work; everywhere this project has been accompanied by energetic new production. As one engaged in these activities-Martha Rosier-observes, they have contributed significantly to debunking the privileged status modernism claimed for the work of art: "The interpretation of the meaning and social origin and rootedness of those [earlier] forms helped undermine the modernist tenet of the separateness of the aesthetic from the rest of human life, and an analysis of the oppressiveness of the seemingly unmotivated forms of high culture was companion to this work." 12 Still, if one of the most salient aspects of our postmodern culture is the presence of an insistent feminist voice (and I use the terms presence and voice advisedly), theories of postmodernism have tended either to neglect or to repress that voice. The absence of discussions of sexual difference in writings about postmodernism, as well as the fact that few women have engaged in the modernism/postmodernism debate, suggest that postmodern ism may be another masculine invention engineered to exclude women. I would like to propose, however, that women's insistence on difference and 62 The Anti-Aesthetic incommensurability may not only be compatible with, but also an instance of postmodern thought. Postmodern thought is no longer binary thought (as Lyotard observes when he writes, "Thinking by means of oppositions does not correspond to the liveliest modes of postmodern knowledge [le savoir postmoderne] ") .13 The critique of binarism is sometimes dismissed as intellectual fashion; it is, however, an intellectual imperative, since the hierarchical opposition of marked and unmarked terms (the decisive/divisive presence/absence of the phallus) is the dominant form both of representing difference and justifying its subordination in our society. What we must learn, then, is how to conceive difference without opposition. Although sympathetic male critics respect feminism (an old theme: respect for women) 14 and wish it well, they have in general declined the dialogue in which their female colleagues are trying to engage them. Some times feminists are accused of going too far, at others, not far enough.15 The feminist voice is usually regarded as one among many, its insistence on difference as testimony to the pluralism of the times. Thus, feminism is rapidly assimilated to a whole string of liberation or self-determination movements. Here is one recent list, by a prominent male critic: "ethnic groups, neighborhood movements, feminism, various 'countercultural' or alternative life-style groups, rank-and-file labor dissidence, student move ments, single-issue movements." Not only does this forced coalition treat feminism itself as monolithic, thereby suppressing its multiple internal differences (essentialist, culturalist, linguistic, Freudian, anti-Freudian . .. ); it also posits a vast, undifferentiated category, "Difference," to which all marginalized or oppressed groups can be assimilated, and for which women can then stand as an emblem, a pars totalis (another old theme: woman is incomplete, not whole). But the specificity of the feminist critique of patriarchy is thereby denied, along with that of all other forms of opposition to sexual, racial and class discrimination. (Rosier warns against using woman as "a token for all markers of difference," observing that "appreciation of the work of women whose subject is oppression exhausts consideration of all oppressions.") Moreover, men appear unwilling to address the issues placed on the critical agenda by women unless those issues have first been neut(e)ralized -although this, too, is a problem of assimilation: to the already known, the already written. In The Political Unconscious, to take but one example, Fredric Jameson calls for the "reaudition of the oppositional voices of black and ethnic cultures, women's or gay literature, 'naive' or marginalized folk art and the like" (thus, women's cultural production is anachronistically identified as folk art), but he immediately modifies this petition: "The affirmation of such non-hegemonic cultural voices remains ineffective," he argues, if they are not first rewritten in terms of their proper place in "the dialogical system of the social classes." 16 Certainly, the class determinants Feminists and Postmodernism 63 of sexuality-and of sexual oppression-are too often overlooked. But sexual inequality cannot be reduced to an instance of economic exploitation -the exchange of women among men-and explained in terms of class struggle alone; to invert Rosier's statement, exclusive attention to economic oppression can exhaust consideration of other forms of oppression. To claim that the division of the sexes is irreducible to the division of labor is to risk polarizing feminism and Marxism; this danger is real, given the latter's fundamentally patriarchal bias. Marxism privileges the characteris tically masculine activity of production as the definitively human activity (Marx: men "begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence"); 17 women, historically consigned to the spheres of nonproductive or reproductive labor, are thereby situated outside the society of male producers, in a state of nature. (As Lyotard has written, "The frontier passing between the sexes does not separate two parts of the same social entity.") 18 What is at issue, however, is not simply the oppressiveness of Marxist discourse, but its totalizing ambitions, its claim to account for every form of social experience. But .this claim is characteristic of all theoretical discourse, which is one reason women frequently condemn it as phallocratic.19 It is not always theory per se that women repudiate, nor simply, as Lyotard has suggested, the priority men have granted to it, its rigid opposition to practical experience. Rather, what they challenge is the distance it maintains between itself and its objects-a distance which objectifies and masters. Because of the tremendous effort of reconceptualization necessary to prevent a phallologic relapse in their own discourse, many feminist artists have, in fact, forged a new (or renewed) alliance with theory-most profitably, perhaps, with the writing of women influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis (Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Montrelay . . . ). Many of these artists have themselves made major theoretical contributions: film~ maker Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," for example, has generated a great deal of critical discussion on the masculinity of the cinematic gaze.20 Whether influenced by psycho analysis or not, feminist artists often regard critical or theoretical writing as an important arena of strategic intervention: Martha Rosier's critical texts on the documentary tradition in photography-among the best in the field are a crucial part of her activity as an artist. Many modernist artists, of course, produced texts about their own production, but writing was almost always considered supplementary to their primary work as painters, sculptors, photographers, etc. ,21 whereas the kind of simultaneous activity on multiple fronts that characterizes many feminist practices is a postmodern phenomenon. And one of the things it challenges is modernism's rigid opposition of artistic practice and theory. At the same time, postmodern feminist practice may question theory- 64 The Anti-Aesthetic

and not only aesthetic theory. Consider Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document (1973-79), a 6-part, 165-piece art work (plus footnotes) that utilizes multiple representational modes (literary, scientific, psychoanalytic, linguistic, archeological and so forth) to chronicle the first six years of her son's life. Part archive, part exhibition, part case history, the Post-Partum Document is also a contribution to as well as a critique of Lacanian theory. Beginning as it does with a series of diagrams taken from Ecrits (diagrams which Kelly presents as pictures), the work might be (mis)read as a straightforward application or illustration of psychoanalysis. It is, rather, a mother's interrogation of Lacan, an interrogation that ultimately reveals a remarkable oversight within the Lacanian narrative of the child's relation to the mother-the construction of the mother's fantasies vis-a-vis the child. Thus, the Post-Partum Document has proven to be a controversial work, for it appears to offer evidence of female fetishism (the various substitutes the mother invests in order to disavow separation from the child); Kelly thereby exposes a lack within the theory of fetishism, a perversion heretofore reserved for the male. Kelly's work is not anti-theory; rather, as her use of multiple representational systems testifies, it demonstrates that no one narrative can possibly account for all aspects of human experience. Or as the artist herself has said, "There's no single theoretical discourse which is going to offer an explanation for all forms of social relations or for every mode of political practice." 22

A la recherche du recit perdu

"No single theoretical discourse . .."-this feminist position is also a postmodern condition. In fact, Lyotard diagnoses the postmodern condition as one in which the grands recits of modernity-the dialectic of Spirit, the emancipation of the worker, the accumulation of wealth, the classless society-have all lost credibility. Lyotard defines a discourse as modem when it appeals to one or another of these grands recits for its legitimacy; the advent of postmodernity, then, signals a crisis in narrative's legitimizing function, its ability to compel consensus. Narrative, he argues, is out of its element(s)-"the great dangers, the great journeys, the great goal." Instead, "it is dispersed into clouds of linguistic particles-narrative ones, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, etc.-each with its own pragmatic valence. Today, each of us lives in the vicinity of many of these. We do not necessarily form stable linguistic communities, and the properties of those we do form are not necessarily communicable." 23 Lyotard does not, however, mourn modernity's passing, even though his own activity as a philosopher is at stake. "For most people," he writes, Feminists and Postmodernism 65

"nostalgia for the lost narrative [le recit perdu] is a thing of the past." 24 "Most people" does not include Fredric Jameson, although he diagnoses the postmodern condition in similar terms (as a loss of narrative's social function) and distinguishes between modernist and postmodernist works according to their different relations to the "'.truth-content' of art, its claim to possess some truth or epistemological value." His description of a crisis in modernist literature stands metonymically for the crisis in modernity itself: At its most vital, the experience of modernism was not one of a single historical movement or process, but of a "shock of discovery," a commitment and an adherence to its individual forms through a series of "religious conversions." One did not simply read D.H. Lawrence or Rilke, see Jean Renoir or Hitchcock, or listen to Stravinsky as distinct manifestations of what we now term modernism. Rather one read all the works of a particular writer, learned a style and a phenomenological world, to which one converted .... This meant, however, that the experience of one form of modernism was incompatible with another, so that one entered one world only at the price of abandoning another... . The crisis of modernism came, then, when it suddenly became clear that "D.H. Lawrence" was not an absolute after all, not the final achieved figuration of the truth of the world, but only one art language among others, only one shelf of works in a whole dizzying library.25 Although a reader of Foucault might locate this realization at the origin of modernism (Flaubert, Manet) rather than at its conclusion,26 Jameson's account of the crisis of modernity strikes me as both persuasive and problematic-problematic because persuasive. Like Lyotard, he plunges us into a radical Nietzschean perspectivism: each oeuvre represents not simply a different view of the same world, but corresponds to an entirely different world. Unlike Lyotard, however, he does so only in order to extricate us from it. For Jameson, the loss of narrative is equivalent to the loss of our ability to locate ourselves historically; hence, his diagnosis of postmodern ism as "schizophrenic," meaning that it is characterized by a collapsed sense of temporalityP Thus, in The Political Unconscious he urges the resurrection not simply of narrative-as a "socially symbolic act"-but specifically of what he identifies as the Marxist "master narrative"-the story of mankind's "collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity." 28 Master narrative-how else to translate Lyotard's grand recit? And in this translation we glimpse the terms of another analysis of modernity's demise, one that speaks not of the incompatibility of the various modern narratives, but instead of their fundamental solidarity. For what made the grands recits of modernity master narratives if not the fact that they were all narratives of mastery, of man seeking his telos in the conquest of nature? What function did these narratives play other than to legitimize Western 66 The Anti-Aesthetic man's self-appointed mission of transforming the entire planet in his own image? And what form did this mission take if not that of man's placing of his stamp on everything that exists-that is, the transformation of the world into a representation, with man as its subject? In this respect, however, the phrase master narrative seems tautologous, since all narrative, by virtue of "its power to master the dispiriting effects of the corrosive force of the temporal process," 29 may be narrative of mastery.30 What is at stake, then, is not only the status of narrative, but of represen tation itself. For the modern age was not only the age of the master narrative, it was also the age of representation-at least this is what Martin Heidegger proposed in a 1938 lecture delivered in Freiburg im Breisgau, but not published until 1952 as "The Age of the World Picture" [Die Zeit die Weltbildes] .31 According to Heidegger, the transition to modernity was not accomplished by the replacement of a medieval by a modern world picture, "but rather the fact that the world becomes a picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age." For modern man, everything that exists does so only in and through representation. To claim this is also to claim that the world exists only in and through a subject who believes that he is producing the world in producing its representation:

The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word "picture" [Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild] that is the creature of man's producing which represents and sets before. In such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is.

Thus, with the "interweaving of these two events"-the transformation of the world into a picture and man into a subject-"there begins that way of being human which mans the realm of human capability given over to mea suring and executing, for the purpose of gaining mastery of that which is as a whole." For what is representation if not a "laying hold and grasping" (appropriation), a "making-stand-over-against, an objectifying that goes forward and masters"? 32 Thus, when in a recent interview Jameson calls for "the reconquest of certain forms of representation" (which he equates with narrative: "• Narra tive,"' he argues, "is, I think, generally what people have in mind when they rehearse the usual post-structuralist 'critique of representation"'),33 he is in fact calling for the rehabilitation of the entire social project of modernity itself. Since the Marxist master narrative is only one version among many of the modern narrative of mastery (for what is the •• collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity" if not mankind's progressive exploitation of the Earth?), Jameson's desire to resurrect (this) narrative is a modern desire, a desire for modernity. It is one Feminists and Postmodernism 67 symptom of our postmodern condition, which is experienced everywhere today as a tremendous loss of mastery and thereby gives rise to therapeutic programs, from both the Left and the Right, for recuperating that loss. Although Lyotard warns-correctly, I believe-against explaining trans formations in modern/postmodern culture primarily as effects of social transformations (the hypothetical advent of a postindustrial society, for example),34 it is clear that what has been lost is not primarily a cultural mastery, but an economic, technical and political one. For what if not the emergence of Third-World nations, the "revolt of nature" and the women's movement-that is, the voices of the conquered-has challenged the West's desire for ever-greater domination and control? Symptoms of our recent loss of mastery are everywhere apparent in cultural activity today-nowhere more so than in the visual arts. The modernist project of joining forces with science and technology for the transformation of the environment after rational principles of function and utility (Productivism, the Bauhaus) has long since been abandoned; what we witness in its place is a desperate, often hysterical attempt to recover some sense of mastery via the resurrection of heroic large-scale easel painting and monumental cast-bronze sculpture-mediums themselves identified with the cultural hegemony of Western Europe. Yet contemporary artists are able at best to simulate mastery, to manipulate its signs; since in the modern period mastery was invariably associated with human labor, aesthetic production has degenerated today into a massive deployment of the signs of artistic labor-violent, "impassioned" brushwork, for example. Such simulacra of mastery testify, however, only to its loss; in fact, contemporary artists seem engaged in a collective act of disavowal-and disavowal always pertains to a loss ... of virility, masculinity, potency.35 This contingent of artists .is accompanied by another which refuses the simulation of mastery in favor of melancholic contemplation of its loss. One such artist speaks of "the impossibility of passion in a culture that has institutionalized self-expression;" another, of "the aesthetic as something which is really about longing and loss rather than completion." A painter unearths the discarded genre of landscape painting only to borrow for his own canvases, through an implicit equation between their ravaged surfaces and the barren fields he depicts, something of the exhaustion of the earth itself (which is thereby glamorized); another dramatizes his anxieties through the most conventional figure men have conceived for the threat of castration-Woman . . . aloof, remote, unapproachable. Whether they disavow or advertise their own powerlessness, pose as heroes or as victims, these artists have, needless to say, been warmly received by a society unwilling to admit that it has been driven from its position of centrality; theirs is an "official" art which, like the culture that produced it, has yet to come to terms with its own impoverishment. 68 The Anti-Aesthetic

Above and right: Martha Rosier, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 1974-75.

Postmodernist artists speak of impoverishment-but in a very different way. Sometimes the postmodernist work testifies to a deliberate refusal of mastery, for example, Martha Rosier's The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974-75), in which photographs of Bowery storefronts alternate with clusters of typewritten words signifying inebriety. Although her photographs are intentionally flat-footed, Rosier's refusal of mastery in this work is more than technical. On the one hand, she denies the caption/ text its conventional function of supplying the image with something it lacks; instead, her juxtaposition of two representational systems, visual and verbal, is calculated (as the title suggests) to "undermine" rather than "underline" the truth value of each.36 More importantly, Rosier has refused to photograph the inhabitants of Skid Row, to speak on their behalf, to illuminate them from a safe distance (photography as social work in the tradition of Jacob Riis). For "concerned" or what Rosier calls "victim" photography overlooks the constitutive role of its own activity, which is held Feminists and Postmodernism 69

plastered stuccoed

rosined shellacked

to be merely representative (the "myth" of photographic transparency and objectivity). Despite his or her benevolence in representing those who have been denied access to the means of representation, the photographer inevitably functions as an agent of the system of power that silenced these people in the first place. Thus, they are twice victimized: first by society, and then by the photographer who presumes the right to speak on their behalf. In fact, in such photography it is the photographer rather than the "subject" who poses-as the subject's consciousness, indeed, as con science itself. Although Rosier may not, in this work, have initiated a counter-discourse of drunkenness-which would consist of the drunks' own theories about their conditions of existence-she has nevertheless pointed negatively to the crucial issue of a politically motivated art practice today: "the indignity of speaking for others." 37 Rosier's position poses a challenge to criticism as well, specifically, to the critic's substitution of his own discourse for the work of art. At this point 70 The Anti-Aesthetic in my text, then, my own voice must yield to the artist's; in the essay "in, around and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)" which accom panies The Bowery ... , Rosier writes: Ifimpoverishment is a subject here, it is more certainly the impoverishment of representational strategies tottering about alone than that of a mode of surviving. The photographs are powerless to deal with the reality that is yet totally comprehended-in-advance by ideology, and they are as diversionary as the word formations-which at least are closer to being located within the culture of drunkenness rather than being framed on it from without.38

The Visible and the Invisible

A work like The Bowery in Two Iniuiequate Descriptive Systems not only exposes the "myths" of photographic objectivity and transparency; it also upsets the (modern) belief in vision as a privileged means of access to certainty and truth ("Seeing is believing"). Modern aesthetics claimed that vision was superior to the other senses because of its detachment from its objects: "Vision," Hegel tells us in his Lectures on Aesthetics, "finds itself in a purely theoretical relationship with objects, through the intermediary of light, that immaterial matter which truly leaves objects their freedom, lighting and illuminating them without consuming them." 39 Postmodernist artists do not deny this detachment, but neither do they celebrate it. Rather, they investigate the particular interests it serves. For vision is hardly disinterested; nor is it indifferent, as Luce Irigaray has observed: "Invest ment in the look is not privileged in women as in men. More than the other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets at a distance, maintains the distance. In our culture, the predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch, hearing, has brought about an impoverishment of bodily relations . . . . The moment the look dominates, the body loses its materiality." 40 That is, it is transformed into an image. That the priority our culture grants to vision is a sensory impoverishment is hardly a new perception; the feminist critique, however, links the privileging of vision with sexual privilege. Freud identified the transition from a matriarchal to a patriarchal society with the simultaneous devaluation of an olfactory sexuality and promotion of a more mediated, sublimated visual sexuality.41 What is more, in the Freudian scenario it is by looking that the child discovers sexual difference, the presence or absence of the phallus according to which the child's sexual identity will be assumed. As Jane Gallop reminds us in her recent book Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter's Seduction, "Freud articulated the 'discovery of castration' around a sight: sight of a phallic presence in the boy, sight of a phallic Feminists and Postmodernism 71 absence in the girl, ultimately sight of a phallic absence in the mother. Sexual difference takes its decisive significance from a sighting." 42 Is it not because the phallus is the most visible sign of sexual difference that it has become the "privileged signifier"? However, it is not only the discovery of difference, but also its denial that hinges upon vision (although the reduction of difference to a common measure-woman judged according to the man's standard and found lacking-is already a denial). As Freud proposed in his 1926 paper on "Fetishism," the male child often takes the last visual impression prior to the "traumatic" sighting as a substitute for the mother's "missing" penis:

Thus the foot or the shoe owes its attraction as a fetish , or part of it, to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy used to peer up at the woman's legs towards her genitals. Velvet and fur reproduce-as has long been suspected -the sight of the pubic hair which ought to have revealed the longed-for penis; the underlinen so often adopted as a fetish reproduces the scene of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic.43

What can be said about the visual arts in a patriarchal order that privileges vision over the other senses? Can we not expect them to be a domain of masculine privilege-as their histories indeed prove them to be-a means, perhaps, of mastering through representation the "threat" posed by the female? In recent years there has emerged a visual arts practice informed by feminist theory and addressed, more or less explicitly, to the issue of representation and sexuality-both masculine and feminine. Male artists have tended to investigate the social construction of masculinity (Mike Glier, Eric Bogosian, the early work of Richard Prince); women have begun the long-overdue process of deconstructing femininity. Few have produced new, "positive" images of a revised femininity; to do so would simply supply and thereby prolong the life of the existing representational apparatus. Some refuse to represent women at all, believing that no representation of the female body in our culture can be free from phallic prejudice. Most of these artists, however, work with the existing repertory of cultural imagery-not because they either lack originality or criticize it-but because their subject, feminine sexuality, is always constituted in and as representation, a representation of difference. It must be emphasized that these artists are not primarily interested in what representations say about women; rather, they investigate what representation does to women (for example, the way it invariably positions them as objects of the male gaze). For, as Lacan wrote, "Images and symbols for the woman cannot be isolated from images and symbols ofthe woman . .. . It is representation, the representation of feminine sexuality whether repressed or not, which conditions how it comes into play." 44 72 The Anti-Aesthetic

Critical discussions of this work have, however, assiduously avoided skirted-the issue of gender. Because of its generally deconstructive ambition, this practice is sometimes assimilated to the modernist tradition of demystification. (Thus, the critique of representation is this work is collapsed into ideological critique.) In an essay devoted (again) to allegorical procedures in contemporary art, Benjamin Buchloh discusses the work of six women artists-Dara Birnbaum, Jenny Holzer , Barbara Kruger , Louise Lawler , Sherrie Levine , Martha Rosier-claiming them for the model of "secondary mythification" elaborated in Roland Barthes 's 1957 Mythologies. Buchloh does not acknowledge the fact that Barthes later repudiated this methodology-a repudiation that must be seen as part of his increasing refusal of mastery from The Pleasure of the Text on .45 Nor does Buchloh grant any particular significance to the fact that all these artists are women; instead, he provides them with a distinctly male genealogy in the dada tradition of collage and montage. Thus, all six artists are said to manipulate the languages of popular culture-television, advertising, photography-in such a way that "their ideological functions and effects become transparent;" or again, in their work, "the minute and seemingly inextricable interaction of behavior and ideology" supposedly becomes an "observable pattern." 46 But what does it mean to claim that these artists render the invisible visible, especially in a culture in which visibility is always on the side of the male, invisibility on the side of the female? And what is the critic really saying when he states that these artists reveal, expose, "unveil" (this last word is used throughout Buchloh's text) hidden ideological agendas in mass-cultural imagery? Consider, for the moment, Buchloh's discussion of the work of Dara Birnbaum, a video artist who re-edits footage taped directly from broadcast television. Of Birnbaum's Technology/Trans- formation: Wonder Woman (1978-79), based on the popular television series of the same name, Buchloh writes that it "unveils the puberty fantasy of Wonder Woman." Yet, like all of Birnbaum's work, this tape is dealing not simply with mass-cultural imagery, but with mass-cultural images of women. Are not the activities of unveiling, stripping, laying bare in relation to a female body unmistakably male prerogatives?47 Moreover, the women Birnbaum re-presents are usually athletes and performers absorbed in the display of their own physical perfection. They are without defect, without lack, and therefore with neither history nor desire. (Wonder Woman is the perfect embodiment of the phallic mother.) What we recognize in her work is the Freudian trope of the narcissistic woman, or the Lacanian "theme" of femininity as contained spectacle, which exists only as a representation of masculine desire.48 The deconstructive impulse that animates this work has also suggested affinities with poststructuralist textual strategies, and much of the critical Feminists and Postmodernism 73 writing about these artists-including my own-has tended simply to translate their work into French. Certainly, Foucault's discussion of the West's strategies of marginalization and exclusion, Derrida's charges of "phallocentrism," Deleuze and Guattari's "body without organs" would all seem to be congenial to a feminist perspective. (As Irigaray has observed, is not the "body without organs" the historical condition of woman?) 49 Still, the affinities between poststructuralist theories and postmodernist practice can blind a critic to the fact that, when women are concerned, similar techniques have very different meanings. Thus, when Sherrie Levine appropriates-literally takes-Walker Evans's photographs of the rural poor or, perhaps more pertinently, Edward Weston's photographs of his son Neil posed as a classical Greek torso, is she simply dramatizing the diminished possibilities for creativity in an image-saturated culture, as is often repeated? Or is her refusal of authorship not in fact a refusal of the role of creator as "father" of his work, of the paternal rights assigned to the author by law? 50 (This reading of Levine's strategies is supported by the fact that the images she appropriates are invariably images ofthe Other: women, nature, children, the poor, the insane .... ) 51 Levine's disrespect for paternal authority suggests that her activity is less one of appropriation-a laying hold and grasping-and more one of expropriation: she expropriates the appropriators. Sometimes Levine collaborates with Louise Lawler under the collective title" A Picture is No Substitute for Anything"-an unequivocal critique of representation as traditionally defined. (E.H. Gombrich: "All art is image making, and all image-making is the creation of substitutes.") Does not their collaboration move us to ask what the picture is supposedly a substitute for, what it replaces, what absence it conceals? And when Lawler shows "A Movie without the Picture," as she did in 1979 in Los Angeles and again in 1983 in New York, is she simply soliciting the spectator as a collaborator in the production of the image? Or is she not also denying the viewer the kind of visual pleasure which cinema customarily provides-a pleasure that has been linked with the masculine perversions voyeurism and scopophilia? 52 It seems fitting, then, that in Los Angeles she screened (or didn't screen) The Misfits-Marilyn Monroe's last completed film. So that what Lawler withdrew was not simply a picture, but the archetypal image of feminine desirability. When Cindy Sherman , in her untitled black-and-white studies for film stills (made in the late '70s and early '80s), first costumed herself to resemble heroines of grade-B Hollywood films of the late '50s and early '60s and then photographed herself in situations suggesting some immanent danger lurking just beyond the frame, was she simply attacking the rhetoric of "auteurism by equating the known artifice of the actress in front of the camera with the supposed authenticity of the director behind it"?53 Or was 74 The Anti-Aesthetic

Sherrie Levine, Photograph after Edward Weston, 1980. Feminists and Postmodernism 75

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, 1980.

her play-acting not also an acting out of the psychoanalytic notion of femininity as masquerade, that is, as a representation of male desire? As Hel(me Cixous has written, "One is .always in representation, and when a woman is asked to take place in this representation, she is, of course, asked to represent man's desire." 54 Indeed, Sherman's photographs themselves function as mirror-masks that reflect back at the viewer his own desire (and the spectator posited by this work is invariably male)-specifically, the masculine desire to fix the woman in a stable and stabilizing identity. But this is precisely what Sherman's work denies: for while her photographs are always self-portraits, in them the artist never appears to be the same, indeed, not even the same model; while we can presume to recognize the same person, we are forced at the same time to recognize a trembling around the edges of that identity.55 In a subsequent series of works, Sherman abandoned the film-still format for that of the magazine centerfold, opening herself to charges that she was an accomplice in her own objectification, reinforcing the image of the woman bound by the frame.56 This may be true; but while Sherman may pose as a pin-up, she still cannot be pinned down. Finally, when Barbara Kruger collages the words "Your gaze hits the side of my face" over an image culled from a '50s photo-annual of a female bust, is she simply "making an equation . . . between aesthetic reflection and the 76 The Anti-Aesthetic

Barbara Kruger, 1981 . Feminists and Postmodernism 77 alienation of the gaze: both reify"? 57 Or is she not speaking instead of the masculinity of the look, the ways in which it objectifies and masters? Or when the words "You invest in the divinity of the masterpiece" appear over a blown-up detail of the creation scene from the Sistine ceiling, is she simply parodying our reverence for works of art, or is this not a commentary on artistic production as a contract between fathers and sons? The address of Kruger's work is always gender-specific; her point, however, is not that masculinity and femininity are fixed positions assigned in advance by the representational apparatus. Rather, Kruger uses a term with no fixed content, the linguistic shifter ( .. I/you"), in order to demonstrate that masculine and feminine themselves are not stable identities, but subject to ex-change. There is irony in the fact that all these practices, as well as the theoretical work that sustains them, have emerged in a historical situation supposedly characterized by its complete indifference. In the visual arts we have witnessed the gradual dissolution of once fundamental distinctions original/copy, authentic/inauthentic, function/ornament. Each term now seems to contain its opposite, and this indeterminacy brings with it an impossibility of choice or, rather, the absolute equivalence and hence 8 interchangeability of choices. Or so it is said.5 The existence of feminism, with its insistence on difference, forces us to reconsider. For in our country good-bye may look just like hello, but only from a masculine position. Women have learned-perhaps they have always known-how to recog nize the difference. 78 The Anti-Aesthetic

I. Paul Ricoeur, "Civilization and National Cultures," History and Truth, trans. Chas. A. Kelbley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), p. 278. 2. Hayden White, "Getting Out of History," diacritics, 12, 3 (Fall 1982), p. 3. Nowhere does White acknowledge that it is precisely this universality that is in question today. 3. See, for example, Louis Marin, "Toward A Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts: Poussin's The Arcadian Shepherds," inS. Suleiman and I. Crosman, eds., The Reader in the Text (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 293-324. This essay reiterates the main points of the first section of Marin's Ditruire le peinture (Paris: Galilee, 1977). See also Christian Metz's discussion of the enunciative apparatus of cinematic representa tion in his "History/Discourse: A Note on 1\vo Voyeurisms" in The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Britton, Williams, Brewster and Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). And for a general survey of these analyses, see my "Representation, Appropriation & Power," Art in America, 70, 5 (May 1982), pp. 9-21. 4. Hence Kristeva's problematic identificatjon of avant-garde practice as feminine problematic because it appears to act in complicity with all those discourses which exclude women from the order of representation, associating them instead with the presymbolic (Nature, the Unconscious, the body, etc.). 5. Jacques Derrida, "Sending: On Representation," trans. P. and M.A. Caws, Social Research, 49, 2 (Summer 1982), pp. 325, 326, italics added. (In this essay Derrida is discussing Heidegger's "The Age of the World Picture," a text to which I will return.) "Today there is a great deal of thought against representation," Derrida writes. "In a more or less articulated or rigorous way, this judgment is easily arrived at: representation 4s bad . . .. And yet, whatever the strength and the obscurity of this dominant current, the authority of representation constrains us, imposing itself on our thought through a whole dense, enigmatic, and heavily stratified history. It programs us and precedes us and warns us too severely for us to make a mere object of it, a representation, an object of representation confronting us, before us like a theme" (p. 304). Thus, Derrida concludes that "the essence of representation is not a representation, it is not representable, there is no representation of representation" (p. 314, italics added). 6. Michele Montrelay, "Recherches sur Ia femininite," Critique, 278 (July 1970); translated by Parveen Adams as "Inquiry into Femininity," mlj, 1 (1978); repr. in Semiotext(e), 10 (1981), p. 232. 7. Many of the issues treated in the following pages-the critique of binary thought, for example, or the privileging of vision over the other senses-have had long careers in the history of philosophy. I am interested, however, in the ways in which feminist theory articulates them onto the issue of sexual privilege. Thus, issues frequently condemned as merely epistemological turn out to be political as well. (For an example of this kind of condemnation, see Andreas Huyssens, "Critical Theory and Modernity," New German Critique, 26 (Spring/Summer 1982]. pp. 3-11.) In fact, feminism demonstrates the impossibility of maintaining the split between the two. 8. "What is unquestionably involved here is a conceptual foregrounding of the sexuality of the woman, which brings to our attention a remarkable oversight." Jacques Lacan, "Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality," in J. Mitchell and J. Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality (New York: Norton and Pantheon, 1982), p. 87. 9. See my "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism" (part 2), October, 13 (Summer 1980), pp. 59-80. Americans on the Move was first performed at The Kitchen Center for Video, Music, and Dance in New York City in Aprill979; it has since been revised and incorporated into Anderson's two-evening work United States , Parts 1-/V, first seen in its entirety in February 1983 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. 10. This project was brought to my attention by Rosalyn Deutsche. Feminists and Postmodernism 79

11 . As Stephen Heath writes, "Any discourse which fails to take account of the problem of sexual difference in its own enunciation and address wiJI be, within a patriarchal order, precisely indifferent, a reflection of male domination." "Difference," Screen, 19, 4 (Winter 1978-79), p. 53. 12. Martha Rosier, "Notes on Quotes," Wedge, 2 (Fall1982), p. 69. 13. Jean-Francois Lyotard, La condition postmoderne (Paris: Minuit, 1979), p. 29. 14. See Sarah Kofman, Le Respect des femmes (Paris: Galilee, 1982). A partial English translation appears as "The Economy of Respect: Kant and Respect for Women," trans. N. Fisher, Social Research, 49, 2 (Summer 1982), pp. 383-404. 15. Why is it always a question of distance? For example, Edward Said writes, "Nearly everyone producing literary or cultural studies mades no allowance for the truth that all intellectual or cultural work occurs somewhere, at some times, on some very precisely mapped-out and permissible terrain, which is ultimately contained by the State. Feminist critics have opened this question part of the way, but they have not gone the whole distance." "American 'Left' Literary Criticism," The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 169. Italics added. 16. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 84. 17. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 42. One of the things that feminism has exposed is Marxism's scandalous blindness to sexual inequality. Both Marx and Engels viewed patriarchy as part of a precapitalist mode of production, claiming that the transition from a feudal to a capitalist mode of production was a transition from male domination to domination by capital. Thus, in the Communist Manifesto they write, "The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal . .. relations." The revisionist attempt (such as Jameson proposes in The Political Unconscious) to explain the persistence of patriarchy as a survival of a previous mode of production is an inadequate response to the challenge posed by feminism to Marxism. Marxism's difficulty with feminism is not part of an ideological bias inherited from outside; rather, it is a structural effect of its privileging of production as the definitively human activity. On these problems, see Isaac D. Balbus, Marxism and Domination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), especially chapter 2, "Marxist Theories of Patriarchy.~ and chapter 5, "Neo-Marxist Theories of Patriarchy." See also Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism (Brooklyn: J.F. Bergin, 1981), especially chapter 4, "The Question of Class." 18. Lyotard, "One of the Things at Stake in Women's Struggles," Substance, 20 (1978), p. 15. 19. Perhaps the most vociferous feminist antitheoretical statement is Marguerite Duras's: "The criterion on which men judge intelligence is still the capacity to theorize and in all the movements that one sees now, in whatever area it may be, cinema, theater, literature, the theoretical sphere is losing influence. It has been under attack for centuries. It ought to be crushed by now, it should lose itself in a reawakening of the senses, blind itself, and be still." In E. Marks and I. de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms (New York: Schocken, 1981), p. Ill. The implicit connection here between the privilege men grant to theory and that which they grant to vision over the other senses recalls the etymology of theoria ; see below. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that most feminists are ambivalent about theory. For example, in Sally Potter's film Thriller (1979)-which addresses the question "Who is responsible for Mimi's death?" in La Boheme- the heroine breaks out laughing while reading aloud from Kristeva's introduction to Theorie d' ensemble. As a result, Potter's film has been interpreted as an antitheoretical statement. What seems to be at issue, however, is the inadequacy of currently existing theoretical constructs to account for the specificity of a woman's experience. For as we are told, the heroine of the film is 80 The Anti-Aesthetic

"searching for a theory that would explain her life and her death." On Thriller, see Jane Weinstock, "She Who Laughs First Laughs Last," Camera Obscura, 5 (1980). 20. Published in Screen, 16, 3 (Autumn 1975). 21. See my "Earthwords," October, 10 (Fall1979), pp. 120-132. 22. "No Essential Femininity: A Conversation between Mary Kelly and Paul Smith," Parachute, 26 (Spring 1982), p. 33. 23 . Lyotard, La condition postmoderne, p. 8. 24. Ibid., p. 68. 25. Jameson, '"In the Destructive Element Immerse': Hans-Jiirgen Syberberg and Cultural Revolution," October, 17 (Summer 1981), p. 113. 26. See, for example, "Fantasia of the Library," in D.F. Bouchard, ed. Language, counter memory, practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 87-109. See also Douglas Crimp , "On the Museum's Ruins," in the present volume. 27. See Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," in the present volume. 28. Jameson, Political Unconscious, p. 19. 29. White, p. 3. 30. Thus, the antithesis to narrative may well be allegory, which Angus Fletcher identifies as the "epitome of counter-narrative." Condemned by modern aesthetics because it speaks of the inevitable reclamation of the works of man by nature, allegory is also the epitome of the antimodern, for it views history as an irreversible process of dissolution and decay. The melancholic, contemplative gaze of the allegorist need not, however, be a sign of defeat; it may represent the superior wisdom of one who has relinquished all claims to mastery. 31. Translated by William Lovitt and published in The Question Concerning Technology (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 115-54. I have, of course, oversimplified Heidegger 's complex and, I believe, extremely important argument. 32. Ibid, p. 149, 50. Heidegger's definition of the modern age-as the age of representation for the purpose of mastery-coincides with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's treatment of modernity in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (written in exile in 1944, but without real impact until its republication in 1969). "What men want to learn from nature," Adorno and Horkheimer write, "is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men." And the primary means of realizing this desire is (what Heidegger, at least, would recognize as) representation-the suppression of "the multitudinous affinities between existents" in favor of "the single relation between the subject who bestows meaning and the meaningless object." What seems even more significant, in the context of this essay, is that Adorno and Horkheimer repeatedly identify this operation as "patriarchal." 33. Jameson, "Interview," diacritics, 12, 3 (Falll982), p. 87. 34. Lyotard, La condition postmoderne, p. 63. Here, Lyotard argues that the grands recits of modernity contain the seeds of their own delegitimation. 35. For more on this group of painters, see my "Honor, Power and the Love of Women," Art in America, 71, I (January 1983), pp. 7-13. 36. Martha Rosier interviewed by Martha Gever in Afterimage (October 1981), p. 15. The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems has been published in Rosier's book 3 Works (Halifax: The Press of The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1981). 37. "Intellectuals and Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze," Language, counter-memory, practice, p. 209. Deleuze to Foucault: "In my opinion, you were the first-in your books and in the practical sphere-to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others." The idea of a counter-discourse also derives from this conversation, specifically from Foucault's work with the "Groupe d'information de prisons." Thus, Foucault: "When the prisoners began to speak, they possessed an individual theory of prisons, the penal system, and justice. It is this form of discourse which ultimately matters, a discourse against Feminists and Postmodernism 81

power, the counter-discourse of prisoners and those we call delinquents-and not a theory about delinquency." 38. Martha Rosier, "in, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)," 3 Works, p. 79. 39. Quoted in Heath, p. 84. 40. Interview with Luce Irigaray in M.-F. Hans and G. Lapouge, eds., Les femmes, La pornographie, l' erotisme (Paris, 1978), p. 50. 41. Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962), pp. 46-7. 42. Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter's Seduction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 27. 43. "On Fetishism," repr. in Philip Rieff, ed., Sexuality and the Psychology ofLove (New York: Collier, 1963), p. 217. 44. Lacan, p. 90. 45. On Barthes's refusal of mastery, see Paul Smith, "We Always Fail-Barthes' Last Writings," SubStance, 36 (1982), pp. 34-39. Smith is one of the few male critics to have directly engaged the feminist critique of patriarchy without attempting to rewrite it. 46. Benjamin Buchloh, "Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contempo rary Art," Artforum, XXI, 1 (September 1982), pp. 43-56. 47. Lacan's suggestion that "the phallus can play its role only when veiled" suggests a different inflection of the term "unveil" -one that is not, however, Buchloh's. 48. On Birnbaum's work, see my "Phantasmagoria of the Media," Art in America, 70, 5 (May 1982), pp. 98-100. 49. See Alice A. Jardine, "Theories of the Feminine: Kristeva," enclitic, 4, 2 (Fall 1980), pp. 5-15. 50. "The author is reputed the father and owner of his work: literary science therefore teaches respect for the manuscript and the author's declared intentions, while society asserts the legality of the relation of author to work (the 'droit d' auteur' or 'copyright,' in fact of recent date since it was only really legalized at the time ofthe French Revolution). As for the Text, it reads without the inscription of the Father." Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text," Image/Music/Text, trans. S. Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 160-61. 51. Levine's first appropriations were images of maternity (women in their natural role) from ladies' magazines. She then took landscape photographs by Eliot Porter and Andreas Feininger, then Weston's portraits of Neil, then Walker Evans's FSA photographs. Her recent work is concerned with Expressionist painting, but the involvement with images of alterity remains: she has exhibited reproductions of Franz Marc's pastoral depictions of animals, and Egon Schiele's self-portraits (madness). On the thematic consistency of Levine's "work," see my review, "Sherrie Levine at A & M Artworks," Art in America, 70, 6 (Summer 1982), p. 148 . 52. See Metz, "The Imaginary Signifier." 53. Douglas Crimp, "Appropriating Appropriation,'' in Paula Marincola, ed., Image Scavengers: Photography (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1982), p. 34. 54. Helene Cixous, "Entretien avec Francoise van Rossum-Guyon," quoted in Heath, p. %. 55. Sherman's shifting identity is reminiscent of the authorial strategies of Eugenie Lemoine Luccioni as discussed by Jane Gallop; see Feminism and Psychoanalysis, p. 105: "Like children, the various productions of an author date from different moments, and cannot strictly be considered to have the same origin, the same author. At least we must avoid the fiction that a person is the same, unchanging throughout time. Lemoine-Luccioni makes the difficulty patent by signing each text with a different name, all of which are 'hers'." 56. See, for example, Martha Rosier's criticisms in "Notes on Quotes," p. 73: "Repeating the images of woman bound in the frame will, like Pop, soon be seen as a confirmation by the 'post-feminist' society." 82 The Anti-Aesthetic

57. Hal Foster, "Subversive Signs," Art in America, 70, 10 (November 1982) , p. 88 . 58. For a statement of this position in relation to contemporary artistic production, see Mario Perniola, "Time and Time Again," Artforum, XXI, 8 (Aprill983)~ pp. 54-55. Perniola is indebted to Baudrillard; but are we not back with Ricoeur in 1962-that is, at precisely the point at which we started?

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The Anti Aesthetic Essays On Postmodern Culture
With a redesigned cover and a new afterword that situates the book in relation to contemporary criticism, The Anti-Aesthetic provides a strong introduction for newcomers and a point of reference for those already engaged in discussions of postmodern art, culture, and criticism. Includes a new afterword by Hal Foster and 12 black and white ...
The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture
The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Paperback - April 1, 2002. by Hal Foster (Editor) 4.5 39 ratings. See all formats and editions. A handsome new edition of the seminal collection of late twentieth-century cultural criticism, The Anti-Aesthetic was named a Best Book of the Year by the Village Voice and considered a bible of ...
The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture
The Anti-Aesthetic is a touchstone volume for postmodern debate and theory. Though the cultural stakes and terms have changed over the last decade, this collection still illuminates--perhaps now even more lucidly--a vital current in contemporary criticism. Contributors: Jean Baudrillard, Douglas Crimp, Kenneth Frampton, Jrgen Habermas, Fredric ...
(PDF) The Anti-Aesthetic ESSAYS ON POSTMODERN CULTURE Edited by Hal
We live in the age of postmodernism. What does that mean? With this call for essays, we asked for proposals for a better understanding. At the same time, we were looking for posts that show how the arts have processed and are still processing the change from the modern to the postmodern selfconception of man, which has been described by philosophy since the 1950s to today.
The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture
With a redesigned cover and a new afterword that situates the book in relation to contemporary criticism, The Anti-Aesthetic provides a strong introduction for newcomers and a point of reference for those already engaged in discussions of postmodern art, culture, and criticism. Includes a new afterword by Hal Foster and 12 black and white ...
The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture
The Powers and the Limits of Oppositional Postmodernism. C. Altieri. Art, Philosophy. 1990. The category of the 'postmodern' is our first glimpse of the historical emergence of a field of post-Romantic aesthetics. The cultural theory of the 1970's ... demonstrated the impossibility of the…. Expand. 2.
The Anti-aesthetic: essays on postmodern culture
Abstract. For the past thirty years, Hal Foster has pushed the boundaries of cultural criticism, establishing a vantage point from which the seemingly disparate agendas of artists, patrons, and critics have a telling coherence. In The Anti-Aesthetic, preeminent critics such as Jean Baudrillard, Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said ...
The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture
ISBN 9781565847422. A handsome new edition of the seminal collection of late-twentieth-century cultural criticism. Named a Best Book of the Year by the Village Voice and considered a bible of contemporary cultural criticism, The Anti-Aesthetic is reissued now in a handsome new paperback edition. For the past twenty years, Hal Foster has pushed ...
The Anti-aesthetic : Essays on Postmodern Culture
The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. For the past thirty years, Hal Foster has pushed the boundaries of cultural criticism, establishing a vantage point from which the seemingly disparate agendas of artists, patrons, and critics have a telling coherence. In The Anti-Aesthetic, preeminent critics such as Jean Baudrillard, Rosalind ...
The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture
Joel Fineman of Art in America has described The Anti-Aesthetic as "probably the most useful, serious and rewarding anthology of its kind; it should be read by anyone concerned with the practice and theory of contemporary art." ISBN: 0941920011. Publisher: Bay Pr. Paperback : 159 pages. Language: English. Buy on Amazon. This anthology provides ...
The Anti-Aesthetic Essays on Postmodern Culture
With a redesigned cover and a new afterword that situates the book in relation to contemporary criticism, The Anti-Aesthetic provides a strong introduction for newcomers and a point of reference for those already engaged in discussions of postmodern art, culture, and criticism. Includes a new afterword by Hal Foster and 12 black and white ...
The Anti-aesthetic at Forty
The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, which I edited, was published forty years ago; it was quickly followed by Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (1984), assembled by Brian Wallis. Although academic presses soon produced related anthologies, these initial entries were issued by an independent publisher (Bay Press) and a ...
Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983. xvi + 159 pp. $8.95.
The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. In an anthology whose con-tributions repeatedly signal the ways that the postmodern condition takes place as a sort of rejection ofmonologic, inviolate, reified and rarefied realms of social practice, the very title participates in a kind of postmodern unde-
The Anti-aesthetic : Essays on Postmodern Culture
The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture Hal Foster No preview available - 1983. Common terms and phrases. according aesthetic allegory Antonio Gramsci appears architecture artists authority Barthes become Benjamin Cage called century civilization collage communication concept condition contemporary context course critical critique ...
The Anti-Aesthetic : Essays on Postmodern Culture
Contemporaneity and Antagonism in Modernist and Postmodern Aesthetics. G. Pierce. Art, Philosophy. 2013. When Paul de Man writes in Blindness and Insight about the tension between literary modernity and literary history--a locus of antagonism, in his view--he seems in many ways to be prefiguring current…. Expand.
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The Anti-Aesthetic Essays on Postmodern Culture Edited and Introduced by Hal Foster. Bay Press, Port Townsend, Washington, 1983. ft is now common knowledge to say that in _these eclectic post-modern times it is getting increasingly difficult to tell a radical from a conservative. For better or worse the illusion of a
The anti-aesthetic : essays on postmodern culture
The anti-aesthetic : essays on postmodern culture. Publication date 2002 Topics Modernism (Aesthetics), Civilization, Modern -- 1950-Publisher New York : New Press Collection inlibrary; printdisabled; internetarchivebooks Contributor Internet Archive Language English. xvii, 183 p. : 21 cm
The Anti-aesthetic : Essays on Postmodern Culture
The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. The Anti-aesthetic. : Hal Foster. New Press, 1998 - Civilization, Modern - 159 pages. The touchstone volume for postmodern debate and theory.
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Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves are an "other" among others. All meaning and every goal. 57 58 The Anti-Aesthetic. having disappeared, it becomes possible to wander through civilizations as if through vestiges and ruins.
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